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Mo Ran had a mask, a calculated mask, he knew it was better to please people. A character modeled on purpose to appropriate the trust of others. He often had depraved thoughts, a desire under his skin to harm anyone who dared to treat him with inferiority. He had imagined several times to skin someone and see their flesh bleeding to death or to burn someone alive and wallow in screams of pain. He wanted to see the world burn if he only could. The flames would consume everything until they reduce to ashes.
The complexity of Mo Ran, however, was also in the fact that the mask he wore wasn't made only and exclusively of convenient lies, sometimes that adoring smile for Chu Wanning was real. An overwhelming desire to be a better person for him, to truly be what he appeared to be. Sometimes pretending that he only was an innocent kid, a little bit of a hothead. Someone worthy.
He once imagined holding his hands around Chu Wanning’s neck until his face reddened in desperate need of air, a scream for help that could not have escaped his lips. Watching him exhale his last breath as his eyes became more and more glassy and life left him. To be the reason for his death. To be so special, to see and hear the last moments of his life. All of this because Chu Wanning with his typical cold and distant expression had punished him for something he had done without malice. Thinking of doing something like that would make him happy. Wasn’t that unfair?
What was more mortifying than receiving such a reaction for something he had done in good faith? Anticipating Chu Wanning that for a second, only a second, would look at him and melt into a smile. Even the hint of a smile. To see how he could make him have a reaction, one that only he was capable of.
That day he discovered for the first time what it meant to have someone entrap your heart and squeeze it until it bled. He knew human nature well, how much people enjoyed doing harm, how easy it was to mock someone weaker and how those at the top of the pyramid of importance of that corrupted society didn't give a damn shit about those below. Human malice was something obvious to him.
He had suffered a lot in his life, he had lost a mother that he had loved with every fiber of his body. But he had never even dared to give his heart to anyone just to receive a bloody piece of flesh and a gaze without feelings. He hated Chu Wanning so much at that time.
He had hated him for a long time but the feelings had always been too strong, with roots so deep and impossible to eradicate. Hate or love didn't matter, he wanted to be everything the other saw. For better or worse, Chu Wanning had to belong to him.
Because Mo Ran had given him his heart without even realizing it.
When he realized that Chu Wanning's coldness was just an inability to prove what he was feeling, he reevaluated many things. He understood that many of his gestures were in fact an invisible caress on his head as if to tell him that he was good, that he saw him. That he was grateful for his existence. To be there with him.
Chu Wanning did not know how to prove that he loved Mo Ran but he was full of love to give to the other. Everything about Mo Ran make his belly tremble. So insecure that he thought it was a feeling that he didn't even deserve to feel but to which he clung with all his strength. Until his hands bleed. He wouldn't have risked dampening that feeling anyway, but he didn't want to take any chances. Despite the pain it caused him, despite the chasm of loneliness he felt in his chest because of him or the grip of jealousy in the pit of his stomach, he never wanted to turn his back on the love he felt towards Mo Ran.
The love they felt for each other was enormous and they both could have been happy. To look into each other's eyes and get lost in the completeness of the other, to find themselves. But their love was a dance in which neither of them knew the steps, surrounded by darkness making it almost impossible to even touch each other. It would have been enough to take each other by the hand and timidly rely on the other. First steps together and it would not have mattered if they had stamped each other's toes, they would have learned together by perfecting their movements until they were synchronized, becoming one.
Mo Ran would have been better for Chu Wanning. By proving to himself that he was worthy because the truth was so much simpler than what he thought. Chu Wanning would always love him, he would always want to be special to Mo Ran, whatever kind of person he was. If he had dropped his mask and showed him what he really was, his innermost thoughts, Chu Wanning's feelings would not have changed. He would always accept him, he would always want it, he would always crave his contact and he would always call himself the unworthy one. The one to whom it was unthinkable to have a feeling like love. Too bad, too boring, too weak, too distant, too useless. An incomplete, broken object that no one would ever want.
Mo Ran just wanted to be lulled into the sweet scent of flowers that Chu Wanning had. To close his eyes before falling asleep feeling that perfume, squeezing the body of the other, satisfied by knowing it belonged to him. Knowing that when he opened his eyes he would be by his side.
It would have been a long and winding road to make Chu Wanning realize that there was someone who wanted him, who would fight for him, to stand beside him. To love him. A person who had imagined several times to undress him from his clothes to kiss that fragile body, touching and holding him possessively, kissing every part and biting hard to leave the marks on the passage of his lips. To make him scream his name.
It would have been a long and winding road to make Mo Ran realize how much Chu Wanning had always seen him in a special way, always wanted his attention, how he had always been jealous of Shi Mei. Of the place she had in the heart of his shizun.
It would have been a love story like few. They would have been happy despite everything.
But not in that life.
There, in that moment, Taxian-jun's agonizing screams of pain echoed through the building, clutching a lifeless, cold, helpless body. The tears and pleas would not be answered.