Work Text:
The dragon twists and turns to the beat of a drum, following the glowing orb. It weaves between dozens of lanterns that light up the twilight sky.
From above, the lights all blend together, a divine ocean descended upon the living realm. He tilts his head back, the sweet wine running down his throat. The stars of the fake sky wink into existence, one by one by one.
-
The light scuffle of heels against the rooftop alerts Dan Heng to a new arrival in his space. Ren doesn’t have his sword out, but that doesn’t make him less intimidating. They hold eye contact for a length of time that could be a few seconds or entire minutes, but eventually the other man relaxes and sits down beside him.
Reaching behind himself, Ren sets a small, well-decorated box on the tiles between them. Deft hands tug at the ribbon, nimble wrapped fingers slipping through until the lid falls open. Sitting in the middle of the box is a round, fat mooncake.
Ren looks away. Dan Heng only had a few mouthfuls of the wine, but he might be drunk already. There’s no other explanation for why he can’t stop staring intently at the silhouette of Ren’s throat, exposed as he, too, looks up at the stars.
He finally manages to focus on the item before him. “What is this?”
Ren looks at him, baleful. That is fair. It had been a stupid question. Dan Heng tries again - “What is this for?”
He’s graced with a verbal reply. Ren’s voice is sharp, brusque. “You.” He looks away again quickly, this time with his face turned downwards at the crowd dotting the length of the harbor.
Dan Heng follows his gaze for a brief moment, but there is nothing worth noticing. He turns to the mooncake but it offers him no answers. It sits there, deceptively innocent, pastry skin glistening under the moonlight as it sits in the gap between their shadows. Dan Heng knows something is wrong.
“It’s a mooncake,” he says, and gets another glare - “A whole mooncake.” Everyone knows you do not eat a whole mooncake by yourself, for propriety or practicality or otherwise. They should be cut into five little wedges and then shared, Dan Heng remembers, and each bite would be almost too rich to savor. There should be sweet wine passed around in cups, or tea for the young ones.
Dan Heng looks up. Ren is staring at him. “Do you want to,” he swallows, “share it?”
“...Mn.”
Ren cleaves the mooncake into four - an attempt at half (the line does not go cleanly through the middle), and then half again. Dan Heng picks up a piece at random and stares at the yellow half-moon in the center, and then looks over at Ren, who is glaring down at the plate.
“Looks like the Abundance,” he mutters, stabbing the egg yolk with his fork. He eats his entire yolk piece like that, separately from the lotus paste. Heathen. In contrast, Dan Heng eats his piece the way it's meant to be eaten, yolk nestled in with the paste.
It would be overkill to eat more than a fourth of a mooncake each. They set aside the remaining pieces of mooncake in the box to sit in companionable silence, watching the festivities continue on. At one point Dan Heng looks down at the space between them. Looks back up. Is Ren closer? It must be his imagination. He looks away. Back. Ren's shadow is touching the empty plate now, so he must be closer, right?
He moves the empty plate to the side, puts it with the mooncake. Just to see what he does.
Ren isn’t looking at him, but, perhaps spurred on by his silent encouragement, he starts visibly scooting closer. The space between them vanishes, inch by inch. Their shadows meet, then overlap, then blend into one.
Eventually they’re pressed up against each other, a warm line of contact running from their thighs to their shoulders. The last traces of warmth in the air are replaced by the heat of Ren’s body. They stay like this, sharing Dan Heng’s jar of wine, taking turns drinking because Dan Heng only brought one cup.
When the last of the wine is poured and swallowed, Ren leans his head against Dan Heng’s, eyes lidded. For lack of better things to do with his hands, he wraps an arm around Ren’s shoulders, stroking his hair. He hmmm’s in contentment, eyes falling closed. The action comes almost too naturally to Dan Heng; fragments of moments flicker through his head. Of smilar sights and a familiar face, scenes from a lifetime ago.
Ah.
So they were like this, once. Sharing drinks and memories under the moonlight, gazing down at the sea of people below. Some things haven’t changed since then. A High Elder and a short-lived Outlander, now a former convict and a wanted criminal. Either way they’ve never fit in. But at least they had each other, once.
They aren’t like this anymore. They’re barely even the same people. The alcohol and memories remain (although tenuously), but they’ve both been tainted bitter with hate and regret.
And yet.
And yet…
The last few times he’d seen Ren, the man hadn’t even attacked him. He’d made a few antagonistic comments and then disappeared. He assumed maybe the guy was just not in the mood, but when is he not in the mood to attempt murder?
