![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losShen Yuan had always been highly intelligent, and—perhaps in consequence—suspicious of the sort of life the intelligent son of a well-off family was supposed to want: of the gruelling, ‘good’ job in some vaguely-defined business. A life of an impersonal privilege, without particular pleasure or satisfaction. Shen Yuan didn’t even enjoy competition, as such. He’d done well on his gaokao, but it had exhausted and even disillusioned him. Ultimately, he’d little interest in prestigious subjects like medicine, or law: his talents lay elsewhere.
The trouble was, said talents were not particularly employable. No one really cared that Shen Yuan was a bright, promising student of classical poetry. No one was going to hire him for being good at all the nerdy xianxia hobbies he’d acquired over the course of his chequered youth: qin, calligraphy, weiqi—anything useless, Shen Yuan picked up easily and never really put down. At least no one was going to hire him for those things at any pay-grade his parents would have considered the makings of a real career. Mainland academia was party-politics hell that Shen Yuan didn’t think he’d last ten minutes in, and didn’t pay all that much better than living off gigs, besides.
If he’d been from an arts-industry family, or otherwise encouraged to pursue music with an eye towards the profession from an early age, Shen Yuan might easily have attended an appropriate conservatory instead of university. He might thus have found himself doing something he was well-suited to—and the same went, really, for any of his talents. But he wasn’t, and he hadn’t been, and now it seemed too late.
About all Shen Yuan could do with his skill set seemed to be tutoring at the posh school school he himself had graduated from only a few years ago. His parents guilted him into it when he’d been at a loose end right after graduating university. His cousin, Shen Jiu, had taken a sabbatical to be part of the team revamping the gaokao: a coveted appointment which would bring the school high repute, and which Shen Yuan’s exacting, highly-irritating cousin seemed ideally suited to. After all, Shen Jiu was what would happen if the Social Science: Chinese test took human form to better give teens anxiety attacks.
It was only a temporary appointment, and private schools were often laxer about teaching qualifications, caring more about one’s guanxi than anything else. Shen Yuan thought they’d have literally put up more resistance to the swap if he hadn’t looked roughly 40% like his cousin. So Shen Jiu’s department head responsibilities were split among his peers, and Shen Yuan absorbed his course-load: teaching from Jiu’s anal-retentive, pre-set lesson plans—at least initially, until he’ grew comfortable enough with the role to give that Gantt chart nightmare a sneer even Shen Jiu would have been proud of, and chucked it over his shoulder in the vague direction of his dresser.
The position provided Shen Yuan with decent money. Because he also agreed to be a residential assistant for students who boarded (as he himself never had), it also offered Shen Yuan with a free, private dorm room, which made this his first time living away from home. He discovered he could be cool and collected in front of the children, and then shut the door to his own room, drop into his chair and wheel around like a madman over to his desktop to gremlin over the web novel instalments he hadn’t checked all! day! long!
Shen Yuan found he liked teaching and tutoring, really. He liked the kids, especially his favourite and best student. He came to wish he’d known any of this about himself when making the core decisions of his life, or that there was a role like this that would be interested in actually hiring him, when tang ge swept back into the picture. But there were only so many posh schools in the city that would have had any use for a classical poetry student, and there were many more directly-qualified candidates for such plum teaching positions. Besides, his family considered this job ’appropriate’ for country-cousin Jiu. They’d have considered it less so for Shen Yuan. And while Shen Yuan thought that was irritating, and patronising, and unfair even if it was awful Shen Jiu they were judging, he still didn’t appreciate the friction that inevitably came when he went against their vague but firm notions of propriety.
Shen Yuan knew he was on borrowed time, and in due course Shen Jiu returned (all ‘why is my lesson plan Gantt chart gathering dust, A Yuan?). Shen Yuan didn’t want to disturb his favourite class of seventeen year olds’ intense gaokao prep by making a fuss about his leave-taking. He wrote all his students an email via his school address about how today’s class had been his last: how proud he was of them, and how they’d now be welcoming back Shen Jiu. Fat fucking chance they would, but Shen Yuan would tell the white lie without a blush. He made it a policy never to let that bitter harpy have a sliver of anything substantive to passive-aggressively reproach him with at New Years.
If the students had any transitional questions, Shen Jiu would be able to reach out to Shen Yuan for them, because in leaving Shen Yuan would lose his Qing Jing staff email address. In reality, Shen Yuan bet that Shen Jiu wouldn’t so much as ask Shen Yuan to piss on him if he were on fire. Shen Jiu was a lemon-sucking bitch who basically wore Shen Yuan’s face, but like, badly: as though tang ge had smelled dog shit, and pulled such a nasty expression that the whole assemblage had gotten stuck that way (as Shen Yuan’s a niang had wisely always warned him it might).
