wretched and divine // shuangshui

prologue: fool this town

whoever said that life treated everyone equally was a fucking liar.

he xuan learnt that long before finishing his third shift in a third different workplace that day, when the last customer finally gathered his respectful ass out and strolled out of the dining room.

in fact, he xuan learnt that even before his entire family died in a fire outbreak in their house four years ago. that was just when he came back from school. he remembered the way his backpack fell to the ground limply while all he could do was stand there and stare as firefighters fruitlessly tried to put down the flames. whatever he once called home now resembled a pile of bricks and sadness. he wished he had been able to at least cry, but there was no time for that.

there was no time for crying when he was five, either. when that boy came to him and stole his crayons claiming them to be his, and the one who got yelled at was he xuan... yeah. that was when he xuan learnt that life was never meant to treat everyone equally.

but just as there was no time for crying then, there was no time for sad reminiscing now. he still had to wash down the last dishes and mop the entire floor; probably also scrub off the leftover vomit from the toilet - a gift from one of the clients who found out he was seafood intolerant a little too late.

he xuan's life was a fucking mess and that's all there was to it.

he'd wake up every day at 4:30 in the morning, pushing past the miniature flat of his to chunk in a glass of water sometimes accompanied by a few crackers, sometimes by a fly that managed to drown in it overnight. he'd scoff as he quickly removed his worn-off tank top to change into whatever clothes were still clean and decent enough. then he'd scoff again as he forced his feet into these old fake converse he bought two years ago. then he'd scoff once again as he rapidly searched through his pockets for keys and empty wallet. after that one was done, he'd run out of the house without sparing it more than half a glance.

at exactly 5:03 he'd appear three minutes left at his first shift of the day. honestly, that was hard to be even called a shift. every day he'd appear three hours before the opening of local café to prepare it for the opening. more often than never he'd be running around with a mop and cloths, scrubbing everything until it glistened. if he was fast enough, he'd be allowed to have a cup of coffee on the house. and if luck was on his side, the boss would leave a note saying he could throw out the leftover cupcakes. would he do that? absolutely not. but he would, in fact, eat them all or pack up in his bag to survive the rest of the week. he'd worry about the consequences later if he still remembered to care.

at 8 in the morning someone would free him from the café so that he could spend three hours of his day smuggling into the corner of their local library, catch up on university work he was due on two days ago, and then before he noticed he was already late for his second shift.

"sup."

"hey."

"today you gotta—'

"i know."

"oh," feng xin nodded. "well then, off you go."

he xuan was a tattoo artist three days in a week as he couldn't afford any more shifts of the kind, seeing how he also had to attend classes at university. so three days in a week he'd come late at 11 in the morning and permanently draw over people's bodies until 5 in the afternoon. that usually meant three clients, sometimes two, sometimes one, and sometimes he'd chunk in five and suffer from wrist pains for the next day. they weren't even that popular. their salon was tiny and run-down, other than him and feng xin the only living being was a forever disgusted cat. though the cat preferred to be called by his real name.

"where's mu qing?" he xuan murmured as he wiped off the excess ink from the woman's shoulder.

feng xin finished drawing a line before looking up, "gravely offended."