"Best." But Lan Wangji invades here, tolerated. Counts his steps and his breaths and the pulse of Wei Ying's shadow-rot, incandescent, the residue of Yiling's death like sand granules and ground seashell when waves retreat after beating the shoreline. Here, Hanguang-Jun is the armour of his qi, bones and flesh curtailing it — lives, a woken candle, yet stoked at the largesse of the Patriarch. Breathes his breath, burns bright in his presence, demure.
Wangji rises, first, wash of silks brushed long behind him. If there is dust to traverse across the universe of Wei Ying's Wen empire, let his robes carry it, let their lace soak, let his steps carve. Let part of him claw and claim all that is Wei Ying's own through brutal physicality.
If not Jiang Yanli, then the dead Wei Ying fears wear names he ill remembers — spilled like pearls from the fevered mouth of young Sizhui, torn from his past through sickness. Uncles, aunts, many not of the blood, but chained to him in the way of stewardship the only weedling of barren grounds earns from each of his elders. If they knew more, Wangji might have arranged their silent altar. Instead, they yield rice and wine and fruit to the nameless passed, to Wen Qing, and to Wen Ning, before they knew the truth of his survival. Now, the ghost shares their table.
He trickles past the teeth of stone, teases their pointed sharpness with his palm. Considers, then, in a fit of whim, gives ghosts what is Bichen's by right: a scratch, a line of red, feeding. Gestures over generosity, with the dead — this alone may yet sate them.
"Use me." This, absently, to Wei Ying. "The guqin will agitate them." They are too many, too old, too confused, too united in their cauldron. "Inquiry will offend." As ever, with victims of slaughter. "Name me as a disciple. I shall work as the Patriarch wishes worked."
And his hand recedes, bled palm tight at his back, righting his posture. A strange thing, to serve ever as Wei Ying's instrument, gladly giving of himself.
"What?" The pause, at that entrance, cast in shadow dark enough to plunge his features into stark relief. A cheekbone, his nose, a touch of his forehead, his chin; a sliver of neck, but then little else, the pale glimpse of his hands, all swallowed by the blacks of his robes. Softened at times by lighter linings, but not now, now when shadows seem poised to swallow him, but only shadows. Not the resentful masked within them, who lurk nearby, but stir, curious, hungry, forever angry, with the fresh offerings twice over.
One old, one new. Both fresh, both tantalising, and caution, oh, caution learned at a bright blade and a dark song, this pairing familiar in minds that have little cohesion or coherency left behind.
He laughs, but it's the exhalation of the surprised, and his smile is that confusion of hearing and disbelieving. Not for an absurdity, but for the willingness, and the ache that follows, boneshattering in his chest.
"Lan Zhan, I don't need, I don't want a disciple. I never did. Partners, right? Side by side. A disciple follows a step behind." He steps forward, shadows shifting, light falling across him in fractals. "I want your help, not your filial piety, Lan Zhan. Will you?"
He will lead every way he must, plunge into the depths he prefers to leave in the past, like every unpleasant memory he's tried to shove away over the course of his life. Sixteen dark years, and he's not whole or unwholly undone after. Merely more human than ever, and surrounded by ghosts, like every living person finds themselves. As Lan Zhan had found, in the time before.
How their sons have been, and it is telling in its way, their collection of haunted, loved children, and the pride that they can share without telling others, in the achievements of their children. Two generations, and wonderful, both.
And I walk ever in your shadow. Ostensibly, to watch Wei Ying's back, where Suibian now lacks her old jurisdiction — from men, from fangs of long lost ghosts, from sabotage, from dagger and poison. From Wei Ying himself, though they toy with this truth, sand and submerge it.
"My pride does not take precedence to the dead." This, a strained clarification, tentative for how Lan Wangji brokers each word. Years dulling the blade of his temper at Zewu-Jun's feet, and he thinks some of the oils of his brother's diplomacy may well have infused him. He need not reduce Wei Ying, only to correct him. "It is not lessened by service."
With his help, his hand, his eyes, his strength — more than his piety, as if an orphan and a fool and a man who learned to spit upon the precepts before wooing their words can be trusted with the notion. Briefly, Lan Wangji pities him with the ancient condescension that anointed him vestige of his father's blood, skin and meat and bones his own, but heir of a school: the steel cog of a jewellery box, rust to never touch its enclosures. The whole of Gusu Lan will forever exceed the summed parts of its pupils.
And what of Wei Ying? Adrift between stones paler than the fire-veined teeth that entombed him. Did it ache to fall? But he learned from spirits before he did from artists of fine-carved healing, who peel gristle from the geometries of bone common to gentlemen and thieves: those who fall break before the landing. The heart, a weak thing, and Wei Ying's brittle beforehand.
( Here, close, spirits lap at his red fingers, lick at the screeching metal of his blood. What will, fed once, forever follow? )
"You have my help." A pause, but he walks on; sixteen years later, the critical progress of knowing that if he steps first, a red-eyed storm will follow him, thereafter.
"But if you are shelter, I am bait," he warns. The Patriarch's protection, the Lan purity. Which will lure them out quickest? "They will give chase."
And so it is, just like he thought it would be, Wei Wuxian falling in step with Lan Zhan and flicking his fingers, a warning paired with a sidelong stare to the dead who lap at Lan Zhan, hounds coursing the hare.
He smiles, and there is more teeth than lip, more memory of violence than that of joy. Try him. To each of the dead who stretched to greedy outreach, try him. He is wise to the worst of the calling, and shelter, ah, shelter for whom may be the question. Shelter for what?
Hadn't that been the fear?
The shadows slip back, mill like the mindless, aimless collections of thinned emotion they are, and the wanting slips in, and Wei Wuxian lays hand to Chenqing.
"They already do," he says, "They'll hasten." No contest, no matter who sung them forth; they slip from one cavernous room in smooth stoned floors to the dark, dry insides of the cavern he'd slept in for the year and then some, called his home. Strands of straw can still be found molded and ossified along the cave's edges, but the thrum of the space is warmer, haunted by memory and not one glimpse of resentment or spirit or soul. Or warmer to him, in the bittersweet memories of a life fought for step by step, and the tears of backsliding into hopelessness because the world wanted the ease of his total, wholly evil guilt than truth, or honesty, or justice.
"Ward the entrance, ward as we clear each outward facing ring. Wards can't hold forever, but it delays, and time is what we need." Here, as he walks across floors thickening again with dust and debris of dead leaves, dead things, dead dreams, and feels the faintest hope. One day, to see Yiling bloom, to see it live, where it had been a condemnation of the damned.
There is no hunting, raw and cruel, like the pursuit of man.
He feels the shadows: growing, grazing, like ink-stained tulle stretched thin enough to moan out the birthing pains of translucence. Too absent for the likelihood of producing harm, though click of Lan Wangji's tongue — tch — and Wei Ying's parting wave, and lo. They disperse like breaking sea foam.
And he feels them again, more toxic in their aftermath, in the stench that drowns his silks now, his body, an inorganic, wistful petrichor. Lungs open to it, eyes brighten wild and feverish. Absurdly alarmed, his gaze ricochets each way, off the cave's edges. And Wei Ying asks, wards. Futile, in a space so narrow, where they entomb themselves alongside ghosts, where the great, groaning tumult of Lan Wangji's power sabotages more than sustains them.
But he pledged to work as disciples do, and no boy of Cloud Recesses would defy his master. Tradition favours parchment and the fast, flame-like ignition of seals. Whim and Wei Ying turn to blood-carved renditions of the same. Between them, testing the tumble of rubble under his boot, the screeching, creaking sounds of stone floor plates finding their balance — Lan Wangji only kneels to scry the symbols with fingers wet disgracefully on his tongue. Dust hindered, enforcements set: they stir alive only once they've passed into the next circle of... quarters, into the crumbling core of Wei Ying's cave. Without an active element, they are anemic: but they are instructed to leech on energy within their reach, to use that for their awakening.
"So they linger as precaution, once we've fled." This, before Wei Ying need ask his explanation. He has nothing to hide: less so than does the man who stripped himself of flesh and the riches of his body's beauty in this alcove, who gave up his likeness along with his fealty to Yunmeng Jiang. As if a Wei Wuxian in health and glory could not have abided to become the monster that the sects named him.
It slips from Wangji's mouth like a wretched thing, tongue slack. "Once, you were king here."
Crack. Wei Wuxian's head rises, turns, as he half turns as well. "Here?"
In this land, shadowed and horrified, a terror of its own deep in soil desperate for anything but the wasteland it became, not barren, growing longer and longer in the whispering grasses of its defeats. A thin harvest, leaving bones cleaving to flesh, nothing between.
"Once life ruled here," he says, and he gestures with his hand, steps forward toward the stone of his rest, toward the entrance out onto the dilapidated courtyard, and its fallow fallen fields. "Once Yiling wasn't a place where the dead drove themselves to madness in their own bitter company. King of that, yes, and warden."
Wards that activate, that bind. Seals that attract, not just repel. Compasses that spun to track down resentment and the shadowed pits of things which were evil for a lack of good, which were greedy with no regard for anything but their own satiation.
He was king, here, and his throne stripped bare, and only the ghosts to haunt it after, turning over loose stones, looking, always looking.
He smiles, circumvents the bones of a bird that had thought, perhaps, the failed lotus pond was a temporary haven. Deadly mistakes, if one is not wise to the way of the world's movement. Even when one is.
"Lan Zhan, shall we play in the courtyard?" Music to soothe, to push on souls.
Play in the courtyard, like brittle courtesans past the flower age of lushly paid performance. Neglected, as a kindness of a patron's discretion — agreeing, peace brokered between all parties, that eroded beauty stains fingers darker than bloodshed. Trueborn deformity can be respected for its purity. Here, they drift ephemeral, men as mould, porous — absorbing within themselves the misplaced wealth of light motes in imperfect diffusion.
