Chapter Text
A proper Hunter needs three things: a rapier, a greenstone, and a partner.
- The Cloud Recesses Rulebook for Ghost-Hunters in New Zealand Aotearoa (Illustrated), Thirteenth Edition, 1975.
Initially, Lan Wangji believes the figure is a ghost; kehua crawling grave-dark through the casement. The image jolts him into action before it jolts him fully into wakefulness, sending him rolling fluidly from his bed and drawing his rapier before the cortisol poured into his body even has a chance to breathe. Then, Lan Wangji realises the figure is something that is almost worse than a ghost: it is a boy.
“Ooft,” says the boy as he tumbles into Lan Wangji’s room, sacrificing his knees to the hardwood with a thump in favour of keeping a cheap plastic bag safely aloft.
At the boy’s hip is a sword – no, a rapier – which had previously gone unnoticed by Lan Wangji due to the overall home invasion element, but now clatters noisily against the floor. The scabbard is sleek, purple-on-black. It clashes with the faded blue flares and red Th’ Dudes jumper the boy is wearing. Lan Wangji has seen the debut touring posters for the band outside the local pub.
With a triumphant ‘hah!’ as he regards his plastic bag prize, the boy turns and makes to get up off his knees. He blinks in surprise when the action is blocked by the business end of Lan Wangji’s own naked rapier.
“What,” demands Lan Wangji, breath frosty with anger and the witching, winter hour, “are you doing here?”
The boy had been slightly cross-eyed while he had been considering Lan Wangji’s sword an inch away from his face, but at Lan Wangji’s words, his eyes snap up to meet Lan Wangji’s. They are silver, flickering.
Ghost eyes, thinks Lan Wangji.
Far too bright and solid to be anything but human, the boy grins. Belatedly, Lan Wangji reminds himself again that, of course, he must be just a boy. Those with the ghost-sense fall into one of two categories: Listeners, who can hear spectres, and Lookers, who can see them. Lan Wangji can only see apparitions, not hear them, and the boy is incredibly noisy.
The not-ghost-ghost-eyed-boy puts the plastic bag down reverently to lean back on his hands in a slouch that is decidedly irreverent, especially for Lan Wangji’s bedroom floor. He says cheekily, “I live here.”
“You do not,” says Lan Wangji.
“I do,” insists the boy. “I just transferred from the Jiang Hunting Company. Alias: Wei Wuxian. Listener.”
A visceral, horrific denial seeps into the seat of Lan Wangji’s spine as several pieces of information that he has been given over the last day begin to awfully align like a botched spinal surgery. A trade between agencies, his brother had said. A late-blooming but talented Listener, his brother had said. A new partner, his brother had said.
Wei Wuxian begins unloading the plastic bag, which, it turns out, contains a six-pack of Speights. The outrageousness zaps Lan Wangji’s capacity for speech back into his larynx.
“Is that alcohol?” he growls, not lowering his sword. His tone does not deter Wei Wuxian, self-professed Listener.
“You want one?” Wei Wuxian says, breaking a can away from the rest and offering it up conspiratorially.
Suddenly, Lan Wangji wonders if maybe in fact his first assumption had been correct, and this creature does need exorcising. “You broke curfew for alcohol?”
In and of itself, being outside a warded zone at night does not always guarantee a ghost attack, much as being inside a warded zone does not always guarantee safety. It is, however, stupidly risky and worse, not allowed.
Wei Wuxian shrugs. “Doesn’t hurt anyone. Wards don’t go off if you don’t use the front door.” He cracks a can for himself, tipping his head back to take a deep pull that makes Lan Wangji want to look away. Beer shining on his lips, he shakes the other can at Lan Wangji again. “Come on – I’ll share, and you can fill me in on this Lan Wangji guy they’re partnering me with. Heard he’s heaps good but a real hardout on the rules. Anyway, what did you say your name was again?”
Lan Wangji’s knuckles tighten on his sword hilt, and he replies cuttingly, “Lan Wangji.”
Half-way to another sip Wei Wuxian freezes. He lowers the can slowly, watching Lan Wangji the way one watches an unfenced cassowary.
“Lan Wangji,” Wei Wuxian repeats with an awkward chuckle. “There wouldn’t happen to be a second Lan Wangji? You wouldn’t be, say, Lan Wangji the Listener who therefore is in absolutely no need of a Listener partner?”
“I am a Looker.” Lan Wangji’s jaw clenches around the words.
