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The drive back from the hospital was silent, other than the throbbing of the radio. Wangji had nothing to say to his brother, and he knew exactly what his brother wanted to say to him. There was no point in stating it. He had neglected to take the medication the nurse had given him, and his back was throbbing towards a crescendo, but he ignored it stoically. He knew Xichen could tell he had faked taking them. The beat of the pop song playing seemed to be synching with the aches of his back, but that was probably his imagination.
“You should have told me you were hurting that much.” Xichen’s voice snapped Wangji out of his reverie, and he turned his head to look at his brother. He didn’t respond, but Xichen continued anyway. “I would have helped you find something to help. Like what the doctor said. When we get home, we’re looking at–”
“No.”
“Wangji, you collapsed in the middle of the market. I think you do.” Wangji scowled at the dashboard of the car as if he were twelve again. “There isn’t any shame in assistive devices.
We can figure something out that works best for you.”
“...No.”
“Lan Wangji, stop saying that!” Xichen smacked his palm into the steering wheel and sped up abruptly. “You have not been fine for the past year! You do realize I can see it when you’ve been crying. And a-Yuan tells me more than you think. He knows when you’re hurting, and he knows what grief looks like. Do you think Wei–” Wangji stared at his brother, his eyebrows narrowing down, and Xichen stopped his sentence. “I’m sorry, Wangji. I shouldn’t have...never mind.” He ran his hand over the curve of the steering wheel. Wangji twisted his hands in his lap and stared down at his fingers. “What is it that’s making you not want to get help for...for anything? Are you afraid it makes you weak?”
That wasn’t it. Wangji stared at the glovebox and waited for his brother to guess. The song on the radio changed to a slow ballad, and he balled his fists tighter. Xichen clicked his tongue in time with the music for a moment. “Wangji, you don’t need to punish yourself for what happened to Wuxian.” Wangji looked at his brother, his eyes widening. He had not been expecting him to guess so correctly. Xichen continued, “It wasn’t your fault. I know you–”
“I let him go.”
“Jiji,” Xichen said, gently. He took one hand off the steering wheel and reached over to squeeze Wangji’s knee. “You were injured. How could you have held onto him?”
“I should have. I should have .” Wangji hunched his shoulders, despite the pain in his back, and dug his fists into his thighs. They pulled up to a stoplight, and Xichen turned to look at him.
“Jiji, don’t blame yourself for that. I know...I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything to help. At least...a-Yuan…”
“They want to take him, too,” Wangji snapped, staring directly at his brother. “I know Uncle wants to find a reason to take him. He’s all I have left of Wei Ying.” The light turned green, but Xichen was still staring at him.
“I won’t let that happen, Jiji. I swear it. I won’t let them take a-Yuan.” Someone honked behind them, and Xichen ignored them. “He’s your son, but he’s my nephew.” He turned his eyes back to the road and began driving again.
------
“Wangji, are you listening to me?” Grandmaster Lan Qiren stopped pacing to stare at the man before him. Wangji stared up at him, trying to keep his expression in check. He could not show his uncle how angry he really was.
“Yes,” he said, crumpling the edge of his cardigan in his fists.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Wangji continued to stare, and his uncle shook his head. “When you chose to take...that boy in, you took responsibility for him. Can’t you explain why a boy in your care would do something like that?”
“Wei Ying was his father, too.”
“Why do you keep defending that man?” Grandmaster turned on him, and Wangji reached one hand over to the wheel of his chair. Yuan had insisted he get a blue one, and had taken it upon himself to decorate it. Currently, the back of the seat was covered in meticulously placed rabbit stickers. “What did he ever do for you?” Wangji’s hands balled tighter into fists. “He led you down the same road your father took, and you know how that went. Don’t you remember?” Wangji rolled himself backwards, and Grandmaster stepped after him. “Lan Wangji, don’t try and leave without giving me an account. I am not the one raising a child who tried to talk back to his teacher. What kind of Lan boy denies history?”
“Why are you blaming a-Yuan for being angry?” Wangji asked. “He is barely five.”
“You should teach him better.” Grandmaster turned and began pacing again. “Remind him of who his father really was.”
“Yes.” Wangji ground his fist into his thigh.
“I will know if you do not.” Grandmaster paused, but did not turn around. “You may leave.” Wangji bowed stiffly, then spun himself around and left the room.
When Wangji reached his room, he parked his chair by the door and hobbled across the floor to his desk, where his guqin waited. He had been wanting to play something to calm himself down, but when he sat down and ran his hands across the strings he found that he could think of nothing to play. He plucked absently at the strings, trying to find a tune, but they kept wandering back to the song he had been avoiding playing for so long. What was the point of a song for someone when that person could no longer hear him play? His fingers found the notes for “Rest” and played it, although he was not paying any attention to what he was doing. He only stopped when tears started falling down onto his aching fingers.
