Chapter Text
(a recourse into the past)
The Nie and Lan clans live close to one another - one at the top of the hill, one at the bottom of it. The children in those houses - two boys each, the older boys closer in age - naturally were introduced and acquainted. As the case with children pre-adolescence, the Nie boys and the Lan boys get along swimmingly, especially the two oldest boys. Despite the fact that the Nie boys are only half-Chinese and the levels of English fluency vary across the children, they communicate in babbles and gestures just fine. The boys shuffle everywhere together, making pacts to be friends together forever, spending time together around the strict timeframes set by the Lan rules, accompanying each other to and from school. It looks to be a lifelong friendship.
Until there is a void in guardianship in the Nie household - Madame and Sir Nie are to be packing their suitcases to work interstate in the mines (Madame) and in submarines (Sir). On top of that, Madame's cousin had recently left behind an orphan - there are now three Nie children left with no adult supervision. They temporarily were foisted over to the Lan's Cloud Recesses while Sir and Madame run about trying to locate a relative to take care of their three young charges, as the Lan boys try and fail to soothe the young Nie girl - youngest among their ranks, a few months younger than even Nie Huaisang. It was a trying time. It put a fracture in the easy camaraderie that Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen previously enjoyed.
The solution is all sorts of heart-breaking. Sir Nie's stepsister is about to begin her fellowship down in the southern state, agrees to take the children in, though she doesn't have a great house, limited time to child-rearing and academic commitments. Sir and Madame are not spectacularly in rapture with this choice, but it is the only viable choice, and it's not even remotely possible to bring and raise children underwater or in the mines. Nie Mingjue, stoic and mature at the tender age of twelve, accepts the relocating news with resigned dignity and selflessness, for his cousin and brother need adult supervision and he is six years too young to carry out that duty. He has to think about his family.
"That," Lan Zhan 'Wangji', solemnly announces, in the way nine year-olds can affect, upon their party perusing the maps, "is really far away."
Nie Mingjue grabs him in a loose headlock to which he does not even attempt to squirm his way out of. "Only twelve hours in a cae."
"Nonstop?!" Nie Huaisang whispers, horrified. Once all legal matters have been finalised, the worst of the journey for them would be the wait in the airport, the plane ride only an hour long. They told him this important distinction. "Why drive? Just fly to Korea for less."
"We can still visit!" Mingjue insists, hopelessly optimistic even though the logistics are impossible to him, young, hopeful.
"Write to us." Lan Xichen gently consoles their collective despair. "We'll keep in touch."
The thing about Lan boys is that they are fiercely independent and mostly raised themselves since they could walk. Madame Lan, when the divorce papers finalised, checks in with her boys on a monthly basis and Father Lan throws himself into his work. Being raised by their uncle Lan Qiren, they perceive the fact that being raised by one's aunt or uncle is the norm and to return things to their natural order, the Nie boys must make haste and embark on their journey down south. Also needlessly mature and free-spirited too early for their young ages, Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji urge Nie Mingjue to leave them, go on, while Nie Mingjue with his incurable brotherly instincts, worries. They're much more competent than the Nie clan, but it comes at a lonely cost. Childhood looks to be on the brink of finalising, which Nie Mingjue ardently objects to. They're kids! They should be allowed to be kids!
"You don't let anyone walk all over you, okay?" He tells Lan Xichen on their last afternoon together. Lan Qiren was inflexible upon the appeals of a sleepover, for this would encourage the belief that rules can be broken if one is to throw a tantrum over their perceived unfairness of the fair rules. However, his one concession to the boys is that freely expressed emotions are allowable, even consolable, for Lan Wangji bitterly weeps into Nie Mingjue's hugs while Nie Huaisang clutches onto Lan Xichen's sleeve fiercely, face set in a displeased frown.
"I never do, anh hai." Lan Xichen loftily informs Nie Mingjue. "My morals stick."
"You're kind of a pushover." Nie Mingjue points out.
"I'm eleven." Is Lan Xichen's reasonable defence. "But I believe in myself."
"Exactly." Nie Mingue nods. "You know best. Rules," he lowers his voice, for Lan Wangji is an unusually solemn child and believes rules will solve everything, "are optional."
