Chapter Text
The Shanghai summer heat wrapped around the lungs like a wet blanket. Up on the concrete roof of their decaying apartment block, the air smelled of smog, damp laundry, and the sharp scent of cheap, watered down acrylic paint.
It was their sanctuary. A stolen patch of sky above the noise of the slums.
Qiu Dingjie sat cross legged on the blistering concrete. His faded high school uniform shirt unbuttoned to his stomach, clinging to his chest with sweat. Between his knees was a dining chair he had dragged out of the neighborhood dumpster two hours ago. It was missing a cross spindle, and its front left leg was fractured.
Most people would have seen firewood, or worse, garbage. Dingjie saw geometry and leverage.
He didn’t need a physics textbook to understand load bearing angles. He lacked the patience for formulas, but put a broken machine or a fractured piece of furniture in his hands, and his fingers instinctively knew where the stress points were. He wedged a piece of scavenged rebar between the wooden joints, wrapping it tightly with a roll of frayed electrical tape and a strip of leather he’d cut from an old belt. He pulled the makeshift binding taut. His biceps flexing under the strain, calloused hands working with a brutal, precise efficiency.
"Give it a minute before you sit on it," Dingjie muttered, not looking up as he tied off the knot with his teeth. "The glue needs to set with the heat."
A few feet away, sitting on a milk crate, Huang Xing smiled.
Xing was a contrast to Dingjie in almost every way. Where Dingjie was built with broad shoulders and a runner’s lean muscle from years of outrunning alleyway loan sharks, Xing was softer, quieter, with long, delicate fingers currently stained in hues of blue and bruised orange.
Xing didn't look at textbooks the way Dingjie did, either, but for a different reason. To Xing, history, literature, and math were just stories waiting to be deciphered. He absorbed information effortlessly, sitting at the top of their high school class without ever seeming to break a sweat.
But his real genius was resting on his lap. A flattened, corrugated cardboard box that used to hold cheap instant noodles.
He couldn't afford a real canvas. Even the cheapest sketchpads from the corner store meant sacrificing a day’s worth of meals. But Xing never complained. Instead, he painted over the cardboard’s ridges. He didn't paint the chaotic, abstract splashes of color that were popular in the modern galleries downtown. Xing painted the truth.
Currently, his brush was bringing to life the old woman who sold roasted sweet potatoes on the corner of their street. He painted her face, the exhaustion in the slump of her shoulders, the smudged on her apron, the desperate, hollow look in her eyes, as she stared at the passing, indifferent city. It was a story of survival, captured in cheap pigment.
"You're frowning at the chair again, Qiu Qiu," Xing said softly. His voice is a melodic tune over the distant blare of traffic.
Dingjie looked up, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist, leaving a streak of grease across his brow. "I'm not frowning. I'm calculating."
"You look like you want to punch it." Xing set his brush down in a cracked plastic cup of murky water. He leaned forward, resting his chin in his hands. "It’s a good fix. You always know how to hold broken things together."
Dingjie met Xing's eyes. The rough edge of his demeanor softened instantly. They had been boyfriends for two years, forged in the fires of shared bruised knees, empty stomachs, and the mutual, unspoken agreement to never talk about the shouting that echoed from their respective parents' apartments downstairs.
Dingjie stood up, tossing his makeshift tools aside, and closed the distance between them. He crouched in front of Xing's milk crate, his knees popping. He looked at the cardboard painting.
"She looks exactly like her," Dingjie said, genuine awe in his rough voice. He carefully kept his grimy hands away from Xing's lap, afraid to ruin the art. "You can see how tired her feet are just by looking at her boots. You're a genius, A-Xing. A literal genius."
"It's just paint on a noodle box, Qiu Qiu."
"It's a masterpiece," Dingjie corrected fiercely. He reached out, gently wrapping his large, rough hand around Xing's slender, paint stained wrist. "One day, you're going to put these in real frames. In a gallery where rich people drink tiny cups of tea and stare at them."
Xing laughed. A soft, breathy sound, and used his free hand to reach out and rub his thumb across Dingjie's forehead, wiping away the streak of grease. "And what are you going to do while I'm doing that?"
"Me?" Dingjie turned his head to press a quick, firm kiss to the inside of Xing's palm, tasting salt and acrylic. He grinned, flashing a slightly crooked tooth. "I'll be the guy standing at the door in a sharp suit, throwing out anyone who doesn't appreciate how smart my boyfriend is."
Dingjie stood back up and walked over to the repaired dining chair. He placed his hands on the seat and pushed down hard. It didn't wobble. Confident, he dropped his full body weight onto it. The chair groaned under him, the wood complaining, but the scavenged rebar and leather held firm.
"See?" Dingjie smirked, leaning back and crossing his arms. "You use your brain to capture the world, Xing. I'll use my hands to make sure you have somewhere safe to sit while you do it."
Xing looked at him, at the sweat dripping down his neck, the grease on his face, the fierce, unwavering devotion in his eyes, and felt a pang in his chest that had nothing to do with hunger. He picked up his brush again, dipping it into the cheap paint. His heart heavy with a love that felt far too large for this cramped, dusty rooftop.
"Stay still," Xing murmured. His eyes flicking between the cardboard and Dingjie. "The light is hitting you perfectly right now."
Dingjie didn't move a muscle, sitting tall on a broken chair he had fixed from trash, looking at Xing like he was the only thing of value in the entire city of Shanghai.
***
The rain in Shanghai didn’t wash anything clean. It only made the grime of the alleyway slicker, mixing with the smell of overflowing gutters and stale beer.
Dingjie sat on an overturned plastic crate behind the noodle shop where he washed dishes, letting the freezing downpour soak through his thin uniform. His jaw throbbed. He pressed the back of his hand to his split lip, wincing as it came away smeared with watered down blood. His father had been drinking again. A thrown ashtray, a shouted curse about how Dingjie was a waste of space, the usual Wednesday night routine.
He didn't care about the lip. He cared that he had to leave the small jar of tips he’d hidden inside his pillow cover because his father had started tearing his bedroom apart out of nowhere.
A shadow moved at the end of the alley. Dingjie tensed. His fists clenching automatically, until a thin silhouette stepped under the flickering light of the shop’s back door.
"Xing?" Dingjie stood up immediately. The crate scraped loudly against the asphalt.
Xing was soaked to the bone. His clothes plastered to his skinny frame. Xing rarely cried anymore, but his eyes were wide, hollow, and dark. He was clutching a plastic bag tightly to his chest, protecting a sketchbook and a few pencils from the rain. His mother had locked him out again, entertaining another string of ‘guests’ who didn't want a teenager in the house.
Dingjie didn't ask what happened. The silence between them was a language of its own, built on years of shared misery. He simply took off his own wet, but slightly warmer, uniform and draped it over Xing’s shivering shoulders.
"I have eighty yuan from the dishwashing shift," Dingjie said. His voice was rough and low over the sound of the rain. "And I got paid for unloading the trucks yesterday. Three hundred."
Xing looked up. His teeth chattering slightly. "I ... I have two hundred from the bookstore. I hid it in my shoe before she could check my pockets."
They stood in the rain, two seventeen year olds doing the desperate math of survival.
"It’s enough," Dingjie said. His tone shifted. The protective instinct that always simmered beneath his skin hardened into concrete resolve. He reached out. His thumb gently brushes a damp strand of hair from Xing's forehead. "It’s enough for a deposit. Old Man Wang’s basement is empty. It’s a shithole, but it has a lock. A real lock on the inside."
Xing’s breath hitched. "Qiu Qiu ... if we leave, we can't come back. They won't let us back in."
"Good." Dingjie’s eyes were fierce, burning right through the cold night. He grabbed both of Xing’s shoulders. His grip grounding and firm. "Look at us, Xing. If we stay, they’ll drown us. They’ll take every cent we make until we’re exactly like them. We have to get out."
Dingjie let go of Xing's shoulder with one hand and held it up, his knuckles bruised, his palm calloused from labor. "We made a pact," he whispered fiercely. "We pool everything. We work. We starve if we have to. But, one of us gets out. One of us actually makes it out of this neighborhood and becomes something. Deal?"
Xing looked at Dingjie’s bruised hand, then up at his split lip. The absolute certainty in Dingjie’s eyes broke the last bit of fear holding Xing back. He reached out and placed his cold, slender hand over Dingjie’s rough one, squeezing tight.
"Deal," Xing whispered.
Three days later, the basement room smelled of mildew and old concrete became their new home.
It was no bigger than a walk in closet. There was only a single stained mattress on the floor they had dragged in from a neighbor's discarded pile, a small grated window near the ceiling that let in the ankles of pedestrians walking on the street above, and a naked lightbulb hanging from a frayed wire. The water pipes along the wall dripped rhythmically into a rusted bucket.
But the metal door was bolted shut. From the inside.
Dingjie dropped his duffel bag, containing three shirts, two pairs of pants, and a stolen blanket, onto the floor with a tired sigh. He stretched his back. His joints popping loudly after a grueling eight hour shift at the docks followed by moving their meager belongings.
Xing was already sitting on the edge of the mattress. He had meticulously unpacked his art supplies first, arranging his pencils on a milk crate like they were fragile glass. He looked around the damp, gray room, but his expression wasn't one of despair. His shoulders, usually pulled up in a permanent state of tension, had finally dropped.
"It's loud," Xing noted quietly, listening to the rumble of a truck passing overhead.
"I can stuff some newspaper in the window grate tomorrow," Dingjie offered immediately, walking over and dropping onto the mattress beside Xing. The springs creaked ominously under his weight. "It'll help with the cold, too."
Xing turned his head to look at Dingjie. Dingjie’s face was bruised yellow and purple from a scuffle at work, his hair was a mess, and he smelled of cheap soap and sweat. Yet, in the harsh glare of the single lightbulb, Xing thought he looked beautiful. He looked like safety.
"We actually did it," Xing murmured, pulling his knees to his chest. A small, disbelieving smile touched his lips. He leaned his head against the concrete wall, looking at Dingjie through his lashes. "We have our own place. We share a bed. We pool our money."
Xing then, unexpectedly, let out a soft, shy chuckle. A sound so rare it made Dingjie’s chest ache. The tips of Xing's ears turned a faint pink. "People are going to think we eloped. Married so young, Qiu Qiu."
Dingjie froze. The casual word married hung in the damp air, heavy and intoxicating. A low, rumbling chuckle vibrated in Dingjie's chest. He turned his body entirely toward Xing, the mattress shifting under them.
"If we're married," Dingjie said. His voice dropping an octave, losing its usual rough edge and becoming something entirely gentle, "then I’m a terrible husband. I brought you to a leaky basement for a honeymoon."
"I like the basement," Xing breathed out. His heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
Dingjie reached out. His large, scarred hands, capable of lifting crates and breaking wood, were incredibly delicate as he cupped Xing’s jaw. His thumb traced the sharp line of Xing's cheekbone.
"A-Xing," Dingjie whispered. All the humor fading into a profound, overwhelming sincerity.
Xing’s eyes fluttered shut at the touch. The space between them vanished.
When Dingjie leaned in and pressed his lips to Xing's, it wasn't desperate or frantic like the lives they led outside this room. It was slow. Reverent. It was the sealing of their pact. Dingjie’s lips were slightly chapped, but they were warm, tasting faintly of the mint candy he always chewed to stave off hunger.
Xing let out a small, trembling breath against Dingjie's mouth. His hands come up to grip the front of Dingjie’s faded shirt. He pulled him closer, anchoring himself. Dingjie shifted his weight, wrapping both arms around Xing’s slender waist, pulling him flush against his chest, as if trying to shield him from the damp cold of the room with his own body heat.
The kiss deepened, sweet and clumsy with first time hesitation, then growing bolder as years of suppressed longing finally broke the surface. They kissed until the chill of the room melted away, until the sound of the traffic above was drowned out by the sound of their own ragged breathing.
When they finally pulled back, resting their foreheads together, they were both flushed. Dingjie kept his arms securely wrapped around Xing. His eyes are dark and fiercely tender.
"I promise you," Dingjie whispered into the space between them. His voice was a vow echoing in their new, cramped sanctuary. "I’ll get you out of this basement, Xing. I swear it."
Xing just smiled, burying his face into the crook of Dingjie's neck, finally feeling, for the first time in his life, entirely at home.
***
Their final year of high school was less about academics and more about an exhausted, relentless crawl toward survival.
Winter hit Shanghai with a brutal, damp cold that seeped right through the concrete walls of their basement. They couldn't afford a space heater, so their evenings consisted of layering every piece of clothing they owned and huddling together on the thin mattress. Xing’s fingers would be stiff and blue as he tried to finish his homework under the dim glow of their single, flickering lightbulb, while Dingjie would press his own calloused, burning hands against Xing's cheeks to keep him warm.
School itself became a strange, split reality. For Xing, the classroom was a place to excel. His mind soaking up history and literature, his hands constantly sketching in the margins of his cheap notebooks. For Dingjie, the classroom was simply a warm place to finally sleep. After spending his nights unloading cargo trucks at the port or washing dishes until 2 a.m. to make rent, Dingjie would routinely pass out at his desk by second period.
Xing never woke him. Instead, Xing took meticulous notes for both of them, and when the teachers inevitably yelled at Dingjie, Xing would quietly absorb the scolding on his boyfriend's behalf. They were a unified front. The other students talked about the newest video games or weekend dates, but Dingjie and Xing whispered about the price of cabbage and whether they had enough coins for the laundromat.
As spring approached, the chatter in the hallways shifted to the Gaokao and college applications. It was a language Xing felt entirely excluded from.
One evening, while sharing a single bowl of instant noodles on their mattress, Xing brought it up quietly.
"Mr. Wu gave me the application form for the Central Academy of Fine Arts today," Xing said, staring at the broth. "He said my portfolio is strong enough."
Dingjie paused. His chopsticks halfway to his mouth. "CAFA? That's the best art school in the country, Xing."
"It has an application fee," Xing replied. His voice was flat, immediately shutting down the dream. "Three hundred yuan. And the postage for the portfolio is another fifty. We need that money for the electric bill." He reached over and dropped the application form into their makeshift trash bin. "It's fine. I'll just look for full time work at the bookstore after graduation."
Dingjie didn't say a word. He just quietly ate half of the noodles. But the next day, Dingjie skipped school entirely. He walked into a blood plasma donation center, lied about his age, and walked out with a small wad of cash and a bandage on his arm. He then went to the post office, fished Xing's application out of his own backpack, having salvaged it from the trash the night before, and paid the fees himself.
When Xing found the receipt on his pillow that night, he had cried until his ribs ached, while Dingjie just held him, kissing the top of his head, exhausted but fiercely proud.
Months passed. Graduation came and went, a meaningless ceremony they barely paid attention to, too focused on their next shifts.
And then, in the suffocating heat of late July, the mail arrived.
The envelope was made of thick, cream colored paper. It felt alien in the damp, subterranean gloom of their basement room, like a piece of the sun that had somehow fallen into the gutter. In the top left corner, embossed in crimson ink, was the crest of the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Xing sat on the edge of the stained mattress, staring at it. The initial, explosive burst of joy, the feeling of his heart soaring so high he thought he might float away, had lasted exactly three minutes.
Then, the math set in.
Spread out around him on the rumpled blanket were his cracked phone calculator, a stubby pencil, and a torn piece of notebook paper covered in frantic scribbles. The scholarship was generous. It covered a significant chunk of the base tuition. But it wasn't full.
Xing stared at the numbers he had written down. The remaining tuition balance. The mandatory housing fees if he couldn't commute. The staggering, unspoken cost of a fine arts degree like the imported oils, the specific canvas weights, the sable brushes, and the exhibition fees. He added the numbers up again. His chest tightening with every digit. He added their rent, their food, and the electric bill.
The final sum at the bottom of the page was impossible. It was a phantom number. They could work themselves to the bone for five years and never see that much money at once.
A cold, heavy stone settled in Xing’s stomach. Slowly, numbly, he folded the cream colored letter along its original creases. He slid it back into the envelope, tucked it under his pillow, and picked up his sketchbook, staring blankly at an unfinished drawing.
An hour later, the metal door unlocked with a screech. Dingjie stepped inside, bringing the smell of gasoline and stale sweat with him. He had just finished a twelve hour shift at a mechanic's garage. His hands stained black with motor oil right up to the wrists.
"Hey," Dingjie breathed out, kicking the door shut with his boot. He leaned his forehead against the cool metal for a second, his shoulders slumping before he forced himself to stand straight. He turned to Xing. His tired face instantly softening into a smile. "I brought dinner. The stall owner gave me three extra buns because I fixed his scooter last week."
He held up a greasy plastic bag, but his smile faltered when he saw Xing’s face.
Dingjie knew every micro expression on Xing's face. He knew the slight pinch of his brow when he was hungry, the bite of his lower lip when a drawing wasn't working. Right now, Xing looked like someone had died.
Dingjie dropped the bag onto the milk crate. He crossed the room in two strides, ignoring the grime on his own clothes, and knelt in front of Xing. "What is it? Did your mom find out where we live? Did the landlord come down here?"
Xing shook his head, looking down at his lap. "No."
Dingjie reached out, hesitating before gently resting his grease stained wrists on Xing’s knees to avoid getting oil on him. "Talk to me, Xing. What happened?"
Xing couldn't hold it back anymore. A single tear slipped down his cheek, splashing onto the sketchbook. He reached under his pillow, pulled out the envelope and handed it to Dingjie.
Dingjie wiped his hands furiously on his work pants before taking it. He slid the thick paper out, his eyes scanning the formal characters.
Suddenly, Dingjie let out a breathless, booming laugh. He jumped up, hitting his head against the low ceiling, but he didn't even wince. "CAFA! Xing, you got into CAFA! You got the scholarship!" He looked at Xing. His eyes blazing with a fierce, blinding pride. "I knew it. I fucking knew you were a genius—"
"I'm not taking it, Qiu Qiu."
Dingjie froze. The laughter dying in his throat. The letter crumpled slightly in his grip. "What?"
"I'm not going," Xing said. His voice trembling but flat. "I've done the math. The scholarship only covers part of it. The rest ... the supplies, the fees, the living expenses ... it’s too much. I'd need to work three jobs just to afford the paint, and I wouldn't have time to actually study. I'm going to decline the offer and take the full time shift at the bookstore."
Dingjie stared at him for a long moment. Then, his jaw tightened. The exhaustion vanished from his face, replaced by a sudden, volatile intensity.
"Are you out of your damn mind?" Dingjie’s voice was low, but it echoed in the small room like thunder.
Xing flinched, shrinking back slightly. "Qiu Qiu, be realistic—"
"Realistic?" Dingjie closed the distance, dropping to his knees again. He didn't care about the motor oil this time. His large hands gripped Xing’s shoulders, holding him firm. He wasn't hurting him, but his grip was a vice of desperation. "Realistic is us rotting in this basement until we're sixty. Realistic is you end up like my father, drinking yourself to death because you hate your life, or like your mother, selling whatever you have left just to survive."
"We don't have the money!" Xing cried out. His voice finally breaking. Tears spilled over his lashes. "Look at us, Qiu Dingjie! Look at your hands! You're working twelve hours a day just so we can eat stale pork buns. How are we supposed to pay for oil paints that cost more than our rent? I can't put that burden on you. I won't."
"You listen to me," Dingjie interrupted. His voice rough, urgent, and thick with emotion. He shook Xing slightly, forcing Xing to meet his eyes. "You listen to me, Huang Xing. You are going to that school."
"Qiu...."
"No! Shut up and listen." Dingjie’s chest heaved. "Do you think I dragged us out of that neighborhood so you could work in a bookstore? You have a gift. When you paint, people actually see something. You think I don't notice? You think I don't know you're meant for a world completely different from this one?"
"But your future—"
"I don't have one like yours!" Dingjie cut him off fiercely. "Look at me. I'm not an academic. I can't sit in a classroom. If I go to college, I'll just be wasting money to fail out in a year. My brain doesn't work like that. My worth is right here." He let go of one of Xing's shoulders and held up his scarred, oil stained hands. "This is what I'm good at. Working. Surviving."
Dingjie swallowed hard. His eyes shining intensely in the dim light. "We made a pact, A-Xing. One of us gets out. That was the deal. It has to be you. It was always going to be you."
Xing sobbed. A wretched, broken sound, and buried his face in his hands. "It's not fair. I'm stealing your youth, Qiu Qiu. I'm making you carry everything."
Dingjie leaned forward, wrapping his arms around Xing, pulling him flush against his chest. He didn't care that he was getting grease and sweat on Xing's shirt. He buried his face in Xing's hair, breathing him in.
"You're not stealing anything," Dingjie whispered fiercely against his ear. "I'm giving it to you. Gladly."
He pulled back just enough to look at Xing's tear streaked face. He wiped a tear away with his thumb, leaving a faint smudge of grease on Xing's pale cheek.
"I'll take the night shifts at the warehouse," Dingjie said. His voice steadying into an unbreakable vow. "I'll pick up the delivery routes on weekends. I can handle it. I'm strong, Xing. Let me do this. Let me be the one to provide for us. You just focus on the canvas. You paint our way out of here."
Xing looked into Dingjie's eyes. Dark, resolute, completely stripped of hesitation. The guilt was still there. A heavy stone in Xing's chest. But underneath it, a profound unmeasurable gratitude began to bloom. Dingjie wasn't just offering to pay the bills. He was offering his sweat, his blood, and his youth to build a pedestal for Xing to stand on.
Slowly, trembling, Xing reached out and picked up the folded letter from the mattress. He clutched it to his chest, right over his heart, and leaned forward until his forehead rested against Dingjie's shoulder.
"Okay," Xing whispered into the rough fabric of Dingjie's work shirt. His tears soaking through. "Okay, Qiu Qiu. I'll go."
***
The hard seat train from Shanghai to Beijing took fourteen hours, rattling their bones until they felt like dust. But the real shock came when they stepped out of the railway station and the northern wind hit them. Beijing’s cold was nothing like the damp chill of the south. It was a dry, vicious blade that cut straight through their thin jackets and settled deep in their lungs.
Because CAFA was located in the Chaoyang district, an area where rent was mercilessly high, they were forced to look at the very edges of the city. They found a place in a crumbling concrete labyrinth just past the Fifth Ring Road.
To call it an apartment was a lie. It was a semi basement storage unit, barely wide enough for Dingjie to stretch his arms out fully. The only window was a narrow slit at ground level that let in no sunlight, only the gray sludge of melting snow and the sight of pedestrians’ boots hurrying past. The walls wept with condensation, and the single radiator in the corner was more of a lukewarm decoration than a heat source.
But it was, once again, theirs.
On their first night, the temperature plummeted well below freezing. They sat cross legged on their new, lumpy mattress, huddled together under two thin blankets. Between them sat a single aluminum pot on a cheap electric hot plate, water boiling furiously.
Dingjie cracked their only egg into the instant noodles, stirring the cheap, salty broth. When it was done, he handed the chopsticks to Xing.
"Eat the egg," Dingjie commanded softly. His breath pluming in the freezing air of the room.
Xing shook his head, pushing the pot back slightly. "We split it. You carried our bags all day."
"I'm not hungry for it," Dingjie lied smoothly, taking a small bite of just the noodles and pushing the pot firmly back into Xing's lap. "Eat. You start classes tomorrow. You need your brain working."
