Chapter Text
Lan Zhan is standing in the center of his New York studio loading the reservoir of his low-pressure air sprayer with water-soluble conservation-approved varnish, when his telephone rings. He glances over to where his phone rests on the table, sees his uncle on the call waiting and swears once, loudly and with feeling before trying to juggle the half-filled reservoir, the mixed varnish and his telephone.
Despite his giant hands and overall coordination, this is impossible and the call connects just as he drops both phone and reservoir, leaving him holding a graduated cylinder empty of actual varnish with fingers covered in sticky liquid as his uncle’s annoyed voice drifts up from his phone, which is now face-down in a pool of the varnish that he’d been about to use.
“Uncle, I will call you right back.” He says, in the vague direction of the floor, and resists hiding his face in his hands only because they’re covered and slowly becoming sticky.
Twenty minutes later, his mobile phone is wrapped in blotter paper and under pressure on his conservation heat table and he’s emotionally preparing himself to phone his uncle back from the wired phone in his office.
Lan Zhan’s art conservation and restoration studio takes up the vast seventh floor of a warehouse looking out over the Brooklyn Bridge. The office is really just a corner of the cavernous space that was broken off into a separate room. The walls were mostly glass in order to give him a view of anything happening in the studio, but he’d designed it with one solid wall opposite the desk he worked at. He’d asked his Uncle to leave it bare when he’d purchased and rehabbed the studio for Lan Zhan’s work because he wanted to make his own choices about colors and art for that one wall. Knowing, perhaps instinctively, that whatever a conservator chose to display on their personal walls would speak loudly about who they were, and that there were things about his life that he did not want to tell his uncle.
The wall was painted a dull, dusky blue and hung with one artwork. It was an antique Chinese painting, in ink on silk, from the Tang Dynasty; a drawing of a young man, standing underneath a willow tree with the leaves blowing across his face. His long hair was tied back with a bright red ribbon and he was smiling off into the distance. Lan Zhan had grown up around art; his grandmother was a famous painter, and the Lan family had been in art as a business for generations dating back to when they first came to the United States. But this piece had been Lan Zhan’s first acquisition for his own personal collection, apart from his inheritance or the family galleries. He’d bought it at a small auction house and bid furiously against another collector for it, elated to have won in the end. He’d handled the conservation of the piece himself, doing everything perfectly and painstakingly, sparing no time or expense until the painting was a showpiece worthy of its place of honor.
He allowed himself to stare at the painting for a long moment, taking solace in the figure’s soft, secret smile and the shadows of the leaves falling against his hair before forcing himself to gather his wits and return his uncle’s call.
“Your brother has been trying to reach you all day.” His uncle said, almost before Lan Zhan realized the call had connected. Politeness and pre-amble were both apparently below him today. “We need you in the office.”
Lan Wangji looked through the windows dividing his office from his workspace. He looked at the canvas currently drying on his varnishing table. He took in both of his hot tables, currently engaged with works he was treating, the humidity room holding a 14th century buddhist triptych, with another panel waiting outside for its turn, and the door to the storage room which was rapidly filling up with other priceless works of art awaiting his attention.
“For what?” He said, without thinking.
He could hear his uncle’s voice get harder, and was treated to the polite series of coughs which his uncle used to eloquently remind Wangji that the Lan Family had paid for art school, graduate school and basically bought his way into his position as the third best Asian Art conservator in the world, all before he was 30. The cough was also meant to remind him that his half of that bargain was to show up whenever his expertise was needed for the family business. And, relatedly, to not ask questions.
“Of course.” He said, quietly. “Do you need me to bring anything?”
“We’ll provide everything that you need.” Uncle Qiren said. “I will send you flight details. And, Wangji?” he added, after a pause. “You should plan for an extended stay. You may need to be here for some time.”
“Yes, Uncle.” he said, rolling his eyes and wondering who he could get to water his plants.
“Very good. We will send someone to meet you at the airport.”
Lan Wangji hung up the phone, and stared at the picture on his wall for a long, long time before he got up and started to get ready to leave.
If anyone had ever questioned him about it, Lan Zhan would of course have said that he loved the painting for artistic reasons alone and that the undeniable resemblance between the man in the painting and the only man Lan Zhan had ever loved was purely a coincidence.
