Chapter Text
It begins about six years before his death, with Wei Wuxian laying upside down in a creek.
Wei Wuxian quite enjoys creeks, in a similar but altogether distinctive way he enjoys other bodies of water. Sure, he says that about all bodies of water, both because he grew up in Yunmeng and has opinions, and for not wanting any body of water to feel left out: creeks are nice for sunny spring days, when it’s warm but not warm enough to warrant diving into the icy depths of a river. Usually, one dips their hands into its waters and uses it to clean their faces, take a sip or another, and maybe give a romantic little sigh before going on their way. They usually do not lay down on top of the rocky riverbed, fully clothed and probably congesting the flow of the stream, but Wei Wuxian has never been known for adhering to expectations.
He rubs both hands against his eyes, cold and damp. His fingers aren’t pruning, so he probably hasn’t been here for that long. And they didn’t even have classes today, so it’s fine.
Man, he likes creeks. He feels fresh. Funky fresh. There’s a watery and mild feeling in his chest — he feels settled into his skin in a way he only ever does when he’s home, in the humid and almost always warm weather of Yunmeng, which he’s been sort of missing ever since he first stepped into Gusu. Home! He misses home. Wei Wuxian breathes deep until it hurts; he can tell where he isn’t just by the way the air tastes. Water curls under his body, trying its best to go through.
As a kid, he’d skip stones into the lakes at Lotus Pier and ask himself whether the things people dropped in it would eventually wash up in the bed of somebody else’s rivers, if maybe that someone would reach down into their stream and pull out a rock that doesn’t look quite right, a rock from far away. More times than he cares to say, Wei Wuxian carved the character of his birth name — Ying, Wei Ying, the only thing he was back then, being too young for a courtesy name, holding on a bit too tight to one of the sole things his parents ever gave him — into the surface of a stone and watched it sink below the greenish waves provoked by the water’s parting. He didn’t know how long it would theoretically take for someone to find his stone and for him to theoretically find something back, so he spent the better part of his ten years of age knee-deep into the lake, whenever he wasn’t attending his classes or sword practice, rummaging through muddy water and leaving no stone unturned.
He knows now how dumb and childish that was, but he was a child and is still arguably stupid, so he tends to keep his mouth shut whenever his sister brings it up, cooing and petting his hair as she goes on and on about how cute and romantic he was when he was little, A-Xian, it’s such a sweet story. Jiang Cheng alternates between mocking him behind Shijie’s back and pretending to gag, so he has no support there. Honestly, whatever happened to respecting your elders?
“You’re not technically older than me,” Jiang Cheng always says. “I was here first.”
“For the love of everything that is good and sacred,” Wei Wuxian always answers, “I was born two years before you. You were here first because I’m adopted.”
“That’s just noise,” Jiang Cheng will say, and the conversation inevitably ends. His brother being a bullheaded idiot is one of the only reasons why still, over a decade since Jiang-zongzhu took Wei Wuxian in, he and Jiang Cheng still call each other by their names instead of the proper honorifics. By this point, if Jiang Cheng ever calls him gege, Wei Wuxian thinks he’ll cry. Actual tears, not the fake sobbing he does when he, like, stubs his toe and wants attention. Quivering lips and all, dramatic wheezing, fanning himself because he’s so overcome with emotion, the whole shebang.
The other reason for it is Yu-furen, but Wei Wuxian dislikes voluntarily thinking about her when he’s supposed to be having a nice time — or any kind of time at all, good or bad — so he will not. He’s looking at the sunlight between the tree branches right now, and it rocks.
Because it’s worth mentioning, the creek has nothing to do with Wei Wuxian’s demise, nor does Wei Wuxian know, years before the fact, that he will meet a premature death. It is simply a measure of time, a time which blurs after a while, growing bluish in the river of memory, because everything is a river; everything flows and fades. And Wei Wuxian does not know he will die, not with any more certainty than any other person does, but Wei Wuxian does die, which might mean he’s been dead since the beginning. It might also mean that here, he is always alive. It depends on where you’re standing.
Wei Wuxian, alive: he blows a strand of hair away from his face, annoyed and still stuck on the last time Shijie started embarrassing him in front of the entire world and Jiang Cheng, which was three days ago during dinner. He loves his sister to death, but she’s a social butterfly not in the sense that she metaphorically kicks open the door of a conversation and bulldozes (read: charms) the entire interaction until she’s either won everyone over or it would be too uncomfortable to ask her to leave (like Wei Wuxian does), but in that people actually enjoy her presence and actively seek it out. Which does mean that most of the time people are listening to what she’s saying, which in turn means Mianmian has started loudly cooing every time Wei Wuxian walks into a room, and it’s awful and embarrassing and Wei Wuxian hates everything about having siblings. Except the actual siblings he has, because he hasn’t figured out how to not be a horrible sap even when he’s annoyed.
Oh, wow. The mortifying ordeal of having a family. Wei Wuxian has only ever had one for seven of his sixteen years, and he’s still taking it day by day when it comes to getting used to it.
But back to the point. He’s not sweet. He’s only cute in the very liberal sense of the world, in which he acts cute so people feel like doing things for him, or to make some boy or girl or another look back at him with a glimmer of interest in their eye. He’s a master swordsman. He’s the youngest head disciple the Jiang Sect has ever had. He’s the deadliest marksman out of all the students at Cloud Recesses right now, as far as he’s concerned. He’s having maybe too much difficulty in getting up from this creek, and the water from the creek, which seemed pleasantly cool and refreshing back when he decided laying down in it was a good idea, is starting to make him shiver.
He slowly drags a hand over the coarse rocks and pebbles where the creek grows back into land. It’s a very small creek; Wei Wuxian has been here for weeks and hadn’t noticed it before today, and only did so because he’d been too focused on watching his feet so he wouldn’t trip and fall on his face. Ever since his first night at Gusu, he hasn’t actually had the gall to sneak any more jars of Emperor’s Smile into the disciples dormitories, so he has to finish all of his drinking back in Caiyi Town before curfew.
It’s usually not so bad since he has a pretty good alcohol tolerance, but he forgot Lan Qiren had warned them all last night about the lantern ceremony that would be taking place today at sundown, which means Wei Wuxian needs to be there before sundown to prepare his own lantern, which means he downed a whole jar of sweet, amazing, very alcoholic Emperor’s Smile in the span of a minute, and on the way uphill towards Cloud Recesses, he got a little dizzy and had to take a small breather.
Listen, it’s not that Lan Qiren scares him. Wei Wuxian barely even holds contempt for him, really, even through all the punishments he’s been on the receiving end of ever since the guy decided it was his personal mission to suck the fun and happiness out of everything. Wei Wuxian is slow to anger, quick to forget, and he has very few resentful bones in his body; he just likes making people mad. He wants to see how many boundaries he can cross before it makes someone pop a vein, and since it hasn’t happened yet, he’s trying his best. Jiang Cheng is still currently ahead of Lan Qiren in the ranking of who-turns-the-purplest.
Regardless of that, there are only so many times Wei Wuxian can be let off with a warning, a mild cold, and bruised skin from kneeling hours on end. Diplomatically speaking. He squirms a little at the thought of Yu-furen ever hearing about all the ways he’s managed to piss people off during his stay in Gusu. Insolent boy, she’d probably say, Zidian sparking in her fist. She doesn’t call him by name, usually; just boy. Insolent boy, good-for-nothing boy, unwanted boy, nothing-but-trouble boy. Wei Wuxian knows the drill. The most recent scar sits on the back of his neck.
So, really — and not that Wei Wuxian is scared of Yu-furen, either; he’s just a big baby who complains about being disciplined —, Lan Qiren could stand to take a few lessons with Jiang-zongzhu’s wife when it comes to intimidation techniques. Angry eyebrows and calls for punishment really just don’t do it for him.
(Wei Wuxian scares Lan Qiren.
Wei Wuxian cannot tell. He is young; foolish, in his ways, even if quick as a whip and too smart for his own good. Every year, dozens of disciples step into Lan Qiren’s classrooms, and every year, he teaches. It is a simple job, and most of the time, a rewarding one, even if that is not the reason why he does so. Lan Qiren is a teacher, and it does not matter if he is a welcoming one, or a gentle one, or an understanding one. He is not: he’s efficient. He teaches, they learn. As one of the elders of Gusu Lan, it is his duty and his responsibility.
Sometimes he looks askance at Wei Wuxian and thinks he sees a shadow.
He would not call the boy evil, though the word, in Lan Qiren’s understanding, carries far less of the fear-mongering meaning that tends to blind the ill-instructed; evil is unspectacular and always human. But if resentful energy is just another form of energy, wouldn’t it be possible, theoretically, to manipulate that energy? Wei Wuxian asks, and he is not evil. He is not evil, not as Lan Qiren shuns him, and expels him from the class, and makes him kneel on hard ground and stones until sundown. Not as he does it again, since the boy keeps looking for answers, even if he doesn’t outright ask.
Wei Wuxian is not evil: he is curious, and he is reckless. That is somehow worse.
Once, Lan Qiren imagined he could curb the issue by simply refusing him answers. Let him flail, he’d thought to himself, like a dull fish flopping on land, ever surprised to find out not everywhere’s a river. When the questions stop, Lan Qiren thinks himself victorious, in a game only he was aware he’d been playing. For a short while, it is even true.
Then Qishan Wen rains hell on Gusu, and annihilates Lotus Pier. Then the young Jiang heir — a boy, barely three years into having a courtesy name of his own — becomes sect leader in his father’s stead, and has to get ready for a war in which his home was the first casualty. Then that Wei Wuxian disappears, and when he comes back, Lan Qiren looks at him straight on and thinks, There. The shadow is there.
Was the shadow always there?
Wei Wuxian, alive, still a boy, looks about a breath away from unbecoming. Wei Wuxian, still alive, a boy, when told that by refusing to pick up his sword again he’ll amount to nothing, says, There is no such thing as nothing. Try and try, you’ll never disappear. Wei Wuxian, still both, for now, once asked a question, and the answer came to find him.
Watching him, Lan Qiren sees what he always sees when flesh is pressed against the dark. How the sharper edges of the body — shoulders, elbows, chin, nose — poke through the blackness, a body halfway in, or out of, a river’s surface. The face eerie, the smile pale. A shadow-thing, even in daytime.
He has no use for the word evil, here. There is something not quite human about it at all.
But where does the darkness lie? It comes out of the person, a shadow tied and alive, trying to be. Here’s what resentful energy does to a body: it eats. Wei Wuxian has always known how to go hungry.
Though it has not happened. Though it will, which means it always has. History is about to crack wide open; the future approaches.)
Wei Wuxian is trying, then, to not be late for once. Plus, lanterns are pretty, and if all goes well, he’ll be in even prettier company.
Yes. Nailing it. Lan Zhan should be fully prepared to swoon.
They have the lantern ceremony in Lotus Pier, too, although it usually takes place in the city, instead of being a private celebration for sect members and cultivators. Jiang-zongzhu has always been adamant of including the people under his care in joyous moments, and it’s one of the only things he and Yu-furen actively agree on. It’s an unexpected place to have a truce in, since half the time it looks like Yu-furen is actively plotting the assassination of her husband (though it could just be what her face looks like; her features are made for sneering), and everyone else treats it like it’s made out of glass. Shijie always looks so damn hopeful when she sees her parents discussing details for the celebration. Jiang Cheng hunches up his shoulders like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It makes Wei Wuxian’s heart hurt. So every time the day comes, back home, he takes his siblings by the wrist and drags them into town. He twirls Shijie around until she’s breathless with laughter, soft lilac robes swirling as townspeople fill the streets with the sound of strings and the smell of food; he buys Jiang Cheng a jar of rice wine and tells him to go off and find his friends, fully knowing he’ll stick close to Wei Wuxian’s side, as always. Yunmeng tastes like summer, mid-spring, and all the lanterns, up in the sky, look like a second sun, orange and yellow and high, high up.
He doesn’t know if the Lans can top that. Wei Wuxian can even picture it: all soft shades and quiet whispers, no alcohol or dances or street stands selling sticky rice cakes. Maybe someone will play a number on the guqin, if they’re lucky. Wei Wuxian could fall asleep just at the thought.
It’s still early in the afternoon, though. He’s watching the sunlight between the tree branches. It’s bright and lovely and the light breaks in about three different ways, up and down and around. The water isn’t actually cold enough to numb him, just enough to keep him constantly aware of its flowing, and it’s quiet. Wei Wuxian hardly ever does quiet, but he lets it simmer now. It reminds him of being very small, sitting in a dirty alleyway somewhere in Yunmeng and breathing in tandem with the thing inside his stomach that always did its best to keep him warm, even if it couldn’t always fend off hunger.
He didn’t have words for a golden core, then, but one does not need words for something they already know, and Wei Wuxian has always been good at making do. He didn’t know about cultivating, so he imagined this thing inside of him was candlelight, flickering and only firm if he kept it fed with the oxygen he could give it and the fuel he could provide. The oxygen he could get by breathing, and the fuel was him. He was always both the fire and the thing being warmed by it, both ember and flame. Sitting by the backdoor of the butcher’s, hoping for some scraps from the day before, watching the sunrise, thinking: A great deal of light falls on everything. Inside, maybe inside, too.
Wei Wuxian doesn’t remember much of his early years, other than the hard facts. His smaller self hunkers somewhere in the back of his mind, tender in his fear, begging to be kept a secret. Wei Wuxian’s memory has always been spotty (and only selective when the time calls for it, thank you, Jiang Cheng), and he’s never been quite sure if that’s a consequence of something or if it’s just how he is.
He forgets little details, things he’s been told, a name or another, not enough for it to be alarming, but enough for it to become a thing. It’s a thing that if Wei Wuxian reached enlightenment and immortality tomorrow, he’d probably have forgotten the order of the steps he took to get there by sundown. Things like these are more often than not looked at as little quirks — it’s a thing that Wei Wuxian can be forgetful, just as much as it’s a thing that Nie Huaisang is an incorrigible gossip, or Jiang Cheng goes purple when he’s angry, or Lan Zhan is absolutely perfect from about three angles and outworldly from everywhere else.
Listen, things are arbitrary, and Wei Wuxian is making the calls. He has a list of Lan Zhan’s things. A metaphorical list, since he’s not a creep, but a list nonetheless.
He keeps many lists inside his head, in order to remember. It seems a bit redundant to keep it inside his head when the issue is forgetting, but he does it for the comfort instead of the practicality. He keeps lists of all the places he’s been: where he’s been hungry in, where he’s hidden away at, where he crawls for comfort, the places where he’s been alone, the ones he has not. He works with images rather than words, which he’s learned, since joining the cultivation world, is not how all people think. It still baffles him, but he’s tried to do better. To do it right.
(Yu-furen is already harsh enough without him giving her any more reasons to think he was born wrong. He can whittle a few of his edges off; he was born during a falling leaves moon, which is to say he’s always been good at sacrifice.)
Anyway, Lan Zhan’s things. He’s quiet. He’s quiet and his words are heavy. Wei Wuxian noticed back in that first night on the rooftop: whenever Lan Zhan speaks, there’s a gravitational pull to it. Wei Wuxian feels drawn. He likes feeling drawn. It’s like standing somewhere high, high up, and looking down, and your hands tighten around whatever you’re holding onto — because you’re always holding onto something — and you think, Oh, wow, this is very high up, and the ground is very far away and I am very small, and suddenly you understand why people stay on land, and being so distant from it, the first thing the mind conjures up is falling.
The earth draws the body, ever present. It pulls. Lan Zhan is like that: he’s solid and sturdy and silent, and quite often, Wei Wuxian has been finding himself wanting him to stay.
He scrunches his nose at the mere thought, slapping a hand beside himself as if to scare off the thought, and gets a scrape from a pointy pebble for his trouble. Dumb, dumb Wei Wuxian, with his dumb feelings and even dumber face. He’s always been one for waxing poetic, but even he has to admit this might be getting out of hand. Him, Shijie and Jiang Cheng will be leaving Cloud Recesses soon, he reminds himself, ignoring the pang of whatever that tries to make itself known in his chest, and Lan Zhan is staying here, because this is his home. It doesn’t mean they’ll never see each other again.
If anything, it’s likely they’ll see much more of each other than it would be normally expected, considering what’s currently weighing down in his pocket. The Stygian Iron emanates a lack of warmth even through the cloth of his robes and the sealed pouch he’s hidden it in, and fuzzy as he is, the seriousness of the secret he holds is as stark as it was when he’d decided, almost involuntarily, to lie about the circumstances around it. Standing in front of Lan Qiren and Lan Xichen, the lingering feeling of Lan Zhan’s forehead ribbon where it’d tightened his wrist numb, Lan Zhan’s arm almost brushing against him: There was nothing in the cave. Lan Zhan and I just happened upon it. Please, there’s nothing to search for.
I regret that I was capable of causing pain, Lan Yi had said. Let me remain where I am not.
Wei Wuxian gets that. He really, really gets that, in a way he’s not sure why, but he’d bit the inside of his cheek and prayed to all spirits that might be listening that he’d be able to do just this one thing for her.
He had half expected Lan Zhan to make a liar out of him, to tell the whole story, because a proper Lan does not lie. Wei Wuxian knows; he’s written down the sect rules enough times to recite them backwards. But Lan Zhan stayed silent and solemn, letting Wei Wuxian take the lead, and afterwards, he’d just inclined his head in acknowledgement and left.
It’s a thing.
It’s so dumb.
It’s even dumber because it’s not like they’re together, or like something has happened. They’re just… Lan Zhan and Wei Wuxian. Wei Wuxian has no idea what he wants, really; they’re a possibility, at best. But what might come to happen means hardly anything when all eyes are turned and fixed on Qishan Wen, and when the word war has become commonplace in most conversations — still a word hushed, still a word whispered, but what’s told quietly echoes. You hardly need to be a master cultivator to pick up tension in the air; it has a metallic taste.
It does hurt quietly, somehow. Wei Wuxian is only dramatic about things that don’t matter, so he nurtures this worry between his own hands and watches over his brother’s face at night, counting his breaths. It seems so final: war. He has lived more lifetimes than many — it’s something Jiang-zongzhu once told him, a couple years ago, when he’d been wandering the halls of Lotus Pier after a nightmare drew him away from his too-dark, too-small room. It still embarrasses him, the fears he gathered while living on the streets; he was so little, and consciously, the only thing he remembers are flickers and flashes, pangs of hunger and cold, but when he’s asleep, everything’s so vivid. Gone as soon as he sits up and heaves for breath, but he still wakes with the sting of a dog’s bite on his thigh, the sweat making his robes stick to his skin far too similar to blood.
What’s most frustrating about his fears, the actual, genuine ones, is that no one else seems to mind them. Jiang Cheng delights on bickering and making fun of him, but he never says a word when the mere sound of a dog barking has sent Wei Wuxian into hysterics, shaking and heaving for breath in the middle of the street; Shijie is always firm on the rule of “no eating in bed unless you’re sick”, but in Wei Wuxian’s first year at Lotus Pier, she never pressed him into dismantling the stack of leftovers he’d kept under his own for safekeeping, back when he was afraid that the Jiang’s might let him go at random, might grow tired of him and his troubles and he’d be back where he started, alone.
(He’s still aware, on a molecular level, that if something awful happens he’ll be the first to go, since he was the last one in, but he doesn’t fear that a single mistake will be all that it takes anymore. Though what qualifies as something awful depends on where you’re standing. What’s unforgivable, for Wei Wuxian? He wonders. It’s a morbid curiosity, which he’s been known to harbor. What would be the straw that breaks it? What would mean he can’t go home again? What would be the death of him — death in life, where one is still alive but gone, gone in all ways that matter?
The death of earth, some scrolls tell him, is to become water. The death of water is to become air, and the death of air is to become fire. The death of us, then, is to become. But to become what?
A disquieting fascination, the way a moth is drawn to what will inevitably kill it. Morbid curiosity, the way everyone is bound to be full of, in their early years. Just that.)
Regardless of whether his siblings don’t mind his fears or not, Wei Wuxian does mind, and he finds them absolutely mortifying. He’s a common haunt in Lotus Pier in the middle of the night, because the dark, silent water of the lakes and ponds calm him, and there’s always a lantern burning at every corner, dying the outer halls a warm orange. Enough of a common haunt, it seemed, that a servant must have ratted him out to Jiang-zongzhu, and that night, when Wei Wuxian looked askance to find Jiang Fengmian staring straight into his fucking soul, he’d given a very unmanly squeal and dropped to his knees, head bowed and mouth already open to apologize.
But he didn’t get a scolding, and it’d been late enough at night that Wei Wuxian only found it odd in a distant sort of way: in the hours before sunrise, he’s told, the veil between the world of spirits and the world of men grows thinner. When he was younger, he’d assumed that meant the line between wakefulness and dreams did the same, and grow as he must, he’s never quite been able to shake off the way he once believed the world worked. If as a child you tell yourself nothing can hurt you if it cannot see you, then you will keep hiding your face whenever you feel scared, no matter how much time passes.
Anyways, it’s not as if Jiang-zongzhu is known for his temper. He’s is far from the only sect leader Wei Wuxian has met, but he’s probably his favorite, and not even for the whole “took me out of the streets and gave me a home” thing. Wei Wuxian is not that sentimental. Jiang Fengmian is just… steady. Firm when need be, but a cool balm to the fiery harshness of his wife, the sting of her words and bite of Zidian’s whip. It might’ve even been foolish to expect a scolding, for something so mild as walking around the place he lived, but… well, in Wei Wuxian’s experience, it’s always been better to be cautious. He’s earned scars for less.
Brows heavy, Jiang Fengmian had said, “You’ve no need to apologize for having memories.”
“It’s been years, though,” Wei Wuxian muttered in response.
“That is why they’re memories,” Jiang Fengmian answered, unmoored. “It is all we are.”
He hadn’t placed a hand on Wei Wuxian’s shoulder, but it seemed like he thought about it, and it was almost the same thing. He has an awkward sort of care when it comes to him, an hesitance that doesn’t exist when it comes to Shijie, and disappears with Jiang Cheng when Yu-furen is not around. It’s not Wei Wuxian’s place to resent him for it, so he does not; Jiang-zongzhu is not his father, close as he was to his parents. What he’s been given is enough.
Then Jiang Fenmiang said: You’ve lived more lifetimes than most. And Wei Wuxian thought: Yes, I have, how could you tell?
He considers his life a set of three; his parents, the streets, and Lotus Pier. He remembers barely anything of the first, tries his best to forget the second, and is currently living his third. They’re not exactly chapters, like the separation of a story in a scroll, since Wei Wuxian doesn’t trust his memory as far as he can throw it. Where in the body does he begin, how can he hold a life with his own hands? He doesn’t know, but he’s got three, two more than most get if they’re lucky. He can’t tell if it’s a blessing or a curse, and he’s got no interest in going for a fourth one.
But it’s made him solid. When he looks at other people his age, he can still kind of see some unsteady ground, spaces they haven’t figured out how to fill yet; and it’s common, of course, it’s what these years are for, but Wei Wuxian has already done it — he knows where he stands, because if he didn’t, they would have broken his knees and eaten him alive.
