Work Text:
Refresh. Load. Refresh.
It was official. Shen Yuan was certain he had read everything worth reading on Zhongdian Literature. And a not inconsiderable amount of content that was not worth reading, for good measure.
He sighed and reloaded the page again.
It was a miserable day outside of his small apartment, which he was using as an excuse to ignore both the work piling up in his inbox and his sister’s texts. The sky was grey, the clouds so low that they were swallowing nearby buildings, the air so humid that a brief dip to the nearest corner store to get a new container of yoghurt had left him sticky with sweat. He’d returned home as quickly as possible, thought about taking a shower, and instead only shuffled into a more comfortable pair of pants and curled up on the couch.
But he had left the house. So take that, Meimei. That was his allotted time outside for the day. He was tired.
He was tired, and he just wanted to read something to lighten the grey mood that had descended with the clouds, but he had finished the last webnovel of any interest the night before and absolutely nothing else looked good.
He had checked the top recommendations in fantasy. Historical. Transmigration. Even the latest harem novels. He had read them all, and what he hadn’t read, he’d determined to be too trashy for even his internet-blasted brain cells to stand.
All that was left to do was refresh the homepage and look to see if anything good popped up in the randomized recommendations.
He had almost decided to toss his phone over the side of the couch and resort to watching aquarium cleaning videos on Bilibili when one of the unfamiliar titles that popped up caught his eye. He scrolled over to it and peered at the small blue cover, which depicted only a faint image of a flowering hill and the title: CAPTIVE FALCON, CAGED CRANE. The tags under it included FANTASY, CULTIVATION, and HISTORICAL, which were Shen Yuan’s preference when he had his pick of genres. Nothing beat a good cultivation novel, and this one didn’t look too bad… he tapped it and scrolled down to the summary, not bothering to look through the rest of the tags.
The summary read:
Gao Yanghong is the only son of the leader of one of the world’s greatest cultivation sects. Trained from birth to lead and defend the common people from any threat, everyone across the land agrees he has the potential to be a once-in-a-generation hero!
There is only one problem: no matter how hard his family tries to train him, his cultivation base is terrible. If he wants to keep his position as heir and the respect of his strict father, Gao Yanghong must find some way to improve his terrible prospects and rise above his disadvantages to lead the cultivation world. The secret to this might just lie in the mysterious courtesan who…
Hmmm. Well, it was better than nothing. From the look of it, the novel hadn’t received much attention: it had fewer than a hundred comments and less than a thousand views, despite being fairly long. Maybe the writing quality was truly subpar, but it couldn’t hurt to check it out.
Shen Yuan tapped on the first chapter, rolled onto his side, and began to read.
It was the first day of Summer, and Gao Yanghong was on the training grounds. Each strike against the wooden post was delivered with perfect form and utmost force, but by the end of his training, he was only left with split skin and blood across his knuckles…
“Why don’t you come sit with me?”
The curtain moved aside, and for the first time Gao Yanghong could clearly see the figure who was lounging on the edge of the bed. It was not the tall, serious woman he he had imagined from the deep voice that echoed out from the swaying array of colorful silks, but rather a slim young man. His hair was ink black, half-tied up with a beautiful hairstick and half-cascading over his bare back. The eyes that looked up at Gao Yanghong had a dazzling hint of gold…
Shen Yuan blinked down at the page. He had been expecting another boring, papapa-fueled romance plotline with some probably tragic-yet-beautiful courtesan. Or maybe a tsundere seductress who would try to take advantage of the heroic Gao Yanghong before warming to him. But instead… the courtesan was a man?
This must be a ‘bond of sworn brothers’ type story instead. Who would have thought! How refreshing! He had read so many absolutely boring romances by this point that it was honestly a breath of fresh air to read a good old-fashioned platonic adventure story. He found himself much more excited to continue reading as Gao Yanghong and Qiu Shui were introduced, the two instantly developing an interesting dynamic on screen between Qiu Shui’s cynical, worldly persona and Gao Yanghong’s naive optimism, tempered by his true dedication to improving himself. Shen Yuan found himself being moved right alongside Qiu Shui when Gao Yanghong helped him throw out a disrespectful customer, and then defend not only the brothel but the whole village from an attack of demonic beasts despite his poor cultivation abilities!
