It’s still dark when Wei Wuxian arrives, smiling and smug and satisfied, at Cloud Recesses’ entrance. As he bounces on the balls of his feet, he studies the ancient stone entryway — conveniently ignoring the ludicrously oversized wall of rules that accompany it — with the sort of focus he typically reserves for the duels he and his mother regularly engage in. Cloud Recesses is well known for its security and Wei Wuxian intends to flaunt it. Such a thing requires the utmost care and attention.
Even his mother, difficult to impress or beat when it comes to mischief, had applauded his ingenuity when he’d informed her of what he’s planning to do.
“I understand the impulse, Ying er. Lans are very fun to tease,” she had said, laughing, when they’d parted ways at Gusu’s southwestern border, “but I hope you know I won’t be able to smooth things over for you with Qiren xiong if you’re caught. He might punish you even more severely knowing I have to claim you as my own flesh and blood.”
Any punishment would be worth it for even a glimpse of Lan Zhan’s face, but if he succeeds today, he’ll no longer be subject to the whims of fateful meetings in the forests around Gusu on those rare occasions his family’s neverending travels line up with Lan Zhan’s hunts.
Tucking himself into the underbrush, he peels a person-shaped slip of talisman paper from his robes and presses his fingers to his forehead. Cradling it in his palms, he anchors a piece of his soul to it. Of its own accord, it pushes itself to its feet and hops, catching itself on the chill breeze that’s picked up and begun rustling the leaves around him. He’d worked so hard to refine the technique until only a little bit of him infused the paper. Risking his entire life on this, well. Lan Zhan nor his parents would be very pleased with him.
Besides, and more importantly, the talisman carries so little of his physical or spiritual presence, there’s no way Lan Zhan can find out what he’s up to before he finds Lan Zhan first.
The talisman taps at the barrier, causing not a single disturbance in it. In response, his fingertips tingle. “Makes sense,” he whispers, intrigued. Then the talisman throws itself at the barrier and Wei Wuxian finds himself less sanguine as his whole body goes numb. “Cut that out!” he tells it. “I’d like to be able to greet Lan Zhan properly, you know?”
It spins around, hands on its hips as it bends at the waist in his direction, and then rounds the entrance, kicking at the boundary where the barrier extends a little past the stone. Here, it’s weaker. Or at least Wei Wuxian’s toes don’t hurt. The talisman seems to notice something because it’s suddenly crouching down. For a handful of moments, it digs. Then, finally, it shimmies beneath the barrier as Wei Wuxian’s back itches from the unusual sensation.
Safely on the other side, it waves at Wei Wuxian, body tilted so it can raise its paper arm. To be honest, it comes off a little smug. Though Wei Wuxian ought not to be so pleased with himself, he can’t help but admire his own genius from time to time. Seems like the little paperman feels the same.
As it floats off, Wei Wuxian slumps back and focuses the entirety of his attention on getting the talisman through Cloud Recesses unnoticed.
Over the years, Lan Zhan’s offered bits and pieces about his life in this most hallowed and revered of spaces. None have captivated Wei Wuxian as much as his descriptions of the jingshi. After all, who wouldn’t want to see Lan Zhan’s private rooms? From the outside, it’s as beautiful as Wei Wuxian might have expected.
Because it’s not yet mao shi, Lan Zhan can’t be awake. There’s time to snoop.
If the talisman could grin, it would.
The talisman slides easily between the door and the wall and studies the interior on Wei Wuxian’s behalf. Though Wei Wuxian can see everything, it’s not enough for this greedy heart of his. He wants to know if it’s cold or if it smells of the same sandalwood scent that clings to Lan Zhan’s robes or if the air tastes different up there. Everything that can be learned about the place Lan Zhan calls home, he wants to know. He’ll have to adjust the talisman somehow.
At Wei Wuxian’s behest, it looks around, filling Wei Wuxian’s vision with all the confirmation he could hope for. In every respect, the space is Lan Zhan’s. Clean, neat, tasteful. It’s a room that could only belong to a gentleman of Lan Zhan’s caliber, meaning it could only belong to Lan Zhan.
Anyone would be lucky to find themselves in such a settled place. It’s beautiful and peaceful. It perfectly suits Lan Zhan. Wei Wuxian thinks it might one day suit him, too, passing all his days with Lan Zhan in this bed, on that porch, draped over the dining desk tucked into the corner of the room.
He will free his parents from the home he’s tied them to since his birth. There is no fear in him that Lan Zhan will want to live the life of a traveling cultivator.
Too eager, he finally allows the talisman to approach Lan Zhan’s form, prone, resting peacefully. He sleeps like the dead, if the dead could pout and huff gentle little breaths. He cannot help but land the talisman on Lan Zhan’s posed hands, as comfortable a chair as any. Though the talisman might do any number of things to wake him, Wei Wuxian finds waiting patiently for him to rouse of his own accord to be the sweeter alternative.
He is rewarded handsomely for his patience when Lan Zhan opens his bright, beautiful eyes and smiles at him.
“Wei Ying,” he says, lifting the talisman so he can better see it. “I was wondering when you might try sneaking in. I never thought it would be in such a fashion as this.”
The only major downside to this form is the fact that he can’t speak, but he doesn’t have to, not when he can spread the talisman’s arms and bow theatrically in reply. Are you surprised, Lan Zhan?
“Remain here. I will arrange breakfast and meet you by the gates. I won’t take long.” He gently settles the talisman on the bed after tidying it. As he walks toward the cabinet where his clothes must be, a privacy screen hiding such items, he says, “No peeking.”
The talisman tosses off a salute or tries to. It’s rather difficult with such a crude figure. Perhaps next time Wei Wuxian will cut the shape more precisely. He does manage to shade its eyes with the blob-like arms. No peeking. I promise.
By the time Lan Zhan reaches him, talisman tucked safely into his robes, pressed against his heart, the beat of which Wei Wuxian feels within his own chest, he’s vibrating with the need to see him.
As soon as their eyes lock, Wei Wuxian’s as gone on him as he’d been the first time their paths crossed so long ago, the both of them too young to know what it meant when one’s heart fills itself so full it threatens to overspill. Wei Wuxian knows now. He thinks Lan Zhan does, too.
One day, he’ll ask Lan Zhan the question that’s seared into his bones and infuses his blood, but right now, he has this at least, clever tricks that prove he is a cultivator worth valuing.
“You take too many chances,” Lan Zhan says, returning the talisman to him. Though he takes it, he only keeps it long enough to absorb the bit of his cognition he’s placed within it. Once that’s done, he hands it back to Lan Zhan.
Lan Zhan tucks the talisman back into the folds of his robes and presses his hand to his chest. “Have you considered asking to be let in?”
“Only a reasonable person would do that. When have I ever given you the impression I’m a reasonable person?” He elbows Lan Zhan just for the excuse to get a little nearer to him. “Let’s go into town, yeah?”
The corner of Lan Zhan’s mouth twitches as he gestures down the path, their goal clear: Caiyi for a bit of fun. He continues teasing Wei Wuxian in his way. “A letter might be appropriate alternative.”
“Aiyo, I can’t let you see my atrocious calligraphy. It would be too embarrassing. What if someone intercepts it? I’ll be in so much trouble. Who’s in charge of discipline? He’ll beat me with a ferule for sure and then he’ll make me practice. Worse, he’ll think I’m corrupting his students.”
“Are you not?”
“Lan Zhan, I’ll have you know I’m a perfect gentleman. I’d never take advantage or corrupt anyone, not even you. My parents raised a proper child. I intend to do this right.” One day, he’ll be a well-established, well-renown cultivator. Even if he has no sect affiliation, he will be accepted. And when he is, he’ll work up the nerve to ask who Lan Zhan’s parents are and beg his own to meet them. Wei Wuxian knows enough about Lan Zhan’s sect to know they’re members of the Lan clan proper, which means he’ll have to be very good to deserve him.
“By sneaking into my room before daylight?”
“Except for that.” Wei Wuxian looks at him from the corner of his eye. “You like it. Anyway, I didn’t do anything untoward.”
Lan Zhan has nothing to say to that.
But Wei Wuxian is different: he has so much to say about everything. “Speaking of untoward, have I ever told you about the first time my mother snuck into my father’s quarters in Lotus Pier?”
The story’s recitation occupies the entire walk into Caiyi and by the end of it, Lan Zhan’s ears are burning red. He can’t meet Wei Wuxian’s eyes.
Wei Wuxian cannot help but be charmed. “See, Lan Zhan? I’m not so bad after all, huh?”
Golden pink light drenches the streets, bridges, and waterways of Caiyi, ostensibly Wei Wuxian’s favorite town in the whole wide world. A staggering number of girls haul baskets of various goods around on the gentle slopes of their hips. They call out happily to Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan, begging for a glance from the pair of handsome young gongzi as they go about their business. Boatmen navigate the canals, broad shoulders flexing as they shout to one another. Old and young alike travel down these joyously lively streets. There’s something to look at in every direction, but not one of the beautiful things he sees stands a chance against Lan Zhan’s profile as it soaks up the warm morning sunshine.
A merchant selling pretty silk umbrellas shouts for their attention. Surely two fine young gentleman are in need of protection from the elements? The sun shines far too brightly to go about with nothing, isn’t it so?
Because Wei Wuxian thinks Lan Zhan would look too fetching with an umbrella in hand, his belt finds itself lightened by a coin or two.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, fond, as Wei Wuxian presses it into his hand. Myriad shades of blue and green swirl over the umbrella’s silk skin, so thin that it’s almost translucent. The sunlight casts cool colors across Lan Zhan’s face through it, shadows dark where the ribs block the light.
“So I was right,” Wei Wuxian says before racing off to the wine shop on the other side of the road. Once it’s properly open, he’ll definitely be coming back to buy a few jars. When Lan Zhan catches up, he places himself so close to Wei Wuxian’s side that Wei Wuxian finds himself protected from the sun, too.
Despite the shade afforded to him by the umbrella, sweat trickles in thin, warm rivulets down Wei Wuxian’s spine. In contrast, Lan Zhan appears no worse for wear. It might as well be deepest winter for how affected he is by the overbearing heat of summer.
As they stroll around, Lan Zhan buys everything that Wei Wuxian takes even a passing fancy to. Toys, a book, a rather flirtatiously delivered comb. Wei Wuxian’s just about to suggest lunch when he catches sight of a handful of pretty girls, pretty girls in robes and carrying swords. They’re giggling over an open book held between the lot of them.
