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He comes home roaring drunk — at least that’s what it looks like at first. His face is flushed and he stumbles more than once as he lurches over to the bed. Without further ceremony, he throws himself down with abandon and is soon fast asleep, lying fully clothed on top of the covers. Lan Wangji allows himself a small smile as he watches him for a moment — sprawled out in the posture of a tripping dancer, his breath coming and going in a soft nasal whistle. Quietly, he strips him down to his inner robes and tucks him neatly under the covers. Then pressing a light kiss to his forehead, he climbs in beside him. The candles are put out; the room sinks into a calming darkness. Only a gentle rustle of leaves can be heard now and then outside the window. Lan Wangji pulls his husband close as he drifts off slowly into a peaceful sleep, content and unsuspecting. Foolishly unsuspecting.
*
In the dead of the night, Wei Wuxian suddenly jolts awake.
The room is lit softly by the gentle glow of moonshine; the shadows of the trees are swaying gently across the walls with the light breeze. As consciousness comes back to him, he becomes slowly aware of a terrible weight pressing down upon his body, as if he were being crushed under great slabs of heavy stone. His breath comes out in short, feeble gasps, his ribs trembling under the strain. Determined to throw off these wretched slabs of stone, he drags himself out of bed and staggers out onto the veranda.
Outside, the moonlight seems almost too bright; the sounds of the night seem to crowd into his ears in one cacophonous body. In deep gulps he breathes in the cool night air — the cold, sharp air. Yet the weight still bears down hard on his chest.
Now he tries to cough it out. He coughs once. And then he retches.
The nausea rises within him in a sudden tide. Gripping the balustrade, he leans over and throws up into the shrubbery, and heaven help him, it feels as though his entrails were being torn out of him in violent fistfuls. His body convulses and shudders and wrings itself over and over, until at last he sinks down onto his knees in an abject posture, his trembling hands still clinging fast to the rail. There is an astringent taste, an acrid taste in his mouth now — the rankness of bile and the tang of blood.
And at this moment it slowly comes to him that he has been poisoned — something slipped into the wine, perhaps, down at the tavern; but the thought forms in his mind like an image of vapour, shapeless and insubstantial. Now he feels a hand on his back, then another taking him by the elbow. Lan Zhan is looking at him with an expression of unconcealed panic. He is calling his name and touching his face and wiping the tears and sweat from it with shaking hands. Wei Wuxian clenches his teeth and shakes his head. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he tries to say, but knows that even if he’d spoken the words, he would not have fooled him.
Now the pulse throbbing in his temples comes like rings from a beaten gong, resounding blows spreading out in rasping shivers. The blood raking through his veins seems to be full of sharp teeth and shards of bone; bubbles rise up to blister and burst in stabs of scorching heat. He clutches the fabric of Lan Zhan’s robe and tries to cry out; it comes out a broken moan. Now a torrent is approaching, a roaring barrage of ice and snow. He hears the rumbling in his ears as he is hoisted over Lan Zhan’s shoulders. Now they’re off; Lan Zhan is running. Here is the crunch of gravel. The yard slips away into a garden, a winding path, an open gallery. But the wave of snow is close behind; the rumbling is pounding now behind his eyes and in his brain. A shadow looms; the wave is upon him. Now a crush of suffocating darkness.
*
An indeterminate amount of time passes.
He is distantly conscious of the fact that he’s back in the Jingshi. He recognises the ceiling above their bed; it looks exactly as it always does, except figures keep looming over him and as they do, their large, cumbrous heads persistently obstruct the view. He recognises some of the faces — medics from the sect, he realises. They poke and prod him; they peer into his eyes and mouth. At times they measure his pulse, then mutter lines of indecipherable noises as they carry on bustling about, coming and going and going and coming again.
At one point someone holds him up to drink from a bowl of some foul-smelling concoction. He tries. It chokes him. He is laid down again.
Sometime later one of the medics is standing with his husband in the corner of the room, speaking in a low, apologetic whisper. His husband nods silently in affirmation, then casts a glance towards the bed. His gaze is solemn.
The days are no longer single, various, but one amorphous body. They melt into each other, flowing, liquid. Sometimes they come down in a sudden deluge, night and day descending one right upon the other; other times they pass in the dribs and drabs of an interminable trickle.
A door shuts. Shadows pass. The morning bell. Larks calling.
*
Sometimes Sizhui comes in to play his qin. Sometimes Jingyi is with him.
“I swear, Wei-qianbei! They won’t get away with this! When we find those no-good bastards who did this to you, Sizhui and I are going to give them a damned proper— Ow!”
