Chapter Text
Just before dawn, Wei Wuxian starts awake with the odd, unpleasant sensation of being sewn back together. He reaches out to shoo Wen Qing, realises she isn’t there, and flounders for a second before getting on with it. By the watery sunlight filtering through the window, he sees two of the three deep cuts on his arm time-lapse mending themselves. Huh. Someone’s been busy, and it wasn’t bloody him. He lays there thinking, his mind its own sleep paralysis demon.
An indeterminate amount of time later, a ringtone blasts shrilly from near the couch. In two seconds flat, Wei Wuxian hears Lan Zhan’s low morning voice answer, “SCA Lan.”
Fuck. Wei Wuxian’s head is mince after last night’s discussion, and that voice takes him and puts him right back in the Grindr. He’s not sure how much Lan Zhan remembers of their conversation, what carnage will lie between them. Back limned in the now-strong morning light, Lan Zhan sits up to attention. Without even checking over his shoulder to see if Wei Wuxian’s awake, Lan Zhan crooks two fingers – still a big oof – and calls him over. Curious and cautious, Wei Wuxian drags himself over and sits gingerly on the couch arm, tipping his head close – but not too close – to Lan Zhan’s to try and pick up the other end of the conversation. He pulls back when he realises Lan Zhan has hit the speakerphone button.
“- a serious issue with recovering the limbs. Is Senior Mo listening?”
“He is,” says Lan Zhan, not looking at Wei Wuxian.
“Can you put him on? And give us a minute?”
Lan Zhan hesitates so Wei Wuxian jumps in. A lightbulb hits and he thinks he might have an inkling about what this is going to be anyway. “It’s fine, Jingyi. Anything personal of mine, you can say in front of SCA Lan.”
There’s an audible click as Jingyi swallows. “We were wrong about Cadair Idris, at least for now. Cymru contacted a local family down on the cultivator register, close to Cadair Idris. They were meant to meet the Cymru guys there. For some reason, they went to Llangollen instead, got there before us. It – the corpse, its limbs – they killed them. We arrived on the scene and found them like – like that. Senior Mo, I’m so sorry, we checked – we checked the register and it’s the Mo family.” Wei Wuxian can feel Lan Zhan freeze beside him. “We’re so sorry –”
Jingyi is doing an admirable job at holding the line, but Wei Wuxian can sense a potential crack in his voice.
Before it happens, Wei Wuxian gently cuts him off. “Jingyi, Jingyi, listen to me – it’s okay. You couldn’t have done anything and frankly, I’m just glad you guys weren’t caught in the crossfire.”
“You can be upset with us,” Jingyi says softly.
“I’m not upset with any of you. It wasn’t your fault. Honestly, my family and I have been estranged for some time now.” That hurts, actually. Bit too close to the sun of Wei Wuxian’s own situation. Still, in the context of Mo Xuanyu, it’s likely a massive understatement if the disappearing cuts on his arm mean what Wei Wuxian thinks they do. Best not to look like a psychopath, though. “I know we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but they really weren’t good to me. It’s – odd – that they’re gone because they were such a big part of my life, but I’m not devastated. Even though I can feel the loss, our relationship wasn’t one of love.”
Rambling, Wei Wuxian realises he’s actually talking more about his relationship to Queen Elizabeth than his limited interactions with the Mo family. Sure, he hated the monarchy, but her face was on coins, she was in the first song he learnt – it’s weird to think of her as just gone, a nation changed. Anyhow, he can’t try to substitute his experiences with his own real family. On a scale of one to John Wick, Wei Wuxian has historically not handled dead family very well.
Jingyi seems to buy it because he exhales shakily and goes, “Okay. I’m still sorry. All of us are.”
“Thanks, kids.” He looks across at Lan Zhan, who is watching him like he is waiting on an exhale. “I guess we’ll meet you there soon. Hang tight.”
Once he hangs up, the silence is an after-gunshot kind of blow.
