The air is thick and heady with iron and hibiscus, with the blighting luminescence of song in dappled gold of groaned, ungainly earned translucence. Where filth sleeps, cleansing is colour, and Wei Ying calls it close, refracted, coils it, then unspools the spindle.
And Lan Wangji knows his part: the second instrument in this, cacophony of shrieks and distraction, the guqin suave for any man whose ear's never been scratched by snake's hiss. Behind his eyelids, violence flickers: the wrench of energy, of flesh bleached of resent, and Wei Ying's play soft for it like slip of silk before it twines and knots the noose, careful to extricate rot but leave the bodies unscathed.
He amplifies. It is his due, fingers gelid, but sliding, lending the burn of sandalwood, of true qi ablution. If Wei Ying is sea water, he is salt, and the wound of their anger weeps and weeps until the well dries, until the sting cauterizes.
And what lives in the wake of it? Precious little impressions, only the imprecations of merchants brokering the same trade as before, only easing. Clasps quieted. Smiles turned strat-laced, more than predatory. The immensity of the change, suffocated into nuance.
A simple thing, to dismiss the zither. Simpler still to blindly seek Wei Ying's hand, to round his grip on the known bite of his wrist bones, and — tug, less for Wei Ying's own sake, than that of Wangji. Alive. Alive, undisturbed, undispered. In his ear, This was our land first.
"You want wine," he rasps, and his tongue's dry, teeth tendered. Wei Ying wants his wine, or it would please a lost ache in Lan Wangji's soul to supply it. To find relief on the whetted edge of another man's gladness. "Come."
He basks, for a moment, in that joined presence, in the ease of finding music an aid and not just the weapon it also is, for Lan Zhan's clan, perched as egrets in the snows of their wintertime mountain peaks. Where the brilliance of it, sunlight cutting down in shafts through the clouds overhead and the dusts raised to swirl lazily through air grown softer, is that for a moment, light feels solid. Like he could reach out a hand, capture the length of it, wrap his fingers around that shaft, and slide.
Warmth, captured. Light, held close, then left to go its way again, to disappear and reemerge, bold and triumphant, with every cracking dawn.
He startles in that softness, the tired a pleasant nudge into his joints, the lassitude of fulfillment for now, an itch scratched to leave his skin reddened but gladdened for being alive. Lan Zhan pulls, and there are words as the land thrums beneath them, as people settle without knowing why it was they had not settled.
Come. He smiles, dusk creeping over a horizon to blue so dark it fades to blackness, and he is the night, the warmth of the summer's evening, where the insects sing and the frogs carol and the river burbles on, impatient and implacable. Wine, and thirst leaves his mouth parched and dry, and he smiles, fondly, but doesn't laugh as he once would have.
"Of course, Lan Zhan." To come, for wine or companionship or whatever feel between them in the ache of a smaller success weighed against the greater joy of living things, and the sons who wait, safe for now. Always for now, in a world where monsters live in the open, and kindness hides in shadows, and for now can be enough in small stretches. Like the walk to the teahouse, the winehouse, one and the same: the only place for stories and drinking and dining on small dishes, up three steps from the street they walk down. Lan Zhan holding to his wrist, and Wei Wuxian twisting his hand, until the fall of Lan sleeves swallows the curve of a hand that bends to turn and hold wrist in turn, much as it breaks the sanctity of Lan Zhan's circled grip.
"Tell me you'll try the tea, however much it might disappoint. They're bound to have something pickled, some rice—" He teases in degrees, eyes flicking around to watch with a master with known benevolence expecting an illusion to shatter. The town holds. The people hold. It is not resentment that rides highest, and he smiles again, a sigh without sighing. Looks to Lan Zhan as they mount the stairs as one more impossible task to master, unwavering.
"Some vegetables cooked in simple sauce, ah?" Dreams, perhaps, because they'll all be turnips and radishes, and he'll have to stare at them with hideous nostalgia and choke down the memory of them before he'd even eat.
Unbidden, he yields, until their hands meander, and it is only a soft grip, a negotiation of fingers gently bound and they are — teasing in open sight. As men who have earned the privilege do, as friends or lifelong companions. Past the study or interference of their witnesses, deep-scowled men who bargain the cost of legumes and trinkets, rickshaws that rattle their carcasses and the road in passing.
Wei Ying steers him. He feels light for it, adrift, an agglomeration of limbs without purpose. A stranger, and unburdened for it, as if, for once, his footprints may leave snow and mud without casting print. Unsaddled of the corset fettering that binds his breath, of Hanguang-Jun.
"This time, you have tea." He remembers. They both do. Scarcity, where now sleeps wealth. They walk up stairs where a door creaks and the tavern master gives welcome to a cracked, heavy wood table — empty, as most seating arrangements are, in a place devoid of clientele.
He sits, with all the straight-backed ceremony of a man who dignifies an establishment through sheer will and presence, the sea of his silks spread evenly about him. He waits for his tea, overly steeped. The wine, faintly clouded. The pickles, requested on whim, and the rice, the millet, the soup.
He pours Wei Ying's wine, unasked. Then, softened, "Pour my cup."
Part of him will be glad the day Lan Zhan graduates away from his horrific reliance on millet. It couldn't even be a proper congee, with the rice awaiting whatever spicing or change the day brought: no, it was the meal, the grain, and he might grimace (he does, lips thinned and twisted before it resolves into a smile, wry) before he smiles.
"More than water for guests," he says, and he lifts the tea, takes one cup, pours the tea within. Swishes it around, cleaning in the manner of a morning's tea house, poured into the spare bowl left for all things deemed unnecessary. But it means the second, proper cup pours clean, no historical detritus floating, and the cup itself cleansed in the way of heated water, the scathed cleansliness of borrowed moments made home; lifts and holds it in fingertips, examined, and offered out to Lan Zhan like this.
He sits at ease on his side of this table, and he offers with that same ease, languid but graceful, always something in him aware of what he could be, in different circumstances. A man grown again better used to living within his skin, better at ease with himself and the silences without finding them his guilty due.
"Lan Zhan." An exchange, cup for cup, alcohol and tea, room warmth and hotter still. Not a match in most any sense, but there'd be no other sensible one for the two who sit here now.
It is his due, Hanguang-Jun come in full regalia, accepting the trivial formalities of hospitality that only Yiling has ever denied him — a scion of Gusu Lan, envoy to Zewu-Jun, official of the sects, now their foremost servant, liege and mouthpiece.
And Wei Ying pours prettily, attentive in the way men accept readily and greedily at teahouses, a learned performance that Wei Ying's sister must have suffered great pains to convey, instant by borrowed instant, gesture by brokered gesture. Let Wei Ying be this: pond-water shallowness in his elegance, fleeting beauty. He has shown himself bloodied and raw long enough at cliff's side, spying the flickered golden sight of his fussing, fumbling, unrepenting nephew, or knelt to beg the dark dregs and embers of Jiang Wanyin's forgiveness. The transition will flatter his forgotten forms, will suit him.
