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It has been three months since Lan Zhan had asked him to stay.
Wei Wuxian has seen many beautiful things since then.
He’s been wandering from town to town, one sect to another and then making the most of the in-betweens -- always travelling alone (unless you counted the small, lazy donkey by his side). He’s climbed mountains for the fun of it, sat upon their heads and watched the trees sway below. He’s passed through villages and charmed strangers into giving him a place to sleep for the night, but has seemed to lost some of the youthful playfulness that’d landed him into all sorts of trouble when he’d been younger.
This was what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? The feeling of wind in his hair, a route for him, only him, to decide.
(He wonders if Lan Zhan thinks of him, from time to time.)
He makes sure to get souvenirs, even if he doesn’t quite have a home to keep them in. Most of them are trinkets, little things from roadside shops he chances upon in the towns he visits -- some of these he sends to Lan Zhan, along with the letters they’ve been exchanging back and forth.
He’d just sent one away in the wind a few days ago, a lengthy letter about his recent travels (a natural hot spring, Lan Zhan, what are the chances --) along with a small, compact package of tea leaves he thought the other man would like. A reply comes back to him in half the time he usually gets them, fluttering in the wind with some sort of urgency that makes Wei Ying’s eyebrows furrow.
The handwriting scrawled hastily over the soft, yellowed paper was not Lan Zhan’s.
He’d read on; the letter seemed rushed, too brief -- Wei-Qianbei, it starts. Wei Ying had blinked, then blanched.
Wei-Qianbei must be surprised, and Sizhui apologises. Hanguang-Jun would surely be angry at me, once he finds out I have sent this -- but I feel, it is important for you to know. Hanguang-Jun is ill, very ill.
A pause in the writing, before it begins on a new line.
He would not tell anyone. But he has been getting worse.
Please, Wei-Qianbei -- hurry back.
Respectfully,
Lan Sizhui
He'd made it to the Cloud Recesses before the sun could even begin its descent.
He bypasses the guards easily, now -- they let him through with a bow, heads tilted down and parting at the gates. (He barely stops to return it, chest suddenly feeling much too tight, heart trembling in a way it hasn’t in a long time.) The sky begins to darken, faint cerulean bleeding into reds and oranges and dark purples, and Wei Ying takes two steps at a time.
He finds Sizhui standing before the Jingshi.
“Wei-Qianbei,” the young man, now, greets him with a bow. He’d been waiting for him, it seems, bright, previously childlike eyes clouded over with something anxious, something that makes Wei Ying’s stomach curl.
“Is he okay?” Are the only words Wei Ying is able to find.
Sizhui takes a breath. Levels his tense expression out into something softer, firmer, then says, voice quiet and tender -- “Hanguang-Jun is stable, at the moment.” The young disciple presses his lips together, worrying at them for a moment before he continues. “Asleep. But…”
Wei Ying thinks his heart trips on something. Eyebrows furrowed and breath caught in his throat, his eyes travel to the shut doors of the Jingshi. “But?”
Sizhui looks around. Eyes holding tumultuous oceans, he says -- “It’s better if we talk indoors, Wei-Qianbei.”
The Yashi looks -- exactly the same.
There are flowers on the low table, now. Carnations, deep red and full and folded, bursting from a delicate clay vase. Wei Wuxian, like with many things now, does not remember why he knows. But he knows, knows the tan wood floors and and the bamboo-plank blinds unfurling from the ceiling and the twisting bonsai beyond the circle-cut windows. (His mind does not remember, but every other breathing cell in him does.)
“Wei-Qianbei,” Sizhui breaks the silence, soft. Bows, gently, and extends an arm. “Please, sit.”
It’s only when he tears his eyes off the room, does he realize they are not alone. There is a lady, a physician -- older but steady, as she curtsies to greet them. Wei Ying bows and clutches at his flute and tries, tries to breathe.
Sizhui -- bless Sizhui, honestly -- seems to sense the urgency bubbling up inside of him, for he begins to speak the second they settle onto the cold, gleaming floor. “Hanguang-Jun has been…...cursed.”
Wei Ying’s eyes widen. All of him lurches, a tiny ship that hadn’t quite gotten a warning in time for a storm. “What?”
The young disciple pauses. Turns to the elder physician by his side, motioning for her to speak with a soft nod. The lady looks Wei Ying over once, eyes grey and deep and knowing.
“A lover’s curse,” is what she says finally.
The words are uttered quietly, but it crashes right into him. Tiny, tiny words -- they gush down his throat, make his bones squeeze for space to breathe.
Lan Zhan had never told him.
Never in the letters they’d exchanged, had he mentioned falling in love.
Wei Ying had -- Wei Ying had imagined it before. Had imagined the great and stoic Hanguang-Jun, who was always, always soft and sweet and beautiful with him -- had imagined him in love. Perhaps it was a disciple. Unlikely -- Lan Zhan wouldn’t let it happen. A pretty lady from a neighbouring clan? A servant, maybe, someone kind, humble. Gentle. Like Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan wouldn’t care about status. (Wei Ying imagines it, and feels an ache deep inside.)
The physician, he realizes, has begun to speak again.
“One-sided love,” she says, soft. “It festers from a one-sided love, grown too deep to be uprooted.”
Wei Ying, then, feels angry. Angrier than the last time he can remember, trembles with it. He knows -- knows love isn’t something to be forced, but the image of Lan Zhan, sick and in pain and in love, only for it to be wasted, makes a fury boil inside of him. Lan Zhan, who was always so careful, so cautious with everything, his words and his actions and his heart, was the last person to deserve that.
“Hanguang-Jun --” Sizhui murmurs, as if a part of his stream of consciousness. “He’s begun to cough blood.”
Wei Ying, all of him, freezes.
“There’d only been flowers, at first. But he’s...deteriorating, too quickly.” The young disciple has begun to worry at his bottom lip again. “Will he --” Wei Ying starts, then stops, the thought of finishing his sentence making his stomach churn. The look on the physician’s face, however, confirms the answer to his question. “If the love is not eventually returned, or realized,” she says, pauses. “Yes.”
