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Chapter Text

Wei Wuxian hasn’t had a name in many, many years. The people at the shop just know him as Lao Ying, which he likes, because it sounds like eagle. “Lao Ying,” they say jovially, pushing open the door to the shop so that the bell on it rings, drawing Wei Wuxian out of the studio at the back, “how much for this inkstick?” He’ll wrap up the inkstick in layers of rice paper and they’ll give him coins, which he’ll hold in his palm while working the abacus on the counter, mainly just to hear its clicks echo around his fingers. “Thank you, Lao Ying,” the customer will say, and he’ll smile, and return to his commission.

The shop is the flight of fancy; he keeps it so that he gets these daily interactions. Often the customer will linger and chat to him about the latest gossip, or if it’s someone from out of town, they’ll tell him about what it’s like where they’re from. But it’s not like he’s a wholesaler, so the schools nearby don’t go through him for their ink, paper, and art supplies, and then there’s the majority of the townspeople in any area who aren’t literate and have no use for such things anyway. So mainly it’s the servants of wealthy houses, or wives, or passing cultivators who initially find him suspicious for running such an unprofitable shop, but relax when they realize that he’s that Lao Ying, the portraitist. And more often than not they won’t be able to resist commissioning a miniature as a souvenir.

Wei Wuxian’s name has disappeared from the world, but Lao Ying’s isn’t doing too bad. In niche circles, he’s known for being precise, diligent, and relatively cheap –– though it’s become custom for clients to pay hefty tips at the end, so that he ultimately makes about the same money as artists with more schooling, and this is where his main income comes from these days. He’s only had to dip into his meager emergency savings once or twice since he set up the business in this middling town, in this inconspicuous region. He’s hoping that the savings can be his retirement fund, for when he’s so old that he can’t move anymore –– it’ll be to pay the youth he hires to take care of him, and when he passes, there should be a bit left behind for the youth too. And then Wei Wuxian will be gone, and that’ll be that.

It’s a good life. Every once in a while an old buddy of his will pass by and bring him expensive wine, and they’ll reminisce, and they’ll try to drag him on one last adventure, one last night hunt, one last hustle. But he tells them all the same thing –– that he really doesn’t mind, that his old hips and knees can’t take all the travel anymore, that even his lungs have gotten too weak to blow his flute for too long. That he likes it here. The people are nice, and sometimes interesting things happen.

Like the wedding portrait he’s working on now. The subject is a middle-aged widow, perhaps the same age as him, though of course it’s rude to ask. She comes from a local merchant family that’s become quite wealthy in recent decades, and her second marriage is an exciting one. Whenever the widow comes to the studio, her personal maid, who gets restless when there isn’t much for her to do, starts to prattle on about the engagement –– mainly the maid seems obsessed with the food that’s going to be served at the wedding ceremony, even though it’s still rather distant. After the exchange of portraits there still has to be the dowry, and the engagement announcement, and an auspicious date picked for the wedding itself; the more prominent the families, the longer the engagement period has to be, for propriety’s sake. But the maid has spoken so much about the whole affair that even Wei Wuxian has gotten invested. Occasionally the widow will speak up and talk a little about the man himself. Apparently he was quite the beauty at his peak, and he’s respectful and polite, with an excellent reputation. Clearly she’s excited, although Wei Wuxian doubts that a man their age who still hasn’t gotten married this whole time is that much of a catch.

“Lao Ying,” the widow says one day as she sweeps into the shop. “Can’t you work those wings of yours a bit faster? Look what’s arrived –– his portrait!”

“Alright, you can show me when we sit down,” Wei Wuxian replies, laughing as he leads the widow and her giddy maid to the back. “We’re almost done, I promise. Next time will be the last time, I think.”

So the widow settles into her seat and Wei Wuxian lays out his brushes and the rice paper that he prepared last night stretched against an easel, ready for the final draft. When he’s got the thinnest brush poised against the paper and is ready to start, he glances over at the widow in time to see her unfurling the painting she’s brought with her and hooking it to the pole that the maid clutches in her hands, so that both the widow and Wei Wuxian can step back and look. And the hanging scroll falls, and the widow says, “Hanguang-jun!” and Wei Wuxian’s heart stops.

He hasn’t seen those eyes in almost twenty years. The artist is good –– and of course, the Gusu Lan sect wouldn’t’ve settled for a mediocre artist –– the serenity in those is still there, the poise, the elegant posture. The way the subject of the portrait sits in front of a guqin, hands hovering over the strings, as though about to play a piece –– that’s something familiar to Wei Wuxian too. His husband used to sit just like that when he played for Wei Wuxian, who would often lounge on the bed and trace the backlit outline of those shoulders, who would sometimes bring out his flute and come into harmony, their music entwined, like their souls.

But the man in this portrait is not his husband; he is a stranger, and not just because he has crow’s feet and is skinnier and the artist somehow hasn’t been able to avoid conveying just how tired he looks, but Wei Wuxian also has no right to call this man his anything anymore. Even though, technically, they are still married. Somewhere, on paper, unless it’s been burned by now, they still belong to each other.

That forehead ribbon, and the way its ends fall into the hair. The white robes. Wei Wuxian hasn’t seen anyone wear white robes in a long time, especially not since he opened this shop. Except for a funeral, once. A parade that passed through this street, the sons of the deceased man at the front, wailing and wailing. The noise ringing in his ears for hours afterwards.

Dimly, Wei Wuxian realizes that the widow is talking, has been talking this whole time. She’s talking about Hanguang-jun, how as a young girl reading about the Sunshot Campaign everyone had fought over him. No, I’m the one who’s going to marry Hanguang-jun, the lovestruck girls would argue, all of them fully knowing just how out of reach he was –– but here she was now, more than thirty years later, and it was actually happening.

All Wei Wuxian can think about is how old he looks in that painting.

Is that really who they’ve become? Are they just old men now? Wei Wuxian thinks he has about twenty, thirty more years left to him, with his ordinary, core-less body, but how is it possible that the man in the painting has aged so much? He should be looking just as he’d looked on the day Wei Wuxian had left. But he doesn’t. And Wei Wuxian wonders what the man in the painting is doing, right this moment. Is he playing the guqin, just as he is in the painting? Is he playing a happy song, a sad song, a wistful one?

Wei Wuxian realizes that the widow has paused, so he begins asking strategic questions, trying to seem like he’s only looking for more idle talk as he paints the portrait –– the portrait that he’s been neglecting this whole time, his wrist so tense that it’s begun to sour. He makes himself start painting even though all his focus is on making sure there isn’t too much of a rise in his voice when he says, “Fascinating, madam.”

So that’s how he learns that the marriage is loveless, a completely political alliance of an ancient cultivator family with an upstart rich family; a fashionable new kind of union that seems to be happening everywhere these days. When the widow snorts and says she has no desire to see her new husband naked and is far too old to produce an heir anyway, Wei Wuxian can feel his paintbrush stutter and he tries to ignore that.

The widow is pragmatic and honest –– it’s why Wei Wuxian has enjoyed her company since she first stepped into the studio –– and, now, it’s how Wei Wuxian can learn about what’s been happening within the Cloud Recesses in the years since he’s been gone. The Lan sect struggling to stay alive, the lack of new disciples, the death of elders, the bleeding of funds and selling of feudal land; the desperation for new alliances, alliances that will last, that are adapted for change in ways the Lans never have been. Hanguang-jun, trotted out like a heifer at the fair, and the widow’s family, purchasing him. Their money will go to the Cloud Recesses; the sect connection will give the widow’s family the prestige they could never have otherwise.

Wei Wuxian intentionally hasn’t kept up with the cultivation world, but the widow’s descriptions match up with the rumblings that have been taking place across the cultivation world these days. Decline. Jin Ling struggling to keep his sect together, even after they’d helped him transition from Jin Guangyao’s death; the whole clan collapsing, after a while –– but Jin Ling safe with Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian had made sure to confirm at the time. He isn’t completely heartless, after all, although he’s sure they all think he is, Jiang Cheng and the kids. It’s not like Wei Wuxian left them in the middle of the night without so much as a note. He sent them letters at first, mostly because he cared for them –– cares, still does –– and partly so they might let his husband know where he was. But as the months dragged into years his husband did not come, and life got busy, and there wasn’t really a point anymore, in keeping up with the past. It became so that he only needed to know that they were alive. His friends, the rogue cultivators he’d met on his early journeys, would let him know if something bad happened. And so Wei Wuxian knows that Jiang Cheng is alive, still the cranky bachelor he always was; that Jin Ling is married; that Sizhui is sect leader; that Jingyi has recently been married too, also to a wealthy non-cultivator family. And now he also knows that––

That Lan Wangji is getting married too.

When was the last time he’d held that name in his hands? He tries to remember, but can’t. He doesn’t think he’s used it since he’d first learned it, at fifteen, tossing it right out for its more intimate form, those two short syllables that had always meant so much more when uttered as part of an exchange. Lan Zhan, Wei Ying, traded back and forth like gifts.

Just letting those names come back to the surface is like swallowing water into his lungs.

“Lao Ying?”

That’s more like it. Wei Wuxian looks up into the widow’s eyes and flashes a smile. “Yes, madam? Would you like some more tea?”

“Lao Ying, it is time for me to take my leave.”

Wei Wuxian blinks. Has it been an hour already? He’s made two marks on the rice paper, wavy strokes that he supposes were meant to have been the curve of the widow’s face but are really more like ripples in water, made from two pebbles being thrown in at the same time. Wei Wuxian puts down his brush, gets up, bows. “Of course, madam. Apologies for having lost track of the time.”

And the widow is shuffling up to bow back to him, too, while the maid rolls the hanging scroll back up and places it into its ornate wooden box. “Is the next session to be our last session?” the widow asks. She tries to peer over at the painting and Wei Wuxian has to block her, because there is no world in which he can explain the utter lack of progress today.

“Ah, I am afraid this humble servant has miscalculated. Perhaps two more sessions, or three. I am happy to receive madam more often, if it is appropriate for madam’s schedule,” Wei Wuxian replies smoothly. He’s already thinking about how much longer he can stretch this portrait. If he never delivers the portrait, they might never be married.

It’s delusional, but as the widow leaves the shop and Wei Wuxian walks to the counter and fiddles with the abacus, listening to it rattle, he lets himself entertain the thought. See where the thought goes.

He could insist on accompanying the portrait to Gusu, to make sure the messengers don’t damage it. It would be the first time there since he left. He wouldn’t have to go into the Cloud Recesses, necessarily; he could just hang out in Caiyi Town for a bit, sip some Emperor’s Smile, think about the better times, when he and his husband had still been so amazed by the strength of their love, when everything had felt possible, when they’d really believed that the two of them were so special, so different, so unique that they’d never need anything but each other. That they’d last.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it, about all these thousand-year-old cultivation sects, lord this and patriarch that, the juns, the zuns, and all their silks and gold and money and most of all, and this is the thing, they all believe that they’re so goddamn superior, that there really is something innate to them that makes them stand out from the people whose taxes they collect. Like when Jiang Cheng’s core had been taken away and he’d cried that he’d rather be dead than ordinary. Like how even Wei Wuxian had only saved the Wens because they’d been the Wens, and had happily ignored all the grannies and uncles and babies who hadn’t had names at all, or at least none that sounded familiar. Even, generally, in the way the cultivators walk, especially the Lan sect. As though the ground, the very earth that nourishes humanity, the very provider of life, were too dirty for the bottoms of the Lans’ white shoes.

