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Overhead, Wei Wuxian can see nothing but darkness, vague shapes suggested in the low gleam of shadows and little else. To his front, he can see the pitiful dance and flicker of their laughable fire, which would have Jiang Cheng raising an impressive stink about what a fool he is. To his side, he can see… well, to his side, he can see Lan Zhan, who has a lot of presence even now. He can see Lan Zhan’s pale, drawn face, his pinched mouth, and the way the firelight catches on his eyes and turns them amber.
“It’s not so bad,” Wei Wuxian says brightly. “Ah, this is good, right? Dark? You like the dark!”
Lan Zhan fixes him with a stare cold enough to turn him right then and there, if he’d had the unfortunate good fortune to be born human. He doesn’t say anything.
“What?” Wei Wuxian asks. That icy look envelops him gently, like snowflakes drifting onto his hair, settling on his nose and into the webbing between his fingers. Maybe the others are cowards; they’re all so afraid of Lan Zhan. His family, too, but especially him. “What?” he asks again when he gets no answer. “Was that offensive? Lan Zhan! Am I supposed to pretend I don’t know?”
“No,” Lan Zhan bites out.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, a paragon of reason.
Lan Zhan is silent again. He looks like he would rather be dead all over again than here in this cavern with Wei Wuxian, which is ridiculous.
“Are you mad about Mianmian? Is that the problem?” Wei Ying ventures.
“No,” Lan Zhan snaps. His voice is cold, too! It’s cold enough that Wei Wuxian shivers this time. He feels gooseflesh rippling on his arms, the wisps of hair at the back of his neck, beneath the long fall of his ponytail, prickling. The cold doesn't often get to him like this, which Jiang Cheng says is cheating, but he can't help the way he was born. Should he pretend to be slower, stupider, and colder in the winter, just so Jiang Cheng and Yu-furen don't have to think about his mother, just so everyone can pretend he's human through and through?
With Lan Zhan, though, he feels it. It hits him like cool fingers at his qi points. It hits him like plunging into the Cloud Recesses cold spring at the height of summer: warm, warm, and then unflinching frigidity.
Wei Wuxian grins. “You are!” It’s not just the cold as he does this. It’s the sense of danger. He’s dancing into the personal space of something inhuman, and he wants to poke. He wants to pry and push. He wants to say, Hey! I’m here, too. Do you recognize me?
Lan Zhan looks pained. It could be Wei Wuxian’s nagging, or it could be the actual pain, or it could be both. He shuts his eyes. The firelight casts flickering, spiky shadows from his eyelashes onto the pale slopes of his cheeks. He’s silent and so still, like he really is a statue. Sometimes, Wei Wuxian thinks how stupid it is when people say that. Lan Zhan’s quiet, and he moves with economy. That doesn’t mean he’s dead. He lies in wait, but anyone can see that he’s breathing. He does that slowly, too, with the deliberation he gives to everything; Wei Wuxian wonders whether he has to think about it, a thought spared for every inhale and exhale, the cost of keeping an undead body of jade alive. Sometimes, Wei Wuxian doesn’t think it’s stupid at all. He sees it, the preternatural stillness, and he wonders what it would be like. His body wants to move all the time. It wants to flit and dart; it wants to play tricks. It wants to do. Lan Zhan’s, he suspects, only wants to be.
Maybe Lan Zhan’s worse at pretending. Lan Xichen is good. Lan Xichen is really good. He smiles warmly, and his eyes twinkle, and if it wasn’t the kind of secret no one bothers to keep, the cultivation world would never know that he’s a vampire. Lan Zhan doesn’t try. His eyes are flat and shadowed. His face is immobile, its features etched into it like an elaborate and beautiful carving. Wei Wuxian studies it now, thinking, If I didn’t know, would I know?
“Lan Zhan,” he tries again. “I’m serious. If you like Mianmian, I get it. She’s a pretty girl.”
Lan Zhan’s sharp, sharp jaw tightens, a noticeable clench to it. “Stop,” he says. His voice has a low shiver to it, like the air is warping around it, like looking at something shimmering with heat or with impossible cold.
