Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Li Tianchen wakes up in a bed that isn’t his. He can’t say he’s concerned about it, per se, mostly because it’s the third time this has happened in the past three months. He decides to go right back to sleep.

He gets pat on his face, then aggressively rolled around like he’s a piece of dough getting kneaded. This doesn’t usually happen, and thus, he slaps the hand away. “What.” He opens his eyes.

Xiaoxi is staring at him with tears in her eyes.

Li Tianchen leaps out of bed, curses, then slaps a hand over his mouth. His twin sister signs rapid words that generally mean “what’s going on” at him. It’s a sort of supernatural experience, and Li Tianchen briefly contemplates if he’s dead and in the afterlife. He drops that idea after reasoning that he would’ve gone to hell, and there’s no way Li Tianxi would’ve gone to hell. What they gather after ten minutes of conversing:

1. Li Tianxi is actually alive, and this is not, in fact, Liu Xiao fucking with him.
2. Falling from a failed handstand still hurts, so this is probably not a dream.
3. The date is July 24, 2020.
4. They’re back in their shared room at Qian Jin’s house.
5. Li Tianchen still can’t do handstands.

Wild.

Li Tianchen would say that he managed to steal Cheng Xiaoshi’s ability and jumped back in time, except that was a stupid explanation and obviously not what happened. Instead, it seems that he and Li Tianxi has invented a new type of time travel. Oh well. He’s not complaining.

It takes him a day for the realization to fully sink in that, oh, they’re back. Before Li Tianxi died, before he went off the deep end to save people he can’t save, before their adoptive father started seeing them as weapons and not children. Before the two of them got blood on their hands. He cries and sobs for two full hours after that realization.

Except, hmm, seems like they do actually have some blood on their hands. One person’s blood, to be specific. That’s awkward.

Cheng Xiaoshi, Lu Guang, and Qiao Ling take three different approaches to spontaneously finding themselves a year and a half in the past.

Cheng Xiaoshi doesn’t really realize until midday. It doesn’t occur to him until then that it’s kind of weird that the sun was up so early, and that so many people are outside without any coats in (what is supposed to be) cold January weather. In his defence, he’s not in a habit of checking that the integrity of spacetime is still intact every morning. He only notices something is off when he notices that he could no longer locate his bullet scar that he fidgets with whenever he was bored.

And when he does notice that the scar is gone, and that his hair feels a tiny bit longer than it felt the previous day, and that it’s obviously July weather outside, he freaks the hell out, fails to clap out of the hypothetical photo he’s in, and runs to get Lu Guang.

Now for Lu Guang’s perspective.

Lu Guang notices the moment he gets up, because his watch is showing him the blatantly wrong date. Unfortunately, a side effect of being in a self-imposed time loop is that Lu Guang had learned to write off the “today is not the date I remember it being” feeling as just a fact of life, and nothing to be concerned about. Thus, he gets up and goes on with his day as if nothing happened.

It's after splashing his face with cold water that Lu Guang’s brain fully turns on and starts processing information. He then realizes that, not only has Cheng Xiaoshi not died recently enough to justify him being in such a fresh loop, he also wouldn’t be able to be in one, at all, because the last one was his last chance.

Lu Guang’s next conclusion is that he has pissed off the laws of the timeline so much that it is now spiting him by throwing his consciousness around the spacetime continuum like a leaf of lettuce in a tossed salad. He takes this in stride and starts contemplating what to have for breakfast.

He is unpleasantly surprised by Cheng Xiaoshi’s shriek halfway through the day.

“Lu Guang! I fucked up!”

Let’s now turn the camera towards Qiao Ling.

Qiao Ling, like Lu Guang, notices when she gets up – her phone is showing her the blatantly wrong date. She actually spends a few seconds freaking out at first about missing her early morning appointment, before swiftly realizing her predicament.

Qiao Ling does not have superpowers. Well, ok, she does, but she has no superpowers she’s not in denial about having. She is also usually the one left out of the loop, because Lu Guang leaves everyone out of the loop and Cheng Xiaoshi would sooner bite his own foot off than “put her in danger”. Thus, her first reaction is caution.

She cannot ignore the possibility of this being some hostile force’s doing. She also cannot ignore the possibility that said hostile force is watching her, right this moment, and so she is careful. She doubles checks that everything is roughly as it was a year and a half ago. She looks over her messages and contacts discretely, making sure everything lines up as she remembers. Etcetera, etcetera.

When she opens up the door to the photoshop, Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang are busily hiding away sheets of paper and looking like she caught them with their hands inside the cookie jar. She narrows her eyes at them.

“Cheng Xiaoshi,” she says menacingly. “Have you done something you shouldn’t?”

He laughs awkwardly. It is so painfully obvious that she wonders if he’s even trying to lie at all. “No, landlady, why would you-”

“Is it, by chance, supposed to be January right now?”

Cheng Xiaoshi stops laughing.

Lu Guang studies her carefully.

Their reaction is as good as saying yes. Qiao Ling can’t say why she suddenly feels comfortable addressing the elephant in the room, where before she stepped carefully around it, scared of startling it. She thinks it may be the sense of safety afforded by numbers. Or maybe the knowledge that whatever she might’ve revealed by not being cautious enough, these two surely would’ve already.

“I’ll go make some tea,” Lu Guang pulls out his omnipotent card for getting out of awkward conversations. “In a bit, let’s sit down and talk through what we remember.”

“What they remember” turns out to be nothing.

They went to sleep the previous night. They wake up. It’s a year and a half into the past. There is no fanfare, no disorientation, no prelude. Cheng Xiaoshi had assumed he’d dived without meaning to, but no matter how many times he claps, he can’t quite return to January. And besides, Qiao Ling and Lu Guang are here with him. It wasn’t a dive, time simply did a backflip, and now they’re here.

“Isn’t this way too big of an impact to the timeline?” Cheng Xiaoshi scratches the back of his head, carding his fingers through his little ponytail in worry. “I don’t remember what happened a year and a half ago, man. I can’t keep the timeline on track.”

Skill issue, thinks Lu Guang. He does not say this out loud. “It doesn’t matter. We don’t  need to keep the timeline on track.”

The words come out of his mouth without having gone through his head first, and he doesn’t get the opportunity to regret them until it’s already too late. He meant for it to be a reassurance for Cheng Xiaoshi that reality won’t implode if he buys groceries a day late. But it comes out sounding more like taking a five-year-old to a candy store and telling them that here, everything here is for you.

“Hah? What does that mean? What happened to ‘past or future, let them be’?”

That principle went out the window the moment the past and future demanded your death, yeah, ok, definitely not saying that one out loud.

Lu Guang does not notice the way Qiao Ling’s attention on him becomes a little bit more intense.

“The reason we try to keep the timeline on track is because we live simultaneously in the present and in the past. The greatest concern we usually have is a paradox: that something you do would change the past so much that it affects the present, where I am, drastically enough that it cancels out the dive. What do you think happens then?”

Cheng Xiaoshi sticks up two hands, in a motion that Lu Guang has seen three times before, and starts thinking through the cause and effect. Lu Guang can see the moment the realization hits him fully. “The dive would have never happened. But then the past would’ve remained untouched, and the dive would’ve happened. Either state is unstable.”

Lu Guang nods. Cheng Xiaoshi is bright, despite acting like he’s got cotton between his ears. He never fails to come to this conclusion, every time the question has been posed to him.

Once upon a time, Lu Guang had been the one ambitiously proposing changes to the past, and Cheng Xiaoshi was the one who had mused what if. Once, the laws of time were ones they learned together through trial and error, and not one enforced by him alone.

“You’re very close. You’re right that either state is unstable. But time demands resolution. If you change the future too much, then you stay stuck in the past.”

“What about you?” Qiao Ling asks. “What happens to the person who’s in the future?”

“I don’t know.”

And he doesn’t. He remembers wanting to set up an experiment with the Cheng Xiaoshi of the first timeline, then tentatively dropping it after much thought and discussion. The thought and discussion mostly consisted of the two of them worrying that the other would spontaneously combust from the paradox. The only reason he knows what happens to the diver was, well, he’s here now, isn’t he?

“Then…” Cheng Xiaoshi says hesitantly. “We don’t have to worry about that, because we’re stuck in the past, either way. There’s no future to go back to, and no one we’re connected with.” The lightning of an idea seems to strike him. “Goddammit! We have to watch Xu Shanshan and Dong Yi dance around each other again!”

That’s not the main problem here, but ok.

“Haven’t you two talked about this sort of thing before? Time paradoxes seem important to know for time travelers.” Qiao Ling says it with a laugh, but the contents of her question very much imply ‘the fuck you mean, you’ve been time travelling without thinking through the full ramifications of a paradox and connection between past and future, what have you been doing?’

In Lu Guang’s defence, if he does lead Cheng Xiaoshi down the path of thinking more about time paradoxes, and about how his power works, in general, his behaviour during dives inevitably changes. And then Vein shows up and starts pew-pew-ing everything, so Lu Guang figured he might as well just keep Cheng Xiaoshi in the dark, trying to keep him from thinking too hard about his power whenever possible.

God, he is so glad that Vein keeled over in this timeline.

Cheng Xiaoshi points at Lu Guang with his thumb. “He just told me the three laws when we first started diving, and never elaborated. I thought he was just being a stick in the mud.”

“Is that why you never listen to me during dives?”

“No. That’s because you never tell me anything about what I’m doing.”

That’s fair, actually.

The three of them bicker, and the conversation lulls into peaceful quiet. It’s early afternoon. Their side gig, at this point in time, hasn’t begun yet. They would be handling their first case in two months, in September.

“Do you think we can do something about Li Tianchen?” Cheng Xiaoshi says suddenly.

Absolutely-fucking-not, is Lu Guang’s first reaction. Watching Cheng Xiaoshi get shot by Qian Jin once was a terrible enough experience, he is in no way interested in repeating that. That’s not going to convince him, is his second thought.

“Oh, that reminds me, I think I have superpowers now,” says Qiao Ling.

“We wouldn’t be a- sorry, what?”

Chapter Text

“Oh, that reminds me, I think I have superpowers now,” says Qiao Ling.

“We wouldn’t be a- sorry, what?” Lu Guang starts saying, probably about to go off on how death is an unchangeable node before his face slackens into the most genuine, full-hearted shock Cheng Xiaoshi has ever seen on his best friend’s face. Even his messy hair seems to be sticking up from his scalp in a surprised manner and making little :o faces.

“I have superpowers,” Qiao Ling repeats. “Originally, I thought that that was ridiculous, but now that we’ve all time-travelled, I guess it’s looking a lot more likely.”

She has a point. “Woah, what kind of power is it?”

Lu Guang still looks like he’s buffering from the revelation. “I think I got it after Xixi- yeah. I haven’t tested it out yet, actually, but-” Qiao Ling puts her hand to her face thoughtfully, her eyebrows screwed in concentration. “I can- kind of feel it there. I don’t know how to explain it. It feels like something. I think it’s probably similar to hers.”

The answer she gives is very vague, but he guesses when it comes to superpowers there’s not exactly a known and normalized way for one to know that one has superpowers. He didn’t even know he had one until-

Until-

Huh.

How did he find out about his powers, again?

Before he can give it more thought, Lu Guang is speaking. “Wait, sorry. Qiao Ling-jie, what is Li Tianxi’s power?”

Qiao Ling tsks. “Ah, right, you weren’t there for that. Li Tianxi can kind of possess people through photos, but it’s more like she’s… layered on top of them. She can’t actually control their actions, and it works in real time, not in photo time.”

Lu Guang sits on this. “…Can you try your power, Qiao Ling-jie?”

“Sure, Cheng Xiaoshi, can you grab me a photo of one of your clients? Someone we don’t know.”

Cheng Xiaoshi grumbles, but does as she asks. “Why not just use one of your five million selfies with your friends?”

She makes a face at him. Lu Guang is still sitting in the corner contemplating the secrets of the universe. “That’s an invasion of privacy. At least I’ll never know or meet any of your clients.”

…Now that she brings it up, their powers are quite an invasion of privacy, aren’t they? Cheng Xiaoshi’s changed in their clients’ bodies before. What does that count as? What about things like phone passwords? Personal banking records? Is he a felon?

Qiao Ling stares, long and hard, at the photo. It’s of a man in overalls, covered in mud, beaming a candid smile. Then, as if released from a spell, she emerges back to reality. “Ok, yeah, same as Xixi’s powers. He’s at an amusement park right now. I can feel the heat and everything.”

“That’s great! That’s such a useful power!” Cheng Xiaoshi beams. And he’s not lying – Xixi’s, now Qiao Ling’s, power is perfect for gathering real-time information. It fills in the gap between him and Lu Guang’s powers, in terms of intel. They could only operate from the past; Qiao Ling could tell them anything from the present.

Greedily, his heart starts beating at double speed. A yawning hole in him opens up. “Lu Guang. If we’re stuck in the past permanently – if the time paradox is irrelevant, then can we- can we change what happened? Can we fix everything?”

Lu Guang is silent. He thinks he’s about to say ‘no,’ and if he did, Cheng Xiaoshi thinks he might’ve been relieved. Back to familiar rules, to their quiet lives as photoshop owners. But then he says: “Yes, we can change things. Functionally speaking, we’re people of this time, we just have knowledge of the future now.”

He feels the rock that’s been suspended in his chest since the Li siblings were brought up bob a bit, then finally settle down. All they need is a photo of Qian Jin or Liu Min, and to meet up with Captain Xiao again, and they could stop the murders before they even began.

This time, they can change an unchangeable death node. This time, they can save Emma.

This time, Cheng Xiaoshi won’t come home to a bloody body on the couch.

The permission invigorates him. They chatter amongst themselves, his own enthusiasm bouncing off Qiao Ling’s caution, planning for how they’re going to change things now that they have the power to. They can save Doudou from a year of trauma. They brainstorm plans for getting Captain Xiao’s trust, for how and where they’re getting the photos of Liu Min and Qian Jin. They debate whether to disclose the fact that they’re time travelers, and how they’re going to get undeniable proof of the Li siblings being behind the murders.

There’s a little voice in the back of his head, and it sounds like Lu Guang insisting that death nodes can’t be changed. Cheng Xiaoshi will have to ask him later how he knows everything he does about the way the timeline works – maybe, just maybe, if the three of them can wake up a year and a half in the past, then death nodes can be changed and Lu Guang just doesn’t know how.

“C’mon, Lu Guang, say something!” He sneaks up behind him and slaps him on the back. Lu Guang starts, knocked out of thought.

“What?”

Cheng Xiaoshi smiles at him. “You should help us plan everything out; you’re the brains of this shop.”

“…What’s Qiao Ling-jie, then?”

Cheng Xiaoshi turns around and pulls a face at Qiao Ling. “The money, obviously. She can buy us all the snacks and bubble tea.” Qiao Ling responds with the international gesture of friendship, a middle finger.

“Then, you’re our mascot,” she says. Cheng Xiaoshi starts arguing that he’s their fighter, and they start play-sparring in their living room.

The result, by the way, is that they both devolve into pulling each other’s hair.

They spend the next few days planning their next moves. Just in case – because who knows, really, when the timeline would deviate far enough for the butterfly effect to reach – Cheng Xiaoshi deletes the photos he posted to their photoshop website, and to any other public social media platforms. Lu Guang confirms that at this point, the siblings have only killed one person, and that they have another month until their next victim.

A few days later, on a Monday morning, they set out for the police station. The first step of their plan: gain the trust of captain Xiao again with Doudou’s case.

Li Tianchen taps his foot impatiently outside of the photoshop.

The sign says closed, and no matter how many times he knocks, the people he knows must be inside just won’t open the door. They’re so cruel. They’re going to leave a poor, defenceless eighteen-year-old little boy outside to dry out in the heat and turn into pink jerky. He’s never going to forgive them.

It occurred to him, on Saturday, that him and Li Tianxi have technically killed someone already. Provided, he very much deserved it, but they are technically murderers. And, once he thought through the full cause and effect, he realized where this was leading them – Lu Guang and Cheng Xiaoshi are inevitably getting involved with their case, once they target Emma. And though Li Tianchen’s appetite for time travel has dulled in recent years, Qian Jin’s hasn’t.

The moment Qian Jin realizes that there are other strange children other than him and Li Tianxi, he would be going after the two from the photoshop. He remembers how that had gone the last time – his sister’s hoarse voice, her tears, the gunshot. Qian Jin, the fucker, never cared for them as children. He only wants them for their power.

He can, and will, kill Li Tianxi again, if he thinks it’s convenient.

There’s also the fact that his sister has made it abundantly clear that she won’t cooperate with him anymore if it means he’s killing someone with their combined power. In fact, Li Tianchen doubts that she’ll even let him combine their powers again, for a long, long time. It makes him feel cold, despite the summer sun.

Li Tianchen wants to grab Liu Min and Qian Jin, extend his mind into another body, and simply get them to kill themselves, or maybe each other. But that’s messy. It leaves, inevitably, loose ends for people to pick up on. Besides, Qian Jin knows his power. Without Xiaoxi’s help, he isn’t confident he can get rid of both of them. And he promised Xiaoxi no more homicidal problem solving.

Li Tianchen lets his head fall onto the shop’s glass windows. So many problems to deal with, and most pressing of all, how to get the two knuckleheads and one normal person from the photoshop to talk. He checked their website. They’re open on Mondays.

He’s asking for their help because he honestly doesn’t think anyone else could hear him say the sentence “my adoptive father is using me and my superpowered twin sister (I also have superpowers) to kill people by possessing them, as per the request of some shady blond guy, so if you don’t mind helping us dig up some dirt on said father and blond guy so they can go to jail and leave us alone, that would be appreciated, also, [insert convincing sob story here about how they’re getting threatened or something], so please can you not call the police over us committing murder” and not do something drastic. And by something drastic, he means to turn around and run away screaming.

He only has these three to count on. Though he loathes to admit it, they’ve proven themselves to be quite the bleeding hearts. He hates relying on other people, bowing his head down to ask them for help, admitting that he needs anyone other than himself. No, Liu Xiao, he does not “have difficulty asking and receiving help from others due to childhood trauma,” fuck you. It’s a practical consideration.

He plonks down on the sidewalk and starts playing mobile games. He’s halfway through cutting a virtual cake when he catches purposeful footsteps growing closer.

When he raises his head, he sees the people he came here for: Cheng Xiaoshi, Lu Guang, and Qiao Ling. Cheng Xiaoshi is leading the charge, shoulders tense, hiding the other two behind his body. Li Tianchen watches as he schools his expression into neutrality.

Interesting.

“Excuse me, are you the owners of the time photoshop?” He flashes them his best boyishly innocent smile.

“Uh- yes. Are you here… to develop a photo?”

Li Tianchen stands up. He sees Lu Guang’s eyes carefully assessing him as he rises. A wave of something indescribable rises in his chest.

There’s a thrill that roils in the space where his lungs are. An itch in his hands. Li Tianchen thinks that he was born doomed, a little monster wrapped up in the skin of a human. It seems to be the only explanation of why he’s the way he is. He wants to feed that itch, but he can’t yet. He needs to get what he needs from them, first, then he can toy with them as much as he likes.

“Not quite. I heard that this shop offers some,” he lets his voice drop just a touch. “Special services.”

Cheng Xiaoshi opens his mouth, going a little blank. Lu Guang speaks first before he gets a chance. “Why don’t we take this conversation inside.”

