Work Text:
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Wang Yibo hates his job. The reason is simple. Not a lot of people know about his job and he has to keep it a secret. Day in day out, he needs to go through his millions of emails, prioritize them, pick a handful and get down to work on them.
What is his job? He is the Cupid.
He got picked for this job when he turned Eighteen. He didn’t even know that Cupid is a real person with powers to make people fall in love. So when he learned that he got picked for the job, he was ecstatic. How many people in this world get to be Cupid, right?
His predecessor explained his job duties and seemed like he couldn’t get away from there fast enough. But Yibo got it all covered. He understands his duties. In his mind, it’s pretty simple actually. “Find people that are most compatible with each other and make them fall in love.”
It’s not like he has any deadlines. Nobody is going to come after him even if he doesn't do his job. After all, he is the one and only Cupid for his generation and until he is ready to retire he gets to do whatever he wants. And when he has enough merits in his account and is bored of being Cupid, all he has to do is just find someone suitable for the job and he’ll be free as a bird. He doesn’t have to work another day in the rest of his life.
But Yibo is determined to do his best in this job. After all, making people fall in love has to be fun, isn’t it? The only caveat to this whole thing is he himself can’t fall in love. With Yibo’s personality, it shouldn’t be too difficult. That’s why his predecessor picked him.
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The first few days on the job were pretty fun. Whenever someone wishes to fall in love, or wishes someone to fall in love with them, those wishes land as emails in his inbox. And he gets just a few millions of emails each day. Sometimes when people are really desperate, they keep wishing everyday spamming Yibo’s Inbox.
The first part of his job is pretty easy. He needs to run those millions of emails through an algorithm that checks if there are any two people who wish to fall in love with each other. If there is a one on one match, then he doesn't even have to lift a finger. Two roses is all it takes. An automated program delivers a rose to each of them in the name of the other with their phone numbers on a card stuck to the thorn on the stem. The drop of blood they sacrifice while plucking the card out adds up to the merits in Yibo’s account.
The second part is when someone has a crush on another person and wishes that person to fall in love with them. This is where Yibo needs to decide whether or not they will be compatible with each other before making his move. If the pair clicks and falls in love with each other that adds a shit load of merits into his account. So this is where he spends most of the time as part of his job.
The third part of his job is all hopeless cases. People who don’t have a crush on anyone but simply wish to find someone to fall in love with. All these emails are automatically routed into a separate folder. When Yibo has nothing else to do then he leisurely goes through this pile. You’ll never know, sometimes the most compatible pairs can come from this pile. And if such a pair clicks and falls in love with each other, he gets double the merits compared to what he gets if one of the parties already has a crush on the other. So he can’t simply ignore this pile. But the chances of finding an even remotely compatible pair from this pile is just one in a million.
Yibo’s goal in life is simple. Work his ass off in his job. Collect all the merits he needed to retire from the job and then just sit on his ass until he gets bored off this job. There is no rush to retire. It’s not like he is going to fall in love anytime soon.
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The first year in his job was pretty fun. He keeps coming up with new ideas to make people fall in love with each other. One of the parties is already neck deep anyway. They just need a little signal from the other party. Sometimes, Yibo himself goes in person to send those signals. One of his simplest tricks is to get them both side by side in a bar, make one of them tipsy and he can simply walk out of there. His job is done.
Not all the couples are so easy though. Some of them have the thickest skin. No matter how many signals he sends, the other person can’t take the hint. If he runs out of all the options, as a last resort, Yibo ends up shooting his arrow at them and that does the trick. He doesn't like to resort to this option though. Each time he uses his arrow, he gets delirious for a whole day. If he misses his work for a whole day, the backlog in his inbox is enough to make him sick for another day.
Toughest decisions are usually when more people have a serious crush on a single person. Finding a match for that person means breaking a lot of hearts. But it is also a high yielding prospect. The more people have a crush on this one person, that many times his credits get multiplied if he can get this person to fall in love with someone. But this is the toughest category though. Because usually celebrities fall into this category and they don’t easily fall in love. Yibo doesn’t mind using his arrows on them because they fill up his merit account faster with less efforts. But first, he needs to find a perfect match for them though. So he needs to learn more about them and sometimes even stalk them. Yep, anything to fill up the merit bank.
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Yibo is nineteen years old now, and will be twenty soon. So far he made up millions of matches and his merit account is steadily growing. For the past few months, he is observing the account of one person in particular. His crush account is getting bigger and bigger.
