Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

There is a woman at the end of the hallway.

Jingyi spares her a customary glance — really just a flick of his head that sends a lock of hair in his eye — but doesn’t say anything as he reaches his front door and fishes around in his pockets for his keys.

He can hear her taking slow, measured steps in his direction, footsteps a soft pattering of sound that echoes all around the quiet, empty hallway. There’s a stairwell to Jingyi’s left that goes all the way down to the lower floors, and he guesses she must be on her way out. The tenants in his building tend to keep to themselves, barely even greeting each other when they meet, so Jingyi hasn’t made much of an effort to get to know any of them.

This woman is likely no exception. He figures he’ll just say hi if she greets him first; otherwise, he’s minding his own business.

“Where the hell did I put them,” he mutters to himself, swinging his backpack off one shoulder and bringing it around to press against his torso. He rests his weight on one foot and leans back for a better view of the backpack’s contents, fingers scouring the bottom for his keys impatiently. The temperamental lamp above his door flickers like a strobe light as the woman passes him by, and Jingyi’s fingers make contact with something cold and metallic just as the woman lightly grazes his shoulder with her own.

The impact is soft, barely even noticeable to Jingyi, but she stumbles and staggers to the floor with a bony thump, landing on her knees. The thin white fabric of her dress spreads out like a fan around her ankles. She isn’t wearing any shoes.

“Shit, sorry, my bad!” Jingyi yelps, stuffing his keys into his backpocket and zipping up his backpack in a hurry to bend down and help the woman. It’s nearing dinner time now, and his stomach growls irritably, having gone unfed for most of the day. He really needs to stop skipping meals. “Are you okay?” he asks the woman.

Before he can even reach a hand out for her, though, she goes rigid at the sound of his voice, still as stone. Her hair falls before her face like a curtain of ink; dark, silky, and unkempt.

“You… can see me?” she rasps, face bent and parallel to the ground.

“Yeah?” Jingyi answers uncertainly, and then thinks, Weird, very weird. Ah, man, I want a taco.

It’s dark outside, the moon a thin crescent of white in the cloudless sky. The windows that line the length of the hallway are closed for the night, and the air inside is stuffy and damp with humidity. That must be why his palms are sweating.

He ignores the nagging voice in the back of his head working up a gradually escalating scream of ABORT MISSION, ABORT MISSION as he kneels down in front of the woman, ducking his head to try and make some eye contact. He doesn’t have much success.

“Sorry about that,” he says, and curses the small quiver in his voice, “let me give you a hand.” He really hopes she doesn’t knife him and leave him for dead or something. He only has, like, twenty bucks in his wallet. (Though, his textbooks might catch a pretty penny. Capitalism is a curse.)

Slowly, the woman’s shoulders start to shake, small puffs of air leaving her mouth in a rhythm that resembles laughter, though no such sound comes out. Jingyi starts to feel the icy clench of nervousness wrap itself around his heart.

He doesn’t remember ever seeing her amongst his neighbors. It’s only been about a month since he’s moved in, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise, but somehow, the knowledge of this sends the hair on the back of his neck rising as he stares at the crouched, motionless form in front of him.

A pale, spindly hand shoots out from the curtain of hair and grabs his wrist in a tight, clammy grip, quick as a viper.

Jingyi flinches, teeth clacking together. “Um, ma’am?” he shrills. THIS IS A WENDY'S, his traitorous brain finishes.

Something hard and cold presses on the inside of his wrist. Jingyi snaps his head down and sees, with no small amount of horror, talons — actual golden, sharp talons — protruding from the woman’s cuticles and bearing down on the soft skin above his pulse point. Naturally, he freaks out.

“Oh my fuck,” Jingyi shouts, loudly enough that he startles even himself, “Fuckity fucking fuck this, I’m out!” He tries to wrestle his hand away from the strange bird woman’s grasp, free hand hitting and scratching at her fingers in a vain attempt to loosen them. The irregular drumbeat of his heart matches the uneven flickering of the light fixture above his door.

But it’s no use. The woman just squeezes his wrist tighter and giggles, the sound sending goosebumps erupting all over Jingyi’s skin. She hasn’t budged even an inch from Jingyi’s struggles.

“You said you’d give me a hand,” she croons, soft and pleasant; none of the rasp from earlier. There’s an eerie, hollow quality to her voice; an undercurrent of something darker, more cloying lurking beneath the tinkling layer of sing-song.

Slowly, she lifts her head. The dark, wavy curtain of hair parts to reveal a pale white moon of a face: skin smooth and poreless, with eyes that look like glittering black jewels, wide and with no eyelashes.

Jingyi swears he goes into cardiac arrest.

“It’s called a figure of speech!” he shrieks, throwing his backpack at her and wrenching his hand away with all the force and energy he can muster on six cups of coffee and one half of a subway sandwich.

His tailbone stings like hell when he lands on it, but the pain is the last thing on Jingyi’s mind when he wastes no time in scrambling away from the woman, cowering as she rises to her full height — almost to the ceiling, what the fuck — and towers over him. There is a buzzing sound building up into a crescendo in his ears, melding together with the heartbeat he can feel on his temple and thrumming in time with the quivering light of the faulty lamp above.

“Too late,” she smiles, and her voice is a song, “it’s a promise.” A gleaming row of fangs unveil themselves from between her pale, pink lips. Sharp, white, and menacing.

The lamp shudders, then; three bone-chilling seconds that seem to stretch on for an eternity. Darkness engulfs the world before Jingyi’s eyes, and he wonders why his life hasn’t started playing like an old-timey movie reel in his head yet.

He only has time to think about the bowl of oatmeal he accidentally forgot to eat and left in the microwave that morning before the woman lunges at him, claws and fangs extended first.

Jingyi snaps his eyes open.

Sunlight is streaming in from the window on the far left wall of his studio apartment, lancing straight across his face like a warm brand and burning his retinas.

He groans at the pain and burrows back under the safety of his blanket, slamming the snooze button on his phone in an irrational surge of rage at the sun’s audacity to rise up every morning. Staring blankly at the baby blue patterning of rabbits on his sheets, Jingyi contemplates his options.

He’s got at least forty-five more minutes before he truly has to get up and begin his daily routine of racing to school in a panic. In that time, he could definitely have himself some breakfast at the kitchen table, for once; a bowl of cereal or some toast, perhaps. A relaxing cup of tea. Maybe play some soothing lo-fi mix on his bluetooth speaker as he waters Henri the succulent with the tiny watering can Sizhui had gotten him as a birthday gift last year.

He yawns, and goes back to sleep.

After four blissful minutes of dozing in, Jingyi’s phone starts vibrating up a storm underneath his pillow. He turns over and squeezes his eyes shut tighter.

It buzzes, incessantly. A hornet’s nest under his pillow. Impossible to ignore.

“Jesus fuck,” he says to the rabbit hovering closest to his line of sight. He curses his life when he pulls his phone out from under his pillow and is momentarily blinded by the unholy amount of light emitting from the screen. He throws his blanket open to the mercy of the sun and compensates by curling up into the fetal position, squinting blearily at the notifications piling up on his phone screen.

There’re several older messages from Zizhen liveblogging some Netflix show about a house on a hill instead of doing his coursework at 4 a.m., which Jingyi steadfastly scrolls past and ignores. He only begrudgingly thumbs his passcode in when he sees who the newest message is from, curious.

Sizhui [6:48 AM]
[image attached]
guys, look who’s here! ( ˵ ° ᗜ ° ˵)

Jingyi stretches as he sits up, yawning hugely as he rubs lethargically at one crusty eye and squints at his phone screen. He feels an itch begging to be scratched at the back of his mind as he stares at the image of Sizhui smiling next to an attractive brown-haired boy; an odd spark of familiarity that nags at him, almost like deja vu.

It’s the huge brown eyes and the smile that’s more of a grimace that’s doing it, Jingyi thinks. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen the guy on campus though, and Jingyi knows practically everyone in his major by now, for better or worse, so he’s stumped. Oh well.

