Work Text:
When he was nine years old, Wei Wuxian nearly drowned.
Naturally, because his memory is like the bowl with holes in the bottom that Shijie had used to drain the water off boiled noodles, he doesn't remember most of it. All he can recall are bits and pieces, aided and embellished by the stories he has been told about the incident by others.
He remembers the feeling of hands on his chest. (He'd been very new to Lotus Pier, then, Jiang Cheng still heartsore about the loss of his puppies and wary of the scrawny little stranger he had been instructed to share a room with, even after that first night).
He remembers the surprise of the shove. (Shijie told him that he had been following Jiang Cheng around, asking him questions that were natural for a child who had been recently brought into a sect, but ones that Jiang Cheng, who had been born into one, was annoyed by).
He remembers his gasp of shock when his head went under the water. The way his lungs burned, and the helpless terror that filled him as he realized he couldn't breathe. The way he had flailed, trying to swim as he had seen the other children do, and getting his limbs tangled in his sodden robes.
He remembers arms closing around him and hauling him to the surface. He remembers choking on water as he was propelled back onto the safety of the pier. Remembers delicate hands pounding on his back with surprising force and a voice ordering him to breathe, a-Ying, it's alright, you're alright, just breathe for Shijie now, a-Ying.
(According to Shijie, she screamed when she realized he wasn't coming up, but Wei Wuxian cannot remember if he heard her or not. Despite her fragile constitution and weak cultivation, unfortunate remnants of her being born before her time, Shijie was the strongest swimmer in Lotus Pier. She told Wei Wuxian once that the water was the only place she didn't feel weak).
He remembers wrenching his eyes open as he coughed, seeing Jiang Cheng knelt beside him, red-faced and bawling. Remembers thinking why are you crying? I'm the one who can't breathe! (Jiang Cheng, Shijie tells him later, had not realized that his ragamuffin of a new shixiong could not swim. Most children in Yungmeng, especially around Lotus Pier, learned to swim before they learned to walk. It never occured to him that Wei Wuxian, perhaps, might not have learned, might not have had the same advantages).
(Many years later, Wei Wuxian will tell this story to his husband, and Lan Zhan will wryly note that Jiang Cheng has a nasty habit of lashing out with the intent to hurt Wei Wuxian and then being shocked when Wei Wuxian is, logically, hurt due to his actions).
Summer in Gusu is balmy, rather than the sticky, oppressive heat of Yungmeng. Still, it's nice to get a little relief from it, which is how Wei Wuxian finds himself like this: In a small, almost-hidden corner of the Cloud Recesses' back mountains, where there is apparently a small lake, with a dock. He and his husband are sitting on it, their bare feet dangling into the water.
A-Yuan and Jingyi are with them, both stripped down to their trousers, playing around in the water. It feels almost like a milder echo of Wei Wuxian's boyhood at Lotus Pier. He half-expects to hear Shijie's voice any moment, calling out for the boys to take a break from the sun and offering them slices of sweet watermelon to help keep them cool.
(Shijie would have adored a-Yuan, Wei Wuxian knows this with the same easy certainty by which he knows that the sun will rise in the east and set in the west. She would have doted on her nephew, just as Wei Wuxian had once dreamed of doting on her children, just as he tries to dote on a-Ling whenever he gets the chance, and she would have loved Jingyi, too, simply because a-Yuan did).
"Have they always been like this?" Wei Wuxian asks idly. "Two seeds from the same lotus pod, I mean?"
"Mn," Lan Zhan nods, sipping on his drink — water with lemon in it, how terribly indulgent — with that soft, sweet look he always gets when he's reminiscing about their son. It's very subtle, of course, since Lan Zhan is Lan Zhan, but Wei Wuxian knows what to look for. "Once, one of their instructors told me he was sure they were meant to be twins, but the heavens had gotten confused and given them to different parents by mistake."
"Which was a blessing in disguise, really!" Wei Wuxian says, "Can you imagine me trying to wrangle two toddlers in the Burial Mounds?"
