"In the dark of the night will hardly make anyone happy, even your esteemed uncle," he says, an allowance of humour and a sort of softening of his expression. There are things even now he's learning, navigations that Lan Zhan hadn't been able to help with before, tectonic movements that Wei Wuxian had to experience alone. Soulmates could not live each other's experiences for them, though they could be a support, leaning like two cracked trees in the depths of a monsoon striking.
Their roots, their anchoring, it had to come from within them. Lan Zhan's meant he did not erode with the mountain storms, and Wei Wuxian, at some point, had found himself adrift and clinging and spreading like vines to, climbing to reach for the world beyond himself without having a proper grounding.
It was not as frightening as it once was, to truly consider his home as being within him, and small as that progress is, gently as he refills Lan Zhan's cup with still steaming tea, he finds and leaves parts of himself everywhere he visits. His once-brother, his mending love with Jiang Cheng, and the gestures of paintings and memories and recollections that hurt as much as they slowly, painstakingly heal. Jin Ling and his vibrancy, smiles and scowls and too keen statements and too knowing looks when it comes to pointing toward his blood uncle's truths, and his own fumbling way to ask for the framework of who his mother was. Even if his cousins, older than he was, could share his father, there'd been only Jiang Cheng for his mother, and Jiang Yanli was a beautiful scar across his heart, a gift given repeatedly in blood he clawed from his chest to leave her son with any memory of a woman he reflected in his own empathy far more than Wei Wuxian would have guessed, in first meetings.
He'd been a fool. He knows he's often enough been a fool, and they both have, and they both will, in the future. Yet their sons, two fathers, soulmates, but not the people who once they'd been, but the versions of themselves they were still growing into: their sons, and their futures, unfettered but by what is chosen.
"You have claim to Yiling," is all he says to that in the end, the same invitation, the knowing quirk of his lips, because Yiling is no man's restful paradise, and he is no man, he is a spectre made flesh, and he will invite rest to this land.
If he will grant himself purpose, if he will grant them both time for themselves, and no time can be granted for their children, then he will be the one to visit and take gasping breath to measure their growth, before he slips under the surface of familiar waters to swim with broad strokes and strong kicks of cloth-wrapped legs, to drag himself out and dry in the familiar sun, or to never quite dry at all in the humid summer's embrace.
Lan Zhan no more wishes to feel saved than anyone else in this world he's been unmoored from, owning relationship's bindings, but with only that weight, and the forever threatening possibility of what he might do, if only, if only. Less with Lan Zhan sitting where he was now, cloaked in his titles and position, but he thinks even after then, they'll see.
There are thoughts for him to investigate, lay flat and view from above, but it is what it is. Things he hasn't allowed himself to consider before, but might now; what fosters a core, and what he might find if he only has that to investigate, and no murders looming, no curses pressing, only the pleasantries of family to turn his attention back onto, and not one of them needs him, beyond everything, needs his sacrifice, without him asking, needs him to prove any part of his unworthy self is worth salvaging. Not for having found worth, exactly, but for having come closer to peace in the wake of storm and child's tantrums and all the terrors and horrors of the everyday and the dead, crossing over with the same abandon that rules the chaos of their beautiful, breathing world.
Freedom is being so unmoored he can choose his own, true points of contact, and not let it be guilt that binds him, but the warmer, better things, like what ties him to each child of theirs. For the children, it's always been easy for him. It's his peers, and the elders, who have always been difficult, in the same way that they all found him difficult, in his pernicious smiles and too keen intelligence with too little younger reason to wonder at the hows of going about things, and not just the doing with little more than a why not.
no subject
Their roots, their anchoring, it had to come from within them. Lan Zhan's meant he did not erode with the mountain storms, and Wei Wuxian, at some point, had found himself adrift and clinging and spreading like vines to, climbing to reach for the world beyond himself without having a proper grounding.
It was not as frightening as it once was, to truly consider his home as being within him, and small as that progress is, gently as he refills Lan Zhan's cup with still steaming tea, he finds and leaves parts of himself everywhere he visits. His once-brother, his mending love with Jiang Cheng, and the gestures of paintings and memories and recollections that hurt as much as they slowly, painstakingly heal. Jin Ling and his vibrancy, smiles and scowls and too keen statements and too knowing looks when it comes to pointing toward his blood uncle's truths, and his own fumbling way to ask for the framework of who his mother was. Even if his cousins, older than he was, could share his father, there'd been only Jiang Cheng for his mother, and Jiang Yanli was a beautiful scar across his heart, a gift given repeatedly in blood he clawed from his chest to leave her son with any memory of a woman he reflected in his own empathy far more than Wei Wuxian would have guessed, in first meetings.
He'd been a fool. He knows he's often enough been a fool, and they both have, and they both will, in the future. Yet their sons, two fathers, soulmates, but not the people who once they'd been, but the versions of themselves they were still growing into: their sons, and their futures, unfettered but by what is chosen.
"You have claim to Yiling," is all he says to that in the end, the same invitation, the knowing quirk of his lips, because Yiling is no man's restful paradise, and he is no man, he is a spectre made flesh, and he will invite rest to this land.
If he will grant himself purpose, if he will grant them both time for themselves, and no time can be granted for their children, then he will be the one to visit and take gasping breath to measure their growth, before he slips under the surface of familiar waters to swim with broad strokes and strong kicks of cloth-wrapped legs, to drag himself out and dry in the familiar sun, or to never quite dry at all in the humid summer's embrace.
Lan Zhan no more wishes to feel saved than anyone else in this world he's been unmoored from, owning relationship's bindings, but with only that weight, and the forever threatening possibility of what he might do, if only, if only. Less with Lan Zhan sitting where he was now, cloaked in his titles and position, but he thinks even after then, they'll see.
There are thoughts for him to investigate, lay flat and view from above, but it is what it is. Things he hasn't allowed himself to consider before, but might now; what fosters a core, and what he might find if he only has that to investigate, and no murders looming, no curses pressing, only the pleasantries of family to turn his attention back onto, and not one of them needs him, beyond everything, needs his sacrifice, without him asking, needs him to prove any part of his unworthy self is worth salvaging. Not for having found worth, exactly, but for having come closer to peace in the wake of storm and child's tantrums and all the terrors and horrors of the everyday and the dead, crossing over with the same abandon that rules the chaos of their beautiful, breathing world.
Freedom is being so unmoored he can choose his own, true points of contact, and not let it be guilt that binds him, but the warmer, better things, like what ties him to each child of theirs. For the children, it's always been easy for him. It's his peers, and the elders, who have always been difficult, in the same way that they all found him difficult, in his pernicious smiles and too keen intelligence with too little younger reason to wonder at the hows of going about things, and not just the doing with little more than a why not.