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The red-haired man regards Tianchen with open curiosity. Tianchen stares back, unreciprocating.
“Hi,” the man says. The syllable is subtly foreign, even as he continues in Mandarin: “Pleased to meet you — though you don’t look as if you’d say the same.” He half-turns, theatrical, for an exaggerated aside: “What’s this, Xavier? I came back from the dead, but your friend here seems...”
“You didn’t actually die,” Liu Xiao says casually, stepping forward. He doesn’t quite place himself between them, but something in his stance suggests that inclination. “Vein, meet Li Tianchen. Tianchen, this is Vein. He’s a—”
“Business acquaintance.”
Liu Xiao’s smile doesn’t shift, but Tianchen can read mild irritation in its frozen angle. Vein holds out a hand — not palm-up in an offer, of course, but for a handshake.
“Has he told you?” Tianchen asks, tone flat. “What I can do.”
Vein raises a too-elegant eyebrow. “Should he have?”
Liu Xiao hasn’t told Vein much about Tianchen at all, it turns out. Not that he’s told Tianchen anything about Vein either. Not that Tianchen cares.
Tianchen’s been curious about others before, of course. Above all: the raw thrill of meeting another person with powers, of playing a game on would-be equal ground. Tactics against counter-tactics, the gleeful dance of a knife in the night. But all that was — before. When there were still scraps of colour in the world, diversions sharp enough to set his blood singing.
He hasn’t felt that since. He doubts he ever will again.
Still. Vein’s presence disrupts the tedium of his days. It’s not curiosity that Tianchen feels, exactly; Vein just takes up space in the apartment, and thus in Tianchen’s attention.
(Tianchen hadn’t protested when Liu Xiao informed him of his new housemate. He’d read the text message, sent no reply. What was there to say, when he owed his current life to Liu Xiao? The small but sleek apartment, the necessities of daily life. A goal.
Vein turned up the next day. Made a throwaway joke about how surely the Quede Games heir could afford more than one safehouse; Liu Xiao countered with a line about operational efficiency, a foreign ease in his voice. Tianchen watched all of it, half-disbelieving.)
Despite the early complaint, Vein seems to have taken to shared living. He tends to commandeer the sofa, book or phone in hand, lounging straight across it like some big cat in the grasslands. Tianchen hasn’t ever thought to do so. He couldn’t have, in either of his previous living quarters.
Vein’s on the sofa again, one empty afternoon, when Tianchen takes a seat in the nearby armchair — not looking up, as if that makes this more casual — and says to the living room’s airy space: “What did it feel like to die?”
“Hmm?” There’s a brightness to Vein’s hummed reply; the permanent amusement with which he seems to view the world. “Curious, are you?”
Tianchen doesn’t have to reply. He doesn’t have to offer any information. And yet he mutters: “I’ve—” died many times and felt nothing “—killed many people.”
It sounds like a confession. Tianchen didn’t mean it as one. He glances over, faintly frustrated, to see Vein smiling at him.
There’s something unsettling about that expression, even though few things are capable of unsettling Tianchen now. Something nearly familiar, a reflection in distorted glass. Tianchen holds eye contact longer than he’d like, trying to work it out. Recognition. Vein is smiling in recognition. Almost like—
No. Qian Jin had been blind from the start. From what Tianchen can tell, Vein has no illusions about himself.
“And what was that like?” Vein asks. Faux-gentle, a lion with its claws retracted.
What was it like? Hell. A hell of his own making, where each new faceless victim dragged him down further, even as he clambered over their corpses towards an imagined light.
Tianchen shrugs, looking away. “Just a job.”
Vein hums again, low in his throat. Says — casual and airy, as if discussing his favourite cuisine — “Far more satisfying to do so because you want to. In my experience.”
Something in Tianchen’s understanding shifts. It’s unsurprising. Not just because Vein is a ‘business acquaintance’ of Liu Xiao’s, but also: the easy confidence with which he carries himself, the knife-edge of his grin. Beasts only hunt when hungry.
“As for dying, well — that wasn’t pleasant. Quite painful, in fact.” His tone is dry, self-mocking. “I don’t recommend trying to find out.”
Tianchen shouldn’t have bothered asking. Of course dying would hold an entirely different meaning for Vein — Vein, who moves through the world as if he owns it, who kills because he wants to. Nothing like what it might mean to Tianchen, now, in this flat grey aftermath. Tunnel; exit. A sense of relief.
“Wasn’t planning to,” he mutters.
The rustle of a turned page. “Good.”
A storybook scene: A beast meets a hunter in the woods.
Or does it? Is there even a hunter here? The ground shifts beneath Tianchen — no, he’s the one who’s shifting, hands to paws and back again, vision flickering between greyscale and red. Which body is he wearing now?
But the beast, at least, is clearly a beast. It draws closer, muscles rippling beneath its hide. The back of Tianchen’s neck prickles: prey instinct, vestigial and long-suppressed. Shameful. He tightens his grip on his bow.
“You don’t need that,” the beast says, pausing. It shakes its regal head, lazily; yawns wide enough to bare its fangs.
“That’s what a beast would say,” Tianchen mutters.
It makes a low rumbling sound. Perhaps a laugh. “That’s what I am, after all.”
Correct in one sense, at least: Tianchen doesn’t need his bow. His hands are his own weapons. He lets go. The bow falls, landing muffled in the grass. The beast takes another step forward, another, the stench of blood intensifying. Closer yet. Close enough that Tianchen can see his reflection in its eyes; the silhouette muddied, still-shifting.
He doesn’t care how the beast sees him. He shouldn’t. And yet.
