Chapter Text
Even hundreds of miles away, even flat on his stomach unable to move for the whip wounds on his back, Lan Wangji knows the moment Wei Ying’s power backfires. He can feel it, a wash of resentment that reaches straight for the lungs, stopping his breath in his throat, and then a burning heat that sweeps through his limbs like it can scorch all the way to his bones.
They are soulmates, after all. Lan Wangji was always going to know the moment Wei Ying died.
It’s not going to be today. Not like this, not after everything Lan Wangji has already sacrificed to save him--his family’s good opinion, the respect of his elders, his will poured into Wei Ying’s fevered frame and his blood arcing over Cloud Recesses’ pale grey stone.
What’s one more sacrifice, if it means Wei Ying will live?
He reaches out with what tiny wisps of power he can muster and grabs onto that tenuous, fading link and pulls until the pain comes back in a flood that drowns out even the soul-scarring throbbing of the discipline whip marks. His vision wavers, then goes dark. His hands and arms shake. His skin feels stretched thin and over-heated to blistering and every bone and tendon aches like something will break at any moment, but still he hangs on. He can do this, he knows he can, knows it’s possible, and that’s all he needs: if he succeeds, Wei Ying will live. If he fails, they will both die and start over, two souls wandering the world to find each other again.
It’s a chance worth taking.
He thinks for just a moment that he can hear Wei Ying’s voice calling his name, and then light flares against his eyelids like a firework and smothering, painless darkness follows in its wake.
Consciousness comes back slowly, indistinct whispers in his ears and flickering warmth over his face. Sharp, stinging pain burns on the insides of his wrists.
He opens his eyes to find a talisman hanging over his face. He pulls it off and blinks into a dim, close space.
There’s blood on his hands.
No, not his hands. Someone else’s.
Someone else’s blood on someone else’s hands, from cuts on someone else’s wrists. Someone else’s blood on their thin-woven, undyed hanfu, and painted in an array that takes up half the planed wooden floor of the tiny room they sit in. The smell of mingled blood and power hangs in the air, cloying and thick enough to taste.
Avenge me, echoes in his mind in an unfamiliar voice.
Avenge me, Hanguang-jun.