[hit5] these empires
these empires
the first thing duan huangwei learns about dong yufeng is that their birthdays are separated by only a few days.
duan huangwei/dong yufeng | 3133 | pg
a/n: yes this is hit5. yes i may be the only person on the planet who cares about them. spawned from this weibo post a year ago.
&
The first thing Duan Huangwei learns about Dong Yufeng is that their birthdays are separated by only a few days. It somehow makes the lonely days in Beijing a little less lonely.
"We're practically twins." Yufeng says with excitement in his eyes that Huangwei later on would say never really faded, despite all they've weathered.
He thinks, at a much later time, that if there was anything that went right, it was this. He'd do it all over again, trip over the same mistakes, and throw away his youth time and time again, if it meant he'd get to meet Dong Yufeng.
&
Autumn is here again. Duan Huangwei knows this because exactly three street vendors have tried to sell him a scarf; he knows this because the posters left over from National Day tell him it's October. He stops at a street corner and squints his eyes to read the sign, sounding out the words one at a time, wondering how they even got their name in the first place.
Sometimes Huangwei does this thing where he pretends to not know the layout of Beijing by heart and tries to get lost among its winding chaos of old and new streets. He ignores this gnawing feeling thats telling him duh this is the business district, the restaurant is just a few blocks to the left. After all how could he forget that place--he and Yufeng went there after their first album sales, arms draped all over each other, their steps bouncing with the ambition of youth, and stuffed themselves silly. Of course what he really wanted to do with that first check was take his parents out to a nice restaurant, but they were too busy to come to Beijing and didn't want Huangwei to take the train back either, they're exact words were probably something like 'you haven't quite made it yet'.
He makes a right at the intersection instead. Wind nips at his exposed skin and suddenly a scarf doesn't seem like such a bad idea. When the next vendor tries to waves him over, Huangwei finds himself following suit. He points to the warmest looking one and doesn't even bother to bargain. It's when he's paying for it that he realizes he hasn't bought any gifts for them yet, not that its necessary really. Huangwei hands the vendor a larger bill and asks for fiv-four i mean can i have four more scarves.
Daylight begins to dim as Huangwei makes two more rounds around the block before finally heading towards the restaurant. When he gets to their reserved room, he finds he's actually the first one there despite being half an hour late. Part of him thinks no one will show at all, since this isn't much of a celebration, not in that sense at least.
Huangwei remembers his first sunset in Beijing. There was just something about the way the last rays of sunlight streamed through the windows of the train as it pulled into the station, casting a faint glow onto the slumped over form of the other boy casted from Xu Zhou, that fills Huangwei with this sort of certainty that he's made the right decision. He shakes the nerves from his limbs, the anxiety over leaving home for the first time carrying with him only a small bag of clothes, a few thousand rmb, and the reluctant well wishes from his parents, and gently kicks the other boy's shoe to wake him up. They way Yang Fan's eyes widen when he takes in the expanse of the Beijing train station, and the way he beams the warmest smile at Huangwei, only confirms the feeling already flooding his own veins: this is it, this is their future.
As if they had planned it, the three of them walk into the restaurant together. There's an unpleasant feeling, Huangwei isn't sure why, that surges through him. Something like jealousy. It's as if they had planned a day without him, and judging the way Yufeng walks in with a few shopping bags in hand seems to suggest such.
Huangwei smiles weakly as the others take their seats.
"Manager says he can't make it, his daughter's come down with a fever or something. He said to order whatever we want and sends his wishes." Gao Yu says, scrolling through his phone.
No one mentions Guo Ziyu's absence. Everyone has their own bitterness about that. The table is silent as the four of them immerse themselves in the menu. It's Yufeng, it's always Yufeng, that claps his hands together and tries to liven the atmosphere.
"Five years guys..." He says with a smile.
Duan Huangwei raises his cup of tea and echoes, "five years indeed..."
Gao Yu and Yang Fan tap their cups on the table and smile as well, but that unspoken bit hangs stale in the air. Five years is a lot of time to waste. Huangwei thinks he hasn't seen Yang Fan really smile in a long time--Yufeng clinks his glass with the others--and Yufeng smiles too much for the lot of them.