That makes Wei Wuxian think of the funeral parade again, so he stops that train of thought there and takes it again from the top, seeing where it goes this time.

If he really does take his sweet time with the portrait, always promising to finish it Next time, next time. What would happen then? Maybe the Lans would get so impatient that they’d send their Hanguang-jun himself to come confront the artist. Wei Wuxian forces himself to hold that name in his hands, the name he never used to use, the name he must use now, the name of a stranger: Lan Wangji. He holds it until it starts to feel less heavy, or at least until his arms get used to the weight. Lan Wangji. If Wei Wuxian withholds the portrait, Lan Wangji might come here personally, pushing open the door politely but with rage contained in his palm and a scolding rehearsed in his head, striding with sweeping steps up to the counter and standing there silently until Wei Wuxian emerged from the studio to greet the new customer. Their eyes, meeting.

But of course that wouldn’t happen either. Lan Wangji would never come here. Of course. If Wei Wuxian remembers correctly from his upbringing in Lotus Pier and those first years spent pampered, there are maybe about a dozen servants in the hierarchy of a sect like the Gusu Lans who’d be sent to wrangle the portrait from a lowly artist like him, before anyone would ever consider Lan Wangji. Not to mention that if anyone had to come ask for the portrait, it would normally be the widow’s family, not the Lans. The widow was the local, after all, and the one commissioning the portrait in the first place. So the whole thing is completely ridiculous.

And yet. If Wei Wuxian doesn’t finish the portrait, then Lan Wangji doesn’t marry. And it’s not because Wei Wuxian is jealous; he’s never been the jealous type, not like Lan Wangji himself who used to go pink in the ears with frustration if Wei Wuxian flirted too hard with a girl at a market stall, back when they’d been married. Even back then, when someone got too close to Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian never admitted to being jealous, and he won’t admit to it now. What he will admit is that he’s petty. He’s always been petty, and it’s immature, he knows, but he’s managed to take it with him to late middle age and by now he’s made his peace with it. He’s supposed to be happy for Lan Wangji, but in delaying the portrait he wants Lan Wangji to feel, maybe, somehow, that it’s him –– Wei Wuxian’s revenge. Wei Wuxian hopes Lan Wangji feels miserable, and impatient. Let his brows furrow minutely in the way they do when things don’t go his way, and let him storm down the mountain and come to the shop and––

But of course, as has already been established, Lan Wangji would never come to the shop for the portrait. None of it makes sense, but Wei Wuxian doesn’t want to let go of the idea.

The idea of what? Of still having some kind of impact in Lan Wangji’s life, even now? Of making himself heard, somehow? No, it’s not like he really wants Lan Wangji to come down here in a sweep of pure white with his sleeves billowing and his guqin strapped to his back and Bichen in his hands and looking just like the day they’d married and––

He doesn’t even look like that anymore, as the portrait the widow showed Wei Wuxian has proven. Somehow, Lan Wangji is old. His face probably a mirror of Wei Wuxian’s own tanned, rough face, his hair probably streaked with white in the same spots as Wei Wuxian’s own hair. No, Lan Wangji’s real wedding day will not be the same as the wedding he’d had with Wei Wuxian. There will be days of feasts with all the food that the widow’s maid has fantasised about –– as long as it is the merchant family taking care of the catering and not the Lans –– and there will be firecrackers, and hundreds of guests in expensive attire, and a bridal veil.

The marriage is the farthest thing from a love match, the widow said so herself. Still, she’s a wonderful woman, and fiercely beautiful for her age, with good manners, easy conversation, and a love for novels. She will do nicely for Lan Wangji; they will pair so well when they sit side by side at banquets. She isn’t a cultivator, but at least she isn’t a demonic cultivator, and she hasn’t killed anyone as far as anyone knows, and she brings what the Lans need, apparently –– money. Lan Qiren clearly approves of her enough to allow a portrait of Lan Wangji to be sent to her. When Wei Wuxian finishes the portrait, all the Lans will gather round and nod their little nods and wordlessly agree that she is right. And Lan Wangji will be happy.

Wei Wuxian knows that he should wish Lan Wangji happiness, but he also knows that he has the right to wish him misery. He has the right. He has it.

So he stalls. When the widow returns for the next session, he’s only able to finish the preliminary outline with her form and isn’t yet ready to add color; and when he does begin adding color, weeks later, it’s a slow buildup of hues and he insists that it cannot be rushed. Wei Wuxian knows the tip this family is going to give him is greatly diminishing each time the widow’s maid has to push open the door to his shop, but he can’t help himself. Sometimes, the mornings of the sessions, he tells himself that he’s going to finish the portrait and let it end here, and go back to the days when he didn’t have to think about Lan Wangji, when that three-syllable name didn’t tumble into his head so easily, when the ache in his heart was dull like an itch instead of so sharp he thinks he’s going to die. But then another ripple of that very pain runs through his chest as he’s painting and his ears start ringing and he has to work hard on breathing through it, and when that happens he knows that he’ll keep stalling. So he stalls.

Until one day news comes from Yunmeng, and he can stall no longer.

Chapter Text

It was relatively small, when it started. A bad harvest. A scuffle over grain tributes; Lotus Pier’s tax collectors taking their decreed share, leaving the farmer with barely enough to feed himself, let alone his children. He and his friends trying to steal some back the next night, and being killed by the guards; a tragedy. A senseless tragedy, Jiang Cheng said to the mourning crowd.

But both sides have been so tired, these past twenty years. That word again: decline. More words whispered in Yunmeng, words that people increasingly dared to utter in the same breath as Jiang Wanyin, words like tyrant or brute, words like entitled that had more than one meaning. What does Sandu mean? Three tumors. What is a tumor? Something to be removed carefully, before it can kill the whole body. What are three tumors? Something already killing the body, to be removed violently, before the body is beyond saving.

When the protests outside Lotus Pier became too loud, Jiang Cheng came back out with Zidian. “Of course he did,” Wei Wuxian says when he hears about it.

Lotus Pier is to burn again.

“But what am I supposed to do about it?” Wei Wuxian asks.

“My patron,” the old friend replies slowly, “is concerned about what the citizens will do and where they will go, with the unrest likely to last through winter. She needs people to help provide food and shelter.”

Wei Wuxian drinks the wine the friend has brought him, and eyes the unfinished portrait of the widow in the corner of the studio, and says nothing.

“Charity,” the friend adds.

“For me to do charity? Or charity toward me?”

The friend chuckles.

“Hey,” Wei Wuxian says, setting down his empty cup and picking up the jar of wine itself, swirling it, hearing the liquid slosh inside the ceramic walls. How fragile a thing. How easily broken. He never used to break them, in his first life, except for that one time, so long ago, under the moonlight, when a jar had been broken for him. These days, he breaks jars for fun. Just to see the ceramic shatter; the pattern of the shards random each time, a beauty of the universe.

“Yes?” the friend replies when Wei Wuxian doesn’t continue. It forces Wei Wuxian to blink, hard, and recall what he was about to say.

“Remember when we first met?”

“You were a brat,” the friend says immediately.

Wei Wuxian rolls his eyes. “I mean the assignment. The jewels, the mountain pass.” Changing their mind halfway across the mountain and kicking the patron down the cliff. Upon arrival at the patron’s estate on the other side of the mountain, giving the jewels to his slaves. Freeing his wives. Shrugging, when asked about it later.

“Mm-hmm,” the friend says.

“We did the right thing, right?”

The friend tilts his head to look at Wei Wuxian. “Is that what you think?”

“I’m asking you,” Wei Wuxian snaps, but then, because he knows this old friend is slippery, he lets it go, changes tack. Says, “What will you do?”

The friend knows Wei Wuxian isn’t asking what kind of charity the friend will be doing in Yunmeng. “Cultivation isn’t dead yet,” he says. “There are still night hunts to be had. Just that it won’t be up to us to define night, or hunt anymore.”

He’s always been so goddamn cryptic. There’s no point trying to squeeze anything serious out of him. Wei Wuxian glares into his eyes and notes that though this old friend really is old –– older than Wei Wuxian by at least a full zodiac cycle –– yet he still looks fresh as a lotus bud. He looks how cultivators are meant to look. His eyes still gleam with the mischief of youth.

Why had Lan Wangji looked the way he had, in the portrait?

Wei Wuxian sighs. “Give me until tomorrow morning.”

When the friend leaves to find an inn, Wei Wuxian finishes the widow’s portrait –– he’s stared at her face for so long he could do it in his sleep –– and leaves it by the shop counter with a note. He folds up a wad of the talismans he still tinkers with in secret and stuffs them into a roll of clothes, which he wraps up in a bundle that he ties around Chenqing. Then he lays down and holds the bundle to his chest and closes his eyes. Waits for sleep.

When he and his husband first got married, he would slip out of his dozing husband’s arms after sex and work on something by the desk until almost dawn. But then he noticed his husband looking forlorn but not wanting to ask, so of course Wei Wuxian began to go to bed early too. He’d wrap his arms around his husband and let his husband’s legs cross with his and lie awake and recite the four thousand rules in his head twice over before finally falling asleep. Never admitting how torturous those hours were, because it made his husband happy.

And it made him happy to make his husband happy. He would repeat that to himself a lot, too, every time he refrained from drink, every time he put on white robes for banquets just to eat bland and bitter foods, every time he so much as bowed to Lan Qiren.

He would ask his husband, too: Does it make you happy to make me happy? Always in the slightly whiny voice he’d put on when he wanted to seem like he was teasing but really the answer mattered to him, so much. His husband would always agree, frowning a bit at even being asked the question, but then the next day when Wei Wuxian proposed going on that big trip they always talked about, travelling for years and years, journeying to places no one had ever heard of before –– Wei Wuxian would bring it up again, ask when they might think of leaving, and his husband would fall quiet and go rigid with anxiety until Wei Wuxian changed the subject.

His husband did that increasingly –– tense up, clam up, not speak. When his husband realized that it riled Wei Wuxian up to see him like that he’d start doing it out of spite. Wei Wuxian would yell himself hoarse over some inane thing and his husband would refuse even to meet his eyes, and it would be like their school days, when Wei Wuxian would’ve done anything to draw a reaction out of the stoic pillar of jade, except this time his husband was doing it on purpose. His husband ignoring Wei Wuxian, rebuffing him not because his husband was shy or too in love, but to be cruel. Maybe his husband didn’t realize it was cruel. Either way, Wei Wuxian would be cruel back. Until half the times they had sex it was wordless and too quick, the kisses too rough, the cleaning up afterwards done separately.

