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One year, seven years after the beginning of his second chance at life, it rained all day on Wei Wuxian’s birthday. So he and his husband had scrapped their idea of a night hunt and had stayed in together. They had talked, played music, and meditated. They had, of course, made love several times in various creative ways.
They had gotten pleasantly drunk together too, because it was a special occasion. Two bottles for Wei Wuxian, half a cup for Lan Wangji. They had made love again.
They sat now among the rumpled flower petals of their bedding, Wei Wuxian in Lan Wangji’s lap, Lan Wangji’s face still pressed into his husband’s neck as their breathing slowed together. Wei Wuxian smiled against his lover’s fragrant hair, running his hands over the strong back under the curtains of black silk, the scars there on their haphazard diagonals.
He felt as much as heard Lan Wangji’s sigh. He muttered something, too low to hear.
“What was that?” Wei Wuxian asked. His voice was still a little hoarse from making the sounds Lan Zhan loved to make him make. Fuck, he loved that man.
“Ugly,” said Lan Wangji, misery painfully apparent in his voice. Wei Wuxian froze.
“What?”
“Ugly,” Lan Wangji said again, and sniffled.
“No, no, I heard you. What do you mean?”
“My back,” Lan Wangji said against his collarbone. “Ugly now.”
“Oh, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian breathed. It had been a long time since being drunk had made Lan Wangji sad. “Lan Zhan, you know I don’t think that.”
“Mn” was the noncommittal answer.
“Hey, will you look at me?”
Lan Wangji lifted his head obediently. His eyes were wet and his soft lips (still pink and swollen from Wei Wuxian’s teeth) pursed in a sad pout. Wei Wuxian moved his hands to gently cup his face.
“Lan Zhan,” he said, looking deep into his eyes, “you are beautiful. Your scars too. Every part of you. That’s what I think. Do you believe me?”
Lan Wangji’s eyes dropped, gazing off into the middle distance somewhere over Wei Wuxian’s left shoulder.
“Believe you,” he answered. He didn’t seem cheered at all.
“Ah, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian repeated, rubbing his thumb over one soft cheek. “Let me, um, let me get us cleaned up, alright? Then we can talk more about this. Is that alright?”
Lan Wangji nodded. He sat still (although listing slightly to one side and slouching improprietously) while Wei Wuxian clambered off of him, returning momentarily with a warm damp cloth to clean away the evidence of their mutual passion.
“Did somebody say something to you?” he asked, running the cloth gently down his husband’s muscular chest and stomach. “Do I need to beat someone up?”
Lan Wangji shook his head slowly, a loose sad bobble.
“They’d better not have. Just a moment, I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”
He half-skipped over to the basin to tidy himself up. The autumn air was cold, and although he had made terrific progress with Mo Xuanyu’s golden core, he still felt the chill keenly on his bare skin.
A slight creak of the floorboard behind him alerted him to Lan Zhan’s presence. He turned, and the illustrious Hanguang Jun was standing behind him, naked as the day he was born, head tilted slightly to one side, still pouting slightly.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian complained, failing to keep the smile off his face. “You never do what I tell you. Didn’t I say don’t move? You’re impossible when you drink, you really are. Why are you up?”
Lan Wangji stared down at him for a short moment until he remembered why he’d gotten up.
“Too cold,” he explained, and turned on his heel to stagger to their shared dressing area. He returned with a thick cloak, fur-lined around the neck and hood, and wrapped it clumsily around Wei Wuxian’s shoulders. He pulled the hood up successfully on his third try and pressed the soft fur against Wei Wuxian’s cheeks with his hands.
“Better,” he muttered, and returned to sit cross-legged on the bed, still completely nude.
Wei Wuxian couldn’t help but laugh.
“Too cold, but you don’t even want to put a robe on?”
“Too cold for you. I am not cold. Just ugly.”
“Lan Zhaaan,” Wei Wuxian moaned. He had never heard his Lan Zhan talk that way. He detested it.
He nestled himself in next to his husband, opening the cloak and wrapping it around both of their shoulders.
“Who thinks you’re ugly? Do I think that?”
