Now that he didn’t have any plans to monitor and enact, Sun Fang found (predictably) that he had a lot more time on his hands. He spent most of this time just lazying about, watching TV and movies. But, eventually, this got boring. The lack of stimulation for his brain was getting to him.

”I’m bored,” Sun Fang announced. He laid splayed out on the long couch, his arm crossing over his eyes, and he sighed deeply to convey his utter boredom. When he didn’t get a response, he clicked his tongue and demanded, ”Think of something to do, please. I can’t stand this; I’m going to go crazy and it will be all your fault.”

”Don’t exaggerate, Young Master,” his butler responded calmly.

Sun Fang took his arm down, pushed himself up so that he was leaning back on his elbows and stared with dead eyes at his butler. ”I’m not exaggerating. This is killing me. It’s so goddamn boring!”

”Young Master,” his butler said and put down the vacuum on the floor. ”Perhaps you should endeavor to go outside? You haven’t left the house in nearly two weeks.”

Sun Fang groaned.

His butler’s voice grew stern as he said, ”None of that now. You aren’t taking care of yourself. Go outside and get some fresh air; it’ll be good for you.”

”Will you at least come with me?”

”Of course.”

He sighed again, deeply enough to exaggerate his point. ”Fine,” he muttered and pushed himself off the couch, stretching as he rose. He’d been lying still on it for too long and now his whole body was weirdly stiff. ”We’ll go for a walk, then.”

His butler didn’t say anything else, but the way he hovered around Sun Fang the entire time he was getting ready told him enough. It wasn’t like Sun Fang didn’t know that he was still feeling some residual effects of his heat and that it was because of this thing he’d been stuck inside without anything to distract him for so long, but he was still feeling exhausted.

To him, a heat simply meant that he stayed inside for around a week and whined a lot about his stomach hurting and sweated a lot more than he should need to. Sometimes it was accompanied by a fever, but it had never reached the insane intensity that was always portrayed in the movies.

This, he attributed to luck. He’d never actually seen another real omega in the middle of a heat, not even Mianmian, and didn’t know how it affected others. Mianmian had always spoken about it like it was a convenient excuse to get out of school and get favors from others by invoking their pity, and Sun Yi had always acted like it was the worst thing he’d ever experienced.

Sun Fang, thus, judged that it was different for everyone and he was simply lucky that it didn’t affect him much. But still, in the aftermath, he was usually a strange mix of restless and absolutely unwilling to do anything at all.

Like now, when he sulked in the corner by the door and waited for his butler to engage the security.

”Done yet?” Sun Fang asked mulishly, his arms crossed over his chest. He was leaning against the wall and when his butler wasn’t looking, stuck out his tongue at it.

”Ready to do, Young Master,” his butler said.

They rode the elevator down to the entrance level. Once there, Sun Fang started slacking behind his butler, his gait awkward and stiff. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his back slouching, as he tried to project an image of ’unwillingness’ as loudly as he could. His butler let him be, knowing well how Sun Fang got in the aftermath of his heats.

The longer they were outside, the straighter his back got. His butler was right, fresh air did him good. He couldn’t smell his own pheromones, of course, but it was still super annoying to be trapped with that smell when he was in heat. It was heavy in a way that he massively disliked.

It was evening. They’d been out, just walking in circles around the neighborhood, for nearly an hour when Sun Fang finally started feeling a bit more like himself. He pulled his sunglasses down his nose a little and leveled his butler with a curious look. ”Do you know where we are?”

”I’m always connected to the GPS system, Young Master,” his butler answered, his voice annoyingly steady.

”We’ve been going in circles,” Sun Fang noted.

”Yes.”

His butler didn’t say anything more than that, and Sun Fang took it to mean that that was all there was to it. Well, he should have expected it. His butler was thoughtful like that, and of course it would do what it could to get him out of the weirdness that always befell him after a heat.

Nodding, Sun Fang pushed up his sunglasses on his nose again. ”We can go back now,” he said.

”Very well, Young Master.”

Sun Fang was still feeling strangely jittery as they returned to the apartment complex, but the feeling had diminished greatly since they’d gone out. The sun was starting to set too, and half the sky appeared pink with it. He tilted his head back slightly as they walked leisurely across the pavement, staring up at the sky over his sunglasses.

His fingers itched for his phone; during the course of his heat, he’d only been binge-watching dramas to distract himself, and hadn’t gone near his phone. He was fairly certain it wasn’t even charged. He was itching to find out what people had been writing about him, and he had a half-finished article sitting in his drafts he couldn’t wait to upload.

His butler slowed down its pace to match Sun Fang’s, and after a second’s thinking, he decided that there was nobody around to dictate otherwise—he stepped closer to his butler and entwined their arms, leaning his weight on it. His butler, tellingly, let him without saying a word.