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first,
The Yiling Patriarch dies.
Cultivators will continue to discuss it long after the event itself has begun to fade and become memory. The years will pass, and still the story will be handed down, mouth to ear. The cultivation world’s worst-kept secret.
It is, according to the tales they will tell, a messy affair. A gruesome one, most will admit, and one they would not have wished on their own worst enemies - though they do wish it on the Yiling Patriarch.
It, and worse.
As time passes, the stories will become legends and, eventually, become myths. In reality, it goes like this:
The earth beneath the Yiling Patriarch’s wrecked body runs inky-black with his blood. He draws in ragged, heavy breaths that catch in his throat like broken glass, until he doesn’t anymore. There are tears on his cheeks, which are sallow-colored and hollow with hunger and an illness that has settled into his body like rain on the earth. The air is heavy with the stink of carrion and smoke. His shidi stands over him with a face as pale as the morning sky. A sword clatters to the ground between them, stained with a brother’s blood.
The Yiling Patriarch had been larger than life. His shadow had seemed to take up the whole of the sky. He looks smaller in death. Unlike himself.
Blood dries on his open mouth, smeared like a kiss over his parted lips. The other cultivators do not know it, but the Yiling Patriarch has only ever been kissed once.
His life has been short, and it has been unforgiving.
(His eyes stare, open and blank, at an unfeeling sky.)
second,
Death is not quiet.
The spirit drifts, and he hears.
In life, he had often pictured what would be waiting for him after the sect leaders finally decided that the risks of letting him live outweighed the rewards. He had imagined death, and, in every imagining, he’d always figured that it would be a very cold, very dark sort of thing.
A night never broken by a dawn.
Silent.
Instead, there is music.
For a long, long while, the spirit does not understand what he is hearing. He cannot understand much of anything. He is adrift in the emptiness, buffeted by time and space and an endless crush of the restless dead. He is no one, and nothing. He is shreds, shattered pieces of the man he used to be, torn apart and scattered to the winds.
Time means nothing in death. It is many earth-years before the spirit begins to reclaim parts of himself again, through no real effort of his own. It is even more earth-years before he finally recognizes the song that has been following him through the endless, senseless emptiness.
Inquiry.
He thinks about answering the call, sometimes. It is terribly lonely, being dead, and this spirit has never been good at being lonely. The music is so soft, so achingly sad, that the spirit figures that the person playing it must be terribly lonely, too. For a long time, he cannot seem to assemble enough of himself to answer, though. All his scattered pieces resist being puzzled back together.
He does not remember much of life, but he thinks that, when he died, he must have been very tired.
The music does not abate, even as the earth-years stretch on and on and on. It continues to follow him through the nothing. And so finally, finally, after what feels like centuries of wading through emptiness, the spirit is able to bring himself to follow the sound to its source.
Oh, he thinks, as familiar notes played by familiar hands on a familiar guqin wash over him like waves.
Oh.
Lan Zhan, who are you looking for? Who exactly did you lose?
And was it my fault?
Remorse rises in the spirit, makes him feel heavier than the nothingnothingnothing that surrounds him. He does not know who this Lan Zhan is, in the same way he does not know his own name or the manner in which he died, but he knows that whoever they are, they’re someone important. Someone who does not deserve to be hurting the way that they are. Someone who deserves only good things - only the best.
He still cannot answer the Inquiry, though. There is not enough of him left in the abyss to reach out. And so he lets himself drift away. Lets death tug him downwards, an insistent and endless tide, and submerge him in the nothing.
Until, suddenly, something grabs ahold of him and pulls.
(Death is not quiet, and isn’t all that endless, either.)
third,
The Yiling Patriarch dies.
(Thirteen years later, Wei Wuxian wakes up.)
fourth,
The first thing he notices is the feeling.
It comes to him sudden and rushing, like the onset of a thunderstorm, the crash of a waterfall. One moment he is nothing and the next he is not. He is the dust-packed floor beneath his cheek. He is the belt tied around his waist, the ribbon tugging his hair sharply away from his face. He is the earth and the sky and the dirt under his fingernails. He is the aching, persistent hurt in his ribcage.
He is the awful, horrible, monumental weight of his own grief.
He is all of it and he is none of it.
He is alive.
The shock of it almost kills him again. Unsteady and trembling, he peels himself off the ground. Blinks eyes that have been sightless for - how long has he been dead? One year? Two years? A hundred?
No, he thinks, as he begins to understand.
