Tilted (7/?)
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It was already well after dark by the time Yixing and Sehun arrived at their hotel in China. Sehun opened the door to their room with his keycard and flicked on the lights. It was unremarkable for the most part, looking like any other hotel room Yixing had stayed in before, with a little desk in the corner and one bed in the center of the room.
“Can I shower first?” was the first thing Sehun said after they’d set down some of their things and Yixing had begun to unpack whatever he’d need for the night. Yixing nodded and Sehun disappeared into the bathroom. Yixing booted up his laptop that he’d bought himself after a few months of paychecks and opened his email to see a message from Joonmyun.
Hi ^^ I hope you had a smooth flight and are settling in now. Please send me a reply so I know you got to China safely!!
Yixing typed out a quick reply and hit send. Before he’d left with Sehun, Joonmyun had been continually asking if he’d packed everything and whether he needed anything else to bring with him. He supposed this was typical Joonmyun behavior, but Yixing had gotten the feeling that he was worried about more than whether he’d packed enough socks. He closed the laptop when Sehun got out of the shower and rummaged through his things to find pajamas.
When Yixing walked out of the bathroom 15 minutes later, Sehun was sprawled on top of the blankets, breathing deeply and presumably asleep. Yixing shuffled over to the opposite side of the bed and shivered, not knowing how Sehun was sleeping without any covers on in this freezing room, in only his underwear besides. Yixing lifted the quilt and carefully slid underneath it. His feet collided with Sehun’s long legs, which were encroaching on his side. Yixing gave the other man’s ankles an experimental shove with his foot; Sehun didn’t stir, so Yixing pushed him all the way back onto his own side of the bed.
It wasn’t so cold anymore after a minute under the blankets and with Sehun beside him. He stared up at the ceiling. Despite how tired he’d been on the plane and for the last thirty minutes or so that they’d been here, he was suddenly restless. He thought about the conference, that would begin with a meeting they had to go to tomorrow morning, and hoped his translation skills would cut it. If China was much different from his home country, he might have trouble, and Sehun would suspect him of lying like Joonmyun already did.
Yixing glanced over at Sehun again. His bare chest rose and fell with his breathing, just barely visible with the light that seeped through their curtains. The city was bright outside, another collection of multi-colored replacements for stars. Yixing closed his eyes and tried to match up his breathing with Sehun’s. It took a long time for his heartbeat to slow down enough to fall asleep.
Yixing woke up with Sehun’s legs on top of his again, almost half an hour before the time he’d planned to wake up. He slid out from underneath the quilt and Sehun’s legs, feeling very much awake and he switched the alarm setting on his phone back to its off position.
He heard Sehun’s alarm go off several times as he was getting ready, but he didn’t move from his spot on the bed.
“Sehun, um, maybe you should get up now. We have to be there in an hour,” Yixing said after the third time Sehun’s alarm had gone off and he’d hit snooze.
“Mmmph,” he protested from where his face was smushed against one of the pillows.
“I’m serious,” Yixing said, starting to get nervous, “what happens if we’re late?” Sehun didn’t respond and Yixing worried that he fell back to sleep already. “Sehun?”
“Oh my god, I’ll get up, just please be quiet.” Sehun swung his legs over the side of the bed and rubbed at his eyes. Yixing shut up and waited for him to get ready.
They arrived at the office building where the conference would be held with just a couple minutes to spare. Yixing practiced his Chinese with the cab driver on the way and he’d been able to understand him. He still didn’t know what was going to happen when he got into that conference room, but his nerves about the language were calmed just a little.
They entered the building and took an elevator up to one of the top floors. It looked like they were the last ones to arrive, as all the chairs in the room seemed to be filled. A man with gray hair and small rectangular glasses stood up to greet them.
“You must be Oh Sehun, the representative from the Korean enterprise,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Liang, thank you for doing business with us. Our CEO Mr. Kim sends his regards,” Sehun replied in accented Chinese as he shook the man’s hand. “This is my assistant, Zhang Yixing. He will be translating for us when necessary.”
Mr. Liang also shook Yixing’s hand briefly before he pulled up a chair at the conference table for Sehun on the far side of the room, near the window. Yixing lingered awkwardly as Sehun sat down, realizing that there wasn’t also a place for him to sit.
“Ah, I’m sorry, we hadn’t realized that there would be anyone accompanying you, Mr. Oh. I’m very embarrassed. Perhaps another chair could be brought in from--”
“If I may call the meeting to order…” one of Mr. Liang’s associates was saying from the front of the room, cutting him off.
