Work Text:
“I’m fine,” Jiang Cheng says.
“You’re fine when I say you’re fine,” Wen Qing says.
Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes, the way he always does. She can see that it’s a mistake this time, holding with tradition, from the way he winces, but he doesn’t back down.
“You know, this is why some people think we’re married,” he says.
He normally rolls his eyes when he says that too, but he does have a sense of self-preservation.
Somewhere.
Apparently.
And by some people, Jiang Cheng means literally everyone they work with. It’s absurd.
The facts are this:
She had been happily (enough) living with Wei Ying and working at the campus clinic in Gusu when Wei Ying had gone from being pretend enemies with Lan Zhan to in love and married about it in like a month. She’d applied to a research position in Yunmeng in a fit of pique after Wei Ying told her that he was breaking their lease.
“I have a roommate for you,” he’d said, while packing up the last of his things.
“I’m not moving in with you and Lan Zhan,” she’d said.
“Oh, absolutely not,” Wei Ying had said. “But Jiang Cheng has an extra room and he’s over that stupid crush he had so it doesn’t have to be awkward.”
She made a tactical decision to ignore the fact that Wei Ying had clearly been crossing boundaries and reading her personal correspondence again, and made a call herself to the number she had been pretending she’d deleted.
Wen Qing can live with anyone and she fully intended to spend most of her time at work anyway. She’d been prepared to live in her fucking car if it got her the research position in Yunmeng, it takes less sacrificed pride than that to live with a guy who no longer views her as dateable.
The reunion with Jiang Cheng could have been awkward, probably should have been. But the moving truck had to be unloaded so she could drop it off and there wasn’t time for any of that.
When they got back home Jiang Cheng showed her the apartment she’d agreed to move into sight unseen, started what is now a long-standing tradition of making dinner while she drinks wine and watches from the relative safety of the kitchen table, and stayed up with her picking the right first day at a new job outfit.
And that was that, really. Back to being friends. But better even, because there was no will they-won’t they dance going on. They wouldn’t, the parameters of their relationship had already been established.
It was a blissful first 36 hours.
Then the joke was on her because while everyone in Yunmeng has a healthy respect for Jiang Cheng, most of them don’t necessarily like him, and the feeling is mutual. Someone who voluntarily spent time with Jiang Cheng, who Jiang Cheng seemed to enjoy spending time with in return?
The rumors wrote themselves.
“People think we’re married because we live together, eat together, and are each other’s emergency contacts,” Wen Qing says, carefully schooling her tone so it sounds like she’s making a joke.
Wen Qing (unfortunately) knows what she wants and the closest she’s going to get is what she already has. No need to make things awkward for everyone.
“You forgot that we drive together,” Jiang Cheng says. He frowns at her like he thinks that she’s the one with the potential head injury.
(He doesn’t have a head injury (she’s already checked) and does in fact, appear to be fine, as long as he agrees not to do anything stupid while his body finishes healing itself. Too bad the Jiang family motto is to do the stupid thing.)
“Effective lists come in threes,” Wen Qing says, doing one last check of Jiang Cheng’s meridians.
Yeah, he’s fine.
She’s still not entirely sure what he got hit with; he was vague on the details and no one else seemed to be available for comment, but whatever it was, his golden core seems to be taking care of it on it’s own.
Which is weird. Anyone in medical should have been able to figure that out and prescribe him with staying off of active duty until he can clear a wellness check, the way she’s about to. She’s only supposed to get pulled from research for a consult if something genuinely weird is going on.
“Go home,” she says. “Take a nap. I’ll update your status.”
“What? No!”
She holds her tablet at an angle so he can watch as she removes his permissions.
“You’re my fake wife, you’re supposed to be on my side,” he says.
She’d tried to fight it at first. But once people think you’re in a relationship, anything you say against it gets that “methinks the lady doth protest too much” garbage thrown in your face.
Jiang Cheng had done his level best to help. He’d started going on a bunch of arranged dates, but everyone had agreed that he could only be That Bad at dating if he was actively trying to sabotage the dates. So he had only succeeded in starting up a whole lot of speculation on why they wanted their relationship to be secret.
Now they both lean into it, but only for the joke.
“Well, as your fake wife, I’d appreciate it if you don’t die because you didn’t follow standard procedure,” she says. “There’s no way I can afford our apartment on my own even if I avoid getting fired for your untimely death.”
“I’ll leave it to you in the will,” he says.
She pinches his chin in-between her thumb and index finger.
“I said no,” she says.