Wei Wuxian’s a fan of giggling. It usually means something interesting is happening. He points discreetly and nudges Lan Zhan, who’s attention is on a teahouse a little further down the street. “Psst. Lan Zhan, let’s go check it out.”
“What is—” Though Lan Zhan’s skin is usually pale, it goes ashen as his gaze follows Wei Ying’s finger. “Wei Ying, we shouldn’t.”
“Ah? Lan Zhan, why not? You’re not afraid of girls, are you?”
“I am not,” he confirms, though his eyes seem kind of wide for someone who isn’t. When Wei Wuxian touches his wrist, his pulse pounds desperately against his fingers.
Wei Wuxian is interested now for an entirely different reason. If Lan Zhan’s not afraid of them, he’s doing a very good job pretending.
“Come on. You know I’ll be awful if I don’t find out what’s going on.” Before Lan Zhan can complain, Wei Wuxian’s dragging him over. Lan Zhan remains reluctant and stubborn the whole way. “Fair maidens,” he says, grinning. “Might I take a peek?”
Two of the girls separate, offering enough room for him to squeeze in without risking the appearance of indecency. Lan Zhan remains a few steps away, face turned.
The book contains a painting of a handsome young man along with various pieces of information about him: name, age, sect, accomplishments, a number indicating his rank is twelfth. But twelfth what? Wei Wuxian flips a page and then another. More young men, each as strapping as the last. “What is this? I see a lot of handsome cultivators here, but I’m not listed anywhere. This seems rigged. Lan Zhan, wouldn’t you agree?” But Lan Zhan has retreated during the scant seconds Wei Wuxian’s been busy studying the tome. In fact, he’s standing next to the nearby canal and pretending he’s very interested in the water.
“Gongzi is very handsome,” one of the girls says agreeably, eyes only for Wei Wuxian. The rest? Well…
The rest start whispering to one another, mouths hidden behind hands and fans and gently falling strands of hair. Their eyes are no longer on Wei Wuxian. This is not a thing he’s very used to.
“He’s even more handsome than his portrait,” they say to one another. “If he’s number two, I can’t imagine how his brother must look. Gongzi, how handsome is his brother? Surely you’ve seen him if you’re close enough to spend time with him.”
“Not handsome at all,” Wei Wuxian says, distracted, though he has no idea if that’s true or not. Wei Wuxian hadn’t even known that Lan Zhan has a brother before this moment. “If Lan Zhan’s second place, who could be first?” He pushes through a few more pages and finds the one belonging to Lan Zhan. The painting barely does him justice, though the biography is appropriately comprehensive, conveying enough about Lan Zhan’s heroics that even Wei Wuxian’s satisfied.
Reading it over a second time, more thoroughly, his heart sinks. He’d skimmed the part about his lineage. Only on this pass does he note it: Lan Zhan’s not only the sect leader’s son, but he’s the nephew of Lan Qiren. His mother’s very own Qiren xiong, notorious in his loathing of her.
His determination to know Lan Zhan has carried him to this point and Lan Zhan’s willingness, his eagerness to be known, has allowed it. Though they haven’t discussed their intentions in great depth, they share an understanding, the same longing.
This information closes every door Wei Wuxian’s held open all this time with grit alone.
Wei Wuxian is a wandering cultivator. His parents are wandering cultivators. No matter how famed Cangse sanren is, her name doesn’t carry the cachet needed to form a legitimate attachment to one with such standing as Lan Zhan has. Had he been the simple clan member Wei Wuxian has expected, Wei Wuxian might have sufficed given enough time. But Lan Zhan is no mere clan member. His station is so much higher than that, the expectations and pressure excruciating. Wei Wuxian can’t imagine what that must be like.
And even if Lan Zhan’s father were willing to entertain Wei Wuxian as Lan Zhan’s spouse, Lan Qiren never would.
He can’t see Lan Zhan going against his family. More than that, Wei Wuxian wouldn’t want him to, no matter what his mother has taught him about love and duty.
She used to make up stories for him, stories of affectionate couples escaping the confines of the cultivation world so they might love one another freely, righteous in the knowledge that they will do what’s right together or not at all. When he was very young, he thought this would be the proper way of things: running off to correct the world’s wrongs together. It’s what his parents did and still do. But as he’s grown older, he’s discovered his wishes diverge from his parents’ on this point.
He wants to be loved. He wants to love. He does not want to be made to run away for it and he doesn’t want to drag Lan Zhan away from his home because of it. Endless nights spent in inns, never resting for more than a few days at a time in a place that might be theirs, but rarely visited, no other family to rely on, it’s not what Wei Wuxian wants for him.
He’s through. They’re through. And pretending otherwise is just asking Lan Zhan to shoulder unnecessary pain.
“This is nonsense.” He shuts the book and shoves it into one of the girls’ hands.
The cover explains its purpose.
Even as she clutches it to her chest, he can read the title. There is no room for Wei Wuxian in this, the courting of the kind of bachelor who finds himself in such a book as this.
He could be the most upstanding, accomplished cultivator in the world and it wouldn’t matter. He can bring no political advantage to Cloud Recesses, no prestige, nothing that could make them wish to welcome into their sect a troublemaker hailing from a long line of troublemakers. They would not want the son of a sect leader’s servant married to the second heir of their clan.
When Lan Zhan finally looks at him, his brow furrows. He takes a single step forward. All Wei Wuxian can think to do is take one back. “Any maiden would be lucky to marry Lan er gongzi,” he declares loudly as he takes a few more. Lan Zhan follows.
The girls, everything Wei Wuxian cannot be, sigh and titter, each as beautiful and suitable as the last. They are rational, beneficial matches. They say, harmonious and sweet, “We know.”
For the first time in his life, wandering around Caiyi loses its charm.
Lan Zhan asks, “Shall we eat?”
The thought of eating turns Wei Wuxian’s stomach. He shakes his head.
Lan Zhan will not be cowed. When he is determined, he gets stubborn. Wei Wuxian is well aware of this tendency in him. His stubbornness is what first drew him to Lan Zhan, the way he’d been so thoroughly annoyed by Wei Wuxian and never willing to back down no matter how obnoxious Wei Wuxian became. It hurts to have it turned on him in this fashion. Lan Zhan will hold this relationship together with his bare hands if he has to. “I saw you looking at the wine shop on this street. Shall we stop there? I would gladly buy—”
“I’m not thirsty either,” he replies, too quick, too sharp, sharp and quick as a knife between the ribs. His steps widen. If he’s fast enough, maybe he can outrun his grief.
“Wei Ying, please don’t allow that book to trouble you. It’s meaningless. A distraction.”
“Is it?” Wei Wuxian loves his wayward, carefree life, but he sometimes wonders, hunched before a fire burning low, the sky ablaze with the loneliest starlight, what it would be like to truly know and be known by others, to see the tender sprouts of his labor grow into something beyond the temporary satisfaction of knowing he’s made this village or that, places he’ll never see, a little safer for a time. What he thinks is this: how nice it would be to settle for good. With Lan Zhan, preferably. He is inevitably alone on those nights in which he thinks such things; when his parents are with him, there is no room for such thinking.
Wei Wuxian has no idea what it’s like to belong to a sect, to owe loyalty to more than just his parents, but he suspects Lan Zhan would take such things seriously. If his family were ever to want something for him, even if it’s something he doesn’t want for himself, he would capitulate. It’s what he owes them. More than that, it’s what he wants to do. In this, he thinks he and Lan Zhan are the same.
It’s luck that his wish to love Lan Zhan throughout this lifetime has met no resistance from his parents. His mother even playfully scolds him from time to time, saying, You can’t court him from afar forever, Ying er.
She’s right in a way; he can’t court him at all.
Lan Zhan grabs Wei Wuxian’s forearm and pulls him to a stop. “Wei Ying, that book is—”
“How long has it been in circulation?”
“Over a year,” Lan Zhan admits because he can’t lie. He likely never would, not even when it might be the more merciful thing to do.
“Over a year,” Wei Wuxian repeats. Maybe Lan Zhan actually is a good liar because Wei Wuxian’s had no idea. A year and it’s never even crossed his mind that Lan Zhan might catch anyone else’s eye. It should have. Lan Zhan is immanently worthy of such attention.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lan Zhan said. “I’ve rejected every suit.”
“You’ve had suitors? Proper suitors?” Stupid question: he’s probably had so many he can’t even keep count. Every woman and some of the men have probably taken their chances.
Lan Zhan nods, too earnest, expression lost. “None of them were you.”
Wei Wuxian laughs, ugly and wet. “Do you really think your father will allow it?”
“My father has little room to judge my decisions and I don’t believe my uncle would put up more than a token resistance to the match.”
Your uncle will loathe me once he knows where I come from.
“I can’t forge an alliance with another sect, Lan Zhan. Maybe he can’t stop you, but it would be irresponsible—” When will his heart stop beating so wildly? He needs an excuse. “I can’t even give you a child."
“Do you want a child?”
“I… I don’t know.” That isn’t something he’s had to think about. He’d only ever cared for Lan Zhan. Why does he need to think about it? “Anyway, that isn’t the point.”
“What is the point?”
Wei Wuxian takes a step. That’s the point. He takes another. Driving it home, this brutal point of his. When Lan Zhan reaches for him, he twists out of the touch. “Lan Zhan, I can’t do this to you.”
Lan Zhan understands immediately and he’s quick to give chase, but Wei Wuxian is smart and quick and determined. The last thing he wants is for Lan Zhan to see the way he has to dash moisture from his eyes.
If Wei Wuxian can be said to have a home, it’s this: just four small, elegantly spare buildings on the outskirts of Yiling. One is his parents’. One is his. One’s the kitchen. One is purported to be for guests — guests they never have, who would stay with them when they’re so rarely there themselves? — and serves better as a library, a storage space. The best figs in the world grow in the courtyard tucked inside, borne from a tree his mother has tended since before his birth, a tiny sprout of a thing she’d decided to bring back from a trip to the far west. It was on that journey, she’d told him once, when he’d asked what the tree was and why it was here and nowhere else that he knew of, that I realized I was pregnant with you. We were so happy, your father and I. I wanted to bring something back. Wei Wuxian has long wanted to share them with Lan Zhan, this fruit from faraway places, sweet and tender and a little miraculous.
