Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ass rules everything around me.

— Freud, probably

 

***

 

The seamstresses of Lan had seen their second young master coming a long way off. Lan Wangji was surprised to learn that while he’d grown up, discussions had occurred regarding him. Plans had been debated on, and decisions made. Carmine-red wedding robes wouldn’t suit skin as pale as his, and so a bolt of rich, earthy fired-clay red silk had been ordered when he came of age, against this day. The fabric gently warmed the mutton-fat jade white of Lan Wangji’s skin just as well as the Aunties who’d known him from infancy had hoped it would. If Xichen and Wangji had always been something like the communal property of Lan, then they were also the hope and expectation of their generation. Motherless and fatherless, A Huan and A Zhan had been cradled in a hundred arms, given lessons at a thousand expert hands. Had been taught to paint and dance and play with exquisite care, for this: the adult lives that they should someday lead.

Beneath his red silk, Lan Wangji wore a black robe. Beneath that, he wore a white one. His sleeves, cuffed with embroidery, trailed almost to the floor. All the cloth looked plain from a distance, but up close one could see that it was richly textured. In fact, it was finer than anything Lan Wangji had hitherto worn in his life: this was a garment intended for the now-grown son of a great clan. Jade ornaments rested at his waist. A ceremonial golden guan that matched the Lan main line’s hereditary eye colouring had been brought out of the treasure rooms and secured in the blue-black stream of his hair, which had been brushed to shine like the surface of the river.

“Acceptable,” declared the matron who’d nursed he and A Huan as infants when she examined her work. Her voice was crisp, and she left quickly—valiantly pretending she wasn’t crying, not a bit of it.

Lan Wangji awaited the bridal party. His brother, their kin and his Lan former schoolmates would accompany him to the central hall, where important ceremonies such as these were held. Lan Wangji had few truly intimate friends, but his skill and courtesy had caused his peers to esteem him highly. Lan was not the sort of sect where flattering the clan heirs on account of their status would have met with good results, but many of them had approached him to wish him well, and to promise to make up the numbers of the groom’s retinue. Lan Wangji had not quite realised that the shimeis he’d taught sword drills and the shiges who’s taught him, the cousins he’d survived a harrowing First Hunt with and disciples who’d struggled through Advanced Arrays with him would want to make this small, important journey with him now. Gusu Lan had its weaknesses and its peculiarities, but sometimes the warp and weft of it caught Lan Wangji in the chest, and he felt held, precisely where he stood: between the history and future of his people.

Somewhat uncharacteristically, Lan Wangji stopped to admire himself in the mirror beside the door. Lan Wangji usually looked unimpeachable. It was expected of him, and Lan Wangji tried never to fail Lan’s expectations, or others’ expectations of Lan.

Today, he thought, ‘I look quite handsome, actually. I have never looked so well as I do now. Wei Ying,’ he thought (with a strange confidence bubbling up in his chest, like a spring from the earth), ‘will enjoy that.’ Perhaps Wei Wuxian would babble and fluster, or possibly he’d look Lan Wangji up and down with confident, frank appreciation. He might soften tenderly at his eyes and at his mouth, or maybe he’d tease Lan Wangji in that way of his, which let Lan Wangji know that Wei Wuxian liked nothing in the world so well as whatever he was supposedly mocking Lan Wangji about.

Lan Wangji knew the whole range of Wei Wuxian’s expressions and responses, and predictively pinning him down to just one of these possibilities was often difficult. But the core of them—the core of Wei Wuxian himself—remained stubborn and steady. His fiance was a thousand variations on a strong, beloved theme.

‘He will find me handsome on our wedding day,’ Lan Wangji concluded with satisfaction, glancing down at the swing of his robes over his tip-turned red-piped boots. At the sway of the pleated black robe’s hem. ‘Is there anything so welcome as that?’

It was as if this was what Lan Wangji’s comeliness had been for, all along—the purpose of his body, realised in this as it was in battle, or music. He was handsome for this moment, for the apotheosis of Wei Wuxian’s appreciation and pleasure. He’d been born to be Wei Ying’s husband, and here it was: the making of him.

When they came to the main hall (the party a fluttering flock of bright-blue wedding robes, gentle laughter, holiday chatter, tapped drums and ringing bells), Lan Wangji stopped short. At Wei Wuxian’s previous weddings, Lan Wangji (among his many other less generous feelings) had been able to admit the bride’s maddening, incandescent beauty. The sight before Lan Wangji now eclipsed those memories easily. Lan Wangji felt his mouth part slightly with wonder. No Jin face-paint contorted Wei Wuxian’s features. No pounds and pounds of golden Phoenix crown bowed his slender neck. Wei Wuxian looked, in his present finery, as free and easy as his manner. As he ought always to look. Wei Ying looked perfectly like Wei Ying, and all the lovelier for it.

How unprepared Lan Wangji found himself for Wei Wuxian in a sheer red veil, beneath which Lan Wangji would still see the brightness of his eyes and the breadth of his smile. For the silver guan of Lan furen, just the colour of Wei Wuxian’s eyes, worn as a crown. Tucked in the back of Wei Wuxian’s coiffure, sitting in a bun braided with Wei Wuxian’s customary red ribbon, was Lan Wangji’s mother’s favourite silver comb, which Lan Wangji had presented to his fiance as a private betrothal gift.

According to Lan custom, the two men had not spoken since the night of the proposal, or had any opportunity to meet. Lan Wangji had conveyed the comb via Jiang Yanli; Wei Wuxian had asked her to bring Lan Wangji a hairstick of his own mother’s from his bedroom in Lotus Pier. It was one of very few momentos of his parents that Wei Wuxian possessed.

This was the first time Jiang had made its presence felt in Wei Wuxian’s wedding attire. Now that Lan Wangji was properly looking at them, with Wei Wuxian kneeling beside him, he could see a lotus motif on the bodice and in the embroidery of his bride’s robes. There were shades of rich Lan blue, of blue-green, and of Jiang violet in Wei Wuxian's layers. The Jiang-patterned elements must have been made well in advance, in anticipation of some grand occasion, and been given over to Wei Wuxian’s use now. For once in her life, it seemed Madam Yu had done well by him. Wei Wuxian looked like what he always was, but had not always been recognised as: the celebrated second son of a great sect, marrying the second son of another.