The Cloud Recesses had once seemed so big but now was so small. Still, there were some parts of it that were far enough away from the jingshi where Wei Wuxian would play a song on his flute and not be heard, and not hear a response plucked right back to him on the strings of the guqin. Three spots, specifically –– one atop a tree by the border of the Lan estate, two by small waterfalls. Wei Wuxian spent increasingly more time there, and at first his husband packed him lunches so he didn’t have to hike back in the middle of the day, but then his husband stopped doing that too, and at no point did his husband go to those spots to find him.

And they never did go on that trip. There was always something to attend to here in Gusu, here with the sect. His husband’s sect. Sometimes Wei Wuxian would take a detour on a stroll and he’d come across the abandoned cottage where his husband’s mother used to live, and he’d think of his dream, the one with the tilling of the fields and the washing of the clothes and the soft kisses and smells of fresh cotton; but he’d also think about his husband’s father, and his husband kneeling in front of these very doors in the snow, and about how you didn’t need four walls around you to be stuck.

There was no breaking point. The end wasn’t even interesting. There was dinner, cooked by his husband and fragrant with spice, and there was Wei Wuxian sulking over something waiting to be asked about it, and his husband going quiet and just not asking, and later the reciting of rules in Wei Wuxian’s head as his husband fell asleep. The tying of the bundle to Chenqing, just as Wei Wuxian was doing now, all these years later.

As if it could have turned out any other way.

***

Yunmeng doesn’t look at all like the city that raised Wei Wuxian anymore, but that’s probably for the best. It hurts less this way, and Wei Wuxian is surprised that his first instinct when walking these streets isn’t to find all the places he’d loved to explore as a child nor even to tell his old friend about all the stupid things he’d done in his youth. Instead, Wei Wuxian sees the collapsed roofs and beggars with tattered clothes, and hears screams and babies’ wails in the distance, smells blood; another riot. And he makes sure that his feet don’t automatically take him on the route to Lotus Pier.

The tension here is solid and thick as cake. It presses against Wei Wuxian’s shoulders and shoves fat fingers down his throat. He tastes salty spit in his mouth, and it pools behind the teeth in the way it does right before he pukes; but the vomit doesn’t come, no, that would be too easy, too cathartic, too liberating. Instead he retches on the side of the street every few steps and sucks in labored breaths while his old friend thumps him on the back.

Despite all the mysterious things his friend said back at the shop, his friend is nervous –– Wei Wuxian can tell from the way he dips his head so that he looks more humble, from the ordinary clothes he’s swapped his rogue cultivator robes for. Wei Wuxian understands. There are rumblings in Qinghe and Gusu probably isn’t far behind, unless the marriage with the widow can somehow remedy the situation in time. All the cultivators are nervous, even the ones not connected to the Big Three.

A river, over time, carves through rock. Sometimes the rock can’t take the pressure, and fissures appear, and it crumbles. The river rushes over its remains, too, until those are broken down into smooth, harmless pebbles. The rock should know not to challenge the patience of the water and the impatience of its flow. Wei Wuxian knows this; the old friend knows this too; but Jiang Cheng doesn’t, at least not yet. It’ll be the death of him. This makes Wei Wuxian sad, of course. But that’s how things are. Gone are the days when he thought he, personally, could save the world; when he thought the world wanted to be saved by someone like him, or like Jiang Cheng, or even like Lan Wangji.

The red dust of the world rises, and settles in new patterns; and the world will save itself. It knows what it wants in ways cultivators, who spend their near-immortal lives striving to move away from the world, will never understand.

After Wei Wuxian finishes retching again –– and he’s lost count of the amount of times he’s retched –– he stands up straight and lets the old friend lead him to their destination, wedged between the city center and a lake.

The old friend’s patron is a Yunmeng local –– the Madam of the biggest brothel, who has opened the gates to her perfumed courtyards and plundered her hard-earned coffers to help the downtrodden people of her town. She’s well-respected across the area and enough allies to scrape together a group of volunteers, including this old friend; she doesn’t recognize Wei Wuxian, not only because his second body is one unfamiliar to anyone here but also because no one would expect the former first disciple of the Jiang sect to look so plain. Although, ironically, his face today isn’t far from those scary Yiling Laozu new year’s portraits that rural folk used to paste on their doors to ward evil. The same wild and coarse hair, the same sun-brown skin and leathery pores; except Lao Ying, of course, is kind and easygoing where Yiling Laozu was savage and violent.

Not that savage and violent is bad these days. Wei Wuxian expected most townspeople to gripe about the riots, the destruction of peace and harmony, the damages to their businesses and the economy and their children’s lives; common people never care about these things, they just keep their heads low and make sure they can afford new sets of clothes for the winter, and that’s how he’s been living ever since he opened his shop. But when he meets the Madam and the townspeople he’s here to help, Wei Wuxian finds that most of them are thrumming with a thrilled, terrified excitement for the tide that is about to break onto their shore. And this is a good thing, he knows, but it also makes him worry about the people he left behind who won’t know how to survive a time like this.

Like his husband.

But maybe Lan Wangji has changed by now, though Wei Wuxian can’t imagine it. On the other hand, he tells himself that not imagining it is good; it means their break has been clean, a border with him in one country and his husband in the other. Lan Wangji, the stranger, wed to the widow –– maybe that version of his husband will survive this.

Wei Wuxian heaps his bundle on the bedside table in one of the brothel rooms, the walls stripped of decorations sold to raise funds, the bed stripped of fine silks to make gentle bandages for the wounded. It’s only late afternoon, but the weather is stormy today, and dark clouds suffocate the sky. It reminds him of the Nightless City. He pushes that thought away, and tucks himself into the bed. The Madam has asked him to join the kitchen tent, accepting donations of food from farmers in the nearby fields and preparing meals for anyone who’ll need it. His first shift is at night, for breakfast, and the Madam has told him to get some sleep before then. But even though it looks like nighttime outside and Wei Wuxian is exhausted from the travel, his eyelids won’t fall closed. In the end, he falls back on that old habit, and starts to recite the rules. He still knows them all. He sleeps quickly, and does not dream.

***

He gets into the rhythm quickly; there’s no reason not to. By day three, he knows how to navigate the kitchen tent that the Madam has had pitched up by the shores of the lake, behind the brothel. There are thousands of mouths to feed, and Wei Wuxian finds that he enjoys the task he’s been assigned –– the chopping of vegetables, enormous things but half-rotted, defects of the harvest that the farmers can’t sell and so bring to the Madam’s charity in heaving wheelbarrows. Wei Wuxian picks each vegetable out of the pile and works them with his cleaver, which has a heavy handle that balances out the sharp rectangle of the blade. He holds it at the part of it where the handle meets the blade and feels how reliable it is beneath his fingers. On that third morning, he does this and thinks about Baxia, the butcher’s blade. And then he doesn’t.

Around the time when Wei Wuxian began considering retiring from being a rogue demonic cultivator, one of his pro bono patrons, a butcher, offered to take him in. The butcher only said it to be nice, as some form of repayment for Wei Wuxian’s services resolving a major haunting in his ancestral home, and even promised a steady salary and good hours. Wei Wuxian had never considered such a thing before, and the shock and newness of the idea almost made accept on the spot. But then he thought about killing, and bleeding, and carving, and pink flesh, and knew that he could not. This, here, with these vegetables, the only living thing being the occasional slug nestled within leaves of lettuce –– this is fine, and good. Safe.

Across the kitchen tent is where the food Wei Wuxian prepares gets cooked and seasoned before being brought out to serve the long, winding queue. He learned on the first day that there is a sizeable vat of chili oil on that side of the tent. Today, near the end of the shift, his mind has strayed again and he has worked too fast, forgetting to savor the crunch of fresher vegetables being torn apart and the soft wilting of the less-fresh ones when he digs his blade into them. So he washes his cleaver and puts it back on the rack and tidies his station for the next shift, and winks at the other volunteers around him, and ambles to the other side of the tent for his daily ritual now –– to dip a spoon into the chili oil and bring it to his lips. The other volunteers don’t mind; all they say is, Lao Ying, aren’t you too old to be eating things that hurt your stomach? To which he laughs and laughs.

Usually he does this when the cooks in this section are bringing the prepared meal out, but this time they still mill about, rushing from station to station in frantic movements, boiling the congee, frying the vegetables, cleaning the pile of bowls. The vat of chili oil gleams, and Wei Wuxian’s spoon arcs through the air and dips down into that soupy redness, and his mouth waters –– and then some stressed cook comes to take the vat away from him and he shouts, “Hey!” and the cook turns around to shoot him a scowl and it’s––

And it’s––

Wei Wuxian’s old knees buckle.

His first thought is that he looks like shit, bleary-eyed in the morning and slouching to exaggerate his potbelly. And his second thought is that Lan Wangji looks like shit as well. Too skinny. Bags under eyes. The portrait painter really did him a favor.

Or maybe it’s because Lan Wangji’s face is contorted in shock and something that looks like absolute terror. It’s the most emotion Wei Wuxian has ever seen this face show, and it sinks right into his gut, and he feels spit pool in his mouth again, that familiar constipated nausea.

Lan Wangji has frozen, the vat still clutched between callused fingers.

“I thought you got married,” Wei Wuxian sputters. To that, there’s a shift in Lan Wangji’s expression and Wei Wuxian can’t bear to be here any longer. He can’t look at that face. He can’t hear the voice that comes out of it. He can’t hear the two syllables he wants to hear the most, Wei Ying, presented to him like a gift, it’ll kill him, he knows that.

He flees.

At first he’s just walking briskly but as soon as he breaks out of the kitchen tent he starts to run. He hasn’t run in so many years, not properly, and he can practically feel his hips creaking. He doesn’t know where he’s going, he doesn’t think he can see, really, or hear anything at all –– maybe he should go to the lake nearby, maybe he should go back to his room in the brothel and hide, but neither of those places are far enough, he just needs to get away. There’s blood rushing in his ears and it pulses with the punches of his heart and he thinks it sounds a bit like the sea. Calling to him. So he follows it, even though he knows it makes no sense, to follow a sound that comes from inside your head. He runs, half-stumbling, until he can’t breathe anymore and until the bile and sourness has risen so far up his throat that he thinks, This is it, and stops to lean against a wall in some street and bends over and opens his mouth and heaves.

Still nothing comes out but his own globs of spit.

He thinks the feeling in his chest is going to tear him apart from the inside. He wishes he’d brought the cleaver, so he could cut his stomach open and let the puke come out that way.

When the black spots in his vision have gone away, he hoists himself back upright and looks around him. He’s somewhere in the streets of Yunmeng, and there’s a crowd not far from him, and they’re doing something with their feet, as though they’re dancing some trendy new dance with hopping steps. He blinks and looks again, and realizes that he’s made his way to today’s riot. The dance is the dance of Lotus Pier’s police, kicking into curled-up bodies on the ground. The music that accompanies it is made of the groans eked out of those bodies, and then the all-too-familiar sound of swords being drawn from sheaths. Wei Wuxian grips his roiling stomach and watches as Jiang Cheng’s disciples kill the very people the two brothers had once sworn to protect.

