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Wei Wuxian is movement.
The same way fire is never still, Wei Wuxian is a study in constant motion; low, warm, bright, roaring.
He is tapping his fingers across his knee, his pose erring just on the side of too casual without being outright rude. Lan Wangji can see Lan Qiren’s eyelid twitch all the way from here as he scans the room of disciples and his gaze catches on Wei Wuxian, loose and comfortable in a room of carefully kneeling students.
Lan Wangji’s gaze catches on him too, and he thinks ridiculous with a pointed glare at where Wei Wuxian’s long fingers won’t sit still.
He doesn’t think he has ever sprawled like that in his life.
It’s distracting — Wei Wuxian is always moving, fidgeting, running — and Lan Wangji wished he’d just stop for a moment so that his head could stop spinning.
He runs through Cloud Recesses, manhandles Jiang Cheng with his elbow crooked around his neck, throws an arm over Nie Huaisang’s shoulders, even reaches out, suicidally in the eyes of some, to tug Lan Wangji forward or back. A force of nature unto himself.
The Cloud Recesses has also been quiet and still — every day a slow, even, steady march forward, day after day. A calm like no other. Lan Wangji has learned steadiness from the tall, old mountains that surround his home, has learned to ground himself in the way the mist falls over the buildings at five in the morning, with the sun barely peeking over the green hills and grey peaks. His heart has beat in pattern for seventeen years. And then Wei Wuxian enters, and kicks up dust on the paths. And Lan Wangji’s heart skips alongside with him as Wei Wuxian runs.
Lan Wangji scowls, he ignores, he watches, he doles out and accepts punishment, and in the end, it doesn’t matter, because he’s as caught as anyone else in the whirlwind that Wei Wuxian pulls with him. His eyes are not the only ones that follow as Wei Wuxian spins circles around everyone, a laugh always on his face. The older Lan cultivators cannot stand that uniquely youthful mix of raw talent, too little sense, too much confidence. Girls smile, flirt back demurely, and giggle behind their sleeves as he strides on. The other disciples either love him, want to be him, or despise him, depending on how easily annoyed and how prone to jealous they are. And Lan Wangji — Lan Wangji waits, almost eager in a way so foreign to him, so wrong , for Wei Wuxian to smile at him, to say Lan Zhan in that infuriating, teasing voice of his.
He shouldn’t, but he does.
A childish desire. His world burns, and he grows up.
Lan Wangji burns with it, but quieter. Anger just below the surface.
He blinks, and his home and his sword are gone. His brother is missing. When he lives it, it feels interminable, watching the careful balance of the cultivation world come tumbling apart. A string pulled, and the cloth unravels.
He blinks, and he is humming a song he’d never thought he would let another person hear to a Wei Wuxian who slips between consciousness and unconsciousness, fever burning.
He blinks, and another home burns. Wei Wuxian’s, this time.
He blinks, and Wei Wuxian is missing.
//
Wei Wuxian now moves with a quickness that is less confidence and more deadly precision.
Like if he didn’t have to move, maybe he wouldn’t.
He is still now, head cocked, eyes cold, and Lan Wangji is frozen on the roof of this house, peering between terracotta slats at the scene below.
His face is sallow and gaunt, dark bruises under his red-rimmed eyes. When he smiles, it’s not the wide, bright thing Lan Wangji remembers: where his cheeks lift, his eyes crinkle. This is small and cold and hard, a slash of red and a flash of teeth like he’s baring them, ready to bite. A predator in wait.
This is the unnatural still before a storm.
Lan Wangji does not want to see this storm, but somehow he knows it is inevitable.
Wen Chao is cowering before him, ghostly shadows flit around the room, visible in flashes of bared teeth and bloodied hands. Beside Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng is equally as still, as shocked. It’s been— months, since Lan Wangji had seen Wei Wuxian, since they’d all assumed he’d died or worse. And now here he is, standing upright, still that casual confidence in every line but more severe, still the same dark hair and high cheekbones but more stark, still Wei Wuxian but more still. All Lan Wangji feels, after the shock, is relief.
The rest comes later.
