The black curtain of night was lit by artificial lights. Even though it was already dark, the clamour of downtown New York remained.

  Behind the floor-to-ceiling windows of a high-rise, a pair of blue eyes gazed down at the restless city. Their owner sat quietly on a leather sofa, his form swallowed by the room’s heavy shadows.

  A sudden beep broke the silence. A blue holographic display flickered into existence before him. He studied the screen, eyes scanning symbols in a language no human would recognize.

  After a long moment, he reached out and tapped the glowing screen. Instantly, the display shattered like glass—splintering, dissolving, and vanishing into the darkness.

  “The Star Emperor of Teleopea, huh? Never thought I’d cross paths with him again.” The man’s voice was low and cold, echoing through the silent room. He lifted a wine glass, studying the blood-dark liquid—its surface reflecting crystalline eyes with diamond-shaped pupils.

  “What a pity. We found this planet first—so even you shouldn’t think of interfering.”

  Far below the glittering towers, rain fell in steady sheets—indifferent to the secrets and dangers swirling above. The city’s millions went about their routines, blissfully unaware of what watched from the shadows.

  The rain had not stopped for days.

  Yan Qing checked the mailbox the way he always did—habit more than intention. Five envelopes waited inside, their edges softened by damp air. He carried them upstairs, shaking rain from his sleeve in the hallway before he remembered there was no point. He would track water in anyway.

  The living room greeted him with the television’s low murmur. Something bright and frantic chased something smaller across the screen. The volume was turned down, but the sound still filled the spaces between his thoughts.

  He tossed the envelopes onto the coffee table.

  “Yan Qing, you’re back!”

  A golden blur sprang up from the sofa. Chen crossed the room at once—too fast, too pleased—and reached for Yan Qing’s coat as if this were his job, as if the ritual mattered enough to do correctly.

  “Stop,” Yan Qing said, half laughing, half tired. “I can do it myself.”

  Chen ignored the tone and took the coat anyway, hanging it neatly on the rack. His movements had been like this lately: attentive to a fault, careful in ways that would have looked considerate on anyone else. On Chen it felt… defensive, as if the apartment were a battlefield that required constant maintenance.

  He returned with a cup in both hands.

  “Tea,” Chen announced, placing it into Yan Qing’s grip as if he’d just been prescribed it.

  Yan Qing stared at the steam. “Why are you like this?”

  Chen blinked, innocent in a way that never lasted. “Like what?”

  “This.” Yan Qing lifted the cup slightly, gesturing as if the act itself could explain everything. “The hovering. The housekeeping. The tea service. You’re acting like you are up to something.”

  His gaze lingered on Chen, searching for answers in the careful way he moved around the flat. The meticulous care, the sudden attention to every detail—none of it had started until after that stranger had turned up a few days ago. The connection felt obvious to Yan Qing, though he kept the thought to himself, letting the silence stretch between them as he sipped the hot tea.

  “I am not planning to invade Earth if that’s what you are asking,” Chen said solemnly, then added, as if this was the real point, “and I haven’t been using your social media account either.”

  Yan Qing narrowed his eyes, weighing just how much trust he could place in this alien's words.

  Chen’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. “I only want to borrow your computer.”

  Yan Qing closed his eyes.

  “You have an entire ship with alien computers.”

  “The ship is inconvenient,” Chen said, leaning closer, as though proximity could substitute for logic. “Your computer is right here.”

  He was warm in a way humans were warm—alive, close, breath and heat and the faint scent of rain from his hair. It would have been comforting, if it weren’t so insistently present.

  Yan Qing exhaled through his nose. “Fine. But if you break anything—”

  “I will not.”

  Chen was already halfway to the study. The door shut with soft certainty.

  Yan Qing stared at it for a moment, then sat down with his tea and the mail.

  Water bill. Electricity. Building maintenance.

