Title: holding back
Fandom: Guardian
Rating: R
Length: 880 words
Notes: pre-slash, fantasy and frustration, set during episode 7. Many thanks to trobadora for beta! No warnings apply.
Summary: When he shuts his eyes, all he sees is Shen Wei, his gaze sharpening into challenge, that little smile of feigned innocence. “But how did you know my bedroom has a window like that?”


Zhao Yunlan slips through his apartment door, closes it and tosses the liniment bottle onto the couch. His skin feels hot and cold, not just his arm—which hardly hurts at all now, by the way; score one for suspected Dixing powers—but all over his body. His toes are clenched in their boots. His heart is thumping. He’s a mess.

When he shuts his eyes, all he sees is Shen Wei, his gaze sharpening into challenge, that little smile of feigned innocence. “But how did you know my bedroom has a window like that?”

“Fuck.” Zhao Yunlan links his hands around the back of his neck and groans at the ceiling. He’d been so damned pleased with himself, fighting off those muggers, saving the damsel in distress, deftly side-stepping the question of how he happened to come along at the right time. And then he’d let his guard down, and he has no one to blame but himself and the warm, electrifying press of Shen Wei’s hands on his arm.

For a moment he wonders whether sleeping with the professor would win him back the upper hand. Zhao Yunlan’s pretty sure that, if he pitched it right, Shen Wei would be receptive, and heaven knows there are a thousand things Zhao Yunlan could do to that pretty mouth. But even thinking about it in the abstract makes his body tighten with restless hunger. As soon as his brain strays into specifics, possibilities, he knows he’s screwed.

Shen Wei backing him against a wall, saying, “You’ve searched my house. I’ll need compensation,” and dragging his hand down to the front of Zhao Yunlan’s jeans. Shen Wei pinning him with a look while he deliberately unbuttons that pristine white shirt, starting with his cuffs. Shen Wei kneeling over him, straddling him, telling him what he wants and what he’s going to take.

It’s the hint of steel behind the demure demeanour. It’s the precision of his gaze. Shen Wei sees through Zhao Yunlan like he’s made of glass, would take him apart with brutal efficiency, and Zhao Yunlan would beg him to do it.

Literally beg.

If Shen Wei ever gets his hands on him, really gets his hands on him, he’ll own him.

And that’s not right. Unnerving people and trampling all over their boundaries is his thing. But with Shen Wei, he’s been off balance from the start, covering as well as he can, and scrambling to keep up.

(It’s terrifying how much he wants to keep up. How he can’t walk away. Never mind that Shen Wei moved in across the hall from him with zero warning. Never mind that he’s so open about the fact of his secrets. Zhao Yunlan keeps circling back—to Shen Wei’s office at the university, to phone calls and night-time walks. As if his heart only remembers how to beat right in the presence of that beautiful, mysterious face.)

He scrubs his hands across his eyes. He’s losing his mind. Maybe he should just march across the corridor and demand Shen Wei fuck him back to sanity. “Come on,” he could say, “we’ve already established you’re good with your hands. Let’s see how you are with everything else.”

Would Shen Wei startle, his eyes widening behind his glasses, his mouth soft and flustered? Or would his expression gleam with triumph? Maybe he’s waiting for it, waiting for Zhao Yunlan’s knock.

Maybe he’s a damned honey trap, sent by Dixing to compromise the chief of the SID.

Zhao Yunlan can’t think straight, can’t think at all. He needs to calm down. He shrugs his leather vest to the floor, kicks off his boots and heads for the privacy of his shower.

Of course—and it’s not like he doesn’t see this coming; it’s at least halfway the plan—he ends up with one hand braced against the cool tiled wall and the other wrapped tight around his cock. Hot water pours down his body, but in his imagination, all that heat is Shen Wei, pressed up close behind, fucking him fast and desperate and sweaty, wrenching a breathy groan from low in Zhao Yunlan’s throat. It’s embarrassing how quickly he comes, how tired it leaves him, but at least in his fantasy Shen Wei is equally wrecked.

Zhao Yunlan towels off slowly, drifts back into the main room and pulls on some cleanish shorts. The evening has been a string of lapses in judgement, from unofficially tailing Shen Wei in the first place to getting jumped by those goons like an amateur, from Shen Wei’s suspiciously effective first aid to the indiscretion Zhao Yunlan just committed. But that last one only happened in the safety of his own head, so he’s giving himself some credit, and in the end, no harm’s been done, and no one need ever know. Da Qing is still elsewhere, and Shen Wei won’t blab about the other parts—he’d only incriminate himself.

Zhao Yunlan picks up the liniment bottle, the only hard evidence of the night’s misadventures, from the couch and glances around, then stows it in the last place anyone would ever look: the fridge. Then he crawls into bed and succumbs to sleep, with his hand wrapped around his arm where a bruise should be.


END