Archive of Our Own ^beta

The bottles of baijiu clink in Wei Ying’s hand as he balances them precariously, reaching into his pocket to wrestle out his key card to get into res. He’s not used to it, even though he’s been on exchange at Cloud Recesses University for three days already. He’s used to living in places with physical keys, not cards he can hide in his wallet or forget on tables after they poke him in the thigh one too many times—they’re just the wrong size for putting in a pocket. He’ll get there, though. He wasn’t used to sharing a room when he first moved in with the Jiangs but he got used to having Jiang Cheng there pretty quickly. The trick is to find the familiar in the unfamiliar–hence the baijiu. Everywhere is a different place, he reckons, but everywhere people like to eat and drink. It doesn’t have to be alcoholic, he quickly clarifies, as a vision of his old lab partner staring him down slams him between the eyes. Amina wouldn’t even eat brandy snaps. Still, Wei Ying thinks he’s onto something.

“What are you doing?” A voice slices out of the dark.

Wei Ying’s heart jumps to the right and when he turns to follow it, jumps just as hard back to the left. “Shit,” he says, as one of his bottles tumbles out of his hands and lands on the pavement, smashing into a thousand shards of glass. He stares at the shattered remains of what promised to be a good time. Life is a series of small heartbreaks, he thinks to himself before looking up at the source of the mystery voice.

...who happens to belong to the most striking guy he’s ever seen in his life. He’s about a height with Wei Ying but just a little bit broader in every other dimension, with shoulders that would make him devastating as a swimmer and cheekbones that look like they could cut paper. All of that is tucked beneath brown eyes so light and luminous that dinosaur DNA could be extracted from them. Worst of all, he’s angry. Wei Ying has always had a thing for angry types. It’s all the passion, isn’t it? Wei Ying likes passion. Apathy does nothing for him.

“Well, I was going to ask how you’d make this tragedy up to me but you are entirely and completely forgiven. I bet you get away with everything, right?” Wei Ying waves at the man’s face. The glare intensifies. Damn. He’s like a sexy bird of prey.

“No alcohol in the residences,” the guy says, ignoring Wei Ying’s compliment entirely.

Wei Ying squints at him. It blurs his vision slightly and makes the man even more devastatingly attractive, softening his sharpness just slightly. “They told me hazing wasn’t allowed.” It was in the orientation packet.

Cause that’s what this is, right? Hazing? Some older student trying to force him to drink the baiju outside like he’s in line at the airport and forgot he was carrying a water bottle. But Wei Ying is smarter than that! He won’t be bullied.

The guy repeats: “I said. No alcohol in the residence.”

“You’re fucking with me.” This can’t be happening. “What do you mean, no alcohol? There was a party my first night here! Two girls got into a physical fight over ‘fuck the dealer!’ Someone threw up in my shoes!”

“Who organised the party?” The anger in the guy’s voice is tipping into a darker shade. Wei Ying doesn’t think he’s joking.

Oops. He might be new here, but much like the universalities of food and drink, snitching is bad everywhere. “There wasn’t a party, I don’t know why I said that, guess I’m tired.”

“You will tell me.”

“Uh-uh,” Wei Ying says, and then has a brilliant idea. “What if I give you one of these bottles and we both pretend we never saw each other.” He jiggles a bottle at the guy temptingly. It would be a wrench, but he can accept a life without this handsome man if it means his sister won’t find out he got in trouble on his third day. He knows she feels responsible for him because he’s come to her city, but it’s actually the opposite! He came here to make sure her husband is treating her right. He’s got his doubts. In general he has his doubts about husbands, but in particular he has doubts about hers.

“Are you trying to bribe me?”

“No? Maybe? I guess so,” he admits, as the guy’s eyebrows crawl higher and higher. Aside from his worsening facial expressions, the man hasn’t moved at all while Wei Ying has been flailing around. Wei Ying decides to press his luck. If the guy is going to do his best impression of a hunk of jade—emphasis on hunk—Wei Ying is going to make like a tree. He turns back to the door, hand gripping his key card so hard the hard plastic stings the soft edges of his palms.

He finds himself physically spun back around. “What the fuck?” His arms are full, but he knows how to handle himself and steps diagonally out from the grip before he can get pressed into the wall. The guy advances, striding forward so smoothly his head stays perfectly level.

Well, shit. The odds of meeting another martial arts aficionado is always non-zero, but he usually knows why someone is coming for him.

But he hasn’t done anything! Well, aside from bribing the rule enforcer, trying to smuggle in alcohol, and refusing to reveal the party creators… okay. He hasn’t done much.

Wei Ying dances away and they fall into a pas de deux. Wei Ying steps back, the man steps forward. Wei Ying ducks around him and he pivots, reaching for Wei Ying. He barely gets out of that one. Eventually he runs out of space to retreat and it’s all over. With his size advantage, the man pins Wei Ying to the wall with an arm on Wei Ying’s chest and a leg between his thighs. Wei Ying holds his bottles away, fruitlessly trying to keep them out of reach. One slam of his arm against the concrete and that fantasy is over, as his nerves fire, his muscles relax and the bottles slip from his grasp. It’s a quiet shatter, or maybe his blood is just loud in his ears.

Now that he has nothing to protect, Wei Ying struggles harder. But he’s already given up the advantage of positioning and mostly only manages to rub his body against the other guy’s. Wei Ying swings his hand in from the side, trying to box the guy’s ear and gets his hand caught for his trouble. Somehow he ends up with both of his hands pinned above his head, held securely in one large hand. Just how big are they? Wei Ying flexes his arms but they don’t budge in the guy’s grip.

He cranes his head up to look but he can’t see. The motion pushes his body against the other guy’s broad chest. Wei Ying can feel the heat of him through the thin material of his t-shirt and it makes him realise how hot he is too. His shirt is sticking to his lower back and he’s panting.

Wei Ying gives a perfunctory struggle but he’s well and truly got. “If you’re going to tie me up you should at least tell me your name.” He smirks.

The guy’s hand flexes on Wei Ying’s wrists. For a moment Wei Ying thinks he isn’t going to answer, but he grudgingly says, “Lan Zhan.”

Wei Ying beams. “Hi Lan Zhan, I’m Wei Ying, nice to meet you.” Manners first.

The corner of Lan Zhan’s lip curls. Wei Ying can’t help but stare at it. When he drags his eyes back up to Lan Zhan’s, Lan Zhan is looking at him assessingly. He squeezes his hand once and Wei Ying squirms. He can feel his face heating. It’s a weird situation! He’s been pinned his fair share, but always in his kit and in the context of training. It makes sense that he’s a little embarrassed.

“I see,” Lan Zhan says and Wei Ying opens his mouth to ask him what, exactly, it is he sees, but he doesn’t get the words out. Lan Zhan presses harder with his hand and brings his chest flush with Wei Ying’s. It’s barely pressure but it drives the breath out of Wei Ying. His brain tingles. Should brains do that? His feet feel like they’re sliding out from under him—good thing Lan Zhan has him. Oh. Lan Zhan has him and Lan Zhan is… leaning in? More? How is that possible? Wei Ying wonders and then he can’t think about anything else because Lan Zhan is kissing him.

It isn’t a nice kiss. He nips the bottom corner of Wei Ying’s lip, he sticks his tongue into Wei Ying’s mouth. Wei Ying wonders what he tastes like, if Lan Zhan is licking it up. Wei Ying, for his part, doesn’t taste much at all, but that’s because he’s too busy having his senses filled with the feel of Lan Zhan, the scent of him. Their faces are so close and Wei Ying can’t help but inhale him. It’s intoxicating. His eyes drift closed.

“Alright,” Lan Zhan says. He steps back. Tries to let go, but Wei Ying tangles their fingers together. Lan Zhan looks down at their linked hands and his eyes soften slightly. It loosens something in Wei Ying’s chest that tightened when Lan Zhan backed off. But Lan Zhan isn’t leaving him, he’s taking Wei Ying with him.

Are they going to hook up? Wei Ying’s never hooked up before. Everything back home felt so tangled, but he’s here now, and barely anyone knows him. There’s a thrill up his spine. This is the university experience he’s entitled to, he thinks. Hot guys with nice shoulders who can carry themselves.

It’s barely a moment before they’re back at the res and Lan Zhan is effortlessly tapping his way in. His unit is right by the door and he taps into that too. It’s a copy of Wei Ying’s. Wei Ying hears that the first years have to share bathrooms and kitchens but Wei Ying is in his third year and they’re not expected to live like military recruits. Instead, they’ve all got little studio apartment style units with galley kitchens and their own microscopic bathrooms. The only difference is that Lan Zhan’s is more decorated than Wei Ying’s. Wei Ying makes out a landscape, a couple of picture frames, and what looks like a set of musical instruments. He doesn’t get a chance to look more closely because Lan Zhan is picking him up and carrying him over to the bed.

The walk back calmed Wei Ying down a little but now, here, with Lan Zhan crawling over him, Wei Ying’s breath picks up again. He feels alert, alive, every part of his body sending him urgent messages that something important is going on.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says, just to hear it.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, and Wei Ying shivers. Oh, this is going to be good. This can be his adventure. One night with hot neighbour Lan Zhan. Wei Ying is going to make the most of it.

***

Wei Ying wakes up all at once, to an unfamiliar ceiling. Oh yeah, Cloud Recesses, he remembers. Then he shifts and remembers more, all at once. His thighs slide on the sheets, newly sensitive. There’s an ache in them like he’s tried out a new exercise, but Wei Ying knows it’s because Lan Zhan held them up and open, thumbs digging in, while he drove Wei Ying to the edge. That was round one.

His stomach rumbles.

He hears gentle clinking from the galley; must be Lan Zhan. It makes him smile. He has a moment of indecision about what to wear. Squeezing his jeans back on feels too much, like he’s expanded too much for them now, somewhere on the inside, but he’s also not sure if it’s cool to wander around someone else’s apartment naked. His stomach rumbles again. Okay, decision made. He hops out of bed and takes the three steps so he can look into the kitchen.

Lan Zhan is there. Wei Ying’s smile widens. He can’t help it.

“Good morning,” Wei Ying says.

Lan Zhan looks over at him, briefly, before turning back to the glass he is drying. “Morning.”

Wei Ying walks up behind Lan Zhan. “What are you doing?” He pops his chin on Lan Zhan’s shoulder to look over.

“Cleaning the remains of breakfast.” Lan Zhan’s shoulder is like a rock beneath his chin.

Wei Ying is reminded why he woke up. “Oh, breakfast. Pop some bread in the toaster for me?” Lan Zhan has one, a chrome thing with dials and buttons.

A pause. “This isn’t a relationship,” Lan Zhan says.

Wei Ying blinks. It’s such an incongruous thing to say. At first his brain says, that must be code. It’s almost like listening to two spies talk in a drama. The handler would say something like ‘the duck swims at midnight,’ and the spy would say, ‘purple is the loveliest colour’ and they’d both nod to each other and know that the prime minister was about to be assassinated, or something. That’s all he can think of, at first. Because of course this isn’t a relationship? This was a fun night. So Lan Zhan must be saying this for a reason. There’s some response he’s supposed to make now, but he’s lost the script if he ever had it.

“Okay…” he says. Then it clicks. Lan Zhan means: you should leave. The slight burble in his stomach turns into a solid stone. He’s standing in a stranger’s kitchen, naked, deeply aware that his inexperience must be showing. Of course there’s no toast. What was he thinking?

It’s okay, he just has to be really chill from here on out.

He walks back to his pile of clothes, carelessly discarded by the side of the bed, and pulls them back on. His jeans feel stiff and rough, pulling on the hair of his calves and the fresh bruises on his thighs. He puts on his t-shirt, clinically cataloguing what feels stiff and tight as his body stretches.

Wei Ying takes the few steps to the door and pauses, fingers touching the handle. Just leaving feels wrong. Rude. “I’m going,” he says, for want of anything better, and doesn't wait for a response.

He makes it back to his room mechanically, slapping his key card on the reader. A walk usually clears his head, but one flight of stairs and twenty paces does not a walk make. All it does is drive home the point that this is his neighbour. He has made a fool of himself in front of his neighbour. “I’m going,” who says that! There’s probably a whole etiquette set for what to do the morning after a hookup and Wei Ying has revealed his ignorance and inexperience. Walking around naked. Asking for toast. Every memory makes him cringe harder than the last. He should have known better. He will know better, going forward; it’s just rookie hookup mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes their first time doing anything. Oh no, that’s another thought. How many other mistakes did he make? Suddenly sleeping with his neighbour seems like less of a good idea than it seemed last night.

Regret trickles in. No one knew him. He could have been cool Wei Ying, with the awesome kicks. Now, only three days in, he’s revealed himself as Wei Ying: asks for toast after sex.

He slaps his hands on his face. He needs to stop thinking about it.

***

Showers are magical. Sticky, sweaty Wei Ying was a literal mess. Squeaky clean and combed Wei Ying can do anything. He can go for an actual walk. Yeah.

Wei Ying makes it outside, fists tucked into his windbreaker, before he thinks: what if I run into Lan Zhan? Lan Zhan does live here, after all.

But why shouldn’t he run into Lan Zhan? Running into him would be totally fine! People run into their hookups and it means nothing because the hookup meant nothing. So it would be chill if they saw each other now. Wei Ying is, as a person, extremely chill. So if he sees Lan Zhan, he’ll just wave and—no. Waving is probably not chill. So he’ll just… uh.

He goes to his sister’s.

“Didi!” she calls out, opening the door before he can walk up the three steps to it. Her duplex is a lovely modern thing, extremely square with very large windows. It’s also got the bonus of being convenient to the university, only a short car ride or two buses away. Jiang Yanli is the newest associate professor in the mathematics department. Her husband has a longer drive to work, but he’d worked in the Bay Area before and he says anything is better than that. His job down there paid a lot more and had a lot more opportunity for promotions, but he said he wanted to come up here for Yanli. She deserves it, of course, and more, but it makes Wei Ying suspicious. He can’t believe Jin Zixuan would give up all of that material benefit without repayment.

He tries to call back to her but his throat closes up. He knew he missed her, that’s why he came, but missing had become a part of his everyday background noise. Just like he doesn’t feel his shirt when he’s wearing it, he stopped noticing just how much he missed seeing her. He takes the last two steps at a run and wraps his arms around her. She smells the same as he remembers, floral, and he buries his nose in her hair, squeezing tighter.

“Ying-er?” Yanli asks when Wei Ying shows no sign of letting go. He tries to make his hands release, but his fingers want to cling on. “If you’re too weak from hunger to walk, I can carry you,” she jokes, trying to help him.

He lets go. “That was one time!” It had been a long field trip for a nine-year-old in the middle of a growth spurt and the school had only offered them pizza, which Wei Ying is still not convinced is actually a food.

She pets his hair and then ushers him inside. “Well, if you are hungry, I’ve got some leftovers,” she says, before pulling out three separate dishes and throwing some chickpeas in the pressure cooker. Ten minutes later Wei Ying has a feast, and the only thing he had to do was scoop out some rice from the cooker into bowls.

“This is beautiful,” he says, with the awe and devotion of someone who has been cooking on a two burner induction stove for three days. “And delicious,” he adds, mouth full. Maybe he had been faint with hunger.

She smiles at him indulgently. “I don’t know how long you plan to say, but we could do lotus root soup for dinner.”

Wei Ying thinks about it. This trip was completely unplanned, so it wouldn’t be right to say he’d planned to stay for dinner, but as soon as she says it, he can’t see why he shouldn’t. He hasn’t had real soup since Yanli moved away. He nods, fervent.

“Okay.” She pets his hair again. “I just need to swing by the store to grab a few things.”

***

Yanli hustles him into her Volvo. It’s old and red and pristine on the inside and outside. Wei Ying has a moment of disorientation sliding into the front seat. He never gets to sit in the front seat. The front seat is for Mrs. Yu or Jiang-shushu. Or someone else’s parents. Logically, he knows this isn’t true, but he feels a bit like he’s stolen this one. But then he remembers that in this instance he’s stolen it from Jin Zixuan, and feels pretty good about it.

The market smells vaguely of melons and Wei Ying feels instantly at home. It’s one of the big ones too, with the skincare section and the ziggurat of Ferrero Rocher balanced on fourteen varieties of instant noodles at the front. He doesn’t even really like Ferrero Rocher, but when Yanli slides one into her basket he’s excited. But produce is really the goal here. The melon smell intensifies, with that slight undercurrent of leafy greens. Ooh, rambutans. He sneaks some into the basket. Yanli shoots him a look, mock stern, but she leaves them in there.

Wei Ying lets himself zone out. They’ve drifted over to the meat section, where the woman behind the counter greets Yanli like an old friend. Yanli gestures at Wei Ying and he snaps back to attention. Yes, he is happy to spend time with his sister. Yes, no one has been feeding him properly, he probably should get a girlfriend. No, he is extremely busy, focusing on his studies. Yanli cuts in to mention that he’s in engineering and the counter lady’s eyes take on a gleam not unlike the reflection of sunlight on sharp steel. It’s not as good as pharmacology but he knows engineering has a certain cachet among aunties with eligible nieces or daughters. He starts looking for an exit, eyes darting between the hanging scale, two Lan Zhans, the display of tooth whiteners, and back again.

Wait.

His eyes stutter and then drag slowly back, whole body turning. It is Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan and a man who looks just like him, except he’s smiling. Yanli notices his lack of concentration and follows his line of sight.

“Dr. Lan,” she says.

The smiling man walks over. “Dr. Jiang.” He nods. “This is my brother—”

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says. Everyone stares at him. Lan Zhan raises one eyebrow slightly. His perfect eyebrow, with its sharp arch, framing his eyes. He is somehow more attractive in the fluorescent lights of the market than he was in the streetlights last night. Oh. Wei Ying should be saying something. “Uh,” he manages.

“You must be Wei Ying,” Dr. Lan says. What a classy guy, totally saving Wei Ying’s faux pas. “I’m Lan Huan. Dr. Jiang speaks of you often.”

“She should, I’m her best brother,” Wei Ying says, falling back on the safety of old patterns, even though Jiang Cheng isn’t there to appreciate the burn.

Dr. Lan gives a single indulgent chuckle. Lan Zhan does not react at all, which Wei Ying can tell, because Wei Ying is staring at him. Embarrassing. He turns himself so that he’s facing Yanli. She has a look in her eye. He doesn’t know what it means, but her lips are curled up, knowing. Oh no. What does she think she knows?

Time to distract. “What about you, Lan Zhan, are you Dr. Lan’s best brother?” Wei Ying asks. He has to look at Lan Zhan again when he speaks and is hit again with the force of his handsomeness. It’s truly unfair. Lan Zhan should be selling vacuums or eyeliner or something. People would buy it.

His brows come down in the middle, the perfect bow of them drawing taut and shooting an arrow into Wei Ying’s chest. It makes him look focused. Wei Ying remembers the last time he looked focused. Wei Ying had been on his back, arched up, and Lan Zhan had slid one large hand into the small of his spine, holding him up. “I’m his only brother.”

“I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about adopting Huaisang,” Dr. Lan says. This must be some in-joke, but Lan Zhan doesn’t laugh. His lips just get pinched.

“Ge,” he says.

Wei Ying is boggled by how normal this conversation is. Wei Ying feels like his spine is straining with the effort of standing normally, and Lan Zhan is just engaging in banter with his brother. Meanwhile, Wei Ying’s palms are sweating so much on his basket he’s worried he’s going to drop it.

Dr. Lan honest-to-goodness twinkles at his brother. He nods at Yanli again. The man is a nodder. “We should go,” he says, and they’re off. Wei Ying stares after them. He’d known, this morning, that Lan Zhan was blase about their hook up—this isn’t a relationship, he’d said, refusing to make Wei Ying toast—but now it’s clear that he really doesn’t care. When Wei Ying looks at Lan Zhan, he sees a body he knows, a body that knows his. When Lan Zhan looks at him he sees… nothing. Nothing worth remembering.

Wei Ying twists his hands on the basket. He just witnessed a masterclass in being chill.

“I didn’t know you’d made friends already,” Yanli says. Wei Ying jumps, feet fully clearing the ground.

Then he snorts. “He’s just a neighbour.” Take that. The student can become the master.

“I see,” Yanli says.

***

His head is drooping into his soup bowl by the time he finishes dinner. He lowers his face towards his spoon, and then his face lowers a couple more centimetres before he jerks it back up. It’s weights and counterweights. But it isn’t the smoothest system; Wei Ying could knock up something better with pulleys.

Yanli offers him the guest room but he doesn’t want to get in the habit of waking up in different rooms every day. Besides, he’s a little worried that if he says yes he’ll just move in, and she deserves better than to have him crash into her married life.

She drops him off at the res. He unclicks his seat belt and leans over the centre console to hug her—a perk of the front seat. He could get used to this life.

Wei Ying makes sure to have his key card in his hand before he approaches the door, this time. He doesn’t even have to pause, just walks up, beeps in, goes up the stairs, beeps in again. Maybe he tensed a little when he went past Lan Zhan’s door, but there was no one around to see it. Lan Zhan’s door remained firmly closed.

He kicks off his shoes, drags his clothes off and leaves a trail of them, like breadcrumbs, towards his mini-bathroom. Adrenaline from a couple of minor slips keeps him awake in the shower, but it makes the fall into sleep sharper as soon as he puts his head on the bed.

***

It’s the first day of class! One of the great things about university is that Wei Ying doesn’t have to pretend to be over it. He can be just as excited as he wants. And there’s a lot to be excited about! There’s new syllabus smell. There’s figuring out how to get the textbooks for free. There’s the crucial scoping out of the classmates to figure out who to become study buddies with.

He walks into his first lecture hall. It’s freezing right now, but put three hundred people in it and Wei Ying knows it’ll heat right up. That’s why it’s important to dress in layers. It’s a calculated move, coming to first class early. Too early and it’s awkward and he might be left making chit chat with the professor. But it’s worse coming late, when all the seats are taken and he has to crawl over people’s legs. bout seven minutes early gives him a good choice of seats and… bingo. In the third row, tall kid with hair in his eyes and a graphing notebook. Those little grid lines are the mark of a true engineer. Or designer. Wei Ying was tricked once. But in an engineering class he’s pretty sure that this is an engineer’s notebook. So he sits down and gets out his own notebook. It’s red with black binding. Obviously he takes notes on his laptop, he’s not an animal, but if there are diagrams it’s still easier to draw them out on paper. Wei Ying is waiting on the future they depict in movies where people can graph things in mid-air or with hand gestures, as opposed to the reality wherein Wei Ying does his math in a separate program than the one that outputs his graph.

His notebook display is noticed and received.

“Hi, I’m Wei Ying.”

“I know,” the guy says, then blushes. He flushes deep and quick enough that Wei Ying can see it through the curtain of his hair. “Y-you were at the res party. You told Wen Chao that he could, um, leave.”

Wei Ying vaguely remembers this. Some guy came because his girlfriend lives there, he was rude and Wei Ying told him to get fucked. Was this guy there?

“I’m Wen Ning,” Wen Ning says.

“Ah! Hi.” Wei Ying does not remember him, but that’s fine. Wen Ning doesn’t seem to hold it against him. Wei Ying is just about to expertly turn the conversation around to future study prospects, when there’s a small hurricane as another student bashes his ankles, pinball style, into the chairs as he tries to sit down. That’s why it’s important to take the corner slowly, to prevent bruises.

“I’m not late!” the new guy says.

“You aren’t,” Wei Ying agrees.

This seems to confuse him and he blinks a couple of times before looking at the big clock at the front of the lecture hall. “Oh, I really am not late, nice.” He does a double take on Wei Ying. “And you’re new.”

The new guy has an appraising look to him. He clocks the notebook, the laptop and its stickers, Wei Ying’s beat up combat boots. It makes Wei Ying feel sharp. “I’ve been here the whole time,” he says in his darkest voice. “I’ve always been here.”

The new guy stares at him for a second before falling over laughing, slapping Wei Ying’s shoulder. Right before the professor steps up, he manages to introduce himself as Nie Huaisang. Huaisang. It rings a bell. It’s not a common name; Wei Ying wonders where he’s heard it before.

