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“You don’t like my cooking,” Shang-Chi says one night in the middle of purgatory, half a bite of limp stir fry tucked in his cheek.
It isn’t his best work; the beef is overdone and gummy, the sauce too salty, too garlic-forward. But he’d taken a Lyft to a market in Nob Hill to prepare it, slipping veggies into his reusable grocery bag as he surfed the aisles, holding up carrots and broccoli to appraise them as if they were labeled with a vintage. It’s been a weird few weeks, living in a San Francisco apartment that isn’t an armpit with a rattling garage door for a wall and being able to get produce that has the word ‘heirloom’ on the label.
Too bad Shang-Chi can do fuck all with any of it.
“Cooking? Wenwu asks innocently from the other end of the table, still looking down at the napkin in his lap. A dining room table: another novelty. “Yes, I suppose you could call it that.” Damn, Katy would have said. Ouch, maybe.
“I know I’m not a private chef, or whatever, but you should eat, Dad,” Shang-Chi says. The dormant rings clack when he puts his forearms down. He’s had to start buying extra baggy hoodies to cover them up when he goes out on jogs (and a mask, insurance against ‘hey! bus guy!’ gawkers).
Dad scoffs, transporting a shard of cabbage from one place on his plate to another with his chopsticks. For a few beats, they both sit there and watch him as he starts to make a significant pile, which threatens to topple into a dark pool of sauce and chili oil. Shang-Chi’s flip-flopped between homebrew Chinese and American meals for the past few weeks with mixed success, Wenwu not seeming to particularly take to either. He wishes he could ask the Chens for pointers, even if he was scolded for it, to get some kind of help, but the prospect of facing Katy’s grandmother is something he never wants to do again in this lifetime.
“Is there something I could make you would actually eat? Someplace you want takeout from?” The idea of thumbing through Yelp again makes him feel guilty, somehow, like a housewife who doesn’t know how to work an oven. By that logic, Shang-Chi reasons abstractly, Dad must be his husband.
In reality, Wenwu is, for all intents and purposes, his prisoner— which is almost even weirder.
He also won’t eat the mediocre cooking that, frankly, Shang-Chi doesn’t particularly want to eat, either.
“That a no?” He prods. Dad is having a sullen night tonight. That happens, sometimes. “Alright. Word.”
His mouth is spilling out more before he can stop it. “Remember the time you made me train for two days without eating? I was ten? Yeah, I ate bugs. I don’t know if you remember that.”
Sometimes, rarely, Wenwu takes the bait, which at least gives them something to talk-- scream-- about, but this one’s a nonstarter. When he doesn’t get an answer, Shang-Chi hunches over his plate to wolf down the rest of his meal, chugs his water so fast his stomach cramps, then stands and clears both their plates.
When he comes back from the kitchen, Dad is still sitting there. The back of his hair nearly brushes his shoulders, now, in thick, black waves. Not one strand of it’s gone silver, yet. He wonders when that will happen.
“Your hair is getting pretty long,” he says, absently, walking up from behind. He’d gone to a barber a few weeks back himself, which had been weird all around, his capacity for small talk obliterated. The guy took pity on him and finally stopped trying to make it happen, just shut up and trimmed his hair down to something short enough that Shang-Chi thankfully won’t have to wander out to get it cut again too soon. The back and sides give a satisfyingly soft prickle to the touch, and he wonders how it would feel for Dad to take him again by the nape of the neck and pull him close.
In a daring move, he reaches out to draw a piece of Dad’s long, soft hair across his fingers, then sweep a hand down his shoulder.
A casual way his father has touched him, hundreds of times over his childhood. In the last few weeks, Shang-Chi has begun to explore a chance to reciprocate his own touches, haltingly at first, then in gulps, as he encountered little resistance. Brushes of fingers while passing utensils. Shoulder taps. Greedily grabbing Dad’s wrist to lead him on laps around the block to make sure the person he hates worst in the world gets some kind of exercise. More explicitly: wiping Dad’s sweating brow and holding him still as he shakes with withdrawal night terrors, still dizzy from banging himself off unfamiliar corners in the middle of the dark apartment in his rush to get to Wenwu’s bedside.
Shang-Chi can feel the way the rings settle their power over his bones, and wonders how many decades it takes before you rattle with the junkie shakes when you take them off. If he could ask Bruce Banner about that.