It’s still home. It will always be a home to him even if no one is there to greet him.
Believing his parents would be gone another week at least, he’d thought it safe to come lick his wounds in the privacy of his own space.
But it’s not to be.
His mother spots him as soon as he steps onto the overgrown path. When he was young, he used to race up and down its winding length swinging a wooden sword just a little too heavy for him, as she chased him. It’s a beloved memory. Back then, he hadn’t yet realized he’s been pinning her to this place the whole time.
“Ah, my wayward child, I thought I’d already lost you forever to those stodgy mountain hermits,” she calls from her perch on the roof of her room. Her leg dangles off the eaves. “How is that young man of yours?”
No longer mine, Wei Wuxian thinks. The entire trip back, he couldn’t forget that last, lingering look in Lan Zhan’s eyes just before he’d lost him near the border. Though three days have passed since then, the memory is sharp enough to cut into his heart. “As beautiful as ever.”
“And?”
And he’ll marry well now.
“Have you finally told him what you wish to do?” she presses. “I’d like to hold a wedding while I’m still young.”
Though his eyes prickle, he has no tears to shed.
He opens his mouth to tell her the truth, but the only thing that manages to come out of his mouth is its opposite, delivered with false cheer: “Aiyo, ma. Next time. Next time, I’ll tell him.”
She beams at him, the same smile his father says he’d inherited from her, a devastating grin that makes Wei Wuxian want to do anything and everything he can to preserve it for as long as possible. If that means pretending…
He can pretend just a little while longer. Until he gathers the right words together, ones that will properly blunt the pain. It will do no harm to wait. It’s judicious to consider such an admission with care.
Besides, his heart is too fragile as yet. He cannot bear to disappoint another loved one so soon.
Two years on, Wei Wuxian still avoids Gusu whenever possible, but sometimes it can’t be helped. Ghosts and ghouls and demons respect no borders and neither can an itinerant cultivator like himself when he’s on the trail of one such creature. So he crosses into Lan territory like a thief in the night, hoping to finish this case before anyone finds out. It shouldn’t be difficult. He’s almost got it.
Only moments from eliminating one of the most resentful fierce corpses he’s ever come across, the bright, vicious light of sword glare slashes across his peripheral vision, lighting the darkness with scouring white.
Wei Wuxian would recognize that shine anywhere. Bichen.
Which means—
Really. Wei Wuxian is better than the chunk of flesh the corpse tears from his neck, the violent crack of his arm as the corpse rips it from his shoulder. It stumbles into his embrace, heavy, and drags him to the ground, pulling the breath from his lungs as searing pain blurs his sight. His femur might snap in the fall, unfortunate, the sound more sickening than the sudden feeling of wrong wrong wrong as he topples.
“Wei Ying!”
Only Lan Zhan could so thoroughly distract Wei Wuxian from getting the job done.
Woozy, he struggles out from under the corpse’s weight, only managing to shove it away with Lan Zhan’s assistance. Its stench clots in the back of Wei Wuxian’s throat. He tries not to vomit.
Lan Zhan is. He’s here. Staring down at Wei Wuxian with fear in his eyes. They pick up every bit of silvered moonlight that filters through the rustling bamboo leaves. He’s as ethereally beautiful as Wei Wuxian remembers him being. The same pain is present in his features. This could have been two years ago and nothing would be any different.
“’m okay, Lan Zhan,” he slurs, voice raspy.
“Where are your parents?”
“Yiling.” Boulders press against his skull, excruciating. He can’t think like this. “Yiling, I think.” He doesn’t know where they are. Maybe they’re in Yiling. Yiling is where he wants to be anyway.
Lan Zhan presses his fingers to Wei Wuxian’s forehead, passing spiritual energy to him. “You can’t travel that far. I’ll take you back to Cloud Recesses and—”
“No.” He can’t recover there. Can’t ever go there and see what’s become of Lan Zhan’s life. Wei Wuxian will rest for a bit, staunch the bleeding in his neck, stabilize his leg. Make his way back somehow. Maybe Lan Zhan will be kind enough to dump him at one of the friendlier inns along the route home. It’ll be fine.
Sighing grievously, Lan Zhan gently turns Wei Wuxian’s head, inspecting the wound on his neck. “It’s not very deep,” Lan Zhan says, “though it must be painful. Don’t speak.”
So commanded, Wei Wuxian does as he’s told, breathing heavily through the agony of his broken body fighting to put itself back together. He’s never been injured like this before.
From his sleeve, Lan Zhan retrieves a bamboo canister of water, a vial, a small jar, and a length of clean cloth. He studies Wei Wuxian’s neck for an uncomfortable stretch of moments before rinsing the blood away. From one of the vials, he produces a pill. “Eat it,” he ordered, holding it to Wei Wuxian’s lips, close enough that Wei Wuxian tastes his skin, the tang of salt and dirt light on his tongue. Once Wei Wuxian complies, he’s dizzy for reasons that have nothing to do with his injuries. Lan Zhan returns to the task at hand, tearing a piece of the cloth free and dipping it into the jar. The peppery, herbaceous scent of angelica assaults Wei Wuxian’s senses, warning him of the sting that follows when Lan Zhan smears it on the wound.
Eventually the pill, an analgesic of some sort, offers relief.
“What did it do to your arm?”
Oh, his arm. Right. He forgot about that. “Dislocated my shoulder,” Wei Wuxian admits, wincing. “Just do what you have to do.”
“Your leg?”
“Broken. Nothing to be done about it here. My mom’ll be able to take care of it. Or there’s a physician who sometimes comes through. He’ll be able to help if she’s not there.”
Lan Zhan’s warm hand curves over his back, gently pulling him into an upright position. “I’m sorry.”
“No point being—” Lan Zhan grabs his arm, twists and pushes it into the correct alignment. Again, Wei Wuxian’s vision darkens, pain knifing him in the back again and again. Though he bites his lip bloody, he isn’t quick enough to stifle the scream that claws its way out of his throat. When he regains awareness, his back is pressed to Lan Zhan’s chest and his temple is braced against Lan Zhan’s shoulder. He’s panting into Lan Zhan’s skin and knows, knows he needs to move away, but he can’t. The pain is still too great; he cannot force himself from this unexpected source of comfort. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just rest.”
“I can’t. Lan Zhan, I have to get home. You’ve done too much already.” When he tries to rise, he feels bone scraping against muscle, tearing through it, the agony vicious and cruel as it radiates through him. So his leg isn’t just broken, it’s very broken.
He slumps back.
“I will take you home.”
“You can’t—”
“I can.” Again, Lan Zhan presses his fingers to Wei Wuxian’s forehead. “Rest. I will take care of it.”
The urge to sleep tugs at his consciousness, tantalizing. He’s drowsier than he ought to be. Wei Wuxian’s brow furrows. “Lan Zhan, what are you—”
“There was a sleep aid in the pill I gave you. Rest. Once I’ve passed you sufficient spiritual energy, I will take you home.”
“Lan Zhan, that’s not fair.” He can’t fight what Lan Zhan gave him, nor the gentleness of his touch, nor the softness of his voice. “Lan Zhan, you can’t—”
“I can.”
“No, you really—” He struggles against the medication’s effects. “My mother thinks I’m still courting you. You can’t…”
The last thing Wei Wuxian sees before being pulled under is Lan Zhan’s wide, hurting eyes. In that final moment, he wishes yet again that he had been less of a coward, that he could deserve such regard from Lan Zhan.
“Please don’t tell her I’m not.”
“Well.” Though quiet, his mother’s voice thunders within his skull. She’d always been very good at knowing when he’s about to wake up. Hazards of raising a child who’s always been determined to cause trouble by first light. She developed a sixth sense for it. “This is unusual even for you.”
Wei Wuxian groans. A strange pressure exerts itself against his sternum, stopping him from pushing himself upright. His shoulder and neck throbs at even the slightest movement. Defeated, he huffs and opens his eyes, stares at the ceiling as he breathes through the ache in his ribs, and turns his head, expecting to see his mother there.
It is not. She’s standing at the foot of the bed, a safe distance. The man next to him isn’t safe at all.
“Lan Zhan,” he breathes. It’s his hand pressed against Wei Wuxian’s chest.
“You’re ignoring your own mother already? When you’ve been on the brink of death for—”
“Ma.”
“—at least eight hours? I might have been worried about you.”
Though he’s speaking to her, he can only look at Lan Zhan. “You could stand to show a little more actual concern for your only child, don’t you think?”
“What would you have me do? Weep all over this fine gentleman you’ve brought home?”
Wei Wuxian’s skin burns with the flickering heat of his embarrassment. Who could have guessed he still has some shame in him? “Ma!”
“It was quite dramatic.” She presses her hand to her chest. “He held you in his arms.”
I wonder why that might be, he thinks. He should be mad, he knows, but he’s too tired to be anything other than relieved that Lan Zhan took the option of telling her out of his hands. Within a few minutes, his mother will begin scolding him and all will be right with the world. Honestly, there’s no better time for such a confession. Having heard it now, she’ll no doubt take it easier on him.
“Wei furen, please,” Lan Zhan says, voice weak. “It was nothing.”
“Wei Ying, they make these boys too polite in Cloud Recesses. His robes were covered in your blood, but he wouldn’t even let me take care of them. He went out to the creek to scrub them clean himself. You owe him. Lan gongzi, please collect your debt.”
A complicated mix of fondness and guilt knots itself around his heart. This isn’t what he would have wanted for Lan Zhan. “I’m sorry.” He tries to take Lan Zhan’s hand, settled on the edge of his bed. Before Wei Wuxian can skim more than his fingertips over Lan Zhan’s skin, he pulls it into his lap and curls it into a fist.
Alright. No touching. That makes sense. Can’t tear down his mother’s hopes and then rekindle them with touch.
“You didn’t tell me they were this handsome either.”
“Ma!” He supposes he should be glad that she isn’t exposing the truth to Lan Zhan, which was that she knew exactly how handsome he is thanks to a painting of Lan Zhan he’d completed back in the early days of his delusional belief that he and Lan Zhan could be together.
She rounds the bed and pats his forehead. Her thumb skims gently over his temple. “I’m sure you’re hungry.”
Wei Wuxian’s room is on the opposite side of the tiny courtyard from the kitchen and storage area. This is as much privacy as they’ll get before Lan Zhan leaves.
