Work Text:
Lán Qǐrén was many admirable things. Principled, reliable, diligent, conscientious, knowledgeable, easy in his command of the classroom, even wise. But few would call him sensitive.
"You need to stop talking to Wàngjī," Lan Xīchén told him, in the uncannily stern tones of a Sect Leader and not a nephew; "and preferably stop talking about him, if you cannot control yourself."
Still unused to the level ground we-two stood on, Lán Qǐrén bristled at this. "Someone must speak sense to or about him. The boy is on a path that leads to — "
"Death!" Xīchén said, his own temper flaring beneath his white jade composure, "How exactly correct, Uncle! The man we have both watched grow up is on a path to end his own life. But you have not watched him do — and I — "
It would be many years before Lán Qǐrén could piece together what Xīchén had watched his little brother do, of late. The point was clear even then.
Xīchén gathered himself. "I would not dare to remind you of the sect rules you taught me so well. I will tell you only to treat Wàngjī as a man in mourning. To speak of him well, or not at all."
Lán Qǐrén thickened his face. "Then I will hold my tongue."
"Not quite." Xīchén's grip on his uncle's shoulder tightened minutely. "I need you… to help me enforce the same among the rest of our sect. With them I do not… I have not been a grown man for long, even more briefly a Sect Leader. Qǐrén — Uncle. I need you."
Lán Qǐrén was many disagreeable things. He was high-tempered, strict, inflexible, insensitive. But none would dare say he did not love his nephews.
So he ceased to speak his mind and began instead to be the uncle his nephews needed. He quashed rumors, as he always had before; quashed them, over the years, with greater and greater subtlety.
"Do not speak such prurient trash," he would say at first. "You should be above it."
Later: "If he were, what of it? You should not speak so coarsely of anyone, let alone your own fellow-disciple."
At first: "If you cannot respect his weakness or his reasons, at least have some respect for who he used to be."
Later: "Would you, in your time of greatest sorrow, wish for others to remember you speaking so unkindly of my nephew in his own?"
At first: "Do not waste any more words on this subject. Enough."
Later: "He is healing. You should be glad of that; the rest is only his concern."
With time, Lán Wàngjī left his 'seclusion,' not to say 'convalescence;' well enough to begin to live again. At first, he did not do much.
"Ér-gōngzi does nothing but care for rabbits all day. What happened to…?"
"Hold your tongue," Lán Qǐrén said; and tongues were held.
"Hanguang-jun begins his gǔqín studies again; but, alas…"
"Regardless of the circumstances, you may be certain that study is admirable. Chatter is not," Qǐrén admonished. And he held his tongue.
"Did you hear? Lán Wàngjī is taking the older juniors on their first nighthunts. Is it advisable to…?"
"Speak one more word," Lán Qǐrén demanded. And not one more word was said.
The longer Qǐrén held his tongue, the more he found he had to say. By degree, the things he did not say became kinder, and more wistful. There was… much, that he felt for his nephew, much he wished to know about him, that he did not know how to speak aloud. He feared that his cat's tongue, its sandpaper rasp, would sharpen it all into knives.
And, truly, he had no wish to see his nephew, who had grown up so well and recovered so much, shrink before his words again.
But.
"Xīchén."
"Uncle. What do you need?"
"I wish to speak to Wàngjī."
Xīchén blinked. "Of course you may. I believe he is in…"
"No, nephew," Lán Qǐrén sighed. "I require your help."
They consulted in private, his nephew rejecting some things and refining others, suggesting some things and proactively dissuading him from certain topics.
"Certainly I would not —" Qǐrén protested.
"I know that, Uncle," Xīchén said, unconvincingly. "Does Wàngjī? Step well clear of it."
At last, Qǐrén's heart was clear as the sun setting between his nephew and he.
"Thank you, Xīchén."
"Uncle…" But Xīchén could not find his words, having helped Lán Qǐrén for some hours to find his own. So he pressed Qǐrén's hand, and left.
The next morning, Lán Qǐrén's path crossed fortuitously with Lán Wàngjī's as he led his adoptive son, Sīzhuī, to the rabbit hutch.
"Dear nephew," Lán Qǐrén began, and immediately Wàngjī's eyes hardened in alarm. "May we speak over tea sometime today?"
"Of course," Wàngjī said warily. "At two?"