There is a beat of silence and then startlingly, Wei Wuxian laughs, shoulders shaking and ghost-eyes dancing. Still on the floor, he grins up at Lan Wangji. “You sure are. What a line – I bet that works on all the girls.”
Anger bristles through Lan Wangji, so hot it almost feels like shame. Flicking his rapier in a come-to-heel motion to draw Wei Wuxian’s attention back to it, Lan Wangji orders, “Come with me. I will notify the Head of your indiscretions. Breaking curfew is forbidden. The alcohol is confiscated.”
Arching an eyebrow, Wei Wuxian cocks his head and quirks his mouth. Everything about him is like that: sinuous, off-balance. Playfully, he says, “Oh no. Better not waste it.”
Nearly faster than Lan Wangji’s eyes can properly track, and certainly faster than his sensible mind can comprehend, Wei Wuxian grabs another beer, draws the rapier at his hip and punctures the side of the can, covering both Lan Wangji and himself in a cheap spray of lager. Lan Wangji watches, shell-shocked and disgustingly damp as Wei Wuxian puts his mouth over the hole he made, cracks the tab and swallows like a hoover.
The whole thing is over in less than ten seconds. Streaks of missed liquor continue to drip down Wei Wuxian’s jaw and neck after he is done, glistening in the bright galleon moonlight. Crumpling the can, he spins his sword in his hand, the quicksilver challenge flashing like his eyes.
Clear as Clarity, the thought cuts across Lan Wangji’s mind with the first clash of their rapiers together: this absolutely cannot last.
A year later, a bright, crisp sunlight filters in through the self-same window as Lan Wangji furtively waters the extensive array of plants in front of him. Given his druthers, he would rather not undertake such an activity – or any activity, really – with such deception or haste, but Wei Wuxian does not seem prone to any of Lan Wangji’s druthers. Current case in point: the ring of the doorbell indicating that Wei Wuxian is returning to their shared dorm an hour earlier than Lan Wangji had anticipated.
As though in competition with the sun, a brighter, crisper peal of laughter that can only be Wei Wuxian in company sounds downstairs as the front door of the Agency slams shut. The government-automated voice above the entrance chimes ‘Two. Hours. Til. Curfew. All. Agents. Marked. In.’ which most of the time Lan Wangji would appreciate as an improvement on the blaring, after-curfew alarm that Wei Wuxian used to semi-regularly set off when he was initially transferred to Cloud Recesses Agency. As it immediately stands, Lan Wangji is not feeling very appreciative of Wei Wuxian’s unusually textbook adherence to curfew as it means Lan Wangji has to knee slide across the floor to desperately stash the watering can under his own bed.
Overall, Lan Wangji does, of course, approve of the ward-alarm and curfew rules. Since the World War, ghosts have posed a very real and, unfortunately, everyday problem. However, in addition to the ghosts, Wei Wuxian has also become an everyday problem for Lan Wangji since he first arrived suitcase-in-hand at CRA.
Balefully, Lan Wangji glares at the rotating, ever-moving contraption surrounding the pots upon pots of trailing ivy, hemlock, and ongaonga. As far as he has been able to parse, the unholy communion of copper rods, rope pulleys and six different sundials does little more than clank irritating around three in the morning when the solar power runs low. The contraption runs across the space of the walls and over the shelves with all the invasive fervour usually associated with wild mint.
Ridiculous, he had thought when Wei Wuxian had chattered about a mechanised system that he was trying to gear to water his many experimental plants to their exact, demanding specifications.
Ridiculous, he had drawn breath to say when Wei Wuxian had first unveiled the machine with a flourish.
“That is fucking ridiculous,” Jiang Wanyin had snapped boorishly from beside Lan Wangji, crossing his arms.
True to form, Wei Wuxian had laughed, and Lan Wangji had fumed, and now Lan Wangji is here covertly watering an infuriating boy’s infuriating plants out of pure spite.
There is a rapid thump-thump-thump of feet running up the wooden stairs to the third storey. An indignant shout that Lan Wangji recognises, against his will, as coming from Jiang Wanyin follows. Heart whirring like it has been replaced with a cuckoo-clock mechanism, Lan Wangji looks around rapidly to check the plants; he has only managed to water half of them. Based on past experience, the likely reason Wei Wuxian has run back here, early and with Jiang Wanyin, means that he wants to show Jiang Wanyin something, and that something is likely plant related.
