Work Text:
(1)
“You’re not coming to the reunion?” Lin Yuan’s voice rises in pitch and volume and Su Chengcheng, winces, moving the phone away from her ear. “Why not? Everyone will be there!”
Instead of getting into her lack of interest in getting dolled up only to be looked past by former classmates regardless, Su Chengcheng just says, “I have a gig that night.”
“Oh? Who is it this time?”
Trust Lin Yuan’s attention to be immediately diverted by the promise of gossip.
“Some starlet in town for a gala.” In fact, Su Chengcheng was just scrolling through Weibo, looking through the starlet’s recent hashtags and super topic. After all, it’s part of her job to research potential threats against her client beforehand. “Her management is worried about obsessive fans, there’ve been some incidents recently.”
Lin Yuan makes an indistinct sound that Su Chengcheng interprets as intending to convey her contempt of such behaviour, then asks, “Is it anyone I know? Can you get me an autograph?”
“I’m a professional,” Su Chengcheng points out, not for the first time. It doesn’t make a good impression if a hired bodyguard shows personal interest in the personage they’re protecting.
“Chengcheeeeng.”
Su Chengcheng sighs. “She’s not on your list.”
Because of course Lin Yuan gave her a list as soon as Su Chengcheng had started picking up jobs in the entertainment industry on top of the “boring” (said Lin Yuan) corporate ones. It turns out there’s a surprisingly large market for a good female bodyguard – yet another industry hogged by men.
“Oh fine, never mind then,” Lin Yuan says and only sounds a tiny bit disappointed.
(2)
Sitting in the office of the CEO of Qianniao, a new beauty brand, Su Chengcheng tries not to fidget at the circuitous route Zhou Jinli is taking towards the point.
“So who do you want me to protect?” she asks, once Zhou Jinli takes a breath, and has to restrain a grin when the other man, who had introduced himself as Gu Yu, looks visibly relieved.
“Our head of R&D,” Gu Yu says. “Tang Qi.”
Su Chengcheng blinks. Tang Qi? Surely it’s not... She doesn’t let her mind go too far down that path – she’s tried, more or less successfully, to put her old classmate crush out of her mind for years – before reestablishing professionalism.
“Why do you believe him to be in danger?”
Gu Yu and Zhou Jinli exchange a look.
“There have been some... incidents,” Zhou Jinli says delicately. “Qianniao is intruding on some competitors’ turfs of late – certain threats have been made. And then of course there was the thing with Guan Shengyu...”
Su Chengcheng takes a deep breath. “I’m going to need details.”
(3)
It actually is Tang Qi. Su Chengcheng stares at the picture Zhou Jinli gave her. He looks... good. Very good. Glasses and a neat suit, curly hair. Still uptight, but in a cute way.
Her heart beats a little faster until she gives herself a stern talking to. Tang Qi probably doesn’t even remember her – it’s not like he ever really acknowledged her back in school, and it’s been years since then. Also, he’ll be her employer.
Professionalism, Su Chengcheng.
(She can’t really imagine anyone wanting to hurt Tang Qi – he’s so intrinsically harmless.)
(4)
“I don’t need a bodyguard.”
Su Chengcheng stands outside the slightly cracked door of Zhou Jinli’s office, listening to people who are technically Tang Qi’s seniors try to convince him through a mixture of pleading and cajoling to take his life seriously. She’s also attempting to dampen her reaction to Tang Qi’s low, smooth voice so she won’t get distracted later.
“I’m just a scientist. No one is going to try and seriously harm me.”
“Your arm only just healed from what Guan Shengyu did!” That’s Gu Yu, sounding both exasperated and worried. “And those threats you’ve been getting – ”
Everything goes quiet for a bit, and despite her burning curiosity, Su Chengcheng keeps still, keeps waiting.
“It’s just for a while, and she’s very discreet.” That’s Zhou Jinli.
More silence.
Eventually Tang Qi’s voice sounds again. “Fine. But this isn’t a long-term solution. We will always have competitors.”
“Yes, yes, yes, just go and meet her. We’ll figure out the rest.”
Even now, she can imagine the unimpressed look Tang Qi is probably wearing right now. Then the door opens and they’re face to face for the first time in years.
Tang Qi looks at her and stops in the doorway, eyes widening in surprise. They flick over her neat black suit, tight enough not to get in the way but tailored to allow her full range of movement.
“Su Chengcheng?” Surprise fades away into something harder to read, deadening the jump of joy her heart couldn’t quite help because he recognised her. “You are the bodyguard they hired?”
“I am,” she says, a slightly sour feeling rising in her stomach. He doesn’t doubt her just because she’s female, does he?
