Chapter Text
I have always been able to read my brother.
Not because he speaks to me—he rarely does—but because Lan Wangji has never learned how to hide what matters most from me. After our mother’s death, emotion became something to be contained rather than expressed—folded neatly behind order and ritual, never allowed to spill. He conceals it behind silence, behind discipline, behind rules carved into bone.
But emotion leaks from him all the same.
Like light through cracks in jade—revealing what was never meant to be seen, only endured.
The elders have always called us the Twin Jades of Lan—polished, flawless, unmoving. They say it with pride, as if jade does not fracture under pressure, as if translucence does not reveal what lies beneath. They do not understand that jade’s beauty comes from endurance, not perfection.
Wei Wuxian was the first crack.
At Cloud Recesses, he burst into our ordered world laughing, irreverent, alive in a way that made the air feel warmer. He broke rules as easily as breathing, smiled as if consequences were theoretical, and treated the sacred like a friendly challenge rather than a boundary.
Where others saw irritation in my brother’s sharp rebukes, I saw something far more dangerous.
Attention.
Focus.
A gravity Lan Wangji neither sought nor understood.
Lan Wangji watched Wei Wuxian constantly.
When he laughed.
When he broke rules.
When he walked too close.
Especially when he walked away.
It was not the gaze of an enemy. It was the gaze of someone memorizing another’s existence—committing shape and sound to memory as if afraid they might vanish.
And when he spoke his name—“Wei Ying”—the syllables carried an intensity my brother afforded no one else.
Wei Wuxian, infuriating creature that he was, delighted in provoking him. Aggressively friendly. Tugging sleeves. Leaning close. Calling him Lan Zhan with a grin that suggested intimacy without awareness. He flirted like breathing—instinctive, playful, unexamined. Obsessed.
I understood then what the elders never could—and I was not immune to quiet satisfaction: these two were opposites, yet exactly the same. The yin of Lan Wangji’s order and the yang of Wei Wuxian’s chaos were not just compatible—they were inevitable. Perhaps jade could fracture, but these two were carved for each other.
And yet, for all that boldness, Wei Wuxian remained oblivious.
Lan Wangji, meanwhile, suffered quietly.
I saw it in the way he lingered after Wei Wuxian left a room. In how his shoulders tightened when Wei Wuxian praised someone else. In the way jealousy flickered—quick, suppressed, painfully human—when attention strayed from him.
My brother had learned early that love could be taken away.
So he held it as if it were already lost—carefully, reverently, afraid to breathe too hard.
Before it had a name at all, there was Caiyi Town.
The water there was wrong—thick with resentment, heavy with the dead. The report arrived during the study period, and by all rights, we should have handled it alone. Lan Wangji insisted upon it, his tone clipped and precise.
When Wei Wuxian offered his help, my brother refused without hesitation.
Final.
Proper.
Lan.
And yet—
When Wei Wuxian laughed it off, when he turned away to speak with Jiang Cheng, Lan Wangji’s gaze followed him out of the corner of his eye, unwavering. His fingers tightened at his side. His spiritual energy stirred—sharp, restless, attentive.
He was already listening.
Already adjusting his steps to match Wei Wuxian’s pace, though they were not yet walking together.
So I intervened.
“We could use the assistance,” I said lightly, as if the decision were purely practical. “Wei-gongzi’s talents may prove… unconventional, but uncannily effective.”
Lan Wangji did not look at me.
But he did not argue again.
That night, as we stood upon the boat and the dark water churned beneath us, I watched my brother place himself—without conscious thought—between Wei Wuxian and the depths below. Each time Wei Wuxian leaned too far over the edge, peering down with reckless curiosity, Lan Wangji’s hand twitched, restrained only by discipline and pride.
When Wei Wuxian laughed, eyes full of mirth—careless and bright, Lan Wangji’s expression remained a repressed calm.
But his spiritual energy never wavered from him.
This was not duty.
It was instinct.
Later, at Cloud Recesses once more, I found my brother after curfew, standing alone with his guqin. His fingers hovered above the strings, knuckles pale with restraint.
“You could play the song you composed,” I suggested gently.
He shook his head. “It would be… improper.”
I did not ask why.
I already knew.
The song he wished to play had a name, and it was not one he believed he was allowed to voice.
So I helped where I could.
I suggested shared patrols. Quiet moments. Spaces where silence could stretch without breaking. I redirected Wei Wuxian gently—Have you seen the cold springs?—and pretended not to notice when Lan Wangji remained there long after propriety demanded he leave.
Even then, even soaked in moonlight and steam, my brother did not touch him.
Lan Wangji’s restraint was never weakness.
