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Chapter Text

He rose with the setting of the pathetic sun, watched foggy light glimmer to pieces across the horizon and fade away.

Xue Yang smirked at its death and knew only peace.

He was a man of night, of shadow and dark thoughts, of cruel mysteries and crueler pleasures. The moon had ever been his friend and the darkness his ally. Through the short years of his life, through small lies and large ones, that had been truth.

And here, in this cursed city, it was an even deeper truth.

The air was cold, as he stepped out of the building. It greeted him like a knife to the exposed skin of his hands, like bones cracking under his fingers.

The cold was so pleasant, he thought, and smirked sword-sharp and deadly.

He was leaving that building behind, with its plain walls and dusty sadness. He was leaving all those he had claimed in its white-washed walls too, but he would return for them soon. It had been a funeral house once, bearing corpses rife with resentful energy and old regrets. There was so much malice steeped into the walls that he could lean forward and lap it with his tongue.

Xue Yang felt so satisfied, in those walls, with his greatest enemy as his plaything.

The smile that crept across his lips was hungry, and he did nothing to hide it. Here he was, surrounded by the blind and foolish. There was no one to see his murderer’s grin but the victims. He’d rip their tongues out, he thought, idle and lazy.

Could he force them to eat it too? It was something to try, something to make a thrill run up his spine.

Here he had carved a home from Xiao Xingchen’s blood and bones, and the fool had offered it gladly. The moon shone high above, a chill wiping the fog from the city and setting into his skin with tiger-teeth.

Xue Yang just smiled against it, healing injuries twinging pleasantly. He would be whole soon enough, thanks to the tender care of Xiao Xingchen. Wounds that should have killed him were washed away by careful hands and a gentle smile.

Fate really had a sense of humor.

What would the man think, he wondered, when he realized what he had done?

Would he try to take his own life? Would he try to raise his blade against Xue Yang? The man had always been so good; did he even know how to kill?

It didn’t matter, in the end. Xiao Xingchen, in all his suffering glory, in all his blind folly, belonged to Xue Yang. From the blood-stained blindfold to the gentle smile, from the calloused hands to the gentle fingers— everything bore his name and claim.

And Xue Yang had always enjoyed taking apart what was his.

But these were not thoughts for the now, on this moonlit night where the fog was burning away. An important task lay before him, the bones of his plans and clever tricks arranged into an array of delicious malice.

Now there could only be the silence and loneliness before the slaughter. He strode out into the street with a jackal’s confidence, watched the lantern lights flicker around him.

His energy was fury and famine, and he loved how it stripped flesh from bone so.

It was a night for triumph, and he knew just how to celebrate it. Tricky fingers pulled a seal of iron and darkness from his sleeve, twirled it in the air. It seemed to catch the moonlight and devour it, a pit of ink come to stain the world.

It was broken, shattered and bent beyond recognition. But Xue Yang thought he had the steps to fix it. The moon washed his hands pale and bloodless, but they held the broken seal strong.

He had the Stygian Tiger Seal, and now he had the tools to make it whole.

Would it obey him, as it had its master? Did his skill yet compare to Yiling Laozu?

A smile crossed his face, crawled over his lips and made the night shudder with his joy. In a motion like ripping tendons and cracking bone, he threw the Stygian Tiger Seal up and up, watched it fall.

Then he called on all the malice in his bones and set it alight. It burned above his hand, caught in black energy and corpse dust.

There was only one way to answer that question, and Xue Yang had never been a coward.

“Let’s see what you can do,” he spoke to the seal, and forced a thousand bleeding hearts through his finger nails. Dark iron glimmered, spun, inky black and devouring the light of the very moon.

Then it pulsed, shone like a living thing with a heartbeat all its own. Did it know who held it? Did it sense that the fingers that reached for it were not its master’s?

He smirked then, and felt the moonlight caress his face. It was no matter. He would claim this amulet soon enough, mark it as his own.

Nothing would be out of his grip, then.

He reached out, scraped the edge of a nail across the iron—

And screamed.

That was the last thing Xue Yang ever did, for in a battle between master and disciple, the outcome was always clear. And the relentless spirit of Wei Wuxian, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, could not be stopped.

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━⊰

A breath, a body not his own. A breath, hands that shook and burned. A breath, and a thousand thoughts he shouldn’t have.

He was dead but the blood pounding in his ears was so very real. Wei Wuxian blinked against the feeling, blinked living eyes. There was no light but moonlight, no darkness but shadow.

Where was the sword sheen, coming to drive into his heart? Where were Jiang Cheng’s tears and screams of rage?

A breath, arms not his own. A breath, skin that felt the cold. A breath, feel for a soul in this beating heart.

But there was none. No fluttering spirit dwelled in this skin but his own, no mind whirled but the one that he had been forced into.

Thunderous metal cut into the palm that was not his, and he looked down to see blackened iron and inky energy. The seal was pressed so deep into the skin of this hand that it couldn’t move without shaking the bones it had buried itself into.

Dark iron was endlessly familiar, and he shuddered at its sight. He had hoped to never see this cursed thing again.

The Stygian Tiger Amulet had cost him so much, and now he blinked dead eyes open to see it again.

What had it cost, to return? Who had paid the price?

Wei Wuxian remembered nothing but a darkness deeper than the abyss, nothing but a death of his own making. He remembered his family’s blood staining his fingers and the rage of Jiang Cheng. He remembered dying and being grateful.

He remembered his mistakes.

He did not remember possessing a new body, didn’t remember curling spiritual hooks into another man’s skin. He wouldn’t have, not as he had stood dying and thankful on bloody ground. He was Yiling Laozu, relentless and resourceful but—

But all he had ever wanted was to keep people safe, to keep those he loved from harm. Even in that he had failed, but he would not have taken another’s body.

The tiger seal pulsed like a blackened heart, pounding resentful energy through veins he shouldn't have had.

Had he failed again, he wondered, feeling blood course through him and leave him warm. This body had a high level of cultivation, golden core thrumming like the light of sun. It had been so long since he felt the heat of a core, so long since he had anything but corpse-strength in his fingers.

It was a gift he didn’t deserve, in a city without a name and a body without a title.

There were a thousand mysteries to solve and a thousand more regrets to nail into his bones. Clinging remnants of fog hung across the empty street he stood in, and every house was painted funeral-white and dingy. Pieces of burial goods sat in dusty corners, collecting bad luck and moonlight.

It was a city of the dead and poor, the untouchables of society.

That he had woken up here was fitting beyond words. He laughed, in the silence of night, in the air that spoke of white carnations and gentle mourning. This body was strong but cursed, it seemed.

Who was this man, where had he been? Why did he have the Tiger Seal?

Wei Wuxian did not know, not even with all his mad genius. He had given his life to destroy half of the amulet, and that had been a worthy price.

Now it was whole and bound him to another man’s skin as shackle and summons.

He looked out across the endless roads, the dingy streets and sputtering lanterns. He looked out but found no solace and no direction.

The Stygian Tiger Seal was implanted into his palm and his soul was bound into yet more mistakes. With all the despair in his relentless soul, he laughed again, a broken and helpless thing.

Wei Wuxian had not asked for this.

It was no matter; ever had he been unstoppable, and ever would he move forward. Humming, feeling the tenor of this new voice, he picked a path and began walking. Noise scratched out of his throat, harsh with a wound that made pain lance up his jaw. He hummed again, louder to feel his voice shake. The road greeted his steps, and the city breathed with illness and dust around him.

But high above, the moon was full and the light bathed him so.

He spent an hour exploring the winding roads, watching pale-faced inhabitants move between buildings like ghosts in the night.

No one here had a sunny happiness, no life seemed bright. The lingering fog had faded into nothingness, but no smiles rose to take its place.

It was a city of the dead and dying, and Wei Wuxian felt its pallor creep into his bones. There was little demonic energy here, not even with all the funeral homes he spotted along the road.

It was a tired city, and no resentment built in its walls but exhaustion. This body was light and quick, leanly built and made for speed. There was a finger missing from the right hand and a thousand small cuts lined the arms.

But they paled before the throbbing wound in his stomach and curving up his thigh, like a snake come to cripple him. Both were wrapped and bound but aching fiercely. It was such a familiar feeling he almost hadn’t noticed it at first, pain an old comrade and bitter friend.

This body had taken a sword to the gut, and Wei Wuxian spared a moment of pity for the lost soul.

That was a painful injury to bear, and not one he’d wanted again.

The moonlight filtered down over his skin as he walked, as he learned the motions of this body. He would need to discover what soul he had devoured, and how the man had come to hold the Stygian Tiger Seal.

The iron throbbed in his skin at the thought, standing proud from his palm and so very familiar.

Wei Wuxian had given his all to destroy it, once. He had been so close to success. Why had that not been enough?

Tap-tap, tap-tap.

The sound was wood striking on earth, of fine bamboo clicking into packed road. It was quiet, but so loud in the silence of this moonlit night. The voice that followed it was loud and childish, a strange match for the gentle rhythm.

It was a girl with white-blind eyes, tapping the ground into music with a bamboo cane. In the light of dusty lanterns, she looked annoyed.

“Is that you? You’ve had Daozhang worried.” It was a question light and airy, sharp and furious. The girl’s sightless eyes were fixed a shade to his left, glimmering milky and pale in the moonlight. “So ungrateful.”

If she couldn’t see, then perhaps—

“I’d hate to do that.” He spoke, felt the tenor of his voice bleed into the air. It was rough with injury and teasing, ever-so-slightly deeper than his old one had been. It bent to his words, curled around them like shadows on a moonlit night.

It felt dark, but right.

She perked up, recognition clear on sightless eyes. But spite made her lips twist and she huffed out her words into dusty air.

“It is you. Well then, come on, Daozhang wanted to look over your wounds again. God knows why he cares.”

Wei Wuxian felt a surprised laugh bubble up his throat, rough but cheerful. It echoed strangely in the bone-white city with its poor feng shui and stark funeral homes. It echoed like broken ice and unruly ghosts.

He thought this laugh suited him very well.

This girl was so very petulant, and so very honest. He liked it, he decided, through the broken twists of his heart.

What had this body done, he wondered, to earn such enmity?

“Ah, I’d hate to make him worry. Lead the way.”

She looked at him then, shock mixing with suspicion in a small face. An unusual sentence, perhaps, or too much laughter in his raw throat.

It didn’t matter. The man who had worn this skin was dead, and Wei Wuxian couldn’t fake his mannerisms.

For better or worse, with the seal driven into his soul and another man’s skin, there was nothing to be done.

Slow taps of the cane led them forward, the girl’s face set into petulance. He kept pace but did not speak, feeling the weight of iron across his palm and the ache of a missing finger.

The moon was beautiful, but he had no space in his mind to bask in its glow.

At last they entered a modest funeral home that creaked like a living thing. White walls greeted his eyes and a man greeted their entry. In the soft lantern light, Wei Wuxian saw broad shoulders and a gentle smile, a set jaw and steady hands.

Thick white bandages wrapped around the man’s eyes, but Wei Wuxian hardly registered them, could hardly think to look.

There was a divine sword resting at the man’s waist, handle glittering and engraved. The scabbard was a bronze that shone gold in the lantern light, gentle snow bursts carved into the sleek metal.

It was a beautiful sword, for a cultivator. It was a dangerous one, for Wei Wuxian.

He fought the tension out of his spine, kept his hands steady. He didn’t recognize the man’s white robes, and what little he could see of that face was unfamiliar.

Perhaps a rogue cultivator then, not attached to one of the great clans. Wei Wuxian couldn’t know, not without more probing questions than he could likely afford to ask.

He didn’t know this body, didn’t know this place, and most certainly didn’t know this man.

What he did know, was that he could not be discovered here as Yiling Laozu.

He had walked a lonely path of briars and narrow roads for so long and pretended to the grand boulevard of cultivators. Would he need to do the same, here and now, with his mistakes fresh in his mind?

Or…

He stopped, took a breath, felt for the power in his chest. There was a golden core fluttering at his fingertips like a trapped bird.

This body belonged to a cultivator too, had strong muscles and a gilded heart. Perhaps there was a path left to him, after all. Perhaps he could ride Suibian through the sky and hear the wind whistle at his laughter again.  

Perhaps.

The man smiled, and it was a gentle thing of soft care. “I’m glad you’ve returned, stranger. I worry for your wounds; they are newly healed, and you should not move too much.”

Stranger, the man called him, and Wei Wuxian had a flash of clever hope.

Perhaps this man knew him as little as he knew this body.

With a laugh and a smile, he waved off the concern. The motion pulled at the wound in his gut, made his body twinge and ache.

He stood in a body with unfamiliar skin, in a city he had never seen, and spoke to a man who had cared for a stranger.

