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Chapter Text

The metallic smell of incoming rain filled the alley before rushing footsteps broke its silent stillness. Just as the first few drops of a summer storm started to hit the pavement, so too did a pair of little legs, closely following the longer, slightly gangly silhouette of a teenage boy. Its contours were half hidden by a worn down jean jacket that flapped behind him as he ran, his gait askew. He held tightly onto the little boy's hand, dragging him along until they finally found some place to hide behind a wall at the other end of the alley. 

He ducked down, pulling onto the hand until the boy came to rest on his lap. The boy curled up against his chest with the ease of habit, snaking tiny arms under the jacket as he buried his face into the faded shirt of his companion. Together they listened for incoming footsteps, and when they came it was almost a relief, like a peal a thunder breaking through the atmospheric pressure. 

He pulled the lapels of his jacket closed around the small body of his friend and covered his exposed ear with a hand as threats and taunts and obscenities briefly echoed through the alley before disappearing into the white rush of rain. 

A moment later, all was silent. 

With a sigh of relief, he finally let his own back rest against the wall and closed his eyes.

"It's alright, A-Yi," he whispered against his friend's hair. "We're safe for now." 

The hands that clutched his sides relaxed, and after a long while, soft breaths joined the muffled groans of the storm. The boy let out another sigh, one that sounded far too heavy for someone of his age, but as he did the little hands tightened their grip on his shirt again, just for a moment, hugging him as tightly as they could before sleep overtook the little boy. Du Cheng relaxed, his frown melting into a smile. He held his friend close and let himself drift off at last.

For now they were safe, yes. Together, they always were.

"Do you really need to go with them?" asked Shen Yi, fingers moving restlessly along the hem of Du Cheng's crisp new leather jacket. He didn’t quite fill it yet, but he had grown, and the gray shadow of a mustache was already darkening his upper lip. Shen Yi didn't like the jacket, didn’t like the boys that had given it to Du Cheng, and above all he didn't like that hard and tired look that always seemed to be on Du Cheng’s face nowadays.

"Yeah," he heard him say. His voice was soft, apologetic, but he was frowning again. 

Shen Yi didn’t like that either. 

He had grown too, but only as high as Du Cheng’s shoulder. When Du Cheng confirmed his worst suspicions, Shen Yi stepped forward and rested his forehead against the bony angle of his clavicle with a pitiful whine. He wrapped his arms around Du Cheng's ribs and plastered himself to his chest, still young enough to be shameless in his possessiveness. 

Du Cheng let out a short indulgent laugh before he sat them both down on a bench, leather covered arms encircling Shen Yi's entire shoulders. Shen Yi was still so light that he fit easily onto his lap, though his legs had long since reached the ground and he had to twist himself into a slightly uncomfortable position to be able to face him. 

"It'll be alright, you'll see," he heard him say. His chest vibrated with the words and it was such a familiar sensation that Shen Yi felt himself soothed by it, if only for a moment. 

"Your teacher will take care of you from now on." 

Shen Yi mumbled his dissent into the folded hood of Du Cheng's sweater. His teacher was kind, if not always nice, but he would never be Du Cheng.

"You're so talented, you will go far," Du Cheng continued. "Don't worry about me and just focus on your paintings."

Raising his head, Shen Yi frowned back at him.

"You're abandoning me to go with them," he accused him.

"It's for the best." 

It wasn't the first time that Du Cheng had raised this meaningless argument, and Shen Yi answered the same way that he had before.

"Bullshit."

Du Cheng clucked his tongue at him.

"Language." 

"You say it too!" 

"It's not the same. Your teacher will want a well-behaved boy in his house. You need to be good for him." 

"Don't abandon me there," Shen Yi whined, switching tactics. 

He squeezed Du Cheng's waist and laid his head back down onto his shoulder. From so close, he could feel the way that Du Cheng's chest caved in when he sighed. For a moment, he said nothing, merely held Shen Yi. Maybe he was realizing that this was the way things should be, the only way, that they should always stay together like this. That they didn’t need anyone else. 

"I'm not trying to abandon you," Du Cheng finally said. "But if I go with them, they've promised to leave this street alone. You'll be safe. I just need to know you'll be good with your teacher so he can keep looking after you for me. Can you do that for me?" 

For the first time in his very young life, Shen Yi became conscious of the presence of his heart inside the cavity of his chest. It twisted and hurt like a bruise, like he had been punched in the sternum unaware. Tears welled up in his eyes so he shut them tightly to keep the sadness from escaping. 

"Don't leave me," he begged, burying his face into the soft cotton of Du Cheng's hoodie. Against his cheek, he could feel the cold clammy leather of the jacket, like a painful reminder of this new skin that Du Cheng was trying to fit into. He jerked his head to push it aside and dug his face into Du Cheng's neck instead. 

"Shen Yi…," Du Cheng tried to argue.

"No!" 

He sighed again and Shen Yi hated that sound. 

There was another silence. Du Cheng bent his head to press a kiss onto Shen Yi's hair, shifting him on his lap so that there wasn't any space at all left between them anymore. 

"I won't be really gone gone, you know." 

His voice was odd, but Shen Yi couldn't bear to let go to look at him. 

"I will… I don't know. I'll try to come back to see you whenever I can. What d'you say?" 

