Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - BDSM, Biologically Determined Dom/sub Roles, BDSM, Bad BDSM etiquette, Sadism, Masochism, Past Sexual Abuse, Sexual Slavery, Self-Harm, BDSM as a Form of Self-Harm, Minor Character Death(s), Arson, Shades of Black Widow Wei Wuxian, Extremely Dubious Consent, Rape/Non-Con Elements, Normalized Homosexuality and Bisexuality, Normalized Polyamory, Nonsexual BDSM, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Pining Wei Wuxian, Jealous Wei Wuxian, Touch-Starved Wei Wuxian, Professional Dominant Wei Wuxian, Sex Worker Wei Wuxian, Gentle Dom Lan Wangji, Mean Dom Lan Wangji, Oblivious Lan Wangji, Past Wen Chao/Wei Wuxian, Minor Jin Guangyao/Wei Wuxian, Mentioned Wei Wuxian/Others, Emotional Infidelity, Angst with a Happy Ending, Endgame Wangxian, Mo Xuanyu Also Gets a Happy Ending, the tags are scary but i promise there's some lightheartedness too, wangxian love one another so much, wei wuxian is healed by the power of nonsexual bdsm and friendship, and then gets bdsm'd quite sexually and happily by the love of his life, Additional Warnings In Author's Note
Content warnings:
- Wei Wuxian plays himself in a way that almost results in a dubcon situation
- bad BDSM etiquette by real world standards
- blood as a result of impact play
- mentions of child abuse in the form of corporal punishment using switches that results in a kink for the same form of punishment as an adult
As Wei Wuxian gestures sharply for Jin Guangyao to follow him, he intends to be strong, but Lan Zhan rises to his feet in his peripheral vision and all hope for self-control is lost with the graceful motion of Lan Zhan’s body. He becomes helpless to the need for one last look, painful though it is.
When their eyes meet, Lan Zhan is already looking at him and only stops looking long enough to touch his fingertips to Xuanyu’s chin, a silent order for him to stand. It assuages Wei Wuxian’s vanity and the gnawing pit of his longing when Lan Zhan’s gaze turns itself over to Wei Wuxian as soon as Xuanyu has complied. If Wei Wuxian can still divert Lan Zhan’s attention this way, then some things haven’t changed. It is a comfort to him, that small familiarity.
He is pulled, suddenly and viscerally, into his memories of the months he spent in Cloud Recesses, learning what every well-bred Dominant and submissive must know to appropriately move through society. For the most part, they are vaseline-smeared by time, his memories, hazy and frustratingly lacking in focus, but some are sharp enough to cut and clear as a freshly washed window, sparkling in the sun.
Cloud Recesses, Thirteen Years Ago
“Look at me, Lan Zhan,” he says, a pleased, trilling laugh on his tongue. He has teased Lan Zhan viciously and now it’s time to smooth his ruffled feathers back into place. “Have I wounded your pride too deeply? Let me see those pretty eyes of yours. There we go.” Those pretty eyes of his, as it turns out, are so heated they could melt steel. The brightness of his anger pushes Wei Wuxian’s glee into the stratosphere. “Oh, I have. Let me make it better, gege. I didn’t mean to tease you.”
Except that he did. Of course he did. There’s no pastime lovelier than teasing Lan Zhan.
For his trouble, Wei Wuxian has earned the sight of an obvious bulge straining against the layers of Lan Zhan’s robes. He’s seated with so much dignity otherwise that it seems lewd, these natural stirrings of a boy coming into himself. Lan Qiren’s even lectured on such things and how to navigate the situation with decorum intact, much to everyone—including Lan Qiren’s—discomfort and displeasure.
With little more than a whimper and an exposed clavicle, Wei Wuxian has made him hard. Right in the middle of copying lines in the library. It’s impossibly charming and surprisingly innocent. “Lan Zhan, please.” He can hold back his laughter no longer. “Lan Zhan, what’s the punishment for—”
He dissolves into a fit of giggles and slaps his hand over his mouth.
