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."
His bounty, found in death. There's some sort of helpless jest in all of it, that the children of his blood are of the places for which he bleeds. To no regret, to no changed actions, and there's a truth buried within it, from the mess of changing diapers to the slathering of salves and the messy reality of the small and needy, selfish beyond all reason.
Lan Zhan frees him from debts not named, but intimated; from the months of Wei Wuxian's grappling guilt and slow resolutions into courses that don't require Lan Zhan's blessing to feel safe, where courting that danger of needing to try that's been tempered by wisdom and the yawning abyss of the sixteen years of darkness staining his mind has a cadence, a whimsy, a truth he can follow. All those months on the road, and he winds back to Gusu Lan, for Lan Zhan, for the children. Winds away, too, and yet returns, a heron mid migration, recalling which pools provide, which sleeping lands are safer enough to dream.
He aches, as Lan Zhan wipes one sleeve across the soft clay tablets they've been writing since Wei Wuxian found his wrist clutched by these same fingers, threaded through his now. Iron bands in warmth, an anchor, then kneeling.
To unmake a truth he'd only learned years too late, and accept what it is, to walk away. There is part of him that considers it, in the fresh terror of that unmooring. That thinks, what would that be? What would it look like, to claim children and no more, to accept that as a due and leave Lan Zhan to his mourning, tempered by the wonder of some part of that man lives yet. He could do it, he thinks. He could be that man, the one who leaves, and he might be content. Not happy but in breathes, not filled but in moments, but he could live hand to mouth, dream to dream.
His parents laughter, and the plodding of the donkey. His only childhood memory that predates the fangs and barking, the last remnant of forgotten ghosts that had loved, and lost, and left, in the proper way of things.
Thus now, he can also choose. Lower to his knees, to kneel in turn, bridging no distance but what their hands do still. Wei Wuxian reaches to his topknot, his uncrowned head, and his fingers find the ribbon wound round. Tug at it, slipping it loose, that long red length, and it slides free into his palm, cascading past his shoulders and then draping, like a delicate thing, down either side of his hand. The ribbon, red as fire, red as blood, red as passion, red as possibility; the red that has decorated his life, then drapes over their joined hands, edges pooling in the soil of Yiling beneath them even now.
"Together," he says, and it's not a Lan's promise, not a wedding of bodies, not a tradition long known. It is Wei Wuxian's promise, the red of him in all its permutations, and Wei Ying's offer, known and knowing. To know each other, there is a bond already, invisible and joining them heart to heart, never clearer than when they find their footing to fight like the brilliance of each other's twin orbits. Yet the knowing has strength in learning, must change as people change, must adapt, and can only do so now with those words, the acknowledgement.
Debts, cleared. Records, evened. Pasts, dead and mourned and honoured, but not carried forever more as the ghosts of the present, tainting the future into shadow.
"Side by side, whatever comes, whatever changes. If I wish for anything, I wish for this."
Two marriages, one lifetime. Perhaps he has strayed too far from the sect's well-trodden path, after all.
For an exhalation between Wei Ying's startle and his stirring, only stupor stretches long between them, like cold-water seas. Spumed with half-gasps and brittle, tenuous confusion. If he shifts their hands, he will propel hefts of drowning wave.
On his wrist, the sleek, slithered thing of Wei Ying's blood, turned coarse-weaved cotton, strangles the harsh crest of bone. He hesitates — detains his breath as if such a minor transgression might upend them — and sees it sink on his arm, loiter taut, bridge Wei Ying's wrist, mount it. A claim, by any other name, its teeth sharp.
What is this, then? Yiling Wei names no rites. Wei Ying, already a mimicry of the boy before who wore his name, only imitates what he has seen before him. In a cold cave, you were taken without consent. And the ribbon rattles red, the wind sings against its anger.
"It is custom," Lan Wangji starts with the amused patience of a sprawled cat beneath summer sun, an educator, "to ask first."
Never mind similar failings on his part, sixteen years aged into their maturity. To be married, but not wedded before living family, eloped to all fittings of purpose. Dishonour unto his name, but this shame he wears well, like cloth of ramie, nettling skin.