“Well,” Wei Wuxian says, “I could.” He shuffles closer to Lan Zhan on his knees, a slow but steady approach. “But I’m bored. And you still haven’t told me why you’re so mad at me. You know, Lan Zhan, you don’t have to lie to me! You like Mianmian, right? You want to bite h—”
Wei Wuxian sees it coming, but only barely. If not for his mother’s influence, he would have been flattened without warning: his back to the rough cavern wall, Lan Zhan’s steel-strong fingers clamped around his forearm and the back of his hand. Those, too, are icy, a soft shock that washes through him. He could pull away. He should, shouldn’t he? He has the strength and speed. Lan Zhan knows that. Lan Zhan’s known that since they fought across the Cloud Recesses rooftops. He doesn't pull away.
Lan Zhan’s teeth must be sharper than Bichen, because they don’t hurt at all as they sink in, carving their path through the tender skin at the inside of Wei Wuxian’s wrist. Lan Zhan’s fangs, Wei Wuxian reminds himself, with a feeling as if the cave floor is tipping sideways beneath them, as if the disgruntled beast awaiting their demise won’t matter at all past this moment, because all the world is about to flip upside-down. Everything will go falling but for the place where Lan Zhan’s fangs are pinning him to reality.
“L— Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian protests weakly. “Aren’t you overreacting? Isn’t this a bit much?”
Curtained by dark hair, Lan Zhan’s head is bent to his work. His eyes are still shut. His throat works, a motion like a pulse. Crimson, a dizzyingly close match for Wei Wuxian’s hair ribbon, wells up around his mouth.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian repeats. His voice is nearer to a whisper this time. “You’re really—ah, you’re really doing that? Drinking my blood?” He’s never been so aware of the pathways of that blood, the rush and thump of it all through his body. His heart pumps. His pulse beats. His meridians flow. Qi and blood and breath. How much of it does Lan Zhan want to devour? How much of it can he devour? He's not a killer. He's a peerless cultivation disciple. He's a virtuous gentleman, an example of how refined a vampire can be.
“Lan Zhan,” he says, just once more. He doesn’t know what he expects. He doesn’t know whether he expects anything at all.
When Lan Zhan lets him go, he does it with so little warning that Wei Wuxian’s head spins afresh. Lan Zhan’s pupils are wide and black. His mouth is a smear of red, the points of his fangs making minute indents against his lower lip. He stares at Wei Wuxian. “You—”
“Me?!” Wei Wuxian protests.
A delicate shudder works its way through Lan Zhan’s body.
“My blood didn’t taste that bad, did it, Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian demands. “Don’t look like that! What came over you?”
“No,” Lan Zhan says. Something rough drags at his voice.
“All right, because my blood—” Wei Wuxian stops, as short and sudden as if he’d run into a stone wall. “Ah, Lan Zhan? How did my blood taste?”
Lan Zhan looks like he wants to close his eyes again. His gaze drops, and those hands of his, the fingers that could tear someone in two, curl in his lap, taking fistfuls of his pristine white skirts. “Not bad,” he says.
“Right, ah, because, Lan Zhan, you know… well…” Wei Wuxian’s wrist throbs dully. He can’t tell if this is pain or something more exotic. “You know what happens, don’t you? When you eat faerie food without permission?”
The tenor of Lan Zhan’s stare changes, like a note played with different fingering. “Faerie food.”
“Well, yes! Me. My blood. That's food to you, isn't it? Did you think I was bragging when I told you about my mother? I never brag! I'm strategic with the truth.”
“Faerie blood,” Lan Zhan says after a beat, one that’s heavy with his realization of what he’s done.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Wei Wuxian says helpfully. “You didn’t ask me first! That puts you in my service.”
Lan Zhan’s mouth is still stained red. It’s turning the color of rust as it dries, and Wei Wuxian feels like a fainting maiden when Lan Zhan’s tongue slips between his lips to catch some of the blood. That blood is his. Lan Zhan drank it from him. “Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, words formed by the tongue that tasted Wei Wuxian’s blood. “My ingestion of your blood puts you in my thrall.”