No, no, no. Put me back. Let me go back.
Wei Wuxian was dead, and now he is not.
He may not be dead, but he isn’t quite right, either, as he quickly begins to realize. He rises to his feet, halting, and he’s shorter than he ought to be. His limbs are slimmer; the line of his clavicle, when he reaches up to grab at his chest, is too sharp. And, most wonderfully - most horrifyingly - there is something occupying his chest in addition to a beating heart.
The potential for a golden core.
This body’s spiritual energy is small. Underdeveloped and unrefined. But Wei Wuxian can feel it, almost like a physical weight. He presses his palm flat against his ribcage and breathes in, feels his body respond, skin and bones and blood.
It is a bizarre feeling, as well as an impossible one. For a full pump of his now-living heart, Wei Wuxian wonders if he perhaps has finally passed on fully and been reborn. That isn’t right, though. That can’t be right. Rebirth is a mercy, a reward for a life well-lived. Wei Wuxian doesn’t remember much about the days and the weeks and the months before his death, but he knows enough to surmise that he will not be rewarded. In this lifetime or the next.
Nausea creeps up his diaphragm.
There is blood smeared on the floor and the walls around him.
It does not take long for Wei Wuxian to assess the situation, once the shock of being alive - really, truly, properly alive - has begun to pass. The rusty-colored blood sigils are familiar enough; they ought to be, he thinks, almost crossly, they’re his, after all. And then things are rather neatly driven home by the arrival of the Mo heir and his lackeys.
This body’s name is Mo Xuanyu, Wei Wuxian discovers, as his cousin beats him black and blue and Wei Wuxian lies there and takes it. As he is struck, he remembers the sting of a whip against his back. Remembers the cool of rain against his skin. Remembers the smell of death, of war, heavyheavyheavy, settling in the air until he’d thought his lungs would collapse under the weight of it.
Remembers Jiang Cheng. Shijie.
You said you could control it. You promised.
A voice, deep and broken, screaming out, Wei Ying!
There’s something else there, too. Something that keeps sliding out of Wei Wuxian’s grasp like water draining between cupped palms. It has to do with Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian thinks. With the way he’d said Wei Wuxian’s name. But no matter how tightly he keeps his fists clenched, the water still drains away.
Wei Wuxian has never been very good at remembering.
He thinks, absently, that he would very much like to die again.
That doesn’t seem to be happening, though, at least not imminently. So Wei Wuxian waits until the beating is done and then unfolds himself neatly from the floor. He examines the long, slender curse-marks on his arm, raw and still seeping blackish blood. He feels along the unfamiliar planes of his new face and wonders vaguely if anyone from his old life could possibly recognize him like this. And then he does what he has always done - or, at least, what he had always done, back when he was still alive.
(He goes to work.)
fifth,
Wei Wuxian is the unluckiest bastard on earth.
Bad enough to run into disciples from the cultivation’s world least lenient sect, almost immediately after his forcible rebirth. Worse, still, to encounter the Second Jade of Gusu, Hanguang-jun - who is as startling and as brilliant and as shining as Wei Wuxian remembers him, if not even more so, with the added elegance of age. A chance meeting with his brother-turned-executioner, on top of all of that? That seems like a little much, even for him.
It would almost be funny, if the sorrow rising in his throat wasn’t threatening to drown him.
Wei Wuxian rolls himself into a seated position, the sting of Zidian sharp and familiar across his shoulder blades. For a brief and somewhat ridiculous moment, he misses Madame Yu so much he thinks he might double over with the pain of it.
“Ow,” he says pointedly. Maybe a little miserably.
Jiang Cheng looks apoplectic. “You-” he begins, Zidian flashing menacingly in his hand.
“Clan leader Jiang, it can’t be Wei Wuxian,” one of the Lan juniors points out - the sharp-tongued, kind-faced one who Wei Wuxian had interacted with the previous evening at the Mo family manor. “Zidian would have cast him out if he was possessing young master Mo. There’s no way-”
Jiang Cheng’s expression does not change. The lines of his face are painted with rage - dripping with it. Staring up at him from the rain-damp earth, Jiang Cheng almost looks unfamiliar, like he’s no longer Wei Wuxian’s brother, no longer the man who watched him grow up and learn and live and die. There’s something flinty and unforgiving in his eyes.
He’d looked like that when he’d killed him, too.
Zidian crackles with energy and Jiang Cheng’s grip visibly tightens on its handle. Wei Wuxian thinks, idly, Well, I did want to die again.
