As Never Was

Chapter 4

He wasn't hurt at all. 

Instead, he just felt a blank kind of loneliness where he tells himself, over and over again, that he knew this was going to happen. There was no need to be sad about it. In his mind, the friendship was lost long years ago. In his mind, this was just a less dramatic way for his nightmare to come true. 

His life didn't change much after that. Except for some international conflicts that gradually drove him insane, and the lack of company that slowly became unbearable, because his stupid, stupid heart was struck time and time again with how he had been lonely all his life, not because he was left alone, but because he isolated himself for fear of hurting. Stupid, stupid, paranoid Charles who was a coward and a selfish, selfish man to have detached himself from earlier on for reasons he was too ashamed to admit. 

His life didn't change much at all. 

He was still the same asshole he was, the same insecure and cruel and manipulative piece of shit he knew he had become once the influence of his peers slowly, gingerly faded from his mind. 

Oh. 

There was one other thing that didn't change at all. 

Shao Long was a constant in Charles' life.

 Always there. Always causing a ruckus. Always a nuisance. Like an insistent fly he just couldn't swat to death no matter how many times he struck. Shao Long was like a whirlwind of chaos, bursting with unresolved anger, hatred, childishness, naivety, immaturity and complete stupidity. It was all moronic. It was all ridiculous and exhausting and annoying and a pain in the ass. And once the chaos he unleashed was trampled over, the Chinese would retreat to lick his pathetic wounds in a flurry of sobs and screams and insults. 

It was pathetic. It was disgusting. 

Charles hated Shao Long. 

But he was the only one who stayed. 

Annoying as he was, Charles would think a normal response to being subjected to Shao Long's sorry excuse of a vengeance was to be irritated beyond belief. It didn't occur to him when it started changing to relief. When he started feeling anxious if Shao Long didn't pop out during events to ruin his life as usual. 

Shao Long was a constant in his life.

An annoying constant, but constant nonetheless. 

He knew everything was normal when Shao Long was there, so much that his absence drove him into a spiral of intrusive thoughts, ridiculous what-ifs and a hundred an one ways how he was doing something wrong. 

And then that idiot had fucking died. 

Like a fucking dumbass that he was, because seriously! How much trouble could he get himself into? How bad must his luck be for him to die just like that? How masochistic was he to always run head-first into trouble every chance he got? Sure, yeah, maybe two years since the event Shao Long had taken to hiding himself in his mansion and they hadn't seen each other during the time in between, but still! How could he—