—

Jian has plenty of days where all he wants and needs is a constant frenzy. To move every second of the day, to talk and laugh too loud, to test the bounds of people’s personal space, and to see how many people’s nerves he can get on. He’ll wake up and hum while making breakfast, greet everyone he walks past at the dorm, and try… well, try the hardest his brain can muster in his classes, but mostly just text Zhengxi about his every waking thought, then look at the notes in the downloadable slides from the lesson later when he should be sleeping.

And this is his usual personality; he’s known for it. If asked, people would call him hyper, a chatterbox, a nuisance, over the top. Clingy, annoying… but also funny and nice to be around.

And they’d be right, he is all of those things (some more fortunate than others).

But, even if most of his days go the same way, earning him his countless names, there are days when Jian acts the opposite of all those things.

Today is one of them.

One of his rare days, where he wakes up after a bad dream and remembers something he wishes he hadn’t. He finds himself sitting cross-legged in his small kitchen, at his lonely table, his ears ringing with, what he blames on, the sound of the kettle whistling. He doesn’t sing, he just sighs as he stands up to get ready for the day.

He avoids his face in the mirror, and he avoids his hands washing his body, and he avoids the thoughts that plague him, even if it’s with just as plaguing thoughts; as if they’re all he has. He avoids the people talking in the hallways, and he even ignores his professors' teachings. He avoids eating, and the conversations of those around him, the words spoken to him.

But there’s one thing he doesn’t avoid. One thing he would never be able to bring himself to avoid.

Zhan Zhengxi.

Jian doesn’t register his teacher ending the class, but he hears the ear-aching screech of his classmate’s chairs scraping across the ground as they stand, and he quickly follows; at a higher pace than he’d been able to manage all day.

His feet seem to naturally guide him right out of the doors and into the street, weaving his body around the crowds of people swarming the busy streets, and right onto his perfectly timed train.

Before he knows it, he’s got a slight pant to his breathing pattern, and he’s unlocking and opening a door.

There’s a certain way you come to handle your emotions after dealing with them for a specific amount of time, and Jian has spent the last 19 years of his life dealing with today’s emotions in one way that always works.

Silent company.

It’s an ironic thing for him to crave, being how he is, but nonetheless, he does. He craves to sit, quietly but not alone. To hear nothing, but with somebody else. To be lost in his thoughts with somebody else’s presence in the room.

Thus, craves everything his best friend can give him. Sometimes it really feels to Jian like Zhengxi was created in a lab to be his ideal partner in life.

A weight falls off of his chest as he finally opens XiXi’s door, after nine hours of internal ringing.

It stops with the mere sight of ruffled brown hair lost in a soft sea of pillows, replaced by the subtle sounds of breathing.

He smiles slightly as he walks in.

Zhengxi’s collapsed on his bed in his formal work clothes, his light as bright as when he turned it on after his shift just to forget about it. Even his laptop is lit up on his desk as if he was going to do something on it but decided to take a ‘break’.

Jian huffs as he sits on the edge of the bed, looking around the room, and his eyebrow raises more and more with every spotted blemish.

Since arriving back home, Jian had gotten used to a new state of this room. Zhengxi, in the time of his ‘disappearance’, seemed to have removed every sign of youthful whimsy from this place. Don’t get him wrong, it was still undeniably the same room, lived in through countless memories, but he got rid of his colourful blankets and furniture, replaced everything with pure white, and rearranged all of his belongings in a way that made the place look like a show room in a house that someone was desperate to sell. Tidy; an attempt at perfection.

Seriously, even his bookcase had become dull even with all of his favourite manga in it; not a single one on the floor or tilted on the shelf from where he poked it out and left it.

But, there’s one on the floor.

There’s multiple on the floor, actually.

And his bed wasn’t made, and his desk chair was half pulled out, and he has a pile of clothes in the corner of his room with a familiar pair of red sweats leaking out of his wardrobe. His calendar also hasn’t been marked for days, nor his saving plan next to it updated. His bin is almost overflowing with energy drinks and canned coffee.

Jian is immediately more intrigued than he ever could have been in his lectures earlier that morning.

He rises to his feet with a strength he thought he wouldn’t regain for the next couple days, and he picks up some of the books from the floor as silently as he could muster.

“Someone’s been tired…” He murmurs as he carefully finds their place and neatly replicates the old placement of each book.

Just as quietly, he then turns off the laptop on the desk and puts the screen down, tucking the chair into its place.

Checking over his friends sleeping form every now and again, Jian keeps moving like that with a strange satisfaction that he never gets trying to clean his own room.

Distracted from his own worries, Jian helps Zhengxi with his, figuring he isn’t the only one that has silent bad days… or weeks, by the looks of things.

XiXi’s always doing things like this for him, so why not do the same?

The clothes in the boys closet become sorted within minutes that Zhengxi couldn’t find; with the clothes on the floor being put in the hamper beside it. His curtains become drawn, and his big light is turned off to honour his bedside lamp. He takes the red marker and updates the calendar (and too lazy to do the math, simply writes an ‘update needed’ underneath the saving plan).

