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“He’s no fun, boss.”
Xia Fei has been whining for the better part of the last ten minutes, meaning just about all ten of them excluding that brief moment where he’d accidentally tripped over something and spent a few seconds righting his step and huffing silently about that instead.
Vein had stopped sideways, said nothing and done even less about the muttering and the mumbling, until Xia Fei had picked up his pace again, hands in his pockets, frown lifted to the sky.
Whining.
“He’s a good business partner to have,” Vein doesn’t so much correct as he simply suggests the reality of Liu Xiao back into the conversation. This late at night, and with most of the commotion motionless in a heap somewhere, the streets seem almost romantic to traverse, blanketed by warm lights and bed to little more than the echo of their footfall and the occasional passing car, somewhere beyond the corners of houses where alleyways and sidestreets open onto the cemented roads that make this place worthy of the term ‘city’ in a modern, urban sense.
Gone is the romanticism of when towns used to care about looking like people lived in them.
Hurray to the modernity of nice and proper, to façades of people walking to and fro, to insinuate a propensity for wealth, people working, people shopping, people busy, hiding the stench of rotting flesh deeper within where they shove all those too disillusioned by life to care to wash it off into.
Streets like these, as much home to crime as to tranquillity, make up the true circulatory system of a city. Arteries filled to the brim with people flowing with intention towards one direction, nourishing hotspots of violence and late-night mistakes.
To land into his hands next, after there’s nothing more of worth in them left, where Vein can pick up the pieces and pretend he’s putting them back together.
“He has a bad personality,” Xia Fei responds a beat too late. He’s not exactly trying to mince his words, Vein isn’t the one he has to play nice in front of to get the money and be done with a job that feels as tasteless as unethical, but he can’t find the right words to mince if he wanted to.
He glances off to the side, frowns harder, somehow.
“There’s something about him that is...”
Sleazy? Off? Wrong? Different?
Predatory.
Liu Xiao plays games he doesn’t hand out guidelines for. There’s no way to tell when you’re in the middle of one. No matter the nature of their relationship, no matter how supervised it may be with Vein’s name woven into every other conversation or so, Xia Fei feels like a rabbit trapped in a bush. A dead-end of his own making, a trap in the centre of a clearing, surrounded on every side by a low-voiced shadow that doesn’t flicker as much as it seems to glide.
Constantly trying to keep as much of himself out of whatever Liu Xiao is in.
There’s power and authority.
Dangerous.
Vein is dangerous too, goes without saying, a thought so redundant to have, Xia Fei feels ridiculous for even entertaining it for the sake of getting to a point in the now silent thought process grating at his brain cells - it’s late, and he doesn’t like this gig, doesn’t like it one bit.
But the danger Vein presents is different. It’s clear, it’s easy to track, it’s visible. Xia Fei reads his movements the way Vein reads his, graceful and elegant, not a pretense in sight that he won’t do what he’d set out to do, if Vein winds up it’s because the blow will land, and if Vein steps to the side it’s because he’s already won the fight.
Vein is dangerous because it is part of the natural order of the world for him to be. Because there’s nothing wrong with Vein being capable, with Vein walking away with his head held permanently high, an air of superiority that need not be re-established, much how describing the air they breathe as air would be a waste of time for everyone involved.
There’s nothing wrong with Vein being dangerous.
Because he isn’t a danger to you. Because you make use of his danger. Because you like it when the authority he wields is wielded for your sake. Because if he’s a loaded gun, you occasionally get to call ‘fire’.
“I don’t think he’s trustworthy,” he settles on in the end, lifting his chin, underlining the statement with a seriosity and willingness to defend it that only garners a snort in response from Vein. An easy and quick thing to deflate moments after, there, when Vein shoots him an amused side-glance and slows to a patient walk, forcing Xia Fei to fall back from his agitated patter into step beside him.
“Who said you’re supposed to trust him? Long as he pays, who cares.”
Xia Fei answers with a noise. Back of his throat, somewhere between displeased and disagreeing. Somewhere between ‘if you say so’ and ‘why would you say so’. Somewhere between ‘maybe I care’ and ‘maybe you should too’.
“I don’t know,” Xia Fei sighs out, kicking a pebble that has no business lying around where no one else does. He doesn’t know where they’re going. It doesn’t really matter. It’s too late to do anything productive, anyway, and his schedule is mostly determined by the man he’s walking next to, so any deviations from it caused by these few moments, and maybe next few hours, won’t be his to carry the blame for.
And it’s nicer this way, anyway.
There’s something about it.
