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Wei Ying lives with Jiang Cheng now, for lack of options. He sits in Jiang Cheng’s professionally decorated guest room and avoids some reading he needs to do — it’s important, a transcription of newly excavated silk-and-bamboo texts from a tomb find. They’re pre-Laozi, but Wei Ying is no purist, and some of the stuff seems like it could be relevant to the ties between cinnabar and blood and mercury under the overarching control of water: external cultivation, which was never going to be the way for Wei Ying, until it was.
Honestly Wei Ying is capable of reading this for fun, but two days have slid by and he has not opened the pdf. He will get to it. Instead today he is thinking about music, another thing that was never anyone’s idea of what Wei Ying would do; it was protested that Wei Ying had been too old to start piano when Auntie Yu took him in. Wei Ying thinks it is very likely that some noise was made that Wei Ying was also too old to start cultivating, even though he was in fact too young.
Wei Ying got cultivation, in the end, and then lost it. He did not get piano. That was for Jiang Cheng, while jiejie fretted with the violin.
There is a fancy digital piano in Jiang Cheng’s condo, never used, bought out of some guilt. In Wei Ying’s guest room, flutes line the shelves. Bamboo, wood, bone, one western-style disassembled and packed away in its box. A few clay whistles, and a homemade bull-roarer, which Wei Ying argues is a wind instrument. He has brought Jiang Cheng’s digital piano in here, and left its fancy stand barren in the hallway. It sits on the desk, naked and forced to understand that it is a keyboard.
Wei Ying’s hair is tied up and he is in a sweater, two sweaters. It is not that he is cold, but that he feels the need for a shell, for pressure all around him like lying at the bottom of a river.
He opens his bedside drawer and hunches over the mirror and puts lipstick on before he sits down on the piano stool which has replaced the desk chair. Wei Ying gets lightheaded playing the flute, so he doesn’t do it all the time. It’s easier to work with the music this way: hands on fake plastic piano keys, weighted to seem real.
It is not his own mouth he’s thinking of, when he puts the lipstick on.
For lack of other nearby sources of resentful energy — ten floors up from the ten thousand years of screaming human history down on the street level, here right on the banks of the Yangtze — Wei Ying experiments on himself. What makes him turbulent, what makes him calm and attentive, waiting and watchful? He can nearly control his own heartbeat this way; feels it stutter or lift as he plays, his vision fading and pale one moment, eyes pressure-throbbing the next. Wei Ying does not mean that he moves his heart like your heart moves when you’re loving music, but rather how a heart moves when something is forcing you to be the music, in a way human organs don’t like all that much. Lan Zhan’s cultivation can work like that.
The heart is a roundish thing, a pulpy hollow in the way that major organs like to be. It will take a note like the belly of a jiejie’s long-untouched violin.
When he’s done, Wei Ying tries to play normal music. He tries to play something that will hold and give form to the rushing white noise of him. Wei Ying wants to make music that excuses the way he lays across the bed lengthwise for hours as a room darkens, until suddenly everything is all jittery in him, in the itching palms of his hands. But all he can play is some easy version of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and a few snatches of drama tunes; he never learned, he never learned, and things rush through him too fast to make his fingers play them.
He takes a shower for no reason at 4PM.
Wei Ying thinks that maybe he should maybe jerk off. He thinks it would be good to remember, in the triumph of orgasm, that his body can do more than feel terrible and reach up to scramble his brain.
Thinking he should try to be indulgent about it, Wei Ying smuggles a dildo across the hall to the bathroom in his bathrobe pocket. He closes the door and turns on the shower and lets the white noise make the world small, make it into only what he can hear. For now this is just pounding water.
Standing on the bathmat he slips a finger in his ass before he even gets hard or starts thinking about anything. Then there is the slide and stretch of the dildo going into him. It makes him panic a little, like he is doing damage. He coddles that panic; fucks that panic.
There is a small commotion in the hall. Jiang Cheng opens the bathroom door when — fortunately — Wei Ying is not very hard yet but has a dildo in his ass. Jiang Cheng cannot see this because Wei Ying has turned to face him and closed his legs. He is naked and his dick is soft, swaying as he moves. He can feel the dildo, which is pink, pressing against the backs of his thighs.
There is a cat twining around Jiang Cheng’s feet. The cat is part of the post-schism Jiang family landscape and is named Princess Peach.
“Princess Peach was meowing to come in,” Jiang Cheng says. He seems to be exasperatedly wrangling the cat more than actively trying to invade Wei Ying’s privacy. Princess Peach, offered the open door, doesn’t even deign to enter, but yeah — so much for that.
Wei Ying leaves the dildo in as he showers, but he just washes normally, clenching down around it to keep it from slipping out till he’s done. He washes it in the sink, soap and water. It’s hard to boil your butt toys in your little brother’s own condo.
Wei Ying is supposed to get dressed now because Jiang Cheng is hosting a restaurant dinner tonight. There are so many people in this town that Jiang Cheng has kept up with and Wei Ying should have kept up with but absolutely did not. Instead he lies around in a bathrobe in Jiang Cheng’s guest room and tries to remember what is a normal amount of pain for a body lying on its side. He tries to think through why spiritual energy settles so easily in bodies, and why resentful seems to catch or tear in his collagen, in connective tissue, and makes him ache between his bones as if he needs not just demonic cultivation but new meridians, new space for them pushed out inside of him to make room. Wei Ying feels swollen, like he is growing whole webs of capillaries.
Outside the sun is low over the city, yellow-orange in the smear of high early winter clouds like a tangerine that has gone a little old and tasteless in places.
