Butterfly
Flashback
………
On his first day back at school after the break, Qi Ying sat in the teachers’ office with his chin resting in his hand, forced to copy words as punishment.
He had forgotten to do his English homework—or rather, it wasn’t that he forgot; he just didn’t really like English. Out of all the subjects, he liked mathematics the most. He was heavily biased: he often scored full marks in math, while his English barely passed. His English teacher knew he wasn’t stupid, just blatantly favoring one over the other, so on the very first day of school, she punished him by making him copy the textbook.
People kept coming in and out of the office. After a while, all the teachers had left, leaving only a class representative there organizing teaching materials.
After writing for a bit, Qi Ying felt bored. He pressed his left cheek flat against the desk, bringing both eyes toward the center as his pupils followed the refill of the pen in his hand up and down.
Suddenly, a butterfly fluttered into his field of vision. Its wings were gorgeous, embellished with bright orange spots. Qi Ying sat up straight instantly, but the butterfly brushed past the doorframe and flew out. In its place, a boy walked in from outside the door.
Judging by the color of his uniform, he was from the same grade, but he looked a little unfamiliar—not from Qi Ying’s class. However, he had a very handsome face and was quite tall; the uniform shirt, which was a size too big on average, suited him well, its sleeves neatly rolled up to the crooks of his arms. Qi Ying gave him a second glance.
The boy stood quietly beside an empty desk across from Qi Ying. From Qi Ying’s angle, he could see the suppressant wristband on the boy’s wrist—an Alpha who had differentiated not too long ago.
“Are you looking for Teacher An?”
Hearing his voice, the boy turned around. The colors of his two pupils were actually different, yet it didn’t detract from the harmony of his face in the slightest. His features were as perfect as a sculpture, but his frozen expression matched it too—he had practically no expression as he gave a low “Mm.”
“She just stepped out. What are you looking for her for?”
His tone was so candid it practically made one think he was a teacher too, but the boy lowered his eyes and caught sight of the dense word notebook in front of Qi Ying: “You’re copying words here?”
Qi Ying pushed the notebook forward and scratched his head, his fingers quickly buried in his fluffy hair: “Sigh, didn’t do my English homework.”
He sized the boy up from top to bottom, catching a whiff of a similarly burdened aura: “What about you?” Teacher An taught math, so the answer was obvious. “You didn’t do your math?”
The boy clenched his hand at his side: “I did it, but…”
Qi Ying looked at him.
The boy kept his eyes lowered, avoiding eye contact: “In short, it’s gone now. I don’t have time to rewrite another copy, so I came over to apologize to Teacher An.”
“If you can’t hand it in, then you can’t hand it in. No need to be so down about it.”
“I want…” The boy clenched his fingers again. “…to ask her not to report it to my father.”
“Ha, you scared of your dad?” Qi Ying let out a laugh, deliberately dragging out his tone. “Teacher An is great at explaining problems, but she’s a bit rigid. She might not necessarily agree.”
The boy bit his lip tightly, standing there looking somewhat uneasy.
Qi Ying tilted his head, watching him for a short moment, then glanced at the inconvenient class representative not far away.
“Come here.”
The boy knit his brows: “What for?”
“Hey, come here, get closer to me.”
The boy reluctantly took a few steps closer, close enough to clearly see the woolly curls sticking up where Qi Ying had scratched his head.
“How about this—you just hand in my math homework.”
As Qi Ying spoke in a low voice, he bent over and rummaged around in the navy blue backpack beneath his feet. The edges of the backpack showed signs of fraying, but it was unusually large, practically swallowing Qi Ying’s entire arm.
Slap—
He slapped the math exercise book onto the desk, flipping through the pages from front to back to show the other party the content he had filled out completely. Finally, he returned to the blank cover.
“See? I happen to have not written my name or class.” Qi Ying bit the end of his pen. “What’s your name? I’ll fill it in for you.”
“…” For the first time, Qi Ying saw a distinct expression on this boy’s face. He took half a step back, as if facing a formidable enemy: “What kind of joke are you playing?”
“Shh, shh, shh—” Qi Ying hurriedly raised his hand to cover his mouth. “Keep your voice down.”
The boy froze, his entire body tense. Knitting his brows, he lowered his eyes to look at the offending hand.
A moist heat quickly rose in Qi Ying’s palm from the hasty breathing. He sheepishly pulled his arm back: “I’m not joking with you. If you want it, just take it. Hand it in and you won’t get scolded.”
The boy still kept a solemn expression and remained silent.
“You don’t need to worry about handwriting issues either. With so much summer homework, the teacher won’t read it. She just tallies the numbers.”
“What if we get caught? Lying is a violation of school rules.”
Qi Ying hadn’t expected someone to actually be this rule-abiding: “Can you not think about things 24 hours from now? Talk about it when we get caught. At least after handing in the homework, you can be happy today! Isn’t it nice to take happiness one day at a time like this?”
The boy looked somewhat tempted, biting his lip again: “If you give me the homework, what will you hand in?”
“Nothing!” Qi Ying rested the back of his head on his palm, saying nonchalantly, “I’m good at math; she won’t bother lecturing me. Besides, I don’t have parents, and my aunt and uncle don’t care about me. If she wants to file a report, let her.”
