Work Text:
The collection is quiet in the evenings. Lan Wangji has become accustomed to it. He stays late on Friday nights, working at the shared computer in the main lab until seven or eight in the thin blue light of the workstation lamp, and waits for the alert to appear: Someone else is trying to access this computer. Do you wish to share access?
He dismissed the alert the first time, before he realized who must have sent the request. He has not dismissed it since. Wei Ying must be somewhere to the east, Lan Wangji supposes, in a time zone ahead of the museum. He prefers to work late, and has since Lan Wangji met him; he always claimed that his dissertation was written entirely between midnight and four in the morning.
So: waiting, in the evening, for the alert to appear, so that the herpetology records may be updated with the latest snakes, lizards, turtles, and frogs that Wei Ying has collected in the “Burial Mounds”. There is no location data associated with this name, no matter how many geolocation requests are submitted. (Nie Huaisang once claimed to know where the Burial Mounds are, but Nie Huaisang also claims that shadow boxes are a responsible method of arthropod preservation, so Lan Wangji has his doubts. The pinned butterflies are, however, very beautiful.)
The records have not been updated for several weeks.
In the past years, Wei Ying has visited home in the winter, while his study subjects are in hibernation. This year, he did not visit. Nor did he return in the spring. Summer is pressing in, and Lan Wangji steps out into low sunshine instead of darkness after his Friday evenings, and nobody knows where Wei Ying has gone.
So he’s been staying a little later. Just to make sure.
Tonight, he is finishing an update of the database of loans from the botany collection. Meng Yao had requested it as part of an attempt to improve outreach. It has taken most of Lan Wangji’s time this week, and he would prefer that it not bleed into the next week as well. His brother had asked, leaning into Lan Wangji’s office with his messenger bag already slung over his shoulder, if he’d be over for dinner that night; Lan Wangji had chosen not to reply.
He is approaching the end of his work on the database. He moved out to the main lab to work at the shared computer, but there has not been a request for remote access, and the hour is growing later—seven-thirty, eight-fifteen. Lan Wangji is not such a stranger to late nights as he used to be, but he can feel the weight of the hours pressing in.
Still, the collection is peaceful at this time of day. He can hear all the tiny noises of the back rooms and laboratories of a natural history museum: the rattle of the old keyboard under his fingers, the click of the mouse, the gentle hiss of the ventilator pumping air away from the carrion beetles in their preparatory lab, and the hum of the deep freezer, the flick of a light switch, the easy creak of hinges. And there is the slight smell of formaldehyde, which always leaks out when the door to the wet lab is opened.
The wet lab—
The world rights itself.
Lan Wangji continues to type. He has some fifty more entries to update with the revised taxonomic names, and he has time, now. He is not waiting anymore.
There is a more distant click, the sound of a key in a lock, another creak of hinges: this, to one of the collection rooms connected to the wet lab. The clatter and roll of the shelves. The scratch of a pen on a paper label. The clink of glass bottles as they are rearranged to accommodate new specimens.
Lan Wangji finishes the final entry of the database, saves the file, and shuts the computer down. He tidies the workspace and walks his own materials back to his office. On the way, he glances into Xichen’s—unlocked, per usual—and notes the thick sheaf of printer-fresh paper stacked to the side of the desk, atop a Sibley’s field guide and a monograph on feather coloration.
He locks up his own office and goes back out to the main lab and down the hall to the wet lab. Sure enough, there’s a faint glow in the frosted window, and the knob turns easily: unlocked.
Lan Wangji slips inside.
The overhead light in the wet lab has been left dark, but the lamps on the two work benches at the right corner of the lab have been turned on. Jiang Wanyin’s bench is a bit of a mess. Jiang Yanli’s is tidier. Both have been stacked with armfuls of jars and vials, as well as one large mason jar and a small tackle box, none of which was there earlier this afternoon.
The door to the herpetology collection room is also leaking light, and propped open. Lan Wangji can hear humming from it, and all the small sounds of Wei Ying between the stacks inside.
He goes to Jiang Wanyin’s work bench, which is piled with most of the new specimens. Lan Wangji lifts a jar to the light and observes the fine, concatenated bones of a snake skeleton floating in the peculiar alcohol solution that always stings his nose. He reads the tag.
Heterodon platirhinos, var. Burial Mounds. Coll: 7/16/18. Alt: 2200 ft. Loc: Burial Mounds.
Another endemic subspecies, perhaps, something rare and limited to this distant place that Wei Ying so fondly calls the Burial Mounds. Lan Wangji would like to see it one day. He would like to know what caught first Wei Ying’s interest and then his loyalty, his care, his love.
It’s common, among herpetologists, to be protective of their favorite valleys and hollows and pools. “Can’t share my good herping spot, can I?” Wei Ying had laughed, and he had continued to say this even when his doctoral committee demanded to know where he had conducted his research. He did not back down. After a week of discussion, his dissertation was rejected, and Lan Wangji had found him that night in the wet lab, packing to leave.
