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For the first few nights, Lin Jing didn’t dream at all.
He should have known better than to get his hopes up — after all, not only had he barely slept each night, what with the still present chaos and the rotating guard at Xiao Guo's uncle's house to make sure no-one got disappeared or anything, he’d also reached heights of exhaustion that he hadn’t known since he was working on his PhD.
Ha ha.
If only it had stayed that way.
The thing was, at the time, everything had just happened so quickly. Cliche, sure, but true — he'd barely escaped the disaster at the lab, then was immediately attacked and abducted by Ya Qing, and then, as a direct consequence of that, got eaten (ew). Then, in that not-place - which he would rather not think about, given how gross and unsettling it had been - time had moved strangely.
And then—
And then—
It wasn’t every night — sometimes it was the disaster in the lab, or something from an earlier case, and sometimes he was exhausted enough to not dream at all.
But, regardless, that meant he was having nightmares almost every night, sometimes more than once, and that made up the vast majority.
And it was affecting him enough that people had started to notice.
Cao Ying was the first to comment on it, though.
Lin Jing didn’t really know her that well - her academic reputation, sure - she was a nationally renowned physicist after all, and she’d worked at the ministry labs before he did, so some of the longer-term employees there had mentioned her.
He could only imagine how the news that she was Dixingren had hit them.
In the present, she side-eyed him across the lab.
She didn’t cut a particularly intimidating figure, especially not with her penchant for wearing softer colours.
There was something about her stare, though, that could cut right through you.
“Lin Jing,” she said. “Something’s bothering you.”
He sighed internally. Case in point - just as he barely knew her, she also barely knew him! So how did she notice!?
“I should be asking you that,” he deflected. “This time last week, you were still on bed-rest. Why are you working already?”
“Lin Jing.”
“What?”
“I can tell you’ve not been sleeping,” Cao Ying said, tone matter-of-fact but expression sympathetic. “Nightmares?”
Lin Jing sighed. No getting out of it, then.
“I’m hardly the only one,” he conceded.
She shrugged, leaning back in her chair and levelling him with a half-lidded stare that was almost cat-like, in both apparent laziness and keen focus.
Clearly, she’d been spending too much time with Da Qing, and Lin Jing told her so.
“You should talk to him,” she said, as if it was obvious who she was referring to, and completely disregarding his attempt at changing the subject.
“What?”
“You’ve complained vocally about everything else that’s happened recently," Cao Ying said, not unkindly. "But not that. Talk to him - it’ll help.”
“Or what?” Lin Jing asked, not even bothering to pretend he didn't know what she was talking about.
She smiled, perfectly pleasant and mostly genuine, save for a strain about the eyes that even the best concealer couldn’t cover, and pulled a slip of paper out of thin air.
Point taken.
“I swear you used to be nicer than this,” Lin Jing groused.
The smile grew wider, and the paper disappeared again.
“Consider it a compliment,” Cao Ying said, sweetly.
Lin Jing didn’t do it, not right away.
He knew Cao Ying was right - deep down, he’d already known what he should do, but sometimes you needed someone else to say it out loud. Also, he really didn’t want an audience, and the Chief had been understandably clingy recently.
Anyway, even on the rare occasions Chief Zhao wasn’t loitering around, while they were still staying at Minister Guo’s house (the hospital having been deemed a Bad Idea, currently), there was no shortage of professionally nosy bastards in and out at all hours, and as such, no privacy.
So, the first step was to wait until neither of them needed quite so much medical supervision and could move back into the Chief’s place.
Then, the second step was to wait until the Chief wasn't hovering quite so much.
Yeah, as if that was going to happen any time soon, not that he could blame them.
Which meant he needed to manufacture a scenario where that happened, and that meant he needed assistance.
Zhu Hong was much too busy, Wang Zheng and Sang Zan were still pretty much fully incorporeal, Xiao Guo… And Da Qing would snitch in a heartbeat. Which left…
He sighed.