They ate in silence, passing the pot back and forth. The shared warmth of the cheap meal and their pressed bodies the only things keeping the freezing Beijing night at bay.
***
As autumn bled into a brutal winter, their lives split into two entirely different dimensions.
Xing entered a world of soaring ceilings, marble statues, and impassioned critiques about color theory and composition. His days were spent in heated studios, surrounded by students who wore designer coats and complained about the campus coffee.
Dingjie entered a world of pure, unrelenting friction.
His day started at 4 a.m. in the freezing dark. He worked the early morning shift at the wholesale produce market, unloading hundred pound crates of frozen cabbages and root vegetables from delivery trucks. By 9.00 a.m., his back was a knot of screaming muscle, but his day was just beginning.
He had bought a beat up, secondhand electric scooter, wrapping the handlebars in rags to keep his fingers from freezing off. From 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., he wove through Beijing’s busy traffic as a food delivery driver. The wind chill on the scooter tore at his face, cracking his lips and leaving his cheeks permanently windburned. He ran up five flights of stairs in office buildings, apologizing to impatient businessmen for being two minutes late, swallowing curses as the tips he desperately needed were withheld.
Then, from 8 p.m. to midnight, he sorted packages at a logistics warehouse, breathing in cardboard dust until his throat bled.
The gap between them became painfully visible in the quiet hours of the night.
Dingjie would stumble into the basement past 1 a.m., shedding his ice cold jacket like a dead skin. He would sit on the edge of the mattress, too exhausted to even take off his boots.
Xing, who often stayed up studying art history or finishing assignments, would immediately put his books down. He would bring a basin of warm water and kneel in front of Dingjie, gently unlacing his boots.
One night, as Xing took Dingjie’s hands to wash them, the visual contrast made Xing’s breath catch in his throat.
Xing’s hands were stained with a chaotic map of colors. Cadmium red deep in the cuticles, smudges of pencil sketches residue on the pads of his fingers. They were the hands of a creator.
Dingjie’s hands were being destroyed. The Beijing air had dried his skin until his knuckles cracked and bled. The heavy lifting had torn his old calluses open, replacing them with thick, yellowed scabs. His fingernails were permanently rimmed with black grime that no amount of scrubbing could remove.
As Xing gently ran a warm, wet cloth over Dingjie’s bruised knuckles, a tear slipped from his eye and splashed into the basin.
Dingjie’s head snapped up, fighting through the thick fog of exhaustion. "Does it smell like turpentine again? I told you to open the window grate when you use that—"
"I'm getting a job," Xing interrupted. His voice trembling but fierce. He looked up, his eyes swimming with tears. "There's a listing at the campus supply store. It’s four hours a day. I can work the register."
Dingjie went completely still. The exhaustion seemed to burn out of his system, replaced by a sharp, defensive panic. He pulled his hands out of Xing's gentle grip.
"No."
"Qiu Qiu, look at yourself!" Xing cried out, gesturing wildly to Dingjie's battered body. "You fell asleep standing up in the shower yesterday! You're losing weight. You're killing yourself to pay for my canvas, and I can't just sit in a warm studio while you're freezing on a scooter!"
"I said no, Xing." Dingjie’s voice was a low, hard rumble.
"Why? Because of your stupid pride?"
"Because of the scholarship!" Dingjie snapped. His voice echoing loudly in the cramped concrete room. He ran a rough hand through his hair, taking a deep breath to calm the spike of adrenaline. He reached out and cupped Xing's face. His rough, cracked thumb wiping away a fresh tear.
"Xing," Dingjie said. His tone turning desperate and pleading. "The scholarship only covers half, and it requires you to maintain top marks. Your professors are already demanding. If you take a four hour shift, when do you sleep? When do you finish your assignments? If your grades slip, they take the funding away. And if they take the funding away, all of this—" he gestured to the miserable basement, to his own ruined hands "—was for nothing."
Xing sobbed, leaning his face into Dingjie's palm, turning his head to kiss the center of Dingjie's calloused hand. "It hurts me to watch you suffer."
"I'm not suffering. I'm providing," Dingjie corrected softly. His eyes filled with a beautiful devotion. "You think I mind the cold? When I drop off a delivery at a high rise and see those rich people in their suits, you know what I think? I think, my boyfriend is smarter than all of you. And one day, he's going to make you pay thousands just to look at what he paints."
Dingjie leaned his forehead against Xing's. "Leave the money to me, Xing. I told you, my back is broad enough to carry this. You just promised me one thing."
"Anything," Xing whispered. His voice cracking.
"Graduate," Dingjie said, closing his eyes. "Be brilliant. Don't let my sweat go to waste."
***
It started with a broken pencil.
Dingjie was off his morning shift at the produce market, rushing to fill out a registration form for a new, cheaper electric scooter battery before his afternoon delivery route. He rummaged through the small wooden crate Xing used as a bedside table, looking for a pen or a pencil.
His fingers brushed against the bottom of the drawer, catching on a loose piece of plywood. It shifted, revealing a hollow space underneath that made Dingjie frowned.
Inside was a neatly folded piece of paper.
He pulled it out and smoothed it open. It was a list in Xing’s elegant, precise handwriting.
- Kolinsky sable hair brushes (Round, sizes 2, 4, and 6)
- Oil Pigments (Winsor & Newton) : Cobalt Blue, Cadmium Red Deep, Flake White, Raw Umber
- Linen canvas roll (Medium grain, 5 meters)*
- Wooden stretcher bars
- Damar varnish and linseed oil
Next to the list were several messy calculations that Xing had aggressively crossed out, followed by a final line that simply read :
Alternative : use cheap acrylics. Pray Professor Liu doesn't notice the texture.
Dingjie didn't understand the terminology. A brush was a brush, wasn't it? He shoved the list into his pocket, found a pen, and left for work.
The next day, during a rare twenty minute break between his delivery shift and his warehouse job, Dingjie parked his scooter outside a high end art supply store near the CAFA campus. He pushed the glass door open. A bell chimed softly.
The store smelled of cedarwood, lavender soap, and expensive paper. Dingjie immediately felt the grime on his jacket. He approached the clean glass counter, pulling the crumpled list from his pocket and smoothing it out on the glass.
"Excuse me," Dingjie said to the clerk, a young woman who looked at his oil stained hands with thinly veiled distaste. "How much for these?"
The clerk read down the list. "The Kolinsky sable brushes are kept in the locked case. They are professional grade. The Cobalt Blue and Cadmium Red are Series 4 and 5 pigments, the most expensive tiers. Are you sure you don't want the student grade synthetics?"
"Just tell me the price for what's on the paper," Dingjie said, his voice flat and hard.
The clerk tapped on her register. "For the exact list ... it comes to about three thousand, four hundred yuan."
The air punched out of Dingjie’s lungs. He stared at the glowing green numbers on the register.
Three thousand, four hundred. That was his entire monthly salary from the market, the deliveries, and the warehouse combined. If he bought this, they wouldn't make rent. They wouldn't eat. He finally understood why Xing had hidden the list under a false bottom. Xing was planning to sabotage his own project rather than ask Dingjie for the impossible.
"Right," Dingjie swallowed hard, carefully folding the list and putting it back in his pocket. "Thank you."
He walked out into the freezing Beijing afternoon. He didn't go to the warehouse. Instead, he rode his scooter to a construction site he had passed a few weeks ago on the Fourth Ring Road.
"I heard you pay day laborers in cash for night work," Dingjie said to the foreman. "Mixing cement. Carrying rebar."
The foreman looked him up and down. "It's backbreaking work, kid. Midnight to 6 a.m. Hundred and fifty a night."
"I'll take it."
For the next three weeks, Dingjie didn't sleep. He existed in a fugue state of pain and caffeine. He lied to Xing, saying the warehouse had extended his hours for the holiday season. He hauled cement bags until his shoulders bled, until his hands shook so badly he could barely hold his chopsticks at dinner.
But at the end of the third week, he walked back into the art supply store. He dropped a thick wad of crumpled, dirty bills onto the clean glass counter.
When Xing came home from class that evening, he found a large brown paper bag sitting on his side of the mattress. He opened it carefully. Inside were the sable brushes, the thick tubes of Series 5 oil paints, and a receipt that made Xing drop the bag as if it burned him.
"Qiu Qiu...." Xing whispered, turning around. Dingjie was leaning against the damp concrete wall, his eyes bloodshot, a nasty scrape across his cheek from a stray piece of rebar.
"Don't hide things from me, Xing," Dingjie said softly, though his voice was raw with exhaustion. "If you need it for school, you tell me."
Xing fell to his knees, burying his face in his hands. His shoulders shaking with violent sobs. "You idiot. You're going to kill yourself over paint!"
Dingjie slid down the wall to sit on the floor. He pulled Xing into his lap, wrapping his bruised arms around him. "Then I die. But your painting won't."
It became their silent, heartbreaking rhythm. Xing would desperately try to hide exhibition fees or the need for a new easel. Dingjie would always find out, quietly take on another brutal gig, and the items would simply appear. A war of love fought through hidden receipts and bruised knuckles.
Xing had mentioned the mid term exhibition a month in advance. It was a major event, a chance for the second year students to be scouted by gallery owners.
"You don't have to come, Qiu Qiu," Xing had said the night before, carefully ironing his only good button down shirt. "I know you have the warehouse shift. It's just a bunch of stuffy professors talking too much anyway."
Dingjie had nodded, agreeing. But the next evening, he paid a coworker fifty yuan to cover the first three hours of his shift.
He didn't own a suit. He wore his cleanest pair of jeans and scrubbed his hands raw with cheap soap, but the grease under his nails was permanent. He wore his winter work jacket to hide his frayed sweater.
When he arrived at the CAFA gallery building, the contrast hit him like a physical blow.
The building was a temple of glass and white marble. The lighting was impossibly bright, casting no shadows. Classical music drifted through the air, mixing with the low, sophisticated murmur of hundreds of people holding champagne flutes and glossy catalogs.
Dingjie stepped inside, instantly feeling his own mass. He felt huge, clumsy, and filthy. Every step he took in his worn out boots seemed to echo too loudly against the polished floor. He kept his hands stuffed deep into his jacket pockets, acutely aware that he smelled like engine exhaust and stale sweat in a room that smelled of expensive perfume and wealth.
He was a beast wandering into a glass house, terrified that a single wrong breath would shatter everything.
He kept to the perimeter, hiding behind large sculptures and pillars. His eyes scanning the room until he finally saw the star.
Xing was standing in the center of the main hall, next to a massive canvas. He looked breathtaking. The cheap, button down shirt he had ironed so carefully looked like haute couture under the gallery lights. His posture was straight. His eyes bright as he spoke with a distinguished looking man in a tailored suit, Professor Liu, Dingjie assumed.
Dingjie looked at the painting.
It was a staggering portrait of a crowded Beijing subway car, but rendered in those expensive, deep oils Dingjie had bled for. The colors were vibrant yet melancholic. It captured the exact feeling of being surrounded by millions of people while feeling completely alone. It was a masterpiece.
Dingjie watched as the professor clapped Xing on the shoulder, laughing warmly. Other students gathered around, hanging onto Xing’s words. A wealthy looking woman with a pearl necklace was pointing at the canvas, nodding emphatically.
Xing was glowing. Currently, he wasn't the terrified boy shivering in a damp basement. He was a star, exactly where he belonged.
A sharp, hollow ache opened in Dingjie’s chest. It wasn't jealousy. It was a cold, absolute clarity.
Look at them. Look at the way they talk, the way they stand. This is his world.
Dingjie looked down at his own scuffed boots. He thought about the coffin room waiting for them. He thought about his days spent carrying boxes and breathing dirt. He realized, with a devastating finality, that he could never stand in the light with Xing. If he walked over there right now, he would only drag Xing down. He would be the dirty secret, the embarrassment, the anchor tying a soaring bird to the mud.
But as Dingjie stood in the shadows, the ache morphed into something harder. Something unbreakable.
He didn't belong in this glass house. He was the dirt. But dirt was what flowers needed to grow.
He watched Xing smile at the wealthy patron, and Dingjie made a silent vow to the white walls. He would break every bone in his body, he would spill every drop of his blood, he would sell his soul to the devil if he had to. He would do whatever it took to make sure Xing never had to leave this light.
Dingjie took one last, long look at his boyfriend, memorizing the smile on his face. Then, before Xing could spot him in the crowd, Dingjie turned around and walked out into the freezing, dark Beijing night, heading toward the warehouse to carry boxes until his hands bled.
***
The dead end didn't come with a warning sign. It arrived in the form of a mimeographed sheet of paper detailing the mandatory expenses for the CAFA fourth year final exhibition.
Dingjie had stared at the paper while sitting on his delivery scooter in the freezing rain. Venue rental, premium framing, promotional catalogs, gallery insurance. The numbers didn't even look real anymore. They were astronomical. He had already stretched his hours to the absolute physical limit. There were only twenty four hours in a day. He was working twenty of them. He had pawned his winter coat. He had skipped meals until his vision swam. He was completely, utterly tapped out.
If they missed this payment, Xing wouldn't just fail the exhibition. He would be stripped of his degree, his portfolio wouldn't be seen by any gallery scouts, and the last three years of starvation and sacrifice would turn to dirt.
That afternoon at the warehouse, a bruised, older loader named Lao Ge had watched Dingjie accidentally drop a box because his hands were shaking too badly from exhaustion and hunger.
"You're killing yourself for pennies, kid," Lao Ge had rasped, spitting a wad of tobacco onto the concrete. "If you don't care about breaking your body, you might as well get paid market rate for it."
That was how Dingjie found himself standing at the bottom of a rusted service stairwell beneath an abandoned meatpacking plant in the Fengtai district.
There were no flashy neon lights, no cheering crowds, and no polished boxing rings like in the movies. The air down here was thick, suffocating, and smelled foul. A wretched mixture of stale cigarette smoke, cheap baijiu, rust, and the unmistakable, coppery stench of old blood soaked into concrete.
The boxing ring was just a square of cracked cement sectioned off by a chain link fence. The crowd consisted of desperate men with hollow eyes, local thugs, and a few men in expensive coats who looked like they enjoyed watching poor people destroy each other. They were passing fistfuls of crumpled yuan back and forth, shouting bets through yellowed teeth.
Lao Ge pushed Dingjie toward a man holding a clipboard and a cigar.
"New meat," Lao Ge said. "Needs cash, tonight."
The man looked Dingjie up and down. He took in the broad shoulders, the calloused hands, and the desperate, cornered animal look in his dark eyes. "Five hundred yuan to step in. Two thousand if you stay conscious past the first three minutes. Five thousand if you win. You bleed on the crowd, you mop it up."
Five thousand yuan. That was a month and a half of delivery driving, earned in minutes.
"I'll fight," Dingjie said. His voice flat.
He stripped off his shirt, the damp basement air biting at his bare skin. He didn't have boxing gloves, just cheap, rough canvas tape the promoter wrapped haphazardly around his knuckles.
They shoved him through a gap in the fence. The gate rattled shut behind him.
His opponent was a man ten years older, built like a brick wall and covered in faded prison tattoos. The man didn't look desperate like him. He was actually looked like he enjoyed hurting people.
There was no referee. Just a bell, clanged.
The first punch hit Dingjie before he even had his guard fully up.
It was a right hook to the jaw that sounded like a baseball bat striking a melon. The impact exploded through Dingjie’s skull. His vision flashed white, then completely black. The concrete floor rushed up to meet him, and he tasted the dust before he even realized he had fallen.
The crowd jeered. Disappointment. Weak.
Dingjie lay on his side. His ears were ringing a high, piercing whine that drowned out the shouting men. His mouth filled with the hot, thick taste of iron. He tried to breathe, but his ribs felt paralyzed.
Stay down, a voice in his head pleaded. It's not worth it.
But then, the ringing in his ears shifted. It morphed into the sound of Xing’s soft voice, reading from an art history book in their freezing coffin room. He saw the mimeographed sheet of paper. He saw the devastatingly beautiful painting Xing had been working on for three months, the one that needed a custom frame. He thought about Xing going back to work at a barbecue stall, his soft, paint stained hands burning on a grill.
Dingjie squeezed his eyes shut. He dragged his taped hands under his chest and pushed.
The crowd went silent for a fraction of a second, then erupted into a feral roar as Dingjie hauled himself back to his feet. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the concrete.
The tattooed man charged again, throwing a brutal combination. Dingjie raised his arms, taking the blows on his forearms, his shoulders, and his ribs. He didn't know how to weave or bob. He had no footwork. Every hit landed with bone rattling force.
A jab caught him in the eyebrow, splitting the skin instantly. Hot blood poured into his left eye, blinding him on one side. Another punch sank deep into his gut, knocking the wind out of him.
But as the seconds ticked into minutes, Dingjie realized something profound.
He wasn't a fighter. But he knew pain. He had been beaten by his drunken father until he couldn't walk. He had hauled cement until his muscles tore. He had starved so Xing could eat. Pain was just a sensation. It was just a heavy box he had to carry from one side of the room to the other.
The tattooed man was getting tired. He was breathing heavily, his punches losing their snap. He couldn't understand why the kid wasn't staying down.
Dingjie looked at the man through his one good eye. He felt a rib crack. A sharp, white hot agony radiating through his chest. And then, he smiled. It was a terrifying, bloody smile.
My pain, Dingjie thought wildly. A manic clarity settling over him, has a market value.
Every drop of blood he shed was a painting tube for Xing. Every cracked bone was a gallery fee. He wasn't being beaten. He was cashing out his suffering.
With a guttural roar, Dingjie stopped blocking. He stepped directly into the man's next punch, taking a glancing blow to the cheekbone to close the distance. He planted his boots on the slippery concrete, twisted his hips the way he did when throwing a hundred pound sack of rice, and unleashed a right cross with every ounce of his desperate, devoted love for Huang Xing behind it.
His taped fist collided with the man's temple. The sound was sickeningly loud.
The larger man's eyes rolled back, and he dropped to the floor like a felled tree. He didn't move.
The basement was dead silent for three heartbeats. Then, the screaming started. It was deafening. A wave of pure, chaotic adrenaline from the gamblers.
Dingjie stood over the unconscious man, swaying on his feet. His chest heaved, pulling the foul air into his burning lungs. He couldn't see out of his left eye. His jaw felt dislocated.
The promoter walked up to the fence, looking at Dingjie with a mixture of shock and predatory greed. He reached through the chain links and pressed a thick wad of cash into Dingjie’s trembling, blood soaked hands.
"Good show, kid," the man grunted. "Come back Friday."
Dingjie stumbled out of the basement and into the freezing Beijing night. He leaned against a brick wall in the alleyway, sliding down until he hit the cold ground. He looked at the money in his hands. It was stained with his own blood. The bills sticking together.
It was more money than he had made in the last three months combined.
He clutched the stack of bills to his chest, ignoring the agonizing flare of his broken rib. He tipped his head back against the bricks, staring up at the smog choked sky, and began to laugh. It was a broken, wet sound that quickly turned into a sob. He had found a way. He had finally found a way to buy Xing the world, even if he had to sell himself piece by piece to do it.
***
Dingjie stood in the freezing, dark corridor outside their basement door for a full ten minutes before he dared to touch the handle.
He was trembling, though not from the Beijing winter. Every inhalation felt like a rusted knife twisting between his ribs. His left eye was completely swollen shut. It lookedlike a pulsing, purple mound of flesh. The blood from his split eyebrow had dried into a crusty, brown mask on half of his face.
He leaned against the concrete wall, pulling the thick wad of cash from his jacket pocket. It was a massive brick of red, hundred yuan notes. It was more money than he had seen in his entire life. Triple of what he could scrape together in three months of backbreaking labor. He stared at it. His one good eye tracing the portrait of Chairman Mao in the paper bills until it felt blurry.
He shoved it back into his pocket, wiped his bloody mouth with the back of his sleeve, and took a shallow, agonizing breath. He finally turned the handle.
The metal door groaned open.
Inside, the room was dimly lit by a single bulb. Xing was sitting on the mattress, a textbook open in his lap, waiting up just as he always did. The moment the door squeaked, Xing looked up with a soft, relieved smile already forming on his lips. "Qiu Qiu, you're finally—"
The words died in his throat. The textbook slipped from his lap, hitting the concrete floor with a loud slap.
For a second, Xing couldn't move. He just stared. All the blood draining from his face, leaving him as pale as the canvas he painted on.
"Qiu Qiu?" Xing whispered. His voice cracking with pure horror.
Dingjie tried to smile, hoping to reassure him, but the movement stretched his split lip and tore it open again. Fresh blood welled up, dripping down his chin. "Hey. It ... it looks a lot worse than it is."
Xing scrambled off the bed. His knees hitting the floor before he stumbled up and sprinted across the tiny room. He stopped inches from Dingjie. His hands hovering in the air, terrified to touch him. He saw the swollen eye, the blood, the unnatural way Dingjie was holding his left arm tight against his ribs to keep them from shifting.
"Oh my god," Xing breathed. Tears instantly spilling over his lashes. "Oh my god, Qiu Qiu. What happened? Who did this to you? We need to call an ambulance—"
"No!" Dingjie said sharply, grabbing Xing’s wrist before he could reach for his phone. The sudden movement sent a spike of white hot agony through his chest, and he gasped, his knees buckling slightly.
Xing caught him, wrapping his arms carefully around Dingjie’s uninjured side, taking his weight. "Qiu Dingjie! You're broken! You need a hospital!"
"No hospitals," Dingjie gritted out, letting Xing guide him toward the edge of the mattress. "I'm fine. Just ... sit me down."
Xing eased him onto the bed. His hands were shaking violently. He turned to run to the small sink in the corner, but Dingjie caught his shirt.
"Wait. Look," Dingjie said. His heart was hammering a frantic, guilty rhythm against his broken ribs. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the brick of cash. He dropped it onto the small wooden crate they used as a table.
It landed with a solid thud.
Xing stopped. He looked at the bruised, bloody face of the man he loved, and then down at the impossible stack of money. The tears on his cheeks caught the dim light.
"What is that?"
Dingjie swallowed the copper taste in his mouth. The lie had been rehearsed the whole walk home, but saying it to Xing’s face felt like swallowing broken glass.
"I was finishing a delivery in Chaoyang," Dingjie said, keeping his one good eye locked on Xing’s. He forced his voice to sound steady, angry. "Some rich bastard in an imported sports car blew a red light. Clipped my scooter. Send me flying into a brick wall."
Xing let out a strangled sob, covering his mouth with both hands.
"He panicked," Dingjie continued. The lie spinning easier now that he had started. "He was drunk, Xing. He didn't want the police involved. He didn't want a breathalyzer. So he got out, dragged me up by the collar, and shoved this into my jacket." Dingjie pointed a shaking finger at the money. "Told me to shut my mouth and walk away. So I did."
Xing stared at the cash. Ansickening mixture of relief and revulsion washing over him. "He hit you with a car ... and just paid you off like you were a stray dog?"
"Let him treat me like a dog," Dingjie said fiercely, leaning forward, fighting the pain. "Do you know how much there is, Xing? It's enough for the exhibition. It's enough for the gallery fees, the framing, the materials. It's enough to pay our rent for the next six months. It's a godsend."
