Work Text:
“You were born in your other form, A-Zhan,” Lan Wangji recalls his mother saying. In the memory, she had him balanced in her lap, combing his hair with her fingers. Her tone was light even though her words dropped around him like stones. “It quite startled me, though not as badly as it might have had I not already given birth to A-Huan. He was born human, you see, but he changed the first time I held him. So from the start, I realized there was very little of me in you children; you’re all your father’s.”
She wore Qingheng-jun’s pearl around her neck, as big as Lan Zhan’s small fist; he stared up at it. Tints of gold shimmered in its surface, the same gold as Lan Zhan’s father’s eyes, his father’s qi. But despite the warm colors it still appeared cold to him, fastened around her neck with a chain. He touched his own smaller, paler pearl that rested in the hollow of his throat.
“I knew,” she said, and ran her thumbs under Lan Zhan’s watchful eyes. “I knew just who you were going to be.”
* * *
Lan Wangji always watches Jiang Wanyin with rapt attention. So he sees the moment of startled joy when Wanyin opens the small silver-inlaid box and realizes what it contains, the warmth that brightens his eyes. He sees when that brightness dims.
Jiang Wanyin closes the box and holds it back out to him. “Wangji,” he says, “I can’t take this from you.”
Lan Wangji stills. The world is abruptly very loud. The distant voices of Yunmeng Jiang’s disciples calling to each other, the burble of the sun-warmed river that rolls past, the quiet fluttering of the private pavilion’s curtains around himself and Jiang Wanyin—all seem to pulse in his ears. He does not take the box back, even when Jiang Wanyin’s jaw tightens and he waggles it slightly at him, arm still outstretched.
Eventually, Lan Wangji opens his mouth. His tongue feels heavy as he speaks. “Jiang Wanyin has never seemed frightened of my other form.”
“Yeah? That’s not the issue. What, you think I’m scared of you?”
In truth—no. Wanyin does not scare easily. Jiang Wanyin faced down countless Wen soldiers during Sunshot, has dragged his once-gutted sect up from the ashes without flinching, has reached out to run his hands over the long, snow-rimed lines of Lan Wangji’s other body, nothing in his face but wonder. (And at other, less romantic times, has hauled the long snow-rimed lines of Lan Wangji’s body around like a sack.) “No,” Lan Wangji confirms. “But then… why…?”
Jiang Wanyin’s jaw clenches even tighter. He looks down at the small box with a taut, complicated expression. In all his years of watching Jiang Wanyin, Lan Wangji has only seen this look once before.
“This would bind you to me,” says Wanyin, “if I take it.”
Lan Wangji nods, cautious. A further bond seems a strange concern when he has already given Jiang Wanyin his ribbon and shares his bed, but, well.
“It would give me power over you,” Jiang Wanyin continues. “I could keep you from ever taking your other form again. Or use it to steal your immortality from you. I could sell this, or blackmail the Lan clan by threatening to reveal their secret lineage, or—or not even do anything actively malicious, just prove a bad match for you.”
A bad match? “I have lived in Lotus Pier for years,” Lan Wangji reminds him. The confusion, the shock roiling in his chest have started to ice over into hurt. “We are married. I have never—”
“That doesn’t matter,” Wanyin snaps, then, seeing Lan Wangji’s face, amends, “or it does matter, but it’s not relevant to what I’m talking about. Why would you be so careless with this part of yourself, Wangji! You can’t just give someone the means to harm you.”
Lan Wangji pushes down his frustration. He watches Jiang Wanyin’s face, and listens to the chords of concern and care that run beneath his words. “We are the same, though,” he says.
“We’re pretty obviously not.” Jiang Wanyin gestures with the gift. Fair enough; full humans do not make such things.
But. “We are,” Wangji insists. “It is no different. I could hurt Wanyin,” he continues, watching carefully, but Jiang Wanyin’s shoulders do not tense any further. “As humans, we are matched in strength, or close to it—”
The corner of Jiang Wanyin’s lips twitches as he recognizes the old teasing. “Excuse you, Hanguang-jun, you want to take this to the training grounds? I’ll kick your ass. I’ll kick your tail.”
“—close to evenly matched—but in my other form I am more powerful than any human. I could devour you. Crush your bones. Freeze your blood, tear you apart with my claws, call down a blizzard to encase Lotus Pier in ice—” Keep him, bind him, weigh him down—Lan Wangji stops. He wants to discuss his point, but he hates even imagining harming Jiang Wanyin.
