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Chapter Text

Gu Lian Qiao

The fan of magazines were gleaming in the light as it filtered through the tall glass windows, thick and a soft yellow as it swept over, running in sleek lines across the covers and stripping them striped white-black-white-black-white cutting through the silhouettes of celebrities as they posed in an array of clothes and a flurry of images: a perfectly styled living room, a silver-linked watch, a yacht out at sea with a tall, sunglass-shod man sitting high up with the ropes held fast in one hand.

Next to them, one of the dental nurses – an intern, he remembered, from Changzhi Medical College – was sweeping them all out, lining them up so they lay in a neat curve, pinned altogether at the bottom left-hand corner.

Lan Wangji had five minutes before his next patient; sitting down on the sofa next to the intern, he reached out and carefully slid out one of the magazines, two fingers on the one underneath so it didn’t break out of the pattern.

On its front cover, the silver watch glittered up at him, star-bright with its white face and spike-silver spokes. The hands on it were frozen at the classic ten-to-two image, the second hand thirty-seven round; in the cover it lay on a blurred-soft background in a bundle of pastels – clean and cool blues and greens and white-white-white.

“That’s a pretty watch,” the intern volunteered, her voice loud in the quiet of the waiting room; it bubbled over the potted plants in the corner and the low-cast sofa they were both sitting on and the paintings hung on the walls in thin, metal-edged frames. “It looks expensive.”

Lan Wangji hummed an agreement. “Forty-four thousand yuan.”

The intern gave a little cough of – surprise? Shock? He couldn’t entirely be sure – and he could hear in that sound the way her eyes had widened, words sitting on her tongue and festering as the price hung in the air.

It made his toes curl and not in the way Nie Huaisang always talked about.

“Wait for discounts,” he said after a pause. “A little promotion never hurts.”

It was one of his shufu’s favourite sayings. For all his family was rich – a fact which, to Wangji, seemed entirely irrelevant to life as he knew it – there was no need to waste money unnecessarily.

And a Swiss watch, no matter how elegant or sought-after or technologically advanced, definitely counted as ‘unnecessary’.

He had his thumb on the pages, reading to flick through to find the article, just to see if there was any news about a possible sale – or discount or shipping bargain or something which would make it anything other than obscene to buy and therefore a pipe dream because he could never let himself buy something that expensive and frivolous; it would make his toes curl and his stomach curl and something scratch at the back of his head until he returned it – when there were a quartet of footsteps from the corridor leading to the practice rooms and Wen Ruohan’s voice called:

“Lan Wangji,” he didn’t smile; Lan Wangji didn’t yet put the magazine back. “Let’s talk for a minute.”

“Mn,” he nodded with a hum, replacing the magazine back in the fan with a movement just a little too stiff; the fan shivered and half of it slipped down the table, drooping out of shape on one side.

Silently, he followed Wen Ruohan down the corridor and into the senior dentist’s office.

It was, ostensibly, the same as Lan Wangji’s: white-washed walls with the same bland, office-appropriate paintings spotting across in the same chrome frames and the same white blinds pulled up-up-up to let the sunshine in. That was where it ended, though – Wen Ruohan had exchanged the standard desk for a bigger one made of heavy dark wood with a smooth leather top; the shelves where Wangji kept reference books and a trio of thick dictionaries were filled in this office with photos in wide gold frames of Wen Ruohan’s sons on their family yacht, skiing in the mountains, or sitting on a terrace in front of what was unmistakeably the Eiffel Tower.

At least, his sons were there if you squinted – small specks in most of the pictures, black smudges among the blue-white swishes of mountains and seas and skies, except for the one of the Eiffel Tower, which showed the family together, father and two sons, all of them looking away from the camera and none of them smiling.

“I see you have suggested that Mrs Chen follow a treatment plan that would save as much of the existing teeth as possible,” Wen Ruohan said, glancing briefly at something on the computer screen in front of him.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji nodded and added, reluctantly, when it seemed Wen Ruohan was waiting for something more: “The plan is appropriate to the patient.”

Wen Ruohan studied him for a moment, his dark eyes fixed and almost as heavy as the wood desk.

“The teeth are not in good condition,” he disagreed, blunt and curt. “You should discard your plan and assign implants.”

Lan Wangji frowned, his fingers tucking into his palms by his sides. It was a habit, an old, ingrained one, and he knew Wen Ruohan marked it.

“Doctor’s authority,” he said, a spike of vicious pride making his voice firm. “To assign the treatment plan. I am the doctor.”

 He bowed – just enough and nothing more – and added, “Please excuse me, I have another patient.”

There was a warm hum of satisfaction in his stomach as he swept out of the room, heading towards the waiting room to collect Mr Wang, who would no doubt have a picture of yet another grandchild he wanted to talk about. (So far, there had been three granddaughters and four grandsons at a rate of one every six months and Wangji was beginning to feel there were only so many times he could agree that yet another photo of a squished-bean baby wrapped in a knitted blanket was cute.)

The corridor was empty of people; probably, he would reflect later, for the best as there was no one to see him march down, walking as quickly as it was possible to without running. His back was stiff as a board, ears red-red-red and his jaw set: anger, hot and uncomfortable, smoked inside his mouth.

His fingers prised out of his palm to twist the doorknob and stride inside and straight up to the desk; a tall streak of blue against the walls stretching out down behind him.

“Get out,” Wen Ruohan looked at him, a steady, glowering frown. “You can’t just barge in here, no matter who your family are.”

“Give her back,” Lan Wangji gritted out, ignoring the admonition.

“Are you mad? Get out,” Wen Ruohan’s glare smoothed into something disdainful and dancing.

“Mrs Chen was my patient,” he insisted, his nails digging into his palms by his sides. He felt tense from head to toe and back up again; he would have to have a bath this evening – yoga on its own wouldn’t be enough. “You stole her to change the plan.”

Wen Ruohan’s glare vanished; a puff of clouds drifted across the sun outside and the light in the room dipped darker, white-to-grey.

“You can’t have an objection, Lan Wangji, because that would mean you think my treatment plan is inappropriate,” he explained, his voice even, shaded smug as he stared up, dwarfed by his tall, leather-bound chair. “Get out of my office and think of this as a lesson for the next time you decide to assign a patient a cheap, optimistic plan.”

“Overtreatment,” Lan Wangji said; the words felt like they were speeding out of him, too fast for him to properly weigh and consider each one before he spoke; instead they rang like a torrent of strung bells, clattering and clanging one into the other into the other. “And ripping off patients is your speciality.

“Wen Ruohan has forgotten the rules. Should treat patients with conscience. Practice with compassion and integrity. Patient comes first – always.”

He wasn’t sure if he was breathing; in his ears, his heart had stopped beating – he couldn’t hear it any more.

The whole world, it seemed, was silent.

“Recite your family rules to whoever you like outside of this clinic,” Wen Ruohan stood up. He was taller than his chair made him look and still broad enough to match up to Wangji; they stood almost eye-to-eye, dark brown to light, their matching white coats blazing as the sun brushed the clouds to one side to watch. “But don’t think everyone else has to follow your outdated gibberish.”

“Not family rules,” Lan Wangji shot back, his neck too stiff to shake his head. The surge of adrenaline as they stared each other down was a rush, fierce and quick; like fire, it guzzled and made him run, run forward, hammering steps out round and round his own head. “Hippocratic Oath.”

The sunlight falling through the windows was warm on his shoulders – it hugged him tight and made the coat feel too tight across the back, strait-jacket like and constricting.

He couldn’t breathe; he could only breathe too loud and too strong.

“If you don’t remember that,” he spoke clearly, slowly. This time, he chose the words and he weighed them precisely; he felt, for the first time in a long time, brutal. It was petty and small of him, but he had always been taught to be honest above everything and no one could claim he wasn’t being honest. “You are a bad dentist and a bad professional.”

Stripping the too-hot too-tight coat from his arms and throwing it in a heap on the floor, Wangji levelled a stone-hard look at Wen Ruohan, reddening beneath his moustache and at a loss for words; the most he could do was a garbled gasp and an audible grinding of teeth as his hands flexed to point and clenched, ready to swing.

With a sharp turn on his heel, Lan Wangji marched back out of the office, refusing to look at any of the other practice staff staring at him as he went, frozen midway through their own actions like odd statues. Halfway down the corridor, he stopped and swivelled around – Wen Ruohan narrowed his eyes and shifted his weight onto his toes – and he stalked past the open office door with a glare of his own, striding into his own office and logging out of the computer, sweeping his coat over his arm and back down the corridor, past Wen Ruohan’s still-still figure and the litter of statues down the corridor, heads pivoting as he went by, and out, out, out, out, out into the sunshine.

He breathed; it was cool in the Spring sun – there was a breeze which bumbled around his face and hugged his shoulders in the shadows flung over by the tower and lifted him up onto the tips of his toes as though he would float if he jumped.

Nie Huaisang was not the first person Lan Wangji would have called or even the most sympathetic person he could have called – but Lan Wangji was reluctant to call his uncle when he didn’t yet have a plan for what next, and xiongzhang was finishing off the last concert of a worldwide tour in Seoul, so Huaisang was the next best.

He knew he was third best. He understood, even though he whined about it a lot.

He was also indisputably the worst person to offer advice.

“Oh, you know what you could do,” Nie Huaisang twirled the glass of wine – a rich, deep red; French and expensive and slyly ordered to Lan Wangji’s bill – in one ring-studded hand, eyes flitting over the city skyline outside the bar before circling back to Wangji. “You could hack the website. It’s not that hard to do if you know how; it wouldn’t even take that long and no one would ever think it’s you because, no offence, Wangji-xiong but you’re famously shit with technology.”

Lan Wangji did not ask whether Nie Huaisang ‘knew how’; he definitely did not ask how he knew it didn’t take that long.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji shook his head twice; an abrupt thing. “Need a plan – for another job,” he added hastily; Huaisang had opened his mouth again, no doubt to offer another idea hatching inside his head that very second. “Not revenge.”

Nie Huaisang sighed – a deep, put-upon thing ending in a morose pout with big, moon-sad eyes. It was the kind of expression which made grannies give him free food and older brothers flex protective and older sisters fold him into endless hugs.

It didn’t work on Lan Wangji. He had been immune since birth; the privilege, Huaisang claimed, of being another didi.

“Fine, fine, fine,” he flapped a hand with an affectedly blasé elegance. “But if you’re not going to do anything about the rumours Wen Ruohan’s spreading about you, or about taking down Wen Ruohan himself, then you’re a bit stuck. Even I can’t help you much if Wen Ruohan’s telling everyone you’re, ah, ‘a liability as an employee’. People are afraid of Wen Ruohan; he has a reputation for a reason.”

Wangji felt his hopes deflate with a soft pop. It was what he’d worried about, but he’d – perhaps childishly, naively – thought Nie Huaisang would have something up his sleeve he could pull out for just this moment.

(Huaisang always had something or a dozen up his sleeves. A cousin who needed precisely that knickknack he was getting rid of; an aunt who was an excellent seamstress and could fix a designer suit in seconds flat; a brother who could crack his knuckles one by one until the potential enemy crawled away on his belly; a thousand and one secrets knotted in the braids in his hair he would mention with a wide-eyed innocence that yanked him out of all but the worst trouble.

That he didn’t have one now was, well, a problem.)

Around them, the bar chattered away: it buzzed in the background of their table – tucked into a corner, a group of suited-and-booted heads poured out baijiu shots they tipped back with a rattle of clinks; nearer, a trio of girls huddled round a tall table in heels and slim-cut dresses. Through the open door a few rows behind Lan Wangji, the sinking evening air brushed in on the heels of singles and pairs and trios of people talking as they went over to the bar for more drinks, the slick smell of cigarette smoke following them.

“Wangji-xiong,” Nie Huaisang, the olive green of his embroidered silk cardigan (“coatigan, it’s a coatigan and it’s fashionable, Wangji-xiong”) winking ink-dark in the low light, orange-peeled and drowning in sleek black stone. He leaned forward, resting his cheek on one hand and his eyes sparkled. “Surely your uncle knows someone? He’s a medical professor, after all – and it wouldn’t be too hard for you to switch into academia. You had an excellent record at university, after all.”

Lan Wangji looked down. He could feel Huaisang watching him – watching the lines of his face, the little twitches and tells, for an answer.

On his wrist, the watch, barely two weeks old, smiled a smile of silver teeth.

“Haven’t told shufu,” he said quietly. “Can’t yet.”

He swallowed; the taste of tea lingered on his tongue, slanting bitter, and he stared into the empty cup sat in front of him. The pot had no doubt long gone cold.

“Quit without a plan,” he added and if he didn’t wince it was only because he didn’t regret it. He wasn’t sure he could regret it, even if now – with his career stalled so early and another job a distant dream – perhaps he should do.

Nie Huaisang regarded him with a solemn, slow nod and reached across to pat his hand once, twice, three times.

“Wangji-xiong,” he said, and his voice was gentle. “Let me buy you a drink.”

It was useless, Wangji reflected, to say that he didn’t drink. Huaisang knew that already.

His mouth was dry – like sand, rough-cut and jagged so that it stung a little to swallow; a sweep of his tongue from cheek to cheek and top to bottom found that everywhere in his mouth was dry-dry-desert-dry.

He blinked his eyes open and then shut again immediately: the light was blindingly bright, a gleaming pale yellow as it leeched through the thin curtains. He briefly considered grabbing at the blanket and pulling it high up over his head – he imagined it in detail, could almost feel the way his muscles would move – but the thought sat in his head as a thought and didn’t move anywhere else.

This, he thought, was why shufu had always told him and xiongzhang that alcohol was best avoided altogether. It was a prudent rule, and with hindsight the sense of it shone all the stronger.

Lan Wangji recommitted – to himself and only in his own head but that was all he generally needed – to never drinking again. Not even for Nie Huaisang. Not even under duress.

Eyes screwed close against the light, he blinked slowly and minutely, feeling a lot like a squirrel waking up from hibernation: lethargic and lazy and hungry and too heavy to move.

Exactly the same as he did every morning, he sat up and swung his legs out of bed and stood – and swayed and winced with a frown; there was a spiking ache in his head and it lingered. He imagined he could hear his heartbeat in it: the throb-throb-beat of it as he walked to the kitchen and poured a glass of water from the half-open bottle in the fridge, stored upright next to a sideways tower of eggs balanced precariously.

He drank it all in one go and poured a second.

First things first: he had drunk water to avoid the crashing dehydration; second, he should take a shower to wash off the sticky-sour smell of alcohol he could feel clinging to his skin; third – on the low, white-wood coffee table, the power button on his laptop was flashing, a one-two, one-two, on-off, on-off thing which rang discordant through his head.

He never left his laptop on sleep overnight. He never left his laptop open overnight.

Still, things ought to be done in order and the second step was for Wangji to take a shower and dress in fresh, clean clothes and eat breakfast – then he could take a look at his laptop.

By his hand, his phone buzzed; the lockscreen showed he had a missed voicemail from Lan Xichen along with three unread WeChat messages, one from shufu, a whole fourteen from Nie Huaisang, two from Wen Ruohan’s personal number. As he frowned at the screen and it blinked innocently back up at him, the count for his graduation class WeChat group was going up and up and up and up and up and people were tagging him in messages saying things like “omg wowwwww”, “you’re so brave, Lan Wangji!”, “I can’t decide if you were brave or stupid lololol”, “good luck!”.

His stomach ached and his head ached and there was a pyramid of eggs in his fridge drawer and his laptop light was flashing and Lan Wangji was dreading finding out what was going on.

His ears were burning and there wasn’t even anyone around to see.

Swallowing hard and closing his eyes, his jabbed the chat with Wen Ruohan to get those over with first – likely just baseless threats and poisonous denunciations which wouldn’t go anywhere.

How dare you make a post like that about me on the national dentist association’s forums? You will never work in this industry again.

Lan Wangji did not, as a rule, post on the National Dentist Association’s forums. He didn’t, in general, participate in any social media beyond the minimum that was required by social convention or cajoled out of him by Lan Xichen and Nie Huaisang (who should, in his opinion, never be allowed to team up against him. It was unfair).

Still… he eyed his laptop with a yawning anxiety stretching in his stomach.

What had he done?

Wen Ruohan is on a power-trip.

Wen Ruohan is guilty of over-treatment.

Wen Ruohan fails to properly care for patients.

Wen Ruohan is only interested in profits.

Cold, that was how he felt now: cold and sticky and swirlingly sick with a nervousness that drowned him from the inside out in a thick, acid-tasting swoosh up his throat. His hands clenched hard enough to draw blood – hard enough to crack the glass and jab his thumb red into a ridge, pearling dark red to drop to the floor.

He stared at his laptop screen, stared and stared and stared and stared, stuck on the idea that he’d done this.

He had been reckless. Foolishly, stupidly, childishly reckless.

He had been right, too – and he knew that just as well, but it was a bittersweet comfort as nausea curdled like sour cream in his belly.

On the sofa, his phone was still buzzing away with message after message on WeChat; still just the one from shufu which meant whatever he had said to shufu (there was something in the back of his mind, something vague behind the sense that he’d needed eggs, a lot of eggs, for… something, that said he’d perhaps called and left a voicemail?) shufu didn’t think it was too bad.

A small blessing but it was enough to make his eyes damp with a sighing relief.

He should look at the other messages, he thought, if only so he could correctly ignore everything that was unnecessary noise, and picked up his phone and –

The notification was bold, a sun-soft yellow spread over the whole screen.

A-Niang’s birthday.

The car park was tucked back from the lake’s edge, but when he stepped out and shut the door, he could see, just above a row of small, haphazard bushes, the wending bend of a canal as it curved round and east before twisting round and down towards the lake, slow and steady and unstoppable; it was a slip of green against the brick and stone and wood of the buildings – and a world away from the glass spires and grey-made streets that made up Lan Wangji’s world in Shanghai.

His phone felt heavy in his pocket as he walked down the street, weaving through the ambling crowds of locals and the occasional, half-dazed camera-clicking tourist, following a guide with a red umbrella with a panicked intent which broke through the gazing, gaping wide-eyed wonder.

He had never liked tourists.

There were rows of shopfronts either side, selling lanterns and seafood delicacies – a man passed him with a pair of buckets of fresh shrimp on ice, his sandals clopping on the slabbed stone – cafes with ‘wifi’ scrawled on the board outside in white-and-yellow chalk and a store window piled high with boards showing stretched out silk, embroidered with tiny golden flowers. People ducked in and out of doorways and stopped dead in the street to shout back as they passed; it was a mishmash of Mandarin and the musical spill of Suzhou dialect and Lan Wangji found himself listening in to the chimes of the dialect as they flowed seamlessly from one person to the next.

It sounded like home. It sounded, he thought, and the phone in his pocket felt heavier and heavier, like his mother did in his memories.

Turning the corner at the main junction, he kept walking, passing underneath the fat-headed trees, rounded and budding a pale, thin green as the first leaves flourished out: the shade was crisp, the breeze brisk as it danced around underneath the branches, flooding in without the sunlight to warm it through.

Then, soon enough – but longer than he’d half-remembered it had been – he was there, at the end of the road, with the lake to his left in a glittering glazed-green glimmer that stretched away from him, and Gu Lian Qiao in front of him.

It was strange, stranger than he would have believed, seeing somewhere again as an adult. He’d expected it to look the same way he remembered it looking as a child: sprung up into the sky with its tall dark-wood body, the red lanterns dotted along it in neat pairs swaying with a gentle, sea-sweet rhythm, the tassels underneath drifting tangled; the blue sky a canvas of sorts strung between the pillars and the carpet of lotuses, wide-leaved and wide-smiled, pooling out out out across the water, still and calm and quiet.

It was exactly that, almost – though the sky was streaked with dust-white clouds and the soft Spring-blue paint and the tassels didn’t so much as drift but startle and swing as the lanterns were buffeted this way and that – but it had lost something: some flash of sweet sugar coating; some spark of wonder that had made it seem celestial.

It was the same, though, and he stepped onto it with the smallest quirk of a smile, his chest clenching.

He had clung onto his mother’s hand as they came up it – xiongzhang had been ahead, trailing one step behind their father, the blue ribbon in his long hair slipping through the wind’s fingers, already staring out across the lake – stepping so carefully on the old wood as though it could break at any moment, grazing fingertips just above the railings with a delicate uncertainty.

“Zhanzhan, look at the lotuses!” he could almost hear xiongzhang calling to him once he and his mother were close enough he didn’t have to raise his voice; seeing his brother peering over the side, Wangji had stretched up on his tiptoes, his mother’s hands hoisting him up the last of the way so he could look over the balustrade and out across the field of flush-green plants, open like bowls with their flat, round-slit leaves and gentle purple-pink flowers flourishing wide.

In the background, his father watched, a voiceless and faceless flash of dulled blue; most of all, he remembered the curving beam of xiongzhang’s delight and his mother’s smothered laugh in his hair, perfume-scented and softly happy.

It took him a moment to realise his eyes were wet; it took him another to realise his phone – switched to silent with wifi and data off – was buzzing in his pocket.

“Wangji,” his brother breathed, tired and soft, when he picked up, and he let the guilt settle in his stomach over the three missed calls and likely litany of messages on WeChat. “How are you?”

“Fine,” he said – and it was true, true enough at least. He was fine here, on this bridge, with the memory of their mother’s smile pressed into the air. “On a walk,” he added because xiongzhang would worry if he left it at ‘fine’. The memory nosed at him again and he bit back a smile, seeing the faint flicker of xiongzhang gazing down at the lotuses, tip-toe-tall, the sunshine combing its fingers through his hair in a gentle, hazy-black shine. “Looking at lotuses.”

“Mm, that sounds lovely,” Lan Xichen smiled then too; it was impossible not to hear it in his voice, even when it was smothered a little by a washing sleepiness.

“Xiongzhang is tired,” Wangji frowned – he couldn’t help it: it sounded like a reproach.

“It will pass,” Lan Xichen assured him. In the background there was the sound of tea pouring: a steady rushing-trickling sound that bobbled as it filled the cup. “Do you have any other plans for today?”

“Mn,” his plan was a half-formed thing: it was Jinxi, and whatever that meant he would find out. “Xiongzhang should rest.”

“Yes, Zhanzhan,” Xichen teased him and the smile burst through the tiredness with a thread of solemn laughter. He sighed small and Lan Wangji knew that, then, for a moment, they were both thinking about their mother. “Take care, Wangji.”

“Mn, xiongzhang also.”

Resting his phone next to him on the wide wood railing, he stepped up close to it, arms over the side, and looked down, down at the water, still in a way only water ever is and covered in a blanket of leaves and stumpy stems beginning to climb up to the sun.

A few metres away, a little girl hoisted her brother up, yanking under his arms to try to get him high enough he could see over the edge too; their father swooped in to lift him up properly before he could start crying – his scrunched-up face smoothed out into a smile as he studied the lotuses, one hand pressed to his mouth.

The bridge was getting fuller, flushing thick with people as they wandered through, and Lan Wangji turned to leave, pushed close to the railing to avoid knocking into a pair of aunties as they made their way past, all with handbags big enough to fit a whole watermelon with room to spare.

There was a tug on his wrist where the watch sat snug, and then it loosened and as he made to grab it, swinging back towards the lotuses and the tumbling wink of it falling, his arm clattered into the railing and he stared, horrified and red-eared and certain people were glancing at him, as the watch – silver, Swiss, forty-four thousand yuan – and his phone both plummeted into the lotuses.

Looking left and right and left again, he wondered with a shrill, too-quick panic where he should go to report it and to ask for help retrieving them.

The twist in his stomach ached; he was trying not to think about them sinking lazily towards the bottom of the lake, sunlight dangling fingers towards them to catch the metal and flash up in a mockery of him standing there and gazing down, trying foolishly, desperately to search through the plants with his eyes.

He wasn’t sure he could move; he felt stuck – as though his feet were glued to the spot – with a horror and a defeat which crashed over his head like a tidal wave, cold and gushing and soaking him through completely.

“Hey,” a voice shouted from nearby, and he blinked, looking about with a frown. People were glancing his way – though they were looking from him to… there was a boat, flat-bellied and topped with a thin wicker roof over the middle, buried in the edge of the lotuses. On it, a man stood on the nearest end, waving at him. “Is this your phone?”

The man was alone on his boat, a long pole resting near his legs and a squish of cushions dotted about the small shaded centre, jostled together on the benches in an array of colours: purple, faded green, a bright red and a dim black. In his hair, a red ribbon looped back, messy and sloppy, and the t-shirt he was wearing was peeling, white letters off black cotton in a language Wangji thought might be French but wasn’t sure.

“Yes,” Lan Wangji said and he could feel his stomach untwist and jump towards his heart, which thudded loudly. By his sides, his hands clenched; the watch would just be a write-off if it was damaged – a stupid, indulgent mistake – but he needed his phone. “Is it wet?”

Giving him an incredulous, exhausted look – in the sunlight which tumbled over him through the lattice-railings of the bridge, the bags under his eyes were dark and dragged down and he looked pale, as though he were cold or sick or sad – the man heaved a sigh. Before Wangji could say anything else (thank you, like he should have immediately, he reprimanded himself), he turned around, the boat swaying and bobbing in the lotuses, and rummaged through a black backpack for pulling out what looked like a red towel and wiping the phone with swift, rough strokes.

“Here,” the man said, leaning forwards on the very edge of the front of the boat and slotting the phone through the carved wood; Lan Wangji knelt quickly to take it from him.

“Watch,” he blurted before he could stop himself, the ache in his stomach pumping gently in time with his heartbeat; if he phone had been saved why not the watch too? “My watch – can you find it?”

“If you need to look for something, you can hire a boat to bring you out,” the man told him with a ticking shake of his head; his voice was flat, the words cut short and rushed. “You should be more careful in future – your phone nearly hit me on the head!”

“It is expensive, please,” Wangji added just as quickly, the twist in his stomach growing tighter at the thought of wasting – losing, drowning – forty-four thousand yuan. He might as well have tossed it into the sea at Shanghai Harbour.

“All the more reason to be careful!” the man called back as he pushed his boat away from the bridge. The lake rushed in to lift it up and tug it away away away away in nodding, bobbing bumps, the long pole easing the boat round in a tight circle before pushing off towards the canal and the town centre.

Tongue-tied, Lan Wangji stared after him as he left, his back a long, black-lined figure against the dull wood of his boat with the red ribbon fluttering flag-like, phone in hand and watch in the lake, and he couldn’t think of anything at all.

Chapter Text

Coffee in the Daytime

The town was bustling, full of life – all the smells and humming noises which layer over each other to make the sound of something alive – and the streets, damp and dry, were full of people: on foot, on bikes, on boats, sitting in doorways and crowded round tables laden with bowls of food or clay pots of tea; it was a strange kind of fullness, lingering on the right side of liveliness without becoming too much, and Lan Wangji found himself unknotting slowly as he walked around.

With no plan to speak of and no deadline (what did it matter if he was in Shanghai in time for dinner or not? What did it matter if he arrived back at midnight? It was a reckless thought and for all it sat uncomfortable in his stomach, the bitterness was stung with a thrill of something bold), he slacked his pace to a sedate stroll and took his time to take it all in. He peered through the murky green-glass window of a shop that seemed to sell books, stepped around an old man smoking a cigarette with one hand buried in his dog’s fur and his head tipped back in the blanket of sunshine draped over him, and glanced over a trio of restaurants and cafes, all of them busy with welcome signs out the front in Hanzi and English, customers loitering at the counters to chat to the waiters.

Underneath everything, the calls and the footsteps and the thuds and shudders and chimes that made up a town’s voice, he could hear the sound of the water, sleek and supple and steady as it swished around the poles and the boats as they went by, wrapping around the legs of the locals as they sat on the canal edges and dangled their legs down in the green-gilled cold.

Two children raced past – girls, young and dressed in pleated black skirts with matching white-striped, forest-green jumpers – followed by a third bending to swing her rucksack onto her shoulders in the middle of a shuddering jog; up ahead, a pair of boys huddled close together over something cupped in a palm, crying a pinched wavering wail that slipped over the passers-by, a curl of blood smeared on a lower lip.

Lan Wangji stopped by them and crouched down.

In the boy’s palm was a single tooth, the bottom rubbed with red-bright blood which lapped around the white body of it.

Next to him, his friend was pale and silent; he looked up once as Lan Wangji reached out to hover his own hand underneath the boy with the tooth’s, but then looked straight down again, biting his lip and clutching onto the bag in front of him like a lifeline, knuckled and fisted.

“Wait here,” he said and ducked in and out of a pharmacy a few doors down, a packet of cotton wool rolls in one hand.

Neither boy had moved when he returned – it was the same, mournful fresco over the little body of the small tooth, full of scrunched up faces and pale, taut hands – and he knelt down again, reaching out again to the boy holding the tooth.

“Is this your tooth?” he asked and the boy just wailed without a break. “Did it just fall out on its own?” the boy, his short dark hair blowing messy in the wind, seemed almost frozen in time: standing still and crying, the tooth cupped in his palm.

“I’m a dentist,” he tried. “Can I take a look?”

Lan Wangji glanced from one boy to the other and then out at the street and the passers-by still passing by, full to the brim with their own lives and thoughts and chattering, a familiar awkwardness climbing like a vine up his spine, slithering steadily as it curled around him, rope-like and stealing.

“No,” the other boy said finally, and he glared like a fierce ghost. “That’s not what happened.”

The smear of blood on his lip was shadowed as a fresh spurt of it bubbled up and out over to drip down onto his chin.

“I hit him,” the boy with the tooth sobbed; a quiet thing, full of a bone-deep, whispering misery, and he still didn’t look at Wangji, still clutching the tooth like it was a diamond. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Should not cry,” Lan Wangji informed him with a frown. “You are not the one hurt.”

The boy sobbed again, almost louder this time, and Wangji turned back to the other boy, with the glare and the blood beading along his lower lip, fumbling to open the packet of cotton rolls.

“Where is the nearest dental clinic?” he asked as he pulled one out. It would be better, after all, for him to get a proper check-up; the best he could hope to do out here on the street with only a pack of cotton pads was to stem the bleeding.

“Thirty minutes drive,” the sobbing boy murmured, his eyes red-lined and his face full with a bleeding-out sadness as he looked at his friend.

Lan Wangji frowned again, before saying to the pale boy, “Open your mouth” and peering inside at the gap where the tooth had been before and then at the tooth itself, still white-body-on-red-lake in the crying boy’s hand.

“It is only a baby tooth,” he told them both and carefully inserted a cotton roll into the gap with a single finger and a firm push to keep it in place and stem the bleeding from the gum. The boy winced and glared and prodded it half-heartedly with his own fingers. “Is your house nearby?”

“Niang, Die!” the boy shouted, breaking into a run that scampered along the edges to the restaurant by the lake-front, the side of it hanging precariously over the edge while the water lapped at the wooden struts holding it up.

Outside the restaurant’s front door, the couple – wary, tense, wavering around each other like cats who had wandered into each other’s territory – spun together to face the boy now racing towards them.

Lan Wangji bit back the ‘you shouldn’t run’ he wanted to say.

“A-Ling!” his father called with a wide smile, crouching down with his arms outstretched to envelope his son in a hug. “Wait – what are you eating? A-Ling, is this blood? What happened? Are you hurt?” his voice rose and rose and rose, the thread of alarm in it pulled to breaking point in a matter of seconds.

Wangji blinked and his cheek twitched. It was caring, he supposed, but unnecessary theatrics.

“It fell out,” A-Ling said, and Wangji noticed that nearby, the other boy – the one who had held the tooth – had crept behind a stack of bin bags, wrapping his arms around his legs, pale and squeezing back more tears.

“What fell out?” A-Ling’s father demanded, immediately tilting his son’s face up with his hand to look at him, scanning him all over as though he was expecting to see bruises battered across his skin.

A-Ling pointed to the padded cotton in his mouth and his father flushed a pale, peony-spread pink.

“Your tooth fell out?” he tutted like a mother hen. “A-Ling, you shouldn’t have pulled it out yourself! We should go to the hospital – let’s go to the car –”

“Zixuan, calm down,” A-Ling’s mother interrupted, quiet and composed as she stepped down from the restaurant’s front door to crouch next to him, leaning in too to peer at the boy’s mouth. “What happened, baobao? Did it fall out on its own?” her forehead wrinkled as she inspected the cotton roll with a quick eye. “Who gave you the cotton roll?”

A-Ling turned and pointed at Lan Wangji.

The boys had both been whisked away the frantic Zixuan – Jin Zixuan he had learned, once the man had pulled himself together again enough to shake Lan Wangji’s hand and bow in turn, stiffly polite, his cheeks still fading pink – and he had found himself ushered inside by Jiang Yanli, who had promptly sat him down with a steaming pot of tea and a home-made clay cup she poured for him with a studious grace, the sleeves of her flimsy purple cardigan flowing behind the movement.

“I should get going,” Wangji said, after he had drunk two cups of tea and she had thanked him again in between rushing to collect empty dishes and smiles from customers. He made to get up but she waved him down again.

“You can’t leave just like that,” she shook her head. “Stay and eat something – it’s on the house.”

“Couldn’t,” he refused politely, making to rise again, but she gave him a pointed look that pinned him in place.

“You helped my son,” she told him, and her voice was, he thought, a deceptive sweetness when paired with the insistence in her eyes. “I’d feel terrible if I didn’t repay your kindness somehow.”

Lan Wangji nodded and hesitated; then, in a voice he forced to be loud, he said, “Yi mein, please.”

A-Niang’s birthday, he thought again, and it twinged at something in his chest – he looked at the candle-holder placed on the table, a wooden thing carved in a lotus with a little red stub of a candle sticking out where the bud would pearl outwards, wax cooled in little, squat pearls on the edges, and decided he would perhaps like to come back here sometime.

With its open-flung shuttered windows and its draped cotton hanging loose around the wooden columns dividing the room up and drenching it with a flutter of soft sunset-pinks and peach-fuzz oranges, leeching in the smell of the sun and the cries of the birds swooping overhead off the lake, it was a gentle, stilled place. It reminded him, in the sense that it looked nothing like it but felt so very familiar, of the house he’d grown up in in Suzhou.

Perhaps if he brought Lan Xichen here, he would understand? Would be better able to articulate the way Lan Wangji felt?

Outside the windows, the sun shimmered off the lake’s surface, making it flash like fish scales, undulating in a lazy, lethargic rippling that swaying up and close and up and closer and up-up-up with a relentless rhythm.

“Here,” Jiang Yanli appeared in front of him, setting down a bowl with a heap of slick-sauce-coated noodles, studded here and there with forest-shaded shiitake mushrooms and leafy-drenched chives. Taking a seat opposite him, she carefully laid two chopsticks just to one side of him, and added a small bowl of plain rice, fluffy-white and sticky. “Is this your first time in Jinxi?”

Lan Wangji picked up the chopsticks and carefully lifted the first mouthful, giving a brisk shake of his head, “Mn. Second – no, third time.”

She smiled again and nodded, a small, bobbing movement like a stone skipping across water. “You should visit us more often here. It is a wonderful town – and not just because it’s my hometown,” there was a spark of something mischievous in her eyes then, though friendly – a joke he was invited into. “Look at the lake,” she sighed, and as she turned to look, so did he, unthinking. “It’s always beautiful. Some days, when I look at it, the way it curves around the shore feels like my mother’s arms around me.”

Her smile had turned watery; she looked away a little and Lan Wangji ducked his head to eat, eyes down and away from where she was dabbing at the corners with her cardigan sleeve.

“I love everything about Jinxi,” she added, more matter-of-fact now. “Except that there’s no dental clinic – that’s the only real downside. It’s a shame, because if there were a clinic here patients would be lining up.”

She looked at him again as he laid the chopsticks down by the side of the bowl to take a sip of water. There was something shrewd in her smile, for all its friendliness – something knowing and cajoling that made him think without a doubt that she was an older sister. It reminded him too much of xiongzhang.

“Let me know if you’re ever interested – I can recommend a good area,” she told him, before she rose to see to another customer, giving him a last, flowing-purple bow.

The car park was packed, a patchwork kaleidoscope of silvers and blacks and dusty blues with the occasional dull red and a single bright, garish canary yellow; next to his car, a battered Toyota strayed over the neat white lines marking the space.

Carefully, Lan Wangji opened the door and slid inside. Dropping the key into the pocket, he pressed the ignition and there was just silence as he sat there, feet on the pedals.

He paused, blinked, and tried again. This time, it seemed to smile at him, mocking and leering.  

“Mn,” he huffed out loud, tugging his phone from his pocket to phone the roadside assistance programme he had signed up to almost before he had bought the car. It would be a while before they turned up, though, and waiting in the car would bend the walls to crushing in around him with crunching, crackling punches so once he had called, he could search on the map for a good café.

The phone screen was dark; tapping his fingers on the screen, swiping across, it remained a steady, stubborn black.

Had it got wet in the lake? It had worked earlier – could damp have a delayed reaction with technology?

He carefully brushed a cream sleeve over the screen and the back, wiping clear the dip for the charger, and tried again. This time, the black-black-black shuddered and switched to the pale blue background; he swiped his fingers across to unlock, and it littered his apps out in front of him in columns. Dipping into his contacts, he scrolled through to the roadside assistance and tapped it once and then twice to call.

It dialled and it dialled and it dialled and it closed itself with a hiccupping beep; he frowned at the screen – but there, at the top was nothing. No internet, no signal.

Lan Wangji did not swear as a rule, but he was sorely tempted.

Covered in green paint with dragging, dripping water-stains like grass grown long, the café seemed to have sprung up out of the canals: it had a small sign reading ‘wifi’ and a large, neon sign shouting ‘OPEN’. Above the pair of old sliding doors – painted the same green as the rest of the building and crowned with a row of plants which tumbled down over the top of the doors with tangling, ticking fingers and a sparkle of star-yellow jasmine – Wangji read ‘coffee in the daytime and beer in the moonlight’.

There was no queue outside though and the doors were shut against the street, promising quiet, so he pulled one open and stepped inside, closing it neatly behind himself.

Inside it was all wood: dark brown, the ceiling hung with beams and white-paper lanterns with red tassels; there were long tables, short tables, square tables, round tables, surrounded by a mismatch of chairs so that the whole lot looked jumbled together. To one side, there was a staircase heading upwards and a jutting wooden screen dividing off a smaller part of the room; to the other, a long bar stretched down the side, covered in upside-down wine-glasses and more miniature lanterns.

At the bar sat a man, still dark-haired with the beginnings of crows’ feet around his eyes, a guitar in hand, strumming it gently, eyes closed and head nodding in time to the beat.

He looked up when Lan Wangji came in, though his hands never left the guitar and when he opened his mouth, Wangji’s skin crawled with the thought of the man deciding to sing to him:

“Iced americano, please,” he jumped in before he could sing anything, choosing a table at random and sitting down.

On the wall opposite him hung two plastic-framed posters: both of the same singer, one was in colour – all earth-tones and sand-shaded – and the other was the same but in black-and-white. The singer was gazing off into the distance, his hair ruffled by an unseen wind and his wire glasses glinting in the sunlight with a wink that defied the wistful, yearning look on the man’s face; below his face ran his stage-name: ‘Fuxue’.

Carefully, with steady-steady hands, the man – the singer in the posters – placed Lan Wangji’s coffee in front of him, eyes flicking between him and the posters.

“Do you recognise him?” he asked.

Lan Wangji gave the posters a second look; he would be the first to admit that, for all people assumed he should know these things, he wasn’t really good on popular culture. Things like musicians and models and actors and celebrities tended to pass him by unless he was forced to know something about them because Nie Huaisang babbled about their new haircut or relationship for three weeks straight or xiongzhang had had an interview or a custom suit or tickets to a film premiere or something like that.

