New Faces, Familiar Tongues
a starter for @rkhyunjoon
Sicheng very often spends the second half of his lunch hour on the phone with Xuxi, picking as private a corner as he can find to blabber to him in whichever mix of English or Mandarin felt most natural that particular day, generally giving him the benefit of not being easily understood by most of the people in TRC either way.
Today, Sicheng and him first discuss Xuxi’s puppy and her growing tendency towards incontinence, and then Sicheng nags him a bit to clean out his fridge; Xuxi’s apartment is the worst sort of bachelor pad, little furniture, and not much in the way of decor, but it’s the agéd condiments in the rear of the fridge that bother Sicheng the most.
He’s only vaguely aware of the glances that the other boy in the diner keeps sending his way, brushing them off until a couple of minutes after he’s hung up on Xuxi, when the mysterious boy approaches, asking rather timidly if Sicheng spoke Mandarin.
It takes Sicheng a second to place the kid, always forgetting that as an entertainment company, TRC did tend to take on new trainees every once in a while, but he offers him a meek smile once he does.
“Uh...yeah,” he says with a bit of a chuckle, trying not to come off as stiff, however bad he was at it, “I’m...Chinese. You’re...the Triple Threat kid, right? Um...congratulations!”