Mentally and physically shrugging the odd feeling off, Jingyi positions his thumbs above the keypad to start typing up a response. He quickly discovers that he can’t actually type anything coherent with sleep still pulling at his eyelids and struggles for several seconds.

Jingyi is typing…

Zizhen [6:49 AM]
oooh whozzat??
pls don’t tell me that’s ur bf
also yooo gmorning jingyi

Sizhui [6:49 AM]
that’s not my boyfriend, that’s my cousin jin ling! ( ˆᴗˆ )
he’s back from studying abroad at yunmeng and just transferred here

Zizhen [6:50 AM]
oh ok phew that’s good
I mean ohh wow rly? sweet! :)
jin ling is the one with the dog, right?

Wait.

Cousin? Jin Ling?

Jingyi pauses mid-type, scrolling back up to stare open-mouthed at the photo of Sizhui and his horrifically gorgeous younger cousin.

What the fuck. No way.

Jingyi tumbles out of bed, tripping on his sheets and pinwheeling his arms as he goes down like a tower of jenga blocks assembled by a posse of drunk college students and lands on a pile of composition notes on the floor. His phone sails across the air and slithers underneath the kitchen table next to his bed.

Getting on all fours and feeling very much like a creepy cave creature as he crawls under the table to retrieve his phone, Jingyi decides that he doesn’t actually care how ridiculous he looks, because there’s no one else to see him in his apartment anyway. So he stays there under the table, front pressed to the floor as he resumes writing a string of typos and sending them in quick succession to the group chat.

Zizhen [6:51 AM]
lmao

Sizhui [6:51 AM]
good morning, jingyi!
yes, it’s jin ling! it’s been a while since you’ve seen a photo of him, huh?
I can’t wait to introduce him to you guys (˃̵͈̑ᴗ˂̵͈̑)

Sizhui [6:52 AM]
like what??

Zizhen [6:52 AM]
like his type
lmao jk
he is pretty cute tho
like u :)

Sizhui [6:53 AM]
aw! you’re cute too, @Zizhen ( ˊᵕˋ )♡
jingyi are you okay?

Sizhui [6:54 AM]
what?

Zizhen [6:57 AM]
what 2.0
also… thanks @Sizhui (/∇＼*)｡o○♡

Lan Sizhui’s cousin is something of an urban legend. (Or just a legend in general, really.)

A man of myth. A creature of lore. An unverifiable entity of questionable origins and sightings.

A cryptid, one might say.

Like Mothman, Zizhen had once said. Elusive, aberrant, and yet celebrated.

He hadn’t really been talking about Jin Ling that day; had actually just been regaling Jingyi with an extremely detailed comparative essay he’d written of his own volition starring Mothman and Bigfoot. He’d also booted up yet another episode of Buzzfeed Unsolved to watch on Jingyi’s laptop that night, Jingyi’s loud protests of betrayal going unheeded in the background.

Zizhen had, of course, selected the Mothman episode. They’d already seen the Bigfoot one several weeks prior.

“It’s not scary!” Zizhen had insisted, already making himself comfortable with a pillow propped up behind his back. Jingyi had come over for a rare sleepover that night, both boys feeling sentimental about graduating high school and leaving for college in less than a month.

“That’s what you said about Hereditary!” Jingyi had screeched, attaching himself to Zizhen’s side like a barnacle and pulling up the assortment of forest green blankets bundled near their feet all the way up to under his nose. “All men do is lie!”

Zizhen had simply popped his tongue at him in response, because he’s a little shit like that. Jingyi both loves and hates him in that very moment.

Luckily, the video hadn’t actually been as scary as Hereditary. In fact, it’d been pretty funny, from what Jingyi can remember. It definitely hadn’t taken him long to start enjoying the show shortly after witnessing the hosts devour a pizza designed to emulate Mothman’s terrifying form. And it was while observing the various tacky tourist traps the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia created in the name of their local interdimensional winged monster that Jingyi had… a thought.

A thought that came to him like a lightning bolt; a mad scientist’s eureka moment:

Lan Sizhui’s cousin is Mothman.

Jin Ling is Mothman.

Hear him out.

Jin Ling is Lan Sizhui’s younger cousin by two years. Sizhui likes to refer to him as his “baby cousin” a lot. Jingyi had once brought up the fact that Jin Ling could hardly be considered a baby if the age gap between them is so small, but Sizhui had just smiled beatifically at him and proceeded to refer to Jin Ling as his “baby cousin” in the very next breath, so Jingyi had wisely dropped the subject.

The setting is thus: Sizhui's house of hell.

It’s called a funeral home, Zizhen would say, but Zizhen is also deeply under Sizhui’s heavenly thrall, so anything he says with regards to Sizhui cannot be fully trusted, in Jingyi’s esteemed opinion. Hell house, monster mansion, funeral home—it’s all the same to him, anyway. The point is that the Lan-Wei household may have dead bodies awaiting embalming stored away in their basement at any given point in time, and Jingyi is not in the business of making friends — or even enemies — with corpses, ever, no siree.

Not that Sizhui’s ever taken him down to his dad’s workspace to watch an embalming take place. Still, if a zombie apocalypse were to ever break out, Sizhui’s large and spacious funeral home would be the last place Jingyi would want to be in, no matter how strong and heroic Sizhui’s fathers might be. (Senior Wei and Hanguang-Jun are very physically imposing men.)

But he digresses.

The first time Jingyi paid a visit to Sizhui’s house was in their freshman year of high school, around two weeks after he’d first met Sizhui. He’d barely taken two steps into the entryway when he spotted the first of many framed photographs that featured Jin Ling scattered about the house. Most of them pictured the small boy either laughing or pouting with a younger, adorably disheveled Sizhui, sometimes with a small puppy wiggling in their arms, or with a huffy, disgruntled-looking man in purple standing in the background.

And here’s the thing: Sizhui is undeniably fond of his baby cousin. He’s always ready to dispense an anecdote or two about the time Jin Ling lived with him and his fathers for a handful of their childhood years before Jin Ling had to move away to stay with some uncle on his father’s side. He’d looked so happy and delighted to be sharing the stories that Jingyi often had no choice but to indulge Sizhui in his reminiscing.

And so it happened that by the third month of their fledgling friendship, Jingyi had come to possess a wealth of knowledge about Jin Ling that, quite frankly, he didn’t know what to do with.

The reason had been simple: Lan Jingyi had, for a brief period in time, been madly in love with Lan Sizhui.

It’s no big deal, really. Jingyi thinks everyone and their mother who has ever met Sizhui and been exposed to his kindness, intelligence, and vexingly divine visage has probably been in love with him at one point or another. It’s just a fact of life now.

Something to weather through and endure, like a typhoon or a tornado, Jingyi thinks. A force of nature. Sizhui is powerful like that.

Too bad fifteen year old Lan Jingyi hadn’t gotten the memo for the natural disaster that was to be his giant crush on Lan Sizhui.

He remembers their first meeting as high school freshmen in excruciating detail. Moving had seemed like the end of the world back then — leaving behind half of his family, his cat, Zizhen — right up until the moment he’d discovered his locker was situated next to the prettiest boy Jingyi had ever seen in his life thus far.

Hello, Sizhui had said, smile shy and polite and absolutely lethal to any living thing lucky enough to be within a mile radius of him. He’d tucked a lock of silky black hair away from his face behind his ear, and Jingyi had studied the movement like it was an act of God, ready to be converted. I’m Sizhui. Nice to meet you. He’d shaken Jingyi’s hand. I see we have the same last name.

Yeah, Jingyi had croaked, palms moist and throat dry. It’d taken him an ungodly amount of time to extricate his sweaty hand from Sizhui’s cool grip, embarrassed. Then, overrun by a sudden rush of panic and blood to his face, he’d blurted out, Think we’re long-lost brothers?

Maybe, Sizhui had laughed, eyes curling up into little smiles of their own, and Jingyi had clutched his biology textbook to his chest like it was a piece of driftwood and the sensation of his heart thudding against the smooth, hard cover was the ocean threatening to drown him.