Shen Yuan had a second motive for cutting his ties very neatly. He was rather furtive about that. Shen Yuan had a fairly good relationship with his family, as these things went. But the thing was, he didn’t actually greatly enjoy living off his parents, the moderate allowance they could afford him, all the ramen that could buy, his family’s slowly-mounting disapproval and his own lack of direction. He wanted breathing room, and so he decided to move back down to Hong Kong. He’d been born there during his mom’s stint at her company’s head office (his parents having exercised their highly-enviable geo-locked legal right to have a ridiculous number of kids to the fullest), and had spent his early childhood in the city before she’d been given her hometown Beijing branch to manage.
Of course he’d told his family he had a media consultancy job, dressing it up in all kinds of webspeak bullshit they could use to impress their friends. They’d be happy enough, and hopefully, so would he. It wasn’t even entirely incorrect, just—deceptively packaged. Because Shen Yuan was absolutely going to need money to make this work, after he wore through his parents’ ‘housewarming gift’. And thanks to some friends in the industry, he’d figured out a pretty good way to get money, just for now. But it would involve three things: never telling his parents the specifics, living in an area where you were unlikely to get busted for this shit, and never, ever visiting his sweet little high schoolers, because he didn’t think he was exactly gonna be ‘role model material’ to the cosseted darlings of Qing Jing Secondary after this shit. The last thing he ever wanted to deal with was the humiliation of being accused of corrupting the youth, or some nonsense.
Honestly, even if someone did get a VPN-blocker, illegally consumed banned materials and was to his parents about it, Shen Yuan was almost certain they’d simply never believe he’d done a stint as a cam boy. Besides, it was only temporary!
***
Shen Yuan had a third motive for vanishing off the face of Beijing, but this one he was so furtive about that he hadn’t even managed to properly tell himself.
That reason was woke up the morning after Shen Yuan’s departure, blinked his way through the worst email of his life, ran down the hall and pounded on a door that was answered by a man who looked, to Luo Binghe, 60% wrong.
“Can I help you?” Shen Jiu asked, flicking cool eyes over the pupil he’d taught from thirteen to fourteen.
“Where’s Shen lasoshi?” Luo Binghe asked around the lump in his throat. He’d read the email before bolting here, but even so, he’d thought he’d have time.
“You’re looking at him,” Shen Jiu snapped. “Slow as ever, I see, despite the scholarship. I did suspect Yuanr had been inflating your improved grades—he’s soft like that.”
Luo Binghe shook his head, too upset to bother engaging with Shen Jiu’s bullshit. Shen laoshi wouldn’t just leave. Not him, not without a word, not in the immediate run-up to the most gruelling trial of Luo Binghe’s young life.
Luo Binghe had been in the room he stood in front of now on innumerable occasions. The bits of it he could see around Shen Jiu’s stiff shoulders were almost unrecognisable. Bare. The only real thing in it was Shen Jiu’s smart suitcase, evidently unpacked but not yet stowed away.
“Where’s Shen Yuan?” Luo Binghe growled.
Shen Jiu raised an eyebrow at him. “Hong Kong, by now. Not that it’s any of your business, Luo nansheng.”
From someone else, ‘Hong Kong’ would have been offered up as a salient piece of information. From Shen Jiu, it was a slick, vicious observation that in a city of almost eight million people, the whole length of the country away, Luo Binghe’s chances of finding any particular inhabitant were very slight.
The thing about Shen Jiu, where his tang di was concerned, was that Shen Jiu had no idea whatever that Shen Yuan didn’t like him. It probably wouldn’t have greatly bothered him to discover it, really, even though his tang di was one of very few people in the world who Shen Jiu actually liked. Shen Jiu had never expressed this preference in any way any normal human could have divined; it had never occurred to Shen Jiu that his few personal weaknesses were not simply glaringly obvious.
Most people liked Shen Yuan. Shen Jiu even felt a little cheap, experiencing such a common sentiment. It was something of a relief to Shen Jiu that he also viciously resented Shen Yuan, which only made sense given that his tang di had thus far moved through his life without any great hardship: a far cry from his own experience of the world. Shen Jiu’s chief comfort, however, was that he understood that most people were wrong about who Shen Yuan was, and liked the boy for stupid reasons: pretty, rich, clever, pleasant, oddly vulnerable. They didn’t grasp that Shen Yuan’s cleverness tended towards the bitingly critical. That he was funny, in a way he’d learned to hide from most of their shared acquaintance. That Yuan di had a flinty independence to him. Shen Jiu caught everything other people missed because he recognised it, as easily as he did the shared bones of their faces.