Wei Ying, Wei Wuxian to a world at large, Yiling Laozu to the tongue in cheek nod at a ghastly horror lurking in the background only recently revealed to be less horror and more horrifically sad than widely believed, laughs. Unfettered, and with a wide grin, and he says:
"You know what they say about my memory."
Not an ownership of it, not when words swirl and spill, just a trickle of them, to say, "I'm willing to ask, Lan Zhan, but it's either arrogance to say marry into nothing, or to ask to marry into your clan. Besides," he says, eyes falling to the red that binds, the vein between them, "This is a promise. Whatever the formalities, whatever the other ties, there's us. Relearning what it is to know each other. It's your clan," he says, eyes lifting, searching Lan Zhan's face for something he doesn't know he needs to see, but curious, looking nonetheless. "That binds like this. Yunmeng Jiang is fond of proposals... and my parents, I presume, were fond of eloping."
A crooked grin, and a squeeze of fingers, if that's whatever weave their tapestry takes in time. Eloping, but there are ties to bind them should they wish them: to Yunmeng, to Gusu, and the ones they care for in each. Even to the Jins, for the one he loves there, in all his bright, burning glory, some unholy mixture of the men who raised him and Jiang Yanli's underlying kindness, given reason to understand emotions far better than his senior generation.
Their sons, three and counting, are worn as pearls around his neck, warm weights of a family he hasn't had for years, and won't shed for a lifetime, not by choice. Whatever they are, whatever they aren't, they're still father to three, and more to the legions of pained and raging dead of this land, even now only catching a hint of less claustrophobic air.
This, their promise. Wei Ying's own rite, fledgling and ill formed, a child nearly aborted. How Lan Wangji hungers for it, stomach cadaverous and rib bones piercing skin, through stench of damp and stale and old, through storm of mote dusts and crackled burning, through the marks and sounds and blurry stirrings of life within-after Yiling. How he wants novelty without heritage, without burden, without blood.
Twice married or betrothed or pledged, or merely intended. Once fated. He nods, less to seal the cinnabar of Wei Ying's calligraphy on their shared lives, than merely to acknowledge the inexorability of his conquest. Wei Ying wishes it so, the Patriarch has wispily rasped, and through his will, the earth quakes, the throbbing pulse of a land simmers and quickens and is.
He does not rip the red string off Wei Ying's wrist, but nooses two fingers within and around it once, and again in a second loop, and tungs to release the tie — to forcibly seize it, war spoils and fairly won, Lan Wangji's won. "I claim this as my binding price. Find another."
A beggar's sole possession, thieved. To remember this day by. Shivered, he remembers the correction, "This, your flute in name, and my children."
"Ours," he says, a quick, easy rejoinder, "Our children."
No, he will not concede that, not to this man, with all the guilt and gratitude in his heart for Lan Sizhui's raising, when Wei Wuxian had gone to his death believing him already dead. Ours, and he relents. Ours, and he forever has a stake in lives beyond his own, beyond Lan Zhan's, in a way still tenuous with his brother and nephew. A way that strengthens, but at a distance, still at cross ties all those tangled webs they stumble into, slowed further until they've struggled their way free.
Surrender a ribbon willingly, tie together two lives repeatedly, name two deaths as intertwined, even yet to claim children apace. His flute, certainly, on Lan Zhan's call as well, but Chenqing is not what he needs in this world. A tool, and one his shijie had called for the naming of, and that reminds him of importance in ways that any simply named bamboo flute otherwise might not. And yet.
The wind whispers, but only through leaves rasping against each other, too ossified to fall, spring a memory so distant it speaks as if legend among the roots of dying giants, and he gives another squeeze to Lan Zhan's hand.
"Bindings both ways. Though if I'm to find another ribbon, we'll be having to head into town."
No, spares he does not carry, does not see need for; had not, almost a lifetime ago, their eldest's lifetime ago, not even recalled to use it to bind Lan Zhan's leg. Funny now in retrospect, to not bind red with red, but red with white. Still, he does not yet shift, studies Lan Zhan like a face he does not know, relearning the planes of it, the shadows that fall, the lean lines of nose and jaw. He has aged well, where the generation above them had been less graceful, and for once, he really things about that, the time etched beneath that skin. Thinks of it, and doesn't linger in the guilt and pain, but wonder at the who, the will, the making of the Lan Zhan he sees today.
Wonders at himself, and the man he's remaking himself into, day by day.