At length, Lan Wangji rewards the care, beholden to bow his back to the appropriate depth and angle, to murmur his thanks as discreetly as a bird's wing touches lake water. He whisks away his sleeve, then receives the tea cup, and sips behind the modesty screen of his other hand, as if he partakes shamefully of the wine vice. Then, politely, "The leaf greens sweeter here."
Flattery, however poorly earned, a great, sweltering fondness in his chest for the morsel of a wrong suffered decades ago, now so poetically righted. It stung you then, he cannot say, gaze kind over the rim of his cup, as he drinks his fill, to the last drop, You still had pride.
Emptied, the cup arrives down with a faint clatter. He stills it with two fingers. "Yiling receives me well. I am humbled."
A twitch of his lips, for all there is a part of him that appreciates the salve of this, over an old, long healed scar; one of many small, unimportant things he could wish had been different, this simple ability to offer tea.
Lan Zhan had, of course, paid put to have it before, in that village of Yiling, below the mountains and the Burial Grounds. Yet there'd been nothing to offer but the lacklustre showing of caves and stone and oh, yes, the hard won, thin health and happiness of those who lived there with him. Lacking so much, but having at least that for comfort warm into the nights that could shriek into their ears with demands from the bodiless dead.
"Thank you," he says, lips pulling up into an easy smile, eyes catching light enough to reflect it back in brightness, "I'm sure the master of the tea house appreciates your praise for their efforts."
Efforts they are, procuring teas to offer when these towns are used as trade-stops more than places sought out for their own merits, excepting the foolish ones who claimed proximity to rights after a legacy that had been whipped out of this region a decade ago. Fewer false Patriarchs these days, until one went further afield, and new names and mythos took precedence.
Still, this is a warmth he basks in, this exchange of pleasantries and deeper meanings, and it's with that in mind that he lifts the cup poured for him, alcohol astringent but not unduly so, a bite promised for the warmth of blood it will draw to the surface on its way down.
"Yiling is humbled," he says in turn, smiling, "To have chance to host Lan Zhan again, after all this time."
Drains his cup in one long swallow, a semi-formal shield of his hand as he does: a cheer, a summation of respect, to the man sitting across from him. Not for his titles, though he has respect for those too, but for whatever he is, this one who could admit to having loved a shade long passed, and who had raised a son to be proud of.
He sets the cup to table surface, one contained and tiny click.
"There's a long road ahead, ah? On a pathway wider than I once thought it was." Perhaps not the broad throughways of the large cities, of places wearing the pride of their passageways in open streets and cheerful markets, but it was not the thin path of animals and mountain destitute eked out in the long shadows of the darkened forests. Broader than a single-log bridge, and sturdier footed, too.
"A second life," he agrees, and drinks his cup, his fill, his due. A road spanning one man's blinked eternity. A course, stone by stone and log by log, erected to last.
"What will you make of it?" Brilliance, hardship, disaster. Blood and war and all the wretched regalia of human misery, when greed and ambition take turns to wear governance. A new path, altogether — the farmer's way. Was this not Wei Ying's calling, by the end of it? The lotus flower was never destined to reflect him: only seemingly drift in still water, weighed down by the heft of its own majesty, anchored in crowns of flat-bodied leaves. He is a simpler, fairer flicker of translucence, flattered by ephemerality.
And Lan Wangji drinks to him, tea cup raised as if it were the courtesy weapon of wine consecrated to the worship of a living hero, a decorated elder. He bows with his back and his hands and his cup, like a moon forced from early wax to waning.
In a world that holds its breath, they are dangerously, exhilaratingly alone, even as the server comes to tempt their appetites with servings of the day's broth, to ask if Wei Ying's jar already wants replenished. "Who will you be?"
'Wei Ying.' 'Wei Wuxian.' A humble, if whimsical daozhang. Disciple to Yungmeng Jiang, renounced and defected. Protégé of Gusu Lan, paths strategically, diplomatically, mournfully divided. The Yiling Patriarch, when the wind breezes, the stars align, and Wei Ying's tongue would saturate in red and iron. Sizhui's father, always, and shared custodian of every child he produces and throws like weed after a summer's rain, in Wangji's path.
A cup raised in turn, in the knit silence and electricity of this dusty building, careworn and careful for the tending of what public comes through, desperate or greedy or anything inbetween, anything that might be better. The wine isn't the best he's had, and yet as he raising the cup to Lan Zhan, what's on his tongue after is sweet, smooth over his tongue and down his throat, and he smiles after, as if nights and days of careless imbibing was to lead to moments like these. Where the offer of a new jar, when for once, he's not drained his dry already, and if it's tempering or moderation or distraction in the moment, he feels light enough to breathe freely.
"I look forward to finding out," he says at last, pours for himself another cup of wine, though he doesn't drink it immediately. He is himself, Wei Ying to few, Wei Wuxian to most, and the bleeding shadow of the Laozu to a public that half believed he'd never been real, and half believed he'd the cause of their worst personal nightmares. He is not that man, in what he will bleed out of Yiling, lancing the abscess of its hurts, draining so that healing can take root the way the rot had.
He is a collection of half-finished thoughts, of better intentions better considered, of actions taken and paced and still only sometimes parallel to the well trod paths they'd all learned through the dawning years of their cultivation. A constructed family, found piece by piece, and it's easier then, easier now, to lift his cup and pause, head tilted to consider Lan Zhan through this all.
Drinks from the cup with his lashes lowered as he blinks, long and slow and carefully careless, the affection of a moment and two men who knew each other once, who may yet know each other again, and not just in the weaving of their children's lives. Yet first in that weaving, and the lancing of wounds, and the bindings of fates without the axe of some outside threat hanging over their heads.
"What of you, Lan Zhan? Who will you be, in this life of yours?"
Not new, not second, not follow-up, but cleared beyond the turgid mouth of its river, flowing to sea. Clarity, a chord for the soul, and not the demand, the enforcement, of anyone else's expectation. Unless he chose. Unless he wished it, anchored as he is, inevitably, by clan, by tradition, by ties to a brother he loves and a life he'd been born into.
Father, first before many things. Wei Wuxian feels he sees more of that in Lan Zhan than the rest, out of hands on throats or bones anchoring wrists, but instead the small smile when he sees Sizhui, the curve of his arms when he holds their younger sons, the daughters he's demanded.
For a moment, they are only geometries of courtesy, hands played and performed and cups traded, the careful tumble of their swarthy translucence: Lan Wangji's bronze with warm tea. Wei Ying's, threatening a mist that betrays a lesser calibre of alcohol, but that they forgive, forget, embrace. He thinks, more fool him —
And reaches, hand raining long shadow over the table's span, to gain the measure of the wine jar and the membrane of its residual wine, swishing it. Enough here to wet his lips, to steal taste and wake the blind, battered, amorphous thing, the slithered tendrils of the animal rooted beneath his skin. The wilderness alcohol brokers. But they keep the company of a young girl, trembled and dancing between tables, of a slew of pale-faced visitors, negotiating distance comfort.