The ‘someone’ the Lan Corporation sent to meet him at the airport was not the lacky he had expected, and Lan Zhan found his brother waiting for him near baggage claim. Xichen, who for some reason preferred his formal courtesy name to his informal familial name, Lan Huan, was staring down at his phone with a warm, slightly dazed expression and fiddling with his hair. Lan Xichen doesn’t look up, until Lan Zhan calls his name twice, and then barks “Brother!”
“Oh.” Xichen says, looking up. “Sorry, Wangji. I didn’t realize you were there. How was your flight?”
“As well as can be expected given that it’s a command performance.” He grouses, noting the use of his own formal courtesy name. They’d been close once, before Lan Zhan had moved away to New York, but not anymore.
“Quite.” is his brother’s non-reply. He follows Xichen out the door and into a sleek, black hired car. Once the driver has pulled away from the airport, Xichen hands him a heavy, pale blue envelope with the Lan Gallery logo on it. “The Lan Galleries have purchased serviced apartments at the Four Seasons for important guests, so we’ve set you up there. The keys to the house and then rental are in the envelope as well as a badge to access the gallery and the conservation suite. Meng Yao has made sure that everything is arranged and prepared for your work.”
Meng Yao was his brother’s assistant, in addition to having some relationship with his brother and/or Nie Mingjue that Lan Zhan did not want to look too carefully at. He also served as the official Lan Galleries collections manager and conservator according to the organization chart. In actuality, any work that is more complicated than routine cataloging was sent out to Lan Zhan under the terms of his agreement with Uncle and Xichen. Still, the arrangement significantly rankled Meng Yao, whose annoyance at holding the title but not the responsibilities and consistently being upstaged were painfully obvious regardless of how he tried to hide it. and Lan Zhan found his transparent falseness and passive aggression wearing.
“Are you taking me directly to the apartment?” Lan Zhan asks.
“No.” Xichen says, meeting his eyes for the first time. “I’m taking you directly to the gallery. You’ll want to see the reason we’ve called you here.”
At least you had a reason this time, brother. Lan Zhan thinks, staring out the window and watching the expressway zoom past. He’s been dragged back to California at regular intervals ever since he broke with the family six years ago, usually for some manufactured emergency relating to the family business that he could have easily handled from New York. It’s his uncle and his brother’s way of maintaining some amount of control over his life despite the distance he’s put between them. He’s unsure what it says about him that no matter how much it pisses him off, he continues to answer those calls.
Traffic being what it is, it takes longer than he would have liked to arrive at the gallery, the tension inside the car ratcheting up every moment, each of them staring into their own screens until the car pulls up at the service entrance of the Lan Galleries.
Xichen leads him in through the front entrance, greeting the ticket sellers and custodial staff as he goes. Lan Zhan follows along in his wake. In the past, he would have known them as well and at least tried to greet them by name and with a smile. Now, when he comes to California he tries to get in, do his work, and get out like a ghost -- disturbing things as little as possible. He doesn’t want to form relationships here. Not when none of them is the relationship he wants.
They take the service elevator down, past the daylight basement that houses offices and the conservation lab into the true bowels of the building -- where the majority of the Lan Family Collection is stored like something out of an Asian Art History version of the vast US Government storage from the Indiana Jones films. Three levels below ground, the elevator doors open and Xichen leads him through hallways into a door that requires not only his ID card, but also a special code to open. “The code to this room is in your envelope.” Xichen says, before Lan Zhan can ask.
Together, they step into a long, narrow room. The air is cool and perfectly balanced for conservation. The walls are cement, with long, narrow drawers set into the walls for flat storage of paintings. The floor and the walls on the ends of the room are wood, sanded soft and lightly oiled to help manage the humidity.
And on the wooden wall, on the far end of the room, hangs a painting.
It shouldn’t be hanging — the painting is in truly bad shape, and he can see un-mended tears and water damage on the canvass. It should be flat on a table, supported by soft, wool felt; conserved. He turns to say as much to his brother and complain about making more work for him when he takes a second to really look at the painting and take in the image.
The rest of his brain is staring at the image in abject shock. He turns to Xichen. “Brother…” He says, his eyes wide. “Is this…” his voice trails off.
Xichen nods, and Lan Zhan can feel the movement in the stillness of the room. “Grandmother’s lost Quanyin. We found it. Finally.”