This was even worse, Shen Yi thought. A goodbye could be fought off. If Du Cheng found a way to compromise, he would really abandon him for real. This was the way adults did stuff, he had learn, backhanded. Shen Yi remained silent, holding onto him. 

"Shen Yi," Du Cheng called. 

When no answer came, he made a strange sort of sniffy hiccup that Shen Yi felt shake his whole chest, but said nothing for a long moment after that.

It was Shen Yi who broke the silence, having finally figured out the only solution to their problem. He straightened up to look into Du Cheng's frowny face while keeping a careful hold onto his waist.

"When I grow up, I'm gonna marry you," he announced firmly, "so you can never leave me again." 

For the first year after that, Shen Yi nourished his hope like a beloved pet, relying on Du Cheng’s sparse visits to feed it. When he came, during that too short hour once every couple of weeks, it was like nothing had ever separated them. He would reach toward Shen Yi with open arms, standing his ground when Shen Yi collided with him and pressed his face against his heart, and he would smile. 

His mustache was growing after some first clumsy attempts at shaving, and his broad shoulders stretched the leather now. But as the weeks passed Shen Yi also watched him grow thinner, his cheeks sink, and his waist remain as small as it had been when Shen Yi had first had to let go of it. More bruises appeared on his skin, a cut at the side of his mouth that had nothing to do with a clumsy razor, his knuckles always raw and bloody or scarred and purple-bruised when he showed up, and when Shen Yi asked about them he always had the same answer to give.

"Don't worry about it." 

He would bring Shen Yi closer and kiss the side of his head before asking about his grades or his art or some other inconsequential thing. Shen Yi felt his hope whither a little more with each time. The visits started getting further apart too. After missing one, it seemed to become easier for Du Cheng to miss a second, until one day Shen Yi ended up telling himself that he wouldn't go. He wouldn't leave his room discreetly to meet him, wouldn't wait by the alley for the sound of Du Cheng's footsteps, his young heart beating inside of his chest. He would remain on his bed, eyes closed against the moving clock hands, ears deaf to their relentless ticking.

But he couldn't. 

He rushed out at the last minute, running through the streets and never stopping until he slammed at full speed into Du Cheng's embrace. Du Cheng was there, on time, waiting for him, and Shen Yi held him as tightly as he could. 

"Hey there," greeted Du Cheng with a surprised laugh, wiggling around for some room to breathe.

Shen Yi looked up at him, still taller and larger than he was, and pretended to ignore the yellow circle around Du Cheng's left eye. He’d found that the more he asked about Du Cheng's life, the worse the visits were, and the more likely it was that Du Cheng would skip the next one. So he sat down beside him, keeping close, and told Du Cheng about his first week of middle school. 

Du Cheng's smile didn’t stay long, though, and neither did he.

“No witnesses.” 

The taller of the two boys didn't shout but his tone was sharp as a whip crack and Shen Yi could make out the words before he even stepped into the old hangar. He didn’t need to know their full meaning to understand that it was bad, and mean, and dangerous, and in general nothing that Du Cheng should want to be associated with. His short legs hurried on despite the primal sort of fear that the crumbling industrial ruin awoke in him. 

This afternoon was the second time in a row that he had sat alone on the dusty ground of the alley, waiting hours for someone who never came, and he had had enough. Dusk was settling over the city when he decided to go in search of Du Cheng. If Du Cheng didn't come, Shen Yi reasoned, he would simply have to go to him. 

Except that when he did find Du Cheng there was a knife in his hand. 

It didn’t really matter that he was the one holding it and not its intended victim. Shen Yi had no conscious thought beside fear and care and worry before crying out his name. 

"A-Cheng!" 

The vowel echoed loud and sharp as a blade in the emptiness of the hangar. Du Cheng whirled around, knife in hand, and almost dropped it when he saw Shen Yi standing in the entrance. 

The two guys had been quick to turn too, but then they twisted back around toward Du Cheng in a slow, slimy movement that made the hair on Shen Yi's back stand on end. They looked like snakes, the bad ones from cartoons that lied and threatened and bit. What was Du Cheng doing with them? 

The tall one smiled a vicious upturned parody of a smile and said again, very slowly, "No witnesses." 

Du Cheng dropped the knife then.

"Go away, a-Yi!" he hissed. 

Shen Yi stepped toward him. 

"Why are you-" 

"I said GO AWAY!" he repeated, this time loud enough for the words to punch their shape into Shen Yi's belly. 

He meant them, every syllable too, it was clear on his face. His eyes were all black, his face dark with hair growing on his brow and on his lip and falling over his forehead, and he wasn't the Du Cheng that Shen Yi knew anymore. Du Cheng had always pulled him close, always wanted him. This one wanted him to go away. He was trembling with it too, shaking like a rabid dog.

Shen Yi felt tears well up and fill his eyes. He didn’t understand why Du Cheng had changed into this… this person who didn’t like him. What had he done wrong? When had it happened? 

"Go," Du Cheng whispered again, his thick brows knitted together. He opened his mouth as if he was about to say something else but then closed it tightly and jerked his head toward the exit. 

The other boys smiled their awful smiles and the tall one patted Du Cheng's shoulder. For a brief moment, Shen Yi glared at him and thought about biting his stinky hand. The one with the upturned nose started to laugh when Shen Yi turned and ran away. 

"Wise choice, kiddo!" he heard him yell in the distance. Shen Yi wiped away the tears that made his vision blurry with a violent swipe of his sleeve and spit out the baddest words that he could think of. 