(He manages a weak laugh at this.)
“Wei-qianbei, just focus on getting well. You can leave the rest to us.”
(Sizhui lays his hand on his and gives a light squeeze.)
*
Trees toss their branches outside the window, the flowers quiver and dance. A bird sings; it sings a warbling, melodious strain. The days draw on at a painful crawl.
Sounds and sensations come to him like shadows down a dark passage, dim and dreamlike, disembodied. He is vaguely aware of someone lifting him gently and wiping him down with a washcloth — Lan Zhan, he knows, from the touch. A soft kiss is placed on his forehead when he is tucked again under the covers.
The next time he opens his eyes, the sunlight has shifted minutely. A damp towel has been laid on his forehead, a cool weight against his skin. He turns his head and gazes out the window. Under a yellow-grey sky, swallows swoop in undulating circles, swiftly beating their sharp little wings. He watches them as the clouds above drive past in long, pale wisps. Then comes the rustling of leaves, faraway footfalls, voices carried on the wind…
He becomes aware of a solid noise, a steady noise, coming from somewhere within the room. It comes heavy, stertorous, like the grinding of a stone mill — ah, it was his own breathing.
*
Sizhui is back. This time Jingyi isn’t with him. Or if he is, he’s being unusually quiet. He wants to take a look, but forcing his eyes open has become too great an effort.
“Wei-qianbei,” says Sizhui. Then after a moment, “Ba.”
He squeezes his arm. “You have to hang in there.”
*
Noises, sonorous, echo as if off the walls of an enormous cave. All day long now, there is a clanging in his head — the heavy clanging of an iron bell echoing endlessly off the walls of the cave.
Lan Zhan is sitting beside the bed, holding his hand. He passes a steady stream of energy through his meridians, and for a while it soothes the tight, throbbing pain in his head.
The energy tapers off. Lan Zhan gives his hand a soft pat, then gets up. Wei Wuxian hastily catches the edge of his sleeve between his fingers.
“Stay,” he croaks. His voice sounds unusually rough.
Lan Zhan obliges, settling back into his seat. He laces their fingers together, and the touch of his hand is warm, familiar.
The room sways gently; it rocks from side to side. The floor rises and falls, as if waves were rolling out beneath it. The bed is heaving up and down, up and down along with the waves.
*
At some point in time (though at this point time no longer holds any meaning), he opens his eyes to find Jiang Cheng standing beside the bed. For a moment he stares at the illusion, wondering at the fancies of his fever-addled brain, until the figure steps closer and proves itself to be real. Jiang Cheng is holding himself a little stiffly, with a strained look on his face as though he’s trying to contrive some decent way in which to phrase his words. Then he realises — for Jiang Cheng to have come all this way, or to have come at all in fact, it could only mean things were looking undeniably grim. So was this it then? Did he come to say goodbye? Now Jiang Cheng is clearing his throat. He opens his mouth.
In a sudden rush of strength, Wei Wuxian cuts him off with a “No!” so forceful it surprises even himself. “No, no, no,” he gasps, clawing at the sheets as he struggles to sit up. But his limbs seem to be banding in mutiny against him. He gets only as far as onto his elbows when his husband slams into the room. At once, the air begins to grow uncomfortably thin. Lan Zhan shoots Jiang Cheng a savage look as he sweeps past him toward the bed.
“I did not say a word to him!” Jiang Cheng bites out, though there seems to be more alarm in his voice than anger.
The only reply Lan Zhan offers seems to be another glare. There is a beat of unpleasant silence as he holds Wei Wuxian close and runs a soothing hand up and down his back. Then at last, Jiang Cheng straightens his robes with a tug and strides over to the door. “Excuse me, then,” he spits. “My apologies for coming.”
With a jerk, Wei Wuxian quickly comes back to himself. “No, don’t go,” he chokes out, as Jiang Cheng steps out of the room. “Don’t go,” he says again, and Jiang Cheng, mercifully, pauses just beyond the doorway. He turns to look over his shoulder and regards Wei Wuxian with a raised brow.
“It isn’t— This isn’t—” Wei Wuxian falters, searching for the words he could swear he had a moment ago. But his mind is a blank; Jiang Cheng is still standing outside the door. “I’m not dying,” he finishes idiotically.
For a second, Jiang Cheng looks incredulous, but in the next, he lets out a soft snort. “Of course not,” he says, and Wei Wuxian can see half a smile now on his lips. Then, with an expression one might almost call benignant, he gives them both a curt nod and closes the door behind him. Wei Wuxian hears his footsteps receding, then the outer door sliding open and closed.