Wei Ying, suddenly, feels like hyperventilating. It aches everywhere, from the deepest corners of his chest that he hadn’t dared touch in months, squeezing at his heart and his lungs and his neck. “What do I need to do,” he chokes out, more of a demand and less of a question. “How --”
Sizhui’s face, then, shifts like a pebble skipping across a river’s surface. He looks to the elder physician, who seems to understand and begins to stand. They all rise with her. “Thank you, Madam Lee,” Sizhui says, soft and polite, dipping into a bow. Wei Ying, with his bits and pieces all over the floor, tries to pull himself together for the few seconds it takes.
Then they are alone again, the sun long gone from the sky, replaced with the gleaming silver of the moon.
It is quiet. “Pardon me, Wei-Qianbei,” Sizhui starts, voice dropping quieter than before. The young man, suddenly, looks embarrassed. “But we were wondering -- it’s strange, that Hanguang-Jun should suffer from -- well, this,” he bites his lip, eyes dropping from Wei Ying’s momentarily. Wei Ying frowns, not quite understanding. Sizhui visibly attempts to rephrase. “Your feelings for Hanguang-Jun,” he says finally, tentatively. “Have they…… “
What.
“My feelings for --” Wei Ying starts. Stops immediately, the words falling away as quickly as they’d come. He, now, feels a little cold, a little lost. He closes his mouth. Tries to smile, and forces out a weak excuse for a laugh. "What are you talking about, Sizhui?"
It is then, that Sizhui seems -- older. No longer is he the small, playful boy they'd told Wei Ying he'd taken in; his face'd seemed delicate, childlike, just moments before.
Now he's fallen silent, something quiet and dark and sad in his large doe eyes.
"Wei-Qianbei," he repeats. It hangs in the air, between them this time, reminding Wei Ying of the strings he used to watch Lan Zhan play. There's a furrow between the disciple's brows, enough to tug gently at the soft-blue band wound around his forehead. Quieter, quieter, he tries again. "Have they changed?"
Wei Ying swallows.
“No,” he says finally. Softly, like falling snow, barely louder than an exhale through his lips. Stares at the blood-red carnations until the silence drags on for too long, and he’s forced to meet Sizhui’s glimmering eyes once again.
The young disciple’s soft, sweet face turns -- confused.
“Then why --” he mutters, more so to himself. The flowers, oversaturated, bleed out onto the table.
Wei Wuxian had -- Wei Ying had tried to forget.
His memories had been shattered, the time he’d died and then woken up with a new face. They’d scattered in his head like loose papers, tracked over with dirty shoes until one could barely make a word out -- before the burial mounds, he remembers. Thank god, he remembers. He remembers -- he remembers, his shijie, her smile. It’s a fuzzy thing, now, but it’s the most beautiful thing in the world, he’s certain. One of, at least.
He remembers Jiang Cheng. How’d they’d been, back then, how his Shijie’s soups had tasted. He remembers water reaching up to his hips and the smell of lotus flowers, everywhere -- he remembers clan leader Jiang and his kindness, his large, roughened hands teaching him to pull a bow. Madam Yu, he can make out in his head sometimes -- he tries not to think too much, about the things she’d say and the way she’d looked at him, always.
Lan Zhan. He remembers Lan Zhan.
Everything that happened after he’d fallen into hell and crawled his way back out, he does not remember.
They’d told him, of course. It’d made him shake, made something so deep and dark settle in his bones that he’d wanted to stop listening, never wanted to hear again.
But still, he does not remember.
He remembers: black. Black, and voices so loud he’d screamed and had been unable to hear it. And then, and then he’d woken up, with blood on the floor and paper talismans dangling from a foreign ceiling, a few inches too short and skin paler than before.
It’s funny. That with every memory he tries to hold on to, grits his teeth and begs to be able to repaint in his head, he’d tried equally as hard to forget Lan Zhan.
No. Not Lan Zhan. Just the way he made him feel.
It’d almost worked.
For the past month he’s been wandering with nothing but a donkey for a friend, and he’d almost succeeded in making himself believe he weren’t hopelessly in love with someone who didn’t, would never, feel the same. When Lan Zhan’d asked him to stay he’d wanted to tell him, wanted to push a hand between the gaps of his ribcage and pull it out -- the ugly, scarlet-dripping mess of his heart. Wanted to tell him, Lan Zhan, it’d hurt less loving you from somewhere far.
He’d smiled, instead, and said no.
Perhaps Wei Wuxian had loved him from the start. Maybe that was what had pushed him to be so -- boisterous, loud, annoying, more than he’d ever been, when they had still been young. Always -- always looking for attention. He just hadn’t known from who.
It’d almost worked. For the last month Wei Wuxian has -- has thought less. Less about everything, but effectively, everything included Lan Zhan. He’d written letters back with a smile plastered on his face even when nobody had been around, had repeated friendfriendfriend in his head until he thought he could believe it, could want nothing but. My friend -- good friend, Lan Zhan. Nothing more, nothing less.
And then Sizhui had written.
“What do you mean?” He asks now, voice quietened. He’d pulled his knees to his chest and rests an elbow on them, now, leans a cheek into his palm. “Why did you -- ask?”
The young disciple fixes him with a gaze he can’t quite decipher. Seems to regard his blank, mildly-perplexed expression for a moment, before heaving the loudest sigh he’s ever heard a Lan disciple let out.
“Wei-Qianbei.”
Wei Wuxian levels him off with a stare equally as exasperated. “Sizhui,” he retorts, deadpan. “Can you get to the point, Sizhui-ah?”
For a second, maybe five -- Sizhui is silent. And then he starts, soft pink lips pursed; “Hanguang-Jun -- he…”
Wei Ying sits up again. Settles both hands in his lap and watches Sizhui fumble, sigh, then blurt out -- “Hanguang-Jun, when he loves someone.”