(Spoiler alert: they hadn’t been long-lost brothers. But Jingyi had gotten over his crush all the same.)

He’s ashamed to admit it now, but the pitifully lovestruck Lan Jingyi of those yonder years had been shamefully, deathly jealous of a perfectly innocent thirteen year old Jin Ling.

Jealous! Him! Of a middle schooler! Sizhui’s own family! It’s embarrassing to even think about.

But in all honesty, how else could Jingyi have felt? He’d been a spirited, emotionally high-strung teenager deep in the throes of an unrequited love. He’s surprised (and relieved) he hadn’t done anything more drastic to win over Sizhui’s heart back then, like stand underneath Sizhui’s window at night, in the rain, with a boombox playing All-4-One’s “I Swear” on Valentines Day or something. Luckily Zizhen had talked him out of doing that one. Senior Wei would’ve definitely never let him live it down if he’d actually gone through with it, and the man has already teased Jingyi about his crush enough times to traumatize him for ten lifetimes.

In the end, the jealousy towards Jin Ling had died down to be replaced by mild curiosity, and later, plain befuddlement anyway.

Over the course of one short year, the pictures of Jin Ling that Sizhui received from the boy himself seemed to rapidly dwindle down to nothing more than the occasional snapshot of a haphazardly thrown peace sign or badly lit selfie for reasons still unclear to Jingyi. Pretty soon, Sizhui had hardly had anything of his beloved cousin to proudly show Jingyi like he’d been able to during the early days of their friendship.

Instead of being elated by this change, however, Jingyi had just felt cheated.

Because somehow, some way, Sizhui’s genuine enthusiasm with regards to his cousin had apparently taken root in Jingyi’s mind, grown on him like some sort of mold, or a very aggressive species of fungi. He’d found, to his horror, that he — apparently cared? About Jin Ling? A boy whom he’d never even met in the flesh despite all his years of friendship with Sizhui?

It was ridiculous. Jingyi had spent at least a day wondering if the stale hotdog he’d had at the school cafeteria the day before his revelation had somehow poisoned his brain and taken over his body.

As the years trudged on, however, Jin Ling only grew more and more evasive, and Jingyi more and more invested. He’d eventually had to recategorize Jin Ling from “rival in love” to “verified cryptid” in the mental office space that was his mind, the boy was that slippery.

Curious, and also very bored and unwilling to work on his math homework one day, Jingyi had bluntly asked Sizhui about the decline in updates concerning Jin Ling some time in their junior year of high school.

“He’s going through a phase,” Sizhui had sighed, like he was a wizened old man and Jin Ling was an unreasonable teenager a whole two decades younger than him, “I think he’s embarrassed and doesn’t know what to think of himself yet. He’s at that age, I suppose.” Then he’d opened his phone and looked at Jingyi with a considering twinkle in his eyes. “He does have a public instagram account, though.” The if you’re interested had been heavily implied.

Embarrassed by his transparency, Jingyi had hesitated — for all of two seconds, that is.

Sizhui obviously didn’t have a problem with it, so why not, he’d reasoned with himself, hooking his chin over Sizhui’s shoulder and taking a gander at Jin Ling’s only public social media account. This must be what stanning an incredibly reclusive celebrity must be like.

He’d expected the usual deluge of group selfies with friends and gratuitous shots of food that would be commonplace for someone in their age group.

Instead, he’d found himself surveying an honestly concerning grid of blurry and near incomprehensible photos on Sizhui’s tiny phone screen.

They featured, from what Jingyi could tell, cryptic, heavily filtered snippets of Jin Ling’s face; never any that showed defining features. There was also an abundance of bow and arrow imagery, most likely owing to the fact that Jin Ling was allegedly some sort of archery prodigy. The pictures were usually adorned with captions that either consisted entirely of vaguely themed emojis, or mentioned something completely mundane that had nothing to do with the photos themselves, like: took a walk with fairy and met some nice ducks today under a photo of Jin Ling’s perfectly arched eyebrow; no waterfowl to be seen anywhere. Another example was a bathroom selfie that entirely cropped out Jin Ling’s face and body from the frame and instead proudly displayed the sink plus the corner of a clothed elbow reflected in the mirror above it, simply captioned with “esketit”.

The only photos that seemed to have been taken with anything even remotely resembling a steady hand were the exceedingly high resolution photos of a handsome black and white Siberian Husky: Fairy, Jingyi’s mind supplied. He supposed if there was one thing he knew for sure about Jin Ling, it was that Fairy is undoubtedly the apple of Jin Ling’s eye, and apparently the only subject worth taking a proper photo of for the world to see.

“Sizhui,” he’d said, staring at a hazy photo of what could’ve either been a beetle or a dollop of dog poo, “I think your cousin needs to get his eyes checked. These look like they were taken by a chicken with a calculator.”

Sizhui lets out another sigh, this time more long-suffering. “Jin Ling has 20/20 vision.”

It’s sometime in the late afternoon when Jingyi finally locates Sizhui in the university courtyard, talking to someone whom Jingyi can’t see. He dismounts his skateboard as he nears the crowded area, tucking it into the crook of his elbow.

Sizhui is standing beside a big, round table sheltered beneath the gnarled branches of a large oak tree, relaxing in the shade with his back to Jingyi, broad and speckled with the sunlight filtering through the leaves above him. Jingyi catches a flash of yellow behind Sizhui — perhaps a jacket? — when Sizhui shifts his weight onto his other foot, but whoever Sizhui is talking to must’ve also mirrored the movement, because the yellow tuft of fabric is gone after Jingyi blinks. He quickens his pace.

It’s mid-May in Gusu now, magnolia flowers blooming all around campus like little golden stars on bright green clouds of leaves. Jingyi has been sweating under his jacket the whole day, and he longs to be back home taking a shower already.

His geology class runs through noontime this quarter, so he hasn’t had lunch yet. He also pushed his luck sleeping in that morning and predictably ended up having to ride his skateboard like the very hounds of hell were after him just to get to his first class on time, so he never had breakfast either. Jingyi is pretty sure his stomach has actually started cannibalizing itself out of desperation. He’s convinced one of these days it’s just going to compress itself into one singular point of gravity, like a black hole of stress and hunger, compounded by his mild caffeine addiction. He’s only had one cup of coffee the whole day too, and he thinks he might be going into withdrawal. Just an hour ago he’d bent down to retrieve his pencil case from his backpack, only to somehow resurface with his shoe in his hand instead.

Basically, he’s running on fumes. He’s not thinking straight. This is the excuse he latches onto when he bolts at the first sight of Jin Ling.

Not away from him; towards him.

“Mooothmaaaaaan!” he bellows, in the same tone of voice he remembers it being called in the Buzzfeed Unsolved episode.

Jin Ling, who’d been the one talking to Sizhui under the oak tree, understandably jumps at the sight of an unknown man running full tilt towards him. Not so understandably, he slides into a fighting stance, feet apart and braced firmly for impact. He looks equal parts baffled and defiant, face pulled into a scowl that Jingyi has only ever seen on childhood photographs. Somehow, this inspires him to run faster.

“Is he running towards me?” Jin Ling exclaims, pointing to Jingyi.

“Oh my god?” says Sizhui, eyes wide with concern. He’d known his friend would be excited to meet his cousin, but this is… unprecedented, to say the least. Unsure of what to do but recognizing he had to do something, he steps into the line of fire, hands up in the air like he plans to grapple Jingyi into walking like a normal person but looking more like he’s being held at gunpoint instead. “Jingyi, what in the world—”

Enter Zizhen: face buried in his phone and unaware of his surroundings. He speed-walks straight onto the battlefield with an armful of canvases, headphones on over his ears. He’s completely vulnerable to the Jingyi-shaped hurricane heading for him.

“Oh no,” Sizhui has time to say before the collision explodes like a supernova before his eyes.

“I’d make a joke about how I always knew you had the hots for me,” Zizhen says, staring up at his best friend with dead eyes, “but currently my left arm feels like it’s been dragged across twenty feet of rough concrete, so, fuck you, man.”

