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
- non-descript references to injuries and scars Wei Wuxian sustained during his time with Wen Chao
- a vague reference to Wen Chao taking unpleasant advantage of situations where he believes Wei Wuxian owes him apology
Two days later, Mo Xuanyu shouts through the door, announcing his arrival with the shout of, “Package!” and then a thud, a knock, and a swear word signaling that Mo Xuanyu is having difficulty juggling it. The noise rouses Wei Wuxian from the nap he’s accidentally taken, head pressed to the couch cushions in the living room.
“Sorry,” he calls as he hurries over, straightening his lounge pants and the oversized shirt he’s wearing. He fears he looks like he’s been wallowing, when really, he’d only been lying there, staring at the ceiling, trying to decide what he wanted to do today.
He slides the door aside and takes his package along with a smaller one, its cardboard flaps open at one end. He jolts with shame until he notices the white box inside says Huawei and realizes it’s the phone Lan Zhan promised him and not something that might raise questions. His own box is a little cumbersome, but clearly hasn’t been opened, safely sealed with four or five layers of packaging tape. “You should’ve had me come get it,” Wei Wuxian scolds, gesturing Mo Xuanyu inside with a jerk of his head.
“It was no trouble,” Mo Xuanyu says, following him. “Wangji has already set up the phone, but I can help you customize it further.”
“Am I illiterate?” Wei Wuxian grouses. “I’m sure I can figure it out. What was there to set up anyway?”
“Password manager, streaming log-ins, payment information.” The way he’s ticking it all off his fingertips, Wei Wuxian wonders if they’ll be there all day talking about the many and varied miracles of modern phone technology. “He added a profile for you on Taobao and Tmall with his payment info, so you can make whatever purchases you’d like.”
Sounds like a pain in the ass to Wei Wuxian.
“He did all that for me?” How much more can he possibly owe Lan Zhan before the weight of his attentiveness gets to be too much?
A disbelieving expression crosses Mo Xuanyu’s face as Wei Wuxian abandons his own purchase in the corner of the living room.
“What?” Wei Wuxian asks.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Maybe it’s something private,” Wei Wuxian says, hedging.
Mo Xuanyu ducks his head. He’s not put his hair up in a ponytail or a braid, so the long, wayward strands sit freely over his shoulder. He pushes a few flyaways behind his ears and makes a motion as though to put it all up before releasing it again, the motion habitual. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
This kid is too earnest. Wei Wuxian can’t give him any trouble at all without finding himself on the receiving end of a doe-eyed look of remorse.
“It’s fine,” Wei Wuxian says. “Nothing very interesting.”
“Uh, huh.”
“Let a man have his hobbies, huh?” If he told Mo Xuanyu what he’s up to, Mo Xuanyu would get interested, and Wei Wuxian can’t help but cringe at how Lan Zhan would receive it when he inevitably found out. “Why don’t we have some tea? It’s the least I can do since you hauled my stuff all the way back here.”
“It really was nothing,” Mo Xuanyu insists, trailing after him obediently into the kitchen. “Truly, it didn’t even weigh that much. You should see how heavy some of the things I buy can get. Wangji is always complaining that I’ll ruin my back if I’m not careful, but he’s always been protective.”
“Has he?”
“Mmhmm. I don’t think I’ve ever been with a Dominant who dotes so much. You should—”
But whatever he should do is something he doesn’t want to hear about. “Sit. Have tea with me.” Wei Wuxian heats water, gathers cups, collects the pot. Lan Zhan has supplied him with such a wide variety of teas that he doesn’t know where to begin. Each portion of leaves has been sealed in delicate envelopes of expensive paper, their name and provenance carefully inked on the front. They live in an ornately carved wooden box that sits on the counter. If he thinks Wei Wuxian wouldn’t recognize his calligraphy thirteen years after the last time Wei Wuxian saw it, he might need to look into that.
Wei Wuxian does not want to think about how much trouble it’s been to gather it all together.
