Work Text:
1.
Ye Xiu didn’t always know magic.
He first took up an interest in it because of Su Mucheng. At that time, Su Mucheng was barely 12, and she had always looked up to her brother like he was an angel descended upon earth.
“Ge!,” she would often say when Su Muqiu would do the littlest thing, stars shining bright in her eyes, “you’re so magical!”
Muqiu would laugh and pat her on the head, humbly denying her claims.
But occasionally it would get to his head and he would start bragging. “Hey, Ye Xiu, you hear that? Where’s your magic?”
Once, Ye Xiu pointed to his computer screen, where his 100% Glory arena win rate was displayed proudly, but sweet little Mucheng had already lost interest by then.
And okay, maybe Ye Xiu became a bit jealous.
So he decided to learn real magic, card magic. It was an era of technology, after all, and learning a new skill was easier than ever. He trained and trained, and went through hundreds of tutorials and videos; and with Ye Xiu’s lithe fingers and sharp mind, he found it was not the hardest skill to learn.
He started with regular playing cards, but as his repertoire of magic tricks expanded, he moved on to something else: Glory cards. After all, he didn’t always carry around a deck of cards, but his Glory cards always stuck to him like glue.
And one day, when Su Mucheng said again “ Ge, your so magical!” , and Su Muqiu shot him a smug smirk over her shoulder, Ye Xiu decided to act.
“Mucheng,” Ye Xiu said as if he was luring in a dog or cat. “Watch this.”
He held up his silver Glory card, gleaming in the light.
Su Mucheng stared attentively.
Ye Xiu flicked his fingers, and poof—the card was gone.
When he looked at Su Mucheng’s expression, her brown eyes were blown bright and round, and she was jumping with excitement.
“Wow, Xiu Ge, you’re magical too!”
Ye Xiu turned back to his computer screen, not forgetting to give Su Muqiu a smug smirk in return.
Su Miqiu’s face then was one he would laugh at for years to come.
2.
Ye Xiu pinched a Glory card between his fingers and shut his left eye. He observed Ye Qiu in front of him, who was ignoring him in favor of angrily munching on an apple.
“Stupid brother,” he was mumbling in between bites. “Just come home already—”
“Pew,” Ye Xiu muttered under his breath.
Ye Qiu practically screamed as he saw the card zooming towards his face, spinning around and around at ungodly speeds. Instead of whamming into his face, though, it curved at the last second and hit the apple, one corner burying deep into it.
“Brother?!?!” Ye Qiu cried in absolute shock. He swore he just saw his life flash before his eyes.
Ye Xiu laughed loudly and pulled another Glory card from his pocket, preparing to launch it again.
“Shameless!” Ye Qiu exclaimed. He yanked the card out of the fruit and tried to throw it back, but it just flopped to the floor pitifully. He picked it up and tried again, with the exact same result.
In the meantime, Ye Xiu was still preparing to shoot the card again, and when he did it hit right on the mark.
Ye Qiu screeched again and dropped the apple.
“BROTHER!!!”
Ye Xiu laughed maniacally.
3.
Wang Jiexi first saw Ye Qiu perform magic during season 5. He was backstage, and most of his teammates were resting on the sides or chatting with the opposing team. Tiny Herb had just lost to Excellent Era, but Wang Jiexi’s resolve was stronger than ever. The magician, people had started calling him. Wang Jiexi quite liked that name— he thought, maybe a tad arrogantly, that it fit his character and style quite well.
Until he saw Ye Qiu perform magic, that is.
Ye Qiu, as always, stood nonchalantly at the side of the stage; if one walked past him one would think he was just a janitor, with his baggy outfit and masked face and his extra extra dead eyes.
Except he definitely was not the janitor, because he was holding a gleaming silver card in his hands.
And, he wasn’t just holding it— he was doing all sorts of things with the card. One moment the card would be on his fingertips, the next spinning in the air, the next gone-vanished-poof, and in the next moment miraculously flipping through his fingers again.
The card glinted through the dim lighting, and Wang Jiexi couldn’t take his eyes away.
‘A real magician,’ Wang Jiexi’s mind whispered at him. He couldn’t help but look at those clear jointed hands even more admiringly, and he found that he couldn’t drag his eyes away.