Frankly, he preferred not knowing. From what he had learned from others, it seemed to free up a lot of space in his head for other thoughts.

“No,” he replied and that seemed to deflate the man a little. He lingered for another moment, frowning up at the posters with their blocky text and wire-rimmed retro glasses, before giving a short bow and returning back to the bar and his guitar.

In his hand, the glass was cold and the ice clinked as he lifted, sipped slow and long – and promptly stopped, swallowing quickly: the mouthful of iced americano and the grimace in one go.

It was horrible. It was, he was fairly certain, undrinkable.

Abruptly, he stood up, tucking his phone back into his pocket – there was still nothing: no signal, no internet, as there had been all the other times he’d checked it, more out of hope now and fervent insistence that things must, would go back to normal – and crossed over to the bar.

“I would like to pay,” he said, conscious that the still-full iced americano was visible dripping little beads of water onto the wood tabletop over his shoulder.

“Are you sure?” the man at the counter asked, sitting perfectly still and frowning himself. His eyes flickered to the left – to the iced americano cup – and Lan Wangji flinched internally. “There’s no rush.”

There wasn’t; the café was empty, still: quiet and cool and a still break from the breeze swishing over the canals and the roads with equal enthusiasm.

It would be rude to sit, though, without having the drink and the drink was, he was becoming more certain with time, undrinkable.

“Mn,” he nodded, and the man shrugged a little and pulled out a card reader.

“Ah, one moment,” he said and his voice, Wangji noted absently, was quieter up close than he’d thought it was – it was more of a murmured thing than anything else. Frowning, he tapped the end of the card reader, turned it the right way up and squinted at the screen and tapped the side of it this time. “Do you have cash?”

Lan Wangji felt his tongue glue to the top of his mouth.

How many times had shufu reminded him and xiongzhang about this? How many times had he deplored the way the youth didn’t carry money, expecting everything to be solved by technology and cards which you tap-tap-tapped away with? How many times had he carefully folded a spare five hundred yuan into his wallet for emergencies?

How many times had he also forgotten because he simply didn’t use it and it seemed a waste?

“Oh,” the man seemed to read the answer on his face, and they stayed there for a trio of awkward heartbeats before the door to the café swung open and a girl marched in, thirteen years old and thirteen years angry, with her dark green cardigan unbuttoned and her tie hanging loose around her neck as she flung a wrinkled backpack on a table with a clattering thud.

Lan Wangji was not scared of teenagers exactly. It couldn’t rightly be called intimidation either – but there was something unsettling about the way A-Qing – as the man had called her – was glaring at him.

She was looking at him through long hair hanging either side of her face, mouth pinched tight like shufu when he was angry, and a narrow, white-hot glare – the kind of look that said he had mortally offended her somehow and promised a painful, drawn-out retribution.

“You’re a fake,” she pronounced with an air of absolute finality. The words dropped into the air and clanged on the bar-top with a solemn, gong-like shudder. Lan Wangji blinked; her father (he was assuming) frowned again.

“Fake?” Wangji repeated, standing stock still. In his stomach, the tension eased as the worry about how to pay was shifted along on the belt and replaced by an honest confusion which tasted blank and sang blank in his head.

“You,” A-Qing said slowly, as though he were hard-of-hearing or she worried he wouldn’t understand. “Are a fake Zewu-jun. No doubt that’s why you thought you could get away with not paying for the coffee you didn’t drink. Pretending to be an idol,” she sniffed. “It’s disgraceful.”

Once, a few years back when Lan Xichen had been filming a music video involving a large number of martial arts – duly posting clips from the practice rooms of him performing spinning kicks through the air and a trio of bouncing backflips – a fan had snapped a picture of the two of them at a restaurant in Hangzhou together, captioning it in pink characters which drank up the dim light of the photo, “stunt double twins!!”.

It had gone viral in hours and Lan Wangji hadn’t left his apartment for a week until he was certain it had died down and wasn’t likely to come back if someone saw him in a supermarket. Xiongzhang had sent him a care hamper to apologise: a suite of his childhood favourites, including the cream-smooth White Rabbit sweets and a box of osmanthus cookies.

He had never before been accused of impersonating his brother, though. That was new. And just as offensive as it was confusing.

Lan Wangji would never impersonate xiongzhang. Aside from the fact that Lan Xichen was Lan Xichen and thus irreplaceable, Lan Wangji could never hope to pass for his brother by virtue of the fact that for all they looked similar enough at a distance, people who got close could read a hundred differences between xiongzhang and him.

He realised belatedly that he hadn’t actually denied it yet.

“Can I transfer it to you?” he asked, feeling his ears flush when they both stared at him. “I will pay.”

Out loud, it sounded worse and worse and worse and worse the longer they sat there, the café owner and his daughter, letting the silence fry the suggestion until it smoked and charred black.

A bright, warbling whistle bubbled in through the sliding doors as they closed behind the man from the boat. He’d changed, Lan Wangji noted, into a red-checked shirt and had tied back his hair in a high ponytail with a thick black band. Over his shoulder, the same black backpack hung, the straps caught around a wrist.

With a sharp nod, he gave the café owner a sharp, quasi-military salute, two fingers touching to his temple for half a second, and gave a toothy grin – though it wasn’t much of a smile, more a flash of teeth as though he had planned on smiling before he did it and it was too late to stop the command to his mouth – to A-Qing as she copied him.

“You,” Lan Wangji felt the word slip from his mouth before he could think. His wrist rang cold without the watch wrapped around it.

The other man glanced at him briefly, before looking at the father-and-daughter duo behind the bar, “What’s up?”

“He’s trying to leave without paying for his coffee,” the man behind the bar explained. The other man, face a mask of steady disapproval, turned to look at him them and Wangji’s ears burned hot-hot-hot.

“Not true,” he protested quickly. “Ordered coffee, tried to pay but everything is broken. Do not carry cash.”

“Oh yeah,” the boat-man nodded, resting his rucksack on the counter with a nonchalant air. “Everything’s down in Jinxi. There’s been a fire at one of the telecoms hubs.”

The girl gasped with a gleam in her eyes, mouth wide; her father frowned, giving a sharp, cricked sort of nod, “When will it be fixed?”

“No time soon,” the other man shrugged. “They haven’t put out the fire yet.”

“Awesome!” A-Qing cheered, slipping off the chair and racing to the door even as her father made to follow her. “I’m going to watch.”

“You’ll pee in your sleep tonight!” her father called after her, standing in the doorway and watching her go, shoulders stiff and long hair swishing in its tight ponytail as he turned.

The man who rescued his phone huffed a smile and shook his head, heaving his rucksack over one shoulder again – though this time through the strap – ignoring how it wrinkled his shirt up his side so it hung lopsided.

“Can you help me?” Lan Wangji blurted, eyes fixed on the man’s sleeve, fingers pinched as though he was about to grab it – as though, in his mind, he already had. His ears burned so fiercely he was surprised it wasn’t spreading down his whole face, leaving him tomato-red and ready to sink into the lake. “Never asked this before, but – for the coffee –” he trailed off, gesturing vaguely in way which he hoped would be understood and added, eyes closed, “Not this kind of person, would rather find some way myself but –”

“Follow me,” the other man interrupted him and Wangji was too shocked to remind him that interrupting was rude. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’ll help you earn it instead, how’s that?”

“What could I do?” Lan Wangji trailed after him, helpless and suspicious and hoping he wasn’t being blindly naïve to trust a random man whose name he didn’t know just because he saved his phone from the lake.

The man threw him a quirked look over his shoulder before quipping, “Valuable hard work.”

Lan Wangji was certain he was doing an appalling job of keeping the horror off his face. He could feel it wriggling along his bones under his clothes, a live and squirming thing which tickled so he shivered.

A few feet away, the crabs scuttled about, claws clicking with a rattling rushing sound that was muffled by the hair on their bodies as they swarmed in a heap like ants: piled high in a shifting hill and seething in rocking, rolling waves going in and out and in out and in and out and click-click-click-click.

Nearby, the workers coming off the fishing boat were tramping down the side in their wellies – padded green and bright yellow and a hot pink with daisies and a no-nonsense black – calling things out to the others on the dock, a pair of elderly grannies and an old uncle closest to Lan Wangji and the man who’d rescued his phone, as they moved in to begin catching the crabs one by one, inspecting them with soft, patting hands to check for broken shells.

“The crabs need to be packed for shipping inland,” the man explained, waving an arm around with a lofting, aimless air. “So they’re picked up, checked for broken shells, their claws are clipped so they can’t pinch, they’re bathed in cold salt-water so they don’t bleed, then they’re packed in a crate and sent out to restaurants and hotels and the like.”

Wangji watched as a crab was held tight on a wooden top, pincer pinched together, and a knife flashed down, neatly cutting off the top of the claw. The crab was turned around, grasped again, and the knife flashed a second time.

The bits of claw were swept onto the floor; the crab was dunked unceremoniously into a nearby plastic tank filled with salt-laced water – there were other crabs in there too, floating down and sitting on the bottom, scuttling out of the way of the hands that dived down searching for them to pluck out.

“Can’t,” he got out, the urge to step back, back, back and away – the sense that he was somehow tainted just by watching this – making his muscles seize.

The man was just watching him, saying nothing and giving nothing away; he looked tired again, Wangji noted, or perhaps it was just that the sunlight streaming down was making the bags under his eyes brighter and bruise-deeper.

“Don’t you know who I am?” he tried – but that was wrong; arrogant, arrogant and all wrong and he winced, but it was too late, the man snorted and replied,

“Sure – you’re a penniless man,” he jerked his head at the scene before them, which had sunk into a well-oiled machine, crabs passing along it like on a conveyor belt. “But go on then, what’s the problem?”

“I’m a Lan,” he said, because that was the simplest way to explain everything. His family were old, wealthy and, even more so since xiongzhang’s success, well-known; there had been Lans in Suzhou, in Jiangnan for a thousand generations. “Vegetarian,” he added, seeing nothing better than a blank disbelief on the other man’s face. “Dentist,” he added again. “Do no harm.”

The other man softened a little and Lan Wangji felt lifted, lighter – and then:

“Popo,” he called to one of the grannies, her shoulders hunched and her hair a stark, curled white. “He’s here to work! Don’t give him the knife, eh – he’s just a tourist!”

The room he’d managed to rent was small and cluttered with the single bed and a table, the candle stuck into a battered copper dish that swayed precariously with the slightest brush of air. With its plaster-coated walls and stripped-back bed, blankets folded at one end and the pillow a traditional wood block wrapped in a plain silk cover at the other, the window covered over only by a pair of slatted shutters which let the night air slip through with cold, salt-tipped fingers, the room was nothing like the kinds of hotel rooms he was used to staying in: it was old-fashioned and a little run-down, with the chipped plaster and the dents knocked into the wood, and sparse.

Still, it was a room. Lan Wangji had been prepared to sleep in his car, so he was determined to see this as a bonus.

It was hard, though: a cricket had hopped through the window and had to be escorted back outside in closed-cup hands; he had had to slip three times down the corridor to the communal bathroom as the first twice there had been someone else inside; the small table by the side of the bed was barely big enough to hold both the candle and his phone – he was half-convinced he would wake up in the morning to find it dotted with white wax-spots; and he was being forced to sleep in his day-clothes, crab-scented and sea-splashed.

It was a room, he reminded himself firmly as he sat on the bed, eyes closed, dreaming of meditation. It was a room and he was grateful for it.

Wangji sighed and opened the shutters; sleep was so far away – he felt destabilised here and yet, grounded, as though he had been uprooted and replanted in a different pot, waiting for the soil to bed in around him.

The breeze blustered in with a licking, barking rush, blowing out the candle in its dish and sending it spinning round and round and round.

Outside, the night was a glittering, stuttering thing made of moonlight and blinking stars, pin-pricks half-covered by wisping, drifting hazes of cloud; it played over the lake’s surface, the light, silver-shod and dancing across the water as it swished and swayed underneath, dragging the stars’ reflections stretched long and thin.

It washed everything – the lake, the sky, the bridges and the canals with their bush-cut trees, and the houses hung with red-string lanterns – a soft, dark blue: sleeplike and dreamlike and sealike.

A cricket chirped nearby and the stars smiled and the breeze brushed cold, gentle fingers against his cheek, and Lan Wangji remembered his mother whispering to him about the moon and showing him the stars, drawing lines from one to the next to the next with his tiny, chubby hand in hers, and he murmured, “Zhu nin shengri kuaile, a-niang.”

The road back to Shanghai was quiet; an easy drive, smooth and uncomplicated. Lan Wangji’s shoulders ached: at some point in the night, he had fallen asleep and had woken up slumped over the windowsill in the pale morning, dew laced over his hair and face and hands, the muscles in his neck and upper back settled stiff.

His phone was settled comfortably in its hands-free set, the notification that shufu’s message was still unread frowning at him in white characters which vanished under the glare of the sunlight, and he resolved that Nie Huaisang was, unfortunately, right. When he was back in Shanghai, he would call his uncle and explain – he would admit his honesty and his recklessness and ask for help.

Shufu would only be a little disappointed; shufu had never been happy that Lan Wangji had joined Wen Ruohan’s practice.

Shufu had never explained why it was that he hated Wen Ruohan – because for all they were Lans and Lans weren’t meant to hate people exactly, the way Lan Qiren oscillated between red-hot and white-cold fury whenever Wen Ruohan was mentioned said that without needing words – but it was a good thing now: any disappointment he would have at Wangji’s hot-headedness would be tempered by his pleasure Wangji was no longer working with Wen Ruohan.

His phone rang; the number, he saw, was unknown and he frowned, tapping the screen to pick it up.

“Lan Wangji,” Wen Ruohan’s voice, low and steady, burst out of his phone. “How is your new job?”

He gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles shone bone-white through his skin. “Don’t have one. You saw to that.”

Wen Ruohan laughed; a small, huff-snorting thing. “So naïve, Lan Zhan. Who would want to hire a whistleblower like you? Especially one who blurts things out in public like you did?

“No,” he continued. “I have an offer for you. Kneel in front of me and beg for forgiveness. Then, if you do well enough at it, I’ll take you back.”

Lan Wangji eased up on the accelerator. In the outside lane of the freeway, another car shot past, the owner giving him a rude hand signal and shouting something at him through the car window.

“Why would I work for a quack like you?” he said shortly and jabbed at his phone to end the call.

Seizing the steering wheel with both hands, he slammed on the brake just in time and swerved with a screech round the u-turn and hit the accelerator with a kick, sending the car roaring off back down the freeway.

On the signpost hanging over the lanes, it showed a fork coming up: Suzhou to the right, Jinxi to the left.

Sticking to the inside lane, he sped along, back down to the lake and the lotuses under the bridge.

Chapter Text

Swords Hall

Spiralling up, up, up, he followed the path as it sloped on a constant, steady rise like a yellow-grass coil curving towards the half-sunk hilltop, surrounded on either side by willow trees which swished sighs along the breeze, long finger-spun branches drifting ribbon-like through the air in gentle greens.

Several metres away, the land dropped off into the lake, a steeping bank growing out of it, loaded with soaked-dark earth and water-thick grass, the trees dipping their heads down and in, dyeing the lakewater a thicker green and yet clearer without the dazzle of the sunlight.

It was beautiful and peaceful; the noises from the road behind him had softened into only the faint zip of the occasional car or truck streaming past, now he could hear the swashing of the tide up the earth and the twittering of birds in the trees, rustling the leaves and the flick-flapping of their wings as they burst out of sprouting clusters of leaves to soar off through the sky, wheeling up out over the lake and circling back in over the town with quick, easy arcs.

Soon enough, the path spread out, lotus-like, into a paddle of stamped-down grass, a circle surrounded an old fishing boat – chipped-white-painted and tilted on its side, the black letters of her name scrawled along one side a strange neat-lined counterpoint to the rust which had settled on the hull and the metal steering wheel in patches of copper-red.

There, wiping a spanner on a familiar faded-red towel, stood the man who had rescued his phone and sent him to pack crabs to earn money and who Lan Wangji had been absolutely certain was a fisherman, not an estate agent.

He hovered, glancing around the boat, waiting for the estate agent to appear from round the side of the boat.

“Hello?” the man frowned at him. “Mr Tourist? Can I help you?”

“Looking for estate agent,” Lan Wangji explained with a polite bow in greeting, still looking past the other man’s shoulder. Jiang Yanli had seemed to think the estate agent would be available – was he perhaps not here? “Wei Wuxian.”

“Did Yanli send you?” the man asked conversationally, climbing back inside the boat with an easy push up off the ground and over the slumped hull, and Wangji frowned at him briefly. Was it proper for him to address Jiang Yanli so informally? He supposed it could be; he was an outsider to the town, after all – she could have invited him to do so years ago.

“Mn,” he nodded, even though the man couldn’t see him. “When will he be back?”

The man’s head popped back up out of the boat and he jumped down, landing in a crouch and straightening up with a release of air that whooshed out of him. He was spanner-less and towel-less and the plain white of his t-shirt gleamed with snake-lined wrinkles across it; reaching up, he began to roll the sleeves of his black button-up down again, rebuttoning the cuffs on the loosest fitting.

“Ah,” he said. “That’s me. What do you need?”

Lan Wangji stared at him. He felt frozen from head-to-toe; he was suddenly aware that he should say something and suddenly more aware of his tongue than he ever had been – and he simply could not speak.

The man gave him a sketched bow and flashed a licence out of his pocket, holding it close enough so that he could read the characters easily.

“Wei Wuxian,” he announced. “Estate agent.”

“This is the only location?” Lan Wangji asked again, standing in the space, looking about at the peeling walls and the scratched glass windows; the bathroom was small and the kitchen facilities were limited – while he wouldn’t want much himself, if he intended to provide refreshments for patients, he would struggle – and the rooms were dimmer than he would prefer.

Wei Wuxian had swept his arms out to show him the view of the lake from the front – the best view, he had claimed, a healthy view for patients, and Lan Wangji had bitten his cheek to avoid reminding him that he was a dentist, not a doctor and beautiful views did not really assist people in brushing their teeth – and told him it was premium location.

And that it was the only place available for his clinic.

“Ah,” Wei Wuxian scratched at the bridge of his nose a little awkwardly. “Yes. There’s not many properties like this around, you know – most of them are cafes and the like which wouldn’t really work for you, would it?”

“Mn,” Lan Wangji was a little deflated; he had hoped there would be somewhere… nicer. Somewhere which needed less work doing to it – this place was old and battered and dark.

“Well, now that’s settled,” Wei Wuxian clapped his hands; it rang loud in the silence, like a hollowed gunshot, and Wangji flinched. “Let’s go see your house!”

Settled? He supposed it was settled, if there was no other option.

After the disappointment of the clinic, he had thought he could not possibly be more disillusioned about his decision to stay: he had determined to look positively at the places Wei Wuxian showed him next. Things were opportunities to remodel, rebuild, rebrand; slates to wipe clean rather than stained cushions beyond rescue and destined for the rubbish bin.

He could see out of the corner of his eye the fledgling smile tweaking at the corners of Wei Wuxian’s mouth as Lan Wangji stared at the wallpaper with a visceral horror.

It was orange, bright orange, patterned with gaudy purple-and-yellow flowers bigger than his head, sprawling across the walls in a geometric scrawl that was blinding on first glance and hypnotising if you looked too hard.

He closed his eyes briefly and looked away, peering into the bathroom as a priority – if it had been like the one in the clinic: a single cracked sink and no toilet, he would have marched straight out of the building and demanded to know whether Wei Wuxian was testing him. As it was, it was tiled everywhere in a deep jade-green stone, but all the facilities were there: shower, sink, toilet.

He could live with sewage-water tiles; he could not live without a toilet.

Still, it did have good feng shui and pairs of elegant sliding doors leading to the bedrooms: the handles were carved into curving, long-necked cranes, their beaks almost touching and their feet buried in mirrored thatches of rushes and bamboo stalks which rose up behind them, cut from a honeyed wood which gleamed yellow-ish against the cream paper.

“Will need remodelling,” he said when he had finished taking stock. The quiet had been a steady thing; Wei Wuxian had been waiting for him to say something he thought, and there was something touching about that, considering how talkative he apparently was.

“Ahhh, and here I thought geometric flower wallpaper would be entirely your style,” Wei Wuxian grinned at him, bouncing on his heels. “No, obviously not – so, what is your style then?”

Lan Wangji looked at him, a clashing kaleidoscope of colour against the backdrop of the wallpaper with his faded purple t-shirt and navy-blue hoodie with tasselled-white strings. He fitted in there, in the rooms and the house and the town; he seemed at ease in a way Wangji could only envy.

“Simple,” he said eventually, glancing back around the rooms. One hand drifted out to skate over the arch of the head of one of the cranes, skin-separated and smooth. “Antique, light, classic.”

Wei Wuxian just nodded, tapping his fingertips against his mouth, brushing over his bottom lip as he twisted round on a heel to look the space over again.

“That’s not so hard,” Wei Wuxian scrunched his nose a little and looked directly at Wangji. “I thought you were going to say that you – I don’t know – would only have spotless white walls and leather furniture imported from France and hand-spun silk curtains in the perfect shade of blue to match your Egyptian cotton sheets.”

His eyes were laughing, but it was a laughter Wangji couldn’t hear as his stomach sank down, down, down like his watch in the lake; he felt small and bitter and stiff.

“Prefer light fittings from Denmark,” he clipped out, his hands creasing the hem of his jumper as he breathed in and out and in again – four and four and four.

Wei Wuxian stared at him, cheek popping into a smile for half a second. Behind them, underneath and around them, the lake-water whispered on its way through the canals, slick and swishing with gentle skirts, sweeping and swooping and calling them both down with a soft humming smile.

“I can do that,” Wei Wuxian told him, tapping his own chest with a closed fist. “Renovations and all.”

Lan Wangji frowned; this man, the red ribbon still in his hair again, had in a handful of days, been a fisherman, an estate agent and now he was also an interior designer?

“Are you scamming me?” he asked, blunt and too loud – louder than he’d meant to be. The words echoed around the small house and the silence when Wei Wuxian froze bit at him with square teeth.

“Why would I do that?” Wei Wuxian rocked back on his shoes, the toes of them – converse, the white rubber stained with all kinds of brown-black muck in long, lazy streaks. He didn’t sound offended, just puzzled.

“I am not from here,” Lan Wangji explained and his heart thudded in his ears, red and thick and quick-quick-quick. He pulled his hands away from his hem and closed his eyes briefly with an inhale. “You know I have money – you saw my phone. And my watch.”

He remembered, with a flash of white-bright clarity, that he had even told Wei Wuxian how much it had cost him.

Uncle had always advised him not to flash fancy things around: it can make people uncomfortable, he had said when Wangji had just been A-Zhan in a pressed blue shirt with a shining leather satchel for school, and it can make people jealous. Sometimes people will want to take it from you, and if you wave your nice things around you advertise them to people who won’t think twice before taking advantage.

“No,” Wei Wuxian blinked at him and shook his head. All trace of the smile from earlier – the underwater laughter – was gone; instead, he was serious, his soft eyes solid and stony. “No. I wouldn’t do that. Why would I do that? I don’t care about your money.

“Look,” he added, shifting to a darting-fast tone that was all business, abrupt and slick. “I do everything for minimum wage. Whatever it is that needs doing. Okay? There’s no scam. Just good old honest hard work. Get it?”

Lan Wangji’s tongue felt wooden in his mouth. He nodded.

“Aiya,” Wei Wuxian sighed, jostling his bag on his shoulder. “I was right – you are difficult. All you city people, so uptight.”

“Your qualifications,” Wangji was tense, too tense: he felt like a rabbit trapped between hands and trembling. “Show me.”

For a moment, triumph seeped through his whole body when Wei Wuxian shook his head, mouth in an ‘o’; and then Wei Wuxian pulled a card wallet out, letting one end drop with a flourish of his wrist so a litany of business cards and licences cascaded down in a long, long line, all leather-backed and plastic-wrapped in their individual pouches, bouncing and waving back and forth and back again.

Lan Wangji stared and the curse which had twisted his tongue into wood had spread to his jaw and down to his throat. He couldn’t speak; he couldn’t swallow.

“I’ll consider myself hired,” Wei Wuxian said and left.

It was a childish thing – selfish, really, selfish in the way that children were: honest and swift and unblinking – but the thing he missed most when Lan Xichen was on tour was their weekly video calls.

Lan Xichen always tried to find the time, he knew, whenever he could – but tours were complicated and busy almost hour-to-hour and with shifting timezones, it was hard.

Their calls were the last booked-in item in almost every week: Sunday afternoon, just the two of them – a digital replacement for the Sunday afternoons they’d spent just the two of them, ever since their mother had died and their father had gone and Lan Wangji had clung to his xiongzhang like a limpet on a rock.

It had been three months since the last one – thirteen weeks, to be exact – and Wangji hadn’t realised how much he’d missed them until he’d answered the video chat (Lan Xichen was always the one to call; there wasn’t any reason why, it was just how it was) and found himself almost brimming over with questions and news tripping over each other on his tongue and tying him in knots like a child again.

Xiongzhang had laughed, clear and bright, and he had shook his head like a disgruntled cat, huffing, but it was too hard to not smile.

“So, how is Jinxi?” Xichen, thankfully, stopped the battle going on in Wangji’s head before he could tangle himself any further.

“Mn, good,” Wangji answered. “Clinic is opening in four days.”

“Oh, that’s exciting!” Xichen beamed. “It’s a very impressive achievement, opening your own clinic. You should be very proud.”

Wangji hummed a little, though he couldn’t stop the small smile which curled at the corners of his mouth; it flickered some these days, though – a lightbulb that didn’t quite fit – but he had expected that. Moving was stressful; starting a business was stressful; and he had always been a person of habit and routine.

It made sense that upending his entire life on a split-second decision made out of spite wouldn’t leave him happy, even if it was to make his teenage idea of owning his own practice spring out of the ground.

Things would settle with time – he would settle with time.

It was a little too late that he realised he had fallen into thought again, and that xiongzhang could always, always read the smallest-scribbled details of his mood.

“Wangji –” Xichen started, gently, too gently, and Wangji – for the first time in years; he wasn’t sure he could even remember the last time – interrupted his brother briskly.

It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would let it sit until time had rubbed the edges where Lan Wangji clashed with his new life soft.

“Want to hear about xiongzhang’s tour,” he said and the ball of knots in his stomach grew and grew as Xichen frowned, a little crinkle in between his eyebrows and a pensive concern lingering on his face before he gave in with a sigh which wasn’t so much heard as seen in the smoothing out of his forehead.

As he listened to Xichen’s stories about the stomach-swooping feeling of looking over an infinity edge pool on top of a skyscraper hotel in Tokyo and the look on the waitress’ face in an American restaurant the US promoter had taken him to when he told her he was vegetarian, the ball of knots in his stomach started to unstick.

And when he teased Lan Xichen – sly and solemn – about the girl in London who had fainted like a princess into his arms when he’d pulled her up on stage for a song and the whole arena had wolfwhistled and cheered as he’d carried her over to an on-rushing medic and a security guard, bridal-style, and she’d blushed bright red before stealing a kiss on his cheek even as the security guard pulled her away, and Lan Xichen had flushed pale-pink and earnestly flustered about what else could he have done, Wangji had found himself laughing – silent but true with shaking shoulders and the ball of knots had dissolved into a mess of jostling strings.

Overhead, the lanterns tangled in a trill with the triangle-cut bunting strung across the little square: slips of paper in yellow-green-pink-blue-orange, jumbled up and a bright dark in the sunlight as it streamed across them, stretching them along the ground in thin, tall shadow-sticks. There was music playing from an old sound system, resting on four black-rubber wheels and hooked up to the speakers around the square so the music thudded, tinny and peeled squeaking, everywhere.

A trio of grannies and uncles sat at a low table shaded by a broad-branch tree; over by an open-air grill, Jiang Yanli was talking to another woman; nearby, A-Ling’s father was directing plates being distributed by a pair of aunties, breaking off partway through to shout something at a man with the same round face and yellow-scale clothes who was busy heaping portions of fish onto a plate.

It was loud: full of a furious sound that felt tall and stiff, like a wall in front of him.

He had told Nie Huaisang about the party when he had been invited; Huaisang’s initial reply had been to splutter over the idea of someone outside of their conjoined social circles inviting Lan Wangji to a party.

Once Wangji had hung up, Huaisang had texted him two words: “sunk cost”.

It had been helpful – though he hadn’t yet told Huaisang that. It was best not to let him become too convinced of his own genius.

“Sunk cost,” he muttered to himself, feeling like a ship on water: bobbing and buffeting this way and that and in need of steadying straight and stick-up to the sky.

“What are you waiting for?” the voice from behind him was enough to make him nervous on its own and he twitched a little as Wei Wuxian came to a stop next to him, his hands tied up with the looping strap of a camera, grey-black-stripes and an inch wide.

“Oh,” Wei Wuxian looked down at the camera, “I’m taking photos of the party.”

“For minimum wage,” Lan Wangji contributed. There was a tug in his stomach – uncomfortable and unsure. People did not normally read things in his face. People normally thought he was cold and untouchable and unreadable.

“Unfortunately, this one’s for free,” Wei Wuxian grinned at him as though it was a joke and raised the camera, forefinger hovering over the button with a grim-grey cloud.

“No photos,” he burst out quickly, taking a step back and raised an arm to shield his face. It had flared, the anxiety, like a spray of water against a wall: high and fast and dying damp to leave a heavy, gaping silence. “Please just – respect my image rights.”

It had been nearly six years since Lan Xichen had won China’s Idol competition, three years into his degree at the Central Conservatory of Music, and photographers had materialised outside his flat overnight – a bombardment of clicking, flashing, blinding-bright lights and voices shouting, calling out.

Six years and Lan Wangji still hadn’t adjusted to the way cameras followed his brother almost everywhere, crowding through windows and lurking behind doors; trailing him too sometimes until xiongzhang stepped in and weaponised disappointment – and lawyers – so they stopped again.

He wasn’t sure he would ever really adjust to it – he wasn’t sure how xiongzhang had; if he even had, really, underneath all the smiles and the perfect politeness.

“Okay, okay,” Wei Wuxian huffed and it sounded like a laugh. “No photos – I got it!”

The relief tasted sweet and sticky, like oranges or lychee fruit squishing against the hard palate at the top of his mouth, and he lowered his arm, giving a stiff nod.

“Mr Dentist!” one of the uncles was waving at him from his seat by two of the grannies. “Come sit with us! Ah, yes, sit here, young man,” the man continued, patting the cushion on the ground next to him and lifting a bottle to pour a splashing glass of baijiu into a cup. “Let this one get you a drink – I brew this myself – think of it as a welcome gift!”

“Don’t drink,” Lan Wangji managed to get out, a kind of horrified nervousness settling in his stomach with the kind of weight that meant it was there to stay. “Alcohol,” he clarified. “Don’t drink alcohol.”

The grannies and the uncle all looked at him; one clucked her tongue at him – the other, lifting her hands, gestured for him to pass the cup over to her.

“Lan Wangji!” Jiang Yanli bowed her head to him from where she approached, her hands full with further plates of food which she settled carefully down on the table. The woman she had been talking to when he had first arrived was with her and smiled at him, pretty and flushed a little pink above her neat-lined lipstick. “Oh, let me introduce you: this is Baoshan Sanren,” she introduced the granny who had taken his baijiu and he bowed, “Granny Wen,” he bowed again to the lady who had clucked at him, “and Fourth Uncle.”

Fourth Uncle smiled too – but it was a little dimmed and a little watchful.

“And this,” Yanli nudged the woman next to her gently. “Is Qin Su.”

“Nice to meet you,” Qin Su bobbed him a bow and handed him a bowl of bi luo chun, which he placed in a free spot on the table, squeezing it in next to a dish covered with cross-hatched mandarin fish, their eyes beading up at him. “I run the Szechuan restaurant in town, you should come by some time! You can ask me anything – I know everything around here.”

Lan Wangji smiled a bit and nodded, murmuring a thank you.

“I’m one of your neighbours,” Qin Su added, waving a small, pink-nailed hand towards Granny Wen. “As is Wen-popo. We’re all very excited to meet you – it’ll be so nice to have someone living in Yanli’s old house again!”

“Thank you,” he murmured again.

A breeze blustered through, catching handfuls of grass and scattered yellow-budded pollen and throwing it over the table; there was a stir of sighs and then the pat-pat-patter of hands brushing as shards of grass and little sputtered patches of pollen were brushed off and back onto the floor.

Lan Wangji watched, silent and decidedly apprehensive, as Baoshan Sanren dipped her head to eat a mouthful of fish whose silver-cast scales glimmered sticky with mandarin sauce and yellow-spot pollen.

“You should try the bi luo chun, it’s a local delicacy and no one makes it better here than me,” Qin Su told him conspiratorially, giving him a slipping wink.

“Not hungry,” he said, glancing over the marinated shrimp, and searching, eyes-wide, for submerged grass or any more fluttered-flung dust or pollen or seeds from the ground, brown-sunk and invisible. “Thank you.”

Around him, there were glances, quick and pointed, and he curled his hands against his legs.

Jiang Yanli folded her hands in her cardigan – pink this time and laced down the edges with little white-bud flowers on a green, curling vine – and Lan Wangji found himself thinking that for all someone like Wei Wuxian seemed to fit here, with his tired t-shirts and his quick-running mouth, so like the canals and the rivulets which traipsed through the town’s alleys, she didn’t seem to fit too well either: there was a fragility about her, like she was made of porcelain and about to break.

“How is the house? If there are any problems, please let me know and I’ll see to them immediately,” she asked him, ringing earnest. “I haven’t had any tenants in there for a while now, so there might be a couple of issues.”

“Mn,” he nodded, and this time relief tasted like smooth white rice: soft and slick across his tongue. “Small things. If you would like a list, I have compiled one – I can email it over?”

“Oh,” she swayed back on a recoil, a frown clouding her face briefly. “Of course, yes, absolutely.”

“Not urgent,” he added, thinking to clarify – the house was perfectly fine to live in, after all, these were just minor things: a few tiles starting to crack, a tiny ripped hole in the screen. “Necessary only when you have time.”

“Not to worry at all,” Yanli smiled again and rushed out, “Please excuse me,” before she hurried away back to the grill where the fish was sizzling in a haze-thick column of smoke rising up into the air.

“You’re the new dentist?” a man asked, leaning over from a nearby table, his body twisted round from where he was sitting – his legs still facing the table, his head and chest turned to face Wangji. The woman next to him turned her head as well, sitting ramrod straight with a cool, steady gaze.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji nodded, glancing over the man’s black t-shirt and purple striped shirt over dark blue, ragged-ended jeans; the woman appraised him coolly, her long red skirt wrapped around her legs. “Lan Wangji.”

“Jiang Wanyin,” the man introduced himself and Lan Wangji wondered whether he was Jiang Yanli’s brother or a cousin of some kind or if it was just a coincidence – it would hardly be an uncommon surname in the Yangtze delta. “I run the hardware store in town.”

“I’m Wen Qing,” the woman added in turn, as though she were mirroring him. “I run the supermarket.”

“Wen Qing started studying to be a doctor,” Jiang Wanyin added, and there was a beam of smiles and nods full of bubbled pride. “So you will have a lot in common, I’m sure!”

Lan Wangji hummed in reply, giving a short nod.

He did not understand: their pride was that she had started studying? How was that something to be proud of – to start but never finish? What did they expect he and she would understand together – they were nothing the same.

“I haven’t seen you buy anything in the supermarket yet,” Wen Qing said – and it sounded like it should be chatter, idle conversation, but there was a casual strictness to her voice which said it wasn’t. “You should stop by tomorrow morning – we get fresh fruit first thing.”

“Mn, thank you,” Wangji bowed a little. He didn’t look up at her again; he wouldn’t go and he knew it, and he was slightly afraid after Wei Wuxian had scanned his face and found words, that Wen Qing would do the same and read his refusal.

The truth was this: he had had the same food package delivered to his door by the same company every week for the last eight years – and it included a rainbow of fruit, from squat satsumas to scaled lychees and plump-paired cherries and bruise-dark plums; even the occasional pineapple with its long, stiff leaves – ever since he had arrived home for the holidays after his first term of university and Lan Qiren had taken him aside, quiet and scanning him critically up-and-down, to give a long-winded, meandering lecture about how he shouldn’t neglect himself; studies were important but not more important than himself, did he understand, and if he needed help or support, that could be arranged, shufu would not have him suffer on either count for whatever reason…

It was familiar; it was routine.

Wen Qing smiled small but it was a smile that was needle-sharp.

“Of course,” she said and turned back to eat, Jiang Wanyin’s head trailing after her.

The music was still thumping away, heavy with a thick bass and a thin melody which was lost underneath the cacophony of voices – deep and roaring and light and tinkling and surging up-up-up – and his head was starting to ache and his stomach twisted and he wondered, curt and cracked, why he had come in the first place.

Sitting at the edge of a table, he felt pushed out; like an island watching the shore and wishing it could join while the sea swept on and on and on around, bubbling and boiling and thudding bum-bum-bum through the bass speaker.

Everyone around him had settled back into their pre-arranged groups, chatting away with an ease which shut him out, and he stood up, fleeing with a quick walk into the community centre, ducking under the sign which read ‘Swords Hall’ with a breath.

At least, he supposed, he hadn’t had to find a gap in the conversation to excuse himself – but that was a bitter-sour thing.

His chest was tight as he unlocked his phone and pressed the buttons with a blind muscle-memory.

Xiongzhang answered on the first ring, “Wangji?”

“Xiongzhang,” he breathed and steadied himself on the desk in front of him as his brother’s voice wound its way through his head and down his spine, a warm wash of calm.  

The room he was in was a tattered old thing: full of sand-painted walls and a trio of potted orchids on the windowsill, bloom-less and drooping; spaced around were bits of junk: a corded telephone in a stolid black, a transistor radio in mud-brown with its dials at odd angles; a pair of plastic yellow in-and-out trays stacked on top of each other, stuffed with half-folded letters and scribbled notes in a slapdash pinyin.

In the corner, just below his head, the microphone light blinked red-red-red-red and he blinked back and turned to face the wall to blot it out.

“I don’t like it here,” he said and the words were too big for his throat and clawed, scratching at him as they went. “I should have stayed in Shanghai. Everything is outside and there’s dust and grass and pollen everywhere, even over the food.

“This café owner,” he added, remembering Song Lan and the way his gaze had flickered to and from the poster in the café; the pause after Wangji had said he didn’t know the singer or the song. “Is an old singer. Has his own posters in his café – asks people if they know him; no one does.  

“There’s a woman too – started studying to be a doctor but never finished,” the words were sticking in his mouth, dry and dusty like the food and the ground and the people outside. “If they had had the talent or the ambition, they would have made it – instead, they failed and they cling to their failures. Only cowards live in the past. Must look to the present. Xiongzhang, what if I become the same?”

There it was, sung out loud: that coiled fear in his stomach, knotting itself tighter and tighter and tighter.

“You will not,” Xichen said firmly, before he hummed a little and added, gentle and thoughtful, “You shouldn’t judge them too harshly, Wangji: unfulfilled dreams tend to hold a heavy place in the heart.”

He lingered in the room with its throwback furniture and shade-less bulb looming white-pasted overhead until he felt steady enough to go back out; ready enough to try to be better – friendlier, less bothered by the dirt and the dust and the tired, worn-through sense that hung over everything like a shroud.

Outside, the sun gleamed and the people stared at him – a sea of eyes and faces and unblinking eyes – Song Lan, the café owner, with a microphone in hand, Wen Qing straight-backed as Granny Wen patted her arm, and Wei Wuxian, Jiang Yanli’s hands reaching for his sleeve as he glared, contemptuously and stirring, swirling for a fight.