And with that, he feels all his strength leave him. He relinquishes the struggle to stay upright, letting his body crumple in a heap over Lan Zhan’s lap. Somewhere far above, in a voice betraying the barest hint of anxiety, he hears him say, “Wei Ying?”
He nuzzles his face against Lan Zhan’s legs and murmurs an answer into his robes: “I meant it, I’m not going to die.” And at that Lan Zhan huffs a soundless laugh, though perhaps it might have been a sigh of relief. Slowly, he begins to run his hands over Wei Wuxian’s hair in light, rhythmic strokes, smoothing it and smoothing it again with a tenderness that lulls them both into a quiet torpor.
His eyelids are heavy; he can feel them drooping as he begins to sink slowly down into the gentle folds of sleep. And as he does, he hears a voice drifting down alongside him, gently forming the shapes of a familiar tune. Softly, it washes over him like long sweeps of a feathery brush, drifting down with him through delicate veils of mist and gossamer, and far, far away in the distance, the rising and falling notes begin to form the waves and swirls of a hazy memory — the damp darkness of a cave, the febrile heat of his body, the cool touch of Lan Zhan’s hand.
How young they were back then. A lifetime ago.
*
In the haze of his slumber he thinks of many things — of all the times he’s nearly died, of the one time he did. Did he think much about them then? Perhaps not; he’d always had more important things on his mind — searching for scraps to fill his stomach, fending off wild dogs in the street, later Jiang Cheng and Shijie and Lotus Pier, and then the absence of Jiang Cheng and Shijie and Lotus Pier, and again the scrabbling for something to fill his stomach, though this time in a barren wasteland reeking of death. Perhaps he’d been so busy living that he’d never given much thought to the idea of actually being alive. There in a cave, on a mountain, on the run, getting caught — how many times he’d escaped death, and each time he’d come out a living being, breathing air and treading solid ground.
The idea of death had always been a constant presence. He’d witnessed it with his own eyes, delivered it with his own hand, experienced it too; he’d known it well. And yet the idea of life, of the warmth of his flesh and the blood in his veins; of love and hate and terror and rage, of despair, ecstasy, all experienced with a violent intensity of being — it had not occurred to him that he’d felt and lived all this as a human being.
For a moment he thinks, if he had to die again this time, at least he could go with a smile on his lips. But immediately he thinks of Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan who had suffered so long, who had mourned him year after year; how cruel it would be to tear away the happiness he finally got to hold in his hands. He thinks of A-yuan too, of everything he’s lost at his young age; would he take even this from him? And then of himself — why shouldn’t he get to have his happiness? Why shouldn’t he get to spend a lifetime loving a man, loving a son, feeling the breeze on his face and the sun on his skin?
He thinks of the poison, of his life now hanging by a thread. Would he by his death repay any of the wrongs he had committed? Perhaps it was selfish, or perhaps it was the truth, but he knew he’d died once and that had done nothing to redress the slightest of his sins. And perhaps it had nothing at all to do with the just and unjust, the blameless, the guilty; perhaps the fact he was alive again had no connection to what he or anyone else deserved. By whatever series of coincidences, the collateral effects of someone or another’s plans, he was again alive, and that was all there was to it. Whether or not he went on being alive, that too had nothing to do with what anyone deserved.
*
He shifts uncomfortably and opens his eyes. Lan Zhan is sitting beside him at the edge of the bed. He lays a hand on his cheek and looks at him with a mingled expression of tenderness and pain. On the stand in the corner, the candles are burnt down low. The washstand, the bronze mirror, the folding screen with its pattern of mist-shrouded mountains are all outlined in stark black shadow.
Then a vase gleams, a tassel flashes in the flickering light. The wind blows in, pressing down the candle flames, making the shadows leap up in long streaks across the ceiling. And then it passes. The flames rise silently from their obeisance; the shadows retreat again to a crouch. He closes his eyes and slips again into dreams.
*
In the dream he is being burned alive. He is stretched out on a funeral pyre in white robes, the flames all around him, licking at his hands and feet. “I’m not dead yet!” he shouts. “I’m not dead!” But his cries are drowned out by the roar of the fire and by a thunderous beating of drums and cymbals. The heat is intolerable; he can scarcely breathe. The air wavers in ripples of crimson and gold. Now his sleeves are smouldering. Now a bead of sweat falls from his skin; it hisses as it is swallowed by the flames.