After listening to his explanation, Chu Shuzhi gave Lin Jing his third-most unimpressed look. Cao Ying silently, and without moving a single facial muscle, laughed at him over her cup of espresso.
"Hey, come on," Lin Jing said. "You know what they're like, and there's no way I can do this if the Chief's there."
Something must have shown on his face, because Lao Chu's scowl dropped a couple of degrees of severity — the closest thing to a positive expression most people were going to get from him — and Cao Ying raised her cup in mock surrender, lips twisting.
Lin Jing hadn’t actually expected them to be this easy to convince - they'd both been almost as bad as Chief Zhao with the hovering- he was fairly sure this was the first time Lao Chu had left Xiao Guo alone in days, and Cao Ying had been splitting her time between the minister’s house, and politely menacing the Regent and the lab - and he’d half-expected at least one of them to tell him to just suck it up and do it with him there.
Though, to be fair, those three were hardly the only ones, just the most obvious about it.
Personally, Lin Jing had at least one tracker on everyone, though he did have to keep replacing Professor Shen’s, since they kept breaking. He was working on it.
“You'll owe me a favour,” Lao Chu told him, which was pretty much the best that most people were going to get, and then he got up and left.
“I'm glad you're being proactive,” Cao Ying said.
“Not going to ask for a favour?”
She cocked her head, bird-like. He couldn’t see her eyes through her sunglasses, but he could almost feel the way she was staring at him with all the sharp focus of a hawk.
“In this case, I was already repaying you,” she said. “And this favour is minor in comparison, so I still owe you.”
“Shouldn't it be me deciding that?” Lin Jing asked.
She gave another one of those sweet, fake smiles and finished her coffee.
“No,” she said, still smiling, and got up to follow Chu Shuzhi out of the cafe.
It wasn't until nearly two months after that day, summer heat slowly smothering the city, that Lin Jing finally got his chance.
The Chief was at a meeting with the Xingdu Bureau until mid-afternoon at the latest, which should give Lin Jing more than enough time. Cao Ying, who was in attendance as the Dixingren representative, had agreed to keep Lin Jing up to date on Zhao Yunlan's movements.
Lin Jing was fairly sure she'd got herself into the meeting for that exact purpose, but he wasn't sure he wanted to know how she'd managed it.
He was equally unsure of what part Lao Chu had played in their little scheme, but it was probably down to him that Da Qing wasn't around when Lin Jing arrived at the Chief's flat.
Lin Jing had probably been there more often in the past month or so than in the entirety of the rest of his time at the SID, so he didn't have any trouble getting there.
He knocked on the door as soon as he arrived, so that he didn't have time to talk himself out of it, but immediately started having second thoughts, regardless.
Lin Jing didn't enjoy sincere emotional conversations at the best of times, even before he had to spend several years spying on his coworkers. Positive emotions were bad enough — it was significantly worse if it was something negative. If it was about something this serious.
So, by the time Professor Shen had opened the door, he had almost succeeded in concocting an innocent excuse for his presence, never mind that Lao Chu and Cao Ying would (figuratively) skin him for chickening out.
Unfortunately for him, the professor was good at clocking when someone was hiding something. He'd had an awful lot of practice, after all.
“Lin Jing?" He prompted, after an awkward silence in which Lin Jing's hastily constructed bullshit failed to even reach his mouth. "Is everything alright?”
“Haha,” Lin Jing said, nervously, feeling very much like the human embodiment of the sweat-drop emoji. “You know, I just realised it’s not actually that important, so—”
Professor Shen gave him a look. He was good at those, too. At least it was a Professor Shen look, rather than a Heipaoshi look.
“Why don’t you come inside?” He suggested, mildly.
They sat down on the couch with tea.
Lin Jing almost managed to forget about it for the first cup, and half the second, eagerly falling into the discussion about a bioengineering article that had been published earlier that year, before…
Yeah, as if it was going to be that easy.
“It’s about what happened that day,” he suddenly blurted, then hastily put his cup down before his shaking hands could spill tea everywhere.