Initially, Wei Wuxian had attempted to leave Lan Wangji’s side of the room in a state that could be considered somewhat untouched. This had lasted an outstandingly short period of time, and now the anchor to one of the Rube-Goldberg-arms is tied to the foot of Lan Wangji’s bedpost, next to a Shakespeare volume.
Like a butterfly caught in an odd, pathetic resin and feeling something between panic and resignation, Lan Wangji pitches himself forward and intentionally trips over the rope.
With Jiang Wanyin in tow, Wei Wuxian bursts in the door just as Lan Wangji hits the floor. The metal arm attached the rope swings and dips, momentum whipping it towards the open door in a furious arc. In comic symmetry, the Jiang duo grab one another and throw themselves at the ground with double the required force to avoid the arm clotheslining them. It crashes into the doorframe with a shocking bang.
Blinking at the ceiling, Jiang Wanyin groans. Wei Wuxian sits up, shaking his head as though he is seeing double and trying to consolidate it into one.
“I tripped,” Lan Wangji says, and it is not a lie. “Apologies. It likely upset the system.”
Jiang Wanyin rolls his eyes and snorts, “It upset me,” which Lan Wangji decidedly ignores.
“Oh no, my babies,” says Wei Wuxian, dragging himself across the floor in a way that is half army-crawl, half lower-torso-has-been-consumed-in-a-zombie-outbreak.
It is stupidly endearing. He reaches the nearest plant – a kawakawa, Lan Wangji thinks – and checks the moisture metre.
“Hmm,” he muses, frowning slightly. “It’s too dry. The machine must be running behind where it normally is by now. I’ll have to tweak it.”
In theory, the set-up was devised to water his plants when he and Lan Wangji were called out on long hunts. It has, again theoretically, since evolved into a fully hands-off self-sustainable system because more often than not, Wei Wuxian is gone, either on a case or to stay with his adoptive family.
In practice, Lan Wangji waters them himself when he is there, and then just bribes Xichen to water them when he is gone by putting up fragments of his dignity for his brother’s amusement and commentary.
Jiang Wanyin mutters something that sounds like ‘tweak it out the window’ but he does spend the next two hours holding plants and hammering nails and helping Wei Wuxian reconfigure his machine. Lan Wangji is also roped into this task and enjoys an adequately restrained sense of superiority whenever Wei Wuxian uses something he has done as an example to show Jiang Wanyin the correct manner of execution.
“Phew,” says Wei Wuxian, wiping his brow theatrically. It is twenty degrees out; he has not broken a sweat. “Now, what I meant to give you–”
Making his way over to the dresser on his side of the room, Wei Wuxian rummages through the top drawer where he keeps his distillations and tonics. His filing system is incomprehensible to anyone except maybe God.
“What’s this one do?” asks Jiang Wanyin, leaning against the side of the dresser as his brother looks.
As sceptical as Jiang Wanyin is of Wei Wuxian’s tinkering, he never refuses his brother’s experiments, even after that incident with the eyebrows. Lan Wangji supposes it is, perhaps, his one redeeming point.
Triumphantly, Wei Wuxian holds aloft and presents what appears to be an old jar of Avon moisturiser. Jiang Wanyin raises his semi-recently regrown eyebrows.
“For improved reflexes - put it over the joints of your sword arm,” Wei Wuxian clarifies, before adding quickly, “Nowhere else though! Might make your knees go backwards if you try it on the legs.”
Cautiously, Jiang Wanyin takes the offering. Wei Wuxian slings a delighted arm each around Jiang Wanyin and Lan Wangji, ignoring their stiffness. It is more along the lines of a headlock than a hug, but having observed Wei Wuxian with Jiang Wanyin before, Lan Wangji thinks that Wei Wuxian may believe this is how hugs work.
Jostling his brother further, Wei Wuxian asks, “Group hunt? Put my Looker through his paces?”
Every time Wei Wuxian refers to him as ‘his Looker’, all of Lan Wangji’s heart bangs its fist furiously on the floorboards of his ribs where he has buried it. One day, he hopes, it will grumble, roll over and start sleeping through any careless, unmeant words that might accidentally rouse it.
“What? No, I’ve got to go get my blades re-warded – it’s why I let you drag me here in the first place,” says Jiang Wanyin, wriggling out of Wei Wuxian’s grasp and crossing his arms.
