The first thing Duan registered was light.
Then pain.
The light was coming through curtains that weren't his and the pain was sitting directly behind both eyes with no intention of moving. He lay completely still and waited for the room to stop tilting and when it finally did he became aware of two things simultaneously — he was on a sofa that wasn't his, and someone in the vicinity was making noise on purpose.
He pulled the blanket over his head.
Something cold and damp landed directly on his face.
He grabbed it. A towel. He peeled it off and opened his eyes and immediately regretted that decision.
Jun was standing over him holding a vacuum cleaner and wearing the expression of someone who had been awake for hours and had zero sympathy for people who hadn't.
"Go shower," Jun said and turned the vacuum on.
Duan sat up.
The room tilted again.
He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead and waited. Jun vacuumed around his feet without adjusting his path. Duan lifted his feet. Jun vacuumed under them.
He got up.
The shower was cold and brutal and exactly what he needed and by the time he was done he felt like something close to a person again. He found Jun's clothes folded on the counter — he didn't ask, Jun had clearly left them — and pulled them on and came out still working a towel through his hair.
He smelled it before he got to the kitchen.
He stopped walking.
Congee. Warm and thick, the smell of it wrapping around the whole apartment, and Jun was at the stove with his back to the room doing something with a spoon like he hadn't just made breakfast for someone he'd been ignoring for three days.
Something sat heavy in Duan's chest.
He sat down without saying anything.
Jun brought both bowls over and sat across from him and started eating like this was just a normal morning. Duan looked at his bowl. Looked at Jun. Picked up his chopsticks.
They ate in silence.
It wasn't comfortable silence. It was the kind that had weight to it. The kind where both people are very aware of everything that hasn't been said yet and are eating around it.
Duan set his chopsticks down.
He reached across the table and covered Jun's hand with his.
Jun went still. His chopsticks stopped moving.
"If I did something wrong," Duan said, "tell me straight. I can take it." His hand pressed down a little more firmly over Jun's. "But I can't keep doing this. Walking past each other. Not talking. I don't—" He stopped. Steadied himself. "I need you to talk to me Jun. I'm not leaving until you do."
The kitchen was quiet except for the sound of the building settling around them.
Jun looked at their hands on the table.
He set his chopsticks down slowly and leaned back in his chair and for a moment he just looked at Duan with that unreadable expression that Duan had spent months learning to sit with.
Then he spoke.
"You didn't do anything wrong," he said.
Duan opened his mouth.
"Let me finish."
Duan closed it.
Jun looked at the table. "I've always been fine on my own. I've never needed anyone around me and I never wanted to. It was easier that way. Cleaner." A pause. "And then you showed up and you just — kept showing up. Every day. And I started feeling things I couldn't control and I hated it." His jaw tightened slightly. "I hate not being in control."
Duan watched him.
"You've been nothing but good to me," Jun continued, quieter now. "From the start. And that's exactly the problem. Because people are good to you until they're not. Until they get tired. Until they find something better." He looked up finally and met Duan's eyes and there was something in them that Duan had never seen before — something unguarded and almost afraid. "So I kept you at a distance. Because if I didn't let you all the way in then it couldn't hurt when you left."
The words landed in the space between them and stayed there.
Duan looked at him for a long moment.
Then he stood up.
He came around the table slowly and Jun watched him come and didn't move and didn't look away. Duan stopped in front of him and then he went down — all the way down onto one knee on the kitchen floor — and he reached up and took Jun's hand and brought it to his own cheek and held it there with both of his.
Jun's breath caught.
Duan looked up at him from the floor and his eyes were very steady and very clear and completely serious in a way that was different from every other version of him Jun had ever seen.
"Listen to me," Duan said. His voice was low and unhurried. "Since the second I saw you — since you got up off the ground at that festival and walked away without looking back — the only thing I thought about was you. Not the idea of you. Not what I wanted you to be." His thumb moved slowly over Jun's knuckles. "You. The real one. The one who kicks my shin and steals the blanket and sketches in every quiet moment and eats two portions without blinking and acts like the world doesn't exist when he's working."
Jun's chest was doing something painful and enormous.
"I don't want to be someone you have to perform for," Duan said. "I want to be the person you breathe around. The one you call when something's wrong. The one who gets to see all the parts you don't show anyone else." He pressed Jun's palm more firmly against his cheek, his eyes never leaving Jun's. "I can't promise perfect. I'll probably drive you insane. But I promise — I promise Jun — that I will spend every single day making sure you never have to wonder if I mean it."
Jun's heart was slamming against his ribs so hard he was sure Duan could feel it somehow.
"Look at me," Duan said softly. His eyes were searching Jun's face, moving across it slowly like he was looking for something. "Can you see it. Even a little." His voice dropped further. "Can you tell that I am so completely and hopelessly—"
Jun stopped hearing him.
Not because he stopped talking. He could see Duan's mouth still moving, could see the earnest devastating openness on his face, could feel the warmth of his hand holding Jun's against his cheek.
He just stopped hearing it.
Because something in his chest that had been held shut for a very long time had come completely undone and there was nothing he could do about it and he knew — with the same certainty he knew everything that actually mattered — that he had already lost this particular fight a long time ago.
His hand moved.
He didn't decide to let it.
It grabbed Duan by the back of the neck and pulled — and Jun was leaning forward off his stool and Duan was coming up off the floor and their mouths crashed together in a way that was not graceful at all, noses bumping, Jun's grip too tight, the angle slightly wrong, and Jun thought distantly that this was not how he did anything, he did everything with precision and control and intention, and this was none of those things.