But that was too dryly-put, and did the thing no justice. Wei Wuxian looked like spring in a person. Lan white was thought too dour for a wedding, but Lan blue inner robes fanned out behind Wei Wuxian in a great fish tail of train. The embroidery on the body of the fabric itself was picked out in complimentary colours. The sky-blue innermost layer of trailing robes, enhanced by a deep blue robe above it, was chased with silver-thread mountains, clouds, and the rivers that connected Yunmeng to Gusu. The design was no doubt a swift alteration to Wei Wuxian’s formal bride-gift of Gusu fabric, the execution of which had been prioritised over the last fortnight. A layer of costly aubergine silk—a bride-gift from Jiang—complimented the thick lilac sash at Wei Wuxian’s waist. Each band of trim-embroidery on the layers of fabric struck a lovely contrast: the rich jungle green silk of the topmost layer was set off by embroidery and cuffs in the pale green of tender shoots.

As they knelt before the Lan altar, Wei Wuxian bumped his shoulder against Lan Wangji’s.

“It’s like we’ve come dressed as each other,” he whispered, grinning under his veil. “I’m in your blue—you know, I’ve never seen you in red before! Lan Zhan looks so very—”

Lan Qiren, waiting to be bowed to, glared at Wei Wuxian. Lan Wangji’s fiance assumed a pious, serious expression, which was only a little mocking. His words (‘in your blue’) twisted through Lan Wangji pleasurably. Lan Wangji extended his hand between them, so that his fingertips touched Wei Wuxian’s, and his ears flushed when Wei Wuxian took this opportunity to hook their fingers together.

Both men were clear-eyed and definite throughout the ceremony. Wei Wuxian was unusually serious. But when they had taken their seats at the banqueting table, before the meal began, Lan Wangji said “Wei Ying, also.”

“Hm?” Wei Wuxian—his husband—asked.

“I have never seen you in such colours, either.” Lan Wangji clarified. “And though it is ever the case, Wei Ying also looks so handsome.”

Lan Wangji felt himself colouring a little. He’d never said that, before. For all his boldness in asking for this union, he’d never said such things to Wei Wuxian’s face. But Wei Wuxian deserved to be told on his wedding day, in his wedding robes, that he was beautiful by the man who’d taken him. That he was the most beautiful thing Lan Wangji would ever see.

His expression only partly visible under the translucent red veil, Wei Wuxian stared at him.

Emboldened, Lan Wangji continued. “I am blessed to call you my own.” An instant’s survey of the room revealed that everyone was still filing in, and that the eyes of the crowd were not yet fixed on the bridal couple. Quick as a striking snake, Lan Wangji placed a daring kiss on Wei Wuxian’s parted lips through the fabric of the veil. It was untutored, quick and chaste. And yet it was enough to make Wei Wuxian gasp sharply, and lean after Lan Wangji when Lan Wangji forced himself to draw back.

“Unfair,” Wei Wuxian grumbled, before turning to accept the first congratulations.

For the whole banquet, during which Wei Wuxian delicately maneuvered around the fabric to eat, Lan Wangji caught glimpses of the slightly-wrinkled spot where he’d marred the perfect fall of Wei Wuxian’s veil with his lips. Each such glimpse stoked the low, keening need in Lan Wangji to do it again.

The inclusion of Jiang elements was not all that Wei Wuxian had asked for when Lan Xichen (much against his will) had negotiated the marriage contract with Jiang Fengmian. In that he was coming into Lan, in legal and ritual terms Wei Wuxian was the ‘bride’ of the marriage, as he had been in both of his previous unions. Given that Wangji was Xichen’s only direct heir, he could hardly go to Jiang. This meant that Jiang was entitled to a bride-price in recompense for the loss of their Chief Disciple, and that Wei Wuxian was entitled to spousal guarantees and accommodations (no bride had yet married into Lan without negotiating leniency regarding sect rules). Accordingly, Jiang Fengmian had come with notes from his foster-son.  

“There is a boy who Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji both met briefly in Dafan,” Jiang Fengmian had begun.

“Yes,” Lan Wangji had agreed with a frown of recollection on his face, locating a bundle of swaddling, with tiny fingers poking out of it, in his memory. “A babe in arms.”

Jiang Fengmian had nodded. “It seems that Wen Ruohan was no good steward of his brother’s village. The boy’s parents were weakened by hunger, and then lost to disease. Blessedly, the child is healthy. He has a deep, strong qi.”

No one had said, but all present had realised, that if food had been limited, then the boys’ parents and their kin had likely chosen to prioritise the child’s health over their own. His survival had been purchased at a dear cost.

“The new Wen zongzhu asked Wei Wuxian to accompany her to Dafan on a relief mission. It seems that Dafan will require significant aid. Meanwhile, Wen zongzhu’s situation in Qinghe is still precarious. Not everyone has accepted her new leadership with grace.”

Lan Qiren had snorted at this. “They ought to count themselves blessed. Wen guniang has more diligence and respect in her than either of her Uncle’s direct heirs ever showed. Her medical cultivation marks her as a great talent—what did her cousins ever do that looked likely to merit a title?”

Lan Qiren might well be complacent about such things; both of the boys he’d raised were already renowned, at a phenomenally young age.

Jiang Fengmian had nodded with half a shrug, as if to acknowledge that they did not live in a world marked by the uninterrupted and universal display of good sense.

“Orphaned as he himself was, it seems Wei Wuxian was quite taken with the child. The boy is truthfully too young to have been weaned, but no one left in Dafan can provide for him thus. Wei Wuxian suggested that this Wen Yuan might accompany him in his marriage, as a ward or son, to be protected, raised and educated by he and his new husband. The Dafan Wen were very grateful for the advantages a Gusu Lan upbringing would bring, provided that the boy might still often see and know them as his extended family. There was some talk of the boy’s grandmother coming along with him, to convalesce under the eyes of healers and to help look after the boy.”

“Wangji and Wei Wuxian are full young to think of sons,” Lan Xichen had protested.

Lan Qiren had frowned at him. “They are young men, certainly, but not boys,” he said. “In another lifetime, we’d have sent them to war, which is still less suitable to their age. If this marriage is to occur,” and he’d given Jiang Fengmian a dark look, which Fengmian only met with some amusement (Wangji himself had not escaped his Uncle’s displeasure so lightly, or responded with such aplomb), “then heirs will almost certainly be a concern. A problem dealt with early is a crisis averted. And what is one more elder to care for to the healers?” Lan Qiren snorted. “Another pair of experienced hands in the creche would leave us the beneficiaries of the exchange.”

