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Yut Lung has not loved anyone since his mother died, and in that same manner, Yut Lung knows he has not been loved since she passed as well. He knows very well now how it feels to be hated, how it feels to be in pain. He even knows how it feels like to want to die- to be thrown into such horrible darkness that it feels like dying would be a blessing, and he also knows how to overcome that wanting to die by trampling over it with a stronger, burning desire for revenge. Yut Lung knows what it’s like to be desired, to be seen as an exotic and beautiful thing to be used by people more powerful than him, to be an object before he ever is a person and he knows how to close his eyes and bury the hurt and use it to grow stronger. He has learnt a lot of things after being alive for sixteen years, and although he has not learnt he will never be loved again, he understands it to be a fact and he does not care about it at all.
Even if his brothers see him as porcelain doll and their caged snake at the same time- see him both as a tool to make the lecherous powerful men they work with more agreeable and as a weapon to silently dispose of people who step where they shouldn’t- Yut Lung is more than those things, because he has had to adapt to his reality to survive long enough to see his one single desire come true. He’s a doll and he’s a snake, but he’s also a liar and an actor, and he’s a silent puppet master laying down the strings to his grand finale and patiently waiting for the time to come when he pulls those strings taut and his brothers fall dead.
Of course, Yau Si is none of those things, because Yau Si is a sweet boy who worries over his dear adopted father and allows strangers into his home because they do one good thing for him. Yau Si is a teenager who was adopted by Alexis Dawson and is coddled by his dear maid Suk Leui. Yau Si is the sort of boy who grew up in a good home and who dreams of making his dad proud, who went to school and probably picked up a normal hobby to fill the space when he’s not busy. Yau Si is the type of stupid, softhearted person who Yut Lung could crush with a single finger if he so wanted to. Yau Si is an easy role for Yut Lung to play because while it’s so difficult for a person to retain that naivety, it’s devastatingly easy for someone who’s forgotten what it’s like to truly be so trusting and gentle to fake being it.
Yut Lung watches Ash be surrounded by people who drag him down. Out of all of them, Shorter Wong is perhaps the most capable after Ash, and Yut Lung already has his role picked out for him. Aside from him, Ash’s little merry squad is laughable: a journalist whose family is woefully easy to locate and whose weakness is easy to dig into, a photographer who’s so clearly a fish out of water in this entire ordeal, and the photographer’s assistant who is somehow even more useless than the photographer himself. There’s no reason for him to be here at all: he’s not related to the ordeal at all, aside from his sticking close to Ash. Even if he didn’t have information about everyone in Ash’s makeshift squad, just by looking at the way he acts, Eiji is clearly dead weight. And Yut Lung hates the way Ash treasures him as if he wasn’t.
He’s not jealous of the attention Ash gives Eiji, mostly because he does not desire Ash. In general, Yut Lung does not know what it is to desire another person: that part of him is probably long dead, killed after years of being an object of desire for people he would never step close to if it was his own choice. And then, Ash should be the same as him: Ash should be too worn by life, too jaded to ever want another person with any degree of tenderness. Yut Lung does not get to have that, and Ash should not either- and yet he would be blind if he couldn’t notice the way Eiji flits and cares for Ash and the way the gang leader reciprocates with unspoken warmth. With tenderness and softness and trust that he shouldn’t be capable of, that Yut Lung screams in his heart he shouldn’t have the ability to give to another.
Of course, Yau Si does not feel any of that because Yau Si is a normal boy who grew up with lots of care and love and he gets to love and trust others. So of course, Yau Si does not tighten his fists nor does he clench his teeth when he sees Eiji patting Ash’s head or when he hears him say words of concern to him. Yau Si has no reason to feel a burning hatred when he sees someone who should be a mirror of Yut Lung get to have someone he cares about and trusts while Yut Lung will never have such a thing. Yau Si simply smiles and goes on with his day and he does not dream of crushing Eiji just so Ash can feel horrible pain and anguish after having gotten to have something Yut Lung never will.
Yut Lung is a good actor, and so of course he has to make sure to not lower his guard even if Ash isn’t in the room, because he knows better than to assume the bunch of idiots that hang around Ash will not notice a small slip up. He might not be wearing any disguise, but the stark difference between who he is as a person and the facade of Yau Si is so marked that he might as well be wearing a mask that hides him entirely. He has to keep that mask on even when dealing with idiots like Eiji, even if he’s sure that the trusting fool wouldn’t even notice if Yut Lung just completely let the act slip up.
“Yau Si, you’re rather tall, aren’t you?” when Eiji talks to him, Yut Lung makes sure to blink and act interested in his words, as if he cares for whatever pointless comment he’ll make. It’s a similar gesture to the one Ash usually makes when Eiji starts talking about silly things, and it’s enough to prompt him into continuing whatever it is he was going to say. “You were sixteen, right? You’re almost as tall as me! You’re probably going to be really tall as an adult. Lucky you!”
