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Head, torso, arms, legs without feet. Hua Cheng built him from bronze and porcelain. Strong and fragile. Just like he was supposed to be. Strong to bear the burden of Hua Cheng's love. Fragile, making every move remind him how much he needs his creator to live.
His enamel-covered skin showed no blemish. Like a marble statue made by the gods, too beautiful to be created by human hands.
He divided him into seven sections as he pieces. Seven for holiness, seven for sins.
The first was Pride. Immaculate and dignified.
He dressed him in the finest silk. As soft as the touch of the porcelain, fully synthetically crafted leather that covered all intricate machinery. The silk was so thin that it transparently, without shame, revealed the secrets that the fabric placed on the body should have covered. If Xie Lian were a living being, thought Hua Cheng, he would surely say, "Ah, San Lang, this is so embarrassing!" hiding the flush of his cheeks behind a transparent veil. This Xie Lian was unable to bring himself to a reaction similar to shame, and although Hua Cheng lamented, he had to accept the solutions he used to program his beloved gege. After all, no defect could make him less perfect.
Hua Cheng felt his hand over the android's cheek. Xie Lian's eyelids fluttered in sudden closure - likely the result of cutting off the conduit responsible for the flow of visual information.
The humanoid began coming to life.
Hua Cheng noticed Xie Lian running his hand over the structure of the fabric he was wearing. He smiled to himself at how wise his gege was. So smart. No detail escapes his notice.
"I changed it to blue velvet." He explained. "Because my gege looks especially beautiful in this color."
The act was a selfish whim of the very fact that Xie Lian couldn't see it with his own eyes.
Next was Greed.
Hua Cheng had been considering tearing out Xie Lian's eyes for a long time. He couldn't bear the regret they got every time it focused their attention on him. He tried to replace them, but it didn't help - Xie Lian still looked as if he knew exactly who or what he was before Hua Cheng created him. Therefore, Hua Cheng had to get rid of his eyesight. After all, the android didn't need it anyway. Hua Cheng could become his eyes, so it wasn't necessary to equip him with his own. After all, their lack didn't detract from his perfection.
The design of the face itself wasn't a challenge. Hua Cheng just took it from the original Xie Lian's form. The only problem was its expression - the constant curve of sadness. When Hua Cheng tried to force his full, sculpted mouth to smile, Xie Lian couldn't do it properly. It just looked pathetic.
He asked why? But Xie Lian didn't know, he couldn't. Android remained passive. Sad. Wistful. Though he didn't know why. He couldn't know.
After all, Hua Cheng didn't give him any memories.
He also didn"t give him the heart, because it was supposed to belong to Hua Cheng in the end. Yet Xie Lian would never have given it to him himself. Not voluntarily. He didn't do it before, then and not now, or at least not the way Hua Cheng wanted. With great difficulty he had to tear it out of his dying lover's chest, so why should he give it back to him now?
Hua Cheng left a burning gap in the android's chest. He didn't explain to Xie Lian why, and likewise he didn't ask. He couldn't.
Envy was another.
Could Xie Lian dream? Probably no. Hua Cheng didn't want to take this possibility into awareness. He didn't want his beloved to be able to dream a reality other than the one to which they belong. The one where there would be no Hua Cheng next to him, the one where Xie Lian would be free. Sometimes Hua Cheng had such dreams - nightmares - he would say. In them he helplessly watched as his beloved flew away. Far far away somewhere, where Hua Cheng couldn't reach. Mu Qing and Feng Xin appeared in other such dreams. They convinced Xie Lian that Hua Cheng wasn't good enough for him. And Xie Lian, in his pure naivety, believed them.
Hua Cheng hated those dreams. They made him impulsive - less thorough, and yet he had to focus on fixing his Xie Lian. Sometimes in anger, he would break one of the cables of the delicate mechanism and lead to a leak of black oil. Extravasation of android blood. Without being calm, the glitch was almost impossible to fix, but how was he going to keep his mind clear when a particle of his soul spilled like a river onto the cold concrete floor?
It was just a mechanism - Xie Lian's body that needed constant repairs, for it was, after all, nothing more than an elaborate machinery he had donned as a body. His body. A body that belonged only to Hua Cheng. His temple of dreams and desires. Hence, he hated the thought that somewhere deep in the obsidian code of his Xie Lian was a place for someone other than himself, just as there was no place in himself for anything other than him. Therefore, the first Xie Lian (the one with flesh and blood) had to be changed. This Xie Lian couldn't live up to his feelings, having in his head and heart insignificant people and beliefs that could stand in the way of their love.
Fortunately, that wasn't a problem anymore.
There was also Lust, because Hua Cheng wanted Xie Lian more than anything, with every part of him.
A desire that made his fingers twist at every touch of the mechanical structure of the body with which he had dressed him.
Xie Lian was almost finished. The effect wasn't quite satisfactory yet, not as perfect as Xie Lian himself, but even without a voice or feet, he was breathtaking. The perfect creation of Hua Cheng - his life's work. Eternal love.
Choking on the flames of excitement somewhere in his lungs, Hua Cheng ran his hand over the intricate engraving of his name on the android's metallic neck - proof that he would always belong to him.
