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[ after lin jingheng and monoeye hawk die, you spend one hundred days locked in your house.
you're working. the eighth is a mess in an aftermath of the battle with the seventh galaxy, and zhanlu has been destroyed. you have to fix him. you spend one hundred days in your house, alone, sending out missives. speaking to prime minister edward, too sickly to do much, taking over his duties where you can. you try and fix zhanlu.
five hundred days into your restart of life, prime minister edward passes away, of sickness, of old age, and you officially take his spot. you, as the new prime minister, host the state affair of his funeral. there was a eulogy. you think you remember people looking at you. staring. watching. you remember the caskets of nothing and the tombstones and now... you're home.
home. for five hundred days, this is where you've spent all your time. five hundred days ago, monoeye hawk and lin jingheng perished, in the battle for the seventh galaxy. five hundred days ago, your entire world ended.
there were no funerals, then.
when you first arrive at the home of engineer 001 and commander lin, as the sign cheerfully reminds you, hanging over the door, you make it all the way inside. you go to the kitchen. the ai of zhanlu, in butler mode, greets you, you think, but it sounds like it comes from underwater. you go to the refrigerator. you think - a drink. i need a drink. and you open the fridge. there's hardly anything in it - supplies in the eighth galaxy are heavily rationed, right now, and alcohol is no exception - but at the back, an unopened bottle of beer, and as your hand curls around the neck, you remember -
you see the mental image, of lin jingheng in his pajamas, bedhead, staring at the beer bottle like it personally wounded him for being so disgusting, and putting it back, and sulking to the kitchen table to a cup of cold tea, instead, and for some reason, the grief and the memory snaps the last remaining piece of your stability in two.
you scream. you just scream, at the top of your lungs, as the image vanishes, the bellow of a miserable animal, and the whole world goes dark as you stagger to the area of the house where the medical capsule is, you bang your fist on the edge of it in your frustration and start asking it, i need a hallucinogen, i need an opiate, i need drugs, give them to me, i need it, i don't want to be awake, i need it, i need it - and the capsule doesn't respond. you're shaking too hard to do anything or type anything and your fingers claw in desperation at the metal. you scream, again, despairing, drowning, miserable, slam your fist against the capsule again.
zhanlu's voice comes over your head. soft, quiet, concerned - you scream at him, too, the AI unable to do anything but warn you. "Headmaster Lu, I can't accept those requests right now, you're too unstable. Headmaster Lu, this is your first warning."
he's an AI. he has to listen to you. you ignore him, shaking, almost hyperventilating, and after the second warning, you snarl - ] Zhanlu, give me a gun.
[ because you've lost everything. in one fell swoop, in one moment, you've lost everything and you can only run from it for so long. you've worked so hard. you've done so much, to not look it in the eye, but the grief is a monster that lives under your bed and in your brain and today it rips you in two. it's all-consuming, like it was when you were a child, and zhanlu can't ignore you, and as the gun is placed into your hands, you start to bring it up, to your head, start to --
then
zhanlu projects footage on the wall in front of your head.
you forget everything.
you sink down to the floor, and you watch the clip again. you watch it again. you watch it again. you watch that clip hundreds of times and you don't sleep, and the next morning, you drag yourself to your desk, grab a pocket knife, and carve a single hatch mark on your desk. you push yourself to standing. you turn off zhanlu's automation function, so he can make conscious decisions, because you - you can't be trusted with yourself, all the time. you know that, now you've fallen and burnt to ashes, and now you have to rebuild yourself. one scratch mark says i fell, and i nearly quit, but i dragged myself to standing.
--
three years pass in the new independent era in the eighth galaxy. you are their leader, the face of their revolution and their prime minister, and no one outside of your home knows the turmoil that you go through. they can't see you that way. in those three years, a group of pirates and black market illegal merchants reemerged, emboldened by the chance to disrupt the economy you've worked so hard to build. it launches the galaxy into a war that lasts three long years, and you command your military forces and your political forces like an expert. you are an expert, you're the prime minister lu bixing. you can do anything.
five more scratch marks are carved into your desk.
you promised prime minister edward before he died this - if you fell seven times, you'd get up eight. these are your falls. these are your dips into despair that are so deep that you want to die. you want to die. locked into the misery of your ruthless job, alone, you want to die. you want to die, you want to die, you want to die.