So it goes: someone who knows where he stands is the best person to fight a war, because they will die upright. And it hardly even matters how old they are, because children cease to be children the moment you put a sword in their hands. Wei Wuxian has lived among cultivators for a smaller time than most, but he knows that there is no such thing as an unarmed disciple, regardless of whether they’re twenty years old or twelve.
Wei Wuxian does not want to think about wars. Whenever he thinks about it, he thinks about Qishan Wen, and whenever he thinks about Qishan Wen, he things about Wen Qing and the fear permanently carved into the corners of her mouth, about Wen Ning and his wide, wide eyes, and it makes him want to cry, just a little. No, he doesn’t want to think about wars. He wants to think about the creek he’s laying down on. He wants to think about rivers. A river is a body of water: it has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs, it lies in a bed. It remembers. A creek is the skin of a body, then, Wei Wuxian thinks, nodding to himself. In human beings, it takes an average of twenty-eight days for all the cells in the body to be born and die and be replaced. This creek probably won’t remember he was even here at all as soon as he gets up.
He’s not as dizzy as he was when he got here, he thinks. He really wasn’t drunk; it takes a lot to get him to that point, and he wasn’t even trying today. He’s probably good to go now, and if he’s quick, he might be able to sneak into the dormitories for new robes without anyone asking any questions. He flexes his fingers, counts to eight, and eventually does not move. His soaked clothes make him feel heavy.
All this talk of water makes him thirsty. All this talk of water makes him think of Lan Zhan, and the cold springs. Hardly anything makes him not think about Lan Zhan, these days. He can almost picture his disapproving frown right now — its edges have softened, though it might be just wishful thinking, dulled by their time spent together. Wei Wuxian is well aware he can be “too much” and “over-friendly to the point of being obnoxious”, but as annoyed as Lan Zhan has looked at him, he’s never told him in so many words to go away. He’s just gotten all frowny and said his name in an incredulous, offended and mildly horrified tone, which, to be fair, is something Wei Wuxian hears a lot.
Bottom line is, Wei Wuxian needs to be told things in order to understand them, so as long as Lan Zhan doesn’t say “Leave me alone”, Wei Wuxian won’t go away. See? Wei Wuxian is a simple man. He doesn’t even need to be asked to stay.
But, picture it: the narrowed eyes, the straight jaw, the perfectly placed Lan forehead ribbon, not a hair out of place. It’s so vivid. If he reached out, he could almost touch it. It’s… it’s the actual, real Lan Zhan, standing above him with a completely blank look on his face.
“You’re in the river,” he says with no inflection in his voice. He is standing by his left, blocking out the sun with his head. It makes him look like a mirage.
“No,” Wei Wuxian answers, and his voice sounds too muffled for his own ears. Maybe he has water in them. He blinks a few times, trying to get droplets away from his eyes. “I’m in a creek. It’s clearly not a river.”
Lan Zhan doesn’t answer, but Wei Wuxian didn’t expect him to; he can already tell a few of his silences apart, and this is either complete indifference or exasperation, and exasperation is only one word away from fond exasperation, which means Wei Wuxian is killing it.
“The dream of life,” he entones, smiling lazily up at Lan Zhan, “is to lie down by a slow stream,” he runs his fingers over the water, “and stare at the light in the trees—,” raises his hand in a sweeping motion, “to learn something by being nothing, a little while.” He finishes by letting his arm fall back, splashing droplets onto the edge of Lan Zhan’s robes. “Ah, Lan Zhan, isn’t this the meditation you Lan’s get all excited about? I’m starting to see the appeal.”
Wei Wuxian is so sure of what Lan Zhan’ll answer that he mouths along with it when he says, “Do not be wasteful with your words.”
Wei Wuxian blows a raspberry. “It’s called poetry, Lan Zhan.” After a beat, he adds, “And I know you’re thinking at least ten different insults right now that you won’t say because you’re nice and righteous like that, but I can see them all in your eyes, and I am extremely offended.”
“Mn,” says Lan Zhan.
Wei Wuxian sits up, shivering as stale water runs down his back, only swaying a little from side to side. He hadn’t realized how much those pebbles were digging into his skin, but he’s bound to have some weirdly shaped bruises come morning. Lan Zhan stares down at him before, after seemingly a few long moments of intense internal debate, folding one sleeve of his robe back and offering an arm to help Wei Wuxian up. Because he’s a gentleman.
Wei Wuxian tries not to look too giddy at the intentional physical contact. He can’t be sure if he succeeds or not, because Lan Zhan’s face would still be flat as a lake as it already is regardless, but it’s the thought that counts. And since Wei Wuxian is thoughtful, he steps away the moment he’s standing upright, because he knows Lan Zhan is not too big on other people in his personal space.
The sun doesn’t seem any dimmer than it was when he left Caiyi Town, but his time-telling abilities only go so far. It’s late summer, which means you can only tell sunset is coming right before it happens: the clear color of the sky suddenly grows faded, and then the horizon breaks into flames, and the light bounces off the atmosphere and colors the clouds in other soft shades; Wei Wuxian might spend his entire life trying to capture it into a canvas and not be able to. He’s no great artist, but the urge stays.
Lan Zhan watches him watch the sky, and then watches him watch the stream, and Wei Wuxian watches Lan Zhan watch him. Ah, but he looks pretty enough to color in, like this. Wei Wuxian would love to bleed inside the lines.
He lifts an eyebrow. Lan Zhan’s eyes flit away, and Wei Wuxian decides to go easy on him.
He pulls his hair back, trying to squeeze the water he can out of it, a respectful enough distance that nothing splashes on Lan Zhan’s prim white robes. “So,” Wei Wuxian says, conversationally, moving to wring his outer robes. “Been a while.”
“It has not,” Lan Zhan says. “We saw each other during the morning meal.”
“Ah, yes, yes, how could I forget.” A lot of water splashes back into the creek, which sounds oddly loud for this part of the forest where they’re standing. Come to think of it, Wei Wuxian hasn’t heard much of a sound other than the odd bird chirp for way longer than seems normal, but he shrugs it off. “Did you miss me too much, Lan-er-gege?”
Lan Zhan, of course, does not answer, but if he did, Wei Wuxian is pretty sure it would be with covert gagging sound. He has one hand behind his back and the other on the hilt of Bichen, the posture so exact Wei Wuxian thinks he could draw it from memory. In the afternoon light, he looks like something out of a tapestry. Once again, in spite of himself, Wei Wuxian leans a little bit closer, and is half surprised when Lan Zhan makes no move to put more distance between them.
He doesn’t know why he’s only half surprised. He doesn’t know why all of his maybes, with Lan Zhan, sound so sure. Both of them are always expecting the next step in this odd dance they’ve never rehearsed, certain that it will come.
Aish, Wei Wuxian needs to stop glancing at his hands, hoping to see a glimpse of red thread. What keeps him hopeful will not keep him sated.
“Sundown is soon,” Lan Zhan says, which answers a question Wei Wuxian forgot to ask. “The disciples are already being gathered to prepare their lanterns.” He very pointedly glances at Wei Wuxian’s clothes. “You will have no time to change.”
Wei Wuxian sighs. “Of course not.” He wrings the edge of his robe more aggressively; nothing else spills out, no matter how damp it is. “I know how it’ll go. It’s always ‘Why did you get in the creek, Wei Wuxian,’ and ‘You’re soaking wet, Wei Wuxian,’ but never ‘How was the creek, the creek looked fun, was it fun?’” Wei Wuxian crosses his arms, pouting only a little. “It makes me feel very uncherished.”
Lan Zhan looks so done with this conversation he might as well be somewhere else entirely. Wei Wuxian likes him so much.
The stream flows next to them, tender, green, curling softly, a lazy nooze in the sunlight as it treads back to its river. Its gurgling is only curbed by the sound of their breathing: each of them quiet, somewhat expecting to see who’ll make the next move, who’ll take a chance with another step first. In knowing Lan Zhan, Wei Wuxian hasn’t really been afraid to misstep, which is a novelty. Wherever he goes isn’t as much a misstep as it is a step in false, treading water in an uncertain direction before choosing something different. Lan Zhan always makes way.
It does surprise him, this peace they’ve arrived at. When they first met, Wei Wuxian had thought Lan Zhan would be amusing at best; something he’d poke at to keep boredom at bay. And it’s not like that isn’t true, still, because Wei Wuxian likes seeing Lan Zhan squirm, but — usually by this point, he’s been told in no uncertain words to stay away. Sure, he can kind of understand how things might have shifted between them after Lan Yi’s cave and the whole thing with Lan Zhan’s head ribbon (and the Yin Iron, which, really, Wei Wuxian hopes doesn’t come to be important), but still. He doesn’t know what Lan Zhan wants, because Lan Zhan won’t say. So Wei Wuxian just keeps… poking. Waiting for something that’ll give him an answer.
Lan Zhan shifts slightly, and Wei Wuxian has to keep himself from shifting in tandem. Old habits from the street; when people move suddenly, he gets skittish. If Lan Zhan notices, he doesn’t show it.
“We will have to go through my uncle,” he says, “to get to the hill where the ceremony will be held.”
Ah. That. “That’s great!” Wei Wuxian chirps, bouncing in place. His clothes make a squelching sound. Lan Zhan’s eye twitches, and Wei Wuxian beams. “Say, Lan Zhan, do you think this’ll be enough to make Lan Qiren go into qi deviation, or should I keep trying my best?”
Lan Zhan’s jaw goes taut. “Do not disrespect your elders.”
“Do not quote the Wall of Discipline to me, I was there when it was written,” Wei Wuxian says. Then, “Wait, no, that was a joke. Lan Zhan, stop glaring at me. Yes, you are glaring, I can see it in your eyes, don’t tell me the Lan sect doesn’t glare. You’re so mean to me, Lan Zhan, and no one even knows.”
“Ridiculous,” Lan Zhan says, still glaring.
“Ah, yes, but we all know that,” Wei Wuxian says dismissively, fanning a hand in the air. “The sky is blue, water is wet, Wei Wuxian is absolutely shameless, etcetera, etcetera. Anyway, sometimes I think you’re doing it on purpose, you know. I say, wow, Lan Zhan looks like he’s in a good mood today, and everyone looks at me like I’m insane because you ‘only have one facial expression’ and it is ‘annoyingly composed and mildly disapproving’.” He does the aggressive air quotations with it, scrunching up his nose in Lan Zhan’s direction. “Really, Lan Zhan, you’ve got everyone fooled.”
Lan Zhan doesn’t raise an eyebrow, but it feels like it does. Wei Wuxian can tell, he’s saying. “But not you,” Lan Zhan says, and it sounds like halfway to a question.
Wei Wuxian smiles. “Ah, Lan Zhan,” he says. “Just because I act foolish doesn’t mean I’m easily fooled.”
Lan Zhan’s eyes are still on him. Wei Wuxian, alive, almost swallows his heart, for unrelated reasons.
“Good,” Lan Zhan says, simply, and then nothing else; instead, he tilts his head slightly, not enough for it to seem like he’s motioning for Wei Wuxian to follow him, but enough that Wei Wuxian takes the cue anyway.
Lan Zhan keeps ahead, for all that he’s not walking that fast — it goes against Lan Sect rules, Wei Wuxian knows, to hurry for no reason — and Wei Wuxian lags behind, avoiding cracks of sunlight on the grass. It looks shattered, like this; the sun is far enough west that all light comes in from their left instead of straight down, and Wei Wuxian keeps maneuvering out of the way so it doesn’t hit him straight in the eyes. But it falls through the trees and the trees cast shadow, and their criss-cross pattern reminds him of fissures in stone, worn away by time. Wei Wuxian avoids stepping over those too, because superstition tells him so.
He didn’t think much of old wive’s tales before stepping foot into Lotus Pier, but if the practice of cultivation has taught him anything, is that a cultivator who is not superstitious is a cultivator who will die early. So Wei Wuxian steps over his cracks, counts until eight whenever he makes a wish, and always stands up first at the dinner table at home, so no one else has to be the first of four to leave. That last one is maybe a bit counterproductive, but, well. The Jiangs didn’t have to take him in; it’s the least he could do.
(Ungrateful boy.)
“Say, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian asks, when he thinks the silence has gone on too long. “Why do you think we have the lanterns?”
Lan Zhan is quiet for long enough that it seems like he might not reply, but Wei Wuxian is expecting it; this might be his “thinking about how to give a good enough answer while using the least amount of words” silence. Eventually, he tilts his head slightly to the left, an endearing trait Wei Wuxian has been finding himself mirroring during their conversations.
“For wishes,” Lan Zhan says. Wei Wuxian tries not to self-congratulate too much about being right.
“The lights for wishes?” Wei Wuxian asks, kicking a pebble to the side of their path. “Well, I guess we do take what we need of light.”
They’re quiet as they walk. Usually that’d make Wei Wuxian want to claw his own eyes off and chatter like his life depended on it to fill the silence, but this isn’t uncomfortable. It’s quiet because Lan Zhan is quiet, and Wei Wuxian likes Lan Zhan. He might be learning to like other things because of him, too. His chest is humming, humming, a lovely tune.
“You think of it as taking.”
Lan Zhan’s voice startles him. Not in a bad way; he just thought the conversation was over. He loves Lan Zhan’s voice. He could listen to it forever, every murmur.
“Huh?” Wei Wuxian scrambles to keep up with Lan Zhan’s long strides — they’re not that different in height, but Wei Wuxian tends to dawdle where Lan Zhan walks purposefully, steadily. “What do you mean, Lan Zhan?”
“You said,” Lan Zhan starts, as if he’s already regretting having said anything, but will see it through to the end anyway, “that we take what we need of light.” He lifts an arm to keep Wei Wuxian from stumbling over an overgrown root, shaking his sleeve and resting his hand on Bichen once he does so.
“Yes, yes, I did say that,” Wei Wuxian agrees. “I do say things. Where are you going with this?”
“You believe wishes are a form of taking, then?” Lan Zhan asks.
Wei Wuxian hums in thought, tugging at his own earlobe. “When you put it like that, it does sound strange,” he says, “but aren’t they?”
Lan Zhan looks askance at him. “It is not my place to try and change your mind.”
“Aish, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, feeling his insides go gooey, which is just embarrassing. “Just say what you mean.”
“Do not say one thing and mean another,” Lan Zhan recites, like Wei Wuxian knew he would. It takes about three more sets of strides before he slows down a little, right before the clearing on top of the hill — they can hear the sound of voices by now, and Wei Wuxian can sense movement but not see it; they’re probably just out of range from the rest of the disciples. He leans against the bark of the tree they’ve stopped by, peering curiously at Lan Zhan’s face.
“Wishing is asking,” Lan Zhan says, eventually. He’s looking straight ahead, but Wei Wuxian keeps watching him. “Asking is not taking.”
“I see your point,” Wei Wuxian says, slowly, though the notion makes something in his stomach harden, though it reminds him of the sound Zidian makes when hitting flesh.
Lan Zhan does turn to look at him full on, then, and ridiculously, Wei Wuxian feels caught. “Wanting,” Lan Zhan says, “is not forbidden.”
Heavy words, coming from a Lan. Wei Wuxian crosses his arms and smiles, making sure it goes wide enough to make his eyes crinkle. “Aiyah, Lan Zhan, you tell yourself that a lot?”
He’s awful. Lan Zhan doesn’t physically recoil at it, but he does straighten his shoulders; Wei Wuxian hit the bullseye.
Best marksman of his generation.
It’s easier to crack a joke and break the moment, when things start getting too close. The back of his neck tingles uncomfortably, and Wei Wuxian pointedly does not move to scratch it. That’s what Wei Wuxian is, really. He’s charming and friendly, a master in the art of making other people feel comfortable; he can have a whole conversation without ever revealing a single thing about himself.
Here’s the thing: if you grew up on the streets, your body always remembers how to recoil first. Even what Wei Wuxian does not remember, his mouth does — as told by the scars that litter his body, he’s familiar with biting.
And so he does expect more of a reaction from Lan Zhan. Or maybe he shouldn’t, because it is Lan Zhan. It’s hard to fully grasp his expressions yet, though Wei Wuxian is sure he could learn if only given a little more time, so he can’t really tell whatever it is that Lan Zhan’s eyes are doing.
He doesn’t look particularly offended or angered; there’s not even that lingering sadness he sometimes finds, in people who know exactly what Wei Wuxian is doing. Lan Zhan just looks like he’s just understood something Wei Wuxian doesn’t know.
“An archer,” Lan Zhan says, “raises his arm high above his head when preparing his bow. In his final position, his dominant arm hides his face and intentions. It is called an arm wall.” He looks away, instead watching the path in front of him, before his eyes flicker back to Wei Wuxian’s for the briefest of moments. “I can see yours.”
He goes on ahead. Wei Wuxian’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.
Usually, when this happens — when Wei Wuxian snaps, recoils, bites, whatever you want to call it — it’s like he’s reassuring himself that he can keep himself safe. That if he covers his eyes, no one else can see him. Even Shijie lets him be, even Jiang Cheng does nothing but grumble.
He’s not sure what to do with this.
If you’re swimming, a poem he once read said, then you’ve lost something important.
Wei Wuxian follows.
“I’m going to kill you,” Jiang Cheng says. “I’m literally going to kill you.”
“Hey, loser, why are you bothering me,” Wei Wuxian says, happy to see him also. “The creek was lovely and refreshing, thank you. I think I’ve wooed Lan Zhan this time.”
“You never startle me with your brilliance, but always baffle me with your bullshit,” says Jiang Cheng, looking particularly purplish. Maybe it’s the dusk. “What the fuck are you even talking about?”
“Mating rituals,” Nie Huaisang says, not looking up from where he’s trying to sew a… duck? A blob, shaped like a duck? onto the surface of his lantern. “It’s fascinating to hear, really.”
“No,” Jiang Cheng bites out.
“It entertains me,” Nie Huaisang adds, as if he hadn’t heard. “Do go on, Wei-xiong.”
“Why, thank you, you’ve always been my favorite,” Wei Wuxian says, delighting in the way Jiang Cheng starts to turn mildly red at being ignored. He immediately launches into a dramatic retelling of his romantic encounter with Lan Zhan in the woods, letting his mouth do all the talking while his senses sharpen, spread, taking in the scenario around them.
The hilltop is filled with more white than green; all the disciples taking part in lessons with the Lan clan are handed their traditional white robes upon arrival at Cloud Recesses, as part of their stay. It makes Wei Wuxian feel like a widow, wearing the color of mourning all the time, especially considering his usual day-to-day attire consists of black, dark gray and red — his parents’ colors, which he’s the only one alive capable of honoring. Shijie always tries to make him wear Jiang purple during special occasions, but a single glare from Yu-furen always shuts that right down: she’s very firm on the fact that while Wei Wuxian may be part of the sect, he is not part of their family. That you can refer to my daughter as your shijie at all is a kindness, she always says. One that you are not entitled to.
So he does feel out of place, in such pale colors, and surrounded by them, it’s like being part of a pack of sheep. Which is… distressing. Wei Wuxian is not sheep.
It has is downsides and its upsides, though: downside, everyone looks exactly the fucking same, so he never knows who he’s talking too unless they’re looking at him straight in the eye, and even then, he can only barely parse out what sect they’re originally from. Upside, when Jiang Cheng gets pissed off, the white makes the purple on his face stand out, and it’s hilarious.
Everyone’s spread out in little groups: Wei Wuxian can see the Jin disciples near the edge, all working on their lanterns with their chins tilted up and that proud look in his eye — Jin Zixuan is talking to Shijie, the both of them sitting side by side on the grass, and Wei Wuxian is being completely normal about it and acting like he doesn’t completely hate his sister’s betrothed’s guts. To the left, closest to the treeline, Wen Qing is the only exception in the sea of white, with her blood-red robes and dark eyes. Her mouth is a firm line, and she’s pointedly not looking away from her work, as if she can tell she’s being watched but will not give anyone the satisfaction of being bothered by it.
Wei Wuxian watches her, also, though with probably less suspicion than everyone else grants her. He can see the way even Lan Xichen keeps a close eye on her, standing near the oak tree with his characteristic serene expression; Lan Qiren, on his part, is not that subtle in his watch, following every move of hers with an unblinking stare. Wen Qing holds the cloth for the lantern, pulls the sewing needle in and out, makes a stitch; sure hands, like a doctor’s.
It makes Wei Wuxian sad, how wary they all are of her. It’s not her fault she’s a Wen. Though some might find fault in her loyalty to the clan, considering their recent actions, he doesn’t. As angry as the stubbornness makes him, every time he tries to be angry or resent her, he remembers her wide, steely stare, the way she always shifts her posture to but herself between Wen Ning and anyone else, no matter what room they walk into. She’s just lonely. She just wants to protect her little brother. Wei Wuxian can’t fault her for any of it, not without faulting himself, as well.
“So what you’re saying is,” Nie Huaisang says, closing his fan — which is a staple in his process of gossip-gathering, and he’s consequently never seen without it — with a snap. “You guys didn’t even do anything. Again.”
Wei Wuxian gasps, clutching at his own chest in mock offense. “Nie-xiong!” he exclaims. “And here I was, thinking you an expert in matters of heart! This Wei Wuxian is aghast. I mean, come on.” He takes the lantern cloth and piece of charcoal Jiang Cheng, who’d left the moment Wei Wuxian started speaking for supplies and conveniently only returned now, throws his way. “We made eye contact. Multiple times. He helped me up, kept me from tripping, and held a conversation with me. Lan Zhan. We’re pretty much in third base right now.”
Nie Huaisang strokes his chin, thin eyes narrowed as if considering. “I do see your point, since it is a Lan we’re talking about,” he says, “but I will not concede it.”
“Understandable, have a nice day,” Wei Wuxian says.
Jiang Cheng stops trying to chew through purple sewing thread (instead of cutting it with his sword, what’s wrong with him) to give Wei Wuxian a surprised look. “You let him off the hook surprisingly easy.” He narrows his eyes. “Suspiciously easy.”
Nie Huaisang doesn’t look bothered. “He’s buttering me up,” he says.
“I’m buttering him up,” Wei Wuxian agrees. “Jiang Cheng, everything’s politics, and if I’m to keep going to Nie-xiong for emotional support, I need to give him something in return.”
“Your love life is so amusing and sad that I wouldn’t even require compensation, if only for the entertainment you provide,” Nie Huaisang says, nodding sagely and patting Wei Wuxian on the shoulder. “Everything else is a pleasant bonus.”
“Well, I’m a pleasant person,” Wei Wuxian says. Jiang Cheng gags.
“Nie Huaisang, love advice,” he says, the way someone would say punishment handstands or dogs. “Who would ever trust you with that?”
“The rich, the bored, and the enigmatic,” Nie Huaisang says, going back to his duck-shaped blob.
Wei Wuxian sighs. “All of my life aspirations.”
“You’re going to die in a ditch,” Jiang Cheng says.
“I’m going to die of a chill because you’re so cold to me,” Wei Wuxian says. He pouts, crossing his arms tightly as if to fend off a shiver. “Freezing cold, Jiang Cheng. Am I not your brother? Do you not love and cherish me?”
