the fourth stage of collapse

by celialoveslwj

Summary:

After the surgery, before he's thrown into Luanzhang Gang, Lan Xichen finds Wei Wuxian.

Or, with a little more time to know him, Lan Xichen falls in love with the boy who had taken his brother's heart.

Notes:

• For rianitida.

hello!!!!

so she decided to dive head-first into a new rare-pair, please grab the reins because someone has to steer this horse somewhere!!!

Chapter 1: come back to me

Wei Wuxian’s fever broke before the sun rose anew. It had been three days since Lan Xichen discovered him, three days since Lan Xichen had stowed him within the barest bones of an abandoned shack in Yilling.

Placid Wei-gongzi, lashes flickering in that recumbent dark. Lan Xichen hadn’t known what to make of him as he drew his hands from the cradle of his chest, folded them over his mouth—like gauze, skin so pale as to be nearly translucent. Hadn’t known what to say from the far corner of that room, watching Wei Wuxian’s blanket scatter across the floor as his torso barreled outward in a breath that looked so much like a scream.

Quiet, their first moment together. Such quiet. The war had splintered them, skinned them to the marrow, into mere pieces of themselves.

“Wei-gongzi.” In theory, daybreak supplants the nightmares of old; gives way, by essence, to healing. But Wei Wuxian is no optimist. He wears the robes of one; presents himself, by expression, as a person given to the inherent kindness of the world. As sunlight spills through the slatted windows, he sits, raises his arm, and smiles as Lan Xichen cycles qi through his limp meridians. Inflamed along the pathway, red in the mind’s eye. In the dantian, bottomless and cold. Will he answer if Lan Xichen asks? Will he smile that self-same smile, maintain the silence tangled between them? “Your injuries—” too many and varied to mention by name “—should heal within the month.” Shall Lan Xichen cut his teeth on the truth? Take the coward’s path out? “You are lucky.”

“Lucky?” Wei Wuxian laughs without inflection. “Zewu-jun, ah, Zewu-jun. If the peerless, honorable Zewu-jun, First Jade of Lan, says as such, then it must be so.”

Truth in jagged metal, like rust on the edge of a blade: Lan Xichen had recovered Wei Wuxian from the base of a hill far into the mountains of Yilling. If he hadn’t found Wei Wuxian, if he’d left him to the elements…

“Wei-gongzi.” No qi, no bitterness, no expectation between them. Yilling has been overrun and Wei Wuxian is barely healed. There will be no escape for them, not now or in the near future. They will need to forge an alliance, and to do so, they must first establish a modicum of trust. “What’s happened to you?”

Wei Wuxian looks at his arm, still clasped between the palms of Lan Xichen’s hands. Insignificant intimacy—to hold, to warm, to stay. Wei Wuxian fastens his gaze to Lan Xichen’s chin, seems to follow the thread of his lips: the words as they are spoken in plain, without the emotion to guide him along. Wei Wuxian flexes his wrist, says, “I don’t think I need to explain what happened in Lotus Pier. The massacre—this, you’ll already know. Shijie is in—should be in Meishan. Jiang Cheng and I, we evaded capture… we… I made a friend a long while ago and he remembered me and he helped.”

“A Wen?”

“He doesn’t know how to—to use a sword. He wasn’t even supposed to be there, Zewu-jun! Should we challenge all the good he’s done just because of his name? He rescued us! He brought us Jiang-shushu and Yu-furen’s remains! He helped us! He helped me! He—he—”

Lan Xichen runs his thumb along the soft flesh of Wei Wuxian’s wrist as Wei Wuxian's eyes mist over. It’s easy to forget in the midst of these things: Wei Wuxian is a boy no older than Wangji. Even beyond this recollection, barely a survivor, barely more than a victim of the Wen aggression.

Insidious, the thoughts these words forment. For what is the worth of a name if not the history chained to it? Yet… should every child be persecuted for the sins of the father? What more for a clan as expansive as the Wen? Are they marked by their leader, destined for execution by the happenstance of their birth?

“Peace, Wei-gongzi. Please, calm yourself.”

Deep breaths. Wei Wuxian’s gaze has fallen to Lan Xichen’s chest, the slow, rhythmic rise and fall. Deep breaths. Lan Xichen gathers Wei Wuxian’s hands to himself and says nothing. Waits for the silence to crest upon them; wash through the raw agony, the burbling outrage.

“Better?” Wei Wuxian nods. “I will not bother you further, Wei-gongzi. What is important is that you are alive. For the meanwhile, you are safe and you have time enough to heal.”

“Zewu-jun?” Lan Xichen squeezes Wei Wuxian’s hands gently before releasing them, allowing the boy to relax into the blankets and spare robes that make up his bed. Wei Wuxian sighs aloud. “Have you heard anything about Jiang Cheng?”

Lan Xichen considers the question, lets the moment stretch a finger’s width between them before he shakes his head. “No. Nor have I heard news of Wangji—though I suppose, in this climate, no news means no sudden development, no movement in the battlefront.”

“No news means good news,” Wei Wuxian interprets.

“As you say, Wei-gongzi.”

“Zewu-jun?”

Slender fingers, nails clipped short, and unassuming. Wei Wuxian's palms, bruised and red at the meat. Battered body. Tumbledown body. Here, in this shack, just one more casualty of the war.

“Wei-gongzi?”

“What about you? What's happened to you?”

-

-

-

“The Wen Supervisory office in Yilling had taken on a new master. I hid… farther underground to preserve my safety, my sanity.”

“Mn.”

The query arose often, embedded into the groves of the increasingly cloistered Nie stronghold: would it truly take a year to salvage an army from the wreckage of the Wen conquest? Fallen clans abound, orphans and stragglers aplenty. If a single speech from Zewu-jun is all it takes to rally the hearts and minds of these remnants, why the long wait to regather, to retaliate?

Nonsense, thought Lan Wangji. To lay the burden of a fair war, a winnable war, on the shoulders of one person. They were, in this stronghold, a constellation of cultivation clans, elites, and victims in turn. What about their contribution to the war effort? Their recruitment strategy and plan of attack?

Unseemly. Yet.

The first chip in the armor, the first inkling of oncoming disaster: Xiongzhang’s expression in the half-light of their assigned rooms, fingers poised over the rim of his tea cup as though contemplating the heat, his gaze elsewhere.

“It was not cruelty, Wangji. I had always intended to return.”

“I understand, Xiongzhang.” But why, stifled behind the cage of Lan Wangji’s teeth. Feelings are difficult to dissect, to enumerate, and relay. Meaning is easier to convey in action—the language of their upbringing, the indelible silence of their home and family—yet to become an interpreter, one must first open one's eyes to what sits before them. Pursed lips, lifted brows, fingers splayed: shades of stillness, translation only conceivable through the art of comparison. The statue of Lan Wangji, dismayed, as by the whisper of a crease beneath his eyes. Ripples of humanity in jade.

Xiongzhang sighs, folding his hand over the cup, caging in steam. He appears sallow, this way. Shoulders brought low, mouth affixed into a thin line. The sun, peering through the windows, only serves to highlight the shadows carved into him: in the jaw, beneath his chin, like a hand around his neck, pulling him towards the ground.

Will you not look at me? Lan Wangji wants to say, cannot bring himself to say. See me. Say anything. Pierce the quiet you have entrapped us in.

