Work Text:
Let there be light,
let there be light,
let me be right
— Sun, Sleeping At Last
🟎
The first time he appears, you forget what night means.
He is smiling. Laughing. In this empty barren lonesome place, he brings his own light.
“Alcohol is forbidden in the Cloud Recesses,” you say, but they are empty barren lonesome words; you cannot say what you really mean, which is: How are you real?
You know it is beyond reason or logic or nature, beyond anything and everything you have ever been taught to be —
His eyes meet yours, and it is sunlight at your throat. No cloud can fully obscure this warmth.
— but you cannot help but drown in the blazing good of his smile, and you know that this thing beyond, this thing you are learning now, is truth.
(Already you know: you cannot hide.)
In the end he bounds away laughing, and your heart echoes his fleeting footsteps. He’s gone, a sun now set.
The evening breeze rushes around you and for a split second you think you are falling, falling, floating. Then night becomes night once more, again empty barren lonesome.
You: the moon, alone.
(But you do not forget how bright he made it all seem.)
🟎
Your whole life you have valued the silence, sat by quiet. Not worshipped, but it has always been the center of your orbit, the absolute certain stillness of silence serene. It isn’t until he’s in your room, filling the mirror-still lake of its space with his rippling laughter, that you realize your orbit is now drawn to this too. This: his burning goodness and brilliant joy, even in the midst of what is technically punishment. This: his bright noise, as kind to you than the quiet has ever been.
(This: him.)
“Lan Zhan!”
The world focuses; there is nothing else. You blink, and in that silent-loud way of his you know he knows you’re listening.
“Lan Zhan, stop staring at me like that. It’s unsettling! If you wanna say something then do it, don’t just sit there and glare at me.” He turns to you, settles his arms over your desk and his head on his arms, looks up at you like a child. You’re not fooled; you already know he is anything but, and anyone who falls for the facade is not looking close enough.
You want to tell him his sleeves will get stained by the ink like this, but the words die in your throat when your eyes catch onto his.
(It infuriates you sometimes, how bright and clear they are.)
He leans closer, grin spreading wide. “Well?”
He wants words. You know you cannot possibly give him the right ones, but still you can’t help but think, as you gaze into those impossibly brilliant eyes, Your brightness, your light, your heart. You. I never imagined I would want something as blinding and beautiful as this —
Something sunlit pounds along your throat, a strange thundering sound loud enough to drown out your own thoughts.
You barely hear yourself say, “Shameless.”
It isn’t until his laughter quiets once more that you realize, distantly:
That was the sound of my heartbeat.
🟎
And you hate him, you hate him, you hate him
(lies)
made all the more shameful
because you fear
because you cannot bring yourself to speak the truth
You have endured so much worse than this,
the sutra you chant to your own unhearing heart:
spears and arrows and words dripping hate —
But this is another kind of suffering:
you never knew your own heart could betray you like this.
🟎
You know, logically, that all suns eventually collapse, their own brightness finally overwhelming their hearts. But this is no logical death, and you will give anything to save him from it.
He is already on the threshold of no return: but still you stay with him, hold his dying wounded body close to yours and lend him all the strength you have, begging and begging these cold unflinching heavens to let him live, let him survive this, let him live so you can at least tell him.
“Wei Ying,” you plead, to him and to whatever greater power still stands by watching and doing nothing, “Wei Ying, don’t— You can’t—” ( not you, not your bright burning light ) “Wei Ying, please,” you beg, and you have never realized that tears, these things of water, could scorch your skin like fire —
You bury your face into his hair, cradle his body, let all the spiritual power you have seep from you to him like rain to soil. Have it, you cry, have it all, have everything I have ever called my own, everything I will give just to —
“My sun,” you choke out, finally, finally. “Don’t leave me here.”
But then he wakes, and the second his eyes meet yours you already know —
“Get lost,” he snarls.
— moon though you may be, he is not the sun for you to claim.
🟎
“He’s dead.”
In the end, it is your brother who tells you, and it is fitting because he is the only one you know who also holds his own sun too close.
“No.” You no longer know your own voice. It is not anger; anger is in heaven. This thing you feel trembles and roars with the ugly injustice of the earth, of the sordid mortal realm below.
“No! No, he —”
And there you stop, because you cannot bring yourself to go on.
“Lan Zhan,” he whispers hoarsely. “I...”
For all your silence and your blankness, this is the first time you find yourself truly empty, barren.
Lonesome.
Your brother’s eyes were shaking before, but now they are sorry. Pleading; with whom, you wish you knew. “Lan Zhan, I am so so sorry, he was going to —”
And there you leave, because you know you cannot bring yourself to grant your brother forgiveness when you have not forgiven yourself.
Something in you dims.
Crumbles to dust.
(You know you will never shine the same again.)
🟎
And you hate him, you hate him, you hate him
(lies)
made all the more shameful
because you mourn
because you no longer have a chance to speak the truth
(how you long and long and long
for this filthy mask to fall away)
you have endured so much worse than this,
the sutra you chant to your own unhearing heart:
mother, father, mother, father —
Wei Ying, you cry out, pounding fists against this cruel sky,
Wei Ying Wei Ying Wei Ying
how were you
so right
and yet so
wronged?
(you thought you knew pain
but some twisted bet in the heavens seems
bent on using your own life
to prove you
wrong.)
🟎
And here is the worst part of it all:
that you cannot join him in heaven, and you cannot find him on earth.
What, then, is left?
(never did you imagine that
death
too
would be a privilege barred from the both of you)
🟎
Yet.
Years and years and years later, on a night in a village as unremarkable as any, you sense that something is different.
And then when you hear the impossible lilting tune, this secret sound of your own heart, that something steps forward, and you, you —
Wei Ying, you realize.
A flute, stumbling and off-pitch, echoes through the mountains, and you fly.
🟎
(the earth, the earth the earth
it shakes and you
close your eyes:
he lives)
🟎
You knew: you knew you knew you knew
his light could never be snuffed out.
Sun, risen once more.
He is alive.
(the heavens truly hold nothing for the two of you)
But you have long come to realize
the two of you have no use for the sky
when that is not the truth.
This is the truth:
guiding one another through the endless days and nights,
orbits not entangled but rather
irrevocably joined,
choosing one another to be the guide
to your cosmic wayfaring.
So you both stay on earth, sun and moon fallen
yet brighter than anything the heavens have ever seen.