He kissed the shell of the smooth column of his collarbone, empty eye sockets, temple, and finally the line of the mouth. Cold, silicon lips without ability to feel, moving unconsciously in trying to speak, without any possibility of making a voice. Just like when its original form breathed its last.
"You want me to be yours?" Xie Lian was whispering silently back then. "It will all be yours. All the pain. All this pain will be yours."
Bitter tears rolled from his cheeks onto Hua Cheng's blood-stained hands. They couldn't wash away the vice. Even now, with Xie Lian back in his arms, red remained a permanent color adorning his fingers. Xie Lian died of red and was born in red.
This is what he got for being who he was. That's what he was.
A murderer and a mourner. A psychopath and a lecher. A heartless lover.
Hua Cheng's love.
Gluttony.
"We will take care of your speech apparatus, gege! I know it took a long time, but I think I know how to solve the wavelength problem and-" Hua Cheng said excitedly, dealing with the complicated machinery. Xie Lian wasn't listening. He was far beyond his own consciousness. Somewhere between the minor errors in his code, flickering images floated disturbingly like a memory. Human memory.
With curiosity - if an android like him could feel something like this - he plunged into a series of unknown pictures. He couldn't understand what he saw. He didn't understand why the images scrolling through his processors showed something he couldn't understand. Showing events he didn't experience, people he didn't know. Xie Lian couldn't tell why it seemed strangely familiar to him. So distant.
Something was wrong.
The android found that he absorbed it like a thirsty person on contact with water. He was starving. Hungry for those memories. Xie Lian absorbed them and absorbed them, yet couldn't get enough without even feeling real hunger. Somewhere in him was still empty. Annoying black hole which the synthetic heart muscle left behind. Xie Lian felt the need to fill this gap with something, though he subconsciously knew that he shouldn't. For the more he ate, the more pain he felt. It was wasting him. Piece by piece.
"This isn't my body! I don't want it! Take it from me!" He wanted to shout but couldn't. After all, he had no speech apparatus, and when Hua Cheng fitted one into him, he found that he couldn't bring himself to say anything.
He could only scream in the dark when Hua Cheng wasn't looking. Trying to fill himself with his suffering.
Anger.
That's how Xie Lian could have called this emotion. Blazing fire on Hua Cheng. For what he took from him. For who, WHAT he made him into.
Hua Cheng didn't know what was wrong with his android. He couldn't understand why he spent days on the operating table with his head turned towards the window. He didn't know what he could see in that tiny opening to the outside world without even having eyes to do it. He didn't understand, and Xie Lian wasn't going to make him realise.
"Gege?" Hua Cheng asked, seeming unimaginably small and fragile at these moments. Unnatural for a person like him. A great scientist, a proud man. And murderer. "Turn to me, gege."
Xie Lian heard the man talking to him, but he was consciously ignoring it. This was the only form of defense he had. It was the only way of expressing reproaches he had. Though Hua Cheng couldn't know it.
"What the hell is wrong with you?!" Hua Cheng pulled on android's clothes and tugged at his hair. He was hoping to get some kind of reaction. Sometimes it was easy for him to forget that without the implemented pain receptors, it would be a senseless act.
"Gege, Xie Lian... Please answer." He begged and the only thing Xie Lian could do was ask.
"Why are you crying, Hua Cheng?"
"Because you're crying too, gege." He was? Xie Lian couldn't say so. He was just an android after all. Androids don't have emotions.
They can't cry.
And at the end there was Sloth. Heavy and sticky. Devastating Sloth.
"I love you, gege." Hua Cheng whispered against the object of his feelings. Squeezed close, as if his chest was the place where he was born and would die. The place where he belonged. They laid like that for a long time, maybe an hour, maybe many days, or maybe an entire eternity. As if they were dead. Xie Lian could tell because he knew that feeling well. Just like for the first time, Hua Cheng pressed his head against his chest, listening to his life fade away.
Hua Cheng took his heart. He took his life and finally his face. He made it anew and locked it in a state of eternal nonexistence.
This time, death was different. His body was working without breathing, so death couldn't be exactly what, in human terms, was meant to be the end. It was much worse.
He was prisoned in a state of emptiness, on the verge of existence and non-existence, filled with regret and pain. Full of emotions that he wouldn't be able to express or give them any vent to. He was powerless. Condemned at the mercy of Hua Cheng. Forced to take his love and pretend that with every word and touch he doesn't fall apart more and more. But he couldn't blame Hua Cheng. Everything he did was a dictation of his feelings and a verdict of desires. He couldn't blame who he was deep in his heart - a child who hadn't been taught properly. Xie Lian could only blame himself.
Because he never loved him enough. Because he didn't listen when Hua Cheng held him in trembling arms pleading,
"Don't leave me."
Well, now he didn't have that option. How could he leave his creator? How could he since Hua Cheng had stripped him of his feet?
He couldn't go anywhere. But he also couldn't stay because being with Hua Cheng was too painful for his tainted soul.
So he fell apart into seven pieces. Seven for holiness, seven for sins.