Chapter Text
Love, isn't always magic.
Sometimes its just... melting.
Or its black and blue,
Where it hurts the most.
-Andrea Gibson
It starts with this.
A moment on a rooftop. A smile that lights up the scene more than the moon ever could, a voice that teases, a body that moves like it's always dancing. At first Lan Wangji doesn’t have words for the feeling that rises in his chest, the taste summoned like bile but sweeter into his mouth. All he has is this smile, the flash of skin, of fingers, of eyelash. The gentle taunts that wake something in him so foreign and frightening that he casts a silence spell just so he can tamp down on this feelings, ignore the drumming in his chest.
This boy spells trouble. He can see it. His uncle can see it. His brother - somehow, sees something else.
He knew he kept these unfamiliar feelings locked away in his heart, but Lan Xichen could always read him when no one else could. Lucky he's the only one. And it’s no matter, Lan Wangji can get through it. He’ll avoid Wei Wuxian and his daring smile. He’ll meditate harder. He’ll practice his sword more, and soon Wei Wuxian will be gone, back to Yunmeng. Cloud Recesses will be as it always was. Serene, undisturbed by raised voices and joyful laughter.
It would be fine, that is, if Wei Wuxian did not keep showing up everywhere he went.
There he was, waving to Lan Wangji from across the classroom, sending him paper men under the nose of Uncle Qiren. There he was, lounging across Lan Wangji’s desk in the library pavilion, teasing him, playing tricks on him, giving him… giving him… it's best not to think on that. And there he was, tagging along to catch the water ghouls with Lan Wangji and his brother, asking Lan Wangji to hold his hand, saying they were close, as if that meant something to him, as if that meant anything.
The night after the incident in the library pavilion Lan Wangji falls asleep, despite himself, to the memory of Wei Wuxian saying his name. “Lan Zhan,” how it skated across his tongue, came out smooth as still water, how the affection seemed to rise in his voice. Ridiculous. Shameless. Wei Wuxian was a flirt and a tease nothing more.
Hands, cupping his cheeks. Kisses peppering his face, a voice, hitched and whispering, “Lan Zhan… Do it up there, just like before, hit that spot, alright…?”
Lan Wangji wakes in the dead of night, body tense and slick with sweat. Through the moonlight shed from the window across his bedclothes he sees a dark, wet spot on his bedclothes…
Oh, oh no.
After the scurry, the leap from the bed, the quick changing of blankets and sheets, wiping himself off and shoving the soiled sheets beneath the bed for a (private) cleaning tomorrow, he lays back against his pillow and stares at the ceiling. That dream… the dark eyes looking up at him, the intensity, the vividness.
Why, why, of all people, did it have to be Wei Wuxian?
If he’s honest with himself, he wants to take the journey to find the Yin Iron with Wei Wuxian. Not for any reason other than Wei Wuxian being his match. A capable fighter. A quick tongue and a clever mind.
A slim waist to grab, a narrow lip to bite… no. oh, no. nothing like that.
But Wei Wuxian is going home, with his family. He belongs there, not with Lan Wangji, who will just have to make this journey by himself. Ah, well.
When he hears Wei Wuxian run up after him, it takes all of his Lan discipline not to let his mouth turn up in a smile. Maybe this journey wouldn’t be so bad, after all.
His home is burning. His leg is broken. The Wens have the Yin Iron. Lan Wangji’s sword has been taken from him, but still, there is so much hope, even in this place, in Wei Ying’s smile. In the way he recites Gusu's rules when he is meant to recite the Wen Sect Essence Collection. In the way he jokes even when clearly he has been beaten down. In the way he offers to carry Lan Wangji, to get him water, to keep pace with him even though they fall behind the others. Not for the first time, Lan Wangji begins, barely, to dare to hope.
“You like Mianmian!” Wei Ying says to him. His smile is teasing, and if Lan Wangji was a little less hurt, or had a little less self-control, he’d be on top of Wei Ying right now, pushing him into the ground, mouth covering his. Images from his dream in the library pavilion flash before his eyes, a dream he’s revisited more times than he’d ever admit, late at night when his bed feels empty and cold.
