Chapter 76: How to say Love you
Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations
Editor: Karai
The afterglow and the swelling that hadn’t yet closed in made Lin Xu’s consciousness dull for a while before he came to his senses. Heinrich lay on his side and seemed to have been looking at Lin Xu’s side, without resting.
“How long have I been asleep?”
The sun was still high in the sky, but the light filtering through the ice had shifted from a pure blue-white to a yellowish hue.
“An hour and a half.” Heinrich replied, carefully averting his eyes as Lin Xu looked over, lowering his gaze to hide the darkness in his eyes. Lin Xu was lying quietly, still emptying his brain and body of the weariness he had just awakened from, when he suddenly heard Heinrich’s low voice.
He was leaning right into Heinrich’s arms, and could feel the vibrations in the other man’s chest as he spoke. Heinrich took a deep breath, then almost held his breath as his voice slowly released. “I’m sorry…”
His lips rested on Lin Xu’s forehead, as if he had been at a loss for a long time, but never let go of his arms, and even hugged him tighter and tighter, making it almost impossible for Lin Xu to breathe. Lin Xu struggled a little, and Heinrich loosened his grip a little, but still held him stubbornly around the waist.
Lin Xu didn’t answer Heinrich’s question right away, and he felt a moment of misplaced tension in Heinrich’s breathing, which turned into a hesitant loss when Lin Xu struggled, and even more so when Lin Xu removed his forehead from Heinrich’s chin.
Heinrich’s arms were strong, his handsome face was as frosty as ever, but his lips were tightly pursed, somehow almost revealing a sense of vulnerability. The next moment, moving his head away from his lips and into his shoulder, Lin Xu rubbed the tip of his nose against the side of Heinrich’s neck, his hair sweeping coolly across his jaw, sending a shiver through his skin. When Lin Xu opened his mouth and licked the wound on the back of his neck, the shivers were stopped in shock and Heinrich froze.
Lin Xu had scratched and bitten him before, leaving a lot of teeth marks not only on his back but also on his exposed neck, but the blood quickly clotted and stopped, and what Lin Xu touched was a blood scab.
He rubbed again and curled his fish tail against the base of Heinrich’s dragon’s tail that hadn’t yet been retracted, “Don’t be in a hurry… I just want to hug you.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Heinrich. No one can force me if I don’t want to… Not even if you’re a dragon.”
He had countless ways to escape from an alpha who had lost his mind and was controlled by his desires. Likewise, Heinrich used to have countless ways to reject Lin Xu instead of taking him for granted.
Yet until then, no one had broken the story, and in silence they had falsely disguised their relationship as a boat in an ocean, pushed forward by the winds and waves of accident and lust. But the road was full of confusion, and both of them were hiding countless secrets in their hearts, either unwilling to remember them or afraid to confide in them, as if they were rocks on the edge of a cliff, swaying in the gale.
In this time and space, Lin Xu was alone, he had nothing to lose, except the memories he didn’t want to repeat, and he revealed his sharp and hurtful temperament and secrets from the very beginning.
And Heinrich belonged to this world, where people had cloaked him with praise and affection, forgetting that they themselves had cursed him with their words and opinions. Once the veneer was removed, he feared that Lin Xu would loathe and fear him as much as he loathed and feared himself.
Lin Xu lifted his head and looked into Heinrich’s deep eyes, golden eyes that seemed to accumulate a deep color of tumbling clouds reflected in a deep pool.
“Heinrich…” Lin Xu called out Heinrich’s name and swallowed a sigh in his throat. How should he speak?
Words had been Lin Xu’s weapon, and he would spout off with impassioned, heartfelt words. But there was no such thing as love, which was so invasive and exclusive. Once upon a time, Lin Xu could never speak with an invasive attitude and mentality, he had to wrap himself in a disguise of gentleness and tolerance, caring and soothing everyone’s heart.
Lin Xu hadn’t fallen for this technique of disguise and could now put on a sweet and attentive face, but Heinrich could recognize it at a glance. What should he say? Shouldn’t he speak plainly and without any purpose? But he had a clear purpose. Lin Xu’s mind was in turmoil like lava about to erupt, and his cheeks flushed abnormally in the cold air of the ice cave as his heart throbbed with pain.
“Heinrich…” He grasped Heinrich’s shirt, the folds running in all directions along his palms until they reached the ready-made seams of Heinrich’s shoulders, strangling him. The dragon’s wings flapped gently, patting Lin Xu on the back.
“Heinrich, say something, call my name.”
“Lin Xu,” Heinrich opened his well-defined lips at the edges and exhaled a breath that smelled of vetiver and two syllables as he kissed the tip of Lin Xu’s flushed nose, as if just saying the name face-to-face had made him content to trace the contours of Lin Xu’s face with realization.
Lin Xu’s cheeks floated with a layer of blood slightly red, but his face was anything but cute and pitiful, pale face imprinted with the blue light reflected from the ice, more icy white, lips previously bitten bleeding and swollen, thick black eyelashes and eyebrows in the nonsense just now was rubbed messy tilted, the contrast was extremely bright and obvious.
There was a haze in his gray eyes, however, the color seemed to float on the iris, like a layer of fog. It was as if it was a swamp that dragged people down in a dark forest of fog and rain. These eyes were now locked on Heinrich, “Call my name and say ‘I love you,’ okay?”
