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There is a joy in being a monster.
Maybe Xue Yang will eventually branch out into “Villain” some day, but for the moment, he’s content with being truly inhuman. There is a simplicity to it. Something true within him gets to stretch its legs a bit.
When he plays the monster, he never has to hold back.
His first ever gig involved a mask.
A simple face, inarticulate, with holes cut out for eyes. A suit that looked like it was made of rusted metal and tangled wires. An android.
The theater had been very small, the play likewise. It had been a week-long run.
His vocational counselor had handed him the review at their next meeting, pleased. His court-mandated therapist had asked to discuss his choices.
“The Robot menaces the performance excellently. I’ve never been more terrified to have an actor stalking down the aisles of a show, but every time they disappeared, I felt the need to look over my shoulder. The disdain for those who created them is palpable.”
It didn’t matter that he was originally supposed to play “Teenager #3” or whatever, before the stage manager switched him in. It didn’t matter that his vocational counselor literally used their meeting to help him learn the lines for “Teenager #3”, because he could hardly read at the time. It didn’t matter that he was barely paid. It mattered that someone saw him, and understood.
At the time, ink was still drying on three separate restraining orders. He was still meeting with the pigs near-daily. Still seeing counselors and therapists. Still having pills shoved at him, as if that would have somehow turned him into a responsible, upstanding member of society. Still struggling to make ends meet in any legal fashion.
But he finally had something.
He was something.
In an artistic vision way, Xue Yang appreciates a director whose goal is apparently to make a performance about war that leans as much into the supernatural as it does real life horror.
Part of it is limitation, of course. Tough to do much more than mount a faux head on a pike from an effects standpoint. You can’t go for entrails spilling out when accuracy is so messy. You can manage it on a film set, but in person? Not from what he’s seen over the past handful of years working.
That said, Live Wire is still some of the wildest shit Xue Yang has had the pleasure of reading, and as of being cast, performing.
He’s not just saying that because, budget willing, they plan on outfitting him with bladed wings.
For one, the cast is composed primarily of teenagers. Not adults who could pass as a few years younger, but actual kids. Ones who go to school. The logistics have to be a nightmare.
Then, all of these kids are going to kill each other. Brutally.
Xue Yang can tell that it’s an anti-war story, he’s not an idiot, but it's one of those narratives that revels in the violence of it all so much that you might as well take the “anti” off.
The part he’s set to play is unnamed in the script, and there are no lines. He is in every act as a presence though. A threat.
He is pain, and corruption, and the end of good intentions.
The lead makeup artist they have for this play is pretty obviously competent, because he shows up with a face that is one immaculate step away from drag show ready, despite looking not particularly sober.
The director greets him with delight, and they both thumb through a binder full of plastic pockets of reference images and sketches. Xue Yang watches them from the dressing table for a while, but goes back to his phone when they don’t actually say or do anything interesting.
Eventually, the director makes introductions.
“A-Yu, come meet your muse! Your angel of death! Your god of war! Xue Yang, this is Mo Xuanyu, he’ll be in charge of your makeup, and certain aspects of your costume.”
He’s not really sure why he’s expecting to be taller than Mo Xuanyu when he stands up greet-intimidate him, but he’s not.
They’re directly eye-to-eye.
It’s like looking into the eyes of a corpse.
One of their first interactions is Mo Xuanyu spattering fake blood onto his face. The brush is gentle, but the hand holding it shakes, despite being stabilized by both a brace, and the opposite hand.
Somehow, the blood ends up looking perfect. Xue Yang is pleased it looks so realistic, though perhaps a touch too bright.
The red manages to avoid his shirt, which is covered haphazardly with a towel, but it gets onto the artist’s wide sleeves. He’s dabbing at them when he sends Xue Yang up to show the director, who is pacing around the stage on the floor above.
The rest of the cast seem to cut a wide arc around them, but the director hums contemplatively.
“This is pretty good, but Mo Xuanyu can do better. I’d like to test out as many variations from the inspiration folder as we can. We’ll probably want to focus on your hands honestly. We’ll finalize the amount of blood for the costume itself later.”
Head of props, one of the background cast, looks at Xue Yang with a grimace.
He smiles back, wishing there were blood on his teeth.
Despite being in charge of hair and makeup for the whole cast, most of Mo Xuanyu’s interactions with the other actors are limited to showing them what is necessary for a stage-natural look for the first few days, with the promise for increased grime as rehearsals go on. He does this while painted in the gaudiest eye shadow imaginable.
