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The water laps at their feet, gentle and colored gold by the rising sun and the sand beneath.
Wei Ying looks at Lan Zhan’s blue-stockinged legs, digging into the sand with a tension she’d only known her to have when she was angry with Wei Ying, as a teenager. Maybe she’s angry with Wei Ying now, too, for running away—again, and again, and again.
She sighs, shivering slightly in her ratty shirt. She keeps her arms where there are, though—hands interlocked around her drawn-up knees—instead of saying anything, and yet, the moment her body shudders against the morning chill, Lan Zhan is turning to look at her.
“Are you cold?” she asks, voice soft, slightly raspy from disuse. Her eyes gleam a bit, like she might cry.
“A bit, yeah,” Wei Ying says honestly, wanting to see how Lan Zhan will react—and then makes a noise of protest when she removes her jacket. “No, it’s fine, it’s fine!” she says hastily, leaning back a bit. Lan Zhan frowns at her, jaw set, and leans right into her space to drape the jacket around her shoulders anyway, insistent.
Wei Ying looks at her, helpless, breath catching in her throat as Lan Zhan draws it snug around Wei Ying’s shoulders, sweeping back the tangled mess of her hair, freed from between the jacket and her body. She doesn’t even wince as she is—where has the clean-freak Lan Zhan gone, she wonders, looking at the solemn, stubborn set of her expression, gaze sliding down to her now-bare arms.
“Won’t you be cold?” she asks.
“I’ve been sitting in that thing all night,” Lan Zhan shakes her head, finally leaning back and allowing Wei Ying to breathe. She’s kind of dizzy. Is that how a teenaged Lan Zhan felt when Wei Ying was constantly all up in her space, poking and prodding and delighting in the idea of seeing her snap? Good lord. “I’m overheated now.”
Blatant fucking lie. Wei Ying can see the hairs rise on her arms, but she decides she doesn’t want to push it, not knowing how to handle a Lan Zhan who doesn’t get angry at her after a confrontation. Since she returned to town, they’ve built a casual, tentative truce; then everything came crashing down, and Wei Ying did what she does best: she bolted.
Except, this time, Lan Zhan was determined to catch her before she got far, which is how they’ve ended up here, sitting at a beach, just far enough that the tide only laps at their feet; their shoes shoved haphazardly into Wei Ying’s bag behind them.
“Lan Zhan,” she sighs, running a hand through her hair. It’s grown out again, long enough that she should think about investing in a hair tie that isn’t thin rubber and doesn’t snap before the day is over—she probably needs to re-dye the red streak, too. She’s kept it that way ever since Wen Qing sat her down and showed her how to properly work with hair chemicals. “You’re so stubborn. Who in the world chases after someone down the road in heels?”
“You were going to leave,” Lan Zhan says flatly. Wei Ying sputters.
“Well, yeah! You think I’m going to stay after Jiang Cheng blows up like that on me? He’s got a target painted on my back! What was I supposed to do?”
“Not run away?” Lan Zhan suggests. “Punch Jiang Cheng, maybe.”
“Wh—I’m not going to punch my brother,” she frowns. “He’s not a bad person…”
Useless endeavor, because Lan Zhan and Jiang Cheng have never liked each other very much. When Wei Ying thinks about Jiang Cheng, and Jin Ling, she feels a hollow pit in her stomach, one she has no business to be feeling, so she puts that one away. She misses Jiang Cheng in a way she can’t quite name. She wishes she could unhear the hurt in the way he had screamed and demanded answers—could unhear the regret and hurt and betrayal and, well, everything.
So she doesn’t think about it. She doesn’t think about the way Lan Zhan had caught her by the shoulder, wrenched her back by force, spun her around, grabbed her other shoulder, and then all but begged, “stay. Don’t go, Wei Ying.”
Her eyes had been frantic, expression pulled into something Wei Ying had never seen before on the lovely jade belonging to the illustrious Lan family. Lan Huan’s little sister, every bit as learned and refined as he is, if not more for her frosty nature and aloofness.
A very long time ago, Wei Ying had learned that Lan Zhan, the beloved, treasured niece of Lan Qiren, carried a fiery temper beneath her exterior—and a mean right hook that had left a bruise under Wei Ying’s chin for days. She’d been too happy about getting a rise that badly out of Lan Zhan to mind, or to realize where and when she’d taken it too damn far.
She’s always like this, and she can’t say it’s not on purpose. She doesn’t understand—she does understand what that look on Lan Zhan’s face had meant, eyes wide and frantic and mouth twisted into something like panic and agony, her voice high, shrill, begging Wei Ying to not go. Holding her so tight her shoulders bruised.
