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“Wei Ying.”
People don’t just call out his name.
He was frozen, Chenqing still at his lips even though he had ceased playing. He hadn't heard anything else, but there was no way that that was a hallucination. It was more likely that the voice that said it was merely waiting, as he always did, never pressing.
People don’t call out his name, no one knows it anymore. Not where he goes. If they know anything of him he is the Yiling Patriarch and he is just smoke and mirrors. They do not know him, they just know of him. They know of his acts. To hear his birth name is to imply that the person knows him. And of course, he does. How could anyone know him more than the owner of the voice?
There have been hundreds of times that people have said his name, shouted it, screamed it in anger, begged it. He had come to associate it with pain, just as others had. But the way it rolled off of the other man’s tongue was reverent, a near whisper. It’s how he’d wished he could always hear his name said. He had wished privately many times that the only person who says his name is the owner of the voice.
He stared at the scenery for a while longer, almost as if thickening his face, almost as if saying goodbye to some unknown force in the wilderness that had accompanied him on his single log road. Truly though there was someone who had been in his heart, in his mind the entire time – had it been such a lonely journey?
He wouldn’t miss being wild. He refused to. If he could bow three times right here and now, he would. He'd made his decision long ago, maybe longer than he had consciously realised it.
He turned slowly, almost as if he were going to discover that his brain had played tricks. He’d been hoping, almost daring to dream, that playing that song would bring forth something other than the memory of a hauntingly beautiful, statuesque boy in a cave humming it for him when he’d asked, back when they’d barely been friends.
He had to say that he hadn’t been expecting such a quick reaction.
If he was being truly honest with himself - with the time that he’d been away he wasn’t expecting anything at all.
But that was the trouble, wasn’t it? When had Lan Zhan ever done anything that he had expected him to?
Everyone always thought that they had Lan Zhan figured out from day one – cold, shuttered, rule-abiding. There had been a time that he had mistakenly thought that too. And it wasn’t that he wasn’t those things, it was that he was more.
Cold, but there was the genuine, deep warmth in his eyes when he looked at Sizhui, when he had stroked carefully behind the ears of the rabbits, when he looked at Wei Ying. Shuttered, but willing to bend and break for those that he deemed worthy, confiding raw emotions in Wei Ying during times when he was more breaking than bending. Rule abiding, except when it didn’t suit him and those he cared for were in danger. Lan Zhan had always been more than other expectations of him.
Even now, he was more than Wei Ying expected.
The smile that burst slowly across Wei Ying’s face came unbidden.
There was that warmth in his face now as Wei Ying stared at him. Looking at his eyes, the small smile on his face, all he could think of was that he was ready. That finally, they were ready.
He would give up ascension in every life if it would mean that Lan Zhan would always wait for him.
It didn't seem fair for him to wait any longer, not when Wei Ying knew exactly what he wanted. In retrospect, maybe he had always wanted it. But what he knew now, with absolute certainty, was that he wanted it forever.
‘Lan Zhan," he said, putting the lilt into his voice that he had teased him with since they were fifteen. "Aren’t you going to say it?”
His hands twitched at his sides as he willed himself to stay in place. If Lan Zhan had been capable of making an expression like rolling his eyes, he probably would have. His smile didn’t fade, and the one mirrored on Lan Zhan’s face showed no sign of dissipating, no matter how small it may have seemed. The warmth in that gaze went far deeper into Wei Ying than anyone’s hatred had ever hit him.
“Come back to Gusu.”
Wei Ying stepped forward then, a hand reaching out as it sought contact with a firm, white-clad one. His smile felt like he could split his face in half. The other didn’t hesitate to take it. He never had, and he never would.
Come back to Gusu.
Marry me.
And this time, he did.