“You’re not going to die of a chill,” says Jiang Cheng, stabbing his lantern with the sewing needle. “If you did, it’d be because you jumped in a river and your hair is still soaking wet, and not because I’m not being fucking nice. I’ll give you my cloak if you promise to shut up.”
“I may well die of a chill, it was a creek, I refuse to shut up, and I’ll take your cloak,” Wei Wuxian says. He takes the cloak, which is huge, lilac purple, and thrown in his face quite aggressively. He beams as Jiang Cheng glowers, tucking into the warmth with a pleased sigh. Wei Wuxian is the taller one, but his brother is broader; if he makes himself small, it fits just right.
“Not even a thank you,” Jiang Cheng grumbles, looking like he’d rather be stabbing Wei Wuxian rather than the cloth. “Fuck knows why I keep you around.”
“My dashing good looks and delightful personality,” Wei Wuxian suggests.
“Your personality is terrible.”
“Well, yeah, but I’m beautiful, so it doesn’t even matter,” Wei Wuxian says. Jiang Cheng makes a gagging noise again. Perhaps he’s coming down with something.
Wei Wuxian waits for the lull in conversation to give a quick look around, eyes resting on where Lan Zhan is. He’s the only one, aside from Wen Qing, who’s working alone; he sits prim and proper where the rest of the disciples have clearly given him a wide berth, seemingly unbothered by the way everyone seems to avoid him.
Something in Wei Wuxian’s chest goes funny. It must hurt quietly, to be regarded as so untouchable in other people’s eyes. They all respect Lan Zhan, but will not approach him. Everyone knows of his name and deeds, but Wei Wuxian bets no one knows anything about him: that rabbits are his favorite animals and he’s ridiculously soft for them; that he’s a complete lightweight, knocked out by a single cup of wine; that his face is impassive, but his eyes are always full to the brim.
Wei Wuxian wants to know what he looks like when he smiles. He wants to be able to recognize the sound of Lan Zhan’s laughter from a mile away.
He bites his lip. Then he takes five minutes to sketch something onto the surface of his lantern, stands up, smooths out his damp robes, tightens the cloak, and promptly walks over to Lan Zhan, flopping down next to him as close as he can get without them touching.
It might be just his imagination, but it’s like a hush falls over the hill. If Wei Wuxian strains his ears, he can hear what sounds like the vein in Lan Qiren’s forehead about to burst.
Lan Zhan gives no outward reaction that he’s noticed Wei Wuxian is even there, other than the way his eyes flickered to follow the movement. Wei Wuxian isn’t sure if he should be offended or pleased — on one hand, he likes to be acknowledged; on the other, it feels… nice, that Lan Zhan didn’t get tense around him. Lan Zhan is tense nearly all the time. Half of it is just discipline, but the other half, Wei Wuxian is learning, is just wariness. He feels a bit honored to be someone Lan Zhan doesn’t need to be wary of, even if that’s all there is to it.
It’s near sundown; the sky is sweet and plain. Late spring in Gusu, everything is made of soft, pale colors, the air thick with the smell of growth and earth — not quite as humid as home, and missing all the cherry trees that don’t grow in the mountains, but Wei Wuxian doesn’t mind it much. He thinks he could grow to like it, if given the chance, even knowing he probably won’t.
A breeze passes through, ruffling robes and almost stealing the lanterns of the least attentive ones, and Wei Wuxian gives a small shiver, in spite of himself. He’s warm under the cloak, but there’s little he can do about the hair, when he has so much of it.
“You’re cold,” Lan Zhan observes, quietly. Wei Wuxian tries not to beam, so he makes a face instead.
“Save the lectures about the creek, I’ve made my peace with the creek, I do not regret the creek, I will not regret the creek.” He swings his head, trying to shake off the chill. “I shall live with the consequences, like a man.”
Lan Zhan frowns, though this time he doesn’t look up from where he’s sewing the finishing touches of his lantern. “I was not going to lecture you,” he says. “It is not my place, and my uncle has already done so. It would be pedantic to insist.”
“Ah, yes,” Wei Wuxian sighs. It was barely a lecture, really — Lan Qiren tried to be intimidating, failed, Wei Wuxian was annoying, succeeded, then he heard Shijie’s voice in his head saying he’d promised to not antagonize people, A-Xian, I’m disappointed, and he’d shut up.
It went a little like: enter stage left, Wei Wuxian, soaked to the bone. Stage center, Lan Qiren looked like he would wish for the sweet embrace of death, if it were not against sect rules. “Hello,” Wei Wuxian said, brightly, dripping water everywhere. “I did expect to see you here, and since lying is against Lan Sect rules, I won’t say I didn’t.”
Lan Qiren’s eyes narrow. “Remind me again,” he said, “what role do you play in Yunmeng Jiang?”
“The one of a nuisance, mostly,” Wei Wuxian said. There was a moment of deathly silence, in which Wei Wuxian could picture Shijie’s neutral face of displeasure, and shivered. “I mean. Head disciple, sir.”
Lan Qiren pinched the bridge of his nose and made a vague gesture somewhere behind him. “Just go sit down,” he said, long-suffering.
“You will be free of me in a few weeks, Lan-shifu!” Wei Wuxian threw over his shoulder. Exit stage right.
“Good times,” Wei Wuxian says, as if it wasn’t fifteen minutes ago. His smile grows sly. “Lan Zhan, are you offering to warm me up?”
Then, Lan Zhan does something that Wei Wuxian hadn’t considered, not even in a million years: he huffs out a breath.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, bewildered, “was that a laugh?”
“He’s fucking hopeless,” he hears Jiang Cheng mutter somewhere behind him, but he couldn’t care less.
Lan Zhan doesn’t answer. Wei Wuxian changes strategies, shifting a little on the grass until their shoulders are almost touching. “Hey, so,” he says. “Have you thought about your wish?”
“Yes,” Lan Zhan says, after a pause, and impossibly, Wei Wuxian gets the impression that he’s not being entirely honest. Today seems like it’s made for surprises.
Wei Wuxian fiddles with his lantern, tilting his head up to the sky. It’s almost sunset; they’ll be starting soon. He runs a hand over the rabbit drawn onto the cloth, without actually touching it so it won’t smudge. “Lan Zhan, I’m thinking,” he says. “How long do you think it takes for the light to go out, after we let it go?”
It takes a long time before Lan Zhan says anything. When he does, it’s with the same tone he’d used back between the trees, the one Wei Wuxian can’t recognize: still low, still quiet, probably still unchangeable if anyone else were to hear it, but Wei Wuxian can just parse out an underlying of something. It’s like Lan Zhan is telling him, this is what I’m saying, but this is not all I’m saying.
Sneaky, sneaky, Lan Zhan. One must know the rules to break them, after all.
“I do not know,” Lan Zhan says, lifting up his lantern with both hands. It’s perfect, not a stray thread or faulty patch to be seen, but also not much decoration. “I do not think of it as letting go.”
“What do you think of it as, then?” Wei Wuxian asks.
“Of opening my hands,” Lan Zhan replies. “Then the lantern rises. That is all.” He pauses. Then he looks at Wei Wuxian in the eye, and it’s so unexpected he loses all of his breath. “I do not think of when it’ll go out,” Lan Zhan continues. “Perhaps it goes out when the sun comes. Perhaps when it touches a rain-carrying cloud.”
Wei Wuxian tilts his head, following the thought path Lan Zhan is going down. “Perhaps,” he echoes, “the light never goes out.” He hums, considering. Around them, the other disciples are starting to move and stand up, getting ready. “Though we do send them up every year. Do you think none of them ever go out?”
“Not necessarily,” Lan Zhan says. “But it is a nice thought.”
Wei Wuxian finds that he can’t quite stop staring into Lan Zhan’s eyes. At the very least, he notes, with no small amount of giddiness, Lan Zhan also seems unable to do the same. It’s too early, too soon, for Wei Wuxian to reach across the small distance that separates them and thread their fingers together. It’s too soon for them to rest their foreheads against each other. It’s too early for Lan Zhan to call Wei Wuxian by the names his parents gave him. But it is just hunger, and he won’t die from wanting.
Perhaps the future is a tiny flame, Wei Wuxian thinks, as they light the fire that’ll make the lanterns go up. Perhaps it’s a flame he’ll nick from a candle. First he’s burning, then what comes next. It’ll keep going even when he cannot see it.
One by one, they all open their hands, and the lanterns rise. They flicker, orange-yellow, yellow-red, up into the dusk, dying the dewy grass with brightness. Wei Wuxian watches them, his wish still lingering in his lips, head tilted all the way back. He’s no wordsmith, and he often finds them lacking; he can’t be sure if he does the things he’s seeing any justice, if he tries to describe them afterward. Come find me in the field, surrounded by light is the best he can muster, but the light itself is far more wonderful than any words about it, so he’s silent. He looks back at his brother, at Shijie, watches Lan Zhan watch him, thinks about how much he misses home, thinks about how he’ll probably come to miss this, too, in a way.
(In a few months’ time, it’ll all be gone. Picture this: they break into your home and they make you kneel. You kneel, and your brother screams as his mother’s weapon leaves new lashes on your body; you bite your tongue until you swallow blood. You bite your tongue, and your brother’s mother takes you by the arm and makes the two of you run before it is too late. Her servants kill the people that broke into your home and it is not enough; more are coming. She makes the two of you run, and tightens her weapon — the heirloom, which she is to be buried with or have it passed on — around your brother’s wrist; it extends into a rope that binds you to him, and neither of you can move. To her son, she says: Be safe. Live. To you, she says: I hate you, and I have hated you. Protect him or you’ll never be forgiven. You are seventeen years old. Your brother is yelling for his mother, even as the river carries the both of you away — everything’s a river, and everything is taking you away from home, and you do not know if there will be one to come back to.
Picture this: your brother’s father is there. He binds your sister together with you, and kisses his children’s foreheads. To them, he says: I love you. To you, he says: It is your duty to protect them, it is what you must always do. He is the closest thing you have to a father; he does not look at you twice. He leaves, and the river takes the three of you. Your siblings are yelling for their parents. You are trying to break the rope. When you reach the shore, you leave your sister with her grandmother; your brother cannot be convinced to stay with her, so the two of you go back. A part of you feels giddy, that even in this, it is the two of you. It is always the two of you.
Picture this: home is ash and blood and bodies and your brother’s parents died reaching for each other. Home is your brother so you take him away before they kill him too. You take him back to the sect his mother came from, where your sister is, and the three of you run. You hide in the city. You spare a thought to ask for help, to call for that boy of yours — but there is no time. They somehow find your brother, and they rip the living core out of him. They destroy him and he lives and it is worse. The people who help you are the blood and bone of the people who’ve done it, but you do not care, because it is not their fault, and they have a house that is warm and safe for a week.
Picture this: your brother wants to be dead. You have never felt such pain before, not when his mother beat you and not when the dogs hunted you and not when you reached for the sword that reeked of future absence. You search for answers. You find them. You ask the girl — her lukewarm tenderness, her fearful care: Will you help me do this? She says: You may die. You wonder why that matters. But she has a little brother as well, and it does not take much to convince her. When she rips the beating core out of you, you stay awake under the knife for two days and one night. There are worse things.
Picture this: you lie to your brother, but your brother lives. You are empty and cold and there is nothing there, nothing there, but your brother lives. When the one who destroyed your home finds you and beats you and brands you, when he takes you to the place people don’t come back from, when he makes you watch what will become of you, it does not matter, because your brother lives, and you have done your duty. When you fall, it is never-ending. It is darkness itself, and it slides like silk down to your lungs, and it is absence, and there is nothing inside you which means there is space for it. It asks: Do you want revenge? It says: We can give it to you.
You think of your brother, and you would have always said yes. You think of the war, and you would have never refused. There is no living thing inside of you anymore, so it does not matter where this will take you, does not matter what will coat your lungs, what will poison your blood, what awful melody will become of your name. Picture this: you do not expect to live much longer afterwards. Picture this: there is someone who will keep trying to keep you alive. It is a slow failure. It’ll tumble off a cliff with a scream while the last note echoes.
In a few months’ time.)
Wei Wuxian looks at Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan is looking at the sky. He thinks of a melody, unbidden, an echo of plucking guqin chords he sometimes hears through Cloud Recesses; Wei Wuxian might not play the instrument, but he knows music. He feels it thrum in his fingers, hears it run over his chest. In this light, Lan Zhan looks beautiful, and Wei Wuxian is very, very gone.
So it goes — he begins with love, hoping to end there.
It doesn’t go as planned.
Litany in which something hollows, something starves, and the end begins.
i.
Wen Qing’s face is pale, hands so thoroughly drenched with blood they could almost be made out of the same material of her robes. She leans over him once, twice, and it takes him way too long to realize it’s because she’s shaking, rocking backwards and forwards as little raw sounds try to make their way out of her throat. He doesn’t have it in himself to offer her any comfort. He doesn’t have it in himself. He doesn’t have.
He’s so cold.
The sky is colorless, as if it’s bled out. There is solid ground under his body, he thinks. He’s not sure there is a body above the ground. He doesn’t feel there, he doesn’t have — he doesn’t have.
Cold, clammy hands settle on his throat, right by his pulse. He can’t feel anything beating, but Wen Qing seems to find what she wants; he watches through hazy eyes as her face stills, steels, becomes sharp again. She has been awake for as long as he has, and it shows in her sunken eyes, her lips dry and cracked. It surprises him that she is able to hold him like this, lift his head onto her lap, cradle his face. He has gotten too used to a knife in her hand.
There is a piece of cloth being used to clean him — wiping the sweat off his brow, the blood from his nose, the sick on his chin. It would make something ugly crawl up his chest if he were able to. He knows he’s been ruined, though it does not matter, but being offered tenderness feels like too deeply cutting of a proof.
Ha. Cutting. Even delirious, he’s still got it.
(He doesn’t. He doesn’t.)
Wen Qing is the one cleaning him. He has known nothing but her, for two nights and one day. Two nights and one day, she’d repeated, over and over, back before they’d gone through with it, back in her house with his empty shell of a brother and fever-ridden sister. The odds are fifty-fifty. We might complete the transfer, but you die.We might not, and you will live. We might not, and you will still die. We might do so, and you will live. Without. Can you live without?
He’d thought of his parents, of the back alleys of Yunmeng, of Yu-furen, of home. He’d said, I can live without anything except without trying.
And if you die? Wen Qing had asked.
He opened his arms wide. Then I am dead.
It hurts him that this is something she had to do for him. He can’t hold on to the thought for long. He thinks it hurts. He vaguely remembers, at some point, the sound of his own dry, heaving sobs, no tears left in him, babbling about how sorry he is, he’s sorry, he’s sorry, Wen Qing, he’s so sorry. She had not answered. Maybe it’d been too incoherent, or maybe she’d already known, or maybe she forgives him, or she does not. There is — something. He’s so cold, inside, like the light has gone out.
He thinks of lanterns. But the thought aches almost as much as the absence, so he does not think it anymore.
Something wet slides down his cheek. It might be blood. He blinks, watching Wen Qing’s face. She looks furious. She looks horrified. She looks sorry. She looks like she’s in pain.
Slowly, with too much effort, he lifts up a hand. He raises it until it reaches where her own is cradling the side of his jaw, feeling the stickiness of her skin, the lack of warmth in it. It makes him want to cry. He can’t remember feeling touch like this, touching and knowing how fragile he is, how easily damaged he will be from now on. Damaged boy. Weak boy. But it is touch, and it belongs to someone, so he squeezes as tight as he can.
Wen Qing freezes. Then her face crumbles and she squeezes back, leaning forward to rest her forehead against his, close enough that he can feel her breath. He closes his eyes, feeling the pressure in them build.
“Wei Wuxian,” Wen Qing says, voice raw, “you would make a terrible hero.”
And Wei Wuxian laughs, laughs because it is his blood on her skin, laughs because he is empty, now, laughs because he asked for it, laughs because it worked. It worked and he has never felt so elated and so utterly terrible in his entire life. He opens his eyes and looks at Wen Qing, still feeling laughter rattling in his lungs. Thinks, One day we will both be laughing about this, doesn’t believe it.
“You crack me up, A-Qing,” he rasps. He’s got barely any voice left. “Ha. Crack up. Can I call you A-Qing? I think I should call you A-Qing. You’ve held my guts in your hands.”
Wen Qing looks at him like she can’t decide if she wants to pick up the knife again and finish the job or hug him until his spine cracks. Both options are of violence Wei Wuxian doesn’t think he can handle right now, and thankfully, she does neither. She cries harder instead.
Wei Wuxian feels mildly alarmed, and tries to pick himself up and do something, but the moment he thinks of moving his body flares up with white-hot pain, radiating through his useless meridians like lightning, across the gaping absence in his stomach. Wen Qing puts her hands on his shoulders, keeping him down.
“Just stay still,” she says. She sounds devastated. “I — yes, spirits, call me A-Qing, call me jiejie, call me whatever you like. I — Wei Wuxian.” At this, her tone grows breathy, almost disbelieving. “How the hell are you even talking?”
“It’s what I do best,” he says, cracking a tired smile. “You can’t call me A-Xian, by the way. Only Shijie calls me that. Only she…” He trails off, frowning. “Jiang Cheng. Where’s Jiang Cheng?”
“Safe,” Wen Qing answers immediately. He thinks he might’ve been told this before. He doesn’t remember. “A-Ning took him back to our place. He’ll be safe there for now.”
“Right,” Wei Wuxian says. “Alright. Okay.” He takes a deep breath, then two and three, biting the inside of his cheek to keep himself from crying out. He tastes copper, but meets Wen Qing’s eye. “Help me up?”
If looks could kill, he’d be dead. “If you think,” Wen Qing says, slowly, her grip tightening on him, “that after a days-long procedure, an unprecedented procedure for which we do not know the possible consequences of, a procedure,” she falters at this, but keeps going, hands still tight on his shoulders, “in which I literally ripped you open and took a piece of you out, I’m going to let you stand?”
“Uh,” Wei Wuxian says, grandly. “Yes?”
Now Wen Qing really looks like she wants to pick up the knife and finish the job. Oddly enough, it helps. It’s normal. Wei Wuxian pisses people off by being unreasonable and obstinate; everyone knows that. And… he’s still Wei Wuxian. He’s still him. Even with this gaping hole inside.
He’s trying not to think of absence, trying not to think of much at all. He just wants to see his brother. He wants to see Shijie. He knows that what he’s done means he’s lost something he’ll never gain back, knows that it has caused irrevocable changes, and he’s scared, terrified that maybe Shijie will take a look at him and know, that Jiang Cheng will not recognize him immediately. There’s something that sets him apart now, even from Wen Qing, who still has his head on her lap. The emptiness is palpable. Loss isn’t absence, after all: it is a presence. A strong presence, right next to him. He tilts his head to look at it. It doesn’t look like anything, which is what makes it unique in its strangeness. It just fits inside what isn’t there anymore. It is not going to go away, he already knows. It will stay as he tries to not sleep. It will beg to be filled, and he will not let it.
There’s the metaphor he’s been looking for: he’s an empty room. The room will grow dusty and unkempt and he will remain inside it, because he is its walls and roof and floor. There is nothing inside.
(It begs to be filled. The world was never gentle; it hears the call.
It’s so close now. They’re coming and they will take him. He won’t be able to say what happens. They will take him and throw him and leave him for dead. The end begins there. It has always been there. The place where he will be buried already exists.
They will call him a monster, because he can’t find a way of being human that won’t kill him, and then being human will kill him anyway. This was always going to happen. He’s been dead since the beginning.
The world was never gentle.)
Wei Wuxian smiles at Wen Qing, the kind that makes his eyes crinkle and disappear. “If you won’t let me stand, then how will we ever leave?”
Wen Qing looks at him like he’s stupid, which isn’t all that different from how she looks at him usually. It settles him further. “You absolute fucking moron,” she says. “I’ll carry you.”
And she does. He never does get to thank her, because he falls asleep before they’re even moving, and he does not get to have a real conversation with her again before they find him. The next time they’ll see each other, after, will be a year down the line, nine months after he disappears and miraculously comes back, with Chenqing at his side and the Burial Mounds in his flesh. Wen Qing will be a half-starved thing in the streets, desperately searching for her brother. The Sunshot Campaign will be long gone. In due time, many will say it was then they noticed that Wei Wuxian was half gone, too, as much of a shadow as the ones he summoned with his flute.
He never gets to thank her. He will die without thanking her for this — they both will. But for now Wen Qing, two heads smaller than him, shoulders Wei Wuxian’s entire weight and takes him somewhere safe. She tucks his head against her neck and hums what her mother used to sing her to sleep: a melodic reciting of chemical elements, to the tune of an old lullaby. The rhythm soothes her. She has blood on her hands and she is thinking of the way light bleeds. A wound gives off its own light, her mother used to say when she was alive. If all the candles in the house were turned out, you could still dress this wound by what shines from it. Back then, Wen Qing had assumed that light was a metaphor for blood. Now she wonders if whoever started this saying had done the same thing as she did.
She held a golden core between her fingers. It bled light everywhere; guiltily, she keeps trying to search for its remains. It was beautiful. She wishes she’d never seen it. It was beautiful. She hates it so much she wants to die.
But she does not. She carries Wei Wuxian home, the stupid, self-sacrificing, ridiculous idiot. He has broken her heart so many times with everything that he does. His smile almost made her scream. But Wen Qing is a doctor, first of all. She will see to it that he lives. Everything else will come next.
Everything else will come.
ii.
Wei Wuxian has died once.
He thinks he did not survive the Burial Mounds. It’s not — it’s not a sappy thing, like, oh, after managing to get away it’s like it’s not him wearing his own skin, or that sometimes he feels like he’s just a ghost forever trapped in the moment of his own demise, or a haunting in whatever room he walks into. It’s not that. It’s just… well, Wen Chao pushed him from very high up. Wei Wuxian is no paragon of a perfect memory, but he’s pretty sure no one survives breaking all of their bones at the same time; that’d make their skin explode from the inside out, and that’s not even to say that there is such thing as dying from pain. Wen Qing said so.
So he thinks he died then, because he couldn’t have lived. Only he woke up again, and since there was no one to see either of those things, it’s like it never happened. Which is cool! Wei Wuxian likes not being dead. He likes when people don’t fuss about him, too, so he obviously kept that tidbit of information to himself, because it would be the thing that finally makes Jiang Cheng pop a vein.
Also there isn’t really a way of coming up to your siblings after being missing for three months and saying, Hey, you remember when I disappeared? Well, someone pushed me out of the sky and I became a little Wei Wuxian stain on the ground. A very much not-alive stain. I think. And then I was brought back to life and stitched together by sheer resentment energy, and it is very likely that by being exorcized of it, I would die again! What are we having for dinner?
He does not often think about the Burial Mounds. It sounds far-fetched, of course, when the resentment is literally living under his skin, when every time he touches Chenqing he thinks of carving it until his fingertips were raw, when there’s something haunting every place he walks into. He hadn’t known that before: how much one leaves behind when they’re gone. He’d like to think most people don’t die tragic and horrible deaths, that most of them don’t leave behind any anger or resentment at all, but it’s not a huge comfort, because some still do.