“Wangji.” Staggered. A fissure in the space between them. Xiongzhang nurses the tea, now at height with his chest; seems to collect his bearings, his strength, from the warmth and scent of the brew. Still, even like this, he refuses to spare Lan Wangji a glance. “Do you ever find yourself… frightened by what is to come?”

Lan Wangji lowers his head.

Xiongzhang breathes, lifts his cup and sips. After, he asks, low and measured, “Do you find yourself… furious with the state of things? The Wen? This war?”

“Yes,” Lan Wangji responds, though he has no clear perspective as to why Xiongzhang feels these questions worth asking. Lan Wangji rests his gaze on the table, on his own cup of tea, and their untouched plate of baozi. Lan Wangji and Xiongzhang shared a room through much of their childhood. They learned together, trained together, broke their fast, shared lunch, and supper, and all manner of extracurricular activities together. Solitude meant a solitary existence alongside Xiongzhang. To have lost him for so many months; to find him, now, changed beyond doubt—it is impossible to express the ache of it. To realize, in the eye of this metamorphosis, that Lan Wangji cannot even discern the point of divergence, what to say, how to fix him—

“Wangji,” Xiongzhang, from deep in the chest, each syllable threaded together by strings. “Have you ever—do you—are you upset with me?”

Lan Wangji squeezes his right hand, beneath the cover of the table, into a fist. That biting sting, fingernails cut into flesh, pinpricks along the palm—good pain, grounding pain, distraction from the agony settled like a stone before him.

What looms in their future? What, of the near-past, of distance and separation, has taken hold of Xiongzhang and led him so astray?

“No,” Lan Wangji says. “Never. Xiongzhang’s life is precious and worth every delay.”

It seems, inexplicably, the wrong thing to say. Xiongzhang closes his eyes. In the face of Lan Wangji’s resolve, he shutters inward and dares not speak again.

-

-

-

A week in and, restless, Lan Xichen dissects Yilling into quadrants. East, for the markets and the peasants who run them. South, for the collection of lumber and bamboo that make up each civilian shanty. West, towards Qishan, where the sun melts into the underbrush. North, where Yilling’s forests slough into Luanzhang Gang.

Wei Wuxian encourages the poetry of these extremes. Yilling is their foxhole; the city streets, sections of a battleground. To learn her is to inhabit her properly, and to inhabit her means to win.

“Or,” says Wei Wuxian, “to get out of here alive, yeah? That’s a kind of winning.”

Lan Xichen hums, tearing strips from an overrobe he hasn’t worn since his flight from Gusu. Wei Wuxian’s body is a menagerie of bruises and open lacerations. In the days since Lan Xichen discovered him, he’s bled through every bandage, wrap, and sash Lan Xichen owns. He lacks strength, still. He heals as fast as a child.

Or a commoner, Wei Wuxian mentioned once and never again. Why the long face, Zewu-jun? Commoner. To be common. Is that so unappealing?

“The Wen bring harm to these civilians,” Lan Xichen states. “We must do what we can to assist them.”

Wei Wuxian pats Lan Xichen on the shoulder. Slow fall, fey heat. Wei Wuxian’s fingers trail Lan Xichen’s unclothed forearm, his palm, before he takes the overrobe from Lan Xichen with a small, wan smile.

“I see where Lan Zhan gets it.”

“Where Wangji gets what?”

Later, Lan Xichen will disguise himself in the rags of a civilian traveler and again roam the streets of Yilling. Better to be deceitful herein than ignorant to the enemy in their midst. Better to compromise what righteousness he harbors within him than to rescind his freedom to the Wen; to deliver Wei Wuxian to certain death, for no other reason than sheer unmitigated hubris.

“That!” Wei Wuxian exclaims, eyes glimmering. “That look on your face!”

First quadrant: stopover to purchase food, bandages, blankets, herbs—necessities to last through the cold and scarcity of the oncoming winter. Third quadrant: spy the animal who’s taken command of the supervisory office and the dogs who cater to him; mark them for death by uniform, power, and loyalty.

War, Lan Xichen has learned, is a game of numbers. Number of weapons, number of soldiers, the quality and durability of both alone and in tandem. Stocks of food, of medicine, and land treaties, of days to subsist as a warring entity.

“I don’t understand,” says Lan Xichen. “What about my face?”

“Did I never tell you, Zewu-jun?”

Numbers. Survival by numbers. The remaining gold, silver, and copper ingots in Lan Xichen’s purse. Food, rationed to stretch through a month. The month itself split into weeks, into nights and days, into shichen. Two cultivators. An abandoned shack. Water from the river. Water from snowmelt. Pieces of the forest needed to fuel for themselves a fire.

“Wei-gongzi—”

“You want to save everyone. It’s admirable, y’know? You’re all alone out there. I mean, you’re Zewu-jun, of course, but you’d be facing a whole fortress!”

One cultivator. Wei Wuxian, hollow-bodied, nothing-bodied, mere victim of this war.

Commoner. To be common. A more difficult, permanent injury.

“It isn’t a fortress,” Lan Xichen says, disregarding the compliment entirely as he watches Wei Wuxian fold and unfold the overrobe. Such dexterity. Sections of fabric fitted along the calluses on the heels of Wei Wuxian's palms, between the joints of his fingers. Where is Suibian now? Lan Xichen wonders. Where is the sword to go with those beautiful hands?

Wei Wuxian tries to tear a strip from the overrobe.

“Wei-gongzi, why don’t I—”

“I can do it,” Wei Wuxian states, lips thinned in concentration. The rip is marginal. From the frayed edge of the robe to the inner lining, the width of a nail. “Just. You’ve done everything for me since you got here. I just—I can do this one thing.”

“It’s really alright.”

Locate the point of tension. Pull. Wei Wuxian will bruise himself this way: fingernails eating into flesh, knuckles bulging, arms straining. He’ll bleed through his bandages and run himself ragged.

Lan Xichen knows, intellectually, that Wei Wuxian lacks a golden core, that the overrobe, even half-scrapped and worn through, is bespelled Gusu-Lan silk but… maybe…

“Just—I just—”

Wei Wuxian’s hand slips and flies towards Lan Xichen in a wide arc, clipping him over the shoulder with a thump.

Lan Xichen blinks.

“You didn’t even react,” Wei Wuxian murmurs, trembling. He’s bowed over the robe now, running a thumb across the frayed thread, the shock of blue near the inseam, the spell work embroidered therein. “Well. I mean, I guess all those rumors were true, yeah? You Lan’s and your monster strength, haha!”

“Wei-gongzi, are you alright?”

“Zewu-jun, ah. I’m sorry. We were talking about the Wen, weren’t we?”

It is, perhaps, the consequence of proximity: this aversion to lesser conflicts, arguments that bubble beneath the surface, unspoken. Wei Wuxian has chosen a wall to harbor his emotions, and Lan Xichen must follow suit: allow the tides of Wei Wuxian's forced apathy to shape the very space between them in fallow irreverence and casual inflection.

“Wei-gongzi…”

“So Wen Chao’s taken control of the supervisory office?”

“Wei-gongzi, I truly believe—”

“Scratch that. Wen Chao—it doesn't matter. We’ve got to plan. Make up plans, do the plans, whatever. We've got to get you out of here alive, Zewu-jun!”

Wei Wuxian smiles like sunrise. It is the first fact Lan Xichen learns with any confidence about him. Even this smile, crumpled into itself, thin: sun over mellow water, warm like summer breeze.

“Both of us,” Lan Xichen states firmly. “I refuse safety without you, Wei-gongzi.”