“Your mother is…” Lan Zhan says helplessly once she was gone.
Wei Wuxian winces. “You can say it, Lan Zhan.”
Lan Zhan’s mouth curves into an unexpected smile. Wei Wuxian had forgotten how devastating they are, his smiles. It’s agony to witness, but he cannot look away. “You and she are alike. I’m glad to have met her.”
“Lan Zhan.”
“How are we to—” Lan Zhan stares down at his hands. The smile crumbles. “Wei Ying, how did this happen?”
“If you mean the part where she thought we are intended for one another…”
“Thinks,” Lan Zhan says, offhand. “That is what I mean.”
Thinks. Thinks? “You didn’t tell her the truth?”
“You asked me not to say anything. I have not. I just need to understand what’s happening here so I don’t unduly interfere.”
Lan Zhan is too good. Wei Wuxian’s heart is going to give out from just how good he is. “I’m an idiot is what’s happening.”
“Wei Ying, you are no—”
He doesn’t have it in him to hear Lan Zhan contradict him. This isn’t a fight Lan Zhan can win anyway. Wei Wuxian’s an idiot. End of story. “She was very pleased by the thought of me one day bringing home my beloved to her. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d… that we were no longer that to one another. I was working my way up to explaining it.” He fusses with the blanket that covers his lap. Lan Zhan, still far too good, takes hold of his hands and squeezes. Just like always, his body thrills at the contact, heart suddenly too small for the wave of affection crashing against the sea wall he’s constructed around it.
“It was several years ago, Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, gentle, reasonable.
“I really was going to talk to her about it. Time just got away from us. Rogue cultivators can’t be relied upon, you know. We’re all so tricky. I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright,” Lan Zhan replies. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Lan Zha—” My mother is Cangse sanren. She is notorious. They’ll hate me in Cloud Recesses. That’s why I couldn’t…
“Ying er, I hope you’re behaving yourself,” she calls, stepping into the room with a small tray of tea and cut fruit, a bowl of plain congee, not a single spice in evidence. Boring fare. A punishment. Her eyes never leave their joined hands. “Lan gongzi, make sure he drinks some of this.”
Lan Zhan nods solemnly, extricating his hands from Wei Wuxian’s. “I will,” Lan Zhan says, painfully serious as he takes the tray from her.
“And make sure you rest and refresh yourself, too. I don’t want word getting back to your sect that I’m a terrible host. Wei Ying, bully him if you have to.”
“Like I don’t do that anyway,” Wei Wuxian says.
She ducks out as quickly as she’d arrived.
Wei Ying can do nothing except accept the cup from Lan Zhan’s hand, obedient for maybe the first time in his life. Though guilt motivates him, he can’t deny the bubbles of pleasure bursting within him at seeing Lan Zhan’s expression shift to one of relief.
He can still do this much to ease Lan Zhan’s mind, at least, before he sends Lan Zhan on his way.
After Lan Zhan has fed and watered him, exhaustion tugs at him, threatening to drag him down into the abyss of rest yet again. He doesn’t know if it’s a lingering effect of the pill Lan Zhan had given him or merely his injuries catching up to him. He’s not sure he wants to know. Biting back a yawn, he says, voice thick with the need for sleep, “Lan Zhan, you should head back. Your family will be waiting for you.”
Lan Zhan, who’s just finished clearing up the tray and putting it aside, takes his place at the side of the bed yet again. “I have already sent word that I will not be returning just yet. They have no reason to worry.”
“But—”
“Would you truly ask your mother to care for you alone?”
Alone. Right. His father’s off consulting with Jiang zongzhu on a case. She’s probably wanting to meet him. It’s been days since they’ve seen one another. Still, better to trouble her than Lan Zhan. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” he insists, knowing in his heart that this isn’t true. “You can’t reasonably expect to stay, Lan Zhan. Nobody could ask that of you.”
“You could,” Lan Zhan says, “but you needn’t. I will do it of my own free will.”
Wei Wuxian must be more tired than he thought. His eyes prickle and his cheeks bloom with heat. “I’ll have to tell—”
“You need tell your mother nothing. If staying requires my silence on the matter of our courtship, it’s a price I will gladly pay. You can tell her in your own time and your own way. I will not force the issue.”
“Lan Zhan, that’s…” It’s too much. Even Lan Zhan can’t be so good. Wei Wuxian’s an embarrassment to the regard they used to have for one another if he truly is this willing to put aside his own comfort like this. “You can’t.”
“I want to.”
“Lan Zhan!”
“Wei Ying.” As Wei Wuxian watches, horrified, Lan Zhan’s ears redden and so do his eyes. Though tears don’t fall from them, they gleam a little more brightly than before. “I would bury the memory of watching you almost torn to pieces by a fierce corpse beneath the weight of the ones I’ll gain by watching you recover. Please. At least let me accompany you until your leg is a little more healed. It won’t take long.”
In all the years they’ve known one another, Lan Zhan’s never asked for anything from him, not with such frantic undertones. Already he’s opening his mouth again when Wei Wuxian doesn’t answer quickly enough.
“Would you not want the same if our positions were reversed?” Lan Zhan presses, so earnest that any remaining fight drains from him. “Wei Ying, I know you. We may not be what we were to one another, but you would want to stay, too.”
It’s true. It’s more than true. He’d sneak in. He wouldn’t leave even if Lan Qiren himself kicked him out of the room and barred him from ever being allowed into Cloud Recesses again. Nothing would stop him from staying. No threat could make him go.
He sleeps for another eight hours. He’ll be lucky if he ever sleeps so well again if the treatment he receives upon waking is any indication.
“Lan Zhan, I hope I never break my leg again.” Wei Wuxian slumps against Lan Zhan, the stoic boulder against which Wei Wuxian leans as his mother brutally tortures him. Pain and fear courses through his body. His lungs ache sourly with his breathlessness as she pokes and prods his thigh. How can a body, even one belonging to a cultivator, recover from this?
Though he does everything he can to hide it, whining incessantly as a form of subterfuge, Lan Zhan wraps his hand around Wei Wuxian’s and says, quiet, “Squeeze.”
He laughs. Even to his own ears he sounds hysterical. “You want your hand broken, too?”
“Squeeze.”
Their fingers tangle together. Wei Wuxian’s shake; Lan Zhan’s are steady. His palm, slick and hot, slides over Lan Zhan’s skin. He hopes Lan Zhan doesn’t notice the trembling.
“The splint is holding well,” his mother says.
Sweat drips down Wei Wuxian’s cheek and follows the curve of his jaw. It gathers under his arms and wets the back of his neck. He can only hope his robes are thick enough to save Lan Zhan from getting drenched in Wei Wuxian’s bodily fluids. And not even fun bodily fluids, the sort you hear about in spring books, the ones he wants still to taste and touch and draw from Lan Zhan’s body. Which isn’t something he should be thinking about right now, ha. He grits out, “Good news, ma.”
“Bad news, my dear child. We’re going to be stuck here while you recuperate.” She brushes back the strands of hair plastered to his temple, tucking them behind his ear. They cling to the ridge of bone behind the shell.
Though he knew that already, it still pains him to hear it. “I’ll be fine on my own,” he says, stubborn. “Just give me a few days and I’ll be able to hobble around just fine.”
“Wei Ying.” Disappointment colors his words and make Wei Wuxian feel helpless.
Wei Ying would like to believe he’s strong, but he hurts and Lan Zhan’s hand feels good and he’s weak and stupid and he’s already caused Lan Zhan so much pain. He can’t disappoint him, not again.. “Lan Zhan will stay. Go see ba in Yunmeng.”
“Wei Ying, you will overtax yourself. As well-developed as your golden core is, you will still require time to heal. You—” He furrows his brow. “I can stay?”
Sniffing, Wei Wuxian refuses to meet Lan Zhan’s eyes. “Not sure why you’d want to,” he insists, “but who am I to stop you?”
“Anyone else would be pleased to spend time with their loved ones,” she points out, finally removing her vicious touch from his body. “You can’t imagine the lengths your father and I went to just to get to meet under appropriate circumstances before we were married.”
“You think this is appropriate?” He extricates his hand from Lan Zhan’s, settling it primly in his lap. Without the excuse of an examination, he can’t fathom continuing to hold Lan Zhan’s hand. Lan Zhan staying here for any length of time isn’t appropriate either.
“I think we live far enough from others that no one will know one way or the other.”
“I’ll know!”
“Do you believe Lan gongzi will do something to compromise you?”
“Of course not. Lan Zhan’s—Lan er gongzi is far too good for that.” His stomach twists at the very thought. He’s often imagined what it would be like to be compromised by Lan Zhan, but that can never happen now.
“Ying er, it’s difficult at the best of times for people like you and I to find someone to care for so deeply, let alone see them. You so rarely talk about him these days. Give this to yourself and to him.” She turns her attention to Lan Zhan, perhaps sensing weakness. “I suspect it’s been a long time?”
“Almost two years,” Lan Zhan admits, the truth and a lie all at once. To Lan Zhan, to anyone from the Lan Sect, it would be a lie, purely and truly. All because Wei Wuxian can’t…
He’s going to tell her. Right now. Open his mouth and say the words.
His mother, usually as lighthearted as he is, offers Lan Zhan a pained, commiserating smile.
He couldn’t break her heart then and he can’t do it now.
Against his better judgment, he keeps his mouth shut.
“That’s settled then,” she said. “Lan er gongzi can remain here. I’ll bring the spare cot.”
“Allow me to assist,” Lan Zhan says, shameless, while Wei Wuxian hopes a hole will open in the ground to swallow him up.
“Lan Zhan, you don’t—” Wei Wuxian calls, but Lan Zhan and his mother are both already halfway out the door and Wei Wuxian? Wei Wuxian is stranded in this bed, helpless to stop them.
Sighing, he slumps against the wall, cold and unyielding, not nearly as comfortable to lean upon as Lan Zhan’s body. “If I get through this, I’m never going to lie again.”
By the time Lan Zhan and his mother have made a ready place for him, it’s late by Lan Zhan’s standards. Though he tries to hide the way his movements grow sluggish and deliberate as he moves around Wei Wuxian’s room, Wei Wuxian can see through him. Even the skin beneath his eyes has purpled. His voice, when he pesters Wei Wuxian, carries the weight of his exhaustion.
