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November 2020, Beijing
For once, Xiao Zhan is hoping that Yibo’s crazy fans know where he is.
The voice message he’d just gotten from Yibo was so garbled he couldn’t make out whether he’d made or missed his flight, so now Xiao Zhan is actually looking at sasaeng reports that Yibo boarded an earlier flight to Beijing and wondering if he really caught that flight -- or if this is just purposefully leaked information meant to divert attention away from Yibo’s real plans.
Xiao Zhan could simply call the man himself, but the last time he actually talked to Yibo, he had been breathless, racing to get to the airport for a shot at an earlier departure, clearly anxious that the incoming bad weather could foil his plans to come home. Xiao Zhan doesn’t want to add to his stress, to risk making him feel bad about something neither of them can control.
Calling Yibo now won’t get him home any sooner.
So Xiao Zhan waits.
They’re doing a lot of this lately -- fitting their disjointed schedules together like puzzle pieces to try to reclaim time for themselves. Sometimes they can only manage to scrape together a few precious hours, at a cost of more hours on a plane or in a car, which (objectively speaking, anyway) seems like a terrible bargain.
But if this is what it takes to be with the person who makes you feel whole, then maybe it’s not that crazy after all.
Xiao Zhan looks out the window of their apartment, at the heavy rain that’s now falling. The weather reports are calling for snow later -- the first of the season for Beijing -- and Xiao Zhan laughs at the irony, that one of the things they’d been longing to share together might be what keeps them apart.
November 2019, Beijing
One of the ways that Xiao Zhan and Yibo got through their long separations was leaning hard into their stupid in-jokes, the references that no one else got (or cared about), but that never failed to amuse them.
There was calling each other “wife,” or referring to Xiao Zhan as a “sofa,” the Mars/Venus thing, Yibo’s ridiculous milking of his cheek injury during A-Ling filming… and so many other touchpoints accumulated over the years that helped remind them of the things they’d shared, especially when they couldn’t be together. A treasured secret language that set them apart from everyone else in their lives.
The latest joke for them was the bamboo rat. It started with Yibo cuddling one of the so-ugly-it’s-cute rodents on Tian Tian Xiang Shang, and Xiao Zhan couldn’t stop cooing over the adorableness of it all.
Yibo by himself was swoon-worthy enough, but Yibo cradling animals was absolutely Xiao Zhan’s kryptonite. Cats, dogs, pigs, raccoons, bunnies -- anything furry. So for weeks after that, Xiao Zhan assaulted Yibo with dumb bamboo rat memes on WeChat.
On this particular day, Xiao Zhan had tried to wedge a bamboo rat reference into an interview with Oasis -- really just to amuse Yibo -- but to his annoyance, its name suddenly eluded him when he was asked what kind of animal he liked.
“All are fine. Cat, dog… I recently like -- what’s the name? It’s a big cute mouse... I forgot its name... seems it has a professional term. Very cute.”
Of course, as it always happens, the name popped back into his head only after the interview wrapped, so Xiao Zhan went on Oasis and posted a bamboo rat meme to call out his memory lapse.
“The case is solved! It’s a bamboo rat!”
Yibo, far away in Hengdian, got excited that the bamboo rat had made an appearance, and posted on Weibo, “Happy New Year everyone!” -- a nod to the fact that the next year would be the Year of the Rat.
Yibo’s fans initially laughed at his very premature holiday wishes, wondering what had gotten into him. But that amusement soon turned bitter when it became clear how much CP fans were enjoying the way Yibo’s bizarre post made sense as a response to Xiao Zhan’s bamboo rat post.
As their respective posts made their way up the ranks on Hot Search, and Yibo’s solo fans got more agitated, Yibo called Xiao Zhan to vent.
“Sometimes fans take all the fun out of posting,” Yibo grumbled.
Xiao Zhan huffed out a laugh. “Well, I enjoyed your post. And now that I’ve seen it, you may as well take it down to avoid inciting a fan war.”
“I don’t know why people care so much.”
“Yes, you do,” Xiao Zhan replied with a knowing smirk. “Wang Laoshi is not that dense. It’s the same reason you post publicly to me when you could simply call or WeChat.” He lifted an eyebrow at Yibo.
Yibo threw his head back with a long groan. “Fine, fine, I’ll take it down…”
Xiao Zhan shook his head at Yibo’s stubborn need to broadcast clues about their relationship. He understood it, of course -- it was why he himself had posted about bamboo rats, or called himself a sofa in his Oasis interview (yes, he had done that too). Sure, it put a smile on Yibo’s face -- a perfectly adequate reason on its own -- but he’d be a fool not to want to do a little public bragging of his own that this gorgeous and talented man was his.
“Listen, Lao Wang, I have to finish up here, but I’ll call you when I’m back home, okay? And then maybe I can work on cheering you up.” He bit his lip and looked meaningfully at Yibo.
That finally got a laugh out of him. “Okay. Talk to you later.”
Once off the phone, Xiao Zhan exhaled heavily. Yibo had always had a hard time with long separations, like the one they were currently in the middle of, but he was definitely in a mood these days. He still wasn’t quite over how he didn’t get to introduce Xiao Zhan’s performance at the Double 11 Shopping Festival just a couple of weeks back. And given that the A-Ling promotion period had ended, any day now they were expecting their companies to tell them it was time to let their CP die.