It was not unheard of for talented male cultivators to bear heirs or for golden orchid women to experience similar good fortune, but neither were such children as common as those born of male and female unions. In the course of its long history, Gusu Lan had accepted appropriate candidates of all backgrounds as disciples. Foster arrangements of various kinds were common, and Lan was well-equipped with a communal nursery, wetnurses and educational programmes for even the very young. Lan considered the vital point a child’s being reared in the culture of Cloud Recesses, under the eyes of Lan kin. An adopted infant was traditionally welcome as a legitimate heir—the main-line blood would also live on in scores of cousins. The most surprising element of the proposal was thus that Wei Wuxian, a heretical cultivator now infamous for having slain two husbands in murky circumstances and with paper-thin plausible deniability, wanted to bring a child into his third marriage.

“This is the most sensible, responsible thing ever to have come out of Wei Wuxian’s mouth,” Lan Qiren had observed. “It would honorably tie us to the new leadership of Wen. We must cultivate a new relationship with that sect to avoid the resentment of the past year dooming us to decades of poor relations with them.” He had glanced at Xichen. “After an appropriate interval, we should invite their disciples to Indoctrinations.”

Lan Xichen had frowned. “Certainly, Uncle. But in smoothing the path, let us not forget the welfare of the stones. Wangji, do you want this?” His gaze was concerned, beseeching even.

Did Lan Wangji want to raise a child with Wei Wuxian? A child who needed help, whom his zhiji had been charmed by, and whom Wei Wuxian looked to entrust to he and Lan Wangji’s joint care? Did Lan Wangji welcome this sign that their marriage was something far, far different to Wei Wuxian than his last two unions?

“Xiongzhang,” Lan Wangji had said, with a note of chastisement. It was no question at all.

Lan Xichen, not happy about any of this, had huffed.

Certainly Lan Wangji was intimidated by the proposed responsibility. But Wei Wuxian always challenged him, and he’d found nothing in his life more rewarding than rising to meet those challenges. Besides, in this case, the whole host of Lan would help at every turn. Thus Wen Yuan and his grandmother were formally taken into Lan’s protection, and were due to be fetched a fortnight after the marriage by Wei Wuxian himself. This would give the Dafan Wen time to say temporary farewells, and Lan time to absorb the changes wrought by the marriage of their second young master.

At the wedding feast, both newly-married men poked distractedly at their food. Wei Wuxian had lorded over both his previous marriage banquets as though the whole thing was a hilarious joke. Despite being nervous himself, Lan Wangji found the idea that he could make charming, confident Wei Wuxian discomposed enough to pick at his dinner, anticipating what was to come, very sweet, and terribly attractive.

For his own part, Lan Wangji was not anxious regarding what was to come. Wei Wuxian had once embarrassed him with pornography, but while Lan Wangji had never before seen material quite like that before (and never seen lovely Wei Wuxian offering it, like it was a suggestion), Lans were great believers in accurate and ample education regarding all aspects of the body. Tantric meditation was a serious component of cultivation. Lan premarital counselling was mandatory, extensive, and overseen by an ancient golden orchid woman who by all accounts had been married since roughly the beginning of recorded history. These tutorials normally took place over the course of months; there were exams. Lan Wangji had spent almost the entirety of the weeks since his betrothal in conference with this grandmaster, cramming the material and scoring ‘tolerably well’ (near-perfectly) on his tests. The act of love would likely go something like all the other aspects of cultivation and physical training he’d studied extensively and then performed well at in the field.

And of course, every lecture-generation of Lan youths was required to watch a very formal, decorous, respectful display of conjugal relations between married couples of various gender orientations (who were not immediately related to any of said youths) in a lecture hall setting. The grandmaster had observed that in their own day, Lan Yi and her cultivation partner Baoshan Sanren had participated in the educational exercise, and had thus inspired quite an engaging poem about longing for the perfume of the orchid from a young lady in attendance. The grandmaster’s pointed look had suggested that these ladies’ descendents would very soon be fielding questions regarding not-so-volun-teering. Lan Wangji refused to dwell on how to get out of that for at least the full first year of his marriage. He and Xichen were not above hiding from Lan elders in bushes, if the threat was dire enough.

For now, Lan Wangji caressed Wei Wuxian’s knuckle with his own, and watched his new husband’s elegant neck as he swallowed in response. Followed the bird-like jerk of it, as Wei Wuxian twisted to look at him with wide eyes.

“I am greatly looking forward to the arrival of Wen Yuan,” he told Wei Wuxian. “It was good of you to propose it.”

Wei Wuxian gave him a big, genuine smile, distracted from his nerves by Lan Wangji’s warm affection.

“It’ll be strange at first, I know. But you’ll take to him right away, like a duck to water,” he promised. “I know you will.”

“I will be proud to act as a father, with you.” Lan Wangji agreed. He didn’t know that grace in this would come so easily to him as Wei Wuxian hoped, but he appreciated the sentiment nonetheless, and would prepare and work to make it true. Truly, it didn’t matter if he had to struggle in pursuit of new skills well worth the having. He would have done much for Wei Wuxian. Loving a child who needed it, whom they would raise together, would be no hardship at all.

Nie Mingjue strode up and, by way of congratulations, made a joke about how disappointed he was to have been overlooked in Wei Wuxian’s amorous progress through sect leaders and their heirs. Wei Wuxian laughed and apologised profusely. Lan Wangji glowered, finding this in very poor taste. Meng Ziyao smiled, but elbowed Nie Mingjue so hard that even that sturdy mountain of a man was winded, and complained about his steward’s bizarrely angular bones—seriously, did he sharpen them to points?

During the bridal procession back to the Jingshi, Lan Wangji noticed that Jiang Yanli had disappeared. Odd, he thought. He craned his head, frowning. If it came to that, where were Wen Qing and her younger brother? Was Wei Wuxian not suddenly, strangely close to both of the Wen siblings? Wouldn’t his friends stick close to his side, on this of all nights?

When Jiang Fengmian had come to Lan to discuss terms, he’d brought Jiang Yanli with him. She’d met with her younger brother’s intended privately. At the end of their conference, she had startled Lan Wangji by asking for, of all things, the Lan and Xue fragments of yin iron.

“Did Wei Ying say why he wanted them?” Lan Wangji had asked his would-be sister-in-law. Wei Wuxian already had Wen Ruohan’s two fragments. Judging by the nature of the Stygian tiger amulet’s power, he also possessed a hitherto-unsuspected fifth and final piece. Only the two outstanding pieces were in Lan Wangji’s keeping, and uniting them all would create a weapon of terrible power. This was the very thing they’d been attempting to prevent Wen Ruohan from doing.