Lan Wangji steps in between them.
Wei Wuxian blinks, surprised. The graceful, angular slope of Lan Wangji’s broad shoulders is a familiar sight - his upright and intentional stance, his flowing robes, the way his hair falls long and neat down his back. Something like nostalgia rises in Wei Wuxian’s throat, thick and cloying. He feels like he might choke on it.
“I will bring him back to the Cloud Recesses,” Lan Wangji tells Jiang Cheng. He says it so matter-of-factly that Wei Wuxian almost doesn’t understand what he’s saying. Like he’s commenting on the weather, or listing off one of the Lan clan’s rules. I will bring him back to the Cloud Recesses, he says, as if he isn’t offering Wei Wuxian a lifeline - freedom, survival - as if it costs him nothing.
He’s protecting Wei Wuxian again.
Again and again and again, Lan Wangji protects Wei Wuxian.
Wei Wuxian cannot understand him. Lan Wangji, with his clear eyes and his jade-fine face and his disdain for all things unorthodox. Lan Wangji, his friend and his enemy, someone he never thought he would get the chance to stand beside again. Lan Wangji, who saved his life for the first time when they were fifteen and hasn’t stopped saving it since.
(Why does everything come back to him?)
sixth,
Lan Wangji is annoyingly sticky.
Despite Wei Wuxian’s best attempts at disgusting the illustrious Hanguang-jun into a camaraderie-ending explosion, Lan Wangji patiently allows Wei Wuxian to shamelessly drape himself all over him. He was never like this when they were teens, Wei Wuxian thinks bitterly. Long gone are the days when Wei Wuxian could tempt him into a meltdown just by fluttering his eyelashes or talking about sex.
Once or twice, Wei Wuxian even considers telling Lan Wangji who he is. There’s no way Lan Wangji wouldn’t leave him, if he knew. In the end, he figures that’s probably too dangerous. There’s no guarantee Lan Wangji won’t hand him over to Jiang Cheng, after all, and Wei Wuxian is just beginning to remember all the things he’d liked about life.
Spicy food, for one thing. Alcohol, for another.
Anyway, despite Wei Wuxian’s valiant efforts, he and Lan Wangji end up something of a matched set in the days following Wei Wuxian’s illustrious return to the world of the living. At first, Wei Wuxian assumes it’s just the allure of unsolved mystery that’s keeping Lan Wangji at his side. After all, the arm that they’d found at the Mo manor had been steeped in resentful energy, and Hanguang-jun is apparently notorious for showing up wherever the chaos is. Sometimes, though, Lan Wangji gives him this Look. It’s hard to describe exactly what’s so unsettling about the Look, but Wei Wuxian thinks it’s something in the way it makes Lan Wangji’s whole face soften.
It’s not that the expression is unfamiliar. It’s just that Wei Wuxian can’t figure out why it’s directed at him.
He runs through possible explanations in his head, ticking them off as they travel together. Has Lan Wangji simply become more patient with nonsense over the years? He’s a teacher, now, so that might make sense. Has he maybe developed a sense of humor in his old age, and finally finds Wei Wuxian’s jokes funny? It could be, but Wei Wuxian has always been hilarious, and it makes no sense for Lan Wangji to just have figured that out now. Did he have… relations… with Mo Xuanyu before he gave up his body for Wei Wuxian? That seems less plausible, and gives Wei Wuxian this odd, sour taste in his mouth whenever he thinks about it.
Anyway.
Lan Wangji isn’t a bad travelling companion. Other than the fact that he keeps those weird Gusu Lan hours, he’s really accommodating. Whenever Wei Wuxian starts to feel tired, Lan Wangji suggests they stop. He brings Wei Wuxian food before he can even ask for it, always perfectly spicy and hot. He lets Wei Wuxian drink himself into oblivion, even though Wei Wuxian can see the unhappiness on his face.
The arm they carry with them leads them West, then East, and then finally to a weird, mist-shrouded town with a name that reads like a bad omen.
(Eventually, Wei Wuxian stops flirting shamelessly and starts falling into the dangerously familiar pattern of living life with Lan Wangji at his side.)
seventh,
The thing about Xue Yang is that Wei Wuxian never seems to see him coming. No matter how long it’s been, he always catches Wei Wuxian by surprise.
Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan are dead.
The hurt of the revelation shocks Wei Wuxian. Xiao Xingchen’s sunken cheeks and empty eyes, Song Lan’s expression of profound and utter misery - they stay with Wei Wuxian after he leaves Yi City. They tail behind him like hungry ghosts.