Wei Wuxian doesn’t feel cold anymore. He’s too hot, sweat gathering under his arms and along his spine. Here in this dank, shadowed cavern, forgotten and abandoned inside a mountain, it might as well be the height of summer, the sun beating down on him without mercy. “What?” he says. He laughs weakly. “Lan Zhan! What?”
Lan Zhan is still sitting. His broken leg, ravaged all over again by the Xuanwu of Slaughter, must ache terribly. The two of them are nearly of a height. Still, somehow, he looms, a distant and terrible creature, as he says, “You are bound to obey me now.”
Wei Wuxian bristles. “And you’re bound to serve me! So, what? What does that mean? What happens when a vampire bites a faerie?”
Abruptly, Lan Zhan is only a seventeen-year-old again, small and weary, vampire or no. He’s a boy whose home just burned. He seems to hate the shape of the words as he spits them out: “I don’t know.”
“Right,” Wei Wuxian says. The sparkle of whatever magic he inherited from his mother is dim now, snuffed out. “Well. I don’t know, either. Hey,” he adds with a laugh, “maybe it won’t matter. If we don’t make it out of here…”
“Wei Ying!”
“Right, right! Ah, do you want me to—” Wei Wuxian wriggles his fingers demonstratively through the air. Lan Zhan doesn’t answer, his expression thunderous; Wei Wuxian takes it as a yes and brushes his fingertips against Lan Zhan’s cheek. The blood clears from his mouth as if wiped away by an invisible cloth, but the rage doesn’t clear from his eyes. It was worth a try. “You’re welcome! I know a few faerie tricks.”
Cold, apparently overcome, Lan Zhan closes his eyes again. “Shut up.”
Wei Wuxian does, mulish. Only a full incense time later does he think to wonder whether he could have resisted the command.
“Idiot!” someone is hissing.
Wei Wuxian groans. The sun is too bright, and the insides of his eyelids feel lined with briars.
“Wei Wuxian!” That isn’t someone. That’s Jiang Cheng, sounding incensed.
Wei Wuxian opens his reluctant eyes. Wasn’t he somewhere else the last time he did this? Cool hands were on his face, steady fingers at his jaw. Lan Zhan was brave; Lan Zhan held onto that qin string, sharp with the chord assassination technique, for ages. The cave has evaporated from around Wei Wuxian: he sees his own bedframe, his own childish doodles, and his own shidi, scowling at him.
“I’m awake!” Wei Wuxian insists. “I’m awake.”
“Ha,” Jiang Cheng says, sharp and not sounding amused in the slightest. “You should have stayed asleep. Do you have any idea what you did?”
Wei Wuxian scrubs at his face with his hands. There’s that familiar prickle of something otherworldly, something he likes to imagine is his mother’s memory asserting itself. Clean wakefulness comes in its wake, the gentle rejuvenation granted him by his fae side. He decides not to mention that to Jiang Cheng. “Well,” he tries, “I was Mianmian’s hero, of course.” He musters a little grin. “Are you jealous now?”
“You—!” Jiang Cheng is so easy to wind up. “Congratulations, Wei Wuxian.”
“What?”
Jiang Cheng brandishes a piece of xuan paper, neat characters lining it in tidy rows. That has to be Lan handwriting. The first thing Wei Wuxian sees is Lan Xichen’s name at the bottom. He sees the word lawyer. He sees blood and permission. His head swims. “Congratulations,” Jiang Cheng grits out. “Lan Wangji? Really?”
“Oh,” Wei Wuxian says. In Jiang Cheng’s grip, the letter shoves closer to his face. He sees marriage.
His wrist throbs, a pinprick of pain. He flexes it, and he feels it again. His marriage bite. The cultivation world is finding itself flattened under Qishan Wen’s greed. Suibian is somewhere unknown, probably in the hands of some Wen cultivator. Yu-furen is going to be horrified. And, apparently, this is what happens when a vampire bites a faerie. Dizzy with the remnants of fever, stunned, freshly married, Wei Wuxian starts to laugh. He doesn't stop for a long time.