you can't die. the eighth needs you.
after the first one hundred days on your own, your house is invaded by other engineers who come to help you work on zhanlu so he's no longer just in emergency mode. it takes you all a total of four hundred days to get him online, but the other engineers are so crowded and messy that you force them out, and you need to move things to the attic. the attic is untouched and filled with lin jingheng's things. you could almost see him next to you. you could almost have him there.
you light up a cigarette. you inhale, just for the sake of the familiarity. to feel like he's there, that you could see him, that he's not gone and you were just delusional the whole time, stupid -
- the smoke burns your lungs, and you start to cough, violently, violently, and you take the cigarette and you smash the burning end into your arm until the pain is so bright and smart that it forces you to come back to your senses. he's dead. lin jingheng is dead. nothing will bring him back and he is dead.
two hatch marks.
another day, you find yourself trembling as you inject a biochip in your arm. it's an opium biochip - the kind being used to create 'perfect humans', though the data is incomplete. it won't be, for you. it becomes your pet project. you work. you experiment on yourself. you inject yourself, over and over again. you work. you work. you don't sleep. you rule the eighth galaxy, you unite its forces through carrot and through stick, monitoring public executions and supply rations and economic growth and population happiness all at once, and you pull an entire galaxy to its feet while you tremble on your knees in the dark.
three hatch marks. four. five.
(you download all of the video data of lin jingheng in zhanlu's system. you watch every single part of it. you work. you work, you work, you work, you throw yourself into your duties and at night you take drugs and force yourself to sleep only when you need to, or when zhanlu forces you to, like a tiny hand tugging at your pinky finger when you're about to let loose on the world.)
--
in the seventh year of the new era, one of your students, brilliant, brilliant mint, pilots the first program to travel through the heart of the rose, the wormhole at the edge of your galaxy, your natural barrier. you are told not to go, but you go, anyway. what's the worst that could happen? you'll die? you don't care. you go on your own.
the people in the eighth praise your courage when you return with fresh research for mint's project. you didn't die. instead, you gathered data, and from the inside of the wormhole, the data gathered gets you the visuals on what happened when the seventh and the eighth galaxy fleets, respectively, were destroyed. your father's ship. lin's. gone. destroyed, in the blink of an eye.
you come home from your trip. you order captain turan to station patrols around the wormhole, now that it's active. you lock yourself in your lab. you take a strand of lin's hair you extracted from the couch and you open a breeding tank in a fit of madness nad you think, i could just reconstruct him, because you could, you're a genius, it would be easy, it would be so easy, and zhanlu blows up the breeding tank.
you stay in the dark lab for three days afterwards, but when you emerge, the knife comes out, and you scratch the sixth mark into the wood of your desk.
--
the final hatch mark is the product of your research, nine years into the new era of the Eighth Galaxy.
you stand there on the precipice. you stand there, with your completed opiate biochip research. with this completed project, with all the tests you ran on yourself, you've given yourself those abilities. you are fast. you are strong, you are, in essence, the perfect human, and you've found a way you could transplant it into anyone. tested on mice, tested on yourself. you have learned that the rainbow virus can be used to break humanity down to ashes, and rebuild them as something greater. you know, now, why you lived through that first outbreak.
you could have an army of superhumans, you could take over the IUS. you could take over the entire universe. it has taken you nine years to prove this scientific theory, and you found out that it's true.
(you could wreak destruction, on the people who took your father and lin jingheng from you.)
you stare at the papers in your hands. they tremble.
this time, you don't call captain turan. this time, you don't call the engineering department. this time you don't deliver the research. you go to your office. you work, all day long. you come home, and you stare at the papers.
you walk to your lab, where you've secretly kept those strains of the rainbow virus, papers in hand.
and you set the sample and every single paper ablaze, and destroy it for good.
when you return to your desk, you mark the final hatch mark.
if you fall seven times, you have to rise eight.
with a storm in your heart, you turn away from destruction.
with a storm in your heart, you rise. ]
you're working. the eighth is a mess in an aftermath of the battle with the seventh galaxy, and zhanlu has been destroyed. you have to fix him. you spend one hundred days in your house, alone, sending out missives. speaking to prime minister edward, too sickly to do much, taking over his duties where you can. you try and fix zhanlu.
