#xiaoxuan

Shen Yi stifles a snigger at the way Du Cheng’s whole being droops. Du Cheng really has worked hard to get into Xiaoxuan’s good graces recently, possibly because he’s been spending quite a lot of time at Shen Yi’s place and felt insulted by the way Xiaoxuan has – so far – mostly ignored him. Or maybe Du Cheng has discovered a hitherto unexplored love for cats but doesn’t want the fuss of raising one himself. (The latter, Shen Yi rather doubts; Du Cheng is as solidly a dog person as can be, as evidenced by the selfie Du Cheng recently sent him with a random dog he’d encountered on his morning run, whose lolling tongue looked about two seconds away from slobbering all over Du Cheng’s face.)

“Don’t worry about Xiaoxuan,” Shen Yi says, lips twitching at the way Du Cheng jackknifes off the ground as if he could convincingly pretend that nothing has happened if he just got upright fast enough. “She isn’t a very clingy cat; you just have to catch her on a good day.”

In fact, when he had first brought Xiaoxuan home, Shen Yi had been somewhat worried that she was blowing so hot and cold – sometimes she didn’t want to come near him and sometimes she monopolised his lap the moment he sat down and then refused to move. After some research that had given him a lot of options, ranging from mildly convincing to definitely spurious, as to why that might be, Shen Yi had decided that perhaps he shouldn’t try to psychoanalyse his cat. He does quite enough of that sort of thing at his job, and anyway Xiaoxuan seemed to be doing fine (she was certainly much gentler and better behaved than the street cats Shen Yi had tried to feed and pet when he was growing up, feral and wary and more apt to bite the hand that brought them food than believe that the hand could return regularly). If she sometimes wanted space, Shen Yi certainly understood that and saw no harm in letting her do as she wished. He wasn’t home enough to give her companionship all the time, anyway.

Several years later, Xiaoxuan still has times she prefers basking in a convenient sunbeam to having anything to do with Shen Yi, but she more consistently let herself be petted and doted on. Shen Yi hopes that means she has found a sense of security in Shen Yi’s presence and leaves it at that. At any rate, he hasn’t yet accidentally poisoned her with art supplies, despite her curious nosing around every time he makes paint.

(Though he had, several times, wished that Qu Lanxin’s cat wasn’t white. There had been a particularly colourful time last year when Xiaoxuan had somehow managed to get indigo paint all over her fur – several baths hadn’t managed to wash the colour out fully, so he’d had a blue-tinged cat for a while. The only silver lining of that episode had been that Xiaoxuan isn’t one of those cats who hate to get wet, and while washing her still usually ends with Shen Yi’s shirt being drenched, she doesn’t make much of a fuss about it.)

“Snacks always work with dogs,” Du Cheng grumbles, gaze on Xiaoxuan who has now decided that Shen Yi’s legs are boring and is wandering off to her favourite napping spot.

Shen Yi smiles at him, handing over the bottle of (100% edible, no paint here) yoghurt he’d left the room to procure. “Maybe dogs are more gluttonous by nature.”

Because Du Cheng knows Shen Yi, that has him squinting suspiciously at Shen Yi’s expression, clearly trying to decide whether he’s just been insulted or whether to continue to ignore the fact that Shen Yi regularly leaves him sticky notes in which he’s depicted as a police dog.