“Wei Ying, can I get anything for you?”
Wei Wuxian shakes his head, guilt-ridden.
“Are you comfortable?”
Wei Wuxian nods, embarrassed. “Yes, Lan Zhan.”
“Wei Ying—”
“Lan Zhan, I just want to sleep,” he blurts. Too quick, he gets his hands beneath him and pushes, intending to slide into a reclining position. How he’s already forgotten his thoroughly shattered leg, he can’t say, but the splint somehow catches on the mattress and pulls, taking Wei Wuxian’s dignity with it.
“Wei Yi—”
“I’m fine,” he shouts, tears blurring his sight. “Just leave it.” He shifts again, more careful, and stares at the ceiling from a supine position. His pillow sits awkwardly beneath his neck, but he doesn’t dare move it.
“I can brew medicine for you.”
“No need,” Wei Wuxian chokes out between a pair of ragged breaths.
The night, needless to say, is a long one.
The next day, Wei Wuxian’s mother checks in just often enough to remind them she’s there before sweeping out again. It makes things worse, her absence: he doesn’t know how to be alone with Lan Zhan anymore, and not for so long. Even when he intended to properly court him, they didn’t get more than a few hours with one another before they parted again. Still, he tries half-heartedly to send her to Yunmeng to be with his father when she does show up, knowing he might not survive all this close contact with Lan Zhan.
He gets to learn things about his habits that only someone intimately acquainted with him should know, like how much quiet, gentle joy he takes in making tea for himself and Wei Wuxian throughout the morning and how relieved he looks when he removes his guan from his hair, smoothing his fingers through the ink-sleek strands as he ties it back with a ribbon, the myriad minor miracles that make up Wei Wuxian’s day as he discovers more and more about Lan Zhan. These are things he has, of course, been desperate to know, but they are also things he doesn’t deserve to know in this way. Or at all.
Lan Zhan puts aside the tray with the remnants of their dinner. He studies Wei Wuxian’s face. As he perches on the edge of the bed, comb in hand, a knot forms high in Wei Wuxian’s stomach. Lan Zhan says, “Allow me.”
Lan Zhan carefully insinuates himself behind Wei Wuxian and separates out the tangles from his hair. It’s a chaotic mess after one night spent sleeping on it. After two, it’s nearly a nest, but Lan Zhan is diligent. The comb works easily through the strands because, unlike Wei Wuxian, he’s thorough and kind about it. It’s not so very different from how his father does this for his mother. “This is too much, isn’t it? It’s not like my arm’s broken.” He squirms and then hisses when his shoulder aches, a memory of the dislocation asserting itself.
“Nonsense.”
“Lan Zhan, really.”
“I wish to do this,” Lan Zhan says stubbornly. “You will be more comfortable.”
Moisture prickles behind Wei Wuxian’s closed eyelids. Nothing about this is comfortable. Every time Lan Zhan touches him so carefully, he fears an explosion or worse, an admission. “Lan Zhan.”
Lan Zhan’s voice is less than a whisper. “Wei Ying, there is little else I can do for you.”
Wei Wuxian twists his upper body to better glimpse Lan Zhan’s down-turned face. Fire lances up his hip as he jostles his thigh, startling in its intensity. He keeps forgetting. Why does he forget? A cry crawls its way up Wei Wuxian’s throat, stifled by his hand.
Lan Zhan’s too busy staring at the comb to notice. When he speaks, his voice cracks. “Don’t take this from me.”
Wei Wuxian strains to hear, his words registering slowly, but when they do, a new wellspring of pain opens itself in his heart, worse than the injury to his thigh. “It’s not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
It makes me want too much from you. “You’re doing what a lover would do.”
“Isn’t that the point?”
The pain in his leg eases as he shifts around, no longer forced to see Lan Zhan’s expression. “Who do you need to convince right now? There’s no one here.”
Lan Zhan pauses as though he intends to say something and stops. He immediately takes up his task again. Eventually he does speak. “Your hair will tangle whether we are intimate or not. To take care of you, how much more conviction do I need?”
Wei Wuxian grumbles under his breath. If only this had happened before he’d broken their understanding. he could have preened under this sort of treatment back then. “There’s no winning against you, is there?”
“Not in this.”
Sighing, Wei Wuxian leans forward, bracing one hand on his uninjured leg and the other on the bed. Between the two of them, he’d always thought himself to be the irrepressible spirit, had prided himself on it. All this time, it’s been Lan Zhan who’s steel-forged.
Long after his hair’s been made as smooth and silken as it will ever get — Lan Zhan’s even used his own hair oil to take care of him, ensuring Wei Wuxian smells like Lan Zhan throughout the rest of the evening — Lan Zhan is still gently sweeping the comb from the crown of his head to the ends of his hair. Every day could have been like this for them, maybe, if Wei Wuxian had done things differently.
Though he should be stronger than this, Wei Wuxian doesn’t have the heart to stop him. Where was this heart in Caiyi when it might have done him some good?
It’s never Wei Wuxian’s intention to fall asleep — he hates sleep when there are so many interesting things he can do — but Lan Zhan’s ministrations had lulled him and Wei Wuxian, no matter how much he wanted to pretend otherwise, was tired. All the time. But his mother’s laughter calls him back to consciousness, bright as bells, the perfect accompaniment to the birds warbling outside. While he was unconscious, he’d been carefully arranged on his back, broken leg appropriately elevated, with a blanket tucked around the rest of him.
Lan Zhan’s doing no doubt.
Both his mother and Lan Zhan are sitting at the table in the middle of the room. It must be morning now, though early or late, he can’t tell. His mother sprawls in the same way Wei Ying does, terminally incapable of taking only an appropriate amount of space and no more, but Lan Zhan’s legs are tucked properly beneath him as he sips tea opposite her.
Neither of them notice him; he can watch, uninterrupted, as they speak with one another.
“You should have seen him,” she’s saying, still laughing, “wet from head to foot. It took days to break the curse. The whole time he dripped everywhere. We couldn’t get him dry. He wouldn’t come out of the bathtub even to eat.”
Lan Zhan’s mouth twitches; he ducks his head to hide it from her, but he doesn’t know to hide it from Wei Wuxian. “How old was he?”
“Eleven. He was so shy back then still.” With a sigh of amusement, she picks up the teapot and pours more for Lan Zhan, pushing a plate of cakes toward him at the same time. “Come, eat more. I can’t send you home thinner than you arrived.” When he takes one, she nods in approval and cups her chin in her hand. “You must have a story or two as well.”
“We once tracked a vengeful spirit to a small village near Gusu’s border. I was certain we would have to eliminate it. Given the circumstances, I regretted that it would be so. I think he knew, though I never said anything to suggest I found the thought distasteful, because he insisted we could put it to rest properly. It took almost a full day between the two of us to succeed and more patience than I knew Wei Ying possessed at the time, but we did. I have never partnered with a more talented cultivator,” Lan Zhan says, shameless. The compliment burns through Wei Wuxian. “Learning from Wei Ying has been the greatest joy of my life.”
It’s about one of his most cherished memories, that night hunt. To know Lan Zhan feels the same way is a gift. Tears gather along his waterline, threatening to spill over. He can’t wipe them away and he can’t turn his head, not without risking Lan Zhan’s notice. All he can do is watch.
Lan Zhan’s chest rises and falls steadily as he takes in a few deep breaths. “I have never felt as understood by another person.”
Wei Wuxian bites his lip and blinks and wishes he hadn’t woken up.
His is a loving family, but she and he express themselves in overwrought teases. In this way, Lan Zhan is so like Wei Wuxian’s father. Wei Changze is quiet, too, and thoughtful and only speaks meaningful words. His mother, perhaps surprised by Lan Zhan’s earnestness, takes a deep sip of tea. She looks toward Wei Wuxian. In an instant, she understands he’s awake and heard everything and is in no position to acknowledge it without embarrassing himself. She dips her eyes and pretends she hasn’t noticed he’s woken up.
When Lan Zhan’s line of sight follows hers, Wei Wuxian’s already closed his eyes.
Lan Zhan rises and quietly makes his way over. The brush of his sleeve over Wei Wuxian’s wet cheek shreds his heart and willpower. The weight of everything he’s cast aside threatens to crush him. When Lan Zhan returns to the table, he says, “I believe it would be prudent to wake him. He hasn’t had any medication in quite some time. He must be in pain.”
“Let him rest a little longer,” his mother insists. Lan Zhan, a good boy to the end, doesn’t contradict her.
They trade a few more stories. Lan Zhan’s recollections are vivid, as polished and well-worn as river stones, shared with authority, full of details Wei Wuxian had forgotten until Lan Zhan breathes life into them.
When they are finished, she says, “My Wei Ying was lucky to find you.” Reaching across the table, she presses her hand to the back of Lan Zhan’s. Though he dislikes the touch of others, he doesn’t flinch away from hers.
He replies, “I believe I’m far luckier, Wei furen.”
He dares to crack open his eyes, but too late. Whatever expression Lan Zhan might have worn before is gone now.
“My husband and I have long wished you both as much happiness in this world as you can grasp with one another.” A crooked, rueful smile crosses her mouth. “My experience with matrimony is irregular. Both my husband and I have no one in the world to answer to. The elders of your sect would prefer a traditional wedding, is that correct? What about your family?”
“My uncle would,” Lan Zhan says, “yes.”
“Your uncle? Not your father or mother?”
“My mother has passed. My father has secluded himself.”
She draws in a sharp breath. “Your uncle is Qiren xiong?”
Lan Zhan nods.
“Perhaps it is arrogant to believe my son is wort—”
“It is not.” His hair falls over his shoulder as he bows his head forward. A horrified note enters in his voice. “My apologies. I did not intend to interrupt you.”
“There isn’t a night in this household that passes without someone interrupting. You’d fit right in.” You would. Not you will. Even she’s uncertain now.
Grief gathers in Wei Wuxian’s chest, thick as billowing, bruised storm clouds, and spills from between his lips, a cry he can’t pretend is pain from his injury.
Lan Zhan’s cup clatters to the table, spilling tea across the surface. He’s at Wei Wuxian’s side so quickly that Wei Wuxian barely had time to cover his mouth, the only way he can think of to put a stop to the noise. “Wei Ying,” he says, studying Wei Wuxian’s face and then his leg. He reaches out, only to have his hand slapped viciously aside by Wei Wuxian, reflexive and thoughtless.