But Tang Qi only says, very neutral, “You always were good at sports.”
(5)
They work out a schedule. Tang Qi is adamant about only needing protection when he’s neither at home nor at the company; given the nature of the threats against him, Su Chengcheng is inclined to agree, but still only does so once she’s checked with Zhou Jinli – the person who’s actually going to be paying her salary. From this, she learns that Tang Qi is a certified workaholic and internally groans a little about an impending future of early mornings. Which sane person insists on being at the office at 8am?! Then she can go off and do her own thing until the late afternoon, when he gets off work – though apparently he quite often works overtime so that’s a moving goalpost. Occasionally he goes on business trips, which will require her full attendance.
Beyond that, he goes grocery shopping once a week, has a standing meeting with some doctoral friend of his every Friday at lunchtime, and apparently frequents the local university’s library on the weekend.
She doesn’t know whether to be relived or worried that apparently that’s more or less all there is to his activities outside of work. Doesn’t he ever go out to have fun? Not that Tang Qi had seemed interested in fun back in school.
Throughout the whole process Tang Qi is reserved and distant but polite. He never once questions her expertise. He also doesn’t ask her any personal questions.
It’s as if they’d never met before at all.
(6)
Su Chengcheng doesn’t even think when she sees the child running into the street after her balloon. She jumps forward, dropping the car keys she was just about to put in her pocket. With the child safe in her arms she twirls out of the way of the braking car, barely noticing the sting as a stray bit of grit impacts her cheek.
When she turns to head back to the pavement, she finds Tang Qi staring at her as if dumbstruck. She frowns, but then the girl wriggles in her grip, distracting her. By the time that’s sorted, Tang Qi looks more composed again, holding out the car keys with a small smile.
“We just passed a pharmacy,” he says, and insists on doctoring her cheek.
She doesn’t know why she lets him.
(7)
Carrying her protection target home from an office party because he’s drunk enough to have essentially passed out on the table is a bit beyond her job responsibilities, in truth, but Su Chengcheng doesn’t put up much of a fight when the bartender corrals her.
She herself hasn’t drunk anything, of course, and Tang Qi is so thin that it’s barely a strain to throw him over her shoulder.
Resolutely ignoring the way his butt is right next to her face – the warm weight of him, the occasional incoherent mumble – she gets him into a taxi, and then out of the taxi again, though he flails a little at a bad moment and bangs his arm into the car door. That’ll be a bruise tomorrow, she thinks with a wince, but refuses to take the blame because again, not really her job.
She hasn’t been in Tang Qi’s house before, always having waited in the courtyard to pick him up in the morning. It’s not quite as neat as she would have thought, with piles of books scattered pretty much everywhere, but its gentle lines and colours are instantly comforting.
With him deposited on the bed, sprawling so inelegantly she has to resist the urge to take an incriminating photo, Su Chengcheng turns to leave. Pauses. Sets a glass of water on his nightstand.
(8)
“Thank you for bringing me home last night,” Tang Qi says the next morning, looking a little worse for wear on top of the palpable awkwardness in the air. His hands are fidgeting with the hem of his coat jacket. “I thought Gu Yu would...”
“Gu Yu was too drunk to see straight,” Su Chengcheng says cheerfully. Ever since she rescued that child on the street, Tang Qi’s attitude towards her has noticeably softened, and it’s not that she needs his good opinion, she really doesn’t, but it definitely makes working with him more pleasant. “Don’t worry about it.”
Tang Qi, of course, continues to look awkward as they head to his car, right until the moment a sunbeam reflects from a nearby building and he winces, hand coming up to block the light.
“Hungover?” Su Chengcheng asks, seeing Tang Qi’s face scrunch into an expression that tells of genuine pain as he rubs his eyes behind his glasses.
“No, well, yes, but...” He pauses, casting her a glance she can’t quite interpret. “It’s not truly a secret, I suppose. I’m a tetrachromat – that means my eyes are very sensitive to colour, but also to brightness.”
“Oh,” Su Chengcheng gets out, even as her brain comes to a screeching halt. He doesn’t like bright things? So back in school, when she had worn that costume and he had vomited... “Is it normally a problem?”
He shakes his head, curly bangs shifting with the motion. “It’s an asset for my work, in fact. I just need to be careful not to look straight at anything too bright or dazzling.”
She nods and doesn’t ask any further questions; she can research tetrachromacy later.
But somewhere inside, a tiny pebble silently dissolves, freeing her from its weight.
(9)
“I told you this sounded like a trap,” Su Chengcheng growls and pushes Tang Qi into the hallway corner behind her.