“Fine,” Qiu Shui breathed, his pale chest flushed, heaving with each breath he was sucking in as though drowning. “The poison has already entered my blood… there is no other way to go forward from here. If I stay like this, I’ll only slow you down.”
“I’m not leaving you here!” Gao Yanghong cried. “Qiu-ge, no matter what, I will absolutely not leave you behind.”
“What other choice do we have? The only way to clear this poison is…”
Gao Yanghong hesitated. In all of their weeks of meeting, they had yet to take this final step in his ‘training.’ But with Qiu Shui left like this, desperate and feverish, soon to be out of his mind with lust…
Oh. Oh! Well. Shen Yuan should probably have read the tags on this novel more closely. He couldn’t believe he’d gotten so invested in a danmei of all things. In his defence, this was nothing like the kind of novel his sister usually read! In her books, men were always going into heat or being sold to rival mafia gangs!
Captive Falcon might be gay porn… but it was gay porn with nuance! Tragedy! Compelling characters! When you thought about it, didn’t that make it more like regular literature that just happened to contain a gay relationship? Not everything with gay people was BL! He was sure he had heard people say that on Weibo before!
Besides, Shen Yuan was an ally. So, it was totally fine for him, a red-blooded heterosexual man, to continue reading this fantasy novel that happened to be a little gay.
If there were tears streaming down his face, no one was around to judge him. Shen Yuan grabbed a tissue to blow his nose and went to tap the ‘next chapter’ button.
No ‘next chapter’ appeared. Shen Yuan realised his finger met with only empty space on the page. He stared down at the screen.
What… what was this? Where was the next instalment? Had he caught up so quickly?
He quickly scrolled up so he could see what day the novel had updated, hoping to check when he could expect the next update. Ah, Monday, alright… Five years ago?
No way! Not possible!
Feeling frantic, he checked the author’s profile. User ‘lordcupnoodles’ had only the one work on the site. There was no social media listed, no links to other work, no hiatus messages. Just a default profile picture and the unfinished novel.
That…
That was it?
Where was the conclusion? Where was the happy ending? Qiu Shui had been abducted back to his adopted family’s manor, believing that Gao Yanghong had abandoned him now that he had used him to unlock his full cultivation potential! It couldn’t just end like that!
Shen Yuan sat up and grabbed his glasses, shoving them roughly onto his face. Where was his laptop? He had research to do.
As he gathered his computer (and angrily started to eat his forgotten yoghurt. What time was it, even? Was this lunch or dinner?), he let his phone fall to the side. He didn’t even check it when it pinged with an alert for the new PIDW chapter.
He had an author to track down.
r/webnovels
Does anyone know what happened to the author of this webnovel? https://www.zhond …
r/zhongdianlit
Captive Falcon, Caged Crane author?
r/xianxia
Underrated cultivation webnovel? Has anyone else read this…
Shen Yuan’s search turned up a big fat nothing. There was only one forum left to investigate. Flushing, he nonetheless pushed through his embarrassment to make his post.
r/danmeinovels
Looking for more information on Captive Falcon, Caged Crane by lordcupnoodle, https…
He was, shortly after making the last post, forced to go to bed by the screen-usage limiting app his er-ge had downloaded onto his phone and laptop, giving him dire warnings about brain damage if he continued to pull all-nighters. He sighed, plugged his electronics in to charge, and cocooned himself into bed.
In the morning, the first thing he did was check his alerts. He scrolled past the one telling him again about the new PIDW chapter, resolving to read it once he had checked on all possible leads for the author of Captive Falcon . His forum posts had a small smattering of comments, most composed of ‘never heard of it’ or ‘who has read something that obscure?’ or ‘is that danmei? seriously?’ or ‘wow, OP is really desperate…’
He responded to none of them, except for an impassioned recommendation of the novel to the one or two people who mentioned being interested now that they’d seen it.
