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“How’s your headache?”
Wen Qing asks with little preamble– the minute Yanli sits down, she has a cup pressed gently into her hands, warmth seeping through porcelain to chase away the autumn from her fingers. “Gone,” she says, taking a sip and bracing herself to the inevitably bitter tea. Medicine has never settled quite right on her tongue, always too sour, too biting.
This time, though, the sting never comes. Instead, it tastes sweet, it tastes like early spring, and the surprise comes so swift, she can’t quite stop herself from looking up abruptly. Tidying up her desk, Wen Qing falters, bowl slipping from her fingers, and she clears her throat, looking away. “Wei Wuxian told me you found it bitter last time,” she explains, turning her back to Yanli, but her voice carries her familiar unimpressed tone, “so I added honey.”
Of course. “Thank you,” Yanli hides her smile. How very honorable of Wen Qing to go to such lengths to uphold a presumed debt towards her brother: most people would not think of small acts of kindness nor find them important, even if for Yanli, they’re the ones that most matter. “But I hope you know you owe us nothing.”
Wen Qing turns sharply. In the half-shadow from the curtains, her face is unreadable, but something flickers in her eyes, no answer forthcoming. Instead, she continues adding herbs now to her bowl, a green, fresh smell wafting up from her work, “what of your energy? Have you been feeling any tiredness?”
One could almost mistake her directness for rudeness, or even carelessness, but Yanli, who has known Jiang Cheng from birth and her mother around her father, knows better. When she takes the cup, their fingers brush, gentle as falling snow. When she examines her pulse, Wen Qing is careful not to startle her. When she tells her to rest, Wen Qing offers her lavender.
When she makes tea, Wen Qing adds honey.
No matter how suspicious the rest of the disciples regard the Wens, Yanli has seen Wen Qing kneel by her brother’s bedside, has seen her cry in worry, and has seen her threaten Wei Wuxian with her needles, hiding a smile in her sleeves when everyone’s backs are turned.
Wen Qing walks her back to her room, steps light as lotus petals, voice flowing quiet as a river’s murmur, and all the while, somewhere near her heart, something warm and radiant takes root.
*
“I thought,” a voice pierces the stillness, startling Yanli into nearly dropping her basket, “I told you to rest.”
The trees shade them from the mellow sun and paint Wen Qing in deeper burgundies among the greenery. Yanli smiles. “Apologies, Wen-guniang,” she takes in her stern expression, the little pinch between her eyebrows, and wonders if it would cause offense to reach up and smooth it out. “We didn’t have lectures and the day was so beautiful…”
“So you decided to ignore a doctor’s advice,” Wen Qing narrows her eyes just slightly, glaring at the basket as if deeply offended by it. Inside it, the lychees and apples sit idly, shiny and colorful, “and carrying weight too, I see.”
Yanli tries to hide her laugh into her sleeve, hitches the basket up, too warm, too content, to feel properly guilty. “You could always join me– wouldn’t it be better, then, if I wasn’t wandering off alone?”
Hesitancy crosses her face in an uncharacteristic feat. Wen Qing seems to be debating with herself whether to storm off or not, a thundercloud in the clear weather that is swept away with the wind as quick as summer rain. Her expression settles. She storms forward instead, taking the basket with a gentleness that belied her previous warpath. “You shouldn’t be straining yourself.”
A lychee rolls off to the floor, flattens a path in the grass. Yanli picks it up, says, “I’m not so fragile.”
Wen Qing’s gaze is scorching the side of her face, steady and sunkissing-intense, but Yanli looks resolutely forward, even as they start walking again, even as Wen Qing speaks up, quiet and certain, “no, you’re not,” she walks at her side, sleeves brushing with every breath, “but I’m your doctor. Can you blame me for worrying?”
“Are you?” What? Worried? Her doctor? Yanli ducks away, hoping to hide the heat she feels spreading across her cheeks, and privately startles at her own lack of answers.
Thankfully, Wen Qing doesn’t ask her to elaborate, merely scoffs. “Of course I am your doctor. How many times have you consulted me?”
Yanli laughs again, picking a lychee off the basket. Vaguely, she wonders if she’s reading this wrong, if they are not friends after all, but Wen Qing has yet to move away, to further the inches between them so their hands wouldn’t brush, so their steps wouldn’t tangle in the grass.