So. Wei Ying doesn’t go. She allows herself to be guided, numbly, farther and farther away from her—fuck it, she hadn’t even known where she was going. Lan Zhan takes her away from where her home had once stood (still stands) and sits her down on the beach and takes off her shoes and then her own and asks her if it’s okay to put inside her bag, and then sits down beside Wei Ying.
Wei Ying should have gone. Lan Zhan won’t let her. So she stays, because really, after weeks of this, after weeks of relearning to be in Lan Zhan’s orbit, a Lan Zhan who’s still every bit as prim and proper with her white-and-blue clothing and her long hair brushed to a glossy silk and understated makeup carefully done, a Lan Zhan, who despite it all, offers Wei Ying patience and space.
She wishes Lan Zhan would fight her, instead, those terrible arguments they used to have, the time they’d screamed at each other hoarse and Wen Qing had stormed out from her room, fresh off a hospital shift, and ordered Lan Zhan to get out and for Wei Ying to also get out but cool the fuck off first, or she would not allowed to watch A-Yuan that night.
Would it be easier? Or is the way Lan Zhan looks at her, expectant, fear breaking through that calm front, a kindness she doesn’t know how to take?
“Why do you want me to stay, Lan Zhan?” she asks, helpless. Her nails dig into her forearm, the edges of her skull tattoo. (The first time Lan Zhan saw her tattooed bare arms, she’d paused to stare at them, and Wei Ying hadn’t known what to say.) “Surely, you of all people…”
Lan Zhan shakes her head. “Wei Ying needs to think about herself, for once,” she says, not even angry, just… tired.
Wei Ying blinks. “I need to—” she barks out a laugh, and it’s a pathetic, twisted thing, scraping up her throat like knives. “Wei Ying needs to think about herself, for once,” she mocks. “You hear yourself, Lan Zhan? When, exactly, in the last decade, have I not been thinking about myself? When, exactly, have I been some sort of selfless hero? What, are your memories of our youth that muddied?”
She regrets it, immediately. Sometimes, she still feels like she’s in her twenties, bent out of shape with so, so much resentment and grief she didn’t know what to do with it. Devil-may-care attitude; drinking all night long; fights with Jiang Cheng; worrying jiejie. The time she’d broken Jin Zixuan’s nose and the only thing holding him back from slipping back into his teenage anger had been the fact jiejie never would’ve forgiven him, and that Jiang Cheng had stepped in front of him, daring him to touch his sister.
(She hadn’t liked that. She doesn’t say that, for years, she’d wished he could come back to do that, if only so she could knock him aside and tell him she was a better fighter than he was anyway.
Jiejie would’ve laughed, and Wei Ying is forgetting the shape of it.)
She can’t afford to mess up like that anymore, so she immediately drops her gaze, looking away. Ashamed, she could call it, if Wei Ying could feel such a thing. Yu-ayi used to say that Wei Ying was the most shameless girl she’d ever laid her eyes on. It had remained true for a long time before and after Yu-ayi had died.
“Sorry,” she mutters, cringing at how it sounds. “I just—”
“Wei Ying doesn’t need to apologize,” Lan Zhan says. “Just—” she bites her lip, a rare show of nervousness. “Wei Ying has been selfish,” she ends up saying, “but… you’re not okay either.”
Wei Ying stares, and then cracks a smile. “Aiya, Lan Zhan,” she shakes her head, “you’re as terrible as ever with words, aren’t you? What makes you think I’m not happier away from home?”
“You looked more dead than alive when you walked back in,” Lan Zhan says quietly. Wei Ying’s smile vanishes. “The last few weeks, it’s… it’s like I’m seeing the teenage Wei Ying again. So.”
That punches the breath out of her. She doesn’t know what to say to that. She’s been riding along on her shamelessness, her loud mouth, her willingness to get into fights (promptly defused by Lan Zhan), to carry herself through the last few weeks. Lan Huan’s strained but courteous kindness, the little ducklings that Lan Zhan’s found herself with being patently unimpressed by her, well, everything. At least until she showed them how to throw a proper punch and deter a creep from trying harassment tactics on anyone ever again.
She buries her head between her knees, hands pressing it down. Fingers tangling into her hair. She’s tired, she realizes. She’s been running on fumes, maybe.
She doesn’t like being home. She hated being alone. She also doesn’t believe in middle grounds.
“You can’t be telling me things like this,” she mumbles.
“If you leave,” Lan Zhan says with certainty, “then, Wei Ying, I’m going with you.”
Her head snaps up. “What—that’s crazy! You can’t do that. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m going with you,” she states, no more and no less strongly than before. Perfectly assured of her decision, as if she can just snap her fingers and make it happen.
“Your family, Lan Zhan!”