Later, Lan Xichen will pour across this moment in a fervor. The seamless shift; the naked candor. Wei Wuxian had always been the howling wind, ever changing, ever welcome, and Lan Xichen let himself be swept into his frenzy.

“Wuxian,” Wei Wuxian corrects with a fond laugh. “If you’re going to say such sweet things to me, Zewu-jun, you should at least drop the formality, no?”

“You may refer to me as Xichen, then,” Lan Xichen replies.

“Xichen-ge,” Wei Wuxian crows. “Xichen-ge! Xichen-ge, I like this a lot! I’ll bug you so much! I’ll say your name all day, every day, and make you regret ever, ever lending it to me, Xichen-ge! Xichen-ge!!”

Lan Xichen laughs and… tonight will meld into all other nights this winter. Still water. Intractable shadows in this cloistered shack of a home. Company in silence and distraction. Lan Xichen will forget the murmur of doubt, the blanket devastation in Wei Wuxian’s gaze as the overrobe slipped from his fingers. After all, it is in Wei Wuxian’s nature to swallow his pride. So named, without envy, he is destined to live despite his inferiority.

That is how Lan Xichen reasons with himself, anyway. When this night is swept beneath the annals of war, when all that is left of Wei Wuxian’s memory is ash.

Even in heartache, even in inconsolable pain, Wei Wuxian was born with a smiling face.

-

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-

It is an acceptable cause for restlessness. The first evening after Xiongzhang’s return, Lan Wangji’s body and mind were yet to come to an accord with the fact of Xiongzhang’s safety and relative health. Curfew is long in the waiting, regardless. It is… expected for one brother to seek the guidance of another.

Yet.

The image of abject regret, the second inkling of this slow-growing cage: Xiongzhang beneath the moonlight, in the sparse garden that once served as Nie Huaisang’s aviary. He doesn’t notice Lan Wangji encroaching upon this space, standing near the bronze, ox-headed fountain at the mouth of the enclave. Instead, he stares, dim-eyed, into the shallow pool; at the koi burbling beneath the surface of the water, scales flashing in the dark.

“I see you in my dreams,” says Xiongzhang, “you dance so beautifully, yet I realize I’ve never seen you dance. What am I to do? Every thought… every memory… but I don’t regret meeting you. I will never regret any of the time I spent with you.”

It is simple enough to fashion a story: in the months since Xiongzhang’s disappearance, Lan Wangji has buried disciples and civilians alike, mere casualties of this senseless war. Xiongzhang was gone for half a year. Despite his prolonged absence, he returned scathingly alone.

Lan Wangji clenches his hands into fists within the folds of his sleeves. When Xiongzhang collapses to his knees, he turns and walks away.

Chapter 2: your paradigm tomorrow

Summary:

“Suppose we were to reintroduce ourselves…”

“Oh?” Wei Wuxian hums. “In what way?” Wei Wuxian presses forward, up and off his makeshift bedding, veins pulsing in his eyelids, green in the arm he proffers to Lan Xichen with a short burst of laughter.

“Like this, Xichen-ge? Or, well. I guess… stranger? Stranger-gege?”

Notes:

TW: dead bodies (cause of the war); meditations of the nature of grief

 

Yes, the chapter count went up. No, I claim no ownership for these ideas--I was assaulted with and by them, and now you all suffer, too!

I listened a lot to this beautiful rendition of WUJI on-loop while writing and planning out scenes for this fic. I'll link it here once i've found it again.

I don't think this chapter is a tearjerker or anything like that, but I will say that if you're expecting anything so straightforward as a love story, love triangle or angle--this fic probably won't be for you. In writing this, I'm mostly concerned with exploring LWJ and LXC as characters, and WWX through their lens as both someone they've come to love and someone who constantly challenges their understanding of the world. Moreover, I think it's a disservice to all involved to define this story and the changes they undergo as being the result of love when really, it's all grief. I'll elaborate more in the end notes haha.

Happy reading!!

Cochineal. Dye so saturated as to resemble blood itself. It is this phantasm of injury, of open wounds and hearts, that bars Lan Wangji from his brother once again.

So it goes: they find themselves cast into a discrepant reality, though no one other than Lan Wangji appears to have noticed. Xiongzhang contorts himself into the perfect gentleman in company: master orator and Zongzhu, swordsman and politician. It is a mask he’s favored since young. Hand-crafted, a muscle woven thick beneath skin. Lan Wangji’s role is to take heed, to mention offhand or scold in private conversation: Jade is mountain-wrought, of heat and the pressure of stone. To falter is unseemly. To splinter here is to fail in some fundamental fashion, as though jade is all Xiongzhang was born to be.

What would Shufu do in Lan Wangji’s stead, staring over the red silk in Xiongzhang’s palms? March forward, surely. Take the ribbon and all its implications to burn. That’s all hearts do in war, anyway. Boil up in the warmth of all these pooling bodies, fattened by expectation, hope. When death calls, to ashes these hearts go. Ashes, after all, have no eyes to weep, nor mouths to spill secrets. Ashes have no memory to redress and suffer for.

So it goes…

Xiongzhang does not regather from the hunched, stiff ball he’s rolled himself into. He summons his guqin with an almost irreverent wave of his arm, and arranges the ribbon into a long, thin line on a mat at width with his folded legs.

Imagine: it is Mao Shi and the sun has yet to flower outward from the oceans that jail it each night. In this dark, with only stars to light his way, Lan Wangji journeys from the Lan's assigned quarters in search of his erstwhile brother and…

Imagine: the Unclean Realm does not host a great many personal pavilions. In the gardens, again… near the shallow pond, again… Xiongzhang devolves into dark hair falling to his waist unbound, in tangles; pale skin and stark white underrobes; hands trembling over the strings of his guqin.

What beast of memory arrests those very first notes of Inquiry?

Gather. Gather around.

Tell me in truth. Please.

I seek… the owner of this garment.

Tell me plainly.

What is your name?

Where are you from?

Do you know—

-

-

-

“Wuxian?”

It is difficult, now, to recall more than passing conversation. There is the obvious frailty. The room as before, restructured in mind: liquid blue-dark, the cot dispersing into the wooden floor, and the wooden floor into wet earth. That same room, by measure of limbs: the length of four legs akimbo, the height of twenty palms stacked from wrist to pointer, twenty heads strung from the flat ceiling by rope to the floor. Lan Xichen buries Wei Wuxian here, in recollection. The grand, heaving blank of him. Colorless. Faceless. A voice without melody. A body without form.

To perceive any more than this is to accept reality. To unveil the complex truth; to speak of it as stories that have come and gone…

“Xichen-ge?”

In mind, as in dreams, Wei Wuxian breathes. He is sickly, of course. He dies slow, as all commoners do; of age if not disease or mortal injury. He heals as he did that winter in Yilling.

“Suppose we were to reintroduce ourselves…”

“Oh?” Wei Wuxian hums. “In what way?”

This, Lan Xichen thinks, is memory. It happened—is happening. Wei Wuxian presses forward, up and off his makeshift bedding, veins pulsing in his eyelids, green in the arm he proffers to Lan Xichen with a short burst of laughter.

“Like this, Xichen-ge? Or, well. I guess… stranger? Stranger-gege?”