They're in a pile of limbs a foot away from the table. Zizhen is smeared halfway on the concrete and grass and Jingyi is crouched above him like he’s testing out a new and improved version of the kabedon. All around them lie the carcasses of Zizhen’s as yet unused canvases, fortunately only bruised around the edges. A crowd of busybodies gather around the premises to watch what is likely the most exciting thing they’ve seen in two weeks of college life, murmuring with excitement at the prospect of a scuffle and dispersing once they see no such event occurring.

“Sorry,” Jingyi cringes, settling back on his heels and pulling Zizhen up into a sitting position with him. “I was, uh, testing something out in the name of science.” His palms are stinging, likely scratched up from the fall, and he winces as he reaches for the cap that had fallen off during the crash and jams it back onto his bedhead.

“Really, now,” Zizhen says, unmoved. The half bun he’d fixed his hair into is a wild mess around his face. “And that would be?”

“Um,” Jingyi coughs, “Breaking the sound barrier?” He flashes a wobbly, toothy grin at his friend.

Zizhen lifts his brows and opens his mouth, likely to deliver a scathing response, when they hear a worried oh my god float out from above them and look up to see Sizhui’s beautiful face blocking out the late afternoon sun. The light hits the back of his head like a halo, illuminating him around the edges in an ethereal, amber glow. Jingyi snorts as Zizhen snaps his mouth shut with an audible clack, heat rising to his cheeks.

Sizhui hunkers down beside them, catching sight of a cut on Zizhen’s temple and extending a hand to swipe carefully at the blood. “Are you okay?” he asks, eyes and voice soft.

Zizhen blinks at the gentle touch and turns to Jingyi, a little breathless, “On second thought, thank you man, good luck on your science experiment.”

“Yeah, I’m okay too, thanks for asking,” Jingyi jokes, waving away the concerned noises Sizhui unleashes on him and winking obnoxiously at Zizhen (who flips him off surreptitiously where Sizhui can’t see him).

Jingyi rolls forward onto his toes, brushing at the dirt on his knees, and starts to get up. He sees the tip of a brown suede sneaker when he’s halfway there, bent at the waist, and follows the legs attached to the shoe all the way up to the disconcerted face of one very real Jin Ling, in the flesh.

“You—” Jin Ling narrows his eyes, licks his lips, and sticks a hand out to Jingyi. He sounds hesitant, and more than a little suspicious. Jingyi supposes he can’t blame him. “Need a hand?”

Jingyi jolts.

There’s something there, something lurking at the edges of his memories — glimpses of white fabric and cold skin and sharp teeth…

A hoarse voice. A lilting voice.

Let me give you a hand.

His own voice.

The words send a weird chill down Jingyi’s spine. Jin Ling tilts his head at him in confusion, and his hand starts to flag as his brows furrow. Unwilling to let go of this opportunity to prove Jin Ling’s physical existence to himself, Jingyi files the bizarre moment away for further examination later as he grasps Jin Ling’s very real, very remarkably noncryptid-like hand.

“Holy shit,” Jingyi says, the feeling of Jin Ling’s warm, callused palm meeting his like a conduit for the return of his common sense and sanity. He is suddenly, deeply aware of what he must look like to Jin Ling at this moment, covered in dust and dirt and stained with grass from a fall of his own doing.

Like a maniac, the unrepentant gremlins in his brain helpfully provide.

You’re all toast, he threatens them, I’m firing all of you.

Trying not to look like he was just talking to himself, Jingyi pastes on the least awkward smile he can bring himself to make and attempts to save the situation through humor.

“Your name’s Jin Ling, right?” He laughs, high-pitched, and then panics. “Or can I call you mine?”

Jin Ling blinks. And then his mouth falls open.

The adorable shade of firetruck red that subsequently saturates Jin Ling’s face would be worth it to Jingyi if it weren’t for the murderous glint that then shoots out of the other man’s eyes like daggers, aiming for Jingyi’s heart and dignity.

“Just kidding!” Jingyi bluffs, shaking the hand still in his grasp and plowing on, “I’m Lan Jingyi, I’m sure Sizhui must’ve told you about me, haha, nice to finally meet you, man!”

Jin Ling rips his hand out of Jingyi’s grasp with an affronted noise and holds it to his chest, like Jingyi is the bearer of a contagious disease and Jin Ling is gravely compromised. His face is still red, and his eyes swirl with a mixture of indignance and open disdain. Jingyi winces, internally and externally. He lifts his hand to rub at it self-consciously.

“You—!” Jin Ling starts with a scowl, but then trails off as his eyes snag on the mottled red bruise on Jingyi’s wrist that Jingyi has only just now noticed as well. Suddenly, Jin Ling’s entire demeanor changes. He steps into Jingyi’s space and carefully but firmly inspects the bruise with his fingers. “Where did you get this,” he asks in a low voice. The gaze he pins Jingyi with is dark and piercing, heavy with things unsaid.

“I don’t…” Jingyi is perplexed. The bruise appears to be fresh, with spots of blue and purple blooming at the margins of the four bright red ribbons that curl around his wrist. It’s an odd shape; almost like a set of fingers had closed around his wrist and squeezed, hard, particularly on the underside of his wrist. Just above his pulse point, there are markings that spider out into thinner tendrils. He doesn’t remember getting the bruise.

Actually, come to think of it, he doesn’t remember much of what he did last night, either.

Too late, a voice sings in his head.

He blinks.

Shakes his head.

“Huh.” Withdrawing his hand from Jin Ling’s hold, Jingyi studies the bruise himself, frowning in consternation. “I must’ve gotten it from the fall just now.” He throws his gaze about their surroundings for what could’ve caused such strange markings, but comes up with nothing and gives up, shrugging the matter off. The bruise doesn’t hurt at the moment, which is good, Jingyi thinks, but that could just be from the shock of the impact; it might hurt like a bitch later in the evening. Hopefully after he’s done his nightly stretches.

“Hmm,” is all Jin Ling says in response. He steps back a foot, but continues boring his eyes into Jingyi’s. His lashes are dark against the tan of his cheeks, and his eyes are large and expressive.

Brown with flecks of gold, Jingyi notes. He really is handsome. He feels heat prickle at the nape of his neck at the thought. Jin Ling’s stare is severe and penetrating, like he’s mining Jingyi’s eyes for — what? Jingyi doesn’t even know.

“Jesus, you’re intense,” he laughs reflexively. Jin Ling is somehow both exactly and nothing like he expected. After years of only hearing about him secondhand, he’s not sure how to reconcile the image of Jin Ling he’d built for himself with the real person standing before him.

Especially when the person standing before Jingyi looks inexplicably like he belongs in an idol group — singing pop songs while running a hand through his artfully styled hair and dancing in front of a horde of adoring fans. Even Jin Ling’s wardrobe must cost more than Jingyi’s entire yearly tuition, looking like they were tailored for him, and what the hell, why is Jingyi thinking about this. His ears burn from the sudden blush that’s worked its way up the back of his neck.

And then Jin Ling scowls, and suddenly, the moment is broken.

“Yes, well, you did come running at me screaming something about a Mossman,” Jin Ling bites out, and it takes Jingyi a second to realize what Jin Ling is responding to.

“It’s Mothman, actually,” Zizhen’s airy voice glides in from somewhere to Jingyi’s right, “and you tell it to him, kiddo.”

Jingyi turns to see Zizhen walking over to their table with Sizhui, a damp blue handkerchief hanging limply in Sizhui’s hands. They must’ve gone to a drinking fountain to clean out the cut on Zizhen’s temple, Jingyi realizes, and then feels a pang of guilt in his chest.

Upon closer inspection, though, he notices that there is no trace of upset or unhappiness on his friend’s face. In fact, it appears as though Zizhen may have a smile playing on the corners of his lips, and a light dusting of pink coloring his cheeks. Jingyi instantly knows with just that one look that there aren’t going to be any hard feelings between them despite Jingyi essentially bowling Zizhen over for no reason.

(He tries not to think about how he must have looked when he was in love with Sizhui, all those years ago. Was he this obvious? He must have been; he’s always being told that he’s easy to read, after all. The thought makes him want to crawl into a hole and die.)