"That is suitable," Lán Qǐrén allowed, and left his nephew and his great-nephew to tend to their many rabbits.
Lán Wàngjī was an immaculate host for tea. The elegance of his attentions to his visiting uncle seemed almost pointed.
On his ground, Xīchén had insisted. You must place yourself at the disadvantage.
"You wished to speak?" his nephew asked at last.
"Mm," Lán Qǐrén assented. "Wàngjī… I will never repeat to you the things I said after we brought you back from that cave."
Wàngjī stiffened.
"The things I should never have said," Lán Qǐrén continued, feeling a great internal pressure. "They were unkind, and unjust, and you did not deserve to hear them."
Wàngjī composed himself; as much as was possible, when only his closest intimates could have noticed his discomposure at all. "You wished to speak," he said, in another voice entirely.
"Only if you do," Qǐrén rejoined. "I will make conversation for a whole hour about — night hunts, and Sīzhuī, and rabbits —"
"Do not concede too much," Wàngjī murmured, in understated good humor; "or I might. Go on."
Lán Qǐrén gathered his thoughts, subconsciously and inaudibly fingering the folded paper script he had copied from his and Xīchén's note-taking.
"I know you to be a good and wise and perceptive man," Qǐrén began cautiously, and already Lán Zhàn's face was thickening. "And you… saw in Wèi Wúxiàn what I could not."
"You have been speaking to Xīchén," Wàngjī observed drily. Lán Qǐrén spread his hands without denying it. "You wish to see what I saw."
"Indeed."
Lán Zhàn sighed, eyes soft and heavy like grass beneath dew. You do not have to speak, Lán Qǐrén did not say.
Let him speak, Xīchén had said. When he will.
"You… saw him, as a delinquent boy," Lán Zhàn said at last, and his uncle did not protest. "I, too, saw this. But you have seen many delinquent boys in your time, and he was only the worst."
A smile played tentatively in the corners of Wàngjī's eyes; Lán Qǐrén snorted in wonder.
Do not say, only the worst! Xīchén's voice said in his mind, imagined this time and not remembered.
"I, too, saw many delinquent boys, you will recall," Wàngjī continued. "You also saw that he was clever, and funny, and daring, and friendly — even overfamiliar."
"At that time, Xīchén said —" Memories shook loose in Qǐrén's arms, like notes from the top of a tower of books. "He thought you were making a friend for the first time."
"Unclear," Wàngjī replied, dry humor mingling with sadness. "He… did his best. Also his worst. I was never sure… what his intentions were."
"He spent a month under your discipline," Qǐrén recalled.
"And tried my patience for all of it. He always… needed an audience. Uncle, you would never have seen him, face-to-face, as the man he — the Yílíng Lǎozǔ."
Lán Qǐrén kept his face blank. "No. Not… at any other time than that once."
Wàngjī's fingers tapped in agitation before he mastered them once more, looking off at nothing. "Once, I visited Yúnmèng. A gaggle of young women threw flowers down to me from a balcony. I looked up and saw Wèi Wúxiàn among them. Egging it all on. Mocking me, perhaps. Inviting me up to visit them altogether."
Lán Wànjī laid out one hand and then the other, as if weighing a merchant's wares, meeting his uncle's gaze with one incongruously urgent.
"All ghosts, one Wèi Wúxiàn."
Like a gong being struck, Lán Qǐrén understood. "Needs an audience…"
"I… do not express myself well," Lán Wàngjī confessed, and Lán Qǐrén nodded, in self-recognition more than condemnation; neither of them ever had. "I can only talk around the edges of what can't be said."
"Three times I said to him: Come back to Gusu with me."
Lán Qǐrén felt a chill ripple over his skin. "You…" he breathed, sorrowfully.
"You know well what that means. What he heard: Come and face your punishment. Not wrong; you and I both know it. But what I meant…" Lán Wàngjī sighed. "You have an audience here, with me. You may speak your mind. I can keep you safe. There are healthful things here, to soothe your troubled soul."
"He was unwell," Lán Qǐrén said, sounding strange to himself. This was not a sense of 'unwell' that he'd known as a young man; it was an 'unwell' he had had to confront for the first time when it manifested in the man before him.
"Did I ever tell you?" Lán Wàngjī asked rhetorically. "No, I wouldn't have… He made Wēn Cháo eat his own legs."