“Stranger,” Lan Xichen murmurs, taking Wei Wuxian’s hand in his. That smile—that sunrise smile—more so in the brows than in the lips; suggestions of warmth, of intimacy, in a room otherwise swallowed by the drudgery of time. Wei Wuxian is a secret, here. When Lan Xichen runs a thumb over the arch of Wei Wuxian’s knuckles, it is a novel curiosity that spurs him. No voice in his ear to remind him of honor and lineage and the duty that threads these together. No other mind or name or body to observe, take offense, retaliate. “You must realize, Wuxian, that I am trying to befriend you.”

“Ah. You’re weird, Xichen-ge.” Wei Wuxian laughs again. “Has anyone ever told you that before? Don’t take this the wrong way, though! It’s a good weird! Like… like two-headed carrots or Lan-xiansheng without a goatee!”

Wei Wuxian’s hand, fingers curling, relaxing, never idle for more than a breath. Wei Wuxian’s bottom lip, pale between his teeth. What scared him that night? Every night before, after? Why—

“As my friend,” Wei Wuxian says, “Xichen-ge should play me a song.”

“What song would Wuxain prefer?”

“Well, now that you mention it—”

-

-

-

Language, as with time, is a finite resource. Introduce thought, expound. Extirpate sinew from syllable and tone—meaning by word and context; as derived from speaker and interpreted by listener. Repeat. Conversate. One stretches the limits of candlelight attempting to express the inexpressible. To say nothing of the body, of flickering hands and roving eyes. To say nothing of the silence that lurks in the crevices of these moments: the short lull, the mellow pause, the all-consuming lack where language fails to articulate—in itself, a kind of communication.

Now, this.

It serves the mind to speak of events with some level of irreversibility.

Eventually, the sky will throw itself to feverish yellow above them, and the shame that excised Xiongzhang from their quarters will put an end to his moldering Inquiry. Eventually, Xiongzhang will stand on bare feet, take into account his state of undress, and rush to don his battle armor of steady cotton, bespelled silk. Eventually, pavilion hollowed and curiosity satiated, it will not matter what Lan Wangji witnessed.

Lan Wangji steps forward without aplomb. When the music trails into nature, into breath and wind and the susurrus of water, Lan Wangji lowers himself into the space beside his brother and laments his wicked, slug-tongue, his stones-for-teeth. What is the point of silence, of language by implication, if the absence of sound is so easily misinterpreted?

Xiongzhang sets his hands on the strings of his guqin.

“Wangji,” he says. “Oh, Wangji.”

“There are three more passages,” Lan Wangji states. “To compel the answers he seeks… Xiongzhang must speak of the dead by name.”

“What is the worth of a name?” Xiongzhang, upon utterance, collects the ribbon to wind around his left wrist. Lan Wangji can barely make out the pattern of the fabric. He imagines the ribbon isn’t a solid block of color, that beneath the travel grime, the dirt and sweat and tears, the embroidery depicts dragons, phoenixes, lotus flowers peering over still water. Xiongzhang asks, again, as he folds his palms atop the shoulder of his guqin. “Why must the spirit be compelled by an invention of mortal life?”

“A name connects the spirit to family. It is also that which the spirit recognizes most about themself.”

“To mark the spirit by lineage; to construct an ideal for the spirit to wear in the absence of a body.” Xiongzhang bows, arms curved, the metal crest of his forehead ribbon touching the one wrapped around his wrist. “He told me to be creative, Wangji. To call him by song. Who am I to refuse?”

“Xiongzhang?”

Lan Wangji grew into music as an extension of himself. Wangji-qin, the third limb. To coax melody through strings, throat, and breath is to inherit the legacy of Lan An. Music: to repel resentment; to cleanse the earth and body of ill; to become a lover of the arts and history, nephew of Lan Qiren, and Second Jade of Lan.

Yet.

Xiongzhang rises, once again placing his fingers upon his guqin. “He helped me compose this piece.”

To name is to manifest a destiny constrained by the explainable language. To describe Xiongzhang’s song beyond note and quality of sound—raw bass, treacle crescendo, tittering melody—is to impart to the named a path without exit, without end.

Yet.

Gentle thrill, like mildew crowning tall grass. The ever-certain sun felting the slow river. Unfettered song—beyond snowmelt, the frigid death of winter, in the warmth that rises from the ground…

Naked reality: “You loved him.”

Xiongzhang’s shoulders tremble as the song unwinds into thick, inconsolable silence. What more is there to say?

A tear shatters across the strings of Xiongzhang’s guqin. He never does reply.

-

-

-

“What of my brother, Wuxian?”

Wangji had rather publicly joined the war coalition in Qinghe, by then. Though far from as safe as Lan Xichen may have preferred, he maintained a far less precarious position than Lan Xichen himself. In Wei Wuxian’s memory, however, Wangji is just one among dozens of gangling disciples at the base of Muxi Shan without weapon, food, or guidance, searching for a monster of myth. He walks with a heavy limp, expression sweat-damp and severe and—

“I felt reassured, y’know? I thought Lan Zhan hated me up ‘til I saw the way he looked at Wen Chao!” Wei Wuxian jogs alongside Wangji, arms raised as though to catch him, beseeching. His pleas for Wangji are garbled, white noise. To Lan Xichen, through his gaze and as gentle as a leaf, Wei Wuxian says, “But you’d know all about that, huh? Y’know he worried so much for you. He cried—I’d never seen him cry before. I think… those feelings that’ve got you looking all twisted up, he felt the exact same way.”

Washing colors, Wei Wuxian calls them. The great mesh of cultivators scattered throughout, a clothesline of teenagers without a sense in the world. Wen Chao rides alongside “Jiao-Jiao” on a steed at the head of their hunting party, and his face is a bulbous pear; his arms, far too short to properly, correctly, even decently guide any kind of animal. Big-eared, big-footed Wen Chao, with a mouth wide as an imp, screams for this great laundry of sect disciples to gather around the entrance of a cave.

“Who found the cave?”

The cave is as simple to locate as any cave. Whatever led them to it, whoever drew them there, merely accelerated the inevitable.

“Some other stuff happened, and Jiang Cheng scolded me for that, no big deal. Wen Chao and his henchmen—” yes, the five, ten, thirty henchmen drenched red, whose faces blur into tree stumps and thorned bushes, “—had us walk ahead of them inside. We were bait, you see. Lan Zhan didn’t like that. The peacock—uh, Jin-gongzi—he liked it even less. I guess there was an altercation, I butted in and…”

The cave opens into a wide pit. Or perhaps the pit had always been there, and sediments had formed around it, caging the pond and the monster lurking in that pond from the world beyond. Wei Wuxian, at the edge and peering through the dark—if only he’d stepped aside, comported himself into someone less sturdy, less disposable or incendiary, someone harmless—

Lan Xichen watches Wei Wuxian fall.

Dim light fails to obscure memory. The feckless, nameless disciples affect little, save no one. The rocks clamber outward like claws, sharp and unforgiving, and when Wei Wuxian lands, the sound deafens everything.

“It didn’t hurt,” Wei Wuxian says, grinning up from where he’s sprawled across the ground, hand pressing into his abdomen, right over where his dantian would be—should be. “I bounced right back up—didn’t hurt, Xichen-ge. I didn’t feel a thing.”

They escape eventually, Lan Xichen knows. Yet seeing Wangji clamber after Wei Wuxian, still limping, frenzied, Lan Xichen isn’t so convinced his certainty matters.