“So,” says Wei Wuxian, “it was Llangollen after all, not Cadair Idris.”
“Xuanyu–”
“I’m okay, Lan Zhan. I’d really rather focus on the case,” says Wei Wuxian,
Mascara-advert lashes lowered, Lan Zhan nods, a little jerky. “Okay. We will move out straight to Llangollen. Unless you would prefer to return to London.” He does not look at Wei Wuxian when he says it.
Wei Wuxian frowns. “London? Why would I take us there?”
Turning his head to see Wei Wuxian's face but not quiet meeting his eyes, Lan Zhan rubs the tips of his own fingers together in a gesture that seems fretful on him, but wouldn’t on anyone else. “Things have become more complicated than you originally signed on for. The team is fortunate to have you, if you’ll stay, but it would be remiss of me to demand it.”
He’s being given an out, Wei Wuxian realises. Lan Zhan must remember everything except – well, except what Wei Wuxian suspects he can’t.
Going for blasé, he shrugs. “Couldn’t let the kids down.”
The journey there is awkward as fuck. It’s dreich outside for most of the trip and Lan Zhan is still avoiding him as much as the three square metres of hire car interior will allow. Whether that is because of last night’s disaster or this morning’s dead family is anyone’s guess. On the flip side, the drive does give Wei Wuxian time to read the report the juniors sent over, fiddle with the tech they’re gonna need, and then brood over the whole hear-no-Wei-Wuxian-speak-no-Wei-Wuxian phenomena. So far, he’s not so much drawing blanks as he is drawing Jackson Pollocks.
“Let’s try to get a timeline on this thing,” he says to Lan Zhan. Exactly what ‘thing’, he does not specify, but hopefully if Lan Zhan thinks they’re talking about their Friend, he might be more forthcoming with his answers. There’s a non-zero chance they’re intertwined anyway.
Without taking his eyes off the darkening road, Lan Zhan goes, “Mn.”
Wei Wuxian puts his knees up on the dash to encourage maximum thinking. “Okay, so both songs are folk songs, we’re talking 19th century. That could put the corpse around that time too, right?”
Tech only works because it is popular; it’s very much a that-one-uni-course-on-Michel-Foucault-both-shapes-and-is-shaped-by kind of vibe. The most simple thing that Wei Wuxian always sees practitioners fail to grasp is that the veil is human experience – nothing more, nothing less. Billy Joel was right on the money: the world’s always been burning, and will forever keep turning. You can’t put out an oil fire out with water. When World War II hit, they were putting the unquiet dead down with Morse code. Now, people are more responsive to a text message.
“Except you believed that something was coded into a cultivator’s tech and it killed them. And we do not yet know if another song has started playing,” responds Lan Zhan.
“Touché, touché,” Wei Wuxian admits with a wave of his hand. After subduing the limbs (which, creatively, had used each other to bludgeon the Mo’s to death) the junior’s had imprisoned everything, including their iPhone Friend, into separate trapping pouches to prevent further mishaps. “If we’re talking about dating dead cultivators, how long have you lived in England? Notice anything rogue? Anyone?”
The entendre-cum-interrogation is out of his mouth before he can really think it through, but he’s fairly certain Lan Zhan won’t get it.
“Since the end of 2008. Nothing or no one I can recall.”
Inauspiciously aligned with Wei Wuxian’s own arrival. As Jingyi would say, it’s giving qi blowback which – if Lan Zhan had been hunting Wei Wuxian and was in the blast radius when he’d gone all Saigon-Buddhist-Monk – would make sense. To his grave and to his nightmares, Wei Wuxian knows the consequences of veil backlash. He asks, “Why did you come over?”
Lan Zhan pauses. “To help my uncle.”
“With what?”
“Nothing important.”
The words sting somewhere dulled but unprotected, like a sharp rock in the shoe that houses your beaten soul. Quieted, Wei Wuxian switches them over to the Hamilton soundtrack and lets songs about someone else’s past catch him up on things he missed during his years gone.
