#sigh i just know gege is kicking his feet twirling his hair

[eightspringdays]

THE WORST MISTAKE OF MY LIFE WAS STARTING JUJUTSU KAISEN. I WOULD NEVER HAVE LEARNED HOW TO READ IF I KNEW THIS WAS GONNA BE THE RESULT. I WISH A 16-WHEEL TRUCK RAN OVER ME AND THEN SOMEONE THREW MY REMAINS TO RABID DOGS. AND EVEN THAT WOULD HURT LESS THAN THIS FORSAKEN MANGA. FUCK YOU GEGE AKUTAMI, I HOPE YOUR COFFEE ALWAYS TASTES LIKE ASS AND ALSO HOPE THAT ONE DAY YOU STEP ON A LEGO SO HARD THAT THE MADE-IN-CHINA GETS IMPRINTED IN YOUR DNA. FUCK OFF. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOUR EDITOR, FUCK YOUR COMPUTER, FUCK SUKUNA, FUCK PANDA, FUCK JOHN BON JOVI, FUCK INUMAKI, FUCK MARTA STUART, FUCK MEIMEI, FUCK PANDA AGAIN.

CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS MY JUJUTSU KAISEN

[merinnan]

The Rescue Job

If anyone had asked Zhao Yunlan this morning how he thought this day would go, kissing Shen Wei would not have even been suggested. He would have thought about it, of course, since kissing Shen Wei was something that he thought about frequently; he’d even kissed the man before, but those were quick, light kisses as part of a job, done just to keep up their cover of being boyfriends, or husbands, or whatever that particular job had them pretending to be. Those kisses were almost worse than no kisses at all, precisely because they weren’t actually real, not in the way that truly mattered – although they were real enough to make him hold on to the memory of every single one like a dragon holding onto its hoard, each scent and warm breath like a gold coin, each brush of soft lips a sparkling jewel.

But to be actually kissing Shen Wei, to have arms wrapped around him and a hand in his hair, bodies pressed so close together that it was hard to tell whose pounding heartbeat was whose, hot mouths exploring each other until they were forced to stop in order to breathe again? This was something Zhao Yunlan had only dreamed about.

He was fairly sure that it wasn’t another dream, however, as these dreams were usually set in his office, or in one of their apartments, or in the park that they sometimes took a walk in, not in a bare concrete room so far below ground that there was no natural light. These dreams didn’t involve Shen Wei covered in his own blood. And they certainly didn’t feature Ye Zun in the background, making gagging noises and ‘get a room’ gestures.

No, this morning Zhao Yunlan had expected the team to go in, do the job they’d been planning for the past week, and get out. The day had begun with them going to do exactly that, and it had been going according to plan up until everything went to hell.

***

Nine Hours Earlier

It was a beautiful, sunny day, just on the cusp of spring and summer – the sort of day that made its way into a myriad of books, or the screens of every rom-com or teen movie when the script called for the protagonists to have a perfect day. Fluffy white clouds drifted across blue sky, not even a single drop of rain threatened, and a light breeze kept the temperature just this side of overly warm. Their mark couldn’t have picked a better day for his garden reception if he’d been able to engineer the weather himself.

Not that Zhao Yunlan was able to properly enjoy it, of course, since he wasn’t at the reception. He wasn’t even outside, enjoying the pleasant afternoon in any way. Instead, he was back at the team’s HQ, sprawled back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, one ankle crossed over the other, tongue working the lollipop in his mouth as he watched six screens showing the feeds of six pinhole cameras, and vicariously experienced both the day and the reception through them. If his eyes happened to linger more on five of these screens whenever a particular blue suited figure appeared on one of them, who was to tell?

“Do you think you could pay attention to more than my gege?”

Well. One man could tell. Zhao Yunlan’s current third-least favourite person in the world lounged in a nearby chair, twirling an ornamental cane in one hand. Zhao Yunlan offered him an easy grin around the lollipop.

“Aiyo, Ye Zun, of course I’m paying attention to all of it. Who do you take me for?” Even as he spoke, a flicker of blue drew his eyes back to the screen showing the feed from Guo Changcheng’s camera, Shen Wei walking past the grifter with neither of them even giving a flicker that they knew each other. Zhao Yunlan couldn’t help but feel a flicker of pride for how far the kid had come, along with a flicker of something that was decidedly more heated than pride at the figure Shen Wei cut in that blue suit, the clothing somehow managing to make him seem both perfectly innocuous with his sensible business shoes and round-rimmed glasses, and also just so undeniably…

“Disgusting.” Ye Zun’s voice drawled across his reverie. “Any minute now you’ll start drooling, and I really don’t want to see that.”

Zhao Yunlan didn’t even have to look up to pull a lollipop from his desk drawer and throw it in the vicinity of Ye Zun’s head. This was an interaction that had repeated far too many times for his taste. While yes, it had been his insistence that Ye Zun was never to be left unattended in the HQ even if he was, technically and officially, now part of the team, he hadn’t anticipated that he would be the one most often on Ye Zun duty, which invariably meant Ye Zun mocking him mercilessly for his hopeless crush on Shen Wei. Zhao Yunlan felt both relieved and regretful that none of their recent jobs had involved Shen Wei and him going undercover together as a couple – while those jobs always left him on even more of an emotional high than successful jobs normally did, buoyed by additional memories of touches and kisses to hoard and wish for something he couldn’t have, they also led Ye Zun to kick the mocking up several notches.

He wasn’t surprised to hear Ye Zun catch the lollipop, rather than the far more satisfying sound of it lightly thunking against his head, or the follow up sigh and the sound of a crinkling wrapper being undone.

