Work Text:
Cheng Xiaoshi maps escape routes through Xia Fei’s eyes. Liu-zong looks at him not unkindly: wealth in the simple cut of her clothing, teardrop-shaped earrings tilting with her head. The shadowed room is crowded with businessmen, pretty women perched on their laps and glasses held loose in their hands, easy and dangerous when they barter among themselves. His patron cuts his pleading short with, “Soaring Dragon and Leaping Tiger Hotel. Chunning City.” A matter-of-fact inflection to her tone. Sympathy, he thinks, and leans into it.
He swallows her answer the way he swallows her wine. Sanguine and silken down his throat, dizzying. Salvation and a too-rich flavor, barely on his tongue before it settles uneasily at the base of his stomach.
The relief cracks open.
Lu Guang says into Cheng Xiaoshi’s head, making a soft noise of surprise before his voice evens into an anchorpoint, The hotel she mentioned closed down a long time ago, and the lulled faith-in-rescue undoes itself. It’s impulse not entirely his own: sudden, too-violent emotion paired with the simultaneous need to temper his rage; the exploitation of the scenario familiar-and-unfamiliar and knifelike in his gut; wine roiling inside him like it’ll come back up. It sits in him like emotions bleeding together, or like recognition echoed-back wrong. Trust fracture-lined to expose rawness.
An accusation: Liu-zong smiles sharp and cynical and takes the drink he’d set down on the table in her own hand, fingers wrapping around the stem in an another unmasked illusion. Sips — simple, lipstick smudging-red against glass as she savors the taste — and doesn’t apologize.
OR: Xia Fei never expects otherwise from a client, but he doesn’t need to.
He plays charming. He draws his mouth into a mask of a smile and entertains. He feels nauseous when his patrons’ hands wander and tries not to pierce antlers into flesh, the guards watching him like cameras posed for a photoshoot, pulls away with a start. Something soothing and dishonest in his mouth.
Xia Fei positions himself into a counterfeit of an escort— safety sickening with the memory of bruises exposed on skin, with the knowledge he’s only a few steps away from falling from a balancing act, the money offered to him stripped-down to slaughterhouse-filth and portioned-out debt. He keeps his own strength and the memory of sparring lessons coiled tight inside himself and pretends at harmlessness, well-accustomed to the lie of it (Tianchen monitoring with knowing eyes and a sly, controlling touch ready, security in alliance).
When blood is spilled on the ground and a butcher knife shines with intent, Xia Fei comes back to himself: palms stinging with the clap. The facade of prey-animal-innocence peels away into combat. The facade of isolation peels away to the sound of Vein’s entrance.
— In a dream and omen, the violet tint to Liu-zong’s hair is different: dark and straight falling below a black hat. Ring-clad fingers wrap around a wine glass, tip red sacrament into Xia Fei’s mouth with a gentle incline of a wrist. Cheng Xiaoshi drinks with Xia Fei’s golden-eyed body. Liu Xiao says something softly.
Faith sits like a false word. Betrayal, precarious, shudders underneath skin.