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Lan Zhan stared at the peeling paint of the doorway, glancing between the address on the card in his hand, and the sun-bleached spots where, he suspected, those same numbers used to be. He’d walked past the place three times before he’d realized that despite the faded awning above the door that advertised a walk-in clinic, he had arrived at his destination.
The doorknob turned freely, and a little sign taped to the warped frame instructed him to lift and pull. Beyond the broken door, a short and poorly lit hallway led him to a cramped waiting room. Lan Wangji hesitated in the entryway. He glanced down to check the address scrawled on the back of the business card one last time, and was more perplexed to find that he had not, in fact, misread the address the other dozen times he’d checked it.
There was a friendly-looking man behind the front desk, taking down the information of a caller on the other line. Behind him, a decidedly less friendly-looking woman poked her head out from a side office. The woman squinted at him.
“Are you ill?” she asked, and her tone of voice betrayed her doubt.
“No,” Lan Wangji replied.
“Injured?” she asked.
“I am not,” he said.
“...Are you lost?” She sounded disconcertingly hopeful. Lan Wangji shook his head, and she heaved an enormously irritated sigh. She pointed toward the heavy door at the back of the clinic, propped open with a cracked milk crate, and didn’t bother to pause to see if he would follow as she turned away. “Fine, I get it. He’s through there.”
Step one: get inside.
Well, he’d nailed that already. The interns assigning badges at the door were easily bribed with tiny sweet buns and apricot danishes. The serving platter was quite expensive at the bakery down the street, marked up for the downtown wallets and assistants wielding company credit cards, but that was a small price to pay for an easy ticket through the door.
Wei Ying found the sign for the breakout rooms and picked one. There was a long line of tables against the far wall already lined with treats. He wasn’t ready to sacrifice the force field that the tray of little baked goods provided just yet, but the breakout sessions had just ended, and it was only a matter of time before he was descended upon by rabid conference-goers clutching their burnt coffees like talismans.
Step two: gather intel.
Wei Ying slipped his hand into his bag, and palmed the stack of papermen he’d created just for this occasion. He slipped the stack under the tray of sweets, disguising the move as a clumsy attempt to set the tray beside the paper plates stacked at the end of the surprisingly fancy fare that was lined up on the table.
It felt a bit like he was in one of those cultivator thrillers, where the daring hero with the odds stacked against them slipped into the lion’s den to solve the mystery.
His goals were almost as noble, or at the very least Wen Qing would likely think so; if he didn’t find himself some new clients, he was rapidly going to lose her goodwill as he lost his ability to pitch in on the rent on one of her offices. The kinds of big-shot cultivator sects that showed up to these events wouldn’t hurt from losing a few clients here and there, and likely would turn down more than one person in need that Wei Ying wouldn’t be too good for, so Wei Ying wasn’t going to lose any sleep tonight.
Wei Ying popped a spicy dumpling from the table into his mouth, turned for the exit, and promptly ran into a wall.
…A very handsome wall.
Security? No, his suit looks much too expensive to be one of the tailored off-the-rack things that a security guard would wear. This looked bespoke. It felt bespoke, when the man’s arm brushed his bare skin as he pushed him back against the wall.
The movement also drew Wei Ying’s eye to a flash of white, which he followed with his eyes to the man’s forehead, and then his sharp eyes. A Lan, then. Maybe Wei Ying would have preferred security.
Wei Ying had one moment to get his hopes up on why such a man would approach him at a party like this, let alone drag him away from the party to a private corner, but when Wei Ying glanced down it wasn’t a tantalizing glass of wine he was holding… it was a paperman.
“Who do you work for?” he asked. Wei Ying put on his most charming smile, and refused to be discouraged when the man was completely unmoved.
“Ah, myself,” he said casually. He reached out for the paperman, but the man pulled it out of reach. The paperman, the little traitor that it was, had wrapped its little arms around the man’s thumb, and was currently rubbing its tiny cheek against his skin.
Wei Ying might have seen an eyebrow twitch, but it was too fleeting to decide if it was a sign of weakness, or a sign that the man's patience was running thin.
