Work Text:
Grief comes in five stages.
***
denial
***
Most days Meng Yao doesn’t want to talk.
Lan Xichen sits down in front of his sunlit window - in front of freshly laundered clothes. He remembers how much he had liked the smell back then, and how pleasant it was to see him clean and bright. His playing is steady, but he hears nothing, nothing back, until the faintest of trills in his ear makes him realize - he is here.
“Good morning,” Lan Xichen trills, in music-speak, and his hand tightens on his xiao. If Meng Yao notices (he does) he never gives it away.
“Er-ge,” he greets, barely more than a whisper. “I do not wish to speak.”
They sit in what Xichen calls companionable half-silence. One plays, and the other listens and never answers.
“Meng Yao,” he says out loud after he finishes Inquiry, but there is no one there in the room but him, and the heavy, heavy weight on his shoulders, where Meng Yao always chooses to descend, has disappeared.
Xichen puts his xiao away, closes his eyes, and continues to work. Today is a new day of seclusion, and his repentance is far from done.
You cannot make a prisoner talk to their jailor. You cannot make a victim talk to the perpetrator.
But what if, Xichen muses, what if we are both?
***
depression
***
His brother is so different these days. He cannot frown in the face of their long-deserved, long-awaited happiness. Seclusion is how he deals with it at first, and when he comes out, they are as radiant as ever, and the one at the end of his song as silent as ever.
“How did you -” he starts, and Wangji looks at him with the same pity he had viewed him for thirteen years. He does not understand how Wangji would stand it, because it makes his skin crawl - ugly emotions rising to the surface that he will never say out loud.
Why him? Why could it not have been me - me , finally - why not us, playing the Sound of Clarity together, with his beautiful eyes raised to mine, no hat on his head that he had ever desired, nothing that he had desired beyond me -
“I didn’t,” Wangji says. He looks at his husband, who plays his dizi in the pavilion, showing the younger children how to suppress a fierce corpse. “You know this.”
Xichen does. He had been there for his first breakdowns. However, Xichen has never been the one having them. He was the shoulder to lean on, not the shoulder that would break with the burden on it.
Now he is neither, and the resentment towards Wei Wuxian never quite leaves because of it. He does not feel guilty, because he knows, and his eyes say he understands. Somehow that - of all things - is what makes him feel guilt. Someone who has known pain for so long does not deserve this, but there are things he cannot help, and this is one of them.
At least he knows, even if we never say it out loud.
None of them are innocent, but this pretense, to him, would be far worse than anything Meng Yao could have done.
***
anger
***
It was a warm summer day when Meng Yao had put down the book in his hand, watching Xichen until his playing had nearly faltered. He had thought he would say it, for a moment -
The spell remained unbroken. Xichen never broke eye contact, and Meng Yao was the one to break away, his eyes on the xiao, the lovely notes that floated upwards like he had never seen it before. Like it was the last time he would be allowed to see it.
In retrospect -
“I’m marrying her,” Meng Yao had said abruptly, and his song had stuttered to a stop.
He had never stopped in the middle of Entreaty before.
“I… I see,” he had stammered. His voice had cracked.
“It won’t interfere with our meetings. Or our -”
Xichen had known what he was about to say. It did not make him feel any less wooden, like the sunlight had been sapped out of him the moment he had said those words.
A Lan did not know how to half-word his feelings. A Lan, he had thought selfishly - so selfishly - does not share.
“Er-ge-!” Meng Yao had called after him, and Xichen had bowed to him stiffly, discarding the remnants of a long-felt emotion on the floor of their tiny secret pavilion like snakeskin, unwilling to acknowledge the ones that grew in their wake.
A Lan does not fall out of love.
***
bargaining
***
Wei Wuxian asks, once - perceptive as ever - if he would let him go.
It is over an evening meeting, a silent sort of affair - Wangji is away on sect business, for once, and his company was requested. He goes with no small amount of surprise, and is greeted with a bow as Wei Wuxian asks if he would take tea.