Of the two main ghost-hunting agencies in Auckland, it is true that Cloud Recesses has the better warders while Jiang Hunting has the more versatile field agents. Still, Lan Wangji has, again not of his own volition, been subjected to Jiang Wanyin’s company enough that he recognises the excuse for what it is. Agencies need a matched set, and by all accounts, everyone had hoped Wei Wuxian would be a Looker. The heir to the Jiang legacy has still not quite managed to reconcile the loss of his adoptive brother as his prospective hunting partner, in much the same way that the British have still not quite managed to reconcile Aotearoa being already occupied when they arrived.
At his brother’s rejection, Wei Wuxian tries not to look disappointed. He drops his arm from around Lan Wangji and Lan Wangji also tries not to look disappointed. “Okay, we’ll catch you at dinner then. You’ll stay here to make curfew, right?”
Nodding once at Jiang Wanyin, Lan Wangji then catches Wei Wuxian’s eye and tilts his head meaningfully towards the door to indicate that he is still willing to do a paired practice hunt. Perking up a bit, Wei Wuxian stuffs a few vials from the dresser into his rucksack and turns to follow Lan Wangji down to the training hall. As the agency was once a school, the training hall really is a series of connected classrooms in the block outside the old dormitories. The structure as a whole functions as a sort of obstacle course for ghost hunting. In Lan Wangji’s opinion, the Cloud Recesses, with its white timber shutters and arched, Spanish Mission, stucco-ed bones is a far more refined environment that produces far more refined agents than the river-wet, dark-wood halls of the Jiang Hunting Company.
When they arrive, the starting classroom is large and relatively empty, as usual. A single cupboard and several bookshelves stand witness along the walls and a teacher’s desk presides at the front of the room, but there is a hollow absence of chairs and school-desks in the middle that Lan Wangji has privately always felt a little unsettled by.
Despite Wei Wuxian’s numerous complaints, Lan Wangji insists on them both wearing the proper fencing gear, sans visor, that is kept in the cupboard. Lan Wangji pays absolutely no attention to the wispy baby hairs at the nape of Wei Wuxian’s neck as he helps Wei Wuxian with the back zip of the agency’s stock-standard white jackets. He pays even less attention to the rasp of Wei Wuxian’s ponytail against the rough of his glove as he holds Wei Wuxian’s hair to the side, so it does not get trapped in the zip.
Lan Wangji made the mistake once of attempting to hold the ponytail with a bare-skinned hand; in his mind, the soft strands burned like nettles and Lan Wangji had felt his ears turn just as scalded red.
Charmingly, infuriatingly and thankfully unaware, Wei Wuxian spins round as soon as he feels the zip catch, whipping Lan Wangji in the face with his hair.
“Oops. Sorry.”
Lan Wangji blinks off the apology, even though he thinks he may be having an allergic reaction. His cheek feels very hot. He wonders what would happen if he ate Wei Wuxian’s hair; maybe it would coil inside him, an eternal rib-deep itch. Mildly alarmed but not necessarily surprised, he blinks the thought away.
From his rucksack, which he has dropped carelessly on the floor, Wei Wuxian pulls a small vial and waggles it hopefully in front of Lan Wangji’s face. “Can I try?”
Dutifully, Lan Wangji nods a yes and then stands still and stares into the middle distance as Wei Wuxian checks his watch before gently dabbing a little of his tonic to the corner of Lan Wangji’s eyes.
Instantly, Lan Wangji feels – something. Looking around the room, his eyes catch on the Great Depression cannery-style jars where several old ghost-relics are safely contained for educational purposes. Having had their hosts eliminated years ago, the ectoplasm remnants are usually too faint for Lan Wangji to read. Now, he can see the lingering, white wisps of it clinging like spiderwebs to the inside of the jar.
He raises an eyebrow in surprise and Wei Wuxian says excitedly, “I’m hoping I can get it to the point where it lasts years rather than minutes! Or, well, at least so it can prolong things for Lookers – like Viagra for eyes. Eye-agra?”
“Do not be vulgar,” Lan Wangji chides automatically, a knee-jerk embarrassment.