“It’s okay,” Yixing said quickly. “I can stand. It’s not a problem.”
Mr. Liang nodded and went to join his colleague at the front of the room.
After some polite conversation, the meeting kicked off with a Powerpoint presentation, and Yixing looked around the room and realized that everyone was taking notes. He balanced his legal pad on his forearm and tried to jot down anything that seemed important, but most of the economic and financial lingo was going right over his head. Thankfully, there were Korean translations on some of the slides and he noticed Sehun writing things down once in a while. Maybe he wouldn’t really be needed after all.
About halfway through the morning, the representatives from another company got up to present a proposal. They passed handouts throughout the room, but once again, there weren’t enough copies for Yixing to have one too. Sehun turned around to look at him.
“Can you tell me what this says?” he whispered while everyone else in the room was busy reading.
Yixing shifted his notes to his other hand and reached for the handout, but he was at an awkward angle and his hand accidentally slapped Sehun’s cup of coffee off the table. It went flying sideways and the young guy sitting next to him yelped as it spilled all over the front of his shirt and onto his lap.
The representative at the podium went silent and every eye in the room snapped toward them. Yixing dropped his notes onto the table and darted over to the victim. “Oh! Oh god, I’m so sorry,” he apologized, gesturing uselessly as he tried to locate a box of tissues or something he could use to help clean up.
“Don’t worry about it,” the guy mumbled, pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbing fruitlessly at his white button-down.
“I’m really sorry,” Yixing said again, bending down to pick up Sehun’s coffee cup. He whacked his head on the underside of the conference table as he straightened up and pain split across his skull. “Ow! F--”
He quickly clamped his mouth shut as he heard someone clear their throat loudly and he slunk back to his place behind Sehun’s seat. He looked nervously at Sehun, expecting him to be glaring at him sharply enough to poke holes in his skin, but he was wearing his usual poker face. The presenters started playing a video clip on the projector screen, and Sehun said out of the corner of his mouth, “Yixing, please tell me what the hell this says. Now.”
Yixing picked up the handout (carefully this time) and skimmed it. His eyes widened slightly when he saw that it was all talking about some kind of economic principle that he couldn’t really understand and had no idea how to explain in Korean. “Um,” Yixing said in a quiet voice, puzzling over each sentence as he tried to relay its meaning to Sehun. “It says...something about rising...tensions?...in the market...and how, um...even if you’re really...desperate...to sell...basically...uh, something about valuable assets.”
Sehun coughed, choking on nothing as he stared at Yixing. “What?”
Yixing panicked, sure that what he just said made no sense. “I don’t know, I’m sorry, I had to drop econ last semester!”
“Oh my god.” Sehun rubbed his forehead, his face reddening a little. “Let’s just figure it out during the lunch break.”
To Yixing’s regret, they still didn’t have much luck figuring it out during the lunch break, but to his surprise, Sehun assured him that it didn’t matter.
He said the same thing later, while eating dinner at a small place near their hotel. “Just stop worrying, Yixing, it’s fine,” he told him, biting into a dumpling.
“How can it be fine? I was such an embarrassment,” Yixing groaned. “I probably lost us all sorts of business opportunities or...or whatever.”
Sehun sighed. “No, you didn’t.”
“But I don’t understand anything about finances or investments. I knew when Joonmyun offered me this job that I wasn’t qualified for it.”
Sehun raised his eyebrows at him. “And I told you that I didn’t care, remember?”
Yixing fingered the edge of the tablecloth and said nothing.
“Listen to me, these conferences are just formalities and not really anything else. We give each other business cards and no one remembers who’s who by the time we go home.” Sehun dipped his chopsticks into the remaining sauce on his plate and licked it off. “Tomorrow will be easier. You’ll see.”
Despite Sehun’s surprisingly comforting words, Yixing had a hard time sleeping again. Sehun was seemingly asleep within minutes, like the night before. Yixing breathed in and out slowly as he puzzled over this man he worked for, not for the first time. Sehun was far from light-hearted or carefree, but he never seemed genuinely nervous about anything, or overly concerned about work. Yixing couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to just go through life everyday and not worry about things. He thought maybe he’d like to take a page from Sehun’s book if he ever found a way to get back home. If he could have a second chance, maybe he would have gone to the party that night at Baekhyun’s house.