"It's blood money!" Xing cried, finally finding his voice. He dropped to his knees in front of Dingjie, completely ignoring the cash. He reached up, his delicate, paint stained fingers gently ghosting over the swollen, purple flesh around Dingjie's eye. "He could have killed you, Qiu Qiu. You could be dead right now, and for what? Paper?"
"But I'm not dead," Dingjie whispered. He leaned his good cheek into Xing's palm, closing his eyes. "I'm right here."
Xing wept softly. The sound breaking Dingjie's heart into a thousand irreparable pieces. "I'll get the water," Xing choked out, pulling his hand away.
For the next hour, the small room was silent save for the sound of water wringing from a rag and Xing's ragged breathing.
It was an agonizing process. Xing brought a plastic basin of warm water and a clean towel. He knelt between Dingjie’s legs, carefully dabbing at the crusted blood on his face. Every time Dingjie flinched, Xing would pause, whispering desperate, broken apologies, as if he were the one inflicting the pain.
"I have to take your shirt off, Qiu Qiu. I need to see your ribs."
Dingjie nodded stiffly. Raising his arms was a fresh hell. As Xing pulled the blood stained sweater over his head, the full extent of the damage was revealed. A massive, horrifying mosaic of black, blue, and yellow bruises painted Dingjie’s torso. The left side of his ribcage was severely swollen.
Xing let out a soft, devastated whimper. He soaked the rag in the warm water, which was rapidly turning pink, and began to clean the dirt and sweat from Dingjie’s chest.
Dingjie sat rigid, biting the inside of his cheek until he tasted fresh blood. He couldn't let Xing know how much it actually hurt. If Xing knew a man's fist had done this, and not a car bumper, he would burn that money in the sink. So Dingjie held his breath, forcing his muscles to relax under Xing’s gentle, trembling touch.
The tension in the room was suffocating. The thick stack of red bills sat on the crate right next to the basin of bloody water. It was a physical barrier between them. A monument to the secret Dingjie had just dragged into their home.
"I hate this," Xing whispered, gently wrapping a thick bandage around Dingjie's chest, pulling it tight to stabilize the ribs. "I hate that we live in a world where your life is worth a bribe in an alleyway."
Dingjie looked down at the top of Xing’s head, feeling a profound darkness settle over his soul. The trust they had built, the sacred honesty of their shared poverty, was gone. Dingjie had shattered it the moment he opened his mouth.
"It's just the way the world works, Xing," Dingjie murmured, resting his uninjured hand on the back of Xing's neck, gently stroking his hair.
As Xing tied off the bandage and buried his face in the unbruised side of Dingjie's chest, weeping quietly for the injustice of it all, Dingjie stared over his boyfriend's shoulder at the money. The physical pain was excruciating, but it was nothing compared to the rotting, hollow feeling of the lie taking root in his chest.
He was safe for now. But as the adrenaline finally left his system, Dingjie realized the horrifying truth of his new reality.
He would have to go back. And next time, he would have to lie all over again.
***
The air in the basement had fundamentally changed. It was no longer just the familiar, stifling smell of turpentine, damp concrete, and shared body heat. It was now thick with the suffocating weight of the unsaid.
For three weeks, the ‘accident’ money had sat in a dented metal tea tin pushed far under the bed, but it never seemed to run out. Every time a new, exorbitant fee appeared, a mandatory lab fee, a bulk order of imported linen, the deposit for the gallery space, Dingjie would just reach into his jacket pocket and produce another stack of red bills.
To anyone else, Dingjie might have looked like a man who simply had a stroke of grim luck with a wealthy, careless driver. But Xing was an artist. His entire life was dedicated to observing the microscopic details of the human form, the interplay of light and shadow, and the subtle ways emotion contorted a muscle.
He eventually noticed the way the purple bruising along Dingjie’s ribs didn't fade into the healthy yellow of healing, but was instead layered with fresh, angry red contusions, like a canvas being painted over again and again. He noticed the way Dingjie’s hands shook when he tried to hold his chopsticks, the knuckles swollen to twice their normal size. Most damning of all, he noticed the smell. The metallic, coppery scent of fresh blood and cheap antiseptic that clung to Dingjie’s skin, completely overpowering the familiar smells of engine grease or warehouse dust.
One evening, as Xing carefully counted out the money needed for his exhibition catalogs, the silence in the room became unbearable.
"Qiu Qiu," Xing started. His voice barely above a whisper. He didn't look up from the bills. "This is another thousand yuan. The guy in the sports car ... he's really just handing over this much cash?"
Dingjie was sitting on the edge of the mattress, staring blankly at the rusted water pipe. He flinched slightly at the question. His jaw muscles feathering. "I told you. He sent a courier to the warehouse. He's terrified I'm going to file a police report and ruin his reputation. It's hush money."
Xing finally looked up. Dingjie’s eyes were darting away, refusing to meet his gaze. Dingjie, who had once looked Xing dead in the eye and promised him the world in a freezing alleyway, couldn't even look at him now.
"Is that it?" Xing pressed. His chest tightening with a sickening, heavy dread. "Because your lip is split again, and you're limping on your right leg today. Did the courier hit you, too?"
"A pallet dropped at the warehouse," Dingjie snapped. His tone sharper and more defensive than he intended. He immediately softened, running a shaking, calloused hand through his hair. "I'm sorry. I'm just tired, Xing. The new supervisor has us double timing the unloading line. Just ... take the money. Pay for the catalogs."
Xing took the money, but the paper felt so heavy in his hands. He felt like a parasite, engorging himself on a host he couldn't see, growing fatter on a poison he couldn't name.
The tipping point arrived on a freezing morning.
Xing had a crucial 9 a.m. critique at CAFA. Professor Liu was going to review his final portfolio pieces. But when Xing woke up at 6 a.m., Dingjie was already gone for his morning warehouse shift, leaving behind his winter scarf on the crate.
Xing picked up the scarf. It smelled distinctly of stale cigarette smoke, sweat, and something chemical that made Xing's stomach turn.
He made a decision. He packed his sketchpad into his bag, walked out into the biting Beijing cold, and walked right past the subway line that would take him to the university. Instead, he boarded the train heading toward the industrial edge of the Chaoyang district.
The logistics center was a sprawling, deafening compound of corrugated metal and diesel exhaust. Semi trucks roared in and out of the huge iron gates, kicking up clouds of gray dust that coated everything in sight.
Xing stood across the street, pulling his coat tighter around his slender frame. He felt entirely out of place here. A fragile glass bird in a canyon of iron and exhaust. He watched the gates. At 9 a.m., a loud siren wailed, signaling the shift change. A stream of exhausted men in faded blue jumpsuits poured out of the gates, lighting cheap cigarettes and rubbing their sore necks.
Xing scanned the crowd desperately, looking for a head taller than the rest, looking for broad shoulders and dark, tired eyes.
The crowd thinned. Then, it disappeared completely. Dingjie wasn't there.
A cold sweat broke out on the back of Xing's neck. He crossed the street, dodging a honking delivery truck, and approached the security booth. An older guard was sitting inside, drinking tea from a thermos.
"Excuse me," Xing said. His voice trembling slightly over the roar of the engines. "I'm looking for someone. Qiu Dingjie. He works the morning unloading shift."
The guard slid his window open, looking Xing up and down, taking in the clean coat, the soft hands, the terrified eyes. "Who?"
"Qiu Dingjie," Xing repeated, louder this time. "He's tall. Broad shoulders. He should have just finished his shift."
The guard frowned, turning to a clipboard hanging on the wall. He ran a stubby finger down a list of names. "No Qiu here, kid."
"He has to be," Xing insisted, panic finally rising into his throat, sharp and bitter. "He left our apartment before six this morning. He’s been working the morning shift here for months."
Before the guard could answer, a raspy voice coughed behind Xing. "Are you looking for the tall kid with the big calloused hands? The one with round eyes?"
Xing spun around. An older, weathered man was leaning against the fence, spitting a wad of tobacco onto the concrete. His face was deeply lined. His knuckles were completely scarred.
"Yes," Xing breathed out, stepping toward him. "Dingjie. Do you know him?"
The older man, Lao Ge, gave Xing a long, assessing look. "You must be the boy he's paying for. The artist."
Xing's breath hitched. "Where is he?"
Lao Ge shook his head slowly. A look of genuine pity crossing his rough features. "He ain't here, kid. Hasn't been here for a while."
"What do you mean?" Xing’s voice cracked. The world around him seemed to tilt dangerously. "He left so early in the morning."
"I don't know where he goes every morning now," Lao Ge grunted, tossing his cigarette butt onto the ground and crushing it with his heel. "But he quit this place three weeks ago. Walked in, handed his vest back to the foreman, and walked right out. Didn't even wait for his final week's pay."
The words hit Xing with the force of a physical blow. His knees actually buckled, and he had to grab the cold fence to keep from falling.
Three weeks ago.
Xing’s brilliant, analytical mind, usually reserved for calculating vanishing points and color temperatures, suddenly did a violent math.
Three weeks ago was the exact day Dingjie had stumbled into their basement, covered in blood, claiming he had been hit by a sports car. It was the exact day the metal tea tin had been filled with more money than Dingjie had ever earned in his life.
"Did he…." Xing choked on the words. His eyes wide and brimming with tears. "Did he say where he was going?"
Lao Ge looked away, suddenly finding the passing traffic very interesting. "The kid was desperate. Asked me a few questions about where a guy could make fast, hard cash if he didn't care about getting hurt. I eventually pointed him toward Fengtai. I shouldn't have. But he had that look in his eye. The look of a man drowning. A man who’d grab a razor blade if you told him it was a life preserver."
Lao Ge looked back at Xing. His expression grim. "Whatever he's doing, it ain't loading boxes. And if he's doing what I think he's doing, he’s trading pieces of himself for paper."
Xing didn't hear anything else. The roar of the trucks, the shouting of the foremen, the biting wind, it all vanished into a high pitched ringing in his ears.
He let go of the fence and stumbled backward. He turned and started walking. He didn't know where he was going, only that he couldn't breathe.
The realization tore through his chest, shredding everything he thought he knew. The paper house they had built together was collapsing around him. The sports car settlement, the courier. the clumsy accidents, it was all a sprawling, horrific lie designed to keep Xing in the dark while Dingjie was butchered for cash.
Every stroke of paint on his canvas, every expensive sable brush he had bought, every tube of imported oil ... they weren't bought with Dingjie's sweat. They were bought with Dingjie's blood. Xing felt a violent wave of nausea wash over him. He stumbled into a narrow alleyway between two dilapidated buildings, fell to his knees on the freezing asphalt, and dry heaved until his throat was raw.
He crouched there in the dirt, clutching his stomach, sobbing uncontrollably. The love he felt for Dingjie, a love so vast and profound it terrified him, was suddenly twisted into a sickening, unbearable guilt. Dingjie was sacrificing himself on an altar, and Xing was the god he was bleeding for.
Xing stayed in that alleyway for hours. The cold seeping deep into his bones, until the tears finally stopped, leaving behind only a cold, brittle, and devastating certainty. He had to stop this. Even if it meant tearing up his scholarship, even if it meant breaking Dingjie's heart, he had to stop him before there was nothing left of the man he loved.
***
The single bulb in the basement was off. Xing sat on the edge of the mattress, cloaked in the freezing dark, staring at the sliver of yellow streetlight filtering through the grate window.
It was past midnight.
Every minute that ticked by was a physical agony. Xing’s mind played the same horrific loop. Dingjie in a cage, Dingjie taking a punch, Dingjie bleeding onto concrete. He had spent the last ten hours oscillating between a burning, furious betrayal and a paralyzing, breathless terror that Dingjie wouldn't come home at all.
At 1.30 a.m., the metal door finally groaned open.
Dingjie practically fell through the threshold. He caught himself against the concrete wall with a wet, ragged gasp, sliding it shut behind him. The sound of him locking the deadbolt was clumsy. The metal scraping loudly because his hands wouldn't work right.
Xing didn't move. He didn't turn on the light. He just sat there, a rigid statue, breathing in the overwhelming stench that had followed Dingjie into the room. It was worse tonight. The smell of sweat, cheap alcohol, and raw, iron thick blood was suffocating.
"Xing?" Dingjie whispered into the dark. His voice a broken rasp. He fumbled for the light switch.
When the bulb flickered to life, Xing finally looked at him, and his heart physically seized in his chest.
Dingjie was destroyed. His work jacket was torn at the shoulder. One eye was completely swollen shut, the skin around it a sickening, glossy black. His lower lip was split so badly it was actively dripping blood onto his collar, and he was cradling his right arm against his chest in a way that screamed of broken bone.
Every instinct Xing possessed screamed at him to jump up, to grab the warm water, to hold him and beg him to stay awake. But the memory of the warehouse, the memory of Lao Ge’s pitying eyes, anchored Xing to the mattress. He dug his fingernails into his own thighs to keep from running to him.
"How was the shift, Qiu Dingjie?" Xing asked. His voice was terrifyingly flat. It sounded dead.
Dingjie froze, still leaning heavily against the wall. He blinked his one good eye, trying to process Xing’s tone through the haze of concussive pain. He tried to straighten up. A pathetic attempt to hide the limp, but his leg gave out, and he slid halfway down the wall before catching himself.
"Heavy load," Dingjie grunted out, forcing the lie through his ruined lips. He reached into his pocket with his good hand, pulling out a thick, crumpled stack of bloody hundred yuan notes. He tossed it onto the crate. It landed with a sickening thud that made Xing winced this time. "Supervisor was ... he was in a mood. Dropped a crate of iron pipes. Caught my shoulder."
Xing stared at the money. He felt a wave of nausea so violent he tasted bile.
"Iron pipes," Xing repeated softly. He finally stood up. His movements were slow, deliberate. "You dropped iron pipes at the logistics warehouse."
"Yeah," Dingjie breathed out. His eyes dropping to the floor. "Can you ... can you get the water, Xing? I think I need a bandage."
"I went to the warehouse today, Dingjie."
The silence that slammed into the room was absolute. The only sound was Dingjie’s ragged, whistling breath.
Dingjie’s head snapped up. The exhaustion on his face vanished, replaced by sheer, unadulterated panic. "What?"
"I skipped my critique," Xing continued, taking a step forward. He was trembling now, the dam holding back his fury beginning to crack. "I stood across the street. I waited for the shift to end. I looked for you."
"Xing, you shouldn't have—"
"I spoke to the guard! I spoke to an old man named Lao Ge!" Xing’s voice cracked, rising into a shout that echoed off the damp walls. "He said, you quit three weeks ago! The exact day you came home and told me a sports car hit you! You haven't loaded a single box in almost a month!"
Dingjie pushed himself entirely off the wall, ignoring the blinding pain in his ribs. "Listen to me—"
"No, you listen to me!" Xing screamed. The rigid facade crumbling entirely. He flew across the room, stopping inches from Dingjie. He wanted to hit him. He wanted to hit his chest, to shake him until the truth fell out, but he saw the horrific bruising on Dingjie's collarbone and his hands stopped in mid air, curling into helpless, shaking fists.
"Where did this come from?" Xing pointed a trembling finger at the bloody money on the crate. "Where do you go at four in the morning? Who is doing this to you?!"
Dingjie looked cornered. He looked at Xing’s terrified, tear streaked face, and the lie finally died in his throat.
"It doesn't matter," Dingjie choked out. A tear mixing with the blood on his cheek. "The money is real, Xing. The gallery is paid for. You can afford the canvas—"
"I don't care about the canvas!" Xing shrieked. Tears freely falling now. He grabbed the front of Dingjie’s torn jacket, mindful not to touch the broken arm, but desperate to hold him. "I care about you! Tell me what you are doing!"
Dingjie squeezed his eyes shut. His entire body trembling under Xing’s grip. "I fight."
The words were barely a whisper, but they hit Xing with the force of a bullet.
"I go to a basement in Fengtai," Dingjie continued. His voice breaking, the confession pouring out of him like poison draining from a wound. "There’s a ring. Underground. They lock us in, and men put money on who stays standing."
Xing let go of the jacket as if it had caught fire. He stumbled back a step. His hands covering his mouth.
"I'm not a good fighter," Dingjie sobbed, opening his one good eye to look at the sheer horror on Xing’s face. "I don't know how to block properly. I don't know how to weave. But I know how to take a hit."
"Stop," Xing whimpered, shaking his head frantically. "Please, stop."
"You want the truth?" Dingjie’s voice broke. The agony in his body finally twisting into a desperate, wretched sob. Tears tracked through the grime and blood on his face. "The truth is ... I let them beat me. Because the more I bleed, the more the crowd cheers. And the more the crowd cheers ... the more the promoter pays me."
His hands shook as he picked up the stack of bills from the crate. Instead of shoving it, he held it out toward Xing with trembling hands. His bloody fingers staining the red paper even darker.
"You see this?" Dingjie choked out. His chest was heaving with wet, ragged breaths. He pointed a trembling finger at a dark smear on the top bill. "That’s a split eyebrow. That pays for your sable brushes. You see this arm?" He looked down at his broken limb hanging uselessly at his side. A fresh sob tearing from his throat. "That’s the deposit for your exhibition space. I don't get paid to win, Xing." He squeezed his eyes shut, tears spilling over his lashes. "I get paid to suffer. The more blood I drop on that concrete ... the more money goes into my pocket."
Xing let out a guttural, wretched sound. A sound of pure, unadulterated heartbreak. He fell to his knees on the freezing floor. His arms wrapping around his own stomach as if trying to hold his organs inside. He dry heaved again with the rest of his energy. The sickening reality of their survival finally settling into his bones.
He was the reason.
Every stroke of paint he applied to a canvas was bought with the destruction of the man he loved. The beautiful, vibrant colors he used were quite literally paid for with Dingjie’s red blood and black bruises. They weren't fighting poverty together anymore. Dingjie was throwing himself into a meat grinder to pave a road of gold for Xing to walk on.
"I'm a parasite," Xing choked out between sobs, pressing his forehead against the cold concrete. "I'm killing you. I'm eating you alive."
"No!" Dingjie dropped to his knees beside him, wincing as his broken ribs ground together. He wrapped his good arm tightly around Xing, pulling him flush against his battered chest. He buried his face in Xing’s hair, weeping just as hard. "No, Xing, no. How can you say that? You are the only thing keeping me alive. Don't you see? If I don't do this, we stay in the mud forever. I am nothing without you."
"I don't want the art!" Xing screamed into Dingjie's jacket, gripping the fabric so tightly his knuckles turned white. "I don't want the gallery! I want you! I just want you whole! I can't paint with your blood, Qiu Dingjie! I can't do it!"
"You have to," Dingjie begged. His voice a wretched plea in the dark. He kissed the top of Xing’s head, tasting salt and despair. "You have to finish. If you quit now, then all of this ... all of this pain means nothing. Please, Xing. Let my blood mean something."
They clung to each other on the dirty floor of the coffin room. Two boys drowning in an ocean of poverty, crushed under the realization that the only way to save one was to sacrifice the other. Xing wept until he had no breath left. Held tightly by a man whose body was broken, but whose consuming love was entirely whole.
Xing pushed back. His hands resting lightly on Dingjie’s uninjured shoulder. He looked at the bruised, swollen face of the man who had traded his own flesh to buy Xing a future, and a cold, diamond hard resolve settled over his heart.
He wiped his tears with the back of his sleeve, smearing Dingjie’s blood across his own cheek.
"You're not going back," Xing said. His voice dropping an octave, stripped of its previous hysteria. It was a command.
Dingjie let out a panicked, wet breath. "Xing, we need—"
"I don't care what we need!" Xing cut him off. His eyes blazing in the dim light. "I don't care if I have to paint on garbage bags with mud. I don't care if I fail the exhibition. If you step foot in that basement in Fengtai ever again, Dingjie ... I swear to you, I will walk into Professor Liu's office the next morning and withdraw from CAFA entirely."
Dingjie’s good eye widened in sheer terror. "You wouldn't. Xing, you can't throw it all away—"
"Try me," Xing whispered fiercely. He reached out and cupped Dingjie's unbruised cheek. His thumb stroking the skin. "I mean it. If my art costs your life, then I don't want to be an artist. I'll work. I'm getting a job tomorrow."
"You don't have the time," Dingjie pleaded, desperation clawing at his throat. He tried to grab Xing's hands, but winced as his broken ribs shifted. "Your classes, the studio hours ... you'll fail if you don't sleep."
"Then I sleep less," Xing said with absolute finality. He stood up, carefully pulling Dingjie up with him, supporting his weight. "You are going to rest. You are going to heal. And I am going to pull my weight."
***
Despite his suffocating schedule, six hours of lectures, four hours of mandatory studio time, and three hours of thesis prep, Xing spent his lunch break walking the chaotic commercial streets just outside the campus perimeter. He avoided the aesthetic cafes and art supply stores, heading straight for the narrow, smog choked alleys where the exhaust fans from a dozen kitchens blasted heat into the freezing winter air.
He found a piece of cardboard taped to the awning of a street side barbecue stall.
Night Helper Wanted. 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. Cash daily.
It was the exact kind of place Dingjie used to work back in Shanghai.
The boss, a sweaty man with a permanent scowl, took one look at Xing’s clean coat and slender, paint stained fingers. "You're a student. You won't last two hours over the coals."
"I'll work the first two hours for free," Xing countered. His voice steady despite the anxiety twisting his stomach. "If I drop a single skewer, you can kick me out."
The boss grunted, tossing him a grease stained apron.
The reality of Dingjie's past hit Xing the moment he stepped behind the grill.
It was a visceral, suffocating hell. The heat from the glowing charcoal was instantaneous. A dry, aggressive wall of fire, seared the moisture from his eyes and lungs. The smoke was a living thing, thick with lamb fat, cumin, and chili powder, blinding him and making him cough until his throat was raw.
"Flip them faster! They're burning!" the boss barked, shoving a handful of raw, icy skewers into Xing’s hands.
Xing’s fingers, hands that were trained to hold a sable brush with microscopic precision, were immediately blistered by the cheap metal skewers. The fat popped and spat, shooting boiling droplets of grease onto his wrists and forearms. Every time he flinched, the boss yelled.
By 10 p.m., his lower back was screaming. He was standing on hard, cracked concrete, the cheap soles of his shoes offering no support. The drunk, loud customers demanded more beer, complaining about the wait, snapping their fingers at him as if he were a dog.
Dingjie did this, Xing thought, gritting his teeth as a spark flew up and burned his cheek. He did this every night in Shanghai. Then he woke up and unloaded boxes.
The contrast was mind shattering. While Xing had been sitting in temperature controlled classrooms learning about the Renaissance, Dingjie had been breathing in carcinogenic smoke and burning his skin. And Dingjie had done it with a smile, coming home smelling of grease and cheap meat, kissing Xing’s forehead and asking how his drawings went. He even make sure to always keep Xing warm in their coldest night.
Midnight passed in a blur of agonizing repetition. Flip the meat. Brush the oil. Dust the spice. Ignore the burns. Serve the plates.
By the time 2 a.m. finally rolled around, Xing was a hollow shell. He felt like his skeleton had been pulverized. His clothes were soaked through with sweat and grease, freezing instantly to his skin the moment he stepped away from the grill to scrub the metal grates with a wire brush.