He leans forward until she lets go and pulls her into a hug. He always gets like this when he’s been injured but is now on the mend, needy for physical affection. It’s the final thing on the checklist for: “signs that Jiang Cheng isn’t lying about being fine.”
“I’m fine,” he says.
He’s fine-ish, but he’s also running hot because relying on his core to burn something out always gives him a fever.
“Remember how we learned that pushing through being sick just makes you more sick? It’s the same with being injured,” she says.
She gives him ten seconds in the hug, which is about nine seconds too long for her own, personal sanity, and then ruffles his hair so he lets go.
It’s a strategic decision. Any longer and she starts getting ideas. (She’s put in the research.)
He follows her out of the examination room and all the way up to her office, where he sprawls out on the tiny couch jammed in there with her desk and whines about how she’s ruining his life until he falls asleep because he really does need that nap she told him to go take.
“What’s it like, to have Jiang-Fucking-Cheng listen to you?” one of her co-workers says when she leaves her office for the lab proper (all of their offices are just glass rooms lining the lab, which is fine in theory but a little awkward in practice).
“He didn’t,” Wen Qing says. “I told him to go home.”
“Yeah, but you took him off of the work list and there he is, not working,” the co-worker says.
Her co-workers have mostly gotten over their obsession with her supposed relationship with Jiang Cheng, but whenever he shows up at the lab they all get nosy again.
Her default is to try to switch the subject. Or at least nudge it in a different direction. Mostly complaining about the school expecting more than they should. Everyone loves to rail against the man, it’s a universal truth.
“I’m only supposed to get pulled to diagnose weird shit,” she complains.
“Did you know that all the medics are scared of him? They draw lots if he gets injured and you aren’t here to pass him off to,” someone else says.
They all stare at her to judge her response. She doesn’t know what they want from her.
“He doesn’t get injured that often,” she says. “And did you just classify Jiang Cheng as weird shit?”
“There’s someone for everyone,” someone mutters, as they all drift off to do whatever it was they were doing before they all compulsively ambushed her.
She hadn’t meant to like, fight them, or scare them all off. But she’s also not heartbroken. Serves them right for being dicks about her fake husband when he’s injured. Honestly.
She goes about the rest of her day pretending that she isn’t weirdly happy about Jiang Cheng being passed out where she can keep an eye on him and contacts his TA about covering his lectures for the afternoon.
“What did you do?” she asks, when she comes home and Wei Ying and Jiang Cheng both look up guiltily.
They’re not even supposed to be here. Wen Qing is supposed to have a lovely night eating whatever she wants and watching whatever she wants without Jiang Cheng having any kind of opinion about it because he’s otherwise occupied.
(Not that Jiang Cheng normally gives an opinion, but he could and there’s a part of Wen Qing’s brain that never turns off if someone else is present.)
Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying are supposed to be attending a conference at one of the swanky hotels downtown, where Jiang Cheng will inevitably be conned into having a sleepover in Wei Ying’s discounted room because Lan Zhan couldn’t make it and Wei Ying hates to sleep alone.
Wen Qing surveys the living room and goes through the options. Sometimes Wei Ying and Jiang Cheng look guilty for no reason and she just ends up paranoid for the next week, but the furniture looks like it’s been knocked around and Jiang Cheng is not only looking guilty, but pale and sweaty.
She frowns at Jiang Cheng specifically and repeats the question.
“Nothing,” Jiang Cheng says.
“Well I didn’t do it,” Wei Ying says.
“It wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t here,” Jiang Cheng says.
“I mean, it’s your shoulder, so it couldn’t have happened without You,” Wei Ying says.
Wen Qing walks over with what she thinks is the outer limits of her patience and carefully pushes Wei Ying out of the way.
Dislocated, almost certainly.
Fucking Jiangs.
She checks Wei Ying over quickly, determines there’s nothing much wrong with him, and sends him to the store with a list of things that she doesn’t actually need. Wei Ying is the worst when someone he cares about is injured, always in the way.
“Just do your best not to fight me,” she says, once Wei Ying is gone.
She doesn’t give Jiang Cheng a chance to respond before grabbing his arm and hand and rotating. Luckily, it’s a textbook dislocation, and she gets his shoulder back the way it belongs on the first try.
“Do you need a trash can?” Wen Qing asks after a moment of Jiang Cheng staring off into the middle distance, a sure sign that he’s thinking about throwing up.
“Ow,” he says, squeezing her hand (a little vindictively, she thinks, but she lets it slide). “Ow. Fuck. The fuck. Why?”