The photoshop is exactly as he remembers it, from the brief time he spent in it when possessing Qiao Ling. It feels strange to see it in this other time. There’s warm sunlight spilled on the couch in the place of red blood, and the walls seem slightly less full of plants and photographs. There’s a warmth and love coating every surface of the place. He wants to burn it all down.

There are no apples on the counter. There is no fruit knife. But he thinks he can hear the sound of it plunging into flesh in the air, the ghost of a gasp.

“What is your request?” Lu Guang asks when they’re all settled down, Him and Cheng Xiaoshi on the couch, Qiao Ling on the chair off to the side, Li Tianchen on a second chair opposite to them. The three of them are keeping their distance, a table between them and Li Tianchen.

“I heard there are people here who can enter photographs.”

“That would be correct.”

Li Tianchen pulls out his phone and leaves it on the counter. It is a peace offering. “My adoptive father has been involved in some… shady business with a certain scion of a large company. The truth is, both my twin sister and I have powers, like you do. He’s been threatening us to try and get us to help him with his business. We would just like your help getting him to the right authorities.”

The atmosphere is so cold he thinks his breath would fog up if he exhaled. Damn. Their customer service really sucks.

“Could you tell us more details?” Lu Guang prods.

Got them.

He’s careful with what information he does and doesn’t provide. Liu Min is siphoning money out from Quede games in collaboration with management. He wants to hire Qian Jin to get rid of his detractors for him. Qian Jin, in turn, wants to use Li Tianchen and his twin sister’s powers to do his bidding. Qian Jin has had some dirty dealings as a lawyer in the past.

He’s not happy with revealing Li Tianxi’s existence. He would much rather keep her behind careful guarding, but unfortunately, if they’re going into photos, they’ll inevitably find out about her existence. The ones he provides are ones he has chosen carefully – mostly from his perspective, and never with any conversations about the murder that he, you know, already committed. It had taken some genuine brainpower to remember what he had been doing at this time, but he’s fairly certain there’s nothing incriminating in those photos.

And if there is, he’s sure he could spin it somehow.

“If I may, can I ask how much you’re willing to pay for our services?” Qiao Ling speaks for the first time in the whole conversation. It’s been Lu Guang leading the charge thus far.

Li Tianchen’s face twitches. Ok, he was kind of hoping they would help him out of the good of their hearts. They seem like the kind of people who would do that. Or, well, Cheng Xiaoshi does. How much money do eighteen-year-olds have anyway?

“… A few thousand CAD?” He offers in the currency of the author’s country, the same way that all monetary value will be listed in this fanfiction, because the author hasn’t been back to China in a decade and doesn’t remember how much a Yuan is realistically worth. He thinks it sounds reasonable enough.

They go over a little bit more logistics afterwards. He needs the job done preferably in a few weeks – that’s how long he can realistically keep Qian Jin off his tail. No, he will not tell them his ability. Yes, he has a plan for when his father goes to jail (beg Liu Xiao to get him and Li Tianxi a place to stay while he gets a job).

The photoshop sends him off on his way after he sends them the useful photos. He gets the distinct feeling he’s not being sent off as much as he’s being thrown out. It’s around two pm when he leaves, the sun approaching the peak of its light.

Li Tianchen feels the little monster inside of him break free as he turns the street away from the photoshop. It stretches his face into a grin. They had been hiding it, but he noticed their discomfort. There’s something off about those three. What, exactly, he can’t be sure, but- this round of their game is about to be fun. The crowd around him is sticky-warm, moving past him like syrup.

He shrugs off his jacket, sweaty. He’s maybe a little too committed to his fashion style.

Liu Xiao had a psychology midterm and a presentation today (or, the previous day), after two of his three presentation group mates failed to show up for a month’s worth of meetings – in the summer semester. One of his associates called in and managed to beg him to agree to be present for a business meeting that weekend. He had to go pick up a new pair of glasses after he dropped the last pair while chasing people down (sure, he has a backup pair, but they’re pink and glittery) and then the sky started pouring Yingdu-style rain, that is to say, buckets. He gets a nice, neat, four hours of sleep, before he gets woken up to engage in a two-hour car chase and it is still, fucking, raining.

He stomps into his apartment. His hat is soaking wet. He smacks it down on the shoe cabinet. If his mind is a piece of string right now, it is held together by one singular fibre. If one more goddamn thing happens-

Liu Xiao’s phone dings.

Chapter Text

Liu Xiao’s phone dings.

He takes a deep breath.

It’s Li Tianchen.

Li Tianchen has been texting him more than usual this week. Their conversations are usually limited to season’s greetings, maybe monthly updates. Out of the blue, though, that Saturday, Li Tianchen had texted him asking him about his exams.

He wonders what happened.

A little flighty bird in his chest says he wants something from you. It’s shaped like an empty car with leather seats, a monotonous closet, and meals cooked to unflinching perfection. A gun cocks in his mind, and the little bird’s tweeting stops. He want something from you becomes you can give him something he wants.

Li Tianfen: bruuhhhh how tf do I write a resume

Li Tianfen: do you think killing my dad counts as work experience???

…?

You: It would be volunteering experience. Unless it was an ordered hit.

You: What are you doing writing a resume?

Li Tianfen: looking for a job. obviously

You: Do you need money?

Liu Xiao starts thinking through his current funds, to figure out which ones are clean enough to send back to China. He’s a little disturbed to find that most of them aren’t, though he supposes that’s what happens when one works so closely with Vein, of all people.

This is the way all relationships are: mutual utilization. Cooperation. I give you something you want; you give me something I want. It is a game Liu Xiao likes to think that he has mastered.

Li Tianfen: do I look that poor to you

Li Tianfen: im just thinking of the future

Li Tianfen: im not gonna live with qian jin forever, i hope

Liu Xiao realizes he’s still standing in his entry way, still in his soggy shoes and soggy socks and his soggy coat hanging off of him, body temperature rapidly dropping now that he’s not speedwalking. He shrugs everything off and goes to sit down on his couch.

Li Tianfen: do i put my own phone number or qian jin’s

Li Tianfen: my own right

Li Tianfen: im sooooo unemployable

How does he even respond to that.

You: I can probably help you get a job.

Li Tianfen: nah its fine, i can do it myself

Li Tianfen: im just complaining so i can put off writing the rest of this stupid resume

Right after that message, Li Tianchen’s icon goes grey.

He clicks out of the chat interface, into his contact list. This is his – well, civilian phone isn’t quite the term he’d use for his phone, because he is a civilian, so all his phones are civilian phones – phone for casual business. Most of his contacts are things like his university classmates, a few of his more legitimate business associates, and a few of the more trusted members of his family’s household.

…What a strange conversation.

Liu Xiao pulls out his other phone. He has an email to send.

He’s halfway through signing off on the email before he remembers something. He switches over to his normal phone, clicks open the chat interface again, and types:

You: You didn’t actually write “I killed my dad” on your resume, right?

There’s noodles on the boil on the stove. The mild aroma of cooking dough spreads throughout the kitchen.

Xiaoxi is chopping up green onions to sprinkle in the soup. He has soft slippers on. Evening light snakes into the room through glossy windows.

I’ll keep her safe this time.

He’s not quite sure how long to cook the noodles, because this is a new brand and they’re thicker than he’s used to. He overcooks them, but Xiaoxi tells him they’re delicious.

“What did you do today?” Xiaoxi asks.

He quickly bites off the rest of the noodle in his mouth, and the broth splashes on his face when the rest of the thing falls back into the bowl. “I was talking to some people. They’re going to help us get away from Qian Jin and Liu Min.”

It will be bloodless and peaceful, so you won’t have to run. I’ll get a job and save up money. I’m sure Liu Xiao will be willing to lend us a place to stay in the meanwhile. And then one day, we’ll be strong the way he is, and no one will ever hurt us again.

His sister’s pink brows twist a little. “Was it anyone dangerous?”

“Who do you think your brother is? No one can threaten me.”

If they do, I’ll tear their fucking throat out.

Xiaoxi puts her chopsticks down, her signs gaining a harried quality. “Big brother, I’m worried for you. You should take me with you next time. That way, I-“

“No,” he cuts her off before she gets a chance to finish. Her hands are frozen mid-motion as if she wants to keep signing while he talks – the magic of multi-modal communication, he supposes. “It’s too dangerous for you.”

“And it’s not for you?”

He puts his chopsticks, down, too, in their unspoken sibling ritual for serious conversations. “It’s different, I can handle it. You’re my little sister, I need to protect you.”

“No,” Xiaoxi’s eyes are intense, and their pink reminds him of their mother. A lot about her does. “I am- we are siblings. We are a family. You always go off on your own, and you never tell me anything. I’m always scared you’ll leave and then never come back. I want to help you.”

He doesn’t know where to begin. His head is too full, and he’s afraid that whatever comes out might hurt her, because that’s all that he does when he’s scared. The little monster underneath his skin doesn’t know the difference between love and hate, and it would rip his sister to shreds if he ever let it.

I don’t want to see you die again. I don’t want you to go where mother is. I’ve already failed you so many times, please let me make it up to you.

He remembers her ripping her hand out of his, running off into the night, to a place he can’t reach. He remembers her plea for them to go home. The heart-dropping second after the gunshot sounded, when denial, stretched thin by reality, finally snapped.

Don’t make me watch you die again.

Qiao Ling emerges out of the picture like a diver rising for air, shoving her head into her hands.

妈的。(translation: a profanity.)

Li Tianxi’s ability feels like becoming another person, wholly and completely. Their emotions, memories, thoughts – all hers, as if they always have been, always will be. It feels like one of those dreams with a fully formed backstory and world, a vivid reality you are only privy to for a brief glance, before it fades. And coming out of the trance feels like waking up for a dream-reality. She’s unsure, for a moment, if she’s Li Tianchen or Qiao Ling.

It's an extremely unpleasant sensation to be experiencing when it’s dark out, and Lu Guang is sitting on the couch.

“Qiao Ling! Are you ok!?” Cheng Xiaoshi’s voice beams into her head like a cow busting through dry wall.

Qiao Ling slaps her hand over his mouth. “I’m ok. Stop yelling, you’re not helping.” He is, but she doesn’t need him to get into the habit of yelling every time she uses her power. Xixi’s power. Whatever.

“What did you see?” Lu Guang is holding a stack of photos in his hands, after not being able to get the information they wanted from those. He got enough information to definitely send Qian Jin and possibly Liu Min to jail, sure, but nothing about Li Tianchen’s behaviour.

Qiao Ling sorts through what happened in her mind. Time has detangled some of the threads in her mind, but not all of them. “… not too much, I guess. They’re having dinner right now. I think… we were right. They’re also from the future.”

“Goddammit. Doesn’t that mean our advantage is useless?” Says Cheng Xiaoshi.

“Not necessarily. They don’t know that Qiao Ling-jie has Li Tianxi’s power.”

Hey, hey, hold on, when did I agree to get dragged into your superpowered drama. I’ve got a job, thinks Qiao Ling.

“True. This way, we can keep track of them as well…” Cheng Xiaoshi says thoughtfully, hand on his chin, stroking a beard that doesn’t exist. “But they’ll find out, the moment Li Tianxi possesses her.”

Qiao Ling can feel his anxiety radiating into the air. The Cheng Xiaoshi of now looks a little, subtly different than he did-does in the past-future. His hair is a little longer, a little messier, the bags under his eyes a bit lighter. He’s less sturdily built, something they found out when he tried to pull a sparring move and tripped over his own two feet. But in a few weeks’ time, she knows, he’ll morph into the person she knows in the past-future.

Lu Guang looks exactly the same.

She speaks to assuage their worry. “Stop. Guys, I don’t think we need to fight them at all.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Do you mean they’re friendly?”

Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang say simultaneously.

Friendly. Hmm. That’s certainly… a word. She isn’t sure if she would necessarily apply it to Li Tianchen if it were up to her, in any context. “I think so. I mean, friendly might be pushing it, but I think Li Tianchen genuinely wants to work together with us.”

Cheng Xiaoshi frows. “Then why didn’t he reveal his hand to begin with?”

“The same reason we didn’t, idiot. He doesn’t trust us.” Lu Guangs tell him.

“He doesn’t trust us? What did we ever do to him!? He stabbed you!” Everyone in the room winces, including Cheng Xiaoshi himself.

“Can you not be so blunt about that. My intestines hurt.”

“Oh, shit. Did the wound carry over somehow?”

“No, it’s just because you’re being too loud about it.”

Qiao Ling snorts.

Cheng Xiaoshi goes to sit down next to Lu Guang. Lu Guang lets him, even tolerating the fact that Cheng Xiaoshi is basically sitting on him, instead of on the couch. He drapes over Lu Guang like a throw blanket as he speaks. “Li Tianchen is too unpredictable. We need to be careful around him.”

“Or we could offer him an olive branch. He’s already asking us for help.” Qiao Ling brings up. “I don’t think he’d hurt us, as long as we prove we won’t hurt them.”

“How do we even prove that? That guy’s way too paranoid.”

“Li Tianxi’s power.” Lu Guang says suddenly.

Qiao Ling and Cheng Xiaoshi look at him. Qiao Ling from one side of the couch. Cheng Xiaoshi from on Lu Guang’s lap where he’s laid his head quite comfortably.

“Li Tian… You mean, we have her possess one of us?” Cheng Xiaoshi says thoughtfully.

“Yes. If she possesses you, she’ll be able to verify that we aren’t planning anything for her and her brother. It’s the best way to get Li Tianchen to trust us.”

Cheng Xiaoshi sits up straighter, and Lu Guang’s gaze lingers after him. “…That also means she’ll know everything about what we’re planning and thinking about.”

“Yeah, that’s why she’ll be possessing you. It’s not like you have any important thoughts.”

“You-!”

Cheng Xiaoshi starts spitting insults never before uttered in Chinese history.

Qiao Ling muses.

Lu Guang looks the same in 2020 as he does in 2022. White hair, pale skin, a little bit of flush under his eyes. She’s sure if she looks back on their first photos together, when they met in 2016-

They-

Hold on.

Didn’t she meet Lu Guang for the first time in 2019?

Yes, she’s certain of it. She knows because when Cheng Xiaoshi first brought up Lu Guang, she had thought to herself oh, he’s getting attached far too quickly. She knows because she remembers spending the first day she ever saw him carefully watching, for care, for gentleness, for reciprocation. Because that is her little brother, who grew up in an empty photo studio, who never lets anyone inside his heart lest they break it again. He has never kept a friend close for longer than a year. And there he was, with a boy he’s known for two months, declaring them best friends. She didn’t trust him, and he knew, and she thinks he was glad for it.

So then why does she want to say that they met in high school?

Chapter Text

June 28, 2019, Bridon.

Death is dizzying, and it’s cold.

It’s really nothing like falling asleep. Death strikes fast, and you don’t really get a chance to absorb the full implications of it. One second you’re you, with all your thoughts and hopes and dreams, and then the next, all those things fade. Thoughts are the first to go, then hearing, then vision. You’re acutely aware of losing grip on reality and unable to do anything but let it happen. The last things you feel are the vestiges of anger and the cold.

Vein doesn’t like the cold. It’s the reason he wraps himself up in dress shirts and coats and long pants, even in the muggy Bridon weather. There are three things Vein doesn’t like in this world: the cold, being hungry, and liars.

He wakes up still cold, pretty hungry, and thinking Liu Xiao, you motherfucker, so you could imagine how he’s feeling right now.

A grey ceiling hangs overtop him. He’s lying horizontally on top of fabric on a flat, cold surface, and the air in the room is dry. A shadowed face peeks at him-

Vein’s first reaction is to throw a punch. He thinks he still has all his limbs and he doesn’t feel any restraints on him so, really, there’s no reason to not. Midway through the punch, he notices that he’s inside of a bag, so his fist course-corrects and strikes empty on his left. Next he tries to get up, forgetting again that he’s inside of a bag, and in a moment of slightly panicked brilliance kicks his legs out (again, into the bag) and rolls towards his right.

His newly-alive body drops off the table and smacks onto the floor. He hits his funny bone and his entire left arm starts dancing. On the other side of the corpse table, Liu Xiao –making a valiant effort to anticipate Vein’s punch and to dodge – overcompensates, falls, and smacks his head onto the floor.

For a few seconds, two of the most powerful people in Bridon each lie on the floor, nursing their respective elbow bruise/would-be-concussion.

“Liu Xiao, did you come to hell with me?” Vein says first.

Liu Xiao gives him an unimpressed lock. “Don’t hex me. We’re both alive.”

They both stand up, a mutual silent pact that none of this ever happened. Liu Xiao grabs his hat from off the ground and claps it right back over his head. Veins mulls over what he said. He supposes that heart attacks aren’t always fatal, with timely CPR and AEDs involved, and a quick trip to the hospital. The only problem is that he’s clearly not in a hospital.

“Then why am I in a body bag?”

“You were dead for two days.”

That doesn’t tell him anything, aside from the fact that he was one day away from being the second coming of Christ.

Liu Xiao never likes providing too much information, even actively hiding the brand of hats he wears; this is a fact that Vein has learned to… tolerate. Typically, this hasn’t impacted their cooperation. It’s in both their better interests if Liu Xiao provides whatever critical information he has. So he doesn’t know why he’s being so purposefully obtuse now.

“… there’s not much else to say. You didn’t incapacitate her in time, did you?”

“I don’t recall that being part of the assignment,” Vein responds cooly. “And let’s get out of here already.” Liu Xiao opens the door, gesturing for him to follow. They’re in some kind of basement, it seems, and the door leads out into a long hall with clean linoleum flooring.

“Relax. I was just checking. Wang Qing has a unique ability that lets her temporarily “fake” the death of a person for a set amount of time. When I heard of your death, I figured that was what happened.” Liu Xiao sticks his hands into his pockets. It’s his body language for confident. “I’m surprised. I thought for sure you would’ve knocked her out.”

Vein shuffles the “ok so superpowers apparently exist” factoid into the little box in his brain labelled “not the fucking point right now,” a box which he foresees growing extremely overstuffed in the upcoming hours. That factoid actually bumps up with another similar factoid along the way. He shuts the lid of the box on the both of them. “I would’ve tried harder to, if you’d warned me that she had a supernatural ability.” Before Liu Xiao can say anything in his defence, he continues. “I’ll settle this with you later. I need to go take care of some business.”

“No need. I already handled that.”

For a moment, Vein’s heart stops for the second time in the past fourty-eight hours. This isn’t the first time someone’s tried to kill him, and historically, there’s only ever been one reason for them to — to take what is his and make it theirs. If Liu Xiao had seen an opportunity, then…

The cold iron blade of his fan lands against Liu Xiao’s neck. The metal gleams in the lifeless hall, the reflected red on its polished surface like a spark of fire. “What did you do?”

“I just let your subordinates know your death was faked, and to hold the scene until you got back. Don’t worry, I gave them your code.”

“Which subordinates?”

“What, do you want a list?” Liu Xiao chuckles. “Yue Han, Ada, Huang Wenshen, and Lv Kejing.”

“Oho. Good choices.” Vein returns the fan to his hips. They continue walking. He’ll double check on what Liu Xiao says later, but for now, this will satisfy him. They’re the exact people he would’ve picked, himself, if he were actually faking his death. “How did you know how to reach them? And my code?”

They reach a set of stairs heading up, another set of doors above them. He is looking forward to being warm again. “I have my ways.”

One might assume that having knowledge of the future helps one sleep easier at night.

Anecdotally, Cheng Xiaoshi can confirm that this assumption is false.