“It would take more than this to kill me,” he said, and watched the man’s lips pinch with worry. The girl just huffed again and snarled out a retort like a rabid cat.

“Don’t make Daozhang stitch you up again because you are a fool.”

Wei Wuxian just laughed. He had always been so much worse than a fool.  

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━⊰

In this city separated out from time and life, Wei Wuxian settled into an easy routine. Three weeks passed quickly as breathing, quickly as the sound of his laughter through thick fog. The wounds lining his body healed slow and sure, all the better for the blind cultivator’s gentle care.

Xiao Xingchen, the man was called, and Wei Wuxian was glad the name was unfamiliar. He didn’t need another echo of his past now, among funeral homes and with old mistakes curling beneath his skin.

So he laughed and greeted A-qing with teasing smiles and did nothing to show his skill. Let him rest, here, where no one needed to see him.

Let him mourn.  

This body bore no name the others knew. Was it to be lost, then, to the ages? A dead man with no one to remember his name?

Yiling Laozu was cursed in every village, in wine cups and on the open roads. What a demon was he, the people said, and everyone agreed.

There were worse things than dying unremembered, Wei Wuxian thought, and smiled into ever-thick fog.

He tied a black ribbon around his sleeve anyway, watched the rough fabric catch on the wind and trail behind him. He may not know the man who had given him this body, but Wei Wuxian would still honor him.

Now, he would turn to the gentle future and his quiet hosts. Xiao Xingchen had saved this body’s life with gentle hands and a stranger’s kindness. The man had saved Wei Wuxian too, given him a place to shake away the old memories and wander empty roads.

It was the least he could do to guide the man through dusty streets and tease out gentle laughter.

It was on a night where the regret beneath his skin boiled to a breaking point when they first truly spoke. Wei Wuxian was wandering across rooftops, staring over the cursed city and its white paint.

He was searching for answers that wouldn’t come, to questions long since burned out of existence. He asked anyway, again and again into the long nights.

He would always ask.

“You are up so late. It is not good for healing wounds.”

The man stood on the ground below, words echoing up like soft-spun clouds. The blindfold did nothing to hide his gentle disapproval, but Wei Wuxian only smiled.

“Never stopped me before, and won’t stop me now!” The wind whistled as he spoke, a cheery background to his cheery tone.

It wasn’t a lie, but it was a mask. The moonlight made the whole city glow like dead bones before candles, like ghosts above water.

It felt like the Burial Mounds had been stripped of anger and given death. It felt familiar. 

In some ways, it felt like home. 

“It is not a night for regrets,” the man said, and it was quiet with understanding. “I have candies, if you want them.”

Those words were a surprise, and he froze at them for a long heartbeat and a longer breath. They were the words of a man who felt regrets of his own and knew their weight.

There was nothing more comforting.

Wei Wuxian felt the weight on his chest thin, felt the moonlight shine a little brighter. He leapt down from the roof and took the man’s blind elbow in a cheery grip, and wondered at how easy it was to make a friend. 

“I’m sold, Daozhang. Let’s go back and eat your sweets. No need to wallow out here, huh?”

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━⊰

On the dawn of the fourth week, with regrets settling into quiet in his bones, Wei Wuxian looked down at the amulet dug into the thick of his palm. It stood stark and cold, a nail-width proud from his skin.

It still gleamed like it had been freshly polished with blood. He hated it as he hated little else.  

He didn’t want this to be a part of him forever, not when it had caused him so much grief. But how could he remove it? How could he rip it away when it held his thunderous soul in this skin?

He may not fear death, but he did not wish for it now.

Fire was, as always, the best option. He summoned up a gilded flame, the feel of golden energy in his veins strange and unwieldy.

He had missed this so.

The fire curled around his fingers, and in its flickering glow and bloody ink he painted a talisman around the Stygian Tiger Seal and across its iron surface.

Pain was no new friend, and he felt it here, clutching at his spine and giving him no peace. It burned, and he smiled.

Slowly, like the drip of blood and the slow pain of death, the seal melted into his skin. It took all of his energy, all of his skill, but after a trembling moment, Wei Wuxian took a breath.

All that remained of the tiger seal was a bloody tattoo, bracketing his fingers and spreading over the strength of his palm.

His wounds would heal, but this mark would never fade away.

What fate was this, to be saved and cursed by the same tool?

Chapter Text

Clouds swept across the sky as ghosts come to greet the stars, pressing into the black of dawn and leaving it gray. The lake beneath echoed those movements, shining with fading shadows and gentle fog.

It was a lake set apart from life, isolated and made chilly by mountain air. The gentle trickle of water across stone was as familiar as his hands, familiar as the gentle stretch of his lungs and the feel of ribs beneath his skin. Rock cradled his legs, held his guqin steady. The morning itself made way for the long lines of his robes, white fabric glimmering in the rising sun.

This place knew him well and greeted him with a gentle silence. Lan Wangji had spent ten years walking these lake shores in search of peace.

He had not found it, but he had found purpose in a boy with a quiet smile. He shifted across the stone, until his body was settled and his fingers poised above sharp string.

Here, the notes of his guqin rang out like thunder and fog, like lightning and the gentle press of rain. When the days grew cold with his aching heart, on the mornings where even the priciples of the Lan Clan gave him no comfort, Lan Wangji came to this lake.

Here, he called out into the mists of death. But his songs returned unanswered, his lonely call meeting no relentless spirit.

Wei Wuxian never heard him, but he would play again. Lan Wangji lifted his fingers, placed them across the shimmering strings.

The first notes were always the hardest.

With the care of a man going to war, he began to play. The first sound whispered into the air, strong with power but gentle and resonant with feeling.

The first note was always the weakest, in these mourning mornings.

He watched it echo out, let his hands move across the strings and begin to play the full scope of Inquiry, poured all of his strength and skill into the melody.

It spun like cracked rock and the brush of silk over steel, like roots forcing their way through stone and yet gentle.

It was all these things and more, the prized skill of the Lan Clan honed over hundreds of years.

Yet for so long, it had lacked an answer.

Now, he played the notes and a trembling melody met him in return. Long fingers froze across the strings, heard the call, heard the response.

Inquiry did not lie, and now it whispered to him of quiet truths. His hands were shaking, he noticed, as if through fog and snow.

He had played for Wei Ying, and for the first time in ten long years, the man had answered.

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━⊰

The moon shone like a living thing overhead, bright and furious as the sun. It gleamed across the city, forcing the shadows of funeral homes into submission and making white walls glitter. The scent of death was washed away before silver light. Bones were bleached dry and a city was bleached with them, long cold and newly dead.

It was a beautiful moon for a beautiful night, and Wei Wuxian spread out into its glow. The ground under his back was hard and rough, pressing rocks into his robes and leaving bruises across his spine.

He didn’t care. Like a cat come to perch on a ledge, he stretched out with a contented sigh. Cultivation would wash away the scrapes later, driven by the golden core he could feel turning in his chest.

It was a luxury he never thought he’d have again, and he couldn’t help but bask in it.

This corner of the city was empty and quiet, buildings standing as abandoned skeletons in the moonlight. The families here had long since faded away or vanished, searching out a life untouched by the stigma of grave goods.

No such life existed in this city.

It was a haunting place, but Wei Wuxian didn’t care. For long years he had danced among ghosts and laughed beside corpses. The buildings here may be stained by funeral goods but he had lived in the tombs of the Burial Mounds.

He didn’t need a fine chair or soft silks to smile.

This corner of this city had the best view of the stars, and this stretch of packed dirt was perfect for staring up at the moon. With the bottle of cheap liquor by his side and old memories nipping at his heels, this view and a stretch of rough ground was enough.

He took a long sip, felt the rough burn of alcohol sear his throat clean. His fingers were steady, but he did not look at his hands, didn’t care to glance down.

He did not want to see the marks that screamed of a body not his own. Let the ink across his palm stay hidden, let the missing finger go unseen. He would sit below these lovely stars and drink cheap wine, and he would enjoy it.

Life always had such sweetness, even in the darkest times.

After a few moments, slow footsteps echoed behind him, ushering in Xiao Xingchen like the first breeze of summer. He looked as at home under the moon as Wei Wuxian felt, with long white robes glimmering as polished bone.

The bandages across his face caught the starlight, made the man morbid enough to fit this funeral city.

Wei Wuxian fit too, with the blood collected under his nails. But he preferred the gentle waters of Lotus Pier to this place, preferred the proud purples of the Jiang Clan to the bleached white of death.

“Do you mind if I join you?” The words were gentle and polite, spoken into the silence of night as offer and kindness.

It was no surprise the man had found him here, even blind as he was. This corner of packed earth was Wei Wuxian’s favorite spot, the only place where he could breathe freely and without fog.

It had such a beautiful view of the stars. He smiled, the taste of liquor heavy across his tongue.

“Join me, join me!”

The invitation was enough to have the man settling beside him, neat lotus pose a stark contrast to Wei Wuxian’s sprawl.

He didn’t care and paid it no mind, pressing the bottle of liquor into a sightless hand. It sloshed merrily as he offered it, half empty and well enjoyed.

It would be empty by morning, if Wei Wuxian had anything to say about it. Even in this body he knew how to hold his drink. And wine tasted all the sweeter beneath the silver light of moon, with the stars shining bright and merciless.  

Xiao Xingchen took a hesitant sip, spluttered out a cough. The look of disgust on his lips was clear and bright.

“This is…”

Wei Wuxian laughed, the sound echoing around them like dancing bells. The wine was cheap as any could be, and all the cheaper for being made in this funeral city.

It tasted like ash, but it burned his throat so well.

“Vile? Better suited to cleaning wounds than gracing throats? Ah, isn’t it lovely.”

The man shook his head, disbelieving. He handed the jug back to Wei Wuxian without another sip and with steady fingers, looking the picture of tragic elegance beneath the moon.

More for Wei Wuxian, if the man had taste.

They sat there for a moment, lit by silver light and basking in a companionable silence. The ground beneath his back was rough and painful with rocks, but Wei Wuxian felt calmed. It had been long weeks since he’d woken to skin not his own. He spoke and heard a voice that was hoarse with wounds, he laughed and the sound was too mocking.

This body wasn’t his. But with each day he claimed more of it, accepted the motions of his hands and the strength in his fingers.

What would happen, he wondered, on the day when this skin felt natural?

They sat in silence, but Wei Wuxian felt calm. This was the quiet that led to honest conversation, and Xiao Xingchen was the first to speak.

“Why have you not left? I do not mind, but—” The man stopped and took a breath, a gentle smile creeping onto his lips. He looked like the first touch of spring, come to wipe away sorrow. He looked like he did not belong in a place with such sadness.

“But I would know.”

The bandages stood stark on Xiao Xingchen’s face, marking him as wounded and vulnerable.

And yet the man was reaching out again, in kindness. Wei Wuxian felt pity well up in his stomach, unstoppable and painful.

This man with the gentle soul did not deserve to bear such cuts.

Whatever had caused this fate deserved death a thousand times, for hurting someone so honest. After a month in Xiao Xingchen’s care, he would gladly be the one to give it.

“I have nowhere to leave for,” he said, and the words stung with all their truth. Jiang Cheng would not take him back into the sect, not with the blood between them.

The burial mounds, his reluctant home that had forged him into a weapon: they had been torched to the ground, razed by a brother’s anger and the furies of public opinion.

He had watched them burn and burned himself, delirious with loss. He had hurt, on that day. Death had come with a gentle touch, and he had welcomed it.

He had no home there.

Wen Ning and Wen Qing were dead. A-yuan, little A-yuan, who had clung to his fingers and loved the toys Lan Zhan had bought—

He was dead. Long fingers tightened around the jug, making it creak with strain. It would have shattered, would have driven shards into his palm and left him bleeding.

It would have broken his skin as he was broken.

But Xiao Xingchen sat beside him and Wei Wuxian couldn’t hurt another with his pain. One by one, he had lost everyone he had ever cared about. But he was, as always, a resilient soul.

He would survive.

The man made a noise of understanding, too deep and too familiar to be forgotten. Had this gentle soul lost everything too?

Wei Wuxian didn’t know. Not even with all his curiosity had he been able to tease the tale out of the blind man, and in long weeks he had tried with smiles and laughter.

And now maybe it was best not to try again.

He lifted the jug and drained it dry, liquor scalding his throat and leaving only numbness. A shame he didn’t have more.

“Besides, with the fine taste of A-qing’s steam buns, how could I think of leaving?”

A gentle laugh answered him, breaking the night into quiet happiness. Xiao Xingchen was smiling beneath the bandages, a tiny thing quirking at the edge of a tired mouth.

Wei Wuxian thought, with the cheer of small victories, that this man could be his friend.

“Of course, forgive me for presuming. The steam buns, truly, are works of art.” It was a gentle response, with a gentle happiness. In the silver light of the moon, they were such soft words.

