Parenting is hard, but it's especially hard when it's not actually your kid and your sister who raised you died three years ago and you have to deal with your own abandonment issues at the same time as your new kid's abandonment issues and the guy who's raising the kid with you won't stop being a better parent than you. Or: Jiang Cheng has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week of birthday party planning.

Jiang Cheng is sort of having a complicated night. She tilts her chin up, moving to the beat of the track, and her eyes slide over him, top to bottom. The beat goes dirty and buzzing and she has to raise her voice to say, “I don’t do straight guys.” Someone grinds against him and he looks down at the prettiest girl he’s ever seen and says, stupid with something to prove, “Good thing I’m not straight, then.” He sounds like he’s sure of it, even though he’s not, but his best decisions have always been forced out of him by people bolder than he is.

Having a crush on your roommate is really embarrassing, except that's apparently the opposite of a problem. Jiang Cheng can't deny that's pretty convenient. Wei Ying holds it up, a series of straps and buckles and velcro and wow, really a lot of leather. It has absolutely no conceivable form beyond tangled. Nie Huaisang opens the door at exactly the moment that Wei Ying holds the thing up to Jiang Cheng’s chest, as if he’s trying to imagine how exactly it would fit onto a person, and it falls into a tangled pile between them while they stare at Huaisang in mild mortification.

Thursdays are for boxing. Thursdays are for Nie Mingjue. He pretends, sometimes, that they’re peers, even though they’re in different weight classes and always will be. He likes spitting and snarling at Nie Mingjue just to see what he’ll do, to push and shove at the boundaries. Nie Mingjue, it feels like sometimes, has self control the way that ponds have ice in the late fall- delicately and temporarily and easily disturbed.

It feels, sometimes, like Jiang Cheng's waiting to have a bad day so he has an excuse. It’s a Tuesday and Jiang Cheng finds himself huddled under the portico in front of Nie Mingjue’s impressive double-doors, wondering what the fuck he’s doing with his life. He’s drenched to the bone, all of his formal clothes sticking to all of his skin, waiting for someone to answer the door before he freezes to death. Or maybe he’ll just freeze to death! Maybe that’s the option at play here. Considering how the rest of his night is going, he doesn’t think it’d actually be all that surprising.

Sometimes Jin Zixuan's life is complicated. When it comes to Jiang Yanli, though, things just seem to make perfect sense. Jin Zixuan loves his wife very much, but it is undeniable that she’s a little evil. Considering how terrible her brothers are, he counts himself lucky that her evil manifests, generally, in the form of playful mischief as opposed to, for example, putting beetles in his sheets. Unlike some Jiang siblings he could name.

Xue Yang's pretty sure that he could be a better girlfriend to Song Lan than whoever the fuck he's actually dating. Like, pretty sure. Almost certain. (xue yang and song lan go to the same gym, and xue yang has never been good at resisting temptation)

It doesn't take an especially strategic mind to recognize that a poorly-maintained weapon is no weapon at all. Nie Mingjue can fix that.