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They met under a late April sun and early flowering trees, at a bench outside the main college building. Wen Ning came first—he had class inside and had read on a flyer about the bunnies a week previously. He stood by the bench and raised a hand to wave as Lan Zhan approached, exchanging an awkward look with a passing tour group when they paused, expecting him to say something. He just shrugged at them. They continued down the street.
"Hi," he said, sitting after Lan Zhan did.
Lan Zhan inclined his head with a smile and an echoed greeting. He leaned his crutches against one end of the bench and looked at Wen Ning, leaning forward just enough to indicate the need for a kiss. Wen Ning complied, received one in return.
"Backpack?"
Lan Zhan made a face at the question. He insisted he wasn't bitchy. He hadn't been, when they'd first met: prim and proper, the perfect child, keeping his pettiness and humor hidden, standoffish because he simply hadn't known how else to be. He couldn't fool Wen Ning, though, and soon twitched a muscle in his cheek in place of a nod, and relaxed his shoulders for Wen Ning to ease off the backpack without jarring his back. He only carried a laptop and charger in there; there had been notebooks and pens at the beginning of term, and a water bottle for responsible hydration, but that was too much, now.
Wei Ying came third, weaving in and out of passerby, one arm up in a wave, yelling something but still too far away to be heard.
Wen Ning exchanged a fond look with Lan Zhan. Wei Ying's sunglasses were askew, his ponytail tilted to one side. Not drooping, never drooping, black and unruly and soft despite the cheap nightmare products he insisted using.
"I didn't forget!" Wei Ying said when he stopped in front of them. The sunglasses slid down his nose and he pushed them back up. There was a small tan line along the line of his eyebrows where he'd forgotten to use sunscreen. "Just got held up on the way over."
"You're not late," Lan Zhan said.
Wei Ying beamed and bent down to press a kiss to the crown of his head, then straightened and likewise kissed Wen Ning's cheek. "I set reminders and everything."
Wen Ning, who had sat with Wei Ying each evening as he'd done that, nodded in support. "You did good."
Wei Ying let out a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a yelp, turning his face away; he didn't get far with Lan Zhan on his other side, when he looked down to hide his embarrassment, and accepted the love for what it was. Good. That task was the first on the joint "Love Wei Ying" list Wen Ning and Lan Zhan had put together, even before they'd reconnected two years before, when the love had been platonic and Wei Ying's memory issues had been a result of brain chemistry rather than traumatic injury.
The fingers of one hand running up and down the wood grain of the bench, Wei Ying lifted his sunglasses, pushing his bangs out of his eyes, and twinkled at them in the sunlight. Then he squinted and stood, the sunglasses fell from the top of his head as if on purpose, and he walked into the building.
"Too bright!" he called over his shoulder. He pressed the button to open the door, heavy and unwieldly, and made a face that it was hidden behind a welcome sign. So much for accessibility. The mechanism caught the door as it was closing, just in time for Wen Ning to let Lan Zhan in ahead of himself.
"How too bright?" Lan Zhan asked when Wei Ying's sunglasses stayed on.
"Nothing bad."
Wen Ning did the thing with his eyes that his sister called manipulation and his boyfriends called adorable. They called it manipulation, too, but Wen Ning was working on focusing on the positives, so adorable it was.
"Nothing bad," Wei Ying repeated. "You know how sunlight gets."
Wen Ning, who, in fact, did know how sunlight got, nodded; Wei Ying was an adult, and as such could be trusted to make calls on his own health and well-being. Most of the time.
"Tell us if it gets bad?" Lan Zhan asked with his own wide eyes, as if he hadn't spent the past several months no more than two minutes away from falling over.
Wen Ning decided to get ahead of that particular disaster and placed Lan Zhan's backpack by a couch that was simultaneously too hard and too soft, just to the side of the conference room the college had set aside for pre-finals animal-petting. There was a sign on the wall—ten minutes until opening—advertising kittens and puppies and bunnies.