“I don’t remember enough to tell you how it all went,” Wei Wuxian says, now standing near the edge of the pond, staring into the beaded eyes of a massive, decomposing tortoise. “I fell, we fought with the Wen some more. Wen Chao and his mistress threatened this disciple, we saved her, and then I just don’t know. He ran away, took his mistress and bodyguards, too. I may have threatened him back a little too much, haha!”

Piety reality, where mind battles body, heart, and expectation in search of some better end. Stalactites hang over battered, beaten laundry, pushing them further into the prehensile dark of the cave pit. Lan Xichen follows the retinue, noticing how Wen Chao and the rest of the kennel’s worth of Wen have thrown themselves beyond the gloom, the pond rot, rappelling ropes burnt in their haste, disappeared.

The tortoise sinks into the water, then—the water desecrated by the blood of hundreds. Arrows fly. The earth rumbles beneath their feet. Jiang Wanyin, who is sixteen—no, seventeen but twig-armed, baby-faced—rushes after the beast in a scream of violet and…

“No one had to tell me my parents died, Xichen-ge. Sometimes you just feel it creeping up on you, y’know? I wouldn't call it dread or sickness or anything like that. I don’t know what to call it, actually, but…” But escape in itself doesn't matter. The Wen, the tortoise, the disciples—sores up the spine of a gnarling willow, all the different ways this tree could have grown. “After Lan Zhan got rid of the Xuanwu, I swear it sat on my chest. The others managed to flee. It wasn't the worst thing that could've happened to us, really, but I swear—I swear it felt like I was drowning right there on dry land.”

“Drowning?”

“You sound surprised, Xichen-ge.”

How much firmament can mask the pain of an era? Along these threadline days, body in collapse, nothing to cradle you but the cold and wet of a cave and a boy who loved you?

“I am.”

Wei Wuxian smiles from his tangle of blankets, whip scars peeking out from his underrobe like fissures. The memory should be simple to disassemble from here: there is no cave, and Wei Wuxian is months older, thinner. The dark that permeates is the same, Yilling dark that's safeguarded them thus far—them, alone, in a shack beyond the reach of allies, the looming specter of cultivation society.

“Xichen-ge?” A hand cradles the back of Wei Wuxian’s head. Long, calloused fingers, rust caught in the bed of each nail, ice-roughed palm curved towards his ear. It should be simple to disregard these questions, thoughts, reality come and gone. It should be so simple.

“I’m glad,” Lan Xichen states, kneading out the tension in his own knuckles, the heartlines at the meat of his palm.

If the end was certain; if the memory wrought nothing more than the unprecedented victory Wei Wuxian described, their words wouldn't be so circumspect. They wouldn't tangle up this way, bleeding platitudes and false cheer.

But how can Lan Xichen say this? How can he look the memory in its eye, and impugn the broken body before him?

How did Lan Wangji defeat the tortoise? And what of his injuries? Wei Wuxian’s? How were they rescued when, by then, the cultivation world had fallen into anarchy?

Wei Wuxian purses his lips. Says, “Lan Zhan sang for me. He has the most beautiful voice." Says, “He was kind to me, even then, though I couldn't appreciate him properly. Me, out of everyone." Says, “But you already know that, Xichen-ge. You raised him so, so well."

-

-

-

It was a moribund summer, and the Hejian front was fetid with decay.

The Nie were, at the time, the Sunshot Campaign’s most sophisticated fighting force, yet they battled through Hejian at an overwhelm. For every Nie, there were four better-equipped, better-funded, better-rested Wen.

Each clash was a massacre.

As cultivators, it was unbecoming to deny even the enemy-dead their funerary rites. As an overworked, diminishing coalition of soldiers, it was near-preordained.

Hovering over them, Wangji-qin in bloodied hand, the corpses seemed innumerable. Every face, turned skyward, was a thumbprint seared into the dark. In the wavering, humid heat, a grand collection of eyes and lips nestled in a field of coagulated limbs and viscera, bones sheer beneath moonlight.

Lan Wangji thought he’d learned all about death, then.

-

Lan Wangji held no position beyond that of the Lan Heir when the Sunshot Campaign was formalized. Though respected as one of the war’s more experienced fighters, with Xiongzhang still unaccounted for, Nie Mingjue was unwilling to risk Lan Wangji’s life more than necessary.

This meant, when Jiang Wanyin called for assistance with replenishing Yunmeng-Jiang’s forces—secretly, more insistently, with locating Wei Ying—Lan Wangji was free to volunteer.

They spent the summer that way, beyond Hejian and various other, smaller skirmishes. The recruitment itself was straightforward: vassal sects were quick to convince, with the death all around them to serve as incentive. The rogue cultivators from Hengduan to the coastline, weary but ultimately spurred to action by the Wen’s evolving cruelty.

They could find no trace of Wei Ying.

Death, Lan Wangji had begun to think, was navigable—to locate the inception, to bury the remains. There was no ambiguity to death, no lengthening shadow of rediscovery. Death. To end. To atrophize the heartflame, surture the open wound of regret.

Lan Wangji did not wish Wei Ying dead. He did not, could not, would never prefer it. But to live with Wei Ying missing was to exist in a state of perpetual surveillance. Lan Wangji imagined it comparable to burning: flesh bubbling outward; tongue stiff between his teeth; the very ground crackling beneath him as he drowned in breathable air.

Selfish abstraction. Concerning, conceited, ignoble—seeped in unspeakable reality, Lan Wangji turned inward.

He never thought of grief as parallel to possession. Grief had always been private; jailed within the halls of home and family. To lose someone, a wholly personal and limiting affair.

Lan Wangji shared many campfires with Jiang Wanyin that summer, though he could not claim to know him any better than he did as a child. The burden of mourning was wasted on Jiang Wanyin, who retained nothing of his past but a sister and a call to vengeance. Lan Wangji had never known anyone to refuse the act beyond ceremony, but Jiang Wanyin trudged through camp dry-eyed and spared not one word for his parents, his clan, the wider carnage that became of Lotus Pier.

For Jiang Wanyin, Wei Ying’s very death was impossible. Wei Ying lived in the silence between each word he spoke, in the extra mat he set out in the tent he shared with no one, in the mementos he clipped to his waistband—Wei Ying’s clarity bell, of course, alongside the crude, wooden carving of a lotus flower and a violet tassle striped through with red. It was difficult not to envy Jiang Wanyin’s optimism; difficult to dwell near his unwavering, bull-headed assurance and feel anything beyond that burning, liquid grief.

What right did Lan Wangji have to mourn? What right did Jiang Wanyin have to drag them through two, five, seven months of silent campfires, the absence between them thickening into an almost tangible shadow?

When Xiongzhang reappeared, Lan Wangji felt grateful and horrified in equal measure. For while Wei Ying’s death seemed ineludible, he never once questioned Xiongzhang’s fate.

-

A series of storms introduces a temporary cessation of conflict, the clans constrained as they are by sparsity in foodstuff, appropriate armament, the logistics of warring in a world frozen over. Although the Wen could hardly care about the uptick in casualties, even they sought relief from the harshening winter, the financial burden it introduced.

That is to say: the cultivators on the front lines fall back to the bulwark of Qinghe, eager for nourishment, rest, reinvigorated battle plans.

That is to say: Jiang Wanyin returns, dragging the worst of the war with him, and there is nowhere left for Lan Wangji to turn, to avoid the ineradicable truth.

-

Notes:

*un-beta'd

Yes, the scene between LXC and WWX is not any kind of elaborate hallucination. If you've watched The Untamed/CQL, you know exactly the kind of reality warping, past-meets-present scene I'm trying to convey... with a little twist.