In his hand, his phone felt hot and heavy and slippery like it was wet.

He looked at the microphone in Song Lan’s hand and the old sound system and the tannoys which circled around the community centre and the square and thought of the light in the office – blinking red-on-red-on-red-on-red-on.

With a shrill trill, the doorbell rang – and when it rang, it chimed through the house.

Slowly, his hair tied back loosely and his feet bare, Lan Wangji padded to the door across the smooth wood planks – slick and a burnished dark brown which shone, here and there, with streaks of honey and amber-like-gold – and opened it with a twist of his wrist.

He didn’t look at the delivery man when he collected the parcel and signed with a flicking finger on the touchpad presented to him.

“Thank you,” he murmured, stepping back with the box in his arms, ready to close the door, when the delivery man snorted and he snapped up, a wave of something angry biting through him with a hanging, open mouth.

Wei Wuxian glared back at him, something set in the line of his jaw; his teeth were grinding together, Lan Wangji could see it in the press of his cheek but ignored it.

“You are staring,” Wangji informed him with a curt, hot-ice fury, his knuckles white around the box as he gripped it, careful not to jostle it too much or drop it.

He should close the door, he knew. He wanted to close the door. He definitely did not want to hear whatever Wei Wuxian had to say to him – or had to show him: he remembered the way Wei Wuxian had looked at him when he’d emerged out of the office, that face which had promised blood and the crunching snap of bones breaking.

He stayed stuck, though, and couldn’t think to move.

“You think you’re better than everyone,” Wei Wuxian pronounced, deliberate and slow-slow-slow. He said it in Mandarin, too, not the Suzhou dialect he normally spun through quick-as-the-wind; as though he was talking down to him, sure he wouldn’t understand if he spoke in dialect.

“Wrong,” Lan Wangji shot back coldly. His feet didn’t move. He kept holding the box.

“Let me guess: you were always clever and good at school, so you got good marks and you became a dentist. Sure, you had some bumps along the way – small speed bumps, just enough to slow you down, but nothing major. Nothing to stop the smoothness of your life,” Wei Wuxian started, and what hit hardest wasn’t the low note of his voice but the matter-of-fact ring to it. As though he knew Lan Wangji inside and out. “You got over everything you faced, so you assumed that willpower could get anyone anywhere.”

“I do not have to hear this. Not from you,” Wangji still couldn’t move. The box was slipping in his grasp and he wanted to let it drop, to hear the vase inside break; to lash out and punch, to bite-bite-bite like he had done as a child when things were unfair and adults spoke to him then as though he didn’t understand anything.

“Why not?” Wei Wuxian snorted again, and the fire smouldered in his eyes, dark and greedy and punching him back. “You judge other people’s lives so easily, why shouldn’t I judge you? What’s the difference? Just know – life isn’t so fair for all of us.”

He hovered a moment longer, before he turned away with a shake of his head and Lan Wangji found his feet were free – he could move again – and he shut the door with a too-quick, too-strong arm, hearing the slam reverberate with a hum throughout the house.

Carefully, he set the box down on the sofa, steadying himself with a long, long breath in and a sigh that cleared out his lungs.

The doorbell rang again – thin and high – and his reassembled calm was scattered like puzzle pieces on the floor.

Marching over, there was a shout in his veins he hadn’t felt in years, his fists clenched by his sides and everything in him tense. He felt wound, like a spring about to bounce up and jump, jump, jump around.

He yanked the door open; it shuddered and creaked and Nie Huaisang fell into him with a wail, mascara smudged down his cheeks in long, inked rivers, the fan in his hand clattering to the floor even as he buried his head in Wangji’s chest, ruining the jumper he had on.

“I took a cab to get here,” he sobbed, giving a little, starting hiccup. “One thousand one hundred yuan! That stupid, ugly, no-good bastard!”

Lan Wangji stared at him, his anger drained away leaving only a muddled, muddied confusion – and little grey smears now appearing on his cream jumper.

“Wangji-xiong,” Huaisang hiccupped again, and this time the wail was more of a sob and a soft whine – purposefully pitiful: a cascade of water over a clear-cut swirl of hurt and clockwork machinations. “Don’t tell my brother – he’ll kill him and I’m too pretty to visit anyone in jail.”

Chapter Text

Blue Scar on the Heart

Huaisang had settled on the sofa, huddled up and covered over with a fluffy ice-blue blanket, his hands full with a large mug of warm camomile tea Lan Wangji had given him carefully. The box of tissues had been raided – little flakes of white drifted about the place now; victims of Huaisang’s aggressive yanking of the tissues out of the small gap in the box – and the bar of fine Swiss chocolate Wangji had put in front of him had toothmarks in it.

It was a good thing Lan Wangji didn’t have much of a sweet tooth.

And yes, while the chocolate had been primarily bought for and intended for guests, Wangji privately felt it was a bit much for Huaisang to assume it was all for him – “my heartbreak, Wangji-xiong, it’s for my heartbreak. It will help me heal” – at this point, he wasn’t going to bother arguing the case.

It looked like a rat had been at it. Huaisang could keep it. And the box of tissues.

“He said he was ill,” Wangji was trying to piece together the blubbed-out-snotted-in phrases he had caught between hiccups and violet-violent threats which grew taller and more spiteful and more fantastical as the minutes had worn on. “You went to his flat with soup –”

“Not just any soup! Shanghai noodle soup from the takeaway place on the corner, you know, by the clinic!” Huaisang interjected, shredding a tissue even as he smudged tears on his cheeks. “Excellent soup – the best soup!”

“With the best soup,” dutifully, he added it in, even though it seemed unimportant to the main facts. “He was there with a woman. You threw the soup at him and screamed at him. And then left.”

“With a woman, with a woman,” Nie Huaisang slumped, cradling the chocolate bar in his hands and taking another bite; the mug of tea was now empty, though he kept picking it up as though expecting it to have refilled itself. “Wangji-xiong, you make it sound like it was nothing! He was with a woman, certainly, but that wasn’t the problem so much as how he was with her.”

Wangji had been trying to skate over that element of it – Huaisang was an artistic soul, delighting in translating colours and shapes into words with a studious elegance that betrayed his actual cleverness from time-to-time, if people cared to listen, but in this situation that was more awkward than helpful.

“Stupid, stupid, useless bastard,” Huaisang hissed, taking a chomp into the chocolate and munching with a poisonous, pouting glare.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji agreed – which was all he had been needed to do for the last half an hour while the story tumbled out in a jumble of invocations and curses and wild hand gestures and tear-sprung wails.

“Wangji-xiong,” Huaisang pointed the nibbled-down bar at him with a steel-shod look. “Don’t tell your brother, understood? Because Xichen-ge will tell da-ge and that won’t go well – not least because da-ge will be jealous Xichen-ge knew before he did.”

Wangji hated keeping secrets from Xichen. They didn’t, as a rule – though it was admittedly hard to keep a secret from someone who could read the slightest twitch in your face.

Still, he knew he would have to if only because Huaisang was right: when they were younger, it had been a constant source of trouble between Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen; it had caused two broken doors and a dent in Mingjue’s car and a week and a half in which Mingjue had refused to speak to Xichen and Xichen had flustered helplessly after him wondering what was wrong.

Lan Qiren had intervened in the end, brisk and curt, and the ground rules had been established.

Nie Huaisang would talk to his brother. Lan Wangji would talk to his brother. Lan Wangji would not talk to his brother about Nie Huaisang; Lan Xichen would not relay information to Nie Mingjue about Nie Huaisang, except in the case of emergencies.

That Nie Huaisang wouldn’t talk to Nie Mingjue who would talk to Lan Xichen about Lan Wangji hadn’t needed saying; Lan Wangji was not really the type to talk more than he had to.

And, he had perhaps been too smug when saying this at the time, he told Lan Xichen everything anyway, so it would never be a problem.

“So,” Huaisang gulped down a second mug of tea and licked a streak of chocolate off a finger. “The next thing to do, Wangji-xiong, is take down those job adverts you posted.”

Lan Wangji blinked.

He had posted three job adverts for a dental nurse online: two on medical job-seeking sites and one on the notice board for Fudan University alumni. It had only been a few days ago, and there hadn’t been any applicants so far.

Why would he take them down?

“I will take a fifty per cent raise,” Huaisang said matter-of-factly. “And free accommodation in your lovely house, and stay here as your assistant. Da-ge won’t kill anyone, I won’t have to see that bastard with that awful, pretty new girlfriend of his in the supermarket on Saturday evenings any more, and you get a competent, qualified, experienced assistant.”

Lan Wangji narrowed his eyes, “Ten per cent raise.”

“Forty.”

“Twenty,” Wangji didn’t blink.

“Twenty-five and you back me up when da-ge calls to shout at me for leaving without telling him,” Huaisang bargained.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji accepted with a sharp nod.

With the lights dimmed down low and the table littered with the remains of the chocolate packet and the osmanthus cookies in their tin and the bowel of cut fresh fruit he had insisted they should eat as well – Huaisang had rolled his eyes with a laughing sigh but had at least eaten a couple of lychees and a quartet of sticky peach slices in syrup – and half the mugs in Wangji’s cupboard along with the powder-blue teapot on its neat, woven mat, it felt like a distant memory: like they were teenagers or children again, hiding from their brothers in a room of their own, playing at being adults with tea and sumptuous feasts, co-conspirators over anything and everything.

It was warm and soft, and Wangji felt his tongue unstick from the top of his mouth – transmuting back from wood to flesh.

He explained what had happened at the party with his eyes tracing the hair-line-thin shoots of gold through the wooden floor underneath his legs, his fingertips running over the grains of the wood, scratching a little at the wax which covered it smooth.

If he was a bit too stilted about it; if he rushed through the telling too quiet and too quick so the words ran into each other, Huaisang didn’t say anything.

Instead, he slurped on the last of his tea, his face caught half-shadowed and half-orange-lit, and ran a finger around the rim of the fruit bowl to pick up a lick of syrup.

“It’s definitely bad,” he assured him. “But we can fix this. Slowly. Carefully.”

Slow, soft, the water lapped at the sides of the houses: at the thick wooden struts which held them up and the stone walls which glimmered with black-lined cracks where the mortar had fallen away or rotten or crumbled from age, pressed down down down into dust by the weight of hundreds of years and hundreds of feet stamping and stomping by.

It was a gentle thing, the night – it sank over the town with a flutter, a shroud in muted, dip-dyed-dark lilac and violet; indigo washing over the lake out over in the distance, the field of lotuses a splodge of black-black paint underneath the red glimmer of the lanterns, their tassels shivering as the breeze sang a long, steady tune.

He had followed his usual nightly routine impeccably as always, responding to the last of the messages from his brother and shufu, brushing his teeth and washing his face and lying in bed as the hands on the silver-frame clock ticked round to nine, and he had stayed awake, too awake to sleep.

With only a single glance back at the yellow-thin glow emanating through the screen of Huaisang’s doors, he had slipped out of the house, keys and phone in his pocket, and went for a walk, winding through the streets and the alleyways with a mindless, aimless air.

He had wanted to see the lake, though, and had tracked underneath a beating bird wheeling back down to the water, a black-flashing shape against the streetlamps and the lanterns here and there.

In the dark, Gu Lian Qiao was swept blue, a glimmering thing, sky-cast and cloud-covered. From a distance, when he had approached, there had been two bridges: one gold-spotted and the second, wavering in the water, red-lined like teeth.

Once he was on it, though, it was all blue-blue-blue, steady and swaying and lullaby-smooth as it lake rocked back and forth and back, tugged by the tide in and out like breathing.

“If you drop your phone this time, I won’t be able to save it,” he heard Wei Wuxian’s voice – sleep-soft, twanging with an amusement which was slick and deadened – and looked over at the arch of the bridge to see the boat manoeuvring over to him in an easy, sweeping curve.

Wei Wuxian was sitting on the back of it, the pole balanced across his knees and the lantern bobbing above his head a soft yellow globe, the paper painted with the character for ‘true’ in a gold which shone black.

He seemed freer than he had done either of the last times they’d met: lighter, gentler, simpler.

Perhaps it was just a trick of the light; the night was full of mirages, things which twisted south in the dark but slid back to north when dawn broke.

“Won’t drop it,” Wangji replied as the boat bumped its nose against the bridge – again, he remembered, this had happened last time too.

“If you climb down, I can drop you home,” Wei Wuxian said, eyeing him with an expression that didn’t smile but didn’t scowl either. “Can’t have you getting lost or falling in a canal somewhere, Mr Dentist.”

“Don’t want to take you out of your way,” Wangji frowned, his hands stiff by his sides. The cool air was blowing over him, mussing his hair around his shoulders and flicking in his eyes; it was a good night for walking: a kind of settled, sunken twilight, not yet the thick black of true night.

“Get in,” Wei Wuxian shrugged at him, beckoning him down into the boat.

Looking left then right, Wangji swung one leg over the side of the bridge, then the other, arms locked onto the wood, careful not to kick or scrape anything. The ridge was thin on the other side and for a moment, he hesitated there, watching the boat bob beneath him – and Wei Wuxian’s eyes gleaming in the dark, cat-like and patient.

He stepped down onto the boat, gingerly and gently, feeling it duck below his weight, juggling and jiggling as it adjusted while he sat, posture straight, hands folded neatly in his lap and his phone safe in his pocket.

Standing up, Wei Wuxian spun the pole in his hands and dug it into the bottom of the lake, easing the boat back out of the lotuses and round to face into the town again. It was calm, languid work, watching him: the pole moved slow, the push a long, lingering thing, and the boat sailed with a skim across the top of the lake, pushed a little by the breeze as it blustered, dragging out the ribbon in Wei Wuxian’s hair and tangling the strands of Wangji’s, snapping it out like a slim, black-shine pennant.

The quiet was sweet, laced with the fresh smell of the lake-water – but Wangji wasn’t surprised when after a while, where Wei Wuxian had watched the water and Wangji had watched the clouds, Wei Wuxian broke it.

“Look,” he began, keeping his voice low and half-murmured. “I get that this is a very different place to what you’re used to – poorer, less cultured, less refined; whatever – but you moved here. You chose to come here, so you have to adapt to Jinxi. People have a different way of doing things here than in the city, and you can’t really live here if you’re not going to be part of it.

“It’s like the lake,” he added, the swish of the pole as it lifted out of the water with a fine half-circle of spray bubbling to underscore his voice. “You can’t change it; you just have to respect it and work with it, even if it’s inconvenient for you.”

At the other end of the boat, Lan Wangji could see the stars glittering behind his head; he imagined drawing lines from one to the next to the next, criss-crossing around the fuzzed outline of Wei Wuxian’s head.

“Alright,” Wei Wuxian said, stopping the boat with a lurching, bobbling jolt. “This is you.”

He was a little unsteady as he climbed out of the boat; under his feet the land felt solid, steady – watching the boat push away again with the water babbling about turned his mind back to the sway of it when he’d sat on the boat and let it rock, felt it rock all the way through to the top of his head, no matter how still and straight he held himself.

“Thank you,” he said. “Good night.”

In the dark, he saw Wei Wuxian’s eyes flash back to him, but if any other words were said, they were swallowed up by the canal as it chattered off through the town.

Suffocating: that was the word for the way it felt, walking around the town. Suffocating: as though someone had slipped a plastic bag over his head and was carefully, slowly tying the strings into a neat bow.

Lan Wangji walked down the street on his way back from work, his coat over his arm and his phone bumping in his pocket, and he could feel it, the way people looked at him – quick and hard – before looking away again: it was a sticky thing, the kind of glare which lingered a fraction too long to be unnoticeable, and it set his stomach to curdling like spilt milk, sour and sick-warm.

What was worst, though, was the couple of people who actively stepped out to pull their children away from crossing his path – or who came out of shops just as he was about to pass and promptly heel-turned back in without a word.

But there was always a look. Always, always, always – and it stung.

Through the thin-stripped crowds zig-zagging across the pavement, Wangji, keeping his head steady and his eyes down towards the ground to avoid meeting anyone else’s, spotted Song Lan, the café owner, coming towards him.

Song Lan stopped and hovered, his usual calm expression cracking into stone; a wobbling kind of stone, like bricks about to crumble, the mortar gone and their sides weathered curved by time.

Lan Wangji stopped as well – he was aware that around them, people were twisting their heads between the two of them, tourists and locals and children with their keyring-covered backpacks. There was a pressure in his head suddenly: apologise, he could hear shufu frowning, you must apologise to those you hurt.

He was too busy thinking that he should do – should find something to say – couldn’t pretend he hadn’t seen, couldn’t lie and say he hadn’t meant it – when Song Lan twitched his head left and right at the street and crossed the road at a half-speed job, slipping through the gap between two cars and a spiral-smoking motorcycle.

He breathed again and started walking once more, the sour-sick in his stomach cooling to lead.

He missed Shanghai. He had always missed it a little, but now, with the staring and the whispers behind his back and the undeniable certainty that he had cast himself as the town’s outcast, he missed it and the hug of anonymity as he walked down the streets surrounded by hundreds of other people, all of them spinning through their own bubbled lives, bumping into each other only very briefly and very barely.

There had been something comforting about the idea that no one outside cared who you were; something special about the moments when that flash of kindness did come; something utterly irrelevant about the times someone glared or pushed or stepped out of line.

This was suffocating. Suffocating and spying and he hated it.

He missed Shanghai – but he couldn’t go back.

Lan Wangji simply couldn’t go back and admit that he’d failed. How would he face shufu? How would he face xiongzhang?

How would he face Wen Ruohan and all of the dentists in his graduating cohort who’d sent so many messages of support in private but had crossed the road like Song Lan to avoid him when they saw him in Shanghai?

Huaisang had said this was fixable and Wangji would just have to trust him. Huaisang did, after all, have more experience with fixing things than Wangji did, and was at least twice the people-person, which he had been assured would help.

The problem was he hadn’t said how or when or what to do in between then and the eventual fix and carrying on as normal was squeezing around his chest, tighter and tighter, slow and steady and fitting its jaw over his head.

Stepping around a woman unloading crates outside of a shopfront, he turned around the corner and saw the two boys from his first – no, third – day in Jinxi sitting by the wall peering into a large cardboard box between them.

“Mr Dentist!” Jin Ling, the boy who had lost the baby tooth, bowed, sloppy and sharp, clambering to his feet; beside him, Wen Yuan, the boy who had hit him, bowed as well, slower to his feet but neater.

“Hello,” Wangji said. They were both still in their school uniforms, backpacks dumped on the ground, and they sat back down almost immediately, Jin Ling’s hands fluttering at the edge of the box’s lid, fingers poking at one of the holes chopped haphazardly into it. “What is in there?”

Wen Yuan looked about, nervous, nibbling at his lip, and then, sharing a nod with Jin Ling – like a double-act: joint-and-separated; two nods at once – they lifted the lid up to almost forty-five degrees, just enough so Lan Wangji could see the white-soft fur of the rabbit kept inside, blinking up at him with pink-smudged eyes.

“Cute,” he approved with a slight smile. He had always liked rabbits – he remembered, vaguely, sitting in a petting zoo once, still and silent, surrounded by rabbits as they climbed over him, spilling out of his lap in a skirt of fluff and fur.

He had a horrible fleeting thought that xiongzhang had taken a photo.

“Niang won’t let me keep it,” Jin Ling sighed with all the put-upon heartbreak of a nine-year-old.

“Mn,” Wangji tried to sound sympathetic and blinked at Wen Yuan in a question that folded in a frown on his face.

“His aunt said he can keep it if he wins the Maths competition,” Jin Ling told him and Wen Yuan nodded, bobbing and ducking out of the way of Jin Ling’s pride with a shy blush. “He’s really smart, he gets full marks all the time.”

Lan Wangji frowned again, “But now?”

Inside the box, the rabbit was chewing on something – grass likely, or cabbage, it was hard to tell in the dim light which made the white fur shine – and it eyed them all as they sat there, a strange trio encircling it.

“Can you look after it?” Jin Ling asked, abrupt and expectant in the way that only children often are. On Wangji’s other side, Wen Yuan looked up at him too, but it was more hopeful than anything else.

“Mn, would not be best,” Wangji felt his face wrinkle a little. He had never had a pet before – shufu hadn’t allowed it and he had never wanted one so it had never mattered – and the thought of looking after one now, being responsible for something and held to account even if only by two children, sent a spike of something wriggling up his spine. “Wei Wuxian?”

If there was one thing he had learned since moving to Jinxi, it was that everyone knew Wei Wuxian and Wei Wuxian knew everyone and he seemed to do everything and anything.

“We already asked,” Wen Yuan told him, his fingers curling over the edge of the box. “And he declined.”

That spike up his spine turned to a twitch of annoyance, hot and quick: Wei Wuxian was so happy to sail about offering his opinion to him without asking, but when two children asked him for help, he refused?

The boys were looking up at him again, a pair of big-eyed twins, patiently impatient and waiting for him to say something.

“I am sorry,” he said and saw their faces fall and looked down, down, down at the rabbit with its white fur and its grass in the box. “Do not know how to have pets.”

Rising to his feet, he watched as Wen Yuan replaced the lid on the box; Jin Ling, on the other side, scowled at him before darting his gaze to the floor and glaring as though if he were fierce enough it would drill a hole through to the centre of the earth.

“I told you he wouldn’t do it!” he heard Jin Ling burst out as soon as he’d barely taken a handful of steps away. “Die says he’s cold-hearted. We should never have asked him.”

The rabbit gleamed in the corner, white fur sleek, crunching through a carrot and hopping about, sniffing all around the hutch he had bought and set up in the small courtyard outside their front door.

He had padded it thoroughly with fresh hay until there was almost no room for the rabbit in the little closed-off room and attached a water bottle to the side with a little spout for the rabbit to drink from.

He sat there for a while, watching it; next to him Huaisang snapped photos and cooed like an overgrown pigeon with one of her hatchlings and chattered aimlessly about should they name it probably not and should they groom it do rabbits need to be groomed Wangji-xiong do you know and should they get a permanent pet together because Wangji-xiong that sort of thing is wise in the beginning but can lead to severe disagreements when friends separate and no offence Wangji-xiong but I’m not going to live with you forever so we really should think about this before it becomes a problem –

It was, he could admit readily, silently, really very cute, this rabbit.

It was D-Day, as Huaisang had named it, and Wei Wuxian was standing in his office.

It was D-Day, as Huaisang had named it, and it was five to six and they hadn’t had a single patient and Wei Wuxian had barged straight into his office without knocking or asking or making an appointment or, well, anything polite whatsoever.

Lan Wangji was thunderstruck.

“You’re an idiot,” Wei Wuxian started and Wangji couldn’t stop staring, too stunned to be properly angry. It was stirring though, rumbling and grumbling like a dragon waking from sleep, all loose coils limbering up. “You thought people would show up just because they need a clinic here when you haven’t apologised to anyone?”

Under the desk, on his knees, his hands clenched tight into his palms.

“God, you’re pathetic,” Wei Wuxian shook his head and sighed, rubbing at his eyes and scratching the side of his nose with a tilted look. “Right, follow me.”

Lan Wangji stared, wound like a cuckoo clock. He jerked up when Wei Wuxian beckoned, stiff and mechanical – a Lan Wangji robot – and followed him out the door.

“Have fun,” Nie Huaisang sang from behind his phone, tap-tap-tapping away non-stop.

The sun was white-bright behind a smear of cotton-clouds, whipped fresh by the breeze across the courtyard in front of Swords Hall. Painted green, the doors looked dark and tall and looming in the distance.

“Why would you bring me here?” Wangji asked, his heart hammering in his ears, loud and quick-quick-quick-quick.

Wei Wuxian snorted, hefting his bag over his shoulder with a hump-jump of his back. “You’re a resident, aren’t you? So you should be at the neighbourhood meeting like everyone else.”

Wangji blinked; the doors seemed to have got smaller, further away, almost as though they were shrinking. They seemed darker, too, black-green and shadowed.

“You can’t just avoid them all forever,” Wei Wuxian sounded exasperated – Wangji could hear the rattling roll of his eyes as his voice followed it: up and over in a long, looping arc that spun. “If you can’t pick up spilt milk, you should at least apologise for spilling it.”

He turned to leave and Lan Wangji found himself turning too.

Follow me, he remembered and his mouth was half-open before he realised there weren’t any words in his head or sliding down to the tip of his tongue.

“Are you leaning on me?” Wei Wuxian’s grin was back: fired cheeky-wide and teasing.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji swung back to face the doors again, red ears and red knuckled.

“Don’t even think about leaving,” Wei Wuxian said after a moment’s pause, and wagged a finger in his face like a parody of someone’s aunty. “I’ll hunt you down.”

In the doorway, he hesitated, hovering with an awkwardness that sent him back to the first day of school with his new shoes and his straight-cut hair and staring out at the new classroom with the new schoolmates and the new teacher wondering where to sit – it was the same now, only worse: there was no shouting or laughing or smacking of bags on floors and pencil cases on desks, only silence and a forest of eyes blinking at him.

“Dr Lan,” Jiang Yanli smiled, weak and watery. “We never expected you to join the neighbourhood meeting or we would have waited for you before we started.”

“Sorry if the town hall doesn’t meet your high standards,” Qin Su added, her voice a little too loud and a little too sharp.

“Aiya,” Wei Wuxian’s voice sounded from behind him, muffled soft. “Get out of the way; these are heavy.”

A series of boxes thudded down onto the ground – one, two, three of them with a series of cacophonous smack – and Wei Wuxian gave a self-satisfied heave of something, wiping his hands together with a loud crack-slap and smiling round the room.

“Mr Dentist got some snacks for the meeting,” Wei Wuxian announced – to everyone. Lan Wangji blinked from his position tucked towards the corner and tried to look as though he knew this. “Too polite and shy to say so himself so he’s left it to those of us with big mouths who can’t stop talking,” he laughed and the room laughed and Lan Wangji blinked again. “Asked me to help as though I don’t have other things to be doing, but who was I to say no?” his nose wrinkled and the second ripple of laughter hooked deeper than the first and tugged louder.

He opened up the boxes and clunked down a series of bottles of Pepsi Max and tall rectangle boxes of chrysanthemum tea; opening the second, he tossed a couple of packets of rice crackers to Lan Wangji in a high, soaring throw, and instructed him to “pass them down, Mr Dentist”.

There were sesame cakes too and a box of chocolate-covered Pocky sticks for Wen Yuan and Jin Ling, sitting at the back of the room and whispering behind a pair of plastic-jacketed textbooks.

The room was full of rustling and the popping and fizzing of bottles being opened and the slosh of drinks being poured into plastic keep-cups kept ready, and Lan Wangji sank into a seat and watched Wei Wuxian as he laughed still, teasing Baoshan Sanren as earnestly as he traded jibes with Jiang Wanyin.

There were stars in the sky and Wei Wuxian was leading the way back towards Lan Wangji’s house – a coincidence this time, but still. It was the second time; it was a different time: there was something in the air this time, something charged and rearing up, waiting as the others – Jiang Yanli and Jin Ling, Song Lan, Jiang Wanyin behind Wen Qing and her brother Wen Ning in his officer’s uniform, and Qin Su with a swish of long, scarf-held hair – all filtered off down other streets and into boats to head home to sleep until it was just the two of them.

Lan Wangji looked at Wei Wuxian and remembered how he had laughed in the meeting, full of smiles and flashing teeth and dancing eyes, and he felt like he was back on the boat: sea-drunk and sea-legged.

“Thank you,” he said and meant it, quiet in the way he always was when he was earnest.

Wei Wuxian stopped and turned with a swivel to face him. He walked close, closer than he had been before, and looked him in the eye, steady and serious.

“Give me your hand,” he said and Lan Wangji raised his hand, sideways, fingers too stiff, unsure and unsteady, and he watched Wei Wuxian carefully, his head full of a thousand thoughts and no words at all; his heart was thudding again but this time only in his chest, banging against his ribs.

He imagined those fingers sliding across the skin of his palm, pressing against his pulse point; he imagined the warmth of Wei Wuxian’s skin, the push of his grip as he caught his hand, keeping him linked – keeping him close –

Wei Wuxian reached out, slow and teasing, a magician’s showmanship, and materialised a slip of paper in his hand.

He never touched him, just dropped the paper into his grip.

Lan Wangji dropped his eyes to look at it, then back up again.

“You know where to send the money by now, but so you don’t think I’m scamming you again,” Wei Wuxian told him with a smile that was teeth, yes, but too sharp – shark-sharp.

“Didn’t ask you to,” Lan Wangji blurted out, though it came out too harsh and too stiff: it was the tension trickling from his head to his toes rolling down his tongue like water out of a tap. “Stop doing it.”

Wei Wuxian, he was disappointed – angrily, furiously, pettily, quietly – to notice, didn’t even look back.

The door snapped open on its hinges and the man who stepped through was wearing a plain green t-shirt and tidy blue jeans, his hair held back except for two long strands which floated either side of his face. He looked around with wide eyes, his round face startled and shy; it reminded Lan Wangji of Wen Yuan.

Lan Wangji stared; Nie Huaisang stared; Wen Ning stared back, doe-like and hovering in the doorway.

“I-is the clinic open?” he darted a look back over his shoulder as though to check the hours in the sign outside.

“Mn,” Wangji felt his mouth move without thinking.

“Oh,” Huaisang said, and there was a moment before he jumped to his feet, covertly sweeping the magazine he’d been reading off his desk and onto the floor even as he plucked a pen from the pot and a form from the stack and laid them neatly on the counter. “Yes, of course. As this is your first time here, you will need to fill out this form…”

Lan Wangji watched as Wen Ning bent to fill in the form, clutching the pen tightly in one hand and walked round him to go into his office.

He felt dazed. Nie Huaisang was making rapid-fire hand gestures at him that he didn’t understand and mouthing words he couldn’t grasp and miming drinking – which he did understand but didn’t approve of – imitating the pop of a champagne bottle before beaming innocently up at their first patient to answer a question.

Their first patient.

Wei Wuxian, thank you for the recommendation. That new dentist is good – and very reasonable prices!

You’re welcome! Tell your partner to go too – his halitosis is starting to make my eyes water!

 W ei-xiong, you are a menace, honestly!

  Aiya, don’t mention it! Besides, you and he both know I’m right! :P

You must apologise to those you hurt, shufu had said and shufu had rarely given bad advice.

The café loomed above him, its scripted sign dull in the daylight, half-hidden by the climbing vines which twinned their way about the doorway, hanging down in tendrils which tugged at his hair as he entered.

A door had never felt so heavy.

Inside, Song Lan sat on the stool behind the bar, his guitar to one side, wary and silent, almost identical to the day he had first come in the café, apart from the thickness in the air that grew thicker as he went further into the room – watching as Wangji approached, his fingernails scraping at the sweat-sticky lines of his palm underneath his folded coat.

“We don’t have any coffee,” Song Lan said abruptly.

Lan Wangji nodded, an automaton again.

Swallowing hard, he forced the words down his tongue and out: “Listened to your album.”

“Oh,” Song Lan’s eyes flickered over to the posters on the wall, half-cut-white with their plastic frames. “Right.”

“Did not like the main single, ‘Exercising in the Moonlight’,” Lan Wangji pushed on, counting the grains of wood in the bar-top surface to make it that little bit easier to get them out, the words, even as they tried to run back down his dry, lumpy throat. “Liked ‘Blue Scar on the Heart’.”

You must apologise, he could still hear shufu’s voice in his head and he hadn’t, he knew that, but he had never been able to apologise when he believed he had been honest.

He wasn’t sure it would be accepted either. Song Lan had a stoniness about him that reminded Lan Wangji of himself; he thought he would somehow be able to tell that any apology wasn’t entirely sincere.

“It’s a question of style,” Song Lan said after a long pause, clicking something on his computer – but it was less abrupt than his denial of coffee: casual, really, like conversation.

“Did not know the microphone was on,” Lan Wangji murmured and his ears burned hot; what would shufu say about excusing his behaviour like this? Wriggling out of giving a straight, blunt apology and offering excuses?

He tried not to think about it.

“Don’t worry about it,” Song Lan gave a sigh and a small, twitching smile.

Lan Wangji nodded and the oncoming relief was a rush of warmth that nearly lifted him off his feet.

He had spotted Wei Wuxian easily: a red-rimmed smudge sitting on a patch of grass by the lake’s edge, a fishing rod in hand – a still and silent backdrop to the hustle of the market with its buzzing, bustling activity and throngs of people bumping around things and other people, arms full of baskets or boxes or fish-stained gloves and hooked nets.

As he had walked round, he had wondered – clenching, awkward – whether Wei Wuxian would still be there when he had arrived, but the fishing rod had been comforting: he knew enough to know that people fished for hours, wrapped in a protesting serenity and a patient idleness.

Still, the twist his stomach didn’t ease out until he rounded the path and saw Wei Wuxian sitting with his long legs out in front of him, a high, swooping whistle twinning through the air above his head, flute-like and sweet and skipping through a melody Lan Wangji didn’t recognise.

Clearing his throat, he waited for Wei Wuxian to turn before he started making his way forward; his hands felt sweaty and he rubbed the palms on the sides of his trousers, smoothing out invisible creases.

“Yes?” Wei Wuxian asked, calling back over his shoulder. “Do you need something else?”

“No,” Wangji shook his head and stepped down the bank carefully. It was slippery here, soaked from the recent rain so much so that the dirt had blended into grass-streaked mud, studded here and there with little stones. “Wanted – wanted to say thank you –”

“What?” Wei Wuxian frowned, calling loud back up to him even as he reeled in his fishing line, the hook at the end flickering silver-sharp in the light and the worm stuck through pink and limp. Wangji averted his eyes and focused on placing his feet in the slope, feeling his phone jiggling in his pocket, the hems of his trousers already flecked brown. “Can’t hear you! Can you come closer?”

Gritting his teeth – he shouldn’t; he really shouldn’t, he knew exactly how bad it was to grind teeth together like that – Lan Wangji gingerly stepped down once, twice, three times more – and then he slipped in the mud, his foot sliding down the slope, stumbling and half-falling, his heart in his mouth and his breath gone and his phone – his phone! – plopping out of his pocket and into a patch of rain-wet grass which sent it down a green-slick slide towards the lake –

And Wei Wuxian stopped his phone with a foot and caught him careening down with an arm about his chest and Lan Wangji just stared and Wei Wuxian just stared and his phone screen flashed blue with the white-script time: 15:04, and he still couldn’t find enough breath to speak.

“Your phone is always causing trouble,” Wei Wuxian mumbled, but he didn’t let go just yet and Lan Wangji could feel the press of his arm burning through his shirt.

Chapter Text

Shangri-La Hotel

The door was opening and closing almost every hour: snapping and clicking and stoppered with Wei Wuxian’s voice calling ‘Mr Dentist!’, ‘Mr Dentist!’, ‘Mr Dentist!’ in a repetition which almost became rhythmical, ringing through the little house with a quickening regularity.

Inside, Nie Huaisang stood in front of the doors to Lan Wangji’s room, sucking a bubble tea through a paper straw and watching, unhelpfully, as Wangji surveyed the mass of clothes neatly piled in open drawers and lined up left-to-right in the slid-back cupboard, a sinking spectrum of beige-white-blue-grey which almost blended in with the soft walls.

It was fanatically neat, perfectly ordered in a circling rainbow, and he had considered and discarded each item in turn.

Don’t you own anything in actual colours, Wangji-xiong, Huaisang – self-nominated fashion-critic and self-titled style guru – had asked some time ago, frowning at yet another pale-water blazer, the cuffs buttoned tight.

The doorbell rung again and Wei Wuxian’s voice echoed through the room again – it was the third time that day alone:

“Mr Dentist!” he shouted and Wangji opened the door with a crisp snap to accept this new box: long and thin, stamped with a black logo and letters that read ‘Armani’.

He could feel Huaisang watching him a moment longer, then turning back to tap-tap-tap away on his phone again – again-again-again.

“I have to ask,” Wei Wuxian rocked on his heels, craning his neck a little to look inside the house. “What’s with all the spending? Are you replacing your entire wardrobe or something?”

“Mn,” Lan Wangji said – to him, it meant ‘no’ this time, but Wei Wuxian’s face squished into a frown and he wondered if that had been understood, so he added, “No.”

Briefly, he considered mentioning, petty and talkative, that Huaisang had pronounced most of his wardrobe ‘like a winter pissed in your closet’ and ‘only good if the wedding is underwater – is the little mermaid the bride?’, but the moment passed and he swallowed the sudden rush of words down dry.

Wei Wuxian nodded contemplatively, then leaned forwards and rapped his fingertips on the box in Wangji’s hands, a little rat-tat-tap thing which jarred with Huaisang’s phone in the background; they were out of time, out of sync and it made him twitch a bit.

“Armani, huh?” he said. “Yesterday’s was Gucci and the day before was – wait, what was it – I do remember! At least, I will remember – Prada, that was it! There was that big box from Bosideng, and 8on8 and the Burr one.”

“Burberry,” Wangji murmured as Wei Wuxian’s nose wrinkled.

“Yes, that one,” he shook his head a little. “You sure like your labels, Mr Dentist. Good thing you can afford them, huh!”

Lan Wangji’s fingers curled tighter around the box. It wasn’t openly rude or dismissive or anything – but it felt like it somehow and it yawned uncomfortable in his stomach.

“Do you,” Wei Wuxian hesitated before ploughing onwards. “Do you actually find those things comfortable? Because they always look just, well, not.”

Lan Wangji frowned then, “Why buy uncomfortable clothes?”

“See,” Wei Wuxian grinned at him, bouncing forward on his heels and raising a finger triumphantly. “That’s my attitude: clothes are about comfort, right, not about price or style or whatever. People should just wear things they’re happy in and which don’t cut into awkward places. So what if things get old or a bit tattered or faded – that just shows they’re well loved!”

“Mn,” Wangji hummed – and even he this time didn’t know whether he meant yes or no.

Privately, in his own head, he thought that once clothes were well-loved, as Wei Wuxian had put it, that was the time for them to be recycled or donated or reused some other way: but they had run their course as the item they had been.

There was nothing proper or elegant about wearing threadbare t-shirts or ragged jeans, even if they were comfortable.

“Anyway,” Wei Wuxian waved the hand still in the air with a flap-flapping motion as though he were shooing Wangji back inside or trying to swat a fly. “Good luck with whatever you’re trying to find an outfit for – it must be a pretty big deal if it’s this much trouble.”

“Mn,” Lan Wangji said with a nod. “This weekend. In Shanghai.”

“Well, enjoy it,” Wei Wuxian stepped back with another sticking wave. “I’ll see you tomorrow with another box – will it be Louis Vuitton this time? Or, oh, what’s the perfume one?” he snapped his fingers impatiently even as he wandered towards the road – then turned, face lit up and declared, “Dior!”

Lan Wangji shut the door and took the box through to his room.

Huaisang sucked on his straw and tap-tap-tapped on his phone.

In the mirror, he stared back at himself, running a critical eye over his reflection from head-to-toe and back up again, standing perfectly still and searching for tiny, tiny imperfections.

“You look good, Wangji-xiong, you’re going to break hearts,” Huaisang told him from the doorway, his voice muffled and muddled with the sleep which had tangled his hair and scrunched his eyes closed.

He supposed the teal-blue blazer did suit him: it was tailored neatly to hang fashionably loose, with the white shirt underneath tied like a tie, triangle-pointed and crisp-tight at the neck, all in a sleek, plain silk.

The shirt was the only concern – the only sticking point, but both Huaisang and xiongzhang, who were far better at fashion-related matters than he was, had told him it was fine, so he had decided to trust them and, well, push the boat out, so to speak.