Night has well and truly closed in by the time they arrive at the Bridge End Hotel. There had been paperwork to file and ley line crews to argue with before they left; Wei Wuxian suspects that one of the reasons Lan Zhan had been so easily convinced to send the juniors off by themselves and trek to Scotland’s crappiest city was because the Caledonians would have likely pulled jurisdictional rank and taken the torso off to Loch Moy for testing regardless. At least this way, their Friend had remained in their possession. Crouched near the river, the hotel is another wood-and-plaster pub-stay, but Wei Wuxian just wants to put his head down on something cold, so it sounds like the fucking Taj Mahal.
To avoid two sets of late check-in fees, Lan Xichen arranges to meet them downstairs with their keys, seeing as he’s arriving not long before they’re set to. Wei Wuxian has a room conspicuously himself – it had made sense for the brothers to share, and apparently Lan Xichen has brought another junior along for the ride, so they’ve all already paired off and gone to bed (under duress).
When Lan Xichen spots them, road-weary across the bar, he does a double-take.
Approaching disbelievingly, he looks at Wei Wuxian and says, “A-Yu? It is good to see you again. You’re working in the field?” His voice sounds painful, longing.
Oh God. Has Mo Xuanyu fucked Lan Xichen?
“Yes, haha – still cultivating and all that jazz,” Wei Wuxian says awkwardly.
Lan Xichen’s mouth trembles, just slightly. “Good. That’s good,” he says softly. “Da-ge would be proud of you.”
Wei Wuxian ducks his head as though overcome with emotion. No, Lan Zhan said his brother hasn’t been in the country for nearly a decade. Mo Xuanyu would have been too young for Lan Xichen. A mentor, maybe? Shit, are they related? Kinky. Too kinky. Surely not.
“Thanks,” he says lamely, still looking at the ground.
“Xiongzhang,” says Lan Zhan, and it doesn’t sound murderous, just care-worn, so Wei Wuxian backs his assumption that he hasn’t fucked Lan Xichen, at least as far as Lan Zhan is aware.
“Wangji,” says Xichen, mouth curving and eyes warming, just a bit. “I’ve missed you.”
“I have missed you too,” Lan Zhan replies. With the itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeniest-yellow-polka-dot-bikiniest hesitation, he says mildly, “I was not aware you knew each other.”
Okay, maybe not aware but still on the cards then, Wei Wuxian thinks.
Lan Xichen just gives his sad, sweet smile again. “Da-ge, A-Yao and I stayed with the Mo family for a spell, the last time we were in the UK. A-Yu was quite taken with Da-ge, followed him everywhere. It was Da-ge who realised he had a golden core and recommended him to study with A-Yao back home.”
Covering for his lack of knowledge with just pure babble, Wei Wuxian says, “I didn’t realise Lan Xichen was your brother.” He pauses a beat. “Wait, Lan Jingyi isn’t a relation-relation too, is he?”
A muscle in Lan Zhan’s jaw tics. “He is not. It is very distant, several generations back.”
Baffled just a touch by the reaction, Wei Wuxian cocks his head. “Well, good to know.”
Lan Xichen’s smile becomes a little less sad as he looks at his brother. If anything, Wei Wuxian would say it becomes a bit scheme-y. As the brothers glide off, he resigns himself to being talked about, which really isn’t anything new.
The following morning, Wei Wuxian is busy placing EMP devices down on the floor when Zizhen and Jingyi tumble through his door, barely knocking.
“What’s it like? Long time, no see,” Wei Wuxian says, straightening and stretching out his back.
At the edge of the EMP ward-circuit, both juniors shuffle awkwardly.
“Senior Mo–” begins Zizhen.
“No, no, no, it’s too early for this. I need a coffee and a pastry before things get started.” Wei Wuxian waves his hands dramatically and ushers them to the side of his ward-circuit.