They struggle through an ice wrap situation where he complains about her not wrapping it up in a thick enough towel even through it’s going on top of his shirt as well and she negotiates him into wearing his old sling from that time that Wei Ying may or may not have broken Jiang Cheng’s arm (Wei Ying says that technically it was Wen Ning but Jiang Cheng has declined to comment and Wen Qing’s private opinion is that her baby brother would never).
By the time Wei Ying lets himself back into the apartment, all the dramatics are done, and Wen Qing and Jiang Cheng are on the couch. Wen Qing is sitting in her normal spot next to Jiang Cheng, but closer than she normally would in an attempt to keep Wei Ying from worming his way in between them and jostling Jiang Cheng’s arm.
Rather than sit on Wen Qing’s other side, or on any of the chairs, Wei Ying perches on the arm of the couch next to Jiang Cheng, leaning hard on Jiang Cheng’s undamaged shoulder while wheedling for help with his mock night hunt.
(He doesn’t actually want help with his mock night hunt. It’s commemorating some weird anniversary with Lan Zhan that, frankly, Wen Qing doesn’t want to know the details about, so Wei Ying wants to be the one to make all the plans. But he does want to brag about all of the plans he’s already come up with and he does want Jiang Cheng and Wen Qing to feel included.)
When taking a break from wheedling, Wei Ying is over solicitous to the point that Jiang Cheng keeps taking it as an insult.
Wei Ying not only cuts up Jiang Cheng’s food for him, he spoon-feeds it to Jiang Cheng and he does his level best to brush Jiang Cheng’s teeth for him, and then tucks himself into bed with Jiang Cheng so tightly that neither of them can move without carefully negotiated effort.
Jiang Cheng never learned an inside voice and Wei Ying doesn’t care to use one, so Wen Qing falls asleep to their bickering.
She wakes up to noise from the kitchen and when she goes to investigate she finds Jiang Cheng hunched over a plate of leftovers, practicing how to use a fork with his left hand before lunch at work tomorrow.
“Nobody is going to care,” she says. “It’s a perfectly understandable situation.”
Jiang Cheng sets his jaw and switches to a spoon. It’s less helpful a transition than he was hoping. Which is what he gets for trying to eat the cold remains of a burrito bowl. Far too many small pieces, which alternate between sticking together and falling apart in unpredictable ways.
Wen Qing leaves him to it and makes an omelette. By the time she’s done, Jiang Cheng still hasn’t gotten much else off of the plate and all the way up to his mouth.
She starts cutting, blows on a piece to cool it down and waves it in front of Jiang Cheng’s face until he opens his mouth.
“See how easy that was?” she asks, taking a bite of omelette for herself.
“I’m not going to ask you to feed me,” Jiang Cheng says.
“Why not?” she says. “We both need to eat. We live and work at the same locations. Ah.”
Jiang Cheng obediently opens his mouth when she prompts him to and she feeds him another bite.
“They all already think we’re married,” he says.
“And nothing we do, or don’t do, will change it,” Wen Qing says. “Did you know that the grocery store has little spoons shaped like airplanes? If you don’t let me feed you like an adult I will chase you around campus with one.”
They work their way through the omelette, Wen Qing alternating between “practicing” feeding Jiang Cheng and letting him feed himself once she’d cut the omelette into pieces.
Since he’s up anyway, she makes him take more painkillers and ice his shoulder again and helps him set up a spot to sleep on the couch because Wei Ying is being “fucking annoying”.
Which Wen Qing takes to mean that Wei Ying is just as active in sleep as he is awake. Normally Jiang Cheng tolerates it just fine so it must be aggravating his shoulder. Fair enough.
She tucks him in and sits down next to him on the couch, holding a heating pad to his shoulder now that he’s done icing.
“Did I say thank you?” he asks, eyes already shut.
“Of course not,” she says. “You never say thank you.”
“I always mean to,” he says.
“There you go, still not saying it.”
“Love you,” he says, curling up as much as he can with her in his way. It feels like he’s curling up around her. His knees to her back, nose down to her knees.
“Go to sleep,” she says.
They have a quiet few months.
Wen Qing gets so wrapped up in the theory behind core transplants that she drives herself to work so she can stay late, guilt free.
When she gets home she’ll find a fully made plate in the refrigerator, just waiting for her. Even if Jiang Cheng ordered in, he’ll arrange it on a plate for her so all she has to do is stick it in the microwave.