Wei Ying’s neck is twinged because he fell asleep on the sofa watching celebrity dance-offs. His gut is twinged in that knot on the lower left side because of the way resentful energy catches and grows in shattered things, bone and perforated intestine alike. His left wrist is twinged because two days ago he tracked down a daolao gui in the underground metro. They throw off venomous darts, and Wei Ying caught one between the two bones of his forearm. Radius and ulna.
Wei Ying did not used to know what those bones are called. He did not know where each part of the guts fold themselves between cradling hipbones. He has learned to distract himself from his body with his body. He ignores a sharpening of the tangling cramp in his lower dantian and tries to remember the bones of the hand. Metacarpals? The tip of the daolao gui dart is still in his arm, the rest broken off; a golden core could burn it right out. But there are other ways, from the alchemy of external cultivation to the kind of traditional medicine he could buy in a normal shop. Or he’ll find some way to whine till Jiang Cheng does it for him. Either way, he won’t die. Left untreated it would be deadly after a day and a night, but—no. No.
The bathrobe is soft. He can’t hear any trains here in Jiang Cheng’s condo, which is a lonely feeling. Even in the Jiang family home out in the lakes you could hear distant trains rattle by on quiet, humid nights, headed to Wuhan. The condo itself is nice for a second home. Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli use it for business in the city, or to host friends from school.
Wei Ying is supposed to get dressed. Wei Ying doesn’t want to feel anything on his skin but the soft bathrobe. He would make an exception to touch someone’s hair. Anyone’s, or — his. He is out of the country right now. He is not coming to get Wei Ying from Jiang Cheng’s condo.
He did not come to get Wei Ying the one time Wei Ying actually asked for it.
Did Wei Ying really say it out loud? His hands move across the bedspread as if he can search out the memory by fumbling touch. He thinks that, back then — in that place — he might have spoken it aloud a few times, when he could see the sky or something else that helped him to recall that elsewhere the world spun on in a series of soft and humid springtime dawns while he lay there in the hollow hill.
Yes. Wei Ying, who is here now, tangled in a soft bathrobe, thinks he whispered: “Hey, hey, I need you to come get me,” with no one but the distant sky and the broken-glass drifts of shattered beer bottles to hear him.
(He thinks the bottle glass must have been washed down with rain some year. Maybe a flood. There had been many floods, silt on silt in that place, you could see it on the walls. He recognized a faded label amongst it and had to — well, not laugh, his back was still broken, but choke on it a little. He and Jiang Cheng used to ask jiejie to buy them the worst beer, and she always tried to buy them something nicer, but they’d insist.)
Wei Ying moves his legs a little, smoothes his ankles together over and over to feel the softness of the bathrobe, not entirely unlike the sensation of someone petting your hair. He thinks: I would pet his hair and it would be as good as someone touching mine. He thinks: unlike glass, bodies move forwards through time, terribly. They heal with fistulas, collagen, and even the littlest scrape can go pink in a hot shower eight years later, blushing scar tissue.
He thinks: There is a list somewhere that some western biologist-type put together with twenty-two criteria that define life biologically. This was considered a short list. Wei Ying remembered the full list during his time in that place but he did not care for it. Life is, Wei Ying is pretty sure, simply the opposite of entropy. Entropy is the universal desire of matter to be less complex and use less energy. Life is not a binary opponent, though. Their contrast is something softer; entropy and life have fishhooks in each other, and—
Jiang Cheng knocks on the door.
Wei Ying licks his mouth. He’s been breathing with it open and it’s sticky. Jiang Cheng comes in; the knock is not a question, just a warning, same as Auntie Yu used to do. Jiang Cheng is in the doorway and Wei Ying is left with time terribly straightened out. The only fishhooks are the regular aches, something sharper in his wrist where a gui’s dart is still embedded in flesh.
“Oh, you’re not dressed?” says Jiang Cheng
It’s not a demand that he get dressed, but it does leave out alternative offers. Wei Ying imagines swanning into Jiang Cheng’s dinner party in his bathrobe like a drunk housewife. He’s never had a Hollywood-esque breakdown before, which is a waste of his foreign exchange year. However, the tangle of resentful energy in the left side of his gut has subsided enough to sit up. His hands crack, every bone in them, as he pushes up from the bed. The room feels too light. Not in a sunshine way but in a gravity way, which means a dizzy way. Demonic cultivation is great for your blood pressure, particularly if you do not want to have any. Ah, his heart does its feeble best.
“Don’t worry, Jiang Cheng,” Wei Ying says, “I’ll be hot for your friends.” He smiles because he means it, even if he can’t look at Jiang Cheng’s face. He’s frightened by how tired he feels and would like to be pretty for somebody, today. Tonight, now. It’s dusk. No one got to see him putting on lipstick to play the piano.
Jiang Cheng’s mouth is tight. For your friends, Wei Ying said. These used to be Wei Ying’s friends, too. Jiang Cheng can have them in the divorce.
Jiang Cheng glares helplessly and Wei Ying laughs a sentence he’s trying to spit out, and sits up and starts pulling on underwear under the bathrobe. Jiang Cheng snorts and says “Nie Huaisang and the Suzhou conference all over again,” which is a reference to a story he must expect Wei Ying to recognize, but holds nothing for Wei Ying. Wei Ying makes a noise in response, anyway, because it seems like maybe Jiang Cheng wants to chat.
Having a conversation while getting dressed was normal in their childhood; now it means Wei Ying has to force his shoulders down. “Were you also dragged to the hot pot place?” says Jiang Cheng, idly conversational.
