Work Text:
When the idle touch comes, fingers tangling in his long hair, Lan Wangji doesn’t flinch. At first, it had shocked him every time, those wandering hands finding new places to explore— places to make him gasp and other more chaste but no less thrilling to them both. These are the touches they’d missed in all those long years apart, moments sitting suspended in time and waiting now plucked generously from the air and treasured here in the present. The fingers in his hair brush the shell of one ear and it immediately flushes pink at the attention; he tilts his head without thinking to allow more of it.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian calls from his perch on the low branch he’s stretched his body along. Whenever he breaks a silence between them to speak, he does it gently with this name, a small consideration that Lan Wangji has become fond of. His reply is a soft noise of acknowledgment, his attention still divided between the book in his hands and the fingertips that have made their way to his neck.
Wei Wuxian’s legs swing, the toes of his shoes grazing the grass beneath him. “Would it be all right if I asked you a question?” Whenever he seeks permission, the answer matters very little; the question will come regardless. So Lan Wangji simply says, “Ask,” to give the illusion of allowing it.
“Since when did you love me?”
Lan Wangji stills. Like a statue made of white stone, Wei Wuxian has accused over and over, though now he often wonders aloud how a statue can be so soft to the touch. After a moment of reflection, Lan Wangji leans back against the trunk of the tree, turning and looking up to find Wei Wuxian’s face alight with curiosity. “Do you not know?” he asks in return. Wei Wuxian shakes his head, the gentle waves of his hair brushing his cheeks with the movement. Lan Wangji wants to push that hair to the side, tuck it behind an ear, but he refrains; they have all the time in the world for that.
Instead, he carefully closes his book and places it into his lap, his expression thoughtful, almost grave. He thinks back and back, far into the past, and it’s a shock even to him— even to Lan Wangji, who had thirteen years of loneliness to reflect on this very question— to realize the answer. “Since the month we spent together in the Cloud Recesses, when you were being punished."
Wei Wuxian’s brows collapse, his mind no doubt traveling the long path back to when they were still children. When he arrives at the remembrance, his eyes widen. “Since then ? But wasn’t I always making you angry?”
“It wasn’t when you were making me angry,” Lan Wangji says. “It was in the moments of quiet.” His voice has softened, gentle as the spring wind barely bending the leaves above them. “I thought that I was seeing you then as no one ever had.” He’s always been a man of few words, but on this subject, he has many. “Even back then, you were always loudly asking for everyone to look at you. I never did when you demanded it but instead looked at you when others were not.”
He realizes that his heart is beating fast. Even now, even after everything they’ve been through, this confession makes him nervous. But still, he feels a lightness, a weight gone from him that he’s carried season after season. Never a burden— he would have borne it forever if this chance to speak it had never come.
Feather-light fingers whisper along his jaw and under his chin to lift his head. Wei Wuxian’s gaze falls on him like sunlight and his skin warms beneath it. “Won’t you look at me now, Lan Zhan?”
Despite himself, the tiniest smile in one corner of his mouth. It doesn’t linger but Wei Wuxian’s clever eyes found it before its retreat anyway; the grin splitting his face gives it away. He can grin even as he brushes his fingertips over Lan Wangji’s bottom lip, bold, shameless. The touch remains but the grin fades away, leaves a ghost in its wake. “Back then,” Wei Wuxian begins, “why did you never tell me? Or in any of the years after?”
There is no accusation in the questions, no disappointment, but Lan Wangji still fears both. In penitence, he lifts his hand, captures Wei Wuxian’s wrist and pulls that palm close to press a kiss to the center of it. Still, when he steals a glance up again, there are those expectant eyes.
Lan Wangji takes a breath, holds Wei Wuxian’s hand to his own cheek and leans into it. He whispers into it as if hoping Wei Wuxian will close a fist around the words and tuck them away where they can be forgotten. “I was afraid.”
