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best two trust falls out of three

Summary:

Sometimes they're too much alike. Sometimes they're just alike enough.

Notes:

Hello ForErusSake! Having checked through the mods, I think the "temporary canon divergence" in the tags is going to be within okay parameters for you? but if you read it and don't feel comfortable with it, say the word and I will be glad to write you something else, seriously. Never sorry to have an excuse to write more in this canon...

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

“I stepped on…something,” Bai Haotian says, because she can’t bring herself to name what she knows it has to be.

Instantly, she wants to bite her tongue out. She is a child of Warehouse 11, she knows how to dissemble, how could she not have…She should have said, Xiao San-ye, I can hear something in the tunnel over there, it could be Jiang Zisuan, can you go and check? No, that wouldn’t have been any good, nothing would have been any good, she has to get him out of here before…before the thing under her foot…before, and how can she do that when he can hardly stand?

The light shifts as Wu Xie directs his flashlight at her feet. She can hear him draw breath. “Don’t move. You hear me, Xiao Bai, stay still!”

“Stay away,” she warns him hopelessly, knowing it’s too late. She’s been called stubborn and strong-willed all her life, but she has known Xiao San-ye for long enough to understand that trying to out-stubborn him is a day’s work. (She’s only succeeded once, back in the Warehouse, and it terrified her, holding her own against a man twice her size and furious with mistrust and suspicion. Well—that was then.) If he would just listen to her this once--! “Stay away!”

No good. Xiao San-ye is already struggling to his feet, catching himself against the wall. As unsteady as he is, she can see that he’s watching exactly where he steps. Another lesson learned too late, Tiantian, she tells herself miserably.

He drops to one knee a careful distance away. In the light of his flashlight, they both see the row of metal nubs, just visible above the sand and dirt of the ground. Wu Xie jerks his chin at them, without speaking; she doesn’t need to be told what they are, what will happen if she moves, or even shifts her weight.

Bai Haotian swallows very hard, and tries one last time. “You have to get out of here. Don’t mind me, just go! What if Jiang Zisuan shows up?”

“Shut up,” he snaps at her, sudden and loud enough to make her gasp, just barely managing not to flinch and shift her weight.

“What are you doing?” she demands, shaky with anger, watching him take out that curved knife he won’t be parted from and unsheathe it.

He bends to her foot, shakes his head a little, shifts to lie prone on the ground, at eye-level with the—call it what it is, Tiantian—with the UXB. The knife is balanced between his palms.

“Xiao San-ye, go, just get out of here!”

This time he doesn’t even bother responding. Carefully, moving in millimeters, he slides the flat of the knife blade between her boot sole and the trigger nub. Bai Haotian holds her breath. Her heart is beating so heavily that she’s afraid her foot will shake with the force of her pulse.

Xiao San-ye closes his eyes for a moment. “I’m going to count three,” he tells her, hoarse but steady. “On three, lift your foot.”

She nods.

“One.

Two.”

Neither of them is breathing.

“Three.”

Bai Haotian lifts her foot.

The world doesn't blow up. Wu Xie's weight is on the trigger in place of her own.

Reaction tears spill down Bai Haotian’s cheeks. She takes two very careful steps back and sinks to a crouch, not entirely on purpose. Xiao San-ye hands her the knife and drags the back of his wrist across his forehead, sweat in his hair and running into his eyes.

“Okay.” He’s breathless. “Now get away from here.”

“No.”

“I said get out,” louder.

“I’m not going!”

“You think this is a game?” he shouts at her. “Are you fucked in the head? Go on, move!”

“Maybe I am fucked in the head!” she yells back, because what does he know about what makes her tick? And who does he think he is, accusing literally anybody else of being fucked in the head? I’m not going! I don’t care how much you yell at me!” Once again she's awash in the fear of his savage anger, but now it's worse. She knows he's only this angry, now, because he cares for her.

“Get the fuck away from here!” Wu Xie shouts, furious, his face wild. The echoes ring against the low ceiling.

Bai Haotian feels herself crumple into helpless tears; she sobs, plants her feet more solidly, clutches the knife as if it were some comfort. They stare at each other, gazes locked.