***

Following the inertia that sometimes happens at the end of class, the three of them drift out together and onto the mall. It’s a nice bit of greenery, but it feels a little exposed despite the charming water feature on it. Wei Ying loves a water feature, he likes thinking about how they work, the secret way they shift the water to them to keep the pressure up.

“When’s your next class?” Huaisang asks.

Wei Ying checks his phone. He’s got an hour and forty minutes, and when he timed the route two days ago it only took him twenty minutes to get across campus. “I’ve got time, why?”

Huaisang takes them to the student union building—the new one, even though the old one “is still around for some reason. It does have the movie theatre in it so if you like old movies I guess it’s worth visiting,” he explains, which answers a question Wei Ying had about the campus map that he looked at. Wei Ying is noticing that Wen Ning seems to be pretty quiet. He never answered Huaisang’s initial question about whether he had time to hang out. But he seems content to come along, occasionally smiling at something one of them says.

The SUB is a big building of glass and steel that doesn’t quite match the general industrial-brutalist vibe of the rest of campus–but then Wei Ying isn’t an architect, who is he to judge?

“Oh, this is just a big food court,” he says, once they get inside.

Huaisang shrugs. “Basically. I’ll take you to my favourite place, it does soup.”

Wei Ying squints at him. Did Huaisang know soup is his favourite?

“Soup is your favourite, right?” Wen Ning offers. Just how much did he and Wen Ning talk at the party? Maybe Wei Ying shouldn’t drink so much.

“Really? That’s great luck,” Huaisang says, and grabs him by the elbow to drag him over.

Wei Ying prepares to pretend to be enthused, knowing that all the soup here will pale in comparison to his sister’s. It’s not made easy by the unassuming appearance of the soup place. It’s definitely one of the smaller ones, more like a glorified walk-in closet with soup tureens two deep on both sides. The cashier is practically outside.

He still selects himself a bowl of asam pedas, which, he has to admit, smells pretty damn aromatic and has big chunks of fish in it.

When he goes to pay, Huaisang stops him. “You haven’t loaded up your card?” Wei Ying, caught with his credit card mid-brandish, shakes his head.

Huaisang tsks. “I’ll get you this time.” He drops his voice. “The point of the soup place is you get a discount if you use your student ID card.” He turns to the cashier. “Sorry, exchange student.” Wei Ying bristles. Huaisang turns back to him. “Go grab a table, it’s about to get competitive.”

Banished, Wei Ying walks out to find a table. Again, he’s struck by the uselessness of the design. The floor is packed with tables, but there are food vendors on all five floors and only tables on this one because each floor is more of a balcony. It does allow all the natural light from the glass ceiling to beam down—lovely effect—but this is really a lifeboats on the Titanic situation. Namely, there aren’t enough. Tables, not lifeboats.

He sees a longer one that doesn’t look as packed. That’s fine, Wei Ying thinks; they can bunch up.

He’s optimistic about it when he realises one of the people at the table is one of the TAs from his last class. The TAs’ names are in the syllabus but the Professor didn’t introduce them… oh well.

“Hi,” he starts, with his most winning smile. “Can we join you? There’s three of us.”

She opens her mouth, but before she can say anything an unfortunately familiar voice cuts in. “This table is occupied.”

Wei Ying’s smile freezes. He turns towards Lan Zhan, whose table setting has a sandwich on it. “Really?” Wei Ying asks. “I thought I was speaking to open air.”

The TA looks at him with surprise, her lips open in a perfect ‘O.’ She collects herself.

“Um,” she says, eyes darting between them.

Wei Ying winces. This is not the impression he wants to make on his TA. But he doesn’t want to back down. He won’t kick a man out of his chair, but come on, Lan Zhan can’t make a little bit of space so three growing boys can eat their soup?

“I’m not asking for your kidney,” Wei Ying says, “just a couple inches of bench.” He tries to make his voice light, joking, but he pushes too hard and it comes out with a bit of an edge.

Luckily, before he can make it worse, Huaisang and Wen Ning show up.

“Hi Mianmian,” Wen Ning says. Huaisang does a subtle double take, looking at Wen Ning with new respect. Wei Ying gets it–friends with the TA is a strong cachet–but he gives Huaisang a warning look anyway. He doesn’t know why he feels so protective of Wen Ning already.

“Ningning,” she says warmly. “Come join us. We’re basically done.”

“Excellent,” Huaisang says, and goes to sit quickly. Wei Ying moves more slowly. He’d been gearing up for a fight and it all resolved so smoothly that he’s having a hard time catching up. As a result, he misses his chance to sit on the roomier side with Mianmian and is forced to perch beside Lan Zhan.

Lan Zhan, to his credit, scoots a little to the right to make space for him. Wei Ying does his best to stay away from him, but Wei Ying has fighter’s thighs and developed glutes and Lan Zhan must be a fencer or something and the long and the short of it is they end up pressed together, hip to knee. Tight enough together that the seam of Wei Ying’s jeans is driven into his thighs.

Wei Ying takes the container of soup and metal spoon from Huaisang. It smells just as appealing as it did before, spices wafting from it, but Wei Ying isn’t so hungry anymore.

Mianmian, a hero, is valiantly starting conversation. “How did you find the lecture?” For Lan Zhan, she adds a clarification: “Wen Ning and his friends are in my Biomedical Instrumentation class.” Lan Zhan does not react to this information.

Wen Ning smiles and makes a happy noise. “It was good! I like that we started on the material, sometimes the first day is just the syllabus and that’s such a waste. We only have thirteen weeks!” This is the most words in a row Wei Ying has heard Wen Ning say.

“Which week are you looking forward to the most?”

“The one about electric cell signals, it overlaps with my Chem course and I’m curious about the practical applications,” Wen Ning says.

“Ugh, don’t be,” Huaisang says. “I failed this class last year and that week is all theory and no practical application for creating robot arms.” Wei Ying stares at him.

“You’re bragging about that?” Mianmian asks, hiding a smile with her hand. Huaisang puts his sleeve over his face. “Nice friends you’ve got here.”

Wen Ning blushes. “Qingyang-jie…”

“Hey, we’re not so bad.” Wei Ying feels compelled to defend himself. He shoots a smile at Wen Ning, who nods back and straightens up. “We’re lots of fun, aren’t we?”

“Wei Ying taught me how to take a jello shot,” Wen Ning says. He sounds proud. Did Wei Ying? He remembers showing a crowd of people how to do it, so he guesses Wen Ning was there. Wen Ning must be really shy, because if they’d talked, Wei Ying would remember it. There’s a bit of a trick to holding the plastic shot glass with the lips only—teeth will crack it—and then how to work the jello out with firm circular motions around the edges. A couple of passes to loosen it and then it’s easy to flick into the mouth. Some people try to suck it right out and that’s how unfortunate jello choking incidents happen. It’s much better to take the careful approach, even if it relies on a little lip and tongue dexterity. He’s glad the lesson was memorable.

“A valuable skill,” Mianmian says. “You can make a lot of ladies really happy with that knowledge.” Wei Ying looks at her blankly. He looks at Huaisang, who equally doesn’t seem to know what she means. Wen Ning coughs, though, turning pink, which means that he knows exactly what she means, but it doesn’t help Wei Ying any. Wei Ying isn’t going to risk a look at Lan Zhan just in case he’s revealing another patch of ignorance to the man.

Then a light goes on in Mianmian’s eyes. “Oh! You’re the guy from the party.”

“That’s me,” Wei Ying says. When someone asks if he’s ‘that guy,’ it’s usually easiest to say yes.

Mianmian puts out her fist. Wei Ying bumps it, baffled but unwilling to leave anyone hanging.

“Wei Ying kicked Wen Chao out,” Mianmian tells Lan Zhan. Wei Ying risks a glance to the side. Lan Zhan’s face is infinitesimally more open than it was when Wei Ying sat down.

“I guess everyone hates that guy, eh?” Wei Ying asks. Wei Ying jostles Lan Zhan’s elbow before he remembers he’s not supposed to be so easy with touching him. “You have to be conflicted. On the one hand, glad that Wen Chao got kicked out, on the other, wishing that everyone was also kicked out and no one ever had fun again, right?”

Lan Zhan glares. Wei Ying takes his elbow back and almost falls off the edge of the bench. He windmills a little but manages to regain his balance.

“Are you still anti-party?” Mianmian asks, eyebrows raised.

“I’m not anti-party when they’re appropriate, but parties in the Cloud Recesses res are against the rules. That’s all.” Lan Zhan’s molars are pressed so tight it’s honestly impressive his words come out so clearly.

Mianmian rolls her eyes. “It’s just a floor party, it’s not like they were plotting sedition.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Wei Ying interjects.

Huaisang laughs and then turns it into an unconvincing cough when Lan Zhan turns his—still impressive—glare on him.

“I have finished,” Lan Zhan says, and stands up.

Mianmian checks her phone. Smiles down at it. Wei Ying can almost see the hearts in her eyes and his own heart gives a sympathetic beat. He wonders who sent the message, how long they’ve known each other, that Mianmian is still affected so much by a simple text. “Oh, I gotta go too.” She stands up. “Nice to meet you, see you in lab.” And she’s off.

The table reshuffles itself to equilibrate the space in accordance with the basics of fluid dynamics. At least Wei Ying has gained some crucial bench space. Now he can focus on his soup.

“I just realised, you’re new, you don’t know about Lan Zhan,” Huaisang says.

Wei Ying chokes on his soup. “Know about Lan Zhan?” His voice is a little high. He brings it down to a casual, conversational level. “What’s to know aside from his rule following freakery?”

“That’s not the half of it. He’s definitely a fearsome rulekeeper, but that’s not his major reputation,” Huaisang says. Wei Ying finds that difficult to believe. What could dwarf being the dude who says no to parties and smashes perfectly good alcohol bottles on the floor? Okay, maybe Lan Zhan didn’t smash the bottles himself, but they were smashed because of him.

Wei Ying spoons some soup into his mouth. “Lan Zhan is the campus fuckboy,” Huaisang says.

Wei Ying chokes on his soup.

“I’m not sure that’s a nice thing to call someone,” Wen Ning says.

Huaisang waves him off. “Not in a bad way; it’s a position of respect. I think every half-decent campus needs a guy like this. Doesn’t gossip about it, doesn’t get weird after, an expert at what he does. Peerless, they say.”

Wei Ying reaches into his backpack and wrestles out his water bottle. An expert. Cool.

“Gosh,” Wen Ning says.

“An expert?” Wei Ying asks after he’s relearned how to swallow.

Huaisang makes a face. “Well, I’ve heard. He’s my brother’s husband’s brother so I feel like that’s too much the plotline of a bad porno to get anywhere near.”

“For sure,” Wei Ying agrees, mind still spinning.

“Wen Ning, have you?” Huaisang asks, in the same tone as someone might ask if they’ve seen the latest Netflix hit show.

Wen Ning shakes his head.

“Well that’s statistically unlikely,” Huaisang says, “but that’s cool. The three of us are some of the few.”

“Are you sure?” Wei Ying asks. But it feels true. At least the expert part, and the no strings. Wei Ying thought maybe grabbing people you just met by the wrist and then fucking their brains out was a normal college thing but maybe it’s more of a Lan Zhan special. “Sometimes people make up rumours.”

“You wound me, I only share true rumours. Besides, I’ve caught him coming out of the accessible washroom on the seventh floor of the library with a different person at least six times.”

“Gosh,” Wen Ning says again.

“I know, the library, so cliched,” Huaisang says. “Let me know if your Lan Zhan status changes though–if it does, you’re eligible for a pin. Dalvir used the button maker in the queer resource centre to knock a bunch out last semester.”

This is the moment, Wei Ying knows, where he could say something and claim his button. Which he’s eligible for. Lan Zhan is famous enough that there are matching accessories for people like Wei Ying. It would be an easy segue too, hey why are you asking Wen Ning when I’m right here… yes I did make record time, hold your applause. But he doesn’t.

Huaisang keeps talking, and the topic moves on, and Wei Ying loses his window. “Speaking of, do you want to go by the queer resource centre? That’s usually where I go afternoons between classes.”

Wen Ning and Wei Ying look at each other. They don’t need to speak to know just how much the other does not want to do that. Wei Ying couldn’t even say, if asked, why that doesn’t feel like the place for him, but it really doesn’t. Maybe it’s that he doesn’t think he has much in common with people who want to make gayness the most important thing about them. It’s not even in the top five of things that other people notice about Wei Ying, and he doesn’t feel the need to push it up the list.

Huaisang sighs. “Fine.” He turns to Wen Ning. “You’re friends with a TA? Nice.”

Wen Ning immediately gets a deer in headlights look. “She’s my sister’s girlfriend,” he mutters.

So the person who made Mianmian smile like that is Wen Ning’s sister. And they’re established enough to have transferable sibling affection. That is so lovely. Wei Ying will be the first to admit that he doesn’t see the appeal of dating, but there is something nice about the way it connects people. Mianmian to Wen Ning, Dr. Lan to Huaisang.

***

Wei Ying splits off from them to head to his next class. The brisk trek across campus gives Wei Ying a chance to think about this Lan Zhan revelation. When he pokes at his feelings he realises he feels… happy? The thing is, if Lan Zhan does this a lot, then Wei Ying’s mistakes won’t stick out.

Plus,there was a tiny corner of his mind that worried that getting kicked out sans toast was a criticism of Wei Ying’s performance, but it turns out it’s not about Wei Ying at all. He’s not special. That’s incredibly reassuring.

Every step Wei Ying takes towards his next class is a little bit lighter than the previous.

Even lunch was really fine, wasn’t it? They all had a chat, Lan Zhan didn’t throw up his lunch when forced to look at Wei Ying’s face again, Wei Ying got to bond with his TA. He’s spent the last day in a haze of undefined worry, but it turns out all of that was unnecessary. He’d wanted a hookup, he’d been a little shaky on the dismount, but it all worked out. It was going to continue working out.

Overall, the exchange is going well.

***

His positive glow continues through the rest of the day and is still in force that night when he shows up at the free trial Wing Chun lesson at the gym. The first week of classes is also free athletics week; all of the classes that would normally cost money are open so people can go around and find their best fit. Wei Ying doesn’t have time for anything too serious, but he also doesn’t want to be bored, so it gives him a chance to see what level the class is at before he has to commit. He’s planning to check out Brazilian jiu-jitsu tomorrow and then make a decision.

He hums as he puts on his workout pants (black) and t-shirt (also black). He decides not to wear the t-shirt with his previous school’s logo in case it’s intimidating.

When Wei Ying walks into the mezzanine that overlooks the main gym, there’s already a group warming up. He frowns. He’s pretty sure he didn’t read the time wrong. He looks closely at the group and—is that really Lan Zhan? It’s a mark of how much his mood has improved that he feels almost happy to see him. It’s a person he recognises, at least.

“Wei Ying!” Huaisang calls out to him. Wei Ying turns around. There’s Huaisang walking in with a man with the most impressive shoulders Wei Ying thinks he’s ever seen. He’s tall too. Wei Ying follows those shoulders up to a full mustache on the face of a man who smiles with perfect dimples.

“Hey, Huaisang,” Wei Ying says faintly. What do they put in the water in this city?

“You must be Wei Ying,” the beefcake says.

“And you're—” the brain cells connect—“Huaisang’s brother.”

“Nie Mingjue,” he introduces himself. They shake hands. He’s got a firm handshake, and big, warm hands. Not quite as big as Lan Zhan’s, Wei Ying’s mind can’t help but note.

“You’re almost late.” Wei Ying knows that voice too. Dr. Lan doesn’t appear to be worried about intimidating anyone, decked out as he is in a National Wing Chun Federation t-shirt. “Did Huaisang manage to hide from you?”

“He tried, but I got him.” Nie Mingjue says. He looks satisfied with himself. He puts out his hand and Lan Xichen steps into it. Their fingers tangle for a moment before they let go.

“I’m going to get class started,” Nie Mingjue says.

Everyone starts to form up into lines and Wei Ying hauls Huaisang to the back of the group. “Is this some weird married couple bonding thing?” he hisses at him. He means Nie Mingjue teaching the class.

Huaisang nods miserably. “Xichen convinced him.”

“I see,” Wei Ying says, even though he doesn’t. He feels like every time he sees adults talking it’s always about how busy they are, or how tired, or how work sucks, but here’s a grown-ass man—emphasis on the ass—who is giving up two evenings a week to drive to the edge of the city to teach a bunch of dilettantes how to avoid getting hit?

“Listen up,” Nie Mingjue says, and Wei Ying snaps to attention. Nie Mingjue explains that they start it as a mixed class. Everyone does the warm-up and goes through some basic forms. Then they split based on level, so Nie Mingjue will be using these trial classes to figure out where everyone is at.

Then he proceeds to destroy them in the warm-up. It’s not a warm-up like Wei Ying is familiar with, there’s a lot more running on all fours and falling and getting up than he’s used to. Wei Ying’s range of motion is fine, he can kick above his head—not that that’s practical—and he can drop into a squat, but he can tell there’s a tiny muscle in his inner thighs that is right on the edge of deciding his legs shouldn’t have to hold him up anymore after the fiftieth jump squat. Tomorrow is going to suck a little.

Nie Huaisang, next to him, is audibly whimpering. Every time they get back into ready position he flails his hands like a hamster trying to swim. Nie Mingjue is ignoring him. It makes Wei Ying feel like he’s hallucinating. Wei Ying looks around. The class is all focused on performing the directed actions. Lan Zhan, damn him, doesn’t even look like he’s sweating. Everyone seems to be ignoring him, except for a couple of five foot nothing girls whose eyes dart between Wei Ying and Nie Huaisang. Abruptly, Wei Ying realises they’re waiting for him to do something about it. Wei Ying’s been waiting for someone else but maybe… he’s the guy? He can see their perspective; they did wave at each other. But Wei Ying just met Nie Huaisang today? Does getting lunch mean that he’s in charge of him?

“Uh, buddy?” Wei Ying whispers, sneaking a look at Nie Mingjue in case he gets yelled at. “You good?”

Nie Huaisang opens his mouth, eyes wild, when Nie Mingjue cuts in. Turns out he was paying attention after all. “He’s fine, just ignore him.”

Before Wei Ying can react to that, Nie Mingjue keeps talking. “Great work, everyone! Now we’re going to talk about stance and guard as the basics of blocking. Wing Chun is characterised by quick hand motions, but from a place of power and balance to make them look easy.” Easy. That’s the opposite of how Nie Huaisang is making class look. Wei Ying’s mouth drops open. He glances over at Nie Huaisang, who looks remarkably composed for a guy who was doing his best impression of a pile of rubber chickens being pressed at the same time.

Wei Ying could do these basics in his sleep, and probably has. When he was in high school the mix of early mornings and late nights meant some very sleepy practices. Sparring always woke him up, though. Which, speaking of.

“I’ve been watching,” Nie Mingjue says, “and I’m going to pair you up now.” Wei Ying hadn’t been sure if Nie Mingjue did sparring at this type of community level class, but he seems like he’s actually a good sifu.

Wei Ying half expects to get matched up with Nie Huaisang, but instead Huaisang is sent off with one of the girls and Wei Ying is sent off to spar with… Lan Zhan. A dark part of Wei Ying’s soul chuckles in morbid fascination. Oh yeah, spar with Lan Zhan, the two of them can see who has better groundwork. Or, he guesses, they already know the answer to that; Lan Zhan is an expert. But Wei Ying won’t go down without a fight. Well, he’ll go down, he knows that too, but not in a martial arts way.

A giggle threatens to burst out of his chest.

“Well, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says, trapped laugh stretching his mouth wide. “Care to dance?”

Lan Zhan’s mouth tightens. That’s what Wei Ying likes to see. Then Wei Ying strikes out. Lan Zhan brings his left arm down, as Wei Ying expected, but instead of Lan Zhan deflecting the punch and following up with his own hit, Wei Ying is already pivoting, changing the line they’re engaging on. This is modern Wing Chun. They don’t have weapons, they don’t have comrades-in-arms on either side, Wei Ying can flow and turn as much as he likes. Wei Ying keeps moving, keeps deflecting, moving in and moving out. He knocks Lan Zhan’s arm down, then sends it away. But unlike their last fight, Wei Ying isn’t on the defensive, he’s not just trying to maintain distance. No, today Wei Ying gets in close, drives forward with every block, and waits for the moment when he can knock Lan Zhan off his line.

He finds it. Sharp kick to Lan Zhan’s shin and Lan Zhan spins a little, enough of a gap for Wei Ying to get in and deliver more touches. They’re all pulled, not designed to hurt, but he can still feel the hit of fist against body. A punch is fist against air, fist flying through air powered by all of the musculature that the body can offer. A hit is that fist getting pushed back, objects acting on each other with equal force. He has to brace himself, dig into the ground so he doesn’t go flying too.

It’s fast and it feels like it should be over at any moment, sharp bodies acting on each other.

But Lan Zhan isn’t easy. The gaps are few and small. Lan Zhan is the picture of control, and he brings that to Wei Ying. Where Wei Ying pushes and exploits, Lan Zhan takes steady steps to dominate. He tries to limit Wei Ying’s sphere of movement, but Wei Ying dances back, gives himself room. Lan Zhan tries to control Wei Ying’s body, going for locks and grabs instead of parries. That’s trickier. Lan Zhan has that weight advantage, as Wei Ying knows intimately. He has to keep moving, keep closing the distance and giving himself space.

Wei Ying knows there are people around them, that they’re moving into their space, but it’s background information. These are the obstacles that Wei Ying has to be aware of so he doesn’t get stuck. Because if he gets tripped up, then it’s over. And Wei Ying doesn’t want it to be over.

He loses himself in it.

A sharp whistle cuts through his focus. Wei Ying spins. The room comes back into focus. The other pairs are all staring at them, their own partners forgotten.

It’s been a minute, maybe two, tops but the world still feels very far away.

“Um,” Wei Ying says. He looks to Nie Huaisang for a little help, but Huaisang just raises his eyebrows. Wei Ying turns to Lan Zhan. Gratifyingly, he finally looks touched. His hairline is beaded with sweat, fringe stuck down on it. There’s a circle of sweat at his collar and his armpits. I did that, Wei Ying thinks. Then he notices Lan Zhan’s glare, bigger and meaner than Wei Ying has seen it. It’s strange, Wei Ying thinks, that when Wei Ying overstayed his welcome that morning he didn’t seem at all annoyed—just blank—but here, after the most fun spar Wei Ying has had in a long time, Lan Zhan seems angry. Wei Ying doesn’t get him at all. “Lan Zhan?” he asks, but Lan Zhan is turning and walking away.

Wei Ying looks to the crowd for clues, but they’re no help. Nie Mingjue claps him on the shoulder and tells him to get water, while Lan Xichen has a small smile on his face. Wei Ying takes that as a good sign; if he’d done something wrong to Lan Zhan, probably Dr. Lan wouldn’t be happy with him about it.

They switch partners a few times, after that, getting a feel for each other. Wei Ying notices that the first round matched all new people with established students, but after that, there’s a bit more of a shake-up. The other spars aren’t nearly as engaging, so Wei Ying has a bit more attention to spare for the rest of the class. Doesn’t look like anyone is a total beginner to martial arts, though Wei Ying has no clue how long any of them have been practising and what types they know. Nie Huaisang, as Wei Ying sort of suspected, isn’t nearly as bad as he was acting during warm-up. He’s good with his partners, meeting them where they are, and he’s definitely got the ease component down. He scores so many hits where it barely looks like he put any thought into it at all, just somehow showed up and hit them in the chest.

After class, they all huddle up and drink from their water bottles. Lan Zhan’s, Wei Ying notices, has no stickers on it, like a psychopath.

Nie Huaisang has bent Dr. Lan’s ear and is complaining. “Ge was so mean, he knows I hate those mobility exercises.” Dr. Lan looks sympathetic. The longer Nie Huaisang goes on, the softer and rounder Dr. Lan’s expression gets.

“Next time, don’t make me wait,” Nie Mingjue says.

“See! He’s bullying me, he admits it,” Nie Huaisang says. Dr. Lan turns to his husband.