They all jump when Lan Zhan’s deep voice sounds from just outside in the hallway. “The other juniors have gone for a run down to the cafe.”
As to be expected, he and Lan Xichen look pristine as they walk into the shabby little room to huddle in opposite the juniors, next to Wei Wuxian’s pushed-aside bed. They’ve got a hot, almost-twin thing going on, both in shades of blue, white and dove grey. Wei Wuxian is wearing someone else’s red T-shirt – not even Mo Xuanyu’s, just some random whose laundry he partially nicked by accident from the hostel. He runs a hand through his own ponytail self-consciously, acutely aware of Lan Zhan’s eyes following the gesture.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Everyone whips around. Sizhui, hovers awkwardly in the doorway with a cardboard takeaway tray of coffees. Next to him, an outraged young man with a Jin zhushazhi and an obnoxious, McQueen sheepskin coat shakes handful of what looks like paper-bagged croissants at Wei Wuxian.
“Uh, I work here?” says Wei Wuxian, raising an eyebrow and putting his hands on his hips.
The gobby junior goes bright red. “Jesus Christ! Have you branched into escorting too?”
“Okay, Del Boy, calm down,” says Wei Wuxian, raising his hands. He’s rapidly beginning to think that he really should have gone through Mo Xuanyu’s phone and figured out what all those apps are for.
His assailant continues, “I can’t believe you’d have the nerve to show your face around cultivators after that video with the sword. Everyone stared at me for weeks!”
Wei Wuxian grins. “Why, did you like it?”
“Disgusting!”
Lan Xichen says, “Jin Ling,” but Jingyi gets there first, jumping in front of Wei Wuxian and crossing his arms. He glares protectively. “You can’t just out a sex worker!”
“I’m not outing anyone!” the so-called Jin Ling shouts. “He literally got the boot from the Beijing Association for it! Everybody knows!”
Wei Wuxian didn’t know, but he supposes that’s beside the point. He had wondered how Mo Xuanyu had so many good photos for the algorithm to choose for his Grindr.
“I did not know,” says Lan Zhan without raising his voice. All the little dust motes in the room hold their breath, Wei Wuxian included. “But it should not matter. Mo Xuanyu is our tech assistant, and an incredibly skilled one at that. If you have an issue with his employment history, I suggest you consider secondment elsewhere.”
Jin Ling gapes. To be fair, everyone gapes.
“Wait, wait, wait, back up,” says Wei Wuxian. “Who here knew?”
Sheepishly, all the (nice) juniors raise their hands. Et tu, Sizhui. The Lan brothers shake their heads.
“Not recently or anything!” Jingyi says hurriedly. From the context, Wei Wuxian can guess that Jingyi didn’t find out about his occupation through the practitioner grapevine but via uh, self-discovery. “Not once we knew you. It’s just, well–”
“You’re pretty popular,” admits Zizhen.
Great. Now he can add ‘anyone who watches porn and is under the age of twenty-one’ to the list of people he has to be conscious of recognising Mo Xuanyu.
Clearing his throat delicately, Lan Xichen says, “Perhaps we should get back to the case.”
Older brothers, coming in clutch.
Still with that quiet authority, Lan Zhan takes the lead and says, “Junior Agent Wen, report.”
Coming to attention and lifting his chin, Sizhui gives a rundown very similar in substance to what Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan had received over the phone from Jingyi, but with a tad more order. When he reaches the part about the deaths of the Mo family, Jin Ling goes fish-belly pale and glances guilty at Wei Wuxian. Good. He should learn to taste his words before he spits them in case the next person isn’t able to take it.
“Why were the Mo family in the area?” Lan Xichen asks.
Sizhui gives an apologetic little wince. “We really don’t know. Cymru Force swore up and down that they ordered them to check things out in Cadair Idris. The G-MOE went a bit wild once we crossed the Scottish border – thought we should cover our bases.”