Existing in a space created by Vein alone is different. There’s a bubble here, one he can step out of by opting for the rest of reality, about as tantalizing as chewing off the tip of his fingers. Safety aside, the demands for existence work differently inside this space. Vein’s shadow is larger, too, carries over and blocks him out from most of everything if he wanted it to. If he stayed put, right there, stood at ease in any corner of Vein’s presence, he could likely walk through life only ever having to wonder about Vein himself.
Curious glances over Vein’s shoulder, the intellectual decision-making that leads him to not ask questions he doesn’t want to hear the answer to, Vein’s smile, the easy familiarity with which Vein treats him.
There’s no pretense there, no social hoops to jump through, no scripts to follow. He can do what he wants, and if that entails something Vein needs to reprimand him for, he’ll get reprimanded. That’s all. Direct. Uncomplicated. Nice, and easy.
Xia Fei risks a glance.
What would Vein say, if he told him that?
He has enough rotten pride left in the back of his throat somewhere to not stumble over himself to make big speeches of undying devotion, mostly because that very same rot crawls through his flesh and implants in the rest of him in a way that keeps him from ever truly referring to it as such.
But the question...
If Xia Fei offered to cease to exist beyond Vein’s arm-length, would Vein-
“Wait,” Xia Fei stops dead in his tracks. His fingers are pinched around Vein’s sleeve before Vein has gotten a chance to stop walking and accommodate the gesture, but accommodating he nonetheless does. Like appearing at the right place at the right time in the middle of the night after having just gotten back to town. Like balancing, carefully and delighted, a reprimand with a reward, like getting his hands almost dirty and stopping and listening and waiting and letting Xia Fei-
Vein stops, accommodates, listens. Xia Fei feels a surge of something he’d describe if he were any better at life, or just slightly more eloquent, or in any way capable in ways that would have either gotten him here faster, or kept him out of this world entirely.
Depending on what he’d prefered, given the chance to know ahead of time.
“You just got back, right?” he tilts his head and watches Vein follow the motion with vaguely, casually interested eyes. “I should welcome you back properly, no? Let me offer you a drink. Or something to eat.”
His hand falls away with an awkward opening of his fingers, retracted with the unease the movement of getting it there had lacked - to retreat is more unnatural than approach, these days.
His smile isn’t tentative, but he feels it should be. He feels it should be more complicated to approach certain things, more difficult to cross certain lines, less obvious, not this much of a given, for Vein to show up in the middle of the night to help him clean up his mess, as he put it, simply and exclusively because Xia Fei had asked.
No, because Xia Fei had demanded.
Because he hadn’t even stopped to consider the alternative of Vein not showing up.
It’s not a lack of self-respect, gods no.
No, it’s whatever it actually is, that prompts Vein to stop and listen and wait and accommodate, that makes Xia Fei feel as greedy - hungry - as he so often feels.
It’s so easy.
It’s so certain.
Uncomplicated.
Ish.
“You want to feed me now?”
Vein sounds amused, but there’s that pinch again. Vein is dangerous, but never a danger to him. And yet, that pinch of something else, something Vein doesn’t vocalize, the silent glances and the unreadable stares, the certainty that Xia Fei doesn’t need to turn around to know he’s in Vein’s line of sight because Vein makes sure he is, that make Xia Fei just slightly more alert, hyper-aware of his own relationship to it, what he'd feel if he'd name it.
It’s a seed in fertile soil Xia Fei keeps shoving the sprout of right back into the ground. Let’s it grow just enough to notice it before he panics.
Snarls and gnaws whenever Liu Xiao steps all around it, the circle he walks smells like the end of something Xia Fei would claw through most others to keep.
“It’s the polite thing to do,” Xia Fei offers, awkwardly. His curled fingers hover over Vein’s forearm, and he watches them with a frozen smile, wonders what would happen if he grabbed Vein, if he just did... whatever he wanted.
He moves so slowly that once he manages to feel the fabric of Vein’s sleeve under the length of his fingers, he feels ridiculous for having stopped to hesitate in the first place.
Vein accommodates - forearm offered like Xia Fei needed it to stand, or like Vein didn’t need it in the first place.
“I mean, also as thanks,” because apparently he bargains to give now, instead of wanting to receive.
He’s never been much of a careless taker, all things considered. He prefers earning all he can call his own, doesn’t want to owe anyone neither debt nor the idea he needs them in any way, shape, or form. His independence, as messy as it has gotten, does matter to him. To his pride. To his sense of self.
He prefers to take only if he can take, and not receive.
Though he doesn’t remember how he feels about giving.
Xia Fei frets. He nearly trips over his own feet to open the door to his flat wide enough to let Vein walk through, opening a gate to a kingdom that isn’t his to a person that is worth more. He feels restless, fidgety, like crawling out of his own skin, glide it off his flesh casually to shake it out and check it for its quality, whether it is even proper enough to wear under such circumstances.