In Yiling, what the sun cannot burn need not live. In Yiling, midday light is a blink of white, cataracted. In Yiling, Lan Wangji is humbled guest and tolerated refugee, a bowed-back intrusion. Vermin serve more honoured cause. Have already, trails of decayed bone stripped of meat at his feet.
In Yiling, he summons his guqin with the selfish, sickly wave of a hand and the arrogant exertion of qi Wei Ying could not spare. Vanity, to excel before your host, in their kingdom. He remembers to cut himself in the charcoal sketch of Jin Guangyao, to set himself a tool at his master's service. May Wei Ying make purpose of him, bloody or return him to sheath.
The play comes soft, easy. Insincere in the hastened way of skill perfected to a crest where minor preparatory strain is rota. He has mastered the peak of musical difficulty, only to stutter here, now, at Wei Ying's behest. Spirits round, bite, breathe.
He allows them empire of him.
"I invite you," he says, and plays at chance, at danger unknown. Never befriend evil, yet it smears his skin, and Wei Ying lies within reach to dispel the wisps of them, smoke, the dark of their teething intrusion, carving game of him in scratches of shoulder and calves. Dogs, biting.
The bittersweet symphony that rises, that snakes forward and coils around Lan Zhan, that muzzles the dogs of humanity degraded, is a trill on Chenqing, a thrumming weight of song that lightens and creates heaviness in turns. Come, he plays, and he is to Lan Zhan's side now, hair stirred in the wind of the dead, in the breeze of the barren thinness of Yiling's life.
There is life, in spite of itself. The bones stripped to white, the insects that crawl, the greed of the plants that continue to sprout and hope despite so often being thwarted in the earliest stages of growing.
Life, jealous as these remnants are of it, hard as they buck against any semblance of order or control or suggestion in their desire to sink into it, to be flush with Lan Zhan's burning heart, the blood that rushes through veins, beating onward, that steady heart.
Lan Zhan, who makes himself the beacon, bright enough that for a while, it's the dead who fail to realise Wei Wuxian's own life, his warmth, and his cutting cull with the song that leaves from his lips and fingers and the inhalations that exhale into command.
Lay down your regrets. Cleave with your resentment. Lingering any longer, any more, will leave nothing to rebirth, to reincarnation. Go. Go. Go.
A brush of heat and yearning, the mourning wail of one spirit, one wreckage of a ghost, one collection of resentment spinning off into thinner threads that come close to snapping before they fade entirely. One. Two. No easy progress, but the tatters of fingers that pluck at Lan Zhan's sleeves, the howl that turns into weeping, the names that call, and he silences those, the pleas and pleading, though Lan Zhan can't be fully spared the cries: Wei Ying, calling to Lan Zhan, his voice the broken octave of a broken man, "Was I always fated to fall?"
There is a crest to this, the giving: a point where tension builds and rises, roiling, and flesh bitterly bears it like-poison-rot, dust gravelly and honeyed with sweat, carved in desiccate skin after chase on a summer day. Spirits catch each other's tails like whirlwind and Ouroboros, nip and lick at burning footsteps.
They ache — impossibly, not for what which was lost, not for guilt, for hardships revisited, for slaughter. Yet for the men they might have been, the faces they ill remember, their own visages glimpsed but carnage-clawed on spreads of polished silver.
Reincarnation will not welcome the skins of fruit without their core. What use does divinity have, to drink of dregs? He knows the score: plays it with a measured hand, a lukewarm tempo. Outside, beyond them, beating the groaning, looming walls, the cave waits and listens, set to entomb them. Storm stokes. Wind. His silks tatter at edges, where a spirit's grasp grows dear.
He does not ask if Wei Ying's safety triumphs. Does not presume. Only shackles Wei Ying briefly at the wrist — "No," in hissed answer — then releases him, mitigating the trickle of seconds wasted with a livened crescendo of the ensuing play. Songs of clarity, Cleansing subdued, then war-drumming.
And then, the dam yields: pressure dissolves like sweets of coagulated herbs on the tongue, and the howl of spirits darkens, gains flesh, nears the precipice seconds before implosion. They are surrounded, invaded, purified, abandoned. Husked and withered.
Bereft, he gives surrender first: kneels on brittle ground that heaves to welcome him, weeds collapsed to each side. Balanced on his thighs, the guqin transitions back into translucence in crisp winks of by-gone light. He does not draw it close, does not insist. Whispers, only, "We fed a womb."
And choked, in what increments of strength might have reshaped as laughter, "The Patriarch bore so many children."
A circle of fingers, burned like no brand on his wrist, located later in the faint lingering heat, the almost bruising that he's prone to when he knocks into things, cannot heal away as swiftly, mindlessly as he did in learning cultivation in his youth.
No, and he had only half heard the voice, the echo that was the sound of him and not the heart, but it's enough. It's always enough, and there are other things to hear, other ways to wind his music into Lan Zhan's, following his lead and overtaking it, handing it back once the crescendo builds and they're left in the aftermath, pressure of relief singing alive in his veins.
Voices for this area, the souls and energies and hatreds that had stirred to follow, that surrendered and rendered in their wake a temporary, fractured peace. This is more than he managed alone, day to day, or fought back nightly to keep the Wens safe. Safe in a living graveyard of hungry ghosts, and what a joy that'd been, when the living eeked out impossible progress over the dead.
The dead had their vengeances. Even now, sinking down to settle by Lan Zhan, who does not laugh but comments on a womb, on children, he feels the echo of the pain in all those ghosts. Were they good, bad, indifferent in living?
"What can I say? You already knew it was fruitful."
A wan smile, the brief lean of his shoulder against Lan Zhan's. Sizhui, and each child that follows; not just our Qingshan, our Qingbai, but every orphaned creature since. The living fruits, borne from a man, wombless, but with a heart that might as well have held each seed to its germination.
"A shame," he says, Chenqing laid across his legs, tassel tangling, brushing ground to dust at nothing that could be shaken off. "So few were meant to make it."
Their peace is purchased for the moment, the line toed in the sand. Spirits are not so endlessly resenting to ignore preservation even of their nothing, their loss of potential, their swallowed dreams. He lifts a hand, unblooded, and sketches the shape of the ward against the air. Inform. Renewing old lines, ones he carved into rock and dirt almost two decades ago, but ones he can start to reignite now. A shimmer of energy, and the tripwire nature of his belled line glows, then disappears, as insubstantial as dust motes in a sunbeam.
"This went better than the last time."
Which last time, and to what extent? He tucks into his robes, the cross of them over his chest, and pulls out a banded collection of talismans. Shows them to Lan Zhan, the writing bold as always, but tempered by something time had won from him, and given back again. Experience. Named, talismans of enduring, like and unlike the wards set within and to their backs, leaving them facing one front, and not many to guard against.
Last time. The array of talismans, like matchmaker portraits presented before him: this pleasing, that fair, the other lacklustre. One, scratched in lines Lan Wangji would name disaster, prone to sharp maws and an ill-ground bite. His part in silent things, road filth, flecked blood and paraphernalia: to slither fingers on each ward, temper the characters, dissect their purpose.
To choose among them, not the fairest, or the most competent, but the most willing — those of the wards whose stubbornness of cast could wage years of war against the natural environment of Yiling's inorganic deterioration and persist, victorious.
Wei Ying tips into him. A lesser set, he answers, tilting back into Wei Ying's orbit, until their shoulders neighbour, tap, collide. And he says, "It will not keep."
It wrenches something of him, resignation. Weaves with wind, and the dirge of a world unlearned to consider itself past the lens of its dead.
"Containment condemns to madness." They roil and ache and make of themselves a sea at storm, these unbound spirits, the fledgling violence of their unspent energy. To fetter them is to rip the last bones of their parted bodies, to give them empire to roam and yet no witness. Tentatively, he mouths the practised solution, dismissed, "Purification dissolves."
It will not keep, like rot dark in his flesh, taking root, building home. The shiver that traverses him could sunder the world. Unbidden, he begs Wei Ying's hand, ropes to round it, closes it on the wards he selects for reinforcement. This and this, and the folly of Lan Wangji's own qi, feeding the beast.
"What of destruction?"
Yiling. Burial Mounds. Eradicated, with the last of Wen Ruohan's legacy. Would Wei Ying bear the parting? The corner of Wangji's gaze snags on Wei Ying's boyish smile. You have endured worse.
"Destruction," he murmurs, a word that weighs heavy and organic on his tongue, carrying the petrichor of a world Yiling has not known now for generations. The healthy rot, the growing decay, too easily swallowed in this world of brittle, coating dust. Leans in to Lan Zhan, a warm light, a cutting one, with his talismans tempted into joining Chenqing in his lap but for Lan Zhan's fingers, velvet steel and honest callouses, reminder of those which had once been his own. "Destruction is what this place fights hardest. Destruction is what Yiling delivers, time and again."
Destruction of life, of heart, of hope; destruction of chance, of choice, of the bitterness and barrenness of a land bereft of living lungs. A tempered Yiling he had been making, and to wildness it had sown, strewn into chaos at the mindless mercies of those too long dead to know what it is to desire living, so much as desire the lost chances they'd never regain.
"This isn't to contain," he says softly, words falling like decrepit leaves from a tree yawning over a ravine. Disappearing down, searching for the bottom that exists but doesn't meet the piercing rays of light filtering down, even at noon. "Anything more than us. Layers. The more of them built, slow, the more they'll turn our way."
