Chapter Text
“Go to Gusu with me.” Lan Wangji fails to fathom why he says it, or with the words that he does. But by the time his mind registers the betrayal that his mouth had muttered, it is with belated but no shortage of shame that he realises that it is what his father had said, if not word for words, surely at the barest demonstrating—going as far as to assign language—to his same odious, selfish, greed-made desires.
And Wei Wuxian, as if his blunder of both mouth and mind had summoned the ghost of Madam Lan herself, follows it, “Gusu? With its thousands of rules? I refuse to go.” Those words that his mother had said as his father offered—no, demanded it. But that, too, is false. A woman, and one who does not belong to a gentry family, would be a fool to refuse the regard of a mighty leader of one. If it is that Wei Wuxian is no woman, and no feeble maiden, that he allows it—his refusal, brimming bitter and blithe. That the other, from the beginning his measure with sword, and now wielding some other formidable form, means he would not be able to bodily drag the boy to Gusu if he so wanted it. Or if that the shame of wanting it at all, of it being a desire born of his own mind—is reason for his sewing shut his mouth. Regardless, the distraught feeling it brings rushes so immense that Lan Wangji barely manages to follow Jiang Wanyin’s grunted, “He should follow anyone but you,” filling the room—all of a sudden seeming too small and dense, stiflingly so—and mingling alongside his older brother’s resumed degrading of Gusu Lan’s rule. And Lan Wangji, as if being met with the ghost of his mother and all that she suffered for being so, finds he is remiss to argue. Yes, what a shameful family, with more shameful men to rule it, and as it would seem, he one no better.
He wishes to say that the desire to bring Wei Wuxian to Gusu was one born from debilitating dread or dire rage, of a meeting with a man assumed dead, and so one he was unsure if he would be able to meet again, no mind the way that he did. Wishes to say that it was one brief and fleeting, there one moment and gone the other. That when he arose beyond the walls of his own home and own rooms and own bed after months of the ardor of battle, that it would, indeed, be gone with the mountain mist during the thawing of the winter months. But, it is Gusu, and so the bitter morning fog stays, as does the wanting for one other to. Why it is that he wants it, is, too, more than his fathoming. If it is to shield from the greed of Lanling or disdain of his family members, or misguidedly—merely, that the sight of the other is one he so misses, as the boy would say, “too good to resist.” Regardless, Lan Wangji does—want it, and it terrifies him how greatly, how more generally, all he seems to do is want and want with regard to the other, how feeble he is to the sheer measure of those desires.
And so all he finds he is able to do is bite down on it, so that it does not grow and fester and infest his being more than is of his means to manage. Shufu senses it, too, the diseased wanting that his brother bore and was also his demise, now mirrored to the boy he raised as if he was his own. Really, it is gratitude that he feels when, for those same reasons, he is handed the Lan rules—assigned to mend and bind those ideals as a guise for reminder—barred from going down the mountain, to remain beyond its borders till told otherwise. Grateful that, for the time being, it is he and not Wei Wuxian suffering that fate.
Months go by that way, Lan Wangji reading, re-reading, and memorializing rules that go against all that the boy he holds most dear is deemed, from his boisterous being to the resentment gnawing at it. Soon forgoing said rules as he drafts guqin melodies as a means of freeing that boy from the bloodied molars of its demanding, so he may resume the way of the sword, and from the eyes of the others, remain the man who defeated the dastardly Wen rather the one going against morality he will be framed if he so resumes down the road he is going. And if he again refuses, Lan Wangji will merely find some other means to fashion from the ghost, what remains of his old Wei Ying. Why wouldn’t he? It is, after all, for the other’s own good, the betterment of both he and the gentry at large.
It is as he sits meditating one mao shi, the readings on resentment stolen from the forbidden libraries to his front, that sudden gusts of wind flutter the gentians from beyond the door frame… But was banishing his mother to reside beyond the walls of a single room—this room—her sole form of amity the blue florals dotting the gardens, too, for her own good? Was it a good that his father did her, and a similar good that he would be doing the other? Or is there a time when death itself is the better, more generous of fates?
It is for those same reasons that he fears the boy will grow worse the longer he is away, fears more that he is better off remaining—away, far from Gusu and the things he himself may do if the other is again to set foot beyond its rigid borders.
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Wei Wuxian has one reason and one reason alone for daydreaming of Gusu when the rebuilding of the sole home he’s had all his life is still at its beginning stages. Really, he didn’t imagine he’d feel so useless when all was said and done, when he, absent of the means for wielding Suibian, no longer felt a familiar if mild battering from his abdomen. And more when to feel anything but grateful is surely foolish. After all, he’s far from dead—or mostly, and the same goes for his siblings; for all that it matters, he made good on his word to Shushu and Madam Yu. So yes, he’s grateful, he is, but to say it all doesn’t bring with it a barbed sting, would also be false. Rebuilding is at full swing; he should be by his brother’s—now Zogzhu’s—side. Rather, he finds his days dallied away swinging round a dizi in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, and worse, on his mind flutters of formal robes and aromas of sandalwood.
For all that he had denied, rather rudely, Lan Wangji’s offers to go Gusu, he finds there is no border he wants more to be. The other had always been a dear friend, and regardless of the strife of the meetings between the two during the many months of battling the Wen battalions, he remains far from foe. If there was a moment Wei Wuxian was of the mind that what the other—what Gusu Lan—wanted, was for he to stand for his wielding of gui dao, forfeiting his freedoms for dissenting the way of the sword—it is long and far gone. No, it was worry that guided Lan Wangji’s demanding, his meddling of matters he had no business. It was, too, a form of worry no one, besides his siblings, had before shown him, one he had seen manifest to the furrow of the other’s brow, the set of his mouth—and Wei Wuxian most definitely had no other reason for staring—that most others would misread as aloof or angered. And if those seemed too ambiguous, there was, also, the widening relief of the boy’s glistening eyes and aghast mouth when finally he’d aroused from days of slumber following the final battle at Búyètiān. He remembers it well for both those reasons and that he had been dressed in red robes, worse—bed robes, as if a blushing bride awaiting her husband. That the blatant worry from Lan Wangji and the resembling of the both to newlyweds brought a flurried feeling to his gut would be embarrassing to admit, but it a rare feeling now that he is missing the fastening of something there, and so battered oddly gratifying—familiar. And why that may be, he will disregard for the time being.
But, more demanding, as an answer to his miserable state, that is what Wei Wuxian deems he will do: go down to Gusu, away from the bustle of the wharfs and the more worried than admonishing eyes of the stall owners he’s been swindling buns from from the age of eight. Away from his brother and the reminders of all that he’s forgone. It’s gone, it does no good dwelling. So he will go, get his mind off of it. And, well, if he also misses that fuddy-duffy Lan Zhan some, that is no one’s business but his own. But, who is he fooling, there seems more one reason for his longing for the Lan abode.