“Ah, you think so? I’ve never thought too much about it, but you might be right.” Yut Lung replies with a smile despite the fact he is truly fighting a scowl every time Eiji comes up to him with that stupid little smile and his stupid small talk that feels so very much like he’s trying to make a teenager whose dad went missing feel comfortable around the strangers suddenly invading his home. Yut Lung finds him stupid enough that it makes him want to tear his hair out. Yau Si smiles shily and finds an excuse to retreat back to his room.
Eiji talks to him like he’s a teenager he’s trying to make small talk with and it’s sickening. Yau Si is sixteen and so is Yut Lung, but Yau Si gets to be a young teen where Yut Lung has never gotten to do that. He has only been treated like a child when he was an actual little child, and then he had to rapidly become an adult: he’s sixteen, but when he’s acting like he usually does, dressed as he usually is, people tend to assume he’s in his twenties. He smiles and pulls all his knowledge of lying to prevent his lip from twitching from how badly he wants to knock the smile off Eiji’s face. Taller when he grows up? Yut Lung has never cared about how he’ll appear in the future: for a long time, he would at most hope to be alive for another year, without any time for whimsical wonders about anything else.
It all leaves a bitter feeling in him that he can’t wash away and he hates it. Playing the role of a worried son hoping for the strangers who promised to help to find clues about his father while he’s actively planning for their downfall should be entertaining at the very least. Knowing he’s working up to stripping Ash of his most beloved person, that he’s about to rip Eiji from his side and remind Ash that he doesn’t get to have that sort of thing should give him a sense of sick satisfaction. But instead if fucking sucks, because he isn’t being Yut Lung the trained assasin who will destroy his own family for revenge, who has learnt to find peace and perhaps even a hint of amusement in others’ suffering when he gets to benefit from it. He’s stuck being Yau Si, stuck having to play pretend as a person who got everything Yut Lung never got in life, stuck pretending to be happy and peaceful by having all the things Yut Lung has told himself all his life he does not need.
Yut Lung does not need to have grown up in a nice house and he does not need a parental figure he trusts. He does not need comfort and safety and he does not need people to come in and help him. All he needs is to play his cards right and strike when the time is right: the only thing he needs is to get his revenge and nothing more. The idea of a normal life that never could have been is useless and he does not need it, and yet he has to play it out as Yau Si and has to act like he has it and that it’s made him into the sort of person that a boy like Eiji tries to comfort and befriend. It threatens to make him sick- it almost feels like a cruel trick of fate.
The time for Ash and that journalist to go running comes and it fills him with relief because he’s sick of being Yau Si. It’s far more natural to stick a needle into the photographer and to render Eiji immobile while Shorter is clearly burning in anger and unable to do anything. He sheds the skin of Yau Si the second he can- throws away all the kind glances and small talk, all the gentleness and care that felt foreign and sickening to him. The semblance of peace and normalcy is shattered as easily as it was for him to pretend to be some goody two shoes adopted kid, and Yut Lung tells himself he’s far more comfortable being surrounded by glowering hatred and the satisfaction of having betrayed the idiots who trusted him.
As he walks out and glances at Eiji’s face, perfectly neutral and peaceful, Yut Lung wishes he had let him realize who it was that knocked him out before he was out, because then he’d have gotten to see the way he reacted when naive and gentle Yau Si, the boy who he’d been trying to be friendly with, to comfort and assure that his father was surely alright, attacked him while Shorter did nothing.
He hates Eiji because he’s given Ash something that he shouldn’t have, has given a person who should be as unloveable as Yut Lung a sort of tenderness that only a naive idiot like him could harbor. He tells himself that he is not jealous of it all, and that his frustration just comes from seeing how easily Ash’s weak point was stolen away. He tamps down his mind by reminding himself that soon he’ll hand off Eiji to Golzine, and from then on Eiji too will go through a hell of his own where he’ll learn how stupid he was to ever trust and love someone like Ash. A person like him should’ve never existed in the first place: a normal, innocent person who saw someone like Ash in the darkness and decided to care for him instead of running back to the safety of the light. Yut Lung knows that nobody will ever try to pull such an idiotic move with him; Ash’s folly was that he forgot that like Yut Lung, he’s a person who will never be loved and shouldn’t even bother to try and feel love.
Yut Lung tells himself he’s glad that he no longer has to act like Yau Si. In a way it’s true, but he’d be an idiot if he let himself admit that that small fraction of time pretending to live a life where he could be stupid enough to let himself freely trust and accept gentleness somehow hurt him. Yut Lung is not loved, he will not love, and he does not need love of any sorts. He does not need tenderness and he does not need to be cared for, he does not need to be treated like a child. He is a snake and he is a doll and he’s a killer, and all he needs is revenge and not another person’s care or tenderness.