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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man who passes a cat on the road is obliged to give up all his dignity to interact with it.
Even the stoic and antisocial Mo Fan is, in fact, no exception, which is how Tang Rou finds him squatting on the pavement, hand outstretched and staring intently at a lovely gray tabby that couldn’t care less about his existence.
Tang Rou approaches slowly, so as not to startle either of them. The cat fixes its gaze on her, which in turn alerts Mo Fan to her presence—he gives her a half-nod, then returns his attention to the cat.
Not much of a greeting, but for Mo Fan it still represents a step up. When he first arrived, he’d made no secret of his indifference toward Happy and his animosity toward Ye Xiu in particular, and for the longest time he’d more or less ignored them all, Tang Rou included. It was less like he was their teammate and more like he existed in roughly the same general space as them.
But he’d gotten better, gradually. He sits at the table during mealtimes now, he sits closer to them in the player area during matches, he shows up to more of the social activities that Chen Guo and the others occasionally coordinate. And during this time, Tang Rou discovered something: that beneath all his standoffishness, Mo Fan is quite a kind soul.
It manifests in quiet ways—the training room straightened up after practice, a lost item reappearing in the middle of the kitchen table. A bottle of eyedrops tossed in Steamed Bun’s direction. Sometimes the others are baffled, but Tang Rou always notices from which direction the gifts appear.
And in her room, taped to the wall above her photo frames, is a little yellow sticky note. In marker, a crudely-drawn stick figure of a girl with short hair holding a spear. The spear’s point stabs through several heads with comical Xs for eyes, their cameras and microphones tumbling to the ground beside them.
The sketch was slipped under her door sometime during that week of chaos and vitriol. She’s kept it up ever since.
The cat meows at the two of them, gently baffled at their silent persistence, then lightly bounds away. Tang Rou thinks she can see Mo Fan’s shoulders sag a little, but he pushes himself to his feet and shakes out his legs.
There’s a bit of a pause, and then Mo Fan mumbles a you didn’t see this.
They walk home together, Tang Rou a half-step ahead and hiding a smile.