“Don’t take his side,” Nie Mingjue says. Dr. Lan stares at him for another moment. “He can take it,” Nie Mingjue says, but he sounds a little less certain.

“He did really well,” Dr. Lan says firmly. He smiles at Nie Huaisang. “Your bear crawls are getting really stable.” Nie Huaisang perks up. They both look at Nie Mingjue. The man’s face does a complicated series of expressions.

“Good job,” he says to his brother, then turns to take the questions of a couple of new students.

That was a masterclass in little brother skills. Wei Ying is genuinely impressed.

Wei Ying turns back to see if Lan Zhan saw that, but he’s already gone. Ah well, Wei Ying was going to ask if he wanted to walk back to res together, but maybe next time.

***

Wei Ying doesn’t go to Brazilian jiu jitsu.

***

Maybe he would have, though, if he’d known Lan Zhan would be such an unrelenting dick all the time.

It’s been about three weeks and Wei Ying sees Lan Zhan oh, about twice a day, and he fights him twice a week—sifu Mingjue seems to like pairing them up—and Wei Ying can count the number of words Lan Zhan has said to him on two hands. And yeah, the guy doesn’t say a lot, and Nie Huaisang gave him both eyebrows when Wei Ying asked if Lan Zhan was being weird, but still. It feels weird. It is weird, right? To be neighbours with someone and not do anything besides nod at them in the hallway? If he runs into Wen Qing or Wen Ning, they ask after each other’s days. If he runs into Wang Lingjiao he turns and walks back down the hallway, but he has an excuse—she’s horrible. In any case, he’s not letting anyone by with a plebian nod.

“He won’t even talk to me, jie,” Wei Ying moans, pushing his face into one of her clean and pleasant-smelling couch cushions. Such a rare experience for him nowadays. Amazing the things campus life teaches one to notice.

“Have you tried talking to him?” Jiang Yanli’s calm and reasonable voice asks him from across the room, where she’s chopping green onions. He wants to scream.

“Have I tried talking to him? Only all the time.” Just yesterday he asked Lan Zhan if he preferred to stretch before or after a run, and Lan Zhan said ‘both’ and then went to stand next to Huaisang, who may or may not have been trying to sidle out of class. Both! Who says that without explanation? This is a classic runner’s gambit question that has worked as an icebreaker for Wei Ying many times. There must be something wrong with Lan Zhan. Like, maybe he’s under a curse that limits the number of words he can say in his lifetime and he’s saving them for something really important.

He knows that Yanli thinks he’s being silly, and he is. He is a full-grown, twenty year-old man with his face pressed into a couch cushion, after all. He can’t explain to her why his reaction is proportionate though.

There are these glimpses that Wei Ying sees sometimes of the Lan Zhan that he wanted to go home with. The way he helps out new students, the wicked way he shuts down Nie Huaisang’s complaints. He’s funny and serious and dedicated.

Wei Ying wants Lan Zhan to want to know him.

He gives in and kicks his feet a little.

Maybe there’s some people in the world who could tell their sister that they’d really like to be friends with the guy they hooked up with, but Wei Ying is not one of them.

It feels like he’s been the opposite of friendzoned—in fact, he’d love to be friendzoned. Get him right in the zone of being friends any day. No, he’s been something else. Bonezoned. Lan Zhan saw his dick, and now they can’t have a daylight conversation. Wei Ying doesn’t want their most substantive conversation to be about whether Wei Ying could take it or not (spoiler: he could take it). He wants to talk about something real, like if they like the same movies and their majors and how fun Wing Chun is.

“Whatever, it’s fine,” he says, sitting up. He pats his hair back down.

“Hm,” Yanli says, and then she, because she is the best human being, changes the subject. “Help me figure out what mooncakes we should make.”

“Oh shit, is it mid-autumn already?” Could that be possible? He supposes it is, which means—fuck—it’s first midterm season. Then he thinks about the question. “Wait, I thought you told me your mother-in-law had strong feelings about what to make.”

Yanli stops chopping for a second. “Well, you remember how we found out about what Jin Zixuan’s father did?” Does Wei Ying ever. Jin Guangshan used to run a fertility clinic, and it turned out he’d been ‘supplementing’ the stocks with his own personal, er, produce. It was lucky Yanli had already married Jin Zixuan. There was no way Mrs. Yu would have let her after that came out. Wei Ying nods his agreement. “Well, A-Xuan has been in contact with the ones we can find, and we’re planning a second dinner for them. You don’t have to come,” she hastens to add. Wei Ying reads between the lines that these half-siblings would not be welcome at the main Jin family gathering.

“Oh, no, I’m definitely coming to that,” he says. She frowns at him very slightly. “To support you!” he corrects hastily. She gives him a suspicious look, but lets it go. Well, more accurately, if he steps out of line she’ll whip out a reminder that he said he was coming to be supportive, and he’ll feel so guilty he will end up being supportive.

She sighs. “So any thoughts on mooncakes?”

That conversation keeps them until Jin Zixuan comes home. Just in time, because Wei Ying is starving and it’s dark outside. He’s not sure if Jin Zixuan works long hours or if the academic schedule gives Wei Ying and Jiang Yanli more flexibility around when they get home. Wei Ying excuses himself to the washroom so he doesn’t have to watch their reunion. He still sees the way Jin Zixuan’s face lights up, like he’s still stunned by his luck.

Wei Ying lingers in the washroom, washing his hands extra carefully, and tiptoes his way back down the hall in case they aren’t done. Which is why he hears them murmuring to each other. “—still think you should let me talk to him, help it along a little.”

A slight rustle. “Wei Ying has to figure it out for himself, he’ll get there. You did, after all.”

“That’s why—” Yanli hushes Jin Zixuan and he drops his voice. “Was it this infuriating watching me flail around?”

She laughs, quiet and pleased. “Worse.”

That conversation isn’t going anywhere good. Wei Ying announces himself with some loud steps and knuckle cracks. Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan are standing together in the kitchen, arms around each other, faces a few centimetres apart. They barely separate when Wei Ying comes in.

Wei Ying clears his throat. “Can I get something to drink?”

“Sure,” Jin Zixuan says. “I could put the kettle on if you want some tea, or we’ve got the sodastream.” Then he looks at Wei Ying for a second. “Or there’s scotch?” Wei Ying is tempted. He bets Jin Zixuan has the good stuff and his need for Wei Ying’s approval would drive him to let Wei Ying have whatever he wanted.

“We got some syrup flavours for the sodastream if you want,” Yanli puts in.

He’s sold. He’s going to pick something blue and something red and make purple. It’s so satisfying watching the colours merge together. Jin Zixuan goes over to the red machine, filling the bottle on the way. “Yanli tells me you’re having fun in Wing Chun.”

Wei Ying shrugs. “The sifu is pretty good.” He accepts a cup of bubbly water.

“It’s Nie Mingjue,” Yanli says. Wei Ying watches strawberry rhubarb and blueberry do the dance of Brownian motion. He takes a sip. Delicious.

Jin Zixuan frowns. “The guy’s who’s married to the Ass Chair?”

Wei Ying chokes. “The who and what now?”

Jiang Yanli pats him on the back. “The Associate Chair.” Right. Of course. What a reasonable abbreviation. She nods at her husband. “Same one.”

Jin Zixuan hums. “That could be great networking for you. Nie Mingjue is CEO of a major materials manufacturer, they could probably find space for another engineer.” Jiang Yanli and Wei Ying stare at him. “What? Martial arts is a great way to build up connections. Getting smacked around by the CEO is how I got my last promotion. And Nie Mingjue seems like a good boss. My bro—Meng Yao reports to him.” Everyone pretends that they didn’t hear the slip. Wei Ying hopes the dinner works out. He knows what it’s like to be in a state of quantum uncertainty with having siblings. Like if he didn’t ask if they were his brother and his sister, then he could simultaneously have them as family and not.

He still feels that way sometimes. Which is why he says, “I’m not there to network. I don’t need to, I’m going to go work at Jiang Industrial.” He reaches for his glass with slightly clumsy fingers. It’s not a lie, so he doesn’t understand why his heart is beating so heavily.

Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan look at each other. Couples are the worst. It must be so weird to have someone take one look and know exactly what the other person is thinking. It’s freaky and unnatural. And they definitely shouldn’t be using that power to talk about Wei Ying while he’s still in the room.

***

Jiang Yanli drives him back to his res in silence. The click of his belt buckle is unusually loud.

“You know,” Wei Ying says, then trails off. He looks at his hands. They’re lit by the glow of the dashboard lights. He’s not sure where this is coming from. Some combination of offering him scotch and the way he couldn’t say the word brother, like the hope of it was too big for his mouth. “You can tell him he doesn’t have to try so hard.”

Yanli looks at him, streetlight shining in her eyes. She looks so genuinely happy about it that he feels like an asshole. “Just me though,” he hastens to add. “He can win over Jiang Cheng on his own time.”

She laughs and reaches over to hug him, seatbelt no barrier to a determined hugger. “I’ll let him know,” she says.

***

Wei Ying huddles with the other students at Wing Chun during the break. He means the university students, specifically. He supposes they’re all equal as students under Sifu Nie Mingjue, but he’s not about to rock up to Dr. Lan like ‘hey do any good math recently?’ It just feels wrong. So he flocks with the people like him. And then maybe he sort of leads the group to be close to Lan Zhan’s space, but it’s just a good location to stand. Either way, Lan Zhan gets folded into the conversational group.

Being students, the group doesn’t have a lot in common outside of class and Wing Chun. And Yanli told him it’s rude to talk about Wing Chun while you’re in it. Well, she specifically told him not to criticise the opera when he was still inside the theatre, even though the singers for sure couldn’t hear him, as they were probably deaf due to loudness—but it’s a relevant point to the situation they’re in now. So, lacking topics outside of academics, they’ve fallen into an old standby, light-hearted snobbery about each other’s majors.

Engineering is, of course, most superior behind math because it’s math, applied. So that means he and Nie Huaisang have made good choices. The girls are in kinesiology, which Wei Ying gives a pass because there’s a strong neuro component and this semester he’s taking a class on Biomedical Engineering and it’s touching on biomechanics, which means he’s learning a bit about their field and he can see its value. The body is a system of levers and pulleys using chemically conductive materials of such complexity that no human has been able to artificially replicate their functions—yet, Wei Ying can’t help but add. In the corner of his heart, he can't help but think that while many are trying, none of them are Wei Ying. He’s got some theories. But he digresses. Kinesiology is a fine major.

“Well, we’re all in sciences, at least, none of those pointless arts majors,” Wei Ying says. Nie Huaisang makes a small hissing sound, like someone startling a kitten. “Imagine being in one of those and going to class like ‘oh yeah I have some feelings? Class credit please.’” Science is at least real. You have to prove it for it to count, there’s no arguing about whether reality exists or not.

Lan Zhan huffs. That’s the most reaction Wei Ying has gotten out of him in weeks. He pounces on it.

“No,” Wei Ying says, gleeful. “You are not an arts major.”

“Literature,” Lan Zhan says. Humanities. Even worse. His jawline juts towards the ceiling.

Wei Ying wants to reach out and pat his cheek. Decides at the last second he’d like to keep his hand. Nie Huaisang tugs on the back of Wei Ying’s shirt. Wei Ying shrugs him off. “At least it isn’t philosophy,” he says, feeling magnanimous. If people in academia can agree on anything, it’s that philosophy is at the bottom of the pecking order.

Nie Huaisang groans. “Philosophy of translation,” he mutters so Wei Ying can hear. Well. Whoops. Maybe that wasn’t the olive branch he thought it was. Can’t back down now, though.

“Congrats on the easy major,” Wei Ying says. “Must be nice to sit around making stuff up and then using words in the most confusing way to hide it.”

“You speak very confidently for someone who knows nothing,” Lan Zhan says. He’s looking at Wei Ying, eyes narrowed. Wei Ying is caught in the beam and he can feel his heart going. He feels his centre of gravity drop. He will not be moved. Not by a pair of pretty eyes.

“You know that postmodernism is just people who didn’t understand quantum mechanics, right? They took the idea that because every instrument to measure something also interacts with the world and therefore impacts it and then said there is no objectivity or truth.” Wei Ying’s proud he knows that at all. At first he was only confused about what the fuck seemed to be going on in the minds of his arts major friends when they would say things like ‘western ontology denies other ways of knowing and the only true knowing is subjective experience’ like—no? The ground is solid and real and scientists can do the math to put a probe on a comet ten years in the future. That’s not subjective. It bothered him, so he got into why the arts people talked like that and one day it clicked. Someone had failed to explain the uncertainty principle. Simple as that.

Besides, even things that feel subjective are measurable. Pain, fear… it’s all chemicals in the brain, they can be tracked and traced, they’re real too. No one gets to tell him that shit’s an illusion—or sorry, a patriarchal hegemonic collective unconsciousness dynamism. Saying that nothing exists feels insulting and childish, to Wei Ying. Isn’t it better to wrestle with what is?

“You are not illiterate,” Lan Zhan says. “You make meaning in written form, and expect to share that meaning with others. How can you argue there is no value in understanding the meaning-making process?” Wei Ying’s world narrows. There is only him and Lan Zhan and this argument.

“I’m all for that. We can understand how neurons send signals to the brain, how memories are encoded and retrieved.” Wei Ying takes a step closer.

Lan Zhan responds. “That is not universal. The brain is plastic and shaped by experience. Experiences are socially determined and transmitted through culture. When we understand literature, we understand thought better than your MRIs can.” Lan Zhan’s lip curls. “A technique so flawed it reads dead fish as experiencing emotions.”

“Oh no, no Sapir-Whorf arguments,” Nie Huaisang says and then points at himself like he too is surprised that he’s spoken. But he continues, not cowed by Lan Zhan’s attention. “Language does not determine thought, sorry Lan Zhan.” Wei Ying stares at Huaisang. "I used to major in linguistics,” he explains.

“Language shapes thought,” Lan Zhan says. Wei Ying snorts. Lan Zhan continues as if he did not hear. “Since you love your empiricism, there are studies that show the effect of priming on memory.”

“Probably some weak psychology study from the ‘70s run at p<.05 significance,” Wei Ying dismisses. “I’ll pass.”

“I have attempted to speak your language, as it were, the world of experiments where everything is disconnected from its context,” Lan Zhan says. Wei Ying’s spine straightens. There’s a hiss to the edge of Lan Zhan’s words. “You dismiss the idea of critical thinking so readily. You, who needs it more than most. You’re studying biomedical engineering, is that purely academic for you or do you plan to hold the lives of others in your hand?” It’s like he was reading Wei Ying’s thoughts. How did he know that Wei Ying has been thinking about practical applications? “I doubt that you can hold yourself back from practical application, and on that day we can only hope that you have considered any question aside from ‘can it be done?’”

Before Wei Ying can put together a response, Lan Zhan spares him another glare and then walks off.

Everyone in class is staring at Wei Ying. Which is fine, he’s good at being the centre of attention. Or he will be, as soon as he can feel his feet again. That is definitely the most Lan Zhan has ever spoken to him before. He doesn’t understand how he went from having the upper hand in that conversation to feeling so put down. Lan Zhan talked to him like he’s a modern day Frankenstein, looking to electrocute something into artificial life in his room.

He’s not like that at all! He thinks about things!

And how did Lan Zhan know he’s studying biomedical engineering? That’s sort of freaking him out. Mostly because he’s not. He’s a materials engineer—will be a materials engineer. That’s what Uncle Jiang wants him to do, what Jiang Cheng is expecting. He just thought that maybe, for this semester, he could try some different classes. That’s all. It’s just an experiment. Like how Lan Zhan was supposed to be an experiment. He’s in a totally different university. It doesn’t count. Not towards his real life.

But if Lan Zhan can tell that he’s doing something different, that he’s studying something that isn’t strictly his focus, he wonders how obvious it is to other people. He doesn’t want anyone to know. If they did, that would be… suboptimal.

He’s still thinking about it when he falls asleep.

***

After breakfast—rice and egg, he is super great at living on his own—he swings by Wen Qing and Wen Ning’s suite.

“Wen Ning, my buddy, I’ve got some questions about the assignment—aaaand sorry to interrupt,” he says after throwing the door open dramatically to reveal Wen Qing on her own with no Wen Ning in sight. She’s got her hair up in a bun, some variety show on her laptop and the biggest cup of coffee he’s ever seen. Wei Ying lived with Yanli, he knows when a woman is having some Alone Time.

She sighs and leans forward to hit the space bar on her keyboard. “He’s not here,” she says.

This makes Wei Ying pause. He doesn’t want to be judgmental but Wen Ning seems to have a terminal case of not having a life. He never wants to come out to the bar with Wei Ying. So Wei Ying can’t imagine where he could be at. “Where is he?”

“This is his usual volunteer slot at the campus food bank.” She’s got one eyebrow up, which might as well be screaming, Why are you still here?

“We have a food bank?” Wei Ying asks, weakly.

“Not every student gets their tuition bankrolled by their rich guardians,” she says. “Some of us are living a little closer to the line.”

That stings. Yeah, Wei Ying is paid for, with enough for him to get what he needs but he’s aware of it, okay? He’s grateful. It was in no way guaranteed that Jiang-shushu would want anything to do with him once he turned eighteen, and Wei Ying appreciates that he did every single day. Then he remembers. “Hey,” he says, feeling slightly aggrieved, “doesn’t your uncle pay for your Med School?”

She sighs. “I’m going to tell you this so you don’t ask Wen Ning, got it?” Wei Ying nods, slightly mystified. “Yes, our uncle pays for our tuition, and sometimes we get an allowance, but only when he’s pleased with us. He’s not pleased if Wen Ning gets a better grade than one of his shitty sons, or if he has a bad day because he gets cut off in traffic. So sometimes, food bank. Wen Ning likes to give back when he’s not relying on it. Again, do not ask him about this.”

Wei Ying gets pride and he gets the helplessness of inconsistent favour. He nods, agreeing easily.

He stands there awkwardly for a second and then something occurs to him. “So when I kicked Wen Chao out of the party…” Did they get punished because of him?

“It was a highlight of my year,” Wen Qing says, eyes narrowed, daring him to argue.

Wei Ying puts up his hands, super ready to let it go. And then he backs right out of her suite. He’ll ask Wen Ning about the assignment at lunch.

***

Getting Wednesday lunch has become their thing now. Little lunch club. It’s nice. They’re all talking about their mid-autumn festival plans. Apparently Lan Zhan’s uncle is super strict but has the best food and that makes it worth it to go, according to Nie Huaisang.

From that, Wei Ying gleans that Nie Huaisang’s parents are dead; otherwise they wouldn’t all end up at the Lans’. Wei Ying wonders what the odds are, that all three of his new engineering friends are orphans. He thought it was their impeccable vibes that had drawn the three of them together, but he wonders, sometimes, if there’s something about being an orphan that gives them a charge that they can sense. Like the missing bonds are flapping about looking for other ions to bond with to make a molecule. He wants to ask, sometimes, if it feels the same way for them that it does for him, like there’s this permanently open space inside of him, big enough for the wind to whistle through and bite when it’s cold. But he never does, because he’s not the right sort of orphan. He got adopted—well, not technically, but adopted enough. He’s got adopted siblings and his siblings have parents, even if he doesn’t.

People don’t understand that he could get sibling without their parents. He's had to draw family trees on napkins multiple times. And once they get it it’s like their brains can’t hold the idea. They slip up and ask Wei Ying about his friends when they mean Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli. After hearing he has siblings, they really can’t take the idea of him not having parents. Siblings but no shared parents? Jiang-shushu and Mrs. Yu were both always really great about not trying to replace his parents, but they did give him a place to live. They fill that slot by most people’s estimation. He understands that, even if it’s not how anyone in his family describes their relationships.

Even if it’s not how he feels about them.

He doesn’t like having that conversation. It always starts with pure confusion. There’s this idea people have of what being an orphan means. There are shapes of stories that people carry around in them, and they can’t handle it when his life doesn’t fit their idea of how the story should go.

It leaves him with an untidy narrative, so he just tucks it inside.

He shoves kimbap in his mouth.

Mianmian has been listening intently. “Oh, that sounds lovely. I miss celebrating, but it’s impossible to leave school this time of year.” He’s pretty sure Mianmian and Wen Qing have been together for years, so it’s pretty shitty that she can’t go with Wen Qing to the Wen family celebration, but it’s not Wei Ying’s family so it’s not his place to say. He focuses on eating. As long as his mouth is full he can’t put his foot in it.

“Dalvir complains about that too,” Nie Huaisang says. “The break schedule is totally messed up for any international student who doesn’t celebrate Christmas. What am I going to do with some random days off at the end of December and forever having midterms at lunar New Year and mid-autumn? I think he has a petition you could sign.”

Mianmian puts up her hands. “I’m not trying to make trouble,” she laughs nervously. “I just want a mooncake.”

Wei Ying forces a swallow slightly too soon. It hurts a little on the way down. “Come to the dinner my sister and brother-in-law are having!”

Mianmian lights up and then deflates. “That wouldn’t be weird?”

Wei Ying thinks about how the guest list is him, Jiang Yanli, Jin Zixuan, and three of Jin Zixuan’s suddenly discovered genetic half-siblings, and feels his face go on a journey. “Nope, absolutely not the weirdest thing.” He ignores the way Lan Zhan is staring at him intently and makes a mental note to explain the situation to Mianmian before she walks into… all of that. “In fact, please come, I could use a friend there.”

She looks a little wary, but Wei Ying is pretty sure this is the wary of ‘am I allowed to accept the thing I really want’ and not someone trying to find a polite way to refuse. “If you’re sure…” she says.

“Absolutely,” Wei Ying says.

Wen Ning eats his soup uncharacteristically quickly and bolts away from the table. Well, his version of bolting is to carefully say goodbye to everyone in turn. But since he usually sits and waits for everyone and then walks Wei Ying to the computer lab, it’s pretty fast. Wei Ying, also a fast eater when he’s not distracted, follows him.

“Where are you off to?” Wei Ying asks.

“I have a volunteer shift,” Wen Ning says, tightening the straps on his backpack.

“Oh, I heard about that,” Wei Ying says and then his cheeks heat. Wen Qing told him specifically not to mention it. And that was only today, why is his brain so bad? But Wen Ning lights up.

“You did? Isn’t it cool? I just believe in the mission so much,” Wen Ning says. Wei Ying shifts his weight from foot to foot. How much is the right amount to agree here? “Helping everyone get access to computers is so important. Lots of jobs and schools just expect everyone to have them, and that’s not true, so many people don’t.” That went somewhere Wei Ying didn’t expect.

“Yeah, it’s really—huh. Yeah. You’re right,” Wei Ying says. They’re definitely talking about something different than Wei Ying had expected, but he does agree.

***

Wei Ying’s phone lights up. Who would dare to call without arranging a time first—oh, it’s Jiang Cheng. He hits accept on the call while deftly weaving around various students. He wants to get off of the main paths on the mall before he becomes responsible for a traffic accident. He likes to pace when he talks, and that is pretty incompatible with being a predictable pedestrian presence. Most of the mall is grass though. Wei Ying assumes it’s very nice for picnics in the summer, if there aren’t too many geese. Because it’s fall, he only has to contend with a single fat squirrel who is staring him down. Wei Ying could probably take it in a fight if it came to that, even if they do carry plague.

“Hey,” he says.

“Is that all you have to say to me? You haven’t called once since you moved across the country and you say ‘hey’,” Jiang Cheng huffs. “You could be dead for all I know.” Well, now Wei Ying knows he didn’t call for any particular reason. If he had he wouldn’t be bantering.

Wei Ying rolls his eyes. “I’m obviously not dead, I just posted a meme in the group chat last night.” Wei Ying is terrible at social media, but he is good at keeping his group chats alive.

“An Emperor’s New Groove trolley problem meme is not sufficient proof of life.” It featured Kronk pulling the lever and Yzma falling down a trapdoor. Objectively hilarious. Maybe he shouldn’t talk so much shit about philosophy if it produces gems like that.

“I actually think it is, who else would post that?” Silence. Which means Wei Ying wins. “How’s your communism degree going?”