Wei Wuxian tilts his silly head contemplatively as Lan Wangji considers the tincture’s appeal. While other supernatural predators exist, ghosts have been documented as presenting the biggest issue; in part because of the sheer quantity of human deaths every minute of every day, but also in part because ghost-sense deteriorates at a supernatural rate. Lan Wangji’s advanced theory classes liken this phenomenon to the vibrations of the ether wearing down the half-life of such senses, much like an elderly person loses mundane hearing and sight. At fifteen, Lan Wangji knows he likely has two or three good years left as an active-duty Looker before his sense fades enough that he gets reassigned to office work. Nie Mingjue, Lan Wangji knows, would approve of Wei Wuxian’s work; if the threshold for Obsolescence is pushed higher, maybe the Age for Recruitment would also be raised. The Wellington Sabres’ Agency head is fiercely over-protective and under-enthused when it comes to his younger brother operating in the field.
Instead of embarrassing himself further by voicing his admiration, Lan Wangji adds anticlimactically, “It has now faded.”
Wei Wuxian grimaces, pulling out a notebook to jot down the time after checking his watch again. “Yeah, gotta work on that longevity. Maybe I can make it into specs, or weave it into your forehead ribbon or something.”
To divert Wei Wuxian from immediately running more tests on him - or worse, asking for his ribbon, to which his greenstone is tied - Lan Wangji reaches into Wei Wuxian’s rucksack and takes out the blindfold he knows is kept there, holding it up meaningfully. Grinning, Wei Wuxian takes it from Lan Wangji’s hand. The talisman-engineered ghosts that they use for practice hunts are not quite sophisticated enough to be able to function as visible to only the Looker, although they are advanced enough that only the Listener can hear them.
“I know you’re distracting me,” says Wei Wuxian mildly, as he ties it behind his head. “Do you think we could -”
“Wei Wuxian,” Lan Wangji says, flicking the wall-switch that activates the practice ghost talismans. “Listen.”
Wei Wuxian fights like a sawn-off shotgun. It is always disconcerting for Lan Wangji to watch how he moves when Listening, especially when his sight is dulled. The rapier is a light weapon – a deliberate, official choice made for adolescent arms and unbroadened shoulders – and Wei Wuxian wields it with a thousand unrelenting cuts to accommodate for his lack of sight. He had told Lan Wangji, once, that hearing ghosts and their relics was similar to tracking the ominous buzz of a mosquito; he can strike with unerring accuracy if the source is close enough, but a constant keep-away vigilance is necessary.
“Joining,” signals Lan Wangji, and Wei Wuxian ceases his continuous rapier flicks, staying coiled and alert.
Not pausing, Lan Wangji steps up to Wei Wuxian’s right, keeping a half-pace behind him and angling himself so he can watch their backs in his peripheral vision. A fake child-ghost appears to the right of them, reaching for Wei Wuxian. With a decisive thrust, Lan Wangji intercepts it. As the Listener, Wei Wuxian’s job is primarily to echolocate whatever relic is keeping the ghosts here so they can eradicate it. As the Looker, Lan Wangji’s job is to protect Wei Wuxian from all the ghosts he cannot see.
“One left, high-three,” Lan Wangji calls as a ghost approaches on Wei Wuxian’s unprotected left side.
In a practised arc, Wei Wuxian swings his rapier out at Lan Wangji’s instruction, cleaving the fake ghost in two.
“Clear,” says Lan Wangji.
In this fashion, they make their way cautiously out of the classroom. As standard protocol, Lan Wangji keeps his non-sword arm outstretched, fingers touching the small of Wei Wuxian’s back so he can keep his eyes focused on scanning for threats and still know where his partner is. As he tends to do when hunting, Wei Wuxian starts humming, barely audible. It had driven Lan Wangji mad when they were first partnered - most Listeners demand silence - but now he knows it is a genuine-if-odd Listening quirk for Wei Wuxian, rather than a bit purely designed to piss him off.
Outside the classroom, the hallway is dim; sunset has faded to civil twilight and only a few naked bulbs glow overhead. They clear the hallway with no more assaults, before three pretend spectres lurch out of the wall by the gym. Lan Wangji swiftly dispatches them without needing to call out, and Wei Wuxian leads them through the heavy doors and onto the squeaking linoleum.
Against his fingers, Lan Wangji feels Wei Wuxian’s ribs jump as he huffs silently, interrupting his light hum.
He hates linoleum floors, thinks Lan Wangji, cutting down a fake ghost in the shape of an old, hatted lady with precise, brutal efficiency.
Anything can be a relic, and the gym provides Xichen and the other agency staff with a grand, ever-rotating selection to spell, from the netball posts to the lines of practice rapiers to the bricks in the walls. To be fair, all of the rooms have their specific difficulties, but Lan Wangji knows Wei Wuxian hates the ghost-frequency produced by the gym floor the most.