“You know your way around so, just sit down wherever.”
It’s a bland space, all things considered. It feels like home just well enough, it definitely breathes similarly enough to him by now that he can associate it to himself, but there’s still something about the way he’d gained the place that makes it slightly less home than it could have been.
The dorms had never functioned as anything but the shelter he needed to not die of pneumonia out in the streets. And home always remained where home actually was - too far across the sea.
But this is nice enough. The next best thing. And furnished with all the different ways he can wear Vein’s name without being too obvious about it.
Everything in here, after all, was only made possible by Vein. Be it the gentle displays of luxury in somewhat better lamps and softer fabrics, or the slightly upgraded versions of things he used to own like the quality of clothes he’d worn adjacent things to or the headphones that apparently promise to last longer and sound better than what he could have bought before everything.
They’d never made it as far as catching dust in a corner, sitting decoratively a-top a piece of furniture, or actually being used by Xia Fei, if Vein hadn’t made sure he was alive enough to get any of it.
Still, it’s in the making. It’s a home he didn’t fight to have. It happened upon him as a direct consequence of being allowed a better shot, a better starting point. And it isn’t exactly easy to consider it well-earned and easy to stitch his name into if it involves gigs with people like Liu Xiao.
“I put some beer in the fridge to cool and didn’t get around to drinking it because, well, you know,” because he’d had to go out and play spy on a random kid for a man he can’t stomach. There would have been no time, and certainly no sense to get shit-faced once he’d made it back home, considering where he’d been sent and how likely it would have been to leave money in a glass there.
“Are you planning on drinking even more?”
Xia Fei nearly jumps into the open fridge at the sudden proximity of Vein’s voice, managing to just barely avoid knocking any of the few items over and onto a floor he’d rather not have to clean. He doesn’t get the time to turn his head to counter the question with a few excuses, before the weight of Vein’s chin on his shoulder blocks him from getting the required angle.
Warm.
Xia Fei feels warm through the spread of it from Vein’s chest into his back, despite the small space left between them, and the spread of it from the space under his navel all the way to where it’s best suited to soothe the nerves in his chest. He doesn’t even recall having felt in any way tense, but it bleeds out of him - as efficiently as a pig split by a butcher.
“Alcohol is bad for the body,” Vein continues, turning his head just so. It doesn’t particularly faciliate Xia Fei’s attempts to meet his eyes, but it doesn’t really have to. There’s plenty enough to look at when you’re mesmerised by the way multilingual lips wrap around characters while never failing to consider the smile they’re as likely to offer.
Xia Fei frowns, opens his mouth, and doesn’t answer when Vein pokes his side and kills the words at the back of his tongue.
“Spoils the product,” Vein whispers, and if it weren’t for the widening of his smile and the warmth he’s letting him leech from him, Xia Fei would have genuinely considered spoiling both product and mood. Instead he fakes a less-than-amused and equally judgmental couple of ‘ha-ha’s and pretends to not secretly delight at the way Vein chuckles, the way he seems to settle so easily in Xia Fei’s space - pretends to not secretly want to climb out of his body a little, at the sudden realization of how easy it is, suddenly, to want to get used to this, at the expense of, well... who even knows.
He swallows, turns away.
“There’s some food in here too,” he mumbles, as if that would make the offer of a drink easier to forgive, even though referring to the few things shoved about his fridge as ‘food’ is as generous as calling Liu Xiao ‘an amicable chap to have a good chat with’.
Extremely generous.
And completely untrue.
“Right,” Vein deadpans, and Xia Fei oddly feels like he’s agreeing with his thoughts as opposed to his words. Would certainly make much more sense.
“I mean, there’s always take-out,” Xia Fei suggests, and if he leans into Vein’s chest to accommodate the step backwards he didn’t need to take a proper look at the inside of his bare-bones fridge, there are more unsubtle ways he’s overstepped, like into the lives of others simply and exclusively because Vein’s favour makes him threatening by proxy.
Right?
Wouldn’t that be something?
Unlikely, unless Liu Xiao’s slimey smiles and casual foot-in-the-door’s are to mollify him enough he doesn’t tell on him.
Xia Fei sighs. Couldn’t he have simply failed to pay his tuition, dropped out, gone back home, tried again later maybe like any normal student his age?
“Do you hate him?”
Xia Fei frowns.
“Huh?”
“Liu Xiao,” Vein supplies, breathed too close to his neck when he'd rather not think it again, as uncomfortably as the man the name belongs to tends to slink about his general existence these days. Where Xia Fei feels protected guarded? by Vein’s contact, by the knowledge he possesses on his habits and being and the levers and switches to modify them as need be, all Liu Xiao’s creepy timing and feigned friendly disposition elicits out of Xia Fei is the desire to wear more clothes, keep the car door unlocked, and become a better sprinter than he already is.