The worry, the anger, the helplessness. Wei Wuxian grows colder, harsher, sharper. He walks a knife’s edge between the Wei Wuxian Lan Wangji remembers and… someone else. Lan Wangji does not feel fear often, but of this, he is afraid.
“Come back to Gusu with me,” he says, reaching for something he knows is already out of reach. Wei Wuxian laughs in his face, and there it is again: that helplessness. He is so close, but there’s a pane of clouded glass between them, and no matter how hard he scrubs at it, how much force he hits it with, it doesn’t become clear, it refuses to shatter. Lan Wangji reaches, but his fingers are already a centimeter further away than he’d thought.
He hears stories. Wei Wuxian, with an army that shouldn’t be. One man and a horde of corpses, razing battlefields. He fights alone, mostly, and the other cultivators fear what they don’t know, so they stay away. Lan Wangji catches glimpses of him, across courtyards during strategy meetings, during diplomatic missions, but his battlefields are further north than Wei Wuxian’s, and their paths cross rarely. Wei Wuxian looks sharper, more severe, with every glimpse.
And then they win somehow.
And then it all falls apart.
Lan Wangji stands in the rain, umbrella forgotten, and hears the words echo in his head ad infinitum. If I am to die, let it be by your hand, Hanguang-Jun. I would have no feelings of resentment.
An impossibility.
Let it be by your hand.
Lan Wangji knows his hand will never be able to move against Wei Wuxian with killing intent. He does not know if this is wrong, or right, or neither. He only knows it will not happen.
And again, the stories: the Yiling Patriarch, terrible, ferocious, evil, insane, immoral. Lan Wangji does not believe them, because he knows men, and men fear what they cannot control.
There is a child clinging to his leg.
He’s small, head barely reaching Lan Wangji’s hip, and after a moment of shocked staring, the little boy starts crying. Lan Wangji has absolutely no idea what to do, and there’s already a crowd gathering around them, and then a voice he didn’t know if he’d be lucky enough to hear again — “ Lan Zhan! ”
Lan Wangji’s head shoots up; their eyes meet across the crowd. He thinks he could collapse at the smile on Wei Wuxian’s face.
They fit together well — this little boy, A-Yuan, and Wei Wuxian. Lan Wangji knows his expression is too soft, but he can’t help it. Wei Wuxian looks… happy, almost, despite the dark bruises under his eyes and the way his cheekbones are stark, his collarbones a clear line underneath the loose drape of his robes. He holds the little boy close to him, and his expression is loving and mirrored right back in A-Yuan’s chubby cheeks and bright eyes. He sits across the table from Wei Wuxian and drinks him in, thinks he could survive off this glimpse alone for the next decade.
Lan Wangji’s fingers ache with the want to keep him safe.
They ache, and ache, and ache, gripped tight to the hilt of his sword, strumming notes on his guqin, a flurry of white in a field of chaos, and his heart splinters.
He cannot find Wei Wuxian anymore.
He’d seen the look of pure panic and heartbreak on the other man’s face, a shard of helplessness painted across the lines of his face, his red-rimmed eyes. This man, on the edge of falling. This man, who had been pushed and pushed and pushed, who had lost everything.
Lan Wangji’s fingers ache.
Wei Wuxian jumps down from the rooftop, and Lan Wangji loses him in the flurry of bloodshed that erupts as that tentative control cracks.
Lan Wangji’s fingers ache.
He is holding his life with one hand, shoulder nearly pulled out of its socket, blood dripping down down down. Wei Wuxian looks up at him and tells him to let go. Lan Wangji cannot. He cannot think about the look on Wei Wuxian’s face as he let himself tip over the edge of the cliff, but it burns at the back of his eyes, overlaid with this Wei Wuxian, desperate and resigned, with blood dripping a slow line down his fingers, his forearm, his robes. His hand is slack. A yell behind him; a sword comes down into the rock near Lan Wangji’s arm.
Half his soul shakes himself free from his grip, and falls.
His fingers ache.
//
Wei Wuxian dies, and for thirteen years the whole world is still.
