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When Wei Wuxian wakes up, he is aware of three things:
He cannot move.
He is in considerable pain.
A warm body is curled against his side.
Only the first of these things is unusual these days. The pain and the bedmate come and go, but the immobility is novel and distressing. So too is the feeling that something is terribly, terribly wrong, something he should be able to remember.
His body feels heavy, uncomfortable, as if filled with lead weights. He tries to look to the side, but his whole neck is rigid; he tries to raise his arm, but it might as well be nailed to the bed. When he opens his mouth to ask what happened to him, all he can manage is a faint noise of distress.
It works. There’s a rustle, and the person next to him sits up. Wei Wuxian finds himself looking up at dark, keen eyes, the sharp white edge of a smile on a boyish face. His heart squeezes.
“Good, you’re awake,” says Xue Yang.
Wei Wuxian and Wen Ning had found Xue Yang in a ditch on the way back from one of their earlier trips from Yiling. Xue Yang was badly injured and completely unconscious, and Wei Wuxian had been strongly in favor of leaving him to his fate. Unfortunately, Wei Wuxian’s closest allies were doctors sworn to preserve life. Wen Ning had made sad eyes at him until he gave up and heaved the delinquent of Kuizhou’s limp body into their cart.
“Is he even alive?” Wei Wuxian asked Wen Qing once they had Xue Yang sprawled out on the floor in the Demon Subduing Cave. He looked small and exhausted and un-mass-murderer-like in sleep.
“More or less,” said Wen Qing, without looking up from the needle she was placing in Xue Yang’s narrow shoulder. “He should recover easily enough. His qi is clearly resilient.”
“Does he have to recover?” Wei Wuxian said petulantly.
Wen Qing deigned to look up, expression cool.
“I’m just saying! It would probably increase the virtue of the world at large if, you know…” He traced a demonstrative line across his throat.
“I’m not a killer,” Wen Qing said, flat and hard. She met his eyes, and Wei Wuxian remembered, not for the first time, what he owed her.
That had been the end of the conversation. Xue Yang remained in the cave, alive.
“What the fuck did you do,” Wei Wuxian asks, but it comes out a mumble through numb lips.
Xue Yang huffs, apparently inconvenienced by Wei Wuxian’s paralysis. “This isn’t gonna work. Gimme a sec.”
He slides a hand behind Wei Wuxian’s neck, taking the time to stroke his fingers teasingly over a mark he left; it would probably feel good if Wei Wuxian could register anything but hurt. His fingers fix on something – a sudden pain so pure it cuts through the others – and then Xue Yang is twirling a long silver needle in his fingers, grinning.
Wei Wuxian finds he can turn his head, and more importantly, talk. “For the second time,” he gasps, disturbed by the feeling as sensation returns to his tongue, “what the fuck.”
“Some stuff happened! You didn’t take it well. I thought you needed to lie down for a bit,” says Xue Yang, tone saccharine. He sticks the needle through his topknot and lies back down next to Wei Wuxian, draping an arm over his hips. The warmth of his skin eases the numbness that seems to be living there. Wei Wuxian shudders, caught between the desire to turn towards him and the desire to pull away, capable of neither.
“Did you steal Wen Qing’s needles to paralyze me?” Wei Wuxian hisses, and then is too perplexed to be afraid. “How the hell did you manage that? Where is she, anyway? Where’s Wen N-“
Memory stops him like a knife through a thief’s hand.
Qiongqi Pass.
Jin Zixuan.
Wen Ning.
Himself.
A cold surge of nausea fills him from his belly to his back teeth. Unable to put his hands up to his mouth, he turns his face away as best as he can, presses it into the bed. His eyes burn – it’s hard to tell whether it’s resentful energy or tears.
Xue Yang is petting his hair sympathetically, skirting the rest of the needles. “Yeah…like I said, you didn’t take it well.”
Once Xue Yang was able to stand, he was, by collective agreement, put to work. They couldn’t afford to have a mouth not paying for its own feed, and Xue Yang apparently had nowhere else in particular to go. So he worked with the rest of them. He was surly about it, but Xue Yang was surly about everything he wasn’t unnervingly delighted with.
Talismans fell into the “delight” category, so Wei Wuxian had him inscribe talismans to keep him happy. They were sitting in the mouth of the cave, working on a new protection array and sweating in the sun. Xue Yang’s robe was mostly open in the front, scars visible underneath.