What Doctor Fang is asking for a meeting about the mesh. What Why would Guan Shengyu be stupid enough to attack me.
The very fact that ‘Doctor Fang’ wanted to meet late in the evening, in her otherwise abandoned laboratory, should’ve been enough to raise alarm bells, but Tang Qi is not only mainly intelligent when it comes to science, he’s also turned out to be more stubborn than a donkey.
“Did they force Doctor Fang to send that message?” Tang Qi asks from his corner – which is a good question, but not one Su Chengcheng has time to contemplate right now. One against three she can do, as long as the three are neither very good nor used to working together, but she needs to concentrate.
To his credit, Tang Qi does sensibly stay behind her while she takes out one (probably fake) security guard after another. Once three men are groaning on the floor and Su Chengcheng has calmed her breathing, he pushes his glasses up his nose.
“Well, if we can tie them to Guan Shengyu then that’s one less threat,” he says, voice wobbling a little as his gaze falls on the man who’s clutching his privates because they’d made intimate contact with Su Chengcheng’s knee.
That’s an almost too sober statement and – wait. Su Chengcheng crosses her arms. “Tang Qi! Did you use yourself as bait on purpose?”
He does, at least, look a little contrite (much good as it would’ve done him if he’d been beaten into unconsciousness). “I can’t be shadowed by a bodyguard forever. This seemed an expedient method.”
“And if there’d been more than three of them? What then?” Su Chengcheng’s glare seems to be infuriatingly ineffectual because Tang Qi only smiles.
“I have faith in your abilities. I’m very glad you’re using your skills in a more... wholesome manner now. Besides, I called the police just before we entered.”
Su Chengcheng moves right past that last statement, anger momentarily diverted by the incomprehensible second sentence. “It’s not like I used to go around beating people up randomly.”
And why does that make Tang Qi’s expression do that disbelieving thing?
(10)
Tang Qi not only becomes more proactive in making her job easier – and more pleasant in general, now that they chat like normal people, friends even, rather than the stilted snatches of conversation that they’d started out with – but he also starts doing small things for her.
At first Su Chengcheng doesn’t even notice. It’s things like little cakes appearing in her vicinity, Tang Qi somehow managing to head off a traffic cop who’d noticed her illegal parking, a hairband she’d thought lost reappearing in her bag.
The day she truly starts to pay attention is when she’s caught out by her period – she doesn’t bring a bag when she’s on active assignment and usually she has an emergency tampon squirreled away in her suit jacket, but she apparently failed to replenish the last one she’d used.
Cursing quietly, she comes out of the bathroom in search of some female customer she might be able to solicit a tampon or pad from, only for Tang Qi to take one look at her pinched expression, dig around in his briefcase, and hand her a pad. He can’t quite manage to meet her eyes, ears flushing red, but Su Chengcheng is far too surprised and grateful to make a big deal out of it right that second.
Back in the car, because it does niggle at her, she says, “Are you tracking my period?”
“Not... on purpose?” Tang Qi is studiously looking out the window. “I just happened to notice you buying supplies twenty-eight days ago. It seemed likely that you did so because of an immediate need, so if your period is regular, it would be due to start imminently.”
She supposes she can’t fault him for noticing, nor for the fact that his mind is a steel trap that a) never forgets anything and b) automatically calculates all kinds of things.
“And why did you have a pad in your bag?”
Tang Qi’s ears are red again. “I have been informed that it is one of the more helpful things a man can carry with them to help female... friends.”
Su Chengcheng has the deep suspicion that it was Gu Yu – who seems to be courting Lin Yuan without much success but cooks a mean dinner – who informed Tang Qi of this.
“Well, thank you then.”
Three days later Tang Qi gives her a small box. In it, Su Chengcheng finds a lipstick she’s pretty sure isn’t on the market yet, with a note in Tang Qi’s elegantly neat handwriting: This colour perfectly matches your skin tone.
Su Chengcheng looks down at the lipstick, the gift, her throat constricting. A small part of her wonders if this is Tang Qi’s way of telling her he thinks her too plain, but after over a month of daily contact with him she’s pretty sure that’s not it. It’s more like... sharing his work with her, and she knows how much he cares about his work. She’s never told him that she’d essentially given up on using makeup after one too many a comment about how much prettier her sister is; she doesn’t need to look beautiful to do this job and she’s good at it. But sometimes she does still wistfully think of pretending to be the princess when she was little.
It’s not so much, she reflects later, that she’s falling in love with Tang Qi again because she’d never managed to fully fall out of love with him to begin with. She’s just learning who he is now, years later.
