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1.
If Nezha could define the word ‘pain’, there would not be enough pages in the dictionary to contain the variations he would conjure.
Pain is an empty seat reserved for his father at his high school graduation.
It’s his mother’s eyes darting quickly away from him to envelop her favorite child in a hug while his arms are still raised in the air for a hug.
It’s his older siblings’ dripping disdain or quiet avoidance, even before he made the biggest mistake of his life—what had made him deserve that kind of treatment?
It’s the smell of salt—whether it’s the sea or his tears—and the sound of ambulances and paramedics pressing their palms down into an unmoving chest.
It’s an urn placed on a shelf in his apartment bedroom with his baby brother’s picture next to it.
Nezha knows pain. He understands it on a fundamental level—no two pains feel exactly the same—a pinch, a twinge, a gut punch, a suffocating sorrow. It can be quick, slow, short, drawn-out, debilitating, but always so, so familiar.
Which is why she shocked him.
She gave him another unconventional entry to his long list—pain is a fist of a stranger connecting to his eye socket, and the simmering rage bleeding out of his wounded pride. She snarled at him for insulting her accent, her clothes, her very presence in the hallowed halls of Sinegard University, and threatened to punch him again if he spoke another foul word about her.
His lip pulled up into a sneer—it was as easy as breathing, by then, putting up a mask of arrogance, clinging to it like a lifeline before that familiar pain that only his father managed to ignite; and he’d told her she didn’t have the guts to and threatened to kill her.
The funny thing is, she would have punched him again had a TA not stumbled upon their brawl and stopped her. She called his bluff.
Nezha learned one thing that day: Fang Runin is reckless, and she embodies pain.
2.
She’s a morning person.
One would think it would be the opposite, given her snappy attitude even when she was well-rested, but she’d told Nezha her body had been wired to wake up at the crack of dawn from the moment she’d been plopped in her foster home in Tikany—cooking the breakfast, washing the previous night’s dishes, checking on an infant Kesegi, scalping the neighbors for a pack of opium at four times the price, all before the sun reaches its crest in the sky.
She’d glared at him when he told her how sad that sounded. She didn’t need any pity, she’d said, much less his .
He knew that, of course. Rin is the farthest thing from pitiful—he’d fit that descriptor more than she ever would. She would not let the hardships of her past define her, unlike he once did before he met her.
The scent of jasmine tea and honey became a staple in his apartment on a weekend morning, the sizzling of eggs and bacon in a hot pan his alarm.
It was music to his ears.
He tried to outdo her, just once. He’d woken up an hour before she did on a Sunday morning and looked up how to make toast and eggs. She made it look so simple; and he’d always been her best competition before—how hard must it be to keep up?
Rin bolted into the kitchen thirty minutes earlier than she usually wakes up when she’d smelt something burning, and found him sheepishly standing over sad, blackened bread slices on a plate.
“You fucking moron, ” she’d sighed, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and unplugging the toaster. He’d heard those same words time and again from Jinzha, but when Rin says it, there is no pure derision laced within her tone, but an exasperated affection that makes his skin tingle.
“Come here,” she tells him, and presses her body against his chest, taking his hands in hers. He’s about to ask what she’s going to do when she peeks up at him and says, “I’ll show you how to make some decent breakfast.”
She guides him through it, holding his wrists with a surprising gentleness and beating the eggs in a glass bowl with a fork. She instructs him to add salt and pour it into the hot pan.
Her hands are so small in his, her words firm and authoritative but not harsh, never harsh.
“There you go,” she says, and he mourns the loss of her touch. This isn’t the most intimate thing they’ve done, by far, but Nezha already treasures it far more than he probably should.
“You think you can handle making orange juice by yourself or do I have to teach you that, too?” she asks with a teasing grin, and he has the sudden urge to kiss her.
Instead, he makes the best damn orange juice he can possibly make from a powdered packet and a cold pitcher.
3.
Fang Runin is a fighter.
He can give her that much credit.
She does not back down, even when he tried to put her in her place—no scathing remark or targeted insult fazes her, and it drove him up the wall.
She places higher than him on an Advanced Calculus elective exam, the first out of many.
He’d been so angry he’d bumped her shoulder on the way out of the classroom, hard. Almost sent her stumbling to a desk.