Wei Wuxian wants to heave again, but he’s close enough that it’ll draw the cultivators’ attention, so he shoves his free hand as a fist into his mouth and hobbles into an alley.

Out of sight, Wei Wuxian shuts his eyes and breathes. Listens for footsteps. None come.

How long has it been since he fled the kitchen tent?

Lan Wangji didn’t follow.

Wei Wuxian stifles a cough and it turns into a small gasp of a giggle.

Of course Lan Wangji didn’t follow. He hadn’t even followed after that night almost twenty years ago; hadn’t deigned to leave Gusu to look for his husband. Why would he follow a stranger today?

But each noise Wei Wuxian hears in the alley makes him jolt a little, and he can’t help but turn to look out onto the street, except he never sees the white robes that Lan Wangji still wears even on kitchen duty. It’s only a shift in the direction of the breeze, or the bark of a dog, or the roaring blaze of a fire being lit on the pile of corpses around the corner.

This is just how things are now.

After a while, Wei Wuxian peels himself away from the wall where he’s been leaning and begins to walk again. The steps he takes are measured, but no less slow as the panicked running that brought him here. As he returns to the brothel encampment, he thinks about his feet, and how they’re the only things on which he can rely. Years ago, his husband carried him all the time, to bed of course, and to the bathtub, but sometimes even up the stairs of the Cloud Recesses if Wei Wuxian was annoying enough about it. His husband absent-mindedly massaged the tired bones of his feet after a long day and let him ramble on about all the things he’d forgotten to mention during all his other ramblings. In those short years of bliss, his husband was such a constant presence that Wei Wuxian forgot what it was like to stand on his own two feet.

He kicks his heels into the dirt. It took him a while, after he left his husband, to learn how to walk without help again. He admits it was painful for a long time, especially when his husband did not follow. But these feet have taken him to the ends of the world. They have no choice but to go where he goes.

And then he thinks about the fact that he needs new shoes. Perhaps Madam will have some to spare.

With that, Wei Wuxian finds himself back at the kitchen tent, which is illuminated by the stark light of dawn. The shift is over by now, and breakfast is being served not far from here.

He blinks hard, and ducks into the tent.

It’s empty, except for a white figure half-bent to sweep the dirt floor. There’s only one person Wei Wuxian knows who would sweep dirt from the dirt ground.

Lan Wangji looks up when he hears the noise and sees Wei Wuxian, and he freezes again.

It really is just like before. He’s just going to clam up like this. Something breaks in Wei Wuxian, something that feels like being kicked in the mouth by a Jiang sect boot.

“Why didn’t you follow me?” Wei Wuxian blurts out, and he feels his voice break at the end of it, oh god. It’s all he can do to choke out, “You bastard,” at the end to make it sound slightly less pathetic before the tears start streaming out, and fuck.

Lan Wangji doesn’t reply, but his brows knit together in the way they always used to when he was confused.

The vat of chili oil sits on the spice shelf in the far end of the tent. Wei Wuxian takes another step forward, halts when he reaches one of the cooks’ stations and stands there. The table is like a shield, though it does nothing to hide how snotty Wei Wuxian’s nose must be right now as he tries to force his hiccups down.

It’s all he can do to keep his eyes open even as they brim with tears. He opens his mouth again, because he can’t stop any of this. “Why did you even take the chili oil?” he blubbers nonsensically. “You don’t even like spicy food. Fuck!”

That one came out as a scream. People outside might have heard, but he doesn’t care. Not when Lan Wangji is just staring at him like that, lips sealed, saying nothing.

“Fuck!” Wei Wuxian says again, slamming his palms down onto the table, and Lan Wangji doesn’t even so much as flinch. “I hate you. I hate you so much. I wish you would just die.” His eyes slide shut again; they sting too much from the hot tears that are leaking out of them and into his mouth now. God he’s so pathetic. He covers his face in his hands even as he realizes he’s still talking, somehow. What’s he saying?

I wish you would die. Why won’t you die? Why are you here? Why won’t you leave me alone? I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

A pair of arms wrap themselves around him and he feels himself pulled against a chest, his nose buried in fine white cloth that smells so incredibly clean even after the hours in the kitchen. He keeps his hands against his eyes and cheeks so they won’t do something stupid like hug Lan Wangji back.

I hate you. I don’t want you here. I wish you were dead.

Wei Wuxian is still hearing himself speak, the words barely intelligible over his sobs, even as his legs give out and he falls to the ground and Lan Wangji collapses with him, still holding him. Even like this he’s aware that Lan Wangji has sat down properly, on his knees with his calves tucked beneath his thighs like he’s at a discussion conference. His back straight, his arms loosely circling Wei Wuxian’s back, like he’s afraid of getting too close.

And still Lan Wangji says nothing.

Even now he won’t give Wei Wuxian what he wants. Maybe he really can’t. Maybe this whole time he wasn’t doing it on purpose. The thought of that makes Wei Wuxian snort with cold laughter, but then that makes the snot choke him, and he can’t breathe anymore, and he starts coughing and the bile is coming back up again. He’s never cried this hard, without being able to control his own body, feeling himself shiver with spasms of pain and grief. He thinks he might die like this.

One of Lan Wangji’s hands moves to Wei Wuxian’s head and starts running light fingers through his hair. It feels a little like before, and the last of Wei Wuxian’s resolve breaks. “I hate you,” Wei Wuxian whispers one last time as he finally lets go of his face and moves his own hands to Lan Wangji’s shoulders. Melts into his embrace. Hates how soothing it feels, and how obvious it is that his own body is relaxing in Lan Wangji’s grasp. Hates it. Hates him. Always has. Always will. He has the right to.

“Are you asleep?”

It takes all of Wei Wuxian remaining energy’s not to flinch at the sound of that voice, so like his husband’s, but not his husband’s.

Is Wei Wuxian asleep? Maybe he is. If he isn’t, then he has to leave, move, say something. But if he’s asleep, he can stay here a little longer. Pretend he’s delirious. And not explain.

“Mm,” Wei Wuxian mumbles as he fidgets a little, letting his cheek slide against the wet patch on Lan Wangji’s robes. It’s convincing, even to himself. He wonders if he really could fall asleep like this, half-sprawled in the dirt, held, kept safe.

As though he can read Wei Wuxian’s mind, Lan Wangji’s arms tighten around him; Wei Wuxian feels a rumbling in Lan Wangji’s chest and realizes that Lan Wangji is humming. His husband rocks him back and forth and hums their song, and Wei Wuxian knows that he can’t let this go on. He waits five seconds, ten, fifteen, but he can’t will himself to move. And he thinks he smells sandalwood, faintly, and he thinks he can feel the scars on his husband’s back through his robes, even though neither of those things are possible because of where they are at the moment, and even though this is not his husband.

The song has ended, but Lan Wangji starts again. Why is he starting again? When it ends the second time, will he start again again? Will he go on forever, as long as Wei Wuxian stays here and lets him? Or will he stop? When will he stop? What will determine him stopping?

Wei Wuxian doesn’t want to find out, so he pushes himself up and away from Lan Wangji’s chest, but then he realizes that like this he’s going to have to look at Lan Wangji’s face, and if he does he might cry again and so, boneless, he lets himself collapse once more. If Lan Wangji notices this, he doesn’t mention it. He keeps humming. When will he stop humming?

Wei Wuxian clears his throat, and he can feel Lan Wangji’s body tense around him, but he pushes through. “I thought you were getting married,” he says again.

Lan Wangji finally stops humming.

“I’m not,” he replies.

And before Wei Wuxian can think, he jokes, “Just couldn’t forget me, could you.”

A pause, enough time for Wei Wuxian to realize what he’s done. Then, Lan Wangji says, “Yeah.”

Wei Wuxian stops breathing. Five, ten, fifteen. Maybe he’ll faint from this. And then he won’t have to be here anymore.

Maybe Wei Wuxian really does doze off. He doesn’t know how much more time passes as the silence unfurls around them, a third person in the embrace, threatening to suffocate them both. Squeezing hard at their ribcages until their chests collapse and the broken bones pierce their lungs and then they explode into flame. Actually, that would be nice right now.

In the end, Lan Wangji is the first to move. He clears his throat, too, as he works to peel Wei Wuxian away from him, tries to shift his knees, which must be numb by now. “Maybe it would be best if we did not see each other again,” Lan Wangji says.

“No,” Wei Wuxian breathes, clutching Lan Wangji’s sleeve so he won’t get up and leave. At this point, he’s so far beyond pathetic that nothing matters anymore. So what if he makes a fool of himself. It’s what he does best. It’s all he knows. Wei Wuxian forces his next words to come out light, casual, almost like back when he’d been pretending to be Mo Xuanyu, so clingy and ridiculous. He steadies his voice like this and says, “Actually, because you said that, I refuse.”

Lan Wangji’s gaze is unreadable.

“I mean,” Wei Wuxian continues, losing courage, “clearly we both have kitchen duty. We can’t avoid each other forever. So.” He shrugs, trails off.

Lan Wangji is still looking at him, and maybe he can decipher what those eyes mean. Irritation. It’s a look Wei Wuxian has never been on the receiving end of, not truly, never not mixed with fondness or lust. But then again, Wei Wuxian reminds himself, this man is a stranger. So.

Lan Wangji makes to move again, but Wei Wuxian tugs harder at his sleeve. He’ll rip it off if he has to. He knows that if he lets Lan Wangji leave right now he really won’t see him ever again. And yes, that’s what Wei Wuxian thought he wanted, but now it’s too late, they’ve met, and Wei Wuxian can’t… He doesn’t know what to think. He’s probably lost his mind. Everything he does is automatic now, there’s no point in trying to resist it. He can’t let Lan Wangji leave right now, and he doesn’t know why, but he can’t.

Wei Wuxian looks into Lan Wangji’s face, really makes himself look. Has it really been only twenty years? It seems as though centuries are etched onto that face. It used to be so perfect. It’s still handsome, of course, but it looks so worn. As though Lan Wangji does not want to wear it anymore.

When did we get so old? Wei Wuxian wants to say. He used to think they’d do the getting old part together, that he’d train until he gave Mo Xuanyu’s body a golden core and then they could spend centuries together, slowly earning those wrinkles and lines. That they’d always be by each other’s side, so that Wei Wuxian would never even notice the changes. Each new white hair would be like silver, treasured for the precious time they represented. Ten years times ten times ten. It’s laughable, now; ten years. They didn’t even last ten years.

“Why didn’t you follow?” Wei Wuxian asks again. He doesn’t know if he’s asking about the chili oil, or about twenty years ago. He just asks. He asks to ask. He speaks to speak. To keep Lan Wangji here a little longer.

“I did not know you wanted me to,” Lan Wangji replies slowly, and Wei Wuxian doesn’t know which time he means either.

“Of course I wanted you to.”

“You didn’t say.”