Once, before Jiang Cheng and Lan Zhan found him again (when he’d been on the hunt for Wen Chao) he spent the night in a small village, only a couple dozen houses and an inn near the neutral territories between Gusu and Moling. The innkeeper thought him a cultivator, and treated him with all due respect. It’d made something ugly churn in his stomach, but Wei Wuxian hadn’t said anything; the less questions, the better. After getting away from the Burial Mounds, he’d noticed how people would act differently around him — their sentences were shorter, their postures less open, their faces anxious. He’s constantly cold, now, without a core to warm him up, and it’s as if it’s noticeable. People are unnerved by him.
Wei Wuxian had told the innkeeper he wanted a room only for a night, and that he’d probably be gone early in the morning. The innkeeper had nodded; then, very hesitantly, told him that if he went north on his way out, he’d probably pass by an abandoned house. Overgrown trees, rotten with fruit, they’d said, you can’t miss it. Please, stay away. It would probably be no trouble at all for a cultivator such as yourself, gongzi, but please, stay away from the house. Us here, we know what happened there. We know what’s best left alone.
Wei Wuxian hadn’t really cared, his mind too focused on his own plans. He’d nearly forgotten about the warning at all, until he’d quite literally stumbled upon said house, with its roof caved in and sickly sweet smell coming from upturned roots. It was quiet. Clearly, no one had been inside or even near it for many years.
The moment he looked at it, he heard a girl scream. He did not hear it out loud: he felt it running in his blood, felt it ringing in his skull, felt it bubbling like the shadows curling over his fist. He hadn’t experienced anything like it since leaving Yiling, and it was like being back with the dead; he’d bolted, tripping over his own two feet and stumbling away, away, for miles, until his legs gave out and he’d crawled to the shade of some tree by the roadside. The scream had yet to fade out, and he did not move until it did.
It was not the last time that happened, and Wei Wuxian has worked hard on not letting it render him useless again, especially now that he’s around other people who can’t know what he’s really doing with Chenqing and the demonic cultivation. It’s not difficult to mask his expressions, to swallow his flinches. There is no such thing as an unhaunted house, after all. If he keeps letting it get to him, he won’t be able to get anything done.
Jiang Cheng already thinks he’s a lost cause, a weak, bumbling drunk. Shijie thinks he’s too pale and too thin, even weeks after coming back. Lan Zhan —
Lan Zhan is looking at him. He’s always looking at him.
It is raining, hard enough that it feels like it could pierce through his skin, cold and sharp. It would probably not bother Lan Zhan, even if he were not covered by an umbrella; Wei Wuxian’s skin is soft now, fragile. Nothing keeps him strong anymore.
It is raining. It is dark. Behind him, what remains of Qishan Wen, wrecked by the war their clan started: the sick and elderly, the injured and non-cultivators, the child. He’s three, one of the eldest had told him, her wrinkled face sunken and terrified. She’d been scared of him, but she’d still spoken, clutching the kid to her chest. Gongzi, he’s only three.
The Jin said that Qiongqi Path held war prisoners. Criminals, who aided Wen Chao and Wen Ruohan on their quest for power. Instead, after following Wen Qing, what Wei Wuxian found were civilians. Healers, Wen Qing had whispered on their way, frantic. From my mother’s side — most of them healers, most of them non-cultivators, and oh, God, A-Ning, I can’t —
Wen Ning is dead.
Or rather, he’s been made dead. Wei Wuxian can make him… not dead. It’s complicated, but it will work, he assures himself, with a manic kind of energy. He can do that. Wen Ning’s skin might be cold as ice forever, but he will live. He’ll make sure of it.
And Lan Zhan is looking at him. Wei Wuxian knows what they must all look like: covered with mud and blood and rain, most of the Wens wearing inadequate clothing for the weather, the scent of death just enough for a strong cultivator to pick up. They must look like criminals. They must look disgusting, less than human.
Wei Wuxian does not care much for being human. But he won this war for the sects — he was their secret weapon, the ace up their sleeve; most of them had looked down on him for not picking up his sword again, tried to convince Jiang Cheng to appoint a new right-hand man, but the moment he’d made himself useful, he was right back in their good graces. He’d woken just in time for the celebrations after the Sunshot Campaign, after three days unconscious. The sect leaders raised a toast to him during the banquet. Called him a hero.
If that’s a hero, then Wen Qing was probably right when she said he’d make a terrible one. He cannot stand and feast if this is the cost; he cannot celebrate over people’s corpses. He can’t — he doesn’t know. He hadn’t thought about living this far. But this is something he can do, even if the only safe place he can give these people is his very own torture chamber, now that he’s learned to tame it. He will make it safe for them. A safe place does not exist yet, but he will make one.
Across the falling water and wind and dark, Lan Zhan says, “Wei Ying.”
If Wei Wuxian had something that could be called a heart, instead of this swirling mass of shadows and emptiness in his chest, it surely would have cracked.
The absence of feeling is still so strange. Of so many feelings. The feeling of being him, when he is so other few things as well. He’s just cold.
He’s smiling. Or at least, his lips are pulling up. He’s always trying to smile, to put people at ease, to make them less worried. Ungrateful boy, always-a-burden boy.
“That’s me,” Wei Wuxian says, quietly. He knows Lan Zhan will hear, even if Wei Wuxian himself has to strain to do the same. They are not made of the same thing anymore.
Next to him, Wen Qing’s hand clutches at the edge of his robe. He’s on the horse, with Wen Ning behind him, and she hasn’t moved an inch away from them. Her face is so dirtied and thin she looks like an apparition. “Wei Wuxian,” she says, jaw tight. “If he tries to stop us, what will you do?”
He knows what she’s asking. It has never been a secret, whatever it is he and Lan Zhan have, not between the disciples who were at Cloud Recesses all those years ago, and not between any of the major sects. So Wen Qing is asking, If he tries to do harm, will you be able to harm him? If he is on one side, will you put yourself on the other, knowing what it means?
If Lan Zhan tries to kill you, will you let him, or will you kill him in turn?
(If you love him, the resentment in his bones whispers, is it really a sin to kill him?)
“Don’t worry, A-Qing,” Wei Wuxian whispers, settling a hand on her head. “There are only two things he might do.”
He will either let them go or go with them. Wei Wuxian knows what he’d do if Lan Zhan tried to kill him; he’d do nothing, because Lan Zhan never would.
The rain tastes like rotting leaves as it slips into his mouth, his drenched hair sticking to his neck and face. It’s such a quiet night, other than the roaring wind. Nothing, nothing — the wind plays the trees’ strings. Nothing, nothing. Emptiness. Inside. Outside, too. No way for words to fill it. He’s gotten used to it, he thinks. It was terrible, those first days: his entire body was a wound. The world that once bloomed and ripened in things had been torn out of him with its roots, with his heart, it seemed.
But wounds heal. Sometimes the skin is unmarred, like nothing ever happened at all. Sometimes it scars, thick and rough, a clear reminder. And other times the flesh caves in and the skin heals around an empty space, around an absence, and you often forget about it until you reach out for what used to be there; then it’s like missing a step in a staircase, a false note in a melody. That’s what Wei Wuxian feels like. Most days it’s fine. He only thinks about what he’s missing when he’s reminded of it. And he’s reminded of it right now, because if he still had a golden core to sustain him, to sharpen his senses, he’d be able to tell what Lan Zhan is trying to say.
Absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps down in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against, where you search for a light, some small glimmer, something to hang onto and guide you. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping, never-ending silence. And Wei Wuxian watches Lan Zhan move, but it is so, so hard to hear anything over the roaring of the rain.
“Wei Ying,” he thinks is what he says. “Think about what you’re doing,” might also be it. “Will you let me play you the guqin? Do you still remember the melody? Will you — will you—”
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, and this will always be clear. “Please.”
He thinks so many things and does not say a single one out loud. He chokes on such longing he cannot spit it out. Yes, desire is different when the spirits bore you hungry. He could devour anything and still be starving, both the person he is and the resentment he carries. He could, but he wouldn’t. He never would. Watching Lan Zhan’s face fall with the rain at his silence, pale clothes shining in the dark, he never would.
Wei Wuxian would give everything to wash that look away from his face. Not rip it away, no — the Burial Mounds have bore him bitter, stuck a carving knife in every wound they inflicted, rotted him from the inside out, but even with blood still staining his hands, Wei Wuxian can never muster violence when it comes to Lan Zhan. He makes him want to be gentle. He makes light want to pour in through the cracks.
But the world was never gentle.
It terrifies him to his very core. Even back when his core wasn’t even metaphorical at all, back when it sat warm and bright in his gut, back when he’d been someone he can’t find anymore, it scared him. Without a core, this body has grown fragile, floating, a reed cut from its roots. If a stream would ask him to follow, he’d go, he thinks. He’s been avoiding bodies of water for too long.
Before that, Wei Wuxian felt every single emotion until it was about to pour out. He was a selfish thing: he’d wanted Lan Zhan’s attention, stumbled after it on clumsy feet. His time at Cloud Recesses is so distant it may as well belong to someone else’s memory, but the things he remembers, he does so with startling clarity — the color of Lan Zhan’s eyes in the gloom of a sunset, the way Shijie would cover her mouth to pretend she wasn’t laughing whenever he and Jiang Cheng argued, the proud tilt of Lan Zhan’s chin as he tried his level best to ignore Wei Wuxian’s bullshit, breaking curfew with Nie Huaisang to sneak into Caiyi Town, watching Wen Qing from afar. The way Lan Zhan always, inevitably, impossibly looked his way, after all. How somewhere along the way, in looking, Lan Zhan ended up finding something he didn’t expect in him.
Wei Wuxian is still a selfish thing, when it comes to Lan Zhan. He thinks he might always be. But there’s something heavy in his bones, resentment is making his mouth sour, the rain is falling, and he can’t stay.
Maybe he would have, if Lan Zhan had asked. Maybe another calling of his own name — Wei Ying, always Wei Ying, safe in Lan Zhan’s mouth — would have done him in. Wei Wuxian is weak like that. But since Wei Wuxian has not answered, Lan Zhan has taken it as a refusal, and he does not speak again. His jaw is taut, and his lips remain thin. There are only two things he might do, Wei Wuxian knows. He does the one he’d expected, the one that breaks his heart: he does not move to stop them, which means he does not move to follow.
Maybe that’s all Wei Wuxian wanted — to be asked a question and have it cover him, like a roof the width of himself. To be asked How can I help? or What can I do? and break down into tears, hide his face in Lan Zhan’s neck and never be seen again. But he is not asked. And even if he were, he could not answer.
(Here’s the thing: by all accounts, their story should be a tragedy. They spend years and years not saying what they want to say to each other, and they do not get the chance to. One dies, and the other lives. One reaches out, and the other rips their arm away from their grip.
They will speak of it as a cautionary tale, in the years after. The righteous one as the widower of evil, light and dark, all that. People do love their stories. Few will know that the first time around, the two of them never even had a chance to start.
It takes time. Spring comes and goes and comes and goes, we grow new bones again, the children grow taller, the wounds scab over, the absences linger, the anger festers. Sometimes we misstep and forget what’s gone; sometimes it is the only thing we can remember. The scars of war ache in the rain, the poor remain poor and the rich remain rich, people tell their ghost stories, teenagers taste liquor from each other’s mouth, music plays, plays, plays, people dance. The living go on living and the dead stay dead.
Only in this story, that last one isn’t quite right.
Here is the thing: Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan get a happy ending. The bad ending just comes first.
It takes time.)
They move slowly through the night. Wei Wuxian does not look back, not even once; they don’t know how long it’ll take for someone to be sent after them, so they can’t afford to linger. He can only hope that Lan Zhan will do what he thinks he’ll do: since he did not move, he will not speak. It’ll give them time. They just need time.
Wei Wuxian doesn’t look back, and he doesn’t scratch the itch in his chest. He’s afraid of what’ll come leaking out if he does. Making his way back to Yiling after so long makes it hard to breathe, the resentment touching him in that still place, a wound ready to burst open like a cadaver, a long buried shame roaring in grief.
But he knows he can make the Burial Mounds safe. It doesn’t matter if he hates it, doesn’t matter if the thought of those rotten hills and dead trees and infertile ground makes his skin crawl. It’s still a place only he can reach, since only he has survived it. It makes it special. See, he already has a territory. Maybe they should make him sect leader. The idea is so ridiculous it almost makes him crack a smile.
He looks at the people around him, trying to pretend he doesn’t see them looking away from him just as quickly. He doesn’t blame them; he knows they’ve only followed him so far because Wen Qing has vouched for him, because she’s their family. He doesn’t ask to be trusted, not even to be liked. He’s just doing what’s right.
Even if it means he can’t come home again. Even if it makes them all hate him, even if Jiang Cheng grows ashamed to call him brother, even if Shijie refuses to see him, even if it’s him on one side and Lan Zhan on another. And it’s better, this way. Wei Wuxian is not a cultivator anymore; he doesn’t belong with them. Staying would be worse. He’s sure it would.
Oh, Wei Wuxian, something croons in his ears. Don’t you love the life you killed?
He’s learned not to answer, but he feels frayed at the edges, so he closes his eyes for a moment. Shut the fuck up.
You’re so hateful, it sneers, in Yu-furen’s voice.
I learned at your feet, he thinks back, and keeps on ahead.
In the stories, it’s different: grief, like the dark, lifts eventually. But this stays. It keeps. It continues. It goes on, and Wei Wuxian goes with it.
How does the poem go again? A voice calls through river-tinted dusk, but I’ve descended into cool mist alone…
No, that’s not it. It takes some time, with Wei Wuxian’s faulty memory, but as they’re crossing into Yiling, it comes back to him, as sudden as drowning.
Ah, he thinks. There it is. If you’re fleeing, the poem says, then your heart’s been broken.
Wei Wuxian thinks he dies once more, leaving.
Wei Ying goes, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. Lan Wangji does not move for a long, long time. It feels like he stands there all night, letting the rain weigh him down. There is only one thought in his mind: Please keep him safe.
He does not know who he’s talking to, to whom he is pleading. He has never been one for asking much. He has never been one for being impotent, for being scared. But he asks now: Be safe. Be still alive when I reach you.
He trusts Wei Ying to keep his end of the promise. Trusts him to still mean it when he’d said he’d carry him. He trusts.
iii.
“You’re grounded,” says Wen Qing.
Wei Wuxian blinks at her. “You can’t ground me.”
“Sure I can,” she says. “I know every single nerve in your body, and I know exactly which ones need to be pressed to cause temporary paralysis.”
“That’s not grounding,” Wei Wuxian says. “That’s physical abuse. Doesn’t it go against what doctors stand for because it’s, like, bad?”
“Semantics,” Wen Qing answers. “Also, I don’t really care.”
“I do,” Wei Wuxian points out.
Wen Qing levels him with a condescending stare. “I don’t really care about that either.”
She extends a hand, every inch of her like someone who’s trying to be patient with a fussy toddler, and Wei Wuxian, all of twenty-one years old and very much not a fussy toddler, lets out a loud whine and clutches the bottle of ale to his chest. He’s not that attached to it, because ale sucks and he hates it and nothing will ever taste as good as the Emperor’s Smile of Gusu, but this is all the alcohol they can afford. So maybe he is attached to it, since Wen Qing has limited him to a bottle per week; he has to be very careful with when he does drink it, since he prefers to down the whole thing in one night instead of going slowly.
If he really wanted to, he could probably manage to scrape together enough to get more than a bottle a week — scrape together a few innovative talismans, do some sweet talking, people eat that shit up. Wen Qing isn’t the boss of him. But she did have a compelling argument in the form of A-Yuan, by which he means she picked the kid up by his armpits, lifted him up to eye-level with Wei Wuxian, and said, “Think of the damn children, Wei Wuxian.”
Wei Wuxian is not soft. He’s got half the cultivation world convinced that demonic cultivation drove him insane, that he’s harboring criminals, that he’s not human anymore and feeds on the blood of animals and small children, that he can drive people mad with a single tune from his flute. He’ll never, ever be able to say no when looking at A-Yuan’s squishy cheeks and tiny hands, he will always pick the kid up and blow a raspberry on his stomach to hear his little giggles, will always carry him on his shoulders and let him teethe on Chengqing, will feel like clutching at his chest whenever A-Yuan calls him Xian-gege. All of those things coexist in harmony, because Wei Wuxian contains multitudes.
He’s trying to be a good role model for A-Yuan, because the Wen’s seem to think it’s a good idea or something like that. He’s tried to argue that he’s not even related to them, and wouldn’t it be unfilial for the kid to grow up with someone who’s not his own family having such a big influence on his life? It was different for Wei Wuxian himself, since he didn’t have any other family and the Jiang’s were kind enough to take him in, but he was still very much… not a Jiang. Through speech and mannerisms and the clothes he wore, it was always made very clear that he was supposed to stand apart. It made sense. It was fair. It made Granny Wen look very, very sad, when he said so.
“The blood that has led us here is stronger than the water from the womb that bore him,” she’d said, gripping his thin hands on her bony ones. “You are the reason he’s still breathing. That’s enough. You are not taking him from us, by doing this. Rather, think of it as giving him something he otherwise would never have again.”
She hadn’t directly told him to act like a father to A-Yuan, which is good, because Wei Wuxian is sure he would have had a conniption. He has no idea how to be a father. He’s never had a father. So A-Yuan calls him older brother, the same way he calls Wen Qing his sister, and even though he knows it’s just a matter of semantics, it makes him feel more settled. He can do it if the words don’t say what they mean.
Plus he’s never been called gege before, not even by Jiang Cheng. It feels nice. It feels wrong and terrible and like some kind of betrayal. He’s never had the chance, never felt like he had the right. He knows he won’t get the chance to, now. Whoever Jiang Cheng’s older brother was, he died the moment the Burial Mounds took him. Whatever was needed for Wei Wuxian to get the courage to call Jiang Cheng his didi has been lost. It has all been lost.
It kills him sometimes. He might be very good at forgetting, but everything he doesn’t is enough to kill him.
Wen Qing sighs, retracting her hand and stepping forward with that thin veil of patience in her face. She doesn’t loom over him, because with Wei Wuxian sitting down on this tree trunk she’s barely a full head taller than him, but she’s got the death glare down. Wei Wuxian pouts, but loosens his hold on the bottle, letting her take it from him without a fight.
Upon having the bottle, Wen Qing sniffs at its contents, downs the entire thing, and then lets it fall to the ground with a dull thunk. “That’s fucking disgusting,” she says, dragging a sleeve across her mouth. “Was that all?”
“Qing-jie, you look so hot right now,” Wei Wuxian says. “I’m almost attracted to you.”
“That makes one of us,” she says. Though her face remains the mask of controlled coolness, her shoulders slump, and she’s hugging herself and she sits down next to him on the half-rotten tree bark, her matted robes making a quiet sound as she moves. Wei Wuxian watches her from the corner of his eye, but makes no move to comfort or say anything about it without being asked. He knows her well enough at this point.
Nothing’s ever kept him from running his mouth, though. “You know, if you wanted to get smashed, all you had to do was ask,” he says. “We could’ve totally shared! You didn’t have to threaten me, I’m a good boy.”
“Shut up,” Wen Qing says. “Shut up, shut up, I hate every word that comes out of your mouth.” She kicks some dirt at him. “And you know why I had to threaten you.”
“Because you think it’s funny.”
“Because I think it’s funny,” she agrees with a little sigh, tilting her head back. There’s not much to see in the sky here, but Wei Wuxian recognizes the habit. He spent three months in this place; up is the only way out.
It should be near autumn now, he thinks. It’s hard to tell time in the Burial Mounds, since on account of them being lands infested by spirits made out of resentment, grief, anger and other vengeful notions, they don’t really get defined seasons. Even the small spaces Wei Wuxian has managed to exorcize carry within them a thin mist, a grayness that doesn’t go away even when it’s dark; it’s never too warm or too cold or too humid, just… there. Without the spirits, the land is still dead. It’s a good thing that Wei Wuxian has experience when it comes to making dead things not that dead anymore.
Case in point: Wen Ning was dreaming yesterday. His eyelids twitching, small sounds escaping his mouth as Wen Qing held his hand. A few months ago, he was beaten to death. It took longer than Wei Wuxian thought it would, although he couldn’t have known how long it would take, since he’d never done something like it before. He’s good at creating, at theorizing. He’d been sure he could make Wen Ning not dead — the rest was guessing.
Imagine, he’d told a sobbing Wen Qing, who’d been cutting off the circulation of his arms as she clutched them, the space at the bottom of an exhale, the hitch between the heart muscle’s closing and opening. Between breathing and having a pulse you’re dead but not dead. That’s what Wen Ning is right now. And I’m going to make him better.
The process is not finished yet; Wen Ning is still undeniably Wen Ning, but he’ll never regain color in his cheeks again, will always have the black veins of the resentment that resurrected him on his neck, will probably not age in a way that’s understandable. That, Wei Wuxian expected. You don’t just get better from being dead in a day, so he’s going to be watching very, very closely, to prevent any loss of control. The entire world already thinks of him as a monster. It would break whatever’s left of his heart to hear it directed at Wen Ning, too.
As exhausted as Wei Wuxian is, it probably doesn’t hold a candle to what Wen Qing feels. He doesn’t have a golden core to keep him healthy, but that also means he doesn’t have a core to deplete, and limits have always been meant to be pushed. People can get used to living with or without anything. But he imagines what it’d feel like to have to put his brother’s life in the hands of someone else and be unable to physically do anything about it himself, and the mere thought makes every inch of his body ache. It honestly surprises him that she’s managed to go this long without a single drop of alcohol. Though the ale they can afford is pretty shitty, so it’s not like she was missing out on much. He drinks for the habit of it.
“Spirits, my mouth tastes like something died in it,” Wen Qing mumbles, hunching her shoulders up further. Wei Wuxian looks at her fully, then, but still makes no move to touch her. “I didn’t — I didn’t plan to take your drink. I know it’s one of the only things that’s just yours. I’m sorry.”
It’s… absolutely not what Wei Wuxian expected to hear. Not the words — Wen Qing is many things but she’s not cold or emotionally constipated; she’s just private. What surprises him is the tone: she sounds a little ragged, voice a little wet, like the words are coming out of her throat unbidden.
Wen Qing is arguably the most collected person he knows. She’s a doctor, a surgeon; she has to be. The way she’s speaking sounds so off he thinks he might be gaping a little, but Wen Qing is staring hard at the ground instead of at him, so she doesn’t see.
“I’m fine,” she continues, probably taking his silence as concern instead of bewilderment. “Most days it’s fine.”
“Well,” Wei Wuxian says, slowly, as one does to a spooked child, “that’s all we can hope for in the end, right?”
