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Night without end. I cannot sleep.
The full moon blazes overhead.
Far off in the night I hear someone call.
Helplessly I answer, “Yes.”
- Anonymous Six Dynasties poem
When Wei Wuxian woke in the dark pre-dawn mornings during those first three months in the Cloud Recesses, he tended not to know where he was. Wei Wuxian had a bad memory in his youth, by which he means a lazy memory. Sleeping places other than home disoriented him.
Wei Wuxian, young and burning-bright, liked it: the few seconds of mystery when he woke and could be anywhere at all in the world. Anywhere, at least until Jiang Cheng snored across their room and Nie Hausang despondently rang the morning bell in the courtyard. Why strain to remember quickly, and brush away the fun dream of it, when in a moment he would be so sure of himself and his place in the world? All he should need to do is kick Jiang Cheng awake for morning meditation; all he should need to do is open his eyes. His face is waiting for him in the bronze mirror.
His face— well. Nowadays, Wei Wuxian’s soul recalls these things, those cold night-dark mornings in the Gusu mountains, the way souls are not meant to recall. Memory is for the flesh. His brains and heart and guts, his remembering-things, are soil now on a hillside far from here. His soul should not have remembered, but in death it went and wandered so far that even Meng Po could not find him to drag back to her underworld bridge and make Wei-Ying-the-soul sip forgetfulness from the bowl. Ah, even Lan Zhan could not find him. Even the golden thing that had once been his did not know where to begin to look.
Now when Wei Wuxian wakes in the Cloud Recesses, he still tends not to know where he is. Wei Wuxian has a bad memory these days, by which he means, grimly, that a spiderweb after a thunderstorm has fewer holes punched through it. Picture, he thinks, careless gaps. Something weeks in the making, destroyed in an afternoon.
His soul tries to speak gently to this new brain, this unsuspecting flesh that deserved more than it ever got. Wei Wuxian sometimes masturbates an extra time, just to give this body something nice. But no matter how soft Wei Wuxian tries to speak to it, letting his memories into it like fish writhing from a crowded little bowl into a pond, there are some things even his soul cannot say in the quiet of this skull. There are times he is unexpectedly a mute, which he does not understand but which Lan Wangji seems to.
Wei Wuxian, at least, has practice waiting for Lan Wangji’s words to come back, when they go away from him. He never minds that the way he minds it in himself, when he can talk but he cannot think.
They are sometimes very quiet together. They are sometimes very loud together. It is one thing of which Wei Wuxian is not ashamed.
This morning he wakes in the Cloud Recesses, where he is someone’s husband and it is late autumn. For a moment he knows nothing but the dark, and that he is older, and that he is settled in some way even as he unspools himself.
He does try to still enjoy the endless possibility of a room that holds, for a moment, only the glint of his own eyes. He succeeds sometimes, though the sensation does come with more vertigo than it used to. And more options; there are so many places his brain thinks he could be. This happens most often at times like these when he wakes before dawn but not before Lan Wangji, and is alone in a bed, not necessarily afraid, just floating out in the black of the universe, the wide world.
He’s lying like this when he feels the bedclothes tug and dip. It is still dark out, nighttime in anyone’s language.
“Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian says. His voice cracks, rough. His nose is cold but under the covers it is warm enough. Time and place reassert themselves; there is no real forgetfulness. Even though Wei Wuxian is dirt on a hill. Even though there is a scar under Mo Xuanyu’s hair that, when bumped, makes Wei Wuxian dizzy and strange and lose about half a stick of incense’s time.
“I am here,” says Lan Wangji, whose legs are cold under the blankets as he slides into bed.
“What were you doing?” Wei Wuxian asks.
“Closing the shutter. It is cold.” Wei Wuxian tries to hide from Lan Wangji’s cold feet, but Lan Wangji hooks a leg around Wei Wuxian’s knee and shoves his bony ankles between Wei Wuxian’s feet.
It boggles the mind, Wei Wuxian thinks, that Lan Wangji, who slept so steadily in their youth that they actually could judge the hour by it, now wakes up to close a window because their room is cold. Maybe outside a frost is settling. Maybe the two of them are getting old, in the way one can when one is a body, and alive. When one is resisting being soil; when one is resisting being a muttering soul.
They can be souls later. They are bodies now; they are bodies.
Lan Wangji lies in a line of heat against Wei Wuxian’s back. Wei Wuxian feels a little shudder in his belly. Arousal is familiar, and happens for familiar reasons, but in slightly different places. What was a thud in Wei Wuxian’s chest is a swoop in Mo Xuanyu’s stomach. His hips fit into the welcoming curve of Lan Wangji’s hips, his arms and chest enveloped by Lan Wangji’s arms.
“I didn’t know where I was when I woke up,” Wei Wuxian says without realizing he is about to say it. He blinks a few times, stretches a little in Lan Wangji’s hold. Those arms tighten around him suddenly, almost viciously.
“Lan Zhan?”
Taught silence. Wei Wuxian feels a rib creak.
“Do you know now?” Lan Wangji asks, holding him with pinching-tight hands.
Lan Wangji’s voice has always been low; now, pitched even deeper with sleep and with his rumbling chest pushed right up against Wei Wuxian, his cold legs tangled with Wei Wuxian’s legs, it makes Wei Wuxian shiver again.