Sometimes she doesn’t even do that, she just stands there and inhales it cold, blocking the refrigerator door open. But only if it’s late enough that she’s absolutely certain that Jiang Cheng is asleep and won’t catch her acting like Wei Ying. A little secret between her and the electric bill.
(Rumor around campus is that she and Jiang Cheng are having “problems”.)
((The concerned looks and offers to talk start to get to both of them, but before they can decide what to do about it Wen Qing eats something she shouldn’t, gets a mild case of food poisoning, and throws up at work. Then the rumor is that she’s pregnant.))
(((It is never-ending with these people.)))
Wen Ning comes to stay for his semi-annual week-long visit. He teams up with Jiang Cheng to bully Wen Qing into taking some time off and she resists just enough that they think they’ve accomplished something when she gives in.
He is the only family member that has picked up on the fact that the entire campus thinks that Jiang Cheng and Wen Qing are married and unfortunately, he thinks it’s hilarious. He makes a point of following her around campus at least one day each visit in order to drop “ChengQing lore” and answer all the questions that Wen Qing won’t.
(She can’t believe he gave them a couple name, little brothers are the worst.)
“Who cares that you aren’t legally married?” Wen Ning says when she protests. “You’re in a more committed relationship than most.”
Wen Ning, it would appear, has also drunk the fucking kool-aid.
Jiang Cheng makes it through the finals marking period even though he claims that that is what is really going to kill him one day. All that paperwork. (He loves the paperwork. He loves complaining about the paperwork in ridiculous ways that make her laugh until her sides hurt.)
He starts taking the undergraduates out on night hunts for field experience. There’s a distinct lack of cultivators at Yunmeng right now and administration wants everyone from grad school and up to be able to respond to calls without supervision.
Jiang Cheng doesn’t think they’re ready. He thinks everyone should be supervised until their thesis is handed in and approved even though that’s never been the policy, but something does have to be done about staffing.
They debate the merits of adopting a puppy vs an older dog from a shelter via text, dreaming of the day that work lets up enough that they could adequately care for either. It’s probably a pipe dream because Wei Ying is afraid of dogs and he already barely visits, but he barely visits and it’s nice to dream.
Maybe she should suggest a cat.
“I’m dying,” Jiang Cheng says one night, dropping onto the couch in her office without so much as knocking on her office door.
Or maybe he did knock and she ignored it. She gets like that sometimes and she certainly didn’t notice that everyone else is gone.
Anyway, she doubts that he’s dying, given all the walking and talking that he’s doing, but she gives him a once over. He’s sprawled out all over her couch like he owns it (if she’s being fair, she only has the couch so he’ll have somewhere to sit, so he kind of does).
There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with him. He doesn’t even look tired.
“How?” she says, eventually.
He extends his hand out to her. The couch is perpendicular to her desk, and close enough that she barely has to move her chair in order to take his hand. There’s nothing wrong with it that she can find.
When she looks up at him he grins, looking unbearably smug. She hates being on the outside of a joke. With anyone, not just Jiang Cheng, but especially with Jiang Cheng. She’s supposed to be on the inside of the joke with Jiang Cheng.
She squeezes his hand, slowly increasing the pressure until he notices that it isn’t fond.
“I’m wasting away,” he says, calmly twisting his wrist so she either has to let go of his hand or get pulled closer to the couch.
As he’s being untrustworthy, she lets go.
He frowns.
“Dying of neglect,” he says.
She pushes her chair back as far away from him as she can get.
He settles back on the couch with a sigh. Makes a heart with his hands and then mimes breaking it in half.
“You’re fine,” she says.
“At least look me over properly.”
“You’re. Fine.”
“I think I have a fever.”
She tsks, but scoots her chair over, close enough for her knees to brush the side of the couch, and motions for him to sit up. He almost certainly doesn’t have a fever. But if he does and she doesn’t check, she’ll never forgive herself (or hear the end of it).
She goes for the highly professional method of pressing the palm of her hand against his forehead and then pressing her own forehead against the back of that same hand, taking care to keep her face tilted just slightly away from his so it doesn’t get awkward.
“You’re a lying liar who lies,” she says, pushing him back down onto the couch.
“It’s coming,” he says. “I should be kept under observation.”
“Really,” she says, raising an eyebrow.
“Pretty sure dinner would head it off,” he says.
“I’m the medical professional.”
“Then medic me.”
“The known cure for fake wife deprivation is dinner at home, on the couch, while watching shitty reality t.v.,” she says, scathing enough for the eye-roll to be implied. “You missed so many steps.”