“Gege could do so much better than you.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Zhao Yunlan scowled, then pulled the half-eaten lollipop from his mouth and waved it at the screens. “Looks like the party’s winding down. It’s supposed to finish at 2:30, right?”

He knew damn well that that was when it was supposed to finish. He and the twins had pored over every scrap of information while crafting this plan, and at this point they probably had the reception schedule more thoroughly memorised than the host. It did, however, successfully switch Ye Zun’s focus to the screens, and allow him to take his own attention away from just how much better than him Shen Wei could do, and all of the other reasons why a gremlin like him and the perfect man that was Shen Wei would never be anything more than just good friends and colleagues. No matter how much more he wanted.

He leaned forward and pressed a key on the keyboard. “Lin Jing, have you found it yet?” Lin Jing’s screen showed wood panelling, the hacker’s hands running along it.

“It’s got to be here somewhere,” Lin Jing replied. “From the map, it should be…”

“Here?” Da Qing suggested. The wood panelling on Da Qing’s feed opened, revealing an electrical panel.

“Yes!” Lin Jing cheered quietly, then quickly began to get to work.

“You’ve got 22 minutes before the reception ends and security starts looking for stray guests trying to overstay their welcome,” Ye Zun warned them.

“Xiao Guo,” Zhao Yunlan adds, “ready to cause a distraction if they need more time?”

Back outside with the main party, Guo Changcheng makes a noise of agreement that the woman he’s talking to takes as agreeing with whatever she was talking about. Zhao Yunlan glances at the other three camera feeds – Chu Shuzhi’s shows him hovering in Guo Changcheng’s general vicinity, while Shen Wei and Zhu Hong are closer to the mansion’s entrance, ready to slip in to help Lin Jing and Da Qing if needed. All where they should be.

“Zhao Yunlan,” Shen Wei says suddenly, his soft voice as clear through the comms as ever. “There’s something wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Too many guests have left.”

Zhao Yunlan and Ye Zun both sit up straight and lean towards the screens, studying them.

“Gege, there’s still a lot of guests there,” Ye Zun says, eyes flitting from screen to screen. Shen Wei’s camera feed slowly turns as Shen Wei does, allowing them a view of more people.

“They’re wrong for guests,” he says. “I think…”

Whatever it was he thought they didn’t hear, as his and Zhu Hong’s comms and cameras went dead. A moment later, Chu Shuzhi’s and Guo Changcheng’s followed suit.

“Shen Wei!”

Zhao Yunlan had barely finished the name when the last two comms and cameras went out. He pulled out his phone, jabbing at Chu Shuzhi’s number, only for it to go straight to voicemail. He tried the next number, aware of Ye Zun doing the same thing beside him. All of the phones went to voicemail.

“Wang Zheng!” Zhao Yunlan shouted, pushing away from his desk. Within moments, the ghostly pale young woman appeared at the door. “Keep trying to call the team through every avenue you can, and tell Lao Li to make sure my car’s ready for an extraction.”

He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, and he was confident in Shen Wei and Chu Shuzhi’s abilities to get everyone out regardless of what had just happened, but still…the way the cameras and comms had all cut out like that left him feeling uneasy, particularly since Shen Wei had thought there was something wrong.

“And call Cheng Xinyan,” Ye Zun added from where he’d taken over the keyboard, his fingers flying over it. He bit his lip in a way that was just so Shen Wei that Zhao Yunlan was left speechless for a moment. For all that they were identical, the twins generally had such different mannerisms that it wasn’t at all difficult to tell them apart, especially not once Ye Zun grew his hair out to collar-length while Shen Wei kept his short. Every so often, though, one of them would do something that reinforced the fact that the similarities between them weren’t limited to just looks.

“What’s wrong?” Zhao Yunlan asked him. If Ye Zun was suggesting that they bring in a doctor, then he, like Zhao Yunlan, had a very bad feeling about this.

“I can’t activate any of their trackers,” Ye Zun said, not looking up from the screens. “To be more accurate, I sent the activation codes, and nothing happened.”

Zhao Yunlan frowned at that, shoving the lollipop back in his mouth and going back to trying to get through to any of the team’s phones while Ye Zun tried to bring the comms back online.

One minute passed. Then five. Then ten. To Zhao Yunlan, each one might as well have been an hour.

Thirty eight minutes after Shen Wei’s comms went down, two cars screeched to a halt outside, and car doors slammed. Zhao Yunlan was halfway to the door when it opened, and Chu Shuzhi staggered inside, his arms slung over Guo Changcheng and Zhu Hong’s shoulders as they half-carried him. Red blood smeared Guo Changcheng’s shirt where Chu Shuzhi leaned against him, and streaked across Zhu Hong’s face where she’d evidently rubbed a bloodstained hand. Behind them, Da Qing supported a deathly pale Lin Jing.

Zhao Yunlan stopped and looked them over, icy fingers creeping up his back. Something had certainly gone horribly, terribly wrong. Wang Zheng and Sang Zan raced forward to help get Chu Shuzhi and Lin Jing to the back room that Cheng Xinyan used as her infirmary whenever they needed to call her in, and Zhao Yunlan was dimly aware of Ye Zun joining them as he looked behind the group. Out the door, the two cars were haphazardly parked on the lawn, silent – and empty.

Zhao Yunlan looked at his returned team again, five where there should be six. When he spoke, his voice seemed so distant to his ears that he almost didn’t recognise it.

“Where’s Shen Wei?”

@trensu

AO3