Work Text:
Gusu, after dark: welcomed on the steps by Zewu-jun, led to the hanshi, served the light first-flush tea Jin Guangyao has told him - eventually and after years - he liked best. They talk.
It is the sort of evening he would think about for weeks afterwards, keeps and presses in his mind like a flower or an insect in amber. A quiet conversation, a shared smile, a silence. It feels like they are waiting. Lan Xichen is warm with wine.
‘I’ve stayed before, A-Yao. This isn’t the first time,’ Lan Xichen says. His hands are hesitant, hovering over Jin Guangyao’s knees, and warm to distraction.
The space between them is magnetic; the flickering embers cast shadows across the other man’s face, his hair, soften the edges of his face, his cheekbones, a warm yellow flushed over his skin.
The room is both smaller and larger somehow by candlelight, a familiar space turned new and exotic in the dark. How many times has he sat here? Seated himself in Lan Xichen’s chambers, taken his tea with steady hands? And -
He is right. It is not the first time. That had been -
‘And I thought that, if you would like to stay, that - you know how I feel. You don’t need to leave. This isn’t any different,’ Lan Xichen murmurs. His voice is low; his fingers, incessant, trace circles on the cloth above Jin Guangyao’s knee. His awareness is narrowed to that circle of warmth, and there is a tension in his knees.
But it is different. Meng Yao, back in Qinghe, restless in the bed of another man: he had liked to think of Zewu-jun idly at night, tracing with his fingers something ghostly along his parted lips. His hands are small, languid and slender; it is not sensual, but contemplative. Questioning. He had known already that Lan Xichen wanted him: he was curious what that meant.
It is different. There’s something triumphant and conspiratorial about Lan Xichen in Jinlintai, something almost playful. And it’s so easy: Jin Guangyao, son and housekeeper, is responsible for choosing the lodgings of his guests. There’s no challenge in it. But this is the Cloud Recesses, newly built, steeped still in the memories of Meng Yao the servant, Meng Yao the boy, the unreachable seat of everything he had ever wanted of, everything he ever dreamt of -
It is different. It’s no longer a game.
‘A-Yao?’
He will not move; his head is bowed, his hair warm and prickling against the nape of his neck. It feels like an exhale, the quiet closeness of the room and the scented warmth and the mountain night.
‘A-Yao.’
Lan Xichen looks at him from with cautious, hopeful eyes. He knows Jin Guangyao wants him. That he will not turn him away.
Jin Guangyao ducks his head. The reflex is automatic, and his smile even more so. It does not reach his eyes.
‘Your room is prepared across the courtyard. You can return there before morning. There will be no reason for people to - well.’ Lan Xichen’s smile is slightly awkward, but his voice is low. His eyes are intense. ‘A-Yao. Stay with me.’
It gives him this expansive feeling, like light under his chest, buoyed up. It’s enough to live on. The common adages and cautionary tales, Jin Guangyao finds, are wrong about a lot of things and especially this: power is not heavy. It is light, an unbearable lightness, a giddiness. Lan Xichen looks at him and he feels drunk.
He thrills with it.
The candle. The dark. A warmth on his knee. Here, and he cannot distract himself any longer: Lan Xichen - dark-eyed, warmth radiating from his skin - is looking at him. There is an earnestness in his voice.
‘Will you? It’s not -‘
It is the feeling he gets at the back of his neck, a prickling, before he turns and sees that - infallible, always - he is being watched with softened eyes. This is what it feels like to be wanted.
‘I,’ Lan Xichen says. He is frustrated; he is patient. He is a more complex man than many realise. ‘You -‘
Lan Xichen closes his eyes for a moment; with his other hand he pinches the bridge of his nose. Jin Guangyao watches, amused, as he is rendered ten years less eloquent. (Unfair: Lan Xichen, ten years ago, is sometimes his father could only aspire to). He will not help him.
At last he sighs. Then he smiles at Jin Guangyao, a helpless, knowing quirk of a smile, a smile that says look what you have made of me. Look what you have done. He sighs, and moves his hand. Jin Guangyao feels the absence of it on his knee like a sudden open window or a prickle of cold.
‘Let me start again, a little less muddled,’ he says, and smiles - warm, conspiratorial - and Jin Guangyao knows he is not truly worried. ‘What I mean to say is - A-Yao, if you would like to stay tonight - I would like that. Nobody will see. I would like that very much.’
The corner of his mouth quirks up, and then he is silent. Composed and elegant once more, he reaches forward to pour the tea: first flush leaves, delicate, a pale almost nothing colour Lan Xichen knows that Jin Guangyao, like him, enjoys best.
And yet this time - he marks it with a notch in the back of his mind somewhere, on a tallystick he keeps, for this man only, out of curiosity and nothing more - Lan Xichen has not quite got it right. Jin Guangyao is not worried about being seen.
He lets the silence drift longer. The candle-flame flickers, its wick only a curl of black above a waxy nub. The smell of it is intimate, and intimately familiar. They have been talking for hours.
Lan Xichen watches him, steady. Leaning across the space between them he is wearing more layers than Jin Guangyao, but for Zewu-jun - he dressed, Jin Guangyao knows with sudden satisfaction, for his coming. Between his ribbon-dark hair and the deep blue of his collar Jin Guangyao can see his throat: taut, smooth.
Jin Guangyao - and he knows what it looks like - raises his eyes.
Lan Xichen’s lips part.
‘Er-ge. I would not want to impose.’
He watches the series of emotions flit that across Lan Xichen’s face: relief, desire, something more tender. Warm formality. Familiar ground.
‘If you’re imposing, it’s an imposition of a most enjoyable kind,’ he says, with an amused raise of his eyebrow. ‘A-Yao. Please. You know you are always welcome here.’
It is the sort of comment that sets off a cacophony in his mind: an instinctive visceral disbelief; the long-familiar simmerings of anger in his stomach that the rest of them never gave him this much; a desire to hurt Lan Xichen for his misplaced trust. A happiness.
Jin Guangyao ducks his head, smiling to himself. He cannot stop it. ‘Then I thank you, er-ge.’
Lan Xichen’s smile broadens. He is holding the cup in two fingers in empty space, arm still with the strength of countless mornings, Jin Guangyao thinks, and the casual supremacy of Gusu Lan. Has he forgotten to put it down?
‘There is nothing to thank, A-Yao. Is that a yes?’
Jin Guangyao draws in a breath.
A-Yao. He could be A-Yao, for this man. He could try.
‘Yes,’ he says.
He exhales, a little shaky.
‘Yes?’
He laughs. ‘Yes, er-ge. Yes.’
He has the pleasure of seeing Lan Xichen’s mouth soften, a pinkness, a tongue in there somewhere, and then there is movement and Lan Xichen on his feet beside him, so quick and excited it is almost boyish. Jin Guangyao laughs again - helpless, endeared, disbelieving - and thinks for one strange breathless moment Lan Xichen will bend down and kiss him - they have kissed before, as Lan Xichen said, this is not the first time, but it is the first time they have done it here, the first time he has offered to let him stay, the first time in this place that means, for different reasons, so much to both of them - and looks up at the man before him, soft and outlined in the warm secret candlelight. Jin Guangyao is shocked by some instinct into stillness, waiting, waiting for him to bend down and seize him and -
He doesn't. Of course he won’t. Instead there is a gentle hand on his shoulder.
Lan Xichen steps closer. Hair, a scented curtain. The heat of him: another body, a man, and by that he doesn’t mean a man but rather a person, another person and another body, and he blinks in the moment it takes to shift from alone to touched.
Lan Xichen gazes down at him. There is a spot of red high on his cheeks. His eyes are wide and dark.
Slowly, hesitantly, Lan Xichen reach down to touch Jin Guangyao’s shoulder.
It is the most chaste of touches. They touch more when he catches his bows, bowing so low only to feel the warm shock of Zewu-jun’s hands, public, telling him he is his equal. But this is unasked for. This is barely offered: Lan Xichen’s eyes are on him now, watching and intent. Is this allowed? This liberty? His hand is warm. It is teasing, but more reverent than anything else. Does he want this to be sacred? Jin Guangyao is not sure about that. He wants him to grab him, lay him down gently, tell him he is a fool, tell him to stay a fool forever, naive forever, his forever -
Lan Xichen has never been a fool.
His hand, moving now, gentle as no-one has been since his mother - don’t think of that now. Is this ok? He wants to seize him, scorn him, keep him safe. And this? Perhaps he could make it sacred, if that is what Lan Xichen wants. Just once, in his exhausted life, something pure. He tests the thought, trying it on for size, wondering if A-Yao would do that, wondering if that is what he would want. And yet -
Jin Guangyao wants control.
He inhales, feeling his ribs expand. A smile settles on his face.
Lan Xichen’s fingers move slowly across his shoulder, tracing the line of his collarbone, slow, warm. Slow again. Lan Xichen is looking at him, intent and wondering and looking at him. At him. Jin Guangyao. A-Yao. Meng Yao. Whoever he is.
He can feel the air between them. He can feel a lightness under his ribs and his clothes and his skin, new, in the hands of his man who once brushed his hand, fully clothed, and changed his life. It is almost funny to admit it to himself.
‘Stay with me,’ Lan Xichen whispers. It is not a question this time. It’s an echo, wondering. Jin Guangyao swallows and closes his eyes.
Lan Xichen. It’s stupid. He's so, so stupid.
The rustle of his robes, cool and almost touching his face. He thinks he can feel the warmth of his thumb on his shoulder, incessant, the gentlest of pressures. He thinks he can feel his heartbeat, his body coming to life - a body, not just a mind - and waking like something dormant, something sleeping, something stirring, the tension in his knuckles and the floor beneath his feet and Lan Xichen, Lan Xichen standing in front of him -
He thinks he could love him. Or that he wants to love him. Isn’t that the same thing? He thinks -
Don’t think.
Or think instead about this instead: that he has thought about this before. That none of this is new. In his bed, alone, curious hands on his hips. Your hands. Would that be enough? Is it enough, what they have now - his helpless lingering eyes across the hall? Will it ever be enough? He thinks -
Don’t think.
Lan Xichen’s hand - careful, feather-soft - brushes against the bare skin of his neck. Jin Guangyao shivers.
Lan Xichen is being so careful with him, like something precious in his hands, cupped there and safe. He is still wary of the edges and shape of Jin Guangyao’s desire - Does he want me? Does he love me? What does this mean? Am I hurting him?
Yes, he would tell him, the only answer he would ever tell him aloud. No, or maybe. Nothing or everything. Am I hurting him? Never.
Lan Xichen watches him with fascination and a tenderness that, he thinks with satisfaction, is one of many facets of love. Or at least the precursor of it.
‘Er-ge,’ he murmurs.
And what does he sound like when he says that? Like A-Yao? Lan Xichen’s A-Yao? And what does this er-ge sound like? This er-ge, said in this voice and right here and now, said on his knees with his eyes closed, swaying slightly, drunk on the touch of him slightly, the knowledge he wants him, needs him. Protect me. Keep me safe. Don’t let him hurt me. (Nie Mingjue, here, always, just out of sight.) Is that what it sounds like?
Is that all he is here for?
Lan Xichen sighs. It is a rippling, an unfolding, and Jin Guangyao feels it tug on a thread inside him, something inside him unravelling loose. He lets himself go boneless and warm. A hand now, tracing the shell of his ear, strangely intimate. His fingers are delicate and barely there, hovering at the corner between his ear and his hairline. His scalp prickles.
‘Open your eyes.’
Lan Xichen’s voice is low.
Jin Guangyao - contrary, testing - instead tilts his head back, baring the flushed fire-lit skin of his throat. Touch me.
Lan Xichen’s hand twitches.
Jin Guangyao laughs, silent and smiling, not quite ready to give in yet. He is poised, giddy, off balance just slightly and ready to fall at the slightest touch, ready to grab his hand if Lan Xichen hesitates and place it on his cheek if he won’t do it, but wanting - needing - to know that he will.
A noise of amusement, aborted frustration. ‘A-Yao.’
He moves his head slightly, the slightest of pressures upwards into his palm. An invitation. ‘Hmm?’
‘You -‘ Lan Xichen breaks off, laughter low and soft in his throat. ‘Open your eyes. Look at me.’
