“I can’t believe I won.” Yuhui’s excitement from the sparring match was electric, tracing his muscles and running rampant through his bones. He looked down to his open palms suspended before him, eyed his fingers like they were not the chaos-wrapped digits that he was born with, like they were a competent man’s hands rather than his clumsy own. Though surely this singular instance was a fluke, he was still full of pride. Bright-eyed, Yuhui looked aside at his companion. “What’re we going to do now?”

“I feel like you oughta get a reward for how you won that match,” Laike said, a sly sideways murmur from a tricky, demure mouth. He leaned against the stone archway leading to the cultivator dormitory’s maze-like halls, head tilted. The boy grinned. “So what do you wanna do? I could show you my room or I could take you up the mountain. We can do whatever you want.”

“Oh! Show me your room,” Yuhui replied, already stepping forward into the dormitories despite not knowing the way. “I want to see what your space looks like.”

Laike bit his lip, chin tucked, before he pushed off the wall, snatched Yuhui’s hand, then proceeded to lead him down the corridor. Anytime their path was blocked by a cluster of loitering students, Laike was leading Yuhui in and out of the shadows to circumvent them. Yuhui had very clearly stated what he wanted and Laike was intent on providing; he didn’t need any delays from curious onlookers trying to start a conversation with the visiting Prince.

Soon the boys reached the end of the hall where the ladder to Laike’s little hideaway stood. “My room’s up there,” the shadowstalker said, looking up. He shifted to the side and, suddenly, he was on the landing, looking down at Yuhui with a coy smirk, both proud and defiant. “Come on. Hurry up.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Eyebrows playfully furrowed to match the thin exasperation in his tone, Yuhui grabbed the ladder and climbed up into the loft. He situated himself on his knees in the entryway, eyes wide as they curiously moved about the dwelling spreading before him.

Though the entryway was only half height, forcing one to crouch or duck to gain entry, the room itself was an open space with a cavernous ceiling, domed over the boy’s sparse belongings. Across the long, far wall was a row of sliding windows, currently open to the morning. On the left side sat a cushion, a low table, a mess of papers and calligraphy supplies, an old and dented iron tea set, and a small hearth full of embers. A pot of water hung suspended above it, bottom blackened by soot. To the right was a bed set directly on the floor covered in all sorts of mismatched bedding, pillows strewn all over a mess of blankets. His favorite, a worn slate blue silk quilt embroidered all over in gold and silver thread, hung over the edge. There were all sorts of small objects dangling from the ceiling: small trinkets he’d been given, little pieces of metal and glass suspended by fishing line, one of the candies Yuhui had given him. On the wall by the bed, near where Laike usually laid his head, were the Prince’s letters hung in a cluster, along with a few drawings he’d exchanged with the Weis and Tiao. The furthest corner had a ragged little bed, stone walls covered in the scratch marks of a drunken (or distressingly sober) cat.

Laike allowed the Prince inside, lips pressed together. He was nervous: his own small space held none of the finery or grace of Yuhui’s usual setting. “You can sit wherever,” he said, glancing around before his hazel eyes returned to Yuhui. “I don’t get a lot of visitors so you can probably relax.”

“Thanks,” Yuhui said of the invitation, smile replacing his wonder. He didn’t yet sit, however. The second prince of Fanxing City wandered around the space, eyes focused up at the glittering array of baubles, then down. Yuhui strode by the table meant for sitting; he passed the hearth meant for heating and veered to the right to stand before the shadowboy’s bed. There, he observed the wall, took note of where the pieces of his memory stood in comparison to Laike’s other belongings.

After a brief pause, Yuhui picked up the worn blanket woven through with shimmering lines. He pulled it close.

“This is my blanket,” the prince said, black eyes turning to that boy of coalesced night.

“That’s cute,” Laike replied, fond despite the sharpness in his tone. He followed the Prince to the bedside, standing close before him. “Is this room yours too?”

“… No.” Ambiguity mottled his tenor. Yuhui put the blanket down. “I mean it used to be mine.”

Looking between the Prince and the blanket, Laike tilted his head. “Master Xueyu and Mistress Jiling found me with it.” He shrugged. “I don’t really remember where I got it from. I was five or six.”

“I remember that I gave it away.” Yuhui turned to the wall, bending at the waist to look at the drawings the fighter’s friends made for him. A smile reformed on his lips. “I had a lot of imaginary friends when I was small. I personified a lot of the strange happenings around me because people kept saying that I was haunted, that ghosts were attached to me. I recall having one friend that I really cherished, who’d come see me to play when the rest of the palace was asleep. Maybe everything wasn’t so imaginary.”

“Maybe ghosts are real,” Laike teased, hands falling to Yuhui’s waist, head tilted. He was a schoolyard jeer, a taunt made real by his proximity, his withholding. “Maybe a ghost gave it to me after it took it from you.