A low whistle sounds, and the corner of Lan Wangji’s mouth curls satisfactorily at being right. Switching his hum to a whistle, Wei Wuxian leads them across to the other side of the darkened building towards the sports equipment racks. Lan Wangji concentrates on not letting his attention shift towards what the relic may be; a beginner mistake that has cost the life of many inexperienced agents. He cuts down another talisman ghost as several more crawl towards them along the floor.
Suddenly, viciously, Wei Wuxian darts forward and skewers a netball. It deflates with a sad raspberry-sound, and the crawling ghosts disappear abruptly. The overhead fluorescents flicker, but do not manage to turn back on as they should. In reality, they would have to burn the relics, but this is more sustainable for practice. Wrestling off the blindfold, Wei Wuxian turns to Lan Wangji with a victory smile.
“One of our better times,” Lan Wangji concedes. He almost wishes it was not; the spark of adrenaline is still running hot through his hands.
Like he can sense it, Wei Wuxian moves into a very theatrical and not at all practical en garde. He pokes Lan Wangji very lightly in the chest with his rapier tip. “Spar?”
Backing up an appropriate distance, Lan Wangji shifts into his own, much more restrained starting position, knees bent and off-hand behind his back. Wei Wuxian cackles and launches himself forwards, sword now in his right hand instead of his left. Lan Wangji knows that this especially is why Wei Wuxian loves to spar; as the primary swordsman, Lookers get to use their dominant hand, which usually leaves Listeners learning swordplay on their weaker side.
Wei Wuxian is formidable with his left; with his right, he is breathtaking.
The sentiment is, currently, quite literal. Lan Wangji is breathing hard as Wei Wuxian comes at him with his blade held wide, less of a parry than a tsunami. He follows through with an adder-quick riposte that Lan Wangji dodges before pressing his own advantage.
Unfortunately, Wei Wuxian also fights with the particular scrappiness of someone who grew up with cousins, the kind where they all piled like puppies on a second-hand mattress that lived semi-permanently in front of the television. He lures Lan Wangji in with a series of textbook moves, footwork neat and respectable as though at a competition. Then, when Lan Wangji forgets about Wei Wuxian’s many cousins, Wei Wuxian beat-parries viciously, steps in close – far too close – hooks their legs and shoves Lan Wangji backwards.
Startled, Lan Wangji tries to disengage but it is too late - they tumble to the ground. The wind is knocked out of him twice; once when his back hits the floor and then again when Wei Wuxian lands on top of him. To be fair, Lan Wangji could be actively asphyxiating right now, and it would be the least of his worries. At the very missile-crisis top of his worries is the fact that Wei Wuxian’s thigh is in between Lan Wangji’s thighs, and there are thighs, and they are touching – touching thighs – in a way that would kill his Shufu, would stop his heart on the spot if he knew, and it might stop Lan Wangji’s heart too but it if does, he would like it to do so posthaste because very soon blood will be pumping places it has no right being.
“You fall for that every time,” says Wei Wuxian, tilting his head, crow-like, as though Lan Wangji is a puzzling piece of coloured glass laying on the ground. His hands are braced on either side of Lan Wangji’s head.
“Corps-a-corps is an illegal move,” Lan Wangji says, running rules through his mind like rosary beads in the hope the repetition keeps his face cool and carved from stone like the Madonna.
Wei Wuxian snorts softly in amusement, and it should also be an illegal move because Lan Wangji can almost feel the playful ripple it makes of Wei Wuxian’s body, barely an inch away. Reflexively, Lan Wangji tries to retreat into the floor and Wei Wuxian all of a sudden seems to remember that Lan Wangji also has a body. His grey eyes go wide as he looks down between their bodies as though surprised to find Lan Wangji pinned to the gym floor.
Wei Wuxian’s shoulders tense and for a second, Lan Wangji thinks it is going to devolve into wrestling. From seeing him with others, Lan Wangji is well acquainted with Wei Wuxian’s penchant for roughhousing, even if Wei Wuxian has not tried it with him since that first, unbearable month when Lan Wangji had finally snapped and Wei Wuxian had snapped gleefully back and Shufu had ended up pulling them apart and caning their hands in punishment. Wrestling is an unnecessary, prohibited skill when a single, prolonged touch from most spirits leaves a person ghost-locked; catatonic and eyes sightlessly misted for the rest of their life.