“Who’s Mothman?” Jin Ling suddenly asks, head tilted to the side in confusion, and the question is like a blast of cold water to Jingyi’s face.

“Yes,” says Sizhui, voice just a tiny bit clipped and hair fluttering like a shampoo commercial as he goes to stand next to Jin Ling, “who is Mothman, Jingyi? I’d love to know as well.”

He has his eyebrows lifted in an expression that somehow manages to be both amused and chastising, and Jingyi quails. He knows for a fact that Sizhui is fully aware of who Mothman is; it was their mutual love for all things strange and macabre that helped to forge the foundation for Sizhui and Zizhen’s friendship, after all, and hell, Sizhui probably knows way more about Mothman than Jingyi does, to be quite honest.

Searching desperately for a way to guide the spotlight of judgment away from him, Jingyi singles out an unassuming boy with an undercut walking behind Jin Ling and metaphorically pounces on him like a starving hawk diving for its prey.

“I wasn’t calling for Mothman,” he blabbers, spinning a web of lies, “I was calling out to my good friend and buddy Norman over there!” He points to the boy behind Jin Ling with gusto and booms out, at a volume that frightens everyone within fifty meters of him: “YO! NORMAN, BUDDY! ‘SUP MAN!”

The boy startles, spilling a bit of the water he’d been drinking from his eco-friendly thermos and startling even more when he turns to see a whole brood of attractive young men all staring expectantly at him. “’Sup,” he greets back with a casual head nod. He blends into the crowd of haggard, sleep-deprived university students at a calm, sedate pace, and Jingyi turns back to his audience and grins, manic.

“See?” he says, “No Mothman. Just Norman, guys, my good buddy Norman!”

“Unbelievable,” Zizhen remarks with a slow, astounded shake of his head. Jingyi can tell from the smile that’s unfurling on Zizhen’s lips that he’s impressed, and honestly, Jingyi is impressed with himself too.

“Your friends are weird,” Jin Ling tells Sizhui earnestly as he watches Zizhen and Jingyi perform an incredibly complicated and long-winded handshake in the background. There is a lot of chest-bumping and dabbing that occurs, and several onlookers gift them with applause.

Sizhui pinches the bridge of his nose and releases a breath, a chuckle bubbling unsolicited out of his mouth as he joins in the clapping. Jin Ling looks at his hands, then at the commotion to the right of him, and curls his lip, resolutely abstaining from applause.

“You know what,” Sizhui says, “yes, yes they are.” He links arms with Jin Ling and turns them bodily to observe the tail end of Jingyi’s and Zizhen’s time-worn friendship ritual, which includes a heartwarming hug at the end that has Jin Ling physically recoiling. It’s with a peaceful surety that comes from having dealt with and accepted Lan Jingyi’s—and subsequently Ouyang Zizhen’s—chaotic energies from the day he first met them that Sizhui then smiles lopsidedly at his cousin and says, pleasant as can be,

“You’re gonna love them.”

They pile into Sizhui’s car shortly after proper introductions are made all around, the older boys intent on celebrating Jin Ling’s arrival and induction into their friend group with a grand dinner at their favorite restaurant.

Jin Ling attempts to refuse the invitation at first, of course, on the grounds that he never agreed to being a part of their little friend group anyway, and is fully capable of making his own friends who aren’t weirdos without his cousin’s help, and besides, he’s not a child anymore, Sizhui, you can’t just make him—

“But I haven’t had dinner with you in so long, A-Ling,” Jingyi can almost hear the puppy dog eyes in Sizhui’s voice, “I won’t force you if you really don’t want to go, but…”

Jin Ling capitulates immediately.

“Ugh,” he says, and then stalks off towards the parking lot. He folds himself into the front seat of Sizhui’s car without so much as a “dibs!” or a “shotgun!” leaving his mouth, and Jingyi only lets him get away with such egregious rule-breaking so that he may stay on the down low until the memory of the Mothman incident dies a natural death on everyone’s minds.

Jin Ling’s backpack is already nestled between his shins by the time Jingyi and Zizhen successfully squish themselves into the backseat, and Jingyi envies him his leg room. When Sizhui pulls out of the parking lot, the movement pastes Jingyi and Zizhen’s sides together, reminding Jingyi of sardines being jostled in a can. They sit huddled with their giant, bulging backpacks cuddled in their laps.

Then, Zizhen sniffs the air and revels in the clean, unchanging scent of Sizhui’s car. “Yas,” he says with perhaps too much emotion, “that new car smell, ugh, the decadence, I love your car so much, Sizhui, can I turn the air conditioner on?”

“Sure,” comes Sizhui’s pleasant reply.

The look on Jin Ling’s face when Zizhen squeezes the upper half of his grass-stained, paint-encrusted body up to the front so that he can turn the dial for the air conditioner up is nothing short of priceless. Even viewed on such a small surface as the sideview mirror, Jingyi can barely stop himself from letting loose the ugliest guffaw of laughter from exploding out of his mouth and has to bite his lip hard enough for it to turn white.

It’s at that moment that he knows he has to contribute.

Innocent as can be, he asks, “Sizhui, can I play some music until we get to the restaurant?”

“Sure,” comes Sizhui’s indulgent reply.

Jingyi puts a ten hour loop of the screaming cowboy on.

The look of dawning horror on Jin Ling’s face when Zizhen and Jingyi launch into a practiced harmony with the song is even more hilarious than the last, and Jingyi decides that it was totally worth it to abandon his mission of lying low for the fun and totally wholesome activity of ruffling the prissy young mistress’s feathers up front.

Dinner that night is held at a small, family-owned Korean restaurant that Jingyi and Zizhen had discovered on one wild, hazy night after winter finals the year before.

They’d been hopped up on an intoxicating brew of caffeine that consisted of coffee, tea, and energy drinks all day that day, and the adrenaline rush of having finished all their exams and projects with their sanity still (mostly) intact had left them somewhat unhinged, to say the least.

Jingyi doesn’t remember much of that night, aside from how good the food had been and how drunk they’d gotten afterwards. Everything beyond those two things is a fuzzy mystery that comes and goes in bursts of clarity in his mind, and whenever he is pressed for details, he grows more and more unsure of their veracity as the stories continuously merge and mix together into a nebulous blob of saturated images and snatches of conversation.

He might have drunk dialed Sizhui in a passionate stupor and confessed to accidentally flushing his socks down the toilet during a sleepover at Sizhui’s place once, and Zizhen might have attempted to down a small bowl of ssamjang mixed with a healthy dosage of fish sauce, sesame oil, and wasabi like it was a shot of soju at one point, but who can really, definitively say they did any of that? No one, that’s who.

After all, they’d sworn the nice, middle-aged auntie who owned the restaurant to secrecy with their shamelessly chaste flirting and charming that night. They had all their bases covered.

“And Auntie Choi wouldn’t betray our trust like that, would you, ma’am?” Zizhen asks the woman as she comes over to their table with another heaping serving of brisket. He bats his eyelashes playfully up at her as she lets out a fond chuckle and boops him on the nose, refilling the water jug at the edge of their table with practiced efficiency.

“My lips are sealed, sweetheart,” she pinches his cheek, “so don’t you worry your pretty little heads about it.”

“Yeah,” Jingyi cheers, earning himself his own fond pat to the cheek from the lady, “that’s our Auntie Choi!”

Jin Ling blinks his huge eyes slowly from across Jingyi and observes the interaction with an oddly open expression on his face, though Jingyi can’t quite read the emotion in his eyes. It’s the most relaxed and unguarded he’s seen Jin Ling all day, and he files the moment away into the mental file folder he’s already put together for Jin Ling earlier that afternoon, privately enjoying how cute the young mistress had looked for a brief, fleeting moment.

“You know what I do remember from that night,” Zizhen says around a mouthful of rice, “is Sizhui coming to pick us up. Like a knight in shining armor. Or a very nice trench coat.” He blinks, a slow smile curling his lips. His voice is serious when he says to Sizhui: “That was a very nice trench coat.”