Jin Guangyao feels a smile tug wider. No. His lips part. Chase me. To be wanted: that was what he was always most curious about. He arches his neck, cat-like, and pushes gently into Lan Xichen’s palm.
Lan Xichen’s hand tightens around his hair, just for a second. There is a sudden rush of heat in Jin Guangyao’s stomach.
The other man shifts closer; he feels the air move, not his robes, as if they are joined by a fixed space, dizzy and warm. A lover’s knowledge, he hears, in a hushed female voice in some room somewhere, and then there is laughter.
And he can feel his own heartbeat just below his ear. It is a tiny pulse warm and alive and delicate against Lan Xichen’s palm. Alive. They haven’t killed him yet.
He sighs, letting his lips curl upwards with pleasure. ‘Lan Xichen,’ he murmurs.
He hears Lan Xichen’s sharp intake of breath at his name. And Jin Guangyao thinks -
A moment, detached, because Jin Guangyao is always looking for metaphors or analogies to make sense of his life: these sighs are real, these smiles are real, every bit of this is real, with Lan Xichen. But he will also use it until, dried up and husky, there is nothing left. It is a performance where he means every word.
And Jin Guangyao thinks -
He does not think. He feels. This is what he can feel: the hand on his scalp, the prickling closeness of Lan Xichen’s robes, and the impossible scent of his oil-black hair. The weightlessness and weight of his body. What else? His own hazy desire, simmering but not forgotten, and the thought that - the thought that -
It bursts through the warm vagueness of touch, sudden and violent as crushed fruit. He is too slow to catch it. And Jin Guangyao thinks -
His neck, bared. The tremour of this man’s hands in his hair. The hard wood beneath his knees. The slither of power, the heat that comes with being feared. A knife dizzy and light in his hands; Nie Mingjue, twisted and ugly against his bonds; the quick drag of a sword through a throat like a knife in butter, snagging a little, but mostly warm and soft. A necklace of red; he remembers thinking exactly that at the time, thinking what terrible poetry, thinking too much time spent with the soldiers, thinking of leaving Nie Huaisang with Lan Qiren, thinking it should have been him, laughing at himself, marvelling at himself, thinking as a line it would do far better in a brothel in Lanling than alone on the steps of Nightless City. (It would not do well in Gusu.) He remembers marvelling that he has become this sort of person. That this is the sort of person he maybe always was.
At the end of the day it is all the same: either way, throat bared, waiting on his knees. Waiting for judgement. It is power, but not a sort Nie Mingjue can touch with his sword.
He smiles, wider this time. The thought is pleasing to him.
He sighs once more - exaggerate, he thinks; sincere, he thinks - and tilts his head back. He feels the tickle of his hair down his back, feels the rising and fall of their chest, the warmth of their shared breath.
‘Er-ge,’ he whispers. And at last, slowly, he lets his smaller hands run over his own shoulders, his own hair - look at me, look - to tangle together with Lan Xichen’s larger ones.
A soft sound escapes Lan Xichen’s lips.
His hands tighten, an involuntary clench, and twist into his hair.
Jin Guangyao opens his eyes.
And -
Zewu-jun standing above him, resplendent in dark blue and a glint of white, eyes wide and dark and hesitant still, hands in his hair, breath coming faster now, a little self-conscious and more than a little determined and Jin Guangyao thinks -
Don’t think.
He smiles up at Lan Xichen, beatific under his lashes, under their hands moving together soft and careless with desire in his hair. He tilts his chin up to look at him, eyes wide and on his knees. It is a supplicant angle, one he knows will make Lan Xichen flush, once out of want and once out of guilt - we are equals, A-Yao, you don’t need to do that - an angle to kiss down the throat of, to put a blade at, to beg. The best angle there is.
‘A-Yao,’ Lan Xichen whispers. His voice breaks. ‘Can I -‘
It happens in an instance. Lan Xichen’s hand in his hair tightens, and Jin Guangyao pulls at his elbows - the slightest of pressures, nothing forced, a reminder of what Lan Xichen wants and what he can give him - until he sways and collapses forward onto his knees. He needs him to fall on his own. They are both swaying now, clutching at each other like the young do, or the drowning - and Lan Xichen’s hand is on the small of his back pulling him forwards, warm and certain. Jin Guangyao reaches up now and runs his hand through Lan Xichen’s hair - beautiful, he thinks, pull, he thinks, but separate and above the warm haze of desire he is still in control, always in control - and so instead in compromise Jin Guangyao arches his head back, a surrender, a retreat, one of those things that is really an attack.
It works.
Lan Xichen, taught since birth to fall so pleasantly between the cracks: he gives a sudden sharp intake of breath. His hands tighten, and the solid warmth of him is suddenly flush against Jin Guangyao’s body.
Lan Xichen.
And his hands are moving now, in his hair and across his shoulders and down his arms and pressing him towards him, feverish and somehow careful at once, a thousand breathless touches, a finger tracing the sharp line of his jaw, his mouth a heat behind his ear, warm, close, warm - did he say that? - and maddening.
Lan Xichen.
The scent of him. Meng Yao, contemptuous, could never have predicted that.
Jin Guangyao exhales, and lets himself sway backwards. Lan Xichen’s hands catch him, soft and firm on his lower back, and together they sink slowly to the ground. Their robes fall around them, blue and gold, and in the fire-flickered light of the candle their shadows are thrown, dancing, onto the wall behind them. The room is darker now than it was. Smoke curls now at the window, and the candle is burnt low. The wick untrimmed. Here in the Cloud Recesses there are always more candles.
His fingers, soft, on the smooth skin beside his lips. Lan Xichen’s hair falls around him like a curtain, as Jin Guangyao - sitting now, legs tangled together with their robes - leans back, tests his strength, sees how far Lan Xichen will hold him. He pulls him closer and keeps him at arm’s length at once: he wants to look at him. To see him.
They are breathing heavily now, chests rising and falling together, and Lan Xichen draws back for a moment, wide-eyed and hesitant and still marvelling that this is real, looking at him like -
Like -
Don’t think. Don’t think it. Not that word, what it means, what it promises. Let it be nameless. Let it be -
Lan Xichen looks at him sometimes like this across the glittering halls of Lanling, his eyes searching, scanning for him, and when he sees him at last - Jin Guangyao turns at the last minute - his face softens. Settles. There you are. That smile, on his lips, just for him, and Jin Guangyao’s answering smile is brilliant. The sharp dizziness of victory triumphant. He has won.
Now. Back to now. Lan Xichen’s hands warm on his back. A tremour in his legs, where they are touching, and his dark eyes -
Jin Guangyao reaches out a hand, delicate and deliberate, to trace across Lan Xichen’s lips. The man stills under his touch.
‘A-Yao,’ he whispers.
He feels Lan Xichen’s lips move under his hand; a soft warning, or an exhale. He wants to -
He wants -
‘Er-ge.’
He is smiling, now, unstoppable. He sees it mirrored in Lan Xichen’s face, wonder and pleasure both at this gift he has offered him: A-Yao, heavy-lidded and fine as porcelain, relaxed in his arms. Smiling finally. I did that. And why should he stop? For a brief moment, giddy with victory, he forgets himself and drags his thumb, sharp and hard, down over Lan Xichen’s bottom lip and his warm open mouth.
‘Ah -‘
Lan Xichen draws in a ragged breath. For a minute they stare at each other - Lan Xichen’s pupils wide and dark, his cheeks flushed, Jin Guangyao frozen with his hand on Lan Xichen’s lips - and then Lan Xichen breathes out. It is shaky.
‘Er-ge,’ Jin Guangyao whispers. He sounds enraptured. He sounds terrified. He has no idea what he is going to say next. ‘I - ‘
Slowly, maintaining eye contact, Lan Xichen kisses the side of Jin Guangyao’s finger. Then he tilts his head and takes it into his mouth.
Oh.
Heat blooms in Jin Guangyao’s stomach; his skin, already taut and prickling, feels electric.
Lan Xichen’s eyes on him, intent, flick down to Jin Guangyao’s mouth. Cheeks hollowed, sucking on his finger, the First Jade of Lan - and Jin Guangyao wants to laugh. Wants to break something.
And then Lan Xichen tilts his head back, just as Jin Guangyao had done, and closes his eyes. A tease, a shared conversation, an acknowledgment: we’ve been here before. Nobody else sees this side of him. It’s playful, it’s trusting, it’s -
But Jin Guangyao needs his eyes open. He needs Lan Xichen to look at him, a need he so rarely feels. He - this is real, right here, and raw. He needs it. If Lan Xichen did not kiss him then, when he was the one playing, it doesn’t matter. But now that he is serious - if he turns him down now, when he is asking for it, when he feels everything is naked and bare -
If he will not do it -
‘Er-ge.’
Lan Xichen, eyes closed, hums.
‘Er-ge, look at me.’
Lan Xichen smiles, and straightens. He draws backwards - Jin Guangyao tenses, protests - and holds up Jin Guangyao’s finger in the firelight, glistening and pink, and draws it - cool, wet - against his cheek. Then, without opening his eyes, he parts his lips again - there it is, his teeth and his tongue and - and he takes two fingers into his mouth.
Jin Guangyao gasps.
‘Er-ge, you -‘
He is thrumming with need, his voice breathless. But he will not move; the desire belongs to somebody else’s body, not his. He needs Lan Xichen in a different way. He needs him to open his eyes. Doesn’t he understand? Jin Guangyao so rarely feels human; and there are moments of clarity, sometimes, that have to be seized. This is one. Something could change, if only Lan Xichen would look at him.
‘Look at me.’
Lan Xichen laughs. They are both laughing, just a little, trembling a little and shaky a little, breathless and breathing each other’s air, hands on each other’s skin, but the laughter in Jin Guangyao’s throat is wild, habit, nothing more. There’s nothing to laugh about. Isn’t that what Lan Xichen promised him, unspoken, back then and everyday since? He does not want to ask more than once; he does not want, he thinks, to have to ask at all.
‘Look at me!’
Lan Xichen: smiling, teasing, cheeks hollowed, throat moving. Glistening.
‘Look.’
He feels the silent shake of Lan Xichen’s body, the vibrations that mean laughter, that it’s a game, that it’s teasing what he himself did early, not a refusal, not really, but a mirroring. And it’s funny, isn’t it, to say no -
It’s not funny at all.
Zewu-jun must never refuse him. Jin Guangyao had decided that back in the brothel, hands curled tight for the first time in the First Jade’s hair as he shuddered and stilled and came apart around him like a man, like something flesh and blood. He will remember me. He will say yes. He will give me all of it.
But now he is arching away from Jin Guangyao, head tilted up - so lovely - and neck golden in the half-light, eyes still closed. There is a smile playing at the edge of his lips as he kisses Jin Guangyao’s fingers, chaste and playful. It’s a game for him, like it is for every rich man. There are no consequences if he loses.
He is angry suddenly. At Lan Xichen, at his birthright, at the furrowed face of gentle bewilderment he makes when he is denied. At his kindness, and his trust. Anger, desire, fear: he is tight with all three.
Jin Guangyao watches him for a moment, contemplating, paused. Then - delicate as a plucked string - he pulls his fingers away.
‘A-Yao?’
Lan Xichen’s voice is still warm, frowning, a smile on his lips.
Jin Guangyao - sudden, quicker than most people expect - has already climbed, nimble, to his feet. He steps backwards swiftly, picking up his clothes, and sweeps his tangled hair over his shoulder. His every movement is neat.
‘A-Yao, where have you -‘
Lan Xichen’s eyes are still closed. Jin Guangyao glances over his shoulder, a quick darting glance, and thinks in quiet fury: why haven’t you opened your eyes? Hasn’t he been left before? Doesn’t he know to watch his triumphs, in case they are snatched away?
He has, though. That’s the thing.
Lan Xichen has been hurt. This room is a rebuild, a new build, Jin built, though he knows it makes Lan Xichen uncomfortable to think of that: and he knows he gets nightmares, knows because - scornful - most people do, and by people he means people who are not him. (His dreams are warnings, or memories. That’s worse.) Lan Xichen’s nightmares are of burning, and breaking, and his brother bearing his light somewhere far away, probably tortured. You’re so perceptive, A-Yao. It isn’t hard: Lan Xichen more than most people is aching to be known. When he turns he sees him sitting there, motionless, swaying over empty space with his soft-slack mouth.
Why won’t you open your eyes?