After that, there were no sounds that Shen Yi cared to hear save for the rhythmic scratchy pounding of his sneakers on the pavement.  He ignored the too-loud creak of the front door, the tired reproaches of his teacher, but then came the silence of his bedroom, impossible to ignore, the face flushing, tears welling, heart breaking silence of complete loneliness. 

He tried to be angry. 

He poured the burning sensation twisting his gut into scarlet and vermilion, slapped the thick paint onto canvas, contrasted it with the ice sharp edge of true blue like the empty sky reflecting off a blade. Shen Yi let it all out into the paint, the shameful sickness of abandonment, the unsettling coldness of solitude, but then his teacher praised the painting, called it a beautiful expression of love, and for the first time in his life Shen Yi learned how it felt to hate something that he had made. 

His heart stung like he had been stabbed there and the wound was not healing right, hot, throbbing, painful and worrying all at once. He stared at the painting long after his teacher had left the atelier.

Was this really love? No wonder the adults all seemed to hate it. It truly, deeply, and completely sucked, in a way that nothing else in the world seemed to compare to. So many artists that he admired had moaned and cried about it, had devoted entire series to the death and decay of their relationships, but Shen Yi didn't want to understand why, didn't want to empathize with them. 

In fact, it couldn't be love. 

No way. 

This stupid feeling made him want to cry and puke and scream, like his body was trying to get rid of a poison. Love was sweet. Love was sugar safe and pillow soft and smelled like faded cotton and laundry soap. It didn't hurt like this. It didn’t make people want to tear out their hair with worry, or to disappear from the human world. What would be the point? Love was in the way his teacher held his wife's hand when they walked to the market together. It was her proud smile when she presented Xu Siwen with his favorite dish. It was how his teacher smiled as he talked about Monet.

This feeling wasn't love.

It was... something else. Something terrible.

Still, whatever it had been, Shen Yi knew that it had changed him. 

He skimmed through the rest of middle school and the start of high school, too smart for his own good but clever enough to keep his head down for a while. But then he started to stay out later and later, to hang out in increasingly bad places, telling himself that it had nothing to do with Du Cheng, that he never looked for his square shouldered shape among the random bonfire-backlit gangs, that it didn’t matter at all if he never saw Du Cheng again. He swallowed his own heart like a sour apple.

All over the city, art appeared in forgotten alleyways, on the rooftops, down under the highways, bold splashes of acid greens and blood-bright reds, large swathes of deep blue and bruise purple spreading the misery of his soul over every damned wall.

Summer came again, and found Shen Yi choking himself on the chemical fumes of his spray cans, pushing back his long hair with stained fingers. Sweat ran down his skinny back in rivulets under his oversized shirt. In the sweltering heat of summer he could feel his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth so when a random guy he was hanging out with offered him a swig of his beer, he accepted, and took a puff of the smelly handrolled joint that followed. As a show of gratitude, he added the man's broken nosed profile to the mural he was spraying. 

Shen Yi drank in the people waltzing through his life without ever truly connecting with them, seeing the geometrical shapes of fat and muscle and bone but forgetting more and more that there were living, breathing human beings inside, forgetting that he himself lived in this desperate thirsting body.

There was something somewhere that he couldn't see, something that kept evading his mind whenever he faced a blank canvas. He lost himself in crowds in search of that one face. At dawn, when he fell asleep, there was a star on the horizon that twinkled, and it reminded him of its expression. And sometimes, when the sea was pitch back he could see a pair of eyes superimposed on the waves, irises as deep and dark as ink, as liquid and as bottomless. 

He could never quite remember them when he woke.

The city lights seemed to ebb and flow like a tide over the horizon. There was life there, near but so far as to be unreachable. In Shen Yi's mind was a glass pane with the world on one side and him on the other. No matter how much he pressed his nose to it the divide remained and he fell back time and again into the liminal subspace of Beijiang society where he belonged, with the drunkards and homeless and addicts. 

With people like him. 

There was no them anymore, if he was being honest. They all had stories like his, one stupid thing snowballing until everything good in their life had turned to ruin and wreck, and they'd washed ashore like the rest. 

It didn't matter that he wasn't even of age yet. He only used substances when he needed to, he told himself, but the threshold of abuse was always just underfoot, calling to him like a cliff edge, and alcohol was free game. He drank anything that was offered to him for whatever price was asked, waking up far too often in strange beds, on strange floors, dazed and dizzy, with only piecemeal memories of the preceding hours, though that last part might have been a mercy. 

It was hard for him to make sense of time anyway. When the mood was right or very, very wrong, he could vaguely remember his childhood, a warm embrace, the glowing sense of safety, but digging any deeper only hurt in a way that made his heart feel like it would finally stop for good.

One day found him crawling out of a den at what seemed like near sunset, climbing over rotten industrial rubble and trying his best to keep the contents of his stomach inside of his body, and the light hit the alleyway in a particular way that wasn't just deja vu. Suddenly he was back there, back then, and rain was on the way, a thick smell of ozone in the air. Someone was there with him, someone dear, someone that was peace and family and home, who was telling him to run, and so he ran, a decade too late to trust in the command. 