Of course I didn’t say. It would’ve defeated the point. But Wei Wuxian doesn’t say that. He doesn’t know what he’s about to say, because the tent flap opens, and another volunteer walks in and stops to stare at them quizzically.

How long have they been sitting here? “Is the lunch shift starting?” Wei Wuxian asks, and when the volunteer nods, and more volunteers start to peek their heads into the tent flap wondering why the volunteer isn’t moving forward, Wei Wuxian laughs awkwardly and gets up as quickly as he can. He doesn’t miss the dirt he and Lan Wangji have managed to get all over themselves, doesn’t not feel a pang of guilt when he realizes that Lan Wangji had somehow managed to stay clean cooking breakfast all morning but that it was his pathetic little show that ruined his robes.

Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian leave the tent as surreptitiously as they can, and thankfully the new shift of volunteers say nothing. It’s weird, coming back out and having to remember that there’s still a world that exists all around them, that has continued to go on this whole time. Wei Wuxian knows he must look like a monster right now, with how red his face is, but he turns to Lan Wangji before he can lose his nerve and says, “Hey, do you want to go see the lotuses? There are still some left on the lake.”

Of course Lan Wangji can’t say no. It would be rude, and Lan Wangji has never been rude. So they go.

They used to lace their fingers together when they walked side by side, or sometimes Wei Wuxian would be shameless enough to hang off Lan Wangji’s arm like an overgrown child. Now, Wei Wuxian crosses his arms and keeps his armpits tight so that his hands won’t escape and try to find Lan Wangji’s on their own accord.

The lake is bare, and there are no boats anymore, of course; they’ve long been taken apart and the wood used for burning. Wei Wuxian wonders if the funeral pyre he’d witnessed was still burning, now. He thinks he’s already gotten used to the smell of cooked human flesh. It mixes in with all the other food smells that stuff the kitchen tent and cling to his robes. He and Lan Wangji walk a little along the bare and desolate shore until they find somewhere that isn’t too littered, so they can sit. Lan Wangji’s robes are so painfully white that Wei Wuxian wonders if he should take off his outer robe and offer it to Lan Wangji as a blanket, so he won’t get even dirtier. But it’s not like that’ll magically put him back in Lan Wangji’s good graces, so he doesn’t.

Instead Wei Wuxian talks. He makes himself pretend like this is just another old friend who has come to visit him in the shop, and he blabbers on about the first things he can think of –– the adventures he went on as a rogue cultivator in the first years after he’d left Gusu, the personalities he met on the way. He keeps his eyes fixed on the three or four lonely, almost wilted stalks of lotus on the surface of the water not far from them. It’s hard, in truth, to tell whether these really are lotus flowers or if they’re just some floating piece of fabric, perhaps the robe of a dead woman, or some other sort of debris. But Wei Wuxian pretends that they are lotuses, and he pretends that Lan Wangji is listening to him ramble.

But soon Wei Wuxian can’t bear that anymore either. He’s finishing his third story in a row and Lan Wangji hasn’t so much as given him an “Mn,” and he thinks Lan Wangji is going to get up and try to leave again any second, and thinking all this while speaking at the same time makes him dizzy. He’s running out of breath again, and he doesn’t know what to do. And it feels so weird telling Lan Wangji about this. All it does is make them both acutely aware that these are places Wei Wuxian went without his husband, because Wei Wuxian left his husband behind, and also because his husband had never gone with him. It’s not really something where blame can be squarely laid on either of them, or at least that’s what Wei Wuxian thinks now. Maybe it’s the calm rippling of the water as it laps against the shore, but Wei Wuxian does think he feels a little better now. Lighter.

So he pauses and counts to five, ten fifteen. Then he says, “I really missed you.” Lets it hang in the air for a bit. Hears Lan Wangji’s sharp intake of breath. “I really wish you’d come looking for me,” Wei Wuxian adds.

Lan Wangji’s next words are clipped, weighed. “You did not come back for me either.”

“Did you miss me?” Wei Wuxian asks. Chews his lip hard, to distract from the pounding of his heart.

After a long silence, Lan Wangji finally manages to say, “Yes.” His voice is strained, all of a sudden. Wei Wuxian takes it as a sign that he can press on, just a little further.

“Were you mad at me?”

“Very,” Lan Wangji says. “Thought I would die of it.” Doesn’t mention that he kind of is, since somehow he has decided to stop cultivating, which is what’s made him so old, which means he’ll die so much sooner than he was ever supposed to. Doesn’t need to mention it –– Wei Wuxian knows. Wei Wuxian can only assume that this self-destruction, this allowing himself to age so haggardly, is because of what Wei Wuxian did; some kind of twisted revenge. Then Lan Wangji says: “I am sorry about your home.”

Wei Wuxian is confused for a second, and then realizes Lan Wangji means Yunmeng. He shrugs. “Don’t be. This isn’t where I live, and it hasn’t been my home since my first life.” Then, because he’s still trying to maintain some semblance of his past self, the self Lan Wangji used to know, in this middle-aged man’s body, he chuckles and adds, “Funny story. I’m a portraitist now. I actually did the portrait for your engagement. Imagine my shock when the lovely widow I’d been painting for weeks finally tells me that the man she’s marrying is you.”

“Right,” Lan Wangji replies. Wei Wuxian can’t help but look over at the profile of that face that used to belong to his husband. It’s tense, and the lips are drawn in a straight line. Clearly Lan Wangji does not find Wei Wuxian’s anecdote funny. He was supposed to find it funny.

Would it really be the end of the world, to let Lan Wangji go? Wei Wuxian wonders.

“You know what’s weird?” he begins. When Lan Wangji doesn’t say anything, he takes it as permission to continue. “I thought I was so mad at you. Even up until an hour ago, I thought I was mad. But it turns out I’m not. The whole thing is just so stupid. We were just so young and stupid… I don’t even remember why I was mad anymore.” He forces out another chuckle.

Lan Wangji says nothing.

“Um,” Wei Wuxian says, though he can barely even hear himself anymore. “You said you were mad. Are you still mad?”

This time Lan Wangji doesn’t hesitate before replying, “Yes.”

“Like, really mad?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” Wei Wuxian croaks. “Okay.”

The silence comes back and stretches, stretches, stretches, so taut. Wei Wuxian wonders when it’ll snap. He wonders how many more seconds Lan Wangji will bear to stay here.

He wonders what Lan Wangji means when he says he’s mad. Is it the same kind of mad Wei Wuxian’s husband used to demonstrate to him, when they fought and were cruel to each other?

Lan Wangji gets up and walks away. Wei Wuxian lets him; doesn’t move a muscle until he hears those footsteps recede.

When things are silent again, Wei Wuxian strips to his undergarments and wades into the water. It’s grimy, and he’s certain there’s some strange sheen of oil covering the entirety of the lake, though he can’t begin to guess where it might’ve come from. He lifts himself off his trusty two feet and begins to swim, gently, without dipping his head in, letting his chin graze the ripples.

He swims toward the lotuses, and confirms that they really are lotuses. He wonders whether he should pick them, like he used to, but decides against it. Instead he flips onto his back, shivering when he feels his soaked undergarments cling to his skin. They’re slick with filth, too, but he makes himself ignore it. Instead he floats, and lets the still waters of the lake cradle him, rock him back and forth. He wishes he were in the ocean right now –– he’s seen the ocean a few times, on his travels after he left Gusu, and has even crossed it once before to a land where the people spoke an entirely different language –– it would be nice, to be at the ocean. He’d let the waves pummel him until they were all he could hear, until they drowned out all other sounds, even that of his heart.

Chapter Text

It’s as Madam predicted –– as autumn turns to winter, things only get worse, not better. Wei Wuxian finds himself wondering why Jiang Cheng’s disciples haven’t run out of people to kill yet. And he wonders what in the world Jiang Cheng is thinking; is it really worth all of this, just to hold on to the story of having rebuilt a sect from the ashes? Will Jiang Cheng die with his sect, with this world, just to prove a point? Wei Wuxian supposes he will; Jiang Cheng never really was the type to let go of the things he convinced himself were true.

When Jiang Cheng dies, Wei Wuxian will burn paper money for him. It just depends when he dies, and how much paper money.

Madam says that riots have broken out in Qinghe and Gusu too; soon the Big Three will be no more. Wei Wuxian thinks of how shrewd Nie Huaisang is, how all those years ago Nie Huaisang was willing to sacrifice many lives in order to get the revenge he wanted for his brother; and Wei Wuxian worries.

The local peasants run out of food to donate, and one night, Madam’s warehouse catches flame with a kind of fire that the lakewater can’t douse out. Surely this did not come from Jiang Cheng directly. But Wei Wuxian doesn’t know; maybe it did. The kitchen staff are sent to travel out of Yunmeng to look for food instead, with only a few left behind to scrounge together the meals in the meantime. Wei Wuxian’s pheasant hunting experience comes in handy.

Wei Wuxian hasn’t seen Lan Wangji since that dawn by the lake; at first he assumed that Lan Wangji had asked to be assigned to another shift, which stung, but when Wei Wuxian hears about Gusu he figures Lan Wangji has gone home.

Why did Lan Wangji come all the way out to Yunmeng anyway, and how did he end up working for Madam? Did Madam know that this was Hanguang-jun? Wei Wuxian doesn’t want to ask, in case he missteps. Perhaps Lan Wangji had been night hunting here incidentally, and decided to stay. Perhaps he travelled here to help Jiang Cheng, but then… technically, Madam’s charity is the other side. Perhaps the Lan sect does not even know that he is here.

Wei Wuxian wonders what Lan Wangji makes of the unrest. Wei Wuxian’s husband would fundamentally not understand what the riots meant, would try to appease the tenants with money, thinking that this will mean the sect and its standing might be spared. Wei Wuxian’s husband loved home and duty too much to ever imagine that anyone in the world might want to tear it all down. But Lan Wangji is not Wei Wuxian’s husband; and these riots are occurring now, not then; and Wei Wuxian cannot guess what Lan Wangji is thinking.

Where will Lan Wangji go, when the red dust settles? Of one thing Wei Wuxian is absolutely certain: he will not let Lan Wangji die.

Everyone else can die. They’re stubborn that way. But not this stranger.

***

Compared to Yunmeng, Gusu is pristine. It shocks Wei Wuxian a little, to be back here, to see merchant girls still happily selling loquats along the river. It makes him worried that, when the dam finally breaks, its flood will drown everyone here.

The postal system has been interrupted by the unrest –– there are smaller-scale uprisings happening in smaller towns, anywhere where a cultivator family dominates –– so Wei Wuxian wasn’t able to send a letter ahead, yet when he arrives in Caiyi Town, Sizhui is there greeting him.

Sizhui still wears his forehead ribbon; it seems that things are not yet bad enough here for him to need to hide –– or perhaps he would rather let the townspeople beat him to death on the street than remove that ribbon. Wei Wuxian does not know, and does not know how to ask, or how to speak to Sizhui at all; he lost that right twenty years ago.