The irony is not lost on the gaggle of teenagers, the majority of whom seem to treat their makeup artist like a creature you find in the zoo.
Mo Xuanyu does not seem to acknowledge the snickers or the jabs, just steamrolls all of the awkwardness of the cast with a chemically-induced apathy that Xue Yang finds kind of funny.
Unlike the rest of the cast, Mo Xuanyu has Xue Yang play dress-up in 50 shades of gore as they try to work out how grisly they want to make him. It’s a constant process of trial and error as they cycle through a lookbook of fake blood to see what the director likes best.
The director is still on the fence about wings, but Mo Xuanyu has started working on an odd sort of mask that will hang down from a band around his head.
When Xue Yang asks about it, Mo Xuanyu flips the inspiration binder to the tab labeled “Death.”
There are a lot of skulls, and some folklore depictions from various cultures, but one of the pages has been taken up by a picture of a soldier whose face is, for lack of a better word, smeared. It looks like his flesh is melting off of him, and down the front of his uniform. The picture is covered in half a dozen notes in two different styles of handwriting, as well as notes written directly onto the plastic pocket.
On the opposite side is a figure with the same smear, but who is wearing a formal, officer’s uniform instead.
“The mask should work for either a helmet or a cap.”
“You’re still deciding? Seriously?”
“The director is. He might decide on opening night for all I know.”
It makes Xue Yang scoff.
“Can’t you just make it the soldier for the pre-war shit, and the brass during?”
“What about post-war?”
“Soldier again, obviously.”
Mo Xuanyu sets his work aside, and grabs a little, pink notepad.
“Why?”
“It’s how people who don’t have to see war perceive it.”
“Then what about the officer?”
“Because the soldiers want to blame someone else. Or their view of war changes. Fuck if I know.”
Mo Xuanyu gives a half-smile, but it slides right off his face like it was never even there.
“More blood, you think?” he asks, tapping the picture of the officer.
As if anyone reasonable would disagree.
One day, fake blood manages to get the better of Mo Xuanyu, and he ends up worse-off than Xue Yang, somehow utterly drenched in red. The stage manager looks at the artist during the check-in before lunch, gives a pitying look, and offers one of the backup costumes, as well as the keys to the only single-stall bathroom in the building.
He comes back ten minutes later in anachronistic clothes, and a face free of the traditional opera makeup he arrived in earlier that day.
While makeup always seemed a bit stupid, people giving their opinions about makeup always seemed more stupid.
Like. No one asked. Why. Who gives a fuck?
Seeing Mo Xuanyu without all of the products is wild enough to make him say something, unfortunately.
“Oh, you don’t actually look half-bad.”
It’s lucky that in whatever state of delirium Mo Xuanyu exists, vaguely backhanded compliments are barely acknowledged. He parks himself in front of the dressing room table and starts applying foundation.
Xue Yang watches with interest as the layers go on, more complex and dramatic than the company's mass-ordered kits. He’s heard makeup called both armor and weapon in the last few years, but that seems over-dramatic.
It’s a mask.
Of course it is.
It takes a while for Xue Yang to amend “Strung-out” to “Heavily medicated.”
It’s none of his business either way, and it’s not like he cares, but he finds out, and there’s no un-finding out that Mo Xuanyu isn’t shakily waiting for his next fix.
No, he’s getting interrupted in the middle of Xue Yang’s gore test touch-up by a understated alarm, and reacting with mild annoyance.
Mo Xuanyu doesn’t exactly toss the tray of pigment aside, but he does treat the palette with slightly less care than usual as he places it onto the counter, and begins wiping his hands down. The box where everything makeup is kept apparently also houses an aging smartphone and a travel pill case. The former is silenced. The latter is flipped open, rooted through, and the pill swallowed dry.
Fucking nasty.
Xue Yang pointedly shoves his can of lychee soda from the counter into Mo Xuanyu’s hands.
“That’s disgusting.”
Mo Xuanyu blinks down at the can. With the size of it, Xue Yang can see the tremor in his hand properly, the soda splashing around a bit until he stabilizes the can at the bottom.
“I can have this?”
“Not all of it,”
Mo Xuanyu shrugs, and gives a sip.
“That’s pure sugar.” he says, putting it back onto the table.