As it is he stares at the laughing man beside him and wonders how someone so clever could also be so blind. He wishes, not for the first time, that he had words inside him, that could make sense of the way he feels, of how the sight of Wei Ying makes his heart feel a thousand tons less heavy, how the smile, the one Wei Ying seems to reserve only for him, blinds him, and keeps blinding him, for days after. But he has no words. He has always communicated through action, through music. He’s never had to do anything more. His brother sees him as he is, and he’s never wanted anyone else to see him. Not until now.
“You…” he stammers. “You…” Wei Ying regards him, still with that smile that only turns up on one side, and suddenly Lan Wangji can’t stand it anymore, can’t stand the longing and the waiting and the feelings building up, and what does it matter, anyway? They’re stuck in this cave without an escape, he can’t even walk without help, they’re probably going to die here, so what else is left? He draws a ragged breath, meets Wei Ying’s eyes.
“How could I like anyone else,” he says, “when you are standing before me?” He hears the rasp in his voice, the raw emotion, and winces internally. With no one else would he ever let himself speak so openly, but Wei Ying is not anyone else. Wei Ying is Wei Ying. He meets his friend’s eyes, gaze level, and sees them widen, hears his soft inhale, steels himself for the laugh, for the joke, for the brushoff. If they make it out of here, he can live with their relationship staying as brothers-at-arms. But here, in this cave, with no one but each other, he doesn’t think he could possibly live another second without making himself clear.
“Lan Zhan…” he hears Wei Ying breath. “Do you mean…?”
“Yes.” his answer is immediate, and his voice is once again steady and clear.
“You’re saying... you like..”
“Mn.”
A hand reaches out, trembling, to touch his cheek, and he closes his eyes, turns his face into it, lips brushing the palm. This could be enough. If Wei Ying would let him have just this… it would be enough.
Another hand comes up to cup his other cheek, and he looks up and suddenly Wei Ying is there, right before him, brown skin and dark eyelash and staccato breath like suddenly he, Lan Wangji, isn’t the only one in this cave caught up in his feelings. Wei Ying leans closer, and his eyelids drop half-closed. A hair’s breadth away, he pauses.
“May I?” Wei Ying breathes, and Lan Wangji wants to laugh, wants to cry, that he thinks he even has to ask, as if Lan Wangji wouldn’t give him anything, everything, all of him, without question or compromise.
“Mn,” he says, and leans in to close the gap between him.
Kissing Wei Ying is like this.
He’d thought about kissing Wei Ying a thousand times in a thousand ways before. In his dreams, certainly, but in his waking moments too, from stealing glances at Wei Ying writing lines in the library pavilion, to seeing Wei Ying’s face as he was escorted to the front row on the first day of the Wen Clan’s indoctrination, to every time between those, every time his eyes lingered a little too long, drank a little too deep, lost himself a little more in that smile.
The real thing was nothing like these thoughts. It was harder, and softer, and at first a little awkward as they navigated noses and teeth and what was he supposed to do with his tongue, but then it didn’t matter because he was lost, leaning into Wei Ying until he pulled a little moan from him. Biting gently on his low lip and pulling back, just to hear that moan again. Wei Ying, who can never stop smiling, not even while exploring the dips and curves of Lan Wangji’s mouth, and all Lan Wangji wants to do is push him down to the ground and hold him there and never let him go.
It’s over too soon, but what follows are more kisses, and soft voices in the dark as the fire Wei Ying built burns lower, and then Wei Ying’s fingers laced with his, Wei Ying’s free hand tracing his robe’s patterns over his thigh, the weight of Wei Ying’s head on his shoulder, and the longing that has filled Lan Wangji’s chest for so long is replaced with.. Something else. Something that curls and warms him. It awakes in him a memory, one that he had thought he’d folded up and put away for good. A small boy resting his cheek on his mother’s arm as she sings softly to him. A smile curves her mouth and a hand cards through his hair and all he feels is warmth and contentment, before his eyelids shutter closed and sleep takes him.
Months go by. He retakes Cloud Recesses, helps his uncle and his brother rebuild. He hears word of the massacre at Lotus Pier, and hopes to hear word from Wei Ying but none comes. When the clans begin to come together against the Wen sect, he joins Jiang Cheng and together they carve a path through the Wens, in search of whatever word they can find of Wei Ying. He reclaims Bichen, and Suibian, and continues his search.