Wei Wuxian chews his croissant contemplatively. He’s perched himself on the iron frame of the bed like an anaemic Rodin’s Thinker. “We should probably check out the gravesite after we put old mate back together. The morgue, too.” Everyone winces, probably in sympathy, but no one objects. He’d studied the photos the juniors sent through with their report, but an in-person butcher’s never hurt. Licking the last flakes off the pastry off his fingers, he says, “Well, let’s get this show on the road.”
In a move that is clever and also flirts with the trapdoor of Wei Wuxian’s gallows humour, Jingyi and Zizhen each have an arm, while Sizhui has both legs. Without removing them from their respective spirit-trapping pouches, the juniors put them all within the ward-circuit. From yet another spirit-trapping pouch, Jingyi removes their iPhone Friend still in his original chilly-bin prison with all the navigation talismans attached. There’s a faint racket coming from inside, but it’s impossible to tell exactly what.
“Keep him on the outside for now,” instructs Wei Wuxian, bringing out some of those zappy collars you use on dogs to stop them crossing an electric fence boundary. There are talisman characters embroidered on the fabric. “We’re gonna do this one limb at a time. Lan Zhan, you green?”
Touching his fingers to the opposite end of the EMP ring, Lan Zhan nods. Cautiously, like he works in animal control, Wei Wuxian yanks the first limb – a right leg – out of its pouch and swiftly collars it.
It continues to lay there meekly, like a dead, dismembered limb.
“Huh,” says Wei Wuxian.
He shrugs and does the other leg. It also gives no reaction. He does the next limb – a left arm.
Really, he should have done the arm first.
Rather than darting out to grab him as he had anticipated, it throws itself towards a leg and undoes the collar. Unimpeded, the leg shoots out over the circle boundary to fly-kick Jin Ling in the solar plexus. Lan Xichen catches him. The arm scuttles round to try to undo the collar on the other leg and Jingyi executes a great dive on top of it just as Sizhui dives for the still-collared leg. They drag them to the edge of the ward-circuit and pin them choke-hold style against its invisible wall of power, keeping the bulk of their own bodies just outside the array. Zizhen wrestles with the right arm, trying to stop it clawing its way out of the spirit-trapping pouch.
“Lan Zhan! The torso!” Wei Wuxian calls, bracing his feet wide.
In one smooth motion, Lan Zhan, still on his knees at the head of the ward-circuit and pumping it full of power, pulls the torso from his spirit-trapping pouch and throws it at Wei Wuxian like a rugby ball. Were Wei Wuxian still in his own body, he would have been able to catch it in a tackle. Instead, it bowls him over like he’s the world’s shittiest scrum-half. He bites his tongue and swears, rolling the bucking torso over and straddling it. Reaching clumsily just outside the ward-circuit, he finds his grounding rod and stakes the torso through its lower dantian like a vampire. There’s a small shockwave and the limbs jerk, paralysed.
“Everyone get those back here and plug them in!”
Quick-smart, the juniors – now all bearing a limb – hastily grab the HDMI cords Wei Wuxian had planted at the cardinal positions of the array and Naloxone-stab them to connect the limbs to their stumps. It’s ugly, but it works. Guided by veil-memory, the limbs fuse back into the body until all that’s left to show their separation is a thick brand of scar tissue like an electrical burn. With his spiritual power, Lan Zhan melts the collars into its skin so they can’t come off a second time.
“Bloody hell,” says Jingyi.
Rather than tell him off, Lan Zhan’s mouth quirks. “Indeed.”
Moving with a mortician’s care, Wei Wuxian runs his hands over the nearly-whole corpse. The addition of limbs does not help with identification beyond 'tall'. There’s a stark difference between what had belonged to the loch and what had belonged to the earth. The torso has bright mollusc-scrapes and algae fissures, barnacles hanging off the ribs like the rigging of The Flying Dutchman; the limbs are littered with moss and mushroom, worming holes through flesh. Its fingerprints have been burned off.
