A/N- This art is impeccable I swear- whoever draws this well, I'm actually jealous of you lmao
YOU HAD WORKED with Fu Yao for many years, and were starting to form a good relationship with him. Underneath his aggressive, fighter exterior, he was actually a very kind young man. However, sometimes he would lash out at you and the other people he worked with, which made him generally disliked throughout Heaven Realm.
You had been yelled at and attacked by him many times, mainly based on your fighting ability. You had healing powers, and were a minor god/goddess, which meant that your fighting skills were negligible if not nonexistent. Whenever you would go to fight with Fu Yao, he would get hurt, which was to be expected, judging by the fact that he often fought Wrath and Devastation level ghosts and ghost kings. All the times he had been injured, you managed to heal him and get him back to health, and the same went for all the other gods/goddesses you had been partnered up with in the duration you lived in Heaven Realm for.
To Fu Yao, however, good healing skills weren't enough to make a good partner. He wanted you to know how to fight. Every time you would try and throw out an attack, and it dealt little to no damage to your enemy, he would rant about how useless you were and how much he hated you. At first, because you liked him, you accepted his rants, and didn't let them affect you much. But as he yelled at you more and more, it got to a point where you completely lost your will to even try to help him. You quit being his partner, and joined up with his rival, Nan Feng, who had recently returned to Heaven Realm after a long quest.
Seeing you flourishing and being yourself with Nan Feng hurt Fu Yao's ego. To make him feel better, he started to play practical jokes on you and Nan Feng to try and break your spirit. At first the jokes were normal, like putting spices in a food that wasn't supposed to have spice, or putting a drug in your food that would make you drowsy, but slowly, they got worse, until you had to reluctantly report Fu Yao's antics to Ling Wen, who would report the young man's disorderly conduct to the emperor.
Ling Wen was as good as her word, and she did report Fu Yao's conduct to the emperor, who ended up punishing the martial god by kicking him out of Heaven Realm for a year. The emperor also made him apologize to you, but Fu Yao didn't have the confidence to approach you and verbally apologize, so he wrote his apology down and handed it to you before leaving Heaven Realm for his year of exile.
Due to your kind heart and respect for Fu Yao's fighting strength and skill, you felt bad for putting him in a year of exile, and you personally believed that he didn't deserve to be put through a year of being severed from his home and losing a lot if not all of his spiritual powers just because he played a few practical jokes. Even if some of them had the risks of getting you or Nan Feng injured, they weren't that bad. So you chose to go down to earth for the year and live with Fu Yao to make sure he would be protected and kept safe during his year of exile.
But what you didn't know was that Fu Yao absolutely hated you now. He despised you for kicking him out of Heaven Realm for a year over what he thought were just dumb and fun pranks. And when you knocked on the door of the dilapidated shack he was staying in in a swamp in the middle of nowhere, telling him how sorry you were and how you were willing to help him be safe during his year away from home, he didn't even listen to you, he just slammed his door in your face.
You felt pretty hurt by this, but you understood the young man's hatred for you. You just had to find a way to show him that you really were sorry for what you did to him. So you ended up doing what you called 'shadowing his movements.' You would follow him whenever he went out of his house discreetly, so that he wouldn't notice, and if he got into any conflicts, you would step out and help him. However, somehow living on earth for a few days had made him kinder to people, and he never got into conflicts with any people that didn't explicitly go looking for fights. So you ended up shadowing him for about six months with no conflict. But on the seventh month he was living on earth, one cold and rainy day in winter, he went out to a more suspicious part of town to strike a deal with someone who had promised him money. And that was when the first conflict began.
The man who had told him he would give him money was lying, and when Fu Yao pressed him to give him the money he had promised him, the man ended up calling some of his friends over that were armed with guns. The guns weren't simple guns like pistols either. One man carried a sniper rifle, the other ones carried many different assault rifles. If Fu Yao got shot at point blank range by one of those guns, you would have to heal him in a few minutes, maybe even seconds, or he would die. You knew that you needed to help him fight, but you barely had any fighting strength.
When the men began to attack Fu Yao, you stood behind them, watching as they shot at him and tried to land a punch on him. The men that had no guns and that were punching him ended up getting wiped out easily, and then he had to face a group of five men with guns. Five very angry men with guns.