They once asked him a long time ago, back when he had hair sticking out all over the place because that was the fashion, what his dream was. He didn't tell them, afraid they would disapprove, or worse, laugh. His mother clutches his latest test scores and his father taps the tabletop expectantly. Huangwei knows what he should say; his parents know what he wants to say. So they just sit and simmer in the silence instead.
&
It felt a little ridiculous to do this, but Yufeng insists that they all need a trip down memory lane to ‘get them in the mood’. Gao Yu’s napping on the couch and Yang Fan’s busy responding to all his Weibo followers. Huangwei’s fairly certain no one’s really going to be tuning into this show anyway. What network is it even on? But something does well up inside of him as they flip through old photos on Yufeng’s iPad. He’s not sure if it’s exactly the mood that Yufeng was hoping for, but its something. He looks at the way they all used to smile and can’t help but feel crushed under the weight of this lost youth.
It not so much a trip down memory lane as it is a sprint through the winding paths. He makes Yufeng pause on a particular photo, he’s not even sure how old it is, but it’s Huangwei and Yang Fan in the practice room after dark. Yang Fan’s staring listlessly at the camera and Huangwei’s throwing up a peace sign. They both look tired, but something about it makes them look happy. It’s a simple photo. Nothing really. But like a fish swimming upstream, desperate to get back to the origin, Huangwei wants nothing more than to be this person again, to run against the course of time, crawl inside those first few years, and live there forever.
Yufeng pats his arm, as if he knows. But how could he? Even now he smiles stupidly bright and Huangwei doesn’t understand how he does it.
“We were pretty dumb back then, weren’t we.” Yufeng says, with only the tiniest hint of something sad, and nudges Huangwei’s shoulder.
“Hey, speak for yourself.” Huangwei gestures to his body, not liking how five years qualifies as back then. “I’ve always been this awesome.”
Yufeng gives him an endearing look, “Of course. Of course.”
The interview happens like all interviews do. They almost even ask the same questions they did years ago, except now they hold a slightly different weight. They all, somehow, have a lot more to prove. Guo Ziyu is also not here and there is a very fine line between leaving someone behind and being left behind. They’re still in the middle of figuring out which it is.
Huangwei fights the urge hide in his palms when they pull up the new promotional photos and Gao Yu spouts off about how much they worked out for this. They all know that it’s really just a lot of photoshop and that underneath all of it is really just a lot of desperation. Still Huangwei kind of admires the way Gao Yu’s able to own up to just about everything. Plus it’s always funny to see Yufeng and Yang Fan with a little more meat on their bones.
At the end of the interview, with their new single rolling in the credits, Huangwei’s still not sure what they were ever trying to prove, even all those years ago.
&
He tries asking Yufeng this one night months later and after too much wine and sitting in the dark.
Yufeng comes home from a day of shooting and sits in the empty spot on the couch beside Huangwei, a little too close because Huangwei can feel the heat from his thighs. It was probably the wrong thing to say since Yufeng never believed they had wasted any time or were ever trying to prove anything because
“We’re not in such a bad place now are we.”
The thing is he can’t keep up with Yufeng anymore, not with his unending optimism. He’s able to swallow his pride, accept these roles and opportunities he knows won’t get him anywhere except further down into this hole. Huangwei had tried that once. He went into it knowing it’d be a low budget horror film, but came out of it not knowing which way was even up anymore.
Huangwei turns and looks at Yufeng and for a moment, he thinks he can see this alternate life where it isn’t like this, isn’t so hard. They’d be different people in different situations, and Huangwei wouldn’t feel like he’s wandering aimlessly through a maze. Maybe in this life, he’d reach over and cup the back of Yufeng’s neck; he’d trace small circles with his thumb on the spot behind Yufeng’s earlobes; he’d say our birthdays are separated by only a few days and I can’t imagine life without you; he’d pull Yufeng towards him and all the years they would have spent together would collapse in that one moment and Huangwei wouldn’t feel like he wasted any of them. Or maybe, in a different alternate life, Huangwei would have stayed in Xuzhou and wasted the years on something else entirely.
Funny, he’s struck with this strange sense of loss even though Huangwei’s not sure what he ever had in the first place.
Maybe it has something to do with the way Yufeng’s body tenses as he says he’s leaving Beijing in a few weeks for an offer in Chongqing, and he looks at him in a way that hints maybe Huangwei should leave Beijing also.
