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As the sun dipped below the horizon, the clear notes of Chenqing wove through the trees.
Wei Wuxian played with his eyes closed, back against the tree, his feet angled toward the campfire. The melody he played was not the one nearest and dearest to his heart, the one only meant for his husband's ears, but it was peaceful and soothing all the same. Despite the fact that he was outside rather than at an inn with a jar of liquor on the table in front of him, the evening would be pleasant if not for -
"I don't see why we have to sleep outside in this weather," Lan Jingyi said sullenly. He was sitting closest to Wei Wuxian, hugging his sword to his chest like it was his firstborn child.
Lan Sizhui sat to his other side, holding his hands out toward the warmth. "If we made sure to stop at all towns along the way, it would take several more days to get to Cloud Recesses. Weren't you the one who wanted to get home quickly?"
He was. Wei Wuxian had already heard a litany of reasons why Lan Jingyi wanted to be back at Cloud Recesses sooner rather than later, but the thing that seemed to bother him most was how long they'd all been away. They'd been travelling for almost a month, which was hardly any time at all, in Wei Wuxian's opinion. He'd spent longer than that romping around Yunmeng in his youth.
Privately, Wei Wuxian wondered what Lan Jingyi expected his life as a fully-fledged cultivator would be like. He was going to end up travelling further and for longer than this if he really wanted to emulate Lan Wangji's habit of being wherever the chaos was. Often, he and Lan Wangji didn't return for months at a time when they went on night hunts together.
Lan Jingyi's expression remained mulish. "If I'd known it would start raining as soon as we made camp, I would've paid for a room in the last town myself."
The rain Lan Jingyi was complaining about was more a light drizzle, enough to make their skin and hair damp, but not enough to soak through their clothes, especially the many layers the Gusu Lan wore for propriety (Wei Wuxian considered so many layers incredibly excessive, especially when alone at night with Lan Wangji). Growing up in Yunmeng with its many lakes, rivers and brothers who liked to push him out of boats, Wei Wuxian was more than used to damp clothes.
Wei Wuxian’s eyes opened and met Wen Ning's over the fire. The way his eyes slid briefly to the sulking Lan Jingyi and then back, and how he offered a small, amused smile, let Wei Wuxian know they were thinking along the same lines. The two of them had endured through far worse conditions than this in their time. Not just the hard existence they'd eked out in the Burial Mounds, where every day had been an uphill battle at first and had never truly become easy, but just on the road together. They'd bedded down in torrential downpours, baking heat and even snow. Well, Wei Wuxian had, at least; Wen Ning had little use for sleep as he was, but he'd sat through it, all the same.
"We'll be on the road for a few more days yet, Jingyi," he finally spoke up, his tone light and amused. "We'd have to make quite the detour now if we wanted to find an inn and the weather’s only going to get worse."
That was just the nature of the current season in Gusu. Really, Wei Wuxian shouldn't need to remind the Gusu natives of this; it was something they should already be well prepared for. When Lan Jingyi only continued to grumble under his breath, Wei Wuxian chuckled.
"What would Hanguang-Jun think if he could hear you, Jingyi? You should try to be more like our Sizhui. He's not complaining."
If he were any less a prized Lan disciple, Lan Sizhui might have puffed up under the praise. Even so, his eyes were pleased. Lan Jingyi threw Wei Wuxian an unimpressed look, though at the mere mention of Lan Wangji, he had unconsciously straightened his posture slightly. Wei Wuxian grinned.
"Ah, Jingyi, you need to toughen up. When I was your age, I spent most of my time in varying degrees of cold and soaked through to the skin. Lotus Pier is right on the water."
"You kept falling in?"
"No," he retorted. "I would never fall in. I was pushed because I have the worst little brother in the world."
Lan Jingyi shivered once, but violently, wiping the chilly dampness off his face with his sleeve.
"I bet you deserved it," he said sullenly.