"Uncle doesn't like that." Lan Xichen is equally conspiratorial when he leans in. "Will you talk to me even if I break all rules?"
"Like, you killed someone?"
"Like," Lan Xichen's eyes widen, "I do something everyone hates."
"I wouldn't hate you." Nie Mingjue insists. "You're my brother." Then, in Vietnamese - "my brother."
"Ok." Lan Xichen nods resolutely. "I believe you."
Little Miss Nie, though she had not share much time with the older boys, is called into their group hug, Lan Xichen patting her head fondly. Nie Huaisang wrangles a mumbled acquiescence from Lan Wangji to write, and the Nie children trudge down the hill back home as the Lan boys watch their retreating backs, forehead ribbons flat behind their heads.
From these shared histories, it would follow that Lan Xichen would bear the burden of maintaining correspondence and keeping in touch with the Nie children. Nie Mingjue writes to them a lot at first, checking more on Lan Wangji, the easily more emotional brother who had suffered two parental losses already. But Lan Wangji ends up writing back more - eventually becoming the sole correspondent with Nie Mingjue over the years, easing into emails and SMS texts. He's grown more ascetic over the years, replying with less words, but he replies nonetheless. Any news that Mingjue acquires in regards to Lan Xichen is through Lan Wangji, Lan Xichen through the perils of growing up, had declined to directly reply to Nie Mingjue's early enquiries and Mingjue ... had ceased to ask.
So they go on, two ships passing each other in the night, and go on to their separate ports.
Nie Mingjue had spent the good part of the last twenty minutes of his morning dodging thrown ping pong balls at his head.
In his defence, that comparison was long overdue. That comparison was necessary for the further advancement of everyone in the table tennis team. They ought to be open to more constructive criticism - and he suspects it’s the coach’s easy coaxing that slowed their progress to this state - so he is just doing his job as a senior. He’s just bringing up Very Obvious Details that no one had the gall to before and now he is nursing several streaks of red across his brow bone and cheek for his insolence to speak of how Lanling’s table tennis teams are hailing. In comparison to their own...lacklustre progress.
“Anh hai is so mean!” Chang Ping had cried, with theatrical tears to boot his entire performance, to the lovely background noise of the kids wailing various renditions of Bad senior, bad senior!
Luo Qingyang 'Mianmian' had tutted at him, disapprovingly. “That was very demoralising, anh. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Wen Qing thinks he rightly deserved the treatment he got, as he vaulted through a few open windows and scaled three trees to get to safety. All the juniors in pursuit let him go after five minutes of him leisurely jogging and them actively sprinting, all in his favours of longer legs and a good set of lungs from track and field. Plus, he was headed towards the medicine faculty. No one wanted to incur the wrath of Doctor Wen before eleven o’clock on a Monday morning unless they want to keep their arms intact for the week.
Mingjue calls Wen Qing 'Qing-er' a ‘heartless harpy’, lovingly and with reverence, of course - as she proceeds to laugh at him even more as he shoos away some kids who scream up at him from the ground, waving the wooden bat around in open hostility.
“They love you." She hacks out a laugh, like creaking planks of wood on a pier. “The loveless Senior Nie had been adopted by a team of table tennis juniors.”
He scowls at her, but his face had been rendered completely ineffective after the second day she interacted with him, so she keeps on laughing even harder, clapping her hand onto his shoulder.
“They need a little bit of pressure,” he insists. “I planned to put the fear of Heaven into them.”
“With what?” Her mouth twists in restraining another fit of cackling. “With that face of yours? Really? You think that’s gonna work?”
He levels his worse and most unpleasant glare towards her, to negative intended effects. She just doubles over, laughing even harder, slamming her palm onto the window ledge that she’s half falling off.
“Usually it works,” he protests, petulant, as further reprimands of his conduct ring out across the courtyard. He elects to ignore every single one of them.
“Hmn, usually,” Su She hums thoughtfully, appearing seemingly from thin air. Nie Mingjue had long grown past the stage where he falls off his chair with this one’s sudden appearance from nowhere, but his heart still gives a violent lurch. Heavens. Will it kill him to make some sort of noise before assuming form? “But we know you, and you’re the direct opposite of what your face or stature might otherwise suggest, therefore it won’t. Maybe if you had taken the good doctor here, then it might have been somewhat more successful.”
