The Only Thing Worse Than Wanting

by AllegraBanner

Summary:

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I have long since grown comfortable in a mundane sort of invisibility. I have learned how to use my smile to disappear into the background of a crowd, weaponising a calculated silence in much the same way as my brother. I could shift from an active participant to a passive observer at the drop of a hat. If I really think about it, this habit of mine may have rubbed off on A-Yao – or perhaps we became close because of a shared tendency to fade out of society on a whim, drifting like feathers on the winds of conversation. Before this moment, I never imagined that I would come to see the fact of my distance as anything more than a tool.

 

-

 

Statement of Lan Xichen, regarding a severing of ties.

Notes:

• Inspired by Web of Loneliness by MadameLapin

things might slow down for the last two since my assignments are starting to become more of a priority, but i'll try to post the next one within two weeks

[TAPE RECORDER CLICKS ON.]

 

ARCHIVIST 

Statement of Lan Xichen as recorded in a personal diary discovered in a Six Dynasties-era mountain settlement, regarding a severing of ties. Recorded on March 19th, 2017, by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.

Statement begins.

 

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

I was always a far lonelier child than anyone thought to question. I think it was mostly because I smiled. 

Smiling was not a thing that came naturally to me, and certainly not to the rest of my family. I can count on one hand the number of times I saw Wangji smile, before the whirlwind that was Wei Wuxian, and the carnage he left in his wake. He expresses things differently, subtly, in the posture rather than in the face. He was a quiet child. He’s a quiet adult. I suspect that he has learned to use this to his advantage. 

My uncle is a stern and serious man. He brought Wangji and I up in such a way that I believe he may have forgotten that we would eventually come to have ideals of our own. He was not cold to us, but there was a distance between him and us that it seemed we would never be able to cross. As Acting Sect Leader, he of course had many other responsibilities outside of raising Wangji and I, and these often prevented us from becoming as close as we otherwise would have been. He tried – he must have – but I don’t believe he succeeded in whatever it was he wanted to raise us to be. I do not recall ever seeing him smile. 

I am a little different from my brother and my uncle. At a very young age, so young that I don’t entirely recall the specifics of the primary situation and likely not long before the death of my mother, I found myself struck by the profound realisation that by simply smiling at people, many situations could be dissolved. 

Now, unlike my brother, I have never had the issues with polite communication that he does. He learned, over the course of many years, how to dull his words to something society would not frown on him for, but it has always been somewhat of a struggle for him. I, on the other hand, have been much like the flow of the river that runs through our home. I find it natural to blend myself into the tone of the conversation, smoothing out the edges and acting more as a facilitator than as an active participant. I think that Wangji noticed this change, at first. I also think, despite how precise he is about many aspects of his life, he believes his xiongzhang to be in total control. He is wrong.

One of the regrets that I have about my particular demeanour is that, in all my life, I do not believe I have stopped lying since I first discovered my ability to. People say that I can’t lie to save my life, that I would perhaps even become physically unwell from the attempt, but they don’t realise that this, too, is a lie. I do have difficulty in lying in the external sense, I’ll give them that – knowledge is not something I have the mind to hide. But I have been lying to myself for decades. 

The thing about lying to yourself is that people often fail to realise that a consequence of this is lying to everyone else by proxy. Lying to yourself means that you misrepresent your own thoughts, trip over your subconscious and fall into patterns that build an exoskeleton of a character that is not who you truly are. It turns the body from a vessel to a cage, trapping your soul within and never forging a key. It is a voluntary and simultaneously an involuntary isolation, akin to the seclusion practices that the Lan tend to favour. That, too, is something that I believe I have internalised. 

I let my mother die believing I was happy, because I did not know what else to be. I do not know whether or not this was kind. I do not know what she would have thought of my actions these past years, but I think she would have been disappointed in me. 

A-Yao was always the better liar. On the surface, this was something I knew well. What I don’t think he ever discovered is the fact that I have never once known what real human connection is supposed to feel like, nor whether or not that matters at all. After all, is the appearance of kindness not indistinguishable from the genuine thought? Is the acting of a role not simply the role itself, if no one knows it’s being played?

I like to think I was kind. I tried to be. Now, however, I do not think I can say I succeeded.