He managed to take down the sniper pretty easily, and he grabbed his sniper rifle and shot down two of the four assault rifle wielders. This made the other surviving two very angry, and they ended up dropping their assault rifles- which you recognized as AK-47s, and picked up the more fast firing assault rifles- which looked to both be SCARS- and fired at Fu Yao. The sniper rifle that he was holding was out of ammunition, and the sniper didn't have an extra mag on his body, so he had to drop the rifle and go in with his fists, ducking and covering behind shipping containers and other metal objects to avoid being shot.
One of the men who was trying to kill him, a heavyset man with many scars covering his muscular arms and streamlined face, was wiser than his comrade. He didn't shoot until Fu Yao popped out from cover, and then he took his time to aim and only fired a few shots. Those shots were few, but they were quite accurate, and you winced as you saw one of the bullets graze his upper arm.
The other man, who was more slender and looked to be in his late teens, an arguably young age to be in a gang like this, wasn't as wise as the heavyset man. He emptied his mag into many of the pieces of cover that Fu Yao was using, and ended up using almost all of his mags before he came to the epiphany that he was indeed wasting his ammo.
By that time, you had already jumped on him and were (somehow, you had no idea how) pinning him to the ground and choking him.
The young man was writhing underneath your grip, struggling to escape, but you held on as tightly as you could, applying pressure and more pressure until the young man finally gave up and let his last breath out. His body froze underneath your tense hands, and you sat on top of the body for a while, trying to come to terms with the atrocious act you had just committed.
When you heard Fu Yao cry out in pain, however, your time for thinking was over, and you went into predator mode again.
The heavyset man with the SCAR had ended up hitting Fu Yao in his side, and the bullet had gotten stuck in the wound. Fu Yao had managed to run into an open shipping container before losing consciousness, but the man was merciless, and was going in to finish him, probably with a terrible amount of gore. You rushed into the shipping container to see Fu Yao lying still on his non-injured side, breathing shakily, with tears streaming down his face and blood streaming slowly from his wound.
"Get away from my friend!" you yelled, throwing your body on top of the attacker.
Because the attacker was so muscular, you couldn't knock him down, but you were like a cat, unleashing as many bites, scratches, and kicks on the man as possible. He ended up knocking you down to the ground, and your head hit the metal, hard. It hurt a lot, but you focused, and managed to unleash a burst of spiritual energy that hit the man directly in his heart. He collapsed to the ground, unmoving. When you checked his pulse, you were shocked to see that you had managed to kill him with the weak blast of energy that you had produced.
You knelt down by Fu Yao's side, and pressed your hands to the wound, chanting out a healing mantra as you let your spiritual power flow into the wound. The bullet popped out of it with a rather satisfying sound, and then the blood stopped flowing, and then, finally, the wound closed up, leaving a rather messy scar there. You felt like you were about to faint from the amount of power you had let out of your body, but you were glad that Fu Yao was safe. Hopefully this would show him that you didn't want to be enemies with him.
As much as you tried to hold it back, you were exhausted from the amount of energy you had used. You swayed in your step when you tried to get up, and fell back down to the ground, feeling too weak to get up. You were afraid that if you closed your eyes, you wouldn't wake up again, and you might die, so you tried your hardest to stay conscious, but as time passed, you just couldn't, and you closed your eyes and succumbed to the welcoming warmth of unconsciousness.
When you opened your eyes again, Fu Yao was standing above you, and you were no longer in the shipping container, but in the dilapidated shack that he lived in currently. He looked very concerned, and when he saw that you were conscious, he sighed in relief and all his concern flooded out of his body.
"Thank you so much for saving my life, Y/N," he said. "I'm so sorry I ever yelled at you, I ever hurt you... I'm so sorry..."
He trailed off, and you could tell from his tone of voice that he was sad.
"I'm glad you apologized, Fu Yao. I accept it, but it's not needed. I did something far more terrible by exiling you here for a year, just for some foolish practical jokes. Please, forgive me," you responded.
You were shocked by how he responded, throwing his arms around you in a sudden hug and starting to sob.
"I was so afraid that I was going to die, and that you were going to be next. I didn't want to believe it, but when I got shot, I just felt so useless! I'm so sorry I ever doubted you, I'm an idiot. I'm sorry... I'm sorry."
He kept on repeating that he was sorry, and you didn't stop him. Crying and letting out his emotions like that was good for him. You held him closely to your chest and let him cry until his tears wouldn't come anymore.
Then you said, "Are we not enemies anymore? Can we be friends again?"
"I would love that," he responded with a teary smile. "I would love that so much."