He opens his mouth to protest some more, but evidently his friends are finished with his misfortunes for the day - Wen Qing is thoroughly entertained by his plight, surely, look at her still gasping for breath.
“You’re such a softie, anh hai." Su She teases. “It delights and disappoints the people.”
Nie Mingjue ventures a look outside and breathes a sigh of relief that his pursuers are gone and he can safely wind back to the engineering building without being mildly mobbed and obviously assaulted with sporting equipment.
“Well,” he twirls a hand back, “the people are never happy with anything. It’s their nature to never be content.”
“Tall, fit, handsome, and philosophical?” Wen Qing ribs, nudging him in the arm. “You’re precisely my type. If my type was men.”
“Your type is small, sharp-spoken, a woman and possibly fit,” he shoves her off him. “Don’t lean on me too much, I’ll fall out the window and then you’ll have to perform an autopsy on my corpse.”
She waves him aside, completely nonchalant. “Aiya, I, a lesbian, dated men here and there before I realised that men aren’t shit, so that brings me here to my glorious realm of existence where I only allow women entrance into my romantic circle -”
Wen Qing throws out two hands that nearly remove someone’s ribs as they sidestep her unintentional assault, shuffling books and worksheets as they chatter about antibiotics and active sites.
“Which other boy did you date?” Nie Mingjue focuses on the Important Things in life and conversations only, as well as Things He Didn’t Have Prior Knowledge Of. He knows of the Yang boy in freshman year. That didn’t last very long. He was sent to apologise to the poor thing. He thought that was it - the one boyfriend in Wen Qing’s life, and then she would inadvertently swear herself off from men and fly into the sunset with her foreign diplomat wife in the foreseeable future.
The men comment can possibly be her just waxing rubbish off the top of her head, but this one is methodical. She holds everything in clear categorical compartments in her brain. Men means more than one boy , and as her local and closest confidante he ought to be informed of which other boys she terrorised - dated is too nice of a term - before her inevitable progression into sapphic love land.
Doctor Wen doesn’t enlighten him of a response. She is sidling close to Su She now, and he doesn’t object to her, because they’ve signed a peace treaty to not enact open violence against each other when they are in contact, him typing very quickly on his phone.
“He’s late today,” she says to no one in general. The other boy grunts a noncommittal response back, which didn’t quite confirm or deny anything.
Nie Mingjue is a little bit more than confused now.
“Who is late and what relevance does this have with your ex-boyfriends?” He clicks his hand before her eyes as she still looks to Somewhere Far Away From Here.
“He’s just letting himself go loose since it’s college,” Su She mildly comments.
Wen Qing pushes herself to a sitting position, grinning conspiratorially. “Or! Or he’s been accosted by a new date for the week and he’s walking the person to their classes!”
Nie Mingjue was away on an internship, then he had his rock-climbing tournament. Before that, he overloaded all of his classes into one semester and nearly died from overwork in academia. He’s always tired and grumpy. He is nearly two metres of human exhaustion and perpetual frowning at the world. He doesn’t know who’s who besides the necessary people he needs to know in his classes and faculty, and he cares precisely for the gossip that can be used strategically against the sports teams he mentors so that it strikes the disdain of losing into their collective hearts.
“I need answers,” he tells his friends. “And right now I’m in prime condition for you to unleash your layers and layers of backstory gossip onto me before I lose interest and then I don’t pay attention to you for the rest of the foreseeable future.”
That perks up the interests of Su She and Wen Qing. Nie Mingjue, interested in gossip? Unprecedented. Never heard of before.
“Anh hai,” the harpy woman migrates over to his shoulder, grasping him by his joint, shaking him back and forth. She's abandoned the Chinese honorifics and went straight to the Vietnamese ones, sinc she likes playing dirty. “Anh hai, d’ya know Lan Xichen from psych?”
