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Rin threw a cup at the wall. It shattered upon impact into a dozen pieces, like the shitty, cheap thing it was, leaving behind a spill of tea and sharp shards that would hurt anyone who wasn’t wary enough. It was pretty fucking poetic, she thought. One cheap, dirty little thing broken by the stupidity of another who had just broken herself by doing something even dumber.
Rin could hardly believe that she was capable of being so foolhardy, so impulsive, so dumb. But she guessed Auntie Fang was right about something at least. The memory of saying “I love you” to Yin Nezha was almost enough to make her drag herself back to Tikany and go back to working as a shop girl, or maybe even just bury herself in the muddy field of some farm there and never come out.
She didn’t even have the excuse of alcohol or drugs or the heat of the moment to play it off to him or assuage her mind with. This would have been so much more manageable if it had just been said during a drinking match after a challenge at a party, or if it had been during a session of swapping joints of weed she’d gotten from Jiang after a particularly gruelling series of tests, or if it had even been during the exhilaration of having received the scores back for those tests and having found out the two of them had aced every single one.
But no. She had said it after the weed session, after the initial joy of success, after even the party and drinking afterwards. Instead, she had said those three, dreadful words the morning after. They’d woken up together on a sofa (fully clothed, thank the Vermilion Bird, and with no memories of any intimacy the night before except a few seconds of eye contact that Rin refused to dwell on). She’d grumbled something to him, the haze of a hangover still clouding her head (not that that was any excuse for her lapse of judgement, stupi-) and he’d let out a laugh, his voice a clear melody that cut through every bit of tiredness and residual intoxication that gripped her.
He was beautiful. Rin had once thought Nezha was ‘pretty’ or ‘handsome’, but those words couldn’t describe him. They were for people, for flowers, for paintings, for silly, frivolous things. He was the farthest thing from that. He was beautiful, like the ocean illuminated by the ethereal light of the moon at night as it hung full in the sky. He was a grand city, bustling with majestically crafted ships ferrying up and down a coursing river. He was flawless, too lovely to be anything human. Rin hadn’t been able to control herself (excuses) her hand slipping through his long hair in adoration, unable to stop herself from admiring each perfectly moulded angle of his face, the light cherry flush from last night’s drinking on his porcelain skin.
“Rin?” he asked softly, and his voice had undone her, had unthreaded every tightly woven boundary and restrain she had made for herself.
“I love you,” she said, seeing the cliff in front of her but jumping off of it for those wide, bright almond eyes.
Of course, after a second, she had seen the fall rushing towards her, but by then it was too late.
She’d run away, scrambling out of Nezha’s arms and running out of the room and his apartment, ignoring his calls for her and rushing to her own.
Here she was, an hour later, having paced in the kitchen, contemplating moving away and never having to meet Nezha’s eyes again and never doing anything so stupid again.
She watched the tea pool and cool down, and suddenly she had to fight back tears. She’d brewed it to try to calm herself down, to try to take her mind off Nezha and his eyes and what she’d done. But she’d gone and thrown it away, and now it was ruined. The mess sat there like a cruel reminder, a reminder that she’d wrecked a friendship that she’d never expected to have had, never with Yin Nezha, who was everything she was not, haughty and privileged, a rival in every facet of life. But it had happened, and it had meant so much to her, so much she hadn’t realized until she had spoken it aloud and shattered it.
Rin pushed the tears back. She breathed in.
This isn’t going to fix itself, she thought. She could clean up the cleanable at this moment and leave the permanently wrecked to be dwelled on later.
But life had decided to fuck her over like usual because just as she was carefully handling a glass shard (she cursed that stupid asshole neighbour of hers. Who the fuck stole a dustpan and brush?) the bell rung and Rin’s hand reflexively gripped tightly onto it like a knife in battle. Who else could it have been but the one person who she wanted to see the least (and the most, a traitorous part of her whispered)? But whatever battle instincts she must have gained from some past life of war backfired here, her hand splitting open with a thin cut that somehow was a passageway for an unholy amount of blood to leak through.
