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
A crisp knock on the bedroom door rouses Wei Wuxian from a doze. It’s too familiar in its cadence to be anyone other than Lan Zhan, and part of him seems to know that, his body waking more easily than if anyone else had approached. He feels gummy from too much or too little rest and slow to respond. He’d only bothered to put on pajama bottoms, thinking he’d actually crawl under the covers at some point. Unfortunately, he’d gone over to the window, pushed open the frame, and found the gentle breeze far too enjoyable to bother with the duvet.
And now he’s exposed. To Lan Zhan. As Lan Zhan opens the door and looks inside, brow furrowed in consternation, his gaze landing on Wei Wuxian immediately.
Cloud Recesses, Thirteen Years Ago
Steam rises from the pool of water before him, tantalizing despite the slight odor that lingers around it, sulfuric and foreboding. His body aches, muscles tormented by the punishment he and Lan Zhan both had taken. He’d been told some time in the hot springs ought to help.
Only one body sits in it, back straight, visible through the gauzy veil of mist.
Wei Wuxian would know that back anywhere, veiled or no.
“Lan Zhan, won’t you let me come in?” he cries. Before Lan Zhan even responds, he’s throwing his clothes in every direction, wading into the hot water with only his thin pair of trousers to protect his nonexistent dignity. “Ah, that’s amazing. And here you were hiding this place from me. Haven’t I suffered enough?”
The hot springs of Cloud Recesses, he’s given to understand, are reserved for the Lan family’s use alone, and guests, should one of them for entirely unfathomable reasons invite them to join.
“That is the point of punishment,” Lan Zhan replies. “How did you sneak in?”
“Who said I snuck?” A natural pout forms on his lips. “Huan-ge let me in.”
“Huan-ge?!”
“Aiyou, Lan-xiansheng, Lan-xiansheng.” He slaps his palm over his mouth. Through it, he continues speaking. “I would never be so bold as to call him—”
“He would not invite such familiarity with a student and he would not have granted you entrance,” Lan Zhan says, so sure of himself, smug in his belief that his brother isn’t as prone to mischief as Wei Wuxian himself. Already, Lan Zhan is rising from the water. Fabric clings to his legs, his cock—
Wei Wuxian slaps his free hand over his eyes and spins around, but too late: the image is seared into his memory. Lan Zhan’s dick is gorgeous. Even the skin magazines Nie Huaisang finally managed to smuggle in can’t hold a candle to the weapon Lan Zhan carries around all day.
He takes another peek, but Lan Zhan has already clothed himself.
“You will return with me to the hall of discipline.”
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian cries, this time for real, or as real as a dramatic, unrepentant youth such as him can make it sound. It’s not exactly surprising, Lan Zhan wanting him to go to the hall of discipline. “Lan Zhan, I’ll behave. I just—”
“And put your clothes back on,” Lan Zhan says disdainfully, ensuring his eyes don’t fall any further than Wei Wuxian’s neck. “Indecent.”
“Like you’re so demurely dressed.” When Lan Zhan only glares at his entirely fair observation, Wei Wuxian complies with what he knows to be a snotty scowl. “You’re gonna end up alone, Lan Zhan!” he calls, cursing after him as he struggles back into his own robes, the fabric fighting him. “You’ll never get a submissive with an attitude like that!” He’s got Wei Wuxian, of course, but that hardly matters to him. “If you ever want to get laid, you’ll wind up paying for some poor submissive to take pity on you for cash! Mark my words!”
He marks them for himself to return to later, turned on by the thought of Lan Zhan paying for him, of wanting him so badly that he’d stoop to doing such a thing just to get his hands on Wei Wuxian’s body.
“No.”
“Lan-xiansheng really did give me permission to be here! He said there was plenty of room for the both of us.”
“There is not,” Lan Zhan says tartly, “and there never will be.”
*
It shouldn’t feel any different than with any of the myriad men who have seen him undressed, but it does. As he jackknifes upright, he swipes up the shirt he’d left abandoned on the edge of the bed. It’s an ugly, oversized t-shirt, fabric stretched from years of use and disuse, not anything in which he’d want to be seen by Lan Zhan. “Lan Zhan,” he says, scolding, as he crosses his arms, body pulling itself inward. “At least warn a guy.”