Though Mo Xuanyu moves as though he intends to make tea for them both, Wei Wuxian refuses with a curt shake of his head. If he doesn’t take some small degree of control from this situation—the sort of control he wants, not the kind that has been unnaturally imposed upon him—he fears he’ll do something very impulsive, though what that impulsive thing might be, he can’t say for sure yet. “I told you to sit,” he says, only realizing when Mo Xuanyu immediately complies that he’d leaned into the demand the way he would have with a submissive at the club.
His stomach lurches. Though he would apologize, he feels his shame too deeply. Instead, he focuses on what’s right in front of him. The familiarity is a comfort, unlocks the chains that so easily locked themselves around his body in that moment of play-pretend dominance.
The act of brewing this tea is soothing, though less than beautiful when the accoutrements are so everyday. A kettle is a kettle, no matter how sleek and shiny and new it might be. The cups are but stylish cups. “I spent a month learning how to make tea at Cloud Recesses,” he finds himself saying, capturing what little of the past he can grasp between his hands. “You should have heard me complain.” He smiles, sniffing the tea leaves, a little smoky for his tastes, but nice. He rolls one dry curl between his fingertips simply because he can. “You’d have thought they were locking me in a room with no plan to ever let me out again.”
The corner of Mo Xuanyu’s mouth twitches.
“We were tested on it, all of us submissives. I completed mine blindfolded to make a point.” He laughs. “Lan Zhan was my proctor, of course, but I didn’t realize it until afterward. He docked me a point for burning my knuckle on the tea pot. Lan-laoxiansheng was livid afterward.”
Mo Xuanyu’s cheeks flush a becoming shade of pink.
“You know that story, too?”
Mo Xuanyu nods, smiling.
“Heh, don’t try to impress Lan Zhan with it. You’d think there’s not a romantic bone in his body for how he reacted.”
“I think he simply dislikes seeing the people he cares for injured.”
“There’s not a lot in this world worth the pain it can cause,” Wei Wuxian says, “but ensuring a good cup of tea is one of them.”
Mo Xuanyu’s smile broadens. “You’re full of shit, ge.”
“Oh?”
Taking the cup Wei Wuxian bestows upon him, he says, “You don’t look like any masochistic aesthete I’ve ever met.”
“Oh, you’ve met a lot of those, have you? So worldly,” Wei Wuxian says. He’s met more than his fair share. At least them, he understands. It’s not often easy to find a Dominant with enough sensitivity to appreciate their desires. If he had to choose a favorite sort of client, it would be those individuals who made him feel like he was doing something beautiful to them. “Then what am I?”
“Someone who wants to take care of the people he loves,” Mo Xuanyu says plainly, “and doesn’t mind too much when that care hurts him in return.”
At Mo Xuanyu’s words, Wei Wuxian’s heart seizes up. His throat dries. He pours himself a cup of tea and downs it without much thought to the flavor, pours another and lifts it in a half-hearted salute, wishing it was a good, strong baijiu instead.
“I notice you didn’t burn your knuckle just to make me a perfect cup of tea. Here, I thought we were getting along so well.”
“Lan Zhan’s house, Lan Zhan’s rules.”
Mo Xuanyu inexpertly pivots the conversation. Wei Wuxian appreciates that about him.
“Speaking of Wangji, he usually practices guqin this time of day.” Mo Xuanyu brings his cup to his mouth. His palm half hides its rounded shape as he sips it.He tells Wei Wuxian that Lan Zhan he usually sits near their pond, though on the opposite side where it’s paved. “You ought to go see him. I’ll be busy this afternoon with guests. We wouldn’t want him to get lonely, would we?”
Though he could ask, it doesn’t take much to guess, particularly when accompanied by a fond, distant smile, but it surprises him.
Lan Zhan always came across as sharp, not exactly possessive, but not not possessive either. Wei Wuxian wouldn’t have expected Lan Zhan to agree to his submissive seeing others without his supervision.
“Does he get lonely?” Wei Wuxian asks, a far more pressing question than prying into Lan Zhan’s love life.
