Chapter Text
Lan Xichen looks up, and feels like he’s been struck by lightning. There’s a man standing before him holding a rather ostentatious bouquet of roses, but it isn’t the flowers that draw his attention. Xichen’s eyes trail down the man’s soft looking purple cardigan, over his long legs clad in dark jeans, and back up to his slightly wind-tousled hair and frankly unfair cheekbones. He has a sudden and overwhelming desire to brush his thumbs over them. With a start, he realizes that the mystery man is looking right at him (with stormy grey eyes, how fitting), a furrow in his brow and a slight scowl on his lips. Xichen doesn’t know how long he’s been staring dumbly at the man, but he quickly collects his manners as he prays it was for a socially acceptable amount of time.
“Hi, how can I help you?” Xichen asks, pasting the usual calm and polite smile on. The man doesn’t immediately answer him and instead looks away for a second to mutter something under his breath. Xichen doesn’t really catch it, but he thinks he hears the words murder and idiotic, to his slightly worried amusement. When he glances back, Xichen is pinned again by those grey eyes. The man sighs.
“Do you work here?” he asks, and Xichen nods.
“Yes, do you have a tattoo or a piercing appointment with us today? Could I get your name please?” Xichen kind of desperately wants it, but the man shakes his head.
“No, sorry. I’m just here to deliver these.” And Xichen suddenly finds his hands full of the giant bouquet. Up close, his nose fills with the sweet scent of the roses, and he can pick out a few lighter varieties among the bunch. His eyebrows raise in surprise.
“For me? Can I ask who they’re from?”
“I think you can figure that out for yourself.” The man scoffs, and Xichen’s blood turns to ice. There’s only one man he can think of that would do this, and Xichen staunchly does not want to be accepting anything from him. Jin Guangyao had made his choice years ago to hurt him, and it had been so deeply that not even Xichen could bring himself to forgive Guangyao… yet.
Xichen takes a shuddering breath, then holds the bouquet back out to the man. “I’m afraid I cannot accept these. And if you could, please tell your employer that these sorts of actions will not be appreciated now or in the future.”
The man looks at him incredulously, “What? Are you being serious right now?”
“I assure you, I am.” Xichen replies, perhaps a little more curtly than he should. Don’t shoot the messenger and all that. The man just stares at him though, the frown on his face deepening. Xichen takes his silence as an opportunity to try to force the bouquet back into his hands, but the man simply crosses his arms and gives Xichen a look that is approaching a glare.
Xichen tries again, “I realize that you’re just delivering these and doing your job, but I truly cannot accept these.” He attempts to tamp down the frustration that he can feel growing inside of him, but the audacity of Guangyao trying something like this grates him in an unforgiving way. “Please, take these back. I have no intention of talking to your employer ever again, and I don’t know what I did to make him think I would be receptive of this gift.” This time, Xichen can’t quite hold back the animosity in his voice.
The man unfolds his arms, and takes a step closer to Xichen, surprising him. The man has a murderous expression on his face, and when he speaks it’s with a snarl.
“You,” he says, and Xichen feels a finger stab into his chest, “will tell,” another stab, another step closer, “him”, Xichen is forced to take a step back to avoid falling backwards, “yourself”. At this point the man is crowded uncomfortably close, and Xichen idly notices that the man isn’t that much shorter than himself. After a moment, the man steps away and curls his fists tightly to his sides, breaking the eye contact by turning his face into a sharp profile. Xichen watches as the man closes his eyes and swallows harshly. He’s not entirely sure how to react; had flower delivery services always been this persistent?
“I don’t know what the fuck your problem is,” the man growls lowly, before turning back to look at Xichen, “But I don’t appreciate this hot and cold act, and I doubly don’t appreciate you doing it to my brother.”
Brother? Xichen thinks. He'd had met Jin Guangyao’s supposed brothers before, and none of them were like this.
“This is what’s going to happen,” the man bites out, “You’re going to take these flowers, you’re going to tell Wei Wuxian yourself how much you don’t appreciate them, and then you’re going to explain yourself to him.” The man levels him with a glare that would probably kill a lesser man, but Xichen can’t look away. “I refuse to be a part of whatever the fuck this is.” The man pivots sharply and leaves then, just barely slamming the door and disappearing just as suddenly as he’d appeared.
Xichen is left standing there, holding the now slightly rumpled bouquet and feeling completely bewildered. Wei Wuxian? Who? After a few minutes, a memory of a man in red and black comes to mind. The man had been at the shop yesterday to visit Wen Qing, and Xichen’s brother Lan Wangji had been at the front desk, where Xichen is now. Wangji was grading some of his students’ papers while he waited for Xichen to finish up with his client. He faintly remembers seeing who he supposes was Wei Wuxian leaning on the desk, smiling and talking with his brother. He remembers the surprise and amusement he’d felt when he noticed the slight tinge of pink on his brother’s ears, despite how he was staunchly not responding to Wei Wuxian’s questions with more than single word answers.
With a deepening feeling of dread, Xichen notices a card that has been tucked into the middle of the bouquet. He picks it off with his free hand and flips it, to where a message is written in what can only be described as chicken scratch. With some effort though, he can make out what it says,
You said you weren’t a tattoo artist here, but I’d let you draw on my body anyways <3
Hopefully yours, WWX
P.S. Can I hire you away to be my receptionist? I promise the benefits package is super competitive ;)
Xichen closes his eyes and takes a very deep, not very grounding breath. If he understands the situation correctly now, he’d just coldly rejected a bouquet meant for his brother from Wei Wuxian, a man that Wangji actually seemed to have some interest in. And he’d voiced this rejection to Wei Wuxian’s brother, who was now under the impression that Wangji was pulling some sort of whiplash hot and cold act like some callous harlot. Wei Wuxian’s very striking and terrifying and attractive brother, Xichen’s brain unhelpfully adds on. Xichen attempts another breath before flipping the card back over again, looking for any sort of information he can use to try to fix this.
There, at the bottom corner, Amethyst Flowers is written in a slightly italicized font. Xichen takes out his phone and looks the name up, letting out a sigh of relief when he sees that it’s not very far from the tattoo shop, about two streets over. He continues looking at his phone as he thinks about what to do, and it’s with a slight grimace when he shoots off a text to Wangji to meet him for dinner at his apartment later. He has some explaining and groveling to do.