White walls surrounded them, but for once Wei Wuxian couldn’t feel their funeral pallor. Men like them were so rarely allowed happiness. For long years, he had clawed his joy free of fate, choosing to step to his own merry tune and forge his smiles from death.

Perhaps Xiao Xingchen needed to learn this lesson too.

“I’ll allow this mistake, just this once.” He leapt up, feet dancing across the packed earth. There were bruises across his back, but they faded before his laughter, before the turns of his golden core.

He took a deep breath and felt living lungs press into unbroken ribs. He was alive, and this place was the only shelter he had to his name.

It was suffering, and he couldn’t abandon it now.

“Besides, this city is cursed to misfortune. How could I leave it in this state? We can’t call ourselves cultivators if we do nothing.”

Xiao Xingchen’s smile went small and brittle, sadness making it shrink to nothingness. “Ah, I cannot call myself a cultivator. With these eyes, I cannot help anyone, anymore.”

Wei Wuxian threw back his head and laughed, the sound echoing across the broken city and between the walls of funeral homes. White walls took the sound and made it deathly, took the sound and lived with a little more color.

Only a broken man could think such thoughts. He knew this better than most.

“But you are where the chaos is! This is all there is to a cultivator, really.”

So many people in gilded towers and fine complexes forgot that, forgot what it meant to walk a path of peace and cultivation. Lan Zhan had never forgotten, Wei Wuxian knew. He wondered what had become of the man, what grand deeds had been claimed for Gusu.

Lan Zhan had always been destined for greatness. Once, Wei Wuxian had stood beside him and had the same fate.

Now white walls greeted his laughter and gave him a coffin-home. Now he was victim to his own invention, bound by the Stygian Tiger Seal.

Now he was dead.

He reached out a hand, forgetting for a moment the man was blind. His fingers hung in the air, catching the moonlight as a gift and gesture. Then he reached forward again, to guide sightless hands to his fingertips.

“Help me then. We have a city that is suffering around us. Are we going to sit around and do nothing?”

“You would have us fix it.” Xiao Xingchen sounded between shocked and fragile, like a flower that had been stepped on one too many times.

This man did not deserve such a fate. If all Wei Wuxian did with this new body was return the kindness Xiao Xingchen had given him, it would be a price well-paid.

“Of course! What are cultivators for, hmm?”

It took a long moment for Xiao Xingchen to respond, a long moment for something other than disbelief to crack across blind lips. The smile that grew in its place was like the sun at high-noon, warm and filled with a cautious hope.

Wei Wuxian pulled the man to steady feet, and the moon greeted them both like they were sworn brothers beneath it.

Not yet, but… maybe given time.

“You are right. I—” Xiao Xingchen stopped, a stale wind brushing his face and making bandages rustle and shift. “I had forgotten. Thank you, stranger, for the reminder.”

The night above them was cold and the moon was bright, but it felt warm with hope. Idle feet began guiding them back to the funeral building they had claimed as a home.

Wei Wuxian had begun to think of it as home, too.

“You know, we are hardly strangers anymore, don’t you think? Why don’t you call me friend instead?”

Xiao Xingchen paused, for a heartbeat, and then he smiled. “Thank you for sharing the wine, my friend.”

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━⊰

Wei Wuxian began his campaign to reshape a city in the natural way: win over the locals.

With white funeral walls surrounding him and fog making the city heavy and thick, he smiled his most charming smile. This face was young and irresistible, when it broke into a wide grin. He thought it would look good smirking too, the clever curl of lips welcoming plots and plans.

Had this dead man smiled, he wondered, or was he stoic and bland. If only he could know. If only he could save the soul he had devoured.

If only.

With a laugh in his step and a casual happiness, he sought out the local traders and funeral homes. He had danced between houses for long hours, and met with shaking heads and grimaces.

No one thought they could wash away the stigma from this city. This was a place of death and funeral goods, of people who were worse than dirt and lives that were not to be touched. In the long tier of social classes, Yi City ranked low enough to belong to the dead.

It was a good thing Wei Wuxian had never cared for the whims of society.

This was his fourth stop, and hopefully, his first success. He leaned across the storefront with a casual grace, with a dancing smile.

He struck up a conversation and waited for the perfect moment.

“Instead of funeral goods made of careful paper, why not crafted flowers?”

The vendor blinked at him, face slow to work to understanding. The sun was shining overhead and cracking across the fog, making it hard to see past their hands.

But this was the edge of the city, where the white paint was dimmer and the mist lighter. Here, Wei Wuxian could judge his effectiveness far better.

The vendor looked intrigued. There was eagerness glimmering in the trader’s eyes, a desperation born of a life of being treated as less.

Wei Wuxian smiled, and struck at that cracked defense. This was the first step, the first stroke in this great talisman to fix the city. He had brought all his relentless genius to this cause.

It would work.

“But will anyone buy them? Our city is known for funeral goods, would flowers even sell?”

Wei Wuxian waved a careless hand, washing the concerns into the mist.

“Fine goods are fine goods. With the skill you merchants have, your flowers would be sought after the land over. And no one needs to know they come from a funeral city, not at first,” he said, funneling all his charm into the words.

It would help wash away the miasma of death over the city, he did not say, letting the thoughts linger across his bones.

“Try! You have nothing to lose and profit to gain.”

After a long moment, the trader nodded, face going contemplative. “Yes, I have been wanting to try my hand at other things…”

And that was the beginning of the end of funeral goods for the city. In two months, every vendor was selling painted flowers alongside coffins. In half a year, the coffins had all but vanished.

Slowly, news spread outside of the city walls. Outsiders came to white walls— slowly at first, and never without hesitation— and bought delicate paper roses by the cart loads. They were relabeled and resold, never a mention of Yi City to be found.

But there would be, soon enough.

It was a step forward and away from the pallor that lingered over the city. The fog had faded a fraction, dimming into the mountains and leaving the city a little brighter during the day.

The moon still shone peerless and uninterrupted at night, and this was when Wei Wuxian felt most at peace.

It was such a night a month into the change, when Xiao Xingchen first asked about the paper flowers. They were settled into the place where the night sky shimmered overhead, where the view was beautiful and the ground rough. The silence of this deathly city had echoed around them for long hours, but they had not spoken.

There was an ease to their quiet that Wei Wuxian treasured. He had finished two jugs of liquor this night, though Xiao Xingchen had taken only a few brave sips.

Perhaps, if they could get some Emperor’s Smile, the man would actually drink with him!

“What do the flowers look like, my friend?” The voice was wistful, lost as a child in the rain. He heard the mournful mood and felt that companionship ring in his bones again.

They really were so very alike.

Like the lotus blooms across a lake, like the flowers Shijie used to wear in her hair.

Like home.

“Like hope,” he said, the response automatic and too truthful. After a moment, he spoke again, this time with a teasing tone. “Also, like paper. They haven’t quite gotten the folding right, but it’s getting better.”

Xiao Xingchen smiled, the expression gentle as the first breeze of spring. If the man still had eyes to cry with, Wei Wuxian imagined there would be quiet tears running down pale cheeks.

What a cruel fate, to never cry again.

“They are trying, friend. Give them time. What would you have me do to help?” The question was gentle, but he could see the desperation lurking behind the white fabric of the blindfold, could see the need to be useful.

Xiao Xingchen wanted to feel like a cultivator again. Wei Wuxian understood that better than anyone.

“I thought you’d never ask!” He laughed, draining the last of the liquor away. The bottle rolled from his fingers into the moonlight, twirling around and around.

Xiao Xingchen caught it with the blind patience of a saint, pulling the jug up to tie to his waist. The man always cleaned up after these nights, holding the jugs of liquor and supporting Wei Wuxian home if his steps were shaky with drink.

For once, Wei Wuxian felt like the younger brother. For once, he felt protected in a way he had never known.

It was a feeling he wouldn’t trade for the world, but it made his heart ache.

Chapter Text

Tap-tap, tap-tap. 

A breath echoed out behind him, loud and annoyed over the fog of day. Then a pause, quiet and sharp as small knives. Wei Wuxian did not pay it any attention, a smile blooming across his face. The ground beneath his fingers was cold with the night’s chill, but he dug his hands in anyway. 

The tapping didn’t stop, but he wasn’t surprised; little A-qing was predictable. 

Tap-tap, tap-tap. 

“What are you doing?” 

The words were flat and harsh, but Wei Wuxian had been in the city long enough to recognize the hint of confusion beneath the annoyance. A-qing was a suspicious girl, and had never lost her fear of him. In the long weeks spent walking the roads of Yi City, Wei Wuxian had always felt a blind stare follow his footsteps. 

A-qing didn’t trust him, but she was still a child. Her expression in this was transparent, as in so many things. 

Wei Wuxian didn’t need to look to see the narrowed eyes. He smiled, felt the earth press into his fingers. 

It would be a chill day, he could tell. 

“Planting willow trees!”

There was a beat of silence, echoing through fog and weak sun. A cane gently prodded his side, long edge of bamboo pressing into his robes. He bat it away with a careless hand, the move too familiar and more painful than a wound. 

Jiang Cheng used to poke him with bamboo, in the cool lakes of Lotus Pier. It had been filled with a brother’s frustration, then, with the swirling touch of camaraderie and impatience. 

Now it was filled with suspicion, but it made him smile all the same. 

“So it really is you, huh.” The tone was dry, the words flat. Confusion chased across A-qing’s face, but Wei Wuxian ignored it in favor of digging into the ground. 

The earth was so cold. 

Ah, if only he had Wen Ning around to dig the ditches for him. His old friend had been fast and efficient, when they had walked through Yiling and planted a thousand crops. Wen Ning’s hands cut deeper and swifter than Wei Wuxian’s had, in the haunted years spent coated in corpse dust. 

But here he was, elbow deep in the press of dirt, with no friend to be found. Could he get Xiao Xingchen to help him, he wondered? The fine brother had no eyes to see with, but he certainly had the build to dig deep. 

Wei Wuxian would ask the man that night. The cultivator had a soft heart and was a softer touch— surely he’d help. He might have questions, but Wei Wuxian would just laugh at those. There would be no answers until his plan grew from the ground as turnips. 

For all his genius, he’d never been great at growing turnips. 

“You can plant trees? You can do work?”

A-qing’s tone was incredulous, and it filled the foggy air like smoke across the night sky. The bamboo stick came again, prodding into his shoulder as if to test that he was real. Wei Wuxian let out a laughing huff, offense giving him strength. So much doubt from so small a person! Really, he should have been offended. 

With earth caught under his nails and a strange peace settled over his skin, he wasn’t. 

“I can do work! When I want to!”

The smile on his face he couldn’t fight, even as he nestled the roots of a sprout in place. Dirt collected across his hands, as he settled the sapling in place. 

Another tree planted; another seed sown. It looked lovely there, the delicate branches catching at the fog and devouring it, gentle green leaves breaking into the dingy air. This was the thirty-fifth tree he had planted across the city, carefully balanced across from the funeral homes with the peeling paint and malignant auras. 

Wei Wuxian wondered how many more it would take, to force the fog away. 

For a moment, A-qing just looked bewildered, sightless eyes staring just off his face. 

“Why?”

Wei Wuxian laughed, shifting on legs bent too long. With a core turning in his chest and a living body dancing to his steps, he felt light. 

“You know, the Feng Shui of this city is truly awful. Whoever designed it was out to make misery into being. With all my skills, how could I not wish to help?”

She snorted, rough and harsh as a bamboo cane to the ribs. It echoed too quietly through the fog. 

Wei Wuxian wanted it to grow louder. 

“Do you even know how to till the earth?”

He thought of the years spent at Yiling, of the stunted turnips and careful lessons of the Wen. He thought of the family he had forged there, of the meals he had shared and the price he had paid. 

He thought of Wen Ning, and answered, “Yes.”

For a moment, silence hung between them, filled with everything he would not share and all her endless suspicions. Then she set her cane to the side, and in the most irritated motion imaginable, reached out her hands. 

“Well? I can’t see, you fool, so you’ll have to tell me where to move.”

He laughed, the sound delighted as the first touch of spring. 

“You’ll do just fine, if you follow my lead.”

They spent ten days moving around the city, planting delicate willows and fragrant jasmine. On the fifth day, Xiao Xingchen found them kneeling in freshly turned earth and laughing. For a moment, the men just stood, smelling the gentle fragrance blow away the fog. 

Then he bent to help, with a gentle smile on his face. 

After the fifth day, Wei Wuxian could lean back and manage the tasks. He settled on the packed earth of the road and laughed into the air, as tree after tree settled under Xiao Xingchen’s hands. Managing was a skill he excelled at, and really where his effort was best spent. 

A-qing did not agree. 

