Work Text:
It’s another Saturday, quiet in the photo studio. Lu Guang taps his foot as he sits in the sunroom. Three months in the past, Cheng Xiaoshi claps his hands together, and comes home.
He stumbles as his feet touch the ground, stepping backwards until his knees hit the couch and he falls back to sit, just a little too close. He lets out this long breath. Lu Guang looks at him, the way his gaze seems lost, eyebrows furrowed. “Are you alright?” he asks, slightly unsure. He didn’t think this would be a bad dive, but Cheng Xiaoshi had been quiet the entire time, and he’s quiet now. Atypical.
“I’m…” Another exhale. Cheng Xiaoshi glances at him, then pauses to really look. He searches for something in Lu Guang’s face, this strange, silent intensity to him. Lu Guang shifts, gaze finding the floor, the wall, Cheng Xiaoshi’s shoulder. Anything but his eyes. “God,” Cheng Xiaoshi breathes, still just looking. Too close, not even trying to touch.
“Did you see something bad?” Lu Guang asks, trying to stop himself from squirming, wondering if maybe he’d missed something when he scanned through the past of that photo. He’s never seen Cheng Xiaoshi like this. Shaken. Softer than that. He doesn’t have the words to label the look in his eyes.
“Bad?” Cheng Xiaoshi echoes. “No, no, nothing bad, just…” Another exhale. Finally, Cheng Xiaoshi reaches out, fingertips finding the base of Lu Guang’s skull and pulling him in until his cheek finds a warm shoulder. An arm wraps around his back. He can feel Cheng Xiaoshi’s breath, the way he’s warm, warm, warm like towels fresh out of the drier or the crackling embers of a fireplace. The way he shudders. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen myself through your eyes,” he murmurs. “I just…”
Lu Guang stares at his shirt, the wrinkles where it isn’t smoothed down, the place where it rides up and shows half an inch of the band of Cheng Xiaoshi’s underwear: washed out blue, a loose thread at the seam on his hip. Something bubbles up in his throat, unease or overwhelm or some other emotion. His skin feels like snow in spring. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands.
“You—” His voice breaks, so he tries again. “You knew,” he says, tries to say. He can hear Cheng Xiaoshi’s beating heart. Can smell the blackcurrant and birch soap scent of him. Soft cotton against his cheek. Body heat bleeding through it like ink through paper. Lu Guang barely breathes, keeps his eyes wide open.
“I knew,” Cheng Xiaoshi agrees. He presses his nose into Lu Guang’s hair, shifts a little so they can meld like hot wax. Sensation up Lu Guang’s spine, in his teeth. He thinks of skin beneath his lips and shoves that far, far down. “But it’s different. Knowing something and feeling it directly. I…” His hand trembles as he pulls it back and runs it through Lu Guang’s hair. He makes sparks with his touch. Lu Guang fights himself not to shiver. “How do you stand it?” Cheng Xiaoshi whispers. “Feeling so much?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Lu Guang sounds robbed of air. Stalk still and still staring at nothing.
“You feel,” Cheng Xiaoshi tells him, “more than anyone.” It’s awe, there. The thing that makes him tremble. The thing that does this, whatever this is.
“I don’t,” Lu Guang denies, heart drumming in his throat. His chest is too small for it. He’s almost afraid, thinking of what Cheng Xiaoshi must’ve felt, must’ve lived through him. Taking this mission, he hadn’t thought—
“How would you know?” Cheng Xiaoshi asks, giving up on crushing him close to look at him instead. A thousand things in his eyes. His cups Lu Guang’s cheek, spreads heat there like he lives to set fire to things. “You’ve never been anyone else.”
“I—”
Cheng Xiaoshi kisses him, swallowing up whatever he was going to say next. His fingers slide back into Lu Guang’s hair, like that isn’t enough. He’s so much sensation, sight and sound and touch and taste walking. There are so many ways to know him, inside and out, and Lu Guang has never really come to terms with that. The fact that he, of all people, is the only one who gets to. He gasps, and this is swallowed up too.
“You don’t get it,” Cheng Xiaoshi pulls back to say. It feels like his mouth leaves an imprint. Lu Guang drags his gaze up from the red, curved shape of it.
“I don’t,” he agrees, still stuck on the body heat, the hand in his hair, the phantom of that kiss. Feeling too much. More than anyone. His heart hammers.
Cheng Xiaoshi looks at him, each eye in turn, his own flicking left and right, left and right. There’s still awe in his expression, but it shifts into this dumb, ever familiar, earnest grin. “You love me,” he says. “You love me so much you can hardly breathe.”
Lu Guang frowns at him. “You knew that.”
“No,” Cheng Xiaoshi whispers. “No, I knew that you loved me, sure, but… not that much. Not like you would build the world up from scratch just for me. Not like…”
“Do I not show it?”
“You do,” Cheng Xiaoshi tells him quietly, thumbing over his cheek. “You do, but to feel that from your side, it’s…” Lu Guang just stares. Cheng Xiaoshi’s smile becomes a heartbreaking thing. “It’s nice, knowing someone could look at me and feel even a fraction of that way. Lu Guang, I…” He’s gone soft, melting into something tender and horrible. He’s the beautiful one, between the two of them. Everything about him, inside and out. He doesn’t seem to realize what a greedy, selfish thing Lu Guang is, and that’s beautiful too.
“Half the world would feel that way if they knew you,” Lu Guang tells him.