What’s the punishment for improper thoughts?
Honestly, he hadn’t thought it would work. After all, the tip came from Nie Huaisang, who excels at thrilling the rest of their cohort with random boasts and managed just this once to enchant Wei Wuxian with a handful of words about how all it takes to bring down a Dominant is a bit of exposed skin and the suggestion of availability.
Wei Wuxian, upon hearing this nonsense, very much wanted to take down Lan Zhan.
Wei Wuxian blames the rule against electronics inside Cloud Recesses. Nie Huaisang would never have made such a provocative claim if his porn stash remained in his pocket. Wei Wuxian has no such rule to explain his own decision to try it on the most frigid Dominant he knows.
Wei Wuxian might have stayed the urge with access to properly illicit materials with which he might entertain himself. Then again, he may not have. He’ll never know.
And now Lan Zhan’s sporting wood in the library and Wei Wuxian doesn’t know what to do with him. Next time, he’ll have to plan for the possibility of success.
“Lan Zhan, you should see how many times I’ve popped—”
“Do not speak to me.”
“Really, it happens to everyone. It doesn’t mean anything. Hell, you should have seen what happened to me the first time I was coerced onto my knees by you for speaking out of turn in class. Talk about embarrassing.”
“Coerced,” Lan Zhan repeats, spitting the word out like it’s little better than filth on his tongue. “That was a fitting, known punishment for your misdeed. It cannot be coercion.”
“I didn’t want to kneel, therefore I was coerced.” He leans into Lan Zhan’s space and taps Lan Zhan’s writing desk. The noise makes Lan Zhan flinch. There is, no doubt, a valid argument about Wei Wuxian’s abuse of the word buried somewhere under Lan Zhan’s fury, but Wei Wuxian doesn’t intend to give him time to find it. He’s going to blitz his way through this ordeal and hope Lan Zhan doesn’t kill him and dump his body somewhere in the back mountains for the rabbits to eat. “That doesn’t make me horny for the Lan family rules.”
What it does, he doesn’t mention, is make him horny for the impossibly beautiful face of the boy who’d coerced him, and possibly the coercion itself. He’s weak to men who float through life with an immortal-like incandescence about them.
Lan Zhan’s jaw clenches and even his neck’s grown a little pink above the collar of his robes, but Wei Wuxian can’t stop himself from speaking. He loves talking far too much.
“My point is,” Wei Ying concludes generously, “I’m not going to make the most reasonable assumption here.”
“What assumption would that be?”
“All I did was stretch, Lan Zhan.” And pull a few of the ties holding his robes shut and brush aside the five-hundred layers of fabric he’s wearing and possibly moan as he dug his fingers into the stiff muscles of his shoulder. “You put me in a posture trainer. It hurts, gege. You never said I couldn’t move around. I didn’t do anything wrong.” He plasters himself across Lan Zhan’s back, breathes directly into his ear. “But my clavicles are lovely, aren’t they? Anyone would think you have a thing for me.”
Lan Zhan’s anger pulls back, a tide receding in the moments before a tsunami strikes. His body goes disconcertingly still.
Wei Wuxian must, as a matter of course, rush headfirst into that dangerous surf.
“Every submissive in the province would work themselves to the bone to earn your attentions. Just admit you’re a little easy and I’ll leave you alone.” Then I can go back to Nie Huaisang and find out what else he knows about Dominants, he thinks gleefully. “I won’t even accuse you of liking me.”
“Leave. Now.” Lan Zhan’s voice is the shivering wreck of its usual haughty tenor.
“But Lan Zhan—”
“It is not worth my time to correct your behavior. Go.” He’s never used an order on Wei Wuxian before. The mere sound of it is intoxicating, so compelling that Wei Wuxian’s pushing himself upright, happy to be of service, even if that service requires abandoning the warm, welcoming stretch of Lan Zhan’s back.
