Chapter Text
The archive will be closing in fifteen minutes. Please let a staff member know if you need help returning any materials.
Lan Zhan glances up from a computer table in the corner. He then cuts his eyes to the side. Wei Ying said he’d be back from the audio section by five-thirty, but in extremely-Wei-Ying fashion, he’s nowhere to be found on time. Lan Zhan exhales and returns to his screen, full of lyric adaptations and poems. His eyes ache from black text and blue light, and he wonders why a school as fancy as his brother’s alma mater still uses the slowest, clunkiest database PCs. Inefficient. He scrolls and his eyelids fall half-shut. He rests his chin on his fist. He scrolls some more.
“Need any assistance?”
Lan Zhan feels hands atop his shoulders. They shift and slide to clasp around his chest. He leans his head back against solid warmth and shuts his eyes.
“I hate the database,” Lan Zhan says. He feels a kiss at the top of his head. “No kissing in front of the database,” he continues sleepily. The person behind him laughs into his hair and then spins his chair around.
“You’re so proper, Su She,” Wei Ying grins, slipping the stolen ID card into Lan Zhan’s hand.
“Hm.”
Wei Ying plants another kiss on his boyfriend’s face and then perches on the chair’s arm. The wheels squeak loudly and someone hisses shh! from across the room.
“There’s only fifteen minutes left, calm down,” Wei Ying mutters toward the reprimand.
“Don’t draw attention to us,” Lan Zhan whispers.
“Yeah, yeah.” Wei Ying tucks some hair behind his ear and stifles a pout. Then he is silent. Hair slips from behind his ear over his cheek. His chin slants toward the ground.
“Did you find anything?” Lan Zhan asks.
Wei Ying does not look up. He doesn’t blink. His eyes wash over burgundy carpet, his hands pale slowly from the fingertips. And Lan Zhan feels a surge of something in his chest, and—
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, grabbing his wrist, and then Wei Ying jolts. He blinks. He shakes his head and cracks a small smile.
“Sorry, spaced out again. What’d you ask?”
“Did you find anything else?” Lan Zhan repeats softly. Wei Ying hums, pulls a beaten-up spiral notebook from his back pocket, and waves thoughtfully through its pages.
“Nope, nothing,” he concludes, snapping the cover shut. “Well, maybe some stuff, but I can’t piece it together yet. You know how all those older poems go—it’s like every other character comes with a three-paragraph footnote.” He grins. “I figure that’s more your territory than mine, Mr. Classical Poetry Minor.”
Lan Zhan scans Wei Ying’s face for anything off. But there’s color in his cheeks and smile lines at his lips, familiar and sweet and loving. Lan Zhan nods slowly. He then glances over his shoulder and pulls Wei Ying closer.
“Did you find a route?” he whispers. Wei Ying nods.
“Cameras?” he adds.
“One at the main room entrance and one at the reference desk,” Wei Ying says lowly. “I figured out a path that’ll keep us out of view—or, at most, only get our backs. This place is incredibly insecure.”
Lan Zhan shakes his head. “Why are you so good at evading security cameras?”
“I credit my rich history of juvenile delinquency.” Wei Ying smacks a kiss on his boyfriend’s cheek. He takes the ID card from his hands and loops it around Lan Zhan’s neck, and then threads his own stolen lanyard through his belt.
“You ready, Su She?” he says.
“When you are, Mo Xuanyu.”
The archive is closed for the day. Please remember to gather your belongings from the hallway closet.
From their perch behind a bookcase, Wei Ying and Lan Zhan hear people file out. They hear the click of the doors, and then chatter from the staff as they straighten chairs and power off computers.
“Ugh, I forgot they’d have to clean—”
Lan Zhan’s eyes widen and Wei Ying promptly shuts the fuck up. They wait. They tense whenever footsteps sound closer, and hold their breath as someone dusts the very case they cram behind. But finally—after a longer silence than Wei Ying is built for—finally the doors squeak shut, the lights flick off, and the space falls empty.
Now?
Now.