“I can’t,” he’d said, as Lan Wangji stood in the doorway. “I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone where it is—it’s so fragile, Lan Zhan, parts are still early successional, and the rest is contaminated from the mines, and if word got out—I promised them—”
“Let me help you.”
Wei Ying had turned from the box he was packing, and he had a terrible, resigned smile on his face. “Yeah? How?”
Lan Wangji, in that moment, had not known. Wei Ying had slipped from the wet lab, and Lan Wangji had let him go.
Tonight, though, there is a light in the herpetology collection, and a light in the wet lab, and a sixty-four ounce mason jar containing two small, darting shapes on Jiang Wanyin’s work bench. There is a double handful of silt in the bottom, and the little catfish appear alert and healthy. Jiang Wanyin, dedicated aquarist that he is, will most likely still be upset at their treatment, but the catfish will be loved. Lan Wangji respects exactly this about Jiang Wanyin, and no more.
He turns his attention to the tackle box on Jiang Yanli’s work bench. Lan Wangji has watched Wei Ying tying flies for her before, and recognizes his hitch knots and red flash among some of those in the box, but the rest are a style he doesn’t recognize, surgically precise and beautiful for it. In Jiang Yanli’s hands, they would be a needle on the wind. He does not know who tied these flies; they are probably not the same as the writer of the notes on bird migration patterns that Wei Ying photocopies and leaves for Xichen. He takes a moment to hope that the fly-tier has brought this sharp-edged care to bear on Wei Ying. This is only the fourth time that Wei Ying has come home. He spends most of his time—away.
Lan Wangji wants, he realizes, to see him. Very badly. He turns toward the herpetology collection, takes a step toward the open door—
and there’s a quick rattle of a stepladder being pulled, the thump of feet on the floor, and Wei Ying appears in the doorway. His hair has grown; it’s tied up in a loose bun and the strands escaping it trail past his shoulders. He’s wearing the same black cargo pants as always, mended so many times that Lan Wangji has considered calling them the Pants of Theseus, just to see if it would make Wei Ying laugh. He thinks it would. He also thinks they would agree on the solution to the question: it is the same pair of pants, the same ship, the same person in the doorway and the same person standing just across the room, no matter how much, on the surface, has changed.
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Ying says, “Lan Zhan, wait there, don’t look closer at anything, I didn’t get to put your specimens on your desk quite yet—” He hurries forward and the distance between them collapses to nothing as he nudges Lan Wangji away from the hiking backpack leaning against his siblings’ work benches. “Don’t tell your brother I brought a-jie those flies, okay? I know he’s still mad about fly-tying—” Xichen would not be angry or even disappointed at the presence of legally tied fishing flies, and is in fact quite supportive of Jiang Yanli, but Lan Wangji does not interrupt.
Wei Ying goes on: “So I found this weird little fern-shaped thing in the Burial Mounds and I thought you’d like it. Hang on—” He unzips a pocket inside the backpack and fishes a file folder out. It’s the same kind Lan Wangji uses in the botany collection to organize the pressed specimens, and it is the same pale blue he reserves for ferns, liverworts, and mosses. “Here,” Wei Ying says, and offers him the folder.
Lan Wangji opens it. Dendrolycopodium obscurum, most likely, a clubmoss—but it’s an odd variation. The growth pattern of the rhizome, which Wei Ying must have dug so carefully from the soil, is angled differently than he would expect...
“Thought you’d like it,” Wei Ying repeats, quieter, and pleased.
Lan Wangji sets the clubmoss aside and looks up at him. “I do.”
“Great, okay, because I can’t tell what’s going on with it—it doesn’t look like the usual clubmoss, right? I’ve found a couple other variations that might be mutually exclusive, so it could be adaptive radiation—oh, I found you some liverworts too but I don’t know liverworts well enough to tell if they’re weird.”
“I will look at them.”
“Thanks,” Wei Ying says, even though there is no need for thanks between them, which he knows perfectly well. “Ah, Lan Zhan, don’t look at me like that, I know, I know.” He sits in Jiang Wanyin’s chair and spins it side to side with one foot on the ground. “Come on, tell me what’s been going on. Is Jiang Cheng still working at the aquarium? Did Nie Mingjue get out of the hospital? Oh shit, how are the kids—has Sizhui figured out what was going on with that weird little clade?”
So Lan Wangji sits down in Jiang Yanli’s chair and tells him. Yes, Nie Mingjue got out of the hospital; he was cleared to return to desk work but he isn’t allowed to do bench work due to the infection risk, and Nie Huaisang convinced him to work from home because the aura of rage was making it hard to get anything else done. Yes, Jiang Wanyin is still serving as visiting aquarist at the aquarium downtown, and has been making noise about staying there long-term. Yes, the junior curators are well, and Sizhui has a paper in revision on paraphyly in the current taxonomy of carnivorous plants. It will appear in print in the fall.
“What about you, Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying asks, and so Lan Wangji tells him this too: his study of ferns, of prehistoric sporulation and diverging lineages, of the finely woven histories in every cell sample. The botanical garden has asked him to give a talk, and he is working on a monograph; his latest paper has just appeared in Nature. He would not say any of this, but Wei Ying is asking, so Lan Wangji will tell him. Lan Wangji will say anything, if it keeps Wei Ying here a little longer.
