Early on, they’d established a safeword. It was not used often, as they were so deeply in-tune with each other that understanding and communication passed between them without words. They spoke with their eyes, and in extension, their souls, which were already so closely intertwined as one intimate being.

But every creature has tolerance. Limits. And Hua Cheng had just reached his own.

It was an intense scene. Xie Lian was in familiar white robes, and while they were parted and hiked up out of the way for convenience of the situation, what they were supposed to imitate was unmistakable. Additionally, covering Xie Lian’s face was a white, wooden mask, details of a half-crying half-smiling face painted in pitch black. Similarly, Hua Cheng’s — Wu Ming’s — smiling mask lay askew on his head, shoved up so that his face was free. His face that was younger now; a little more delicate. His cheeks were blotchy and damp with tears. His hair was messy and wild and falling out of his ponytail.

Xie Lian, his beloved, his God, his universe, was saying something but Hua Cheng could not hear it. There was a ringing in his ears, a pressure in his chest and throat. He thought he could handle this. Something of this nature he had before. But Hua Cheng was reduced to something raw in this moment; something viscerally painful to recall. He felt Wu Ming’s hurt at the sight of a crushed flower, of his beloved’s hardships. Hua Cheng felt so helpless. So wretched. He felt Wu Ming’s terror and despair of watching his beloved suffer — the stench of blood in his nostrils, suffocating him. Xie Lian’s blood. It was all his. The squelch of organs and the scrape of bone. Hua Cheng could not take it. There is nothing more painful in this world than watching the one you love in pain and not able to stop it.

Hua Cheng’s lips part. The safeword spills between ragged gasps, his voice a feeble croak.