“…ah.”
Professor Shen put his cup down too, angling his body so he could watch Lin Jing more easily with that calm, non-judgemental gaze.
No wonder his students liked him so much - he was scarily easy to talk to like this.
“It’s been bothering me,” Lin Jing said. He laughed nervously. “But who doesn’t it bother? I mean, it’s worse, now we’re less busy. I can’t stop—”
He broke off, ironically unable to continue.
“I see,” Shen Wei said, mouth twisting down for a moment. “I take it there’s something specific…”
By this point, Lin Jing was fairly sure Shen Wei already had a pretty good idea what the topic was, but was hoping that he was mistaken, or that Lin Jing was going to talk around it.
Unfortunately for the both of them, however, they probably needed to talk about this. And, according to, like, psychology or something, Lin Jing would probably feel better after confronting it directly.
Ugh.
He folded his hands together, knuckles going white with tension.
“I mean it’s—” he started. Broke off. “Sometimes, when I get too tired, I can still feel it on my hands—”
The words were spilling out like vomit, now, but the hard knot of nausea in his core didn’t lessen
“I killed you,” he said, finally, desperately.
The next words stuck in his throat, an ache building there, too, and at his temples.
Professor Shen didn’t fill the silence, merely waited patiently for Lin Jing to continue.
“If it weren’t for—”
He cleared his throat, tried again.
“If things had gone even a little differently, with the wick, with that, that device Professor Cao had me get from the Lab, and, haha all the rest of it—”
Cut himself off again as he felt himself go a little light-headed.
Took a deep breath, then a couple more to try and calm down.
“I would've had that on my conscience for the rest of my life,” he said. “And I know it didn’t happen, that everything turned out fine — well, as fine as it could. But…”
“But sometimes your mind doesn’t remember the ending. Just the horror of the moment.” Shen Wei said, quietly. “You said you can feel it - blood? - on your hands, sometimes. I take it you’re having nightmares as well?”
Lin Jing nodded.
“And, y’know. The dread,” he said.
Having expressed that last point absolutely atrociously, he hadn’t been expecting the slow, understanding nod from Shen Wei, but he probably should have.
There was another silence, less tense, more thoughtful.
Something about Shen Wei’s total lack of surprise throughout the conversation finally sparked a realisation in Lin Jing, now that his brain had stopped catastrophising for long enough to latch onto that train of thought.
“Did Cao Ying tell you?” he asked, already pretty sure of the answer.
Professor Shen’s mouth twitched in a small smile.
“She did mention that you had something delicate you wanted to discuss,” he said, then paused to adjust his glasses. “And, if it was work-related, you wouldn’t have approached it like this.”
Lin Jing raised his hands in acquiescence, reached up to push his own glasses back up his nose to hide the rueful grimace, then picked up his now lukewarm cup of tea to give his hands something to do.
Professor Shen watched him with an expression that was difficult to decipher.
“I know this probably won’t help very much,” tone gentle in the way it only usually got when speaking to upset students or small children, “but it wouldn’t have been your fault. If you hadn’t been there… Well, I would have managed.”
“That’s horrible,” Lin Jing said, strangled around a hysterical giggle that fizzed in his chest and tried to spill up his throat.
"I know," Shen Wei said, expression twisting into something apologetic. "I am sorry. I never should have asked that of you.”
Lin Jing drained the rest of the tea, set the cup down.
“I wish you hadn’t,” he said. “But I—”
He paused, unsure how to say it in a way that didn’t sound deranged. Then he shrugged mentally.
“If you had,” he started, slowly, “and I hadn’t been there, you’d have had to spend your last moments with the Regent, and I don’t think anyone deserves that. So, in a way, I’m glad I was there.”
Professor Shen ducked his head to hide a laugh, but the tension in the room had noticeably lightened.
“I won’t disagree with you,” he said. “And thank you.”
Lin Jing shook his head.
"No, thank you. I do feel a lot better already.” He paused. “But I'm still telling Cao Ying what you said.”
