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Lan Wangji clutched his lighter sleeping robe tighter around himself and stared at his surroundings.
The people surrounding him stared back, eyes wide.
Lan Wangji was suddenly very glad that tonight had been one of the rare nights that he’d put a sleeping robe back on after his usual bedtime routine with his husband. (It was getting colder and his dead husband had a far chillier body temperature than a living person would).
“Who is it?”
“Someone ascended?”
“It’s been hundreds of years—”
“Who?”
The whispers were deafening.
Lan Wangji slowly turned in a circle, trying to get a sense of where he was. Thankfully none of the people seemed hopefully hostile, though a handsome, taller man was making a rather amused “oh ho!” noise.
He was outside somehow, in the middle of seemingly endless palaces that were more lavish than he’d ever seen. And he’d been to Paradise Manor.
Perhaps the most alarming thing was that while he was clearly no longer in his bedroom, his husband was nowhere to be seen.
A couple young men jostled their way to the front of the crowd—one was rolling his eyes as he pushed through, while the other was cursing. Following them more sedately was an elegant woman carrying a bunch of scrolls.
“Hanguang-Jun, I am Ling Wen.” The woman had a smooth, even way of speaking and while Lan Wangji was still on edge, Ling Wen at least seemed sensible. “Welcome to heaven. You are the first god to have ascended in…” her face twisted slightly. “Well. It has been a long while. Welcome,”
Lan Wangji stared at her. The two men who’d shoved themselves to the front with her were staring, though neither of them had made any motion to say something to Lan Wangji.
Lan Wangji wasn’t sure what Ling Wen had been expecting him to say, but he got the feeling from her blank look that it wasn't, “How do I leave?”
The rushed whispers rang through the crowd again.
“Leave? What?”
“No way—”
“How rude!”
“Does he not know what this means?”
Lan Wangji just stood there, waiting for a response.
“Oh fuck, it’s another one,” The man with the lighter brown hair said. His companion elbowed him in the gut.
Ling Wen finally sighed. “Maybe it would be best to talk with you before you do anything rash–”
“I wish to leave. How do I leave?” Lan Wangji repeated calmly. If nobody would tell him he wasn’t above simply picking a direction and beginning to walk. There had to be an end somewhere.
Ling Wen’s shoulders slumped slightly, a haggard look on her face. She opened her mouth to reply—
—And a horrifying screech through the entire heavenly communication array. Every single god in the area flinched, clapping their hands over their ears. Ling Wen made a face.
Lan Wangji, who hadn’t been given the password nor ever used a communication array yet, just gave a confused tilt of his head.
“Where the FUCK IS MY HUSBAND?”
One of the meeker civil gods fainted right there.
A good chunk of years ago the gods had been terrorized by a new Calamity. It’d been hundreds of thousands of years since the Calamites had been cemented into their places, and nobody had shown up that was able to change that pecking order. To the gods, there was an overall sense of gratefulness that the current Calamites now kept to themselves for the most part. Crimson Rain Sought Flower still was a general terror, but if you just left him be if he was seen strolling about heaven—and didn’t bother him or his husband—then you were generally fine. Everyone steered clear but he didn’t go out of his way to harm anybody.
Black Water Sinking Ships had always been reclusive and that hadn’t changed. Shi Qingxuan brought him occasionally up to heaven when they visited for whatever mandatory meeting was being held—but as the god of beggars they spent a lot more time in the mortal realm, which meant that Black Water too stayed (for the most part) off doing whatever Shi Qingxuan managed to drag him into doing.
White No-Face was quiet. Nobody was going to prod that hornet’s nest.
But a little while back, Night Touring Green Lantern had been overthrown by the Yiling Patriarch. And that had brought a new level of horror to the heavens.
Qi Rong had been a pest, but a predictable one. The heavens had gotten used to his general attitude and bothering, and Xie Lian usually dealt with him before he could really cause any big issues.
The Yiling Patriarch was new.
Worse, he was seemingly on great terms with Crimson Rain and Black Water. Nobody knew where he had popped up from, but the three were seen together without trying to slaughter each other. Oddly enough, the Yiling Patriarch didn’t seem all that concerned with the gods. They held their breath in terror as they waited for him to make some move, but he never did. Instead, he seemed more interested in playing his evil flute and commanding the dead when the fancy struck him.
So the gods mainly avoided him.
Until… they couldn’t anymore.