The doorbell rang and the silence that followed rang twice as loud.

“Yours,” Huaisang yawned, big and bear-like, and shuffled back into his room with a sliding-snap of his crane-carved doors.

Opening the door, Wangji blinked once, twice at seeing Wei Wuxian there, dressed smartly in a grey blazer and clean black trousers with a shirt and a slim-line red tie around his neck. He had even, Wangji noticed, brushed and styled his hair so it was smooth and tame; it did not, he reflected, suit him nearly so much.

Behind him, hovering by the edge of the square courtyard in front of the house, were Wen-popo, Baoshan Sanren, and Fourth Uncle. Wen-popo was carrying a large duffel bag which bulged at the sides, and Fourth Uncle had a hat in one hand and a plastic raincoat in the other.

“Ah, you’re ready!” Wei Wuxian nodded at him with a smile that doubled the sun. “I was hoping so since I wasn’t sure where you parked your car. Let’s go then!”

“En,” Lan Wangji made a noise of some sort – dissent, perhaps, like the way he’d used to sniff and huff and hum noises to his brother and uncle when he was young rather than outright refuse – and Wei Wuxian looked back at him.

“What’s up?”

“Go where?” Wangji asked, his eyes sliding over the little group again.

“To your car,” Wei Wuxian repeated slowly. “To go to Shanghai. Wen-popo is going to see her daughter who lives there with her husband and their three children; Fourth Uncle is going to see his son and son-in-law, who flew over from San Diego to visit for the week; and Baoshan Sanren is meeting an old friend who’s in town for the weekend.”

There was – not a silence, but a quiet, filled with the bubbling of the canal as it bumbled by and the twittering of birds arcing overhead.

“You don’t mind driving them, do you, only the bus is very difficult for them to manage and it’s such a long journey!”

“En,” Lan Wangji said and Wei Wuxian beamed again, clapping his hands together.

Outside the landscape swept by: a rush of brown-smeared houses and green-blotted trees, blurring and brushing into each other underneath a sweet blue sky. It was squashed horizontal through the car windows, the whole outside world: the car felt small underneath the open-clear sky.

It also felt small because it was full: the grannies and Fourth Uncle tucked into the back seat side-by-side-by-side and Wei Wuxian in the passenger seat, his backpack in between his feet.

Lan Wangji wasn’t sure he had ever driven this car with so many people stuffed in it; the journey should only take an hour or so, perhaps an hour and a half if there was traffic – two if it was bad – but that was on his own. With people – well, time just felt so much longer.

They had barely been driving ten minutes before there was a thick rustling in the back of the car and then the crack-click of plastic food boxes being hauled out and opened, filling the already-close air with the smell of freshly-made rice cakes and the soft stickiness of ci fan tuan. There was a gun-fire-quick series of crunches as you tiao sticks were snapped in half to share, changing hands as the boxes were passed about, rice cakes bitten into and crumbling-crisp – and then front:

“Wuxian,” Wen-popo waggled a green-clipped box by his head, full of purple-bruised ci fan tuan, rolling about in a cascade of rice-spattered marbles, heavy and hearty. “Did you have breakfast this morning?”

“Ah, Wen-popo,” Wei Wuxian laughed, twisting in his seat to look round. “You know I did – I always do! Da bing and some mala tang from the other day –” she was still thrusting the box at him like a threat. “Aiya, alright I’ll have one. You know I can’t resist anything you make – such an excellent cook!”

“Don’t flatter her, Wei Wuxian,” Fourth Uncle advised with a hacking laugh. “Everyone always tells her that.”

“I speak nothing but the truth!” Wei Wuxian defended, his teeth crunching through the sticky-rice shell into the yellow oozing egg and pork and the sour pickles with a happy hum. A trio of loose rice tumbled onto his lap and he tutted at himself, brushing them off and onto the floor of Wangji’s car with an easy flick of his wrist.

“Dr Lan?” Wen-popo offered, tilting the box in his direction.

Lan Wangji didn’t look; he was concentrating on driving, eyes flicking between the mirrors and the windscreen as expected, hands stuck steady at ten-and-two.

“He’s vegetarian, popo,” Wei Wuxian explained, the seatbelt wrapped around him stretching even further as he leaned his chest on the top of the seat, squished against the roof oddly, reaching an arm back into another box to sneak a rice cake from Baoshan Sanren.

(When Wei Wuxian had learned that, he didn’t know and resolutely didn’t wonder.)

“Don’t steal!” Baoshan Sanren scolded him, slapping at the air where his hand had been a moment before. Leaning forward with a shuffle up her seat, she stuck a box into the gap above the gearstick and shook it a little. “You tiao, Dr Lan, to keep your strength up.”

They smelled fresh and warm; he could imagine how they would sit on his tongue: light, airy, just chewy enough they wouldn’t melt away.

When he and xiongzhang had been still in Suzhou, shufu had taken them to tai chi classes in the park early on Saturday mornings, their bare feet and hands cold in the dew-frosted air until the heat of summer settled down, and afterwards, their bodies loose and aching, he had sent them both over to the you tiao sellers by their trucks with the steaming oil pans, fresh chopsticks in hand to sprog the you tiao onto – avoiding waste; shufu had never liked their mother’s habit of squishing mountains of plastic bags into drawers to use and reuse and reuse – baked seconds before and a sweet, sunny golden-brown.

He frowned. “No food in the car.”

Four faces stared at him, four hands frozen clutching food, crumbs spotted about laps and fingertips and in the creased lines of palms, small and yellow-spun and sticky with sauce and smears of grease.

There was a series of clicks as the lids were all snapped back down over the plastic containers and the boxes were shuffle-shoved back into duffel bags and oversized handbags.

Sucking in a breath, long and deep, Lan Wangji glanced in the left-hand wing-mirror just in time to see a sleek silver car sweep up beside them, swerving over the lane line, close – too close – he slipped his wheel to the right, swaying out of the way and slowing, slowing down to let the silver car screech in front, lights blank and still close, too close – his heart was hammering and he let it out in a huff.

“So dangerous!” Fourth Uncle exclaimed with a shake of his head; there was a chorus of mutterings, low and tutting and angry.

Lan Wangji pressed on the accelerator; the car pulled up, up, up the freeway, until they were alongside the silver car again – he had moved back over into the inside lane again, one arm hanging out of the open window, his radio blasting out into the wind.

The guy looked over at him; Wangji glared back – he felt petty and vindictive and gloriously alive.

“Drive better,” he called out of the window, curt and bitten out. “Be responsible.”

Laughing, wide-smiling and flashing a rude hand signal, the guy shouted back, “What are you, a woman?”

Wangji stared and glared and his hands tightened on the steering wheel, but before he could say anything, there was a screech from behind him and then Baoshan Sanren’s head was poking round the side of his seat, fire-lit and fire-spitting as she screamed at the silver car driver, her hands flying through a series of moves: she waggled a curled hand up-and-down; she shook two fingers in front of his face; she shoved a fist roughly up towards the top of the car.

Wangji had never heard a popo swear so much before – or, in fact, have so many suggestions as to what he could do with various body parts, with or without, well, help.

Lips twitching, he sped past the silver car as the driver shook his head and eased up, waving the arm outside of the car wordlessly; it felt like sailing away, smooth and sweet.

Baoshan Sanren sank back into her seat, Fourth Uncle and Wen-popo holding onto her arms. Fourth Uncle looked deliriously happy; Wen-popo shocked-white.

“Popo,” Wei Wuxian laughed in turn, mouth split in a big grin. “Where did that come from?”

“I am sorry,” Baoshan Sanren said to him – though she didn’t sound sorry at all, mostly a little out of breath. “But I couldn’t possibly let him be that rude.”

“Mn,” Lan Wangji agreed with a sharp nod. “Is fine.”

When he next checked the right wing-mirror, he caught a glimpse of Wei Wuxian’s face: he was still grinning, laughing at something in his own head as he carefully sank his teeth into a chocolate-covered biscuit stick, a white-paper box poking out of the pocket of his hoodie. With a wink, Wei Wuxian tugged the corner of the box out and tilted his head to ask the question and Lan Wangji fixed his eyes back on the road, cold again.

“So Dr Lan, tell us about your family,” Wen-popo invited, and Baoshan Sanren and Fourth Uncle both perked up too; next to him, Wei Wuxian glanced over, his restless hands stilling on the zip of his backpack. “You speak dialect well – are your parents from here? What about siblings, do you have any siblings?”

“Do you have any sisters?” Fourth Uncle broke in and there was a whooshing thud as Wen-popo leaned over Baoshan Sanren to hit his arm. “Aiya, what was that for? Dr Lan is a good-looking man, well-educated man, if he has sisters they’d be very eligible!”

“One brother,” Lan Wangji said slowly; his voice holding steady. The car felt small. Too quiet. “A-Niang is dead. Fuqin…” he trailed off – he had never known what to say about his father. His father simply was a name more than anything else.

“Fuqin is gone,” he added eventually, and there was a soft sigh from behind him.

He didn’t look at Wei Wuxian; didn’t want to see his face.

“Were you alone?” Baoshan Sanren’s voice was blunt – so blunt it was almost rude – but it was easier perhaps than Wen-popo’s spilling sympathy would have been.

“Shufu raised us,” Lan Wangji explained. They were passing the turning into Shanghai; to the left, sweeping away on another freeway, Suzhou was barely twenty minutes away. “Fuqin’s family are from Suzhou.”

There was a bobbing battle of nods in the rear-view mirror, downcast faces and a long, heavy silence.

Wei Wuxian was looking out of the passenger window; in the wing-mirror, his reflection chewed idly on his bottom lip, thoughts jumping in front of his eyes as he frowned to himself.

Lan Wangji looked a little too long and then changed lane.

The room was long and spacious, filled with light: it streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, letting in blue-star views of the river as it twisted through the city like a wide ribbon, and rebounded off the squat chandeliers and the mirrors scattered here and there, doubling the room with its own reflection.

It was a beautiful room, with everything painted a soft yellow – from the embroidered tablecloths to the piles of flowers tumbling out of tall, swan-necked glass vases – and studded with touches of pressed white in the napkins and fine china dishes, their rims edged with thin gold lines.

It was beautiful, yes, but it was oddly quiet for an engagement party. The music in the background was a soft, tinkling thing; the kind of music played in classy restaurants and rooftop wine bars – it was drowned under the gentle murmur of people talking to each other, sipping at their wine and taking small, neat bites of food.

He was glad for the quiet, though; on the table behind his, sitting almost directly behind him, was Wen Xu.

Why Wen Xu was here when both of the couple were dentists from Lan Wangji’s cohort at Fudan University, one of whom he’d worked with in his first role after qualifying – which was the only reason Wangji had been invited and the only reason he’d come – he didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to know.

But here Wen Xu was and Wangji did not want to speak to him at all.

The chance that Wen Xu hadn’t heard about Lan Wangji denouncing his father online was next to none; the chance that Lan Wangji would be able to leave without a fight if Wen Xu saw him was slim to none – Wen Xu had always had a reputation for being happy to get in a scrap or two or three: he had a habit of winning them, too.

Lan Wangji put it down to experience.

“So,” the woman next to him – small and slight with bobbed hair; he had never met her before but she seemed to know a couple of the others on his table, talking brightly to the man on her other side and the woman three seats down – turned to him, resting her knife on her plate briefly. It was almost silent, their table, when she asked, “You’re a dentist – where do you work?”

“Own practice,” Wangji answered shortly, as the rest of the table – including four other dentists: one from his university cohort, two from the year above and an older woman who ran a well-known chain across Western China – looked over to listen in.

“Oh yes,” the man he’d graduated with rapped his fingertips on the table a couple of times with a decisive nod. “You moved out to Jinxi, didn’t you?”

The woman who ran the chain clicked her tongue, taking a sip of wine with neat, pursed lips; it made her lipstick crinkle. “Small-town dental practices are rarely successful for too long – it’s so hard to keep the energy going once that initial buzz wears off. The population are trapped, true, but it’s not normally large enough to sustain a good practice.”

It was a splash of cold water and it doused the table quiet again.

“Not true – main problem is reputation,” Lan Wangji shook his head. How to explain it – that people in small towns needed the care close to them and valued that? That if a dentist was willing to duck a little to meet the lower incomes of the townspeople then they could still make a very healthy profit? That small towns sat close together and people talked and talked and talked and that could be helpful for a person who knew how to use it?

There was a laugh – loud, boisterous, scoffing – from behind him, and he turned his head a bit, eyes darting over his shoulder, to see Wen Xu slung across his chair, wine glass in hand, red and tilted slanted, his smile vicious, ignoring his own table in favour of leaning in to Wangji’s.

“And what would you know about reputation, Lan Zhan?” he drawled, his dark eyes bright and fierce.

Lan Wangji said nothing; he gripped his knife tightly and thought of the lake at night-time: steady and calm and still.

“As I thought,” Wen Xu laughed again; he was drawing attention. It must, Wangji reflected look a strange tableau: Wen Xu sprawled over his gold-backed chair with a falsely-languid arrogance, all grinning-fury in his face, and Lan Wangji, straight-backed and silent, coldly stiff with a still tongue. “Nothing. Stay in your little hovel of a town, Lan Zhan – you’re not welcome in Shanghai any more.”

The table was silent and even after Wen Xu had turned back to his own table, his laughter lingered at Wangji’s, wrapped around his head like a shroud – and the table remained quiet.

It was a good thing no one said anything more to him, because Lan Wangji didn’t say another word.

The sunshine glimmered off the glass skyscrapers, running down the sides in slim strips of silver-gold glitter and thudding into the pavement, warm and yellow-tinted and funnelling down the tall streets. Around him, the city was painted like a chessboard: square-cut dark-light blocks neatly stacked one after the other after the other after the other, dark-light-dark-light-dark-light.

It was easier to breathe outside the hotel, with its streets bubbling over with noise: cars shuffling along in queues, motorbikes cracking like a whip as they weave between them while sleek-slick electric bikes hum down the white-marked bike lanes, side-by-side with the Saturday afternoon joggers and parents with children flailing out of pushchairs.

He had left as soon as he could, slipping out of the room with Wen Xu’s eyes on his back and a brisk stalk away from the hotel before he could be followed.

Outside a small coffee shop – flooded with neon lights and tall bar stool seats and polished metal everywhere: tucked under tables and propping up shelves and half-covered over with long, dangling plants – he lingered for a moment, checking his phone for the time.

He had agreed with Wei Wuxian they would meet outside the car park where he had left his car at five thirty; he was a bit early: his phone screen shone white-bright four forty-seven.

There was a burst of noise – a cheering, laughing, whopping thing, studded with the clattering of heels on pavement and clapping hands – from a handful of metres down the street and he watched as a couple stumbled out of a hotel lobby, both of them dressed in almost-matching long red qipao, veils flung back over their hair, tangling around their interlinked hands.

They were surrounded by a mob of family and friends: bouquets were pressed into hands, red pouches squeezed back; three children further back were throwing flower petals in the air, sending them falling like a soft red rain over the parties’ heads as they giggled wild.

One of the men, grey-haired and standing closest to one of the brides, was stiff, blinking too quick to be unaffected; he held the door of the stretch Hummer open and helped his daughter in, exchanging a last few, private words with her. When he emerged, he tilted his face to the sky for a moment, the sunlight falling over him and lifting away any trace of tears with a whisking sun-shot breeze.

Nearer, a woman clutching a small bag over one arm was holding onto the other bride, hands gripping hands and sobbing, sobbing through smiles and tearful, water-full laughter as they hugged and clasped and talked earnestly, hurriedly.

The second bride, her golden earrings twinkling, stepped back from her mother, pulling her hands free and smiled – radiant and soaked and beamingly happy – and blew a trio of quick kisses as she climbed into the car, pulling the tail of her dress and long, lace-edged veil in after her.

The door shut and the party cheered, waving and throwing petals after as it sped away, down towards the freeway and the airport – and the brides’ parents stood, the woman in tears still, white handkerchief pressed to her mouth, and the man still blinking, his head bobbing in a pleased nod, absent and contented.

Something ached in his chest as he watched. He had never thought about getting married, but there was something about the happiness of it all and the sorrow laced through it which scratched at him.

His parents had never seen either of their sons go to university. They had never seen xiongzhang’s win – seen the way he had shone, almost transcendent, as the spotlights glittered gold-rain over his head and he had picked Wangji and shufu out of the screaming, celebrating crowd – and they hadn’t seen Wangji open his own practice: sending him lucky bamboo plants in jade-green pots for the first day and driving down later for a tour and to marvel over how he’d grown with cupped hands round his cheeks and misty smiles.

Now, when he watched the brides’ parents on the pavement, he thought of his mother – how she would have loved to see them both now! How much he missed her; hated that she hadn’t been there for any of it, that he’d never got to see her smile again – see how proud he could make her.

He thought, too, gentler and quieter, that he should call shufu when he got back to Jinxi. Should invite him down for the day – show him round the practice and his house, down to the lakefront with the bridge.

“Mr Dentist?” Wei Wuxian’s voice rang next to him; he flinched and jerked his head round to look. “Are you alright?”

Wei Wuxian was looking at him with an odd, solemn expression: his face was drawn, tense and pale in his dark, smart clothes. Over his shoulder, his backpack loomed slack and the bamboo coffee cup in his hands was two-thirds empty, sloshing to a halt.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji murmured, setting his shoulders to pull himself together. “You are early.”

“Ah, yes,” Wei Wuxian smiled. “Very early! I was finished earlier than I thought so I went to get a coffee before coming here – though you’re early, aren’t you? Didn’t we say half five?”

“Mn,” Wangji nodded.

Down the street, the wedding party had moved back inside and the street felt emptier. A trio of pigeons fluttered down and clawed at the abandoned rose petals, dipping pointed beaks to peck at them, throats warbling when they discovered they weren’t food.

“Well, since we’re both early that’s not a problem,” Wei Wuxian took another gulp of coffee, grimacing. “Cold, ugh. Unless you want to grab anything before we go –” and he gestured vaguely at the shop behind them, taking another mouthful and wrinkling his nose again with a shudder that was only half theatrics.

A pair of white vans sped along the street, followed by a trio of black-and-silver motorbikes, swerving up to a stop in the bike lane; a cyclist going past shouted something – passers-by glanced over – and then the vans were opening up, cameramen jumping out, hefting their cameras and tripods with them, heaving them over a shoulder and fiddling with settings. Photographers snapped off helmets and flicked the strap over their wrists, all of them focused on the hotel doors, scrumming together in a tight semi-circle; a sea of lights and little glass screens waiting for whoever came out.

Lan Wangji felt cold; it lanced down his spine swift and spiking. He grabbed Wei Wuxian’s arm and turned his face away, away from the photographers and the cameramen and pulled them both into the café with its metal-glinting furniture and wash of plants and up, up to the back by the counter.

“Er,” Wei Wuxian tapped his arm, frowning at him from closer than he usually was. “What was all that about, Mr Dentist? I know you don’t like having your picture taken but that was really something else.”

Wangji was still holding Wei Wuxian’s wrist, tight and firm; he let go and stepped back.

“I apologise,” he said and the words were heavy to get out of his mouth, glancing out of the side of his eye at the coffee shop doors.

He couldn’t hear anything from further down the street; the photographers and the cameramen were waiting, too, poised and posed before they would flicker into animals for a handful of seconds, flashing and shouting and surging in close while the bodyguards and security pushed them back again, one into another into another.

People were glancing at them in the shop but he couldn’t see them really: they were blurs behind his mind stretching out and down the street to listen for the cacophony of noise when the photographers would have their fill and then go.

“Some people like having their photo taken,” Wei Wuxian said, finishing the last of his coffee and fastening the lid back on with a pop. “Don’t worry – they’re here for some famous dude with too much money and an ego the size of Jupiter. For all you’re pretty, Mr Dentist, they’re not going to take pictures of you, I promise. And if they do, I’ll get in the way okay?”

“No,” Lan Wangji blurted, something like horror twisting round and round in his stomach at the thought of photographers snapping pictures of the two of them – of Wei Wuxian throwing himself in front to shield Lan Wangji. “Can’t. Can’t let them see me. Can’t be seen with you.”

Wei Wuxian was looking at him oddly again – only this time there was a swipe of red in it, like blood; but the hurt was covered up quickly with a thick layer of over-understanding.

“Of course, of course,” he nodded, fiddling with the strap of his bag over his shoulder. “Well, how about we wait until they’re gone, then? That way you avoid all that risk and I can get another coffee.”

There were things he should say, Wangji knew, words he should find and push to trot out of his mouth, but he couldn’t find them and he couldn’t find the energy to push them out. Instead, he nodded again and sank onto a bar stool, hands folded on the table in front of him and breathed in and listened for the photographers and breathed out.

omg that’s such a cute photo!!

  Wait, when did Lan Wangji get a boyfriend?

  What does that matter lol it’s a cute photo – who cares when???

  I mean, don’t you want to know??

  Good for Lan Wangji!

  Good for his boyfriend I think you mean :P

  Oh wow Lan Wangji’s boyfriend is hotttttt

  @LanWangji congratulations man!!

  If all the guys in small towns are that good-looking, I’m moving there tomorrow :’) :’)

  @LanWangji if you ever need a second dentist and your guy has equally fit friends, call me first!! :P

Lan Wangji did not read all the messages; it was enough to see some of them.

Carefully, he muted the Fudan Dental School 2016 Alumni group and placed his phone face-down on the table beside his bed.

People thought Wei Wuxian was his boyfriend. People he knew thought Wei Wuxian was his boyfriend. People he knew had seen him and Wei Wuxian together and assumed, based on their interactions, that Wei Wuxian was his boyfriend.

It sat oddly in his chest, that: it jostled when he thought about it, turning it over in his mind.

He couldn’t think how he felt about it.

In his hands, the cup of tea – white tea and just a little bitter like lemons – was warm: the thin spiral of steam curling above it was faintly, weakly visible in the fierce, electric lights.

It was a gloomy day, dim and weak and grey; blustering and blundering with a wind which rattled at shutters and the sloshing lake, the sky was full of clouds and the promise of rain.

Lan Wangji sipped small and neat; the warmth travelled, speeding down his arms and from his mouth to his stomach.

So far, it had been a slowish morning: a handful of patients, most of them initial consultations and a couple of routine check-ups. Still, it was progress – and it was normal for clinics to start slowly once the first flooding rush of people had been blotted and stemmed.

“Mr Dentist!” Wei Wuxian’s voice rang through the staircase outside the clinic door, loud and brassy and covering over another voice, smaller and higher and but not less strong.

“Ah, Mr Dentist,” Wei Wuxian appeared in the doorway, helping Baoshan Sanren over the threshold with an arm looped under to support hers and stubbornly, steadfastly ignoring the withering look she was giving him, her jaw clicking shut in front of Wangji and Huaisang and her chin lifting with a jut as if to say, I will not be moved. “Popo needs an appointment – she has pain in her teeth.”

“You are meddling,” Baoshan Sanren snapped at him, though the flash of heat snuffed itself out quick and sighing.

Wei Wuxian shook his head a bit and looked at Wangji, his face serious.

“Can you see her now?” there was another half to that sentence – if you say we have to go, she’ll never come back – which hung in the air, unspoken but not unseen, and Lan Wangji nodded.

“Mn,” he said, placing his tea cup on the side and stepping out into the corridor to lead them both through. “Am free.”

Shufflingly, creakingly, Baoshan Sanren made her way round him and into the clinic room, swatting at Wei Wuxian as he tried to hold her arm again, telling him with an exasperated hiss, “I can walk this far! Aiya, young man, I am not that decrepit!”

Wei Wuxian’s smile was sheepish as he passed and he mouthed something to Lan Wangji; it was indecipherable, though, the shape of his mouth forming something like an ‘o’ and stretching out in a bow as though he had been kissed and smiled.

Inside the room, Wangji watched as Wei Wuxian helped her up onto the seat, listening to them squabble gentle, good-naturedly – though with less force than he had seen Wei Wuxian grumble with others – as she flapped him away when he tried to help her lean back into the chair and adjust her legs, threatening to kick him if he tried.

“Please wait outside,” Wangji said to Wei Wuxian once there was a small break in their playfighting.

Once the door had closed behind him, Lan Wangji turned to Baoshan Sanren, only to see that she was eyeing him with a shrewd, narrowed sort of look. With her hands draped over the armrests of the chair, fingertips down and wrists soft, and her hair hanging down her back in a long, straight fall of silver-spun white, she seemed almost like a queen or a dowager empress of old, sitting in state. He felt almost like he should bow.

“Will this take long?” she asked him eventually.

“En,” he shook his head and she huffed a reply of her own as the chair hummed and tilted her so she was facing the ceiling.

She wasn’t shouting, that was a blessing at least – but he had never before had a patient fling the blue bib into his face and slap his arm with a trio of curses and a clawed grip as she steadied herself to climb off the chair and stalk, hair swishing behind her, out of the room, her handbag thudding against her hip with a dull, muffled sound.

The door swung shut behind her and he could hear her still talking, talking to herself or Nie Huaisang or Wei Wuxian or all of them at once: she was repeating the same things over again – his disrespect for her, how she had never been so insulted, how had he dared to speak like that – and the sharp slice of her voice through the air after the low murmur of Wei Wuxian, asking her what had happened no doubt, was enough to make him flinch a little and close his eyes.

He had made a mistake.

He had not thought it was a mistake – had not thought about it at all – and that had been his mistake too.

She would not be back.

Silently, he slipped back into his office, avoiding the reception and Huaisang. He did not want to have to say what had happened.

On his desk, waiting for him, was a fresh cup of green tea, four drops of honey stirred in steady, and an osmanthus biscuit from the tin in their little kitchen.

Sitting there and smelling the fresh, calm scent of the tea, he thought that occasionally Huaisang’s talents for eavesdropping and walking through walls were things to be grateful for.

In the window of the restaurant, a gaggle of heads bobbed, up-down-up-down, like a flock of pigeons strutting about a scattering of crumbs on the floor. Jiang Yanli was clattering plates into a pile, her head darting outside; Qin Su and Jiang Wanyin were standing side-by-side, the latter eating crackers he was sneaking from a bowl left on a nearby table; Wen Qing was sitting, stretching her neck to see over the wooden windowsill, her leg bouncing up-down-up-down with its spiked heel pointing outwards.

Nie Huaisang was sitting at a table two windows down. He had yet to look up from his phone, as far as any of the others could tell, but he was facing away from them, the blue light of his phone screen a constant blazing blink.

Outside, by the lakefront, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji stood opposite each other: facing off, almost.

Wangji was stiff, tired and worn – he felt frayed, like a shirt with a loose thread being tugged, tugged, tugged out further. When Huaisang had suggested they go out for dinner, taking in Lan Wangji’s slumped shoulders and clicking jaw and correctly assuming he wouldn’t be cooking that evening, neither of them had expected Wei Wuxian to come barging in halfway through and all-but drag him outside to glare at him, all reddish eyes and clenched fists, talking to him in a slow, sneering Mandarin that simmered.

“Would you say that to your grandmother? Ask her about her means to pay?” Wei Wuxian spat the last three words; they landed on the pavement between them like a curse, heavy and broken-glass-sharp.

“Not my grandmother,” Wangji said simply. By his sides, his thumbs were brushing over the hem of his shirt, small and tucked and trying not to grip too hard.

It was late. He would be sleeping soon – he should try to relax or he would lie awake until the air grew cold.

Wei Wuxian laughed; it was an ugly thing, this laugh: it was crisp and curt and fake-fake-fake.

“So that means you can talk to her however you like? I knew you were a rich city boy with little respect for others with different, harder lives, but I thought at least you would respect the elderly!”

“Not disrespectful – business,” Wangji clipped out with a frown. “Normal with patients.”

“Not here!” Wei Wuxian waved an arm; it smashed through the air, against the wind, and he rocked forwards. “How can you be so ignorant – or are you just selfish, concerned about your profits?”

Inside the restaurant, Jiang Yanli gasped, a stack of bowls shuddering in her hands; Jiang Wanyin let out a low whistle and Qin Su and Wen Qing exchanged pointed, cat-like smiles.

Nie Huaisang looked up from his phone and paused.

It was a body-blow. Wei Wuxian would have hurt him less by punching him: the words snuck under his skin, already festering and crawling, maggot-like and bobble-bodied, into his stomach and up his throat. He tasted bile and his head ached and his heart ached.

For a moment, he was stunned breathless.

“Not selfish,” Wangji bit back, cold now and stone-grim. Nothing of him moved but his mouth. “She is selfish.”

“What,” Wei Wuxian's voice was a breath, half-strangled by the wind, and he surged forward, arms raising and for half a second, Lan Wangji thought Wei Wuxian would actually hit him.

For half a second, Wei Wuxian did.

“How dare you,” Wei Wuxian breathed out again. He was close now, so close that Wangji could see the fierceness in his eyes – like battle-fever, bright and fervent.

“Parents have a duty to their children,” Lan Wangji said, still cold, still stiff but quieter. It was trickling out, his hurt and bruised anger – like water, it dripped away bit by bit by bit. “To stay healthy.”

There had been gentians outside his mother’s house when he was young: blue and vibrantly sleek, like velvet. He and xiongzhang used to spend hours sitting in them, watching the butterflies and picking the flowers, lacing them into chains and necklaces and crowns, draping them over each other and arranging them clumsy-delicately in A-Niang’s hair while she smiled and hugged him close on her lap, her arms warm but weak, weak and thin and full of bone.

There were still gentians outside his mother's house. No one picked them any more.

“Lan Wangji,” Wei Wuxian murmured, and that was almost stranger than the way he was looking at him: struck and half-frowning, caught between a fading fury and a dawning, clear-light realisation. “Your mother –”

Lan Wangji blinked; his eyes were damp. Without saying anything else, he turned on his heel and walked away, up the road into the centre of the town.

At the restaurant windows, Nie Huaisang stood, surveying the small group clustered by the other window with a cool, glinting sort of look. He waited a quartet of seconds as the silence grew heavier, thicker, flatter, and then he left too, unlocking his phone once more and dialling ‘er-ge’.

When he passed Wei Wuxian, he flashed his fan open in his hand, holding it up, steady and firm between their faces; a paper-stick wall.

Chapter Text

Come Down the Mountain

The local government offices loomed tall and dull in front of them: they were grey, square-squat buildings, studded here and there with plain rectangular windows, like holes poked through shoes or cut into a cheese grater – the ugly duckling in the surroundings of Jinxi.

It was a beautiful day: spring had steadied herself to smile and laugh down at them, the sun beaming bright and warm, thick through the still air.

Outside the offices, Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin waited for a moment, both of them wearing old, ripped jeans and tattered hoodies stamped with different-matching slogans and elbow-length yellow rubber gloves.

“Are we sure the Peacock's inside?” Jiang Wanyin asked, tossing his head a little to flick a stray hair out of his eyes. He was frowning at the building, his face wrinkled a little as he rolled out the word ‘peacock’ with a distinct displeasure.

“Yep, I watched him go in about fifteen minutes ago with a coffee,” Wei Wuxian grinned, rubbing his hands together with a clap. “So, shall we?”

Bending their knees, they gripped the knotted necks of a heap of black bin bags lying about their feet and hefted them up, up the steps to the building and through the door in a mess of rustling black plastic, squishing and squashing against the glass of the door.

“Hello!” Wei Wuxian called cheerfully as he barged through the entrance to the building, passing several people waiting on cushioned chairs and a startled trio of receptionists who flustered out of their chairs too late to stop either him or Jiang Wanyin, who scowled as he heaved the bags up a little more, shifting his grip and turning sideways to waddle through the door, bags in front and behind.

The offices inside were silent as Wei Wuxian bundled through, dropping his bags in a heap; one fell on top of another one and rolled off, coming to a halt near an employee who stared down with wide eyes and an open mouth.

Carefully, he moved his shiny leather shoes away from the bag.

“Wei Wuxian!” Jin Zixuan burst out of his office, his cousin trailing behind him with a scowl to rival Jiang Wanyin. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Oh hi!” Wei Wuxian beamed again, stripping off his gloves with a sigh of deep, honest satisfaction. “Just helping out, stopping by - you know the drill!”

“Helping – what? These are bin bags,” Jin Zixuan spluttered, frowning at the pile of bags now sprawled across his neat office floors.

“Congratulations on pointing out the fucking obvious,” Jiang Wanyin muttered sourly, rolling his shoulders. “Why did I have to carry all the heavy ones?”

Wei Wuxian ignored him with a roll of his eyes and an elbow to the ribs; Jiang Wanyin shoved him back. Jin Zixun snorted and then scrunched up his face, taking a step back.

“What is that smell?” he demanded, covering his face with his sleeve moments too late – half the office was on the other side of the room and the other half of the room were already covering their noses. One young man had plucked a face mask from a desk drawer, looping the strings over his ears, and had already got back to work, furiously typing out an email with a rushing-clattering speed.

“They’re bin bags,” Wei Wuxian blinked at Jin Zixun. “What do you think is in them?”

“Get them out of here,” Jin Zixuan ordered, his own sleeve raised to hover in front of his nose. There was a delicate wrinkle between his eyebrows and his face was turned a little away; he looked pained.

“Ah, see that’s the problem,” Wei Wuxian explained, hopping up to sit on a nearby desk. It was full of things: stacks of paper, a half-finished mug of coffee and a pot jammed full with pens and blunt-ended pencils. Its owner had abandoned it, however, to retreat further back from the smell. “We could get them out of here but their owner keeps dumping them in the street. At the bottom of streetlights. Like, I don’t know, sandbags or something. Only they’re bin bags.”

“They smell,” Jin Zixun waved a hand at the bags as though he could flap away the smell. “Take them outside now!”

Jiang Wanyin snorted and bared his teeth. “Or what?”

“Please,” Jin Zixuan, flinging an arm out in front of his cousin’s chest and closing his eyes briefly, breathing in deeply and then wrinkling his face with a sour expression, the sleeve pressed closer to his nose. “Take them away. I’ll – I’ll get someone to look into them being dumped outside, alright? Just take them out.”

Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin glanced at each other. Then, in a rebounding echo, they both shrugged.

“Sure thing,” Wei Wuxian grinned, slipping off the desk and wriggling on his yellow rubber gloves again – theatrical and full of squiggly fingers. “Nice doing business with you!”

Jiang Wanyin flexed his arms as he bent and lifted his load of bags again, turning back to face the door; they stepped towards it and then hesitated.

It was a pull door from this side.

“Ah, Jin Zixuan,” Wei Wuxian said, coughing out a laugh. “Would you mind getting the door?”

Around his fingers, the water was cold; it chilled him to the bone, creeping up his arms and settling in his hands, soapy-slick and stiffening. His fingertips were red; his knuckles red; his nails shone pink – in his hands, the dress twisted tight, squeezing the water out back into the bowl in a rushing cascade.

Dunking it back in, he rubbed it with the soap again.

“This is excellent soap, popo,” Wei Wuxian said, keeping his tone deceptively light. “Where did you get it?”

Baoshan Sanren rolled her eyes from her seat on the deck in front of her house, sunshine-drenched and dressed head-to-toe in a forest of greens which shone bright and diamond-patterned-white, and tutted at him.

“You shouldn’t boast,” she told him. “It is impolite.”

Wei Wuxian smiled, keeping his head down and working his hands over the dress to clean it.

“Will you go back?” he asked after a pause, still not looking up. If he didn’t look up, he wouldn’t see her glare.

He did, however, feel the towel she threw at him; it landed over his shoulder with a gentle thud and he flinched dramatically, clutching a hand to his chest and opening his eyes wide. “Popo!”

There was a gleam in her eyes as Baoshan Sanren glared back at him; it sunk into her mouth and played around there, twitching one corner upwards with a small, smug-like quirk.

“Why would I go back?” she said, looking past at him and watching a bird swooping through the air, following the canals in a meandering, hazy path to the lake. “That boy was rude,” she sniffed and added, “To think he claims to be a Lan from Suzhou. His great-grandmother would never have stood for him to treat me like that.”

“You knew his great-grandmother?” Wei Wuxian gaped, his mind rattling backwards through numbers, trying to work out how that would work.

“Oh yes,” Baoshan Sanren sighed with a private, wistful smile; her eyes were far-seeing, drifting out down to the lake with the birds. “Lan Yi and I were great friends for a long while.”

Wei Wuxian nodded, his hands stilling cold-cold-cold in the water, before he splashed a hand out to point at her.

“Hey, you’re distracting me!”

“Clearly it didn’t work too well,” Baoshan Sanren said dryly, shuffling a little on the step, resting her hands over the edge of it, chipped light here and there and starting to splinter. “Are you finished yet?”

Lifting the dress out of the water, he grasped it and squished the water out of it, his wrists pulling it into a taut spiral which drip-drip-dripped a little fall of rain back into the bowl.

“Popo,” he said, running the words over in his mind and then on the softness of his tongue. “Children have duties towards their parents: helping and caring and honouring. But don’t parents have duties to their children too? Like staying healthy for as long as possible.”

She glanced him over, “Where did you get that idea from?”

“Someone mentioned it to me the other day,” he shrugged, stretching the dress out flat and pegging it on the washing line strung from one wall to the next, a high-flung, looping-low string which bounced as he clipped the material to it with pastel-coloured pegs. “Does that matter? Aren’t they right?”

With a click of her tongue, Baoshan Sanren turned her head and shook it slowly, her long hair rustling behind her back, the tips brushing back and forth along the wooden deck, a white-bristled sweep-sweep-sweep.

Wei Wuxian sat on his heels, before he said, careful and running-quick – like a child who knows he’s about to get in trouble – “If it’s a question of money, I owe you for all the –”

With a shriek, Baoshan Sanren kicked the tub with one foot. It jumped with a crack and tumbled over onto Wei Wuxian, knocking him flat on his back, his legs awkwardly jammed underneath it; his head was sprawled on the hard-dirt ground and the water, soapy and slick-cold, was seeping into his clothes in bubbled-white bumps.

“Get out!” she ordered, and he scrambled up, slow and aching, from underneath the bowl and left, grabbing his backpack from the bench by the wall.

The phone rang, a trilling brilling ring-ring-ring-ring-ring. It rang and rang and rang and rang; it rang almost to the end, before there was a beep and his voice saying, “Hello?”

“Xingchen,” she said, and if there was a small smile creeping onto her face and into her chest, there was no one around to see it. “You sound well.”

“A-Niang,” he sounded surprised – and could she blame him? Perhaps another mother would, but she had been the one to tell him to leave; leave and don’t look back; leave and don’t come back. “I am well – how are you? Is there something wrong?”

There wasn’t any bite in it; she thought that was what hissed in her chest. The banal normality of it all.

“Nothing,” she said instinctively, clamping her jaw shut.

Her teeth ached.

“Oh, well, that’s good,” the relief in his voice was sweet – he had always been a worrier, this third child of hers. Too soft-hearted for his own good, but then that had, she thought, been a problem with the other two as well, only they’d showed it in different ways.

What did it say about her, she wondered, when she was the one who had raised them all?

“Well, it’s lovely to talk to you," Xingchen said, reluctant and pleading all at once. “But if there’s nothing else, I’m very busy at the moment – there’s a lot of opportunities going round at the moment and I don’t want to miss out and if I’m late –”

She swallowed with a nod and rubbed her teeth against each other; it ached, it ached, it ached up to her ears.

“Of course,” she said; and if this second smile was a little thinner and a little briefer – a shadow of the first – then there was no one there to see that one either. “Good luck.”

“Thank you!” she could hear him smiling through the phone line, could see the way he would bow, shallow and polite and graceful. “Goodbye, A-Niang.”

The phone clicked off.

