Archive of Our Own

There is not much you can do when you are falling. When the dead-animal cry of sputtering engines stuffs your head like cotton and acrid smoke burns your lungs. Officer Lan knows this, tries to suck in air through his nose. He's never been a smoker, never liked the sharp taste of far-off drugs lingering in the back of his throat, never liked the fuzzy-floating feeling of the high.

A distant sun flares orange and white.

Outside the window, the Officer Lan's world goes pink, a wash of color startling against the blackness. It deepens to red, and his tin-can of a ship trembles so hard his teeth clack together and he feels a percussive rumbling in his bones.

Lan Wangji has never seen a fireball from the inside. The atmosphere rips apart violently as he punches towards the planet, dropping dropping dropping. The safety harness is tight against his chest, metal clasps hot and digging into his ribs.

There's something - panic, yes, that's panic - rising in his head and clotting his thoughts. His fists go white-knuckled around the joystick, wrenching up in some feeble last ditch effort as darkness sloughs into the edges of his vision, thick like smoke and burning just as much. He coughs, sputters, feels like his body is flattening from the oppressive weight of g-force, like the air is being wrenched from his lungs. Is that vertigo, or is the whole universe spinning? He could vomit, he could cry, it's getting harder and harder to suck in desperate breaths.

The viewfinder cracks, splinters like a cheap wineglass, shattering inwards. It wasn't supposed to end like this, reduced down to fire and blood, shards of thick glass slicing his face.

Shot down from the sky like a hunted bird.

He wonders what the impact will feel like, if the blackness will have overtaken him by then or if he'll feel every crushing moment of the crash, his body crumpling into the dirt, bones cracking. He wonders if there will be a body to recover if his brother will get ashes and shards of metal and a fingerbone.

God, his brother, his brother will have to identify his remains, look at his charred and red face, hair burnt off, flight-suit all melted into his skin.

Lan Wangji pulls up again, hard, putting every last dredge of his strength into one command, other hand flicking over the engine, the emergency routers, the canons - just, redirect the nose, reroute the, the energy, he can't - can't think through the desperate, breathless fog, the trickles of darkness creeping in on him.

There's weightlessness, then fear so deep and raw it cuts him to the bone.

The impact slices through his body, hard and fast and painful. His teeth snap together and he tastes the sharp copper of blood on his tongue. Everything aches and hurts -

Pain. Smoke. Blood in his mouth.

People have been whispering about war with Gusu for a while now - failed trade negotiations, small skirmishes on the moon, and then the fucking hostage situation.

Wei Wuxian just didn't expect the war to come to Yiling. His little corner of the solar system was supposed to be safe, tucked away on a dwarf planet that could count as an asteroid in a pinch. War wasn't supposed to come here, war was meant for big, glittering city-planets like Qishan, where it takes two days of elevator rides to drop all of the way to the surface. Where cities are stacked like sheets of mica.

Yiling is meant to be peaceful, simple, homespun robes and dirty fingernails and tangled pepper roots.

Yesterday, in the town's market, Wei Wuxian heard from the egg-seller that she heard murmurs of an oncoming attack, that the holonets were talking about the negotiations really really failing. He had laughed it off because, really, who would wage war in the skies above Yiling?

But he's wrenched from sleep when the planet shakes like rolls of thunder, and smoke stains the sunrise-sky gray.

"Fuck," he shouts to no-one in particular, stumbling barefoot outside. The moment he throws his front door open, he's met with chaos - there's nothing peaceful about the battle raging overhead. It shakes the planet to it's core, the atmosphere rippling and popping as fire and rubble rains down. Meal patters into the soil, smoke fills Wei Wuxian's lungs. The animals are panicking, squawking and hooting in their pens, eyes wild and crazed. It only fuels the anxiety in his chest, and when he looks up to the sky, it's filled with - with fucking ships, highlighted in bursts of beamgun-light. There's massive battle cruisers outside the atmosphere, big as a city, stark white and gleaming in the blue glow of force-fields.

A hot, godawful wind rips through his scalp and sends his robes fluttering around him. He feels the panic that he can see reflected in the eyes of his animals, sharp down his spine, as the rumbling gets loud and loud like the world is fucking splitting and he stumbles to shove his bare feet into a pair of gardening boots, holding his worn overcoat tight around him. Dirt bites at his face, and he looks up in search of the searing heat and the noise that rockets through is bone-marrow.