They opt for the confident approach, walking toward the blocked-off hallway with all the conviction of authorized archivists. (Of course, if they were part of the staff, they wouldn’t be taking a roundabout route in near-complete darkness, but...still.) Wei Ying pulls on some white cotton gloves and hands a pair to Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan, in turn, unhooks the velour rope and clasps it neatly behind them both.
“Creepy,” Wei Ying whispers as they slink down the hall. It’s barely wide enough to walk side-by-side, and it boasts ceilings higher than should be allowed for a windowless passage. It smells like rubber and freshly-vacuumed carpet. Wei Ying skips his flashlight across dents in the wall and chipped paint at the ceiling, finally settling it under his chin with a ghoulish whisper.
“You look demonic,” Lan Zhan says.
“Nice,” Wei Ying replies.
The hall finally opens up to a small space with two doors, one marked RESTRICTED and the other marked STORAGE CLOSET. After a minute or two of pained decision-making, they reluctantly elect to complete their mission in the former room instead of hooking up in the latter. They scan their IDs at the keypad.
It’s dark as fuck. Wei Ying fumbles for the light switch, and then it’s bright as fuck.
“That’s gotta be bad for the preservation,” he squints. Lan Zhan finds the dimmer and turns it down.
“The documents prefer proper mood lighting,” he says, deadpan, and Wei Ying loves him.
Neither actually knows where to begin—there’s no glowing beacon on a weathered text, no all-revealing manuscript in a bulletproof box. Spy movies have not prepared them for this.
“I guess...find some poetry?” Wei Ying suggests. “And I’ll look through the flat files?”
For a top-secret, off-limits archive, the stealthy research is way less sexy than anticipated. Wei Ying slides open drawer after drawer after drawer, snapping photos of each relevant sheet with his phone camera. In the back corner Lan Zhan rummages through an archive of poems. The high-quality copies are tucked into little plastic sleeves, and a few original fragments are preserved in temperature-sensitive cases. The room itself is just cold enough to prickle skin, just dry enough to crack lips. It’s dead silent.
“Here I was, expecting stuff to be protected with laser traps,” Wei Ying says after that silence is too much.
“Unlikely.”
“God, I just want some kind of...some kind of locked vault with secrets inside.”
“Locked, so we wouldn’t be able to read them?”
“No, like a clear vault. Some National Treasure shit.”
“I’m sure a Storm The National Archives-themed escape room exists,” Lan Zhan says, poorly concealing interest.
“It’ll be good practice for someday storming the capitol in real life,” Wei Ying muses in return. He shuts the last of the flat file drawers and glances through his photos and yawns. It’s late, and he is woefully devoid of snacks.
“You find anything promising?”
“I’m surprised,” Lan Zhan starts. “I haven’t seen...”
Lan Zhan doesn’t finish his sentence. Wei Ying’s shoulders straighten. He turns to see Lan Zhan standing frozen, gaze fixed on a sheet in his hand.
“Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying prompts. Lan Zhan does not respond, instead gesturing come here with his fingertips.
“Have you seen this poem before?” Lan Zhan asks. Wei Ying stares at it thoughtfully.
“Nope,” he says. He is not very poetic.
“It...one moment, let me…” Lan Zhan reaches in his Everlane tote and pulls out a notebook and starts making elegant scribbles.
“Lan Zhan.”
“Note-taking,” Lan Zhan murmurs.
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Ying whispers, with feeling. He grips his shoulder and hushes, and nods toward the door.
Footsteps.
Shit.
Wei Ying scrambles to shut the flat files and kill the lights. Lan Zhan snaps a photo of the poem with his phone, and then takes another because the first one was blurry. And then he joins Wei Ying in the corner, behind a cabinet marked “1909-1987 Classical Guitar”. They settle, disgustedly, into a veritable ocean of dust bunnies. Barely two seconds later the door creaks open, and light unspools into the room.
There’s some shuffling. A clang, some under-breath muttering. Probably a staff member who forgot something, Wei Ying thinks. He hears a crinkly sound and sees some orange fall to the floor, and desperately wants to point it out as Dorito crumbs. Lan Zhan squeezes his knee.
After a little more shuffling, the light flicks on.
“Where was the…” a voice hums, low and annoyed. “Oh.”