Turns his hand, showing those talismans all the more clearly, his face only caught in shadow as his bangs slide forward, going from slender tendrils to more pronounced, won loose of that morning's topknot by grasping hands to tiny beings, less anything else.
"Purification," he says, the toll of a bell sounding from li beyond them now, "And ablutions as destructions. Lan Zhan," he says, looking to his face, all his own solemn and echoing the unkindness of years in the depths of his eyes, like the space between the stars, "We bring this down, stone by stone, but we clean none of it by fire."
Not for the thirst of the Wens, or the starting point, the burning blood of the Xue patriarch, a century ago. And he says, "The rains did not always avoid Yiling."
Ablutions. Again and again and once more, like flood waters raining away slaughter. Red spumes on his fingertips, and he reaps only what sects before him have sown, sin of the ancestors thickened on tired tongue. Swallows, to taste burgeoning bile.
Toils of bodies tortured here, of broken joints and ached minds and the sport of their hunt, pricked by serendipity. He thinks corpses were needle once, and fate bludgeons them in hard land, breaks it in littered wells of unended hurt. Water will sprout of it. The rains did not always avoid Yiling.
He is knelt already, a servant in attendance. When he bows, it's to the song of wild wind and a rusted sky, the whispered, winding devastation of a moment's anticipation, a breath held — his own, and his body contracts, lessens itself to the boy who begged pittance at his mother's doors, the youth who rescued dreams of estival rebellion from Wei Ying's praying hands. Firestorm breathes and evaporates in him. Earth crackles, welcoming less than the humility of Hanguang-Jun, but the might of Gusu Lan discipline, ghosting until a sirocco summons aged blood and sorcery and debris, stripped of land.
In cupped hands, he welcomes it, brings it up, until it smokes and mulches his fingers, his sleeve, until it greases him like a door at its hinges, begging his mouth open — until he kisses dirt and gravel, first on his fingertips, then, wilted as his body breaks, on trembled land. Yiling. Let him come a petitioner, then, a worshipper, let him show himself faint. There's a devastation in this dirt that answers him, one widower and mournful soul, bare before another.
He cannot breathe. Blisters, "I beg of you, pardon. I beg of you, peace."
How fails him, the root of disaster? Sects upon sects and this ground trampled, by foot and hooves, and their glory earned on castles of corpses. What use is the mortal coil of Lan Wangji in feeble retribution? He cannot house a thousand spirits, barely contains the soul he names his own. Storm inundates him. Fresh bundle of crumbled dirt in his grasp, the land's core, and he raises it — sets his thumbs stained to write long vertical lines of printed turbulence on Wei Ying's cheeks, in their wake.
"We beg." A simple rite, a careless giving. Uncle would never approve.
There is heat, and desolation, and cold that burns more than any lightning strike or fire, and Wei Wuxian feels them all where he kneels, where Lan Zhan brings dirt that he's seen tilled and tilled and untilled to the point where his walking footsteps lost their care because he had to, to move forward. Learned apathy, stripped from him in those vertical lines, furrows in his skin, both felt and numbed.
His hand comes up, captures one of those hands, captures the dirt and blood and death and the undeniable beat of life between them, palm to palm, calloused fingers to calloused fingers. The shape of those callouses have changed, shifted in their orbits, but still within the same galaxy, still in the same breathless expanse of sky between them, sixteen years in the weaving of quiet and lightlessness.
"We beg." Supplicants, in the dirt and wearing it on hands, fingers, under nails, under eyes, in the lungs that draw in, in the exhalations out, in the hairs that stir from his shoulders, slide forward, follow him down.
Beg, and this is a bow, respect and something that sinks lower, touches on the buckled backs of bone ground to dust and buried by time, even before this was a burial grounds. A bow, and no hold slackened, together, and the words that people have meant for themselves for ages, will mean, but not with the depth of hollow echo in his chest, from deeper, from the space behind his heart and lungs, from the gaps in his teeth, thin and unseen.
"We're sorry." Not simple, those words, not with a weight of apology and grief; three different kinds, between Lan Zhan, Wei Wuxian, and Yiling underneath and over and around them in every sense, mountains looming taller than men can ever strive to rise. A land that holds to what it has been given, and who trembles, unsettled, by the slipping grip of its fingers.
Sorry isn't enough, yet the supplication, the depth of apology, is beyond the simplicity of bowed heads, strained, gaunt fingers, and heartbeats, steady or otherwise, until the ground beneath them thrums and beats to match.
But it begins, he thinks, Here.
The earth rumbles, and shakes, and the cries of the dead are a long, sustained keening, before both settle, bouncing rock and crashing dirt resettling as around them, the world tries to unmake itself. The courtyard held for a century fractures behind them; the stone pillars at the framing door crack, sway, hold.
"I think Yiling heard us," he says, and it's a dry statement from a parched throat, and he can only cast his gaze askance at the solidity of Lan Zhan, the frailty of his dust-bathed light. So human, so alive, so what.
Wei Wuxian stares, and he finds no words in the morass of his thoughts, only glimmering lights and dancing shadows and it is the forest, on an autumn day, brisk and lovely, the sun filtered through the leaves. The river and its susurrations in the distance, whispering promises of water and disaster and travel and trade. No smoke on the wind, but voices, far distant and indistinct. They laugh. Alive.
In the great groaning stratosphere of magic dispersing, clinging to his hands, his limbs, darkening his eyelids — he feels weighted, anchored, a rusted coil that tightens, reduces itself. The flakes of his metal strip in shavings. He corrodes, and cold earth cries deaf around him.
He stumbles to sit, drifts until his legs fold beneath him. Waits for Wei Ying to recollect himself, and steals the first glance molten, the second hard, the third — rapt in latent study. Earlier, he knows, and filth runs slick and sticky on his fingertips, collects beneath his nails. Earlier, the pulse between them germinating, electric.
The way of the land, he knows. The ache of it, grief flaying itself to leave the tattered remains of loam and silt, divided from history. Yiling heard them, and yet, what lives still of Yiling? What lives still of Lan Wangji, death walker of deep prints across this world?
He does not know himself, until he claims Wei Ying's hand again — struggles with the understanding that Wei Ying is a disparate creature, and not a natural extension of himself, his body.
His thumbs curl. Pads flicker. "Your hands run cold." And softened, "Who made a snake of you?"
Thrumming outside his skin, and breathing through it, in some sense of unfathomed loss and quiet, countryside exhalation. Not a finishing, but a hint of settling, of old lands giving birth to new avenues, trickles of qi like water brushing past them.
The damages here were deeper, heavier than they'd had a right to know. Than anyone had a right to realise, without being destroyed in the unveiling.
They breathe yet.
He swallows, and touch doesn't bring him back to himself, really, not until it's touch and words, and he looks to Lan Zhan as if surprised to find him there, to find his hand caught, to find himself catching Lan Zhan's hand in turn. Cold, and what of it? Snakes, and he startles into laughter, curls a hand and tugs on Lan Zhan. Tugs without moving further, leading nowhere.
"Snakes become dragons, you know. All the legends tell us so," he says, and his eyes lose some of their depth of cold, some of their glacial awareness, to turn warmer, a thawing to uncertain spring. "Besides, the cold never bothered you anyway."
"No core," he translates, for the peace of his own ears. Sickness betrayed by symptom. And action — the loitering lines of Wei Ying's hand, the tug — poisoned by reaction — he pulls back, strength applied in misdeeds of offence. Coarse strength, repurposed against a man weakened by — absence.
No heat to roam Wei Ying's body, reinforce the marrow of his bones. To make of him a molten pulse at the heart of viscous, gravel, cracked grey. He nods, then gives Wei Ying a child's mercy, drags his hand under the grave mantle of Wangji's sleeve, pressing his fingers in to borrow close to the warmth of the wrist. If this were Sizhui, a beanstalk ill grown, he would have nestled as deep as the first few layers of Lan Wangji's collar, seeking beads of heat.
A strange thing, to raise a child, and taste the small pleasures in the knowing of whom he becomes, as you see him grow. Whom you become, as you bear him witness. To bloom to his full potential, a son must walk his father's grave.
"When Sizhui..." But it dies, cold on his lips. Again. "When Yuan." No. "When I raised a child alone." When you abandoned me to the task. But there is no spite to it, no rancor — only the aftertaste, lavender-like, of melancholy. "Our winters sowed his misery."
Disagreed with him, precious burden of the Wen, sun-kissed and a boy of the summer season. What a thing to remember, here, now, buried in the ashes of Wen ancestors. He breathes white.
"Children do." When the world is cold, when small bodies might survive a chill or a fever that would slay an adult, when left to one man's unknowing arms, and to that of his brother, and his uncle, and the clemency of a clan that had not known it was to host so many orphans, and yet had done so. Its own and those of others, as Sizhui was raised, as Wei Wuxian visited, as little needs saying in a world that has known and will know war.
Yiling knew war, and still could not breathe free of its reminders, but Wei Wuxian has seen a world beyond it. One of small kindnesses, and larger ones, and while Lan Zhan tugs his hand back, brings his chilled hand to his wrist, Wei Wuxian steps in, to pull again, toward himself.
"He had you to find. Zewu-jun as well, I can imagine, and enough braizers, enough blankets, clothing not worn thin." A tug of hands, again, to bring them back to him. "Affection held host here, and we had fires, banked, and he had the best of us, for that time past a year where we lived. You raised A-Yuan alone," and that name, because it thickens in his throat, "With a clan behind you, and it was a good thing, being in the cold, alive enough to hunt warmth, and to find it. Lan Zhan," he says, and tucks folded hands not to his chest, not to his throat, not to anywhere poignant, but instead to the fold of his arm. Tucking them up under his armpit for the time-old truth: warmth that comes, in the folds of the body, because a core does not define the world around them. Does not define this, or Yiling, hollow at its core like he is, and cold, yes, but capable of more.