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰

But for all Wei Wuxian’s careful plans, the real problem lingered beyond the funeral homes and poor luck, below the corpses and the white robes. 

In this city of death and decay, the true curse lay in the geography, in the mountain ranges bracketing the white walls and the river rushing past it. The Feng Shui was rotten to the core, and Wei Wuxian would need to fix that before any trees could help. 

Diverting the river was an impossible task, but it would balance the landscape and open the air to clear skies and bright sun. It would help Yi City grow beyond its curse. 

A good thing, then, that Wei Wuxian had ever strived to achieve the impossible. 

He stood on the high wall, let the wind catch his face and twirl away his hair. Rough robes scratched his skin, but he paid them no mind. He’d worn worse, in the Burial Mounds. He would survive. 

Wei Wuxian, Yiling Laozu and greatest mind of his generation, always survived. 

He had no flute before him now, and no gentle bamboo to carve. All he had was his voice. 

That would have to do. 

He leapt off the high wall, spinning to land on his sword as it flew out into the sky. Quick as lightning they moved, the ground shimmering below them and the sheen of his sword bright in the dawn light. 

It was early, far too early for Xiao Xingchen to be awake, and far too early for little A-qing to follow him here. 

Now, he could do what he must. 

The fields around the city were scattered with cemeteries, the final homes of the lost and abandoned. Thousands of corpses were sent here each year— the ones with no family stayed, cursed to an unmarked grave.

It was here where he would begin. 

He let out a low whistle, pressed resentful energy into its sound. It echoed out across the fields, caught on the bones and souls dwelling below. 

Wake up, he spoke, in swirls of energy and the high notes of a dead tune. It caught, and like a fishhook driven into a shark’s mouth, a thousand souls responded to his call. 

A hundred skeletal hands drove out of the ground, and then another hundred, and another. He should have felt some strain from controlling this many, and he hadn’t called for all of them. But the tiger seal in his palm was warm and pleased, humming with a malice all its own. 

Wei Wuxian hummed, standing high above the ground on a sword that belonged to a dead man. 

Was their control one in the same, now? Was their power the same? How much of himself had he given to this seal, in that last attempt to destroy it?

It didn’t matter, right now. He had people he could save, and lives to make better. What was his soul worth in the face of that?

A whistle sounded out again, sharp and commanding as a general’s call. And he was a general, to these bone soldiers. They shambled forward, broken legs working faster than they should have, powered by the glimmering energy of the seal. 

Wei Wuxian called and commanded, and they had answered. 

Four hundred strong, it took them five hours to dig deep into the river bank, and two more to flood the canyon beside it. With trembling fingers and a throat hoarse and whistled raw, he fell silent for the first time. His body was quaking, but the heat from his palm had only grown feverish. 

But it was done, and he could only laugh. 

Wei Wuxian looked out across the plains and saw a river no more but a thundering waterfall, falling away into the mountain crags below. 

If this didn’t fix the feng shui of Yi City, he didn’t know what would. 

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰

Wei Wuxian should have known nothing would ever go so smoothly. He stepped to the ground with light feet and heavy heart, sword slipping into his sleeve and moon shining high overhead. 

Xiao Xingchen’s sword was not sheathed. 

“I felt corpse energy, and Shuanghua responded to it. Was that you?” 

The man looked severe as he rarely did, soft heart hardened into fury and body ready for a fight. He looked like Jiang Cheng had, all those years ago under the stain of death and bones. Wei Wuxian’s brother had been crystalline in rage in that moment, and Jiang Cheng’s sword had been sharper. 

Wei Wuxian almost wanted to laugh. He had grown to expect kindness from the gentle blind man, these past months.

But once a cultivator always a cultivator, and the stigma against demonic cultivation ran deep. 

“And if it was? Are you so opposed to demonic cultivation that you would strike me down for it?”

The morning sun was coming now, breaking into a dawn like fire and blood. It burned into his skin, hot as the iron tattoo carved into his palm. There was a moment of tension, fine boned and newly painful. 

The silence between them had always been so calm, before. Now it was not.

“I would ask if you killed anyone to make that army,” Xiao Xingchen said, after a long hesitation. The sword in his hand dipped down, a fraction less than dangerous.

That was some small consolation, but Wei Wuxian just laughed, harsh with broken trust. He didn’t know if it was his own or Xiao Xingchen’s. 

It didn’t matter. 

“I did not. And it was no army. Judge for yourself, tomorrow.” Shoulders tight and pride keeping him tall, he brushed past Xiao Xingchen, past the man he had begun calling brother.

It felt like old memories and older pain, to walk past a brother and know only rejection. 

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰

The next day, the dawn came and brought with it no fog. The people of Yi City first looked with astonishment, then with delight. A-qing muttered curses at the heat of the sun, but stayed out in the warmth for long hours. It had been so long since she’d seen the glimmers of sun. The flowers, she begrudgingly admitted, looked quite beautiful in the morning light. 

Xiao Xingchen stepped into the sun and knew regret. 

But the man known only as friend was nowhere to be found. Blind and bound by his duties, he could not take the time to look. 

He had hurt a friend and a brother, he realized, standing in the light of a happy city. He had hurt one again. 

This time, he’d apologize. 

The second day, the dawn came and brought with it the warmth of a summer’s day. The people of Yi City danced in the streets and threw flowers across the packed dirt, hope blooming in their hearts.  

A-qing made three dozen steam buns and cursed the stranger the entire time, fingers working meticulously and worry eating at her thorny heart. 

Xiao Xingchen walked the streets with his sword in hand, for hours beyond counting. Blood seeped beneath his bandages and he could not see, but ever did he walk on. 

But the man known only as friend was nowhere to be found. 

The third dawn came and brought with it a thousand prayers. The people of Yi City knelt before the new waterfall, praised the gods for taking mercy on their miasmatic home. 

The sun shone across the water-spray and made it look like crystals given life, and it was the most beautiful thing any had seen. 

A-qing took her muttering outside, caring for the young willow trees with deft fingers and angry curses. They flourished in the sun, weak leaves turning to catch the morning light. 

They looked beautiful, without fog curling over their roots. 

Xiao Xingchen did not leave the funeral home, on the third day. When the fresh sun began to set and the warmth faded from his skin, he carried three bottles of cheap liquor across the city, hands heavy and blind eyes aching. 

He had assumed so much, and knew so little. 

He stepped into the lonely corner of the city he had come to call peace, expecting no one. His friend had not been seen in days, not since that night when Shuanghua had hummed of demonic energy. Xiao Xingchen knew the need for distance well, and respected it. He had run for years, from the sting of his own failure. 

He wondered, as he felt the road shift beneath his feet, what the stranger ran from. 

But Xiao Xingchen found he was not alone. There was the noise of shallow breaths, the shifting of robes, the residual traces of demonic energy lingering in the air. 

His friend sat there, Xiao Xingchen knew. 

He paused, bottles in hand. The breeze brushed over his face, carrying a chill all its own. Could he approach? Was he welcome? He had so much to apologize for, so much to explain. 

Would the man give him that chance? 

A laugh is what drew him in eventually, the sound familiar and warm as the sun that had lingered across his skin for days. 

It sounded like family. 

“You going to stand there and lurk, Xiao Xingchen, or sit down?”

He can’t fight the gentle smile that curls up his lips, the fondness overwhelming as the wind that caught on his robes and tugged them. With a lighter heart, he sat. With blind fingers, he held out the liquor, a gift and an apology. He would give a thousand more, if it won him back a friend. 

“I am truly sorry, my brother. I reacted badly to the energy, and I should not have.” He let his chest dip forward, the bow instinctive and honorable. 

It should have been lower, he thought. But a shifting sound echoed beside him, and warm hands curled across his arm to pull him up. 

“Stop stop, there is no need. I know how some people get with demonic energy,” the words were playful, but Xiao Xingchen thought he heard a thread of old pain lingering beneath. 

It sounded like his voice, and that was cause enough for honesty. 

“No, I owe you an explanation.” He took a deep breath, felt it settle the sadness leaking over his bones. He had lost so much to Xue Yang. He would not lose this new brother too. 

“There was a cultivator, a man by the name of Xue Yang. He—” 

He broke me and all I care for. He carved the eyes from my closest friend’s head and left me a ruin of a reputation. 

He destroyed me. 

“He has cost me so much. He used the demonic arts, styled himself after Yiling Laozu.”

The wind brushed across his bandages, and he felt the blood spilling underneath. How many years would it take, for these wounds to heal? Would his heart ever mend?

Was he the man he had been once? A strong and peerless cultivator with shining conviction and no equal? Or was he broken and lame, doomed to limp through the streets and never see another sunrise? 

Xiao Xingchen didn’t know, but he knew he would apologize here. 

“I felt that aura and reacted without thought. For that, I apologize.”

There was a beat of silence, the sound of a jug popping open. Xiao Xingchen felt a sigh brush over his fingers, and then heard the beginnings of words. 

“You aren’t the first to judge so quick, I’ve had worse. At least you brought liquor to make up for it, huh?” 

The man took a long swallow, echoing and pleased. Xiao Xingchen felt guilt burrow deeper into his chest. He had hurt this man, and again he had been driven to such folly. He knew this friend— this brother. He had stood beside him for long months, and knelt in the earth and planted a thousand willow trees. 

He owed him more than doubt and hard accusations. Xiao Xingchen needed to learn to trust again, and he would try, for this corner of the world where the stars surely shone so brightly. 

He would try, for a brother. 

There was no warmth on his skin but the chill of night, and no touch but the breeze. He could not see the sky, but that didn’t matter now. He titled his head back and imagined it, as his friend had once described. 

He was sure it was beautiful. 

“What happened to the man who hurt you?” The words were soft and lazy, echoing over the lid of a jar of cheap liquor. They sounded resonant anyway. 

“He is dead,” Xiao Xingchen said, picturing the clouds lingering under the stars. 

Xue Yang was dead, and in many ways, so was he. There was a long swallow, a pleased hum. The wind brushed his face and he waited for his brother to speak. 

His brother, his friend, the bane of A-qing’s existence— this man understood him so well, and had walked with him through darkness he could not see. 

Xiao Xingchen treasured that, in the bones of a funeral city. 

At last, there was a slow exhale, and his friend spoke light words. 

“Good. I’d hate to have to go avenge you!”  

Xiao Xingchen couldn’t help the smile, just as he couldn’t help the laugh. If anyone could have taken revenge on a dead man, it would be his friend. 

But Xiao Xingchen didn’t want him to pay that price. 

“You know what the demonic cultivation costs, my brother.” The words were almost a question, and each one dragged out of him with a heavy weight and heavier pain. 

He did not want his new found brother to be washed away in malice. 

“It is fine, Xiao Xingchen, really. I have…” There was a pause, and he strained his ears to catch the hitching breath. It was light, caught in the throat like the flutter of a bird trapped in a net. 

It was the sound of a familiar pain. 

The man had always understood him. Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to Xiao Xingchen why that would be, why their minds met so well and their hearts beat the same tune. 

But of course, the man had lost everything too. Somehow, in the rush of flowers and the gentle nights beneath the moon, he had forgotten. 

He would not make that mistake again. 

“I have made mistakes, because of this cultivation. I know it’s price.”

And with the tone of those words, with the heartbreak he could hear lingering in them, Xiao Xingchen had no doubt. 

They really had walked the same path. 

Chapter Text

There air was surely cold, but he couldn’t feel it. The sun was surely warm, but it didn’t touch his skin. The world surely existed, but it didn’t hold him. 

That was strange, because there was a sound pulling at his soul. It called to him through stone and steel, through blood and bone. 

It called to him, and he thought the world might answer. 

He had been someone once, he thought. He had known more than the song, though the song was familiar as warm laughter and warmer smiles. The wind touched his skin but he could not feel it, shifted cloth across but his arms but coarse fabric rubbed without whispering its secrets. 

He had been someone once, he thought. 

He took a shambling step forward. Chains rattled with the motion, heavy on his arms. He did not feel their weight. He didn’t hear their shattering, even when he kept walking beyond their reach. 

There was somewhere he had to be, the song said. He had to walk faster, had to race forward as a someone who had once been, and not a thing who did not belong. 

He took another step, a growl building in his throat like fire. Why did he know fire so well that he could almost touch the flames? Why did the sun feel cold, when it should have had unending strength?

He didn’t know. But he thought he had been someone once. He wanted to be someone again. 

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰

The sun was shining overhead, peaking through barren fog and burning it to pieces. It lingered on the bark of sapling willow trees, glinting down to the pack earth streets and shading them tan. It was stronger than it ever had been before, and soon the white mists were nothing but dark memories. 

There was light in Yi City, and it was the fault of the damned stranger.

Tap-tap.