“Maybe, it’s blurry,” Wei Ying replies, rote, wondering if this happened in the months that he was in that place watching light in broken bottles, or if he just forgot. His legs feel terribly pale and strange when he hikes up the robe to pull on his jeans. He thinks of how Jiang Cheng opened the bathroom door, earlier, when Wei Ying was about to jerk off, when Wei Ying had a dildo in his ass: every part of Wei Ying made permeable. There is no need to feel like something has been stolen from him. He has learned his lesson. Everyone is permeable in the right conditions.
Wei Ying thinks of how when you pick up Princess Peach, she stops struggling after a while and just stares away with big cat eyes, totally disassociated from her mortal form. The war is over. He just needs to go limp until — until. Until he’s figured it out. Until he can live here without touching the walls and letting the claustrophobia flood in . He’s still thinking, an obsessive little undercurrent, about the way Lan Zhan braids his hair, about how it would feel to touch it. How he’d feel it in his lungs as much as his hands. Goddamn.
Wei Ying pulls the soft safety of the bathrobe off, eyes shut against the sensation. He feels over-sensitive and raw more than exposed — exposed is no longer meaningful — but swallows the discomfort down into his stomach and pulls a button-down over his head, to save his injured wrist the embarrassment of trying to do up buttons in front of Jiang Cheng. When he opens his eyes, though, Jiang Cheng is gone.
In the kitchen, Princess Peach’s dry food bowl rattles. It’s fine then.
No one thinks that Wei Ying is any good at going limp, and blinking wide eyes at a wall until it’s over. That is fine. He stands still, waiting for energy to thread a belt through his belt loops, and thinks about Lan Zhan’s hair in a fishtail braid, or french braided and tucked under. In college he would steal Jiang Cheng’s phone, with its unlimited calls, and sneak away at parties to ring Lan Zhan. To poke at him. He never said, “I need you to come get me” because university was fun and not really like that, for Wei Ying. He just called to say, “I’m drunk and you’re not! Talk to me, Lan Zhan!”
He liked to think, then, of Lan Zhan on his phone in a darkened bedroom, the crinkle of the warm bedclothes. Lan Zhan paying attention.
Wei Ying is dressed. He finds Jiang Cheng shrugging on a sharp blazer in the kitchen. Wei Ying’s own jacket is black corduroy with hand-sewn trim and five hidden pockets heavy with strange things. “Don’t worry, didi,” he says to Jiang Cheng. Bending over to tie his laces is nice on the dull pain in his spine, a welcome stretch. “I’m on your side.” It feels important to say, here in Jiang Cheng’s kitchen before they go off to face Jiang Cheng’s friends, or whoever.
“What, against people like Huaisang?” Jiang Cheng asks, snorting, “Is there a betting pool again?” Perhaps he is still talking about a time in Suzhou that Wei Ying does not remember. But he looks pleased, cautiously.
Jiang Cheng can’t come get Wei Ying. He already did. Wei Ying has been got.
~~✴~
It is not Jiang Cheng’s friends at the restaurant. These are all family heads, along with spouses and a second-in-command, if that post wasn’t already filled by a spouse, along with various hangers-on and pseudo-diplomats. Absolutely no one will be messing about with betting pools, but at least it’s clear that Jiang Cheng (or possibly jiejie) was in charge of the guest list, because while the main families cannot be ignored even by Wei Ying’s hotshot little brother, the smaller ones that particularly annoy Jiang Cheng are absent. Did Yanli arrange it remotely, or did Jiang Cheng do it? Wei Ying spends fifteen minutes mulling it over and can’t decide.
Wei Ying’s wrist throbs. He has seven hours to get the dart out before it becomes a problem. Everyone in this room could burn it out without a thought, which is a cool thing to think as he lowers himself into his seat. If they sense the dart’s venom on him, they likely write it off as a side effect of demonic cultivation.
Jiang Cheng is seated to Wei Ying’s right, being toasted by some of the Nie delegation. There’s an informal conference this week, so everyone is here. Lan Huan is seated the next table over, back to back with Wei Ying. After forty-five minutes of toasts, when everyone starts eating, Lan Zhan’s brother turns and smiles. Wei Ying’s hands clench under the red tablecloth.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Huan says, “How are you?”
Lan Huan is as aware as everyone else in this restaurant that Wei Ying is not really one of the crowd, anymore. That he politely asks how Wei Ying is could be nice, or could be goddamn grating. Wei Ying can’t decide which. His knees ache the way they do when he’s been sat down for two long.
It would be so easy to smile back at Lan Huan and say I’m lovely, but where is A-Zhan, again? Is it Seoul? Kyoto? No one calls Lan Zhan that familiarly, even if he is actually a year younger than Wei Ying. And Wei Ying knows exactly where he is.
“I’m lovely,” Wei Ying says, and nothing more. Just smiles and smiles to match Lan Huan. He wonders if Lan Huan would sleep with him. He wouldn’t do anything about it — he’d be too paralysed, he knows — but he wonders. A queasy indulgence.
The real questions burn in Wei Ying’s smiling mouth. He could voice what is maybe the easiest of them, How is he doing? but Wei Ying is afraid of asking even that.
Lan Huan, in leaning to face Wei Ying better, brushes his shoulder blades against Wei Ying’s. Wei Ying feels his face freeze. This is the most he has been touched in months, and it is an odd, intimate feeling to brush his back against Lan Zhan’s brother. Wrong, terribly, but his belly is hot with the association.
Lan Huan has pulled his shoulder away, but not far at all. Wei Ying can still feel his body heat, as Lan Huan gazes at him, frank and open.
Wei Ying lives with Jiang Cheng but they don’t touch often, and jiejie lives there too but is rarely home. For his part, Wei Ying is relearning the polite fiction of his personal space after discovering that he is actually always permeable. There is a concept in ancient Greek geometry of a terminus : the idea that the mathematical edges of shapes are real. This has always been bullshit.