The next class they shared, she didn’t just bump his shoulder—no, she almost shoved him into the doorway, and stared him down, challenging him to retaliate. His arm was sore, and he decided it wasn’t worth getting in trouble again and his father finding out.
She really is… something, that’s for fucking sure.
4.
“What’s your favorite color?” she slurs into his neck, the aroma of wine coating her breath.
He bites back a laugh, shifting her in his arms as she loops hers around his neck, nuzzling at his collar. Nezha suppresses a shiver, pressing a kiss on the side of her head.
She loves bragging about having such a high tolerance, but out of the many things where she can put her money where her mouth is, drinking is not one of them.
“I don’t think I have one,” he replies, flicking her nose lightly. Rin gives him a confused frown he thinks is adorable.
“I do. It’s blue. Blue is nice,” she replies, “and red, too. They’re good.”
“Then I guess those are my favorite colors, too,” he says, and he realizes he’s not lying.
“You have good taste.
Nezha smiles. Before he can reply, Rin diverts her attention to playing with the pendant of her necklace—nothing too flashy, just the shape of a poppy flower molded in gold and small diamonds. He’d given it to her for her birthday, and she’s worn it for every single occasion they’d gone out for.
“You bought me this, right?”
“You don’t remember?” he teases, and she shoves his shoulder.
“It looks so expensive.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Liar.”
He gazes at her hands, her fingers, calloused and rough from years of work, but slotted perfectly into his.
Nezha wonders how nice a ring would look on them.
5.
An impasse is a delicate thing. Like tiptoeing on a floor with invisible broken glass, wondering if the next step would make the first cut.
Fang Runin is anything but delicate.
But she also knows her priorities—and her priority right now is making a solid term paper with a designated partner, who simply happened to be him.
What were the odds, really?
“You better not fuck this up for me,” she hisses lowly at him, and Nezha has the strangest urge to grin at her.
“I promise I won’t.”
They get the best paper, not just among the class, but among all the students in their batch, barring Kitay’s paper.
He is, after all, a man of his word.
“It was nice working with you,” he somehow manages to tell her without choking or bursting into laughter. It doesn’t feel like a lie.
She doesn’t say it back, but Nezha can see it on her expression—she, grudgingly, feels the same.
6.
“Do you not have an umbrella with you?” Nezha asks, wanting to fill the awkward silence in the car. He’d turn the radio on, but he doesn’t know what music she likes.
Rin doesn’t reply, staring out the window from the passenger seat.
He didn’t know why he offered to drive her home—they weren’t friends, they were barely acquaintances, held together by her closer ties with Kitay and Venka, one he couldn’t hope to match.
But it was raining, and she was standing under the student activity center’s awning, cursing like a sailor, and the words slipped past his mouth without him realizing.
(Or regretting.)
“What was your last class?”
“Jun’s,” comes her clipped response, and Nezha’s fists clench around the steering wheel.
He’s not a quitter, but she just effortlessly frustrates him. Nezha just can’t manage to get through to her.
“Can you put on some damn music?”
Nezha almost sags in relief as he gestures for her to take his phone and choose a song.
Soft rock. Soft rock is the kind of music she plays.
Nezha doesn’t know why he makes a mental note of it.
He offers her another ride the next day, even when the sky is clear of rain clouds, and plays all of the soft rock songs he thinks she’ll like.
When he catches her listening to them discreetly on her phone soon after, a grin makes its way to his face and stays there for a long while.
7.
Her favorite lip gloss tastes like strawberries to him.
She keeps insisting it’s raspberry, but really, does it matter as long as he gets to taste it?
8.
She hates his family. She makes no secret of that.
But whenever he visits them, and comes home late and exhausted, she’s waiting for him on their couch with two cups of coffee in hand.
She’s memorized how he likes it—slow-roasted, two teaspoons of creamer, one teaspoon of sugar, and a few drops of honey.
Nezha sits next to her and warms his hands with the mug.
They don’t speak. Rin only moves closer, and rests her head on his shoulder.
Strange.
The silence in his family’s manor is suffocating.
The silence with her is safe.
9.
Rin has four freckles on her left cheekbone, and six on her right.
Nezha wonders if she would find it strange if he asked to trace them.
10.
“Look up,” Rin demands. “Look at me.”
Funny how simple it is for him to do when she’s the one saying it.
