Chapter Text
He knows.
He knows they’re real, and he knows how it sounds, that’s why he has never told anybody. Not even his brother, who seems completely oblivious to the fact that they’ve been brothers for far longer than 28 years.
He doesn’t have proof, of course, but there’s ache beyond a bad dream. The pain, the sadness... they’re too intense for them to be a constant remnant of a nightmare. And even if they were... there’s also the regret. How can you regret something you’ve never done? How can you feel nostalgia for a life you’ve never lived?
“They’re not bad dreams.” He tells himself “They’re memories.”
Lan Wangji has been dreaming of them all his life, but that’s not why he can reconstruct that song note by note. He can because he composed it himself, he sang it himself when he asked for it.
There weren’t many times in which he would ask for help.
However, asking for help was all he had to do for Lan Wangji to run to him. But Lan Wangji never said that, and Wei Wuxian never asked. The last thing Wei Ying asked of him was an impossible request.
“Let me go”
How could he?
He failed him one last time and held onto his hand. But it was useless. He let go. He let go. And ever since he has never seen him again.
Before that moment, he had thought he knew what it was like to lose him.
He knew better now.
There were two more things that he knew:
The first one was that if he never got to forget him in his past life as a cultivator, he wasn’t going to do so in this life as a history teacher. He knew it because studying history to know more about your own past and to have access to archives to look for signs of his body wasn’t what you would call moving on. He knew it because the pressure in his chest every time he woke up after seeing him fall again was the same pressure he felt in the Cold Pond for three years. He had lived a long life after that, and he knew that it only got bearable, not better.
The second one was that he wasn’t the only one. If Lan Xichen had been reborn as his brother again, there had to be more. And if they were back, maybe, just maybe… he was back too.
And that was another familiar spark in his chest. In his previous life he held on to the thought that if his corpse was never found, he wasn’t really dead. Now, he was holding onto the thought that he could find him if he followed the clues.
That lit the same hope spark that he bore with him in his past life.
Maybe it never faded away.