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Tang Rou sees no reason to react when the door slams open and Sun Liang tosses some shouty fool onto the balcony’s night-cool tiles. Tang Rou does move a little bit, sure—drawing her mouth away from Chu Yunxiu’s with a dirty drag of teeth on lip—but it’s more to appreciate the subtle flash of fierceness in Chu Yunxiu’s eyes than anything else.
It’s certainly not out of concern.
There’s no need for Tang Rou to be on alert. No need to activate the weaponry concealed so smoothly beneath her skin, nor even shift so much as a fingertip toward the misleadingly basic, old-school hardware strapped—far more visibly—to her thigh. (Go on, underestimate me always was a core part of Happy’s approach to survival and, anyway, Tang Rou likes the blades.)
There’s definitely no reason to slip from Chu Yunxiu’s lap, even if the shit-for-brains dripping blood at their feet is apparently cracked enough to think he seriously has any kind of upper hand in this situation. For all of his posturing, though, Tang Rou recognises the brittle edge of a person not entirely sure exactly what’s been happening to them for the last few hours. Which— well. Tang Rou rather assumes that Misty Castle’s netrunner will have already used the guy as access credentials to uncover whatever it is that has landed him the uneasy privilege of being tossed at the boss’s feet.
Anyway, the gonk’s indignant tirade is already cluing Tang Rou into his identity: some two-bit doughboy with fixer ambitions—and also the one behind the recent spate of trouble on Misty Castle’s turf. He is, to be frank, leaking information about as well as he’s leaking blood.
The merc had—his ranting is making it abundantly clear—apparently been under the misguided impression that there was some kind of power vacuum going on in these parts. What with Misty Castle’s notoriously unreliable crew. What with Misty Castle’s so-called leader so weak that she’d even gone as far as to bring in Lord Grim’s cold-bitch joytoy. As if yet another set of pretty tits was going to help.
Tang Rou does see a reason to slide from Chu Yunxiu’s lap, then.
She steels her fingers beneath the heavy leather of Chu Yunxiu’s waistcoat, instead—warming her discontent upon the luxurious plushness of sweet, soft skin. She isn’t actually here to join Chu Yunxiu’s crew, whatever the word on the street might be, and it isn’t her style—these days, at least—to go around offing people in allied territory.
Besides, there is—Tang Rou has learned—when the mood is right—a certain pleasure to be found in permitting others to fight your battles. And their own battles, too, for that matter. Just every now and then. As a treat.
The gonk truly is a gonk all around, though. A bold one. But a fucking idiot.
‘Ahh,’ interjects Chu Yunxiu. The interruption is breathed out upon a slow drift of smoke. She doesn’t actually move as she speaks—she doesn’t raise her voice—and yet the battered merc falls quiet as Chu Yunxiu says, in a cadence as unhurried as the sensual shift of her fingers upon the small of Tang Rou’s back, ‘See, friend, that’s where I’m going to have to say that you’ve broken a house rule.’
A house rule. Pft. Tang Rou meets Sun Liang’s eyes before directing her smile at the city’s neon sprawl. Not that Tang Rou is hiding her expression to be polite, of course; she simply has no desire to ruin Chu Yunxiu’s punchline before it’s been delivered.
Chu Yunxiu’s hand shifts smoothly behind Tang Rou’s body. The merc makes a furious noise, and then a rattly-wet one—not Sun Liang’s handiwork, Tang Rou knows, but Chu Yunxiu’s.
‘Mm,’ Chu Yunxiu murmurs—and Tang Rou doesn’t need to see her to know that she’s smiling. Chu Yunxiu’s tone is all low and warm; it has the smoky, playful timbre of the kiss this chrome joke and his bruised violence are blocking. ‘The thing is,’ Chu Yunxiu says, walking her fingers across the nape of Tang Rou’s neck, ‘It’s not that you called my mainline a joytoy, y’know? It’s that you said it like you think that’s a slur.’
The merc grunts and—Tang Rou might have almost been fascinated, a handful of years earlier—manages to spit out, ‘Heard it like I meant it then, you b—’
Chu Yunxiu’s voice is calm, and entirely indifferent to the fool in front of them, when she confirms shortly, ‘Data read?’
Tang Rou stops looking at the city.
Sun Liang nods.
Chu Yunxiu’s fingers barely move to make the sigil above Tang Rou’s spine. The magic fizzes.
‘Bang,’ Tang Rou says, with a MediaCorp-perfect smile, and the merc has just enough time to look confused before he’s flatlined and twitching.
‘I’d say I have no idea why you’re so okay with your shitty reputation—’ Chu Yunxiu says once it’s the two of them left beneath the city’s shifting glow.
Tang Rou snorts, bringing her thumbs up to graze back and forth across Chu Yunxiu’s nipples. Tang Rou says, with a smile, ‘—but people content to let the world assign them, very incorrectly, as useless fems prone to caving under the first sign of pressure probably shouldn’t throw stones…?’
Chu Yunxiu’s laughter curls like an upper, and Chu Yunxiu’s kiss spools pleasure in Tang Rou’s core. Chu Yunxiu’s fingers, though, brush down along Tang Rou’s thigh—dance right across Tang Rou’s throwing knives—and if Chu Yunxiu doesn’t say it’s all about the underestimation, darling, well—
Tang Rou hears it anyway.