"You're slow," the boss grunted, wiping his hands on a dirty towel. "But you didn't quit. Come back tomorrow."
He reached into his pocket and handed Xing a few crumpled bills.
Xing stood on the freezing Beijing sidewalk. The neon lights of the closed shops buzzing overhead. His hands were shaking violently as he looked down at the money in his palms.
Eighty yuan.
He stared at the blue and green bills. The math, the horrible, relentless math of their poverty, crashed over him like a tidal wave.
Eighty yuan. A single tube of the Series 5 Cobalt Blue oil paint he needed for his exhibition cost three hundred yuan. It would take him four grueling, skin blistering nights of work just to buy one tube of paint.
How many skewers did Dingjie have to flip to pay their rent?
How many boxes did he have to lift to buy their noodles?
How many years had Dingjie traded his youth, eighty yuan at a time, just to keep them afloat before the desperation finally pushed him into the boxing ring?
The sheer, monumental scale of Dingjie’s sacrifice materialized in front of Xing, heavy and suffocating. It wasn't just the blood in the ring. It was years of this. Years of grease, burns, exhaustion, and pennies, all silently absorbed by Dingjie so Xing could paint the world.
Xing stumbled into a dark, narrow alleyway, hiding from the main street. He leaned his back against a freezing brick wall and slid down until he hit the asphalt. He pulled his knees to his chest, clutching the eighty yuan in his ruined, blistered hands.
He broke down.
It was a violent, wretched sobbing that tore through his chest. He cried for the burns on his arms, he cried for the smoke in his lungs, but mostly, he cried for Qiu Dingjie. He wept for the boy who had dragged a broken chair off a rooftop, the boy who had promised to get him out, and the man who had let himself be beaten half to death because his legitimate sweat was mathematically worthless in the face of Xing's dreams.
Sitting in the grease stained dark, clutching his pitiful wages, Huang Xing finally understood the true, crushing weight of what it cost to love in poverty.
***
The clock on Dingjie’s cracked phone read 2.34 a.m.
For the first time since they moved to Beijing, Dingjie was the one waiting in the dark. He was sitting rigidly on the edge of the mattress. His broken right arm bound tightly to his chest with a makeshift splint and bandages from a cheap pharmacy. His ribs screamed with every shallow breath he took, but the physical agony was entirely eclipsed by the suffocating, clawing terror in his throat.
Xing was never this late. Even when he stayed at the studio to utilize the free heating, the campus security always kicked the students out by midnight.
Dingjie had spent the last three hours tearing his mind apart. The horrific fight from the previous night replayed behind his swollen eye. He remembered the sheer, unadulterated disgust on Xing’s face when he realized where the money came from. He remembered Xing vomiting on the floor.
He left, Dingjie’s panicked brain whispered. He finally realized you're just a violent thug. He packed a bag while you were asleep and went back to Shanghai. Or, he went to stay in the dorms. Anyway, he's gone.
Dingjie tried to stand, intending to walk the streets to find him, but his bruised leg buckled, sending a shockwave of pain up his spine. He collapsed back onto the mattress, burying his face in his good hand. A dry, wretched sob tearing from his throat. The basement had never felt so much like hell.
At 2.50 a.m, the metal door finally screeched open.
Dingjie’s head snapped up. He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the blinding pain in his ribs, and practically threw himself toward the doorway.
Xing stood on the threshold.
The immediate wave of relief that crashed over Dingjie was so intense his knees almost gave out. He's here. He didn't leave. But as the dim light from the hallway hit Xing, the relief instantly mutated into a profound, chilling shock.
Xing looked like a ghost. His face was entirely devoid of color. His lips tinged blue from the freezing walk home. His clothes were damp, but the smell that rolled off him hit Dingjie like a physical blow.
It was the overwhelming, suffocating stench of cheap lamb fat, charred cumin, charcoal smoke, and sweat.
It was a smell Dingjie knew intimately in his own marrow. It was the smell of the Shanghai slums.
"Xing?" Dingjie breathed out. His voice trembling. He took a step forward. His good hand reaching out. "Where ... where were you?"
Xing didn't say anything. He stepped into the room, gently pushing the door shut behind him. He moved like an old man, his shoulders hunched, his legs dragging. When he looked up at Dingjie, his eyes were red rimmed and hollowed out by an exhaustion so deep it looked terminal.
Slowly, Xing raised his right hand. His delicate, beautiful fingers, the fingers that could blend oil paints into masterpieces, were covered in angry red burn marks from spitting grease.
He opened his fist.
Resting on his blistered palm were a few crumpled, grease stained bills. Eighty yuan.
"I flipped skewers," Xing whispered. His voice completely raw from the smoke. A single tear escaped, cutting a clean line through the dirt on his cheek. "For seven hours. Over the coals."
Dingjie stared at the eighty yuan. The air punched out of his lungs. He felt a wave of horror so intense it made him dizzy. Xing, his genius, fragile Xing, whose hands were meant for sable brushes and luxurious galleries, had been standing over a street gutter grill.
"Why?" Dingjie choked out, dropping to his knees right there on the concrete floor, entirely disregarding his broken ribs. He grabbed Xing’s blistered hand with his good one, bringing it to his chest, cradling it as if it were made of spun glass. "Why would you do that? You promised me you'd focus on the exhibition—"
"I had to know," Xing sobbed. His legs finally giving out too. Ending up face to face with Dingjie on the freezing floor. "I had to know what you did for me."
Xing looked at the eighty yuan, his face twisting in a mask of pure, self loathing agony.
"It's nothing," Xing cried. His voice breaking into a wretched wail. He threw the bills onto the ground. "It's absolutely nothing! I burned my hands, I couldn't breathe, my back feels like it's broken, and they gave me eighty yuan! It won't even buy a single brush, Qiu Dingjie! It won't even buy a fraction of what I need!"
Dingjie reached out, wrapping his good arm around Xing’s neck, pulling him in, but Xing resisted, pushing his hands against Dingjie’s uninjured shoulder.
"I ruined you!" Xing screamed. The guilt finally consuming him entirely. He looked at Dingjie’s split lip, his black eye, the sling holding his broken arm. "Do you see how little this world pays for honest sweat?! You did this every single day! For years! You wasted your youth standing in the smoke and carrying boxes for pennies, and when it wasn't enough for my selfish dreams, I forced you into a cage to be beaten!"
"Xing, stop—"
"I stole your future, Qiu Dingjie!" Xing sobbed hysterically. His fingers curling into Dingjie’s shirt. "You could have had a normal life! You could have found someone who didn't drain you dry! Look at what I've done to your body! Look at what I've reduced you to! I'm so sorry. God, Qiu, I'm so sorry...."
Dingjie didn't say a word. He just listened to the agonizing sound of the boy he loved tearing himself apart.
When Xing’s sobs finally began to subside into ragged hiccups, Dingjie shifted closer. He ignored the blinding flare of pain in his chest. He reached up, cupping Xing’s dirt stained face with his calloused, uninjured hand, forcing Xing to meet his eye.
"Are you done?" Dingjie asked softly. His voice a low, steady rumble in the dark room.
Xing sniffled, looking away, ashamed. "I hate myself."
"Look at me," Dingjie commanded, gentle but immovable. Xing slowly brought his eyes back to Dingjie's.
"You think you stole my youth?" Dingjie asked. A small, sad smile touching his ruined lips. He shook his head. "Xing ... before you, my youth was a drunken father and a moldy mattress in a hallway. My future was becoming a thug in an alleyway, dying over a gambling debt before I turned twenty five."
Dingjie moved his thumb, gently wiping away the tear track on Xing’s cheek.
"You didn't steal my future," Dingjie whispered fiercely. "You gave me one. You gave me a reason to wake up. You gave me a reason to walk out of that neighborhood."
"But the fighting—"
"The fighting is just math," Dingjie interrupted. His tone filled with absolute conviction. "It's just a transaction. But you? You are my life. When I stand in the back of that gallery and watch people look at your paintings, do you know what I feel? I feel like a king. Because I know I built the walls of that gallery with my own hands."
Dingjie leaned his forehead against Xing’s, closing his eyes, breathing in the scent of smoke and grease that clung to Xing’s skin. It didn't smell like poverty to him. It smelled like devotion.
"I am not a victim, Huang Xing," Dingjie said. His voice dropping to a fierce, unbreakable vow. "I am exactly where I want to be. I am the shield holding the world back so you can paint it. Don't ever apologize to me for letting me protect you. And don't ever think I regret a single drop of blood I've shed for us."
Xing closed his eyes. His breathing finally beginning to steady. The cold concrete beneath their knees was unforgiving, the smell of the barbecue stall was suffocating, and the eighty yuan lay discarded like trash on the floor. But as Dingjie held him, Xing felt the crushing weight of his guilt begin to recede, replaced by a love so profound it felt like an anchor holding him fast in a hurricane.
"No more street stalls," Dingjie whispered against Xing’s lips, pressing a gentle, chaste kiss to his mouth. "Your hands are too important for that."
"No more fighting," Xing insisted back. His voice still trembling, but firm. "I mean it, Qiu Qiu."
"Okay," This time, there was no hesitation. No secret reservation. Dingjie looked down at Xing’s delicate fingers, at the angry red burn marks forming across his knuckles from the spitting grease, and a cold, absolute terror gripped his heart. The thought of Xing’s hands, hands meant to create masterpieces, being permanently scarred over a cheap grill was infinitely more agonizing than any punch Dingjie had ever taken.
"I'm done," Dingjie said. His voice dropping to a fierce, unbreakable vow. He gathered Xing's hands and kissed the unblistered patches of skin. "I won't go back to the basement in Fengtai. I'll pick up the morning shifts at the market again. Deliveries. Whatever it takes. Just ... promise me you will never go back to that stall. Your hands are too precious."
Xing let out a shuddering breath. His eyes searching Dingjie's battered face for any sign of a lie. "I promise. But I'm checking your schedule, Qiu Qiu. I'm walking you to the market if I have to."
"Deal," Dingjie whispered, pressing his forehead against Xing's.
"Let's see what we actually have," Xing sniffled, pulling back slightly. He wiped his face with his sleeve and pushed himself off the floor, his joints popping. He reached under the mattress and pulled out the dented metal tea tin.
They sat cross legged on the freezing concrete, shoulder to shoulder, and emptied the tin.
It was a gruesome, sobering task. Some of the hundred yuan notes were still stained with dried, brown flakes of Dingjie's blood. Xing’s hands shook as he flattened them out, making neat piles on the floor. Dingjie sat quietly, watching Xing’s brilliant mind go to work.
Xing pulled his worn notebook from his bag and began to calculate. He wrote down the remaining tuition fees, the mandatory gallery deposit, the framing costs, the linen, the oils. Then he wrote down their rent, their utilities, and the absolute minimum they needed for rice and cabbage.
The basement was dead silent, save for the scratching of Xing’s pencil.
Finally, Xing drew a hard line under the numbers. He looked up, his eyes wide, reflecting the dim light of the single bulb.
"Qiu Qiu," Xing breathed out, his voice trembling with disbelief. "It's enough."
Dingjie blinked. "What?"
"The money from ... from the ring." Xing touched the stacks of cash gently. "It covers the exhibition. All of it. And if we eat nothing but plain noodles and cabbage, it covers the rent until my graduation. You just need to cover the daily utilities with a normal part time job."
The math was tight. It was a razor thin margin of survival, leaving absolutely zero room for emergencies. But the math was there.
A suffocating weight that Dingjie hadn't even realized he was carrying suddenly lifted from his crushed ribs. He let out a long, ragged exhale, slumping forward until his head rested on Xing’s shoulder. They had done it. They had bought their way through the final, impossible hurdle.
Xing wrapped his arms around Dingjie's back, avoiding the bandages, and buried his face in his neck. For the first time in months, the tears they shed weren't from terror or grief, but from the overwhelming, exhausting relief that they could finally breathe.
***
Two weeks later, the brutal edge of the Beijing winter began to thaw, offering a fragile, pale imitation of spring.
It was a Sunday afternoon. Dingjie had managed to secure a relatively tame morning shift sorting mail at a local post office. A job Xing had personally vetted by showing up unannounced twice in the first week, glaring suspiciously at the manager.
With the shift over and the exhibition fees safely paid, they did something they hadn't done in over a year. They left the apartment for no reason at all.
They walked to Chaoyang Park. They didn't have the money for the amusement rides or the rented rowboats, so they simply walked along the edge of the man made lake. The trees were just beginning to bud, casting spindly, wavering reflections on the water.
They sat on a free wooden bench. Between them was a single, foil wrapped roasted sweet potato they had bought from a street vendor for five yuan. It was steaming in the cool air, smelling of caramel and woodsmoke.
Dingjie broke the sweet potato in half, careful of his right arm, which was finally out of the splint but still stiff. He handed the larger, softer half to Xing.
"Your eye looks better," Xing noted softly, taking a bite of the hot potato.
The grotesque, swollen black mass had finally faded to a sickly yellow green, and the split on his lip had finally closed into a jagged, pale pink scar. Dingjie looked rough, like a stray dog that had survived a bad winter, but he looked human again.
"Doesn't hurt when I blink anymore," Dingjie replied, taking a bite of his own half. He leaned back against the bench, turning his face up to the weak sunlight.
Xing reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, cheap sketchbook. He didn't have his expensive paints or his sable brushes, those were safely locked away in the studio, but a simple graphite pencil felt right for today.
He began to sketch Dingjie. He didn't try to hide the new scar on his lip or the fading bruise on his jaw. He drew them exactly as they were, capturing the quiet, profound exhaustion that rested in the lines of Dingjie's face, but also the undeniable, unbreakable peace in his posture.
"You're drawing me again," Dingjie murmured, keeping his eyes closed, feeling the warmth of the sun. "I'm telling you, people in those fancy galleries don't want to look at a bruised up delivery guy."
"They'll look at whatever I tell them to look at," Xing replied. His pencil scratching softly against the paper. A small, genuine smile touched his lips. A rare, beautiful sight. "Besides, I'm not drawing a delivery guy. I'm drawing the man who holds up my sky."
Dingjie chuckled. A low, warm sound that finally didn't catch on broken ribs.
They sat in comfortable silence, surrounded by families flying kites and elderly couples practicing Tai Chi. They were still incredibly poor. They were still wearing second hand coats, sharing a five yuan snack, and returning to a damp, windowless basement that smelled of mildew.
But sitting on that bench, listening to the scratch of Xing’s pencil and feeling the faint warmth of the sun, they pretended. They pretended the future wasn't a terrifying, looming cliff. They pretended they weren't drowning in the relentless current of the city. For one perfect, stolen afternoon, they were just two young men in love, sitting by a lake, entirely and utterly enough for each other.
***
The universe, Xing would later realize, possessed a sickening, cruel sense of humor. For months, Dingjie had stepped into a concrete cage, offering his flesh and bone to violent men for the entertainment of gamblers. He had taken blows that would have killed lesser men, absorbing the trauma with a grim resilience. He had survived the underworld.
And yet, ironically, it was the safe job that finally broke him.
It was a random afternoon at the postal sorting facility. It wasn't a heroic sacrifice or a dramatic battle. It was just a rusted, poorly maintained chain on an overhead cargo crane.
Dingjie was standing on the loading dock, checking off a clipboard, entirely focused on the mundane task of earning a clean, honest wage. Above him, a pallet carrying five hundred pounds of commercial paper shifted. The old chain snapped with a sound like a gunshot.
There was no time to react. No time to brace. The corner of the wooden pallet struck Dingjie directly on the side of his head, throwing him violently against the concrete loading bay.
He didn't wake up.
The smell of the intensive care unit was entirely different from the damp mildew of their basement or the greasy smoke of the barbecue stall. It smelled of industrial bleach, rubbing alcohol, and the nightmarish, sterile scent of impending death.
Xing stood on the other side of the glass partition. His hands pressed flat against the cold pane.
Dingjie was unrecognizable. His head was wrapped in thick, white gauze. A strak contrast to the long hair Xing loved to run his fingers through. A thick plastic tube was taped down his throat, connected to a ventilator that forced his chest to rise and fall with a rhythmic, mechanical hiss.
He survived the ring, Xing thought, his mind fractured and spinning. He survived the blood and the cages. For this?
The sliding door hissed open. A tired neurosurgeon in green scrubs stepped out, holding a tablet.
"Are you the emergency contact?" the doctor asked, not looking up.
"I'm his ... I'm his family," Xing rasped, his voice sounding like torn paper. "Is he going to wake up?"
"He suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. A subdural hematoma," the doctor explained. His voice clinical, detached. "We performed an emergency craniotomy to relieve the immediate pressure on his brain. That stabilized him. But there is severe secondary swelling and a piece of fractured bone pressing against the optic nerve. He needs a second, highly specialized decompression surgery within the next forty eight hours, followed by at least a month in the ICU."
Xing swallowed hard. "Okay. Do it. Please, do the surgery."
The doctor finally looked up. His expression softening into a grim, familiar pity. "Mr. Huang ... the emergency craniotomy wiped out the deposit you brought in."
Xing was frozen still.
He had brought the metal tea tin. He had emptied the gallery fees, the rent, the food money, every single bloody bill Dingjie had earned in the ring, onto the hospital admission desk.
"The secondary surgery, the ICU bed, the specialized neuro monitoring...." The doctor sighed heavily. "It will be upwards of three hundred thousand yuan. The hospital administration requires at least half of that upfront before we can book the surgical theater for a non immediate life threatening procedure. He is stable for now, but without the surgery, the brain damage will become permanent, or fatal."
Three hundred thousand yuan.
It wasn't a number. It was a death sentence. It was ten years of flipping skewers. It was a hundred boxing matches. It was a sum so unfathomably large that it completely crushed the air from Xing’s lungs.
"I'll get it," Xing whispered, the room spinning around him. "Just keep him alive. I'll get the money somehow."
***
An hour later, Xing sat on the hospital floor. His knees pulled to his chest. The harsh fluorescent lights buzzing like angry hornets above him. His phone felt slick with cold sweat in his shaking hand.
He had called every friends he know. They had either hung up or laughed. He had called the logistics warehouse, begging for a settlement, but they claimed Dingjie was an independent contractor and threatened legal action if Xing harassed them.
He was entirely, utterly out of options.
With trembling fingers, he scrolled to the only contact left in his phone. Professor Liu.
The phone rang three times before the distinguished voice answered. "Huang Xing? It's quite late. Your exhibition pieces are due in the studio tomorrow morning—"
"Professor," Xing interrupted. A wretched, desperate sob finally breaking through his teeth. "Professor Liu, I need help. Please."
There was a pause on the line. "Xing? What’s wrong? Where are you?"
"I'm at the hospital. My ... my partner. He was in an accident. He's in a coma." Xing pressed the heel of his hand hard into his eye, trying to stop the tears. "Professor, I need to sell my paintings. All of them. The exhibition pieces, the sketches, everything. I know you have contacts with gallery owners. I don't care how much they pay. Tell them they can have my entire portfolio for a hundred and fifty thousand. Please. I need cash by tomorrow."
Professor Liu let out a long, heavy sigh. It was the sound of a man who knew how the world worked, speaking to a boy who was about to be crushed by it.
"Xing, listen to me carefully," the professor said gently. "The art world does not work like that. Gallery owners are businessmen. If they smell desperation, they won't buy your art. They will exploit it. Even if I called my best contacts, appraising, authenticating, and transferring funds takes weeks. Sometimes months. You won't see a single yuan by tomorrow."
"But he's going to die!" Xing shrieked. The sound echoing down the sterile hallway, drawing the eyes of a passing nurse. He covered his mouth, lowering his voice to a frantic whisper. "He's going to die, Professor. I can't let him die. He gave up everything for me. I have nothing left to sell but my art!"
The line was dead silent for a long minute. All Xing could hear was his own ragged breathing and the distant, mechanical hiss of Dingjie’s ventilator through the glass.
"There is ... another way," Professor Liu finally said. His voice slow and heavily burdened. "But you are not going to like it, Xing."
"Anything," Xing begged instantly. "I'll do anything."
"The École des Beaux-Arts in Paris," the professor began. "They reached out to me last week. They are offering a singular, fully funded fellowship to one of our top students. I was going to offer it to you after the exhibition."
Xing frowned. His exhausted brain struggling to comprehend. "A fellowship? Professor, I can't think about school right now, I need—"
"Let me finish," Liu interrupted gently. "This isn't just a tuition waiver. The French government provides a massive, upfront relocation and living stipend to ensure the student can establish themselves in Paris without financial stress. It is disbursed the moment the contract is signed. It's equivalent to roughly four hundred thousand yuan."
Xing’s breath hitched. Four hundred thousand. It was enough for the surgery. It was enough for the ICU. It was enough to save his life.
"I'll take it," Xing gasped, scrambling to his feet. "Send me the contract right now. I'll sign it. Can the funds be wired to the hospital?"
"Yes, the funds can be diverted if you sign the emergency proxy forms," Professor Liu said. Then, the professor's voice dropped, thick with sorrow. "But Xing ... you must understand the terms of this fellowship. It is strictly audited by the French Ministry of Education. The visa and the stipend are for one student only. It does not cover dependents. It does not cover … partner."
Xing froze. The buzzing of the fluorescent lights suddenly sounded deafening.
"If you sign this contract," Professor Liu explained softly, delivering the final, fatal blow, "you are legally bound to board a plane to Paris in two months. You will live in their provided housing. And you will go alone."
The phone slipped slightly in Xing’s sweaty grip.
He looked through the glass partition. He looked at Dingjie, the boy who had dragged a broken chair off a rooftop, the boy who had kissed him in a damp basement, the man who had let his own blood spill onto concrete just so Xing could hold a paintbrush.
The lifeboat was right in front of him. It had enough gold to pay the ransom on Dingjie's life. But there was only one seat.
To save Dingjie’s life, Xing had to abandon him.
"Send the contract, Professor," Xing whispered. The tears streaming freely down his face. His voice entirely devoid of life. "Beggars can't be choosers after all."
***
The first thing Dingjie registered as he finally wake up from his coma was the sound. A rhythmic, piercing beeping sound that seemed to vibrate directly against his exposed skull. The second thing was the pain. It wasn't the dull, throbbing ache of a broken rib or a bruised jaw. It was a sharp, blinding agony behind his eyes, as if someone had driven a railroad spike through his temple and left it there.
He tried to turn his head, but a heavy, restrictive collar held his neck in place. He groaned. The sound tearing at a throat that felt like it had been scrubbed with sandpaper.
"Qiu Qiu?"
The voice was tiny, fragile, and trembling.
Dingjie forced his right eye open. His left eye wouldn't cooperate. It felt heavy and smothered under thick bandages. The light in the room was blindingly white. A sterile, chemical brightness that made his stomach heave.
Slowly, the blurry shape beside his bed came into focus.
Xing was sitting in a plastic hospital chair, leaning over the metal railing of the bed. He looked entirely translucent. The dark circles under his eyes were bruised, and his collarbones jutted out sharply from the collar of his sweater. But as Dingjie’s single, unfocused eye met his, Xing let out a broken, watery gasp.
"You're awake," Xing whispered. A tear immediately spilling over his lower lash line. He reached through the bed rails. His hands shaking violently as he gently cupped Dingjie's unbandaged cheek. His fingers were ice cold. "You're awake, Qiu Qiu. You're here."