He walks past him, picking up the length of his robes, head held high. He does not look back. The flicker of the candlelight sends shadows jumping along the walls, and it is darker here, cold and winter. He has not been invited into his bedroom, or given explicit permission: he hasn’t been with Lan Xichen in Gusu, not after the war - been with, how nice, and look how far Meng Yao’s come since he sat in the gutter and thought fuck - and it’s much easier to fuck someone, to be with someone, when you're the guest. Harder to invite them into your own home - or it would be, if it meant anything to him. (It doesn’t.) Jin Guangyao’s room is bland as his most pleasant smile. Sometimes he lies on his bed - soft, big enough for two - and looks up at the ceiling. He imagines those hands on him, Zewu-jun, imagines what it means to be taken apart and put together and what it might mean to be seen. Sometimes, but not often: he is a busy man.
Lan Xichen: does he crane his neck? Jin Guangyao's not looking. It hardly matters. At any rate he won’t hear him, not here where the floorboards are so fresh and unwarped by the damp (a bet in his head: two years until they creak, and a second bet, unspoken, because it’s likely he’ll be dead by then). If Gusu Lan were not so wealthy even now, if Jin Guangyao were not a war hero, suddenly - and that’s all it took - and if he didn’t think about things like the cupboards or the cups or the floorboards, he is still certain Lan Xichen would not hear. Certain? He can’t be certain. Lan Xichen is a cultivator, perhaps the strongest there is. He carries power with grace, with ease, so naturally and so much a part of him he looks at Lan Xichen, smiling faintly, and thinks: that’s it. That’s what he wants.
But it is true that Jin Guangyao is quieter than most people expect. That training came in three parts: grown up lowborn, grown up wrong, stepping in the dark on the tail of the shadows and - less fanciful, please - closer to the wall, because the wood of the floor won’t creak so much when it’s already weighted down. Furniture is best: a table, placed just right, and if he steps close enough to it he can go downstairs for some water. If they catch him he lies. There’s no real purpose to any of it, no reason why I’m thirsty shouldn’t be good enough, except that so often it isn’t. So: it’s his mother who is thirsty, or Xiao Mei or Xiao Lan or any of the other rouge-painted women with flower names, coquettish and overworked at forty, and when they catch him - it’s always when, not if - he looks down, and he thinks quiet, thinks what they would do to his mother if he lifted his gaze, thinks that he is nine and skinny and doesn’t know enough about bodies yet in the way that counts, where they're soft, where they give. And where are you supposed to put it, after it’s done?
Where are you going? Where are you now? When he goes to the apothecary and the queue is longer than usual, he tenses: it is not enough. Not enough of an excuse. He’s lying somehow. He needs something more truthful, somehow, more real, something better than the truth. So he tells them about the apothecary’s daughter - true so far - and the way that she grinned, thuggish, and knocked the bottle on to the floor where it smashed. See? He has the cut across his palm. Not wholly untrue: yesterday he was stupid enough to cut himself yesterday in the kitchen, and if they had seen him - blood in the soup! - he would have had to go into himself while they shout, make himself a ball like he does sometimes, smooth his face and make himself quiet and that’s how to survive, really. He doesn’t know why everybody else finds it so hard.
So there’s that. Sometimes he forgets: sometimes he is careless. Weeks later he comes home, lines the bottles up carefully on the counter, wipes the surface clean and goes to wash his hands. Meng Yao, the man at the door says, the kinder one, face strange. Didn’t you have some problem with the apothecary’s daughter? Did you manage to fix it? Yes, he says, and smiles. So what did you do? Oh, he says, heart beating in his chest, and thinks: what’s next, Meng Yao? What will it be now? And he could have just told the truth - and why didn’t he? - and he tells him that he has agreed to teach her to read, just a little, and the man’s voice softens and tells him his mother has raised him well. He ducks his head; he agrees. He is twelve years old.
(And the daughter is really very kind, when he starts to teach her: she gives him their tonics for cheap, and he buys - with his own money, painstaking and carefully earned - a small wooden toy. She likes him. He likes being liked.)
There had been enough fights in the brothel, customers that grew belligerent and rough with wine, but he had mostly watched those: silent, guarded, curious, hands curled around the wall, hardly daring to breathe. If he looks on and does nothing, it’s his fault; if he stands, in rare moments of defence, that’s his fault too. Better to stay hidden. He is torn, as he often is, between his mother’s furious well-meaning admonishments - get away, Meng Yao, come here, leave them alone, they’ll be gone in a moment - and his deepening understanding of the strangeness of his presence, a teenage boy growing into his limbs, in a house full of women. He is child of a whore: what will happen when he is no longer a child? He feels the silent deadline like an itch in the back of his throat, and he knows his mother, apprehensive and protective, does as well. They are running out of time.
And it’s because of his mother, finally, that he has to leave. The first time he kills, clearer than any time since, seized with terror and rage and a knife in his hand, again and again. He had thought about it idly before: poison, because he still has friends in the apothecary, and a carriage to steal away in the night. He knows exactly how much he needs to save. This is nothing liked that. Nothing planned.
But the quiet helps him there, too: an alleyway, rough hands on her robes, his mother crying, stroking his hair, the wild elated feeling, the fear, the way he didn’t drop the knife to clatter to the street but loosened his grip, gentle, and wiped it on the darkest part of his clothes so that it would not stain. He cannot wash them until next week. He remembers sitting still, as still as he could, sitting apart from his mother, feeling her softness against the straightness of his spine. She is looking at him with frantic eyes, searching, as if she could find on his face any hurt that matters. Are you alright? A-Yao, are you alright? His head is bowed. He is waiting for retribution. When they arrive - the men who own her, the men who would own him too if they could - he kneels. He looks up at them and tells them the truth: that they tried to hurt his mother. Tried to damage their property.
This, too, feels like a lie.
Then Qinghe - he moves past the interval empty space, father-shaped, with brisk efficiency - where he learns with a stinging face what he always knew academically, what always held logically true: next to the cultivators, he is nothing. He is weak. There is a world order, and he is at the bottom. He feels it keenly, with a child’s sense of outrage not yet touched by bitterness. It’s a joke, what his mother told him, that all humans are equal. She tells it to him, he thinks, mostly because she knows she should. It’s half-hearted. She does not even believe it herself. Why else would she make him study, make him practice his posture with cups on his head, hiss at him - and she’s sorry afterwards - that he needs to learn faster? Be better. You’re bigger than this, Meng Yao. You’re meant for something more. For what? And it’s worth it to her, somehow, that nebulous future, worth enough for her to throw the very last of whatever money she had on books, on ink, on anything for his studies. It is painful to watch. He learnt so many things in the brothel: his quiet presence, so considerate, a gentle hand on her arm, his ability - they laugh at it, call it uncanny, but all it’s made of is fear - to know with knife-sharp certainty and night-bright alertness what it is that powerful men want. To watch them. He knows what angers them; how to change his face and his voice to keep them happy; he knows how to do everything, anything, to stop them from raising their voice -
And in Qinghe it's all worthless. Everything he has learnt.
In Qinghe he smiles and they brush past him. He bows and they laugh. So what if he can walk quietly? Meng Yao, what are you doing out of bed? That was a child’s game. You’re not taking that for yourself, are you? A child's lie. It’s not good enough. Thousands of hours in his mother’s lessons, out on the streets, learning how to bow and to walk and to smile, learning zongzhu, learning how to recognise the petty gentry by the cut of their clothes and the way they walk through the world, head high, as if it is made for them. Learning how to copy them, a bitterness in his throat. What does any of it matter? His mother can’t keep him. His father doesn’t want him. The soldiers won’t trust him. They hit him. They spit at him. They mock him. He folds.
It is a good lesson. One of the finest he has ever been taught. And he thinks -
Enough.
Jin Guangyao takes a breath.
He comes back to himself. It is like climbing a ladder out of a lake into the light: he breaks the surface, and breathes in. It is easy enough with practice.
Only a few moments have passed. He is sitting on Lan Xichen’s bed, smoothing the folds of his autumn robes, tracing the shape of the patterns with a delicate, absent finger. It is dark here, the night a cold grey, and down and around the corner he can see the warmer vagueness of the room he had left a few moments before.
Lan Xichen.
He takes stock. Looks inward. The things he feels are both muted and distorted out of proportion, both washed out as pencil and hard and dark and violent as ink. He is distant, removed, like he is watching it on the other side of a sheet of ice; he feels that the ice is shattering across him, splinters in his shivering back, again and again. It was a game, he thinks, wasn’t it? Lan Xichen will do whatever he asks now. He knows he will. And shouldn’t he be happy, that he feels comfortable enough to tease? To test him?
He’s not.
There’s still a clenching, deep and forgotten, in the tense muscles of his shoulders, an old fear of something overlooked, a mistake he can’t correct, words that can’t be taken back. Maybe his hold over him isn’t as tight as he thinks. Maybe Lan Xichen will be angry; this, the final thing that breaks him. And he thinks -
He smooths the front of his robes. Schools his face to something calmer. Light and firm, footsteps outside the door. He is coming. He knows his footsteps well: he is slower than usual, carrying something. Is it tea?
A silhouette, behind the screen; the door slides open, a crack of widening orange light.
Lan Xichen.
He is silhouetted and framed; the idea of a man. In one hand he has a candle, and his hair is loose; his forehead ribbon is a yellowish white in the warm dark. There is a hesitance in his face. He pauses at the door, and glances down.
‘A-Yao,’ he says. His voice is careful, polite; he is still so careful now with Jin Guangyao, after everything. ‘Did I do something wrong?’
That’s intolerable. That’s absurd. What could he possibly do wrong? Jin Guangyao smiles at him, a doe smile. He lets him wait there for a moment, shifting at the door like a guest, whilst he sits uninvited on his bed. Then he stands.
He walks forward. Slowly, deliberately, he glances over him from his feet to his face. He lets his eyes linger at the places he likes best: the line of his jaw, his clever hands. Lan Xichen’s eyes are wide. His lips parts.
‘Er-ge,’ he says. And then he steps forward once more, so close that Lan Xichen is tense against him. He is still angry, but it is a simmering thing now, familiar, a fuel that can be used in some other furnace. It’s settled, in the way that rock is settled, hard, unchangeable, permanent. And he is no longer sure he is angry at Lan Xichen.
He places his hands on Lan Xichen’s arms, deliberate, digging in harder than he has ever dared to before. Remember this. Remember what you want. Then he stretches upwards, standing on his tip-toes, and puts his mouth to the warm skin below Lan Xichen’s ear.
It tastes of salt.
‘Er-ge,’ he murmurs.
He pulls back. Watches him: watches how Lan Xichen’s eyes, helpless, fall to his mouth.
‘Er-ge,’ he says again, and what he means is: remember me, here, when you sleep. Remember what I gave you. Remember what that means. ’Come to bed.’
Lan Xichen follows like a sleep-walker, hand loose in his. Jin Guangyao guides him downwards, feather-light touches, and eases him onto the bed. There. Here. He settles himself across him, propped up on an elbow, so close he can feel the radiant heat of his body all along the length of his own.
‘A-Yao -‘
He tugs his robes open; one layer, two, but that’s all. That’s it. The thought is delightful - that Zewu-jun dressed for his coming in clothes more appropriate for sleep. There's enough space now for him, or enough space for his hands, anyway, and he touches the skin beneath his robes, wondering still at the newness of it, how much he wants to keep him, touch him, never let him go. He wants him. He needs him. He needs to touch him. He wants him safe. He needs Lan Xichen to know, to see him, crack him open like nobody else can. He wants to push him. He wants to keep him pure. He needs this as a refuge, as something finally good, maybe the only good thing he has. He -
He makes his decision.
Jin Guangyao yanks his robes open. Lan Xichen gasps.
It’s a risk, calculated, based mainly on circumstance and the way Lan Xichen watches him sometimes, still, like he is afraid of breathing. A risk, because apart from earlier - and then Lan Xichen had taken his fingers into his mouth - he has never touched him like this. It’s always been gentle. Worship. But there’s no point in waiting: he takes it all in one single sweep of his eyes, clinical and discerning. Lan Xichen’s abortive twitch under him, the way his hands flutter at his sides. The way he relaxes and tenses at once.
He likes it. The thought is visceral, searing, ecstatic. Jin Guangyao had not been sure he would.
