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Before he begins the ritual, the first thing Mo Xuanyu does with the dagger is to cut his hair short. Thick black hair falls to the ground, and he spares only a moment to apologize to the specter of his mother for the disrespect. He had such lovely hair, he knows.
But they say Wei Wuxian died with his hair cut short, so perhaps this will be familiar. Perhaps the Yiling Patriarch will deem his body a suitable home, if he makes it as familiar as possible.
The ends of his hair tickle the back of his neck. He raises the dagger to his arm.
--
Wei Wuxian looks at himself in the copper mirror, and after the hanging-ghost makeup and the different nose and face shape, what catches his eye is the hair. It’s short—so much shorter than any man of the gentry would cut it. Amateurish as well, it’s clear that the previous owner of this body just chopped it short and hoped for the best. Still, it’s not as if Wei Wuxian can throw any stones, since he’d cut his own hair short, just before the Burial Mounds were besieged.
Maybe that’s why this poor man chopped off his hair. In which case, well, Wei Wuxian honestly feels bad for him, because he’d cut his hair in a fit of insane grief. He doesn’t feel insane now, but then again he hadn’t felt insane before, either, just desperate and furious at the world and willing to take everyone who came after him down with him.
Then the cousin and his thug burst into the shack and start kicking and swearing at him, and he thinks he can understand better why someone might turn to the sacrificial ritual and cut their hair. This is ridiculously childish of these two, truly.
He gets up, afterwards, stretches his back out, and blinks as the ends of his hair tickle the back of his neck. It’s a strange sensation, one he wasn’t used to when he died and one he’s still not used to now. “Ugh, I think I liked the longer hair better,” he says with a sigh, then looks around the small, shabby room.
A red hair ribbon lies on a thin blanket. Wei Wuxian picks it up, turns it over and over in his fingers.
It’s not his old ribbon. That has likely long since rotted in the Burial Mounds. Still. Still.
He ties it around his wrist.
Maybe one day he’ll be able to use it. Wouldn’t that be nice.
--
“You wear your hair short, these days,” says Lan Zhan, long afterward, the two of them making their way down a lonely road to Yi City. Wei Wuxian stops twirling his bamboo flute around his fingers for a moment, and looks back at Lan Zhan in surprise. “I had heard you’d cut it…”
“Ah, yeah, someone’s told you about that,” says Wei Wuxian, touching the messy strands of hair. He still hasn’t gotten around to cleaning it up just yet, but then again he’s been kind of busy lately, so it just hasn’t been a high priority. “I did cut it just before the siege, yeah, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what I was thinking then. It’s mostly a blur.”
“Did you cut it after you woke up?” Lan Zhan asks, and Wei Wuxian snorts out a laugh.
“Nope, it was already done for me!” he says. “Mo Xuanyu’d done it himself, but as you can see, it wasn’t really very good.” He sighs. “I guess it helped with being seen as a lunatic, but really, it’s a little extreme. How will anyone see these good looks now if they can’t get past the hair?”
“If you wish,” says Lan Zhan after a moment, “I will clean it up for you. I have some practice.”
“You’re sure?” Wei Wuxian asks, stopping in his tracks for a moment. “I can trim it on my own, I’m actually competent at it when I’m not about to fight for my life.” He’d used to trim away burnt ends and split ends and, on one memorable occasion, a tanghulu skewer that had gotten stuck in some poor baby disciple’s hair. Then he’d trimmed A-Yuan’s hair a touch, mostly just to keep his hair clean and manageable.
“If you do not mind,” says Lan Zhan.
“Not at all!” Wei Wuxian says. “It’s been bothering me for ages but I just haven’t had the time to sit down and clean it up. Mo Xuanyu really wasn’t all that careful with it.” He doesn’t think Mo Xuanyu, or his awful family, were very careful with this poor body. It feels strange, to feel pity for it, for this thing of muscle and bone that he’s been dragged into against his wishes, but here and now he doesn’t mind so much.
