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It begins, as it often does, with his Mother.
His blood beats harshly in his thighs, his toes numb. The heat of his body is sapped insipidly, breath by breath, into the snow. His linens grow damp and stick to his skin, and seem to tighten and tighten. Snow turns to slush and then to liquid around his knees, swallowing him.
When he looks down, he is kneeling in a pool of blood.
He leaps to his feet, or tries to. His limbs are like lead and his movements are sluggish. His chin snaps up, teeth clacking, slicing his tongue. It HURTS.
Framing his Mother’s modest prison are not the huddled, disdainful trees of Gusu, packed tightly together like disciples on a pilgrimage. Nor is the yawn of the sky cool and bright and empty, but black and opaque. There is no moon. There are no stars. There is no wind. It is still.
Deathly still.
A lance of foul heat hits his face, and he swallows a gulp of acrid air with a gasp and a whimper. The ache in his chest blossoms from a tender fear to HORROR.
The house is on fire.
Suddenly, he can hear it. It cracks, it SNAPS. It gorges itself on timber and silk, the paper flapping in the yawning gaps between beams curling and blackening. They look like clutching hands. Now there ARE clutching hands, bursting from the bloodied snow at his feet. They snatch his ankles, and the heat hits his face again like a PUNCH.
“Mother-!!!” he hears a ragged echo of himself howl, like a fat fish breaching the surface of a still pond.
He lunges forward, but the air is like sand in his mouth in his eyes in his nose, and he is slow. Too slow. As he bursts up the steps and stumbles through the gaping maw of the doorway, he is instantly swallowed by silence and darkness.
Where is she?! Ah, there.
She is kneeling behind the table. As she always was, smiling sweetly. She and the table are the only lit things in the endless black. He cannot see her eyes, her dear, sober, smiling eyes. She is wearing a thick, ornate silver mask.
The mask of Mo Xuanyu.
...why?! Why would-
Suddenly, his Mother’s red slash of a mouth opens impossibly wide, and lets out an inhuman SCREECH. She claws at her face, at the mask, and there is a hisssssss as it seems to scorch her skin.
He is upon her immediately, nails scraping at the grey wood, trying desperately to pry it from her face, but it’s stuck fast. She howls like a dying beast, guttural and deep, the pale column of her neck pulsating wildly-
He wrenches it free. The face, unmarked but ashen grey, is not his Mother’s: it is Wei Ying’s.
The former Yiling Patriarch opens his mouth, voiceless, emitting nothing but a wretched gurgle. His tongue works, his eyes bulge. A thin, crimson line sits upon his neck like a grotesque adornment.
The ground beneath them collapses into NOTHING, and Wei Ying falls.
“WEI YING!!!”
His head is BLISTERING, the agony a silent crescendo growing louder and louder and louder, his chest is caving in, it hurts, it HURTS-
“Lan-Zhan.”
He is reaching and reaching and reaching, but that precious body and heart and mind is beyond him, falling faster, falling deeper-
“Wei Ying, Wei YING-!” his own voice is ragged, a foreign thing.
“Lan-ZHAN! Wake up!” a frantic voice insists, sternly. Calloused fingertips take the taut muscle between his neck and his left clavicle, and PINCH. Hard.
Lan Wangji gasps like a drowning man inhaling silt, and bolts upright, right arm flailing wildly, still reaching, reaching. His elbow collides soundly with something solid, bony and fleshy, with a sound THWUNK.
“ACK!” the beloved voice cries, wounded “UGH! My dose. You god my DOSE!”
The former Chief Cultivator pants wretchedly, chest hollow, his every bone rattling within its prison of shivering muscle. His face is dank with cold sweat and thoughts flit about his stunned, muggy mind like a thousand trapped insects. He is so afraid, so pained, he has BECOME those things.
Light speckles of blood darken the cerulean fabric encasing his legs.
Wei Ying’s blood.