Jiang Cheng is double majoring in Business and Communications. It sounds like a very corporate degree but no one told the Communications professors that. One of his professors apparently snapped a pen in half while telling his classroom of blazer-wearing, transparent plastic folder using aspiring PR managers that if they didn’t learn to critique society and sit with discomfort they would not be able to resist fascism. Yet Jiang Cheng hates it when Wei Ying reasonably points out the leftist bent to his education. Like Wei Ying is the one who made Jiang Cheng read Marx as a class requirement.

Wei Ying can actually hear Jiang Cheng grinding his teeth about it. Jiang Cheng is the only twenty-year-old that Wei Ying knows who has to sleep with a mouthguard to protect his enamel.

“It’s not—it's going fine,” Jiang Cheng says.

Wei Ying can’t help but smile. He’s missed him. He rolls his neck. “Oh, I actually had a question you might be able to help with.” Wei Ying bites back about a comment about how that’s shocking and unexpected because he wants to keep this conversation roughly on track. “I’m having a measured and reasonable academic discussion with someone getting a PhD in philosophy of translation—”

“Might as well be underwater basket weaving,” Jiang Cheng cuts in. See, Jiang Cheng gets it.

“Yeah. But I need some talking points or something to prove that it’s totally bullshit and Engineering is the best major.”

“Hm,” Jiang Cheng says. “I think I have something for that.” At the end of the day, this is why they’re brothers; Wei Ying knows Jiang Cheng will help him out. Bitch and moan the whole way, but he’ll show up.

“Awesome.” Wei Ying changes the subject now that that’s settled. Jiang Cheng didn’t call for a reason, but he definitely wants to talk. “So you say it’s going fine, but why do I get the sense that someone is being an idiot?”

Jiang Cheng literally growls. “My group project member—”

Wei Ying lets his voice wash over him.

***

Wei Ying loves Wing Chun for itself, but he can’t deny that one of the perks is the post-workout clarity. There’s something about it that gets him into the most incredible flow state. He can’t count the number of times he’s had to lunge out of a post-workout shower mid-wash because he’s cracked a problem.

He’s got his headphones on and he’s just going, code coming out so clearly that it takes him a while to realise that the thumping sound he’s hearing isn’t an odd syncopation on the track that he’s listening to. He pulls his headphones off his ears. It’s his door; someone is knocking.

He gets tangled in his headphone wires twice trying to get up. In his defence, he wasn’t expecting anyone!

Yanking the door open, trailing headphone wires off his elbow, with his hair still damp and only wearing sweatpants is not his ideal way to greet Lan Zhan, especially because Lan Zhan looks perfectly put together in soft grey lounge clothing. It may not be ideal, but it’s what’s happening. Lan Zhan raises an eyebrow and Wei Ying realises he’s staring.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says, swallowing. “Ah, come in.” He steps away from the door, and Lan Zhan takes a couple of steps in, just enough for Wei Ying to close the door. Wei Ying lunges for his laptop, which is blasting Dally by Hyolyn at full volume now that his headphones are unplugged. He pauses the music, feeling Lan Zhan’s eyes on his back like an itch between his shoulder blades.

He turns around, wiping away a bead of water that’s dripping down his chest.

He watches Lan Zhan glance between Wei Ying’s computer chair and the edge of his bed, before choosing the edge of the bed. Possibly Wei Ying’s damp towel, draped over the back of his chair, dissuaded him from the chair. Again, Wei Ying is struck by how not strange it is to have Lan Zhan in his space. It’s not that Wei Ying is very particular, but there is a bit of power in thresholds, he thinks. Usually. But like his body, his bubble seems to not see Lan Zhan as an intruder.

When the music dies, so does the coloured light strip that Wei Ying is programming to colour shift in time with the music, so he turns on a lamp to compensate for the sudden darkness.

“What is that?” Lan Zhan asks.

“It’s K-pop?” Wei Ying answers. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if he has to explain what K-pop is to Lan Zhan.

“The lights,” Lan Zhan clarifies. That makes more sense.

“I’m programming them to change colours and pulse to the music,” Wei Ying explains.

“There are things you can buy that do this,” Lan Zhan says.

Wei Ying scratches the back of his neck. His fingertips come away wet. “Yeah, but there’s something about doing it myself. Besides, I can give it all the features I want this way.”

Lan Zhan nods like this means something to him. His lips aren’t doing that thing where they get all tight and pressed together, which makes this the best conversation they’ve ever had.

Unlike Jiang Cheng, Wei Ying is pretty sure Lan Zhan isn’t here for the bants. “Can I help you with something?” He winces slightly; that feels rude, like he’s implying Lan Zhan wouldn’t just visit. But Lan Zhan just nods.

“Qingyang told me you’re collecting for a present to celebrate Wen Qing passing her medical board exams.”

“Oh! Yeah!” Mianmian is obviously doing her own thing to celebrate with Wen Qing, and Wen Ning too—his own separate thing, not connected to Mianmian’s. “You want in?” Wei Ying walks to his computer to open up his spreadsheet. He’s keeping track of everyone’s contributions there. “We’re getting her a pair of Dansko clogs. They’re pricey but Reddit says they’re the best shoes for surgeons cause they’re waterproof and orthoped—you don’t care. Anyway, we're about fifty short right now.”

“Where should I email you money?”

Wei Ying rattles off his email.

Then he ruins the nice time they’re having. “You painted that landscape in your room right?” Lan Zhan nods. “If you can do your own art, why is your research about other people’s work? You could be doing your own stuff instead of reiterating the thoughts of dead people. It's not like their words are gone or anything.” Wei Ying has memorised his fair share of important old stuff, even if memorising 江 村 was mostly him sucking up to the Jiang aunties.

Lan Zhan’s lips do the thing. Ah, Wei Ying, why are you like this, he thinks. “Aren’t you also building on the work of others?” He points at the light-up strip, which… Wei Ying hadn’t thought of that. Fair point, Lan Zhan. But he doesn’t feel done, so he keeps talking.

“You’re smart and talented, I just don’t get it. I mean I guess Benjamin says that translation is its own form of art closer to poetry rather than something derivative but that doesn’t really make sense? It’s still built on someone else’s work.” Wei Ying half expects Lan Zhan to walk out because of the insult, but he doesn’t.

“You read Benjamin?” Lan Zhan asks. His lips are slightly parted. Wei Ying nods. It was in the package Jiang Cheng sent over. “Then you’ll remember that he argues that translation is one of the main ways that language expands. Translators do new things with language when they convey meaning.”

Wei Ying swallows around a suddenly dry mouth. He does remember that. He nods and feels his way into his desk chair, so he can look Lan Zhan dead on. “You want to expand language? That seems like… a big task.”

“There are ideas that you and I are familiar with that others aren’t.” Wei Ying watches the apple of Lan Zhan’s throat bob as he thinks of other words. “Language is how we tell each other about our lives. Without re-transmission, important things can fade away and die. How do we keep these things alive? Someone translated them for us, but we have to keep translating them to others to hold that space.”

That was… not what Wei Ying had been expecting.

“I thought you’d say you just really liked old shit,” Wei Ying says weakly.

Lan Zhan smiles. Honest to goodness. It’s a tiny thing, barely a wisp of a lip lifting, but Wei Ying knows a smile when he sees one. “That too,” he says.

***

Wen Ning and Wei Ying are standing on the mall in the designated area they got a permit for so they can ask students to donate their broken tech. Broken… for now! But hopefully not broken after Free Geek gets their hands on it. Sure, a lot of things are victims of planned obsolescence and are unrecoverable, but more is fixable than people think.

Wei Ying has spent some long nights falling down the repair youtube video hole. He’s gotten really into the videos of this one who illicitly fixes iPads, in particular. He has the coolest collection of tiny screwdrivers and even tinier soldering irons that he uses to get into their tightly packed guts. So there’s a lot that can be done. But the real utility is in outdated laptops. That’s the program Wei Ying works on; he refurbishes them and they get donated to low income kids. But to fix things, they need things, ergo Wei Ying and Wen Ning sitting in the light rain under a white easy-up in their GoreTex jackets while students shuffle past them and refuse to make eye contact. They’ve gotten a few things though—still with no eye contact, but who cares. Wei Ying thinks that half of the point of this is, uh, what was the phrase? Raising awareness. They’re raising awareness that people can actually do something. If people know they can donate their broken stuff then maybe they’ll do that instead of stashing it in their rooms until it becomes a toxic threat from battery leakage.

Nie Huaisang runs up to them, skidding a little on the last couple of steps. It throws up a small wave of water onto Wei Ying’s shoes. “Where’s the fire?” Wei Ying asks. He hands a chemical warmer over to Wen Ning, who snaps it and holds it between his hands.

“What?” Huaisang asks. “No fire, I’m just running late for class but I wanted to tell you the latest news from the queer resource centre.” Every once in a while Huaisang tries to tell them about an activity or event that’s getting organised there, like that’ll make them want to go, but Wei Ying doesn’t need a theme night to have a good time. And he doesn’t want to watch bad movies from ten years ago. Wei Ying braces himself to come up with some more excuses. “Apparently Lan Zhan hasn’t hooked up with anyone in a couple of weeks.”

Instantly, Wei Ying does not know what to do with his hands. He shoves them into his pockets. He knows this is not about him, but he doesn’t know what the normal way to react is. “Oh?” he says.

Then, like he's been summoned, Lan Zhan walks by. He's got his leather messenger bag across his chest and his raincoat fits so well it's smooth beneath the strap, not crumpled at all. Wei Ying waves. Lan Zhan looks at him and does not wave back. They watch him walk past.

Wen Ning speaks and Wei Ying turns to him. Wen Ning frowns. “Is that news? Why is everyone so obsessed with Lan Zhan?”

Huaisang looks Wen Ning up and down. “Who is everyone? I’m a normal amount of interested, it’s you two who are weird.” He stomps his foot a little. “Don’t make me feel bad about this! It’s not gossip, he’s like a public figure or something. It’s a small world and small campus, we have to talk about something.” There are fifty thousand students, that’s not tiny, in Wei Ying’s mind.

Wen Ning hates being told off so he kind of crumples, shoulders coming in. Wei Ying doesn’t like that. He turns and stands in front of Huaisang, matching their centre lines. He takes his hands out of his pockets, leaving them loose. “Leave Wen Ning alone, he’s got more important things to care about than who his neighbour hooks up with, is all. Don’t make him feel bad.”

Huaisang throws his hands in the air. “Fine! I don’t know why I try.” And then he walks off.

Wei Ying and Wen Ning stand together in silence. Wei Ying wonders if what Huaisang says is true. Wei Ying is pretty sure he noticed at least two people leaving Lan Zhan’s room, and a couple of nights where Lan Zhan didn’t come in until Wei Ying was going to sleep, even though Lan Zhan prefers early morning runs. But Wei Ying had only paid enough attention to verify what Huaisang had told him about Lan Zhan’s habits. After that he’d figured it was probably creepy, so he’d tried to stop.

So he can’t say for sure—no, that’s a lie, and what’s the point of lying inside of his own head? Lan Zhan’s schedule has been very regular recently. Used to be that sometimes he’d walk towards the computer lab with Wei Ying after Wing Chun—if people don’t like Wei Ying’s post-workout smell that’s their problem, he’s there well after main hours, they should be home—but now he always turns and goes back to the res.

Water that has been pooling up on the edge of the plastic canopy slops down with a crashing noise and Wei Ying jumps a full foot into the air. When he lands, Wen Ning is looking at him curiously.

“I’m fine,” Wei Ying says.

***

Maybe Wei Ying is thinking about what Nie Huaisang said about Lan Zhan not hooking up. But that’s normal, right? Nie Huaisang said everyone thinks about Lan Zhan.

He runs his brain at capacity, thinking about it. The thing is… the thing is that he and Lan Zhan are friends. Friends talk to each other about things. It’s true that friends mostly talk to each other about things like ‘when are we going to get together to game?’ and ‘dude I almost had you.’ It still feels strange that Wei Ying heard that Lan Zhan wasn’t hooking up from Huaisang instead of from him directly.

What if there’s something wrong with Lan Zhan? What if he pulled a muscle in his groin at class that has left him tragically unable to fuck? Maybe he needs someone to rub it out for him, or help him stretch. Or, if it’s bad enough, carry him. Wei Ying could do those things!

Lan Zhan seemed fine at their last class, but Wei Ying can’t trust it, because if he’s hiding this, he could be hiding anything. He’s a man of mystery, Lan Zhan is.

“Augh,” he says, out loud, to the beige of his ceiling, turned grey by the weak moonlight that trickles into his room. He can feel his brain overclocking.

Luckily, he’s got mid-autumn festival dinner with Jin Zixuan’s new siblings coming up to take his mind off of it.

***

Lan Zhan lingers at the end of Wing Chun, which he never does. Wei Ying sees him out of the corner of his eye while he’s doing some extra blocking practice with sifu.

Wei Ying wraps it up quickly. Lan Zhan jerks his head towards the exit and a huge smile breaks out on Wei Ying’s face. He knew Lan Zhan was waiting for him! He knew it! He’s definitely winning Lan Zhan over, they are going to be best friends. His chest is full of bubbles.

“Miss me?” Wei Ying asks when he catches up. Lan Zhan says nothing, but Wei Ying doesn’t need him to. He laughs and knocks his shoulder against Lan Zhan’s. “What’s up?”

“You asked Qingyang to your family’s mid-autumn festival celebration,” Lan Zhan says.

“Well, yeah,” Wei Ying says. You were there when I asked her.

Lan Zhan hesitates. He’s not a very hesitant guy. He’s more of a take charge, storm out kind of guy.

“Qingyang is in a long-term, committed relationship with Wen Qing,” Lan Zhan says. His lips are pressed together. Wei Ying isn’t sure what he said wrong.

“I am aware of that…” Wei Ying says slowly, waiting for the rest.

“You shouldn’t flirt with her,” Lan Zhan says. “I recognise you are a habitual flirt, but if you also suggest taking her home to your family, that creates a certain set of expectations that you cannot impose on her. She is not available.”

Wei Ying stopped walking somewhere around ‘creates expectations’ and he can feel the way his jaw is hanging open. He thinks about Lan Zhan: doesn’t set expectations for others, no strings, no dates. Wei Ying thinks he’s done a pretty good job of not expecting anything from Lan Zhan back. He knows that the morning after was his misapprehension. He knows that he’s maybe a bit naive when it comes to this stuff, and that it’s Lan Zhan with the expertise. So he trusts Lan Zhan to know what a relationship looks like. If he thinks that Wei Ying is doing something that indicates… that puts pressure on Mianmian… He doesn’t want to put her in that situation.

“I don’t expect anything from her, I’m not, I don’t—” He doesn’t know what to say. “I’m not trying to make her toast.” He wants Lan Zhan to understand.

Lan Zhan stiffens.

“You should be more careful,” Lan Zhan says.

And that pisses him off, a little. Like Wei Ying will think about his mistakes, sure, but he’s not going to get told off. And besides, Lan Zhan had so many chances to bring this up, why wait til now? He was there when Wei Ying asked her.

“Where is this coming from?” Wei Ying demands. “Mianmian is my friend and I don’t think anyone should have to be alone on a holiday. So I asked! That’s all. I think you’ve misjudged this.”

Wei Ying is friendly because he doesn’t want other people to feel—it doesn’t matter.

Regardless, Lan Zhan shouldn’t throw that at him like it’s a bad thing. Why would he do that? Now that Wei Ying is thinking about it more, it doesn’t make sense.

His mind skitters around, trying to figure out where this is coming from. Trying to figure it out, he traces back everything he knows about Lan Zhan and he remembers what Huaisang told them today.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying asks. The possibility is so horrible, but it would explain why this came up now, would explain Lan Zhan’s behaviour. “Do you like Mianmian?”

Lan Zhan stares at him.

“Wei Ying, you are the fucking worst,” he says and walks off into the night.

***

Going shopping the weekend before a major festival is always an exercise in getting viciously elbowed by grannies—with the bruises to prove it. Wei Ying’s engineer brain thinks that they should therefore optimise their plans so they… don’t… but it still seems to happen. So, obediently, he shows up at Yanli’s a day ahead of time so they can hit up the market.

“Hey, I have a question,” Wei Ying asks as they’re fastening their seatbelts.

“Hm?” Yanli prompts, adjusting the seatbelt cosy she has so the strap doesn’t dig into her neck.

“If someone said that someone else was the worst, what would it mean?” The fucking worst, actually. He's never heard Lan Zhan swear before. He's not sure if it makes it better or worse.

Yanli’s seatbelt snaps into her neck. “Whoops, dropped the cosy.” She arranges everything and then adjusts her rearview mirror. “Who said that?” she asks casually.

“Hypothetically,” Wei Ying says. He’s resisting the urge to squirm. He doesn’t know why he asked. He doesn’t want to say what happened. He doesn’t think he did anything wrong, inviting Mianmian, but what if he did? Bringing it up is just asking Yanli to be disappointed in him and he doesn’t want to hear that right now.

“Well,” Yanli says, “Hypothetically, if someone said that to someone in our family, it would be an insult to the entire family and we’d expect an apology.”

"It's not… isn't it a thing that friends say to each other sometimes? Teasing?"

Yanli peers are him. "Are the two of you friends?"

Yes, Wei Ying wants to say, but he hesitates. Every interaction they've had has been Wei Ying pushing and Lan Zhan becoming visibly annoyed. That's not what his friendships with Huaisang or Wen Ning are like. Not like the friendships he had growing up. He thinks friends are people who get together to have fun. But it's not fun if he's the only one having it.

“Oh,” Wei Ying says.

***

Yanli has a list, but she’s also got a few things she wants because she has coupons. She cheerfully shows him her coupon app as they go in, so he knows exactly what to look for. In his mind, Yanli has always been perfectly adult, and a perfect adult. He knows now that when he was eight and she was sixteen, she wasn’t an adult at all. In his memories she still seems super grown up. But even he knows she wasn’t always a person who did coupons and had a seatbelt cosy and a sodastream. Is that something that gets assigned to people as they get older? Will Wei Ying wake up and want to batch cook meals? And if not, then how did she figure out that’s what she likes? And she does like it. She seems happy. It burns a little, seeing the way she’s expanded to fill the space. Not because he wants her to be sad! But because he didn’t know she was unhappy before. Because she’s happier living apart from him than living together.

It makes him think about how maybe he’d be happier too, living away.

Well, time to find paper towels.

He meets back up with Yanli near the front of the shop—at the side, not the actual front; Wei Ying would not be able to withstand the tidal pressure of people pushing past him to get to the till. She examines the contents of his basket and deems it acceptable, and Wei Ying feels a warm glow in his heart. More so when the cashier scans all of Yanli’s coupons and her face warms from terminally bored to almost impressed. Wei Ying helped with that.

It’s a lot to wrangle, though, and they’re still shifting bags between their hands as they walk out of the door and into Lan Zhan and his brother.

Wei Ying stumbles.

“Oh! Dr. Lan, Lan Zhan,” Yanli says. She’s smiling, eyes darting between Wei Ying and Lan Zhan.

One time, in high school, Tezeta dared him to drink some of the milk her mother insisted she bring for lunch every day. It made him feel the way running into Lan Zhan is making him feel. Slightly sweaty and like his internal organs are making a bid for freedom. His small intestine has the right idea, he thinks; it would be a great time to leave. His feet, however, are rooted.

“Dr. Jiang,” Dr. Lan says, smiling his permanent crescent moon smile. Lan Zhan says nothing.

They stand there for long enough that Yanli’s smile fades and a look of knowing creeps into her eyes. Wei Ying can see it in the way her hands tighten on the bags. Wei Ying figures it’s probably past time for them to get home.

“Jie,” he says, and jiggles the bags in his arms. She snaps to attention.

“Right,” she says, and they turn and walk away.

On the drive back, Yanli keeps up chatter about one of her students who keeps needing things rescheduled because of competitive bhangra and how some professors complain but she doesn't mind. If the student is trying to learn, then that's fine, exams can be postponed. She won’t get to compete in bhangra forever, what’s an exam compared to that?

Wei Ying is tense the whole way, so when Yanli pulls the parking brake in front of her house, for a wild second he thinks the metal creaking noise is coming from inside his chest instead of from the car. It takes him a second to get his bearings. He does a masterful recovery, undoing his seatbelt in only two tries and managing the door handle on his first.

They go inside, Wei Ying barely able to see over his pile of bags, and put everything away. She's got her kitchen arranged just how it was when they were growing up.

Then she offers him tea.

He's beginning to realise that what felt like a moment where his skin had turned to glass and revealed all of the messiness beneath it wasn’t so obvious to anyone else. He shouldn't be so worried. That's his punishment for thinking the world revolves around him.

He relaxes.

***

Interestingly, the dinner only had a fraction of the seething tension of his meeting with the Lans at the market. He isn’t sure what he expected, but it wasn’t mostly polite but continuous eating at a generally quiet dinner. Mianmian was a champ. She got along with everyone, hitting it off immediately with Jin Zixuan and making small talk with Qin Su.

Wei Ying even makes it back to res mostly sober, and at a reasonable hour. That might be the strangest bit, he thinks as he toes off his shoes. He goes into the fridge to get some root beer.

He hadn’t known much about the new siblings; he’s embarrassed to say he didn’t even know their names.

Wei Ying had been thinking about Jin Zixuan’s unfortunate sibling situation in the aggregate. There were siblings, it was not technically illegal that they existed, somehow, and everyone was trying to navigate it. But here, in his sister’s house, he was faced with them as individuals, and also faced with how little he knows about them.

Well, Jin Zixuan had mentioned Meng Yao. But Qin Su and Mo Xuanyu were new to Wei Ying. Seeing them together, Wei Ying felt instinctively that they belonged in a set.

In terms of attitude and bearing, they were an extremely different bunch. In one corner there’s his brother-in-law, with huge ‘okay team we can do this’ coach energy, and then on the other end there’s Mo Xuanyu, almost prototypical e-boy. He looks like he runs a TikTok where he breaks down modern battle strategy and gets into arguments about whether there is a DIY way to take down a tank or if specialised materiel is the only way. He’s probably on like seven different watchlists.

They couldn’t be more different but when seen together their paternity is undeniable. Meng Yao and Mo Xuanyu share the same eyes, Mo Xuanyu and Jin Zixuan have the same nose, Qin Su and Meng Yao both have this same turn around the edge of their mouths. Wei Ying, who is used to defending himself against accusations that he doesn’t look anything like his siblings, finds it kind of freaky.

Strange to think that they didn’t know each other until recently. It’s like twins separated at birth except they never should have existed. They don’t have to exist now. Legally, they’re nothing to each other. Wei Ying knows there are more siblings out there who didn’t even want to know, let alone acknowledge this situation. But these ones did; they reached out and decided to have dinner together and ask questions about each other’s lives that they would already know if they were really family.

He should really call Jiang Cheng more.

And as awful as the whole thing is, there was this look on Jin Zixuan’s face, this quiet smile whenever he pushed a plate towards Qin Su, or got up to refill pitchers because Meng Yao was thirsty. He was happy. Wei Ying doesn’t really know what to think about it. It doesn’t seem like things would be better for any of them if they’d never known about each other, even though things would be a lot simpler if they never had. Would they have known they were missing anything? That there was a person out there with half of their facial features walking around? Qin Su has Jin Zixuan’s smile, she shares a nose with Meng Yao. They could have gone their whole lives without this, and Jin Zixuan’s mom probably wishes they had. It twists Wei Ying’s head up a little, all of the possibilities and permutations. He shakes it to clear it.

He cracks open the top of his root beer, waiting for the fizzle to die down before he opens it all the way. There’s only one thing for it—time to fiddle with lighting strips until his fingertips go numb.

***

One of the perks of having a sibling who’s a professor is that if Wei Ying wants to hang out somewhere and doesn’t have enough time to trudge back to res in between classes, he can go to her office. She keeps the heavy wood door closed but if he knocks she’ll pull it back to let him in.

Like her home, she’s done a good job decorating it even though she hasn’t been here that long. She’s got her shelves up on one wall, heavily secured to support the sizable math texts on them, one wall is all whiteboard from floor to ceiling, and she’s managed to fit a small loveseat under the window. On a clear day, if someone knelt on it and looked out the window they’d be able to see the mountains.

