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Avoiding someone while also working for them wasn’t easy, but Yin Yu thought he was managing alright. He managed to keep his interactions with Hua Cheng to a minimum, and ensured that any face-to-face meetings were as short and professional as possible before escaping. He could tell Hua Cheng wanted to say more, to broach the topic of how they last left things, but Yin Yu firmly shut down any hint of that type of conversation.
In that way, he managed to avoid the topic with Hua Cheng with relative ease for a month. Avoiding Xie Lian, however, was much more difficult.
Not in terms of staying away. Yin Yu had no reason to directly report to Xie Lian, so there was less chance he would have to run into the prince, but when he did…
“Please, A-Yu, I just want to talk.”
Yin Yu was tempted to slam the door in his face, but restrained himself. Being ambushed by Xie Lian outside his bedroom was the last thing he needed today.
“San Lang and I are worried. If we did something wrong please just talk to us!”
Yin Yu shifted. He tried not to pay attention to how harried Xie Lian looked, how both he and Hua Cheng had seemed to be losing sleep lately, had shorter tempers, how they both looked at him with blatant concern.
“Whatever it is, A-Yu, we’re sorry, so–”
“Would you stop that?!” Yin Yu didn’t mean to snap, but the tension and emotion that had been bubbling up over the last month boiled over and it came out. “Stop with the pet names, stop toying with me like this, just stop it!”
For a moment, silence hung heavy between them. Then, Yin Yu realized what he had done.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered. He closed the door between them, and with a quick roll of his—of Hua Cheng’s—dice, he was gone.
-
Hua Cheng found him shortly after in the woods on the outskirts of Ghost City, where the ghost realm blended with the mortal realm. There was a perpetual chill in the air, one that had long become a comfort to Yin Yu rather than the disconcerting presence it had been when he’d first arrived here so long ago. He was staring at a marker on the forest floor, where years ago he had constructed a small memorial for his former sect mate Jian Yu.
“That was quick,” Yin Yu said as he heard the jangling footsteps approaching behind him.
“You didn’t exactly make it difficult,” Hua Cheng replied.
Yin Yu didn’t even need to ask if he’d heard about the confrontation with Xie Lian. “Am I fired?” he asked instead.
“Do you want to be?”
Yin Yu shook his head, biting his lip.
“Then you’re not,” Hua Cheng said simply, as if any of this were simple.
Yin Yu let that small reassurance settle over him for a moment before speaking again.
“I buried my ashes here,” he confessed. He heard a sharp inhale from Hua Cheng, who took a moment to gather his words before speaking again.
“With Jian Yu?” he asked softly, the gentle tone sending a light flinch through Yin Yu’s body.
“In the place I met you.”
It was nearly a whisper, but he could feel the weight of the words as he said them. It was tradition after all, and though he had known deep down from the moment he woke up as a ghost that he could never gift them directly to the one he wanted, this had seemed like a good enough compromise. He hadn’t looked into his reasoning too much at the time, but now…
Hua Cheng obviously knew the significance, and for once seemed to be at a loss for words.
“If that changes your answer, I understand,” Yin Yu continued.
“Why would that change anything?” Hua Cheng finally managed to find his voice.
Yin Yu shook his head. “I don’t want to come between you and Dianxia.”
“You couldn’t,” Hua Cheng said, almost automatically.
“I know.” Yin Yu couldn’t look him in the face, staring intently at the ground as he continued. “Nothing in this world could, and I– I can’t keep pretending that it doesn’t hurt to be the afterthought to that. I want to stay, to serve you both in whatever way I can, but I can’t go on like this knowing that my feelings aren’t reciprocated. I’m sorry, Chengzhu, I just can’t.”
Yin Yu didn’t know what he was expecting after that, but it certainly wasn’t a gentle hand on his arm.
“A-Yu, have you heard stories about what Ghost City was like before you arrived?”
Yin Yu nodded. “I have. A lot of them are exaggerations, but—”
“No. They’re not.”
That startled Yin Yu enough for him to look up. The stories he had heard before he started working for Hua Cheng described him as harsh, viciously decisive, changing moods rapidly from one day to the next, wearing a form that barely seemed to be human most days. But when he met Hua Cheng, he had offered his help with Jian Yu’s spirit, and offered a position working with him openly and sincerely. Yin Yu had rarely seen that crueler side of him, and so he had assumed the ghosts were exaggerating as they often did.
“I had been searching for so long by that point that I was starting to lose hope,” Hua Cheng said. “I was so angry, at the gods for casting him out, at the world for separating him from me, at myself for failing to find him, and I was taking it out on anyone who dared to step into my sight without bringing me news of Xie Lian.”
“Then shouldn’t you have been angrier at me?” Yin Yu asked.
“I should’ve,” Hua Cheng agreed. “I wanted to be at first. I had heard the rumors of a banished god, got my hopes up, and instead found you. I should have been so angry, but then… Even having just been banished, even though it was at least in part Jian Yu’s fault, you still wanted to help him.”
“I reminded you of him,” Yin Yu realized.
“You did, and I didn’t hate you for it.” Hua Cheng was smiling at him so fondly that Yin Yu found himself stepping closer before he could think about what he was doing. It hit him then, how much he had missed Hua Cheng. Even before all of this started, for a long time it had really been just the two of them, and there had been something growing in between them ever since Xie Lian had been added to the equation.
“I tried to tell myself it was just that for a long time,” Hua Cheng continued, “but it wasn’t. My feelings for you are separate from my feelings towards Gege, but they are just as real, and I’m sorry I ever led you to believe they weren’t.”
To his horror, Yin Yu felt tears beginning to well up in his eyes. “You—” he pushed through a tightness in his throat, “But what about—”
“He knows,” Hua Cheng reassured. “He knows and he doesn’t care. This whole thing was his idea, to give us the space to work this out, and maybe explore some of those feelings himself—though, that will be for the two of you to discuss, I imagine.”
The tears spilled over. “I can have this?”
Hua Cheng took Yin Yu’s hands into his own. “You can have this.”
He pulled Yin Yu close and held him while his pent up emotions bubbled over and forced their way out as sobs. Once he had finally tired himself out and his eyes started to dry, the arms around him loosened, though Hua Cheng waited for him to pull away before fully letting him go.
“Ready to go home?” Hua Cheng asked, holding up his dice.
“One moment,” Yin Yu said. He knelt down next to the marker and dug his hands into the dirt, emerging a few minutes later with a small box. He offered it to Hua Cheng. “You should have this.”
Hua Cheng tucked the box containing his ashes away, and Yin Yu felt something settle deep in his chest that had been there since he died. A feeling of contentment washed over him.
“Let’s go home,” he said.