“You do not,” Lan Wangji admitted sullenly.
“Do… do you think that?”
“...mn.”
“Oh.” Wei Wuxian swallowed. “I… I didn’t know that. Because of the scars?”
Lan Wangji nodded miserably again.
“Was beautiful when you met me,” he muttered.
“I see.” Wei Wuxian furrowed his brow. He wanted to tell Lan Zhan, over and over again, that he was beautiful still, breathtakingly, achingly beautiful, more beautiful every day.
But that wasn’t what this was about. Wei Wuxian finding his husband beautiful would not make Lan Wangji find himself beautiful, no matter how much Wei Wuxian wished it might. And as ridiculous as the idea of anyone finding anything about Lan Wangji unattractive might seem to him, he understood what it felt like to dislike one’s own body.
Wei Wuxian had spent, heaven knew, a long time coming to terms with the body he currently inhabited. A long time learning to think of it as anything but a disappointment, a pile of inadequacies. He had hated his last body too, after asking Wen Qing to carve out the part of it that made him Lan Zhan’s equal.
They’d talked about it, and it had been very difficult. Lan Zhan had been so patient with him. It felt, truly, like a bit of a slap in the face to know that Lan Zhan the whole time was feeling something similar about his own body.
That was why he wanted to approach this especially carefully. Sober, Lan Wangji would never admit he felt this way, Wei Wuxian was certain. He would feel like his problems were smaller than Wei Wuxian’s, and therefore less important. He was always doing this; putting Wei Wuxian’s needs so far ahead of his own that he sometimes forgot he had needs. Hypocritical, of course, for Wei Wuxian of all people to call him out on that. They really were a pair.
“What do you think it would take,” he finally asked, “for you to change your mind about that?”
Lan Wangji sighed deeply and leaned against him.
“Don’t know,” he said, then took in a short breath, as though he was about to speak. He said nothing, but he didn’t let the breath go.
“Unless?” Wei Wuxian prompted.
“Unless you could… like with the Burial Mounds… make it a home.”
“Make it a home?”
“Mn.” Lan Wangji shifted back and turned to look at him with that strange, deep, earnest intensity that drunkenness often brought out of him.
“It was ugly and… and damaged. You made it a home. When I visited you there, it was nice. Not beautiful, but not ugly. Nice.”
Wei Wuxian thought in that moment he might cry, actually. He swallowed past the lump in his throat.
“You think I could help you feel the same way about your back?” he asked. He hadn’t noticed taking Lan Zhan’s hands in his, but there they were. Lan Zhan nodded.
“Alright,” Wei Wuxian said. “I want that. Let’s make that happen. Can we start tonight?”
“Yes, Wei Ying.”
“Great.” He leaned forward, and kissed Lan Wangji’s forehead in the center of the slightly paler stripe where his ribbon sat in the daytime. “So. Where can we start?”
“Paint it,” Lan Wangji responded immediately.
Wei Wuxian smiled. “You’ve thought about this before, haven’t you?”
“Mn.”
“You want me to paint a picture of your back?”
“No. Paint it. Paint on it. Make it… make it look like home.”
“Oh. Oh. I see. Alright, of course.” The idea was so… intimate. Erotic, certainly, in a slightly different context. He had no idea what Lan Wangji meant by ‘make it look like a home’, but he was bound and determined to figure it out, and not to squander this opportunity and his husband’s trusting vulnerability.
“So. Shall I get a brush and some paint?”
“Yes, please,” Lan Wangji answered, suddenly a little breathless.
Wei Wuxian kissed him again, softly. He retrieved his paints and his best brush and lit a number of candles. Turning back to the bed, he found Lan Wangji now sitting turned towards the wall with his hair cascading over his shoulder, leaving his back bare. His head was turned so Wei Wuxian saw his face in profile, candle-lit. His gaze was low and soft, but Wei Wuxian knew he could see him in his peripheral vision.
Wei Wuxian felt a flutter in his stomach that felt suspiciously like nerves.
“So,” he said, kneeling behind his husband, “where should I start?”