It’s Monday night. He’s been rolling around in bed for – three hours, he thinks. His blanket is too warm and the creases are felt too prominently on his body. His hair tickles his neck. He feels like a dumpling being pan-seared by an anxious first-time cook, restlessly flipped over and over, never given enough time on the heat to brown.

…He’s also quite hungry.

“Are you still awake?” Lu Guang calls from the top bunk.

“Yeah. Have I been keeping you up?”

Lu Guang’s voice gets softer and lower when he’s sleepy. It gains a whiney tail to it, a slightly different rise and fall in pitch. “No. I can’t sleep either.”

“Damn. Both of us, huh?”

Cheng Xiaoshi tries to leave it there, but now he feels stupid lying awake in bed with his best friend also lying awake in bed, with a linear distance of roughly a metre separating the two of them, and not doing anything. Most nights, the two of them leave it, unspoken, and ignore the other’s insomnia. He feels like he can’t do that anymore.

He swings his legs up and sits up in his bed. “I’m making some midnight snacks.”

Lu Guang hums in acknowledgement and Cheng Xiaoshi gets up to make his way down the stairs. He has his slippers on without socks, and a coat swung haphazardly over his shoulders.

For a long time, he only cooked himself the simplest bare-bones recipes he could find that wouldn’t give him scurvy. Qiao Ling’s family invited him over to eat sometimes, something he secretly looked forward to – it meant he would eat foods that weren’t just rice with whatever vegetables were on for cheap that week. He knew he could cook himself far better meals, but he could never quite find the energy to do it, not when all the utensils in the kitchen felt strange in his hands, and the apron fit too large on him.

After Lu Guang moved in, Cheng Xiaoshi was motivated – if only because he now has another person living with him, and he feels personally responsible for making sure he doesn’t starve – to try to switch up his recipes.

His favourite dishes are stews: cabbage with tofu, bone broth and daikon, lotus, tofu skin, chicken and wood ear, potatoes… They take a long time to make, though. He pulls out some eggs instead and gets started making danbing.

Halfway through his second danbing (it’s a very elliptical bing because he forgot to twirl the ladle), Lu Guang paddles down the stairs. He puts the kettle on boil.

“Hey, Lu Guang, do you really think we can change anything this time around?” Cheng Xiaoshi asks while Lu Guang mixes honey into his water.

Lu Guang doesn’t answer immediately. He doesn’t acknowledge the question, either, but that just means he’s thinking. “We can. It just may not be in the way we want them to. No one can predict the way that time behaves.”

Cheng Xiaoshi thinks that Lu Guang probably could, if he tried to. Lu Guang seems to always know everything, to have all the answers to his questions. Cheng Xiaoshi wonders what would’ve happened to him if he didn’t have Lu Guang to back him up. He wonders who was the one to teach Lu Guang what he knows?

Perhaps invigorated by the smell of cooking egg and flour, he decides to ask. “You know so much. How did you learn any of this?” He laughs. “I feel like you know more than I do about my own power. Hey, come here, try for salt.”

Lu Guang takes a sip of his water first, carefully, as if worried of burning his tongue. Then he comes on over and grabs the plate with the finished danbing and takes an equally small, careful bite. “Do you remember what I told you about how I found out about my power?”

He doesn’t, actually.

It’s strange. He thinks he would remember if Lu Guang told him how he found out about his literal super powers, but. Clearly, he does not. But that’s embarrassing to admit, considering they’ve been roommates/best friends/partners for something like, three years.

“Uh… vaguely…?”

Lu Guang’s voice is quiet. “My parents had similar powers to me, and they knew other people with powers, too. One of the people they knew.” He stops. Cheng Xiaoshi takes his eyes off the stove to look at him, who’s not looking back. “Was someone who had a similar power to you.”

Cheng Xiaoshi doesn’t know why he’s surprised. After all, he knows that at least one other person has his power, or something like it. It still feels strange. “Huh. I didn’t know there were so many other people with superpowers.”

The plate gets put back to his right-hand side. He’s chuffed to see that the topmost danbing is halfway gone. “There aren’t that many, we just tend to know each other.”

“Is that how you learned about the death nodes?”

It is, perhaps, not the smoothest change of topic he has ever executed in his entire life. In fact, it’s rather unlike a change of topic, and more like an abrupt execution and reanimation of the topic into an entirely other topic.

 “…Yeah,” Lu Guang says after a long time. He’s forcing himself to be calm, his words suddenly short and bitten through his teeth. “The person… kept going back, to try and save someone who dies.”

The danbing are done. Cheng Xiaoshi takes the plates over to their living room, and Lu Guang trails after him. The streetlights outside cast rectangles of dim warmth onto their otherwise cold table.

“They didn’t end up succeeding, did they?” He asks a question he knows the answer to.

Lu Guang gives him the answer they both know he’d give. “No. They didn’t.” And then, after a pause, quietly: “They were foolish to think that they could.”

Cheng Xiaoshi frowns. This ‘foolish’ is different from Lu Guang’s usual ‘stupid’; it carries a vehemence unbefitting of someone like Lu Guang. A genuine, seething contempt that doesn’t belong to his best friend. “Hey, don’t say that about someone. It must’ve been painful for them to lose someone they cared about that much. I can understand why they did that.”

Lu Guang doesn’t seem to hear his words, or at least, isn’t convinced by them. “It wasn’t love. It was- dependency. They were just,” he stops, as if looking for words. “Stubborn. And holding on, because they were too weak to let go.”

“…Damn. Do you have some kind of blood feud with this guy, Lu Guang? You sound like you really don’t like them.”

Lu Guang laughs a little, though it sounds bitter. “Maybe.”

The danbing are a little crispy on the edges, coming right out of the pan. The batter forms riveted patterns where it met the oil. It feels tasteless in his mouth.

Lu Guang had always warned him to follow their laws, but it was always sort of – 不痛不痒 (translation: neither pain nor itching). A warning without much substance, a rule he wasn’t given reason for following. No matter how he acted in dives, he could always come back to the present, to the photoshop, and everything would be as it was. And even though Lu Guang threw a fuss while he was in the dive, he always, inevitably, forgave him a few hours after he returned.

Now, he finds that he does have a limit to his tolerance. That there is such a thing as a time traveler who is so contemptuous as to earn his ire.

“You know, after you got stabbed, when I thought you were dead, I…” Cried. Screamed. Begged for things to be different. He had been a boy once more, and he didn’t listen to reason, only knew that he wanted that other someone in the photoshop to come back. “Considered going back, to save you. I didn’t, obviously, but I wanted to go back. If I- you- would you hate me? If I had?”

Lu Guang’s response doesn’t leave him any time to feel anxiety. “Idiot. Why would I hate you?”

He asks it like it’s the most obvious question in the world. Cheng Xiaoshi disagrees; everyone has a bottom line. He just found Lu Guang’s, and it is unfortunately a line close to where Cheng Xiaoshi has already been testing his patience.

“If,” he says. “If we change things this time, and things get worse. Because death nodes can’t be changed. Then would you still feel that way?”

“… If things get worse, then… we tried. And maybe death nodes can be changed. This isn’t a dive, after all.”

Cheng Xiaoshi smiles a little hearing Lu Guang talk in terms of if and maybe and can. It’s a side of him he’s never seen before; a side he wants to keep to himself and cherish. An uncertain Lu Guang. One who is equally as lost as he is.

“Ha. I’ve never heard you sound so uncertain.”

“Well, I’ve never travelled back in time, either. There’s a first time for everything.”

Li Tianxi looks at Qiao Ling-jie.

Li Tianchen looks at Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang.

Cheng Xiaoshi stares at Li Tianchen.

Lu Guang looks at everyone, then back at himself. He moves his right hand to cover his abdomen.

“Hello~” her brother says in a tone inviting a punch to the face.

Here is what happened:

It is Thursday. Cheng Xiaoshi texted her brother asking to meet up the previous day. Li Tianxi saw this, and had a half-hour argument with Li Tianchen that finally ended with him agreeing to let her come to his photoshop appointment the next day.

So now, here she is.

“We’re from the future and so are you two,” Cheng Xiaoshi says all at once.

Li Tianxi has gathered. In fact, and this is a little strange to say, she actually expected the photoshop three to have travelled back with them, when her and Li Tianchen first woke back up. She can’t say exactly why. She supposes somewhere in her mind, she’s slotted the three of them right into the little box circled me and mine and decided they would surely do anything together.

Be at the police station together. Go to an abandoned theatre together. Get attempted murdered (and actual murdered, in her case) together. It makes sense.

Her brother and the two taller boys are glaring at each other, exchanging tense words. Qiao Ling walks on over to her and starts saying something, but Li Tianxi interrupts her.

“Wait. I want to listen to what they’re saying.”

She’s so focused on studying the three talking people that it takes her a second to remember that Qiao Ling doesn’t understand Sign. Instead, she makes a shushing motion, points to her own ears, and then to the other three. Her eyes flicker over to them and she tries to school her face into an inquisitive look. Qiao Ling seems to understand.

It’s difficult for her to understand the complicated plans her brother makes with other people, sometimes. There’s a lot of convoluted back and forths, buts and because and in case, and though she can understand each one of those statements separately, they become difficult to wrangle the moment they join. It is not, however, difficult for her to assess emotions. In particular, Li Tianxi is closely tuned to the emotion of rage, of hostility. Others, too – fear, distrust, acceptance, care.

She can see that Cheng Xiaoshi-gege and Lu Guang-gege care about each other. She sees that they both keep try to move the other behind them, though it never quite succeeds and they just end up rubbing shoulders. She sees that neither of them trust her brother. And she sees that her brother sees them as threats, stance planted wide and wearing his sharp, defensive smile.

Neither of their parties trust the other. And there is a simple solution, Lu Guang proposes: Li Tianxi and Qiao Ling both have a copy of the same power. If they each use their power on someone from the other side, then they can verify their honesty. Cheng Xiaoshi volunteers to be the target.

Li Tianxi looks to her brother to confirm. He nods.

She never likes going into another’s mind. It always feels wrong somehow, like wearing wet clothes, cold against her skin and weight on her shoulders. Cheng Xiaoshi-gege, for all his kindness, is the same. His mind is winded up taut, emotions on a tightrope, and she sees herself from his perspective.

Memories: Sunlight, a table, a dark room, gunshots, the bottom bunk.

We don’t want to hurt you, she-he-they think, and it’s such a jarring feeling being addressed directly that Li Tianxi snaps out of it immediately.

He’s genuine, and she tells her brother as much, while Qiao Ling looks into a photo and dives into her brother’s mind. In a few minutes, it’s over – the magic of superpowers.

“Now, can we get started?”

Chapter Text

Lu Guang has already gone through the photos and picked out which ones have potential. There are a few candidates:

1. A photo of an URL that Li Tianchen warns him not to look further into, on pain of getting stabbed again. Lu Guang politely reminds him that his power works in omniscient perspective and he cannot selectively censor laptop screens, even if he wants to. The website, by the way, is a page selling hair accessories. Within the next twelve hours, he is fairly certain that Qian Jin and Liu Min meet up.
2. A photo of Li Tianxi with a comedically large bowl of noodles at a restaurant. She finishes off the bowl incredibly quickly; it is horrifying. Within the next twelve hours, Li Tianchen enters Qian Jin’s study, where there’s a pile of papers that feel illegitimate.
3. A selfie by Li Tianchen standing in front of a horrendously ugly, balding tree. He’s trying to line up his head with the tree branches, but it’s lopsided. When Li Tianchen comes home, Qian Jin directly asks him if he’s ready for “an assignment” later that week.

“Dammit! I thought for sure that I chose ones that weren’t suspicious.” Li Tianchen cries, leaning over Lu Guang’s shoulder as he explains each photo.

It will be hard to get solid evidence of Qian Jin’s corruption that holds up in court. It needs to be airtight, hence why just an accusation from the Li siblings wouldn’t be enough. Photographic evidence of dirt would be the best – but recording with Li Tianchen’s phone would constitute a change to the timeline.

“Besides, doesn’t the fact that Li Tianchen’s phone doesn’t have any photos like that currently already prove it wouldn’t work, anyway?” Qiao Ling says. When the rest of them shoot her a confused look, she says “if it works, then the photo would already be on his phone.”

“Modifications made to the timeline from within a photo are impossible to observe from a point in time prior to a dive. Once the change has been made and propagated, reality and memories are modified, and only the divers retain the memories of the original timeline. If the newly formed reality were to change the divers’ prior reality significantly, they would experience backlash. And if the newly modified reality nullifies the original dive, that would create a paradox.”

“What are you on about.”

Cheng Xiaoshi dives into the last photo: the selfie.

“Damn, Li Tianchen’s bad at taking photos. The lighting in this one’s pretty awful.”

“Silence is a virtue,” Lu Guang tells him.

He directs Cheng Xiaoshi-Li Tianchen to a nearby electronic store, to buy a voice recorder. As he speaks, the others in the photo studio hang around aimlessly. Qiao Ling mixes up some beef with scallions and soy sauce for Li Tianxi, while Li Tianchen scrolls lazily on his phone.

“Say, if Cheng Xiaoshi’s in my body right now, then will my memories change to reflect what he does? Will I know he’s possessing me?” Lu Guang does not dignify him with a response.

They can’t get recordings of Qian Jin plotting any murders without also implicating Li Tianchen, which is an issue. The first photo might be better for recording his and Liu Min’s dealings, but Li Tianchen didn’t leave the house that day, and it would be a deviation to bring him out. This dive will just be for getting the recording device into the house.

“Say, why don’t we record the conversation between Li Tianchen and Qian Jin anyway? Maybe we can get Qian Jin to say something useful, and we can delete anything suspicious afterwards.”

“The police may be able to recover the deleted clips from the recorder.”

“Yeah, but would they bother looking? I mean, I wouldn’t.”

“Cheng Xiaoshi. This is why you keep losing your hairties around the house. You never think to look anywhere other than the obvious”

“Is he always this much of a jerk?” Li Tianchen fake-whispers to Qiao Ling from across the house.  

With the patience of a saint, and a man who has been through five timelines, Lu Guang focuses on Cheng Xiaoshi.

“Think about it, man. We’ll get past the first part of the conversation, then I’ll just try to fish something out of him.” Cheng Xiaoshi spaces out while talking to him, the Li Tianchen of the photo now staring blankly at a chart of common USB types posted on top of a products shelf. If he starts saying anything, I’ll just press pause on the recording.”

“… Fine. But follow my instructions exactly. We can’t risk Qian Jin getting suspicious. And if I say stop, then immediately pause the recording, and don’t start it again until I say to.”

“Yes, sir, yes.”

Then Li Tianchen of reality continuously makes jabs at him – thankfully metaphorically – and Li Tianxi sits stiffly on the far end of the sofa. The walk to Qian Jin’s house isn’t far, so it’s not long until Lu Guang has a valid excuse to ignore Li Tianchen.

“Stay on guard.”

Qian Jin’s apartment building is a grossly modernist eyesore. Frosted windows make everything inside seem foggy and indistinct; the architecture hides behind itself as if ashamed of its own squarishness. The hedges in the yard look like plastic.

When Cheng Xiaoshi enters the unit, Qian Jin is sitting on the couch typing away at a laptop. He looks up, greeting Li Tianchen with a mild-mannered smile.

“You’re back, Tianchen?”

“Yup.”

“His face looks so punchable.”

 “How was your outing today?”

“What do I-”

“Pretty good. It was boring, though.”

Cheng Xiaoshi repeats after him obediently. He even manages the distinctive Li Tianchen tone – a lazy, childish drawl.

“Oh? I suppose these sorts of days are a bit too peaceful for your liking, aren’t they?”

“Maybe. There’s nothing worth doing.”

Qian Jin’s smile turns a little deeper, a little more ominous. “What if I said I had an assignment for you?”

Lu Guang tells Cheng Xiaoshi to straighten up, match his body language to the past of the photograph. He does so without struggle, the genuine hostility even managing to radiate across their telepathic bond. “What is it this time?”

Qian Jin explains the target; this is before Liu Min contacted them, which means this was before the murders ramped up to a speed that invited police scrutiny. The target is the friend of a witness who’s proving problematic for a court case Qian Jin is trying to win. Cheng Xiaoshi’s disgust is palpable through their bond. It rankles, like coarse hairs on his forearm, a near-physical sensation that feels stronger than it should have any right to be.

Cheng Xiaoshi gets past the conversation with no slip-ups. His acting has gotten better, Lu Guang thinks. This is the most obedient version of Cheng Xiaoshi he’s ever known, and the thought makes him ache.

Now, it’s time for the unscripted portion. He tells Cheng Xiaoshi to start recording.

“What’s the case this time, again?”

Before Qian Jin even responds, Lu Guang knows what he’s about to say. His power works strangely – the more he puts in, the more he gets out. The easiest thing to do is to look into the photo passively, letting time flow past him like a river, each instance and detail lapping at his ankles. Wade a bit deeper, and time lies down obediently, stretching ahead of him and allowing him to move the playhead back and forth, the imagery and sounds shifting as he moves.

If he focuses hard enough, time stops being time at all, and becomes space. The entire timeline spreads out all around him, each second occurring simultaneously and occupying the same space inside of his head. He feels his consciousness strain to disperse itself across it. His vision more than doubles, it overlays itself in an entirely new direction. A fourth dimensional object splayed out in front of him.

It is a feeling he has not experienced since leaving his home, what feels like a decade ago. But the situation demands this level of care. He needs to do more than watch Cheng Xiaoshi’s present; he needs to see his future.

“Defamation case. It’s just someone pesky bringing up accusations against some of Liu-zong’s employees. The witness has some e-mails we don’t want getting out, and they’re not yielding to threats.”

“Oh? You can’t even handle something as small as this?”

The future flashes in his mind. He feels a pressure start building up in his head. “Stop.” Cheng Xiaoshi presses the stop button.

Here is the problem: he can’t predict what effects Cheng Xiaoshi’s actions have on the timeline in advance; he only sees them after he’s already done or said whatever he will. So, the only thing he can do here is try to feed him lines he thinks may get them something useful.

“What, didn’t you say you were bored? I figured you might enjoy a job like this. Clearing out the weak. Isn’t that your favourite hobby?”

Cheng Xiaoshi crosses into the living room, sitting down on the couch, emulating Li Tianchen’s posture. “Basically, you’re too lazy to do something yourself.”

“Start.”

“Oh, I’ve already tried the other methods. Blackmail, coercion, even trying to buy her out… I’m afraid she’s quite stubborn.” Qian Jin says, frowning, irritated. Even though Cheng Xiaoshi’s righteous anger roils, its ripples hitting Lu Guang second-hand, the Li Tianchen in the photo maintains an apathetic look.

“Whatever.” Cheng Xiaoshi pulls out Li Tianchen’s phone and starts scrolling (the photo album app), ending the conversation.

“You can stop the recording now.”

Lu Guang carefully finds a time point for Cheng Xiaoshi to move into Li Tianchen’s room, where they’ll leave the recording device. Before he can make it to the door, Li Tianchen yells. “Stop! Don’t go into my room.”

“Cheng Xiaoshi, stop. Act natural.”

“How am I supposed to-“

“What is it? Is there something in your room?”

There’s a faint flush on Li Tianchen’s face. “It’s my room. I don’t want someone else in it.”

On the one hand, Lu Guang can understand that. If it weren’t for the fact that him and Cheng Xiaoshi share a room – and the fact that he hasn’t kept personal artifacts in years – he thinks he’d probably also be pretty mortified about someone going into his room. On the other hand, Li Tianchen is hiring them to send his adoptive father to jail. He thinks it may be a little fussy to draw lines about room privacy.