In the settled dust and stone, capable of more.
"I welcome the warmth, but I don't hunt it. I don't have a core," he says with a half smile, holding on to that hand. "But I am not less for being different from you, and the same as so many people we've defended in our lives."
He thinks, foolishly, he knows this: the moment when Wei Ying unmoors his hand, meanders it north-bound, past the natural bindings of modesty, into territory nebulous and shifting. The moment when a man has narrowed the selfishness of his balance with singular, strategic specificity: when the single-log bridge can only afford him one step, then the next, and no distraction of foreign sentiment.
This is what Lan Wangji has transgressed into: eyes bright, but mind dulled, his affection weighted, an unwelcome margin of error. Offers rejected, hands turned away. Finish the bows, he'd urged in a village half submerged in the terrors of its practicality. Denied, even then.
He presses his other palm, slick with cold shivers, clammy, on the wound of exorcised grand. Grips there, if only to give himself pillar.
"The man you were. Do you begrudge me," he starts, and finishes, and breathes, and is. Is, so very lone, mahogany and hale, but earthy in a way that takes root in this cavernous world of Yiling, his grief their own. He misjudged the land, the hawkish, trembled whispers of its aches. How they woo him. "That I knew him?"
A core alive, incendiary, an example of fortitude. If polished, no doubt Wei Ying might have surged past prominence, into immortality. The heavens would have sundered in sharp, toothy invitation, to rain down their secrets.
"Or do you begrudge me that I was better learned to care for him?" That he knew the Wei Ying who shared his path instinctively, through the wealth of shared experience. That he knows the Wei Ying of now as a broken bone, through splinters of pain delivered throughout Wangji's body, his absence an earthquake, tectonic.
He holds, and in a moment that extends heartbeats into finite universes that collapse and fold back on themselves, bright darknesses of life and potential realised and laid to rest, his eyes warm. Heat, a prickling of tears that aren't one emotion or another; the rains did not always avoid Yiling, and certain droplets had always found themselves swallowed by the gasping, dry maw of its expanse.
"No," he says, fingers twitching, stepping closer to stare into Lan Zhan's face, to offer none of that distance he usually minds just enough to make it apparent when he intrudes on it, as he inevitably does. Wei Wuxian has always been a man for closeness in visible ways, but not the ones that lie deeper, that means sharing fears, worries, and not just the redirections, the burden minding, the telling silences around the alcohol drowning out his thoughts.
"No, Lan Zhan, I'm glad you knew me. Knew the man I was, before a war began, and we all gained new names, new scars. Before we changed, and kept changing."
An echo of Yunmeng, the sandalwood incense, the lovingly tended plaques of each generation of Jiangs that came before. Where his shijie hung now, and the tears spill, unremarkable in their path down his face, mingling with dust, streaking him with mud to take root from. A lotus starts there, buried in the mud, reaching for the surface.
Drowning is a matter of breathing in the wrong way.
"He was an easier man to know. More arrogant, though I didn't unlearn that for years yet. Hiding secrets and telling people to let go of me because I thought it would spare them, that I was fated to bear these things on my own. It was poorly done."
It was not a transgression to any one person alone, but to each of them in turn, the people he cared for more than most the world around them. Even now, even when some of them lie dead, buried or fated to soul shattered endings.
"You, Lan Zhan, I've only been in the relearning of you for these months. Neither of us are the youths we once were, and I won't begrudge us having known them. Or to remember them, when Lan Zhan was Lan Zhan, before he was Hanguang-jun. When Wei Ying was Wei Ying, and no laozu."
He smiles, and it's small, the weight of death lessened on his shoulders, despite the toll that says something wicked this way came, and circles them both, invisible dogs that should terrify him yet. They would be hypocrites, to believe either of them have unstained hands. Not just for the war, but for every step in each journey after; and Lan Zhan, as always, the righteous bearing of teeth and blade. Supported, respected, admired: yes, even so.
"Do you begrudge me for not being that man?"
Yiling, uncaring, wheezes around them, wind through barren branches, dust settling, and the trickle of pebbles that fall and bounce and still again, somewhere behind.
He weeps as children do, Wei Ying, for the pretty poetry of it, the indentation of a cleansed path on cheeks dust-stained and greyed, and his mouth soured, his soul contorted. A picture of innocence, tattered for sport — it speaks of the old practices, of defiling a bride, only to tear her veils, injure her family, spoil honour. To wash your hands in brittle gold and see them come glistened, and know cold river waters will steal their shine thereafter. To seize, for the arrogance of a claim.
A graceless thing, to own Wei Ying when he bares himself, the man he was before he gained new name, the boy, the martyr. When he vivisects his reputation, skin to bone, and finds gossamer and spiderweb, stale air and decay. No substance.
Alone, Lan Wangji wrenches himself — shifts, clumsy and slow and unresting beside himself the weight of ground-host, of sacred territory. There is in inhalation, a part wind, a part himself, the better half the destitution of Yiling.
"I think, once, I may have loved him." But he tips like brass pendulums, momentum paralysed by weight — collides in increments, forehead to Wei Ying's own, the divide of his headband a cold juxtaposition of distance and filigree. He does not exorcise the wet of Wei Ying's face with starved fingertips.
And he decides, "I think," for all it aches, "you are not him."
Worthy of the name 'Wei Ying'. Wearing the parchment of a known face. The sum of broken parts. "But I know you."
There is a settling in those words. A suspicion, an understanding, whose bones unearth as surely as the ones around them, caught in tangled, dead grasses, gnarled in roots long questing for water, for substance, for life. The trees grow from decay, and like mushrooms in their shadows, find use in it, find life, tenuous and painful.
Crack open his ribs, and find his heart, and the hollow of his dantian, right there where his breastbone ends. The soft spot following the hardness of bone, and yes, in those organs one finds nothing but the usual hollows, the crowded spaces, the mass of viscera necessary for living.
A golden core filling his dantian is not. Neither, as it turns out in aching ways, is the love of a man he thinks, once upon a time, he had started to love too. Had balked in the face of, because his realisation even then came already too late. When he was lessened of this, and could not be the companion he had been, could only disappoint.
Tricks are not true cultivation. You walk a fine line. He's commandeered the path, and his steps fall steady, now, and the joke of it all being his crimes are that of the righteous, too.
"I loved him once, too. That man who lived and died in the shadow of Yiling."
He won't say, that man might have loved you, too. It wasn't true until later, and later, later was too late. Later was a lifetime, even if it'd barely been a year.
He allows the press, forehead to forehead, and he allows the tears, because he allows himself this much felt, too. Not for them, but for an inevitability, a lancing of an old, festering wound. The brief closing of his eyes, in extended blink, and the light that's in them, different but familiar to a man who had once lived, as of yet unbroken.
"You're learning me," is what he says, and feels, because there's enough of a shadow of what he had been that skews what Lan Zhan does, even now. "Just as I'm learning you, sixteen years a widower, sixteen years living that I'll never touch."
Distance, and he pulls his head back, and in the sad quickness of a snake's strike, brushes his lips over Lan Zhan's forehead, above the ribbon. Sparing the whole of silk and metal with uninvited intrusion. No, it is not romance, but benefaction, a rasp of lips rendered soft from time spent living outside of the wind and heat and dry cold of Yiling, and his own heart.
"You still know more of me than anyone else. That's enough," he says, but he reclaims his distance with a foot slide out, turning to no longer face him head on, but to offer his side. To look out into the expanse of forest and rock and grass and decay that wants to be better than the sum of broken parts, but can't heal simply through wishing. Can't be what it was before, but forge through to becoming something new, something different. Better or worse? There was no point in asking such things.
"Knowing this man, that's enough."
What is love? A frightening thing, a binding of the heart, yoked to one cart and unable to slip away, to make it feel like it was okay if the cart goes abandoned, falls sideways, if the axel breaks. Yet only one love, in the shades of so many others: of sons, under their care, of brothers, who they'd face maelstroms for, on some level. For peoples and lands and causes, and those have always been easier for him to grasp, for him to pour himself into, for him to love. It's with bruised, aching heart he feels a little lighter, as if he's been finally absolved of a sin he hadn't intended to write.
I think, once, I may have loved him. I think, you are not him.
If Lan Zhan can say it, he speaks true, for all he lies in omission or technicalities, and Wei Wuxian can let it breathe freely, air in his lungs. There is no owing, for a man he was once. There is only this, and the knowing they grow into, where the support they'll lend of blade and blood is unquestioned, easy instinct. The rest? That knowing comes in time, and if it never touches love, that word, that cart he'd been frightened by when Yanli still breathed, he's no lessened for it.
Lan Zhan is not lessened, for having loved and lost, with some familiar stranger returned as ghost to haunt his bed. Half-married, half-wedded, and it can be that middle ground, Wei Wuxian knowing what boundaries he won't cross, what things he's never tasted, and needn't have. Family, for him... that he's been granted. By a man who says now, he loved what he had been, once. A man who's granted the ghost of whom he loved something so infinitely precious, all he can say, standing there and surveying a realm he will see heal, so help him if it takes a lifetime:
"Thank you." For the honesty, and for having felt, at any time, that Wei Wuxian, Wei Ying, had been a man worth loving. "And I'm sorry."
That he could not, would not ever, be that man again. That he leaves Lan Zhan widowed, even bodied as he stands now, breathing and never truly dead, and had since long before he'd decided it was easier to fall than breathe in a world where he destroyed everything he sought to protect. To love.