He leans over and steals a quick sip of Lan Zhan's lemon-water. It's refreshing, after all, you really can't blame him! If Lan Zhan truly objects, they can just duel about it like gentlemen. (And if their spars and mock-duels, as of late, usually end with Lan Zhan shoving him against the nearest flat surface and doing very ungentlemanly things to him, that's nobody's business but their own).
"Wei Ying would have managed," Lan Zhan replies serenely, wiping a stray drop of lemon-water from Wei Wuxian's bottom lip with his thumb. His confidence, while flattering, seems entirely unearned, at least to Wei Wuxian.
Wei Ying would not have managed, he wants to argue. Wei Ying was struggling to feed everyone with only one baby to worry about stunting and starving. Wei Ying skipped meals for days to be sure a-Yuan had a little more, and it still wasn't as much as he needed. Jingyi is wonderful, but if there had been two tiny Wen boys…
Then Wei Wuxian would have worked twice as hard, stretched their meager resources twice as thin, to provide them whatever he could. Worried twice as much and gone twice as mad, probably. He knows himself well enough to be certain of that.
(Other thoughts burble up from where he tries to keep his darkest ones locked away: If there had been two of them, would he have been able to hide them both? Would both of them have been lucky enough to go undiscovered? Would Lan Zhan, wounded and distraught as he was, have been able to carry them both?)
There were not two of them. It didn't happen, and so it is pointless to fret about impossible hypotheticals.
"Your faith in me is humbling, my love," he says instead, and receives a lemon-tinged kiss for his words.
The Lan Sect's Head Healer is tall for a woman, and has a stately sort of elegance, power and authority clear in her bearing despite the fact that she shows the signs of her age the way few powerful cultivators allow. Somehow, on her, the wisps of gray in her hair look almost ethereal, like streaks of starlight.
"So you're the one Wangji-tangdi's been pining after all these years," she says to Wei Wuxian when they are finally introduced officially, entirely uncaring that Lan Zhan is in the room and able to hear what she says.
Wei Wuxian, delighted by the notion of someone so casually referring to Lan Zhan as their little cousin, bows respectfully.
"Gossip is forbidden, Shufen-tangjie," Lan Zhan protests, and somehow — despite Lan Zhan being a grown man, old enough to have brought up a child of his own, and a war hero besides — it comes out sounding like the weak, petulant complaint of a helpless boy.
"Oh, hush, you," the healer (Lan Shufen, he needs to remember her name) retorts, waving a hand dismissively at the most renowned and respected cultivator in their society. "I watched you come into this world, child, I can say what I please about you."
"Oh, you and I are going to get along wonderfully," Wei Wuxian predicts, grinning.
Lan Zhan sighs, in the manner of a person who knows he is going to have to sit through embarrassing stories about himself.
"Once, during the lectures when the two of you were fifteen," Lan Shufen says, eyes alight with mischief, "Wangji came to me and asked for help because every time you came near him, his heart would start pounding and he couldn't take his eyes off you. The poor, fool boy was certain you had somehow cursed him."
Wei Wuxian laughs so hard that he tips over into Lan Zhan's lap, sees his husband's blazing-red ears, and laughs even harder.
Reluctantly, Wei Wuxian swallows down the tonic the Head Healer had forced into his hands — A thick, foul-smelling, and terribly bitter concoction that Wei Wuxian is not ashamed to admit he almost spits out on principle.
"What is this, mud?" He rasps once he has reluctantly swallowed the horrible sludge.
"Yes, it's mud, I thought it would make a nice change from tea," Lan Shufen retorts with a very un-Lan roll of her eyes. (She reminds him of Wen Qing, sometimes, a Wen Qing who was permitted to age into a sharp-tongued, gentle-handed auntie. The notion both comforts him and makes him sad, all at once).
"Will you sit still and behave if I tell you more stories about Wangji as a little one?" She asks, hands on her hips.
