following

They cross at the front hall, and—Jiang Cheng stares. His head, he registers dimly, is turned: Lan Xichen is singlehandedly maneuvering a rolled-up Purple mattress through the double doors. His muscles are bulging, there’s a light sheen of sweat at his temples, yet he’s barely breathing hard.

Jiang Cheng finds himself eating the man up with his eyes.

Fortunately Lan Xichen is too busy with his bulky burden to notice, and Jiang Cheng manages to smooth out his expression.

“Those things weigh, like, two hundred pounds,” he says, perfectly neutrally. “Let me help you.”

Lan Xichen meets his eyes, and smiles, and Jiang Cheng’s heart is fucking fluttered.

“More like one hundred,” his gorgeous heart flutterer says. “But I’ve got this. You’re willowy, and you look like the studious type. You shouldn’t be doing menial work.”

He says it matter-of-factly, but Jiang Cheng hasn’t been subjecting himself to weekly therapy for two years with nothing to show for it but the improvement to his own mental health.

He’s not sure, between the two of them standing here in this hall, on whose behalf he’s more indignant.

“Lan Xichen.” He addresses his new roommate with a note in his voice that even Wei Wuxian would know for danger. “Are you calling me a nerd, and yourself a meathead?”

Lan Xichen pauses.

“Yes?” he says uncertainly, and shifts, and rests the Purple mattress on the wood floor.

“Are you, by chance, in high school?”

“No?” he answers, no less uncertainly.

“Are there activities you enjoy that don’t require the use of your—frankly impressive, but that’s beside the point—muscles?”

Lan Xichen looks like he doesn’t quite know up from down.

“Yes?” he says.

“Such as?”

“Watercolor,” he answers, without hesitance this time. “And calligraphy.”

“What else?”

“The flute.”

Momentarily distracted from his interrogation by the mental image of his beefcake heart flutterer handling a flute, no doubt expertly, Jiang Cheng promptly dismisses it and presses on.