Will Laurence (gentlemanly) wrote in valloic, @ 2021-09-21 18:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, temeraire: william laurence, the untamed: lan xichen |
Who: Laurence and Lan Xichen
What: A couple of excessively prim men go for pizza
When: Early/Mid-September, before the Katamari plot
Where: Nino's Pizza
The decision to exit seclusion hadn’t been one that Lan Xichen had made easily. The first few days of it had been difficult and overwhelming. A couple of weeks in, though, and he was beginning to remember that he was in fact a people person.
Unlike his dedicated introvert brother, Lan Xichen enjoyed being social. He’d genuinely missed cultivation conferences and tea houses and visits with friends - he’d just been too deeply depressed to realize it. Coming back into the world (and adapting to a new one) wasn’t easy, but it felt better than he had expected it to. It was good enough, in fact, that today he was setting out to deliberately break one of the three thousand precepts.
He was going to talk during dinner.
It would be rude not to, in this case, he reasoned, and Lan Xichen was done with following rules just because they existed. Following the rules had not led to good judgment and success before, not when the real crisis came. It seemed time to re-evaluate the precepts and which of them really merited following, and “talking during meals is prohibited” seemed like a good place to start.
So here he was, standing on Shuoyue to make the flight from Cloud Recesses to Vallo City, enjoying the fine weather and the wind in his hair rather than taking the Waypoint. He wasn’t the strangest thing in the sky, this being Vallo, and he actually drew rather few curious looks as he slowed his flight and began to land on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant where he was to meet Laurence.
Laurence had thought, briefly, of inviting Lan Xichen to his home for dinner in response to Lan Xichen inviting him to Cloud Recess, but he’d disregarded the thought almost as soon as it had crossed his mind. Aside from the obvious fact that Laurence didn’t know how to cook - except in the most dire of circumstances, when he was forced to build a fire in which to burn his meat - his apartment was hardly one that he’d have been proud to have guests in. There was nothing that could be considered a proper dining room, unless one considered the kitchen a dining room, which Laurence most certainly did not (it would be bad enough having the kitchen in public view at all, let alone forcing a guest to eat in it), and while he could close both his bedroom and his bathroom doors, the fact of the matter was that the rooms would still be embarrassingly visible from anywhere where he could keep his guests. While it was clean and functional, it was far too intimate to have any but his closest friends visit: Tharkay or Jane, perhaps Granby if the situation called for it. There was no one in Vallo whom he would consider appropriate to have over.
And so Laurence had tasked himself with finding a restaurant to invite Lan Xichen to. He’d heard several mentions of how delicious “pizza” was since his arrival, and when he’d looked up reviews, they’d all said that the pizza at Nino’s was excellent. Now that he stood outside of the establishment, he wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake in inviting Lan Xichen here - at the very least, he should have examined it in person himself, instead of simply relying on internet reviews.
A lesson to make note of for the future. It was too late to make new plans now, and so all he could do was hope that Lan Xichen wouldn’t think too ill of him for suggesting the place.
His attention was caught by the sight of someone flying through the air, and he was only a little surprised when he realized it was Lan Xichen. He had, until now, pictured sword flight to take place sitting, and he’d been wondering to himself if Lan Xichen rode his sword sidesaddle or astride, but he saw now that he’d been entirely mistaken. He marveled at how dignified Lan Xichen looked in his approach, back straight and robes and hair billowing gracefully behind him, and was a little awed when he thought of how much balance it must take to not go toppling off the sword in particularly strong winds - winds that he knew, from his own flights with Temeraire, were common the further from the ground one was.
“Lan Xichen,” Laurence greeted him, a little anxiously, making his bows - these he did in the English style now that he was no longer visiting Lan Xichen in his own home. “I’m so glad you could make it, though I’m afraid my judgement in this matter may have been poor.”
Better to get it out in the open before Lan Xichen drew his own conclusions from the bustling restaurant behind him.
Lan Xichen bowed in his own usual manner, and as he rose he gave Laurence a slight tilt of his head in curiosity. He appeared entirely unruffled by his journey, as though the wind had barely touched him and getting smacked in the face with insects was something that happened to other people.
“Lao Ren-Tze,” he said politely. “Why do you say that?” A glance around told him nothing - the place appeared loud and overwhelming, but so was practically everything compared to the quiet contemplation of Cloud Recesses. Vallo City was a bit much even compared to the busiest tea house full of yelling philosophers in Lanling. This particular purveyor of food didn’t seem inherently worse at a first look.
“I would have preferred to invite you to a quiet restaurant that was more suitable for conversation,” Laurence said. Not that the noise level was so loud to as make conversation, but it was enough to be distracting. The door opened again behind him, and the sound of raucous laughter filled the street before it was muffled again by the door closing. “I’m afraid I didn’t do my due diligence. If you’d like, I can attempt to find somewhere more suitable.”
Perhaps the bar where Dorian had taken him. He’d have liked to avoid an establishment that specialized in wines when Lan Xichen was, presumably, prohibited from drinking alcohol, but the atmosphere was nicer and there had been a food menu.
“If you would prefer to be elsewhere, I will follow.” Lan Xichen was ever-cognizant of the comfort of others, often to his own detriment. He would certainly not insist on staying, despite his curiosity about pizza. “You don’t need to change places on my account, though. And…”
He paused, considering the various talismans and spells in his repertoire. Yes, he had a few that would do. A spell that would guard a camp against the call of restless spirits in the wind should also keep a table from the clatter and shouts of pizza enthusiasts.
