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It happens so abruptly that there’s no time to brace himself.
Yet another attempt of Wei Wuxian’s to make nice with Jiang Cheng — for Jin Ling’s sake, if nothing else — ended in a mostly one-sided shouting match, until Wei Wuxian gave up and just left. That wasn’t the abrupt part. That’s standard, at this point.
Really, he should have known better than to bother. They’re never going to see eye to eye, never going to repair what they had. It’s been too long. Too much has been lost.
But even if Wei Wuxian’s been long since disowned from the Jiang clan and can’t call Jiang Cheng his brother anymore — they’re still brothers. Even death didn’t change that.
No matter if Jiang Cheng wishes it had.
They’re walking away from Lotus Pier, trudging along in silence. They’d intended to stay the night, but it felt too stifling to remain in that place with his own golden core roiling with resentment for him some rooms away. Wei Wuxian hadn’t even had to ask — he’d just given Lan Wangji a watery-eyed look, and they’d left without another word to anyone.
Wei Wuxian is trailing just behind Lan Wangji, turning the argument over in his head, Wen Ning a few paces back from the both of them, when Lan Wangji stops walking, so abruptly Wei Wuxian collides with him and nearly stumbles. When he shakes off the haze of his own thoughts and looks up to ask what’s the matter, he stops.
Almost instinctively, he takes a single step back.
Lan Wangji’s shoulders are hunched, his hands curled into fists, and anger radiates from him so intensely that it almost takes physical form.
“Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian asks. Softer than he means to. Nervous.
He’d never usually be on edge around Lan Wangji, even at his angriest, but Wei Wuxian feels rubbed raw already, lashed by Jiang Chang’s harsh words, and the heat of Lan Wangji’s rage stings, even if it isn’t directed at him.
And then Lan Wangji turns around, and Wei Wuxian’s stomach drops. It is for him.
“Why?” Lan Wangji asks.
“Why?” Wei Wuxian echoes. Uneasy.
Lan Wangji seems to realize that he’s scaring him. His hands clench tighter, then forcibly relax, but none of the emotion barely contained behind his taciturn expression fades. “Why do you — why do you let him talk to you like that?”
Wei Wuxian laughs. He can’t help it. It cracks loose from his chest so painfully it feels like a sob. It might be a sob, just laced with the bare dregs of humor. “Arguing back just makes him meaner.”
Something flares in Lan Wangji’s eyes, bright and dangerous. “He has no right,” he says, and if Jiang Cheng were still nearby Wei Wuxian would fear for his life. “After all you’ve done for him, all that you’ve suffered. He has no right to speak such harsh words.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Wei Wuxian replies, trying to wave him off. There’s a tension in his chest, an uncertainty. This isn’t a topic to be broached, not this soon and maybe not ever. It’s just — complicated. “But it’s not worth trying to stop him. He doesn’t mean any of it, anyway. He’s always been like this.”
Always has been. Always will.
Lan Wangji’s scowl deepens. “If he doesn’t mean it, why does he say it?”
There’s no answer to that question that doesn’t make it all sound… worse than it is. He just wants to hurt me. He’s just trying to stop feeling small. The people he really hates are dead and I’m just the next best thing. I deserve it. I don’t deserve a brother that loves me. If he loved me I’m sure I’d lose him too.
Something aches like a wound in the pit of Wei Wuxian’s stomach, cold and horrible, right where his golden core used to sit. “He’s always been like this,” he repeats. His lips feel numb around the words. Hanguang-jun is so angry. “Just don’t — worry about it, please?”
Before the words are even out, Lan Wangji is already shaking his head. “No, I can’t. Not when he speaks such falsehoods with such confidence. Not when he pulls up old grievances simply to see you flinch. Not when he knows what you sacrificed for him and he still speaks so hatefully, not when he speaks as though the family you lost was his alone. No! I cannot. I will stop worrying when he stops bringing you to tears.”
Self-consciously, Wei Wuxian wipes at his face, but it’s dry. He’d only cried for a few minutes as they left Lotus Pier, frustration more than anything else. The tears have long since stopped — he doesn’t make a habit of crying over the insults Jiang Cheng hurls at him, if only to save himself the trouble. He doesn’t mean what he says.
Crying wouldn’t do anything to change things if he did.
“It’s not worth it,” he tells Lan Wangji, swallowing the lump in his throat. “It’s not worth it, all right? You’ve seen… you saw what happened, when I tried to defend myself, the first time around. It’s never worth it. No one believes me anyway, no one but you, and everyone just gets angrier when I stick up for myself. Especially Jiang Cheng. He doesn’t want to hear it. He wants me to be guilty—” the tears are rising again, but Wei Wuxian forces them down. He’s not going to cry about this, there’s no point. There’s never any point. “I don’t want to risk it, anyway.”
Lan Wangji’s anger is run through with a terrible pain, and Wei Wuxian aches to have put it there. “Risk?”
“You were there,” Wei Wuxian stares past him, forcing the words out through his teeth. “You saw what became of me. My—” jiejie. He stops. Shakes his head, slow, so the tears don’t spill. “It’s never worth arguing back. My reputation doesn’t mean anything to me, just let them believe what they want.”
He doesn’t know what response he’s expecting, but it isn’t the one he gets.
Lan Wangji starts to cry.
