Wish Upon A Falling Star

Chapter One

i know i'm supposed to be updating that other fic but i promise that this one has all the parts already written, i just need to fix some things. I PROMISE. 

on that note, please enjoy. :))

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Chapter One

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On his 25th birthday, Huang Jingyu wishes for a miracle.

What he gets, instead, is Xu Weizhou.

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Jingyu moves away from memories of mountains and coal pits once he's old enough to earn his own living. It's not as if he dislikes his hometown – it's small and familiar and doesn't ever change. The world does, though, and Jingyu wants to see everything while he's still young and courageous and stupid. He buys a one-way train ticket the day after his birthday and tells his parents about it during dinner, careful to avoid his father's eyes and ignore his mother's downturned lips. Despite their initial disapproval, they send him off and his chest doesn't hurt as much as he thought it would. His father presses a wad of wrinkled, rubber-banded yuans into his clammy palm, calloused hands from years of hard work gripping tight. His mother doesn't cry. Jingyu does (but secretly, in the train's too-tiny bathroom somewhere over the border). They write to him once in a while, fingerprints smudging shaky handwriting as they ask if he's doing okay, if he's eating right.

If he's found somewhere better than home.

He answers the first two questions and leaves the last one to linger inside his head like a disgruntled ghost.

It's nice to have company, after all.

After his third year of travelling across the country, surviving on manual labour and part-time gigs and whatever else he can get his hands on, he decides to find a place and stay. At least for a while. The nomadic lifestyle is interesting and all, but Jingyu soon tires of sending postcards from unfamiliar post offices and updating his address every two months or so. Making new friends all over again, punching in lines upon lines of numbers into his old mobile phone that he'll have to erase once he packs up and leaves. It's just too much hassle. So he finds a nice, quiet town (his finger lands on a small sliver on the cheap map he'd bought from the local tourist spot, entirely by chance) and spends hours in trains, buses and old, wheezing cars to be deposited to a place not unlike the one he's left behind. 

Only with less mountains and more river. He tries not to get too homesick and heads for the property office, charms his way into a one-room apartment that overlooks the water.

He goes out and tries to find work before his meagre savings run out.

The only place hiring is the local noodle restaurant and they barely give him a glance before telling him to come the next day. Which he does and he soon learns to balance fifteen bowls in two hands without spilling soup and getting third degree burns. They make him wash the dishes until his fingers are prune-wrinkled, only to laugh when he complains. A few of the elderly ladies who frequent the shop make it a habit to pinch his cheeks and anything else they can reach (his ass, more often than not) and their gummy laughter at his embarrassment punctuates his days. 

It's not too bad, because the owners are nice and he gets free meals twice a day. 

That's more than he deserves.