He flinches. Nie Mingjue may be unaware, and a certified rock-dweller - that is, he frequents the place of Zero Knowledge About Anything Outside of Engineering Academia - but thing is, Lan Xichen has the honour of occupying the only spot of Popular People Nie Mingjue Knew. He doesn’t enlighten anyone of this knowledge because he’s hassled enough as it is. His path and Lan Xichen's firmly do not intersect - had stopped intersecting long ago, when he left. They won’t go back to what they were and what they had when they were children, as is the way of time.
His brother showed him a meme once. It be that way sometime. Indeed.
“Of course I know Lan Xichen from psych. Everyone knows Lan Xichen. What about Lan Xichen that sends you into tizzy?” He grouses, pushing her off, as her hawk eyes zero in on him.
“You know him? You?” Su She squints. “You who know like, ten people max in that head of yours?”
“Hey,” he says, weakly defensive at the uncomfortable truth. “I operate on a necessity basis.”
Onto something, Su She asks him softly. “Is knowing who Lan Xichen is a necessity, anh hai?”
He doesn’t answer that question. “We lived in the same neighbourhood when we were younger, before I moved away to live with auntie. It’s just a coincidence that we ended up going to the same college.”
Wen Qing, naturally unsuspicious of anything out of sorts even if it waves a flag in front of her, peels herself off him to land a punch to the middle of his chest.
“Ah good! Have you two talked since?”
He doesn’t answer her, just looks down at her.
“Okay y’all haven’t. That’s fine. That’s valid -” she chatters away, as Su She rolls his eyes at Mingjue from his perch on the table edge.
“It’s a complete coincidence that you and him, two bright people in your respective departments, end up in one of the most prestigious universities this side of the country, as if you weren’t going here in the first place? Ge,” his voice is bland, the Chinese disparaging, "are you or are you not Asian?" Mingjue makes a face at him. It was a possibility, but not one he loses time over pondering and re-pondering. If they meet, then they meet. If they don't, then that's just the past ten years on repeat.
A fresh wave of students swarm through and they shuffled, awkwardly, holding onto each other, into a different corridor.
Wen Qing, in the cool space, immediately seizes his arm sleeve. “So, I was talking about the eldest Lan boy because there’s A Thing that he does.”
“A Thing,” he repeats, with the appropriate capitalisation. "What Thing?”
“The one week long dating contract.” Su She is still typing, one shoulder rotating as a vague indication of his participation in this conversation.
He is allowed time to process the phrase. He didn’t need all of that time.
“I understood those words, separately,” he announces. “Now explain to me what they mean - together.”
Su She, for the first time since the clock strikes eight, puts down his phone. There is a class that Mingjue has to get to and it is in forty minutes.
"What that meant is that our charming master Lan will date the first person who asks him out on Monday morning and will wine and dine that person with finesse for a week and then break up with them sometime on Sunday, with the exact same line -”
Wen Qing is too happy to oblige with fulfilling in the Most Important Details. “I had a great time this week, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to fall in love with you. I’m sorry.”
"Just like that?" He blinks. "Why?"
"If I know the answer of this Great Mystery, we wouldn't be calling it a mystery, anh hai." Wen Qing claps his shoulder.
“Hang on. You two know all of this,” he squints at them, “how?”
Su She volunteers first, almost eagerly - “Well, we did go out with him.”
The other half of the We jumps out at him with a loud - “Surprise, that’s my second and last ex-boyfriend?”
“He would date anyone?” He repeats. “Why?”
When he asked that, he did specifically just meant ‘why you two specifically’, but they select the bits they want to hear and so they don’t address the disbelieving stare he gives them.
The Offending Two offer him a singular and collective shoulder shrug. “We’re not him, we can’t answer you that. But he genuinely will date anyone for the week. Lots of people have dated him, and lots of us can attest to that. He’ll make it a genuine experience for you, and then -”
There are some hand movements to aptly describe 'and that's it'. Nie Mingjue can't help his whistle.
“Listen, it was a while ago, and frankly I enjoyed my week. So you should take a number down the line of people itching to date His Highness to have that experience yourself before he settles down for good and you’re not in the Cool People Club of I Dated Lan Xichen At Some Point In My Life.”