It’s Xiao San-ye, finally, who shakes his head a little and looks down. She watches his throat work. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, in a tone almost unrecognizably gentle against his rage of moments ago. His eyelashes are damp.

Bai Haotian sniffles unbecomingly and manages a smile. “You didn’t go…when said to,” she offers thickly.

“Two of a kind, aren’t we?” Wu Xie lets out a long weary sigh. “Xiao Bai, please. What if Jiang Zisuan comes back? I need you to watch out for him—buy me some time.” He’s brushing sand and grit away from the mechanism on the side of the UXB.

As much as she hates to admit it, that makes sense. Some sense. After all, the last thing Jiang Zisuan did was shoot Xiao San-ye in the chest; she doesn’t think he’s going to let her slow him down by much. But—

Her train of thought is cut off when Wu Xie's breath catches on a fit of coughing. Alarmed, Bai Haotian picks her way carefully around the row of threatening triggers to rub his back. When it’s over, his eyes fall shut for a moment. He’s ashen under the grime and bruises.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asks fearfully, idiotically.

Xiao San-ye draws a long breath, wheezing, and opens his eyes. “Fine. Go, Xiao Bai. It’s okay,” he says, adjusts the angle of the flashlight propped on the ground, and begins to unscrew the side of the UXB.

And hesitates.

Bai Haotian can see it too.

“Xiao San-ye,” she says, in her very best flirtatious, pouty, I-know-something-you-don’t-know tone. It couldn’t be more inappropriate for the situation, and that’s what gets Wu Xie to look at her. Bai Haotian clutches the knife hilt harder—it’s too big for her hand, hurting her finger joints—and wags a finger of the other hand at him, making her eyes huge. “Xiao San-ye. Did you know your hands are shaking?”

Xiao San-ye looks down at his hands, looks up at her face, says nothing.

She can see him struggling to come up with a solution. It’s not even that hard—but he’s exhausted, and he can’t breathe, and he’s distracted by the magnetic pull toward Leicheng (and his Sanshu, and Zhang-dage, and…).

So she says it for him. “But mine aren’t.”

Wu Xie closes his eyes once again, lashes ghost-dark against his cheeks. Bai Haotian presses her advantage: “And you know I can follow instructions.” She gulps down the last remnant of her tears. “Trust me.”

Xiao San-ye’s eyes open, impossibly wide and dark, and for a moment she knows why Pang-ye calls him Tianzhen. Wondering, somewhere at the back of her mind, what it would have been like to be the one twenty years older, she repeats in the calmest voice she can muster, “Trust me.”

“…I do,” he says, almost inaudibly.

Bai Haotian shifts closer to him, until she’s sitting almost tucked against his side. This way she can reach the UXB (aah, she can reach the UXB, she’s going to have her hands in a UXB, aah, no, do not think about it that way right now, Tiantian) and the angle is close enough that it should be easy for him to direct her.

Wu Xie clears his throat, and says “Okay. First step is, put the knife down. You’re going to need both hands.”

Once they get into the rhythm of it, it’s almost like being back in the Warehouse, where they’d learned to work together well (and, painfully, to trust each other in the face of worse things). Bai Haotian keeps her hands steady, tiny precise movements, doing only and exactly what Xiao San-ye tells her, letting her whole awareness narrow down to her hands, the mechanism, and his voice.

Xiao San-ye’s instructions come smoothly—this is obviously not his first UXB—except when he has to stop and work to breathe. Once he chokes on a word, twists away from her to cough helplessly, doubling over. Bai Haotian focuses her whole attention on keeping her own hands absolutely still, poised between processes so that not a gram of pressure shifts and she can keep on doing exactly what she was doing. It takes all the willpower she has.

Eventually the coughing subsides; Wu Xie straightens with visible effort, still gasping for breath, and goes on with what he was saying as soon as he can speak. She forces herself to fall back into concentration along with him.

“Wu Xie!”

They both freeze. Jiang Zisuan, Bai Haotian thinks for a horrified instant, but no, the voice is familiar and reassuring. The dim light glints off Huo Daofu’s glasses.

“What the actual fuck is going on?” he demands. All right, they probably look like…like goodness knows what.

“Stop!” she gasps as he takes a step forward, her voice overlaid by Wu Xie’s “Don’t move!”