The door slid open, and Yuan dropped his shoes down beside the wheelchair and slid across the wood to clamber into Wangji’s lap.
“What are you playing?” he asked, knocking his head backward into Wangji’s chest. Wangji took his hands off of the strings and wrapped his arms around the small boy, resting his chin on the top of his head. “Was it “Rest”? I think I heard you playing “Rest”.”
“It was,” Wangji said softly. Yuan fastened his hands around Wangji’s fingers.
“You’re missing Daddy again,” he observed. “Is it because of what I did in class? I’m sorry.”
“It isn’t your fault.”
Yuan contemplated this, then said, “I don’t understand why everyone hates Daddy so much. Was he really evil?”
Wangji stared across the room at the window out on the courtyard. He had no idea how to answer the boy’s question. The simple answer was no, of course, but that wouldn’t explain why everyone thought it was yes. How did you explain the terrible machinations of politics to a five-year-old?
“Baba?”
“No,” Wangji said softly, hugging Yuan closer and rocking him back and forth as much as his aching back would let him. “He was not evil, a-Yuan. He just...he did things people didn’t like, and so everyone decided he was evil.”
“But why ?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Wangji suppressed the strangled sob that was threatening to escape from his throat. Yuan tugged Wangji’s arms even closer around himself. They sat there until the dinner bell rang and Yuan scrambled out of his father’s lap to put his shoes on. Wangji watched him carefully unstrapping each shoe and placing the velcro back exactly on top of the corresponding piece of fabric. He wondered if his son would ever be able to learn in a place that told him the full, nuanced truth of his father’s life.
------
Wangji had wanted to do all the packing himself, but Xichen insisted on helping. There was really no way he could have hidden what he was doing from his brother. If Xichen didn’t know he was leaving, there was no way their uncle could punish him for Wangji’s actions, but Xichen had figured what was happening out. Yuan had probably told him.
They were almost finished. The bookshelves had been deconstructed and tucked away, and the once-clear floor of Wangji’s room was swallowed up by stacks of plastic bins and cardboard boxes. Xichen had begun moving them to his car. Their timing had worked out perfectly; Lan Qiren had gone to visit one of the other clan leaders, which made the moving process much easier. They didn’t have to hide as much. Currently, Xichen was sitting cross-legged on the ground taking Wangji’s desk apart while his brother perched cautiously on one of the more sturdy boxes. It was not the best place to sit, especially for his back, but Wangji did not want to navigate the maze that led to the actual chair.
“Baba!” Yuan appeared from the pile of boxes and held a framed photograph up to him. “I haven’t seen this before.” Wangji took it from him, and a tight feeling rose in his chest. He had tucked this photo away with the rest of the pictures of Wei Ying, but Yuan must have found the box. It was the last picture he had of him. Jiang Yanli had given it to him right after Jin Zixuan had died, had tucked it into his hands before he had gone rushing to find Wei Ying. The creases left by his trembling fingers were still visible behind the glass, but Wei Ying’s grinning face was unsullied by the three years that had passed. He was sitting at a table in an outdoor courtyard, wearing a worn black flannel and his hair tied up with a red ribbon. A bowl of soup was cradled in his hands. Wangji rubbed his thumb over the ridge of the frame and felt tears tracing their careful way down his cheeks.
“Wangji?” Xichen put the final leg of the desk into the box and straightened up. “What did you find?” He stood up and walked over to join them. When he saw the photograph Wangji was cradling, he sat down on the box next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “When did you take that?”
“Jiang Yanli did.”
“Oh. Oh, I see. That’s...right.” Xichen studied the photograph, then looked out across the sea of boxes. “What else do we have to pack, Yuan?”
“The guqin, and my toys, and some clothes but I think we’re putting those in the suitcases so we can have them.”
“Do you want to go take care of your toys?” Yuan grinned, gave his uncle a thumbs up, and scrambled between the boxes to the neat pile of stuffed animals and action figures next to the bed frame. Xichen turned back to Wangji as if he had something to say, then seemed to lose what he was going to say. He held out his hands for the picture, but Wangji shook his head. He stood with an effort and limped over to the remains of the bubble wrap. Yuan had been charged with wrapping up the framed photos, and the box he had been putting them in was full of puffy packages. Wangji picked up the leftovers and gently wound it around the photograph in his hands. It fit nicely with its brethren in the box. The act of crouching and closing up the box hurt his back and his leg, but he ignored the pain for a moment.