Huangwei smiles around the edge of his wine glass and tries to say with as much conviction as he has left “I’m happy for you.”
Yufeng’s face immediately brightens and he pats Huangwei’s knee, letting his hand linger a bit, and Huangwei thinks maybe this is his chance to reach out and lace his fingers through Yufeng’s, but the moment passes before he’s able to process it all. Yufeng stands up to finish a few of the chores still left in the kitchen and Huangwei closes his eyes, letting the world spin around him. In this moment, he wishes for some alternate life, and just for this moment, he lets it make him feel sad. The faucet runs quietly and Huangwei looks around at the boxes he hasn’t bothered to unpack since coming to stay with Yufeng, and he knows that even if he wanted to, he could never leave Beijing. He’s left too much of himself here, but maybe he could use a break.
Huangwei would think about this in the weeks to come. He’d toy with the idea of leaving Beijing for somewhere new as he watches Yufeng pack up his life. He doesn’t know how Yufeng’s able to go around picking up all the pieces of himself without leaving anything behind, except he is leaving something behind.
Huangwei can’t help but sink into the doorframe a little when Yufeng steps into the elevator and nods back at him
“Take care.”
&
A few weeks before his trip to Europe, Huangwei considers calling his parents, maybe to tell them he’s going to be out of the country for a while. Over the years it had always been a game of phone tag between them. In the early years Huangwei called them more than they answered and certainly more than they called back. But now they call him more, wanting him to just come home and settle down.
He hesitates though, thinking they might not even notice he’s on vacation. There aren’t really too many regular correspondences between them, and he knows it’ll be the same routine. He’ll tell them about albums that are selling (barely), offers for acting roles (either extremely minor or ridiculously low budget films), and they’ll tell him to just come home (they know someone and he could be at a desk pushing paper by the end of the month), they tell him to get married (he’s edging into thirty and needs to start thinking about family). Huangwei will tell them he has someone, that it’s Yu--Yiling, who’s moving in with him (who doesn’t ever want to get married or have children).
It’s all the same routine, and Huangwei thinks if he runs through the conversation in his head enough times, there isn’t really a need to actually call them. It’ll be like they already had it.
He thinks about calling Yufeng and then thinks about the last time he saw him on television, all bright smiles and toothy grins, and Huangwei doesn’t know what he’d say to him, so he updates his weibo status instead, hoping they’ll all get the memo.
&
He finds the kind of stillness in Paris he never knew he was searching for. Five years have slowly bled into six, and Huangwei doesn’t know how long he can keep counting.
He realizes as the plane is touching down, and the gloomy skies of Beijing greet him in the way he wishes he wasn’t so familiar with, that he doesn’t even know what he’s trying to hold on to all this time. It wasn’t really the dream, he has always known he wasn’t really cut out for singing.
Then what was it? Why didn’t he turn his back earlier?
Maybe it’s that part of himself he’s left with Yufeng. All that time and the youth. They way things were always effortless. Maybe he thought, like Ziyu, he’d be losing more than just the title of HIT5.
It’s perhaps when he’s walking through the terminal after he lands and looks up to see Yufeng offering to help him with his carry on, that he feels the gravity of it all. Yufeng smiles like absolutely nothing has changed, as if they were still 20 years old with the world at their feet, but Huangwei knows they’re not even a little bit like the people they were before. Maybe if he was still the person from all those years ago--maybe a little braver--he’d have gone to Chongqing with Yufeng and maybe he’d smile a bit brighter. Instead Yufeng pulls him into a hug and says he’s going to treat him to a meal because it’s been way too long since they’ve last done anything like that.
Later after they’ve eaten and probably drank a little too much, Huangwei will be saying goodbye with his hands in his pocket and Yufeng will be wishing him all the best in the future. He’ll be playing with the ring he’s been keeping in his pocket for too long and Yufeng will be looking at his shoes and under the terrible lighting of the streets, it’ll look briefly like a scene from a sad movie.
It’s then that Huangwei knows he’s probably giving this ring to the wrong person.