He ran on shaky legs, still too small and skinny, stumbling over gravel and rusted metal, scraping an elbow on the wall as he turned a corner, and ran straight into something large and meaty. The shock sent him careening backwards and for a blissful second he was too startled to feel anything, but very soon reality caught up to him and he barely had time to turn to his side before his entire body heaved. The obstacle was talking to him but he couldn’t hear anything distinct, only that the voice changed from concerned to accusing before he was done, and then cold steel was closing around his wrists as he was dragged to his feet. He probably lost consciousness in the car as he often did, and wasn’t about to complain. 

He didn’t wake up on cold hard ground as he expected but on a somewhat dusty mattress in harshly lit room, stifling and full of noise. People were yelling but not at him, so he turned around and closed his eyes tightly, hoping to fall back into the dream he had been having. It had been so close, that feeling, that he could have almost touched it. Home was just there, if only he could remember it. 

“On your feet, kid, I know you’re awake.”

Shen Yi grumbled in response, but didn’t turn. 

“Come on, I know you didn’t hit that thick head of yours, I saw you fall. Hungover’s gonna feel better after some food. Then you can talk to me about those pals of yours.”

Finally facing the officer - only a high-ranking cop could master that kind of condescending friendliness - Shen Yi blinked at him until he resolved into a steady image. He sat up, then slowly stood up, bracing himself against the bars of the cell until his stomach had stopped sloshing around so uncomfortably. 

Two hours later he was still sitting at the man’s desk, and though his stomach was pleasantly full for once he was fucking tired and the bastard kept going around in fucking circles and all Shen Yi wanted was to lay his head onto the desk and go back to sleep. His hands were shaking so he stuffed them into his hoodie pockets, but there was no hiding the scrunch of his face when the guy started again on the same question. 

“I don’t know who they are, I told you.” 

“Well there has to be something more you can tell me about them. I saw your blood work, kiddo, and you have one hell of a cocktail in you, there’s no way guys like them would give all of that to you for free. So what is it, prostitution ring, do you watch out for them, bring packages around for them, what?”

“I don’t knooww,” drawled Shen Yi, falling forward until his hair hid his face from the neon light. “I just paint stuff.”

The officer scoffed. 

“Yeah, so you said. I never knew art was such a lucrative career. But-”

Before he could finish the sentence, a commotion came from the door and a group of cops came in with struggling convicts in handcuffs, flapping around between them like fish in a bucket. 

“We got them!” yelled one of the younger cops. 

At this the officer got up, having seemingly forgotten Shen Yi. He was useless now that the gang had been caught, so maybe he would get out easy in the end. 

He should have known not to tempt fate. Just as the thought hit, the guy being dragged by his handcuffs looked up and his eyes met Shen Yi’s through the curtain of hair, hate passing through them like a steel blade, and Shen Yi knew that there would be no point protesting his innocence. The cops might let him go, but Zhen would not. 

Fuck everything, he thought with feeling, finally letting his head rest upon the desk top. Deep set survival instinct made him keep his head turned toward the entrance, but he allowed himself to close his eyes for a second. For now he was in the sweet spot at the center of the tornado. His body went limp as he relaxed and he could actually feel his heart rate dropping.

The officer’s voice returned. With one eye open, Shen Yi saw him congratulate the young cop, patting his shoulder, and the guy beamed like a fucking dog. Ugh. Shen Yi told himself that such good sentiment might be enough to make him puke again. Look at this sucker, all regulation haircut and straight back. If he had a tail it would be wagging. The guy turned and Shen Yi opened a second eye, letting his hair fall to the side. Of course he was good looking and freshly shaven. Shen Yi would have bet he was the kind of guy who smelled like soap all the time. 

The officer gestured toward him and the guy spared Shen Yi a glance, barely grazing the filthy hoodie and pathetic stature, but for one short second their eyes met and Shen Yi froze entirely. It was like the bottom part of the world had dropped down from underneath his feet, like his stomach had suddenly turned into a black hole and was consuming him from the inside out. Shen Yi knew those eyes, he knew them like he knew his own soul. They had been the night cradling him through all those years, the deep pool where he had hidden his heart away. 

Unaware, he had moved, and the chair suddenly escaped from under him. He barely avoided slamming his face on the desk and braced himself, looking down and away from- 

What was his name again? 

He knew it, he knew that he knew it, but it was - ugh! still so infuriatingly out of reach. It was him, Shen Yi was certain of that. There was no mistaking this. It would be like missing the sun out of the sky. 

“Good job, Du Cheng,” called out the officer as he returned to the desk. 

Shen Yi was still facing the ground, head between his braced forearms, and he breathed out a sigh from deep within his chest. 

Du Cheng. 

It was him. 

He had known for sure that it was him, there was not even a potential possible molecule of doubt anymore. It was him, it was Du Chen, and Du Cheng was his, he knew him, he was a fundamental building block of his universe and Shen Yi would have known him anywhere.

His Du Cheng.

He didn’t hear a single word of what the officer told him after that, repeating the name inside of his mind like a mantra. He would never forget it again. Melting away from the world he sunk into the memories, the name like a lifeline. Du Cheng. Du Cheng. Du Cheng, on and on like waves lapping at the shore. When next he resurfaced, he found himself tracing a pair of eyes on the concrete. 

Shit hovered for a while longer before hitting the fan, though Shen Yi didn’t pay much attention. He didn’t return to the den for his things but managed to grab a sketchbook and smuggle it out of an art shop under his hoodie before the security guard could catch up with him, and he spent the next days filling it with Du Cheng. 