“Yeah,” Yuhui replied, straightening his spine and turning back to the boy. “Maybe.” The prince watched Laike’s face, chin angled up in the light of the day’s slow procession. His fingers wrapped around the fighter’s wrists, holding him loosely.

“I like your room, Laike,” the older boy hummed. “It’s really cozy.”

“We’ll have to go soon. There’s breakfast,” Laike said as he sidled closer to the prince. He was easy, less nervous than the night before, than any of their nights before. They were hip to hip; Laike’s chin tilted down, demure but suggestive. “Then morning training exercises, then study…”

“How much time is soon?” Yuhui’s black eyes slid sideways to the gentle light of the outside world streaming in through Laike’s window. He was still even in the sway of the younger boy’s suggestion—hands and hips, heartbeat steady.

“Thirty, forty minutes,” the shadowy thing replied. There was a hazel eyed miscreant where a perfect pupil once stood; his touch was a truant’s persuasion, exhilarating and defiant. “More if you’re not hungry for breakfast.”

“I’ll see how I feel when the time comes, I guess.” Yuhui looked back to Laike. “What are we going to do until then?”

Laike barely left time for Yuhui’s last word, took the Prince’s question mark straight to his own lips. He brought his hands to the other boy’s jaw, answered him in action. Laike had decided, at some point between their late night triste and their morning reunion, he was no longer a hostage to nervous inaction; he didn’t want to be a slave to uncertainty, mired in regret.

Xueyu’s path wasn’t his path; his master’s choices weren’t his choices. Laike wanted—he wanted.

The prince took his captor’s hips now, draping them in the digits of a chaste touch: a light weight atop the monochrome layers of the mountain sect, a grounding warmth in the dizziness of that swell of affection. His chin tilted up to meet those lips, partner in crime to a blushing conspiracy. Yuhui gave back what he was given, merciless mirror salivating silver.

“I thought about it,” Laike said, his vertigo voice finding the small moments wherever their lips parted. “All I can think about is how stupid I was last night. I wanted you then so badly; I want you now even more.” He paused in his affection’s slide toward debilitation, his tumultuous kisses that only gained intensity with gravity. The fighter leveled his strange eyes on that boy so close, that boy whose saliva dressed his lips. “Do you still want me?”

“I do,” Yuhui responded, leaning back into looking distance. “But immediate gratification isn’t worth lingering consequences, the regret. If you want to be in love with me before we do anything else, then we should stop this.” He looked down to Laike’s chest, following the sharp line of his robe as left crossed right. “You’re not stupid. There’s no going back from this and I don’t want you to feel like you made a mistake down the line.”

Laike’s gaze was stripped. He was a live wire sparking hot through eroded stone; he was a single moment’s consideration. He, without a past; he, without a future.

He didn’t even know what kind of beautiful fuck-me stare he wore.

“Xia,” Laike said softly. “If love is desire and desire begets suffering…” He paused to breathe, paused to swallow, paused to bite his lip. “You should know I’m suffering greatly, right now.”

On the tail end of a gentle sigh, the corners of Yuhui’s lips turned upward in his chin’s downward angle. He moved his hands away from Laike’s hips, letting his fingers trace up the lines of his robe in tender, sweeping motions as if to smooth them down.

“If you can’t tell me plainly, how do you expect me to have confidence in your change of heart?” The prince looked up. “Love is so much more than desire. Don’t do things you’re not ready to do, don’t say things when your heart is only half-way there.”

“How will I know? How do I keep you until I know I can say it plainly?” Laike asked, plaintive in his crestfallen song. His brow was creased in confusion, in distress, quirked higher on the right than the left. He hesitated before he continued. “Do you… do you not want me at all until I’ve figured it out?”

Yuhui chewed his lower lip briefly, eyes searching the other boy’s face. “… The back and forth is just too much right now, too sudden. I want you. I think you’re beautiful and I really enjoy the time I’ve spent with you. I want to spend more and more time with you, plain and bare, heart to heart. But how am I supposed to feel comfortable pressing forward with you if you’re giving me signs that you don’t know what you want? I won’t be a mistake, okay? I refuse to be. If there were more than a few hours between your choices, then I might feel more confident that the intimacy we share is going to be something remembered fondly rather than forced. I rushed us into this, I don’t want to make the same error twice.”

“I know what I want.” Laike was pained, conflicted; his despondence was evident in Yuhui’s study. “I want you. I wanted you the first time, I wanted you last night—you didn’t rush me. My stomach lurches when you act like I didn’t choose to be with you, when you act like the only intimacy that’s good enough is intercourse, like what I gave you that first night was less than because I didn’t fuck you.” Laike pulled away from Yuhui, turning toward the windows to peer out over the morning mist, like separation would give him clarity. “If it’s all the way or nothing at all, just tell me. I can handle that; I can handle anything if you just lay it out for me.”