“Xichen…” Lan Zhan says in a brisk exhale. “Where? How?”
“A palazzo in Italy. Venice, hence the water damage. We think she was still working on it and brought it with her when she ran away, and then it was left there when Grandfather found her and made her return to the United States.”
Lan Zhan walks slowly forward, his steps echoing against the wood and concrete. The picture, hanging suspended in its bubble of warm light, glows in the dark room. Even with the imperfections, it is absolutely and completely stunning. It’s been described by more than one Art History academic studying her work as his grandmother’s lost masterpiece, and he thinks he agrees with them. It just might be the single most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
On the surface, the Quanyin looks like a very traditional buddhist-influenced Chinese devotional picture. The form of the goddess fades in from the dark background, where the impasto and sketchy brushwork shows the curves and feathering of the traditional background. She’s wearing a traditional hairstyle and layers of jewelry, as befits a Goddess. The figure’s eyes are downcast and her limbs are held in a mudra position from traditional dance.
But something looks wrong. There’s something about her hands that seems… off.
“Turn off the lights.” Lan Zhan says to Xichen, his eyes never leaving the painting. He reaches into his shoulder-bag, and pulls out the small, metal cylinder of his portable black light. He switches it on, and Xichen cuts the light.
Her hands and arms fluoresce in the purple of Lan Zhan’s blacklight, but the objects in the curves of her fingers and in the arch of her arm remain dark.
“Is that overpainting…?” Xichen asks, his voice nearly breathless.
“Mn.” Lan Zhan nods. He bends closer, difficult because of the sheer size of the canvas, and reaches up to shine the light closer. The haze of dirt and varnish make it difficult to see, but her hands look to be the original paint, but the things that she’s holding and a part of her fore-arm have been changed and painted over.
The overpainting feels odd, though. He steps back a bit, sweeping the painting gently with the black light, and then moving over to see how it shines across the warp and weft of the fabric. Looking at the details, the condition and curvature of the canvas, he seriously doubts that there has been any prior conservation work done on this painting. Which means that the overpainting — the retouching of the image over the top of the original — could have been added later, or could have been his grandmother’s own work, changing her mind about her intentions for the image.
This is at the same time the worst, the most fascinating and the most difficult problem for conservators like Lan Zhan to address. His entire raison d’etre is to preserve and protect the image that was created by the artist as close to how the artist intended it, and for as long as possible. He exists to make sure that future generations of people are able to see the work of the artist as that artist had intended it to be seen. But when the intentions of the artist are not clear, decisions must be made. And with no client other than himself and his brother, Lan Zhan has the unaccustomed freedom to act as he believes is in the painting’s very best interest.
Lan Zhan continues his gentle sweep of the blacklight over the painting slowly, but there is little else that appears out of the ordinary. He won’t know more until he moves the painting into the studio where he has tools and time to take a proper look. Until then, it will have to remain a mystery.
“Turn the lights on please?” He asks his brother, and then blinks heavily as they come up. His brain is working a mile a minute, cataloging all the tiny imperfections and tears, looking at the water and mold damage, making a plan as to how to approach this beautiful, beautiful legacy of his grandmother.
“You’ll do the work?” Xichen asks.
“Of course.” Lan Zhan says. “That is our agreement. Take it down from here and get it to the conservation suite and on to some supportive felt as soon as possible — carefully. No one should touch it but me. I will begin in the morning.”
“Very good.” Xichen says.
Xichen walks him out of the gallery, making awkward small talk that Lan Zhan responds to monosyllabically until his brother hands him off to a chauffeured car to take him directly to the residence. Lan Zhan’s hands shake in the car as they drive, and he’s unsure if it’s the exhaustion from his flight or excitement.
The Quanyin, finally.
Lan Zhan had slept poorly the night before, his dreams haunted by plans for his trip and by memories of Wei Ying, so he spends his time in the car collecting his thoughts and making notes about the conservation. Lan Zhan has made his reputation on being careful, meticulous and very, very ethical — preserving the original intent of works that other people had considered a lost cause. This makes him an amazing conservator, but does not prepare him for the challenge of working on this painting.
He won’t know for sure until he runs tests, looking at the varnish layers and the solvents and the paint used, but at this point he has no reason to believe that the overpainting was executed by someone other than his grandmother, who was changing or scarring her own painting. If that is the case, what is the original intent that he needs to preserve? The painting as it was first executed, or the later revisions?