Jiang Yanli had shaken her head.

“He only said that it was very important he have them, and to ask you when you and I were alone.”

Jiang Yanli had not appeared to understand the scale of the errand entrusted to her. That made sense. Lan Wangji only fully grasped it himself because of all Lan Yi had told him. He had then considered the scope of Wei Wuxian’s request.

In one thing, Xiongzhang was correct: Wei Wuxian was no longer simply the boy whose teasing provocations Lan Wangji had endured for a year. Wei Wuxian had grown and changed. He was capable, now, of exercising his considerable potential with immense skill, and even with ruthlessness. He’d not chosen to share several important facts with Lan Wangji, and was actively concealing still further information.

And yet if Wei Wuxian had sought to rule the cultivation world, he might have done so twice over, now. If he’d wished to use the yin fragments in more than self-defense, he’d never have sent Lan Wangji Xue Yang’s piece for safekeeping. If his idealism were so untested and ultimately disposable as that, he wouldn’t have risked his life to save Wen Qionglin from the Waterborne Abyss. He’d have let Lan Wangji die when they’d been attacked by fierce corpses, or the dire owl, and taken the yin iron from him then. He wouldn’t have tried to take Lan Wangji’s punishment for him, the night they shared Emperor’s Smile. In small actions as in great ones, Wei Wuxian was consistently noble. However dark Wei Wuxian’s heretical cultivation seemed, he’d used it to bring down tyrants, to give justice to wronged innocents and to make Jiang Yanli happy. His actions spoke for him, and his ends for his means.

This, then, was the sort of question maidens were asked in folk-stories. Don’t turn back to look at your lover; don’t light a candle to see them. Don’t open the box, don’t be unkind to the beggar-lady. Know your own true love by his milk-white steed, and never let him go. Lan Wangji was an excellent cultivator, an avid reader and an unrepentant romantic. His was a love tested, built on all his sound judgement. Lan Wangji had trained all his life to pass such a test as this.

Better to trust one’s beloved and to be failed than to fail to trust. Though he acknowledged the considerable risk, Lan Wangji sincerely believed that he was safe in Wei Wuxian’s hands. That the whole world was. If Lan Wangji could not believe in his fiance, his ridiculously brave zhiji, the most fiercely righteous of men, then who could he believe in? What would be left for him, in such a world as that?  

So Lan Wangji had wrapped the yin iron fragments in separate cloths. He’d packed each in its own qi-dampening pouch to conceal it, and he had, in secret, given the world’s most powerful weapons to Jiang Yanli, who was true as gold, and who no one ever suspected of anything.

“Be very careful,” he’d said to her. “The yin iron may still draw danger to you. If it should, tell your father what you carry. He knows the importance of its not falling into the wrong hands.”

When he’d passed the pouches to her, Jiang Yanli had held onto him for a moment, supporting his knuckles with her soft palms.

“Thank you for trusting that A Xian’s hands are the right ones,” she’d said, observing him with care.

Lan Wangji had nodded.

“You’ll be good to him,” Jiang Yanli had said firmly, at once asking him, assuring herself and telling him to do exactly that. It was a curious thing to ask on behalf of someone so evidently capable of taking care of himself—but then Lan Wangji wondered whether that stock phrase quite captured the nature of Wei Wuxian’s extraordinary competence? Wei Wuxian could survive anything; he did not always nurture himself.

And so Lan Wangji had nodded, quite serious. This was, after all, the most important personal responsibility he’d ever pledged himself to.

“To the best of my ability, Jiang guniang.”

Jiang Yanli had smiled at him, and let go of his hands. Lan Wangji had thought to ask her whether she, too, was now once more engaged, but he didn’t like to embarrass the girl. Doubtless he’d hear of it from Wei Wuxian.

And now the bridal party conducted them homewards. Wei Wuxian, who was, as of half a shi ago, Lan Wangji’s husband, said “look there.” He pointed at the sky, an instant before anything happened.

“Lan Wangji,” Wei Wuxian said in his ear while staring up at the blank canvas of the night with him, his voice suddenly intent, “wish very hard, right now, for peace, and prosperity, and all the good things that may come of a wedding. Think of all you’ve ever hoped for, and believe in it, all right?”

Lan Wangji clenched their palms together. He wove his fingers through Wei Wuxian’s, and surrendered to the perilous beauty of his husband’s command. Under his veil, Wei Wuxian closed his own eyes. It struck at Lan Wangji’s heart to know that his beloved was at his side, fervently wishing that their life together would be a good one.

Then, dead silent against the black night, a vast pillar of green light billowed up to the heavens. It was encased in a twisting cage of gold, purple and red. Lan Wangji felt a tug: felt something in him surging towards and joining in that strange riot of colour. At the top of the column the ghost-light green energy spread, like the boughs of a tree. Then, like a cherry tree in bloom, it burst into a thousand and a thousand blossoms of light. The clusters of illumination drifted away and dissipated slowly, glowing still, like fireflies. The sound came a moment after: a roaring rush, like the hungry ocean.

The whole lantern-bearing wedding procession stopped to stare, wide-eyed with wonder and some fear.

“What is that?” he heard Jiang Wanyin ask his father.

“I don’t know. A Li?” Jiang Fengmian said, turning about to look for his daughter.

“She’s fine,” Wei Wuxian assured them, his voice soft and steady. “Just busy. I asked her to help me with something for the wedding.”

Wei Wuxian was smiling, with what Lan Wangji realised was relief.

Lan Wangji turned to fully face his husband with a silent question in his expression. Wei Wuxian dropped Lan Wangji’s hand to tap the side of his own nose.

“I said Wen Qing owed me some help with a firework display weeks ago, in Qishan,” he said, a little sulky. Wei Wuxian then heaved a great sigh, shaking his still-veiled head. “Honestly, Lan Zhan, your memory—”

“And the rest of you act like bumpkins who’ve never seen wedding fireworks before!” Wei Wuxian addressed the party, making his brother frown mutinously.

“They’re very impressive,” Nie Huaisang said. “Such an unusual shade of green!”

“Ah, yes,” Wei Wuxian nodded sagely. “Just like ghost-fire, isn’t it? Well, I thought, what colour could be more appropriate for a wedding between cultivators?”