A starting like that, makes Wei Wuxian freeze. Every muscle wrapped tight around his bones now only seems to wind tighter, chest stuttering to a deafening silence before it, as quickly as before, breaks out into rain against a tin roof.
The Lan disciple seems to make a decision.
“When Hanguang-Jun loves someone,” Sizhui tries again, voice held steady. “He does it -- with everything he has. And I -- Sizhui apologises for meddling; I will serve my punishment when it’s due, but……” the tremble in his exhale betrays the mask of calmness he’d managed to find, one reminiscent of Lan Zhan’s own. “Wei-Qianbei. Hanguang-Jun loves you so, so much.”
Everything, for a little while, stops.
A breeze blows by, slipping in through the open windows, not quite cold. Warm. The sky outside is an inky, dark blue, now, and like a woollen blanket it hushes all that is beneath it -- Sizhui is looking at him. Almond, glittering eyes, face open like a freshly-printed book.
(Wei Wuxian’s chest is a plateau of wild horses.)
“What?” He rasps.
Sizhui looks at him, quiet, delicate face not quite managing to look pinched but radiating the sentiment anyway.
Perhaps it’s something on Wei Wuxian’s face, however -- the expression tenderly wipes itself off Sizhui’s face as quickly as it’d come, the Lan disciple taking in a soft breath. Drops his eyes down to the table to the swollen carnations, and says -- “Hanguang-Jun is waiting for you, Wei-Qianbei.” Pauses, looks up, then smiles something like snow. “He’d be happy to know you’re here.”
Wei Ying’s head spins.
Somehow, he manages to stumble to his feet. Voice shaking like earth, cracking a smile oh so fragile yet coloured tenderly in warmth, he croaks -- “Our Sizhui has really grown up, huh.” Watches the young man in question soften, looking like the moon has descended right into the Cloud Recesses. (He wrings his hands, eyes already tracing the hallway to the Jingshi.) “I --” he tries. Pauses. Calms, for a second, to say, “Thank you, Sizhui.”
(Running is prohibited in the Cloud Recesses. But Lan Zhan would know, would know Wei Wuxian is not something to be tamed by rules.)
(Lan Zhan, has known for a long, long time.)
*
Wei Wuxian does not cry often.
Sure, he’s shed many, many tears, over the course of both his previous life and his current. But -- they’d been in the face of massacres. The death of his Shijie. The sight of the chaos he’d breathed to life. The overwhelming, drowning feeling of I don’t know what to do.
So, he feels a little silly now, standing before the Jingshi. A hand pressed against the sliding doors, not quite moving to open it -- eyes burning, something sour and throbbing in his throat.
Lan Zhan is asleep, and there are broken, rumpled carnations bleeding into his bedside table.
They are the same ones from the Yashi. The same shade of red, the same breed -- and it was exactly something Lan Zhan, Hanguang-Jun, would do.
(To cradle the consequence of his tender heart in his large, careful hands. Give it a place to stay, somewhere familiar; accept it for what it was with no trace of guilt, not a bit of fear, not leaving any room for embarrassment. Even if it killed him.)
Wei Ying stays by his bed for a long time.
At some point the night falls, heavy and still. He’s been watching the bloodied flowers for a long time now -- just staring, tracing the dark brown stains on their already-red petals, an arm rested on the side of Lan Zhan’s bed. And then, he looks at the man himself. Soft lashes brushing against raised cheekbones, nose arched gently in the same way he’d remembered him. Skin pale like white jade, thinner compared to the last time they’d been together. He sees him, all of him, laid in a position so stiff but looking like all the tender things Wei Wuxian misses -- and he wonders, now, how he could’ve ever believed what he felt for him was anything less than all the earth’s oceans.
Perhaps he’d fallen asleep, for the next time he blinks he has his cheek rested against Lan Zhan’s mattress, legs curled up beneath him and aching against the hard floor.
There is a hand over his, the one he’d settled next to Lan Zhan when he’d been awake and hadn’t dared to touch.
He startles.
Lan Zhan is -- blinking at him. Eyelids soft and slow and heavy, his other hand still clasped over his chest. His face is -- so open, cradled tenderly in the palms of sleep but not quite sinking into them. (Beautiful, he looks beautiful.)
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying speaks up. His voice, rough from unuse, cuts through the still, night air too loud. Lan Zhan doesn’t quite seem to mind.
“Wei Ying,” he echoes back. Voice crackling, splintering worse than Wei Wuxian’s had, sending the man into a coughing fit -- panicked, Wei Ying sits up.
“Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan,” he repeats, like the words were meant to soothe. Fumbles, for second, before hurrying to pour a glass of water from the pot left by the bed. A stray carnation petal comes up tattered. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, something saturated and overripe aching in his chest.
Lan Zhan, blearily, drinks it.
“Why are you apologising?” Said man mumbles. His eyelids are drooping again, words slurring where they connect, though he moves to pull Wei Ying’s hand closer. “Missed you. Wei Ying.”
Wei Ying, a little dumbfounded and all too dazed, lets the half-asleep man maneuver him into his bed. “Miss you always,” Lan Zhan adds in a sleep-ridden whisper when he’s successfully pulled the former’s chest against his face, pillowy lips moving against the front of his clothes in a way that makes Wei Ying shudder.
(He feels the words right over his heart.)
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying tries.
Lan Zhan sighs. It comes out as a warm puff of air, pressed right into the part of him that’s trembling double-time -- said man pulls back, then, just enough to rest his head against his pillow again. “Hm?”
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying repeats, softer. The one in question -- Hanguang Jun, second jade of Lan, quite possibly the love of his goddamn life, only blinks sleepily. He would’ve thought him to be asleep, if the light of the moon wasn’t glinting against his irises every time his eyelids fluttered.
Wei Ying thinks it first. Turns the words over in his head, fits them into different shapes. Imagines his own voice voicing them aloud. Looks at Lan Zhan, then, with his hair down and soft and his face, everything, pulled close, and forgets all of it.