She set it on the table and breathed out for a long one-two-three-four-five-six seconds, touching a hand to her jaw.

Up at the counter, Wen Qing was jabbing numbers into the till with a quick eye over the pile of items heaped in front of her, her long nails hovering over the packets of rice and bottles of milk, pointing down at the tissues hidden underneath the long-limbed spring onions and the bag of bean sprouts.

He still hadn’t spoken to her since the disaster with the microphone; there was something intimidating about the way she met his eyes head-on, and something almost intimate about the way that he had dismissed her half-started studies: they had both been medical students, once, and that seemed to matter somehow.

In front of him, Nie Huaisang was scanning through a list written on his phone – “written? Wangji-xiong, no one writes anything any more. That’s what voice notes are for” – pointing things out and rummaging around to the back of the shelves before dropping them into the basket Wangji was holding, the plastic-covered metal handle smooth to the touch.

 “We should get some more water,” Huaisang muttered, hefting the four-pack of water bottles, their glass bodies clinking together with a chattering clatter, and setting them down in the basket with an exaggerated ‘oof!’.

He made a face and flexed his arms, “Ah that was too much effort! I’m a delicate thing – my arms aren’t used to working like that!”

Tucking one arm under an elbow and resting his chin on his curled hand, he examined the array of vegetables and fruit in front of them: a sea of variegated greens and bright orange carrots and clementines, waxy yellow lemons jostling against the bananas with their green-striped jackets further down.

“Do you think we need vegetables, Wangji-xiong?” he asked, tapping his fan – closed and clotted-cream coloured with pin-prick embroidered butterflies – against his mouth with an idle thoughtfulness. “No one gets scurvy these days, do they?”

“En,” Wangji hummed, shifting to one side to let a woman past with her infant child, the boy already sipping at a box of milk that seemed to be glued to his hand and mouth.

Up ahead, rounding the end of the aisle, he could see Baoshan Sanren, dragging a shopping bag with two wheels behind her, the covering a weave of navy-blue-black checks. It sat upright and waited as she hunched over to look at the onions, testing them in her hands to see if they were firm and lifting them to her nose to smell for freshness.

“We should get some drinks,” Huaisang had flittered away and was now perusing the stacks of beer boxes and local-brewed wines and spirits; the stocked piles of strong, clear-cut Russian vodkas and dark-bottled Japanese sake. “In case of visitors. If da-ge comes round and we have nothing to offer him, he’ll think I’ve moved to a shack somewhere.”

Baoshan Sanren was making her way down their aisle, dropping fruit after vegetable after fruit into her bag: a handful of cherries in a net bag; a trio of round, ripe-dark plums; bok choi and cucumbers and goji berries with their damp-red bodies.

“Wangji-xiong?” he turned to see Huaisang waiting for him, flicking his head like a bird between a pair of bottles of vodka. “Which one do you think is better?”

Wangji said nothing and waited, the basket starting to grow heavy in his hands.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Baoshan Sanren moving closer and closer.

“Oh right – Lans,” Huaisang wrinkled his nose a little with a sigh. “You don’t have to drink it, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know something about it! How else will you know what to serve guests when you’re hosting an elegant dinner?”

“Mn,” Wangji murmured.

“If you’re going to ignore me, just do it, Wangji-xiong,” Huaisang tapped his fan on Wangji's chest with a surprisingly shrewd look; the glance towards Baoshan Sanren was less than subtle, though, and spoiled by the smile and wave – big and bold – he gave to catch her attention.

“Popo, popo!” he called, catching not just her with a swishing-sway of white hair and the slow, stuttering turn as she twisted her head to see but half the store.

At the counter, Wen Qing paused to look over; sweeping over all of them with a critical, scanning sort of gaze.

Huaisang was either oblivious or blind.

He smiled and gave a courteous bow: just a little ridiculous to be a lot charming.

“Popo, that looks like a heavy bag you have there, one of us should carry it for you,” he offered, gesturing to the bag she was tugging behind her, its wheels squeaking; one of them was cracked to one side, out of line with the other. It would be hard and heavy to pull.

Huaisang did not pull things. Huaisang was not even holding his own basket.

Wangji's hands tightened on the basket handle; Huaisang was both oblivious and blind and blissfully ignoring the glare Wangji was giving him: fierce and swift and cold-cold-cold.

It was a shame that xiongzhang and Nie Mingjue were so fond of Huaisang. Wangji would be perfectly happy to smother him in his sleep after this.

Shufu, of course, did not believe in hating people. Shufu preferred to describe Huaisang as 'trying'.

Baoshan Sanren gave a small, dipping bow back and nodded, glancing between two of them. “If you insist.”

“I do, I do,” Huaisang beamed at her, his smile – delighted and successful – half-hidden behind his fan. “Ah, Wangji-xiong, do you mind – I should get home as soon as possible; let me take that –” he squawked as Wangji dropped the basket into his hands; it plummeted a good half a foot before he recovered and heaved it back up again. “Thank you, popo, for allowing us to assist - it is our honour. Wangji-xiong, I’ll see you later – don’t worry about dinner, I’ll find something somewhere!”

He skipped out of the store with a sleek, slipping walk that carried him off quickly. Behind him, Wen Qing called out after him and levelled Lan Wangji with an icy, demanding stare.

“Excuse me,” Lan Wangji bowed in turn to Baoshan Sanren. “Must pay first.”

Dig the end into the bottom of the canal – feel for it and push down and then along; down and then along – that’s it; it was slow, unhurried work to peel the pole off the canal floor and set the boat to drifting along the surface: each stroke took seconds and seconds and seconds all told, a languid thing which stretched out long in front of him and rushed time onwards either side, a sprinter in running shoes on the pavement, thin vest flapping about their chest.

Under the canopy, Baoshan Sanren watched him, sharp-eyed and quiet, offering advice as he punted the boat up the canal towards her house, the shopping bag neatly propped up against the wall, stuffed to the brim with ingredients and bits-and-bobs for this-and-that.

Mostly, though, she just studied him or gazed out with half-shut eyes across the water and down the streets which weaved their way alongside: shuttered glimpses of gardens and high, ivy-laced walls with the first buds of Spring; children’s laughter springing up and over as dogs barked and motorbike exhausts crackled with a pop-pop.

Eventually, they arrived at the right mooring and he stilled the boat, clutching onto the wooden post as he tied the rope around it, pulling it in close and climbing out, lifting the shopping trolley up and then reaching back to help Baoshan Sanren, her thin hand strong in his.

“Parents have a duty,” she quoted, out of the blue, as he carried the bag inside the walls of her front garden, stepping neatly on the rough-cut slabs of stone set into the dirt to form a dusty-dirty path to the door. “To their children to stay healthy.”

He set down the bag carefully, nudging the loose wheel straight again with his shoe and avoiding looking at her.

“Wei Wuxian has never said a thing like that in his life,” Baoshan Sanren told him, and there was a hint of amusement in her voice – something fond. It reminded him of how Nie Mingjue spoke about Huaisang: that hot-studded exasperation tempered down with a deep, stilled care.

“How old were you?” she asked and the question caught him off guard. He didn’t flinch, didn’t twitch, just blinked and swallowed salt.

“Six,” he murmured, and he could see her nodding without looking at her.

In the gently fading light, her hair shone silverish, wisping away into the wind and the night.

“Stay for dinner,” she told him, firm and final, and he nodded once, words too hard to find and too big to voice, following her into the house with the bag and its crooked wheel.

The evening was a light-hearted thing: it swept over in a wash of rose-red-pink and faint apricot-orange on the horizon where the sun sank; it danced around the rooftops in a lazy waltz, carding through hair and stirring the clothes on the washing line out to dry.

On Baoshan Sanren’s roof, tied above a long red tassel with a white-milk bead, a silver bell chimed, high and sweet and lingering with an echo that peeled away on the breeze.

It was the first bell to ring, the small silver one, and the others traipsed after: lower and warmer, gentle humming things which rang clear and clean and tinkling in a discordant harmony.

“They were gifts,” Baoshan Sanren said, her hands clasped on her lap as Lan Wangji poured out the tea – green and mottled and strong. “The bells. From a friend – ah,” she sighed. “It was a very long time ago now.”

She accepted the cup of tea with white, chilled fingers and shoulders which were only hunched a little and the plum-purple horizon began to twinkle with stars.

“Lan Yi said she would not let me live in a house which didn’t have bells,” she continued, and Wangji glanced over. “How else would I remember I was from Suzhou, she told me. As though I could forget!”

There were tiny, string-strung bells on his mother’s house in Suzhou; the bells by his father’s house had been deep and low, in mourning as much as he had been. Shufu had a quartet of little bells above his back door which sung soft and trembling in the slightest breeze.

His going-away present for xiongzhang had been a set of bells: etched with the characters for prosperity and wealth and luck and joy; each had come gleaming and jingling in their box, a cascade of metal from largest to smallest, nestled in silk and with a lid which snapped shut on sneaking fingers.

He smiled a bit; the clay cup under his hands was rough-smooth as clay always was, unglazed and handmade.

The breeze swept through as the evening deepened, splashing lavender and watercolour-violet across the sky, a hint of the black-spotted wash that was yet to come. Dangling on the edge of the roof, the bells swung quicker, out of time and out of sync and melodic all the same.

He had not touched his tea; he sipped slow and small and listened.

On the table in front of them, the small pile of white cardboard boxes and little foil baskets were licked clean, flecked here and there with the remains of that day’s lunch: stuck through with cutlery in slanting metal and wood; the air still smelled like food: the breeze through the open window whipped it round and out.

“Ahhh Wangji-xiong, that was a very good choice,” Huaisang sighed with a cat-like, whisker-twitching smile, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes.

Sipping at his water bottle, Wangji took a moment to enjoy the peace and quiet; it wouldn’t be long before they reopened officially after lunch and the patients came in again.

There were two long-ish appointments scheduled for that afternoon and a consultation he expected to take a while, plus a flurry of children’s check-ups, awkward and anxious – almost more so for him than for the kids themselves.

It was good, but the moments like this when he could just sit and let his mind and body unwind a little, swamped by the sunlight through the south-facing windows and their warm, polished glass, were his favourites.

“Am I early?” Baoshan Sanren’s voice rang from the doorway as she carefully stepped over the threshold and its bumped-up wooden slat.

Wangji slipped standing, twisting the water bottle’s lid on.

“A little,” Huaisang mumbled, drawing in a yawn and fluttering his fan with a smile as he pulled himself together. “But it’s not a problem at all, popo.”

Baoshan Sanren was eyeing him with an expression scrawled across her face in characters ten inches high: amusement and disbelief linked arms and sat there, plain and bright and patient.

“I can wait,” she offered, but Huaisang was already dragging himself to his feet and back over to his desk, waving away her protests.

“No, no, no, no need – we’re both free now! In fact, it’s perfect timing: this way, the doctor can see you before this afternoon’s treatments start,” he smiled, flapping his hands about behind the desk as though searching for the right form.

Wangji watched it all: there was something quiet and proud stalking round his stomach with a rumbling purr.

He hadn’t thought she’d come back. He hadn’t thought he’d done enough to convince her.

“Ah, one moment,” Baoshan Sanren said, rummaging in her little, clasp-held handbag bouncing on her hip, holding up a hand to hold Huaisang at bay.

She frowned, tutting at herself and wittering through a litany of little noises as she searched, before, “Ah, here it is!”

With a smile – satisfied and laughing – she pulled out a wad of notes and a cascade of coins, letting them drop onto the counter in front of Huaisang’s face with a rumpling, crumpling clatter. The sunlight winked off the coins, bright and fierce, running its fingers over the creased edges of the notes; worn and thinned out and faded but still good, still enough.

“Oh,” Huaisang made a noise that sounded oddly like one of the birds he kept at his brother’s house in a tall, tree-feathered, red-tiled aviary: high-pitched and a dragging thing. He surveyed the lot with wide, distressed eyes. “Thank you, popo.”

The voicemail was short, from Wen-popo and very skimpy on the details: “Baoshan Sanren needs help. Come now. Hurry.”

Wei Wuxian tapped off the message and ran, jumping with a splash onto the prow of a boat sailing snail-like down a canal and onto the other side of it, shouting an apology back at the uncle driving it without turning his head.

“Popo, popo!” he was shouting again even as he ran up through the small front dirt-paved garden, bursting through the open sliding doors and skidding to a halt, dropping to his knees and breathing in gasps, “Popo!”

On a bamboo bed covered over with a heap of blankets and a stiff, wooden pillow, Baoshan Sanren was a graceless, still figure, her face scrunched in pain and her eyes closed. She kept a blanket, pink-knotted, tugged up to her chin and the shutters were locked tight against the sunlight.

Wen-popo, on the other side of the bed, exchanged a glance with Wei Wuxian as she set down a glass of water, half-full, next to a cup of green tea – minty and fresh. Her face, weathered and lined, was pinched in worry as much as Wen-popo, a grandmother many times over, ever looked worried.

When a woman who has seen almost literally everything worries, it doesn’t bode well.

“Oh, Wuxian,” Baoshan Sanren released one hand from the blanket to reach out for him, seizing his wrist and pulling him close – she was strong, stronger than she looked and far stronger than she had any right to be, lying in her bed like the dying. “Why did she call you?”

“Popo, what’s going on? What do you need?” Wei Wuxian burst out; his breath was mostly back now, though the quick-jumping-hammering in his heart hadn’t settled down yet, drumming a quick da-dum-da-dum-da-dum double-time. “And why shouldn’t she have called me? Aiya, you are so stubborn!”

Baoshan Sanren shook her head and opened her mouth, taking her time to gather her thoughts before she squinted in pain and said,

“Soup, get me soup.”

“Soup,” Wei Wuxian repeated. Wen-popo looked at him and he looked at her and together they both looked back at Baoshan Sanren.

“Yes, idiot boy!” Baoshan Sanren snapped, giving a soft moan as the movement of her mouth snapped her jaw. “The stupid painkillers have worn off and I’m so hungry – the doctor said I need to keep my strength up.”

“Soup,” Wei Wuxian repeated again, almost in disbelief. The smile breaking over his face was dawn-like, wide and beaming.

“Yes, and hurry up with it!” Baoshan Sanren ordered as he stood to head into the kitchen. “And I want Shanghai noodle soup! Not just whatever slop you put into a pot and drown with chilli oil.”

Wei Wuxian paused in the doorway to the kitchen, spinning on his heel with a laughing flourish. Giving an exaggerated bow, halfway to the floor, he nodded and pulled his phone out of his pocket.

“Anything for you, popo,” he said, solemn – but it was spoiled a moment later as he couldn’t restrain the smile from popping out again.

Wen-popo settled down in the corner on a cushion to wait, pouring some more tea for herself and adding a third cup for Wei Wuxian.

“Has he always looked like that much of an idiot when he smiles or are the painkillers still working?” Baoshan Sanren wondered – but that was spoiled by the small whine of pain she gave as her mouth stretched to laugh.

Wen-popo nodded, too wise to say anything, and sipped her tea.

Soft and sleepy, the night was a damp thing: the spattering shower earlier that day had eased away, leaving behind miniscule diamond-drops hung on blades of grass and dripping off bell-curving petals, bobbing with the weight and the last of the breeze as it drifted by, slight and hazy and almost ghost-like.

The windowpanes were still gleaming where the rain had tumbled down them, raindrops racing to get to the bottom and slip to swim in the canal barely a metre away, bubbling by with its usual, floating pace and the steam covering over the bathroom window gave the illusion of fog outside; of the rain still falling in a steady, thick sheet as the shower beat down, warm and indulgent, onto his shoulders.

Shutting off the shower and stepping out, Wangji wrapped a towel around his hair and squeezed out most of the water, letting it hang down his back in a tangled, twisted-tight black mass; it was still steam-warm as he wiped the trickle of water off his body and pulled on pyjamas.

When he opened the bathroom door to leave, the rest of the house felt a little chilly.

It was quiet, too – it was normally quiet: Huaisang, for all his annoying habits like the forgetting-to-pay and leaving dirty plates and dishes on the side and almost always having something in the washing machine, was a quieter roommate than he’d expected. Still, he wasn’t silent and without the low hum of his music from his room, leaking out with the yellow-dust light through his bedroom doors, the house was eerie.

Barefoot, he padded through to his room and dropped the towel on his bed as he took the comb from his chest of drawers, next to the detangling spray and the conditioning mousse in their tall, black plastic bottles, and stopped in front of the mirror.

His reflection pulled his hair over his shoulder, spraying one-two-three-four-five down the length of his hair before sweeping the comb through, stop-start where it snagged on knots.

It was almost ritualistic, combing through his hair: there was something about the repetition which was soothing.

About him, the room was dimmed; it was eight-thirty and he would slide into bed and off to sleep soon enough – everything was a gentle light, dark-cast and night-like, and if there was a tiredness in his body it was matched with a pleased thrum in his chest and head.

Carrying the hairdryer over to the mirror, he pushed the plug into the socket in the wall, flicking the switch so it turned on. It revved, loud in the silent house, and blustered fierce, blowing his hair out, long and rippling, as he dragged the comb through it again, watching as the occasional, singular drop reluctantly plummeted onto the wooden floor.

A handful of minutes later, it all stopped.

The moonlight filtered through the shutters over the windows, slatted and slotted, and silver-grey spotted with the cherry-red glow from the lanterns hung down the canal.

Carefully, Lan Wangji turned the hairdryer off and pulled it out of the socket. Then, he picked his way across the floor to the light switch and turned it once – then twice. Nothing happened.

Outside the window, kitchen lights flickered for his neighbours; the streetlights bubbled orange.

For a moment, he hovered there, a tall silhouette in greyscale. He knew, theoretically, what had happened: the fuse had blown. It had happened before, in Shanghai, in his previous apartment - but then he had simply called the electrician who had come to fix it, quick and professional and efficient in the bright light of day.

Who should he call now?

Theoretically, he knew who would be best to call now – but there was a childish part of him that wanted to muddle through on his own, another part of him which wanted to call xiongzhang or shufu even though neither of them could help, and the last part of him, well, drew an idle sketch of Wei Wuxian in monochrome, shaded smiling.

He breathed in for four and out for eight and cast about for his phone.

The knock on the door thudded loud and clear. He jumped; startled out of his pose: he had spent the half an hour wait sitting and meditating on the rug on the floor, his bare feet nestled in the plush faux-fur thing, clearing and reclearing and recycling his own mind with a brutal, ruthless, scandalised efficiency.

Unfolding his legs, he stood up – the little trio of candles on the coffee table wavered and waved – and went to open the door, standing aside immediately so Wei Wuxian could make his way inside, the toolbox in his hands a comforting sight.

“Right,” Wei Wuxian clunked the box down on the coffee table and turned back to him, hands on hips and his voice booming too big for the space and the silk-soft night-light. “Do you even know where the fuse box is?”

“Mn,” Lan Wangji nodded and led the way, showing him through the sliding doors, across his bedroom and to the back of his closet with its rows of colour-cascading shirts and slick trousers and a hanger full of ties in orderly rows: black and blue and white and dove-grey.

The fuse box was there: it sat between the empty watch box and the small tower of boxes with the cufflinks shufu had got him on his graduation and the rings he’d inherited from A-Niang.

In the dark, it was a solid black lump, reflecting gleaming streaks of light back like arcing, sweeping shooting stars.

Unzipping his backpack with a flourish, Wei Wuxian fished out a torch and turned it on with a wiggle, focusing it on the fuse box with a hum and a nub of tongue sticking between his lips as he thought.

The light was bright-white and startlingly clear – it made Lan Wangji blink and squint, three paces behind Wei Wuxian and looking half-over his shoulder.

“You don’t have to watch me, you know,” Wei Wuxian told him, lifting up the fuse box cover and pushing the torchlight closer so he could read the numbers and characters lettered underneath the rows of switches with their multi-colour handles.

Lan Wangji nodded, hummed, “Mn,” and slipped back out of the room to wait in the living room.

It felt odd knowing Wei Wuxian was in his bedroom. It felt odder knowing that Wei Wuxian was in his bedroom and he wasn’t there too.

It was intimate – he supposed it made sense that it would feel so, since the only people who had ever come into any of his bedrooms before were shufu and xiongzhang and A-Niang – awkwardly dissecting: like he was being neatly sliced open and examined, bit by squishy-pink bit by careful-steel-blade.  

Too restless to sit and too conscious of Wei Wuxian in the other room to return to meditating, he got up from the sofa and moved to the kitchen to make a pot of tea: herbal and soothing; for sleepless nights and pooling candlelit evenings.

In his bedroom, Wei Wuxian was humming something. It was off-key and obnoxious and somehow charming; it was a ribbon of melody over the stuttering drumming outside – the rain had returned, steady and staid in the still night.

He poured the tea delicately; the steam rising from the boiled water was scented and spiralled white-edged up, up, up to sweeten the air.

“All done!” Wei Wuxian announced, bounding back into the room with a brisk step.

Lan Wangji set the two tea cups and the half-full teapot down on the table, along with a bowl of salted nuts – pistachios and pecans and almonds jumbled together – and gestured for Wei Wuxian to sit.

“Oh no, you don’t have to do that,” Wei Wuxian shook his head, tucking his torch back in his backpack and snapping the plastic clasps on his toolbox down again. “I should be going anyway.”

“Raining,” Wangji told him with a small, creasing frown. As if to prove him right, the rain battered harder, louder; or perhaps it was simply he was listening for it now.

“Ah, well, a little rain won’t kill me!” Wei Wuxian smiled, but he was still there – lingering, hesitating, fingers playing with the strap of his backpack.

“You helped – eat, drink. Wait until the rain stops,” Lan Wangji insisted, and he waited, patiently, for Wei Wuxian to fold, crumpling onto the sofa with a sigh and setting his hands around the teacup, before he took a sip of his own.

Around them, the night pressed in close, thrown into shadow-lit relief by the orange-yellow glow of the candles dotted around the room, all white wax and square-cut towers, burning silently, constantly as time ticked away.

The tea was gentle on his tongue, and the crunch of the nuts with their salt-encrusted bodies clattered through the rain, a crashing, percussive counterpoint.

In the flickering, cream-dim light, Wei Wuxian’s face was hollow, full of cheekbones and dark lips and black-dark eyes like lakewater at night. It suited him, this half-light, Lan Wangji thought, and tried not to look at him too much – not to stare.

When Wei Wuxian stretched out a hand for another couple of nuts or to refill the teapot, more graceful than he would have thought, he found himself watching, tracing the lines of light as they ran along his skin, highlighting the bones in his fingers and the bumps of his knuckles.

His mouth felt dry. He poured more tea and stopped eating nuts.

“Thank you,” Wei Wuxian said eventually, quiet and sincere.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji glanced at him; Wei Wuxian’s eyes were warm and there was the slightest uptick of his mouth. It was a question, that noise, and this time it didn’t surprise him when Wei Wuxian seemed to understand.

Even in the half-light, he was readable to Wei Wuxian and it wasn’t surprising, just unbalancing - like a rollercoaster when it tilts.

“For helping Baoshan Sanren,” Wei Wuxian clarified. “I know you spoke to her and I know she wouldn’t have gone if you hadn’t. So, thank you.”

He nodded.

Had Baoshan Sanren spoken to Wei Wuxian then? He wondered what she had said about him – whether she had approved of him at all?

“You’re much softer than you seem, Mr Dentist,” Wei Wuxian observed, licking a strip of salt off a finger and Lan Wangji looked over his shoulder. “You seem all cold and distant – such an ice prince! – but actually you’re fluffy as a panda underneath, aren’t you? Soft-hearted and sweet. Are you as cuddly as one too?”

It was a joke; it was a joke, it was a joke, it was a joke, and Lan Wangji’s ears were red-red-red.

He wanted to snuff out the candles nearest him and sit only in moonlight so they couldn’t be seen.

“Speaking of fluffy,” Wei Wuxian added after a pause – pregnant, embarrassed, hot-hot-hot. “What’s with the hutch outside? Do you have pets, Mr Dentist?”

“En,” Wangji shook his head briefly. “Not my pet. Looking after it – for Jin Ling and Wen Yuan.”

Wei Wuxian laughed a little, “Ah so you’re who they got to do that! See, like I said: fluffy and cuddly.”

Wangji twitched; he couldn’t think of what to say – what would be the right thing to say without being too blunt or too much or too entirely-wrong-for-the-situation.

“They said they asked you,” he said eventually. He had forgotten about that, but now Wei Wuxian had mentioned the rabbit, it was back and the wonder that he’d had then came with it, hand-in-hand and persistent. “You refused. Why?”

Wei Wuxian’s smile dimmed and he bobbed his head a bit, tapping his fingertips on the teacup in an old habit.

“Ah, yes. Well, I don’t take live things,” he said – and that was nothing like the answer Wangji had expected, but the weight in Wei Wuxian’s voice when he said it was a warning not to push.

Lan Wangji could sympathise easily with not wanting to speak any more than demanded.

Outside, the rain shuddered, trickling away to a thin, spattering thing, half-hearted and meagre as it clung on to the land even as it was whisked away by the wind and the grey-bellied clouds to other places and other people, and the stillness that came after it was creeping, tentative and delicate.

“I should get going,” Wei Wuxian said, standing up and dusting his hands free of salt. “Thank you for the tea and snacks,” he hoisted his backpack over one shoulder and looked at Wangji; they stood almost eye-to-eye, the coffee table set between them. “You should check your fuse box in a few minutes, make sure you’re happy everything looks normal, but other than that, it should be good to go. If you have any other problems – well, I need to sleep so try not to have any other problems until morning.”

Lan Wangji nodded and followed him to the door, shutting it carefully behind him.

He tidied away the tea cups and the teapot and the little bowl for the nuts, wiping a damp cloth over the table to clean it quickly.

The candlelight was still soft, painting the room fire-warm and he was reluctant to change it – to test the lights and blow the candles out.

He lingered in the living room, rattling about for something else to do before he couldn’t put it off any longer and crossed into his bedroom and over to the closet, sliding open the door and lifting the fuse box: the rows of switches stared back at him, shadowed-dim and wordlessly unhelpful.

The boxes either side had been moved; Wei Wuxian must have knocked them over when he was investigating, leaning in close to fiddle with his arms akimbo: the cufflinks box was on the wrong side and the box for his lost watch was settled on top of the box with A-Niang’s rings.

Lifting the two boxes up, he switched them back – and hesitated, his hand lingering over the watch box.

It had rattled. It was empty.

Or, rather, it was meant to be empty.

Carefully, slowly, he cracked open the lid with a pop.

In the moonlight, the silver watch glittered, sharp and bright and star-strong.

Chapter Text

Beer in the Moonlight

The world didn’t seem brighter or clearer or immeasurably sweeter; the sky was puffed cloudy, freckled white-and-blue when the wind whipped bobbles of cloud away from each other, and the sun filtered through in a soft, drizzling slink.

What was true was that Lan Wangji felt lighter.

It was a strange, swirling sort of giddiness, coiling up his throat in a rush of something fiercely sweet and greedy; it lingered at the back of his mind, washing a shine of contentment over everything, diamond-white tinted and shimmering like moonlight.

Even Huaisang, who had managed to be late three days in a row running – the first day, he was searching for the right pair of shoes; then he simply had to make a smoothie before work; finally, he managed to spend twice as long as usual in the shower, failing to offer any explanation other than a yawn and a horrified, bug-eyed stare – couldn’t shake it.

If every now and then he cracked the watch box open and looked at it, tracking the second hand as it ticked round bit by bit by bit, silver against the dark blue background, then no one would know.

“I am glad,” xiongzhang had said in their last call, Wangji’s phone propped up on a pile of books in front of him, the dim light in the video flickering off the smooth black-waxed wood of Lan Xichen’s piano over his shoulders and shadowing the smile on his face. “That you’re happy, didi.”

Lan Wangji had simply hummed and smiled back – a tiny-tiny thing, but there, tucked into the corners of his mouth.

If his ears had shot red when he brushed his fingertips against the watch and remembered the way a red ribbon trailed through the air on the wind, following after a fading laugh, then that was his to know alone.

In his office, in between patients, though, there was no one to see other than the birds which fluttered around the window, heading down towards the lake and the carpet of lotuses and the deep, swaying-still water. Instead of running his fingers link to link along the strap of the watch, instead there was just skin and the bulk of bones and the taut, string-thick tendons of his wrist; his skin felt flushed when he skated over it: hot-hot-hot against the cold of his fingertips.

Once he’d noticed, he couldn’t stop either – it was obsessive: strange and childish and rapidly evolving towards a habit.

It wasn’t unusual for him to pick up traits and tricks and ticks like this, but they had always been grounding before: this one left him feeling present, but sky-high and soaring and staring down a long, rock-toothed drop which made his head spin if he looked too hard.

It had been five days since he had last seen Wei Wuxian.

He had ordered lunch from Qin Su’s restaurant on Wednesday, when he knew Wei Wuxian worked there as a delivery driver; he had stopped by Song Lan’s café on Friday, only to be greeted by Song Lan’s sombre nod and A-Qing’s flounce as she disappeared off to school. He had even waited for thirty-five minutes or so by the junction where Wei Wuxian usually hovered in his boat to collect passengers to take up the canals and rivulets before he had had to admit, reluctantly, that Wei Wuxian simply wasn’t coming.

He would think it was deliberate if only for the fact that was nonsensical: Wei Wuxian had found his watch in the lake and brought it back to him, Lan Wangji needed to thank him and thank him properly.

It was infuriating.

He did not, resolutely, determinedly, think about how he knew Wei Wuxian’s odd-job, odd-hours schedule – or how he had never tried to learn it, simply absorbed it somehow, like a teenager running through a school timetable week-in, week-out, week-in.

“I want an appointment,” the voice carried through the just-ajar door into his office. It was sharp and too confident: it was a voice which demanded, rather than asking.

“Of course!” Huaisang chirped, bright and too-cheerful in the way he always was when faced with a difficult customer. “When would you like?”

There was a pause, pregnant and impatient.

“Did I say I wanted to wait?” the voice huffed a snort and he could hear the headshake and the tutting tongue. “I said I wanted an appointment.”

“Yes, gongzi,” Huaisang could be infinitely patient when a situation called for it, he was confident and capable enough to handle something like this.

Lan Wangji could feel his own jaw settling stiff and breathed out long and steady, one-two-three-four, forcing his teeth apart and his jaw down.

“We can book you in as soon as possible – let’s see: we have an appointment free tomorrow at ten in the morning, would that work? What name should I put it under?”

“Are you stupid?” the man sneered. “I said I wanted an appointment now – why are you giving me appointments for tomorrow?”

Standing up, Lan Wangji swept out of the room in a flurry of white coat and blue shirt, his hands clenched by his sides.

In the reception, Huaisang was wilting as the man – Jin Zixuan’s cousin, he was fairly certain – tried to loom over him at the front desk, his voice folding in on itself until it was vanishingly, tremulously small.

“Jin Zixun,” Wangji waited until he had finished – interrupting would be rude – and if his own voice was ice-thick, then so be it. “Same-day appointments for emergencies only. All other appointments booked in advance.”

Jin Zixun stared, his forehead creased in a frown, his hands falling from tucked behind his back to swing at his sides.

“Why can’t I have an appointment today?” he demanded, waving a hand around the clinic reception to show the empty seats sprayed white-light by the sunlight through the windows. “You’re not even busy!”

“Is there an emergency?” Wangji asked, blunt and it thudded even blunter in the quiet.

“We – wha – how would you even know?” Jin Zixun spluttered.

“No exceptions,” Lan Wangji said.

Jin Zixun’s face pinched, “You!” he burst out but nothing followed and Lan Wangji watched, impassive and immovable, as Jin Zixun stormed out, slamming the sliding door behind him; it bounced back out of the frame, gliding to a halt halfway open against the late spring warmth.

When he turned to go back to his office, Huaisang was watching him curiously.

“You didn’t need to do that, Wangji-xiong,” he said – though there wasn’t any reproach in his voice, just calm and a studied sort of ease. “I would have been fine on my own.”

“Mn,” Wangji nodded, feeling his fingers ghost over his wrist again, lingering on his pulse for a heartbeat, two, three. “Don’t like him.”

“You should get a bracelet,” Huaisang said absently, turning back to his computer screen to hide the curl of his smirk and the glint in his eyes which shone mischief. “Or a watch.”

For a moment, Wanji was frozen; but when he carefully shut the door to his office and sank down into his desk chair, his ears were burning.

His wrist was warm, though, and his fingertips were still cold.

On the counter, the ice was slowly dripping off the first iced coffee as the second was poured. Song Lan had a slow, steady, rhythmical hand as he poured in loops; he was pouring with a studied concentration: fierce and unrelenting, a slight squint about his eyes as he watched the pot spiral round and round and round as he poured.  

Two seats down, A-Qing, her hair in a pair of long, French plaits, was glaring at him.

Lan Wangji didn’t like to think he was discomforted by her. She was thirteen and he was an adult with his own clinic; what reason was there for him to be nervous?

A-Qing narrowed her eyes at him, the almost-empty cup of coffee in front of her pushed away.

“I still don’t believe you,” she announced, arms folded. She said it like a judge in court, heavy and solemn: I sentence you to…

Lan Wangji hummed a question, slanting his eyes at her even as he watched Song Lan carefully-carefully pouring the coffee.

“That you’re not impersonating Zewu-jun. I mean,” she elaborated with a wrinkle of her nose. “That you weren’t. When you tried to get away with not paying for things.”

The melted ice was puddling around the glass cups, slinking along the grains of the wood in the counter-top, spider-thin and spider-silk-like, dyeing it almost-black. Drops chased each other down the sides, bumped and humped like little splashes of glass: clear-cut and winking up at him, blue-cast in the light.

“Would never impersonate xiongzhang,” he said eventually; and he sounded a lot calmer than he felt.

He had never told someone before – had never really needed to: what do you need to say when your older brother is a global star, plastered across billboards and flickering on the tv screen in adverts for this and that and the other product, his voice echoing out of radios in shops about a jumping drumbeat? What is there to say when you look almost exactly like him, only colder, harsher, bleaker? – and it hammered against his ribs with a bruising anxiety.

A-Qing stared at him, her mouth open as she scanned him up and down, head-to-toe in a critical, exacting glare.

“No,” she said, hushed, then: “No!” and excitement and disbelief made her loud; her voice echoed around the café, sinking into the walls.

“Don’t shout, A-Qing,” Song Lan rebuked her absently, the loops of warm water over the coffee beans finally stilling as he squatted down to peer at the coffee in the clear-glass pot.

“No, no-no-no-no-no-no-no!” she hopped off her stool and bounced a little on her feet. Her hands clenched and splayed open by her sides; she didn’t seem to be able to keep still: she buzzed on the spot, before swaying and lurching forwards to clutch at Lan Wangji’s arm. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You really are? Do you have pictures? Can I see?”

“Mn,” he hummed, gratefully accepting his keep cup back from Song Lan, full and steaming hot. It was hard not to smile: minuscule and inflected smug. “Am late for work.”

A-Qing’s howl – two parts glee, one part fury – rang in his ears long after he had entered the clinic over a kilometre away.

At quarter past twelve, Huaisang barged into his office with a flutter of a cherry-red fan and a heaving sigh:

“Why is it so hot today?” he complained, slouching into the chair, stiff-backed and white-wood, opposite Wangji’s desk. “It’s unbearable – and it’s only going to get hotter, Wangji-xiong; it’s not even summer yet. How will I cope?”

He did look a bit pink and damp, Wangji thought uncharitably, the bright light slinking through the open shutters and shattering on the metal edges of his laptop in a dazzle of silver-sliding-yellow.

“Mn,” he agreed, though, and added, after a pause, “It is the humidity. You will adjust.”

“Will I?” Huaisang sighed, and for all he enjoyed complaining about the weather whatever kind it was that day – too windy, too rainy, too hot, too cold, too bright – he did seem decidedly deflated in the lethargic, drained-down way people are when they are sticky and dried-out and too hot. “Perhaps I will perish instead.”

Another day, Wangji might have ignored him, writing his complaints off as nothing more than Huaisang’s usual theatrics – but his thumb skated over the edge of the watch wrist-band and he paused, the words on his tongue trickling away to nothing.

After a moment, he said, simply, “Come,” and stood up, gesturing for Huaisang to leave the room – frowning and fluttering his fan and finally quiet.

“Aiya, Wangji-xiong, are you trying to actually kill me?” Huaisang whined later, staring outside at the sun as it glittered off the pavement outside, dyeing the budding leaves yellow-ish.

Wangji plopped a hat on his head and swept outside followed by a squawk that rattled his teeth into a smirk.

Like a wave, the cool air washed over them both as they stepped through the door, Wangji closing it neatly behind both of them, trapping the sunshine and the rolling spring heat outside. Inside the restaurant, the soft pinks and purples drifted in the ever-present breeze, listing in from the lake so close by, and the light patterned soft as the clouds floated by, fat and lazy with high-sunk rain and the still, still sky.

“Ah, Doctor Lan!” Jiang Yanli smiled as she came over, stopping off on the way to drop a tray loaded with tall glass bottles full of water and a homemade lemonade for a group of tourists with cameras on strings around their necks and blistering, sun-reddened faces bright in the wood-dimmed sunlight.

It was a sweet smile, but it wavered, tense and guilty, and Wangji wondered why.

“And Nie Huaisang, are you here for lunch?”

“Mn,” Wangji nodded once.

“Let’s sit by the windows,” Huaisang announced, leading the way over, past Jiang Yanli as she slipped over to fetch them some menus. His voice was louder than usual: he never boomed like his brother did, but his voice somehow carried out-out-out-and-away without much effort when he wanted it to. “You can look out at the lake, Wangji-xiong, and I can eavesdrop on people walking past.”

When he looked over, behind the fan, Huaisang’s smile was pointed and his eyes sharp.

“I’ll bring over some water now and just let me know when you want to order,” Jiang Yanli didn’t say anything, but her smile had slipped onto her chin; she lingered for a brief moment as though there was something else to say before turning away again, the purple-lined hem of her skirt whisking after her.

“Now,” Huaisang carefully laid the folded fan to one side, scanning down the menu with a business-like severity. “We should order rice, of course, and some steamed vegetables, but would you like to share some lotus root soup? There’s a version without the pork – and I want some Yunmeng Fish Noodles as well.”

“Mn,” Wangji glanced down, running through the mix of Hubei and local dishes. Hot Dry Noodles were vegetarian but they sounded, well, hot, and chefs weren’t known for being happy about being asked to water down the spice in dishes. “Will be fine.”

“Excellent,” Huaisang brightened and turned with a hum – a little, skipping song he thought was a k-pop song – to look out of the window, resting his chin on a curled hand and scanning the people walking past.

“Eavesdropping on others is wrong,” Wangji told him absently, and nodded at Jiang Yanli, who had just appeared at their table, notepad in hand and a thin smile on her face. She looked pale, and she waited expectantly for the order, vanishing off to greet the newest customers at the door as soon as he had finished listing the dishes.

He wondered if she was ill. She had always seemed more fragile than the rough-cut bustle of the water town and most of its people: if they were wood, she was china, polished but delicate.

He would not ask. It would be rude to ask.

“Doctor Lan,” Jiang Yanli stopped him by the door, half-caught in shadow where the restaurant tipped from dining room the kitchen, her hands buried under a circle-spotted dishcloth.

She breathed in, long and deep and full, and he waited while she arranged her thoughts on her tongue.

She was, he reflected, nothing like her brother – quick-tempered, quick-tongued.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, but the intensity of how she was looking at him was identical to Jiang Cheng’s and he felt scrutinised even when she looked away, her eyes flitting from curtain to wooden plank to tablecloth to him again. “The other day when you were arguing with A-Xian, we could hear your conversation through the windows. We didn’t mean to eavesdrop but still – it was a private conversation and we shouldn’t have listened.”