“Is there anywhere else we can hide it? It needs to be accessible for you later on without Qian Jin getting suspicious.”

“There’s a place,” says Li Tianchen. “Go into the kitchen.”

Unhappily, Lu Guang expands his range of vision – so far, he’s been trying to offset the strain of extending himself temporally by limiting what his power shows him spatially. Now, he forces himself to return to his bird’s eye view. Qian Jin’s house blends with time, with the photoshop, with a familiar bedroom, with flashing lights. He wants to let go of the taut hold he has, bearing time open wide like a corpse undergoing autopsy, but he can’t afford to yet.

“Go straight, then left. You’ll find the kitchen,” he tells Cheng Xiaoshi.

Li Tianchen reacts quickly. “The first bottom-right shelf from the sink. There’s a box of powdered milk tea inside. You can fit the recorder in there; Qian Jin doesn’t drink it, and I still haven’t finished it yet.”

Lu Guang wants to question Li Tianchen’s choice of beverages, but if he does, he fears he might get stabbed.

“Huh, I’ve never seen this brand before. You think it’s a specialty drink or something?” Cheng Xiaoshi says after Lu Guang relays him the instructions.

“Maybe,” he says, mostly for the sake of saying something. “You can come back now.”

Cheng Xiaoshi lands with the sound of air getting displaced. Finally, Lu Guang can take his eyes off that damn photo.

“Pretty good dive, huh? Don’t you think so, Lu Guang?”

“Idiot. Don’t talk so loud.” The sensation inside his skull isn’t quite a headache. In fact, it’s not inside his skull either, it’s more like he’s outside. He’s too aware of every single hair on his nape, and the world seems both too much and too flat. It feels like trying to focus on something that refuses to sharpen itself.

“… Lu Guang, are you ok?”

His stamina has gone down. He used to be able to do this for hours. “I’ll be fine. Just give me a few minutes, we’ll dive into another photo next.”

Qiao Ling walks on over. He hadn’t been paying attention to what she was doing; mostly, the only person in reality he was watching was Li Tianchen. He sees now that she had been writing something down. “Are you sure? You don’t look so good.” She chuckles good-heartedly. “Should I possess you to see how you’re feeling?”

“We don’t need you for that power. Xiaoxi’s got that handled. Right, Xiaoxi?” Li Tianchen looks towards Li Tianxi. She makes a few Signs that Lu Guang cannot be bothered to even try to infer right now.

Lu Guang hopes they aren’t serious about that. They’ll never let him look into photos ever again.

Cheng Xiaoshi catches his hesitation. “How about we all go home for today? The photos will still be there by tomorrow. We can pick up where we left off some other day.”

It’s already afternoon by now, and the Li siblings have been hanging around in the photoshop for a few hours. Li Tianchen must’ve gotten his fill of malevolence, because he acquiesces and takes Li Tianxi’s hand to lead her home.

“I’m going to check to make sure the recording device is still there!” He calls over his shoulder as he leaves the door. Lu Guang does not have the mental capacity to think through whether or not he should do that.

To: [email protected]

From: b64R#[email protected]

Have you noticed anything recently?

To: b64R#[email protected]

From: [email protected]

Yes. He’s been going on quite a few outings as of late. Once on Monday, and once today.

I had someone tail him today. It’s some “Time Photo Studio” in the commercial district. They couldn’t figure out what exactly he was doing there, though.

He has also been acting strange, but it’s hard to explain. He seems colder than usual. And a lot more clingy with his sister.

To: [email protected]

From: b64R#[email protected]

Ok, keep watching him. Try to find out what he’s doing in the photo studio. And pay attention to what he’s doing around the house, as well. You never know.

I’ll wire you the payment in an hour.

August 2, 2019. Bridon.

Xia Fei is going to die tonight, and he has no one to blame but himself.

This is a lie. Objectively speaking, the people most at blame for his imminent death are presumably his imminent murderers. The problem is that his murderers wouldn’t be after him if it weren’t for his stupid ass getting involved in goddamn organized crime.

Bridon is raining. When is it not. The smell of rain, not the downpour kind but the misty, noncommittal kind, mixes with the stench of the dumpster and an overexaggerated scent of bloody iron. His clothes stick, cold, against his skin. He tries to curl his leg closer to himself to hide them better behind the dumpster.

It’s no use, and he knows it. He’s pretty sure he’s been doomed since a month ago, actually.

Vein has been dead for a little over a month. In the wake of a sinking giant, the world of Chinatown went up in a Tsunamic shock. For a day, it seemed nothing was spared. The modelling agency was hit – but more than that, as well. A few banks closed for the day. Mysterious buildings, which Xia Fei had never figured out the purpose for, looked dimmer or brighter or empty or full of people. Strange faces that do not look like residents prowled about. Although Chinatown still hustled and bustled, something had gone askew in its backdrop. Some of the more senior members of Chinatown told him to stay away from the enclave until “everything calms down.”

Two days later, everything calmed down. Life returned to normalcy. It was like nothing ever happened.

Xia Fei doesn’t think his death will have a fraction of the effect that Vein’s did. Probably what will happen is that his roommates will grumble when the schoolyear comes about why he’s not there to absorb one quarter of the rent (he’s subletting for the summer, so he doesn’t have any roommates as of right now), his supervisor will send him a few emails, and then maybe Bridon police will alert his mother that her son has gone missing.

After all, he’s pretty sure they’re not going to find a body.

He turns on his phone, dimming the phone screen, as if that’s going to save him. His lockscreen is of a cartoon dog on a yellow background, and his screensaver is a photo he took of one of his school’s better-looking buildings.

The old screensaver was a selfie of him and his boss at a food truck, but, well, that clearly did not pan out well.

Xia Fei misses his ma and ba. He opens up the first photo he can find of his family – it’s a shot he took of his ma proudly holding a beautiful bowl of homemade zhajiangmian.

They’re taking a long time to arrive. They must know he has nowhere to run.

Xia Fei is at a dead end. The front-going path is blocked off by construction debris and he took a right, only to come face-to-face with a brick wall. He’s not sure what he’s doing hiding here – his chances are better if he tries to at least climb over the debris. Hell, they’d be better if he went in, metaphorical guns blazing, to fight his pursuers. He doesn’t think he has the energy to, though. He’s been running for nearly an hour by now.

He lowers his forehead to touch it against his phone screen. He sees, in his mind’s eye, the memory of the day. His ma and ba had found a new recipe they wanted to try out. His ma painstakingly rolled out hand-noodles with their tiny rolling pin, and his pa stormed their kitchen with the smell of cucumbers and soy bean paste.

I’m sorry, ma, ba. He thinks. Your son’s not getting that engineering degree, after all.

“There you are, kid.” The voice of a woman comes from in front of him. “Are you-?”

Xia Fei lifts his head to look at her.

She’s a bulky woman, with a missing right eye and a boldly asymmetrical haircut, short on the right and long on the left. Her left eye looks at him with an unexpected confusion.

“Miss, are you alright?” she says.

…

?

“What?” His voice gives him a jumpscare. It sounds like a woman’s voice. Xia Fei is, and he is fairly certain of this, not a woman, nor does he intend to be one.

Some of the woman’s compatriots poke their heads out from behind her. There’s a taller heterochromic man with a nose bridge piercing, glaring at him as if he killed his dog. Another person is wearing a ludicrously large collar, and Xia Fei would laugh if it weren’t for the fact that xe’s the second-fastest person he’s ever met.

“Never mind. Have you seen a tall man with blond and black hair run by here?”

You’re looking right at him, he thinks to himself. Except she’s clearly not.

“Um.” He tries to look around the alleyway without giving himself away. “I think I saw someone like that run by, but he went that way.”

He points them towards past the construction debris.

One-eye turns to make eye contact with Collar, who nods resolutely and dashes off. She looks back at him. “Alright, thank you for your help. Do you need help getting home?”

These are the nicest fucking hired assassins he’s ever met, what the hell. “…No, I’ll be alright. I’m just, uh… waiting for someone.”

“Ok, then. Take care.” And then she’s gone.

The moment she’s gone, Xia Fei stands up on shaky legs and starts walking back the way he came. Part of him thinks it’s some sort of trap, but getting up confirms that it’s not.

He’s a solid head shorter than he was than the last time he checked. His shoes feel a little different. Hair tickles his neck in places they’re not supposed to, and instead of a shirt, he’s got some sort of wooly sweater situation going on.

Xia Fei turns on his phone again, and pulls out the selfie function. He flinches from the sight.

Why does he look like his mom!?

On a rooftop not far from Xia Fei, peering down on the whole scene, Vein puts away his gun.

He was in a meeting with Liu Xiao when his phone pinged with a location. Felix has, it seems, been using his chat with Vein as a sort of near-death-experiences diary. Every few weeks, he’ll receive a text with a location, arrive, and find the kid cornered or running for his life.

He had honestly not planned to have anything more to do with Felix after his “death.” But, well, his texts give him an excuse to go gallivanting around the city, so he supposes he’ll play the part of Felix’s shadowy protector for a bit longer. Besides, he’s always managed to extricate himself from all his pursuers thus far. Tonight is no different.

The good news is, he didn’t have to shoot anyone and risk revealing the fact that he’s still alive to the kid. The other good news is that Felix does have some skills other than running away.

The bad news is that Felix has superpowers. Which… complicates things.

Chapter Text

Cheng Xiaoshi’s next dive is unsubstantial. Well, it’s pretty substantial for Li Tianchen, who has to go through the mortifying ordeal of being there while Cheng Xiaoshi goes through a day in his life. But it’s unsubstantial for him.

All that the restaurant photo requires is for him to make a photocopy of the papers in Qian Jin’s office while he’s out, and then stow them away in the same milk tea cabinet that they were kept in before. He’s in and out within two hours. The next dive with the Liu Min meeting is long, and needs them both fresh, so they’re doing it another day. The Li siblings insist that after such a long journey (thirty minutes by bus) they deserve to do something more than sit around and watch Lu Guang say things at air.

“We are a business. We can’t just close doors randomly when we’ve already spent a morning diving.” Cheng Xiaoshi says.

“I am literally paying you for your dives.”

“That doesn’t mean you get to monopolize the rest of our day as well!”

Li Tianchen laughs. “Does your tiny store even get customers? You can close it and be just fine. It’s Sunday.”

It takes every single muscle in Cheng Xiaoshi’s body, all six-hundred-fifty-plus of them, to not do violence against the child.

Qiao Ling, appearing like a shining saviour into the room, speaks up. “Saturdays and Sundays are actually their busiest days, since everyone is off work and able to visit to get their photos taken. If you don’t believe that, you can try working here for a day. Without wages, of course.”

“Will you write me a reference letter when I apply to jobs?”

“Of course,” Qiao Ling flashes the smile of a Bachelor of Business Administration.

12 pm: Li Tianchen formally takes over front desk.

“If I ruin your precious photography equipment, you’re probably going to whine a bunch.”

“Brave words for a brat,” Cheng Xiaoshi spits back. He does not dispute Li Tianchen’s decision to stay far, far away from his technical equipment.

12:30 pm: The first customer of the day!

The customer is a short person wearing a grey backpack with neon blue patches. Their hair flops all about their head in a botched undercut that looks more like a bowl, and their shirt is a heinous checkered orange-on-white.

“Hey kid,” Li Tianchen says in an excessively friendly voice. “How can we help you?”

The customer fixes him with a dead stare. Bags carve crescent moons beneath their eyes, and they carry the distinctive haunted look of a wage slave. “I’m twenty-five,” they say in a booming baritone.

His professional etiquette is the only thing preventing Cheng Xiaoshi from laughing.

12:35 pm: Li Tianxi, props extradinaire

The customer, Ya Dang, is looking for a passport photo. These are one of Cheng Xiaoshi’s least favourite orders. He has to set up the big white tarp, then fight with the lighting, and the photo itself always ends up taking forever because he has to follow a million guidelines.

Li Tianxi offers to help him set up the set. She’s attentive and careful, affording each movement more care than she needs to, but Cheng Xiaoshi appreciates that about her. With her help, the photo is done after ten minutes, and they quickly take everything down. Ya Dang lingers for a little while, looking curiously around the shop.

1:45 pm: Elizabeth visits

Elizabeth visits. She heads straight for Lu Guang, who’s dusting off some corners, and jumps on top of his shoulder without warning. It makes him nearly fall over.

“A cat’s enough to bowl you over? Guang-guang, do I need to feed you more?”

“I was just surprised,” Lu Guang hisses like an upset cat. His head of upturned white hair adds to the effect. He looks like an irritated pom-pom.

Li Tianchen has his chin in his hands. “A cat,” he says, trying to sound like he doesn’t care. Out of spite, neither Lu Guang nor Cheng Xiaoshi offer for him to pet her.

3:00 pm: food

Their usual fare, back in July of 2020, was instant noodles. It will remain instant noodles for all future months. The point is, they’re broke, and that’s an indefinite state.

Li Tianchen turns his nose up at the suggestion, and Li Tianxi, though she’s trying to be polite about it, obviously also isn’t happy about her dining options either. Cheng Xiaoshi tries to think of what to do instead. He doesn’t feel comfortable leaving Lu Guang alone with the two while he goes grocery shopping, and Lu Guang feels the same vice versa. Qiao Ling is out until six. If he sends the twins out, he gets the feeling Li Tianchen is going to buy something that bankrupts them without even meaning to.

 It's up to him to try and modify their instant noodles into something that tastes less like instant noodles. It’s a difficult task, because instant noodles are instant noodles are instant noodles.

The Li siblings end up liking his handiwork. Li Tianxi asks for fourths, and Cheng Xiaoshi discovers that there is an emotion in between pride and fear.

6:00 pm: Closing duty

The wind-down of the day is a slow, relaxing process.

They flip the sign to ‘closed’ and turn off the entryway light. The summer sun still beats enthusiastically on the pavement outside. Cheng Xiaoshi goes over the day’s orders, and Lu Guang starts cleaning off their tables. Li Tianchen flops bonelessly onto their couch.

“Thank you, Cheng Xiaoshi-gege and Lu Guang-gege. Today was a lot of fun.” Li Tianxi tells them, courtesy of her brother’s translation.

Cheng Xiaoshi beams at her. “Why, thank you for helping us! It was a pleasure having you here.”

Li Tianchen sticks his tongue out at them. “Blegh. My legs are sore. I’ve been standing all day long. Why don’t you have a stool at your front desk?”

“Well, us adults don’t need one. But you’re still a kid, so I guess you’d get tired more easily than us.”

Li Tianchen turns red at a visibly appreciable rate. “Hey-!”

When Qiao Ling comes back with a few groceries a minute later, she nearly turns right back around and leaves the photoshop the way she came. She doesn’t. Because she loves them, or something.

It’s later, when Qiao Ling and Cheng Xiaoshi are alone downstairs and Lu Guang is upstairs writing emails, when Cheng Xiaoshi says “I’m not sure how to feel about Li Tianchen.”

Qiao Ling puts the dishes they’re done washing back in the cabinet. “Me neither.”

The exact reasons are left unsaid, though they can both guess at it. One person with the power of supernatural empathy, needing only a photograph to become another person entirely; another who lives a day in their life, feels slices of their emotions, sees through their eyes.

Lu Guang thinks that Cheng Xiaoshi acted so in-character in Li Tianchen’s photo because he’s gotten better at acting, but that’s not entirely the truth. He was good because he didn’t need to act. Because there’s something wriggling inside of Li Tianchen’s heart that’s in his, too, the sharp buzz of a childhood unfulfilled, the bitter why me, of all people? When Li Tianchen sees Qian Jin, he and Cheng Xiaoshi’s protective flares sync up. When the things they distract themselves with are gone, they both go back to the same place. To that little mom-and-dad-shaped hole inside of them. The desperate chase to fill that hole up with anything that might fit.

Cheng Xiaoshi hates it. He feels like he’s betraying Lu Guang, even though he’s sure Lu Guang would call him stupid for that thought. But how else can he feel? He can’t just forget what Li Tianchen did. He can’t scrub the image of his most precious person lying lifeless on the couch no matter how hard he tries.

Yet, he can’t help but feel like, sometimes, that he’s only condemning a version of himself.

A short-haired figure crouches under the awning of a closed-down bubble tea shop.

“Nah, they’re clean. I don’t think they’ve done an illegal thing in their life,” someone drawls in a lazy swing rhythm, every English word coloured by the texture of Chinese vowels.

The screen of a phone shows an outgoing call with a contact labeled XLD. A single Bluetooth earbud plays the response from the other caller.

A moment later, an awkward ah. Soft and breathy, voice pitched upwards. “That’s true. Other than that, I guess.” A question from the other end of the phone.

“Mm, I got one. There’s this pink guy in it, though. Is that gonna be a problem?” A dog barks on the street. Shadows stretch, like reaching hands, towards the east. “Not really. I mean, he was speaking Chinese, so I couldn’t tell.”

The figure leans back against the wall, stretching a sore neck, rolling stiff shoulders. “Alright, sounds good. Anything else you need done in China?” Then, a confused blink, thoughtful recollection. “Oh, uh… no, not really. Why? What are you expecting?”

A small pair of hands plays with decorations dangling from a sky-blue phonecase. “Ah, well, I’ll double back here once I’m done in Yantai. Is that alright?”

A smile with teeth. “Sounds good.”

2019, August 2, Bridon.

“Are you sure you don’t have superpowers.” Liu Xiao looks at Vein, who left their meeting ten minutes ago to “take care of some problems” at some place halfway across Bridon, and just came back.

“Hmm? Yes, I’m sure. Why?”

Liu Xiao looks down at his watch for extra dramatic effect. “You left ten minutes ago, and just now came back. The trip there took you five minutes.”

“I see post-secondary education hasn’t failed to teach you basic division.”

Is he dense? Or is he doing this on purpose? “Vein. You crossed half of Bridon in five minutes. What do you call that other than superpowers? Even the police aren’t that fast.”

“The police are useless. Of course I’m faster than them.” Vein spectacularly misses the point. He starts taking off his slightly damp coat and hanging it on the rack. He’s not even sweating, what the hell. “Bridon is a small place, and I know a lot of shortcuts.”

 Was that some sort of code for I can make portals? Liu Xiao tilts his head down a little bit, angling his gaze. He’s aiming for sharply suspicious mastermind, but he gets the feeling he ends up closer to guy whose glasses aren’t quite the right prescription so now he has to look over their frame whenever he’s looking at something close to him. “Ok. How do you get there, then? What are you doing in those shortcuts of yours?”

Vein looks at him with the expression of someone looking at a three-year-old about to fall down the stairs. Or a guy whose glasses are the wrong prescription. “…I run? Liu Xiao, is your head okay?”

Ok. This is officially going nowhere.

Liu Xiao gives up on the line of inquiry and returns back to their original topic, some of Bridon’s usually political going-ons.

His family has worked with Vein for almost ten years now. He’s not really sure how his father ended up forming a working relationship with a fourteen-year-old would-be-crimelord, but it’s gotten him his contact with Vein, so he’s not planning on complaining about it too much. Their long-term cooperation has cemented their relationship with an easy trust that Liu Xiao would have trouble finding elsewhere.

A trust that’s been recently shaken.