The mess that was Guanyin Temple is documented well enough that I do not see the need to explain its specifics here. I will say only that I thought A-Yao to be the closest thing to a friend I had ever experienced. I realise, now, that I was wrong.

A-Yao, I think, never realised that I thought of him in such a way. Perhaps if he had, things would not have ended so badly. He was a companion through Wangji’s grief – as incomprehensible as it was infectious, seeping through the walls of the Jingshi. He was my saviour, when Mingjue died and when Cloud Recesses burned. Of course, he was also the cause of much suffering. To both of us.

I do not like to think on it, but I can’t help wondering if I made things worse. If, had I been harder in the lines I drew – maybe not as solid as Mingjue, but close – then A-Yao would have been forced into a confrontation that culminated in something tangibly better than what has happened in reality. Perhaps my kindness was its own breed of cruelty. I suppose I could ask him, but I am far too cowardly for the confirmation. 

Seclusion was the easy choice. If I had attempted to continue my duties as Sect Leader, I would not have done as good a job of it as the Lan deserve. I think that, even if I had been in public when the absence began to claim me, all the eyes in the world would not have been able to keep me in focus.

I suppose I should explain. I have been in seclusion before, though it felt more like hiding at the time. In the aftermath of the burning of Cloud Recesses, I was forced to run from the Wen army, and essentially to vanish from the map. In hindsight, and in comparing what I felt then to what I feel now, I believe that this was the point at which the forces that stole my parents away in my youth started to truly sink into my skin.

I always thought it would be Wangji, if anyone, who would fall into this limbo. Prior to Wei Wuxian’s appearance in his life, I feared that he would live and die entirely within the bounds of our beautiful, but isolated home. In the years of his grieving, I was thankful for the presence of the child – A-Yuan – whose origin is even still unclear to me. Had he been left to grieve without distraction, I do not believe he ever would have stopped. He has always been… not like our father, not in any way that could scare me, but – shadowing him, while at the same time walking the path of our mother. An amalgamation of his quiet fury and her ravenous violence. Wangji has always been the more obscure of the two of us. Always far less predictable than everyone else seems to believe.

There was one specific moment when I became conscious of what was happening to me, though I still do not understand the how or why – I only know that it is. In a way, that might be more terrifying than anything else.

Before I really knew A-Yao, when he initially came looking for me after I ran from my burning home, I only saw his Wen uniform. I’d met him before, as Mingjue’s advisor and companion, but I did not know enough about him to realise that he had a greater plan than simply switching sides. I do not know him as well as I once thought I did, but his words to me when I ran him through will always ring in my ears. He told me he never once wanted to hurt me. I believe he meant that truthfully.

I have never been good at hiding. On the singular occasion I was invited to play with other disciples my own age, before my Sect Heir training began in ernest, I was quite awful at hide-and-seek. It did not surprise me that, in my disorientated grief and panicked, feral fear, I found myself directly in front of a man I thought to be a Wen soldier – one of the few who would be able to recognise me, even in the absence of any symbol of my status. 

I felt a lot like the rabbits I pretend not to know Wangji feeds in the back hills near the cold springs. Frozen, skittish, and yet unable to look away. A-Yao is not a tall man, but in that moment, he seemed to burn brighter and higher than the flames engulfing my home. It was impossible for him not to have seen me.

And yet.

A-Yao was looking at me, but I soon noticed that that wasn’t quite right. His head was turned in my direction, but on closer inspection, his eyes seemed incapable of comprehending my presence. I did not move. I was scared, yes, but now I was also confused. He had to have seen me. He must have been pretending. In a moment of baffled lapse in judgement, I waved my arms at him, just to see what would happen. His demeanour did not change. He did not look at me. He looked through. 

I have long since grown comfortable in a mundane sort of invisibility. I have learned how to use my smile to disappear into the background of a crowd, weaponising a calculated silence in much the same way as my brother. I could shift from an active participant to a passive observer at the drop of a hat. If I really think about it, this habit of mine may have rubbed off on A-Yao – or perhaps we became close because of a shared tendency to fade out of society on a whim, drifting like feathers on the winds of conversation. Before this moment, I never imagined that I would come to see the fact of my distance as anything more than a tool.