He only had what few coal-tipped pencils he kept stashed in his pockets on hand but he tried every variation he could think of, aged up, bearded, blond, Du Cheng with glasses, middle-aged officer Du Cheng, long-haired or side-lit. 

He fell asleep at some point but woke up with more ideas, ignoring the crick in his neck and the pain in his back from sleeping curled around the sketchbook in the corner of a derelict boat hangar. He drew Du Cheng's full body, and then just that little line at the corner of his left eye. He drew the line of his shoulders, standing proud like he had in the station that day, but didn’t draw the officer behind him. 

In all of the pages, Du Cheng was alone, not with him but not with them either. Du Cheng was the sole focus, all the facets of his face a hoard for Shen Yi’s eyes only.

Greedily, he drew on, forgetting the hours.

Shen Yi drew his eyes, again and again, happy eyes, sad eyes, dark and beautiful eyes. 

The only thing he didn’t draw was the Du Cheng that lived in his memory, that child in the jean jacket, held back by that same survival instinct that reminded him of the pain of remembering. He didn’t draw him as a teenager either, because he couldn’t bring himself to imagine him then. Du Cheng had wanted him out of his life, and Shen Yi had forgotten him, eventually. Those years didn’t exist, and he couldn’t put them to paper. 

But now that he remembered, what would happen? 

Before Shen Yi could think of an answer to that question, the door to the hangar creaked open and Zhen walked in. Shen Yi only had time to drop the sketchbook into the oily waters beneath him before he was taken away. 

Du Cheng had become the new axis around which his world revolved. When Shen Yi stepped back from the mural, he thought: this is the officer that congratulated Du Cheng. 

When he saw him again, Shen Yi understood what that thought meant, and then wished he didn’t. 

The paint can was ice cold in his hand. Superimposed over it was the sense memory of Du Cheng’s warm, trembling grip, holding Shen Yi’s fingers as he begged him to remember. 

He hadn’t noticed the name on the suspect file, hadn’t recognized his face. All he had known of Shen Yi was his involvement in the death of his mentor, his guilt, his failure. Du Cheng had been on the other side of the table, closer than he had been in a whole decade, and yet he had never been further out of reach, not even when he had been wrapped in a shroud of amnesia. 

Shen Yi’s heart hadn’t stopped hurting since. The hope he hadn’t known was growing in him had been crushed back into the dust, and yet through Du Cheng’s cries and anger, he had looked at him and thought, I have never loved you more. 

God, he wanted a drink. 

Instead, he grabbed the can more tightly and raised it. 

His art had caused Du Cheng so much pain and yet, he couldn’t keep it inside anymore. There was something deep inside of his chest that was filling up to overflow, and needed to be spilled over the walls of the city. He had found the place when he first went into hiding after Zhen released him, and it wasn’t easy access, but the wall faced the entire city.

This was where he would be enshrined.

Shen Yi had climbed up with a backpack full of spray cans, traded for way more than their worth, stolen, borrowed, taken, and spent a night and a day, not sleeping or drinking, not existing as anything other than a medium for what wanted to come out. 

When the tears returned, he wiped them away with the sleeve of his hoodie and painted on, telling himself that he would destroy it once the mural was finished. It didn’t matter. He had to bring him to life first. 

His Du Cheng, the one that lived inside of his heart.

Chapter Text

The moon was bright outside the foggy bar windows, bright and cold and silent. She drew Shen Yi’s eyes like an oasis of peace as he swallowed the last remnants of beer in his glass. Around him, his colleagues cheered and pushed each other like schoolchildren in recess, relieved that the case was finally over.

It had been a bad one, made worse for Shen Yi by the absence of his team. It wasn’t unusual for him to be lent to another squad after his hour of fame in solving Lei Yi Fei’s murder, but it always felt unsettling and, truth be told, lonely. Not that he would have been in a celebrating mood anyway - the alcohol swimming in his veins made his head dizzy and his eyelids heavy. 

When the bar closed, they instinctively looked for a Jeep, and he couldn’t hold back the sigh when he realized there wouldn’t be one waiting to take him home. Giving a reassuring gesture to the waitress, he detached himself from the lamppost and started walking into what he was sure was the direction of his apartment building. 

His eyes found the moon again, who seemed to be guiding his steps. She was so bright, so calm and gentle, it was easy to believe that she really was showing him the way. He passed people, he knew it, but all he could see was the moon, filling his eyes with silver light. He walked on. 

Some time later, he couldn’t tell how much, only that there were fewer people passing him by in the streets and that the corner shops had finally turned off their neon signs, he realized that he was still walking. He was also extremely, definitely lost, and not in a metaphorical sense. He blinked dry eyes, trying to focus his vision on anything remotely familiar, but all he could see around him was industrial rubble and the skeleton shape of scavenged buildings soon to be pulled down. The part of him that was still somewhat rooted in the here and now told him it was the new territories, where the city was gentrifying traditional neighborhoods and reclaiming industrial wastelands in the name of development. Confusion soon gave way to a long forgotten fear. 

There was something familiar here indeed. 

The ghosts of years ago seemed to echo off the empty street, taunting him, searching for him. Voices he couldn’t place, faces he couldn’t remember, called out to him. He was alone, so far from the lights and life of the city, that no one would come to help him, only hurt him. 

