Archive of Our Own

Much like Icarus, rather than torn right out of his back, the glue that kept Zihao's wings firmly attached to his body melted away slowly and surely right under the sun.

Maybe not the sun, but the spotlight. Big dreams, big words in meeting rooms he was much too young to have a say in, big expectations. Big money — lots of it, more than he could keep track of. The stage lights burn, but only for a moment. A few years-long moment. But a moment indeed.

A bit unlike Icarus, though, he doesn’t plunge right into the ocean. His feet always kind of brushed against the waves, teasingly, as a reminder that all of this was a big house of cards ready to tumble. When the water reached his calves, then his knees, he stayed positive. The cold bothered him when it came to his waist, made his bones shake when it reached his shoulders. It eventually reaches his neck and head, covers his ears and drowns out any other noise. He doesn’t let it cover his face because he’s a stubborn son of a bitch who won’t go down even after a years-long fight. His face has never embarrassed him before, so he looks straight into the sun and dares it to burn his retinae.

And, burned because I beauty love,

I shall not know the highest bliss

And give my name to the abyss

Which waits to serve me as my grave

Zihao likes to think he was born with the glue already in his back.

He knows people could see it. His family, his friends, himself. There was always something about him that made people wonder. His dance teachers laugh and rub his head, his back, amused to no end by his confidence in doing literally anything. He smiles too because he knows he’s good, and they say he has a brilliant future. He also learns pretty early on that he can be a little much. A little too loud, a little too energetic, a little too confident. He doesn’t care. He talks big, bigger than he probably should. He doesn’t care. 

(Years later, he and Zeyu argued, ugly yelling at each other over too much stress, too much work, too little results; Zeyu tells him to be realistic for once, Zihao says he’s being pessimistic and not realistic. Zeyu yelled at him, told him he’ll die by his mouth like a fucking fish, and stormed out. It hurt, he can’t lie, but deep inside, he knows Zeyu has seen through him since day one, when they were eleven and too young to understand. Zeyu saw his weakness in his hunger for strength, the Freudian slips that always surfaced after midnight, in the familiar tones of their shared dialect when neither of them could sleep. They never talked about that fight again, but Zihao pinpoints it as the first time someone saw the target hanging over his head. Zeyu shot the arrow, missed it just enough for Zihao to realize that what he couldn’t see would probably kill him.)

Even in adversity, Zihao looks at himself in the mirror and admires the frayed feathers glued to his back. They’ve become one with his skin, and peeling them off might as well take the pale layer that covers his flesh with them.

So he kicks back, he always does. When people question whether it’s worth keeping the group going, he doubles down. He sits stubbornly like kidney stones in the meeting rooms, pestering anyone who comes within the meter to hear him out. He’s great. Boy Story is great. Boy Story hasn’t been making money. That’s temporary. Maybe if your management wasn’t so negligent. Watch your mouth. Hear me out.

Back home, Xinlong comforts Shuyang and Mingrui. They don’t look him in the face. Not in anger, but in something akin to embarrassment. He doesn’t resent them for being silent, for going with the tide. Hanyu cooks silently, Zeyu hides in his room. When almost everyone is in bed, Xinlong finally cries silently, sitting by his side in the dark. He can’t speak, and Zihao can only hold him because he can’t cry. He knows Xinlong is worried, that his confidence has grown thin over time. If he cries, Xinlong will think they share the same view. And they don’t. Zihao won’t say things are over (die by your mouth, like a fucking fish) because they aren’t. Hanyu joins in, and Zihao can see the way he mirrors Xinlong, always two sides of one coin. He doesn’t cry, but the hurt is there.

He doesn’t scold Zihao, doesn’t yell at him to be realistic. Eyes low, he asks Zihao not to bring it up again, if only for the sake of the others. Zihao looks away. He agrees, but his mouth tastes bitter.

He is only a man, though.

The day they sit in that meeting room and ‘decide’ to halt activities, Zihao is silent for the first time in his entire life. He’s tired, so tired. He can see the others are tired as well; they deserve to rest, to do what they want to. There is no shouting, no fighting. He hugs Mingrui and Shuyang, says they’ll do great in university. He knows they will. When Zeyu is put on hiatus, when Xinlong and Hanyu don’t have the energy to write anything besides a few lines for half-finished songs, when his mother calls him and says it might be a good time to visit again. Every time, the feathers almost come off.

He tries holding his head high, even if he holds back his tongue. He keeps walking, keeps breathing. When he looks in the mirror, the feathers are ugly and stripped bare, looking more like spines on a porcupine than anything else. He wears it like a soldier’s badge. He won’t go down.

They end up in a survival show. The other contestants look at them, shocked, like they’re completely out of place. He knows the production wants a sob story, knows they want them to humiliate themselves in front of their rivalry to pull at the audience’s heartstrings. He won’t. They deflect the question. His feathers turned spines come out of his back now and then, a warning. Touch it, provoke it, try it at your own risk.

It’s unfair, as most survival shows are. Things don’t go as planned, and Zihao watches himself go through a metamorphosis. Something coils deep in his gut, akin to confidence, akin to fear. He can do this. As long as no comments, no prejudice, nothing can touch him personally, he’ll come out on top. With the feathers worn so thin, everyone can see the glue in his back again. Even if they try to ignore, if they refuse to pick him and love him and treat him as someone deserving of attention too, he knows. Their eyes, they never lie.

He and Xinlong drift apart on purpose, so people can’t point out their codependency as something negative. He finds solace in his new friends, and in Xue Suren. They intrigue each other, they pull at each other like magnets. Suren runs his fingers through his spines as one caresses their loved one’s hair in deep devotion. Fingers much too rough to be cut open by Zihao’s pains, he smiles and tells him he’s beautiful.

When Zihao ends up in his bed weeks later, on a rushed trip back to Suren’s apartment, he feels the happiest and most normal he’s ever felt. The marks of Suren’s nails sit right beside the glue. They’re a badge of honor in their own way. He got a few of them on his chest and in the places most people won’t look for, as well. They ache deliciously as he slips his shirt back on, as they sit, hand in hand, on the cab back to the dorms. He’s beautiful.

The morning after his official elimination, Zihao feels like waking up from a dream.

He finally went under the waves, finally stopped fighting and beating the body of his old self with a stick to hear its insides mush around. Forget the dream, it’s like coming back from the dead. Three days later, he wakes up as something coming from the depths of the ocean, from the depths of a tomb. He dips under the waves as Icarus and comes up as Lazarus. The world is an entirely different place. He hugs Hanyu, calls the others, and his family. His heart is cauterized, in a good sense. He’s less hard around the edges, more malleable, ready to adapt instead of breaking his way into fitting. At almost twenty-one, this is the youngest he’s ever been.

The feathers, the spines, are gone. The shore brings him back to the beach, washes the glue off his back. He flew for so long he almost didn’t remember how to use his legs. The sun still burns hotly, but he stands up either way and gives it his back. He feels like something else entirely, something supernatural. A miracle, a god, a demon. Maybe all. For the first time, he walks, half-man, half-beast, and finds out he quite enjoys the feeling of sand on his bare feet.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   

Beware

Beware.