Bullet Points

KO

"Have you ever seen anything more beautiful in your whole entire life?"

For the umpteenth time in half an hour, Han Shangyan contemplated taking a swan dive off his balcony and just surrendering himself to the mercy of gravity. He was so irritated even his eyeballs were throbbing. It wasn't often that the venerated Gun God made an uncalculated mistake, and yet, here he was, reaping the reward for his monumental error in judgement. It was just his luck that he, the crown prince of the poker face, would wind up with a girlfriend with an innate weakness for all things cute and white. Maybe he was just a grouchy old man but Tong Nian, for all her intelligence, could be a total airhead on occasion!

Lord knew he loved her, but sometimes they were as different as chalk and cheese and he didn't always know how to handle her. Ten years sometimes seemed like an insurmountable lifetime - Little Squid was still so vigourous and full of life, entertained by things he had long lost interest in. She was full of wonder whilst he was decidedly jaded in his old age. It was a challenge sometimes to see eye to eye with her but he really was trying - she was the one who had blown past him without so much as a hello! Despite himself, Gun could feel the beginnings of a headache taunting his temples as his girl giggled from somewhere behind him. He had been trying to distract himself with work, but it was impossible when she was in his room, laughing so sunnily. Tong Nian, silly girl that she was, had been fixated on his latest blunder from the moment she had arrived and Gun had just about reached the end of his tightly reigned tether. His patience most certainly wasn't endless, and if he was completely truthful, he was feeling a touch neglected. He really should have expected this and yet, it still bothered him more than he cared to admit.

The taciturn Big Boss was usually content to fade into the shadows in order to avoid direct scrutiny, but when it came to Little Squid, he was not accustomed to being ignored. It felt unnatural, a glitch in the careful programming of his life; if there was one thing Han Shangyan despised, it was disruption to his linear world. Tong Nian was and would always be the singular exception to that rule; even if she did appear to have forgotten he existed at the moment. Silly girl is too excitable for her own good... Gun rolled his eyes moodily as Nian Nian continued to coo and fuss over the blasted little abomination that had invaded his sacred space and seemingly stolen his girlfriend irrevocably from him.

Gun could feel himself pouting like a child, an expression he was one hundred percent certain he had never worn before. Only Tong Nian possessed the uncanny ability to snarl all his rationality into little more than a ball of tangled wire and leave him smarting over things that were decidedly unimportant. Her syrupy sweet voice was strangely bitter on his palette but he tried his best to swallow down his own annoyance. There was no logical reason he should allow himself to be jealous over something so arbitrary! He was Han Shangyan, and he would not be riled up! Even if his every instinct screamed at him to toss the damn thing off of the balcony in a bid to reclaim her attention... Patience is a virtue he reminded himself stubbornly as Nian Nian squealed so loudly, he was certain she had just broken the sound barrier. Gun's eye twitched, his hands suddenly still on his keyboard as he contemplated all the ways he could commit murder and get away with it.

Whilst it wasn't often that Gun lost his grip on his rigid self-control, unfortunately, he had always had a tenuous grasp on his impulsivity. It was a pity that whenever he fell off the wagon, the results were always a fingertip shy of catastrophic. Whenever he succumbed and gave in to his compulsions, it inevitably left a convoluted web in his wake that took an age to untangle. The evidence was littered throughout the pages of his life. For some reason, Gun had always had a proclivity for rebellion that was more than evident if he examined his track record. Han Shangyan, the man who ruled his Lost Boys with an iron fist, had never quite been able to purge himself entirely of his recklessness. It usually came back to bite him in the ass.