“I knocked several times.” His gaze lifts itself no higher than Wei Wuxian’s chin, but drifts no further down either. “And called your name. I was concerned.” He’s holding a tray, every bit of space filled with bowls, cups, plates, chopsticks, a spoon. When he finally meets Wei Wuxian’s eyes, he looks a little lost, unsure of where to look. “My apologies for startling you.”
Wei Wuxian pushes his hand through his hair. He’s worn it short for so long that he should be used to it, but simply seeing Mo Xuanyu’s made him remember what it was like before, and now he feels its loss as he tugs on the strands. “It’s fine.” Blinking a few times and rubbing his eyes, he asks, “What’s this?”
“You slept through lunch. This is… dinner, I suppose.”
Dinner? Already?
“You didn’t have to bring it here. I would have come to you.”
The corner of Lan Zhan’s mouth twitches, but he kindly refrains from contradicting Wei Wuxian. “It was no trouble.”
“But Mo Xuanyu…”
“Xuanyu will be fine for the five minutes it’s taken me to bring this tray to you. Despite his appearance, he is not particularly delicate.”
Sick at heart, Wei Wuxian can only say, “He is a fine beauty, isn’t he?” And then, because his mouth can’t help adding to his torment. “He takes it well?”
Lan Zhan inhales, pauses, doesn’t say anything despite Wei Wuxian’s masochistic need to hear Lan Zhan speak of his desire for Mo Xuanyu above all others, that what Wei Wuxian failed to do when they were young is something Mo Xuanyu has perfectly succeeded in acquiring. He needs to hear Lan Zhan say he loves Mo Xuanyu so he can let go of the dream he’s cradled close for so long.
“Come on, Lan Zhan. Even you can find something to say about the gorgeous submissive you’re keeping. He has to be something special for you to have collared him so thoroughly. I didn’t think you were the type to settle down like this.”
Lan Zhan’s shoulders tense up. His grip on the tray tightens, causing one of the cups to rattle. “Why would you believe that?
All Wei Wuxian can do is stare until he gathers enough brain cells to say, “I don’t know? You were always so buttoned down and stuffy back then. I figured maybe you—” His cheeks burn. There are some things he cannot say. Like that he might have believed there was no one out there for Lan Zhan except himself, truly a selfish, cursed thought, and unfair. Lan Zhan deserves companionship, whomever he chooses. And he shouldn’t have to deal with the grime and pain of getting it in exchange for money.
“You figured I… what?”
“Aha, nothing! Nothing, Lan Zhan.”
But Lan Zhan dredges up the same memories Wei Wuxian has of the last time they ever talked about Lan Zhan’s likelihood of finding companionship. “Do you really think I’d use a club worker’s body for my satisfaction?”
Wei Wuxian winces. Hearing Lan Zhan talk this way about what he did, it hurts a little, makes Wei Wuxian feel more used than he already does. But it is use and Lan Zhan should be displeased that Wei Wuxian once lumped him in with the kind of people who do such services. Wei Wuxian has only himself to blame for his dented pride. There are only three types, in his experience: the ones who are desperately lonely, the ones who want to punish any Dominant he can hold power over, and the ones who think they are above forming real connections to people. Just the sort of thing a youth like Lan Zhan, who carried no romance in his heart and didn’t actually seem interested in sexual activity of any kind, might do.
It’s a terrible thought to have about someone. And it’s not true. Lan Zhan isn’t like those submissives he serviced.
And worse, he’d jerked off about it a lot back then, one of his favorite fantasies. He’d pretended he was one of those submissives, imagining some horny, fun version of reality where the whoring he did in a club was the kind he wanted to be doing. Lan Zhan would have been so mean to him, would have taken him so brutally, if he bothered taking him at all and didn’t just push him around for a while and leave him to suffer—
“All I mean is, he got through that armor of yours somehow. What is that if it’s not liking someone?”
“When we are together, he is like water. Resilient,” Lan Zhan says, the words somehow both over- and underwhelming, offering no detail with which Wei Wuxian can reach a proper conclusion. What does it mean to be water? To be resilient? “I do enjoy his company.” Lan Zhan breathes out slowly, mouth slightly parted. If he has something more to say, he doesn’t say it. Instead, he steps forward and places the tray over Wei Wuxian’s knees. “You should eat.”