“I’ll make them understand,” she nods decisively. Then, pointed and gentle all at once, “you’ve been alone for how long?”
Wei Ying stares at her. Beautiful, lovely, competent Lan Zhan with a competitive streak a mile long and a vicious streak only slightly less than that, tempered by her normally awkward nature. Lan Zhan, who has spend every day of the past—how long as it been, even? However long it’s been, Lan Zhan’s stuck by her side, and Wei Ying…
Ah, Lan Zhan. Wei Ying has to bite back something too-honest, something cracked-open, like a raw egg thrown across asphalt. She looks at Lan Zhan, glowing in the light of the early-morning sun, her expression stubbornly set, childishly determined.
And, Wei Ying realizes: she wants Lan Zhan to stay with her so badly she would give up her peace for it.
She leans forward, seizing Lan Zhan by the shoulder. “If I behave like this,” she asks, leaning all the way into her space, “would you still—”
The world tilts, and she hits the soft sand beneath her so suddenly she’s still blinking, trying to process why Lan Zhan would do that when the woman herself appears above her, hovering with a dark expression on her face. “Wei Ying underestimates exactly what I’d do for her,” she says, low.
“Um,” Wei Ying manages. “Ah?”
Here’s the truth: Wei Ying has always wanted to be in Lan Zhan’s orbit. From the moment she met Lan Zhan through the fancy exchange program, she’s wanted to poke, to press, to pull. To see what she could pull out from the prettiest girl in the world; to see if she would differ in the way the rest of the world treated Wei Ying, and, well.
Was Lan Zhan any different from the beginning? Hard to say. Lots of people have a problem with Wei Ying’s attitude, one she gleefully, delightfully, leans into it. Lan Zhan snapped faster than most people, true; Lan Zhan addressed her with such specific intensity that Jiang Cheng once asked if she wasn’t sure Lan Zhan wasn’t plotting murder, to which Wei Ying had laughed. Lan Zhan could never, she’d said, swinging her legs, perched on her windowsill (Jiang Cheng hated when she did that, afraid she’d fall out and crack her head open; Yu-ayi periodically found out and raised hell, until she gave up).
And why not? Jiang Cheng, already having decided he didn’t like her, asked, eyebrows raised.
She likes fighting with me too much, Wei Ying had informed him. Jiang Cheng had called her delusional, and she’d responded with inching out the window, laughing at his panicked yells.
But, but—the thing is, Wei Ying hadn’t known whether Lan Zhan truly hated her or not. It’s hard to tell. For a long time, she didn’t know if their little game was just that, or if she was just dancing around until she stepped on a landmine, far too unrepentant to wait and consider. Regardless, when life blew up in all of their faces, Wei Ying had been quick to cut her losses. Jiang Cheng hates her for it, and she can’t say it’s undeserved; for all that she wants to yell right back, it’s—
It’s like this: Wei Ying hanging out in the rundown areas of the city, stinking of cigarrette smoke that Wen Qing would surely want to murder her for, only meant she longed for the familiarity of being seventeen and carefree (or relatively so) again. Lan Zhan showing up and berating her for the spiral she was falling down didn’t mean shit, except when it did.
“Lan Zhan, oh, Lan Zhan,” she’d once said, “you’re going to be mistaken as my friend one of these days, you know?”
Lan Zhan had paused, stiff, and then continued on her way, dragging Wei Ying right back to where she was staying with Wen Qing and the others. Wen Ning had looked at her with worry, then at Lan Zhan with apprehension, but when it quickly became clear that in all situations Wei Ying couldn’t summarily handle (of which there were few, she must be clear here!), it was Lan Zhan doing the saving, then, well.
Once upon a time she had taken great delight in getting a rise out of this girl. Then, she’d done it purely for the hell of it, truly trying to make Lan Zhan angry, and she did succeed—two days before she ran, ran like hell, not looking back, angry and horrified and so, so hateful. All that time wasted, muddling around with Lan Zhan. That she still feels capable of such anger and hate scares her, and so—
When spending time back home with Lan Zhan, stuck to her side, flirting, a bit put off by her utter impassiveness, spending time with her, these past few weeks…
Hasn’t it been a lot like. Well.
(She’d missed familiarity; she’d missed Lan Zhan while she was gone. It had hurt, without quite getting at why; this ache that existed in her, in the same place where jiejie’s memory rests, where Yu-ayi’s and Jiang-shushu’s last words reverbrate in her like a curse. She hates calling it a curse.
She has come home, and she is so lonely and afraid. She knows she brought this upon herself, but she is so lonely and afraid.)