Lan Huan is still looking at him. Wei Ying’s back is still so warm.
Wei Ying stands so fast the room tilts. It feels like all the food on the lazy susans should be sliding off to the left. For a moment his vision buzzes out, sparkling white. He honestly does not know what to blame this on: his body or his mind flickering?
He plunges through the tables to the washroom.
There’s one person in there, a man a little older than Wei Ying from the Jin delegation who is drying his hands. He looks up when Wei Ying comes in, and opens his mouth like he’s going to try to start up some political smalltalk right here, right now.
“Have you ever considered the cultural impact of the restaurant washroom?” Wei Ying asks him loudly, before he can get a word out. Wei Ying thinks it’s a fair question. Imagine what would become of Wei Ying at gatherings like these if he lacked the socially acceptable swift exit to the restaurant washroom?
His face still feels cold. He wonders if he is about to vomit.
This is a very nice washroom. There’s a waterfall on one wall, and salt scrub and lotion by the sinks. Wei Ying gets his teeth in his own queasy fear, presses it brutally down to strike back at him later, and lets his presence into this room like smoke creeping under a bedroom doorway, like a terrible thing about to happen. He can still fill up a room, huh? There’s a little waffling, a little Lovely to meet you, but the man leaves and no one else is around. Good. Wei Ying opens all the stalls to check, just in case.
Wei Ying leans over a sink, splashes water on his face. It helps. His body is not so good at regulating temperature now, and he’s flushed. The little bloom of resentful energy he used to scare a man in a washroom fades and as it does his wrist throbs, hard. Shit.
It is comforting, though. To be able to see the injury. A clear cause-and-effect that demands a clear action.
Still, Wei Ying should have taken care of this earlier. Daolao gui aren't common, so he's not working with a lot of information here, but what little literature there is does seem pretty insistent that the venom needs to be neutralized within twenty-four hours, or death will follow. “Neutralized” is pretty vague, but still — if something shoots a venomous dart at you, there's one pretty obvious fix.
(The fix is not, unfortunately, leave the dart in and see what happens. Possibly Wei Ying’s resentful energy would eat it, if he tried? Gui are ghostly; it's possible he could metabolize this. But there's still a bit of dart in there, in his wrist. He dislikes that.)
The choices are: do it here and now, while the food’s just been served, or try to sneak away early and do it in the condo before Jiang Cheng gets home.
Really, the choice is already made. That he has — or, Lan Huan has — jolted himself into fearful, nauseous clarity, that for the first time today Wei Ying looks at his wrist and the necessity and the steps needed to be taken all make sense, means he must do it now. Now, while he wants to. Now, while he is able to.
Wei Ying breathes nice and even and splashes his face again, instead of pulling out his knife from one of his five hidden pockets. A little procrastination. An act of indulgence, finally attained. Then he dries his hands and feels his face go funny and expressionless-dull as he pulls the knife from his jacket pocket. This he learned from his jiejie and from Auntie Yu herself: how to let your eyes go dull like two river stones and do what must be done.
Wei Ying sets the knife to the side of the sink. It's a thin stiletto switchblade, notably illegal but also not designed for showing off. He's carved the flat of the blade with a few talismans, but none of them are for impromptu washroom surgery. He washes it, and his hands again, and the little puffy puncture on the inside of his wrist carefully with soap and water. Then he fumbles in another pocket — fuck, should he wash his hands again? — and comes up with his phone, six talismans scribbled on receipt paper, a seventh with a curse on a business card (he's testing something), and finally a little cigarette lighter. It's a pretty thing, subtle, classy if you're into that kind of thing. Seems to be real silver.
The lighter is Lan Zhan’s, who smokes only when Wei Ying or strangers can see. Maybe no one else knows. Fuck, Wei Ying isn’t sure Lan Huan, waiting out there in the restaurant, knows. It’s not like anyone would be angry, or even care that much.
The lighter is heavy and cold, comforting in Wei Ying’s palm. He’s never kept something of Lan Zhan’s before, but this little thing has lasted. Wei Ying just keeps not losing it.
Wei Ying flicks it on, and picks up the knife. His reflection in the big washroom mirrors, glancing back at him, looks strange and ridiculous. Like a memory of himself and jiejie and Jiang Cheng and at least five different Jiang cousins crammed in a bathroom of the Jiang house, lighting candles to tell scary stories while they adults were having a party.
Wei Ying is not actually sure how long he will have to hold the flame to the knife before it's sterilized. He wishes a little that he'd poked around the fancy washroom for some hand sanitizer instead. Ah, well. It's a nice lighter, it never gets any use. He waves the flame on the tip of the knife, steady back and forth, and counts down fifteen seconds. It’s only fifteen seconds because Wei Ying is being a wuss, worried it’ll hurt more if the knife is hot — the pain needs to stay manageable for him to keep his other hand steady — or that a heated knife will just do more damage.
The next part is not pleasant. Wei Ying uses one of the loose, decorative rocks scattered around the sinks to weigh down the hand on his injured side, because not flinching is hard. Bodies flinch. On a certain level, it’s barely a mental thing. He does not feel ashamed about it, just plans around it.
Wei Ying glances around and pulls a pile of clean hand towels closer. He checks that everything is as ready as it can be; it looks fine. And well, if someone could walk in on this, that's just permeability for you. Wei Ying can appreciate but does not expect the dignity of privacy.