"Pick it for me," he says, and it's pure whimsy, to tell Lan Zhan, do this for me. "When we get there." Red or black or white or blue or purple, ah, he doubts purple, but anything. Even a strip of repurposed lace.
"Ours," he hastens, in the way of an animal that learns late its nips and mouth's teasing have earned blood unduly spilled — in the way of an animal that might lick that hurt now, ease it. He did not intend — but Yiling is a coreless ground, made funerary hearth for misplaced intentions. Here, the twisting and turning of weeds in a space small, confined, is the reorganisation of pale geometries around dangers and weapons and cruel, timeless assault. Here, they suffer no feet's prints, only invasion, and what is Wei Ying, but Yiling lent flesh?
We worked you well, ground your bones, tattered your flesh. We worked until no more of you persisted.
"To town. We will want to see the reverberation. The spread of spiritual poison." Too much of the mark here, roots and forests and decay of shades grown and expansive, and Wei Ying, the deathless king, whose presence stokes them. In the low fluorescence of candid light, a brokered morning, Wei Ying is like threads of old silk, frayed at the ends of him, and each ghost comes to suckle at its mother's teat, and he has them, his children, his belly barren and his arms full. They must yet see what has become of the village, suffused so long in the toxicity of spiritual energies, cloyed and thickened.
Lan Wangji rises first. He has this, ever: back ripped, knee's joints that do not yield. One part of him, sustaining the whole, his hand drifting out less to anchor Wei Ying than make the victor's offer — come, then, be lifted. Make an attendant of the chief cultivator. "You will have a ribbon now, if I have a daughter later."
Stay, he needn't negotiate, then. It does not end with vows and territory, with pretty, worthless mimetism of rites Wei Ying smooths and folds and lays distantly cold across his body, like winter's mantle. Yiling is a step on long stairs, and no conclusion.
In all his mind's eye, the one that calculates and considers and sees problems from familiar angles and unfamiliar ones, shifting two steps over to see possibilities where others saw impassable walls. The echoes in people, the spirits that flee, the bleedover of raw intention that has claimed unprotected minds in so many cases. Yiling carries that poison heavy in its veins, but not alone in the ache of it, not when those who would play at being master to the dead claw their way through the shadows across these six realms and further afield.
The smallest villages carry their secrets, and some will always kill. He stands, absent clutch of Lan Zhan's hand, lift his gaze from his inward focus and the thought about which degree the resentment lingers as its own energy, independent of the spirits that birthed it and the case study that Yiling becomes for this unique depression of spirit, only to summon himself back to the moment. To promises, to chosen bindings, to unwritten ones, and to Lan Zhan, dark eyed, with his words a different sort of promise to a man starved for family as much as he's been starved for sustenance of the body. To glut, body and soul, at the same table, watching children scream and cry and fuss and quiet and grow, learning as they do. Teaching, yes, to be taught if fortunate, and they as fortunate for the opportunity.
Whatever men or manner of creature they become, under the power of their own progress in an uncaring, undisturbed landscape.
He smiles, lopsided, and then fully, laughing as he stands, clasps both hands around Lan Zhan's one. So the ribbon has been claimed, and so he finds it more odd in thought than odd in feeling; ties that bind break under enough testing.
Faith, to believe this one won't, too. They both know children are never binding enough.
"Haven't I promised you a daughter already? Dark of hair, pale of skin, temper either sweet or fiery, she's someone we'll have to know in time." No pattern of timing to the children left in their care, only the echo of pain, of loss, of despair that's slowly rinsed away with the affection they can spare. More, it turns, than they've known to give each other without fangs bared over open veins, thinking what if, what if they press down, break skin, let blood flow free.
"But know her, we will."
He won't be the one to break the contact of their hands, this time. Once, he'd held on to Jiang Cheng, to Jiang Yanli, and with them stepped forward into a world filled with light and possibility. Later it had been stability and pain and love and suffering in unequal measures, and one day, they'd all turned down different paths. Had died, or lived, or found some inbetween through no fault of their own. When A-Yuan's hands had disappeared, and reaching out meant clasping cold air, to wake with a cry broken in a throat, and eyes unseeing for the time it takes to recognise the prison of his own flesh.