The apartment they had found was on the top floor of a squat little building just outside of the business district in Cayi Town. Wangji had considered going further away, but Yuan had not wanted to leave his friends or his uncle. It was a good thing Wangji did not have many material possessions; it took them at least three hours to get everything out of the car even as it was. Xichen did most of the carrying, despite Wangji’s insistence that he could stack two boxes on his lap without hurting himself. Yuan helped by following his uncle everywhere and directing the placing of boxes. Watching the small six-year-old try to take on so much responsibility was amusing. Once all the boxes were stacked along the edges of the front room, which combined the kitchen and the living room into one large space, they began the process of unpacking. Furniture came first, and Yuan insisted on helping. He wanted to do the actual job of putting the bookshelves back together, but Xichen and Wangji decided that this was a little too intensive for him. They did let him help put the drawers of Wangji’s desk in, which satisfied him.
Hours later, after the most important things had been freed from their boxes and after they had eaten their way through a pizza, Xichen left for Cloud Recesses with a promise to return the next day to finish up the packing. Yuan insisted that he wanted to stay up and keep taking things out of boxes, but he fell asleep shortly after Xichen left. Wangji carried him to bed, then returned to the front room. His desk had been placed in front of the large window that dominated the back wall of the apartment. It was mostly bare, other than his guqin and a few framed photographs. He walked slowly across the floor and sat in front of his instrument. Wei Ying beamed up at him from every one of the three pictures Yuan had chosen. There was the one of him with soup Yuan had found earlier. There was the only picture of their entire family that had survived the destruction of the Burial Mounds. And there, front and center, was a photo of them at sixteen, before their lives had started to fall apart, before the very act of loving had become a rebellion.
Wangji closed his eyes and found the places where his hands belonged on the guqin. For the first time in three years, the tune that his fingers tugged out of the strings was the one he had written for Wei Ying. The notes were tentative at first, but soon he was playing it as confidently as he had used to. Something in him did not want to stop playing, and so he added variations on the first few melodic ideas and repeated the chorus with extra ornamentation. He did not stop even when the tears started rolling down his face and onto his hands. Finally, he let the final notes rise up into the air and fade away. His hands pressed into the strings, and his shoulders shook with the silent sobs he had been holding in while he played.
When his crying had eased, Wangji stood with an effort and walked to the bathroom to begin getting ready for bed. He paused by the sink and stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes were red from crying, and his headband was slipping askew. He reached up to adjust it, then hesitated. A memory came to his mind. What is the fifty-second doctrine of our clan?
“What is evil?” he asked his reflection, repeating words he had spoken three years ago. He was not sure if he knew the precise answer to that, but he was beginning to get an idea of it. Slowly, with trembling fingers, he undid the fastening of his headband and took it off. The last time he had been without it, someone else had removed it. Had that really been six years ago? Without his headband, Wangji’s face looked bare. He stood staring at himself in the mirror for a long time before he actually began getting ready.
------
“I still don’t understand why they’re making it. It’s a stupid topic for a movie.” Jingyi came marching unceremoniously into the apartment, tugged his shoes off, then continued his rant. “Sure, it’s got potential for dramatic shots or whatever, but they’re not going to get any of the nuance or the trauma that went into that. Hi, Hanguang Jun.” Wangji, who was restringing a guqin, looked up briefly to acknowledge that the boys had arrived.
“They’ll make money off of it,” Sizhui pointed out. He had begun going by his courtesy name now that he was sixteen, but Wangji still reserved Yuan for moments of affection. “All the people who weren’t actually part of the war will go to it and pretend that that’s what actually happened. Sixteen years is enough time for people to forget a lot of things.”
“I think Zewu Jun should try to stop them. It’s just going to be Jin propaganda. You saw that they’re funding it.”
“Of course they’re funding it. Do you really think Bóbo will want to stop Jin Guangyao doing anything?”
“He’s Zewu Jun. He can do whatever he wants.” The boys disappeared into Sizhui’s bedroom, still discussing the movie. Wangji finished tying off the string and regarded the instrument in front of him. It was one of the student models the shop he had been working at since his defection offered for rental, and it was not the most high quality instrument, but it still played fine. He plucked out a simple tune on it and nodded in approval at the tautness of the stringes he had just replaced. Generally, Wangji did his work in the store, but he had asked to be allowed to work from home for these two days. He was usually granted requests like that. Working at a single store for ten years gave you that kind of power.
When Wangji had been looking for work in those first few months after leaving home, he had realized that being a twenty-three-year-old defector with no real higher education degrees and little work experience made it difficult to convince people to hire you. Being a war hero and the esteemed Hanguang Jun was all well and good, but when every single person you could ask for a work reference believed you were a traitor, things got tricky. Wangji had been lucky enough to find a music store that desperately needed someone who was familiar with traditional instruments and handy with tools. They had looked over the fact that they were hiring someone who was the subject of a huge uproar in the cultivation world, and ten years later he was still working there. The job was flexible, worked around Sizhui’s school schedule, and allowed him to take his work home when he had bad pain days.