Only when he got back to the danmei-specific forum did he find anything useful.
u/donnadonera
i’ve read this one! such a shame it was discontinued, shuishui was such a sexy ML
u/airimitsu
aahh another one falls to CFCC. a classic to approximately 10 girlies in 20XX…
u/gruglantis
Novel sounds familiar… let me check
u/gruglantis
https://www.gongzicp.com/user/paymeinnoodles/captive-falcon-caged-crane/chapter-one
u/gruglantis
Its under a different ID, but the author used to post on Chang Pei. Some more of their work is on there
u/proxyonline
i think there’s more here??? https://www.gongzicp.com/user/paymeinnoodles/moon-an…
Shen Yuan clicked on the links so hard he almost dropped his phone.
Score! The author’s profile on the other site was much more robust. They even had a bio, one filled with a cutesy introduction and some internet 1.0 graphics that made Shen Yuan cringe even as he was reluctantly charmed. Ah, why did this have the vibes of something made by his little sister?
Come to think of it, this was exactly the sort of novel his sister would enjoy. He shuddered.
Not only was Captive Falcon on this site, there was more! Two previous novels! One of them was also unfinished—there was a catboy on the cover, and Shen Yuan didn’t feel too bad about skipping it. The other was a modern fantasy and complete, although it was shorter than Captive Falcon and had been published even earlier.
Still, it was something! Shen Yuan felt a buzz of excitement under his skin, practically making him squirm as he hunched over his kitchen island to read.
Lord Cup Noodle’s other novels were certainly more amateur work. The author had clearly advanced a lot in writing by the time Captive Falcon, Caged Crane came out—the prose less flowery, the characters more multi-layered, and the pacing much tighter. Still, he found the whole day disappearing as he read. Mist and Moon was about two high school girls who began the story as class rivals, united by a melancholy sort of supernatural mystery. There were a lot of scenes that took place in some sort of spirit world, and at times Shen Yuan struggled to tell what was literal and what was metaphorical in the narration, but it had the same compelling characters and sense of tragedy that Shen Yuan was beginning to think of as a signature of Cup Noodle’s work.
It was also over too soon. Much too soon! And with an ambiguous ending, too!! What the hell?!
Shen Yuan was preparing to spend the evening sleuthing as well, but his phone beeped with Er-ge’s text tone.
Er-ge
Back in town. I will pick you up in fifteen minutes.
Shen Yuan cursed, the mystery of Lord Cup Noodle temporarily forgotten in his haste to clean his apartment as fast as humanly possible.
“What are you reading now?” Er-ge asked, wrinkling his nose at a bundle of leafy greens in the grocery store. He had insisted in a walk through the park and grocery shopping before departing to the Shen family home to see their parents. Shen Yuan had already been grilled on his love life, his grades, and the effectiveness of his current medication. He was, frankly, already tired of his brother’s visit, and he had only been back in Shanghai for three hours.
“Ah,” Shen Yuan said, thinking of the update to PIDW he had waiting in his inbox. Then about Captive Falcon and what, exactly, his brother would think about that particular piece of literature.
Unfortunately, he must have flushed, or perhaps released some sort of fear chemical into the air that his brother could instantly sniff out. His eyes narrowed. He shoved the bundle of greens into Shen Yuan’s basket.
“What, is it worse than the novel you were telling Meimei about, with the demon harem?”
Shen Yuan got even redder. “Ge! Don’t say that so loudly in the grocery store.”
Er-ge rolled his eyes. “If the cashiers want to judge your reading choices, they should be allowed.”
Shen Yuan ducked his head, scowling. A moment later, he felt a nudge to his arm.
“Hey. I do want to know.”
Shen Yuan shrugged. “I, uh, I started a new novel yesterday. It was pretty good, but it looks like the author never finished it…”
Shen Yuan returned home, weighed down by two bags of groceries and a commandment from his brother to actually cook something with them or face his wrath. Instead of doing that, he shoved stuff into the fridge and then got back on Chang Pei.
There had to be some clues here as to where the author went. Either Shen Yuan was forced to accept that they had died tragically in the middle of writing it, or they were out there somewhere. And if they were out there somewhere, then they needed to at least tell him how it was going to end!!!
