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In the Cloud Recesses, the place Lan Wangji calls home, silence is pervasive. He has been taught for all his life to be careful of his words: to reflect before speaking, and, when he speaks, to make sure that it is the truth.
He has never lied.
Silence is infectious. If he has never lied, it is because he has never been asked.
Lan Xichen asks to see Wangji after the ceremony. It is supposed to be Lan Wangji’s first night in the disciple dormitories, but he has received permission to visit his brother, who at fourteen has moved permanently into the Hanshi. They have less than an hour before curfew, but it is enough.
Lan Wangji pulls the instrument from his sleeve. The motion is unpracticed. He feels unbalanced, constantly attuned to his left.
“Beautiful,” his brother murmurs. The wrappings are loose. The strings are close to the end of their lifespan. Xichen tugs away the white cloth and Lan Wangji’s breath catches. Wangji looks wrong on his brother’s table. It looks wrong in the amber light of his brother’s lanterns.
“Xiongzhang,” he says quietly. His throat is tight around the word, but he must ask. “Have you ever seen him?”
Xichen’s hands still on the dark, gleaming wood. His eyes are lowered, lashes brushing across his cheeks. Lan Wangji is glad — sometimes, when his brother looks at him, he cannot breathe.
“Father?” He asks, trying to keep his voice light. But it catches; his voice cracks, like it sometimes does, young-sounding. He clears his throat. “I… Yes. I have.”
For a moment, fear is sick in Lan Wangji’s stomach. He stares at his brother, whose face has done something strange. His mouth is pursed, and he stares at Wangji on the table like — like he hates it.
“... Xiongzhang?” Lan Wangji asks. He breathes through his chest, which is more difficult than usual. He focuses more on it, on the flow of energy through his body. He is a cultivator, he is a Lan: self-control is a rule, not a suggestion.
Finally, Xichen speaks.
“It was just once. Uncle took me to him several years ago, after my naming. We met in the library pavilion.”
Lan Wangji blinks. His brother reaches out and gently, carefully strokes down Wangji’s thickest string. The friction makes a low, hard noise. It floats aimless in the air between them, then dies.
“He hardly spoke. And I didn’t know what to say.”
Lan Wangji’s mouth hurts.
His brother does not seem to know what to say now. Lan Wangji hardly remembers his naming ceremony; it was in that first month of tight, hot grief. He shies back from the thought of it. How young he had been, then.
He looks down at how much bigger his brother’s hands are on the table next to Wangji. The shape of them, suddenly, is too familiar.
If Xichen asked, he would answer, he thinks. Almost desperate. He would. Lying is prohibited. He would say —
He tries to imagine it. Yes, he would answer. I have, and he —
He feels sick. He has not been ill since he formed his core, but nausea has persisted. It is now a familiar enemy, one he refuses to indulge. He sips carefully at the tea he poured for the two of them.
“Would you…like to see him?” Lan Xichen asks him, and the twist in Lan Wangji’s stomach is either disappointment or sick relief.
How long should he think? How long would be proper? His brother does not look as if he wants the answer to be yes; he looks almost like a child again. Lost. His lips are pinned up into an effortful smile.
“No,” he answers. He cannot imagine it. Sitting somewhere — defiling the library pavilion — never being able to relax with his books and notes again, always afraid of footsteps at his back. It is bad enough that he knows, now, that his father had ventured there from seclusion. Even once.
His brother relaxes. His smile looks less pained; he tears his eyes away from the guqin on the table, and looks at him instead. It’s an appraising look, not a searching one, but he feels pinned by it anyway.
What does his brother see when he looks? Not knowing the answer feels heavy. A hand on the back of his neck.
“Lan Wangji,” his brother says. Thoughtful. “It suits you.”
It must. It is all he ever will be.
Lan Wangji lowers his head and accepts it.
Now that he is a junior, the days pass in a blur. Instead of solitary or paired lessons, of seniors and elders carving out time from his carefully-protected childhood, there is an endless list of responsibilities he must constantly be attuned to. Lectures and practices with his cohort, among whom he is the youngest and, yet, the most studied. Maintaining his current independent studies in the healing halls and the archives. Meetings with his brother and uncle and the clan elders, for he is as close to an heir as they will have once Xichen, inevitably, lifts the mantle from their father.
