What It Means To Be King

Chapter 63: The Two Years We Knew Each Other

Leo knew a lot of things, primarily. There was a lot of which he didn't need to know but found great pleasure in knowing, if either to make someone severely uncomfortable, or just to satisfy his own thirst for knowledge. Before Shao Long told him he had an affinity for medicine, he wandered around the world, absolutely lost, absorbing information without purpose, without care of what it was, be it facts or numbers. He barely had any interest, just the desire to know all the things he could get his hands on. Afterwards, it grew in one direction, and then it thrived.

And deep down, he always felt grounded by the knowledge that sit within his memory, a guide to his life, a reassurance that he could handle something he deemed troublesome. 

But Leo didn't know a lot about Shao Long. 

It wasn't that the boy kept secrets. Yes, his information online was almost nonexistent; he learned that that was Xi Wenzhou's workings. But Shao Long talked a lot, and he talked about everything but nothing that really mattered. It came to Leo's concern, one day, that Shao Long rarely ever talked about his...hmm. He talked a lot about himself. About his favorites, about his relationship with all the aunties and uncles from the market, his love for sweets, his reluctance towards dogs and passion for business. But he didn't talk about his darker, more somber feelings. 

Leo had talked his heart out, whatever was even in it to Shao Long. He knew Anubis did the same too. Shao Long had been witness to his filthiest corner of mind, all the detachment he felt towards humanity, he had broken down in front of Shao Long over his first dead patient. He knew Anubis talked to Shao Long about his older brother, talked about that one prince he met who looked like Bada, about his violent desire for aggression and his need for lies. Shao Long listened to it all. 

And in turn, both Anubis and he had been talked their ears off with Shao Long's careless rants and casual nothings to fill in his boredom.

It had been two years since they first met. Two years since Shao Long, Anubis and him had formed a peculiar form of friendship. Two years since the boy started his company and two years of the consistent smiling face that always popped up whenever he saw either of them. 

Two years of listening to his rambles and he still didn't know that Shao Long was very frequently bullied. 

It started with a few suspicions. 

The first was Anubis' story of how Shao Long was chased by a group of teenage gangsters across the streets of Beijing, prompting him to hide in a trash bin in the middle of the city with a stranger who he had just bumped into. At first, he struck it as odd. Then he recounted his own first meeting with Shao Long and brushed it off as Shao Long messing around with people he didn't need to. 

Then came the second suspicion when Shao Long wore band aids, bandages, wrist slings, sporting a black eye once, covered by a gauze. He had scraped knees during the first summer, and wore wet coats during the winter. But Leo recounted the time the three of them first properly met together, how Shao Long almost falling off of a tree and shrugged it off carelessly. 

Of course, the third was much more alarming. Xi Wenzhou and Xi Yanya was ridiculously protective of the boy. But they were both rather....subdued. Like they didn't dare tell Shao Long to stop his adventures, didn't tell him to stop where he went to, didn't try to contain him. They asked, they fussed, they threatened both Leo and Anubis at least once. But otherwise, they let him be. Leo had thought that that was the way they treat rich second generations these days. Until he found out that Shao Long often transferred schools from the boy's inconsistency of naming the school he went to.