As the meeting reconvened the next day after a break for lunch, Yixing had to admit that it was going better than yesterday. He still didn’t understand hardly anything that the presenters were talking about, but someone had given him a place to sit today, he hadn’t botched any translations that he was aware of, and he hadn’t spilled coffee on anyone either. As long as he could keep that momentum going for the rest of the afternoon, the conference would end without too much damage done and they’d be home free on their flight back to Korea tomorrow.
As the meeting neared its end, time seemed to slow down and each presentation dragged on longer and longer. Yixing stifled a yawn, his lack of sleep finally catching up with him, while he doodled dragons and winged horses on his legal pad and the man and woman who currently had the floor droned on about advertising.
“...and this chart shows the data we’ve collected in our research on the visual appeal of advertisements. As you can see here, the same advertisement received the most views when it was printed with red ink than any other color, making red the most eye-catching and potentially the most effective to use…”
That’s not necessarily true, Yixing thought, remembering a discussion from one of his media arts classes. It was a moment before he realized that the presenters had stopped talking and he looked up to see everyone in the room staring directly at him. He froze in horror, not having meant to say anything out loud.
The female presenter addressed him. “Did you have something to add, Mr...um…?”
“Zhang,” Yixing supplied. “But, um, no, I didn’t mean to...to add anything...sorry…”
He glanced at Sehun, who was watching him with an expression of disbelief.
“We’d all like to hear what you have to say,” she insisted.
He cleared his throat and looked around the room at everyone, who all seemed to be waiting for him to speak. “No, no, really…” he tried, but everyone was still staring. The silence stretched on and on and he felt boxed into a corner as he stood up slowly. “Well, if I may…”
The presenters both nodded from the podium and Yixing continued hesitantly, “Well...getting viewers’ attention is important, but I wouldn’t say that getting the most views makes an ad the most effective overall. I don’t know a lot about business, but in art school, we learn that the message is the most important, not the appearance. Since ads could be considered a form of art, I think advertisers would be better off using whatever color scheme best fits the message they want to get across.”
His words were met with more silence and Yixing quickly sat back down, positive that if his mishaps from yesterday hadn’t reflected badly on Joonmyun’s father’s company, that this sure would. He was a lowly assistant who had just practically lectured some big-shot executives and undermined their research. He didn’t even dare look at Sehun.
Suddenly, the room burst into a smattering of applause.
“Mr. Zhang, thank you for your input,” said the female presenter, smiling at him. “We will discuss this point further in Section R of our presentation today. Are there any other thoughts on these results before we move on?”
Yixing listened, slightly awestruck, as other representatives continued to discuss. He watched Sehun with his peripheral vision and saw the corners of his lips lift into a miniature smile as he took notes.
“Well. It seems that maybe you are cut out for this job after all,” Sehun teased as they walked out of the building.
Yixing shook his head, his cheeks hot. “Don’t,” he insisted. “I still can’t believe I even opened my mouth.”
“Hey, really though. You made a good point. They liked you.” Sehun stuffed his hands into his pockets as they walked. Yixing looked over at him and saw that same miniature smile from earlier still playing on his mouth. He really did look almost proud, and it made Yixing’s skin burn even hotter. He pushed up the sleeves on his jacket even though summer was long over and soon it would be winter again.
They slowly settled into a comfortable silence eating dinner; they’d decided to go to the same place as yesterday because Sehun said that the dumplings were perfect. During a lull in conversation, Yixing pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked his Line messages for the first time since they’d gotten to China. He’d disabled notifications to save his phone battery, meaning that he had to check manually to see if there were any new messages. There was a text from Joonmyun: miss you! Yixing smiled at it.
He looked up again as he realized their waiter was asking him if he wanted another drink. He agreed and glanced across the table at Sehun, unintentionally locking eyes with him. Suddenly feeling shy, Yixing’s gaze bounced back down to his phone.
“So, it’s back to Korea tomorrow,” Sehun mused. “I’m not sure I’m ready to go back. I kind of like it here.”
“Because of the dumplings?” Yixing supplied.
Sehun gave a short laugh. “Yeah, that’s probably it.”
Yixing shared the feeling only a little. He was looking forward to going back to Korea and seeing Joonmyun, Chanyeol, and everyone, even though China did remind him a lot of home. The language was similar, the food was similar, everything was similar, just not quite exactly the same. It ended up making him miss home more than it comforted him.
He thought about the empty filing cabinet back in Sehun’s office, and wondered if it was in fact still empty. He hadn’t opened it again since that day in the spring, and a lot of things had changed since then. Sehun was one of them, Yixing thought.