Then, he registers exactly what Lan Zhan has said, and he’s no longer so elated.
The words are a slap to the face, a jump into a lake of ice-cold water. They burrow into his heart and leave behind shame and pain and, yes, a hint of arousal, too.
Lan Zhan must be really mad if he thinks Wei Wuxian is behaving so that irredeemably that correction has become useless. He struggles against the order, and the more he fights it, the more a bulge begins to form in his own stodgy, traditional garb, right against Lan Zhan’s spine.
“Wei Ying!”
Wei Wuxian falls backward as Lan Zhan elbows him, legs going out, like Lan Zhan’s tugged every bone from his body save one. Splayed like this, he feels… well, it’s obvious enough how he feels.
Lan Zhan’s face is flushed as he twists on his knees, glaring down at Wei Wuxian. His body finds the perfect home between Wei Wuxian’s legs as he presses his palms to the wooden floor on either side of Wei Wuxian’s head. Anger sparks in the rich, deep brown of his eyes, almost black with entirely natural urges. Wei Wuxian is fucked. Probably literally, if that erection of Lan Zhan’s has anything to say about it.
He’s not even sure he wants it like this, too sudden to plan for, too sudden to turn it into a romantic interlude, but that only makes it more exciting.
The silky strands of Lan Zhan’s hair tickle Wei Wuxian’s sweaty neck. “L-Lan Zhan, you’ll get—”
You’ll get messy, he thinks, and then he’s not thinking anything at all when Lan Zhan stands and smooths down his robes. The fabric settles discreetly around his legs. He is the proper second heir to the Lan family once again. If he’s still erect, there’s no sign of it. Even his expression has cooled.
He is bereft when Lan Zhan strides out of the library with no further acknowledgment of him, disgustingly proper in his affect. That stodgy hypocrite. Where does he get off turning tail like that?
It’s not until later that he learns that Lan Zhan assigned himself fifty strikes with a ferrule for disorderly thoughts—so that’s the punishment—and an additional twenty because he won’t explain to his uncle which thoughts deserved such wicked punishment in the first place. When Wei Wuxian jerks off about it after curfew, pillow stuffed in his mouth to keep from alerting anyone in the nearby residences set aside for guests, he imagines himself taking those hits instead.
In the morning, he offers up his own body for punishment—parity is only fair, it took two to behave indiscreetly—but Lan Zhan won’t acknowledge him and he doesn’t dare go over Lan Zhan’s head to address Lan-laoxiansheng directly. It would raise too many questions.
*
“Wei-xiansheng?” Jin Guangyao says, dragging Wei Wuxian out of the perfect reverie he’s fallen into. He can’t even remember if Jin Guangyao’s paid for a fuck on top of everything else, mind too full of Lan Zhan. If he has, performance won’t be a problem tonight. Embarrassed, he draws in a breath and scans the room to orient himself.
Lan Zhan has already disappeared. It turns his stomach to have squandered the last chance he might ever have to see Lan Zhan. He could have cherished those last few moments instead of abandoning himself to fruitless reminiscence.
“Come,” Wei Wuxian says, disinterested, leading Jin Guangyao into the darkened hallway that leads to Wei Wuxian’s suites. Jin Guangyao scurries after him, but keeps two steps behind him, like he’s guessing at properly submissive behavior. It’s too unnatural and grates of insincerity. Wei Wuxian would almost not believe him a submissive at all.
Then again, if a submissive can play act as a dominant, who’s to say? If he’s to keep his position here, he needs to know.
Abruptly, he turns and presses Jin Guangyao into the wall, hand splayed across Jin Guangyao’s chest. “Are you a null?”
There’s nothing wrong will nulls wanting what they want—Wei Wuxian’s a live and let live kind of guy—but he loathes down to his core the thought of servicing someone who might see through him. He’s learned how to keep other submissives in the dark on this point—be meaner, tougher, uglier about it than they’ve paid you to be and they’ll never notice you can’t actually order them around—but he doesn’t know how to navigate around a null who might have successfully lied to Madam Yang.