“It’s the withdrawal,” he says. “My brain has stopped working properly.”
“Hm, sounds like a serious case then,” she says, looking back at everything on her desk.
It will still be here tomorrow. She hasn’t spent time with Jiang Cheng in forever. The last time they hung out was with Wen Ning and that’s been…months? Jiang Cheng could be real married by now and she would never know until the real wife decided it was time to kick her out.
Wen Qing pushes down the sudden sick feeling she has at the idea of Jiang Cheng for real married and out of her life. Or, probably not out-out of her life. But not in it in the same way.
A new wife wouldn’t like a fake wife hanging around, begging for scraps of attention.
She looks back at Jiang Cheng. He’s biting his lip like he’s not sure that this gamble is going to pay off. General policy states that Wen Qing hates being interrupted, especially when she’s working on something interesting.
“We should order now and pick-up on the way home,” she suggests. “We don’t want to waste any time with a case this advanced.”
He grins and pulls out his phone.
The first thing she notices when she gets the call is that it’s too late. Normally, when she stays late, Jiang Cheng calls her when he’s going to bed to remind her that time exists and that she wants to go to sleep at some point. But that should have happened hours ago.
There was a text, that he was going on a night hunt. Which means there should have been another text letting her know that he’d gotten back.
She’s already moving as she answers, heading for the stairs down to medical. It would probably be faster to take the elevator, even with the wait, but she has to be moving to feel like she’s doing something.
Downstairs is the tightly controlled chaos of a medical staff that knows what they’re doing, but needs to be doing a lot very quickly.
Thankfully, this is just another pass-Jiang-Cheng-off-to-Wen-Qing moment and not a call-research-to-try-and-get-a-consult-on-something-else moment because Wen Qing doesn’t think she’d be able to focus on the something else until she got a good look at Jiang Cheng.
Well. She probably could. But she doesn’t want to.
He’s sitting on a chair in the hallway outside of the main room of the clinic and eyes her warily over the basin he keeps coughing blood into.
That’s how she knows that whatever happened is serious. When he’s fine, or mostly fine, he wants to see her. Wants to be cosseted specifically by her. But when he’s legitimately injured he always tries to hide.
The coughing blood thing was a fairly significant clue, but it’s mostly the hiding thing.
By the time she finishes patching him up, the running around has calmed down, and they make their way into the main room, Wen Qing tucked under Jiang Cheng’s arm to lend support should he need it (he needs it). The three students inside cheer when they see Jiang Cheng.
“You were so cool,” one of them says.
“Can we go back?” another one says. “I really think I almost got it that last time.”
“Fuck no,” Jiang Cheng says. “You almost died.”
“I didn’t almost die,” the student scoffs.
“Sure you didn’t,” the third student says.
Wen Qing looks over at one of the medics. They wiggle their hand around as a maybe-maybe not. Great.
“It doesn’t matter, it’s been taken care of,” Jiang Cheng says. “There’s nothing left to fight.”
“So cool,” the first kid repeats.
The amount of weight that Jiang Cheng is letting her hold is slowly increasing. She did a pretty good job, if she does say so herself, but he’s running on sheer adrenaline at this point. He’s going to crash soon.
“Alright,” she says. “You’ve seen them, they’re in good hands, lets go home.”
The room doesn’t go silent because everyone who works with them already knows (or think they already know) about Jiang Cheng and Wen Qing. But it feels like the room goes silent with the sudden attention the three students are now leveling at her.
“I want reports from all of you on what went wrong and what you should have done instead,” Jiang Cheng says, heading off any and all questions they might ask.
Wen Qing drags Jiang Cheng out the door while the students are still protesting the sudden added homework.
Back home, she wants to deposit Jiang Cheng directly in bed. Getting from the car up to their apartment had been a whole thing. But he refuses to go to sleep without brushing his teeth, and is only agreeing to go to sleep without a shower because tomorrow is the day he changes sheets anyway.
(Also, neither of them is ready for her to help him take a shower and it’s increasingly obvious that she would need to.)
She pushes him against the bathroom sink and slides out from under his arm, but stays hovering behind him with one hand on his back, just in case she needs to grab him.
“That isn’t actually necessary,” he says.
She would beg to differ. It’s entirely necessary from a physical standpoint. And from an emotional one, she just can’t stop touching him.
She knows objectively, that if he’d been in legitimate danger of dying the medics wouldn’t have left him to get treated until she could get downstairs, no matter how much they would prefer to hand him off to her.
So like, he’s fine. He was always going to be fine, she was never in danger of loosing him.