“Mn. When we find a good place to sit and rest, I will trim your hair.” Lan Zhan continues on beside him in silence, and it lasts for maybe ten more minutes before his eyes catch on something in the distance, and he nudges Wei Wuxian’s side. “Wei Ying.”
“Yeah-hm?” Wei Wuxian says, mostly thinking now about the slowly-building sense of something off in the air. The closer they get to Yi City the more he can’t help but feel uneasy. Something about the place…it’s cold enough that even here, some distance away still, Wei Wuxian shivers against the cold.
Lan Zhan takes his wrist, and says, “This way. We will sit, and I will cut your hair.”
“Wait, what,” says Wei Wuxian. “I thought we were going to save that for later!”
“We can do it now,” says Lan Zhan. “We have time. No one is expecting us. And anyway, if it bothers you, you do not have to put up with it.”
“Do we even have anything for cutting hair,” says Wei Wuxian. “Don’t pull out Bichen!”
Lan Zhan just hums, and tugs Wei Wuxian along. It’s—wild, really, because back when they were younger Wei Wuxian had never been able to get Lan Zhan to even brush a hand over his shoulder. By those standards, he’s being downright touchy-feely now, and not for the first time, Wei Wuxian wonders what happened to him to get him to relax like this. Certainly he was never like this during the guest lectures! Or the Sunshot Campaign!
Well, Wei Wuxian’s not about to complain, if he’s getting a free hair trim out of this.
Lan Zhan sits him down on a relatively flat rock, and drags a log over to sit down on as he takes out a qiankun pouch full of supplies. “Hold still,” he instructs.
“Sure, sure,” says Wei Wuxian, scooting slightly closer so Lan Zhan can start working. His shoulders slump as Lan Zhan brushes out his hair, gentle with any tangles, smoothing it down as best as he can. “I used to cut hair for the younger disciples, you know? Before they came of age.”
“You?” Lan Zhan asks.
“Yeah, me,” says Wei Wuxian. “First Disciple, after all. Part of the duties was to look after the junior disciples, and I figured, well, why not? I might as well.” He blows a strand of hair out of his face, and says, “I even did Jiang Cheng’s! While Madam Yu was visiting her relatives in Meishan, anyway.” If she’d caught them at it, there would’ve been such hell to pay, and Wei Wuxian hadn’t really felt like paying it over hair. “It was—mostly trial and error, I’ll admit, but I got pretty good at it over the years.”
The scissors start gently snipping away, and Wei Wuxian relaxes.
“If you do not mind,” says Lan Zhan, “I will trim it to just above the shoulders.”
“Don’t mind at all,” says Wei Wuxian, sending a small apology to Mo Xuanyu and his ancestors for this. But he really does need his hair cut. It’s distracting him too much, getting to his pride—his face is generally thick enough to handle most things, but people keep eyeing his hair oddly and he can’t even defend his own hairdressing skills, because everyone else thinks he’s Mo Xuanyu. “Where’d you learn how to cut hair?” he asks.
“Mm.” Lan Zhan pauses for a moment, then: “Trimmed the younger disciples’ hair when I was younger, as well. It was a task I was happy to take on.”
“Really? You?” Wei Wuxian marvels. “I didn’t know! How did it go?”
“It took some time before I was any good at it,” says Lan Zhan, carefully snipping at a particularly tricky bit of hair. “And a great deal of practice. But I have been told that it looked well enough. Ah—you have a mat, here.”
“Ow,” Wei Wuxian hisses, and he feels Lan Zhan’s hand drop from his hair and gently, apologetically squeeze his shoulder. “I’m all right, Lan Zhan, really. Tugged a little hard, but it’s fine.” He huffs out a tired little laugh. “That’ll teach me to not deal with it soon as possible, huh? I know, I should’ve done it while we were at Cloud Recesses, but I was busy pretending to be Mo Xuanyu and the wild hair added to it.”