Lan Wangji stared, stiff. He jerked a little nod and blinked once and then it was his turn to take a breath in – quick and sharp.

“Is fine,” he said – though his tongue felt fat in his mouth. Do not tell lies, he thought to himself, hadn’t shufu drummed it into him all his life? Hadn’t it always been the best way to live?

Do not tell lies, he thought again but bitter, and walked back to the clinic to the clip-clop sound of Huaisang tapping something out on his phone.

Down the road, the argument thrummed like a bridal procession: it bounced, it swirled, it beat like a drum ba-bum ba-bum and it rang through the air, full of colours and noise and a squirming, restless bubbling. It grew, too, surging up the road, pulling heads round and out of far-flung windows to look, popping up from the edges of the canals to see, shake and dip down again.

For Jinxi, this was normal: it would be stranger if Jiang Wanyin and Wei Wuxian and Jin Zixuan were walking down the street in silence, a trio of comfortable companions.

“Aiya, such a peacock,” Wei Wuxian grumbled, grinning at the glare Jin Zixuan shot him; his voice was faked low, the kind of thing which carries across a room or still water or down a mountainside, and he knew he was heard.

“Just stop it,” Jin Zixuan snapped at them. His hands were taut around his son’s schoolbag, and Jin Ling trotted behind, warily oblivious to the ongoing squabble in front of him as he bent his head in to look at the smartly-wrapped packet of stickers Wen Yuan was holding, bubblegum-pink and lime green and a smooth blue, lumped and glittering.

“I want some too,” Jin Ling sulked, eyeing his father up ahead and looking from his father to his uncle, face glum even as he opened his mouth to intervene.

“Look,” Wei Wuxian hoisted his backpack on his shoulder. “Peacock – I mean, Zixuan –” there was a pause and then a sigh that contained all the suffering in the world. “We are just good citizens, what can we say? We see a problem and we like to help to fix it.”

“Fix it?” Jin Zixuan was spluttering almost before he had finished speaking. “You’re not fixing it! You’re piling rubbish bags in my offices!”

“As we said,” Wei Wuxian continued blithely, waving a hand through the air with an almost musical swing. “We’re just doing our civic duty –”

Jin Zixuan scoffed, his face – handsome and pale – scrunched up in distaste, “No you’re not! Don’t lie, Wei Wuxian. This is about Yanli.”

The mention of her name rang like a bell over their heads – like a tower bell or a little handheld bell rang to summon unruly students or a bell at the end of a boxing round, ding-ding-ding take a break, a breather before you go again; like a fighter, Jiang Wanyin tensed and glared, hands already in fists.

“What do you mean by that?”

His voice was sharp and in the sweet spring light, he looked wolfish: toothy and rangy and hungry.

Jin Zixuan flinched, his throat bobbing and he looked away, a flush creeping over his cheeks, patchy and splashed like paint up a wall.

When they were boys, Wei Wuxian reflected, Jin Zixuan hadn’t known really how to handle shame – it had made him angry, defensive and snappy and ten times more awkward than usual – but now, now as an adult shame sucked his tongue away, leaving him voiceless and patchwork-guilty.

Growth, Wei Wuxian thought, was an odd thing.

Next to him, Jiang Wanyin snorted, his strict-back ponytail swinging severely from side-to-side as they walked on down the street.

“If you’ve got a problem with the bin bags in your offices, you should fix the problem,” he said, and the bite in his voice made it a challenge of sorts; almost a threat.

“I’m trying,” Jin Zixuan protested but the words sunk quiet at the end, trailing off into a sighing silence. “I’ll try again, but I don’t know if it’ll work. It’s not my department.”

“Peacock,” Wei Wuxian said reasonably, half-jovial and half-serious. “Nothing is your department.”

As they neared Lotus Pier, with its doors flung open to let the air in and the scent of cooking oil and roasting spices out, Jin Ling suddenly shoved his way through the trio, elbowing his uncle into his, well, his sort-of-uncle who laughed, yelling, “Niang, niang, I’m back!”

“He never does that with me,” Wei Wuxian wiped away an imaginary tear.

Jiang Wanyin gloated next to him, one hand tucked over the ribs where his nephew had pushed him aside, sharing a brief – very brief and swiftly regretted – smirk with Jin Zixuan. They looked away at once; and then back, because Jiang Yanli was stepping out of the restaurant carrying a pink napkin clutching a steaming baozi.

She was, sadly, looking past them and at Wen Yuan, who was loitering behind, both hands settled on the bottom of his rucksack straps, little face serious.

“Take this,” Yanli told him, carefully transferring it into his cupped hands. The pink cotton flopped over his fingers like long, trailing petals, covering his hands completely. “To eat on the way home.”

She stroked his head twice, gentle and smiling, and he ducked his head up under the pressure to smile back.

"Bye, A-Yuan!” Jin Ling shouted from behind, his voice muffled by the bun stuffed in his own mouth; he waved a little, though, jerky with his father’s awkwardness, and Wen Yuan gave a small laugh and called back.

“Come on, A-Yuan,” Wei Wuxian tapped him on the shoulder – they were a matching pair with their backpacks in sensible black and their hair tied back from their faces. “I’ll walk you home. Do you think if we run we’ll get there before Wen Qing comes looking for you? I bet we could.”

Wen Yuan blinked a frown up at him and shook his head, “Er, gongzi,” and looked down at the baozi, gently steaming the napkin dark.

“Oh, right,” Wei Wuxian nodded thoughtfully as they headed off. “Well, then, you should focus on eating that before it gets cold. My jie-jie is the best cook, after all.”

Early afternoon and Jinxi’s streets bustled: there were tourists trekking round with their cameras and phones flashing as they snapped photos of this and that and Li-gonggong sat at his xiangqi board opposite Tao-laoshi with their speckled salt-and-pepper hair and quiet, careful concentration. Restaurants all had their doors half-closed, settled in the lull between lunchtime and dinner, and people smiled in the sun, despite the humidity which had swelled fat for this early in the year.

Even the canals were busy, thronged with boats which shivered past each other, their drivers waving and calling genially across, a riot of let me buy you a drink next time; aiya you must remind me to drop off the dish we borrowed from you; tell your wife I said hello!

“Wei Wuxian!” Mu-gongzi, a young man with sad-set eyes, manoeuvred his boat close to the bank, offering a small, uneasy smile to Wen Yuan – he had never been good with children. “You should come by for dinner tomorrow night – the boiler is perfect now, thanks to you!”

“That’s not necessary –” Wei Wuxian started but then laughed, absently taking the baozi-free napkin from A-Yuan and tucking it in a pocket so it drooped out, a wave of pink-on-black. “I’ll be there, I’ll be there – I can’t live to see your mother upset with me again, I swear!”

Mu-gongzi nodded and smiled a bit as he sailed past, the tourists in the belly of his boat dipping their heads to marvel at the red-paper lanterns hanging on the sides of the houses and the carved edges of the roofs.

Rounding the corner, Wei Wuxian steered A-Yuan through the crowds, hands on his shoulders, heading for the red neon sign sketching out the characters for supermarket.

Underneath it, the boys who helped out at the supermarket – a pair of Wen cousins, a tangdi and biaoshu who were both quick to laugh and quick to help – were restocking the shelves of fruit in the front windows: summer-set peaches and long, leafy sticks of rhubarb; piles and piles of little loquats and kumquats and five-pointed starfruit.

“Wei Wuxian!” Wen Qing called, coming out from the supermarket with her hands swirling her hair into a neat bun and her sleeves rolled up to above her elbows. “Thank you for bringing A-Yuan home!”

“No problem at all!” Wei Wuxian beamed, patting Wen Yuan on the head and mussing his hair.

“If you wait inside, there’s iced water for you by the table in the back and I’ve cleared some space for you to do your homework before we go home,” Wen Qing told A-Yuan, who nodded and turned to bow to Wei Wuxian.

“Hi Mr Dentist!” he called, adding a second bow to Lan Wangji – who blinked and stopped, startled – as he passed by, his white blazer neatly folded over his arm so the yellow-soft silk lining could only be seen in whisks of wind. “Would it be okay if me and Jin Ling came and visited our rabbit?”

Lan Wangji was stiff, but not in the way he usually was: this was a rusty stiffness, as though his shoulders had seized suddenly, cutting off his hands and arms and leaving his brain stuttering as it tried to work out what had gone wrong.

His eyes flickered over the small group of them outside the supermarket, “Mn,” he nodded and Wen Yuan smiled a smile as wide as the sun, bowing to him again and then to Wei Wuxian again for good measures and trotted off inside.

It was silent and then Lan Wangji bowed a little, twice, like a clockwork prince, and strode off briskly up the street, his long hair blowing behind him as the wind broke on his face.

When Wei Wuxian turned back to see Wen Qing, she was vanishing into the supermarket too and there was a fierce pride in the way she punched the numbers into the till.

It had been almost six minutes by his watch; six minutes of standing outside the paper-thin doors with the yellow light blooming from the bedside lamp Huaisang always had turned on in the evenings while he read his magazines and dense political texts and painted his nails to podcasts of people shouting arguments at each other.

Lan Wangji had always been bad at asking for help.

He was used to just keeping on going no matter what, silently and simply; he was good at it, too, and it was natural for him: it was just how he was. Asking for help had always been uncomfortable and at times insurmountable – even when he was young and it was just for something so small and insignificant and then as he grew older and he grew up in his brother’s shadow, always following the footsteps of someone who shined so bright at everything.

It just was: he was not the kind of person who asked for help.

“Wangji-xiong,” Huaisang opened the door just enough to allow him to fill the space and looked up at him with a decidedly placid face. “Are you going to stand out here all night or are you going to ask me whatever it is you want to ask or say or whatever?”

Wangji swallowed and nodded but the words – how do you apologise to someone you hurt when you feel so impossibly, terribly, horrifically guilty? – stayed heavy on his tongue and didn’t move.

“Ah,” Huaisang clicked his tongue understandably and smothered a yawn. “Look, if it is that important to you but that difficult to say, perhaps you should try having a drink beforehand? Just a little one – to remove your inhibitions, make you braver, you know?”

He blinked and then nodded again, leaving Huaisang to the soft light splayed around his room in a dizzying shatter of yellows and the pile of books and magazines on his bed, dark against the glare from his iPad screen.

In the quiet of his own room, he braided his hair for sleep and turned the idea over and over and over in his head.

The streets of Jinxi were almost emptied in the early night: they sighed into soft, spooling pools of lamp-light, orange and candied-warm in a light, sprinkling rain; here and there, people hurried past, their heads buried under hooded coats and clear plastic raincoats, white-edged and gleaming in the dark.

Out down north-wards, the lake swam blue-dark and smothered inky; the sky above it hung a mess of black-purple-blue like licked-long bruises, studded with stars through the thin layer of cloud, grey-ish and jostled by the winds up-up-up high.

When he slipped into the bar with its green wood walls, Song Lan was the only person inside, sitting in front of his laptop plastered with stickers, logos of bands and singers and little cartoon animals: Blackpink and a blushing red panda and IU in silhouette, her pink ballgown trailing along the top of the bar.

“Doctor Lan,” Song Lan looked up when he approached and nodded once. He glanced at the laptop once more, twitching as though to close it – but he didn’t. “Would you like a coffee?”

“En,” Wangji shook his head – then elaborated, “No coffee, thank you. Would like –” he hesitated.

Huaisang had been helpful enough to suggest he would need a drink, but not enough to suggest what to drink or how much or how long it would take to take effect?

He had never before thought that he would wish he could remember what happened on the rare, rare occasions he drank anything at all – usually with Huaisang and once, horribly, with a group of his course-mates at university – but there was no doubt that the information would useful now.

Xiongzhang drank, even if not much – but the thought of asking him how much or what he drank seemed almost as bad as asking him if he had ever had intimate thoughts about another person.

Wangji was fairly certain that to ask the question would be to risk one or both of them collapsing from embarrassment.

Song Lan, in his way, was silent, waiting so perfectly patiently for Lan Wangji to work things out in his own head; he seemed almost to be listening to the rain as it fell outside, his eyes distant and his head tilted to one side.

“Would like,” he said slowly. “Something to drink. Alcohol.”

Song Lan nodded again, sliding off his barstool. “Does Doctor Lan have any preference?”

On the laptop, his brother’s sticker-silhouette, midnight-blue-haired and moon-shadowed and indigo-swamped, seemed to watch him. It didn’t have eyes – just the bare outlines of a sleek suit as he sat on the curve of the moon, splotches of white-white flowers in his hair – but it watched him all the same.

He felt judged. By a sticker.

When he reached the house again, he stowed the bottle of baijiu recommended by Song Lan in his cupboard, behind a backpack he always took home to Cloud Recesses whenever he went. Then, he flicked through his CD collection, finding his brother’s second album, Shuoyue, with its moon-lit cover, and carefully placed it in a drawer upside down.

I thought Doctor Lan doesn’t drink?

he doesn’t – why what’s happened?

aiya does he need rescuing? wait for me

wait, no, send me pictures!!!

  He just bought a bottle of baijiu. His purpose wasn’t clear but he seemed nervous.

Should we check on him? I’m on the late shift tonight, I could pass by his house?

ah wen ning you are too sweet!! no no need i’m sure if he needs rescuing he’ll call!!

  You are a good friend to Doctor Lan, Wei Wuxian.

  i fucking knew it

A-Cheng don’t swear. It’s good that A-Xian has friends! And Doctor Lan, too

Since when were you friends with him, Wuxian?

qingqing it’s not like that – you’re still my best friend!

how could you think i would abandon our friendship like that??

and for what – a stuffy, arrogant, hot doctor??

for shame

well this was pointless

don’t update me on this again until there’s actual news

chengcheng do you not care about my life???

go to fucking sleep you gremlin

A-Cheng!

Jiang Yanli is right, you should not swear.

You should also all go to sleep.

Chapter Text

Spring Conference

The knock on the doorframe was a timid thing – it seemed to shrink back even as it sounded, a dull rap of bone on wood – and the man who leaned around the doorpost was just as shy.

“Um,” he said, glancing around the waiting room with the auntie sitting in the corner flicking through a magazine, the young woman next to her rocking a baby while a toddler poked curiously at a picture book Lan Wangji had allowed Nie Huaisang to purchase for the purpose of keeping the calm painted by the white-cream walls and the tall windows with their view out and down to the lake. “Am I late?”

Nie Huaisang, who had been studiously devoting himself to updating his Weibo profile and his Instagram account to properly reflect the glorious sunshine-drenched promise of summer, looked up from his phone and smiled – slow, this time, slow and steady and inviting.

“Not at all!” he assured Wen Ning. The auntie glanced up, between them and then back down at her magazine. “Are you here for your follow-up appointment?”

“Oh, er, yes,” Wen Ning nodded once, a long dipping thing which made his head bob like a swan. “But if it’s inconvenient then I can come back, no problem!”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Huaisang shook his head, waving a hand to indicate the still-empty spaces on the sofa and the chairs dotted about the room, slim-line and softly sea-blue. “Please have a seat. I’m sure Doctor Lan will be out soon to collect you.”

Wen Ning nodded and bowed once more, slow and steady, before tucking himself onto the edge of a white-wood chair, the seashell-paint of it clashing against his dark trousers. He sat very still: preternaturally so, like a statue, and looked down at the little girl prodding through the picture book with a faint sort of smile.

It was a strange picture, Huaisang thought: he didn’t seem very comfortable, perched on the very edge of the seat with his hands lying straight along his thighs to cover his knees, but he looked oddly serene about it all the same – as though the uncomfortableness of how he was sitting simply didn’t touch him, washing up and away over his head.

It was sweet. Innocent and wide-eyed and easily-startled – which was weird for a police officer – and awkward and Huaisang was curious.

“Wen-gongzi,” he said politely, watching as Wen Ning looked over, his large black eyes blinking slowly. “Would you like some tea? Or lemon-water? Doctor Lan is in with a patient currently, so it may be some time before he is available to see you.”

“Oh, er, no, I’m fine, thank you,” Wen Ning shook his head.

“Are you sure?” Huaisang wrinkled his nose. “It’s horribly hot today and it’d reflect badly on us if we let an esteemed member of the police feel dizzy in our office without doing anything!”

“No-no, I’m fine,” Wen Ning assured him, and the shake of his head this time reminded Huaisang of a small bird, ruffling its feathers along its body, beak twitching and its head cocked, shy and ducked and cute.

He focused on the computer screen – tagging Instagram photos was an art form all in itself, he would tell anyone who would listen – and the gentle humming of the air conditioning in the background pulled a summer-sheen haze over the room, tumbling in with the sunshine through the windows, golden-thick and strong and whisked chilled.

It was sleepy and sleepless and full of daydreams; the kind of moment which feels liminal: caught here and there and nowhere at all and yet indescribably fixed somewhere.

Huaisang didn’t realise he was dreaming, gazing at the computer screen with a drifting, lazing stare, until Lan Wangji gave a small, huffed cough from next to his desk.

He jumped; Lan Wangji’s face twitched minutely and he watched Huaisang straighten up and readjust his composure with an impassive mischief.

“I am ready for the next patient,” he said politely. “Please send them in.”

“Of course, of course,” he said hurriedly, feeling the heat on his cheeks and he fumbled for his fan, fluttering it briefly. He looked squarely at Wen Ning – rose-cheeked, eyes-to-the-floor Wen Ning – and drew up to say, “Doctor Lan is free now if you would like to go through, Wen-gongzi.”

Wen Ning blushed dark and nodded mutely, standing and trailing through to the treatment room in Lan Wangji’s wake. He walked silently, steadily, and vanished beyond the door with barely a whisper of a click of the lock.

Huaisang sighed and beamed at the uncle waiting in front of the desk to pay.

“Aiya, uncle,” he complained. “It’s so hot today, don’t you think? Let me see about getting you sorted and you can be safely on your way home to some fresh ice cream before you melt in here!”

The uncle smiled, bemused and amused, and slid his wallet out of his pocket as Huaisang clicked through the system to prepare the card reader.

“Mama,” the toddler said in a loud, running whisper, the picture book discarded on the floor with a page bent into a diamond. “Can we get ice cream too?”

The market stalls flooded the streets, swelling up and spilling over onto the waterways, boats stocked wobblingly tall full of baskets of fruit and grains and carefully-packaged seafood: a rainbow of lobsters with clicker-clacker claws, buckets of shrimp, oysters and scallops and an ocean of fish all in gleaming, dead-eyed rows. Under the high roof, the floor was splashed wet here and there, and the smell of the saltwater hung in the air, thick and sharp.

It was noisy, too, and crowded, flush with locals jostling their way through and shouting at each other over the prices – “you charge that today? Do you think we’ve grown stupid in two days?” – and tourists who bumped around, lost and dazedly wonderstruck.

Lan Wangji hated it; everything about it was something he hated.

A man barged past him, a white-topped tank held firmly under one arm, the orange-backed lobster in its scuttling about the bottom as the tank tipped from side-to-side as the man twisted to talk to his companions: a younger woman with round glasses and a big man who bobbed his head continuously, ducking his head to listen to his friend.

Wangji flinched and opened his mouth to apologise in horror to the auntie he had just jostled – but she was already gone with a dirty look in his direction, talking loudly on the phone in a dialect he hadn’t been able to catch.

In his hands, the thick plastic bag he collected all his shopping in – reusable, of course, to avoid waste – was imprinting into his palms, clutched in front of himself like a tiny barrier between him and the rest of the world. The rhubarb tops poked out of the top in a flutter of green leaves and the plump taro knocked against table edges and plastic tanks and other, bobbled bags as he fought his way to the exit.

There was a pressure building in his head, like a swelling under his skull, and he could feel, distantly, the ache that it would bring soon enough.

Finally outside, he breathed a long sigh in and sped down towards an empty space by a canal, poking up between a row of houses, their doors plain wood and painted green and bright yellow. It was quieter there – not silent with the lapping of the lakewater against the edges and the gentle splashes of the poles as they worked in to push the boats drifting along this way and that past him – but it was enough to be out of the market and away from the cacophony of noise.

Even the shouts of children playing somewhere nearby, half-screaming and laughing and calling fierce, sounded soft.

“Mr Dentist, are you alright?” a voice asked, tentative, from somewhere to his right and he opened his eyes and turned to see Wen Yuan and Jin Ling, in their school shirts and trousers – their bags and blazers had been abandoned by the wall of one of the houses, out of the fall of sunlight and piled together haphazardly so that the arm of one of the blazers trailed along the ground and a jumper was busy gathering dust from the pavement.

“Mn,” he hummed, and added, “I am fine, thank you.”

Jin Ling wrinkled his nose, “You look like you sucked a lemon.”

“Jin Ling!” Wen Yuan looked horrified. “You can’t say that!”

“What? He does,” Jin Ling frowned and shrugged, folding his arms over his chest. It was unerringly reminiscent of his uncle, Jiang Cheng – and thinking that just made Lan Wangji think of how he so often saw Jiang Cheng scowling, arms crossed, while Wei Wuxian steered him about with an arm draped across his shoulders.

It was just a thought but it twisted something in his stomach and he didn’t care for it.

He shook his head and closed his eyes in a long, steadying blink again. When he looked again, the boys were still there, Jin Ling kicking at a loose patch of dirt and scuffing his shoes; Wen Yuan, though, was watching him again, that same, smooth frown pasted on his face.

“Hey, Doctor Lan,” Jin Ling burst out all of sudden, cutting off whatever Wen Yuan was thinking about saying. “Can we come see the bunny?”

“Yes,” Lan Wangji blinked and nodded once, firmly, to emphasise the point. “Whenever you like. The hutch is in the yard.”

“She’s in a hutch?” Jin Ling looked horrified. “You don’t even have like, one of those pen things for her?”

Lan Wangji felt his ears burn. “Mn,” he murmured. “Will get one.”

Jin Ling hmphed but for all he didn’t look convinced, he didn’t say anything more on it.

Lan Wangji, though, felt keenly that he was being judged and found wanting – again. It stung, but less deeply than before; instead, he felt a spike of vindictive determination to set things right, to prove he could and would.

“Thank you, Doctor Lan!” Wen Yuan beamed at him and bowed.

Wen Yuan held the watering can carefully in both hands; it was a large thing, made of copper with a flat, punctured head and a squat body. Full of water, it was heavy, overbalancing easily to throw a gush of water onto a bed of bowed flowers, battering them down to the ground, soaked and sodden and straggled.

He kept one hand under the spout as he tipped it, the metal warm under his fingers. Even the slow slope of the sun behind the horizon hadn’t stripped away that – though the stirring of the wind, idle and huffing like breath, in and out and in, pricked at the skin on his arms, a cold counterpoint to the light.

Behind him, Wen Qing sat next to Wen-popo on the veranda outside the front of her house, an old blanket spread out beneath them both.

“Summer is coming,” Wen-popo murmured, her face turned to the sun like a sunflower: round and smiling and soft. “I am looking forward to eating fresh peaches again.”

Wen Qing sat straight, arrow-stiff and sticky, and she looked straight ahead, out towards the rows of neat houses and, behind them, beyond them, the lake with its deep, dark-cast waters. With her hands in her lap, folded neatly, she was statue-like and statuesque: like carved from stone.

“Don’t water the roses too much, A-Yuan,” Wen-popo instructed. “Though you can be a little more generous with the begonias.”

Wen Yuan nodded and dipped his head before carefully pouring another trickling spurt of water onto the fire-orange begonias, their spindly petals fluttering underneath it in a leather-velvet rustle.

It was a quiet evening: there was the noise from the traffic from the main road – infrequent and faint now – drifting through and out again, the occasional clatter or chirp from neighbouring houses as a man stubbed out his cigarette and returned inside or a woman called in to the children to stop fighting. Over it all, lay a humming tranquillity that sighed in anticipation of the night already coming.

“I could have done it,” Wen Qing said suddenly, and for all her voice was sharp, there was something unsure in it. A discordant note of sorts, which you don’t hear until after it’s rung. “If I’d really wanted to.”

“You have always been capable of anything you decide, A-Qing,” Wen-popo agreed, after a pause where she opened her eyes slowly, gazing at the orange slice of the sun as its rays shrunk in the sky.

“I would have been a great doctor,” Wen Qing said again, and the pride that rang this time was a sad thing; painted wistful.

Wen-popo smiled a bit and took her hand in hers. “You would,” she agreed again.

Wen Yuan splashed some of the water onto his shoe and shook it; jostling the watering can, he spluttered water over the dirt in the yard – it sank into the cracks between the tarmac and pooled there, a gleaming eye peering up.

“I made the right decision,” Wen Qing asked, it was a statement that didn’t ask for confirmation, didn’t want confirmation, but somehow saying it dared a reply. “To stay. Leaving would have put too much strain on you and A-Ning, it wouldn’t have been fair.”

Wen-popo squeezed her hand tight and neither of them spoke again until A-Yuan had finished drenching the flowers in their round jade-painted pots and shallow-dug beds and the watering can was empty, hanging spout-down from one hand.

“There’s a glass of milk for you in the fridge,” Wen-popo told him. “And some dried mango.”

“Thank you, popo!” A-Yuan smiled and skipped up onto the veranda, the watering can spinning to be cradled in his hands as he disappeared inside.

Overhead, the sun was gone and the sky was a spoilt blue, the stars shaded by a sweep of cloud covering them over; here and there, one peeked out for a moment and then was shrouded again. The breeze skipped quicker and higher, kicking up its heels and it whisked away along the rooftops, leeching the warmth from the houses and the stone and the tarmac.

“Sometimes,” Wen-popo said softly. “I wonder why you never seem to think of the future. There is nothing stopping you now: A-Ning is grown and capable, with a good job, and A-Yuan is doing excellently in school. They would understand – they would tell you to go. Ah –” she clucked her tongue as Wen Qing turned quick to look at her. “I would tell you to go too. I’m well cared for here.

“What I do not understand is why it is now that you bring this up again. Is it that dentist and what he said at the summer party?” nothing was said and Wen-popo shook her head, lips thin. “He doesn’t know your hardships so why waste time on his words?”

She squeezed Wen Qing’s hand once more and sighed. “It’s a little windy now, I think I will go inside.”

But she stayed sat all the same, her face still turned towards where the sun had been.

“Don’t you have that meeting soon?” Huaisang’s hair was wrapped up in a long, olive-green towel but somehow still drip-drip-dripping onto the floor. With his legs curled up, he was glued in front of the tv, the screen pasted onto a pastel-lit show about choosing idols; currently, a group in all black were trying to learn a dance routine – and it cut away every now and then to show their mentor, a woman with sharp-short hair, where she was watching sat on the floor in front of them.

Lan Wangji blinked and frowned, ignoring the screen as it flickered to show the mentor standing up and demonstrating a jump to the assembled group. They all copied her, out of sync.

How did Huaisang know that?

“You’ve normally left before Idol starts,” Huaisang explained, dipping another rice cracker into a pot of dark soy sauce and taking a loud, crunching bite. “Though you’re usually obsessively early, Wangji-xiong, so you’ll probably still be fine.”

“Mn,” Wangji hummed and grabbed a jacket from the hooks by the door, toeing off his slippers and pulling a pair of shoes towards himself. It would not do to be late.

In the background, one of the girls on the tv show was being consoled by their mentor, little, plump tears squeezing out of her eyes and quickly pressed away with the back of her hand.

“Oh, tell me all the gossip when you get back,” Huaisang added, snapping a cracker in half and dipping one semi-circle pointy-end down. “Apparently no one knows what happened to Wei Wuxian after he left to go to university – he never came back for years and then all of a sudden just moved in and never left again. People say it’s a mystery.”

“Gossip is wrong,” Lan Wangji said absently; the words were familiar, trotting out of his mouth in a neat, thoughtless line as he ties his laces.

Once he’d shut the door behind him with a soft click, covering over the crunch-crunch-crunch of Huaisang’s crackers, he set off down the road, quick and purposeful but he couldn’t help but wonder: he hadn’t known Wei Wuxian had even gone to university, let alone that he had vanished.

In truth, he realised, bitter and a little cold, that he didn’t really know anything about Wei Wuxian at all.

Swords Hall was full that evening: Qin Su sat next to Jin Zixuan, who was squished in beside his cousin; Wen Qing and Wen Ning – still in uniform – were on the far side, in front of Wen Yuan and Jin Ling who were conspiring over a book; Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli had seats next to Song Lan, who had been accompanied by A-Qing; and in the corner, Wen-popo, Baoshan Sanren and Fourth Uncle were already cracking open ziplock bags full of home-dried mango slices and tubs of jian bing, layered on top of each other in thin, peeling strips.

Wei Wuxian was between Jiang Cheng and Wen Qing; when he saw Lan Wangji, he looked up and smiled, eyes catching on the watch now permanently on his wrist.

Lan Wangji felt his mouth twitch in response and his fingers brush over the strap.

“Doctor Lan, Doctor Lan, sit here!” A-Qing called, edging into her father’s space to make enough room for Lan Wangji. “Sit next to me!”

Wei Wuxian closed his mouth and jerked his head as if to say, there you go, and – slowly, reluctantly, trailing a weave of curious, wondering glances behind him – Wangji slipped in between A-Qing and Fourth Uncle, who immediately handed him the bag of mango slices and gestured to pass it round.

“Thank you,” he murmured, and A-Qing beamed and Fourth Uncle smiled a bit, giving him an absent pat on the hand.

“At least you weren’t too late – we were just about to start!” he told him. “Then you would have missed all the food!”

“This is not about the food,” Wen-popo reminded him with the sigh of a long-gone argument. “This is about the event.”

“It’s not an event,” Baoshan Sanren corrected, her long white hair folded into a rough-cut fishtail braid down her back. “It’s a competition.”

“Aren’t they the same?” Fourth Uncle asked, taking a bite of a mango slice.

“Hardly,” Baoshan Sanren sniffed. “A competition is competitive, by nature. An event simply… is an event.”

Lan Wangji squashed down a smile at that and it was smothered finally with a polite, insistent and desperately fake cough from Jin Zixuan, who had stood up ready to speak.

The trio all adjusted themselves to sit tidily, plastic tubs of food strewn about the table in front of them, along with flasks of home-made lemonade and purified water, their silver bottle-tops gleaming in the bright electric light.

“Apologies,” Baoshan Sanren smiled. “Please continue.”

“Right,” Jin Zixuan gave another little cough and looked away to address the room at large. “As you all know, this year’s competition is coming up – it’s only a few weeks away now. Unfortunately, there’s still a few things to get sorted before everything will be ready, so that’s the first order of business today.

“If no one minds, I’ll start with the list of what’s left and we can go through it to divide up the work?”

No one did mind; but perhaps that was just because Wen Qing had a tight, nail-tipped grip on Wei Wuxian’s wrist and Jiang Cheng was distracted by Jin Ling reaching across him to grab at the tub of jian bing.

The list was as follows:

One of the caterers had pulled out so there was a need for another to take his place.

The quote for the company who had offered to do the tickets was twice as expensive as expected.

The security for the event had not yet been organised.

A new venue was needed as the first had been requested to be given up to the Jiangnan Historical Society’s latest conference – and it had not, perhaps, been an ideal venue in the first place.

The search for a local celebrity to act as emcee and special guest performance had turned up nothing.

The event, as Lan Wangji quickly found out, was a singing competition that was held every year – a local mock-up of China’s Idol (“Jinxi Idol, if you like,” Fourth Uncle had commented to general groans even as he grinned) – where anyone and everyone could participate, alone or in groups, singing anything and everything from the latest k-pop smash to more traditional folk songs and heart-wrenching romantic ballads.

Last year, apparently, there had been a bit of a commotion when one of the contestants, a high schooler aged fifteen, had decided to rap a hit American song he’d heard on Youtube. People hadn’t all understood what he’d been saying, but the hip-thrusting and blushing faces of some of those who had understood had been enough to scandalise some of the more conservative locals.

There had been complaints for days, Jin Zixuan said and looked pained, as though he were re-experiencing the headache they had undoubtedly left him with.

“I voted for him, he was good,” Wei Wuxian added offhandedly, licking his fingers after a third jian bing.

“Of course you did,” Jin Zixun muttered, loud enough that everyone could hear, and Jiang Cheng shot him a glare which glued his tongue to the top of his mouth.

Most of the items were quickly ticked off: Jiang Yanli volunteered to provide a food stall – Jin Ling pulled a face when she assured Jin Zixuan she would have enough help to run it, presumably already assuming that would mean him – while Wen Ning stuttered out that he could organise security.

There was a short debate on the issue of the venue, which was abruptly solved by Jiang Cheng pointing out that there was a large enough space down by the Gu Lian Qiao, and they could set up floating stalls on the waterfront for overflow stalls and facilities behind the stage. That was followed by Qin Su adding that then surely the money that would have gone to the venue could go to the tickets and the security issue – which was slowly agreed by Jin Zixuan, his nose wrinkling as he squinted the calculations in his head.

“Where are we going to get a local celebrity, though?” Qin Su asked, her earrings tinkling as she tilted her head in thought. “It’s not as though they’re easy to find.”

Lan Wangji felt Song Lan shift next to him, stirring and resettling, though he didn’t say anything. On his other side, A-Qing looked at him.

“Song Lan,” he said quietly, and the table dropped silent. It made him blink, taken aback.

“What did he say?” Jin Zixun asked, before glancing around everyone else as though someone would repeat Lan Wangji’s words to him.

“Song Lan,” Wangji repeated. “Song Lan is a local celebrity, he can emcee,” he considered for a moment longer and then added, “Would be better than someone from outside.”

Everyone was staring at him; his ears burned and he ducked his eyes to the table.

He could feel Wei Wuxian’s eyes on him and he did-didn’t-couldn’t-wouldn’t-wanted to see his face. He didn’t look up.

“Oh yes, of course,” Jin Zixuan said after a pause. “That is, I mean, if Song Lan is happy to do so?”

“We can get a big name singer for the special guest performance too, can’t we, Lan Wangji?” A-Qing jumped in eagerly, covering her father’s bemused, awkward acceptance with a loud, sneaky plea.

Everyone was looking at him again. It was hot, all those eyes on him, too hot by far.

“Really?” Wen Qing’s voice was sceptical. “Top celebrities don’t come here, A-Qing, you shouldn’t demand such things – you’ll just be disappointed.”

“No, really,” A-Qing insisted. “Doctor Lan has connections. Real, proper, serious connections! Don’t you?”

Jiang Yanli smiled gently and it seemed to encompass just him and A-Qing somehow. “If Doctor Lan has connections or not, that doesn’t mean he has to use them. We shouldn’t demand such things of him.”

Wei Wuxian was still watching him, all dark eyes and dark mouth and a dark hollow at the juncture of his collarbones, studying him with an even bland stare that was worse than anything else. Lan Wangji felt it tracking along his skin, felt it tightening on his face, his mouth, his neck until he felt almost lightheaded.

“Yes,” he said, thoughtless and recklessly steady. “Will arrange.”

Next to him, A-Qing screamed so loud and so long the glass in the windowpanes rattled.

The sun had dipped under a blanket of clouds, leaving the sky cold and grey-shuttered. Winding through the lanterns and the hanging-dangling branches, the breeze blustered loud, flicking thick splays of hair into faces and snatching hats off heads.

All along the street, people hurried along, plastic bags and jackets ballooning in the wind, buffeted this way and that; doors were fastened in place or closed, with signs put up reading ‘OPEN’ in hanzi characters and a smatter of English and French in big red letters to encourage visitors inside. Above the wind, people shouted across to each other, raising hands to wave even as the breeze licked away the sounds and swallowed them up.

On the canals, boats were slow, slow, slow one way and sailing along the other, hurried along as the wind plucked at the water, shattering the surface into little picking, nipping ebbs that flowed up, up, up through the town.

Inside Lotus Pier, the restaurant was half-empty; caught in that mid-afternoon lull between lunch and dinner, there were a few people sitting at tables nursing cups of steaming tea and snacks – fresh-baked buns and tea eggs and cong you bing with their green-speckled bodies, lying in neat fan-shaped rows on plates. It was gentle, with a soft hum of hushed conversations and the rustle of people turning pages in books and the grandfather who sat in the corner every afternoon from two until five with a brush and a pot of ink, stretching out long sheets of yellowed paper to paint calligraphy on as he huffed and hawed and hummed as he concentrated.

The bus trundled down the street, a little way outside of its usual route, the white paint dulled in the dim daylight and stopped with a hiss just before the road curved into nowhere and a loop towards the lake.

A woman climbed down one, two, three, four steps onto the pavement, thanking the bus driver with a bow and a smile as he handed down her luggage. She was small, her hair blown back off her face and she turned her head away, eyes squinting, to grab the handle and pull the suitcase – a practical dark blue – almost beside her as she walked towards the restaurant.

Around her, the breeze battered at her face, drawing her hair across like a mask and she made her way slowly but surely, her eyes on the ground and her feet careful to avoid the occasional dropped posy of flowers or plastic wrapper skittering across the tarmac.

It was a while before she made it to the door, but when she did, it opened in front of her and a warm voice ushered her inside, hands taking hold of her bag to help her in with it as she sorted out her hair.

“Let me help you with that,” Jiang Yanli said, closing the door firmly behind the new customer and doublechecking that the ‘OPEN’ sign, written in Wei Wuxian’s inimitable calligraphy – he had excellent skills when he tried – was still holding up. “The wind is terrible today, you’ll need a moment to catch your breath – let me show you to a table and get you some tea –”

Yanli’s voice trailed off into the background buzz; her hands were still holding the suitcase, tightening to white, and she dropped her eyes, her cheeks flushing a little even as she bit them with a hard jaw.

The nametag was face-up, the clear plastic covering leaving the neatly-written characters easily legible: Luo Qingyang.

“Hi Yanli,” Mianmian said quietly and smiled – though it was weak and it wavered.

Chapter Text

Phoenix Hunt

It was harder to say which spread faster as gossip: Luo Qingyang’s return to Jinxi or Lan Wangji’s promise to secure a big name celebrity for their little town singing competition.

It was easy to say which one people believed – Mianmian was dipping in and out of shops, wearing a hesitant smile and boot-cut jeans, leaving pools of silence rippling out in her wake, lapping out and out and out until she was far enough away that they would burst in a shower of shushed whispers and low, fervent voices, swapping rumours and stories and age-old tales, about a girl and a boy and another girl, once upon a time.

“You should be careful what you promise,” Baoshan Sanren told Lan Wangji one late afternoon. He was accompanying her home from the supermarket, her bag with its wonky wheel in his hands as he hefted it in and out of the boat and over the wobbled pavement. “In the city perhaps people would forget such things being said, but not here. People here have long memories and high expectations.”

“Baoshan Sanren’s advice is wise,” Wangji said, and his stomach squeezed a little. “This one will remember for the future.”

She snorted, unlocking her front door with a slow, steady hand. “It’s a bit late for that.”

“Mm,” Lan Wangji hummed as he lifted the bag over the threshold and into the house, taking care to keep his shoed feet outside. “It is not a problem.”

It wasn’t a problem – wouldn’t be a problem, shouldn’t be a problem, couldn’t be a problem, but he had yet to work up the courage to call Lan Xichen and ask.

He had never asked for something like that before; it had never been something he had even thought of doing before – using his brother’s celebrity to make himself seem grand and attaching his brother’s name to something he hadn’t been able to decide on himself – and it sat uncomfortably in his stomach, heavy and acidic and sickly.

The walk back to the house was cool and quiet; he slipped through the maze of little streets and curved moon-bridges, passing house after house with light-lit windows leeching laughter and shouts and the thudding bass from music; the smells followed him further: fish sizzling in oil and a flutter of spices mingling like perfume.