Or at least, he hates it now.
When their betrothal was first arranged, many years ago while he recovered from the discipline whip, Lan Wangji had been furious to learn who the elders had promised him to. He hated Yunmeng, which had closed its doors to Wei Ying and let him die. He hated its interminable summers and too-mild winters—yes, it had enough water to sustain a Lan’s true form, but the Lan were creatures of vapor and ice, not stagnant lakes and wide, sluggish rivers; Lan Wangji would surely weaken if deprived of the mists that collected in the mountains, of Gusu’s swift half-frozen streams, of the quiet chime of snowfall.
And, most of all, he hated Yunmeng Jiang’s master.
He despised Jiang Wanyin—loathed him—swore he would never allow such a contemptible man to touch or even see him in his other form. Jiang Wanyin would never know what Lan Wangji truly was, but he knew Jiang Wanyin’s truest self: He was jealous and uncaring and cruel. Whatever camaraderie Lan Wangji had imagined they found together while searching for Wei Ying during the war had been a delusion, a mistake. A fatal mistake, considering Wei Ying’s subsequent death.
Lan Wangji’s half-healed throat throbbed with wrathful words he did not know how to shout. He spent many nights, upon his and Sizhui’s arrival at Lotus Pier, seething in the heat and dreaming of ways he might harm Jiang Wanyin. Even though he never truly intended to do it, the idea was satisfying.
Then came the summer night, roughly six months into the betrothal, upon which Jiang Wanyin had found Lan Wangji half-submerged, all-unconscious, and fully-transformed in Lotus Pier’s deepest, coldest lake. Lan Wangji, broiled by that year’s heat wave, had refused to explain why the weeks of record-breaking heat made him so sick, and eventually collapsed into his other form through sheer exhaustion—and Jiang Wanyin, once he got over the shock of seeing his husband-to-be as a vast, serpentine creature complete with antlers and claws and pale blue, mirror-bright scales, hauled Lan Wangji to an icehouse originally built to preserve ingredients for Jiang Yanli’s cooking.
Lan Wangji woke to find himself curled in the huge ice pit, filling the entire space so his tail protruded from the icehouse door, with his betrothed swearing frantically and dumping buckets of cool water down onto him from above.
Lan Wangji snarled in instinctive fury and fear—to be seen, manhandled, in his other form, by this man—! But when he took stock of himself, he found that the marks of lingering heat where Jiang Wanyin had laid hands on him were minimal, only what he must have needed to carry Lan Wangji here—and what an embarrassing mental image that was, his limp body slung over Jiang Wanyin’s shoulders like a scaly stole, his lower body, back legs and long tail all dragging behind them for a good four or five bu—and that the scar at the hollow of Lan Wangji’s throat, where his pearl had once rested, was at least untouched.
He kept snarling anyway, out of principle.
Jiang Wanyin snarled back. He stood over Lan Wangji, small and human but unafraid. He was soaked from pulling Lan Wangji out of the lake, his heaving shoulders limned by moonlight, his fine robes disheveled and his formerly-neat topknot draggling down the side of his head. It was a little strange to see him so undone.
“You!” he shouted. This was another strange thing: Lan Wangji knew Jiang Wanyin was harsh and angry, and had expected to be constantly bellowed at in Lotus Pier. But for the months Lan Wangji had lived there, Jiang Wanyin was just cool, formal, and excruciatingly polite.
He did not look formal, just then. His eyes flashed and his chest swelled with twinned exertion and outrage. Lan Wangji stared.
“You! Hanguang-jun! Putting aside the—” Jiang Wanyin gestured at Lan Wangji’s coiled body. “The—You know what, I can’t even deal with that right now. More to the point, are you insane? You were burning up! What is wrong with you?!”
Nothing was wrong with Lan Wangji, aside from the heatstroke, the reveal of his family’s deepest secret, and the humiliation of his otherworldly personage being hauled around like luggage. Correctly interpreting Lan Wangji’s responding silence as scorn, Jiang Wanyin went on,
“I assume you didn’t intend to be found half-dead in the mud. But you came here already injured—I’ve seen the lashes on your back—and you’ve done yourself no favors since then, pushing yourself. Who do you think you’re helping, suffering in silence for no reason? Or, what, for pride? For spite? For self-righteousness? Do you think he'd want—Fuck. Lan Wangji, save me some face—you’ve made it clear that you wish this to be a marriage for politics alone, and we may never get along, but I am not the kind of asshole to intentionally destroy my spouse’s health. If you suffer this much from the heat, say so! If you need special accommodations to survive in Lotus Pier, explain what you need! If you hate your situation so much that you’d rather die than remain, then go!”