Seeing as he’s the only standing member in his own club of I Was Lan Xichen’s Childhood Playmate, Mingjue isn’t exactly foaming at the mouth to join in the line of suitors vying for Lan Xichen’s hand in accosting him in what is essentially a contract for a week. A week-long performance. A pantomime of pretend feelings stretching for seven days.
That sounds especially and unnecessarily complicated. And for what? Who has the time? Who has the motivation? Who has the energy to be so devoted for an entire week?
This news piques his brotherly intuitions and the learned busybody practice inherited from living in a house of nosybodies. He should - well they haven’t talked directly, and Lan Wangji's strict moral code would ensure that he can get precisely zero word through before he gets shut down, but he should, like, check in with Lan Xichen. Ask him how he’s doing. See if he's doing okay.
“I’m going to go to class, and I’ll find you two later. We’ll continue this,” he makes very clear and deliberate I’m Taller Than You eye contact to the Troublesome Two, “later. Now scram.”
“Good to see you too, gege!” Wen Qing screams at him as he speed-walks down the corridor, and through a staircase to engineering.
“Don’t get mugged on the way there!” Su She calls out, and he throws back some very selected curse words that his aunt would have kicked him into a well for.
---
Fifteen minutes before his lecture starts - twenty if he wants to enter by the side entrance, and that’s assuming his lecturer is on time, which, the old man is rarely ever. Fifteen minutes before everything goes.
Fifteen minutes before he has to go in, he passes by the university bus stop, and is spooked by a speeding car rolling by, the car’s door sliding up from their closed position, letting an elegant man step a foot, then two out.
He can’t quite grasp onto the sight of the driver, but he has a hunch that he had heard this particular brand of a laugh before, before the doors slide back to their original, intended use, and the car speeds away, obnoxious crimson paint only a dot in the traffic.
“Right,” he blinks. “That. Was an experience.”
He hears a faint laugh, the same one from his childhood, wind shuffling through reeds, before dissipating onto the water.
Lan Xichen, like a horrible mirage from ten odd years ago, stands in a pristine white ensemble, bright and clean enough for his clothes to warrant a one-metre radius of clearance. He looks bright enough to possibly leave a trail of glitter if he dares to touch, which Nie Mingjue isn’t as foolish as to venture into that specific urge. It has Stupidity plastered all over it and he indulged in stupidity just enough for a lifetime, thank you very much.
"Good morning." Lan Xichen, mild and impersonal, inclines his head. "Stranger."
It's meant to be a jab that hurt - which it does. They haven't talked in the three years he's been here and the two that Lan Xichen is here. Everything about this is a complete coincidence. They are just strangers now, and it is a coincidence that they're meeting properly after all this time.
Right. A response.
Old habits swim unbidden under the surface of his words.
"Hello to you too," his hands are rigid by his side. He does not dispense with Vietnamese. It seemed too childish of a time gone past. He decides with neutral, unoffensive Chinese. "Master Lan."
Lan Xichen tilts his head hello, pleasant as if they were mere acquaintances from university. Two ships passing in the night.
The urge to ask the question of Why now why here pesters him, but he spots a couple of eager suitors out of the corner of his eyes, and a twitch lodges itself in his temple. People who are close to him always marvelled at how his need to protect is an actual human reflex and it will trump over all other emotions and priorities in him, as the case of now.
Casting aside disapproval at Lan Xichen's unsurprising stupid game, he steps in closer, as if there isn't a gap of eleven lost years spanning between them.
"When's your class? Let me walk you there." He offers, out of the blue. The suitors, too confident in his inability to grasp knowledge of current events, pause in their retinue and curse their delay of dating Lan Xichen for another week. He can see them wishing each other better luck next time.
"Oh my." An enigmatic smile, holding all the secrets behind his lips, eyes calculating. "It's far from engineering. I wouldn't want to impose."
Somehow, despite the Eleven Year Gap, they still retain the back and forth aggressive politeness from their youth. He or this one would offer, forcefully, and then the corresponding party would decline, with just as much force.
"I insist." He grounds out, playing underhanded. "As your senior." He still does not use Vietnamese.
Lan Xichen's eyes adopt a faux innocence. "Thank you. But you needn't trouble yourself now, anh -"
This rebuff is the equivalent of a fuck you four ways in Lan Speech. No thanks I've got it. His ancestors are being spat on.