The faintest of noises can still be heard from the chilly bin. With a nod from Lan Zhan, Sizhui pries the lid off.
At ear-splitting volume, Tom Jones screams, ‘WHY, WHY, WHY, DELILAH –” before Sizhui winces and jams the lid back on.
“Well,” says Wei Wuxian, “that’s a new one.”
Try as they might, no one has any idea what ‘Delilah’ could be referencing. Lan Xichen pulls out his fancy education and even fancier laptop and goes biblical.
Zizhen, who seems to have taken the role of resident researcher, sits down next to him on the floor in order to balance his own laptop on his knees. “This is a break in the pattern,” he muses, “the others were pretty direct in hindsight, even though the ley line thing threw us initially.”
Tilting his head towards the door, Wei Wuxian catches Lan Zhan’s eye.
“Junior Agent Wen, stay here and monitor the corpse,” Lan Zhan says. The ‘and these two nerds’ goes unsaid. “Junior Agents Jin and Lan, with us.”
It does not escape Wei Wuxian’s notice that Lan Zhan had left the most powerful junior to hold the fort. Jingyi might be a Lan and first cab off the rank into a crisis, but Sizhui’s quiet dependability is going to be a force to be reckoned with if he stays with the LCA.
In any case, it’s a good call. The cemetery where the juniors had found the body is barely across the river, and Jingyi gives them another rundown. Lan Zhan flashes his practitioner ID at the Cymru guy almost before Wei Wuxian ducks under the blue checkered barrier. Even without the tape, it is very obvious where everything went down: an impressively stout monument lies cracked and on its side, having been blasted through the wrought-iron fence that surrounded this particular grave. An above-ground stone sarcophagus has also been blown in half, and several smaller gravestones decimated. The ground is freshly churned, earthen rot a bit too warm.
Reaching into the veil while pretending to examine the grave-dirt, Wei Wuxian has a bit of a stickybeak. Instantly a hook of death-life-loops try to superimpose themselves, the most insistent of which being a laughing woman in a top hat. He shakes them and tries to find a trace of their Friend, but to no end. The most he gets is an impression, like an inkless lithograph; their Friend was put here to disrupt? obscure? something rather than to power something. It’s not extremely enlightening, given that the most likely theory is he’s literally a dead body probably hidden for murder purposes to avoid jail but, there you go. For his trouble, Wei Wuxian produces a sausage roll – pilfered at breakfast – from his coat and goes to town. Jin Ling is appalled.
The mortuary is even less enlightening. Madam Mo and her son lay on metal slabs, their gold-peony protection rings in useless trays next to them. Lan Zhan attempts his email Inquiry, and even with the bodies so close, gets nothing back. After several minutes, he simply shakes his head.
“No sense in hanging around then,” says Wei Wuxian. He puts his coat on and makes to leave; he gets all the way to the door before he realises that the other three are hovering like uncertain blowflies with awkward hands. “Do you want to talk about me or to me?” he asks, cocking his head.
Cashing in on his seniority, Lan Zhan simply glares at Jingyi and Jin Ling until they book it. He turns that siren gaze on Wei Wuxian and every bit of neurological control Wei Wuxian has throws itself overboard.
“Are you okay?” Lan Zhan moves closer, shoes for once not silent, defeated by the rubbery linoleum.
He lifts a hand as though to touch Wei Wuxian’s shoulder, to cup his cheek. The room is cold; his hands look pale, red at the knuckles. Wei Wuxian really doesn’t know what Lan Zhan is talking about, but he also, for a scrambled instant, doesn’t really care. Swallowing, he nods and lists ever so slightly towards Lan Zhan’s raised hand. Abruptly, it falls back to Lan Zhan’s side.
“Good,” says Lan Zhan, looking away suddenly, as though out the window. There are none. “Let me know if Jin Ling behaves inappropriately again.”
Turning on his heel, he exits the room and Wei Wuxian feels like one of those old-fashioned pearl divers, yanked up from forty fathoms deep and now unable to breathe without the pressure, gasping out on the deck. Right. Jin Ling. Mo Xuanyu’s work.