His wits return to him with sudden startling clarity, and he rounds on his bedmate: shivering palms cupping Wei Ying’s face and pressing, tightly. He wants to say, hold still, let me see, but cannot summon the words. His tongue is fat and useless like a dead slug on the floor of his mouth.
His partner’s dark eyes soften from affront to re-assurance, catching Lan Wangji’s guilt before it begins to even occur to him “I’b alrighd.”
He curls tan fingers around Hanguang-Jun’s shuddering wrists, sniffs harshly around a swelling nose, and tries again “I’m alright, Lan Zhan, but we should fatten you up. Your elbows are sharp as a blade!”
He titters, placatingly and with false cheer. He’s shaken, too. The blood is from his lip, not his nose. It was caught between his assailant’s flailing arm, and his own teeth.
Lan Wangji presses a thumb, coarse and sore from strumming his zheng’s strings, to the offended flesh. Wei Ying inhales gently, his breath a hot, sharp huff. He squirms, forces himself to still. He has learned to inhabit himself more patiently, over these years.
Some stolen. Too many, stolen.
Wei Ying blinks, forehead creasing, and says, with gentling inquiry “...Lan-Zhan…? You...”
Wei Ying is here. Alive.
He is soft and solid, and glorious in his details, remembered and unremembered. Little things Lan Wangji could not have imagined, could not have conjured up from despair alone: his smell, for one thing. The tang of leather and wood varnish, the sour huff of liquor on his tongue, and the curdling spice of his natural musk.
The healing scar on his third left-hand knuckle, from where he meandered drunkenly into a doorway the previous night.
His VOICE. The way Wei Ying and only Wei Ying calls his name: Lan-Zhan. A sound like skipping stones on water.
“Lan Zhan.” the beloved voice says, dropping low, aghast. His hands slide from Hanguang-Jun’s wrists, to skim his cheeks.
They come away wet, glistening.
“You’re crying.” he exhales, with breathy calm. His tone becomes sonorous and sweet, as though talking to a child, or a cornered animal “Are you in pain? You’re not hurt, somewhere?”
Lan Wangji’s heart stops and breath turns to dust in his throat. His ears fill with blood and burn with shame. He does the only thing he knows HOW to do, when confronted like this.
He bolts unsteadily upright, teeters, and flees.
“OI-!”
The bare soles of his feet catch the rough wood railing of the balcony. He leaps, suspended for one long moment in the air, before descending to the ground beside the inn they’re staying in. He cannot THINK, cannot feel, his only thought is to get away, get gone. NOT be seen.
Not like this. Not by HIM.
“LAN-ZHAN! Stop being ridiculous!” Wei Ying hurls from the balcony, insulted “Don’t think I won’t chase you, you stubborn-!”
Lan Wangji doesn’t look back. The night is empty and cool bar the odd chirrup of lazy crickets and distant yeowling of some alarmed cat, and he traverses street and wall and roof easily. Directionless, fast.
He should have known Wei Ying would follow. When had he ever not?
He is, in some secret corner of himself, immensely glad for this.
After an interminable period of gaining and losing a lead, of pounding feet on stone and slate and lost breath, Wei Ying finally crashes to an irritable halt just behind him “Lan ZHAN! Slow down!”
As if caught by a thread between them, Lan Wangji also stops, dead in his tracks, in the haphazard mess of some neglected shrine. His feet are parted by a single step, poised, ready to ascend, away.
Or descend, towards. He has no idea which.
Without looking, he can FEEL the heat of the former Yiling Patriarch’s glower piercing the back of his head. Wei Ying huffs, utterly exasperated, and throws his hands high “...fine. You stubborn, infuriating fuddy-duddy, if you really want to be left-”
He turns away. Lan Wangji’s heart drops like lead into his stomach, and he whips around, grits out a sharp “Don’t.”
The word is torn from him like a wild, desperate thing: his voice cracks like a thin eggshell, like a broken scab, and bleeds into the empty night.