It was peaceful enough but his phone felt fat in his pocket, the rectangular press of it bumping his thigh.

Nearby a child screamed a laugh and squealed, “Gege, gege is funny! Do it again!” and his chest twinged as he remembered being eight years old and too solemn and too serious and laughing, laughing until he was sick and cried as Lan Huan had told a story about a tiger and a teacher and a pile of textbooks that he swore was true but was far too convoluted to be anything but an attempt to make him laugh.

Lan Huan had beamed like the sun and wrapped him in a hug which almost made him choke. Shufu had been teary-eyed and pretended not to notice when he gave them sweets after dinner.

Climbing up the low, slabbed steps of Puqing bridge, he stopped at the top.

The sunlight was starting to soften, dipping from bright-white-yellow to a gentler, plumper sweep of orange-yellow, pale and dampened by the clouds overhead, spotted and spotting across the sky in lumps that sped to clump together, out over the lake. It was growing cold in the way that Spring evenings do, slinking under lighter clothes to bubble against skin; the shadows were long, chilled things, thrown from house to house as they pressed close together, setting the boats on the canals to drifting between zebra-stripes of light, thin and jagged.

To one side of the bridge, a pair of boys with identical haircuts and scuffed trainers sat together on the edge of the canal, their legs dangling over the water as they peered over something on an iPad, held firmly by the older boy, bumping shoulders occasionally and swiping with stubby, sticky fingers.

Slipping his phone from his pocket, Lan Wangji looked left, looked right, and then swiped on his turn: green, to call.

The posters were plastered over the town: a stock photo-esque image of Gu Lian Qiao with its field of lotus flowers, all green and purple-washed, pasted over by a headline announcing the Jinxi Town Singing Competition in big, bold, yellow-shadowed characters.

The date: 26^th May

The time: 5pm

The location: the lakefront by Gu Lian Qiao

The prizes: 20,000 yuan to first place; 10,000 yuan to second place; 5,000 yuan to third place

“Jinxi Idol,” it screamed, winner glitter-gold, “You are invited!”

Matcha bubble tea in one hand, the red paper straw sticky and dark-damp, Nie Huaisang ambled down the street, slow and lazy. His phone tucked away in the pocket of an embroidered silk jacket, grey and patterned with curling, curving scrollwork like metal, he looked over the people flocking this way and that down the street, crossing between still cars and crawling traffic, ducking their heads as they went.

People-watching probably seemed strange, but Huaisang had always found something fascinating about the way other people went through life, tripping and running and skipping up onto pavements, shouldering past each other – it was addictive, watching like this. He could sit and scan and invent stories in his head, half-cobbled wonderings about this person or that: a phone call or a crying child or a man wearing sunglasses under a sky full of clouds.

Resting on a little wall, worn smooth and spotted with green-brown moss, he sipped at his drink and watched.

Jin Zixuan’s awful cousin Jin Zixun strode past, bumbling his way through two men and a woman with a child; the child stumbled and tripped and her mother pulled her to one side to soothe her, offering a tired, thin smile to the woman behind. The woman following, short and pushing her lips thin in worry, stopped and turned to cross the road, looking one way then the other, her yellow dress flaring around her knees, and she darted across as the traffic ground to a halt, ducking her head in a bow to the two men who paused in the middle of the gridlocked cars to let her pass ahead of them.

The matcha bubble tea tasted suddenly bland.

The two men reached the pavement just in front of Huaisang, turning to head down towards the lake-front and the bridge, following the tourist trail. They were both tall, within a few inches of each other, one dressed in a plain leather jacket over his plain white t-shirt; the other’s blue blazer had cuffs folded artfully back to reveal a cloud-patterned silk lining and a silver ribbon bracelet which gleamed glitter-like in the sunlight.

Huaisang squeaked to himself and sat still, very still; he felt like a mouse hiding near to two snakes.

Carefully, he watched the two men walk away down the street, and relaxed, returning to his tea. He would finish it and then leave.

Nie Huaisang loved unexpected guests when he was the one who was unexpected; he hated them when they showed up at his house.

It was simply inconvenient.

For now, though, the sun was slipping through the houses onto his head, gently rocking him warm, and the bubble tea was chilled and refreshing with that faintly earth-ish taste of the matcha lingering at the back of his tongue. Inconveniences could wait.

“A-Qing,” Song Lan reminded her, fingers hovering over the keyboard of his laptop, tip-tapping down notes for a new song – single; album; comeback – his mind caught up on old memories: the heat of the stage sticking to his skin, white silk ribbons and the still air in the recording booth as he sat there, headphones chunky over his ears, alone but for the sound in his head and heart.

A-Qing scowled and huffed, hopping off her stool and dropping her phone on the bar-top with a clatter. She glared at him and swished over to the two new customers, her long white dress a bright spot among the dark wood and the green-green-green of the plants and the paint.

“Would you like anything to drink? Eat?” she asked. It was her best attempt at being polite but it wriggled out of her mouth bored and flat.

“An iced coffee for me,” the man sitting underneath the window said with a nod. His leather jacket was flung over the back of his chair and the small logo on the chest of his white t-shirt wrote ‘money’ in large letters. He looked, A-Qing thought, like someone’s bodyguard or hired killer: all muscles and hard stares.

If he cracked his knuckles, she was sure she’d hear them all the way over the other side of the café.

He was, though, probably just another tourist down from the big city wanting a sweet snapshot of the quaint water-town life.

A-Qing considered him a moment longer before turning to the other man, his blazer draped neatly behind him.

“White tea, please,” Zewu-jun smiled, his hair newly long and dark again and left half-down even in the growing heat. The ribbon-spun bracelet clattered a little against the table and his loose t-shirt was washed cream-white and artfully faded, stretched thin in places.

She stared and heard the other man – the hired killer – smother a laugh with a cough into his fist.

She stared and Zewu-jun’s eyes gleamed gold-ish in the sunlight and she scowled at Lan Wangji, snatching the menu from the table in front of him with a whip-quick hand.

“You should stop that,” she told him tartly, folding a hand into a fist. She wished she could punch him in the shoulder, but if she did her father would probably tell her off and take away her phone and she would shriek if he did that again. “It’s not funny, fooling good people into thinking you’re a celebrity, even if he is your brother.”

Across the table, the hired killer was trying to stuff his fist into his mouth.

Lan Wangji looked more than a bit stunned, as though she’d accused him of being the hired killer, before he quickly schooled his face into a carefully-calm serenity and opened his mouth and she glared at him as fierce as she could and swatted him on the arm with the menus.

“Just because you know I like your brother more than you doesn’t give you the right to be a dick,” she added with a sniff that was all drama, sweeping away with a pleased vindictiveness thrumming through her even as her dad looked up from his laptop with a frown to watch her come back.

There was a lot of coughing from behind her. She hoped, idly, passively, that he choked. Stupid Lan Wangji.

“One iced coffee and one white tea,” she told Song Lan as she sat back down, unlocking her phone screen with flicking fingers to see that no, there were no new posts on Zewu-jun’s Instagram.

She scowled again and slammed her phone face-down on the tabletop, folding her head into her crossed arms. For good measure, she glared at the back of Lan Wangji’s stupid, gleaming head.

Nie Mingjue cleared his throat, the grin over his face drawn broad and bright with a glee he didn’t bother to hide.

“So,” he began, fakely-serious even as his moustache twitched, and he saw the sigh leave Lan Xichen rather than hear it. “Wangji, if Xichen’s smothering you again, you can tell me.”

Lan Xichen closed his eyes and shook his head, too tickled by the novelty of it to frown; instead, he smiled again, an honest humour-heavy thing.

“I have never been mistaken for Wangji before,” he commented thoughtfully. “It’s a good sign: I’m glad he’s so settled here.”

On the table, his phone screen flashed up, mist-drenched mountains hiding forests and the sloped roofs of ancient houses half-hidden against tall spikes of stone: one message from Didi, short as always.

He smiled wider and poured his tea smooth and steady.

“I think, Mingjue-ge, it will be good to walk around, don’t you think?” he said thoughtfully. “Since our brothers have settled here, we would remiss in our duty not to see the town properly before judging.”

Nie Mingjue swallowed a mouthful of coffee; it was too bitter and too strong and he grimaced a bit as he set the mug down.

“That’s terrible,” he muttered, glancing briefly over at the café counter where A-Qing was busy looking back at her phone and Song Lan was sketching songs in mid-air. “So your whole plan is to just… wander around and see what happens?”

Lan Xichen, xiongzhang, Zewu-jun, China’s number one bachelor, smiled with a grace that was a little too placid – like a lake on a summer’s day.

“Mn,” he hummed in agreement and if the mischief broke the surface then it was only in the sunlight, like the flash of gold in his eyes.

The kitchen was cluttered, full of pots and pans and a thin-high cloud of smoke that filtered away and out; the sous chef shouted at the waiters as they called out the orders to him, tucking the little paper slips into the metal bar above the workstation, wafting gently in the whoosh of air as the door opened and closed and swung open again, letting in little glimpses of the dining room with its wood walls and flush of visitors, settling at their tables and rustling with menus and clicking reading-glasses cases.

“A-Ling,” Jiang Yanli called from where she was stood behind a series of mismatched pans, carefully sliding lids onto bamboo boxes filled with steaming xiao long bao and ma qiu, uniform and round and golden-brown. “Can you put these with the others in the boxes?”

Jin Ling, leaning on a pile of boxes, heaved a sigh that cut off mid-way when his mother looked over at him with a smile.

His mouth twitched and he slunk over to pick the bamboo boxes up, stacking them up one-two-three-four, and carrying them over to the heap of cardboard boxes, pushed back against the wall by the back door. Picking them up one by one, he placed them carefully in the cardboard boxes, next to the lot already in there, still warm in the heat.

Swivelling on the heel of his trainers – solid scruffed-dirty white with a long purple tick – he grabbed his phone, leaned against the boxes and scrolled away again, picking at a loose thread on the sleeve of his t-shirt.

In the next swing of the door, there was a bubble of laughter from the restaurant floor; the sous chef clattered plates full of rice and neat-chopped vegetables and big bowls brimming with soup onto the workstation and shouted, order up!, and the waiters bustled in to collect – and behind her pans, Jiang Yanli smiled to herself, stirring a pot slowly boiling thick as it brewed.

Casual, calm and careful, Nie Huaisang walked down the street, quick and quiet, slipping through the crowd with a deceptively slick slide. His phone was in his pocket, oddly, and instead he scanned the people wandering about him for that same, tell-tale blue blazer and the leather jacket.

The crowd cleared in front of him at the crossing; across the street, a man in a leather jacket nodded as his friend in the blue blazer said something, both their gazes turned to one side, looking down the street and the shopfronts.

Huaisang eeped and ducked behind a gaggle of schoolchildren still in uniform, green amongst green as his jacket blended in with their jumpers and smart ties.

Over the other side of the road, Nie Mingjue glared at a lamppost and watched his didi sneak away like a goose among ducklings: taller and older and a shinier green coat.

“I’ll catch up with you later,” he told Lan Xichen, who blinked and then nodded, adding an ‘of course’ before he hurried forwards to offer his hands to a popo loaded bent-backed with a bobble of bulging shopping bags.

At the other side, Nie Mingjue turned left: following the trail of the schoolchildren with their gleaming white shirts and long socks and, somewhere in their midst, Nie Huaisang.

It was a hurried thing, lunch that day: the clinic was fully booked, from eight thirty until five thirty solid – they had perhaps a little over fifteen minutes to eat and return to work. Wangji had felt a little unprofessional sending Huaisang a lunch order via WeChat in between appointments, but there hadn’t been time to do anything else.

“It’ll be here in a minute,” Huaisang told him when he finally – finally! After four hours straight of sitting – left his office to step into the reception where Huaisang was typing away furiously fast on his keyboard, his eyes never leaving the computer screen even as he talked. “Qin Su said it would be twenty minutes and she’s always three minutes early.”

With a hum, Wangji sat on one of the chairs, looking out of the tall, clear windows out at the lake beyond before closing his eyes on a breath out.

It would be a long pair of days: tomorrow would be the concert into the night and there was a long checklist in Jin Zixuan’s hands at his office listing a whole host of tasks volunteers had signed up to do.

Huaisang had wrangled himself a role doing social media and photographs – he was actually a good photographer, for all he rarely took his own photos if someone else was there to take them for him – and Wangji had signed up to help set out chairs before and after the event.

That Wei Wuxian had signed up for the same task (along with helping Jiang Wanyin with the wiring for the lights and the sound equipment, building the platforms for the floating food trucks, and helping Jiang Yanli with her food stall whenever he had a spare moment) was neither here nor there.

It was a sensible, simple task; that was all.

“Oh, Qin Su!” he heard Huaisang cheer from behind his desk. The typing was ongoing; Lan Wangji could feel the clicks of the keys in his own head, a tap-tap-tap that resounded through his skull. “You’re perfectly on time, as always!”

Qin Su, her hair plaited into a bun and decorated with gold-plate hairpins, smiled back at him – it was a little shy and a little pink; she was carrying a thick plastic bag which made the table shake with a thud as she set it down. If she saw Lan Wangji there, she ignored him.

It wasn’t unexpected – she’d never liked him since he’d moved in and he’d never known what to say to her: she was pretty, vivacious and talkative in the same quick, casual, gossiping way that Huaisang was.

“It’s probably for the best you ordered,” she commented as she pulled dish after dish out of the bag. “The restaurant’s too full today: you might not have got to eat anything before you had to leave!”

“Plus we wouldn’t have seen you in person,” Huaisang added and she laughed, soft and swiftly smothered into the back of her hand.

“Do you have to head off already?” Qin Su was already halfway to the door, her plastic bag in hand, when Huaisang, his typing finished and his fan fluttering, called after her. “You can stay and talk for a bit? We’ve got a few minutes, don’t we, Wangji?”

Qin Su glanced at Lan Wangji; it was brief and didn’t quite reach his face, resting somewhere on the toe of his shoes.

“Oh, no, I can’t,” she refused gently. “I have to go pick some things up for Wen Qing – she’s running the medical tent during the concert and she can’t go herself because there’s no one else to run the supermarket while she’s gone.”

“Medical tent?” Lan Wangji frowned; he hadn’t seen the medical tent on the list of volunteer jobs for the competition. Was it too late to switch jobs? Would his offer of help be refused, if he asked to join Wen Qing?

Qin Su looked at him sharply, her little mouth puckered into a stern, twisted pout.

“Yes, the medical tent,” she said and her voice was cool. “She’s perfectly qualified to do it, even if she’s not a doctor.”

She looked at him for a second more before she turned and left, leaving the door to slide shut behind her.

Lan Wangji closed his eyes again, listening to the rustling as Huaisang trotted over to the table to explore the dishes they’d ordered, fetching the bowls and spoons they kept in the kitchen along with fresh wooden chopsticks.

Idly, bitterly, he wondered if he would ever get the chance to apologise to Wen Qing properly. He had a horrible, sinking feeling that he’d missed his chance.

The thought tasted sour in his mouth, like spoiled milk.

The news spread like wildfire: didn’t you hear, people whispered to each other over weiqi games and cups of fragrant white tea; didn’t you hear, they texted each other on WeChat; didn’t you hear, they said as they leaned in their doorway to chat to the neighbours, Luo Qingyang’s back in Jinxi.

The story went like this: once upon a time, two girls had befriended a boy. He was awkward and shy and easily rude; they were one who was quiet and kind and one who was bright and blunt. Once upon a time, they had grown up together, in this small water village town, going to school together, huddled on two seats on the bus so they could share trading cards and dog-eared books and the latest CDs. Once upon a time, the boy had fallen in love with one of the girls. One upon a time, the boy had married one of the girls.

The problem was, he hadn’t married the one he’d first fallen in love with.

And now – well, now.

She’s back, didn’t you hear?

The canal was a thin thing, squashed in between houses, shaded over by overhanging trees which dripped the last of blossom petals down in flutters of sighing, dying brown-curled pink; it trailed through the town up towards the road their house was on and Huaisang knew it better than he’d ever admit: it was his usual way back when he didn’t want to see people – quiet and full of high-hedged walls topped with tumbling vines and chipped bricks.

It was just wide enough for two boats to slide past each other, bumping against the canal walls and easing through as their drivers laughed and shouted, steadying the boats with careful, firm hands.

Huaisang could theoretically have jumped the distance, if he’d tried – but he usually preferred to wait until a boat passed by, waving to the driver with a flutter of a painted fan and a wobbling lower lip to ask to jump across the gap in a one-two-three from the bank to the boat to the bank again.

Now, though, he was using it as a shortcut to get home without being spotted by his brother or Lan Xichen.

Or, admittedly, Lan Wangji, who had never really understood the idea of hiding from your brother.

Lingering by the water’s edge, he leaned out to look left and right to see whether there was a boat coming or if he would have to attempt to jump the gap.

“Huaisang!”

He flinched with a squeak, arms windmilling as he toppled forwards – and then stopped, abruptly, jerked to a halt by the collar of his t-shirt.

“Da-ge!” he cried, staring down at the water as it seemed to gaze back up at him, lapping away at the canal walls with a steady, serene sort of hunger. “You saved me!”

The evening was sweet, painted lavender and peach-flush orange and spotted with puffed clouds dyed cream-white and a soft, bruise-purple as they drifted away from the sinking sun towards the north. In the distance, the lake’s edge stretched, littered with smudged trees in green-black and the shadowed shapes of birds in the sky, soaring and arcing and singing to each other and nothing at all.

Below the bridge, the water was ink-blue under the lanterns, deep and dark and glittering here and there with spots of silver – the light spooled out, rippling over the waves as they lapped at the wooden posts, but it was always swallowed by the lake itself, hungry and cold and strumming a long, slow rhythm up to the town.

It seemed to whisper to him, cajoling him to breathe slower, deeper; it was soothing, Lan Xichen reflected, in a way that couldn’t really be created.

Standing by the railing, he looked out, out, out across the water, at the far line of trees, snaking in and around back into itself again; there were so few buildings and boats – so few people.

Just the dark drown of the lake and the sweep of orange leaking out from the sun.

There were lotus flowers on the other side, or the starts of them: pink buds, tightly wrapped and growing on tall, thickening stems. They crowded each other in a field of light green, throwing shadows over each other as the lights flickered on: lanterns with their reddish bodies and the solid, yellow-lit windows from the restaurants and squat houses lining the banks of the canal as it wound up and in-land.

Lan Xichen didn’t turn to look at the lotuses.

“Zhanzhan, look at the lotuses!” he had called years before, stretching onto his toes to stare down, delighted and fascinated – he had wanted to touch them to see if they felt soft or rubbery or feathered, but it wasn’t okay to just touch things that weren’t his – as the flowers shuddered in the breeze, pink heads rocking back and forth as though they were singing.

His father had been beside him, or almost, looking out somewhere else; A-Zhan with their mother, his big eyes dark and serious, pudgy little hands scrabbling on the wood as he tried to see over the railing.

He had seen the way A-Zhan’s face had softened into an ‘o’ as he gazed down at the flowers; had split a secret, secretive smile with their mother even as she held Wangji steady and reached out to smooth his hair, buffeted fuzzy by the breeze.

“Xiongzhang,” he heard Wangji’s voice, lower now than it had been all those years ago and he turned to smile as Wangji came up beside him. They stood at the same height now, and in the dark they looked identical but for their clothes: a mismatch of shadow-dipped blue and soft white.

“Wangji,” he said, the sounds from the town trickling out behind them: the whoosh of cars and shouts like bursts, breaking between the waves. “It’s good to see you.”

“Mn,” Wangji hummed, his mouth twitching into a brief, second-slim smile before it vanished into a steady, narrow glance. “Xiongzhang has been enjoying himself.”

There wasn’t much in it – not enough frustration to be angry and a little too ironic to be amused – but it was enough to make Lan Xichen dip his head with a sheepish sort of smile.

“Ah, I’m sorry, didi,” he apologised all the same. “It wasn’t intentional – I hope I wasn’t out of line?”

“Mn, their fault,” Lan Wangji agreed, and the bland tone in his voice gave away the smirking joke underneath. “If they can’t tell the difference.”

Overhead, the sun was settling into a reddish glow, trailing smears of burnt orange behind even as the night closed in and smothered them down with blue-washed dark and sprinkled stars. It doused everything quiet, the evening, patting down the water as it swished in and out until it sunk into the background along with the chirps of insects and the occasional, sky-high twitter of birds in their nests.

One by one, the little boats still out on the lake drifted away to the banks, their lanterns bobbing along until they winked out; behind them, the throngs of people near the bridge thinned, slowing to the occasional couple or person strolling alone, hands in pockets and face to the water.

Eventually, Lan Wangji turned, stepping round his brother and leading him off along the bridge, through the steady slide of light to dark to light to dark again as they moved from lantern to night to lantern again.

It was almost sad, stepping off the bridge and leaving it behind; Lan Xichen felt slightly reluctant to go just yet: he could have stayed there, watching and watching as the sun sank and the night swelled overhead until it swept everything over dark.

“Xiongzhang,” Wangji was frowning a bit – he looked tired, his little brother, but perhaps that was just the light – and Xichen shook his head to catch up with him.

“So,” Xichen felt lighter than usual and Wangji was with him and Wangji seemed happy, if tired, and there was really one question he really wanted to ask. “This Wei Wuxian, does he still bother you?”

It was sly and a bit unfair, but ah how many times had Wangji mentioned him in calls? How many times had Xichen wondered what exactly it was Wangji meant when he talked about how Wei Wuxian was irresponsible and loud and somehow always there, and Wangji’s ears flushed red in a way which explained more than his words did.

At least now, under cover of evening, Wangji could avoid the telltale blushing. Xichen had been kind enough to give him that.

“Wei Wuxian does not bother me,” Wangji said simply, but he added too quick and too snappish, “When is xiongzhang leaving?”

Xichen laughed out loud, clear and bright, and saw Wangji’s shoulders huff. It lasted a moment before Wangji reached back and grabbed his wrist, speeding them up the road and into the town, setting them along the winding paths to the house.

The touch was only for a handful of heartbeats but it was enough to smooth everything over and the silence which settled was sweet.

At the other end of the bridge, while their father’s hands hovered over Wangji’s shoulders, framing him in front of him and out of the way of the march of people across the bridge, their mother had crouched down to retie the ribbon in his hair, her hands gentle as they carded through the long, sleek strands.

“Can we have lotuses at home?” he had asked, before frowning. “They would grow, wouldn’t they?”

A-Niang had laughed quietly, teasing apart a knot in his hair as he stamped down a wince. “I think they would grow at home, yes. Why, would A-Huan like lotuses at home?”

A few steps away, A-Zhan hugged his arms close to his sides as the swell of people bulged outwards almost to encompass their little group of four. Their father stayed put, hands either side of A-Zhan’s shoulders, keeping him steady in place.

“I think,” he had said thoughtfully, feeling the squeeze of the ribbon in his hair as A-Niang tugged it tight. “I would like a lotus.”

“Well, then,” A-Niang had said, soft and even in his ear. “If A-Huan wants a lotus, A-Huan will get a lotus.”

He had beamed, bouncing forward on his toes when she had finished with his hair and taking hold of A-Zhan’s hand, sticky and pudgy and curling so easily around his own.

“Zhanzhan will help me take care of it, won’t you?” he had asked, and A-Zhan had given a solemn little nod, waiting silently for their parents to guide them back into town for dinner: their father in front, as always, and their mother shepherding them along.

The next day, they had been promised a boat ride out onto the lake – perhaps then Lan Huan would get to touch a lotus.

Chapter Text

Shuoyue

The rain was light-hearted and cheeky, darting out and in and out again like a child playing tag - when it did fall, it was the thin kind which soaked you straight through to the skin, leaving you drenched and damp and still somehow warm. Overhead, the clouds carrying it were fat and grey-bellied, sailing along slowly through the blue sweep of sky.

Outside Lotus Pier, Jiang Yanli stepped along the row of plants in their neat window-boxes, all green leaves and heads turned towards the sun, yellow and half-hidden by cloud. She had a watering can in hand - old and scratched-metal - and carefully sprinkled out showers here and there to keep the flowers beaming.

It wasn't really necessary, with the rain, but it was a habit to check on the plants every two days and she'd been forgetful this week so far - it had been so busy, with all the planning and the extra work for the concert and. Well. Mianmian.

The watering can was heavy and her wrists were sparrow-thin - she had been given exercises to do by the doctor, with a tiny pink dumbbell, to strengthen them but, like, so many things, she'd been forgetting them lately - and she shook as she lifted it up to water the hanging baskets by the entrance.

"Careful!" a voice cried, and then there were hands sweeping around hers to grab the watering can, warm and steady and damp from the rain, and Mianmian looked at her, mouth in an ‘o'.

The moment hung, a painting of sorts, the kind of thing that breaks too easily.

"Here, let me," Mianmian eased the watering can out of her hands and set it down on the steps. "Are you alright?"

Yanli nodded; her face felt warm and her heartbeat was so fast, so double-time-quick she felt it was making her shake.

"Are you sure?" Mianmian frowned, her eyes wide with concern - the same concern she'd seen so often when they'd been teenagers at school and then just after. She raised a hand to press the back of her hand to Yanli's forehead. "You look flushed - do you feel faint?"

"Thank you," Yanli managed to get out - it was a bit louder than she meant it to be. "I'm fine, really."

Mianmian nodded, though she didn't seem convinced - and Yanli remembered, unbidden, those hours she and Mianmian had spent sitting in the school nurse's office, her tucked in the bed and Mianmian next to her, a pile of schoolbooks stacked on the spindly table, or sitting side-to-side underneath a tree, her head against the bark-trunk as Mianmian fanned them both, pointing birds out of the sky, making them both smile.

How long had it used to take her to persuade Mianmian that she was fine? How long had it used to take Mianmian to see through her when she was lying? How many times had Mianmian tricked her into resting until she actually felt better, no matter what she said, lying down or reading or claiming she wanted to nap?

They had been close once, before -

"Jin Ling, don't run!" Jin Zixuan's voice - too much a bark, so like Jiang Cheng in that moment even if neither of them would ever admit it - ripped through the moment and Yanli glanced up the road behind Mianmian to see Jin Ling racing towards her, his white trainers splashing through dirt-laced puddles and plastering leaves here and there like stickers.

He pulled up in a halt next to her, making a face at his father's voice, before he grinned at her. "Hi, niang!"

"There's juice in the fridge for you and some fresh jianbing if you're hungry," she told him, smoothing a stray hair back into place; he went to jerk his head away but stopped halfway and let her, before grinning again, chirping a "thanks, niang!" and vanishing into the restaurant, letting the door clang shut behind him.

"Yanli," Jin Zixuan's voice was stiff - he said her name like it hurt his tongue to get it out.

She didn't trust herself to speak - not when Mianmian was right there, not when she knew so much, too much, about everything that had gone wrong between them - so she just nodded and lingered, her fingertips pressed against the white flowers spun into her dress.

"Jin Zixuan, hi," Mianmian smiled, tentative and nervous. "It's been a long time."

It shouldn't hurt, to see them interact. She had married him, after all, and Mianmian had left. It shouldn't hurt, it shouldn't - but Jin Zixuan straightened up with his chest puffed out a little like he had done all those years before when he was a peacocking teenager, his cheeks spattered faint pink, and he gave a small, jerky sort of bow-nod.

"Mianmian," he said and it sounded nothing like her name had. This rolled off his tongue with a rust born from lack of use, supple and slick and almost breathless.

"I'll leave you two to catch up," Yanli ducked her head underneath Mianmian's look - questioning, alarmed, straight at her - and darted inside, closing the door firmly behind herself.

The click of the lock thudded into the silence of the restaurant floor and she stayed there for a moment, the wood a solid barrier between her and them: between the way Mianmian was looking after her and Jin Zixuan was still looking at Mianmian, sixteen and stupid again.

It stung, deeper than she'd thought and she felt seventeen again, awkward and plain and frail, watching the boy she liked looking at another girl with diamonds in his eyes.

The afternoon sunk into early evening quick and sly, sparking a flurry of activity like a wildfire, racing from one place to the next, jumping from house to house until the whole town, it seemed, was covered.

Down by the waterfront, Wen Ning was organising a group of the fishermen who sailed their boats out, steady and calm, to attach the floating platforms, testing them gingerly with one foot first, then the other, then the smallest, most tentative rabbit-hopping jump. With a nod, he smiled and gave neat, awkward bows as they ambled off over to the stall Qin Su had set up, serving milk tea and cold lemonade in thick paper cups.

"Wen Ning," Qin Su called him over too - his face was damp with sweat from pushing the platforms into place and his t-shirt was soaked through from treading water to the hold them in place as the youngest and nimblest of the crew had tied loose knots before Hei-shushu, short and stocky with shaggy, long hair, had pulled them tight and secure.

Hei-shushu had been in the Chinese navy once upon a time - he never spoke of it, but he could tie a knot no one else could undo and once, when a car had crashed into a wall, he had been the one to prise open the crumpled door and press two fingers to the glass-spattered driver's neck.

"Here," Qin Su smiled, handing Wen Ning a little paper cup of lemonade, fizzing away gently. "It's hot - you should drink something before you get heat-stroke."

"Thank you," Wen Ning bowed, taking the cup from her with careful hands.

"It doesn't look much like a stage," Qin Su commented, eyeing the floating platforms with their blue tops and the roped-off space. There were a few pieces of litter - plastic packets from crackers and a wooden Pocky stick box and a pair of crunched plastic bottles emblazoned with the names of different brands in brightly coloured stickers - still skittering about the ground as a gaggle of volunteers chased after them, their little hands clumsy as they grabbed and caught air.

"Wei-gongzi and Jiang-gongzi will fix that," Wen Ning said, calm enough - but he watching the children as they ran about, veering close to the water's edge after the litter, brooms swinging through the air fast and wobbly.

"They make me worry when they do that," Qin Su said suddenly, nodding towards the kids with an absent air. One hand brushed over the space underneath her breastbone. "A-Song fell in once, it terrified me - I jumped in afterwards, and it was only then that I remembered I was never good at swimming."

Wen Ning's smile fell sympathetic - shadowed and wide open - and she looked away, busying herself with checking the volume of lemonade in one of the jugs and opening another bottle of milk for more milk tea.

In the little house, Lan Wangji sat with his legs folded and a colour-burst of dishes spread out on the table in front of him: a little bowl of tea eggs piled like marbles, tofu flower soup (free from the shrimp and scallions that normally decorated it and scattered instead with sliced mushrooms), a large bowl of fresh-cooked sticky rice, mustard greens, pea shoots and chopped spring onions laced with garlic and ginger, and a pile of hong shan yu he had baked early that morning with Lan Xichen like they were boys again, watching them rise on the bellies in front of the oven with a pair of books, their elbows bruising on the tiles.

Behind a pair of closed doors, Nie Huaisang and Nie Mingjue were arguing again - quieter this time, thankfully.

He glanced at his brother, but Lan Xichen simply sipped at his tea and ice-speckled water, the corners of his mouth quirked into a smile that laughed.

Perhaps not arguing then. Perhaps just... being Nies. Loudly. Argumentatively.

He huffed and looked woefully at the tofu flower soup; it was lunchtime, couldn't they discuss whatever it was later?

Clipboard in hand, Jin Zixuan winced. Behind him, Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin - with help from the two Wen boys who helped at Wen Qing's supermarket - were building the stage, their hands full of hammers and wrapped in long bundles of wiring for sparkling, black-metal lights that sat in front of them, blocky and big.

They were... loud, and angry - and he frowned when Jin Ling sniggered at a particularly rude shout from Wei Wuxian, wielding a hammer at his brother and nearly tripping over a twisted cable even as he grinned.

"A-Ling, don't let me hear you ever say that," he said sharply, only just hearing the sulked "yes, die," in reply.

There was a squawk from the stage and a shout of "Wei Wuxian!" which rang the ears of every person nearby - a concertina of curious tourists bumbled into each other looking to see what had happened.

Jin Zixuan thought longingly of his house with its quiet and shaded interior and the paintings Yanli had bought over so many years, one for each year they'd shared, plastered over the walls in light-wood frames.

Watching Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin was worse than babysitting the kindergarten class. At least they were, rightfully, not allowed near hammers and electric circuits.

What he would give to be sitting in the low chair with its purple velvet pillow in the middle of his back, a mug of Yanli's milk tea and a little platter of those half-chocolate biscuits she had always bought for herself and he always ate.

It tasted sour, though - that wasn't his house anymore, wasn't his life anymore. The divorce had seen to that.

"Jin-gongzi," Lan Wangji appeared, collected and stone-faced as always, his blue t-shirt short-sleeved and tight around his arms. There was another shout from the stage as Wei Wuxian tripped again, and Jin Zixuan saw Lan Wangji's eyes slink that way before flicking back to him. "I am here to help with the chairs."

"They haven't arrived yet," Jin Zixuan heard himself say - and that was stupid, wasn't it? It was obvious they weren't here yet.

"Mn," Lan Wangji nodded, perfectly serious as though what he'd said hadn't been stupid. "Can help  with whatever needs helping."

His eyes shot sideways again - there had been a disturbingly loud crash and Jiang Wanyin had half-howled with rage. Titters from the gathering crowd of tourists and litter-picking local children were a sibilant undercurrent to the loud brass of Wei Wuxian rhapsodising about workplace safety on building sites.

"Lan-gongzi," Jin Zixuan said, and if his voice was as exhausted as he felt, that was perhaps only to be expected. "How are you at babysitting?"

The evening closed in quietly, gently, warmly: it was the kind of evening which hugged you, sticking to your skin as the sea-salt air licked at the back of your throat. Lavender-dipped, it painted the sky a wash of brilliant blue, spotted with the white-grey bellies of clouds as they drifted past high above the lake, lapping slow and steady at the underside of the town and the stage.

Down by the lakeside, there was a thrumming buzz as the crowd swelled around the chairs and the makeshift stands, shouting over heads to each other, waving frantically at friends and late-arriving family members still in uniforms. Jiang Yanli and Qin Su and Uncle Hu called out prices from behind their stalls, shuttling out cups of soup and fresh-cooked jian bing and ma qiu stored in neat rings inside round bamboo boxes and bubble tea by the litre; their voices were quiet under the growing throng of people, darting quick from person to person.

Children ran about, dodging between legs, their hands sticky with chocolate and fruit juices from melon slices and red-bodied cherries, early this year. Their parents kept half an eye on them, chatting with friends and neighbours and helping popo into a seat with steady hands - it was a messy, orderly sort of chaos.

Lan Wangji sat to one side, Lan Xichen to his right with his hair tucked under a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of slick sunglasses covering his face, next to Nie Huaisang and Nie Mingjue; a few rows in front to his left, he could see Wei Wuxian, squeezed in between Jiang Cheng and Wen Qing - they had flung cloth bags and coats over a bunch of seats to keep them clear and were busy arguing loudly, caught between rowdy laughter and indignant anger.

It took almost twenty minutes for everyone to be settled, hands full of boxes and paper cups, straws stuck in mouths and sweet with the taste of tea - the sun was still strong, gleaming yellow in the west, and the hum in the air had swung thick with excitement.

Eventually, Song Lan, wearing a loose, flowing black shirt that billowed behind him like a pair of bat-wings, the microphone glittering dark in his hand, stepped out onto the stage and the audience hushed, expectant.

"Welcome, Jinxi!" he called, his usually-stern face vanishing into something softer, brighter, sweeter. "Welcome to Jinxi Idol!"

The town cheered; in the background, Lan Wangji heard Fourth Uncle shout "that was my idea!" and Baoshan Sanren's cackling laugh, and he found himself swallowing down a smile.

The lights sputtered on, bright even against the evening sky. The speakers hummed, and somewhere behind the curtain, the first of a line of hopefuls and thrill-seekers waited, black microphones pressed into their hands one by one as the audience cheered, a cacophony of light sticks from concerts flickered on, purple and pink and pale-blue.

Lights; camera -

Up first, a group of four girls strutted their way through a rap-dance hit which bristled with sharp-cut choreography practiced for hours in the weeks before - "how you like that?" they sang, stretching flat and a little breathless.

The lights for Qin Su, punching her way through a Britney Spears song, were as red as he felt his ears turning; it was a good thing for Jin Zixuan's head, perhaps, that the lyrics were all in English and her voice was, well - still, he thought, as he watched her stumble into Jiang Yanli and Wen Qing and Wen Ning with a pink face full of giggles, she seemed to have enjoyed it at least.

Suited-and-booted, a stoic-looking bank manager warbled his way through a ballad; he was swiftly followed by Baoshan Sanren who stood alone on the stage, lit by a single spotlight, and promptly showed him up with a heartfelt, fading love song - the crowd turned, briefly, into a sea of sparkling lights as they swayed out of time, waving their phones over their heads.

Lan Xichen nudged him with his shoulder, and Lan Wangji could hear his brother humming along underneath the speakers.

There were hollers from the crowd when Jiang Wanyin came out onto the stage, looking decidedly nervous as he clutched the microphone. "My precious didi," Wei Wuxian shouted from the crowd, standing up and punching the air, his other hand wrapped around a bottle of something, a wild delight on his face - and if he'd been planning to say anything else it was drowned out as the music started and Jiang Wanyin snapped into action a beat too late.

He was a dark horse: the song was fast, furious, and crashed through the steadily dimming evening; he got a whopping, rolling cheer from the crowd, punctured by wolf-whistles, and walked off a little dazed.

Lan Wangji could only remember too clearly how Jiang Wanyin didn't like him, but it was petty to regret that he'd been good and he felt his ears burn again, hidden in the shadowing light.

"Doctor Lan," Wen Yuan appeared by their row, giving Lan Xichen a curious once-over - with the sunglasses gone there was no hiding how almost-identical they were, and more so than usual with Xichen's hair hidden beneath the hat - before making a polite, aborted sort of bow to Wangji. "Can you come with me?"

Wen Yuan was tense, his hands worrying at each other in front of him, and his face couldn't hide the downward pull of his mouth and the wide-brown frown in his eyes.

"Mn," Lan Wangji nodded, squeezing out past his brother.

Wen Yuan didn't wait, pausing only to flick one final glance at Lan Xichen, before heading out and round the makeshift stage, into where the space they had designated backstage, plastered with neat signs in neon pink and wood-framed beach chairs scattered about near wicker tables. Someone had pressed cushions here and there and draped the occasional blanket about, shades of yellow and green dipped dark.

By one of the chairs, Jin Ling hovered, pacing up and down like an expectant father - he looked, in that moment, almost exactly like his father - and casting glances back at the chair.

Spotting Wen Yuan and Lan Wangji, he jumped a bit, flustered and called, too loud for the small space, "Doctor Lan, thank fuck!"

Pink-cheeked, he blinked and shut his mouth firmly, glancing around for one of his parents or uncles.

"Mn," Lan Wangji hummed - the swearing could wait. "What is wrong?"

"It's A-Qing," Wen Yuan explained, leading him round the chair and closer to Jin Ling, who scowled past him. "She's hurt her ankle."

There was a sniff from behind him, and he turned to see, sunk in the chair, A-Qing, her eyes swollen with tears, her nose red, and her phone face-down in her lap. With her hair slickly back in a pair of small buns and an oversized white blazer falling about her, she was unrecognisable.

"I haven't hurt it," she snapped, but the irritation ran short and fast, leaving her voice thin. "I've sprained it, you idiot."

Jin Ling rolled his eyes and went to say something - behind him, the stage manager called the next performer and handed him a microphone, and Jin Ling promptly turned white.

"Let me see," Lan Wangji knelt down to take a better look.

"You're a dentist, what do you know about ankles?" she grumbled - but she didn't move when he rolled up the cuff of her jeans, laying two cool fingers against the bumped, warm skin of her ankle. She just watched, silent and patient.