Then he is again in bed. The covers have tumbled to the ground; their robes are strewn across the room. Sweat trickles down the arch of his back, down the cleft between his shoulder blades. A drop oozes from a puckered hole and slides down the curve of a cheek — a drop of white, the colour of pearls, a drop of warm sap fresh from a young stalk. Here and there petals of red and purple have fallen upon soft, snowy slopes; here and there a bruising touch adds to their number. Sensations rise like curls of smoke, held aloft in thick, sultry air. They unfurl in waves from the base of the spine, the depths of the gut; they gather and rush forth in a burning spout. He feels Lan Zhan’s hands on him, Lan Zhan’s mouth on him, limbs tangled, fingers intertwined. Here is the flood of rapture, of heat, the emotion of the body, blood rushing bright red through thrumming veins. Their hearts beat in tandem; their bodies are pressed close. The throes of passion. Of life. Warm flesh.
He is acutely aware of his material body. Aware of the heat under his skin and the blood in his veins and the ceaseless kicking of his own heart. Though he had always known desire, he had not in all those years known pleasure — not in the way Lan Zhan knew how to give it. And here he knew it now, discovered like a precious stone unearthed from desert sands, a ruby held in the palm of a smooth, unfamiliar hand he had learned to call his own. And with his unfamiliar hands he had unearthed too, an array of corporeal sensations — the coolness of water on his tongue and the warmth of a hot meal, the smell of air in the early morning, and the way a cold breeze nipped his skin. Perhaps the strangeness of his body arose not from his unfamiliarity with it, but from the simple fact that he was once again alive.
Alive. He feels it now, the soul alive within his flesh. It fills him to the brim and stretches into the very tips of his fingers, his toes, the top of his scalp. He feels it tingling all across his skin as Lan Zhan draws it along with his fingers, and it feels as full and sweet as ripened fruit.
Then swiftly, the ripe touch turns purulent, festering; the warm caresses now bony fingers of a rotting corpse. Now a dozen hands are dragging long nails across his body. There are rasping whispers in his ears, a fetid stench in the air. Lashing swirls of bitter smoke gather and whip all around him, scratching, thrashing, shredding robes and raking through his skin. Rows of teeth tear through his body, shadowy claws gash meat and bone. Now the crunch and snap; the harsh, wet ripping; the shear and slash; again, again. The flesh swings loose in ragged strips from splinters of mangled bone. Blood sloshes red, now black, now hot and oily; now it splatters in clumps of viscid ooze. The ropes of flesh, the strings of sinew — they fling, they fly in all directions.
And as they land, they sink down into the murky depths of a fathomless pool, where sunlight and shadow are indistinguishable in the grey-blue water. Here the fragments of bone and flesh dissolve like snow as they drift softly downward, and when at last he comes to rest on the sandy floor at the bottom, he finds that there is nothing left at all of his body. Slowly, he curls himself into a tiny ball, and there he lies at the bottom of the pool, rocking back and forth, back and forth with the constant movement of the water; seeing and hearing nothing except the faint flickers of shadow that pass now and again overhead.
Then as time passes, he grows dimly aware of another presence in the water. There are creatures — once human, possibly — all around in the gloom, some curled up like he is, some crawling on all fours, some pawing and sniffing the ground like witless animals. But in the vastness of the thick, dark water they offer neither threat nor companionship, and so they are of no interest to him. He remains curled in a ball on the sandy floor of the pool, rocking, rocking, endlessly from month to month and year to year, until time begins to break up and melt away into the water.
Then from somewhere far away in the distance, far up beyond the surface, drifts down a sound — gentle, melodious, the plucking of strings; and then, a voice.
“Wei Ying, Wei Ying.”
Something reaches up from deep within the recesses of his memory, parting the thick, dark water and the flickering shadows as it begins bearing him toward the source of the voice. He rises slowly, sliding through the murky water, rising up and up as the light grows stronger and sounds gradually sharpen by the degree. And at last, in a great crash of frothing white, he breaches the surface and emerges onto a rocky promontory high above a heaving sea. The wind rushes in his face; the salt air shimmers as he draws it into his lungs.
It seems as if laid clear and bare before him was the very frailty of life, delicate like the shell of a bird’s egg. How easily it could all slip away, with just a breath of the wind. He sees it now — the egg falling from a nest, a half-formed body spattered over the hard stones. How vulnerable the flesh, the body in which the soul resides; how easy to let it all slip away beneath one’s feet. He feels so tired, so worn, so incredibly spent. If he could only surrender, just give in and sink under… He’s felt it before — the embrace of death; it wasn’t as bad as one thought it to be.