In the end, they’re all back together again, though probably not in the way Huangwei ever thought they would be. His parents are at one of the front tables and they’re beaming at him as Huangwei raises his wine glasses. Ziyu even came and he’s laughing over a flute of champagne as Gao Yu imitates the latest director he’s been working with. It’s almost like it’s seven years ago and Huangwei almost laughs. Yiling leans into him softly and it’s like they’re pieces of a puzzle that have inexplicably fallen in place.
“To us,” he tips his glass towards his bride, his parents, and the four other people he wouldn’t trade for the world, “and to dreams coming true.”
And for only the smallest of moments, he lets himself think about that alternate life.
&
One night during Huangwei’s second year in Beijing, after a few too many bottles of wine and too many hours of KTV, Yufeng slumps onto the pleather couch next to Huangwei, slinging his arm lazily across his shoulders, while one of Yang Fan’s new friends bellows out the lyrics to some english song in a really bad accent, and looks Huangwei intently in the eyes. “So what’s your dream now?”
“It’s a new year after all.” Yufeng adds with a laugh and a sip of wine he certainly doesn’t need.
Huangwei wonders suddenly, how his Da Nian Ye has slowly turned into nights like these, and how nights like these slowly turn into his every night, how the days keep mashing together, the years bleeding into one another, and how no matter how hard he wishes or tries, he just can’t get it right.
“You know… Same old same old…”
“I have this theory…” Yufeng raises a finger and points it at the bridge of Huangwei’s nose, “that maybe certain dreams don’t come true because we’re not making the right wishes, that maybe there are certain things you’re suppose to wish for and certain things you’re not.”
“I wonder…” He whispers almost inaudibly into his glass, “how other people make wishes…”
Suddenly, the room erupts into a countdown, as the Lian Huan Hui playing on someone’s phone begins welcoming in the new year. Ziyu and Gao Yu both jump up onto the coffee table and begin chanting the numbers.
Huangwei slips his hand into Yufeng’s, maybe he’s had a little too much wine as well, and as the numbers wind down to the new year, Huangwei closes his eyes, squeezing Yufeng’s hand. He thinks there are a million things he wants, but in the split moment he has, Huangwei can only think of one thing he knows he would never be able to live without.
So this time, he tries to make the right wish.
the first thing duan huangwei learns about dong yufeng is that their birthdays are separated by only a few days.
duan huangwei/dong yufeng | 3133 | pg
a/n: yes this is hit5. yes i may be the only person on the planet who cares about them. spawned from this weibo post a year ago.
&
The first thing Duan Huangwei learns about Dong Yufeng is that their birthdays are separated by only a few days. It somehow makes the lonely days in Beijing a little less lonely.
"We're practically twins." Yufeng says with excitement in his eyes that Huangwei later on would say never really faded, despite all they've weathered.
He thinks, at a much later time, that if there was anything that went right, it was this. He'd do it all over again, trip over the same mistakes, and throw away his youth time and time again, if it meant he'd get to meet Dong Yufeng.
&
Autumn is here again. Duan Huangwei knows this because exactly three street vendors have tried to sell him a scarf; he knows this because the posters left over from National Day tell him it's October. He stops at a street corner and squints his eyes to read the sign, sounding out the words one at a time, wondering how they even got their name in the first place.
Sometimes Huangwei does this thing where he pretends to not know the layout of Beijing by heart and tries to get lost among its winding chaos of old and new streets. He ignores this gnawing feeling thats telling him duh this is the business district, the restaurant is just a few blocks to the left. After all how could he forget that place--he and Yufeng went there after their first album sales, arms draped all over each other, their steps bouncing with the ambition of youth, and stuffed themselves silly. Of course what he really wanted to do with that first check was take his parents out to a nice restaurant, but they were too busy to come to Beijing and didn't want Huangwei to take the train back either, they're exact words were probably something like 'you haven't quite made it yet'.
He makes a right at the intersection instead. Wind nips at his exposed skin and suddenly a scarf doesn't seem like such a bad idea. When the next vendor tries to waves him over, Huangwei finds himself following suit. He points to the warmest looking one and doesn't even bother to bargain. It's when he's paying for it that he realizes he hasn't bought any gifts for them yet, not that its necessary really. Huangwei hands the vendor a larger bill and asks for fiv-four i mean can i have four more scarves.