“Seriously, what the—Ah!” Huo Daofu stops dead, one foot lifted, as he sees the row of UXBs in the light of Wu Xie’s torch. He stares for a moment, then lets out a long breath and shakes his head, mouth tight—his ultra-controlled version of a string of curses, Bai Haotian thinks.

Xiao San-ye, his voice neatly divided between tension and amusement, says “We’ll be done here in just a minute or two. Xiao Huo, will you stand guard? Jiang Zisuan’s still around somewhere. I really don’t want him walking in on us.”

Bai Haotian can’t quite hold back a slightly hysterical giggle. Huo Daofu gives Wu Xie a very dirty look, turns his back showily, and stands braced at the entrance to the tunnel, shoulders tense.

Xiao San-ye closes his eyes for a moment and scrubs a hand across his cheekbones. “All right, Xiao Bai, where were we? Okay, yeah. You can see the two wires, yes? Yellow and white?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You need to cut the yellow wire first, then the white wire, then we’re all good.”

“Cut them!” Bai Haotian squeaks. “With what?”

Once again, Wu Xie hands her his knife. “It’s very sharp. Almost no force required. Yellow first, then white, Xiao Bai, do you hear me?”

“Trust me,” she says again.

“With my life,” Xiao San-ye answers promptly, unfeigned. “Go ahead. When you’re ready.”

“No time like the present,” Bai Haotian tells him, jerking her chin up defiantly. It takes an effort. She holds her breath, inserts the knife tip delicately into the tiny space.

Yellow, then white. Yellow, then white. Oh thank goodness, the knife really is that sharp, it was probably Zhang-dage who taught Xiao San-ye to take care of his weapons this way and she’s going to be forever grateful to him…Yellow, then white.

The yellow wire parts. Bai Haotian shifts her grip, minimally. The white wire gives way.

Wu Xie waits, very carefully, until she has set the knife down on the ground and let her hands fall to her knees. Then he takes a deep breath—this close, she can hear the heavy rasp in his chest—and lets his weight come off the trigger.

Nothing happens. The bomb sits there with its guts exposed, looking outdated and pitiful.

“I did it?” she says, only it comes out like a question. “I mean, we did it?”

“You did it,” Xiao San-ye confirms. He’s starting to slump against her, his full weight coming onto her shoulders so that she has to brace herself with one hand. “Nice work, Xiao Bai.” She feels him drop a quick kiss on the top of her head, a badge of honor like her first Warehouse 11 manager-level ID disc.

“Done?” Huo Daofu says, turning to face them. “Quick enough work, I suppose.” He sounds very cross. Bai Haotian is surprised to discover that she knows him well enough to parse this as worry. “Oh, for the love of heaven, Wu Xie…” He circles the line of triggers, precise and careful, and kneels on Wu Xie’s far side to ease his weight off Bai Haotian. “There’s water in my pack, Xiao Bai, get him some.”

Bai Haotian hurries to obey, standing up on shaky legs and rolling out her stiff wrists. “Knife,” Wu Xie murmurs, eyes closing as his head sinks onto Huo Daofu’s shoulder, and she picks it up and sheathes it carefully, then sticks it in her belt for lack of anywhere else.

She’s putting the water flask away again when there’s a commotion from the corridor, and a flailing mess of arms and legs staggers into the open space.

Careful!” Huo Daofu shouts. They manage to stop moving before the line of UXBs. Jia Kezi and Li Jiale have Jiang Zisuan by one arm each, hanging on hard while he struggles and curses. They’re all a little the worse for wear: she can see a huge bruise starting on the sniper’s forehead, while Jia Kezi has the beginnings of an impressive black eye and Li Jiale’s bottom lip is split and dripping blood down his chin. It speaks to how hard she and Wu Xie were concentrating that they hadn’t heard a thing.

Having seen Wu Xie, Jiang Zisuan is struggling all the harder, hissing incoherent imprecations; Wu Xie hasn’t even bothered to open his eyes.

“How’d you manage not to get shot?” Huo Daofu asks, ignoring the fuss.