What he finds, he does not like.
Back in the cave, he had been so sure, that how he felt when he looked to Wei Ying was returned in kind. Together they’d kissed, they’d killed the Tortoise of Slaughter, Lan Wangji had shared his spiritual energy, sang the song he’d composed, the one he hadn’t played nor planned to play for anyone but Wei Ying, and Wei Ying had smiled, had called it beautiful. But here. Now.
Something had changed. Something was different. Even before the cave, he had seen how Wei Ying’s body turned towards his in any room they were in together, like a flower turning with the sun. He had seen how, of all the many, many smiles that graced Wei Ying’s face, there was but one smile that he saved only for Lan Wangji. He had seen how Wei Ying pushed himself into his personal space whenever possible, how he himself had allowed it to happen, had steeled himself each time a hand dropped to his wrist or fingers tugged on his clothes to keep himself reigned in, to not push Wei Ying against the nearest wall and kiss him rough and slow and more than a little bit dirty.
But now, there was something else. How Wei Ying kept his distance, how his smiles did not reach his eyes, how he refused to carry his sword. Did he regret what happened in the cave, after all? Did he no longer see Lan Wangji as his friend, as his confidant?
He can’t understand it, this change, like a shadow fallen over a valley. But even if Wei Ying has changed his mind, Lan Wangji can not stop up his own feelings so easily. But it is not becoming of a Lan to put their feelings on others. If he can only have Wei Ying through the bond of brotherhood, it is enough. It has to be.
And then. After the fights, after the slaughter, after the victories and celebrations and reordering of things. Then, there’s the mountain.
It’s like when they were boys, Wei Ying always eager to show off, always ready to take the mighty down a peg. His trick with the archery will only make him more enemies, but no matter. No matter how many enemies Wei Ying makes, Lan Wangji will stand between them. For brotherhood, of course. One does not turn one’s back on one’s brother.
He ventures out on the night hunt alone, but it’s not long before he’s drawn to the spot where Wei Ying is, their eyes meet and he sees a smile twinge Wei Ying’s face. Not the mocking or tight smiles he’s seen in public since Wei Ying returned from the Burial Mounds, nor the sunlight smiles he saves for Lan Wangji, but a small, cautious smile. One that dares to hope but does not dare to speak of hope.
“Lan Wangji, what do you take me for? Can’t you leave me alone?” How can he answer such a question? Perhaps this, more than any other part of Wei Ying’s behavior, is his answer. The confirmation of the fear he had felt at their first remeeting, when he had been told to stay out of Jiang affairs. But even now, his heart, his stupid, weak, fallible heart continues to beat out hope.
“What do you take me for?” he asks back, a challenge, a request. His posture is already perfect but he puts attention into squaring his shoulders and steeling his spine anyway. He should meet Wei Ying’s eye, take his answer head-on, but in a moment of weakness he looks down, eyes latched on Chenqing instead, ready to catch the shattered parts of his heart as they fall.
A slow inhale. He waits. Lan Wangji is always so good at waiting.
“I had once taken you as my soulmate in this lifetime,” is the answer and as Lan Wangji’s eyes snap up to Wei Ying’s face. Wei Ying doesn’t look at him, eyes cast down and away, something wistful on his face, something like regret.
“I still am.” Wei Ying’s eyes dart up, meet his, lips parting in surprise. And before he can stop it, Lan Wangji is moving forward, pushing Wei Ying back against the tree he’d been sitting under, hands at Wei Ying’s wrists, crushing their lips together. And then there’s a pause, and he wonders between heartbeats if this was the wrong move. And then, Wei Ying shifts against him, and presses closer, kissing back and it’s as sweet as it was in the cave, but deeper, more desperate. Wei Ying’s wrists are pushed above his head and a soft moan escapes him as Lan Wangji relinquishes his mouth in favor of his jaw, his ear, his neck.
A noise causes them both to freeze, and then in the moment that Lan Wangji loosens his grasp, Wei Ying wriggles free, and pulls him down behind a bush to watch Jin Zixuan and Jiang Yanli stroll by on the path below.
Crouched behind the bush, inches away from Wei Ying, Lan Wangji wills his pulse to slow, his emotions to settle. It was fine, if they were interrupted. They had time. They had so much time.