Wei Wuxian’s stomach is too sour with regret. He can’t do it. No matter how delicious it is—and it does look incredibly good, meat and vegetable dishes that are redolent with the spice he’s always favored—he won’t be able to eat it. The strong scent nauseates him.
“Wei Ying, you do not have to eat all of it, but you will eat.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” Lan Zhan presses the back of his hand to Wei Wuxian’s forehead. “You’re warm. Are you feeling ill?”
With embarrassment, maybe. “I’m fine. Just a little tired from the drive.”
There are two ways this can go: Lan Zhan will let it go or he will not. Wei Wuxian has been pretty lucky so far. Maybe Lan Zhan will let this go, too.
“Wei Ying, I don’t believe you.”
Apparently not.
“It’s a stomachache, Lan Zhan,” he says, fitting the shape of the lie to what he told Mo Xuanyu earlier. “I’ll get over it.”
“Thank you.” Too gently, he takes the tray from Wei Wuxian. “I’ll return shortly.”
Wei Wuxian is too mortified to do anything but stay in the bedroom despite hearing the clatter of activity coming from the kitchen. When Lan Zhan returns only fifteen minutes later, the tray holds a steaming bowl of liquid, a cup, a pot, and a wrapped ginger candy.
“Vegetable broth, plain rice,” Lan Zhan explains, “and warm water.”
“Lan Zhan, how—”
Lan Zhan places the tray over Wei Wuxian’s lap and sits on the edge of the bed, turning so one leg is hitched up. Though it’s been years since he’s heard Lan-laoxiansheng’s voice, it’s easy to conjure it in his mind. Sitting improperly is forbidden. “Eat.”
“So much for five minutes, huh?”
“It will be fine, Wei Ying. He can take care of himself.”
“Should he have to?” Piqued, he unwraps the candy and pops it into his mouth. As he sucks on it, the tension in his abdomen releases and dissipates the nausea.
“I’ve wrapped up the rest of your meal and placed it in the refrigerator. You can eat it later if you wish or not at all, but I would suggest starting with this. I will leave you alone once I’m satisfied you’ve had enough of this for sustenance.”
You can, if you wish, I would suggest…
“You’re really annoying, did you know that?” Wei Wuxian grouses.
“Haven’t you always thought that about me?”
“No.” Taking up the spoon Lan Zhan has provided, he swirls it through the thin, pale broth, letting himself fantasize about the possibility of Lan Zhan making him eat. It’s too easy to imagine the satisfaction he would feel, being forced to do something, even if it is innocuous. “I used to think you were great.”
He still does, but no need to say sappy shit like that out loud.
“Wei Ying, eat,” Lan Zhan says without any power behind it. His ears are red. He finds a piece of fuzz on his shirt and rolls it between his fingertips. When he looks up again, his expression is closed off. He adds, demanding, but not demanding enough, “Please.”
Reasonably disappointed in himself for his cowardice and unfairly disappointed in Lan Zhan for not psychically intuiting his needs, Wei Wuxian takes a bite. The broth is more flavorful than it looks, rich and lightly salted, thick with a savory flavor. This has to be homemade, something they just keep around to use in home-cooked meals. Lan Zhan gets to live the kind of life with Mo Xuanyu that involves these sorts of things.
It should be enough that he gets to share in it even temporarily, that Lan Zhan has shown as much care as he has. He feels stupid suddenly for behaving like a spoiled child, too needy and too envious. The least he can do is behave properly, not give Lan Zhan trouble, not make him ask again and again for Wei Wuxian to do the things he wants him to do. They’re easy enough to accomplish: eat, rest, show some of the liveliness he carried in his heart when he was fifteen so he knows Wei Wuxian is fine.
If he wants to, he can spin it as his way of submitting to Lan Zhan, a gesture of thanks, since Lan Zhan has no reason or inclination toward Dominating him the way he would prefer.
He’ll be good, careful. He won’t flirt or pout or invite Lan Zhan’s attention like this. He won’t sleep through dinner, won’t give Lan Zhan reason to worry about him. For six months, he can avoid taking Lan Zhan for granted.
“Thank you, Lan Zhan,” he says, between one sip of broth and the next. “It’s good.”