He returned to their profile, scouring through the cutesy text and kaomojis. And, aha, there! A link to a Lofter profile!
The Lofter account revealed a lot of old fanfiction that Shen Yuan found hard to decipher and some memes of even more questionable quality. It went inactive at arround the same time that Captive Falcon stopped updating. The closest he got to a further hints were some re-posted Minecraft streams, which didn’t have Cup Noodle’s face in them and didn’t seem to have been watched by anyone. Their mic quality was terrible. Cup Noodler wasn’t that good at Minecraft.
Shen Yuan watched them all anyways. Just in case there was anything relevant to their identity hidden within. He fell asleep listening to the bangs of monsters exploding and quiet, grainy swearing.
The answers that Shen Yuan was seeking did not come that week. He read the two PIDW updates he’d missed and each one that came after, and left his usual comments lambasting the ridiculous, over-the-top drama and pointless papapa of the week. Despite this return to normalcy, it just wasn’t the same. He couldn’t stop thinking about Qiu Shui and Gao Yanghong. Turning over their story in his mind this way and that. If it continued, what would happen? Would they find a happy ending, despite their differences in station? Would Gao Yanghong take over his sect, proving wrong everyone who had doubted him? Would Qiu Shui ever recover his cultivation after healing Gao Yanghong? There were so many what-ifs. He even tried searching for fanfiction of the novel, but it was too obscure—aside from him and a couple of the sisters on r/danmeinovels, no one else in the world seemed to have heard of it.
Unexpectedly, it was not his amateur internet sleuthing that eventually uncovered the mystery. Instead, it was a call from his brother.
“Hey,” Er-ge said. “Are you still looking for that author you like?”
“… yeah,” Shen Yuan said, phone propped against his ear while he slathered steroids on his hands. “Why?”
“I asked an acquaintance of mine to look into it. He has some contacts at Zhongdian Literature and with individuals in the tech sphere. He told me that your author, this,” Er-ge pronounced the words with deep disdain, “‘Lord Cup Noodle,’ may have left the site, but the same phone number registered to the Weibo account linked in their other social media is registered to another account that’s still active.”
“Really!?” Shen Yuan asked. He almost dropped his phone and got it covered in steroid goo, narrowly catching it between his wrists. “What’s their ID?”
“It’s—” Er-ge paused, “—I’ll text it to you.”
“Just tell me now, ge, I have stuff on my hands. I can’t text.”
A staticky sigh. Er-ge sounded physically pained, now. “The username is ‘Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky.’”
…
……
From: PeerlessCucumber
To: AirplaneShootingTowardsTheSky
hey
i wanna talk
what's your wechat?
From: AirplaneShootingTowardsTheSky
To: PeerlessCucumber
haha thats qt bro but i am abslty not letting u doxx and/or mrder me
From: PeerlessCucumber
To: AirplaneShootingTowardsTheSky
i do not want to murder you i just want to ask you about something
its not PIDW okay
From: AirplaneShootingTowardsTheSky
To: PeerlessCucumber
??????
still no way dude wth
From: PeerlessCucumber
To: AirplaneShootingTowardsTheSky
ill pay you for your time
From: AirplaneShootingTowardsTheSky
To: PeerlessCucumber
you have said the magic words
friendinvite_qrcode.jpg
The name loading on the video chat was ‘Luo Zhaodi.’ Shen Yuan fought the instinctive wince at both the family name (cringe, self-inserting hack) and the personal name (cringer, yeesh).
The face that loaded in, pixelated and dimly lit on the backdrop of a plain beige wall, was round and unassuming.Large, dark eyes peered at the screen with the slight squint of the truly sleep deprived. Their hair was medium-short, falling around their ears and into their face. They were wearing a large hoodie that absolutely swallowed up any other identifying physical characteristics. Even through the video screen, Shen Yuan could see it was stained.
