the_leaky_pen

Jin Zixuan works at the fancy tea shop, T2. As a manager at Williams-Sonoma, Lan Xichen helps a lot of customers, but this is his first time helping someone outfit a kitchen from scratch.

"What about you, dage?" Nie Mei asks after a while.

"Hm?"

"You're gonna take me to Lotus Pier to find my soulmate, but what about you?"

Nie Mingjue pulls up the left sleeve on his traditional formal robes and stares thoughtfully at the mark on his forearm. Watch where you're going, damn it! This is a hospital. A messy horizontal scrawl.

He really had thought it might happen this year, when Father had started qi deviating. Overcome with worry in the sect hospital near the Unclean Realm, more than once he'd lifted his head and realized he'd lost track of where he was headed and who was around him.

But no staff member or worried relative had snapped at him about it, and at the time he'd had bigger things to worry about. And now…

"I'm not in a hurry to spend any more time in hospitals, didi," he says.

Nie Mei grimaces. "Yeah, me neither."

I'm very close to being done with this fic, so here's a chunk from one of the earlier sections.

"And how was the redoubtable Lieutenant Boyd?" Allison asked, putting a match to her own cigarette.

Dan grimaced. She had some idea that Allison and Boyd had met briefly in Cambridge, where Allison had gone to the women's college, before the war. It wasn't much, but in France, friendships were often built on smaller coincidences.

When England joined the war, Allison had enlisted without even finishing out her year. Dan couldn't imagine having an opportunity like college and choosing to drive a bloody ambulance instead. But Allison, for all her haughty ways and care with her appearance, was a fierce sort. She had a sweetheart somewhere in the lines—an enlisted man, not an officer—and Dan sometimes saw her in the morning mess, clutching a scrap of letter to her heart as she ate.

"I wish he wouldn't flirt with us," Dan said, exhaling a stream of smoke into the chill air. "I never know what to say."

Allison raised a single flawless eyebrow. "He never flirts with me," she said. "Always correct, that's Matt Boyd." She eyed Dan as she took a drag of her cigarette. "What on earth did he say to you?"

Welcome to the jianghu!
Hold onto your hat,
‘Cause a swordsman just got killed
over a jar shaped like a cat.
It’s not well-made, but it’s full of
those qi-boosting pills;
Don’t act appalled, you know
you want them, you shill!