Lan Zhan’s answering, “Mn,” is full of reproach, and, if Wei Wuxian’s not mistaken, a smug air of I told you so.
“I know, I know, I’m regretting it now,” Wei Wuxian sighs, as the scissors cut that away. “Thanks for this, though. Truly.”
Lan Zhan’s hands still for a moment, and he says, roughly, “No thanks between us.”
Wei Wuxian turns his head just a little, because that tone sounded—weird. A little sad, he thinks, but covered by the veneer of Lan Zhan’s vaunted Lan stoicism. “All right,” he says, a little confused at the insistence. “I am grateful, though. Even if, ah, people are going to make such a fuss about it.”
“Less of one than they did before,” says Lan Zhan, resuming the hair cut, snipping carefully away. Wei Wuxian wishes he had a mirror right about now, just to see Mo Xuanyu’s wild hair tamed to something more manageable. “You say Mo Xuanyu did it before you woke up?”
“Yeah,” says Wei Wuxian. “Probably minutes before he started the ritual, when I think about it. There was dark hair scattered everywhere, like he’d just,” and he mimes, with his hands in front of him, gathering up dark strands of hair and then chopping it ruthlessly off. “And then just chucked it into a corner. That Mo cousin and the servant certainly were surprised to see he’d gone and cut his hair.”
“Mo Ziyuan and A-Tong,” Lan Zhan says. “Lan Sizhui gave me the reports.”
“So he did!” says Wei Wuxian, pleased to have names to put to—well, the blurry faces, really. Things had happened so fast and so chaotically that Mo-furen stands out more in his memory than her awful son ever did, just by dint of Wei Wuxian having known her as a living person for a couple hours more. “What a good boy, that Sizhui. Anyway, yeah, them. They completely ignored the great big array I was lying on, the idiots.”
“They certainly lacked a certain aptitude, yes,” says Lan Zhan, and Wei Wuxian snickers, restraining himself from a full-body cackle because—you know, haircut. And he did promise to hold still, after all. “He must’ve thought to make his body more of a home for you.”
“I had that same thought,” says Wei Wuxian, letting out a sigh. “If that was his intention, though, it’s a little off the mark. I only had short hair for…what, a day or two before I died? Not long enough to get used to it.” Certainly he hadn’t even been thinking straight in those final days, lost in grief and fury and heartbreak, so sure that the whole world loathed him and that he loathed the world right back.
How stupid. How arrogant.
“Wei Ying looks all right,” says Lan Zhan, “whether your hair is short or long.”
“Flatterer,” says Wei Wuxian. “I prefer it long, though. Maybe after all of this I’ll get myself a comb and let it grow back out.” He pauses, then says, “Tell me how you take care of your hair?”
“Mm,” says Lan Zhan, and tells him, his deep voice lulling Wei Wuxian into, if not a true sleep, then a light half-doze. More than he thought he’d get out here, so near Yi City, his senses still soaked in the miasma of resentment. It’s nice.
He should ask Lan Zhan if he’s got any bottles of that special shampoo, Wei Wuxian decides. Later.
--
By the time they seal Jin Guangyao and Nie Mingjue in a coffin together for well over a century, give or take, Wei Wuxian’s hair has grown out to brush past the tops of his shoulders when he turns his head. It’s long enough now for him to put it up in a little bun, and usually he ties it off with his usual red ribbon, but as he’s putting it up after Lan Zhan ravishes him (again!) in their bed, he feels Lan Zhan’s fingers lock around his wrist.
“Lan-er-gege,” he whines, blinking prettily at him. “I’m already so sore! Give your Wei Ying a little time to get us some breakfast, hm?”
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan murmurs, smiling a little as he sits up. “No, I only wanted…” He pauses, then reaches up to take the ribbon from Wei Wuxian’s unresisting fingers.
Wei Wuxian briefly remembers the way his scalp prickled when Lan Zhan tugged on his hair, and feels his face heat. And other places, too.