“Here, look at this,” said Xue Yang, reaching over to show Wei Wuxian a new design. The collar of his robes gaped open further. Wei Wuxian jerked his gaze away so quick his eyes almost fell out of his head. Xue Yang was compact and graceful and a murderer, and Wei Wuxian did not want to look at his bare chest.
He managed to actually look at the talisman. “Hey, this is actually pretty good. The way it runs the energies in a loop so it’ll sustain itself without having to be charged so much, that’s smart.”
Xue Yang grinned, glowing like a sun-warmed knife. He always lit up when his cultivation was praised – not with wonder but with satisfaction. Yes, I know I’m good at this. I’m glad someone finally noticed. It made some funny feeling that Wei Wuxian didn’t like well up in his chest. Hopefully not recognition.
“You learn a trick or two when you don’t have practically infinite qi like you gentry,” said Xue Yang. “If we ran these off my yin iron, they’d keep the wards up for months.”
Wei Wuxian snorted. “You don’t have the trick of being sly about what you want. I already said no yin iron. That’s not going to change.”
Xue Yang kept smiling, but his eyes looked colder, more intent. They’d been having this argument since Wei Wuxian had realized Xue Yang still had the stuff. It was perhaps an arbitrary line to draw now that Wei Wuxian was a full-fledged demonic cultivator, but he didn’t like the idea of using unrefined yin iron for anything, especially in the Burial Mounds themselves, especially with a community to protect.
That was a boundary Xue Yang was intent on pushing, apparently just because he could, but whatever argument he was going to make was cut short by a “Wei-gongzi!”
Both men looked up to see Wen Ning making his stiff, faintly awkward way up the slight rise to the cave. His mobility looked better than it had, Wei Wuxian noted gladly.
“Wei-gongzi,” Wen Ning said with a nod. A pause. “Xue-gongzi.”
“Young master Xue, that’s me,” said Xue Yang. His smile had turned into mostly teeth.
Wen Ning, shy as he might have been, didn’t seem intimidated or impressed. “You’re wanted down where they’re digging the new well. They hit some boulders and Fourth Uncle says they need someone young and strapping to go lift them out. I’m too tall to fit.”
Xue Yang’s eyes slit. “So I can either sit out here in the sun with Wei-qianbei, or I can crawl around a mud pit with a bunch of geezers. Wonder what I’ll pick.”
“Auntie says that you can have two of the dried apples we got in Yiling if you do it,” said Wen Ning immediately. They were all learning the skill of managing Xue Yang.
He looked somewhat mollified but still unconvinced. Then, he glanced over at Wei Wuxian: not asking permission, but calculated, winsome. “Wei-qianbei could come with me.”
“Ah, Wei-gongzi has to try out the talismans you were working on. I heard him mention he wants to set them up right away, since you’ve been doing so well.” said Wen Ning. His voice was surprisingly smooth – every now and then, Wei Wuxian remembered Wen Ning had lied him and Jiang Cheng out of Yunmeng a lifetime ago.
It did work. Xue Yang preened a little, then got to his feet. “Fine, fine, mud pit it is. Don’t wait up, gongzis.”
They watched him frisk off down the hill, no doubt planning to get himself immediately in trouble. Wei Wuxian was of the theory that the busier they kept him, the safer he was to be around, and it had held so far.
He turned back to Wen Ning. “Alright, you clearly wanted me alone for something. Out with it.”
Wen Ning’s face couldn’t manage so many expressions anymore, but it was more than capable of sheepish. “Ah, well, that is…”
Wei Wuxian sighed. “Wen Qing sent you to bother me about my cultivation, didn’t she.”
“She’s worried about the state of your qi,” said Wen Ning reproachfully. “Even cultivating resentful energy through talismans might be too much exposure. I agree with her,” he added when Wei Wuxian huffed.
“Wen Ning-ah, you take my side in everything else, why not this?” said Wei Wuxian mournfully. “I’m managing it just fine! And having another demonic cultivator around is…probably not good, but it takes some of the load.”
Wen Ning was quiet in a way that suggested doubt.
“I don’t trust him either! But I can handle him, I can handle my cultivation, and I can handle my own temperament.” Wei Wuxian gave Wen Ning his brightest smile, the one that normally made people concede.
Depressingly, Wen Ning still looked unconvinced. Maybe Wei Wuxian was losing his edge. “I…I don’t know. I trust you, but he gives me a feeling like…like he could do anything at all. Just because he wanted to.”
Wei Wuxian looked at him in mild surprise. “And I don’t give you that feeling? Me, the famous untamed young master following his own whims against orthodoxy. I could do anything at all, too.”