A-qing’s cane tapped the ground beside the table, sharp and angry. She felt angry too, broken expectations laying at the ground by her feet to match the flour from dumplings. This stranger was far too strange. He was far too cheerful too, eyes bright and terrible. 

A-qing didn’t like him. She didn’t know what to make of him either, with his face that was too sharp but smiled so easily. 

He was standing before her now, grinning like a fool with the sun shining through the door and across pale skin. His mouth had always seemed better suited to smirking, but it was alight with a mischievous happiness now. 

It made A-qing grumpy, to see that much happiness. 

“You’d—” She stopped, felt the words catch in her throat. Hope was painful, and this breathless anticipation was worse. 

The man’s smile, bright and happy, was the worst thing of all. A-qing watched without seeming to observe, letting her eyes shift to his right. She tapped her cane against the ground, and was annoyed it didn’t make a louder sound. 

He deserved a cane to the face, for that smile. 

“You’d train me to cultivate? I can’t even see, you fool.”

The man just laughed, the sound like dancing thunder. He shifted under the sun he had helped create, in a city that was free of fog. He shifted and laughed and A-qing didn’t know if she wanted to smack him anymore. 

Really, the man was worse than a kick to the face. 

“So? A blind man can do more than the fool, anyway.”

He was serious. 

For a moment, she weighed the options, felt their worth. It had been long months since the man had done anything suspicious, and longer still since he had set off her instincts. Despite herself, she had lost herself in planting trees, in the dinners between three lost souls, in the teasing laughter that came with every meal. 

For the first time in so many years, her spiteful heart found a family. It had forced her guard down, and broken through her suspicion. A-qing didn’t know if that was the most suspicious thing of all, with her cane lingering on the packed earth. 

The stranger had changed, and now he was offering her a path out of poverty, a skill all her own. 

How could she say no?

“No, you damn fool. Why would I learn from you?”

A sound of protest broke from his mouth, low and offended, but she spoke over him. She didn’t need to hear what he had to say, not when her cane was caught in sunlight. 

“I’ll learn from Daozhang, of course.”

A pause, a gentle silence, and then—

The man smiled, gentle and small as a child’s coffin. A-qing kept her eyes trained to the side, watched the look grow and shift with the last of the dying fog. A smile was not odd, not for this damned man. The stranger smiled daily, with each breath and each sentence. A-qing wanted to knock the grin off his face most days, cane at the ready and irritation hot in her blood. 

No one should smile that much, and not with such teasing. 

But this one felt different. It was quieter, softer. It felt like the sun after a long night, and for once she didn’t want to knock this one away.

Somehow, that was the most irritating part of all. 

Beside her came a spluttering sound, as Daozhang choked on his tea. She ignored it, sniffing into the air and shifting away. Her cane wouldn’t even reach to hit the smile, now.  

This was terrible. 

“Ah, I see I’m not good enough when compared with Xiao Xingchen.” The stranger looked across the table as he spoke, grin growing wide and teasing. The edge of long hair brushed the space between them, and a hand reached up to brush it away. 

A-qing caught a single glimpse of a tattoo before it vanished, but that was fine. She had examined it at her leisure before, and watched the fine black lines move with each gesture. 

Yet more strange things about this man. 

“Fair enough! He is quite handsome. It would be hard to compare to such a distinguished cultivator, really.”

Tea sprayed across the table, in an arc that the stranger had to lean back to avoid. For a moment, there was a heavy silence, broken only by the flush of color creeping up Daozhang’s face. 

A-qing couldn’t stop the smile that curled up her lips, bright and mocking. Nothing in her could stop the laughter, even with irritation still lingering in the fingers around her cane. 

Daozhang’s cheeks were red and embarrassed, the sun was shining overhead, and there was no fog left in Yi City. 

A-qing’s world had settled into peace, and she didn’t even mind. Well, mind much. Irritation stole at her everyday, as it always would. 

The stranger’s smile was even brighter now. It felt kind, without any of the ulterior motives she had suspected for so long. This was not the man that had held a sword out and watched her nearly walk into it with a smirk. This was not the man A-qing had distrusted for so long.  

He was not cruel but kind, and not greedy but giving. 

What had happened?

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰

The day was cool and damp, rain threatening overhead and the hint of thunder crawling across the sky. The clouds boiled with it, fierce and dark as steel. Across the city, people were surely packing away paper flowers, tucking them into the corners of a thousand shops that had once held paper dolls. Across the city, people were looking up at the sky and seeing it for the first time. 

Clouds were beautiful, in a city that had only seen fog in the day. Wei Wuxian smiled against their rain, but did not run from it. 

Rain was beautiful too, even in a city of paper flowers. 

But here, in this corner of the city, there was only the dust of training and the tapping of a cane. The rain had not fallen yet, and until it did the dust wouldn’t settle. 

How could it, when A-qing and Xiao Xingchen sparred across the packed earth?

“That was very good, A-qing, your instincts are well-honed. Make sure to keep your balance low. Since we cannot see, our movements must be guided by sound and touch.”

Xiao Xingchen’s voice was gentle as the brush of fog that had once lined this city, encouraging as the best of teachers. It was the voice of a man who could have forged a sect from the ground up, made of bonds stronger than blood. 

It was a voice that wouldn’t have a chance to do that now. Wei Wuxian leaned back further against the roof, felt the tiles rub against the fabric of his robes. It was comfortable, in the way any space was comfortable to a lounging cat. 

Wei Wuxian had always been good at sitting where he shouldn’t. He perched above A-qing and Xiao Xingchen now, observing the training with a lazy eye. They made quite the pair, blind disciple and blind master in a city with no fog. A-qing’s cane still guided her movements, and Xiao Xingchen’s were slow for a cultivator of his strength. 

But together they moved well. 

After a moment, A-qing leaned forward, hands moving smoothly through the basic motions of open hand combat. Each palm strike was clean, each kick well placed and precise. Some were too low, and most aimed poorly, but they were a start. 

Wei Wuxian smiled, laughter bubbling up in his bones. A-qing’s bitter energy channeled so well into violence. She’d make a great cultivator, he thought, watching her movements grow sharper. 

She was well on her way to the beginnings of cultivation, two months into study and already looking like water poured over rock. Within two years, the first glimmers of a golden core would turn in her chest. 

She would live a long life, standing beside her master. Wei Wuxian thought he might stand beside them too, and feel the warmth of a family again. 

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰

Months passed like that, and with each day A-qing’s arms grew stronger and Xiao Xingchen’s steps lighter. With each day Wei Wuxian’s laughter grew brighter too, until it ghosted from his chest honest and happy. No fog lingered on the streets now, and each day dawned bright and beautiful. The roots of willow trees had spread down into the ground, and the saplings opened new leaves as a show of strength. 

Wei Wuxian stood on the rooftops, and thought Shijie would have loved the painted paper flowers. He wished she could have seen them, bright and delicate as a lotus bloom. 

He wished he could see her smile again too. 

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰

The beginning of the end came at the end of a night that threatened no rain but snow. It came with the dawn, with a traveler in dusty clothes and a blind girl’s tapping cane. 

It came, as it always did, at the hands of family. 

The door to their home creaked open with the first hints of light, noise hard as the first frost. Wei Wuxian shifted, felt a breeze catch at the edges of his skin. It was colder than it should have been, even with the approach of winter. 

Strange. 

“Daozhang, I brought someone, he says he knows you. I have to fetch something but I'll be back in a minute.”

A-qing’s tone was less bitter than usual, eased from anger to a light quiet. But there was tension in the words, making them sharp as A-qing’s tongue usually was. Wei Wuxian heard the warning in it, the silent message to familiar ears.

Be ready, just in case, her voice said, and so he rose with light steps and a sword in his hand. If the sword wasn’t enough, well. 

Wei Wuxian had always been a good whistler. 

“Coming!” He said, voice dancing through the air of the funeral home. But it was hardly a funeral home any longer, not with pots of small plants nestled into the corners, not with the paper flowers strung across the sill to catch the sunlight. The coffins had long since been broken down and made into tables, long since been made better. 

What better purpose for the tools of death than to hold the food of life?

He walked to the door with ready hand and wide smile, but met only a cold stare. The man before him looked like snow had risen to life and walked among men, frosty and unrelenting. He had a fine face, but the hard eyes and bearing of a Gusu Lan Sect member.  Those eyes flicked across the room too, in a way Wei Wuxian understood and had felt in his bones for long months. 

Then they flashed harder than steel, and his grip on his sword went a shade tighter.  

“You,” the man said, as if Wei Wuxian had broken his soul and carved out his heart.

In the short years of his life, Wei Wuxian had seen more than his share of hatred. He had ground armies and lives to dust beneath his heel, watched sworn brothers raise their swords for the last time towards him, eyes filled with a fury like madness. He had lifted Chenqing in return, a melody floating from his lips to destroy a thousand lives. 

He had been death and felt fury, and so he knew the tone of this man far too well. It was the sound of a breaking heart and a warrior’s anger, and it was terrible to behold. 

Hate could never be mistaken. 

But for once, Wei Wuxian hadn’t earned this pain. He took a step back, feet light and heart so heavy. What had this body done to earn that anger, he wondered? Was this the moment when this gentle life fell apart, as his life always must?

“Me? You know me that well? Can’t say I know you in return, I’m afraid, thought it’s polite to introduce yourself when you walk into someone’s home.” He said, voice shooting for lightness. It failed, cutting across paper flowers to land on a tone much more dreadful. 

He tried anyway. 

“Introduce myself? You are scum, Xue Yang,” came the next words, fierce as a storm and just as painful. The hate only grew, as hatred ever did. “I will kill you, for what you have done. For the people you killed. Why have you been living in this house? What have you been doing to Xingchen?”

Eyes like snow and frost burned into him, and he had no words to respond with. After long months, he finally knew the name of this body, and it was spoken with hate. 

Xue Yang, he thought, marking the name into memory. 

“Ah, I think there has been a misunderstanding. All I have been doing here is eating steam buns and planting trees.” 

He took a step back, hands raising in a gesture of peace. The sword up his sleeve was small and lethal, and he didn’t need that to defend himself. But Wei Wuxian, Yiling Laozu and deadly cultivator, didn’t want that. His heart was racing with the threat of fresh pain, with a new name. 

Why was this man here? Did he know Xiao Xingchen? Was there yet another grudge between them? 

But in the space after his words, there was only a crash, a gasp like broken bones and shattering hearts. Slowly, with every piece of him dreading what was to come, Wei Wuxian turned to the stairway. 

Xiao Xingchen stood there, blood leaking from blind eyes and face pale and cold. Shards of a broken teacup scattered around the floor at his feet, petals to the warmth of the sun outside. There were paper flowers lining the house like starbursts, but Wei Wuxian couldn’t see them now. 

He had a sinking feeling that the man once called Xue Yang had done his new brother wrong. 

“Is it…” there was a pause, a sharp inhale from the new cultivator with the snowy eyes. Xiao Xingcheng looked so broken, and so furious. 

“Is it you, Zichen?”

There was a sharp inhale, and then, “Yes, Xiao Xingchen. It—” a moment of silence, of hovering pain. Wei Wuxian heard that pain as he heard nothing else. 

It was so familiar, and he thought that this man might also be so much like him. If the fury he saw in those icy eyes was true, he would never get to find out. 

“It is me.”

Xiao Xingchen took a shaky inhale, and Wei Wuxian could see his hands tremble. He did not move, and did not breathe, not when there was a home cracking apart around him. 

Xue Yang, the stranger had said, and Wei Wuxian suddenly remembered a story Xiao Xingchen had told him under the pale gleam of the stars. He almost wanted to laugh. Hatred was such a familiar companion, and he knew this place had been too good to be true. 

Peace always was. 

“And is it, is it truly Xue Yang?” The words were so helpless, quiet in the space of four walls and over the leaves of paper flowers. For so long this building had shaken off the history of burials and become a home. 

With a sightless stare and a furious one burning into his skin, Wei Wuxian couldn’t help but feel the deathly pallor leaking into his mind again. 

Was this to be the funeral home of him, or just his happiness?

“Yes,” came the response, furious as poison. The man— an old friend it looked like, with snowy eyes and icy glares— turned to Wei Wuxian like the sound of thunder. “How long have you been here, watching him? What have you been doing?” 

It was a demand and a curse, and never had Wei Wuxian wanted to laugh more. 

What had he been doing, the man asked? He had been planting trees and laughing in the new sunshine. He had been brushing his fingers over paper flowers and moving the flow of rivers. He had been living, a life as carefree as he could manage with so much death beneath his nails. 

He had been helping. 

Restless, he turned to Xiao Xingchen, voice tight and asking for understanding. He did not know all of what this body had done, but he did know he had spent so many nights with this man he could now call a brother. 

Let him understand. 

