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Megaphone to My Chest

Chapter 6

Summary:

Chu Wanning deals with the aftermath of his... first... ever? masturbation session.

Notes:

CW: mentions of homicide and suicide.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

This was it.

 

His life was over.

 

All these years, Chu Wanning had cultivated this ascetic kind of lifestyle, completely dedicated to his crafts, of which he had many. His novels. His inventions. His treatises, his manuscripts, his monographs. His pupils.

 

It appeared that he had let one of those overpowered the others and in the worst possible way.

 

“Chu-laoshi.” The sound filtered in through the thick pane of glass, and Mo Ran’s face in that flood of light blinked in and out of existence with every bobbing of the head, and Chu Wanning forcibly squeezed his fingers tight around the edge of his kitchen table until he could feel the wood splinter underneath.

 

That had been a cheap table, anyway.

 

Oh god oh god oh god.

 

The zipper.

 

He had to close the zipper.

 

His hands shook around the metal tab, his mind blank. It was as if he was on autopilot, and in his life with so few things that had gone wrong in it, his body had never quite learned how to resolve these particular kinds of situations.

 

He simply did not get into situations. 

 

“Chu-laoshi, please, let me in. I can explain.”

 

Did he hear something? Or was it simply the clinking-clanking of all the gears inside his head shutting down all at once?

 

He needed to close up the zipper. Then, he would need to take out a suitcase and pack the most important of his current projects, and he would need to dig his passport out from underneath the boxes he never bothered to unpack from the last move, and then…

 

“Laoshi, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see anything, I swear…”

 

… and there was the lease, he could end it, he would have to pay a rather hefty severance fine, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world… 

 

“Laoshi, if you can just let me in… or if you’re afraid of breaking quarantine, let’s talk outside, I’ll stand two... no, ten meters away, please.”

 

The worst thing in the world had already happened.

 

He would have to let Xue Zhengyong know. A crushing illness. A relative abroad who needed his help. But no, Xue Zhengyong knew of his homelife, in that there was none.

 

He needed to go find himself. Search for the answer of the true meaning of life.

 

He needed to volunteer with an organization to help orphan children in a far-off country.

 

He needed to further his research and had already been accepted to a writer-in-residence position at a university in Europe… because that made perfect sense, Chu Wanning thought, to leave a tenured-track position for the vagabond academic life, and right now, in the middle of a pandemic, where there was definitely no writer-in-residence position to be found. Xue Zhengyong wasn’t an idiot.

 

If he killed Mo Ran right now… if he threw something through that window… his old fencing sword was on the wall, he could just grab it, and no one would notice, everyone was under lockdown, and then he could kill himself, and the media would cover it as a murder-suicide of a professor and his graduate student.

 

Good lord.

 

None of these options was satisfactory. 

 

Mo Ran… had seen…

 

How long had Mo Ran been standing there? Did it matter? What really mattered was that Mo Ran had seen at least the last few moments before their eyes met, had definitely seen his cock bulging with desire, had seen the thin spray of white that now covered his fingers and smeared some on his pants, had definitely heard his own voice from that laptop moaning obscene things… it really was all over.

 

“Wanning, please… let’s talk.”

 

And that was enough to send Chu Wanning flying into action.

 

“Mo Ran!” Close the zipper. He had to close the zipper. His finger finally managed to get the metal tab into position, and that bit of evidence of his shame, at least, was hidden from sight. Not so the evidence on his hand, or on his pants, or seared deep into the front of his consciousness and no doubt Mo Ran’s eyes. His voice shook, the anger within it burning only himself. “What you just saw...”

 

Mo Ran blinked, shaking his head furiously against that backdrop of sunlight. “I didn’t see anything. Wanning. Chu-laoshi. Umm.”

 

“You dare break quarantine and come to my house,” he continued in a low voice, his fingers itching to wrap themselves around something, anything large enough to fill that entire grip. His mind went blank for a quick second, the white noise within still latched onto Mo Ran’s face in the video, the shameless moans, the bulge of something definitely too large that he had glimpsed on numerous occasions when Mo Ran wore pants that were just a touch too tight…

 

Stop. Stop.

 

His sword was just right behind him. Tianwen could take care of this for them both.

 

“You dare send me such disgusting materials,” he said, and the more he talked, the more he wanted to strangle himself.

 

Stop talking.

 

But he could not. “Do you know what the consequences are for this kind of academic perversity?”

 

Shut up. The only academic perversity here had been him. An old man lecherously pleasuring himself to his young graduate student. He was the very definition of academic perversity, the creepy old professor that parents warned their undergraduate daughters about. The kind who would coerce young students into whoring themselves for better grades, the kind who kept his office hours late on purpose, the kind with a mahogany desk conspicuously clean for purposes that had nothing to do with academia or the cultivation of knowledge, but a different kind of cultivation, dirty and lewd and disgusting and everything that he had sworn never to be, culminating at once into his own image reflected back at him from that laptop screen.