“Whoa, hey,” the person who was presumably Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky said. They looked a lot more self-conscious than Shen Yuan had imagined. He wasn’t sure what to do with that information, although it made him feel a bit less bad about his own less-than-peerless appearance. “Is this where you threaten to come kill me for forgetting that wife number six hundred whatever is from a demonic clan that’s not supposed to exist anymore? Because I totally—”
“I told you, it’s not about Proud Immortal Demon Way,” Shen Yuan said, scowling.
“I really don’t know what else you could possibly want to ask me?” Airplane said.
“Your old ID was LordCupNoodle, right?” Shen Yuan asked.
Airplane’s computer wobbled and dipped and Shen Yuan’s view went fuzzy as they scrambled to right it.
“What the fuck, how do you know that?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Shen Yuan said quickly, thinking of whatever dubiously legal avenues his brother had gone through to acquire this information. “I read your book. Your other book. Captive Falcon.”
“Wow, really?” Airplane asked. “Is this, like, a hate crime thing? Please don’t hate crime me. I really need this heterosexual porn to pay the bills.”
“I’m—I’m not going to hate crime you! I wanted to talk to you because it’s good!”
Airplane blinked owlishly into the camera.
Shen Yuan had always assumed there was no way Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky was anything but a pervy middle-aged man living in his parents' basement, and had similarly assumed that Lord Cup Noodle must be a girl his Meimei’s age. He wasn’t sure what to do with the reality of the person he was looking at—some random person close to his own age, with dubious stains on their shirt and a voice that cracked. He was starting to feel like a bit of an asshole for harassing them, which was not a state of being he enjoyed. He was the wronged party here. If anything, Airplane had spent the last several months harassing him with his horrible, addictive writing.
“You… liked it?”
“Yes! It’s good! And I don’t get it—you can obviously write. Even your older stuff is pretty good, and you were only getting better after Mist and Moon . And the beginning of PIDW! So much promise and potential. Luo Binghe is such a good protagonist, and there are so many interesting plot threads set up, and then it all just dissolves into meaningless sex! I mean, what is even up with all of the big-breasted waifus? You’re—”
He trailed off, caught between the part of his brain that wanted to say ‘a girl’ and the pre-flinching expression on Airplane’s face.
“—gay, I assume!” he settled on instead, and was relieved to see the hunted expression dissolve.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but gay tragedies don’t exactly sell on Zhongdian,” Airplane said. “ Captive Falcon, Caged Crane wasn’t drawing in any readership, and I really need readers to like, afford rent and keep myself in those aforementioned cup noodles. The stallion novel market is way more lucrative than obscure danmei.”
“But what about your craft?” Shen Yuan asked, resisting the urge to flail his hands. “Artistic integrity? Don’t you think you would get more valuable readership if it was actually good?”
“The people want big titty anime waifus, dude, and as long as they pay my paycheck, I deliver,” Airplane said.
“What about Captive Falcon?”
“What about it?”
Shen Yuan gave into the urge for a little bit of flailing. “It was never finished! And it ends on a cliffhanger! Can’t you at least wrap it up somehow?”
“Bro, I have to write ten thousand words a day to keep up with PIDW. Do you know how much time that takes? I basically live, breathe, eat, sleep straight porn at this point. I don’t have time to continue my passion projects right now.”
“That doesn’t sound very sustainable.”
Airplane shrugged. “C’est la vie. You either kill yourself or get killed by malnutrition, or whatever.”
Shen Yuan, who often got text messages from his brothers about impending death via malnutrition, scowled.
“How was is it going to end, then?”
“Well…” Airplane said. “If you really want to know. So, you know how this whole time the reason that the sect was putting so much pressure on Yang’er was because he’s the only son of the Sect Leader, right? Well, once he goes back to the hidden valley with his newfound power, it turns out…”
Shen Yuan and Airplane (“Should I call you…” “I honestly would so prefer just Airplane” “Noted.”) talked for a couple of hours, before Airplane checked the time and frantically logged off so that he could get back to meeting his deadlines. It was meant to be a one-off thing, but then Shen Yuan had more questions about Captive Falcon , and also some follow ups on the ambiguous ending of Mist and Moon (“So the lillies were a metaphor?” “Dude, I was sixteen—I truly could not tell you what I was going for there.”) And then, well, he wasn’t going to just leave comments on the next few chapters of PIDW when he could go straight to the source, right? And talking about Airplane’s novels led to talking about other novels, and then games and shows, and soon they just called each other up to hang out quietly on voice chat while Airplane typed away at his laptop and Shen Yuan did his online university coursework.