Wei Ying blinks his large eyes, pivoting slowly back on the heel of one foot. A slight wind lifts his hair. Mussed and kinked with sleep, it fans out awkwardly like a flag.
Wei Ying takes a purposeful set of steps forward, palms raised as if in surrender, coaxing “Lan-Zhan…”
He takes three further steps forward, the leather soles of his shoes crunching on the tiny stones beneath his feet.
“Don’t.” Lan Wangji bites out with a lance of panic “Don’t come near.”
...he is unsure WHY he feels such shame in this. Perhaps because, upon Wei Ying’s return, he swore silently to be certain. To be sure. To be strong and perfect, and everything he could not be before. To succeed. To catch Wei Ying before he even BEGAN to fall.
Standing before him sniffling like an infant hardly fitted into that narrative.
Wei Ying clucks his tongue and rolls his eyes, unperturbed, and continues forward “Lan-Zhan, really? You know I never listen to you. If there’s one idiot in this world dumb enough NOT to-”
He trails off as he comes truly close. Exhales and curls his palms around Hanguang-Jun’s biceps, his thumbs sweeping gently against the thin fabric there. Lan Wangji still cannot quite catch a steady rhythm in his breathing. Those tender fingers squeeze, ground him. It helps, a little.
“Still crying.” Wei Ying murmurs, and his face crumples as his heart breaks in sympathy.
Hanguang-Jun fixes his partner with an unamused, deadpan expression, even with his wet cheeks, as if to say: no, really? I hadn’t noticed.
Wei Ying laughs, sonorous, relieved “Aha. There’s my disdainful Hanguang-Jun.” he wags a rogue finger, and the tension dissipates like a popped pustule “Here, come. Sit.” he uses his grip on Lan Wangji’s upper arms to manhandle him to sit upon the worn steps.
Wei Ying shudders deeply as he presses flush to Lan Wangji’s left side, thigh to thigh, ankle to ankle “Ayo, you are freezing.” he scrubs his palms roughly at his partner’s upper arms to try to warm him “You mustn’t let me steal all the blankets every night, you know.” he scolds, brow creasing.
...let? The former chief cultivator thinks, for a moment, unamused. As if he could stop Wei Ying, in anything he ever does. As if he would want to deny him anything, anything at all that he wants, anymore.
It is quiet. They are disturbed only by the wistful jingle of a few forgotten temple bells, suspended from a mangled rope in the shrine at their backs.
“Talk to me?” the former Yiling Patriarch murmurs, bright yet subdued, after an interminable amount of time.
A simple request. One he knows is gargantuan for his partner to meet. Lan Wangji inhales, a long, slow rattle. His breath does not catch, his nose does not run. But these damn tears would NOT stop running, unbidden, sliding like rain across marble, from his sore eyes.
“Alright. Then I’ll talk.” Wei Ying reasons, with rare patience “Did you...perhaps. Have a bad dream?”
Not nightmare, Lan Wangji notes: bad dream. How childlike Wei Ying still can be. Where once he would’ve scorned this, now he’s grateful for it.
He does TRY. He searches within himself for the words, for some way to manifest the terrible affliction running ruin across his sleeping mind, but can’t. There are too many words, too much within him, so much of it shameful. And so he still says nothing at all.
“...Lan-Zhan.” Wei Ying implores now, hurt and despair creeping into his voice “Please, tell me. I want to help. Seeing you like this…” he inhales, sharply, as though struck “Makes my heart hurt, too.”
Faced with the ignobility of having hurt his partner’s feelings, Lan Wangji manages to force out a very stilted “...foolish.”
Not Wei Ying. Wei Ying, he knows now, is as far from a fool as can be. It is he who is being a fool: a weak, useless fool. Grieving for a man who is walking and talking and returned to him. MADNESS, is what it is.