Rather than make a logical argument, or just like, any kind of response at all, she wraps her arms around his waist and pushes her face against his back. He’s sweaty and gross and alive and if he ever does this again she’s going to kill him.
He keeps one hand on the sink, but covers her hands with the other one and squeezes.
They stay standing there like that far longer than they need to for him to brush his teeth.
“Auntie Qing?” Jin Ling says, hovering at her office door.
None of the family is under the misapprehension that Wen Qing and Jiang Cheng are married, but Yanli had done that thing where she taught Jin Ling to call any adult in his vicinity aunt or uncle.
Adorably, he hasn’t stopped even though he refuses to do most things his parents tell him to do these days. (He’s trying his best to be a rebellious teenager, but his heart isn’t quite in it.)
((His heart is in it enough to get himself suspended for three days so Yanli shipped him over to Yunmeng to be their problem in the name of touring the school in advance of filling out college applications. But even that Wen Qing has her suspicions about.))
(((Jin Ling’s rage response might be on a hair trigger, but he shows a strong tendency towards flight. If someone overwhelmed, or prevented him, from using flight, the twerp probably deserved to get punched in the face. In Wen Qing’s extremely inexpert and unsought opinion.)))
“What’s up, kid?” she says.
It’s a semi-regular thing for Jin Ling to be following Jiang Cheng around campus, and so it is also a semi-regular thing for Jin Ling to ditch his uncle mid-class in favor of the superior vending machine selection in the medical building, so she’s not immediately worried about his appearance.
“Um…” Jin Ling says, continuing to hover instead of coming inside. “So like, it’s probably fine…”
Which is the number one way to confirm to Wen Qing that whatever it is, it is absolutely not fine.
“But?” Wen Qing says.
“Well, he says he’s fine—” Jin Ling says.
“Get there faster,” Wen Qing says.
“JiuJiu is on the ground and he won’t get up, but he also said he would expel anyone who contacted the medics,” Jin Ling says, all in a rush.
Hence the non-student being sent to find the non-medic. Lovely.
“For fuck’s sake,” Wen Qing says. “Where is he?”
“For fuck’s sake,” Jiang Cheng says, when she and Jin Ling walk up to him. “Why do you think I said not to contact the medics?”
He’s not on the ground anymore, but he is also not fine. She’d interrogated Jin Ling on the way over and was relatively sure about what she was going to find, but she wasn’t ready to be relieved that it wasn’t worse until she saw him.
And now she’s just mad.
“Again?” she says.
“It’s easier to do the second time around,” he says.
“Which is why you’re supposed to do physical therapy,” she says.
“I did.”
“You’re supposed to keep doing it.”
Fucking cultivators. They heal faster, and just generally better than regular people, which makes them think that they can get away with skimping on the basics.
But like it or not, Jiang Cheng is over twenty, so it’s only a matter of time before he has a life-defining injury. Magical healing ability or no, the warranties on human joints just don’t last as long as they should.
All of Jiang Cheng’s students are huddled around and watching avidly. She throws one of them, one of the ones from the night that Jiang Cheng got injured on a night hunt, she’s almost certain, the medic bag she had borrowed on the way over.
“How, exactly, did you do this?” she says.
“I don’t know,” he says, sounding equally frustrated.
“If you were trying to demonstrate something stupid because you were trying to be cool…” she says, trying to get a look at his shoulder without actually touching it before she has to.
“Hey!” a student protests, one that she doesn’t recognize. “Professor Jiang is very cool!”
“Unbelievable,” she says.
She puts his shoulder back, there in front of the kids, and then dismisses them while Jiang Cheng glares off into the middle-distance again.. She makes Jin Ling give her his sweat shirt to tie Jiang Cheng’s arm to his side until they get to the clinic and can get a proper sling.
He’s stoic in front of the kids, and in front of Jin Ling on the walk to the clinic, but starts whining as soon as she gets him into an examination room.
“I’m fine,” he says.
He is.
He’s going to have limited mobility on one side for a bit, and then apparently she’s going to have to annoy him into doing his physical therapy exercises for a reasonable amount of time, but he’s fine.
Nothing life threatening, just inconvenient.
She practically throws an ice pack at him.
“No you’re not,” she says. “You’re falling apart. Literally. You have got to start being more careful, my heart can’t take it.”
“I wasn’t aware I had anything to do with your heart,” he says, half-shitty, half-uncertain.
“It’s the adrenaline, you asshole,” she says.