Lan Xichen nodded. “I think I can dampen the noise, once we have a place to sit.”
Laurence frowned thoughtfully, considering. If Lan Xichen could quiet some of the noise, then that might not be such a terrible thing. The whole general atmosphere was not what Laurence would have liked, but that was more for Lan Xichen’s sake than his own; Laurence had had plenty of experience with less-than-reputable places in these last few years, and this restaurant seemed miles above the bars of New South Wales in terms of clientele and ambiance. If Lan Xichen himself had no problem with the restaurant, then Laurence wasn’t about to dictate that they move because of some unfounded prejudices. And he was curious about pizza.
“If you’re sure you don’t mind,” Laurence agreed at last. “I have heard quite a lot about pizza, so it would be a shame to let this opportunity go to waste.” He turned to hold the door for Lan Xichen.
Lan Xichen appreciated the gesture, nodding to Laurence as he walked through and gave the faun who served as the hostess tonight a serene smile. The faun, looking altogether charmed as Lan Xichen bowed to her, chirped a “welcome to Nino’s!” and a “follow me!” before trotting off to lead them to a table.
Lan Xichen very carefully did not stare at the goat legs as they started across the restaurant toward a booth. He also did not stare at the gentleman who gave off a faint blue glow at the table to the right, nor the...demon? It looked like a demon, chomping down on a slice of what was apparently pizza with a group of human-looking friends. The place was noisy beyond any place he’d been outside of a battlefield, but it was a joyful noise. This pizza establishment was teeming with life in the best of ways. Lan Xichen thought he should have found the edges of it too sharp, but he found himself actually delighted to be experiencing something that wasn’t more cold, dark misery and silence.
He still tamped down the noise around their table, making a neat little bubble of power around them that kept out the worst of the din, but he didn’t silence the area completely. A bit of noise, Lan Xichen decided, was nice.
“Will that do?” he asked, turning his smile to Laurence as he completed the spell.
It said something about the human's ability to adapt that Laurence took hardly any more notice of their hostess' cloven feet than he did of her uniform. The demon almost got a second look, though Laurence resisted the urge through the power of sheer propriety.
He was startled, at first, when the noise suddenly dimmed, and then was impressed. "Yes, that'll do quite nicely," Laurence said. "It would be disconcerting, I think, if it were completely silenced. I hope it's not too much effort to maintain?"
He glanced around the restaurant, more surprised by the fact that nearly everyone seemed to be eating with their hands than by the strange assortment of humans and people who were not entirely human, and then he glanced toward the menu of pizza toppings. He wasn't entirely sure what pepperoni was, but everything else seemed straightforward enough. "Is there anything you can't eat, or don't particularly enjoy?"
“I don’t eat meat,” Lan Xichen replied, because in his continuing analysis of the Lan precepts, he had decided that was one he would keep. There was a good reason for it, readily evident, which made it a rule worth continuing to follow. “Other than that…”
Lan Xichen’s shoulders lifted in a subtle shrug accompanied by a rueful smile. “My home is not known for its food. Anything beyond steamed rice and vegetables is exotic and indulgent by our standards.”
"Then why don't we try the vegetarian pizza?" Laurence asked. Normally, he'd have expected them to order their own separate meals, but he'd heard pizza was a good that was shared, and almost everyone in the restaurant seemed to be sharing theirs.
"Britain has a little more variety. It's mostly meat, bread, and vegetables, but we also have pastries and puddings and custards. Spices are becoming more common for those who can afford them," which had, but no longer, included Laurence (though he supposed it did one again; spices were astonishingly cheap here). "There's nothing like the variety here though. I think I could eat something new every day and I would still never get through it all."
“About half of the people here from my world come from Yunmeng, which has much more variety than we do in Gusu,” Lan Xichen said, because he didn’t want the rest of his world getting a bad reputation from the deliberately ascetic approach to food that the Lan clan took. “And the cultivators of Meishan Yu eat food with so much pepper that I would have to expend a constant flow of chi to keep my mouth cool enough to eat it.”
He looked around the room as inconspicuously as he could manage, making note of the dishes shared among the whole table (which were familiar) and the triangular slices of what must be pizza (which were not). It smelled good, Lan Xichen had to admit, for all that it was incredibly strange. But that was what they were here for, wasn’t it? Time to experience new things.
"You can do that? I'll admit to being jealous. When I was a lieutenant in my early twenties, I had the mortifying experience of crying at my captain's dinner table while we were berthed in India because of the spiciness of our food. It was an experience I've been careful to never duplicate."
It wasn't the most mortifying experience of his life, but it ranked highly. He was only a little mollified that he hadn't been the only one to cry, and one of the warrant officers had quit the table altogether.
When the server came by, he ordered the large vegetarian pizza and a coffee. He wasn't especially fond of the sugary, carbonated drinks that seemed popular here, and it seemed rude to order a beer if his companion couldn't drink.
Lan Xichen requested tea, because tea and water were virtually all he drank. He'd had the very occasional cup of wine, but given that just one cup made him quite insensible, that seemed another one of the prohibitions of Cloud Recesses that he should probably stick with. He was a bit nonplussed, however, when the tea quickly arrived in a large plastic cup, served over ice.
He should say something, he was sure.
But the tea. It was practically a whole pot of tea. Served in a single glass. With cubes of ice in it.
Thus it came to pass that in the dining room of a pizza purveyor, the practically legendary, renowned for his elegance, eternally even-keeled First Jade of Lan was reduced to staring in visible confusion at a drinking glass.