Wei Ying sees a full, honest-to-God whole Dorito chip fall to the ground. His stomach grumbles.
“Huh?” says the voice. Wei Ying inhales sharply. There’s a rustle.
“Oh,” the voice says again, and Wei Ying and Lan Zhan see a gloved hand reach for the chip, orange dust staining the white cloth.
Wei Ying laces his fingers through Lan Zhan’s as the figure steps around, trips over something, and looms far too close to the cabinet. After a few stretching minutes, the shadow snaps out with the lights. The door squeaks shut. Silence.
They wait for a long count of twenty before getting the hell out of there. They slink down the hallway, shoulders pressed against the walls. No sign of the staff member. The doors to the main space are surprisingly unlocked, which sucks—that means Wei Ying brought a bunch of hairpins for nothing.
They rush down the hall and unclip their lanyards and slip them under the staff room door. They grab their coats and gloves from underneath a box in the closet, and head into the check-in space, and press the proper buttons, and then finally, finally they’re in an elevator moving downward. In the silence, Wei Ying briefly wonders whether the elevator hides a security camera. Eh, who cares—he pulls Lan Zhan close and kisses him anyway.
When he leans back, Lan Zhan looks at him.
“What?” Wei Ying breathes. Lan Zhan touches his lips. He isn’t really sure how to say that was intense and dramatic for an elevator kiss, are you sure everything’s okay? So he says nothing, and instead wraps his hand in Wei Ying’s until they reach the ground floor.
They head toward the subway station, evading mud and branches and clots of wet leaves. People trickle out of restaurants and reroute to bars. Shop owners pull down storefront gates and wipe the chain grease away. Teens cluster outside bodegas, sharing Cheetos and hiding cheap beer under their coats. Wei Ying smiles as he passes. He remembers those days.
The stairs into the station fill with puddles from earlier rain. Wei Ying and Lan Zhan avoid them on their way to the platform and settle on a bench next to a kid blasting something very dated and very emo. Wei Ying hums along.
“How do you feel?” Lan Zhan asks as Wei Ying melts into his side. The southbound train is sixteen minutes away.
“Like I want a fucking good night’s sleep,” says Wei Ying. He laughs a little and then doesn’t anymore. He smushes his cheek into Lan Zhan’s shoulder. “I don’t want to go back home.”
“Where will we go?”
“Can we please not go back home?” Wei Ying looks up at Lan Zhan. “Just for tonight?”
Lights from the subway start to glimmer on the tile, and sound growls louder in the tunnel. Wei Ying reaches and smooths his hand across Lan Zhan’s, and together they stand to catch the slowing train.
__
“So...you broke into an archive after hours,” Nie Huaisang starts, narrowing his eyes, “and you didn’t…”
“Find anything of value or intrigue?” Wei Ying offers. “Nope.”
“Not what I was going to say, but okay,” Nie Huaisang hums. He raises his eyebrows and dips a chicken wing into a little cup of ranch dressing.
“Thank you for letting us stay over,” says Lan Zhan, clearing his throat.
“Please, like we want you guys to get attacked by some...ghost, or whatever? Why didn’t you come over sooner?” says Nie Huaisang.
“Curiosity?” offers Wei Ying, and Nie Huaisang scoffs.
“I have tea, beer, bad whiskey, good whiskey, white wine, and water,” Wen Ning calls from the kitchen. Everyone, for the sake of utmost convenience, makes a different selection.
“Okay, so, what the fuck is actually happening?” asks Nie Huaisang, once everyone’s at the table and he has his stem glass of wine.
“We do not know,” says Lan Zhan.
“Musical instruments playing by themselves. Incessantly. The guqin, specifically,” adds Wei Ying.
“Sweet,” says Wen Ning without thinking, and then, flustered, takes it back. He hides behind a glass of good whiskey. Wei Ying downs a shot of Fireball.
“It’s the same tune, over and over,” he says after adjusting to the fact that, wow, Fireball tastes way worse than he remembers. “We found a song on YouTube that matches, but don’t have a name other than Lamenting Inquiry . We thought we’d find something in the sexy restricted archives, but years of watching spy movies gave us unrealistic expectations.”
