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Sweep. Sweep. Sweep.
The bristles of the broom drag across the porch in a slow, rhythmic arc, Luo's arm working on autopilot while his mind works overtime. 'How did I get stuck on nightly cleaning duty?!' The thought circles in his head like a drain. He kicks a stray can in frustration, watches it tumble off the porch and disappear into the grass below, and immediately regrets it. Because now not only does he have to go get the can, but the can has rolled itself directly next to a small pile of other trash he absolutely cannot pretend he didn't see. He drags a hand down his face. Curse his bad luck for making him actually do his job!
He hops off the porch to gather the mess, muttering under his breath. Since the fear incident, the orphanage had been rebuilt and brought to a functioning state again, but the staff shortage hadn't fully resolved, and the gap had been filled the way these things always are, by the kids who couldn't say no. Luo could never say no, or rather, his bad luck always arranged things so that he ended up on the schedule anyway. Midnight cleaning was, objectively, the worst time slot. Not that Luo had been given much of a choice.
When he crouches down to gather the trash, his fingers brush something that doesn't belong among the candy wrappers and debris. Small, plastic, and shaped like a four-leaf clover. White in color with cyan outlines. He pinches it between two fingers and holds it up under the dim porch light. A Lucky Cyan keychain, her signature clover icon dangling from it, the little charm perfectly intact despite being wedged in the dirt. Luo stares at it for a long moment before looping it over his wrist, letting it hang there as he finishes collecting the trash.
He falls back into sweeping, but his arms are slower now, the broom moving without intention as the past few months unspool in his mind. Since that night, their tearful embrace in the middle of everything falling to pieces and then somehow being put back together, he hadn't really seen her. Not in any way that counted. Cyan had thrown herself into rebuilding the orphanage's reputation with a kind of selfless intensity that Luo recognized as genuine, concerts and auctions and volunteer drives filling her schedule back to back. The new Dean was kind in a way that felt earned rather than performed, which was a relief. But at every event Cyan put on, she was pulled in ten directions at once, surrounded by people with outstretched programs and camera phones, always performing, always on. They'd exchanged waves and smiles across crowded rooms. That was the extent of it.
‘Perhaps that’s just how things are now…’ Luo thought contemplatively as he continued sweeping, the Lucky Cyan keychain on his wrist jingling about. ‘Different worlds.'
She was up there in the top ten, a name people actually said with weight behind it. He was here. Still sweeping a porch at midnight. There’s no way he would want her to throw that all away. Especially not just for someone like him…
'She's living the dream for both of us… right?' He held the thought up and examined it the way he had the keychain, trying to figure out if he actually believed it. He was happy for her, genuinely and completely happy, but happiness for someone else and contentment with your own situation were two different things, and he was starting to feel the space between them.
"She's out there giving smiles to people who need it," he says quietly to the empty porch, the words trying to shape themselves into something that sounds like peace with it. "I just wish I could be lucky for once and actually talk to her again." His hand closes around the little clover charm. Maybe he'd keep it. A small, stupid way of feeling like the distance wasn't quite so total.
He cradles the little keychain in his hand. Perhaps he’ll keep it as a way to be close to Cyan in some way in the future…
A rolling sound cuts through the quiet, and Luo's head snaps toward it. Something small comes skimming across the pavement of the path beside the porch and bumps softly against the side of his shoe. He looks down. A cyan yoyo sits against his sneaker, still wobbling faintly as its apparent glow faded. He crouches and picks it up, turning it over in his fingers.
"A cyan yoyo? Did one of the kids drop it?" He pauses. "Wait… doesn't Cyan carry one of these?"
‘Wait, but a stray yoyo shouldn’t be able to roll and turn its way over here—’
"Sorry about that. Clumsy me." The voice arrives from somewhere just off the porch, deliberately innocent in its delivery, warm underneath it. "Mind giving it back? And maybe sticking around for a long chat as well?"
Luo turns.
The girl standing at the base of the porch steps has hair so bright and so distinctly cyan that she was never going to sneak up on anyone effectively, which made the attempt charming rather than impressive. She's smiling the way she always has, wide and warm, the kind of smile that makes you forget what you were worried about for a moment.