“Sect leader Lan,” Wei Wuxian says, bowing, because he thinks that’s what he’s supposed to do.

“Xian-gege,” Sizhui replies, and Wei Wuxian does not know what he’s supposed to do anymore.

They speak like this, standing in the middle of a street, feet pointed away from each other, as though having just bumped into each other while out on errands. Let’s catch up sometime. It’s been an age.

“Hanguang-jun is not here,” Sizhui says, and Wei Wuxian breathes a sigh of relief because he has not said any of Lan Wangji’s names out loud in so long that he did not think himself capable of doing so anymore.

“Oh,” Wei Wuxian says in response. It seems that is all he can do these days; let his mouth fall open like that of a fish. He thinks breathing is poisoning him. Once or twice on his slow journey to Gusu he has dreamt of slicing gills into his throat. After the blood drained out of him, he’d be able to live.

“Even if he was, you would not be able to see him. He would return to seclusion.”

Seclusion?

It feels farcical. Wei Wuxian once heard it described as the curse of the Lan men –– to love wrongly, and then to retreat; his husband’s father, his husband’s brother. But since even before he left the Cloud Recesses, Wei Wuxian has thought more and more of his husband’s mother, and how seclusion, for her, meant something so different. He is surprised that his husband went into seclusion again. That he was in seclusion for almost two decades, apparently. It’s weak. It’s unlike him. But maybe it’s who Lan Wangji became.

It terrifies Wei Wuxian, to think of his husband as weak. At the same time, though, it stirs something in him –– after all, Lao Ying is weak too. Here, now, and tomorrow, maybe weak can mean strong.

Wei Wuxian wants to hear more about his husband, and also does not. He asks after Sizhui instead. Sizhui is just like Wei Wuxian’s husband –– he wishes the Lan sect still had the money to afford distributing to the people who live on their lands, to appease them, to show them that the Lan sect is generous, and kind, and thoughtful. But, unlike Wei Wuxian’s husband, Sizhui understands that there isn’t very much he can do at all. He’s bound by duty to watch over a dying place, to die with a dying world.

Maybe Sizhui wants Wei Wuxian to say, Come with me. Abandon the sect. It’s over. Maybe Wei Wuxian should say that, just so Sizhui can shoot back, We can’t all be like you. Sizhui has a ghost general for a cousin; Sizhui grew his little turnip roots in the Burial Mounds, in land that no one thought would nourish life; maybe Sizhui thinks a dead world is worth staying for. In any case, Wei Wuxian knows that Sizhui will not come with him. That’s alright. He came to Gusu to find Lan Wangji. He can make Lan Wangji come with him, at least.

Sizhui has started to tell Wei Wuxian about the day he left. He describes Wei Wuxian’s husband barefoot, hiking the mountains of the Cloud Recesses, climbing trees and getting his long sleeves hooked on branches, wading into waterfalls; going, over and over, to all of Wei Wuxian’s secret spots, the places Wei Wuxian had assumed his husband did not care enough to know about. Sizhui tells him about having to block his husband from going barefoot down to Caiyi Town.

Wei Wuxian thinks about having needed to learn to walk on his own two feet; and he thinks about his husband’s feet, bleeding.

“We were very worried about him,” Sizhui says, and Wei Wuxian can’t help but flinch. He’s not sure why he’s being told all this, though he supposes he deserves it.

“It must’ve been hard to know what he was thinking, what he needed,” Wei Wuxian says, because it’s the first thing that comes to mind.

Sizhui stares at him, the confusion written in his brows.

“Um,” Wei Wuxian says. “Because he––“

“No, actually, he screamed quite loudly and for quite a long time,” Sizhui interrupts. “The elders had to sedate him.”

Instead of trying to imagine that, Wei Wuxian makes himself think of nothing.

Sizhui continues. “We thought about telling him that you were dead. But we weren’t sure if that was actually worse.”

Wei Wuxian wants to get down on his knees and clutch at Sizhui’s legs and beg to be told what to do, what to say. He wonders how much longer they’re supposed to stand here, letting the current of the town crowd wash past them, letting people shoot them odd looks when they realize who Sizhui is. He wonders if anyone here recognizes him.

“I really thought he was going to come after me,” Wei Wuxian says finally.

“Frankly, that’s stupid.” Sizhui’s voice is polite; he has good sect leader manners. Wei Wuxian wishes he’d be more emotional. Or even that he’d throw Wei Wuxian out. Anything but this. “You’re the one with the words, are you not?” Sizhui is saying now.

In their school days, Wei Wuxian’s husband always wanted to duel. He doesn’t know why he’s suddenly recalling that now.

“He couldn’t’ve really thought…” Wei Wuxian trails off. Really thought that Wei Wuxian didn’t want to see him anymore?

In truth, for the first few days and weeks Wei Wuxian was so angry that he mainly hoped his husband would catch up to him just so he could reject him to his face. That way Wei Wuxian would’ve gotten it both ways –– vanishing without a word, like a ghost; and the explosion, the ability to hurl hurtful things in his husband’s face. Or at least that’s what Wei Wuxian told himself at the time. He can’t know what he would’ve actually done if his husband had found him a day later, a week, even a year.

But he knows what he’s dreamt about for twenty years, the dreams becoming increasingly frequent after he settled down to open the shop. He’d hold that familiar face in his two hands and lean in until their noses touched, until they breathed the same air, in and out. He’d press his lips to his husband’s forehead, and then to both of his cheeks, and then his husband would be the one to bring their mouths together. They wouldn’t need to say a thing. The silence would be the good kind, the kind that meant his husband was comfortable in his presence. Wei Wuxian would trace the outer curve of his husband’s ear until it turned pink. It’s a stupid dream. Wei Wuxian always wakes up with shame curled in his gut, feeling as though his very intestines were venomous snakes sliding against each other; pets for him to feed.

Braised pork steamed red with spice. A lacquered wooden comb run through disobedient hair in the mornings, teasing loosely at the knots with scented butter until everything was smooth. A look from across the room, eyes finding each other as if they were the only ones there. When they were married, Wei Wuxian never had to even consider a world in which his husband did not want him. He assumed it was the same in reverse, too; that his husband lived in the knowledge that no matter how far Wei Wuxian strayed he would never not want his husband by his side.

But maybe his husband didn’t know, never knew, never could truly be sure. Maybe his husband should’ve just asked. Maybe Wei Wuxian should’ve just said. He’s the one with the words, is he not?

Sizhui raises his arms and puts his hands together so he can bow to Wei Wuxian. Is he leaving? That’s probably for the best. Wei Wuxian supposes he must go back to Yunmeng now. He wants to look for Lan Wangji, but he doubts Sizhui will tell him where he is. One last thing, though––

“Do you think it’s too late?” Wei Wuxian asks.

Sizhui pauses in his step, turns his head to half-face Wei Wuxian. His back is knit so tightly; he really is much more of Wei Wuxian’s husband’s son. “I don’t fucking know,” Sizhui replies. Wei Wuxian smiles. Then: “By the way, after seeing the way the two of you behaved, I swore never to marry. So.”

Wei Wuxian stops smiling. Sizhui flashes him a smile now; it’s not very genuine. They part.

***

So.

So it’s back with Madam, in one of the medic tents this time, not the first-aid ones but the ones for longer-term patients that are located farther from the unrest. Wei Wuxian is only really allowed to go around distributing the medicines and the plates of food and to dress the wounds, and apart from that he stays on call in case someone chokes or has a seizure. As jovial and slightly clumsy Lao Ying, it all comes so easily, and he soon settles into a routine; the only reason he remembers that there is still a world outside is the evidence on the bodies of those he treats.

At night, when everyone is asleep, Wei Wuxian sits at his station in the medic tent and makes talismans for Madam, while he’s still allowed to –– in Yunmeng, at least for the time being, demonic cultivation is tolerated, if only because Jiang Cheng had hated it so much for so long that people hardly think demonic cultivators will be on his side.

Wei Wuxian wonders how much longer this will go on. He wonders what will happen after Jiang Cheng dies. Perhaps Madam will take over. She’s certainly good at running this charity of hers. There are more of her tents standing around Yunmeng than there are wooden buildings nowadays. But can Madam’s influence extend to all the other uprisings?

And Wei Wuxian wonders where Lan Wangji is, what he’s doing now. He wonders if Lan Wangji still carries Bichen around, even though he no longer cultivates, even though he’s lost so much weight he might not be able to carry it around with him all the time anymore. It’s still a sword, after all, and can still be used to protect oneself.

It turns out that this is not the case, when Lan Wangji appears in one of the beds after another riot. Wei Wuxian’s earlier suspicions are confirmed when the teenagers who carry Lan Wangji in do not seem to know who he is at all. They say that he was part of the protest that day, and has been seen in the crowd for some time now; they don’t have a name for him, but they know that he is reliable, and kind to others, and also rather passionate a protester. Today, his leg has been broken, but there are bruises all across his skin kissed by Jiang sect boots. Against his stark ribs, the wounds bloom like flowers on a trestle. The flowers’ invisible stalks, winding around the wooden frame of the trestle, wound around each other.

Wei Wuxian stands back as the medics treat him and tries to seem only mildly interested. When they leave, he does his lunchtime rounds and chats softly to the patients that are awake. He comes to Lan Wangji’s bed at the very end and looks at the splint the medics have made for him, the bloodied bandages. It’s not yet time to change the bandages, and Lan Wangji doesn’t seem to be awake, so Wei Wuxian stands there and counts to five, and then moves away again.

When Wei Wuxian does come back to change the bandages, Lan Wangji is awake, and glares at him with so much rage in his eyes, stopping only to blink. Neither of them say anything, and when Wei Wuxian finishes, he lingers, working up the courage to reach out and pat Lan Wangji on the shoulder, in a friendly way, or something. Like maybe that pat can convey all the words he doesn’t know how to push out of his throat. But then someone across the tent says, “Lao Ying, water,” and Wei Wuxian is gone.

The old friend who recruited Wei Wuxian to work for Madam visits the next afternoon. He’s mostly been either at Madam’s side, helping her with the organizing, or off finding more volunteers, and Wei Wuxian hasn’t seen him since before Wei Wuxian left for Gusu. The old friend bears gifts for everyone in the tent, sweet little candies that he says come especially from Lanling; Wei Wuxian doesn’t dwell on why the old friend might’ve been in Lanling, which has been poor since the Jin sect crumbled many years ago. Instead, Wei Wuxian notices the erhu slung around the friend’s back and convinces him to play for the patients. But then that backfires on him, because the friend announces to everyone that Lao Ying is a flautist, and makes Wei Wuxian take out Chenqing from his bundle by the desk against which he’s been sleeping, and they play some duets, for the sake of the new year, which Wei Wuxian didn’t know was soon –– time has stopped holding much meaning for him. Wei Wuxian and the friend don’t sound very good together, but the patients love it, and no one seems to mind the noise.

Except for Lan Wangji, that is, who glares, as he has done since he’s arrived here.

Maybe it’s not because he hates Wei Wuxian. Maybe he just doesn’t appreciate the lack of harmony, or the bawdy drinking songs that they’re playing.