Lan Wangji jerked at that, lips pulling back from his teeth.
Jiang Wanyin bared his teeth in return, a vicious, bitter smile. “You’re not in chains. Nothing holds you here, save your own stubbornness! Let yourself heal enough to travel, then fly off into the sky or eel away down the rivers. Put us both out of our misery.”
Lan Wangji’s mother, and her closed door—the chained pearl that bound his parents together, the yoke around her neck—
Fury tore through Lan Wangji like a storm. “If you wish me to be able to leave,” he growled between his teeth, his inhuman voice full of seething rivers and shattering ice floes and howling winter wind, “then give me back my pearl!”
“Your what!” Jiang Wanyin roared back, throwing his hands in the air.
Lan Wangji’s jaw snapped shut.
Deep-seeing as he was in his current form, Lan Wangji could see that Jiang Wanyin was not lying; his qi was calm (well, not calm, but not agitated in the specific ways that indicated falsehood). He truly had no idea what Lan Wangji spoke of.
Lan Wangji had woken from the discipline whip with thirty-three wounds across his back and one across his throat, and had assumed—what else would the elders have done with it, if not taken it to force him to go where they wished, to make the unruly Second Young Master Lan into someone else’s problem? Who else could have it if not Jiang Wanyin, gloating over it like any other bauble sent along with the Lans’ betrothal gifts? Lan Wangji could not sense the pearl, had presumed Jiang Wanyin was using spells to hide it from him. Was it not stolen, then, but gone? Had it been destroyed by the resentful energy in the Burial Mounds, with Lan Wangji too focused on Wei Ying to notice? Had it shattered in the whipping? Had it dissolved on its own when the foundations of Lan Wangji’s self cracked, as he turned his sword against his own kin to defend Wei Ying? It was the symbol of Lan Wangji himself, his spiritual journey, his heritage, his soul, all the different sides that formed him.
If neither he nor Jiang Wanyin had the pearl, then why—what did keep Lan Wangji here in Lotus Pier? What kept him himself at all?
Nothing. He said nothing. His pulse beat in his ears.
Jiang Wanyin’s expression slowly shifted. It was fascinating to watch. The furrow of his brow changed from anger to confusion, the taut line of his jaw loosened. His eyes flicked from Lan Wangji’s own, down across his body, with its scales and half-healed scars, then to his throat, where legends said a pearl should rest—and then Jiang Wanyin paled with horror, and he rocked back as if from a physical blow.
“No,” he said, expression taut and complicated, “I would never. I’ll—The Jiang treasury is open to you, you’re free to search through whatever you wish, but I swear I was never given—Lan Wangji. I would never take such a thing from you.”
And despite all the contempt Lan Wangji had for Jiang Wanyin, and his baking-hot sect full of smiling, diligent disciples who he trained himself, and his intractable nephew who liked to make A-Yuan laugh, and the careful way Jiang Wanyin had accepted Lan Wangji’s ribbon from him at their official betrothal ceremony, making sure not to even brush Lan Wangji’s fingertips with his own if Lan Wangji did not so wish—
He believed him.
“But you wouldn’t,” says Wanyin, easing Lan Wangji from his thoughts.
Lan Wangji shakes himself. It has been years, now, since he yearned to harm Jiang Wanyin. He no longer has to fear that, at least. “Mn. I would never wish to hurt you,” he confirms. “And I trust Wanyin. Wanyin would never wish to hurt me.” He considers. “With something other than his voice, anyway.” Jiang Wanyin’s tongue can certainly flay a man, but Lan Wangji can give back as good as he gets. And in fewer words, too. “So it is the same. You could hurt me, but you will not.”
Jiang Wanyin flushes—he always does when Lan Wangji speaks about his regard for him, his esteem. Lan Wangji is not naturally vocal, but the first time he complimented Jiang Wanyin aloud, the resulting bloom of pink in Wanyin’s cheeks instantly became his favorite color in the world. Lan Wangji has since tried to be more open.