The residence belonging to the Lan Galleries is a two bedroom serviced apartment attached to the Four Seasons hotel. It’s clear that Uncle bought it furnished; there is no personality in the decoration and the art on the walls is mass-market, but it’s been adequately prepared for his stay. He makes a note to himself to have something more peaceful sent over from the Lan Collection, since it looks like he will be staying here for some time.
When he opens the door he finds the refrigerator full of food, including a bottle of white wine in the chiller. Lan Zhan doesn’t drink; he’s inherited the family allergy to alcohol in spades and has a lower tolerance than even his brother, who once famously got falling down drunk from the alcohol in a Black Forest gateau. But tonight, he’s in San Francisco and all he wants to do is sleep and forget. He kicks off his loafers, hangs his slacks and dress shirt and changes into pajamas. There’s a re-heatable meal in the refrigerator, which he prepares and eats standing at the breakfast bar before he settles into the large, white bed in front of the fireplace with a half a glass of wine.
He turns the glass in the combined light of the fire and the bedside lamps, watching it catch the light and the colors shift from palest yellow to green, with occasional flecks of silvery-gray, the color Wei Ying’s eyes had been in the sunlight.
They’d fallen in love so slowly that Lan Zhan hadn’t really noticed it happening. Wei Ying had gone from the arrogant student in his physical chemistry class to his study partner to the other half of his heart in steps that were so slow and so perfect that he’d hardly noticed the change. Until one day he had his lap full of Wei Ying and his hands underneath his shirt, catching his breath with his face pressed into the other boy’s shoulder, and realizing that he had completely lost the ability to live without him.
The last time he saw Wei Ying, they’d talked about their future, and that had never stopped galling Lan Zhan, like a splinter that he could not work out. He’d wanted to propose — he’d chosen a ring, an antique platinum-and-diamond art-deco piece from his grandmother’s collection that he’d always wanted to see on Wei Ying’s thin, long finger. He had it taken out of storage, cleaned and re-sized and ready. He’d organized a picnic of delicacies spread out on a blanket on the roof of the gallery, and it had been a beautiful summer night with the sun fading off into the ocean.
Wei Ying hadn’t said no. Lan Zhan remembers his finger gentle on his lips, saying “Not yet, Lan Zhan. Ask me again when you come home this summer. I’ll say yes then, I promise.” And then they’d kissed again, and the kissing had segued perfectly into the sweetest and hottest and best sex that Lan Zhan has had (or, he’s fairly sure he will ever have) in his life — Wei Ying below him, shaking and crying out, completely lost in his pleasure and Lan Zhan inside him with nothing between them, both laying stretched out on the blanket, his hair spread out by the wind and his body painted in gold vermeil by the sunset
He’d ached that Wei Ying hadn’t accepted his proposal, that he didn’t get to see that delicate platinum wrapped around his finger. But it hadn’t been no as much as not yet, so Lan Zhan had boarded the plane to Shanghai for his summer conservation internship with his heart at peace, eager to come home to Wei Ying and the promises they’d made to each other.
He’d known something was wrong when Wei Ying’s replies to his emails had become slower and shorter before they finally stopped coming at all. When he’d come home at the end of the summer, Wei Ying was the first thing he asked about, the first phone call he made.
The number had been disconnected.
He’d done everything he could think about — haunted Campus and their shared dormitory at Stanford, banged on the door of Wei Ying’s family’s house until his adoptive mother had called the police, angrily confronted Uncle and Xichen, who he was sure knew something that they weren’t telling him.
But he’d never seen Wei Ying again.
He googles him sometimes, desperate for any information, but nothing has come up on social media or anywhere else. He avoids San Francisco, and really the whole of California, not sure he could survive a chance meeting at a gas station or coffee shop.
He is stubbornly sure that he will never love again. He has his memories, and that will have to be enough.
***
“Baba, I don’t want to go to Qing-jie’s house today…” Yuan whines. “I wanna go to daycare!” He’s eating off-brand cheerios on the bed and dribbling milk on their blankets while Wei Ying pulls out the under-bed trundle and roots around behind it and underneath their daybed hoping against hope that there is some spare change laying there that he hasn’t already found and spent. A couple of quarters would frankly be a life-saving miracle at the moment, but he’ll take just about anything silver or even pennies if that’s what he’s got to do since the situation is desperate. He’s late to class already, 85 cents short of bus fare, it’s raining outside and it’s a week before his next student aid check will hit his account.
