Love Unexpected, Love Regardless
"Here," Wong slurs, holding out a scrap of—goddamn, is that parchment, like honest-to-God ancient scroll shit?—parchment with an elegantly-inked mantra on it. Under the flashing jelly lights of the KTV room, the letters dance in front of Katy's exhausted, drunk eyes. "Take this."
After a beat, during which Shaun stares between her and Wong like a stunned ox, Katy reaches out, turns the paper over in her hand, and tries to make sense of the word. She opens her mouth, then closes it. Her head aches, her eyes burn. No, no way. Too tired for this. She passes it to Shaun.
He tries. "Sham—shamball-gail?"
Wong stares at them; at least, he tries. His eyes keep sliding out of focus. He shakes himself like a wet dog and says, "It's Gmail. Shamballa at . Our email address at the monastery, so you can contact me when you're ready to come train at Kamar Taj. You'll want to learn what those rings can do somewhere you're not gonna blow a hole through your apartment walls," he points at the lump of the rings poorly-concealed under Shaun's flannel, "And it won't hurt you to work on those archery skills."
Sometime before they'd opened the first bottle of baijiu, Katy remembers him talking about that—training at his magical monk-hut, not destroying Shaun's apartment—but she'd honestly thought he'd been joking. Yeah, it made sense that he'd want Shaun to spend time there; he was a wuxia master, now elevated to superhero, fully-equipped with a magical weapon and all. But then Wong had also asked her to go along, but she'd laughed and taken her first shot and the alcohol had obliterated everything but the next line of Don't Stop Believin'. And considering the way Wong had screeched along, she'd thought he'd forgotten all about it too.
"You're serious," she says, blinking. "I had one lucky shot in one fight and you want me to...what? Turn into Michelle Yeoh?"
"Yeah, and we've got a lot of stuff to clean up here," Shaun fidgets with the rings around his wrist. They don't lay as easily on his arms as they did on his father's; Katy's been watching him fiddle with them all night. "Can we talk about this later?"
Wong blinks. "Yeah. That's fine. That's why," he gestures, "I gave you the email address."
Katy laughs, breathless. "Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. Good job thinking ahead, dude."
"Yeah," Shaun chimes in, "That's why you're in charge."
"Right," Wong looks from Katy's face, to Shaun's, and sighs. "Right. Time to go, then."
He turns to the bare wall across from the screen and begins making widening circles with one hand, the other braced against his chest. Katy can barely manage to shuffle one foot in front of the other; she can't imagine having this much discipline even when she doesn't want to puke up her toenails. She can just imagine herself training next to his—what d'you even call a baby monk, a disciple?—disciples, and making an ass out of herself.
She's not cut out for that shit. She's not a hero. She's not even a functioning adult.
When Wong's portal is big enough, with its orange fluorescent sparks spitting across the room and singeing the frayed edges of the sofa, he climbs onto the table in the middle of the room, wobbles over their pile of crumpled chip bags, knocks over a few empty cans of beer, and vanishes into nothingness. A gust of wind flings Katy's sweaty hair off her brow and ruffles the pages of the songbook as the portal closes, and the rings on Shaun's wrist hum quietly in some kind of mystical harmony.
The minute Wong disappears, it's as if he was never there. Not because Katy can't remember the whole night—even though there are definite gaps in her memory from the half-hour she spent hugging the toilet bowl—but because his presence in the first place was so weird, so fundamentally out-of-place, that her brain doesn't want to believe that he was ever there at all. This place is hers and Shaun's, and no one else really belongs.
Shaun stares at the wall, shakes his head, and turns to her. "Auntie Gao's?"
Katy groans. Yeah, Auntie's xiaolongbao are amazing, but she's never forgiven Katy for accidentally running over her ancient dog's tail on her bike one morning eight years ago. Usually she'd just passed Shaun her money and let him buy the dumplings for their lunch while she took the long way around. Auntie Gao loves Shaun, like she loves any Chinese kid who can actually speak and read Chinese. Katy'd always felt like a failure when she'd stumbled over her tones and Gao had sighed, repeated her request in sharp, textbook-perfect Chinese, and had Katy repeat and repeat it until she finally deemed it acceptable.
