deepestbluesky · 2 years ago
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hanwenzhou thought of the day: zhou zishu is some kind of fantastical creature along the lines of a siren, where he can appear to people as what they want to see. it’s a very handy quality for a spy, especially when he has such good control over how he appears that he can do it voluntarily and he can adjust the degree to which it changes him. (is he mostly him but a little altered to appeal to who he needs to get information from, or is he completely unrecognizable because he needs to sneak past a guard who is hoping to get through his shift without trouble?)
it makes it easy once zzs leaves tianchuang. no one really wants to look at a beggar at all, they practically make him invisible, leaving zzs free to do what he wants. except then he starts getting entangled in the jianghu machinations (they want to see a wandering hero) and involved with chengling (he wants to see a father figure) and followed by wen kexing (who knows exactly what he wants to see, zzs certainly pretends he doesn’t), and by the time han ying shows up in ep8, zzs is back to tailoring his appearance to whoever he’s performing for. because the thing is, he’s always performing. it’s instinct to him.
wen kexing sees his face clearly, but zzs can barely help it: of course his eyes look bigger and softer when he needs wkx to go along with what he’s asking, of course he looks taller and stronger when chengling is looking to him for guidance, of course he seems visibly sick when yby is examining him.
and i just think. what if there’s a moment. post-canon, everyone lives, etc etc, where hy and wkx are looking at him and zzs nearly breaks down because he can’t be what both of them want at the same time, he can’t be hy’s zhuangzhu and wkx’s a-xu at once, and the idea of of just being himself is genuinely terrifying for him. when was the last time he did it? does he even know how anymore? and wkx and hy are also having a Time because they didn’t realize that zzs compulsively, automatically tries to shift to match what they want from him, and they all know that they love each other truly but. that there’s always been this level of performance from zzs is painful.
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