Who are they but ships in a stormed night, lights flickered in nebulous greeting? Before him, Wei Ying wears sixteen years' sorrows like bridal garment. Gratitude and apologies, the easy lacerations of courtesy ill set to stab. Wei Ying, a hapless executioner, mouth his blade, the wetted spread of Lan Wangji's forehead his first kill. Bite of it, like a feathered bird, squirming and living and wailing, rip the throat when the prey's blood yet runs warm.
All at once, Wei Ying dissolves, as the exorcism earlier, as the pains of whispered death that walk Lan Wangji's back. No man should reduce him, but the beast of Yiling catches and grinds him in its maws, spits out remains. There is nothing but blood and reckoning between them, stretches and spills, oil invading water.
Thank you, the starveling of a forlorn ghost, taunting his ear. Then, And I'm sorry. She dissipates.
Hurt reeks in him like the mould that spreads aggressive and web-like on each stone corner, like lichen. His throat cannot bear a swallow more. And still,"Drink my cup to him."
The funerary tokens fate denied him, for what man may mourn a traitor freely without incurring the wrath of the sects upon his clan? And in this, he would not have transgressed, might have pursued his own defection, so that he might wed and bed his grief without the law of tragic attractions whipping brother's limbs. Fate favoured him: long before the Yiling Patriarch surged to glory, the men of Gusu Lan had patroned their whites. Still, no mourning courtship of Wei Ying's peace, no body, no altar.
If Lan Wangji reaches out again, to trail fingers over Wei Ying's knuckles and know the slopes and mounts of them, it is to capture, at long last, the tattered remains. Snare. Snag. From the cavernous abyss, no voice in answer. You released my hand first. And so Wei Ying cannot be simply an extension of empty ground now, cannot sit immutable. Let stone bleed water.
"He was incandescent. Armed to change the world." Willing, able. A fount of idealism, brimming. As if Wei Ying was a creature sundered from his own experience, as if he did not live and breathe, as if he does not know. Remember him, Wangji's lips nearly tear and bleed, remember what you took.
His palm encompasses the back of Wei Ying's hand like snake bite. "I made of me a bowed-back bridge for his ghost's steps." Unasked, his ribs contorted, his spine a fertile field under white scarred stripes of a long gone whip. His choice. Wangji's alone. He heaves, "You raised me."
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.
What is the fickle moment of abstraction when a child watches his hand, then that of his mother, grasping it, and knows the two severed? When he understands with grim certitude that strength and substance can be contained by separate, isolated units of skin — that knowing is not the same as possession, and both are privileges of happenstance.
His fingers seep between Wei Ying's, fill negative space like brimming water. He breathes, blankets, clutches.
"Whatever debt you think between us." Life and death and the crackled territory of scars painted like tree branches on Wangji's back, and a child raised well, a reputation restored. What gain was there in this, but the righting of a balance? Yiling screams, a light burning low beneath their feet. "You gave me children."
Sizhui, first among them. The babe, a chanced discovery, odds improved by Wei Ying's charisma, his easy way with the letting of fierce ugliness diffuse itself from old secrets, before it might fester among the wounds. The rabbit, a marriage and wicked sabotage of Wangji's ancient weaknesses. More sweetness than fur or limbs, a gasp of soft pallor.
"Name the ledgers cleansed." He burns with the land, breath ragged. Scorches with the inevitability that a man unfettered may choose his freedom away from his once masters. Over Wei Ying's hand, his fingers claw. Stay. Stay only the heartbeat longer.
And he turns, an abrupt negotiation, scuffs his knees and blisters their bone, and lands before Wei Ying at a respectful knelt distance — two boys again, sharing a secret, only their hands bound. "The man I betrothed passed. If you wish it, be free."
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Wangji rises, first, wash of silks brushed long behind him. If there is dust to traverse across the universe of Wei Ying's Wen empire, let his robes carry it, let their lace soak, let his steps carve. Let part of him claw and claim all that is Wei Ying's own through brutal physicality.
If not Jiang Yanli, then the dead Wei Ying fears wear names he ill remembers — spilled like pearls from the fevered mouth of young Sizhui, torn from his past through sickness. Uncles, aunts, many not of the blood, but chained to him in the way of stewardship the only weedling of barren grounds earns from each of his elders. If they knew more, Wangji might have arranged their silent altar. Instead, they yield rice and wine and fruit to the nameless passed, to Wen Qing, and to Wen Ning, before they knew the truth of his survival. Now, the ghost shares their table.
He trickles past the teeth of stone, teases their pointed sharpness with his palm. Considers, then, in a fit of whim, gives ghosts what is Bichen's by right: a scratch, a line of red, feeding. Gestures over generosity, with the dead — this alone may yet sate them.
"Use me." This, absently, to Wei Ying. "The guqin will agitate them." They are too many, too old, too confused, too united in their cauldron. "Inquiry will offend." As ever, with victims of slaughter. "Name me as a disciple. I shall work as the Patriarch wishes worked."
And his hand recedes, bled palm tight at his back, righting his posture. A strange thing, to serve ever as Wei Ying's instrument, gladly giving of himself.
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One old, one new. Both fresh, both tantalising, and caution, oh, caution learned at a bright blade and a dark song, this pairing familiar in minds that have little cohesion or coherency left behind.
He laughs, but it's the exhalation of the surprised, and his smile is that confusion of hearing and disbelieving. Not for an absurdity, but for the willingness, and the ache that follows, boneshattering in his chest.
"Lan Zhan, I don't need, I don't want a disciple. I never did. Partners, right? Side by side. A disciple follows a step behind." He steps forward, shadows shifting, light falling across him in fractals. "I want your help, not your filial piety, Lan Zhan. Will you?"
He will lead every way he must, plunge into the depths he prefers to leave in the past, like every unpleasant memory he's tried to shove away over the course of his life. Sixteen dark years, and he's not whole or unwholly undone after. Merely more human than ever, and surrounded by ghosts, like every living person finds themselves. As Lan Zhan had found, in the time before.
How their sons have been, and it is telling in its way, their collection of haunted, loved children, and the pride that they can share without telling others, in the achievements of their children. Two generations, and wonderful, both.
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"My pride does not take precedence to the dead." This, a strained clarification, tentative for how Lan Wangji brokers each word. Years dulling the blade of his temper at Zewu-Jun's feet, and he thinks some of the oils of his brother's diplomacy may well have infused him. He need not reduce Wei Ying, only to correct him. "It is not lessened by service."
With his help, his hand, his eyes, his strength — more than his piety, as if an orphan and a fool and a man who learned to spit upon the precepts before wooing their words can be trusted with the notion. Briefly, Lan Wangji pities him with the ancient condescension that anointed him vestige of his father's blood, skin and meat and bones his own, but heir of a school: the steel cog of a jewellery box, rust to never touch its enclosures. The whole of Gusu Lan will forever exceed the summed parts of its pupils.
And what of Wei Ying? Adrift between stones paler than the fire-veined teeth that entombed him. Did it ache to fall? But he learned from spirits before he did from artists of fine-carved healing, who peel gristle from the geometries of bone common to gentlemen and thieves: those who fall break before the landing. The heart, a weak thing, and Wei Ying's brittle beforehand.
( Here, close, spirits lap at his red fingers, lick at the screeching metal of his blood. What will, fed once, forever follow? )
"You have my help." A pause, but he walks on; sixteen years later, the critical progress of knowing that if he steps first, a red-eyed storm will follow him, thereafter.
"But if you are shelter, I am bait," he warns. The Patriarch's protection, the Lan purity. Which will lure them out quickest? "They will give chase."
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He smiles, and there is more teeth than lip, more memory of violence than that of joy. Try him. To each of the dead who stretched to greedy outreach, try him. He is wise to the worst of the calling, and shelter, ah, shelter for whom may be the question. Shelter for what?
Hadn't that been the fear?
The shadows slip back, mill like the mindless, aimless collections of thinned emotion they are, and the wanting slips in, and Wei Wuxian lays hand to Chenqing.
"They already do," he says, "They'll hasten." No contest, no matter who sung them forth; they slip from one cavernous room in smooth stoned floors to the dark, dry insides of the cavern he'd slept in for the year and then some, called his home. Strands of straw can still be found molded and ossified along the cave's edges, but the thrum of the space is warmer, haunted by memory and not one glimpse of resentment or spirit or soul. Or warmer to him, in the bittersweet memories of a life fought for step by step, and the tears of backsliding into hopelessness because the world wanted the ease of his total, wholly evil guilt than truth, or honesty, or justice.
"Ward the entrance, ward as we clear each outward facing ring. Wards can't hold forever, but it delays, and time is what we need." Here, as he walks across floors thickening again with dust and debris of dead leaves, dead things, dead dreams, and feels the faintest hope. One day, to see Yiling bloom, to see it live, where it had been a condemnation of the damned.
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He feels the shadows: growing, grazing, like ink-stained tulle stretched thin enough to moan out the birthing pains of translucence. Too absent for the likelihood of producing harm, though click of Lan Wangji's tongue — tch — and Wei Ying's parting wave, and lo. They disperse like breaking sea foam.
And he feels them again, more toxic in their aftermath, in the stench that drowns his silks now, his body, an inorganic, wistful petrichor. Lungs open to it, eyes brighten wild and feverish. Absurdly alarmed, his gaze ricochets each way, off the cave's edges. And Wei Ying asks, wards. Futile, in a space so narrow, where they entomb themselves alongside ghosts, where the great, groaning tumult of Lan Wangji's power sabotages more than sustains them.