"Cyan?!" The word comes out louder than he intends.
"In the flesh." She brings a finger to her lips quickly, pointing upward with her other hand in the direction of the sleeping quarters. "Voice down, genius. Some of us don't have midnight cleaning duty and are actually resting."
Luo blinks. Then blinks again. Then the smirk comes, slow and familiar, because some things don't change, no matter how long it's been.
"So we're talking on the roof?"
"Obviously. Now come on before your bad luck wakes someone up." She reaches out and grabs his hand without ceremony, tugging him along the side of the main building toward the back where the ladder waited. The motion is so natural that it takes Luo a beat to register that she just grabbed his hand like no time had passed at all.
The ladder hadn't changed, but everything around it had. A cage of new security measures had gone up around the access point with multiple padlocks of varying types, and one could pick out two rotating cipher dials even in the low light.
"Wow," Cyan says, tilting her head as she looks it over with the clinical admiration of someone who has broken through harder things. "They really committed to this. I don’t even know what some of these locks even are. Luo, what were you doing up here while I was gone?"
"Taking what I was owed," Luo says without guilt, crossing his arms. "Do you know how many midnight cleaning shifts buy you roof privileges? A lot in my mind. Trust me." He nods at the locks. "Think your luck's actually up for that? You could always just, I don't know, jump us up there with your super hero Trust powers or whatever."
Cyan answers by smirking and unclipping the spray canister from her belt and giving it a practiced shake. Luo watches with wide eyes as she goes down the row of locks, spritzing a light mist over each one, spinning dials to whatever combination her hand chooses without looking, pressing, clicking, pulling. Every single lock opens on the first try, one after another, in a clean, unbroken sequence.
"…Okay," Luo says after a moment. "That's so cool!" Luo lights up at seeing Cyan’s power in action more clearly. He didn’t really see what she did during the fear incident until their little scuffle, even then not much.
"It lets me channel things more precisely," Cyan explains, pulling the cage door open with a soft creak. "Before it was a bit like sneezing on something and hoping for the best. Now I can actually point it." She gestures grandly toward the ladder. "After you."
The roof is exactly as Luo remembers it. Wide, quiet, slightly cool underfoot, with the kind of unobstructed view that made all the security measures worth circumventing. The sky has cooperated — clear and generous with its stars, the moon hanging full and unhurried above the treeline. The two of them find a spot on the tiling near the low outer ledge and sit, falling into the old orientation without discussion, shoulders a comfortable distance apart, eyes turned upward.
The night sounds fill in around them as they settle in a comfortable enough place on the roof: voices of crickets chirping all around them, a car was passing, and the faint hum of the city was at rest.
"So," Luo starts, glancing sideways. "It's been a while."
"Yeah," Cyan agrees. "It really has."
A beat passes.
"How did you even get here tonight?" Luo asks to start the conversation properly. "More specifically, how did you get permission to be here tonight, because I have a feeling that wasn't in anyone's official schedule."
Cyan breaks into a guilty grin immediately. "Let's just say my driver is extremely susceptible to sad eyes. I put on my most genuinely pitiful expression, and he just… folded. Immediately. The VIP tickets to my next show helped seal it though."
"Wow," Luo deadpans. "Stardom has really changed you. Bribing people already."
She shoves his shoulder. "Hey. It was a trade. Completely fair. Don't make it weird."
But even as her mouth puffs up in protest, her expression settles into something quieter, something that has weight to it. Her eyes drop to the tiling between her knees. "Actually, speaking of all of that… there's stuff I wanted to talk about. Properly. Not in between autographs or while someone's pulling me in three directions." She pauses. "A lot happened. I want you to actually know what those years were like."
Luo lets the teasing go. "I'm listening," he says, and means it.
She starts at the beginning, the weeks of busking after the escape, performing on street corners with his guitar in her hands and his song in her throat. Luo goes quiet when she tells him that part. The idea of her alone on a street corner, playing his music to stay afloat, doing it because thinking of him was the only thing that kept the grief at bay. It does something complicated to his chest that he doesn't have a clean word for. He's glad he could give her that, even without knowing it. Even from a distance.