Laurence attempted to hide his smile, though he thought he did a poor job of it. He didn't mean to smile at Lan Xichen's discomfort, but the difference from his usual countenance was charming, and he recognized the confusion in himself. The first time he'd gone into one of the local coffee houses and seen the paper coffee cups nearly as big as some people's heads, and the see-through cups - plastic, he'd later learned - that were filled with iced coffees that were somehow larger, he'd been unable to keep from gaping.
He'd also been unpleasantly surprised the first time he'd tried his tea iced.
"It is a lot, isn't it?" Laurence asked, reaching for the cream and sugar so he might add half a spoonful of each to his coffee. "It seems they're not lacking for resources here, so they tend to give extremely large portions for almost everything. It's an excess I haven't quite yet grown used to myself. It might be a little on the sweet side though; if you don't like it I can ask if they have hot tea."
Lan Xichen stared at the “tea” a moment longer, contemplating his options. Later, he thought, he would have to meditate upon how familiar things appearing in a manner so unfamiliar was actually more unsettling than the obviously strange. A restaurant worker with little horns on her head and the legs of a goat he could accept with equanimity, but tea served deliberately cold in a massive vessel? That was too much. Nonetheless…
“We did come here to try new things.” Lan Xichen took the glass in both hands, feeling a bit like a child using a tea cup too large for him. He smiled and took a sip, and then promptly looked confused again. The drink wasn’t bad, exactly. It was just...not tea.
“I think I would like this better had I not been expecting tea,” he said thoughtfully. “I like the sweetness. If I had been told to try the mysterious sweet cold brown drink and not been told it was tea, I would be enjoying it.”
Laurence hid a smile behind his hand. He didn't mean to smile at him, as if he were enjoying a joke at Lan Xichen's expense, but it was difficult not to at the all too familiar confusion, the holding the drink with two hands, and the mention of a 'mysterious sweet cold brown drink.'
"They call it iced tea," Laurence said, once he was sure that he had his facial features under control once again. "Truthfully, I'm not sure it contains any tea at all, iced or otherwise. They've an iced coffee too, which is filled with enough sugar to make your teeth ache, but at least I'm certain the base is still coffee. If I didn't know any better, I would think you couldn't add ice to something if it didn't also contain a lot of sugar." Ice cream, too, was much sweeter than it had been at home.
Lan Xichen didn’t mind being laughed at in this gentle sort of way; the situation was rather funny, after all. Usually people took him so seriously, and his family was so formal. Making someone smile again was nice.
“I like sugar more than is reasonable for someone older than six,” Lan Xichen admitted. “My clan is cautioned against excess in food and drink as we are in all other things, and a second red bean bun has always been harder for me to turn my back on than a cup of wine.”
Laurence hoped he hadn’t allowed his moment of confusion show on his face before he realized that the prohibition against alcohol must have applied only to the Cloud Recesses themselves and not to those who lived there.
“My eldest brother has always had more of a sweet tooth than I think he cared to admit. I think that perhaps his favourite part of having children was his ability to sneak away bits of their candies when he thought no one was watching. I’d always made sure to buy a little extra when I brought Christmas gifts for my nieces and nephews.”
He supposed now that he wouldn’t be buying anymore gifts for his brother’s children now; even if he were back in his own world, it was impractical to send gifts so far and unlikely that George would accept them even if he did. Whether or not George had been willing to hide Laurence when he’d mistakenly thought he’d escaped from the gaols, accepting a gift from someone who was considered a traitor would still lower his standing in the eyes of his peers.
“Is he your only sibling, or are there others?” Lan Xichen asked. Eldest brother seemed to imply there was more than one brother, and in the society Lan Xichen came from, family was of the utmost importance. Asking about family seemed a sure way to get to know someone better. For good or ill, they were all shaped by the people they came from.
“I’ve two older brothers,” Laurence answered. “George is six years my senior and is set to inherit our father’s title and estate. Last I saw him he’d already taken over many of the duties.” His father had been quite ill, but that had been years earlier, and Laurence had hoped he’d recovered now that the shock of his treason was less fresh. “Charles is three years older than I am, though aside from the occasional letter during the holiday, I haven’t seen much of him since he entered the Church.” He took a sip of his coffee. “You mentioned you have a younger brother here as well, didn’t you? Is he your only sibling?”
“He is,” Lan Xichen replied with a nod. Given the difficult circumstances surrounding his parents, Lan Xichen was frankly rather surprised that even two children had come of their union. Surprised, but thankful; he couldn’t imagine facing life without his brother. “Lan Wangji is three years younger than I am, but we have always been close.”
Which brought him to another one of those sticky cultural questions. Some things he could equate to things he knew - titles and estates were ideas he recognized, for instance, even though they took a far different form in Britain than in the lands that were not yet China. The Church, though...he had some sense that maybe it was like being a Taoist monk, but not exactly enough that he felt comfortable letting the notion go.
“When you say the Church...what does that mean?”
Laurence gave a small, genuine smile when Lan Xichen said he and his brother had always been close. Laurence had never been particularly close to either of his brothers - most likely because he’d left home at twelve and hadn’t been anywhere near England for long stretches of time - and while he’d never regretted the lack of closeness, he did enjoy hearing of other siblings who had a more intimate bond.
“Ah,” he said in response to Lan Xichen’s question. He knew that Christianity had been present in China for some time, which meant that if Lan Xichen wasn’t familiar with it, he must have either been from a time much earlier than Laurence, or from a world where Christianity didn’t exist, as Dorian was.
