In Between Us || Zhanyi

|| 66 ||

[A/N: I hope the arc is bringing little relief to all~~~~~I like to mention a small thing...I hope readers keep in mind, here Zhan is a professor and as I try to include more interaction....Zhan's dialogs may feel off to you, please share your feedback. 

If readers couldn't connect, I will change the dialogs and try to make it more simple. ]

By the next week, Zhan had coaxed him outside.
Just a short walk to the small park down the lane — quiet and tucked between old trees, the air carrying the scent of grass and evening dust.

They walked without a destination, steps unhurried, shoes brushing against loose gravel and fallen leaves. The city still hummed somewhere beyond the trees, but here it was distant — muted like the aftersound of a dream.

Yibo didn't remember the last time he had walked so slow. Ever since he had learned to think, he'd been running — chasing, proving, surviving.
But this past week had taught him something fragile, something new:
the art of being still.

How even without running, he wasn't losing.
How sometimes peace wasn't found in achievement but in surrender.
Maybe, he thought, stillness was also a kind of courage.

They moved side by side, close enough that their sleeves brushed when the wind stirred. Zhan didn't talk. He didn't ask how Yibo was feeling or if he was tired. His silence wasn't distance — it was patience, steady and sure.

After a while, Yibo's throat felt dry. He looked toward Zhan, who was matching his pace perfectly.
"Water," Yibo said quietly — not an order, not even a request, just a word.

Zhan turned, the corners of his lips softening into a smile. They stopped near a bench beneath a flowering tree, the breeze soft enough to stir the loose hair at Yibo's temples.

"Sit there," Zhan said, glancing toward the bench. "I'll get one."

Yibo hesitated, eyes lowering. "You'll walk? I can come—"

Zhan shook his head, gentle but firm. "Then who'll stay with you?"

Yibo blinked, confused.
Zhan leaned slightly, brushing his thumb against Yibo's sleeve as if to ground him. "Accompany yourself first, hm?"

He said it like it was the simplest thing in the world. Yibo kept his gaze, watching Zhan's back.

Stepping away toward a patch of trimmed hedges, Zhan turned again "The sun's good today. You should let it touch you a bit." Then he walked off, leaving Yibo under the shade of a half-bloomed tree.

Yibo watched him go — Zhan's back straight, hands in his pockets, the kind of calm that never hurried even when the world did.

Yibo lowered himself onto the bench, palms resting on his knees. The earth looked freshly watered; sunlight spilled through the leaves, dappling the grass in uneven gold.

The breeze moved softly through the leaves. Yibo watched the ground — how sunlight dappled the grass, how the air smelled faintly of earth after water, how the bench creaked each time he breathed in.

He felt his heartbeat slow.
For the first time in a long while, he wasn't thinking about being left behind...for the first time him being alone wasn't haunting him.......it wasn't anxious to seat all by himself......he had no thought of chasing because somewhere a new believe had started forming.

Zhan always comes back to him.