Wen Qing turns to him. In the half-twilight of the Burial Mounds, where everything is gray and endless, she looks pale but not sickly, like she’s been carved from marble. The drab greens and browns of her clothes usually make her look like the farming maiden she’s become, but her features and sharp eyes always betray that she comes from what used to be one of the great sects of the cultivation world, that she knows seven different ways to kill someone while making it look like an accident off the top of her head. It’s comforting to have her here. They’ve never been proper enemies, not even when they were on opposite sides of a war, and Wei Wuxian is glad for it. She’s his best friend. Probably his only friend, too, but he doesn’t like to think about it.
“I talked to A-Ning again,” Wen Qing says. Her voice is quiet, her hands fidgeting in her lap. “I mean, we’re not sure if he can hear me or not, but still. I kind of fell asleep, dreamed. In the dream he thanked me for still waiting for him. And I said…” She lets out a sad little laugh, letting go of her own fingers to slap her hands on her thighs, uncharacteristically aggressive. “I said, if my A-Ning died, they would have had to bury me too. Without thinking, that was my answer. No hesitation.”
Wei Wuxian nods to let her know he’s listening. He gets it, and Wen Qing knows it; he didn’t give up his golden core just for kicks. He doesn’t know where exactly she’s going with this, but they’ve always been different people; the sentiment seems entirely logical and understandable for Wei Wuxian, but Wen Qing looks unsettled.
“And it’s just…” Wen Qing lets out a frustrated groan. “I’m worried,” she settles on, after a long pause, “that I’ve made my brother’s survival all that’s keeping me going. It’s — spirits, it’s almost unfilial to say this, but that’s not my point. The point is that it got me thinking about what I would have done if there wasn’t a chance A-Ning would come back. If…well, if you weren’t involved. You weren’t supposed to be involved, which means he wasn’t supposed to live, either. And I’ve just been wondering what I would have done. If I would have been able to keep going.”
“Nobody lives on maybes,” Wei Wuxian points out, twirling Chengqing between his fingers. “Nasty habit, all this wondering. Gets you nowhere, but hurts you enough for a lifetime. Don’t torture yourself, Qing-jie.”
Wen Qing levels him a flat stare. “Don’t make me laugh,” she says. “Someone who has no regrets doesn’t wake up screaming every time he sleeps.”
Ouch. Point taken.
He shrugs off the wince at that, knowing it’d make Wen Qing falter in her forwardness, shift the tone of the conversation. She’s not gentle with him, and isn’t afraid to push all his buttons, but like any good doctor, she only pokes at wounds when it is conducive to healing. She’s not a fan of infections.
“Ouch,” Wei Wuxian says instead, clutching at his chest in mock offense. “I was about to compliment you, and this is what I get?”
“Yes,” Wen Qing says. “Now compliment me.”
“Aish, women are so hard to please!” Wei Wuxian exclaims. “No, don’t hit me. Qing-jie, no hitting, you promised, I’m fragile, I’m a delicate little flower, not even a core in me. Would you hit a dainty little flower? Just a flimsy little guy?”
“I will remove your tongue with a pair of clippers,” Wen Qing says earnestly, eyes very wide as she grabs his shoulder tightly. Ouch, cultivator strength. That’s gonna leave a mark. Since the procedure, he bruises like a peach. “Don’t think I won’t.”
Wei Wuxian lets out a small shriek. “I’ve never doubted your abilities!”
“Good.” She lets go of him, posture slouching again as he rubs at the sore spot. He pretends to be upset about it for another minute before sighing and schooling his expression into something more neutral, which is as close to genuine as he can get nowadays.
In the Burial Mounds, the wind that whistles by is only heard by him. That’s because it isn’t really wind at all, but energy — he may have gotten rid of resentment around where he and the remnants of the Wen are based, but “getting rid of it” was just an exacerbated way of saying nullifying. He can’t get rid of the energy in this place any more than he can rip the mounds out of the earth with his bare hands; the Burial Mounds are made of energy. The only thing he did was take out all the ugly things in it and take them into himself so everyone else can breathe. Sishu says that sometimes Wei Wuxian’s hair flutters as if moved by a breeze, even when there is no breeze there, and Wei Wuxian just smiles.
Just because you can’t see the ghosts, he says, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Yiling-laozu, remember?
Sishu snickers like it’s an inside joke. It’s nice to be met with bemusement instead of horror.
That same invisible wind blows again, ruffling his robes and making the limp edges of his hair flutter. Wen Qing watches him as if she’s waiting.
Wei Wuxian sighs, shifting Chenqing from hand to hand as he looks at his friend. “You would’ve survived, Qing-jie,” he says, frankly. “You always would have survived, even if you’d never met me. Hell, maybe not being associated with me would’ve helped in the long run, I don’t know.” He tilts his head, considering. “We both know Wen Ning would have wanted you to, anyway.”
“He would’ve survived without me, too,” Wen Qing says. “You know how he is. He would’ve charmed a new family into taking him in as their charge in minutes.”
“Yes,” Wei Wuxian concedes. “He would have.”
He knows where she’s going with this now, but he still waits for her to say it. “It makes me nervous,” she says, “that he could live without me, but I don’t know if I could do the same.” She sighs, rubbing a hand on her forehead. “I’m supposed to be the eldest.”
Wei Wuxian pokes her with Chenqing. “Hey,” he says. “That’s why you don’t know.” When she gives him a look, he continues, “You’re the eldest. That’s why you don’t know. Maybe you were an only kid for a little while, but the moment Wen Ning was born, the first thing they told you was to take care of him no matter what, right?” She nods. Wei Wuxian smiles sadly, chest aching. “Your very first duty. If we can’t protect our little brothers, what are we even doing?”
Wen Qing looks at him. And she keeps looking at him for a long while without saying anything, the only sound around being the wailing noises of resentment from outside their barriers and the quiet chatter of the Wen’s near the Demon Subdue Palace (funny name, not so long story, Wei Wuxian likes to think of himself as a master of comedy).
Eventually, Wen Qing seems to find whatever she was looking for in Wei Wuxian’s face, because she pushes his shoulder, softly. “You haven’t been half bad at protecting your brother, Wei Wuxian,” she says, because she always aims straight for the throat. “You gave up on an entire life for him. You’re still protecting him now. Tell me one thing about this,” she makes an all-encompassing gesture, “that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for you trying to protect Jiang Wanyin.”
Wei Wuxian gives her a tight-lipped smile. “We’re supposed to protect our little brothers,” is all he says.
Or there is no reason for you to be here, the memory of Yu-furen says. Ungrateful boy. If my son gets hurt, you’ll get it three times over. Your life is only worth all the ways in which you can sacrifice me. You should thank me for being so patient with you, because this is a lesson you never seem to learn. I am not usually this lenient with servants’ children. I do hope you will not make me repeat myself again.
The woman’s dead and gone, but leave it for her to linger like a sour aftertaste. In the end, Wei Wuxian did everything she ever asked, though for a reason she probably hadn’t fathomed: instead of protecting Jiang Cheng and Shijie out of a sense of duty, he did it because he loves them. They’re alive now and they’ll stay that way, even if Wei Wuxian does not have a part in their lives. That was never his part of the deal.
Wen Qing seems hesitant, which is a new look on her. She’s never measured her words, but now it looks like she’s struggling to be gentle with what she has to say.
Like Wei Wuxian knew she would, she eventually groans and gives up on it. “It’s so hopeless,” she says, with so much vehemence her voice echoes a little. “Some days it’s fine. I can make myself fine. We’re growing things and we’re building things and we’re surviving. And surviving. And surviving.” Wen Qing clenches and unclenches her fist, agitated. “You know when you pull a fish out of the water and leave it in a shallow puddle? And it keeps struggling, because it’s enough for it to not die, but not enough to sustain its life? It feels like that. It fucking feels like that. So it annoys me, too, when you say I would have survived without A-Ning, because I don’t care how selfish it sounds, but I want to be able to live.”
The air rings when she stops speaking. Wei Wuxian lets out a slow breath, wiping sweaty hands on his robe, unconsciously grabbing Chengqing for comfort.
Faulty as his memory is, he hasn’t forgotten, not for a single moment, that the Burial Mounds are as much a prison as they are a safe haven. No one will come after them while they stay, but they also cannot leave. Wei Wuxian doesn’t mind himself being here, because he can hardly imagine anywhere else he’d be able to belong, but the guilt that comes after sits heavy on his stomach, looking at the square of undead land that he and the Wen’s call home. Thinking about that one time he took A-Yuan down to Yiling for a walk, because Wen Qing started getting worried he wasn’t walking as much as a toddler should be; it started raining, and A-Yuan had been terrified, clutching at Wei Wuxian’s leg. Xian-gege, he’d whispered, where is the water coming from?
It does not rain in the Burial Mounds. This is something Wei Wuxian has taken from him.
Maybe he’s not that much better than the Jin, after all. Maybe he just gave them a smokescreen of comfort and the illusion of autonomy when this is actually just another place they’re trapped inside. Wei Wuxian spent three months in this place, and he only remembers three things about it in tandem: a darkness so cold and thick it bloated his lungs and made his eyes bleed, a hunger so intense it’d make him sick, again and again, gagging mouthfuls of nothing as his empty stomach spasmed, and the notion, as he’d carved Chenqing with a piece of metal and his own nails alike, that there is no surviving this. Once he took the resentment in, once it made itself at home in his marrow, he knew that there was no reason to survive what would always keep happening to him.
He may have left, may have done what he’d had to do, may have pretended he was able to live the life he had before for a few months, but he came back in the end. Perhaps these lands killed him, broke him unfixable — but the jagged edges that tore him apart are still the perfect shape to fill the empty spaces the tearing left behind.
There is a comfort in pain, a familiarity to it. There doesn’t have to be a way in or a way out; it’s over, it’s happened. And if it’s referring to his anguish, it’s just a thing. The shape of a wheel, or a knife. It’s just a thing, small and hardened into a stone in his chest. He’s so used to breathing through the ache that he can barely recall what it was like to be without it anymore.
When it comes to his time spent here, Wei Wuxian would rather think that he’d temporarily died than that he kept on living and can’t remember a thing. He’s filled with ghosts, but he’s not one himself, after all. He breathed, he ate, he walked. But we are able to bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. The body remembers. We do not.
But he knows he’s different. He’s always told Shijie, half-joking, that it’s as if everyone else remembers too much. Wei Wuxian isn’t forgetful in the sense that he misses birthdays or is late for important gatherings; he’s forgetful in the sense that, if someone asked him about his most precious memories, he’d stare at them blankly and be unable to answer. He remembers things in sound and color only, all watery and faded, as solid as the stream of a river. He lets it all flow through him and go past, without looking back. His life has been nothing for survival for so long that he doesn’t miss the way it was before, simply because he doesn’t remember how it was.
He thinks he’s lucky when it comes to that. He sees the anxiousness in the Wen’s shoulders, the way they bite their lip until they draw blood: the possibilities agonize them because they’re able to recall the realities of other outcomes. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve spent in the Burial Mounds — they were somewhere, someone before them, and they imagine they will be somewhere and someone after it, too.
Wind blows, a whistle. Only Wei Wuxian hears or feels it.
“I can feel it rotting in my stomach sometimes,” Wen Qing whispers into the hungry silence. “This fear. It feels like I’m holding my breath all the time. I don’t know who I am outside of survival. A doctor is supposed to know all about healing but all I know is how to keep people from dying. I don’t know if I’m more scared that this won’t ever end and I won’t get the chance to figure it out or that it will and I’ll have to.”
And that’s where, no matter how similar they might be, Wen Qing and Wei Wuxian will always be intrinsically different. Wen Qing’s pragmatism makes her steady, but it does not stop her from hoping; Wei Wuxian’s flexible thinking when it comes to his talismans and inventions will always clash with the fact he considers some things irrevocable and unchangeable: he cannot go home, he will die before his loved ones, and he will only be remembered with fearfulness. Wen Qing calls him stubborn. Wei Wuxian tells her she needs to be more realistic. We’re in fucking purgatory, Wen Qing says. How realistic can I be?
Wei Wuxian usually doesn’t answer. Wen Qing believes one day it’ll all be over and she’ll be able to make a new home for her family somewhere; he likes to believe she will, too. But he also kind of knows that her plans include him, and he cannot leave this place and live as well. It doesn’t matter how many wars come to pass: he’ll die a monster, now. He has no need to be anything other than a cautionary tale, something for people to hold against the light and tremble at the shadow. He’s never had the opportunity to be anything else than what he’s been told he is.
But Wen Qing is a person. She’s a bit older than him, but they’re both still young. He doesn’t want her to stay in survival mode for the rest of her life any more than she does, but he also knows that no matter what he says, she won’t be leaving him behind. It makes him feel so guilty his insides churn.
It’s a bit of misplaced guilt, because he knows that the Wen’s still being alive is the best case scenario, but he’s still the one who put them into this situation. He’s the one who dragged them all to the place people don’t come back from, where he had to rip ghosts from the air itself to make it breathable. He’d said: It’ll be okay. He’d said: I’ll keep you safe. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.
He hasn’t said: The only reason why you’re still alive and no one has come for you is because they’re more scared of me than they are vengeful.
Wei Wuxian has cultivated that fear. He doesn’t care about being a monster; he’s the best monster there is. He’d never heard of someone becoming a myth before they even die, but if people need an enemy they will find one. He’s barely had to lift a finger to make it happen, just letting the stories fester. He hears it when he goes into town, though the people of Yiling look upon him with something closer to respect and gratefulness than disdain and terror; he can understand that, what with them having lived under the shadows of the Burial Mounds for centuries, and with him being able to tame their energy. It’s a win-win situation.
But outside these borders, the other sects have begun to call him something else. Yiling-laozu. They’re too afraid he’ll try to grasp at a chance to start his own sect, so they’ve slapped a title on him before he could dare call himself anything. It’s something he can hide behind, so he doesn’t mind. If they fear the Yiling-laozu for drinking the blood of children and driving people mad then they don’t see Wei Wuxian, throwing up blood after exorcizing another square of the Burial Mounds, Wei Wuxian bed-ridden from a common cold without a core to keep it at bay, Wei Wuxian thinking of rabbits and pale blue and not finding a single tear left to shed. You can sweep anything behind a title, then forget the person that bears it.
Wei Wuxian’s good at forgetting. Anyone can be, if they want to.
(In a dream, Lan Zhan says: “I used to think I would recognize you anywhere.” In a dream, Lan Zhan says, after a pause: “I have been finding this hard to do.”
Sometimes your tongue is removed, sometimes you still it out of your own accord. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. Sometimes you have a name, sometimes you are named for what — not who — you are. There are many things one invents, when they are scared and want to be rescued. Wei Wuxian has never known how to be kind to himself, so this is what he comes up with, even asleep.
One suspects Wei Wuxian would howl in anguish, if there were any sound there; but all sound is internal.)
A monster is a necessity and an impossibility at the same time. The object of fear needs to be something bad. With Qishan Wen gone, it really wasn’t a surprise that the cultivation world took one look at Wei Wuxian — demonic cultivator Wei Wuxian, who did not carry his sword anymore, who did things they could not understand with power they could not fathom — and dug its claws into his being. And it’s fine. Wei Wuxian’s always fine.
The crux of the matter is that even if Wei Wuxian had been destined to come back to the place that killed something in him from the very beginning, the Wen did not have to come with him. It’s not so much a choice they made as it something they had to do, back then. Sometimes, he fears they’ve only stayed out of a misplaced sense of gratitude. It is an easy country to disappear in, after all, if only they were willing to try.
Wei Wuxian looks at Wen Qing. Squeezes his lips into an apologetic smile, because she hates self-pity. Doesn’t even get the chance to open his mouth before she punches him on the shoulder, with all the strength of a half-starved cultivator, which is still leagues stronger than Wei Wuxian is.
“Don’t you dare fucking apologize,” Wen Qing says, settling back and ignoring his pained whines as he clutches his smarting arm. “This isn’t me blaming you, this is me blaming everything else that isn’t you.” She looks him straight in the eye, then, looking half pissed and half sad. “You’re the only good thing to come out of this.”
“Qing-jie,” Wei Wuxian says. “Don’t.”
She slaps him. “You’re the reason we’re even here to bitch about how difficult it is to survive,” she says, ignoring his pained whimper. She’s strong. “If it wasn’t for you, I would’ve starved on the streets, A-Ning would have stayed dead, and the rest of my family would’ve either been murdered or worked to death in a prison camp. Granny Wen, A-Yuan — they were not supposed to live. Lanling Jin wanted all of us gone. We’re not. It’s…” Wen Qing trails off with a small sigh. “I should be glad that I get to be mad about this at all. Dead people can’t be mad.”
“Oh, sure they can,” Wei Wuxian says, brightly, taking the exit for what it is. Outside the wards, something howls in agreement, and Wen Qing shivers. He puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes, more for the skinship than anything else. “But you’re not dead, so you get to be alive and pissed off. Congrats!”
“Small miracles,” Wen Qing mutters, shrugging off his touch with an embarrassed press of lips. “Would it kill you to just act like a normal human being when someone thanks you instead of redirecting the conversation?”
“Oh, man, at this point? Probably,” Wei Wuxian says. He straightens up on his seat, lifting a hand to his cheek and gasping as if he’s just had an epiphany. “Oh, spirits, quiet down! If the other sects figure out that gratefulness is all it takes to bring me down, I won’t live to see the light of day!”
Wen Qing snorts, pulling her hair away from her face. “Nah, you’re fine. You ever heard a sect leader say thank you?”
“Hm, you make a good point,” Wei Wuxian says. He feels something tremble at the edge of the northern ward, and sends a pulse of energy as a warning towards it with a quick flick of his hand; enough to make someone’s instincts tell them to get the fuck away. “But please,” he continues. Wen Qing hadn’t even blinked at his actions, too used to it. “Do refrain from doing so anyways. It’s not good for my heart.”
“Your heart is fine.” Wen Qing narrows her eyes at him, as if daring Wei Wuxian to suddenly collapse and prove her wrong. “Or it would be if you remembered to sleep more than four hours a night. Those eyebags of yours are deep enough to die a full robe Jiang-purple.”
“Oh, you know how my memory is,” Wei Wuxian says, smiling lopsidedly. His hands are very cold around Chenqing. “I forget things, then I forget I’ve forgotten them, and then it’s daytime again. At the very least, it keeps me young.”
Wen Qing raises an eyebrow, but ultimately says nothing. Wei Wuxian’s memory has always been something of… not exactly a sore spot, but a disagreement between them. Wei Wuxian forgets, Wen Qing goes on remembering, Wen Qing says there is no logical, actual reason for his memory to be this horrid, Wei Wuxian gets defensive, Wen Qing looks sad, they stop talking about it. It’s happened enough times that they’ve both stopped bringing it up, but whenever the subject does show face, it always ends with them looking away from each other.
“You can’t just forget and call it healing,” Wen Qing had shrieked, once. Inside the Demon Subdue Palace, her voice echoed, hands fisted on the front of her robes. “You forget and forgive everything, anyone, except for those whose actions harmed someone else instead of you. You forgive anything but yourself. That’s not forgetting, that’s a conscious choice.”
Wei Wuxian recalls the cornered feeling in his chest, that unbearable itch in his throat, fingers tight around Chenqing like a child seeking comfort in their favorite toy. “Maybe you just remember too much!” he yelled in turn. “Maybe you just hold on to too much, all you cultivators, you can’t be greedy enough by living hundreds and hundreds of years, you get to keep what happened to you, too. It makes me sick. I’m—” An animal, primal sound had escaped his throat, something between a pained whine and a sob, and it had stopped Wen Qing dead in her tracks, eyes wide. “I’m sick,” Wei Wuxian had said, ragged. “I’ve been sick. I’m going to die sick, like a dog, all rotten inside. I don’t get to keep anything.”
“Of course you get to keep your memories,” Wen Qing had answered, quietly, taken aback. “Of course you get to look back on your life, Wei Wuxian, you’re allowed to—”
Wei Wuxian had laughed, helplessly. “I don’t even get to keep myself,” he’d said. “It’s alright. Leave the remembering to everyone else. Every good story needs a ghost, and I’ve got plenty. Please don’t feel bad.”
Wen Qing’s eyes had followed him for the rest of the day, wildly searching for something she’d never found, not before Wei Wuxian came up to her again the next day, beaming brightly as he showed her the phallic-shaped turnip he’d found on the field, as if nothing had happened. He’d kept his smile firmly in place and pretended not to notice as her shoulders sagged, eyes softened with sadness.
So they don’t talk about it.
“Make sure to get some sleep tonight,” Wen Qing says instead. She’s looking at the nothingness of the sky instead of him. “You have to go into town tomorrow. We’re almost out of…” she huffs a mirthless laugh. “Everything, I guess.”
“Sure.” Wei Wuxian twirls Chenqing in his hands. “I’ll take A-Yuan with me. It’s been a while since he’s seen people other than us.”
“As if the kid cares about anyone other than his Xian-gege,” Wen Qing drawls. “We’re all terribly jealous.”
Wei Wuxian laughs a little. “The big, bad, evil Yiling-laozu bends to a three-year-old’s every whim,” he says. “If only they knew.”
Wen Qing looks askance at him. “You’re not evil,” she says, almost tentatively, as if she wants to hear what he’ll say.
It makes him crack a genuine smile. The action pulls at his skin, but he’s loath to let it go, even if it’s just shallow amusement. All bodies become sicker bodies — a kind of object permanence, a curse bent around his stomach. It’s so unsettling, now, to feel light. He wishes he were only as cruel as the first time he noticed he was cruel, standing over Wen Chao’s bloody face, knowing he’d been driven mad by Wei Wuxian’s own hand. He thinks he’s gotten worse. Lan Zhan always did say that this resentment would rot him from the inside out. If he saw him now, he wouldn’t be smug enough to say I told you so, because Lan Zhan isn’t smug, but Wei Wuxian would be able to see it in his eyes, and it’d be enough.
“Wei Wuxian,” Wen Qing repeats, that no-nonsense tone that reminds him of the healers at Cloud Recesses. “You’re not evil.”
He loves her. He loves how much she genuinely believes it. But he knows what he is. He’s sick of haunting himself from within. He will die sick, like a starved child in the streets, because stories always come full circle, and he’s never stopped being what he was at the beginning.
“And you’re not selfish for wanting to live for yourself,” he counters. “There, see? We’ve both said things we think are true.”
They look at each other unflinchingly for a long, long time, both unwilling to look away first. They’ve seen each other at their worst, at this point, and every day Wei Wuxian pushes the limits, giving Wen Qing more and more reasons to leave, unsure if the only reason why she hasn’t is loyalty or stubbornness. The only person who’s ever gotten this close is Lan Zhan, but the circumstances and awfulness and everything else has kept them apart.
He would have been fine with being alone here. He could’ve led the Wen somewhere else, given them new identities, and come back by himself. The loneliness doesn’t feel much like loneliness at all, when it’s so physical he can almost pretend it’s a presence. The consistency of hurt is what makes it so comforting; we tend to repeat what hurts us. After all, the worst has already happened: he cannot go home anymore. What else can truly hurt him, then?
Every day, at dusk, he can feel that the things he had buried are exhuming themselves; clammy fears and dangerous thoughts and the shadows he’d put away from a more convenient time. Looking at Wen Qing, the both of them fundamentally unable to change each other, regardless of how much they keep each other standing, he knows he can’t put those things away forever: there is always a day of reckoning. But not all dark places need light — especially not this one.