Which meant that Laurence now had the uncomfortable task of attempting to explain the Christain Church to someone who likely didn’t know what Christianity was in a way that was both comprehensible and yet not too long that it bored someone. There were several reasons why Laurence had run away from home instead of joining the Church, and not having any desire to proselytize was not the least among them.
He cradled his coffee in his hands and took a long sip to stall for time, and finally began: “In Britain - in much of Europe and the world, really - we follow a a religion called Christianity, and while there’s some differences between certain sects of it - and Christianity itself is a sect of the greater umbrella of Abrahamic religions - the core belief is that there is a single God who had a son named Jesus Christ, who came to this world to free us from sin. The Church spreads the word of Christ, and those who join the clergy, as my brother has, help aid those who wish to worship, help soothe those with troubled souls, and try to provide guidance and remind us that Christ loves all his children.”
All said and done, Laurence didn’t think he’d made too much of a pig’s ear out of it.
Lan Xichen listened with interest, despite lacking much of the broader context that would make it all make more sense. The cultivation world didn't interact much outside its borders. The idea of soothing troubled souls and providing guidance clicked, though - that part indeed was not too far off from what monks and priests did in the world he came from.
"So you have a brother who inherits your father's position, a brother who is some kind of priest…" A faint smile came to Lan Xichen's face before he took another sip of his decadently sweet and strangely cold tea. "What does a third son do?"
"The third son was also supposed to join the Church, but he chose instead to run away from home and join the King's Navy; the military." His father had never truly forgiven him for it, and there was some small, quiet part of him that suspected that Charles had taken it hard too.
He hoped that learning as much wouldn't negatively affect Lan Xichen's opinion of him. He knew filial responsibility was of utmost importance to many, and several of his father's peers had seen his disobedience as disrespect, even if they were later able to shrug it off as the follies of youth. But Lan Xichen was one of the few friends he had in this strange place and the only one who was still confounded by the changes progress had brought; the thought of him thinking ill of him was oddly distressing.
Instead, it appeared Lan Xichen thought quite the opposite. Another gentle smile turned his lips, and he gave a single nod of acknowledgment.
"It is difficult to do what is right rather than what is expected," he said. Because of course Laurence had made the right choice, hadn't he? It had led to him befriending a celestial dragon. If that wasn't clear evidence of the hand of fate, Lan Xichen couldn't imagine what was.
And that completely aside, he'd developed a certain appreciation for forthright people who were willing to discard the strictures of society. They could be shocking and overwhelming, but they were never going to spend years on lies and trickery to advance themselves. If they were going to kill someone, they'd do it while looking them in the eyes. There was something to be said for that, Lan Xichen had learned, in the most bitter and painful way possible.
“Yes, it is,” Laurence said, a little grimly. While he couldn’t deny that it wasn’t comfortable to have no one know you for committing treason, it seemed like a peculiar kind of cowardice to keep quiet about it. He told himself that if it ever arose naturally in conversation, then of course he wouldn’t hide it, but then, that was cowardly too: the chances of the question of him ever committing treason ever arising in conversation was slim. If he were to have any kind of true friendship with anyone, it was important that they knew what he’d done and why he’d done it so they could make an informed decision on whether or not he was the kind of person they wished to associate with, and this seemed as likely an invitation to talk about it as any.
“I -” he started, but swallowed the rest of his words as the server returned to their table, bearing what looked like a large, metal cake stand, on top of which sat their pizza.
No, tonight was not the time for that particular discussion, he decided.
He thanked the server as she placed the pizza and two smaller plates on the table next to them, and then she left.
“This does smells good,” Laurence said, using the cake knife to lift a piece of pizza onto one of the plates. He made a mess of the plate with the melted, stringy cheese, and so he put that aside for himself, and managed a much neater slice for Lan Xichen.
So this, then, was pizza. It had some vegetables he recognized and a few he didn't, and of course cheese was almost unheard of in his native cuisine, but the smell had Lan Xichen intrigued. Figuring out how to eat it, though, was even more of a puzzle than the tea. Chopsticks certainly wouldn't help, not that any were even present on the table.
"So...we pick this up like a cake and bite it?" Lan Xichen asked. That was what the people around them appeared to he doing, when he took a surreptitious glance around the room. The pizza slices seemed much too large for that, but local custom apparently involved too-large everything.
“It seems so,” Laurence said, staring at his own slice of pizza in dismay. It looked so messy, and greasy enough that he could see the sheen of it. He scanned the table, and was even more distressed to see that there were no forks or knives present. Though the custom seemed to dictate that this was a finger food, Laurence couldn’t quite understand how anyone had could have possibly come to that conclusion.
He took a fortifying breath, and then said, “Well, there’s no sense staring at it.” Then, he picked it up with one hand, keeping another hand beneath it to catch any spillage, and took a bite.
It was only with all of his willpower that he avoided spitting it out again as the sauce scalded the top of his mouth, and he held up a hand in an attempt to stop Lan Xichen from making the same mistake he just had.
Lan Xichen had luckily not yet figured out exactly how he was going to eat this food without dragging his sleeves through it. He’d just come to the conclusion that he would need to shield his robes from damage as he would if he were going into battle when he saw the urgent gesture for stop.
“It’s...hot?” he guessed aloud, watching Laurence for any signs of genuine distress. Lan Xichen hoped it was just food served too hot. The only other explanation for the look on Laurence’s face was a casual poisoning.
Laurence nodded, and after a few more moments was able to swallow the pizza without worry of it scalding all the way through. “Very,” he said at last, giving his still-warm coffee a wary glance and choosing instead to flag down a server to ask for a glass of water. “I would not have expected the sauce to be so hot. So, I suppose there is some sense in staring at it for a while,” he added, reluctantly.