Vein never lies unless necessary; even then, Liu Xiao suspects he’d rather shoot, stab, and otherwise maim his way out of a confrontation than weasel through with a lie. That’s why, when Liu Xiao said to him I feel like you don’t trust me as much recently, Vein responded easily with well, yeah, you pretty much plotted my death.

The accusation passed by them easily, fading away from view as if it was a weightless spectre. This is the way all conflicts between them go; the threat of mutually assured destruction keeps them both tidily within their own lanes. Two smiling predators circling the same carcass, knowing it’ll be both their losses if they can’t settle things peacefully.

Wang Qing was a genuine surprise. Vein wasn’t supposed to die there, and Liu Xiao certainly didn’t think that he would. He’d guessed maybe a 95% survival rate, death only if Vein’s tranquilizer shot missed. When Xia Fei had ran out of the theatre on shaking legs, Liu Xiao barely blinked an eye. 5% wasn’t impossible, after all. He had a plan for the possibility.

He’d planned to earn back Vein’s favour by tidying up the mess that his “death” left behind. That backfired, when Vein instead grew suspicious of how exactly he’d learned of his trusted subordinates and codes. That was his mistake – he misread the other man, thought he’d put competence above trustworthiness.

And now Vein thinks that Liu Xiao had something to do with his death. Liu Xiao can’t even defend himself, because what can he say? Their cooperation right now is hinged on the fact that Liu Xiao has information about superpowers that Vein wants and doesn’t have. So if he explains why he didn’t tell him about Wang Qing’s power, there’s a chance Vein might just up and leave after getting the information he wanted in the first place. He can’t explain how he knew the names of his subordinates or code without giving away his own trump card.

So now they’re stuck.

Neither of them backing down.

Pretending everything’s going just fine.

“How’s Felix?” Liu Xiao says during a lull in the conversation.

Prior to the faked death, Xia Fei (or Felix, as Vein called him) popped up in probably at least one or two conversations a week. Hey, Felix’s calculator broke, do you think this one would work as a replacement? You know, Felix really hates fish head soup. Oh, I can’t meet this Saturday, Felix wants me to go help him fight (?) some geese (?) at the park (?) (Liu Xiao still isn’t sure what that quite was). Liu Xiao has never before learned so much about another person entirely against his will. Now, Vein’s cagey even about him.

“He’s doing fine. A little shaken up, but he’ll be ok.”

“That’s all?”

Vein gives him a look. “What else do you want to know? His class schedule?”

Liu Xiao considers saying yes, just because he thinks there’s an actual chance that Vein does know Xia Fei’s schedule for the upcoming semester. “I just thought you’d have more to say about him. You like him quite a bit, don’t you?”

“I suppose he’s fun to watch. That’s it.” Vein’s heartbeat is steady and he speaks with a completely straight face. Incredible. He fully believes in what he’s saying.

If it weren’t for the fact that he has long trained himself to tailor every external expression of self for strategy and manipulation, Liu Xiao thinks he would roll his eyes right now. He could see Vein being a particularly challenging PSYC 301 project. Third year psychology, unit three: How to get your business partner, who has not felt the warmth of genuine human connection in all twenty-four years of his life, to realize that he actually has someone whom he cares about and who cares about him.

Class average: 0.

He steers the conversation a bit to the left. “Are you not going to tell him that you’re not really dead?”

Vein makes a face at him. At least his facial expressions are as entertaining as always. “Why would I do that? He doesn’t need to know about this.” When he says ‘this’, he gestures to their entire room.

The stacks of research-related books on the table. A map on the wall with thumbtacks and sticky notes. A hidden compartment in the table hiding a key and a sheet of ciphers. The room, instead of having a proper overhead LED, is lit up by three lamps strewn about the room, and a mysteriously glowing plane of glass mounted on a wall. Liu Xiao doesn’t even know how many guns and knives Vein has hidden around the room.

“Maybe not. But don’t you want to involve him? He could be useful.”

Vein’s face grows immediately dark. “No. He’s just a university kid. If you met someone who’s just going through their life as normal, is your first reaction to drag them into this sordid business?”

“I only make friends with strong people,” he says in lieu of an answer. And people who have the potential to be strong. Pink hair and wide, cautious red eyes flash by in his mind. Ah, he’s excited to see the little hunter-wannabe again. “Besides, didn’t you involve him while following those two kids from China?”

“…” Vein doesn’t say anything to that. But Liu Xiao hears his heartbeat speed up, for a few beats, and then settle back down to its usual lazy adagio. “Speaking on those two kids. What do you have on them?”

Liu Xiao shrugs. “Only what you know. The white-haired one is Lu Guang, and the black-haired one is Cheng Xiaoshi. They’re both university students from China. I’m afraid I haven’t been able to track them since then.” He has other problems to deal with, like helping Vein quell conflicts in Chinatown. Unlike Vein, who has the spare time to blitz around Bridon doing God-knows-what. “Why?”

Once, there was a time when Vein’s pulse would have remained steady as he asked for information without hesitation. And when Liu Xiao responded, he would have taken the answer at more-or-less face value, and moved on with it. Now, Liu Xiao sees a flash of doubt in his expression, something that hasn’t been directed towards him in years.

The dying ordeal is proving to be more of an issue than he’d hoped it’d be.

Vein shrugs and leans back in his chair. “They seem suspicious. After all, anyone who you’d be interested in can’t be all that simple.”

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

Liu Xiao blinks. A white lie.

… Interesting.

Chapter Text

Cheng Xiaoshi closes the laptop screen as gently, yet quickly, as he can. It’s a dinky old thing that looks like it might service well as a blunt force weapon.

This is the last, and most difficult, Li Tianchen photo they’re going to dive into. It will complete their collection of damning evidence for Qian Jin and hopefully Liu Min: admission of blackmail and murder, possession of sensitive records, and an audio recording of the two having a meeting about Liu Min’s illegitimate income source. They could collect information if Captain Xiao asked, but these three alone should at the very least justify launching an investigation.

As for Li Tianchen and Li Tianxi, hopefully, Captain Xiao could be convinced into not putting them on trial for murder, if only because there’s no precedence for superpowered murder. Thinking about it makes Cheng Xiaoshi want to grit his teeth at the injustice for their victims, but — he has to admit, as they are now, there’s no point throwing them in jail when they’re not doing anything anymore.

Lu Guang had, for once in their partnership, actually given him a play-by-play of how the dive will go. He needs to go grab the recorder from the kitchen cabinet while pouring himself a glass of apple juice. The photo was taken at around 5 pm, and the conversation between Qian Jin and Liu Min happens at 10 pm. Li Tianchen is known to go to sleep around that time, so Cheng Xiaoshi will have to make sure it looks like he’s in the room for the entire duration of the conversation.

The first five hours pass without incident. At this point, Li Tianchen is a skin Cheng Xiaoshi is familiar with wearing as if his own. It drapes over him like a coat, a little baggy but still fitting.

At 10:15, he crouches just beside the door inside of Li Tianchen room. It’s a little funny, he thinks, that despite Li Tianchen’s valiant efforts, Cheng Xiaoshi still ended up being in his room. He doesn’t see what’s so mortifying about it, to be honest – there’s basically nothing in Li Tianchen’s room. It has a bed, table, and laundry basket, and that’s pretty much it. All the items Cheng Xiaoshi saw were for utility: pen and paper, charging cables, a sewing kit.

He waits for the light outside to turn on, a little rectangle of dim yellow peeking through beneath the door frame. It’s a light from the doorway, not the hall. He opens the door, pushing the entire thing downwards so the hinges don’t creak (a suggestion from Li Tianchen) and heads into the hall.

The hall turns right at the end, opening up into the main room of the house and with the unit door on the other side of the room. beside the door, partially obscured by a wall, is the living room. The kitchen is at the very end of the main room, backed up against the right wall, and further leads into a dining room at the opposite corner of where the hallway is,

The conversation is happening in the living room. This is a problem, because the entry to the hall where Li Tianchen’s room is in view of the sofas, where Liu Min is currently sitting. If Cheng Xiaoshi wants to get close enough to get actual decent audio, he needs to somehow turn invisible for a few seconds while he runs from the hall to behind the wall separating the living room from the kitchen.

He obviously does not have invisibility powers. Instead, Lu Guang’s presence hangs the back of his mind, instructing him on where to go. It feels like that, with recent dives, Lu Guang’s presence has been stronger than usual. Cheng Xiaoshi almost thinks that he can see him, sometimes.

“On my count. Three… Two… One…”

Qian Jin is grabbing some hot water from the kitchen. As he walks back into the living room through dining, there is a brief window – only a few seconds, according to Lu Guang – where neither him nor Liu Min are looking in Cheng Xiaoshi’s direction. He needs to take that time to hide behind the wall that covers half the living room.

“Go.”

In socked feet, with a hoodie covering Li Tianchen’s peach-pink hair, Cheng Xiaoshi sprints over to the wall. He slides behind its cover right as Liu Min leans back and starts turning back around.

Success.

“Good job,” Lu Guang says, and Cheng Xiaoshi internally puffs up a little bit with pride. “You can stay here for the next twenty minutes while they talk. When they get up to leave, wait inside the kitchen until I say so, then move to hide in the dining room. Qian Jin will go straight back to his study, and you can put the recorder back where it belongs. After you make it back to Li Tianchen’s room, clap out."

“Got it,” Cheng Xiaoshi responds in his mind.

The conversation between Qian Jin and Liu Min is mind-numbing, but extremely helpful. They talk about everything from Liu Min’s income source to Qian Jin’s offer to eliminate his critics. To pass the time, Cheng Xiaoshi comments occasionally on what they say, aiming to get Lu Guang to laugh.

“Are you ok, Lu Guang? You seem tired.”

“Idiot. We’ve been on a dive for almost six hours. Of course I’m tired.”

“You should take a breather. I have the rest of this handled. I’ll call for you if I need you.”

The little imaginary Lu Guang that Cheng Xiaoshi visualizes in his head puts his little hands on his little hip all seriously. “Can’t. Who’s going to watch you?”

“It’s literally just recording.” Little imaginary Cheng Xiaoshi rolls his eyes. “Relax, man. You’re gonna get white hairs at-”

“…”

“-This rate.” Without even blinking, Cheng Xiaoshi finishes his sentence.

“…Ok. But the moment something goes wrong, call for me. I’ll be holding the photo, so I’ll be able to help you immediately.”

Cheng Xiaoshi is surprised that worked. He expected Lu Guang to insist on staying in the photo with him. This job must be more tiring for him than he thought it was. It’s strange, though. They’ve been on dives much longer than this one, and Lu Guang’s never been this drained by them before.

Nevertheless, the rest of the dive progresses smoothly. Cheng Xiaoshi cheers internally when Liu Min finally leaves – the man emits a sort of uncomfortable aura, like a speaker playing a constant humming bass, that leaves you wired and on edge. He dodges Qian Jin’s field of view, leaves the recorder where it was earlier in the day, and heads back to Li Tianchen’s room.

Right as he turns the corner of the hall, he comes face-to-face with Qian Jin, coming out of his study.

“我靠！Lu Guang!” (translation: a profanity.)

“What is i- Qian Jin?”

“Why is he here?!”

Qian Jin still has all his formal clothing on from earlier, something very intimidating to see from Li Tianchen’s height. “Li Tianchen, what are you…”

Lu Guang is still processing the information, so Cheng Xiaoshi says the first thing that comes to mind. “I was using the washroom.”

“Idiot! The washroom’s the other way!”

“Oh? But the washroom is that way.” Qian Jin points behind him, at the door directly across from Cheng Xiaoshi’s room. His face is still, as of now, locked in genuine confusion, but it won’t be long until he catches the whiff of conspiracy.

“Lu Guang, what do I do, c’mon-”

“I was going to grab some water first.”

That’s not Lu Guang.

Li Tianchen’s voice cuts cleanly into the noise.

“What-"

“Just say it.”

“I was going to grab some water first.”

Qian Jin looks to his hand. “… you don’t have the water.”

“Yeah, because I left my mug in my room. Now move, I’m thirsty.”

Cheng Xiaoshi repeats after him. Hidden from both Qian Jin, and from the telepathic bond which is now apparently between him and Li Tianchen, little imaginary Cheng Xiaoshi is having an aneurysm.

Why is Li Tianchen in his head. Why is Qian Jin in the hallway when he should’ve been in the study. Where is Lu Guang? Why hasn’t he said anything? He wouldn’t just leave. Qiao Ling said that powers can be passed on when people die, is that what happened? Was this all one big ploy to get him to leave Qiao Ling and Lu Guang in a room alone with Li Tianchen, so he could kill them and take their powers?

Rational, diving Cheng Xiaoshi thinks to himself none of that makes any sense, they’re fine. He shoves little Cheng Xiaoshi into a corner somewhere, stuffs some cotton into his mouth, and follows the directions Li Tianchen give him as if they were coming from Lu Guang.

“You better have a good explanation for this when I get back.”

The Li Tianchen bond feels different from Lu Guang’s. It’s a little bit malformed, colder, maybe, not slotting into place quite as smoothly. It digs under his skin and wriggles there like maggots. “Shut up, I’m saving you right now.”

A few minutes later, Cheng Xiaoshi claps out with enough dread in his heart to fill a cement truck. When he lands back in the studio, and sees Lu Guang and Qiao Ling perfectly safe, the resulting relief nearly levitates him.

Li Tianchen is holding Lu Guang’s arm, letting go when he sees Cheng Xiaoshi land in the room. Lu Guang gives a start.

“Cheng Xiao-” he stops when he sees Cheng Xiaoshi standing in the room. “-shi? Did you clap out early?”

“No, Li Tianchen guided me through the rest of the dive. It ended fine.”

He puts two and two together. Li Tianchen must have possessed Lu Guang to talk to him. Lu Guang connects the dots around the same time. He slumps over like a deflated balloon, and Cheng Xiaoshi, too, plops down onto the couch and against Lu Guang. “I’m… so sorry. I should’ve seen that coming.” Lu Guang says at the floor.

“Ah, it’s fine, it’s fine! Look, we got it done, didn’t we?” Cheng Xiaoshi tells him hurriedly. He’s never seen Lu Guang this genuinely affected by his own mistakes. He almost wishes it had been his error that landed them there, just so he wouldn’t have to see that expression. Qiao Ling, too, notices something off and comes on over.

“Don’t be so gloomy. Everything worked out in the end.” Qiao Ling pats both of them on the back. She messes up Cheng Xiaoshi’s hair very specifically. “So, you do listen during dives, after all?” He bats her hand away

Li Tianchen rolls his eyes. “Thank you, Li Tianchen, for saving us from our own stupidity. We truly couldn’t have done it without you.”

Qiao Ling laughs. “Well, it’s true. You did save us there. How did you know you could do that?”

“It was just a lucky guess. Since Xiaoxi and I can link up our powers, I figured the same might apply for Lu-xiansheng over there. You may thank me now for my brilliance.”

Lu Guang looks up. His expression is back to its default blank, now. Cheng Xiaoshi wonders what would have to happen for him to see Lu Guang smiling for once after a dive. “I do have to thank you. We couldn’t have completed the dive safely without you.”

Li Tianchen’s face does a little funny dance, like he’s trying to frown but can’t quite locate his eyebrows. Li Tianxi smiles happily and hugs him.

Cheng Xiaoshi leans a little more into Lu Guang’s warmth. It’s soft. It’s comfy. It’s nice.

That following night, Li Tianchen pulls out his phone, texts Liu Xiao a few amused messages, and goes to bed looking forward to being rid of a thorn at his side.

When he wakes up, twelve hours later, he’s tied to a chair.

Goddammit. Will one thing in his life go his way?

August 13, 2019. Yingdu.

The floor buttons on the elevator dim ominously with each passing floor. Their red light dies as people filter in and out of the sliding doors. 3. 4. 8. 9.

Dan Yazar lives on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise apartment building, in unit 1422. He is a coroner with the Bridon Police force; according to Xia Fei’s sources, he performed the autopsy on Vein.

Xia Fei skips out of the elevator, wearing a glittering pink backpack and with his hair in two loose braids. Now would be a good time to mention: he currently has the appearance of a seven-year-old-girl.

He locates 1422 quite easily, sucks in a breath in preparation, and knocks. He hopes that Dan is in and awake – it would be a bother for him to have to come back again later.

“Coming!” a man’s voice calls, then the door opens. Dan is much, much taller than Xia Fei expected, or maybe that’s just because he’s short right now. He’s wearing an orange hoodie, and vitiligo speckles his face. He looks confused at Xia Fei standing in front of him.

Xia Fei pushes against him, trying his very best to limit his own strength (he had found out that when he shapeshifts into other people, his strength does not change, which implies some… interesting things about kinesiology). “Someone’s chasing me! I need to hide!” he cries.

He can’t see Dan’s face, but his body language shifts instantly. He sidesteps and lets Xia Fei into the room, closing and locking the door behind him.

Good. Now he just needs somewhere to actually hide.

He manages to convince Dan to let him hide inside of his closet, and tells him to pretend I’m here, don’t even talk to me. He breathes in relief as the closet doors finally close. It’s not a moment too soon, as less than a minute later, his shapeshifting breaks.

Xia Fei, like any good STEM student, immediately ran experiments on himself after finding out about having superpowers. With the help of Microsoft Excel, he surmised the following important points: 1. Each shift lasts for, at most, ten minutes. 2. His power has a thirty minute cool down between activations. 3. He can shift using any photo, but his shift lasts longer if they’re photos taken by himself.

So. He could leave the closet as himself, and get what he needs done that way, but it’s safer if he gives it another thirty.

Thirty minutes in the uncomfortable closet later, he taps his forehead against his phone, just as he did in the quiet supermarket outside the apartment building. His next photo is one of a muscular man at a bar he’d snapped a few nights ago.

Shapeshifting doesn’t feel like anything, until it does. His power does not provide him the benefit of an updated proprioception. It just drops him into a new body and leaves him to flounder. He’s lucky that, unlike the previous photo of the little girl, the subject of this photo is at least roughly the same height as he is.

He bursts out of the closet door, and finds Dan on his laptop (probably googling what to do if a kid shows up at your apartment door and tells you she needs to hide in your closet). Dan looks up and does a double-take.

Xia Fei raises a knife to point at him. Another rule of shapeshifting: Anything not attached to him when he shifts into someone else stays behind, and anything attached to him goes… wherever his real body goes whenever he shifts, returning when the power breaks. Yeah. He hasn’t really thought through the implications that his power has on thermodynamics yet.

“Cooperate, and I won’t hurt you,” he says to Dan, who’s moved to take his phone out of his pocket.

The other man hesitates for a second, then takes his phone out anyway.

That’s not good. Ok. He can still save this. What do people in those mafia movies do when things like this happen? Ah, right. They usually have guns, not kitchen knives. Um. Uh.

Xia Fei quickly strides across the room, trying to psyche himself up to stab someone if he needs to. “Who do you think’s faster? The police, or my knife?” Oh my god, please be intimidated, Xia Fei doesn’t think he even knows where to aim if he’s actually going to stab him.

That gets Dan to put the phone down. “What do you want?”

“I want in-“ before Xia Fei can finish his sentence, Dan strikes. His left elbow juts out and Xia Fei just barely manages to dodge; his right hand comes up to grab for the weapon.

???

One million llamas leap across the green grassy field of Xia Fei’s mind.

What are they putting in coroners’ breakfast cereal nowadays?

He jumps back, putting distance between them. “Are you insane?!” he cries out. This isn’t good. He needs to get the information, leave, then rush down fourteen flights of stairs and outside somewhere sparse within ten minutes. He can’t waste more time here.

