Chapter Text
Dedicated to Booky.
—
The new boy could shoot better than Wen Ning.
Wei Ying, everyone called him. The “ying” stands for “baby” or “infant”; not “hawk,” as he first thought.
Strange. It was more a nickname than a proper name, but one look at his boyish, sunshine face, and it was evident that something more proper would be unsettlingly serious. He had a big, stupid grin that was equal parts coy and...more stupid.
“Earth to Lan Zhan.”
He startled. “Ge.”
Lan Huan smiled at him indulgently, which Lan Zhan knew to be his big-brother smile before he thrashed him like a normal sibling. “If you’re so into him, why don’t you go make friends with him?”
“Ge...,” he said, only changing the intonation half a dial.
Lan Huan’s smile changed serious, just a little bit. His eyes flicked towards the new boy, whose arrow flew across the sky, and struck the target dead—because of Wei Ying’s hawk-like eyes.
“A-Zhan,” he said. “You’ll be claimed someday, and move to a cabin other than Hermes’s, but they are still good to us for taking us in. And, it is prudent to have friends in other cabins. He’s already made friends with those two from Apollo’s cabin.”
Lan Zhan felt his lips thin.
He didn’t respond, didn’t need to. But when it was his turn to shoot, and the new boy whooped for him and called him, “Lan-er!” he did not ignore him; he spared him a glance, and then refocused on what was important there and then.
His arrow thudded into the target. Dead and center.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Wei Ying said to a boy next to him—someone Lan Zhan had seen with him before, attached at the hip—“let me go again, Jiang Cheng. Let me go, let me go, let me gooooooo.”
“My gods,” said the boy, rolling his eyes. “Fine, if it’ll make you stop whining.”
Wei Ying whooped; Lan Zhan hardly registered as he brushed past him to reach the spot he had been standing in seconds ago, because he was busy registering Wei Ying brushing past him. “That was a good shot, Lan-er,” he said.
Lan Zhan bit. “How do you know my name?”
“Who doesn’t know the great and refined Lan Zhan, brother of Lan Huan, who sleeps across my bunk in the cabin?” Wei Ying asked, eyes sparkling with mirth, like a naiad’s. “They say you’re the next Percy Jackson.”
Lan Zhan wasn’t sure that he liked the sound of that.
Wei Ying winked at him, like a naiad trying to seduce him, and turned back to face the target, nocking his arrow. “看好了蓝湛“，he said casually, in their shared language.
Without realizing it—no one else was shooting on the range, all eyes on Wei Ying, so of course he would too—he obeyed.
Wei Ying had chosen a classic bow, all wood and strung with something hand-coiled. He stretched it back, all angles between the bow, the taut string, the cock of his arm. The feather of the arrow moved over his profile. It slid past his eye.
With a smirk, he released.
That was why he had chosen to take up Lan Zhan’s target...before anyone could collect the arrow Lan Zhan had shot. Wei Ying’s arrow touched the end of his in the blink of an eye; in another blink, it had pierced his through.
Wei Ying was not done. Before any demigod had the chance to bring their hands together, he had pulled and fired again, twice, three times, until there was a neat stack of arrows pierced together in a pile against the center of the target.
“You can clap now,” he told the stunned demigods gathered around the range.
They did, breaking into claps. Wei Ying turned back, casting another glance at Lan Zhan.
Lan Zhan felt his breath catch in his throat.
—
It was the first in a series of episodes in which Wei Ying played a game of Rile Him Up, with Lan Zhan as the main goal. And each time, it stirred up a raw feeling in him that made him go absolutely mad.
“He seems to want to make friends with you,” Lan Huan commented on their outing for strawberries.
Lan Zhan stopped their trudge up the hill—glide, more like, he refused to let his back bow more than necessary even on an upward incline—to sweep the horizon, the valley in the sunset. It was an orange sunset today, drowning Camp Half-Blood more than the sparkling sea in the distance could reach.
“He spilled my soup yesterday,” Lan Zhan said, and his older brother was kind enough to not add, But he immediately offered you his entire lunch and claimed he wasn’t hungry anyway. No, he just let it hang silently in the air instead. Lan Zhan had the best older brother in the world.
“He can be thoughtless at times, but still so thoughtful,” Lan Huan finally said, and this thought must have circulated in his mind for quite a while, because he said it after they had picked a basketful of strawberries in comfortable silence.
