The night was still cloaked in velvet midnight, but the silence wasn't peaceful—it was pretending. The moon, that ancient and indifferent witness, spilled its ivory glow through the cracked windowpane, casting fragile light across the slumbering figure of Shu Yao.
Yet he wasn't sleeping. Not really.
He lay there motionless, as if resting, but beneath the surface—something was dying. Quietly. Slowly. Like a candle burning inward, its wax weeping even as the flame fought to shine.
The moonlight traced the tear sliding sideways down his cheek like it knew the route, like it had traveled this sorrow before. The silver streak shimmered with betrayal, catching the light in such a cruel, beautiful way—it almost looked like a jewel. What a perfect way to break a boy, Shu Yao thought somewhere deep in the distance of himself. With beauty. With silence.
How absurd, how poetic, that he suffered in dreams and in waking. That the torment followed him like a shadow too stubborn to dissolve, too loyal to leave.
It was starting to feel like the world hated him. Or perhaps worse—forgot him entirely.
Or maybe… maybe God loved him too much. Loved him in that strange, aching way that meant stripping him of everything slowly, thread by thread, until he was bare and bruised and kneeling—ready to be taken back.
Back to the place before pain.
Back to the beginning.
Back to the end.
And still, the moon watched on. Cold. Gentle. Knowing. As if it, too, had once wept sideways in the dark.
Somewhere far from "shu Yao"
The Banglore hall was cast in bronze and shadow, the late hour tinting the walls in a soft sepia glow. It was an old place, steeped in the prestige of Rothenberg blood, and tonight, the air hummed with the quiet murmur of secrets and smoke.
George Harold von Rothenberg sat with one leg crossed over the other, his dark slacks pressed to perfection, the glow of a cigarette painting his fingers in soft ember light. Opposite him, in a deep leather armchair as worn as the family's legacy, sat his elder brother—Niklas. Stern, cold-eyed, cut from marble and time. Niklas exhaled with the fatigue of men who carried kingdoms in their palms.
"So," George began, smoke coiling from his lips like silk ribbons unfurling, "tomorrow will be the first time Bai Qi shoots, hm?"
Niklas's gaze didn't flinch. He stared through the dusk with the stillness of a monarch watching storms roll in. "Yes," he answered, voice low, as if any louder might fracture the moment. "He wasn't obeying me. I've told him many times to shoot for the Rothenberg name. Always, he turned his head away. Silent. Defiant."
A pause. Niklas's fingers tapped the armrest. "But something changed."
George lifted an eyebrow, mildly intrigued. "You mean he finally listened to you? What made the great Bai Qi bend a knee?"
"That's the question, isn't it?" Niklas replied, reaching toward the polished mahogany table between them. He slid a sleek, silver laptop into view and opened it, the glow of the screen cutting through the rich amber of the room.
"I suspect it's this boy."
George's gaze snapped toward his brother, his cigarette briefly forgotten. "Who?"
Niklas's lips curved—not quite a smile, but something like it. He turned the screen for his younger brother to see. On it was an image. A boy wrapped in light, like he belonged to it. Golden skin, autumn-length hair tucked back in a velvet ribbon, those distant eyes that didn't look at you—they read you.
"The boy I made an offer to earlier today," Niklas said.
George leaned forward, attention caught like a moth in sudden flame. His voice softened, caught between curiosity and something warmer. "Shu Yao."
Niklas nodded slowly. "Yes. That boy."
George said nothing for a long moment, letting the silence do what words could not. His lashes lowered, and in the glow of the screen, his cheekbones turned a quiet pink—as if the thought itself had reached into his chest and plucked the wrong string.
"What kind of deal?" he asked finally, voice coated in velvet.
Niklas leaned back, arms spread on the armrests like a king overseeing his court. "A simple offer. To model for our brand. But it's never simple with boys like him, is it? He didn't say yes. Not yet."
George's eyes lingered on the photo.
Shu Yao didn't pose in the image—he existed in it. Fragile but resolute. Like wind in a cathedral. Like a painting that forgot it wasn't supposed to breathe.
"And if he says no?" George asked, his voice now barely a whisper.
Niklas exhaled. "Then we find another beauty. But I doubt it."
George turned away from the screen slowly, but not before memorizing the lines of Shu Yao's jaw, the sadness that haloed him like he was born of it. There was something ruinous in that boy—something rare. Like a comet that never touches earth but leaves the sky burning.
"He's too beautiful," Niklas said, almost absently. "Almost cruelly so."
George smiled faintly. "Yes," he whispered, not to his brother but to the flickering ghost of the boy now haunting the room. "Too rare."
The clock chimed once—midnight, soft and silver. Outside the window, moonlight struck the glass like a soft knock, asking to be let in. Neither man moved.
Inside the hall of Rothenberg, two brothers sat with a world between them. Smoke rising. Silence stretching. And in the center, like a secret neither of them wanted to speak aloud, lay the name: Shu Yao.
Tomorrow, everything would change.
And the storm had golden hair.
The night folded itself like silk around the windows of the bangloy, swallowing the world in a hush that only the moon could hear. In a chamber vast enough to echo royalty, Bai Qi slept—if one could call such stillness sleep. He lay diagonally across the bed, half-draped in shadows and half-devoured by moonlight, like a myth painted in chiaroscuro.
His torso was bare, unmarred by fabric or flaw—only the brushstrokes of muscle, sculpted and taut beneath skin the color of first storm clouds. He wore nothing but a pair of soft black trousers that clung to his hips with the kind of arrogance silk might envy. His obsidian hair was damp, still kissed by the shower, wild and tousled like the man of a wolf who refused to be tamed. A single strand curled over one eye, motionless—yet every inch of him whispered movement, restraint, danger sleeping.