Ye Qiu looked up and caught his eye, and Wang Jiexi looked away with burning ears.
“Captain,” one of his teammates interrupted his musings, “We should get going.”
“Yes,” Wang Jiexi agreed, but as he left he couldn’t help but turn to look at Ye Xiu again, the silver Glory card now spinning precariously on his fingertips.
4.
“Three cards,” Ye Xiu said, indeed holding three cards spread out in his hand. The outer two were silver first server cards, but the middle one was the bronze color of the more recent style.
Bao Rongxing watched with wide eyes from one side.
Ye Xiu blew softly at them for dramatic effect and then flicked his fingers. And suddenly, the middle card was not bronze anymore, but silver like the other two.
“Wow,” Bao Rongxing whispered, staring wide-eyed at him, “Boss, you’re a wizard!”
Su Mucheng laughed, her voice tinkling like bells.
Legend has it that Ye Xiu’s magic tricks were what actually convinced Bao Rongxin to join.
5.
Ye Xiu frowned. “No, that's not how you do it.”
Huang Shaotian groaned and stopped his awkward finger fumbling. “How should I do it then?”
“You have to find the center of mass when spinning, or else it’s going to fall out of your hands.”
Huang Shaotian threw his hands up. “That's what I have been doing! Practice practice practice, you said, and I did practice! But yet I still can’t do it. What if I'm just not cut out to be your student? What if I'm just not good enough? What if your fingers are just magical and—”
He started pacing the length of the room in his frenzied state of mind. Who knew learning a simple card trick could be so stressful?
“Huang Shao,” Ye Xiu stated bluntly, “calm down and try again, you can do it. Remember the center of mass.”
Huang Shaotian nearly had tears running down his face. He picked up the card and tried again.
The card spun once, twice, and then dropped to the floor. Huang Shaotian groaned.
“Why did I ever ask you to teach me this,” he muttered.
This would be one in many interactions between teacher and student.
(Huang Shaotian became a magician once he retired.)
6.
The child wailed. Wei Chen sweat. Never in a million years would he have thought he would be in this situation. In a children’s hospital. Entertaining children. One of which was now crying in front of him.
“Uh…” Wei Chen was way too old for this. “Do you want me to go get a nurse?”
Wei Chen looked beside him at Ye Xiu helplessly, begging him to do something. “Ye Xiu”, Wei Chen hissed from the side of his mouth. Ye Xiu only shrugged a shoulder but didn’t make any move to help. Shameless .
The youth in front of him only cried harder, wiping his snot on the hospital bed’s sheets.
Wei Chen continued to stand there awkwardly, and in his mind, he started to really regret agreeing to this hospital visit. Did he mention he hated children?
“Hey, hey, hey.” Ye Xiu finally took pity on his poor old soul knelt down next to the bed, “what’s wrong?”
The child only cried harder.
“Shhh. Shhshhshh.” Ye Xiu awkwardly patted the child’s shoulder. “Look at me, it’s alright.”
Ye Xiu dug around in his pocket a little, and Wei Chen wondered what horrible shameless scheme he was thinking up next. Surely he wasn’t going to offer the boy a cigarette?
Instead, Ye Xiu only took out his silver glory card and held it up to the boy’s face. “You see this?”
The boy nodded mutely, looking at the shiny silver card.
“Watch,” Ye Xiu said, and he flicked his fingers inwards and the card vanished.
The boy gasped in wonder.
Ye Xiu smiled and reached behind the boy’s ear. With another flick of his fingers, the card appeared again, but this time there were two of them.
The boy finally smiled, his face still splotchy with tears.
Seeing that it was working, Ye Xiu continued to perform tricks, and eventually, the boy was full-on laughing.
On the contrary, Wei Chen was regarding Ye Xiu with newfound suspicion. Was this really Ye Xiu??? The shameless, shameless man he knew? No, it must be a stunt double or a doppelganger.
Before Wei Chen could ponder further, Ye Xiu was already standing up and getting ready to move on to the next patient.
“Wow,” Wei Chen said as they left the room, “You’re not completely shit with kids after all. Maybe I should just sit back and let you take care of the rest.”
Ye Xiu groaned.
He should have never learned magic.