fic for Friday because why the hell not
Oct. 28th, 2022 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiThis is something I wrote a while ago and for some reason didn't feel like posting on AO3; it feels a bit...slight? But I still kind of like it so I'm throwing it on here just for fun.
It had taken a few times of Zhao Yunlan hearing his father talk (approvingly) about “Director Li” before he put the name together with the self-enclosed, desperate, helplessly miserable graduate student whom he’d encountered when first meeting Shen Wei (okay, his first meeting, not Shen Wei’s). It really was the same person, but somewhere in there she’d acquired the steady calm and surety unique to people who have…well, who had survived the kind of thing they all had, at this point.
Which was just as well, since he and she were now holed up together in a tiny, sweltering attic apartment previously occupied by a joint Haixingren-Dixingren sub-terrorist organization. Hurray for interworld harmony.
Zhao Yunlan would be the first to admit that his standards for tidiness and good order were not high, but this apartment was pushing it. Maybe two ping all told, with a stack of flat mattresses taking up half of it, now taken up in their turn with three large unconscious men (sorry, Lin Jing, next time you can stay in your nice safe lab) whose arms and legs spilled over into the rest of the space. Otherwise, there was an old gas ring so encrusted that Zhao Yunlan wanted to spare Shen Wei’s eyes from ever having to look on it, and an absurdly homey square of imitation Tianhe rug positioned under the large, slanting, (very dirty) skylight. On this Zhao Yunlan and Li Qian were now sitting, Li Qian kneeling tidily in her elegant trouser suit (the only tidy thing in this whole place), Zhao Yunlan sloppily hugging his knees.
Sun was pouring in through the scratched skylight, making the apartment into an oven. Zhao Yunlan struggled out of his denim jacket, trying not to elbow Li Qian too badly, and draped it over Lin Jing’s dangling legs; his multivalent subordinate wasn’t doing anything else useful right now, he could do double duty as a coat rack. Li Qian slipped neatly out of her brown gabardine jacket and folded it over her lap. The fine hairs that had slipped out of her bun were beginning to curl along her hairline.
“I didn’t know you could fight like that,” he remarked, for something to say and out of genuine curiosity. The first man when they burst through the door had tangled with Zhao Yunlan, and while he was occupied the second had turned a jury-rigged-looking spray gun on Lin Jing. Li Qian had gotten an elbow through his, knocked him off balance, and turned his own gun around on him faster than Zhao Yunlan had knocked out his opponent.
She put a hand to her mouth, a little embarrassed. “Agent Chu taught me.”
“Lao Chu?”
“I…after everything happened…I wanted to be able to take care of myself better. In a fight. If I had to. I asked Changcheng if he could help, and he asked Agent Chu to teach me some self-defense techniques.”
Zhao Yunlan blinked.
“He was very kind,” Li Qian added. “No wonder Changcheng is so fond of him.”
You learn something new every day, Zhao Yunlan reflected. “You could’ve asked Shen Wei, you know. He knows one or two things about fighting.”
Li Qian giggled into her fingers. “So I’ve grasped. But he’s so busy already, I didn’t want to cause him trouble.”
Zhao Yunlan approved of this stance, even though he was pretty sure there wasn’t anything Li Qian could ask for that Shen Wei would think of as causing him trouble. “Well, it looks like either Lao Chu was a good teacher or you were a good student or both. Remind me when we’re done here to bump up his bonus for the month.”
With comically perfect timing, Lin Jing groaned and shifted on the thin mattress. Zhao Yunlan swore. “Are they waking up already? The one I cold-cocked is going to be out of it for a while, but I don’t want the one who had a taste of his own medicine to sit up and get frisky.”
Li Qian stood up with some difficulty, trying not to bump her head on the skylight, and leaned awkwardly over Zhao Yunlan to examine Lin Jing. He put a hand up to brace her forearm so that she wasn’t cantilevered over him, and felt her twitch for a moment at his grip and then allow him to take her weight, exactly as much of it as she needed in order to keep her balance.
She’s so much like Shen Wei, he thought suddenly, recognizing the reticence, the quiet, hard-won poise, the determined competence, the self-contained reluctance to burden—in this case literally—anyone more than absolutely necessary. No wonder Shen Wei cared for her so much.
“—doesn’t seem to be coming to the surface yet,” Li Qian was saying, unaware of Zhao Yunlan’s reflections. “I think the other man is Haixingren, so the effects should be similar. I’m not sure about the one you knocked out.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure he was hauling off with dark energy. At least we know how that works.”