Shock travels down that same arm. “Afraid? Of me?” Finally, that touch disappears, but it isn’t gone for long; Wei Wuxian comes down from his perch and settles in the grass beside Lan Wangji, crowding close, searching that usually impassive face for any hint of emotion. “Afraid of me?” he repeats in disbelief.
“No.” These reasons had always been his own, his sole companions for thirteen long years, and he’d been prepared for even longer with only them in his heart. They’d built foundations and felt every last beat from the moment he’d realized his feelings to the first note of his own song from Wei Wuxian’s flute atop that mountain— and from there, in the whirlwind, they’d been momentarily forgotten. But to release them to another, even to the very object of their meaning, requires such a feat of strength, of fortified will.
Wei Wuxian, in his kindness, gives Lan Wangji all the time he needs until, finally,
“I was afraid of… the person I could be if I had you.”
The silence that follows is a relief but Lan Wangji knows Wei Wuxian and knows that he’s burning for an explanation. And doesn’t he deserve it, for all he’s suffered? There isn’t anything Lan Wangji wouldn’t give him if he asked, if it were within his power. This, at least, is something he can offer, no matter how his throat wants to close around his voice. He watches intently the face open wide to him, expressive of every last feeling, every last vulnerability. He has to catch his breath before he speaks again.
“You were… free and bright. So different from me, in a strange world. I didn’t fit there.” Wei Wuxian presses ever closer, closer, so close that another inch would likely put him right in Lan Wangji’s lap. He moves the book just in case, letting it lay in the grass beside him. “I needed to follow the rules of my sect. I needed to learn, to study, to master. It was my duty. I couldn’t let myself stray, not like—”
He stops. Not like my father. But, in the end, wasn’t he his father’s son after all? Seems such a waste now, to have spent all that time holding himself back from Wei Wuxian.
Fingers entwine with his. Lan Wangji now knows their every curve and groove and plane. Every scar. Every callous. He knows the taste and the press of them.
“And then,” he says quietly, “the war.”
The Sunshot Campaign hadn’t been the beginning; it had started with the burning of the Cloud Recesses, the destruction of Lotus Pier, the countless lives of smaller sects that had been lost to the Wens. And for the two of them, personal tragedy after personal tragedy had pulled them away from each other only to push them together again when bodies and hearts were wounded and torn and not fit for love.
“And then,” he says, quieter still, “you were gone.”
Wei Wuxian does finally make his way into Lan Wangji’s lap, pressing their two bodies chest-to-chest, arms coiled around his neck, as if to say, I am here now. I was gone but now I’m here. Again, again, again, Lan Wangji is grateful— for the reminder, for the weight and the heat of him, for being allowed the chance to hold him exactly like this.
The voice in his ear is sweet enough that he thinks he can taste it on the back of his tongue. “My Lan Zhan,” it says, and Lan Wangji closes his eyes to its melody, settles his face against the soft skin of Wei Wuxian’s neck. “When I was gone and it didn’t seem like I would return, did you ever try to find someone else?”
Again, stillness. Again, the lines of his body turning statuesque. Rigid. Unmoving. Wei Wuxian shifts in the seat he’s made for himself as if to move away— and that’s when Lan Wangji comes back to life, wraps his arms around that waist, holds that body close. He lifts his head and the scant space between them allows their noses to bump and their lips, briefly, to touch. Lan Wangji’s eyes like ambered glass capture and hold Wei Wuxian’s gaze. “No,” he says. His tone is a decided one. “It was you. Always you. The whole time.”
He looks down at the mouth parted in shock, at plush lips that bloom in the springtime. Thirteen years, twenty-six years, thirty-nine years, all of the endless, endless years of his near-immortal life, it could never have been anyone but Wei Wuxian. This, he knows in his heart. Of this, he has always been absolutely sure. For once, he waits for nothing; he presses his mouth to Wei Wuxian’s where his lips fit exactly, in this world that’s both of theirs, a world in which he is his father’s son, a world that’s free and bright. And Wei Wuxian melts into the kiss.