Chapter Text
He did not want to be here.
That, in itself, was worthy of note. Lan Zhan, courtesy name Wangji, known in some circles as Hanguang-Jun, was not the sort of person—was not believed to be the sort of person—who went places he did not want to be. After all, why would he have spent all those months of the Sunshot Campaign looming out of the darkness and chaos like a beacon of light if he did not wish to? Why would he spend his life among the three, verging on four, thousand rules of the Gusu Lan if he did not wish to? Why would he, a peerless cultivator (except perhaps for his literal peer, his brother, the other Twin Jade of Lan) and one of the most respected individuals in the whole cultivation world, do what he did not wish to?
By and large, Lan Wangji had to admit, this view had some value to it. He did wish to emerge in the chaos, if that was a necessary corollary to doing justice and living without regret (and it was). He did wish to live in Gusu Lan, because it was his home and his world and a place that sat at the very core of his being. And he did, frequently, do what he wished.
But those who looked at him and saw only someone who could do whatever he wanted were vastly mistaken, and he had the thirty-three scars on his back to prove it.
Not that he needed to bare his back for the world to know that he was a man bound by many obligations. After all, those same people who whispered about his freedom of action were likely in the next breath to talk about the strict life of Gusu Lan, even as they assumed he had never questioned a single rule carved into the living rock of Cloud Recesses. Nor was he free of duties to family, to justice, or to himself even if his sect were absent entirely. But by and large, the world ignored those restrictions on Hanguang-Jun, and he had to admit that he himself had rarely felt them as constraints. Rather, he had bloomed and blossomed within the rigor of the Gusu Lan and under the eye of his uncle, Lan Qiren, in particular. Like ivy that required a trellis or a tree to wind around, Lan Wangji was most at home where he was most restricted, and so in a manner of speaking those restrictions were truly liberation in disguise.
But not in this case.
Not in any case, he had discovered, where Wei Ying and his legacy were concerned.
And especially not here, at this discussion conference, his first after his long seclusion and healing, where somehow, impossibly, the cultivation world was still managing to place the blame for everything that had ever gone wrong in history on Wei Ying’s shoulders, and expecting him to agree.
Which, of course, he did not.
But they had the tact, or the self-preservation at least, not to say any of it to him.
Which meant, on the other hand, that he couldn’t say anything about it to them, because the Gusu Lan rules forbade it.
He did not fidget, both because he was Lan Wangji and he did not fidget and because fidgeting would have rubbed the scars of his lashes against his robes, and while they did not hurt any more physically they were still painful in other ways. At times he embraced that pain, but today was a day where he was required to keep face for the Gusu Lan sect, and he could not focus on that if he was focused on his anger at the elders.
It was that focus, also, that allowed him to ignore the way that the cultivators around him whispered at the sight of him, white on white on white surrounded by the other Gusu Lan cultivators in blue.
This, xiongzhang had not been able to talk him out of. Would never be able to talk him out of. Had not, in the end, tried, though Wangji knew that if he had made eye contact with his brother at any point in the preparation process for today’s conference he would have received a look that could not have been interpreted as anything but a request that he change to match the rest of their delegation.
That was, of course, why he had not looked his brother in the eye.
Besides, if xiongzhang wanted him to match the others in the sect, he had only to command them to wear white as well. It was a sect color, after all. Wangji knew, and xiongzhang knew, that he was wearing it for Wei Ying. But he had worn it before.
Wei Ying had always pointed it out, in fact. Perhaps that was why, more than anything, he wore white for him. Not just because of his grief, but because it was grief for Wei Ying in particular, and Wangji knew that if Wei Ying could have seen it (ridiculous thought, since if he had been there to see it Wangji would not have needed to wear it, but then even after death Wei Ying was a past master at inspiring ridiculous thoughts in Wangji) he would have enjoyed the sight, enjoyed the humor of those Lan ‘mourning robes’ he had always teased Wangji about being put to their proper use.
Wangji would have given anything for Wei Ying to see it. He would even have broken the Gusu Lan rules (as he had, of course, in his useless defiance after Wei Ying’s death—no, not useless, never useless, not when Lan Yuan was back safely in the junior disciples’ quarters in Cloud Recesses) if it would have brought him back.
But it would not, so he did not.
He ignored the whispers and the almost-but-not-quite questions and the blatant stares. He did not correct the rumors that swirled and mixed and remixed and eventually settled on a belief as far from the truth as possible: that Hanguang-Jun wore white to remind himself to remain unsullied as he touched evil only to destroy it. After all, had he not stood on the cliff by the Yiling Patriarch as he fell to his death from Sect Leader Jiang’s attack, blood running down his hands and over the cliffside? Was not his seclusion connected to the wounds he had sustained at that time? Surely he wore white to commemorate the fact that he had come so close to evil and remained unmarked.
The competing rumor, that Hanguang-Jun was in mourning for a wife, was closer to the truth, but foundered on the rock that was his reputation for following sect rules: Lan marriages were publicly disclosed, and as Lan Wangji had not been entered as married he could not be.
But Gusu Lan rules also banned gossip, so Lan Wangji closed his ears, and kept his head down, and focused on getting through the conference. Once he was done, they could go back to Cloud Recesses, and he could sit with A-Yuan among the rabbits (now a generation older than those he and Wei Ying had encountered in Lan Yi’s cave, and so bereft of the headbands that had marked them as little Lans—but still, in his heart, sect members and not pets).
And if he was very lucky, the black rabbits among them would leave fur on his white clothes, and he could imagine, for a moment, that he looked at black robes with a hint of red peeking out behind.
It was not enough, but then, when had he done enough for Wei Ying in his life?
And what were a few rumors next to that monumental truth?