“Better than med-taste.”
“Fair. Thanks.”
Xue Yang shrugs.
“Don’t mention it.”
He does check the case to see what Mo Xuanyu takes.
There is no way he wouldn’t check.
He tries to look up what each of the many pills are by description, but that still means that he has to figure out what they’re for, and other than the over the counter painkillers, that could be anything.
He doesn’t bother putting it away when he decides he doesn’t care, just leaves it out on the table.
He’s flipping through one of the cast’s social media when Mo Xuanyu comes back into the dressing room at the end of the day, binder and notepad in hand from talking to the director.
“He says that the bones poking out from your knuckles in act three would be good for the last act.”
The pill case is unacknowledged as Mo Xuanyu packs away all of the palettes and brushes around it.
“Doesn’t that mean you have to stick prosthetics to my hands for the final twenty minutes of the show?”
Mo Xuanyu, in charge of sticking these prosthetics to his hands, nods with a tinge more weariness than usual.
“That’s bullshit.”
“I’ll try to talk him into bringing them out at intermission instead.”
“It makes more sense there too, right? Isn’t that after one of the kids beats another to death with his bare hands?”
“If you mention it at the next meeting, he would probably listen to you. He appreciates that you want to embody the violence, I think.”
He doesn’t think they’re going to acknowledge the silver box, but after everything around it has been put away in its proper compartment, Mo Xuanyu turns to him with the little pill case in hand.
“Painkiller. Painkiller. Anti-psychotic. Anti-psychotic. Anti-psychotic. Anti-anxiety. Sedative.” he says, pointing at each in turn. “I would offer you some, but I don’t think you would enjoy them”
“No. I think someone tried to give me that one,” he says, pointing at a distinctly peach-colored round one.
“I don’t enjoy that one either.”
The case snaps shut.
The both of them are in the middle of one of the mask test-runs when Mo Xuanyu says, in a voice only slightly more emotive than usual,
“You’re pretty handsome, you know.” Nervous. He’s gotten in trouble for this much before, Xue Yang knows.
“The next Xi Shi.”
The minute bit of tension lessens further, and Mo Xuanyu huffs.
“The fish forget to swim with you around?”
“That's why I always perform with a mask.”
“Always?”
“Well. That, and I always play the monster.”
“Every role? Every time?”
Xue Yang makes eye contact through the mirror. One of the bands of the mask is being affixed to a bun that will be tucked into the various headgear throughout the show. For this rehearsal, it’s being left as-is. The mask hangs down over most of his face, so Mo Xuanyu doesn’t see it when he grins with teeth bared.
“All the time.”
He’s not sure why he does it.
It’s not like he’s curbing his unkindness—his contempt.
It’s not like Xue Yang is being nice.
He doesn’t soften his edges around Mo Xuanyu, or tuck them away.
That would be ridiculous.
His artist never asks him to be anything less than he is. He makes the rest of the cast squeamish, covered in gore. He haunts the stage during his scenes. His disdain for everyone and everything is evident, and makes everyone around a little uncomfortable.
But Mo Xuanyu keeps Xue Yang company nonetheless.
He’ll share his soda, or the candy from the convenience store that doesn’t taste quite right, and they’ll both make snide comments on the goings-on of the show. It happens once, and then it keeps happening. They find each other during lunch, even if they’ve spent hours together during rehearsal.
Mo Xuanyu has spent more time putting blood on him than Xue Yang has spent with anyone other than his roommates during his second round of confinement.
It’s the closest Xue Yang’s ever gotten to companionship.
Mo Xuanyu is midway through gluing on the prosthetics that make it look like the bones of his knuckles are sticking through his skin when Xue Yang puts it together.
“Your hands are shaking less.”
From where he’s kneeling at the side of Xue Yang at this part of the process, he always looks like some sort of servant. Eyes downcast. Gently holding his hand.
It is the sort of moment where he should take his hand away, and tilt Mo Xuanyu’s face up so that their eyes can meet.
But Xue Yang doesn’t want to mess with this portion of the process any more than necessary. Extra time in the chair isn’t exactly fun, even if he’s curious.
Mo Xuanyu only answers his non-question when he switches sides to work on the other hand.
“Worsened by the old meds. Time for some new meds.”
He gives a funny little finger flutter gesture from behind him in the mirror.