When conceptualizing the scene, there were a few things I had to take note of:
a. we ALL know what happened between WX and the rest of the sect disciples at the end of the indoctrination, in Muxi Shan/the Xuanwu Cave
b. LXC *doesn't* and WWX doesn't have any incentive to tell him the whole truth, when he's been strangled (ik JC didn't mean it; no arguments in comments, please!) into thinking he caused every bad thing in LP to happen by playing the hero in the cave. OFC he'll uplift LWJ, OFC he'll downplay his own hurts and triumphs, and OFC he'll brush LXC off when LXC tries to prod him a little harder, if carefully.
c. LXC is a highly unreliable narrator, and though he's essentially retelling everything he experienced with WWX, he's also got his own biases, his own assumptions--sometimes informed by WWX's own words--that warp his understanding of things. Given that we *all* know how the Xuanwu Cave incident happened, and the fic (by and large) is absolutely strictly canon up until WWX is found by LXC, we as readers can kind of pull apart where the distortion begins, and why.

As for LWJ... Initially, I storyboarded him as this passive force who mourns WWX and mourns *for* LXC. He's supposed to be the eyes of the reader, the reader-insert so to speak. Then I thought, fuck that, lemme try something else!

The fun thing about LWJ, though I love him, is that he's such a stickler for the rules and societal definitions of acceptability that he actively shoots himself in the foot all throughout his first life with WWX. Though his love for WWX is never, EVER, put into question, he doesn't actively change as a person--certainly not for the better--until after WWX has died and he's too-little-too-late. Now we have LXC who kind of takes on this role in LWJ's place. He thinks WWX is dead, he has every right to and it's eating him up inside in the present timeline, and so it's almost a catalyst to a kind-of, very ISH, fix-it of the canon story. Where does that leave LWJ?

And now you, dear reader, fully understand why this fic isn't necessarily a LOVE story. At least, not only. :>

Thanks for reading !!!!

Chapter 3: you go on with your living

Summary:

“Shijie is the prettiest when she’s happy!” Wei Ying exclaims, rocks scuttling under his boots as he tries to grab onto a short canopy. “You can’t judge me for it, Xichen-ge!”

Wei Ying's fingers slip.

The fall doesn’t come, though Lan Xichen expects it to. After a brief pause, a blink, they’re seated by the creek. Wei Ying’s wound is raw but clean as he bows over the beginnings of a campfire, a talisman burning in his grasp.

“I’ve never idled before," Lan Xichen murmurs. It is night and quiet, and time is flat between his palms. Moribund winter, he thinks. The cold presents itself as damp in the overlapping floorboards; heaving through the slats boarding the windows, the narrow spines of the walls. He'd never noticed it before: the stagnance, the wood rot stench that clings to the back of his tongue. “Tell me about yourself, Wuxian." And the dark. The great blue-dark that sits all around them in granules; no puncture of candlelight, no reflection of the moon to pierce the veil. “Wuxian?"

Lan Xichen remembers now: it is the fourth night of their acquaintance, and a fever ravages Wei Wuxian in waves.

Later, Lan Xichen will claim he only ever hovered nearby, palms folded in the bed of his knees, eyes cast elsewhere. Truthfully, there was only so much shack to explore. Four walls, a ceiling, and floor. The neglected fire-pit. Their chamber pot. The cot that was not a cot and the body poured into it. Where else could Lan Xichen have gone?

So they shared the remains of those robes, those discarded blankets. So Lan Xichen had carved for himself a space between Wei Wuxian and the shack’s only door, Wei Wuxian’s forehead canted towards his clavicle, his faltering, harsh breaths the only warmth between them.

The order of these events is upended. Lan Xichen understands himself enough to know, logically, the kind of distance he would have enforced. Perhaps he pressed his shoulders right against the door, maintaining an arm’s berth between them. Perhaps, in the moment, he referred to Wei Wuxian with appropriate formality. Gongzi, like any distal acquaintance. Gongzi—with lounging gravitas—amiable, polite, and nothing more.

“Wuxian?” Lan Xichen feels Wei Wuxian in searing touch-memory. The shape of Wei Wuxian's brows, his long, fluttering lashes, right over the slip of fabric covering Lan Xichen’s sternum, his rumbling heart.

“Xichen-ge.” And Wei Wuxian’s voice. His reedy, laughing voice. How sick must Wei Wuxian have felt that night? Yet he broke his silence to appease Lan Xichen; the quailing, insidious loadstone in his belly. “Silly Gege.”

Lan Xichen closes his eyes, soaking in Wei Wuxian’s unbearable, naked fondness. He can picture Wei Wuxian now, almost. The perfect bow of his lips, the beauty mark beneath the waterline of his right eye. Still only fragments of him. But the warmth Wei Wuxian exudes feels real enough. Wei Wuxian’s fingers, tangled around the hair at the nape of Lan Xichen’s neck; Wei Wuxian’s feet, knobby and dry, locked around Lan Xichen’s shins—true enough, there enough, real enough, real enough, real enough—

“When I was eleven, I hurt my knee really bad after falling from a grotto.”

Five years ago, Wuxian was a name buried beneath sect correspondences, treaties, and trinkets. The pothole years had been kind, and so the name would not be forgotten, but Wei Ying appears seventeen in the mind’s eye, as tall and rambunctious as Lan Xichen has come to know him, and Lan Xichen wonders why he feels the absence of Wuxian so keenly here.

“Seems you’ve made this a habit of yours.”

Wei Ying, the boy who would become Wei Wuxian, stares Lan Xichen into joining him in the palm of this forest as he picks small stones and crushes leaves from the jagged wound below his left knee.

“Pain’s just pain, Xichen-ge. You fall, you get up, and dust yourself off. No big deal.”

“How did you fall, then?”

The forest splinters in front of Lan Xichen’s eyes, and Wei Ying is pulled from his cradle of moss and wood sorrels. A few steps north, the grotto appears to be a mouth from which a spring feeds a steady, clear creek. Though not extreme in elevation, the rocks are slick and chiseled from a steep, if low-lying hill. Lan Xichen huffs out a laugh, despite himself, watching Wei Ying clamber for shallow protrusions or dents in the rockface to use as handholds. Fussing, as Wei Ying calls it, over a bundle of geraniums. He’s been climbing so high, for so long, surely his arms will stage a mutiny if he drops them. And, anyway, bruises on such delicate petals are an eyesore.

“Shijie is the prettiest when she’s happy!” Wei Ying exclaims, rocks scuttling under his boots as he tries to grab onto a short canopy. “You can’t judge me for it, Xichen-ge!”

Wei Ying's fingers slip.

The fall doesn’t come, though Lan Xichen expects it to. After a brief pause, a blink, they’re seated by the creek. Wei Ying’s wound is raw but clean as he bows over the beginnings of a campfire, a talisman burning in his grasp.

“Ah, Xichen-ge, Xichen-ge, you really... If you could see yourself right now, I think you’d break your own heart.”

“My heart is already broken,” Lan Xichen responds. He’s not following the script. The memory crumbles into itself; the youthful, tender-eyed Wei Ying subsumed by the dark of the shack and the cold that seems to follow him even beyond that Yilling winter, beyond that wasted journey to Qinghe, the decision that will have killed him. Lan Xichen doesn’t know what else to say, though Wei Wuxian smiles, smoothening out the wrinkles in the blanket folded over his thighs. Time seems to have unspooled again. It is nearer, now, to the fateful day Lan Xichen deemed Wei Wuxian healed enough to travel. Nearer now to the beginning of the end.