Lan Xichen is beautiful; he’s the most beautiful thing, here in the dark, that Jin Guangyao has ever seen. He’s his. And because he can, and because Lan Xichen has gone pliant and melting under his touch, he pushes him down, holds his shoulders with his hands, draws a line along his collarbone with the point of his tongue, fingers pulling in his hair, and wrenches his head to the side - a sharp gasp - to hold him there. Lan Xichen is trembling against him, stronger than he is, trying not to move. Jin Guangyao surges forward and kisses a line of scorching kisses onto that throat, a tongue flicking at his ear, teeth at his jaw, a bruise. If Lan Xichen offers him this, he will take it.
‘A-Yao,’ he says, gasping a little. He is laughing, amazed, and the corners of his eyes are crinkled in a way that is so lovely. ‘A-Yao, this is - is this - you -‘
‘Be quiet.’
It’s his tone, mild-mannered, a rebuke. Lan Xichen’s eyes go very wide, and he goes very still. Jin Guangyao draws back and looks at him, satisfied: open-chested, colour in his cheeks, an expression on his face that is part wonder and part surprise and part, Jin Guangyao thinks, something else -
‘Please,’ Lan Xichen asks.
He is laughing at himself, a wry smile on his face that in one frustrated knowing expression says I am helpless, says you have done this, says isn’t this silly? And it is: desire is always a little silly, a little vulnerable, a little raw, and all the more so when you are Lan Xichen, agreeable and unreachable as smooth polished stone. It will always be ridiculous to Jin Guangyao: to want so badly someone’s skin on your own. It’s folly. It’s ruin. It’s the only thing there is.
‘Hmm?’
He is languid and particular, teasing and tense at once. Angry, still, but that’s no longer relevant. And he wants -
‘Stop it,’ Lan Xichen laughs, but he doesn’t mean it like that. ‘You’re teasing me. A-Yao, kiss me. Would you? Please -’
There’s a heartbeat, the briefest of triumphant pauses: he has to capture the moment, curl it up, store it somewhere safe. A-Yao, kiss me. Then he leans forward, graceful as a dancer, and brushes his lips against Lan Xichen’s.
***
Later. Hours later. The sex is good, as these things go; Lan Xichen under him is new and sharp with promise. Lying against him in the dark, skin to skin, is better.
The candles have gone out. The dark is familiar, close. Jin Guangyao knows - not by length of exposure, but by applied and deliberate force of memory - the length and breadth of every line of this man’s body. The sharp length of his calves. The hollow of his collarbones. The places where muscle meets muscle, and where the tendons shift, breakable, under his skin. He doesn’t need the light. And Lan Xichen’s hands on his own body are reverent, worshipping: he has never been touched like this before. Like touch itself is a gift.
‘A-Yao?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Was that - for you. Was that good?’
This is Lan Xichen, the First Jade of Lan. He always asks. He is a pillar of goodness, Jin Guangyao thinks, even when nobody is looking. It's not weakness. Not for him.
His voice is less clear than it usually is; Jin Guangyao feels the same pleasant tiredness, a softening along the length of his body. He is so rarely truly relaxed. He leans forward, and draws a slender finger down Lan Xichen’s sternum. ‘Do you need an answer to that, er-ge?’
Lan Xichen reaches out, blindly, and draws Jin Guangyao in to fit snug against his chest. ‘Need one? No,’ he says. ‘But I would like one all the same.’ Jin Guangyao can feel him smiling. ‘You know how I feel about such things. Did you like that? Did you - ’
His tone is casual, light, but his arms around him tighten. There is something a little desperate in it, as if he is already living in a memory. It’s a necessary balancing act: Jin Guangyao cannot leave his father too often, and it is good for his absence to remind Lan Xichen, gently, what he is missing. What he lacks.
‘Er-ge,’ Jin Guangyao says. He smiles. This particular brand of honesty, demanded by Lan Xichen - and by brand he means sizzling, iron, marked on his flesh. ‘That isn't necessary. You were there, I believe. Or was that someone else?’
Lan Xichen laughs. He laughs so much here, a silent vibration under his chest. ‘I believe I was. Though I’m not sure, if you ask me, if I can remember most of it. It was - well. I was - ah -‘
Jin Guangyao smiles, a secret dipped smile. He is pleased to have pleased him. He reaches forward and - in the gentlest possible imitation of what they have already done - tips Lan Xichen’s chin up with a single finger. He kisses him: soft, slow, the sort of needless kiss Jin Guangyao had never understood before now. Lan Xichen sighs. It's like water. His hands rest lightly on the small of Jin Guangyao’s back.
They trade kisses for a while more, lazy and open-mouthed. It’s unhurried, and feels endless; like this night, caught for a moment in an eddy of time, will last forever. And it’s so nice. It’s the nicest fucking thing. He holds Lan Xichen like he will break under his touch, his hands so gentle, such a contrast to earlier, and every kiss he fills with what he cannot say. Lingering, exquisite - there’s nothing to tell him, he doesn’t understand it himself, needs it to remain, for the moment, unspoken. He kisses him with a fervour that feels like a confession. Like an apology.
‘A-Yao,’ Lan Xichen murmurs. This man. This man, here, so kind. The best man - and he means that in every sense, the most good, most accomplished, most beautiful - he has ever known. Here. In his arms. Like he has been before, and like he certainly will be again. And yet, even with weeks of idle speculation and secret smiles - this is victory, right here - it never feels anything less than electric. Like lightning. All of it at once.
‘Er-ge,’ he whispers. Does Lan Xichen feel it too? It’s different, crucial, a pivotal moment in space. He is such a fool. He -
Does he love him?
The thought crashes into him, sudden and wild. He tenses.
Like most things, it is something he always felt at distance - it was always there, hovering on the horizon. He has considered the possibility before. What it would mean. But he has never -
He needs to -
He surges forward, and meets Lan Xichen in a kiss that is deeper, more tangled, more demanding than any before. He wraps himself around him, holding him tight, all limbs and corners. Lan Xichen makes a noise of shock against his mouth, and then opens to him, opens his mouth, lets Jin Guangyao take what he needs, lets him kiss him, a hard slide of tongues and lips and teeth, with need and desperation. With fear.
Does he love him? Does he -
What has changed? Why now? He hadn’t need to name it before. Had been happy to let it curl around him, warm, forgiving in its vagueness. It’s - it’s possession, and desire, and gratitude, and admiration. He has always felt all of these things towards Lan Xichen. There’s no lie there. Has always been good at dualities, at keeping what must be separated separate: he thinks about this man daily, hourly, the focus of everything he does, and he includes him in a tenth of it, maybe less. He admires him, as he admires no one else. But he won’t change for him. Won’t be better, not really, because there are so many things that he still has to do, plans to finish, people to end. He does not wish to see him hurt. He is planning, right now, the murder of his sworn brother - a death which will hurt him, he thinks, like a well-aimed, well-twisted knife. (The only thing which might hurt him more is the fact that it is A-Yao who has done it. Has done it, past tense - he will be successful. There’s no room for thinking otherwise.)
But that is Lan Xichen’s fault. He will not help him. Not where it matters. Not if it means going against - a flare of hatred - his da-ge. He has left Jin Guangyao with little choice.
Lan Xichen. It’s funny: of all the puzzles in his life, the mess of Xue Yang and the Yin iron and his father and his coterie of newly acquired brothers, he spends the most time on this. He wants to pick him apart, thread by thread, until he understands the cloth that this man is made of, until he understands which stitches are integral, architectural, and which he can pull, a little, until they come loose.
But there are moments of purity too. Of goodness. This is one of him: with Lan Xichen’s body around him, warm, he is happy. Isn’t he? It’s overwhelming, in a sort of distant way - and at the same time as he is overwhelmed, the same time as he is afraid, he is also a little amused, a little embarrassed, because at last this is proof - though they told him otherwise - that he is human. A man. And all men are weak.
That was enough before. So why, right now -
It’s the truth, all of this, the most of it he can ever offer: that he once wanted to give this man everything he was willing to give. No more, but still: Lan Xichen should know how lucky he is to receive even that. It’s more than anyone else. He wants to wake up next to him and see his easy smile. To know he has kept him with him throughout the night, and not just to fuck. He wants to be safe, protected, but not only: he wants this to be the man who protected him. He wants to comb his hair. Isn’t that enough? That multitude of truths? It doesn't need a name.
Does he love him?
No matter, now, what has changed: it matters, these things always matter, but he can interrogate that later. Pull apart the folds of his heart - that’s whorehouse poetry again, cheaper than anything he could ever gift - and find where it’s weak. What it was, the exact right point, that changed him. It's important to know that, if he wants to understand himself. But for now -
I love him, he thinks. I love this man.
It’s staggering. He knows it with a sudden prescient certainty, and an inexorable sense of doom. The parts of him fitting together like they never have before. It’s another thing the poets have got wrong, he thinks, apart from power - he doesn’t feel light, in love. Is he in love? He doesn’t feel - what? - breathless, or buoyant, or any of those sort of things they say. He feels heavy. Helpless. Like he is caught in tar, stones on his feet, dragging him down.
Everything was already perfect. Lan Xichen was already his. Nothing will change, with this revelation, except that knowledge, insidious and unsettling, that Jin Guangyao is tying himself - slowly, methodically, and without his own permission - to the regard and well-being of one man. He hates it. He is exhilarated. He is terrified. He -
When they pull apart they are both breathless. Jin Guangyao can feel himself coming apart, losing himself, but he won’t stop. It’s an anger. A helplessness. It isn’t even a need of his body - it’s a claim, a claim he needs to stake, a sudden impossible understanding, a terror. He feels like he is coming apart at the seams.
Lan Xichen is staring at him. So many risks, so much new tonight, but he thinks - for once, for once in his life - it has all paid off. Lan Xichen looks at him with heavy, dark eyes, hunger written in every line of his body. His hands tighten on Jin Guangyao’s hips.
He swallows. ‘Do you -‘
‘Again,’ Jin Guangyao says. It is a demand.
***
Afterwards they collapse, chest heaving, onto the bed. The sheets are wet now, cooling and sticky, and Lan Xichen lowers himself back into it, frowning, testing, an experimental finger across Jin Guangyao’s chest.
‘Er-ge!’
It’s easy to jump from one thing to another, like shedding a skin. Now he is scandalised. Lan Xichen laughs, delighted.
‘That’s - get up, er-ge. Get up. That’s disgusting. Do you have anything to put down?’
The moonlight has shifted; he can see Lan Xichen just a little now, a glimmer in its silvered path, a creature made of stars and shadow -
‘I like it,’ Lan Xichen says helplessly. Jin Guangyao stares.
‘You -‘
Then he laughs.
He is speechless. He isn’t sure what to say to that. What is there to say to that? Zewu-jun, First Jade of Lan, not a creature of moonlight after all.
Lan Xichen is smiling too now, burgeoning and mischievous, delighting in Jin Guangyao’s open mouth, his astonishment. Then he shifts. It’s a tease. ‘Come back here.’
Jin Guangyao draws himself upward, sits up in horror. ‘No.’
‘A-Yao, come on - come back here - ‘
He laughs, short, and swings his legs off Lan Xichen and off the bed. ‘Absolutely not.’ He needs to wash, to make himself clean, to find - to find, apparently, something to put on the bed, because Lan Xichen has no interest whatsoever in moving. A turn of events he never anticipated.
He glances back at Lan Xichen over his shoulder. ‘Where am I looking?’
‘The chest by the door.’
The chest, by the -
Another laugh, quieter this time, disbelieving. Looking back at Lan Xichen, who has prepared for his coming, whose room is stocked with things they might need. And who will do the laundry? He feels his lips curl: there’s an old fear in there somewhere, a whiff of times past and a sense memory of his hands, scalded, in stained sheets, but he buries it. It’s irrelevant. It’s gone. The servants of both Cloud Recesses and Jinlintai know what they are doing, must have known for months - there’s no secrets from the people who wash your clothes. He understands that, accepts that as what it is, part of the push and pull of power. He wonders if Lan Xichen has thought about it at all.
‘This one?’
‘No,’ Lan Xichen says. He can hear the smile in his voice. ‘The other one.’
Jin Guangyao huffs in frustration. ‘Er-ge.’ It’s cold. He’s naked, and shivering, and -
He feels Lan Xichen's eyes on him from behind. He has been watched before, but this is different. Even Lan Xichen’s desire - embarrassed, sometimes, but never ashamed, never apologetic - feels earnest. Sincere.
