Chapter Text
Wei Ying shows up on his doorstep for the first time in thirteen years and says, “Lan Zhan?”
Says, “This is Wei Sizhui—he’s my son.”
Says, “I’m sorry to ask. I wouldn’t have come here if we could’ve gone anywhere else, I just—”
Says, wringing his sleeves, “Can you let us stay?”
--
The decade-old disappearance of controversial rock star Wei Wuxian, at the height of his career as the Yiling Laozu, has been the subject of a hundred conspiracy theories ever since he went missing. Many of them are centered around the album he was working on at the time of his disappearance, entitled Yin Tiger, that some claim contained sensitive information that the government killed him for. Others believe that it contained an occult ritual that backfired greatly on Wei Wuxian. Still others simply say that he simply was dissatisfied with the album and quietly retired from the music world…
- Shen, Y. “The Yiling Laozu Disappearance.” No Body No Crime: The Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of Music, p. 128 (Quirk Books, Philadelphia).
--
Wei Ying folds down on Lan Wangji’s plush couch as Wei Sizhui, a teenager of maybe fourteen or fifteen years, puts his bag down to the side and sits, politely and properly, beside his father. Lan Wangji stares at them both, Sizhui in a sweater vest and patched-together glasses, and Wei Ying, who—
Who is wearing red, as he usually does, but here and now it’s only a red shirt and dark jeans. It’s nothing half as stylish and glitzy as when he was the Yiling Laozu, but it’s also not really his style. Lan Wangji feels his heart wrench at the sight, wondering what happened.
He doesn’t say that. He only says, “I have two guest rooms, though they’re both a little dusty. Let me clean them up and you’ll have your rooms.”
“You don’t have to,” says Wei Ying, “I can do the clean-up just fine.”
“I am your host, am I not?” Lan Wangji asks. “Let me clean up. I would not ask you or your son to exhaust yourselves even more than you’ve likely already done coming here.”
“It wasn’t very exhausting, Mr. Lan,” says the boy. “We used the last of our gas money to get here. I’d like to help too.”
“Anyway, it’d go quicker with two other people helping you out, yeah?” Wei Ying asks. Then he looks to his son, grins, and adds: “And Sizhui here needs to do a little work anyway, he’ll become a lazy and indolent young master in the summer if he doesn’t get a little work in!”
“Dad,” says Sizhui, jabbing his father in the side with an elbow. “I’m sorry for my father, Mr. Lan, his sense of humor takes some getting used to.”
“I could get into stand-up comedy, you don’t know,” says Wei Ying, but his smile is brittle, as if the thought of taking the stage in any way pains him. Lan Wangji thinks of the last times that Wei Ying got on a stage, the last tour he had as the Yiling Laozu all those years ago, and understands why.
“I am used to it,” he says now. “We were in college together, once.”
Sizhui’s eyebrows go up into his bangs, and he looks to his father, who huffs out a breath and says, “Ah. Yeah. We were—We used to date, actually, up until…” He trails off then, and says, too brightly and quickly, “Anyway! Let’s go and clean out the guest rooms, hm? So we don’t spend the whole night sneezing up a storm and ruining poor Lan Zhan’s sleeping schedule!”
“I can handle one room on my own, Dad,” says Sizhui, as he stands up. “You and Mr. Lan should catch up, though! If it’s been so long since you guys last met.” He hoists his bag up onto his shoulder, glances at his father.
Wei Ying says, “You sure, A-Yuan?”
“The guest rooms are the third and fourth rooms on the right,” Lan Wangji says.
“I’m sure,” says Sizhui, and starts for the stairs.
“Take breaks!” Wei Ying calls after him, and Sizhui shouts back, “Of course, Dad!” in the tone of voice all teenagers take when they’d rather keep the conversation short so they can get to more important things. Lan Wangji knows that tone well. He teaches musical theory to high schoolers, he’s grown familiar with it.
Wei Ying laughs, and leans back on the couch. “He’s such a sweet boy,” he says. “I’ve been bracing myself for teenage rebellion since he turned fourteen this year, but he’s as polite and kind as ever, you know? Nothing like me at that age: an unholy terror of a teenaged star.”
“I have seen your interviews,” says Lan Wangji. “That is patently not the case.”
“You didn’t see behind the scenes,” says Wei Ying. His smile fades, and he hunches in on himself, choppy hair falling forward, says, “I’m sorry, again. Trust me, I’m well aware I’m the last person you want to see after how everything between us ended, but I—I wouldn’t have come here if it wasn’t my absolute last resort. You know?”
He knows. God, he knows. It’s an argument Lan Wangji used to have with his boyfriend, back when they were still boyfriends—that Wei Ying could not and would not allow himself to rely on anyone else but himself, not unless he was at the end of his rope and had run out of ideas. The fact that Wei Ying is here, now, after ten years without any contact and thirteen years of being broken up, means he’s desperate and has no other option.
It breaks his heart. He’s never wanted to be just the last resort, but. At least Wei Ying is talking to him. Doesn’t seem to hate him.
“I know,” he says instead.
“I guess you did get me to come to Washington after all,” Wei Ying ruefully says. “It only took thirteen years.” His fingers play with the hems of his sleeves. “We’ll stay out of your hair, promise,” he says. “Sizhui just needs a place to sleep and do his schoolwork, I just need to scrape some money together so we can afford a place. And even if I can’t…” He swallows, looks up at the stairs where Sizhui’s gone, and says, “I can busk. Sizhui’s just a kid, he needs shelter.”
“Wei Ying,” says Lan Wangji, sitting down next to Wei Ying and taking his hand. He brushes the hair back from Wei Ying’s face with his free hand—it’s messy and choppy, like he took a pair of scissors to it and called it a day. “You can stay. You can both stay. I will not separate you from your son, nor would I ask you to leave when you clearly need the help.” He wants more than that, he wants to see Wei Ying in the morning and kiss him in the evenings, wants to help Sizhui with his homework and see him off to college, wants their belongings to clutter his house, but. But.
Well, what right does he have to that, now? They dated in college, him and Wei Ying. They broke up. These things happen. Most people would’ve already moved on—Lan Wangji simply doesn’t care to, because there’s really no one else who can measure up to Wei Ying. He doesn’t really have to wonder if Wei Ying ever did, because Sizhui’s upstairs.
“You’re sure?” Wei Ying asks now. He doesn’t pull his hand away from Lan Wangji’s, but turns it over instead, his thumb brushing over the callouses on Lan Wangji’s fingers, from playing so many stringed instruments. “I can’t pay you back right now, but I will, I swear.”
“No debts,” says Lan Wangji, shaking his head. “Please, you owe me no debts, you’ve no need to pay me back.”
“Lan Zhan,” says Wei Ying. “I can’t—I won’t impose on you, all right? Let me pay back even some of it, even a little bit of rent.”
“It is not imposing just to ask for help,” says Lan Wangji.
“It is when I’m the one who broke your heart in the first place,” says Wei Ying. “Look, you can say you told me so. You can yell at me, whatever, it’s okay, it’s not worse than what I’ve said to myself over the past decade or so. But I just…” He gnaws on his lower lip, and says, “When I say there’s no one else left I mean there’s no one else.”
“Not even the Jiang siblings?”
“I can’t go to them,” says Wei Ying. “They’re too close to—I’m not going to let the fucking Jins hold me over their heads for good reviews and,” he almost spits the next phrase out like it’s poison, “good behavior. As if Jin Guangshan gets to define what’s good behavior, that piece of shit. And I won’t let him anywhere near A-Yuan.”
Lan Wangji has never had the misfortune of meeting Jin Guangshan himself, and thank god for that. What little he’s heard from his brother down in California is enough to make him deeply glad that Tacoma’s the better part of a day away from Los Angeles. And now here’s Wei Ying snarling the man’s name like a curse.
Pieces are falling into place. The next time he sees Jin Guangyao he may just strangle him, because now he sees the implied threat, all those years ago.
So the Jiangs are out. He says, “What of Nie Huaisang? I remember you were close.”
“A-Sang?” Wei Ying shakes his head. “Lives too close, and anyway even I heard about Nie Mingjue disappearing. Didn’t want to drop in on him and get his hopes up—I don’t know where Mingjue’s gone.”
“Your grandmother?”
“Baoshan-waipo?” Wei Ying says. He shrugs. “She doesn’t have a fixed address, I don’t know where to find her.”
“Sizhui’s…” Lan Wangji trails off.
Wei Ying seems to understand anyway, because he tilts his head to the side. His lips twitch upward. His voice is grave when he speaks, but Lan Wangji knows when Wei Ying’s faking gravity for comedic effect: “Oh, there’s no mother. I birthed Sizhui of my own body. Immaculate conception, y’see.”
Lan Wangji doesn’t bother to suppress the groan that escapes him even as Wei Ying breaks into a fit of cackling laughter. “Mm. Is that so,” he says, dry as dust.
Wei Ying leans against him as he tries to speak through the laughter, but it takes a while for him to catch enough breath to say, “No, I found him under a radish patch.”
“Wei Ying,” says Lan Wangji, trying to sound pained and instead—he has missed him too long, to manage even the faintest appearance of exasperation. Wei Ying’s name comes out fond, soft.
“Seriously, though,” says Wei Ying. “I adopted him when he was a toddler. We used to have roommates, but…” He gets quiet, and says, sadly, “Things got expensive. So now it’s just me and him.”