“It’s just a feeling,” Wen Ning said uneasily. He looked away from Wei Wuxian, down the slope where the well-builders and Xue Yang were faintly visible. Wei Wuxian sighed and patted his shoulder, and they talked about nothing for a while.
Eventually, Xue Yang came back up towards the cave, covered in mud, laughing and joking with the Wens. He could be charming, Wei Wuxian thought, in his own way. Watching him, Wei Wuxian could see something else in his expression when the others weren’t looking at him, something satisfied and proprietary. He looked at the dwellers of the Burial Mounds as though they belonged to him.
Wei Wuxian thought maybe this wasn’t so alarming. For his own part, he certainly thought of the Burial Mounds community as his – to protect, to bear out the consequences of his choices for. Maybe Xue Yang saw it that way too, though Wei Wuxian wasn’t convinced. Hopefully, if he saw them as belonging to him, he saw himself as belonging to them, too.
Perhaps feeling Wei Wuxian’s gaze on him, Xue Yang broke off whatever conversation he was having and looked over his shoulder at Wei Wuxian.
He had that same steady, clear, completely unabashed expression. Like Wei Wuxian was something he owned.
Wei Wuxian dropped his eyes and went back to working on the talismans.
Wei Wuxian still can’t properly move, but he manages to jerk away from Xue Yang’s touch. He could scream in frustration at his own body – he needs to get up, to do something, to fix this, because Jin Zixuan is dead, and the sects will take that as an act of war, the Wens have no one to defend them except him, and he killed his shijie’s husband, what has he done-
“Hey, hey, shh, it’s okay,” says Xue Yang, pulling him down by his shoulders, which is how Wei Wuxian realizes he’d been trying to fight his way off the bed. “I mean, you did fuck up pretty bad, and we’re probably going to get into a fight with the entire cultivation world, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. Wen Qing and Wen Ning are out preparing, by the way.”
Wei Wuxian doesn’t want to go to war again. He is pretty sure he’s finally met something he can’t handle, and the dread of it sends shivers running down his frozen limbs. Xue Yang’s smile, his eerie calm, is only making it worse.
“We can’t fight,” he says numbly. He can barely manage to speak; he just wants to wail like a madman, feels he’s probably on the verge of becoming one. “There’s not enough of us, what are we supposed to do?”
Xue Yang’s smile turns sly. “We’ve got more than enough power to fend them off, trust me. Those two doctors, they wanted to give themselves up to buy time! What a fucking waste. This is gonna be much better.”
He snuggles back in next to Wei Wuxian, tucking his head against his shoulder. His hand rests tenderly over the frozen-solid pain in Wei Wuxian’s stomach. “It’s all going to be fine. Trust me, qianbei, everything is going to be just fine.”
There were nights when Wei Wuxian just hurt.
They did wax and wane with how much resentful energy Wei Wuxian manipulated, but no matter what Wen Qing had to say about it, that wasn’t going to change his habits at all. He had so much work to do: protection talismans to keep fierce corpses from eating them all in their beds, purification talismans to keep the water drinkable, a thousand other little projects to keep Wei Wuxian from going insane. It was all important stuff.
Unfortunately, that didn’t actually make the pain any less. The constant ache in his dantian had graduated to a throb and then a sensation like something trying to eat its way out of his guts. The buildup of resentful energy in his meridians made him disoriented and shivery. And then there were the spirit voices telling him to murder every creature from there to Yiling, but those were at least familiar.
Since there wasn’t much else he could do, Wei Wuxian was lying on his side on the floor of the Demon Subduing Cave, huddling his arms over his abdomen like a child with a stomachache, and trying not to think about Wen Qing’s expression the last time she’d tested his qi function. He was in the early stages of badgering himself into getting up and being less sorry for himself when he heard someone clattering around at the mouth of the cave.
“Qianbei! Come out and do something interesting for a change!”
Xue Yang, then. Wei Wuxian got awkwardly to his feet, ignoring when his vision fogged over and his head swam, and started picking up his scattered notes in order to look like he was doing something useful.
“If you wanted interesting, living on a farm with a bunch of old people was a really spectacular choice,” he called back.
Xue Yang advanced into the cave, ever-present grin firmly in place. “It’s your fault for feeding me, qianbei. What are you even doing in here? Shouldn’t the Yiling Laozu be out terrorizing innocents at this time of night?”