She suddenly feels like she’s about to start crying and there’s no where to hide in an examination room. She spins looking for anything, but keeps finding shiny, reflective surfaces instead. Her expression looks eerily similar to Lan Zhan’s, when Wei Ying had that mishap on a night hunt last month and they were all waiting to see what the medics could do.
Nothing even happened.
He’s fine.
Or as good as.
Such an overreaction.
“Right,” Jiang Cheng says, holding out his good arm so she can tuck herself underneath it.
She pushes her face into his good shoulder and tries to come up with a logical explanation if he asks.
He doesn’t.
He ducks down and mutters something into her hair that might be an apology. He’ll never admit it, so she doesn’t ask either.
Wen Qing is just getting diagnosed with a slight concussion when she hears Jiang Cheng. She waves at a nearby co-worker, one who’s already been checked out, who then goes off to fetch him.
The problem with having your medical staff housed in the same building as an experimental lab is that when the lab has an unplanned explosion happen, you have to shut the whole building down to check for structural damage and then your injured staff has to go to the nearest ER to get treated.
It had been chaos for a while, but everything is calming down now and some of the Paramedics and EMTs from ambulances that had been used to transport the more seriously injured, are set up in a hallway, checking out those like Wen Qing, who need a professional once over for insurance purposes, but no actual medical attention.
It serves her right for being social.
But she’d thought she should go out and congratulate whoever had just made the breakthrough that caused all the cheering, and then it turned out not to be a breakthrough at all, but a bigger fuck-up than normal.
Ugh.
She hopes the walls of her office held or else all of her notes are going to be absolutely ruined. Not that they’re going anywhere, at this point.
As far as she can tell, there is no such thing as a viable core left inside of a deceased cultivator, cutting off the source of most organ harvesting, and no one is going to risk damaging their core to satisfy her curiosity. So. Time to find a new project.
“I’m fine,” she says, as soon as Jiang Cheng is close enough to hear her.
“You’re fine when I say you’re fine,” he snaps, lips pressing down into a thin, white line.
“That doesn’t make sense when you say it,” she says.
He starts doing a rough check of her limbs and meridians, the way cultivators get trained to do if something happens out in the field.
“She’s fine,” the paramedic says, then promptly looks like they regret it when Jiang Cheng slowly turns to look at them. They hand Jiang Cheng a pamphlet on concussions, before leaving to deal with literally anyone else.
The responsible thing to do is to leave, it’s a busy hospital even when the school isn’t having an emergency, but instead she leans forward and pushes her face against Jiang Cheng’s chest.
He takes the cue, pulling her closer until she feels safe and secure for the first time since everything went sideways.
“The paramedic checked me, you’ve checked me, I’ve checked me,” she says. “I’m fine.”
“They gave me papers,” he says. “They wouldn’t have given me papers if you were completely fine.”
“The most minor of concussions,” she says.
“That’s a brain injury,” he says, pulling back, his voice getting louder. She winces and his eyes widen, as if that just proved anything other than the fact that Jiang Cheng is the loudest human on the planet.
She loops one arm up around his neck and uses her other hand to frame his face so he’ll focus where she wants him to. Presses their foreheads together, breathes in deeply.
“I’m right here, and I’m fine,” she says.
She says it like she’s reassuring him, but it’s mostly for her. She’s still here, next to Jiang Cheng, and she’s fine.
Except maybe she’s not completely fine because this still doesn’t feel close enough. Something (someone) could still take him away. They’re already all lined up, she only has to tip her face the slightest bit to kiss him.
They’d been at the same school for a while, in undergrad. He’d asked her out at the worst possible time, right in the middle of the worst year of her life, and she’d turned him down flat. She’d known her limits and she’d known without a doubt that she would fly into a million tiny pieces if she tried to take on one more thing at the time.
She’s always regretted it, but in a vague way. They’re still friends; best friends, even. She didn’t loose anything and she sees college students every day. They’re literal fucking children, no more equipped to handle a relationship than any other adult task.
It would have ended badly.
Almost certainly.
When Wen Qing kisses Jiang Cheng, Jiang Cheng kisses her back.
And she regrets so much.
Someone pushes past them and breaks whatever spell they’re under. Jiang Cheng breaks off the kiss and all but bodily hauls her out of the hospital and into his car. He stares out the windshield for a few minutes, running his hand through his hair, before he puts the key into the ignition.
“You know, it’s things like this that make people think we’re married,” he says, finally.
It’s a tidy little out. A neat way to turn all of this into a joke so they can go back to normal.
“Maybe we should be,” Wen Qing says.