"The first couple of days I made a lot of actual money," Cyan says, and the tone shifts to something brighter, "I went to this little restaurant nearby and got a burger. And I know that sounds so small, but Luo, it was the best burger I have ever eaten in my entire life—"
"You ate a burger," Luo says slowly.
"A good burger. With my own money. Do you understand how different that tastes?"
"Monumentally better than orphanage food, I'm guessing."
"There is no comparison. None whatsoever. The comparison cannot be made."
He laughs, actually laughs, and the tension in his shoulders releases a fraction. He can picture it so clearly of Cyan at a little restaurant table, determined and eating a burger with the kind of satisfaction that only comes from having earned something completely on your own terms. It makes him happy in a way that feels almost physical.
DOS came next. She navigated the telling carefully, clearly filtering as she went of what was worth sharing or what was still being processed. Luo leaned in when she mentioned Queen, eyebrows climbing.
"You're on a first-name basis with Queen?" His surprise and disbelief were immense.
"Yuwei," Cyan confirms with a little nod, trying and failing to look casual about it.
"The second-ranked hero. Yuwei," he emphasized.
"She has layers! She's very composed most of the time, very serious, but she has this absolutely helpless soft spot for cute things." Cyan's expression warms at the memory of it. "You should see her with Big Johnny… that's The Johnnies' little alien cat thing. She completely loses all composure. I swear, one time, I caught her baby-talking to him when she thought no one was watching. Full-on soft voice and everything."
Luo stares. "I cannot picture that."
"I know. But I promise you it happened and it was the most endearing thing I have ever witnessed."
The Johnnies themselves she described with clear and genuine fondness. There was a young guy with too much energy, a creature that was a weird cat-alien-dog thing, and a relationship between the two that was equal parts chaotic and touching. "He considers Big Johnny his son," Cyan explains. "Like, actually, sincerely his son. And when you see them together it just… makes sense somehow, even though it shouldn't."
“But how did that—”
“I have no idea still,” Cyan answers before he could finish.
She then described her first concerts, and Luo could see the nervousness she was replaying in the way she held her own hands. "They didn't start me small," she says. "Full stadium. Thousands of people. I was completely terrified beforehand. Just standing backstage, convinced I was going to be sick."
"What stopped you?" Luo asks.
Cyan turns her head to look directly at him. The look is steady and sincere in a way that doesn't waver. "You did," she says simply. "I thought about all those nights here. The two of us hammering away at songs until way too late, you playing and me trying to figure out my voice, all the things we made together. That's what I went back to. It reminded me why I was doing it." A small smile crosses her face. "To carry the dream forward for both of us, you know?"
Luo holds her gaze for a moment. "I'm glad something got you out there." He reaches over and lightly boops the tip of her nose, which catches her completely off guard. "But going forward? Sing for your own reasons, Cyan. Not just for me. Do your own thing, your whole Cyan style. Not just the Luo-approved playlist."
She recovers her composure with a smirk. "Fine. My next song is going to be so specifically, aggressively Cyan that it is going to blow you clean out of this orphanage. Just watch."
"Looking forward to it."
They're both laughing softly, and then the laughter fades into something warmer and smaller, the way it always does when two people run out of deflection.
"I missed this," Cyan says, leaning back onto her hands. The stars are still generous overhead. Her voice drops just slightly. "Missed you."
"Yeah," Luo says, leaning back as well. "Me too."
The quiet that settles between them is a comfortable one, but not without its undercurrent. Cyan's expression shifts slowly, the easy warmth edging toward something more deliberate. She's been holding something back and they both know it.
"How were things here?" she asks, her voice careful. "With the Dean. While I was gone."
Luo is quiet for a moment. "He didn't go after me the way I thought he would. At least not directly." He keeps his eyes on the sky. "Mostly he just… put me in a room. Kept me away from everyone else. Tried to make it feel like that was just how things were going to be." He pauses. "Kevin kept me from completely losing my mind. You remember Kevin?"