But he pledged to work as disciples do, and no boy of Cloud Recesses would defy his master. Tradition favours parchment and the fast, flame-like ignition of seals. Whim and Wei Ying turn to blood-carved renditions of the same. Between them, testing the tumble of rubble under his boot, the screeching, creaking sounds of stone floor plates finding their balance — Lan Wangji only kneels to scry the symbols with fingers wet disgracefully on his tongue. Dust hindered, enforcements set: they stir alive only once they've passed into the next circle of... quarters, into the crumbling core of Wei Ying's cave. Without an active element, they are anemic: but they are instructed to leech on energy within their reach, to use that for their awakening.
"So they linger as precaution, once we've fled." This, before Wei Ying need ask his explanation. He has nothing to hide: less so than does the man who stripped himself of flesh and the riches of his body's beauty in this alcove, who gave up his likeness along with his fealty to Yunmeng Jiang. As if a Wei Wuxian in health and glory could not have abided to become the monster that the sects named him.
It slips from Wangji's mouth like a wretched thing, tongue slack. "Once, you were king here."
And beneath Lan Wangji's step, crackling bone.
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In this land, shadowed and horrified, a terror of its own deep in soil desperate for anything but the wasteland it became, not barren, growing longer and longer in the whispering grasses of its defeats. A thin harvest, leaving bones cleaving to flesh, nothing between.
"Once life ruled here," he says, and he gestures with his hand, steps forward toward the stone of his rest, toward the entrance out onto the dilapidated courtyard, and its fallow fallen fields. "Once Yiling wasn't a place where the dead drove themselves to madness in their own bitter company. King of that, yes, and warden."
Wards that activate, that bind. Seals that attract, not just repel. Compasses that spun to track down resentment and the shadowed pits of things which were evil for a lack of good, which were greedy with no regard for anything but their own satiation.
He was king, here, and his throne stripped bare, and only the ghosts to haunt it after, turning over loose stones, looking, always looking.
He smiles, circumvents the bones of a bird that had thought, perhaps, the failed lotus pond was a temporary haven. Deadly mistakes, if one is not wise to the way of the world's movement. Even when one is.
"Lan Zhan, shall we play in the courtyard?" Music to soothe, to push on souls.
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In Yiling, what the sun cannot burn need not live. In Yiling, midday light is a blink of white, cataracted. In Yiling, Lan Wangji is humbled guest and tolerated refugee, a bowed-back intrusion. Vermin serve more honoured cause. Have already, trails of decayed bone stripped of meat at his feet.
In Yiling, he summons his guqin with the selfish, sickly wave of a hand and the arrogant exertion of qi Wei Ying could not spare. Vanity, to excel before your host, in their kingdom. He remembers to cut himself in the charcoal sketch of Jin Guangyao, to set himself a tool at his master's service. May Wei Ying make purpose of him, bloody or return him to sheath.
The play comes soft, easy. Insincere in the hastened way of skill perfected to a crest where minor preparatory strain is rota. He has mastered the peak of musical difficulty, only to stutter here, now, at Wei Ying's behest. Spirits round, bite, breathe.
He allows them empire of him.
"I invite you," he says, and plays at chance, at danger unknown. Never befriend evil, yet it smears his skin, and Wei Ying lies within reach to dispel the wisps of them, smoke, the dark of their teething intrusion, carving game of him in scratches of shoulder and calves. Dogs, biting.
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There is life, in spite of itself. The bones stripped to white, the insects that crawl, the greed of the plants that continue to sprout and hope despite so often being thwarted in the earliest stages of growing.
Life, jealous as these remnants are of it, hard as they buck against any semblance of order or control or suggestion in their desire to sink into it, to be flush with Lan Zhan's burning heart, the blood that rushes through veins, beating onward, that steady heart.
Lan Zhan, who makes himself the beacon, bright enough that for a while, it's the dead who fail to realise Wei Wuxian's own life, his warmth, and his cutting cull with the song that leaves from his lips and fingers and the inhalations that exhale into command.
Lay down your regrets. Cleave with your resentment. Lingering any longer, any more, will leave nothing to rebirth, to reincarnation. Go. Go. Go.
A brush of heat and yearning, the mourning wail of one spirit, one wreckage of a ghost, one collection of resentment spinning off into thinner threads that come close to snapping before they fade entirely. One. Two. No easy progress, but the tatters of fingers that pluck at Lan Zhan's sleeves, the howl that turns into weeping, the names that call, and he silences those, the pleas and pleading, though Lan Zhan can't be fully spared the cries: Wei Ying, calling to Lan Zhan, his voice the broken octave of a broken man, "Was I always fated to fall?"
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They ache — impossibly, not for what which was lost, not for guilt, for hardships revisited, for slaughter. Yet for the men they might have been, the faces they ill remember, their own visages glimpsed but carnage-clawed on spreads of polished silver.
Reincarnation will not welcome the skins of fruit without their core. What use does divinity have, to drink of dregs? He knows the score: plays it with a measured hand, a lukewarm tempo. Outside, beyond them, beating the groaning, looming walls, the cave waits and listens, set to entomb them. Storm stokes. Wind. His silks tatter at edges, where a spirit's grasp grows dear.
He does not ask if Wei Ying's safety triumphs. Does not presume. Only shackles Wei Ying briefly at the wrist — "No," in hissed answer — then releases him, mitigating the trickle of seconds wasted with a livened crescendo of the ensuing play. Songs of clarity, Cleansing subdued, then war-drumming.
And then, the dam yields: pressure dissolves like sweets of coagulated herbs on the tongue, and the howl of spirits darkens, gains flesh, nears the precipice seconds before implosion. They are surrounded, invaded, purified, abandoned. Husked and withered.
Bereft, he gives surrender first: kneels on brittle ground that heaves to welcome him, weeds collapsed to each side. Balanced on his thighs, the guqin transitions back into translucence in crisp winks of by-gone light. He does not draw it close, does not insist. Whispers, only, "We fed a womb."
And choked, in what increments of strength might have reshaped as laughter, "The Patriarch bore so many children."
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No, and he had only half heard the voice, the echo that was the sound of him and not the heart, but it's enough. It's always enough, and there are other things to hear, other ways to wind his music into Lan Zhan's, following his lead and overtaking it, handing it back once the crescendo builds and they're left in the aftermath, pressure of relief singing alive in his veins.
Voices for this area, the souls and energies and hatreds that had stirred to follow, that surrendered and rendered in their wake a temporary, fractured peace. This is more than he managed alone, day to day, or fought back nightly to keep the Wens safe. Safe in a living graveyard of hungry ghosts, and what a joy that'd been, when the living eeked out impossible progress over the dead.
The dead had their vengeances. Even now, sinking down to settle by Lan Zhan, who does not laugh but comments on a womb, on children, he feels the echo of the pain in all those ghosts. Were they good, bad, indifferent in living?
"What can I say? You already knew it was fruitful."
A wan smile, the brief lean of his shoulder against Lan Zhan's. Sizhui, and each child that follows; not just our Qingshan, our Qingbai, but every orphaned creature since. The living fruits, borne from a man, wombless, but with a heart that might as well have held each seed to its germination.
"A shame," he says, Chenqing laid across his legs, tassel tangling, brushing ground to dust at nothing that could be shaken off. "So few were meant to make it."
Their peace is purchased for the moment, the line toed in the sand. Spirits are not so endlessly resenting to ignore preservation even of their nothing, their loss of potential, their swallowed dreams. He lifts a hand, unblooded, and sketches the shape of the ward against the air. Inform. Renewing old lines, ones he carved into rock and dirt almost two decades ago, but ones he can start to reignite now. A shimmer of energy, and the tripwire nature of his belled line glows, then disappears, as insubstantial as dust motes in a sunbeam.
"This went better than the last time."
Which last time, and to what extent? He tucks into his robes, the cross of them over his chest, and pulls out a banded collection of talismans. Shows them to Lan Zhan, the writing bold as always, but tempered by something time had won from him, and given back again. Experience. Named, talismans of enduring, like and unlike the wards set within and to their backs, leaving them facing one front, and not many to guard against.
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To choose among them, not the fairest, or the most competent, but the most willing — those of the wards whose stubbornness of cast could wage years of war against the natural environment of Yiling's inorganic deterioration and persist, victorious.
Wei Ying tips into him. A lesser set, he answers, tilting back into Wei Ying's orbit, until their shoulders neighbour, tap, collide. And he says, "It will not keep."
It wrenches something of him, resignation. Weaves with wind, and the dirge of a world unlearned to consider itself past the lens of its dead.
"Containment condemns to madness." They roil and ache and make of themselves a sea at storm, these unbound spirits, the fledgling violence of their unspent energy. To fetter them is to rip the last bones of their parted bodies, to give them empire to roam and yet no witness. Tentatively, he mouths the practised solution, dismissed, "Purification dissolves."
It will not keep, like rot dark in his flesh, taking root, building home. The shiver that traverses him could sunder the world. Unbidden, he begs Wei Ying's hand, ropes to round it, closes it on the wards he selects for reinforcement. This and this, and the folly of Lan Wangji's own qi, feeding the beast.
"What of destruction?"
Yiling. Burial Mounds. Eradicated, with the last of Wen Ruohan's legacy. Would Wei Ying bear the parting? The corner of Wangji's gaze snags on Wei Ying's boyish smile. You have endured worse.
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Destruction of life, of heart, of hope; destruction of chance, of choice, of the bitterness and barrenness of a land bereft of living lungs. A tempered Yiling he had been making, and to wildness it had sown, strewn into chaos at the mindless mercies of those too long dead to know what it is to desire living, so much as desire the lost chances they'd never regain.
"This isn't to contain," he says softly, words falling like decrepit leaves from a tree yawning over a ravine. Disappearing down, searching for the bottom that exists but doesn't meet the piercing rays of light filtering down, even at noon. "Anything more than us. Layers. The more of them built, slow, the more they'll turn our way."