“I love you, Lan Zhan,” he says, a quiet and tender, pulsing thing in the dark.
For a moment, it is silent. He’s halfway to wondering if Lan Zhan had heard him, if he’d fallen asleep after all, when Lan Zhan’s lips lift into a smile.
It is -- sad. Lan Zhan smiles and it is a weeping willow in the moonlight, leaf tendrils brushing, not quite touching, the surface of a quiet lotus pond.
Lan Zhan smiles sadly. Looks at him, for a moment, eyes lidded with the weight of sleep, and Wei Ying wants to ask why -- but then, then Lan Zhan shifts upwards and kisses him, and every rational thought flies out of the window.
Wei Ying doesn’t quite dare make a sound.
His eyes, still open and frozen with surprise, sees Lan Zhan. His gentle cheekbones, his lashes settled quietly against them -- the slight, barely-visible furrow of his brows. Lan Zhan’s lips are soft, even if dry, perhaps tasting a bit like blood, like carnations -- it takes him a second, but then Wei Ying is breathing. Closing his eyes, moving his arms to drag the man impossibly closer, feeling the warm huffs of breath against his cheeks.
It is far from his first kiss. And he’d liked the girls from when he’d been younger -- pretty and blushing, sometimes huffing at his playful words. But Lan Zhan kisses him now, gentle and warm and whole, and Wei Ying thinks he might never be able to want anyone else like this again.
“Lan Zhan,” he says breathlessly once they part, Lan Zhan’s soft hands caught between their chests, alive. His own are curled around the other man’s small waist, smoothing over the wrinkles in his night robes -- he might cringe at himself, thinking back on this later -- but now his heart thrums, in the surest rhythm it has ever known. “Love you, Lan Zhan. Love you so much.”
Lan Zhan smiles, but it seems even more broken this time.
Instinctively, Wei Ying raises a hand, as if meaning to brush the sadness out from the corners of his eyes, the planes of his face. It settles himself on Lan Zhan’s cheek instead, a little hesitant and a little confused. “What’s wrong?”
Instead of answering, Lan Zhan moves forward to bury his face into his chest once more. He sighs, so softly Wei Ying wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t felt it brush against him. “No,” Lan Zhan says, quiet. Looks up at him again, something fragile and glimmering in his eyes, before they begin to droop again. “Nothing’s wrong.”
He would ask again. He would ask again, but then Lan Zhan is settling back down, claiming the spot closest to Wei Wuxian’s heart. Falling very, very still, breaths evening out as quickly as they’d come. And Wei Ying -- Wei Ying thinks, at least he is here now. He will ask in the morning, when the cicadas go to sleep and they are both more awake.
For now -- for now, this is more than enough.
*
Wei Ying, to his own surprise, wakes before Lan Zhan does.
But perhaps it is because he hadn’t quite been able to fall asleep. When he awakes he is startled, for a moment, by the view of the room that greets him and the weight of something on his chest -- the sun has barely begun its ascent, the Jingshi bathed in a quiet, hazy blue.
He looks down, then, sees Lan Wangji-- remembers, the letter and the flowers and Lan Zhan, kissing him -- and softens, inexplicably.
He stays there, for a while. Closes his eyes and breathes it all in, Lan Zhan and the smell of his sheets, the freshness of the barely-morning air. Lets his mind wander, but it doesn’t quite find sleep. It finds -- a sailboat, wondering if the lighthouse it’d followed had been waving something else down. Uncertainty. Sizhui had told him Lan Zhan loved him. He’d come back, finally, he’d come back home, but Lan Zhan’d only looked so terribly sad.
What if Sizhui was wrong?
In the dark, Lan Zhan shifts. For a moment Wei Ying thinks he might have awoken, pushes back a little to give the other man space -- but Lan Zhan’s eyes stay gently shut.
Under this light, the second Jade of Lan looks -- peaceful.
In the day, Lan Zhan’s face was always -- well. He’s heard it before, heard people whisper about the man’s infamous facade of ice -- Wei Ying, however, doesn’t quite agree. Perhaps he’s just never had the chance to see him like that, has never been on the receiving end of a cold stare. No, never from Lan Zhan. But the man had never quite felt like ice. Like stone, maybe, he would understand -- not a rough mountainside, but smooth pebble. Not quite meaning to repel, but not quite willing to open up either.
But lots of things wore a pebble down. Running water. A persistent pair of hands.
Lan Wangji had taken it, tucked this mask back into his own pocket, and the gentle gold in his eyes had been the most wonderful thing Wei Ying had seen since the first time he'd died.
He huffs out a breath, now. Soft; it displaces a strand of hair draped over Lan Zhan’s shoulder. Wei Ying wants to touch him, wants to hold him again and kiss him again, and again and again -- but something in this hazy darkness stops him. What if Lan Zhan wakes up, and begins vomiting flowers again?
His legs begin to itch.
Against the syrupy-golden thing in his bones begging to stay, he very carefully slips out of bed. It takes a while -- he knows Lan Zhan isn’t exactly a shallow sleeper, but it had only been trained in him from young -- to be looking out for danger, even with his eyes closed. So Wei Ying waits. Shifts, bit by bit, towards the edge of the bed, before he manages to very quietly stumble to his feet.
Ignoring the sudden lack of warmth in his side, he makes for the kitchens.
He’d been in and out of the place a few times -- when he’d still been a teenager he’d always been the one to pander to the kitchen ladies for food, for something more than the bland meals typical of the Cloud Recesses. Every meal is nothing more than a variation of the previous one -- tofu, softened vegetables, steamed rice. Fruit, if they were lucky. (Lan Zhan, he knows, likes it nonetheless.)
The Cloud Recess is always quiet -- but something about the sun not being up yet cloaks the place in a heavier sort of serenity, something Wei Ying finds himself not quite minding. Everything is soaked in blue, the trees and the classrooms and the stone gardens, all wrapped up in its haziness.