No-one else in their shared family made Shen Jiu feel that odd mirror-shock of kinship. Certainly they had common interests—Shen Yuan having pursued everything Shen Jiu might have wanted to, if he’d had the funds and the time and hadn’t been so frantically concerned with ensuring his future was viable. But perhaps their most fundamental commonality—entwined with the vulnerability people did pick up on—was that they were both queer. Shen Jiu had known that absolutely, almost since they’d met, when Shen Yuan had been in his first year of university. He couldn’t have said how he knew. It was in everything Shen Yuan did, seeping into his gestures, the soft set of his mouth and the very timbre of his voice—the boy as stripped bare as Shen Jiu felt he himself was. Shen Jiu wanted to shake him, to tell him to tighten his spine and sharpen his edges because people could see, and they wouldn’t be so fucking stupid forever, they’d talk. And someone would take advantage.
Someone like this rough little shit, panting right in front of ’Shen lasoshi’s’ door, growling at him like a street-dog.
Finds LBH threatening
Jiu and Binghe’s beef
Accent conversation
Jiu is actually originally a poor country cousin but he took his real topolect/accent out back and murdered it a decade ago and is now more Beijing than anyone has ever been OFFICIOUSLY so
LBH’s migrant worker mom
Yuan’s notes about Binghe are glowing, does he even know?
This was a favour to him, trust and calculation re someone else becoming dept head
Annoyed he only loosely followed the lesson plan, but the results are acceptable.
Annoying the kids LIKE him so much
maybe subconsciously Yuan knew there was kind of a Thing here but Binghe was young and it was uncomfortable, like what 22 yo is Friends with a 17 yo he's being a loser!! and Yuan HARD SUPPRESSES any hint of interest/picking up on Binghe's interest and is just like good to get distance
***
It’s fine because no one can ever recognise him in public if he never leaves his house!! Plus if somehow anyone told his family members, they would simply never believe it.
A few years later, Shen Yuan is like well I can’t like say no to TRYING this terrible bad dragon product sent by a sponsor because that’s more money than I’ve ever been offered in my life, like, for anything—
He’s kind of bitchy, patronising and sarcastic sometimes about the products he’s using, it’s like his Thing, ppl think he’s a brat but he’s like I’m not really I just have standards!!
***
This is why terrible cam boy crack makes sense to me bc it’s like, it’s not real sex if you never engage with any people that is safe and controlled
Am I even gay if it’s just toys?
By professionalising this interaction I can distance myself more!!
Mari: It's barely even masturbation if I'm only doing it during my work hours
Me: Is it even sexuality if it’s work in a self contained bubble???
***
SQQ spent the first 6 years of his life abroad, while his mom had a high end corporate job, and a couple of his nursery words retain a sweet, off-key twang that squeezes LBH’s heart with how adorable it is
Binghe only FINALLY knows where gege went bc Hualing has a huge following and has also seen the picture(s) in Binghe’s room of he and Shen Yuan
And she’s like oh I did NOT know Peerless did meet-ups god you’re a little young in these
Ppl really like the imperious coldness and binghe himself is like it’s fun as A mood but honestly it makes me sad that he NEVER is soft with himself in these or very playful, he doesn’t really seem to be enjoying the prep, it’s DISPLAY, he doesn’t care about the people watching him or being watched but it’s like a fast food worker doesn’t care about ppl eating the fries they’re not taking time to LOVE making fries
Mari: All his tips come with weird requests like "show us what you really enjoy even if it's not camera friendly"
"fuck yourself on this and talk about a time you were emotionally vulnerable with a partner---"
Shen Yuan just deletes them immediately
Me: binghe's kind of like, in a way I LIKE that he shows SO little of himself really bc while I want to see it I kind of don't want anyone else to
Shen Yuan is THE WORST BITCH about parasocial shit he makes me look Keen
'the other day someone asked me about my career path/plans and I am still Shaken--'
Binghe: I JUST WANT TO KNOW IF YOU'RE HAPPY BC YOU DON'T SEEM VERY--
Mari: Meanwhile irl binghe fully just keeps slipping up and calling Shen Yuan his boyfriend "I guess I'm technically seeing this guy"
***
LBH real dad meet up
LBH real business theory, crypto, money shelters, stuff changes
LBH media empire, boyfriend experience programme
You’re upset that it’s ME?