Sometimes, Lan Zhan thought he should be more talkative when they had these moments together; his brother was spending more and more time with that Meng Yao, also unclaimed, and if he were Wei Ying, he would probably be begging for Lan Huan’s attention back the way Wei Ying did Jiang Cheng. But he had such a secure attachment to his brother, who had been here when Lan Zhan was born silently as he lived. Lan Huan could go far, far away, but he would always come back for Lan Zhan to treat him with cold indifference. That was his love language, after all.
Why does Wei Ying want my attention?
Why does Wei Ying cringe at every mention of Cerberus, Hades’s hound?
Why does Jiang Cheng keep telling Wei Ying not to bother me, but then roll his eyes and look at me like I was the one bothering them?
Why am I thinking so much about Wei Ying?
“Didi,” Lan Huan said.
Out of it, Lan Zhan found his brother’s gaze. They were almost back at the Hermes cabin. “Ge.”
He just smiled. Lan Zhan was not sure whether to be annoyed or endeared. Well, it was his brother—so both.
The Hermes cabin was so loud this time of day, when everyone ought to be tired right before bed. But instead, it was crowded, and bustling, and there was one particularly guilty culprit in the middle of it all. Its name was Wei Ying, and its laughter could power an entire skyscraper in Monsters Inc.
Which he, of course, was narrating in great detail.
“Mike Wazowski is a Cyclops with amnesia!” he argued, while Jiang Cheng hovered in the background, rolling his eyes.
“Mike Wazowski took his girlfriend on a date to a sushi restaurant,” said another of the boys—Nie Huaisang, an actual, born son of Hermes. There had been a vague sense that he and his brother, Nie Mingjue would take on the legacy of the Stoll brothers as Cabin Eleven’s co-head counselors...until Mingjue had been claimed by Ares.
It was none of Lan Zhan’s business, but everyone wondered what kind of woman had managed to snag both Ares and Hermes as fathers to her children.
“Therefore,” Huaisang was continuing, seeming almost offended, “why would he eat fish? Poseiden’s pretty much all of them’s dad, that’s like eating his brother!”
“Well, yeah,” Wei Ying fired back, “that’s why he doesn’t know. Because amnesia!”
“The body remembers when the mind forgets!” Huaisang responded. “J.L. Moreno, the creator of psychodrama.”
“How do you even know that, when you can’t read?” Wei Ying fairly shrieked, obviously seconds away from calling his friend a nerd.
“You and I both have dyslexia, you know we can still read a little!” Huaisang actually shrieked.
Lan Huan cleared his throat.
All heads turned towards them. Lan Zhan wanted to be the younger brother rolling his eyes right now—Lan Huan had stage presence when he wanted to, didn’t he? But he had been taught to never, ever, ever roll his eyes, so he settled for giving everyone the cold shoulder as he walked away instead.
“We have procured some strawberries,” Lan Huan said goodnaturedly, and the entire cabin exploded in the sudden rush to gently wrest them from him before they were all gone.
“Me first!” Huaisang said, drowning somewhere in the middle. “I want to give some to my brother!”
“The Ares kids can pick their own strawberries!” Jiang Cheng huffed, strolling back to his bunk. He slept under Wei Ying. Wei Ying had the top bunk. And Lan Zhan had the next top bunk. They were next to each other.
Below him, the entire, considerable mass of Hermes demigods had turned into a sea of sardines. Had he and Lan Huan even picked enough?
Out of that sea exploded Wei Ying. “There aren’t anymore!” he exclaimed to the crowd that he was probably trampling his way out of right now. “No more, no more...sorry, guys...”
“You just put them all in your pocket!” one of the Hermes kids shouted. There was a split second of silence, before the shrieking cabin kids flung themselves at him. Those shrieks turned from accusing to disappointed as they realized...surprise, his pockets were flat and empty against his legs.
They pulled back, leaving him blinking innocently. “Why would I do that?” Wei Ying asked, sounding offended. “Why would I get more than my share? I don’t even like strawberries.”
“Uh-huh,” some of the demigods said, disbelievingly, but there was nothing else they could do. They drifted back to their beds, or the front stoop of the cabin, cradling their precious red-flavored catch of the day.
It was only once Wei Ying was left to his own devices that Lan Zhan turned his head to see him huddled with his brother and sister in the corner, gently pressing strawberries into their hands. Squint, and he could see them rolling from his sweater sleeves.
That clever little...