Jian even goes as far as to plug Zhengxi’s phone on charge and hang his coats better on the door hanger, placing his slippers where Zhengxi would find his feet when he wakes up, and of course takes a picture of his sleeping friend to ridicule him later.

His mind is easy as he mentally checks off each task he does, and just when he assumes he’s done, he looks up to some gnarly cobwebs to find a large folder, with its sharp edge hanging off the top of the bookshelf he thought he’d already fully sorted.

Curiously, he reaches up and takes it, showing himself the front. His eyes widen as he realises it’s that photo album that Zhengxi would never let him look in before.

Without a thought, he opens it, ready for pictures of tiny Zhengxi to brighten him up. If he found out, he’d probably only pretend to be mad then let it go. Probably.

He sits on the end of the bed with his legs tucked up and feels a glisten in his eyes return with each photo.

They’re themed around each stage of Zhengxi’s life, it would seem; birthday pictures are prominent, along with school photos where his friend looks characteristically straightfaced. There’s their first picture together still in there, albeit worn from being taken out so much, that brings a flush to Jian’s face, just for it to quickly die as he sees photos where Zhengxi has small bruises and scuffs in his uniform from helping him with bullies.

Over the course of the book, the pictures become less frequent, with Jian in every single one as they somehow managed to grow more and more inseparable with each year, with the last photo being, strangely, from middle school graduation with the two of them holding a bouquet. Wide smiles driven with the excitement of managing to pass together... Just about a month before…

At this point, Jian’s laying his back on the bed with his knees kicked up and swaying, a frown dragging down his face. Then he notices, there is one more photo.

The back of it is almost the same shade as the pages of the book so it’s easy to miss but… it’s turned the wrong way.

Jian tips his head back to where Zhengxi is further up on the bed to make sure he’s still sleeping before picking the photo out of the film.

He flips it, and a coldness returns to his face.

The subtle ringing in his mind returns as he makes eye contact with Zhengxi in a blacked out robe, holding up a certificate with a face Jian has only ever seen in himself in his reflection on his worst days.

It’s undoubtedly Zhengxi’s high school graduation photo.

Zhengxi’s blue eyes are dark like the bottom of the ocean, with bags under his eyes slightly reddened as if he’d been rubbing them a lot.

Most notably, it bears a contrast to every other grad photo in the album. It looks as lonely as it feels to be in a room full of people.

Jian isn’t there with his hand over his shoulder.

Jian flips the image back over and places it back inside, putting it back right where he found it.

The sides of the image were picked at, and there was no dust on that album at all, Jian taps his foot in the air, back on his back.

He’d thought all the work was getting to Zhengxi, and maybe that’s a lot of his problem as well but, Jian hadn’t particularly thought Zhengxi would be so saddened to forget to take care of himself for the exact same reason Jian does.

He bites the inside of his lip and shakes his head, standing once again just to place himself better on the bed.

He shuffles closer to his friend and delicately runs his thumb over his temple while his other fingers rest in his hair.

Zhengxi huffs at that, shifting his head to feel more.

Jian looks at him with dark eyes as he sees all the obvious signs of exhaustion on the face below him. Hell, Zhengxi hadn’t even woken up while Jian was going through all his stuff that he’d typically get throttled for.

He does that motion until he sees his phone light up with a message that he recognises to be from his art class groupchat.

He rolls his eyes and picks it up, opening the message to see his classmates talking about their new project.

It was something about drawing people when they aren’t aware to test candid expressions and realism, he reminded himself since it seemed like it was juuust about to slip out of his brain to never see again.

Then he looks down again and an idea sparks his interest.

His weight dips in the mattress as he reaches to his bag and drags out his sketchpad and a pencil.

Taking his mind off things once again, he captures this moment in the form of a drawing for an assignment, like how Zhengxi would pluck up his digital camera in a moment he wants to keep forever; slowly working the lead around the page, until he slowly…

Slowly drifts off himself to the sound of his pencil scratching, thinking endlessly about his and XiXi’s shared exhaustion, and how much work he probably missed out on today.

—

A couple hours later, Zhengxi finally stirs, practically jolting awake as he realises he was asleep in the first place.

He blinks the sleepiness from his eyes and looks around while he sits up and cracks his back. He starts from the left side of his bed, and eyes over to the other side wondering where all his crap went when he almost falls off his mattress at the sight of Jian limply sat next to him.

He holds his chest and exhales loudly, looking incredulously at his friend who only twitches slightly, dressed still in his jeans and jacket.

He checks his phone to see if Jian had told him he was coming, and expected to see a massive flood of messages before and after but…

Nothing.

Jian didn’t message him anything.

He huffs, rubbing his temples as he thinks about how Jian must’ve had one of ‘those days’ and all Zhengxi could do was sleep.

Reaching over, he glances at Jian's drawing before nudging his shoulder. With sleepiness still in his voice, says says:

“Hey, wake up.”

And nudges him until he does.

Jian rubs his eyes and yawns, then looks over and smiles all dopey.