They have not earned the dubious blessing of Hanguang-Jun, the drunken menace. Under the dusty, hazy pallor of dying light, he teases droplets of wine in his tea, gives the cup a swirl and drinks with an air of timid, carefree consternation.
"Not a teacher." A shortcut, they both know, to start with a negative definition, to sculpt purpose from the stone of his uncertainty. Then, softened, "Not the leading cultivator."
Not ruler of one sect, not liege of them all. Not a spider, casting his web long and meandering and glistened with dew-like silvered effervescence. Not tightening his spill.
"Too much of me belongs to others." A sect, a cause, a lifetime. The forehead that fetters him tighter than garotte. He wishes, distantly, to drift. "I forget where they begin, and I end."
A skip in his memory of breathing, watching Lan Zhan's advance, the slide of fingers around the wine jar flirting with the barest touch of a filled remembrance, dregs as mediocre as the first pour. He can recall when Lan Zhan had drank with full awareness, has a hazier recollection of the time he'd convinced, ordered, whatever it had been with that talisman he's forgotten with the sway of time, and things had been simpler.
He wonders if Lan Zhan's mind ever sits in knots of too busy chatter, of cross purpose and questions and doubts and further questions and endless, immense, insatiable curiosity; but he thinks that at times, Lan Zhan has clarity, and others, he's like the wine mixed in with his tea, and his answer, spilled past his lovely lips like the slide of his tongue over them.
A taste of what is, and what isn't. Listening to Lan Zhan's words, forming with his hands the script of his consideration. It feels rare still, even when Lan Zhan is less absolute in his trade of golden words than he once was, or often could be. Worth the extra consideration, the admittance of how he turns, caught within the web of their collective lives, of the realms, and even their chosen duties.
An empty cup, his fingers curled around its sides. Studying Lan Zhan's face, and offering a smile, without edges, without promises. Better natured, but wry, thoughtful.
"I might recommend travel," he says at length, "For starting to find the edges of an answer. When you don't need to be the leader," of realms through the handholding and the keen-eyed watch on the unfair and fair dealings of humanity and the inhuman. "You live up to your name, Lan Zhan. You fit Hanguang-jun, but that light doesn't need to shine as the sun does. Light enough to guide you fits. Lan Zhan fits. Finding the weave of who that man is... for yourself, who that man is. Tell me how to help, when you find you know."
Sound gains flesh within him, like every cancerous growth. He finds screams coagulate, the instinctive and visceral revulsion that rewrites the cage of his ribs, pushes thin the barrier of his diaphragm. He drinks, and the whimper drowns, and he seems no more murmured than the wash of patrons that negotiate their first few tastes of their meals alongside them. And he finds Wei Ying's face, cut of his gaze blanched:
"No." And softened snow, "I do not wish to meet you unfinished."
As if he were a puppet absent strings, a clay thing losing the shape of his moulding. Paper burned. He cannot be a fickle, feeble thing, not when the years have battered and turned him. Poetry, empty verse, the judgement of faint, aged philosophies. What has he learned, if not himself? How to drink (poorly) and precepts.
"To be another tribe for Wei Ying's salvation." By name of Wen, or in their chaotic impossibilities to pursue progress without reconciliation, Jiang or Jin. Let them follow, blind-eyed and aimless and know Wei Ying will deliver them to virtue and balance and the cleansing of blood once spilled, the erasure of sins committed. How many steps down the paths of Lanling? Carp Tower will learn new slopes and tumbles.
"This is not the way of equals." They cannot be as they are, and walk a line, one behind the next.
A trail he can follow, walk the line of progress over unfamiliar hills, in the learning of himself. Has he not but recently set out doing the same? Finding pieces of himself, pieced together, stitches that aren't pretty so much as patchwork and beautiful for their borrowed wholeness.
"It takes time for any person to know themselves. I'm still learning," he says, admitting it with the same cavalier grace in which he's named himself a half-wrecked cultivator, he who has the techniques and the teachings and the methods and the limitations of his body's own natural qi to use any of the above. Power in those moments, or the metred use of that finite resource. Time has given him the means of its effectiveness, even while he has not needed to fill his empty cup with resentful energies for years.
Oh, but he had, once. Had again when he'd sought out his own death, at the hands of those who had been so greedy for it, for the power they thought he held indiscriminate, so that they in turn could wield it with righteous terrorism.
"The young grow together, and the old, we learn to walk together. Companions, and not saviours. It's long past my turn to be the one who waits, Lan Zhan." A smile, small and true and tired, for sixteen dark years and sixteen years of plunging into chaos, and children, their numbers growing one by one.
He should not indulge, should not murmur, "Mmmm. On battered knees, counting ants and worms."
— but he remembers. Heavens have and hold him, he recalls, ancient and dust-licked steps, splintered by the heft of their grandeur. How the coarsened silk of Wei Ying's robes lent them polish, how he preoccupied himself with all that stood a flickered distraction on long, summer's youthful days, when the midday sun dappled fine white on his cheeks before they learned to fissure for tears.
They were children, once. Boys, before war. Hands do not recover their shape after knowing the sword's hilt. How must a tea cup now fill the strain of that absence? And yet he drinks, to the supervising smile of a child-server, relieved her patrons remember enough of their tolerance to promise no impatience or violence or words of anger.
"You have no patience." And Lan Wangji lacks the academic spirit to teach it. "Make no pledges. Walk the world. Where our paths intersect, they converge."
"Waiting doesn't mean without motion." Patience in holding position he had, for a year and more if he needed it, but it wasn't the same thing. Patience for him is balanced against an earlier life of rashness, of being unable to hold still before injustice, and then holding himself so carefully still to walk that narrow path of survival with his Wens. The ones that Lan Zhan recalls now, one people to save after another, but doesn't he remember how that ended?
Wei Wuxian is no saviour. No hero, but clever, and curious, and alive, those are things he is, and hopeful in a way he hadn't been when he woke up in the Mo Manor, when he'd been a cursed man trying to understand a world that'd flown by him, happily tarnishing his name while using his tools, and wanted him still, chewed and worn in their fetid jaws.
"Then no pledges to you, but there is one I have to make. To our children," he says, and their daughters, for future paths, the convergence of two living beings with their talents and their failings, "That we both will know their growing. I lost that chance once. Not again, please. I don't want to miss it all again."
This, the quieter pronouncement, Wei Ying's eyes blinding-bright with the feverish agitation of a man who knows his despair misplaced, his pleas pointless. Lan Wangji has tasted the ginger acridity of salted supplications, among petitioners who deal themselves a hundred cuts only to present the blood and bone to the chief cultivator and damn their offenders.
