Chapter Text
The first letter arrived on the edge of winter, five years after the end of Lan Xichen’s punishment, nine years after Jin Guangyao’s disappearance, and two years after Lan Xichen had fully resumed the duties of sect leader. It was nondescript, plain ink on plain paper, sealed with pain wax, with no indication of the sender or the place of origin on its outside, but he would know that hand anywhere, and the author had taken no steps to disguise it. He’d stared at it for an hour, meditated for two, and then stared at it for another hour before he placed it at the bottom of the drawer in which he kept correspondence. The next day he moved it under a floorboard under a mat.
Another letter arrived two months later, when the Cloud Recesses was blanketed in heavy snow and the stars burned in the night sky like ice. It looked the same as the first, addressed to Zewu-jun in Jin Guangyao’s perfect hand. Perhaps it was because he was sorting his letters beside a brazier that day, instead of at his desk that Lan Xichen placed that letter into the flames, and watched the paper curl and blacken and smoke like Jin Guangyao’s heart. He didn’t think too much about the regret that flaked off his satisfied anger as the gray ashes of the letter flaked off into the air around him.
After that, the letters arrived with every new moon, sometimes a day or two late if the weather was poor. Lan Xichen burned them all. He told himself it was because sect principles forbid association with evil, and Jin Guangyao had tricked him into two decades of trampling on that with his words before. Whatever lies and prevarication and pathetic attempts at self-justification his letters contained, Lan Xichen had no desire to see it. And that was true. It was also true that Nie Huaisang, Jiang Wanyin, and young Jin Rulan had been making every effort, with Wangji’s support as Chief Cultivator, to track down Jin Guangyao wherever he had stashed himself and bring him to justice, and these letters probably contained vital clues to his whereabouts. If Wangji knew about the letters, he certainly would not approve of Lan Xichen burning them.
There had been a trial in absentia after Jin Guangyao had vanished from the temple. Lan Xichen had testified at it, had limited himself to cold facts, had swallowed the risings of his hostage heart which still, still after everything he had seen and heard, persisted in its belief that there was some mitigating circumstance, some reason, some explanation that would keep all of this from being true, keep Jin Guangyao from being the callous, vengeful picture of a perfect monster painted at his trial. No one came forward to speak for the accused. Lan Xichen had remained silent while the other sect leaders discussed sentencing. Jin Ling could be forgiven for begging mercy for the uncle who raised him, or blanching at some of the more creative penalties suggested, but not Lan Xichen. At least that was what he told himself. He had spent half his life speaking up for Jin Guangyao. What would it say about him if he continued to do so now, now that he knew the truth. He’d looked away when they’d agreed on a fittingly gruesome sentence, swallowing the bile that rose in his throat with his tea. Justice must be done, yes, but there was a line between justice and sadism, justice and spectacle. It seemed only the Lan understood this.
Over the years, there had been many false reports or promising trails gone cold. A few times, Jin Guangyao seemed to have vanished into thin air as his pursuers broke down his door, just as he had in the temple. Every time a bounty hunter turned up at a cultivation conference with a tale of how the conniving Liangfang-zun had eluded him, every time there was another failed expedition by the sects based on faulty intelligence, every time another lead greyed and withered and turned to smoke, Lan Xichen’s heart beat a little easier. It was a weakness of his since childhood that he was incapable of the type of cold anger, the type of hatred, that others more righteous than him could hold in their hearts towards evil people. He used to think that he and Wangji might be a little alike in this, before he had realized that Wangji’s devotion to their mother and to Wei Wuxian rested on his unshakable belief in their goodness. Lan Xichen could not even pretend to such a belief in Jin Guangyao, not anymore, and yet, as much as the memory of his studious attention as he taught him Song of Clarity enraged him, as much as the memory of Da-ge lying stitched together in that coffin still turned his stomach, as much as he still felt the need to direct Gusu Lan’s resources to assisting those women too old or ill to still make a living on their backs out of vicarious guilt for what Jin Guangyao had done to them, despite the continuing quiet scandal of his uncle and the elders, Lan Xichen could not hate him.