Daylight begins to dim as Huangwei makes two more rounds around the block before finally heading towards the restaurant. When he gets to their reserved room, he finds he's actually the first one there despite being half an hour late. Part of him thinks no one will show at all, since this isn't much of a celebration, not in that sense at least.
Huangwei remembers his first sunset in Beijing. There was just something about the way the last rays of sunlight streamed through the windows of the train as it pulled into the station, casting a faint glow onto the slumped over form of the other boy casted from Xu Zhou, that fills Huangwei with this sort of certainty that he's made the right decision. He shakes the nerves from his limbs, the anxiety over leaving home for the first time carrying with him only a small bag of clothes, a few thousand rmb, and the reluctant well wishes from his parents, and gently kicks the other boy's shoe to wake him up. They way Yang Fan's eyes widen when he takes in the expanse of the Beijing train station, and the way he beams the warmest smile at Huangwei, only confirms the feeling already flooding his own veins: this is it, this is their future.
As if they had planned it, the three of them walk into the restaurant together. There's an unpleasant feeling, Huangwei isn't sure why, that surges through him. Something like jealousy. It's as if they had planned a day without him, and judging the way Yufeng walks in with a few shopping bags in hand seems to suggest such.
Huangwei smiles weakly as the others take their seats.
"Manager says he can't make it, his daughter's come down with a fever or something. He said to order whatever we want and sends his wishes." Gao Yu says, scrolling through his phone.
No one mentions Guo Ziyu's absence. Everyone has their own bitterness about that. The table is silent as the four of them immerse themselves in the menu. It's Yufeng, it's always Yufeng, that claps his hands together and tries to liven the atmosphere.
"Five years guys..." He says with a smile.
Duan Huangwei raises his cup of tea and echoes, "five years indeed..."
Gao Yu and Yang Fan tap their cups on the table and smile as well, but that unspoken bit hangs stale in the air. Five years is a lot of time to waste. Huangwei thinks he hasn't seen Yang Fan really smile in a long time--Yufeng clinks his glass with the others--and Yufeng smiles too much for the lot of them.
They once asked him a long time ago, back when he had hair sticking out all over the place because that was the fashion, what his dream was. He didn't tell them, afraid they would disapprove, or worse, laugh. His mother clutches his latest test scores and his father taps the tabletop expectantly. Huangwei knows what he should say; his parents know what he wants to say. So they just sit and simmer in the silence instead.
&
It felt a little ridiculous to do this, but Yufeng insists that they all need a trip down memory lane to ‘get them in the mood’. Gao Yu’s napping on the couch and Yang Fan’s busy responding to all his Weibo followers. Huangwei’s fairly certain no one’s really going to be tuning into this show anyway. What network is it even on? But something does well up inside of him as they flip through old photos on Yufeng’s iPad. He’s not sure if it’s exactly the mood that Yufeng was hoping for, but its something. He looks at the way they all used to smile and can’t help but feel crushed under the weight of this lost youth.
It not so much a trip down memory lane as it is a sprint through the winding paths. He makes Yufeng pause on a particular photo, he’s not even sure how old it is, but it’s Huangwei and Yang Fan in the practice room after dark. Yang Fan’s staring listlessly at the camera and Huangwei’s throwing up a peace sign. They both look tired, but something about it makes them look happy. It’s a simple photo. Nothing really. But like a fish swimming upstream, desperate to get back to the origin, Huangwei wants nothing more than to be this person again, to run against the course of time, crawl inside those first few years, and live there forever.
Yufeng pats his arm, as if he knows. But how could he? Even now he smiles stupidly bright and Huangwei doesn’t understand how he does it.
“We were pretty dumb back then, weren’t we.” Yufeng says, with only the tiniest hint of something sad, and nudges Huangwei’s shoulder.
“Hey, speak for yourself.” Huangwei gestures to his body, not liking how five years qualifies as back then. “I’ve always been this awesome.”
Yufeng gives him an endearing look, “Of course. Of course.”
The interview happens like all interviews do. They almost even ask the same questions they did years ago, except now they hold a slightly different weight. They all, somehow, have a lot more to prove. Guo Ziyu is also not here and there is a very fine line between leaving someone behind and being left behind. They’re still in the middle of figuring out which it is.