“I am glad to see the trouble is heat and not a horrifying fast-acting poison,” Lan Xichen replied, his tone and the slight relaxing of his shoulders indicating that a horrifying fast-acting poison, while unfortunate, would not necessarily be unexpected. He had acquired some trust issues in the last few years. “Did it taste good, though?”
“I don’t think I’ve managed to do anything yet that would give anyone cause to want to poison me.” Not to say that it wasn’t likely to happen sometime in the future. He’d had some attempts made on his life back home, and had been driven out of more than one country by a flock of dragons.
He thought about Lan Xichen’s question for a moment. He’d been so overcome with the heat of the thing that he hadn’t made any especial note of the flavours, but from what he recalled and the aftertaste in his mouth, he thought it safe to nod. “I think so,” Laurence said. “It certainly didn’t taste unpleasant, but I’ll need another taste to be certain.”
Lan Xichen gingerly touched his finger to the cheese on top of the pizza. It was still hot, but not quite so blisteringly, now that it had taken a moment on the table. “I’ll attempt the next bite,” he said, deciding that he would overcome his skepticism of cheese and excessive flavors all at once.
Channeling a bit of qi ensured that his pale blue sleeves were protected from the grease, sauce, and potential escaped mushrooms. Feeling very strange about it, he picked up the pizza slice and took a mindful bite. This was the beginning of a journey of expressions on Lan Xichen’s normally serene face.
First, he looked thoughtful, analyzing the parade of flavors and textures in his mouth. Then he looked a touch skeptical as he tried to decide if any of these flavors were actually good. He reached the conclusion that some of them were, but also that they appeared to be at war with each other, engaged in a pitched battle of equal strength on several sides. Finally that brought him to a smile, as he imagined a mushroom wielding a sword.
“There is a lot happening in one bite of this,” he concluded aloud.
Watching Lan Xichen’s first bite was infinitely better than taking his own first bite, and he spent a moment trying to figure out exactly what it was he was seeing. The smile brought one of his own, glad that even if his meal choice hadn’t been ideal, at least it wasn’t a complete disaster.
He took a second bite of his own. There was still some discomfort in the roof of his mouth, but nothing nearly as bad as the first bite, and he was able to properly taste the thing now. Most of the foods - the tomato sauce and the cheese and many of the vegetables - were things he’d eaten at home - cheese was nearly a British staple - and the vegetables that didn’t frequently grace British tables had cropped up occasionally on his travels. But the tomato sauce was more flavourful than the stuff back home, and the combination of all of them - along with the pizza crust - made a tasting portfolio like Laurence had never had before.
He was more than a little surprised at just how well it all fit together.
“It is a little busy, isn’t it?” Laurence said. “I’m impressed at how well balanced it all is. But you mentioned before that your diet is typically rather simple before, hadn’t you? It’s not too rich, I hope.”
“I’ve never had anything like it,” Lan Xichen admitted. It might very well be too rich, for all he knew. Cheese was a British staple, but virtually unheard of in Lan Xichen’s part of China. Mushrooms he recognized, and peppers and onions (for all that they weren’t exactly the ones he would see at home, Lan Xichen knew them), but the olives were completely foreign, as was the tomato sauce, and he’d certainly never had all these things piled onto one piece of bread before. It wasn’t a bad experience, but it was a curious one.
“Do you know what the salty things are?” he asked, nodding toward the little rings of black olive scattered across the pizza. “I like those.”
“Those are olives,” Laurence answered. “They don’t grow in my part of the world, exactly, though they grow close enough that they’re not terribly difficult to get in England. There are green olives as well, though they’re typically a little more bitter.”
Laurence took another bite of the pizza. He thought he could grow to like this food quite a bit, so long as he had proper cutlery next time he tried it. He was sure he looked a barbarian as he ate it. “What were some of your favourite foods back home? You’d mentioned the red bean buns before.”
Lan Xichen was both surprised and pleased that Laurence remembered his off-hand comment from earlier. It was a small thing, but Lan Xichen had always appreciated small things. The Gusu Lan were not a demonstrative group, and if they expressed fondness or care at all, it was usually in subtle ways. Accordingly, they tended to enjoy those little gestures from others.
“Red bean buns, the steamed kind, are my favorite,” he replied with a faint smile. “And egg tarts, and plums. Moon cakes, which I think I enjoy more for only appearing at the Mid-Autumn Festival. See?” His smile turned a bit rueful. “Sweets and more sweets.”
Laurence snorted softly, something that could almost be considered a laugh. "There's no harm in enjoying sweets, truly." Laurence himself quite liked fruits and foods with a mild sweetness,so long as the sugar wasn't overpowering. "We've a fair amount of desserts in Britain that I'm sure you'd like. Especially our custards, if you're fond of egg tarts, though we've also a variety of puddings and creams and baking. I don't think I've had the pleasure of trying a moon cake." He pictured cakes of the European sense, but he was sure he was likely incorrect.
“The Mid-Autumn Festival will be upon us soon,” Lan Xichen replied. “Given everything else that exists in Vallo, I can’t imagine we’ll be without moon cakes. If nothing else, I expect Wei Wuxian will talk his sister into making some. I’ll make sure one finds its way to you.”
The Mid-Autumn Festival was normally a time for families to celebrate together, but here they were all cut adrift from their families. Of course, Lan Xichen’s family at home had never been an ideal case to begin with, and celebrations at Cloud Recesses were a muted affair compared to those held elsewhere. Maybe this year he would see some of Yunmeng’s traditions at Lotus Pier.