Lan Zhan takes a sip of tea.
“What’s the song?” Wen Ning asks.
“It’s like—like—” Wei Ying starts humming before Lan Zhan pulls out his phone recording and hits play.
“God, I was hoping not to hear that fucking tune again tonight,” Wei Ying says as he buries his face in his arms.
“Shh.”
“I’m shushed .”
“Oh,” Wen Ning listens, “Lan Zhan, so you played it.”
Lan Zhan sets his mug on a coaster and raises his brow. “No.”
“But that’s you,” says Wen Ning. “I mean...ah, I’m sorry, I probably don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I...” Lan Zhan starts, voice soft. “What do you mean?”
Wen Ning brings the phone to his ear as the song loops again.
“The way it’s played,” he says, uncertain, “the pauses, the…”
Lan Zhan curls his hand around his mug.
“...the emotionality,” Wen Ning concludes. “It’s how you play.”
Silence drapes around everyone. Nie Huaisang studies the rim of his wine glass, and Wei Ying sets his jaw, and Lan Zhan grips the handle of his mug and gazes past the table edge. His breathing quickens.
“Are you—” Wen Ning starts, but Lan Zhan just nods. He stands up quietly, then, and leaves the room.
Hot water, he needs more hot water. He moves into the kitchen toward the kettle and pours. Some of it scatters outside the lip of the cup and he realizes his hand is shaking. He almost wipes it with the hem of his sweater, but that would ruin his sweater, he doesn’t want that. Where’s a paper towel? He sees a roll on the edge of the countertop. He reaches out but someone beats him to it—there’s Wei Ying, soaking up hot water with a napkin and settling his other hand on Lan Zhan’s arm.
It’s narrow in the galley kitchen, and Wei Ying braces his hip on a cabinet. He turns Lan Zhan gently toward him, and Lan Zhan rests his face on his shoulder. Wen Ning appears in the doorway, concerned, about to say something, but Wei Ying shakes his head. He wraps his arms around Lan Zhan and holds him close, as close as possible, and muffles kisses into the top of his head.
“I’m so tired,” Lan Zhan whispers.
“I know.”
“He’s right,” Lan Zhan continues, pulling back a little. “I think Wen Ning is right.”
Wei Ying blinks and doesn’t know what to say, because what the hell? He exhales and leans more into the counters. He crosses his arms at his chest and shrugs. Usually, when overwhelming situations compound to create a final-boss-level of overwhelming situation, he laughs. He laughs because not laughing scares him.
He doesn’t laugh now.
“Are you scared?” he asks Lan Zhan.
Lan Zhan threads his fingers through Wei Ying’s hair. It’s gotten long, well past his shoulders for the first time since he cut it after college. He remembers helping him. He got hair shears from the sale section of the drugstore and wrapped him in a recycling bag at the kitchen table, and poised the scissors at different lengths in front of a desktop mirror.
Here?
Higher, Lan Zhan.
Here?
Higher! I can’t look like a metalhead at my first teaching job.
Here?
Oh, my God, not a bob!
Lan Zhan cut it below his chin, just long enough to pull back into a ponytail, so Wei Ying could be a cool professor with a ponytail. Wei Ying wanted to just lop it off in one go, but Lan Zhan took his time—trimmed each edge to match, re-checked his work. It was strange seeing Wei Ying with short hair. Wei Ying combed his fingers through, and then ruffled Lan Zhan’s head. He got a stray hair in his mouth when he kissed him. And they laughed, and tucked the ends into a bag to donate later. And Wei Ying loved him.
“I’m not scared,” Lan Zhan says, now, looking at Wei Ying.
“Lan Zhan, ah, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying hums, and the hum turns into a yawn. “Let’s think in the morning.”
Nie Huaisang has a terrible pull-out couch, bad for the back. He piles it with throw pillows and decorative blankets, lends charging cables, and brings a carafe of water to the side table.
“You’re the only one in our age bracket who has an honest-to-God carafe,” laughs Wei Ying softly. Lan Zhan thinks about getting one.
They’re both too tired to even attempt any of the activities Nie Huaisang emphatically prohibited. Within minutes they drift asleep, chilly where the blankets end, warm where they press together.