In defense of his absolute loss of marbles, he’s been working with a shit hand, by anyone’s standards. The Avengers had said hang tight and keep an eye on your father-- you know, the terrorist--we’ll text you, then peaced out. He has intermittent access to Ten Rings funds, which Xialing controls like some kind of perverted allowance. Nothing really in the way of a job, hobbies, or friends, who probably think he’s dead. No more Katy, even, a hole of a thought that Shang-Chi carefully maneuvers around from waking til sleep, lest it suck him down (he avoids driving, but that’s not hard with no car. Keeping away from buses is harder. He walks a lot, when he leaves the apartment).
It’s all Dad. Just Dad-- which it always has been, if he thinks about it, but now in a more brazenly malignant way, in which Shang-Chi’s days center around doing pushuips and obsessing over if his father had gotten enough congee to eat for breakfast.
Which he generally doesn’t.
His father catches his hand on its way down his shoulder without turning around. His hand is warm. Shang-Chi cannot decipher this as a signal for him to stop or a desperate bid for a more direct touch.
“Egg tart.”
“As in, that’s what you want?”
Dad grunts.
“Okay.”
--
It takes Shang-Chi twenty minutes and several calls to find a place that has egg tarts at this time of night, and another forty five for them to be Uber Eats’d over. He spends most of the wait time doing dishes and then working out, pulling chin ups from a doorframe bar he’d ordered off Amazon. The weight of the rings on his arms feels onerous, awfully heavy.
They come in a little white box. He takes them to Dad’s room, which he busts in without knocking, sweat on his neck and in the crooks of his arms, muscles pumped, jocked up. The room, though smallish, is impressively dirty, half-sty, wads of old clothes on the floor reminding Shang-Chi that he needs to throw another load in the washing machine; it is blatantly obvious that Dad has spent the last couple hundred years with an entire fleet of help tending to his every human need.
Wenwu is reading a book in bed, blanket-- a bald, white duvet from Ikea like a college kid-- tented over his knees, and he doesn’t look up when his son comes in. Shang-Chi’s damp, socked feet trip on the hardwood as the unshakable feeling of interrupting his father in his study lances through him, hard enough to make him stop and stand there like a kid caught committing irrevocable trespass. It is still as easy as Dad not doing something to make Shang-Chi chatter with anxiety. Desperately simple to destroy him via a look, or by withholding one.
“Don’t just stand there, Shang-Chi,” Dad says, instead. He pats his hand to his thigh over the blanket, just once, too lightly even to hear, as if calling a dog to heel. With the other, he turns a page. Shang-Chi swallows his own bitter, ugly tongue-- the fuck you-- long enough for his legs to carry him obediently closer.
“You’re welcome,” he says, once Dad puts the book aside. If he had reading glasses, they’d be pushed up on his forehead so he could squint forbiddingly down at the box, Shang-Chi thinks, but his eyes don’t need them, yet. One day, they will. His hands look too capable as they negotiate the packaging and tissue paper, deftly plucking and folding until they’re holding one creamy, golden tart; Shang-Chi wants them to shake, wills it, even.
Dad takes a careful bite, swallows deliberately, and darts his tongue over his lips. At this point Shang-Chi realizes he’s just standing there, looming, waiting for his dad to eat like some kind of twisted anthropologist getting his rocks off watching his ape in its cage. Wenwu closes his eyes for a brief moment, in which his eyelashes fan gently over his creased face, before the egg tart is returned to the box with its siblings, then the box to the bedside table. The cardboard hisses against the laminated wood as he uses the tip of his middle finger to push it to the far edge, as if it was offensively close, otherwise.
Shang-Chi has quite literally been trained, by degrees of threats and blows, to detect the faintest whiff of his father’s disappointment from any possible tell-- but he doesn’t need to be.
“What’s wrong?” He pleads. He can hear the harebrained edge to his own voice, surprised by how incredibly upset he is. All at once, he is right there, right on the edge of destruction, exit routes away from the end of the world closing up and the Protector’s mane slipping through his fingers fast.
“Too sweet,” Dad says, as if that explains all of it.
Shang-Chi’s mouth snaps open and closed in irritated gasps. Something about the petty logistics of the Uber order, the carefully chosen vegetables, the incredible skill his father possesses in being a fussy infant concerned only with himself. “You don’t-- ? It was the only--”
“I’m not hungry.”
Shang-Chi doesn’t know when, exactly, he became aware of how much smaller Dad was than him. Back in Macao, when Wenwu brought him close to murmur how good and strong he had grown up to be, how much he was wanted as his son, Shang-Chi had to stoop down a little bit. He’d never thought about that before. That their foreheads had met unevenly. Maybe being in America is like being in space, he figures, where your unencumbered, calcium-juiced bones are less compressed than they should be. Maybe it’s the slant of the San Francisco hills that hits different, or the fact that his father is truly dying for the first time in a thousand years.