Jiang Cheng makes a huffy sound like he’s trying to to force a laugh and starts the car, like it’s being here that’s the problem.
And maybe Wen Qing should take that as her cue to let it go. To settle back into the comfortable roles that they’ve built for themselves.
It’s not a bad life.
It’s an enviable one, even.
Past her wouldn’t have dared dream.
But he kissed her back.
He asked her out all those years ago, and he went out of his way to let her rent a room when she moved to the city, and she knows that he never even looks at anyone else because the entire fucking school would make sure she knew if he did, and—
He.
Kissed.
Her.
Back.
They’re silent the whole drive home (well, he’s driving). They’re silent on the way up the apartment (fine, Wen Qing doesn’t need their neighbors knowing their business either). And then they’re still silent inside the apartment (yeah, she’s over this).
She leaves him being silent and broody in the living room and goes to take a shower. She feels like she’s covered in a fine layer of grit and she’s always done her best thinking behind a locked door.
When she comes out of the bathroom he’s hovering nearby and annoyed enough about the locked door thing that he’s no longer silent. She thinks she figured out what went weird mid-shower, so she brushes off all of his what-ifs and grabs his wrist so she can drag him into her room.
They don’t really go into each other’s rooms. Not as a rule, they just don’t have a reason to. They have the rest of the apartment to hang out in, the bedrooms are for sleeping and privacy.
Wen Qing hands Jiang Cheng her comb and sits down on her bed with her back to him. She tilts her head a bit, just enough to catch sight of him in the mirror, tracing the flowers carved into the edge like he recognizes them before he starts on her hair.
He should recognize it. He bought it for her at a street fair they all went to, way back. Before he’d asked her out, but after she’d known that he might.
“You kept it,” he says. Not as a question, even though she knows he wants to ask.
“Of course I kept it,” she says. “The boy I liked bought me a present.”
Jiang Cheng breaths in sharply, but doesn’t respond, choosing instead to focus on the task at hand. It can be a risk, giving him a task when she wants to have a conversation. It traps him, but he can also use it as a distraction.
He finishes brushing her hair and pulls it back into a braid. Out of the way, but not tight enough to pull.
She already has a headache, no reason to add to it.
“You couldn’t possibly have liked me since I bought you that comb, you turned me down like, immediately after,” he says, carefully sitting down next to her on the bed.
“You had bad timing,” she says.
“You have a head injury.”
There it is.
“So we both have bad timing,” she says.
“And it’s barely a head injury,” she adds, bumping shoulders with him.
“I—“
“You kissed me back,” she says.
“Of course I kissed you back,” he says. “The woman I love kissed me.”
“Then what, exactly, is the problem?”
“It might actually kill me, if you don’t mean it. If you’re just confused or you decide you take it back.”
“I could never kill you,” she says.
“Your logic is faulty,” he says.
“I have a brain injury.”
“Barely,” he says, and then laughs and smiles at her like she tricked him into something.
She smiles back just because it feels nice to smile at him.
“I didn’t apply to Yunmeng because you were here, but it was a nice little bonus. That you would be. That I’d get to see you again. And then Wei Ying said that you were “so over” me so I might as well move in and…well. Moving in seemed better than my other options.”
“Oh, shit,” he says.
“Oh, shit,” she says back.
He leans over, kisses her shoulder, and pulls back. Leans back towards her and kisses her full on the mouth. More sure, more solid than at the hospital. Like he thinks this might be a beginning, not an end.
The secret to having a successful conversation with Jiang Cheng is giving him enough time to process things.
“I’m still not proposing until next week,” he says, when he pulls away again.
“Tomorrow,” she counters.
“Give me a chance to buy you a ring,” he says.
“Take me with you.”
“Wow. Trust my ring choosing ability that much, huh?”
Well. Basically. Jiang Cheng definitely falls victim to the idea that more expensive is better even when it’s very obviously not. He’s banned from buying appliances or furniture on his own.
“Next week, but you take me with you and you take a nap with me now,” she says.
“I don’t know why you think the nap is negotiable,” he says.
They tuck themselves in together, a little set of nested spoons. Wen Qing hasn’t ever actually done this before, the spooning thing. She’s never had time, or much inclination, for cuddling. She pulls Jiang Cheng’s arm down around her waist a little tighter.
Wen Qing falls asleep making a pro/con list over inviting everyone to the wedding or just pretending she and Jiang Cheng have been married all along. She thinks she’s partial to pretending.
They all probably wouldn’t believe it anyway.