“I have been living here, actually. Drinking too much maybe, but—”

A sharp hand cut him off, cut into his soul and voice. He had never expected the dismissal to come from Xiao Xingchen, but the man only looked furious. 

“Stop, just.” There was a long breath, and for once it didn’t sound fond. It ghosted over paper flowers and shook them, as hands had shaken on a broken tea cup. 

Wei Wuxian felt dread sink into his bones. 

“Just stop, Xue Yang.”

That is not my name, he wanted to say, the words like fire in his soul. He couldn’t take it, not anymore. If it cost him everything, he would still speak the truth now. 

“No, you don’t understand, I’m not—”

But Xiao Xingchen didn’t let him finish, voice raising into fury. 

“Stop!” 

Wei Wuxian closed his mouth with a snap like breaking bone. But Xiao Xingchen kept speaking, each word rougher than the last. 

“Just, stop. I treated your wounds. I cared for you. And you have been him, the entire time. You have been the man that cost me everything.”

The desolation in those words was matched only by the heartbreak in Wei Wuxian’s marrow. He should have known better than to hope for a peaceful future here, in this city he had begun to call a home. 

Fate had never been kind.

“Is that all that we have been? You are telling me to be quiet, and not hearing my story? Xiao Xingchen, you…” But he couldn’t finish, couldn’t call the man a fool. He didn’t know what Xue Yang had done, after all, and there was no judging without that knowledge. 

What did months of friendship hold before betrayal? 

“For your help and…” 

There was a break, a choked breath that sounded like eaten dreams. Xiao Xingchen just clenched his fingers, standing among broken shards of cup and spilled tea. Wei Wuxian wanted A-qing to step in and scold them into cleaning it. He wanted flour to dust the floor, and not broken things. 

But hate could never be mistaken. 

“For what you did in the last year, I will let you leave without death. You deserve it a thousand times, but I cannot kill you.”

There was a noise of protest, echoed by the sheen of a divine sword. Song Lan looked like fury made into a winter storm, and the bare blade in his hand was no different. 

“Xingchen, I do not know what spell he cast over you, but we cannot let him go. He killed everyone.”

Wei Wuxian felt the danger but knew no pain, eyes fixed on his brother’s face. Those lips that smiled so gently were trembling with rage and pain, now. Had he done that?

No, it was this body, not yours. This was not you. For once, it was not you.

“No, Zichen. I— I cannot kill this man.”

Hate couldn’t be mistaken, but neither could love. Neither could friendship, and the bonds that bound men who could have been brothers. 

Wei Wuxian could not smile. 

“Then I will.”

There was a snarl like frost and snowfall, and graceful as a storm, the stranger stepped towards Wei Wuxian, sword shimmering for blood. 

“No—”  came the shout from Xiao Xingchen, but he stood no chance stopping a quick blade, not when the man had two working eyes and Xiao Xingchen was blind and bare of a sword. 

It didn’t matter. Wei Wuxian could not let that blade fall, not now. Not when Xiao Xingchen wanted to spare him, even in the body of an enemy. He danced away instead, dodging blow after blow as the sword in his sleeve vibrated for blood. 

Wei Wuxian did not draw it. Xiao Xingchen had told him to leave, with a broken voice and bleeding eyes. He didn’t have it in his weary body to do anything else. 

“Fine,” he said, voice broken and laughing, tired and so very fragile. “I will leave. Do not worry, stranger. I won’t come back.”

Each word he spoke tore into him, and he talked over the precise swings of the man’s blade and the hatred that gleamed like ice. 

It took a heartbeat, to flip through the door. It shut behind him with a clatter, and a sword pierced the thick wood to drive close to his ear. He spared a glance for the blade, a glance at its divine sheen. 

It was a beautiful sword, he thought. He wished it hadn’t cut his home to pieces so quickly. He wished the door hadn’t been damaged, and the tea cup hadn’t been broken, and the paper flowers hadn’t been crushed. 

He wished, for a heartbeat. And then he mounted his sword and flew away.

Chapter Text

The sun shone overhead like a burning beast, touching over her skin and leaving her hot and furious. It was a bright thing, with no fog to block its path and no trees to offer shade. The willows were too young, roots barely sunk into the earth under her feet. 

A-qing hated it. She hated that she wanted to walk nearer to the trees, that the sun dared to shine when she was so angry.There had been no fog for long months, and she had begrudgingly appreciated that, once. Now she wanted the fog to curl over her scowl and hide her away. 

The trees were lonely. 

The sun was hot but it was no match for the bitterness lining her bones, the trembling feelings she didn’t want to admit to, let alone name. 

It had been three long days since the stranger had left. It had been three long days, filled with a terrible silence and a new stranger in their home, eyes cold and icy as winter. 

It had been three days, but still A-qing didn’t understand. 

Daozhang had told her the tale, the story of Xue Yang and his terrible cruelty. A cultivator of demons and restless spirits, with madness in his bones and moral compass lost and broken. The blood spilt at that man’s hands could fill a river, he said, and A-qing believed him. 

But that was not the man she had planted willow trees with. 

She stepped forward in the sun, felt it burn her face. She was bound pretending to be blind, but she knew what she had seen. 

She had seen the stranger smile sadly in the light of the noon, seen him laugh like the world was right and Daozhang had given him true happiness. She had seen him dig into pork buns with a hunger like a rabid tiger, stuffing his face until his cheeks bulged and he had no dignity left. 

She had seen all this, and watched the gentle curve of sharp eyes when he thought no one was looking. 

The stranger had been a relentless soul but a fundamentally gentle one, and he if he had madness in his heart she had not seen it. 

And she had been looking, since day one. She had been suspicious, and ready to stand in defense of Daozhang. 

But he had been a good man.

She stepped forward, cane tapping across the packed earth. Paper flowers lined her path, crinkling in a light breeze and making the street come alive with dancing petals. 

There was no life in this city that the stranger had not given it, and she wanted to throw a thousand steam buns at his face for leaving her here. Somehow, she had grown attached to the laughing man with his sad eyes and foolish ways. She had thought Daozhang had to. 

She thought they had been a family. 

But history trumped the life the three of them had built here, even if that new stranger and Daozhang had barely uttered a word to each other. They’d sat in silence, in a cold shock of broken trust. 

They’d been fools.

A-qing thought it was beyond stupid, to let history cloud blind eyes. She wanted to slap this new man with her bamboo stick, wanted to rage at him for breaking the careful family that had wormed under her bitter skin. 

There was only one thing to be done, in the end. She would speak her peace, to Daozhang. If he did not hear her, if he did not listen— well. She had never been a coward, unlike him. 

 She would go find the stranger herself, blind pretenses be damned. She had not scraped through life and earned the beginnings of a cultivator’s golden core to abandon her family. 

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰

On the first first day, Wei Wuxian flew like lightning. The wind caught his robes, swirling rough fabric in the air and brushing it across his skin. His sword trembled with the beats of his heart, with the shaking of his skin, with the bone-deep exhaustion that seemed to haunt him. 

On the first day, he did not slow or stop, not until the golden core in his chest gave out with strain. 

On the first day, he did not cry. 

What tears did he have to give, after all? There was nothing to be done now, and no home to return to. He was lost again, and it was no new feeling. 

Ever had Wei Wuxian been a relentless soul, and even now, with the path fogged before him, that didn’t change. He wouldn’t give up, not even when his heart remembered long nights drinking under the clear moon, and a brother’s hand pulling him off the ground. 

He had never been able to give up. 

So at the end of the first day, he picked his weary body off the ground, pressed himself up from where he had fallen to sleep. He laughed at the forest around him, a place he had never seen before and never would again. Rest wasn’t worth more than a few hours of sleep, not when it was so close to that first day.

But green leaves danced in the air and caught his eyes, full of a the fresh life of spring. There was a gentle trickling stream beside him, pouring over rock and sand in the quiet of morning. 

Wei Wuxian was, as he always ended up, alone. 

He spared it only a single thought, before flipping his sword back in its sheath and turning to step beside the stream. 

Then he began to walk. For two days, he kept up a gentle pace, letting his eyes catch on interesting rocks and his fingers pluck bright fruits from the trees. 

There was bamboo along the path, but he did not break it off and didn’t run his hands across it. His fingers itched to play a terrible melody, to play a gentle flute, to soothe his heart and walk beside something. 

But he did not break it off.

On third day, he stumbled into a village and wandered its bustling streets without purpose. The people were strange to see, with bright robes and loud smiles. There was little white haunting the doors, and no paper flowers crinkled on the doorsteps. 

But then again, Wei Wuxian was used to the quirks of Yi City. The City of Death had become so different in the long years he’d danced across its streets, but it still held its mad white spirit into the sky like a banner. 

It was still filled with funeral homes, and there were only living people here. 

It was strange. 

Wei Wuxian walked among the stalls, let his eyes glance across bushels of fruits and the woven goods. The sun shone down on him and he let it burn his skin, let it sear across a body that wasn’t his. He looked into the horizon and felt his eyes ache, deep and painful. 

It was with nothing but the light, he told himself, smiling into high noon. 

After a few minutes of walking, he stumbled across a stall filled with fine jade trinkets, rows of expensive carvings lining the wood of the stand. They were exquisite, catching the sunlight and shining clear and beautiful. This must be a wealthy village indeed, to afford such luxuries, he thought, for a single heartbeat.  

But this was not what caught his eye and not what drew him in and made his smile honest. Decorating the front of the sanded wood, glued on with a heavy paste that absorbed the light, were dozens of carefully folded paper flowers. They looked so bright in the sunlight, careful paint making them gleam a thousand colors. 

Wei Wuxian looked at those flowers and wanted to cry until his eyes were dried out but the sun. 

He stepped closer instead, brushing one with an idle finger. He thought he recognized the craftsmanship, thought the painting looked familiar. This was the merchant by the gates, he thought, from the stylized curl of this paper lotus. The man had always made sure to give A-qing flowers as they passed, handing her carefully folded stems and lovely petals. 

His daughter had given her even more, a blush across a delicate face. A-qing had taken them and not known their meaning, but Wei Wuxian had watched the two girls and felt a mischievous happiness in his stomach. 

The edge of a nail caught on the flower, and in his carelessness, it ripped in two. 

“Hey!” The vendor’s voice was sharp and furious, but it couldn’t sting as much as his heart did. “You better be able to pay for that, those are imported! They cost an arm and a leg, from Yi City direct!”

“Ah,” he said, lowering his hand like it had been burned and his skin was boiling. The sun was too hot across his neck, and his eyes stung so brightly. 

“Of course, of course, calm down. I wouldn’t leave you with a broken flower.” 

But—

But did he had a wallet? 

His skin went pricklingly cold, and he felt sweat bead up his back. In the rush to leave, in the rush to flee his brother’s broken voice, he had taken only his sword. 

There was no wallet on him, and not a scrap of value in his pockets. He smiled, even brighter, and took a careful step back, feet bunched to run. He didn’t want to leave without paying for the flower but well, Wei Wuxian had done worse things that break a trinket owned by a rich man. 

He’d done so many worse things. 

It was time to leave, he thought, and leapt away with the fury of a storm. 

“Hey— hey!” 

The merchant’s voice behind him was sharp with offense, but he just ran, breath catching at his lungs. He had no money to pay that slight with, and nothing to give. He didn’t have the face to bear any more. 

In his haste, he glanced back, eyes catching on the light mayhem in the street before him. 

In his haste, he did not notice the man in the fine white robes until Wei Wuxian had careened into him. An arm caught his waist, and he was braced and held from a fall he could have survived.

He looked up, took in silk fabric white as snow and embroidered with the patterns of a thousand clouds, and felt his heart sink. A slow glance had his eyes settling on a face that was peerless as carved jade, and just as immovable. 

Lan Zhan, the man who had ever been his enemy and his friend. A man from his past, when he had not thought to see a future. 

And Wei Wuxian had thought this day could not get worse.

He took a step back, slipping from that strong grip with dancing steps and a light smile.

“Sorry, didn’t see you there!” 

The man glanced at him, golden eyes glimmering but holding no recognition. Wei Wuxian’s heart twinged, but he could only be thankful. The last thing he needed after these long three days was another moment of recognition. 

This body had cost him too much already. 

He opened his mouth to speak, but loud shouts from behind caught at his throat and made him curse. 

“Damn,” he muttered, the word catching beneath his breath. All this for a fragile paper flower. If Wei Wuxian didn’t know the work that went into them and their cost, he would have been astonished. 

But he had designed their cost to help Yi City, and so he could only be tired. 

He took a step to the side, moving to run across the ground and make a break for the edges of the village. The forest wasn’t far from here, and Wei Wuxian’s sword was strong as his core. 

He could fly away, and leave all this behind. As he had before, and would again. 

