A #CQL #ThreadFic for @villainousfriend - thank you for the prompt! I have an everything-happening-at-once weekend, so I'm inventing the #SlowFic hashtag and my whole entire goal is a glacial one or two posts per day, just little snack-sized moments.
Lan Sizhui's customer-service smile is truly unrivalled, and more importantly his purse is overstuffed at Hanguang Jun's insistence (of course), but it's not enough to distract the innkeeper's gaze from the bashful corpse in the doorway.
It probably doesn't help that Wen Ning is also trying to smile. Personally Sizhui thinks he's pretty good at it, but he's noticed that it sometimes... backfires. If a person's already nervous about a dead boy looking at them, it doesn't always help for the dead to smile about it.
That seems to be the innkeeper's feeling, anyway. He's got that Look, a look Sizhui has already learned to recognise after only two weeks of travel with his uncle. Fear. Anger. Disgust. Rejection.
Sizhui decides to go Full Lan.
Is there a problem? he asks the innkeeper.
He feels his eyes go hard, and his smile get dangerous. The Chief Cultivator has given him much more than a big purse, after all, and it's not for nothing he's been there to see how Lan Wangji reacts to impertinent people. He's rewarded with the man's startled eyes back on him. He's become more frightening than Wen Ning, he realises with more than a little glee.
He can't wait to tell Jingyi about this.
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Wen Ning stares and stares. He forgets to smile (which is probably for the best) while a-Yuan pays the innkeeper.
He knows that, although a-Yuan is related, it's only as extended family rather than immediate. So the family resemblance is only passing, usually.
Except right now, putting himself between Wen Ning and this glaring innkeeper, a-Yuan looks exactly - EXACTLY - like Wen Qing.
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Stygian Selkie (she/her)
Frogie