"A-Qing should be a doctor," he said, rolling the cuff back down. "It is sprained. No dancing."

"What!" A-Qing shrieked - "shush!" came the hiss from the stage manager, as heads turned from the other performers as they gathered: a woman who was frantically muttering to herself under her breath and a pair of teenagers who were pulling on matching jackets and oversized glasses. "No, I have to be able to dance - I can't do the song if I can't dance! Doctor Lan!"

"No dancing," Lan Wangji repeated, and he shook his head once, adding gently, "I am sorry."

"You don't understand," A-Qing slumped in her chair, her eyes flooding with tears again and Lan Wangji felt a rising wave of panic - what would he do if she cried? What was he meant to do? "It's pointless without the dance, I might as well just give up now. Quit - I quit, I quit!"

The stage lights flared, throwing her face into bright, fright-white relief, puffed red and smeared sad and Wangji looked at the floor, a half-formed plan building itself in his head.

There wasn't really a break - songs rolled into each other, the music starting and stopping and stuttering on again in waves, full of rocking and rolling as the tempo swerved this way and that, crashing from genre to sub-genre to traditional songs to modern pop phenomenons. It was relentless and yet, it simmered away happily, washed a little languid by the lake as it lapped at the shore.

In the wings, Lan Wangji waited, his palms sticky with sweat. His face was the same: stiff and carefully calm; his heart was racing.

There were two options: either he could do it himself, or he could ask Xichen. Both were unthinkable - the thought of going up on stage, standing in a blinding spotlight and looking out across a sea of faces made nausea swell in his stomach and the part of him that ran to his xiongzhang turn and scrabble away, only to be caught swiftly because somehow, the thought of asking Xichen seemed impossible and humiliating and rude.

In his mouth, his tongue was dry and his lips felt glued together.

A-Qing next to him was pale, twisting her hands in her lap. She was looking mostly at her ankle, taped up and propped up on a spare chair.

Lan Wangji waited. He wasn't sure what he was waiting for, really, but he waited.

"A-Qing, Doctor Lan," the lady running backstage, her face plastered with an encouraging smile, called over in a loud whisper. "You're up next. Here you go," and she passed over a pair of microphones, both in black.

The lights sputtered on in a blaze of white-bright glare. A-Qing shuffled into her chair, her leg sticking out in front of her.

Next to her, Doctor Lan, in his blue blazer and his hair loose and long down his back, allowed himself a small, sneaking sort of smile - lingering and faintly, gently mischievous - as he raised the microphone.

"I didn't know A-Qing had entered," Qin Su poked Song Lan, tucked into a chair on the very edge of the crowd, in the shoulder.

He blinked and frowned - it was a minute thing, barely creasing his eyes. "What?"

She pointed to the stage and watched as his mouth fell open, just wide enough to catch a fly.

"Did you know Doctor Lan could sing?" Jiang Yanli nudged Wei Wuxian, who huffed and shrugged and took another swig from his bottle.

"Nope, no idea!" he shook his head. "Forget the singing though - who knew he could dance like that?"

Jiang Wanyin snorted and slunk back in his seat, arms folded across his chest. "You shouldn't be allowed to add other performers so late in the game - it's unfair to other contestants."

"Didi, you should have asked! I could have been your backup dancer!" Wei Wuxian grinned, waggling a nagging finger in Jiang Wanyin's face. "Though probably for the best you didn't - I would have blasted you away without trying."

Jiang Wanyin huffed and glared to the side and cracked open a beer.

Some rows away, Nie Huaisang was tap-tap-tapping on his phone when the music kicked off and someone slunk back into the seat next to him.

"Don't put that stupid hat on," he warned, as a blue blazer hovered a hand over it. "It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen and I will burn it on your head."

There was absolute silence; the rest of the crowd were too busy watching the performance up onstage - listing to the way A-Qing's voice, scratchy and lurching from note to note, was carried off through the melody by her assistant - to pay any attention.

"I told your brother it was ugly," Huaisang added, off-hand. "But he has a reason to wear an ugly hat I suppose - you, on the other hand, have every reason to not wear an ugly hat. So. Don't."

The hand hovered a moment longer - Huaisang's eagle eye, sly and close, watched - and then it retreated.

Huaisang tapped away, absent-mindedly bobbing his head to the one-two-three-and-four beat; one-two-three-and-four-and-a-one-two-three-and-four-and-a-and-a-and-a-

There was one last, final beat in the music and then the crowd clapped; Song Lan stood, clapping harder than anyone else; Wei Wuxian wolf-whistled, yanked firmly back into his seat by Jiang Wanyin, who was slapping one hand against his leg; Baoshen Sanren applauded politely, though the look on her face was shrewd, eyes squinting up from her front-row seat at the man in the blue blazer.

"We did it!" A-Qing beamed as she hobbled off stage, one arm slung around her duetting partner's shoulders, her whole body tense with the adrenaline of it all: the lights, the loud sound of the music through the system, the fear-wonder mix that shook her stomach and her hands.

"We did it!" she cried again, flinging her arms around Doctor Lan's neck in a hug that took him by surprise. His long hair was tangling from the breeze blowing about the lake-shore, matting on the back of his neck with cooling sweat and he hugged her back carefully, gently - paternally, almost.

"You should sit," he told her, tugging her off him with a warm, steady smile.

"Right, right, but not here," she told him, checking the time on her phone. "It's nearly time for Zewu-jun and if I miss seeing him I'll actually die!"

"I'm sure you won't die," he assured her and the shadow of laughter in his voice made her scowl.

"Yes," she told him with absolute, damning certainty, stumbling off with one hand dragging his arm behind her. "Yes, I will - and it will be all your fault."

Wen-popo and Fourth Uncle had attempted to do a rendition of a pop song; but it had dissolved into a mess of stuttering sung syllables and increasingly childish dance moves as Fourth Uncle dodged Wen-popo shaking her hands at him and berating him loudly enough to be heard without the mike.

Fourth Uncle performed the sprinkler to the audience just as she closed in; he managed a pretty good floss, an attempt at twerking - which had Baoshen Sanren curling up in her seat as she cackled loudest - and left the stage as Psy, Gangnam-style.

Wen-popo looked dishevelled and pursed lips, but she laughed as they took their seats again.

Last to go, Jin Ling stood alone on the stage, standing in single, golden spotlight. The microphone was held firmly in both hands and he stared resolutely out, jaw set and face stern, across the audience.

He almost missed the first note, but then, he sang.

(Jin Zixuan cried. Jiang Yanli cried. If they held hands, then no one said anything about it. At least, not to them and not then.)

"Die, stop fussing!" A-Qing hissed at Song Lan as he pressed a bundle of ice in a plastic bag to her ankle, the back of his hand brushing against her forehead like she was ill. "Leave me alone - Zewu-jun will be on stage any moment now and I'm not missing him for anything!"

It pooled in a ripple of hazy blue, the light, casting shadows across the stage floor and into the black curtains shrouding the wings. Dark, it fell onto the back in a mock mirror of the sky overhead and in the east: navy-blue and studded with little silver stars which twinkled and twittered.

It was such a simple stage - just the lights and Zewu-jun, alone, with the faintest of spotlights crowning him in a pale, moonlight-blue.

The music, when it started, was slow and soft: the tripping tumble of a piano falling from note to note, lingering on the long, last low; the audience was silent, still, waiting as the melody struck up, the guitar in the backing track and the drums with their heavy, steady beat.

"Half the audience will be in love with him by the time he's finished," Huaisang wrinkled his nose, murmuring quiet enough he avoided shushing by the trio of schoolgirls behind him, who were filming on their phones with practiced hands.

"Quiet," Lan Wangji told him, though for all the force he felt his voice too was quiet: he watched the stage as closely as the rest of them, his mind turning through threads of earnest questions and fading, far-away memories.

"Aie, why? It's not as though you haven't seen him play Shuoyue before," Huaisang complained.

There was a pause and Lan Xichen's voice rose over the backing track, warm and sweet as honey; for all the sweetness, it was a blue song and his voice fell blue too: sighing and sweeping from note to note with a gliding lightness that matched the in-and-out-and-rise-and-fall of the waves lapping against the shore.

"Oh, you haven't, have you?" Huaisang mumbled - mostly to himself, and promptly shut up, gluing his mouth together and sensibly keeping his phone tucked away in his lap with the screen face down.

How long had it been, Wangji wondered, since he had seen xiongzhang perform? Six months at least - perhaps a year? The sinking in his stomach, the rifling through his mind, suggested it had been longer than that: eighteen months or more.

He had been busy, he knew that - he knew Xichen knew that; Xichen was endlessly understanding, always patient - but how had he become so focused on work, on progressing in his career and building himself up and up and up, that he had forgotten about his brother?

Perhaps forgotten was too strong a word, they talked every week still - they were in contact almost every day with messages here and there and then - but he had missed this:

Xichen on stage, elemental and fundamental and so much himself. Xichen, the superstar. Xichen, who used to play him fragments of songs on the piano in the fading hours of the evening before they went to bed. Xichen, who had insisted Wangji was the first to hear his first single - before anyone else.

Xichen, who had invited him to his studio to hear his first album, to fumble through cover designs and photocards; Xichen, who had invited him to concerts in Beijing and Shanghai with spaces for guests if he didn't want to go alone; Xichen, who had invited him to the launch of his second album, cracking the iron glove of confidentiality his label had insisted on to tell him the time and date of it months in advance because I know your schedule is busy, didi.

He had never gone. Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. Always busy.

Xichen, who had never said anything and Xichen who never would.

Wangji's hands clenched and he watched and he waited and ordered the words in his head.

A-Qing cried, waving her phone above her head with the torchlight glittering.

The prizes were simple:

Third was A-Qing, who beamed at her father as he handed her the oversized cheque.

Second was Jiang Wanyin, who looked poleaxed when he climbed back up onto stage to wolf-whistles from Wei Wuxian.

And first, first was Jin Ling, who looked almost as sick as his uncle, his parents either side of him and equally, matchingly proud.

The concert wound down slowly and then all at once - as all community events tend to: people left in huddled groups, threes and fours and sixes, all talking over each other as they bobbed their way up into the town, splashing into boats and wandering steadily along the pavement, carrying infants and listening to children laugh, the whip-quick comments from teenagers still caught up in the moment of it all.

Wen-popo and Fourth Uncle waved goodbye, with Baoshan Sanren in between them to keep the peace, shuffling up the street to where Wen Ning waited with a boat to take them back into town. By the medical tent, Wen Qing was packing away the medical supplies into the first aid kits and a small cardboard box; Wei Wuxian was lounging near her, loudly complaining he hadn't been allowed to help tidy away the beer Qin Su had brought.

Wangji carefully stacked the chairs up again, one on top of another on top of another, brushing any fallen crumbs off the seats - on the other side of the audience, Wen Ning was doing the same thing, hefting a pile of chairs seven tall to one side where they would be collected later.

"A good evening," Nie Mingjue broke into Lan Wangji's thoughts. He too was stacking chairs, though less carefully: he dropped them into a stack together, quick and slick, lugging them away and returning with a brisk, brushing clap of his hands, to start another pile. "Thank you for inviting us."

"Mn," Wangji hummed in response, dipping his head a little. It hadn't been much of an invitation, really - and he hadn't, strictly speaking, invited Nie Mingjue at all; Xichen had done that, really.

Somewhere, he knew, behind the wings, Jin Zixuan and Lan Xichen were dismantling the lighting rig with Jiang Wanyin, somehow already fiercely friendly.

"I was sceptical when Huaisang told me he was here, at first," Nie Mingjue said, his forehead creased in a frown. "Didn't think he'd last a week - he's never not lived in a city, not since our father died. Didn't think he'd cope."

"If he does not cope, he will let us know," Lan Wangji commented and Nie Mingjue laughed - it was a booming sort of laugh, the kind of thing that echoed out over the waterfront.

"Yeah, he will, won't he?" he agreed, and Lan Wangji allowed himself a small smirking twitch of his mouth.

"It suits you," Nie Mingjue added. It was blunt and plain - just the three words, nothing else. Not the wistful gentleness Xichen would have given it, or the huffing happiness of his uncle - just ‘it suits you'. "This place."

"Mn," Lan Wangji hummed - other people might expect more of a reply, but Nie Mingjue's reputation for being taciturn was well-earned and well-deserved and something they had in common.

"Hey, Doctor Lan!" Wei Wuxian called, clambering over a row of chairs to get closer to them. "Lan Zhan! Oh, hey, Lan Zhan's friend - didn't see you there!"

It was the most ludicrous statement. Nie Mingjue was not the kind of man people simply didn't see: he was too tall and too broad and too obviously made of muscle for that.

Lan Wangji very studiously avoided looking at him, stacking another chair, and replying, "Wei Ying, can I help you?"

Wei Ying. Wei Ying. Wei Ying. The name rang in his head - he wondered if Wei Wuxian had noticed yet: Wei Ying.

Wei Ying.

Nie Mingjue snorted next to him and moved off to stack a row of chairs further down. For all of the physical distance that created, Lan Wangji didn't doubt that if he felt he needed to step in, he would be straight back up.

Older brothers were like that. Interfering.

"I didn't know you could sing!" Wei Wuxian tapped his chest with a waggling, knowing gleam in his smile. There was a redness in his eyes and a bitter sting on his breath; the smell of the beer he had been drinking all of evening and it twisted Wangji's stomach. "You've been holding out on us all!"

It would be easy, he thought, to say nothing, to let Wei Wuxian continue believing it had been him up there, his voice softening the harsh, rasping notes of A-Qing's - him in the blue blazer he was currently wearing again.

It would be easy but it would be very wrong.

Lans, shufu had always told them, do not lie.

"Can't," he said, quiet and curt.

"What?" Wei Wuxian frowned, flopping down onto a chair - lonely and waiting to be stacked - and looking up at him. It reminded him, obscurely, randomly, violently, of the rabbit in its pen: all dark eyes and soft fur. "Thought you didn't lie, Mr Doctor? I saw you! We all saw you!"

"No," he shook his head once. "Wasn't me."

"Aiya, you're such a pain, you know that?" Wei Wuxian sighed, stretching his legs out. "It's almost as though you want to just be a stiff prick! Why won't you admit when you do nice things - you helped Baoshan Sanren and now you helped A-Qing: those are good things! Ah, you frustrate me! Who struggles this much with being a good person?"

His voice was rising; Nie Mingjue was casting glances in their direction. From behind the stage, the clicking and clacking of the lights and the rigging being taken apart were stopped - finished or just stopped, he didn't know.

"Wasn't me," Lan Wangji insisted, steady still - he could feel the blood hammering in his chest, in his temples. His hands curled around the nearest chair, clinging to the backrest like a railing. "Can't sing. Xiongzhang sang. As me."

In the background, Wen Qing hovered, her hands clasped in front of her, her dark eyes flicking between the two of them, back and forth and back again. She had a stillness which spoke of interrupting, of weight.

Wei Wuxian's face fell, open and open-mouthed. "So you lied?"

"En," Lan Wangji frowned a little himself. Had it been a lie, really? He had never claimed it was him - and Lan Xichen had never said it wasn't him. Were they supposed to wear badges so people knew which was which? Was it their fault if others mixed them up?

His stomach protested: they had, after all, swapped blazers and re-tied Xichen's hair and slipped off jewellery to be properly convincing.

"So you did sing," Wei Wuxian folded his arms.

"En."

"So A-Qing knows it wasn't you?"

"En," he shook his head again - though whether it was at Wei Wuxian or himself or Nie Mingjue, who was creeping ever closer, he couldn't have said.

"So you did lie," Wei Wuxian concluded; and he launched out of his chair, striding away towards Wen Qing, who looked back over his shoulder at Lan Wangji with an expression that was unreadable in the night light: blank-cut and beautifully still.

He got a handful of paces away before he stopped sharp and pivoted back, storming close with a hand jabbing into Lan Wangji's chest painfully, fiercely, forcing him to take a step back.

"Look at you, Mr Dentist, so fucking sanctimonious," he breathed, and it was worse than the shouting, this: this was a kind of anger that simmered, slow and steady like water, cold and careful and slipping between ribs to really dig deep. "With your fancy degree and your fancy clothes and all your airs as though you're better than everyone - you're just a liar, aren't you? How much of it is a lie, huh? All of those nice things you've been doing - how many of them are just lies? Just facades? Is there anything of you here that's even real?

"God," he laughed and it was a sickly, cruel sound. Lan Wangji flinched. "How could I have been so stupid to think there was anything more to you? To think that I even thought I -"

"Wei Wuxian!" Wen Qing had reached them; Wangji hadn't even noticed when she had moved - but she was there, grabbing for Wei Wuxian's arm, a hardness in her eyes and a pinched worry to her lips.

He shrugged out of her grip and shook his head, rolling red-rimmed eyes at the sky before swinging back to Lan Wangji again - there was a shout behind him, "Wei Wuxian!", in Jiang Wanyin's angry alarm - and then his hand, falling open, was caught, Lan Xichen's fingers curled around his wrist in a grip that wouldn't be broken.

"I think you should go home," Lan Xichen said, and the coldness in his voice was startling.

For a moment, Wei Wuxian, scowling and shifting from foot to foot, seemed to consider something - more, something stupid, something wild and dark - and the air stayed stuck. It thickened, tense, as he half-raised an arm, the muscles and bones in his hand flexing taut.

By Nie Mingjue, Jin Zixuan hesitated, and Jiang Wanyin thrummed with energy, caught indecisive.

Then, it fell and Wei Wuxian let out a huff and stalked away, kicking over one of the chairs as he went and brushing past Wen Qing.

It took Lan Wangji half-way home to realise he was angry, too. 

Chapter Text

Jinxi Elementary School

The café was always empty first thing in the morning – the tourists were all still asleep or not yet there, waiting somewhere in Shanghai or Suzhou for their buses in, and the locals were all still at home, sipping tea and iced coffee from their own pots and cups.

Song Lan knew, as he opened up the doors and set up the coffee maker on the counter, switching his laptop on, what each of them would be doing.

Jin Zixuan would be sitting at the low table in his living room, sparsely decorated in yellow-and-cream, reading the town newspaper as he drank his tea – too bitter and too thin; Wen Qing would be bustling about, finding task after task to do in a house that was neater than neat, even as Wen Ning bowed out of the house, already in uniform with his hat under his arm and a freshly-made wrap in his pocket. Jiang Yanli would be setting a plate full of food – cong you bing pancakes and malatang soup – down for Jin Ling, already preparing a second for Wei Wuxian, still asleep in the boat down by the lakefront.

He had passed Qin Su on his way in, giving her a nod as they passed by; Jiang Wanyin would already be in the shop, fiddling with some electronics or another and swearing at his computer as it sputtered blue-screen-of-death yet again.

Glancing at the clock, he carefully the ice into the blender, waiting perched on his stool.

It was nearly half past seven. Doctor Lan would be here any minute on his way to work.

Clicking on his laptop with the old-fashioned black mouse, wired in and blaring red light whenever he knocked it onto its back, turtling and rocking side-to-side, Song Lan opened up the file containing his planned old album.

These days it had been itching at the back of his mind, like a scab on the back of his neck: unseen but felt.

At thirty-eight minutes past seven precisely – it was always the same, give or take a minute – the bell over the door chimed and Lan Wangji walked in.

Song Lan blinked once, frowning. No – two Lan Wangji’s walked in.

Stranger still, one was smiling.

“Two teas, please,” Lan Wangji said, flat and a little harder than usual, placing his usual reusable cup – block-sky-blue with a thick white rim – on the side and waiting in silence.

“If you do Wangji’s first,” the smiling Lan Wangji said. “Mine can take as long as it takes – I’m not in any rush.”

“Mn,” Song Lan murmured an agreement, adding the water to the tea leaves with a steady, confident hand.

Something about the smiling Lan Wangji bothered him – like his album, it itched at the back of his mind, picking at something covered up in his memory. He was certain, certain he had seen him before, but where?

On the stairs, A-Qing thudded down, dressed for school with her hair in a messy ponytail and her eyes smudged with black mascara. Her tie was wonky and her blazer flung over her arm rather than on her back, but at least her bag was packed and closed properly and she was down earlier than usual.

Perhaps, he thought, she might not be late this morning.

Rounding the corner, dumping her bag on the nearest stool, A-Qing hopped behind the bar to kiss his cheek and ask, impertinent and bleary-eyed,

“That’s not for me, is it?” pointing at the tea he was pouring out into Lan Wangji’s bamboo cup. “It looks horrible.”

Smiling Lan Wangji ducked a wide smile behind a hand; actual Lan Wangji didn’t twitch, his eyes fixed down on the counter.

“Ah, please serve your daughter before me,” smiling Lan Wangji said. “It’s important not to be late for school.”

A-Qing scowled up at him, then, Song Lan watched as she did the same doubletake he had done earlier: she glanced between them, smiling Lan Wangji and actual Lan Wangji, her mouth dropped open, her eyes widened and she breathed, quieter than he’d ever heard her say anything before,

“No, no no no no no no no no no no!” it was almost like a chant or a prayer of some kind, he reflected.

Smiling Lan Wangji smiled again – gentle and idly amused.

“You didn’t realise it was me last night, so we were never properly introduced,” he said. “So I thought I would ask forgiveness instead.”

A-Qing was still staring; Song Lan was waiting for the scream to break out. None of them were prepared for her to break into tears with an ugly, hiccupping sob, and fall into Zewu-jun, who looked far less alarmed than he should have been, all things considered.

Song Lan pushed Lan Wangji’s tea across the counter, followed by the contactless card reader. A tap, a blinking green light, and they nodded to each other.

Lan Wangji slid a block-printed business card across the bar, “In case you need help,” he said, and then left, quick as a breeze.

Picking it up, Song Lan read: Nie Mingjue, Director & Producer.

Slipping it into his pocket, Song Lan pushed a box of tissues along the countertop towards Lan Xichen and A-Qing.

A-Qing was still crying, shaking her head and nodding and hiccupping out loose, lonely words to Lan Xichen, black streaks trickling down her cheeks and smearing across her face as she wiped them away, somehow abashed and shy with Zewu-jun right there.

He supposed A-Qing would be late to school after all. As usual.

The corridors bustled in between lessons, full of green blazers and white shirts and backpacks in red and black and bubblegum pink as the students jostled their way from class to class, whispering and gossiping and laughing and humming as they went, carrying stacks of exercise books and plastic-coated textbooks. No one was ever really that loud – no one shouted, exactly – but the noise blended and merged together until it was a heavy, shouting kind of buzz.

Wen Yuan and Jin Ling nestled their way between the other students, ducking around the older students as they cut through the crowds, their bags swinging off their shoulders.

“Do you think we’ll be late?” Wen Yuan asked as they approached the classroom. The crowd in the corridor was starting to thin out a little, people disappearing off into classrooms in small groups; the noise was spreading, sneaking through the corridors and into the classrooms the way strawberry plants spread underground, popping up new shoots further away.

They had had a project the term before to research about a particular plant and then give a presentation on it to the class, for Biology.

Jin Ling had chosen strawberries. Wen Yuan had chosen radishes.

Jin Ling snorted, scowling to himself as an older girl thumped past him, her yellow backpack with its stylised silver seven charm smacking into his shoulder. She didn’t turn around to look.

“We’re early,” he said. “We’re always early. Why do you always think we’re going to be late?”

Ducking into the classroom through the open door, they were the first two in the class – apart from a pair of girls who were sitting at the back, their chairs turned to one side as they braided each others hair with careful, lip-bitten concentration.

“I told you!” Jin Ling said loudly, triumphantly.

“Excuse me,” the voice sounded from behind them and he squawked, jumping out of the way to let the teacher inside.

“Sorry, miss,” Jin Ling apologised again, bowing hastily – Wen Yuan bowed with him.

“Oh it’s not a problem,” she smiled, setting down the pile of exercise books she’d been carrying; all of them a bright orange and full of exercises and homework and marks ready to be returned.

“You’re new, aren’t you?” Jin Ling blurted out. “I saw you at my Niang’s restaurant, with all of your bags.”

She considered that for a moment, her long hair swishing in its neat, slicked-back ponytail. Her smile had dipped, but she covered it over with an air of overly-serious contemplation.

“I grew up here, but I moved away and now I’m back,” she said, thoughtful and slow. “So I’m not really new, just… late.”

“I’d like to be late,” Jin Ling said wistfully, and grinned when Wen Yuan glanced at him, wide eyes scandalised.

Punching him in the arm playfully, Jin Ling said, “come on, then!” and led the way over to a pair of seats by the window, pulling his pencil case and textbook out of his bag.

At the front of the classroom, Luo Qingyang watched as the students trickled in in twos and threes and fours, the occasional one rushing in, laden with a violin case and a bundle of sheet music or a sports bag bumping against their legs.

Still, she found that she almost always inevitably ended up glancing over Jin Ling last. She felt guilty about it: as though she were favouring him somehow, over the other students; as though it somehow meant something, which was a silly, romantic, absurd thing to think, even to herself.

Jin Ling was just… so much his parents’ son. He looked so much like his father, sounded so much like his uncles, and the bursts of smiles and simple, instinctive kindnesses every now and then were entirely his mother.

Mianmian couldn’t help but wonder, if she’d stayed, would he have got anything from her?

(Silly and romantic and absurd.)

The school building loomed large, yellow-tinted and severe with its straight, square-cast lines. It was a squat thing, studded with plain windows and a pair of glass doors in the centre, beyond the stretch of tarmac which doubled as a playground and an exercise field.

Currently, it was empty: all the students were inside in lessons, heads down and pencils scribbling away; there was no one outside but the birds – well, the birds and Lan Wangji.

With his satchel in one hand, he stood stiff and straight, gazing at the building with a certain amount of worry. He had never been good with children – even when he had been a child himself, he hadn’t been good at it. They had always seemed so strange to him: unpredictable and wild, and they had found him equally as odd.

At least, he supposed, all he was meant to do was go in and give a presentation. Nothing complicated, nothing odd about that – and children never seemed to like these kinds of things, stuffy presentations about health and wellbeing, a reprimanding parent with a set of cute slides, so it was likely to be boringly, dully predictable.

It was easier said than done, though, and the satchel strap was warm and a little damp with the sweat from his palm.

“Ah, Doctor Lan,” Wei Wuxian, a bright splash in a faded red t-shirt and a – strange, strange, strange – neat white suit, was a muted thing when he came to a halt a little way away, just inside the school gates. “Did Mianmian ask you to do the dental talk?”

With a frown, Lan Wangji nodded, giving a little hum of confirmation.

“Ah,” Wei Wuxian nodded too, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I mean – of course she did! That makes sense, right? Asking the local dentist? Why would she ask anyone else?”

It sounded mostly like he was talking to himself, but Lan Wangji wasn’t completely sure – so he nodded again, to be safe.

He shifted the satchel in his hand, tightening his grip.

“Cool, cool, cool, no problem – enjoy the talk! I mean,” Wei Wuxian wrinkled his nose and Lan Wangji watched, feeling something thump in his chest. He was talking quickly, far quicker than normal and there was an edge to his voice of something Lan Wangji couldn’t place. “Good luck! With the kids. You’ll be fine!”

With a last, decisive sort of nod, he turned on his heel and went to leave and Lan Wangji jerked, aborted, and said, “Wei Ying.”

Wei Wuxian stopped and turned, the whirl of his spin sending his suit jacket flaring, all white and sleek and smooth. His face was unreadable, deceptively blank and tricking, and Wangji instead looked to the side of his head, at the sky and the cluster of roofs growing out from each other, like triangular mushrooms after the rain.

“Luo Qingyang asked you to assist with the dental lecture – correct?”

Wei Wuxian jerked his head – short and sharp and reluctant.

“I do not see any problem with that,” he continued.

The words hung in the air for a moment. Wei Wuxian, for his part, seemed almost stunned. He blinked and shook his head a little, the long strands of hair he always left either side of his face swinging about his jaw.

“You are good with children,” Lan Wangji added, his voice bland and calm. His hands were damp. He would need to wash them once he was inside. “It will be beneficial.”

On the edge of the school grounds, a solitary white-and-red figure between the tall, green metal gates, Wei Wuxian hovered, almost immobile as he watched Lan Wangji who watched him back, steady and still and patient.

Eventually, Wei Wuxian dragged his gaze onto the school and nodded, just once.

It was enough. Lan Wangji breathed out and turned to walk into the school, quick and purposeful and thrumming with a sudden burst of energy, nervous and humming and bright.

Sitting in the police car with the blue swash along each side, Wen Ning looked serious, hands on the wheel in a perfect ten-and-two. Carefully, he was scanning the traffic that wound its way through the junction, little snakes of cars and helmet-clipped bikes growing each time the lights flickered over amber-then-red.

The coffees in his hands were warm through the paper rings they had slotted around them – it leeched into the skin of his palms and his fingertips, but he carried them carefully all the same, ignoring the sting of the heat.

With a twist of his wrist, he rapped his knuckles on the car window.

Wen Ning flinched, glancing up, wide-eyed out through the window, speechless. At a trio of gestures and a winning, sweet-cheeked smile, he rolled down the window, blinking up at Nie Huaisang.

“H-hello?” he mumbled, looking a little stunned that Huaisang was there, let alone talking to him.

“Hi!” Nie Huaisang beamed at him. “I brought you coffee!”

“Oh,” Wen Ning blinked, his eyes twitching around the crossroads before he put an arm out, tentative and slow, to take the spare cup of coffee from Huaisang. “Th-thank you. You d-didn’t have to.”

“I know,” Huaisang waved it away with a flapping hand; his long cardigan rippled below his arm in a fall of silver-grey. “But I wanted to, so I did!”

“Th-that’s very k-kind of you,” Wen Ning said, his round face creasing into a small, pleased smile as cradled the coffee, a little lick of liquid resting in the dip of the plastic lid.

“Yes, yes,” Huaisang was trying to frown but it was hard: he found himself pinching back a smile of his own. To disguise it, he sipped at his own coffee – black and strong and sprinkled with a twist of sugar. “Don’t worry about it – you can buy me coffee next time. So, I saw you at the festival – well, concert-slash-competition – picking up all those chairs, and you’re obviously really strong, when do you find the time to workout with all your shifts?”

“N-next time?” Wen Ning stuttered out, and he was frowning now, his big eyes ringing with a clear confusion – all innocence and wonder. It was, Nie Huaisang thought, pretty cute.

“Yes, next time,” Huaisang said matter-of-factly. “That’s how this works, you know? This time, I buy the coffee. Next time, you buy it. Or drinks or food or whatever you’d like to do. Go to the cinema, I don’t know,” he added – and promptly wondered what kind of films Wen Ning would see if he did go to the cinema?

Something artsy, he liked to think. Something pretty and emotional and Aesthetic from head-to-toe.

“Oh – okay,” Wen Ning started, nodding slow and unsure – and then the radio in his car crackled and he jumped, hurriedly jabbing a finger at the button to scroll the window up again. “S-sorry!”

“Away with you!” Nie Huaisang waved cheerfully. “Duty calls the brave!”

He was loud – a bit louder than he meant to be, and there was a moment before a flush bloomed in Wen Ning’s cheeks, rosy and rose-round, and he wandered off, sipping his own still-hot coffee with small, pleased sips.

Well, he thought to himself, settling on a nearby low wall where he could watch Wen Ning listen to the conversation over the radio, face clouded and lips pursed as he tasted the coffee before he settled it down and pulled out of the bay he had been sitting in, the car smooth and quiet as it pushed into the traffic, that had been a very nice first date.

He wondered what Wen Ning would choose for their second date.

The presentation was slick, perfected into twelve simple slides, familiar enough that Wangji could probably have recited it in his sleep if he had had to. It finished, as always, precisely eighteen minutes after he had started, closing with a little video clip he’d found a long time ago of a panda brushing its teeth with a twig.

It was silly but it always made the children laugh, which was the point.

Then he said, as he always did: “are there any questions?”

Before, it had always been the phrase he dreaded saying the most – it invited everything from serious questions to the absolutely bizarre, random things children could come up with to personal questions they didn’t realise were personal.

Now, though, he had Wei Ying.

“What if I forget to clean my teeth?”

“Well, that’s okay, everyone forgets sometimes! But you should try to make it a habit to do it twice a day.”

“Do pandas clean their teeth?”

“Haha, well, I expect they probably have people clean their teeth for them – so they don’t do it themselves, but they do get their teeth cleaned!”

“My jiejie said that if there’s blood when you brush your teeth it means all your teeth are rotting and are going to fall out, is that true?”

“Aiya, your jiejie is funny! Blood when brushing isn’t necessarily something to worry about, but you shouldn’t be seeing it too often. If you are, talk to Doctor Lan here, and he’ll be able to help you!”

“I want to be a panda dentist!”

“Wow, you must be the brave one! You’ll need good grades to do that, so make sure you study hard, okay?”

On the ground of the schoolyard, a cluster of leaves blustered over the fence, bright green and tugged off by the wind as it roared through a day before. Their edges beginning to curl in, they skittered about the tarmac, chasing each other in circles and scattering this way and that.

He watched them, feeling Wei Wuxian walking next to him and also looking somewhere else: at the sky or the ground or counting the railings in the fence, perhaps.

It wasn’t a comfortable silence: it itched at him, restless and awkward, throwing words out into the plains of his mind like Huaisang rifling through a closet – messy and frantic and mindless.

You should apologise to those you hurt, his uncle’s voice sounded in his head, severe and laced with that frank disappointment.

Wei Wuxian had not apologised to him.

The hurled insults still rang inside his head when he least expected it, when he stole a quiet moment and tried to think clear and free: look at you, Mr Dentist, so fucking sanctimonious.

If he tried to close his eyes, tried to block them out – think of something else, something sweeter and kinder and softer, it would clear for a moment before slamming back: your fancy degree and your fancy clothes and all your airs as though you’re better than everyone – you’re just a liar, aren’t you?

He swallowed, thick and suddenly bitter.

They were almost at the gates now, silent and side-by-side and looking anywhere but towards each other; it was as though the world around them had cracked down the middle and divided into two neat halves: Lan Wangji’s half and Wei Wuxian’s.

“Thank you,” he said, abrupt and cold.

“What for?” Wei Wuxian sounded suspicious – and that, that hurt too. What was suspicious about saying thank you? What wrong could Wei Wuxian possibly spin that into?

“For helping. With the talk,” he clarified, still curt and clipped.

He almost regretted saying it. For all it had been the right thing to do – the honest thing to do – he wanted to take it, to snatch the words out of the air and swallow down the sound of the syllables so they vanished.

“Oh,” Wei Wuxian made a noise. “Um, you’re welcome?”

“Mn,” Lan Wangji hummed a bit; the gates either side of them loomed bright even with their flaking paint in the sudden sunshine and he sped up, walking faster and faster and faster until he was halfway to running down the pavement, winding through the streets of Jinxi, Wei Wuxian left far behind him somewhere, ambling and indecisive.

She was late. She hadn’t meant to be – but there had been a problem in the kitchen and Mu-nushi had ducked out to take a phone call from her daughter, who was currently six months pregnant and horribly melancholy so she had been the only one able to handle it. So, there she was: late.

Hurrying inside the gates, she scanned the schoolyard, expecting to see Jin Ling there, with his purple backpack and neat hair, kicking his feet on one of the benches as he usually was.

A pair of sisters, barely taller than each other, sat on one bench, the older clutching her bag to her chest, and the younger studiously retying a tangled shoelace; on the other side of the playground, a boy a little older than Jin Ling bounced a basketball from hand to hand; about her feet, a trio of leaves, starting to brown at the edges, blown off in the wind, blustered in a little, skittish kind of dance.

Jin Ling wasn’t there.

In the quiet of the schoolyard, the sound of them brushing across the pavement was loud and sibilant; the sigh that left her as she continued into the building rang in her ears – huffed and puffed out of her chest.

Silence in schools was a disorienting thing: it always felt wrong, as though you were intruding somehow, creeping along the corridors to places you shouldn’t be going, guilty and gaslit. This soon after the end of the school day, it wasn’t yet quite silent – there were occasional sounds: doors shutting, the flare of laughter and voices in chorus rising from rooms spotted about the school, the click-clack of heels on the floors as teachers tidied up from classroom to teachers’ lounge to out and away.

Yanli hadn’t been in the school for a while – Jin Zixuan was usually the one of them to go to the parents’ evenings and collect Jin Ling from basketball; it was hard to leave the restaurant on evenings, bubbling with customers and takeaway orders ringing through the phones – and she found herself nearly taking the wrong turn twice, heading towards previous, infant classrooms.

She rounded the last corner and stopped dead.

Mianmian – Luo Qingyang was standing outside the classroom with a small, almost-shy smile, Jin Ling to one side, scuffing his shoes against the floor as he waited, impatient, for Jin Zixuan to stop talking, an arm folded behind his back with his fingers twitching in a nervous tick he’d never been able to break.

“Yanli!” Luo Qingyang beamed, a flash of relief glancing across her face.

Jin Zixuan turned to see her, twisting on the spot in his fancy leather shoes, arm still stuck stiff behind his back, and the expression on his face – surprised, caught, nervous – was something she couldn’t clearly read; it reminded her of those days way back when, when she’d been the shy girl with the stick-thin frame and the clothes that didn’t fit and Mianmian had been the pretty girl, popular and athletic and clever, with Jin Zixuan their strange third wheel in his rich clothes and his father’s puffed-up name following him everywhere he went.

She had always wondered why they were both friends with her, these people who could have been friends with so many other people – and she’d known there were reasons, really, that Jin Zixuan was painfully awkward to the point of rudeness and Mianmian was too brash and too loud to be considered a good girl but those had always seemed to vanish when it came time for partners in class or teams in sports lessons.

Then they had turned sixteen and Jiang Yanli had fallen, slowly and gently and inevitably, like a river, in love and she had thought that perhaps, it would be her turn for a storied romance.

And then Jin Zixuan had fallen – faster and clearer and pinker – in love and she had been reminded that stories only ever happen to pretty girls.

Now, here it all was again: the pretty, bold girl returning to town and the teenage dream she’d left behind; the teenage boy who’d longed for her now a man, successful and handsome and grown more confident, waiting for her to finally, finally look back.

The story wrote itself.

Her chest ached.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she said and the smile – water-weak and thin – that she gave was transparent. Mianmian’s face fell into a frown, pretty pink lips pursed. “I just came to pick up Jin Ling – sorry for being late.”

“Oh, it’s no problem,” Luo Qingyang said quickly. “These things happen –”

“Yes, it’s not a problem – I just finished work so I dropped by instead,” Jin Zixuan added, his eyes darting to her and then away again to stare at the wall opposite.

“You didn’t have to,” Yanli tried, and Jin Zixuan smiled, lowering his eyes to look at the ground.

“I know, but I’m his father, shouldn’t I be responsible?” it was, though, less of a question and more of a statement: pontificating and self-aggrandising in the way he still did occasionally. Mostly, though, he kept it at work – it had been a long time since she’d heard him talk like that to her. Not since the day she’d announced their divorce.

Between them, Jin Ling stood, his green blazer slung over his shoulders and his bag dropped by his feet, glancing at his parents, one then the other then the first again; he had stopped moving, his feet neatly parallel together.

“Well, I won’t take up any more of your time,” Yanli murmured, gesturing to Jin Ling to come with her, and she smiled once more, offering a small, dipped bow in place of saying anything else.

What would she even say? Goodbye? See you later?

She left them there, walking calmly but surely home, Jin Ling trailing next to her, snatching looks at her every now and then, oddly, horribly silent. She knew it wasn’t fair on him – knew it wasn’t something he should have to worry about – but she couldn’t quite muster up the courage to say something comforting. Not yet.