And now he’s here, intimately close, sharing a mooncake with him… what is Dan Heng supposed to think? He needs to know.
“You know, Ren, you’ve been… different lately,” he begins, volume lowered so as not to be too jarring. Ren lifts his head up, blinks at him blearily for a moment. “For one, well, you seem less like you want to introduce my guts to the floor every time you see me…”
“And then there’s this,” he gestures vaguely at the two of them, the mooncake, the roof, the way they’re sitting, no space between their bodies. As if this is normal for them. “Just. I’m curious to know… what changed?”
Ren huffs. Even that is slightly different, less angry than before. “That Stellaron brat, too nosy for her own good… Kept pestering me about my past, nagging me on how you’re different from that fucker Dan Feng…annoyingly persistent.”
“ Am I? Different? People on the Luofu still look at me and see him .” he can’t quite dispel the bitterness from his tone.
Ren actually scoffs . “If you were anything like that asshole, I would be trying to tear your throat out. And I wouldn’t be cuddling you right now.”
“Are we cuddling?”
The glare he receives is dripping with vitriol. That is also fair. Ren doesn’t seem like the type to touch people casually.
So then, what exactly does this mean for their relationship?
He’s never really thought about finding a partner before. In the past, running from an angry man wanting revenge prevented him from doing so, and nowadays his nomadic lifestyle greatly restricts the potential candidates. And he knows there are countless grievances between them that need to be properly laid out, before they can truly move on.
But maybe, just maybe, from the ashes that remain of their past, something can be rekindled between them.
And besides, when he’s not chasing him to the ends of the universe, Ren is.. Really pretty. Unfairly so.
He must have been lost in thought too long, because Ren is pulling away now, standing up and dusting off his pants. He scrambles to follow him up.
“Wait,” he bites his lip, “Can I see you again? Like this?”
They both know what he’s really asking, but Ren smirks. “At night on a rooftop in the middle of a festival?”
“No! What I mean to say is…”
Ren leans forward, impossibly closer, still grinning smugly. “Come now, surely you know how to... properly ask someone out? Go ahead, I’m waiting…”
He swallows. "G-go out on a date with me."
“Mnn? Not even a ‘please’?” his hand rests under Dan Heng’s chin, aligning it so their breaths mingle.
“Ugh, fine- please, go on a date with me?”
"Mm, that’s better. Since we're already here… let's go on a date right now."
With him so close, Dan Heng finds himself having trouble forming coherent thoughts. It must be the alcohol from earlier. “W-what about the mooncake?” It will be a bit of a hassle to bring it along with them, but there’s an entire half of it still left so he doesn’t want to throw it away.
“Oh yeah,” Ren straightens back up. “We can drop it off first.”
“What?” Ren has already picked up the mooncake box and the paper plate and is tugging him along “W-wait, where are we going?”
—
Jing Yuan isn’t in the room when they sneak in, but that doesn’t mean it’s empty. Mimi lounges on the carpet, yawning widely at them.
Dan Heng freezes, but Ren isn't phased. “It’s a lazy thing,” Ren says. “Spoilt rotten.” The lion blinks lazily at them.
“Aren’t they territorial?” Dan Heng asks, but Ren does not reply.
“This isn’t for you,” Ren tells him. “It’s for Jing Yuan. Show him where we left it when he gets back." He sets a piece of mooncake on a side table.
“Does it understand you?” Is it a specially trained lion? A genetically modified one? A mechanical construct? Dan Heng voices the questions.
“Just a regular lion,” Ren says, and scowls at the thing. “But it is Jing Yuan’s lion.” In response Mimi yawns at him. Ren’s response simultaneously answered none of his questions and yet reassured him at the same time.
“Tell him we said hi, won’t you?” Dan Heng tells Mimi, who flicks his ear at him.
“Lion’s can’t talk,” Ren says, and vaults out the window.
…Blunt as ever, huh.
But when Dan Heng follows him out, he’s waiting for him, just off to the side.
Bailu happily takes the last piece of mooncake off their hands, waving them off cheerfully and wishing them well. She doesn’t seem at all surprised or concerned to see Ren, which seems a bit odd, but what would he know about children? He grew up in prison, after all. He also doesn’t question why Ren would choose the future High Elder as the last recipient. Who knows, maybe they have history too.
Ren drags him around the festival grounds, winding through all the pop-up stalls. Dan Heng still can't believe a hat and a pair of glasses allows him to just. Walk around without being recognized. He doesn’t linger near the food stalls, instead leading him to a paper cutting booth. There, he… makes Dan Heng fold a yellow piece of paper…? It’s folded diagonally in half, then in fourths, eighths, sixteenths, each fold going through the centerpoint. With a pencil, Ren roughly sketches some shapes.
