if you're still taking salty shrimp requests, I'd love some post-canon. anything, really, as long as they're together. <3
Hiii Haro!! :D this was fun to think about hehe
-> mostly inspired by the QnA where NPSS says that they didn't have friends outside of each other (x)
"You have plenty of friends now," Haixia remarks, peeking over his shoulder at the letter in his hands.
It was from Zhang Qianjun, writing in excitement to announce that they were expecting a child. Hailou doesn't miss the slight bitterness underlying Xiazai’s tone, quick as he is to straighten out his expression, sliding into the stool next to him to pour himself a cup of tea. Longjing—Hailou had chosen it on purpose, so that the old witch wouldn't swipe his tea.
"Zhang Qianjun, you probably met him too, in Bailejing—his shifu was Shifu's old flame—or should I say, the poor man had a one sided relationship with Shifu? That heartless woman forgot all about him once she left Nanqiang."
"Who are you calling heartless?" Hailou nearly falls off his stool with the force of her slap, barely catching himself at the last moment, to Haixia’s amusement.
"You're demonstrating it now, aren't you?" Hailou scowls, tucking away the letter.
They always seemed to put Xiazai on edge, somehow—letters from He Jianxi and Da Guotou got his face all twisted, his eyes haunted and empty—and Hailou didn't like putting that expression on him. They'd been through enough for a lifetime, he decided. They deserved nothing but brighter, easier days. Xiazai most of all.
"Ungrateful brat," Shifu scoffs, stalking off with a last disdainful sniff at his tea.
(Hailou wasn’t slow—he knows Xiazai’s attitude likely had something to do with his previous statement—you have plenty of friends now, said with something akin to loneliness lurking at its edges.
He gets it, he thinks. They only had each other, growing up. Xiazai had been the kind to keep people at an arm’s length, despite his affable attitude. As for Hailou, Shifu and Xiazai had always been enough for him.
This wouldn’t do, surely Xiazai, with all his smarts, had to know that Hailou wouldn’t leave them? Wouldn’t leave him? Especially not after nearly losing them.)
“Xiazai,” Hailou says, waving a hand in front of his face, the words on his tongue drying up under the full force of his attention. Xiazai had very pretty eyes, he thinks distractedly. The kind one could get lost in forever, if they weren’t careful. Hailou blinks, averting his gaze in an attempt to regain his composure. “Help me look over these? I don’t believe that old witch ever did any of these—she’s just messing with me, isn’t she?”
That wasn’t what he wanted to say.
He wanted to reassure Xiazai that he was still his most important person, that he would stay with him until their heads turned white together, and after, if Yanluo Wang permitted. But the words had gotten stuck in his throat, all jumbled up as they often did in front of Xiazai.
Silence. Xiazai giving him a weighed, pointed look, as if answering his unspoken confession, and the courtyard suddenly seemed too small, too cramped to possibly fit in all his affection, his love for the man in front of him.
Hailou coughs, averting his eyes. “I don’t even know what half of these refer to, Shifu just threw me in there without any explanation and went on her retirement.” He gestures to the papers, pushing them towards the other with a grimace. He had put them off long enough, one file turning into ten, and then thirty.
Xiazai obliges, patiently reading over the stack of papers, and Hailou is struck with a hollow pang of grief. Taking on the mantle as Acting Director was his penance, his own form of atonement, of course—but in another life, a kinder one, the position would rightfully belong to Xiazai—he should be proudly taking over a proper, whole and unbroken Bureau from Shifu.
“Xiazai,” he repeats, tasting the words in his mouth, the name he regarded more important than life itself, the name that haunted his dreams, his every waking moment, in those horrible days when he’d thought he lost him.
“Yes?” Haixia answers, setting down the papers, watching him carefully.
“Thank you for choosing me."
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