Which Wei Ying is doing now. Ostensibly Wei Ying is studying, but actually they’re talking about number theory. And as always happens when they talk theory, they’re getting pretty into it. Yanli has just gotten up and uncapped a whiteboard marker to make her point when there’s a knock at the door.

“Come in!” she calls out, putting the cap back on her marker.

Dr. Lan opens the door. He’s carrying a file folder. He takes a step in and stops when he sees Wei Ying.

“Dr. Jiang,” he says. No eye crinkle.

Wei Ying looks at his sister. Her hand is tight on the marker.

“Hi, Dr. Lan,” Wei Ying says. Dr. Lan smiles at him, quicksilver, barely reaching the eyes, before he locks back on Yanli.

“Dr. Lan,” she says, voice even and utterly neutral. “How can I help you?”

“I brought by the birthday card for Anoop, in case you wanted to sign it,” he says, holding out the folder.

Yanli’s eyes tighten. “I received the departmental email about it, I was going to stop by the secretaries’ desk later on, as the email specified.”

Dr. Lan smiles, a wintry gleam of a thing. “It’s no trouble to bring it by, I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t forget.”

Wei Ying cringes. The whole conversation has been weirdly hostile in a cold way, but that’s an overt declaration of ill intent. Wei Ying has been alive long enough to hear the insult in that. Dr. Lan is as good as saying he thinks that Yanli doesn’t deserve the respect of an adult, who could be trusted to sign a birthday card on their own. Instead he’s brought it to her like he would do for a child. But not a regular, good child. An irresponsible and inconsiderate child.

The cap flies off the marker from where Yanli has been gripping it, a small ping, but Wei Ying reacts to it like a clap of thunder. He flings himself to the ground, patting the floor until he can get his fingers on it. Then he stands up, hands the marker cap to Yanli and puts himself between Yanli and Dr. Lan. He reaches for the folder.

“Thank you,” he says, with his best pleasant smile. “I can take that.”

Dr. Lan’s fingers linger on the folder and Wei Ying has to yank it, just a little, but he eventually relinquishes it and leaves.

Wei Ying waits one heartbeat, two, and then turns to his sister. For her part, she looks absolutely normal. Now that Dr. Lan has left she’s smiling again. Only the placement of the marker on her desk instead of its designated ledge on the whiteboard shows that something was wrong at all.

How to ask… “Um, jie?” he starts.

“Yes?” Her face gives nothing away.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she says. Her face is a perfect picture of pleasant innocence. He’s not going to get anything out of her when she’s like this, he knows that from long experience. So he gives up.

“Never mind.”

***

“It was fucking weird,” he says on voice chat with Jiang Cheng later. They’re playing bootleg World of Warcraft on a private server that some guy in France is running. So far everyone he’s met that isn’t their guild speaks Spanish. Such is the internet.

“You swear?” Huaisang says. “Since when?”

“He swears all the fucking time, he’s the worst influence. When our sister has kids he’s going to be banned from the house,” Jiang Cheng says. Wei Ying takes his character off of auto-travel just to jump at him a few times. Take that, slightly obscured vision.

“You drive me to it, dickhead,” Wei Ying says, which as he thinks of it, is true. Since he’s come here he’s hardly used any bad language. Weird. He was always getting punished for it back home. Except for when he snuck into the uncles’ late night gambling session, where it earned him some extra baijiu. “But seriously, something is up between Dr. Lan and Yanli.” Wei Ying pauses. “Huaisang—”

“Don’t ask me, I don’t know anything,” Huaisang says. There’s a bit of good-natured heckling of him at that.

When that dies down, Jiang Cheng hums. “You know I don’t really pay attention when she talks about how university stuff works, but she’s always talking about grants and committees and tenure… maybe she’s in a turf war.”

“You make her sound like a gangster,” Wei Ying protests.

“The mob has nothing on academia,” Huaisang says. Look who has decided to know things.

“Guys, someone is trying to gank me,” Wen Ning says, and they all have to focus up.

***

Wei Ying’s skipped the last two Wing Chun practices—he had a lot of homework. But now that Wednesday has rolled around he gets on his stretchy pants and marches in, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.

He shows up on time. Makes a point of smiling and waving at Dr. Lan. Dr. Lan smiles back—but is it a chillier smile than usual? Wei Ying squints.

The thing is, Wei Ying has been accused of being self-centred before. So he knows he’s in danger of thinking everything is about him. But the other thing is: there’s no reason for Dr. Lan to suddenly hate Yanli. Yanli is objectively perfect and amazing. And they seemed to get along ok the first time everyone ran into each other at the market. So Wei Ying can’t help but think… well. He can’t help but wonder if it’s him who has made Dr. Lan mean. The evidence is faint, but it’s there. In the office, Dr. Lan hadn’t smiled at him like normal, hadn’t asked after him at all. It wasn’t the harshness of the birthday card insult, but it wasn’t how he normally treats Wei Ying either.

Someone jostles his elbow. It’s Huaisang. “Dude, you’re blocking me,” he says. Wei Ying is standing in front of the area people can drop their bags in and no one can get past him, whoops. He steps to the side. When he looks back, Dr. Lan is in conversation with Lan Zhan. Wei Ying looks away.

When it comes time to pick sparring partners, Wei Ying moves towards Dr. Lan, but he’s already talking to Lan Zhan, so Wei Ying makes a hard swerve and grabs Huaisang by the arm. Huaisang yelps. “Ow! Sharp!” He’s a big baby, but Wei Ying loosens his grip so his nails aren’t digging in anyway.

“We’re partners,” Wei Ying says.

Huaisang looks at him. “Whatever, okay,” he says. This is actually a better plan. He can keep an eye on Dr. Lan and see if he’s acting weird. He seems focused, sparring naturally with his brother.

Huaisang cuffs him on his ear. Not super hard, but it still leaves him with a ringing sensation. Wei Ying rubs it, like that will help. “What was that for?” he yelps.

“What is your problem with Lan Zhan?” Huaisang asks. He whispers Lan Zhan’s name, which is a fair precaution. Lan Zhan has, like, Batman hearing.

“Me? I don’t have problems.” He points at himself to illustrate.

Huaisang rolls his eyes. “Whatever, you can avoid him if you want and I won’t say anything.” Which is super unfair. Wei Ying has not been avoiding Lan Zhan.

And he’ll prove it. At the end of class Wei Ying interrupts the Lan-Nie family huddle. Dr. Lan gets a small line between his brows when Wei Ying butts in, but that could be because Wei Ying is interrupting. There’s lots of reasons for the change in Dr. Lan’s behaviour towards him. He did wait for sifu to finish speaking, though, so it should be fine.

Dr. Lan is definitely staring at him. Wei Ying is starting to get a feeling, a bad feeling. And Wei Ying’s bad feelings are always correct. The good ones lie to him, but the bad ones are always dead on.

Lan Zhan stares at him for a long moment. Wei Ying resists the urge to rub his hands on his pants.

“So, good class today,” Wei Ying ventures. Everyone stares at him. Wei Ying is no stranger to slightly disapproving silence and so perseveres. “I really liked that uh, punching move.” Lan Zhan turns his back. Lan Zhan’s shoulders are a topography of sharp rises and falls, the valley between spine and blade. Something hard and cold slides between Wei Ying and the conversation. And, like he always does when things feel difficult, he gives up, because he is absolutely a quitter. “Okay, bye,” he says, and walks out.

***

He means to head straight back to the res. But instead what he does is lurk behind one of the pillars near the gym and wait for Lan Zhan to come out. Once he does, Wei Ying jumps out. Well, first he calls out, “Lan Zhan!” because it is never a good idea to startle someone who is a martial arts expert.

Lan Zhan is too polite to fully ignore a direct greeting, but he barely slows down.

“Can I walk with you?” Wei Ying asks.

Lan Zhan honest-to-goodness sighs, which is kind of adorable, especially because it sounds like he is absolutely dying inside. Wei Ying bites back a smile.

The walk back is in silence, which Wei Ying expected. It’s fine by him, he has some thoughts to chew on. Unfortunately, he likes to think out loud. He can’t think of anything he’s done that could have upset Dr. Lan. That’s not true. He can think of one thing.

“Did you tell your brother we slept together?” Wei Ying immediately wishes he could take the words back. His face heats, so much blood rushing to it that he can feel his heartbeat in his forehead. He’s almost light-headed with the rush. Involuntarily, he pushes his fist against his face; too little too late, the words have already escaped. They don’t talk about this. They never talk about this. And why should they? It was such a small thing. And way in the past. It’s been weeks now.

Lan Zhan’s eyes cut to the right to look at him. Wei Ying hopes the dark is hiding the tomato that his face has become. Lan Zhan’s pace slows. “No,” he says, equally slowly.

The worst case scenario here is that Lan Zhan asks a follow-up question, so Wei Ying jumps on it. “Then did you tell him I’m a bad influence on you? He’s super giving me the stink eye and I have no idea what I did.”

“He seemed to treat you normally in class today,” Lan Zhan says.

“That was ice queen behaviour, and you know it,” Wei Ying retorts.

“I will speak to him,” Lan Zhan says. “I told him specifically not to—” Lan Zhan cuts himself off.

“Not to what?” Wei Ying prompts, but Lan Zhan won’t say anything more. “Don’t speak to him about it, though, that’s a terrible idea.”

“Then what do you want?” Lan Zhan asks. Wei Ying can hear the exasperation. It’s slight, but it’s just a little tightness in Lan Zhan’s perfect diction. Man should have a podcast. Maybe he already does. Chinese Literature Podcast sounds like something Lan Zhan would do, maybe with a little intro that he composed himself for the qin.

Wei Ying explains what he saw in his sister’s office.

Lan Zhan’s brows pull down sharply in the middle. “But you don’t want me to speak to him about it.”

“Absolutely not.” Wei Ying says. “You can’t go to someone and tell them to stop picking on someone, it only makes it worse.” He bites his lip, thinking it through. Lan Zhan is paying full attention to him now, which is good at least, it means Lan Zhan is on board. Now that they aren’t moving, it’s a little cold. He wraps his arms around himself for warmth as he thinks through the options. Lan Zhan makes an abortive movement. “Besides, I don’t want to be responsible for any conflict between you and your brother.” Imagine if Dr. Lan extended any of that coldness towards Lan Zhan. No, no, not on Wei Ying’s watch.

This isn’t going to be solved in twenty seconds while Wei Ying’s core temperature drops. Better to wait for a moment of inspiration.

“I just need some time and I can figure this out.” Wei Ying says the last bit mostly to himself, but it’s a solid plan. He can observe and narrow it down.

***

In the morning he’s mostly talked himself out of it. One weird encounter doesn’t mean there’s a horrible scheme in place to undermine Yanli’s position at the University until it’s untenable for her to stay there anymore. Maybe Dr. Lan had a migraine that day and that’s what made him so sharp.

“That makes sense. There’s a psychological principle called the Fundamental Attribution Error,” Huaisang says when they’re pulling out their notebooks for class. “It says that we think the stuff we do is because of a state we’re in, like hungry or tired, but that the things other people do are because of their personality: they’re grumpy or short-tempered.”

Wei Ying raises an eyebrow.

“I used to major in Psychology,” Huaisang explains.

“Sure,” Wei Ying says. One day he’s going to ask how Huaisang’s gotten away with never sticking with a major. But today is not that day. “Maybe I’ve got attribution fundamentals, and that’s making me paranoid.”

“I don’t think you’re paranoid,” Wen Ning says. The other two turn to stare at him. He seems to realise what he’s said and waves his hands. “No, no I mean, your brain is fine, not that Dr. Lan is up to anything.”

“Aw, thanks buddy,” Wei Ying says, and holds out his fist for the bump. He can always count on Wen Ning to validate him. Wen Ning gives him a gentle one back. Then the professor starts talking and they all have to pay attention.

***

Saturday started normally. He’d taken the bus to Yanli’s, only a little later than he’d meant to, but that wasn’t his fault. The bus detached itself from its power line unexpectedly and plunged the bus into darkness. It had only taken a couple of minutes to fix, but it had made him miss his connection. To be expected, though, and he had his podcasts. He has to admit that he did look for a Chinese literature podcast in case Lan Zhan did have one, but didn’t find one. So he’s listening to the one that America’s Test Kitchen runs. When the bus unexpectedly stopped working he’d just learned that Hydrox actually came before Oreos, which was shocking enough that for a second he wasn’t sure if the bus had actually stopped or if his brain had just shut down for a second. But no, it was the bus. It is weird, though, that something that today seems like the No Name knockoff was the original and the knockoff has more legitimacy.

Weird how things can shift like that.

It does make him want cookies something fierce though.

“Jie!” he calls out, toeing off his shoes, “do you have cookies?”

He hears her slippers flapping before he sees her. “Not right now,” she says. Curses! Never cookies when you want them. “But I wanted to go to the market anyway.” Life is dark, but sisters are good.

They talk about what to have for dinner on the way. Wei Ying argues for soup, Yanli say it’ll take too long and they compromise on mapo doufu.

Wei Ying’s first small hint that maybe he isn’t being paranoid is when they’re pulling into the parking lot.

Yanli tsks, and Wei Ying looks around to see whoever had a tantruming child or had littered, but there’s no one. Instead, she takes one hand off the wheel to wave. “Look at where that man parked,” she says. What man? Wei Ying wonders. “So close to the door, taking a spot that someone who might need it more should have.” Wei Ying is not entirely sure that’s how parking spots work. It’s not like the car is in a disabled parking space. He reminds himself not to jump to conclusions, maybe this is some other person Yanli is annoyed with.

They go into the store, and Wei Ying isn’t sure if the air is crisper in the store today or what but he feels like everything is smelling a bit sharper. He hears someone’s shoes scuffle on the ground before he sees the source: a twenty-something trying to hold one too many packages of mascara and stumbling a bit trying to catch them before they fall. His alertness extends enough to see the woman behind them with her lips pursed, trying to get past and failing because the ‘trying not to let mascara drop’ walk creates some very erratic movements. Wei Ying’s overall level of awareness continues as they move through and so when Wei Ying feels the hairs on the back of his neck tingle, he trusts his spidey sense and turns his head to the left, in time to see Dr. Lan move into the home goods section.

“Let’s get cookies,” Wei Ying says, keeping the corner of his eye locked on Dr. Lan.

Yanli blinks. “Here?”

“No,” Wei Ying says. “I want the President’s Choice ones.” He’s thinking on his feet! Going to get them out of the store!

“Alright,” Yanli says, peering at him over her basket. “Let me just grab some soy milk.” They have the fresh stuff here, which Wei Ying can admit is objectively better, but he’s been drinking the VitaSoy he can get at the Buy-Low and it tastes just fine to him, plus it has that childhood nostalgia glow on it. He doesn’t think that Yanli will accept this argument, though.

Naturally, that’s where Yanli and Dr. Lan come face to face. Wei Ying sees Nie Mingjue first and his stomach drops when the other man’s eyes widen. But it’s too late. They come face to face.

Yanli’s hands tighten on the basket. “Dr. Lan,” she says.

“Dr. Jiang. Stocking up?” Dr. Lan asks.

“Just getting dinner ingredients,” she says.

“Ah, yes.” A pause. “I try to stay ready for guests.” Wei Ying opens his mouth to say he likes helping, or maybe that he’s not really a guest, but Nie Mingjue puts up his hand, stop. Wei Ying, used to obeying that gesture from hours of training, snaps his mouth shut.

She smiles, sickly sweet. “I believe fresher is better. My Ying-er deserves the best, not whatever’s left around nearby.”

Dr. Lan smiles at her in return. Both of their eyes are slits, glittering.

Nie Mingjue touches his husband’s elbow. Dr. Lan stands stiff as a board. Wei Ying thinks it isn’t going to do anything but then Dr. Lan’s spine seems to uncoil all at once. He leans into Nie Mingjue’s hand for a second and then they move away.

“Wei Ying,” Nie Mingjue says as they walk away.

Yanli’s eyes are locked on Dr. Lan’s back like they’re laser guided. Wei Ying knows they’re not getting out of the store that easily. They’re tracking Dr. Lan and sifu. Oh, Yanli wouldn’t say that, but she matches her pace to them. They’re at one end of the aisle, Dr. Lan is at the other. They lose and regain visual contact every few seconds. Dr. Lan makes a right turn for produce and Yanli speeds up, reaching the winter melon stack at the same time as he does.

She reaches for a melon and Dr. Lan reaches out, lightning fast, and drops it in his basket. This happens four more times: reach, grab, basket. Even Wei Ying can tell that the last one was a little less than the best. But Dr. Lan still put it in his basket.

Yanli doesn’t look at them. She keeps her eyes firmly on the melons as she says , “I guess there isn’t any good winter melon right now,” and walks away. The melons are a pile in Dr. Lan’s basket, balanced one on the other and threatening to leap to the floor.

Yanli goes to the cucumbers and stares at them for a second. It doesn’t look like she’s seeing them. Wei Ying isn’t sure what to say. He shifts his weight from foot to foot. There are moments, Wei Ying knows, when there is a right thing to say, and a wrong thing to say. And sometimes things that are the right thing for one person and the wrong for another. He’s usually pretty good with Yanli. Most of the time he can jolly her when she gets small. This isn’t smallness. He doesn’t know what to do about this. He’s never known. He’s seen this a few times before. One time she was shelling lotus seeds for him and Jiang Cheng and stopped, nails digging into the soft flesh of the seed. A few other times. But usually he stands next to her, and she realises he’s there and puts a smile on her face is fine.

But he’s already here. And she’s not smiling.

“Right,” she says. She does not pick a cucumber.

The store is filling up as post-work shoppers come in, which means it’s a good time to go. Wei Ying thinks that’ll be it, but apparently there’s still time for more. As they engage in the traditional elbow dance of attempting to hold their spot in line while other people try to cut in front, who should appear but Dr. Lan, just as a new lane is being opened up. Yanli outright sprints for it, and Dr. Lan, with his longer legs, takes huge strides. They get there roughly at the same time, but Dr. Lan’s melon gluttony proves to be his undoing. He’s forced to keep one hand on the melons, which means his elbows aren’t as free. Yanli snipes ahead, triumphantly scanning her coupons.

Wei Ying does not look back to see Dr. Lan’s reaction.

***

3 a.m., lying in his double bed, staring at the shape of the shadows on his ceiling, Wei Ying gives up. He picks up his phone and messages Huaisang. “What are the ways someone can get their academic career sniped?”

Wei Ying figures he’ll have to wait, so he tabs over to Reddit but Huaisang pings back moments later. In this way, and—to be fair—in many others, Huaisang is an engineer. Wei Ying bites his lip, reading the list. Then, heart beating low in his stomach and squishing his liver he tabs back to Reddit and starts corroborating points.

***

Wei Ying corners Lan Zhan after his run, over pretending he doesn’t know his schedule. He had to stay up to make sure he could catch him but it’s whatever. He can sleep after this.

Lan Zhan should look like a sweaty mess but apart from their first spar Wei Ying has never seen him look particularly pressed. He’s wearing coordinated blue athletic wear. Layers too, thin blue long-sleeve over tank top, leggings beneath shorts, phone in an armband around one toned bicep. How is Wei Ying the underdressed one?

Lan Zhan takes a look at Wei Ying, standing at his door, in his sweatpants and Cowboy Bebop sleep t-shirt, wearing slippers, and raises an eyebrow.

Still, Lan Zhan opens his door and jerks his head so Wei Ying knows it’s ok to follow.

Lan Zhan gets himself some water. Wei Ying knows better than to ask for anything. Well. Scratch that. Aside from the huge favour he’s about to ask.

He inhales, holds it. Any moment now he’s going to say something. His head starts to sparkle a bit and all the air comes out in a rush. Lan Zhan is staring at him now. Great, he thinks, blinking the leftover floaters in his eyes away, this is a perfect start. He opens his mouth to try again. He will be calm and clear and lay out a logical case.

“Look,” he says. “I know you don’t like me much and I can’t blame you.”

“Don’t like you,” Lan Zhan says. A bead of water runs down the outside of his glass until it hits his finger and spreads out. Wei Ying doesn’t let himself get interrupted, or he’ll never get this out.

“But I am hoping you can put that aside to help end this feud between our siblings before your brother puts out a hit on my sister’s academic career.” He drags his eyes up to Lan Zhan’s face to see how receptive he is.

“I’m listening,” Lan Zhan says, which is great but also jams a fist into Wei Ying’s stomach. It’s confirmation that Lan Zhan has also seen the tension.

The hit also kicks Wei Ying’s heart into overdrive, makes the words dribble out of his mouth. “So I know I’ve been irritating and bothered you and your brother thinks I’ve been bullying you or, or, something and he’s taking that out on her.” The words hurt, pushed past the ache in his chest. “But if we could pretend, just for a bit, that you like me and there’s no bad feelings between us, I think that will calm your brother down.”

“Pretend,” Lan Zhan says. He puts his glass down. It makes a click when it hits the counter.

“Yes, are you just going to repeat everything I’m saying?” Wei Ying demands.

Lan Zhan presses his lips together again. Ok, not the way Wei Ying wants to approach this, he’s trying to get Lan Zhan on-side, not antagonise him further.

“It is not only my brother who is picking fights,” Lan Zhan says. Which isn’t an agreement.

Wei Ying winces. “Would we call this picking fights?” Everything has been terrifyingly polite, even if fighting words have been exchanged. Lan Zhan stares at him. Wei Ying leans into the wall and sighs. “No, it’s not just your brother,” he admits. Lan Zhan stares at him: go on. He has remarkably expressive stares. “But this plan should fix that too.” He flaps a hand. He’s pretty sure that Yanli is mad at Lan Zhan because he won’t be friends with Wei Ying and Wei Ying was maybe a little too exuberant in how he expressed his disappointment about that. Which is why he should never tell anyone anything; he can’t control how they’ll respond. Lan Zhan keeps looking at him. “Trust me,” Wei Ying says, “I know her.”

Lan Zhan swallows. “What would I have to do?”

***

They decide to start at practice, a logical choice because they can guarantee Dr. Lan will be there. Despite his abject failure last time, Wei Ying figures chat time at the end of class is his best moment.

“—I know you can’t tell me,” Dr. Lan is saying and Wei Ying’s heart drops. Is he onto them so fast? Wei Ying hasn’t even done anything! “But if they are going to strike… I could plan my assignment schedule accordingly.”

Oh, right. Wei Ying hasn’t really been paying attention but he did hear that the teaching assistant union was thinking about going on strike. He thinks their grievance is something to do with the dental plan.

Lan Zhan says, “The TSSU discussions aren’t public.”

Wei Ying figures if he’s close enough to hear this conversation, he’s close enough that it looks like he’s hovering, which is worse than trying to insert himself. He takes the two extra steps to come stand next to Lan Zhan. He raises his arm to put it around Lan Zhan, decides that’s too much too fast and lowers it back down, settling for bumping his shoulder against Lan Zhan’s as he comes in.

Lan Zhan shifts away from him.

Lan Zhan! Wei Ying thinks furiously. They had agreed. No one is going to believe that Lan Zhan genuinely enjoys his company if he keeps acting like this.

Dr. Lan watches this whole thing without changing his expression.

Sifu Nie Mingjue comes over. “You know Lan Zhan can’t tell you,” he chides his husband.

Dr. Lan sighs. “I suppose.”

“Besides, he doesn’t know,” Huaisang says. They all turn to look at him. He shoves his face into his water bottle and leaves them all staring at his ‘send noods’ sticker, cheerful noodle bowl and all. Huaisang isn’t a TA of any type, he shouldn’t know anything, but of course instead of explaining how it is he knows things, he puts up a screen. Master of avoidance, that one.

Still, it gives Wei Ying an opening. “Huaisang knows everything,” Wei Ying says, conspiratorially. No reaction. They stand there in silence. Wei Ying thinks about trying again but he doesn’t like his chances. Between Sifu’s general equanimity, Dr. Lan’s inscrutability, and Nie ‘I am one with my water bottle’ Huaisang, he feels like he’d have a better shot arguing with a rockface. So he cuts to his main gambit. “Well, if you’re ready, I could walk you back now.”