“Of course you would remember that,” Jingyi mumbles out the side of his mouth. He yelps when Zizhen pinches his side.

“Thanks?” Sizhui laughs. “You were both squatting next to a fire hydrant crying that night when I came to get you.” He presses his lips together to prevent more laughter from coming out.

“Crying,” Jin Ling wrinkles his nose and casts a reproachful look at Jingyi and Zizhen’s side of the table, “why?”

“See, I don’t remember any of this happening at all,” Jingyi says, a bite of kimchi halfway up to his mouth, “so who can prove any of it really happened?”

“Sizhui wouldn’t lie,” Jin Ling says confidently. Sizhui strokes his cheek fondly, and Jin Ling blushes and swats his hand away with a grumble that ends in a whine. Jingyi may or may not have watched the interaction with rapt attention.

“Weren’t we on the phone with someone?” Zizhen asks, and then takes his eyes off the grill to stare at Sizhui in abject horror. “Oh my god, were we on the phone with you the whole time? Did I say anything weird?”

“No,” says Sizhui, “you weren’t on the phone with me.” His mouth twitches. “You might have said something weird; I don’t know. You were talking to a phone sex operator when I arrived.”

Jin Ling’s mouth falls open for the second time that day. “Why,” he whispers.

“Oh,” Jingyi and Zizhen say, with completely different intonations and thoughts.

“I guess you weren’t really talking to the operator,” Sizhui amends thoughtfully. He arranges some vegetables in a neat section to be cooked on the grill. “You were all three just crying, very loudly, when I got there. It was as alarming as it was entertaining, I must say.”

“You really aren’t selling the idea of this friend group very well,” Jin Ling says flatly. He recoils when he and Jingyi reach for the same slice of meat on the grill, and Jingyi makes a face at him and retaliates by vindictively stealing all of the meat on their side of the grill. Jin Ling sputters at him in indignation.

“Aren’t I, though?” Sizhui’s eyes twinkle with mirth. “When I picked up the phone and asked the operator what was going on, they were very insistent about relaying their thanks to the nice young men who took the time to listen to them and give them advice on their troubles, so, I don’t know, I think I’m doing a pretty good job.”

“I am a very good listener,” Zizhen says proudly.

“And a good talker too,” Sizhui smiles, mischief in the curve of his eyes.

“Wh—what’s that supposed to mean,” Zizhen stammers.

“Ooooh,” Jingyi vocalizes, voice warbling when he doubles over with laughter as Zizhen shakes his shoulders and demands answers. Sizhui giggles behind a hand from across them.

“That’s,” Jin Ling says, and then doesn’t say anything more. A circus of emotions contort his face too fast for Jingyi to read.

“—real cool of us to do?” Jingyi finishes for him. “For a complete stranger? I know. Think of what we could do for you if you accepted us as your friends.” He wiggles his fingers in a vaguely threatening manner. “Come to the dark side, Jin Ling~” He searches the table for something to offer and picks it up with his chopsticks. “We have garlic~!”

Jin Ling draws back from the herb and curls his lip at Jingyi with all the repugnance of a high-born noble being accosted by a peasant. “You sicken me.”

“What’s that? I’m sickening?” Jingyi widens his eyes innocently. “Why, that’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me all day, Young Mistress, I’m flattered!”

“Who are you calling ‘Young Mistress’,” Jin Ling squawks, half out of his seat. Sizhui grabs onto his waist in alarm. “I’ll break your arms and legs if you say that to me again, bastard, just try me!”

“Oh yeah?” Jingyi yells, rising to the challenge. Zizhen pulls his seat out for him, and Jingyi fist bumps him without looking. “Five-thirty p.m. tomorrow, after my physics lab, meet me at the Life Science square by the Bell Tower!”

“Be there, or be square,” Zizhen whispers reverently.

“Why do we have to follow your schedule,” Jin Ling argues, “I have my own to follow too!”

“Well then tell me what your schedule is, Young Mistress, and I’ll make sure to bend over my back for your every wish!”

“Fuck you, that’s not even—!”

“I am so sorry,” Sizhui apologizes when Auntie Choi comes over because of the commotion.

“You know what else I remember,” Zizhen says again, and Jin Ling groans please, no more, “I think I tried to pay Sizhui for the car ride back to my apartment that night.”

“Ah,” says Sizhui, shoulders shaking with laughter at the memory, “yes, you tried to slip me an IOU you’d written on a napkin while we were still in the car, and then insisted I keep the change when I refused.”

Zizhen chokes on the bite he’d just taken, flushing down to his neck. “Oh, my god. I’m so sorry. Please never let me drink again.”

“Don’t worry,” Sizhui smiles warmly, angelic even despite the gochujang staining his lips. Several other restaurant-goers around them discover what it means to fall in love at first sight. “I was very impressed by how beautifully you could write in a moving car. And you were lying on your stomach the whole time.” He giggles. The waiter refilling their water jug fumbles his hold.

“Yeah, well, you’re a very good driver,” Zizhen fidgets, scratching at the reddening skin on the back of his neck. “No bumps or sudden stops. Perfect for practicing calligraphy.” He looks up at Sizhui through his bangs, smiling bashfully.

Jingyi whistles, soft and joking, as Jin Ling stares silently at the expression on his cousin’s face. For a moment, it looks as though Jin Ling might say something, and Jingyi has to wonder if he should step in or not.

But then, Jin Ling simply looks away and resumes flipping the meat on the grill, so Jingyi returns to bothering him and pretending to snatch the meat Jin Ling sets aside for himself as well. Jin Ling growls with his teeth bared at him, and Jingyi is reminded of a little puppy.

“Didn’t you turn the IOU in for your Intermediate Drawing final last year?” Sizhui asks, smiling gratefully when Zizhen hands him a plate piled with vegetables.

“Yes,” Zizhen says, “and I passed with flying colors.” He frowns. “Maybe I need to drink more often. The things you can get away with in a contemporary art class…”

“All’s well that ends well, I guess?” Sizhui laughs.

“Not for me,” Jingyi groans, and then lets out a mini shriek when he drops the meat he’d just unstuck from the grill into a bowl full of soy sauce. The dark black liquid spills all over his and Jin Ling’s half of the table.

Jin Ling tsks at him condescendingly. “You’re a mess,” he derides and, well, fair.

“I would argue, but — oh, thanks, you don’t have to do that.” Jingyi blinks when Jin Ling wordlessly pushes the napkin dispenser closer to him and gets up to help him mop up the mess on the table as well.

“It’ll go faster this way,” Jin Ling rolls his eyes.

“You never did tell me what exactly happened after Sizhui took you back to your dorms,” Zizhen says. “It can’t have been any more embarrassing than all the other things we did prior to being put to bed.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” Jingyi grimaces. “I ended up sleeping outside that night.”

“Do I even want to know,” Jin Ling says with a disgusted wrinkle of his nose. He finishes wiping up the last puddle of sauce on the table and sits back down to resume staring at the assortment of side dishes spread out in front of him, picking up a slice of overcooked pork from the grill and pausing with it up in the air between his chopsticks. He bites his lip, and it occurs to Jingyi that Jin Ling doesn’t know how to make a lettuce wrap.

He contemplates picking up the wrap he’d just made for himself and feeding it to Jin Ling, like Zizhen is doing for Sizhui at that very moment.

He’ll probably bite my hand off instead, he thinks with a roll of his eyes, and plates the wrap and slides it towards Jin Ling to imitate or eat instead.

Predictably, Jin Ling blushes and frowns down at the offering. There is a brief moment where Jingyi thinks Jin Ling is going to refuse the wrap out of some misplaced sense of pride at having been caught not knowing how to do something, and he huffs inwardly in annoyance.

But then Jin Ling looks up, meets his gaze, and says a simple thanks before picking up the wrap and stuffing it whole into his mouth.

He looks — he looks like a chipmunk, with his cheeks full of food like that, Jingyi observes with horror. And then experiences an existential crisis when Jin Ling starts to chew, with obvious difficulty. Oh my god.