A pledge to their children: one, a heartache of a boy grown his own man, shadowed silhouette drifting after the tatters of his Wen uncle. Two others, unlikely earnings of the road, both carved from rift and suffering, from the pain of their flesh or their forbearers.
"I cannot stay time." Not even in this, for Wei Ying. Beneath the clatter of his falling hand, Wei Ying's fingers scratch the table's sticky lacquered wood, when Lan Wangji drags them. "Qingshan already learns words."
Time is the province of children, wasted without sense or reason. Wangji tallies it in every li of folded, vibrant silk the seamstresses stitch to broaden Qingshan's robes, with every ten days' passage. Children are wet things, made for and of drenching: like lichen and weeds and mould, they grow senselessly, poisoning those who neglect them.
"Come and go as you please. You have claim to Cloud Recesses." Needs must, the wards can disperse like spring's snow and yield the patriarch an open path. "But choose your hours wisely."
"In the dark of the night will hardly make anyone happy, even your esteemed uncle," he says, an allowance of humour and a sort of softening of his expression. There are things even now he's learning, navigations that Lan Zhan hadn't been able to help with before, tectonic movements that Wei Wuxian had to experience alone. Soulmates could not live each other's experiences for them, though they could be a support, leaning like two cracked trees in the depths of a monsoon striking.
Their roots, their anchoring, it had to come from within them. Lan Zhan's meant he did not erode with the mountain storms, and Wei Wuxian, at some point, had found himself adrift and clinging and spreading like vines to, climbing to reach for the world beyond himself without having a proper grounding.
It was not as frightening as it once was, to truly consider his home as being within him, and small as that progress is, gently as he refills Lan Zhan's cup with still steaming tea, he finds and leaves parts of himself everywhere he visits. His once-brother, his mending love with Jiang Cheng, and the gestures of paintings and memories and recollections that hurt as much as they slowly, painstakingly heal. Jin Ling and his vibrancy, smiles and scowls and too keen statements and too knowing looks when it comes to pointing toward his blood uncle's truths, and his own fumbling way to ask for the framework of who his mother was. Even if his cousins, older than he was, could share his father, there'd been only Jiang Cheng for his mother, and Jiang Yanli was a beautiful scar across his heart, a gift given repeatedly in blood he clawed from his chest to leave her son with any memory of a woman he reflected in his own empathy far more than Wei Wuxian would have guessed, in first meetings.
He'd been a fool. He knows he's often enough been a fool, and they both have, and they both will, in the future. Yet their sons, two fathers, soulmates, but not the people who once they'd been, but the versions of themselves they were still growing into: their sons, and their futures, unfettered but by what is chosen.
"You have claim to Yiling," is all he says to that in the end, the same invitation, the knowing quirk of his lips, because Yiling is no man's restful paradise, and he is no man, he is a spectre made flesh, and he will invite rest to this land.
If he will grant himself purpose, if he will grant them both time for themselves, and no time can be granted for their children, then he will be the one to visit and take gasping breath to measure their growth, before he slips under the surface of familiar waters to swim with broad strokes and strong kicks of cloth-wrapped legs, to drag himself out and dry in the familiar sun, or to never quite dry at all in the humid summer's embrace.
Lan Zhan no more wishes to feel saved than anyone else in this world he's been unmoored from, owning relationship's bindings, but with only that weight, and the forever threatening possibility of what he might do, if only, if only. Less with Lan Zhan sitting where he was now, cloaked in his titles and position, but he thinks even after then, they'll see.
There are thoughts for him to investigate, lay flat and view from above, but it is what it is. Things he hasn't allowed himself to consider before, but might now; what fosters a core, and what he might find if he only has that to investigate, and no murders looming, no curses pressing, only the pleasantries of family to turn his attention back onto, and not one of them needs him, beyond everything, needs his sacrifice, without him asking, needs him to prove any part of his unworthy self is worth salvaging. Not for having found worth, exactly, but for having come closer to peace in the wake of storm and child's tantrums and all the terrors and horrors of the everyday and the dead, crossing over with the same abandon that rules the chaos of their beautiful, breathing world.
Freedom is being so unmoored he can choose his own, true points of contact, and not let it be guilt that binds him, but the warmer, better things, like what ties him to each child of theirs. For the children, it's always been easy for him. It's his peers, and the elders, who have always been difficult, in the same way that they all found him difficult, in his pernicious smiles and too keen intelligence with too little younger reason to wonder at the hows of going about things, and not just the doing with little more than a why not.
He laughs, does not intend it. Crystalline and brittle, scratches on diamond beds. "No man has claim to Yiling. The Patriarch surrendered his."
In death, in the long chase after, the metaphor of the cultivation sects' hounds at his shivered feet. Wei Ying walks these lands more to haunt them — begrudges the lesser ghosts he spies here their frailty of their inheritance, the blunt, bastard dullness of their claws, the silken terror of their transgression. Under Wei Ying's hand, Wangji's tea pours limpid and earthy now, and he strains to balance the cup between two hands, to honour it with careful sip — tasting the granular muddiness of leaf, the threat of idle friction.
"What do you give me?" Empty dowry, poorly brokered. Let Zewu-Jun negotiate for the sect, on the occasion of nuptials he will not know to celebrate. Their secret on pale-dead lips, blued. Shake of his head, hair tumbled and the look of him porcelain stripped and scratched and strained, and he is no second Jade of Lan here, only — foreign. Indistinct in his whites, shrouded already in the exotic veneer of an 'outsider.'
If this were a love match, his brother would coax free from the cage of Wei Ying's gentle fingers the pledge of alliance, the token tolerance of the dead, if not — for terror of abuse — their service. If this were an arrangement of convenience between two sects, Zewu-Jun would wrench land and teeth from Wei Ying's bloodied mouth. But they breed and raise and shelter a fledgling thing, nameless among Lan Wangji's bastards. He finds his loose footing strangely soothing.
"You misunderstand me. I want no land. No bindings." Perhaps in this, he is the cherished, spoiled son of a sect that has yet to exile him — in contrast to Wei Ying, face drawn and alight with the pains of enforced, ill-begotten defection. A simple thing, between the laggard pulse of a slow heart, to say, I wish for nothing, when Wangji's coin purse sings full, and his hands go rich with possibility, when the simplest undulation of his voice commands the sects. To renounce, knowing it will not be accepted — that is true privilege. When his hand singes his forehead ribbon, it lingers, in love with the easy hurt of its symbol.
"I keep the signs of the sect." For as many days as Zewu-Jun chooses seclusion, Lan Wangji is the sect. "I have my children, Bichen, my reputation. Allow me to want nothing more."
"I am no patriarch." He smiles with that, a careless shrug of his shoulders; a name never lived up to, but granted, yes, as such things are, by people. The way of every name, chosen by others to define the ones around them, and there's no ill will within it in the end. "So you're doubly right, I suppose."