With all that going on, Xiao Zhan got why Yibo was so upset at having their silly call-and-response posting fun spoiled by fans.
Back at home, he called Yibo with news that he thought would make Yibo smile.
“Bo-ge, it’s snowing!”
“Yeah, I know. I saw your post.” Yibo didn’t sound excited at all.
“It was beautiful,” Xiao Zhan murmured, a little disappointed. “I thought you would be happy…”
“You are beautiful,” Yibo corrected. “But it just means it’s another year that we’ve missed being together for the first snow!”
“We’re together on the phone, though. We’re sharing the experience right now! Look, I even posted with kadian to match your first snow post from last year. 55, like we're holding hands together.”
Yibo frowned. “What kind of a Koreaboo are you?”
“Mo!? Aishibal!” Xiao Zhan cursed with a goofy smile on his face, trying to make Yibo laugh. It didn’t work.
“I told you, we have to be able to go out together in the first snow. It doesn’t count if I’m not there.” Yibo was pouting now. “And I won’t be home for another month…”
Xiao Zhan cast a sympathetic eye at Yibo through the phone, his voice warm and fond. “I wish we were together right now too. But you know that we don’t need Korean folklore to predict that we’ll be together, Lao Wang.”
This seemed to take some of the edge off of Yibo’s irritation. “You are the most superstitious person I know,” Yibo mumbled. “Aren’t you disappointed to miss this again?”
“Sure,” Xiao Zhan allowed, “it would be another sweet memory for us that I would enjoy. But you not being here for the first snow doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to how I feel about you. You know that.” He gave Yibo a soft, loving look. “We’ll just have to keep trying, every winter, to be together for that first snow… until you’re 81, if we have to.”
Yibo finally smiled, his eyes a little watery. “Promise?
“Yeah.”
November 2020, Beijing
Xiao Zhan is standing in the kitchen, trying to decide whether to start preparing something for dinner, when the apartment door swings open with a bang.
“Zhan-ge, I made it home!” Yibo bellows from the entryway. He impatiently toes off his shoes, charges into the kitchen, and flings himself around Xiao Zhan. He’s damp and disheveled and smells of airport, and it’s everything that Xiao Zhan has been waiting for all day.
Xiao Zhan presses a kiss to his lips and smiles. “Welcome home, Lao Wang.”
Yibo sits in the kitchen while Xiao Zhan brews green tea, and he spins out the tale of his epic journey home: the repeated rebookings, the near-misses, the minor miracle of not being on one of the many flights canceled as bad weather barreled into Beijing airspace.
Yibo stops mid-story and looks up with hopeful eyes. “It’s getting pretty bad out there. Maybe… maybe it’ll snow?”
Xiao Zhan knows what he wants, but he also doesn’t want Yibo to fixate on something as variable as the weather as an omen for their relationship, so he shrugs and says with a bright smile, “you never know!”
Over tea, Yibo is still vibrating from the excitement of his travels and of being back with Xiao Zhan and the words are just spilling out.
The prospect of snow has Yibo talking about the video that Xiao Zhan’s studio had posted the year before, on the night of Beijing’s first snowfall, with Xiao Zhan twirling under fat snowflakes falling in a parking lot. The studio had cut the audio of him shouting, “Lao Wang! It’s snowing!” but Yibo had heard the words in his heart anyway.
“I watched that video so many times that month before we got to see each other again at Tencent,” he says. “Even if we technically didn’t get to go out in the snow together then, it did make me feel like I was there with you.”
A wicked smile spreads across his face. “And that bondage bunny shirt you were wearing underneath your coat gave me sweet dreams at night too.”
“Lao Wang!” Xiao Zhan laughs. But he knows that nothing in the videos he posts is really an accident. (He could have kept his coat closed, but he was hoping to cheer Yibo up that night.)
Yibo sips his tea and maybe the warmth is calming because he has that thoughtful look on his face that Xiao Zhan loves because it’s open and earnest in a way that’s just for him.
“You were right,” Yibo says. “We don’t need the superstition of the first snow to know that what we have is real. You know me, though -- I like the drama, the big gestures. But I think I’ve really learned to appreciate the everyday stuff -- the little things that we share. Like sitting here and having tea together and talking. In the long run, it means more than whether we’re together on a random day when it snows.”
Xiao Zhan feels his heart flip at his words. He adores his loud, exuberant puppy, loves how completely he throws himself into tending what they have. They’re apart more than they’re together these days; without Yibo’s willingness to go big, would they still be here, companionably sipping tea in their kitchen?
But a love built on high drama and grand gestures can’t be sustained for long. Xiao Zhan knows too much these days about booms and busts. He’s come to treasure the endurance and the pleasures of the mundane, and it’s a relief to him that Yibo is seeing it too.
He’s about to say all of this when Yibo leaps to his feet, sloshing the tea and nearly overturning the table.
“Zhan-ge! IT’S SNOWING!”
Yibo laughs like a gremlin as he grabs Xiao Zhan’s hands, pulls him out of his seat, and drags him to the door.