He lifts his head, cheeks wet with tears. She kneels in front of him, meeting his gaze head-on. She takes his face in her hands and wipes away the tears with her thumbs.
“I’m sorry,” he croaks pathetically, and closes his eyes for the final blow.
You continually disappoint me, Nezha.
Why can’t you be more like your brother?
You should have been the one who died.
“Why are you apologizing to me?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says, his lip quivering as he holds back his tears. Pathetic. “Because I fucked up.”
“But it’s not your fault,” Rin tells him, baffled, but he doesn’t know why. It is his fault.
It always is.
“You’re angry. And disappointed.”
“I am,” she replies, and he flinches, but Rin holds his face in place. “But not at you.”
“But—”
“ No. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”
“Rin, please— ”
“It’s not your fault, ” she insists, eyes hardening. “Say it back.”
“But—”
“ Say it back. ”
Nezha pauses, unsure of himself. But Rin is steadfast and strong, and her mere silence dictates what he does next.
Like always, he can’t deny her.
“It’s… not my fault?” he says slowly, the shape of the words foreign on his tongue.
“Is that a fucking question or a statement?”
“It’s not my fault,” he repeats with more forced conviction.
“No, it’s not,” Rin replies, satisfied. He leans forward and kisses her, and she kisses him back.
He doesn’t believe it, not one bit, but for her, he’ll pretend to.
Maybe one day, he’ll end up really feeling that way. And it’ll be thanks to her.
11.
“Is that… is that my shirt?” Nezha asks, blinking at Rin who’s rolling the sleeves up to her elbows of one of his polos over one of her undershirts.
“I ran out of clean clothes here, they’re all at my apartment,” she tells him, “And I’m gonna be late to Sonnen’s class if I swing by.”
His stomach swoops at the sight of her in his clothes.
“I’ll wash it and bring it back, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“ No ,” he blurts out. “No, you keep it.”
“But—”
“I have other shirts like that. It’s fine. Keep it.”
The side of her lip quirks up, her eyes betraying that she sees right through his sad, little excuse. She doesn’t call him out on it, though, but her radiating smug amusement was a call out enough.
When she leaves, Nezha falls back onto his bed, heaving a shuddering breath and trying to calm his pulse.
He resolves to give her full access to all his shirts and jackets and hoodies.
They’d all look better on her, anyway.
12.
He loves saying it.
Three simple ones, they roll off his tongue with surprising ease, like he’d been waiting to say them to someone his whole life. The words don’t come as easily to her, and he doesn’t fault her for that.
But he thinks she says them more often, in a million different ways.
She says them by mending his coat buttons before winter starts because he forgot to buy a new one.
She says them by cooking a comfort meal after a particularly exhausting day at the university, even if she had a shit one herself.
She says them when she calls him one of her best friends.
She says them when she yells at him and lays out her extra notes from classes he missed because he got recklessly sick.
He loves saying the words.
He doesn’t mind when she doesn’t—he loves deciphering them in the things she does for him just as much.
13.
Is she worth the risk?
That’s not a question to him. It had never been a question to him.
The answer will be yes , every single time.
14.
Nezha has many secrets of Rin’s he keeps.
Here’s one of them: Rin has a scar on her lower back. Her foster aunt was the perpetrator, like she always was, and it involved her oversleeping and a thrown metal spatula.
He hugged her a little tighter to his chest the night she told him that story.
Here’s another one: she’s a terrible dancer.
Absolutely no sense of rhythm, kept stepping on his foot and swearing when he bought them lessons for Valentine’s Day, and never failed to flip him the finger whenever he mocks her for it. It’s endearing, and utterly hilarious.
Here’s one last, and it’s his favorite one, one she’d quietly whispered to him: he is the first person she’s ever fallen in love with.
He hopes he’ll be the last, and only one, too.
15.
“Can I kiss you?”
Rin doesn’t flinch, or gape, or even curse at him.
If anything, she looks unimpressed.
“It really took you six months to ask me that question?”
He blinks once, twice, not understanding.
She sighs, rolling her eyes. “You’re a fucking mess.”
Then she leans forward and presses her lips against his.
16.
There is no sudden realization. No grand schemes or over-the-top plans, like he expected himself to make.
He’s in his office one day, staring at a framed photo of her on his desk.
He imagines how lovely she would look in white.
He imagines a house decorated with those same photographs, littered across the walls, memories encased in glass through the years.