And it’s clearly running Wei Ying ragged. Lan Wangji recalls his own uncle, saddled with two children at a young age after their parents’ deaths—he’d had help from the rest of the family, at least, but Lan Wangji knows it had been difficult even with help and wealth in spades. Wei Ying is alone, and Sizhui might be a good child, but he’s still a child.
Raising a child on your own, no matter how good that child tries to be, and Lan Wangji will wager his house Sizhui has been trying to be good for his entire life, is a difficult, nearly impossible task. Wei Ying has always been one for attempting the impossible—but god, he doesn’t have to, not for this. He shouldn’t have to.
Lan Wangji lets out a breath. “If you or Sizhui need anything,” he says, “please, come to me. I cannot guarantee miracles, but I want to ease your burdens.”
Wei Ying smiles. It’s the smile he plasters on when he’s trying to put a brave face on, when he wants to keep the world from seeing how close he is to falling apart. It is, unfortunately, a well-practiced one. “You don’t need to,” he says. “I’m the one who turned up at your door begging for help. And after we broke up, too.”
“I want to,” says Lan Wangji. He squeezes Wei Ying’s hand, gently, and his other hand rests on Wei Ying’s shoulder. The fabric of his jacket is fraying, threads coming loose. “We may no longer be lovers, but—I care about you. It does not sit right with me, to see you carrying such a heavy weight.”
“Ah, Lan Zhan,” says Wei Ying. “You’re too good to me, you really shouldn’t be.” He lets himself tip forward and lean onto Lan Wangji, and he’s warm, and real, and solid. Here.
He’s missed him so much. “You deserve good things,” Lan Wangji murmurs, and wraps his arms around him—it’s easy, so easy. His body has never forgotten how to hold Wei Ying: gently, with room for Wei Ying to wriggle around. He used to be so squirmy.
Here and now, Wei Ying settles in, burrows down. He doesn’t move much. Perhaps he’s simply too exhausted, after a decade in the wind. “I think I…” he whispers.
“Hm?”
“Nothing, Lan Zhan.” He breathes out. “It’s just good to see you again. That’s all.”
--
Why Golden Scale Is An Overrated, Overhyped Mess
Jiang Wanyin
Lotus Magazine
Golden Scale: Worst Yiling Laozu Album Yet?
Evie Frye
Rolling Stone
INTERVIEW: Wei Wuxian on Golden Scale Criticisms: “Who Cares? Get Lost”
Xue Chengmei
Coffin City
Wei Wuxian’s Golden Scale Disappoints Critics, Flops On Charts
Himeko Murata
Astral Express
HOT GOSSIP: Closeted Rock Star Spotted In Back Alley Of Notorious Gay Bar WITH COMPANY - PICTURES INCLUDED
Heather Duke
TMZ
--
Lan Zhan’s home is much, much nicer than any motels Wei Wuxian had been planning to stay in the second he got kicked out of the house. No noisy neighbors, for one thing. No weird smells from the bed. No unidentifiable things in the shower that you have to put up with because you can’t afford better.
And in the morning he wakes up on a nice cozy mattress in the guest room, just as the morning light is beginning to stream in through the windows. The problem with having a teenager is that you have to take the kid to school, and to do that you have to wake up so insanely early that even the sun is still struggling to get out of bed. Wei Wuxian honestly misses the days when he could sleep in whenever he pleased, if only because these days he’s perpetually sleep-deprived.
It’d be nice, he thinks, if he ever got a moment to sleep in. But parenthood doesn’t stop for a second, so he sighs and pushes himself up and out of bed, yawning as he cracks the door open and—blinks.
Someone’s already cooking breakfast. Pancakes? Yeah, pancakes, he knows that smell. Except these aren’t the kind of pancakes Wei Wuxian usually makes, out of a box and slathered in cheap maple syrup. Doesn’t smell like it. Hm.
He creeps downstairs, and blinks at Lan Zhan, who’s…already in the kitchen, already fully dressed, and already flipping pancakes over in the pan. Soufflé pancakes, the fluffy kind in YouTube videos.
“Holy shit, I didn’t think those even existed in real life,” he says, stunned.
Lan Wangji carefully scrapes one free of the pan, and deposits it onto a waiting plate. “They take some time to perfect,” he says. “I still occasionally have trouble.”
“Yeah right,” Wei Wuxian snorts, and he moves closer to watch Lan Wangji deposit two more pancakes onto two other plates. “Sizhui likes his pancakes with strawberry jam,” he adds. “It’s pretty hard to squeeze it into our budget so I just save it for after his exams, usually—”
Lan Zhan opens the cabinet, grabs a mason jar of artisanal strawberry jam, and puts a generous dollop of jam onto a pancake.
“You have strawberry jam,” says Wei Wuxian, stunned. “You have hipster strawberry jam.”
“There is a farmer’s market every weekend,” says Lan Zhan. “Mrs. Ajero’s jams are of the highest quality, of all the wares on offer.”
Wei Wuxian stares at him for a long moment, doing the numbers in his head. “I can’t afford that,” he says, finally.
“I can,” says Lan Zhan with a shrug.
“You’re going to spoil him,” says Wei Wuxian. “He’s going to expect jam with breakfast every time now. I’m never gonna be able to get him to go back to Welch’s.”
“Why would you eat Welch’s,” says Lan Zhan, looking pained.
“That’s the kind of money that could go to Sizhui’s books and my old roommate’s medical expenses,” says Wei Wuxian. “Welch’s is cheap enough that getting it once or twice in a while doesn’t make too big a dent in our budget.” Not like field trips, or extracurriculars, or good instruments besides Wei Wuxian’s beat-up old acoustic guitar. He’s done his best with what they have, but you can only stretch so far, and some things are just…out of reach, no matter how much he wishes he could drag them into Sizhui’s reach.
Lan Zhan turns off the stove, and says, “Wei Ying.”
“Yeah?”
“Do not worry about your finances, here,” says Lan Zhan, his voice steady, his gaze unwavering. “You do not have to pay rent, or utility, or any of the bills.”
Wei Wuxian swallows his first instinct, the urge to snap I won’t be your fucking charity project, Lan Wangji at him. That’s just pride talking. His son’s more important than his pride.
He breathes in, then out. Thinks it through, thinks of what he remembers of Lan Zhan, how he’d kept insisting: come to Washington with me, Wei Ying, please, there is a place there you can rest, let your body recover from what you’re doing. “Is there a catch?” he asks.
Lan Zhan makes a soft, hurt noise, and something inside Wei Wuxian’s heart hurts right back at the same time that it grows soft. “There is no catch,” he says, and he is so, so achingly sincere. As he always was, is, has been since they were young. As Wei Wuxian should’ve always seen.
“I still want to pay,” says Wei Wuxian. “I—Look, I know, okay. You want to help me. Okay. Fine. I’ll take it—Sizhui needs stability and safety more than I need my pride.”
“But you still have it,” says Lan Zhan.
“Yeah,” says Wei Wuxian. “Some tatters I can’t just barter away, anyway.”
Lan Zhan heaves a sigh. “You have always been proud,” he says. “Frustratingly so. I’m not very surprised that it has not entirely changed.” He takes out artisanal peanut butter (good fucking god) from his cupboard and spreads that onto the second soufflé pancake. “So. What is it?”
“Let me pay you back.”
“No,” says Lan Zhan. “I do not want your money. Or anything else, before you ask. You need your money more and I will not demand anything from you that you are unwilling to give in any other circumstance.”
God. And he means it, too. “Let me pay you back, anyway,” says Wei Wuxian. “Don’t—Don’t give me that look, you know me. You still put peanut butter on my pancakes for me.” It’s been a long time since he did that for himself, unable to quite justify the expense when they already had the occasional Welch’s. “Just let me do something for you, all right?”
Lan Zhan puts the bread knife down, seems to think about it. Then he says, “I will take coffee.”
“Coffee,” says Wei Wuxian.
“Once a month, at the end of the month,” says Lan Zhan. “I do not need it to be pricey.”
“You can’t stand instant coffee,” says Wei Wuxian, with a snort. “What if I get you the shitty vending machine coffee, huh?”
Lan Zhan’s brow wrinkles, his nose scrunching at the very thought of it. “Acceptable,” he finally grunts. “Do not stretch your means. If vending machine coffee is all you can afford at the time, I will take it.”
“You used to pound shitty vending machine coffee like shots during finals week,” says Wei Wuxian. “You can handle it.” But he’s not going to make Lan Zhan drink that. He has a month, right? He can make something. He can run trials. There’s something called dalgona coffee, he could do that.
“Mn,” says Lan Zhan. He sprinkles powdered sugar over all three pancakes. “We have a deal, then?”
“Coffee at the end of the month,” says Wei Wuxian. “Yeah, we got a deal. What happens if I don’t hold up my end of it?” He knows Lan Zhan won’t throw him out, but he does need to know what he’ll do, just in case.
“I will be very disappointed,” says Lan Zhan, tranquilly.
“Oh, you’re going to play the guqin passive-aggressively at me,” says Wei Wuxian, snickering at the memory. “A terrible fate!” He slides past Lan Zhan, looks over the coffee beans on offer, and starts on a cup. “Hey,” he says, softer now. “You still take it with milk and two sugars?”