(Like Lan Zhan, his mind supplies helpfully. Azure blue.)
The kitchens are a quiet, measured flurry of activity. It smells good, he begrudgingly thinks, even if it's only gravy-steamed vegetables and rice. The Gusu Lan chefs work in silence, the only sound coming from ladles hitting the side of woks, delicate china being set out onto trays -- when he steps in, the ladies startle.
“Wei-Gongzi,” they chorus.
"Good morning," he sing-songs. Tries to act casual. Flashes one of the ladies one of his most charming smiles, and thinks it works. "Is Hanguang-Jun's breakfast ready? I'd like to -- to take it to him. Myself."
There's a bit of scuttling around. The chefs are visibly caught off-guard -- it wasn't everyday that anyone, much less someone as well-known as Wei Wuxian, stepped into the kitchens this nonchalantly. Still, muscle memory works when the mind does not, and soon enough Wei Ying finds himself backtracking out of the Gusu Lan kitchens. Bowing, as well as he can with his hands full, in thanks.
When Wei Ying returns, footsteps slow and eyes plastered to the bowl of soup set carefully in a corner of the tray, Lan Zhan is awake.
The second Jade of Lan is now spread out, arms out like a basking starfish -- Wei Ying knows he is awake, for his dark, honeyed eyes are trained on the ceiling, blinking soft and slow and sleepy. Against his expectations, however, Lan Zhan doesn't seem anywhere close to making a move to get out of bed.
When he takes a cautious, quiet step into the Jingshi, Lan Zhan startles, hard. (Wei Ying winces, and worries for the man's neck.)
"Lan Zhan," he calls, soft. The corner of his lips upturning just a little, without much need for thought. "You're awake."
Lan Zhan -- sits up. Stares, eyes so wide and silent, Wei Ying might even call him bewildered.
“I went and got you breakfast, see?” He only continues, smile widening into something more alike to a grin. Shuffles forward to the low, rectangular table set in the centre of the room, and sets the tray of still-steaming food down. “I don’t know how you can eat this stuff every day, Lan Zhan, how deprived are your tastebuds --”
“You,” Lan Zhan says. Breathes. The notes of his voice trembling on the single word, the sound hanging still in the air like plucking a string on his guqin would.
Wei Ying’s head snaps up. A beat of silence passes, before he’s sitting back on his heels, confusion rippling over his forehead like a pond’s surface.
“I,” Wei Ying repeats. Waits, something soft on his face. Not quite understanding why Lan Zhan looks like -- like that. “What’s wrong?”
Lan Zhan only stares. Stares, gentle lips parting for a short second before clamping shut again. He looks at Wei Ying, up and down, with an almost-visible wrinkle between his brows -- drags his eyes to his lap and blinks twice, each beat firm and furious.
“You……” he looks up, tries again. “Why are you here?”
Wei Ying goes a little bit blank. Hanguang-Jun would be furious, Sizhui’d told him -- and although Wei Ying knows, somewhere inside of him that Lan Zhan wouldn’t be angry, not truly -- he decides to keep it to himself, for a little while longer. He laughs, the sound coming out a little weak. “I was just passing by, Lan Zhan,” he says, huffing, eyes not quite managing to meet the other man’s. “I just -- thought it’d be good if I came to visit, and then --”
“Last night,” Lan Zhan interrupts. Wei Ying almost makes a quip about it being against the sect rules, to be cutting someone off like that, but something in Lan Zhan’s gaze weighs his tongue down. “You were --” he looks away, staring intensely at a specific spot on his bedsheets. Voice falling quiet, in a way that Wei Ying knows means he’s embarrassed. Uncertain.
“You were here.”
Wei Ying swallows. Makes a soft, affirmative noise in the back of his throat.
“You said you --” Lan Zhan starts, voice quiet and low and small, this time cutting himself off. It’s as if he doesn’t quite dare to say it; perhaps even that was too cheesy for the great and respectable Hanguang-Jun to be verbalising -- Wei Ying’s insides begin to fill with murky, scalding dread.
“Did I -- Did I assume wrong, Lan Zhan?” He opens his mouth, tries to make it better but all that comes out is a tight, trembling spillage, “I assumed wrong, didn’t I?” He laughs, forces his eyes where Lan Zhan’s can’t touch. “I’m sorry, Lan Zhan -- ah, I must’ve made you uncomfortable. Forget about it, okay? I’m okay, I promise! You --”
“You said,” Lan Zhan interrupts, and wow, he’s really on a roll today, isn’t he -- Lan Zhan interrupts him and this time there is something thick and oversaturated in his voice; when Wei Ying looks up the other man’s jaws are clenched, tightening then relaxing as if trying to keep something down. “You said you loved me,” he says, softer now. Still not quite meeting his eyes. “Is it…...true?”
The ink-stained ocean in his chest cavity meets a lightning storm.
“Lan Zhan,” he tries.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan repeats.
Wei Ying swallows. (Lightning hits water, and everything shudders with life.)
“Yes,” he says finally. Tries to give the word conviction but it leaves his mouth in a whisper, forcing him to lift his eyes to Lan Zhan to confirm if he’d heard him at all.
Lan Zhan is -- silent. Home. Not looking at him. Crying.
Crying?
Wei Ying snaps out of -- out of whatever heavy, hazy thing he’d been in. Blinks once, twice, and wonders if his eyes are painting its own mirages; Lan Zhan, sat on his bed with the sheets pooling at his waist, stares at his pillow.
The sun had begun to rise, sometime outside. In its light, Lan Zhan’s eyes glisten.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying speaks up, soft, as if afraid to scare him away. His voice swelling, too, cracking at the very end -- Lan Zhan still does not look at him. Instead, the second Jade of Lan flops abruptly, gracefully, back down onto his bed, effectively burying his face into his pillow.
Wei Ying -- laughs.
“Lan Zhan,” he repeats, this time insistent and impossibly more tender. He pushes himself off his knees, now, half-crawling and half-stumbling over to the bed. “Lan Zhan.”