But does he hate him?
He shrugs, one-shouldered to not shove Vein out of his space.
“Not really, I mean, I don’t feel either way about him.”
Vein doesn’t hum. It’s not entirely out of character for him to be silent. He gathers his observations and the truths out of Xia Fei’s arteries mostly in silence too, supplying them when there’s a reason for them to be introduced into the daylight, casually, as soft reminders that there’s no foot in Xia Fei’s door in his case considering Vein is already standing inside.
But there’s silence.
And there’s silence.
“I’m not lying,” Xia Fei does turn this time. Vein’s presence can be suffocating, if Vein allows it to be. Where Xia Fei simply pokes his head out from the worst of the waves, he’s seen, known others to simply start scratching at their throats instead, wade helplessly through the endless ocean of all the various ways Vein shouldn’t be crossed.
People are born with a primordial instinct to recognize when running would be best for them to do. We call it a sense of self-preservation. Only problem is, humans have been detaching from it, retiring that instinct, their own access to it, for the better part of our artificial evolution now, Vein once said. They need a bit of helping, sometimes, to recall why their teeth aren’t made for ripping jugulars and chewing through bones: they weren’t born hunters.
Xia Fei, therefore, is either as big an idiot as the seemingly easily impressed - harmless, friendly, not that bad, kind of nice - Cheng XiaoShi, or his sense of self-preservation has a much easier time reminding him that predators only devour their own when they’re starving.
And Vein has a way of seeming particularly well-fed.
Still, his frown tilts downwards at the corners, and pinches in the middle, when he believes to pluck tentatively disappointed disbelief from Vein’s mask.
Then Vein smiles, and Xia Fei remembers how to breathe. Vein pats his head, reminiscent to what he’d done not too long ago, but distant enough in time that Xia Fei struggles to figure out why whatever he’d side-stepped here is worse than opening his mouth the next time Vein swings his fan and offer to be stabbed through the throat with it.
“I know,” Vein says, and pats his cheek for good measure as well, making Xia Fei feel smaller, less worthy of attention and more likely to get leftovers of it. Then Vein leans in close enough to block out the rest of his flat behind him and Xia Fei pretends the reason for the amused crinkle at the corners of Vein's eyes isn’t the displeasure he’s wearing trying to maintain its rule over his features when he's actively fighting the urge to meet him halfway.
“But you’re not being entirely honest, either. Does he make you uncomfortable?”
Xia Fei sighs. He turns around, shuts the fridge with his shoulder and frowns in distaste at the bottles in his hand. He’d reach around Vein or away from him to deposit them somewhere he can pretend to forget about them, rather than admitting he’s lost all sense of joy of an easy night in, but that would mean either forcing Vein out of his space, or bursting the bubble.
Liu Xiao is...
Okay, let’s try a different angle: what is Liu Xiao not? Trustworthy, as established. Honest, there’s no way. Ethical, absolutely not. He will make no comments on the concepts of legality, not when he doesn’t care for the law as much as he does for morals, but for the sake of having something else to add to the list, he’s half-tempted to.
What else.
Safe.
Liu Xiao doesn’t feel safe.
“Yes,” he says, offering Vein both bottles to have the decision taken from him. Vein is always helpful, always gives and takes as much as Xia Fei needs, or is willing to partake in, so long as it fortifies whatever this is, so long as it keeps the ground beneath his feet firm, so long as he won’t fall into a body of water too deep to be pulled out from this time. Vein accommodates. Vein eases them out of his grip, opens the fridge to shove them back into it without forcing Xia Fei to do more than side-step to grant just the bare minimum of space required to do it, and when he breathes a sharp-toothed soft praise against his temple in passing and suggests he take a shower while Vein handles putting something to eat on his table, Xia Fei vows to signal to Liu Xiao just how much fun he’s having playing a pawn on his chess-board.
What a downgrade from the winning die he is in Vein’s palms.
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Hm?”
“I’ll talk to Liu Xiao.”
“Hey, hold on, I wasn’t complaining that bad, I didn’t say I wouldn’t-”
“I’m not punishing you.”
“... huh?”
A moment of pretense as Vein picks out his favourites from the side dishes, a knowing side-smile.
“Oh.”
A moment of soft relief, soul-suffocating adoration, as Xia Fei sits next to him, legs pulled up, food forgotten in his lap, an open, wide look of startled gratitude, the gentle descent of it into something warm and tender, impossibly large to swallow without blinking something stinging at his eyes away.
“Thank you.”