Dingjie tried to speak, but his tongue felt like a dry sponge. "Water," he rasped.
Xing scrambled up. His hands fumbling with a small plastic cup and a sponge swab. He carefully moistened Dingjie’s cracked lips. The water tasted like chlorine and plastic, but it was enough to let Dingjie find his voice.
His brain was moving sluggishly, piecing together the fractured memories. The loading dock. The sound of snapping metal. The crushing weight.
He looked past Xing, taking in the sterile walls, the IV bags hanging from a metal pole, the complex monitors flashing numbers he didn't understand. And instantly, the ingrained terror of their poverty spiked through his chest, sharp enough to rival the pain in his head.
"Hospital," Dingjie choked out. Panic making the heart monitor beside him beep faster. He tried to lift his arm to pull the IV out, but his muscles felt like melted wax. "Xing ... we can't ... the cost...."
"Shh," Xing said instantly, leaning in close, pressing his forehead against the edge of the mattress. He caught Dingjie's weak hand and held it tightly in both of his. "Don't move, Qiu Qiu. Don't pull anything. You had surgery. A bad one."
"The money," Dingjie insisted. His chest was heaving under the thin hospital gown. His singular focus, even while actively dying, was the fact that a single night in this room probably cost more than a year of rent in their basement. "Take me home. We don't have the money for this room, Xing."
Xing looked down at their joined hands. He didn't blink. He didn't let his voice tremble. He drew upon a well of terrifying, cold acting skills he didn't know he possessed.
"I took care of it," Xing said. His voice was entirely steady.
Dingjie’s brow furrowed, pulling painfully at the stitches on his scalp. "How? How could you...?"
"Professor Liu," Xing lied, staring fixedly at Dingjie's calloused knuckles. "He ... he pulled some strings. He advanced me the money from the exhibition sales. A gallery owner in Chaoyang bought the whole portfolio, Qiu. They paid upfront. It’s enough. The surgery, this room, the medicine. It’s all paid in full."
Dingjie stared at him. His brain was too foggy, his body too broken to do the math to question why a gallery would pay hundreds of thousands of yuan for a student's unfinished portfolio.
He just looked at Xing’s face. Xing looked exhausted, but he was smiling a small, reassuring smile.
"All of it?" Dingjie asked. His voice was barely a breath.
"All of it," Xing confirmed softly. "We don't owe the hospital a single cent. The meter isn't running."
A profound exhaustion washed over Dingjie, extinguishing the spike of panic. The painkillers pumping through his IV were pulling him back under. A dark, heavy tide dragging him away from the waking world.
He didn't have the energy to pry. If Xing said the bills were handled, then Dingjie would believe him. He had to.
"Okay," Dingjie slurred. His eyes drooping shut. "Okay. Good. I'll get better faster ... so we can go home. Don't want to ... waste the money."
"Just sleep, Qiu Qiu," Xing whispered. "Just heal."
Dingjie’s breathing evened out. The mechanical beep of the monitor returning to a steady, rhythmic pace.
Xing let go of Dingjie’s hand and slowly sank back into the hard plastic chair.
The silence of the ICU pressed in on him, heavy and suffocating. Xing stared at the man sleeping in the bed, and a hysterical, bitter laugh bubbled up in his chest, dying before it reached his lips.
The irony of the moment was so absolute, so devastating, it felt like a physical blow.
He had just looked Dingjie dead in the eye and lied without a single stutter. He had painted a beautiful, comforting picture. A generous professor, an eager gallery owner, a sudden windfall of clean money. It was a flawless masterpiece of deception.
And he had learned exactly how to do it from the man lying in front of him.
Xing remembered the night Dingjie had stumbled into their freezing basement, his face a ruined landscape of purple and black, handing over a stack of blood soaked bills and claiming a sports car had hit him. Xing remembered the righteous fury he had felt when he uncovered the truth of the underground ring. He remembered screaming at Dingjie, How could you lie to me? How could you make me a part of this?
Dingjie had built a paper house of lies to protect Xing from the harsh reality of their poverty. And now, Xing was building a new one right over Dingjie’s hospital bed.
They were trapped in a horrifying, mirrored cycle of sacrifice. Dingjie had sold his blood, bone by bone, to buy Xing’s canvas. Now, Xing had sold their future, year by year, to buy Dingjie’s breath. Both of them were terrified of the world, but even more terrified of letting the other suffer the consequences of it.
I am doing the exact same thing, Xing thought, his hands gripping the armrests of the chair until his knuckles turned white. I am hiding the knife behind my back and telling him everything is fine.
The contract for the École des Beaux-Arts in France was already signed and mailed. The deposit, the price tag on Dingjie’s life, had cleared the hospital's accounts. The lifeboat had been purchased, and it only had one seat.
Dingjie had lied to be the breadwinner. Xing was lying to be the savior. It was the exact same sin, committed for the exact same reason. A love so violently protective it demanded they destroy themselves to keep the other whole.
Xing leaned his head back against the cold cinderblock wall, letting the tears fall freely in the sterile white room. He was keeping Dingjie alive. But the moment Dingjie was strong enough to stand on his own two feet, Xing was going to have to execute the rest of the lie. He was going to have to pack his bags, board a flight to Paris, and break the heart of the only man he had ever loved.
***
Coming back to the basement should have felt like a defeat, but after a month in the sterile, nightmarish limbo of the ICU, the damp concrete walls felt like an embrace.
Dingjie’s recovery was a grueling, humiliating process. The right side of his head had been shaved for the craniotomy, leaving a vicious, curved pink scar that snaked behind his ear. He had lost a terrifying amount of weight. His broad, muscular frame whittled down to sharp angles and protruding collarbones. Simply walking from the mattress to the small bathroom left him dizzy and gasping for air. His vision occasionally swimming with dark spots.
He hated it. He hated being weak. But Xing wouldn't let him lift a finger.
They entered a strange, fragile period of domestic isolation. A safe bubble suspended in time. Dingjie wasn't allowed to work, and Xing had requested special permission to complete his final thesis pieces from home to act as Dingjie's caretaker.
For the first two weeks, it was a bittersweet paradise.
Xing would set up his easel near the sliver of the ground level window to catch the weak afternoon light. Dingjie would lie on the mattress, his head propped up on a pile of pillows, simply watching Xing paint. The rhythmic, soft sound of the brush against the canvas became Dingjie’s lullaby. Xing would talk softly as he worked, explaining his color choices, entirely content. Every hour, Xing would put down his palette, walk over, and press a gentle kiss to Dingjie’s unscarred temple, checking his temperature.
It was the closest thing to peace they had ever known. But Dingjie’s mind, shaped by years of ruthless survival, never truly stopped calculating.
The suspicion didn't hit him all at once. It seeped in slowly, dripping like the rusted water pipe in the corner.
It started with the cold. Or rather, the lack of it.
One evening, Dingjie woke up from a deep, medically induced nap. He expected the familiar, biting Beijing chill to be settled over his face. Instead, the room was incredibly warm. He turned his head slowly, his brow furrowing. Sitting in the corner of the room, glowing a cheerful, fiery orange, was a brand new electric space heater.
Dingjie stared at it. Space heaters were notorious electricity drains. Running one for even a few hours a day would quadruple their utility bill.
When Xing returned from the market, his arms were loaded with plastic bags.
"I bought pork ribs," Xing announced cheerfully, setting the bags onto the small wooden crate. "And lotus root. I'm going to make a proper broth. The doctor said you need collagen and protein to help the bone heal."
Dingjie pushed himself up on his elbows, wincing slightly. He looked at the bags. Peeking out from the top of one was a cluster of imported green grapes. It was a luxury fruit that cost a small fortune in the early spring.
"Xing," Dingjie started, his voice raspy. He pointed a shaking finger at the corner. "Where did the heater come from?"
Xing didn't miss a beat. He began unpacking the groceries, his back turned to Dingjie. "Oh, the landlord’s son was throwing it out. The coil was slightly bent, so I asked if I could have it. I managed to fix it with a pair of pliers. It works perfectly."
It was a plausible lie. Xing had picked up a few mechanical tricks from watching Dingjie over the years. But then Dingjie looked at the groceries.
"And the ribs? The grapes?" Dingjie asked, his chest tightening. "Xing, we counted the money in the tin. It was enough for the rent and the exhibition, but only if we ate cabbage and plain noodles. If you're spending this much on food...."
"I told you," Xing interrupted, turning around with a bright, reassuring smile that didn't quite reach his exhausted eyes. "The gallery owner bought the whole portfolio. They even paid a small bonus stipend for my materials. We have plenty of breathing room, Qiu Qiu. You don't need to worry about the math anymore. I'm the provider right now."
Dingjie wanted to believe him. God, he wanted to just close his eyes, eat the hot soup, and pretend the world wasn't waiting to crush them. He nodded slowly, letting his head fall back against the pillows.
But the breathing room didn't stop at soup.
Three days later, Xing came home with a thick duvet. "A gift from Professor Liu," Xing claimed smoothly. "He said he had an extra one in his guest room and knew our basement was drafty."
A week after that, Xing unpacked a brand new set premium canvas stretchers. "Discounted at the campus store because of a scuff mark," Xing explained before Dingjie could even open his mouth.
Dingjie wasn't stupid. He was uneducated, and he couldn't pass a math test to save his life, but he understood the brutal economics of their reality.
Professor Liu was a stern academic, not a charity worker handing out luxury bedding. Gallery owners were vultures who bought low and sold high. They didn't hand out bonus stipends to unknown students. And landlords in Chaoyang didn't throw away perfectly functioning appliances.
Dingjie lay awake at night. The glowing orange coils of the space heater mocking him in the dark.
He felt a creeping, suffocating dread crawling up his throat. He was trapped in a golden cage. He couldn't work. He could barely walk to the end of the street without his vision blurring. He had completely surrendered control of their survival to Xing.
Where was the money coming from?
Did Xing go back to the barbecue stall at night while Dingjie was asleep?
No, Dingjie checked Xing's hands every morning. There were no new burns, and he didn't smell of grease. Had Xing taken out a predatory loan from the neighborhood sharks? The thought made Dingjie's blood run cold. He knew what those men did to people who couldn't pay. He was the living proof of their brutality.
One afternoon, while Xing was at the campus submitting paperwork for his graduation, Dingjie finally forced himself out of bed.
His legs trembled violently. His atrophied muscles screaming in protest. He held onto the wall, taking slow, agonizing steps toward Xing's side of the room. He hated snooping. He felt like a traitor invading Xing's privacy, but the anxiety was eating him alive. He needed to know if Xing was in danger. He needed to know if there was a loan shark's ledger hidden under the mattress.
Dingjie reached the small wooden crate Xing used as a desk. He pulled open the small drawer.
Inside were Xing's pencils, a few kneaded erasers, and a stack of mail.
Dingjie fumbled through the envelopes. Electricity bill. A flyer for a local supermarket. And then, at the bottom of the pile, a thick envelope made of expensive, watermarked paper.
It looked exactly like the letter from CAFA that had started this entire nightmare years ago. But this one didn't have a Chinese crest. The postage stamps were foreign.
Dingjie leaned tiredly against the concrete wall. His breath coming in shallow gasps as he slid his thumb under the flap of the unsealed envelope. He pulled out a thick packet of documents printed in both French and Chinese.
At the top of the page, in bold, elegant lettering, were the words :
Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale - Bourse d'Excellence
École des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
Dingjie’s limited vocabulary didn't matter. He could read the name Huang Xing typed clearly on the recipient line. He could read the staggering financial figures listed under the ‘Living Stipend Disbursement.’ And, most devastatingly, he could read the stark, bolded condition at the very bottom of the first page.
This fellowship is strictly granted to the individual applicant. Sponsorship of dependents, spouses, or partners is explicitly prohibited under this visa category.
The paper slipped from Dingjie’s trembling fingers, fluttering to the damp concrete floor.
The space heater suddenly felt like it was burning the oxygen directly out of his lungs. The pieces snapped together with horrifying, violent clarity.
There was no generous gallery owner. There was no bonus stipend.
Xing had sold his future. He had accepted a one way ticket to the other side of the planet, entirely alone, and used the huge, upfront foreign government stipend to pay for Dingjie’s brain surgery, the pork ribs, the space heater, and the new blanket.
Dingjie slid down the wall, clutching his chest as a phantom agony tore through his heart, far worse than any punch he had ever taken in the ring. Xing was leaving him. Xing was crossing an ocean. And he was doing it, ironically and tragically, to keep Dingjie alive.
***
The metal door scraped open, letting in a gust of cool spring air and the sound of Xing’s exhausted but relieved sigh.
"Qiu Qiu, I got the graduation paperwork stamped," Xing called out, turning to lock the deadbolt. "The lines at the registrar were a nightmare, but—"
Xing turned around, and the words died in his throat.
Dingjie was sitting on the cold concrete floor. His back pressed against the wall beside the makeshift desk. His chest was heaving. His face was pale and slick with a cold sweat. Scattered across the floor around him, like fallen snow, were the elegant, expensive pages of the French fellowship contract.
The silence in the basement was absolute, broken only by the cheerful, mocking hum of the electric space heater.
Xing dropped his bag. It hit the floor with a dull thud. "Qiu Qiu ... you shouldn't be out of bed. Your head—"
"France," Dingjie croaked. His voice cracking violently. He looked up. His single good eye red rimmed and filled with a devastating, primal betrayal. "You're going to France and you didn't even tell me about it. Were you going to tell me when you're already halfway across the ocean?"
Xing froze. His hands trembling. The meticulously constructed lie had just shattered into a million irreparable pieces. "Qiu Qiu, please let me explain. Get back in bed, you’re shaking—"
"Don't touch me!" Dingjie shouted. The sudden volume sending a spike of blinding agony through his healing skull. He winced, clutching his head, but his gaze remained fiercely locked on Xing. "You bought the ribs. You paid for the surgery. You bought my life with a ticket to Paris. A ticket for one."
Xing took a slow, terrified step forward. Tears already brimming in his eyes. "I had to sign it to get the stipend disbursement. The hospital wouldn't book the surgical theater without the deposit. They were going to let you die, Qiu."
"So you wanted to leave me?" Dingjie demanded. His voice thick with tears. His pride bleeding out onto the concrete. The fear he had carried since they were teenagers, the fear that he was just a temporary anchor tying a soaring bird to the mud, was finally materializing. "You know I can't follow you all the way to France, Xing! I can't even speak the language! I can't even pay for a train ticket to the airport, let alone a flight across the world!"
"It's not about leaving you!" Xing cried out. His voice echoing sharply off the damp walls. "I didn't want to go! I had no choice! You almost died!"
"I'm feeling like dying already!" Dingjie roared. The confession tearing from his throat in a wretched, agonizing sob.
The words hit Xing like a physical blow. He staggered back. A hand flying to his mouth.
Dingjie looked at the French documents on the floor. The stark, black ink confirming his obsolescence. He had lost his physical strength. He couldn't lift a box. He couldn't step into a ring. He had nothing left to offer Xing, and now Xing had found a way to buy their survival without him. The realization made Dingjie feel incredibly, utterly worthless.
"You're tired of it," Dingjie choked out. His chest caving in on itself. He looked away, unable to bear the sight of Xing's tears. "You're tired of the poverty. You're tired of the basement, and the cheap food, and ... and a boyfriend who can't even read a gallery contract. I get it. I do."
"Qiu Qiu, stop it—"
"If you wanted to break up so badly, then it's better earlier!" Dingjie shouted, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to deliver the fatal blow before Xing could do it to him. He was burning his own house down to save Xing the trouble. "Just go! Pack your bags and go to Paris. We're done, Xing. Break it off now so I don't have to sit here and wait for you to realize I'm not worth coming back for!"
"No!" Xing shrieked. A sound of pure, unadulterated panic.
He lunged across the room, dropping to his knees on the hard floor right into the scattered papers. He threw his arms around Dingjie’s neck, mindful of the scar, but holding on with a desperate, crushing grip.
"No, no, no," Xing sobbed hysterically, burying his face in the crook of Dingjie's neck. "Don't say that. Please don't say that. I will never leave you. I am never breaking up with you."
Dingjie tried to push him away. His pride demanding he maintain some shred of armor, but his arms were too weak, and his heart was too broken. "Xing, the paper says—"
"I know what the paper says!" Xing wept. His tears soaking into Dingjie's collar. "I know! The visa is only for me right now. But that's only the beginning! I have a plan, Qiu Qiu. I swear I have a plan. We can still communicate. Every single day. I will buy you a laptop before I leave."
Xing pulled back just enough to frame Dingjie's face with his trembling, delicated hands. He forced Dingjie to look at him.
"I am going to save every single euro I receive from the French fundings," Xing said. His voice was ragged but filled with a manic, desperate conviction. "I will eat plain bread. I won't turn on the heat in my dorm. I will save everything, and in a few months, when you are stable and your head is fully healed, I will have enough cash to buy your flight. You'll follow me. We will live in a tiny room in Paris, just like this one, or maybe a better yet, and we'll be together."
Dingjie stared at him. His breath hitching. The fear was still a cold knot in his stomach. "Why? Why go through all that? Why drag a broken guy with a ruined head all the way to Europe?"
"Because you are my home," Xing sobbed, his voice breaking entirely.
Xing dropped his forehead against Dingjie's. His hands sliding down to grip Dingjie's trembling shoulders.
"Please," Xing begged, the words pouring out of him like a prayer. "Please, let me provide for you now. You have done so much for us. You bled for us. You broke your bones so I could hold a paintbrush. You made me able to finish my studies. If you hadn't taken my burdens, I would still be working at a bookstore in Shanghai."
Xing leaned back, looking deep into Dingjie’s eye. His expression completely stripped of fear, replaced by a fierce, undeniable devotion.
"Now it's my turn," Xing whispered fiercely. "Now it's my job to be the breadwinner in this family. You protected me. Now let me protect you. Please, Qiu Qiu ... believe me."
The silence settled over the room again, but this time, it wasn't thick with betrayal. It was heavy with the profound, crushing weight of their reversed roles.
Dingjie looked at the boy he had dragged out of an abusive home. The boy he had starved for. The boy who was now a man, standing on the precipice of a brilliant international career, yet sitting on a freezing concrete floor, begging to carry the weight of their survival.
Dingjie’s pride, the raw, defensive armor he had worn his entire life, finally cracked.
He reached out with a trembling hand and pulled Xing back into his chest. He buried his face in Xing’s hair, inhaling the faint, familiar scent of turpentine and clean soap.
"Oh, A-Xing," Dingjie whispered. The fight entirely draining out of him, leaving behind only a bittersweet, aching exhaustion. "When will we get our peace?"
Xing let out a shuddering breath, wrapping his arms tight around Dingjie’s waist, crying quietly against his chest. They sat together on the floor, surrounded by the French documents that dictated their unpredictable future. The reality was brutal. They were going to be separated by thousands of miles, an ocean, and a huge time difference. But as Dingjie held the new breadwinner of their makeshift family, he finally accepted the bitter pill of his own rescue.
After all, what other choice did Dingjie have but to accept the harsh reality?
***
The CAFA grand auditorium was a cavern of polished mahogany, crimson velvet, and golden light. It was a space designed to celebrate the elite, filled with the murmurs of proud, wealthy parents clutching big flower bouquets and flashing expensive cameras.
Dingjie sat in the very last row of the upper balcony, as far away from the stage as he could get while still having a clear view.
He was wearing a white button down shirt. One Xing had bought for him using the French stipend. It fit perfectly over his broad shoulders, hiding the fading yellow bruises on his ribs and the lingering stiffness in his right arm. But nothing could hide the ugly, angry pink scar that curved behind his right ear. He kept his head tilted slightly, letting the shadows of the balcony obscure it from the families sitting nearby.
He felt entirely out of place. A rough stone sitting in a velvet jewelry box. Yet, his eye was fixed unblinkingly on the stage.
"Huang Xing."
The name echoed through the sound system. To the professors and the wealthy families in the front rows, it was just the name of a prodigy, a talented student who had secured an incredibly rare international fellowship.
But to Dingjie, it was the sound of a war being won.
Xing walked across the stage. He was dressed in the traditional academic robes, the dark fabric making his pale skin and bright eyes stand out. He looked radiant. He looked like the boy on the rooftop who had painted on a discarded noodle box, finally stepping into the frame he was always meant for.
As Xing approached the dean to accept the diploma, he didn't look at the flashing cameras of the university press. He didn't linger to talk with the professors.
Instead, Xing tilted his head up. His eyes scanning the shadowed upper balcony until he found the solitary figure sitting in the back row.
Across the vast, glittering auditorium, their eyes locked.
Xing smiled. A small, trembling, entirely private smile. He took the diploma, his delicate hands gripping the leather firmly, and gave a subtle, almost imperceptible nod upward.
We did it, that look said. This is ours.
Dingjie’s breath hitched. A profound, overwhelming wave of emotion crashed into him, so intense it made his healing ribs ache. Tears, hot and fast, blurred his vision. He didn't bother to wipe them away.
That piece of paper was their shared masterpiece. It was painted with Xing’s brilliant mind, but the canvas had been woven from Dingjie’s sweat at the docks, his shivering nights on a delivery scooter, and the blood he had left on the concrete floor in Fengtai. They had beaten the crushing, merciless jaws of the poverty they were born into.
For a fleeting, perfect minute, as the auditorium erupted into applause, Dingjie felt a soaring, victorious joy.
Then, the ceremony ended, the house lights came up, and the crushing reality of tomorrow stepped into the room.
Later that evening, the basement was suffocatingly quiet.
Xing’s diploma sat on the small wooden crate, right next to a half packed suitcase. The visual was a knife to Dingjie’s chest.
Xing was meticulously folding a stack of sweaters, his movements stiff and anxious. His flight to Charles de Gaulle Airport was in exactly thirty six hours.
Dingjie sat on the mattress, watching him. The joy of the graduation had entirely evaporated, leaving behind a cold, hollow dread that seemed to hollow out his bones.
"I bought an international calling card," Xing was saying. His voice overly bright. A thin layer of veil over a deep panic. "And I already set up the video chat software on the laptop I bought you. It’s a seven hour time difference, so when I wake up for morning classes, it will be mid afternoon here. We can talk while you're resting."
"Okay," Dingjie replied. His voice was a flat, empty rasp.
Xing stopped folding. He looked at Dingjie, his shoulders slumping. He walked over, dropping to his knees by the mattress, and rested his chin on Dingjie’s knee.
"You're drifting away from me again, Qiu Qiu," Xing whispered, reaching out to trace the knuckles of Dingjie's good hand. "Please, don't shut down. I can't leave if you're looking at me like that."
"I'm not shutting down," Dingjie lied softly, though he couldn't bring himself to meet Xing's eyes. He stared at the open suitcase instead. "I'm just ... trying to memorize the room with you in it."
The truth was, Dingjie was drowning in a sea of his own powerlessness.
For years, whenever a problem arose, Dingjie had a simple, brutal solution. He worked harder. If they were hungry, he took a night shift. If they needed paint, he bled in a ring. He had solved every equation of their lives with his own physical suffering.
But he couldn't fight an ocean. He couldn't punch a time zone.
