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dan heng has a new problem, and it comes in the form of you.

you’re a brilliant strategist and a reckless tactician, careless with your own safety but calculated with everyone else’s. he never knows what you’ll do next. you never tell him. even after all this time, he can only guess in the split seconds before and within disasters.

it’s what makes you so great, but aeons, does it keep him on his feet.

as a guard, it is his duty to ensure the safety of the astral express’s passengers. you just happen to be one among their few numbers. so—he’s never paid any heed to the moments where his gaze gets stuck on you, nor his tendency to reach for you first in moments of trouble, because you’d have gotten yourself killed several times over by now if he hadn’t. his behavior is perfectly logical when taking yours into account.

“yeah, but you’re always staring, even when nothing’s happening!” march accuses in an exasperated whine.

dan heng doesn’t deign to look at her, letting his hands continue with sorting through archive entries. (his usual response, you’d say.) “there is always something happening on this train, march.”

to call this issue new would be misleading, considering the amount of time that has passed since your initial encounter all those lives ago—(him, still a wandering exile, and you, a starry specter)—but he’s only been made aware of it recently. more accurately, march has made it her mission to shove this idea down his throat like it’s the last berrypheasant skewer on the luofu.

her idea being that dan heng, infamous for his "mysterious and brooding persona” (according to march), has a crush on you.

she huffs again. “it’s not just some crazy idea. ask anyone else and they’ll tell you! you’re so obvious about it—”

“obvious about what?” you interrupt.

march shrieks and jumps away from the door like it’s shocked her. in reality, you’ve just stuck your head through the opening in dan heng’s door. if he didn’t know any better, he’d assume the tilt of your head suggested innocence. he does know better though, so dan heng is almost certain you did that on purpose to get a reaction out of march. your grin is too sharp to be guileless.

then you turn to him, and he pauses.

“updating the data bank again, dan heng?” you float across his room in the span of a heartbeat like a dream, anchoring yourself with your hands on his back and your chin tucked over his shoulder. warmth seeps past his clothes and under his skin where you’ve made contact, but dan heng has always run cooler than most. (well, that’s what his excuse is, anyway.) “we just got back from another fiasco, and you’re missing game night cooped up with notes that sunday could give you himself.”

“it’s best to store information while it’s still fresh,” he excuses. his attention belongs to you now. “you’re welcome to wait if you want.”

“and leave the others short of three players?”

“three?” dan heng would never admit it aloud, but he forgot march was still in the room. (in his defense, she had been uncharacteristically quiet since you entered—or maybe he had just tuned her out.)

true to your word, she had seemingly gathered herself from your little scare and now levels a look at him that is just as smug as it is knowing. dan heng doesn’t want to know what that look entails, only that it signals trouble. especially for him.

“you know, i just remembered that himeko asked me to get something!” march promptly takes the opportunity to leave—but not before throwing an exaggerated wink at him from over her shoulder. “but take aaaall the time you need! really! actually, we can move game night to tomorrow!”

and with the subtlety of one of idrila’s knights, she leaves him with you.

your gaze follows her out the door and stays away for a few moments after—moments stretching into eternity. (dan heng wishes your attention would return. for no particular reason, of course.) “well that’s suspicious,” you muse, eyes finally falling back to him. “you wouldn’t happen to know anything about what she’s planning, would you, dan heng?”

“nothing of note,” he dismisses absentmindedly. it’s a little hard to focus with your new appearance. you’ve always been half-star, half-reverie, but it’s as though penacony’s dreamscape has imbued itself into your skin ever since leaving. something that demands notice no matter how he may try to look away.

“then i guess we’ll be in for a surprise soon, then?”

“a surprise?”

“something of the sort,” you correct, tracing circles into his shoulders. “there’s always one when she’s scheming. regardless—you really won’t come out? we don’t get guests on the express that often. it’d be a shame to miss this one, especially considering how much time i spent convincing silly sunday to leave his little nest.”

the mention of you and sunday makes him bristle, something that dan heng quashes like a bug—back into the deep, deep recesses of his psyche—the second he realizes it’s there. there’s no need to start petty conflict, not when he himself knows the pain of strained history.

even so, he shakes his head. “i’d much rather stay here.” (with you, a traitorous part of him supplies.)

you sigh, dropping your head into the crook of his neck.

never let it be said that dan heng has no resolve. he likes to think he has the most self control among the junior express members. he’s often the one keeping march in check and stopping stelle from trash diving—

“ask nicely though, and i’ll consider it.”

—but he takes you in now, impossible and changed and all the same, and the only thing that matters is that you’ve made it through once again. maybe it’s exhaustion from penacony’s disaster, or residual memoria messing with his head—

“my favorite space snake, would you care to deign us worms with your presence?”

—but the truth is that dan heng has always been a little weaker to your whims than others’.

“only if you want me to.”

excruciatingly fond, perhaps.

“that’s what i’m asking, isn’t it? keep up.”

and he’d go anywhere with you.

dan heng is selfish. he’s been outrunning fate his entire wretched life, trying to live beyond a sentence forced upon him by his predecessors, and he still didn’t know what he wanted until you pulled him onto the astral express that day. he is a fool for ever believing he was immune to you and your wild, insatiable heart. you found your way into his in the end.

that’s why he lets you take his hand and pull him down the halls of the train cars you call home. your shimmering shadow blurs into the infinite stars, catching on the edges of reality, propelling two lives into the light of tomorrow.

so, yes, dan heng does have a problem, and yes, that problem is you—but march is wrong when she says that the problem is a crush.

dan heng is, against his better judgment, in love with you.

#honkai star rail #hsr #honkai star rail x reader #hsr x reader #dan heng #dan heng x reader #saw this guy for the first time before hsr was even released when all we had was that one trailer with welt getting on a train #and i immediately knew he'd be the favorite #there's a second wip that was induced by the permansor terrae announcement and his penelope of ithaca arc but who knows if i'll finish that #still not sure how ooc this is because he's always avoiding and in a state of perpetual denial #but also part of his development is getting over that so #shrug #bone apple tea

I had a little fun animating it~ Here's a lil sneak peek of all the bones. So many bones. Alastor has 7 bones in his head. That's 5 more than Lucifer's hair.

Bone apple tea.