The former Yiling Patriarch searches his partner’s face and, impossibly, divines all this. To Wei Ying, Lan Wangji’s stony expressions have never been anything of the sort. To him, he had always been an open book: complex and deep as the sea, the only mysteries being his beginning and his end.
“Lan Zhan.” he whispers, a reverent breath, and swipes a calloused, tender set of thumbs against the now easing tears marring his partner’s cheeks “Anything that makes you pull a face like this, could NEVER be foolish.”
His finger’s fall away to instead boldly take Lan Wangji’s limp hands between his own, cradling them and tracing soothing patterns, looping from nail to knuckle to wrist, and back down again, languid, lazy.
Very slowly, the agony eases from Hanguang-Jun’s taut body, as his attention becomes fixated on the caress, and only the caress.
A light film of frost creeps in. Flakes fall from the heavens, too weak to settle, and a fleck lands on the round tip of Wei Ying’s nose, making him giggle. The sound is a balm.
“It’s so beautiful when it snows, don’t you think?” his partner extolls, cleaving closer to Lan Wangji’s side “Everything shines, and it goes all quiet. Unshod snow reminds me of you, you know.” a wry smirk “So cold, so soft.”
Lan Wangji, for his sins, HATES snow.
“You died.”
Wei Ying freezes, just for a moment, and says placatingly and without pity “I know, Lan-Zhan.”
Hanguang-Jun’s throat is thick and hot “I couldn’t save you.”
“...this again?” Wei Ying murmurs, swallowing his frustration. And yes, they have spoken, at length and in endless, mindless circles, about it. About what happened. About how it wasn’t Lan Zhan’s fault, there was nothing he could have done. But it was the one thing he could not give Wei Ying, his acceptance.
Yes, he thinks. Always this. Until the day I die.
Wei Ying inhales sharply, nostril’s flaring, and says bluntly “No more tears.” Hanguang-Jun lets his eyes slip shut and thinks: that, I can do. I can keep from offending him with this. But he’s mistaken his partner’s intent, and Wei Ying immediately scrambles to correct him “No, wait - that’s not. Let me try again.”
He thinks deeply for a moment. Then takes Lan Wangji’s chin and turns his face to meet his eyes “No more tears of guilt, from you. If you are sad, come to me, and cry. If you’re in pain, come to me, and cry. If you’re happy, come to me, and cry.” he forces a bittersweet smile “But no more guilt. Please.”
Hanguang-Jun turns this over and over in his mind for some time.
“You, too.” he manages, eventually, hushed and hoarse “Try.”
It really was quite hypocritical for the former Yiling Patriarch to lecture HIM on the toll of blaming oneself, when it was Wei Ying’s favourite pastime, then and now.
Wei Ying lets out a short bark of laughter, teeth flashing merrily. Acquiescing “Alright. That’s fair! Fair and wise as always, my shining and most gentle Hanguang-jun.”
“Hnn.” Lan Wangji grumps, embarrassed.
He looks down at his lap, a thick wave of ink black hair falling unrestrained over his shoulders. He jolts, startled, and his hand flies to his bare forehead, panicked “My-!”
A tan hand appears at the end of his nose, the thin silver token in the shape of rising clouds flashing like fish scales. Wei Ying is pinching it gently between forefinger and thumb, the azure blue ribbons of Lan Wangji’s treasured headband trailing down his partner’s wrist like rivulets of water “Here.”
Hanguang-Jun exhales, relieved. His lips quirk and his eyes crinkle gently in thanks. He feels a flush of warm feeling engulf him.
Wei Ying’s fingertips brush his temples “Tilt? That’s it.” he positions and winds the headband about his partner’s head with ample precision, adjusting and re-adjusting, his tongue poking from the side of his mouth.
It’s endearing. Lan Wangji swallows a further smile.