And, atop all of it, he practices with Wangji.
Uncle sits with him the first time he restrings it. His face is tight, wrinkles creasing his brow. He does not touch the guqin, for which Lan Wangji is grateful. He himself often cannot tell if touching it thrills or repulses him.
“Good,” Uncle finally says, once each string has been perfectly tuned. The ebony wood is pristine, small scuffs from years of neglect buffed and polished away under Lan Wangji’s scrutinizing eye. He has started channeling spiritual power through it under his uncle’s careful instruction.
He nods his head. Plays, slowly, a perfect scale progression.
At his side, far enough that he could reach out and touch, Uncle sighs. And, despite the control of his body that he has worked so hard to master, Lan Wangji shivers. A crawl down the back of his head and down his spine. The movement transmits itself to the strings.
He blinks. The room is full of warm spring sunlight, but his lungs constrict as if with biting winter cold.
This is Uncle, he reminds himself. Hot with fury. He is not afraid of Uncle. He is not afraid.
“I apologize,” Uncle says. His voice is low, perfectly controlled. “The fault was not in you. I was merely… remembering.”
“Remembering?”
It is an impertinent question, perhaps, but Uncle is more permissive with him than anyone may expect. His standards are high, but only because Lan Wangji thrives under the weight of his expectation. And both of them know that their time together, like this, is a finite indulgence. Already they meet less, and for less time.
“My mother played this instrument,” Uncle says, and Lan Wangji’s throat closes on his next breath. “It was gifted to her by one of the elders, a master craftsman, when she married. Both your father and I grew up with it.”
It is the most he has ever heard his uncle speak about his childhood. It is the first time he has looked down at Wangji and considered where it came from. For years it has been nothing but an extension of that small, quiet house; a looming threat in the back of his mind.
He waits, and is rewarded with another sigh. Uncle is not prone to nostalgia; he is practical, and disciplined, and Lan Wangji loves that he can rely on the steadiness of him. But that steadiness has been shaken, somehow, by the instrument on the table.
“I wondered if it would waste away with him,” he continues. He still does not reach out to touch it, like Brother had, but his gaze does not waver.
It was not wasting, Lan Wangji could say. He can almost taste the words. He thinks of them, tries to strip away the sick power they have over him. I have been playing it for years.
But the memories stick the words in his throat. Years. He would have to tell Uncle — lying is forbidden.
Why did you go back, Uncle would ask. Horrified? Disgusted? And Lan Wangji would have to answer.
What would he say? He names the emotion that rises, to strip it of its power: blind panic. He is familiar with it.
They sit together in silence, locked in memory.
He tells himself, over the years, that he should not expect to be asked. He is doing well in his studies. He is an upstanding junior disciple. If he does not make friends, it is not unexpected; he is nearly two years younger than the youngest member of his junior cohort, and the distance between them is uncomfortable.
No one is discourteous to him, even in the relative privacy of the dormitory. He is Second Young Master Lan to most of them, including his roommate, and Lan Wangji to the lead disciple and his seniors. His silence is easy, and expected. It creates an empty space around him that no one ever tries to breach.
It keeps him safe. It keeps him alone. No one thinks to ask why, because he has always been alone in most of the ways that matter.
“Nie Mingjue’s brother is coming to the guest lectures this year,” his brother tells him when he is thirteen. Lan Wangji does not deign this with a response, despite the hope clearly coloring the statement.
Nie Huaisang and his cohort of visiting disciples are uninteresting. Lan Wangji’s cohort spends the year with them, and their attitude to him informs the guest disciples. Everyone is deeply polite. Nie Huaisang quavers his way through asking Lan Wangji for a study guide, which Lan Wangji provides him a day later, and he still fails several of Uncle’s benchmark exams. He does not finish out the year, and Lan Xichen’s hopes for a friendship vanish with him.