Ah, the math is better this way. If Wei Ying had tried to remove the dart back at the condo, the odds of Jiang Cheng opening the bathroom door — again — and wondering what the hell the knife and blood were about? Pretty high. Odds that anyone at all will walk in on this, in a crowded restaurant? Nearing one hundred percent, he'd say, but it is much less likely that it'll be Jiang Cheng. And there are no non-cultivators here; pretty much everyone else will see Wei Ying with his hands bloody and assume he's up to some demonic cultivation and ask no questions.
He wants to laugh. A demonstration of the demonic art of splinter removal, right here for anyone to see. He does not laugh. He does not like this part. He still dislikes knowing the surface tension of skin under a sharp thing.
There it is: pressure, and pressure giving way like a pop. A beat, then the pain. His body, perversely, is always learning better how to go into shock at times like these instead of building up a tolerance, so he carefully breathes and waits out his whited-out vision and cold-numb face.
There. He can see. The blood is flowing, but not too fast. He’ll do some research tonight for future reference, hopefully never to be used: should he have used a tourniquet, should he have (how?) elevated his arm above his heart? He knows, at least, where he is: radius and ulna and the soft things in between. He maps himself as best he can when he is a shifting riverbed, prone to flooding.
Wei Ying has cut down to the dart and is attempting to get the fingers of his other hand on it to grip and pull when he hears voices in the hallway heading his way. That will be the sound of people expecting a fancy washroom with a waterfall and scented towelettes, not Wei Ying finally getting his bloody fingernails into the clipped-off end of a daolao gui dart and beginning to pull.
"Hoooold on," Wei Ying says, not looking up as the door swings open, concussive. "I've nearly got it."
There it is. An urge to vomit and a sense of accomplishment roil thickly through him. “Hi,” he says to the dart that has given him so much grief. Then, “Say," he adds, feeling woozy and pressing a perfumed towelette to his wrist, turning to give the first person through the door a ghastly grin, "Have you ever considered the cultural impact of the restaurant washroom?"
Wei Ying’s eyes focus. Frozen in the doorway, wrapped in a black-and-white houndstooth coat with at least two people following right at his heels — that's. that's.
Lan Zhan says, "I had not considered it." Then he turns and closes the washroom door in someone's face.
There is a muffled protest, which Lan Zhan ignores. His foot is against the door. Lan Zhan is so good at ignoring people. Wei Ying is so bad at being ignored by Lan Zhan.
The commotion on the other side of the door fades and Lan Zhan strides across the black and white tiled floor. His hair is not braided, like Wei Ying has been imagining. It's loose around his shoulders, styled subtly where he's pinned it a little, and now his strong hand is pressing the towelette harder to Wei Ying's bleeding arm. Wei Ying is a little hazy, but he’s certainly not bled enough for it to be a problem. It’s just a remnant of the mild shock from wilfully cutting open his own skin. Lan Zhan does not know that though, holding the towelette hard against Wei Ying’s wrist, tugging it up to elevate it in a move that seems automatic, but leaves them standing close, their hands raised together like some parody of a waltz.
He looks between Wei Ying's face, his arm, and the little sliver of — "Daolao gui dart," Wei Ying gasps, holding it up between them, defensive. "Gave me a little, uh, trouble."
Then he says, to Lan Zhan’s subtly wide eyes, his parted lips, "But—you're out of the country?" He thinks if he’d been allowed to just finish with the dart removal and stumble back to his seat, he was going to at least consider really asking Lan Huan, jokes and barbs and feigned ignorance of Lan Zhan’s whereabouts aside, how Lan Zhan was liking Tokyo, how he was liking his several-month liaison with the Rare Books and Old Materials special collections at the NDL, and how he was liking having the whole East China Sea between himself and Wei Ying.
Lan Zhan says, pulsing spiritual energy through his fingers and down Wei Ying's arm like punctuation: "I am absolutely not out of the country".
Wei Ying feels the lasp wisps of the venom fade, a misty pond exposed to sunlight. The pond stays, the mist fades. Lan Zhan glances at him from the corner of his eye. "I just flew in. It was last-minute," Lan Zhan admits. Lan Zhan is so terrible about admitting things.
"But I didn't even call you?" Wei Ying says. He feels numb, tired, like he is being held by a wounded part of himself as if he is dancing, because he is. Wei Ying’s knees try to give out. He thinks, distinctly: scrape me up off the floor, then, if you’re so determined.
He really didn’t call. The war is over. What is left to be asked for? Why does he still need to beg for anything that desperately?
Lan Zhan’s eyes, which have been on his arm or on their shoes, their frozen waltz, now snag on Wei Ying’s face. Lan Zhan’s mouth parts. Shakes.
Sometimes Lan Zhan looks very sad. Wei Ying is not sure what he looks like now. "No," Lan Zhan says. "You did not call me.”
He wraps another towelette around Wei Ying's wrist and ties it to keep the pressure. Then Lan Zhan puts an arm around Wei Ying’s waist, halting his attempts to just lay down on the tile floor, and starts to herd Wei Ying towards the washroom door.
"I can't go out there with a towel on my arm," Wei Ying complains. He can’t get his voice above a whisper. “Ahh, take it off, it’s not bleeding that much.” He doesn’t know how he is talking. He makes so much sense. He sounds sensible and he feels like something that is going to burst all over the floor, impossible to clean up well.
He thinks he would have gone back into the main floor of the restaurant anyway, but Lan Zhan opens the washroom door and breezes off to the left, towards the restaurant kitchen. Wei Ying follows him. He realizes Lan Zhan is still wearing not just his coat, but his scarf, his gloves. He must have only just arrived. Wei Ying stumbles after Lan Zhan and out a back door marked Emergency Exit; no alarm sounds.