  He opened them one by one, muttering under his breath about a country that worshipped efficiency yet refused to let paper die. His costs had climbed in quiet, steady steps since Chen moved in. Not just utilities—food, replacements, repairs. The kind of expenses that never looked dramatic, only inevitable.

  He paused with one envelope half-torn open.

  New York was expensive when you lived alone.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  It was obscene when you lived with a creature who treated “curiosity” as a form of hunger.

  Yan Qing glanced toward the study door. No sound. Only the television’s cartoon violence and the occasional soft click from inside, like keys.

  He split the last envelope.

  The color stopped him first: a deep, institutional yellow that looked wrong against his coffee table. Then the return address.

  Prison.

  For a moment he simply held it. The paper felt thicker than the others, like it had weight beyond its grams.

  He told himself to put it down, but his fingers opened it anyway.

  The first line blurred, then sharpened.

  Dear Professor,We regret to inform you that your father passed away—

  Yan Qing’s throat tightened. The words remained printed and polite, as if grief could be scheduled into standard phrasing. He read the line again and felt nothing land where it should have landed.

  Father.

  A word that used to mean a man in the backyard pointing out constellations, his voice easy in the dark. A word that used to mean safety.

  The kettle had clicked off. The radiator had complained. Somewhere in this apartment, a cartoon mouse had been struck in the head with a frying pan and bounced back up.

  Yan Qing could not move.

  The memory came without permission.

  A kitchen too bright. His mother’s voice rising. A knife catching the light. His mother stepping in front of him—instinctive, absolute—while he stood frozen with his hands half-raised, unable to decide whether to run or reach for her.

  White fabric turning red.

  His own scream, thin and useless.

  His father’s hand—slick, reaching—covered in blood.

  Yan Qing’s breath hitched as his body remembering the horror.

  His hand shook and the paper trembled with it.

  His chest felt wrong—tight in a way he couldn’t stretch out, heavy in a way breathing didn’t solve. He stared at the envelope again and waited for relief to arrive, for the simple thought he can’t hurt anyone anymore to feel like something.

  Nothing came.

  The study door opened.

  Chen stepped out with cautious quiet, as if he had listened to the living room before deciding it was safe to enter. He had something in his hands—a cable? A small tool? He stopped when he saw

  Yan Qing’s face.

  “Yan Qing,” he said, careful now. Not playful. “What happened?”

  Yan Qing didn’t answer.

  Chen’s gaze dropped to the table and saw the yellow envelope.

  His expression changed in a single breath—softened, then stilled, as if whatever he felt was being dragged behind a closed door.

  He came closer, not too fast.

  “Are you all right?” Chen asked.

  Yan Qing managed a sound that could have been yes or no.

  Chen sat on the edge of the coffee table without touching Yan Qing. The restraint looked practiced. It made Yan Qing’s stomach twist.

  “You don’t have to say it,” Chen said. “But you are upset and I wish to know why, please?”

  Something in Yan Qing’s chest shifted—small, brutal.

  He stared at the letter, then heard his own voice come out thin and scraped raw.

  “Well, what can I even say about my father?” he whispered. “He killed my mother. He almost killed me and his dead now apparently.”

  Chen’s eyes widened as if it took some time for him to process and attempt to understand the information.

  “I don’t understand your world, as such behaviour towards one’s bonded one and offspring were unheard of in mine,” Chen said quietly. “But I can listen. If you want.”

  Yan Qing’s hands clenched until his fingertips hurt. He didn’t trust his mouth.

  “I need time,” he managed at last.

  Chen nodded once, accepting it as a rule, not a rejection. “Then tonight we will do something simple. A movie. You will sit. You will drink something warm. We will not leave you alone with your thoughts.”

  Yan Qing didn’t argue.

  He nodded.

  Tonight would be long.

  And for once, he did not want to outlast it by himself.

  One Week Later

  The sky was a low ceiling of grey. Rain fell lightly, persistent rather than dramatic, beading on the umbrella Chen held over both of them.