“You can’t say things like that.” Cheng Xiaoshi falls into him, too much weight to support sitting up like this. Lu Guang brings a hand behind him, still unsure what to do with the other one. How to touch without bursting. “Not when you mean them. Not when I know you mean them.”
Cheng Xiaoshi clings to him now, both hands fisted in his shirt, face hidden away in his throat. He’s warm like sunlight. His hair tickles. Lu Guang’s wrist starts to ache. He swallows, sets his free hand on Cheng Xiaoshi’s back. “I’d have thought most people would like hearing that kind of thing.”
Something wet like tears soak into his shoulder. “You really can’t comprehend how much it might mean to someone to be loved so wholeheartedly, can you?” Cheng Xiaoshi murmurs. His exhale is shaky. Lu Guang can feel the way it makes his chest cave, the way he whispers, “I can’t believe you,” right after. Even quieter, he says, “I love you.”
“Cheng Xiaoshi.”
“I know this wasn’t the point of that dive, but… Thank you, I guess. I knew but I— Now I— I’m sorry if this is weird for you, but I’m happy. Really, really happy.”
“Not weird.” Lu Guang might get it. It feels a certain way to have someone love being loved by you too. Almost overwhelming. The fact that he can make warmth personified feel a bit of that back. “Not weird at all.”
Cheng Xiaoshi kisses him again, softer this time. He can kiss so sweetly when he wants to. Like dew on leaves or skin on fresh sheets. Slow, careful, Lu Guang leans back to take the pressure off his wrist. He hits the arm of the sofa. Cheng Xiaoshi follows, giving up the kiss to rest their foreheads together instead.
“I love you,” he says again.
Lu Guang tries not to shudder. Cheng Xiaoshi smiles, edges up just a bit, so close, like he’ll kiss Lu Guang again, but all there is is his breath and this teasing tension that he likes to build. Lu Guang is no stranger to this, and, breath held, a little bit frustrated, kisses Cheng Xiaoshi himself.
It’s easy, the way they fit. Cheng Xiaoshi with a hand on Lu Guang’s knee, pressing it open so he can fit between them, other arm on the sofa, soaked through with this living warmth beneath his skin. It takes time for Lu Guang to get used to it, it always does. Slowly, his skin settles and his hands remember that they belong to him. He tugs at Cheng Xiaoshi’s ponytail, curls fingers around his upper arm. Kisses him, head tipped up, lips slightly chapped. Kisses him and kisses him like stepping into a hot bath or stumbling to a stop after running for too long. It’s hard to breathe, when they kiss like this. Maybe Lu Guang just forgets to, too focused on the way this feels, the way Cheng Xiaoshi touches him.
Next it’s his mouth, dragging along his cheek, pressing to the top of it and smearing down. His jaw, the underside of it, his neck. Cheng Xiaoshi finds his hands and laces their fingers together, pinning them back beside his head. “I love you,” he says yet again, lips against Lu Guang’s pulse. It makes him shudder, starting to ache where they’re pressed so close.
“Are you trying to start something?” he asks, hands straining against Cheng Xiaoshi’s hold. He’s met with a grin.
“I can, if you want,” Cheng Xiaoshi replies, and Lu Guang has reached his threshold for these kinds of emotions. His whole body is warm enough to sweat.
“You are—” he starts, but he’s cut off by Cheng Xiaoshi’s mouth on his neck again, the way it gives him goosebumps, makes his breath hitch and cut himself off.
“Lovely,” Cheng Xiaoshi fills in. He sucks another kiss into the soft, sensitive part of Lu Guang’s throat. “The most wonderful partner in the world.”
“An idiot,” Lu Guang hisses, wound up so tight he shakes a little bit. His neck offers itself up, as it always does. His face floods with heat.
“Sure,” Cheng Xiaoshi agrees, letting one of his hands go to hold his waist, slipping beneath the hem of his shirt and up over bare skin. Everywhere he touches feels branded, phantom sensations lingering. Lu Guang wraps an arm around him, keeping him close. “But you love me. You love me so much you—”
“Shut up,” Lu Guang says, all breathless. “You don’t get to use that against me, not when you—”
Teeth on his throat. Cheng Xiaoshi smiles against him, but he shuts up. That’s a win, maybe. His hand slides further up Lu Guang’s abdomen, and that’s not. “Can I?” he asks.
He’s distracting. Terribly, horribly distracting. Lu Guang finds his breath and asks, “what?”
Cheng Xiaoshi’s cheek presses into him. His eyelashes tickle. “Start something,” he elaborates. Cold air seeps in where Lu Guang’s shirt has rucked up, caught on Cheng Xiaoshi’s wrist. He, like Lu Guang knows him, knows Lu Guang too. Inside and out, in so many ways. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“By whose standards?” Lu Guang scoffs, but he is, and always will be, someone without the self control or strength that he should have. Cheng Xiaoshi is the thing he would destroy worlds and overturn timelines for. A feeling builds in his chest. Too much, always too much. Sometimes he looks at Cheng Xiaoshi and he wants to cry. It’s a strange, beautiful burden to carry.
“You’re not as good as you think you are at pretending you don’t want me,” Cheng Xiaoshi informs him. “I’ve seen too much. I’ll never believe you.”
You shouldn’t, Lu Guang says, you should never believe I don’t want you. It comes out as, “You’re an idiot.”
A smile. Slightly crooked teeth. “You love me,” Cheng Xiaoshi says. Sure of it, beautifully sure of it. “So?”
And Lu Guang never really says no to him, not seriously.