Then, Wei Wuxian’s eyes dart back up to his face and Lan Wangji feels just a little bit paralysed and wonders if he might be ghost-locked after all.
Still breathing a little fast from their bout, Wei Wuxian keeps staring. His gaze strays stickily to odd things – Lan Wangji’s hairline, his eyebrow, his pulse – but keeps coming back to Lan Wangji’s eyes.
Pressed flat to the linoleum, Lan Wangji’s palms sweat. Wei Wuxian is used to this, Lan Wangji reminds himself. He does this with Nie Huaisang, with Jiang Wanyin. It is Lan Wangji that is unused to proximity. A cultivated distance.
Fast enough to be a trick of the light, Wei Wuxian’s eyes dip to Lan Wangji’s mouth.
“Lan–”
The bell for dinner rings, breaking the moment.
Wei Wuxian jumps cartoonishly, and then gives a self-conscious laugh which morphs into a groan as he hauls himself to his feet, offering Lan Wangji a hand.
Taking the offered help, Lan Wangji stands and brushes both himself and the strange interlude off; an ill-suited garment that he would be foolishly fanciful in thinking anything more of. Mistaken vision in the twilight, nothing more. As though in agreement, the long, white overhead lights flicker on in a buzz of electricity, as they were supposed to earlier.
While Lan Wangji shrugs with cultured calm out of his fencing gear, Wei Wuxian argues that as they can call by the room quickly to change clothes and showering would take ‘forever, come on!’, being late to the dinner table would most definitely be the greater sin and should be avoided at all costs. Despite a proven record of not actually caring about tardiness, he gets his way as per usual and drags Lan Wangji along with him.
In the hall, they join a table with Jiang Wanyin, siblings Ngaire and Aroha, a recently recruited pakeha boy that Lan Wangji cannot yet remember the name of, and Nie Huaisang, who is on a so-called ‘exchange’ to Cloud Recesses. As yet, Lan Wangji is still to figure out who they exchanged him temporarily for: he suspects no one, but Nie Huaisang cannot enter the field if he does not have a matched partner, and he cannot be assigned one if he is not at his home agency.
The mood is pleasantly jovial in a way that Lan Wangji would have found insolubly excruciating mayhap eight months ago. Now, despite the residual, off-kilter buzz of the gym incident, he mixes quietly but contently, the hunter’s pidgin of Te Reo, English, Mandarin and Cantonese not as incomprehensibly slang-laden as he had once found it. Hunting is a dangerous profession; more so because the most crucial parts of it cannot be done by fully-grown adults. In the twenties, according to leading scholars, the violent energy from mass war-deaths fractured the balance and kickstarted the Haunting - whether that balance was between God and Satan, tapu and noa, or some as-yet undiscovered quark-based particles, is hotly debated. Not at all debated is the fact that when this occurred, rich, pakeha parents very vocally did not want their children, however strong their ghost-sense may be, to join an agency. Naturally, the work was taken up mainly by the more desperate working class, disenfranchised Māori, and the newly migrated. Fifty years later, hunting has since gained veteran-like respect, but that legacy still manifests in ways.
On the bright side, the essential-but-lower-class nature of hunters means the community is both more open to, and less likely to be targeted for, any other deviation from social norms. Hunter pairs are sometimes - discreetly - very, very close friends, a fact of which Lan Wangji is painfully aware.
On the downside and the opposite end of the table, Lan Wangji watches as Wei Wuxian draws the new recruit – Shane, apparently – into conversation. Shane has a frame that is only two good meals away from being scrappy rather than gaunt, and two younger sisters he would like to keep out of the profession. So caught up in his involvement – not eavesdropping; passive involvement – is Lan Wangji that he does not notice his older brother’s approach until Xichen clears his throat.
The table quiets as they all turn to face him inquisitively. With his balmy presence and safe-harbour mouth, Xichen’s appointment as Head of Cloud Recesses is both respected and appreciated, especially considering his uncle and predecessor. Eyes going bright when he sees the file in Xichen’s hand, Wei Wuxian grins widely at the agency Head, who smiles with genuine ease in return, and Lan Wangji wishes, not for the first time, that he himself had gotten just a little more of whatever it is his brother has when the angels were clay-making.
“Wangji, Wuxian,” says Xichen, holding up the file and looking warmly at his two chosen agents. “I’ve got a case for you.”