It would have bothered him once, either out of spite and acceptance of a name he didn't ask for, simply because he could turn it around on those who yoked him with it. Another time to feel there was anywhere carved out in the landscape of this vast world for himself and those he cared for, only to know now, it was only he who lacked the roots. The rest of those in his heart were established, had places, and if they loved them or resented them, it was a certainty he didn't need to provide.
So brittle laughter of his closest friend, a man who loved the man he once was, and it's easy to smile. No weighted pain, in this moment, or the ones that follow.
He raises his cup high, to Lan Zhan, to whatever the future is or isn't, and to the children they share. Misunderstandings will continue, he knows, because they both are who they are, and they haven't learned how to work smoothly outside of the battlefield. Maybe they never will, but he has faith, and faith is more than he's had in a long time.
"Lan Zhan, my soulmate, whatever claims you felt I once had, the ones I never would have made would be in organising your wants. Allow me only to respect what you decide, and to hope for your happiness, when and where it finds you."
A drink of tea and warmth and second chances, in a world so fond of giving few.
'Soulmate.' A man who knows him, mote to whole, part to system, the bindings. If he is flesh, Wei Ying runs red and raw and rust, blood thick. Poison.
He thinks, once upon a time, he lived under a pale, watchful sky, and he bathed growing limbs in cold waters, and he took his sword and his name and is uncle's path.
He thinks, he died at cliff's edge, a restless collision of electric frictions — a storm that never waged itself, stifled with Wei Ying's fall.
He thinks, he has been haze and dreams and steps bridged one after the next, since.
He thinks —
But he says, "Thank you."
And he drinks his stale tea, much as Wei Ying consumes his watered wine, and they comport themselves, loose on their strings, like the puppet show the hour commands, under the weathered, greyed eyes, like morose inertia and sleet, of their curious spectators. What a spectacle they make, two gentlemen in their blood-drenched fineries, negotiating words with the skill of children, gravitating gracelessly towards each other's (absent) cores.
Incomplete, but forcing connection — searching. Lan Wangji's hand trickles on Wei Ying's, on the wine cup. Finding.
Slow, unmoored, but stitching back together through inertia. Place is a function of time. 'Belonging' merely expresses the mathematics. He has the patience to become scholarly, in this.
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The air is thick and heady with iron and hibiscus, with the blighting luminescence of song in dappled gold of groaned, ungainly earned translucence. Where filth sleeps, cleansing is colour, and Wei Ying calls it close, refracted, coils it, then unspools the spindle.
And Lan Wangji knows his part: the second instrument in this, cacophony of shrieks and distraction, the guqin suave for any man whose ear's never been scratched by snake's hiss. Behind his eyelids, violence flickers: the wrench of energy, of flesh bleached of resent, and Wei Ying's play soft for it like slip of silk before it twines and knots the noose, careful to extricate rot but leave the bodies unscathed.
He amplifies. It is his due, fingers gelid, but sliding, lending the burn of sandalwood, of true qi ablution. If Wei Ying is sea water, he is salt, and the wound of their anger weeps and weeps until the well dries, until the sting cauterizes.
And what lives in the wake of it? Precious little impressions, only the imprecations of merchants brokering the same trade as before, only easing. Clasps quieted. Smiles turned strat-laced, more than predatory. The immensity of the change, suffocated into nuance.
A simple thing, to dismiss the zither. Simpler still to blindly seek Wei Ying's hand, to round his grip on the known bite of his wrist bones, and — tug, less for Wei Ying's own sake, than that of Wangji. Alive. Alive, undisturbed, undispered. In his ear, This was our land first.
"You want wine," he rasps, and his tongue's dry, teeth tendered. Wei Ying wants his wine, or it would please a lost ache in Lan Wangji's soul to supply it. To find relief on the whetted edge of another man's gladness. "Come."
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Warmth, captured. Light, held close, then left to go its way again, to disappear and reemerge, bold and triumphant, with every cracking dawn.
He startles in that softness, the tired a pleasant nudge into his joints, the lassitude of fulfillment for now, an itch scratched to leave his skin reddened but gladdened for being alive. Lan Zhan pulls, and there are words as the land thrums beneath them, as people settle without knowing why it was they had not settled.
Come. He smiles, dusk creeping over a horizon to blue so dark it fades to blackness, and he is the night, the warmth of the summer's evening, where the insects sing and the frogs carol and the river burbles on, impatient and implacable. Wine, and thirst leaves his mouth parched and dry, and he smiles, fondly, but doesn't laugh as he once would have.
"Of course, Lan Zhan." To come, for wine or companionship or whatever feel between them in the ache of a smaller success weighed against the greater joy of living things, and the sons who wait, safe for now. Always for now, in a world where monsters live in the open, and kindness hides in shadows, and for now can be enough in small stretches. Like the walk to the teahouse, the winehouse, one and the same: the only place for stories and drinking and dining on small dishes, up three steps from the street they walk down. Lan Zhan holding to his wrist, and Wei Wuxian twisting his hand, until the fall of Lan sleeves swallows the curve of a hand that bends to turn and hold wrist in turn, much as it breaks the sanctity of Lan Zhan's circled grip.
"Tell me you'll try the tea, however much it might disappoint. They're bound to have something pickled, some rice—" He teases in degrees, eyes flicking around to watch with a master with known benevolence expecting an illusion to shatter. The town holds. The people hold. It is not resentment that rides highest, and he smiles again, a sigh without sighing. Looks to Lan Zhan as they mount the stairs as one more impossible task to master, unwavering.
"Some vegetables cooked in simple sauce, ah?" Dreams, perhaps, because they'll all be turnips and radishes, and he'll have to stare at them with hideous nostalgia and choke down the memory of them before he'd even eat.
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Wei Ying steers him. He feels light for it, adrift, an agglomeration of limbs without purpose. A stranger, and unburdened for it, as if, for once, his footprints may leave snow and mud without casting print. Unsaddled of the corset fettering that binds his breath, of Hanguang-Jun.
"This time, you have tea." He remembers. They both do. Scarcity, where now sleeps wealth. They walk up stairs where a door creaks and the tavern master gives welcome to a cracked, heavy wood table — empty, as most seating arrangements are, in a place devoid of clientele.
He sits, with all the straight-backed ceremony of a man who dignifies an establishment through sheer will and presence, the sea of his silks spread evenly about him. He waits for his tea, overly steeped. The wine, faintly clouded. The pickles, requested on whim, and the rice, the millet, the soup.
He pours Wei Ying's wine, unasked. Then, softened, "Pour my cup."
His tea. Their binding rites.
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"More than water for guests," he says, and he lifts the tea, takes one cup, pours the tea within. Swishes it around, cleaning in the manner of a morning's tea house, poured into the spare bowl left for all things deemed unnecessary. But it means the second, proper cup pours clean, no historical detritus floating, and the cup itself cleansed in the way of heated water, the scathed cleansliness of borrowed moments made home; lifts and holds it in fingertips, examined, and offered out to Lan Zhan like this.