Still, Jiang Wanyin doesn’t yield. “I’m not saying—Fine. Being vulnerable to hurt comes with the territory of marriage; I wouldn’t do harm intentionally. But what if—” He swallows, stroking a thumb over the box. “If something went wrong, it’s important to be able to leave. Giving me this would take away your ability to do that.”
“I don’t wish to leave.”
“But you could.”
“This would fix that.”
“It’s not something to be fixed! You trust me; I won’t use that to trap you. I’ve seen what happens.”
Lan Wangji has seen it too, from the other direction. His mother’s silent house, the golden pearl, supposedly giving her power over his father but instead pinning her in place. Jiang Wanyin must know what Lan Wangji is thinking of, but does not bring it up. Taking care with him, even when arguing.
“It isn’t the same. I would not be trapped,” Lan Wangji points out, his own frustration flaring once again. “I would be… kept.” His tongue feels slow, unable to impress the distinction upon Wanyin. Words do not come easily to Wangji in either form. That cannot be blamed on his Lan heritage; that has always been all him, from the moment he was born.
“What, like a pet? I have the frogs already, and the bunnies you smuggled along with you. Not to mention their approximate ten million subsequent bunny offspring,” Jiang Wanyin says drily, but Lan Wangji will not be deterred by his intended’s sharp tongue.
“Kept. Like an oath. Wanyin is familiar with it. You keep Wei Ying’s flute, and maintain it in good repair.”
Jiang Wanyin’s face spasms, and he looks away. Lan Wangji steps toward him. They’ve fought about Wei Ying before, and no doubt will again. But now that he truly knows him, Lan Wangji will never again be so foolish as to think Jiang Wanyin never cared for Wei Ying.
“You keep your sister’s son, and raise him with an attentiveness and devotion that would honor her. You keep my own ward, and give him the same support.” He takes another step and cups his hands around Wanyin’s, still holding the inlaid box. Even while ostensibly rejecting Lan Wangji’s gift, Jiang Wanyin holds the box so carefully. “And you have kept my secret, for all the years you have known it.
“You take such care with everything you love.”
So, why can that not apply to Lan Wangji?
There had been no single, shining moment that made him fall in love with Jiang Wanyin. Even that summer night in the ice pit had not seemed so significant at first. (Well. Not emotionally significant, anyway. It was very significant on a practical level, as once Lan Wangji explained his needs through gritted teeth, Jiang Wanyin had discreet ice pits constructed all over Lotus Pier and reconfigured various architectural features so Lan Wangji’s rooms suddenly received the best cooling crossbreeze possible. His whip-scars at last began to heal.)
Instead, there had only been the slow, rising swell of feeling, like warm tea filling an empty cup. Lan Wangji watched Jiang Wanyin, and watched him, and then came to understand how he showed his care, the small and ceaseless ways in which he looks after those he loves. The keeping of them.
Eventually Lan Wangji had simply raised his head and realized that he wanted that care for himself. As Jiang Wanyin’s spouse, he already had it in some measure, true—but knowing how much he wanted it was revelatory. How much he wanted it to come from love.
So now, Lan Wangji has placed his whole, truest self in Wanyin’s hands, hoping to be held.
“It is not trapping me, to keep me,” he murmurs. “Not if I want it. Choose it. If I give myself, and am given to in turn.”
Jiang Wanyin swallows. His eyes sweep from the box they hold up to meet Lan Wangji’s. “But is it choosing, is it giving? If you cut off every other option for yourself?”
Lan Wangji thinks again of the heavy pearl chained at his mother’s throat. When Qingheng-jun offered it to her, she took it willingly, as far as he knew—or at least more willingly than the other options available to her—but aside from that, she kept nothing Lan in her house, not even gifts from her own children. He cannot blame her. Still, the fear that he was, in this, all Lan, all his father’s, had choked him for years. A burning desire, a gift of one’s whole self, meant to be given freely, instead warping into a demand, a claim—was that not as much Lan Wangji’s heritage as his own scales, his own cutting claws? Once he realized he loved Wanyin, he became paralyzed. Even if he had a pearl to give him, he knew well such a gesture could trap Jiang Wanyin as much as himself.
But Jiang Wanyin broke down Lotus Pier’s walls for him. He built ice pits, and helped him search for the pearl he lost, and kept his secrets. Jiang Wanyin is not afraid of Lan Wangji; his brave Wanyin has only ever been frightened of not being enough for people. How could Lan Wangji not offer his whole self in return, if only to show how deep his feelings are?
This is choosing, it is giving, a gift to himself as much as to Jiang Wanyin. It is the only option Lan Wangji wants.