Sizhui lets out the most delicate sounding snort, and holds a hand up to his mouth as he swallows the mouthful of bean sprouts he’d just taken.

“Jingyi wasn’t a mess,” he says, the word sounding a bit awkward on his tongue, “but it was a battle even walking him to his building when he kept shrieking that he would die if he didn’t stay on the lines of the sidewalk. And when we did get to his dorm, he wouldn’t let me in to escort him to his room.” He turns to Jin Ling and almost—but not quite—snickers. Whether it’s at the sight of his cousin’s bulging cheeks or at the memory of Jingyi’s tomfoolery, Jingyi isn’t quite sure. “He kept insisting I show my ID to the bouncer to confirm my age.”

Jin Ling swallows, lips a little slick with oil. Jingyi looks away and makes another lettuce wrap.

“Who was the bouncer,” Jin Ling asks in a tone of voice that suggests he already knows the answer.

Sizhui smiles, and if Jingyi didn’t know him better, he would think the expression was gleeful.

“Why, the bouncer was Jingyi himself, of course.”

Jingyi buries his face in his hands as Zizhen and Sizhui titter with good-natured laughter.

“Wow, what a shock,” says Jin Ling, dry as the desert.

Zizhen snaps a picture of Jingyi beside him and solemnly intones, “At Eternity’s Gate, Vincent van Gogh.” And then to Sizhui he says, “Please continue, this is giving me life.”

“Demon,” Jingyi hisses at him, but looks up from his hands to regard Sizhui with resigned eyes. He waves his hand in a dramatic shooing motion. “Go on, you might as well put me out of my misery, it’s too late to save me now.”

“Alright,” Sizhui cheerfully obliges, at the same time Jin Ling mutters no kidding. “In the end I had no choice but to borrow Jingyi’s phone and call his roommate to let him in as a last resort. He absolutely would not believe that I wasn’t a high school student trying to con him, even when I did show him my ID.” He pauses to take a sip of water. “And also, he lost his room key.”

“Again, what a shock.” The sarcasm is sharp on Jin Ling’s tongue.

“You could pass for a high schooler though,” Zizhen says, examining the lines and angles of Sizhui’s face with a discerning eye. “But you could also pass for an adult?” He holds a chopstick out at arm’s length in Sizhui’s direction, one eye closed. “Fascinating.”

“It was a tumultuous night, alright!” Jingyi protests, thinking of the teal blue knit cap he’d lost somewhere between stumbling out of the restaurant and squatting on the road, “I lost a lot of things that day.”

“Yeah, like your marbles, apparently,” Zizhen cackles, still in the middle of mapping out Sizhui’s face.

“Like you’re one to talk!” Jingyi slings an arm around Zizhen’s neck and puts him in a headlock.

“At least I didn’t wake up in the bushes next to the campus police office that night!” Zizhen wheezes. “That was you they were talking about in that campus safety email they sent, wasn’t it!?”

“N-no!” Jingyi shouts, narrowly avoiding an elbow to the face.

“Yes,” says Sizhui.

“Et tu, Sizhui?” Jingyi wails.

“But I don’t understand,” Jin Ling twists his brows, “didn’t you call his roommate to collect him? What happened to—” He gasps. “Did you murder your roommate?” he asks in a horrified tone of voice that, quite frankly, Jingyi finds offensive.

“As if,” he scoffs, finally releasing Zizhen at the latter’s taps of uncle on his arm, “Xue Yang would’ve sooner murdered me before I could even so much as devise a plan to slightly inconvenience him. No, I turned myself in to Lost and Found.” He stops, busying himself with piling cloves of garlic onto a half-made wrap for Jin Ling to draw attention away from the blush rising on his cheeks. “I mean, I was going to, but then I realized how bad of an idea that was, and then I just decided to sleep outside.”

“Why.”

“Because I was tired? And drunk?” He extends the newly made wrap across the table and places it on an empty plate near Jin Ling. He sniffs, full of bravado. “Don’t worry. You’ll get there eventually, young Padawan. Just give it a few more years of anxiety and stress.”

Jin Ling wrinkles his nose haughtily and sneers, “I’m not a lightweight.” He eats the wrap with significantly more grace this time and Jingyi does not coo. Outwardly, at least.

“Uh-huh, sure, Freshman.”

Jin Ling bristles. “Just because I’m a freshman doesn’t mean—”

“I should’ve known calling Xue Yang to let you in was a bad idea,” Sizhui loudly interrupts, “I should’ve just taken you home with me.” He sighs with genuine mournfulness.

Jingyi shrugs. “Eh, you’d done enough by that point in the night already, I don’t blame you at all.” He leans back in his chair and cracks his neck, feeling a phantom crick in his muscles at the memory. “It was kind of nice sleeping outside anyway. I was warm from the alcohol, and the Christmas lights on the trees and street lamps looked kind of like stars against the air polluted sky.”

Jin Ling furrows his brows. “What’s so bad about this Xue Yang guy? Did he just not come down to get you or something?”

“No,” Zizhen snickers, “he probably did, and Jingyi just got cold feet and ran away.”

“Again, why.”

“Xue—”

“Shhh,” Jingyi hisses, ducking down almost all the way under the table and looking over his shoulder to scan the mildly crowded restaurant for his ex-roommate. “Stop saying his name, you idiot, you’ll summon him!”

Jin Ling peeks at him from over the side of the table and says, “What is he, Voldemort? The hell are you doing?”

Satisfied that no sign of He Who Must Not Be Named can be found within the restaurant, Jingyi wiggles back up to his seat and wipes at the sweat dotting his brow.

“He might as well be,” he says, “he’s certainly pale enough to be Voldy. I’ll tell you about him another time, alright, preferably when we’re not…” He casts one more suspicious glance around the restaurant. “When we’re not in public.”

Jin Ling looks down at him from his nose like Jingyi is an insect under his shoe and says, “You are so weird.”

Jingyi lobs a sauce stained napkin straight at his face.

“So why did you call me Mothman and try to tackle me earlier today,” Jin Ling asks, seemingly apropos of nothing. He stares unblinkingly at Jingyi with his huge, terribly brown eyes as Jingyi coughs through the mouthful of water he’d just inhaled into his lungs.

Jingyi slams a palm hard down onto the table. The cup of water he’d just put down almost capsizes beside him, and he saves it with a curse. He can feel his face start to go embarrassingly red at the mention of The Mothman Incident — as he’s taken to calling it in his head — and he points a finger at Jin Ling’s nose, filled with nervous energy.

“I told you,” he flounders, skin slowly burning to a crisp, “I wasn’t running at you, I was just going to say hi to my buddy Norman, like I said! He’s — a rugby player, okay, he…” Jingyi trails off, knowing absolutely nothing about rugby besides the fact that some sort of violent body contact is involved while a ball is — kicked? Passed? — thrown around a field.

Zizhen sips loudly at his water, watching the train wreck that is his childhood friend trying to lie with wide, amused eyes. He orders some alcohol from a passing waiter, deciding that the fracas that is sure to result from this conversation would be better observed while buzzed.

“He what?” Jin Ling prompts with an imperious eyebrow raise. “You can’t get yourself out of this one, Lan Jingyi.”

“He — greets people,” Jingyi chokes, startled by the sudden use of his name. Sweat rolls down his cheek. “By tackling them, duh. That’s, uh, what you do in rugby, y’know: tackle people. You might not know this because you’ve been abroad for so long, Jin Ling, but, uh, that’s how you… show your support! For rugby players. Yeah. I… am a very supportive friend.” He turns desperate eyes on Zizhen and Sizhui. “You know.”

He’s met with resounding silence from all occupants at the table. Jingyi considers walking into oncoming traffic.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Jin Ling deadpans the obvious.

Zizhen and Sizhui burst into raucous laughter beside them.

“He’s got you there, man,” Zizhen wheezes. “That’s always been one of your weak points.”

Sizhui doesn’t say anything to either back up or refute Zizhen’s statement, but the laugh that he muffles behind a napkin is enough of a nail in the coffin of Jingyi’s dignity, and he whines at them, flicking the water he gathers from the condensation on his cup in betrayal.

