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He had known something was wrong for a while, but he is nowhere prepared for the sight of Jiang Cheng silently crying on the medic’s cot.
“Jiang Cheng - “ he tries, and when that goes ignored, he moves closer tentatively “Di?”
“They say it’s an underlying heart problem.” Jiang Cheng says without looking at him. Tears still pour unbidden from his blankly staring eyes, but when Wei Ying grabs a hold of his hand, Jiang Cheng squeezes back tight - painfully. “They say stress from drifting aggravated it. It’s no longer underlying.”
Jiang Cheng’s grip is crushing on his own and his brother still would not look at him. A moment of white noise fills Wei Ying’s mind before the realizations crash over him like the waves raging against the shatterdome.
Jiang Cheng can’t drift with him anymore - not without putting himself seriously at risk. Jiang Cheng can’t be a pilot anymore.
And then, selfishly, shamefully, the thought crosses his mind - neither can I, if I don’t have a partner.
“I am personally putting together a list of possible candidates,” HuaiSang tells him when he catches him in the mess hall later “Ge wants Mopai Nihilist combat ready as soon as possible.”
A pause. Then, more softly: “How is he?”
Wei Ying closes his eyes. “Not great. You should visit him later.”
“I will. He will be fine. He’s not the same as when we went through the Academy.” HuaiSang sighs, as if recognizing that he’s trying to convince himself as much as Wei Ying. “We test physical compatibility tomorrow. Get your ass to Kwoon at thirteen hundred, and for the love of keeping your legs unbroken - don't be late.”
Wei Ying is late only by three minutes. He gives a wave and grin that is hopefully apologetic to the glowering Marshal Nie at the front of the room and hurries to a corner to change. HuaiSang scampers over with a clipboard and an extremely haggard expression immediately.
“How many are we testing?” Wei Ying says before HuaiSang could start venting about how much his brother is going to murder both of them in their sleep.
“Only two.”
That gives him pause, and his practiced grin slips a little “You’re so sure of these two? Who are they then?”
“Well I’m going to have you go a few rounds with the juniors later as practice, but I think Wen Ning first-”
“You’re going to split up Rouge Valour?”
“Wen Qing has a high compatibility rate with multiple partners, you do not - now stop interrupting. I want you against Lan WangJi after Wen Ning.”
Now he openly stares at HuaiSang, incredulous “If Second Jade wanted to drift with me, he would have done it when I asked him five years ago.”
“People change, Wei Ying.” Lan fucking WangJi’s voice sounds from behind him.
From the front of the room, Marshal Nie looks ready to skewer him alive, so Wei Ying plasters on his best smile and turns around instead of bolting right the fuck out of there.
“Lan Zhan!” He notes that the other somehow learned to emote even less with his face since they last met two years ago. “It’s been a while!”
“Indeed.” Lan Zhan says, bows slightly to him like he did back then, and walks away as if he didn't just use five words to leave Wei Ying with enough shit to process for a year.
“You better put together another fucking list.” He hisses to HuaiSang before grabbing a bo staff.
Two men sit side by side three hours later, watching Mopai getting her left arm maintenanced.
“When did you arrive in Hong Kong?”
“Oh-eight hundred this morning.”
“Were you in Panama before this?”
“Sidney.”
The whirring of far off machinery softly penetrates their bubble of silence, when Wei Ying steals a glance, Lan Zhan’s face is lit with the soft blinking light from the sparks falling like rain from Mopai’s naked arm.
“Why didn’t you drift with me five year ago?” Wei Ying asks, even though he’s not sure he wants to know the answer. Of course they had been compatible. He knew they would be from the moment they first sparred, a week into the Academy almost a decade ago.
Well, more ‘fought after curfew’ than ‘sparred’. But if and when his grandchildren ask, they were definitely sparring.
“I was not ready.” Lan Zhan answers him, and that was that.
Jiang Cheng is sitting up in bed when Wei Ying gets back to the medics wing. The circles around his eyes are bruise purple, but he’s no longer terrifyingly vacant, and he lets Wei Ying gather him into an embrace with a soft scoff.
“They are keeping me here for ‘observation’.” Jiang Cheng tells him ”What a load of bullcrap. I’m not even fucking injured.”
Wei Ying leans in and whispers “I’ll sneak in the good melon bread if you promise not to fight the doctor.”
Jiang Cheng pushes him off with a scowl: “I’m not you. I don’t fight every authority figure that comes my way.”
Wei Ying just grins at him until Jiang Cheng caves. “Add in some roast duck and I promise not to sneak out tonight.”
“Tall order but Wei Ying is on the case!” He laughs at Jiang Cheng’s increasingly unimpressed expression, and can’t help but rekindle the hope that Jiang Chen might come out of all of this end of the world stuff alright.
“So you and HanGuang Jun, eh?”
“HuaiSang told you?”
“Yeah.”
Wei Ying leans back, smoothes a hand across his brother’s hair. “We are drift compatible.”
He doesn’t miss the flash of pain, visceral and bright crossing Jiang Cheng’s face like lightning through dark skies. Both of them are notoriously difficult to drift with, and Wei Ying finding another partner is the last nail in the coffin containing Jiang Cheng’s piloting days.
“When’s your first drop sim?”
“Two days.”
“You two better fucking kill some fucking god damn Kaijus.” Jiang Cheng tells him, and this time, it’s Wei Ying’s tears that land between the brother’s embrace.
Two days pass, not fast enough, and entirely too quickly. At the entrance to the cockpit, Lan Zhan meets him, suited, but helmet off.
“Wei Ying.”