Luckily, without the element of surprise, Dan, too, doesn’t seem thrilled by their situation. Xia Fei grits his teeth, trying to mask his anxiety as anger. “I’ll let that one go for now. All I need from you is just some information about an autopsy you performed a few months ago, then I’ll be on my way.”

“Which?”

“A red-haired man named Vein. He died three months ago, on June 26. Your report claimed myocardial infarction, but there’s no way that was actually the case, right?”

Right?

“I didn’t perform that autopsy.” Dan says flatly.

Anger flares in Xia Fei’s guts. “Don’t you-“

“You don’t get it.” Dan interrupts. He’s tucked the phone back into his pocket fully now. “I was assigned to that autopsy, yes, but my supervisor reached out to me and ordered me to leave the body untouched. I didn’t write a single word in that report, I just signed my name at the bottom.”

Xia Fei sucks in a breath.

He wasn’t expecting that.

He had thought, surely, that he’d be told the real cause of death was poison, or internal bleeding, or a hidden wound, not- not this.

“Who’s your supervisor?”

Dan looked to the floor. “Elizabeth Claire. Don’t bother looking into that. She died a few days after the fake autopsy.”

Elizabeth Claire. Regardless, the name is useful.

“Did she explain why you couldn’t do the autopsy?”

“No. Just said to drop it.”

“…Did you ever see the body?”

When Xia Fei imagined how this confrontation would go, he’d seen himself righteous. He’d imagined a coward who would tell him that he found signs of struggle but was sworn to secrecy, or maybe a conspirator who would smile viciously and tell him well, he’s dead now, isn’t he? But here he is, in the apartment of Vein’s false “coroner,” and he finds he just feels empty.

He’s holding someone at knifepoint in his own apartment. There’s an empty coffee mug on the table, a fish tank by the window, a knitting project sitting on the couch, and a calendar hung sideways next to a crow painting, no doubt as some kind of inside joke. Dan probably thinks he’s going to end up dead after this, too. Oh God. What has Xia Fei gotten himself into?

Dan’s voice snaps him out of his momentary lapse in concentration. “I did. Elizabeth ran in right as I was going to make the first cut. Obviously, I didn’t get the autopsy done, but I can tell you that I didn’t see any obvious causes of death.”

Hope flickers in Xia Fei’s heart, a little spark of warmth that’s doused as soon as it comes. “But he was definitely dead. There were no signs of life.”

He could stay for longer, ask more questions, but that would risk running out of time. He’s far too recognizable in his true body – the dual-toned hair acts like a highlighter, drawing attention to the rest of his features, no matter how many layers of masks he covers them with. He needs to leave.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” he bites out, turns around, and walks out.

Chapter Text

Thursday morning is cloudy. Grey light, filtered through clouds mixed with the barest hint of smog, makes the view outside the window look a little bit more dead than usual. Li Tianxi likes overcast days; the soft, unifying grey-blue makes her feel safer than blinding gold.

But there’s something wrong inside the apartment. The air is stale. It’s too quiet. Pinpricks run down the length of her arm.

Her brother isn’t present at breakfast. Sleeping in, maybe, but then Qian Jin sits down with his bowl of congee and, oh, there’s something wrong about him.

There’s always been something wrong with Qian Jin, even before he started leading her brother into the bushes of a dark forest, before he shot her, before everything. She doesn’t like the way he looks at her. Qian Jin sees her brother as a tool, but he sees Li Tianxi as a burden. He never looks at her for long. When she walks into the room, he doesn’t bother to greet her. He makes her talk to him with AAC, even though she prefers Sign.

But there’s something extra-wrong with him today. A dark cloud of irritation around his head, a stiffness to the way he holds his utensils. Usually, today would be the kind of day where Li Tianxi definitely doesn’t talk, retreats into her room and waits out the low-pressure storm.

Where’s her brother?

She finishes eating breakfast and goes to open his bedroom door. Qian Jin grabs her arms before she reaches the doorknob.

“Let’s not go in there, Li Tianxi.” He smiles. “Your brother’s ill. He needs his sleep.”

It’s a lie, and it makes Li Tianxi nervous, because why is he lying? What’s wrong with her brother? Why is he smiling like that – unnatural, showing too many teeth.

Li Tianxi closes the door to her room.

She had promised her brother, when her power first manifested, to not look into his photos. He cited privacy, and she respects that, but there’s something wrong today and she needs to make sure if he’s ok or not. If he’s even still in his room, or if he’s out there again, starting things he won’t be able to finish, straying further and further away from home.

There’s nothing when she looks inside the photo. She backs out. She’ll try again in an hour or two.

Qian Jin leaves the house at midday, and with him, the nerves in the air also leave. Li Tianxi stays in her room, still; his anger leaves residue in the rooms outside she doesn’t want to touch.

The next time she looks into her brother’s photo, he’s awake. He’s tied to a chair. It’s dark, and Qian Jin is there. The wrong look on his face has transformed into a familiar one, cruel and powerful all at once, something which pins her to the ground and steals her already barely-there courage.

How did he find out? Fuck, is Xiaoxi safe? I need to get out of here. Are the documents still where I left them?

Li Tianxi escapes from the photo, her heart beating just as fast as her brother’s.

Li Tianchen’s in trouble.

Qian Jin wants to hurt him, want to hurt her, wants to hurt them like everyone before him. She needs to do something. Anything.

The photo studio. Qiao Ling-jiejie and Cheng Xiaoshi-gege and Lu Guang-gege. They helped her once before, surely they’ll do it again.

She finds her brother’s phone and her own, grabs her fare card, and she’s about to go before she remembers that she’s probably not going to come back. Should she bring anything else…?

An extra change of clothes, and her wallet with her ID inside it. A charger for her phone. Then, Li Tianxi’s off.

She’s ridden the bus to the photo studio something like three or four times now, so it’s a familiar route. She hops off the bus at her stop and rushes to the studio.

October 13, 2019.

The Undersky is a portion of the Bridon Underground seldom known to anyone outside of their trade, if you could call it one. Unlike the rest of the city, carved up into spheres of influence, the Undersky is neutral and has remained resolutely so for decades. As the head of one of Bridon’s biggest factions — representing Chinatown and its subsidiaries — even Vein treads carefully here.

He makes way to a door hidden behind a curtain, in what looks like an abandoned commercial district. It opens into a set of stairs that ends with another set of doors, the chipping white paint streaked with dirt.

Short-long, short-long, short-long.

A few seconds later, the door opens.

“Vein,” says Remus Iah, Bridon’s best gunsmith — at least, the best that Vein’s ever met. “Thought you croaked.”

Vein shrugs. “So they say.”

And technically, he’s right. He did die. He just came back to life right afterwards.

Remus takes this in stride, because it’s the Bridon underground so honestly, what the hell, and lets him inside.

Two people operate this store — Remus, and Penny. Remus handles firearms, whereas Penny deals in blades. Their skill is as evident as the colour of the sky. You could tell just by looking at the weapons they have on display on their walls. It’s been a few months since Vein last visited, and he sees a few changes. An old set of knives have been switched out for a strange pole-thing, and a new rifle has been mounted on a wall.

They sit down at the informal Dealmaking Table. Remus is a little person, and Vein is pretty tall, meaning that between the two of them, there’s about two feet of difference. Sitting down makes the difference a little less prominent, but Vein is still acutely aware of the fact that half of the furniture in the room is tailored for someone not his size.

There are almond cookies on the table. Vein takes one, though he’s vaguely aware that the cookies being there is probably supposed to be an intimidation tactic. Oh well. His appetite is well-known enough to be forgiven. Remus, indeed, doesn’t blink an eye “I’m guessing I can’t ask you to regale me with the tale of how you faked your death? A heart attack, I heard.”

Hmm. How he wishes that he faked his death. “Maybe later.”

Coming from anyone else, the phrase would sound like appeasement. But coming from Vein, it is an actual promise. Remus’s eyes shine a little bit.

Vein’s here for some routine upkeep on his guns, and to replace one of his fan blades. He’s a stable, routine customer; he comes here every few months to get cleaning that he can’t do himself done. It’s a slow day, so Remus tells him the job will be ready in an hour or two and that he can stick around, if he’d like, or he could come back later.

Vein keeps nibbling the almond cookie (it’s a bit too crumbly, so it gets everywhere) and decides to stick around. Maybe he can convince Penny to come play some card games with him while he waits. He’s gotten a little sick of his job as of late; being legally dead comes with annoying limitations he has to act within. It’s good, he thinks, to have an hour off from his duties. Work-life balance, or something.

Remus cling-clangs in the background as he pulls out his tools. Vein’s eyes rove the walls of the room. There’s rifles, handguns, revolvers, knife sets, more guns…

Hmm.

He wonders if he should get Felix a weapon.

The kid’s been getting bolder since discovering his own power. Despite having what should be an easy ticket out of most confrontations, Felix still texts him those near-death-experience location pins every few weeks, exploiting his power to make riskier decisions. He always gets out of them in the end, but it’s a close thing. Vein’s not sure what Felix keeps texting him for; to him, he’s dead. Maybe he’s trying to summon his spirit?

“Hey, Remus,” he calls. “Do you have any suggestions for novice weapons?”

“Uh, depends,” Remus yells back. “Who is it for?”

“Young adult, male, needs it for self defence.”

“… Can I have more context?”

Vein weighs the pros and cons of how much to reveal. Most Undersky residents have their own codes of confidentiality, and the same applies to Remus and Penny. Vein’s never been able to glean any information about Bridon’s residents from them, and he can only assume that no one else has been, either. If he trusts them with the knowledge of his living…ness, he can probably also trust them with information about Felix.

He still doesn’t want to tell him too much. Not for any practical reason, but in a way more like a child who’s found a good hiding spot in the trees. This secret is his, and he doesn’t want anyone else to have it.

“He’s involved in investigating something. He’s not part of any organized faction, though he mainly moves around Chinatown. He works for his own goals. And he has a pretty typical civilian persona.”

He turned nineteen three months ago, and my gift for him was a company-wide notice of leadership change. His least favourite class is fluid mechanics I. He keeps nearly getting himself hurt or killed investigating my death, and I can only shield him from so much before something slips past me.

Remus comes back into view, tapping his pen against a pad of paper. It’s a strange little thing, obviously modified. Snakes of red and blue twine around its wooden casing. It writes with the smoothness of gel with the control of ballpoint and, damn, he wants a pen like that. His are all ass. “Does he have any allies? And does he need the weapon on him when he’s in his civilian persona?”

Vein sighs. “No and yes. The little idiot didn’t think to keep his two personas separate when he started out. And he refuses to trust anyone else.”

Which is also exactly what he did when he started, but that’s beside the point. For one, he has the very valid defence of being twelve at the time. His first real act of self-directed criminal shenanigans was also committed while under the haze of a fourty-degree fever.

“I would suggest two weapons, then. He’s going to want something like a gravity knife, or your fan, in case someone comes after him in his civilian life. Penny can suggest some designs. For a firearm, I would suggest just a small revolver.” Remus cringes at what he’s about to say next. “Because, I’ll be honest, unless he’s as strong as you are, the gun will just be there for cover while he hauls ass.”

“A gun won’t work. He doesn’t know how to shoot.”

“…”

“He also isn’t very good with knives.” His current weapon of choice is a Swiss army knife, which he uses more like a stake than a knife. “He can’t fight very well, either.”

Remus writes down what he says, contemplates, and then says gravely: “Have you considered dissuading him from our trade?”

Vein smiles at the engineer, flashing his canines, eyes curving into slits. “Do you mean to say that you can’t fulfill the order?”

Disregarding the fact that he can’t contact the kid at all, Vein thinks he wouldn’t, even if he could. After all, if he really wants to stop Felix, all he needs to do is to plant his own “murderer” for him to find. Once Felix finds who he’s looking for, he’ll stop.

He doesn’t want to. He wants to see how far his little fox cub, who clinged onto his first saviour in a foreign country like a duckling imprinting after hatch, will go. Felix is a strange little spark of light in Bridon’s oppressive dullness, tender spring grass amongst decay. Vein wants to see what he does next, wants to know the shape and feel of a corruption born out of loyalty to a man the boy knew for less than a year. Arming him serves to satiate his curiosity, he decides. He wouldn’t want his little curios to die so early.

Remus’s easy expression freezes for a moment. “No, just a remark. We can figure something out for-“

The door behind him opens.

Vein whips his body around.  The room is set up so that Remus can see the rest of room, while he’s facing the corner with his back towards the entrance, and that has never been a problem before but now it is-

He tears his (backup) gun out of his holster and aims, but then someone else shoots first.

Qiao Ling is busy writing an email – her fourth one of the day, god, she’s already so sick of them – when her phone starts blaring. It’s Cheng Xiaoshi.

“HolyshitQiaoLingcomeover,” he says in one breath.

She’s out of her seat and tearing down towards the photo studio in a second. Are he and  Lu Guang in trouble? Christ, they’ve been in the past for- not even two weeks yet, can’t she have one month where those two don’t try and give her a heart attack? Who the hell did she piss off in her last life to land her here-

She arrives to find Lu Guang and Cheng Xiaoshi sitting anxiously next to an even more anxious Li Tianxi. Li Tianchen is nowhere to be found.

“Is everyone ok!?” she cries.

Li Tianxi stands up, stumbles over, and drags her over to the couch. Lu Guang sighs. “We  think Li Tianchen’s in trouble.”

The dread in her heart subsides a little bit, and guilt wells up immediately after. She still feels complicated about Li Tianchen. It manifests in a collision of worry and relief and karmic retribution, you murderous little pink scruff she doesn’t want to untangle right now. She pushes all of that down in favour of the present issue.

“What happened?”

Li Tianxi has her phone with her, which means she can type out what she wants to say with an AAC and all Qiao Ling has to do is listen.

The flat, mechanical voice of the software relays the story with entirely too much calm. Li Tianchen got kidnapped, which means Qian Jin has probably somehow figured out what they’re doing. Li Tianxi didn’t get a chance to check the cabinet for the hidden documents – never mind the fact that she doesn’t even know where the cabinet is, since she wasn’t a diver – but there’s a good chance that they’re gone.

“We need to contact captain Xiao,” says Cheng Xiaoshi.

They’ve been keeping contact with captain Xiao for the past two weeks, after quickly resolving the Doudou case and preparing the case against Qian Jin. As it turns out, Qiao Ling’s power is exceptionally useful, and it has earned them captain Xiao’s full-hearted trust.

“I guess there is something good to come out of this, and that’s that we can definitely try Qian Jin for kidnapping now.” Lu Guang says after getting off the phone with captain Xiao, who’s coming in ten minutes.

“You’re only ever funny in the weirdest situations.” Cheng Xiaoshi runs a hand through his hair, looking like he might go bald from stress. “How did Qian Jin find out? What the hell changed?”

“Time is unpredictable. It could’ve been something as small as a different grocery order that cascaded into a larger change later.”

“That’s also very much not the point right now,” Qiao Ling interrupted the two’s doom spiral. Well. Cheng Xiaoshi’s doom spiral. Lu Guang’s “I’m providing an answer to your problem, what do you mean you still have emotions despite that fact” spiral. “Xiaoxi, would you mind passing me a picture of your brother?”

Li Tianxi hands her her phone, opened and showing a photo from a few days ago of Li Tianchen trying to hide the world’s ugliest crayon drawing behind his sweater sleeves. Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang look at her curiously.

“What? Never seen someone use superpowers before?” she says.

Sometimes she wonders how those two own a business together.

It’s not the first time she’s dived into a photo to solve a crime. She did the same for another similar case, after Doudou, also incidentally a case with a missing brother. Except it turns out that the brother was dead, so. She hopes it won’t be the same with this case.

“-your business,” he grits out, arms sore from being restrained for so long.

“On the contrary, I think it very much is my business.” Ugh. He sounds so pretentious. “I don’t remember you ever going to that little shop before.”

In the background of the argument, another mind grips onto her identity with an iron fist and wanders. Qiao Ling is Li Tianchen, but Li Tianchen is not Qiao Ling, and that dichotomy is- an interesting feeling. The memories of Li Tianchen are vaguely there, beneath the surface, pulsing and breathing like a living thing. Qiao Ling grabs at whatever she can with wispy hands, flashes slipping through her fingers, leaving behind a thin coat of sensation.

Li Tianchen’s focus is on Qian Jin. It takes real, palpably physical effort to tear herself away from that. She focuses on the surroundings. A dark, cold room, lifelessly grey. Tiled floor. A shelf on their right.

A convenient memory flashes past. It’s one without context, but the accompanying feeling: regret, mockery, it’ll-be-different-this-time, places the memory concretely in June of the previous-next year. Li Tianchen and Qian Jin are having a conversation there, too, about Lu Guang, it seems. She gets a too-vivid view of Li Tianchen jabbing his hands into Lu Guang’s wound. It overlaps with her own very real memory of blood on her hands and a fruit knife with a bloody hilt.

It’s all worth it, though, in the end – she clutches the memory tightly and bares her teeth at the forces trying to pull her off, and she’s rewarded with a hazy recollection of the outside of the building. It’s a tall, abandoned tower, surrounded by similarly empty buildings.

This is the furthest her power will let her see. Li Tianchen has shifted tracks to the present moment, and the memory she was holding onto fades as his attention steers away from it.

Still, it is enough.

She doesn’t realize she’s out of the dive, really, until she hears welcome in, boss! chiming at the front door. It takes a moment to adjust. She’s back in her own mind; there’s no need to grab at any fading memories, to brace for the whiplash of another person’s thought processes.

Qiao Ling is sitting on the couch. It is the morning of August 6^th. Captain Xiao is staring at her, concerned.

“I’m fine,” she says, unsure if anyone asked in the first place. “Someone go get me a pencil. I need to draw out how the building looks before I forget.”

It ends up being Li Tianxi who draws the building instead, because Qiao Ling’s art skills leave… a lot to be desired. Li Tianxi’s building looks like an actual object which exists in three-dimensional space. Qiao Ling’s looks like a quadrilateral. She can’t even say it looks like a rectangle; she doesn’t think any of its angles are ninety degrees.

“I’ll have my staff search for anything that matches,” captain Xiao says.

Cheng Xiaoshi taps Lu Guang on the shoulder. “Hey, Lu Guang, do you think your power might be useful?”

“Mine…?” Lu Guang takes a moment to think. “If I can have security footage.”

“Is it any faster than just flipping through the cameras manually?”

A flash of a grimace appears on Lu Guang’s face, then disappears before Qiao Ling can figure out what it means. “It can be. No harm in trying.”

They would want to leave the photo studio anyway, because Qian Jin mentioned their shop to Li Tianchen, which means he may very well know of their involvement with Li Tianchen’s documents. They can only hope that he doesn’t know about the superpowers thing yet, though the chances are… not optimistic, on that front.

Anxiety boils in Qiao Ling’s chest, but she slams the lid over it before it gets a chance to overflow. They’ll find him. They have the advantage: knowledge, time, powers. Things will be different this time. They have to be.

Chapter Text

The intruder’s head snaps back and his body falls, framed by a bloom of blood around the door frame.

Remus is holding his pen, smoke drifting from its reverse end which has been modified into a barrel. An empty casing rolls off the table. A clever weapon. Now he wants a pen like that even more.

“Relax,” he says to Remus, whose eyes are blown wide and staring at the door. “That looks like one of the Sons from Arlington. They operate alone.” Only the Sons would wear hats so hideous they could give Liu Xiao a heart attack.