Yibo opened up this account history on his computer and found that it’s been there for a few years already. And it kept growing at an alarming rate. If Yibo could find a perfect match for him, then his own merit bank would be overflowing and he can easily retire. Retirement after just a couple of years of working? Wow, that thought alone is enough to make Yibo focus all his efforts on this one person’s account. But the problem is so far, he hasn’t received any wishes from this person so he needs to learn more about him before he could find a perfect match and then he can roll his magic.
Yibo learnt that this person would be acting in a TV drama soon. That is his best chance to observe this guy closely. He just needs to join the cast, of course it wouldn’t be difficult for him. After all he is Cupid. People will have to line up to work with him. So he sent his own pictures for a role in that drama.
Alas! He got rejected. Twice!!
Yibo couldn’t believe it. Did they even look at his picture? Who on earth could reject him? He is the Cupid. Unrelented Yibo decided to go in person. If it comes down to it, he will have to use his Cupid superpowers to change their minds to get this role. But Yibo doesn't want to go down that route. Not because he thinks it's wrong, who are we kidding? He is Cupid after all, he does the shadiest things to get his job done in the name of love. Using mind control pokes a whole to his merit bank. And he absolutely wants to avoid it.
He doesn’t have to worry about it though. The moment he walks through there, dazed by all the noise and people all around, even before he opened his mouth to say hello, they gave him the role.
Now all he needs to do is to wait until the shooting begins. Yibo groaned about having to do a second job. Five months is a lot of time. He needs to find a way to tackle his ever growing inbox. If he neglects his inbox during these five months of filming, even if he earns enough merits to retire, no one would want to take over that job with that huge amount of backlog. Unfortunately he can’t disclose his identity to anyone, so he can’t hire someone to help him with his backlog. Nope, he needs to work smarter and pick the requests with better prospects.
Over the next few weeks, Yibo came up with a new algorithm to analyze the messages in his inbox that produces the compatibility matrix for possible matches. He tested it a few times and the success rate of the matches found by this algorithm is a staggering ninety percent. With the new algorithm set up in place, he just needs to work for an hour each day and the rest of the day can be dedicated to his new second job that would open up the door to his retirement. Luckily it is all set before the filming starts.
Now, it’s time to go meet this XIAO ZHAN!! And get him to fall in LOVE!!!
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It’s been two months into the filming of the drama. For Yibo, it's easy peasy work. He is acing at this acting job and his inbox is under control too. The only problem is with this Xiao Zhan account that is dangling the keys to his retirement in front of his face.
Over the past two months he learnt about the man quite a bit. Based on what he learned, he added Xiao Zhan’s key characteristics to his notes so that he can run his algorithm on this account later. To Yibo, he seemed like a handsome, simple, straightforward, honest, reliable, kind, hardworking, smart, intelligent, sweet, pleasant and I forgot to mention, very handsome and sexy guy. He is smoking hot too. What kind of smile is that? Yibo often had to turn away from looking at that guy. There is something fundamentally wrong about that smile. It just doesn’t belong in this world. Even Cupid can’t be immune to that smile. Yibo laughed inwardly thinking about the prospect of the Cupid falling for someone. And then he looked at that guy next to him and sighed loudly to shake out a shudder.
Day after day, the character tags he is adding to Xiao Zhan’s account keep growing. But still there is not a single match that crosses sixty percent on his compatibility matrix. Is there something wrong with this guy? If so many people have a crush on him, how can there not be a single perfect match? Yibo is getting more and more frustrated. People around him are calling him a grumpy baby. If only they know the kind of power he has, uhm, they would be begging him to find a match for them.
In the middle of all this frustration, the only fun Yibo could find is teasing the hell out of this guy Xiao Zhan. And so, that is where he turned his entire focus on. He put him Cupid duties on autopilot, and poured all his attention into this one man. He has to get to the bottom of this man. Oops!! Not that bottom, you know. He needs to figure him out. Is there no chance for this guy to have a crush on the millions from his crush account? If a perfect match is not found, at least him developing a crush would put an end to this stalemate.
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Finally the filming has completed. Yibo thought he had a good time. Plenty of fun. Maybe this acting is something he can pursue as a hobby after he is retired. That brought his thoughts back to his retirement. He didn’t check his Cupid account dashboard in a long time. He set up to receive alerts on his phone if something goes wrong, so he doesn't have to keep an eye on it. No alerts means all is well.
The filming is done, the after party celebration is done, he bids goodbye to everyone. Unfortunately, he has to bid goodbye to Xiao Zhan too. During their filming, Yibo thought it would be nice to have people like this Xiao Zhan around him every day. Yibo let out an involuntary chuckle when some of the shenanigans they did during filming came to his mind. Maybe he can keep meeting this guy, after all, he still needs to know more about him, he still is the key to his retirement.