(11)
She only finds out much later that Qianniao’s first ever perfume is specifically calibrated with her in mind.
(12)
Su Chengcheng doesn’t really think about cracking the walnuts in her bare hand – she’s always done that and it’s not like she’s running around with a walnut cracker she could use instead. The way Tang Qi flinches, however, eyes widening as he stares at her hand, does make her pause.
“What’s wrong? Don’t you like walnuts? They’re good for your brain.”
She holds out her palm.
Tang Qi reaches out very slowly to pick out a bit of walnut from the detritus of the shell. “You... did you mean to give me nuts to eat back then? In the cafeteria?”
“Of course.” Sometimes Su Chengcheng really doesn’t understand Tang Qi’s brain circuit. “What else?”
“I thought, well, I thought you were intimidating me. Because you didn’t like me.”
Strike that, sometimes Su Chengcheng really doesn’t understand Tang Qi’s brain circuit at all.
“I wasn’t trying to scare you, I had a crush on you.”
The way Tang Qi stares at her in total incomprehension, looking like a fawn deprived of its mother, is just cute enough to distract her from her rabbiting heartbeat. She hadn’t meant to confess that... had she? She’s just gotten too comfortable in his presence, lately. Yes, that’s the problem.
“I’m sorry,” Tang Qi says, quiet and sure. “It seems I really misjudged you back then.”
(13)
When Tang Qi proposes the convoluted plan of drawing out the threat from Vandai by pretending to have issues with his eyes, Su Chengcheng feels a headache coming on.
“I’m supposed to keep you safe,” she says, vividly remembering his manoeuvring to ‘deal with’ Guan Shengyu. “Not use you as bait.”
She can all but see his stubbornness kicking into place.
Unfortunately, his next point is valid.
“Even if there weren’t other considerations, Qianniao is a new company,” Tang Qi points out, voice and expression serious. “We are still struggling for capital and hiring a bodyguard is a significant and unnecessary drain on resources. It’s already been over a month.”
“I think keeping you from annoying someone into beating you to death is quite necessary,” Su Chengcheng mutters, but she can’t really deny his point about money. Her services aren’t expensive as far as good bodyguards go, but given the hours involved it’s not cheap. She knows Tang Qi feels awkward about how much money is being spent on his behalf.
Something else niggles at her mind. “Other considerations?”
Tang Qi, interestingly, goes a little red. Adjusts his glasses. Then he looks her in the eye, gaze suddenly so open that Su Chengcheng’s heart jumps into her throat.
“I want to court you,” he enunciates, terribly earnest, and Su Chengcheng sucks in a sharp breath, heart not only hovering in her throat but also beating quite rapidly now.
It’s a good thing Su Chengcheng did notice some of his little moves – and had talked to Lin Yuan about them, who’d squealed and declared that he was clearly in love with her despite Su Chengcheng’s very rational doubt on that score – because otherwise she would probably also be gaping at him unattractively.
Two years ago, she wouldn’t have believed him at all. Now, there’s still a kernel of disbelief, that someone like Tang Qi – handsome, intelligent, accomplished – could be in love with someone like her.
“Even though...” she starts, not quite knowing where she actually wants to go with that sentence.
Tang Qi’s gaze remains firm. “There’s no ‘even’. I just like you, Su Chengcheng.”
(13)
Operation: Draw Out The Bad Guys itself is easy: Tang Qi, with dark glasses and a blind stick, feeling his way around the streets near his home after a few days of conspicuous absence at work – and Su Chengcheng, shadowing him much more successfully than the two hired thugs.
And if, having just stopped him from falling headfirst into the river after being pushed by one of the thugs, she holds him in her arms for far longer than necessary, Tang Qi doesn’t seem inclined to protest.
When her contract is done, he smiles as brightly as she has ever seen and asks again.
(12)
Su Chengcheng doesn’t yet know whether her relationship with Tang Qi will last, though it’s going well enough she’s considering telling her parents and sister some time... soon. Lin Yuan, of course, already knows (and has plenty to say on the subject).
But she knows: that she likes the way he’s determinedly learning how to be a better kisser through a combination of theoretical and applied research; that she won’t get tired of the way he melts a little bit into her grip every time their lips meet; that she is delighted by how he yelps and then clings obediently when she picks him up; that she treasures the way his gaze goes a little molten when she demonstrates her strength; that she will never forget the moment he truly made her understand that he finds her attractive with and without make-up; that she appreciates that he doesn’t try to interfere in her work even when he gets worried about her safety.
That she doesn’t want to give up their cosy mornings when he has earnestly cooked her breakfast.
It's a pretty good start.