So, yeah, she can only gasp and sigh into it when Lan Zhan leans down and kisses her, and it’s by no means a refined kiss, nothing delicate like that, no. She kisses Wei Ying like she wants to eat her alive, forcing her mouth open and taking exactly what she wants, and Wei Ying whimpers, losing herself into it. They part for a breath; their eyes meet, and Wei Ying almost says something stupid; Lan Zhan glares fiercely at her and kisses her again.
Okay, so, the beach is objectively not a bad place to have a date, or even have a heavy make-out session. The sun is rising, the waves are pleasant, the breeze is blowing; what’s not to like about it?
Being pressed into the sand, though—that’s a different story. It’s getting in her hair, her clothes; but she says nothing. She just drags Lan Zhan closer and sighs into the kiss, shivering because the young madam of the Lan family is apparently insatiable and likes taking what she wants. Her hands do not stay in place; and, well.
Wei Ying is fine with that, shockingly? She’s okay with this.
And then Lan Zhan lets her go and says, rough, “now will you believe me?”
“I,” Wei Ying starts, still a bit kiss-dumb. “Lan-er-jiejie!” she whines, indignant. “Unfair to make me answer that after positively ravishing me! Taking advantage of me! How undignified for a daughter of the Lan family!”
“Would you like to know how else I can take advantage of you?” Lan Zhan asks her, very seriously. Wei Ying squeaks, flushing red.
“No!” she says hastily, eyes flicking around as far as she can see. The beach being empty is one thing in her favor. “No, that’s—okay, Lan Zhan, I believe you, I believe you!”
“Then,” Lan Zhan says, bringing up one of Wei Ying’s hands to her mouth, placing a kiss upon the tips of her fingers, “will Wei Ying let me accompany her where she goes?”
“Lan Zhan,” she says, helpless. Red, overpowered, utterly useless against—whatever this is. How long…? “I—yes, I—of course, I couldn’t—would never be able to stop you if I tried.”
I wish I’d stayed back then, but it’s a lie, she knows. Just as she would not be able to stop Lan Zhan now, Lan Zhan would not have been able to stop Wei Ying back then. It’s just the way things are, and there’s no point ruminating on it, wishing things would be different. The hollow ache in her where she grieves A-Yuan, and Wen Qing, her childhood, her mistakes, the choices she should have made, jiejie, everyone else—the anger and hate that’s dulled down into an acceptance that this is how it is—it pulses hotly in her stomach, when she considers what this means.
“I don’t know where to go,” she confesses. “I’ve—I’ve just been, hanging on, really, and I… don’t really have anywhere to return to, right now.”
The only thing she’d been planning at all was maybe visiting Yu-ayi and Jiang-shushu’s graves on her way out. Maybe jiejie’s, if she was brave enough for that.
Lan Zhan’s gaze softens. “Then come with me,” she offers. “Even if it’s not forever, I can help.”
Wei Ying snorts. “Your uncle is going to spit blood with fury if I do that,” but she’s already moving to sit up, moving with Lan Zhan’s movements. Settling firmly into her hold, chin hooked over her shoulder. Sand falls off her body, slipping uncomfortably into her clothes. She’s going to have to wash her hair. “You okay with that?”
“He’ll have to listen,” Lan Zhan insists. “There’s plenty of space, and if I ask my brother to help me, then he’ll stand no chance.”
“Scary. Weaponizing his affection like that! Does he even have any affection to speak of?”
“Wei Ying,” she scolds. All it does it make Wei Ying snicker. “You can still say no, Wei Ying. Wherever you go…”
“I am not dragging you away from your whole entire life based on some stupid excuses,” Wei Ying says, sharper than she intends to. She pulls back a bit to look at Lan Zhan, who, to her credit, doesn’t flinch back, doesn’t yield a single inch. “I’m… not sure about this, but. It’s better than nothing. I don’t know.”
Something she doesn’t say: it gives her more time—maybe more than she needs—to work out where else to go from her. The shattered fragments of her old life. Jin Ling’s weird acceptance of her that will inevitably cause collision. Wen Ning, who still looks at her like she hung the stars and moon and sun in the sky. Jiang Cheng, who’d asked—
“Okay, then,” Lan Zhan says, gentle as anything. Still water on a pond, ice melting in the spring. She kisses Wei Ying’s cheek, and then her lips, light as a feather. “Okay, Wei Ying.”
“Okay,” Wei Ying agrees back, helpless, and completely okay with it. She sinks into Lan Zhan’s hold, trembling all over—just a bit, okay, just a bit! Sometimes a girl needs time to process these things!—and breathes. In, and out. Focuses on the sun beating down on them; Lan Zhan’s arms around her. Yeah, that’s better.
Whatever this is—it’s better than anything else she could’ve hoped for.