(The essence of tragedy is that it is inevitable. Not only have you been dead since the beginning, you’re dead before the story starts. A Greek sentiment: Of course. Everyone has their part to play. He has to put us to death, and we have to bury our brother. That’s how the roles were cast. What do you want us to do about it?
Another inevitability: Wei Wuxian has been both dead and alive since the beginning. He was always going to be buried in the place he died, and he was always going to come back the way he did. Jiang Cheng still has to bury his brother. Lan Zhan still spends three years in seclusion with a thousand wounds festering. Wen Ning still spends decades a prisoner without a mind of his own. Everyone else still has to die.
This is being told to soothe the hurt. Know that some people will live, although others will not. Know that no one will ever love Wei Wuxian as much as Lan Zhan has always loved him, and no one will ever smile as brightly as Wei Wuxian will when he meets his eyes thirteen years after his death and is recognized, is known, even wearing a different face — because surviving means you get to keep your body, and Wei Wuxian did not survive.
The music is always the same. The melody that thrums under these words: if this story didn’t hurt then it wouldn’t be this story; there is no such thing as hurt without the possibility of healing.
It is closer now. It will be a sunny day in Yiling, come morning. Wei Wuxian will take A-Yuan out on a walk. Lan Zhan will come into town. It all goes from there. The end has started long ago.
Ah, Lan Zhan, Wei Wuxian will say, smiling like a thousand suns. Did you miss me?
Wei Ying, Lan Zhan will reply. It has always been his best answer.)
The air is dry, not exactly cold nor warm. Wei Wuxian misses the rain. He misses the humidity of Lotus Pier, the freezing lakes in mid-winter. The closest body of water they have is the river that curves away from the edges of the Burial Mounds, cutting across Yiling; since it’s drinking water for the villagers, no one’s allowed to swim in it. Sometimes he feels like he’ll burst out of his skin if he doesn’t get to go for a dive somewhere soon, but he knows it’s just want; human beings don’t actually need swimming to survive.
He thinks of a cool creek in the mountains of Gusu. He thinks of blue. He thinks of something else.
Wen Qing sighs, the burst of air loud in the quiet. “Your stubbornness is going to be the death of you, Wei Wuxian.”
“Only if it gets me first,” Wei Wuxian replies easily. He knows a truce when he sees one. “Many things might be the death of me.”
She gives him a cheeky smirk. “Me included?”
Wei Wuxian puts a hand over his heart. “You’ve always been the first thing on the list.”
Wen Qing stands up with a small flutter of her robes, smoothing out her skirt. She’s probably going to check if the people back in camp need any help with supper, and they will inevitably tell her to go rest and leave it all to them, and she’ll either get A-Yuan plopped down on her lap so she can keep him entertained, or go sit by Wen Ning’s bedside. As he watches her pale face, Wei Wuxian thinks he can sort of understand what she means about being always stuck, always struggling for air. The days go by like a repetition, forever trapping them inside.
She turns around to leave without giving him a second glance, and it doesn’t surprise nor hurt him. He’s too much for everyone at some point. He doesn’t know how to not weigh on everyone around him, as much as he tries to not leave marks on the soil.
The reason why Wei Wuxian never remembers it’s because it is not interesting to remember. The damage is not interesting. But Wen Qing is not him, and she deserves to live past it.
“Hey, Qing-jie,” Wei Wuxian calls after her. She stops, but doesn’t turn around, and he continues, “If surviving is all we ever get, what do you think you’ll make of it?”
In the weak light, Wen Qing looks over her shoulder. Her eyes are dark. “Survive what?” she says. “I’m talking about living. Nobody ever survives.”
Wei Wuxian smiles wryly. He picks up the empty bottle of ale from the ground and lifts it in mock cheer. “Hear, hear.”
She huffs, doesn’t smile back. Leaves without saying anything else, and he watches her go, sitting in a rotten tree bark inside a square of land that used to be dead with ghosts howling at every edge of him, outside and in. He looks back at the bottle in his hands, the way his face looks distorted against the hazy glass, and lets it fall to the dry earth with a thunk, hands going up to tug at his hair.
(Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the lack of sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the water inside swayed this way and that, unwilling to pour more out and drown from it. Never did anybody look so sad.
If you find that you cannot run when you want to, says the poem, then you have forgotten that there is someone coming for you.
A silly thought. A tragedy is the story of a human growing into his death mask. Sometimes Wen Qing cannot look at Wei Wuxian because all she sees is his ghost. Sometimes he does the same to her. She will die before him. Even with all her pragmatic tendencies, it is the one thing she never planned, and one she never ends up regretting. She will die so he doesn’t have to. He will die anyway. The Burial Mounds were always mean to be a cemetery; it will take three years for someone to come to mourn at its mass grave.
That someone will be very pale and very thin. He will be wearing a widower’s clothing. He won’t have uttered a word for months on end. He will sit on the earth and play half of a song on the strings of his guqin, a song only two people ever knew. Not even the thirty-three lashes on his back will be as painful as this is, being the sole bearer of a melody for two. Not even that.
If you are tugging at the strings, the poem says, then someone you know is preparing to come back from the dead.)
iv.
When you talk to your brother for the last time, it goes a little like this:
He is sitting across from you on the table, kneeling politely. He never used to kneel politely when it was just you, and though his tongue is just as sharp with masked fondness as it was when you were young, you find that there are traces in his face you do not recognize anymore. He looks like an adult; he looks like a child playing dress up; you feel like neither, just the same old haunting in your bones, the hollow stomach. Your brother does not comment on how you scarf down the food he’s brought as if it’s the first meal you’ve had in weeks. You do not tell him you’ve not had a full meal since returning to the Burial Mounds.
Your brother’s fists are tightened on his lap, where he thinks you cannot see. It seems like you’ve both forgotten a few things about each other: you’ve forgotten just how horrid your brother is at keeping his emotions in check, and he’s forgotten that you always notice. Lately you’ve found yourself cataloging every interaction you have as if trying to commit them to memory — how tight A-Yuan holds on to your thigh every time you are near, the steadiness of Wen Qing’s hands whenever she touches you (she is the only one other than A-Yuan who does, anymore, and it is usually to patch a wound or dab the blood from his nose and lips; rarely does she ever squeeze your hand or lean her head against your shoulder at night, but you treasure each time she does), the smiles and laughter thrown your way back at the camp. The Burial Mounds have never been a place for brightness, and even a small amount leaves you blinded.
You have not seen much of Lan Zhan, though you have seen him more than you’ve done your siblings. Ever since that day in Yiling, the shape of his eyes when he saw you have not left your mind. How he looked hopeful, at first, when he’d heard your voice — hopeful! To see you! — and then upon doing so, softened around the edges, everything about him looking warm, clear even through the Lan posture he never drops. How he’d kept one arm behind him as you walked, as always, and how the hand lightly gripping the hilt of his sword kept brushing against yours, every time you reached out to hold him because you had to tell him something, Lan Zhan, you won’t believe what’s been happening.
It was only a day, and then two, gone too quick but still shimmering golden behind your eyelids every time you close your eyes. You are loath to forget it. You want to remember him forever.
But you have not seen your brother since that day the two of you renounced each other publicly, since he kicked you out of the Jiang sect and you broke his arm. A small part of you thought you’d never see each other again. Not because you’re foolish enough to believe he doesn’t care about you, but because you’d figured he’d eventually realize it would be easier if he didn’t.
You tell him this. “Aw, Jiang Cheng, did you miss me?” You ask, smiling over tea. “You weren’t supposed to.”
It isn’t really telling him, but then again, you’ve never been known for being direct. Your brother knows you, though, or at least he did once and it still counts for something. He holds in an impatient breath and turns a familiar shade of purple, and it’s almost enough to make you untense your aching jaw, to stop holding yourself so tightly. You trust your brother and your sister; you do not trust anyone else. Resentment coils tight on the once gaping hole in your gut, and you stay alert.
“I didn’t miss you,” your brother bites out. (He’s lying.) “This is because jiejie asked me to. She made your fucking soup herself, too, so you better not leave behind a single drop of it.”
He pointedly looks at your bony wrists, peeking out from your robes as you hold your bowl, and then back at your face. You do not know how much you’ve changed since the last you saw each other, since the closest thing to a mirror you have back where you’re staying is the stream running through Yiling, but you can imagine your hollowed out cheeks, the cracked lips. You probably look like the exact grown up version of the little boy jiang fengmian found in the streets of Yunmeng all those years ago, half-starved.
You eat the soup. It is warm and salty and just as flavorful as you remembered it, the tender ribs and pork, the tangy aftertaste of lotus. It tastes like every sick day you had as a child, of your sister’s cool hands on your forehead, of every cold night during winter where the two of you sat together by a fire and leaned on each other. You have not let yourself feel how much you’ve missed her, even now, as your eyes keep wandering at the spot where she left, going back inside to get changed. You do not let yourself feel it because if you did, the pain would be unbearable. So you tell the story while standing apart from yourself. It is the only way to make it through.
“I wouldn’t leave a drop behind even if you paid me,” you say cheerily, with your mouth full, because you know it annoys your brother. “The things Shijie makes never taste anything short of Heaven. Heaven, Jiang Cheng.”
“You’ve got no idea what Heaven’s like,” your brother answers immediately, frown etched into his face. His hands are still clenched on his lap, but the back and forth seems to have unwinded something in him.
You take another noisy slurp, watch his eyes twitch. “Well neither do you,” you say. “Unless you’ve died before but never told me.” You gasp dramatically, clutching at your chest. “Are you dead, Jiang Cheng? Did I unknowingly summon your ghost?”
“Stop being stupid!” Your brother barks out.
“Ooh, nice alliteration,” you say. “How long did it take you to come up with that? About a week? Two?”
As your brother does his level best not to throttle you, you smile brightly and try not to think about how you have died before and never told anyone. You think Wen Qing might know, since you sleep near each other and even in dreams, you’re loud, but the words have never come out of your mouth. Too much time has passed now, and you’re not sure it would make a difference. Or a good difference, anyway. It’d do nothing but break your sister’s heart, if she knew, and you hate causing her pain. You do not need to add any bodies to your brother’s nightmares.
Your brother manages to swallow whatever he’d been wanting to yell, settling. You’re almost proud. There are guards surrounding this building, you know, both to protect you and your siblings from others, or, as they most likely expect, to protect your siblings from you. It’s almost laughable. What a reputation, the one you’ve garnered. It manages to sound both exactly and nothing like you.
“I’ve never understood your whole thing about the damn soup,” your brother mumbles, eyes straying away from you. “Sure everything jiejie makes is amazing, but lotus pork and rib soup is almost as base as rice.”
You lower your spoon, though you haven’t finished. Your stomach feels tight; it’s been a long time since you’ve eaten this much, and you don’t know how well this body of yours will take to being full. You run your tongue over the back of your teeth, thoughtful. You have had the taste of blood in your mouth too many times to count. Most of the time the blood was yours, but not always. There is nothing on the Burial Mounds, after all. The only thing it has, other than ghosts, are the bodies where they came from.
“When people are hungry enough,” you say, very lightly, “they will eat anything.”
Your brother narrows his eyes at you. You know the implications of your words, but your brother has never been good at accepting unacceptable things, regardless of how often the unspeakable happens. He’ll try to convince himself, first, that there is no way you could possibly mean what he thought you meant; then, when he does not manage to make you confess to it, he will scream and rage and throw things, before storming out to be by himself. Only after that will he come back, meek and furiously tear-stained, to quietly say whatever he wants to say.
Or maybe it’s something he would have done once. You have known him best as a child, but neither of you are children anymore.
Your sister comes back before he manages to open his mouth, though, so whatever might have happened is lost. She smiles at you, sitting down next to your brother, not a sliver of tension to be seen on her frame. She is both a great actress and remarkable in the art of being unafraid; when you first saw her today, she’d been standing with her head high, dressed in her wedding robes, beaming at the sight of you. The wedding itself is not for another month or so — you know because you received the invitation, and they came for you because they knew you would not go.
A part of you was afraid your sister would feel slighted at your absence, although the only time you’ve ever seen her mad was the one time when Jin Zixuan (her fiancé! The very man she’s marrying! For shame!) humiliated her, back when they were all disciples at Cloud Recesses. You only remember because punching the bastard in the face was what got you sent home early, but your sister’s face was also one for the books. If you hadn’t intervened, she’d probably have broken his nose herself.
But your siblings came for you, because they knew you would not be able to attend. For your safety, Shijie had said. She had not said, and for everyone else’s, too, but you can’t be fully sure she hadn’t thought it. In her place, you would have.
She is back in her normal robes again, still the Yunmeng Jiang lilac she’s worn their entire lives. She will have to change into Lanling Jin gold and off-white the moment she marries, and you’re distantly glad you probably won’t see her after this, so you won’t have to get used to the sight. You’d rather keep what you already have of hers.
“A-Xian,” she says, warmly. “I hope the soup is still to your liking?”
You beam at her, eyes crinkling. “As if you could do anything that wasn’t, A-Jie.”
She laughs, the sound bright like a bell, and reaches out to squeeze your hand. When she touches you, you flinch, opposite hand abruptly letting go of the spoon. The sound it makes as it hits the bowl is too loud for the mostly empty patio, but it isn’t louder than the sudden rush of blood in your ears, than the muted horror in your siblings eyes. You do not know what they see in your face, and you don’t notice for a few long moments (in which you’re trying to catch your breath) that the look in their faces is due to the black swirls of resentful energy crawling up your arms, around Chenqing, tight like vines.
They always come out when your emotions soar. You spend most of your days in a lukewarm sort of mood, because the only way to live through something that seems unsurvivable is to keep a level head. You’re usually got a pretty good grip on the energy the Burial Mounds infused to your bones, but you don’t control it any more than it controls you. When you grow agitated or angry or scared — waking up from a nightmare or being grabbed from behind, standing on too great a height or forgetting anything’s changed, looking over your shoulder to say something to someone who isn’t there — they burst out of your skin, licking it like cold flames. They gather around Chenqing, making your fingers itch to play. You have grown used to beautiful melodies telling you terrible things.
But your siblings do not know this. As far as they can tell, this — demonic cultivation — is something you’ve chosen. They don’t know your motive, your reason for running, why you will not let anyone hold your wrists, where you spent those three months during the Sunshot Campaign, why you went to the Burial Mounds, why you never picked up Suibian again. They don’t know the Burial Mounds are somewhere you went back to. They don’t know that there is no core inside your gut to keep you from falling apart, and your bones have been stitched together by ghosts.
You breathe. You swallow the bile in your throat. You smile shakily at your sister, and pretend you do not see the heartbreak on her face. “Aish, A-Jie,” you say, not an ounce of trembling in your voice. “Warn a guy next time! You almost led me to an early grave.”
Shijie frowns, her lips thin. “I would never,” she says, oddly serious. Your brother is looking at the both of you with a childlike sort of helplessness, like he did as a kid when his parents fought over dinner when you were younger. “You know I would never hurt you, A-Xian.”
“Of course I do,” you say. Of course you do. You have never doubted it.
She does not look convinced. “Maybe you do,” she says, hesitantly squeezing your hand once more before letting go. Your skin tingles at the loss . “But perhaps your body has forgotten.”
“That’s what you get for living in a death landscape,” your brother mumbles. Shijie slaps his shoulder with an admonishing A-Cheng!, like she’s afraid they’ll offend you by saying a word about how you live, but it just makes you crack a smile. You don’t feel any more settled into your own skin, still somewhere not quite here, but it’s easy to fall back into step with your siblings. The three of you were supposed to always be together, as Shijie once said. It’s not their fault you messed it all up, but at least they’ve still got each other.
“Don’t mind, A-Jie,” you tell her. You turn to look at your brother, raising a brow. “I do live in a death landscape, Jiang Cheng,” you say. “Ghosts! Resentful energy! The odd rotten body here and there! Lots of crows. Like, lots of crows. Everywhere.” You grimace. The crow conundrum is one you and Wen Qing have been at work trying to figure out a solution, because the crows keep stealing your turnips, but they don’t need to know that. “I never said I liked the death landscape, only that I live in it.”
“You could come home,” your sister says. with no trace of hesitation, almost suddenly, as if she’s been holding it in the entire time. Her eyes are wide and earnest, looking at you, and you love her so much. You love her even more because you know she means it, even if it’s one of the worst things that have ever come out of her mouth. “You could always come home, A-Xian.”
You feel your lips twitch. “No,” you answer. “No, I couldn’t.”
If you are hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Most times, you feel like it’s your heart that’s eating away at you. It is leaving no trace behind. Since there is no core inside you, sometimes it feels like there’s nothing else, too. If it weren’t for the occasional nosebleeds, you’d think your skin was hollow. You do not know where you are going from here, only that here is inescapable, because here is a prison you’ve created for yourself. The Burial Mounds are a chrysalis, but you will never become anything other than a worm. Anytime you go anywhere, you feel disconnected, an observer in a world that wants nothing to do with you other than make a myth out of your wrongdoing. You feel rotten inside; in your lifetime, you’ve gone from shining disciple of an important sect to Yiling-laozu, the one who drives people insane with a tune and makes himself sick with longing, and the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay. If everyone’s lucky, there’ll be nothing left in the end.
Your brother opens his mouth, probably to yell at you for being stupid, but your sister raises a hand to silence him. “Don’t,” she says, sounding a bit tired. “This is supposed to be a happy reunion. let’s not push any boundaries, alright, A-Cheng?”
He sulks for exactly a second before a withering glare from Shijie makes him mutter a Yes, jiejie. You smile at the sight. You are trying to imagine if this scene would look any different if you weren’t in it. You feel you’re haunting a family instead of being a part of it.
Maybe that’s what their mother meant when she said you would never be a Jiang, when she kept you from referring to your brother and sister the way real siblings would refer to each other. You’re the kind of person who needs to be told things to know them, but you only need to be told once.
“Right,” you say, pleasantly. One hand is drumming fingers on the surface of the table, and the other is holding onto Chenqing. Across the courtyard, a guard is glaring at him, grasping the hilt of their sword. You sigh a little. You’re tired of this — of being surrounded by so many cultivators whose skin wouldn’t even break where being pierced would kill you, and still being considered the most dangerous thing around, like a wild animal. You can see it even on your siblings’ faces, that hesitance, the unwillingness to push. Your brother has never held back with you before, but now he looks at you as if he’s trying to remember how to recognize you.
Lan Zhan is the only person who hasn’t changed when it comes to this, despite what your dreams told you before. He still looks at you the same way he’s done for years, since the contempt leaked out of his expression one cheeky flirtation and life-or-death situation at a time. He looks at you like he’s glad he gets to see you again, each time. He looks at you not like you’re the Yiling Patriarch, not like you’re Wei Wuxian, spat from the mouth of every sect leader at least once. He looks at you like you’re Wei Ying. You look at him like he’s Lan Zhan. It almost makes you want to tell this story differently, to go back.
But you do not. You reach for the white bottle on the table, the one you’d noticed but hadn’t had the courage to point out yet, unsure if you’d be welcome. A part of you is afraid to drink it, that you’ll taste the drink and do something stupid like moan or burst into tears, because this is Gusu Emperor’s Smile. You recognize the pearl blue details near the top of the bottle, the weight of it in your hand. You haven’t had it in years.
Looking at it reminds you of the moonlight in Cloud Recesses. It reminds you of being a kid, with a core burning inside. It hurts so much you don’t even think you’re able of saying anything, but as always, you do anyway.
You reach for the bottle, for the glasses, pour three drinks. Your brother is watching you with a face that wants to break out into a wry smile. Your sister is smiling softly, even though her eyes are unbearably sad.
“Just one?” you say, trying not to sound too hopeful. You push the glasses towards each of them. “For old time’s sake?”
You don’t say, let’s do it for the love that used to be here. You don’t say, I hope it still is . You don’t say, please.
Your brother raises his glass in lieu of an answer. Your sister clicks her tongue, the way she did when she caught the two of you drunk in Lotus Pier, barely months into having their own courtesy names and daring each other to jump into the lakes. You drink.
For a moment, you’re fifteen again. You’re sitting at the back of the Cloud Recesses dormitories, your brother grimacing at the bitter taste of alcohol, you laughing at his face, both of you pushing each other’s shoulders. Then, quite abruptly, you realize you will never be fifteen again, and the sorrow you feel is so dense you nearly choke on it.
But you’re fine. You’re always fine. If you’re hollow without a core, you can’t be anything else but fine. So you let the taste curl on your tongue and down your chest, and you think of Lan Zhan’s lips, and you think of an ending to this story. It always seems to be near without ever arriving. It always seems to pull at your skin and try to drag you six feet under.
The last time you talk to your siblings, you miss about a thousand chances to say something that could have changed the outcome. You miss another thousand to break down into tears and have Shijie ask you what’s wrong — and you would tell her, because you could have never done otherwise. You miss the chance to live a little longer, to keep your sister alive, to not leave your little brother alone.
But in turn, your sister does not ask you what is wrong. She does not ask you to stay, not really, and so you don’t, because she hasn’t said it. Your brother does not get to know what you mean about being hungry, and therefore he does not find the truth about the Burial Mounds and the core transfer and everything else, and when you die he will think you did it all on purpose. But he does not ask you to stay either, and so when the sun begins dipping on the horizon, you tell them you want to go back before it gets too dark.
They think maybe you’re happier where you are. They do not notice you didn’t refer to where you’re staying as home, just that you had to go back. If you ever broke enough and managed to say the words I want to go home (which you find yourself incapable of, at this point, so stitched together you’re stretched thin), there are only two things you could be referring to: Lotus Pier or Lan Zhan. But they do not notice. You leave.
The next time you see your sister, she will die. The next time you see your brother, he won’t kill you, but at the end of the day it will be as if he had.
(Here’s the thing: Jiang Cheng hates Wei Wuxian for all he did and failed to do. Here’s the thing: the only thing Jiang cheng hates more than Wei Wuxian is himself. Here’s the thing: Jiang Cheng spends sixteen years half-opening his mouth, glancing behind his shoulder, waiting for a witty comment or a muffled giggle, and he cannot stop missing his brother like a little kid.
Here’s the thing: does Jiang Cheng hate Wei Wuxian because he truly believes him to have killed A-Jie, or does he hate him for leaving him alone? Are little brothers responsible for their big brothers? Could Jiang Cheng have done something different?
Am I my brother’s keeper? asks his brother’s murderer. Aren’t we indeed the keepers of our dead?
Wei Wuxian is gone. Jiang Cheng is not. Some nights, in his dreams, Jiang Cheng kills him, over and over again. In others, he is helping him sneak a jar of Emperor’s Smile into their living quarters. In others, he is teaching him how to swim. In others, he wakes up suddenly, as if someone had yelled him awake, and expects to hear his brother whimpering in a nightmare, just across the room. In others, he dreams of summer, and the sunlight dyeing Lotus Pier honey-gold, and fingers sticky with sugar, and his siblings’ laughter.