“Maybe we should stop for a moment,” Wen Qing places a hand in her arm, soft and steady, but does not look directly at her. Instead, her eyes slant to a tall cherry tree a few paces off the path, its overreaching branches casting a long shade in the earth.
If she’s being honest, Yanli is beginning to tire. Cloud Recesses is colder than Lotus Pier and the chilled air pierces her chest like pinprick needles. It’s distracting. It melts like snow in the sun when Wen Qing’s hand lowers to cup her elbow, guide her to the shadowy corner.
They sit, the basket between them, and Yanli takes care not to stare at her for too long– the late afternoon sun illuminates her profile too well, Wen Qing looks too lovely, it pulls at Yanli as if tied together by a string, tight and unrelenting. “Here,” she says, offering the lychee she’s just peeled. Her fingers are sticky with juice, but Wen Qing looks at the fruit, at Yanli, and her heart is set on fire.
She takes it as if it’s something precious. “Thank you,” comes the response, prim and proper, and just thorny enough to very nearly send Yanli into giggles. Still, their hands brush. Still, her skin burns.
Still, Yanli picks another lychee.
It’s not yet blooming season for the cherry tree and the leaves cling thoughtfully in their branches, and they sit in the shade, sharing lychees and apples and peaches, time dripping away sugary sweet.
*
Later, when Wei Wuxian asks her, wide-eyed and sweetly unaware, why like someone at all, Yanli takes pity on him and doesn’t question his motives any further, answers him in the only way she thinks it won’t scare him off from Lan Wangji’s lingering eyes.
For once in his life, he leaves it well enough alone and– she’s glad. How do you explain loving someone so much you overflow with it? How to tell him it grows like ivy over your heart, a blooming thing golden and light, hiding behind your core? A yearning happiness so encompassing you ache with it. It’s wonderful. It’s terrifying.
And all the while, Yanli thinks of fingers sticky with lychee juice, the grass brushing her ankles, honey on tea.
*
The commotion with Jin Zixuan stays with her long after the dust has settled.
Guilt swells in her chest– should she argue further for her engagement? Should she not care more about the abrupt breaking? Jiang Cheng thinks so. He’s still fuming over it, long after even Wei Wuxian has cooled off, long after their father has returned to Yunmeng.
Privately, Yanli thinks the anger is just a smokescreen, that maybe breaking off this engagement is a blessing not just for her, but she will not push, not right now. Knowing her brother, it would do no one any good. Instead, she listens to his angry grumbling and pretends not to notice his looking. Jiang Cheng seems to be always looking, these days, eyes following Jin Zixuan as if a moth to a flame.
He calls it glaring, of course.
This helps, a little, with the guilt and the embarrassment– her mother will not be happy about any of this, not at all, and gossip will run amok between sects, yes, but if it saves her brother the misery, then how can she regret it?
“Jiang-guniang,” Wen Qing’s voice reaches her before she comes into view, leaning against the railing beside her. She doesn’t dare turn to face her, but she feels the warmth of her hand so close to hers.
“Please,” Yanli says in a moment of boldness, words spilling without her permission and falling down to the garden below them, “are we not past these formalities? Call me Yanli.”
It seems to take Wen Qing aback, forcing her to pause, and Yanli watches her blink, a pink glow to her cheeks. “Well, only if you do the same,” she clears her throat, “Yanli, how have you been?”
Yanli shivers. The sound of her name in Wen Qing’s voice– how can it be so different? The way her lips curve around the vowels– she wants it to live there, safely in her mouth, always. Say it again, she almost asks, never stop, never tell me anything else. Instead, “I’ve been well, no headaches, no more tired than one would expect.”
“I meant,” Wen Qing shifts, their fingers brush in the wooden railing. She shivers again. “About your engagement.”
Oh. Finally, Yanli turns, glancing away to the greenery growing over the rocks to catch the tail-end of what must have been a concerned expression. As with looking directly at the midday sun, Yanli burns. “Then I thank you for your concern,” she nods politely, more muscle memory than any real presence of mind, “but there is no need for it. I’m fine, truly.”
Wen Qing hesitates, brow crinkling, leans forward just slightly, as if not even realizing, “forgive me if I overstep, but you seemed upset, earlier.”