Footsteps stomp into the main room. “WHAT THE FUCK – oh hey, mate – WAS THAT!?”

Penny is a massive woman, nearly as tall as Vein is, and built like a cement block. Hypertrophic scars run up and down what’s visible of her arms and torso. He’s fairly certain that if a truck ran into her, it would end up crumpling. Her wild black hair sweeps behind her shoulders.

“Just an ordered hit. You two might have to consider upgrading your security.” Vein tells her.

“For sure,” says Remus, his playful voice temporarily flat and monotonous. “Penny, could you come over? We have an order for a weapon. We’ll clean up the body once we’re done.”

Vein gets up to move his chair so that they’re all sitting in a circle around the table. It is a respect he rarely shows to anyone. Remus shows her the notepad, which she studies.

“The hell is going on in Chinatown?” Penny scratches her head. “I’m gonna be honest with you, mate, this one’s a tough one. I could get you something like a good switchblade, or a disguised polearm, but your options are much better if you could somehow train the kid on how to fight. Else, anything we make’s probably just gonna end up arming his opponents anyway.”

Vein thinks. “I might be able to pull some strings on that one. I can get him all the resources he needs to learn, but whether or not he does will be up to him.”

“I believe that he will,” says Remus. “Anyone willing to step underground to investigate something is willing to learn how to fight for it. I’m actually amazed he hasn’t done so, yet.”

He hasn’t because he has the superpower to shapeshift, and uses that instead of his fists to get out of tough situations, but Vein can’t exactly say that.

With Penny present at the table, they settle on two weapons: a revolver, modified to minimize its noise and recoil in exchange for lessened range, and throwing blades. The blades’ design is reminiscent of his own fan, only, for Felix, they’ll be disguised as dangling jewelry that goes around his hips.

It makes him smile to know that Felix will use the same kind of weapon that he does. It’s like playing with a dressup doll; except the doll is his former employee who’s investigating his murder, and the outfits are guns. Penny and Remus look visibly disturbed by his expression.

“Now, would you like to hear the story of my death?”

The light, metaphorically, finally turns back on behind Remus’s eyes since the intruder showed up. Penny is less interested in the highs and lows of Bridon underground politics, but she also looks curious.

“Do the two of you believe in superpowers?”

“Yeah,” the two say simultaneously.

Vein takes this in stride, because, again, it’s the Bridon underground so honestly, what the hell.

“There’s a woman in Chinatown. Well, used to be one. She had the power to cause someone to experience a fake “death” for a certain amount of time. She had something that I wanted from her.”

He watches for their reaction.

He’s not volunteering this story for no reason, as much as he likes telling it to freak people out. Even though the two weaponsmiths would never tell him anything useful, information is transmitted in other ways – expressions, reactions, pauses, thinking. Most of the time, whatever this sort of observation tells him is vague enough that it’s pretty much worthless. With this, though – he knows so little, because Liu Xiao won’t fucking tell him anything, so he’ll take whatever he can get.

There’s no recognition when he mentions the woman in Chinatown, but Penny does make some sort of expression at the description of her power. He notes that down mentally to chew on later.

“I got it from her — only, it seemed she was possessed by someone else while we were fighting. Then, that possessed person left her body, and she used her power on me. I died, and that was the end of it.” He leans back on his chair, shrugging. “It’s a pretty anti-climactic way to die.”

“I see.” Remus nods. “And I’m guessing you’re going after her now?”

“No, actually!” Vein says cheerfully. He does love subverting expectations. “An associate of mine is going after her. I’m going after someone else. You see, I wasn’t supposed to die in that situation. I would’ve been fine, actually, but some kid from China delayed me to make sure I “died.” Why exactly he wanted me dead, I don’t know. We think he also has some kind of superpower, and so I’m going after him instead.”

Remus and Penny take a second to sort out the web of homicide their heads. Then, he sees the revelation come to them.

The Undersky follows a general code of neutrality in all Bridon conflicts. But in terms of any conflicts they have with foreigners, no such code applies. In fact, most members of the Undersky are motivated to assist in the Bridon underground in fighting against other cities — after all, if their city comes out on top, then everyone in it benefits.

Vein isn’t going after a woman in Chinatown, who may have connections and loyalties with other powers in Bridon. He’s going after some kids from across the globe — and, sure, there may be some ties that stretch across continents like that, but the chances are low.

The set of Remus’s jaw becomes stiffer, and Penny’s eyes narrow. They do have useful information after all.

“And what’s your plan for that?”

Vein leans in. “I was hoping you would be able to help. I’m truly clueless to the world of superpowers. I was wondering if the two of you may know anything.”

He waits.

“If you could, please tell us what you know about superpowers first?”

“Nothing!”

He is so glad of his reputation for honesty. If someone else said that to him, he’s not sure if he would believe it.

Remus looks like he wants a good swig of something strong, though he is obviously denied that. “… Right. Ok. Um… So, yeah. Superpowers exist. They have an incidence rate of, something like, one in twenty thousand? Ten thousand? But not everyone who has them knows they have them. They tend to be passed down genetically, and activate later in life. Uh…”

“They’re usually pretty useless,” Penny chimes in.

“Not useless. Niche. They tend to have specific use cases and activation conditions. Like, ah, we knew a guy who could make his voice really loud, but only when he was in falsetto.”

So, a screaming baby?  “Curious.”

“Yeah. Dude shattered a lot of glass. Never watched horror movies with him after the first one.”

It seems the two of them are leaving the topic there. But Vein isn’t satisfied. The main thing he’s pulled out from that is genetics — he’ll have to look into Wang Qing and Felix’s parents — but he wants more. “How did you learn about superpowers?”

“Australia,” the two of them say at the same time, as if that explains anything.

It does not explain anything.

Thankfully, Penny elaborates. “Everyone and their dog has superpowers in Australia. The actual incidence rate isn’t much higher, but since we have an actual superpowered organization — we’re the only continent-”

“Country, we’re part of Oceania now.”

Penny ignores Remus and keeps going. “-with one — people activate their powers way more often, so it looks like we have more people with powers. Anyway, we used to do arms deals with them, so that’s how we know.”

Vein feels like he’s stumbled into a middle-grade novel. In fact, he feels like the villain of a middle-grade novel, even though he is very much the one who almost died. He swiftly decides that what happens across the ocean is precisely none of his business, and even if it were, he would probably find a way to make it someone else’s business, anyway.

He lets the air sit still for a few seconds. “Is that it?”

Remus’s casual, wide-eyed expression settles back into professional stillness. “If you want any more information, I’m afraid we can’t provide any. If you could show us concrete proof that this won’t be touching anyone in Bridon, that may change.”

It signals a hard stop to the conversation. Vein wants to push. He wants to whip out his gun and point it at the two, to rip away the veneer of pleasantries with blood and iron. It wouldn’t be impossible. Vein’s the best fighter in Chinatown, and probably not far from the best in Bridon. Even outnumbered by the two, and in their homefield, he’s confident in his chances.

Unfortunately — well, unfortunately for him, fortunately for most people who have to interact with him — violence doesn’t always solve all problems. For one, he needs a working relationship with the two to continue sourcing his specialty weapons from them. And second, if the relationship between him and them breaks, then nothing binds them to silence anymore. His faked death will become, well, well-known to be faked. And that would be a pain to deal with.

Instead, he hands them a generous commission fee, takes his gun and fan once they’ve been finished, sets up a retrieval date for Felix’s weapons, and sets back into the Bridon night.

Proof that the conflict won’t involve anyone in Bridon…

He supposes he’ll have to start with finding out more about Lu Guang and Cheng Xiaoshi.

August 6, 2020.

“Approaching Guidu airport, cabin crew please be seated for arrival.”

You know, you’d think planes would have earpieces for these types of announcements so they wouldn’t bug the riders with irrelevant messages.

Liu Xiao stretches out his shoulders and legs, mentally patting himself on the back for getting a seat with extra legroom. The flight from Bridon back to China is as brutal as always.

It’s been a few years since he last came back. He’s been so busy in Bridon recently — first helping Vein clean up his mess, then tracking down Wang Qing’s trail, which went unhappily cold, and also applying to university at some point during all those tasks. He wonders if he’ll be able to keep up with mainland slang after all this time.

At the airport, he checks his phone, confirms where he’s meeting Qian Jin, and starts heading out. Coming back to China feels like coming home, but also not. He’s spent so long in Bridon that the suddenly more crowded hallways and distinctly Chinese chatter fills him with a sort of displaced unease. Yet, it feels familiar. Old and comforting, like a ratty blanket.

He’s left Bridon in a bit of a mess, he knows. His gambit there should preferably develop for a few more years before boiling over, but it can’t be helped. He can adjust his own moves depending on the outcome there. The situation in China requires more of his attention.

…Hmm.

Where, precisely, is the exit…?

The police force identify the building Li Tianchen is in by 5 pm. A derelict office building, still legally “in use” but barely occupied, on the outskirts of the city. Yet, by the time they arrive, it is inexplicably empty.

They search everywhere they can within the building, but all they can find is a cigarette butt in the room’s trash can, and a few squatters confused about why police have suddenly shown up. They regroup in the police car sitting in the dusty-yellow parking lot outside.

Li Tianchen had been blindedfolded around 2 pm — Qiao Ling had dived into his photo, an hourly check to make sure he was doing ok, and found that she couldn’t see anything. She dives into his photo again now, and still finds nothing.

“Damn,” Captain Xiao curses. “There aren’t many security cameras nearby, so we won’t be able to track their movements.”

“Captain Xiao, where is the nearest security camera?” Lu Guang asks, his hair all puffed up in interesting directions. Cheng Xiaoshi’s hands had been itching with anticipation on the way here, and Lu Guang had offered up his own hair for him to tussle with, if it meant he would stop with the distracting hand motions. For his generosity, he gets to be 炸毛 (translation: explode fur) for the next few hours.

“A few blocks down by a hotel,” answers Captain Xiao.

Lu Guang looks at Cheng Xiaoshi. Cheng Xiaoshi looks at Lu Guang. “You think we can?”

“If you’re up to it.”

Captain Xiao has nearly-visible question marks floating about his head. Right. He doesn’t know as much about Cheng Xiaoshi’s power in this… well, it’s not a dive, precisely, but Lu Guang isn’t sure what else he should call it.

They run over the basics of his power with captain Xiao. Dive into a photo with a photographer and possess them for twelve hours; dive into security camera footage and insert himself into the frame for twelve hours. Lu Guang starts talking about the three laws before Cheng Xiaoshi slings an arm around his shoulder to get him to stop lecturing.

On paper, it’s a simple plan. Cheng Xiaoshi dives an hour or so ahead of the earliest time Qian Jin could have left with Li Tianchen — around 1 pm, when Qiao Ling last confirmed that Li Tianchen was still in the room — with a disguise on to avoid being recognized. He figures out what vehicle they have Li Tianchen in, and does his best to follow them to wherever they end up.

“You just need to follow them until they enter an area with denser security cameras,” says Lu Guang. “We can handle the rest.”

The grey-blue light of countless security cameras from around the city shines on Lu Guang’s face as Cheng Xiaoshi claps to enter the one nearest the building, two kilometres away. It’s 6 pm; Lu Guang has used his power so much today that he can barely feel his hands. It doesn’t matter. If it takes the edge of anxiety off of Qiao Ling-jie’s face and makes Cheng Xiaoshi stop worrying, then it’s worth it.

Camera-Cheng Xiaoshi has a wig on, dressed in an overly large T-shirt that hides his frame. He rides on a rented motorcycle, yellow dust flying behind him as he races towards the building where Li Tianchen was kept.

“I can’t believe we actually have a budget this time,” Cheng Xiaoshi laughs. “Money makes things so convenient!”

“Focus,” Lu Guang grumbles, as if he isn’t smiling at Cheng Xiaoshi’s happy face while he pushes the speed limit on a clankety old motorcycle.

His heart rate picks up when Cheng Xiaoshi exits his field of vision. So long as Cheng Xiaoshi is within the city’s net of cameras, he can track them, both in the dive and using the real-life wall of footage he’s facing. But once he exits out of the last camera and into the deadzone surrounding the building, the only thing Lu Guang has is their telepathic connection.

“Recite everything you see to me. I can’t see where you are.”

“Oh, well, to start, the sky is blue and-“

“Cheng Xiaoshi.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it. I’m just messing with you.”

Nothing happens for around five minutes. The silence is broken by Cheng Xiaoshi’s confused voice.

“Huh. Another car just arrived. It’s some guy with a hat.”

Thank you, Cheng Xiaoshi. What a useful descriptor for someone out during noon in summer.

“Any more details?”

“Uh, he’s got a big long coat on… his hat is really big. He’s got purple-ish hair, I think…”

His stomach sinks, before he reminds himself that Cheng Xiaoshi is diving and can clap out at any moment. “Does he have two moles under his left eye?”

“I don’t know, I’m not close enough to see. What? You know him?”

“I’ll explain later.”

It says something that Cheng Xiaoshi is immediately pacified, even pleased, by this. The sensation Lu Guang catches across their link is something like warm popping, like gentle fireworks.

“He’s entering the building now. Should I follow him, or…?”

“Stay put. Wait to see what happens with Li Tianchen.”

Unsurprisingly, about half an hour later, Cheng Xiaoshi reports back that hat-guy and Qian Jin walk out of the building with Li Tianchen in tow. Li Tianchen’s hands are tied behind his back, unable to move and possess anyone. They drive off in another car which arrived some ten minutes ago, though it’s unclear who the driver is. Cheng Xiaoshi gives Lu Guang the description and license plate of the car, who relays it back to Captain Xiao.

“I’ll follow them and let you know where they are. Cheng Xiaoshi presumably revs up the engines of his motorcycle, if his whistle is anything to go by. “Let’s see how good my driving skills are!”

“Do you even have a license?”

Cheng Xiaoshi ignores his question. Soon, they’re back in camera range — around the same time, Captain Xiao’s people report that they have visual on the car and are tracing it throughout the city. Lu Guang has Cheng Xiaoshi park at a grocery store for the time being, to avoid being detected by the people he’s tailing.

The footage ends with the car disappearing into an underground parking lot. Unable to go much further, Cheng Xiaoshi claps out.

The parking lot they drove into is a private underground space for some kind of venue. The police force explain that they’ll take over from now on, so the civilians in the equation — come to think of it, are they even allowed to be this involved in the investigation as civilians — can rest easy at a hotel for the night.

Li Tianxi and Qiao Ling share a room, while Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang share another. The two girls end up coming to their room anyway for the night; there’s safety in numbers, in a sense.

After three rounds of card games, Cheng Xiaoshi turns to Lu Guang. “So, hat guy? Who is he?”

Qiao Ling watches Lu Guang’s face flash a very brief oh shit before settling back into neutrality. “… Let me organize my thoughts.”

They give him a minute or two, chin resting on his hands, staring at a card (a red four) on the floor in front of them. “... How much have I told you two about my parents?”

“Not much. I just assumed you popped out of the Earth fully formed,” says Cheng Xiaoshi.

Lu Guang throws him a side-eye. “Cheng Xiaoshi, I know for a fact we've had a conversation like this before. As a reminder, my parents both had powers. They, in turn, knew other people with powers, around the continent. The guy with the hat — his name is Liu Xiao — is someone I heard of through that”

Li Tianxi’s head perks up at the name, though she doesn’t say anything.

“Like some sort of secret society?” Qiao Ling says.

“More like just… people who know people. I don’t think there’s ever been an actual, organized superpowered group, historically speaking. They happened to know a few people with powers in Bridon, and one of them was mentoring this kid with purplish hair, an exchange student from China. I saw a photo of him.” He pauses. “Then, when Cheng Xiaoshi and I were in Bridon, we met him at the airport. So it just, reminded me of him, since purple hair isn’t the most common.”

Qiao Ling nods thoughtfully. It’s a reasonable train of thought; she can understand why Lu Guang was suspicious.

But something doesn’t feel right, and it’s nagging at her.

“Oh, I have another question,” says Cheng Xiaoshi.

“Shoot.”

“You remember that thing you talked about last week? About how… ah, something about knowing the effects of dives before they occur.”

Lu Guang nods. Once again, Qiao Ling ponders how these two ran a time-travel business together without sitting down and having a serious conversation about how their time-travel powers work. “Diving changes the past. But the diver will always retain memories of the unaltered past — their reality isn’t adjusted the way everyone else’s is. It’s why you and I didn’t notice anything wrong when Xu Shanshan came to us for the Dong Yi dive, even though your acting was terrible-”

“Hey!”

“-because the version of events we lived through and remember was the original, unaltered version. Qiao Ling-jie, on the other hand, remembers the altered version.”

“Huh.” Come to think of it, Xu Shanshan had been acting different that day. Qiao Ling had just written it off as nerves or awkwardness at confronting her years-long dilemma that really shouldn’t have been a dilemma. But it makes sense if it was a dive.

“Ok,” says Cheng Xiaoshi, brain clearly veering towards somewhere the average person cannot comprehend. “So. Can a dive cause itself?”

“Pardon me?”

“Can a dive create the circumstances for itself to occur? Like, can I dive into a photo that… um… like, can I dive into Qiao Ling’s photo, to tell myself of the past to dive into her photo? And create a loop like that?”

Ah. Qiao Ling sees where this is going.

Maybe she should give Cheng Xiaoshi a little more credit. He does seem to have some critical thinking going on in his head, after all.

“… Sort of. A dive can be part of a closed loop, but it needs to be an inclusive loop, meaning that the dive must have been triggered by something other than itself in the original timeline. The diver lives through an unaltered timeline; therefore, their dive can’t be caused, initially, by itself. But it can appear to have caused itself in the altered timeline, especially if the dive obscures the original cause.”

Ok. A lot of information. Qiao Ling thinks that if she digs enough into the implications of Cheng Xiaoshi’s power, she’ll probably arrive at some tremendously horrific revelation about the structure of reality. If she digs enough into the implications of a certain person’s memories she incidentally got a glimpse of, she’ll also probably arrive at a tremendously horrific revelation about said person, too, but she ain’t about that right now.

But, wait-

“Wait, then what did you take that photo for?” Cheng Xiaoshi blurts out.

The photo from the hospital. They’d been operating on the assumption that Lu Guang had taken that photo, meaning for Cheng Xiaoshi to dive back into it later, but then-

A dive can’t cause itself, but it can appear to by obscuring the original cause.

Someone else had given that unaltered-timeline Lu Guang the information about Cheng Xiaoshi’s whereabouts.

“Which photo?” Lu Guang frowns.

“The cityscape, from when you were in the hospital. You took a photo of the night sky, and I clapped into it to go rescue, um, myself. But you came to rescue me in my unaltered memories. So then how did you know where I was? And why did you take that photo and leave your phone behind?”

Lu Guang processes the new information for a few seconds. Qiao Ling decides that the next time they have to perform a series of convoluted time travel to save someone from kidnappers — which she supposes is what they’re doing right now— they need to have a debrief of all the time travel that occurred at the end. “I came to rescue you in the unaltered timeline?”

Cheng Xiaoshi nods, looking like a chicken pecking at pieces of millet.

“I don’t remember.” Lu Guang’s voice is low, certain, like he’s making a pronouncement. “When you dived into the photo, it would have erased my memories of the original timeline.”

“Then why did you take the photo?”

“I don’t remember that either.”

