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When Wen Qing first meets Wei Wuxian, she instantly discards him as an irrelevance. Too loud, too obnoxious, too much of everything she dislikes. So she shuts off, lets him crash against sharp glances, barbed retorts, and all the other walls she’s built around herself. Wei Wuxian laughs it off once, twice, three times. He doesn’t push, exactly, but he doesn’t go away either. She’s not sure what to do with that, other than turn away from it.
She keeps Wen Ning away from him as best she can, but her brother is surprisingly obstinate sometimes, and soon he's at Wei Wuxian's side almost constantly. The way he looks at the other boy makes Wen Qing worry.
If Wei Wuxian is anything like his brother, if he’s even half as rash, half as vulnerable, half as intense in his desires and self-flagellating in his denial of them, well, that's another disaster waiting to happen. She doesn't have the time or the energy to deal with another Jiang Cheng.
Wen Qing reminds herself that when she comes home to find Wei Wuxian asleep on her couch. His hair is falling in tangles over the pillows and there are heavy circles under his eyes, a tension in his brow that isn’t so obvious when he’s awake. When he’s guarded. She thinks that’s what the too-wide smiles are for, most of the time, a hyperbole of expressions to hide the underlying tightness.
It feels, a little, like a funhouse mirror.
She sits by the table and considers herself, her brother, and the tornado that is the sleeping boy in front of her.
Wen Qing is aware that she has what many people would and have called a limited capacity for caring. This doesn’t upset her. Not everyone has to be a leaf on the wind, movable and flighty and easy .
She is perfectly happy as she is, focused, rooted, and solid. If you know who you are it's easy to make others understand who they are in relation to you, easy to place boundaries and stick to them, easier still to live without regrets. That's what keeps her coming back to the Unclean Realm and the little corner of rules that Nie Mingjue has encouraged her to build there.
Wen Ning doesn't relate, exactly, but he understands. Mianmian understands, too, which is why they have stayed together for so long. Nie Mingjue, Jiang Cheng, the others in the scene either understand or she sits them down and has a conversation with them until they do.
Wei Wuxian looks like he's never met a boundary he didn't attempt to jump over immediately and Wen Qing is tired of people like that, people who barge in and demand her attention, demand she puts them first and foremost, demand she accommodates and compromises. She's got a life. She's got people. There's simply no space.
And yet here Wei Wuxian is. Asleep. On her couch. She has to clasp her hands together to stop them reaching to smooth out his frown.
When Wei Wuxian wakes up it's to an empty living room, and more confusions than epiphanies.
Wen Qing tells Mianmian about it, once, after she stays the night in Wen Qing's flat to get a break from her husband and her new fussy baby. They don't have sex, which feels slightly weird for them both, but Mianmian's libido is a strange thing postpartum and it's not as if Wen Qing doesn't have other people to get orgasms out of. Instead, she rubs Mianmian's back, teasing knots out with the steady patience that she applies to everything in her life, and talks.
"I don't trust him," she says.
"I don't think he's good for Wen Ning," she says.
"What does he even want," she says, and Mianmian rolls over, pins her with a look, a hand on her wrist. Her face is a bit puffy, her breasts swollen and strange on her body that’s usually nothing but muscles and sinew. She looks beautiful and her eyes are, as always, understanding.
"Qing’er," she says and doesn't really need to say much more. "What are you afraid he’ll ask of you?"
Wen Qing looks at her lover and just shrugs, hopelessly.
In the years since the first night he spent at her table, Jiang Cheng has told her he loves her on four different occasions, although he only remembers two of them. Wen Qing keeps count both because she feels she owes him to remember, and because she owes it to herself.
This is what you can have. This is what you decided you don’t want.
She will often take these memories out and contemplate them, weigh them against each other and see if they cause her any pain, if she feels differently about them than she did before. Usually, the answer is no. She cares for Jiang Cheng a lot, loves him, probably, but she can see how unsuitable a relationship with him would be, clearer than anything. He falls in love with people quickly and unthinkingly and unfailingly expects to have his heart broken. He’s been right too many times to change now.
Wen Qing knows that she could love him, but she also knows that if she let him he would exert himself trying to take care of her in a way that would exhaust them both and the worst thing is he wouldn’t even understand he was doing it. In another time he’d be exactly what she needed but, perhaps, not now. No, she still doesn’t regret keeping him at arm’s length. Sometimes it’s the best you can do for people and Wen Qing is good at it.
And then comes Wei Wuxian.
Something shifts when she comes home one night after a horrible hospital shift to a bowl of congee covered by a plate standing on the coffee table. There is a man-shaped post-it stuck on it with handwriting she doesn't recognize as Wen Ning's. She eats the congee and falls asleep on the couch and when she wakes up there are two blankets left out for her at the foot of the couch. Someone else would have covered her with them. It was a cold night and people often prioritise warmth and safety over a sleeping person’s agency. She smiles in the dark and pulls the blankets over herself.
Something shifts when Jiang Cheng comes to the club one night with his eyes dark and his shoulders tight, looking like a thundercloud. She shakes her head firmly when he looks at her, makes him go through the Butcher before she even allows him to glance at her table.
"Family dinner," the Directoire whispers when she looks at him, and the pattern of Jiang Cheng's bad days and the nights she's found Wei Wuxian on her couch reveals itself to be two parallel lines, bracketing her life.
Something changes when she looks at Wei Wuxian and Wen Ning as her brother smiles, always a rare and welcome sight, and Wei Wuxian stops mid-conversation and stares as if he notices, as if he knows what that means. When Wen Ning tells her he and Wei Wuxian talked about things she’s surprised, but not shocked. She hugs her brother and skips the club to order take out that they eat from the cartons, curled up on the couch like question marks.
It’s not the worst heartbreak of Wen Ning’s life and the next time she sees Wei Wuxian she makes sure to nod at him, acknowledging his presence.
It really could have been much worse and they, she understands, both know it.
Wen Qing has known Wei Wuxian for almost a year before she admits they're friends, first in the privacy of her own head and then in a private conversation with Mianmian. Wei Wuxian does not need that information yet. Even the thought of telling him is completely insufferable.
It doesn’t really matter whether she does or not.
Wei Wuxian hasn’t asked anything of Wen Qing yet, after all. Not even her approval.