Huangwei fights the urge hide in his palms when they pull up the new promotional photos and Gao Yu spouts off about how much they worked out for this. They all know that it’s really just a lot of photoshop and that underneath all of it is really just a lot of desperation. Still Huangwei kind of admires the way Gao Yu’s able to own up to just about everything. Plus it’s always funny to see Yufeng and Yang Fan with a little more meat on their bones.
At the end of the interview, with their new single rolling in the credits, Huangwei’s still not sure what they were ever trying to prove, even all those years ago.
&
He tries asking Yufeng this one night months later and after too much wine and sitting in the dark.
Yufeng comes home from a day of shooting and sits in the empty spot on the couch beside Huangwei, a little too close because Huangwei can feel the heat from his thighs. It was probably the wrong thing to say since Yufeng never believed they had wasted any time or were ever trying to prove anything because
“We’re not in such a bad place now are we.”
The thing is he can’t keep up with Yufeng anymore, not with his unending optimism. He’s able to swallow his pride, accept these roles and opportunities he knows won’t get him anywhere except further down into this hole. Huangwei had tried that once. He went into it knowing it’d be a low budget horror film, but came out of it not knowing which way was even up anymore.
Huangwei turns and looks at Yufeng and for a moment, he thinks he can see this alternate life where it isn’t like this, isn’t so hard. They’d be different people in different situations, and Huangwei wouldn’t feel like he’s wandering aimlessly through a maze. Maybe in this life, he’d reach over and cup the back of Yufeng’s neck; he’d trace small circles with his thumb on the spot behind Yufeng’s earlobes; he’d say our birthdays are separated by only a few days and I can’t imagine life without you; he’d pull Yufeng towards him and all the years they would have spent together would collapse in that one moment and Huangwei wouldn’t feel like he wasted any of them. Or maybe, in a different alternate life, Huangwei would have stayed in Xuzhou and wasted the years on something else entirely.
Funny, he’s struck with this strange sense of loss even though Huangwei’s not sure what he ever had in the first place.
Maybe it has something to do with the way Yufeng’s body tenses as he says he’s leaving Beijing in a few weeks for an offer in Chongqing, and he looks at him in a way that hints maybe Huangwei should leave Beijing also.
Huangwei smiles around the edge of his wine glass and tries to say with as much conviction as he has left “I’m happy for you.”
Yufeng’s face immediately brightens and he pats Huangwei’s knee, letting his hand linger a bit, and Huangwei thinks maybe this is his chance to reach out and lace his fingers through Yufeng’s, but the moment passes before he’s able to process it all. Yufeng stands up to finish a few of the chores still left in the kitchen and Huangwei closes his eyes, letting the world spin around him. In this moment, he wishes for some alternate life, and just for this moment, he lets it make him feel sad. The faucet runs quietly and Huangwei looks around at the boxes he hasn’t bothered to unpack since coming to stay with Yufeng, and he knows that even if he wanted to, he could never leave Beijing. He’s left too much of himself here, but maybe he could use a break.
Huangwei would think about this in the weeks to come. He’d toy with the idea of leaving Beijing for somewhere new as he watches Yufeng pack up his life. He doesn’t know how Yufeng’s able to go around picking up all the pieces of himself without leaving anything behind, except he is leaving something behind.
Huangwei can’t help but sink into the doorframe a little when Yufeng steps into the elevator and nods back at him
“Take care.”
&
A few weeks before his trip to Europe, Huangwei considers calling his parents, maybe to tell them he’s going to be out of the country for a while. Over the years it had always been a game of phone tag between them. In the early years Huangwei called them more than they answered and certainly more than they called back. But now they call him more, wanting him to just come home and settle down.
He hesitates though, thinking they might not even notice he’s on vacation. There aren’t really too many regular correspondences between them, and he knows it’ll be the same routine. He’ll tell them about albums that are selling (barely), offers for acting roles (either extremely minor or ridiculously low budget films), and they’ll tell him to just come home (they know someone and he could be at a desk pushing paper by the end of the month), they tell him to get married (he’s edging into thirty and needs to start thinking about family). Huangwei will tell them he has someone, that it’s Yu--Yiling, who’s moving in with him (who doesn’t ever want to get married or have children).