" - and now you insist on walking me to class? What motives do you have?" He smiles, grey eyes mildly assessing him.
"It's the socially accepted norm to walk your intended to their class, is it not?" He might have stumbled a little as he falls into Lan Xichen's side. "And I want to chat. Catch up with you. A-Zhan talks an average of three words every month and I don't hear enough about you. Maybe that's a motive. We didn't get a chance to talk after the two years going on a decade that we spent not talking."
"Your intended?" Xichen repeats, tone a touch delighted. "My, I didn't know we were meeting again under such intimate standings."
He can't help his eye-roll. Sharp words, biting edge to his smiles. Still the same kid with a sharp edge to his words.
"Don't be smart. It's not a good look." He takes that other step, leaning in closely to an ear obscured by a strategically placed fringe. "I didn't want you to be whisked away by your hordes of suitors before class. We need to talk about this, Lan Xichen."
"I suppose." There is no turning of head to reciprocate, but a fingernail taps onto his watch, his sleeve rolled behind the band. "But your class starts first, is it not? Is it not then more appropriate for me to walk you there?"
He can feel the familiar twitch in his eyebrow now, the one that is Lan Xichen-induced since young.
"I offered, Master Lan." He smiles, teeth bared. "Please allow this humble one to fulfil the task I said I would do for you."
Lan Xichen flutters a hand, withdrawing the finger back from tapping on other places on his arm and incurring an accidental reflexive slap across the face, as they both remember from their youth.
"It is too much trouble, anh hai. This one insists."
"You are too much trouble. And speaking in third person isn't lofty. You just sound creepy." He rolls his eyes, knowing that this is just a ploy to steal time from the crafty bright-eyed trickster to inhibit him from walking him to class and vetting him on all the Dating Shenanigans.
Lan Xichen smiles even wider at him. Nie Mingjue sighs, eyes pulled into a determined close so that he can't see the Victory Beam from a Lan. He's been on the receiving end of a few and honestly they feel awful if you've just lost. "I'll get you next time."
He can hear the bright beam and resignedly opens his eyes. In the span of time, the Lan boy had already been marching confidently to the engineering lecture hall, hair in a half up twist, held up by the familiar Lan snow white ribbon, his white cloak billowing as he steps in big strides away. "Anh hai," he calls summons and Mingjue, spurred by the demons, steps in tandem with him, the two of them bickering as if they are old friends, to his lecture.
"I'll see you at 1." Is the smile he got at the door before Lan Xichen returns his phone with a new contact. "I'll text you before I get here."
Mingjue isn't even surprised that his phone a. Got stolen and b. Easily was also unlocked due to his little friendly stupid habit of having zero passcode on his phone ever since he attained a phone for himself.
Having no room to ask why Lan Xichen know this titbit of information, he only gets to call out - "You needn't fetch me!"
"I want to!" The menace insists, nose upturned in that little stubborn twitch in the air. He's taller now, never going to be taller than Nie Mingjue, playing the role of little brother, one decade later. Mingjue's chest is ticklish with a number of things - guilt, cringe, sudden recourse into the past, resignation, defeat.
"Me saying no wouldn't make a difference anyway." He smothers a hand over his face. "Why are you doing this though? Are we -" he gestures vaguely to the space between them.. There should be a word for this. "Stuck together? It for the week?"
Lan Xichen's brows bundle together. "It?" He repeats, breath leaving him in a short hack of a laugh. "Oh, I suppose so, anh hai. You could deign to name it nicer."
"I'm not naming anything that brings up 'handcuffed together' anything nice. Best I can do is shootout at the end of the week."
"With a dash of pretend brotherhood on top of our respective murder mission." Hums the tall man-child, still playing at eight years of age.
On one hand, he doesn't know how and what to do in order to entertain this perpetually excited child, a year his junior. But on the other hand, he can keep an eye on him and his stupid dating experiments, because, well, he has an inkling that he's responsible for this outcome, like someone standing at the beginning point of a fallen domino stash, finally aware of the consequences.
"Go to class." He steps back. "I'll know when you text, ong noi."