Wei Wuxian lies awake the night after they leave Song Lan behind, twin swords crossed over his back and a pouch with precious cargo clutched carefully in his hands. As the night wears into morning, Wei Wuxian holds himself very, very still, his eyes open and staring blankly at the wooden ceiling of the inn they’ve found to stay at. His chest is aching. It is bitter and overwhelming, like it had been in the moments after he’d first woken up in Mo Xuanyu’s body, as his spirit was remembering how to feel. Maybe even a little worse.
If he’s being honest, he’d sort of thought that he’d run out of grief by now. But there was always something about Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan - about the promise of them, of two people who could’ve gone anywhere in the world with anyone in the world and still stayed with each other - that had seemed so sacred to Wei Wuxian. That had seemed unbreakably, inviolably precious.
Distant snow and cold frost, bright moon and gentle breeze.
The world, without them, seems a little crueler.
To Wei Wuxian, Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan had always been a marvel. Their bond was not built by clan or blood. They weren’t tied together by any formal inter-family alliance or political maneuvering. Instead, they had simply chosen each other, every single day, over and over again. Every morning when they woke up, they had looked at each other and thought, This is the person I want by my side. This is the person I trust to have my back, out of every other person in the whole entire world. This is the person I choose to be with, freely, of my own volition.
What would it be like, Wei Wuxian wonders, to have someone choose you like that?
Beside him, in the quiet room, Lan Wangji sighs softly in his sleep. The moonlight, filtered through the open window, catches on the angle of his cheek and the downward curve of his mouth. Wei Wuxian turns over, carefully, to face Lan Wangji. He watches the easy, natural rise and fall of Lan Wangji’s chest. At the way his expression changes, opens like a flower, in sleep.
I should tell him, Wei Wuxian thinks.
Lan Wangji’s eyelashes flutter against his cheekbone.
In the morning, Wei Wuxian decides.
(In the early hours of the morning, Wei Wuxian finally drifts off to the steady rhythm of Lan Wangji’s measured, even breathing.)
eighth,
Koi Tower has changed.
The changes are subtle, but Wei Wuxian has nothing to do but pay attention, these days. The mood in Lanling is different. Not relaxed, but maybe… confident? Collected? Wei Wuxian can see Jin Guangyao in everything, everywhere he looks.
Attending the Cultivation Conference means running into the past constantly. Nei Huaisang is around one corner, all big eyes and trembling lips, begging Lianfang-zun to help him fix whatever problem he’s run into this time. Jiang Cheng is around another, all brooding silences and sharp glares and bitter smiles.
They have enough on their plate without the addition of Wei Wuxian’s weird, unsettled feelings, including but not limited to Jin Guangyao’s scheming and his secret dungeon and the reappearance of Suibian and, oh, yeah, Nie Mingjue’s whole entire severed head. So Wei Wuxian tries to act the same as he always does, bright and chipper and carefree.
“Are you okay?” Lan Wangji asks him, watching with impassive eyes as Wei Wuxian carefully etches a sigil onto a tiny, human-shaped paper talisman.
“Hmm, yeah, I - wait, what?” Wei Wuxian asks, looking up from his work. “Me?”
Lan Wangji arches an eyebrow. They are the only two people in the room.
Wei Wuxian tugs at the sleeve of his robe, off-guard. “I’m fine,” he says. “Why? Are you okay?”
Lan Wangji says, “It is difficult for me to be here.”
Wei Wuxian spills ink on his talisman.
“Shit,” he says, softly, trying in vain to wipe it up. Lan Wangji watches him quietly for a second before reaching across the table to help.
“The last time I came here,” Lan Wangji continues, his voice unwavering, “I was losing someone very important to me. He was telling me goodbye, and I didn’t even realize it.”
Wei Wuxian pauses. The ink on the table is slick and red. He can see his reflection in it.
Lan Qiren? Wei Wuxian thinks. He can’t remember, but he thinks Lan Qiren was probably in a coma the last time Lan Wangji was here. Is that what he is talking about?
“I don’t like it here, either,” Wei Wuxian says, because it seems like something Mo Xuanyu would say. It’s only a half-truth, though. It’s not like things had been great the last time he visited - he’d stormed off to go find Wen Ning in a concentration camp, he seems to recall - but there was something simple about his anger back then. Something logical and orderly.