No, he knows the trickery of his own senses at times, and he holds on until he's wrested away, a laugh easy on his lips as movement turns him toward the village, to taking steps forward and down, wind parting the twisted leaves on warped branches, sweeping aside yellowed grasses, tinder-thin creeping bushes that send spindly fingers flinching forward, teasing at the edges of their robes.
It is not a warm day, but it doesn't feel cold like it should. Nor is it warm, more tepid, like an uncertain spring morning where winter's claws still rake at the ground and whisper, Not yet.
The feeling lingers as they wind down toward the village beyond the collapsed barriers of near two decades before, people stepping through the measures of their day with little visible effect for it. Not that such things are needing to be obvious, and the spill of people past street venders, even at the corner he once favoured, bickering a note too high, and he thinks they might start to have the shape of the bleedthrough, the trickle down to the worst emotions, from the easiness of anger to the coldness of...
"Revenge." He turns his head, eyes finding Lan Zhan's. "Emotional spillover, carried in, flowing downhill. Do you think?" It's possible, he doesn't voice. Of course it's possible; of course a land can bleed feeling as much as it bleeds water from stone.
The sun can kiss her. Knife's edge, the parting thought: he watches Wei Ying with baleful, hawkish greed, sees his womb and its slow-baking work. After sixteen years' lull, consider haste.
"I think," he starts with the air of every petulant infant who has spotted the treat denied to him, of Sizhui when he was still Yuan, and sticky fingers trailed to catch the fineries stretched over merchants' stalls, "I shall have two."
Be warned, be wary. And Yiling, a widow, Wei Ying a mother, Lan Wangji their husband-witness, their cause, their resolution. The whip of his tongue stays, his hand ropes a quiet claw that clenches tight and pulsing at the plant root of his back, the bulb of his posture. He stifles his aches: counts milliseconds of yearning, then heartbeats, then moments whole, until he is the glass recipient of waters, roiling. And jasmine-bland, his gait slows, reshapes itself: he escorts, one hand on his sword's hilt, Bichen a shriek of hunger crystallised sharp, fettered.
Red, vibrant, bloodied beneath his sleeve — Wei Ying's string, trapped on his left wrist, shielded from the dangers of friction inherent in the bearing of the dominant hand. The Gusu Lan way, for all of Wei Ying's exceptions. It will serve. It has served well so far, served often.
The village is a world stitched together from patches of rags and misplaced thread, needles prickling. Each way, men turn with apprehension, the bright-eyed terror of creatures that know themselves hunted and small, and see their predators alive among them.
"I think," he murmurs, and concedes to the offensive inevitability of easing himself between Wei Ying and the nearest stranger, "you should call wards."
Not to arm or guard them, but for how people move, serpentine, how they gaze at each other with distrust mounting. How their touch lingers too often on blades held out, their eyes search jugulars. They are animals fed well with grudge and spite, to saturation. One flicker, and sparks will turn to effervescent flame and —
"...cleansing. Can you yet...?" In truth, he knows Wei Ying might be himself too deeply entrenched in startled energies to perform ablutions. Better, "Can you amplify what I anchor?"
The perimeter is too broad. Their watchers are too attentive of strangers. And the first taste of pure energy, when they come so drained, might prove...
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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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Lan Zhan frees him from debts not named, but intimated; from the months of Wei Wuxian's grappling guilt and slow resolutions into courses that don't require Lan Zhan's blessing to feel safe, where courting that danger of needing to try that's been tempered by wisdom and the yawning abyss of the sixteen years of darkness staining his mind has a cadence, a whimsy, a truth he can follow. All those months on the road, and he winds back to Gusu Lan, for Lan Zhan, for the children. Winds away, too, and yet returns, a heron mid migration, recalling which pools provide, which sleeping lands are safer enough to dream.
He aches, as Lan Zhan wipes one sleeve across the soft clay tablets they've been writing since Wei Wuxian found his wrist clutched by these same fingers, threaded through his now. Iron bands in warmth, an anchor, then kneeling.
To unmake a truth he'd only learned years too late, and accept what it is, to walk away. There is part of him that considers it, in the fresh terror of that unmooring. That thinks, what would that be? What would it look like, to claim children and no more, to accept that as a due and leave Lan Zhan to his mourning, tempered by the wonder of some part of that man lives yet. He could do it, he thinks. He could be that man, the one who leaves, and he might be content. Not happy but in breathes, not filled but in moments, but he could live hand to mouth, dream to dream.