Let it never be said that Wei Wuxian is one to pass up on a good deal. He spreads his arms wide in a "have at me" sort of gesture. "I entrust myself to your capable hands, Lan-daifu."
"He didn't cry when he was born," Lan Shufen tells him, as she looks him over and prods at him. "His one obligation, and he refused. We should have known he would be stubborn from the start!" She clicks her tongue, in the way of all older relatives judging a younger for perceived poor manners.
"His poor mother was bleeding more than she ought to — he came early, you know, and that always makes a birth more complicated than it should be — and the little brat didn't even have the decency to scream like he should. We were all afraid he'd been born asleep, and there he was, just looking around, as if he was wondering what all the fuss was about."
Wei Wuxian imagines a teeny-tiny, newborn Lan Zhan, naked and covered in blood, but looking just as subtly disgruntled about crowds and loud noises as the current Lan Zhan. It's almost charming, in his mind. He's so drawn into the tale, so endeared by his imaginings, that it catches him completely by surprise when Lan Shufen smacks him upside the head.
"Ow!" He cries reflexively, more shocked than hurt. "Daifu, aren't you supposed to heal, not harm?"
"That," declares Lan Shufen, "is for diving into a river in the middle of winter! What, do you never think before you act, you foolish child?"
"Not if I can help it!" Wei Wuxian retorts cheerfully.
The kitten which had fallen through the thin spot in the ice on the aforementioned river was safely returned to its mother, thanks to Wei Wuxian's intervention, and that makes any potential injuries on his part worth it.
"Just you wait," Lan Shufen warns, wagging a finger in his face. "You're going to be in terrible trouble, boy, and I won't do a thing to help you."
"What will you do?" Wei Wuxian asks. Despite the frantic concern of the juniors who had been with him at the time, he seems to have emerged from the incident mostly unscathed, if Lan Shufen's flippancy and lack of urgency are anything to go by. If he were in imminent danger of freezing to death, he assumes there would be much more fuss going on. A few bruises, maybe a few days of aches and pains, the temporary discomfort of being wet and cold, that's all. "Make me drink more horrible medicine?"
"No," says Lan Shufen, with a dagger-sharp look in her eye. "I will tell your husband what you did."
Wei Wuxian gasps. "You wouldn't!"
Lan Zhan is away at the moment, attending to some almost-certainly-trivial matter that Yao-zongzhu had insisted needed his personal attention, but Wei Wuxian is certain that that moment he finds out about this incident, he will fuss over Wei Wuxian until he's certain no true harm has been done.
It always makes Wei Wuxian feel a strange mix of pleased and guilty.
Before Lan Zhan, the only person he could ever remember fussing over him was Shijie, and she was always discouraged and scolded for doing so, by Madam Yu or Madam Jin or any number of other people. (He still remembers the words he overheard, shortly after his resurrection, on Mt. Dafan, calling him a mad dog who bit the hand that fed him — "What an injustice for Jiang Yanli, too, to have raised such an ingrate.")
To have Lan Zhan fret over him always left Wei Wuxian strangely uncomfortable, certain that he is not worth all the fuss, not worth the worried wrinkle in Lan Zhan's pretty brow.
If Qing-jie had known how easily Lan Zhan could bully me into complying, he finds himself thinking, she would have dragged him to the Burial Mounds herself, just to keep me in line.
The mental picture of tall, dignified Lan Zhan bent in half as fierce, tiny Wen Qing drags him by the ear makes him laugh so hard he wheezes. Lan Shufen swats him with a towel.
A-Ling looks strikingly similar to Jin Zixuan. It figures, really. He wasn't happy with merely giving the child much of his character, but he just had to pass on most of his looks, too. However, there is a sort of softness, a delicacy, to a-Ling's features, that did not come from his father.
There are some days, when the guilt is especially heavy, when Wei Wuxian cannot meet his own nephew's eyes.
Shijie's eyes in Jin Zixuan's face. The living embodiment of Wei Wuxian's mistakes.