Or, the world moves. Moves on, moves constantly, blurring past, but Lan Wangji only sees the gaps in it: where there should be movement, but there isn’t.
He hears whispers, that he follows chaos, with no regard to importance or rank or severity, not like those sect leaders that only bother when it threatens them directly. That he goes where the chaos is, and goes righteously, fights and protects the people, from the most common to the highest ranked. The whispers are half right — when there are people suffering, he will do whatever it takes to keep them safe. The justice and righteousness and fairness of the Lans course strongly through his veins.
But he does not follow chaos; he follows movement, and he hopes.
//
Wei Wuxian is not still anymore.
No — Wei Wuxian is alive and breathing, his chest rising and falling, his slender fingers dancing across the flute in his hands, and Lan Wangji thinks his knees will give out then and there, but he somehow manages to stay upright, manages to reach out and wrap his hand around Wei Wuxian’s wrist.
He doesn’t let Wei Wuxian know that he knows it’s him (it’s him it’s him it’s him , alive and breathing and wonderful and perhaps the face he wears is new but the way his eyes blink at Lan Wangji is the same), because Wei Wuxian is a thunderstorm, and Lan Wangji thinks he might be swept away, might be drowned if he lets himself be, so he doesn’t risk it.
Instead, he tucks all of that away behind the expressionless exterior he keeps, and they go back to Gusu.
Words from another life echo in Lan Wangji’s head: come back to Gusu with me . The memory stings, but this is different.
Lan Wangji watches him grow into this new body’s movements. The way Wei Wuxian seems to get confused at his now shorter stride. Adjusting for his slightly more slender build. Going face to face with someone to argue, and having to tilt his head up rather than look his opponent in the eye, or even down. The gracefulness, the confidence, are still there, but sometimes stilted.
“He who goes where the chaos is,” Wei Wuxian says, musing. “Ah, Lan Zhan, you were always the most just of us all,” and Lan Wangji doesn’t know how to say that it was not justice that led him on those paths, but a twisted sort of hope. Maybe Wei Wuxian is where the chaos is — because for Lan Wangji, movement has always been a sort of contained chaos. He never learned how to be electric like that, erratic like fire. Maybe if Wei Wuxian isn’t there, then I will finally go to him — because for Lan Wangji, chaos has always meant lives at stake, lives that are more important than his. The common people, the cultivators, the peasants and the princes, all more deserving of being saved than Lan Wangji, with his one foot in this world, waiting, and his other foot in the next world, searching.
Perhaps it was pure dumb luck that he stayed alive all that time, following the chaos wherever it was. Lucky that Lan Wangji is skilled, fluid like water and deadly when he needs to be. Lucky that he had Lan Sizhui, to give him a reason to live. Lucky that now he has Wei Wuxian sitting in front of him, hair messy after a day of travelling, chopsticks in hand, mumbling theories about the severed limbs in the qiankun bag while the inn bustles with the dinner rush around them.
Wei Wuxian’s mind is the same, jumping so quickly between thoughts, ideas and solutions that no one else would have considered but which make so much sense.
Everything that had unravelled before slowly starts pulling itself back together, the cloth restitching, the lies and treachery and violence around them, and Lan Wangji’s heart, quiet for so long, beats back to life stronger and stronger with every moment that Wei Wuxian is near him, next to him, close enough to touch.
His heart nearly freezes again when Jin Guangyao has the garrote pressed against Wei Wuxian’s neck. Jin Guangyao steps back, pulls tighter, even as Wei Wuxian yells for Lan Wangji not to listen, not to do anything, but there’s a thin smile of red stretching across the elegant line of Wei Wuxian’s neck, and so Lan Wangji sheathes Bichen, locks away his spiritual powers without hesitation.
He has lost Wei Wuxian once before; he will not lose him again.
When his brother’s sword sinks into Jin Guangyao’s chest, Lan Wangji cannot help the feeling of relief that sweeps through him.
Relief: the people he cares about are all safe. The questions, the uncertainties of the past years fall into place. Wei Wuxian is — alive, breathing, his .