“You could never,” she shakes her head, a small smile blooming unbidden, “I was upset to have caused such a disturbance and I admit, his words stung at the time, but– I think, it might have been for the best.”
Something flickers in Wen Qing’s eyes and Yanli wonders how she could have mistaken her as the sun before: it’s as if clouds have parted and the sky has cleared, and Wen Qing is brighter than ever. A constellation made flesh, light given a soul.
Yanli wonders–
“In that case,” Wen Qing smiles, and it’s the loveliest thing Yanli’s seen in this life, the kind people would go to war for. She would do anything to see it every day until the end of the world. “Perhaps I asked the wrong person. Surely, Jin-gongzi must be distraught– otherwise, if he’s not, then he must be stupider than I thought.”
This startles a laugh out of her, too used to Wei Wuxian to be properly scandalized with the lack of decorum and delighted with the abrupt rudeness. She should not be so amused, she thinks, or so endeared by it, but as with all things concerning Wen Qing, Yanli is helplessly charmed. “Wen Qing,” she chides for the sake of it, just to say it aloud, savoring the name in her tongue, feeling it echo from her heart.
“It is forbidden to lie in Cloud Recesses, after all,” Wen Qing recites, wry and pleased, her eyes twinkling in the moonlight with mischief. It’s one of those things that she seems to keep very close to her chest, and Yanli swells with happiness at being allowed to witness it so freely.
You could never overstep, she had meant earlier, anywhere you want, I’ll let the light in for you. Maybe this could go both ways. Hopefully.
“Are you really not heartbroken?” She asks, growing serious once again, seeming to give her one last chance to request a shoulder to cry on.
“Yes,” Yanli tries to speak with as much confidence as she can, suddenly desperate for Wen Qing to believe her, “we have been betrothed since we were children but it has never been any more than that.”
A nod. “You do not feel sad,” she catches her eye, solemn and infinitely patient. Kind. Gentleness hiding in plain sight if only one cares to look. “Then how do you feel?”
Has anyone asked Yanli this and meant it in such a way? She doesn’t know. Her heart trashes, swallowed by a riptide. “Free,” she smiles, “awake.”
Wen Qing seems to soften in the light. How is it possible they know each other for less than a year? It feels longer. It feels like she’s known Wen Qing her whole life, has been waiting for her. Whatever lies after death, she’ll know her there too. “I’m glad,” Wen Qing says, reaching to cover Yanli’s hand with hers, thumb brushing circles in a soothing heart-stopping rhythm, “you deserve more than that.”
Maybe it’s selfish of her, maybe she is the one overstepping, maybe she is reading this all wrong. Maybe Wen Qing doesn’t mean herself. But– so far, Yanli has hardly dared to want anything for herself. Can’t she have this? If nothing else, this. Her.
“A-Qing,” she dares, voice quiet with all the other words she wants to say, and reaches for her, feels the silent tremor that travels underneath her palm. Hope. “A-Qing,” she repeats, and Wen Qing is so beautiful, eyes dark and wide, and Yanli never wants her to look away, never wants to say anything else other than her name. Forever, just them. Just their names in each other’s mouths. “What if I wish for more than I deserve?”
Wen Qing breathes, eyes fluttering shut for a moment. “Impossible. You deserve more than this world could hope to offer,” she glances at the moon high above their heads, then back down at Yanli with fierce certainty, “tell me: whatever it is, it’s yours.”
Please, she begs, her. “What if all I wish for is you?”
The words taste like honey in her tongue, and they slip syrupy sweet from her lips, conquering this secluded garden in the Cloud Recesses for themselves and taking residence between the green. Yanli wants to cry, wants to dive in the lakes of Lotus Pier and stay underwater until no one remembers her existence, wants to–
Wen Qing makes a small, wounded sound, and lurches forward, hands shaking like they never do, and she smells like the herbs she crushes to make into medicine, like lavender, and Yanli loves her. “Then you must surely know,” she tells her, voice like a leaf in the wind, “that it’s always been yours.”
A happiness so encompassing, it aches. Yanli is so in love, it spills into the world like rain. “A-Qing,” she says into her lips, and then Wen Qing answers, a whispered A-Li tucked in between a kiss.