The next year, Nie Huaisang returns, but Lan Wangji has completed his uncle’s course of study for guest disciples. He spends the year night hunting with his cohort, perfecting his guqin language beyond even Uncle’s reproach, and beginning composition lessons with a senior instructor.
That is the year he is summoned, alone, to the hall of healing.
“This is not to single you out,” Lan-daifu tells him, her voice entirely matter-of-fact. This building is one of the few not gender segregated, located as it is at the three-fold intersection of the men’s grounds, the women’s grounds, and the path leading to the community of elders and families between the sect compound and Gusu proper. Lan Wangji used to have to skirt around it at night, one of the only buildings in the Cloud Recesses with lights on past curfew.
It is not a place to be afraid of. He has studied musical healing here, with Lan-daifu and her subordinates. He has been honored with requests to play for injured or unwell disciples, and for their families. Lan-daifu once asked him if he would consider a formal apprenticeship, but he knew well by then his own failings. His own reluctance to reach out and touch, even to make a diagnosis.
“I do not understand,” he tells her stiffly. “I have no interest in these matters.”
“Be that as it may,” she says, “I spoke with the rest of your junior class last year. It is non-negotiable, Lan Wangji.”
He blinks at her. His chest is tight again, his stomach pitted. He has not felt like this in a long time — not in years, really. He is a man now, he has control over his body and its responses that rivals the elders’.
For a moment, the humiliation of it overpowers his fear. He cannot betray himself like this. He plays Wangji without flinching, as he always has. He sets it on its table every night and cleans it, tunes it, familiarizes himself with each and every facet of it.
What he knows so intimately cannot hurt him. He has made sure of it. He has grown accustomed to not being questioned.
The old fear is powerful, though. If he does not think of it — he never does — it is easy to ignore. He does not know what he is afraid of, beyond the instinctive flinch. A hand passed too close to a flame.
What would he say, if she asked? What would she ask him in return?
Why did you wait so long, he imagines her demanding. Lan-daifu is speaking to him, words he does not care to hear. No questions. Instructions, guidance, advice. It is normal, she tells him. There are precepts that can be applied to any situation that arises.
Why has he waited? It has been years now. Almost as many years as it had lasted. Four years of silence and discipline and an unbreachable layer of space around him.
No one has asked. Why would they? How could they know to?
“Your self-discipline is not in question,” Lan-daifu tells him gently. She must see something on his face, and he acts quickly to smooth it out. “You have only reached an age where you may start taking an interest in your peers, especially the female disciples you night hunt with. It is my duty, in turn, to make sure you understand that with this interest comes responsibility. You are an heir of the clan. These things have an impact.”
He has many responsibilities. To his sect, to his peers, to his family. He is only a second son, without his brother or uncle’s burdens of leadership. He is not sect leader.
“I understand,” he says. He is glad they are sitting together over tea, so that he can keep his hands folded carefully in his lap. He practices breathing, slow and deep. He traces the flow of energy through his meridians, and struggles to ease the knot of tension in his stomach. It is not a physical hurt; it lives deeper than that.
“Er-gongzi,” Lan-daifu says gently. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
He looks at her. He sees that she believes it.
She lets him leave without asking a single question.
After the mid-autumn festival, he is made Head of Discipline. His uncle confers the title upon him in a small ceremony, in the presence of sect elders and a handful of senior disciples, and makes a point to announce that he is the youngest member of the sect to hold that title. That his virtue and discipline are unimpeachable.
“I have informed your father,” Uncle tells him after, privately, as they take tea before their guqin session. Lan Wangji goes very still.
He does not know what to say. He does not know what Uncle wants him to say, or what will make Uncle stop speaking. He has spent much time, these last few months, probing into the fear that rises every time his body betrays him, and he still cannot quell it when it does. The pain is a steady, constant ache, like the throb of a missing tooth. A vacancy inside of him. A sensation in his mouth.
“Did he say anything?” Lan Wangji finally asks. An appropriate question, he thinks. From his brother, he knows that their father speaks rarely, though Uncle speaks to him of sect business, of family developments, of the world outside the mountain.
Uncle’s mouth purses. He strokes down his beard, a developing habit of frustration Lan Wangji has observed in him over the last years.