Lan Xichen's eyes flutter shut in a smile and he pushes himself off from the threshold.
"Did you just," someone whispers to him, incredulous. "Got walked to class by Lan Xichen?"
He blinks. "...Yeah?"
"And you called him grandpa?"
"It's an inside joke. Ask him about it yourself."
"Are you dating?" The person chases after him even as he moves inside to get away.
"That's confidential!" He rolls his eyes back, Annoyed Face switched on, and the general population of the third year student body turn away from him, fearing for the force of his glare as he directs it at any part of their head.
When he writes his notes for his lectures that morning, he motivates himself via the route of anger by glancing at the newly-created contact on his phone. Lan Xichen :) greets him, with a note of you don't need to baby me well into my 20s, anh hai.
---
Monday sees him and Lan Xichen meeting outside the other boy's biology class, students instead of weaving around the two of them, clinging instead to the vicinity and ogling the Spectacle openly. They are two towering heads over everyone else and Nie Mingjue feels like a particularly freakish giraffe that Western tourists can't help but gawk ceaselessly at.
He ought not to glare. He ought not to glare -
"Da-ge!" Lan Xichen blindingly and dramatically makes eye contact and wades through the sea of people, parting the human heads as if his arms provide natural human repellent ingredients. The Chinese greeting grates on his nerves all the wrong ways. "This way!"
He comes willingly, reaching over to pull back the long strap of the falling satchel on Xichen's shoulder, a soft reprimand on the frown of his brows.
After the biology department decides to stop trying to re-enact the Berlin Wall in human units, he turns to his companion, literal partner of crime. "Da-ge?"
"It's appropriate." Lan Xichen opens wide and un-innocent eyes. "Toes all the right lines."
He sets his teeth and doesn't offer any enlightening commentary. It's suggestive. It's indicative of a budding relation. People are going to assume. People are going to talk.
Lan Xichen had long since zoned him out, tying a reply to someone on his phone, not looking at where he is going - so Mingjue has to stow his perpetual worry for his old friend to the end of his hair and steer him from slamming forehead first into a pole. It hasn't happened yet but he doesn't want to be there when it does happen, hence the extra precautions.
"Watch where you're going," he nags, and gets only a garbled reply back. "Don't make me take your toys away."
Because Lan Xichen lives perpetually on the edge or he is just that distracted, he doesn't heed Mingjue's threat - empty, yes, but still carries potential - and carries on his death march to the bus terminal.
"And I've told you - there's no need to worry." The kid finally stops and peers up, long eyelashes catching the sun in them.
“Unlikely,” he mutters, even as his hand steers the shoulder away from mild to imminent danger. “I'll die worrying.”
Lan Xichen only continues to march onwards, stopping briefly enough to pass a look at his hand pushing into a shoulder.
Called out. But he doesn’t take the hand away, lifting his eyes to stare right into mercury in motion flitting underneath opalescent glass, swinging in a breathless pendulum. Breathless, then lifeless. His brows draw together.
“Where are you going, Lan Xichen?” He asks, surging forward to catch up, to fill in the gaps.
“Home,” is the over the shoulder response. “I’m done for the day.”
“Good for you. Are you going to explain to me what’s all of,” his other arm goes fluttering vaguely in the air as he chases for the socially acceptable phrasing for ‘speed dating contractual, city-wide known shenanigans’.
“The dating?” Lan Xichen lifts a brow and flags down a car speeding along the curb side to skid to a screeching halt before them. “Why should I?”
Nie Mingjue splutters, finding himself at a loss as to why exactly this complete stranger should reveal all of his bone-deep trauma to him, equally a stranger. He would run away in the first five seconds.
“I may be nothing to you,” he begins. “But I was your friend, your brother in the past, and I still care what happens to you. What are you doing, Lan Huan?”
Lan Xichen doesn’t answer, doesn't react to the birthname summon. A façade of ice, built to keep intruders out.
He waits.
“I'm following your philosophy." Lan Xichen smiles, impish twist to his mouth.
“That’s not an answer,” he notes, waiting for more. There has to be more, right?
"Think of it as steps leading to the answer.” Lan Xichen smiles, zero teeth behind such a conspicuously aggressive statement.