Lan Wangji breathes across Wanyin’s fingers, letting the condensation of his breath turn to ice, letting his eyes change as they remain locked on Jiang Wanyin’s, watching the colors of the world warp and refract as qi becomes visible to him. His forehead itches beneath his ribbon as his antlers press against his skin, longing to twist upward like snow-covered branches. His nails sharpen. Qi pulses gently from the box, the contents warming in their cupped hands. He watches the flicker of emotion across Wanyin’s face.
“Wanyin assured me that he would never misuse my pearl, years ago,” he says. “You seemed quite certain. I recall the conversation well, as it involved you throwing buckets of water at me as I lay in a hole. What has changed?”
Jiang Wanyin grimaces as he looks away again.
Lan Wangji moves even closer. “Wanyin. What has changed? You were not afraid before.”
Jiang Wanyin mutters a reply.
“Mn?”
“Well, I didn’t want you back then, did I!” Jiang Wanyin barks. His head snaps up, eyes fierce and alight. “The marriage offer was only meant to secure an alliance between our sects, and you made no secret of your feelings—you loathed me, and I despised you in return. You wanted to be gone, so I wanted you gone. What risk was there of tying you down with my feelings? None! But now, you treat A-Ling well, you protect my disciples, you argue with me without making it all my own fault, you hang about making me take breaks from work even when I say I don’t need coddling, you let me coddle you, you smile when we’re together even if it never reaches your mouth, you’re the stubbornest, pettiest man I’ve ever met—Now—” He thumps his forehead against Lan Wangji’s shoulder. His blush has spread so far it shows at the back of his neck. Lan Wangji feels suffused with heat.
He was right. He was right; Jiang Wanyin returns his feelings. He was right; Jiang Wanyin only fears the same things as he did. He was right to offer his gift.
“Now you love me,” he murmurs at last.
“Damn it, you smug snake,” Jiang Wanyin says. “Yes.”
Lan Wangji rocks backward half a step, then forward. He and Jiang Wanyin settle into each other.
“So I can’t accept this gift, you understand? I know it’s precious, I know it took courage to offer it. But when I first opened the box, I thought you’d found the pearl you lost, and was glad for you—and then figured that meant you’d leave. And I felt—it was an ugly reaction, Wangji. It turns out I’m a jealous husband after all. …And then I realized what you were actually giving me. But with the way I first reacted, the way I wanted to stop you and keep you here—I can’t risk it. I can’t hurt you.”
“Mn. Hush.”
“Don’t you shush me! This is serious!”
Nothing holds you here, save your own stubbornness, Jiang Wanyin had said. It’s a good thing that Lan Wangji is so stubborn, and so will not give up. It will do no good, he thinks, to simply assure Jiang Wanyin that Lan Wangji will never wish to leave, that Jiang Wanyin will never hurt him. They have hurt each other, in the past. Frankly, they have hurt each other just in the space of this conversation. They have made themselves vulnerable to that, over the years together. Loving someone hurts.
But years ago, Jiang Wanyin had already explained to him what needed to be done in such cases.
“If you hurt me,” Lan Wangji murmurs into Jiang Wanyin’s hair, “I will say so. I will explain what I need. And then Wanyin must only apologize, and work to make it right. And I will do the same, if I hurt you. It is simple, but hard. But we are practiced at such things. We had to work hard, to love each other; we had to choose each other. So if you keep my gift or not, it changes nothing; I had already chosen to stay with you before this pearl ever began to form.”
Jiang Wanyin jerks back, eyes wide.
Then his whole face, his whole body, relaxes. Just by a hair’s-breadth, but it does.
“Smug snake,” he mutters again. But he is smiling.
Smiling as well, with his eyes if not with his mouth, Lan Wangji presses against Jiang Wanyin, wrapping his arms around him. Jiang Wanyin embraces him in return. Half-transformed as Lan Wangji is, the warmth of Jiang Wanyin’s body is a searing, summer-sweet heat against his own cold skin, a firestorm of golden qi.
“I promise, Wanyin,” Lan Wangji says, “I already chose you.”
Then he takes another step so they plunge backward into the lake. Wanyin squawks. They hit the water with a great splash and much billowing of robes, then sink.
The water wraps, cool and familiar, around them both. Here in his natural element, Lan Wangji’s awareness expands—he feels every eddy in the lake, every shift in the river’s current, every ripple, every bubble, every loving lap of the water along the well-known edges of his home—and then his body follows suit.