His body was broken. The doctor had made it explicitly clear. One more concussive blow to the head, and Dingjie would likely be paralyzed or dead. The underground ring was permanently closed to him. He was a gladiator without a sword, sitting in a damp basement, watching the love of his life pack his bags for a city of lights he could only dream of.
"I'll send for you," Xing said fiercely, reading the despair in Dingjie's silence. He squeezed Dingjie's knee. "Six months, Qiu Qiu. Maybe less. As soon as I find a cheap apartment and bank the rest of the stipend, I will buy your ticket."
Dingjie finally looked down at Xing. He looked at the beautiful, earnest face of the boy who had just conquered CAFA.
And in that moment, Dingjie experienced the most painful, heartbreaking revelation of his entire life.
He shouldn't come back for me, Dingjie thought. The realization ringing with a clear, agonizing truth.
Xing was going to Paris. He was going to walk through the Louvre. He was going to drink espresso in sunlit cafes with European artists who spoke of philosophy and high culture. Xing belonged in the light.
And who was Dingjie?
He was an uneducated high school graduate with a traumatic brain injury. He was a boy from the slums whose only real talent was taking a beating. If Dingjie went to France, he would be completely dependent on Xing. He would be a luggage, dragging Xing down into a new, foreign kind of poverty.
Even if I could fight again, Dingjie realized with a sinking sorrow, I shouldn't. He deserves better.
Xing deserved a partner who could walk into a Parisian gallery without feeling like a filthy beast in a glass house. He deserved success, unburdened by guilt. He deserved a life where he didn't have to constantly check his boyfriend's ribs for bruises.
Dingjie loved Xing with a violence that terrified him, but love, he was finally learning, didn't mean caging the butterfly you had bled to set free. It meant opening the window, even if it meant freezing in the draft.
Dingjie reached down, threading his fingers through Xing’s hair. His thumb gently brushing against Xing's cheek.
"You're going to be the best artist in that whole country," Dingjie whispered, forcing a smile that felt like it was tearing his face in half. "You're going to paint things that make those rich French bastards weep."
"I'm going to paint you," Xing promised, leaning into the touch, closing his eyes. "I'm going to paint the man who groomed my wings."
Dingjie’s heart shattered silently in his chest. He leaned down and kissed Xing's forehead, sealing his own quiet, devastating vow. He would let Xing go. He would smile at the airport. He would answer the video calls. But he would never, ever let Xing spend his bright, beautiful future dragging a broken man out of the dark.
***
Beijing Capital International Airport felt like an alien spacecraft designed specifically to abduct the person Dingjie loved.
The scale of it was terrifying. The ceilings soared impossibly high. A vast canopy of steel and glass bathed in an artificial, clinical daylight that made no shadows. The air smelled sterile, tinged with the faint, chemical odor of jet fuel and expensive perfume. Above the constant, low roar of thousands of people, a disembodied voice echoed from the speakers, announcing departures to cities Dingjie couldn't even pronounce.
London. Frankfurt. Paris.
They stood in front of the International Departures security gate. It was a literal line drawn on the polished tile floor. Beyond the glass partitions, only ticketed passengers were allowed.
Dingjie stood with his good hand resting on the handle of Xing’s suitcase. He had insisted on pushing it all the way from the subway, his right arm tucked stiffly into his jacket pocket, his head throbbing under the harsh airport lights.
Xing was wearing a new, warm trench coat for the European weather. His passport and the boarding pass were clutched so tightly in his hand that the paper was beginning to crumple. He was staring at the glass security gates as if they were a firing squad.
"Flight AF125 to Paris, Charles de Gaulle, is now boarding all zones," the overhead speaker chimed, the English immediately followed by the robotic Mandarin translation.
Xing flinched violently at the sound.
He spun around to face Dingjie, and the fragile composure he had maintained all morning shattered instantly. The panic in his eyes was wild and absolute.
"I can't," Xing gasped, taking a step back from the gates. His chest heaved. His breathing turning shallow and erratic. "I can't do it, Qiu Qiu. I'm not going."
"Xing," Dingjie said softly. His heart dropping into his stomach.
"No, listen to me," Xing pleaded, dropping his carry on bag to the floor. He grabbed the lapels of Dingjie’s jacket with both hands, shaking him slightly. Tears were already spilling over his cheeks, frantic and hot. "I'll go back to the registrar. I'll tell them there was a family emergency. I'll return the stipend money. We can pay the hospital back in installments. I'll get a job at the bookstore—"
"Hey. Stop." Dingjie let go of the suitcase. He reached up, ignoring the twinge in his ribs, and wrapped his large, calloused hands over Xing’s trembling, delicate fingers. He squeezed them, anchoring Xing to the floor. "Look at me."
Xing shook his head, burying his face against Dingjie’s chest, hiding from the airport, from the announcements, from the future. "I'm leaving you here broken. How am I supposed to sit on a plane for twelve hours knowing you're going back to that freezing basement by yourself? I'm abandoning you."
"You are saving me," Dingjie corrected. His voice a low, steady rumble against Xing’s ear. He had to be the strong one now. He had to be the stone wall that Xing could push against to launch himself forward. "If you don't get on that plane, Xing ... then every punch I took, every bone I broke, the scar on my head ... it all means nothing. It was all for nothing."
Xing let out a wretched, heartbroken wail. His fingers curling tightly into Dingjie's shirt. "It wasn't for nothing! It kept us alive!"
"Alive isn't enough anymore," Dingjie whispered fiercely. He stepped back just an inch, forcing Xing to lift his head and meet his gaze.
Dingjie’s tired eye was calm, offering a perfect, flawless mirror of reassurance. But inside, his soul was screaming. He was looking at the boy he had shared a single bowl of noodles with, the boy who had shared his first kiss in the rain in a Shanghai alleyway. He was looking at his entire world, and he was about to push it away.
"I need you to succeed," Dingjie said. His thumb gently swiping a tear from Xing’s cheek. "I need you to go to that city, and I need you to paint things that make them stop breathing. I need you to be the breadwinner, Xing. Remember? If we go back now, we'll be drowning in debts again, trying to payback the stipend that we used. And I can't help with that again. I’m … retired, Xing. I’m tired."
"Six months," Xing sobbed, repeating the mantra they had clung to for the last thirty six hours. "Just six months. I'll eat nothing but bread. I'll save every euro. I am buying your ticket, Qiu Qiu. You have to promise me you'll get on the plane when I send the ticket."
Dingjie felt the familiar, bitter taste of the white lie coat his tongue. He looked at Xing, so beautiful, so terrified, so destined for greatness, and swore the most painful oath of his life.
"I promise," Dingjie lied smoothly. His voice never wavering. "Send the ticket, and I'll be there."
"Final boarding call for Flight AF125 to Paris," the speaker droned, merciless and final.
"You have to go," Dingjie whispered.
That was the vow.
Xing threw his arms around Dingjie’s neck, crushing their bodies together. Dingjie wrapped his good arm around Xing's waist, burying his face in Xing's hair, inhaling the scent of him as if trying to store it in his lungs for the rest of his life.
They shared one last desperate, messy, agonizing kiss. It tasted of salt, of shared blood, of damp concrete, and of endings. They kissed like starving men, trying to communicate a thousand unsayable things through the press of their lips.
I love you.
I'm sorry.
Thank you.
Don't forget me.
When they finally pulled apart, they were both gasping for air.
"I love you," Xing wept, picking up his carry on bag. His hand lingering on Dingjie's arm until the very last second. "I love you more than art. I love you more than breathing."
"I love you too," Dingjie said, offering a small, brave smile. "Now go. Before they close the gate."
Xing turned around. He handed his boarding pass to the security officer. He stepped through the glass doors, dragging his worthy belonging.
He walked backward for as long as he could. His eyes locked on Dingjie, tears streaming down his face, waving his hand. Dingjie stood tall. He kept his shoulders squared. He kept the small, reassuring smile plastered on his face, raising his good hand to wave back. He looked like an unbreakable pillar of support.
He held that pose until Xing turned the corner toward the international terminal.
The moment Xing disappeared from view, the invisible scaffolding holding Dingjie together instantly vaporized.
The smile dropped. His broad shoulders caved inward. The sheer, crushing gravity of what he had just done hit him with the force of a falling building. The airport, with its clinical lights and indifferent crowds, suddenly felt like a graveyard.
Dingjie staggered backward. His knees giving out. He hit one of the cold, metal pillars near the ticketing counter and slid down until he was sitting on the polished tile floor. He pulled his knees to his chest, wrapping his good arm around them, and buried his face in his jacket.
There, in the middle of the busiest airport in the country, the boy who had never cried when his father beat him, the boy who had never shed a tear when his ribs were cracked in the ring, finally broke. He wept with a silent, violent, full body agony, mourning the loss of the only light he had ever known, entirely consumed by the long distance and the dark.
***
The seven hour time difference became the new, cruel metronome of Dingjie’s life.
When the sun set over the smog choked sprawl of Beijing, plunging the damp coffin room into its familiar, freezing darkness, the sun was just reaching its zenith over the Seine.
At 10 p.m. every night, Dingjie would sit cross legged on the mattress, balancing the expensive silver laptop Xing had bought him on his knees. He would wait for the chime of the video call software, staring at the black screen until his reflection appeared. Haggard, his hair grown out to hide the pink scar behind his ear, the dark circles under his eyes carved deep into his skin.
Then, the screen would flash to life, and the basement would suddenly be filled with Parisian light.
"Qiu Qiu!" Xing’s voice, filtered through thousands of miles of fiber optic cables, still managed to sound like a physical embrace.
Xing was sitting by a large, arched window in his dorm in the 6th arrondissement. Behind him, Dingjie could see the slanted rooftops of Paris, bathed in golden afternoon sunlight. Xing looked ... breathtaking. The anxiety that had constantly pinched his brow in Beijing was entirely gone. He wore a loose fitting linen shirt speckled with fresh paint, his hair messy, his eyes bright and manic with inspiration. He even looked a little plumpier than he was before departing from Beijing.
"You look tired, Qiu Qiu," Xing said, leaning closer to his webcam. His smile faltering slightly. "Are you sleeping? You promised me you wouldn't take the early shift at the mail office."
"I'm sleeping," Dingjie lied, forcing his lips into a warm, easy smile. He deliberately kept his own lamp dim so the cheap webcam wouldn't pick up the stark exhaustion on his face. "Just a long day. Tell me about the Louvre. Did you finally see it?"
Xing’s face instantly lit up. For the next hour, the damp basement was filled with stories of a world Dingjie couldn't even fathom. Xing spoke of standing in front of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa until his legs went numb. He spoke of his professors, who debated art theory in rapid fire French over tiny cups of espresso just like Dingjie used to say. He showed Dingjie his hands, no longer blistered from a barbecue grill, but stained with vibrant, expensive European pigments.
Dingjie listened to every word, his heart swelling with a massive, devastating pride.
He made it, Dingjie thought, watching Xing’s hands move animatedly on the screen. The butterfly is finally flying.
"And look," Xing said excitedly, minimizing his video window. A moment later, a sharp ping sounded from Dingjie’s cracked phone sitting on the crate.
Dingjie picked it up. It was a notification from their shared bank account.
International Transfer : +8,000 CNY.
Dingjie stared at the glowing numbers. Eight thousand yuan. It was a staggering amount of money. It was more than Dingjie used to make in two months of breaking his back at the logistics warehouse and shedding blood in the Fengtai ring combined.
"My professor helped me sell three pieces of my painting studies I did in my first week," Xing’s voice echoed from the laptop speakers, bursting with pride. "They loved them, Qiu Qiu. I set aside my rent for the month, and I sent the rest to the shared account. I looked up flights. If I can sell one of my oil canvases next month, I'll have enough for your ticket. You can come by October."
Dingjie’s throat closed up. He looked at his own hands, resting on his knees. They were still calloused, but the cuts had healed. That morning, he had worked a six hour shift sorting mail at the local post office, earning a pitiful sixty yuan. He had deposited it into the shared account on his walk home.
His sixty yuan sat next to Xing's eight thousand.
The visual representation of the widening chasm between them was almost too much to bear. Dingjie was no longer the provider. He wasn't the shield. He was a dependent, sitting in the dark, being kept alive by the genius of the boy he used to protect.
"Xing, you need to save that for yourself," Dingjie rasped. His pride stinging. A bitter pill he forced himself to swallow. "Food is expensive there. Buy a warm coat. I don't need this much—"
"I am the breadwinner now, Qiu Dingjie," Xing interrupted fiercely. His tone brooking no argument. "That was the deal. Let me take care of you. Promise me you'll buy meat tomorrow. And turn on the space heater."
"Okay," Dingjie whispered. "I promise."
When the call finally ended, the screen went black, and the basement was plunged back into its suffocating silence. Dingjie closed the laptop. The quiet was absolute, pressing against his eardrums.
He didn't turn on the space heater. He pulled his thin jacket tighter instead around his shoulders.
The next morning at the post office sorting facility, the physical reality of his broken body began to demand attention.
Dingjie stood at the conveyor belt, his job was simple. Read the zip code on the envelopes and toss them into the corresponding canvas bins. It was mindless, easy work. But halfway through his shift, a dull, throbbing ache began to pulse behind his right temple. Right where the crane hook had shattered his skull.
He blinked hard, rubbing his right eye with the heel of his hand.
When he opened it again, the envelope in his hand was blurry. Not just out of focus, but partially obscured. There was a gray, cloudy smudge in the center of his vision on the right side. He closed his left eye to test it.
The numbers on the envelope disappeared entirely into the gray fog.
Panic, cold and sharp, spiked through his chest. He dropped the envelope. He remembered the neurosurgeon in the ICU, speaking to Xing through the glass partition.
A piece of fractured bone pressing against the optic nerve ... severe secondary swelling….
He rubbed his eye frantically, trying to wipe away a smudge that was written into his own damaged nerves. It didn't go away. If anything, as the hours passed and the strain increased, the gray spot grew larger, eating away at the edges of his peripheral vision.
He stumbled out of the post office at the end of his shift. The world tilted and nauseating. The bustling Beijing street looked flat and disjointed. Depth perception was becoming a guessing game.
That night, he didn't tell Xing.
When the laptop chimed, Dingjie positioned himself so the right side of his face was slightly in shadow. He smiled. He listened to Xing talk about a trip to the Musée d'Orsay. He praised Xing’s sketches.
But when the call ended, the true torture began.
Xing had emailed him high resolution photographs of his latest thesis project. A huge sprawling oil painting of the Beijing subway, re-imagined with the vibrant, chaotic colors of a Parisian sunset. It was a masterpiece of blending two worlds.
Dingjie opened the image file. The harsh blue light of the screen illuminated his pale, exhausted face in the dark room.
He leaned in close to the screen, wanting to see the texture of the brushstrokes Xing was so proud of. He wanted to see the subtle blending of orange and blue sky that Xing had spent twenty minutes describing on the call.
But as he stared at the screen, the gray smudge in his right eye obscured the center of the painting. The vibrant colors washed out into a muddy, indistinct blur.
Dingjie let out a frustrated, ragged breath. He raised his hand and covered his right eye entirely, relying solely on his left to view the art.
The image sharpened, but the metaphor was a physical knife twisting in his gut.
He was losing him. Not just to the distance, or the time zones, or the massive disparity in their finances. He was literally losing the ability to see Xing's world. Xing was evolving into a creature of light, color, and breathtaking detail, and Dingjie was slowly, irreversibly fading into a broken, gray blur.
Dingjie sat alone in the freezing basement. His hand clamped tightly over his failing eye, staring at the beautiful painting on the screen until his remaining good eye burned with unshed tears. He was a man made of dirt, watching his flower bloom on the other side of the world, knowing that soon, he wouldn't even be able to see the petals.
***
The gray smudge did not stay a smudge. Over the next three months, it thickened, darkened, and spread, like black ink slowly blooming in a glass of water.
Dingjie sat on a hard plastic chair in a crowded, underfunded district clinic. He couldn't go back to the top tier neurosurgeon at the main hospital. That required Xing’s stipend, and Dingjie refused to touch another cent of it.
The overworked ophthalmologist clicked off the harsh penlight and let out a tired sigh.
"Read the third line on the chart, please," the doctor said, pointing to the wall.
Dingjie covered his left eye. He stared straight ahead. There was no chart. There was no wall. There was only a suffocating, impenetrable void.
"I can't see the wall," Dingjie said flatly.
The doctor nodded, writing something on a cheap clipboard. "It’s traumatic optic neuropathy. The blunt force from the accident caused micro fractures in the orbital canal. The swelling was treated, but the optic nerve was starved of blood for too long. It is slowly dying. Atrophy."
"Can you fix it?" Dingjie asked, though he already knew the answer. His voice sounded hollow in the small room.
"No," the doctor replied gently, closing the file. "The damage is irreversible. Within a few weeks, the remaining peripheral light perception in your right eye will be gone. You will be entirely blind on that side. The brain will eventually adjust, and your left eye will compensate, but you will permanently lose your depth perception. You need to be careful walking, and you absolutely cannot drive or operate heavy machinery."
Dingjie walked out of the clinic and into the stifling heat of the Beijing summer.
The world had literally halved. People walking on his right side seemed to materialize out of nowhere, brushing past his shoulder and making him flinch. He misjudged the curb and stumbled into the street, narrowly avoiding a passing bicycle.
He stood on the corner, the chaotic roar of the city swirling around him, and a cold, absolute terror seized his heart.
He imagined himself stepping off a plane at Charles de Gaulle Airport. He imagined trying to navigate the sprawling, unfamiliar streets of Paris, unable to read the signs, unable to speak the language, and unable to even see the traffic coming from his right.
Xing was a rising star in the European art scene. He was attending galas, speaking with wealthy patrons, and building a bright promising future. If Dingjie went to him now, he wouldn't be a partner. He would be a patient. He would be a pitiful permanent liability. Xing would have to hold his hand every time they crossed the street. Xing would have to translate the world for him, guide him through crowded rooms, and constantly worry about him falling down a flight of stairs.
Dingjie had broken his body so Xing wouldn't have to carry the weight of poverty. He absolutely refused to let his broken body become the new weight dragging Xing down.
He looked up at the smoggy sky with his one good eye. He had promised Xing he would get on the plane. But sitting in the dark of the basement that night, Dingjie realized that keeping that promise would be the most selfish thing he could possibly do.
***
It was 10 p.m. The silver laptop chimed, piercing the silence of the coffin room.
Dingjie let it ring three times before he reached out and hit the trackpad. He had positioned the webcam carefully, plunging the entire right side of his face into deep shadow.
The screen flared to life. Xing was practically vibrating.
He was standing in what looked like a massive, sunlit studio with hardwood floors and towering windows. He was wearing a paint splattered apron, his now long hair tied back, his face flushed with an ecstatic, breathless joy. Behind him was a canvas twice his size, covered in the magnificent, chaotic swarms of the butterfly series that had consumed his final months in Beijing.
"Qiu! Qiu, are you there?" Xing’s voice bubbled with happiness so pure it physically ached to hear it.
"I'm here," Dingjie said quietly, gripping his own knees under the desk to keep his hands from shaking. "You look happy."
"I am! God, Qiu Qiu, you're not going to believe it!" Xing stepped back, gesturing wildly to the massive canvas. "A man from Munich came to the academy's summer showcase today. He owns a chain of boutique luxury hotels across Germany. He saw the butterflies, Qiu Qiu. He saw them!"
Dingjie offered a soft, strained smile. "And?"
"And he bought the entire collection!" Xing practically shouted, spinning around in a circle. "And he commissioned me to paint the lobby murals for his new flagship hotel! It's a year long contract, Qiu Qiu. It pays ... it pays more than I can even comprehend. They're setting me up with a studio in Berlin next month."
"Berlin," Dingjie repeated. The word tasted empty in his mouth.
"Yes! I know we planned on you coming to Paris for our six months reunion," Xing rushed on, leaning into the camera. His eyes shining with tears of sheer joy. "But the funds will clear next week. What if ... what if you fly to Germany instead? We can get a real apartment. With windows, Qiu Qiu! Real windows! You can quit the post office tomorrow. Just pack your bags. I'm buying the ticket."
Dingjie stared at the screen. He looked at the boy he loved, the butterfly who had finally broken out of his chrysalis, his wings spanning across continents, catching the light of a world Dingjie could no longer see.
The silence stretched. It pulled taut across the thousands of miles, heavy and suffocating.
Xing’s smile slowly began to falter. The breathless excitement in his eyes morphed into a familiar, anxious confusion. "Qiu Qiu? Did you hear me? Germany. We can finally be together."
Dingjie took a slow, agonizing breath. His chest felt like it was being crushed by the iron plates of the loading dock all over again. He had to do it now. He had to amputate the limb to save the host, and he had to do it with a clean, sharp blade.
"I'm not coming to Germany, Xing," Dingjie said. His voice was terrifyingly calm. It wasn't angry. It was just incredibly, devastatingly empty.
Xing blinked, leaning back slightly. "What do you mean? Is it your visa? I can hire an expediter—"
"It's not the visa." Dingjie looked directly into the camera lens with his good eye. "I'm not coming, Xing. Not to Germany. Not to Paris."
"I ... I don't understand." Xing’s voice trembled. The panic beginning to rise in his throat. "Qiu Qiu, we promised. We have the money now. The poverty is over. I can take care of you."
"I don't want you to take care of me," Dingjie lied. It was the most brutal, agonizing lie he had ever told, and he delivered it with the flat, emotionless tone of a stranger. "Look at you, Xing. Look at where you are. Look at what you're doing. You belong in those galleries. You belong in those high rise hotels in Berlin."
"You belong with me!" Xing cried, gripping the edges of his laptop.
"No, I don't," Dingjie said softly. "I'm a high school graduate who hauls boxes for a living. I don't speak the language. I don't understand the art. If I go there, I'll just be sitting in a nice apartment instead of a basement, waiting for you to come home and tell me about a world I don't fit into."
"That's not true! I don't care about any of that!" Xing was weeping now. The sudden whiplash from absolute joy to sheer terror breaking him instantly. "Qiu Qiu, please. You're scaring me. Why are you saying this?"
Dingjie squeezed his eyes shut for a fraction of a second, fighting the violent urge to sob, to confess his blindness, to beg Xing to come back and hold him in the dark. But he forced his eye open, locking away the pain behind a wall of cold resolution.
"Because I'm tired, Xing," Dingjie said quietly. "I loved you. I really did. But we survived. You made it out. And now ... I just want to live my own life, without having to catch up to yours."
"Qiu Qiu, no. Please." Xing pressed his hand against his webcam, as if trying to reach through the screen and grab Dingjie's shirt. "Don't do this. I can't breathe without you. We built this together!"
"You're a butterfly now, Xing," Dingjie whispered. The finality in his voice absolute. "You have the right to fly freely. Don't let me pin you to the ground."
"Qiu Dingjie, please! I'm begging you, don't—!"
Dingjie reached out and closed the laptop.
The screen snapped shut. The audio cut off mid sob.
The silence that rushed into the basement was deafening. It was a physical weight, pressing against Dingjie’s eardrums, filling his throat, choking him.
He sat in the dark for a long minute. His hands resting on the closed silver lid of the laptop. The only sound in the room was his own ragged, shuddering breathing. He didn't cry. He was too hollowed out to cry. He had just severed his own heart from his chest and left it bleeding on the floor.