There - in the sky, closer than the battle raging and moving twice as fast - he has to squint to see it, scrunching his face up in the wind, there's something there. Something falling, plummeting to the ground and making the air tremble with a godawful sound. Wei Wuxian can hear the blaring of engine-alerts and the pathetic sputtering as the pilot must be trying desperately to stop the stomach-lurching descent.

Before he even knows what he's doing, Wei Wuxian is swinging his leg over his speeder and revving the engine with a twist of the handle, tossing aside his helmet in his rush to - he's not sure what his goal is here, but there's smoke everywhere and someone is dropping from the fucking sky. He can't even see the fighter's insignia from here - the ship is damaged beyond recognition, it could be Gusu white or Yunmeng purples. He's not even sure if it matters because a stupid, self-sacrificial force is driving him forwards, gaze trained on the violence on the horizon line.

He wants to squeeze his eyes shut and pray but he can't look away from the wreck as the ship angels up in a feeble attempt at flying, engine roaring for a short moment before it barrels into the ground, cutting a deep trench in the earth. The ground rumbles with the collision impact and Wei Wuxian skids to a stop, shielding his eyes against the smoke and the flames as he hops off of the speeder and dead-sprints towards the wreck. He's not sure what his plan is, or if he even has one, he just knows - the ship had a pilot, and if he does nothing, the pilot is sure to die.

The thick glass of the viewfinder is half-cracked, shards littering the ground and glittering around the smoking wreckage, but he still has to kick at the glass for a few desperate moments to make a hole big enough to reach through. He's about to grab at the captain when he sees the uniform, the fucking uniform, sleek white with sharp shoulders, blue stripes high on the collar.

Fucking Gusu.

A pop-squeal sounds from the engine and an acrid, awful smell fills his lungs, the air overheating beyond what's bearable. Tears prick at his eyes and his throat burns, and Wei Wuxian knows he has moments to make his decision.

An enemy soldier, god fuck.

But - the man looks as feeble as the baby birds Wei Wuxian nursed back to health in the spring when they fell from their nests. His face is smoke-stained and covered in thin cuts, blood dripping down his chin from a gash in his lip. Even with his chest rising-and-falling with shallow breaths, he still looks on the verge of death, so really there is no other option.

He leans into the cockpit and yanks a bowie knife from the sheath on his hip, coughing against the smoke as he saws at the pilot's harness. The man makes a choked-off sound, groaning - alive, he's alive, and Wei Wuixan is able to free him from the harness and drag his limp from from the ship. Scraps of fabric torn from his uniform catch on the sharp glass and he hisses a quiet noise of pain at the jostling, but Wei Wuxian steadfastly ignores it.

The Gusu pilot is tall as fuck and heavy, long legs dragging on the ground as Wei Wuxian carries him over to the landspeeder, stumbling against the wind. Facing the one-person speeder, he's not quite sure how to transport Gusu-Officer. The best he can do is strap him to the back of the ship and hope he doesn't fall off.

Well, it's something at least.

The first thing Lan Wangji registers is pain - sharp points of awful pain scattered across his body, his ribs and his back and his face, then an underlying ache. Dull and throbbing, deep in his head and his bones. For a moment, he entertains the idea of falling back asleep but its definitely past 5:00, past the base's set wakeup time. Even on other systems, townships, planets, they follow the Gusu sunrise.

The second thing he registers is the tug of gravity, real gravity, not the artificial spin of the GSS Recesses.

The GSS Recesses is a sprawling ship. It is clean and precise, full of polished floors and sharp white corners. Even the windows are flawless, free from fingerprints and oil. The air is perfectly formulated, tasteless, clean. Officer Lan likes his world that way - the artificial gravity does not tug at his bones like the weight of planetside atmospheres does, the air is cool in his lungs, not hot and dirty, he doesn't need to grip a respirator between his teeth to suck in unsullied air.

He never quite learned how to exist planetside. Sometimes, the crew teases him for that, chuckling when he stumbles to get his feet to work in the pull of real gravity. Growing up on a township, as it turns out, has it's drawbacks - namely, how intensely foreign planets are. In his world, dirt is constrained to perfect, smooth squares in the garden, air-use is calibrated every evening, and the temperature is regulated to use the exact right amount of energy while keeping the entire ship cool.

And he knows - this is not the GSS Recesses, this is not the Jingshi Township, this is a planet. Dust in the air clogs his noise and he can taste grass, animals, the sweet smell of sugary tea. His first instinct is to reach for his beamgun but it's not fucking there. It's not there, not at his hip, and even the small movement of sliding his hand to the holster hurt so bad he has to bite back a hiss of pain.