"You go. Get me a dozen. I'll stop at Tiger's and get some milk tea."
"No boba for me."
Katy flinched. "Yeah, dude. I know."
Everything in Katy's body aches. Parts of her hurt that she didn't even know had nerve endings to feel pain. Every step uphill sends a spike of pain from her heels to her head. It's only been two days since everything that went down at Ta Lo—not to mention everything that came before that, like falling off a goddamn skyscraper in Macau—and there's only so much that beer and baijiu can do to dull the shrieking of her sore muscles. Even Shaun is flagging, but he has enough strength to put an arm around her waist and haul her along.
He's done this before. They're friends, close friends, best friends, even. Shaun's seen her sick and furious and laughing so hard soda's come out of her nose, and on one occasion, he's even seen her naked. They've fallen asleep together and drooled on each other and Shaun's even thrown up on her. Twice. She'd thought they were too close for the simple press of his arm to make her heart beat faster. This is Shaun. She's not attracted to him; he's like her brother. In fact, she spends more time with him then with her own, actual brother.
It's the adrenaline, she tells herself. It's the strangeness of everything that's happened. Shaun's the same, no matter how much she's learned about him in the past few days.
Isn't he?
"Don't go home today."
It takes a minute for his words to sink through the ringing in her ears. "What?"
"I mean," he's not looking at her, "if you want to stay with me, you can. Do you know what you're gonna say to your mom yet?"
"No," she replies, dread pooling in her stomach, harsher and more corrosive than liquor. "Mom's gonna be at work by the time I get back. I'll sleep it off and figure it out later."
"But your grandma'll be there."
"I'll tell her I was with you."
"For a week?"
Katy laughs, dry. "She'll assume we're married. That'll buy me some time."
"And be worse for you when she finds out the truth."
"Hell no, man. I'm not telling them the truth. It's one thing to tell Soo and John, but I'm not about to tell my family that you're some kind of superhero and that I shot a soul-stealing nightmare Cthulhu monster in the throat while trying to save you and your long-lost sister and the rest of the world in a mystical Chinese village that guards a portal to another dimension."
"Then you're gonna need some time to think up a good lie." They've arrived at Shaun's door; he doesn't let go of her as he fishes in his pocket for his keys. "C'mon. We'll eat breakfast and think of something."
Katy gives up. He's right, and right now all she wants to do is lie down, inhale greasy, salty soup dumplings, and chase that down with milk tea sweet enough to make her teeth rot. Doing that in Shaun's tiny studio sounds more peaceful than going home and being woken up in a few hours by her mom pounding on the door. Yes, she's just dodging responsibility, but Katy's used to doing that. Now is not the time to turn over a new leaf.
They haul themselves upstairs; Katy sits on the stairs while Shaun fiddles with the ancient lock on his door. They kick off their shoes and Katy slides into the slippers he keeps ready for her.
They flop onto the bed a moment later, Shaun opening the paper box of dumplings between them and Katy passing over his tea. At the shop earlier, Katy had thought about ordering him a cup with boba, as petty revenge for his weird assumption that she'd forget what he likes, but she's not a dick.
Well. She is a dick, she can definitely be a dick, but she's not a dick to him. No matter how much she kind of wants to be right now.
Despite Shaun's promise to help her to figure out how to plausibly lie to her family, they eat in silence, hissing around the steaming broth in the xiaolongbao and clinking the ice in their tea, both too tired and hungover and occupied by their own thoughts to help the other parse theirs. Katy finds herself staring at the rings, revealed now that Shaun's rolled up his sleeves. Every time he lifts a dumpling to his mouth, the rings slide and chime against each other. They don't look right on Shaun, not yet. She still can't forget the way they looked around his father's wrists, nor the crazed light of hope in his eyes that turned to blank, unfeeling coldness as hope turned to madness. Katy can't bring herself to see them as anything other than a threat, not even now that Shaun is wielding them. If the rings made his father a crazed immortal warlord, could they do the same to Shaun?
Shaun's face in profile is thoughtful, not troubled as hers must be, but what does she know? She'd thought she'd known him. She's known him for years. But how much could she have known, really, when he'd been hiding so much from her?