He pulled back.
They were centimetres apart.
Duan was staring at him. His eyes were very wide and very dark and he looked like someone who had just had the ground shift under them and hadn't landed yet.
Jun looked at him.
Waited for the regret to come.
It didn't.
What came instead was Duan's hand sliding up the side of his jaw and into his hair and then Duan was kissing him and this time it was nothing like the first one.
This was slow.
This was deliberate.
This was Duan taking his time like he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it. His mouth moved against Jun's with a patience that was somehow more devastating than urgency would have been — like he was learning something, memorizing it, treating it like it was worth treating carefully.
Jun's hand was still on the back of his neck and his fingers curled in and he felt Duan exhale through his nose, felt him press closer, felt the warm solid weight of him and the three days of distance between them dissolving into the space between one breath and the next.
Jun parted his lips.
Duan made a low sound against his mouth and his other hand came up to Jun's jaw, tilting it slightly, and when his tongue swept in Jun's grip tightened involuntarily in his hair and Duan kissed him deeper and Jun let him, let all of it, let the careful controlled distance he'd been maintaining for months collapse completely because there was nothing left to hold it up with.
They stayed there.
Neither of them was in any hurry to be anywhere else.
When they finally came apart they were both breathing like they'd been somewhere far away and had just come back. Jun could feel his own pulse in his throat. He could feel where Duan's hands still were — one at his jaw, one at his waist, both warm, both still.
Duan looked at him.
His eyes dropped to Jun's mouth and something darkened in them and Jun felt it land somewhere low in his stomach.
Duan leaned in.
Jun pressed two fingers to his lips.
Duan stopped.
Jun nodded at the table without breaking eye contact. "Getting cold," he said.
His voice came out lower than he intended. He was not going to acknowledge that.
Duan looked at him. At his mouth. At him again. His jaw moved slightly like he was doing calculations.
Then he exhaled slowly through his nose and stood up and went back around the table and sat down and picked up his chopsticks and Jun watched him do all of this with the careful movements of someone exercising a truly extraordinary amount of self restraint.
Jun turned back to his bowl.
His hands weren't completely steady.
He ate anyway.
---
They skipped class.
Jun's idea, which had genuinely surprised Duan, and now they were on the sofa and the television was on and Duan had been talking for forty five minutes.
"So we're together now."
"Watch the movie."
"Jun."
"The movie."
"I'm just asking one question—"
"You've asked fourteen."
"This is the last one."
Jun looked at the television.
"Are you my boyfriend."
Silence.
"Jun."
"I heard you."
"Then—"
"Watch the movie Duan."
Duan slumped into the cushions and stared at the ceiling with the energy of someone being deeply wronged. Jun watched the movie. Duan stared at the ceiling. Jun did not acknowledge the staring.
"You kissed me," Duan said to the ceiling.
Jun said nothing.
"Twice."
Nothing.
"That means something."
"Does it."
Duan sat up so fast Jun felt the air move. "So it does mean something—"
"Watch. The movie."
Duan looked at him.
Jun could feel him looking. He kept his eyes on the screen and his expression neutral and he was doing perfectly fine until he made the mistake of glancing sideways.
Duan was looking at him with the full force of everything he had — warm and open and completely unguarded, the dimple already forming like it had given up waiting for something to smile about.
Jun looked back at the television.
His jaw moved.
Duan opened his mouth.
And then something happened because one moment he was watching the movie and the next Duan had launched himself across the sofa like something that had been wound too tight for too long and Jun was on his back against the armrest with both wrists pinned above his head and Duan's grinning face directly above him.
Jun stared up at him.
Duan pressed a kiss to his cheek.
Jun's eyes narrowed.
His other cheek. His forehead. The tip of his nose. The corner of his jaw, which was a problem because Jun's jaw was apparently sensitive in a way he had not previously been made aware of, and the sound that came out of him was not dignified.
"Duan—"
His nose again. Both cheeks again. Jun was turning his face away and Duan was following him with complete cheerful dedication and Jun was — he was—
He was laughing.
Out loud. Properly. The kind that takes over your whole body and doesn't ask permission. He was laughing and squirming and Duan was holding on with both hands and laughing too and the television was saying something to nobody and Jun couldn't breathe—
The doorbell rang.
Duan's head came up.
Jun used the half second of distraction to get both feet under him and shove. Duan went sideways off the sofa and hit the floor and Jun stood up and straightened his shirt and walked to the door and pointed one finger at Duan on the floor without looking back at him.
He opened the door.
Jet. Chawin. Dom. Fah. Four of them, standing in the corridor with bags hanging off both arms, wearing the collective expression of people who had made a decision and were not open to discussion about it.
Jun looked at them.
Jet looked at Jun's face. At his hair, which had not survived the last ten minutes intact. At the general state of him.
The corner of Jet's mouth pulled up.
Jun stepped aside before he could say anything.
They came in like they owned the place — Jet heading straight for the kitchen, Chawin setting bags down on the counter, Dom looking around the corner and spotting Duan picking himself up off the floor.
"Both alive," Dom announced. "Good."
Duan walked over and looked at Dom and Fah. "Why are you here."
"The bar," Fah said simply. "That was a lot."
Duan scratched the back of his head. He looked across the room at Jun.
Jun looked back at him.
Then Jun looked away and went to find more cups and if there was something almost like relief on his face at having four people between him and Duan for the next few hours — well.
Nobody needed to know that.