Lan Zhan just looks at him. Suddenly Wei Ying is doubting himself. He thought this was the plan, but Lan Zhan isn’t picking up his half of the script. Wei Ying licks his lips nervously. “Uh, if you don’t have other people—plans. If you don’t have other plans with people.” Abruptly, Wei Ying remembers why sometimes Lan Zhan doesn’t always go back to the res straight after class. What if Lan Zhan did have someone he was meeting up with?

“No,” Lan Zhan says, after a delay. A hysterical giggle threatens to burst out of Wei Ying. “Walking back sounds—good. As we discussed. When we were hanging out.” Wei Ying’s mouth is hanging open. Lan Zhan is trying gamely but this was possibly the most suspicious thing anyone has said in the history of ever. “I am ready.”

Wei Ying is a little nonplussed. Nothing else for it, though. “Alright,” he says. “Let’s go.”

He resists the urge to look back at the group to see how they’re taking the performance. He does get a text from Huaisang that’s just a gif of Homer squinting, but he decides to ignore it.

***

They discussed other things to try on the walk back, since Wei Ying was pretty sure that performance wasn’t going to win them an Oscar.

“We can do friend stuff,” Wei Ying says.

“Like what?”

Wei Ying thinks about it. What does he do with his friends? He goes drinking, which Lan Zhan doesn’t do. He plays video games, which—“I don’t play,” Lan Zhan offers.

“Not even Flow? Or NHL?”

“No.” There goes that option.

They can’t study together because they’re in different faculties. So they decide to get boba.

Lan Zhan gets ginger lemon black tea, which Wei Ying thinks is pretty boring but does go well with the fall weather. For himself he gets a Thai style brown sugar milk tea because caffeine is life.

“There’s no trick to paying for this, right?” Wei Ying asks, suddenly suspicious, remembering the soup incident.

Lan Zhan looks at him, a quick cut of his eyes, before he taps his card. “No,” he says.

“Don’t laugh at me,” Wei Ying mutters, “this city is weird.” And then he says, “Soup.”

“Yes,” Lan Zhan agrees, “it is this city that is weird.”

Wei Ying ignores him and focuses on stabbing his boba. He is above being baited. Besides, boba straw insertion takes focus. When he was little, he got instructions on how to stab Yanli with her epi-pen if she ever got stung by a bee and he thinks about it every time he gets boba. Grip the straw, drive straight down, don’t hesitate.

“How do we make sure our siblings find out about this?” Lan Zhan asks, when they step onto the street. There’s a bit of ducking and weaving to get past the crowd at the bus stop, so Wei Ying doesn’t try to answer until they get to the corner.

“Uh,” Wei Ying says. He’d planned to casually drop it into conversation at dinner, flash a picture in the name of showing off the drink and oops looks like his new best friend Lan Zhan is also in the frame. But Wei Ying doesn’t put a lot of stake in Lan Zhan’s casual conversational gambit skills. “You could post it to your instagram.” When Lan Zhan doesn’t say anything, Wei Ying raises a finger. “Let me guess, you don’t have an instagram.”

“It’s the worst of the social media.”

“Worse than TikTok?” Wei Ying gasps.

Lan Zhan’s nose twitches. “There are some entertaining TikToks.”

Wei Ying needs to know what Lan Zhan thinks is an entertaining TikTok, but more than that he has to tell Lan Zhan about this TikTok that has been rocking his world. “You have to check out these ones of this lady who makes angora sweaters and she takes the fur right off the rabbits while they’re just sitting there. It’s so soothing.”

Lan Zhan’s gaze sharpens.

“Do you like rabbits?” Wei Ying asks.

“I don’t know much about them,” Lan Zhan admits.

“Here, let me show you,” He fumbles for his phone, but he can’t work his phone and hold his drink at the same time. Lan Zhan solves this issue by taking the boba out of his hand. Wei Ying flashes him a distracted smile. “Ok,” Wei Ying says, navigating to his page, “check this out.” He takes his boba back and shoves his phone under Lan Zhan’s face. Lan Zhan leans in so he can see it easily. It must be moving around because he puts his hand over the back of the phone, on top of Wei Ying’s. Lan Zhan’s hand covers his entirely, and Wei Ying feels a prickle on the back of his neck. He gets hot easily, always has, and Lan Zhan’s hand is very warm. He remembers that from their night together. Even though Wei Ying had been sweating, Lan Zhan’s hand still felt hot wherever it touched him. His ass had been almost slippery with sweat, difficult for Lan Zhan to hold on, but his hand had felt like a brand where his fingers had dug in to get a grip.

The next video starts to load in and Wei Ying takes his phone back. He takes a long sip of boba, not even chewing the pearls. “Cute, right?”

Instead of agreeing, Lan Zhan says, “What was their username?”

Wei Ying can’t help but grin. “I told you they were good.”

Lan Zhan’s face seems to soften a little. “Very good,” he agrees. Wei Ying feels like he’s trapped in a feedback loop. Lan Zhan looks at him, and he looks at Lan Zhan. It’s Lan Zhan who breaks it. “I can send this to my brother,” he says. “And say I learned of it when we were hanging out.”

Wei Ying feels his smile flicker. They’re here for a purpose, Lan Zhan is doing him a favour, it shouldn’t bother him to be reminded of it.

“Good idea,” he says and sips more of his boba. He takes a step back, putting some space between them. Maybe Lan Zhan had the right idea with a hot one; he gets a bit of ice this time and shivers.

***

Yanli hums appreciatively about Wei Ying’s boba pictures. She doesn’t say anything about Lan Zhan being there, but that’s fine. As long as she’s not muttering his name darkly, or glowering, he knows that it’s only a matter of time before she gets over her dislike. After all, it’s only on Wei Ying’s behalf and if he isn’t having it, then there’s no reason for her to carry it.

***

Maybe that’s enough, he thinks. He’ll keep walking Lan Zhan home from class, and Dr. Lan will not feel like Wei Ying is wasting his brother’s time and everyone will be cool.

But Lan Zhan suggests that they go and do some tourist things, since Wei Ying isn’t from here. Which makes sense. Wei Ying should have realised that meant a rigorously planned schedule. They get up and take the bus to the market with the famous doughnuts, then catch the Aquabus to hit up Science World. Pause for lunch. That puts them in walking distance of Chinatown, so they walk around the gardens. After that Wei Ying needs to beg for coffee so Lan Zhan lets them stop in a cafe, as long as they don’t take too long, because he wants them to get to Stanley Park before it gets dark. They can go for bbq after, he says.

“This is too many activities for one day,” Wei Ying complains.

“I thought you liked the big marble machine,” Lan Zhan says. Wei Ying had. It was pretty mesmerising watching all of the balls roll around and set each other off. One would go up the little elevator, join three others waiting, which would be enough to tip their container over and send them all cascading down various metal tubes. The engineer in him liked it a lot. The little kid in him liked it even more. “And you liked the doughnuts.” Lan Zhan sounds certain of that, and he’s right about that too. The doughnuts were delicious. They weren’t too sweet and they were fluffy, it’s everything anyone could want in a doughnut. But there are good doughnuts out east, too, and Ontario Place also has one of those Epcot ball things, so it’s not like his world was rocked. And his feet are tired.

He makes big eyes.

Lan Zhan sighs. “We could visit Stanley Park another day,” he says.

“Oh,” Wei Ying says. Lan Zhan frowns when Wei Ying isn’t immediately happy. He tries to muster up a smile. “I had a lot of fun today,” he says, and it doesn’t say everything he means.

He had so much fun today. Fun watching Lan Zhan seriously ask for the freshest doughnuts like a seasoned trader. And it was fun having Lan Zhan herd him around, one hand hovering behind Wei Ying’s back and gently touching him if he was about to make a wrong turn. A month ago, this would have been all that Wei Ying would have wanted. Hanging out with Lan Zhan! Maybe convincing him to be a friend! But that’s not what’s happening. Everything Lan Zhan does is yet another example of Lan Zhan being very diligent in what he’s set out to do and Wei Ying isn’t going to make the mistake of reading more into it. He agreed to help pretend they’re friends and he’s working as hard at it as he can. Wei Ying knows this, but somehow it’s hard to really convince himself. If he’s not careful, he’s going to start thinking of Lan Zhan as a friend for real.

It’s already starting. The first step in friendship, as everyone knows, is sending memes and videos. In addition to the rabbit one, Wei Ying has also sent videos of cats getting groomed and one of those technique critiques where stuntmen break down fight scenes. Lan Zhan responded to each one, too, saying he liked them. He hasn’t sent anything back. So, again, this is all Wei Ying pushing.

He needs to remember that things don’t come in bundles. Activities don’t mean interest. This isn’t a relationship.

Lan Zhan nudges Wei Ying’s coffee, which he’s been ignoring as he’s been chewing on this. Wei Ying picks it up and takes a sip. It’s just how he likes it.

“Do you think it’ll take much more to convince your brother we’re friends?” Wei Ying asks. Lan Zhan seems to withdraw, at the question, probably because he wasn’t expecting it. It’s kind of out of nowhere, but also it shouldn’t be. “I’m just trying not to take up too much of your time, here.”

“I don’t mind,” Lan Zhan says. “I also had fun.”

Wei Ying doesn’t say anything immediately. He can’t stop the part of him that perks up. “You need to be careful, talking like that,” Wei Ying says. He’s watching Lan Zhan closely. “Or I might start to think you don’t hate having me around.”

Lan Zhan lifts his chin. That’s agreement.

“Okay then,” Wei Ying says. He feels lighter, like Lan Zhan lifted more than his chin with his admission. “Next weekend, then?”

“We can bike around the seawall,” Lan Zhan suggests. “Make a day of it.”

Wei Ying groans. “Big barbeque, promise me.”

Lan Zhan nods.

***

Wei Ying thinks they are, maybe, friends.

“Do you think we’re friends?” he asks Wen Ning when they’re both on a shift together at Free Geek. It’s Wen Ning’s turn with the hugeass magnet that erases harddrives. He hefts the thing very carefully. His cheeks puff out when he passes the magnet over, it’s cute. Wei Ying is on labelling duty. He’s already misused the label maker to put an ‘evil genius plans’ label on Wen Ning’s notebook.

“I don’t know,” Wen Ning says.

It’s not the answer Wei Ying wants to hear, but he’d rather get honesty, and he can count on Wen Ning for that. “Yeah, you’re right. I shouldn’t assume anything.” He labels some more bins. Then he cracks his neck. Ugh. Too much thinking about feelings, it can’t be good for him. “How’s the problem set treating you? Question 4h is giving me a hard time.”

Wen Ning grabs onto the conversational gambit. He’s really the best.

***

“So then I got stopped for directions to the Lost Lagoon and Lan Zhan totally didn’t help even though I’m the visitor here and he’s lived here his whole life. Those poor girls. Who knows where I sent them.” He’s moving around in Yanli’s kitchen making tea.

“You’re spending a lot of time with Lan Zhan,” she says.

Thankfully, Wei Ying manages to bite back his initial reaction of not a lot, a normal amount. He’s been spending so much time talking himself down about it, he forgot that the main reason for this plan was to sell their friendship to his sister. He catches himself in time and says, “Yeah, he’s fun, we have a good time.”

He fiddles with the temperature dial on the kettle. Then he risks a look up. The trick is to not check in for the reaction too quickly, that’s a dead giveaway. When he does make eye contact, she’s smiling, fuzzy at the edges. Her fingers fiddle with her wedding ring. Jin Zixuan put a second band on it on their last anniversary with his bonus. It looks beautiful on her.

Wei Ying clears his throat. “What about you? Anything fun?”

“Hmm,” she says. “I told you that I’m on the curriculum committee right? And I had all of those suggestions for improvements to the Intro level courses?” Wei Ying nods to show his understanding. “Well, I didn’t get them all but I finally brought the committee chair around. He said it was pretty bold of me to suggest changes in my first year of teaching but I figure this is the only time I can claim ignorance. If I don’t do it now, then it’ll be ‘oh Yanli, you didn’t have a problem with this before, let’s take our time and think it through’.” She’s doing an impression but Wei Ying isn’t sure of who.

The kettle clicks. The thing is, like, jet powered. Wei Ying pours water into the pot. The leaves dance when the water hits them. Wei Ying doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. It’s weird to think of classes as something that other people have to sign off on, they always feel completely up to the whim of the professor.

“Did you say that?”

She laughs. “Yeah, I did. He didn’t like it but I like to think he respects me more now.”

Wei Ying can’t imagine anyone not being awed by her. “I bet he does,” he says.

***

Yanli’s relaxation is only half the plan. The second half relies on Lan Zhan.

“We just need to know if your brother has chilled out too.” Wei Ying is plugging in the HDMI into the big TV in the common room on their floor.

“Very well,” Lan Zhan says. He’s sitting on the couch with a printed out stack of student papers and a green pen. Apparently red pens are bad for student outcomes. Lan Zhan had given this information entirely unprompted at Wei Ying’s stare, totally misunderstanding. Wei Ying is still shocked that other fields print things out. “Have you noticed a change?”

The room has a dimmer switch so Wei Ying turns it down before coming back to the couch.

“He’s seemed better at Wing Chun,” Wei Ying says. This is not strictly true. Dr. Lan keeps looking at Wei Ying like he’s a puzzle, eyebrows all wiggly about it. Wei Ying doesn’t get it. He’s a clear pane of glass, he is a shallow pond. No hidden depths. “But I think we need to see them together.” It’s their interactions that should let them know if the plan has worked and they’re back to being amiable colleagues.

“At the store?” Lan Zhan suggests. It makes sense, they’ve run into each other there before.

“Sounds good. Not this week though.” Saturday is Halloween so between departmental parties and his birthday, he’s not up to engineering a run-in with the Lans. Wei Ying clicks around with the mouse and the Netflix logo pops up on the screen and does its deep decibel drop. “I still can’t believe you haven’t seen any of these.”

Lan Zhan shrugs. And fair enough, why would he. “Why have you?” Lan Zhan challenges.

“Why have I seen the greatest action film franchise ever made?” Wei Ying demands, mock outraged. “The Fast and the Furious are cultural touchstones. They’re classics. They’ve been making them since before I was born and they’re not going to stop any time soon.”

“Classics are important,” Lan Zhan agrees and he is absolutely fucking with Wei Ying. “2 Fast 2 Furious and Du Fu, important pieces of culture to study.”

Wei Ying points at him. “You’re laughing. Both The Fast and the Furious and Du Fu’s poetry are observational studies of society that offer important insights into how people live and what matter, delivered in heightened and emotionally affecting terms, and you’re laughing.” Lan Zhan’s thesis is on Du Fu translations, so Wei Ying is absolutely needling him right back.

Lan Zhan’s eyes crinkle. “I bow to your superior scholarship.”

Wei Ying grumbles a little, for form. He pops open their dosa containers and passes Lan Zhan’s to him. “You’ll see,” Wei Ying says.

He starts up the movie. A prison transport bus appears on the screen, heat haze distorting the bottom of the screen. Lan Zhan sits passively through the first—amazing—scene, with the daring rescue of Dom by his family using very fast cars.

“Am I supposed to know who these characters are?” Lan Zhan asks. Wei Ying lunges for the mouse to jiggle it so he can pause.

“Well,” Wei Ying says, “Yes, but I think you can get by with context clues.” Lan Zhan nods, but his lips are parted. “What is it?” Wei Ying asks.

“This isn’t the first one,” Lan Zhan says, a question in his tone.

“No, it’s the fifth,” Wei Ying says. Fast 5. Objectively the best one.

“Why aren’t we watching the first one?” Lan Zhan asks. “It would probably be less confusing.”

Wei Ying is torn. He believes in the Han order, which involves watching the movies in the chronological order that the character Han experiences, and that means starting with the first one. But on the other hand, “If I can only show you one of these then this is the best one. It might make you want to watch the others.”

“These matter a lot to you,” Lan Zhan says, after a long moment, correctly interpreting Wei Ying’s feelings. Wei Ying squirms. They do, but…

Well. Lan Zhan is asking. “They’re Jiang-shushu’s favourite movies.” Wei Ying is watching Lan Zhan’s face closely, looking for any sign that he’s bored with this story. “He likes action movies in general but these ones the ones he likes the most.” Wei Ying was surprised because Jiang-shushu and Mrs. Yu seemed pretty traditional but he learned pretty quick that was mostly her. She’d come back from yearly trips to Hong Kong with suitcases full of DVDs and CDs to play on their multi-regional DVD player; meanwhile Jiang-shushu only cared that movies had exciting enough action scenes. He always seemed pretty calm in who he was and what he liked and never pretended to like things just because they were more respectable. Wei Ying wishes Jiang ‘I stop listening to music when it gets too popular’ Cheng would learn some of that sometime. “When I first moved in and couldn’t sleep, we’d sneak into the living room and watch them together. There were only four then. And then it became tradition to go see them on opening weekend. They’re kind of our thing.” He holds his breath, waiting for any questions. Questions like, ‘moved in with your uncle? why?’

Talking about his family is a bit like teaching physics. He starts out with total lies that fit into frameworks that people understand, and then as they learn more he can start unpacking those to be more in keeping with current scholarship. People don’t need to know that his siblings are both particles and waves until they hit advanced study. And that’s nothing to say about ‘so you call him Jiang-shushu and her Mrs. Yu what’s up there?’

He’s bringing Lan Zhan into level two now, which is a good place to stop if Lan Zhan wants to.

Instead Lan Zhan nods and says, “It is important to do things with family.” Wei Ying keeps looking at him, waiting for it. “If I agreed, now, to watch more than one, could we start with the first one?”

Wei Ying exhales, shaky. “You’d do that for me?”

Lan Zhan says nothing, the line of his lips firming. It’s not quite pressing them together, so he’s not fully annoyed, but like Wei Ying is testing him. When Lan Zhan says something, he means it. It’s still difficult for Wei Ying to believe. These movies can’t be Lan Zhan’s idea of a good time.

“Alright,” Wei Ying says, quiet, offering the trust. He clicks around. Time for some high-speed robbery of trucks shipping boxy TVs. A historical artifact of a different time.

Wei Ying settles in to enjoy it, wiggling backwards into the couch and shovelling dosa into his face. He checks in on Lan Zhan periodically, to make sure he isn’t hating it. Lan Zhan is very polite though, keeping his attention on the screen, not even looking at his pile of grading safely tucked on one of the other chairs.

Wei Ying doesn’t talk during movies, as a rule. He’d almost kicked Huaisang out of his room when they were watching Boku No Hero Academia and he’d been engaging in ‘what-if’ scenarios. Lan Zhan doesn’t talk, well, in general, and it suits this situation perfectly.

After a while, Wei Ying forgets to be nervous and lets the film pull him in. He’s seen it so many times, but every time it’s revealed that Brian is a cop, he gasps in anticipatory betrayal. Dom deserves better.

The movie carries them along and they sit together in the dark. Couches have their own gravity, though, and without realising it Wei Ying and Lan Zhan have slowly been pulled towards the middle. Lan Zhan flexes a little and Wei Ying feels it where they’re pressed together, arm to arm. This is nice, Wei Ying thinks.This is the friend hangouts he’d wanted ever since—he shuts that line of thinking down. Ever since he realised how cool Lan Zhan is.

Lan Zhan shifts again and their knees touch. It’s not a nudge, but Wei Ying takes it like one. He needs to stop being in his head and focus on the movie.

***

Walking back together from Wing Chun, Wei Ying asks a question that’s been niggling at him. “Why are you always free after class now?” He wasn't always free, before. Lan Zhan doesn't say anything. Their shoes scuffle a little on the wet cement. It has been raining for the last three days, in a low-level everything is somehow wet but Wei Ying can’t find a raindrop kind of way. “Wen Ning thought maybe you’ve been studying, but I’m pretty sure you’re on the edge of the curve in your classes.” Huaisang thought Lan Zhan’s dick was broken—possibly sprained from too much sex—but Wei Ying doesn’t feel the need to share that theory. Lan Zhan still doesn’t say anything and Wei Ying starts to babble. “Unless they don’t curve things in Literature. I know they don’t in some of the advanced engineering classes when they get a bit smaller and the statistics stop working.”

“They don’t curve grades in my department,” Lan Zhan says. “Do you want to come to the departmental party on Friday?”

“The Halloween party?” Wei Ying asks. Lan Zhan nods. “Uh, why?”

“There’s free beer,” he says.

“Alright,” Wei Ying says.

Lying in the bed, he puzzles over it. But spiralling on things has never gotten him anywhere; it’s sort of in the name. No one’s taking spiral roads out of town. So he lets it go. It’ll either make sense later or it won’t.

***

Wei Ying is proud of his costume and he is planning to wear it all weekend. He has been told that people here don’t really do that, even the drama majors, but that’s just one of the ways this place is a bit damp. Halloween is about costumes! Every holiday that has costumes is a holiday that’s doing it right.

Possibly they simply lack imagination. Imagination, Wei Ying has. His costume this year is a robot dinosaur. Which is mostly a black outfit but he’s got that light rig that he’s been working on finished. He built a small exo-skeleton for it so he can squeeze his hands and the Tyrannosaurus jaw cage on his head will close and open its mouth. It’s a perfect costume because it fills all of the costume requirements. First, extremely eye-catching even in the dark. Sun sets at like 6 p.m., costumes need to hold up in the club and on the street. Second, it’s layerable for cold weather. The cage can go on top of as many or as few layers as Wei Ying wants. Perfect for site to site transport in below 0 temperatures. Third, easy to pee in. He wore a onesie one time and never again. This costume is modular as fuck.

He’s been fielding compliments and posing for selfies all day. It’s lucky he doesn’t have an instagram or his mentions would be flooded. His favourite pose is to stick a friend’s head inside the jaws and then chomp a few times. He did it to Huaisang and he giggled so hard it shook the cage. Wei Ying warned him it might blur their selfies but they came out okay.

It’s a great day, is what he’s trying to say.

Wei Ying meets Lan Zhan outside of the English building, which is a Bauhaus monstrosity as opposed to the much more respectable Brutalist monstrosities that form the main buildings. Wei Ying, as an engineer, doesn’t have to put up with that and instead spends his time inside of buildings that are recent, but much cheaper construction. Yes, he is convinced the roof is going to fall on him any time, regardless of whether the wood ceiling is supposed to represent a boat or a whale.

Lan Zhan, to Wei Ying’s disappointment, but not his surprise, has not dressed up. He’s in his sculpted denim, leather shoes, and matching messenger bag. He could not look more like an upscale ad if he held his wrist perfectly below his eyes so everyone’s attention would be drawn to his expensive watch.

“Let me guess,” Wei Ying says. “Sexy graduate student.”

Lan Zhan raises an eyebrow.

“See, because you aren’t—ok, nevermind.”

They take the elevator up.

A peppy girl who seems to know Lan Zhan bounces up to them. She, at least, is wearing a costume. As… some old-fashioned dude?

She clocks his questioning expression and flips her blue scarf around her neck. She tucks a hand under her chin and peers at him severely. “Get it?” she asks. “I’m Edward Said!”

“Ah,” Wei Ying says, like that means anything to him. Lan Zhan must pick up on that.

“Founder of postcolonial studies,” Lan Zhan says. The girl gasps. “He’s an engineer, Amira,” Lan Zhan says. It’s an explanation, but Wei Ying feels it like a rebuke. His smile twists a little.

“You said there’d be beer?” He pushes his way into the room.

The party seems pretty standard. Bowls of chips and pretzels, other bowls of Smarties and some fake cobwebs in the corners. And low, also in a corner, the big bowl of soon-to-be melting ice filled with beer.

The bowl next to it has pop in it so Wei Ying grabs a root beer. When he turns around Lan Zhan is there.

Wei Ying almost crushes the can in his hand. “What’s that on your head?” He can’t help laughing.

Lan Zhan’s eyes dart upwards, briefly, the closest to an eyeroll Wei Ying has seen. “Apparently costumes are mandatory.”

“Mmm,” Wei Ying says, holding it together. “And the cat ears count.”

“Yes.”