“I’m doing important Yiling Laozu business, probably,” said Wei Wuxian. “Quit calling me qianbei, it makes me sound old.”
“As if Yiling Laozu doesn’t,” Xue Yang snorted. “I have to call you something, don’t I? After all you’ve done for me.” His voice went strange and sugary at the end in a way that made Wei Wuxian’s head hurt.
“How about calling me Wei-gongzi, if you want to show some actual respect?” Wei Wuxian bent down to pick up a divination coin and didn’t quite hold back a wince. Had Xue Yang seen it?
“Boring! And not enough! Zhongzhu, maybe. Or shizun, that’s a good one.” Xue Yang dropped to a crouch right in front of him, all his teeth gleaming. He was enjoying this game.
Wei Wuxian just felt tired and disconcerted at the idea of leading anyone or anything, let alone this sect Xue Yang was playing pretend at. He was fine with the path he’d set himself on. He wasn’t glad to see anyone else trying to follow him.
He straightened up, stuffing the coin in his sash, and rolled his eyes. “Radish-shizun. Wei-zhongzhu of the Yiling Potato Sect.”
Xue Yang cackled. “Alright, alright!” He stood and then took a step forward. Suddenly, he was very much in Wei Wuxian’s space. “I could just call you gege.”
Wei Wuxian hurt badly enough that his head felt blank with it, and Xue Yang’s proximity, something about his wide, dark, earnest eyes, made it worse. In the second-longer-than-normal it took Wei Wuxian to scrape up a clever reply, he saw Xue Yang’s gaze sharpen.
“What’s wrong with you? You look like shit.”
“I’m fine,” said Wei Wuxian.
“You are not,” said Xue Yang. “Those Wen doctors are fretting over you day in and day out. And you spend all day in this damn cave.”
Wei Wuxian tried to smile. “I’m just tired, Xue Yang. Since when were you so worried about me?”
That just made Xue Yang look more frustrated. “I do everything you ask! We work together, I study your cultivation, and you don’t even trust me.”
Wei Wuxian had several reasons not to trust Xue Yang, but they were mysteriously hard to remember when Xue Yang pressed in close to him. The warm aliveness of him felt good, or at least better than Wei Wuxian was feeling before. He couldn’t find it in himself to pull away.
“Let me help, gege,” said Xue Yang, voice throaty and quiet. “Let me make you feel better.”
Wei Wuxian, cold and tired and in pain, couldn’t stop himself. He reached for Xue Yang.
When Xue Yang crowded him up against the wall and pressed his mouth on Wei Wuxian's like he was trying to eat him, it was easier to remember why this was probably a bad idea. Wei Wuxian had never been kissed before, but he wasn’t sure this deserved the name. Xue Yang was insistent and bitey, nipping Wei Wuxian’s lips and licking into his mouth victoriously when he opened it in shock.
It wasn’t a good kiss, maybe, but it was…something. Something other than pain or exhaustion or regret, a feeling that wasn’t this. And Wei Wuxian kissed back, kissed the mouth of this murderer, this monster who had killed fifty people.
Why should that matter, now? Wei Wuxian couldn’t even number the lives he’d ended. If Xue Yang was a monster, Wei Wuxian was that too.
They fumbled backward along the wall, Xue Yang pushing and Wei Wuxian pulling. Eventually, they landed in Wei Wuxian’s bed, and Wei Wuxian, head hazy with gladness, with not-pain, pulled Xue Yang on top of him.
Xue Yang froze.
At first, Wei Wuxian thought he had upset him somehow. Xue Yang was twitchier than he liked to pretend, cagey about his bad hand, his murky past. But when Xue Yang pulled away, the expression on his face was not fear. It was something close to rage.
His hands were flat on Wei Wuxian’s belly.
“What the fuck happened to your golden core?”
Wei Wuxian’s stomach tried to drop, but it barely registered under the ache from that selfsame missing core, all the hurt flooding back in. He was too exhausted to have this conversation.
“I lost it when Lotus Pier fell.” It almost wasn’t a lie.
“Bullshit!” Xue Yang snarled. “There’s no fucking way-“
Wei Wuxian grabbed his lapels and yanked him down to kiss again, as hard as before and then harder. When Wei Wuxian took a leaf from Xue Yang’s playbook and bit his lip, Xue Yang groaned and clutched at him like a man drowning.
When they pulled apart to breathe, Wei Wuxian reached up and took Xue Yang’s face in his hands.
“I don’t want,” he said very softly, “to talk about it. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Xue Yang nodded, the motion made small by Wei Wuxian holding onto him. His eyes were very, very black.