Jin Ling grunts at the display and sips primly at his cup of water. “Hmph,” he says. “Childish.”

But then his mouth twitches, and Jingyi turns to glare at him just in time to see a smug, victorious, and infuriatingly fetching smirk stretch itself across Jin Ling’s red lips.

It’s an expression he hasn’t seen on the myriad photos of Jin Ling that Sizhui’s got displayed all over his home, and it’s different from all the scowling and glowering Jin Ling has done all day, too.

A warm, lightning-quick spark of electricity shoots up Jingyi’s spine. His own lips slide into a dangerous grin. Not one to be outdone (and oddly spurred on) by the brazenly challenging aura Jin Ling is giving off across from him, Jingyi rallies himself briskly and drops the act, switching tactics.

“Alright, fine,” he sneers, narrowing his eyes with pleasure when Jin Ling immediately goes on the defensive and starts scowling, “so maybe I was lying about Norman. But,” and here he does his most convincing imitation of Sizhui’s patented Innocent Sparkly Eyes, “am I really such a bad liar if, after all this time, I’ve managed to keep every single one of you from finding out why exactly I called the venerable Young Master Jin ‘Mothman’ earlier? Hm?” He allows his words to sink in for a couple seconds more, before (gently) slamming his hand down on the table again and yelling, chopsticks and fist raised triumphantly in the air, “BOOYAH, SUCKERS! CHECKMATE!”

“Pfft,” Zizhen blows a raspberry at him, “that’s a terrible argument.”

“Be that as it may,” Sizhui says, brows furrowed in serious thought, “he’s kind of right? In a way?” He smiles lightly. “Though that’s really more of a case for Jingyi’s ability to evade a question than it is his ability to lie.”

“Whatever,” Jin Ling and Jingyi grumble at the same time, complete with a simultaneous roll of their eyes.

They stare at each other in horror and astonishment for a long, nauseating moment.

Then, Jin Ling whips his head around to Sizhui and repeats, emphatically, almost begging: “Sizhui, your friends are weird.” He leans away from the table in what Jingyi hopes is exaggerated disgust and points a slender, accusing finger at Jingyi, grimacing when he says, “Especially that one.”

“Hey!” Jingyi shouts indignantly. “Rude!”

Jin Ling ignores him and shoots a glance at Zizhen, who is calmly munching on some beansprouts. Zizhen smiles when he meets Jin Ling’s eye.

Jin Ling hesitates, but then eventually adds, “The jury’s still out on… Zizhen, I guess, but my hopes aren’t exactly high.”

Sizhui sighs, trying to think of a way to ease the situation. He’s saved from doing so when Zizhen suddenly jumps up in his seat.

“Hey~!” Zizhen happily exclaims, exiting out of his seat to round the table and shake a bewildered Jin Ling’s hand, “You finally said my name, man!” He’s grinning like a thousand watt light bulb as Jin Ling stares up at him with his mouth agape. “Let’s get along well, yeah? Sizhui talks a lot about you, y’know, and I really think we could be really good friends if you would just give us a chance, really!” He shakes Jin Ling’s hand vigorously, and Jin Ling’s arm flops like a noodle between them.

“I,” Jin Ling looks flustered, a pretty pink flush making its way across his cheeks. His huge brown eyes look almost glassy in the restaurant’s warm yellow lighting.

He looks like a doll, Jingyi thinks, and can’t quite decide if he’s jealous or appreciative of how long and dark Jin Ling’s eyelashes are. Probably both.

“You…” Jin Ling licks his lips and tightens his grip on Zizhen’s hand, engaging the older man in a business-like handshake that has Sizhui quirking his lips into a small, amused smile beside them. The ghost of a smile lingers on the corners of Jin Ling’s mouth too, and oh, Jingyi finds that he’s definitely appreciative of that. “You said ‘really’ three times in that one sentence.”

“I am aware,” Zizhen replies lightly. He returns to his seat beside Jingyi and cheers when Auntie Choi arrives with a jaunty smile and several bottles of flavored soju for them, getting to work pouring everyone but Jin Ling a shot and grinning sunnily as he says, “I don’t mind being ‘weird’, by the way,” he mimes quotation marks, “though I personally don’t think I am. It’s a good thing to be ‘weird’ in my line of work.”

“Which is?” Jin Ling asks, looking a little chastised. He picks up a shot glass and holds it up to Zizhen, who raises a brow at him. “I can drink.”

“A-Ling,” Sizhui says warningly, tone of voice not matching the pleasant smile on his face. Jin Ling grumbles, but obediently pours himself another cup of water instead.

Zizhen laughs and says, “I double major in creative writing and art. Being strange would actually be an advantage for me, so trying to push my buttons like that won’t work, I’m afraid.”

Jin Ling flushes, starting to look a bit constipated, and Zizhen takes pity on him.

“It’s chill,” he says, “we’ll just have to work on finding our own special dynamic, be it watching horror movies together or,” he winks, “taking romantic walks at the beach together.”

“Boo, horror movies,” Jingyi jeers.

“Yay, romantic walks at the beach,” Sizhui laughingly cheers.

“Uh-huh…” Jin Ling says, still a bit uncertain, but noticeably less embarrassed.

Seeing the dark red of Jin Ling’s face simmer down to a light, peachy pink, Zizhen smiles in victory and raises his shot glass up in the air, waiting for everyone else to raise theirs as well.

“Gotta say I’m a little jealous of how quickly you and Jingyi took to each other, though,” he says offhandedly, face impassive but eyes alight with mischief, “like Tom and Jerry. Or Naruto and Sasuke.”

“Not Naruto,” Jingyi yells, snatching his shot of grapefruit soju back from the air.

“Am I Sasuke?!” Jin Ling shrieks, also snatching his cup of water away from the formation.

“Guys,” Sizhui reminds them patiently.

They clink their glasses and shout, in unison, “Cheers!”

Sizhui [8:17 PM]
:D

Zizhen [8:17 PM]
aaayyy welcome to the family little lingling

Jin Ling [8:18 PM]
this family is a nightmare

Sizhui [8:19 PM]
???

Zizhen [8:19 PM]
they’re
i’ll pm u the link sizhui

Sizhui [8:20 PM]
okay?

Jin Ling [8:20 PM]
wow I feel so included

Zizhen [8:21 PM]
i mean

Sizhui [8:22 PM]
cute!

Jin Ling [8:22 PM]
more like

Sizhui [8:23 PM]
:(

Zizhen [8:23 PM]
jin ling u monster u made him sAD FIX THIS

Jin Ling [8:24 PM]
jEsUs fine

Jin Ling [8:25 PM]
gross im changing it back wtf

Sizhui [8:25 PM]
why don’t we just go with groups of four?

Jin Ling [8:26 PM]
cliche
also we are literally none of those things pls try harder

Jin Ling [8:27 PM]
fUCk u im turning 20 in a couple months im barely a teenager anymore

Jin Ling [8:28 PM]
what the hell WHY do u know that tf

Jin Ling [8:29 PM]
friendship ended with sizhui now no one is my best friend

Jin Ling [8:30 PM]
nice
@Jingyi 2018 called it wants its memes back

Zizhen [8:31 PM]
nice
sizhui?

Sizhui [8:32 PM]
may i suggest one?

Zizhen [8:32 PM]
by all means

Jin Ling [8:33 PM]
………………….

Zizhen [8:34 PM]
brilliant i love it let’s keep it

Sizhui [8:34 PM]
>///<

Jin Ling [8:35 PM]
i cant believe we spent nearly 20 mins on this

Zizhen [8:36 PM]
listen professor nie is a MANIAC and i refuse to be cowed i WILL get him to compliment me

Zizhen [8:37 PM]
but did he MEAN it
i think not
tricksy man

Sizhui [8:37 PM]
if it’s any consolation, i think you’re a wonderful artist, zizhen (๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♡

Zizhen [8:38 PM]
suddenly i am filled with confidence and inspiration

Jin Ling [8:39 PM]
god
i repeat, this family is a nightmare