They’re blue wire cat ears and Lan Zhan has them perched perfectly on his head.

“Now you’re a sexy cat,” Wei Ying says, still laughing. He needs a picture of this.

“You’ve said that twice now,” Lan Zhan says. Wei Ying gives an inquiring look. “Sexy.”

Wei Ying laughs again, this time weakly. He doesn’t really have a defence for that. Aside from, obviously Wei Ying thinks Lan Zhan is sexy? He did sleep with him, after all. But Wei Ying is more than happy to never talk about that or the totally fine and normal morning after. Puts him in a sticky position though. It happened and he can’t really pretend it didn’t when the other guy who was there is right here. But he still hasn’t learned the proper etiquette for post-hookup friend banter. He keeps meaning to ask Huaisang but then he never gets around to it. He’s worried he’ll come across weird, which is not what he means. He totally respects that Lan Zhan is a one-and-done guy, he doesn’t want to make it awkward between them.

Luckily, their proximity to the drinks means the conversation comes to them. Wei Ying pushes the can of root beer into Lan Zhan’s hands and does not think about how hot Lan Zhan’s fingers are. He needs to stop handing this man things.

The conversation itself is easy. Wei Ying has seen Squid Game and is happy to talk about his feelings about it. He works the convo around easily to Alice in Borderland and Battle Royale and how sure, they’re all battle royales but each one is using the plot in different ways to say different things. He gets some considering nods. If this is what lit class is like then this is breezy.

Then someone says the word ‘semiotics’ and Wei Ying is totally lost.

“I don’t know what that means,” Wei Ying says, with a smile to make it go down easier.

She huffs. Not exaggerated but like she’s tired. It gets Wei Ying’s back up immediately. Sure, engineers can get into their jargon, but they don’t expect other people to know it. This is so typical. It’s not like Wei Ying can’t talk about books and stuff, these people just make it impossible on purpose.

He thinks about how much Lan Zhan has been working to change the way Wei Ying thinks about the humanities and feels a little guilty about it. Wei Ying cranes his neck around looking for him. Lan Zhan is behind him, one step back. They lock eyes.

The girl who was speaking, this one with thick wavy hair and a nose ring, is waiting for him to say something. Wei Ying notices she’s also been given the cat ear treatment but hers are pink.

Amira interjects. “Um, Tahnai, he’s an engineer.”

Wei Ying wishes they wouldn’t say it like it’s an apology. Wei Ying’s had a lifetime of ‘he’s adopted’ to mean ‘don’t mind him’ and he’s not embarrassed about being an engineer. “Sure am,” he says. The beer is an IPA, harsh and sour and it twists his tongue. “Best faculty.” He said the same thing to Lan Zhan the second time he met him and he’s just as confident in it as he was then.

Tahnai’s eyes widen and she whips her head around. Her cat ears wobble. “Don’t you have any worries about how engineers support capitalist rapaciousness of the earth? We don’t need to always be consuming.”

Wei Ying thinks about how what he wants to do, more than anything, is make artificial hearts and skeletal supports that could be used to save candidates who don’t currently meet thresholds for survivability. And he thinks about how if they knew that, they’d come back at him about unnatural science. It makes him feel tired.

Some people only know how to criticise and think that’s a contribution.

“Don’t you get bored, picking everything apart? Making trying anything feel worse than doing nothing at all?” Wei Ying shoots back. There’s no winning but sometimes winning isn’t the only goal. If he can make them turn even one iota of their reflective impulse inwards so they can see just how hollow and rotten their lines of argument are, then that’s something. “Some of us at least make things.”

Or maybe that’s a positive spin on what he’s doing when actually he just wants to not go down meekly. These people argue for fun, they argue like it does anything, like having talked about a thing is having done the thing. He can’t beat anyone like that in an argument. If they don’t think it’s cooler to try, that it’s worthwhile to go from nothing to something, he can’t convince them. So he’s not actually doing this for them.

“You want to build things? Why and for who? Who profits? The sciences create the illusion of objectivity so they don’t have to reckon with the fact that the sciences create and underpin all our modern systems of inequality.” Tahnai pauses. “Someone has to fight for change,” she says, and he can tell she means it, like holding mediocre beer and wearing cat ears to tell off the engineering major is doing something for the world. “Science is the status quo. We want more than that. We want things to be better for the people who have been denied their chances for too long.”

The blood pulses behind Wei Ying’s eyes and his ears are ringing. “You—” he says. And then he turns and walks out.

He doesn’t realise Lan Zhan is following him until the pounding in his ears recedes and he can hear the sound of footsteps behind him.

Wei Ying looks back. “Are you here to yell at me?”

It’s starting to mist a little. Not fully rain, but not dry either.

Lan Zhan stops a couple of feet away. “No.”

“No,” Wei Ying says, unable to keep the mocking thread out of his voice. The rain is making the lamps on the side of the path shimmer. “Not for criticising your precious department?” Wei Ying takes a step closer. “Not for being a filthy engineer?”

“No,” Lan Zhan says, standing his ground.

“Why not? Why did you bring me there, then? If not to be berated? You couldn’t convince me one-on-one so you got the advantage of numbers.”

Lan Zhan looks conflicted. “I didn’t bring you there for that. I just…” an uncharacteristic pause. “Wanted you there.” Wei Ying doesn’t know what to say to that. He lets Lan Zhan into his space. The pink and green lights glow on his face, on his stupid cat ears. “They were wrong.”

Wei Ying peers into his eyes. “You don’t think the sciences underpin modern injustice?” Lan Zhan’s eyes cut to the right. “You totally do!” Lan Zhan can’t argue.

“You don’t. Your work isn’t doing that.”

“You don’t know what I’m trying to do,” Wei Ying says, sour.

“I know you.”

“Lan Zhan…” Wei Ying says. The rain blurs his vision, gives Lan Zhan soft edges. Lan Zhan knows him. Lan Zhan wanted him there. What does Wei Ying care what some Lit majors say? He shuffles in and leans his head on Lan Zhan’s chest. Well, he tries. The dinosaur head bonks softly against Lan Zhan’s sternum, giving a little, but holding firm. Wei Ying has two other parties lined up for tonight, but. “Can we go home?”

***

They make it back to res. They step inside the hall, the fluorescent lights dimming the brightness of his costume. He’s still feeling halfway scraped raw, so when Lan Zhan shoots him a look—he kept shooting him looks on the walk home, like Wei Ying was going to have another meltdown on the pavement—he agrees to watch a movie in Lan Zhan’s room. The common room is right there, but Wei Ying thinks if someone looks at him right now he won’t be able to put his face on in time and people will see the meat underneath.

Lan Zhan puts on the kettle when they get inside.

“Can you help me?” Wei Ying asks. Wen Ning helped him into the dinosaur head earlier, it’s a little awkward for one person. Lan Zhan steps up behind Wei Ying and Wei Ying shows him the clasp that connects the armature to Wei Ying’s shirt. They lift it off together and Lan Zhan carefully sets it to the side. It looks a little strange on the floor with its lights out, a lot more like a dinosaur fossil instead of the moving almost-dragon that Wei Ying has been wearing.

Wei Ying takes off his over-shirt and drapes it over the dinosaur head, like he’s trying to give it privacy.

When he straightens up, Lan Zhan is right there. “You’re shivering.”

In just his tank top, with slightly damp skin, Wei Ying supposes that makes sense. Lan Zhan takes his hand. “Oh,” Wei Ying says.

A shiver hits Wei Ying’s body, hard. Lan Zhan brushes his thumb over Wei Ying’s knuckles.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says.

“Yeah,” Wei Ying says and bites his lip. That was way too breathy. Lan Zhan pulls Wei Ying’s hand closer to his face and Wei Ying lets him. His fingers are close enough to Lan Zhan’s mouth that Wei Ying can feel his breath against the rapidly warming skin.

Lan Zhan keeps looking at him, eyes driving into Wei Ying’s, and Wei Ying looks back. He’s not sure what Lan Zhan is looking for but Lan Zhan must see something because presses his lips to the tip of Wei Ying’s index finger. A jolt of heat runs through Wei Ying’s body, more than can be explained by the barest touch of lip against finger.

Lan Zhan does it again, lips slightly parted. Wei Ying can feel where they’re wet at the seam. Lan Zhan pushes his head forward and Wei Ying’s two first fingers slide past his lips, into his mouth.

Wei Ying’s body sways like he’s been taken out at the knees. His hand scrabbles at Lan Zhan’s back, looking for a way to hold himself up.

Lan Zhan’s mouth is hot and his teeth scrape against the pads of Wei Ying’s fingers. Wei Ying can almost imagine that he can hear the sound it makes, even though that’s impossible. Lan Zhan sucks, pulling Wei Ying’s fingers in deeper and Wei Ying can’t help but fall. He lands against Lan Zhan’s chest. It feels like completing a circuit. Where Wei Ying was floating, shocky, now he is grounded.

“Lan Zhan,” he says. He presses his head into Lan Zhan’s neck. Lan Zhan pulls his fingers out with a pop but doesn’t let go of Wei Ying’s hand. Wei Ying tangles their fingers together. He pulls his head back, tilting it up just as much as Lan Zhan is tilting his down, and they’re kissing.

Wei Ying pushes into it, holding Lan Zhan against him. He wants to be close to Lan Zhan, as close as he can.

He’s not really tracking anything else, but he’s not surprised when the backs of his knees hit the bed. Lan Zhan knows how to maneuver in space, Wei Ying has experienced it when they spar. Lan Zhan pushes him down and Wei Ying drops his weight to his elbows. He has to give up his hold on Lan Zhan to do it, but Lan Zhan isn’t going anywhere, he’s crawling on top of Wei Ying and kissing him, and kissing him.

Always greedy, Wei Ying drops to his back so he can free up his hands to touch Lan Zhan more. His hands seek the skin under Lan Zhan’s shirt, the knobs of his spine, the muscles on his shoulderblades. They’re working, rippling under the palms of Wei Ying’s hands as Lan Zhan holds himself up, working Wei Ying’s shirt up and off.

Wei Ying gasps when Lan Zhan breaks the kiss, but he doesn’t waste time getting Lan Zhan’s shirt off at the same time. Lan Zhan gets up on his knees up and starts working on the button fly of his jeans. He slides them off his hips, with his underwear. There’s a perfect arrow of hair down from Lan Zhan’s belly button, blooming into a nest that frames his cock. His cock is just as Wei Ying remembers it, thick, with darker skin under the head and at the root.

There’s a moment where Wei Ying pauses. This wasn’t the plan when he came into Lan Zhan’s room. He didn’t even have an inkling of it. He just knew that he wanted to be with Lan Zhan. And Lan Zhan wanted to be with him tonight. Lan Zhan doesn’t do repeats, Wei Ying had heard, so he never considered it. But Lan Zhan is offering and Wei Ying wants.

He reaches out and runs his fingers down the plane of Lan Zhan’s stomach, noticing the point where the hair gets coarser. He tangles his fingers in the hair where it’s thickest, tugging a little. Obediently, Lan Zhan tips forward.

His hand is gentle when it reaches up to cup Wei Ying’s face, thumb on temple. “Wei Ying,” he says, a little choked. Wei Ying takes pity on him and wraps his hand around Lan Zhan’s cock. Lan Zhan groans, right into Wei Ying’s ear. It makes his chest warm, that he can affect Lan Zhan like that.

“Are you going to fuck me?” Wei Ying asks, genuinely curious.

Lan Zhan’s hips jerk in Wei Ying’s grip.

“Oh, did you like that?” Wei Ying asks, a little less genuinely. He didn’t realise how much he could impact Lan Zhan like this.

“Watch yourself,” Lan Zhan says, voice low.

“Or what?” Wei Ying asks, widening his eyes.

Lan Zhan fucking bites him on the jaw. It’s not a nip, it’s a full on bite.

Wei Ying jerks, whole body tensing. He felt that bite in his toes. Lan Zhan soothes over the places where his teeth pressed in with his tongue, sucking gently at the underside of Wei Ying’s jaw. He didn’t know that was such an erogenous zone. When Lan Zhan is done, Wei Ying is quivering.

“You were saying?” Lan Zhan asks.

Wei Ying makes a noise. He’s not totally sure what type of noise, but it definitely isn’t words. Lan Zhan has to kiss him, after that. He grabs Lan Zhan’s jaw with both hands and pulls their faces together.

“Pants, pants now,” Wei Ying says into Lan Zhan’s mouth.

To his credit, Lan Zhan does try to reach between them on feel alone, but Wei Ying’s stupid pants have a snap buckle and a zipper, or what basically amounts to a combination lock in terms of how annoying it feels right now. Wei Ying huffs.

Lan Zhan pulls back, and kisses the edge of Wei Ying’s pout before turning his attention to the difficult pants. As soon as he gets them back, he lays back down on top of Wei Ying, kissing him again. Their cocks catch on each other. This type of pressure doesn’t do much but there’s something to knowing that it’s Lan Zhan’s body on his that makes Wei Ying throw his head back. Lan Zhan pushes forward to recapture Wei Ying’s mouth. It drags their cocks together and Wei Ying moans.

This is so much more kissing than last time. Lan Zhan had kissed him, sure, but only right at the beginning. After that it had been more panting and holding on and less mouth on mouth.

“You need to get the stuff,” Wei Ying whispers.

Lan Zhan makes a noise, but it isn’t agreement. Alright, Wei Ying guesses it’s kissing time.

They kiss for a long time, until the space between their bodies gets hot and slick and Lan Zhan starts to slide on him. It feels good, maddeningly so, like scratching next to the itch. It makes Wei Ying frustrated. He turns the tables, biting at Lan Zhan this time, pulling Lan Zhan’s bottom lip between his teeth.

Lan Zhan pulls back and Wei Ying doesn’t let him, sucking on the bit that isn’t between his teeth.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying whines when he does let go. “You said you wanted to, don’t you want to?” He’s past being seductive or trying to tease. He wants Lan Zhan, badly, and he’s not ashamed to show it.

Lan Zhan nods, and keeps nodding as he scrambles to the side table. Wei Ying takes the chance to get up on all fours. That’s how Lan Zhan had wanted him last time. He’d tucked his dick between Wei Ying’s thighs and told him to hold it tight while he pressed his fingers into Wei Ying’s ass. His thighs had trembled when Lan Zhan found his prostate and Lan Zhan had used his free hand to slap them when he’d stopped gripping him tightly enough.

So he’s surprised when Lan Zhan flips him immediately onto his back. Wei Ying can’t help but laugh, the instinctive reaction to moving quickly in space. He gets why, immediately. In this position, Lan Zhan can keep kissing him. Lan Zhan’s fingers find their way by feel and Wei Ying helps, letting his knees drop open and edging his hips until his ass meets Lan Zhan’s fingers.

Lan Zhan takes his time, tasting the sounds Wei Ying makes when he runs his finger in a circle. Wei Ying doesn’t normally tease himself; he had no idea he had so many nerve endings right there, that’s wild. His stomach jumps every time the blunt edge of Lan Zhan’s short nails catches on the skin, and relaxes every time Lan Zhan completes a circle. Then Lan Zhan slides his finger in and Wei Ying remembers this. The strangeness of it. Wei Ying isn’t a stranger to having things up his ass, but this is another person. It’s not him at all, he can’t control that finger, and the finger can’t feel what Wei Ying does.

Wei Ying squirms, more to assert control than because it’s uncomfortable. Lan Zhan’s other hand has been brushing up and down Wei Ying’s side but when he squirms Lan Zhan presses down right on top of Wei Ying’s pubic bone, right above where his cock is sticking straight up in the air. Wei Ying’s eyes pop open. The bit of pressure there feels insane. Why? He squirms again but this time, with his leverage, Lan Zhan keeps him going nowhere fast.

One finger turns into two and then Lan Zhan is hooking one of Wei Ying’s legs over his elbow and sliding a condom on.

“Any time,” Wei Ying says.

Lan Zhan nods, leaning down one more time to kiss him before sitting on his heels and pulling Wei Ying onto his dick. The first push is a surprise, like his body forgot that something was going to go inside it, but then it’s just hot pressure and fullness. Lan Zhan works his way in slowly, hips nudging forward a bit at a time until they’re pressed together as tightly as they can be. They breathe together.

They’re so close together that Wei Ying can feel Lan Zhan’s happy trail against his skin. It crinkles between them, almost tickles. Wei Ying shifts, trying to feel it more clearly.

Lan Zhan squeezes Wei Ying’s thigh. This, Wei Ying remembers. Lan Zhan’s implacable grip on his thigh, every finger pinning him on Lan Zhan’s cock.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, a warning.

“Come on,” Wei Ying says. This sign can’t hurt him because he can’t read. There’s nothing he has to be warned of here. He can take what Lan Zhan gives.

Lan Zhan starts to fuck him, long thorough strokes. Wei Ying’s eyes drop shut as his body demands that he feel. And he does feel. He feels every inch of Lan Zhan’s cock, feels the heartbeat of it all the way up to his throat.

He falls into the rhythm of it. Not lulled, though, that would imply that he isn’t electrified by every stroke, that every time Lan Zhan’s balls hit his ass his back doesn’t arch. But it does. Lan Zhan doesn’t have to fuck him hard to drive him up the bed, to turn Wei Ying into a curved bow.

Wei Ying is pushed, inexorably, up to the head of the bed. He pushes his hands up, palms flat against the headboard. Lan Zhan meets resistance for the first time since he started fucking Wei Ying and Wei Ying sees his eyes flash.

Wei Ying hears his next thrust as much as he feels it. Harder and sharper than the ones before. Lan Zhan switches from long strokes to quick jabs. Wei Ying braces his hands and he pushes back. He rolls hips up. Lan Zhan moans.

Lan Zhan drops down and Wei Ying is grateful for every bit of flexibility practice that he uses to kick above his head because it means that when Lan Zhan surges forward to kiss him, the elbow that is still hooked under Wei Ying’s knee just stretches him more open for Lan Zhan’s cock. Did he say they were as close as possible before? He lied. This is it. With Lan Zhan’s tongue in his mouth, Lan Zhan’s cock drives even deeper. Wei Ying sucks his tongue and takes his cock and shakes.

His elbows start to quake and Lan Zhan slides his arm around the back of Wei Ying’s neck, anchoring them together. Freed from having to hold them in place, Wei Ying reaches down and grabs his cock. How does even this feel better when Lan Zhan is fucking him? It’s just his hand, it’s just his cock, but with Lan Zhan inside of him it feels so much more intense. He grips harder than normal, but it’s just what he needs, something strong to match how much Lan Zhan is making him feel.

He didn’t think he was that close, but he twists his wrist on his next stroke and that’s it. His body draws down to a single point and he shatters, shooting over his hand and onto his stomach. It immediately smears onto Lan Zhan’s stomach as Lan Zhan keeps thrusting. Lan Zhan relinquishes Wei Ying’s mouth to let him moan and cry out, going to the source and sucking on the apple of his throat. Lan Zhan’s tongue buzzes against his throat using Wei Ying’s own vibrating voice box. His skin feels so tight there and so relaxed everywhere else as his body starts to come down. His leg sags in Lan Zhan’s grip, his arms fish out and his head feels like it weighs twenty pounds.

Wei Ying is done, his body has given everything it can, but Lan Zhan is still taking, still driving inside of him. Wei Ying feels tender; what used to be a gentle caress now feels like a slap every time Lan Zhan drives his hips against Wei Ying’s ass.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying whispers. He swallows. His Adam’s apple shifts in Lan Zhan’s mouth. “Please.”

Immediately, Lan Zhan groans. Wei Ying feels his ass lift higher as Lan Zhan drives down into him, once, twice, three times, and one more in quick succession.

“Mmm,” Lan Zhan moans into Wei Ying’s mouth, coming back to the source as his hips jerk out their final aftershocks. Wei Ying feels each one like they were full thrusts.

Wei Ying pets his hair.

***

Wei Ying is pretty sure he doesn’t remember falling asleep. Lan Zhan was insistent about taking showers, which Wei Ying wanted to skip in favour of cuddling, and then he was insistent about cuddling when Wei Ying wasn’t sure about what was supposed to happen next. And next thing Wei Ying knows, he’s waking up and the sun is coming in bright through his closed eyes.

Wei Ying stretches, feeling pretty great. Wei Ying loves endorphins, endorphins are where it’s at. Some people like adrenaline, and sure the rush is good, but the steady high of muscles that worked hard? Nothing better. His arms slide around in the sheets and that feels good, muscles finding their edge. And then his body processes the information his body is giving him. If his arms can spread as wide as they can, that means.

He’s alone in the bed. He can hear sounds in the kitchen.

If he’s in here, and Lan Zhan is in there, then that means…

His heart pounds. Actually, fuck adrenaline. His breathing is crazy loud when he slides out from the sheet. He’s practically panting as he puts on his clothes and goes over to the door. It takes him three tries to tie up his laces, fingers feeling thick and cold.

The door doesn’t make a sound when he opens it, but it does make an unmistakable click when it closes.

***

He’s fucked up, he’s fucked up so bad.

The thought echoes in his head the whole time he’s on the bus.

He didn’t stop at his room, he just left the building and kept walking until he hit the bus loop. He wasn’t totally aware that he had a plan until he was halfway to Yanli’s. He should send her a message to let her know he’s coming. But his phone is dead—full day battery his ass. That’s fine. If she’s not home he can circle the neighbourhood until she comes back. He tries to remember if he knows her usual Saturday schedule, but he can’t.

He rings the doorbell of her townhouse. He can hear the two-tone chime go off inside. Luckily, she’s home.

“Wei Ying!” she says, pulling the door open in a rush. “What a lovely birthday surprise!” He stares at her, mouth opening and closing. Her brows come together. “Ying-er?” she asks, voice so soft.

“Hey,” he says, with a crack down the middle.

***

Everything flutters around him after that and he sits as the unmoving centre. She pulls him inside, puts him on the couch, pulls a blanket all the way up to his chin. She brushes her hand along his shoulders, his hair, feeling his forehead.

He leans into it, pathetically, like there’s something wrong with him as opposed to him having made a critical error. He can’t be comforted out of the consequences of his own actions.

Eventually she subsides. By now she can tell there’s nothing physically wrong with him.

She keeps looking at him with big, worried eyes and he can’t look back. “I could put on The Fast and the Furious?” she asks. It cracks him wide open, pottery on the floor. That’s his comfort movie, his late night refuge. Lan Zhan said he’d watch them with him, that he’d watch more than one. Wei Ying wanted that, wanted nights with Lan Zhan, wanted Lan Zhan to have this piece of him. Lan Zhan would still give him that, Wei Ying is pretty sure. Lan Zhan wouldn’t back out of a promise, and Wei Ying believes him when he said he wanted to spend time together. It’s Wei Ying who can’t keep the agreement, Wei Ying who can’t ever be satisfied with the good things he is given. It’s Wei Ying who never lets himself be happy.

“I can’t,” he says, feeling small like he hasn’t since he was nine and twisted his ankle. He crumples.

Today is a day of realisations. He’s twenty—twenty-one and he doesn’t feel it. He feels ancient, withered down to his bones. He knows what he’s supposed to want, but he doesn’t. He wants two people who pick each other and make a family and he can’t do casual. Fuck. He really can’t do casual. He might actually want a relationship. He knows that’s not weird on the face of it. Lots of people like that, he thinks. Well. His sister likes that. Wen Qing and Mianmian seem to like it. Dr. Lan and his husband. Lots of people have found a person for them. But it’s a shitty time to realise he wants that right when he’s been slapped in the face with how much he doesn’t have it.

He’s been trying to rewrite this whole semester so he could pretend that it wasn’t what it was.

He had a hookup. That was fine. But his stupid brain couldn’t leave that alone. He had to go out and make friends so he could what? Play the track in reverse like they weren’t perfect strangers when Lan Zhan kicked him out of his apartment?

“I want toast,” Wei Ying says.

Yanli stops trying to pull Wei Ying onto her shoulder for a second. He feels curiously distant from his body. He’s only sure he’s not crying because he’d see tears dropping down onto his shirt if he was.

“Right now?” she asks.

He can’t answer her.