Lan Zhan nods, his golden eyes going soft and sad. “Yes,” he says. “You still remember.”
“I made it for you for two years,” says Wei Wuxian. “It’s kind of hard-coded into my head.” Along with everything else about Lan Zhan, which is deeply sad and kind of pathetic if he thinks about it too much. He’d been a rock star, and they’d been broken up, so he hadn’t exactly turned down anyone willing to warm his bed for a night. But it’s Lan Zhan’s coffee that he remembers best. “You put peanut butter on my pancake.”
“The habit was ingrained over two years,” says Lan Zhan. “I could not forget it even if I wanted to.”
Which…means he didn’t want to.
What that in particular means, Wei Wuxian’s not sure yet. But hope, treacherous hope, grows in his chest like a weed. He swallows against it, and turns away, reaching up a hand to his hair and pushing through it. Messier than it really should be, and choppier as well, but then that’s what happens when you’re not very experienced in cutting hair and you decide to take scissors to it. On the bright side, just about the only person who has recognized him with his terrible hairdressing skills in ten years is Lan Zhan.
Wei Wuxian says, “I have to go get Sizhui up and out of bed.”
“Does he like orange juice?” Lan Zhan asks.
“I pour him milk, for his bones,” says Wei Wuxian, and scurries up the stairs before he can look at Lan Zhan and see the tenderness on his face, the love still in his eyes. Yes, the love—Wei Wuxian is more than familiar with what that looks like on Lan Zhan, still, even after thirteen years. There’d been a time he basked in it, like a cat stretching out in a sunbeam coming in through the window, warmed by the morning light. Lan Zhan was morning light, warm against his skin even in the coldest winter.
He still is.
It’s just that Wei Wuxian’s boarded up the windows and shut all the doors. It’s just that there’s no cat anymore, but a haunted house filled with stories of heartbreak and misery. It’s just that it’s been a long, long time since Wei Wuxian was the boy that Lan Zhan had loved back in college before it all went to hell, and he doesn’t know if Lan Zhan loves him or just the version of him he knew once upon a time.
Best not to think about it. Best to focus on Sizhui like he always does, and make sure the kid can make it to school on time. He calculates the time from Lan Zhan’s place to the bus stop to the school in his head—barring any incidents with traffic, Sizhui’ll be able to get to school with more than enough time to spare for a morning nap if he can get him up now.
He knocks on the door, and hears Sizhui groaning awake on the other side. “A-Yuan, my darling, my sweet child, my little radish treasure, my xiao tang yuan, if you don’t get up in thirty seconds I’m coming in there and planting you in the garden out back!” he calls.
“I’m getting up, Dad, stop that,” Sizhui grumpily answers.
“Thirty seconds, radish!” Wei Wuxian says, singsong. “Or it’s the garden for you!”
“I’m thirteen years old, that’s not gonna work on me anymore!” But Wei Wuxian can hear his son rolling out of bed, yanking on clothes, opening the guest room’s bathroom door.
Lan Zhan, from downstairs, calls up: “Your father used to beg for five more minutes to sleep when we knew each other.”
“Lan Zhan, I am trying to be a role model here!” Wei Wuxian yells down. He spots Lan Zhan poking his head out from around the corner leading to the kitchen, and swears he sees the tiniest twitch of a smile even from here. Swears it looks almost smug.
God. He really has missed him.
--
The one good thing about having moved states near the start of the school year is this: Wei Wuxian didn’t need to do too much paperwork when he took Sizhui all the way here and enrolled him in a reputably good public school. He is going to need to do more paperwork now that they’ve gotten evicted and are staying with Lan Zhan, but that’s easier than transferring entire schools mid-school year.
He accompanies Sizhui on the bus, takes him all the way into school and tries not to squirm too much when he passes under the metal detector and the security guard’s dirty look. He knows what he looks like. He knows he looks like the sort of person you don’t allow near your kid, scruffy and shabby as he is.
He waves Sizhui off to his classes, then heads off to go meet with the secretary so he can grab the paperwork he needs to do and go.
While he’s there, the secretary says, “You know, you look kinda familiar, Mr. Wei.”
“I’ve just got one of those faces,” Wei Wuxian says. His hand hovers over the blank signature section briefly, and he signs the nigh-unreadable signature he uses these days, instead of the one on his Wikipedia page. “Oh, hey, while I’m here. How much do the books cost again?”
The secretary tells him. He swallows reflexively, then pays up the cash—he won’t be needing a motel room, anyway, and his car’s at Lan Zhan’s. He’s not going to need gas money either. He is going to have to top up this subway card, though, so he’ll need to find a popular corner tomorrow to busk on. And he needs an actual job, and he needs to work on his resumé, which means he’s going to spend time at the library tomorrow working on that and cover letters and sending out application after application.
Lush wants a clerk. Beauty spa in University Place wants a nail technician. Chinese restaurant downtown wants a waiter or a dishwasher. The Tacoma Times office is in sore need of a janitor. He’ll probably have to narrow down the search to part-time jobs, because if he sticks with one job it won’t nearly be enough to cover laboratory fees and Wen Ning’s medical expenses.
Sometimes he wonders how the Jins are enjoying his bank accounts, his royalties, everything. Maybe they’ve emptied them out by now. He hopes to god, at least, that they’ve given some of it to Jiang Yanli. He’s pretty sure they didn’t, though—Yanli’d never accept the money if she ever even caught a whiff of where it really came from, how they really obtained it.
When he comes out of the school, Lan Zhan’s car is idling in front, and Lan Zhan rolls the window down and waves hello.
“What are you doing here?” Wei Wuxian asks, floored. “Oh, shit, do you work here?”
Lan Zhan shakes his head. “I work Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays at a school further downtown,” he says. “Today is Thursday. You mentioned you were going to come here to finish up some paperwork—I wished to see if you wanted to have lunch with me.”
“Lunch!” Wei Wuxian says. “I couldn’t possibly impose, you don’t need to buy me lunch.”
“Wei Ying, I made lunch,” says Lan Zhan, nodding to the picnic basket in the backseat. “I also packed a lunch for Sizhui. It is enough to share.” He pauses. “I want to pick your brain, also,” he adds. “I am working on a lesson plan on the basics of musical theory, but I would like a second opinion on it. My students inform me that some things I leave too unclear.”
“Aha, an ulterior motive!” Wei Wuxian crows. He knows damn well that it’s not, but he likes how Lan Zhan snorts in response, the tiny upward turn of his mouth. On anyone else that would be a cackle. “I knew it. You only want me for my brain.”
“It is a very large brain,” says Lan Zhan, and leans over to open the passenger door. Wei Wuxian slides inside and twists around to dump his bag into the backseat, then settles into the passenger seat. “Do you still like Emperor’s Smile? There is an Asian grocery that sells it.”
“Ah.” Wei Wuxian slumps down in his seat. “I would, but I’ve been sober since I adopted A-Yuan. Can’t really risk it.” He pauses, remembering that if not for Lan Zhan they’d be homeless, and adds, “Can’t risk it more, anyway.” He knows how thin the ice is for someone like him—queer, not white, scraping every spare cent together to pay the rising cost of living. One wrong step and he’ll crash through the ice and he won’t be able to break the surface again.
“Oh.” Lan Zhan drums his fingers on the wheel, then says, “Apologies, I wasn’t—I had only thought, you used to enjoy it.”
“I still would, if not for, y’know, being a father,” says Wei Wuxian. “And hey, if you want to drink I’m not going to stop you or anything, long as Sizhui’s not in the vicinity.”
“Will it not affect you?” Lan Zhan asks.
Wei Wuxian huffs out a laugh. “A different addict would say yes,” he says. “But—honestly, no. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think—you know, the camera’s off me. I’ve always been a better person when I haven’t got a camera pointed at me.” It had been true back in college, the first time Wei Wuxian had a taste of that life. It’s true now, ten years after he was last in a recording studio. “And anyway. I have to look after Sizhui.”
“You weren’t such a bad person even when you were famous,” says Lan Zhan. “Misguided, yes. Reckless, yes. But you never stopped being yourself.”
Wei Wuxian runs his teeth over his lower lip. “Feel like I did kind of a bad job, then,” he says, softly. “I was trying to be someone else.” It had worked. For a little while, anyway. Still, he looks back from ten years on and sometimes he wonders how he managed to see the other side of it, how he’d clawed his way up from that dark pit and pulled himself out of the grave he was digging. Then he thinks: I didn’t pull myself out. That was the Wens.
“Why?” Lan Zhan asks.
Wei Wuxian tips his head back against the headrest, and says, “Someone else would’ve been just fine with what they were doing to me, to what I wrote. What kind of life I was muddling through.” He breathes out slowly, and says, “Anyway, forget about that, you know, it’s insane they charge you for textbooks. Like, holy shit, seventy-five dollars for a physics textbook? I could just download it and print everything for twenty dollars at the library, and it just wouldn’t have any color.”
“Shufu paid over a thousand dollars for my textbooks in eleventh grade,” says Lan Zhan. “So this is not a new complaint.”
“What the fuck,” says Wei Wuxian, stunned. He’s never had a normal childhood, he and Jiang Yanli and Jiang Cheng had tutors and shit, and Madame Yu had made goddamn sure all three of them could comport themselves in front of the cameras without bringing shame upon the family and the business. Sometimes he looks back and wants to shake everyone involved in raising them like that, because when he imagines Sizhui in his place he dearly wants to start burning things down.