It’s all the same routine, and Huangwei thinks if he runs through the conversation in his head enough times, there isn’t really a need to actually call them. It’ll be like they already had it.
He thinks about calling Yufeng and then thinks about the last time he saw him on television, all bright smiles and toothy grins, and Huangwei doesn’t know what he’d say to him, so he updates his weibo status instead, hoping they’ll all get the memo.
&
He finds the kind of stillness in Paris he never knew he was searching for. Five years have slowly bled into six, and Huangwei doesn’t know how long he can keep counting.
He realizes as the plane is touching down, and the gloomy skies of Beijing greet him in the way he wishes he wasn’t so familiar with, that he doesn’t even know what he’s trying to hold on to all this time. It wasn’t really the dream, he has always known he wasn’t really cut out for singing.
Then what was it? Why didn’t he turn his back earlier?
Maybe it’s that part of himself he’s left with Yufeng. All that time and the youth. They way things were always effortless. Maybe he thought, like Ziyu, he’d be losing more than just the title of HIT5.
It’s perhaps when he’s walking through the terminal after he lands and looks up to see Yufeng offering to help him with his carry on, that he feels the gravity of it all. Yufeng smiles like absolutely nothing has changed, as if they were still 20 years old with the world at their feet, but Huangwei knows they’re not even a little bit like the people they were before. Maybe if he was still the person from all those years ago--maybe a little braver--he’d have gone to Chongqing with Yufeng and maybe he’d smile a bit brighter. Instead Yufeng pulls him into a hug and says he’s going to treat him to a meal because it’s been way too long since they’ve last done anything like that.
Later after they’ve eaten and probably drank a little too much, Huangwei will be saying goodbye with his hands in his pocket and Yufeng will be wishing him all the best in the future. He’ll be playing with the ring he’s been keeping in his pocket for too long and Yufeng will be looking at his shoes and under the terrible lighting of the streets, it’ll look briefly like a scene from a sad movie.
It’s then that Huangwei knows he’s probably giving this ring to the wrong person.
In the end, they’re all back together again, though probably not in the way Huangwei ever thought they would be. His parents are at one of the front tables and they’re beaming at him as Huangwei raises his wine glasses. Ziyu even came and he’s laughing over a flute of champagne as Gao Yu imitates the latest director he’s been working with. It’s almost like it’s seven years ago and Huangwei almost laughs. Yiling leans into him softly and it’s like they’re pieces of a puzzle that have inexplicably fallen in place.
“To us,” he tips his glass towards his bride, his parents, and the four other people he wouldn’t trade for the world, “and to dreams coming true.”
And for only the smallest of moments, he lets himself think about that alternate life.
&
One night during Huangwei’s second year in Beijing, after a few too many bottles of wine and too many hours of KTV, Yufeng slumps onto the pleather couch next to Huangwei, slinging his arm lazily across his shoulders, while one of Yang Fan’s new friends bellows out the lyrics to some english song in a really bad accent, and looks Huangwei intently in the eyes. “So what’s your dream now?”
“It’s a new year after all.” Yufeng adds with a laugh and a sip of wine he certainly doesn’t need.
Huangwei wonders suddenly, how his Da Nian Ye has slowly turned into nights like these, and how nights like these slowly turn into his every night, how the days keep mashing together, the years bleeding into one another, and how no matter how hard he wishes or tries, he just can’t get it right.
“You know… Same old same old…”
“I have this theory…” Yufeng raises a finger and points it at the bridge of Huangwei’s nose, “that maybe certain dreams don’t come true because we’re not making the right wishes, that maybe there are certain things you’re suppose to wish for and certain things you’re not.”
“I wonder…” He whispers almost inaudibly into his glass, “how other people make wishes…”
Suddenly, the room erupts into a countdown, as the Lian Huan Hui playing on someone’s phone begins welcoming in the new year. Ziyu and Gao Yu both jump up onto the coffee table and begin chanting the numbers.
Huangwei slips his hand into Yufeng’s, maybe he’s had a little too much wine as well, and as the numbers wind down to the new year, Huangwei closes his eyes, squeezing Yufeng’s hand. He thinks there are a million things he wants, but in the split moment he has, Huangwei can only think of one thing he knows he would never be able to live without.
So this time, he tries to make the right wish.