Lán Qǐrén's eyes widened. "Eat…"
"Alive," Wàngjī clarified, and quirked an eyebrow as if to say … and you never know, with Wèi Yīng. "If anyone deserved it, it would be that man. But…"
"No healthy man would…"
"I could see it," Wàngjī said, a little brokenly. "Just his classmate, once. Just the strict assistant to his teacher, but I could see it. His brother could not, and in those days, before Wēn Ruòhán fell, no-one else could. He was the unorthodox hero of the Sunshot Campaign. No-one thought…"
Lán Zhàn drew a shuddering breath, eyes clouding. "No-one seemed to need to know what had happened to him, but me."
This, to Lán Qǐrén, was quite enough. He had dredged up enough of Lán Zhàn's sorrows; he could trace their brushstrokes on his own. An unruly, charming boy, who (it was known even then) had affected his nephew greatly with his flirtatious mischief, growing up into a wounded man his nephew had wished to protect and to save.
"When did you know?"
Wàngjī looked up to him with narrowed eyes. Lán Qǐrén recalled some of the subjects that Xīchén had advised he step well clear of.
"I do not — when did you — when did you know it was him?"
Wàngjī's dry good humor seemed to be returning by degrees as he watched the thin spots in his uncle's face contort.
"I… was never sure of his intentions," Wàngjī said softly, "In our boyhood."
"Did he…?"
Wàngjī's eyes shuttered briefly, and he sighed. "No. He was eventually quite clear. But… at the time, I did not know whether he meant to bully me, or to flirt."
Qǐrén thought of the Ribbon Incident. "Pulling hair…"
"Or cutting it," Wàngjī said, affecting great seriousness as he mocked gripping an imaginary goatee and snipping it with his fingers.
"Nephew," Lán Qǐrén scolded.
"Enough," Wàngjī said, well-tempered. "Wèi Yīng, he… hold on. It's still here."
Lán Zhàn got up and rummaged around briefly, finding a sheet of paper marked with traces of smoke. He held it for Lán Qǐrén's attention, thumb carefully placed.
It was a portrait of his younger nephew as a student in the Library Pavilion, drawn in a moment of quiet focus on his own calligraphy. The hand was technically sound, but the artist's perspective on the subject far transcended technical correctness.
It was…
"He drew this for me at the end of his punishment," Lán Wàngjī said in soft bewilderment, and then moved his thumb. "And when my reaction did not satisfy him, he added a flower on the side of my head. And laughed."
"It's…" Qǐrén found the word. " Intimate ."
Wàngjī nodded, resigned between sorrow and fondness. "I still… do not understand why. It was always thus."
"He spoke very… highly, in his way," Lán Qǐrén struggled to articulate, "of you."
"Always complimenting me as he mocked me," Lán Wàngjī said wistfully. "Bolstering my ego, shattering my peace of mind. Too familiar, too intimate, then… turning, always turning, the subject back onto girls."
The silence hung a bitter veil over Wàngjī's eyes.
"Uncle," he began again at last. "That disastrous nighthunt on Phoenix Mountain?"
"I recall," Qǐrén assented.
"Well before the unpleasantness, Wúxiàn was at it. Throwing flowers with the girls. Taking dares… he began the night-hunt blindfolded." Lán Wàngjī blushed. "I… took advantage."
Qǐrén frowned, but did not press.
"I kissed him, then fled. He found me almost immediately, and began to act as if he didn't suspect a thing. Telling me I surely had never kissed anyone, then telling me about all the girls he had kissed…" Wàngjī paused. "I don't know if he meant to anger me. He seemed to be trying to let me know that he wasn't like that , but that he…"
Lán Wàngjī shrugged elaborately, an absurdly large gesture on a man so controlled. "I don't know. What did he want from me?"
"I… think I understand," Lán Qǐrén said, frown deepening.
"Uncle…"
"He led you on!" Qǐrén insisted.
"Uncle."
"All the kind, mannerly men in the world, and this is the one who has trodden my nephew's heart beneath his boot."
"Uncle."
But Lán Zhàn was smiling. It would have been hard for anyone else to tell, but Qǐrén knew a Lán Zhàn smile when he saw one.
Many unpleasant things could fairly be said about Lán Qǐrén. For all that, none could deny it: Lán Qǐrén loved his nephew utterly.