“I thought you do everything your partner asks for." He states, stopping short of a question. "I wasn't too sure if that's fake or not."
“Believe what you may, anh hai. But I deserve the right to reserve my secrets to myself. We are barely anything." Something unspeakable flickers across mercury eyes. “But I shall honour the deal I offered to all, even if it is you who had answered."
He opens his mouth, defences drawn, artillery up in arms. He didn't plan for their first meeting to be fraught with hostility, the age-old nostalgic fondness cannot wipe away the violent departure and abrupt accosting that he partook in this morning. He had acted without thinking. Lan Xichen bows first to the driver, still turned to him with an eyebrow quirked. Waiting for an apology.
"My apologies for my careless actions."
Lan Xichen hums, before breathing out an elegant - "You're not quite forgiven. But you will live. Anh."
"Will you tell me why, soon?" He badgers, because he's like a croc with prey - can't let go.
"A bet, then." Lan Xichen smiles. "Three days for you to gather up clues. Or you could try to remember yourself. Though, there isn't much to tell."
Nie Mingjue is trying very hard to recover, digging through all the bones of memories, but coming up empty. What did he say that brought about this domino effect? What the hell did he do?
"When I win," Xichen pulls open a car door, keeping close to the kerb. "I'll make you bike me up a hill to an observatory." Without waiting for a reply, the car speeds off, leaving him in a fume of smoke.
---
True to their long held family traditions of non sequitur as a greeting to phone calls, he rings his brother with no preambles, greeting him with - "What now?"
His own brother had greeted him with the same non sequitur energy of - "Since you care so much to ask, the Lan Entourage made it. Wangji texted me 'Landed', with a full stop. Then next line - Regards, LZ, no full stop. I'm telling you, he's warming up to me."
"Ha. I got 'Made it', and he signed off with Yours. Eat that." He smugly retorts, as Nie Huaisang grumbles about older brothers stealing everyone away from him. "Also I'm kinda in a fake relationship with our old friend Lan Xichen, how was your day?"
There is a moment of silence, until Huaisang ventures the Dreaded Question. "Anh hai, Explain. Make it make sense."
How to explain his situation to an interested brother, because, to everyone's words - Senior Nie doesn't attract Drama to him so when there is drama, it's Huge.
After three succinct sentences, his brother is deadly silent, despite being a chatty person at his core. "So your solution," his brother, a meek little thing, never raised his voice ever, echoes back blankly over the call, "to er-ge and his dating shenanigans, in your eyes, is to implicate the both of you in a pretend farce of a relationship?"
"Say it shorter, my brain doesn't understand long and convoluted sentences after 4 PM." He grouses back, the phone on the desk as he fervently types out the rest of his essay plan.
"You're stupid." Huaisang repeats in the tone of derision he reserves for Mingjue whenever he goes and pitches headfirst into Particularly Silly Things. "You can't solve dating problems by pretending to date. It doesn't work like that."
"It's less a relationship and more," he squints and locates the key, "a bet? You know, direct approach to the problem and all that. Fight fire with fire. Fight dating by actively dating."
"That is not how any of that works." Huaisang wails. "I bet you're on everyone's blacklist now. The people hate you."
"The people already hate me." He counters back, and hears a contemptuous Isn't that what you wanted? "That's my end of drama. What about you? If both the Lans are here, then Wei Wuxian is here. If -"
He doesn't specifically sound out any words of disconcertingly similar inflections to Ah, Chengcheng, but his brother heard it and begins squawking at him indignantly.
"Stop listing! Stop listing!"
He knows when to stop. Knowing his brother, he'll cave eventually and everything will arrive in a three-part live action retelling of all his wrongdoings, and he'll just have to kick back, make affirming noises that he's paying attention, and enjoy the show.
Monday sees him dismissing his brother and vague siren tunes blaring in the distance for a subdued note of relief, somewhere deep and annoyingly lodging behind his fourth rib down from his collarbone. The mellow sunshine, back on his mind, after a decade and a half of his silhouette eroding away in his memories, hush down the more insistent voices in his head.
"What the hell is that idiot doing to himself?" He mutters, before he has to head back home.