It’s ridiculous.
‘Here,’ he says, and throws it at Lan Xichen with a twist of his mouth. ‘Now get up. You can’t sit in that.’
They take turns to clean each other, soft, clothes between their legs and over their stomachs. Lan Xichen slides to his knees, and places his head against Jin Guangyao’s thigh. Jin Guangyao watches him. He curls his fingers in his hair, soft now, as Lan Xichen takes a moment - he is an intense man - to breathe in his skin.
The expression on his face is so raptured, so distilled, that Jin Guangyao balks from it. He can’t look at him. He looks at the ceiling, bites his lip, feels - without the sting and protection of desire - vulnerable, hates himself for it, forces himself to breathe. Sex is easy. Kissing, too, is easy. This -
Lan Xichen smiles, draws him in. They settle next to each other on the bed, naked, feet tangling together like teenagers. Lan Xichen rubs a small circle into the meat of his palm. It’s - he’ll never get used to this, the ease of it, the fact that he is naked and all Lan Xichen wants to do is kiss him. It doesn’t seem to bother him at all.
Why is this different?
‘A-Yao,’ he says some time later. They are lying on the bed now, and Lan Xichen’s voice is different, not teasing. Hesitant, careful. It’s coming at last. Jin Guangyao tenses. He knew it would.
Knew, but he had hoped somehow they wouldn’t talk about it, that Lan Xichen would let it slide, the sudden need, and fierceness with which Jin Guangyao had held him, held him down, held them together. Of course he will. He is so eager to please him, Lan Xichen, so afraid of causing him pain. That is who he is.
‘What happened then - are you alright? You seemed a little -‘
Desperate? Panicked? Afraid?
‘I know things are not exactly - as you would have expected them, in Lanling. You work hard. Is that why - ‘
Lan Xichen is too kind to say it. Those aren’t words for Jin Guangyao, or not the A-Yao he knows. That’s somebody different. A-Yao is measured in all things he does. Considering. Careful, meticulous, respectful of his lover Zewu-jun.
That isn’t fair.
He recognises that, even as he thinks it in bitterness and sudden contempt. Meng Yao: be reasonable. Lan Xichen is more perceptive than that. He thinks of Lan Xichen’s hands, under him, tightening with sudden pleasure. He knows, even if he doesn’t know what it means, some of the edges of who Jin Guangyao is. The sharper points: he knows Lan Xichen likes them. He sees it in his eyes in Lanling, a gentle murmured disagreement, an argument that lands particularly well. And he saw it now in the way that Lan Xichen went soft under him as he held him there, melting inch by inch, gasping under his teeth and his nails. In the way he cried out when he came. He has never done that before.
He doesn’t know all of it, of course. Jin Guangyao is still A-Yao, whatever that means. Still protected by the keen warmth of Lan Xichen’s regard and his refusal - and it is a refusal, and it makes him afraid - to see how broken things are between his sworn brothers. But he knows some. Enough for his dismissive condemnation of Lan Xichen to not land quite right. They have always understood each other.
He feels a sting of shame; and somewhere, high above his body, he wants to laugh. Hysterical. It’s his own fault.
‘You can tell me,’ Lan Xichen says. It’s a murmur against his skin. ‘I won’t ask, if you don’t want to. But - ‘
But I’ll be here. I’ll wait. I’ll be patient, and when you come to me, however that is, whatever form, I’ll want it.
It’s sickening.
And also untrue. He knows Lan Xichen. There are many things that would shatter whatever they have, whatever this is. Things that are unforgivable. He does not love like his brother loves: Jin Guangyao is loved on sufferance, on pain of being precisely what Lan Xichen wants. What he thinks he is. And he will be loved, without hesitance and in earnest, until the exact moment he is not.
That knowledge keeps him sane.
He twists against him, this man, and buries his face into his chest. It’s - it’s not a smart move, because all it does is confirm Lan Xichen’s fears. Tells him there is something different. But he cannot look at him and he cannot explain.
He needs the dark. There are some things that are too real, too raw. He isn’t a whore, isn't his mother, has only ever had two men - but living where he lived he has been touched, sickening, more times than he can count. It was normal once. Nothing much to think about, just one more intrusion, one more erasure, one more slight, careless, and proof that he was not a person at all. He could have sold his body himself, pretty enough, pleasing enough, pleasant enough. His mother did all she could to protect him so Meng Yao, son of a whore, does not become a whore himself. But it hurt her, had cost her freedom, days of her life; and he had once sworn to do all he could to stop her being hurt. So: a few liberties taken, keeping his head down, a weighed-up balance between gain and loss. What are a few straying hands?
Only had two men that mattered, and both of them mattered so much. He isn’t so used to intimacy - the real kind - for it to be easy. Rather, he acknowledges, it seems to be getting harder. More difficult, the more he knows Lan Xichen, because -
It had never been like this with Nie Mingjue. It had a competition: a game, however serious, that soldiers played. They fucked like they were on the training field, exhausting, exhilarating, dangerous. He had loved the play of light across the flat planes of his stomach, the knots of his arms; he had loved his strength, there, so biddable, so his. That was what he learnt for the first time in Qinghe: that there is a special pleasure, a delight, at making a slave out of a man so much better than yourself. He wants me. He wanted him, but he had never asked for Jin Guangyao’s mind. He was a soldier; he knew, better than most, that there were some things you did not share. And Meng Yao had cried out because he knew Nie Mingjue liked honesty in a form he could expect, could offer, and so he let himself be honest; he let himself shudder and still and twist - more truth, but still targeted - because Nie Mingjue liked to feel him come apart under his rough gentle hands. That was his truth. He needed to be perfect - by which Jin Guangyao means imperfect, by which he means weak and strong in just the right measures, someone useful, someone respected. Someone to protect. Qinghe saw Jin Guangyao become two things at once: a paradox, a balancing act, difficult to carry out. Not impossible. He had loved to see the whole of Nie Mingjue; to watch him, greedy, under the morning light of the sun. He still thinks of Nie Mingjue’s hands in his hair.
Lan Xichen is different. Lan Xichen -
It’s the biggest irony of his life, this - that after everything he has done, everything he has tried to be and had to turn himself into, gold and grey and red and whatever else they took from him, that the only thing Lan Xichen wants - and he has said this, in these words - is Jin Guangyao, as he is. You don’t have to do that, A-Yao. But who is that? Who is it that Lan Xichen wants? It’s funny to think about. It’s hilarious. And unlike Nie Mingjue, he will not settle for less. He’ll keep looking, an interrogation carried out over the span of years and the turning of the seasons by furrowed brows and gentle hands and soft questions at night. It’s worse.
Honesty, truth: Lan Xichen asks for it simply, as if it's a simple thing to give. As if it’s not the hardest thing of all. Not because it’s difficult exactly, to remember what he has done and to remember why he did it, but because the whole idea of it, put that way, is so simplistic. It’s the black and white of someone who has never had to put their life into boxes in rooms each with a different key. Of someone who only has one side to them, cut dazzling into the rock, that reflects the light.
Who are you? Here’s the problem: it’s all true. There’s truth in everything he does. A-Yao, you don’t need to be like that with me. But what else does Lan Xichen want? What else is there to give? And even now, on the other side of that decision - hard-made and hard-won - that this man is different than the others, deserves more, deserves some sort of sincerity, as much as he can give him - even now it feels -
It feels like a performance. Like a lie. Like once again he is nine, looking over his shoulder, and thinking: they won't believe me. The truth isn’t enough. Not big enough, not meaningful enough, not - just not enough, somehow, for an occasion like this. Lan Xichen, loose-limbed, bare-skinned: what else in the world matters?
Lan Xichen is different. With this man he needs the dark.
‘A-Yao,’ he murmurs.
Jin Guangyao realises he is tense, too taut against his side. He forces his muscles to relax one at a time, until at last he sighs, and drapes himself over Lan Xichen’s chest. He feels strange, unsettled. It’s odd to lose control, but at the same time - vulnerability can do things that nothing else can. And Lan Xichen always responds so perfectly; he couldn’t write it better. It can -
This is the problem. This is exactly the problem. He can’t give him sincerity even if he wants to. He doesn’t know how.
Cover it, he thinks. Breathes. A lesser truth, offered up in service of a greater one. He can’t tell it. It will be tainted, and -
He can never tell him. Mustn’t ruin it. Can never risk that happening. It’s the one good thing in his life, the one moment of fucking brightness. The only way he can be truthful is to withhold this truth. Instead he can offer it to his with actions, because they aren’t lies: kisses along his thigh, a gentle hand unpicking his braids, water on his skin. A smile.
That is what Lan Xichen deserves.
‘It’s nothing, er-ge,’ he says. ‘It’s -
Lan Xichen places a kiss to his forehead, so gentle. He waits.
Jin Guangyao sighs. It’s a ladder of truths, each more valuable than the last, and on any other day, sat with Lan Xichen and drinking his tea like a guest, he would never even think of telling him this. Now he offers it freely.
‘You’re right,’ he says at last. ‘Jinlintai is - difficult. My father is - difficult. And -‘
And that’s enough. It’s more than anything he’s said before. They don’t talk about things like this. Already, furious and unbidden, he can feel a lump in his throat.
He is looking at him again. Even in the dark, pressed up against his throat, he can feel it. Like what? Like -
Like he always does: it’s a mixture of intensity and amusement and fondness and warm appraisal when their eyes meet across the room. Here or somewhere bigger, somewhere more watched. He could hate Lan Xichen for that. He hates himself for it; he doesn’t understand how it’s possible. An example: two weeks ago, in Jinlintai, when Lan Xichen had arrived alone and resplendent without his deadweight brother and when Jin Guangyao had stepped down the dais, feeling in his throat a tight constricting warmth, a pressure on his lungs, and not only in front of the Lan but also the Jin and also his father - Lan Xichen had held his gaze in front of all of them. Every single one. His face had softened like Jin Guangyao had brought him the world.
He wouldn’t. But it sounds pretty.
It isn’t only about the kindness. The first time it had been. When he had been Meng Yao and Lan Xichen had been Zewu-Jun. He had been starved for kindness, desperate for it; it is vaguely embarrassing to think about. But he has spent enough time awake since - analysing, quantifying, imagining scenarios where Lan Xichen is killed, testing himself, seeing whether he would feel sad, wondering what he would do, wondering whether he would do anything - to understand why it bothers him so much. That look. It’s the expectancy. It’s the rawness of it in the open. Lan Xichen looks at him like that, in front of everybody, and expects Jin Guangyao to do the same. That honesty, in public, as if a smile where there are spectators is the same thing. He expects him to smile, in a way that means something, in way that is different from his other smiles, but not so different that the others will notice, or maybe -
No. He stops the thought like it is a weed, with a gentle pinch of self-reproach: he has been trying to be more fair. More realistic. Lan Xichen does not want any of those things.
‘My father,’ he says again, ‘is not - he’s not - ‘
That’s it. That’s enough. Lan Xichen makes a soft sound, a quiet sound of understanding, of sorrow for his pain. He won’t say anything else. They hold each other, for a moment, and Jin Guangyao holds the other man like he's someone else, less of whatever it is that will break him, forces himself to relax his fingers, stops himself clutching at him, stops himself twisting the skin of his flesh, stops his hands that itch to push something, hurt something, and thinks -
Don’t think.
Lan Xichen’s arms, warm and strong. His back. The heat of his skin, fiery even at night. The strongest cultivator there is, a core with shifting currents of heat, always burning, and a man who would lift - and has lifted - his blade for Jin Guangyao, when he needed to.
Lan Xichen.
It isn’t enough.
‘Lie on your stomach,’ Lan Xichen says.
Jin Guangyao cracks an eye open. ‘Er-ge?’
‘Turn around.’
Amused, curious, he obeys. There is a shifting movement, a decoupling of skin, a little sticky, and then he feels the coolness along his flank where there is space and suddenly air. He cranes his neck backwards, but Lan Xichen shakes his head.
‘Close your eyes.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m not going to hurt you. Close your eyes, A-Yao.’
And then: hands, Lan Xichen’s hands, heavy on his back. Kneading at the tension caught between his shoulder blades, massaging away the knots of pain. His breath flutters out. His eyes close.