Lan Zhan nods in acknowledgment, adopts a smile that looks slightly pleased. Instead of getting up to leave, he hikes his knee up a little more, draws closer. It would feel deliberate—Wei Wuxian’s heart is definitely treating it as though it’s deliberate, racing as Lan Zhan nears, the gentle scent of his cologne washing across Wei Wuxian’s senses—if it wasn’t only in service of leaning toward the tray to check how much broth remains.
“Why am I annoying?” Lan Zhan asks. Apparently satisfied with Wei Wuxian’s performance, he takes the tray from Wei Wuxian’s lap and stands.
Because you can’t stay, Wei Wuxian cannot say aloud.
*
In the morning, Wei Wuxian rises early. Step one of his plan to ensure Lan Zhan has no reason to worry about him.
As he steps into the bathroom, he’s accosted with every possible product he might want. In fact, many of them are the products that had crowded the countertop in his bathroom back at the club, items he couldn’t take with him and isn’t sure he wants. Even the perfume he liked is here. Wei Wuxian can only stare at the bounty, overwhelmed by it all, before separating out the things he’ll use from the ones he might like to use, but won’t. Those are the ones that make him feel uncomfortable, like he’d be playacting the role of a submissive out to snag a Dominant.
It’s not until he’s finding room in the closet for his clothes—the options available run the gamut of presentations, Lan Zhan unable to find the shape of Wei Wuxian’s tastes in fashion back—that he realizes Lan Zhan must have snooped around the bathroom to feel so confident in his choices there. He thinks he ought to feel intruded upon, but imagining Lan Zhan doing something so illicit just to glean a bit of info about him is thrilling.
He must have felt like a creeping pervert doing it, and that delights Wei Wuxian even more. “Lan Zhan, ah, Lan Zhan. You truly are something else.”
After he’s finished hanging his things, he ponders the various cuts, colors, and fabrics that Lan Zhan has picked, touching each piece in the hope of divining the right ones to pull around his body. Eventually, he settles on his own beige tunic and a pair of fitted trousers in the same shade. The silhouette is terrible even after he tucks the tunic in, but it’s better than making a fool of himself trying to figure out on the fly what he actually would enjoy wearing.
Once he’s washed up and brushed his teeth, he steps onto the porch and surveys the courtyard. When he gets bored of standing there, he follows the path, poking his nose in the various garden areas he stumbles across. He stops when he comes across what must be Mo Xuanyu’s favorite pond. Unlike the others he’s seen, this is the only one that includes a waterproof box about the width, length, and height of multiple cushions. When he pops open the lid, he discovers he’s right.
Taking the uppermost one out, he places it near the edge of the pond and kneels, delighting in the large fish splashing around just under the surface of the water. Their white and red speckled bodies gleam in the sunlight as they dart to and fro. Occasionally, their long, flowing fins breach the surface, leaving playful, rippling trails behind them.
“They’re comet goldfish,” a gentle voice says from behind him. “In case you’re wondering.”
Heart pounding, Wei Wuxian rises smoothly and tries to brush the wrinkles from his tunic. This morning, Mo Xuanyu is dressed in pajama bottoms, a thin t-shirt, and a long, pale blue cardigan. Wei Wuxian hadn’t even heard him arrive.
“I’m glad you found them,” Mo Xuanyu says. In his hand, he’s carrying a small dish filled with dry flakes of fish food, along with lettuce leaves and a few other bits of vegetation. He retrieves one of the other cushions and places it next to Wei Wuxian’s. “When Wangji brought them for the pond, I sat with them for hours every day. I didn’t even know what type of fish they were at first.” Several of them approach, heads bobbing above water as Mo Xuanyu kneels. “I felt really stupid about it, but they’re fun to watch, you know?”
Mo Xuanyu retrieves his phone from the cardigan and pulls up a timer. With a gentle grace Wei Wuxian wouldn’t have been able to match, he flicks his hair over his shoulder and looks back at Wei Wuxian. Instead of a prettily decorated ponytail, it’s now carefully braided low over his shoulder. Wei Wuxian wonders if Lan Zhan braided it for him. “Would you like to feed them with me?”
Wei Wuxian approaches, eager to push the thought of Lan Zhan playing with Mo Xuanyu’s hair from his mind. “I’ve never done it before.” Funny. He grew up around water, but there had always been hired help to care for the fish.