The corner of Shen Wei’s mouth curled, amused.
"Not Zhao Yunlan?"
"Haha, I still have this month's bonus, I don't want to risk it.”
Lin Jing leaned back, stretching his hands absently. They still ached a little from all the typing he’d had to do on substandard keyboards recently.
“Besides,” he continued. “She’s more likely to yell at you.”
Unsaid, but painfully audible - because she was still mad at him in a way Zhao Yunlan wasn’t.
If Lin Jing hadn't already been looking directly at Shen Wei’s face, he would have missed the wince - because no matter what Zhao Yunlan might say, Shen Wei was excellent at hiding his emotions. He’d had a lot of practice. It was just that some people were equally excellent at reading people in general and him in particular.
"Quite," Professor Shen said, dryly. Unspoken - ‘again’. "Perhaps leave it a little while - she has been rather tense lately."
An understatement to be sure - she’d looked tempted to snap at Xiao Guo the other week, something that was (apparently) wildly out of character, and that even the most hardened criminals rarely had the heart to do.
"We all have," Lin Jing said, thinking about the murderous glare Lao Chu had shot her in response. "It’s been a pretty stressful, uh. Year.”
That received a quiet chuckle, following which they both fell silent.
Lin Jing's phone broke that silence with a loud vibration.
He wrangled it out of his pocket and checked the message preview that popped up on the lock screen.
🦋: ZYL just left
And as he watched, a second message covered the first
🦋: gave me a dirty look, so I think he's onto us
Lin Jing winced and unlocked his phone to hastily reply.
👓: blame the deputy
🦋: oh, i do.
🦋: i give you at most 10 more minutes of privacy
👓: 👍
"Sorry, Professor,” Lin Jing said, putting his phone away. “That was my ten-minute warning.”
Shen Wei nodded, completely unsurprised. One of the other two Dixingren had probably said something to him. That, or he’d figured out the scheme himself on account of Lin Jing’s suspiciously convenient timing for a private conversation.
"I take it Zhao Yunlan will be back soon, then,” he said.
It took Lin Jing a moment to register the teasing tone.
"Ah, it seems so,” he said, giving a rueful smile. “Anyway, ah, I'm sorry for bothering you, Professor—"
He broke off, suddenly unsure of what he’d been about to say.
Instead, he stood, picked up his empty cup, and stiltedly gestured towards Professor Shen’s.
The other man nodded, uttered a quiet thanks, and pushed it towards him, then stood as well.
"It wasn't a bother,” he said. Then - “ah, just leave them on the counter” - as Ling Jing quickly ferried the cups over to the kitchen. “You - any of the team, you're all welcome here any time. Especially if something is troubling you."
"Within reason,” Lin Jing tagged on, returning to the living area to collect his bag.
That earned another ducked head, laugh more poorly hidden this time.
"Yes, within reason,” Professor Shen echoed, still with a faint smile even as he raised his head.
Bag secured, Lin Jing let Shen Wei walk him to the door in less awkward silence than he’d arrived in.
"I really am glad you're okay," Lin Jing blurted out, suddenly, right in front of the door. "Not just because of—” he broke off to wave his hands demonstratively. “Or, well, you know —”
Shen Wei nodded.
He knew.
“But, yeah, I know we haven’t even known you a year, but we would have missed you.”
That got him another smile, small, barely visible, painfully genuine.
"I'll be coming to the office tomorrow," Shen Wei said, an unspoken reassurance of ‘I’ll still be here tomorrow.'
Lin Jing smiled back, then huffed out an awkward laugh and ran a hand through his hair.
Then he remembered the state the main room was in, and the worse state the lab was in.
His hand reflexively clenched in his hair, smile freezing in an almost grimace.
“Of course, Professor,” he said, opening the door. “But, haha, I suddenly remembered something very important I have to do back at the lab. Thanks for the talk! And the tea!”
And with that, he made his escape, absolutely certain that Professor Shen was laughing at him as he went.