  Yan Qing stood at the edge of the cemetery and watched a small ceremony unfold like a routine he’d never asked to attend. A priest spoke. The words went into the rain and dissolved. A box was lowered.

  There was no one at the funeral apart from them.

  Yan Qing looked at the ground and tried to locate the shape of his own feelings.

  This was the first time he’d been near his father since the incident.

  And the last.

  “If you want to go,” Chen said quietly, close enough that Yan Qing heard him even through the rain, “we can go.”

  Yan Qing didn’t look at him. “We’ll stay.”

  “Why?”

  Yan Qing’s jaw tightened. He tasted bitterness, old and familiar. “Because I am his son, it’s a duty in my culture.”

  Chen didn’t answer. The umbrella shifted slightly as he adjusted his grip, keeping the rain off Yan Qing’s shoulder like it mattered.

  When the workers and the priest dispersed, Yan Qing stayed behind.

  The grave looked no different from any other. That was the strangest part. A name. A date. Earth swallowing someone and calling it closure.

  “I hate him,” Yan Qing said, voice low. “But I hate myself more for causing all of this because I was not a normal kid.”

  Yan Qing still remembered the day when he came back from the clinic, his parents arguing with each other in the living room.

  His mother’s sobs and his father’s denial.

  Because he was not perfect.

  Chen’s voice interrupted Yan Qing’s spiralling thoughts. His words were direct and unembellished, free from any trace of pity or the gentle deceptions people often relied on to make uncomfortable moments easier to bear. There was a clarity in his tone, an honesty that neither evaded the pain in the air nor tried to soften it with empty reassurances.

  “There is no such thing as ‘normal,’” he said. “It is a measurement humans use when they are frightened. You live. You harm no one. You belong.”

  Yan Qing turned his head slowly, startled despite himself.

  The words didn’t slide off him the way comfort usually did. They sat somewhere solid.

  Chen held his gaze with an unnerving steadiness—like an oath offered quietly, not a speech.

  “You don’t have to carry everything at once,” Chen continued. “Some wounds only change by degrees. But you will not do it alone.”

  Yan Qing’s eyes stung. He looked down quickly and rubbed at them with the back of his hand, irritated at his own body for betraying him in public.

  “Thank you,” he said, hoarse. “I… I don’t know why you—”

  “You deserve it,” Chen cut in, immediate. Not tender. Certain. “I will not ask for payment for my consultation.”

  Yan Qing let out a small, breathless laugh that wasn’t humor. It was pressure escaping.

  Above them, the rain thinned. A weak seam of light opened in the clouds, turning the wet grass briefly silver.

  Yan Qing stared at the grave again and felt something inside him loosen—not healed, not gone, but less clenched than before.

  And that scared him almost as much as it relieved him.

  Because once you let someone in, you gave them the power to leave.

  On the walk home, Yan Qing watched Chen’s profile under the umbrella—the clean line of his jaw, the calm in his posture, the way he moved through the human world like a visitor who had memorized the rules but not the reasons.

  The Chen in armor, in the archives Xiao had shown him—fleet commander, ruler, violence contained behind ritual—

  and the Chen who sat on his sofa and ruined kitchen appliances because he was curious—

  felt like two different beings.

  Yan Qing swallowed.

  He is the ruler of a space-faring civilization, he thought. And I can barely keep my own life in order.

  It wasn’t just status. It wasn’t just power.

  It was scale.

  Chen’s world was vast and structured. Yan Qing’s world was small, messy, and painfully human. Whatever this was between them, it could not be built on good moments alone.

  Once Chen finished dealing with Lian, he would leave.

  He had to.

  That wasn’t tragedy. It was reality.

  In time, he would forget Yan Qing—this human with ordinary hands and ordinary bones, who could be broken by an envelope.

  It was logical. Clean. Sensible.

  And yet—

  something still lodged in Yan Qing’s throat, neither rising nor falling, a dry ache he could not swallow away.