two lifetimes, i am yours

Shen Yuan's (very confused) POV:

You know, there are days you wake up and think, “Wow, life is weird.” And then there are days you wake up and there's a beautiful, irritated, probably-came-from-a-period-drama man sitting on your couch like he owns the place, glaring at your toaster like it personally offended his ancestors.

Yeah. I’m talking about that kind of day.

It started, as these things always do, with a thunderclap, some suspiciously glittery mist, and the next thing I knew, there was a very angry, very elegant man standing in the middle of my studio apartment. He looked around my humble little man-cave—okay, fine, it was a bit of a pig sty. I wasn't expecting visitors—and sneered so hard I thought his face would stay that way forever.

“This is your abode?” he asked, with the same tone I use when I accidentally step in dog poop.

“Uh,” I said intelligibly. “Yes…?”

He hissed. Hissed. Like a very angry, very pretty feral cat. It was alarming. And a little hot? No, stop that, Shen Yuan. Bad. No petting the murder kitty.

So. A quick summary: the stranger introduced himself—begrudgingly—as Shen Jiu.

A handsome stranger.

And he was in my house.

Living in my apartment.

Breathing my air.

Criticizing my instant ramen choices like he wasn’t literally eating all of them.

“You eat like a beggar,” he said yesterday, sipping tea he made himself after complaining my kettle was ‘barbaric’. “This isn't sustenance. It's punishment.”

Okay. One: accurate. Two: rude.

But we fell into a rhythm after a few weeks, somehow. Like a weird little odd-couple sitcom. Every morning, I’d wake up to Shen Jiu curled in a pile of throw blankets on my futon, looking like a disgruntled Persian cat. He hated the TV but would still watch it with a kind of horrified fascination. He especially hated anime. That was… a problem.

The turning point came when he caught me watching some over the top shonen anime and heard me make a passing comment about the protagonist’s abs.

“You like that?” he asked, voice tight. “You like him?”

“What? No, I—” I laughed, awkward. “It’s just anime—”

He made a sound like someone dropped a piano on his pride and turned off the laptop with a single disdainful poke of a button.

“You’re not allowed to look at other men,” he said, eyes narrowed.

“…What?”

“You heard me,” he said, as if that explained anything and then settled on my lap.

Then he stole my glasses.

He literally plucked them off my face like a bully on the schoolyard and perched them on his own perfectly arched nose.

I stared. Squinted, really. “I’m legally blind.”

“Good,” he snapped. “Then you can’t ogle those fake men anymore. Who draws them like that anyway? It’s obscene.”

“Jiu-ge,” I said gently. “Um… Can I have my glasses back please?”

“For what? To look at other men? I don’t think so.”

Never—and I mean never—has anyone been so furiously jealous of fictional anime boys that they physically robbed me of my glasses. It was almost impressive.

And I let him keep them.

Why? Because the alternative was him going back into Feral Mode™ where he hisses and threatens to set my bookshelf on fire with qi that I still don’t believe exists in this universe.

Besides… I didn’t mind the glasses thing so much when he was situated on my lap like I was his personal throne.

“You’re warm,” he said, nonchalant, like this was normal. Like he didn't came from a completely different reality.

“Cool,” I wheezed, not cool at all.

“You’re flustered,” he added, smug.

I was. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. Instead, I tried to focus on the dead screen of my laptop, even if everything was blurry.

So now I’m trapped in a never-ending loop of being lowkey bullied by a man with cheekbones sharp enough to commit murder, who eats all my ramen, hoards my glasses, gets jealous of anime characters, and has absolutely no concept of personal space.

And you know what the worst part is?

I think I might like it.

Please send help.