“What about me?” he whispers. He raises a hand, in challenge or defence—
—and the beast lowers its bloodstained muzzle, nudging its forehead into Tianchen’s unresisting palm. Says, halfway between a purr and a growl: “Isn’t that for you to decide?”
Tianchen could kill it. The beast that lays its fearless head against his hand. The beast he’s always been himself. He could—
He wakes in darkness. Light seeps in under the closed door, from the living room. He listens for signs of life, perhaps a conversation; hears nothing. Falls back into a deep and dreamless sleep.
It turns out that you can order an entire hotpot meal through delivery. Not just the trays of chilled raw ingredients, but litres of broth, a portable stove, and the pot itself. Tianchen hadn’t had a reason to learn this until now.
“I told Xavier that the right establishments would understand the need for discretion, but he didn’t think it was worth the risk,” Vein says, lifting another tray of sliced meat from the cooler bag. “Fair enough, I suppose. I’d hate to have to ruin a favourite restaurant just because a waiter couldn’t keep their mouth shut.”
Tianchen can’t remember the last time he ate hotpot. Or went to a restaurant. He isn’t going to volunteer this info, obviously, but a small bitter voice inside him sneers at the luxury of having a favourite restaurant.
“I suppose it’d sound like a bad joke, anyway,” Vein goes on. He hands a tray of something slimy and viscera-dark to Tianchen: duck blood, maybe, or sliced liver. “The Quede Games heir, a dead man, and a wanted murderer walk into a hotpot restaurant.”
“It’d make the headlines, at least,” Liu Xiao says serenely. He’s standing away from the table, hands in his pockets, as if to underline the impossibility of him lifting a finger to help. “Unfortunately.”
Vein reaches into the cooler bag again. “You chose your own partners.”
Their banter remains disconcerting. Tianchen lays out the trays of food, attempting to find a practical distraction. It doesn’t work. This entire meal is ridiculous.
And yet it happens. Eventually, with everything set up, they sit down to dinner. The hotpot bubbles in the centre of the table, divided between a roiling spice-red mix and a milder, clearer broth. Vein empties a drift of vegetables into the latter; pauses over a bunch of coriander, considering, but leaves it on the tray. Liu Xiao’s expression flickers, just as Tianchen glances over. This is the first meal Tianchen’s had with him.
Vein moves through the plates of meat with remarkable speed. Liu Xiao deigns to dip a few slices of fish into the broth.
“Eat more,” Vein says cheerfully, depositing another slice of meat onto Tianchen’s plate. “You’re a growing boy.”
If his tone were condescending or ironic, Tianchen would be able to feel righteously angry; instead it’s careless, genuine. It irritates him, like everything else about this meal. The absurdity of it, the false — what? Not domesticity, but close enough. Playing at warmth. Round tables and reunions.
Another delivery. Vein pauses, chopsticks hovering rudely close to Tianchen’s plate. “No appetite?”
Tianchen hasn’t had an appetite since that night in the subway tunnel. Before, he’d enjoyed spicy food, as fiery as possible; sought the too-rich flavours of junk food, the sharp sweet fizz of Coca-Cola. Nothing tastes like that now.
“I can help myself,” Tianchen mutters. He reaches for a slice of raw meat to swish in the broth, ignoring the small heap on his plate.
“Excellent,” Vein replies, unfazed.
Tianchen can feel Liu Xiao’s gaze from across the table. He keeps his head down, concentrating on the meat. It tastes—
“Has he ever talked to you about...” Tianchen hesitates. The words feel suddenly childish, now that he’s about to voice them. “Hunters and beasts.”
There is only one he that they might be talking about, so that can’t be why Vein raises an eyebrow and replies: “Elaborate?”
Tianchen doesn’t want to do so. It would feel too much like a student reciting a lesson; a sign that he took it seriously. Grudgingly: “How people are either beasts or prey. But some can become hunters.”
Vein laughs. “Certainly sounds like what Xavier would say.”
Liu Xiao probably didn’t mention it to Vein, then. Had he only told Tianchen? Or, unsettlingly: Had he crafted that philosophy for Tianchen? And if so, why? A question that Tianchen’s felt for years but never allowed to completely form, about futures and parallel lines and—
“There was this kid I knew once,” Vein says. “If you didn’t know him, you might think he seemed harmless. Helpless, even. A deer in headlights.”
Tianchen tries not to remember. A head on his shoulder. A trusting hand in his.
“What people don’t realise,” Vein goes on, “is that even a cornered deer can be dangerous. An animal isn’t prey until its predator succeeds — and the predator doesn’t always.”
Disruption, again, like sand in clockworks. Tianchen’s jaw tenses, a resistance more felt than understood. Prey are prey, he thinks; because they cannot protect themselves, they must be protected. Unfair to see it any other way.
Tianchen knows his disagreement is showing on his face; Vein smiles, as if in response. “So which are you? A beast or a hunter? Or perhaps—” grin widening, a flash of fang “—merely the hunter’s weapon?”
Anger flares, instinctive, before it’s overtaken by surprise. “I thought you were his—” Friend, Tianchen almost says. A childish concept. “Ally.”
Vein shrugs. “Our interests are aligned, for now. And even if I were — well, all the more important to see him for who he is, then.”
Tianchen isn’t convinced that Vein does; he isn’t sure that anyone can. But he considers the idea, gingerly, turning it over like a too-sharp blade. Knives in the dark. The bare weapons of his hands. Liu Xiao has always looked at Tianchen as if he sees right through him, to the wounded beast within; Tianchen has only ever seen the offer of an open hand. He doesn’t know any other way to see Liu Xiao.
Vein’s watching him, still, with the patience of a predator. A kind of recognition. For perhaps the first real time, Tianchen looks back.