It's not his fault, she reminds herself, chewing on her straw. With a family like his, a childhood like that, how could he ever feel safe talking about it unless he had to? And yet...
It chafes. Katy prides herself on being an outspoken, honest person. She brags about how little of herself she hides, whether good, bad, or ugly. But even so, Shaun has always known more about her than anyone else in the world. He knows how scared she was to graduate from Berkeley and to face the rest of her life without the structure of organized education, without a goal to strive for, with all her mother's spoken and unspoken expectations weighing her down like chains. So yeah, she can admit that it hurts. How open she's been with him, how vulnerable, when all this time he's been hiding more than half of himself.
She wouldn't have judged him for his psychopathic father or his gangster sister. She still doesn't judge him, not even knowing that he's a murderer, and became one when the worst trouble she was in was getting detention for sticking bubblegum in her middle school bully's hair.
His past sucks beyond belief, and all it deserves is pity and understanding. She would have given him that. She wants to give him that.
But she doesn't know how to say it. That's the worst part; she isn't sure, anymore, how to talk to Shaun. And he's the only person she wants to talk to about all this.
He yawns, body bowing off the bed, and Katy has to look away as his shirt slides up from the line of his belt. He's bruised so badly it puts a lump in her throat, but the defined muscles in his stomach send additional, confusing impulses through her body. Even if she were attracted to him, which she isn't, it would be wrong to thirst over someone when he's injured. Wouldn't it?
"Want some ice?" she jerks a thumb at his bruises, mostly to distract from the heat rising in her cheeks.
"Nah. I just wanna sleep for a week," he blinks up at her, sweet and soft and sleepy, and now Katy's heart twists and all she wants to do is put her hand on his cheek.
She eats another dumpling, chewing noisily.
"Mind if I pass out?"
She shrugs. "You do you. Can't believe you've been awake all this time anyway. Can't believe you're still alive, all things considered."
"Disappointed?"
She punches him and he groans, comically overdone. Then he rolls over and, after thirty seconds, starts to snore. Katy lies awake, eating the rest of her breakfast and half of what's left of his, before she finally passes out, her chopsticks dripping broth on the quilt between them.
The bed is shaking. Earthquakes aren't super uncommon in San Francisco, but no matter how common they are, Katy still hates them. Her eyes snap open and she glances around the room, too tired and sore to get up yet, but poised in case it becomes necessary. It feels like a big one, but nothing else is shaking. Just the bed.
A wet gasp echoes through the room, pained, but also painfully quiet. It's punctuated by three little coughs, and another quiet breath. Katy freezes on the bed as she realizes what's happening.
It's Shaun. It's Shaun and he's crying. It's Shaun and he's crying and he's hiding it from her.
Katy doesn't know what to say. What does Shaun, or Shang, or whoever he is, need from her? Does he need anything at all?
Katy doesn't know. All she knows is that what she needs, and wants, and has to do right now, is comfort her friend. Because he is her friend, her best friend, and nothing can change that. She won't let it.
She rolls over and Shaun's sobs evaporate immediately. His body tenses as she slides her arm around him and presses herself against his back. She hears him open his mouth to say something, and shakes her head; he feels it.
"It's okay," she murmurs, and squeezes them both tight, trying to pour her empathy and love and understanding into him. "I've got you."
This isn't her strong suit; she feels a little disingenuous doing it. She's more the gruff older-sister type, the girl to make fun of you and laugh you out of your angst. But this isn't something worth laughing at. This is Shaun's worlds colliding and both of them crumbling apart. But she's still there. She's always going to be there, whoever he is, or was, or becomes. Because she has to be. Because she cannot imagine her life without him in it. She's followed him to Macau, and Ta Lo, and she'll follow him to Kamar Taj if that's where he goes.
She won't say it yet, because this moment isn't about her. But she hopes he feels it. She hopes he knows that whatever else he loses, he's not going to lose her. Because she loves him.
She loves him.
Shaun's hand closes over hers, hot and damp and clammy. It squeezes, then pulls her arm further down and over, until she's draped over him like a blanket. They're so close that Katy feels the echo of his heart beating through his back and into her own.
After another minute or two, he starts to cry again.