“I think that’s none of your business,” Jin Guangyao replies. “I’ve paid you for what I’ve paid you for.”
He’s right, and Wei Wuxian hates that, too.
When they reach his rooms, Wei Wuxian puts Jin Guangyao in a blindfold, sits him on the edge of the bed, and checks the dossier one more time. Sex is optional, but pain is not. His safeword is a name, Meng Shi, and he’s listed no implements as off-limits. In fact, he’s listed nothing as off-limits. He’d not paid attention to that piece when he’d reviewed it earlier, focusing entirely on the details surrounding Jin Guangyao’s business dealings so he wouldn’t sound like a rube sitting at Jin Guangyao’s table. “Is this your first time submitting to someone?”
“No.” He pauses, as though waiting for Wei Wuxian to demand he use an honorific with him, but all of that is moot if Jin Guangyao’s a null prancing around in drag, and if he’s not, Wei Wuxian doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of discipline.
Were he a real Dominant and Jin Guangyao truly submissive, he could demand a genuine answer from Jin Guangyao and believe it without a doubt, but all he has is his instincts and a dossier demanding pain. Wei Wuxian is frustrated and humiliated enough to give him that, Dominant, null, submissive, or otherwise. It doesn’t require a specific orientation to dish it out. He knows he ought to ask Jin Guangyao if he knows that’s what he wants and not just what he thinks he deserves, but he’s not being paid for that kind of sensitivity. Madam Yang will have warned him when she offered Wei Wuxian to him. That’s good enough.
Treat Jin Guangyao as the pathetic submissive he is or wants to be, he flings the dossier at him, its pages flutter in every direction. One of them leaves a delicate cut on Jin Guangyao’s cheek.
“I don’t like liars,” Wei Wuxian says.
Jin Guangyao swallows, coughs up another lie. “I didn’t!”
“There’s not a submissive on this planet who doesn’t have something they don’t like to do or have done to them.” Even Wei Wuxian has limits he doesn’t like crossing, and he’d say he’s pretty open to a lot of shit others would think twice about. “A smart one would list it. An inexperienced one wouldn’t know what to list.”
Jin Guangyao stills.
Wei Wuxian is happy to press. “You’ve lied to me about something tonight.”
Jin Guangyao stubbornly holds the line, jaw tense.
Again, no answer. With a sigh, Wei Wuxian mentally catalogs his collection of toys, pairing them with the man sitting before him. Lest he lose control of this encounter, he tells himself, not for the first time, that domination in a place like this is just another type of service submission. It makes these unnatural acts easier to complete.
His closet stands in one corner, hidden behind an elegant sliding door. Suits, ties, shoes. They all hang inside, neat and organized, as befits a neat and organized Dominant. There are belts, too. A belt could be promising. He could put Jin Guangyao over his knee, raw the skin of his thighs with the thick, rigid leather of his newest one, or bludgeon him with one of the older ones, maybe swing a little off center, let the buckle catch on the round curve of his ass or higher.
That doesn’t feel quite right though.
He remembers then that he once had a client, raised abroad, who wanted Wei Wuxian to force him to cut a switch. He’d even specified the kind of wood and Wei Wuxian had had to procure a branch of it and a knife—a knife Wei Wuxian didn’t give to him until after Wei Wuxian leashed him to the bed, he’s not stupid—and then watched him spend at least forty minutes slicing away the bark and stems. He’d cried the whole time, promising Wei Wuxian he’d be good, that Wei Wuxian didn’t have to hit him.
There’d been a stipulation in his contract that Wei Wuxian was, under no circumstances, permitted to take the client at his word in that respect.