“Fuck!” she snarled, but the bleeding continued, and the rings kept coming, with them somehow feeling like they were getting more insistent.
Gritting her teeth, Rin found a clean enough cloth on the dining room table to drape over her cut hand and then made her way to the door and opened it with her other one.
“What?” she snarled hotly at Nezha’s face, her anger the only shield she had to prevent herself from breaking down at the sight of it. Her head was pounding, her heart was breaking, and she didn’t need her eyes sobbing on top of that.
“I-” Nezha began, before his eyes shifted to her hand, expression shifting from frustration to alarm. “You’re bleeding.”
Rin glanced at it and grimaced, because of course she couldn’t help but make another stupid decision on top of all the others she had made today and had used a white cloth. Already, it had turned crimson, beads of red gathering and about to drop to the ground. Because a stained carpet was just what she required. Cleaning that up would be a shitty task before she dumped this place and ran back Tikany to die in ignominy.
“Amazing perception Yin. Look, what d-” before she could snap out a full response, Nezha had managed to enter and was tugging her along to the living room, back where the two of them had spent long nights when not at his place, reading textbooks and practicing questions with Kitay and Venka. They had both been so nervous, terrified about the slew of tests that would be coming up. If Rin had known where success would lead her, she would have dumped every book and let herself fail.
Before she could even begin to formulate a protest, after she got over Nezha’s strong arms wrapped around her as they had been a scarce hour earlier, Nezha had placed her on the sofa and dove under it to find the first aid kit she stored there.
“You should be more careful.” he chided as he took out a bandage, his voice filled with a worry that made Rin want to stroke his head and reassure him. “You need to take better care of yourself.”
She couldn’t repress a shiver as his gentle fingers wrapped the white cotton binding cautiously around her palm. It wasn’t fair. He had such nice fingers, she noticed, calloused from long hours of training, but still clean and well cared for, long and nimble.
“Being careful,” she muttered, looking away, “hasn’t really been something that I’ve been any good at today, huh?”
She felt Nezha’s fingers pause. “What do you mean?” She hated and loved his voice. Every time she heard it, she came undone. She did something stupid. Well, it wasn’t as though there was anything left to wreck, huh?
“You don’t need to be so gentle,” she whispered quietly. It was her fault. It was her fault for longing for something Nezha could never give her, for even letting the thought into her mind, for lashing out when he’d done nothing wrong. “You…heard. What I said.”
He was quiet for a moment before responding. “Yes. I did.” Then he finished with her bandages, his fingers somehow even lighter than they had before. Before Rin could deal with that, the same fingers moved up, both of Nezha’s hands cupping her face and bringing it down. He was kneeling in front of her, his face a well of beatific sweetness. “Did you ever think that maybe I’m being so gentle because of that?”
“Oh.” That didn’t make any sense. It was like pondering the mechanics of a star descending into a field, of the oceans parting for a single pebble thrown into it. “But…why? I’m… you’re-”
She couldn’t find the words, but maybe she didn’t need to. He was Nezha. She was just Rin. Why would he ever?
Nezha smiled, and it felt like her cut had moved to her heart, only with an impossible swelling inwards rather than out. “You really need to take better care of yourself.” he chided.
He nuzzled his nose onto her cheek, and then breathed into her ear. “There’s your answer,” he whispered with such reverence that she felt like the holiest being in the world alongside him, “you are you. My wonderful girl. My Rin.”
He pulled back, and suddenly she noticed his face was flushed a darker red than it had been even last night.
“I love you,” he said, his voice shy and faltering.
If Rin came undone and kissed him right then, had wrapped her arms around him and fell down making out on her shitty carpet with him? Well, maybe listening to Nezha’s voice didn’t lead to all bad decisions.