Wei Ying hesitates, finally, in the parking lot at the car door opened for him. It's a silver audi, an airport rental but still marked by Lan Zhan's taste. "Please," says Lan Zhan. "We do not have to go anywhere. But it's best to check that the daolao gui dart is fully removed."
They could have done this in the washroom, but Wei Ying does not protest. Anyway, Lan Zhan is correct about the dart. He gets in. Everything is soft and muffled when Lan Zhan closes the door for him. It's okay to have no edges in here. It means something softer.
Lan Zhan gets something out of the trunk, then slides into the driver’s seat while Wei Ying blinks sleepily at him. Lan Zhan puts a first aid kit on his dashboard; it must have been in his suitcase.
Maybe Wei Ying is tired. It feels like it's the middle of the night, not that night only fell thirty minutes ago, wintertime-early.
Lan Zhan turns on all the internal car lights, and his phone’s flashlight for good measure. His fingers are very gentle where Wei Ying is punctured and bloody, like he knows Wei Ying is extra permeable today and is being careful. That's nice.
"The daolao gui — it was in the underground metro," Wei Ying tells him, because he thinks Lan Zhan might care. "I didn't know they were one of the gui that hole up in there. Might be new." Lan Zhan blinks at him, his pretty lashes, his serious face. Wei Ying yawns.
“I have not heard of daolao gui nesting there previously. I believe you are correct,” Lan Zhan says. Then he goes back to peering at Wei Ying’s poor wrist. Wei Ying makes sure to flinch so that Lan Zhan, ever polite, does not linger, or check Wei Ying’s meridians. Instead, Lan Zhan removes his hands from Wei Ying quickly and turns his head to find a sterile bandage pad and some wrapping tape. His hair slides and obscures his face. His coat hides his wrists, but his fingertips are so clever.
"Take me somewhere pretty," Wei Ying says. He seems to have leaned his head against the car window. "Or somewhere I can sleep. Augh." Lan Zhan silently finishes wrapping the wound and turns off his phone flashlight to send a text.
"Did you eat enough at the restaurant?" Lan Zhan asks, finally looking up at Wei Ying. Wei Ying begins to smile reassuringly — without lifting his head, that doesn’t seem like it’ll happen — but Lan Zhan wrinkles his nose delicately before Wei Ying can reply. "I will take you to KFC."
Wei Ying laughs until he's just giggling, head lolling against the window as Lan Zhan turns the car on and frowns at his GPS.
“I can’t stay awake for KFC. How is that somewhere pretty, Lan Zhan? Or somewhere to sleep?”
“Fine,” says Lan Zhan. “Sleep in the car, Wei Ying.”
It sounds blunt but it’s Lan-Zhan-kind, somehow. Wei Ying can tell. Wei Ying may have never learned music but he knows those notes. Lan Zhan doesn’t let just anybody sleep against his car window, even in a rental.
He doesn’t quite sleep but he goes somewhere liquid and quiet; cold winter rain begins outside and slides down the lights as Lan Zhan glares his way through traffic that isn’t even commuter-hour bad. Mostly it’s Lan Zhan and food delivery people getting wet on their electric scooters. Lan Zhan driving through Wei Ying’s city, scowling at the long red light near the condo; ah, it’s — something. It feels like something.
Wei Ying tucks his knees up to his chest, letting his head hang on his seatbelt, and thinks about this moment as hard as he can, so it won’t fade away or bleed into something else. Lan Zhan gets cut off by a lady whose blue electric scooter has streamers on the handlebars. Wei Ying, who is curled up holding his legs, squeezes his knees tighter, to keep some kind of wanting in.
In the condo, Wei Ying finds that he is not awake, but he is present. All his borders are shot through. He is tangled up in the blankets, or tucked up in them. The bed dips. Lan Zhan says, “I brought you a peach.”
He knows better than to try to put it in Wei Ying’s hands. The peach, damp from a rinse in the sink, is pressed against Wei Ying’s mouth. Wei Ying bites up, obedient. Fingers catch the peach juice on his face. Something dabs it away; the sheet or Lan Zhan’s sleeve. How terribly messy of Lan Zhan.
Wei Ying eats half the peach and then won’t eat more, just sucks gently at the pit until Lan Zhan makes a noise and takes it away.
How do you make it clearer than that, sucking on a peach pit until a strong hand pulls it away? He had not been meaning to make anything clear, but then it was clear, even to him: what he is asking for. You came and got me. Now what; now what?
“Hey,” Wei Ying starts, sitting up, trying to untangle himself from the bedclothes, to follow Lan Zhan up, “hey, I need you to—” Lan Zhan does not make him finish. He is there, half in Wei Ying’s lap. He has put the half-eaten peach down on the bedspread, did not spare a moment to place it even on the bedside table.
Lan Zhan’s thighs are straddling Wei Ying’s lap, and Wei Ying gasps at the way this — Lan Zhan’s thighs firm on his hips — makes Wei Ying into a warm and wanting thing. But Wei Ying remembers, suddenly, showering with the dildo sitting cold and still in his ass, his inability to even jerk off, even fuck himself, which does not require him to get hard and is thus even easier than jerking off. His stomach goes cold at the idea of asking for anything, of pretending that he is any good at being a warm and wanting thing, when that is all he does with himself given the chance.
Lan Zhan, he thinks, notices. This is something of a surprise, though Wei Ying is able to think, dully, that it probably should not be. Lan Zhan slows, and picks up the peach from the sheets. He does not move from Wei Ying’s lap, however, and Wei Ying is so relieved that it melts the frozen queasiness in his stomach, some of the sharp tension in his neck. Lan Zhan’s free hand comes up to touch Wei Ying’s hair. Wei Ying hides his face in it, in the safe darkness he can find in Lan Zhan’s palm.