The room itself seemed to breathe around him. Heavy curtains stirred as though they feared to wake him. Even the moonlight crept carefully across his abdomen, tracing the rise and fall of breath so faint it might be mistaken for none at all.
There was no cruelty here. Not in this moment. Not in this stillness. Just a boy—if one dared to call him that—with his war mask shed and his demons at bay.
And for once, Bai Qi looked... young. Human.
But the softness was an illusion, the kind that coaxes moths too close to flame.
For when morning comes, the wolf will rise again. And the silk will burn.
But this—this was not the monster that Shu Yao dreamed of.
No, this was the real Bai Qi.
The one the world rarely saw, and perhaps was never meant to.
Here, beneath the tapestry of midnight, he was not the sharp-tongued cruelty of nightmares nor the boy who bruised others with silence. He was only Bai Qi—just a man with secrets folded beneath his ribs and kindness blooming in the marrow, unseen by most.
His chest rose in a soft rhythm, like a tide that had finally stopped fighting the moon. And the ring on his finger—yes, that ring—still shimmered quietly beneath the silver spill of moonlight. It caught the glow like a promise whispered too late or a vow remembered when no one is listening. It did not belong to vanity nor pride. It belonged to someone. To something lost. And Bai Qi, even in sleep, held it as though letting go would tear the sky in half.
His hand, resting over his stomach, was slightly curled, like he'd tried to hold something in a dream and couldn't quite keep it. His brows were not furrowed. There was no storm behind those closed lids. No battle. Just breath. Just bone. Just quiet.
Here, there was no venom. No fire.
Just a quiet flame. One that warmed instead of destroyed.
No matter what Shu Yao's dreams whispered,
this was the truth of him.
Not a villain.
Not a ghost.
But a boy trying chasing his love, where no one was watching.
And the moon, like an old friend, kept shining—
because sometimes, kindness needs a witness too.
In Bai Qi's dream, the world softened into rose light. The ballroom was a watercolor of silken pastels and echoing laughter — and there she was. Qing Yue.
She wore pink — not the timid blush of roses, but the warm bloom of a cherry blossom caught in spring wind. Her dress billowed like a whisper as she twirled within the golden spill of chandeliers, her skirts a ribbon unspooling around her ankles. She danced with barefoot grace, every movement effortless, as though the world had never bruised her.
And Bai Qi — bare-chested even in dream, hair still tousled from sleep and eyes gentler than usual — caught her hand mid-turn.
The music hushed. It wasn't real music. It was memory, perhaps — or something deeper. A feeling. Qing Yue laughed, the sound like water lapping at the edges of a porcelain teacup. Her cheeks were a shade darker now, warmed by closeness, and she tried to turn her head away.
But Bai Qi pulled her in.
Not possessively. Not with that cold detachment the world had once feared him for. No — this was a quiet pull, like gravity, like longing dressed in silk gloves. His hand rested against her waist, steady, reverent. And in the hush between two heartbeats, he leaned down and kissed her.
Her lips tasted of spring rain and unspoken things.
She did not resist. Her hands rested delicately against his collarbone, fingers curling inward as if to hold the moment in place — a delicate girl caught between the past and whatever this might be. She allowed it, not with desperation, but with a trust only time could earn.
The dream lingered. Bai Qi, with his hand at her back, led her again into the gentle spiral of the dance floor. Her hair floated like ink in water. Her breath caught. Her eyes met his — wide, luminous, quietly astonished.
There was no ache in this dream. No blood on the walls. No silver tears.
There was only softness. The world where no one hated. The world where Shu Yao never existed.
Outside the dream, the moonlight filtered in over Bai Qi's sleeping body, tracing his spine and shoulders with light. The silver ring still shimmered faintly on his finger — a ring Shu Yao once noticed and said nothing about.
Bai Qi, in the still of midnight, looked too serene to belong to pain.
But not everyone was granted the same mercy.
Somewhere, on the other side of the world — where the sky held a different moon, and the silence tasted lonelier — Shu Yao lay with his eyes shut tight, greedy nightmares won't protect him.
No"
It didn't.
His lashes, delicate as moth wings, trembled. And beneath them, tears spilled quietly — not in gasps, not in sobs, but in that slow, unspectacular way sorrow prefers. Like rain sliding down a closed windowpane. Like a wound that had forgotten how to bleed loudly.
Everyone else's world — it seemed — was fine. Whole. Healed. Smiling. Bai Qi was dreaming of soft laughter and silk dresses, and even the wind outside whispered kindly to some.
But not to Shu Yao.
No, the wind always came for him with teeth.
His nightmares never asked permission. They crept in like thieves with familiar faces, dragging memories that smelled of metal and jasmine and betrayal. Sometimes he couldn't tell where the dream ended and the day began. Reality bled through both, like ink through thin paper. His ache wore two masks: one of the dream and one of the waking.
Both hurt.
And somewhere, beneath it all — buried like an ancient vow — was a promise. A fragile, forbidden thing that should never have been whispered beneath stars or sealed with glances that burned too long.
A promise that should never have been made.
Shu Yao curled tighter beneath the weight of it. The sheets twisted at his waist, too hot and too cold. His hands, folded like prayer, trembled just once before stilling.
He said nothing.
Only the pillow caught his tears, soft and silent as ever. No one heard. No one came.
In a world full of light, Shu Yao remained the quiet eclipse.
Alone, aching, and awake — even when his eyes were closed.