“He should be proud of you.” Uncle’s voice is harsh. He has been growing more so. He is sect leader in all but name, and Xichen is yet caught in between adulthood and adolescence. At the same time as he must lead, Uncle must teach. “You have earned it, Wangji.”
It is the last thing he wants. Lan Wangji flips it in his own mind: Uncle is proud of him. Uncle believes in his decency, in his discipline, in his virtue.
He cannot lie. He knows this about himself. If he tries, the few words he can ever manage to reach shrivel up inside of him, leaving silence in the absence of truth.
For some people, the absence of words compels speech. For Lan Wangji, at least, silence is a relief from it.
He is grateful now, intentionally, that his uncle knows him. That he knows his uncle in turn; that this silence allows Uncle to gather himself. Let go of all resentment, he must be telling himself. The frown eases from his face.
“Wangji is grateful for xiansheng’s regard,” he says, his voice low. That gets an actual smile, severe as it is.
“Pah,” Uncle scoffs. “I have nothing to teach you. Go on, show me.”
The tea is abandoned. Lan Wangji plays an old song, composed by Lan Yi’s son after the death of his daughter. There is no spiritual power to be laced through the notes; it is only a song. His hands fit the strings, now. The instrument fits him.
Night patrol is necessary. Lan Wangji acknowledges it. It is a mark of adulthood to be granted the responsibility; his coterie of disciples has been advanced to full courses of individual duties. Many of their promising scholars and artists have found mentors among the senior disciples and elders; others have turned to paths of instruction or night hunting. Around the administrative duties of the Head of Discipline, Lan Wangji had intended to spend this year immersed largely in independent study, and in furthering his few, faltering compositions.
But Lan Wangji has been instructed by his brother to, once again, attend the guest lectures.
Yunmeng Jiang’s heir is attending, as is Lanling Jin’s, his brother told him in that same, hopeful wheedle as last time. Nie Huaisang as well, of course. Wangji, please. You spend so much time alone.
For that, he had given Xichen a scathing glare, and requested permission to seclude himself before the beginning of the lectures, to calm his mind in preparation.
It is not entirely a contrivance. Calm is elusive; the first time he was scheduled for night patrol, he spent the following morning in a still haze of fear. He could not sink into meditation. He sat at Wangji’s table in the Jingshi and did not play a single note. That evening, when his head had cleared and shame gnawed in his stomach stronger than the fear, he sent word to his brother that he could not meet, and he forced himself through his scales, and he knelt at his mother’s tablet until curfew. Punishment. Discipline.
Subsequent patrols had hardly been easier. He does not like the mountain after dark. After he emerges from a week of unrestful meditation, he walks it anyway.
For the most part, he can almost convince himself that it is a peaceful task. He observes foxes slinking through the woods, hones his hearing against the near-silent rush of owls’ wings. But he cannot immerse himself in moving meditation; he cannot stop himself from turning at each sound.
There is never someone there. There is never anyone there.
Until, all of a sudden, there is.
Wangji-xiong.
There is a boy on the wall and Lan Wangji thinks he hates him.
Wangji.
There is a boy at the guest lectures and Lan Wangji cannot stand him.
Lan Wangji.
There is a boy in the library and Lan Wangji will not look at him.
“Lan Zhan!”
Lan Wangji looks. Against every instinct he has, he looks at Wei Wuxian, who beams back at him, delighted to have earned a reaction.
He is slouched, his feet up, entirely improper. He wears the guest disciple robes with a lax carelessness that must be intentional.
No one calls him Lan Zhan. He is not even sure where Wei Wuxian learned to. Ever since his naming he has been Wangji to his sect, to his uncle, to his brother. They were so proud of that name. Proof that his father could look beyond the four walls of his own seclusion.
“Sit properly,” he demands. Wei Wuxian laughs, and puts his feet down, and does not sit properly despite it.
Wei Wuxian talks like silence will kill him. He needles Lan Wangji endlessly. He sees with a terrifying, clear-eyed accuracy that Lan Wangji is almost afraid of.
He looks at Wei Wuxian, and Wei Wuxian looks back at him.
