Chapter Text
Lan Zhan understands that natural disasters are a fact of life. Tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, blizzards, typhoons, that one time he dated a finance guy, and yes, hurricanes. However, the Facebook invite for “Milton and Margs” from the frat guy in his Library Administration class still has him baffled. The frat guy is even smart! He's got a shocking wealth of knowledge of William Morris’ influence on high fantasy that even Lan Zhan is envious of.
‘I’m disappointed in you, Kyle,’ he posts underneath the Facebook event page and promises his uncharacteristically frantic uncle that he will be departing soon before putting his phone away. Bichen and Wangji wiggle their noses from their carrier by the open front door.
“We will be fine,” he promises, reaching into the carrier to rub their little bunny heads. “It is only a fourteen hour drive.”
Only.
He’s just finished tossing his duffel, backpack, and overnight bag into the backseat when he sees his neighbor across the street. Unlike Lan Zhan’s house, which was recently rebuilt, his neighbor’s house is presumably only still standing because the termites are holding hands.
(Yes, he does feel bad living in a half-gentrified neighborhood, but in his uncle’s defense, the property value was very low when he bought it for him. The Seminole Heights Serial Killer dragged the area’s property value down with him. Lan Qiren has very little knowledge of gentrification to begin with, anyway.)
“Hey, Lan Zhan!” Wei Ying jogs across the street in shorts and flip-flops, no shirt. “Oooh, are you evacuating?”
“Yes. You should evacuate as well.” Lan Zhan does his best not to stare at bronze skin dotted with freckles and glistening in the humid warmth.
“Ha! No, I’m okay here.”
“You absolutely are not okay here.” Lan Zhan scowls. “Do you not understand that your house could be destroyed?”
“That’s my landlord’s problem.” Wei Ying shrugs. “Besides, where would I go? I don’t have anyone to stay with and I can’t take my babies with me to a shelter. I’m not leaving them behind.”
“Babies?”
“Cats. I have two cats.”
Lan Zhan’s eyes slide from his neighbor who is easily as beautiful as he is (presumably) broke, to his rabbits, and back. He's barely spoken to this man, aside from exchanging names when Wei Ying first moved in and trotted over to introduce himself. Wei Ying brought him a plate of sugar cookies that he couldn't eat because they had butter in them. He'd seemed friendly enough, but Lan Zhan hadn't been able to shake his suspicion of the unkempt man with the unkempt car and the unkempt house who always seems too friendly and too eager.
It occurs to Lan Zhan that maybe he is an enormous asshat. He sighs, staring at the patchy, sagging roof of Wei Ying’s house.
“You have one hour to pack your things and your cats and be ready to go.” Which is perhaps only one step up from being an enormous asshat, but baby steps are still steps.
“Excuse me?” Wei Ying stares.
“You will accompany me and my rabbits to my uncle’s house in Virginia.”
“Where in Virginia?”
“Manassas, not far outside of D.C.”
“Ooh! Can we go to the Smithsonian?”
“Sure, if you can be ready in one hour.”
Wei Ying’s eyes settle on Lan Zhan’s very nice Crosstrek (outfitted for camping) before drifting upwards to an overcast sky. It's not overcast from Milton- the calm before the storm has yet to arrive- but it's still rather foreboding. In their respective pockets, the national weather alert system blares and buzzes.
“Does seem pretty ominous, doesn’t it…”
“Mn.” Lan Zhan calmly silences the alarm. Wei Ying’s keeps buzzing. “One hour.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I will have time to pack my library up in trash bags in case the windows blow out.”
“Well if you finish early and wanna come over and pack some of my books… Fuck it, one hour.”
Lan Zhan does indeed finish packing his books into double-layered trash bags. The finer ones, the expensive ones, the old ones, the favorite ones are then packed also into Rubbermaid storage bins and stacked into the top of closets and onto the kitchen counter. He does not make eye contact with his winter garments or camping supplies, left to fend for themselves in neat stacks in the living room. Those items are easier to replace and less precious to him.
Once he’s finally accepted that there’s nothing more he can do, he takes the rest of his roll of trashbags and heads across the street to help Wei Ying.
Wei Ying’s house (more like shack) smells musty and has suspicious black-green speckles in all the corners and ants crawling back and forth along an invisible highway across the floor and the swamp cooler is wheezing away, hanging by old duct tape from an algae-encrusted window. The very old shag carpeting is stained and torn and not finished properly at the edges and the kitchen linoleum is cracked and peeling and sharp enough to cut bare feet.
It has to be illegal to charge Wei Ying money to live here. It just has to be.
It turns out also that Wei Ying owns practically nothing: an air mattress, a ragged cat tower, a scattering of mismatched kitchenware, a few outfits, and an extensive collection of science fiction and fantasy novels going back to the fifties and sixties. Lan Zhan even finds an impressive collection of vintage serials, all including entries from Isaac Asimov.