‘That’s nice,' he says, and smiles.
Lan Xichen moves over him, so he is sitting across the backs of his thighs. There’s nothing remotely sexual about it. He leans forwards, and presses his hands into the taut muscles of Jin Guangyao’s upper back, his shoulders, the broad butterfly wings of his scapula. It’s soft at first, exploratory. He can feel Lan Xichen thinking, his fingers measuring the distance between points, testing -
He presses two fingers, hard, into the meat of his upper back.
Jin Guangyao cries out. He tries to twist, but Lan Xichen smoothes his palms along his back, so gentle and inexorable he does not even realise he is being held still. He is barely using half his strength.
‘Don’t move,’ Lan Xichen says mildly. He finds another stop, exactly right, and presses his thumbs in.
Jin Guangyao hisses. It’s a sharp liquid pain, brutal and sudden. ‘That hurts.’ His tone is accusatory.
Lan Xichen laughs. ‘If it doesn’t hurt, it won’t do you any good. You’re so tense.’
He huffs. ‘You don’t need to -‘
‘You’ll feel better afterwards. I promise.’
‘Oh? Well, if it’s a promise -’
Lan Xichen’s answering smile this time is mischievous. ‘Of course. I, Lan Huan, courtesy name Xichen - ’
They both laugh.
A promise: there’s no point even thinking about that. It’s not the sort of thing Jin Guangyao trusts, not the sort of thing he pays attention to. But the pain will take him out of his mind, into his body, and it fits well with his strange, flighty mood. He wants to hurt, to hurt and be hurt. It’s another kind of intimacy.
He settles himself down, forces himself to relax. ‘Then, er-ge,’ he says, and looks over his shoulder with a quirk of his lips, an arch of his eyebrows. ‘I leave myself in your capable hands.’
Lan Xichen flushes - flushes, after hours of sex. He is absurd.
His hands on his body; they are soft, at first, and then - with a hiss - suddenly much harder. He has done this before; for who? Unnamed Lan disciples? Unimportant: don’t think about them now. Lan Xichen works through the knots in his body expertly, systematically, in a way that stings at Jin Guangyao’s eyes. After the first reaction, he holds himself still and his mouth tight. Lan Xichen’s fingers are relentless. He knows - and Jin Guangyao recognises this with a quiet satisfaction - exactly where Jin Guangyao carries his tension. The sharp flares of pain, exactly in the points he is knotted tight, are almost sickening; he cannot move, has subjected himself to this, decided it will be worth it, but -
‘Er-ge,’ he says, and begins to laugh.
Lan Xichen’s hands stop. ‘A-Yao?’
‘It’s -‘
He cannot stop laughing.
‘What?’
‘It hurts,’ he says helplessly. And then looks over his shoulder at Lan Xichen - Lan Xichen, whose hands are hovering above his back, his expression now slightly alarmed, and why wouldn’t he be - and laughs again at the look on his face, slightly hysterical, slightly edged.
‘A-Yao -‘
‘No, don’t stop. You said it was going to. Keep going.’
Lan Xichen is hesitating still. Jin Guangyao twists behind and grabs his arm, places it once more again on his back. He is shaking slightly, and forces himself once again to be still. There, with Lan Xichen’s hand on his back; he feels steady, but steady doesn’t mean safe. He feels chained once more, feet in stones, dragged to the edge of the cliff. Steady: all that means is stasis.
Does he love him?
It’s relaxing, in a funny sort of way. He tenses - can’t help it - as Lan Xichen is deciding where next, listens to his quiet admonishments to sit better, walk more, feels strange and giddy with the sudden sharp shocks of pain. It’s the inconsistency that does it; there’s no time, apart from anticipation, to think of anything else at all. And that is such a blessed rarity. Despite his tension, despite his tensing, he can feel Lan Xichen’s fingers kneading his skin, working it loose, working it free. He feels like he is floating. He feels like -
‘A-Yao,’ Lan Xichen says, some time later. His hands have slowed to a slow press along his back, dreamy and unconscious.
‘Hmm?’
Lan Xichen’s smile is lazy, tired. ‘Let’s sleep.’
Sleep. He stills, just a little, not enough for Lan Xichen to notice.
Here, with Lan Xichen. Sleep in another man’s arms, another man’s house, another man’s bed, skin against his, held -
With a jolt he is wide awake, undoing in a second the work of the last half an hour. He feels nauseous.
‘Here, er-ge?’
A laugh, soft and fond. ‘I’m not going to kick you out, A-Yao. Yes. Here.’ A hand on his cheek, sleepy. ‘I’ll wake up soon enough. If you want to go back to your quarters before sunrise, I can wake you too.’
‘It’s fine,’ he says. It is. The laundry, remember the laundry: they already know. And he is not here tonight, not officially, and this trip is not on state business and the path he took up to the Cloud Recesses is nothing he had ever trod, before, in homespun shoes. Remember it is fine. He will leave at first light.
‘If it makes you uncomfortable, A-Yao, you can return now.’ Lan Xichen's voice is a murmur. ‘But I thought that - since we have already - ‘
It’s the same. The same as the beginning. Lan Xichen thinks - and he understands why - that it’s the sex that needs to be navigated. Not this. This is a wordless assumption for him. A wordless trust. What’s the problem in that? He loves A-Yao; and A-Yao wants him, at the very least.
But it is the first time. It’s the first time in so many ways: the first time he has been here, in Zewu-jun’s room, and that knowledge has hung between them, unspoken, all evening. Fucking him here - being with him here - feels like closure in some sort of way, closure for those days of stolen glances and astonishment and Meng Yao, so young. So watchful. And Zewu-jun everywhere, this man made of starlight, and he had smiled -
So yes: it’s closure. It’s also a beginning, to sleep in a bed that the Jin helped pay for. A roof he helped build. Lan Xichen will never forget.
And it is the first time that it had mattered - or rather, when it mattered before - because it had - it had mattered in a sort of compartmentalised way. The brothel had been a moment out of time: Lan Xichen clothed in something rough and naked without his forehead ribbon, hair spilling over his shoulders. Another lie that Jin Guangyao has heard: in that moment I forgot everything. In that moment I had no choice. In that moment he was just a man. He forgets nothing. There had been a rawness to it, a strange openness, but he had never made the mistake they sing about. He knew who this man was. Why else would he have done it?
But there was no loss, seeing him there. No loss of nobility. Zewu-Jun, cross-legged on the sex-scuffed floor of a whorehouse, the same serenity on his face. In the mountains he had been part of the landscape, something natural, formidable, even as the kindness in his smile cracked a thin line in the veneer of the image he made for himself. There in the brothel he stood out like a stone; rising unmovable against the current, peerless and upright and drawing the eyes. Irresistible: and he does not only mean the kiss. It was the way that he moved. Zewu-Jun: untouchable, revered, even while resting. Meng Yao had hated that, in a way he hated most things he could not be. He could not look away.
Lan Xichen’s mouth around the word brothel. Jin Guangyao hears again his cautious, generous words - it was the safest place for us - and the flush as the name and the sudden guilty weight of it dawning on him. He likes to prod at that feeling like a bone that is newly broken, testing its weight. He is grateful: that's another truth. But what are the limits of that? He is grateful to absurdity for that grace, for his halting words that still, in the end, spelled out the words brothel and thank you and A-Yao, that name that sends shivers down his spine, a thrill of possession. Grateful, and magnanimous in his gratitude: he is so good to Lan Xichen. A-Yao. He is so good to this man.
I thought we would die. That was why he had done it. It is the sort of reason Meng Yao told himself, when he was younger, had respected - the poetics and dramatics of survival, bared teeth - but it is not the only one. He knows himself better now: and Jin Guangyao is older. Balancing two names and stronger. Why should he lie?
And the man had looked at Jin Guangyao with a helplessness, a gratitude, a frown sometimes. He did not like to inconvenience; not even in his asking, eyes closed, for a little water.
He wonders if Lan Xichen ever has bad dreams.
Jin Guangyao exhales. His eyes are open and fixed on the ceiling. ‘Er-ge.’ His voice is pleasant still. ‘What are you saying? Of course I’ll stay.’
Lan Xichen smiles; he feels it against his forehead. ‘Then, if you will permit me - ‘
Jin Guangyao lies still as Lan Xichen moves around him, shifting in the dark, pulling covers and exhaling and settling, still, to something warmer. He curls himself around the smaller man’s back, and wraps a warm arm over his waist. The sheets against his bare skin feel -
It won’t work. It -
Lan Xichen can feel his tension. Must be able to feel his tension. He must know, somehow, that Jin Guangyao -
He lies very still. Breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth. It’s an old exercise, one of those things that Nie Mingjue had taught him. He had been such a fast learner. Now he centres himself; concentrates on the breathes, on the things he can control, alive when others would have failed. Thinks -
Don’t think.
But how? How? There’s nothing to distract him now from the weight of it, the sinking of it, the -
Lan Xichen’s breathing has slowed. He has fallen asleep.
Jin Guangyao breathes in. Breathes out. Lan Xichen’s chest is warm against his back, and Jin Guangyao didn’t think - didn’t even think - to stop him holding him like this. At his back he has Lan Xichen; at his front the wall, the side of the bed. Nowhere to go. And he can feel every inch of skin, every hair and nerve and space in his body, but not in the pleasant way, the before-sex way, but -
Instead he feels trapped. Trapped by the body at his back, the wall at his front, the covers over them - heavy, too, though Lan Xichen’s core is warm enough for both of them - and in his head he is back in Qinghe, back in the brothel, back in the claustrophobia of his rooms deep under Jinlintai, dark with the stench of blood. (Not really. He is meticulous: the rooms are clean.) Back in Qishan, waking to a man over him with a knife and a glint in his eye. Back in the Cloud Recesses, the first time, restless and awake when Nie Huaisang, drinking, had thought he was sleeping - Wei-xiong, wait! - and aimless, careless, a walk under the stars in the clear night, and Lan Xichen, at the door of the hanshi -
If we could go back to the night we first met; how you looked, carved, under the painted moonlight -
He breathes in. Breathes out. He is safe here. No: that’s funny, that’s hilarious, that’s ridiculous. He isn’t safe when he knows what he knows now. He loves him. Well done, Meng Yao. Is he supposed to find the thought comforting? Is it something to be proud of? Love? It isn’t. It’s a vine. The weight of Lan Xichen across him, his hand across his chest: he is caught, quite literally, weighed down by a man so still he could be dead. He tries another thought on for size, a cap on his head and a golden gown, to see how it sits: he is safe, here, from everything except Lan Xichen.
Or rather: if Lan Xichen does not harm him, nobody will.
That is better. He feels his heartbeat begin to slow.
He is tense, still, but he repeats it in his mind like a mantra. He won’t hurt him. It’s almost amusing, this fear - he sleeps nightly in Jinlintai, exhausted, sound, for at least a few hours. He is in far more danger there. And yet -
He will not hurt him. If he does not hurt him, nobody will. But those two things are not quite the same. There’s - space, in the middle. Space for something to grow.
Paranoid, Meng Yao?
He needs to sleep.
He is used to living with discomfort, used to turning it into something smoother. And so he settles himself. Settles his breathing. Calms, forcibly, his uncalmed mind.
He listens to Lan Xichen’s breaths. They are deep and slow. He concentrates on the feel of his chest against his back, not as a weight but a presence, and he tells himself: I could leave if I chose. He could walk out, if he wanted to, all the way back to Lanling if he wanted.
(It isn’t true. He’s made his bed, and now -)
He can feel the rise and fall of Lan Xichen’s chest. He does his best to copy it, a good student, to sink himself into him, to become, in all ways that matter, the man that smiled at a boy in Nie-grey robes. He isn’t trapped. He’s wanted. He isn’t trapped. He’s wanted. He isn’t -
He falls asleep.
***
When he wakes, not long after, it is much worse.
His whole body is so tense he can barely breathe. Lan Xichen’s warmth against him makes his skin crawl. It’s hot. So unbearably hot.
He feels an itch, a restlessness, a nauseous along the line of his limbs. He can’t move. He’s frozen. If he moves, if he moves an inch, Lan Xichen will wake up. That’s not allowed. Not possible. He can’t - here in his bed, only under sufferance - say it again - he can't interfere. He can’t stop him sleeping, that would be - it’s impossible. Won’t risk waking him.