He sits at ease on his side of this table, and he offers with that same ease, languid but graceful, always something in him aware of what he could be, in different circumstances. A man grown again better used to living within his skin, better at ease with himself and the silences without finding them his guilty due.
"Lan Zhan." An exchange, cup for cup, alcohol and tea, room warmth and hotter still. Not a match in most any sense, but there'd be no other sensible one for the two who sit here now.
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It is his due, Hanguang-Jun come in full regalia, accepting the trivial formalities of hospitality that only Yiling has ever denied him — a scion of Gusu Lan, envoy to Zewu-Jun, official of the sects, now their foremost servant, liege and mouthpiece.
And Wei Ying pours prettily, attentive in the way men accept readily and greedily at teahouses, a learned performance that Wei Ying's sister must have suffered great pains to convey, instant by borrowed instant, gesture by brokered gesture. Let Wei Ying be this: pond-water shallowness in his elegance, fleeting beauty. He has shown himself bloodied and raw long enough at cliff's side, spying the flickered golden sight of his fussing, fumbling, unrepenting nephew, or knelt to beg the dark dregs and embers of Jiang Wanyin's forgiveness. The transition will flatter his forgotten forms, will suit him.
At length, Lan Wangji rewards the care, beholden to bow his back to the appropriate depth and angle, to murmur his thanks as discreetly as a bird's wing touches lake water. He whisks away his sleeve, then receives the tea cup, and sips behind the modesty screen of his other hand, as if he partakes shamefully of the wine vice. Then, politely, "The leaf greens sweeter here."
Flattery, however poorly earned, a great, sweltering fondness in his chest for the morsel of a wrong suffered decades ago, now so poetically righted. It stung you then, he cannot say, gaze kind over the rim of his cup, as he drinks his fill, to the last drop, You still had pride.
Emptied, the cup arrives down with a faint clatter. He stills it with two fingers. "Yiling receives me well. I am humbled."
Wei Ying has redeemed himself.
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Lan Zhan had, of course, paid put to have it before, in that village of Yiling, below the mountains and the Burial Grounds. Yet there'd been nothing to offer but the lacklustre showing of caves and stone and oh, yes, the hard won, thin health and happiness of those who lived there with him. Lacking so much, but having at least that for comfort warm into the nights that could shriek into their ears with demands from the bodiless dead.
"Thank you," he says, lips pulling up into an easy smile, eyes catching light enough to reflect it back in brightness, "I'm sure the master of the tea house appreciates your praise for their efforts."
Efforts they are, procuring teas to offer when these towns are used as trade-stops more than places sought out for their own merits, excepting the foolish ones who claimed proximity to rights after a legacy that had been whipped out of this region a decade ago. Fewer false Patriarchs these days, until one went further afield, and new names and mythos took precedence.
Still, this is a warmth he basks in, this exchange of pleasantries and deeper meanings, and it's with that in mind that he lifts the cup poured for him, alcohol astringent but not unduly so, a bite promised for the warmth of blood it will draw to the surface on its way down.
"Yiling is humbled," he says in turn, smiling, "To have chance to host Lan Zhan again, after all this time."
Drains his cup in one long swallow, a semi-formal shield of his hand as he does: a cheer, a summation of respect, to the man sitting across from him. Not for his titles, though he has respect for those too, but for whatever he is, this one who could admit to having loved a shade long passed, and who had raised a son to be proud of.
He sets the cup to table surface, one contained and tiny click.
"There's a long road ahead, ah? On a pathway wider than I once thought it was." Perhaps not the broad throughways of the large cities, of places wearing the pride of their passageways in open streets and cheerful markets, but it was not the thin path of animals and mountain destitute eked out in the long shadows of the darkened forests. Broader than a single-log bridge, and sturdier footed, too.
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"What will you make of it?" Brilliance, hardship, disaster. Blood and war and all the wretched regalia of human misery, when greed and ambition take turns to wear governance. A new path, altogether — the farmer's way. Was this not Wei Ying's calling, by the end of it? The lotus flower was never destined to reflect him: only seemingly drift in still water, weighed down by the heft of its own majesty, anchored in crowns of flat-bodied leaves. He is a simpler, fairer flicker of translucence, flattered by ephemerality.
And Lan Wangji drinks to him, tea cup raised as if it were the courtesy weapon of wine consecrated to the worship of a living hero, a decorated elder. He bows with his back and his hands and his cup, like a moon forced from early wax to waning.
In a world that holds its breath, they are dangerously, exhilaratingly alone, even as the server comes to tempt their appetites with servings of the day's broth, to ask if Wei Ying's jar already wants replenished. "Who will you be?"
'Wei Ying.' 'Wei Wuxian.' A humble, if whimsical daozhang. Disciple to Yungmeng Jiang, renounced and defected. Protégé of Gusu Lan, paths strategically, diplomatically, mournfully divided. The Yiling Patriarch, when the wind breezes, the stars align, and Wei Ying's tongue would saturate in red and iron. Sizhui's father, always, and shared custodian of every child he produces and throws like weed after a summer's rain, in Wangji's path.
And beyond?
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A cup raised in turn, in the knit silence and electricity of this dusty building, careworn and careful for the tending of what public comes through, desperate or greedy or anything inbetween, anything that might be better. The wine isn't the best he's had, and yet as he raising the cup to Lan Zhan, what's on his tongue after is sweet, smooth over his tongue and down his throat, and he smiles after, as if nights and days of careless imbibing was to lead to moments like these. Where the offer of a new jar, when for once, he's not drained his dry already, and if it's tempering or moderation or distraction in the moment, he feels light enough to breathe freely.
"I look forward to finding out," he says at last, pours for himself another cup of wine, though he doesn't drink it immediately. He is himself, Wei Ying to few, Wei Wuxian to most, and the bleeding shadow of the Laozu to a public that half believed he'd never been real, and half believed he'd the cause of their worst personal nightmares. He is not that man, in what he will bleed out of Yiling, lancing the abscess of its hurts, draining so that healing can take root the way the rot had.
He is a collection of half-finished thoughts, of better intentions better considered, of actions taken and paced and still only sometimes parallel to the well trod paths they'd all learned through the dawning years of their cultivation. A constructed family, found piece by piece, and it's easier then, easier now, to lift his cup and pause, head tilted to consider Lan Zhan through this all.
Drinks from the cup with his lashes lowered as he blinks, long and slow and carefully careless, the affection of a moment and two men who knew each other once, who may yet know each other again, and not just in the weaving of their children's lives. Yet first in that weaving, and the lancing of wounds, and the bindings of fates without the axe of some outside threat hanging over their heads.
"What of you, Lan Zhan? Who will you be, in this life of yours?"
Not new, not second, not follow-up, but cleared beyond the turgid mouth of its river, flowing to sea. Clarity, a chord for the soul, and not the demand, the enforcement, of anyone else's expectation. Unless he chose. Unless he wished it, anchored as he is, inevitably, by clan, by tradition, by ties to a brother he loves and a life he'd been born into.