Lan Zhan is deeply, deeply jealous and big enough to admit it.
“Yeah, it’s uh. What it is.”
“You have a beautiful collection.” Lan Zhan means this with every cell in his body.
“Thank you. It’s been… It’s my life, basically.”
“A good life.”
“A million of them.”
“Mn.”
With that new understanding and kinship, Lan Zhan begins carefully excavating piles of books, placing them in trash bags according to what stack they were in since he can see some hint of organization or intent behind the different clusters. Once they’re bagged, he lifts them onto the kitchen counter. The pantry is half-full of what appear to be dehydrated or jarred vegetables, beans, lentils, some Spam, and a 50-pound bag of the cheapest rice San Wah Farmer’s Market has to offer. The kitchen cupboards don’t have doors, and display only a mismatched assortment of plastic plates, bowls, and cups, two ugly coffee mugs, and a pile of equally mismatched cutlery.
Wei Ying is shoving his only visibly valuable possession, a very expensive gaming laptop, into a backpack held together with duct tape. He has a rumpled, worn-out t-shirt on now, a faded Bass Pro Shop tee with Sasquatch holding up a largemouth bass captioned “Bassquatch”. His hair is damp, curling at the nape of his neck and around his cute ears like he might have showered before Lan Zhan came over.
Wei Ying dumps a scant collection of cat toys on top of his laptop and accoutrement, and stuffs a few threadbare outfits into the front compartment.
“Is that all you’re bringing?” Which is maybe not much better than ‘Is that all you have?’ but Lan Zhan has never been known for his social skills.
“Pretty much. Um. My cats are in the back room. I don’t have carriers for them, but they should be fine on their harnesses. They’ll probably find a place to sit and sit there until I take them out.”
“They sound well-trained.”
“They are! I didn’t always have a car-” Lan Zhan thinks it’s a stretch to call the rusty, lichen-encrusted ‘01 Corolla outside a car. “-so I trained them to be good on buses. It was a lifesaver before I found this place… That’s everything. Let’s grab the cats and… get out of here, I guess.”
“Mn.”
Wei Ying’s cats are identical to Lan Zhan, but Wei Ying can tell them apart. “This one is Suibian-” Lan Zhan’s respect for the man drops. “-and this is Chenqing.”
“You named one of your reported babies ‘Whatever’?”
“Yeah, haha! When I found Chenqing, she was a stray. So I’d put out food for her. And she was around a lot and always acting hungry, so I fed her more. It was weeks before I realized I was feeding two cats. When I finally spotted them together, they both started screaming for food. I threw my hands up and laughed -Whatever!- and it stuck. So I have Chenqing and Suibian, and they’re mine. I’m honestly glad I didn’t flub the naming too bad- I don’t know a lick of Mandarin.
“Say, what's in your trunk?”
“My solar panels.”
“Oooh, fancy! I can't wait till we're down in the 80s so I can turn my AC off for a while. I can help you reinstall your panels when we get back. I do some side work as a… ‘self taught’ electrician.”
Lan Zhan says nothing, wondering how someone with so little would spare so much for two stray animals or bother with his solar panels. The cats are as well behaved as Wei Ying promised, sniffing curiously at the rabbits before finding spaces to settle in - one on Lan Zhan’s packed duffle and one on the passenger side dashboard.
An hour later than he planned to be, traffic is heavy and slow on I-275, and people are going back and forth on whether to act neighborly or ghastly to one another. Which is still about 50% more neighborly than Floridians normally act toward each other on I-275.
And his car only has a quarter tank.
And Wei Ying keeps taking breaths through his mouth like he wants to talk before biting down on his tongue. Possibly literally.
They endure in this manner - uncomfortable strangers who haven’t exchanged more than names and greetings and maybe the occasional checking-out - all the way to Dade City at a socially awkward crawl . By the time they manage to find an exit along their route, it’s just after 8pm.
“We will stop here for gasoline and food,” Lan Zhan decides.
“Okay!”
Lan Zhan sits in line for another half-hour of silence to fill up his tank, and then, because he’s not a complete dick like the person on the other side of his pump, pulls into a parking spot to go inside.
As he expected, there is a severe limit of things he can eat. He stares at a snack item of Sabra hummus and pretzel chips and argues with his morals for about thirty seconds before giving up.
“We will have to go to the Publix down the road. I cannot eat anything here.”
“Sure. Just let me…” Wei Ying pulls a wadded up single and some coins from the pocket of his shorts, small coffee in hand. He’s frowning as he sorts through the change.
“Allow me,” Lan Zhan says, gently taking the coffee from him.