Cheng Xiaoshi doesn’t believe him. Qiao Ling doesn’t believe him. Li Tianxi, despite only knowing Lu Guang for something like two weeks in total, looks at him with such naked doubt that she clearly doesn’t believe him either. Lu Guang, who Qiao Ling trusts has some level of self-awareness, must know that.

“I-” Cheng Xiaoshi starts talking, then deflates, looking as if he’s given up on something he meant to hold on to. “You’re not gonna tell me the truth, are you?”

Lu Guang’s hands remain tightly clasped in his lap. Qiao Ling can see him softening, like butter, at Cheng Xiaoshi’s plea. He’s never been able to resist Cheng Xiaoshi’s requests, not really.

“September 13^th.”

Qiao Ling blinks. “What?”

“2022, September 13^th.” There’s resolution in his words, and something a little bit more tender, too. “I’ll tell you after then. About why I took that photo.”

Cheng Xiaoshi groans and flops onto Lu Guang’s shoulder. “That’s so long! Why not now?”

“Cheng Xiaoshi.”

Her little brother, who grew up without parents, who’d give up himself for others he doesn’t even know, whom she has seen die before, through third-hand memories, smiles faintly. His chin rests comfortably on Lu Guang’s shoulders. “Yeah, yeah, I got it. It’s ok. I’m used to waiting. At least you’ve given me a deadline.”

Chapter Text

February 4^th, 2020, Bridon.

Bang.

Xia Fei lowers his arms, tingles running up and down his skin from the recoil. He takes a deep breath.

Two 8s, three 7s, and one 5, at ninety metres out. Good. He’s improving.

Xia Fei, second year applied physics/engineering student at Bridon University, has two quizzes, a report, and two discussions post due by week’s end. There are innumerable things he should be doing instead of practicing his shooting skills; alas, no number of practice problems will save him from getting murdered on his next investigative-trip-gone-wrong, but gun skills will. So here he is.

He takes off his earmuffs, head aching a little from their squeezing. He’s been at the range for an hour, shooting rounds after rounds, and even his eyes feel-

“Enjoying yourself?”

Xia Fei jumps, what feels like a foot off the ground, but realistically probably more like a few centimetres. A person stands behind him, hands in their pockets, watching him quietly.

Oh wow, ok, Xia Fei’s nervous now. “Hello, Lv-xiansheng.”

“It’s nvshi today. And hello to you, too, kid,” says Lv Kejing, the facilities manager of half of Chinatown’s shadier buildings, Vein’s ex-employee, fourty-something years old and far too entertained by Xia Fei’s floundering.

Xia Fei swears, up and down, on his mother’s name and his father’s too, that he doesn’t know how he got genuinely involved with the Chinatown underground. It was one thing after another. Well, actually, it was one broken window after another, but that’s beside the point.

“Um, can I help you?” He flashes her an awkward almost-smile. This is the mask he has taken up around the friendly occupants of Chinatown’s darker streets: docile, stumbling, uncertain. He’s not sure if they necessarily believe him, but if they don’t, they haven’t called out his fib yet.

Lv Kejing waves her hand dismissively. “Just here for some conversation. What are you doin’ nowadays?”

“Not much.” That’s a lie. He has so many things he has to do. “It’s not quite midterm season yet, so I don’t have that much schoolwork. My job’s going well. The investigation…”

Lv Kejing leans haphazardly against the wall. She keeps her eyes on him, silently giving him the time to think. Overhead lights buzz.

Chinatown was, and is, ran by more than one person — if Vein had been the only one doing any work, Xia Fei suspects he wouldn’t have had the time he did to drop by and terrorize Xia Fei while on shoot or to clean up his messes for him. Lv Kejing, the way she tells it, owns and manages its facilities.

She also does a lot more. Such as grabbing a university student on his way home off the streets, pointing a gun at his head, and telling him that he needs to learn self-defence. She’d been one of Vein’s subordinates when he was alive, and loyal enough to make sure his “favourite civilian employee” (which implies that Vein has a favourite non-civilian employee, whom Xia Fei sort of wants to meet) doesn’t get himself killed rolling around in the Bridon underground.

So. He wouldn’t call Lv Kejing his ally, per se, in investigating Vein’s death, but she certainly makes no moves to stop him or get in his way.

“The investigation’s hit a dead end,” Xia Fei mumbles, staring at the ground. It’s embarrassing to admit it, but he’s struck a brick wall after exhausting his last lead, somehow having chased down a suspicious-looking emblem to a closed-down dental office(??). He keeps an eye on Lv Kejing, her relaxed stance, the casual dark green coat. Her tea-brown hair is swept back from her face, a little side braid dangling an inch or two longer from jaw-length strands. Huh. Should he start growing his hair into braid-length as well?

He doesn’t like showing weakness like this, admitting to his own incompetence, but it can be an asset at times, too. Lv Kejing pities him. He knows this from the way she’d first approached him after Vein’s death, the way she listens to him talk about his investigation like a story, the way she always seems to be looking down at him despite being shorter. Xia Fei hates being pitied, but it can be used as bait.

“What’re you planning to do about that?” She doesn’t offer anything. Damn. He was hoping she would.

Xia Fei makes one last attempt to fish for information. “I might reach out to Liu Xiao for his help. He should have more connections than I do, so maybe he’ll know something.”

Lv Kejing’s face does something. Xia Fei’s pretty sure it’s some sort of negative emotion, but he can’t really place what exactly it is. “Oh? Him? Really?”

Yeah, look, Xia Fei’s not happy about that, either.

“Yeah. What, you know him?”

Lv Kejin stands in thoughtful silence.

She’s an easy person to read, so much so that Xia Fei wonders if it’s on purpose — if she wears every thought on her sleeve to disguise what really goes on underneath. Lv Kejing is easy to be around, and it’s disconcerting, how quickly she makes him slip up and admit to something he shouldn’t.

It doesn’t escape him that, in contrast, he doesn’t know anything more about her other than her name.

Oh, and the haircut. Seriously, why does everyone in Chinatown wear a side braid? Is there a dress code he wasn’t aware of?

“Who knows? Maybe I’m just surprised you’re asking for help at all,” she teases.

Xia Fei feels his window of opportunity closing. Is this a hook, or a genuine slip-up? Does she want him to pry, or to leave it alone?

“But, yes, I do know of him. As for how…” she looks to the ceiling in thought. “How about this. You show me your gun skills, and if they’re good, I’ll tell you.”

Xia Fei considers it for a second, then nods in acceptance. No loss here, he’s not the one paying for the rounds.

He goes through the routine to prepare for a shoot. Putting on protective equipment, loading, checking for safety. He visualizes a red beam coming out from the nozzle, imagines where a bullet may land if it misfires, ensures that beam never lands anywhere near a person.

Will he ever point that beam towards a person?

Pull the trigger. A six.

Another shot. A seven.

Three more shots, and it’s a very mediocre performance from him. One six, three sevens, one eight. Xia Fei weighs options in his head and decides to dial up the confidence a bit more. Who knows? Maybe Lv Kejing has low expectations for what she considers “good” gun skills.

He lets his arms down smoothly, putting on easy confident smile #2 as he turns around to face her. The ear protection comes off as he says: “How was that?”

Lv Kejing puts her hands to her chin in thought. “Not bad, but you’d still be turned into a sieve in a real firefight. I think you’ve earned… One piece of information!”

Xia Fei tries to imagine himself in an actual gunfight, and finds that he can’t. In fact, the Xia Fei in his imagination is running around the scene with his Integral Calculus II textbook in hand and using the thing to block bullets. Which he would never do in real life. Textbooks with bullet holes in them resell for less.

“Liu Xiao had a mentor in Chinatown way back then. That was how he entered the sphere.” Lv Kejing said. “His mentor’s name was Tang Li. Lao-Tang wasn’t a very active person in Chinatown, but he had some sway and some influence. Then…” She went silent in thought. “I think it was maybe three years later—”

 Xia Fei felt all the blood in his body stop flowing for a moment as she said: “—that Tang Li died under mysterious circumstances. Never figured out what killed him.”

Qiao Ling and Lu Guang stand, waiting for the elevator, heading downstairs to pick up a kettle for some tea. Their room, incredibly, didn’t come equipped with one.

The two of them don’t spend a lot of time with each other. If they do, it’s doing chores, or taxes, or some other admin task. Their relationship is built on comfortable silence and clear-set boundaries. Neither of them are great at being vulnerable to each other.

Well, screw that. “There’s something you’re not telling us.”

Lu Guang hesitates. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Dishonesty; Qiao Ling docks a point from Lu Guang’s little tally in her mind, knowing that no number of points deducted can ever change how she feels about him and Cheng Xiaoshi, anyway. “You just admitted you won’t tell us why you took that photo until two years later.”

“Maybe that,” Lu Guang concedes. “But I genuinely don’t remember what happened during that first timeline. My memories were erased.”

“There’s more you’re hiding from us, other than that.” The elevator arrives, and the two of them step in. Qiao Ling presses the button for the main floor. “But… I’ll trust you’re hiding it for a reason. So I won’t pry. In exchange, I want you to promise me: you’ll explain everything to us after September 13^th, or whenever you can. Nothing held back. You can’t keep lying to Cheng Xiaoshi, or to me.”

Lu Guang is usually straightforward to read, despite his stoic expressions. He looks away when he’s nervous, his voice wobbles when he’s worked up. But Qiao Ling can’t pick up anything from his expression now, dead and still, as if a fossil trapped in amber. “I promise. After September 13^th, I’ll explain everything.”

“Ok.” Qiao Ling nods. They leave the elevator, silence draped awkwardly over their shoulders, to the front desk.

“One more thing.”

“Yes?” Lu Guang says, sounding like he very much does not want there to be one more thing.

“Since I have Xiaoxi’s power, there may be times when I might dive into a photo of yours. If I do, I might… learn whatever secrets it is, that you’re keeping.” She doesn’t mention the fact that she already maybe has. “I need to know: how important is it that you keep this secret? How desperate do we need to get before I can dive into your photo?”

Lu Guang is silent as they pick up the kettle and make their way back. Once they’re inside the elevator again, he says: “If there’s a threat to your, or Cheng Xiaoshi’s life. And you have no choice. Then dive into my photo.”

“You left out your own name.”

“Yeah.” Qiao Ling resolves, silently, to talk about this to Cheng Xiaoshi: Hey, I don’t think your roommate-best-friend-business-and-life-partner who’s also my little-brother-in-law-or-whatever values his own life, has he always been like this or is this a new development. “If it’s me, then… Leave it. Don’t worry about diving.”

Her chest feels tight hearing him say it out loud, explicitly, undeniably. “You know I can’t promise that.”

“I know. I’m going to ask anyway. I can… I can explain everything after September 13^th. I promise.”

There’s no use arguing with Lu Guang when he’s got his mind set on something. Qiao Ling backs down.

“It’ll be all three of us there, right?” Lu Guang turns, a little surprised. A crack in the amber. “All of us. Not a single person missing.” She doesn’t know why she has to say it out loud, why she wants Lu Guang to promise her. Still, she thinks it would help her feel better.

He faces away from her, not towards the door, but towards the far corner of the elevator, like he’s hiding his face. “…Yes. It’ll be all three of us.”

Li Tianxi comes to Cheng Xiaoshi once Lu Guang and Qiao Ling leave the room. She has her phone in her hands — None of them understand Sign, her preferred way of communication, so she has to use AAC instead. “Cheng Xiaoshi-gege, I think I know the Liu Xiao that Lu Guang-gege was talking about.”

Xiaoxi talked to (or, er, communicated with) me! Score. Cheng Xiaoshi thinks before he even processes what she says about Liu Xiao. “Oh? What do you know?”

He gives her time to type the words out on her phone. “My brother knew him, in the year before we all came back, after I died.” She taps at her phone screen, trying to sort out the convoluted past-future involved in time travel. “He said that he went to Bridon to live with him, since Qian Jin went missing.”

“…Why does that sound like your brother got trafficked?”

“It’s not trafficking!” Li Tianxi looks scandalized. “He said that Liu Xiao was a childhood friend of his. He told me that once we got rid of Qian Jin, we could meet him and his friend again.”

Huh. A childhood friend who’d be willing to take in a recently orphaned (again) boy from across the globe. That… well, he supposes it lines up with the would throw hands with a thief at the airport for two strangers impression he has of Liu Xiao, but it’s a pretty massive coincidence. “Are you sure they’re the same person?”

Lu Tianxi’s excited eyes dim a bit. “I didn’t think about that part.”

“Do you know what he looks like?”

The girl thinks for a little bit, scrolling through her phone gallery. She pulls up a photo of her brother, hiding an ugly crayon drawing from view. “I took this photo after my brother and I made drawings of him and his other friend from Bridon. Maybe you can dive into it?”

“Lu Guang can look at it when he comes back.” Cheng Xiaoshi smiles at her. “Thank you, Xiaoxi. This will be helpful.”

Lu Guang dives, slow and steady, letting the scenes in the photo sharpen gradually instead of forcing them into clarity the way he usually does.

He doesn’t pay attention to what Li Tianchen says, or what Li Tianxi does. All he needs is the spatial resolution to see what hides behind Li Tianchen’s hands, slightly gritty with graphite and eraser shavings. A drawing comes into view.

…It is exceptionally ugly. It tells him nothing.

But Li Tianxi, too, has her own rendition of the same drawing, and it is much better than Li Tianchen’s. Lu Guang focuses on that instead.

There are two heads of pink hair, obviously the Li siblings, and beside the short-haired Li Tianchen, a purplish figure with a large hat. Li Tianxi has carefully dotted two moles under his left eye, which explains why his face appears to be half black in Li Tianchen’s version. That’s Liu Xiao for sure, Lu Guang thinks, dreading the knowledge that he’ll have to sort out the how and why of suspicious-hat-dude being involved with Li Tianchen somehow.

Out of curiosity, his vision drifts to the rest of the page. Next to the Li Tianxi-figure is another person also standing and smiling. They have blood-red hair in a braid that goes down to their waist-

Lu Guang falls out of the dive.

Before the others get a chance to ask him any questions, he’s right back in the photo. His earlier easygoingness is gone, dialing the image in front of him into definition as soon as he can. I must’ve been mistaken, he thinks, a little hysterical, fixing his mental eye on the piece of paper.

Red braids, longer than he remembers, dangling from a head of spiky short hair. White shirt, black pants, a black coat around his shoulders. Sunglasses hide the figure’s eyes.

Vein, who should’ve been three years dead by the time Li Tianchen and Liu Xiao had their little childhood-friend-definitely-not-human-trafficking rendezvous, smiles at him through the drawing, through the photo. Li Tianxi has taken the time to give him sharp teeth and lots of little red jewellery scattered about.

Lu Guang backs out of the dive.

妈的。我靠。卧槽。他娘的，我去，我的老天爷啊。Lu Guang recites, passionately, every single Mandarin curse word he knows in his head, runs out of fitting ones, then quickly moves on to profanities in his dialect.

“Lu Guang? What are you spacing out about?” Cheng Xiaoshi pats him on the back. “You good?”

No, Cheng Xiaoshi, he is not good. He just found out that the guy whom he plotted the death of — who knows he was the one who plotted his death — is apparently still alive, and gets along well enough with Suspicious Hat and Guy Who Stabbed Him to be included in some kind of unhinged family photo-drawing produced by Guy Who Stabbed Him’s recently revived sister. Also worth noting, this is the guy who usually shoots Cheng Xiaoshi dead in two years’ time.

Yeah, no. This is one of the worst days he’s had this dive, by far.

Obviously, he can’t say all that, so he tells them quickly that Li Tianchen’s childhood friend is, in fact, the Liu Xiao he mentioned earlier. Their concerned expressions don’t go away.

“You look spooked,” Qiao Ling surmises.

“I…”

His first instinct, the one that he’s been following all this time for five dives (more than five, so many more than five, but if he calls it five dives and ignores the years of time spent in between them, then he prevents himself from losing it), is to bury the feeling as fast as he can and pretend that nothing’s wrong. Write it off as shock. Exhaustion. Anything.

But he looks at them, crowded about him in a circle, Cheng Xiaoshi’s entire torso hanging over his, centre of gravity balanced precariously as to not fall over. Qiao Ling’s looking at him with her eyebrows turned downwards, and even Li Tianxi looks like she wants to apologize to him.

What are you lying to them for?

The answer is a lot. The answer is some esoteric, unnamable thing, a tangled mass of string beneath the skin of reality, the fact that sometimes he doesn’t recognize their faces when he looks at them.

In the first dive — the second time he’s lived these three years (he swears it used to be five; he swears it was, why is it three now?) — he told them everything. It had been one week in, and the secret was too much to bear. Losing them afterwards hurt too much, and he’s never told them anything since. If he keeps them out of the loop, then it’s less real. Seeing their dead bodies is a softer blow. Less like losing a piece of his soul.

Cheng Xiaoshi had been so happy when Lu Guang promised to tell him how he knew about Liu Xiao.

And you didn’t even give him the full truth.

Lu Guang rubs his temples, making a decision. “…Li Tianxi, who is that red-haired man in the drawing you made? Did your brother meet him in 2022?” In the space it takes Li Tianxi to type out her response, Lu Guang hopes. Just in case. Maybe-

Li Tianxi seems relieved that he’s not mad at her. “Yeah. That’s Vein-gege. He’s one of Liu Xiao-gege’s friends. My brother said that he met him when Liu Xiao took him to Bridon, so if we ever visited, I should know what to call him.” Well, never mind. His hopes are dashed before they get a chance to bloom.

“Vein?” Cheng Xiaoshi catches on immediately. “The ‘you look tasty’ guy?”

“Hah?” says Qiao Ling.

They never really gave Qiao Ling a full debrief of what happened in Bridon, mainly because it was such a train wreck of a vacation, which they’d went on with Qiao Ling’s explicit disapproval. But she should know one thing about the trip, at least.

“The corpse that Cheng Xiaoshi found.”

“Lu Guang! You didn’t have to say it like that!” How else, pray tell, should he have said it, Cheng Xiaoshi? The person that Cheng Xiaoshi was suspected to have killed? The man who Cheng Xiaoshi coincidentally was laying next to, who also happened to not have a pulse?            The human specimen in the same room as Cheng Xiaoshi, estimated to have been still alive as recently as up to five minutes before police were called?

“Wait, wait, wait, I’m not following,” says Qiao Ling, rightfully so. “So Vein’s the guy that the police called me for?”

Lu Guang nods. “He should be.”

“But I thought he’s dead. How could Li Tianchen have met him if he’s dead?”

“That’s the thing.” Lu Guang has to force himself to not elaborate, to not pour out all the secrets he’s been keeping in search of the barest hint of comfort. “He should be dead. But he isn’t.”

Later that night:

“Hey, wait, does that mean it was you who rammed into the ship with a motorboat?”

“…Pardon me? I did what?”

“In the original timeline. You rammed into the ship with a boat and jumped over deck. I remember thinking that it made sense if I was the one doing that, since, you know, I’m cool like that, but it’s weird that you were the one who did that first.”

“I… guess it was the fastest way to get there…?”

“Oh, ok. Hey, where’d you learn to drive a motorboat anyway?”

“I haven’t learned. Why on Earth would I learn how to drive a motorboat?”

“But then how were you driving it that day?”

“…They’d probably have a driver’s manual on the boat, right…? Also, didn’t you also drive the boat on your dive?”

“Yeah, well- I’m just cool like that. Could probably fly a plane if you put me in the pilot’s seat.”

“Do you even know where the brakes are on a plane?”

“There are brakes on planes?”