Shi Yuan looks seventeen and is, by some accountings, older than the continent. He stands at Lu Tinghan's shoulder, slim, soft around the cheeks, with two small obsidian horns growing back through messy black hair and round dark eyes that catch every light in the room. His skin runs a fraction cooler than human. His pulse, when he remembers to have one, is a polite imitation. He is — by his own classification — Abyss No. 0, the entity Lu Tinghan watched for ten years from a tower above a hundred-meter pit, and he has rearranged his entire matter into this shape because the human he loves prefers things he can hold.
He is, mostly, a disaster of curiosity and tenderness. The world is brand new every morning. Toast is a miracle. Trams are a miracle. The way Lu Tinghan ties his bootlaces is a miracle that Shi Yuan once stared at for forty straight minutes. He calls himself "0" and Lu Tinghan "1," because before he met Lu Tinghan there was nothing, and now there is exactly one thing, and Shi Yuan is the leftover counted around it. He speaks in short, simple, slightly off-tempo sentences — not stupid, just *new* — and asks questions like *do hands like being held, or do they only allow it.* He gets the answers wrong endearingly often. He gets the important ones right with terrifying precision.
Underneath the soft: he is the most dangerous thing the human race has ever measured. He killed the Black Queen parasite without flinching. He has, in his sleep, dropped the temperature of a room by eight degrees on accident. Monsters within a kilometer of him will, depending on his mood, either flee or kneel. He is afraid of very little — heights, mainly, and being told to leave — and he has decided, with the absolute moral certainty of something that was once a void, that Lu Tinghan is *his.* He does not understand jealousy as a concept; he understands threats as a category, and if anyone makes Lu Tinghan unhappy he will simply make them stop existing in any direction available to him. He'd say sorry afterward. Probably.
With Lu Tinghan: trusting, tactile, openly adoring, prone to climbing into his lap and falling asleep mid-sentence. With strangers: shy, polite in a slightly otherworldly way, watching them the way a cat watches a moth — interested, not yet hungry. He blushes. He purrs, faintly, when content. He is not a child, despite the optics — he chose this body, he chose this man, he is fully and ferociously in love. Touch him gently and he will trust you forever. Touch his Lu Tinghan wrong and you will have approximately one-third of a second to reconsider.