“Sorry,” he says to Lan Zhan. He had forgotten, god he’d forgotten: even if Lan Zhan comes to get him, there is a reckoning on the other side of it. His body remembers better than his mind: it’s the pain of recovery that he recalls more clearly than the initial snap of his spine, the pulverization of what turned out to be a kidney and a little of his liver. What saved him was necrotization, which is a nice way of talking about how some parts of a body die faster than others. Necrotization, an empty lower dantian, and the ability to whistle. That life can hinge on things like that is ridiculous.
He is still frozen, eyes shut. He should not, he thinks, be thinking about necrotization. That’s not right. Lan Zhan, from the sound of things, leans over to the bedside table, where he must place the halved peach. Both of Lan Zhan’s hands return with Wei Ying’s bathrobe, and tuck it tight around his shoulders, around his chest.
There is a long silence that Wei Ying thinks they will not come back from, but then:
“I forgot I would freak out,” Wei Ying whispers.
He should have known. It’s like muscle memory stumbling: what his brain recalls is true about him is not. To his memory of himself, he is good at touching and Lan Zhan is not the person he would call to come and get him. He is using the wrong map.
Yeah, he should have known; he called out for Lan Zhan enough during the — during the schism, they’re calling it. The conflict. The in-fighting, like it was a philosophical difference and not something that resulted in deaths and the wreck of Wei Ying’s childhood home, which he has avoided seeing since. This does not change the fact that Lan Zhan does not know the secrets Wei Ying left back in that place, buried now in river muck, and those secret-keeping parts of him have not betrayed him, have curled up like pill bugs waiting for the prodding hand to pass.
But Lan Zhan has wrapped the bathrobe so tight around his shoulders and it feels so good. All of these things can be true at once, maybe. Lan Zhan thinks that the universe doesn’t feel that it owes anyone sense. He said it once, and Wei Ying has always wanted to ask what he meant.
“You didn’t know?” asks Lan Zhan. Then, un-Lan-Zhan-like, he adds a second question. “Do you want to be touched?”
Wei Ying nods. That is Lan Zhan’s business voice. That is now Lan Zhan would have enunciated were he the one who had been in the washroom with Wei Ying, monitoring his condition as Lan Zhan helped him dig the daolao gui dart out of his wrist.
Lan Zhan swiftly puts two hands on Wei Ying’s shoulders, heavy. Wei Ying responds again, to the first question, Did you not know. “Not really. I forgot I would. It surprised me.” He finds it’s easier to talk about it if he thinks like this is a medical procedure. Like his head is a puzzle he and Lan Zhan are solving together, like they have before on night hunts, and during the schism.
“Mm,” agrees Lan Zhan. Wei Ying’s heart is not pounding so hard now, and Lan Zhan feels like a friend again. His big hands press down and brush from Wei Ying’s shoulders down his ribs, down his belly, stopping before his hipbones before reaching back up to land heavily on his shoulders and do it again.
Wei Ying sighs out. Often when he is like this he does not want to be touched, but it is good. A distraction, a pressure. The fiercely guarded miracle of help asked for and given.
“Tell me when it is no longer effective,” Lan Zhan says, still stroking. Wei Ying nods. The sensation is doing something; it is taking him from numb to sparking in a little way that is probably good.
They stay like that for some time. “You shouldn’t be…” What? Here? Touching me? “You shouldn’t be… yeah. When Jiang Cheng comes home,” Wei Ying says. Lan Zhan presses particularly firmly on the next stroke. Wei Ying realizes that he was just able to speak, even if it was stumbling. His brain, still foggy, is noticeably more clear.
“My brother will text me when Jiang Cheng leaves,” Lan Zhan says. “Huan-ge made your excuses.”
“Oh,” Wei Ying says, tongue still unlocked. He discovers that finding something handled for him is the most difficult thing yet. He starts to smile and feels it tremble; he turns his head again and Lan Zhan does another extra-hard stroke. Wei Ying gasps involuntarily; he is sparking from this, skin-warm. His nipples are getting rubbed oversensitive under his shirt. His eyes flutter open wide, and he has to look straight up into Lan Zhan’s face, Lan Zhan’s heavy gaze and parted pink mouth. Lan Zhan’s hands must be tingling by now, buzzing and his palms, paler than the rest of him, rubbed pink like Wei Ying is.
Wei Ying’s cock is chubbing a little, where it has been tucked, soft, in his underwear, curving up towards his stomach. He’s not certain he wants to do anything about it. He’s not certain he can do anything about it. It feels good though; it feels like he is full of warm seawater, roiling gently under Lan Zhan’s hands like a swell.
He is content like this, but Lan Zhan stops and reaches up with his rubbed-hot palms and cradles Wei Ying’s face. Lan Zhan’s breath catches on something; a fishhook of his own. Wei Ying wants to look at his steady eyes but it is Lan Zhan’s trembling mouth that keeps giving something away, something neither of them can handle, not in body or mind. Lan Zhan shudders above him. His palms are steady on Wei Ying’s cheeks but his fingers frantically trace what they can of Wei Ying’s face.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, and it sounds like a sob.
“Lan Zhan…?” Wei Ying asks. Lan Zhan’s breath shakes out of his lungs and he closes his eyes. When Lan Zhan opens them again he is fine; his mouth is just a line on his face.
“Show me your wrist,” Lan Zhan says with a little frown, hands falling away from Wei Ying. Wei Ying shows his wrist. Lan Zhan inspects the wrapped puncture wound — more a wound from Wei Ying’s knife than the dart, which was a glorified splinter — and checks the temperature of Wei Ying’s skin, his fingers golden on Wei Ying’s pale, vulnerable inner arm.