It was devotion sharpened to a blade.
When Wei Wuxian gifted him the rabbits, it was meant as a joke. A laugh. A whimsy.
Lan Wangji came to me that evening, expression carefully neutral, and asked what should be done.
I had to turn away before I smiled.
We had rules about animals. Strict ones. Known ones.
“Keep them,” I said instead. “Just… don’t let Uncle know.”
He inclined his head in thanks, but his relief was unmistakable. The next morning, I saw him kneeling in the grass, sleeves pushed back, carefully arranging food for the rabbits as if they were precious artifacts entrusted to his care. Lan Wangji had never tended anything so lovingly.
Wei Wuxian watched him from the doorway, expression soft and unfamiliar.
That, too, I noted.
When Wei Wuxian later began to walk a path others feared, I did not pretend I was untroubled. Demonic cultivation is not something our sect condones, nor something I could ever praise.
But I watched my brother.
Lan Wangji does not give his heart lightly. He does not bend his principles for convenience, nor mistake righteousness for affection. If he loved Wei Wuxian, then I knew—without question—that there was goodness there still.
I trusted my brother’s moral compass more than the noise of the world.
And more than that, I wanted him to be happy.
Then came loss.
Wei Wuxian’s death hollowed my brother in ways no punishment ever had. He returned to Cloud Recesses broken by despair, silent in a way that went beyond discipline. During his seclusion, I was the only one permitted to see him.
He played Inquiry night after night, fingers bleeding, asking the world a question it refused to answer.
I guarded him as best I could.
When Wei Wuxian returned—laughing again, chaotic and alive in Mo Xuanyu—Lan Wangji brought him to the Jingshi without hesitation.
Others were confused. I was not.
My brother would not have brought anyone else there.
Nor did he impose what others expected him to enforce.
Resurrected Wei Wuxian drank Emperor’s Smile openly beneath our eaves. He spoke too loudly. Laughed without restraint. Shameless. Irreverent. Endlessly troublesome.
And my brother… allowed it.
No one else would have been permitted such irreverence.
Lan Wangji, who once recited rules as if they were scripture, did not rebuke him. Did not correct him. Did not confine him within the boundaries of Cloud Recesses.
It was not indulgence. It was unwavering faith.
He had never doubted Wei Wuxian’s moral core. Not when the world condemned and demonized him. Not when he fell. And not now.
Lan Wangji did not fear corruption. Wei Wuxian never betrayed his principles.
He feared diminishing him.
He had once asked the world to return him. He would not silence him now.
This time, Wei Wuxian clung to him.
This time, he smiled softly, trusted freely, leaned into Lan Wangji’s presence as if it were the safest place in the world.
And still—still—he did not understand what he was doing.
He teased. He flirted. He relied. He stayed.
Lan Wangji watched him with an intensity that bordered on reverence. He hovered close without touching, stepped half a pace behind, ready to shield, to defend, to die if needed.
Because Lan Wangji loved as if love were sacred.
And therefore terrifying.
Finally, Guanyin Temple happened.
Blood, truth, old sins laid bare. The world balanced on a blade’s edge. And there—cornered, wounded, breathless—Wei Wuxian finally spoke.
“You’re especially wonderful,” he said, voice trembling but sincere. “I like you.”
Lan Wangji froze.
“I fancy you,” Wei Wuxian rushed on, words tumbling faster now. “I love you. I want you. I can’t leave you. I—whatever you.”
“I want to go on night hunts with you for the rest of my life.”
It was not eloquent. It was desperate and honest and utterly Wei Wuxian.
“I whatever you.”
I watched my brother’s entire world rearrange itself around those words.
It was as if two halves of the same soul had finally recognized one another. Their yin and yang—the chaos and the discipline—had found equilibrium. I could not have been more certain: nothing in the world could undo what was always meant to be.
Lan Wangji stepped forward and took Wei Wuxian’s hand—steady, deliberate, undeniable.
Wei Wuxian blinked. “Lan Zhan…?”
Lan Wangji did not speak.
He did not need to.
Later, when the world had survived them and night hunts stretched ahead like a promise, Wei Wuxian laughed and tugged Lan Wangji close, already planning their shared future aloud.
Lan Wangji let himself be pulled.
When he glanced at me, his eyes were calm with happiness—at last.
I smiled.
And love—quiet, stubborn, luminous—was finally allowed to remain. Chaos and order, no longer at war.
The world would remember battles, betrayals, and blood.
I would remember this instead.
Two souls who had circled each other through silence and chaos, finally choosing to stand side by side.
Love did not arrive with ceremony.
It arrived with truth.
And in that moment, nothing more needed to be said than—“I whatever you.”