His cracked phone on the crate buzzed. Then it rang. The screen illuminated the dark :
Incoming Video Call
A-Xing.
Dingjie picked up the phone. He didn't answer it. He pressed the power button, holding it down until the screen went completely black.
With slow, numb fingers, Dingjie reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a bent paperclip. He pushed the tip into the tiny hole on the side of the phone. The SIM card tray clicked open.
He pulled out the tiny plastic square, the only thread connecting him to Paris, to Berlin, to the only person who had ever looked at him as if he were worth something.
Dingjie placed the SIM card on the concrete floor. He raised his work boot and brought his heel down, grinding the plastic into pieces against the stone.
He was entirely, utterly disconnected.
Dingjie slumped forward, resting his head on his arms over the makeshift desk, surrounded by the crushing, silent dark of a world he could now only half see, vanishing from Huang Xing’s life forever.
***
Halfway across the world, in a sunlit Parisian studio, the video feed snapped into a black, silent void.
Xing stared at the screen. His own terrified, tear streaked reflection staring back at him. His hands shook violently as he hit the redial button. It rang endlessly before going to voicemail. He called again. And again. Twenty times, he listened to the dial tone.
An hour later, the automated operator's voice changed.
The number you have dialed is no longer in service.
Xing dropped his phone onto the floor.
Dingjie hadn't just hung up. He had simply throw away the only communication tools they have. The cold, dead tone in Dingjie's voice, echoed in Xing’s ears over and over again, but Xing’s analytical mind absolutely refused to accept it. He knew the boy who had bled for him. He knew the man who had starved for him. That man didn't just get tired overnight and change his mind so suddenly. Something was horribly, terribly wrong.
Xing didn't sleep. At dawn, he was standing in the office of the German commissioner. He didn't ask for money this time. He simply pleaded for a one month delay to prepare before moving to Berlin. The commissioner, already completely captivated by the breathtaking butterfly canvases, was more than willing to wait. In fact, terrified of losing such a talented young artist to another gallery, the man voluntarily wrote out a huge advance payment on the spot just to officially book him and bind the contract.
Xing didn't use those euros to rent a studio in Berlin. He used them to buy a direct, next day flight back to Beijing Capital International Airport.
It took Xing three agonizing days to track Dingjie down. The damp basement was locked tight, the landlord complaining that the tenant was working double shifts and ignoring his knocks. Xing practically tore the Chaoyang district apart, finally dragging the address of the postal facility Dingjie worked now, out of a reluctant supervisor from the last office Dingjie stayed.
It was 5.30 p.m. on a sweltering Friday when Xing finally found him.
The street outside the Chaoyang mail sorting facility was a chaotic river of honking cars, shouting street vendors, and exhausted commuters. Xing stood on the cracked, filthy pavement, wearing a tailored European trench coat over a neat white shirt, looking like a prince who had accidentally wandered into a slum.
Then, the iron gates opened.
Dingjie walked out, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He was thinner than he had been in the hospital. His collarbones jutting sharply against the collar of his faded work shirt. His eyes looked tired. His head tilted slightly to the right as he moved around.
Xing’s breath hitched. A huge wave of relief instantly crashing into a wall of pure, unadulterated fury.
He didn't care about the crowds. He didn't care about the noise. He took a deep breath, letting the cool air fill his lungs, and screamed over the roar of the Beijing traffic.
"QIU DINGJIE!"
Dingjie froze. The voice was a ghost. A hallucination brought on by exhaustion.
It couldn't be real.
He turned his head slowly.
Dingjie’s heart slammed against his ribs with the force of a sledgehammer. The air vanished from his lungs. Every single cell in his body screamed at him to close the distance, to fall to his knees, to bury his face in Xing’s chest and breathe in the scent of him. He missed him so much it felt like a physical amputation. His hands actually twitched, desperate to reach out and touch the flesh and blood reality standing ten feet away.
But then Dingjie remembered the German hotel. He remembered the breathtaking butterfly canvases. He forced his hands deep into his pockets, clenching them into fists until his fingernails dug into his palms. He clamped down on his heart with jaws of iron, constructing a wall of absolute, freezing ice around his face.
"What are you doing here?" Dingjie asked. His voice a dead, hollow monotone as Xing crossed the distance in three long strides.
"What am I doing here?" Xing shouted, entirely ignoring the commuters walking past them. "I flew across the world! I delayed the biggest commission of my life! I spent three days walking through the slums looking for you because you smashed your SIM card and vanished like a coward!"
"I told you on the phone," Dingjie said, stepping back, keeping his good eye locked on Xing. "We're done. I don't want to do this anymore."
"Liar!" Xing screamed. The word echoing sharply against the concrete walls of the post office. People on the sidewalk stopped, turning to stare at the impeccably dressed artist yelling at the grimy postal worker. Xing didn't even notice them. He grabbed the front of Dingjie’s work shirt, shaking him violently. "Look at me and tell me you don't love me! Look at me!"
Dingjie kept his face entirely blank, though his chest was ripping apart. "I'm looking at you. And I'm telling you to go back to Europe." But he can't, for the love of God, say he didn't love Huang Xing.
"You arrogant, selfish bastard," Xing spat. Tears of absolute rage spilling over his eyelashes. He shoved Dingjie backward. "You don't get to make that decision for me! You don't get to decide that I'm better off without you! We promised we would be together!"
"Things change, Xing! I got tired!" Dingjie yelled back, forced to raise his voice over the noise of a passing bus. He tried to act irritated, rolling his eyes, but it was taking every ounce of his willpower not to break down. "I realized I didn't want to spend the rest of my life following you around like a stray dog in a country where I can't even read the street signs. Is that so hard to understand?"
"Yes! Because it's a lie!" Xing pointed a trembling finger at Dingjie’s chest. His eyes scanning Dingjie's body with a horrifying, heartbroken clarity. "You said you wanted to live your own life! You said you were tired of catching up! So why do you look like this?!"
Dingjie flinched. "Like what?"
"Like a corpse!" Xing shrieked. His voice breaking into a wretched wail. He stepped forward again, grabbing Dingjie’s wrists, pulling them out of his pockets. He held up Dingjie's thin, trembling arms. "You're starving! You look worse than before I left! Where is the money I sent you, Qiu Dingjie?! Where is the eight thousand yuan?!"
"I didn't touch it," Dingjie gritted out, wrenching his arms out of Xing’s grip. "It's sitting in the bank account. I don't want your charity."
"It's not charity! It's ours!"
"It's yours!" Dingjie roared, finally letting a sliver of genuine emotion bleed through. It was a desperate, protective anger. "You earned it! You painted it! I stand at a conveyor belt sorting mail for pennies, Xing! We are not the same anymore! I don't belong in your world, and if you have half a brain in your head, you'll turn around, get back on a plane, and forget you ever knew me!"
"I would rather die," Xing hissed, stepping into Dingjie's space. The smell of his expensive cologne completely overwhelming Dingjie's senses. "I will stand on this filthy sidewalk until I rot before I leave you here."
"Then you're an idiot," Dingjie snapped. His throat tight with tears he refused to shed. He couldn't do this anymore. If he stood here for one more minute, if Xing touched him one more time, his resolve would shatter. He would beg Xing to stay, and he would ruin Xing's life.
Dingjie turned sharply to his right to walk away, desperate to cross the street and disappear into the subway station.
He didn't check his blind spot.
He stepped off the curb, his head still turned slightly back toward Xing. He didn't see the electric delivery tricycle barreling down the bike lane from his right side, the driver looking down at his phone, carrying a big load of stacked water jugs.
Xing saw it.
"Qiu Qiu, wait—" Xing started, but the words died in his throat as the metal cart closed the distance at top speed.
Dingjie didn't even flinch. He didn't turn his head. He just kept walking directly into the path of the speeding metal, completely oblivious to the massive object rushing at him from the right.
"Qiu Qiu!" Xing screamed. A sound of pure, primal terror.
Xing lunged forward, grabbing the back of Dingjie’s collar with both hands, and threw his entire body weight backward.
The force of the yank sent Dingjie stumbling back onto the pavement just as the delivery tricycle violently swerved. The driver shouting a string of panicked curses as the cart clipped the edge of Dingjie’s jacket, tearing the fabric.
Dingjie hit the concrete hard, scraping his palms. He gasped, entirely disoriented, his head whipping around to the right to see the tricycle skidding to a halt several meters away.
"Are you crazy?!" the driver yelled back at them. "You stepped right in front of me! Were you not looking?!"
Dingjie sat on the ground, his breathing shallow, his heart hammering in his throat. He hadn't seen it. He hadn't seen a thing.
Xing dropped to his knees beside him on the filthy sidewalk. He was panting. His face entirely drained of color. His hands hovering over Dingjie as if terrified to touch him.
The anger was gone.
Xing stared at the passing tricycle. Then, slowly, he turned his head to look at Dingjie. He looked at the way Dingjie had his head tilted unnaturally to the left to look at the driver. He remembered Dingjie keeping the right side of his face in the shadows during their video calls.
Xing reached out. His hand trembling so violently he could barely keep it straight. He slowly waved his hand just inches from the right side of Dingjie’s face.
Dingjie’s eye remained fixed straight ahead. He didn't blink. He didn't react.
The realization hit Xing with the force of a detonating bomb. The air was sucked out of the busy street. The noise of the traffic fading into a dull, distant roar.
"Qiu Qiu," Xing whispered. The sound fragile and broken. He moved his hand to cup the right side of Dingjie's face. "Your eye."
Dingjie closed his good eye. A profound, agonizing defeat washing over him. The secret was out. The last piece of his armor had just been violently stripped away. He sat on the dirty concrete, surrounded by staring strangers, and finally let the icy facade melt into the wretched, broken truth.
"It's gone, Xing," Dingjie whispered into the smoggy Beijing air. "I'm half blind."
The word hung in the stifling air. Heavier than the exhaust of the idling buses and louder than the chaotic Beijing traffic.
Half blind.
Xing remained frozen on his knees. His trembling hand still hovering inches from Dingjie’s sightless right eye. For a long, agonizing moment, he couldn't breathe. His mind flashed back to the hospital, to the bandages, to the way Dingjie had desperately tried to push him onto that plane to Paris.
And then, the shock shattered, violently replaced by a surge of furious, heartbroken adrenaline.
"Is this why?" Xing’s voice cracked, dropping to a devastated whisper before rising into a raw, ragged shout. He dropped his hand and grabbed the collar of Dingjie’s work shirt. "Is this why you asked for a break up?!"
Dingjie tried to pull away, turning his face to hide the useless eye. "Xing, stop—"
"No! Look at me!" Xing yanked him forward, forcing Dingjie to face him. Tears were streaming down Xing’s face, tracing clean lines through the city dust on his cheeks. "You broke my heart! You let me think you didn't love me anymore! Over this? Over an eye?!"
"I'm half blind!" Dingjie roared back. The cold facade completely incinerated by the sheer panic of being exposed. He pushed Xing’s hands away. His own hands shaking uncontrollably. "I can't drive! I can't work a real job! I can't even cross a damn street without someone saving my life! I am a cripple, Xing!"
"I don't care!" Xing screamed. Hitting Dingjie’s chest with his open palms, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make him listen. "Do you think I care about that? Do you think the galleries, or the money, or the art means anything if you're not there to share it?!"
"I am a burden!" Dingjie yelled. The core of his deepest, darkest fear finally erupting on the filthy sidewalk. He pointed a shaking finger at his own ruined face. "Look at me! You are going to European galas, Xing. You are sitting with rich commissioners. What am I supposed to do? Hold a cane and wait for you to lead me around? I can't protect you anymore! I can't provide for you!"
"I don't need a provider!" Xing shrieked. His voice tearing, echoing off the concrete walls of the post office. "Not anymore. I need you! I need the man who fixed my chair on the rooftop! I need the man who shared his noodles with me! Is my love so little to you, Qiu Dingjie?!"
Dingjie flinched as if he had been struck. "Xing…."
"Is it?" Xing sobbed, grabbing Dingjie’s wrists. His grip desperately tight. "Have I not shown you how much I love you? I flew across the world for you! I burned my hands over a grill for you! Do you really think my love is so cheap, so incredibly shallow, that I would abandon you because you lost your sight?! Do you think so little of me?!"
The accusation tore right through Dingjie’s chest.
"No," Dingjie choked out. His throat constricting so tightly he could barely breathe. "No, I just ... I wanted you to be free. You deserve a perfect life."
"There is no perfect life without you!" Xing wailed. The anger finally burning out, leaving only a wretched, bottomless grief.
Xing collapsed forward. He didn't care that they were sitting on the filthy, spit stained concrete of a Beijing sidewalk. He didn't care that dozens of commuters were staring at them. He buried his face in Dingjie’s chest, clutching the thin fabric of Dingjie’s work shirt in his fists, and wept. It was a heartbreaking, agonizing sound. The sound of a soul that had been stretched across an ocean and finally snapped back together.
"I missed you," Xing sobbed into Dingjie’s collar. His entire body trembling against him. "God, Qiu Qiu, I missed you so much I couldn't breathe. Every day. Every single day. Please don't push me away again. Please."
Dingjie sat rigid for exactly three seconds.
He looked down at the top of Xing’s hair. He felt the familiar, desperate heat of Xing’s body pressing against his own. He smelled the faint trace of expensive cologne, utterly overpowered by the scent of tears, sweat, and the sheer, undeniable reality of the boy he loved.
The walls Dingjie had built around his heart over the last month started to crack until it pulverized into dust.
A strangled, wet gasp tore from Dingjie’s lips. The dam broke.
He couldn't hold it back anymore. Dingjie reached out. His calloused hands burying themselves in Xing’s hair, and pulled him in. The moment his skin touched Xing, a jolt of pure, electric desperation shot through his veins.
"A-Xing," Dingjie sobbed. His voice breaking entirely.
He threw his arms around Xing’s back and crushed him against his chest. He hugged him so tightly it bordered on painful, burying his face in the crook of Xing's neck, breathing him in like a drowning man breaking the surface of the water.
Months of forced coldness, of lonely nights in the dark, of terrifying isolation, it all poured out of him in violent, shuddering sobs. He clung to Xing’s coat, twisting the expensive fabric in his fists, utterly desperate for the contact.
"I'm sorry," Dingjie wept loudly, not caring who heard him. He pressed desperate, frantic kisses to the side of Xing's head, his temple, his hair. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I missed you too. I missed you so much."
Xing let out a muffled cry of relief, wrapping his arms around Dingjie's waist, holding on just as fiercely.
They sat entwined on the dirty pavement, two halves of a violently fractured whole finally crashing back together. The city raged around them. The blaring horns, the shouting vendors, the smogbchoked air, but in the center of the chaos, Dingjie just held on tighter. He closed his sightless right eye, and for the first time since the accident, he didn't feel broken. He felt anchored. He was still in the dark, but Xing was finally, miraculously, holding his hand in it.
***
They stayed on the pavement until the frantic, burning adrenaline finally faded into a bone deep, hollow exhaustion.
The commuters eventually stopped staring, the traffic continued its relentless crawl, and the sun began to dip below the Beijing sky. Slowly, Xing pulled back just enough to look at Dingjie’s tear streaked face. He didn't let go of Dingjie’s jacket.
"Let's go," Xing whispered. His voice raw but anchored with a new, unbreakable resolve. He stood up. His expensive coat now stained with city grime and Dingjie’s tears, and reached down to pull Dingjie to his feet.
Xing hailed a taxi, keeping a firm, protective grip on Dingjie’s good arm the entire time. During the ride, neither of them spoke. They didn't need to. Xing simply rested his head against Dingjie’s shoulder in the backseat, his smooth, delicate fingers tightly entwined with Dingjie’s rough, calloused ones. Dingjie leaned his head back, closing his eyes, letting the chaotic blur of the city wash past them.
But when the taxi pulled up to the curb, the reality of their new dynamic hit Dingjie like a wall of ice.
The transition from the sweltering, exhaust choked streets of Beijing to the hushed, climate controlled sanctuary of Xing’s hotel felt like stepping onto another planet. It was a five star international hotel in the heart of the business district.
As Xing led him through the towering glass doors, Dingjie instantly felt the weight of a thousand invisible eyes. His worn out work boots left faint, dusty scuffs on the mirror polished marble floors. His clothes smelled of sweat, cheap soap, and the postal sorting room. The lobby smelled of fresh lilies and apple tree.
Dingjie instinctively shrank into himself, keeping his head bowed. He kept his right side, his blind side, pressed as closely to Xing as possible, terrified of clipping a passing bellhop or knocking over a luggage cart. He felt like a stray dog being dragged into a palace.
When the silent elevator reached the top floor, Xing swiped a keycard and pushed open the door to the suite.
Dingjie stopped dead on the threshold.
The room was massive. The floors were covered in a plush carpet that looked thick enough to sleep on. Floor to ceiling windows offered a sweeping, panoramic view of the glittering city skyline. There was a low profile living area, a king sized bed wrapped in impossibly white linens, and soft, warm ambient lighting that left no dark corners.
It was the glass house, brought to life.
"Come in, Qiu Qiu," Xing said softly, dropping his ruined coat onto a velvet armchair. He turned back. His expression open and incredibly tender. "You need a shower, and I'm ordering room service. Whatever you want."
Dingjie stepped over the threshold. His boots sinking into the carpet. He felt massive, clumsy, and entirely wrong for this space. He quickly knelt to take off his boots by the door, placing them neatly in a corner, suddenly hyper aware of the small hole in the toe of his right sock.
"I'll ... I'll just wash my hands," Dingjie muttered, wanting to hide.
He walked toward what looked like the bathroom, keeping his good eye trained on the doorway. But in his desperate attempt to look natural, to pretend he wasn't navigating a fractured, half blind world, he moved too fast.
He didn't see the transparent glass coffee table positioned perfectly in his blind spot.
His shin collided with the thick glass edge with a sickening crack.
"Damn it!" Dingjie hissed, stumbling forward. He threw his hand out to catch his balance on the nearby side table, but his ruined depth perception betrayed him. His hand missed the edge by an inch, swiping awkwardly across the top instead.
He knocked over a crystal water carafe and two glasses.
They hit the floor with a violent crash, shattering into a hundred glittering shards across the carpet. Water soaked into the plush fibers instantly.
The sound echoed through the quiet suite like a gunshot.
Dingjie froze. The sharp pain in his shin was nothing compared to the sudden, suffocating wave of shame that crashed over him. He stared at the broken glass, his breath hitching. He had been in this beautiful, perfect room for less than a minute, and he had already destroyed something.
I am a beast in a glass house, the intrusive thought roared in his mind. I break everything I touch.
"Qiu Qiu!" Xing rushed over, completely ignoring the water soaking into his expensive socks.
"Don't touch it," Dingjie choked out, immediately dropping to his knees. His hands shook violently as he reached for the shards of broken glass. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Xing. I didn't see it. I'll clean it up, I'll pay for it—"
He reached for a large piece of glass, but his fingers misjudged the distance again, closing on empty air before knocking the shard further away. A profound, wretched sob tore from Dingjie's throat. He pulled his hands back, pressing them against his chest as if trying to hold his own failing heart together.
"I can't even pick it up," Dingjie wept, bowing his head. His tears falling onto the wet carpet. The ice he had tried to maintain on the street was leaving him completely raw. "I can't even walk across a room, Xing. Look at me. I don't belong here. I'm going to ruin this for you. I'm going to break everything."
Xing didn't say anything, and he certainly didn't call for housekeeping.
He dropped to his knees right in the middle of the spilled water and broken glass. He reached out and grabbed both of Dingjie’s trembling, calloused wrists, pulling his hands away from the dangerous shards.
"Stop it," Xing commanded. His voice firm but entirely devoid of anger. It was thick with an overwhelming, protective love.
"I shouldn't be here," Dingjie sobbed, refusing to look up. "I'm a burden."
"Qiu Dingjie, look at me."
When Dingjie didn't move, Xing let go of his wrists and cupped Dingjie’s face. His thumbs gently wiping the tears from the rough, scarred skin. He forced Dingjie to raise his head and meet his eyes.
"Do you remember the day I got the CAFA letter?" Xing asked softly. The memory was warm in the chaotic room. "Do you remember what I said to you in the basement?"
Dingjie sniffled. His breath shuddering. "You said you couldn't take it. You said it cost too much."
"I said I was stealing your youth," Xing corrected. His eyes burning with a fierce, unwavering intensity. "I told you that you were killing yourself for my paints, and I wanted to throw the scholarship away and work in a bookstore."
Xing moved his hands down, intertwining his delicate, unscarred fingers with Dingjie’s rough, trembling ones.
"And what did you do?" Xing pressed. His voice dropping to a fierce whisper. "You yelled at me. You grabbed my shoulders and you told me that realistic was us rotting in a basement until we were sixty. You told me you were giving me your youth gladly. You said my job was to focus on the canvas, and paint our way out of the mud."
Dingjie closed his good eye. A fresh tear slipping down his cheek. "That was different. I could provide for you then. I was strong."
"You are the strongest man I have ever known," Xing said fiercely, leaning in until their foreheads touched. "You always are and you always be. You think your strength was just in your muscles? Your strength was in your absolute belief in me. When I was terrified of the future, you held the sky up so I didn't get crushed."
Xing pulled back just enough to look directly into Dingjie’s left eye.
"Well, Qiu Dingjie," Xing whispered, gesturing to the sprawling, luxurious suite around them. "I painted it. I painted our way out. And I didn't paint it so I could sit in this hotel room by myself. I painted it for us. Just like our pact."
Dingjie let out a ragged breath. The crushing weight of his insecurity warring with the profound sincerity in Xing’s voice. "But the glass ... my eye ... Xing, I'm going to be clumsy. I'm going to need so much help."
"Then I will help you," Xing said. His tone carrying the absolute finality of a vow. "Just like what you always did back then. I will move the tables. I will hold your hand when we cross the street. I will describe the paintings to you. I will gladly do it every single day for the rest of my life."
Xing brought Dingjie’s hands to his lips, kissing his knuckles with the same reverence he had shown in their freezing basement years ago.
"You carried the heavy things when I couldn't," Xing said. A tear of his own splashing onto their joined hands. "Now the heavy things are gone. We're safe, Qiu Qiu. The fighting is over. Let me carry you for a while. Please."
Dingjie looked at the boy who had grown into a beautiful, unshakeable man. The terror of his blindness, the shame of the broken glass, the suffocating fear of not being enough, it all slowly broke against the immovable wall of Xing’s love.
Dingjie slumped forward, burying his face in Xing’s shoulder. A long, exhausted sigh leaving his lungs.
"Okay," Dingjie whispered into the expensive fabric of Xing’s shirt, finally surrendering his pride, surrendering his fear, and allowing himself to be caught. "Okay, Xing."
Xing wrapped his arms tightly around him, resting his cheek against Dingjie's hair. They sat together on the wet floor, surrounded by broken glasses, but for the first time in his life, Dingjie didn't feel like a broken thing that needed fixing. He just felt like he was finally, irrevocably, home.
***
Housekeeping was called to deal with the glass half an hour later, and Xing gently guided Dingjie away from the living area, leading him by the hand toward the suite’s master bathroom.