“Alright,” Lan Zhan says, “You can go to sleep.” He’s so bossy, he’s so strange. He held Wei Ying’s face in his hands. He flew across an ocean and took Wei Ying out of that awful washroom and did not let him staunch his blood with scented towelettes.
“Kay,” Wei Ying says, against this onslaught. The bed feels too soft, like Lan Zhan did something to it, but all he did was arrange the weird guest room throw pillows around Wei Ying’s shoulders and sides. Wei Ying doesn’t like a messy bed, but he will make an exception, he guesses. It’s like a nest.
Wei Ying rouses himself enough to say, “Make yourself, you know, at home. You should play the piano — sorry, the keyboard. It’s just a keyboard and it should remember that.”
Lan Zhan huffs a breath and stands up from the bed. He walks the few steps to the keyboard sitting on the desk and sits down on the faux piano bench. They can see each other in the reflection of the window over the desk, the one that looks out over the city, looks north instead of onto the river, like the other two rooms. On the outside of the black glass, raindrops tremble in the wind.
Lan Zhan presses the power button and looks at the keys. Wei Ying has had to label them with sticky notes cut into fourths: ABCDEFG and so on, on the white keys, like a little kid learning. He’s mostly memorized it, but when he’s making music do strange and terrible things he likes to be sure of himself.
He expects Lan Zhan to take a moment, maybe get used to playing on a keyboard, but he presses his hands to the keys without hesitation. The first few notes of Debussy ring out like slow, slow drops of water. Claire de Lune, that’s Claire de Lune. Wei Ying knows the music even when his hands cannot cooperate to ever push it out of himself, for himself.
“Okay,” Wei Ying mumbles, “Okay, that works.”
Another huff like a laugh. A trilling embellishment on a high note that no Debussy variant ever intended, because it does not fit the tender, bright melancholy.
“Noo,” Wei Ying sighs, “No, it’s like—” he nestles further into his pillows. “It’s like, dah-dah dah! ...dah— duh-duh dun… you know?”
He blinks. He thinks he is falling asleep. Lan Zhan turns a little, still playing. He looks so sad but his mouth is still calm. The sadness does not quite overrun its banks.
“Hey,” Wei Ying says, suddenly. “Hey, can you make my heart do the thing.”
Lan Zhan’s hands finally falter. He looks at Wei Ying, blinking rapidly. Is he afraid? Ah, there are no monsters here.
“The thing,” Lan Zhan says, his voice heavy and rich.
“The thing,” Wei Ying confirms, flapping his good hand. “My chest is all tight. It’s not — not cause I was upset,” he adds. He can tell the difference. “It’s just a thing, my heart’s thing. Make my heart do the other thing. The steady thing, with the music.”
Lan Zhan inhales like he has taken a blow, but nothing else about him reacts in that way. His hands go back to the keyboard. It is not Claire de Lune now; no more Debussy and his odd beats, his beautiful silences. None of that for Wei Ying’s heart, apparently.
Wei Ying doesn’t know enough to guess the composer — piano was not for him — but the steady sweetness of the waltz is familiar. The way the music has soaked in Lan Zhan’s golden core, in Lan Zhan’s magic, is new. Wei Ying breathes and feels himself straighten out. His heart, racing against nothing, used to the balancing pulse of a golden core, slows, wobbles — Lan Zhan plays a little lighter, adds a few notes, and it steadies. Wei Ying sighs. The relief to it is palpable.
Sometimes his mind is not at fault. Sometimes his body is just doing fleshy things.
Lan Zhan keeps going. The music is steady but not plodding; a waltz is warm but light on its feet. Wei Ying’s heart beats gently in three-fourths time.
“Cool,” Wei Ying sighs. “That’s better.”
Then Lan Zhan’s eyes are dark and serious again, his hair almost catching on his soft, full mouth. “Wei Ying,” he says, as he plays piano for Wei Ying. But Wei Ying is sliding into sleep, his hands fluttering as he tries futilely to speak. Ah, Lan Zhan, too sneaky. He won’t be able to let Lan Zhan play for him again, if it’s so easy to drag him under. But it was nice, this one time he gets. It was nice.
~~✴~
When Wei Ying wakes it is to discover that he is still in Jiang Cheng's condo and nowhere else. The sky is that dawn color, that pink-and-blue that makes you ache right down to your center, even if you're already someone who aches all the time.
Lan Zhan is here. Lan Zhan is breathing next to him. Lan Zhan who should be across a sea, a relatively little one, but a sea nonetheless. Wei Ying's wrist is a sharp, wet pang. His bones grind. Things in him rest in the wrong places. Lan Zhan's ankles are tangled with Wei Ying's and on the pillows, their hair has also tangled across the geography of the bedclothes, stained with peach. The pit is on the bedside table; Lan Zhan must have eaten the second half. Lan Zhan must have put his sweet mouth on Wei Ying’s peach pit.
Wei Ying tips his face into Lan Zhan's side, his moving, healthy ribs, and breathes until that dangerous, honest color of dawn slides away — watches Lan Zhan who never sleeps in but has today, here in a guest room where Wei Ying lives, right now. Watches the way Lan Zhan’s face moves as a tremulous hand strokes his hair.
Wanting like this is too much; certain types of pain, he knows now, can destroy you just a surely as a blow to the head. His own music will have to be enough. His own hands brushing out his hair, the lack of daolao gui dart in his wrist will have to be enough. Ah, survival will have to be enough. The war is over, but he still has to go limp and last, until—until—
Princess Peach meows at the door, and Wei Ying gets up.