The whole time, Wei Ying listens intently, smiling, and interjects and asks questions, and their conversation sails onward through the evening in the dim light of the work lamps. The glow makes Wei Ying’s face vivid, striking; Lan Wangji focuses on continuing to speak even as he stares. The same eyes, yes, if a little more tired, and the same nose and chin, longer hair but the same color, the same single stud earring, the same laugh. The same mud on his boots, that particular silt of the Burial Mounds. The same—warmth.
“I am hoping that the paper will be well received,” he finishes.
“Of course it will be! I mean, anyone can write genetic analysis, but you’re actually legible about it. Much better arguments than anyone else.”
“I hope so.” Lan Wangji weighs his next statement. “And you, Wei Ying?”
“Oh, what? Me?”
“What have you been doing?”
Wei Ying leans back in the chair, still turning himself lazily side to side with his one foot on the ground. “Aw, you know. Fieldwork in the Burial Mounds.” He doesn’t elaborate, and Lan Wangji feels a wound peel open in his chest. Who does Wei Ying tell his secrets to? It used to be him.
Instead of asking that, he says, “Has it gone well?”
“I think so.” Wei Ying shrugs. “I’m pretty close, but it’ll be hard to tell without a few more years of data.” A few more years. “Then... we’ll see.”
“Will you publish?”
“Ah, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says.
“Will you?”
Wei Ying looks at him, in the dark. The light in his eyes steadies, solidifies. “If that’s what it takes. If they agree. Not yet, but... maybe.” Wei 2024, Lan Wangji imagines. Wei 2023. If he’s wishing, Wei 2019. In Nature or Herpetologica or anywhere, really, any peer-reviewed journal that will clear Wei Ying’s name in the eyes of the scientific community.
“And then?”
“And then what, Lan Zhan?”
“Will you stay in the Burial Mounds?”
Wei Ying blinks at him. There’s a flash of confusion, of unsteadiness, and then he smiles again: “Haven’t decided! You know me, always on the move.” He pauses. Looks down. Looks back. Says, hesitantly, “I thought, y’know, this summer, I might stay a little longer. I need to work out some things, and my lab there is pretty good but it’s not great, so I could use the equipment here. I know I don’t work here anymore, but I might see if they’ll hire me to help run summer camp. Then I’d have lab access. Not that I’ve told anyone—I came up with that plan when I was walking in because I saw the flyer—but I thought... I might stay. For a little while.” Another pause. “Lan Zhan?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay? You look... kind of like someone hit you with a truck. Or like you’re drunk. Are you drunk? Lan Zhan, if you’re drunk, you have to tell me—”
“I am not drunk.” He has been waiting for so long.
“Uh huh. So what is it then? I—you know, I can leave if I shouldn’t stay—”
“Don’t leave,” Lan Wangji gets out.
Wei Ying stops. “Okay,” he says. “I won’t leave.”
“There is room for you here, if you want it.”
“I—yeah,” Wei Ying says. “Really?”
“You are welcome to stay.”
“Ah—not that I’m not flattered, but Lan Zhan, are you sure about that? You know me, I—”
“I do know you,” Lan Wangji says, and gives up, and kisses him.
Wei Ying, wonder of wonders, kisses back. He clings to Lan Wangji’s shoulders—strong hands, clever, callused hands, with river silt under the nails—and then uses those same long-awaited hands to push back a little bit so that he can say, against Lan Wangji’s mouth, “No kissing in the labs, right? Lan-er-gege? Formaldehyde—poisons you, I’m pretty sure—and the arsenic in the skins collection, that gets on everything, which is bad—”
True, but Lan Wangji hates it, as much as he can hate anything Wei Ying says (very little, in practice). He kisses Wei Ying’s neck to express this.
“—and we probably shouldn’t fuck in the collection because of the same reasons—”
Lan Wangji had not realized until this very moment how much he wants to fuck in the collection. It seems like a fine idea to him. They can put down some Tyvek.
“—but my bike’s in the parking lot, and you still live near here, right—fuck, Lan Zhan, holy fuck—”
Lan Wangji finishes leaving a hickey on Wei Ying’s neck and looks up at him, at his parted lips, his wide, bright eyes. “My office is closer,” he says.
Wei Ying nods very fast. “No poison in botany,” he agrees, which is untrue but good enough for now, and he drags Lan Wangji out of the wet lab hand in hand.
(Wei Ying stays the summer.
He leads the kids’ camp in the mornings, and he spends his afternoons in the collection on the phone with a fly-tier and a birdwatcher, planning the next field seasons, and when he is not with his siblings, he goes home with Lan Wangji at night. When Lan Wangji is working at the shared desktop—that summer, and during all the months he spends away, and then, when those months are finally done, for years and years—Wei Ying uses his own laptop, a mere two rooms away, to inquire: Someone else is trying to access this computer. Do you wish to share access?
Lan Wangji always answers, Yes.)