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The mornings in Cloud Recesses were quiet and cold. This early in the day its cliffsides were still draped in mist and frost, and even the senior cultivators hadn’t yet risen. Only Lan Wangji was awake, which suited him fine. It was not the first morning he had woken this early, and hadn’t been in what felt like a very long time.
It started the same as it always did. Wangji rose and dressed himself, ignoring the protestations of the flayed skin on his back. Then he took his seat before his qin, ghosted his fingers over its strings, and found the familiar rhythm of Inquiry before he even had to think.
Before-dawn Cloud Recesses had been perfectly silent until he had started disturbing its peace. Wangji knew he was unlikely to be interrupted, that few would dare to try, but he also knew this was when he was most likely to go unheard. Though he didn’t fear the whip, or the bastinado, or being made to kneel, he did dread the looks others gave him—his brother’s somber, fragile smiles; the crease in his uncle’s brow that Wangji thought must now be permanent; the junior disciples chattering like birds right outside his door in the middle of the day, despite gossip being forbidden.
Wangji didn’t care what they said of him, but the reminders didn’t help. He couldn’t sleep as it was, so he simply decided to fill his nighttime hours with the qin instead. At first he paid little attention to what he played, often settling on mindless scales, unable to bear the thought of playing the only two songs that actually came to mind. But eventually—whether it was the result of weeks of sleepless nights or actually having gathered the courage, he didn’t know—he let his fingers find the melodies that terrified him the most. He wasn’t sure which was worse: the one he’d written that reminded him of everything he couldn’t forget, or the song that might grant him an audience with the one person he wanted to speak with but hoped couldn’t answer.
And now it was simply habit. He would rise early, if he had slept at all. He would dress and groom himself, meditate, wash his wounds, replace his bandages, make tea, and eat enough to appear marginally functional to the others, and so he wouldn’t have to lie to his brother when he asked. Then he would play when nobody could hear.
It wasn’t their pity that bothered him, because nobody pitied him. What did, though, was the reminder of what wasn’t there. What was missing.
The feeling wasn’t new to him. It was an old ache, as deep as his bones, reaching as far back in his memory as his mind allowed. Even in his earliest childhood it had gnawed in his gut like hunger, and only during a few brief moments in his life could he remember that pain subsiding. It had faded in the moments he walked through his mother’s door, and in the rare times his father emerged from his self-imposed isolation. But more than anything, it faded at the sight of Wei Ying’s smile, like the sun breaking through his lifetime of clouds. Wei Ying’s hand tugging on his robes, even when he grumbled and pulled away. Every Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan.
But indulging in those memories, much like the moments themselves, was like staving off starvation with broth—warming him only for a minute before they were gone. His parents had barely been there to begin with. And just like them, Wei Ying, too, had inevitably been taken from him.
Wangji plucked another of Inquiry’s chords, listened to the space between the notes, the distant sound of rousing songbirds, and his own heartbeat as it went unanswered.
He should not have felt this way, he reminded himself. He hadn’t lost everything. He still had his uncle and brother, after all. Gusu had burned, but was still standing. Others had far less.
He plucked another note, which echoed all around his quarters like an unanswered prayer.
Wangji knew all this, and yet none of it made a difference. Not when he had lost the only thing that truly mattered.
And there was only so much loss and loneliness one could take before it took everything from you, before it ate away at you until there was nothing left but a body haunted by ghosts.
Wangji plucked another string of his qin, barely registering that the note had gone flat when he felt a warm, wet drop on the back of his hand.
His hand went still, before it started trembling.
It did not matter if the note was flat. It did not matter how many times, or how perfectly, he played. Nothing in either the heavens or on the earth cared that he regretted so much or so deeply that he felt like his soul would crack. Nothing and nobody cared that Wei Ying was beautiful, intelligent, funny, kind, loving, good… or that now he was gone, when so much ugliness still remained. The world would remember the Yiling Patriarch, slaughterer of three thousand souls and scapegoat for their sins. They wouldn’t remember Wei Ying. Not his laugh, or the way his eyes glowed in the sunlight, or the way he would pout or scratch his nose--or the way he had made Wangji feel, for the first time in his life, that he was not alone.
And now, Wangji realized, even Wei Ying’s spirit was gone. Inquiry was never answered because he was not there to answer him. That he never would be again.
The note he’d plucked went sharp and hollow as his hand shook so hard that it slipped from its place.
Lan Wangji was silent for a long time.
He did not notice his shoulders were shaking until the whip marks started to ache. Then he wished they would rip open all over again, wished that he could tear himself apart and let his wounds swallow him whole. Anything to bury this feeling that burned him from the inside out and filled his heart with ashes, that scalded his eyes until the world swam and he couldn’t see either the qin or the walls watching him, silent witnesses as grief clawed its way from his chest. It felt like his lungs were collapsing, like something inside his ribs was actually breaking, splintering into a thousand tiny shards until he couldn’t breathe and all he could think was that Wei Ying was gone.
Wangji’s hand flew across the qin again before he even knew what he was doing, sour notes ringing out from its strings before their force struck a low table, a bookshelf, and a teapot, and the crash of flying furniture and books and shattered porcelain hammered the silence to pieces. But all he heard was his own wet sob.
“Wei Ying.” He choked on the words. “Wei Ying.”
Like Wei Ying could hear him and might choose to come back, even now. But Wangji’s only companions were the walls of his room, bearing down on him on all sides—and they, like the rest of the world, had nothing to say. The world would turn, the sun would rise, and for everyone else, nothing would change. Except for Wangji, who felt like the gods had stolen the earth beneath him and shattered the sky, ripped a hole straight through his chest, and gleefully snatched away the one thing he couldn’t bear to lose.
Because Wei Ying was gone, and he was never coming back.
He wasn’t even aware of snatching up the teacup beside him and throwing it, hard, in the direction of the already-smashed furniture, or of picking up a second one until it shattered in his hand and blood trickled between his fingers, heavy and red and pleasantly painful. He tossed the pieces aside and scoured for something—anything—else, fumbling half-blind through his stupidly neat belongings to try and find something more fragile than him. But though he tried, neither smashing ink pots nor ripping through texts on law and decorum did much to soothe the gaping wound between his ribs, the hollowness in his chest, or the way grief and misery welled inside every empty part of him, when all he wanted to do was smash himself into pieces instead.
So Wangji snarled and stood, ripping Bichen from her sheath. He saw nothing through the haze of his tears, but that didn’t matter. He slashed until he struck something—more furniture, the floor, his bed, a doorway, he didn’t know and he didn’t care. He wanted the world to crumble and bleed and fall apart, just like he was. He wanted to scream. He would scream at the heavens until everyone living and dead had heard him—and then he realized he was screaming, only still nobody was listening.
Then Bichen caught on a column in his room and Wangji nearly stumbled straight into the blade, stopping himself only a moment before he wished he hadn’t. But that didn’t matter. If he couldn’t destroy himself, then he’d destroy everything else—even if it was just the jingshi, and no one in this world or the next would either notice or care.
But when he tried yanking Bichen free, she didn’t move, and even when he cursed her and everything else in this rotten world she still didn’t budge, not even when he begged her to please, please not ignore him too, so that when Wangji finally fell to his knees he was still gripping his stuck sword, sobbing to the only thing he had left in this world that would hold him and listen.
“I loved him,” he said, over and over. “I loved him. I loved him.”
He loved him, and he hadn’t told him yet.
With the clanging of his sword stopped, his qin left untouched, and the last of Inquiry’s notes long left unanswered, the morning now rang once again with deafening silence.
He would never get to tell him again.