Wei Wuxian is smart. He’s quick. Back then, he could see the writing on the wall as the cultivation world began to turn its back on him, before his brother and his sister and probably even Hanguang-jun.
The ink has been cleaned up. Lan Wangji leans back, away from Wei Wuxian, his hands settling neatly in his lap. Wei Wuxian hadn’t noticed the proximity until he’d lost it. The absence feels like cold wind washing over him.
“We won’t stay long,” Lan Wangji tells him. Wei Wuxian knows he means don’t worry.
Wei Wuxian finishes his paper talisman and changes the topic to Jin Guangyao’s secret room, his hidden wife, and the discovery of Chifeng-zun. He knows he’s rambling and desperately hopes the bizarre, inscrutable pain in his chest isn’t showing on his face.
(Across the table, Lan Wangji watches him silently, his eyes as golden as the moon.)
ninth,
Wei Wuxian is not a perfect man.
He is stubborn and headstrong. He is short-sighted and careless, sometimes, and prone to saying things he does not mean. His memory stinks. He’s loud and obnoxious and he takes serious things too lightly and light things too seriously. He has hurt people - more people than he can count, people he loved and treasured and people he never even met, whose names he never even learned. Right now, he has a hole in his ribcage because of the mistakes he’s made, the people he’s hurt, the loved ones he’s let down.
Wei Wuxian is not a perfect man, but he is also not a liar.
The way Lan Wangji looks at him cuts Wei Wuxian deeper than any sword ever could. As he lies in Lan Wangji’s arms, stab wound weeping blood, Wei Wuxian realizes, bitterly, that he has been deceiving Lan Wangji in a way that is unforgivable - willfully and constantly. He can barely bring himself to play the part of Mo Xuanyu anymore, even halfheartedly.
Lan Wangji holds him carefully, reverently, like Wei Wuxian is something immeasurably, unspeakably precious. His starlight-pale robes are stained with Wei Wuxian’s blood, a startling riot of ugly color. He is trembling, ever-so-slightly. Wei Wuxian feels it in his hands, pressed to the wound in Wei Wuxian’s chest.
Lan Wangji, Lan Zhan. Hanguang-jun. Second jade of Gusu Lan.
He is crying, silent, elegant tears.
It’s me, Wei Wuxian wants to tell him. It’s me, Lan Zhan. I died, and now I’m back, and I missed you so much it hurt, and I don’t know why.
I still miss you. How can you miss someone who’s right in front of you?
(In the end, Wei Wuxian lives, but he will not forget Lan Wangji’s tears.)
tenth,
They survive Jin Guangyao, and Nie Mingjue’s fierce corpse, and the immense and terrible grief of Zewu-jun. They survive, and they leave the cave together, and suddenly there is a future, stretching out in front of Wei Wuxian. Not a mystery to solve, not a battle to survive, just a future.
It hasn’t been like this, for Wei Wuxian, for a very, very long time. Even back before he’d died, life in Yiling had been about survival. About lasting another day, another week, another month, another year. Suddenly, Wei Wuxian has options .
Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian stand together in an open field, time stretching out in front of them, and Wei Wuxian finally, finally breaks.
“I have to tell you,” he says, his gaze directed at Lan Wangji’s feet. The words tumble out of him, high-pitched, panic rising, bloody and familiar, in his throat. “I’m not… Hanguang-jun, I don’t-”
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says, gentle.
Wei Wuxian shakes his head. “No, wait, just let me finish saying this. I know you’ve been helping me, and I’m grateful, but if you knew who I was, you wouldn’t let me be here with you, and I don’t know if I can-”
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says again.
“Listen, Hanguang-jun, I’m trying to tell you that I’m-”
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says, insistent.
This time, Wei Wuxian understands.
His throat closes.
“Oh,” he whispers. “Oh. You knew.”
Lan Wangji nods, once. He is looking at Wei Wuxian, just looking, his face painted with the same studious blankness that Wei Wuxian has been memorizing since they were fifteen.
“Since when?” Wei Wuxian asks.
“Since the beginning,” Lan Wangji tells him.
Wei Wuxian breathes out a laugh. “Hanguang-jun really is amazing,” he begins.
Lan Wangji shakes his head, fierce. “Don’t call me that,” he says, sharply.
Wei Wuxian lifts an eyebrow. “Then, Lan er-gongzi-”
“My name,” Lan Wangji says. “Wei Ying. Please.”
Wei Wuxian takes in a breath, long and slow. Lan Wangji’s face is icy-still, his brow furrowed and his lips pressed thin.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says.