A little over eight months into this arrangement, Airplane went radio silent.
It took Shen Yuan a couple of days to notice. He was recovering from a particularly brutal brush with food poisoning and enduring his family’s fussing in the aftermath of a teeny, tiny hospital trip to get his stomach fixed up.
He was ashamed to admit that he only realised it at first because his phone hadn’t alerted him to an update of PIDW the entire time he’d been sick. When he checked Zhongdian Literature, he saw it had been at least a week since Airplane’s last update. When he texted, his messages went unanswered and unread.
When he finally got ahold of Airplane, a series of increasingly concerned WeChat messages and a strong debate of asking his brother to actually doxx the man later, it was via a sudden video call another week after he’d disappeared. Shen Yuan would normally be upset about this, but…
“You got electrocuted?”
Airplane, one arm wrapped in bandages all the way up to where it disappeared into his sleeve, nodded.
“Haha, yeah. I spilled instant ramen all over my computer, and then I tried to unplug it, and…” he waved his unburnt hand with a half-shrug. “I was, like, in a coma for a bit. I didn’t have any weird dreams of living a separate life that I can never return to, which is lowkey a bit of a bummer.”
“Holy shit, dude,” Shen Yuan breathed. “Are you okay? Who’s with you?”
“Uh,” Airplane winced. “Yeah, it’s fine. Some muscle and nerve damage, and they’re still doing tests for, like, neurological stuff or whatever. I’m just back at my apartment, so.”
Shen Yuan stared at him.
“No way,” he said. “No. What’s your address? My brother and I can be there in a day. We’ll rent a car. You’re staying with me until there is less of a risk of you dying in your apartment.”
“I think you’re overreacting a little.”
“ Where do you live?”
Shen Yuan and his er-ge got on a plane and flew to Beijing the same day. In the end, they didn’t even need to rent a car—Airplane owned few enough belongings that they could pack them all up in a few bags and get on a train back to Shanghai the next morning. Er-ge spent the entire trip muttering about the state of Airplane’s apartment and then pointedly listing off the life-threatening complications of Post-Electric Shock Syndrome. Shen Yuan, who was used to both his brother’s judgment and his medical catastrophising, tuned him out. Airplane, less used to both of these things, was looking distinctly pale by the end of the trip. Though maybe that was the Post-Electric Shock Syndrome.
Shen Yuan had not had roommates since his disastrous first attempt at college. Having Airplane stay with him was different, strange even, but… not terrible. It was a lot like hanging out with him over video chat, only he also got to hear him singing in the shower and to scold him for loading the dishwasher wrong.
They watched movies and Er-ge dropped off medically approved snacks. Airplane took control of both the kitchen and Shen Yuan’s ancient CD player, which Shen Yuan thought were probably better off left out of his hands anyways. Meimei came by, and the two of them got way too deeply into a discussion of some danmei Shen Yuan pretended to have never heard of. Now, instead of sitting to do work hours apart, they could do it curled up on the couch together.
Airplane went back to updating PIDW, but Shen Yuan noticed that the chapters were shorter and sloppier than ever. He had taken to looking each draft over the evening before Airplane posted, just to double-check for spelling mistakes or sentences that made absolutely no sense, even for Airplane’s usual shameless lack of regard for literary excellence.
“Hey,” he said, a week and a half post-Airplane abduction while his… friend? Roommate? Affectionate nemesis? Was laboriously typing away on Shen Yuan’s laptop with one hand. “Are you… doing okay?”
Airplane stopped typing, folding up the computer and resting his head on it with a sigh.
“I don’t know, man. It’s just… hard right now. My arm hurts and I feel like my brain is totally full of cotton, and those medical bills were so expensive. I don’t know how I’m gonna afford rent and paying them off on PIDW’s income right now, and I just—” He shrugged.