They'd come for the bunnies, of course. Fifteen minutes of cuddling to make up for the nightmare of higher education. It was almost a fair trade, so Wen Ning had cleared his schedule and Wei Ying had put every effort into remembering the date and time and Lan Zhan had gritted his teeth and accepted the fact that he might not be able to make it. He'd skipped a class earlier in the week to conserve energy, something he wouldn't have considered doing before, but he hadn't even batted an eye. Bunnies! he'd said vigorously, and the matter had closed. He'd made it.
Wei Ying, who had no qualms causing a scene to procure a straw for Wen Ning when they went out to eat, was first at the door, bending down to the organizer at the sign-in table to secure their place in line without actually standing in it, and to ask for a chair.
He threw them a thumbs-up and a smile when the task was finished, and returned with three stickers.
"'Cause we're in the first group." He gave one to Lan Zhan and peeled another one off to stick to the front of Wen Ning's shirt. His own was upside-down at first, and he fixed it: there was a large handwritten "#1" on it in red.
When the door finally opened, it was Wei Ying who steadied Lan Zhan as he stood, which Wen Ning didn't begrudge, because then Wei Ying grabbed his hand, and didn't let go as they walked in.
Bunnies, first. There was a chair by the hutch, not too close to hinder the workers, that Lan Zhan was directed to, and Wei Ying and Wen Ning plopped at his feet.
Wen Ning muffled a snicker as Wei Ying tugged at the bottom of Lan Zhan's pants in excitement, but he couldn't quite contain the feeling, either. There had been a thought, however fleeting, that Lan Zhan would be able to get bunnies when he moved out of his brother's apartment to live alone. He'd hardly lasted a full semester before ending up in the hospital, and only a month after that had scheduled a second surgery, just barely pushing through the end of his final year: three days after graduation. So much for independent living. So much for bunnies.
But seeing, now, a small grey fluff being set into Lan Zhan's hands, and the softening of his eyes and the rising tension around his shoulders as he struggled to contain his emotions, no matter that the movement would add to his aches tomorrow, and the half-smile, more an opening of the mouth than anything else, the short exhale of adoration as he gazed at the bunny—Wen Ning glanced sideways at the shine of Wei Ying's phone as he took a photo, and tore himself away only when he received his own bunny, one ear brown and the other white, paws next to its nose, and so, so, so impossibly soft.
"I'm gonna cry," Wei Ying whispered next to him. His bunny was black with a white patch on the forehead. "I'm really gonna cry."
It was like holding a cloud if clouds could be held.
"I'm never gonna let go."
Something that might have been a sniffle came from above; Lan Zhan passed it off as a chuckle as he moved his bunny to his lap, supporting it with his thighs instead of his arms, unable to bend over as much as he wanted yet still moving his lips in silent exclamations of adoration. Cooing, if he was someone else.
"Hold it up, I want to get a photo," Wei Ying said, phone screen catching on the light and flashing as he moved it. "You, too, Lan Zhan."
Because who knew when the next bunnies would be?
"Smile!"
There was no hiding the delight, but there was something else, too, not quite sorrow and not quite bitterness, and Wen Ning squeezed Lan Zhan's calf with his free hand in silent support, and received a half-smile—as if he, too, was a bunny worthy of devotion—in reply.
"I'll send them later," Wei Ying said, putting his phone away, and Wen Ning made a note to himself to remind him as he took out his own phone to get a photo of Wei Ying, too. His bunny made a bid for freedom. Wen Ning switched his phone to video mode and laughed along, forgetting that the sound would be caught, too, as he scrambled to catch it, as he pulled it away from chewing on the hem of Lan Zhan's pants, as he stopped it from chewing on his hair, as he dissolved into giggles halfway through scolding it because Lan Zhan was laughing from above.
Who knew when there would be bunnies again? But they didn't need bunnies to make such memories.
(Later, when the school year ended and Lan Zhan returned from the hospital, when he was able to sit up on his own, they brought bunnies to the apartment he once more shared with his brother, and held his hands and kissed his cheeks and paid Lan Zhan's brother for new curtains when they escaped.)