If A-Yuan ever decides to be famous one day, that’s fine, but god, let that happen when he’s in his twenties, and not while he’s still so small, so like a baby bird.
“It is also why I prefer to hand the materials out on the first week,” says Lan Zhan. “It is an unnecessary financial burden to place on the students’ families. The less of one the better.”
“Why does nobody else do that,” says Wei Wuxian, baffled. “Seventy-five dollars. For one physics textbook. Christ.”
“I can pay for it,” Lan Zhan offers.
“I mean, I already did,” says Wei Wuxian, and Lan Zhan pouts at him. No one else would know he’s pouting just looking at him, but Wei Wuxian spent a long period of time fixated on Lan Zhan’s face, memorizing every twitch, every line, every microexpression. That little downward purse of his lips, that sad blink, that twitch of his nose—he’s pouting. “You already cook for us!” he says. “I was just going to busk tomorrow so I could top up the subway card for a while.”
“You have a car,” says Lan Zhan.
“I don’t have gas money,” says Wei Wuxian, with a careless shrug, before he sees the determined set to Lan Zhan’s jaw. “That’s not an invite to pay for it! I can scrape the gas money together, and anyway, listen, public transportation—”
“I will pay for gas,” says Lan Zhan. “You can pay for your subway card. You will not be left wanting for transport.”
“Lan Zhan,” says Wei Wuxian. Then: “You don’t mind if I busk, then?”
Lan Zhan looks at him, surprised. “Why would I?” he asks. “I see you at your happiest when you are singing. I would only ask that you be safe.”
The label would’ve had his hide for it—why play for pennies in a subway station, after all, if he could play Madison Square Garden and earn them millions? But Wei Wuxian’s always liked busking, because he gets to talk to people, learns a little bit about their lives when they make requests of him. He couldn’t get that at Madison Square Garden.
“I’ll bring a taser and a can of pepper spray,” he says. He pulls the seatbelt down and clicks it into place, and Lan Zhan nods, satisfied, before he shifts the car into gear. They pull away from the curb and Wei Wuxian shuts his eyes, breathes out, and drifts to the sound of Lan Zhan’s NPR.
--
Yiling Laozu: A Reappraisal
Was It Really That Bad?
We’re talking about Wei Wuxian, aka the Yiling Laozu, aka one of the most controversial rock stars of the nineties, most notorious for disappearing in the middle of producing his album Yin Tiger! This episode features: Prompto’s long-enduring belief in ghosts, questionable album art, a side trip into who of the Jiang kids would play which Pathfinder class, Noct’s conspiracy theory about why Golden Scale was just so bad (hint: it’s the closet), and why child stars maybe should be able to commit a little arson once or twice when they grow up.
This episode was sponsored by: Morrigan’s Call, the new TV show starring Shay Cormac, airing on NBC this fall. Learn more about it here!
--
Wei Ying is more settled in his own skin now.
Back when they were dating in college, Lan Wangji had often noted that Wei Ying never seemed able to sit still. He’d try, he really did, but he’d fidget, he’d drum his fingers, he’d hum absently to himself, he’d doodle in the margins of his notes. In some of their bigger classes this went unremarked upon, on account of the professor having much bigger problems than a fidgety student, but Wei Ying used to bitch about this one professor he had in Eastern Philosophy of the 18th Century who seemed to hate him just for existing, branding him a disturbance to his class.
“Do you mean my uncle,” Lan Wangji had said, dry as dust.
“Oh my god, he’s your what,” Wei Ying had said, sitting up in bed. “I just took the class because it was the only one left! Oh shit, is this a conflict of interest?” Even then he had been jittery, always on the move.
“No, he just does not wish for his lectures to be disrupted,” Lan Wangji had told him.
“Well, tell him to stop being so fuckin’ boring, then,” Wei Ying had huffed, before he’d hopped off the bed and said, taking Lan Wangji’s unresisting hands and yanking him up off his chair with a laugh, “Lan Zhan, Lan-er-gege, come with me, let’s eat, let’s have some fun.” There’d been track marks on his arms, but they were all old.
He doesn’t have very many of them, now. Lan Wangji’s seen him with his jacket off, and most of the ones he’d seen back then have faded with time. There are no new marks. But he wears his shabby jacket like an armor against the world, and now that he’s older, he seems to go still more often than he moves. He still drums his fingers, but where thirteen years ago Wei Ying would’ve idly flicked the lock button on and off, Wei Ying here and now just looks out the window and watches nothing in particular, if he’s not napping in the front seat.
They pass the fifteen minutes it takes to get from Sizhui’s school to Ruston Waterfront in relative silence, with only Melissa Block’s voice on NPR filling the air between them. Those kinds of salaries wouldn’t be, uh, looked askance at in LA, so describe for us what the town of Belobog is like so we know just how out of the ordinary they were—
Wei Ying says, “Does your brother visit often?”
“No,” says Lan Wangji, with a resigned sigh. “Xiongzhang has a lot of work that keeps him in Los Angeles. He comes up on special occasions.”
“But you’re never down there,” says Wei Ying.
“I prefer not to go to LA often,” says Lan Wangji. “I have gone for my brother’s birthday, but only once a year. More than that…” He shakes his head. “If there is an emergency severe enough for my brother or my uncle to call me, I would go, but Xiongzhang is able to handle things well enough most of the time that there is no real need.”
“Does he usually say anything, before he comes up?” Wei Ying asks. “So I can get a motel room. Sizhui can stay at yours while he’s there, I just…don’t want to risk it. He’s too close.”
“Xiongzhang will wonder about his presence,” Lan Wangji points out.
“Say you’re babysitting for his terrible parent who went out of town,” says Wei Ying.
“You are not terrible as a parent,” says Lan Wangji, heatedly. He has seen terrible parents, seen how afraid their children are of them, of disappointing them. Sizhui has never been afraid of his father—he adores him, but he also banters with him over breakfast, teasing him over his grey hairs and groaning when Wei Ying calls him a radish who needs planting. That is someone who is confident his father will always be on his side, no matter what. “Sizhui loves you. I will not belittle that love.”
“Okay, okay,” says Wei Ying. “Okay. Just say you’re babysitting. Don’t mention my name.”
Lan Wangji lets out a breath. “All right,” he says. “You are a good parent, though.”
“I do love that you’re so ready to go to bat for my parenting skills,” says Wei Ying. “I just thought about how I’d feel if Sizhui was ever treated the way I was and I realized that if that happened to him I would set so many things on fire, it’s kind of wild.”
Lan Wangji comes to a stop at a red light, turns to look at Wei Ying, and says, “I have wanted to commit arson, at the very least, ever since you first asked how much you had to pay me for cooking you a meal.” It had been the first week of college, and Wei Ying had grumpily complained that they didn’t have any good food in the cafeteria in the mornings, so Lan Wangji had opened the cupboards and cooked them both some breakfast. It was a simple bowl of congee, spiced to some degree in consideration of Wei Ying’s tastes.
Wei Ying had eaten his bowl happily, but then paused, frowned at Lan Wangji, and asked, “I need to pay you for this, how much did it all cost?”
“You do not need to pay me,” Lan Wangji had said, baffled.
Wei Ying had laughed uneasily. “I mean, people who aren’t related to me don’t do things for me just because they feel like it,” he had said then. “Famous, y’know? Either they’re being paid to do it or they want something, so. How much?”
It took Lan Wangji fifteen minutes to convince Wei Ying he really wasn’t looking for anything in return—he’d enjoyed the cooking and had taken the opportunity to make something, that was all. But the uneasy tinge to Wei Ying’s laugh…that’s stayed with Lan Wangji all these years. That’s been fleshed out by all the other things he’s been told about Wei Ying’s childhood and adolescence in the spotlight.
Back then, Wei Ying had simply laughed it off even when he knew it hadn’t been good for him. Or at least he’d said he knew it. Here and now, it’s…it’s something, that he recognizes how it would hurt Sizhui. That the thought of it makes him angry. A sign of improvement, Lan Wangji hopes.
Wei Ying says now, “I want him to be happy. I don’t—I don’t know how anyone can look at someone like Sizhui and see anything other than a kid.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “We were everything and anything but. My son won’t know what that feels like, if I’ve got anything to say about it.”
“That is the start of being a good parent,” says Lan Wangji. “Hold on to that.”
The light turns green. He drives on.
Wei Ying pushes the back of his shoe against the edge of his seat. The shoe comes off and smacks against the car floor, and he pulls a knee up to his chest, his expression pensive. “Remember when we spent two weeks in Suzhou, that last summer?” he asks, finally, circling around something heavy. “And we fed each other xiaolongbao?”
“I remember,” Lan Wangji confirms. “You accidentally spilled soup on your shirt.”
“I wasn’t sure how to eat it!” Wei Ying laughs. “I’d never had it before. And you showed me and we finished off the whole bowl together.”
“Mm,” says Lan Wangji, remembering Wei Ying’s bright eyes, his sneakered foot tangling with Lan Wangji’s. What he best remembers is the aftertaste of the soup and the spicy condiments still lingering in Wei Ying’s mouth when they kissed under a bus stop’s roof. “I e-mailed the proprietor after we left. I had meant to make it someday, so I requested their recipe and promised not to profit from it.”