He stretches, grows. The constraint of his own flesh thins like morning mist and he expands outward—the rush of his elongating body, the easing itch as his antlers slide from his forehead, the click of his claws, the icy clatter of scales layering themselves over his skin, the stroke of Wanyin’s hands down his long neck, ruffling the Jiang braids woven into his mane. The water turns crisp and cold as autumn, the chill of his body and the warmth of Yunmeng’s waters combining to just the right temperature for both him and Wanyin together.
Lan Wangji winds his long body around and around Jiang Wanyin and then clings close, full of relief: Finally, he is nearly big enough to contain the enormity of his feelings.
He settles his head into Jiang Wanyin’s free hand. Jiang Wanyin grins at him, free and young-looking as he only ever is in the water, bubbles streaming upward from his smiling mouth. He scratches Lan Wangji’s chin and cheeks as if he were a puppy, unafraid of the teeth that are now as long as his hand from wrist to fingertip. Then he kicks, and Lan Wangji obligingly lifts them both up.
Jiang Wanyin, whose lungs could practically rival an immortal’s, doesn’t need to gasp for air when they break the surface; he shakes his head back and forth, his wet hair loose around his face and falling over his shoulders. The grin remains.
“I accept, then,” he says. “It’s a beautiful pearl, Wangji, and I’ll treasure it. Now, change back, will you? Not that the long snout and frosty whiskers and sharp teeth aren’t a good look on you, but they do make my husband much harder to kiss.”
Just to be contrary, Lan Wangji first gives Wanyin’s whole face a forceful lick with his long tongue (“Augh, you beast, that’s freezing!”), then takes Wanyin’s face in his two warm hands to kiss him, and be kissed in return, the pearl-box pressed tight between their chests.
* * *
Lan Wangji had been born with his first pearl already formed—perfectly colorless, smooth to the touch and cold as fresh-fallen snow. Wisdom, spiritual energy, the physical manifestation of Lan Wangji’s heritage. As a child, he would sometimes soothe himself by rubbing it with his fingertips, even though that was considered indecorous. He would roll it between his palms as he knelt outside his mother’s closed door. He would look at his own reflection in it, and watch how it changed—slowly, slowly, almost not at all.
That pearl shattered, or was lost, or was hoarded away by his clan for their own purposes—whether to keep him safe and connected to his family as he married out, or to keep control of him even at a distance, he never knew. Or perhaps it simply no longer reflected his true heart, and so faded away. But regardless, it did not last. Though Lan Wangji searched the Jiang treasury, then the whole of Lotus Pier, then the mountains of Gusu, the edges of the Burial Mounds, his own dreams, he never found it again.
The second pearl, he made himself.
It required many years of work to materialize a new pearl from his spiritual energy. Like a mundane pearl, it formed first from grit and irritation. Then from patience. Then from focused intent, as he meditated on sun-warmed docks by sun-warmed waters, healing and growing, as he lounged in cool, comforting spaces built just for him. Then from love, as he began to dream of the one it was for. The one he wished would keep it, and to keep in return.
When held up to the light, the second pearl turned out to have tints of Lan scale-blue and Yunmeng silver in it, a tinge of gold like watchful eyes, faint blushes of pink and lavender at certain angles. It was slightly misshapen—a smooth ridge here, a few bumps there—but still soothing under his fingertips. It was not at all heavy. He rolled it between his palms, skin humming with its spiritual energy, then held it up again. Its surface reflected the sunlight that warmed Lotus Pier to a golden glow in the morning, and also Lan Wangji’s own determined face, his flushed ears—and, when he looked deeper, it reflected a dragon, golden-eyed and mirror-scaled and a little changed from who he had once been.
It was not a perfect pearl. But he made it himself, here in a place he had come to love, a place in which he had been cared for, a place in which all the sides of himself had been kept and honored like an oath. He knew exactly why, and for whom, this pearl had been made.
“Hanguang-jun,” called a disciple as Lan Wangji emerged from his rooms, “Sect Leader is taking his breakfast at the private pavilion. No doubt he has been waiting for you to join him!”
“Mn,” said Lan Wangji, nodding his thanks. With great care, he tucked the pearl in its small box inside his sleeve.
Then he made his way across the peaceful lakes and wide, rippling rivers—so fast he practically flew, even on human feet—toward the man he’d chosen.