Shen Yuan frowned. He really hated conversations about feelings and anything adjacent to them, but…
“You could just keep staying here,” he said. “My apartment is big enough, and I don’t need you to pay me rent. My family literally owns this building.”
“Yeah, yeah, rub it in.”
“I’m serious. You’re fine to stay here. Then you don’t have to worry about rent or groceries. My brother is always bringing me weird vegetables I don’t know how to use.”
“I can’t—I can’t just accept that,” Airplane said. His voice had gone high the way it did when he was truly stressed. Shen Yuan wondered absently if there was a way he could get him on his family’s insurance, too. That had to be better than whatever resident insurance Airplane had now. They might have to get married for that, though… “What do you even get out of this arrangement? A weird nerd who sleeps on your couch?”
Shen Yuan rolled his eyes. “There is an entire guest room, you’re hardly sleeping on the couch. And…” he thought about it for a moment. Then, he brightened. Whatever look was on his face made Airplane lean away nervously. “And you can absolutely do something for me. Stop working on PIDW.”
“W-what?”
“It’s obviously making you miserable right now. You literally have brain damage. Take a break. And when you can write again without frying what’s left of your brain you can finish Captive Falcon, Caged Crane. Or whatever project you want to work on, with actual time and thought instead of churning out as many words as possible to feed horny weirdos on the internet.”
“Bro. You are horny weirdos on the internet. But go on.”
Shen Yuan did not let himself be thrown from his roll. “I’ll even pay you for it. It’s like back in ancient times when wealthy patrons would adopt artists to paint murals or write epic poems for them or whatever.”
“… Are you saying you want to be my patron? Like, my sugar daddy?”
Shen Yuan wrinkled his nose. “Gross.”
“You are literally asking me to live in your house and write you gay porn for money!”
“Shut up! Don’t be weird! It’s perfectly normal for a straight man to ask another man to, platonically, be roommates and work on writing a good book that happens to feature gay people!”
“Bro…”
They did get married. For insurance reasons, obviously, Airplane was totally getting scammed for his medical costs after the accident. Shen Yuan couldn’t let that fly for the person he was sort-of employing!
And being married meant doing married people things, like kissing. At first, Airplane just casually kissed his cheek when passing along a new chapter of his latest book, Celestial Companion, or leaning against him while they were watching dramas on the TV in the living room. Shen Yuan thought that Airplane was getting really committed to selling their marriage even in the privacy of their home, and he couldn’t let his… husband? Shoulder all that commitment alone!
So, he suggested that they start sleeping in the same bed. And when Airplane kissed him goodnight, he had to reciprocate by kissing him back. And then, if one of them woke up, er, excited in the morning, it was just being a good bro to help each other out. Even if Airplane didn’t have the same equipment as Shen Yuan, that was no reason not to be a conscientious bro!
“So,” Airplane said a year later, ladelling a bowl of soup with pork and bean sprouts into Shen Yuan’s bowl. He had been getting pretty good at cooking, lately. “Did you, like, have your gay crisis in private, or…?”
“What?” Shen Yuan asked. He finished setting the table, neatly arranging their napkins and pouring Airplane’s favorite juice into a anime-character covered cup.
“I was just kind of curious. Like, you went from being all ‘I’m a heterosexual man, rahh’ to queer domestic bliss pretty fast.”
“I’m not gay,” Shen Yuan said.
Airplane frowned, lowering the ladle. “What, because I’m not a man? Because dude, that is fucking low after—”
“No, no,” Shen Yuan waved his hands, “Obviously you’re a man! I mean, aren’t we just like, bros? Platonically?”
“... Platonic bros. Who are married.”
“Yeah.”
“And have sex.”
“... yeah.”
Airplane looked around their apartment. At their set table, with their matching anime cups. At where Bingpup, the stray dog they’d adopted a few months ago, was sleeping in his little doggy bed. At their coats on the coat wrack, and his new computer setup at the desk in the corner, and the wall calendar with Shen Yuan’s upcoming doctors appointments marked in green.
“Yeah,” Airplane said, turning back to the soup. “As bros.”