His robes are Lan robes, his forehead ribbon intact. He is the picture of grace as he pours him his tea, not a drop splashing onto his cloud-patterned sleeves. His hands are delicate, scholarly, and Xichen remembers a different pair of hands, and thinks - he would have done a better job.
But Wei Wuxian - so prim, so reserved - is a surprise in many ways now. A glow hangs about him that he doubts he had ever seen on anyone else, and there is a light in his eyes that feels well-deserved, even in the midst of four thousand and nineteen rules that he has to abide - if only barely. He does so with a pleasure that leaves Lan Qiren conflicted and raging by turns.
He has a knack for surprising people. Perhaps it’s love - love fulfilled. Xichen would not know.
It is then that he asks, tone half-abrupt, half-accusing; and Xichen stops, teacup halfway to his mouth, to think about the question.
The fact of the matter is -
Lan Xichen knows who is to blame - it is both of them, consuming each other in their wake.
“No, I think not,” he says. He does not smile - a mask is useless, for people who have suffered as the two of them have. “But he won’t either.”
The spirit that clings to his back grows heavier, even when he is not present, and Wei Wuxian bows his head, and apologizes.
They both know it is not for the intrusive question.
Xichen accepts it. He has always been too forgiving for his own good.
***
acceptance
***
“He could reincarnate,” Wangji says.
Xichen does not pause the song. He keeps playing till the ending note, and there is no answer. No closure.
He takes a deep breath. “He could.”
“Would you want to -” Wangji begins, and then falls silent. There is a realization to be had there, in the sharp lines of the face so similar to his, the circumstances such a painful reminder, the heart so different from his.
“Wangji,” Xichen says slowly. “If you knew he did not feel the same, would you want him to be with you?”
Silence. “That isn’t - he did,” Wangji says. He’s frowning. His brother is single-minded - it is the way he is, Xichen knows, has seen him grow up. Once he’s caught on to an idea he will see it to the end. Xichen is, however, painfully different. Normal, the elders used to say, before he grew up and shut down their gossip before it started affecting Wangji in debilitating ways.
They aren’t talking about Wei Wuxian anymore.
“He did, brother,” Wangji says. He doesn’t look pleased about it.
Xichen will have to put it another way. “Father loved our Mother.”
Wangji inhales sharply. “Brother -”
“No, Wangji. He did. She might have loved him too.” Xichen puts his xiao down in front of him, breaking eye contact to stare at it. “It did not make a difference.”
Wangji understands this, he knows. He was there - younger, but he remembers all too clearly what had happened. Xichen remembers him at the gate to the Cloud Recesses, happy to only have him by his side to protect; but he also remembers his tears after he had come back empty handed, time after time, refusal after refusal.
“I have played enough, I think. It will not make a difference,” Xichen says, a note of finality in his voice. He puts the xiao away at his waist. He does not say: I will not make a difference. I have harmed him enough.
I will not play Entreaty for him again, not as long as that boy in my memory exists.
“Wangji,” he says lightly. “Do you think the disciples would like to learn how to play the xiao?”
Wangji’s eyes widen. He struggles with his words for a second. “I will lead the way.”
His shoulders are lighter when he gets up to follow him.
It feels like the closure he’ll never get in person.
***
coda
***
In a land far away, a boy comes back with a laundry basket full of fresh clothes, and sees another boy practice a song on his xiao.
“What is that song?” he asks with avid interest, as he sets it down on the floor next to him. “I have never heard it before.”
“It’s a secular tune,” the boy in white says, with some embarrassment. A smile dances on his lips nonetheless. “I composed it. It is named Entreaty.”
“Oh? Who is it for, er-ge?” he asks, a light in his eyes that the other hopes never goes out.
The flutist smiles. “Someone who looks very, very good,” he says, staring at the boy’s clothes, far too big for him, “even in borrowed robes.”
“Careful what you wish for, er-ge,” the boy says, amused. “One day you might not like them as much as you think you do.”
“Well,” Xichen says, all-too-genuine smile on his lips, “I can always entreat you to change.”
“I can be convinced,” Meng Yao allows, and leans in to kiss him - and in that world, in that moment, everything is perfect.