Glittering agony fills his eyes, blinked away almost as quickly, the only sign of dismay he expresses at Wei Wuxian’s rejection of him. If Wei Wuxian had looked away for even a second, it couldn’t have cut through him so deeply.
This can’t stand. He’s hurting all three of them for selfish, impossible reasons. Better to do this as cleanly as possible.
“Ma,” Wei Ying says. “Ma, there’s something—”
Lan Zhan shakes his head once and only once. Don’t, he mouths. Not now.
It’s only weakness that stops him, his terrible weakness and Lan Zhan’s request and his mother’s concern. “Ma, will you make ba’s congee for me?” He pouts for effect. The lie is cold on his tongue, tastes of ash. “You make it too plain.”
The tension around Lan Zhan’s eyes relaxes. When he studies Wei Wuxian’s leg this time, Wei Wuxian can’t reject his touch. “Lan Zhan, why?” he asks, once she’s gone. He’d only asked Lan Zhan not to tell her, to lie for him by omission. He’d never expected this. He doesn’t know how to stand up to this.
Lan Zhan doesn’t answer. Instead, he takes hold of Wei Wuxian’s wrist, no doubt feeling Wei Wuxian’s treacherous pulse, and passes spiritual energy to him.
“This is cruel,” Wei Wuxian says, unable to stop himself from pushing.
Lan Zhan still doesn’t answer. He carries inside of him a degree of stubbornness even Wei Wuxian couldn’t have anticipated.
As expected of a man as unparalleled as Lan Zhan, the treatment Wei Wuxian receives throughout the rest of the day and into the next is truly loving. Wei Wuxian’s read poetry less moving than the care Lan Zhan takes with him, both when his mother shows up and when they’re alone.
Every gentle touch and gentler admonishment that he eat or rest or sit with Lan Zhan while Lan Zhan plays the qin chips away at Wei Wuxian’s resolve to absolve Lan Zhan of the relationship between them. Back when he’d done it, it had seemed like the right thing to do. Correct action in the world, he has felt, requires the sacrifice of what one personally wants for the sake of others. There’s no greater thing he can do than do right by the people he cares for.
But he’d be a fool to ignore the subtle upward lift of Lan Zhan’s mouth when Wei Wuxian complies with his requests, the amber-sweet warmth in his gaze when Wei Wuxian accepts hurried touches as soon as his mother comes into view, like they’re trying to hide something precious. In those moments, Lan Zhan only pulls away when he’s sure she has seen.
The pain their future together would cause Lan Zhan is entirely hypothetical; the pain he’s caused Lan Zhan by his past decisions is very real.
It’s a matter, he realizes, of trusting Lan Zhan to know his own heart, the heart Wei Wuxian’s sworn to protect, the heart that may one day wonder if Wei Wuxian is worth it should Lan Zhan’s family disapprove. If the worst were to happen, would he regret Wei Wuxian’s weakness now? Will he wish Wei Wuxian had freed him of their affection for one another?
Wei Wuxian thinks he might be learning the answer in real time and it does him no credit.
There is a question in his heart, one he’s been too cowardly to ask.
Why Wei Wuxian speaks now is entirely beyond him, but suddenly words are tumbling from his mouth. Not the question, but other things. “My mother used to make up stories to tell me,” he says, no reason for it, just the pressure of needing to speak enough to bring them about, “about people who fall in love.”
“Tell me one?” Lan Zhan asks, low and intimate, as he checks Wei Wuxian’s leg. When he’s done, he flips the quilt back over them.
Wei Wuxian shakes his head. “They weren’t very good,” he lies. They were as good as they needed to be to ensure Wei Wuxian grew into the sort of man who could believe in them.
“What were they about?”
“Doing what one must,” Wei Wuxian says. Lan Zhan’s expression falls. “The lovers were always running away together, living happily on their own. It seems to have worked out well for my parents. When I was younger, I thought that meant it was right, falling in love with the prettiest person around and sweeping them off on some adventure.”
Lan Zhan’s too busy studying the quilt covering Wei Wuxian’s legs to look at him. “Mn.”
“But I don’t know if it is. Most families aren’t like my family.”
“No.”
“You’re the son of a sect leader, Lan Zhan. I don’t want you to have to choose between me and yours.”
“I would choose.”
“You think your uncle would be happy with that?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Lan Zhan…”
“You believe it’s a foregone conclusion my family will oppose. I do not, but even if they did, I would make the decision I know to be right. Because you are adamant in your resolve, we can never know what might happen. There is no point torturing yourself thinking you need to explain it to me.”
“So I should torture you with this?” He plucks the loose trousers covering his leg between his fingers. And hereitis: “Why won’t you let me tell her?”
Finally Lan Zhan looked at him, frank and open. “I want more time with you.”
“Why?”
Lan Zhan looks past him to the doorway. Wei Wuxian’s mother is approaching again, a basket in her arms. He rises and smooths out the lines in his robes. In a low tone, he says, “Why wouldn’t I,” before turning his attention to her, approaching her. “Wei furen, let me take that for you.”
Twilight is only just twisting the golden red colors of sunset into a dreamlike purple when exhaustion wreaks havoc on Wei Wuxian’s ability to stay awake. While his mother chatters away at Lan Zhan, he drifts, half awake, half somewhere else.
“What’s your family like?” she asks. “We were all so much younger the last time I crossed paths with your uncle. I only met your father once or twice.”
Whatever Lan Zhan says, Wei Wuxian hears little of it. Before he can rouse himself fully, knowing he’d like to hear it, he’s pulled under.
Wei Wuxian wakes to the sight of Lan Zhan bent over him. This isn’t so unusual. Lan Zhan often bends over him. This is the first day, however, that Wei Wuxian is aware of something else of interest in that area of his body. “Lan Zhan!” he cries, pulling the blanket over his lap. His heart races furiously and his hands carefully plant themselves—
He bites back a moan, definitely not there.
—on either side of his legs, safer than where he’d first placed them. Where he might have imagined Lan Zhan might be before he’d woken up. Good heavens.
At least the blanket conceals everything a righteous, upstanding gentleman wouldn’t want seen by others.
Lan Zhan’s body straightens. He, of course, is entirely proper in every respect save the slightest pink tinge on the tips of his ears. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” Wei Wuxian manages. And it’s true. Despite his embarrassment, the pain in his body has eased. When he shifts, there’s an ache, sure, but it’s not debilitating. “I told you it wouldn’t take long for me to feel better.”
Lan Zhan’s eyebrow climbs toward his hairline.
When Wei Wuxian swings his legs over the edge of the bed, he hisses, but even this he can wave off. “Help me up,” he says, imperious, reaching for Lan Zhan’s hand without much thought or care. As long as he pretends he’s not a complete embarrassment, he’ll get through this. He very lightly slaps his face and forces down the humiliating laugh threatening to loose itself from within him. “See? Not so bad.” He might even be able to hobble if he doesn’t put all his weight on his leg. Lan Zhan swoops in and takes hold of his arm. That’s even better than hobbling about, but he can’t let himself think of it that way. He can’t rely on Lan Zhan forever. “I’ll make a crutch or something.”
“Wei Ying.”
“Let’s go for a walk. I’m sick of this room.”
Though Lan Zhan sighs, he leads Wei Wuxian to the door, takes careful hold of Wei Wuxian’s waist as he steps over the high threshold.
Two pale stone pathways cross one another in the center of the courtyard, connecting the buildings on either side. It’s small and not very grand as far as such things go, but it’s theirs. “Let’s go over there,” he says, pointing to the pair of wide stools sat on either side of a table situated beneath the gargantuan white fig tree that shades the corner opposite Wei Wuxian’s room. It’s been there longer than these buildings, Wei Wuxian thinks. It feels like the sort of tree that might always be there. Beneath the table, there’s a box with a rough-hewn weiqi board and pieces. “It’ll be comfortable.”
Lan Zhan’s touch lingers, warm, on his arm and around his waist. Their pace matches as they cross the path and Wei Wuxian’s heart thrums with need, flashes of the dream he’d had this morning crossing his mind. Not a righteous dream.
Lan Zhan seats him on one of the stools. A few figs dot the ground. Lan Zhan stoops to pick them up and studies them. He opens one up and grimaces as sticky juice flows over his fingertips. “What are these?”
Wei Wuxian plucks it from his hand and eats it, offering a square of linen in exchange, embarrassed. How can he tell Lan Zhan about the figs now? Before Lan Zhan can press for an answer, Wei Wuxian takes the rest and tosses them aside. Lan Zhan keeps the linen, stares at it, unwilling even to fold it up and put it away. Lan Zhan isn’t a man who puts things away; he holds them in the cup of his palm, protective. He would have kept hold of the sticky, ugly mess of these figs, too, if Wei Wuxian didn’t stop him.
A flash of understanding: “You’re trying to convince me, aren’t you? That’s why you’re doing this.”
No answer, save the one in his own heart. Lan Zhan’s words would be superfluous.
He could see himself building a life here with Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, who stubbornly picks up another fig to open for Wei Wuxian. Perhaps they’d stake out Yiling as theirs, save the nearest cultivation sects the trouble of protecting it. To save himself from the pain of this dream, he says, “I can’t marry you.”
Toneless, Lan Zhan says, “That is your prerogative.”
This is Wei Wuxian’s refrain over the days that follow. Lan Zhan ignores him.
“I can’t marry you,” when Lan Zhan collects jujubes from the bushes along one of the nearby dirt paths. They fill baskets and Wei Wuxian can only feel sick at the sight of them, how much he wants Lan Zhan to gather jujubes for him always.
“I can’t marry you,” when Lan Zhan hauls water for his bath.
“I can’t marry you,” when Lan Zhan is the only one he wants to marry and Wei Wuxian can’t make the required overtures to Lan Zhan’s family. Isn’t it too arrogant even for him? How can he let his parents go to Lan xiansheng and beg for him? They’ll be left without any face.
“I can’t marry you,” he says endlessly while Lan Zhan only replies: “That is your prerogative.”
The day is a warm one, so they’re again sitting under the fig tree, the fourth or fifth or tenth in a row. It doesn’t matter, so many days have passed. They blur together. A few more blushing green figs had fallen, bruised, to the hard-packed ground. Wei Wuxian stretches to pick one up, beating Lan Zhan to it. There’s only the smallest possible twinge in his thigh as he does, a testament to Lan Zhan’s patience with him. Lan Zhan has no reason to stay and they both know it. “I can’t marry you.”