It goes until it doesn’t.
He never stops loving Wei Ying, but he learns to let Wei Ying go. The first time, when he lets Wei Ying and the remnants of the Wen clan go, on that stormy pass. He loses track of how long he stood there after they were gone, letting the rain drench him.
Lan Wangji has lived his whole life in a house made of rules. It has always been so easy for him, to know right from wrong, when there are rules to follow and traditions to tell you what to do. Wei Ying lived in a world without rules, and when first they met, Lan Wangji was sure that meant that Wei Ying did not know right from wrong.
Over, and over again, Wei Ying proved him wrong. The vow they made at the lantern lighting, to live protect others and to live without regret. Lan Wangji was so sure that this is how he did it, by following the rules that told him right from wrong.
But Wei Ying also followed a code, and his code still knew right from wrong, despite its deviance from the Lan code. The rules told Lan Wangji that Wei Ying needed to be stopped. His heart told him that he and Wei Ying were one and the same. That the code that bound them was stronger and truer than the code of the Lan sect.
What, then, was right? And what was wrong?
And so he had let him go. And if by letting him go he had lost Wei Ying forever, he would be content with knowing he could love him from afar. If the alternative was to steal him away to Cloud Recesses, to be cloistered away in a gilded cage until time had replaced their love with resentment, then he would let Wei Ying go.
But even so, something pulls him to Yiling one day. On the pretense of a night hunt, he goes. And there, in the town, something else pulls on him. A child, wrapped around his leg, weeping for its parent, and the crowd gathering around him assuming he is the father. Lan Wangji never liked crowds, and to be anchored here, at the center, by this poor boy… he freezes, looks inward, hopes it will be over soon.
And then. A face, a voice, a smile that shatters his walls. Wei Ying, dressed down in peasants’ clothes. Wei Ying, telling him tales of how he birthed this child. Wei Ying, taking his hand and drawing him along for a meal. Wei Ying, and Wen Yuan, who takes to Lan Wangji so quickly, you’d never have guessed their first meeting began in tears.
As he lets Wei Ying lead him through the Burial Mounds, Lan Wangji allows himself, just for a moment, to dream of possibilities. Of what could be, if he could leave his wide road and stay here in the narrow path with Wei Ying. Sharing the burden of Wei Ying’s demonic cultivation, here at his side, where Lan Wangji should make sure he never lost control.
Perhaps, if things were different. Perhaps, in a different, future life.
It ends like this.
Leaning over the edge of a cliff, blood dripping down his immaculate clothes. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except that he just keep holding on, that he just keep Wei Ying from falling.
There’s still time. There has to be. And then Jiang Cheng is there and for a moment Lan Wangji thinks he’s there to help but then there’s a flash of steel and Wei Ying has twisted himself out of Lan Wangji’s grip, forced him to let go, and then he is falling, and his eys are closing and Lan Wangji lets out a cry like a gutted animal as he watches his life fall to his death.
In the years to come, Lan Wangji will walk through his memories until the paths are well-trod, remembering every moment he let go. Every time he was not by Wei Ying’s side, down to the very last.
He goes to the Burial Mounds and fights everyone because there’s nothing left for him to do. Wei Ying is gone, and what is he without him? But there, in the Mounds, he finds A-Yuan, and he realizes that here is not his place to die.
He returns to Cloud Recesses. He takes his punishment, only questions Lan Qiren’s ideas of right and wrong. But still, he follows the rules of the house he lives in. He raises the bunnies left behind by Wei Ying, he raises A-Yuan alongside them. No memory seems to remain of A-Yuan’s other parent, of his time spent in the Burial Mounds.
Perhaps it’s just as well. He’s too young to understand why the man who said he gave birth to him is no longer there, although a part of Lan Wangji wishes just a little that A-Yuan did remember. If he did they could, perhaps, mourn together.
Whenever he can he goes out to search. Any time he hears a rumor of the Yiling Patriarch, if his duties to his clan do not call him elsewhere, he goes. He is aware that Jiang Cheng, too, searches for the Yiling Patriarch. He tries to think he is not blinded by grief as Jiang Cheng is, but the fact remains that they are not too different. Two men, raising boys alone, in the shadows of those who have left them.