Li Jiale grins, winces, and licks blood off his lip. “Kezi heard him before he heard us, you know? Sneaked up behind him, bashed his face on the wall, and grabbed the gun while he was groggy. Right, Mr. Jiang?”

Jiang Zisuan, absorbed in his hatred of Wu Xie, doesn’t even seem to notice he’s being addressed.

“Nice job catching him,” Huo Daofu says distastefully, “but what are you going to do with him now? You two can’t stand there wrestling him for ever.”

“Tie him up,” Jia Kezi says in his familiar laconic way. “Rope’s in my pack. Uh, Manager Bai?”

“On it!” Bai Haotian chirps.

The tying-up process is a messy one, and by the end of it Bai Haotian has earned her own bruised jaw (actually where Li Jiale’s elbow caught her by accident), but the sniper is securely bound and Jiale and Kezi are seeing to each other’s minor injuries.

Huo Daofu, who ignored the whole process to focus on Wu Xie, says “We need to get back to the Tianlinlou, now. Wu Xie needs more than I can do for him here. And don’t even fucking think about telling me you’re fine,” he adds to an alarmingly limp Xiao San-ye.

Bai Haotian giggles again in spite of herself, recognizing one of his more annoying habits. But she’d rather have him lying through his teeth about his health than white-faced and silent in Huo Daofu’s arms.

“We must be just about under the Tianlinlou,” Jia Kezi volunteers, neatly tying off a bandage around Li Jiale’s fingers. “Spatial reckoning-wise. I can’t hear through this much rock, but Liu Sang might be able to hear us…”

“If he’s still there. If he’s still alive. If he’s got nothing better to do than sit around listening on the off-chance we might show up,” the doctor snaps.

Bai Haotian is suddenly having an idea. It’s a terrible idea and she should just forget about it and pretend it had never crossed her mind, but it’s also such a Xiao San-ye kind of idea that she can’t help giving it a try.

She says his name.

Wu Xie doesn’t lift his head from Huo Daofu’s shoulder, but his eyes open, very dark and fully aware. “Xiao Bai?”

“If Pang-ye were here,” she says carefully, “what would he be doing?” To make her point, she reaches out—very carefully—and tinks her fingernail against one of the other UXBs.

Xiao San-ye blinks once, slowly enough that she wonders if he’s tracking, and then a slow grin begins to shine through the painful exhaustion on his face. Bai Haotian learned during the Warehouse 11 tests to be very, very wary of that look (and to love it); that’s the expression Wu Xie wears when he’s just realized that he can solve a problem by standing it on its head, audacious and dangerous and brilliant.

She’s beginning to figure out that she can do that too.

“What the fuck are you thinking,” Huo Daofu demands of him, and then, a beat late, catches on. “Are you two serious?”

“Us,” Xiao San-ye says, conserving his breath, “down. Tianlinlou, up. Boom. Nice surprise for Liu Sang.”

“And he can alert Pang-ye and the others,” Bai Haotian fills in. “And maybe the ceiling will fall down and they’ll be able to pull us straight up?”

“As long as the ceiling doesn’t fall down on our heads,” Li Jiale points out in alarm. “Because, sorry, but I don’t actually volunteer to set one of those things off so everyone else can get out?”

“Of course not.” This is the crowning glory of Bai Haotian’s terrible idea. “It’s like you’re all forgetting we have a sniper right here.”

Jiale and Kezi exchange glances. Huo Daofu opens his mouth and closes it without saying anything, wearing his cursing-internally expression. Wu Xie’s eyes are closed again; he looks at best half-conscious.

Jiang Zisuan himself barely reacts at all; he’s sitting sprawled against the wall with hands and feet bound, gazing vengefully into nothingness.

Bai Haotian takes a deep breath and gets a good solid grip on the handle of Xiao San-ye’s knife. She can do this. She’s watched Xiao San-ye work his magic before, somehow bringing people who ought to hate and distrust him around to his devoted allies (just look at every single one of them here right now). It’s like disarming the bomb. She can do it too.

“Hi, Mr. Jiang,” she says, cheerful and bright, as if she was checking in with one of her sub-managers at the Warehouse. When he doesn’t react, she unsheathes the knife and sets the tip of it gently under his chin, exerting the tiny amount of pressure needed to draw just a drop of blood. He blinks and glares at her, but doesn’t speak.