His parents laughter, and the plodding of the donkey. His only childhood memory that predates the fangs and barking, the last remnant of forgotten ghosts that had loved, and lost, and left, in the proper way of things.
Thus now, he can also choose. Lower to his knees, to kneel in turn, bridging no distance but what their hands do still. Wei Wuxian reaches to his topknot, his uncrowned head, and his fingers find the ribbon wound round. Tug at it, slipping it loose, that long red length, and it slides free into his palm, cascading past his shoulders and then draping, like a delicate thing, down either side of his hand. The ribbon, red as fire, red as blood, red as passion, red as possibility; the red that has decorated his life, then drapes over their joined hands, edges pooling in the soil of Yiling beneath them even now.
"Together," he says, and it's not a Lan's promise, not a wedding of bodies, not a tradition long known. It is Wei Wuxian's promise, the red of him in all its permutations, and Wei Ying's offer, known and knowing. To know each other, there is a bond already, invisible and joining them heart to heart, never clearer than when they find their footing to fight like the brilliance of each other's twin orbits. Yet the knowing has strength in learning, must change as people change, must adapt, and can only do so now with those words, the acknowledgement.
Debts, cleared. Records, evened. Pasts, dead and mourned and honoured, but not carried forever more as the ghosts of the present, tainting the future into shadow.
"Side by side, whatever comes, whatever changes. If I wish for anything, I wish for this."
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For an exhalation between Wei Ying's startle and his stirring, only stupor stretches long between them, like cold-water seas. Spumed with half-gasps and brittle, tenuous confusion. If he shifts their hands, he will propel hefts of drowning wave.
On his wrist, the sleek, slithered thing of Wei Ying's blood, turned coarse-weaved cotton, strangles the harsh crest of bone. He hesitates — detains his breath as if such a minor transgression might upend them — and sees it sink on his arm, loiter taut, bridge Wei Ying's wrist, mount it. A claim, by any other name, its teeth sharp.
What is this, then? Yiling Wei names no rites. Wei Ying, already a mimicry of the boy before who wore his name, only imitates what he has seen before him. In a cold cave, you were taken without consent. And the ribbon rattles red, the wind sings against its anger.
"It is custom," Lan Wangji starts with the amused patience of a sprawled cat beneath summer sun, an educator, "to ask first."
Never mind similar failings on his part, sixteen years aged into their maturity. To be married, but not wedded before living family, eloped to all fittings of purpose. Dishonour unto his name, but this shame he wears well, like cloth of ramie, nettling skin.
"Wei Ying's memory fails him."
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"You know what they say about my memory."
Not an ownership of it, not when words swirl and spill, just a trickle of them, to say, "I'm willing to ask, Lan Zhan, but it's either arrogance to say marry into nothing, or to ask to marry into your clan. Besides," he says, eyes falling to the red that binds, the vein between them, "This is a promise. Whatever the formalities, whatever the other ties, there's us. Relearning what it is to know each other. It's your clan," he says, eyes lifting, searching Lan Zhan's face for something he doesn't know he needs to see, but curious, looking nonetheless. "That binds like this. Yunmeng Jiang is fond of proposals... and my parents, I presume, were fond of eloping."
A crooked grin, and a squeeze of fingers, if that's whatever weave their tapestry takes in time. Eloping, but there are ties to bind them should they wish them: to Yunmeng, to Gusu, and the ones they care for in each. Even to the Jins, for the one he loves there, in all his bright, burning glory, some unholy mixture of the men who raised him and Jiang Yanli's underlying kindness, given reason to understand emotions far better than his senior generation.
Their sons, three and counting, are worn as pearls around his neck, warm weights of a family he hasn't had for years, and won't shed for a lifetime, not by choice. Whatever they are, whatever they aren't, they're still father to three, and more to the legions of pained and raging dead of this land, even now only catching a hint of less claustrophobic air.
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Twice married or betrothed or pledged, or merely intended. Once fated. He nods, less to seal the cinnabar of Wei Ying's calligraphy on their shared lives, than merely to acknowledge the inexorability of his conquest. Wei Ying wishes it so, the Patriarch has wispily rasped, and through his will, the earth quakes, the throbbing pulse of a land simmers and quickens and is.