“Kevin? Kevin Kevin… oh yeah, that one kid that tried to help us to the door. He got swatted away by the Dean’s… weird invisible tentacles. Is he okay?” Cyan almost forgot about the kid who was instrumental in the more planning part of the whole escape plan. Kevin respected the Holy Maiden like all the other kids, but didn’t fear her like many of the others did as a sense of authority. Due to this more indifferent attitude, Luo targeted him for help in planning their escape. After some charisma on the part of Luo over a couple of months, he made Kevin sympathize with Cyan’s treatment to get her out so she could be herself. He was the one who mapped out the escape route and the whole sequence of events. She had to thank him the next time she saw him. Actually, she probably saw him at one of the orphanage fundraising events and forgot. That was on her for forgetting…
"He's fine. Got a similar treatment to me since he was connected to the whole thing. But he's good now. We've been reconnecting." Luo says it lightly, but Cyan can hear the seams in it, the places where the lightness is covering something heavier. She doesn't push. Not yet.
"That brings me to…" Cyan's voice loses its shape for a second. She presses her lips together, starts again. "There's something I owe you an explanation for. About why it took so long." She stares at the space between her knees. "DOS isn't a bad organization. I don't want to paint it that way. I met a lot of great people who work at the agency. But they have priorities, and those priorities are…" She searches for the word. "Focused on reputation. On trajectory… my trajectory."
She tells him about the early assurances — of course they'd help, of course she'd get back to the orphanage, the paperwork was just taking time, the situation needed to be assessed properly. And Cyan had believed them because she was new and grateful and wanted badly to believe that doing the right thing and doing the career-smart thing could be the same thing. The assurances became delays, became vague redirections became, eventually, a folder placed on her desk by an agency coordinator with a regretful expression.
Documents. Dated. Official-looking. Luo's name on them.
"They told me you were gone," she says, and her voice has gone very quiet. "And I didn't believe it. At first I completely, absolutely did not believe it." She stops. The silence stretches. "But the documents looked real. And months had passed. And I was…" She exhales slowly. "I was tired, Luo. And scared. And I am so sorry, because I did have doubt. At some point I did. I don't know when it happened but it crept in and I hate myself for that." Her voice frays at the edges. "And then when it finally did become something I had to come back for, the scandal and clearing my name. I came, and it worked out, and I found you, but it was still… it was still because of my career. Not because I had fought hard enough or been smart enough to get back to you sooner. I should have pushed harder. I should have been louder about it. I should have—"
She doesn't get to finish the sentence or let her tears drop because Luo's arms are already around her, pulling her in with the unhurried certainty of someone who has thought this through and landed on a conclusion. She goes rigid for half a second out of surprise before she folds into it, shoulders dropping.
"Hey," he says. Not loudly. Just enough. "I can feel that you mean it. Right now, sitting here. That's real." He doesn't let go. "I'm not going to make you feel worse about it."
"Cyan, I wanted you to live your life, not be tied down by more things in the past. That's why I sacrificed myself in the first place for you dummy," Luo reassures her gently.
Cyan breathes out against his shoulder, uneven.
"I'm sorry as well," he adds. "For that night. For what I said. For letting him get into my head about both of our parents' flight." He shakes his head. "He framed the whole thing in the worst way possible and I was already so far gone that I just—"
"It was everyone on that plane, including your parents," Cyan corrects quietly, pulling back just enough to look at Luo. "They gave all their wishes, dreams, and luck to one little girl to survive." Her eyes are shining with the magic of that moment from her past, the sheer emotions of that event. "And the Dean twisted that into something terrible and fed it to you and I—" She stops, composing herself. "I understand why you believed it. I'm not angry. I just… I want you to know the truth. All of it."
"I know it now," Luo says. "So with that… how about we call it even."
The acknowledgment sits between them and slowly, carefully, they let it rest. After a while, a nice, comfortable while, they release the embrace and settle back down again.
"DOS is what it is," Cyan says eventually, her tone more settled now that the heavier weight of it is out in the open. "I don't think anyone there is actively trying to do harm. I just think they care a lot about what hurts the brand and what doesn't, and a hero being emotionally tied to some guy in an orphanage who wasn't part of the approved narrative probably wasn't on the approved vision board." She tilts her head slightly. "Queen actually explained the whole thing to me pretty plainly. The way fan culture works, especially an idol like myself and the way people project onto the people they trust. If I'm seen being close with someone, it becomes a thing. People speculate. People get possessive. It's not fair… but it's unfortunately real. Apparently, Yuwei and even Johnny have had a few creepy encounters with fans being a bit… what’s the word… parasocial, that’s it."