If the living room was a glass house, the bathroom was a temple.
It was an expansive cavern of dark slate and polished white marble. In the center of the room sat a huge freestanding soaking tub deep enough to drown in. Dingjie stood in the doorway, staring at it. The concept of a bathtub was entirely foreign to him. For years, bathing meant shivering in their freezing basement, using a cracked plastic bucket and a rag, rushing to scrub the sweat and engine grease off his skin before the hot water from the kettle ran out.
Xing walked over to the tub and turned the chrome handles. A waterfall of steaming, clear water began to fill the basin, filling the room with a thick, warm mist and the scent of eucalyptus.
Dingjie stood awkwardly by the sink. His hands hanging uselessly at his sides. He kept his head turned slightly to the right, ensuring Xing stayed firmly within the field of vision of his left eye. He felt incredibly out of place. A filthy, scarred creature brought into a holy sanctuary.
"The water is perfect," Xing said softly, turning back around.
Without a trace of hesitation, Xing reached up and began to unbutton his white shirt.
Dingjie’s breath caught in his throat. He froze. His good eye widening as the fabric parted, revealing the smooth, pale expanse of Xing’s chest. Xing shrugged the shirt off his shoulders, letting it fall to the marble floor, and then reached for the buckle of his belt.
A sudden, overwhelming rush of heat flooded Dingjie’s face. He averted his gaze, staring intensely at the grout lines between the floor tiles. His heart, which had just begun to settle from the panic on the street, started to hammer a frantic new rhythm against his ribs.
He was shy.
It was a ridiculous, almost childish feeling, but it paralyzed him completely. He was a grown man who had stripped down to a pair of shorts in front of screaming crowds in an underground fighting ring. He had taken punches that shattered his bones. Yet, standing in this quiet, steamy room, watching the boy he loved undress, he felt completely breathless.
The realization hit him with a profound, aching clarity.
They had been together for years. They had shared a cramped, moldy mattress every single night since high school. But they had never truly had the time to be intimate. Every touch, every kiss, every embrace they had ever shared had been steeped in desperation. They hugged to stay warm because they couldn't afford heating. They touched to clean each other’s wounds. They kissed like starving men, terrified the other would be snatched away by the crushing weight of their poverty.
Survival had consumed every ounce of their energy. The sheer, terrifying effort of staying alive had left absolutely no room for romance, for exploration, or for the slow, tender vulnerability of simply existing naked together.
This, standing in a warm room, shedding their clothes without the fear of freezing, preparing to touch simply for the sake of feeling each other's skin, was entirely new.
"Qiu Qiu?" Xing’s voice was a soft murmur through the steam.
Dingjie slowly looked up. Xing was completely naked, standing a few feet away. The harsh, artificial lights of the bathroom illuminated him perfectly. He was beautiful. He looked like one of the marble statues he had described seeing in the Louvre, unblemished and radiant.
"I…." Dingjie swallowed hard. His voice barely a rasp. He gestured vaguely toward the tub. "I don't know how to do this. I'm going to get the floor dirty."
Xing smiled. A smile so devastatingly gentle it made Dingjie’s chest ache. He closed the distance between them, completely unbothered by his own nakedness.
"Let me help," Xing whispered.
He reached out. His delicate, paint free fingers finding the top button of Dingjie’s grimy postal shirt. Dingjie stood rigid. His breath hitching as Xing’s knuckles brushed against his collarbone. Slowly, meticulously, Xing undid every button. He pushed the fabric off Dingjie’s broad shoulders. His hands trailing down Dingjie's arms to toss the shirt aside.
Then, Xing’s hands moved to Dingjie's chest.
Xing didn't flinch at the sight of him. He didn't look away from the faded, yellowing bruises on Dingjie's ribs, or the jagged, pale scars that crisscrossed his torso from years of manual labor and underground fights. Instead, Xing pressed his palms flat against Dingjie’s chest, directly over his racing heart.
The skin to skin contact sent a violent, electric shock straight to Dingjie’s core. It wasn't the frantic, grasping touch of the basement. It was slow, deliberate, and entirely reverent.
"You're shaking," Xing murmured, looking up into Dingjie’s good eye.
"I've never...." Dingjie choked on the words, feeling a flush of vulnerability so intense it made him dizzy. "We've never done this."
"I know," Xing said softly, stepping closer until their chests were almost touching. "We never had the luxury of time, Qiu Qiu. But we have it now. We have all the time in the world."
Xing knelt down on the hard marble, gently coaxing Dingjie out of his work boots, his socks, and the rest of his clothes. When Dingjie was finally stripped bare, he felt entirely exposed. Not just his scars, but his blindness, his fears, everything he was.
Xing stood back up and took Dingjie’s hand. "Come here. Step over the edge."
Dingjie allowed himself to be led. He lifted his leg, careful of his bruised shin, and stepped into the massive tub. The water was incredibly hot, sinking into his exhausted, aching muscles like a liquid embrace. He sat down, the water rising all the way to his chest.
Xing stepped in behind him. The tub was large enough for them both, and Xing settled at the back, pulling Dingjie flush against his chest.
Dingjie let out a long, shuddering sigh as Xing’s arms wrapped securely around his waist beneath the water. The heat of the bath seeped into his bones, melting away the deep, ingrained tension he had carried since he was a teenager.
Xing reached for a bottle of expensive liquid soap, pouring it into his hands and working it into a rich lather. Gently, he began to wash Dingjie’s shoulders. His fingers massaged the tight, knotted muscles of Dingjie’s neck, moving with a slow, hypnotic rhythm.
"Close your eyes, Qiu Qiu," Xing whispered, pressing a soft kiss to the back of Dingjie’s neck. "Just rest."
Dingjie closed his left eye, plunging himself completely into the dark. But for the first time since the accident, the dark wasn't terrifying. It wasn't a void. It was filled with the scent of eucalyptus, the sound of softly lapping water, and the warm, sliding friction of Xing’s soapy hands charting the landscape of his scarred chest.
Dingjie leaned back, resting his head against Xing’s shoulder. He reached under the water, finding Xing’s hands and lacing their fingers together, marveling at the simple, miraculous sensation of skin against skin. They sat in the quiet steam, letting the hot water wash away the grime of the city, the blood of the past, and the nightmarish miles that had kept them apart, finally allowing themselves the absolute luxury of touch.
The water eventually cooled, but the warmth between them remained absolute.
When they finally stepped out of the tub, the intimacy shifted from the vulnerability of the water to a quiet, profound tenderness. Xing grabbed a plush, impossibly thick white towel from the heated rack. Instead of just handing it over, he stepped close and began to dry Dingjie himself.
He patted the towel over Dingjie’s chest, mindful of the fading bruises, and carefully dried the damp hair clinging to Dingjie’s forehead. Dingjie stood incredibly still, his breath catching every time Xing’s knuckles brushed his collarbone. He felt cherished. It was a very beautiful sensation.
Xing had laid out the hotel’s complimentary sleepwear. Soft, gray cotton sets that felt like woven clouds compared to the stiff, threadbare t-shirts they were used to.
"Here," Xing murmured, holding out the shirt.
Dingjie raised his arms, and Xing gently guided them through the sleeves, pulling the soft fabric over Dingjie’s head and smoothing it down his chest. He helped Dingjie into the pants, his movements slow and deliberate, treating Dingjie’s battered body with the reverence of handling a priceless, fragile sculpture. When Dingjie was dressed, Xing quickly slipped into his own set.
They walked into the bedroom. The main lights were off, the room illuminated only by the sprawling, glittering expanse of the Beijing skyline filtering through the windows.
Dingjie pulled back the duvet and climbed into the king sized bed. The mattress was so soft it felt like sinking into a snowdrift. A moment later, the mattress shifted, and Xing slid in beside him.
Xing immediately closed the distance, throwing a leg over Dingjie’s thighs and resting his head on Dingjie’s chest, right over his heart. Dingjie instinctively wrapped his good arm around Xing’s shoulders. His fingers tangling in the soft hair at the nape of Xing's neck.
They lay there in the quiet dark, listening to the synchronized rhythm of their breathing. But the sprawling city lights outside the window were a glaring reminder of the vast, intimidating world waiting for them tomorrow.
"Xing," Dingjie whispered into the quiet room. His voice was thick with lingering hesitation.
"I'm right here," Xing answered softly, shifting his weight closer.
"Berlin...." Dingjie swallowed hard. His thumb mindlessly stroking Xing’s shoulder. "Those people in Europe. The gallery owners, the patrons, that German commissioner ... they're high society. When they look at me, they're not going to see an artist's partner. They're going to see a broken thug with a dead eye and an empty head."
Dingjie let out a ragged sigh. The old, jagged insecurities clawing at his throat. "I still don't know how I'm supposed to stand beside you in a place like that. I'm going to embarrass you."
Xing didn't argue immediately. He didn't offer a quick, dismissive platitude.
Instead, Xing pushed himself up on one elbow. He looked down at Dingjie, his face cast in the soft, golden glow of the city lights. He reached out with his free hand, gently brushing Dingjie's overgrown hair away from his right temple.
Xing leaned down. He didn't kiss Dingjie's lips, or his jaw. He pressed his mouth softly, tenderly, directly over Dingjie’s closed, sightless right eye.
He lingered there, breathing against the scarred skin, offering a kiss of absolute worship to the very thing Dingjie despised most about himself.
When Xing finally pulled back, his eyes were bright with unshed tears, but his voice was so soft and warm, like an embrace.
"Do you know what I see when I look at this?" Xing whispered. His thumb tracing the line of Dingjie's cheekbone. "I see the exact price you had to pay for my future."
Dingjie’s breath hitched. His good eye widening in the dim light.
"I can work hard for as long as I live," Xing continued. His voice trembling with a an overwhelming devotion. "I can paint a thousand canvases. I can sell out galleries across the world. But no amount of money, no amount of success, could ever be enough to exchange for an eye."
"Xing...."
"You are my equal, Dingjie," Xing said, cutting him off, leaving absolutely no room for argument. "You always have been. If anything, it’s me who should be embarrassed. I should be embarrassed of my own worth compared to what you have done for us. You traded pieces of your own body so I could hold a paintbrush."
Xing rested his forehead against Dingjie’s. Their noses brushing, their breaths mingling in the space between them.
"So let me pay you back this time," Xing pleaded. His tears finally slipping free, dropping onto Dingjie’s cheek. "Please. Stop trying to protect me. Let me pull my worth. Let me be the one who takes care of you. When we stand in those galleries in Berlin, I want every single one of those high society patrons to know that I am only standing there because the man holding my hand groomed the ground beneath my feet."
The words hung in the quiet air of the suite, heavier and more precious than gold.
Dingjie lay completely still. The soft glow of the city illuminating the devastating sincerity in Xing’s eyes. For his entire life, Dingjie had operated under a single, brutal law of physics. His value was entirely dependent on what his body could endure. How many boxes he could lift. How many punches he could take. How much money he could bleed onto a concrete floor.
He had convinced himself that without his physical utility, he was nothing. A hollow shell. A burden.
But looking at Xing now, feeling the gentle, reverent press of Xing’s lips against his sightless eye, that brutal law finally shattered. Xing wasn't looking at him with pity. He was looking at him with a profound, almost overwhelming awe.
The last, petrified remnants of Dingjie’s pride completely dissolved, not into defeat, but into a warm surrender.
A ragged, shuddering gasp tore from Dingjie’s throat. He reached up with both hands. His calloused fingers sliding into Xing’s hair, and pulled Xing down into a fierce, desperate embrace.
"Xing," Dingjie choked out, burying his face in the soft cotton of Xing’s shoulder.
He began to cry. Not the panicked, hysterical tears of the street, but the deep, chest heaving sobs of a man who had carried the weight of the world on his shoulders for far too long, and was finally, miraculously, being allowed to put it down.
Xing didn't shush him. He didn't tell him it was going to be okay. He simply wrapped his arms entirely around Dingjie’s torso, holding him together as years of accumulated terror, exhaustion, and pain washed out of him. Xing pressed his lips to Dingjie’s temple, rocking him slightly, absorbing the tremors racking Dingjie's powerful frame.
They stayed like that for a long time. The only sounds in the room being Dingjie’s ragged breathing and the faint, distant hum of the central air conditioning. A far cry from the violent rattling of the rusted pipes in their old basement.
Slowly, the storm passed.
Dingjie’s breathing evened out, leaving behind a bone deep, incredibly light exhaustion. He didn't pull away. He shifted his weight, turning slightly onto his side so he could wrap his good arm securely around Xing’s waist, pulling Xing flush against him.
Xing settled into the embrace, throwing one leg over Dingjie’s hip and resting his head comfortably on Dingjie’s chest.
"I don't know a single word of German," Dingjie murmured into the quiet dark, his voice thick and raspy, but lacking the bitter edge it had carried for months.
Xing let out a soft, warm laugh that vibrated against Dingjie’s ribs. "Neither do I. I’ve been using a translation book the commissioner gave me. We’ll learn it together. Or we'll just point at pastries in bakery windows until they give us what we want."
Dingjie closed his good eye. A small, genuine smile finally touching his lips. He lifted his hand, finding Xing’s in the dark. He traced the smooth skin of Xing’s knuckles, feeling the faint, familiar calluses where Xing held his paintbrushes.
"I have to go back to the basement to get my things," Dingjie said quietly. "My winter coat. The tea tin."
"We'll go tomorrow," Xing replied. His thumb stroking the back of Dingjie’s hand. "We'll pack the tin. We'll leave the coat. I'm buying you a new one. A thick one. It snows in Berlin."
"You're going to spoil me."
"I am going to ruin you," Xing corrected fiercely, tilting his head up to look at Dingjie in the dim light. "I am going to buy you clothes that fit. I'm going to buy you food that doesn't come from a street stall. I am going to put you in an apartment with so many windows you won't even need to turn the lights on. That is my job now."
Dingjie looked at the fierce, beautiful determination in Xing’s eyes. He didn't feel the urge to argue anymore. He didn't feel the need to push back and assert his dominance as the provider. He just felt incredibly, wonderfully tired.
"Okay," Dingjie whispered. The word feeling like a physical release. "Okay, Xing. Let's go to Berlin."
Xing smiled. A radiant, breathtaking thing, and pressed a long, soft kiss to Dingjie’s jaw. "Sleep now, Jie. I've got you."
Dingjie rested his chin on the top of Xing’s head. He pulled the duvet up over their shoulders, cocooning them in warmth. He listened to the steady, strong heartbeat pressing against his chest.
For years, sleep had been a battlefield. It was a brief, anxious pause between shifts, haunted by the math of their poverty and the terror of tomorrow. But tonight, as the glittering lights of Beijing kept watch outside the glass, the war was finally over. Dingjie closed his eyes, held the boy he had given everything for, and, for the very first time in his life, simply allowed himself to rest.
***
The morning of their departure, the basement felt smaller than it ever had. Just a concrete box that had finally run out of secrets.
Dingjie stood in the center of the room. His good eye sweeping over the damp walls one last time. He didn't take much. Most of what they owned was a testament to a life they were leaving behind. He left the threadbare blankets that never quite kept out the Beijing chill. He left the rusted kettle and the cracked plastic bucket. But he carefully tucked his old, worn sketchbook into his bag. The pages filled with Xing’s early, desperate drawing lines. And, finally, he picked up the dented metal tea tin. It was empty of the blood money now, feeling strangely light in his hand, yet as he ran his thumb over the rusted lid, he felt the phantom weight of every thousand yuan stack it had once hidden. It was the reliquary of their survival, and he couldn't leave it behind.
"Ready?" Xing asked from the doorway. He was framed by the morning light. A silhouette of the future.
Dingjie took one last breath of the mildewed air, the scent of the struggle, and stepped out. He didn't look back as the metal door clicked shut, the sound final and hollow, like a period at the end of a very long, very dark sentence.
The transition to Beijing Capital International Airport was a blur of motion. The airport was a monument of glass and motion, a place that had once been the site of Xing’s absolute undoing.
But today, the air felt different. Xing led the way to the international terminal with a quiet, steady confidence. In his leather folder were two passports and two visa packets, stamped, official, and indisputable. It had seemed like a bureaucratic impossibility for a man with Dingjie’s history to secure a long term European visa, but Professor Liu had performed one final miracle. Moved by the sheer, tragic devotion of his protege, the Professor had used his international academic clout to categorize Dingjie as a ‘Specialized Studio and Research Assistant’. He had personally vouched for Dingjie’s necessity to Xing’s creative process, effectively telling the French and German consulates that Xing’s genius was inseparable from the man standing beside him.
Dingjie looked at the stamp in his book. It was a miracle printed in ink, legal permission to exist in the light.
As they reached the security gates, Xing’s footsteps slowed to a crawl. The polished tiles beneath his feet felt like ice. The last time he had been here, he had felt like a man walking to his own execution. He remembered the animalistic terror of letting go of Dingjie’s sleeve. He remembered the twelve hour flight to Paris, huddled in a seat, feeling the physical sensation of his soul being stretched across an ocean until it frayed.
"Xing?" Dingjie’s voice, low and grounded, pulled him back.
Xing blinked. The sterile airport lights coming back into focus. He looked down and saw his hand, his delicate, artist's hand, completely enveloped by Dingjie’s large, rough grip. The phantom weight of his past grief evaporated.
"I'm okay," Xing whispered, leaning into Dingjie’s shoulder. "I was just remembering the dark. But the sun is up now. Let's go."
The Boeing 777 was a gleaming leviathan. Thanks to the German commissioner’s massive advance, a gesture of faith in Xing’s talent, they weren't huddled in the back of the plane. They were in business class, a sanctuary of leather, quiet, and space.
Xing guided Dingjie to the window seat, helping him settle into the wide pod before taking the seat right next to him. As the cabin doors sealed with a pressurized, airtight hiss, Dingjie’s composure began to fracture.
He was a creature of the earth. He understood the unyielding reality of concrete and the honest weight of the soil. The idea of being suspended thirty thousand feet in the air, held up by nothing but physics and a prayer, sent a cold, paralyzing spike of terror through his chest.
Then, the engines began to whine. A low, rising scream of turbines. Dingjie’s breathing turned shallow. He gripped the plush armrests so hard his knuckles turned white, his body turning rigid.
"Qiu Qiu," a soft voice murmured.
Xing didn't scream over the noise. Instead, he was leaning across the center console as close as he could. He placed a warm, steady hand on the back of Dingjie’s neck. His thumb stroking the skin just below the ear.
"Look at me," Xing whispered. His voice an intimate, hushed cocoon that blocked out the rest of the cabin. "Don't listen to the engines. Just listen to me."
Dingjie’s good eye flickered to Xing, wide and panicked. "The floor ... it’s moving, Xing. It feels like the ground is falling away."
"The ground isn't falling, Qiu Qiu. We're just outrunning it," Xing said. His voice rhythmic and calm like a soothing melody against the mechanical roar. He moved his other hand to rest over Dingjie’s white knuckled grip on the armrest. "You know, the commissioner is going to be so confused. I told his assistant we were arriving three weeks early than expected because I suddenly have a sudden motivation to start the murals. He would think I'm an impulsive workaholic prodigy. He has no idea I just need to pick up my boyfriend and couldn't wait to show him my favorite pistachio baguette."
"Pista … bagu … what?" Dingjie frowned, confused.
Xing let out a tiny, soft laugh. His breath was warm against Dingjie’s cheek. The plane turned onto the runway, the engines surging with a terrifying, raw display of power. The force of the acceleration pinned them both back into their seats.
Dingjie’s eyes squeezed shut. His jaw clenching.
"Stay with me," Xing whispered, leaning in even closer. His forehead resting against Dingjie’s temple. "I want to tell you about my next piece after I’ve finished the commissioned murals in Berlin."
The nose of the plane lifted. The wheels left the runway. Dingjie felt the sickening lurch of gravity being cheated. His stomach dropping.
"For so long," Xing continued. His voice low and intense. A private secret shared in the middle of the sky, "you were the earth for me. You stayed in the dirt, you took the hits, and you let the world bruise you so that I could keep my hands clean enough to paint. You were the dark soil that let me grow."
The plane pitched upward, slicing through the thick, gray industrial haze of Beijing.
"But I don't want to be a flower in the dirt anymore, and I don't want you to be the ground," Xing murmured. His hand moving to gently cup Dingjie’s face. His thumb tracing the bridge of his nose. "The storm is over, Qiu Qiu. The rain has finally stopped. And do you know what happens when the sun finally hits the rain?"
The violent shaking of the climb smoothed out into a steady, effortless glide. The roar faded into a peaceful hum.
"Open your eyes," Xing whispered. "See what I'm going to paint for you."
Dingjie slowly opened his left eye and turned his head toward the oval window.
They had broken through the clouds.
Below them, the world was a boundless, rolling ocean of white foam, hiding the smog, the slums, and the scars of their past. Above them was a sky so vast, so piercingly, impossibly blue that it felt like an insult to every gray day they had ever endured. The raw, unfiltered sunlight of the high altitude poured through the glass, golden and thick.
It fell across Dingjie’s face, illuminating the jagged pink scar of the craniotomy and the sightless right eye. In that pure light, the damage didn't look like a tragedy. It looked like a map of a victory.
"I'm going to call the masterpiece Painting Your Sky Rainbow," Xing said. His voice was thick with a sudden, beautiful emotion. "Because the rainbow is the bridge, Qiu Qiu. It’s what happens when the light finally finds the water. I'm going to take the red of the blood you gave, the violet of your bruises, and the gold of this sun, and I’m going to stretch them across that widest canvas I could find. I’m going to make sure that everywhere you walk for the rest of your life, you’re walking under colors that belong to you."
Dingjie stared out at the infinite, golden horizon. The terror of the height had vanished, replaced by a quiet, holy awe. For the first time in his life, he wasn't looking at a concrete wall or a boxing ring. He was looking at the top of the world.
A single tear spilled from his good eye, catching the sunlight and glowing like a prism before falling onto his new warm coat. He didn't wipe it away. He turned back to Xing, the boy who had survived the dark to become a creator of light. Dingjie brought Xing’s hand to his lips, kissing the delicate knuckles with a devotion that transcended words.
"It's beautiful," Dingjie whispered. His voice was a broken, happy rasp. "Paint it for me, Xing. Paint it all."
The plane carved a path through the silent, crystalline blue. A silver needle stitching the fragments of their broken years into a single, seamless future. Below them, the shadows of the basement, the suffocating scent of grease, and the cold, cruel math of survival finally vanished beneath the white, rolling waves of the clouds, becoming nothing more than a memory of a world they had outgrown.
Dingjie leaned his head against Xing’s shoulder. His good eye closing as he surrendered to the warmth of the cabin and the steady, rhythmic pulse of the man who had become his entire universe. He didn't need to see the horizon to know it was there. For the first time, the darkness behind his sightless eye wasn't a void of loss or a reminder of the ring, but a quiet, hallowed space where the ghosts of their struggle could finally rest, gilded by the light Xing had promised to bring home.
They drifted onward, two boys born in the dirt who had finally cheated the gravity of their own grief, flying straight into the heart of a beautiful, breathtaking, blinding arc.
A rainbow painted in blood, sweat, and gold, stretching across a sky that was now, and forever, entirely their own. []