“Copy the precepts an additional time,” Lan Wangji instructs him. It does not have the desired effect.
That night, he dreams about darkness. About sly eyes and long limbs and a laughing mouth. He wakes well before dawn, and he listens to birdsong as the mountain comes awake around him, and he hates himself so powerfully he feels that he might crumble into ash.
Where is virtue, in this? Where is discipline?
Lan Zhan! Wei Wuxian calls out to him, just a few hours later. He jumps up and down, waves his arms. It is the loudest anyone has perhaps ever spoken in the Cloud Recesses.
He looks. He comes to learn, slowly and painfully, that he is unable to stop himself.
Every fortnight, esteemed elder Lan Ruoxi holds a composition seminar, attended by a set of hand-selected disciples. As he nears sixteen, she has judged Lan Wangji an acceptable addition; it becomes a refuge, of sorts, from the turmoil of the world. From his brother’s appraising glances, from his Uncle’s exhausted temper, from the empty chatter of a guest lecture cohort that no longer includes Wei Wuxian.
In the seminar, for the first time in years, he feels like a child. He is the youngest disciple in attendance by nearly a decade — the closest attendant in age to him is also one of his closest cousins, Lan Yawen, who is still eight years his senior. She is the female disciples’ primary sword instructor, and he has night hunted with her before, and at his first session she gestures to the cushion to her left and welcomes him with a smile that looks shockingly like Xichen’s.
“Quite the upstart, Wangji,” she says, and flashes him a wink, and laughs at whatever she sees on his face.
He stares down at his hands, folded gracefully in his lap. He remembers another laugh, ringing like a bell across the courtyard.
Composition does not come naturally to him. He does not submit a piece for review for the first half-year he attends; when he does, it is fragments that his seniors attempt to help him stitch together.
“Lan Wangji,” Lan Ruoxi says, when she keeps him behind after the review. “You are not at ease with your instrument.”
He stares at her, all propriety forgotten. She is one of the oldest members of the clan; despite her high cultivation, her skin is thin and creased. She has spots of age on her hands, which he has watched move as fluid as water on an ancient guqin. Her eyes are a full shade lighter than his own, and for a moment he understands why others shy away when he looks at them.
“Forgive me,” he says. He cannot think enough to say anything else.
What has given him away? He cannot imagine. Even when he was young, barely named, he was adept enough at concealing —
He shies away from the thought. Does it count as a lie, to pretend at comfort? Had he actually succeeded, or had no one been looking?
“Nothing to forgive.” She waves his apology away with a pale hand. She peers at him, keen-eyed. He has never felt so much a liar in his own skin. “It is only an observation. You play it like a master, though, despite your age. Your father was much the same way.”
He wants to leave. He has never before so envied Wei Wuxian’s delight of leaving rooms, of breaking off conversations, of floating away between one breath and the next.
“Your composition is conflicted,” she says, instead of following that thread. She gestures, and he lays Wangji on the cleared table between them. She touches it without compunction, plucking strings, feeling the curve of the wood. “You search for music, but you devote yourself to silence. You understand the instrument, but you fear it.”
She looks up at him. Pins him again with those clear, cool eyes.
To lie to her would be unthinkable. But he cannot speak. He has never been able to. He does not think he ever will.
“I cannot tell you what you fear, Lan Wangji. It is not my path, nor my inclination. I only encourage you to decide, before your next review, if you love this song more than you fear writing it.”
He hardly breathes. He is shamed, powerfully, for reasons he cannot bring himself to understand.
That evening he restrings Wangji. He treats the wood. He shines its surface until he can see his reflection in it, lit by the fading rays of the late summer sun. He tries to imagine what she had seen in his hands, in his face, in his composition.
He does not finish the song on the guqin. He hums it instead, fragments stitched together as he feeds a small, huddled group of rabbits on the back hill. He names it, and pretends he does not.
In the Jingshi, he keeps his life in order. Here is the sword stand. Here is the desk. Here is the table, and the beautiful guqin, and the silver strip of silk underneath.
In the Cloud Recesses, there is decency, and there is virtue, and there is discipline.
There is silence. Lan Wangji does not break it.