The stage manager approaches Xue Yang on the second day of Mo Xuanyu’s absence. He’s been managing their current configuration of blood and mask alone, but he’s missing some of the more intense pieces, and the difference in spatter quality is obvious.
“You’re close with Mo Xuanyu, right?”
“No.”
“Excellent. The director wants you to check on him.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t say, but he told me to give you the address.” the despite that breaking so many rules goes unsaid.
She catches him when he leaves for the day with the copied down destination.
“Don’t make me regret this.”
He scoffs, and leaves without comment, but takes a different bus than his usual. It’s a short ride. Still in the city proper, though definitely a weirder area than the theater.
Sitting on the sidewalk out front with cell phone in hand, Mo Xuanyu greets him, and unlocks the door to let him in.
He was expecting the building to be nice for some reason. Maybe because Mo Xuanyu’s clothes are, more often than not, clean. It’s not nice though. It’s shit. There’s a proper entranceway, and a lobby-adjacent deal, but the paint is peeling off the walls, and there is visible mold creeping in from the corners of the ceiling.
The building might have been nice thirty years ago, but it certainly isn’t now.
Another surprise becomes apparent as he follows Mo Xuanyu up the stairwell: He doesn’t wear the flowy blouses outside of work. Or maybe he does, and he just doesn’t wear them at home. Or maybe he does wear them at home, and he’s just not wearing one today.
He’s in a slim-cut, graphic t-shirt with an illegible script font. Short sleeves.
Scarring on full-fucking-display.
Xue Yang is the one without all of his fingers. He saw some wild scars when he was locked up years ago. He’s got scarring from being locked up years ago. He’s still caught off-guard by scars that look like that.
Not new, but long—tracing the length of his forearm. The dots from stitches are still visible.
He wonders what would push Mo Xuanyu over the edge again.
He wonders if there’s anything stopping him now, other than the medication, obviously.
Medication... That he is no longer on.
Ah.
Apparently he has been drafted into doing a wellness check.
Mo Xuanyu lets him through a door, and the lobby makes sense as the apartment building shifts into hotel renovated into low-income housing. The furniture is the giveaway, faux-nice and bolted to the walls.
Despite the obviously standardized dresser-table-bed-chair set, Mo Xuanyu’s personality comes through in the space. Clothing spills out of the closet, messier than he ever allows his makeup box to be. A laptop sits on the table, covered in stickers. Dishes cluster around an unplugged element.
There’s actually just. A lot of mess.
Mo Xuanyu stands in the middle of it, like the center of an explosion.
Xue Yang doesn’t really give a shit about that.
“When did you last eat?” tumbles out, unprompted, as if he actually is doing a wellness check.
Mo Xuanyu shrugs, looking something other than lethargic for once.
He looks like he’s going to cry.
Honestly? Fun.
The current lack of makeup will be less interesting, but he’s wanted to see Mo Xuanyu cry for a while now.
Maybe later though.
Instead, parses through a refrigerator of food probably past expiration to find something edible. The closest is likely the takeout stir fry where the box has yet to wilt entirely, meaning that it’s probably safe.
He yanks out the wire closure, and shoves the entire box into the microwave.
It rotates without comment for the full four minutes, though he is prompted to stir at two by the sensory memory of unevenly heated food.
He pulls out disposable chopsticks from one of the drawers, flattens the box down on the table, and gives a theatrical bow.
“I didn’t know you could do that with those boxes.” and then after a pause, “Thanks.”
Feet propped up on the table, Xue Yang watches as Mo Xuanyu eats the full meal.
Xue Yang stays the night on the couch, and escorts Mo Xuanyu to work the next day. They split up after rehearsal, but standing in the middle of his apartment, Xue Yang feels a loss of control. There’s a simple solution to that. He packs up a duffel, and only calls when he’s waiting outside of the not-hotel again.
Apparently, it’ll take a few weeks to get Mo Xuanyu to the full dose of his new medication, and it’s not like there’s much else going on.
Mo Xuanyu doesn’t argue when Xue Yang moves in.
Choosing to spend time with a person outside of work is different from working with someone, and living with someone is a different game entirely.
There’s not exactly enough space for them to have their own space, but all that means is that when Mo Xuanyu ends up staring at a wall for twenty minutes, Xue Yang sees it, lets it live out its entertainment value, and then drags his roommate into doing something else.