“Oh,” breathes Wei Ying.
“I can make them on Friday after I am done with classes,” says Lan Wangji. “The Asian market I prefer gets restocked that day.”
“Let me help, I asked them for their recipe too,” says Wei Ying, which is news to Lan Wangji, he had not realized this when they’d flown back to America. “I wanted to make it for you, but—y’know. Shit happened.” Then he shakes his head, and says, “That’s…not actually what I wanted to talk about. I was thinking, I wrote a song about that trip.”
“It did not make it onto Golden Scale,” says Lan Wangji.
“No, it did not,” says Wei Ying, lips thinning at the mention of his last album. “But you know what album it made it onto?”
“Your unreleased album?” Lan Wangji asks.
Wei Ying shakes his head. “No,” he says. “It was supposed to be on Golden Scale, you know? But I passed it off to my manager, and when I asked for it back, he told me it was Leon Kennedy’s song, now.” His eyes narrow as he glares out the window. “They don’t credit me. They don’t credit Kennedy, either—I’m pretty sure he wrote one of the songs on the album, but they stripped out everything they thought deviated too much from what sold well. That, I think, was the end for me—because that was our trip, that song was for you, and they took it from me and tore you out of it for their bottom fucking line.”
Lan Wangji’s breath catches in his throat. Ah, he thinks, beginning to understand the shape of Wei Ying’s grievance against his label now, beginning to see the answer to the mystery of the Yin Tiger album’s disappearance. “Wei Ying,” he says, softly.
“I’m sorry,” Wei Ying says. “I wanted you to hear it from me. I wished you had.”
“Do not be sorry for what was not your fault,” says Lan Wangji. “Sing it for me? Please?”
“What, here, now?” Wei Ying drums his fingers on his knee. “I don’t have my guitar with me, and I can’t sing and play the flute at the same time.” Then he pauses, considering something, amd says, “Actually, I can tap out the beat. I’ve changed my mind, sure, let’s do it here.”
And with his fingers keeping a beat going, he opens his mouth to sing.
--
We’re swinging out from under the awning
Laughing and chatting until it’s morning
You taste so spicy like ginger and chili
Forgive me for sounding a little silly but
The raindrops fall and I don’t give a damn
We’re soaked to the bone and I don’t give a damn
Water’s in my boots and I don’t give a damn
‘Cause, love, I love you with all that I am
--
It’s been a long time since Wei Wuxian’s sung his own songs.
When he busks, he relies on popular songs. Top 40 hits and popular musicals and eighties hits are far more reliable at bringing in the loose change than original works and gimmicks, and besides that, no one really expects a missing rock star to be singing Ariana Grande on a street corner. Sure, he thinks she’s overrated, but she gets people dancing and that’s all he really cares about, because that’s a guaranteed ten dollars at least and everybody’s happy.
He hasn’t…he hasn’t really sung his own songs, the ones he wrote, for anyone else but Sizhui since he adopted him. He’s sung for himself, he’s scribbled lyrics in his notebooks and strung some songs together. He’s been singing his and Lan Zhan’s song, the one song they worked on together, with different lyrics since the Wens picked him up. But—
It’s been a long time since he sang anything from his own pen for somebody else. It’s fitting, he thinks, that the first time in years he does it, it’s for Lan Zhan.
Lan Zhan doesn’t react to it immediately, beyond a soft intake of breath, but Wei Wuxian knows to let that be for now. Lan Zhan just needs to collect his words. Wei Wuxian just leans over and touches his shoulder, a reassurance he’ll hear him, and waits for them to park at the waterfront before he gets out of the car and gets the basket.
He’s checking out what’s inside when Lan Zhan says, “I wish that you had sung it. There was something missing about it when I heard it on the radio.”
“Yeah, they stripped out anything that wouldn’t appeal to a mass audience,” says Wei Wuxian. “Thought it sounded better as a hyper-pop love song than the slow dance I wanted. And, y’know, rock star. So.”
“It is good, the way you sing it,” says Lan Zhan. “It’s beautiful.”
“Tell that to Jin fucking Guangshan and his asshole friends,” Wei Wuxian mutters. Then he sighs and shakes his head. “Thanks, Lan Zhan. I—It’s been a long time since then. Tell you the truth, I barely even think about the album much anymore.” Mostly he’s been busy concentrating on Sizhui and worrying about their finances, stretching every dollar to its limit. “It’s in the past, you know? Not worth worrying about now.”
Well, so long as nobody realizes just who the scruffy janitor humming snatches of top 40 pop in the salon really is.
“It is not right,” says Lan Zhan. “It is not fair to you, nor is it fair to this other artist.”
“It wasn’t,” says Wei Wuxian. “Like I said. All the label wanted was the cash.” He looks at Lan Zhan again, swallows, says, “I—meant it. You know?” I still do.
Lan Zhan brushes their pinkies together, the briefest, slightest press of skin against skin. Wei Wuxian’s breath catches in his throat anyway, the sparks firing off just underneath his skin. “I know,” Lan Zhan says, something soft and tender in his voice. So that’s—something.
So they take lunch on a park bench, the picnic basket between them. Wei Wuxian slurps up the chow mein noodles, and says between bites, “You know, the last little town Sizhui and I lived in, couple years back, they served these crispy and in a sandwich?”
Lan Zhan sets his chopsticks down into his Tupperware and says, “Ah. I am aware of the style.” His tone says he doesn’t like it much, which doesn’t surprise Wei Wuxian much, he’s known Lan Zhan since college and he knows the man hates crispy noodles. He snickers anyway.
“Sizhui loved it,” says Wei Wuxian. “He came home from the library once and he’d printed out a recipe for crispy chow mein. We spent ages figuring out how to make it, I must’ve eaten so many burned noodle pancakes.” Waste not want not, after all, and anyway he’d eaten worse things. “I’ll tell you something, though?”
“Yes?”
“He’s the only one,” says Wei Wuxian. “I tried it and I thought, ah, I see why Lan Zhan hates this.” He chuckles. “If I ever see them again I’m sure I’ll have war flashbacks to all those burned noodle pancakes.”
“I would prefer you didn’t,” says Lan Zhan, “it would be very disheartening for Sizhui.”
“I’ll do my best,” says Wei Wuxian. He twists the noodles around his chopsticks, making sure to catch a few stray vegetables, and says in the meantime, “Tell me about what you’ve been up to, lately. I’ve seen you on YouTube once or twice, giving out guqin lessons for free on the Internet.” When he’d caught sight of Lan Zhan’s video one night his heart had hammered against his ribcage, and he’d tapped on the video and cried into his pillow the whole time, like a sadsack, like the second choice in a romantic drama when the girl falls out of his arms and into someone else’s. Worse, because he’d been the one to end it.
“You saw them?” Lan Zhan asks. “They’re only popular in a certain niche.”
“Well, yeah, I saw them,” says Wei Wuxian. “The thumbnail popped up in the feed one day and I thought, huh, let’s see what Lan Zhan’s been up to since college, and I watched it and had delusions of playing the guqin for two days before I did our weekly budget and realized getting my guitar restrung needed that money more.” He sighs theatrically. “Alas.” He doesn’t tell Lan Zhan the truth, which is that he went through every video on offer from Guqin Lessons for the Beginner and wept at every single one of them.
It’s pathetic. He’s aware of this already. Wei Wuxian’s the one who broke both their hearts and all his promises to Lan Zhan and Jiang Cheng and everyone he’s ever loved, he doesn’t get to mourn anymore. (But still.)
“So tell me how that happened,” Wei Wuxian says now.
“One of the students in my class, in the year I first uploaded the video, needed more help in retaining what she learned,” Lan Zhan explains. “I spoke with her and her parents and found out she learned better if given more time than could be allotted for my class. So I uploaded the videos for her to learn from.”
“Did she pass?” Wei Wuxian asks.
“B minus,” Lan Zhan confirms. “Previously her grade was D, so this was a significant improvement.”
“That’s my Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says unthinkingly, before he freezes up. “I mean—”
Lan Zhan’s ears have turned red, and he says, “Thank you,” as Wei Wuxian stuffs noodles into his mouth before he can say anything else that might imply he thinks he’s still got the right to be Lan Zhan’s anything. Which he doesn’t. He knows he doesn’t. He knows, okay, it’s just that his heart hasn’t got the memo just yet, apparently.
After a moment, Lan Zhan says, “It has been helpful, for my students, to have something they can refer to when not in class, so the videos have been exceedingly successful.”
Objectively speaking, the videos aren’t all that popular, at least compared to others, with a view count of maybe a couple thousand over the course of a decade. Wei Wuxian imagines it might’ve been some kind of algorithmic fluke that pulled the video onto his page, and he doesn’t know whether he should curse or bless YouTube’s busted algorithm for it. But Lan Zhan’s never been one for popularity—all he cares about is they did the job he made them to do, and they’ve been doing that fantastically.
“Didn’t you ever think about branching out?” Wei Wuxian asks. “Maybe vlogging a little?”
Lan Zhan shakes his head. “There is little point to it,” he says. “I am their teacher, there is no need for them to learn more about my personal life than what they already know.”
“You never know,” says Wei Wuxian, “maybe they want to know your hair care regimen.”
“If they want to ask me that,” says Lan Zhan, “they can ask me after class.”
“What is it, anyway?” Wei Wuxian leans over the picnic basket, putting his fork down for a bit. “Can I…?”