But strong fingers gripped his wrist before he could move more than a few steps, holding him firmly in place. The fingers were calloused and warm, and far too familiar. 

Wei Wuxian hadn’t wanted to feel these fingers again, even if he had wanted to touch them a thousand times. 

Lan Zhan was really far too dangerous, but he couldn’t care. The man was staring down at his hand, as if there was a mystery to be solved lingering across Wei Wuxian’s palm. 

He didn’t need this. 

Bright eyes flicked up to meet his, shining gold and terrible in the light. There was an emotion swirling there that he could not name, and did not try to. But the grip on his wrist gentled into something unbreakable but unbruising. 

Wei Wuxian was trapped. He couldn’t break free without making a scene, and that was the last thing he wanted now, with the sun shining on his skin and the ache in his heart. 

There was a stampede of loud footsteps, and the merchant barreled around the corner, face red from the heat of noon. He flicked out a hand, voice sharp and demanding. 

“Pay back my flower!”

Wei Wuxian tried to lift his hands, but the grip on his wrist kept him still. He settled for a sheepish smile instead, felt the sun burn over his skin.

He didn’t care for the hand trapping his wrist, but he did care for Lan Zhan. 

“I’ve no money to pay you back with, I’m afraid!” His voice was practically chirpy in the silence, but his skin was humming with tension. 

Why had Lan Zhan intervened? When had the man not let go? Why had fate thrown Wei Wuxian into the jaws of a new struggle? He had already been alone. 

Wasn’t that enough?

“You—” the merchant’s face colored from red to purple, stormy as a cloud. The man looked like he might burst a vein, standing there with the shreds of a delicate paper flower cradled in one hand. Wei Wuxian felt sympathy rise in his chest like a tide, despite all the jade and expensive clothes. He knew how precious those flowers could be. 

He held them precious too. 

The clink of coins interrupted his thoughts, blanketed by soft silk and given a gentle sound. In a motion smooth as fog, Lan Zhan stepped forward to place a single coin in the merchant’s hand. 

He still did not let go of Wei Wuxian’s wrist. He did not shift anywhere but closer, and did not look away from Wei Wuxian. The merchant looked up at the peerless cultivator with his fine robes, and bowed in thanks, confusion clear in his eyes. 

He looked almost as lost as Wei Wuxian felt. 

Lan Zhan, immovable darling of the Gusu Lan Sect had stepped in for a thief and paid his debts. Lan Zhan, man of endless morals and regal quiet, had gripped Wei Wuxian’s wrist in gentle hands and protected him. The man looked elegant and beautiful and like everything Wei Wuxian remembered of him. It had been so long, and yet this man had changed so little. 

It was a strange day, and Wei Wuxian couldn’t help the warmth growing in his chest. 

What was going on behind that fine face?

“You can let go now, you know.” 

He said the words with a smile, but his skin was too warm. He felt steady, after three days of loneliness, grounded into steel and sunshine and old pain, like they were his roots and he were a willow tree. Despite it all, Wei Wuxian had never been made to stand alone, even if he always did, in the end.  

But Lan Zhan did not let go. 

“No,” the man said, after a long moment and the silence of a quiet morning in Gusu. Then he turned and began walking down the path, fingers pulling Wei Wuxian along behind him.

“Hey,” Wei Wuxian began, voice light and annoyed. But his words were ignored, and he couldn’t break out of that grip without giving away too much. 

And he didn’t want to. He had been so lonely, for the last three days. The sun had shone on his skin and cast him lost, and a family had been stripped away from him with a single sword stroke. 

He had been lost. He had been alone. 

It would be alright, if for a moment, he followed Lan Zhan. 

The man led him to an inn, spoke quietly to the innkeeper, and then pulled him up wooden stairs to a room with a fine bed and a blanket of silence. 

The steps creaked below their weight, and sweat had built under the broad hand across his wrist. 

Still, the man did not let go. 

“Hey, fine cultivator, are you going to explain why you are dragging me along?”

There was a beat of silence, a slow glance backwards. Gold eyes burned into his skin but offered no answers. Wei Wuxian had never been able to speak the language of Lan Zhan’s careful glances, and he had never wished more for that skill. 

Maybe if they’d been friends, he could have understood.

Lan Zhan just sank to the floor, pulling Wei Wuxian down beside him with that strong grip and quiet motions. He fell down into an ungraceful heap, sword hitting the soft mats with a muffled thump. 

He didn’t even try to move. 

Damn the Lan Clan and their peerless faces. Damn the sun, for shining in his eyes so and making it hard to resist the pull of a familiar face. 

A face he didn’t have a name for, technically. 

“At least tell me your name, if you are going to kidnap me.” He said at last, teasing and frustrated and far too honest.

“Lan Zhan,” the man in white robes said, like giving out his birth name was a common thing. 

Lan Zhan, he said, like he was inviting Wei Wuxian to call him so casually. What had happened to the icy man who never let others approach? What had happened to the pride of Gusu, made of polished jade and just as beautiful. 

Wei Wuxian didn’t know, but the skin of his wrist was too warm.

“Lan Zhan, will you please let go of my wrist? You’ve been clinging to me for too long, I’ll start to get the wrong idea.” 

He layered teasing into his voice, let it drop enough to make fingers fall away from his skin. But Lan Zhan just stared into his soul for a moment longer, palm hot across his wrist and face like carved jade. 

It was so much, and too much, and he was driven to distraction. 

After four frantic beats of his heart, as his pulse began to pick up for a reason he couldn’t name, Lan Zhan slowly pulled his hand away. 

Wei Wuxian’s wrist felt so cold in its wake, prickling uncomfortably. 

Strange. 

He leaned further back against the floor, stared across the delicate space between them. Lan Zhan had not looked away, and still Wei Wuxian didn’t understand. 

What drove the man to this? Did he accost strange thieves on the road everyday? What had the man seen, to make him drag Wei Wuxian away?

A creeping thread of dread meandered up his spine, slow as the drip of honey but tasting like poison. This body was not his own, he remembered, with a horrible realization. Its sharp face and laughing smile had once belonged to a man called Xue Yang. 

It had once belonged to a man that had wronged Xiao Xingchen. 

Did Lan Zhan know him? 

The smile across his face was growing tight and fake, but he smiled on, relentless. He didn’t know what had happened between them, how Xue Yang acted if they met. 

He didn’t know, and so he could not put on that mask. He would have to be himself, and hope that was enough. 

“Well, Lan Zhan? You going to explain why you dragged me up here?” The question was as good a start as any, a place to begin what would surely hurt. 

For a moment, there was no response, the man’s lips set into silence. Lan Zhan had always kept his words close to his heart and tongue; it seemed a decade and more hadn’t changed that. Wei Wuxian almost wished it had, even as he was glad it had not. 

At last, with a quiet gravitas, “No. But you may stay.”

It was a question and a statement and everything in-between, and Wei Wuxian didn’t know what to make of it.

Why?

“Stay for what, Lan Zhan? For how long? Why?” His questions were endless, relentless, but he couldn’t help the smile creeping up his lips. He had so much to ask of this man, and so much to understand. 

“If you have nowhere to go, you may stay.” 

The words froze him solid and left him breathless, for a heartbreaking moment. Then he laughed, voice catching on the sound and leaving him wishing for fog to creep over his legs. It was so like Lan Zhan, to offer out a hand to someone in need. 

And here he was, offering a home. It was like their youth and yet so very different. 

Here, it was not a demand but an offer, and here it was stretched out gently and with no strings.

They were sitting close in this small room, with soft floors cushioning their legs and the sun filtering in to warm his face. Despite the threat of discovery, Wei Wuxian couldn’t help the contentment curling in his stomach. 

He felt a little less lost, somehow. 

“Ah, where would I go? Might as well follow you, gege.” He spoke with a teasing tone and a smile that was more real than anything else. 

He could have imagined it, but in the filtered light of the sun he thought Lan Zhan’s eyes went soft at the edges, and the corner of his lips quirked ever so slightly. 

But perhaps it was a trick of the light, after all. 

Chapter Text

The moon was shining overhead, though he could not see it. The wind was blowing across the paper petals, moving them into a thousand arrangements of delicate blossoms to catch eyes he didn’t have. 

He knew this, even though he could not see them. He had felt the petals before, coated with careful paint and made lovely. The wind ran across the trees he had helped plant, and it carried a laughter he could hear. 

The world was beautiful, but now Xiao Xingchen couldn’t even hear the rustle of petals and know peace. 

He had thought— he had thought too much. 

The wind brushed against his skin, rustled the bandages covering his face. He was alone, in a lonely corner of the city where the moon shone beautifully bright, and dust still collected on the buildings. 

Or so he’d been told. He had never seen the light, and it had never warmed his skin. Had it been a lie too? Could any sliver of the sky above be seen? He didn’t know, and with all his gentle heart, did not want to. 

Some things were too terrible to know. 

The ground beneath him felt twice as lonely, without bright laughter to keep him company, and terrible drink spilling over the dry ground. It felt cold, and bare, even though Xiao Xingchen couldn’t see it’s shape. 

It was lonelier without his new brother— without Xue Yang. 

He let out a slow breath, and felt the wind catch it and whisk it away. Nothing changed, for the wind, for all that everything had changed for him. Xiao Xingchen had been a fool. He had thought the stranger he’d saved had a lonely soul like his. He had thought they understood each other, in a way he’d never quite known before. 

He may have carried the man home as he giggled with liquor, but the stranger had been his eyes when he needed to see, and his sword when he needed to fly. 

The stranger had made this place better too. The city was calmer now, from the gentle willow trees to crinkling paper flowers. A river had been rerouted, and the sickly fog burned away under the bright sun. There were leaves swaying in the wind, now, and they let shade fall quietly over the city that was no longer dead. Yi City was a new place, because of the man Xiao Xingchen had called brother. 

And yet he had chased the man out. And yet the man had been Xue Yang.

And yet. 

The sound of footsteps was heavy behind him, the gentle clink of sword all the more telling. The wind pressed over Xiao Xingchen’s skin, and there was no laughter. 

Song Lan did not sit beside him, as his brother would have. The man did not settle to the ground in what sounded like a sprawl, and did not laugh into the night. He didn’t reach for a bottle of drink either, and describe the view of the stars. 

Song Lan was not Xiao Xingchen’s brother but his heart, and that heart had broken a thousand times in his honor. He would let it break it again, if he must, but this lonely corner did not need that sadness. 

It wasn’t supposed to be lonely. 

“Xingchen,” Song Lan began, voice cold and yet unmoving. Xiao Xingchen wished he could see the expressions dancing over a face like ice and snow. Did the man still think him responsible? Could Song Lan see, with those eyes? Was he still as lovely as Xiao Xingchen remembered? Xiao Xingchen didn’t know, and couldn’t. Calloused hands were trembling in the wind, but he had no jug of wine to hold steady. 

The months had been long, but his brother had made them short and bright. Xue Yang had made them bright, he thought, as his fingers clenched on empty air. 

He didn’t know if he had it in him to speak to Song Lan without breaking to pieces. 

“Zichen,” he responded, and the two voices sounded as quiet boats in the night. The air carried his words so gently, so slowly. 

Would they miss each other again, he wondered, looking up at where the moon surely glowed? 

Would they meet in the middle and speak as they once had?

Would Song Lan run a blade through his chest?

“I—” there was a pause, caught on the wings of a bird and left to flutter. Xiao Xingchen wanted to smooth it away with soft lips, to kiss away the ice and leave a smile behind. 

But that was not his place, and never had been. 

“I know it was not you, that night.” Song Lan’s voice was a punch to the gut and sweet relief, a sword and a kindness. Xiao Xingchen felt like his chest had been locked in a vice, like he was a lake meant to catch those words and swirl them deep inside. “I know you did not kill them.”

It was forgiveness, but it had taken so long to carve its way into his skin. Xiao Xingchen had given up hope for those words long ago, with the last of his pride. They stung now, digging into his hands and forcing his fingers closed. 

His heart could not bear this, not now. Xiao Xingchen had cast his brother away, and he had been deceived. He had banished a man he treasured, and he had housed his greatest enemy. 

He had been a fool. 

For long years he had thought of Song Lan’s smile and borne the pain of the world as his punishment. He would never see it again, and Xiao Xingchen had made peace with that, for all that it broke him. All of him was cracked, held together by the bitter kindness of A-qing and the teasing laughter of the man he had called brother.

By the poison kindness of Xue Yang. 

And now, beneath this moon that surely glowed so beautifully, Song Lan offered him forgiveness. Xiao Xingchen looked up, stared at the sky with sightless eyes. He looked up, though he could not see. 

There were no tears left to him, but blood followed the same path, curving down his cheeks. He wondered if the moon was brilliant. He wondered if the stars were shining. He wondered if Song Lan had missed him dearly too. 