The world has been shaped under the weight of his dad’s presence, tacitly, even when it didn’t know it was; The way Shang-Chi hauls him up from bed, you’d think he weighed nothing. He throws Wenwu to the ground in one economic motion because this is the only thing he can do: bodily haul Dad out of his aloof holding pattern he’s been in for the past weeks, or years, the place where he stands to the side to survey, arms folded behind his back, deeply, generally disinterested in the goings on of played-out life at large. Shang-Chi grabs up so much of his shirt that it makes the squealing sound fabric does when it starts to tear, begging Wenwu to live precisely in this moment in history, and stay there.
He goes down with an awkward thud, a sight which is pretty unprecedented on multiple levels. Shang-Chi looks on, stupefied, Dad just laying there, curled heavily on his side with his hair in his face. He’s wearing a short sleeved t-shirt that had once been Shang-Chi’s that’s so big the arms sag nearly to his elbows, already loose from being over-washed, the logo from a college education he had nothing to do with faded on the front in peppy red.
“Are you gonna do something?” Shang-Chi finally demands, voice wavering with the lightheaded power of oh shit I just did that and what the fuck is going on, are we crazy? We are crazy. This is affirmed by the fact that there is something inherently, Christ, exciting about how close Dad’s head is to his feet; a low, throbbing urge to kick him while he’s down, and another, just as strong, to kneel and take him in his arms, to hear him grovel for his love.
“I have lived more than my fair share of life, and incurred a great debt by doing so,” Dad says, seeming to examine his own folded hands. If his father looks up at him from the ground, Shang-Chi knows he will be destroyed; the image of him brought low will simply be too much. He can’t bear it.
He tries to wrangle this. Dad’s-- sick. He’s not okay. He stoops down to try and help him up, to paw at his curled shoulder to try and pull him onto his back, then aspirationally, to his feet.
“Fuck, I’m… I’m sorry, Dad. I shouldn’t have done that, I’m--”
Shang-Chi sees Dad’s fist, curled creakingly tight, and, for a second, it actually makes his heart leap, even though he knows he’s about to get his ass beat in point two seconds. It’s a sign of life. Keep the thumb outside the fingers when you punch so you don’t break it , he thinks. Dad does. It is a textbook swing, and the teeth on the left side of his face are going to be loose for a good long while.
He cries out with the pain and licks at the blood welling in his cut lip, blinking away stars. Blocks the next punch when it goes for his knee, a reflex, then counters it, which is another one, and suddenly, they’re scrabbling at each other like they haven’t in months, since the gate. Dirty laundry flies. Dad’s blows are weaker, but smarter, his reach shorter, but more decisive. It’s just as good as it is infuriating, touching all over like this; bone on bone with tender flesh between, crackling at contact points. He snarls as his fists and elbows are firmly cupped and redirected into harmless, empty space, which is consistently as frustrating with another decade of experience as without, empathetic in a way that makes Shang-Chi’s stomach flip.
It’s so much easier to know what to do when they’re fighting, versus whatever they’ve been roleplaying as since they stepped into America via Wong’s portal. Warden and prisoner; caretaker and invalid; son and father. He’s been chin-upping and curling and squatting and lifting and moving through forms ruthlessly for his whole life from the time he was seven years old right up until the very moment the little box showed up on their doorstep not five minutes ago, actually.
Which makes it all the worse when his heavy offensive swing is blocked, letting Dad take his feet out from under him with a low, cutting kick, which, shit, also means he’s on the ground with his hands pinned behind his back in the next second flat. He bristles, feeling Dad’s weight on his back and listening to his strained breathing, the rings humming against his skin with another truth, coming around like a right hook after the first: Wenwu, even at his weakest and most waifish, can still beat his ass.
“Why be tender to me? Why be soft?” Dad asks, panting a little. He sounds pissed.
Shang-Chi shouts with frustration and kicks the bedside table hard enough that its lamp is knocked off and shatters, making everything snap blue in the dark.
It takes so little. The rings slide from his arms so quickly they burn to the touch, stripping Dad’s hands. He’s thrown off, and Shang-Chi is able to push up off the floorboards quickly enough to watch him get pinned to the ground by his arms and legs, magnets snapping into satisfying place with dramatic, booming thuds. He feels the jarring impact of his limbs, hears the fleshy flats of his hands slapping on the wood with a small, breathless gasp.