“The question,” Li Qian said, folding herself carefully back down into her position on the rug, “is whether their homebrew here—” she prodded distastefully at the spray gun, lying in the corner where it had fallen—“is the same weapon that temporarily deprived those three victims last week of their powers. In Haixingren it just seems to induce temporary unconsciousness—”
“Lin Jing’s going to be spitting thunder when he finds out he was his own experimental subject.” Zhao Yunlan gave Lin Jing’s dangling foot a casual pat of apology. “Which reminds me, is the Institute running with you two both hanging out here? I may be notorious for getting my hands dirty in the field, but I feel like you should have some minions you could have sent out instead.”
Li Qian clasped her hands in her lap. “We have some very promising young researchers, but they all…they…they joined us afterward. They haven’t been through…they’re not field-tested.” By which she meant they’d still been happily researching away in cozy university labs (or wherever) the day the city burned, and before that. Not like Lin Jing, or Li Qian herself.
“Maybe you ought to get them all some combat training,” Zhao Yunlan suggested. “I’d be willing to rent out Lao Chu to you at a very reasonable hourly rate—”
Li Qian gave him a delicately judgmental look of amusement, making him think of Shen Wei again. “I will take that under consideration, with attention to the Institute budget,” she said primly.
“Yeah, you do that.” Zhao Yunlan bent his neck backward to hear his shoulders crack, wishing there was room to stretch out like Da Qing. “Also, maybe add a line item in the budget for the study of dark energy fields that fuck with mobile phones?”
“We already have a subunit looking into the interactions of dark energy with electronics and other Haixing technology, under Lin-xuezhang. It’s an enormous field, though, as you can imagine, and other than his work there’s not much existing research…”
“Might want to move it up the priority list, just in case Lin Jing’s evil twin shows up one of these days.” Zhao Yunlan heard himself and winced, closing his eyes for a moment. “This one here’s a pain in the ass, not a disaster,” he went on determinedly, pushing the glancing reference aside. “These days Xiao Guo is getting pretty good at putting the pieces together, and he can always call in Cong Bo if all else fails, and they’ve got Shen Wei. We won’t be in here too long. You think it was a standing field they had?”
Li Qian frowned down at her folded hands. “Most likely an emergency measure, one that was triggered when, um, our friend over there threw dark energy at you and hit the door instead. Do you think he’s the only one who can undo the seal and open the door?”
“Shen Wei can open it,” Zhao Yunlan told her, with absolute faith. “You’ll see when he gets here.”
Li Qian smiled at him, her serious face turning sweet and merry. “Professor Shen can do anything.”
“Bet your life on it.”
“I have,” she said, not quite smiling any more. “I would again.”
At that point, three things happened at once. Lin Jing groaned loudly and said “Boss?”, the previously unconscious Haixingren criminal sat up and inquired “What the fuck?”, and there was a hiss and crackle of dark energy followed by the door falling in.
Shen Wei, Chu Shuzhi and Guo Changcheng burst into the small room, filling it almost entirely. The awakened criminal rolled off the bed, taking Lin Jing with him in a yelling mess, and grabbed wildly for the spray gun abandoned in the corner. Zhao Yunlan kicked it away from him, tried to get a good angle for a punch, and ended up falling on top of the man and bringing an elbow down onto the back of his head.
Relative silence fell. Li Qian, as far as Zhao Yunlan could see from his odd position, had gotten hold of the spray gun and was keeping it well out of reach, good for her. “Qian-jie!” said Guo Changcheng brightly. “Are you all okay? What is that?”
“Director Li and Lin Jing get to answer that one,” Zhao Yunlan told him, still prone and slightly out of breath. “It’s the anti-Dixingren spray we’ve been hunting down. Handle with care, eh?”
“Oh yes! Wait—Lin Jing-ge, is that you?” Xiao Guo prodded gently at the visible parts of Lin Jing, who grunted and pushed ineffectually at the two men on top of him. “Chief, can you stand up so we can disentangle everyone?”
Shen Wei, who had not spoken, was suddenly there to lend a strong arm. Zhao Yunlan sat up, more or less under his own steam, and felt Shen Wei’s hand cup the back of his neck for a moment.
Xiao Guo was dragging a complaining Lin Jing upright, while Chu Shuzhi saw efficiently to immobilizing the two unconscious miscreants. Li Qian said “Professor Shen, may we call on you for advice during the weapon analysis?”
“Of course. You aren’t hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“She did beautifully,” Zhao Yunlan told him. “Kept her head the whole time.” He winked at Li Qian, who managed a credibly Shen Wei-esque look of wry amusement, although she was blushing a little.
“I’m glad the two of you were able to look after each other,” Shen Wei said quietly. “I worried.”
Zhao Yunlan put a hand on Shen Wei’s shoulder and used it to get to his feet. “Here as elsewhere, we rely on one another, it’s how we survive. Eh, meimei?”
“Yes, Zhao-dage,” Li Qian said solemnly, and breathed a laugh before straightening her back to settle back into her Director Li poise. Shen Wei’s tense mouth relaxed into an almost-smile; Zhao Yunlan leaned comfortably against him and watched his people get the job done.