“Yes,” says Lan Zhan, leaning a little closer.
“Remember when I used to touch your hair and you’d start yelling at me,” says Wei Wuxian with a laugh, to try and stave off the sheer affection spreading through all his limbs in a treacly manner. He winds a few strands of silky-soft dark hair around his fingers, marvels at the texture. It’s been a long time since he got to touch Lan Zhan’s hair like this. “Before we started dating? You did such a 180 after we kissed.”
“Impertinent,” says Lan Zhan. “I remember. I wanted to shut you up and hold you still.”
“Well, you sure did that,” says Wei Wuxian. “Ah, it’s still as soft as ever! What do you do to it?”
“Hot oil treatment, once a week,” says Lan Zhan. “I prefer argan oil. Hair mask once every two weeks. Also, I do not rinse off conditioner after thirty seconds.” He leans a bit into Wei Wuxian’s touch, and Wei Wuxian’s stupid heart kicks hard against his ribcage, even his very bones vibrating with sheer desire. “I can lend you some of my supplies.”
Wei Wuxian reluctantly and gently pulls his hand away from Lan Zhan’s hair, touches his own choppy hair. The first time he’d cut it short is barely a blip in his memory, a blur of color and anger and crushing regret. The second time had been in the Wen siblings’ bathroom, sober, staring at the mirror and realizing he didn’t recognize who was looking back at him—and if he didn’t, no one else would. His hair’s been choppy and awful ever since, and he’s not exactly fond of it but he’s used to it. Nobody looks twice at shabby buskers.
“Are you saying I don’t know how to cut my own hair, Lan Zhan?” he teases instead. “Maybe I like looking like this.”
“You look good anyway,” says Lan Zhan, which is—Wei Wuxian’s breath catches in his throat again. “I offer because it feels good when it’s cared for, in my experience. I have had weeks where I neglected my routine and felt worse for the lack—it might help you.”
“I’ll—think about it,” says Wei Wuxian, finally. “I can’t guarantee anything, but. I’ll think about it.” He can’t promise Lan Zhan something that will mean he’ll stay. This is temporary, as much as he hates the thought of having to leave Lan Zhan behind again—who’d want their college ex hanging around their home indefinitely, after all? Who’d want to be reminded at every turn of how badly it ended?
Lan Zhan says, “I wouldn’t be offering, if I minded.”
“You’re really so good, hm?” Wei Wuxian says. “You’re coping a lot better than anyone else would, if their asshole ex turned up on their doorstep with a surprise kid.”
“You need help,” says Lan Zhan. “I can give it. And you asked.” He sighs. “I only wish you’d turned up sooner. I dislike the thought of you and Sizhui suffering through hard times on your own.”
“We weren’t on our own, not at first,” says Wei Wuxian. “But that’s a long, sad story.” He smiles at Lan Zhan, and prays he doesn’t see the dull ache in the deepest core of his heart at that old loss. “Talk to me about your students,” he says. “What kind of shenanigans do teenagers these days get up to, hm? Can’t be any worse than what we used to do.”
--
Jiang Wanyin: Fucking knew we’d be talking about him at some point.
Valerie Rodriguez (Editorial Director, 2009 to present): Wei Wuxian, Wei Wuxian, Wei Wuxian. You know, I’ve got the job that was supposed to be his?
Lena Oxton (Staff Writer, 2003 to 2008): Oh, yeah, love, I was there for that whole mess. Wanyin and Wuxian were the closest of mates—where one went you’d always find the other. They were supposed to start Lotus Magazine together, and then—whoops, Wuxian takes the record deal from Guangshan and his solo career jets off into the stratosphere.
Valerie Rodriguez: I wasn’t around back then, but you hear stories about it when you join up. You hear that’s why Wanyin torpedoed Golden Scale, which is what all the Yiling Laozu fanboys swear up and down. The cold hard truth of it, though? It really is just a bad album. Which sucks, because Wuxian’s a pretty damn good singer. When he hit, he made premium hits.
Jiang Wanyin: You think I wanted to write that fucking review in the first place? Somebody had to do it and it had to be me, because every other writer I had was too chickenshit to do it. Golden Peony Records hated it if you even pissed in the wrong direction of their golden garden, and you’d better fucking believe I heard no end to it.
Lena Oxton: …he really didn’t want to. But yeah, no one else wanted to write that review.
Jiang Wanyin: Wei Wuxian’s a lot more thick-skinned than most people. I knew he could take a bad review. Hell, he took that whole barrage of bad reviews and shrugged it off. But I…
Valerie Rodriguez: You ask me, it was never the review that fucked him over.
Lena Oxton: Poor bloke. Poor, poor bloke. Nobody deserves to get outed like that.
Jiang Wanyin: …that stupid fucking TMZ article. I hope to god wherever Heather Duke is, she’s boiling alive right now.
Jiang Yanli (sister, former member of the Lotus Petals): A-Xian was always the one who took it the hardest when the details he tried so hard to keep private came out in the press anyway. This mess with the article—I should’ve checked up on him, that morning. I’ll always have that guilt, now: maybe I could’ve done something. Maybe I could’ve talked to him. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
- Shang, Q. “Chapter 4: Disappearing act.” Pages Floating in a Lotus Pond: An Oral History of Lotus Magazine, pp. 198-199. (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company)
--
Wei Ying’s son is, in many ways, a contrast to his father.
Lan Wangji does not tend to hang around Sizhui often, at least not without Wei Ying in the room with them. The boy is often off doing one thing or another, whether it’s school or research at the library or homework or reading books in his room, but apparently he has a talent for playing guitar, the same as his father. “He borrows mine when I’m not using it,” says Wei Ying. “Taught him on it and everything.”
Wei Sizhui’s playing style is slower and more deliberate than Wei Ying’s. Wei Sizhui himself seems to find it easier to hang back and be still, to watch the world around him and learn how it flows before he makes a move. He’s polite in a way his father never was at this age. He’s mindful of what he spends in a way that Lan Wangji has seen in teenagers who have learned, the hard way, how to carefully manage every cent they have. He’s friendly enough with Lan Wangji, but he keeps a distance as if he doesn’t expect this to last.
How many times have they moved over the past decade or so? Lan Wangji is aware that even a shoebox apartment in a major American city can cost far more than a single parent working three jobs can manage to pay. Wei Ying must’ve had to move them so many times as rents got higher and higher.
He asks Wei Ying once, over lunch, if Sizhui has ever tried his hand at a part-time job.
“Not outside of summer, no,” says Wei Ying, in a flat voice. “And he won’t need to, ever. He should be a kid. I’ll worry about the finances, I’m the adult.” He tears into his gyro with such force and anger that Lan Wangji doesn’t ask again.
He’s not surprised, though. Wei Ying has worked since he was young. He’s earned his cynicism over this, though Lan Wangji wishes he wouldn’t work himself into the ground.
So Lan Wangji doesn’t get to talk to Sizhui alone. He sort of prefers it that way, because he’s used to speaking with teenagers in a professional setting, where he’s teaching them about music with the practical goal of ensuring they at least know the basics of Western music notation. He is not at all used to interacting with a teenager on a personal basis, in his home, where the boy lives.
He isn’t expecting to see Sizhui in his music room on the first weekend, running fingers over the neck of Wei Ying’s guitar. Wei Ying is out at a weekend job near the center of town—apparently there’s a freshly-opened café in terrible need of baristas good at music. “Oh, good, I can take my flute!” Wei Ying had crowed, stashing his flute in his bag. “Sizhui, if you’re going to the movies or the library, text me—”
“—four times, yes, Dad, I know! Before I leave home, when I get there, after I leave for home, when I get home!”
“I’m a very paranoid parent,” Wei Ying had said with a laugh.
Lan Wangji doesn’t think so. His uncle would have had conniptions if he or Lan Xichen had ever gone out on their own at Sizhui’s age. Wei Ying’s being downright lenient by Lan standards, and perhaps by Jiang standards as well.
Sizhui doesn’t head out for the library, instead booting up his laptop at the kitchen. “I have some stuff I have to do,” he mumbles, his cheeks turning slightly pink. Lan Wangji gives him the grace of not calling him out on it, especially when he catches a brief glimpse of what the boy’s looking at: words on a white background bordered with red. Some site that some of the enthusiastic young writers in his class furtively browse on their phones when they think he’s not looking.
He does text Wei Ying about it. Your son shares the same tastes in websites as some of my students, he says.
oh lol he’s on that new fanfic website isn’t he, Wei Ying texts back. don’t know what it’s called but he gets super embarrassed when i ask about it and changes the subject. is this what it’s like to have your child keep secrets from you?? idk why anyone gets so weird about it!
Not for the first time, Lan Wangji remembers that Wei Ying grew up with no real privacy, from the moment he first set foot on a stage. He’s likely more relieved than anything that Sizhui feels the need to keep secrets from him.
also wow they’re playing the new kassandra album rn, Wei Ying tells him, along with a string of fire emojis.
I take it you are fond of it, Lan Wangji notes.
Wei Ying responds with another, longer string of fire emojis, and a few 100s for good measure. pirating her album the second i get home, he adds, with a pirate flag emoji rounding out the declaration. oh shit yeah you’re a good boy who follows rules forget i said that.