*
After Mo Xuanyu leaves, Wei Wuxian goes to the closet and finds himself stymied to discover he’s forgotten to launder the tunic he usually wears. Everything else, even those things dyed in paler shades, are all more colorful than he’s used to wearing. The number of options paralyzes him.
He eventually yanks a shapeless pale blue shirt off a hanger without letting himself think too hard about it and pairs it with a pair of slim, dark trousers. The whole time he’s dressing, he tells himself he’s not choosing what he thinks Mo Xuanyu might wear under the circumstances.
When he’s satisfied with his appearance, he returns to the kitchen and hunts around in the box of tea for a variety he knows Lan Zhan will like. He also does a cursory search for a more aesthetically pleasing kettle, something a little more enjoyable than the functional one Lan Zhan’s chosen for him, but he finds nothing of the sort. Maybe he’ll have to spend more of Lan Zhan’s money, promising to pay him back later. He misses doing things the slow way, even if it is rather silly.
As the water boils, he rinses the pot and cups he’d used earlier with Mo Xuanyu. By the time he’s done, his mind is little more than the fuzz of white noise buzzing in his ears.
Setting a timer on his phone, he pours hot water into the pot of leaves, gathers everything onto the tray and makes his way toward the pond. The yearning strain of the guqin is audible before he even sees Lan Zhan. He steels himself for the sight of Lan Zhan kneeling before his guqin, a favorite sight when he was young.
Lan Zhan’s practice continues until Wei Wuxian’s nearly on top of him, his attention fully dedicated to playing. How Mo Xuanyu can bear to spend time with Wei Wuxian when he should very much prefer listening with his whole heart to the music Lan Zhan makes is beyond him.
If Lan Zhan lets him stay, Wei Wuxian will owe him even more. Even a symbolic gesture of thanks will be better than none. Balance the books a little, if only within his own heart.
Holding the tray one handed, he drags first one sweaty palm down his flank, then the other, approaching slowly and quietly on the off chance Lan Zhan hasn’t already noticed his arrival.
The song ends on a sonorous note, melancholic all the way down to its twanging heart. It isn’t one Wei Wuxian has heard before.
Lan Zhan lifts his gaze, smiles gently at Wei Wuxian, and gestures for him to retrieve a pillow from the box nearer to the pond itself. He himself is sitting on a short wooden stool he’s brought, height perfectly matched to the table on which the guqin sits. There’s little enough room for the tray on that table. Considering what Wei Wuxian intends to do, it’s just as well.
This section of the courtyard is flat and composed of intricately laid brick. It’s the perfect surface on which to place a tray, and equally good for kneeling when one is attempting to be contrite.
It feels rather perversely good, the sharp bursts of pain radiating from his knees as they meet the unforgiving brick, the dignified, ritualized acknowledgment of his status and wrongdoings. He’d accepted punishments cheerfully enough when he was younger, begged pardon with good humor and little repentance, but as he grew older, slights and indignities piling up around him, he could no longer do it easily or well. This is hard for him. It means something, that he is doing this.
“I’ve been negligent in thanking you for your generosity,” he says, pressing his hands to the brick as he inclines his head, offering his neck, a metaphor—he has only his neck to offer. Though he knows Lan Zhan won’t take it literally, not the way Wen Chao had, time and time again, but his voice comes out shaky, an embarrassment to them both surely.
“Wei Ying.” Lan Zhan stands, takes a moment to return his guqin to its case, and rounds the table. He kneels, too, and pulls Wei Wuxian upright, one hand curving around Wei Wuxian’s shoulder, the other tipping his chin up. “What are you doing?”
He turns out of Lan Zhan’s touch, unable to meet his eyes.
Since he cannot look at Lan Zhan, so he pours tea for him, wondering at how steady his hands are as he holds the cup out for him to take. “I haven’t thanked you properly.” He can speak some of the truth, at least. “And Mo Xuanyu suggested I come. He said you might be lonely.”
Lan Zhan’s expression softens. “He might get it in his mind that you can be bullied into doing as he wishes if you follow his suggestions.”