“That’s alright.” He starts the timer and picks up a pinch of the flakes, sprinkling them into the water. The fish kiss the surface, sliding next to one another to get their share. “We just do this for about two minutes.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Wei Wuxian repeats Mo Xuanyu’s actions precisely, waiting until Mo Xuanyu nods to let the flakes fall into the churning, bubbling water.
“You can ask about our relationship, you know,” Mo Xuanyu says as he shreds and tosses in a piece of lettuce. It floats on the surface for the length of a breath before it’s snatched up.
“I don’t want to pry.”
“I’d like you to get to know us,” Mo Xuanyu says. “Besides, you’re his friend.”
“If Lan Zhan wants me to know, he’ll tell me.”
“What if I want you to know?”
Wei Wuxian freezes, flakes cupped in the palm of his hand. “Why would you want that?”
“I’d like you to get to know me, too. It would be nice if we could be friends, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so,” Wei Wuxian agrees, though he can’t fathom why Mo Xuanyu would want that. “Lan Zhan didn’t mention how you met. I’ve been kind of curious about that.”
Mo Xuanyu ducks his head and smiles ruefully.
“A true romance for the ages,” Mo Xuanyu replies, tone dry with amusement. When Wei Wuxian merely quirks his eyebrow, he continues, “I ran into him at the train station. Quite literally, to my mortification. He, um. Mistook me for you.”
“What?”
“I think I must look like you did once,” he says, “sort of. Obviously I’m shorter than you, but maybe… you couldn’t always have been so tall, right?”
Baffled, all he can say is, “Right.” Back when Lan Zhan knew him best, he had been shorter, slighter, his features a bit sharper, like Mo Xuanyu’s are now. Some of that is because he hadn’t hit his final growth spurt at Cloud Recesses, but some of it is the fact that he’d purposefully broadened out, exercising according to a strict regimen set by Madam Yang that encouraged muscle growth. He supposes, if he lets himself think about it, he can see the resemblance.
Considering Lan Zhan hadn’t seen him in years by that point, it’s a fair enough mistake to have made. He tries to make himself feel numb to it, but can’t. Lan Zhan thought Mo Xuanyu was him and then what? They fucked about it?
“I bet if your hair was longer…” Mo Xuanyu says, reaching for him.
Wei Wuxian jerks away from the brush of Mo Xuanyu’s fingertips against his temple. Before he can apologize, the phone’s alarm goes off. Wei Wuxian startles at the shrill, violent interruption of it, Mo Xuanyu does, too.
“Sorry.” Lowering his gaze to the bowl of fish flakes, he pinches a sizeable portion and flings it at the pond before dumping the rest of the vegetables in: more lettuce, some peas, things Wei Wuxian never would have imagined fish eating. The fish don’t seem to mind the sudden bounty, happily feeding upon what’s been given to them. “That was incredibly rude of me.”
“It’s okay.” Honestly, people have done worse to him for more nefarious reasons. “Really.”
Offering a lopsided grin, Mo Xuanyu repays his equanimity with a truth too ugly to be a lie. “I was a mess when Wangji met me. Nineteen and full of shit, getting into trouble with the posse of Dominants who run my father’s companies just to give him a real reason to loathe me.”
Mo Xuanyu must recognize something in Wei Wuxian’s expression, because he laughs knowingly, a little too knowingly, the kind that itches just beneath the surface of Wei Wuxian’s skin.
“It’s in the past now anyway,” he says, sounding impossibly young. Nothing, in Wei Wuxian’s experience, stays in the past, not when there’s enough past there to catch up to you. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t feel the need to do that sort of thing anymore.”
“Still. You don’t have to—I didn’t mean to ask a loaded question.”
“It’s bound to come up eventually, right? I’d rather you hear it from me.”
Wei Wuxian can definitely understand that. “Alright.”
“Anyway, Wangji… after we ran into one another on the train, I started to hit on him, just constantly annoying him. I thought it would be fun to debase one of the twin jades of the Lan Group, but he’d just take me to dinner or wherever I wanted to go when I asked. At first, I thought it was because he was pretending he was a gentleman, but eventually I realized that he was just doing it to keep me from doing something really stupid and dangerous to get laid in ways my dad would finds shameful.”
“How did you even know where to find him?”
“Ha, my half-brother is… his own kind of mess, but he works with Xichen-ge. They were always at one of Jin Enterprise’s parties and Wangji was often roped into coming, too.”