The mention of a man named Wei Wuxian and his sister was yet another reminder to Laurence that he was quite alone here - it seemed like many of the newest arrivals had friends or family already here, and while Laurence would not inflict his presence on his family where they to appear, he did miss Temeraire, and Granby and certain current and former members of his crew - even Tharkay, who seemed to appear in the most unlikely and remote areas in the world at the same time as Laurence, as if by magic, seemed unlikely to find his way to Vallo.
Still, he was more grateful for the offer than particularly dismayed - this was an ache he was growing quite used to. “I would be most grateful for it,” Laurence said. “When is the Mid-Autumn Festival, if I might ask?”
“The fifteenth day of the eighth month, as we mark time in the cultivation world,” Lan Xichen replied. “I’ve learned it’s different here - they plan by the sun rather than the moon. According to the others at the Outlander Coven meeting, it should fall around a week from now, at the same time as their Solstice celebrations will happen. It was fascinating to learn how similar the celebrations are in nature, despite the differences in the outer trappings.” Because yes, Vallo was as crowded with new things as this pizza was, and it was also equal parts strange and fascinating. Lan Xichen was beginning to think he might get a taste for both, as he continued learning and experiencing them.
Laurence was passably familiar with the Chinese Calender, and his mind had already started to try to calculate what date, exactly, that would be before he realized that it would be quite impossible to do so without a reference point that was sooner than two-hundred years prior. This assuming Vallo worked on the same rotation as Earth did; the stars were completely unfamiliar to Laurence and so he couldn’t be sure if anything else was the same. While the Fall Equinox seemed to fall at about the right time, he couldn’t be sure unless he wished to do two-hundred years worth of calculations - which he was certain would absolutely do his head in - and besides, it had been June not more than a month prior.
‘About a week from now’ would have to suffice. He wondered if it would fall on his birthday. “The similarities are rather fascinating - both disconcerting in some ways and comforting in others. I hope you’re able to have a marvelous Mid-Autumn Festival.”
“Thank you,” Lan Xichen replied, and inclined his head toward Laurence. A curious look took him soon after, because it occurred to him that if Laurence didn’t know when the Mid-Autumn Festival was, odds were that his celebrations were as different as the ones in Vallo. That was a much simpler thing to discuss than last Mid-Autumn I ate rice alone because I was too sad to enjoy moon cakes or people, so he went for it. “What holidays do you enjoy, where you came from?”
Laurence thought of the approaching holidays of home. There was Samhain and Halloween, though he’d never celebrated either very much; those were holidays that were more commonly celebrated in Scotland or Ireland than England. There was Guy Fawkes Day, though Laurence had never been especially fond of the holiday. There was something morbid about celebrating a failed plot from two-hundred years ago, which involved having effigies hung of the failed conspirator and later burned, and there was no way to describe said celebration to an outsider without it sounding grim, despite the general air of celebration during the holiday itself.
“During the winter, we have the Christmas season,” Laurence said. “On Christmas, we’d often spend the day in worship, and then there’d be a Christmas Feast, and that would kick off the Twelve Days of Christmas, which typically involve a lot of feasting and dancing and celebrating. On the Twelfth Night, we’d usually host a ball, and guests would draw slips of paper that would tell them who they were to play - characters from literature and dramas, or sometimes particularly well-known Lords, and, of course, for King and Queen - and were expected to remain in character all evening. One of the Twelfth Nights I spent at sea, one of the midshipmen - he couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen - drew captain, and he had me scrubbing the deck until he evidently felt bad and issued me an extra ration of grog.”
It had been an enjoyable evening, even if Laurence had thought that his days of scrubbing the deck were behind him.
Lan Xichen laughed.
For the first time in months, Lan Xichen laughed, and he was so startled by it that he was late to covering his mouth, and then he was so mortified by that that he stopped cold in the middle of laughing.
“I apologize,” Lan Xichen said quickly, striving to school his face into some more appropriate expression. He could hardly believe his own uncouthness. It had just been so long since he felt much of anything at all that he was out of the habit of keeping excessive emotion under wraps. Laughing out loud! Grandmaster would be horrified.
It had felt good, though.
Laurence smiled - a broad, genuine smile, even as Lan Xichen seemed ashamed by his own laughter.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Laurence assured him. “In fact, there’s nothing that would have pleased me more than it, I assure you.” It had been years since the last time Laurence had been able to make people laugh at one of his dinner stories; years since he’d last had cause to tell them. “The highest compliment a storyteller can receive,” he added, just in case Lan Xichen needed more convincing that laughter was nothing to be ashamed of.
Relieved that he hadn't damaged his new friend's opinion of him, Lan Xichen relaxed and nodded to Laurence. "Thank you," he replied, still sounding a touch apologetic, but at least not horrified. "I don't know how many of the three thousand precepts you read while you were waiting at the gate, but loud laughter is specifically forbidden four separate times with slightly different wording. It's going to take me some time to get used to how open people are here, I think, and to how free I am permitted to be."
"I understand," Laurence said. "I've been learning that very skill for nearly six years now, and each time I think I've managed to navigate it to some small extent, I'm thrust into a situation where the people are somehow less governed by specific rules and customs. The Aerial Corps were much more lenient regarding certain societal structure than the Navy had been." And New South Wales had nearly seemed to do away with them altogether. Vallo was more civilized than the penal colony often was, but at the same time it was less reliant on the old world ideals. "It's been challenging deciding which rules to hold on to, and which rules serve no positive purpose, but I can assure you that it does get easier."