“Is he that much of a brat?”
“Less of one than you used to be,” Lan Zhan replies, honesty for honesty, “but more of one than you are now.”
“We all have to learn our lesson sometime.”
“Do we?”
“Most Dominants take it as a challenge to their authority” As he speaks, the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. This is as close as he’s ever come to talking about his only experience with a formal partner. There are scars on his body, badges of honor, he likes to think of them, that speak to the utter failure of that relationship. “Am I wrong?”
“The reinforcement of previously given lessons can be pleasurable when both parties know the experience is coming from a place of joy,” Lan Zhan says. Then, somber, aggrieved, “Wei Ying, I’m sorry you were contracted with an individual with whom you are incompatible. You deserved more than that.”
Wei Wuxian’s throat closes around a thick, twisted lump of emotion, sadness, happiness. He doesn’t know what it is. Lan Zhan’s the first person who has ever expressed remorse for what happened to him.
“That time is done.” Wei Wuxian coughs delicately into his sleeve. “And he paid for it in the end.”
Lan Zhan’s gaze cuts sharply toward him. “Not enough.”
“You shouldn’t wish ill of others, Lan Zhan,” he says, reciting one of Lan Zhan’s family’s rule back at him. “It wasn’t a good way to go.”
“You were there?” Lan Zhan asks, flat, horrified. “Were you injured?”
He fusses with the tea pot, checks the timer. Only a few seconds remain on it. He cancels it out, calmer than he ought to feel at having slipped so thoroughly, and removes the basket with the tea leaves.
“Wei Ying?”
Wei Wuxian pours Lan Zhan a cup of tea and hands it to him. Though he takes it, he immediately lifts it to Wei Wuxian’s mouth, encouraging him to drink instead, his knuckle brushing lightly over Wei Wuxian’s chin. It’s not his best work, this pot—an oversight that Wei Wuxian hopes can be forgiven—but Wei Wuxian feels certain he’s never tasted anything quite as good, even with the excess of tannins flooding his taste buds. “Yes. I was injured.”
Lan Zhan opens his mouth, surely to pester him further, and snaps it shut again. “I should not have spoken so lightly of this,” he says when he is able to speak again.
“Lan Zhan—”
“Thank you for the tea, Wei Ying, and for coming to see me. I hope…”
“You hope?”
“I hope, despite my clumsiness, you’ll feel inclined to do so in the future.”
He’s been an uncordial guest when Lan Zhan has been nothing but welcoming. He resolves to do better. “You should thank Mo Xuanyu for insisting.”
“I will.”
“How long will Mo Xuanyu be busy?”
“Through the evening, I expect.”
“Do you…?”
“I have not.”
“Are you lonely, Lan Zhan?”
“Not because Mo Xuanyu spends time with others,” Lan Zhan answers.
“Then…” But he can’t ask that, and Lan Zhan doesn’t offer further explanation. Wei Wuxian doesn’t know Lan Zhan well enough these days to find the boundaries across which he should not leap. He cannot guess. Perhaps an evening to himself is a welcome opportunity. Maybe it’s only Wei Wuxian who would prefer the company of a friend or lover or both wrapped in one. “What will you do tonight?”
“Prepare dinner. Maybe read. Go to bed.”
That sounds so perfectly like Lan Zhan, yet to Wei Wuxian’s ears, it seems so small and sad. For reasons he cannot understand, he blurts out the first thing that pops into his head. “Can I help?”
Lan Zhan searches his face, eyes bright, mouth slightly parted in surprise. “You would want to?”
He nods, unable to bear the thought of going back to his own residence knowing he hasn’t offered. It feels like courage to double down. “Only if you don’t mind.”
If he had any doubts about Lan Zhan’s sincerity, they’d be wiped away by the warm smile he gives to Wei Wuxian, somehow even more vibrant than the one he spared earlier. Wei Wuxian could get addicted to inflicting these smiles on himself.
“I would like that, Wei Ying.”