They don’t dream that night, or if they do, they don’t remember.
Lan Zhan wakes up first. It’s still dark, but light blue slides between a gap in the living-room curtains. It washes over slate-green armchairs and glints on artwork frames. Mirrors, edged in burnished metal. On the table, a dish of last night’s empty chicken bones.
That’s you. The way it’s played.
Lan Zhan sinks back into the pillow, careful not to move Wei Ying out of sleep. His mind runs through a variety of impossible possibilities.
- He got drunk, played a tune, recorded it, and then rigged a recording device inside of his guqin to play later in an elaborate attempt at self sabotage—
- No, that’s ridiculous. Maybe it’s Wei Ying. It’s the intensive October Prank War season, after all, and—
- Wei Ying wouldn’t allow any pranks that disturb his sleep.
Lan Zhan gazes at his boyfriend, hair spilled across the pillow like he’s underwater. He breathes softly.
- Maybe he’s dead.
- Maybe they’re all dead!
- Lan Zhan doesn’t feel dead. Why would he be dead, and only notice through a guqin song? That’s ridiculous. He’s not dead. Nobody’s dead.
- It’s probably a group hallucination. Mass hysteria, like the dancing plague he learned about from a podcast once. Was that mass hysteria? Was it ever proven? Was—
- Oh, no, did he remember to cancel music lessons for this week? What time is it? What—
“Lan Zhan,” mumbles Wei Ying. “You’re thinking loudly.”
Lan Zhan pulls a hand to his lips and realizes he was whispering his list aloud.
“Sorry,” he says, and pulls the covers to Wei Ying’s chin. “I’m going to get up, all right?”
Wei Ying nods sleepily, and kisses his wrist, and then lets him go.
Lan Zhan brings his notebook into the kitchen and settles into a nook under the window. He means to open to a fresh page, to record his morning thoughts, but instead he lands on notes from last night. Notes about that poem.
He pulls up the photo on his phone and rereads it, pen in hand. It’s short, but there’s something familiar about certain turns of phrase. The imagery, the characters. It’s a love poem, and it’s happy—two people united against the world, living unrestrained. But something about its beginning feels off. Like it started too late. Like it gained momentum elsewhere.
“I couldn’t fall back asleep,” comes a soft voice from the doorway. Wei Ying leans there, blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “Coffee?”
“Mn.”
“Really? I was kidding, but…”
“Cream and sugar,” Lan Zhan says, and glances at the poem again. It’s familiar. He must have read it before. Hell, he has a poetry minor, of course he’s read it before. Probably?
Then again, if it was in a restricted archive, maybe he hasn’t.
“Wei Ying,” he says, tapping his pen at his cheek, “would you read this again?”
Wei Ying swings next to him and props two coffee cups on the windowsill, one a sweet pale tan. He scans the poem again.
“Really read it,” Lan Zhan says. Wei Ying scans it slower.
“Oh,” he says. “Wait, wait—this has got to be about Legend of Yiling Laozu,” he says, suddenly.
“What?”
“No, yeah, the—the two characters—the—”
“Are you sure?”
“No, of course not,” Wei Ying says, bright with barely a sip of caffeine in his system. He glances at Lan Zhan, brows way up high, face like the sunrise. “I need to see my teaching notes.”
__
Shoes kick off at the doorway. Water slams in the kettle. Wei Ying throws off his coat, running to the bedroom closet to toss through old files. And Lan Zhan kneels by his guqin, its strings still echoing over and over and over. And the kettle simmers loud, and the radiator clangs. And then Wei Ying bursts out of the bedroom, a thick manila folder in his hand.
He spreads its contents on the floor—annotated papers, lecture notes, printed PDFs that he scanned from pricey textbooks.
“I know it’s in here…I fucking remember the passage, but I don’t remember which…” Wei Ying plants his finger at the side of his nose and glances past his own college sheets. The guqin notes strike. A little drawing decorates one of the margins, a sketch of Lan Zhan from early college days.