A flicker crossed the boy’s deep pupils. Qi Ying hated this kind of veiled sympathy and unspoken gratitude the most—the speaker couldn’t say it, and the recipient couldn’t respond, making one get goosebumps and cringe endlessly.
He hurriedly waved his hand, “Hey, hey, hey, don’t dilly-dally. The teacher will be back in a moment…” Then he leaned over the desk, the tip of his pen resting on that horizontal line, “Just say what your name is and be done with it!”
The boy moved his lips.
“My name is…”
………
Qi Ying suddenly woke up.
He wiped his face forcefully.
Sometimes dreams were magical like that; with a single wipe of the face, they scattered into the air, growing too thin to capture.
He couldn’t quite remember the details of this dream, only knowing that he had dreamed, even feeling as though he had incorporated the people and things he had encountered recently into this dream, turning it into a bizarre concoction.
He might have been under too much mental tension and stress lately.
Opening the tin box containing the lemon candies, he found only five pieces left. He stared at them anxiously for a moment before snapping the lid shut again.
Ten minutes after Qi Ying woke up, Lu Mengzheng moved in the video feed. He slowly covered his eyes with his arm, propping his knees up on the bed. Qi Ying suspected he was already awake, but he hadn’t made up his mind yet on whether to actively talk to him about what had happened half an hour ago.
However, without giving him much time to think, Lu Mengzheng connected the communicator first.
“What you injected me with was not a suppressant.”
It was a statement of fact.
For a highly tense person like Lu Mengzheng, it was very easy to discover a blank gap in his meticulous consciousness, as well as the fresh bruise marks left on his wrists by the interrogation chair. Yet he was not furious; his tone could even be described as excessively calm.
What was done was done, and he didn’t like spending time on regrets. Furthermore, he was no stranger to the word “betrayal”—if he hadn’t been “betrayed,” he wouldn’t have fallen to this state in the first place.
In truth, Lu Mengzheng had been placed under surveillance shortly after entering the country. Only a few of the closest people within the military knew the time of his departure and his alias. He had immediately made arrangements, altering his route to deliberately take a detour in an attempt to throw off those eyes. Yet after a brief escape, he was still captured in A’nan.
Even among those in the same camp, it was like this. How much more so for a guard in a foreign land?
Yet Qi Ying remained silent for a moment before saying, “I’m sorry. I really didn’t know.”
His guilt was genuine, but it didn’t last long, because Lu Mengzheng’s first words upon waking were actually to blame him—when Qi Ying hadn’t even settled accounts with him yet. “But you weren’t affected either, were you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You told them you came to Jasu to find someone—that was a lie, wasn’t it?”
Lu Mengzheng moved his arm away from his eyes: “What else did I say?”
This counter-question was undoubtedly adding fuel to the fire. Qi Ying stood up furiously and slammed his hand onto the desk with a loud bang, startling Koukou in the fish tank so much it leaped, splashing a spray of water.
“You still have the nerve to ask me? How despicable of you! You said you came to find me! I really don’t understand what good it does you to drag me down with you. Originally, I could have still gotten you some chicken legs to eat, but look now—who cares about you?”
Lu Mengzheng sat up: “I came to find you?”
“Tsk, stop acting, will you?” Qi Ying said impatiently. “Speak up! You traveled all this way to an enemy nation just to find a Beta named Qi Ying?! Listen to that—does that sound plausible? Is that reasonable…”
Lu Mengzheng interrupted him with a tight frown: “Wait a minute. What is your name?”
“Didn’t you know long ago that my name is Qi Ying? Who told you? Did I ever say it?” Qi Ying paced anxiously in circles inside the monitoring room. “But I don’t know you at all, and they don’t believe that a full-fledged Major like you would come all the way here just to find a Beta who has nothing to do with you either. So no matter what your purpose is, they won’t believe it.”
Lu Mengzheng’s lips moved slightly. He shot a glance at the camera, then revised his phrasing: “So you’re not a local of Jasu?”
Qi Ying had no idea how these questions were connected at all: “I lied to you before because I was afraid of what you might do to me, but now you’ve already done whatever to me, so I’m not afraid of you anymore. I’m indeed not a person from Jasu, but I don’t remember where I’m from either. Two years ago I lost my memory, and I’ve been staying here ever since.”
After Qi Ying babbled out a whole tirade, he realized that Lu Mengzheng was sitting cross-legged, playing with the scattered playing cards in his hands. In the surveillance video, he appeared abnormally quiet, seemingly lost in deep thought.
A moment later, Lu Mengzheng gathered the cards, looking toward the camera. Across the vast distance, Qi Ying could still discern an indescribably complex emotion within his gaze—like a deep undercurrent hidden beneath a calm sea.
“Officer Qi…”
At a time like this, trying to curry favor with him was useless. The Beta responded fiercely: “What?”
“Could you step inside for a moment?”
The prisoner’s voice was warm and filled with patience, yet in Qi Ying’s ears, it sounded like a malicious provocation—because every single entry code in this facility had been reset, and he couldn’t get in even if he wanted to. Having only been quiet for a brief moment, Officer Qi slammed his hand on the desk and exploded all over again.
“In your dreams! You just want me to go in there so you can fight me one-on-one. I’m not stupid—I can’t beat you at all! Come out if you dare!”
“…”