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Li-jie is lying in bed, scrolling Weibo absentmindedly after a long day of tough scrims and listening to yelling coaches and frustrated teammates. It’s a day like any other, life and job bleeding into one hazy passage of time that he can’t fully grasp. As he’s ready to put the phone down, a blinking text pops up at the top of his screen.
“Jiejie.”
Jiejie [Sent 29 days ago]
Jiejie [Sent 13 days ago]
Jiejie [Sent 10 seconds ago]
Li-jie doesn’t know if it’s more intimate than not that he still gets called by his professional name. Do you still see me as your teammate?
But that one word text is a siren song that drags him down to the murky depths of dark and terrible things, and he is powerless to it. So like the last time and all the rest, he grabs his keys and puts on his shoes and begins to drive. It’s a silent drive, no emotion as he keeps a casual speed. The route is familiar like the back of his hand, whether it's soon, or in hours, or days, he would always go down this road.
The ride up the elevator is slightly nauseous, the pressure of flying up 60 floors in the span of a few seconds never quite settling in his stomach like it should've - even after it's been squashed this way countless times.
Just like how he shouldn’t know the pass code to Yechan’s apartment this well - but Li-jie thinks that one day when he died, whoever had the sad luck of working on him might see those 8 little numbers carved right into his heart.
Should. There's a lot of ‘shoulds’ that strangle Li-jie.
The apartment hisses open, one last warning as if to tell Li-jie to turn around and walk away if he knows what's good for him, but he pushes past all that into familiar dim corridors. At the end of it, there is one person he knows more intimately than anything else, sprawled on a long lounge sofa. Even from afar, Li-jie can see the flush on his pretty face.
Yechan’s not sober.
He rarely is anymore.
Emptied bottles and cigarette butts strew the table but like always - at the end of the glass table is a bottle of too-expensive Cognac that never goes down unless he’s here. Mentioned once or twice in far away conversations long gone. His favourite.
History is a cruel and distant thing, and they sure have it in spades.
Li-jie’s thin fingers find the familiar neck of the bottle and uncaps it with ease. He doesn’t even pour it into glasses - it’s just another one of those things they don’t share in common. The liquor slides like lighter fluid to his churning insides, turning his throat to cinders on the way down.
Yechan is a selfish person, taking freely and without regard for any else’s sake. Li-jie despises him, sometimes wishes the bottle in his hand was Yechan’s neck. He is not sure whether he wants to choke it or caress it more. His heavy hand makes the bottle sound like a gun shot when it gets roughly placed back down on the table - he’s long lost the patience to know how to be gentle with things that aren’t Yechan. And it’s barely gentle, if that.
Li-jie wipes the corner of his lip with the back of the hand, before taking off his jacket. At the sound of clothes being removed, Yechan finally turns around to look at him, gesturing at him with two fingers. Come here.
And Li-jie, like the trained dog he is, does exactly that.
Li-jie meets Yechan like a tired wolf that sees the first spring snow. Their kiss tastes like alcohol and ash but it’s warm and Li-jie has half a mind that he loves the taste of death after all because it’s all Yechan ever tastes like. It’s pathetic - Yechan’s pathetic, but when that message arrives on his phone at some spontaneous time on some spontaneous day, the truth is so is he.
Because Li-jie has missed this, truly. He has missed all the broken parts of him that come back together whenever he feels Yechan’s soft skin and blazing touch. He misses the bruises he leaves on Yechan’s body as he sinks his claws in - vague retribution for being all the bits of terrible things Li-jie has learnt to live without. It hides his vain attempt to claim something of the older for himself - as if he could save the skin beneath his nails as proof of holding something real.
Li-jie’s only reclamation of pride comes when Yechan looks up at him through barely-there tears while choking on him. And then together, they find all the ways to descend into hell, hitting every wall, counter and stairs on the path down.
When Yechan is panting under him, he can close his eyes and pretend it's just like the old times.
Back when Li-jie still had his wits about, in that icy palace of Reykjavík. It was so cold, and yet Yechan was still the warmest thing he knew as they held each other. They were still the teammates joined by the gods of fortune that went through every trial as one. Each triumphant kiss sent butterflies into his lungs, each stolen glance buzzing with a secret only they shared.
Back when Yechan still looked back at him with some sort of sincerity in his eyes.
How had they come so far?