It takes a while. A few seconds, at least, maybe fifteen -- before Lan Zhan finally moves, shifts a little to his side to show one half of his beautiful, sleep-softened face. His cheeks are dry but the lashes that are visible have begun to clump together, dark irises glimmering with something like rain.
(God, he is anything but stone, now; he is more fresh fruit cracked open, more dewdrops on green-flushed leaves.) Wei Ying, all of him -- his shoulders and his lungs and his thundering, overripe heart, twist with something aching, something like love.
“Lan Zhan,” he murmurs, quiet. Holds his breath and heart in one hand and reaches out with the other, gently cradling the other man’s face in his palm. “I love you, Lan Zhan. I’m sorry I made you wait so long.”
Lan Zhan’s eyelids droop with it. In the palm of his left hand, Lan Zhan’s eyes are half-lidded and wondrous -- there is a pain that comes with the tenderness in his face and it is a blood-red mandarin, split open to reveal all its soft, sweet insides. “Love you, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying repeats.
There is magic, in the way Lan Zhan's breath catches in his throat. The man is staring at him, the intensity of his gaze almost too much -- Lan Zhan turns his head. Slow, graceful like his music -- turns his head, and presses those soft carnation lips into the heart of Wei Ying’s palm. Kisses him there, eyes deep and honeyed and flickering, as if fighting instinct to shy away.
It sucks the breath out of him.
Any joke Wei Ying had been trying to form on his tongue, to dispel the tension in the room like he was used to doing, dies away. There is just Lan Zhan, just him and Lan Zhan and Lan Zhan’s lips on his skin, pressing into center of gravity, into the epicentre of his feeling.
Wei Ying has never been good at being serious about his own feelings. Had always brushed them off before they could fester, had always laughed and wrinkled his nose at the notion of falling in love. Now, knelt at the side of Lan Wangji’s bed, with the latter’s soft mouth in the heart of his palm and eyes reaching deep into the folds of his chest, Wei Ying thinks he understands.
“Lan Zhan,” he breathes instead. “Move over, will you?”
Lan Zhan shifts backwards like that -- pressing closer to the other corner of his bed, dragging half the sheets with him. Wei Ying’s hand detaches from his face if only to hoist himself upwards, crawling into bed with him. He has half a mind to apologize -- he hadn’t even had the chance to take a bath, before he’d knocked out the previous night. (Lan Zhan’s eyes, plain and dark but swirling with all sorts of wonder, make Wei Ying think the other man might not care in the least.)
Lan Zhan opens his mouth. His lips are dry, voice earthy and low -- “thought I dreamt it,” he says, quiet.
“What?”
“You.”
Realization dawns on him, seeping in like sunlight finding places it’d never been allowed to touch. “Lan Zhan ah, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying murmurs, sighs -- there is a gentle smile on his face, now, almost teasing. Painfully fond. He takes Lan Zhan’s large, careful hand in his, and presses his mouth to the back of his palm. (Feels the other man tremble at the touch.) “Does the great and respectable Hanguang-Jun dream of me at night?”
He doesn’t expect a proper response. He gets the exasperation -- the firm, emotionless set to Lan Zhan’s expression that has quickly become the expected reaction to many of Wei Ying’s antics. But then Lan Zhan’s face is softening, too, the unamused front giving way to something tender, vulnerable -- “Always,” he says softly. Eyes dropping down to fixate on a spot near Wei Ying’s collarbone.
It is a rushing ocean inside of him. A mass so deep and wide Wei Ying doesn’t quite know what name to put to it, only knows there is Lan Zhan’s voice in the deep-sea echoes and Lan Zhan’s breath in the salt-laced breeze.
“You always……” the other man trails off. Swallows, and doesn’t quite finish his sentence, but Wei Ying thinks he knows. Loved me. “So I thought.”
I do, Wei Ying wants to say. Wants to press the words into Lan Zhan’s mouth until he gets it, until he understands. Lan Zhan, I do, you make my heart do things it didn’t know it could -- instead, he moves Lan Zhan’s hand down to his chest. Maneuvers the other man’s gentle, graceful fingers until his palm breaches the first layer of his robes, lying flat against his undershirt.
“Feel that, Lan Zhan?” He says, not quite knowing why he has begun to whisper. Lan Zhan’s hand freezes beneath his, yet stays so impossibly warm. He smiles. “I’m real. Right here.”
Lan Zhan’s bed was never made for two -- they’re so close together, now, that Wei Ying can feel Lan Zhan’s scalding breath against his collarbone. (It’s a steady, quivering thing.) Don’t take your hands off my heart, he wants to plead -- but that would be like, like reminding the sun to rise. Like reminding little children to keep breathing. Wei Ying thinks of himself and knows that Lan Zhan, too, has never known anything else.
So he takes Lan Zhan’s face in both hands. The latter’s hand remains on his chest even without a weight to hold it there -- gentle, trembling. Shifts, then presses down, firmer still. (Behind Wei Ying’s ribcage is a hummingbird, wings beating like it’s all it’ll ever do.)
“Lan Zhan,” he says, suddenly finding himself hoarse. “You’re so good, Lan Zhan. Like you so much. I’m sorry I tried to forget.”
He dips forward, brushes his mouth against the delicate edge of Lan Zhan’s jaw. The other man's breath stutters, and Wei Ying feels it. “Forget?” Lan Zhan manages to ask, lips barely moving, the word almost coming out slurred like some part of Wei Ying made him a drunken man.
Wei Ying moves up to his cheek, now. Closes his lips and plants a soft kiss there, then on the other. "I tried to convince myself I didn't like you like that," he murmurs -- huffs as if laughing at himself, pulling back to give the other man space. (This, however, is only met with the soft, barely-visible furrowing of Lan Zhan's brow, the tightening of Lan Zhan's hand over his chest.) Wei Ying laughs, real this time, and surges forward to press a pacifying kiss to the end of Hanguang-Jun's nose.