He gets to watch Mo Xuanyu break into wheezy laughter as much as he does tears, although neither of them seem particularly grounded in whatever is happening. He doesn’t actually smile much when he laughs either, which is kind of creepy.
He’s also there to discover that Mo Xuanyu is talkative. Not particularly articulate, more rambling than anything, but much more vocal than he was only a week before. He doesn’t always think through what he’s saying, which is how they manage a lot of stupid conversations in addition to fun ones.
“Doesn’t it bother you that I like men?”
“Does it bother you that I do? Shut the fuck up.”
They continue to share the bed.
He never gets the full story.
Neither of them ever get the full story.
If Xue Yang were to have taken a guess, he would have pegged Mo Xuanyu as the sort to overshare, maybe drunkenly, maybe weepily—but he doesn’t.
“I used to, probably,” Mo Xuanyu admits one day, when Xue Yang says as much, “I don’t remember well enough, but I think I did.”
What Xue Yang gets instead is the back of him, places that are harder to reach by oneself, covered in different types of scars. Small thin ones, with clean edges. Wider ones where the edges are rough, but the scar tissue itself has grown over smoothly. Big, indents, where instead of becoming pointed at the ends, there’s a flat edge. Ones that cluster together and fan out from a point of impact.
He’s got a smattering of the usual self-harm scars too, ones Xue Yang would have called a cry for help on anyone else, but when bisected by the long, thick ones on his forearms, they ring a different tune.
Control, if Xue Yang were to guess. He understands that.
He does get this much though, accidentally, when he asks why the director is so clingy with him.
“He found me, after.” Mo Xuanyu mutters with a self-explanatory raise of his inner arms. “I think he feels responsible for me.”
“A-Yu?” says the director, whose memory for names and faces is questionable at best, but who can and will overshare whether or not anyone asked. Xue Yang asks. “Hah, yeah. He was in a shitty situation. I don’t think he would have survived if someone else had found him. I’m surprised he can move, actually. Lacerations like that can fuck with mobility.”
Xue Yang understands through wellness checks, accomplished by the wife of a half-brother, and occasionally the director, but never by family or friends.
He understands through near-constant visits to a pharmacist, because the psychiatrist doesn’t prescribe more than a week’s worth of doses. The recycling bin is always full of orange bottles, because their contents go directly into a pill case.
Mo Xuanyu probably understands him in turn through the intermittent letters and visits from various officers, doctors, and counselors. He is probably known by the lack of fingers on his hand. By a starburst of a gunshot wound in his shoulder. By some cuts from people who got the drop on him when he was locked up.
At the end of the day, neither of them ask.
Neither of them have to.
The final mask is seamlessly scary. It turns his face into one plane, smearing all of his features to nothing as the idea of flesh melts down his front. It's made of strange fibers, wires, and beads, all applied to a reinforced half-mask. The director makes sure there will always be some makeup behind it, especially near the sides of his face and jawline, but he otherwise proclaims himself satisfied with the final look.
Xue Yang has his mask.
His costume pieces end up being finalized one by one, patterned with blood.
The production finally, truly, has its monster.
In the end, it isn’t such a big deal when Mo Xuanyu’s extended family ends up spotting them getting off the bus to rehearsal during lunch break.
On the one hand, killing someone probably violates his parole.
On the other, maiming probably also violates his parole.
And he really and truly would like to do either or both of those, because Mo Xuanyu is his, but instead he settles for threatening, because what doesn’t get back to his overseer won’t hurt him.
He doesn’t even have to do shit.
Xue Yang already has blood on his hands.
Today the blood is fake, but it doesn’t have to be.
Scaring off the idiot cousin is just a matter of a manic grin, hateful eyes, and a caress of a sticky, red fingers.
Getting Mo Xuanyu to believe he’s not in danger anymore takes significantly more effort. There’s not enough time for cast and crew to babysit a hyperventilating man with his own job to do, so the pill case comes out.
The sedative is necessary, probably.
It still tastes like failure, secondhand.
When the as-needed medication wears off deep into the evening, along with the residual panic, Mo Xuanyu kisses him.
The dressing room is miraculously empty, everyone is up on the stage on the floor above listening to the night’s closing notes. The muffled voices and shuffle of bodies covers up the ambient buzz of electricity coming from the mirrors.
It’s probably a bad idea to share one of the deflated, disgusting armchairs, but here is Mo Xuanyu, draped over his lap, and cutting off the circulation of his legs.
