Work Text:
They met when they were both in their early thirties. Although Cheong Myeong called Tang Bo a brat, a leech, a little shit, their age difference wasn't quite so acute. When they were both over half a century old, something like that no longer showed up in any of their interactions.
The truth is that the two Saints had an age difference, and six years doesn't feel quite so acute when you're both grown men.
But here, now, a hundred years and two deaths — two rebirths — later, when their new bodies were young, when they could still be considered children, it was especially palpable.
And while Cheong Myeong could experience much from the feeling that Tang Bo was here with him, living and breathing too (he's alive, he's alive, he's alive), the first thing he did was laugh, unable to stop laughing.
Sure, the brat of eleven kicked his new body of seventeen, but Cheong Myeong couldn't keep laughing, looking at the leech of his baby cheeks that he never wanted to pinch like he did now. He shouldn't be surprised that Tang Bo was a cute kid, even when sulking while holding back tears. Laughing was better than crying; and they cried, a lot, a very lot.
Later, Cheong Myeong was running away from a very, horrifyingly, insanely persistent girl of the Tang family, and the bastard was already laughing at him, not helping him, not even for a second; still later, Tang Bo was of course rooting for him to beat up all those children of his family, because that's what caring ancestors do (he thought the sahyeong voice in his head was rebuking him, but Cheong Myeong skillfully ignored it; even less appreciated by the brat when he caught him talking to the air); then Cheong Myeong stole the two 'children' of the Tang family, as it may seem to everyone else.
Tang Bo is too light, weighing almost nothing, but clung to him with all his limbs, not letting go for the entire thousand li to Huashan.
(Cheong Myeong stopped laughing when the brat reached puberty, and already in his fourteen tried to climb on him, and Cheong Myeong, again in his twenty, already the commander of the whole Alliance, hid from him all over the city, begging from above for patience and luck).