Out of a long-ingrained habit, he ran. 

The path appeared in front of him, moonlit and meandering like it had been back then, but he allowed himself to slow down as he penetrated the building. The further in he disappeared, the higher he climbed, the safer he felt, and the more he slowed. Darkness closed around him like the shelter of a burrow. Memory lifted his feet, pointing out an itinerary through the chaos of debris, until he emerged on a ledge, high above the city. No one would find him here, he knew. The neon lights were far away, glittering like a mirage on the horizon. There was only the moon with him, peeking through the long broken windows. With one last effort, he swung his legs up and sat on the ledge, breathed deeply, and allowed his eyes to look at what he knew would be there:

Du Cheng’s face. 

The faded features still stood out in the moonlight. It had been almost full when he had painted it, he remembered, allowing him to work in secrecy. Now it shone like a spotlight on an art piece. 

What an art piece. 

Shen Yi laughed quietly to himself as he looked at it. The spot of white shine on the shoulder of the leather jacket, he thought. The flames. The fucking dragons in the background. 

God, it was so bad. 

The composition was something that only a seventeen year old could have come up with. Worse, it was absolutely dripping with the most transparent and embarrassing love. Shen Yi passed a hand over his entire face, pausing for a moment before looking at the mural again. He tried to see it through the eyes of the art teacher, but it was always the same dark, dark eyes staring back at him over the empty space, the same beautiful face overlooking the city like a protector, like the saint he now knew Du Cheng not to be. 

He laughed again, and halfway through the laugh turned into a sigh and lodged itself in his throat. He couldn’t take his eyes off the mural. After all this time, after months of seeing him everyday, of working together, of pushing down the little voice that nudged him whenever they were alone in the Jeep, that face still had the same effect on him. 

Glass gritted under the sole of his shoes as he settled down. Even with no extra light he knew what he would see there: bottle shards, old syringes, the odd soaked pack of cigarettes from a cheap discontinued brand. For years and years now the building had been scheduled for a destruction that wasn’t coming, and that was a symbol of sorts, or at least it had been to his addled teenage brain. It stood proud and ruined, daring the powers that be to act on their decision, to affect it in any way, to take charge of it which they never seemed to come around to doing. He swept his feet left and right to clear the ground and rested his back against the naked concrete, still looking across the divide at Du Cheng’s face lit by the lonely moon. 

He could still remember the last time he had come here, the angry frown that had distorted the beloved features as Du Cheng had chased him out of his life. 

After the black tangle of misery surrounding Captain Lei that Shen Yi had only recently started to pull apart and amend for, he had tried to stay close, following Du Cheng on his rounds like a stray dog hounding his old master. He had tried to be sneaky about it, but he probably hadn’t been. His judgment on anything during these years was unreliable at best, and the fog of memory wasn’t helping now. All he remembered was being cornered in a side alley, and Du Cheng yelling at him. The guilt and the shame and the deep rooted fear of never ever seeing him again had raged together until Shen Yi had ended up here, shaking under the onslaught, desperate for any kind of relief that would offer itself. He had pulled from all his caches, had raged and cried and howled at the moon, to no avail. The face was still there, looking back at him, challenging him to do better. In the morning the wound still bled and ached, so he had destroyed the whole stash and had checked himself into rehab. 

The next time he had been tempted, he had come back here, and another crushed bottle had been added to the grim pile, spilled but untouched. It was pathetic, but it had worked. This was the evidence of years of training himself to deafen that little voice, of drawing strength from that graveyard of love until he could pass for a normal person, for someone worthy of walking beside Du Cheng. 

Shen Yi bumped his head softly against the wall. He had come so far, but was still going nowhere. Somehow he had ended up here again, still alone, still lost. He could feel the alcohol swirling in his stomach but he wanted something stronger still, had never stopped wanting it since he had started. He easily pushed the thought back, but it still remained, out of sight, hidden in the dark at the back of his mind. He felt proud of himself, and dizzy, and hollow, too much of too little all at once. It felt as if his life was a giant pendulum swinging back and forth with Du Cheng as a central point, now closer, now further, now closer again, but always escaping him, always somehow at no more and no less than arms’ length. He was close enough to hope now and it was just as dangerous, it had to be if he had ended up here once again. His heavy head swung forward, then back, and he pressed it against the wall to keep it from moving again. He was so damn tired, he thought. Swallowing down the nausea, he closed his eyes. 

Shen Yi shivered awake, and then recoiled against the scratch of concrete against his cheek. His vision swam with the distant glitter of city lights, something dark and close obstructing the view. He blinked, inhaled, tried to find his bearing in the here and now. He shivered again with cold, until something warm and heavy was draped around his shoulders, smelling of smoke and sweat and soap. His reflexes screamed at him to run and yet he didn't. The movement - or perhaps the smell, familiar and comforting - unsettled him and he half-fell off the ledge, steadied at the last moment by a pair of arms. 

He blinked again as if it could dislodge the dream from his retina and return the world to normalcy. In the background the dragons still danced among the flames but Du Cheng was here, alive and human in a way that his art had never quite managed to achieve, his face so close that he could -

Du Cheng said something and Shen Yi was looking at his lips as he spoke but the words came as through cotton wool, muffled by the rustle of his clothes as he secured the jacket around Shen Yi’s shoulders. He was too rough, or Shen Yi not stable enough, and Shen Yi stumbled again, face crashing into the sweaty smokey fabric of Du Cheng’s shirt and for a moment he was five again, resting his head against someone safe, feeling the heart of the person he loved most in the world beating against his cheek, the heat of his skin. 