But some nights, Jiang Cheng kills Wei Wuxian. Good. Maybe this way he’ll never forgive him. Maybe now he’ll never leave him alone.)
The world was never gentle. You float back to the Burial Mounds, the graveyard, the place where everything will be back under the earth one day. When Wen Qing asks you how it went, you give her a thin-lipped smile. Then you go into the place in the cave where you keep your inventions, and you stay awake for three days.
v.
He comes for Wei Wuxian days before it all falls apart.
Wei Wuxian won’t really remember how much time before, how close of how far away it’d been, on account of the fact that he’s pretty sure back then he’d been running on exactly zero hours of sleep and an energetic blend he’d crafted with herbs and a bit of Wen Qing’s special cultivation magic. She hates when he calls what she does magic, but it’s the sort of revenge he’s found about not being able to cultivate anymore: mock the act of cultivating. Really, it’s her fault for helping him at all. She also hates that he sleeps as little as humanly possible, and has been known once or twice to paralyze him to sleep, which is unethical and just plain rude, but she’d been surprisingly lenient when Wei Wuxian asked her for help on brewing it. Something about “making sure he doesn’t poison himself”, or whatever.
Honestly! Yiling-laozu! Grandmaster of demonic cultivation! As in, he literally invented a form of cultivation, because he’s a goddamn genius. He wouldn’t accidentally poison himself. The lack of faith is baffling.
It’s a bit hard to fully believe in all those titles seeing that the moment he hears Lan Zhan’s voice, Wei Wuxian stands up from his work desk (read: slab of stone) too fast and almost faints because he hasn’t eaten anything more than one serving of watery stew for the past two days. He sees stars, goes hot and cold, the whole thing. But he ultimately does not faint, which counts as a win in his book.
But Lan Zhan is here. Lan Zhan shouldn’t be here. Wei Wuxian blinks really hard for a few moments, just to see if maybe the image will melt away with the shadows cast by the torches along the walls, but it doesn’t seem to work. He’s just there, all tall and proud in his clean Lan clothes and the silver ornament in his hair, hand resting on Bichen. He never looks any different, regardless of how much time passes. The familiarity, to Wei Wuxian — who’s pretty sure he wouldn’t recognize his own face twice over the course of a week — is both comforting and unsettling.
Unsettling because Lan Zhan looks wrong, in this place. The Demon Subdue Palace is only a palace in title, because it is in reality a glorified cavern at most. It’s dark and damp and it smells metallic due to the blood pool — which is, you know, not an actual pool of blood, conceptually. It’s just… water with bad stuff in it. Bad, bad stuff. Resentment, the odd exorcized ghost, leftover energy from failed talismans. Bad stuff. So it looks like and smells like and has the consistency of blood, but it’s not actual blood. Wei Wuxian likes to be very emphatic on that point. It’s not real blood. He wouldn’t even know where to get enough blood to fill a whole pool, because in spite of what the rumors say about him, he doesn’t kill people.
Well. He has killed people. Conceptually. He prefers the words driving people to their death, because at the end of the day, it’s like, would those people have died if he hadn’t been there? Probably not. But he also never laid a finger on them, so is he really a murderer? It’s all a matter of perspective, really. Hiding behind technicalities can keep anyone sane.
Wei Wuxian doesn’t like the way the shadows fall on Lan Zhan here. It makes him look so pale, even paler than usual, almost sickly. He doesn’t like to think about Lan Zhan being sick.
And he needs to say something. He’s been silent for too long. Lan Zhan never starts conversations.
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian exclaims, feeling clammy, running his hands through his hair. He tends to keep it up most days, but the fumes inside of here keep it frizzy regardless of what he does. “You’re… here?”
Lan Zhan blinks, as if he’s not sure what to make of the questioning tone. Wei Wuxian squints in his general direction, then glances behind him, where Wen Qing had come in quietly and is currently gathering up some stuff from her work desk (read: another slab of stone.)
“Wen Qing,” Wei Wuxian calls out, letting his narrowed gaze go back to Lan Zhan’s figure. “Exactly how long without sleep does one need to go before they start hallucinating?”
“A week to nine days,” Wen Qing replies without lifting her head. She takes one of the vials on her desk and sniffs it, then does the same to another five as she piles them up in one hand. “I’m sure you could get there with enough strength of will. No one is rooting for you, they’re just kind of impressed it hasn’t happened already.”
“Ah,” Wei Wuxian says, nodding. He is also impressed it hasn’t happened already. Wen Qing and her paralyzing needles always find him somewhere around day six. But that does bring him back to the fact that, “So Lan Zhan is… here.”
“I am,” Lan Zhan says. It’s the first he’s spoken since he arrived, and Wei Wuxian shivers a little at the sound of his voice. It’s been too long, even if they’ve seen each other more recently than Wei Wuxian has seen any other cultivator apart from his siblings. He’s missed him.
A part of him hates how Lan Zhan makes him feel present, more settled, when most of the time it feels like he’s standing inside his own body and watching it go through the motions. Another part of him is standing on shaking knees, trying to remember its edges, and feeling a bit of warmth thaw its chest.
Wei Wuxian beams at Lan Zhan. “Hi.”
Lan Zhan doesn’t smile back, but his eyes are warm. “Wei Ying.”
Wei Ying. He always says it like Hello, like How are you, like I hope you’ve been doing well, like It has been too long, way too long, like I am glad to see you again. He always says it like Lan Zhan. No one else has called him by the name his parents gave him, not since before he received a courtesy name; even then, he was always Wei-gongzi, A-Ying, the way children are called. Once he turned fifteen, it was always Wei Wuxian, or in Shijie’s case, A-Xian. Never anything else.
Wei Wuxian looks at Lan Zhan for another few moments, just drinking in the sight of him. Wei Wuxian’s work desk is somewhere in the very back at the cave and Lan Zhan is still awkwardly standing by the entrance, so he walks forward to meet him; even dizzy with missed meals and the underlying unknown sickness or other, he’s so used to pacing back and forth on this ground he doesn’t even stumble.
And then, right before he gets close enough to touch, Wei Wuxian quite abruptly remembers he probably looks like a mess, where Lan Zhan is all composed and gorgeous and perfect, and he quickly tries to tug his hair into an appropriate updo, hiding the oily and unkempt strands the best he can, while also smoothing out the front of his robe. He’s so glad he wears black all the time so no one can see how it’s probably stained with dirt and soot and whatever else.
He’s flustered. He feels all bashful, like a giggling schoolgirl. He hasn’t been flustered in what feels like years.
Lan Zhan is still looking, and Wei Wuxian, upon giving up on fixing what he cannot, can’t do anything but bite his lip. “Hi,” he says again.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Wen Qing. “Why are you being shy? That’s weird. That’s really fucking weird, stop doing that.”
“Rude,” Wei Wuxian says, straightening the ribbon on his hair. “That’s just what my face looks like.”
She drops all the vials and a bit of scrap paper into her carrying bag, which she’d exchanged for a few radishes in Yiling a few weeks ago. She’s probably going near the stream to do a bit of research (he wishes he knew on what, but she won’t tell), and Wei Wuxian finds himself a little weak at the knees at the thought of being alone with Lan Zhan. “My fault for letting him in,” Wen Qing says, jabbing a thumb in Lan Zhan’s direction. “Can’t believe I forgot what the two of you are like when you get together.”
Lan Zhan tilts his head in questioning. “What we are like?”
Wen Qing’s jaw suddenly goes tense, like she hadn’t expected to be addressed directly. She gives Lan Zhan a wary look, holding her bag closer to her side. She’s never been relaxed around other cultivators, and after what’s happened to her family, Wei Wuxian can’t blame her. “Infuriating,” she says, in a flat tone. Lan Zhan looks adorably confused.
Suddenly, something clicks. “Wait,” Wei Wuxian says, turning an accusing look on her. “You let him in? That’s why I didn’t feel the wards?”
Wen Qing shrugs. “I caught him just on the edge of them and told him to stop stalling. I did figure you wouldn’t feel him passing, though.”
“Why?” Wei Wuxian asks, going for playful, but his mind is already thinking about the faults in design — if he felt nothing now, he can’t even be sure this is the first time someone has gotten through without him noticing, and that means there could be someone out there right now, waiting, learning their routine, and—
A sharp sigh cuts him off from spiraling. It’s an ingrained response at this point, snapping to attention whenever Wen Qing sounds aggravated. She crosses her arms, eyebrows raised. “Wei Wuxian,” she says, as if she’s speaking to a toddler. “The wards are meant to keep unwanted people out. You designed the spell for that purpose.”
Wei Wuxian blinks. “Yes?” he says.
“You make me want to walk into the woods and never be seen again,” Wen Qing replies. She gestures in Lan Zhan’s direction, almost hitting him on the arm. Lan Zhan watches her hand like a kitten fascinated by the reflection of light through a seeing glass. “The spell keeps unwanted people out.”
“Yes,” Wei Wuxian agrees, more certain this time. “That tracks.”
“You want him, you fucking idiot,” Wen Qing says.
Wei Wuxian chokes on his own breath. He sees Lan Zhan jolt from the corner of his eye, startled by the force of his coughs, but though they’re already within touching distance, he raises a hand to stop him from coming any closer. Doubled over, he knows the first thing Lan Zhan would do upon reaching him would be checking on his spiritual energy levels, see if he’s sick. And Wei Wuxian doesn’t have spiritual energy on his veins anymore, just rot, just resentment, and it does make him sick in other ways that Lan Zhan can’t know. So he raises a hand, trusting that Lan Zhan will follow along, knowing he will.
“Qing-jie,” he wheezes out. Coughing always makes his insides feel like they’re rattling, still unused to the empty space inside. He tastes a bit of metal and quickly swallows, glaring at Wen Qing through teary eyes. “A little warning would have been nice.” He coughs one more for good measure, bracing his hands on his knees before straightening up with a huff. “And they call me shameless.”
“Oh, boo-hoo,” says Wen Qing. She’s always so charming.
“You are shameless,” Lan Zhan chimes in. His expression hasn’t changed a single bit, carefully flat — Wei Wuxian can tell it’s to mask the alarm he’d felt a few moments before. Wei Wuxian steps back a little, under the guise of gathering himself.
“No, you’re shameless,” Wei Wuxian says, pointing at the two of them. They’re ganging up on him. He wants to make them stop. “Saying these kinds of things out of the blue, heedless of my poor heart, no mercy to be found!”
“I’m not nice nor merciful,” Wen Qing says easily.
Wei Wuxian pouts. “Yeah, but I am, so I do try to give you the benefit of a doubt every once in a while.”
Wen Qing raises a brow, arms crossed. “That ever work out for you?”
“Well, no,” Wei Wuxian says. He’s about to say something else when he catches Lan Zhan’s eye, and it fills him to the brim with so much emotion that the words turn to water on his mouth and he has to swallow them.
Lan Zhan is looking at them — at the back and forth with Wen Qing, so familiar now that Wei Wuxian hardly ever realizes he’s stopped what he’s doing to talk to her, both trying to counter each other’s wit — with… warmth. That’s the word. Wei Wuxian is sure pretty much no one else would be able to tell, but for him it’s unmistakable, how soft Lan Zhan’s features are, even in this horrid place, even through the flickering light. He feels himself doing something like it in return, his insides going gooey and melty as he looks back. He’s so cold all the time, but now he barely notices it.
Wen Qing gags. “You two need to sort your shit out,” she says, vehemently, before turning around and stalking out the door (read: slab of stone, but bigger) without so much as a backwards glance. Her steps echo, and it feels like it takes her much longer to leave than it actually does.
Lan Zhan watches her go. “Wen-guniang was not like this,” he says. “Before.”
Wei Wuxian lets out a little laugh. It echoes through the cave, somehow feeling noticeably emptier with only two people instead of three. “You mean at Cloud Recesses?” he says, for clarification. Of course he knows what Lan Zhan means (he may use as few words as he can to get the point across, but he always makes himself clear), but it helps to make conversation. Wei Wuxian shifts the weight on his legs. “Well, she could hardly afford to be. She was a Wen — she is a Wen — and she was only welcomed through threat and formality. Everyone assumed she and Wen Ning were spies; if she didn’t hold her tongue, they would’ve thought she was violent as well.”
There’s a small flinch at the mention of Wen Ning’s name, but Lan Zhan makes no indication he’ll follow that as a line of questioning. Distantly, Wei Wuxian is glad. He’s thankful Lan Zhan can still manage to be so civil and so kind to him, even after all that’s happened, but he doesn’t want to push it with an anecdote on necromancy.
Instead, Lan Zhan shifts his weight slightly, too, as if he’s anxious about something. In the dim light, he looks like something straight out of a bard’s tale — the hero come to the villain’s lair, standing proudly between the ruins and cracked pieces of damp rock. His posture is perfect, his stance steady, hand resting on the hilt of his sword; he’s Hanguang-jun, the one who goes where the chaos is. Enveloped with light, even in shadows. In front of him stands the Yiling-laozu, the whisper of a cautionary tale, the first cultivator to ever master and practice demonic cultivation. The dark arts, as some elders say.
Listen, Wei Wuxian doesn’t find much fault in his title. It simply states his place of origin where he established himself as a grandmaster — and it aches quietly, that people are starting to forget he’s from Yunmeng, that he was raised on those streets with the heavy summer heat and burning smell of chili oil, that his accent drags the syllables along where in others’ mouths it they stay sharp, but it’s so silent it’s barely a whisper. He’s known as something, which he knows not many monsters get. There’s a lot of power to be hidden behind a title. The abhorrence is inseparable from the reverence.
It’s flattering, really. But it stands to the point that while Wei Wuxian is named for fear, Lan Zhan is named for his integrity. They’re diametrically opposed, on every level, except that they’re really, really not. Because Lan Zhan looks at him and still sees Wei Ying.
Lan Zhan shifts his weight once more. If it were anyone else, Wei Wuxian would call him skittish. As it is, Lan Zhan is perfectly composed when he says, “And Wei Ying would know.” He pauses, searching for something in Wei Wuxian’s eyes. “About behaving a certain way, due to others’ assumptions.”
Wei Wuxian closes his eyes. He heaves a sigh before opening them again, suddenly feeling tired all the way to his bones. “What are you doing here, Lan Zhan?”
He doesn’t get an answer at first, not that he expected one. He knows Lan Zhan speaks so little because he isn’t good with words, and most of his silence is just him trying to figure out a way to say what he means, how he means. It doesn’t stop Wei Wuxian’s heart from jackrabbiting in his chest, teeth worrying at his cracked lips. He holds his arms crossed over his chest until he absolutely has to move, cracking his knuckles and bouncing a bit on the back of his feet. He doesn’t — he doesn’t think it’s anything bad or urgent, like something about his siblings’ well-being or an imminent threat to the Wen, because otherwise it would have been the first thing out of Lan Zhan’s mouth. But Wei Wuxian also can’t fathom an unimportant motive for Lan Zhan to be here, because the whole thing about him living separated from society in a death landscape serves the purpose of him staying away from people.
It’s not about being isolated. He lives in a very small clearing with thirty-something people and a toddler, so he’s hardly alone; and he’s always liked people, always been the annoying social butterfly of the bunch wherever he went. It’s not like he’d left for his own benefit.
(For once, the voice sneers in his head. Selfish boy. )
“Jin Zixuan and Jin Yanli’s son,” Lan Zhan starts, slowly. There’s a strange intensity to his words. “Your nephew.”
Wei Wuxian’s chest twinges with pain. “My nephew,” he echoes, trying not to falter. He covers it up with a cheeky smile. “Aish, Lan Zhan. A-Jie’s name will always be Jiang Yanli, no matter what color her robes.”
Lan Zhan almost smiles at that. His stance softens a little, mouth tracing up. “Jiang Yanli,” he echoes dutifully. “There will be a celebration, for the first month anniversary of her son’s birth.”
“As it’s been known to happen for centuries,” Wei Wuxian teases, just for the kick of it. He hasn’t seen the kid since he was born; Shijie asked him to choose a courtesy name for him, which he did, but it’ll only start being used after his coming-of-age ceremony, at fifteen. Wei Wuxian doesn’t know the kid’s birth name, and he refused to use Jin for someone who’s clearly a Jiang. “Did you really have to come all this way to inform me of that, Lan Zhan? I already knew.”
“Word is,” Lan Zhan continues, as if he hasn’t heard, “that an invitation will be sent out to all the sect leaders.” Wei Wuxian nods, still not following. Lan Zhan fixes him with a level stare. “Which includes Wei Ying.”
Wei Wuxian lets out an involuntary laugh, waving a hand to dismiss the thought. Really, this man! “I’m not a sect leader,” he reminds him. “No need to worry your pretty little head about it, Lan Zhan, no invitation will come to my big slab of stone. I mean, my door.”
But Lan Zhan looks unmoored, even as the tips of his ears go red. He can’t take a compliment to save his life, honestly. It’s not like he doesn’t know Wei Wuxian thinks he’s pretty, or like Wei Wuxian has never said it out loud before. It’s a bit endearing.
“There was a meeting,” Lan Zhan says, shifting again. He does look nervous now, and Wei Wuxian frowns as he watches him. His hand closes around Chenqing, just for comfort. “Called forth by Jiang Yanli. Your sister.” Lan Zhan pauses. “She insisted that you’d be allowed to attend, since you are her family, even if not by blood, and since the only thing that separates you from the position of sect leader is title only.” He tilts his head, staring hard at Wei Wuxian. “Maybe I should have used the word demanded instead of insisted.”
“I’m not going,” Wei Wuxian says, after a few seconds of silence. He’s breathless, palms clammy, Lan Zhan’s voice echoing in his ears. He doesn’t even know what to focus on: how thrilled he is that his sister wants him there, she said she wants him there, she called him family — how delighted he would be to meet his nephew, to hold his tiny hand in one finger, to see Shijie and Jiang Cheng again. How the mere thought of stepping out of the Burial Mounds in the direction of Lanling Jin makes cold terror course through his bones, his ears ring, his throat go tight. He laughs, absurdly, feeling faint. “Lan Zhan, I’m not going. I — they didn’t agree, right? The other sects, they — they told Shijie it was a dumb, impossible, stupid idea, to let me attend, right?”
He knows he sounds desperate; he probably looks it too. Lan Zhan is watching him carefully. “They did not,” he says. “Jin Zixuan backed her demand. Guilty or not, Wei Wuxian is still family, he said.” Lan Zhan huffs a breath. “They can never settle on what Wei Ying is guilty for,” he comments, almost as an afterthought, “just that he is.”
Of course I am guilty, Wei Wuxian wants to say, but finds that he can’t. He’s guilty of so many things he can scarcely put them into one coherent sentence. He feels guilty. Most of all, he feels unforgivable, which is worse. His guilt has hardened into a rock in his chest, where it sits and scrapes against his lungs, aching whenever he breathes too deeply. Oftentimes, when he’s brought down to his knees by an illness or other — he’s chronically sick, at this point; his body was born with a core and therefore has only managed to survive without one, not adapt to it — he thinks if he coughs hard enough it might come tumbling out of his mouth, like a broken tooth. He searches for absolution in the blood that falls from his lips, on his knees against the stone under his hand as he crouches, hidden away where the Wen can’t see him, where A-Yuan won’t find him. Shakes apart on Wen Qing’s hand and sweats off a fever for days on end under her ministrations, caught with a thing or other. He searches for forgiveness, even knowing he won’t find it, like poking at a wound just to see if it’ll still hurt.
It doesn’t matter if he’s guilty or not, he wants to tell Lan Zhan, because regardless of that, he will not be forgiven. Maybe it’s for helping the Wen, for going against Jin Guangshan, for his cultivation or lack thereof. Maybe they truly do think him evil for learning how to harness resentful energy, and Wei Wuxian can hardly fault them for that. He’s done terrible things, monstrous things. He has made a man tear his own hair off and eat his own flesh in terror. There are people who will never be sane again because of him. There are people who he’s killed. He — he had to survive, in the Burial Mounds. He’d been so hungry he thought he was going to die, and there were — there were bones. He’s been telling himself they could have belonged to anything. He’s been telling himself.
What would Lan Zhan do, if he told him? He doesn’t even have to say a thing about the core transfer, not — he can’t say anything about that, it’s the one thing he can’t do, but what if he just told Lan Zhan about where he spent those three months? About Wen Chao, about the Burial Mounds, about the things he’s done? Wei Wuxian likes to think Lan Zhan wouldn’t hate him for it. He’d think him weak, certainly. Maybe list all the things Wei Wuxian could have done differently, even if he’d be polite enough not to say them out loud. Maybe, and most likely, he’d be disgusted.
Wei Wuxian doesn’t even know if he’d be able to tell him. Physically able, he means. He’s never had to put it into coherent words, because he’s never told it to anyone. Wen Qing is the one who knows the most, but only because she was there for most of it, and picked up the rest on context cues. She’s never asked. He’s always been thankful for it.
“Oh, Lan Zhan,” is what he says instead. He smiles, falters, tries to smile again. His eyes are very dry. His nails are digging into his arms, but the sting keeps him present. “It doesn’t — it doesn’t matter whether I’m guilty or not. At this point, it wouldn’t even matter if I turned the Wen in tomorrow, gave up on demonic cultivation forever and kissed Jin Guangshan’s feet. I’d still be the Yiling-laozu. I would still be…” Wei Wuxian trails off under Lan Zhan’s stare. He knows what he is. He does not want to say it out loud. “I would still be what I am,” he settles on. He watches the shadows cast by his own figure, all too dark and long.
“What you are,” Lan Zhan echoes. His jaw tenses. “Wei Ying.”
Wei Wuxian blinks. “Yes?”
“What you are,” Lan Zhan says again. “You are Wei Ying.”
It’s such a Lan Zhan answer that Wei Wuxian throws his head back and laughs, suddenly disarmed. This ridiculous, ridiculous man. It’s been years, but Wei Wuxian likes him so much. He still likes him so much. His laughter has to be part nerves and hysteria, but it’s mostly amusement, and he laughs until it fades off into breathless giggling, eyes teary with mirth. He wipes them with the back of his sleeve, still smiling in that thoughtless way when you don’t even notice you’re doing it, and finds that Lan Zhan is closer than he was a minute ago. He must’ve stepped forward while Wei Wuxian was distracted, because while they’re not yet chest to chest, they could touch each other without even fully reaching their arms.
And the way Lan Zhan looks at him is so warm. Wei Wuxian never noticed the gradual change — because he’s sure the only thing he made Lan Zhan feel when they were fifteen was annoyed, and he can’t see his life objectively enough to be able to tell when that started changing. Maybe after the Xuánwǔ Cave? The indoctrination at Qishan Wen? Wei Wuxian has always had a faulty memory, when it comes down to it. He can’t recall when they became what they are to each other.
“That I am,” Wei Wuxian says, quietly. He can’t look away from Lan Zhan’s face, his hands twitching with want at his sides. “Still Wei Ying, to some. To you, mostly.” He grins, a small, wet thing. “To you only, probably.”
Lan Zhan’s voice is so quiet it’s almost a whisper. “Only?”
