Rough fingers, clearing the peaks and valleys of his knuckles, and it's such an odd thing to strike as hard as it does. Wei Wuxian has always been casual in his affections, but circumspect more than people assumed, and he's still not used to this. Whatever it is, and whatever it isn't, like fingers sliding around his throat, or the clutch of a wrist that makes itself an iron band, unbending.

There are so many ways they've seen each other now, and the men they'd once been, what had that meant? Incandescent, as if he was all motheaten shadow now. Jaded, yes, more realist than idealist, but still fighting for the changes in the world he wanted. Smaller scale. Day by day, and now, stretch of shadow by stretch of shadow.

He swallows, ground steady beneath his feet. Feels the burning warmth of a hand at the back of his, of Lan Zhan, laid down across a gulf of unknown and the unknowing, of blood staining white robes, of a punishment for guarding a ghost.

His hand shifts, fingers splaying, invitation without anything said. Take.

"You stood by me. You believed, with a world convinced otherwise. Even not knowing," he says, his free hand resting over his breastbone, "What I'd given away, decades before, and why I walked the paths I walked. Or what paths I never even looked down."

A demonic cultivator by name, who did not consume souls, who did not inflict curses, who did not start conflicts, and who did not, in the end, even finish them.