Eventually, Yanli gives up and goes to the kitchen. She comes back with brown sugar ice cream bars, and a pack of lactaid pills. She picks up the remote and puts on “Three Heroes.” The familiar movie comes on, and Wei Ying pretends to watch it.

It pulls him in, despite himself. He eats an ice cream bar.

Wei Ying looks up at the sound of keys jangling in the door and then looks back at the TV. He has no idea what shape his face is in but he bets it’s better in profile.

He sees Jin Zixuan come in out of the corner of his eye. There’s the sound of puttering as shoes are taken off and keys are placed on their ring and then Jin Zixuan lumbers into the room. He bends down and gives Yanli a kiss. Wei Ying takes a bite of the ice cream bar.

“What did Lan Zhan do?” Jin Zixuan asks. His fists are clenched. Yanli is making cutting motions with her hands.

Wei Ying looks at him. This guy who Wei Ying has tortured, for years, and who moved to this city just to be close to Yanli. Wei Ying wipes his nose with the corner of his sleeve. If he doesn’t touch his tears, he doesn’t have to acknowledge that he’s crying. Another example of the perfect Wei Ying logic that put him in Lan Zhan’s orbit like he could avoid the crash. But things that go up, come down, no matter how fast they go.

The thought sets him off and he cries harder.

“Oh shit,” Jin Zixuan says.

***

Wei Ying doesn’t go back to the res. There’s no reason to, really. There’s a washing machine and dryer for him to clean his clothes at Yanli’s. He can borrow a notebook for class. It’s fine. He knows he hadn’t wanted to impose on Yanli, wanted her to have his life, but that was before. He’s lucky he had somewhere to land when he crashed.

“Um, you missed the party,” Wen Ning says when Wei Ying slides into the desk next to him. That would be party two, the one at the less shitty campus bar that was supposed to be with their lunch group.

“Yeah, I had a family thing,” Wei Ying says, reaching into his borrowed 2014 Seoul International Conference of Mathematicians totebag. Yanli assured him that she was drowning in swag totebags so it was fine to take it. Wei Ying feels like the deeply unstylish logo is giving him a fashion edge. What even is it? Two wibbly circles hugging each other?

Huaisang snorts. “A family thing.”

The dubiousness feels uncalled for. Besides, it’s barely a lie. Eventually Wei Ying had remembered to charge his phone. Well, remembered is inaccurate. Yanli got an angry phone call from her mom about how Wei Ying wasn’t answering his messages and how rude it was to do that on his birthday so he’d spent the afternoon placating various relatives.

“They already think I’m irresponsible and party too much, I don’t understand why they’re expecting anything different,” he’d joked. Yanli had frowned at him and he’d dutifully gone back to thanking everyone for their well-wishes.

And then he’d gone into his settings and turned off all notifications.

“Sorry if you messaged,” he says to Huaisang. “My phone isn’t giving me all my notifs.”

Huaisang narrows his eyes.

***

Wei Ying gives an excuse not to join them for lunch. Instead, he eats in Yanli’s office.

This is all working out pretty well.

And then on Wednesday, Huaisang slams his hand down on Wei Ying’s notebook when he’s trying to pack up at the end of class. “This ends now,” Huaisang says. He squares his jaw. Wei Ying can see that his weight is perfectly balanced and his right hand is loose, but raised halfway. Somehow Wei Ying knows that if he made a break for it, Huaisang would physically fight him.

For the heck of it, Wei Ying looks over his shoulder… where Wen Ning is standing. A pincer maneuver. Wei Ying is genuinely impressed. Also a little insulted that Huaisang thinks he’s such a flight risk.

“I’m listening,” Wei Ying says casually, hands flat on the desk where Huaisang can see them.

“I am going to fail this class—again—if you don’t stop skipping study party. What is it going to take to get your head back in the game?” Huaisang is dead serious.

Wei Ying feels a pang of guilt. He’d promised them both that they’d all pass together.

So Wei Ying makes his way to the computer lab in the afternoon so they can study. It’s all very normal, even though Wei Ying’s shirt is notably softer after being washed so many times in quick succession. It’s good Huaisang hadn’t fought him, cause he doesn’t think the fabric would hold up to any rough handling. He’s not shameless enough to want to end up half-naked in front of his professor.

The only weird thing is the mountain of snacks Wen Ning has brought. There are four separate flavours of chips. That’s excessive. That’s why all-dressed chips were invented. No need to decide between a single taste, just put all the flavours together and shake the bag.

“Ooh, honey butter,” Huaisang says, and pops it open.

They work through the problem set and the snacks together. They’re almost at the end when Huaisang leans back, big stretch with his arms over his head. “We should get ready for Wing Chun,” he says to Wei Ying.

“You’re unusually keen to go,” Wei Ying observes, instead of what he wants to say, which is ‘haha you go ahead I’m good.’ But it is uncharacteristic for Huaisang to be the one to suggest it. He always makes it seem like Wing Chun is done on sufferance.

Huaisang shrugs. “Well, since Dalvir broke up with me I don’t have anything better on.”

Wei Ying feels his eyes bugging out. He didn’t even know they were dating, let alone broke up. How did he not know that? Huaisang talked about him all the time and Wei Ying never asked or anything. Wei Ying’s been nursing his own drama fit and here Huaisang is, having an actual situation that deserves sympathy. And where was Wei Ying? Abandoning him to failure and probably switching to yet another major.

“I’m the worst,” Wei Ying says, an unconscious echo of Lan Zhan’s words.

“No you’re not,” Wen Ning says, promptly.

“No, I am. I was totally ignoring my phone this whole week and you probably messaged to tell me and I didn’t even look.” Wei Ying pulls at his hair.

“I knew you were ignoring us,” Huaisang mutters.

Wei Ying keeps going. “I do only think about myself, fuck. I’m going to die alone. No one is ever going to make toast for me.”

He’s going to have to get cats so there will be someone to eat him when he does, otherwise they’ll find his body years later, mummified. Being discovered mummified is the worst thing he can think of.

“What are you talking about, you demented wingbat. You are not going to turn into a mummy.” Huaisang rolls his eyes. Then he looks at his phone to check the time, before putting it down and squaring himself to Wei Ying. “Alright, out with it.”

Wei Ying stares at him.

“Whatever it is that is turning you into the amazing invisible man.”

A long moment of silence. Wei Ying is just supposed to… tell them? He can’t do that.

“Wen Ning,” Huaisang says. “Alcohol.”

“He doesn’t have—” Wei Ying starts. Wen Ning pulls a mickey out of his backpack. “Why do you have that?”

“It was for your birthday,” Wen Ning says. His cheeks are pink.

Wei Ying is genuinely touched. And he can see on the label that it’s mid-tier tequila, genuine Olmeca. That is so thoughtful.

“But I don’t know if we’re allowed to drink in here,” Wen Ning says.

Huaisang waves him off.

“I don’t have anything to drink it out of.” Wei Ying’s water bottle is back in his room.

Huaisang reaches into his backpack. Wei Ying leans forward. Huaisang produces a flask and hands it over. Wei Ying takes it and his thumb immediately lands on the engraving. It’s his name and a little gear beneath it.

“This one is a group gift,” Huaisang says.

“You guys,” Wei Ying might cry again. He’s cried more in the last week than in the last ten years and that includes the time he dislocated his shoulder.

He expects the pat on the back from Wen Ning, but not the words that go with it. “You made sure jie got her present and you always check in with us. Of course we wouldn’t forget your birthday.”

Wei Ying does some rapid blinking. He exhales, shaky. “Okay, give me that,” he says, and makes a funnel out of a piece of paper so he can pour some into his flask. “I’m not drinking alone, though,” he warns.

Huaisang chugs his water and pours tequila straight into his bottle, but Wen Ning uses a thermal flask for his water and the lid is designed to be used as a cup. They make an odd set, clinking their various drinking implements together.

The first swallow burns and Wei Ying shakes his head. Where is the lime when you need it. He’s scared to ask in case Wen Ning has a whole bartender’s set inside his backpack.

His ears feel a little leaky. Once they settle, he says, “I slept with Lan Zhan.” It’s the first time he’s said it out loud and it sounds absolutely unbelievable.

“Oh,” Wen Ning says.

“I didn’t think you did hookups,” Huaisang says, contemplatively.

Wei Ying laughs, mirthless. “I don’t.” It’s the first time saying that out loud.

Wen Ning’s gaze sharpens.

“Oh no,” Huaisang says. “You like him.”

“Yeah,” Wei Ying says. He holds out his flask. The others clink with him, somberly. They drink to it; the physical version of an ‘F’ in the chat.

***

They get drunk enough that Wei Ying thinks Huaisang shouldn’t take the bus and also that it would be a great idea if he crashed in Wei Ying’s room. It’s not until the three of them are falling over each other trying to get their key cards out—well, Wei Ying and Wen Ning’s keycard, Huaisang is just hindering—that Wei Ying realises this means he’ll have to go to the res, the place he has been avoiding.

“We have to be really quiet,” he whispers, pulling a finger to his lips as the door swings open.

“Why?” Huaisang whispers back. He’s really loud though and Wei Ying winces. He should learn to be quiet like Wei Ying.

“Lan Zhan’s room is right by the door.”

They both nod at him seriously as they make their way to the stairs. The stairway door makes a clonk as it opens, and naturally Lan Zhan opens his door.

“Oops,” Wen Ning says, but Huaisang is already pushing them into the cold air of the stairwell. “Go, go, go,” he says.

Wei Ying can’t help but look back. Lan Zhan is in his soft drapey fabric getup again. The left side of his mouth is drooping down. Wei Ying’s heart sloshes to the side, looking at it. He wants to press his fingers to those lips again.

Huaisang waits till they get to the room to ask questions. What a bro. “Why are we hiding from Lan Zhan though?”

Wei Ying winces. “I, ah, maybe haven’t talked to him?”

“No notifications,” Wen Ning says, nodding sagely. He’s surprisingly stable for someone who drank his fair share of the tequila. Wei Ying almost couldn’t tell, aside from the careful way he’s putting his feet down.

“You just left?” Huaisang shrieks. Wei Ying and Wen Ning flap their hands at him. No one needs to summon a complaint from Wang Lingjiao who, as the current record holder for complaints against her, loves to find a reason to report on the rest of them. “Bro.”

“Wei Ying can leave wherever he wants to,” Wen Ning says loyally.

“Just this time!” Wei Ying says. “Last time I tried to stay for breakfast and that was a mistake so this time I just, you know, left.”

Huaisang puts a hand on his face. “Last time.” He pushes past Wei Ying and goes to Wei Ying’s computer chair and sits down. “Alright, I’m prepared. Tell me about breakfast.”

Wei Ying explains about how ‘this isn’t a relationship so no toast.’

“Wow,” Huaisang says. “He said that?”

“Yeah, I’m not used to hookups so I didn’t know toast was like, bad etiquette.”

“I wonder what a sandwich is,” Huaisang wonders aloud, “a marriage proposal?”

Huaisang seems to be past being useful. Wei Ying turns to Wen Ning who is now leaning against the wall. Wei Ying brings him to the bed so he can sit down. He smooths the duvet down first and everything. “Is that not usual?”

Wen Ning’s eyes are wide. “N-no,” he says. “Toast is totally normal after hookups.” He thinks about it for a second. “Even eggs.”

“Wen Ning seems like the kind of guy who’d make a full breakfast for any one-night stand,” Huaisang says, stroking his chin. Wen Ning doesn’t say anything. “And classy enough to not brag. Damn, Wen Ning, do you secretly have game?”

Wen Ning continues not to answer Huaisang. “He should have made you toast,” he says to Wei Ying.

“I need to know how many people he’s pulled this routine on,” Huaisang says, taking out his phone. He does a double take at Wei Ying, who is projecting please don’t as hard as he can. “Dude, this in no way reflects badly on you.”

Wei Ying squirms. He hears what Huaisang is saying, but Huaisang wasn’t the one standing in Lan Zhan’s kitchen, naked, with visions of more kisses and instead being summarily dismissed. And Huaisang wasn’t the one who knew better and then went back.

“This doesn’t add up, though,” Huaisang says, tapping his lip with his phone.

Wei Ying flops back on the bed. The ceiling is as boring as ever. “I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.”

“No,” Huaisang says. “Something else is going on here.”

***

Eventually, they sober up a little and Wen Ning goes back to his own room. Wei Ying throws Huaisang an extra pair of sweatpants.

They crawl into bed together. Wei Ying takes the wall side because it’s colder and Huaisang is a guest.

The room is quiet and dark, barely any light filtering in through the window. Even Wei Ying’s computer tower has given up its usual green blinking light dance after so long with Wei Ying away.

The sound of their breathing becomes a palpable presence in the room, like Wei Ying has put his ear up against a seashell, but it’s everywhere.

They aren’t touching. Wei Ying swallows. “Do you miss him?” Wei Ying asks.

Huaisang knows who he means. He turns and faces Wei Ying. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry,” Wei Ying says. “For not being there.”

“I didn’t expect it,” Huaisang says, which makes Wei Ying feel worse. Huaisang should. “University relationships don’t last,” he says, voice slightly bitter. “So it shouldn’t be a big deal.”

It echoes what Wei Ying has been telling himself. His throat feels scraped raw when he says, “Yeah.”

“You know what sucks the most?” Huaisang asks.

Wei Ying braces to try not to cry again. “What?”

“He liked to top.”

Wei Ying doesn’t know what to say to that. “That sounds rough.” Always a good response.

Huaisang turns onto his side to face Wei Ying. “It’s so hard to find someone who likes it who isn’t super weird about it.”

“Really?” Wei Ying asks. He has a very small sample of hookups, exactly two, both with the same person, so that’s news to him.

“Dude, how do you not know that? We had a parody panel last year during Pride week about the international top shortage. It’s past being a meme, it’s just like, a true thing.”

“Huh,” Wei Ying says. “Then I’m sorry for your loss.” He feels more on solid ground now.

Huaisang groans and buries his face into the pillow. “I’ll get over it,” he says, muffled. “But I’m going to sulk for a while.”

“Fair enough,” Wei Ying says, and has to fight a giggle. Huaisang wasn’t trying to cheer him up, but there’s something about talking about this together, about knowing they can, that absolutely is. Also the pure comedy of grieving the good dick.

***

Huaisang wakes Wei Ying up in the middle of the night. “I fucking knew it,” Huaisang hisses. He shoves his phone in Wei Ying’s face and it nearly blinds him

“What the hell,” Wei Ying says, grabbing at the phone to get it away from him. “Why are you waking me up at this hour?”

“Dude, it’s 7 a.m.,” Huaisang says.

“I repeat the question.”

“Whatever,” Huaisang says. “Take a look at this.”

Wei Ying’s eyes have stopped watering enough that he thinks he can. Huaisang hands him his phone, open to his text message history with his brother. The one at the top of the screen is a row of angry faces and three follow-ups about skipping practice. Then, one about remembering to eat dinner, which, chips are dinner. The last one is from ten minutes ago—what is up with morning people and how can they be stopped? It reads:

Slang question: what does it mean when someone says they want to make someone else “toast”

Another message comes in.

Is it drugs

Wei Ying is suddenly wide awake.

“Wait,” Wei Ying says. “Do you think…” Wei Ying can only think of one reason that Nie Mingjue would be messaging his brother about toast and it involves a telephone thread that includes Dr. Lan and his brother.

“I absolutely do think, you carbohydrate craving messy bitch. Go get your metaphor.”

“Right,” Wei Ying says, and staggers out of bed. He makes it two steps. “Maybe I should brush my teeth first.”

***

Huaisang insists on following him. It’s fine, he says, he can play dead and everyone will forget he’s there. Wei Ying, focused and not in the mood to be delayed, decides not to argue.

The problem is, he can’t find Lan Zhan.

He’s not in his room. It’s too early for class. Wei Ying grips his hair. If he can’t get to Lan Zhan right now he’s going to scream.

“Huaisang,” Wei Ying says, voice even. “I need to find him.”

“Uh,” Huaisang says, “we can find out which room his next class is in?” Those are all listed up in the unwieldy database they all have access to. The database engineering students are always talking about how they could do better. Wei Ying knows when Lan Zhan’s next class is, though; it’s not until ten. And it is eight in the morning. That is two hours too many.

“That’s going to take too long,” Wei Ying says. Now, Wei Ying would not be caught dead with an iPhone, see: right to repair and planned obsolescence. But. He knows how they work. “Does he have Family Sharing turned on?”

The light goes on in Huaisang’s eyes. “I bet he does, but not with me.”

Wei Ying won’t be stopped by this. “What about your brother? Or,” Wei Ying swallows but there’s no person he wouldn’t debase himself in front of in this moment, “Dr. Lan?”

“I can call him,” Huaisang says. Wei Ying spares a moment to be touched by Huaisang’s willingness to go hard for him. What a good bro. “What do you want me to say?”

That’s a stumper. What would make Dr. Lan be willing to give up his brother’s location. “Something,” Wei Ying says, “Anything. Tell him I was taken hostage.”

Huaisang looks at him dubiously, but dials the number. “Huan-gege?” he says. Silence while Dr. Lan presumably says something. “I’m alright.” Huaisang smacks himself in the forehead. “Oh, no actually, uh, I really need to talk to Lan Zhan like right now. I thought maybe you could use find my iPhone?” Another long pause. “One sec,” Huaisang says. He mutes himself and turns to Wei Ying. “Ok, he is not really buying this?” Wei Ying is shocked. Huaisang is giving such a good performance, who wouldn’t believe he needs this information.

“Give me the phone,” Wei Ying says. He puts out his hand. Huaisang looks at him dubiously but he hands it over. Wei Ying unmutes. “Hi, Dr. Lan,” he says, perky. Dead silence. Wei Ying pulls the phone back to double check that he didn’t disconnect, but no. “Do you know where Lan Zhan is? I need to talk to him.” Wei Ying knows that Dr. Lan is less likely to trust a desperate sounding Wei Ying. Wei Ying knows that the more he sounds like he needs something the less inclined people are to give it, but he can’t help himself. It creeps in around the edges, along with the realisation that he doesn’t really have another plan. Well, aside from waiting two hours but who can do that?

“He doesn’t—” Dr. Lan cuts himself off. There’s muttering in the background. Wei Ying listens hard, but he doesn’t have to. He’d recognise that voice anywhere. Lan Zhan is with Dr. Lan. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” Dr. Lan asks. What enough? Wei Ying hasn’t even begun.

“Yep, sure,” Wei Ying says. And then he hangs up.

Huaisang gives him a consoling pat on the shoulder. Wei Ying is already in his settings, though, and isn’t really paying attention. He navigates the stupid menus until he finds what he’s looking for. He knew it. Maybe Huaisang wouldn’t have Lan Zhan in his phone, but the conscientious Dr. Lan would have his little brother-in-law’s location and that link goes both ways. A tap of his fingers and the map lights up. Hell yes.

Wei Ying squints at the map. They’re close by, in fact they’re… Wei Ying starts walking.

Huaisang squawks and follows him. Wei Ying doesn’t understand what the problem is? He thought Huaisang wanted to come.

Wei Ying traces the familiar path to the math department. He walks into the open atrium area with its couches and turns right down the hallway, past the office, past the vending machines. He walks past his sister’s office. Her door is open. He doesn't stop to wait to see if she’s seen him.

He walks all the way to the end of the hallway, where Dr. Lan’s office is. The door is closed but the iPhone doesn’t lie. It’s blinking away merrily, dot on top of where they’re standing. He gives Huaisang back his phone.

Taking a deep breath, he knocks on the door.

Dr. Lan opens the door. Wei Ying cranes his neck and he can see Lan Zhan sitting at a dark lacquer table in the corner of the office. He only sees him for a moment before Dr. Lan closes the door halfway, so only his face is visible.

“Can I talk to Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying asks. He wishes it was a little less like begging for permission, but this is where his life has brought him.

“I don’t think that's a good idea,” Dr. Lan says.

Wei Ying winces. “Is he very angry?”

“Angry?” Dr. Lan’s eyes blaze. “Really, Wei Ying, you should know better than that.”

“Would it help if I said I didn't know?” It’s Wei Ying’s only defence. When he left he was only thinking about how he couldn’t go through getting kicked out a second time. He hadn’t thought at all what it might mean that Lan Zhan brought him back a second time, that that wasn’t something Lan Zhan did.

Dr. Lan's face hardens, which Wei Ying takes to mean that it does not help. “Whatever you want to say to him, you can say to me,” he says.

Well, then. Nothing else for it. “Lan Zhan!” he calls out, raising his voice slightly. “I’m sorry I left that morning! I really didn’t think you wanted me to stay, but actually, I—”

“What’s going on?” Yanli says, from behind Wei Ying.

Wei Ying turns around guiltily. “Hi, jie,” he says.

She glares, but it’s directed slightly to the left of him. “What are you doing?” she says to Dr. Lan, who is still wedged in the door.

Wei Ying flaps his hands. “He’s just looking out for his brother.”

“I don’t see how this is any of his business,” she says. He’s never heard this level of steel from her before. This must be her work voice. No wonder she got curriculum concessions.

“Really,” Dr. Lan says, puffing up. Wei Ying can tell that whatever he says next is not going to be anything good.

That's when Lan Zhan pulls the door open and steps out into the hallway. Wei Ying’s heart flip flops, hard, at the sight of his face. There's a piece of Lan Zhans hair that is falling into his forehead. Wei Ying wants to reach up and press it back to join the others, tuck Lan Zhan all the way in and put himself right in there next to him.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, urgent. The rest of the world fades away. Distantly he notes that his sister and Dr. Lan are hissing at each other, but Wei Ying doesn’t care about them. “Do you mean it?”

Wei Ying opens his mouth. Closes it. Somehow this was easier when he was shouting at the closed door. Half of him says, just say it, what’s the worst that can happen? He’s on exchange, after all. This is a break, a rupture from the course of his life. But he knows better now. This is real life. The hurts he’s felt here are as real as any he's had. The friendships he’s made are just as true. And Lan Zhan—Lan Zhan is always going to be what he wants. Even when he’s back home his heart is going to be reaching out west.

“I wanted to stay,” Wei Ying says. He laughs. “I don’t really know what I’m doing, and I don’t put the thought in like you do, I know you’re so careful about what things mean. But if you want to—have breakfast, or, or whatever, then I want to do that.” He swallows. “I really like you,” he says.

Huaisang coughs in the corner. So much for playing dead. But if he didn’t want to hear something really fucking gay he shouldn’t have come to Wei Ying’s desperate love confession.

“Yes,” Lan Zhan says. “Wei Ying, I…” he trails off. “I don’t just want breakfast,” he says. “I want everything with you. All that you'll give me, for as long as you’ll have me.”

Wei Ying’s throat gets suspiciously thick. He clears it. “Well, that’s…” he means to say ‘good’ but he can’t take it anymore. He throws himself at Lan Zhan and Lan Zhan catches him easily, pulling him in. And then they’re kissing. Kissing like they did on Halloween. And oh, Wei Ying couldn’t have known but he should have known. Lan Zhan kisses with his whole body, giving it over to Wei Ying, and Wei Ying gives it right back.

When they pull apart, Wei Ying gives in and tucks Lan Zhan’s errant lock back up where it belongs. Lan Zhan smiles at him with his eyes and gives Wei Ying’s fingers a kiss on the way down.

The world slowly comes back in. Huaisang has turned to face the wall, which, good for him, while Dr. Lan and Yanli both have their arms crossed and are glaring at each other. But Wei Ying isn’t worried about it. People come around.

He squeezes Lan Zhan’s hand. “You know what?” Lan Zhan raises an eyebrow. “Halloween is our anniversary. And it’s my birthday. Triply lucky.”

“Then you should have a very big present,” Lan Zhan says.

“Oh yeah?” Wei Ying teases. “Are you going to get it for me?” Wei Ying imagines, like, a really big stuffed horse with a sash on it with his name.

“Yes,” Lan Zhan says immediately, like he doesn’t have to think about it. Like it isn’t a joke.

Wei Ying groans. “What am I going to do with you?” he asks, unbearably fond. His serious, earnest Lan Zhan is too much.

“Keep me,” Lan Zhan says. “Nothing else.”