Truly, he was a son of Hermes. Lan Zhan could not wait until he found out who his father was, and he could finally go someplace where he would not have to hear Wei Ying snoring at night.
And yet, it was nine. Wei Ying was still huddled in the corner, giggling and whispering with his siblings. These sounds were keeping Lan Zhan awake, though his eyelids were heavy and he wanted to give in to that lull.
It was not until Wei Ying clambered his way into the bunk across Lan Zhan’s that his soft, happy snores filled their side of the cabin.
As he finally fell asleep, Lan Zhan realized that he had familiarized himself with the sound of Wei Ying’s snores.
—
Spring had finally burst into a full, ripened warmth that was gentle to them even at night. Wei Ying walked around in short sleeves now, which meant that he had to find a better way to hide things.
Lan Zhan sat by his brother as food appeared on his plate.
“Ah, your favorite! Watery soup!”
He twitched. “Wei Ying!” he said sternly, just barely stopping himself from covering his soup with his hands.
“Ah, I’m not gonna spill it this time, promise, promise!” Wei Ying said. “I said sorry for last time too, right? You can even have some of my food this time around! Or I could climb over and get some strawberries for you right now.”
Lan Zhan could feel his brother’s gaze on them both. “That will not be necessary,” he gritted out, picking up his spoon with deliberate care and slowness. And that would be the end of that.
According to him, not Wei Ying, who could not be stopped, “Ah, but those strawberries you and your brother picked the other day were so good. And you never got to taste them? What’s the point of a climb like that if you don’t even get a little bit? I could return the favor.”
“That will not be necessary,” Lan Zhan repeated. Maybe it would make him finally go away.
And on it went, Lan Zhan falling silent, Wei Ying bothering him still until his sister called him away.
“Sorry about that,” Jiang Cheng said, sounding not very sorry at all. “He’s adopted.”
Suddenly, there was a hush.
Lan Zhan could not describe it if he tried—the chattering camp fell silent, and he was compelled to follow. Nothing had happened. No sudden appearance of anything in particular. But he was sitting there next to his brother, all at once heavily aware of an uncomfortable silence.
He exchanged a glance with Lan Huan. It was not the sort of silence that led them to think there was some imminent attack oncoming, but he tensed slightly all the same.
At the front, Chiron stood, frowning slightly. He opened his mouth, but needn’t have bothered.
It became cold—the kind that felt like opening a refrigerator too fast on a steamy summer day. Lan Zhan was used to the coolness of clouds, but nothing like this. It was bone-deep, and that was how he knew who had come.
Not very far from him at all was Wei Ying, and Lan Zhan twisted his neck to see him let go of his siblings’ hands; he was standing between them, now staring straight at Lan Zhan as though confused. His eyebrows furrowed as he opened his mouth to speak, but for the first time, nothing came out. Black smoke furled gently from his clothes, rising above him, curling its tendons around them all. Lan Zhan refused to recoil when one touched him, and his unflinching bravery was met with a brief sense of...something. Resentment, maybe. Something dark. Something deeper than he could understand, though he understood perfectly.
As the wisps caressed his hands, his face, whatever smoke rose evaporated into a cloud above Wei Ying, whose eyes still never left Lan Zhan’s. He was stark, stark pale next to the black, and Lan Zhan was sure he looked much the same way.
Eventually, the cloud coiled into a shape. A crescent, though it stood like a tree.
A hush, for real this time.
Chiron trotted forward.
“All hail the son of Hades,” he said.
Wei Ying’s eyebrows dragged all the way up into his scattered bangs, as he finally blinked and looked around at anyone else that was not Lan Zhan.
Hades...the children of Hades rarely ever led happy lives, and yet here was Wei Ying, the brightest mark of light in anyone’s life.
But his large, puzzled doe eyes snapped back to Lan Zhan. Some part of them, Lan Zhan realized with a startle, was accepting. He even saw the hint of a smirk scratching the edge of his lip, like the revelation no longer troubled him. Like he embraced it, was excited for it.
“A-Zhan.”
Lan Huan. And, not just him, or Wei Ying—when Lan Zhan finally looked around, everyone was staring at him now. And he saw why, because his brother must be mirroring him: The two of them were surrounded by a reddish-brown glow, that slowly melted away. Nothing had changed otherwise, but there was viscerally something different—like his brother stood taller, his chin tilted higher.
“Oh,” someone gasped.
“Ah,” said Chiron. “All hail the sons of Aphrodite.”