Another note. Wei Ying sucks air in his lungs. And then he finds it, printed on the cheapest Staples copy paper: The Legend of Yiling Laozu. It’s the copy he prepared for teaching, pored over at night in the summertime and marked up with weeks of different pens. And stacked underneath with a fold at the corner are adaptations: children’s stories, novel excerpts, cartoon screenshots.
“Lan Zhan,” he says, and Lan Zhan scoots close. “Pull up the poem.”
Lan Zhan grabs his phone.
“Look at the rhythmic repetition,” says Wei Ying, shifting between them. “And the matching vocabulary.”
“There’s no way…”
The guqin melody slips again in the air.
“And both poems have two lovers,” Wei Ying goes on. “Or...I mean, they could be two lovers, I’ve always read it that way, or—you took more poetry courses than I did, you’d know better—”
“They are,” murmurs Lan Zhan. He scans from poem to poem and feels sludge spread in his chest and coat the inside of his lungs. He feels stones latch on veins under ribs, a clog at the base of his throat.
“Lan Zhan…” Wei Ying says, and he lifts his fingers to Lan Zhan’s cheek. The skin is wet.
Lan Zhan gets up and moves toward the guqin.
“Lan Zhan, you’re crying—”
“It’s okay,” Lan Zhan whispers and wipes his face with the back of his hand. He looks at the guqin, still vibrating with the slide of notes, and he sits. His hands hover over the strings and they close out their excerpt of melody.
“Wait, are you gonna play? Do you even have a plan? What if we...” Wei Ying starts. The melody loops, and Wei Ying catches Lan Zhan’s eyes.
“I trust you,” he says, softer, then. “I trust you.”
And before the song can start again, Lan Zhan presses his fingers to the strings.
The room heaves a breath, and then exhales, and takes another. Lan Zhan steadies the shake of his hands and then plucks the same melody back, and Wen Ning was right. The way he plays is identical to what has looped for days.
There’s silence. And then a clang shatters over the strings in response, surprised and shaky.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan whispers.
“I’m here, I’m here.” Wei Ying slips onto the bench, presses his hand to the small of Lan Zhan’s back.
Lan Zhan lifts his hands away and the room’s edges blur. The melody glimpses again, plucked slow and deliberate.
“Holy fuck...holy—”
“Wei Ying—”
“Shh,” Wei Ying shushes himself. He brings his arm around Lan Zhan and holds him closer, and doesn’t mention the lines of water on his cheeks.
Lan Zhan hovers his fingers at the strings again, but doesn’t play. Instead, he glances toward the poems left scattered on the floor.
Wei Ying understands.
He gently leaves Lan Zhan’s side to gather them, arranging Yiling Laozu on the music stand and propping Lan Zhan’s phone beside. He sits back down and centers his hand between his boyfriend’s shoulders. Lan Zhan closes his eyes, takes a quiet breath, and then looks ahead.
At the first note the air shimmers. It thickens and swims in their ears. The melody starts light and then swells and then drops, humming low, hurting. Lan Zhan swallows hard. He’s making it up as he goes along, but he follows the poems as a guide, whispering their syllables under his breath. The strings are hot beneath his nails and saltwater pools on the polished wood, and he can’t tell if it’s from him or if it’s from—
—and the song nears the end and Wei Ying is falling, not really falling because his hands still twine in Lan Zhan’s collar but inside, he’s falling away, head thrumming with seeds of red light. Something itches the tip of his tongue, some ache plunks deep between his ribs. He feels pinpricks wash down his back into his hips, and numbness spreads from his fingers and toes. He closes his eyes and the air is too hot. The radiator clangs, burning lint and choking. And then there’s haziness—sounds turn to cotton—and then an envelope of blunt gray, and then—
—and then things shift again, the sigh of a pause before another melody.
Lan Zhan looks at the new poem, now, and mouths its words softly, and chooses notes slow. Wei Ying’s eyes flutter open and the world is blurry. Then it is not. He turns to watch Lan Zhan, how his hands glance over the strings and his lips hold words. He flattens his palm at his back and feels sturdy, moving warmth.