They part, but there is a red ribbon tied around Lan Wangji’s wrist, underneath his sleeve, and he knows that it will be collected by its owner one day, and so his heart is impatient, but calm. He hasn’t felt that kind of hope in years, not since —
— not since the years when he waited for that sweet voice calling Lan Zhan! across a quiet courtyard, for a smile to be directed his way, for a rule to be broken.
“ Wei Ying ,” he says, steady on a mountaintop outside Cloud Recesses, and watches half his soul, his love, his light, turn around, watches the blinding smile stretch across Wei Wuxian’s face.
What an irony that he should be Hanguang-Jun, Light Bearer. His light comes from someone else.
Wei Wuxian is bright, and blinding, and a spring storm, calm and wild and lovely all at once. They fall together. Lan Wangji holds out his wrist, offers the red ribbon back, but Wei Wuxian closes his fingers over it, and says, “Keep it. It’s yours now, always,” and what Lan Wangji hears is I’m yours now, always .
But Wei Wuxian is still sometimes, too still, like he’s remembering what it’s like to be dead.
Eyes distant, fingers motionless. Like he’s listening to a sound that comes from far away, from the past.
And other times, his movements are not his. Lan Wangji usually sleeps like a rock, all but passed out, but he is more attuned to the rise and fall of Wei Wuxian’s chest than he is to his own circadian rhythms, at this point. Through sleep, through dreaming, he can hear the hitch in Wei Wuxian’s breath, and he blinks awake the next moment. Beside him, Wei Wuxian jerks, still asleep. His breathing is hoarse, coming in short gasps now. He mutters something under his breath — no, don’t, no, I won’t let you! — an arm goes flying up, as though pushing something, someone away.
Wei Wuxian’s fingers tremble where they’re stretched out. Don’t touch them; just take me instead, take me- and Lan Wangji doesn’t think twice before he sits up, runs a gentle hand down Wei Wuxian’s shoulder to wake him, only for the other man to shoot upright in the bed, eyes wide and frantic, breathing heavy, fingers scrambling towards the bedside table where his flute sits before he realizes that it’s just Lan Wangji.
“Ah, Lan Zhan,” he says, and his voice is shaky, though he clearly tries to hide it. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry, it’s a wonder you put up with me sleeping by your side every night.” He laughs, short and fake, and tucks his shaking hands under his armpits.
“Mm. You should not apologize,” Lan Wangji says, chest aching for some reason he can’t pinpoint, and he opens his arms to pull Wei Wuxian towards him. Wei Wuxian goes easily, sighing into Lan Wangji’s chest as he goes limp, tucks himself tighter into the circle of his arms.
Lan Wangji smooths a hand down Wei Wuxian’s back and doesn’t dare let go, even as Wei Wuxian’s breathing evens out, as slips back into sleep, both of them still half upright but his fingers curled tight in the front of Lan Wangji’s sleep shirt. He feels where those fingers rest right over his heart, a comforting presence. Lan Wangji’s chest feels both too big and too tight for all the ways he feels right now. Like if he doesn’t draw in a deep breath, he will simply explode, or maybe he should hold his breath till this tide subsides, till he can draw in air without fear of disintegrating.
He thinks perhaps he feels too strongly, after all, beneath that ice exterior. His brother has all but told him this much, a worrying look on his face and a quiet, you are undone because of him. Is that healthy?
Lan Wangji had not answered, had not known how to. Lying is prohibited in the Cloud Recesses; he could say neither no nor yes. It was true — he was undone because of Wei Wuxian. Pulled apart, unravelled, unmasked. He had never felt sadness like that until Wei Wuxian had died. He had never felt joy like that until he had Wei Wuxian alive and breathing again under his palm.
He looks at Wei Wuxian, sprawled out in the grass, in the sunshine, a rabbit sleeping on his chest, and thinks perhaps he does feel too strongly, but if this feeling — of contentment, of happiness, of calm — exists now so vibrantly, then those long years of despair had their purpose too.
He would live them again and again, if only Wei Wuxian could remain here and now smiling gently at him like that, as safe as he could hope to be, squinting against the sun in his face.
What a selfish person I am , Lan Wangji thinks. He loves movement too much to regret the stillness.