Lan Wangji exhales, almost a shudder. And then he reaches out, slow and careful. His hand is trembling, ever-so-slightly, as his fingers bump against the soft skin below Wei Wuxian’s jaw. As his thumb traces a line along Wei Wuxian’s skin, sliding up to his lips.
Wei Wuxian huffs out an involuntary, surprised breath against the pad of Lan Wangji’s thumb.
Lan Wangji’s eyes blow wide.
“You,” he says, his voice strangled. “You.”
“Me,” Wei Wuxian whispers back, and he tries to grin, but now Lan Wangji’s hands are tracing his throat, his cheekbones, the length of his eyelashes, hungry and earnest, and it’s making it extremely difficult to concentrate. So he turns his face into Lan Wangji’s open palm and presses a kiss to the space between his thumb and his fingers, letting his eyes flutter shut.
“I called for you,” Lan Wangji breathes. “You never answered. I thought-”
“I heard you,” Wei Wuxian tells him. “I’ve always heard you, Lan Zhan. I just haven’t always been listening.”
Lan Wangji’s breathing falters.
Wei Wuxian lifts his gaze and meets Lan Wangji’s eyes.
“You were telling me,” he says, low and soft. “All this time, you’ve been telling me. I’m sorry I didn’t understand it until now.”
Lan Wangji blinks. He is so beautiful, Wei Wuxian thinks. Pale eyes, made from starlight. He has always been the most beautiful person Wei Wuxian has ever seen.
“I should have said it more clearly,” Lan Wangji tells him, eyebrows furrowed, voice level.
“Hmm, maybe,” Wei Wuxian says. “You can tell me now, though. Lan Zhan. Lan er-gonzi. Lan er-gege.”
“I love you,” Lan Wangji tells him.
Wei Wuxian’s heart stutter-steps into his throat.
Alive, alive, alive, it beats into his skin.
Loved, loved, loved.
“I love you,” Wei Wuxian whispers back. “Lan Zhan, I love you, I like you, I need you, I want you, I fancy you. I never wish to be parted from you, ever again.”
“Me too,” Lan Wangji tells him. “Love you. Need you. Want you. It has to be you.” The words are so quiet, Wei Wuxian almost cannot hear them - he tilts his head forward until his lips hover over Lan Wangji’s shoulder. Until Lan Wangji’s breath is warm on Wei Wuxian’s ear.
“Let’s stay together then,” Wei Wuxian says. “Stay with me, Lan Zhan. We’ll go wherever you want. To the Cloud Recesses, to travel, I don’t care.”
Lan Wangji heaves a breath that catches in his throat. There are tears in his beautiful eyes, spilling over, streaming down his face in silent lines. He is also smiling, so bright and honest it almost hurts Wei Wuxian to look at. Even crying, Hanguang-Jun is graceful. He looks like he has been carved from ivory and breathed to life.
Wei Wuxian kisses him.
Lan Wangji goes very still, his eyes blowing wide. And then he makes a soft sound, deep in his throat - and oh, all right, Wei Wuxian files that away to think about later - and surges forward, catching Wei Wuxian’s face between his hands. The kiss is messy. Lan Wangji tastes like salt and spice from dinner and something warm and heady. Wei Wuxian’s mouth slides open against Lan Wangji’s. Lan Wangji licks into his mouth. Kisses his bottom lip. Bites it, gently, and then not so gently.
“Ah,” Wei Wuxian says, surprised.
Lan Wangji pulls away. His face is still jade-smooth, but Wei Wuxian is a scholar of Lan Zhan Expressions. Even if it is minute, his breath is stuttered, and his ears are crimson as the dawn.
“Don’t do that again,” Lan Wangji says, mulishly.
Wei Wuxian blinks. “What? Kiss you?”
Lan Wangji shoots him a look that says, very articulately, You are truly the dumbest creature I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. “No,” he mutters. “Disappear.”
“Ah,” Wei Wuxian says. “Ah. Lan Zhan. I’m sorry. I made you wait a long time.”
“I would’ve waited,” Lan Wangji says. “As long as I had to.”
“Forever?” Wei Wuxian asks.
Lan Wangji nods. “Forever,” he says.
And then Wei Wuxian grins, and curls his fingers in the collar of Lan Wangji’s outer robe, and guides Lan Wangji’s mouth back down to catch his own.
(Now, he thinks, it is forever’s turn to wait.)