But -
His heart is racing. He needs air. Needs -
As carefully as he can, pulse thundering in his ears, mouth dry, he picks up Lan Xichen’s hand, heavy, and moves it away from his waist. Will he notice? Will he -
Will he hate me?
It’s a stupid question, a stupid fear, but he isn’t in his right mind, so he can forgive himself a little: it’s past midnight, the small hours of the morning, and he is plastered, sweaty and naked, next to another man, another person, and he needs -
Teeth gritted, excruciatingly slowly, he extricates himself from Lan Xichen’s embrace. He is a heavy sleeper. With Jin Guangyao gone, he turns - a faint indistinct noise - and shifts across the rest of the space of the bed.
Two thoughts: one, that he’s so indescribably fond of this man, always but especially now, undone in the darkness, and two -
He picks up Lan Xichen’s robe from the floor. He wraps it around his shoulder - lets it down slowly, not too much material at once, quiet so it doesn’t rustle, doesn’t wake them, quiet as only Meng Yao can be - and walks to the door. He glances back at Lan Xichen, but he is still sleeping. Jin Guangyao would have woken by now. There’s no light; he’s fumbling in the dark, but does even this carefully - so carefully, blood thundering in his ears, sick, nauseous, perfectly quiet - and the trick is to walk a step at a time, to shift your balance after your foot is already placed, to test it with half of your weight first long before the whole. Your hands, bent slightly - if you hit an object, there must be space to give - and moving cautiously, methodically, across all planes of space.
He doesn’t know this place. He will, of course, there’s no question about that. But that doesn’t serve him now.
He knows the stretch of corridor, though. Knows the reception room, where he sits and learns, wide-eyed, the secrets to the song that will kill the man who once held him, bird-like, in his living arms. Knows the door.
Through the living room - not louder, he won’t risk it, not even now - and he takes a moment to glance back, convinced he is being followed, and then the doors, opened so carefully, and then - and then -
He bursts out into the night.
He takes a ragged breath, chest heaving. It's cold. It’s dark. Air, blessedly cool, in his lungs. He is disorientated, blinded for a moment - he forces himself to stand still. He must look mad.
His hands twitch, massaging his chest, smoothing down the cold prickling skin - autumn, and there is no cloud - and feeling his heartbeat. It’s fast.
He can’t go far. Won’t go anywhere else, risk getting found half naked wearing the First Jade’s robes, too large and rustling on the ground. It’s enough to -
It’s enough to breathe.
The stars, beyond the moon-latticed branches and whispering wind-swept hush of the bamboo, are bright. There is a dampness in the air, a turning of the season. When Lanling is resplendent in red, winter will have already arrived in the Cloud Recesses, a well-settled guest. He has seen it before: beautiful, quite beautiful, and captured so well in the assured and sweeping ink of Zewu-jun.
He shivers. The panels of wood are cool under his feet. It makes him feel young again. For once, the memory is good: the water in Yunmeng, the gentle dappled sunlight. He had felt so grown up, as a child, carrying his money and going to the market and waiting, cautious, until the adults move away and he can buy what is left. He had been needed. And his mother had trained his memory that way, lessons so subtle he had not yet realised he was learning, only that he wanted to please: you can remember that, can’t you, A-Yao? You’re cleverer than me. Had heard it from his mother often, almost like a plea: you’re cleverer than me. But she had been clever. And her saying that had made him afraid.
There was a good part of this memory - a sense memory, brought on the frigid wood under his feet. Oh. He remembers now. Back to Yunmeng, back to little Meng Yao with his hands callused and eager to help in any way he can: he had played in the lake when he was very young. The boys around him were stronger. They’d push him under, and he’d writhe and thrash and burst through the surface grinning, triumphant, the only fights he ever won. He was slippery as a fish. And watchful, even then: he liked to sit on the pier, looking at himself in the dappled water, looking for his mother in his own sun-dazzled reflection. His own face just out of reach.
It’s a good memory. Doesn’t have any of the stain of the later stuff; he wasn’t even Meng Yao then, not really, didn’t understand what their laughter meant. Why it was so ugly. Why they shut him out. He had liked to sit and shred reeds with his fingernails after dark, absent-mindedly, listening to the distant cries and shrieks of children at play. He didn’t join them often; the games in his head were better. He was a self-possessed child.
Anyway. It calms him.
He clutches Lan Xichen’s robe around him; it’s stupid that he didn’t think to bring anything warmer. But it brings a tight smile to his face, even now that his teeth are beginning to chatter, to retrace his footsteps through the house to pick up Zewu-jun’s clothes: a layer by the door, a layer in the corridor, a layer by the bed. The best, of course, are the clothes that he decided never to wear. The Lans dress themselves, he knows that: Lan Xichen, smiling, admonishing himself in that soft, wry way. Which will A-Yao like better? The formalities he had shed.
That calms him too.
At last his heart rate returns to normal. He still feels a little sick, a little nauseous, but now that he can risk moving. Now that he isn’t touched the jerky hollow energy in his limbs is beginning to fade.
Gradually he surfaces. He tests the edges of his thoughts, cautious. He is steady once more.
Himself again - a joke, not his best - he takes a moment to think on what just transpired. Because it’s not - he’s not -
He had thought it might happen. Maybe he should have anticipated it. But despite everything that has happened between them it is true that this is the first time he has stayed overnight for more than sex.And before Sunshot, on the road - they had been so careful with one another. It’s sheer luck that has brought them this far without it.
It was the same in Qinghe, with Nie Mingjue’s men. There was a rawness and a richness in their bonds, battle-tested, that he had never seen before. On nighthunts men would fall asleep across each other, legs careless, arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Look after this, they'd say, and wouldn’t look back to check that they had. And he had had lain awake for hours. He hated the restlessness of his skin, the hyperawareness of somebody’s foot against his. Was he breathing too slowly? Too deeply? Could he move his arms, now, or will they know’? With Nie Mingjue it had never taken more than a glance, that arch way he found so provocative and so incensing, and then he had walked away. There had never been any questions. Once again: Nie Mingjue was a soldier. He had understood.
He isn’t sure why it’s so frustrating now. It’s weak, obviously. But there’s more than that. As he thinks that - it often happens like this - he suddenly knows: it’s because he wants to offer this to Lan Xichen. This, standing in for the sincerity he cannot give him in words, in a way he cannot taint or use or shape. Actions instead. There’s a more selfish reason too. It would be proof that Lan Xichen were different. That Jin Guangyao could overcome - for him alone - his years of wary, fitful sleep and his distrust, fundamental to his every move, of anybody beyond himself. He wants that proof more than anything.
There’s also a lurch in his stomach, something more fearful. If he can’t give him this - if his body won’t relax, won’t let him relax - it will get in the way. It’s intimacy. And he needs Lan Xichen to see him at his most vulnerable, to think about A-Yao in his bed, wide eyed, when he sees Nie Mingjue. There must not be any doubt in his mind that Jin Guangyao needs him. That he is someone to protect.
He needs to foster that helplessness. The sense of fondness. He needs to -
He needs to stop fucking thinking.
It is cold; too cold to stay out here for longer. And he is calmer now. Jin Guangyao turns, pulling the robe closer over his slight shoulders, and then stops.
He is not sure what to do now.
It’s warm, the room, but it’s also oppressive. Expectant. If he’s there, even when Lan Xichen is asleep, he feels the need to - to what? To be something else? Or more like himself, Jin Guangyao distilled? He doesn’t know. But it lurks there, curling, a nagging feeling of deception and guilt without knowing even what he is guilty for. Another person steps into a room, and he becomes a mirror. It’s instinctive. It’s exhausting. He doesn’t know how to turn it off.
It’s better with Lan Xichen than most. But he also has more to lose. The stakes are so high.
He takes a breath, stalling. His feet are numb, blocks of ice; his fingers too are beginning to hurt. But he cannot get back in that bed with Lan Xichen if he wants to sleep. And he does want to sleep - he needs to. It’s shameful, and Lan Xichen had seen right through it, but Jin Guangyao is bone-tired. Exhausted. Light-headed, often, and at the point of collapse.
And yet -
Jin Guangyao, cleverer than me, mind sharp as a whetstone: it takes him a shameful amount of time to see the answer. A small smile settles over his face. All men have their pressure points, and Lan Xichen’s - one of Lan Xichen’s - is guilt.
So this is how it will go.
Jin Guangyao, delicate in Lan Xichen’s robes, will slip back into the hanshi. He will be quiet, once again, as only servants and bastards know how to be. He will not not get back into bed with Lan Xichen, but will watch him instead with wide eyes from the door. There’s no question about that; he loves to watch this man. Never gets tired of it.
He can see him now. The softness of his hair, a river of ink, and the moonlight on his naked skin. He isn’t sleeping on his back like he is supposed to, but like a human man, somebody reachable, somebody that Jin Guangyao could know: one leg is sprawled across the blankets, and his foot dangles in empty space. In an empty half-curled fist he holds the sheet with a slack grip. On the floor beside him, luminous in the dark, is his forehead ribbon.
It’s a strange feeling, a lump in his throat, like standing on the edge of a precipice. Lan Xichen: endlessly trusting, naked, unconscious.
He will turn, then, away from the bed, and settle himself beside the door. It won’t be a pleasant night; he will be cold, though it will be bearable, and the floor will be hard. But anything is better than the sickening prickling of somebody else’s skin on his. There, at least, he will be able to breathe.
Fast forward the few remaining hours until morning - they are both early risers - and imagine this: Lan Xichen begins to shift, a smile on his face, eyes closed, and reaches for Jin Guangyao. His hands come away empty. He frowns, pushes himself to sitting, eyes scanning the room - and then he sees him, there, on the floor. Curled up. Huddled into himself against the cold. A-Yao wanting so badly not to wake Lan Xichen, not feeling like he can, perhaps, or too afraid -
He doesn’t like to remind anybody else of his status. But he can do it for Lan Xichen. The pleasure of seeing him pause, his earnest explanations, his exhortations that please, A-Yao, we are equals, his shame when he forgets - it’s worth the tightening in his stomach. It’s a sharp thrill.
‘A-Yao? What are you doing out here?’
Jin Guangyao is jolted back into the present. Lan Xichen - the real one, this time - is standing with a hand brushing the doorframe.
He blinks, startled. He should not have been able to sneak up on him; he must be more tired than he thought. He -
‘Er-ge,’ Jin Guangyao says. He does not want to look at him, but he makes himself himself turn. He is shaken; he should have heard Lan Xichen approaching. ‘It’s nothing. I’m sorry to wake you.’
Lan Xichen shakes his head.
‘You didn’t wake me. I didn’t hear you go out at all.’
It is said so quietly, but Jin Guangyao can hear it for what it is: a soft reprimand.
He smiles. It feels thick, an effort, harder than it has been in months. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’
Lan Xichen shoots him a look; it’s incredulous, or as close as he has ever seen on the man. ‘A-Yao. You -‘
He sighs, and runs his fingers through his hair. He is clearly unsettled.
At last he speaks. ‘Come back to bed,' he says. ‘We can talk there.’
In the moonlight there is a statue-like quality to Lan Xichen. A colourless beauty. But the rest of him is as alive as Jin Guangyao has ever seen - his eyes tired and concerned, watching Jin Guangyao as if he is an animal that will run, or bite, or leave with no farewell at all. His hair is loose and touchable, and his hands twitch - is he going to try and touch him? To soothe him? - before he thinks better of it.
Jin Guangyao doesn’t want to talk. He is profoundly exhausted by all of it: the alertness, the fear, the sense, always, that there is something he has forgotten. He doesn’t want to talk. If he talks, he has to think. Has to think about the tone of his voice and the shape of his body and the expressions on his face, even here, even with this man. This is the place where he is closest to happiness, if there is such a thing, and yet -
He is exhausted. But that’s a given: it exhausting, in its most basic form, to exist as Jin Guangyao. And the net needs to be tighter. Carefully, slowly - he plucks the thoughts out of the fertile soil of his mind. Snips their stems. There’s no room for doubt.
But maybe -
It’s ridiculous. He has plans; there are things he wants, things only this man - and his father, and Nie Mingjue, and Xue Yang - can do for him. He has enough presence of self to be amused by the very image: a small homestead in the woods. What would he do there? He can’t outrun his mind.