Heinrich’s sweeping, outlined gaze momentarily paused at the edge of Lin Xu’s brow bone and turned to Lin Xu’s eyes.
“Lin Xu…” The end of Heinrich’s voice trembled into an airy sound.
“Hmm?” Lin Xu frowned slightly, and the gaze seemed to have rough ice blades scraping across his heart.
“Lin Xu…” Heinrich leaned down and kissed Lin Xu’s brow bone, calling Lin Xu’s name for the third time, each time with a different emotion, his voice ringing right next to Lin Xu’s ear, “I love you.”
“Mmm.” Lin Xu closed his eyes and let Heinrich’s kiss spread from his brow bone all the way down his eyelids to the tip of his nose, his midsection, his chin, and he let out a long breath, his low voice sounding like he was rambling to his heart.
“I love you, too.”
The two just embraced, doing nothing, quietly listening to each other’s heartbeats as Heinrich’s heartbeat changed from extremely violent and irregular at first to a slow and strong beat, drumming warm blood from his heart chamber to his whole body.
After an unknown period of time, the sun outside the ice layer sank into the horizon approximately after the light inside the ice cave gradually dimmed. Lin Xu ate a crystal core to replenish his strength, and then lit a flame in his hand as a source of illumination and heat.
The ice was tinted with a warm yellow light. Heinrich used the light to start collecting the items scattered in the ice cave, torn exoskeletons, scattered medication, weapons…
His tail and wings hadn’t been able to retract, and Lin Xu had to shrink pathetically into a ball in order to leave Heinrich enough room to move around in the ice.
“Before you woke up, I sent a distress signal to the outside world. The communicator was broken and I could only send a one-way signal, so hopefully they’ll locate us here soon.”
Lin Xu looked at the ice blocking the cave entrance before, estimating that the ice was nearly ten meters thick, not yet knowing how the snow conditions were outside, and that this path would not work.
But Imperial troops have spent years fighting in the harsh environment of the planet, so they had mature search and rescue technology. It was only a matter of time before they found two people and used the machine to open the ice hole from the outside. Lin Xu was more worried about a more pressing matter at hand – the two of them, unable to put together a complete pair of pants.
Lin Xu’s fishtail emerged holding up the lower half of his containment suit and exoskeleton, and Heinrich’s containment suit had a dragon’s tail swinging behind the tail vertebrae, and once the dragon’s tail was put away, there was a big gaping hole where the wind was leaking. The Abyss Fleet commander could not afford to lose face.
Heinrich sorted and tallied the rest of his belongings, and after splitting two nutrients with Lin Xu, Lin Xu and Heinrich talked about this awkward pants problem and added, “I remember after we rolled down from it, we passed the base’s emergency kit reserve room, which also collapsed, and the whole thing slid down the hillside, and you can see it when you break through this ice wall. “
Heinrich went back to see the extent of the ice wall circled by Lin Xu, “the internal force structure of the snow mountain is unstable, it is easy to cause avalanche again.”
Lin Xu went up and knocked on the ice, “It’s okay, I remember there was a boulder stuck here, after opening the ice, just use the laser to cut a hole in the middle of the boulder big enough to pass.”
Heinrich found the laser knife, calculated the force structure of the ice and began to cut. There was indeed a boulder behind, he continued to cut the hole in the boulder, but in order to ensure that the boulder would not break from the upper part, this hole passage was very narrow. Heinrich closed the back of the wings to squeeze in, after Lin Xu drilled through, to take out two emergency kits.
The structure of the reserve room collapsed and there was no possibility of finding a way out from here. The plain cloth emergency kits were faded, containing compressed cookies three thousand years old and pure water frozen to ice, as well as small items such as rope, rusty pocket knives, yellowing bandages, and finally a radiation suit.
Heinrich watched Lin Xu skillfully pull out various items from the emergency kit without looking at them, as if he had already confirmed the contents of the bag. Lin Xu handed Heinrich a set of radiation-protective clothing, waiting for him to be able to retract the dragon tail before changing into it, while he himself quickly turned the fishtail back into his legs and changed into pants for easier movement.
“Lin Xu, you know this place?” Heinrich looked at the ancient items in the emergency kit one by one, and he couldn’t read any of the words printed on them. Lin Xu’s movements slowed by half a beat, and only after he buttoned his pants did he fully slow down and move at his normal speed, “Not that I know much about it… I know what you want to ask. I’m from Earth, three thousand years ago.”
“You came from Earth 3,000 years ago?”
Both said at the same time, one stating and the other asking a question.
“The period I lived through was called the apocalypse by the humans back then,” Lin Xu continued as Heinrich backed off his statement, “Nuclear war, biological mutations, zombie siege… Everything sucked.”
“Imperial history began three thousand years ago.”
“Hmm. But I didn’t hear about any plans to escape Earth myself at the time, and the Ark fleet was supposedly formed after I left. I used to live in the old base under the lake. I don’t know how it became what it is now, the new base in the snowy mountains should have been built after I left, but the basic shape and internal arrangements are the same as in the past.”
Lin Xu went to his backpack, which contained Yan Yuan’s notebooks, and might allow them to find traces of the old days.