Father, first before many things. Wei Wuxian feels he sees more of that in Lan Zhan than the rest, out of hands on throats or bones anchoring wrists, but instead the small smile when he sees Sizhui, the curve of his arms when he holds their younger sons, the daughters he's demanded.
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And reaches, hand raining long shadow over the table's span, to gain the measure of the wine jar and the membrane of its residual wine, swishing it. Enough here to wet his lips, to steal taste and wake the blind, battered, amorphous thing, the slithered tendrils of the animal rooted beneath his skin. The wilderness alcohol brokers. But they keep the company of a young girl, trembled and dancing between tables, of a slew of pale-faced visitors, negotiating distance comfort.
They have not earned the dubious blessing of Hanguang-Jun, the drunken menace. Under the dusty, hazy pallor of dying light, he teases droplets of wine in his tea, gives the cup a swirl and drinks with an air of timid, carefree consternation.
"Not a teacher." A shortcut, they both know, to start with a negative definition, to sculpt purpose from the stone of his uncertainty. Then, softened, "Not the leading cultivator."
Not ruler of one sect, not liege of them all. Not a spider, casting his web long and meandering and glistened with dew-like silvered effervescence. Not tightening his spill.
"Too much of me belongs to others." A sect, a cause, a lifetime. The forehead that fetters him tighter than garotte. He wishes, distantly, to drift. "I forget where they begin, and I end."
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He wonders if Lan Zhan's mind ever sits in knots of too busy chatter, of cross purpose and questions and doubts and further questions and endless, immense, insatiable curiosity; but he thinks that at times, Lan Zhan has clarity, and others, he's like the wine mixed in with his tea, and his answer, spilled past his lovely lips like the slide of his tongue over them.
A taste of what is, and what isn't. Listening to Lan Zhan's words, forming with his hands the script of his consideration. It feels rare still, even when Lan Zhan is less absolute in his trade of golden words than he once was, or often could be. Worth the extra consideration, the admittance of how he turns, caught within the web of their collective lives, of the realms, and even their chosen duties.
An empty cup, his fingers curled around its sides. Studying Lan Zhan's face, and offering a smile, without edges, without promises. Better natured, but wry, thoughtful.
"I might recommend travel," he says at length, "For starting to find the edges of an answer. When you don't need to be the leader," of realms through the handholding and the keen-eyed watch on the unfair and fair dealings of humanity and the inhuman. "You live up to your name, Lan Zhan. You fit Hanguang-jun, but that light doesn't need to shine as the sun does. Light enough to guide you fits. Lan Zhan fits. Finding the weave of who that man is... for yourself, who that man is. Tell me how to help, when you find you know."
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"No." And softened snow, "I do not wish to meet you unfinished."
As if he were a puppet absent strings, a clay thing losing the shape of his moulding. Paper burned. He cannot be a fickle, feeble thing, not when the years have battered and turned him. Poetry, empty verse, the judgement of faint, aged philosophies. What has he learned, if not himself? How to drink (poorly) and precepts.
"To be another tribe for Wei Ying's salvation." By name of Wen, or in their chaotic impossibilities to pursue progress without reconciliation, Jiang or Jin. Let them follow, blind-eyed and aimless and know Wei Ying will deliver them to virtue and balance and the cleansing of blood once spilled, the erasure of sins committed. How many steps down the paths of Lanling? Carp Tower will learn new slopes and tumbles.
"This is not the way of equals." They cannot be as they are, and walk a line, one behind the next.
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"It takes time for any person to know themselves. I'm still learning," he says, admitting it with the same cavalier grace in which he's named himself a half-wrecked cultivator, he who has the techniques and the teachings and the methods and the limitations of his body's own natural qi to use any of the above. Power in those moments, or the metred use of that finite resource. Time has given him the means of its effectiveness, even while he has not needed to fill his empty cup with resentful energies for years.
Oh, but he had, once. Had again when he'd sought out his own death, at the hands of those who had been so greedy for it, for the power they thought he held indiscriminate, so that they in turn could wield it with righteous terrorism.
"The young grow together, and the old, we learn to walk together. Companions, and not saviours. It's long past my turn to be the one who waits, Lan Zhan." A smile, small and true and tired, for sixteen dark years and sixteen years of plunging into chaos, and children, their numbers growing one by one.
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— but he remembers. Heavens have and hold him, he recalls, ancient and dust-licked steps, splintered by the heft of their grandeur. How the coarsened silk of Wei Ying's robes lent them polish, how he preoccupied himself with all that stood a flickered distraction on long, summer's youthful days, when the midday sun dappled fine white on his cheeks before they learned to fissure for tears.
They were children, once. Boys, before war. Hands do not recover their shape after knowing the sword's hilt. How must a tea cup now fill the strain of that absence? And yet he drinks, to the supervising smile of a child-server, relieved her patrons remember enough of their tolerance to promise no impatience or violence or words of anger.
"You have no patience." And Lan Wangji lacks the academic spirit to teach it. "Make no pledges. Walk the world. Where our paths intersect, they converge."
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Wei Wuxian is no saviour. No hero, but clever, and curious, and alive, those are things he is, and hopeful in a way he hadn't been when he woke up in the Mo Manor, when he'd been a cursed man trying to understand a world that'd flown by him, happily tarnishing his name while using his tools, and wanted him still, chewed and worn in their fetid jaws.
"Then no pledges to you, but there is one I have to make. To our children," he says, and their daughters, for future paths, the convergence of two living beings with their talents and their failings, "That we both will know their growing. I lost that chance once. Not again, please. I don't want to miss it all again."
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A pledge to their children: one, a heartache of a boy grown his own man, shadowed silhouette drifting after the tatters of his Wen uncle. Two others, unlikely earnings of the road, both carved from rift and suffering, from the pain of their flesh or their forbearers.
"I cannot stay time." Not even in this, for Wei Ying. Beneath the clatter of his falling hand, Wei Ying's fingers scratch the table's sticky lacquered wood, when Lan Wangji drags them. "Qingshan already learns words."
Time is the province of children, wasted without sense or reason. Wangji tallies it in every li of folded, vibrant silk the seamstresses stitch to broaden Qingshan's robes, with every ten days' passage. Children are wet things, made for and of drenching: like lichen and weeds and mould, they grow senselessly, poisoning those who neglect them.
"Come and go as you please. You have claim to Cloud Recesses." Needs must, the wards can disperse like spring's snow and yield the patriarch an open path. "But choose your hours wisely."
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Their roots, their anchoring, it had to come from within them. Lan Zhan's meant he did not erode with the mountain storms, and Wei Wuxian, at some point, had found himself adrift and clinging and spreading like vines to, climbing to reach for the world beyond himself without having a proper grounding.