Wei Wuxian got rudely awoken by the feeling of Lan Zhan disappearing from underneath his sleeping form. It wasn’t the usual feel of his husband waking up and shifting him off so he could get up, it was the feeling of his entire body blipping out of existence.
Wei Wuxian choked on the sudden faceful of the pillow he inhaled. Jolting upright, he stared in confusion at the empty bed below him.
That’s when it fully hit him that Lan Zhan had truly, completely vanished.
He wasn’t in their rooms, or anywhere he could have vanished to in the mere seconds between him being underneath Wei Wuxian and then disappearing.
Wei Wuxian teleported in a blip of shadow, appearing in a crowd of startled ghosts. Qi Rong had time to yell a string of profanity before Wei Wuxian vanished again—having confirmed that the Green Ghost hadn’t somehow managed to kidnap Lan Zan. Wei Wuxian continued his teleporting, zipping everywhere he could possibly think that Lan Zhan may have possibly been kidnapped to. His heart would have been frozen in terror had it not stopped beating long ago.
“What could have possibly gotten you into such a tizzy?” Baba’s voice filled his private communication array without warning. Father didn’t say anything, but if Baba had opened up their array then he was no doubt listening in too.
His parents must have received news of the Calamity tearing apart the landscape in a frenzy that was startling the local ghosts.
“Lan Zhan vanished!”
“Did you attempt another one of those—” His father sounded more than a little amused.
“We were not doing anything with the invisibility potion again.”
“Oh. Well. That is strange.” His father didn’t sound all that concerned, but his father generally didn’t sound very concerned with much of anything. “I’m sure he’s fine. He is Hanguang-Jun after all.”
They were silent for a moment longer while Wei Wuxian continued to dart around—he happened upon a small town and accidentally scared the shit out of some poor farmers. He’d have tried to reassure them but he really didn’t feel like offering any sort of assurance to anybody right now, not until he was able to find his lost husband.
“Ah.” Father’s soft exclamation was filled with amusement. “A-xian, have I ever brought you to heaven?” .
“Where the FUCK IS MY HUSBAND?”
Lan Zhan whirled, his generally blank face breaking into a small, soft smile. “Wei Ying,” he breathed softly.
Ling Wen didn’t exactly make a pained face, but there was a weight of exhaustion that settled onto her shoulders at the sound of Wei Wuxian’s voice booming through the heavens.
Lan Wangji absently noticed that there were a few silver butterflies hanging around his husband—and that his white-robed father in law was standing slightly off to the side with a polite smile on his face—before he was nearly bowled over by the force of Wei Wuxian flinging himself into Lan Wangji’s arms.
“I thought you’d been kidnapped!” He nearly-shouted, brilliant red eyes beginning to tear up.
“Wei Ying, I am an adult. I cannot get kidnapped.”
“You–!” Wei Wuxian made an indignant noise and then crashed his lips into Lan Wangji’s. Lan Wangji eagerly responded, tilting his head and deepening their kiss.
When they finally parted, Wei Wuxian dipping back in for a chaste peck of his lips against Lan Wangji’s before pulling away completely, Lan Wangji noticed that most of their godly crowd had dispersed. He was slightly distracted by the feeling of Wei Wuxian completely relaxing against him—long arms looped around Lan Wangji’s neck and nestling his head right underneath his chin. He tightened his arms around Wei Wuxian’s waist. He’d had enough times of being yanked away from his beloved, it wasn’t going to happen again.
Hua Cheng was looming slightly off to the side, seemingly bickering with a pair of martial gods—one of whom kept rolling his eyes so hard that Lan Wangji was mildly impressed.
Xie Lian was talking quietly with Ling Wen, who just looked plain exhausted by this point. With a pinched expression, she said something and walked off, Xie Lian offering a polite wave as she slipped away. He turned to his adopted son and his son’s husband, offering one of his usual quiet smiles.
“It seems that you are the first god to ascend in many years, Lan Wangji.” Xie Lian said, golden eyes alight with amusement.
Wei Wuxian blinked, still hanging off Lan Wangji. “Lan Zhan ascended?”
Xie Lian nodded. “It seems that it runs in the family.”
Wei Wuxian burst out laughing, and he would have flopped to the ground had Lan Wangji not held him upright. Lan Wangji himself didn’t care all that much, but he supposed if it meant he could stay with Wei Wuxian forever, then he should be a bit grateful.