Lan Zhan’s face remains placid.
“What if I never marry you?” Though Wei Wuxian has given up on the deception that they’re together, Lan Zhan never has. He moves to take the fig from Wei Wuxian’s hand, but Wei Wuxian is quick. He keeps it for himself.
“So be it,” Lan Zhan says, placid, as he sets the weiqi board. He wipes dirt from the awkwardly carved and painted pieces and even plucks a long fallen leaf, dry and yellowed, from the container that holds them. The sleeves of his white robes are no longer pristine, grown gray with dust. No matter how much he scrubs and beats them, they are no longer the bright white they would have remained in Cloud Recesses. It’s a pity that something so beautiful could lose its shine.
“Maybe I’ll marry someone else.”
“Will you?”
Wei Wuxian can’t say who’s more hurt by the question: Wei Wuxian with his weak convictions or Lan Zhan with his strong ones. Wei Wuxian supposes he’ll never know; he can’t exactly ask Lan Zhan how he feels about it. Driving his thumb into the fig’s flesh, he pries it apart. Juice coats his palm; he wipes the larger half on his sleeve and holds it out to Lan Zhan, fighting the urge to scowl. “No.”
The expression on Lan Zhan’s face can’t be called smug exactly, but it’s more pleased than these repeated rejections warrant.
“How long are we going to keep this up?”
Viciously chewing his portion, he waits for Lan Zhan’s response. If it was possible, he’d wait until the end of time for it. But they don’t have that kind of time and Wei Wuxian is impatient.
“Don’t you miss Cloud Recesses?”
“Ask me again when I’ve missed it as long as I’ve missed you.”
Annoyed, Wei Wuxian picks up another fig, wipes the dirt from its surface. “You’ll say no then, too.”
“I will.”
“I’m going to walk around,” Wei Wuxian says. “My leg hurts. It helps to stretch.” When Lan Zhan moves to stand, he waves him off. “I’m not going very far, sit and relax.” He splits this fig, too, and hands both pieces to Lan Zhan and licks the juice from his fingers. “Try it. They’re not bad.”
Lan Zhan’s gaze follows him as he paces along the length of the pathway, occasionally rakes down his body and back up. Every time he does it, Wei Wuxian shivers with excess energy, energy that he uses to kick at the figs that still litter the ground. Some of them have fallen too early. He should have watered the tree, maybe. There hasn’t been many storms this year. “Aren’t you tired of this?”
Lan Zhan tilts his head. “Yes.”
He returns to the table and steps past it, considering just for a moment allowing himself to drop into Lan Zhan’s lap. Instead, the tree takes his weight, a neutral onlooker to the embarrassment of these proceedings. He extends his leg straight out. It’s almost comfortable.
Closing his eyes, he tips his head back, enjoys the breeze as it blows across his face.
Lan Zhan draws in a breath, lets it go. Finally speaks. “In the time I’ve been here, you’ve told me to do many things and have asked me to do many more, but there’s one request you’ve never made of me.”
“Oh, yeah? And what’s that?”
“You’ve never actually asked me to leave.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been—”
“You haven’t. Not once. Even your attempts to make me feel unwelcome are lackluster.” He lifts the bit of fig that remains, as though it’s proof of anything.
“It’s rude not to share.”
“I didn’t like splitting them open. Did you think I wouldn’t notice what you’re doing?”
Wei Wuxian keeps his mouth firmly shut the way he ought to have done this whole time. What he notices or doesn’t is none of Lan Zhan’s business.
“You do not have to marry me. I won’t ask that of you. But I deserve to hear the truth from you.”
“You seem to know everything here, Lan Zhan. Why do I need to speak?”
“I want to hear it. I want you to hear it. I’m tired of seeing the toll pretending has taken on you.”
No. Wei Wuxian can’t do that because if he does…
The last two years will have been for nothing. He will have sacrificed that time for no good reason. Lan Zhan’s future is worth this sacrifice. It has to be.
“If you can’t tell me the truth, then tell me to go.”
Wei Wuxian isn’t used to feeling angry about things. He carries too much joy in his heart to experience anger. His mother encourages him too well to let the things that hurt him go. Fury is a foreign concept to him. And yet the thought of telling Lan Zhan to leave his home enrages him.
He can’t look at Lan Zhan and hear such words. Tell him to go? How can he?
Lan Zhan says nothing. Wei Wuxian has plenty of words for the both of them.
“What do you want to hear, Lan Zhan? That I was jealous? I was jealous. Did I feel betrayed when I learned how unattainable you are?” He scoffs. “I’m a good cultivator with no connections. I was arrogant to think I could stand up to that. I was wrong to want to court you, so I fixed it.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“I was wrong! It was stupid to think I was the only one who valued you the way you deserved to be valued. There are better matches. You deserve one of them. I broke my commitment to you back then. Stop trying to fix it. You shouldn’t want to fix it. I dragged you into a lie, Lan Zhan. Do you think your uncle will approve of that? My mother is Cangse sanren. Do you truly think your uncle will approve a match made with her son? Why don’t you tell me the truth?” Wei Wuxian’s voice lifts, catches. It reverberates in his ears, the sound of it, a thunderclap.
“Ying er?”
His mother is standing on the other side of the courtyard. In her hands is a tray and on that tray are a variety of foods Wei Wuxian knows Lan Zhan prefers. She’s already learned what he likes and wants to give it to him, too. Lan Zhan inspires that feeling.
“Ma,” he says. The heavens have probably heard his outburst. There’s no way she hasn’t.
She approaches. With every step, he sees better the disappointment in her eyes, disappointment and clear understanding. He had to inherit his sharp mind from someone.
“Wei furen,” Lan Zhan says, rising to his feet, offering courtesy. His ears are red and his expression is contrite. Yet again, Wei Wuxian’s dragged him into trouble.
“How long?”
Though this question is for Wei Wuxian — her eyes are on him after all — Lan Wangji answers. “There was a misunderstanding…”
“How long?”
“Two years, ma.”
She closes her eyes. “Because of me?”
“Ma.” This is why he never said anything, why he’d needed to work up the courage to tell her. He’s never made his own mother cry before, but he sees the way her lip twitches, pulling back into an ugly scowl. She can’t cover hide this horrid display behind her hands, filled as they are with the tray. “Ma, not you. You didn’t do anything wrong. I just…”
“I understand.” But it’s so very clear she doesn’t. She is Cangse sanren, disciple of Baoshan sanren, who descended an immortal’s mountain and found the love of her life and never regretted a single thing. She has no one but herself to answer to and neither does his father and they are luckier, Wei Wuxian thinks, than any two people could hope to be when they’d been so alone in the world before their union.
But Wei Wuxian is not alone and neither is Lan Zhan. This incident is proof of that. Their decisions affect the people around them.
“Wei furen, I assure you, this is only a misunderstanding.”
“Lan Zhan! What misunderstanding? I hurt you and I made you lie to my mother. Ma, I lied to you about courting Lan Zhan. The reasons why do me no justice.”
“I am also—”
“Stop trying to fix it.”
“I will do what my heart—” Lan Zhan’s heart will have to break. Sometimes, that’s the only way to fix these things.
“Lan Zhan,” he says, cool, “I want you to leave.”
Lan Zhan is quick to gather his things from Wei Wuxian’s room, returning them to his qiankun bag with stiff, pristine focus. He doesn’t speak except to Wei Wuxian’s mother, who is failing to convince him to stay until tomorrow at least. It’s already so late in the day — it’s not — and it will likely be cold — that hardly signifies for a cultivator. They are the sort of things one might say out of courtesy so as not to improperly shoo a guest from one’s home, but she means it. Or at least, she’s grasping at whatever straw she can find to make him stay.
“There’s no point,” Wei Wuxian says, guilt-ridden. “Lan Wangji is a man of his word.”
“What word, Wei Ying?” she snaps. “There’s always a point in showing one’s guests welcome. I would have thought I’d taught you that.”
“I promised Wei Ying I would leave if he could tell me to go,” Lan Zhan offers, dispassionate. Not only is he a man of his word, he’s a polite one as well.
“Wei Ying!”
“It’s for the best,” Wei Wuxian insists. He will not back down on this point. He’s dragged his out long enough.
“It’s—” She brushes her hands down the skirt of her robes, perhaps to keep herself from using them to drag Wei Wuxian into the courtyard by his ear. “You think breaking this man’s heart is for the best? Did I raise you to be this cruel, too?”
“It is for the best,” he repeats. If he says it enough, he’s sure it’ll stick in the two most stubborn brains he knows.
“It’s foolish. Who are you trying to protect? You think I can’t sweet talk Qiren xiong into seeing what a good match you would be to his nephew? Am I that useless as a mother?”
Embarrassment heats his skin. He can be strong. He won’t succumb to her words; they fill him with too much hope. They are a distraction. She cannot remake the world to fit her whims. Her stories are only stories. “I don’t think Lan xiansheng will care about any qualifications I might have when Lan Zhan might marry someone who’d bring influence and strength to the sect.”
“So we’re nothing is what you’re saying?”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. He won’t succumb and he won’t let her win this argument on a technicality. “Ma.”
“You think the knowledge we carry wouldn’t be of value to them? The cultivation manuals alone that you or I could write…”
“Oh, you’re going to write cultivation manuals now? I’m going to let my mother confine herself to a library just so I can—”
“Wei Wuxian!” Her voice is dangerously low, terrifying on a woman who only ever smiles and laughs. “I would do whatever is necessary to ensure your happiness.”
“You don’t even want to confine yourself to our—” Though is voice is low to match hers, he cannot speak the word that haunts him the most. There are easier things to say. “I don’t want to run away with Lan Zhan in tow because his uncle disapproves. If he has to choose his h—Cloud Recesses—” There. That’s easier to say. “—or me, I want him to be able to choose Cloud Recesses. I want him to have that. He shouldn’t have to choose.”
“You mean his home?” Her gaze flicks to the corner of the room where Lan Zhan stands. “His home is very obviously you, Wei Ying. Who are you to decide for him what he can and can’t choose?”