“Your half-brother is Jin Guangyao?”
“Yeah.”
Too curious to stop himself, he asks, “So how did you get from hitting on Lan Zhan to feeding his fish?”
Rolling one shoulder, Mo Xuanyu says, “May I be coarse for a moment?”
Wei Wuxian’s mouth twitches in suppressed fascination. “Sure.”
“I fucked around real hard trying to get his attention one night. The ‘I’m pretty sure I would have been disowned if I’d succeeded’ kind of fucked around. He caught me before I got very far and, well, he told me if I stopped messing around, he’d put me under when I needed it. I was ‘making it obvious I needed some kind of stress relief.’“
Wei Wuxian’s heart freezes over, feeding glass-sharp shards of ice into his arteries, painful as they rip through his body. He aches for that kind of attention from Lan Zhan, for him to see and know and do something about it.
“And he did do that for a while. All non-sexual stuff. He might as well have worked in a clinic for how distant and professional he was about it. For a long time, I didn’t feel anything for him except resentment, but I kept coming back and he kept accepting me. Eventually, I realized I cared for him deeply. He tried to warn me off, but I kept pursuing him. I don’t think many people pay attention to him, you know? But I did. I learned about all of his favorite things and bullied him into doing them. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, the year I spent wooing him.” A gentle smile steals across Mo Xuanyu’s mouth. “I think he was as caught off guard when he finally accepted my confession as I was. We’ve been together ever since.”
Swallowing around the ugly, misshapen lump of jealousy caught in his throat, Wei Wuxian smiles back. “How long ago was that?”
“We’ve known each other almost four years now. We’ve been together… ten months, I think? Almost a year anyway.”
Ten months. He almost asks at what point Lan Zhan collared him, but that feels too intrusive. “That’s really sweet. I’m happy for you both.”
Mo Xuanyu’s nose wrinkles, utterly destroying the image Wei Wuxian has of him being the perfect submissive. Clearly, he’s some kind of nymph, too playful to be perfect. No doubt Lan Zhan’s got his hands full with him. “That’s a little sappy, isn’t it?”
It’s exactly what Wei Wuxian would want if he was in Mo Xuanyu’s shoes. Hell, it’s what he wants now in his own, too close to Mo Xuanyu’s for comfort. “Grow up, would you?” he says teasingly. “It’s okay to be sappy sometimes.”
Mo Xuanyu’s eyes twinkle brightly. “I really am glad Wangji brought you,” he says. “You’re easy to talk to. You don’t judge. And now I can make you feed the fish for me. I didn’t know you woke up early, too.”
“Pfft. I’d like to see you try.”
He juts out his lower lip in a cute little pout, but is only able to hold it together for a handful of seconds before another smile breaks across his face. “Alright, fine. Wangji did say you like to sleep in.”
Mo Xuanyu is nothing like Jiang Cheng, but he’s always been a soft touch for those who are younger than him wanting things from him. If Lan Zhan had ever asked for something in earnest—requests that he respect the rules don’t count—Wei Wuxian would have been too weak to do anything other than give it to him even though he’s barely younger than Wei Wuxian. “I’ll feed the fish with you.”
As Mo Xuanyu rises, some of the elegance of his bearing returns to him. Given what he now knows about Mo Xuanyu, he wonders if Lan Zhan himself trained Mo Xuanyu in how to comport himself.
“I can see why he fell for you,” Wei Wuxian says, clamoring to his feet with far less grace.
“Oh?” Mo Xuanyu tilts his head and hugs the empty fish food bowl to his chest. “Why do you think he fell for me?”
“I think he likes to engage with relentless little demons.”
“And you think I’m one?”
“Of course, you are. You’re the worst I’ve ever seen. Absolutely shameless.”
“Even worse than you were?”
His memories of the last decade are smeared over by a cacophony of screams, needy, sharp, violent, vicious, erotic, desperate, painful, horny, so many kinds of screams that he can’t even visualize his own life without discordant sounds drenching each image in noise. He cannot truly remember what he was like at Mo Xuanyu’s age, beyond the fact that he would not have appealed to Lan Zhan by then no matter how much he tried to woo Lan Zhan.
“Yes,” he says, “you’re definitely worse than me.”