“Okay,” he thrusts the folded paper in Dan Heng’s hands. “Now you cut.” Dan Heng looks at the paper, wondering if he’s meant to do it with his spear. Is this an exercise in precision?
“Oh right, you’ve probably never done this before. Here,” Ren takes his hand, gently curling his fingers around - oh right, scissors. He can’t believe he thought to pull out his weapon first. Then again, it’s almost strange to see Ren casually hand him scissors - it’s such a common household item - when he’s used to seeing him with much more dangerous tools.
He tries to hand the scissors back. "You should do it, I don’t know what I’m doing-” Ren pushes them back to him again.
“Can’t,” he says. “My hands. Can’t do detailed things anymore.”
His hands, of course. Dan Heng has seen the bandages, obviously. But he’d never stopped to consider what they meant. Ren used to be a bladesmith, hadn’t he? A really, really good one. He made Cloud Piercer, which is still as sharp 700 years later as it was the day it was forged. Dan Heng can tell how much its maker must have loved his craft, to put that much care into his work.
But now, those same hands…
“Alright,” he agrees, voice trembling slightly. “Can you show me how?”
Ren shows him which parts he wants cut out, tracing over the lines he drew with a bandaged fingertip.
The scissors are not particularly sharp at the edges, so during his first attempt he doesn't manage to cut anything, and on his second attempt he cuts too hard and the entire tip of the folded paper flies off from the force.
Oops. The first design is past the point of saving, savagely bisected by the scissors. He turns to Ren to apologize, when-
"Pfft-!" He's chuckling softly, hand over his mouth in an attempt to stop. The sound of his laughter is so soft, so different from his usual countenance that Dan Heng just stares, entranced, even though Ren is absolutely laughing at his expense.
"Ah… you looked like the world was ending just then, what an expression," he marvels, once he's done making fun of him. "Do you really care that much about this?"
Dan Heng feels his cheeks heat up. "... I wanted to do it well for you…"
Now it's Ren's turn to flush, pink creeping in from his ears to his face and down his neck. Who knew the infamous Stellaron Hunter could be rendered speechless like this. Dan Hen will remember the sight forever. "You… saying things like that…a-anyways, just don't worry too much about doing it perfectly. We don't even have that much time until they start clearing everything up."
"Okay," he agrees, making no move to resume cutting.
"Tsk, quit staring at me already!" Ren shoves his shoulder hard with one hand as he turns away and covers his face with the other. The tips of his ears are still pink.
After a long and arduous struggle with the child-friendly scissors, Dan Heng unfolds the finished product. The yellow mooncake has a jagged star cut through the middle, from his initial blunder, and the little designs he’d cut out are rough around the edges, but overall it seems to have turned out well. He tentatively holds it up for Ren to see.
“Hmm… “ he makes a show of inspecting it closely. It still makes his heart thud nervously in his chest. “A decent attempt for a first try. You should hang it up somewhere.”
Strange, that such mediocre praise makes him feel so warm inside.
As the festival draws to a close, they leave and stroll around Central Starskiff Haven. The city never truly sleeps, but they manage to find a more quiet corner, at a railing overlooking the industrial districts.
“So,” Dan Heng chances, “how did you like the… date?”
“Mmn, it was okay.”
“Okay?”
“Mn. Not bad.”
“Okay. That’s, that’s good.”
Ren turns to him. “We should go on another one.”
“Okay- I mean - yes.” Dan Heng coughs. Ren is leaning closer again.
He grins. “Next time you should show me where you hung the paper up.”
Dan Heng inhales sharply. “...Okay.”
“... You should kiss me.”
“... Yes.”
After a brief moment of hesitation, Dan Heng leans forward, hand coming up to rest on the side of his face. Ren also leans forward, closing the distance. Dan Heng’s eyes flutter shut.
-
Dan Heng is walking back to the inn for the night when his phone buzzes with an incoming message. It’s an attachment from an unknown sender. He opens it. It’s a picture of himself from the back, when he was drinking alone on the roof. The camera is angled so that his figure is outlined by the moon. He saves the number.
Dan Heng: You take good pictures
Ren: Obviously.
Dan Heng: Happy Mid-Autumn Festival, Ren
Ren: You too.
Ren: Happy Mid-Autumn Festival.
Ren: Don’t die before the second date.