But instead of tugging on his hair and having his wicked, filthy way with Wei Wuxian’s mouth, Lan Zhan takes his carefully folded forehead ribbon from the desk and uses that to put Wei Wuxian’s hair up into a bun for him. “There,” he says.
Oh. Well. Never mind the hair-tugging, then. “Lan Zhan,” says Wei Wuxian, knowing fully well that he must be as red as a tomato or as his favorite spicy soups at this very moment. How can he not be, when Lan Zhan’s as good as staked his claim on him? His heart. “Your ribbon! How am I going to tidy up my hair now if I can’t touch it?”
“You can,” says Lan Zhan, perfectly calm. “We are betrothed. We have bowed twice. You can touch the ribbon.” He pauses, then adds, “You were not complaining about it last night.”
“You were plundering my poor throat,” says Wei Wuxian, with exaggerated woundedness. “So harsh to me, your poor virginal fiancé.”
Lan Zhan snorts through his nose, which, in most people, would be equivalent to a full-body cackling fit. “I believe we took care of that somewhere on the road,” he says, and Wei Wuxian leans in close to boop him on the nose with a pointer finger.
“So mean,” Wei Wuxian says, with no real heat, before he kisses Lan Zhan’s cheek. “I’ll see if I can get you some of that vegetable soup you liked in the last inn,” he says. “Thanks for the ribbon. I’ll take good care of it, promise.”
“Mn.” Lan Zhan kisses him deeply, then lets him go.
--
Sometimes, when Lan Zhan is asleep and he’s not feeling too sated to move, Wei Wuxian extracts himself from his husband’s arms, goes to the mirror, and winds his dark, growing hair around his fingers, stares at himself a while. Jiang Cheng would roll his eyes and call it vanity, then drag him off so they could do something else and his mind would be sufficiently distracted from the mirror. Wen Qing would tug on his ear and tell him that if he had time to stare at himself, he had time to come and help her with the harvest, those talismans you’re working on can wait until you’ve had rest.
Lan Zhan, he knows, would simply sit behind him, hold him gently, and wait until Wei Wuxian felt like talking. Even if he never does feel like talking.
It’s not vanity, though. Not really.
His hair was darker. Black like a raven’s wings. It’d made him look like his mother when he let his hair down. He’d gotten his eyes from his father, though. He used to sit in front of a mirror when he was young, and try to piece together their faces from what Jiang Fengmian had told him over the years, and from his own face.
All that’s gone now, though. The hair had gone first, the raven-dark hair just like his mother’s. He had felt nothing at the time, too consumed by resentment to feel much else, if at all.
Here and now, he lets out a breath. “Sorry, A-Niang,” he says, softly. “Sorry, A-Die. You gave me that body and I just…let go of it, instead. Apologies to A-Niang, especially, for the hair—that was a gift from you. I…I don’t have it now, anymore, but I’m here again, so I’ll take care of what I do have now.” He shifts around, hisses a little as the fabric of his clothes brushes over some bruises from the ropes, and adds, “Well, me and Lan Zhan are doing our best.”
He tugs on his hair, experimentally. Mo Xuanyu’s hair has a spring to it, a little natural curl that Wei Wuxian theorizes might have been from the second lady Mo. It’s lighter in color, which is, ugh, an inheritance from Jin Guangshan, he’s certain. In this body, without opening his mouth and hearing his own cadence coming out of it, he looks vaguely similar to Jin Guangyao. Just a little taller, perhaps.
“Mo Xuanyu,” he says. “You see? I’m taking care of your hair. It’s nice—thank you for it, and the body. Even if,” he adds, severe as a disappointed teacher, “you shouldn’t have cut it short like that, now I have to grow it out!”
There’s no response. He doesn’t really expect one. He knows well the price of the summoning ritual. He can only hope that one day the pieces of Mo Xuanyu’s soul can pull themselves together again.