"I'm sorry, Lan Zhan," Wei Ying repeats, softer.
Lan Zhan's eyelids flutter when he exhales, quiet like everything he has kept inside --"no apologies," he murmurs back. Eyes like honey, telling its own truths.
Wei Ying pouts. "Sizhui…...told me about it," he speaks up, then. Brushes at the hairs in Lan Zhan's face absentmindedly, watches the man's face change into something curious. "Your ill--" Wei Ying starts. Changes his mind. "Flowers."
Lan Zhan's expression shifts into one Wei Ying can't quite name yet. He hurries to continue, painting over the younger disciple's name hastily -- "You should've said something about it, then I would've known earlier how much of an idiot I was being, Lan Zhan."
Lan Zhan does not say anything. Merely looks at him with the same soft eyes from sixteen years ago -- then shifts forward still, until his forehead collides gently with the crook of Wei Ying's neck. Wei Ying’s own hands find a place around the man's stable shoulders, now, fingers smoothing down Lan Zhan's silky, dark hair.
Lan Zhan, all of him, had always been sturdy. Rooted and unwavering, like a house.
"It started not long ago, right?" He asks softly.
"Mn."
“A month ago?”
Lan Zhan pauses. “Yes,” he says, voice low and soft. “Sizhui told you?”
Wei Ying shakes his head. “No. I…”
Lan Zhan leans back to look at him, face open and waiting. Wei Ying huffs and dips forward to press a fond kiss to the other man’s face, lips finding themselves somewhere near the curve of his chin. “That was when it started working too well for me,” he answers the unspoken question, something sweet and perhaps, sad, in his voice. “Trying not to like you. So I figured -- y’know.”
Lan Zhan does not answer for a while. Wei Ying begins to think that perhaps the second Jade of Lan has nothing to say, doesn’t quite know what to say, until Lan Zhan’s lips part once more. “You…...before that,” he breathes lowly. “How long?”
Wei Ying stills, just to look at him.
“I don’t know, Lan Zhan,” he murmurs. Tucks a strand of hair behind the other man’s ear, absentminded. “How long have you loved me?”
The look on Lan Zhan's face makes Wei Ying wonder how he'd never realised.
"I missed you too," he mumbles, just for the sake of it. Just to make sure Lan Zhan hears it, just to feel the tightening of warm, steady hands around his undershirt. "Like you so much, Lan Zhan." Dipping forward again, he now presses his lips into the space between Lan Zhan's brows.
Lan Zhan shudders. Wei Ying almost doesn't catch the slight movement, but then he's feeling the man's hands shake. "Me too," Lan Zhan croaks. Swallows visibly, like he has all the words but doesn't quite know how to draw them out.
Wei Ying hums. Moves on to the other's cheekbones, leaves a series of soft kisses there too. His infuriatingly gentle cupid's bow. The lobe of his left ear. And then -- and then, with Lan Zhan looking at him, dark honeyed eyes now a little bit dazed, Wei Ying cradles his face with the most careful hands he’s ever owned. Flits his eyes over the pale-blue ribbon pulled taut over Lan Zhan’s forehead. Smooths either side down and -- kisses him there, gentle lips to his carefully-crafted crown.
When Wei Ying draws back, Lan Zhan’s eyes are closed.
For a long while, they do not speak. Wei Ying lies there and imprints Lan Zhan’s face to memory, and Lan Zhan -- breathes. Tightens his hand around Wei Ying’s chest. The latter only belatedly realizes, now, that the other man had been able to feel his heart beat this whole time. Would’ve, while watching him lean forward to brush his lips against one of the most sacred parts of him, felt Wei Ying’s beat faster and faster and faster.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan finally breathes out. Opens his eyes slowly, fluttering against the warming daylight.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying echoes. Smiles.
Lan Zhan, with Wei Ying’s heart cradled tight in his large, warm, steady hands, kisses him.
This time, Lan Zhan is awake. Really, truly awake, and kissing him -- cupping his jaw within the breadth of his free hand and threading trembling fingers through his hair. Wei Ying’s arm around his torso, the dip in Hanguang-Jun’s waist making the mountains in his own chest shake.
With someone else -- with anyone else, Wei Ying would’ve felt unnerved, letting the beat of his own heart be spelled out against another’s palm. But this was Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan, who was always careful, who always thought too much but never let water spill. No, Wei Ying thinks. This is not intrusion; this is lighting an old fireplace so you can say hello, I missed you.
When they part, Lan Zhan holds on.
Holds on, and says, voice sounding like crackling embers -- "Want you all the time. Wei Ying." Then, exhales. "Love you. Always -- always loved you."
Wei Ying shifts back a little. (Lan Zhan is looking at him, eyes dark and gold and a little bit bright.) He blinks, and everything blurs for a bit.
Lan Zhan inhales, and -- starts coughing.
“Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying repeats. Something hot and fearful creeping up his throat, as if he was the one who was sick -- the other man is sitting up, twisting in place. Hacking, pained and harsh, into his palm, Wei Ying stumbling onto his hands with the sound. “Lan Zhan,” he chokes out, his vision now blurring for a whole other reason.
Sizhui said -- Lan Zhan said --
“Wei Ying,” the latter now struggles to say. There’s a tremble in his voice and it must hurt to speak, but Lan Zhan speaks anyway -- there is blood on his lips, red darker than before. The sight of it makes his blood run cold. “Wei Ying. It’s okay.”
He clutches tight at Lan Zhan’s arm.
When Lan Zhan’s palm unfurls there are bloodied flowers pressed into their very heart. Carnations. Red, staining brown. Through something damp and glossy blurring his vision, Wei Ying shudders and tries to breathe.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan’s voice breaks in-between, yet manages to sound steady anyway. He’s looking at him now, pretty, sleep-washed face soft like a still pond. “They are dead, Wei Ying.”
(Brown, they are brown.)