He’d ask Wen Qing and Wen Ning to borrow bus fare from them, but they can’t lend him what they don’t have. Given that they were all sharing off-brand boxed Mac and Cheese that Wei Ying had bought with food stamps and he an a-Yuan’s WIC checks for dinner last night, he can’t see putting them in the position of having to tell him no. Especially when they’re already doing him the enormous favor of watching a-Yuan between Qing-jie’s classes and Wen Ning’s therapy so that he can go to most of his classes and do his lab hours at school. There is no way he’s going to be able to pay for daycare this month, even with the substantial subsidy that he gets as a single, low-income parent.
“I know, Radish.” He says, crawling out from under the daybed. “But it’s not a daycare day today. And maybe if you’re very nice you and Wen Ning can go to the park this afternoon when it’s cooler.”
That seemed to grab the kid’s attention, thank goodness. “Park! Park! Park!” a-Yuan chanted, as he stood up and clambered off the day bed to go across the room and put his dishes in the tiny sink in the minuscule kitchenette of their studio apartment.
Giving up on bus fare and stealing himself to walk to class, he refocuses on finding everything a-Yuan will need for the day. Shoes, excavated from a pile of laundry -- was there something wrong with five year olds that they couldn’t take their shoes off by the door? -- extra clothes in the backpack, along with a current favorite book (Captain Underpants and something involving lunchroom zombie nerds. He was glad his radish was an advanced reader, but really?).
“You’ve got your bunny?” He asked, and a-Yuan pointed at Checkers, the black and white beanie baby they’d received as a gift when he brought the radish home from the hospital, tucked neatly under his arm, and they’re on the way out the door.
Wei Ying lives in what was once an old-style Motel, an L-shaped building with individual rooms available around a courtyard. It had been offered as ‘transitional housing’ for people coming out of addiction, teen pregnancy or other destabilizing situations. When he’d come out of the hospital with a brand new baby a-Yuan and nowhere else to go, their offer of means-tested housing had been a god-send, especially given the years-long waiting lists for Section 8 housing assistance from the state of California.
It had become less of a god-send over the last five years, as this particular neighborhood in Oakland had gotten worse and as things in the apartment broke down and fell apart and just stayed broken. Wei Ying is pretty sure that he hasn’t seen a repair person on site since at least the Christmas before last. His water works when it wants to, and they’ve got bottles set aside for when it doesn’t. The electric flickers and doesn’t allow them to plug more than one thing in at a time, and he’s patched the leaks in the roof as best he can with extra-thick cling-wrap and newspaper.
On the other hand, he was supposed to have access to the apartment (which is a gentle euphemism for what is really one room with a hot-plate and intermittently-running water) for a year and he’s been here for almost five. At first they kept talking about moving him on and remodeling or knocking down the motel, but after this long he’s kind of hoping that they’ve forgotten that they’re all here. His entire precarious life plan rests on not having to move until he graduates. There’s basically no way that he could find a place of his own and pay market rent until he graduates, and that’s at least a year away.
He walks a-Yuan down to the apartment that Wen Ning and Wen Qing share, across the potholed courtyard. The Wen Siblings had only been his neighbors for about 18 months, after Wen Ning had been in a car crash caused by police negligence which resulted in a traumatic brain injury and extensive rehab. The interim settlement had entitled him to transitional housing while the court case was pending, and leave it to the Bay Area Police to cheap out and find the worst place possible. Still, it was another gift to Wei Ying, since they’d fallen in love with a-Yuan the moment they saw him and had become Wei Ying’s best friends and strongest supporters.
“Qing-jie!” a-Yuan says the moment she opens the door, throwing himself at her and hugging her legs. So much for his case of the ‘I don’t wannas’ this morning, Wei Ying thought, giving him a smile.
Wen Qing bends down and gives a-Yuan a kiss on his head, and takes his backpack from Wei Ying. “Can you be back by three?” She asks. “I have a night class.”
“Sure thing.” Wei Ying promises, knowing that without bus fare that’s going to seriously cut into his lab time, but you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. He provides goodbye hugs and an admonition to be good to his son, and then squares his shoulders for the hike to campus.