Panic shoots through Wei Wuxian’s chest. “Hey, hey, Lan Zhan, what did I do wrong, what did I say — please don’t cry, I’m sorry, whatever it is, I’m sorry—”
As soon as he steps within arm’s reach, Lan Wangji’s arms shoot out and drag him into an embrace, burying stifled sobs in his shoulder. “All of them, the rabble of the cultivation world, the lies they spoke about you, the pointless cruelty,” he grits out. “Them, I could disregard. They know nothing of you. Gossip-hounds. But Jiang Cheng — he of all people…”
“What would you have me say?” Wei Wuxian asks, clutching Lan Wangji tightly almost on instinct. “I won’t beg him for mercy. I won’t silence him. It doesn’t matter, really. He’s probably right. It probably is my fault—”
Lan Wangji cuts him off with a squeeze that forces all the air out of his lungs. He’s still crying, and it’s unbearable.
Wei Wuxian looks at Wen Ning, standing back from them with his brow pinched in concern. Desperate for help, as though Wen Ning will be able to do anything more about this than he can.
“He’s right, you know,” Wen Ning says, which is the opposite of helpful. His gaze is clear and earnest, his voice soft. “For someone that everyone seems to think is vengeful, you really don’t stick up for yourself.”
An ugly thread of hurt pulls taut behind Wei Wuxian’s ribs, and he opens his mouth to say… something, he doesn’t know, something to warn him off caring about this, since Lan Wangji apparently can’t be swayed, but Wen Ning keeps talking.
“You stick up for other people. But not yourself.” Wen Ning tilts his head, thoughtfully. “Why?”
Wei Wuxian laughs, thin and strained and without humor. “You don’t want me to answer that.”
Lan Wangji pulls back from their clinging embrace just enough to pin him with a look, stern and frigid even though the tears, and Wei Wuxian flinches from it, buckles beneath its weight. He used to do everything in his power to summon up that look, because it meant he’d struck a nerve, accomplished something with his teasing. Now it stings like a slap. He’d rather Lan Wangji hit him, actually, than be hurt by him.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.
“I stick up for people that—” deserve it, “—need someone to stick up for them.”
Lan Wangji’s brow furrows. “And you don’t?” he asks. He sounds awful. Hoarse, like he’s been crying — or trying not to — for much longer than the few minutes he’s been coming apart in Wei Wuxian’s arms. He hopes that isn’t true. It’ll be much harder to keep forgiving Jiang Cheng if it is.
“No,” Wei Wuxian says, with a confidence he knows is foolish. Being who and what he is — a low-level cultivator’s body with a soul out of practice by a good two decades — he never would have gotten this far without Lan Wangji sticking up for him. He probably wouldn’t have survived as long as he did the first time around, without Lan Wangji and Wen Ning’s protection, and Wen Qing’s, and Jiang Cheng’s, and—
It still hurts too much to even think her name.
Lan Wangji is looking at him with heartbreak on his face, and Wei Wuxian hates himself for it, but what’s another thing to hate himself for?
The list is so very fucking long.
“Then why…” Lan Wangji asks, soft as anything. Choked with tears. “Why defend Jiang Cheng? What has he done to deserve that?”
Wei Wuxian knows full well the answer isn’t good enough. He says it anyway, low and miserable. “He’s my brother.”
Wen Ning lets out a little breath in understanding— even though he doesn’t need to breathe, he still tends to feign it, and it’s so charming a habit that it makes Wei Wuxian’s heart ache just a little more. “Oh.”
But Lan Wangji is unconvinced, his face steely with frustration, his cheeks still wet. Of course he wouldn’t understand. His brother loves him. For all that’s happened, the Twin Jades have always had each other.
“I don’t—” Wei Wuxian explains. The words come slow and thick. “...Have any other family. Left. I can’t even call them that anymore but that doesn’t… I don’t care.” His eyes burn. Fuck. He’s fucking crying over his brother who doesn’t want to be his brother, the way he really tries not to, because he’s worried if he lets himself start he’ll never stop. He’s a little furious at Lan Wangji for it, and it sits sour in the back of his throat. He rubs his knuckles into one eye. “He’s my brother,” he repeats, helplessly.
There’s silence, for a long moment. Just the faint sound of the wind, the three of them breathing. Wen Ning feigning it, slow and steady and reassuring. Lan Wangji not weeping any longer but not calm. Wei Wuxian trying as best he can not to choke on his heart.
“They asked—” Wei Wuxian manages at last. Tears drip onto the cold soil at his feet. “Madame Yu and Jiang-shushu, they asked me to take care of him.”
More of that terrible silence.
Lan Wangji sighs, a deep and weary sound. “I see.”
“I want,” it’s hard to speak without sobbing. Wen Ning’s hand comes to rest on Wei Wuxian’s shoulder, and it doesn’t help the tears at all. “I want to stop talking about this now.”
For a moment, he thinks Lan Wangji will argue. Then Wen Ning’s grip tightens, almost imperceptibly, on his shoulder, and Lan Wangji only sighs again. “As Wei Ying asks,” he concedes. He starts to walk again.
Relief pools in the burned-out hollow of Wei Wuxian’s chest. He covers Wen Ning’s hand with his own and squeezes, and when he lets go Wen Ning falls back to follow behind them again, as Wei Wuxian takes a few jogging steps to catch up with Lan Wangji.
“Thank you,” Wei Wuxian says, when he’s blinked back most of the tears. “For sticking up for me.”
Lan Wangji takes his hand, slotting their fingers together. “Always.”
And Wei Wuxian may not deserve it, may not ever deserve it, but he believes him.