“You’re really beautiful like this. You look like you’re wearing the night with your hair like that.” The older boy’s head turned askew, as if the angle would alter the majesty he greedily took in. “I don’t normally get flustered, but you’re really something special, Laike. Sometimes I have these moments when I’m looking at you and I just… don’t know what to do. You’re so beautiful.”

Laike’s laughter levelled off, died down till it was a ghost in his mouth, tail end of his exhale a soundless specter under cover of all that runoff. That riparian runaway had a velvet glance when he looked at that haunted flood sprite saying his name all 喇, 喇, 喇 with his tongue tied up in phantom poetry. Laike tucked his chin; he lowered his eyes to watch Yuhui’s reflection and found even his obverse stared with a century’s longing.

“You’re a liar,” Laike replied with a coy lilt on his shy smirk. “You know what to do.”

“Okay. Well. Then, you gotta come here.” Yuhui dipped his shoulders down, letting the glistening lacquer pool hold him by the jaw. His eyes beckoned in lidded splendor, trained on that boy dressed in white water, enticing beneath the intriguing bend of his brow. “So I can do it.”

“You c’mere,” that honey-eyed killer countered, tilting his head all play-pretend like he could take or leave Yuhui’s offer where it floated on the pool’s surface. “I’m comfortable.”

“Mm, no, you should definitely come over here.” The royal boy grinned, straightening his chin, his line of sight. “That rushing water might make you miss some of my affection. I’m much better experienced in the stillness, I think.”

“You say that like you have plans; like you know exactly what you do,” Laike replied, narrowed his eyes as though he’d known all along. He was a playful slide back into the water he’d removed himself from, slow glide like he understood Yuhui’s fib but couldn’t decide on the source: modesty or deceit. Regardless of any faux reservation, that shadowless boy relinquished himself to the prince’s grasp when he delivered himself within ambush range. He waylaid that black-eyed boy he so admired, mired him in the ring of his arms about his neck. “Do you still think you don’t know what to do?”

Yuhui responded in kind, looping limbs around the shadowboy’s waist. He used their bodies to squeeze the space between them, to compress the emptiness to naught, to press skin to skin in the slide of silken water streaming elsewhere softly.

“My problem is that I want to do too much.” His voice was softer now, plagued with an indecision that spanned the entirety of his imagination, from surface thoughts to deeper desires to his very recesses—all the dark corners he dressed with thought-strung deviance. “My problem is that we only ever have a limited time together to do so much and I never really know where to start, where to go. You’re so distracting, you know?” Yuhui’s softness faded further into whispers, words given to his friend’s jaw as his lips trailed along its severe bend toward Laike’s ear.

“How do I become less distracting?” Laike shivered in the dark. He wasn’t accustomed to quaking in the absence of light and yet here he was: a creaking cast shadow to Yuhui’s endlessly resplendent shape. The taller boy tilted his head back, a will and a dare. “We have time now. Tell me—show me.”

Now that he had that boy where he wanted him, Yuhui lifted his hands to take hold of the disciple and readjust his grip. He brought his touch down beneath the waterline, urged his fingers to hold around the prince’s ribs, to feel them expand and constrict in his grasp with Yuhui’s every breath chilled by the night.

“I don’t think being distracting is something that you’ll ever be able to fix… At least when it comes to me.” Yu’s chin inclined in his forced observation, sacred angle suspending his indecent stare. “It’s not a bad thing, though. Don’t take it as a bad thing. I love being distracted from my thoughts by you—it feels something like meditation, but different.”

“But different,” Laike repeated softly, hands flat against every cascading rung of that boy’s ribs. He’d hold him like a ladder if he could. He’d grasp him like he was slipping his fingers through the space between guzheng strings, like he could grip him hard and fast by his very bones, tight as a sword hilt

a strange anatomist fantasy

a surreal figment of the uncanny

wrapped in a moment of stendhal splendor.

Laike sighed, fraught—he didn’t know how a breath could stutter.

“Yeah, different. Like hyperfixation.” Yuhui caught him in the echo, drank his reverb like a sympathetic string melody fragment displaced from a slow symphony in progress. He wrote their movements in careful detail, every touch a peculiar note in a passage of many—collected all their half beats and misplaced flats and sharps,

their tune

detuned

by that chaotic boy’s poor conduction,

greedy for all the sounds he could coax from the midnight vinyl of that skipping recording.

Still, the prince stole spaces of silence where he could, four-count pauses pressed to the lips of that boy from the depths of shadows.

laike still didn’t know the exact tune of the song

yuhui tried to wrench from his catgut heart

but he could sing at first sight—oh gods

how he’d sing for him like it was

first sight every sight.

his mouth was broken into quarter step cadence.

he was an idiot savant with glissando hands gliding through some

carelessly composted antiphon refrain, an ad lib tritone aria that could’ve wept

to bear the burden of his col legno cadenza—

but he remained gentle. he remained the dissonant muse so responsive to yuhui’s turbulent takt, his ictus upended. he gave himself to every broken chord kiss that started on one tongue, ended on another.