The song lifts gently. It’s pale silver moss after rain, yellow-green coatings of fresh grass in mud. Sometimes Lan Zhan holds a note for too long, thinking of what to do next, but then he presses into Wei Ying’s hand and the melody grows, bright blue and warming sun. It’s reunion, it’s love. It threads around furniture and sinks to the floor. It washes the ceiling. It’s gentle in their lungs.
Wei Ying doesn’t know how long Lan Zhan plays, but after some time his hands fall still. He pulls them from the strings and into his lap, and Wei Ying covers them with his own. Lan Zhan looks at him.
“You’re gonna have to stop crying at some point,” Wei Ying says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. He wipes his own eyes with his sweater sleeve.
Lan Zhan opens his mouth to reply, but no words arrive. He takes Wei Ying’s hand and they both sink to the floor, backs against a bookcase, fingers entwined. They wait, but no sounds come. Wei Ying holds Lan Zhan’s waist, and Lan Zhan leans into his touch. And they fold around each other, breath slowing.
“You answered the Inquiry, it seems,” Wei Ying says, a laugh of disbelief lifting in his voice.
And there they stay for long moments, tangled on the hardwood floor.
And the room, at last, is silent.
one month later
“So that was it?” Nie Huaisang asks. “Nothing else?”
Wei Ying stretches into the couch, resting one arm on its top edge. “Nope! I mean, the interviewer said they’d contact my professional reference, so that’s a good sign.” His face splits into a grin. “By the way, Nie Huaisang, I listed you as my professional reference.”
“I’ll give a glowing review of your abilities,” Nie Huaisang says. “What’s the job for again?”
“Creative Content Producer for Local Influencer,” Wei Ying replies. “Someone can’t think up YouTube video ideas, I guess.”
It’s late November. Windows have been shut for the season, air conditioning units have been pulled gingerly out of walls. Carelessly turned-up thermostats alternate with Lan Zhan’s solution of just wear a jacket inside . The days rest early, the nights stretch long.
“Well. I’m submitting my resignation tomorrow, so you might need to be my reference in return,” says Nie Huaisang.
“Better freelance gigs?”
“And personal projects,” Nie Huaisang says. Wei Ying lifts a beer in salute.
“Are you both heading home?” Lan Zhan asks, peering in from the kitchen.
“Yeah,” says Wen Ning, pulling on a thick black parka. “Sleepy.”
“I haven’t actually written the resignation yet,” adds Nie Huasiang. “There’s templates online for that, right? God, I wish I could just leave by fainting in the office.”
“I believe in you,” says Wen Ning.
Nie Huaisang winds a green satin scarf around his face. (It’s not warm at all, but hey, it’s stylish.) He steps into the landing to pull on his boots. Before Wen Ning follows, he glances back through the doorway at Wei Ying.
“You’re still all good?” he asks, brows lifted in concern.
“Yeah,” Wei Ying nods. “Yeah, we are.”
After they leave, Lan Zhan comes in from the kitchen and tucks next to Wei Ying, wrapping a light blue blanket around them both. The overhead light is off, and the room flickers with the warmth from lamps and a tealight. Wei Ying kisses his forehead. On the side table is his laptop, open to another shared list:
?????? More WTF?????? (COMPILED FOR HOPEFUL EXPLAINING)
1. Thermostat keeps turning down on its own (wei ying)
- Lan Zhan was just being frugal ugh
2. Felt sort of weird in early November (Lan Zhan)
- sweetheart, you just had a cold (wy)
3. Saw the dog again. I think it just lives there. Will avoid taking that street (wy)
4. GUQIN SOUND PLAYED AGAIN (wy)
- I accidentally sat on Lan Zhan’s phone and it played the recording (wy)
5. Shared dream? (Lan Zhan)
- sweetheart, everyone dreams about falling sometimes (wy)
6. Did not receive Everlane order (Lan Zhan)
- oh my GOD lan zhan (wy)
Wei Ying basks in the candlelight, gently tousling his boyfriend’s hair.
“Do you still wonder about it?” he asks softly.
“Of course,” says Lan Zhan. He noses the sweater seam on Wei Ying’s shoulder.
“I think it was a ghost,” says Wei Ying. “No—a slip in space-time.”
“Do you even know what space-time is?”
“No. Oh! You know what I think? I think it was an alternate universe.”