"Who knows," Wei Wuxian replied serenely, knowing full well he usually had. Whether it was Jiang Cheng or his other shidi, he had spread his mischief and teasing around liberally. Only Jiang Yanli had ever been spared their pranks through silent agreement and understanding that he and Jiang Cheng would bloody anyone who dared try.
“The point is,” he continued, “this is nothing. You’re not going to melt in a little bit of rain.”
Lan Jingyi hmphed. Actually hmphed. Wei Wuxian couldn’t help but laugh.
“What are you going to do when you’re night hunting in Qinghe, where it’s all dry and dusty and there are no villages for miles at a time? Or in Yunmeng during the summer heatwaves and storms, trudging through the wet, muddy terrain and even swimming across rivers and lakes? You’re going to spend a lot of time wet and dirty and that’s half the fun of it. Might as well get used to it now.”
“That doesn’t sound in any way fun,” Lan Jingyi countered, his lip curling unconsciously.
Wei Wuxian snorted. “You were raised in Cloud Recesses, weren’t you? You missed out on the fun of running wild as a kid. Jiang Cheng and I would sometimes be gone for days and come home covered head to toe in dirt, scratched up and bruised. One time, Jiang Cheng lost his shoes in the lake and had to walk barefoot through mud for almost a whole day before we got back to Lotus Pier. It looked like he’d made shoes out of mud. Yu-furen was horrified. That was good fun,” he finished with a fond smile.
“Still not seeing how that’s meant to be fun.”
“Wei-qianbei, wouldn’t you prefer to be inside than out in the rain?” Lan Sizhui asked. Ever the diplomat, he expertly sensed that this conversation might turn to bickering if left unchecked and redirected it effortlessly.
“Well, sure,” Wei Wuxian reluctantly conceded, though he refused to even so much as acknowledge Lan Jingyi’s smug look. “Of course I’d prefer to be warm and dry, but I don’t complain when I’m not. I learned a long time ago not to be attached to the comforts of home.”
“Not even Cloud Recesses?” Lan Sizhui asked quietly.
Wei Wuxian opened his mouth, but perhaps for the first time since they’d met, Wen Ning beat him to speaking, much to his astonishment.
“Wei-gongzi actually complains very much when it’s cold,” he said, his soft voice somehow carrying perfectly even over the crackling of the fire.
“Wen Ning!” Wei Wuxian shouted, aggrieved and scandalised by the sudden and unexpected betrayal. Wen Ning, however, merely smiled, clearly utterly remorseless, and went back to poking at the fire with a long stick.
“Don’t tell me you still think of Lotus Pier as home? I know you grew up there -”
“No, no, no,” Wei Wuxian interrupted before Lan Jingyi could carry that thought on even further. “Lotus Pier hasn’t been my home for a long time. Even if I was welcome there, I’d always come back to Cloud Recesses because it’s Lan Zhan’s home. But we spend almost as much time travelling and night hunting. I’m as comfortable on the road as I am in the Jingshi.”
“I don’t know if Hanguang-jun would be happy to hear that,” Lan Sizhui said pensively.
“Don’t you worry about your Hanguang-jun,” Wei Wuxian reassured, leaning back against the tree. “He knows. He knows everything about me. You might start to understand it some when you’re older.”
Knowing full well how much two young adults would hate to hear that and how outspoken one could be, Wei Wuxian shut his eyes, effectively exiting the discussion. If he could feel the weight of Lan Jingyi frowning at him, he chose to ignore it.
Truth be told, he knew Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi would likely never understand how he felt. They’d both grown up in the safety and security of the Cloud Recesses, never wanting for a thing. For that, particularly in Lan Sizhui’s case, Wei Wuxian would always be grateful. But his own tenuous relationship with the concept of home had been mercurial from a very young age and hadn’t improved with time.
He remembered very little of his birth parents - mere flashes of images and colours, impressions of how he felt or imagined he must have felt - but he always remembered travelling, whether atop a donkey, riding on his father’s shoulders or snuggled up together in the back of a hay cart. His mother was a rogue cultivator, and their life was spent on the road. He didn’t remember settling down anywhere, of considering anywhere a place to come back to.