And Yuhui strung him on and on and on, coaxed that crotchet touch into perfect frequency, droning ever long into the silence of their glittering canopy, the soundrush of nearby watersong.

He slid his fingers up through Laike’s hair, short to long so sculpted by the falls’ flowing attention. He caressed the back of his skull with a touch that demanded more beneath the flirtations of its flutter, pulled away briefly and looked at that stunning thing and his willow heart full of resonance.

“Will you be with me tonight?” Yuhui asked, near and forthright. His ache was apparent in the small tremble left deep in his throat, the way his eyes watched that boy like he’d come to a conclusion from all the ideas he had swirling about his shrewd mind.

“I am with you.” Laike murmured his reply wet, tried to find his way back to Yuhui’s mouth without delay. That idiot boy could barely read the lines much less between them. He was deaf to polite subtext; all he knew was the beggar’s whine winding down his spine, into his sacrum, down under and beneath. Gods,

Yu was so hard

pressed up against Laike’s abs

like he was gonna gut that boy when he mugged him.

“I am with you,” he repeated. Yuhui’s tremble was contagious—it caught Laike by his shy yearling throat and gnashed his veins to a pulpy red stream between voracious teeth. How would he survive without his throat? How could he breathe, how could he swallow,

how could he say:

yes, please—

yes.

“I mean that I want you to fuck me.” Yuhui was good at playing keep away when he wanted to, dodged the rest of that boy’s attempts at reunion with the sort of grace that was a package deal with his bloodline. The directness with which he spoke was tempered by the charming mischief of his gaze, focused and attentive, his father and mother in a perfect little package of pandemonium. “Will you fuck me, Laike?”

And Laike, strange and shadowless, a crossbreed of a postwar catastrophe he’d never know, froze. All he heard were his teacher’s words in his head:

I just want you to be

careful with your heart

careful with your heart

careful with your heart

careful with your heart

careful with your heart

careful with your heart

careful with your heart

careful with your heart

careful with your heart

Jumping into anything

headfirst is a bad idea.

You know this, right?

“I want to, Gods—I want to…” Laike murmured, chin tucked as he turned his head just slightly away, evading the electric seeking of Yuhui’s blackened conduit gaze. “…but I think we should wait.”

“A—alright.” Yuhui looked down, around, away from the shape of that boy, beyond him into the shadows of the tree line he wanted to suddenly dart into. “Okay.”

Of course Yuhui would be fine to wait—it was why he’d asked after all—but he wasn’t expecting to be turned down. Was he too much? Was he incapable of reading the silent language shared between bodies? Surely he was too much, too needy for affection, too forward, too eager to make miles out of the inches he’d been given. Ashamed and abruptly reserved, the prince pushed himself and his arousal back, kept his eyes on that nature like it was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.

“Then… Is there anything else to see around here?” Yuhui masked his awkwardness in the change of subject. The quicker he could get away from this moment, the better off he’d be.

“Don’t go—I didn’t say that I don’t want you.” Quickly, Laike caught Yuhui by the wrist, pulled their contact back flush. He placed Yuhui’s hand to his pulse, nursed their tenuous reconnection with his own palm holding that other boy’s in place. “I want… I want to be in love with you. When we do this, I… I don’t want to fuck you—I want make love to you because words fail to describe the depths of my suffering when I’m not at your side. I want you to be in love with me when you look me in the eye and ask me to be with you. Can we do that? Can you give me the time, Yuhui?”

“Yeah, Laike, of course we can. You can have all the time you need. I heard what you said, I didn’t read anymore into it than was necessary—” Yuhui breathed, unsteady in his touch. He looked up to his friend, darkness catching no light. “But it’s just a little awkward for me right now. With my body against you like this. I just need a minute to calm my breath, okay? Show me something else. Let me be around you so that I can fall in love with you.”

Laike grasped Yuhui’s hands between them when he let the prince put space between them once more. Looking upward, the spark of a grin crossed his betrayer mouth. “Are you afraid of heights?”

“I’m not really sure.” The prince’s shoulders lifted in a half shrug, even as he tried to follow the line of his friend’s inclining sight. “This is the highest I’ve ever been.”

“Not for long,” Laike replied, clipped. He leaned forward, back toward Yuhui. He placed a gentle kiss upon his prince’s lips as he folded the world in half, enveloping them both in the papercraft weight of absolute dark.

He turned the page,

then another,

then

eight

more

before the sky flickered back into itself, but off; wrong; strange. There was no more blue cast to the night; instead the blackened world was tinted warm by a desaturated gradient of davy’s grey to shale-slate to charcoal, the sick colour of a typhoon sky hanging weighty over their heads. They were no longer at the foot of Yelu. Instead, they stood nude atop the world where the falls began, holding hands beneath a sky that seemed too pale to be night, too alien to be earth or heaven. The black spot moon swung low in the sky. Amid the rimlit abyss of silhouetted trees and mountain crags below, Luanshi’s lights could be seen like a fading candle, low wicked and weak in the distance.