Lan Wangji smiles down at the phone screen, just as he hears the sound of a guitar being played from his music room. He has a good idea of who it is because there’s no one else in his house at the moment, so when he pokes his head in he’s not surprised to see Sizhui with Wei Ying’s beat-up guitar, strumming idly on the strings.
Sizhui freezes up anyway, and says quickly, “Mr. Lan! I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you.”
“No disturbance,” says Lan Wangji. “I was speaking with your father. He has declared he will illegally download the new Kassandra album when he gets home.”
“Yeah, he does that,” says Sizhui, relaxing. “I can, uh, get out of your hair.”
“You live in my home,” says Lan Wangji. “If you wish, you can use the music room whenever you want. If I need it, I will let you know.”
“Oh.” Sizhui stares at him for a moment, eyes narrowed in suspicion. As if he’s seen people before mistreating his father—and perhaps he has, Lan Wangji realizes with a pang resounding in his heart. Wei Ying is a busker, a poor Chinese-American man, a single father working multiple jobs. He’s done his best to shield Sizhui from harm, but no parent, even the best ones, can completely keep every cruelty from their child’s sight. “No catch?”
Oh, this child. “No catch,” Lan Wangji promises him. “To this or to staying here.”
“Really,” says Sizhui, doubtful.
“Really,” says Lan Wangji. “Your father is—I was not able to help him before he disappeared. I want to help him now.”
“He’d say he wasn’t willing to be helped,” says Sizhui.
“And what do you think?” Lan Wangji asks.
Sizhui chews on his lower lip, clearly weighing his words, the risk of being too honest or too deceitful. He says, “My dad—still needs help, and is a lot more willing to be helped these days. But it’s not uncommon for someone’s help to come with a catch.” Unsaid: And neither of us knows for sure if yours doesn’t.
Lan Wangji cannot possibly fathom why someone would look at a single parent trying to raise a child and decide to take advantage of them. Even putting aside the revolting lack of morality, there’s nothing they can offer that can’t just be obtained some other way. He says, “If I wanted anything from your father, I would ask him for it. I do not want him to believe he owes me a debt, monetary or otherwise, for letting the both of you stay at a time you badly need shelter.”
“Do you?” Sizhui asks. “Want something from my dad.”
God. It’s Wei Ying. Of course Lan Wangji wants something—he wants him. Wants to have them stay in his home for the rest of their lives. Wants to feed them both good food and take Sizhui to school and take Wei Ying to whatever job will treat him well. Wants to hold Wei Ying’s hand, wants to kiss him, wants to pin him down to the bed and leave a mark on his neck and his thighs and—
But they closed the door on all of that thirteen years ago, before Wei Ying ever disappeared. “I only want him to be all right,” Lan Wangji says now, to Wei Ying’s son. “We were friends in college, first, before we started dating. I would hope that we are still friends, or at least friendly enough that he is sure he knows me.”
“That’s it?” Sizhui asks.
There is so much more to it than that. “That is all,” Lan Wangji says instead. “I will not ask him for more than he is willing to give. It is enough for me to see him healthy.”
Sizhui stares at him for a long moment, scrutinizing. Lan Wangji meets his eyes, and lets him see, as best as he can. Finally, the boy breaks their locked gazes first, with a sigh as if he’s seen something he approves of, at least for now.
“There’s a lot he’s willing to give,” says Sizhui, “for my sake. I—He doesn’t talk about it with me much, but I know he doesn’t eat as much as he should, sometimes, because we couldn’t get enough groceries. I know he’ll work any job so I can afford my books and lunch at school and we can pay the annual fee on my library card.” His shoulders hunch up to his ears, and he says, “He doesn’t talk to me about it, but I’ve seen him. I’ve heard him begging the electric company and bargaining with the school and asking the boss of the month to give him another chance even though he hated working for the guy. He’d—He’d break himself open if it meant I didn’t need to.”
Wei Ying has always been like that. Lan Wangji had known that from the day they started dating, had argued with him about it more than once. He’s not surprised that Wei Ying would do anything for his son—he’s just heartbroken circumstances have clearly pushed Wei Ying to his breaking point, if he’s pushed aside his pride to this extent.
“I will not let him,” says Lan Wangji. “He will not have to decide between necessities for both of you. Where I can help, I will.”
Sizhui looks at him then, and says, with the tone of someone who’s having a small revelation, “You really do mean that, do you?”
“I do,” says Lan Wangji.
Sizhui’s quiet for a long while, then he turns to the instruments hanging on the wall and says, “Are these all for decorative purposes?”
“No,” says Lan Wangji. “They are all working instruments. I have friends who are music tutors, and I let them borrow the space when they are in need. It happens often enough that it is easier to keep their preferred instruments here.”
“Oh,” says Sizhui. He steps closer to a bamboo flute on a rack, picks it up, twirls it around his fingers. It’s clumsier than his father’s usual manner, but Lan Wangji recognizes the habit. “When you say I can use the music room whenever I want—I can play this, then?”
“If you wish,” says Lan Wangji. “But I would like to ask you take good care of the instruments, in return.” He lets a corner of his mouth turn slightly upwards, before he adds, “I saw Wei Ying’s concerts on TV, before. He had a bad habit of smashing very expensive guitars. I would hope this has not carried onto you.”
“Oh god no,” says Sizhui, looking horrified. “I’d never.” He pauses, then says, “Wait, my dad broke guitars? But he used to tell me I had to treat his guitar like a lady!”
“Then he really has grown up,” says Lan Wangji, amused. Then something occurs to him to ask: “He taught you how to play the dizi?”
“Yeah, when I was younger,” said Sizhui. “Why?”
Lan Wangji can’t help it—he smiles, just a little, at the memory that bubbles up. “I taught him how,” he says.
--
Wei Wuxian stows his flute in his bag with a tired sigh, slumping into a chair outside the café as Lan Zhan’s car pulls up. His shift’s done, but he’s got a couple of job interviews and right now, after this kinda hellish shift, he doesn’t feel up to braving the subway.
Chu Wanning, his coworker, pokes his head outside, a takeout bag in hand. He blinks at Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan’s car and says, “Ah. I thought maybe…”
“Not Mo Ran,” says Wei Wuxian. “Lan Zhan. Also, please, Chu-xiong, for my sake, talk to the asshole.” He gets to his feet and waves Chu Wanning back inside, then opens the back door to shove his bag inside before he kicks it shut and moves to the front passenger seat.
“Your coworker?” Lan Zhan asks as Wei Wuxian slides into his usual seat and clicks the seatbelt shut.
“Yeah, the one who keeps flirting really awkwardly with this rich asshole,” says Wei Wuxian. “Rich asshole only comes in just to needle him, by the way. He was absent once and when the guy showed up he was disappointed it was me. Apparently I’m just not half as fun.” He rolls his eyes toward the car roof and says, “The youth today.”
“Mn.” Lan Zhan drives away from the curb, and Wei Wuxian lets himself sink down into the seat with a tired groan. “Was it not a good morning, then?” Lan Zhan asks.
“It wasn’t,” says Wei Wuxian, pinching the bridge of his nose with a groan that comes from the very marrow of his bones. “God, it really wasn’t. I had to deal with some entitled assholes and someone who couldn’t make up their mind and this couple this close to breaking up right in front of me who got into this whole argument. Again, right in front of me.” Which had been very awkward and deeply annoying and also personally Wei Wuxian’s kinda rooting for the girl to dump her awful boyfriend. “And the supplier screwed up the order so we have way less ingredients than we need, and Mackenzie came in stoned again, and now one of the ovens badly needs repairs or else we can only serve at half the speed. I barely even got to play my flute at all, which blows because I came up with a couple new songs and everything.”
“Oh?” Lan Zhan asks.
“No lyrics,” says Wei Wuxian. “Yet, anyway. Maybe it’s a sign not to do it?”
“No—I would like to hear them,” says Lan Zhan. “Sizhui would too, lyrics or no.”
Oh, they’re getting along! That’s nice. “If there’s time,” says Wei Wuxian. “I’ll see how these interviews pan out.” He sighs, and says, “I should start looking into apartment listings, but every time I do, the rent is so insanely high that if I rented the closet I’d still be selling a kidney just to pay. Gentrification’ll do that, I guess.” He scratches idly at his chin, and says, “And then you factor in Sizhui and it gets even more expensive. And like—I don’t know what state my insurance is in, it’s probably gotten cleaned out too. Hopefully it went to Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli.”
“And Jiang Yanli’s son,” says Lan Zhan, and Wei Wuxian almost chokes. “Ah—Wei Ying?”
“A-jie has a kid?!” Wei Wuxian yelps. “What the fuck! When did that happen! She and the peacock were barely even friends before I left!” He pauses, and then says, “Lan Zhan, if the peacock’s laid a single hand on her I’m gonna go to LA and rip his intestines out through his ass—”
“They are happy,” Lan Zhan assures him, and Lan Zhan wouldn’t lie to him about that, so Wei Wuxian relaxes back into the rather plush seat. “I am told by my brother that they are happily married and that their son is unbelievably spoiled.”
And Lan Xichen wouldn’t lie to his brother about this kind of thing either, so Wei Wuxian will take it on faith. “Still,” he says, performatively huffy. “She could do better.”
“Mm.” Amusement colors Lan Zhan’s tone. “I haven’t met with Jin Zixuan in years, so I do not know for certain.”