five hundred days into your restart of life, prime minister edward passes away, of sickness, of old age, and you officially take his spot. you, as the new prime minister, host the state affair of his funeral. there was a eulogy. you think you remember people looking at you. staring. watching. you remember the caskets of nothing and the tombstones and now... you're home.
home. for five hundred days, this is where you've spent all your time. five hundred days ago, monoeye hawk and lin jingheng perished, in the battle for the seventh galaxy. five hundred days ago, your entire world ended.
there were no funerals, then.
when you first arrive at the home of engineer 001 and commander lin, as the sign cheerfully reminds you, hanging over the door, you make it all the way inside. you go to the kitchen. the ai of zhanlu, in butler mode, greets you, you think, but it sounds like it comes from underwater. you go to the refrigerator. you think - a drink. i need a drink. and you open the fridge. there's hardly anything in it - supplies in the eighth galaxy are heavily rationed, right now, and alcohol is no exception - but at the back, an unopened bottle of beer, and as your hand curls around the neck, you remember -
you see the mental image, of lin jingheng in his pajamas, bedhead, staring at the beer bottle like it personally wounded him for being so disgusting, and putting it back, and sulking to the kitchen table to a cup of cold tea, instead, and for some reason, the grief and the memory snaps the last remaining piece of your stability in two.
you scream. you just scream, at the top of your lungs, as the image vanishes, the bellow of a miserable animal, and the whole world goes dark as you stagger to the area of the house where the medical capsule is, you bang your fist on the edge of it in your frustration and start asking it, i need a hallucinogen, i need an opiate, i need drugs, give them to me, i need it, i don't want to be awake, i need it, i need it - and the capsule doesn't respond. you're shaking too hard to do anything or type anything and your fingers claw in desperation at the metal. you scream, again, despairing, drowning, miserable, slam your fist against the capsule again.
zhanlu's voice comes over your head. soft, quiet, concerned - you scream at him, too, the AI unable to do anything but warn you. "Headmaster Lu, I can't accept those requests right now, you're too unstable. Headmaster Lu, this is your first warning."
he's an AI. he has to listen to you. you ignore him, shaking, almost hyperventilating, and after the second warning, you snarl - ] Zhanlu, give me a gun.
[ because you've lost everything. in one fell swoop, in one moment, you've lost everything and you can only run from it for so long. you've worked so hard. you've done so much, to not look it in the eye, but the grief is a monster that lives under your bed and in your brain and today it rips you in two. it's all-consuming, like it was when you were a child, and zhanlu can't ignore you, and as the gun is placed into your hands, you start to bring it up, to your head, start to --
then
zhanlu projects footage on the wall in front of your head.
A 14-year-old Lin Jingheng was attending the opening ceremony of the Black Orchid Academy. The ceremonial hall was decorated with heroic histories of the Union since its founding, motivational and inspiring. The young boy sat in the corner with his attention being pulled away occasionally. But even then, he still wanted to act cool, and pretended to look around in boredom whenever he remembered he was still in the middle of a ceremony. He then accidentally noticed the small camera beside him that was recording his every move; his face reddened in embarrassment and anger as he slapped his hand down and turned off the recording.
you forget everything.
you sink down to the floor, and you watch the clip again. you watch it again. you watch it again. you watch that clip hundreds of times and you don't sleep, and the next morning, you drag yourself to your desk, grab a pocket knife, and carve a single hatch mark on your desk. you push yourself to standing. you turn off zhanlu's automation function, so he can make conscious decisions, because you - you can't be trusted with yourself, all the time. you know that, now you've fallen and burnt to ashes, and now you have to rebuild yourself. one scratch mark says i fell, and i nearly quit, but i dragged myself to standing.