No, no, he thinks immediately, vehemently. Not like this. Not now, not with what he had to lose, not with what he would be leaving behind. With his arms outstretched, he calls forth his resolve, a remorseless obstinacy, his spirit of revolt, and raises them like weapons with which to beat back the image of death. The pall is thrown off; the shroud goes with it; the veil is rent. He opens his eyes and sits up in bed.
*
Lan Wangji dreams. He dreams of lying with Wei Ying, of his body and his taste. He dreams of his eyes — they are not the same eyes, but they sparkle just as they have always sparkled, a deep black somehow full of glittering colour. He dreams of Wei Ying’s laugh and Wei Ying’s hands and Wei Ying’s face — these are different too, but it is still him. And he is here.
But now he dreams of hands that are not Wei Ying’s hands. There are so many of them — long, taloned fingers all thin and grey and sallow, clawing and snatching at a swirling mass of black, bitter smoke. There are horrible noises — crunching bone and ripping flesh and hissing, animal snarls — and there is so, so much blood. The noises keep coming; he can scarcely bear it. He cannot block them out with his hands or with his screams. Still they keep coming. The blood is flowing. Gods above, there is so, so much blood.
And then the blood stops flowing. The noises cease. He is surrounded by dark, sticky water at the bottom of a deep pool. He is now walking along the floor of the pool. As he walks, his feet kick up stones and sediment that have lain untouched for centuries, and as they stir and rise, they form soft clouds that linger in a trail behind him. He walks slowly; the heavy water makes his movements slow, and as it is dark and he cannot see where he is going, he treads carefully, with deliberate steps. This goes on for hours, days, months perhaps. The water is still thick and heavy, and still he knows not where he is going.
At length the floor of the pool narrows into a point, and the water falls away in a shivering crash to form a vast sea beneath him. Now he is standing high up on a sharp precipice jutting out into the water, and from up here he can see the whole expanse of sea and sky laid out like a painting in a scroll.
He sees now, he sees clearly, that Wei Ying was for all his power and all his genius still a man, a mote of dust in the vastness of the universe, the flash of a rocket in the night, a spray of gold soon lost to the dark. The fact that Wei Ying could die and he would go on living — it seemed impossible now, but with sobering clarity he remembers he had survived that way for thirteen years. Life went on; the sun was still hot; the moon still waxed and waned. For the first time in a long while, he awakened to the fact that they were single persons and not one inseparable whole.
The realisation stabs into him like a knife to the breast, yet he knew that by placing his happiness in the fragile hands of mortal man, he had always laid himself open to the claws of suffering. He knew that life, astonishing, many-coloured, vivid, had the power to pierce one’s body through with a lunge of its sharp beak. And though in the agony of the moment it might seem as if the red blood would pour forth for all eternity, in time the flesh slowly knits itself back together; and eventually, where once was a gaping wound, one finds only relics of it in the ridges of an old scar.
But please, he begs, he is not ready to have that deadened skin torn open again so soon.
He feels a sudden shift beneath him. In a surge of panic, he jerks awake.
The light in the room suggests it is still mid-morning; he must have fallen asleep at some point sitting by the bed. The coverlet on which his head was resting must have shifted as Wei Ying sat up.
He quickly gets to his feet and leans over to take Wei Ying’s face in his hand. “Is everything alright?” he asks. It’s the first time he’s seen him sitting up without help since he collapsed almost a month ago.
“I was poisoned,” Wei Ying says, slowly, as if feeling out the words. “That day, at the tavern — there was something in the wine.”
“Mm,” he answers. “We’ve caught the culprit.”
Wei Ying gives a short little laugh. It doesn’t hold any bitterness, only a touch of resignation. “I don’t suppose I need to ask the motive.”
“No,” says Lan Wangji. But he doesn’t wish to continue this thread of conversation, so he asks instead, “How are you feeling?”
Wei Ying smiles, his eyes softly shining, and it feels like the golden rays of a vernal sun emerging after a long, grey winter. “Good,” he says. “I feel alive.”
He looks it too, Lan Wangji observes. He looks as if after wandering for weeks through a labyrinth of misty spectres, he has finally emerged into the vivid sunlight, terribly battered but still unvanquished, the inextinguishable glimmer still bright in his eye. His face is still horribly wan and thin, but a little colour is already creeping back over the ghastly pallor.
He sits down on the edge of the bed and draws Wei Ying into his arms, feeling the warmth of his body against his, breathing in the faint scent of his skin. Silently, Wei Ying relaxes into his hold and rests his head against his shoulder. And together they stay that way for a while, simply holding onto each other, without having to say a word.