His smirk was somewhat unsettling.

“Please don’t die,” Xichen, who’d managed to sidle up to Lan Wangji, muttered very earnestly to his brother. Xichen was staring at Wei Wuxian. Half-hidden under his red veil in the night, he looked almost sinister.

Lan Wangji only rolled his eyes.

“I daily endeavour not to, Xiongzhang.”

***

Before passing the Jin seal to its rightful custodians, Wei Wuxian had put in some work orders with the sect’s seamstresses. Rush-jobs, at that. Madam Jin, to her credit, had not said a word about the outrageously expensive clothing he’d commissioned. After all, it was a mere drop in the bucket of Jin’s finances—and think how much he’d saved them by cutting Jin Guangshan’s prodigious outlay on sex workers from the budget! The fact was, Wei Wuxian was leaving willingly, and would have been bought off cheaply at thrice the price.

Yet Wei Wuxian now found himself slightly nervous about the whole affair. He’d given instructions, and these had been admirably fulfilled. That didn’t make him less tense, because it couldn’t make dressing himself for Lan Wangji’s bed less of an exposure. The clothes were certainly revealing, but the intent they conveyed was far more so. Wei Wuxian’s previous husbands had gifted him trouseaux in their own taste, after the style of their Sect. He’d been shown off as a war prize, he'd been prepared for use. But tonight Wei Wuxian had, for the first time, undertaken to anticipate and cater to Lan Wangji’s preferences in his own right: to make a gift of himself. And it seemed it was much, to think so highly of yourself as to make such an offer. It was taking all Wei Wuxian’s nerve.

Since Lan Wangji had been given leave to cast off his adolescent disciple’s robes, Wei Wuxian had noticed that he favoured blue. So here Wei Wuxian was, trying to be something Lan Wangji might favour. Each layer of the sky-blue silk covering him was gossamer-thin. Only their layering, coupled with the silver embroidery and deep-blue silk ribbons that framed the piece and accentuated it, made Wei Wuxian decent.

On Lan Wangji, blue looked sacred, crisp and authoritative. Deeply attractive, Wei Wuxian had always thought. On Wei Wuxian, a blue so light lay differently. He hadn’t expected the effect would be quite so embarrassingly virginal. He didn’t know whether Lan Wangji would like it—didn’t know what Lan Wangji liked, or wanted of him. That much had become obvious in Fragrance Hall, when Lan Wangji had asked for this marriage. Wei Wuxian had gone years now thinking that he adored Lan Wangji painfully, and that Lan Wangji was nice enough, somewhat-interested enough, and enough his friend to let him do it. To entertain the impossible possibility with pleasant permissiveness, as a thing never to be acted on.

Marriage—and such a public declaration of intent as theirs had been—was nowhere in the realm of bittersweet unreality Wei Wuxian had consigned the entire possibility of them to. Lan Wangji’s proposal might have been an effort to control the amulet, and, by doing so, to settle an unstable political situation. That wouldn’t have been as outright-insane as a love-match. But Wei Wuxian had watched Lan Xichen beg his brother not to do this. Lan Wangji had shaken off the person he respected most in the world, and had steadfastly asked Wei Wuxian for his hand.

Wei Wuxian almost couldn’t hold that knowledge. His whole body felt too small for it. He’d avoided thinking of it as much as possible, until he could ask Lan Wangji what he’d meant by it. Until he could at last reveal his whole hand—regardless of Lan Wangji’s claims that such things would not matter. (Lan Wangji didn’t even know what manner of secrets Wei Wuxian was keeping! How could he possibly be held to judgments and declarations he made without knowing all that?) And when he’d told Lan Wangji everything, Wei Wuxian thought he’d ask, breathless, do you still, though? Would you still? Do you want this? Am I a thing you could want?

Against that possibility, Wei Wuxian had daydreamed. He was too used to thinking in terms of logistics, and too accustomed to putting aside his own feelings, to process such a turn as this through any other means. He’d been as practical as he could. He’d gone with Wen Qing to Dafan, and held A Yuan in his arms again. He’d sent the only father he could remember to ask Lan Wangji for space and safety for the child. Wen Qing had spent the whole sword-flight to Dafan, and much of the coming days, tempering Wei Wuxian’s vast carnal knowledge (obtained almost exclusively through Nie Huaisang’s spring book collection, acres of gossip and watching livestock breed) with a doctor’s pragmatic advice. (No Jiang or Dafan Wen auntie or uncle had not caught Wei Wuxian to share their experience; he now knew some very surprising things about Uncles Four and Five’s very lively marriage.) He commissioned night-robes for a wedding. He made preparations. And he’d both feared and wanted the conversations he and Lan Wangji were about to have, and all that might and must come after them.

And now Wei Wuxian’s nervous hands fluttered around his hair—ought he to take it down? But no, perhaps Lan Wangji would want to pull the pins from it himself. Wei Wuxian bit his lip to think of it. He slid his hand across his own waist, adjusting the fall of the ruched pleating, and over the skirts of his robes. The silk sash at his waist, that would give under another’s hand. The collar of the over-robe at his throat, the embroidery of which flowed down to trim the edges of the cinched robes. Wei Wuxian’s fingers twisted anxiously in the material of his wide sleeves, thick with embroidered bands. Blue and blue and blue against his skin: blue as light as yielding, breathable air and there, where the ribbons traced their paths, blue as dark as blood in the veins seen through the skin. Blue as pronounced as a bruise. This was a thing he could be to Lan Wangji, if Lan Wangji liked.

For as much of his life as Wei Wuxian could remember, his body had been serviceable to him. It had survived everything it had been subjected to: the streets, training, whipping, and then war and the Burial Mounds in alternating succession. Wei Wuxian’s guardians had been pleased when his body had been made effective, for Jiang—when he’d proven a credit to them, a serviceable tool. Even Wei Wuxian’s favourite food was served liberally scattered with goji berries, to promote qi flow.

It wasn’t that Wei Wuxian felt alienated from his own active, playful, useful body. He knew it very well, but only in quite limited capacities. Flirting was physical: a somewhat-calculated cultivation of others’ good will, via suggestions neither party would ever follow through on. Flirting with his first two prospective husbands—offering them the use of his body, to enhance their power—had thus come easily to Wei Wuxian. But he’d never thought of his body as a site of his own or another’s pleasure, before. It was muscle and endurance, strain and pain, performance and capability—conversational, at its best. He’d never tried to see himself in a sensual way, or to give that to anyone. To enjoy himself.