The tenth letter felt different than the others had. It looked exactly the same, arrived at the expected time (Jin Guangyao had always been methodical), and it was the same weight as the others had been. But something about it felt different, final, as if there would be no more if he burned this one. Lan Xichen stared at it, unopened, for an hour. There was nothing that Jin Guangyao could say to him that he would want to hear, not even ‘I am turning myself in to the Chief Cultivator to face justice for my actions.’ He knew what would await Jin Guangyao in that event, and it wasn’t anything Lan Xichen would recognize as justice. But he had gotten here, gotten everyone here with him, but not looking, not listening, ignoring what was being presented to him on a plate when it came to Jin Guangyao, and wasn’t that what he was doing now? And if there were clues to Jin Guangyao’s whereabouts in his letters, perhaps there was a way for Lan Xichen to see that Da-ge and those twenty women and Qin Su and little Rusong and Jin Zixuan and Jin Zixun and the Wen remnants and Wei Wuxian and Jiang Yanli and Lan Jingyi’s parents and everyone else received justice, real justice, and not the orgy of pain and humiliation that the other sect leaders had planned.
In the first months of his seclusion, Lan Xichen had screamed himself mute in the cold pond cave, shrieking all of the questions he needed answers to that he would never get at its walls. The echoes of his own voice were the only answers he’d ever gotten, and there was wisdom in that, in shouting “How could you do this?” and hearing, in response, “how could you do this?” But that wisdom left him as hollow as those echoes, and it had been the meat of knowledge he’d hungered for, not wisdom’s ephemera. And knowledge might be found in this unassuming letter. And could something not be learned even from lies, as long as one knew they were lies?
The letter stared back at him, opaque, silent, inviting. Just like Jin Guangyao had stared at him many a night, offering Lan Xichen the option of opening him up but never doing something so obvious as asking him to. He should burn it, and leave it at that. In all likelihood another would turn up next month, and he could burn that one too. He could put it with the first one and make his decision later, or just leave it there to gather dust. He could forward it to Wangji with a note, letting him know it had come from Jin Guangyao. What he absolutely should not do was read it. Instead of doing any of the things he should or should not do, he pulled a Ban Liang coin from the purse in his sleeve. A shameful and childish way to make a decision, hardly befitting a sect leader, but there was comfort in chance, or fate, or destiny, or the Gods, or whatever taking this decision out of his hands. He couldn’t trust himself when it came to Jin Guangyao. Maybe fate had better judgement. Ban Liang, he would read the letter, blank, he would burn it.
Sighing heavily, Lan Xichen balanced the coin on his thumbnail and flicked it, spinning, into the air. He caught it and brought it to rest on the back of his forearm, took a deep breath, and removed his hand.
Ban Liang.
Well then.
The letter is light in his hand, delicate, fragile, so like its writer (or how he had always thought of him, anyway. Something else he got wrong). Lan Xichen feels the pull of the cheap paper on the pad of his thumb as he runs it under the fold, the coy resistance that is no resistance of the seal as it lifts for him. The dry crackling sound the paper makes as he unfolds it is almost unbearably loud, and, though he knows better, a blade of worry sprouts in him that it must have been heard by everyone in the compound, that in a moment, Wangji or Shufu will open his door and catch him with a letter from that man open in front of him and know, know that he still cannot bring himself to condemn him in his heart…
That, of course, doesn’t happen. It is the excited worry of a child unwrapping stolen sweets in a clearing, convinced that guilt will out, that uncle will pop out from behind a tree and catch him just as he brings his prize to his mouth. The world is not that neat. One can, it turns out, get away with almost anything.
The letter is unsigned, undated. It is written in the code they used during Sunshot. Lan Xichen had never shared their code with anyone else. As far as he knows, Jin Guangyao never shared it either. As far as he knows, which was never very far with Jin Guangyao. Decoding the message takes him the better part of the afternoon, and he has to revise his work several times. He’s out of practice. He remembers long hours beside Meng Yao (he was still Meng Yao then. Is he Meng Yao again? What name is he using, in his new life, wherever he is?) working to create a way to communicate that no one else would understand, the enthusiasm and pride and fluttering joy of working so closely and so well with such a sharp-minded person.
Sharp. Yes, A-Yao had always been sharp, in whatever version of himself he was wearing, impossible to handle without being cut.
Why should this time be any different? The only way to avoid the inevitable consequence was to burn the letter, as he had known he should from its arrival. It would cut him, if he read it, somehow, and so skillfully that he wouldn’t even notice until his life-blood pooled at his feet. How many chances would he give before he would learn?
Apparently, one more.