 

Never in his life had he thought he would stoop to this level.

 

“Chu-laoshi, please, it was a mistake. I came as soon as I realized,” Mo Ran panted out between shallow breaths, still winded from what was undoubtedly a long run from the dorms. “And I didn’t see anything. I really didn’t. I’m so sorry, can we just pretend this never happened?”

 

“Starting today, I’m transferring you to Xuanji-laoshi,” Chu Wanning said, or at least he hoped that that was what came out of his mouth. Mo Ran’s sweat glinted in that sunlight, trailing down that tanned skin at the nape of his neck, the white sleeveless top completely soaked through and barely doing anything to cover that muscular chest.

 

God. What had he done to deserve this.

 

His whole career, ruined. His life, ruined.

 

If he could cut off that useless appendage hanging between his legs, he would.

 

Mo Ran’s face crumbled, plastered against his window. Were there anything normal about this situation, he would have barked at Mo Ran to take that disgusting face off of his perfectly clean glass, but he knew there was nothing ordinary about this, and the only disgusting person in this place was him. “Laoshi, please, don’t do that, it was my fault, but please don’t transfer me out…”

 

If he could bluster his way through this conversation and keep his pride intact, he would, but Chu Wanning was not delusional enough to place the blame entirely on Mo Ran even though his thin face could barely handle looking at the object of his… what? perversion? at all, let alone admitting fault.

 

The fault was his. The fault was no one’s but his.

 

But in any case, the end result would have to be the same. “You can choose another advisor, then. Anyone else. We no longer have any kind of relationship, Mo Ran. I can’t be your advisor anymore.”

 

He would tell Xue Zhengyong that there had been irreconcilable differences. Academic differences. Mo Ran had written a truly atrocious paper. Mo Ran had espoused a philosophical standpoint that he simply could not support. Mo Ran had… been perfect, beautiful, a vision, a gift, and what had he done with it.

 

Squandered everything.

 

If he truly was stuck in this place for the foreseeable future with no way out, then at least he would make sure he no longer had to interact with Mo Ran in any capacity. He would send an email right after this, and he would resign, he would, but with his other students… but would he even have the face to ever look at them again, knowing what he had done to the video of their own colleague.

 

He was not fit to teach anyone ever again. But that was a decision for another day, perhaps not in the middle of the pandemic, and in the meantime, perhaps it was simply sufficient to transfer Mo Ran to where he could no longer see him, to old, kindly Xuanji who would never harbor any kind of inappropriate thoughts about his graduate students, who definitely did not have his hand smeared in his own come still stretched in front of him, too stunned to know what to do with it, the liquid congealing in white puddles on his palm, in the spaces between his fingers.

 

Mo Ran’s moans in the video.

 

The fucking video.

 

How laughable that the only way he could see Mo Ran again would be to watch the video that had ruined everything in the first place.

 

“Chu-laoshi, if you would come out, we can talk about this. I can…”

 

“Can what? Can explain what you sent me? Can explain—”

 

Nobody could explain what Chu Wanning did when he watched that video. There was only one explanation, and they both knew it, and neither of them would say it.

 

How would he even begin to explain that all he wanted was those strong, runner legs wrapped around his waist from the top as their owner tore into him with what was rumored to be one of the most impressive members the entirety of Sisheng University had ever seen?

 

How would he even begin to explain that, even now, in this moment when everything had crumbled, when Mo Ran’s face itself crumbled from that window, that Chu Wanning had already grown hard again, against all odds, under those pants, the come on the fabric still not yet dried from the previous turn.

 

How would he even begin to explain that if he were a braver man, he would risk almost anything to open that door and have Mo Ran fuck him senseless against the wall?

 

But Chu Wanning was not a braver man, and his thin face had only grown thinner through the heat threatening to scorch his cheeks. “Mo Ran, go home.”

 

“But…”

 

“Go home before I get you kicked out of school for good,” he said, letting the guilt consume him completely. Not only was he a perverted old man, he was a perverted old man not afraid to use his own power to intimidate his pupils.

 

When Mo Ran peeled himself off the window and cast one final glance backward, Chu Wanning had already turned away, slammed his laptop shut, and smashed it against his kitchen floor, letting the solid titanium piece chip off a piece of tile, and hoping that he had destroyed it for good.

 

But it was simply not his day, had never been his day, his luck on this fine afternoon as awful as it had ever been. The screen came to life with a simple press of the Space bar, and there was Mo Ran’s face again on that monitor, paused in the last moment of that video, his mouth slightly opened, his eyes thin slits of desire, and in the shape of those lips Chu Wanning could make out the first syllable of his own name.

 

God.

 

He had ruined everything.

 

Notes:

Come say hi @sovanninh.