“Morning XiXi!”

“It’s 10pm.” Zhengxi runs his hand through his hair stressfully, turning around and putting his slippers on beside his bed. “Are you okay? You didn’t text…”

“Yeah, I just had a boring day.” Jian closes his sketchpad and lobs it back into his bag, along with his pencil that’ll probably stick upwards and jab him tomorrow. “Seems you’ve been busy though!”

Zhengxi, allowing Jian to not talk about it, replies, “I’m still getting used to making time to play games and go to work while also getting sleep in…” He stands and walks out of the room, with Jian naturally following. “You haven’t eaten, right? When did you even get here, and how much of my stuff did you touch?”

Jian, also allowing Zhengxi to not talk about it, lets out a light chuckle, “I had instant noodles for breakfast… And I got here at like five, then decided to sort your room out. If my room was like that you’d scold me to death!” He starts with his theatrics, and Zhengxi shakes his head while grabbing two bowls for cereal out of the cupboard.

“Your room’s like that all the time, it’s different.” He fills the bowls with milk.

“No it’s not…” Jian says dejectedly, sitting down to eat across from the brunette.

“Sure it’s not.” Zhengxi hides his smirk with a mouthful of granola.

The two of them eat in silence after that.

They had this way of knowing when they needed it. That feeling of just being, together. Letting their thoughts blossom; obviously present, but unspoken.

—

Zhengxi has found himself a slightly annoying, very persistent problem after getting together with Jian.

It’s his hair, and the length of it. To put it more accurately, he does love the length of Jian’s hair, he really does, but… it gets in the way, a lot.

It’s a problem Zhengxi hadn’t even figured could exist as someone who’s always had shorter hair.

It first struck him when he and Jian were kissing the other week, and they both separated from blonde strands in their mouths, grimacing and trying to remove it from their lips. Jian groaned and tucked them behind his ear, but it just came loose again eventually when Zhengxi thoughtlessly carded through his hair with his hand.

And that wasn’t the only time it’s happened, just one of many.

Then Zhengxi thought about it, there’d been quite a few times that he’d seen the other inconveniences of Jian’s hair.

Whenever he put his head down to read at school he had to keep a hand on his forehead, whenever a fan had to be used he had his hair all over the place, whenever a breeze came by he had to slap his head to keep it down, and it’d always end up looking a mess. When he sleeps, his hair gets caught in his drool… and the amount of times his hair ends up in food, or being dragged out of Zhengxi’s mouth after waking up…

All of this leads to Zhengxi suddenly coming to a halt while walking home from work.

He stops and stares to his side, an accessory shop conveniently placed beside him. The illuminescent pink lights of the store shine across his form, as if casting a light on his troubles.

A hairband or clip should work, his mind supplies.

He walks in awkwardly, aware it’s very likely a store for little girls; a place he’d only be able to look normal in if he was with his sister. He sighs at the memory of his interrupted kissing sessions with Jian, decides it’s severe enough to sacrifice his dignity, and walks further in.

After a while of only seeing Hello Kitty and Stitch themed items, he finally finds the hair clips. They’re all glittery, doused in pink, and/or embellished with cartoonish branding.

He looks through the LED-lit stands and pretends he doesn’t see the school girls walk past him staring. How could they not, seeing this grown guy in a casual suit bent over in an aisle like this. He shakes his head, keeping his goal at the forefront of his mind.

Jian does look good in cute things (like skirts, and ribbons in his hair), so this type of thing wasn’t too bad, he supposed.

Coming to his conclusion, he grabs some light pink clips, and finds some glittery blue ones and takes them over to pay.

Of course, he knows the cashier doesn’t care why he’s there, why he’s buying clips for little girls, and it doesn’t matter, but the lie of “they’re for my sister” sits on the tip of his tongue nonetheless. Instead of letting it out, he just walks away swiftly and stiffly after his receipt is printed and goes home, a hot pink plastic bag brandishing his arm; the same colour as the lights.

He opens the door to Jian on the couch playing on his phone and watching a cartoon on TV, and the blonde immediately shoots his head up.

“XiXi~ you’re late!” He starts.

The brunette takes off his shoes, and Jian continues, “Ah, did you go into a shop?” He asks after seeing the bag on his boyfriend’s arm. “Got some stuff for ZiXi?”

“No, I got you something.” Zhengxi says, then goes to the kitchen with Jian now hot on his tail.

He tips the bag onto their counter and starts taking some of the clips from their packaging. “Hair clips?” Jian asks, standing right behind XiXi’s shoulder, then he takes a step back when the other turns around to face him.

Zhengxi brushes the boy's hair behind his ears, looking at him almost impatiently, shutting him up immediately, and puts the clips in.

After securing them tightly, Jian blushes heavily when Zhengxi leans in and kisses him, his hands immediately tucking into Jian’s nape.

The blonde kisses him back in confusion, his brain unable to do anything whenever he remembers he and XiXi are like this now.

His eyebrows furrow as hands card through his hair experimentally. There’s some light tugs and a lot of smoothing, but his hair doesn’t falter.