“There! Fixed.” Wei Ying declares, sitting back to admire his work with a proud nod; his face quickly creases into a giddy grin, the kind that whips the earth out from under Hanguang-Jun’s feet “Lan-Zhan. Your ears are all red!”
Lan Wangji wordlessly goes to stand and flee again, scowling.
The former Yiling Patriarch smirks and throws his arms around his partner’s waist, toppling Lan Wangji so he slumps back across his lap with an undignified huff “AY! Ay, don’t be like that. Don’t struggle - you can’t get away from me!”
Hanguang-Jun has heard such words before. He glares into the incandescent brightness of Wei Ying’s smile, and utterly fails to be angry with him “Not a rabbit.”
Wei Ying snickers, mightily smug “But you are sweet LIKE a rabbit. When you are not dressed for a funeral with a face like stone.”
He wrangles their limbs until they’re sat somewhat comfortably, knees between knees and flank to flank, the Yiling Patriarch’s arms set loosely about his partner’s waist. Lan Wangji wonders briefly what his Uncle would think, to see his precious pupil perched across a heretic’s knees like a maiden astride a steed.
...hmph. Hang his Uncle. Hang the lot of them.
Hanguang-Jun no longer has to step back from Wei Wuxian. He has him. He wants him. He wants this and wanted it more than anything, for the longest of times. He knows this, now.
He reaches out to tuck a stray tangle of hair away from Wei Ying’s high cheekbone, smoothing it carefully back amongst its peers. Wei Ying’s grin widens, sly and impossibly pleased: Lan Wangji feels a pang, and wishes he could give him more, more often. He topples further, falling at the precipice he couldn’t before, and presses a chaste kiss to his partner’s cheek.
The former Yiling Patriarch’s mouth falls gormlessly open, and he looks like he may combust. Lan Wangji’s lips twitch slyly, satisfied, and he compounds the act by leaning his head boldly against Wei Ying’s shoulder.
“Heh.” Wei Ying huffs ecstatically, curling his arms more tightly around Lan Wangji’s body and resting his chin atop his partner’s head.
He begins to rock them ever so slightly, from muted ecstasy or proffered comfort, Lan Wangji neither knows nor cares. He allows his eyes to fall shut and inhales that dear smell, basks in Wei Ying’s solidity all around him. Sure fingers creep into the hair at the crown of his head, and stroke gently. His Mother did the same, once. Long ago.
He is allowed this, Hanguang-Jun thinks, prays. We, surely, are allowed this? Please.
“Lan Zhan. Are you sleepy?” Wei Ying murmurs against the shell of his ear.
“No.”
“Do you know the legend of the rabbit on the moon…?”
“Yes.” Lan Wangji replies, lips twitching “But tell me, anyway.”
Despite the fact he can’t see it, he knows Wei Ying is grinning: something in his voice.
The body beside him shuffles a little, settling “Senior sister told me. Or perhaps...maybe my Mother, I’m not sure. Someone with pretty hands, who smelled really nice.” the former Yiling Patriarch clears his throat with faux sobriety “On the moon, there lives a rabbit and a toad…”
Hanguang-Jun revels in his partner’s low voice, and lets the past fall away. At least, for now. His body grows heavy and his mind fills to the brim with warmth and blissful nothingness.
“...Lan Zhan?” he hears, from somewhere far away.
“Heh.” his nose drops against the soft skin and taut muscle of someone’s neck, and lean arms reach beneath his back and knees, and lift “Come on, up you go.”
...something wriggles in the recesses of his mind. Something about being carried. Something about it being unsightly…
He is laid down tenderly against coarse cloth, a hand beneath his head, and it feels oddly familiar. In his stunned state, Lan Wangji still manages to catch and clutch at the body that tries to recede from him, eliciting a low, gleeful chuckle from above him.
Warm lips press against his forehead, and there is a rustle of cloth as that warm form tips from above him to settle at his side “Goodnight, Lan Zhan. I will be here when you wake up.”
He sleeps, and does not dream.