When he’d lost them, he’d wandered by himself, because that was all he knew. If Jiang Fengmian hadn’t found him and invited him back to Lotus Pier, he might have wandered his entire life. He hadn’t truly grasped the idea of staying in one place for a long time even after he began to settle in and accept he was welcome, always wondering in the back of his mind when they would move on.
It did become home, for a while. A place where he was happy, where the memories still shone brightly in his mind like the morning sun on the lakes of Yunmeng. He had found a family there; one that was worth walking the razor’s edge of Yu-furen’s approval to keep, one that he would have fought to the death to protect, that had broken something deep inside when he lost it.
Lotus Pier had since been rebuilt, as faithfully as possible to the original, but Wei Wuxian had walked through those new rooms and across those boardwalks and they just weren’t the same. He had accepted, bitter as the thought was, that his time there had passed, unlikely to return.
There had been one final, pitiful attempt to carve a place for himself and those who needed him out of a world that had turned its back on them, toiling fields fertilised with the corpses of generations before them and trying not to think too hard about it, fighting the ever-present pull of the resentful energy that permeated every blade of dry, brittle grass on that mountain.
For a time, he had almost believed it would work. That a group of outcasts, social pariahs and walking dead could survive and even thrive in the home they’d built with their bare hands, that the Burial Mounds could actually be a safe and fitting place to raise an innocent child so long as they shielded him from the worst of it.
That fragile hope, like so many others, had crumbled to dust long ago. Though the child had gone on to live a better life than he could have ever provided, had survived and thrived enough to be sitting at this same campfire with him, Wei Wuxian had lost too many others and the final place he’d laid claim to.
Soon after, he’d lost his own life as well.
Since his unexpected return, he’d determined never again to attach himself to any one place, not even since coming to live in the Jingshi with Lan Wangji. He loved the Jingshi, had even come to enjoy being in Cloud Recesses despite the cold and Lan Qiren’s disapproving stares, but it wasn’t the place itself that made him return again and again. That was something else entirely.
Wei Wuxian knew before anyone else that they were no longer alone, a subtle shift in the air around them that might as well have been a shout, so attuned was he to it. Like one of his compasses finding its target, his head turned before his eyes even opened, recognition surging through him like a bolt of lightning.
“Lan Zhan!”
Both the Lan disciples jumped, though whether it was because of the name or his volume, it was impossible to say. It didn’t matter, because a familiar figure suddenly appeared in the firelight, a tall column of flawless white in the dark night.
“Hanguang-jun!” they greeted in unison, hurriedly scrambling to their feet to bow like dutiful cultivators. Wen Ning offered a respectable bow from where he sat, still tending the fire. Lan Wangji’s gaze swept over them, acknowledging their greetings, before meeting eyes with Wei Wuxian.
Faintly, he wondered if there would ever be a time where he didn’t get that instant gut punch from seeing his husband after time spent apart, that shock that this perfect man was still his and still wanted to be, from the way his already brilliant golden eyes brightened and even heated at the mere sight of him. Wei Wuxian’s grin was so wide, it actually hurt, but he couldn’t find it in him to care.
He scooted over to the side, making room for Lan Wangji to join him leaning against the tree. Immediately, Lan Wangji arranged himself neatly beside Wei Wuxian. He sat close enough that there was not an inch of their thighs that wasn’t touching and he reached over, calmly and self-assuredly, to take one of Wei Wuxian’s hands and draw it into his lap, lacing their fingers together.
Looking at their joined hands, Wei Wuxian thought this. This was home for him, the only one he needed. This man and everything he embodied, who waited and suffered silently for so long, who had been and always would be by his side from now on. This man who expressed his love and devotion in a million different ways, who wanted and would settle for no less than all of him in return. This man who offered shelter and freedom in equal measure, who understood him perfectly and hid nothing of himself.
Wherever Lan Wangji was, that was home.