Be safe and well.
It had taken a few times of Zhao Yunlan hearing his father talk (approvingly) about “Director Li” before he put the name together with the self-enclosed, desperate, helplessly miserable graduate student whom he’d encountered when first meeting Shen Wei (okay, his first meeting, not Shen Wei’s). It really was the same person, but somewhere in there she’d acquired the steady calm and surety unique to people who have…well, who had survived the kind of thing they all had, at this point.
Which was just as well, since he and she were now holed up together in a tiny, sweltering attic apartment previously occupied by a joint Haixingren-Dixingren sub-terrorist organization. Hurray for interworld harmony.
Zhao Yunlan would be the first to admit that his standards for tidiness and good order were not high, but this apartment was pushing it. Maybe two ping all told, with a stack of flat mattresses taking up half of it, now taken up in their turn with three large unconscious men (sorry, Lin Jing, next time you can stay in your nice safe lab) whose arms and legs spilled over into the rest of the space. Otherwise, there was an old gas ring so encrusted that Zhao Yunlan wanted to spare Shen Wei’s eyes from ever having to look on it, and an absurdly homey square of imitation Tianhe rug positioned under the large, slanting, (very dirty) skylight. On this Zhao Yunlan and Li Qian were now sitting, Li Qian kneeling tidily in her elegant trouser suit (the only tidy thing in this whole place), Zhao Yunlan sloppily hugging his knees.
Sun was pouring in through the scratched skylight, making the apartment into an oven. Zhao Yunlan struggled out of his denim jacket, trying not to elbow Li Qian too badly, and draped it over Lin Jing’s dangling legs; his multivalent subordinate wasn’t doing anything else useful right now, he could do double duty as a coat rack. Li Qian slipped neatly out of her brown gabardine jacket and folded it over her lap. The fine hairs that had slipped out of her bun were beginning to curl along her hairline.
“I didn’t know you could fight like that,” he remarked, for something to say and out of genuine curiosity. The first man when they burst through the door had tangled with Zhao Yunlan, and while he was occupied the second had turned a jury-rigged-looking spray gun on Lin Jing. Li Qian had gotten an elbow through his, knocked him off balance, and turned his own gun around on him faster than Zhao Yunlan had knocked out his opponent.
She put a hand to her mouth, a little embarrassed. “Agent Chu taught me.”
“Lao Chu?”
“I…after everything happened…I wanted to be able to take care of myself better. In a fight. If I had to. I asked Changcheng if he could help, and he asked Agent Chu to teach me some self-defense techniques.”
Zhao Yunlan blinked.
“He was very kind,” Li Qian added. “No wonder Changcheng is so fond of him.”
You learn something new every day, Zhao Yunlan reflected. “You could’ve asked Shen Wei, you know. He knows one or two things about fighting.”
Li Qian giggled into her fingers. “So I’ve grasped. But he’s so busy already, I didn’t want to cause him trouble.”
Zhao Yunlan approved of this stance, even though he was pretty sure there wasn’t anything Li Qian could ask for that Shen Wei would think of as causing him trouble. “Well, it looks like either Lao Chu was a good teacher or you were a good student or both. Remind me when we’re done here to bump up his bonus for the month.”
With comically perfect timing, Lin Jing groaned and shifted on the thin mattress. Zhao Yunlan swore. “Are they waking up already? The one I cold-cocked is going to be out of it for a while, but I don’t want the one who had a taste of his own medicine to sit up and get frisky.”
Li Qian stood up with some difficulty, trying not to bump her head on the skylight, and leaned awkwardly over Zhao Yunlan to examine Lin Jing. He put a hand up to brace her forearm so that she wasn’t cantilevered over him, and felt her twitch for a moment at his grip and then allow him to take her weight, exactly as much of it as she needed in order to keep her balance.
She’s so much like Shen Wei, he thought suddenly, recognizing the reticence, the quiet, hard-won poise, the determined competence, the self-contained reluctance to burden—in this case literally—anyone more than absolutely necessary. No wonder Shen Wei cared for her so much.
“—doesn’t seem to be coming to the surface yet,” Li Qian was saying, unaware of Zhao Yunlan’s reflections. “I think the other man is Haixingren, so the effects should be similar. I’m not sure about the one you knocked out.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure he was hauling off with dark energy. At least we know how that works.”
“The question,” Li Qian said, folding herself carefully back down into her position on the rug, “is whether their homebrew here—” she prodded distastefully at the spray gun, lying in the corner where it had fallen—“is the same weapon that temporarily deprived those three victims last week of their powers. In Haixingren it just seems to induce temporary unconsciousness—”
“Lin Jing’s going to be spitting thunder when he finds out he was his own experimental subject.” Zhao Yunlan gave Lin Jing’s dangling foot a casual pat of apology. “Which reminds me, is the Institute running with you two both hanging out here? I may be notorious for getting my hands dirty in the field, but I feel like you should have some minions you could have sent out instead.”
