Concept: Unflowered .5 ranwan-had-relevant-conversations-and-are-in-a-relationship Mo Ran tries to initiate something with Chu Wanning, which accidentally hits something not good for Chu Wanning.
Chu Wanning, on triggered reflect from Taxian-jun, tries to slap him.
Mo Ran - not being Taxian-jun, doesn’t retaliate harder - but also being Mo Ran doesn’t actually avoid or block it. (It doesn’t of course really hurt him; their current physical power differential hasn’t changed. But it lands, and Chu Wanning did put what strength he has behind this one.)
At which point they’re both somewhat triggered - Mo Ran is upset he did something that actually would hurt Chu Wanning (and there’s the problem that he knows that Chu Wanning doesn’t really respond well to talking about these things, and obviously he doesn’t want to do another thing Chu Wanning doesn’t like, but also he still has the feeling.)
Chu Wanning is upset that he actually hit Mo Ran, which also brings up his things about feeling like he was a bad teacher (and is obviously a bad partner) - which is also all tangled into Taxian-jun things because he used that for self-blame/self-responsibling so much. And Chu Wanning already has enough problems bringing things up as a general thing, but also this thing also has the problem that Mo Ran resists talking about it (and same thing, Chu Wanning then doesn’t want to on top of other things go push it anyway).
And a thing is that Mo Ran does in fact have undealt with feelings about that too, but he generally won’t let them come up even to the level of acknowledgement, and partially because of just how he himself is reasons but also because of the Taxian-jun thing - which makes it feel frantically important to affirm to Chu Wanning that actually he thinks the world of him - and affirm him as Mo Ran’s Shizun - and makes it really hard to bring up anything not positive, with the specter of ‘Taxian-jun (which to Mo Ran of course still feels like ‘I’) derided and tortured you and said it was punishment for your failings'.
(So they have to find and make their way through some very hard and fraught things that repeatedly push their shard-edges into each other.)