“Y’know my memory’s never really been good,” Wei Wuxian says, picking up a thread of conversation Lan Xichen struggles to recall. “It’s why… It’s why I cherish the things I do remember. Maybe—no, even the bad things. Even the stuff that hurts me, because I’m still here. I survived all of that, and I won't give it up. I don't want to forget, because forgetting the bad means I forget all the good, too.”

“a-Xian,” Lan Xichen murmurs, suffused by the knowledge of the path laid before them. The name is sweet on his tongue—a promise, one he never got to explore with the boy. He thinks he may have been settled by the door, or perhaps below the window, in an empty bit of space far enough to make the distance between himself and Wei Wuxian seem palpable, infinite. He’d been hurting, then. Smarting about something. Their stagnation, perhaps. The war. Wei Wuxian hadn’t much to offer but anecdotes that barely seemed to matter, pieces of himself that Lan Xichen couldn’t fully, adequately appreciate.

“What makes you happy, Xichen-ge? Tell me about something that makes you happy.”

The memory bubbles up without forethought: Wangji, in the back hills, a basket of vegetables at his elbow, surrounded by bunnies. Bunnies gifted to him by Wei Wuxian.

It feels almost like a curse. Everything—every moment between them, outside of them—tainted.

Wei Wuxian laughs. Lan Xichen had told him the truth, in confidence, and Wei Wuxian laughs because these discrepancies affect nothing, save no one. The mind is shielded within the body, and both by dreams far from the reality compressing them. Wei Wuxian breathes because Lan Xichen wills it. Here, while the memories are fresh, crystallized into strange immortality. Wei Wuxian lives because Lan Xichen won’t have it any other way.

-

-

-

Jiang Wanyin watches, glacial and immutable, and chatter seems to bluster outward from the various tables, sect disciples, coalescing between him and the Lan contingent. Indignant. Disrespectful. Nonsensical. His is an inherited fury, one that seethes through his teeth as it drowns out his better thinking. What sparked the fire tonight? Who shall be tasked with the role of mediator to bank the flame before it catches onto the alliance, burns the bridge of their quest toward victory?

“Wangji?"

It would be so much simpler if his eyes sought Lan Wangji through the din. To calm the brewing storm, Lan Wangji would need only to excuse himself, recluse himself. Jiang Wanyin’s rage, a mere apostrophe to the treatise signed between their clans and the Sunshot Campaign.

“Think nothing of this,” Lan Wangji states, though his gaze staggers on Jiang Zongzhu, seated beside his sister, Zidian dormant upon his right arm, the supper spread before him untouched. This would be the first time they shared a room since Xiongzhang’s return. Separated as they are by leagues, disciples who swell through the door, all this noise, all this refuse, still Jiang Wanyin finds space enough to spew his wordless enmity.

“It is not… optimal to be at odds with allies.” Sensitive phrasing, if clumsier than Xiongzhang is capable of. Then again, beset by those eyes, that fury, without reason or excuse, would Lan Wangji fare any better? “Wangji—”

A similar scene had played out upon Jiang Wanyin’s arrival this morning. Nie Mingjue, joined by Xiongzhang and Lan Wangji, served as the greeting party for the Jiang forces at the gates of the Unclean Realm. Standing at the head of their retinue, Lan Wangji prepared himself for a brusque, if professional, greeting and a hastened parting of ways. Instead, Jiang Wanyin had locked eyes with Xiongzhang and reared back, a scowl splitting his lips like a hook between his ears. He said nothing, even then, but Lan Wangji recognized the bitter wrath within him all the same.

“We don’t know what ails Jiang Zongzhu has taken to make it here,” Xiongzhang whispered when Lan Wangji attempted to step forward, to question the unbridled, animal fury in Jiang Wanyin. “A rational mind seeks no conflict, Wangji.”

Yet the day has collapsed into itself, and this winter night bleeds more of the same. Even as Jiang Wanyin takes to his meal, chastised by Jiang Yanli, his eyes weave through the crowd, past rank-and-file Nie, Jin, Jiang, and Lan disciples, past Lan Wangji himself, and settle firmly on Xiongzhang.

-

-

-

Tonight, Lan Xichen finds himself on an unmarked road. Beside him stands Wei Wuxian, whose hands settle along the small of his back in a corded bow, sinew and muscle and skin like glass, and it’s easy, marking his reflection on a curving fingernail, to realize Lan Xichen has come upon a dream.

“These are becoming more elaborate,” Lan Xichen says. It should concern him. Lan Xichen has a high level of cultivation; he cannot remain subject to such ridicule from his own heart and mind. And if these were not the fabrications of his body, his own regret and need for atonement—if Lan Xichen is being haunted—he has a sacred duty to lay this spirit to rest.

“Aah, Xichen-ge, I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Lan Xichen cannot discern the date, though the sleet coating the road and the trees facing skyward, barren and gnarled, places them somewhere towards the beginning of their journey. After winter. Before spring. Those intermediary nights, like a breath held, when the world itself seemed given to silence.

“Anything,” Lan Xichen says, then pauses, considering his words. “What did we speak about the day we left Yiling? I want to remember it the way you do.”

“Hmm…” Wei Wuxian’s hair whips behind him as he takes the lead. The road is ocher, then rust, brittle where it isn’t muddy, though the earth sloughs off Lan Xichen and Wei Wuxian’s boots all the same. The memory, unlike so much of what’s come before, appears unfinished. Maybe because Lan Xichen can’t recall it. Maybe because it hadn’t happened at all. Wei Wuxian turns, and he’s wearing Lan Xichen’s winter coat over his torn and bloodied Jiang sect robes. If his injuries pain him, limit him in any way, he doesn’t show it. Wei Wuxian places his finger on the bridge of his nose, and his eyes are clear, the same deep ocher of the road, the forest beside and ahead of them. His mouth splits wide as a wound. “Xichen-gege, I don’t know how much good I can do in our fight against the Wen, but I’ll try my best. I hope that’s enough.”

The sky turns puce, though the storm it heralds remains in the clouds, in the heavens. Lan Xichen remembers the thunder, the way it rumbled throughout Yiling and the mountain path he had half-carried Wei Wuxian through on the first two days of their travel. He remembers, with sudden clarity, that they had no choice but to leave.

“Wen Xu was killed,” Lan Xichen says. “Wen Chao was desperate and we were…”

“Vulnerable?” Wei Wuxian dips his chin. Though he doesn’t waver, he wraps his fingers around a cane that hadn’t been there before. Sturdy thing. Lan Xichen had torn it from an oak tree, hacked the nubs and branches smooth as Wei Wuxian watched, shaking and unable to carry himself. Compromise.

“The conversation, a-Xian.” The road twists to fit Lan Xichen’s request. The mountains of Yiling bear down on them as the ground becomes slush beneath their feet, and while Wei Wuxian stands before him, Lan Xichen feels the boy like coals draped across his back: wet, fevered breaths by the shell of his ear; arms locked over his sternum. They fled in the dead of night, and though the worst of winter was behind them, the cold had settled like a shroud. It was… difficult to imagine they survived the onset; difficult to think they'd live to see an end. “a-Xian.”