Li Qian clasped her hands in her lap. “We have some very promising young researchers, but they all…they…they joined us afterward. They haven’t been through…they’re not field-tested.” By which she meant they’d still been happily researching away in cozy university labs (or wherever) the day the city burned, and before that. Not like Lin Jing, or Li Qian herself.
“Maybe you ought to get them all some combat training,” Zhao Yunlan suggested. “I’d be willing to rent out Lao Chu to you at a very reasonable hourly rate—”
Li Qian gave him a delicately judgmental look of amusement, making him think of Shen Wei again. “I will take that under consideration, with attention to the Institute budget,” she said primly.
“Yeah, you do that.” Zhao Yunlan bent his neck backward to hear his shoulders crack, wishing there was room to stretch out like Da Qing. “Also, maybe add a line item in the budget for the study of dark energy fields that fuck with mobile phones?”
“We already have a subunit looking into the interactions of dark energy with electronics and other Haixing technology, under Lin-xuezhang. It’s an enormous field, though, as you can imagine, and other than his work there’s not much existing research…”
“Might want to move it up the priority list, just in case Lin Jing’s evil twin shows up one of these days.” Zhao Yunlan heard himself and winced, closing his eyes for a moment. “This one here’s a pain in the ass, not a disaster,” he went on determinedly, pushing the glancing reference aside. “These days Xiao Guo is getting pretty good at putting the pieces together, and he can always call in Cong Bo if all else fails, and they’ve got Shen Wei. We won’t be in here too long. You think it was a standing field they had?”
Li Qian frowned down at her folded hands. “Most likely an emergency measure, one that was triggered when, um, our friend over there threw dark energy at you and hit the door instead. Do you think he’s the only one who can undo the seal and open the door?”
“Shen Wei can open it,” Zhao Yunlan told her, with absolute faith. “You’ll see when he gets here.”
Li Qian smiled at him, her serious face turning sweet and merry. “Professor Shen can do anything.”
“Bet your life on it.”
“I have,” she said, not quite smiling any more. “I would again.”
At that point, three things happened at once. Lin Jing groaned loudly and said “Boss?”, the previously unconscious Haixingren criminal sat up and inquired “What the fuck?”, and there was a hiss and crackle of dark energy followed by the door falling in.
Shen Wei, Chu Shuzhi and Guo Changcheng burst into the small room, filling it almost entirely. The awakened criminal rolled off the bed, taking Lin Jing with him in a yelling mess, and grabbed wildly for the spray gun abandoned in the corner. Zhao Yunlan kicked it away from him, tried to get a good angle for a punch, and ended up falling on top of the man and bringing an elbow down onto the back of his head.
Relative silence fell. Li Qian, as far as Zhao Yunlan could see from his odd position, had gotten hold of the spray gun and was keeping it well out of reach, good for her. “Qian-jie!” said Guo Changcheng brightly. “Are you all okay? What is that?”
“Director Li and Lin Jing get to answer that one,” Zhao Yunlan told him, still prone and slightly out of breath. “It’s the anti-Dixingren spray we’ve been hunting down. Handle with care, eh?”
“Oh yes! Wait—Lin Jing-ge, is that you?” Xiao Guo prodded gently at the visible parts of Lin Jing, who grunted and pushed ineffectually at the two men on top of him. “Chief, can you stand up so we can disentangle everyone?”
Shen Wei, who had not spoken, was suddenly there to lend a strong arm. Zhao Yunlan sat up, more or less under his own steam, and felt Shen Wei’s hand cup the back of his neck for a moment.
Xiao Guo was dragging a complaining Lin Jing upright, while Chu Shuzhi saw efficiently to immobilizing the two unconscious miscreants. Li Qian said “Professor Shen, may we call on you for advice during the weapon analysis?”
“Of course. You aren’t hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“She did beautifully,” Zhao Yunlan told him. “Kept her head the whole time.” He winked at Li Qian, who managed a credibly Shen Wei-esque look of wry amusement, although she was blushing a little.
“I’m glad the two of you were able to look after each other,” Shen Wei said quietly. “I worried.”
Zhao Yunlan put a hand on Shen Wei’s shoulder and used it to get to his feet. “Here as elsewhere, we rely on one another, it’s how we survive. Eh, meimei?”
“Yes, Zhao-dage,” Li Qian said solemnly, and breathed a laugh before straightening her back to settle back into her Director Li poise. Shen Wei’s tense mouth relaxed into an almost-smile; Zhao Yunlan leaned comfortably against him and watched his people get the job done.
Be safe and well.
