Disclaimer: I don't own Dynasty Warriors or any of the characters therein, yadda yadda... They belong to Koei and W-Force.
Author's Babble: I got depressed playing Zhou Yu's musou, and this is the result. XD We require happy SCZY, yes we do. (takes happy pills) This is also what happens when you've just had a long gaming session with someone who thinks that the fact that the guard towers can hurt you very badly is pretty damn cool.
What He Means
They had known each other since they were children. Given that, it was common sense that the two, now young men, could very well talk about anything with each other, and often did so. There had always been a lot of words exchanged between them.
What was really important, however, never took more than a few.
Zhou Yu's shoes pattered across the tiled floor, in and out of Sun Ce's vision. His lips were set in a thin line like an invisible barrier against everything he had to say to the other, his eyes glowering in what appeared to be anger, but was in fact something very different.
He realized he often grew increasingly concerned about his friend, these days. He knew also, now and later, that he nearly always had good cause to do so.
"How could you be so careless?" he said at last.
Sun Ce lay abed, bound and bandaged and grinning, and maybe there was something in his expression, infuriating and endearing all at once, that put so many words in Zhou Yu's mouth just to fill the silence.
"Ce, you poor fool, you dropped an archer tower on yourself. For goodness' sake, has the thrill of battle gone so much to your head that you forget to move out of the way before it falls?" he griped, and glowered, and paced some more, all of which was meant to say, You scared me.
The man in question made no reply. The pacing came faster, in erratic circles, as Zhou Yu continued in the vein that Ce might well have been killed—it was almost a miracle that he wasn't—and that it would be a great, great embarrassment for the indomitable Little Conqueror to be squashed to death under a guard tower, and one that he had felled himself, no less, by which he meant, Never worry me like that again!
Ce only smiled and said, "Well, I wasn't killed, Gongjin. Now come over here and sit yourself down; you're going to make yourself dizzy and smash into something at the pace you're going." And Gongjin realized that underneath the light air and the jibe, he'd just been told, I'm sorry, okay?
Regardless, he moved to do as he had been asked, and sat, and sulked some more. "Ahh, damn it, Ce. Shut up. Just shut up," he snapped.
But that wasn't what he meant to say. He often took to berating the other man when things of this nature occurred, scolding him, lecturing him, but all those thousands of words came down to a simple heartfelt plea that By Heaven, you just scare me sometimes, you know? You just scare me. That's all.
As he had on the many occasions before then, Ce only smiled and put his hand out to stroke the long hair that fell unbound down the back that had been turned to him, and said, "Oh, you shut up. You're turning into such an old codger," though he meant something altogether different. By the way Zhou Yu leaned back into the touch, with a little sigh that was half resignation, half relief, he knew he had been understood.
It sufficed, at the end of the day, to know that each meant what he said utterly, even if he didn't always say what he meant.
Fin