Dad’s senselessly pretty to look at, spread full out face-down in the soft light of the rings, dark hair shaking as he tosses his head and scatters pieces of broken lamp and wasted egg tart. His back muscles flex under his pajama shirt. They used to lash people to horses and ride in opposite directions until their arms and legs were pulled off, in this position, sucking and tearing at the joints. Drawing and quartering. That’s what it’s called. For one scalding moment Shang-Chi sees the horror of Wenwu with no limbs, utterly defenceless, utterly needing of Shang-Chi in every way, unable to even move, and thinks-- he could do it without the horses.
The rings pulse in full-body agreement. They speak in a sort of golden power and he hasn’t tried to converse with in months. Leap-tall-buildings-in-a-single-bound type type shit. The towering confidence of sitting on a throne for a few hundred years, and the competence to stay there a few hundred years more. The ability to prevent Wenwu from moving one inch under his own direction ever again in his life. He did this, they say, coursing through him in a hot feeling like praise.
Shang-Chi’s dick is hard.
His throat lurches closed around the surge of bile climbing up the back of it, the stir fry threatening to come back up, and he braces the back of his hand to his mouth. Each small brush of his cock against his shorts is electric; he’s filling so quick it hurts. It’s the most rude, base exclamation possible at the end of the epic rush of the rings-- almost funny.
Oh my god, he says, horror curdling in his gut. Stop. Holy shit, stop. The rings have hardly slid back home over his arms before Dad has twisted onto his back and delivered a vindictive kick to his ankle, merciless. The whiplash of arousal pounding down into pain is making Shang-Chi’s vision fizz, and there’s little he can do but take a few staggering steps backwards to try and regain his balance, arms up to protect his head and neck from the bewildering mess that is his life. The power of the rings echoes inside him.
Dad gives no quarter, no longer Shang-Chi cruising around his perimeter, now, more Wenwu actively, cruelly pursuing. Two thudding hits, one to Shang-Chi’s chest and one to his back. He retaliates desperately, not sure if he wants to keep Dad’s body as far away from his own as possible, or-- something else, hotter and more confusing. He takes one blow to the side and blocks another, Dad’s skin rasping against his own as he bends his strike with one arm. There’s a hole in the drywall, now, that the property manager will love but who gives a fuck; Dad’s lost a little balance and suddently, there it is, there’s the opening. Shang-Chi’s already putting the pieces together as Dad goes down, knee-pins to keep him horizontal while he swipes the broken lamp base, yanking the cord from the socket. Dad doesn’t make it easy, binding his hands with that cord. In theory, Shang-Chi is a fucking genius, using his environment to fight. He wraps both of Dad’s hands at the small of his back with competent, tight passes, then closes the hold with his arms and legs to keep him from wriggling, Dad’s back rising as his own chest. Falling against each other with deep, catching-up breaths in some kind of rhythm.
They are confusingly tangled, too close.
Shang-Chi’s stomach lurches. He’s got Dad’s legs under his and one arm wrapped tight around Dad’s shoulder, one hand keeping the cord pulled tight to keep his hands bound, all well and good-- a solid pin-- but it puts his crotch flush tight to Dad’s hip by way of the soft curve where thigh meets his ass, and, yikes. It feels so heavenly that Shang-Chi trembles. Even just breathing pushes them together, and he is mortified to wonder if Dad feels the bud of his arousal, there, and then doubly mortified to know that he must.
This isn’t the rings, now, he knows in an abstract way, far away in his brain. It’s not their spells or their power; it’s just him. Just plain old vanilla Shang-Chi, who hasn’t so much as ever tried to tie someone up in bed , too busy running and hiding and beating the shit out of his own body to have time to date, to nurse anything but this raggedy, festered frustration. Now, there is an undeniably large part of him that wants to seek the weakness of Dad like thumbs into fruit flesh, dig into it, really appreciate the texture of it, roll around in it to get the smell of it on his pelt like a dog. To just revel in the hereness of his dad, and the fact that now, Shang-Chi is boss of who goes and who stays, for both of them.
Relatedly: it is somehow infinitely more of a hot mess that Shang-Chi was loved, first, rather than hated all the way through; that he knows how it feels to fall asleep on Dad’s chest while watching TV, having his hair stroked, blanketed in one hundred layers of safe quietude.
He’s so fucked.