Turns his hand, showing those talismans all the more clearly, his face only caught in shadow as his bangs slide forward, going from slender tendrils to more pronounced, won loose of that morning's topknot by grasping hands to tiny beings, less anything else.
"Purification," he says, the toll of a bell sounding from li beyond them now, "And ablutions as destructions. Lan Zhan," he says, looking to his face, all his own solemn and echoing the unkindness of years in the depths of his eyes, like the space between the stars, "We bring this down, stone by stone, but we clean none of it by fire."
Not for the thirst of the Wens, or the starting point, the burning blood of the Xue patriarch, a century ago. And he says, "The rains did not always avoid Yiling."
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Toils of bodies tortured here, of broken joints and ached minds and the sport of their hunt, pricked by serendipity. He thinks corpses were needle once, and fate bludgeons them in hard land, breaks it in littered wells of unended hurt. Water will sprout of it. The rains did not always avoid Yiling.
He is knelt already, a servant in attendance. When he bows, it's to the song of wild wind and a rusted sky, the whispered, winding devastation of a moment's anticipation, a breath held — his own, and his body contracts, lessens itself to the boy who begged pittance at his mother's doors, the youth who rescued dreams of estival rebellion from Wei Ying's praying hands. Firestorm breathes and evaporates in him. Earth crackles, welcoming less than the humility of Hanguang-Jun, but the might of Gusu Lan discipline, ghosting until a sirocco summons aged blood and sorcery and debris, stripped of land.
In cupped hands, he welcomes it, brings it up, until it smokes and mulches his fingers, his sleeve, until it greases him like a door at its hinges, begging his mouth open — until he kisses dirt and gravel, first on his fingertips, then, wilted as his body breaks, on trembled land. Yiling. Let him come a petitioner, then, a worshipper, let him show himself faint. There's a devastation in this dirt that answers him, one widower and mournful soul, bare before another.
He cannot breathe. Blisters, "I beg of you, pardon. I beg of you, peace."
How fails him, the root of disaster? Sects upon sects and this ground trampled, by foot and hooves, and their glory earned on castles of corpses. What use is the mortal coil of Lan Wangji in feeble retribution? He cannot house a thousand spirits, barely contains the soul he names his own. Storm inundates him. Fresh bundle of crumbled dirt in his grasp, the land's core, and he raises it — sets his thumbs stained to write long vertical lines of printed turbulence on Wei Ying's cheeks, in their wake.
"We beg." A simple rite, a careless giving. Uncle would never approve.
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His hand comes up, captures one of those hands, captures the dirt and blood and death and the undeniable beat of life between them, palm to palm, calloused fingers to calloused fingers. The shape of those callouses have changed, shifted in their orbits, but still within the same galaxy, still in the same breathless expanse of sky between them, sixteen years in the weaving of quiet and lightlessness.
"We beg." Supplicants, in the dirt and wearing it on hands, fingers, under nails, under eyes, in the lungs that draw in, in the exhalations out, in the hairs that stir from his shoulders, slide forward, follow him down.
Beg, and this is a bow, respect and something that sinks lower, touches on the buckled backs of bone ground to dust and buried by time, even before this was a burial grounds. A bow, and no hold slackened, together, and the words that people have meant for themselves for ages, will mean, but not with the depth of hollow echo in his chest, from deeper, from the space behind his heart and lungs, from the gaps in his teeth, thin and unseen.
"We're sorry." Not simple, those words, not with a weight of apology and grief; three different kinds, between Lan Zhan, Wei Wuxian, and Yiling underneath and over and around them in every sense, mountains looming taller than men can ever strive to rise. A land that holds to what it has been given, and who trembles, unsettled, by the slipping grip of its fingers.
Sorry isn't enough, yet the supplication, the depth of apology, is beyond the simplicity of bowed heads, strained, gaunt fingers, and heartbeats, steady or otherwise, until the ground beneath them thrums and beats to match.
But it begins, he thinks, Here.
The earth rumbles, and shakes, and the cries of the dead are a long, sustained keening, before both settle, bouncing rock and crashing dirt resettling as around them, the world tries to unmake itself. The courtyard held for a century fractures behind them; the stone pillars at the framing door crack, sway, hold.
"I think Yiling heard us," he says, and it's a dry statement from a parched throat, and he can only cast his gaze askance at the solidity of Lan Zhan, the frailty of his dust-bathed light. So human, so alive, so what.
Wei Wuxian stares, and he finds no words in the morass of his thoughts, only glimmering lights and dancing shadows and it is the forest, on an autumn day, brisk and lovely, the sun filtered through the leaves. The river and its susurrations in the distance, whispering promises of water and disaster and travel and trade. No smoke on the wind, but voices, far distant and indistinct. They laugh. Alive.
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He stumbles to sit, drifts until his legs fold beneath him. Waits for Wei Ying to recollect himself, and steals the first glance molten, the second hard, the third — rapt in latent study. Earlier, he knows, and filth runs slick and sticky on his fingertips, collects beneath his nails. Earlier, the pulse between them germinating, electric.
The way of the land, he knows. The ache of it, grief flaying itself to leave the tattered remains of loam and silt, divided from history. Yiling heard them, and yet, what lives still of Yiling? What lives still of Lan Wangji, death walker of deep prints across this world?
He does not know himself, until he claims Wei Ying's hand again — struggles with the understanding that Wei Ying is a disparate creature, and not a natural extension of himself, his body.
His thumbs curl. Pads flicker. "Your hands run cold." And softened, "Who made a snake of you?"
The world, stripping away Wei Ying's skins.
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The damages here were deeper, heavier than they'd had a right to know. Than anyone had a right to realise, without being destroyed in the unveiling.
They breathe yet.
He swallows, and touch doesn't bring him back to himself, really, not until it's touch and words, and he looks to Lan Zhan as if surprised to find him there, to find his hand caught, to find himself catching Lan Zhan's hand in turn. Cold, and what of it? Snakes, and he startles into laughter, curls a hand and tugs on Lan Zhan. Tugs without moving further, leading nowhere.
"Snakes become dragons, you know. All the legends tell us so," he says, and his eyes lose some of their depth of cold, some of their glacial awareness, to turn warmer, a thawing to uncertain spring. "Besides, the cold never bothered you anyway."
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No heat to roam Wei Ying's body, reinforce the marrow of his bones. To make of him a molten pulse at the heart of viscous, gravel, cracked grey. He nods, then gives Wei Ying a child's mercy, drags his hand under the grave mantle of Wangji's sleeve, pressing his fingers in to borrow close to the warmth of the wrist. If this were Sizhui, a beanstalk ill grown, he would have nestled as deep as the first few layers of Lan Wangji's collar, seeking beads of heat.
A strange thing, to raise a child, and taste the small pleasures in the knowing of whom he becomes, as you see him grow. Whom you become, as you bear him witness. To bloom to his full potential, a son must walk his father's grave.
"When Sizhui..." But it dies, cold on his lips. Again. "When Yuan." No. "When I raised a child alone." When you abandoned me to the task. But there is no spite to it, no rancor — only the aftertaste, lavender-like, of melancholy. "Our winters sowed his misery."
Disagreed with him, precious burden of the Wen, sun-kissed and a boy of the summer season. What a thing to remember, here, now, buried in the ashes of Wen ancestors. He breathes white.
"He hunted his warmth."
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Yiling knew war, and still could not breathe free of its reminders, but Wei Wuxian has seen a world beyond it. One of small kindnesses, and larger ones, and while Lan Zhan tugs his hand back, brings his chilled hand to his wrist, Wei Wuxian steps in, to pull again, toward himself.
"He had you to find. Zewu-jun as well, I can imagine, and enough braizers, enough blankets, clothing not worn thin." A tug of hands, again, to bring them back to him. "Affection held host here, and we had fires, banked, and he had the best of us, for that time past a year where we lived. You raised A-Yuan alone," and that name, because it thickens in his throat, "With a clan behind you, and it was a good thing, being in the cold, alive enough to hunt warmth, and to find it. Lan Zhan," he says, and tucks folded hands not to his chest, not to his throat, not to anywhere poignant, but instead to the fold of his arm. Tucking them up under his armpit for the time-old truth: warmth that comes, in the folds of the body, because a core does not define the world around them. Does not define this, or Yiling, hollow at its core like he is, and cold, yes, but capable of more.
In the settled dust and stone, capable of more.
"I welcome the warmth, but I don't hunt it. I don't have a core," he says with a half smile, holding on to that hand. "But I am not less for being different from you, and the same as so many people we've defended in our lives."
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This is what Lan Wangji has transgressed into: eyes bright, but mind dulled, his affection weighted, an unwelcome margin of error. Offers rejected, hands turned away. Finish the bows, he'd urged in a village half submerged in the terrors of its practicality. Denied, even then.
He presses his other palm, slick with cold shivers, clammy, on the wound of exorcised grand. Grips there, if only to give himself pillar.
"The man you were. Do you begrudge me," he starts, and finishes, and breathes, and is. Is, so very lone, mahogany and hale, but earthy in a way that takes root in this cavernous world of Yiling, his grief their own. He misjudged the land, the hawkish, trembled whispers of its aches. How they woo him. "That I knew him?"
A core alive, incendiary, an example of fortitude. If polished, no doubt Wei Ying might have surged past prominence, into immortality. The heavens would have sundered in sharp, toothy invitation, to rain down their secrets.
"Or do you begrudge me that I was better learned to care for him?" That he knew the Wei Ying who shared his path instinctively, through the wealth of shared experience. That he knows the Wei Ying of now as a broken bone, through splinters of pain delivered throughout Wangji's body, his absence an earthquake, tectonic.