“What? What are you even saying?” Yuhui recoiled, brows furrowed in frustration. “You’re the one that drew the lines, you’re the one that asked to slow down. It’s not all or nothing, but I’m not just going to jump at the opportunity to get fucked on the tail end of a veiled proclamation of love because you ‘thought about your hesitation and actually nevermind.’ I’m doing nothing but respecting the decision you made, you’re the one arguing with me about the type of time we’re spending together like it’s not good enough.” The older boy crossed his arms over his chest.

“After I told you I didn’t want to go all the way you started pushing me away,” Laike said, leaning against the window frame before he looked back to Yuhui. “You don’t have to humor me or… do this, any of this, if I’m not who you want. We can just be friends; I can just be the scribe that wards you. Right now, I’m on a path that ends with me falling in love with you. I can feel it rolling downhill. I know where the cliff is. I know when I get there, I’m going to jump. I want to be intimate with you; I want to please you; I want you to want me; I want to be yours. And… and I feel just—just so fucking stupid wanting these things, thinking I’m worth that sort of attention from you. I’m no one. You’re everything. So if I read things wrong, I’m really sorry; I’m sorry if I misunderstood the line that got drawn last night.”

“I’m not humoring you.” Yuhui shook his head. “You’re not no one and you’re not stupid. I’ve told you over and over that I want you. I just want to be sure that you know that you don’t have to put out to make me happy; you don’t have to have sex with me to keep me near; you don’t have to pay for my attention with your body; you don’t have to strip to keep me looking. Laike, I don’t want to inadvertently use my status against you or make you feel like the minutes between us are do or die. I’m sorry for pushing you away. I took slow down to mean less.”

“Okay,” Laike said as he tilted his head. At first his expression was serious but it was short lived: his gaze was always ardent when he looked upon Tian Yuhui. “Can you come here and show me everything’s okay? That we’re good?”

Wordless, Yuhui crossed the distance Laike put between them and grabbed that boy’s hands. He moved them back where they belonged around his waistline then pulled the fighter down to anoint his lips in the riches of his kiss. Every touch of his was sure, weighted with the want he mottled with too many words, demanding closer in the seeking slide that caressed up the mountain boy’s neck. Yuhui was a greedy thing, even in restraint.

The shadowstalker melted into Yuhui’s outline; he was at Yuhui’s waist, looped through his belt, firm at the small of his back. He returned every kiss with his affection amplified by elation, by relief. Laike didn’t trust word; he trusted action.

He trusted this.

“This is all I wanted,” he confessed, smeared against the wall by Yuhui’s mouth. “You, unburdened. You, as you are.”

“I always am as I am,” the shorter boy replied in a breath, heels up to dress himself in the shadows of that soot he was adoring. “I can’t be anyone else.” Yuhui wanted so much, wanted too much. In the sturdiness of his resolve, his knees felt weak. A shiver ran up his spine, uncognizant of the warmth of sunlight.

“You know what I mean,” Laike teased, touch drifting lower as he pulled the Prince closer, improperly flush. “I—”

“The view from your windows is perfectly composed at this time of day, Laike of the Shadow Rift,” a chime-like voice commented from outside the boy’s door at the foot of the ladder. “It is thoughtful that you would choose to admire it with the Second Young Master, even as breakfast has begun.”

Laike froze in place, eyes suddenly wide. He behaved as though a full stop would convince the Priestess that no one was home, that if they didn’t move, she would be unable to detect them.

“Lady Jiling is right,” Yuhui pulled away to admire Laike, to stare softly into his hazel eyes illuminated. The prince brought a thumb to the boy’s mouth to dab away a shimmering reminder of their kiss. “The view is lovely.”

Laike rolled his eyes to mask his real response. Despite its cheesiness, the prince’s words had that shadowy boy blushing.

Yuhui turned, heading to the exit while checking the arrangement of his robe, resetting whatever perfection had been marred by their proximity. “We’re coming. Sorry we’re late,” he called down to the priestess. “I held him up with my curiosity.”

Jiling looked up at the boys with a lacquer box in her hands. Her amused smirk was held tight in the corners of her small mouth. The Mistress of the mountain always looked as though she knew more than she should; she always looked world weary, unsurprised, like everything she heard was either expected or repeated. “I am sure you will find time to engage your curiosity as you train, my Prince,” she said smoothly. “A visitor is currently arriving for you.”

“Oh! That must be Fei. I should go and greet him.” Yuhui made quick work of the ladder down from Laike’s lofty space, presenting himself before the priestess after that moment’s worth of shuffling. “Will you be coming with me, Lady Jiling?”

“I will accompany you for as long as our paths are singular,” the Luanshi leader stated, looking up to Laike. “Laike will surely meet with you in the afternoon, after his schedule. He should begin heading toward the dining hall since he no longer has to choose between sustenance and… curiosity.” Jiling smiled warmly as she stepped aside for Yuhui.

Laike, on the other hand, was withering in embarrassment, hidden atop the landing.

“I’ll see you soon, Young Master,” he barely managed to say as he peeked over the edge.

“See you later, Laike.” The prince waved to the pair of eyes watching down from above, then turned on his heels and moved down the hall with his gracious host.