"That's a relief," Lan Xichen replied, and truly, it was. The only person he knew personally who went around questioning rules without being a power-hungry evil was Wei Wuxian, and things had always seemed very difficult for Wei Wuxian. The prospect of setting forth on a journey like that of his own had been more than a little terrifying. It was still frightening, but Lan Xichen was slowly feeling more capable of it.
"Do you have any guiding principles to help you decide?" Lan Xichen asked. "When you're looking at the rules you know and making your choices about them, how do you do that?"
"Only Temeraire, I suppose," Laurence said, and hesitated. "And other friends." Tharkay had been tantamount for keeping Laurence on a path that wouldn't completely destroy his conscience and soul. "I've made mistakes. I've made terrible mistakes," he still thought, often, of his conduct during the invasion of Britain, of the men he'd slaughtered without giving them any sort of chance at a fair contest, "but I've had people who were good enough to correct my course. All I can do is continue to sail forward and hope my bearings are right, and if they're not, hope some better man will be there, as they always have been, to make sure I don't run aground."
That was a lot of nautical metaphors for one explanation, but Lan Xichen knew the feelings expressed well enough to fill in the gaps in what he knew of the sea. People one could trust were the greatest joy in life, especially the ones who genuinely made one a better person. Being wrong about them, though...
"My worst mistakes have been in choosing the wrong shipmates," he replied, because it would have been a crime against poetry to switch metaphors at that point. "Three thousand rules couldn't overcome the results of trusting the wrong man, and that is how I've come to reconsider the rules themselves."
Laurence, when depressed or thinking of difficult topics, tended to fall naturally to nautical metaphors; he'd hardly been aware that he'd done it until Lan Xichen continued, and it would brought a smile had they not been talking about something so grim.
"Ah," Laurence said. He'd been lucky in the sense that nearly all the people he'd trusted had been worthy of that trust thus far. There had been Rankin, when he'd first joined the Aerial Corps, but his friendship with Rankin had done nothing worse than make Laurence into the fool for a few months, embarrassed that he hadn't been able to see him for what he was before he had. It certainly hadn't shaken Laurence's confidence in his judgement so much as to make him reconsider everything he'd held dear.
He suspected that Lan Xichen's misplaced trust had likely had more dire implications.
"I'm afraid I can offer no more counsel than I have," he said after a moment. "You must trust in your own judgement as much as you are able, and trust that you are now wiser than you once were and might not repeat the same mistakes of the past. I suspect that I'll make many more mistakes in the future, but I'd like to believe that I'm at least not so blockheaded that I'll make the same ones over and over." He hesitated, wondering if he might be overstepping, and then added, "I hope, Lan Xichen, that you'll not take your mistake so hard that you find it difficult to open yourself up to other, worthier friends."
He wondered again if he wasn't betraying Lan Xichen's trust by hiding his own crimes, like a coward.
"I thought, at one point, that I might simply separate myself from the rest of the world forever," Lan Xichen admitted. "But while staying locked away would prevent me from doing any harm, it would also prevent me from doing any good. So, I am…"
Ha paused briefly as he considered the phrasing. What did one call an attempt at writing a new life in a new place with nothing but a badly damaged brush and watery ink?
"Trying again," he said at last. "Wiser than before, I hope. Listening to my brother. And," he added with a slight smile, hoping to ease some of the weight of the conversation, "talking during meals and smiling foolishly if I so choose. I might even run down a hallway in Cloud Recesses."
“Careful, Lan Xichen: before you know it, you’ll be sitting ungracefully,” Laurence teased, lightly, though in truth he wasn’t sure if he imagined that Lan Xichen was capable of doing anything without grace. Somehow, he even managed to eat pizza with a sort of quiet dignity, which Laurence couldn’t replicate as he finished off the rest of his slice.
He wiped his fingers on a paper napkin before gripping the cake knife again, and served himself a second slice. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’ve decided against separating yourself from the world. I’ve quite enjoyed your company.”
"And I yours," Lan Xichen replied with a gentle nod. After a year spent entirely alone, it was good to have friends again, even if those friendships were very new and in the midst of such a strange environment. They ate vegetables piled onto bread here, and they called each other by birth names on the shortest acquaintance, and they called brown sugar drinks 'tea'...but Lan Xichen had meditated a great deal upon looking past the surface of things recently. Underneath what could look like disrespect and barbarism, there was a good heart to this place and its people. He was beginning to truly believe what Wei Wuxian had told him when he first arrived: that this was a good place for healing and for second chances.
"And I'm glad to know I haven't completely forgotten how to be in company," he continued. "I think I may actually be grateful for the more relaxed manners here, just for that reason. The expectations of being social aren't nearly so high."
Laurence nodded. "I sometimes miss the strict social rules," he admitted. "Every situation and every relationship had a set of rules that one was to follow; it made it far easier to navigate any given circumstance. But…" Here, he proceeded more cautiously. "But I don't think I would wish to go back to them, if I could. It made it very difficult to find a true connection with someone, more than I had ever realized at the time. I'd a promise to a girl, a childhood sweetheart, for eighteen years, and when it ended due to circumstance, I don't think either of us were truly broken up over it."