At some point, the friend takes notice of the skinny middle-aged man in the splint and frowns a little, but says nothing. The friend is slippery; if he recognizes Hanguang-jun, he won’t do anything about it, or at least not until he can figure out a way to turn it to his advantage.

After the friend takes his leave and the patients have had dinner, Wei Wuxian sits by Lan Wangji’s bed and starts to ramble, because it’s what’s he’s best for anyway. He starts off talking about Lan Wangji’s leg and how it’s coming along, and then introduces all the other patients in the tent, their names or nicknames, why they’re here, what annoys him about them –– the latter of which he says loud and clear, and which makes the patients protest loudly and throw insults back. Suddenly Wei Wuxian has made the tent rowdy again, and he knows Lan Wangji doesn’t like that, so he gets up to leave, but then Lan Wangji’s hand shoots out from beneath the covers and catches his wrist.

It’s loose, not at all the same as the rough way Wei Wuxian’s husband used to clasp his wrists, when they fucked. But it’s Lan Wangji’s hand, and it’s there.

Wei Wuxian looks at it, and then dares to twist his hand around and place his fingers lightly on Lan Wangji’s wrist. Dares to squeeze twice, gentle as a heartbeat. Then he lets go, and watches Lan Wangji’s eyes slide shut.

At the next mealtime, Lan Wangji lets Wei Wuxian talk, slipping in “Mn”s at appropriate times. And the meal after that, too, until they slip into a routine, Wei Wuxian’s voice a low murmur so that Lan Wangji knows the stories he is telling are only for him.

Wei Wuxian wants to ask Lan Wangji how he ended up with this broken leg, but he knows that’ll mean asking Lan Wangji how he ended up here at all, in Yunmeng, frail and anonymous, with Wei Wuxian at his bedside instead of inside his bed –– and of course Wei Wuxian will not ask that. Instead he tells Lan Wangji about setting up his art shop, the funnier of his portrait commissions, like the nude one his client wanted to gift to a lover before the lover went to sea.

“I used to want to save the world,” Wei Wuxian says. “I used to want to be the best cultivator. Now I don’t think being a cultivator was the right path for me at all. Once I got drunk and wondered what would’ve happened if Jiang-shushu had never found me on the streets, if I’d just grown up that way. But… we would never have met otherwise, so there would’ve been no point.”

“Mn,” Lan Wangji says, and Wei Wuxian doesn’t know if that means Lan Wangji agrees to the last sentence –– that if he and Wei Wuxian never met, there would’ve been no point. To anything.

Wei Wuxian dares to ask a question; an innocuous one. “What would you have done, if you’d never become a cultivator?” Then realizes that there never was any other option, for one of the Twin Jades of Lan, so adds, “Like maybe if you were physically unable to develop a golden core, so you were still Lan-er-gongzi, but not a cultivator.”

Lan Wangji seems really to give this some thought. “Qinggong,” he says finally.

Never mind that this is the first real word Lan Wangji has spoken to Wei Wuxian since he entered the medic tent. Wei Wuxian pouts and says, “But what if you couldn’t do that either? Like what if you had to be totally ordinary? What would you do?”

Lan Wangji tilts his head to look at Wei Wuxian. “What would you do?”

“Portraitist,” Wei Wuxian replies, grinning. “Or maybe… a fisherman. Remember how good I was at catching fish with my hands?” Lan Wangji gives him a skeptical look, so Wei Wuxian pouts again. “No? I’d be a great fisherman!”

“I would be better at it.”

It’s the last thing Wei Wuxian expected Lan Wangji to say. He guffaws in laughter, and then clasps a hand over his mouth so he doesn’t disturb the other patients in the tent.

“Okay, then,” Wei Wuxian says when his shoulders stop shaking. “We can both be fishermen. And then we will get to meet. Maybe we meet on a boat. You’re the stoic team captain and I’m the one being all annoying distracting you from work, but then one day I fall off the mast trying to show you something cool and you have to jump into the water to save me and…”

Wei Wuxian stops. He almost said, And then we kiss passionately and fall in love just as we did in this life.

And maybe it’s just him, but he thinks there’s less anger in Lan Wangji’s gaze now. Lan Wangji says, “Mn,” and again Wei Wuxian has no idea what that’s meant to be in agreement to.

In any case, though, Wei Wuxian nods. “We would be good fishermen. We’d collaborate well and get good catches every day. Maybe we’d hunt down an enormous monster fish, like the Xuanwu.”

Lan Wangji blinks. Wei Wuxian wonders if he misspoke, but then Lan Wangji says, “Everyone told me that we were fundamentally incompatible.”

Water rushes into Wei Wuxian’s lungs. He’s glad he’s already sitting down. He knows Lan Wangji is waiting for him to say something to that and that the longer he waits the worse and more awkward it’ll be, but still he stays frozen for a while until he remembers that here, in this tent, he’s Lao Ying, and Lao Ying is not Wei Ying. Lao Ying will be fine.

Wei Wuxian clears his throat and says, “I thought so too, for a while. But do you really think that could be true?” He shrugs. “If we were really so incompatible, then why did you love me for so long?”

“Fantasy,” Lan Wangji says without hesitation.

It hurts, of course. Wei Wuxian makes himself admit that, as something sour crowds into his eyes. “Then why did I love you for so long and not even know it?”

“Maybe you never did.”

Is Wei Wuxian going to weep every time they talk, for the rest of time? Maybe that’s just who he is now. “I hope you don’t think that,” Wei Wuxian says softly. “I always have. I always will.” It’s the only constant in his life; he knows that now. In a way that stabilizes him, grounds him. It makes him remember that he is a person who is alive –– often, he forgets this fact. Especially back in his darkest moments, he willingly forgot this fact all the time.

“Even now?” Lan Wangji asks.

“Yes,” Wei Wuxian says quickly. Too quickly? He takes a deep breath, remembers that he’s the one with the words. “I tried to deny it for a long time, after I… after I left. Because I thought it would help me get over you. But I found that it would come out in everything I did. It felt a bit like you and I were both living in my body at the same time… And every day I think it’s impossible to love you more, but then the next day I do, and it’s kind of exhilarating. I think when we were together I couldn’t understand it. Or, I know. I don’t think, I know. I was scared of it. It required me to let you see so much of myself.”

Lan Wangji says nothing. Wei Wuxian wonders if anything he’s just said makes any sense. They don’t make sense to him entirely, but he’s hoping they do to Lan Wangji.

Wei Wuxian knows he has nothing left to lose, but his voice still trembles when he says, “Do you still love me?”

“I don’t know,” Lan Wangji replies after a pause, as Wei Wuxian’s tears finally break past his eyes and begin to trickle down to his chin. “Sometimes I feel like what I felt for you was never love.”

Wei Wuxian stifles a hiccup, remembers when he first saw Lan Wangji again in the kitchen tent, the way he collapsed and screamed I hate you I hate you I hate you. “Hatred?” he asks.

“No, not that,” Lan Wangji says. “Myth.” He frowns a little as he says his next words. “I was young when I met you. I let my idea of you define who I became.”

That makes Wei Wuxian snort, and embarrassingly, a snot bubble comes out of his nostril and pops, making his lips salty. “I don’t think that’s true at all. You’re Hanguang-jun.”

Lan Wangji looks away, closes his eyes; Wei Wuxian thinks about how, when he was married, he liked to kiss his husband’s shut eyelids right before bed. Left, right, left, right, until his neck ached from all the turning. Until his husband said, Wei Ying, hand squeezing his waist in warning.

And Lan Wangji doesn’t say anything else, but Wei Wuxian guesses that he doesn’t want to be Hanguang-jun anymore. Look at the world around them. Look at Lan Wangji. He is not a jun. He does not bear light.

***

“I wish we could…”

Wei Wuxian trails off, sighs. Lan Wangji raises an eyebrow at him, waiting for him to explain. He’s well enough to sit up on the bed now, and is picking slowly at the congee that he used to help make in the kitchen; it’s plain, of course, though Wei Wuxian couldn’t help but add some scallions to the top at the very least before serving it to Lan Wangji.

Wei Wuxian scoffs. “It’s nothing. I was going to say… I wish we could go back to the way before. But that’s stupid, and not even true. ‘Before’ was so foolish. So I guess… I wish we could run away together again. Properly this time. With all the things we know.”

It feels frustratingly easy to slip into we again. As though the past twenty years were frost on a window, gone with the sun.

Because Lan Wangji says nothing, and because Wei Wuxian has already been sitting at his bedside too long, Wei Wuxian suddenly stands up again. “Do you… feel like you’re being forced to talk to me?” Wei Wuxian asks, trying not to let himself sound upset. Because he doesn’t have the right to be. “I’m happy to stop coming. I really won’t be hurt or anything. I can tell Madam to––“

“It is fine,” Lan Wangji says. Is this the first time Lan Wangji has ever interrupted anyone? Wei Wuxian remembers that Sizhui had interrupted, too, when they’d spoken in Gusu.

“Okay,” Wei Wuxian breathes, feeling his heartbeat settle down again, by just a little bit. Slowly sits back down. “So you don’t mind this? Seeing me every day?”

“Do not mind,” Lan Wangji replies.

“Do you… do you enjoy my company?”

“Yes.”

Wei Wuxian can push a little bit more, maybe. “Do you also wish we could run away?”

Lan Wangji looks at him, his face unreadable. “With my leg, I cannot run.”

“Was that a joke?” Relief floods through Wei Wuxian’s body; he feels his arms and legs lighten, suddenly, and yet there is still a fist enclosed around his heart in his chest. Prying the fingers of the fist away is something he’s trying to work on, slowly. “But do you?”

“I do. But I do not know if we should.”

Okay. Okay. Wei Wuxian can work with this. He reminds himself that all he needs is for Lan Wangji to be alive. To take him out of here, alive. “I want to fix this,” Wei Wuxian says, intentionally vague about what this is, letting Lan Wangji interpret that how he wants. Wei Wuxian gulps. “I would like for you to tell me how I can fix this.”

“I do not know what to say,” Lan Wangji replies.

“Just tell me what you want.”

“What do you wish to hear?”

“No,” Wei Wuxian almost snaps. He tries to stay calm. “Don’t do that. Just ask something of me. Anything.”

“I don’t know if––“

“Stop thinking. Just tell me, and we’ll work through it together, we can talk about it. Anything at all, really.” Wei Wuxian spreads his hands, shows Lan Wangji his palms, as if to say––

As if to say what? Trust me. I’m yours. Take me. Take everything. It’s pathetic. But Wei Wuxian is a pathetic person these days. And Lan Wangji kind of is, too.

“What if what I want isn’t what you want?” Lan Wangji asks and maybe it’s the dim candle by the bedside but there seems to be a glean in his serene eyes. Wei Wuxian wonders what Lan Wangji means when he says this. He wonders if Lan Wangji is going to ask Wei Wuxian to kiss him. He doesn’t know if he’s ready for that; he fears it’ll make them slip into who they used to be again.