--
three years pass in the new independent era in the eighth galaxy. you are their leader, the face of their revolution and their prime minister, and no one outside of your home knows the turmoil that you go through. they can't see you that way. in those three years, a group of pirates and black market illegal merchants reemerged, emboldened by the chance to disrupt the economy you've worked so hard to build. it launches the galaxy into a war that lasts three long years, and you command your military forces and your political forces like an expert. you are an expert, you're the prime minister lu bixing. you can do anything.
five more scratch marks are carved into your desk.
you promised prime minister edward before he died this - if you fell seven times, you'd get up eight. these are your falls. these are your dips into despair that are so deep that you want to die. you want to die. locked into the misery of your ruthless job, alone, you want to die. you want to die, you want to die, you want to die.
you can't die. the eighth needs you.
after the first one hundred days on your own, your house is invaded by other engineers who come to help you work on zhanlu so he's no longer just in emergency mode. it takes you all a total of four hundred days to get him online, but the other engineers are so crowded and messy that you force them out, and you need to move things to the attic. the attic is untouched and filled with lin jingheng's things. you could almost see him next to you. you could almost have him there.
you light up a cigarette. you inhale, just for the sake of the familiarity. to feel like he's there, that you could see him, that he's not gone and you were just delusional the whole time, stupid -
- the smoke burns your lungs, and you start to cough, violently, violently, and you take the cigarette and you smash the burning end into your arm until the pain is so bright and smart that it forces you to come back to your senses. he's dead. lin jingheng is dead. nothing will bring him back and he is dead.
two hatch marks.
another day, you find yourself trembling as you inject a biochip in your arm. it's an opium biochip - the kind being used to create 'perfect humans', though the data is incomplete. it won't be, for you. it becomes your pet project. you work. you experiment on yourself. you inject yourself, over and over again. you work. you work. you don't sleep. you rule the eighth galaxy, you unite its forces through carrot and through stick, monitoring public executions and supply rations and economic growth and population happiness all at once, and you pull an entire galaxy to its feet while you tremble on your knees in the dark.
three hatch marks. four. five.
(you download all of the video data of lin jingheng in zhanlu's system. you watch every single part of it. you work. you work, you work, you work, you throw yourself into your duties and at night you take drugs and force yourself to sleep only when you need to, or when zhanlu forces you to, like a tiny hand tugging at your pinky finger when you're about to let loose on the world.)
--
in the seventh year of the new era, one of your students, brilliant, brilliant mint, pilots the first program to travel through the heart of the rose, the wormhole at the edge of your galaxy, your natural barrier. you are told not to go, but you go, anyway. what's the worst that could happen? you'll die? you don't care. you go on your own.
the people in the eighth praise your courage when you return with fresh research for mint's project. you didn't die. instead, you gathered data, and from the inside of the wormhole, the data gathered gets you the visuals on what happened when the seventh and the eighth galaxy fleets, respectively, were destroyed. your father's ship. lin's. gone. destroyed, in the blink of an eye.
you come home from your trip. you order captain turan to station patrols around the wormhole, now that it's active. you lock yourself in your lab. you take a strand of lin's hair you extracted from the couch and you open a breeding tank in a fit of madness nad you think, i could just reconstruct him, because you could, you're a genius, it would be easy, it would be so easy, and zhanlu blows up the breeding tank.
you stay in the dark lab for three days afterwards, but when you emerge, the knife comes out, and you scratch the sixth mark into the wood of your desk.
--
the final hatch mark is the product of your research, nine years into the new era of the Eighth Galaxy.
you stand there on the precipice. you stand there, with your completed opiate biochip research. with this completed project, with all the tests you ran on yourself, you've given yourself those abilities. you are fast. you are strong, you are, in essence, the perfect human, and you've found a way you could transplant it into anyone. tested on mice, tested on yourself. you have learned that the rainbow virus can be used to break humanity down to ashes, and rebuild them as something greater. you know, now, why you lived through that first outbreak.
you could have an army of superhumans, you could take over the IUS. you could take over the entire universe. it has taken you nine years to prove this scientific theory, and you found out that it's true.
(you could wreak destruction, on the people who took your father and lin jingheng from you.)
you stare at the papers in your hands. they tremble.
this time, you don't call captain turan. this time, you don't call the engineering department. this time you don't deliver the research. you go to your office. you work, all day long. you come home, and you stare at the papers.
you walk to your lab, where you've secretly kept those strains of the rainbow virus, papers in hand.
and you set the sample and every single paper ablaze, and destroy it for good.
when you return to your desk, you mark the final hatch mark.
if you fall seven times, you have to rise eight.
with a storm in your heart, you turn away from destruction.
with a storm in your heart, you rise. ]
[ good. good, that's better.