This was the moment in which I discovered how viscerally terrifying my life was becoming. Not in the way that the Sunshot Campaign was – terror on a scale not seen in centuries – but in the sense of a quiet, indiscernible horror that had its claws in my sinew before I could remember the lack. There was no sudden change, no abrupt severing of ties or tangling of threads. There was only the dawning realisation that, somewhere down the line, I had ceased to participate in the rest of reality. Through no fault of my own, and through every misstep I had ever taken, I was, for a brief moment, entirely absent from the world in which I lived.

I managed to escape it that time. In my desperation, I grasped A-Yao in a chokehold until he – thankfully – convinced me that he was there to help me escape. The moment my arm locked around his neck, something unshifted, and I became as real as I had always been one more. For the rest of the Sunshot Campaign and the years that followed, I pushed that moment from my mind. I did not think about it beyond a conscious effort not to. That is, until three days ago.

I did not succumb to the feeling again until very recently. I have been attempting to reenter my previous life, and to ease back into the skin of my previous station. I will not be as good as I once was – cannot, in some respects – but it is my duty to try. I have been in seclusion for almost a year, and while it is nothing compared to what my father subjected himself to, I think it is enough. And so, three days ago, I exited the Hanshi for the first time since A-Yao’s death, looking for the life I’d left behind.

The first place I went was the Jingshi. I realise that my relationship with my brother is not what it once was – and that it hasn’t been since Wei Wuxian’s death – but he is still my brother, and the only thing that I have left after the collapse of every other relationship that truly mattered to me. 

I knocked on his door. I knew he would be awake as he keeps to the same traditional Lan routine as I do, perhaps more strictly than anyone, including our uncle. I knew that Wei Wuxian was likely to also be inside, but he was wont to wake far later than Wangji save for on the odd occasion when he was needed earlier in the day. He’d grumble about it, no doubt, but he would not protest to the point where his complaints passed from endearing to frustrating. No, it would be Wangji who came to greet me. 

I heard the steady thump of my brother’s footsteps approaching the door and mentally reassessed myself. I know I no longer look my best, but I made a concerted effort to appear at least somewhat put together for my first foray back into the rest of the world. I remember smoothing down the front of my robes in the moment before the door slid open.

Wangji frowned at me. This was not unexpected. Wei Wuxian, sleepily and slurring his words further inside, asked: “Who ‘s it, ‘an Zhan?”

Wangji turned back inside, already closing the door, and it was only because of my involuntary lunge for the fast-narrowing entrance that I heard what he said in response.

“No one. It was the wind.”

The words landed like a dagger to my heart – a sword, straight through my chest. Wangji’s rejection was something I prepared for, but not like this. This is not how he acts, no matter how much he hates a person. He has always struggled with being overlooked, though no one would ever think so. He would never ignore a person so casually. Wangji’s ignorance is loud, pointed, and uncomfortably obvious. No, this was something else.

That didn’t stop it from hurting.

I wandered, dazed, in the direction of the library. It was early in the day still, but the Lan have always been early risers, and so there were a number of people about already. It was at this point that I began to feel a distinct sense of deja vu.

I have spent most of my life as a smiling shadow, only becoming real when I was needed, save for in the presence of a select few people. The thing that I have become is not a shadow – rather, it is not anything at all. There is nothing physical about any part of it. There is only the lack, and the hollow where the shadow should have been. 

I cannot begin to describe my experiences these past few days in any way that someone will be able to understand. A life you’re unable to enter in any way that matters. The trying, and failing, and for the second time in my life – the screaming. The drop of the stomach every time yet another person seems to notice you, only to stare through all that you are and find you to be the only thing worse than wanting: absent. The freedom to go anywhere without consequences becomes far less freeing when you are unable to share it with anyone. 

When I entered seclusion, I made the request that I not be disturbed under any circumstances. I told them that I would not answer; that I would come back into their lives of my own accord. That it would take time, but that I would eventually, one day, emerge. 

No one will come for me. I only have myself to blame for that. The worst of it is the knowledge that it may not ever end. 

I’m still lying to myself. The worst, the true worst, is that I don’t know if I want it to.

Three days is a long time to spend alone. In my voluntary seclusion, the time seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. Now, each second is its own eternity. 