Lan Wangji glanced back and frowned a little. Not an unhappy frown, but puzzled. An unspoken ‘I don’t know either.’
“When you pictured this in your head, when you were thinking about it before, what did it look like? What kinds of things were you imagining?”
“Trees,” Lan Wangji answered softly. “Flowers.”
“That I can do,” Wei Wuxian replied, smiling.
He took in his canvas. They were deep and mean, those scars. Ragged. But each one proof of Lan Zhan’s love, and his stubbornness, and his deep, unshakable goodness. He started to see it. He dipped his brush in the velvety black ink.
“Alright, ready?” A nod and a held breath.
The first touch of his brush to Lan Zhan’s skin raised goosebumps.
“I’m drawing a cherry tree,” he said, as he traced one of the deeper scars that ran from the bottom of one shoulder blade to behind the other armpit.
“This is a branch, here. The trunk, here. Sorry if this tickles.”
He drew the brush down Lan Zhan’s side, over the back of his hip bone. Lan Zhan shivered lightly under it.
“This is another branch,” he said as he traced another thick silver scar up near the gentle arc of the back of the neck.
“Now the flowers. There are so many of them. In the springtime you can barely see anything else.”
Lan Zhan bowed his head as Wei Wuxian painted dozens of tiny, intricate flowers onto his skin and dotted little shadows to suggest the texture of the bark. The tree now arced up from Lan Zhan’s right hip, its branches reaching to cover his left shoulder in blossoms.
“What about mountains in the background?” Wei Wuxian asked.
“Mountains are good,” answered Lan Zhan’s sweet, deep voice.
“Mm-hmm. They’re just here. The Cloud Recesses, and all the mist and waterfalls.” The mountains incorporated three more scars.
“What else?” Wei Wuxian asked.
“Lotuses, for you,” Lan Wangji answered.
“Of course. Thank you.” He made a lotus pond on the lower left side. One of the scars became a little dock. He could tell from the slight bump under it that that particular blow had broken a rib.
“The lotuses grow very well here,” he murmured. “In most places they flower after the cherry trees, but here they bloom at the same time.”
“Because you’re here,” said Lan Wangji.
“You be quiet, you old softy,” Wei Wuxian admonished him.
“Put our house. Put us, and Sizhui. And Little Apple, and the rabbits.”
“So demanding, Lan Zhan! Haha, alright. You can just see our house in the valley, there. Are you going to be upset if this isn’t geographically accurate?”
“You talk too much. Keep painting.”
“Fine, fine! Here’s Little Apple, eating herself fat. The rabbits are all around; they mostly look like dots from this distance, but here’s their hutch. Here’s--” he had to stop and clear his throat (when had he become so sentimental?)-- “Here's us, weeding the vegetable patch.”
“Make sure you are beautiful,” Lan Wangji interrupted.
“So bossy. How do you mean? What should I look like?”
“Slender and flexible like a willow wand,” Lan Wangji said with his eyes closed. “You smile like sunshine, and your laugh is like birdsong. Put some birds too.”
Wei Wuxian laughed, completely smitten.
“You’re ridiculous, do you know that? I don’t know if I can paint all that, but I’ll add some birds. And up here is Sizhui. He’s flying home to see us.”
“Mn. That’s good.”
“Yeah.” He set his brush down. “I think it’s done. Do you want to see?”
Lan Wangji hesitated, then nodded. Wei Wuxian handed him a mirror, held its twin up behind him. He watched Lan Wangji’s eyes trace the lines of his painting, his face indecipherable.
He looked as well. The scars were still there, still obvious. Not covered, just… incorporated. Part of the landscape, part of the story.
It was a good painting. Harmonious and balanced. Geographically and seasonally inaccurate, of course, but who gave a shit about that? Not Wei Wuxian, certainly, and judging by his face in the mirror, not Lan Wangji either.
Lan Zhan lowered the mirror and turned to face him with his golden eyes gleaming.
“Do you like it?” Wei Wuxian asked. Even though the answer seemed obvious, he still found himself nervous. “Is it what you wanted?”
“It’s good,” Lan Zhan choked out, taking his hand again. “Like home.”