"Oh!" a loud voice says suddenly, and as Wangji blinks his eyes open he sees a dark red-and-black shape to the side, long hair tied back with a ribbon. He can't make out the face, his vision is still swimming and vertigo rolls through him, "You're awake - I wasn't sure you'd even wake up."

Sluggishly, he tries to get his mouth to form words but all that comes out is a muddled groan then a nasty, retching cough, hurting all of the way to his rib cage and his lungs.

"Ah-ah-ah, none of that - here, here, here," there's a chipped mug pressed against his lips then something warm and sweet is poured into his mouth, a steadying hand against the back of his head. The warmth is instantly soothing, numbing the scratchy pain in his throat. "That's it," the man - Wangji is pretty sure that's a man, at least - says, "nasty-fuckin'-crash you had."

"Bichen," he manages to say in a slurred mumble, "my - my ship . . . "

"Um, scraps? You ship is scrapmetal now."

That ship - that ship was his life. He almost wants to cry at the knowledge that Bichen is just a hunk of twisted metal now, like a dead carcass in the dirt. He practically grew up in that ship, spent his teenage years looping around the Gusu sun and watching the slow roll of solar flares. It was his escape from the township, gave him quiet solitude among the stars and now it's crumpled in the ground on whatever planet this is.

He realizes with a jolt that he doesn't even know what planet he's on. Somewhere in the Yungmeng system, surely, which is bad, very bad. Prisoner of war level bad.

The man must recognize the panic in his eyes because a second later he's pressing him back into the thin mattress, tucking a blanket around him like he's a child, and saying, "None of that, either. You're not getting far if you run."

"Where . . . am I?"

"Yiling," he says, "No - you're safe." There's something kind in the man's eyes that speaks of the truth - just enough to make Wangji falter and take in his surroundings as his vision clears and the vertigo slowly fades. His head is still pounding, but the drink has soothed his throat and grounded the sweeping, swirling feeling in his skull.

It only takes a moment of examination for Wangji to see that the man before him isn't a soldier. Worn, homespun robes hang from his frame, dyed a faded red color with unraveling cuffs that speak of years of use. There are patches on the elbows, decorated with cheery purple embroidery, and the tie around his waist ends in a cluster of bells that jingle as he moves, lending a musical quality to his steps. When his smile starts to fade, he has the face of someone dangerous, low brows and dark eyes that look like the black holes that haunted Wangji's childhood nightmares - but he doesn't look like he could ever hurt someone when he flicks his long hair over his shoulder and adjusts the bright red ribbon holding it back in a messy half-ponytail.

The room he's in is small, too, cozy and cramped. Wangji pushes himself up on his elbows into something close to a sitting position and takes in the room - herbs hung up by the window to dry, plants crowding the corners and creeping up to the exposed ceiling beams. This doesn't look anything like the clean, crisp walls of the CSS Jingshi, the dust in the air is enough to tell him that, and this is definitly not a hospital or a prison camp or a questioning facility. There is no glimmer of force fields or crackling of intercoms - only the reflected light of stained-glass windows and the baying of animals outside.

"Where?" he asks again. He has to - has to contact this unit, get a message out to his brother.

"I can't tell you that," the man says, looking genuinely sad, "I'm sure you think you're in danger, right?" Wangji nods and it sends his head spinning again, "But - here I am, with a Gusu soldier in my home." With that, he presses the mug into Wangji's hand and stands, moving over to the kitchen station that lines the opposite wall, talking as he rummages through the cupboards for something, "Ah, I know you're Gusu. You're lucky you landed - crashed, actually, that was a fuckin' crash if I've ever seen one - so far out, if you'd wound up closer to the city or on a central planet they'd have strung you up in a second. Sorry for the image. You gonna tell me your name, Gusu?"

"Lan - " he stops himself halfway through his name, because Lan Wangji is a recognizable name, a name with a bounty on it's head in Yungnmeng, "Lan Zhan."

"Lan Zhan," the man repeats, savoring the name. It sounds odd in the Yungmeng accent, the way his mouth shapes the words and forcefully pushes him past his lips, noting like the soft musical words of Gusu. And even worse is a stranger, a stranger on a rock in the Yungmeng system - saying his given name, it makes hims squirm like there are ants under his skin. The name is meant for his family, his brother, no-one else.

The Yiling stranger doesn't give his own name, instead he turns back to Wangji with a first aid kit and a folded cloth. He sits beside Wangji on the bed, invading into his space, "Well, Lan Zhan, now that you're awake, let's get you patched up."