“Yes,” Wei Wuxian whispers, and his own voice sounds strange to his ears. Ragged, like Lan Wangji is already doing more than just holding him.
“Kiss me,” he says, which he could not say as dirt on the side of a hill. He hopes Lan Wangji has never kissed the dirt on the side of a hill in Yiling, where a person named Wei Ying was born and died. “I’m alright, I’m fine, I remember where I am. Kiss me so I know you’re alright too, Lan Zhan, my Lan Zhan,” he says.
Lan Zhan shudders. Wei Ying wonders if souls sleep, truly, and if he ever woke up in some corner of the underworld or wherever he lost himself, thinking he was in Lan Wangji’s bed.
He hopes so. There is absolutely no dignity in death, none at all, so he hopes he was able to make a fool of himself in the best way he can currently imagine. He hopes that Wei-Ying-the-soul believed for a moment that he was a body, a husband, in Lan Wangji’s bed. That his head was sliding off the pillow. That his hair was tangled from sleeping so well.
⭒⭑☾⭒⭑
Lan Wangji is awake with the autumn moon.
Sometimes nowadays Wei Wuxian wakes up in the middle of the night, worried, grasping Lan Wangji’s hand or his sleeve near the elbow. As Lan Wangji forces himself awake, Wei Wuxian says things like, “That time, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you didn’t know anything had happened until three months later. I’m sorry, so sorry.”
Sometimes Lan Wangji knows which time he means. Mostly he does. Their scars tend to match up.
“I’m sorry, Lan Zhan, you must have felt—” Wei Wuxian will say, and Lan Wangji has learned through careful study how to rub a hand up and down a back: Wei Wuxian’s back. Wei Wuxian has a back and lungs that can shake on an exhale and then smooth out. A hand up and down his back and he goes from worried to calm. He’ll slide an arm, sleep-hot and pleasantly heavy, around Lan Wangji’s waist.
And other times, like this morning, Wei Wuxian wakes Lan Wangji and it’s similar but not the same. This morning he is worried in the pre-dawn dark, hands tight on Lan Wangji’s shoulders, but his voice is softer. The love and fear is less brittle, but deeper. Not poison which can be bled away, but an ache in the bone.
“Lan Zhan,” he whispers, right into Lan Wangji’s greedily open mouth. Lan Wangji would breathe only air left over from Wei Wuxian’s lungs if someone let him. It is a good thing that no one lets him. (Though he is trying to, a little, this morning.)
Wei Wuxian says, unexpectedly and soft: “Lan Zhan you were born three months before me. You were alive and in the world three months all on your own. That frightens me! I didn’t exist and you did. I’m sorry. Was it too lonely? I’m sorry Lan Zhan.”
Lan Wangji freezes. There is a sound outside. A deer, or wind, or a toad in the leaf matter. “Ah,” says Wei Wuxian. “Ah, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, come here.”
He gathers up Lan Wangji; he lets Lan Wangji breathe from his mouth. Lan Wangji’s eyes feel hot until Wei Wuxian sniffs and tucks his jaw up against Lan Wangji’s, smudging any tears away, smudging them all over. His skin is soft, his nails always a little ragged where he has bitten them down. The outside air is not so warm, but it does let Lan Wangji feel a little sharper.
Lan Wangji had not thought in so many words about those three months, not compared to thirteen years, not compared to every month of Sizhui living without Wei Wuxian or anyone else who must have wanted to see him grow, the way Lan Wangji’s own mother must have watched her sons grow in an odd, sped-fast way, at least a month packed between each day. But here is Wei Ying, thinking about those three months for him, so anxious that Lan Wangji can only curl into him, let tears he doesn’t understand fall on Wei Wuxian’s warm, damp neck.
All he wished for, for a few months at a certain point, was for Wei Wuxian to come and comfort Lan Wangji through the process of grieving Wei Wuxian. Maybe that is what he also felt like for three months as an infant. Lan Wangji was a baby who, by all reports, cried demandingly and often, though not inconsolably. He wishes he had taken the time to be inconsolable.
Wei Ying is getting so good at gently taking the pieces Lan Wangji doesn’t yet understand about himself, taking them and holding them so gently until Lan Wangji can take them back.
“Was it lonely?” We Wuxian whispers where his nose is mashed into Lan Wangji’s breastbone.
“Nn,” Lan Wangji says, and means yes, means no. But there is no urgency to this particular thought, no guilt, no tangle. He feels comforted, like he is still breathing Wei Wuxian’s air.
He thinks Wei Wuxian will eventually stop waking up with a specific memory tied to an apology and kneading, anxious fingers. That is something that can bleed itself mostly dry.
He might not stop waking up this way, the second way, though. This might just be the shape of life, reflecting back at them, the way the golden sky before sunset sometimes makes Lan Wangji so sad that he can barely move.
“I loved you,” Lan Wangji says now in the middle of the night, with Wei Wuxian’s hair getting in his mouth. “In those three months.”
Wei Ying laughs. “Oh?” he whispers, half-asleep, present in this world. “Yes, yes.” And he guides Lan Wangji’s hands to touch his face.