Lan Zhan does not flinch at the angry flare in his evacuation companion’s eyes. He stubbornly scans the coffee and taps his phone to the receiver. “I am here. I can help. You can let me.”
“I can’t.”
“One day, when you can help someone in need, do so. Then, we will be even.” He returns Wei Ying’s coffee. “Pay it forward in the future. Okay?”
Wei Ying grinds his teeth - weirdly hot - and finally grumbles. “Fine. But don’t think I won’t do it!”
“Mn.”
Publix does have more options. He purchases a salad with quinoa, butternut squash, cranberries, and pepitas for way more money than is righteous, a charcuterie ("adult Lunchable") for Wei Ying, and a fruit salad to share, because he isn’t sure when Wei Ying last had a nutrient dense meal.
They eat in the car with the doors open, Chenqing and Suibian lying in the grass in one of the parking lot dividers. For the first time, it’s not awkward.
“So… vegetarian?”
“Mn. I have aversions to most meats, though I partake in white fish. I am allergic to dairy. It makes me very ill.”
“Right, I almost killed you with cookies when you first moved in. That’s rough, with such big restrictions.”
“It does tend to complicate an emergency 14-hour road trip.”
Wei Ying giggles, layering cheese and salami on a sea salt and olive oil cracker and stuffing the whole slab in his mouth. He looks… perkier, now that he has some food in him.
“Thank you. For the food.”
“It is fine.” Lan Zhan savors a piece of squash. It’s one of his favorite foods. “I invited you to come with me.”
“Thank you for that too.”
“You are welcome.”
Lan Zhan wonders how his uncle will react to his unexpected guests. He forgot to call. When Lan Zhan told Lan Qiren he was forsaking his promising music career for library sciences, they argued from lunch until dinner and greeted each other with sharp glares and stony silence for days. When he came out as a trans man, Lan Qiren took 15 seconds to think about it, said ‘okay’, and they returned to drinking tea in silence. So really, it’s anyone’s guess what will happen when Lan Zhan shows up with a random vagrant and his two cats.
“Do you want to let the buns out?”
“Mn.”
Lan Zhan clips Bichen and Wangji into their harnesses and leashes and lets them out to sit in the grass with Chenqing and Suibian. To his relief, the two pairs seem entirely unbothered by each other - cautious, but curious. It’s much better than the cats trying to eat his own beloved babies.
“What are their names?”
“Wangji and Bichen.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds supremely dignified, as expected of Lan Zhan!”
Lan Zhan doesn’t know what to make of that, so says nothing.
Eventually, they run out of food to eat and load their pets back into the car, being very mature and not at all in evacuation traffic/Florida traffic Hell. They pass a sign with an obviously fake fetus on it that’s begging its non-existent mother not to kill it, followed by “Vote No on Number 4”.
“I am so voting yes on Number 4,” Wei Ying mutters, sipping from his battered old Nalgene. “Partly because I hate that fucking sign.”
“Mn.”
“I bet I can spot more Cracker Barrel signs than you.”
“You’re on.”
Wei Ying giggles. “They should make little stamp booklets for every Cracker Barrel and you get a little stamp for each one you visit.”
“It would be a huge hit among RV travellers. You’d make a killing.”
“I’d rather do a drinking game, but alas that’s not feasible.”
“You’d be dead before we reach Georgia, anyway.”
Wei Ying actually laughs at that. It’s cute. He’s cute. His nose crinkles with his eyes - he has freckles on his eyelids. He has freckles on his eyelids. Fuck, that’s adorable. There has to be a rule about catching gay feelings for your evacuation buddy. Lan Zhan decides to invent his own just in case.
‘Catching gay feelings for your evacuation buddy is forbidden.’
They try the emergency lane for about three minutes before deciding the slightly increased travel speed is not worth constantly having two tires on the rumble strip. It felt like Lan Zhan’s teeth were going to vibrate out of his skull.
All is well until about 9:30, at which point his circadian rhythm tells him it’s time to go to sleep. His eyes start itching and he drifts a little - very bad when the emergency lane is open.
“You okay?”
“I will need to sleep soon. I keep early hours.”
“Oh, take the next exit and we can switch.”
“Are you sure?”
“What, you worried about missing the Cracker Barrel signs? I learned to drive in a big-ass SUV and now I drive a junker that may or may not be registered. I can handle your nice, well-maintained car.”
“Your car has up-to-date tags.”
“Yes, for sure. Remember that if FHP comes for my ass, okay? I’m an innocent man. Falsely accused.”
“Mn.”
Lan Zhan manages to get over just in time to make the exit, and pulls into a Pilot gas station. They fill up, stop by the restroom, and Lan Zhan buys Wei Ying another coffee. They make the switch, and he curls up in the passenger seat under a soft blue blanket made from layers of loose cotton weave. He's asleep in minutes just as the traffic begins to loosen up.