“You’re lying,” he said, which Wei Ying found a little odd, because if this man actually thought that he was up to no good, it would make a lot more sense for him to raise the alarm for any of the actual security that was posted around the room, rather than boxing him in against the dessert table like a particularly aggressive date.
“I’m really not,” Wei Ying said. He reached into his pocket, ignoring the way the man’s eyes followed his fingers like he couldn’t take his eyes off them—probably thinking he was going for a weapon. Wei Ying pulled out a business card and waved it between them like a white flag.
“I’m a freelancer,” he said. “Just looking for new clients. Got to pay the bills, you know? And it's not really fair that you lot only let your own members into these parties, when there’s plenty of cultivators out there who are just as competent…”
As if the universe were agreeing with him, a particularly ugly laugh cut through the din of conversation, and both Wei Ying and the man glanced over to see Jin Guangshang holding court with a drink in one hand and the other around the waist of a woman who was most decidedly not his wife.
“...or more so,” Wei Ying finished.
“And you’re doing this, brazenly, at a conference full of competitors, to which you were not invited,” he said doubtfully.
“Well, when you say it with that disapproving frown on your face, you make it sound like a bad idea,” Wei Ying said. “Try it again, but sound intrigued. Or impressed!”
“I am not impressed,” he said flatly. “You are trespassing.”
That may be, but the man hadn’t dragged him out on the street yet. He decided to press his luck, but still, Wei Ying was a little surprised when he reached out to slip the business card into the inside pocket of the man’s jacket, and he actually allowed it. He was beginning to look more perplexed than anything, and Wei Ying could work with that. He patted the man’s breast pocket with a cheeky grin.
“You can hold on to that,” Wei Ying said. “In case you ever have a case that conflicts with those four thousand rules of yours. Lan…”
“Lan Wangji,” he said, after a moment of hesitation.
“Ah!” Wei Ying said. “Lan Zhan! I didn’t realize I was talking to Lan royalty. Can I have that back?”
He very much was not expecting Lan Wangji to hand the paperman back over. He’d half expected him to crush it, and maybe blast the rest of the papermen scampering beneath the buffet tables, but maybe there was something in those four thousand rules about destroying a handsome stranger’s things.
After a tentative moment where it became apparent that he was not about to commit mass paperman murder, Wei Ying took a cautious step around him, and was delighted to find that Lan Wangji was going to let him go.
“You can call me if you ever need anything,” Wei Ying said, and then added with a wink, “or if you just end up missing me.”
Wei Ying gave the man’s breast pocket one quick pat, to remind him that the card was there, but also to just cop one that feel for the road, and then left his papermen to do their work.
Lan Wangji followed the woman the few steps across the room. She didn’t bother to strip off her gloves, kicking the bottom of the closed door with the toe of her heel.
“Wei Wuxian! This is a clinic, not a club house! Quit dragging strange men through here!”
There was a muffled, but clearly confused sound from the other side of the door.
The door swung open, and Lan Zhan ignored the way his heart skipped when the man’s gaze landed on his face, and he broke out into the same smile he’d shared with him at the party. He had, apparently, not forgotten about their meeting.
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian said. “Did you end up missing me after all?”
Lan Zhan held the business card up, pinched between two fingers like a warding talisman, like it might protect him from this very handsome man’s very shameless behavior.
“No,” Lan Wanji said, though it was a blatant lie. “I have a job for you.”
“Oh?” That made Wei Ying perk up. He swung his legs down from where he’d propped them on his desk and leaned in, eyes bright and distinctly teasing. “And what am I supposed to do that the great Lan sect can’t?”
“An unusual case. A missing child. I’ve been told to drop it,” Lan Zhan said, and failed to keep the frustration from his voice. Even between their limited meetings, that piqued Wei Ying’s interest just as he knew that it would. “May I come in?” he asked.
Wei Ying hummed thoughtfully.
“You have my attention,” he said, and swept an arm toward the sofa pressed against the far wall. Lan Zhan took a seat in the stiff wooden chair across from the desk, and Wei Ying pulled the door to his office closed, the click of the latch sounding more like a beginning than an end.