Wei Wuxian knew that across the Jingshi, behind a screen of his own very like the one Wei Wuxian had readied himself behind, Lan Wangji was kneeling and making his own final preparations. He couldn’t hear Lan Wangji breathing, but it was a queer, nerve-wracking comfort to know he was there.

Wei Wuxian thought of saying something—‘I’m ready, husband’, bright and easy, as though this were nothing. But it was so much. He swallowed with the pressure of it, heavy in his throat. He stepped out from behind the screen and knelt in the Jingshi’s central reception chamber, before the table where Wangji rested. He touched light, soundless, fond fingers to its strings. He waited.

In another moment, Lan Wangji emerged. He took a few confident steps forward and then stopped, gazing at Wei Wuxian from across the room.

Lan Wangji’s mouth parted. His hair was down, a curtain of blue-black spilling across his back. The fall of it was so startlingly intimate that Wei Wuxian felt his own eyes widen.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji spoke, with a voice like his eyes, heavy-dark and smother-soft. “How beautiful you look,” he said. It might have been polite, or stilted, but in Lan Wangji’s mouth each word was a discovery, thick with wonder. “For me?” he said, at once statement and question.

Cheeks burning, Wei Wuxian nodded.

“Who else?” he said, light as he could, before remembering that actually, he’d dressed a little like this before, and Lan Wangji had seen him. He shook his head, emphatic, wanting to explain. “I’ve worn costumes when I needed to, but—” he took a breath, letting himself feel the vulnerability in saying it, “this, I did for you. But Lan Zhan, you—” Wei Wuxian shook his head again, struck with wonder.

Perhaps the most arresting element of Lan Wangji’s garment was the stiff, high embroidered collar. It left just the very fore of his throat visible—a slice of skin only just wide enough to bite. A thickly-embroidered semi-circle of brocade then scooped down to cover Lan Wangji’s chest. The long flow of gathered black silk stretched from the collar at Lan Wangji’s elegant neck to the floor, and even a little along it, training slightly behind him. The robe flattered his already impressive height like a fawning courtier. The ensemble presented a gorgeous interplay of structure and drape. Firm shoulders came to belled sleeves, which were gathered in at the elbows where shining black ribbons encased his forearms in an echo of Wei Wuxian’s own customary bracers. The tight line of the wrist made Lan Wangji’s large hands look still bigger, starkly pale and nigh obscene.

Wei Wuxian didn’t see how the garment could part—how it might yield him up his husband. This only made his fingers twitch with physically-manifested curiosity. Lan Wangji brought a large hand up to smooth the drape of the fabric at his stomach, and Wei Wuxian swallowed hard.

“Neither of your previous husbands dressed for you,” Lan Wangji said. What ought to have been a question sat flatter and more satisfied in his mouth. Objectively it was an observation, and actually it was a self-contented remark that other men hadn’t been able to give Wei Wuxian this, and had failed even to try. There was, after all, no mistaking the intended recipient of Lan Wangji’s costume, or his care.

Wei Wuxian laughed at the very idea, short and sharp.

“Lan Zhan,” he said, dragging, sultry and fond. “The idea that you’d need to compete with anyone, when the sun shines through dripping honey to try and catch the shade of your eyes—when, the moon, if she’s lucky and she works for it, can make the night sky gleam just a little like your hair. When even jade envies your lustre.”

Lan Wangji’s mouth curved, just slightly, at the excessive praise, and he ducked his head.

“If I do any of that, then it is done for you. Like all that I do, Wei Ying.”

Wei Wuxian looked at him, stunned.

“Who else?” Lan Wangji repeated back to him, shaking his head.

The enormity of that was too much for Wei Wuxian to bear, let alone respond to. Wei Wuxian held up a hand to him, and Lan Wangji crossed the room and knelt before him to take it.

Wei Wuxian gave him a slantwise, teasing look. “But aren’t you frightened, Lan Wangji?” He leaned in to whisper a salacious secret. “I’ve been the death of my last two husbands, you know.”

“I am not frightened in the slightest,” Lan Wangji said, holding Wei Wuxian’s eyes and bringing his knuckles to his mouth for a light kiss that had Wei Wuxian biting his lip. “But if death was the price, either for helping you or having you, I’d willingly pay it.”

Wei Wuxian felt a pressing need to lower his husband’s expectations. He smiled, a touch awkwardly.

“It may shock you to learn this, Lan er gege, but I’ve never actually,” he made a slight hand gesture, “consummated a marriage, before.”

“No,” Lan Wangji said, running his thumb over Wei Wuxian’s knuckles. “It doesn’t shock me in the slightest,” he clarified. “Then you and I weren’t yet together, in the future you came from?”

Wei Wuxian blinked at him for several moments, then threw his head back and laughed, delighted.

“Of course you figured it out. Lan Zhan. Who would even think to guess such a ridiculous thing? Only you.” He shook his head, smiling. “No, we weren’t. Though I’m afraid that was only one of many problems facing me. But how? How could you know?”

Lan Wangji shrugged, his free hand finding Wei Wuxian’s. “I knew your actions, however incomprehensible they seemed, must have sound motivation behind them even if I didn’t agree with the courses you adopted. That is always the case. When I found you playing a song I was still composing, in a more finished form, I suspected thought transference, a temporal anomaly and even my own sanity. I definitively settled on temporal distortion when you went out of your way to be kind to Jin Zixuan, and to even encourage his pursuit of your sister. That was nothing you could have taken from my mind. It showed both a recognition on your part of qualities the man has yet to demonstrate and a mature acceptance of his relationship with Jiang Yanli, which—forgive me, dearest—you are not yet capable of.”

Wei Wuxian wrenched a hand from Lan Wangji’s grip and tried to irritably smack his chest with it. Lan Wangji caught the wrist mid-flight. He brought the pulse-point to his mouth to suck a bruise onto.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian gasped, squirming and flexing the hand Lan Wangji was merely holding, “I can’t think when you do that.”

Lan Wangji gave him an unrepentant look that suggested Wei Wuxian had done far too much plotting of late, and could stand to endure a period of thoughtlessness. He continued suckling at Wei Wuxian’s skin.

“You’ve said it won’t change anything,” Wei Wuxian began.

Without setting Wei Wuxian’s hand at liberty, Lan Wangji lowered it from his mouth.

“It will not,” he affirmed.