It was nice. The smell was wrong, nice but wrong. The Du Cheng that lived in his memories smelled like gravel dust and his mom’s cooking and sometimes like blood when the big kids tried to ambush them, not like cigarettes and aftershave. This Du Cheng was his colleague, his boss, his friend at most when things were going well, and Shen Yi should get a grip on himself and get up, or at least lift his head, he knew it. 

But Du Cheng was not chasing him away, was he? He was here. He had come here. He had come for him, hadn’t he? 

Wait.

He was here.

After a couple of attempts, Shen Yi managed to get his tongue unstuck from the roof of his mouth and raised his head to ask: “How d’you know about it?”

The chest rumbled under his hands, ribs shaking with laughter like an earthquake in a cathedral. 

“Are you kidding me? Every damn cop in the city knows about it!” 

Shen Yi froze, his eyes dropping closed as he braced for impact, but what came instead was another laugh, softer, fonder. 

“At first they thought it was a psycho threatening me. They’d found a sketchbook, they told me. Even gave me protection around the clock for a bit. I was the luckiest rookie in the precinct, the gangs thought I was some big gun with the force, and the other guys thought I had the gangs on my side. As long as I kept my mouth shut, I could get away with anything. The juniors even started calling me ‘Guardian of the City’, it took years of actual work before I got rid of that nickname.” 

With a small start Shen Yi looked up. The name was familiar, even if the story wasn’t. He had heard it whispered, the City Guardian, had heard the people hanging around these ruins and others call it from time to time. So it was him? Oh, if he had known then, he…

“But as soon as they let me look at that wall I knew.”

Du Cheng’s face was dark, sharp jaw set off by the torch he had left lying about, his eyes full of the reflection of the neon glow. It was completely unreadable and Shen Yi shivered unconsciously, hunching his shoulders under the jacket. 

When he had woken up from his bender, there had been thick yellow police tape around the wall. He had been intent on erasing it but couldn’t, and then he’d thought they would but they hadn’t. It had been as simple as that. After a while the plastic tape had dissolved in the sun and rain, and he had assumed that the world had forgotten about it and him. He never returned to the wall, only ever here, away, hidden, safe under the watchful eyes of the city guardian. 

“It took me some time to figure out how to come here, you know,” Du Cheng said. “There are not many places that the wall is visible from, but you certainly picked the hardest to access. I’m guessing that was on purpose, eh? Must be why I never managed to find you in all this time.”

There was a hand resting on Shen Yi’s hair, slowly stroking, until it came to rest warm and heavy against his nape.

Du Cheng had known about this all along. The thought was intoxicating, more than hard liquor. Shen Yi could feel it tingle in his hands and feet, spread along his spine like liquid fire. His eyes burnt with unshed tears, twenty years worth of them piling up his throat and choking the breath out of him. 

“You know,” Du Cheng continued, frowning a little at his own non sequitur, “I’m not good at understanding art like you. I’m just a dumb cop, even if I’m a pretty good one. But I get the advantage of knowing the artist, yeah? Back then I thought you were laughing at me with that painting, but at least it meant that you were out there, and it’s damn beautiful too. Now, it’s… Well, it’s different, isn’t it? And I think I was wrong. It wasn’t a joke, was it?”

The last word had barely crossed his lips that Shen Yi gave up on any sense of propriety and grabbed two handfuls of shirt to drag Du Cheng into the cradle of his own body. Clutching at the fabric he buried his face into Du Cheng’s shoulder as ripples of tears passed through him. They were ugly tears, bubbly and snotty and uncontrollable. Without noticing he hooked his ankles around Du Cheng’s legs, holding on like a drowning man to a lifeboat.

“God, I’m sorry,” he heard Du Cheng whisper into his hair. It was too little too late and they both knew it but it had to be said. “I’ve been such a- god, I’m so sorry. The one time I could have done something for you I fucked it up.”

The hand had tangled in his hair now, Shen Yi could feel the soft pull of it against his scalp, grounding him. Du Cheng’s other hand was rubbing his back, so warm against his skin. The jacket must have fallen away, but he wasn’t cold anymore, not with Du Cheng plastered against him like this, so close that he could feel every heavy breath passing through his lungs. He wanted to shake his head, to tell Du Cheng that it was too late now for regrets, that it didn’t matter anymore, but he couldn’t. His heart felt wrung out like old laundry, washed in too many tears. 

“I don’t know how many times I’ve come here trying to catch you, and then one day you appeared in front of my desk, just like that. But even then I fumbled again like an idiot. It’s like a curse, I swear. I always want to bring you home and I always keep missing.” 

There was a laugh again but it sounded hollow and wet. Shen Yi sniffed, trying to breathe again. It wasn’t a curse, he thought, it was a pendulum. An orbit, Du Cheng and him always spinning at arms length. In his mind the picture appeared, twin lines twirling around one another without ever truly touching. 

“Even now,” Du Cheng sighed. “Now, I told myself, once we were done with everything I would finally talk to you, but there’s always something or someone who needs us, there’s always a new crisis every goddamn day, and now I’ve made you cry again. God, you don’t know how sorry I am-”

Du Cheng pressed his head against Shen Yi’s in a way that almost hurt, as if he hoped that everything he couldn’t say could somehow pass right through their skulls. 