“You’ve got the most of all of us,” she tells him, “invested in keeping Xiao—in keeping Wu Xie alive.” It’s a lie, but one he’ll believe, because he already does. “Do you want to wait here and watch him die? I know you don’t, c’mon. You want his death all to yourself, you want to take him down in a fair fight, so you can give your sister some face.” It’s a risk, mentioning his sister, but it seems to concentrate his attention more—she eases up on the knife just the littlest bit—without driving him into a rage, so far so good. “Which means you need to work with us here.”

Jiang Zisuan’s eyes meet hers for the first time. “What are you offering?” he rasps.

Think fast, Tiantian. “You do the shooting for us, to set off the UXB from a safe range. You can do that, can’t you?”

He snorts. “In my sleep. Blindfolded.”

“Oh. Um, wow! Okay. One bullet only in the gun, and you won’t aim it anywhere but the UXB.” She presses a little harder on the knife. “You cooperate with us—even when we untie you—until we’re back at the Tianlinlou. Then you give us time for Dr. Huo to do his thing—” It’s the only place where her voice almost catches, remembering just how ill Xiao San-ye is and how little recourse Huo Daofu will have, even aboveground. “And we give you a head start. After, uh…”

“Four days,” Huo Daofu says from behind her.

Jiang Zisuan sneers a little. “Auspicious.”

“That’ll do!” Bai Haotian tells him, finding her perky smile again with great effort. “After four days, all bets are off. I mean, personally I think you would be much better off just throwing in your lot with us, it’s worked for the rest of us so far—”

“Until it doesn’t,” he hisses, “just like it didn’t work for my sister.”

Misstep. She dances to keep her mental balance. “Or not. That’s up to you. Those are my terms. Our terms. If you renege, we’ll take our chances without you—we don’t have to untie you, you know.” She grins at him, the cutest little-girl grin she can manage. “What do you say?”

Management experience, Bai Haotian thinks later, is vital to moving up in the world. It all works pretty much the way she said. They take shelter in the tunnel, and Jiang Zisuan shoots off the trigger of one of the UXBs with lazy competence, barely seeming to aim. The amount of rock that falls is, well, a lot more than she imagined. She covers her ears against the roar of it and sees Jia Kezi doing the same, with Li Jiale’s arm around him for good measure. Huo Daofu is holding a damp cloth to Wu Xie’s face, trying to protect him from the dust filling the air, but even so when the rocks settle the first thing she hears is Xiao San-ye coughing.

The second thing she hears is Liu Sang’s voice from above, shouting for backup.

Days later, when Xiao San-ye has come back to them, when they've set off again on the next leg of the journey, she says to him “You know, I only managed to talk Jiang Zisuan around because I was imagining how you would have done it.”

“No,” he says, smiling at her. “That’s not how I would have done it at all. You did it much better.”

“I did?”

“You aren’t me, Xiao Bai. You don’t have to be. Do you trust me?” he asks her, the way she asked him in the tunnel.

“With my life,” she says back, the way he did.

"Don't do that. Jiang Zisuan is right, you know. I get people killed." There's a shadow in his eyes that she has never seen before. "Trust yourself. I do, you know." The bright light of his smile--a real one, she can tell the difference now--only darkens the shadow further.

"As upper management," Bai Haotian tells him, in her very best tones of bureaucratic disdain, "it is incumbent upon me to make my own decisions about who to trust. You expect me to take your word for it that I'm not supposed to trust you?" She hears herself a moment later and cracks up, tears springing to her eyes as if to belie the mirth.

Xiao San-ye's grin turns wry. "That's it, Xiao Bai. I knew you'd understand."

Bai Haotian wipes her eyes on her wrist, and then, greatly daring, reaches out to thumb a stray tear away from the crinkles at the corner of his eye. "What are you waiting for, Xiao San-ye? We're on the clock," she says briskly, and they bump shoulders and take the next steps down the road to Leicheng and hope.

 

Notes:

As you will have noticed, roughly the first quarter of the fic is drawn directly from season 2 episode 14. The rest is mine.
Disclaimer: Everything I know about disarming bombs I learned from Zhao Yunlan.