“Nevertheless, before we go any further in this, I need you to know—” Wei Wuxian let out a shaking breath, nodding firmly to himself, “everything. My husband should know all my secrets.”

Lan Wangji’s hands curled around his. “I have waited for your confidence, these past weeks,” he admitted. “Sought it, and been wounded by its absence.”

Wei Wuxian ducked his head, in recognition of that. “Never again, zhiji. Forgive me for not having known I could wound you. But when I show you, you’ll understand why I kept what I did to myself.”

“If that is the case,” Lan Wangji said, looking at him directly and intently, “then it is knowledge you should not bear alone.”

Wei Wuxian took a deep breath. He tightened his grip on Lan Wangji’s hands and dropped them down into Empathy.

The two of them endured the Wen Indoctrination together. It was not like a painting, or like a book: Lan Wangji experienced whole totalities of time and feeling, days in minutes. In Wei Wuxian’s memories, every moment in Lan Wangji’s company was bright with emotion. Wei Wuxian’s eyes tracked Lan Wangji as he stumbled on a path in Qishan, burdened with an untreated wound. Lan Wangji sang to him as they lay dying together. Even losing consciousness, Wei Wuxian attended to the tune well enough to remember it later.

Wei Wuxian had not seen the initial siege on Cloud Recesses. His knowledge of its gravity came via Lan Wangji himself. But there was no sparing Lan Wangji, in this state, from Wei Wuxian’s own memories of the destruction of Lotus Pier. Of everything he’d subsequently done to save Jiang Wanyin. Of his unlucky meeting with Wen Chao, and of his time in the Burial Mounds. Wei Wuxian had been able to push Wen Qing through these memories lightly and swiftly, but Lan Wangji had his own grip on Wei Wuxian’s familiar mind, and Lan Wangji resisted. He’d had enough of being cosseted, enough of not knowing the bitter, awful things Wei Wuxian had been forced to do to survive, and to ensure the survival of his loved ones. They were here, and half-truths would provide no relief from what had befallen his husband. Wei Wuxian had already endured this alone once before.

You’ll see me, Wei Wuxian hissed in his mind, trying to keep Lan Wangji from tasting the bone marrow he’d consumed in the Burial Mounds along with him.

Then let me see you, Lan Wangji responded, dead flesh between their teeth, fat coating a shared mouth, sticking, sticking. It was what it was, and all Lan Wangji felt was pity that it should have happened to anyone—great sorrow that it should have happened to Wei Ying. Life included grotesquerie and tragedy, and a love that could not accommodate both was too frail for a commitment such as the one they’d made before heaven.

Strange, to watch yourself fight a war, which now would never come to pass. Stranger still for Lan Wangji to feel Wei Wuxian’s ambivalence towards him, while watching himself through Wei Wuxian’s eyes—Wei Wuxian’s shame and anger, Wei Wuxian’s unslakable yearning. In forests and in banquet halls, in drenched, miserable prison camps—Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan.

Lan Wangji saw himself clean and bright in Yiling, when little else was either of those things—felt, as his own, the clench of Wei Wuxian’s heart at the sight. Lan Wangji didn’t know if he’d ever looked so content in his whole life as he did in Wei Wuxian’s memory of him, peacefully holding a boy whom Wei Wuxian was rearing like a son. The image was cut out and well-handled as a picture, and drenched with suppressed want.

And all the while, Wei Wuxian was conscious of how bitterly unfair the situation was: what had happened to the Wen remnants, what had happened to his own body, the fact that he couldn’t ask Lan Wangji to stay, and couldn’t even let him stay if, out of a sense of duty, Lan Wangji were to offer to, uninvited. There was no sense in ruining both their lives. What for? In his memories, Wei Wuxian found it unfair that he should love Lan Wangji so much and be met with only a flicker of fondness in return—something, certainly, but no match for his own wild, pitching infatuation. Wei Wuxian had spent his life protectively trying to ensure people found him useful and amusing, and only now that he felt like a polite amusement to Lan Wangji did the full awfulness of such a position strike him.

But Wei Wuxian had snuffed even this trace of wistful disquiet out like a candle at bed time—had told himself he was being ungenerous, unfair to Lan Wangji, ungrateful. Hadn’t Madam Yu always said he was ungrateful? Didn’t Lan Wangji still respect and care for him, when others listened to convenient lies? Wasn’t it his rice they’d eaten through the winter? Wasn’t it the memory of his rare, precious smile Wei Wuxian lived on even after, like it was meat and drink? He’d hated himself a little for it—here he was, back in the Burial Mounds again, once more sustaining himself on stolen bits of people. Leech, Madam Yu had said once, years before she’d died. A beggar, before that—a thing that lived off kindness, more even than children were by nature. Maybe he’d always been a cannibal. Maybe he didn’t know how to be anything else. But survival was survival, and so Wei Wuxian had dragged himself on, and on.

How wrong it had gone: the dull grey of Wei Wuxian’s life suddenly pitching to unrelieved black. His terror for the Wen siblings, for A Yuan. His brutal grief for his sister. How hard Wei Wuxian had fought that end, the dying of their light. Everything he’d done since returning to his own past.

Wei Wuxian’s bewildered wonder at this final, true proposal. His shocked incapacity to understand it aright.

Wei Wuxian in Yunmeng, then, gathering duckweed and kudzu for his wedding rites with all the Jiang shimeis and shijies. The work-songs for harvest, for weaving, for weddings. His sister’s hands, winding the kudzu into long ropes. His sister’s voice, asking if he was sure, A Xian? And he was.

Wei Wuxian and Wen Qing in Yunmeng, testing the ropes on the dancing statue, finding a configuration that would hold. A Yuan in his arms the whole time, as he walked, as he worked—he almost couldn’t put A Yuan down, couldn’t let him go. Wei Wuxian had cried over the sleeping child and nothing, ugly and frantic, until Qing jie had found him and sat down next to him, silently pressing the line of her body against his side.

“I thought I lost him,” Wei Wuxian said through gulping, tearing breaths as he wound down. “I woke up, and you were gone.”

Wen Qing regarded him steadily. Took his hand in hers and let him feel that she was here, alive.

Then she was shooing Wei Wuxian away for the best part of a week while she tested the enchanted kudzu rope with a scientific commitment to reproducible results. She told Wei Wuxian to play with his talisman cages; they weren’t strong enough yet, and besides, she needed quiet to think about something.