His hips are moving. It is just fucking happening. Plunging him deep down in the basement of his brain, along with a whole trove of other cast off unmentionables: memories of the carnal, extensive jackoffs he used to have in the privacy of his room after training at the compound, hands chewed raw with fighting. More than just beating off, but actually fucking his fist, needing to penetrate, every stroke burning his torn up hands. Purely the throbbing thought of exerting the obligation of his hard dick on his dumb bastard of a father-- in any way, hands, mouth, whatever-- enough to get him off. Fuges of anger-squeezed tears and huffs of frustration and low sounds of abuse until he was spilling all over himself with gratuitous slickness, horniness and a deep sadness, grief, all wrapped up together in a nice sloppy package of teen angst.
Come to terms with who you are, Shang-Chi. What do you do-- what do you do if you are a coward? If you grew up so angry at your dad, you fucking jacked off about it?
He’s rutting against Dad’s ass with pure, jerky instinct, still blanketed over him like he’s terrified he’ll try and get up and bolt in the next second, even though he should do exactly that, all the layers of past girlfriends-- the few there have been-- shucked off in favor of something sexual but different than sex. It feels really really good, his father’s warm, compact muscle against his dick, his prone back beneath his chest. His hair, where it is pressed against his nose and bared teeth, smells nondescriptly good, like the shampoo Shang-Chi bought them that lives in their shared bathroom, and also like sweat.
There had been one time that Dad had been too weak from withdrawal to wash his own hair, and Shang-Chi had helped him shower, rubbed him clean with clumsy passes; Shang-Chi moans to remember how Dad’s eyes had closed in quiet acceptance of the hot water, of his hands, just the thought shooting a straight bolt of pleasure right to his dick.
It’s only workout clothes and pajamas between them, thin layers of soft cotton and sweat-wicking fabric that’s been working overtime to cool both their damp bodies bunching up in Shang-Chi’s crotch something fierce. It’s not that he’s never seen his Dad naked, especially now, especially with how in each other’s pockets they are and how anally Shang-Chi manages all things Wenwu related, these days.
It’s just that-- he needs more, and that’s crushing. The undistinguishable days of worrying and long nights of half-sitting, half-laying shoehorned into the narrow viable strip of his father’s bed to nurse him through his sickness bubbling over in one hideous froth of need. Maybe all of the small touches have been leading up to this one big touch, Shang-Chi’s effort to crush his father and himself into one trembling, hot body.
Fuck you. Fuck you!
“Dad,” he gasps. He’s rutting his dick so hard against his dad that it’s making the old battered-thin floorboards creak in lewdly rhythmic squeals. The neighbors must think they’re fucking. That’s the poignant thought that pushes him over, a white-blind wall of need. He comes with a painful whimper, clutching, opening his mouth to grunt against Dad’s shoulder so that he can angle the full sound of it somewhere safe, needing every harbor his father can give him and more.
He comes and comes, pulsing for an absurdly long time, his clammy shorts filling into something molten and wet. When he’s done, he unlocks his arm from around Dad’s neck and flops bonelessly sideways, onto his back, panting and jelly-headed, like a guy at the end of a sex scene in a bad movie.
Things are making only halting sense. Slowly, Dad moves beside him, maybe wriggling to free his hands, maybe turning over. There’s a crunch, then a hiss. They’re surrounded by broken shit. Shang-Chi feels a start of alarm, and sits up, the true horror there and ready, steadily climbing up from the bottom of himself like a wave. Ready to fully wash over him soon, but not quite yet. He’s getting there.
“Oh, shit, you good?” He asks. Dad’s hands are free and he’s holding up his elbow, examining the bottom of his forearm. There’s a black fleck there, next to the impressions from the cord, nondescript in the darkness, small but growing. Shang-Chi reaches one hand meaninglessly forwards, as if to help.
It’s a shock, but also kind of not, when Dad slaps his hand away. His father’s shirt has been rumpled on his torso, his face pressed ruddy by being pinned and by fighting. It is too dark to see his eyes. He looks slutty, messy; like he was obviously just fucked, and now bleeding.
“What would your mother think of you?” He asks, voice loud as a gunshot, still looking at his arm. Shang-Chi has no particular answer. His ears are ringing with a steadily increasing intensity.
Dad rises slowly and with more difficulty than Shang-Chi has ever seen. He pads to the door in his disheveled pajamas, kicking away pieces of debris before Shang-Chi has time to warn of their danger, opens it, then firmly shuts it behind him.
They actually have enough space in this apartment, now, that there is another room for Dad to go into. Wild. Shang-Chi sits there with his wet underwear, cold rings on his arms, enjoying the excessive luxury of being alone.