“Are you ready Lan Zhan? What memory do you want to use as a starting point? How about when I first beat your ass in the Academy? Ha- or! Or! Remember when you got drunk? Do you think that memory is still in the drift? You said you can’t rem-”
“Wei Ying.”
Wei Ying stops his nervous babble at the touch on his arm. Lan Zhan still does not have his helmet on and Wei Ying tries not to panic.
Lan Zhan’s grip tightens on his forearm slightly, and his thumb rubs a soothing circle on his wrist. “Wei Ying, I am ready. But if you are not, we do not have to drift.”
And Wei Ying thinks of five years ago, when he screamed at Lan Zhan who stoically refused to get into a cockpit with him when Onibaba was pushing into Nagasaki’s waters and Marshal Nie himself had to gear up instead.
He thinks of seven years ago when Lan Zhan pinned him in two moves, and he had looked up into Lan Zhan’s widened eyes and had been breathless with the certainty that they were meant to pilot a jaeger together.
He thinks of two days ago, when light danced across Lan Zhan’s skin, and his eyes spoke only of honesty.
“I’ve been ready for years, big boy.” He laughs, and just for a second, he swears he sees Lan Zhan’s lips twitch up into the ghost of a smile as he slides his helmet in place.
They are strapped in when Wei Ying speaks again. “We should still think of a common memory to start off though, we both have way too many R.A.B.B.I.T.s.”
“Mn.”
“Hey! How about the time I got you rabbits! You know, for the irony.”
“Ridiculous.” Lan Zhan’s voice is a soft thing from his left side, “But alright.”
“Rangers, are you ready?” The Marshal's voice sounds through his headset.
“Born ready!” Wei Ying grins just as Lan Zhan replies “Yes sir.”
The smooth voice of the Mopai counts down for them, she takes them into her bosom, and drops them into the drift.
The rush as if his soul is suddenly in free fall- and then they find each other. Lan Zhan’s warmth in the drift is wondrous, and Wei Ying can feel, somewhere far away, his physical body gasp as they align, two iterations of the vast human experience coming together with incomprehensible intricacies, and then-
Uncle’s beard twitch when he spilled ink - stepmom yelling - xiongzhang’s voice asking him to - a freshly caught fish launched into HuaiSang’s screeching - annoyance at having to practice calligraphy - the bo staff in his hand - rabbits -
-He drops two rabbits into Lan Zhan’s lap, and watches in delight as the other man’s usual expression cracks just a tiny amount to show an affronted confusion. “These are for y-”
-Wei Ying stands before him in Nagasaki, righteous rage on every line of his body, he glows with it, like he was sculpted and fired by NuWa herself, asking him what can be more important than protecting the shoreline right now, telling him they can do it together if he would drift with h-
“Wei Ying.” in the Drift, and Lan Zhan’s voice is to his left, but also all around him, inside him - is him “Wei Ying, I will answer, after. If you probe, you will chase.”
And Wei Ying knows he is right, knows Lan Zhan feels the burn of his questions as insistently as he does, knows Lan Zhan’s sincerity like his own. “Promise?”
The drift answers: Yes.
And they open their eyes. Mopai’s voice tells them: Neural handshake established. Holding steady.
They are cheered as they leave the cockpit. Good news is hard earned and few in between nowadays, and any tiny victory is taken by the last standing Shatterdome and stored carefully within hearts.
He walks with Lan Zhan back to Ranger’s quarters, HuaiSang hurrying behind them talking a mile a minute about their drop sim stats.
The backs of their hands brush, they breath in and out as one, their steps synchronized, and Wei Ying feels at peace like he hasn’t in a long while.
“Oh my god -” HuaiSang gasps from behind them, and they turn as one to look at him “you two are ghost drifting - after just one drop sim? God that’s so disgustingly sweet. I’d say I’m happy for you if you two are not obviously mindfucking right now-”
Silently, Lan Zhan opens his door, steps in and holds it open. Wei Ying can feel his grin stretch obscenely across his face as he steps through behind him, and turns to give a wink before slamming the door in a scandalized looking HuaiSang’s face.
When he turns back to Lan Zhan, it’s to find himself already being studied. Wei Ying smiles, and his heart feels fit to burst when Lan Zhan matches him, gives him a soft smile to treasure as his.
“I didn’t know you liked my ass that much.”
“Shameless.” Lan Zhan gives back, but through the ghost drift, Wei Ying feels the current of affection and he’s positively high off of it.
“Do you want to talk about Nagasaki?”
He had always thought Lan Zhan had refused to drift with him because he’s all too aware both of them have a myriad of issues they are both bringing into the neural bridge, he had thought it was Lan Zhan’s last line of defence against Wei Ying’s relentless pursuit in their early days. But, he had seen himself from Lan Zhan’s eyes, and he had never looked like that, not through Jiang Cheng’s brotherly familiarity, not through YanLi’s protective gaze, and definitely not when he looked into a mirror.
In Lan Zhan’s eyes, he was a general who would defy the gods themselves. In Lan Zhan’s eyes, he is raging fire and summer storms, and he is powerful in a way that is beyond his own understanding.
“I could not drift with you,” Lan Zhan says, moving closer, and both of them are reaching for each other. Wei Ying finds himself in Lan Zhan’s embrace and feels the connection between them settle within his ribs and run joyfully through his bloodstream “because trust is essential to a stable connection.”
“You trusted me.” Wei Ying says, certain because he had felt it, in the drift, the immensity of it still staggering.
Lan Zhan presses their forehead together “Yes, but I didn’t trust what I felt for you.”
And then, Wei Ying’s breath is stolen. Their kiss is a promise, a mirror of the one made in the drift. Lan Zhan pulls away just enough to say into the spaces between them “I do now.”
Wei Ying laughs, and kisses him again.