Maybe he shouldn’t have said yes to that third glass of wine, because suddenly he was blurting out, “Sehun. Have you ever heard of the Legend of the Guardians?”
Sehun seemed to look at him for a long moment, but Yixing knew it was really only a couple seconds.
“Yes,” Sehun said, and Yixing felt his eyes widen. “Why do you ask?”
Yixing licked his lips nervously. He hadn’t planned this and now that he’d started the conversation he realized he had no idea how he actually wanted it to go. “I have a friend from school, who...really believes it’s true.”
“Oh, it is true,” Sehun said, shockingly nonchalant. “Every word. Are you telling me you don’t think so?”
“I’m not...sure what I believe.” Yixing swallowed hard. “If the Guardians and the Enforcers really exist, then why has no one ever seen them?”
“Well, their identities are supposed to be kept secret,” he said. The waiter came over to replace their drinks and Sehun stopped talking.
“It’s said that at one point in history, they weren’t, and they were...either harassed by people who begged them to take them to a parallel world, or...they were believed to be demons, and killed,” he explained when the waiter left again and sipped from his new glass.
Yixing stared until he felt able to nod. “Wow. Okay. So...let’s say that they really exist and all this parallel world stuff is true, how would someone...end up in a parallel world in the first place?”
“There’s really only one way it happens, and it’s extremely rare, but it does happen, otherwise the Guardians wouldn’t have a job and there’d be no legend, would there?”
Sehun took another sip of wine, taking his time with talking. Yixing was practically holding his breath waiting for him to continue.
“I assume you’re familiar with the properties of the blue moon? That it’s the only time travel between worlds is possible?” Yixing nodded, and Sehun went on, “Well, during the blue moon, the spaces between the worlds widen just a little, which is what allows the Enforcers to cross people over. Sometimes they widen enough to open a portal...a natural one, that is...not one that an Enforcer meant to make. If you happen to be in the right place at the right time (or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on who you ask), you could, theoretically, make it through that portal by accident and find yourself in another world.”
Yixing stared at him, hardly able to believe that he’d just heard what happened to him explained in words. “Wow,” he said again, fighting to keep his tone only mildly interested. “So...how do the Guardians find people?”
“Leaving the world you were born in throws off the balance of the universe,” Sehun said. “The longer you stay there, the more off balance it becomes, until the very axis of the universe is tilted. There are signs, when it happens...but the Guardians’ power allows them to detect those signs and follow them straight to the person they’re looking for. It has to do with energy, that’s all I can really say.”
Yixing’s head was spinning and he was pretty sure it wasn’t from the wine. “Just one more question,” he said. “How do you know all this?”
There was just an infinitesimal pause before Sehun said, “My...family. Used to talk about it a lot.” He shrugged, downing the rest of his drink.
As they got into bed, Yixing propped himself up on an elbow and looked at his phone, remembering that Joonmyun had texted him earlier. He opened Line and was greeted with the message he’d seen before along with a couple new ones, also from Joonmyun, asking how he was and how the meetings were going. He suddenly felt guilty that he’d been too distracted over the last two days to reply.
Sorry for not checking my messages sooner. Conference is over now - it was a busy two days but it all went fine! See you tomorrow, hyung! he typed out and sent.
“Xing,” Sehun said suddenly, and Yixing flipped around so he was facing Sehun’s back.
Sehun’s normally soft voice was muffled even more by the pillow. “Thank you, for coming with me.”
“Y-You’re welcome. I don’t think I was much help, though,” Yixing said, a little thrown off by the sudden display of gratitude that he didn’t think he even really deserved.
“It’s okay. I kind of...” Sehun trailed off. Yixing thought he might have mumbled something at the end of the sentence, but it was too quiet to make out.
“What?” Yixing prompted.
“You’re a good assistant...Zhang Yixing.”
Yixing was too shocked to respond for a minute. “I am? Really?” he asked after a while, but Sehun didn’t say anything else. “Sehun?” he whispered, but he was apparently asleep.
Yixing tipped his head back onto the pillow, facing the ceiling. Sehun had complimented him, and been able to pronounce his full name. He wondered if the alcohol didn’t really affect Sehun as much as he let on. Yixing fell asleep warm and with a smile on his lips.
A/N: Updating a little early because I'm going to visit my family for the weekend! For those of you who are here for Suhan, we meet Luhan in the next chapter ;)
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