lin jingheng isn't afraid of the openness of the air around them right now, he's not anxious of anyone happening upon them, because right now there's a heliocentricity to lu boxing, the mad genius and young man (even after all this time).
it's been a long time, and each touch feels like it warms over long frostbitten nerves under his skin. he lets him crowd him against the dock and he smiles, a small, satisfied thing when they kiss that imprints itself on lu bixing's lips.
he just holds tightly to him, fingers digging slightly into his shirt. ]
lin jingheng isn't afraid of the openness of the air around them right now, he's not anxious of anyone happening upon them, because right now there's a heliocentricity to lu boxing, the mad genius and young man (even after all this time).
it's been a long time, and each touch feels like it warms over long frostbitten nerves under his skin. he lets him crowd him against the dock and he smiles, a small, satisfied thing when they kiss that imprints itself on lu bixing's lips.
he just holds tightly to him, fingers digging slightly into his shirt. ]
[ oh.
well yeah okay.
it's the salt that gets him, sharp enough on its own and still enhancing the sweetness of the cookie just enough.
the texture is good too. wow. ]
Good, [ hm ] so what's the favor?
[ he moves to wipe some crumbs from his mouth. ack. ]
well yeah okay.
it's the salt that gets him, sharp enough on its own and still enhancing the sweetness of the cookie just enough.
the texture is good too. wow. ]
Good, [ hm ] so what's the favor?
[ he moves to wipe some crumbs from his mouth. ack. ]
[ lu bixing is as annoying as a little flea, but about as sweet as honey, and lin jingheng can't help but let his gaze flick towards him as he tries to meet his eyes. has he helped anyone? he certainly doesn't feel it, and even as they hold hands here, hardly space between them, lin jingheng believes he is floating aimlessly here in this place that he was sure he'd be at the end of it all.
he always thought hell wouldn't keep him, but as it turns out, it's just been waiting. hasn't it.
even if there, at the center of it all, is paradise in the form of one person who says too many kind things to him. his brow furrows and he lifts his hands to gently place them on lu bixing's wrists, not to wrench him away, but just to hold. ]
I've done nothing unless I can get us out of here.
[ every week their pool narrows. ]
If I need to drink the Devil down then I'll do it.
[ his fingers tighten. but i can't do it without you. ]
he always thought hell wouldn't keep him, but as it turns out, it's just been waiting. hasn't it.
even if there, at the center of it all, is paradise in the form of one person who says too many kind things to him. his brow furrows and he lifts his hands to gently place them on lu bixing's wrists, not to wrench him away, but just to hold. ]
I've done nothing unless I can get us out of here.
[ every week their pool narrows. ]
If I need to drink the Devil down then I'll do it.
[ his fingers tighten. but i can't do it without you. ]
[ this is hell, right? a little sinning is allowed, as a treat? in this case, that sinning might be something like this, again, kissing lin jingheng under an artificial sky. he asked, after all, and it does such an excellent job at restarting his brain chemistry that he's taking the distraction for everything that it is. taking in the sweetness of the fact that he can kiss lin at all.
he holds it, makes a soft noise when he feels lin smile against his mouth, and readjusts so that he can run his fingers through the soft black of his hair, turning his face a little to kiss him again, to linger, a little longer. a little deeper, greedy for it, greedy for the feeling of lin holding onto him, for both of their dear lives.
he only stops after a second kiss, a third, and only enough to mumble against his mouth, enough to be felt. ] I love you.
he holds it, makes a soft noise when he feels lin smile against his mouth, and readjusts so that he can run his fingers through the soft black of his hair, turning his face a little to kiss him again, to linger, a little longer. a little deeper, greedy for it, greedy for the feeling of lin holding onto him, for both of their dear lives.
he only stops after a second kiss, a third, and only enough to mumble against his mouth, enough to be felt. ] I love you.
[ this is hell and they are definitely allowed to sin just a little more. like what's gonna happen, more hell? they've already been through that.
the fingers through his hair earn a soft sound, a subtle sigh that skims over lu bixing's lips as he lets his hands trail down his shoulder blades, his ribs, down to thumb at his waist. the reality is, they're still here and breathing, and he's done fearing the worst. he turns away from the anxiety bubbling in the back of his skull, just in time to hear lu bixing murmur words softly against his mouth.
he presses their foreheads together, brow knit. it could be bruising, it might be, he just wants to be close, craving the proximity as one of his legs hooks around lu bixing's. his cigarette is burning out between his knuckles, but the smell keeps him comfortable, calm, winding around lu bixing like an eager serpent. ]
Don't go anywhere.