Neither of them would say that the extra contact is necessary or anything, but Xue Yang feels the weight of the artist over him, and something feral in him settles.
Mo Xuanyu is starting to scroll through his phone in a less absentminded manner, and when Xue Yang gives a conscious evaluation, he would say that Mo Xuanyu seems to be reasonably present again.
They catch each other's eye.
The smile Mo Xuanyu gives is tired, but it doesn’t slide off his face leaving no traces. It’s fixed in place, and stays that way when their lips press together.
Xue Yang has been possessive before. It’s the reason for one of his restraining orders, although it could arguably be considered the root cause for all three. He knows it’s not a good idea for him to feel so much about a person.
Whether or not it’s love doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Mo Xuanyu is his.
A lot of the good monster stories have a predator turned protector. Something to remind the audience that the monster is not only a creature of destruction for destruction’s sake.
The affection of a monster destroys just as much.
Xue Yang thinks he would create a lot of hurt if it could make Mo Xuanyu smile.
It takes a couple of weeks for the old meds to cycle out, and the new meds to kick in properly.
Mo Xuanyu continues to be one of his favorite things to watch.
All of his missed birthdays wrapped into one man relearning how to be a person.
Maybe Xue Yang would care less about Mo Xuanyu smiling if he had not lived with him. If he had not seen him with dead eyes. Maybe a smile would be something he expects from a random, dumb guy who sometimes wears traditional opera makeup to go grocery shopping, just because he can. People smile all the time.
Up until recently, Mo Xuanyu’s smiles have been short-lived. They were shallow quirks of the mouth, though not insincere, and they melted off his face as soon as they arrived. The weird laughter doesn’t count.
Now though?
He smiles at the caustic remarks Xue Yang makes, and at the antics of the director, and at the teenagers being teenagers.
He smiles at the movies they watch on the laptop in the evening, resting against the faux headboard of the bed.
He smiles at food that tastes good, and soda that tastes too sweet, and at the candy that Xue Yang slips him.
He smiles when the soldiers pull off the makeup that makes them look sleepless, and he smiles when the costuming crew hands him Death’s uniforms for final touches. He smiles when, for one of the rehearsals, they both decide to drench Xue Yang in the last of the fake blood formula they’re not using during this show that will go bad otherwise—which creates a sort of swamp monster effect that makes one of the soldiers shriek.
This is stupid.
Mo Xuanyu makes him stupid, and he doesn’t mind.
There’s no reason not to take what he wants.
It would be easy.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t.
But maybe it’s because Mo Xuanyu is the one who makes every step forward.
They do eventually fuck. It was actually inevitable in some ways. Mo Xuanyu fully admitted that he used to sleep with just about anyone, and probably still would, were it not for medication side-effects. When the lethargy clears, so does his disinterest.
Xue Yang is present, and available, and himself, also interested.
The first time Xue Yang blows him, Mo Xuanyu cries.
“I forgot that I could feel that good.” he admits, before sucking it up and returning the favor.
He seems to enjoy returning the favor enough that he does so all week.
As full run-throughs begin, the director confirms that they won’t be getting the bladed wings for this show.
Xue Yang is good at what he does, and he doesn’t need a weapon to be a threat.
“I can see them anyways,” admits one of the kids, “I read the script, and I couldn’t see you without them. You’re kinda scary, you know?”
“I know.”
Opening night is full of reasonable nerves for most of the cast, but Xue Yang, as per usual, has nothing to fear.
These are the times he feels most at home in his skin.
He says nothing, standing next to the recruitment officers, clean and polished. Behind their invisible trenches, bloodied and powerful. At the head of the cot at night, as the last living soldier recovers. Then he haunts that last soldier at home when the veteran speaks of his past to a child who looks exactly like him when he enlisted. He is the shadow of that child at the end of the show, a menacing omen. An implied continuation to the cycle, one which repeats during the next show, where he stands next to a recruitment officer, clean and polished once again.
He is the monster, and he delights in it.
Mo Xuanyu helps him into each new role Death plays, switching out his jackets, a cap for a helmet, bathing him with more and more red. He glues bone to his knuckles at intermission with hands that still shake, that may always shake. He straightens the mask of melting flesh, and looks into Xue Yang’s eyes, and he sees him.
The fake blood smears across their lips when they kiss.