Wei Ying sucks in a breath. Sucks in a breath, and then another, feeling all of him collapse into something like relief. “Lan Zhan, you --” he says shakily. He doesn’t quite follow up with anything more, but perhaps Lan Zhan feels it, knows-- the man raises his free arm and pulls him close, like that. Wei Ying’s cheek tucked into the planes of his collarbones.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan echoes. Makes to move but then comes to a stop, reroutes to wipe his mouth against the fabric of his sleeve. Only when he seems satisfied, does he shift his face. Press his lips into Wei Ying’s hair. “It’s okay.”
“You better be,” Wei Ying says thickly. Pulls back, and on his face there is the same, choked-up fight that'd seen the remnants of the Wen clan saved, all those years ago. Lan Zhan looks down at him, face impossibly tender, and that expression melts into something indignant. Closer to a pout.
"I am," Lan Zhan murmurs. Everything on his face softens and Wei Ying knows for sure, now, that the other man is smiling.
Wei Ying exhales, and tries not to let it shake.
“Okay,” he agrees hoarsely. Grips softly at Lan Zhan’s wrist and thumbs over the drying blood on the cuffs of his nightgown. When Lan Zhan moves he lets him go, releases the other man long enough for him to clean the bloodied bloom from his hand.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” He blurts out when Lan Zhan turns back to him. “All this time -- I was writing letters to you, you could’ve called me back --”
Lan Zhan looks at him, and his voice dies out a little.
“And?” The other man repeats softly. Waiting.
“I don’t know,” Wei Ying whines, a gentle mix of affronted and exasperated. Lan Zhan’s hand shifts on his thigh and -- this is nice, he thinks. It would be nice, to keep having this for a long time. “You could’ve at least tried to seduce me or something, Lan Zhan.” He flicks the other man on the chest, not hard enough to hurt. “Don’t always suffer alone.”
Lan Zhan is quiet, for a while. He thumbs at Wei Ying’s knee absentmindedly -- small, light movements like the ones he would be making on the strings of his guqin. Wei Ying finds himself leaning into it, like falling into gravity.
“I cannot force you to stay,” is what Lan Zhan says, when he speaks up again. He looks Wei Ying in the eye and his face is a calm patch of ocean -- perhaps a little sad, something ultramarine in his irises. He looks, nevertheless, like he’s stating a mere fact. Reciting yet another rule of his clan.
Wei Ying has never understood being in love.
He’d told his Shijie all those years ago -- liking someone was like -- shackling your own neck. He hadn’t understood, then. Was only learning to understand now. He’d seen his adoptive father argue with his wife like it was the only thing they knew to do, and then he’d watched them refuse to let go. He’d watched Jin Zixuan make his Shijie cry and then he’d watched her sit by his coffin in white. He’d watched Mianmian find a family with someone so different, then he’d watched them night hunt together like none of it mattered.
Perhaps he is just a victim who has been held so close he’s learned to love his captor, but Wei Ying thinks he’s right, this time. No, love is not a shackle. Loving Lan Zhan is not captivity. It is coming home.
But Wei Ying, back then, had not known. Had not let himself know, had thought he and Lan Zhan, with the lack of a common goal, were too different to grow in the same spot of sun. There were no mysteries to solve, now. No plotting villain, no unsolved murder. Lan Zhan had to stay in the Cloud Recesses. And Wei Ying did not have enough space to breathe up in those mountains, was used to sprawling lakes all his life.
It was better if nothing happened. So Wei Ying had left.
But now -- now Lan Zhan’s hand is a gentle weight on his clothed knee. Now he has known Lan Zhan’s lips and it is the finest wine he has ever tasted. Now, Lan Zhan has been on the brink of death and he has decorated the rooms with it, and Wei Ying realizes that he has been very, very stupid indeed.
Lan Zhan is still looking at him. Sweet, sweet Lan Zhan, with his hair down and his face washed with sleep. Lan Zhan, righteous and graceful and kind and good. Lan Zhan, who’d seen what his father had done, who’d watched his parents wither before his eyes --
-- Lan Zhan, who’d, with the very same heart, let Wei Ying go.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying speaks up now. Shifts a little so he’s fully facing the other man, watching Hanguang-Jun’s expression shift into quiet attentiveness. “When I told you no,” he starts. “I’d thought, there’s no way.”
Lan Zhan is silent.
“I’d thought --” Wei Ying carries on, voice breaking a little. Lan Zhan’s hand finds its way into his. “It didn’t matter if something happened. You could not leave. And I could not possibly stay. But Lan Zhan --” he inhales. Brings the man’s hand closer, runs his thumb across the back of his broad palm. “I’ve been thinking, Lan Zhan. A lot of things have seemed too far out, in my two lifetimes.,” he says, soft. “But I went and fought for those things anyway, and --” he breaks off. Lan Zhan’s eyes are liquid gold. “You make me want to try again, Lan Zhan. Y’know that? The last time I was this relentless I died, but you make me want to try again.”
Lan Zhan’s expressions shift in the span of a few seconds -- microexpressions that’d taken Wei Ying years to put a name to. Quiet sadness. Pain. Gentle, overwhelming love. “Okay. Wei Ying.” Lan Zhan brushes his thumb over the back of his palm, breathing. “Try again,” he says. His voice is the softest Wei Ying has ever heard it. “I will be here.”
Wei Ying, despite himself, despite the sudden, startling wetness on his cheeks, smiles. Grins, full force, can’t help but stumble forward with his palms flat on the bed, just to kiss Lan Zhan again, again.
It’s an awful kiss. Wei Ying is smiling too hard for their mouths to fit together properly, and their teeth meet in something painful and horribly, horrendously ungraceful. When Wei Ying pulls back he is half expecting a distaste in it, at least some form of visible discomfort -- instead, he watches as Lan Zhan’s own pinkened lips raise. Tug upwards, pulled by something genuine and magnetic. Reaching his eyes.
Lan Zhan smiles, and somewhere outside the Jingshi, the sun breaks free from the horizon.
(So they try. They both try, and know that wherever the other is -- they will both, always, be here.)