Out of options, Wei Wuxian lays on the mortuary floor and mopes. He tinkers with a two-way veil radio and mopes. Then, in a fit of inspiration, he opens all his apps until figures out that what he wants is OnlyFans, checks if Lan Zhan has a subscriber account (he does not) and mopes. Eventually, he decides he has reached his mope quota and heads out, wanting to see if he can talk to Zizhen further about his song research.
A few feet away from the building, Jingyi is leaning against a lamppost. He looks up when he hears footsteps and gives a tentative smile. “Alright?”
“Alright,” says Wei Wuxian, hitching his tech briefcase and trying not to look like he’s been moping for the last forty-five minutes.
Pushing off the lamppost, Jingyi moves closer, frowning all concerned like Sizhui does sometimes. “Are you okay?”
The déjà vu makes Wei Wuxian blink. “Fine.”
“You know it doesn’t matter to us, right? What Jin Ling said. It doesn’t matter to me,” Jingyi says insistently.
Sweet kid. Wei Wuxian smiles. “Thanks, Jingyi.” He swings his briefcase towards the bridge in an encompassing get-moving motion, putting a bit of cheerfulness in his tone. “Now, where’s Zizhen? I want to go over his notes.”
Trotting along beside him, Jingyi checks his watch. “Want to do dinner first? I’m starving and honestly, he’s probably demolishing the carvery anyway.”
A sausage roll consumed in a graveyard does a meal make according to Wei Wuxian, but also, he has never been one to turn down free food and he’s still got a copy of the LCA credit card. When they make their way back into the Bridge End, Zizhen (and Lan Zhan) are nowhere to be seen. Lan Zhan’s brother, however, is hovering by the Yorkshire puddings.
“Lan Xichen!” Wei Wuxian calls when he spots him. “Come sit with us!”
The three of them snag a table by the fire and Wei Wuxian leans close, relishing the warmth. Sodding floor was cold. Looking idly at the flames, Jingyi starts humming absent-mindedly. Out of the corner of his eye, Wei Wuxian sees Lan Xichen accidentally elbow his own knife onto the floor.
“Cute,” says Wei Wuxian, resting his hand on his chin and thinking fondly (for once) of Inverness. “Must have got that from Lan Zhan, hey?”
Jingyi startles and stops humming, flushing high across his nose. “I–”
“What do you mean?” Lan Xichen’s voice, low and urgent, cuts across the table like a diatribe.
Both Jingyi and Wei Wuxian shift to face him. His knife is still on the floor, forgotten. With a cultivator’s strength, Lan Xichen’s hands grip the table edge.
Instinctively spreading his palms in the universal put-the-gun-down gesture, Wei Wuxian speaks cautiously. Something buzzes in the back of his brain, less a hummingbird and more an augury. “The humming while you wait for things. Lan Zhan’s been doing it all week.”
“Do it again,” says Lan Xichen, looking at hard at Jingyi.
A little louder than before, Jingyi continues the melody for a bar before Lan Xichen cuts him off harshly. “Louder. Whistle it.”
With a wary flick of his eyes towards Wei Wuxian, Jingyi obliges. He’s not half-bad, though the song is unfamiliar, consistently high in places and low in others, as though a call-and-response. It’s the wrong kind of melody for something Celtic folk; more the trailing, rippling water falls of traditional Chinese.
“Enough,” whispers Lan Xichen. “Enough.”
The song cuts off abruptly. In placid agony, Lan Xichen closes his eyes for a beat, then those long eyelashes – so like Lan Zhan’s - snap open sharply. On an inhale, he wets his lips.
“I know who our corpse is,” he says, and Wei Wuxian gets an awful, hangman’s-drop of intuition a second before it happens.
Lan Xichen continues, mouth unaware and resolute: “What do you know about Wei Wuxian?”