He still thought of Edith Woolvey, née Galman, occasionally, with a pang, and he knew well enough from their awkward reunion during the Invasion of Britain that she hadn't forgotten all there'd been between them. The fact that she'd waited for him for eighteen years, well past when she should have properly been married, spoke to the fact that it hadn't been false, and he could not blame her at all for not wishing for the lonely life of a wife of a Captain in the Aerial Corps. But he regretted his betrayal of Jane more bitterly than he did his disappointment of Edith. All of the people in his life now - or rather, then, in the other world he had left behind - had stayed by his side through treason, let alone what Laurence saw now as a lateral move in circumstance.
“False certainty has a way of keeping people blind,” Lan Xichen quietly agreed. He’d been so sure once of his place in the world, of his duty, of the right thing to do. The precepts and the elders and all of society made the right path so clear, he’d thought. All they’d really done, it turned out, was keep him so certain of his course that he never looked to the side to see what was happening around him. He’d paid dearly for it, and so had so many others - and a look at Laurence suggested that he, too, knew what it was like to have his trust in the authorities of his life broken.
“We’re getting melancholy, aren’t we?” Lan Xichen offered a gentle smile. “I apologize for drifting in such a sad direction.”
“No, no, it’s my fault,” Laurence said, waving a hand. “Though the conversation may be on the melancholy side, I assure you that I am not.” Well, no more than he normally was, though there were likely some who might have described Laurence as too serious or perhaps even grim.
“But tell me of your time here thus far. Aside from the loose manners of the place, have you had any particular shocks?”
“The indoor plumbing was a surprise.” Lan Xichen tilted his head slightly, considering what had been most shocking of the very many shocking things. “And the many types of magic. And men and women both going out so...uncovered. I’ve never seen so many bare arms outside a bathhouse.” He laughed softly at that, a properly polite laugh this time rather than the shocking out-loud laughter of before. “What of you? It sounds as though your world is nearly as different from here as mine is.”
“The innovations in indoor plumbing have certainly been among those I personally rank most highly,” Laurence agreed. “I don’t know what I shall do if I ever find myself without access to hot, running water again.” Taking showers hot enough to steam the bathroom mirror had very, very quickly became one of Laurence’s favourite things, and when he’d first arrived he’d taken two a day just for the sheer pleasure of it. If Temeraire were ever to arrive, he’d have to find a way to let the massive dragon experience it; he was sure Temeraire would appreciate it even more than he did, though Laurence suspected that even in the 21st century, showers large enough for Temeraire didn’t exist.
“The near undress of some certainly came as a shock, at first,” Laurence agreed. England had bare arms - many women’s dresses bared the arms and decolletage, though men rarely showed their own arms if women were present - but when he’d first arrived and the weather had been warmer, he’d seen more bare legs in a single afternoon than he had in nearly his entire life.
Easily, the most shocking thing Laurence had seen were the dragons here, but it still unnerved him to think of the creatures so bereft of their sapience, even once he’d started reading the books Dorian had loaned him, and so he tried not to, too much. “Have you tried watching television at all yet?” he asked instead. “I tried to, one evening, but the things I saw I’m sure would be too much for even the most salacious novels of my time. I don’t think it’ll be an experiment I try to recreate in the near future.”
“No, I’ve not, though my brother’s partner tells me I must,” Lan Xichen replied. “Wei Wuxian has taken to watching cooking and singing competitions on the television and says I will be required to watch something called Cutthroat Kitchen once I have settled in here more.”
He had no idea what Cutthroat Kitchen really was, except that it was another cooking competition and that no throats were actually cut in the process. From Wei Wuxian’s explanation, it sounded interesting, but Lan Xichen wanted to get a bit more of a feel for Vallo before he went looking for entertainment. Not to mention, he needed to eat more kinds of food before he watched anybody cook it competitively.
Cooking shows and singing competitions didn't sound so bad, though he couldn't imagine anything called Cutthroat Kitchen would be especially pleasant to watch.
Then again, he evidently was not very good at judging television titles. "I'm sure your brother's partner won't steer you wrong, though I would not recommend a show called Jersey Shore should you come across it." The experience had, on the whole, rather turned him off the medium altogether.
"Jersey Shore?" A single eyebrow quickest slightly upward in a subtle declaration of puzzlement. It sounded safe enough, after all, and certainly not as alarming as Cutthroat Kitchen initially came off. Lan Xichen wasn't family with Jersey, but he had been to various shores, and all of them had seemed rather lovely and peaceful. The look on Laurence's face upon mentioning this title, however, would indicate quite the opposite.
"I'd thought it would be about the Isle of Jersey, near England, or perhaps the colony in America, but it seems it was about a group of ill-mannered men and women who live on a beach." He was sure they'd been speaking English, but he'd not been able to make much sense of the slang they used; he suspected that was probably for the best. They'd worse manners than anyone he'd met in life, and he'd spent the last year in a penal colony.
"They don't actually cut the throats of the contestants on this cooking show, do they?" Laurence asked after a moment, hesitant. He wanted to think that they wouldn't, but now he was thinking of women who loudly announced their bowel movements on television for all the world to hear, and whatever it was that apparently passed for dancing in that place (he'd thought, back home, that some of the horror the displayed by the previous generation over waltzing was overblown, but now he thought maybe they'd had a point) and suddenly the prospect didn't seem quite so preposterous.
"Apparently my face asked that question when Wei Wuxian first told me the title, because he immediately assured me that no throats were actually cut," Lan Xichen replied, and then attempted to give a secondhand explanation of what the show actually was. It was convoluted and he was almost certainly getting some of it wrong, but it was still fun to have someone to talk about Wei Wuxian's silliness with while eating this extravagant pizza.
Talking during meals, Lan Xichen decided, would no longer be forbidden at Cloud Recesses.