He does not rip the red string off Wei Ying's wrist, but nooses two fingers within and around it once, and again in a second loop, and tungs to release the tie — to forcibly seize it, war spoils and fairly won, Lan Wangji's won. "I claim this as my binding price. Find another."
A beggar's sole possession, thieved. To remember this day by. Shivered, he remembers the correction, "This, your flute in name, and my children."
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No, he will not concede that, not to this man, with all the guilt and gratitude in his heart for Lan Sizhui's raising, when Wei Wuxian had gone to his death believing him already dead. Ours, and he relents. Ours, and he forever has a stake in lives beyond his own, beyond Lan Zhan's, in a way still tenuous with his brother and nephew. A way that strengthens, but at a distance, still at cross ties all those tangled webs they stumble into, slowed further until they've struggled their way free.
Surrender a ribbon willingly, tie together two lives repeatedly, name two deaths as intertwined, even yet to claim children apace. His flute, certainly, on Lan Zhan's call as well, but Chenqing is not what he needs in this world. A tool, and one his shijie had called for the naming of, and that reminds him of importance in ways that any simply named bamboo flute otherwise might not. And yet.
The wind whispers, but only through leaves rasping against each other, too ossified to fall, spring a memory so distant it speaks as if legend among the roots of dying giants, and he gives another squeeze to Lan Zhan's hand.
"Bindings both ways. Though if I'm to find another ribbon, we'll be having to head into town."
No, spares he does not carry, does not see need for; had not, almost a lifetime ago, their eldest's lifetime ago, not even recalled to use it to bind Lan Zhan's leg. Funny now in retrospect, to not bind red with red, but red with white. Still, he does not yet shift, studies Lan Zhan like a face he does not know, relearning the planes of it, the shadows that fall, the lean lines of nose and jaw. He has aged well, where the generation above them had been less graceful, and for once, he really things about that, the time etched beneath that skin. Thinks of it, and doesn't linger in the guilt and pain, but wonder at the who, the will, the making of the Lan Zhan he sees today.
Wonders at himself, and the man he's remaking himself into, day by day.
"Pick it for me," he says, and it's pure whimsy, to tell Lan Zhan, do this for me. "When we get there." Red or black or white or blue or purple, ah, he doubts purple, but anything. Even a strip of repurposed lace.
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We worked you well, ground your bones, tattered your flesh. We worked until no more of you persisted.
"To town. We will want to see the reverberation. The spread of spiritual poison." Too much of the mark here, roots and forests and decay of shades grown and expansive, and Wei Ying, the deathless king, whose presence stokes them. In the low fluorescence of candid light, a brokered morning, Wei Ying is like threads of old silk, frayed at the ends of him, and each ghost comes to suckle at its mother's teat, and he has them, his children, his belly barren and his arms full. They must yet see what has become of the village, suffused so long in the toxicity of spiritual energies, cloyed and thickened.
Lan Wangji rises first. He has this, ever: back ripped, knee's joints that do not yield. One part of him, sustaining the whole, his hand drifting out less to anchor Wei Ying than make the victor's offer — come, then, be lifted. Make an attendant of the chief cultivator. "You will have a ribbon now, if I have a daughter later."
Stay, he needn't negotiate, then. It does not end with vows and territory, with pretty, worthless mimetism of rites Wei Ying smooths and folds and lays distantly cold across his body, like winter's mantle. Yiling is a step on long stairs, and no conclusion.
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The smallest villages carry their secrets, and some will always kill. He stands, absent clutch of Lan Zhan's hand, lift his gaze from his inward focus and the thought about which degree the resentment lingers as its own energy, independent of the spirits that birthed it and the case study that Yiling becomes for this unique depression of spirit, only to summon himself back to the moment. To promises, to chosen bindings, to unwritten ones, and to Lan Zhan, dark eyed, with his words a different sort of promise to a man starved for family as much as he's been starved for sustenance of the body. To glut, body and soul, at the same table, watching children scream and cry and fuss and quiet and grow, learning as they do. Teaching, yes, to be taught if fortunate, and they as fortunate for the opportunity.
Whatever men or manner of creature they become, under the power of their own progress in an uncaring, undisturbed landscape.