“Hm.” Lan Zhan presses his face close to Wei Ying’s neck.
“An alternate universe where you still play the guqin, and you...I don’t know, wanted answers about something. And maybe the two universes merged somehow, and your song slipped into our reality, and through the power of music—”
“Wei Ying.”
“What! It’s a good theory.”
“Not that. Look,” whispers Lan Zhan.
Wei Ying follows his gaze, across freshly-cleaned rugs and shiny polished tabletops. He lands on the window to the fire escape, where a dust of white is growing.
“First snowfall,” says Lan Zhan, huddling closer.
“Let’s go.”
“What?”
“Come on!” Wei Ying whispers, and then sweeps Lan Zhan to his feet, blanket still curled around them both. Wei Ying kisses him, and laughs, and then pulls him to the windowsill. He bends to heave it up, and with a little shake, it yields. They step out onto the fire escape, snow swishing in the blanket hem.
It’s warmer than expected, but Wei Ying still holds Lan Zhan close. It starts as a flurry, and then slows—big, fluffy snowflakes on a lazy downward path. The sky is bright for evening, grayed-out violet, hazy clouds of red from cars and streetlamps.
“Over there,” whispers Wei Ying, nodding toward the sky. “A star.”
“That’s an airplane.”
“Don’t kill the mood.”
“I’m just being factual.”
Wei Ying laughs and spins toward Lan Zhan, and holds his hand against his jaw. His skin is warm.
“Just being factual,” he repeats, and kisses the tip of his nose. “Unbelievable.”
“Mn.”
Wei Ying laughs again, and pulls him down so that they both nestle on the fire escape stairs. He rests his head against his chest, and Lan Zhan wraps the blanket across them both. It’ll get dirty from the stairs, maybe. Oh well. They can wash it.
“Look,” Wei Ying says again, only this time he’s looking into Lan Zhan’s eyes, and Lan Zhan leans down to kiss him.
“You look like you did back then,” Wei Ying whispers. And Lan Zhan does—his face is sweet and gentle. Open. Gazing, just like he did so many years ago, when he said he loved him first in winter.
“I still do,” Lan Zhan says, tracing snowflakes off of Wei Ying’s brow.
“And I love you,” replies Wei Ying.
Some music drifts over, then. They can’t tell from where. It washes, weaves between the snowflakes, sounding distant and so close. It smooths against the breeze, whistles over the wrought-iron rail. And then a note hangs in the air. A guqin note.
Wei Ying sits up.
“I remember this song,” he says. “It played on the stereo that one time.”
“It did?”
“You were asleep, I think,” Wei Ying continues. The song is slow and gentle but serious, too. Grounded, even in the air.
And then, the lilt of a dizi joins in, and brightens its pathway in the night.
“You don’t know it?” asks Wei Ying, turning to face Lan Zhan.
“No,” he admits. He tips his head, trying to find direction of the sound, but he can’t—it’s all around him.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It is.”
“Peaceful.”
Wei Ying thinks of his dizi in the music nook. He hasn’t played it in awhile.
“I wonder what the song name is,” he continues. “We should learn it.”
Lan Zhan raises an eyebrow. “Back to the archives?”
Wei Ying laughs and shifts so that his arms rest over Lan Zhan’s shoulders, hands clasped behind his head.
“I was gonna suggest online searches,” he smiles, “but you know how much I love trespassing.”
They stay like that for long minutes, wrapped under blankets, melting into limbs. Wei Ying peppers kisses—cheekbones and brow, collar and jaw.
The song breathes a final note. It lingers, presses into snowfall, traces on their chests. But the world does not blot quiet, no. Car tires roll over gravel. Kids run around the sidewalks, catching snowflakes on their tongues. Music pours from neighbors, subway cars rumble, sirens snag the air. And on the fire escape, Wei Ying and Lan Zhan breathe heavy, and laugh into each other, and blink into the pale of the sky.
“Another mystery,” Lan Zhan hums, taking hold of Wei Ying’s hand. He rubs a snowflake from his eyelash.
“As long as it’s with you,” Wei Ying replies, and kisses him warm in the cold November air.