Frustration burns within him, threatening to rend his body in two. It finds release on his tongue, the last place he’d want to find it. He points at the courtyard. “I grew up under that fig tree.” His bed. “I sleep better in this room than any other.” Out toward Yiling. “My favorite tea can only be bought in town and nowhere else. I want to honor the values you’ve instilled in me, but people aren’t homes. It matters to me that Lan Zhan gets to be settled and happy somewhere even if can’t be with me. I know you and ba would prefer to never set down roots, that having me forced that decision on you. I won’t do it again to someone else.”
His mother’s expression, he’s never seen it before. He can’t read it. Can’t even read the tone of her voice when she finally speaks. “Is that what you really believe?”
If he doesn’t explain himself in full now, he’ll never manage it. At least he can only hurt his mother once with such words. His courage will fail him if he leaves anything unsaid. This is the truth he’s never wanted to acknowledge: “I want a home that’s ours, not one he or you or anyone suffers on my behalf. I don’t want him to be lonely because he chose me.”
Lan Zhan makes a noise, broken, small. Wei Wuxian might not have heard it if silence hadn’t greeted his admission. Frankly, he’d forgotten Lan Zhan was right there, hearing all of this, too. His attention snaps to Lan Zhan’s face. “Wei Ying.”
“Lan Zhan?”
“I have been lonely,” he says, lowering his gaze to the floor. “I was lonely until I met you. It was only then that I felt I could be anything else. My choice was made long before you decided to pursue me.” His shoulders shift, as he straightens his posture. His chin lifts. His light colored eyes are so very clear, certainty shining from deep within them. “It doesn’t matter where I might be if it’s without you. I will be lonely there. There is no one else for me but you.”
“Lan Zhan…”
He draws a rattling breath, approaches slowly, like he fears the thought of seeing Wei Wuxian run from him. He is close enough to press his cool palms to Wei Wuxian’s overheated cheeks. Wei Wuxian cannot breathe through the fear that this will all go wrong. Lan Zhan asks, “How do I convince you?”
“Lan Zhan?”
His hands find Wei Wuxian’s shoulders, grip him lightly. There will be bruises later. “Can you not see the truth of it? This will require no sacrifice on my part. Tell me.” He’s never seen Lan Zhan’s eyes fill with tears like this. His muscles tremble. “How do I convince you?”
He’s forced the same loneliness on Lan Zhan that’s been unintentionally visited upon him. The shape of it might be different, but at its heart, it is the same. It cannot be borne, but there is no relief in it, this acquiescence, not until Lan Zhan draws him into an iron embrace. Even then, the comfort is thin. Lan Zhan is wrong. This will not work. His mother’s stories were right about one thing: no one who chooses love can have everything.
If Lan Zhan is so determined to make a thief of Wei Wuxian, he will be made a thief, stealing away with the best and brightest of the cultivation world. He cannot deny Lan Zhan any longer, not knowing he has been the architect of so much misery. A liar and a thief, what an excellent husband he will make.
“Tell me to go,” Lan Zhan whisper into his hair. “Just one more time for certainty’s sake.”
Wei Wuxian’s fingers ache with how tightly he holds onto Lan Zhan. His robes strain under the pressure. Wei Wuxian whispers back, “I can’t.”
“This is the famed yashi, huh?” Wei Wuxian asks. As they stand outside the elegant — it truly lives up to its name — room in which four people now sit, deciding their future, even Lan Zhan seems nervous, standing even more stiffly than Wei Wuxian’s used to seeing. Wei Wuxian numbs his own anxieties. This is a formality only, outcome assured. It’s only Lan Zhan who still has a stake in these proceedings.
“It is.”
When they’d arrived, Lan xiansheng was waiting for them on yashi’s threshold, Lan Zhan’s inferior twin next to him, offering a creepily sweet smile to all of them. His face — Lan xiansheng’s, not Lan Xichen’s — was a sickly shade of pale pink and Wei Wuxian’s mother said, “I’ve missed you, too, Qiren xiong,” before entering with his father and closing the door with them all on the other side of it.
It’s now three hours later and there’s been no news.
“At least we can’t hear them?” Wei Wuxian says. In truth, he’d imagined more yelling would be involved.
“Mn.”
Qiren xiong will be convinced by me, his mother had promised. He hopes his father’s been able to temper the steel in her voice.
“You’re sure your uncle will approve?”
“I did not say that.”
“Lan Zhan!”
Lan Zhan’s too penetrating gaze slices Wei Wuxian open. “Do you require his approval for your happiness?”
“No,” Wei Wuxian admits. At this point, he’ll be grateful for grudging acquiescence. If he can spend the rest of his life convincing Lan xiansheng he’s worthy, that will be a life well-spent. He won’t spirit Lan Zhan away unless he has to.
Lan Zhan has opened his mouth to speak when the door slides open. His mother is grinning, as is Lan Xichen. His father’s expression remains placid. Lan xiansheng, well. He’s not quite as purple as when they’d all shown up here anyway. Is it good news? Is Lan Zhan right?
“You’re allowed nowhere near Qiren xiong with an unsheathed blade. I’ve been barred from explaining why, so don’t ask,” his mother warns him, adopting a sober expression, “and you will be expected to remain elsewhere for half the year.”
“What?” Wei Wuxian asks, shrill. Half the year? Every year? What about Lan Zhan? He doesn’t think he can live that long without Lan Zhan. This is… it’s better than he should have expected. It’s not no.
Her smile from before returns, grown even larger despite, or perhaps due to, its momentary absence. “With Lan Wangji, should he wish to accompany you. I hear there’s a comfortable place in Yiling that stands too empty throughout most of the year. I might recommend it if you’re looking for somewhere to stay. The rest of the time, you’ll be expected to reside in Cloud Recesses to assist with night hunts and training as well as attend any events that a spouse of the Lan clan’s second heir would be expected to attend. You are also expected to learn proper Lan Sect etiquette and trot it out on any such occasion where your behavior will reflect on the Lan Sect as a whole. Which is always.”
“You mean…?” Wei Wuxian looks past his mother to where Lan xiansheng is studying the sky, perhaps hoping it will fall upon all their heads. Wei Wuxian’s never been happier. Even if the sky did fall, he’d hold it up to ensure this moment isn’t spoiled. “He said yes?”
“He did, in fact, say yes.” Her eyes carry gray, sparkling mischief. “You have no complaint about these expectations?”
Wei Wuxian shakes his head. They are fairer than anything he’s been imagining. “I wouldn’t want to embarrass you or Lan Zhan.”
“My son must love you very much, Lan Wangji,” she says, quiet. “If I was expected to learn etiquette from Qiren xiong, I’m sure, well… I’ve been barred from discussing that as well. Don’t let him become as stodgy as you lot, huh? It suits you much better than it does me and presumably my offspring.”
“I will take care to ensure no such thing happens,” Lan Zhan says, earnest, like this is a serious request Wei Wuxian’s mother is making of him and not simply a chance for her to tease them both. “I like Wei Ying as he is.”
Six Months Later, give or take
Wei Wuxian steps across the barrier leading into Cloud Recesses, hand in hand with Lan Zhan. “Huh,” he says, studying it from this angle. After their marriage, they’d remained in Yiling the six month stipulated in his mother’s agreement with Lan xiansheng. More often than not, his mother and father had been there, too, filling the courtyard with a vibrancy Wei Wuxian hasn’t seen since he was too young to spend much time on night hunts. Though he expects wanderlust will get the better of them soon enough, he cherishes the time they’d spent together.
This is their first time returning. Wei Wuxian might be nervous, but he’s also incredibly curious, as always, about the workings of this barrier.
“What is it?”
Wei Wuxian lets go of him and steps outside again. When he tries to step through, his forehead bounces off the barrier. Though Lan Zhan frowns, he can only laugh. As he rubs away the numbness, Lan Zhan captures his wrist and drags him back across. He says, “You will have your own soon enough.”
He’d been given to understand that the construction of a beloved partner’s token takes time. Wearing one is akin to having earned admission into the sect and treated with the same importance. In Wei Wuxian’s case, nothing quite so formal is wanted or required, but Lan Zhan had still insisted on having one made for him.
“This is the first time I’m getting to legitimately cross this barrier,” Wei Wuxian points out. “It gave me no end of trouble before, thinking of a way to sneak in without alerting anyone.”
“Savor the past if you must.” Lan Zhan tugs him forward, impatient, if such an accusation could be laid at the feet of one such as Lan Zhan. Even having spent so many of their days filled with one another’s presence, each day more blessed than the last, Wei Wuxian melts at how demonstrative Lan Zhan is. In the sneakiest of ways, he’s always assuring Wei Wuxian of his affection. “You’ll never again be unable to enter whenever you wish.”
“But Lan Zhan, that was half the fun.”
“Even so.”
“And anyway, I only came to see you. Since you’ll be at my side, it’s not like I need anything else. I can just pilfer yours.”
“It is the principle of the thing,” Lan Zhan insists. As Lan Zhan hauls him up Cloud Recesses’s illustrious steps, every disciple they pass turns curious eyes on them. Near the top, he pulls Wei Wuxian out of the way of a group of juniors wandering past. “I also hope that you will be comfortable here. Freedom of movement is essential.”
By now, he’s learned about Lan Zhan’s family, why his uncle is an authority when his father is not. “Aiya, Lan Zhan,” he says, softly rubbing Lan Zhan’s chest. His heart is pounding furiously against his sternum, felt by Wei Wuxian’s palm, sensitive now to such intimacies. “You’re too much for this heart of mine to take.”
“I believe in Wei Ying’s fortitude. I think his heart can endure a great deal more.” His lips brush the shell of Wei Wuxian’s ear, a shameless display by Lan Sect standards. “Perhaps I might show him? We can ensure his new bed is comfortable in the process. I would hate for him to be unable to sleep here.”
He slaps at Lan Zhan’s shoulder. A nearby disciple boggles at the display and all Wei Wuxian can do is turn his head to hide the evidence of the heat blazing in his cheeks. “Lan Zhan!”
Awkward titters sound; they don’t belong to Wei Wuxian at least.
“Handle your sect’s disciples, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian whispers. “No gossiping in Cloud Recesses, isn’t it?”
“Let them,” Lan Zhan whispers back. “The Cloud Recesses won’t crumble because we stirred up a bit of trouble. You’ll see.”
Lan Zhan isn’t wrong at all and Wei Wuxian wasn’t either, all those years ago, when he’d first snuck himself into the jingshi.
This is home to him, too.