He smiles, lopsided, and then fully, laughing as he stands, clasps both hands around Lan Zhan's one. So the ribbon has been claimed, and so he finds it more odd in thought than odd in feeling; ties that bind break under enough testing.
Faith, to believe this one won't, too. They both know children are never binding enough.
"Haven't I promised you a daughter already? Dark of hair, pale of skin, temper either sweet or fiery, she's someone we'll have to know in time." No pattern of timing to the children left in their care, only the echo of pain, of loss, of despair that's slowly rinsed away with the affection they can spare. More, it turns, than they've known to give each other without fangs bared over open veins, thinking what if, what if they press down, break skin, let blood flow free.
"But know her, we will."
He won't be the one to break the contact of their hands, this time. Once, he'd held on to Jiang Cheng, to Jiang Yanli, and with them stepped forward into a world filled with light and possibility. Later it had been stability and pain and love and suffering in unequal measures, and one day, they'd all turned down different paths. Had died, or lived, or found some inbetween through no fault of their own. When A-Yuan's hands had disappeared, and reaching out meant clasping cold air, to wake with a cry broken in a throat, and eyes unseeing for the time it takes to recognise the prison of his own flesh.
No, he knows the trickery of his own senses at times, and he holds on until he's wrested away, a laugh easy on his lips as movement turns him toward the village, to taking steps forward and down, wind parting the twisted leaves on warped branches, sweeping aside yellowed grasses, tinder-thin creeping bushes that send spindly fingers flinching forward, teasing at the edges of their robes.
It is not a warm day, but it doesn't feel cold like it should. Nor is it warm, more tepid, like an uncertain spring morning where winter's claws still rake at the ground and whisper, Not yet.
The feeling lingers as they wind down toward the village beyond the collapsed barriers of near two decades before, people stepping through the measures of their day with little visible effect for it. Not that such things are needing to be obvious, and the spill of people past street venders, even at the corner he once favoured, bickering a note too high, and he thinks they might start to have the shape of the bleedthrough, the trickle down to the worst emotions, from the easiness of anger to the coldness of...
"Revenge." He turns his head, eyes finding Lan Zhan's. "Emotional spillover, carried in, flowing downhill. Do you think?" It's possible, he doesn't voice. Of course it's possible; of course a land can bleed feeling as much as it bleeds water from stone.
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"I think," he starts with the air of every petulant infant who has spotted the treat denied to him, of Sizhui when he was still Yuan, and sticky fingers trailed to catch the fineries stretched over merchants' stalls, "I shall have two."
Be warned, be wary. And Yiling, a widow, Wei Ying a mother, Lan Wangji their husband-witness, their cause, their resolution. The whip of his tongue stays, his hand ropes a quiet claw that clenches tight and pulsing at the plant root of his back, the bulb of his posture. He stifles his aches: counts milliseconds of yearning, then heartbeats, then moments whole, until he is the glass recipient of waters, roiling. And jasmine-bland, his gait slows, reshapes itself: he escorts, one hand on his sword's hilt, Bichen a shriek of hunger crystallised sharp, fettered.
Red, vibrant, bloodied beneath his sleeve — Wei Ying's string, trapped on his left wrist, shielded from the dangers of friction inherent in the bearing of the dominant hand. The Gusu Lan way, for all of Wei Ying's exceptions. It will serve. It has served well so far, served often.
The village is a world stitched together from patches of rags and misplaced thread, needles prickling. Each way, men turn with apprehension, the bright-eyed terror of creatures that know themselves hunted and small, and see their predators alive among them.
"I think," he murmurs, and concedes to the offensive inevitability of easing himself between Wei Ying and the nearest stranger, "you should call wards."
Not to arm or guard them, but for how people move, serpentine, how they gaze at each other with distrust mounting. How their touch lingers too often on blades held out, their eyes search jugulars. They are animals fed well with grudge and spite, to saturation. One flicker, and sparks will turn to effervescent flame and —
"...cleansing. Can you yet...?" In truth, he knows Wei Ying might be himself too deeply entrenched in startled energies to perform ablutions. Better, "Can you amplify what I anchor?"
The perimeter is too broad. Their watchers are too attentive of strangers. And the first taste of pure energy, when they come so drained, might prove...
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