I will not escape this. Whatever the cause, I don’t believe that anything has truly changed. At any point over the course of that first year, I could have drifted from the rest of the world and never discovered the difference. This warping of what I am could very well have been looming in the background since that day with A-Yao. I will never know. 

I think I will live with this. I don’t know what else I can do. Would it be better, perhaps, to take that last step into true absence? I don’t think so. It would not be worse. I doubt it would be anything at all. There are very few people left to miss the space I’d otherwise fill, and even they are used to the void.

I think about pulling someone in, sometimes. Even before I knew the extent of it, I thought far too often about cutting someone else’s lifelines, just so they’d know what it felt like. Just so I wouldn’t be alone in my isolation. Just so I could say, see? Wouldn’t you have done the same? Wouldn’t you have hurt, just like me? Wouldn’t you have wanted others to hurt, too?

Sometimes, I think it’s better that I’m unable to interact with others anymore. I think if my uncle saw me, I would not be able to bear it. If Wangji had welcomed me into the Jingshi that day, I dread to think what I would have done to leave. I dread to think what I would have done to stay.

I think A-Yao might have been the only person who ever understood me. Wangji came close, of course, but not like A-Yao did. I think that maybe, in the end, that’s why he had to die. Not because he widened the distance between us until it was an unfathomable chasm, no – because we floated too closely together in the stream, and if I’ve learned anything at all about love, I have learned that we are destined to suffer the consequences.

 

ARCHIVIST

Statement ends.

The first aspect of this statement I looked into was the mentioned ‘Guanyin Temple’. No location was given, but I believe it to have been located in the area formerly known as Yunmeng, which would have been the territory of the Jiang Sect. There are a number of references to events that occurred there, chiefly the death of Jin Sect Leader Jin Guangyao, Lianfang-zun, formerly Meng Yao of the Nie Sect and advisor to Nie Sect Leader Nie Mingjue, Chifeng-zun, before his expulsion from the Sect, but the details are consistently vague. It is noted that Sect Leader Jiang Wanyin, his nephew and Heir of the Jin Sect Jin Rulan, Wei Wuxian, and Lan Wangji were also present during whatever this confrontation was. There are implications of other less notable figures also being present, but nothing is confirmed.

Jin Guangyao, Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue are recorded as sworn brothers, with the ceremony taking place immediately after the end of the Sunshot Campaign. Though tensions between Jin Guangyao and Nie Mingjue are noted as being almost hostile towards each other, they are both known to have been close with Lan Xichen. The way that Lan Xichen refers to them throughout the statement – ‘A-Yao’ and ‘Mingjue’ respectively – is yet more evidence of this. 

Though the specifics of Guanyin Temple have been swept out of the public eye, there are a number of references to a ‘vengeful spirit’ attaching itself to a sword that belonged to Nie Mingjue in life, known as Baxia, and a corpse in the Temple that it was trying to reach. This corpse, I have come to Know, was Nie Mingjue.

This is the fifth statement to come out of this specific period of history, and I strongly suspect that there are far more to be had than are present in Hua Cheng’s collection. At a glance, nearly every prominent figure in the Great Sects seems to have been at least tangentially connected to the Fears, if not an Avatar outright. I’m beginning to think that this period may have been brought about by preparations for some sort of ritual, or the aftermath of the partial success of one. 

Lan Xichen’s statement… echoes many of the aspects of the Lonely I see in Martin. The withdrawal, and the resignation that comes with it, is familiar. Uncomfortable. Lan Xichen was a well-liked figure among the Sects, but there is not much said about him aside from that he was a nice, kind, and genial person with almost everyone, and that he did not emerge from his seclusion after the events of Guanyin Temple.

This is… This is the bleakest of the statements I have encountered from this collection so far. Lan Xichen seems to never have escaped the confines of his Patron. The rest of the world moved on without him. There isn’t even a report of a body – simply an announcement that he died, and the ascension of Lan Wangji to Sect Leader in the aftermath. It’s almost as if they forgot he existed at all.

End recording.

 

[TAPE RECORDER CLICKS OFF.]

Notes:

find me on tumblr @ allegrabanner

 

next up, one of the original three i came up with when i started thinking about this series and one im super excited to get to: the flesh

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 12 of They Are Still Human