Sizhui and Jingyi reappeared out of Sizhui’s bedroom. Jingyi went to raid the cupboard, and Sizhui walked over to examine the guqin Wangji had been working on. Wangji turned it towards him, and Sizhui plucked out the beginnings of a scale.
“It sounds nice for a beginner,” he observed.
“It’s because Hanguang Jun has the touch of an angel,” Jingyi called from the kitchen. “Every instrument he works on sounds beautiful, no matter what.”
“This is a nicer instrument,” Wangji explained, picking the instrument up and placing in its case. He stood and hobbled across the floor to add it to the pile of cases next to the door. Sizhui and Jingyi had the next two days off of classes, so they had volunteered to help him bring the finished instruments back to the shop when work started back up again.
“Did you see the posters for that Sunshot campaign movie?” Sizhui asked, perching on the edge of the desk. Wangji had, but he had done his best to not acknowledge their existence. As Jingyi had observed, he got the impression that the movie was not going to be dealing sensitively with anything regarding the Sunshot campaign.
“It looks stupid,” Jingyi said. “Did you see how everyone looked? There’s no fucking way Jiang Wanyin looked that cool at fifteen.”
“Daddy looks like a cartoon villain,” Sizhui added. “What are they even going to do with that narrative?”
“The one thing they got right was making Hanguang Jun and Zewu Jun incredibly hot.” Jingyi joined Sizhui on the desk, and Wangji gave him a bemused look. “Did you see that one poster with both of you? Those actors are so buff and handsome.”
“I was not handsome at fifteen.” Wei Ying had always maintained that Wangji was the most handsome disciple in all of the cultivation world, but at the time he had insisted this was true, Wangji had looked more ten than anything else.
“Jingyi, stop calling my dad hot to his face, please. ” Sizhui looked extremely tired of his friend’s antics.
“At least they got some of the cartoon villains right,” Jingyi continued. “Wen Ruohan looks perfectly evil. I just think they should have read an actual history textbook.”
“They’re aligning perfectly with the textbooks we have.” Both boys shook their heads in twin disgust. Wangji returned to his desk and pulled out the calligraphy piece he was working on. The teens slid off and returned to Sizhui’s room. They were supposed to be doing homework, but Wangji could clearly hear the sounds of a video game leaking through the door. He shook his head and smiled. They would get their work done eventually; a few hours of games would not hurt them in the long run. He allowed himself to be absorbed into the poem he was copying out from memory, letting the strokes and flicks of the brush become the only thing he could think about. It was one of the classics, and he was doing his best to not think about what the characters actually said.
He finished it an hour later. The sounds the boys were making had shifted from video games to pop music, which meant they were either doing their homework or trying to learn an idol group dance. Wangji waited for the ink to dry completely. Now, he could not avoid reading the words on the page. Ten years, dead and living dim and draw apart. I don’t try to remember, but forgetting is hard. A lump rose in his throat, but he swallowed it down and rolled the paper up. Some of the characters smeared, but he was not bothered. This was not for displaying, after all.
The family altar was tucked into the corner of the living room. It was small: nothing more than two overturned wooden boxes with a few photographs on them. Wangji had not been able to find many good group photographs of Sizhui’s Wen family in his small collection, but the picture he had found was a sweet candid shot of them eating dinner and laughing. Wei Ying had kept a photograph of Wen Qing and Ning sitting on the steps of the Demon-Subdue Palace with his things in the Burial Mounds, which Wangji had taken with him when he had rescued Sizhui. Front and center sat a photograph of Wei Ying. It was the one Yanli had given Wangji, and whenever he looked at it he felt a loss that no other photograph made him feel. He knelt carefully–being mindful of his gently aching leg–and tucked the rolled up poem in between the bowl of loquats and the bottle of Emperor's Smile. There was a stray speck of dust on the frame, and he brushed it away. That evening, he and Sizhui would go into town and buy more things to add to the offerings. Stores did not typically close for the holiday, but neither of them wanted to be out when the entire world was celebrating the death of the man they were honoring.
“Wei Ying,” he murmured to the photograph. “You would have laughed at this new movie. I hope you can, wherever you are.” The frozen Wei Ying in the frame did not answer, but Wangji could hear his boyfriend’s voice commenting on the state of cinema these days, and why hadn’t they made him as handsome as his brother? He sighed, adjusted the frame one last time, and rose slowly. The pop music died down, and the sound of Sizhui’s guqin replaced it. He was playing “Wangxian”. Wangji wiped a stray tear from his cheek and walked slowly into the kitchen to start cooking dinner.