“Well, hopefully, he’s changed since he was a bitchy little asshole in college,” Wei Wuxian grumbles. “Or I really will rip his intestines out through his ass with my teeth. I’ll do it.” He pauses, and says, “Or. Well. If he hasn’t mysteriously died yet. Then maybe.”
“Mm, maybe,” says Lan Zhan.
Wei Wuxian taps his fingers against the windowsill as they drive along the street, slowing to a stop at a red light. “How are they?” he asks, finally. “I—haven’t really sought out any news about them. Except that one documentary I caught, Where Are They Now, and that was more of an accident while channel-surfing, uh, two years ago? Don’t remember much about it, besides that it was 2 AM.” Mostly what he does remember is crying himself to sleep, and then waking up to a concerned Sizhui shaking him awake.
“They are well,” says Lan Zhan. “I have not talked to Jiang Wanyin in years, but his magazine has flourished. Jiang Yanli speaks to my brother often—apparently they are in the same knitting club. Her son wishes to go into acting, but she and Jin Zixuan have been adamant that he at least finishes college before he starts auditioning. They do not wish for any details of his life to be publicized before he is an adult.”
“Oh, good,” says Wei Wuxian, more than pleased. The thing about growing up the way he and his siblings did is that it left them all with very, very weird relationships to the camera, and Wei Wuxian knows all too well how it particularly messed with Jiang Yanli, growing up a woman in the camera’s eye. That her kid will never have to learn the lessons they did—something in his heart loosens, softens. “I didn’t even know she had a kid. I would’ve sent something, had I learned.” He pauses, and says, “Do you…”
“His name is Jin Rulan,” says Lan Zhan. “Though he wishes to be called Jin Ling.”
Jin Rulan? Wei Wuxian bursts into a fit of surprised laughter, gripping onto something solid for support as he doubles over cackling. “She really went for it!” he gasps between peals of delighted cackling. “I didn’t think she’d remember!”
“What,” says Lan Zhan.
“D’you remember, when we started dating, we all went out to a bar for Yanli’s birthday,” says Wei Wuxian, getting his breath back and straightening back up, “and then Jiang Cheng got drunk, and we had to go rescue him before he tried to lick a streetlamp on a dare?”
“I remember,” says Lan Zhan.
“So before that,” says Wei Wuxian, “me and Yanli, right, we were hanging out and doing shots, and she said she was thinking about having kids someday maybe? I said, oh, when you do, I call dibs on naming your first, and they need to be named Rulan.” He snorts out a laugh. “I didn’t realize she remembered! Oh, no wonder the kid’s going by Jin Ling. When I scribbled the characters on a napkin I used the one for orchid.”
“Ah.” Lan Zhan’s mouth twitches. “Well. You did call dibs. I imagine she honored it.”
“She would,” says Wei Wuxian. “She would, she’s always been like that. I—” miss her. He doesn’t say it. He left them all hurting and heartbroken, he yelled at her in that last explosive argument they all had, he doesn’t think he gets to say as much. “If she’s happy, I’m happy,” he says, finally. “She deserves all the best.”
“If you want to send along a message,” Lan Zhan starts.
For one brief, shining moment, Wei Wuxian spins the message in his head: tell her A-Xian’s okay, and she has a nephew, and he’s the best kid in the whole world, and I’m happy we’re both managing not to horribly damage our kids. Then cold reality sinks its claws into his brain—he can’t. He can’t. “No,” he says. “No, it’s—it’s okay. Thank you, Lan Zhan, really, just…it’s not a good time.” It might never be a good time, he thinks, and he swallows the grief down, lets it spread out till his whole body feels heavy with it.
He’d known he could never go back from the second he took the masters. All he can do is keep moving forward. But god does it hurt, sometimes, to know how much he’s missed.
Lan Zhan watches him for a little while, then reaches his hand and rests it on top of Wei Wuxian’s. “She will not know from me,” he says. “But one day she should.”
“Yeah,” says Wei Wuxian. “Maybe.”
--
Claire Redfield: So this is pretty obvious to me already, but for the audience—what’s influenced your decision on guarding your son’s privacy so much? Nobody even knows his name.
Jiang Yanli: I wouldn’t say no one knows his name! Just, you know, we didn’t publicize it and we won’t until he’s of an age to decide that he wants to be a public figure.
CR: Oh?
JY: Yeah, I mean, you know—I was a child star, so were my brothers. We grew up under some…very harsh circumstances, because of that: always performing, always working. Our faces were plastered pretty much all over the place!
CR: Must’ve been rough for a kid. Even rougher for you.
JY: It was, it was! And I didn’t want that for my child even then, but when I gave birth to just the most perfect little boy in existence, I realized I could never let him go through what I went through when I was young. It’s—It’s not the kind of existence I want my son to know. It’s too lonely, and it hurts you in so many ways.
CR: How does he feel about it?
JY: Now that he’s thirteen? [exhausted chuckle] He wants to audition for Netflix so, so badly, and he’s mad his father and I won’t let him be famous. I told him, if you want to be famous, that’s fine! Just do it after college!
- Hi, Mom, I Made It: Conversations with a Washed-Up Teen Idol. Hosted by Claire Redfield. Raccoon City Productions. Episode 21: Jiang Yanli of the Lotus Petals.
--
The job interviews go—well, they go. Wei Wuxian comes out of them feeling exhausted, knowing in his bones he’s not getting either job. Honestly he’s pretty sure they just advertised the jobs just to make it look like they’re making an effort to be more diverse, but he’s seen the way the interviewers looked at him when he came in. He knows they’re going to turn him down.
Lan Zhan drives him home, afterward. “I am sorry that they did not turn out as you’d hoped,” he says, once he kills the engine in the garage. “Those jobs are the poorer for their prejudices, in turning you out as they did.”
“You’d think if they were really dealing with a shortage they’d hire just anyone,” says Wei Wuxian. “Guess not.” He slumps in his seat, picking at his sleeves. “Still haven’t heard back from that one office that wanted a janitor, and that job already closed, so. Didn’t even get the courtesy of any response from them.” He sighs. “You think they’ll hire me if I say I’m the long-missing Yiling Laozu?” he asks.
“If only for the novelty of having a rock star working for them,” says Lan Zhan, but it’s clear from his tone that he doesn’t like the idea much.
“Kidding,” Wei Wuxian reassures him. “I’d rather not do that, anyway. Might get back to my old label if I did and then where would I be? Where would Sizhui be? Nowhere good, that’s for sure.” Maybe if it were just him he’d do it, but he will never let anything that happened to him happen to his son. Never. Sizhui’s going to grow up happy and safe, and if Wei Wuxian has to break himself into pieces for that to happen then he will.
They get out of the car, and Wei Wuxian glances briefly at himself in the side mirror. His choppy hair’s growing out past the length that makes him squirm to look at, because past that length he starts to look like himself—the man on those thirteen-year-old posters who’d had the world at his feet. He doesn’t like that man much. If he could he’d punch him in the face and yell at him.
He hurries after Lan Zhan instead, and says, “Hey, listen, remember when that girl in our dorm, what’s her name, the one who used to beat everybody at Warcraft III—”
“Mary,” Lan Zhan supplies. “Yes, I remember.”
“—yeah, Mary,” says Wei Wuxian, “remember when she got gum stuck in her hair? And she couldn’t afford to get her hair cut so you offered instead.”
“Yes,” says Lan Zhan.
“Can I,” starts Wei Wuxian, then twirls a lock of his hair around his finger. “I need to look like someone not me,” he explains. “This gets any longer, people start looking at me. I can’t—If they’re looking at me when I have my hair longer than this, I worry they’ll recognize me.” There’d been a time he’d liked it when people looked at him and recognized him, but that’s long in the past, now, and the thought of it now sends a tremor down his spine.
Ten years is a long time, and he’s been raising his kid for long enough now to look back on his own childhood with sheer bafflement and horror. No wonder he’d turned out the way he did. No wonder he’d crashed and burned. He’d loved being looked at but he could not handle having to perform all the time, especially not after he’d had a taste of freedom from the performance in college. He doesn’t know if he can do that again—the tours, the videos, the TV interviews where he has to smile for the camera and pretend he’s just fine and the album’s coming along fine and he doesn’t want to claw at the host’s stupid pale neck on live TV. He’d rather just be a face in the crowd, a busker on the corner singing Ariana Grande for pocket change.
Lan Zhan nods. “We can do it now if you’d like,” he says. “Your hair is…” He stops, clearly trying to find a polite way to say ugly as sin.
Wei Wuxian chuckles, and says, “You can say it looks like shit. I promise I can take it.”
“It is very amateurishly done,” says Lan Zhan. “You have done your best with it, though, and it seems better than a true beginner’s attempt would look.”
“But you wanna fix it.”
“But I would like to fix it.”
Wei Wuxian snickers, opening the door and letting Lan Zhan step inside first before he does. “Yeah, please fix it,” he says, just as the sounds of someone playing a flute reaches his ears. “Oh!” he says, delighted to hear the trills of his son’s favorite song to play on the flute. “I know that song, I know that style of playing, that’s Sizhui!”
He dumps his bag off on the couch, pausing only long enough to pull his flute out of it (“don’t worry about cleaning up, I’ll do it after, just let me”) and rushes to the music room, where his son is deftly playing a song: bubbles under sunlight shine with color…