"That's genuinely awful… I didn’t realize being a famous hero had all this baggage to it," Luo says.
"Yes," Cyan agrees. "It’s completely ridiculous." She pauses, wanting to change the subject to something less depressing. "You've gotten taller, by the way."
The pivot is so sudden that Luo blinks. "What?"
"You're taller. Since last time." She gestures vaguely at him up and down. "It's different. Threw me off a little when I first saw you. I didn’t have a moment to properly point it out to you until tonight."
"Is that a problem?"
"No, just an observation. My hair is longer too, in case you were going to point that out."
"I was absolutely going to point that out." He eyes the length of it, the way it catches the moonlight. "It suits you."
"Thank you." She reaches up and flips a length of it over her shoulder with perhaps more performance than is strictly necessary. Then she settles again, quieter, looking out at the city beyond the rooftop. "What about you? What comes next for you?"
Luo is quiet for a moment. "Music, probably. That's the honest answer." He picks at a bit of tile near his shoe.
“Not being a hero? You always kept going on and on about being one when we were kids. Honestly you kept repeating it at nauseum I’m sure I wasn’t the only one tired of you saying it.”
“Heh. Well… I am just an orphan right now, an orphan with famous bad luck no less. I’m thinking I’ll start small and start with being a musician. Then perhaps that fame can translate to hero work later like you kinda did. Though I guess I don’t have that Holy Maiden foot in the door you had.”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly a foot in the door I really wanted…” Cyan clarifies.
"Anyways, I've been writing. Not seriously. Just to have somewhere to put things. But I think that's where I want to go." He pauses. "The problem is, I don't have much of a road to get there from here. Being an unlucky nobody orphan isn't exactly a great launchpad for a music career."
"Then we change the launchpad," Cyan says, simply, like it's already decided. "I've been thinking about it anyway. There are so many people with real ability who just don't have a path in. Yuwei, Queen, is extraordinarily good at structuring things. If anyone could design a program that actually connects upcoming artists with genuine opportunities, it's her. I'll bring it up."
Luo looks at her sideways. "You'd do that?"
"I already want to do that," she says. "You just gave me a more specific reason to push for it."
"…Thanks, Cyan."
She smiles. Let's the beat pass. Then, with less ease than everything else she's said tonight, she adds: "What else? Don't just tell me about plans. How are you actually doing?"
Luo's mouth opens and then stalls.
"Three years is a long time," she adds quietly, when he doesn't fill the space.
Something in the way she says it without pressure, without expectation, just opens the door. That's what does it. Luo looks down at his hands.
"It was lonely," he says. Not dramatically, just as a fact, the way you state something that has been true for so long, it stops feeling like a complaint. "The isolation was… it was a lot. Kevin helped. Having something to do helped. But three years is a long time to have nothing but a radio and your own head for company." He turns the Lucky Cyan keychain over in his fingers without really looking at it. "Hearing you on the radio, at the orphanage events, whenever I could catch a signal, that got me through a lot of it. More than I can really explain." He pauses. "But it also made it harder sometimes. Because I could hear you, and you were right there in some ways, and in every way that actually mattered, you were completely out of reach."
Cyan is very still beside him.
"I want to be in your life again, Cyan. Actually, in it." He finally looks over at her, and there's nothing guarded in it. "Not just hearing your voice through a speaker. Not just waving at you across a fundraiser crowd. I know how things work now, I know what your career is and what it costs, I'm not asking you to blow anything up. I just…" He exhales. "I missed you. The real you. Not the hero. Not the idol. Just the girl who used to eat terrible orphanage food and make me rage at board games and make me teach her the same chord about forty times before she got it."
"Forty-two times," Cyan says softly. "And I got it eventually."
"You got it eventually," he agrees.
A beat of quiet passes between them, gentle this time.
"I know," Cyan says. And then, because she's always been more honest than careful when it counts: "Me too. I felt it too, the whole time. There were nights I'd finish a concert and be surrounded by thousands of people and come back to my room and just… sit there. Because none of it was you." She looks out at the city lights on the horizon. "Queen explained the whole idol culture thing to me very logically and she was completely right about all of it, and I still think it's the most frustrating system in existence." A small, rueful exhale. "But I also didn't come here empty-handed."