He wondered many things, in a lonely corner that should have been filled with laughter. 

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰

The first day of travel was filled with laughter and chatter, but it came from only one throat. The sun was shining overhead, but only one man was smiling as bright. 

Wei Wuxian, destroyer of armies and commander of the dead, grinned wider. 

“Lan Zhan, we’ve been walking for hours, but you haven’t said where we are going! That’s so rude, Lan Zhan, you could at least carry me,” he said, taking dancing steps around the man beside him. 

Lan Zhan’s expression didn’t shift, not even a hair. Gold eyes glinted in the sun, but they did not look annoyed. Wei Wuxian couldn’t mind. He felt light, in the bright air with a path before him and a person to walk beside. 

For a moment, he didn’t feel lost. 

The second day was filled with questions and comments, and oh how he tried to tease Lan Zhan out of that quiet composure. Nothing worked, not his smirks and not his words. He thought that maybe nothing would, but that had never stopped Wei Wuxian before. 

Achieve the impossible, he had once been told, in a home long lost to his folly. He’d lived those words like they were carved into his bones, and even if these bones weren’t his, he’d live them still. 

Nothing in him could stop. 

He did not think of purple robes and a brother’s snarl, and didn’t remember the sound of wooden piers creaking over water. He didn’t see the swirl of lotus petals across a still lake, and the crackle of lightning.

He did not think of Xiao Xingchen either, and that was for the best. 

“Lan Zhan, what’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten?” He asked instead of thinking, leaning in to catch the smell of sandalwood. Lan Zhan only hummed, slow and thoughtful. After a long moment came the response, and it was simply—

“Spicy congee.”

 The man was truly a mystery, Wei Wuxian thought, and laughed until he couldn’t breathe. That was the first of many questions, the first of the unimportant ones. 

Lan Zhan answered each one, with quiet purpose. 

“Lan Zhan, what do you think that cloud looks like,” was the next, and Wei Wuxian pointed to the smallest cloud in the sky. It was a particularly fluffy cloud, white as snow and shining twice as brilliant in the sun. It looked even brighter, against a sky that threatened rain. 

Lan Zhan glanced up at it, golden eyes glimmering and thoughtful. 

“Rabbit,” came the response, and Wei Wuxian laughed again, voice thick with memories. 

Are rabbits even allowed in the Cloud Recesses, he wanted to ask, the words lingering on the end of his tongue. But Lan Zhan had given him a name and nothing more, and the question was more than Wei Wuxian could afford. 

This path was the only one he had to walk now, and he didn’t want to leave Lan Zhan too. 

“Lan Zhan, have you ever kissed someone before?” He asked, when the cloud had vanished into the beginning of a storm. That question brought a missed step, the tiniest moment of hesitation and a blink of golden eyes. 

It was enough to make Wei Wuxian’s heart rise with glee. A response, from the stoic Lan Zhan. He had finally won a response.

Those peerless lips had pressed into another’s. What had that felt like, he wondered, eyes trailing down to stare at Lan Zhan’s face. The lips were shaded a light pink, opened ever so slightly for a quiet breath.

“Whoever you kissed is a lucky person, Lan Zhan!” He said, and looked up at the storm clouds, and watched them crawl across the sky like waves on an ocean. 

He thought it might rain.  

By the end of a week, they had settled into a comfortable companionship, and Wei Wuxian’s questions mellowed in speed. He still asked them of course, as they walked along the quiet roads and through small villages. How could he not, with Lan Zhan here and freely giving his company?

But they were slower, and less pointedly pointless.  

At last, on the evening of the sixth day, with sunset chasing their heels and happiness lining the road ahead, Wei Wuxian asked the question that had been clawing at his mind for days. 

“You know, you’ve never asked my name,” he said, voice casual and light as a breeze. It was bright too, but this time it was purposeful. For a moment there was silence, held on the fine handle of Bichen and glimmering of carved silver. 

Lan Zhan looked at him then, and golden eyes glimmered like they had stolen the sun. 

“Names are unimportant.”

It was a strange response to a simple question. It was stranger still, coming from one of the Twin Jades of Gusu. It was so very like Lan Zhan that Wei Wuxian wanted to laugh. He smiled instead, a bubbling feeling that curled across his lips and over his skin. 

This man had always been a mystery, in the years before his death. Now Lan Zhan was a mystery in the years after too, and Wei Wuxian couldn’t say he was surprised. He turned to watch the man even closer, and stepped ever nearer. 

Wei Wuxian had always loved mysteries. 

“Oh, then what is important?” He asked, with a smile that was white as bone. Lan Zhan’s eyes glimmered in response, but the man didn’t stop to think. 

“It is the soul that matters,” Lan Zhan said, direct as always. 

“And what kind of soul do you think I have, Lan Zhan?” The words slipped from his tongue before he could think to stop them, before he ever had the chance. 

He wasn’t sure he wanted to, but what if these questions were the step too far? Wei Wuxian did not want to lose this path he had found, and this gentle company. 

Lan Zhan gave him a quiet look, kept on the edge of long eyelashes and the cut stone of fine cheekbones. He really was far too handsome, Wei Wuxian thought, eyes catching on the curve of elegant lips. 

How was that fair to the rest of them?

“Impossible,” the man said after a moment. “You have an impossible soul.” 

Wei Wuxian felt the air catch in his throat. He laughed, and it was a quiet thing. It didn’t echo beneath the clouds but fade away, to dust and corpse ash. Really, Lan Zhan was the impossible one here. What other man could leave Wei Wuxian speechless?

What other man had such bright eyes?

“That’s all very elegant and distinguished of you, Lan Zhan, but you still don’t have anything to call me. Don’t you want my name, Lan Zhan?” He asked, again, for an answer that did more than leave him staring at the sky and wishing for a white city. 

The man looked at him in return, eyes glimmering gold and deadly. 

Wei Wuxian couldn’t look away. 

“If you wish to give it,” Lan Zhan said, tone clear as water beneath the moon. Before that voice, Wei Wuxian didn’t have it in him to lie. He didn’t have the freedom to speak the truth either, not when Lan Zhan had hated so much of what he had once stood for. Not when Lan Zhan had hated him too, as they fought together against the Wen, and against each other in the aftermath. 

Wei Wuxian couldn’t give his name, but the thought of Lan Zhan calling him by anything else left a bitter taste on his tongue, and made his stomach sour like vinegar. 

Nothing was better than a name, when a name came with history. 

“Ah, you can call me anything you want, Lan Zhan!” He laughed again, stepped forward, and smiled a brilliant smile that was too sharp. 

The man only hummed in response, deep and resonant between them. It was clear he wouldn’t speak a name, and with the tightness in his chest, Wei Wuxian could only be glad. 

The days after that passed quietly, in laughter and loud questions, and in the silence of peace. Wei Wuxian wondered how long they would walk a road without an ending. 

He wondered, in the moments before midnight when Lan Zhan was asleep and he had no reason to speak, what would end it. 

He wondered if it would come from this body’s sins or his own failures. 

“Hey, Lan Zhan, do you know who Xue Yang is?” He asked on the road again, another question he didn’t know the answer to. There was a pause, enough to speak of knowledge won and earned. 

“Yes,” came Lan Zhan’s response, after a long moment of silence. “He was a demonic cultivator, housed by the Lanling Jin Sect for many years. Unstable, and a practitioner of demon cultivation. He fled after eliminating a smaller clan.”

The man continued on at Wei Wuxian’s request, and the tragic tale of Xiao Xingchen folded out between them. At the end, Wei Wuxian was quiet, chaining in his twisting emotions to a chest that wasn’t his own.

“Ah, so this Xue Yang really wronged Xiao Xingchen, huh?” He turned his face towards the sky as he spoke, watched the sun as it watched him. 

Smiling had never been so painful. 

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰

The crinkle of paper flowers filled the air, lively and lovely in the breeze. It was a sound of happiness, filtering through every home and every door. It underlaid every conversation, every bickering trade and every quiet laugh. 

It was loud, and it was everywhere, and it was all the damned stranger’s fault. 

A-qing couldn’t stand it. She shifted under the sunshine, felt it warm her skin and leave her too warm even when the walls behind here were too cold. She didn’t like the sound of paper, not when there was no teasing laugh to echo over it and through the silent house. The walls were echoingly cold now, coated with an ice that she didn’t care to burn away. 

It was too damn quiet. 

A-qing clenched bitter teeth, shoulders pulling up like she could grow a wall all her own against the world. They were sore with training, exhaustion creeping up her skin to stain her shaky and but not quiet. They were growing strong too, golden energy fluttering weak and new under her fingernails. She was becoming a cultivator, and it was all that damned man’s fault. 

It was too quiet, and the paper crinkled too loudly. She wanted to rip the walls. It was all his fault. He had made them happy, over long days spent laughing at her side. He had worked so hard for all of this, and shaped the city around them like it was easy, like the world was his to mold. 

And now he was gone. 

Daozhang thought the man a murderer, thought him evil, thought him someone else. 

But A-qing remembered the man she had met on that first day, when fog coated the city and made her white eyes sightless. That man had almost run her through with a sword, and those eyes had glimmered with hate, with malice and blood lust and every dark emotion she had ever seen. 

She hadn’t trusted those eyes, and never would. But those weren’t the eyes of the stranger. No, the stranger’s eyes had glinted with playfulness, and shimmered with sadness. They had been bright, even in the fog. But they had been brighter under the new sunshine. 

Daozhang thought the stranger was evil, but A-qing knew he was lonely. She’d be damned if she let a lonely man walk the world alone.  

Daozhang and his old friend would have to learn to do better, she thought, and stepped angry feet into the house. 

It was still cold. 

⊱ ━━━━.⋅❈⋅.━━━━ ⊰ 

After three weeks, Wei Wuxian caught the answer to his question, and the fresh scent of mystery, in a single moment. There was smoke lingering in the air, the scent of burning grass and disturbed peace. It was a dark thing, heavy with ash and the cold touch of resentful energy. 

Wei Wuxian inhaled and thought the scent was familiar beyond words. The trees looked familiar too, wrapped in the gentle press of fog that was laced with the memory of ash. 

This was a place known to him. 

“Lan Zhan,” he said, words tumbling out like laughter and happiness. “Where are we?”

“Near Lotus Pier,” the man answered, as if it was all that simple, as if it was a simple thing, to walk into a place with so many memories. 

Wei Wuxian stopped walking. 

“Ah, did you have some business to do here, Lan Zhan? I thought you said we were just wandering, huh?”

The wind carried the smell of fresh water, and the air held the sounds of a city he had grown up in. Wei Wuxian didn’t step forward.  

“I have no business here,” the man said, looking back at him. They were a few steps apart now, but it felt like a cavernous gap. 

Wei Wuxian wondered if there were lotus roots for sale, or if he’d have to steal them. He moved before he could think to stop, walking towards the quietest corner of the lake shore. 

He wanted to find the roots that he used to eat. He wanted to know if they tasted the same in this body. 

Wei Wuxian had always done what he shouldn’t have, and so he waded into the water and let it soak into his robes. There would be time to dry off later. Maybe Wei Wuxian could steal Lan Zhan’s robe too, and laugh more.

The man looked like he might even be okay with that, standing a few feet from him and radiant in the sunshine. The man looked like he might join Wei Wuxian in the water, and they couldn’t have that. 

“No, Lan Zhan, you should stay dry. If you get wet, who’s clothes will I steal?”

That made the man pause, for a long heartbeat. 

“My robes are woven to dry quickly,” Lan Zhan said at last, and the sun caught across the man’s face and stained it red. 

Or maybe it was red already. Waist deep in water, and with mud collecting under his fingernails, Wei Wuxian couldn’t tell. 

He had lotus roots to steal. 

“Hey, who gave you permission to walk here?” The words broke out moments later, when wind caught his hair and five lotus roots were stacked in Lan Zhan’s perfect hands. 

The voice was young, and sharp with command. It sounded like the voice of a young lord, and it echoed bright and brutal over the water. 

Wei Wuxian didn’t wait for the echos to fade. 

“Come on, Lan Zhan,” he said, sword sliding from his sleeve to slip under his feet. He moved fast through the air, a bubbling laughter crawling up his throat.

He felt light, even as Lotus Pier vanished beneath them. 

Jin Ling, standing on the pier and covered in splashes of muddy water, could only stare at the fading glint of swords. They had moved so fast, and been so bright. 

Had that been someone from Gusu Lan? Jin Ling didn’t know, but he had gotten a good look at one of their faces. He’d find them, and tell his uncle of this. 

Strange cultivators in Lotus Pier was bad enough— but this one, with the laughing grin and bright eyes, had splashed him with water. 

Jin Ling wasn’t going to forgive that.