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“There’s something that feels so fucking shitty about how different you are to him,” Xukun says later, curled up in his silk and satin sheets much like how a droplet of water would nest itself on a particularly smooth leaf. At least, that’s how Ziyi sees him: a teardrop on a glistening surface.
“Why do you say that?” Ziyi humours him. Maybe he should be upset by how abrasive the words are, but at the same time, he doesn’t feel much about it anymore.
Xukun turns over a bit, so that his piercing eyes are fixated on the slope of Ziyi’s neck against the clear, dark background. “You know … it’s just … that same feeling that I’m forgetting him somehow by being with you now.”
Ziyi hums. He doesn’t say anything.
Xukun sits up in bed, stares past Ziyi’s shoulders and into the city sky. “I used to tell Zhengting not to wake me up in the middle of the night unless it was for something important.” His mouth twitches, the corner of his lips curling up ever so slightly, his eyes glimmering. “Annoying little shit would come all the way from across the palace and throw rocks at my window. And I swear: it was never about anything important.”
Ziyi lets his eyes trail from Xukun’s lost gaze to the beautiful expanse of the man’s chest, sloping down into his hips. “What’d he want then?”
Xukun smiles fondly. “Something to drink. Something good to eat. But most of the time, he just wanted to come bother me enough so that I would agree to whatever he wanted to do, and I would go along with it.”
“Sometimes … it was to just go with him on a walk in the palace grounds. Sometimes it was to go with him into the forest bordering the palace and explore a bit. Sometimes, he just wanted to steal some food from the kitchen and wanted me to stand witness to it.”
Ziyi feels a trickle of laughter pour from his lips. “Then in that regard, maybe he and I aren’t so different.”
“You think?” Xukun redirects his gaze back to Ziyi, and Ziyi is staked, pinned down onto the bed again, by those brilliant, bright, fond eyes.
Ziyi swallows.
“Zhu Zhengting was like … he was like a ray of sunlight. And I don’t mean that in a warm, soft way. He was so bright and scorching and burning, I felt like I was on fire every single time I was with him. Him and his poisonous tongue and tumbling laughter and pretty cheeks and his infuriating attitude about everything.”
Xukun paused. “I loved him so much .”
Ziyi moves so fast that he registers his arms by Xukun’s side even before he realizes that he’s gotten up from the sheets.
Xukun continues, calm and collected, but Ziyi is still there, because it took so long for him to be like this again, and he doesn’t want all of it to be for naught again. “And … I don’t know. You’re just so fucking different from him, in so many ways, at least on the surface. You’re so calm all the time, and you never want to cause any trouble like he did. You’re so much more persistent than he was, so much more patient with me. You let me dance circles around you the same way he did to me.” He laughs suddenly. “God, hearing me say it that way makes it seem like you’re a lot like how I was to him.”
“Maybe,” Ziyi says, not unaffected. “Maybe.”
“God, you must really love me, don’t you?”
“Maybe,” Ziyi says, quieter.
Xukun shivers with all of his cold, pale skin, leaning into Ziyi a bit. “It feels weird when you say that.”
“Say what?”
“That you love me.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Ziyi points out, gently. “I was just agreeing with what you said. And I said ‘maybe’.”
“Ah,” Xukun says, not really engaged, then stops.
There are a few suspended moments where Xukun leans his head on Ziyi’s shoulder, curled into Ziyi’s arms around him, and where they both stare out the window onto the bustling night city below them.
“But Zhengting loved you too, didn’t he?” Ziyi asks, a while later. He can’t tell if his heart is shaking in his chest, beating with the blood that is meant for him and Xukun now.
Xukun pauses for a long moment. There are a thousand things Ziyi thinks he could say -- anything from yes to no to another story to a rant to nothing at all --, because Xukun is like that: a sharp diamond that shines differently depending on how you want to look at it. However, Xukun chooses something that Ziyi supposes is the simplest answer, the true one.
“He did,” Xukun says softly. “He loved me a lot.”
I love you too.