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"No," he says, fingers twitching, stepping closer to stare into Lan Zhan's face, to offer none of that distance he usually minds just enough to make it apparent when he intrudes on it, as he inevitably does. Wei Wuxian has always been a man for closeness in visible ways, but not the ones that lie deeper, that means sharing fears, worries, and not just the redirections, the burden minding, the telling silences around the alcohol drowning out his thoughts.
"No, Lan Zhan, I'm glad you knew me. Knew the man I was, before a war began, and we all gained new names, new scars. Before we changed, and kept changing."
An echo of Yunmeng, the sandalwood incense, the lovingly tended plaques of each generation of Jiangs that came before. Where his shijie hung now, and the tears spill, unremarkable in their path down his face, mingling with dust, streaking him with mud to take root from. A lotus starts there, buried in the mud, reaching for the surface.
Drowning is a matter of breathing in the wrong way.
"He was an easier man to know. More arrogant, though I didn't unlearn that for years yet. Hiding secrets and telling people to let go of me because I thought it would spare them, that I was fated to bear these things on my own. It was poorly done."
It was not a transgression to any one person alone, but to each of them in turn, the people he cared for more than most the world around them. Even now, even when some of them lie dead, buried or fated to soul shattered endings.
"You, Lan Zhan, I've only been in the relearning of you for these months. Neither of us are the youths we once were, and I won't begrudge us having known them. Or to remember them, when Lan Zhan was Lan Zhan, before he was Hanguang-jun. When Wei Ying was Wei Ying, and no laozu."
He smiles, and it's small, the weight of death lessened on his shoulders, despite the toll that says something wicked this way came, and circles them both, invisible dogs that should terrify him yet. They would be hypocrites, to believe either of them have unstained hands. Not just for the war, but for every step in each journey after; and Lan Zhan, as always, the righteous bearing of teeth and blade. Supported, respected, admired: yes, even so.
"Do you begrudge me for not being that man?"
Yiling, uncaring, wheezes around them, wind through barren branches, dust settling, and the trickle of pebbles that fall and bounce and still again, somewhere behind.
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A graceless thing, to own Wei Ying when he bares himself, the man he was before he gained new name, the boy, the martyr. When he vivisects his reputation, skin to bone, and finds gossamer and spiderweb, stale air and decay. No substance.
Alone, Lan Wangji wrenches himself — shifts, clumsy and slow and unresting beside himself the weight of ground-host, of sacred territory. There is in inhalation, a part wind, a part himself, the better half the destitution of Yiling.
"I think, once, I may have loved him." But he tips like brass pendulums, momentum paralysed by weight — collides in increments, forehead to Wei Ying's own, the divide of his headband a cold juxtaposition of distance and filigree. He does not exorcise the wet of Wei Ying's face with starved fingertips.
And he decides, "I think," for all it aches, "you are not him."
Worthy of the name 'Wei Ying'. Wearing the parchment of a known face. The sum of broken parts. "But I know you."
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Crack open his ribs, and find his heart, and the hollow of his dantian, right there where his breastbone ends. The soft spot following the hardness of bone, and yes, in those organs one finds nothing but the usual hollows, the crowded spaces, the mass of viscera necessary for living.
A golden core filling his dantian is not. Neither, as it turns out in aching ways, is the love of a man he thinks, once upon a time, he had started to love too. Had balked in the face of, because his realisation even then came already too late. When he was lessened of this, and could not be the companion he had been, could only disappoint.
Tricks are not true cultivation. You walk a fine line. He's commandeered the path, and his steps fall steady, now, and the joke of it all being his crimes are that of the righteous, too.
"I loved him once, too. That man who lived and died in the shadow of Yiling."
He won't say, that man might have loved you, too. It wasn't true until later, and later, later was too late. Later was a lifetime, even if it'd barely been a year.
He allows the press, forehead to forehead, and he allows the tears, because he allows himself this much felt, too. Not for them, but for an inevitability, a lancing of an old, festering wound. The brief closing of his eyes, in extended blink, and the light that's in them, different but familiar to a man who had once lived, as of yet unbroken.
"You're learning me," is what he says, and feels, because there's enough of a shadow of what he had been that skews what Lan Zhan does, even now. "Just as I'm learning you, sixteen years a widower, sixteen years living that I'll never touch."
Distance, and he pulls his head back, and in the sad quickness of a snake's strike, brushes his lips over Lan Zhan's forehead, above the ribbon. Sparing the whole of silk and metal with uninvited intrusion. No, it is not romance, but benefaction, a rasp of lips rendered soft from time spent living outside of the wind and heat and dry cold of Yiling, and his own heart.
"You still know more of me than anyone else. That's enough," he says, but he reclaims his distance with a foot slide out, turning to no longer face him head on, but to offer his side. To look out into the expanse of forest and rock and grass and decay that wants to be better than the sum of broken parts, but can't heal simply through wishing. Can't be what it was before, but forge through to becoming something new, something different. Better or worse? There was no point in asking such things.
"Knowing this man, that's enough."
What is love? A frightening thing, a binding of the heart, yoked to one cart and unable to slip away, to make it feel like it was okay if the cart goes abandoned, falls sideways, if the axel breaks. Yet only one love, in the shades of so many others: of sons, under their care, of brothers, who they'd face maelstroms for, on some level. For peoples and lands and causes, and those have always been easier for him to grasp, for him to pour himself into, for him to love. It's with bruised, aching heart he feels a little lighter, as if he's been finally absolved of a sin he hadn't intended to write.
I think, once, I may have loved him. I think, you are not him.
If Lan Zhan can say it, he speaks true, for all he lies in omission or technicalities, and Wei Wuxian can let it breathe freely, air in his lungs. There is no owing, for a man he was once. There is only this, and the knowing they grow into, where the support they'll lend of blade and blood is unquestioned, easy instinct. The rest? That knowing comes in time, and if it never touches love, that word, that cart he'd been frightened by when Yanli still breathed, he's no lessened for it.
Lan Zhan is not lessened, for having loved and lost, with some familiar stranger returned as ghost to haunt his bed. Half-married, half-wedded, and it can be that middle ground, Wei Wuxian knowing what boundaries he won't cross, what things he's never tasted, and needn't have. Family, for him... that he's been granted. By a man who says now, he loved what he had been, once. A man who's granted the ghost of whom he loved something so infinitely precious, all he can say, standing there and surveying a realm he will see heal, so help him if it takes a lifetime:
"Thank you." For the honesty, and for having felt, at any time, that Wei Wuxian, Wei Ying, had been a man worth loving. "And I'm sorry."
That he could not, would not ever, be that man again. That he leaves Lan Zhan widowed, even bodied as he stands now, breathing and never truly dead, and had since long before he'd decided it was easier to fall than breathe in a world where he destroyed everything he sought to protect. To love.
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All at once, Wei Ying dissolves, as the exorcism earlier, as the pains of whispered death that walk Lan Wangji's back. No man should reduce him, but the beast of Yiling catches and grinds him in its maws, spits out remains. There is nothing but blood and reckoning between them, stretches and spills, oil invading water.
Thank you, the starveling of a forlorn ghost, taunting his ear. Then, And I'm sorry. She dissipates.
Hurt reeks in him like the mould that spreads aggressive and web-like on each stone corner, like lichen. His throat cannot bear a swallow more. And still,"Drink my cup to him."
The funerary tokens fate denied him, for what man may mourn a traitor freely without incurring the wrath of the sects upon his clan? And in this, he would not have transgressed, might have pursued his own defection, so that he might wed and bed his grief without the law of tragic attractions whipping brother's limbs. Fate favoured him: long before the Yiling Patriarch surged to glory, the men of Gusu Lan had patroned their whites. Still, no mourning courtship of Wei Ying's peace, no body, no altar.
If Lan Wangji reaches out again, to trail fingers over Wei Ying's knuckles and know the slopes and mounts of them, it is to capture, at long last, the tattered remains. Snare. Snag. From the cavernous abyss, no voice in answer. You released my hand first. And so Wei Ying cannot be simply an extension of empty ground now, cannot sit immutable. Let stone bleed water.
"He was incandescent. Armed to change the world." Willing, able. A fount of idealism, brimming. As if Wei Ying was a creature sundered from his own experience, as if he did not live and breathe, as if he does not know. Remember him, Wangji's lips nearly tear and bleed, remember what you took.
His palm encompasses the back of Wei Ying's hand like snake bite. "I made of me a bowed-back bridge for his ghost's steps." Unasked, his ribs contorted, his spine a fertile field under white scarred stripes of a long gone whip. His choice. Wangji's alone. He heaves, "You raised me."
And Wei Ying's choice, to save him.
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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.
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His fingers seep between Wei Ying's, fill negative space like brimming water. He breathes, blankets, clutches.
"Whatever debt you think between us." Life and death and the crackled territory of scars painted like tree branches on Wangji's back, and a child raised well, a reputation restored. What gain was there in this, but the righting of a balance? Yiling screams, a light burning low beneath their feet. "You gave me children."
Sizhui, first among them. The babe, a chanced discovery, odds improved by Wei Ying's charisma, his easy way with the letting of fierce ugliness diffuse itself from old secrets, before it might fester among the wounds. The rabbit, a marriage and wicked sabotage of Wangji's ancient weaknesses. More sweetness than fur or limbs, a gasp of soft pallor.
"Name the ledgers cleansed." He burns with the land, breath ragged. Scorches with the inevitability that a man unfettered may choose his freedom away from his once masters. Over Wei Ying's hand, his fingers claw. Stay. Stay only the heartbeat longer.
And he turns, an abrupt negotiation, scuffs his knees and blisters their bone, and lands before Wei Ying at a respectful knelt distance — two boys again, sharing a secret, only their hands bound. "The man I betrothed passed. If you wish it, be free."
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