( Wei Wuxian enjoys kids most days, even if these ruffians have as much respect for their elders as seems to be convenient at any given moment. It's somewhat nostalgic, ignoring everything unfamiliar about the situation, and how odd it continues to be finding all these boys with short cut hair, and only the girls sporting anything longer.
Snowball fights are a fun sort of mischief he doesn't mind engaging in, partly to observe the people in the neighbourhood. Enough of them are "native," such as it is; but he's looking for discrepancies, odd notes to their activities. There's an odd sort of tenaciousness to the beliefs of these people, and their resistance to certain lines of conversation, versus how readily they embrace the repetitive inanities.
What he doesn't expect is to hear a voice that takes a long moment to register as familiar; most of his experience in talking with Xiao Xingchen was either almost two decades old, or through the eyes of a young woman who'd lived her life pretending to be blind, next to his own blindness. It's those memories he'd witnessed with Empathy that have him dusting off cold hands and jogging over, ducking a snowball lobbed at him and wagging a finger at the giggling children responsible, his smile bright with nothing much reaching his eyes. None of it is their fault, but he's distracted, and he's calling out to the man in the clothing of this place, with the odd frames on his face, and the long hair so few seem to favour with a: )
Shishu?
( He's a dead man with a shattered soul: is it even possible? Also reasonable enough a call followed up by what's more practically familiar: )
Daozhang.
( Is this another strange hallucination in this place. Xiao Xingchen, please advise? (It doesn't occur to Wei Wuxian there's... no way... he's ever met Xiao Xingchen before. Or that calling out shishu can be all but meaningless, in its own ways.) )
ii
Snowball fights are a fun sort of mischief he doesn't mind engaging in, partly to observe the people in the neighbourhood. Enough of them are "native," such as it is; but he's looking for discrepancies, odd notes to their activities. There's an odd sort of tenaciousness to the beliefs of these people, and their resistance to certain lines of conversation, versus how readily they embrace the repetitive inanities.
What he doesn't expect is to hear a voice that takes a long moment to register as familiar; most of his experience in talking with Xiao Xingchen was either almost two decades old, or through the eyes of a young woman who'd lived her life pretending to be blind, next to his own blindness. It's those memories he'd witnessed with Empathy that have him dusting off cold hands and jogging over, ducking a snowball lobbed at him and wagging a finger at the giggling children responsible, his smile bright with nothing much reaching his eyes. None of it is their fault, but he's distracted, and he's calling out to the man in the clothing of this place, with the odd frames on his face, and the long hair so few seem to favour with a: )
Shishu?
( He's a dead man with a shattered soul: is it even possible? Also reasonable enough a call followed up by what's more practically familiar: )
Daozhang.
( Is this another strange hallucination in this place. Xiao Xingchen, please advise? (It doesn't occur to Wei Wuxian there's... no way... he's ever met Xiao Xingchen before. Or that calling out shishu can be all but meaningless, in its own ways.) )