“Good,” said Wei Wuxian and smiled. “Now give this qianbei a kiss goodnight.” And Xue Yang, grinning like a tiger, surged down to crush his mouth against Wei Wuxian’s again.
They pressed together in the dark.
Later, Wei Wuxian woke to a patch of fading warmth in his bed and an emptiness at his side. Xue Yang was gone.
Wei Wuxian sat up, casting around the bed for him in vague, half-awake anxiety. Then realized he could hear Xue Yang’s voice from outside the cave. Furiously raised.
He could hear Wen Qing too, even and cool in the way that meant she was furious too.
They were too far away for him to properly hear them, and trying made his head split. He was faintly aware that whatever they were arguing about should worry him. But: he hurt. And he was so, so tired.
Either Xue Yang would come back, or he wouldn’t. Wei Wuxian rolled over and went back to sleep.
There is one last sliver of logic Wei Wuxian has access to, in this feverish nightmare he’s living, and he follows it like a prisoner following a sunbeam to a chink in the wall. He manages to twitch his shoulder, jarring Xue Yang away, and turns his head to glare at him.
“You said that we had more than enough power, but that absolutely can’t be true. We’ve got less than fifty old people, a three year old child, Wen Qing who’s a doctor, Wen Ning, you, and me. Unless you’ve magically pulled a new yin tiger seal out of your asshole, or one of us suddenly ascended to immortality, there’s just no way that-“
With the click of a joint snapping, everything slots into place.
Why Xue Yang is so self-satisfied. Why Wei Wuxian feels cold. Why he’s paralyzed, as if for a medical procedure. Why, though the rest of him aches, his lower dantian feels heavy. Full.
“You didn’t,” he rasps. “Xue Yang, the yin iron, you didn’t…”
“I was wondering when you were going to figure it out,” says Xue Yang. He pets gently over Wei Wuxian’s stomach: admiring, Wei Wuxian realizes, his handiwork.
Wei Wuxian cannot think of a response for this except to claw open his own belly with his nails and take it out. He tries to shove away from Xue Yang, shaking with revulsion, but he’s still weak. Xue Yang just holds him tighter, crooning at him not to hurt himself.
“Wen Qing will kill you,” he manages to gasp out. “You hurt her patient. She won’t hold back, now.”
“Kill me?” Xue Yang laughs. “Qianbei, she helped. Her and that brother of hers. Did you really think I could’ve stole her needles?”
“You’re lying,” Wei Wuxian replies on automatic. He can barely hear himself over the ringing in his ears.
“She didn’t want to at first! But you were throwing off so much resentful energy we thought it actually might kill you. And you were dying slow anyway, of your meridians being eaten away.”
Wei Wuxian shuts his eyes against the grief that cuts through him. “You shouldn’t have made her…she’s already done so much. I've made both of them do so much. You should have just let it happen.”
“Hey, hey!” Xue Yang seems to have finally recognized Wei Wuxian’s distress. He’s cuddling even closer, taking Wei Wuxian’s face in his hands so Wei Wuxian has to look directly at him. “She agreed, okay? Wen Ning, too. We didn’t want you to die, none of us want you to die.”
Xue Yang is very like how he was that first night in the cave – his big, glossy eyes, his horrible sincerity. Wei Wuxian can’t think of an answer to it, other than what if I deserved to die. He doesn’t think Xue Yang will find this argument compelling. He doesn’t think Wen Qing or Wen Ning will either.
“What if I die anyway,” he says weakly, for lack of anything better. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“You won’t,” says Xue Yang, his confidence both comforting and awful. “You’re healing so quick – those needles are supposed to put you flat on your back for at least a full day, and you can already sit up! You’ll be like new in no time.”
He smiles wider and wider, the edges going sharp. “And then the sects will pay for trying to come after us.”
Wei Wuxian considers this. There’s nothing left for him outside the Burial Mounds now. Jin Zixuan is dead and with him Wei Wuxian’s last tenuous connection to the cultivation world. All that he has now: the people he defied the world for. The debts he still has to pay. The metal in his body. The murderer in his bed.
He can’t leave the path that he is on. All he has left is to protect what he still has left to protect. And if he becomes a monster for it, that’s nothing new.
Wei Wuxian concentrates, feels the power running out in ice cold ripples from his replacement core. Seizes it. Forces his body to ignore the lesser metal clamping down on his muscles. He lifts his arms.
He holds Xue Yang tight.