It was not as frightening as it once was, to truly consider his home as being within him, and small as that progress is, gently as he refills Lan Zhan's cup with still steaming tea, he finds and leaves parts of himself everywhere he visits. His once-brother, his mending love with Jiang Cheng, and the gestures of paintings and memories and recollections that hurt as much as they slowly, painstakingly heal. Jin Ling and his vibrancy, smiles and scowls and too keen statements and too knowing looks when it comes to pointing toward his blood uncle's truths, and his own fumbling way to ask for the framework of who his mother was. Even if his cousins, older than he was, could share his father, there'd been only Jiang Cheng for his mother, and Jiang Yanli was a beautiful scar across his heart, a gift given repeatedly in blood he clawed from his chest to leave her son with any memory of a woman he reflected in his own empathy far more than Wei Wuxian would have guessed, in first meetings.
He'd been a fool. He knows he's often enough been a fool, and they both have, and they both will, in the future. Yet their sons, two fathers, soulmates, but not the people who once they'd been, but the versions of themselves they were still growing into: their sons, and their futures, unfettered but by what is chosen.
"You have claim to Yiling," is all he says to that in the end, the same invitation, the knowing quirk of his lips, because Yiling is no man's restful paradise, and he is no man, he is a spectre made flesh, and he will invite rest to this land.
If he will grant himself purpose, if he will grant them both time for themselves, and no time can be granted for their children, then he will be the one to visit and take gasping breath to measure their growth, before he slips under the surface of familiar waters to swim with broad strokes and strong kicks of cloth-wrapped legs, to drag himself out and dry in the familiar sun, or to never quite dry at all in the humid summer's embrace.
Lan Zhan no more wishes to feel saved than anyone else in this world he's been unmoored from, owning relationship's bindings, but with only that weight, and the forever threatening possibility of what he might do, if only, if only. Less with Lan Zhan sitting where he was now, cloaked in his titles and position, but he thinks even after then, they'll see.
There are thoughts for him to investigate, lay flat and view from above, but it is what it is. Things he hasn't allowed himself to consider before, but might now; what fosters a core, and what he might find if he only has that to investigate, and no murders looming, no curses pressing, only the pleasantries of family to turn his attention back onto, and not one of them needs him, beyond everything, needs his sacrifice, without him asking, needs him to prove any part of his unworthy self is worth salvaging. Not for having found worth, exactly, but for having come closer to peace in the wake of storm and child's tantrums and all the terrors and horrors of the everyday and the dead, crossing over with the same abandon that rules the chaos of their beautiful, breathing world.
Freedom is being so unmoored he can choose his own, true points of contact, and not let it be guilt that binds him, but the warmer, better things, like what ties him to each child of theirs. For the children, it's always been easy for him. It's his peers, and the elders, who have always been difficult, in the same way that they all found him difficult, in his pernicious smiles and too keen intelligence with too little younger reason to wonder at the hows of going about things, and not just the doing with little more than a why not.
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In death, in the long chase after, the metaphor of the cultivation sects' hounds at his shivered feet. Wei Ying walks these lands more to haunt them — begrudges the lesser ghosts he spies here their frailty of their inheritance, the blunt, bastard dullness of their claws, the silken terror of their transgression. Under Wei Ying's hand, Wangji's tea pours limpid and earthy now, and he strains to balance the cup between two hands, to honour it with careful sip — tasting the granular muddiness of leaf, the threat of idle friction.
"What do you give me?" Empty dowry, poorly brokered. Let Zewu-Jun negotiate for the sect, on the occasion of nuptials he will not know to celebrate. Their secret on pale-dead lips, blued. Shake of his head, hair tumbled and the look of him porcelain stripped and scratched and strained, and he is no second Jade of Lan here, only — foreign. Indistinct in his whites, shrouded already in the exotic veneer of an 'outsider.'
If this were a love match, his brother would coax free from the cage of Wei Ying's gentle fingers the pledge of alliance, the token tolerance of the dead, if not — for terror of abuse — their service. If this were an arrangement of convenience between two sects, Zewu-Jun would wrench land and teeth from Wei Ying's bloodied mouth. But they breed and raise and shelter a fledgling thing, nameless among Lan Wangji's bastards. He finds his loose footing strangely soothing.
"You misunderstand me. I want no land. No bindings." Perhaps in this, he is the cherished, spoiled son of a sect that has yet to exile him — in contrast to Wei Ying, face drawn and alight with the pains of enforced, ill-begotten defection. A simple thing, between the laggard pulse of a slow heart, to say, I wish for nothing, when Wangji's coin purse sings full, and his hands go rich with possibility, when the simplest undulation of his voice commands the sects. To renounce, knowing it will not be accepted — that is true privilege. When his hand singes his forehead ribbon, it lingers, in love with the easy hurt of its symbol.
"I keep the signs of the sect." For as many days as Zewu-Jun chooses seclusion, Lan Wangji is the sect. "I have my children, Bichen, my reputation. Allow me to want nothing more."
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It would have bothered him once, either out of spite and acceptance of a name he didn't ask for, simply because he could turn it around on those who yoked him with it. Another time to feel there was anywhere carved out in the landscape of this vast world for himself and those he cared for, only to know now, it was only he who lacked the roots. The rest of those in his heart were established, had places, and if they loved them or resented them, it was a certainty he didn't need to provide.
So brittle laughter of his closest friend, a man who loved the man he once was, and it's easy to smile. No weighted pain, in this moment, or the ones that follow.
He raises his cup high, to Lan Zhan, to whatever the future is or isn't, and to the children they share. Misunderstandings will continue, he knows, because they both are who they are, and they haven't learned how to work smoothly outside of the battlefield. Maybe they never will, but he has faith, and faith is more than he's had in a long time.
"Lan Zhan, my soulmate, whatever claims you felt I once had, the ones I never would have made would be in organising your wants. Allow me only to respect what you decide, and to hope for your happiness, when and where it finds you."
A drink of tea and warmth and second chances, in a world so fond of giving few.
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He thinks, once upon a time, he lived under a pale, watchful sky, and he bathed growing limbs in cold waters, and he took his sword and his name and is uncle's path.
He thinks, he died at cliff's edge, a restless collision of electric frictions — a storm that never waged itself, stifled with Wei Ying's fall.
He thinks, he has been haze and dreams and steps bridged one after the next, since.
He thinks —
But he says, "Thank you."
And he drinks his stale tea, much as Wei Ying consumes his watered wine, and they comport themselves, loose on their strings, like the puppet show the hour commands, under the weathered, greyed eyes, like morose inertia and sleet, of their curious spectators. What a spectacle they make, two gentlemen in their blood-drenched fineries, negotiating words with the skill of children, gravitating gracelessly towards each other's (absent) cores.
Incomplete, but forcing connection — searching. Lan Wangji's hand trickles on Wei Ying's, on the wine cup. Finding.
Slow, unmoored, but stitching back together through inertia. Place is a function of time. 'Belonging' merely expresses the mathematics. He has the patience to become scholarly, in this.