Luo watches her reach into the front pocket of her jacket. What she produces is a phone — slim, relatively new, in a case that is unmistakably, aggressively branded. Cyan green. A small four-leaf clover embossed on the back. Lucky Cyan's logo is printed neatly along the bottom edge with a little clip for a small charging block and cable.
"You cannot be serious," Luo says.
"I had it specially made," she says, completely unrepentant. "The merch department owed me a favor."
"You got me a Lucky Cyan themed phone."
"I got you a phone, Luo. The theming is a bonus. Consider it a reminder that I'm thinking about you even when I can't be here." She holds it out to him. "And before you say anything, yes, I know it's a little much, and it also has a bunch of unnecessary features that super expensive phones have like solar power, but I stand by it."
He takes it along with what he assumes is the power for the thing with the chord and block in a little pouch. He turns the little rectangle over in his hand. Despite himself, despite the branding that is frankly aggressive in its cyan-ness, something about the weight of it in his palm makes his chest feel full in a way he wasn't prepared for. A direct line. A thread that goes both ways.
"Okay," he says. "What's your number?"
The next few minutes are spent in the low, easy warmth of two people exchanging contact information for the first time after years apart. Cyan reads her number aloud slowly while Luo enters it with the careful deliberateness of someone who is absolutely not going to mistype it. He sends her a single text that reads: unlucky orphan, do not delete, and she laughs properly at that, the sound bright enough to carry across the rooftop.
"I'm going to try to come more," she says, tucking her own phone away. "Not just events. Actually come. Show up. Be here." She says it with the seriousness of someone making a promise they've thought through rather than one thrown out in a good moment. "I'm going to be better about it."
"I'll hold you to that," Luo says.
"You should." She glances at her watch, and whatever she sees in it makes her expression shift into something caught between reluctance and necessity. She starts to push herself to her feet, brushing tile dust from her knees. "My driver is probably getting anxious. I gave him a two-hour window and I think we're pushing it."
"Fair enough." Luo stands with her, and for a moment, they're both just standing there under the open sky, neither one quite ready to be the first to say goodbye.
Cyan seems suddenly nervous with her arms behind her back, looking at the ground. Her mind is currently tossing and turning in her head about something as her foot twists against the ground. After a bit of deliberation, Cyan solves their deadlock by stepping forward directly to Luo’s cheek.
It's quick. A press of her lips to his cheek, warm and slightly impulsive, like she made the decision a half second before she acted on it. Then she's stepping back, and even in the low moonlight Luo can see the color that has rushed into her face, her composure briefly completely dismantled. Luo himself goes bright red, looking moments away from short-circuiting entirely.
"O-Okay uhm," she rushes, in the tone of someone who has decided not to address what they just did. "Roof ladder. Down I go. Good talk Luo! Have a very normal evening—"
"Cyan," Luo manages to say normally.
She stops.
He's smiling. Not in a way that teases, just genuinely, fully, the kind of smile that reaches somewhere behind the eyes. "Come back soon."
She looks at him for a moment with an expression that is doing several things at once. Then she nods.
"Yeah," she says. "I will."
He watches her go from the edge of the roof, the swing of long cyan hair disappearing down the ladder, the soft sounds of her crossing the yard below, the quiet thud of a car door. The headlights of a waiting vehicle sweep across the grass as it pulls away from the curb, and then the street is quiet again, just the crickets and the distant city and the dark.
Luo stands there for another minute. His cheek is still warm where she kissed it. He is not going to be weird about this.
…He is absolutely going to be a little weird about this.
He looks down at the phone in his hand, its frankly unreasonable cyan case, its embossed clover, its newly saved contact reading Lucky Cyan ☘ with her actual personal number tucked beneath it. He looks at the keychain still looped around his other wrist, the little clover icon that started the whole night in the dirt outside the porch.
His luck, for once, had been extraordinary.
He turns and heads back toward the ladder with his broom forgotten entirely on the rooftop, his footsteps lighter than they've been in three years, the city lights glittering below him like a night sky turned upside down.