[ the irony, of lin jingheng having to say that. saying that at all.
but he's done with disappearing too.
i love you too. ]
Or I'll have to go with you.
the fingers through his hair earn a soft sound, a subtle sigh that skims over lu bixing's lips as he lets his hands trail down his shoulder blades, his ribs, down to thumb at his waist. the reality is, they're still here and breathing, and he's done fearing the worst. he turns away from the anxiety bubbling in the back of his skull, just in time to hear lu bixing murmur words softly against his mouth.
he presses their foreheads together, brow knit. it could be bruising, it might be, he just wants to be close, craving the proximity as one of his legs hooks around lu bixing's. his cigarette is burning out between his knuckles, but the smell keeps him comfortable, calm, winding around lu bixing like an eager serpent. ]
Don't go anywhere.
[ the irony, of lin jingheng having to say that. saying that at all.
but he's done with disappearing too.
i love you too. ]
Or I'll have to go with you.
[ they are definitely a little funny-looking to people like them at first, but lin jingheng is patient with lu bixing, and he waits until it's in his ear, then he presses play before lifting a finger and flicking him on the nose (lightly) ]
Spoiling your own surprise.
[ the guided tour begins to murmur softly into the earbuds, and lin jingheng braces himself for the overflowing nerdery that might just happen on this date. then again, isn't that what he likes? the sound of lu bixing's voice, his life, brilliant beside him like a warm lamp to stretch beneath. ]
Spoiling your own surprise.
[ the guided tour begins to murmur softly into the earbuds, and lin jingheng braces himself for the overflowing nerdery that might just happen on this date. then again, isn't that what he likes? the sound of lu bixing's voice, his life, brilliant beside him like a warm lamp to stretch beneath. ]
I don't believe you.
[ at all.
he holds faster to him, despite the flinching, because it's too late, because he has every intention of not letting go of him. his face remains unreadable save for the faint flicker in his eyes. he doesn't hate him. he could never bring himself to.
it's too late.]
Again.
[ at all.
he holds faster to him, despite the flinching, because it's too late, because he has every intention of not letting go of him. his face remains unreadable save for the faint flicker in his eyes. he doesn't hate him. he could never bring himself to.
it's too late.]
Again.
[ here we are in a kitchen (where?) a kitchen. lin jingheng is seated on the counter because fuck the rules, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and being put to work stirring something because what else are his arms good for?
anyways, he can't have any proper part of the baking. you know what would happen. ]
anyways, he can't have any proper part of the baking. you know what would happen. ]
[ his arms are good for hugging lu bixing? hello?
anyway. he's over here at the pantry, a cookbook projected on his personal device, hovering over his wrist, and scrolling through the instructions. when he finds whatever he's looking for, he comes back - holding a bag of what looks like chocolate chunks, which he brings over to lin's bowl. ]
Thank you, Lin. [ this week isn't as miserable as last week was, but he still sounds a little tired. loss is loss, no matter what. ] Another Thursday passes.
anyway. he's over here at the pantry, a cookbook projected on his personal device, hovering over his wrist, and scrolling through the instructions. when he finds whatever he's looking for, he comes back - holding a bag of what looks like chocolate chunks, which he brings over to lin's bowl. ]
Thank you, Lin. [ this week isn't as miserable as last week was, but he still sounds a little tired. loss is loss, no matter what. ] Another Thursday passes.
[ he definitely winces, this time, at that flicker - golden eyes drifting away from him, down to the ground, the muscle in his arm flexing and tensing.
... softly, again, though it's got a little more strength to it, lu bixing repeats himself. he's trying to summon it up, but its hard, in the face of everything. in the face of the way lin is looking at him, at how badly he wants to run away.
he tries, though. ] I know, Lin.
... softly, again, though it's got a little more strength to it, lu bixing repeats himself. he's trying to summon it up, but its hard, in the face of everything. in the face of the way lin is looking at him, at how badly he wants to run away.
he tries, though. ] I know, Lin.