“If you ever recover enough to see your mother,” he says, “tell her, thank you, too. And apologize, this is such nice hair! You didn’t need to cut it like that.” He tugs his fingers through his hair, humming delightedly at the silky texture. “Ah, but look at me, talking to ghosts who can’t hear me now while staring at my reflection. Don’t mind me. I’m just…happy to be here.”
To his surprise, he realizes: that’s true. He’s happy to be here.
There’s a possibility that perhaps he’s never been happier in his life.
--
“You’re growing your hair out,” says Lan Xichen, when Wei Wuxian’s allowed to visit him in seclusion. It had been touch and go for a minute, with only Lan Zhan allowed to come to the cave where Zewu-jun had shut himself up, but now members of the main family can swing by once a week. Wei Wuxian’s a member of the main family now by dint of marrying in, so he sends off a talisman announcing his imminent arrival before he saunters in.
He figures a dramatic entrance might not play well with Lan Xichen’s fragile psyche right now.
“Yeah, I’ve been at it for a year and a half now,” he says. “There was a time I’d almost gotten it long enough to reach the small of my back, but then some of it got burned during a night hunt so I had to get it cut back again.” He sniffles exaggeratedly. “It was such a tragedy.”
“You should be more careful with yourself, Wei-gongzi,” Lan Xichen says, faintly scolding, but his eyes are—not focused on Wei Wuxian. Instead they’re on the tea, on the bitter medicinal soup, anywhere but directly at him.
If this were anyone else, like one of the elders, Wei Wuxian would be annoyed about the disrespect to Lan Zhan, who they know gets more and more pissed off when people mistreat his beloved husband. But this is Lan Xichen, and Wei Wuxian knows exactly why he can’t look.
Because right now his hair’s the same length Jin Guangyao’s had been, and Mo Xuanyu had been another of Jin Guangshan’s bastards. Of course they look similar. Of course Lan Xichen doesn’t want to look at him.
He props an elbow up on the simple table. Usually he likes to chatter away during mealtimes, content to fill the silence while Lan Zhan fills his stomach, but Wei Wuxian knows how to be quiet when he needs to be. So he leans into Lan Xichen’s field of vision, and watches him flinch, hears the sharp intake of breath.
“You know, you can look,” he says. “You should look, because Lan Zhan put my hair in a braid and it’s a crying shame you’re not even looking at it.” He pauses. “They aren’t Nie braids,” he adds, quietly.
Lan Xichen looks at him, and says, “Oh—so you’re right. Da-ge disliked putting flowers in his braids. He thought they were a distraction.” He relaxes a touch, which, hah, mission accomplished. “I—am really quite sorry, Wei-gongzi. It’s only…” He falters.
“I know who I look like,” Wei Wuxian says with a shrug. “So I get it, really. And.” He sighs. “Look. I’m the last person to judge, all right? About mourning someone you shouldn’t. I’ve been on both sides, I know how much either hurts.”
“You do?” Lan Xichen asks.
“Yeah,” says Wei Wuxian. “It’s…Zewu-jun, you still loved him. You get to miss him and what you had.”
“What we had,” Lan Xichen echoes, before he lets out a tired, mirthless chuckle. He looks so pale, so thin. So sad. “I do not know if what we had was even real. Is it possible to mourn a dream?”
“Yeah,” says Wei Wuxian. “Who told you it wasn’t? That’s ridiculous.” He sighs, hands absently going to his braid, draped over his shoulder, and tugging lightly. “To you it was real. You get to mourn, and to do it for—as long a time as you need. It’s your choice.”
“Some might say,” Lan Xichen points out, lifting a teacup to his lips, “that it is unbecoming of a sect leader, to seclude himself from worldly affairs for so long.”
“Some people can gargle wet shit for all I care,” Wei Wuxian says. He thinks he knows who said that and he’s going to give Lan Duyao a good long yell over it. “Your brother and your uncle are running the sect fine. I saw you at the last banquet, don’t think I didn’t notice you made more mistakes than you did fifteen years ago. Right now it would hinder both you and the sect more than it would help, if you came out of seclusion now.”