Whatever else he was, that client was good at cutting switches. Wei Wuxian had liked the way it swished through the air, how flexible it was, the awful marks it left on that guy’s skin. The tip curved around his hip and left one tiny, delicate bloom of a bruise on his side, capillaries bursting in a pretty floral pattern.
Afterwards, the man had told him—not that Wei Wuxian had cared to know—that he’d been hit a lot as a child. No shit, Wei Wuxian had thought. But the reason why he still likes it—presumably that’s still the case today—is because it’s humiliating to be struck with something so unrefined. A stick is just a stick and if that’s all he’s worth, then what does that make him?
Worthless.
It makes Wei Wuxian’s skin crawl, that kind of thinking, but far be it for him to judge how other people get their rocks off. As long as he gets paid, the rest doesn’t matter.
A switch will work on a peony brought up on the Jin family’s wealth.
“Xichen-ge is not a Dominant inclined toward hitting or sadism,” Wei Wuxian says, working off of a hunch. Inexperienced or null, it doesn’t take much arithmetic to reach the conclusion that Lan Xichen was not very happy to see Jin Guangyao with a Dominant and that Jin Guangyao might have wanted it that way. Wei Wuxian may not have experienced much romance in his own life, but he has seen what ill-advised love can do to people. “Seems like your tastes might not align.”
Retrieving the switch, he allows himself to delight in Jin Guangyao’s sharp inhalation when he swings it through the air right next to him. Because he can, he rolls up his sleeve and cracks the switch across the inside of his own forearm—a nice, centering little indulgence—and admires the red-blooming stripe that results.
“Tell me, when Jin princelings are punished, do they really get hit with gold paddles? I’ve always wondered.”
Jin Guangyao’s lip twitches, distaste deepening his dimple.
“Or didn’t daddy care enough?”
Jin Guangyao’s next exhalation almost forms a word, answer enough for Wei Wuxian’s purposes.
“I bet you think Xichen-ge would take care of you.” The switch bends smoothly between his hands, thwacks nicely against Jin Guangyao’s clothed back, earns Wei Wuxian a punched out moan. “I think you’re right in the sense that he’d try. Middle of the bed, on your knees, ass up.” He yanks Jin Guangyao’s trousers and underwear down, lets them tangle around his knees. “I don’t know if he’d succeed, but I know I can.”
By the time Jin Guangyao goes under—so he is, after all, a submissive—tears dripping down his face, snot clogging his nostrils, muscles trembling, his ass and thighs are a bloody mess. He might very well scar if he’s not careful. Wei Wuxian will have to toss the switch, ruined by how much it took to get the truth out of him. He ought to tack on an additional fee for the strain on his shoulder. His dress shirt is ruined with sweat, another thing he ought to charge for.
Streaks of come coat the comforter along with the blood. He’s exhausted just thinking about swapping it for another, but he can’t quite bring himself to demand that Jin Guangyao do that chore for him.
What he can do is steal a few moments to clear his own head of what he’s done. Retreating to the bathroom, he scrubs himself down in the shower, water icy against his skin.
When he returns, Jin Guangyao is still on his hands and knees and flinches at the sound of Wei Wuxian pulling on a pair of non-latex gloves. “Take off your clothes.” As Jin Guangyao struggles to comply, he adds, “And lie on your stomach when you’re done.”
Wei Wuxian cleans away the blood with water and damp washcloths and applies antiseptic to the wounds, one final torture for the night, but one that helps calm Wei Wuxian.
By the time he’s done, Jin Guangyao’s mouth is slack with unfulfilled pleasure and his eyes are closed.
Though he’s probably fallen asleep, Wei Wuxian says, “I’ll wake you when your time is up.”
He could set an alarm and retreat to his private rooms, get a few extra hours of rest on Jin Guangyao’s dime, but he knows a fruitless endeavor when he sees one. At best, he’ll think of Lan Zhan, and he doesn’t want to do that on a night like this.
Instead, he tinkers in the playroom. That always takes his mind off of things he doesn’t want to consider too closely.