“I keep failing you.”

The surprise startled a snort out of Shen Yi, wet cough catching on yet unspent tears. He was the failure, the one that had wasted his youth, the one that wasn’t worth returning for. Everything Shen Yi had felt like he was holding onto it by the tips of his fingers, including Du Cheng. 

When he looked up, Du Cheng’s eyes found his like he had been waiting, and Shen Yi’s stomach fell through him. Hope had carved a sillon in his heart, churning it over like fresh earth in spring. He never thought they would be as close as they are now, and with it left the gut wrenching thought that Du Cheng could be taken away again, not just for a few weeks, what were a few weeks after all, it didn't seem so bad now that he was here, close enough to touch and hold and smell, he couldn't be taken away from so close now, could he? 

Could the pendulum swing Shen Yi’s way for once? Could he grab onto it and let himself be swept closer than he had ever dreamed? 

He shook his head.

“I’m the one that made a mess of things,” he said, his voice raspy. “I-”

I missed you too much, he thought.

Then he said so, because if the pendulum must swing back it might as well do it now, when he still had Du Cheng's heat and smell and heartbeat-touch next to him, when the painted eyes still looked over him with kindness and a strength that he had painted but never felt himself. While the Du Cheng in his earliest memories and the one in front of him seemed so similar as to be one. 

If he could bear it at any moment it must be this one, here, now, in this sacred place where he had first buried his love. 

He truly felt like he was five now, weak and mumbling, but Du Cheng seemed to understand it, or enough of that kindred feeling had remained from their childhood that words were superfluous. Du Cheng’s arms tightened around him.

“I don’t know how I got so lucky that you keep coming back to me every time I mess up, but now I’m never gonna let you go again, you hear? Never. Can’t tempt fate anymore.” 

Memory struck Shen Yi like a bolt of lightning, and out of the ages words came to him. He couldn’t hold them back even if he tried. He tried to say them lightly, like a joke, like the memory of a happy time, but that dreadful sincerity seeped through, betraying him. 

“You’ve got to marry me, then.”

Pressed once again against the meat of Du Cheng’s shoulder, Shen Yi felt his face turn crimson with the shame of having never evolved out of that hope, of still being the same twelve year old kid in love. He bit his tongue, as if it could unsay those words. 

But suddenly the hand in his hair pulled sharply and he didn’t have time to open his eyes or even think before Du Cheng’s lips were on his, kissing him like it was the only possible answer to that unsaid question. 

Wetness spread over Du Cheng’s face, mixing with the sharp points of his stubble, the softness of his lips, the warmth of his breath. Shen Yi’s heart thundered against his breastbone, trying to rip free, his world turned upside down at the slow slide of Du Cheng’s tongue against his, the feel of his hands on his waist. 

Even afterwards, Du Cheng rested his forehead against Shen Yi’s as if that was the longest distance he could allow, speaking quiet words against his mouth. 

“I wanted to kiss you so badly when you first asked me, you have no idea. You couldn’t see it but I was brick red when you said that, I’m sure of it. It feels a little weird now because you were just a kid, to be honest, but I want to do it so much. I wanted to grab you and run away forever.”

Du Cheng kept talking as if Shen Yi was too young to remember it all clear as daylight, but Shen Yi couldn’t blame him. He talked of the other kids, of the danger, of Shen Yi's isolation and his own impotence to protect him without throwing his own self into the fire, and it was a lot to take in on five beers and however many tears and one earth-shattering kiss. Shen Yi listened, but all he could hear was regret. It had sucked, but so much more for Du Cheng, he thought, older, sadder, too young to be so tired. 

“Thankfully I could see you for a bit every now and then at least,” Du Cheng said. “Even when I was dead tired, having you show me your drawings and smile that cute smile with your missing teeth was enough to last me a week or two.” 

A few words and another puzzle piece turned, revealing a completely different picture. Shen Yi wished that he could have spoken then, could have pinpointed that ache and shared it when it would have made a difference. It wouldn’t now, so he held his tongue, but a certain part of his heart at long last stopped bleeding. 

Du Cheng told him about that time he got arrested, how he had helped arrest those kids in return, how it had led him to join the force so no one would have to make the choices he had made. How he had been a rookie living in a shared dorm, but had thought he would go back for Shen Yi as soon as he had had a place of his own. How hard he had tried to track him once Shen Yi had left his master’s place. 

Cutting short the apology, Shen Yi reached forward and pressed their lips together once more, softly. He didn’t tell him about that time their paths had crossed at the station. It still felt unreal to him, and that too would only pain Du Cheng. He had never wanted to hurt him, not then, and not now. 

So he told him about the rehab after painting the mural instead, about the times he had come back here when he had been tempted, about his long way back to Du Cheng’s side. He had long stopped crying but he felt oddly drained, his voice quiet and strained like the odd rumble of clouds after a summer storm. 

“A-yi,” Du Cheng called when he was done. 

Shen Yi looked up. Behind Du Cheng, dragons danced and flames roared in the distant blue of the sunrise, the City Guardian blessing them from afar. In that moment he knew that it was the last time that he would see that painting.

He smiled. 

“Take me home,” he said. 

Reaching forward, Du Cheng kissed him, holding him against his heart like time had at last unwound.