Maybe the mistake was wanting more. Something so vulnerable scared the fox - made it retract its fluffy tail and run away. Like the male protagonist who drove the peach-wood sword through the sacred fox-spirit’s heart - to dare to claim its shining existence for himself was tantamount to committing the greatest sin, now doomed to live forever with the knowledge of what he destroyed.
“I can’t. I don’t.”
And so Li-jie is stuck here, watching the years slip between his fingers as their friendship, relationship, whatever awful situation they have now deteriorated even further away into a few strung-out drunken fucks a month.
Through it all, Yechan looks to him, but never at him. Even though Li-jie is right there in front of him, even his mere existence as Zhao Li-jie will not be spoken. Li-jie wonders if even back in Iceland, if what spurned the male on was merely just the reflective gleam of that cup reflected in his eyes - chasing that light of victory.
But Yechan still moans the same way, still trembles just as delicately and still has the same habit of digging his fingers into Li-jie’s hips when he falls apart. It’s all so close Li-jie can do this song and dance blindfolded by now. The ghost of something familiar haunts him, and sometimes he tries to catch it - but like Yechan, it fades faster than it stays.
Once Li-jie satisfies both their vile urges, Yechan only sighs softly. His hand flies towards a bedside draw, muscle memory working with ease as he fishes out a rectangular carton and a lighter. In one smooth motion, he extracts a slim white stick and pops it in the corner of his mouth. The flicker of flame in the dark room illuminates Yechan’s face in stark warmth. The mid-laner is all smooth jawline and narrow eyes cast downwards in concentration, eyebrows slightly furrowed to catch the light. Li-jie watches Yechan, like he always has - because to let something so beautiful stay unobserved would be an affront to humanity itself.
Yechan gulps greedily on his cigarette, before exhaling a billow of smoke that looks far too massive to have come from a body so small. An expression faintly akin to peace passes across his delicate face before he lies backwards, absently flicking his ashes to the side. In this moment after they have finished brutalizing each other, in pieces from the coupling of their worst vices - it's just the right amount of space, enough of a distance that Yechan doesn't have to run away.
Li-jie doesn’t smoke. He finds it quite disgusting actually, but when Yechan passes him the butt of his still-smouldering stick, Li-jie puts it between his lips without a word. Sharing this, where his lips trace over the damp impression of Yechan’s, he figures it’s the closest to a genuine kiss he ever would be offered. The drag is sharp and harsh and burns his chest viscerally - in his blood like venom that he surrenders himself to every time. How familiar.
He always thought this would be something he would get over with time, that he would grow out of his feelings - a boyish affect that tinted his youth at the tender age of 19. And yet, Li-jie - now old enough to know better - is still circling the waters like a single wave in a bottomless ocean. Yechan, who knows he has claimed him to a darkened abyss before he has even begun to sink, tugs the short leash Li-jie is on every so often so as to not let him drown.
And Li-jie can be better than this, he is better than this, but he doesn’t think he will ever choose to be because he’s all too comfortable to let the things in his life and chest smash into fragments if it means he can have Yechan against him a little longer. Li-jie knows that they will never have more than this, never be more than this - this bed shared in silence.
He can’t stay too long though - maybe three cigarettes worth of time, that really feels like no time at all with the rate Yechan burns through them. Terrible habit after terrible habit, Yechan exists only through crutching across blurred lines, lined with the remains of past late night decisions. The various types of liquor lining his cabinet is evidence of each invisible chain he still holds.
When Yechan, an enigma that considers nothing and no one, goes silently into that long night, Li-jie too settles down - put back away on a dusty shelf as the world runs ahead and away from him, waiting for the moment Yechan thinks of him enough to bring him back down.
In his heart he waits, always waits for Yechan to come over, to poke him - in which he will rouse from the miserable pile he has nested himself in as he pretends he hasn’t always longed for it. When he waits, it’s easier to seem like he still has a semblance of dignity, of self control, as if his insides don’t fray and burn to ashes each time Yechan averts his gaze.
This is the cage that he had grown to call home.
At the door frame, he casts a look past his shoulder back at the male. He can see the gentle rising and falling of Yechan’s chest, who is putting out his last cigarette. A silent signal that, for now but not forever, their time is up.
When Li-jie peers into those cool, casually cruel eyes, it’s a simple truth.
It’s never been hard to love Yechan, not even a little.
Li-jie just has to forget the taste of freedom.