“Is it not a duty of mine to do what I can to help them?” Lan Xichen asks.
“Are you ready to?” Wei Wuxian counters.
The silence that falls over them, and the way Lan Xichen averts his eyes from him, says everything Wei Wuxian needs to know.
“You are the only one who gets to decide the manner and the length of your mourning,” says Wei Wuxian. “You are the only person you need to consider. If anyone else tries to tell you otherwise, tell them, my choice.” He pauses, then adds, “And if they try to cite the rules, send for me or Jingyi, we know the rules back to front after all that time we spent copying out the lines. We’ll argue them into giving up.”
Lan Xichen laughs, then, and this time it sounds more real. He cuts himself off, shock flashing in his eyes, as if he’d forgotten what his own laughter had sounded like.
“It’s not a betrayal of mourning them to laugh and take joy in something,” says Wei Wuxian. “Believe me, I’d know. In fact I think he’d probably be glad, to hear you were on the way to being all right.”
“He…would be, yes,” says Lan Xichen.
“See, I’m right,” says Wei Wuxian, smug. “I always am.” He picks up his own tea and takes a sip, then scrunches up his face. “Ugh, I like Lan Zhan’s better,” he grumbles. “No offense, Zewu-jun, but the tea from Henan he likes to get is way better.”
“All the way from Henan?” Lan Xichen asks.
“He has a whole box full of it,” Wei Wuxian says. “Whenever he starts to run low I make a trip out there just so I can buy it for him, because he gets so sad and tragic that I just can’t stand it. Like he’s about to mourn the loss of this specific brand of tea.”
“Our mother,” says Lan Xichen, nostalgic and sad, “came from Henan. That was the tea she would serve for us, when we were visiting her.”
Ah. Wei Wuxian drums his fingers on the table, and says, “I’ll talk Lan Zhan into bringing you some of it, next time he drops by. You ought to mourn her together.”
“It has been a long time,” Lan Xichen starts.
“Grief doesn’t really go away,” says Wei Wuxian. “You just learn how to treat it like a guest. That’s all.” And he’d know. God, how well he knows it, these days.
--
He ties up his hair into two braided buns a few times, after visiting Lan Xichen that first time. “Like my shijie used to wear,” he explains to Lan Zhan later, and adds, “Jin Guangyao never wore his hair that way. I’m already something of a walking reminder just because he’s Mo Xuanyu’s half-brother and the resemblance is undeniable.”
“You do not resemble him that much,” Lan Zhan points out, pinning Wei Wuxian’s hair up into the buns. It’s long enough now that he has excess hair to braid around them.
Lan Zhan’s biased, of course, and also doesn’t tend to pay attention to faces overly much. Wei Wuxian’s noticed he goes by sound, scent, and clothes most of the time, and Wei Wuxian never actually wears any gold, so of course Lan Zhan would never even think of him in relation to Jin Guangyao. Now that he thinks about it, Mo Xuanyu didn’t have anything in Jin gold in his closet, did he?
Anyway: “I mean, I do, because Mo Xuanyu.” He waves a hand at his face. “It isn’t identical, but we have the same profile. He and Mo Xuanyu got the nose from Jin Guangshan, but the hair…” He runs a hand through what’s left loose. “The curl is Mo.”
“The smile is Wei Ying,” says Lan Zhan.
Wei Wuxian makes a noise like air escaping from a teakettle. “Lan Zhan! I’m weak to compliments, how dare you!”
Lan Zhan’s lips do not move an inch, but he still somehow wears a smug little smile as he leans down to press a kiss to the very top of Wei Wuxian’s head. The asshole. At this moment, Wei Wuxian feels so full of love, so overwhelmed with affection, that he has to twist around and meet Lan Zhan’s lips with his.
And things kind of devolve from there, after that.