Once he was back in his Cupid burrow, he checked his Cupid account on his laptop. The dashboard is all green. So everything is running smoothly. His merit account doesn’t look too bad either. He decided to check Xiao Zhan’s account for any potential matches before he calls it a day.
When he opened the account, a loud DING sound startled him. A big window popped on his screen with the words “Perfect match found.”
Yibo’s eyes widened in horror and he immediately closed the laptop lid.
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What the hell happened? Where did it find the perfect match from? There wasn’t one until not too long ago. Yibo felt his heart racing faster than when he ran a marathon. Which was never, unless running away from a chasing mad dog counts.
Yibo is trying to think about what this means while tapping his fingers on his laptop. It is not a bad thing though, is it? I mean now he can retire. So he should be happy about this. Why is he not happy though? Or does happiness actually feel the same as anxiety?
“If Xiao Zhan falls in love with someone….”
“Then it’s good for him, right?”
“Right.”
“But”
“...”
He decided to go meet with Xiao Zhan one last time before he had to run his magic and let Xiao Zhan meet the love of his life.
“Maybe I can just invite him to eat out.”
“Or a movie?”
“Or to play a video game?”
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”
“I am Cupid. Why the heck do I need to have a reason to meet anyone”
Without another thought, he went to meet Xiao Zhan at his home. This isn’t the first time he visited him at home, but this is definitely the first time he is visiting uninvited, unannounced.
Knock Knock.
Kreeeeeeeek…. The door opened after a few seconds.
And a pair of arms dashed towards him and wrapped him in a hug. Yibo, as if on autopilot, immediately mirrored the action.
A few seconds or may be minutes or may be hours.. Nah, it has to be just seconds, may be minutes.. Alright alright, will settle with minutes.
After a few minutes they parted slightly to look at each other without actually breaking the embrace. Xiao Zhan looked deeply into Yibo’s eyes. It’s clearly written on his face how much he missed Yibo. Weren’t they together just a few hours ago?
Yea, but after spending so much time together, the thought of parting and not seeing Yibo for a while was enough to turn on the longing mode.
After realizing the ache in his heart so far had nothing to do with heart attack, Xiao Zhan smiled without taking his twinkling eyes off Yibo.
Damn!!! That smile again.
Yibo leaned forward and kissed Xiao Zhan on the lips.
Naturally after some time, his brain fog lifted and he slowly broke the kiss to look into Xiao Zhan’s still smiling face with a shocked expression.
Xiao Zhan led him inside, and went to get a drink for Yibo.
Yibo hurriedly took his phone out, opened his Cupid account and navigated to Xiao Zhan’s account from the “Recently found matches” and finally clicked on the “Perfect match found”.
Well, there is no surprise there. The match found was of course Yibo.
He quickly opened the audit logs to find out how they both got matched. Apparently, there were a bunch of emails received during the past few months when the Cupid Yibo subconsciously wished for the other man’s love and just an hour ago there was also an email with Xiao Zhan’ also wishing for Yibo’s love. And the algorithm that ran tirelessly over the past few months to find a match for Xiao Zhan, finally found the perfect match with 95% compatibility.
Yibo, still clutching his phone, was rolling on the couch soundlessly trying to subdue to his excitement. Xiao Zhan soundlessly entered the room with a drink in his hand and stared at Yibo with a raised eyebrow for a while before he cleared his throat.
Yibo snapped out of whatever that is he was doing, and immersed himself completely in Xiao Zhan’ company for the rest of the night, obviously forgetting he is still a stupid Cupid.
The next morning when the reality hit him, his first thought was to go jump off the balcony. Instead, he called his predecessor, the one who picked him for the job, asking for his advice.
After he got off the call, he went back to bed to nuzzle Xiao Zhan’s neck to wake him up for another round.
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On the way back to his house, Yibo still had a stupid and dreamy smile on his face. By the time he reached home, his predecessor was already there to collect the keys. He was reluctant to come out of his retirement at first when Yibo mentioned how he broke the Cupid custom and fell in love. But after Yibo explained to him about his new algorithm and the minimal effort it requires to perform Cupid duties now, and finally giving up his close to retirement merit account, the predecessor agreed to take back the Cupid duties from Yibo.
Though he can no longer dream about not having to work for the rest of his life, thinking that he gets to be with his love for the rest of his life, Yibo happily packed his bag, returned the keys to the Cupid burrow and went back to his perfect love.
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