‘A-Yao,’ Lan Xichen says again. Perceptive, again: he is watching him with a hesitance and wariness. His hands hover; he wants to offer touch.
Maybe it’s because of that. Maybe it’s that one moment of understanding, tiny, infinitesimal really, but the words burst from him without his permission, low and bitter.
‘I can’t.’
Lan Xichen is startled for a moment; then his voice turns soft. ‘What do you mean? You -‘
‘I mean that I can’t sleep with you, er-ge, not in your bed - not with you there.’
Jin Guangyao’s voice is a little louder now, sharper. The words are coming, and he has a brief moment of clarity, of understanding - this, too, is intimacy - as his skin crawls and he curls his hands into fists. He hates this.
Lan Xichen stares. He doesn’t understand. Can’t understand. Why would he? It’s not something he has ever had to think about probably, has always been safe in his bed, and even in wartime, even - going right back - when they were in the brothel, silent, watching the door, even then he had not been alone, not totally, because Meng Yao had been by his side -
Softly, gently:
‘Is it because of me?’
Jin Guangyao laughs. It’s a bitter thing. What a stupid question.
‘No, A-Yao, please - don’t do that. Look at me. Is it - something that I have done?’
He isn’t begging, though the words could be. The please is politeness only.
Jin Guangyao turns away, contrary, wild, paces forward, his hands clenched at his sides. Should he - should he -
‘Yes,’ he says.
It rings, sudden and loud, in the air.
There’s a soft noise from Lan Xichen. The noise of a man who has been struck. Jin Guangyao is confused for a moment; then he realises, all too late, what that must sound like to him. Yes. He turns -
Lan Xichen is staring at him. There is a bewilderment in his eyes, and sorrow. His voice is so quiet. ‘Will you tell me what it is, A-Yao? Then - perhaps I can change it.’
Change it? What? Jin Guangyao is shocked too; he hadn’t meant that. Does Lan Xichen think -
The other man’s expression is shuttering in front of him. ‘I am sorry,’ he says haltingly. ‘If my desire has made you uncomfortable. I never meant for that to happen. If I have misunderstood, or - or if it was something that I - ‘
Jin Guangyao stares at him.
‘Er-ge,’ he says helplessly. His mouth twitches into a laugh, hysterical, but he pushes it down. If he laughs now it will ruin everything. ‘Er-ge, no.’
He moves forward, and grabs Lan Xichen’s hands. There is a flicker of that old energy in him, a twinge of nausea at the touch, but he pushes that down too. It’s irrelevant.
‘I can’t sleep next to anyone,’ he says. ‘It’s not you. It’s a -‘
He hates this. Hates himself. Hates the words that he is struggling, right now, to get out. Eventually he sighs.
‘You haven’t done anything,’ he says at last. ‘You haven’t misunderstood.’ He reaches up and brushes Lan Xichen’s cheek with a single shaking finger. His voice has sunk to a murmur; a swallow, difficult. He can still save this, if he plays it right. His eyes are steady on Lan Xichen’s, and he sees the moment his words land.
‘Lan Xichen,’ he whispers, ‘I hold you in the highest of regard.’
A beat; a silence. Jin Guangyao hears it, and Lan Xichen surely must too: the weight of the words he cannot say.
Lan Xichen. I -
Not yet. Not tonight.
Lan Xichen is looking at him, eyes wide. He reaches out a trembling hand to place on Jin Guangyao’s face.
‘I am glad,’ he says quietly. And again, eyes fluttering shut, as if it is a sigh: ‘I am glad.’
They stay there for a moment. The night is cool; Lan Xichen’s hand, on his cheek, is warm. There is nothing else that needs to be said. At last Lan Xichen shifts. His eyes are glimmering; is he crying?
’May I hold you?’ he asks. ‘If it isn’t - if that isn’t too much. I would like to -‘
Jin Guangyao looks up at him. He smiles, the kindest smile he can give, a smile only for him, and places his hand on top of Lan Xichen’s. He holds it to his cheek and intertwines their fingers. A jerk of energy, a strange hollowness; it’s still there. But he closes his eyes for a moment and breathes in. Settles himself, tests himself. It’s manageable.
Now he lets himself laugh, a quiet laugh, the kind Lan Xichen cannot possibly misunderstand. It is so fond. ‘Er-ge,’ he says. He is smiling.
He steps forward, and slides his arms around Lan Xichen’s waist. Lan Xichen’s hand - hesitant, and then firm - come and rest on the top of his upper back. The other rests on the back of his head, curled in his hair, holding Jin Guangyao to his bare chest. They both sigh.
Hours, minutes. Eventually Lan Xichen disentangles himself and steps back, holding Jin Guangyao still at arm’s length.
‘Come inside,’ he says at last.
Jin Guangyao smiles, pained. There is a sinking feeling in his stomach, but it isn’t unexpected. Telling him was a mistake, because Lan Xichen - he will think he can fix it, like he tries to fix everything, by giving it enough space and enough love. If Jin Guangyao refuses him that love - turns it away, tells him he doesn’t want it - he will think all the lesser of him. He will -
He will think it is Lan Xichen he does not trust.
(It’s true, of course. But he can never tell him that.)
He closes his eyes. ‘Er-ge. I can’t -’
His plan. His plan had been so perfect: the balance of goodness, for once, in his favour. It would have buoyed him up for weeks; and Lan Xichen, guilty, frustrated, would find a day to visit. A gift. A symbol, in front of everybody, of his regard. It had all been so perfect. Why had Lan Xichen had to wake up? Why had he - ‘
‘And I’ll take the floor,’ Lan Xichen says. ‘You can take the bed.’
Jin Guangyao looks up at him, sharp.
What?
‘If you - don’t want to share. And if you don’t want to go back to your quarters,’ Lan Xichen says. He is - he is so clever, to have seen, to tell him so carefully, to see how close Jin Guangyao is to breaking, more than any other night he has known him, and to know - how does he know? - how Jin Guangyao would deny it, if he said it outright. ‘Of course you could go back, if you wanted to. I don't want to pressure you. But if you want to stay, and you won’t sleep if we are - then - ‘
‘Er-ge,’ he says helplessly.
He forgets, sometimes. That the paper figures in his life are real. That they can make choices too. Lan Xichen has rendered him speechless.
The other man is looking at him with something like amusement. ‘It’s alright, A-Yao. I’m used to it. I’ve spent enough time night-hunting in my life. It’s only for a few hours.’
Jin Guangyao’s mouth, he realises, is hanging open. Dignified, too late for that, he shuts it. He tries to explain. ‘I’m not taking your bed, er-ge. That’s - that’s - ‘
‘It’s what?’
He hates how Lan Xichen is watching him - the softness of his eyes, the understanding in the twist of his smile.
He turns away, rubs his hands, lets out an angry, vicious breath. ‘Don’t be -’
He stops himself just in time.
‘Don’t be what, A-Yao?’
‘Er-ge,’ he pleads.
Lan Xichen steps backwards, cocks his head in curiosity. ‘No, go on. What were you going to call me?’
Jin Guangyao glares at him, mutinous.
Lan Xichen is laughing now, a gentle laugh; he is in the same playful mood, flushed with Jin Guangyao’s almost confession, that he was earlier in bed. ‘Were you going to insult me, Lianfang-zun?’
Jin Guangyao looks at him. He smiles; it’s a little angry, a little defensive. A little provocative. ‘I would never be so ridiculous,’ he murmurs.
The other man’s smile grows. ‘I want to hear it.’
He sniffs; deliberate, careful, he plucks Lan Xichen’s hands off him and lifts his jaw, turning his head away. ‘I would never be,’ he says, ‘as ridiculous.’
It takes Lan Xichen only a second to understand. He quirks an eyebrow. ‘Ridiculous? I would say, Lianfang-zun - and correct me if I am wrong - that there other things more ridiculous, and less befitting my role as host.’
His eyes are warm, and merry.
‘Letting an honoured guest sleep on the floor, I have been told, is one of them.’
‘Er-ge,’ Jin Guangyao says shortly. He is too tense, too exhausted, for whatever game Lan Xichen wants to play. ‘An honoured guest?’ He sounds scathing; it is the best he can manage. ‘Is that what I am?’
They stare at each other.
For a minute Jin Guangyao regrets it; if Lan Xichen gives him sincerity now, frayed as he is, he is not sure he can take it.
Lan Xichen’s smile, to his relief, does not fade. Instead he takes his hand between his. He lifts it, and presses a kiss - warm, lingering - to the back of Jin Guangyao’s hand.
‘Of course,’ he murmurs. His eyes are so kind. ‘The most honoured of all guests. A-Yao - please. I know you are exhausted. Take the bed. Sleep.’
‘Er-ge,’ he says, hesitating. He needs Lan Xichen to understand why this is a bad idea. He feels almost hysterical with exhaustion, anger, the emotions of the night. ’I can’t - it’s your room - and you’re - ‘
‘Please,’ Lan Xichen says softly. ‘For me.’
He stares at him. Thinks -
A warm settling feeling. It breaks, at last, through the sickness and the fear. It’s the sharp rush of triumph, the heady scent of victory, the notes that hang, light, over his guqin. Lan Xichen had taught him that. Had praised him, softly and with genuine astonishment, and turned to him and said, in pleasure and complete sincerity, that he learnt so fast. That he had the makings of a great musician. And there hadn’t been any pity in his voice when he’d said that, none of the qualifications that Jin Guangyao knows that everybody, even Nie Mingjue, is forced to apply -
You could have had such a strong core. It’s a shame that -
If you had started earlier, you could have -
There’s none of that with Lan Xichen. There never is. He takes a delight in Jin Guangyao’s learning in a way that Jin Guangyao has never seen; he approaches teaching like another problem, asks for Jin Guangyao’s patience, tells him I think I can explain this better, if you will give me a few days to think. Asks him, as if it is Jin Guangyao who is helping him and not the other way around, which part it was, exactly, that helped him finally understand. Would you prefer me to explain it fully, or you would prefer to copy? Either way, Lan Xichen tells him - and he means it - is possible. If Jin Guangyao can’t do it, can’t get it, can’t make that last little leap - and he flinches away, hating himself, hating to show his weakness - the person that Lan Xichen berates is himself. There’s no such thing as a bad student, A-Yao. Let me see if I can find another way. He doesn’t shy away from discussion of Jin Guangyao’s weaker core, but neither does he pity it: instead he accepts it, methodical, as one factor to consider amongst many. Something to work around.
And Jin Guangyao is getting better. The calluses on his hands harder, his fingers stronger. Soon, he thinks, he will be ready. And then he will be safe.
A smile spreads across his face. Settles. The future, spread out in front of him, is intoxicating. Nie Mingjue. Da-ge. He is so grateful to Lan Xichen. None of this would be possible without him.
He exhales.
‘If you’re sure,’ Jin Guangyao says. ‘If you’re certain you will sleep.’
Lan Xichen grasps his hand. ‘I am.Thank you.’
He says it like it’s a gift.
And Jin Guangyao he lets himself laugh at last, shaky. He is smiling. He pictures it: Meng Yao, whoreson and bastard, beaten and locked outside and ignored and kicked down the stairs, Yunmeng and Qinghe and Lanling, the threads of it, the tides of it, all leading to this moment. Meng Yao, the lover of the First Jade of Lan, alone in his bed. ‘Er-ge - er-ge - ‘
Lan Xichen looks at him, the corner of his mouth twitching. He is so very beautiful. ‘What?’
Jin Guangyao needs to look at him. Needs, for just a second, to remember him like this: Lan Xichen, bare-chested and silvery-skinned, hair loose and inky-black over his shoulders, eyes dark as night. This man: a thrill of victory, an ache, exhaustion, possession. He has won.
Jin Guangyao reaches out, and touches him. He is real.
‘A-Yao?’
Lan Xichen is watching him, curious.
Jin Guangyao swallows. It’s - he can’t explain. Never can.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says, and looks up at Lan Xichen, a look that comes full circle, the slow heated look he gave him earlier in the evening, wide-eyed and supplicant.
Then he lets it change. His guard, slowly and hesitantly, comes down. His eyes soften. He looks up at Lan Xichen, uncertain, intent, so very tired -
‘A-Yao,’ Lan Xichen breathes.
Jin Guangyao closes his eyes. That was enough. That was too much. ‘It’s cold, er-ge,’ he murmurs, and takes his hand. ‘Let’s go inside.’