“I won’t know until you tell me,” Wei Wuxian manages.

“You might leave again.”

“Never, never.” Wei Wuxian feels a stab in the chest, scrambles to grab Lan Wangji’s hand, squeezing it as hard as he can, just to hold on. “How do I persuade you that I’ll never leave you ever again as long as you’ll have me?”

Lan Wangji blinks, but does not remove his hand. “Even when we were married,” he says, “and I trusted you completely, I was always afraid that you might leave.”

“So I can’t persuade you.”

“No.”

“Not definitively. Not forever.”

“No.”

“And…” Wei Wuxian stops to count to five, ten. “It’s the same now. You’re saying we can’t fix this.” How familiar that we sounds; how sweet.

“Not in one go,” Lan Wangji replies. His fingers curl in Wei Wuxian’s hands; holds Wei Wuxian back.

Wei Wuxian thinks he understands what Lan Wangji says but does not say. “But we could try?”

“Would you be willing to try?”

“Yes.” Wei Wuxian nods so vigorously that he makes himself dizzy. He needs to make sure Lan Wangji knows. “Would you?”

There’s a silence, and Wei Wuxian panics for a moment, but then feels the way Lan Wangji’s hand anchors him and remembers that silences can be good. Silences can mean thinking. Silences can mean caring.

Things can be good.

After what feels like an eternity, Lan Wangji says, “It scares me. Trying, without knowing what happens after. I have… never not known in this way.”

That makes Wei Wuxian smile, his lips pulling themselves upward of their own accord. “That’s because you’re too perfect, Lan Zhan. You’ve never had to try.”

“Wei Ying.”

Oh, hold on. Wei Wuxian blinks, looks at the man in the bed whose face is half-illuminated by the candle, half yellow, half blue. He weighs the name in his mind again. Lan Zhan. Could this be Lan Zhan? Is that allowed?

Could Wei Wuxian be Wei Ying?

It was so easy to let it slip out. Lan Zhan, Wei Ying. Wei Wuxian can’t tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing, to have happened. But then he tells himself that it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, because those words have no meaning. The only thing that has meaning is the person whose hand Wei Wuxian is holding now. He traces his gaze from that hand up to the wrist and arm and shoulder and neck and face. Lan Zhan’s face.

Lan Zhan’s eyes. He drinks in Lan Zhan’s eyes. He swims in them. He wraps himself around in them like a blanket in this cold winter.

Wei Wuxian brings Lan Zhan’s hand up, unwraps his own fingers a little to admire those knuckles and those fingers; the calluses are long gone, and the palms are soft now, but the skin on the back of the hand is rough in a different way, an aged way –– Wei Wuxian runs his thumb over the ups and downs of those knuckles, then brings them to his mouth and presses a kiss on them.

He puts the hand back in his lap, but holds them, still. They stay like this in silence, hand in hand, until Lan Zhan falls asleep.

***

After the new year begins, it’s supposed to be spring, but the gale is still harsh as it beats and howls against the thin walls of Madam’s tents. Lan Zhan’s leg has healed enough for him to hobble around on a cane, though the exertion always makes him sweat through his robes. Still, he makes an effort to assist Wei Wuxian with his rounds, handing Wei Wuxian the things he needs. He doesn’t know what name to give the patients until someone calls him Lao Tui’r, old leg, and Wei Wuxian laughs, and it sticks.

Lan Zhan vacates his bed to make room for new patients, of which there are still so many daily. Madam offers him a room in the brothel, but it’s too far from this medic tent, so instead he sits on the bench with Wei Wuxian at the desk in the corner of the tent, and dozes against Wei Wuxian’s shoulder at night.

Even after all this, he still sleeps at nine and rises at five.

His posture could do with some Lan discipline again, though. Of course part of it is because of his healing leg, but he’s starting to look the way Wei Wuxian used to look as a carefree teenager, back bent and arms all over the place. He’s so skinny that he looks like a bundle of firewood, ready to burn.

One evening, Wei Wuxian doodles an idea for a talisman, and Lan Zhan rests his chin on Wei Wuxian’s shoulder and idly blows cool air from his lips onto the page.

Anticipating Lan Zhan’s question, Wei Wuxian whispers, “It’s to cook food on the go. I experimented with something like this when I travelled, but I’m trying to make it easier to use, for the protesters.”

“Mn,” Lan Zhan replies, and Wei Wuxian giggles just to feel the way Lan Zhan’s head bounces with Wei Wuxian’s shoulder. “What was your favorite place?” Lan Zhan asks, in as low a voice as possible without having to physically speak it into Wei Wuxian’s ear.

“Hm? Favorite what?”

“On your travels.”

“Right.” Wei Wuxian’s brush hand stills as he works out what to say to Lan Zhan. He’s still worried that he might say something wrong and destroy the little house of cards they’ve managed to build together. “I don’t know. I never really thought about what was… better or worse. They were all just things I did, and it blurs together a bit.” Then he takes a risk: “It didn’t really turn out the way I thought it would, when I thought we were going to travel together.”

“Mn,” Lan Zhan says again. “What made you miss me the most?”

Wei Wuxian has to count, to make sure he doesn’t start crying again. He has to count to fifteen. Twenty. “The ocean,” he croaks.

He hears Lan Zhan breathe.

“Do you want me to take you there?” Wei Wuxian asks finally.

Lan Zhan nods. His chin digs into Wei Wuxian’s collarbone. It hurts, in a good way. “Mn. That would be nice.”

In the end, Wei Wuxian cries anyway, like the sad old man he is. Lan Zhan lets him.

The next morning, Jiang Cheng is killed.

Everything else happens quickly after that. Jin Ling inherits the ragged, hated remains of the Jiang sect and immediately capitulates. Lotus Pier stays relatively intact, and Madam moves the medic stations into it so that they don’t have to live in tents anymore.

Jiang Cheng’s treasury is opened, and there’s far more money in there than anyone had expected; Wei Wuxian wonders what Jiang Cheng was planning to do with all that, not bringing them out at a desperate time like this. The money is distributed freely, no questions asked; but most people use it to start rebuilding their homes, rebuilding Yunmeng.

Fields need tilling, and the harvest needs planting. Wei Wuxian remembers that all this began with a bad harvest, and with the farmer and his friends. If this year’s harvest is bad, it’ll be okay; no one will starve.

Madam governs through not governing. It seems like every former neighborhood in Yunmeng has their own little economy.

The medic tents start to empty, with much more people healing than newly injured. Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan try their hand at farming; neither of them do very well, what with their sore hips and Lan Zhan’s leg, which will take many more years to get better, or perhaps never. For a moment, Wei Wuxian panics that they’ll be asked to leave, now that they’re no longer of much use, but everyone seems happy to just have them sit around for the time being.

And Lan Zhan seems happy here too. Wei Wuxian notices that Lan Zhan smiles now. Those tiny smiles that had once been reserved by his husband for Wei Wuxian are now imparted freely onto others; though, Wei Wuxian notes with satisfaction, Lan Zhan now seems capable of a broad smile, and that one he saves for Wei Wuxian.

Wei Wuxian never had to try, either, as a youth; things came naturally to him, much to Jiang Cheng’s chagrin. And when things got bad, later on, it was always easier to give up completely than to try. Trying was so hard, so painful.

Today, trying feels good.

***

The rebuilding of Yunmeng doesn’t get far before Madam’s old brothel is set on fire; again with those flames that ordinary water cannot kill.

The old friend tells Wei Wuxian that the Nie sect is coming. They say it’s to quell the unrest in Yunmeng once and for all, but unrest is no longer what they call their world anymore, and really it’s the old cultivator lords’ last stand.

At the same time, they cannot underestimate the resentful energy that throbs in the Nie sect’s butcher knives.

As Yunmeng readies itself for another war, Wei Wuxian remembers how Lan Zhan broke his leg –– as part of a riot –– and he takes hold of Lan Zhan’s hand and asks, “Do you want to stay?”

Lan Zhan’s fingers curl around his. They slot together so easily, although both their palms are sweaty for some reason. It’s a little unpleasant, but it also makes it more pleasant that they’d still hold each other despite this. Finally, Lan Zhan says, “I don’t think they need me here.”

“Okay,” Wei Wuxian replies, squeezing. “Do you want to go back to Gusu?”

“I don’t think they need me there either.”

"Right."

“I––“

“I need you,” Wei Wuxian says, quickly, breathlessly, before he can regret it. He doesn’t look at Lan Zhan’s face, doesn’t look for something written on it; waits for Lan Zhan to tell him.

“I need you too,” Lan Zhan replies finally. And then his face blooms into that smile again, the smile that pushes his cheeks up and that Wei Wuxian still doesn’t fully understand. In truth, it terrifies Wei Wuxian a little, to see Lan Zhan undone like that.

But terror can be good, too.

“Do you want to go to the ocean now?” Wei Wuxian asks.

Lan Zhan lifts his head to look at him. “Will you take me?”

***

Wei Ying has not seen this part of the ocean before. He’s only been to the sunny ocean in the south, and the narrow strait. This beach is colder, and the waves churn in a threatening way. The sky is grey, and the ocean here looks unforgiving.

But Lan Zhan sits down in the humid, packed sand and sets his cane down beside him; stretches his leg and flexes his toes, and Wei Ying lays a hand on Lan Zhan’s shin and starts massaging it out of habit. “What are you thinking about?” Wei Ying says, asking to ask.

The strong wind runs its hand greedily through Lan Zhan’s hair and bites the tip of his nose red. Lan Zhan takes notice of the lighthouse not far from them, on the rocky part of the shore where there is sure to be little clear pools of water that house all sorts of interesting shell creatures. Wei Ying wonders how a lighthouse can be built on rock. He knows that they will find out very soon, when they get closer to it.

“I am thinking,” Lan Zhan says, “that I would like to stay here.”

“Hmm,” Wei Ying replies, stopping the massage so he can trace curling designs across Lan Zhan’s skin instead. “I am thinking that there must be lots of fish to catch here.”

It’s getting dark, and suddenly there is the echo of a click, so loud and unfamiliar that at first Wei Ying jolts, thinking it’s some hungry beast. But the eye of the lighthouse lights up with a white glare –– glare as in bright, glare as in light, not glare as in a bad stare.

The beam is cast into the ocean in front of them, and it’s so strong in contrast to the rapidly darkening sky that it etches itself into Wei Ying’s vision.

Then the beam begins to rotate ever so slowly. It moves anticlockwise, the light glancing in the opposite direction of the two old men huddled on the beach, and for a few moments the lighthouse is backlit against it, this stable, lonely little structure. And then the beam swings toward them, and Wei Ying has to bring his free hand up to shield his eyes at the strength of the light.

The lighthouse brings the light to them. All they have to do is accept it.

THE END :)

Chapter Text

think this is cool?? it's actually an entire ANIMATION and you can click right here to watch this absolutely mesmerising video that i could not for the life of me figure out how to embed into the fic itself. CLICK HERE YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT!!!!!!!!

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