He arrives sweaty and out of breath, but not so late that he’s going to feel terrible sneaking into the back of the lecture hall. The local community college is a far cry from Stanford, and between costs and credits he’d lost because they hadn’t transferred, Wei Ying had needed to switch majors from his experimental chemistry course to computer science, needing a degree that will result in a job as soon as possible. And it’s not like he’s a bad programmer, exactly. But he doesn’t love it, so he doesn’t have that same level of curiosity-fed hyper focus that he’d so easily fallen into at Stanford. Combining that with limited study time and only being able to take a couple classes a year and at this rate, he’s terrified he won’t have a BA in computer science until sometime around 2029.
Or, perhaps into the 2030s, if he can’t manage to get caught up in this math course before the midterm, he thinks as he settles himself into his desk and pulls out notebooks and pens. A-Yuan had gotten strep throat a few weeks into the semester, and it had taken almost two weeks to get him on antibiotics because of their shitty health insurance… which meant that Wei Ying had also gotten strep throat, and then he was a month behind and still hasn’t caught up.
He writes down as much as he can, scribbling as fast as the professor talks, and then spends two hours in the campus computer lab going over Khan Academy lectures and working through practice problems trying to make it all fit together, before he heads home — taking most of the walk at a run, because it’s 2:43 and he’d promised Wen Qing he’d be back at three.
He bursts through the door of the Wen’s apartment at 3:19, apologizing profusely for being late. Wen Qing grabs her bag and her keys, and brushes his shoulder as an affectionate hello and goodbye as she rushes out the door to her class, like ships passing in the night. Yuan and Wen Ning are sitting on the floor playing video games on an ancient Wii.
They play through the rest of the afternoon, giving Wei Ying more time to steal the Wen’s wifi and try to make sense of more of his advanced Stats homework before Wei Ying and Wen Ning raid their respective refrigerators hoping they can find something that at least sort of adds up to dinner for the three of them. It’s not a ketchup-soup kind of night — Thank God, because they’ve had more than a few of those lately — But it’s not far off, but they’re able to pull together a somewhat respectable egg fried rice with no scallions and the remains of several half packages of very freezer-burnt vegetables. Cauliflower isn’t exactly traditional, but Wei Ying is well beyond caring.
They play for a bit longer, a-Yuan eventually giving up on the Wii for his bag of knock-off legos and Wei Ying and Wen Ning switch over to trouncing one another at Mario Kart until a-Yuan falls asleep on the couch and Wei Ying has to drag his sleepy little boy back upstairs.
Their apartment is dark when he tries to flick on the light switch, and Wei Ying sighs since he’s itching from the sweat of two walks today and no power likely means no water in the shower. A-Yuan brushes his teeth at the kitchen sink with bottled water, and Wei Ying does his best to clean them both up with a wet towel and soap, before settling his son in the nest of blankets on the top of the daybed and pulling the trundle out for himself.
“Baba, tell me about my a-Die.” A-Yuan asks, after a long silence. Wei Ying had thought he was asleep and was laying quietly on the trundle playing with his phone and wondering if he can get away with picking up some of the mess while a-Yuan sleeps.
Wei Ying now deeply regrets every single time he spun this particular fairy tale for a-Yuan. Grieving Lan Zhan, going through pregnancy and their baby’s birth without him, he’d told himself that someday his prince would come back, driving a family-safe white Volvo with carseats already installed in the back and sweep him and his baby off to a life of plenty and peace. Or at least, somewhere to live that featured separate bedrooms and reliable water and no more hoping that there were dollars left in his EBT account at the end of the month. It had seemed natural to him to tell that story to tiny baby a-Yuan, both to give himself something to hope for during the worst days and to let his son know something about his absent father.
And then somehow as a-Yuan grew and became more verbal and started to understand what he was being told, he just… didn’t stop telling the story. Which, on one hand, helped a-Yuan answer when people asked him if he had another parent at home and whether it was a daddy or a mommy at Pre-school. But on the other hand, gave him a hope and a longing for his unknown, mysterious and idealized second father. A person that Wei Ying was pretty sure at this point was never going to actually show up.
“Not tonight, Radish. It’s late and I’m sleepy.”
“Can I have kisses?” a-Yuan asks, his voice thick with sleepiness.
“Of course, baby. Always.”