Wei Wuxian reaches out. He lifts his hand to Lan Zhan’s face, hovering without quite touching, fingers tracing the air around his cheek. He’s warm like a furnace, and Wei Wuxian’s hands have been cold for years now. He’s beautiful. His eyes, fixed on Wei Wuxian’s every move, are wide, wide, gray like a river cutting through a storm. Up this close, Wei Wuxian can see every twitch of the eyebrow, the exact shade of red his ears are turning, how his head ribbon is slightly crooked to the right, as if he’d come by in a hurry. The light from the torches on the walls covers them both half in shadow, half in light.
He runs his thumb under Lan Zhan’s eye, cupping his cheek, watching him shiver at the touch. Wei Wuxian knows how freezing his skin is these days. Kind of like a corpse, Wen Ning says. Kind of like mine. He tries not to think about it too much.
It’s warm. Lan Zhan tilts his head, leaning into Wei Wuxian’s hand as if seeking the contact, and it’s so tender Wei Wuxian almost lets out a sob. It’s a near thing, but in the end, he doesn’t. Instead he gives Lan Zhan a tiny little smile, before cupping the back of his head and pressing their foreheads together. The metal emblem of the Lan sect digs into his skin, but he pays it no mind.
“To you only,” he whispers into the silence between them. He thinks Lan Zhan might be holding his breath. Wei Wuxian thinks he might be too. He huffs, digging his fingers into Lan Zhan’s hair, pressing closer, still smiling, blinking through stinging eyes. “Lan Zhan,” he says. “Lan Zhan. Please, just — when everyone else forgets, please remember your Wei Ying, alright? I don’t — I don’t need anything else. Everyone else can forget, as long as you remember. I’d like to keep being Wei Ying to you, if you don’t mind.” His voice has grown shakier, but he doesn’t let any tears fall. “When you leave, this time, Lan Zhan, don’t come back.”
Lan Zhan tenses. Wei Wuxian goes to pull away first, looking askance so he doesn’t have to see the expression in Lan Zhan’s face, but before he can get far enough, Lan Zhan has reached back and is clutching at his wrist, keeping him in place.
Of course he was fast enough. He’s a master cultivator, one of the best of his generation — when Wei Wuxian touched him his skin was warm, but hard as stone; no ordinary blade would be able to pierce it. He has a core, and a reputation, and a sect, and a brother who loves him. Wei Wuxian has nothing. And Lan Zhan is holding his wrist.
That makes it worse.
Wei Wuxian must make some sort of sound, some kind of keen or whimper, because Lan Zhan looks alarmed and lets go immediately, stepping away as if from a wild animal. Wei Wuxian stumbles back, almost falling to the ground as he clutches his arm to his stuttering chest. He certainly feels like an animal, he thinks, wildly, crouching down and putting his head between his knees when he’s unable to catch his breath, just like Wen Qing taught him. Only a cornered one, a mangled and pathetic one. Not the kind of dog that used to growl and snap when Wei Wuxian lived in the streets of Yunmeng, whose bite marks still litter his body with scars, but the small and and sickly ones he’d find in the back alleys, skin and bones and whimpers and Wei Wuxian scrambled away from them from pure instinct instead of threat. He feels — he’s shaking. Shaking, shaking, and Lan Zhan is… speaking?
He is speaking, Wei Wuxian notes absently. His voice is low and soothing, constant; he’s speaking more words at a time than Wei Wuxian has heard him say in total since they’ve met. He can’t grasp what’s being said, but he can focus on the sound, the steadiness of it, so he does so, head still buried between his knees. He’s crouched low enough that a bit of the dampness of the ground seeps into his robes, but he’s beyond caring about their state at this point. He’s still grasping the arm Lan Zhan held, running his fingers over the phantom touch like a self-soothing toddler.
He’s so weak, but it was so close. The wrist is where one of the most important flows of spiritual energy lies in a cultivator; the meridians run through one’s entire body, and though the wrist isn’t the largest (that would be the stomach, where the core is), it has the easiest access. To check on someone’s spiritual levels, all you have to do is press two fingers to the pulse point and reach out — energy reacts to energy. Wei Wuxian has done it before, nervously checking whenever Shijie came down with a fever, or those nights when he’d find Jiang Cheng up in the early hours of the morning practicing in the courtyard after a particularly scathing commentary by Madam Yu during dinner. It’s a gesture of care. It can be done professionally, by a healer, but the action is more commonly seen as one of tenderness.
If a golden core is an ocean and the spiritual meridians are its affluent rivers, then Wei Wuxian’s body is a scenery of drought. If Lan Zhan were to reach for his energy, he’d find nothing. The only thing he has now is resentment, and it doesn’t flow through his body the same way; not even a master cultivator can properly sense it, for reasons Wei Wuxian doesn’t know. Demonic cultivation is an art that begins and ends with him. It’s all trial and error.
So if Lan Zhan were to hold his wrist and search for something, he would not find it. And then he would know, and that is nearly unbearable.
He doesn’t know how much time passes until he manages to lift his head again; the torches don’t dim or die out due to the talismans embedded in them, so the shadows remain the same. He aches all over as he moves, letting himself sit down when his legs aren’t strong enough to hold his weight. He almost doesn’t want to look at Lan Zhan, to be on the ground while he stands, because it’s such a vulnerable and degrading position to be in, but then he registers the bunched up robes in front of him, the pale blue slowly and surely getting dirtied by soil and moss.
Lan Zhan is kneeling. He’s sitting seiza position on the floor, hands braced on his thighs; he’d be the picture of composure if not for the way his robes are stained with earth, the almost wild look on his face — his eyes are wet and his eyebrows are scrunched up, and he looks so concerned. Wei Wuxian almost wants to ask him what’s wrong, to wipe the expression away from his face.
But Lan Zhan is kneeling. He brought himself down to Wei Wuxian’s eye level because Wei Wuxian couldn’t stand.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, stumbling over numb lips. He reaches out a hand, pulls it back before touching. “Lan Zhan, stand up, stand up, your — Lan Zhan, your robes, they’re all dirty now, this place is all dirty—”
“The robes can be washed,” Lan Zhan says calmly. He doesn’t move any closer, just leaning his head a bit forward, eyes wider than Wei Wuxian has ever seen them. “Wei Ying, you are not well. I would not…” He trails off. For a second, he looks a bit lost. “I would never hurt Wei Ying.”
Wei Wuxian closes his eyes. They’re stinging so bad, but nothing will come out of them, like his insides are dried up. “I know,” he whispers.
“You flinched,” Lan Zhan says. He doesn’t sound accusing, and it’s a bit disconcerting. There’s no We’ve known each other for years, and this is what you think of me? Just concern. “You panicked when I touched you, and pulled away.” Lan Zhan pauses. “You are scared.”
“Not of you,” Wei Wuxian blurts out. He opens his eyes, needing to make sure Lan Zhan understands that. “Not of you, Lan Zhan, I’ve never been scared of you, I couldn’t.”
“Wei Ying.” There is no judgment on Lan Zhan’s face, only open worry and what looks like underlying fondness. That last one hurts the most. “I did not think that. I only said you were scared.” Lan Zhan’s eyes run over his body, lips downturned. “You’re sick.”
Wei Wuxian smiles, helplessly. He’s been sick for years. He’s been nothing but sick for years, he’s been rotting standing up every single day since he crawled out of the Burial Mounds for the first time and killed Wen Chao. He’s been dead since the beginning.
But he can’t say that to Lan Zhan’s face, because it would kill him. Because they’ve been tied since Lan Yi’s cave, their wrists bound with the blue head ribbon, the tug always the same even after all this time. They are tied, but they cannot be inextricable from each other, because Lan Zhan is supposed to live. Yeah. He’s supposed to have a good life out there, cultivate himself into immortality, teach generations of Lan disciples with their fresh faces and eager eyes, bowing clumsily as he walks by. And Wei Wuxian is going to be forgotten eventually, and all that will remain of him is the Yiling-laozu and his fabled army of the dead.
“I’m alright, Lan-er-gege,” Wei Wuxian says, mouth trying to quirk up into a smile. “Thanks for worrying.”
“I will always worry about Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan answers, like Wei Wuxian knew he would. He smiles for real this time, trying to massage some feeling back into his lower legs. He stayed crouching for too long. Lan Zhan watches him for a few moments, before saying, “There are healers at Cloud Recesses.”
Wei Wuxian stops, hands on his shins. He knows what Lan Zhan is trying to suggest, and it’s such a foolish notion he plays along with it. “Oh, yeah?” He asks. “I do remember the infirmary back in the day. Nie Huaisang was prone to bouts of morning sickness, the poor thing.” Wei Wuxian smiles lopsidedly. “It was especially worse after nights of drinking.”
In a disheartening move, Lan Zhan does not take the bait. “Gusu Lan healers are the most sought out out of any sect,” he continues as if Wei Wuxian hadn’t spoken. “They are trustworthy and true to their practice.” He wets his lips, as if anxious. “I could take you there.”
“Sure you could,” Wei Wuxian says, airily, trying not to tense up. “You could do many things. Aish, Lan Zhan, come on.” He grins as brightly as he can. “Your precious Lan healers would take one look at me and have me sent in chains to stand trial at Jin Guangshan’s hand in the amount of time it’d take you to blink. Stand trial and be found guilty of my many crimes, of course.” Wei Wuxian chuckles, jabbing a thumb at himself. “Good ol’ Yiling-laozu, remember? I’m sure they’d throw in a few morality lessons about the ethics of practicing demonic cultivation, as well.”
Wei Wuxian aims for levity, hits bullseye at dark humor. He used to be known as the best marksman of his generation, but he supposes time does them all in.
There’s a tick in Lan Zhan’s jaw. He looks almost frustrated, and it’s oddly reminiscent of the first time Wei Wuxian got him to call him by his name, when he was supposed to be writing lines at the library in Cloud Recesses. If the tension weren’t so thick you could cut it with a knife, he might’ve even found space to be amused.
“They are healers,” Lan Zhan repeats. “They have sworn an oath of protection. They would not turn away anyone who sought help at their door, regardless of who it was.” His eyes flash. “Regardless of whether that person is the Yiling-laozu, or the Chief Cultivator himself.”
Wei Wuxian blinks, startled. He’s never heard Lan Zhan say his title before, he notes, and it sounds so odd in his mouth. It’s nothing like he says Wei Wuxian’s name: he sounds furious merely uttering it, voice dripping with contempt.
Well. As if Wei Wuxian needed any reminder than Lan Zhan might not hate who he is, but he does hate who he’s become. He smiles humorlessly at his own hands, nodding.
“Lan Zhan,” he says, lightly, “I will not go.”
The first flicker of true anger flashes through Lan Zhan’s face. “You will not go, and you ask me to leave,” he says, voice taut. “You will not explain, and yet you expect me not to question. Wei Ying,” and his voice always softens at that, “why should I go?”
Wei Wuxian almost screams. He hurts all over, like his whole body is a wound. “Because you can’t stay,” he says, stressing the words. “You have a life. It’s a good one, it can be a better one, don’t — don’t throw it away on me. I’ve already torn mine apart. Let yours stay whole.”
Lan Zhan frowns. “How can it be whole without Wei Ying?”
The laugh that bursts out of him is more like a cry of pain than anything else. “Don’t do this,” Wei Wuxian pleads, and it sounds like a sob, echoing in his head. “Please, Lan Zhan, I can’t.”
“Wei Ying.” Lan Zhan’s voice is so gentle. “You do not have to make any promises. I am not asking you to stay. I am just…” He seems to struggle for words, fingers tightening the grip on his own legs. “Worried. I am worried, and I would like to make sure you are really alright.”
“What can the healers at Cloud Recesses do for me that Wen Qing can’t manage?” It’s a weak argument, and Lan Zhan answers it with a raised eyebrow. Wen Qing might be a doctor, but she’s a dirt poor one who sterilizes suturing needles with fire and doesn’t wait for them to cool off before starting on stitches on someone’s skin. The Gusu healers have an infirmary and medical supplies.
“They will not turn you away,” Lan Zhan says, firmly. “I give you my word, and I will make them give theirs as well. They would not turn away any man—”
“A man!” Wei Wuxian exclaims, feeling torn open. He scoots a bit further away on the ground, like a proper cornered animal trying to run when it’s unable to. Lan Zhan is pushing, pushing, and if he keeps going like this, Wei Wuxian will break. He’ll say yes. He’ll go. It’ll all come falling apart. “I’m not a man, Lan Zhan,” he seethes, baring his teeth. “Haven’t you heard? The only use I have for mankind is eating its heart raw, driving it mad with terror, being the demon behind its door. Lan Zhan, don’t you know?” He might be yelling now. His throat tastes of metal. The palms of his hands sting where his nails have dug into the flesh, and his eyes are dry and shaking, and Lan Zhan is there.
All of a sudden, it feels like too much to bear. Wei Wuxian doesn’t know where he begins and ends — his edges feel scrambled and shaky, like a little kid’s first attempt at drawing a talisman; he feels too bloated for his skin, too broken to be contained and defined.
Lan Zhan is looking at him like there isn’t anything else, and the more he looks, the more Wei Wuxian is afraid there really isn’t anything there, that maybe all the resentful energy he’s been wearing in his bones for years has caved around him and erased him entirely, that he’s become just another shadow like the ones he was arrogant enough to call himself a master of.
Then Lan Zhan says, “Wei Ying.” His eyes look wet. “My Wei Ying.”
An ugly burst of laughter makes its way up Wei Wuxian’s throat, and he has to bite his tongue to keep it in. It’s not like anything’s funny; the sound is all hysteria. “You,” he says, vehemently, hand tugging at his own tangled hair so hard it makes him tear up, “were supposed to be a hallucination.”
“I’m real,” Lan Zhan says, as if that’s not exactly the problem. “Wei Ying—”
Wei Wuxian wants to break apart. He wants to let his head fall to Lan Zhan’s chest and crumble on his lap, cry until he can’t anymore, have Lan Zhan’s arms settle around him. He wants Lan Zhan to tell him the words. He’ll show his teeth and tell him he’s just hungry for truth.
And he is hungry for truth. He just won’t be able to stomach it; his insides have shrunk with malnutrition.
“Oh, Lan Zhan.” Wei Wuxian tries to smile. He really does. He’s not sure it works. “What did I ever do to deserve you?”
“You love me,” Lan Zhan says, and it sounds so much like a proper answer to the question that it almost makes Wei Wuxian burst into tears. Maybe he would have, if he had any left.
“I do,” Wei Wuxian answers. He’s a liar, but not about this. It’s not a surprise that Lan Zhan knows it. He’s always been supposed to. “Why are you still here, Lan Zhan?”
For a second, Lan Zhan looks almost confused. Wei Wuxian can read every twitch of his expression, even in the gloom: he thinks he’s said so already. But Wei Wuxian needs to be told to know it.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says again, rephrasing. He straightens up and looks him in the eye. “If you love me, then why are you still here?”
He’s spent the past three years trying to build up some kind of a skin after it was scraped away, so he wouldn’t drip with blood every time he brushed up against something. After all, why does tragedy exist? Because one is full of rage. Why is one full of rage? Because they are full of grief. This is why Wei Wuxian would rather be apart, would rather not be inside his skin. It hurts so much. But just like a wound caused by an arrow, he must deepen the cut and pull the arrowhead through. He has to complete the injury if he wants to live after it.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, and there goes the sting, “I would never leave.”
Wei Wuxian closes his eyes. Smiles, a small, watery thing. “I had a dream where you said that, Lan Zhan,” he whispers. “Thanks for saying it. You weren’t supposed to.” He stretches his smile wider, pulling himself closer to Lan Zhan again, until their dirty knees are touching. “When you go,” his voice breaks on the word. He clears his throat. “When you go, please don’t forget to remember me, alright? Maybe it’s selfish of me, but I would like it if you missed me. I don’t know if I’ve ever been missed before.”
He beams, going for a final burst of light, before gathering his weight under his legs and standing up, trying not to whimper as he does so. His insides feel like they’ve been torn open and left hanging out to dry. He needs Lan Zhan to leave. He wants him to never go away. He stands shakily like a newborn fawn and steps back a little, giving Lan Zhan enough space to rise as well.
Maybe they will part like this. Maybe it’ll ache but it’ll heal, and they’ll both be left with the memory of each other to look back on. It’s a kinder ending than what Wei Wuxian thinks he deserves. He thinks he would like it very much.
Lan Zhan stands. He does so much more gracefully than Wei Wuxian, but the bottom half of his robes is undeniably ruined. He’s staring hard at the ground, everything about his posture closed off, and Wei Wuxian tries not to let that sting. It’s only fair, he reminds himself. He’s hurting too.
“If you will stay,” Lan Zhan says, after what feels like an eternity. The light on the walls seems to lean in to hear what he has to say. “If you will stay, you cannot stop me from coming back.”
Wei Wuxian smiles, close-lipped. “I cannot,” he agrees. “But you will stop coming, eventually.”
Lan Zhan’s eyes are stony. “Why?”
Since he can’t answer with the truth — Because you will live much longer than me; I will die first without a core, I will grow old while you stay young, I would never make you bear watching me whither away — Wei Wuxian simply shrugs. His status as a demonic cultivator lets him get away with cryptic comments like clockwork, since no one knows how it works, and it’s about the only advantage it’s ever brought him. It serves him just as well now, when Lan Zhan presses his lips together and says nothing.
“Go on, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says. “You have to be at Koi Tower in a few days. Have you even bought a present for my nephew?”
Lan Zhan ignores him. “Wei Ying,” he says. “Will you give me your hand?”
His chest goes hot and cold at the same time. Wei Wuxian flexes his fingers by his side, feeling a sad smile take up space on his mouth. “I’ll stain you,” he murmurs.
“I’ll take it.”
Wei Wuxian… almost gives in. He falters for so long it may as well have been an acceptance — he can see the expectation in the tautness of Lan Zhan’s jaw, how he looks less tense as the moments drags on, almost certain, almost, almost. And it hurts all the more because Wei Wuxian opens his mouth and shudders all over, before winding his arms around his own stomach, trembling
“I can’t,” he whispers, at last. “Lan Zhan. I can’t.”
Lan Zhan nods. His hand goes tight around Bichen, but he does not draw it in anger. He just nods, accepting.
Before he can second guess himself, Wei Wuxian darts forward and presses a kiss to the side of Lan Zhan’s mouth. He’s already halfway through the cave by the time Lan Zhan is still blinking, lifting his fingers to press against where Wei Wuxian’s lips had been.
“Don’t miss me too much, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, grinning. He turns back to his work desk, making sure his steps are purposeful, but Lan Zhan’s voice makes him falter.
“I will miss you.” There’s no waver, no uncertainty to it. When Wei Wuxian glances back over his shoulder, Lan Zhan looks almost fond. “Will you think of me?”
Wei Wuxian feels himself soften. “Every day,” he says. “Every day. Will you do the same?”
“Hm,” Lan Zhan hums.
Wei Wuxian smiles brightly. It burns together the lights of the cave, driving the shadows away.
Three days later, an invitation comes to your front door.
“I shouldn’t go,” you tell Wen Qing. “It’s a trap. They will kill me on my way or poison my wine.”
Wen Qing’s eyes are dark and knowing. “You’ve made a gift,” she points out. “For your nephew. And you don't plan on attending?”
You trace a finger over the signature. It’s fancy paper. You haven’t seen such high quality in years. “I thought I could send it to Koi Tower,” you say, half-hearted. You do not even believe yourself. “It’s too big of a risk.”
“It’s family, Wei Wuxian,” Wen Qing says, standing up to leave. “It can’t be anything else.
And so, although you told Lan Zhan you would not, you go. You take Wen Ning down Qiongqi Path, feeling animated and bubbly in a way you haven’t in a long time — your nephew! Shijie’s child! Does he have your sister’s eyes, or your brother’s jaw, you wonder? He won’t look like you, there’s no blood relation, but maybe you could teach him a thing or other, when he grows older. Maybe it will be okay. Maybe you can make this work.
Wen Ning’s fist goes through Jin Zixuan’s chest and you watch your nephew’s father choke on his own blood.
You do not know who looks more surprised: you, Wen Ning, Jin Zixun, with his horrid curse, or Jin Zixuan himself, at the very last moment. You had only wanted to fend off Jin Zixun, and with no corpses around, the closest thing was Wen Ning. You hadn’t — it was an ambush, you were ambushed. You only retaliated. Jin Zixuan was not supposed to be here. You were — you were—
You were angry. Like a cornered animal, when Jin Zixuan claimed not to know about this, to have been warned by Jin Guangyao minutes ago, you got scared and angry and you lost your temper, and Wen Ning has always responded to your emotions rather than your intentions.
This was not supposed to happen. It was not. You’re so cold. Your knees hit the ground with a thud, your mind fuzzy with horror. You do not stay conscious long enough to see Wen Ning kill Jin Zixun, as well.
Koi Tower wants Wen Qing and Wen Ning to turn themselves in. It’s a truce. They say it’s a truce.
“No,” you say. You are too weak to stand up, but you grasp at Wen Qing’s shoulder as tight as you can, hard enough to make her bite back a whimper. “No, no, no, no, no—”
The bite of the paralyzing needles are somehow a thousand times more painful than most things you’ve felt. You feel like there’s shards of glass under your skin, and you cannot move, cannot speak, cannot do anything as Wen Qing rests her head on your chest and bawls like a child, shaking hands gripping your robes. You cannot comfort her, cannot yell at her or call her an idiot or hug her one more time.
Before she leaves, she says, “Thank you.” She says, “I’m sorry.” She says, “You’re my best friend, you’re always going to be my best friend, I wouldn’t have made it so far without you. I love you. I’m so sorry.”
You cannot keep yourself awake anymore. You sleep for three days. In the meantime, all the remnants of Dafan Wen go with her and Wen Ning to Koi Tower as a show of support for their sacrifice — because it is a sacrifice, because they all know it won’t be anything but a sacrifice.
At Koi Tower, they kill them all.
Your sister dies looking into your eyes. Her blood coats the front of your robes, spilled from a sword gone through her back. If she were not there, it would have gone through your heart. You know which option you prefer. You know that choices are a luxury. You watch her slump into your brother’s arms, and you watch his face turn cold.
You’re standing by a cliff.
This is how the story goes: Wei Wuxian builds a life, and he tears it apart. Impossibly, the earth keeps spinning and the sun keeps shining. This is also how the story goes: Wei Wuxian dies. Some do the same. Others do not.
This is how it goes: his brother is trying to kill him, and Wei Wuxian deserves it. But he also knows Jiang Cheng would never be able to live with himself if he did so, so Wei Wuxian rips his arm from Lan Zhan’s grip first.
He will never forgive himself for it. He knows Lan Zhan so well, he can see it on his face: he thinks he could have held on tighter. He thinks he could have pushed Jiang Cheng away. He thinks he could have done something to change the outcome.
Oh, Wei Wuxian thinks. I haven’t said goodbye to the ruins yet. There is a creek that cuts through Yiling. Its water is the same water that cuts through Gusu. One time I laid in the water. It passed me by. It flowed back to the ocean as streams do. The water remembers. The water of Yiling, the water of Gusu.
It ends.