“We were in the shack still. You had to do all the packing—I’m so sorry. I told you that. I’m so sorry I can’t help. ‘There’s not much to do, Wuxian,’ you said. ‘Don’t worry. Save your strength.’ Then… no. I don’t know. Shack becomes mountain, night turns to day turns to night again, and we talked all about how we’d stop the Wens, ‘cause that’s imperative. You’re Zewu-jun, y’know? Sect heir. And so I said what I said and you got angry and—”

“I was never angry.”

They were forced to stop near the dawn of the second day. Lan Xichen’s spiritual energy was waning, and he became certain that if they pushed any harder, any further, Wei Wuxian would die. Why did he now think this make-belief, dream-Wei Wuxian would know, would understand, more than those surface emotions? So the rain eventually fell. So they’d near-barreled headlong into a line of trees. So Lan Xichen felt frustrated, exhausted, confused, and he let the silence reign between them like a quagmire.

What was there to remember? What was so important to recall?

“You said my concern didn't matter,” Wei Wuxian tells him gently, delicately. “You made me upset.”

The memory is a curse. It unfolds, separate from the mind that recalls it, from the words that summoned it into being: Wei Wuxian slumped into an outcropping, chin tucked over his knees as Lan Xichen struggled to build them a fire. Lan Xichen hadn’t noticed, then—or he had, but found other priorities to capture his time and care. Wei Wuxian, in the morning that bloomed scarlet above them, dragged his palms over the high ridge of his cheeks, his ears, and cried.

-

-

-

It sounds, at first, like a whisper. The words are indistinct. Lan Wangji can barely parse the tone, but he hears it like water in the walls. The melody: sibilant rhythm, like the shush in the air that rises from the ground as steam. Spring song, he thinks. Unfettered greeting.

The moon is full and weighs heavy upon the night. Outside these guarded quarters, it bathes the Unclean Realm in shades of blue. Lan Wangji had promised himself he’d go to his rest soundly, but that familiar melody crests, quavers, and he wonders why he assumed slumber would find him without trouble.

“Xiongzhang?”

The melody collapses into itself.

“Wangji… I apologize.”

Before the war, the Nie would have assigned a sprawling ward for each clan it hosted. Lan Wangji would have quarters separate from the Lan who make up their delegation, Shufu if the Cloud Recesses could spare him, and Xiongzhang. Now, even space is rationed. As Lan heir and Zongzhu, Lan Wangji and Xiongzhang share a room that could have fit two more disciples, if forced, and it is luxury enough.

Lan Wangji lifts himself from his bed, arms lax in the vee of his legs, and he wonders at the thoughts tripping, bursting, behind the cage of his teeth. It would be simpler if he could imagine the wedge of these words, the sound they would make. Simpler, if he could see Xiongzhang seated behind the curtain between their beds, the expression alighting his brows, to decide from there.

As ever, Xiongzhang takes the reins of their conversation. “You must be curious,” he says. “It is Hai Shi, and I find myself drifting, disruptive.”

Lan Wangji hums, but doesn’t otherwise respond.

Xiongzhang chuckles, ragged and half-hearted. “He comes to me in my sleep. One cannot qualify these—memories, I suppose. These wishful fantasies. What does it matter, Wangji, if he lives in my dreams where in waking…” Xiongzhang stops himself, breathing sharply. “He had such dirty, tavern humor. He hated to take anything seriously. He talked with his mouth full, it was the most—the most disgusting thing!” Awful. How awful. Xiongzhang’s voice twists, warps, until every word comes as a gasp, a revelation. He laughs like it kills him, these memories, and Lan Wangji wonders about the person Xiongzhang longs for, aches for; wonders how truly spectacular he could have been if he let himself die, anyway.

Resentful thought. Unneeded, unnecessary, unfair, unfair, unfair.

Lan Wangji thinks of Wei Ying, inexplicably, lost for eight excruciating months. Wei Ying, with his hands clasped behind his back, his hair fluttering in the breeze. When did Lan Wangji last see him? What did they say to each other, that final night in the Xuanwu cave?

“He saved me, Wangji,” Xiongzhang says. “He saved me, and this is how I thank him—how selfish! I am so selfish!”

Xiongzhang’s voice rings in Lan Wangji’s ears. He wants to refute. He wants to slice through the panic that’s taken hold of Xiongzhang; to shatter the remains. But want is separate from doing, from being. Lan Wangji is marble carved into his bed on the far side of their shared room. In place of reassurances, he thinks only of his own heartache, his own splintering loss.

Wei Ying, the apples of his cheeks bunched around a grin.

Wei Ying, Suibian brandished in the light of the setting sun.

Wei Ying, his languid gaze slanted towards Lan Wangji—circling him. Always circling him.

Notes:

*un'beta-ed

is LXC delusional? no. is this an unconventional way of looking into grief that i totally pulled out of my ass? yes. do i have any regrets? absolutely not!

and dw, we'll explore more about what all is going with JC very soon mwehehehe

Edit:

Just adding this is, because I may forget: it is incredibly important to me that you as readers never have room to doubt how much lwj loves lxc and vice versa. While, yes, this is a love angle (of a sort), the sting of lxc's very specific silence mostly comes from the fact that he does utterly adore lwj, he wants only the very best for him. The problem is, in canon it is SO clear he does not respect lwj. Not enough to take him at his word, until after wwx has died. Not enough to make actions to at least investigate lwj's insights - because lwj DID talk about the wen's treatment, and lxc was privy to at least some of it himself. He was so focused on his own comfort, on not rocking the boat, that he kinda convinces himself to downplay the severity of the issue lwj tried to raise with him... And then wwx died.
This manifests, in this fic, as the secret lxc keeps about wwx's supposed death. Yes, I'm confirming for you that wwx is merely in the BM - this is canon resuming after a brief pause, just a little sideways - but lxc doesn't know this. Lwj doesn't know this. Now we have two different people mourning the same person, and only one of them realizes this. Its just an awful, human situation.

Notes:

i have had this idea baking in my head since OCTOBER 2022. IT HAS BEEN ALMOST THREE YEARS!!!

 

now, folks who've followed me a long while on ao3, and my various social media accs know i don't necessarily like lxc. he's interesting, but passive and i think that passivity is a large part of the reason the novel goes the way it does.

but celia! why write this fic then?

easy! i am ALSO a big proponent of that one theory where wwx is impossible NOT to love so long as you open your heart to him. he is so utterly loveable OF COURSE shunting lxc into a closed space with him for a prolonged period of time has lxc kissing the ground he walks on - it's INEVITABLE.

now i think part of my interest in this plot - other than the obvs - is that i truly do see lxc as someone who's actions are constantly informed by others in his circle. nmj, jgy, they both played a HUGE role in the kind of sect leader lxc turned out to be... except in this au lxc never meets jgy. in this au, rather than jgy, lxc finds himself taking cover in yilling with wwx. i think there's an unprecedented amount of change that'll happen to lxc herein, that i tried to hint at in this very short edition to the fic (the second part will be longer!!!), simply because wwx is the kind of character that's constantly pushing others to reflect on themselves, their beliefs and inherent biases, and all the ways they can better themselves to best serve the world around them. we see this most keenly in canon with wn, the juniors and ESPECIALLY lwj.

njfksnjvnjkf anyways enough yapping for me! thanks for reading and hope ya'll have as much fun with this au as I DO

(p.s. will keep this fic open to the public until like a week after it's complete, then i'm locking it down too. hope ya'll understand!!)