He imagines waking up next to her every morning.
He smiles, and he doesn’t stop smiling.
He asks her in the quiet of their dining room, eating a reheated dinner, because both of them had to work overtime that day.
She says yes.
17.
“The Trifecta became their own undoing,” Rin summarizes the textbook paragraph, eyebrows creasing together, “It’s fucking depressing.”
“They loved each other and it became their downfall,” Nezha agrees, highlighting a passage.
“Love,” she scoffs. “Love doesn’t cause wars. Power does. They’re all fables to cover up the ugly stuff that comes with wars, Tearza and the Red Emperor. The Trifecta. The Dragon Marshal and the Phoenix General.”
He looks at her, then, sat across him, illuminated by just the moon by his window sill—she has a strange habit of studying in the dark—legs crossed as she furiously writes something in her notebook. A stray strand of hair falls in her face, and without thinking, he leans forward and brushes it back, tucking it behind her ear. She freezes, giving him a wide-eyed look. He returns it, surprised but not regretful.
Love doesn’t cause wars, she says.
Nezha wonders whether that’s true.
Because what he’s feeling right now, what he feels every time he looks at her?
If they even felt a fraction of how he feels, he thinks he understands.
Love doesn’t cause wars, no, not alone. But love kept them fighting, and Nezha knows he would do the same, too.
18.
“You’re going to scratch the glass if you put it like that,” Rin says, looking down at the picture frame; it’s Mingzha, grinning up at the camera from the grass, with Nezha’s arm slung around his shoulder, mid-laugh.
Nezha nods—it’s one of the bad days today, when he puts it face down on the shelf because if he stares at it for any longer, he thinks he would be crushed by his swelling guilt. Rin had noticed it the first night she’d stayed over, but never said anything—he’d been waiting for her to ask why he had it, who it was, what had happened, but she never did.
“You know, every time I look at this, he reminds me of Kesegi,” she says, a little quietly. “But I guess they all look like that at a certain age, don’t they?”
Rin knows the story now. The beach, the riptide, the failed resuscitation. The way he was supposed to be the one to look after him.
On the 10th anniversary of his death, Nezha had one too many drinks alone and left her to clean up his mess, and it all came spilling out. He remembered, through his alcohol-addled haze, that Rin was silent after, eyes glued to the shelf opposite his bed—his mother couldn’t bear keeping the urn around their home for her to see, so Nezha took it into his room, and when he’d moved out.
Rin turned around, kissed him on his forehead, and tucked him in.
Mingzha’s photo and urn were devoid of any speck of dirt, wiped cleaner than he had ever managed to do himself, the next morning.
“You two have the same smile,” Rin mutters, squeezing his hand tightly. She hands him back the photograph and excuses herself, and Nezha thinks he hears her make a call.
He thinks he hears a soft “Kesegi? It’s jiejie, ” from the other room.
For the first time that day, Nezha manages a tiny smile.
Mingzha, he wants to say, this is the girl I love. This is the girl I’m going to marry someday.
Mingzha, I think you would have loved her, too.
Instead, he lets his thumb brush over the glass, over his brother’s face, and imagines he’s smiling at Rin.
19.
He’s had food from all over the world, prepared by the most famous, decorated chefs on the planet. He’s had hundreds of cuisines grace his palette, and sampled thousands of different flavor profiles and textures of dishes.
But sitting next to her as she complains to him, sitting on the roof of his car, eating Hesperian take-out at 4 AM after studying for a final and getting locked out of their dorm for curfew, beats every single five-star restaurant experience he’s ever had.
20.
It's her laugh that gets him, in the end.
It's a rare thing, hearing Fang Runin laugh—like a special mineral one has to excavate from the deepest depths of a cave or a comet Nikara scholars map out among the stars passing by once in a century, Rin's laughter does not come easily. Rarer so when he is the one who manages to coax it from her—she makes herself scarce with him, and though he couldn't blame her because of their history, it's like a chase with no end with her pressed lips, caging her laughter back behind her teeth.
But the first time he does, the first time she deems him trustworthy enough to hear it, he knew he's lost this particular fight. That laugh hooks him into its clutches and envelops him with a warmth he'd never once associated with his father's rigid stance or his mother's suffocating judgment.
Yin Nezha is deeply, terrifyingly, irrevocably in love with her.