“Oh gods,” Yuhui was holding his breath as they touched down into that place of obverse, that flip world switched and settled and dressed in the queasy warmth of opposites. He lingered on the obsidian moon, the stars scattered like pinprick voids across the dove-tone sky. He looked out to the strange horizon, enchanted by its esoteric iteration forced to capitulate under the will of that creature gifted enough to control it.

Yuhui squeezed Laike’s hand, exhaling slow. “It’s so beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful,” Laike confided like a tease, imparted like a confession, staring at that boy held so rapt by that devil’s night sky flip. He watched Yuhui, similar to the Yuhui he’d held just moments prior, just stuck at twenty percent saturation; his photophobic eyes had been replaced by two silver coins, polished to mirrors by the antithesis of night. Laike’s own pupils flashed. His eyes affected a feline tapetum lucidum staring at that royal boy like a signal flare. “Gods, there’s nothing in this world I want to look at as much as I want to look at you.”

“That’s sweet of you to say.” The older boy smiled, dipping his chin down.

“You come into this shade of the world a lot, right? Do you find it more comforting than the regular colors of everything?” Yuhui pried his line of sight away from the landscape, turned his chin to look up at the face of that alluring inverse.

“I don’t think I really belong in either place,” Laike replied softly, thumb listlessly stroking the bones of his companion’s palm. “Either place I’m always separate. I don’t wear the colors of here; I’m not good at being the person they want there. But I guess here is better: there’s no one around so I can just be.”

With his strange eyes flashing down demure, Laike shyly smirked. “If I wanted to take care of you, would you let me?”

Yuhui turned pensive at the question, expression awash in a shade of confusion.

“I… Thought you wanted to wait?” The prince couldn’t look away from the fighter, stared him down in the strange hues of his misunderstanding. “I dunno. Maybe it’s something with me, maybe I don’t understand the difference between things. Does that intimacy mean less than the intimacy involved in fucking or making love to me? In either scenario I’m giving you my body, but in one you don’t want to take it? I dunno, Laike. Tell me what I’m missing here. I don’t want you to feel like you have to do anything with me if you don’t want to. Did… Did I force you to be with me last night?”

“You didn’t force me to do anything—I promise you, I wanted last night,” Laike was quick to clarify, bringing Yuhui’s knuckles to his lips: to kiss them in comfort, to buy himself time to assess his own reservations. “I don’t know. I guess it’s just so fast—this, us. I already have so many feelings for you and, fuck my life, they’re strong. I guess I’m just…” The younger boy pressed his lips together, hunting for words, piecing himself together so he could lay himself plain to that other boy. “I’m afraid of being disappointing. I don’t want to disappoint you. And I guess I want to wait on some things so I can learn better doing other things. Or maybe I think that this anxiety will all go away if I’m so overcome with emotion that there’s no time to worry about being not good enough—only time to act, to move.”

Laike sighed, head tilting back so he could look at the black hole moon. “I’m sorry. I’m not making much sense, am I?”

“I think you’re making sense. It’s okay.” Yuhui reassured the taller boy, squeezing his hand again. “Let’s slow down. If it’s too fast, then we’ll slow down. Just enjoy the night with me at my side. Be my friend until you feel more comfortable, until you decide you want something else, until you’re not worried.”

“Okay… okay. Yeah.” Laike nodded slow as Yuhui’s reassurances washed over him like all that water from the falls. If the world had color, Laike would surely have been red eared at the scenario he found himself in. “I still want to kiss you. Is that okay? I mean, I guess we can wait until we get our clothes back…”

Yuhui took Laike by the shoulders and pulled him in, planted kisses all along his jawline like they would linger and grow into something more, into feelings he’d yet to reconcile within himself, into those future moments of affection he so desired. The prince kissed the disciple’s out-of-color cheek, lifted a hand to take him by the jaw and leave the taste of his inverse on that boy’s lips.

“Yeah,” Yu whispered, “Kiss me as much as you want, okay?”

Oh, Laike would—

he’d kiss that boy senseless,

kiss him till the wounds of his spurning

melted into his skin and ebbed away, till Yuhui no longer

thought about his current timeline’s no

and only anticipated their

future’s yes.

Forehead to forehead, nose to nose, Laike smiled blind in the dark. He’d spend the night at this boy’s side, show him everything he loved, everything he lingered on in his indolent moments between ritual, prayer, study, and violence. He’d take him to the pages of his favourite books; the pearl alcoves before the Buddha that glowed with the most calm. That pale eyed fighter wouldn’t waste a moment of the time misfortune had granted him.

He kissed Yuhui again.

The sky didn’t matter with Yuhui before him.