At least we know now that it's not so bad.
[ he trails off in a way that is an unspoken "yet." the messages have been helpful to receive, reassuring especially considering who they've lost. he pauses in his stirring to let him pour some of the chips in, beginning to just. make a poor attempt at folding them in. he's doing his best. it's more like mashing so you know what you should probably do.
(someone is dead, char)
/winks ]
[ he trails off in a way that is an unspoken "yet." the messages have been helpful to receive, reassuring especially considering who they've lost. he pauses in his stirring to let him pour some of the chips in, beginning to just. make a poor attempt at folding them in. he's doing his best. it's more like mashing so you know what you should probably do.
(someone is dead, char)
/winks ]
Yeah -
[ well
help he's going to say something else but then lin starts SMASHING (winks) and he just, laughs? this sort of half startled noise, immediately reaching out for the bowl with one hand and lin's hand with the other. time for the top to take over as usual ] - Whoa, whoa, whoa, easy there, Commander, it's not a missile...
[ teasing, tired, but still playful. ]
[ well
help he's going to say something else but then lin starts SMASHING (winks) and he just, laughs? this sort of half startled noise, immediately reaching out for the bowl with one hand and lin's hand with the other. time for the top to take over as usual ] - Whoa, whoa, whoa, easy there, Commander, it's not a missile...
[ teasing, tired, but still playful. ]
[ he reaches forward and takes his chin in his fingers, tilting his head up just a bit more. ]
One last time.
[ he believes him, but he knows that he will have to bolster it just as well, lingers closer, letting his other hand move so that he can hold his face in both hands. his thumb strokes slowly over his cheek, eyes soft. ]
Okay?
One last time.
[ he believes him, but he knows that he will have to bolster it just as well, lingers closer, letting his other hand move so that he can hold his face in both hands. his thumb strokes slowly over his cheek, eyes soft. ]
Okay?
[ i'm crying. he's so cute. this is like - after everything, this is so cheering? it's the little things like lin being like this that make lu bixing the happiest, that remind him the most that he's here, and he smiles a little as he moves their hands on the bowl and pushes it into lin jingheng's lap.
and then picks up a spoon and hands it to him. ]
Can I try some?
[ because this is going to be beyond baking bc its ugly now but cookie dough is fine. his cheekiness here is a little more toned down than usual, but he seems glad to lean into it a little as he rests a hand on the counter and waits patiently for lin to catch on. ]
and then picks up a spoon and hands it to him. ]
Can I try some?
[ because this is going to be beyond baking bc its ugly now but cookie dough is fine. his cheekiness here is a little more toned down than usual, but he seems glad to lean into it a little as he rests a hand on the counter and waits patiently for lin to catch on. ]
[ "bc it's ugly now" wow but it's true, lu bixing really strives for his best and lin jingheng has botched it! he holds the spoon but in like a fist-like grip because what the hell is he supposed to do with this?
zhanlu might've piped up by now, something about getting sick from consuming raw batter. but he can't now, so lin jingheng tips the spoon towards himself and...
's some of it off of the spoon.
and then closing the distance between them. it won't go to waste. ]
zhanlu might've piped up by now, something about getting sick from consuming raw batter. but he can't now, so lin jingheng tips the spoon towards himself and...
's some of it off of the spoon. and then closing the distance between them. it won't go to waste. ]
[ this is so gross. this is how you cope, sometimes, by shotgunning cookie dough
oh. he's about to make a little bit of a pout about it, mouth opening in pretend pikashook, but then he picks up on what lin's doing and his eyes light up a little? it's very silly, but it makes the corner of his mouth lift up in a smile, and he huffs a laugh, tilting his head a little bit and letting his eye flutter shut to allow this to happen.
his other hand comes up, gently, to cup his cheek and hold it there, letting some of the tension dissolve out of his shoulders. momf. ]
oh. he's about to make a little bit of a pout about it, mouth opening in pretend pikashook, but then he picks up on what lin's doing and his eyes light up a little? it's very silly, but it makes the corner of his mouth lift up in a smile, and he huffs a laugh, tilting his head a little bit and letting his eye flutter shut to allow this to happen.
his other hand comes up, gently, to cup his cheek and hold it there, letting some of the tension dissolve out of his shoulders. momf. ]
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