He knows, now, that the disasters at Qiongqi Path and the Nightless City were not entirely his fault. That they were the result of machinations beyond his purview, that men with wicked intentions had manipulated him and those around him to form him into the perfect scapegoat for their own crimes. He was not as fully to blame (fully wicked, fully heartless) as everyone had been led to believe — As he, himself, had believed for a long while. Still, that cannot fully erase the shame and guilt he feels, even now that the truth is known and he has been publicly exonerated.
Wei Wuxian mentions, once, that he really doesn't blame a-Ling for stabbing him, that night at Koi Tower. It was a fully-justified stabbing, in Wei Wuxian's opinion! If it had been him who had just found out that the man who allegedly murdered his parents had been hanging around him under a false name, he thinks he would probably feel rather murderous as well. No hard feelings!
A-Ling and a-Yuan are as different as the sun and the moon, but they give him almost-identical looks, at that, a sort of bewildered horror. Lan Zhan merely sighs a long-suffering sigh that seems to say do you see what ridiculousness I have to put up with?
They are similar, though, in some ways, his nephew and his son. Both bring wonder and delight to Wei Wuxian's new life, both are reminders of all that is still good in the world. Both boys who he had thought he had damaged beyond repair and lost forever years ago, who grew into strong, good young men despite that.
Wei Wuxian never knew a-Yuan's original parents, but Wen Ning says that a-Yuan looks very much like his natural father did at his age. (Wei Wuxian sometimes wonders if there is any relation between the Dafan Wens and the Twin Jades, because a-Yuan also looks very much like Lan Zhan. However, he doesn't think there is anyone left alive who would know). A-Yuan purses his lips when he's angry, just as Wen Qing did, he hums while he works, like Uncle Four, and his hands are as deft and gentle as Popo's once were.
A-Ling tilts his chin up when he's feeling insecure, an exact copy of Jiang Cheng. He fiddles with Suihua's tassel when he's nervous, just as Jin Zixuan used to do. He shows his worry by fussing and clumsy attempts at caretaking, and that comes directly from Shijie. Sometimes, even the way a-Ling rolls his eyes reminds Wei Wuxian of Madam Yu, or his sighs bring Jiang-shushu to mind.
(Sometimes, Wei Wuxian wonders if Jiang-shushu ever saw him as himself, as Wei Ying, rather than seeing only whatever echoes of his old friends he could find in Wei Wuxian's face and mannerisms. He always feels guilty and ungrateful for having those thoughts, but they appear in his mind nonetheless).
Once, after watching a-Yuan attempt to chide his companions for their reckless behavior only to be dragged into the fun and laugh uproariously at some mischief or another, Wei Wuxian turns to Lan Zhan to say "He's just like you," only to find Lan Zhan saying the same words to him at the exact same moment. Wei Wuxian laughs, and Lan Zhan smiles his sweetest smile, the one he only ever uses for Wei Wuxian and a-Yuan.
A new life does not mean the entire shedding of the old. There are still aftershocks. Inns in tiny, backwater villages who will not serve him. The occasional veteran of the Sunshot Campaign who will curse him as soon as look at him. Nightmares that will never fully abate. Guilt and regret he will never feel he can properly atone for. His beloved shijie and her husband are dead. The Wens he had protected, who had loved him like family, are dead. Jiang Cheng is alive, but might as well be dead to him, as their relationship will never be what it was long ago. Nothing will bring the lost back to life, or restore bonds that have shattered to the way they were before.
But there is good in the world, still. There is spicy food and Emperor's Smile. There are lotus seeds and the sweet cakes that make Lan Zhan's eyes light up even though he won't admit to loving them. There are Lan Jingyi and Ouyang Zizhen, two children so different from their families that Wei Wuxian half-suspects them to be changelings, and cares for them all the same. There are a-Yuan and a-Ling, learning and bickering and playing together like the cousins they should have grown up as. There are bittersweet reminders of those from his past in them. There is Lan Zhan's smile.
Even after the darkest nights imaginable, the sun always rises again, and Wei Wuxian carries on.