Wei Wuxian taking the re-constructed yin seal and placing it in Cold Pond Cave this very morning, cocooned in a woven duckweed basket that closed around it like a clam shell. Placing talismans. Setting barriers. Trailing braided, oiled kudzu rope out with him, unspooling it from a heavy loop around his arm and whistling as he went. Placing the end of the fuse in Wen Ning’s hand as he explained the sequence of events to Wen Qing and Jiang Yanli. They’d need to come when the wedding procession set out, and light it with a taper from the bridal lanterns.

Everything together should just be enough: all the ritual energy of the wedding and its trappings (hundreds of cultivators bearing witness, participating, lending their energies to the ceremony in spectation); the heady magic of the new-married couple’s potent good wishes; the sacred Cold Pond that had successfully contained a fragment for many years; Wei Wuxian’s talismans; the cultivational energies of this small, trusted bridal party, each member of which Wei Wuxian knew to be free from the kind of ambition the yin iron could work its will on, and wise to its tricks. They would also serve as witnesses to the amulet’s destruction before the cultivation world. These elements would, together, in accordance with Lan Yi’s wishes, safely eliminate a weapon Wei Wuxian was no longer desperately dependent on.

Then Madam Yu was tying Wei Wuxian’s sash for his wedding with brusque hands, coughing so that her voice would come out even when she said he looked well enough. Years of weight between them, but some of that weight was the heaviness of love. It wouldn’t have hurt so badly, if there hadn’t been any.

Then Yanli’s comb through Wei Wuxian’s hair. Wei Wuxian had never wanted her with him before, not for the travesties of Wen Ruohan and Jin Guangshan’s unions, but now he needed it. A wedding to Lan Wangji, impossible as it seemed, deserved to be handled with care. Treated as something serious and precious.

Wen Qing catching Wei Wuxian in his dressing room before the rites began, taking her turn with the comb. And pulling, from the pocket of her robes, the box Lan Wangji had seen her carrying in Jinlin Tai.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought,” Wen Qing said in Wei Wuxian’s fresh memory, “and I believe I can do it. The risk was in getting it out of him in the first place and stabilizing it, and that I’ve managed. I didn’t want to get your hopes up, in case I couldn’t.”

What she was saying began to cut through the buzzing anticipation in Wei Wuxian’s mind. Wen Qing opened the box, and there it was: shining bright. Deceptively small. Familiar. Few people had ever seen a golden core outside a human body. But Wei Wuxian had.

“I’ve warded it as we do when preserving a body for a funeral, or an organ for transplantation,” Wen Qing said. “So much of Jin Guangshan’s core was stolen from others, so it wasn’t fixed in his body as yours was. I was able to slip it from him.” She snorted. “He was in danger of overload and qi deviation as it was, if he did that trick many more times. And I don’t think he could have stopped himself. Trust Jin Guangshan to believe that only he was clever enough to have come up with the idea, rather than wondering whether others tried before him and found out the limits of predatory cultivation hard way.”

Wei Wuxian knew (and thus Lan Wangji now knew) that Wen Qing must have managed this while slipping in to confirm that Jin Guangshan’s suicide looked legitimate. While Jin Guangshan had still been in the process of expiration, Wen Qing had sliced him open, roughly pulled core out of his body sealed him with qi so that he didn’t bleed through his robes. By that point he’d been too delirious to identify her in Inquiry. Anyone who’d seen the wound while preparing his body for burial would have blamed the same angry ghosts that had rent his face with their nails. Wei Wuxian’s core transplant had taken days, but both the nature of his core’s unstable attachment and Wen Qing’s willingness to cause Jin Guangshan suffering, her carelessness with his life, had made this extraction just an hour’s work. Wen Qing subsequently seemed to have arrived first in response to Wei Wuxian’s performative scream.

Wei Wuxian stared at the box, stunned.

“You know how to fix me, Qing jie?” he asked, not daring yet to believe her.

“Not yet,” Wen Qing said, matter of fact. “Not exactly. But I’ve thought about it all this week, and now—I know I can. It’s a matter of tests. Refinements. You remembered everything I needed to know about how the transplant worked, which was a boon. Not everyone could control the spirit fragments this core’s made up of—but if anyone has the necessary experience, it’s you.”

Wei Wuxian looked at her, almost afraid.

“But those spirits—”

“You’ve pacified them,” she said, her voice deliberate. Calm. “We heard their testimonies. We gave them justice. They have peace. All that’s left is this, which no one’s using. Someone ought to, and I owe you a wedding present. I owe you everything, Wei Wuxian.”

He gave a bark of a laugh, which turned almost hysterical with incredulity.

“But I’ve resigned myself to it, Qing jie,” he said. “I’ve given that up.”

Wen Qing closed the box, slipped it back into her sleeve and fixed him with a glare.

“You’re allowed hope, idiot. You’re allowed justice rather than exile. How is it you care more about whether the spirits are comfortable than whether you are? They’re dead. You aren’t.” She put her hand on his heart, where a brand he’d never earned in this life nonetheless sat. “I would pay my debt to you.”

“There’s no debt between family,” Wei Wuxian said, drawing her to him, into an embrace.

She snorted into his hair.

“I don’t think that’s either of our experience of family. Say that the debts are vast. Always being repaid, yet always being forgiven.”

“All right,” Wei Wuxian said, blinking back tears. “All right. We’ll—I’ll talk to Lan Zhan.”

Lan Wangji felt, with a sense of shock, how much Wei Wuxian had relied on him at every step of this. Wei Wuxian had needed his family, and Luo Qingyang, and Wen Qing to practically accomplish everything he’d done, but each step he’d taken had been built on things he and Lan Wangji had done together in the past, on Lan Wangji’s interventions in the present, and on the knowledge that he could risk much because if he miscalculated and faltered, Lan Wangji might well be able to save him. Wei Wuxian believed absolutely that Lan Wangji would try to do so, whatever the odds against them.

“You’ll tell him everything, this time?” Wen Qing said sharply, pulling back. “No more ‘hide the missing core’?” At Wei Wuxian’s nod, she rolled her eyes. “Good. I never thought I’d see the day you learned something.”

Wei Wuxian scoffed. “Whereas I know I’ll never see the day when either you or Jiang Cheng can say anything sweet without salting the life out of it, just in case anyone should suspect you have feelings.”

And then, in Wei Wuxian’s memory, the marriage celebrations began. Wei Wuxian cut the cord of his recollection with an abrupt snap and a sense of apology. It’d be, he intimated, too embarrassing to subject Lan Wangji to a barrage of effusions on his own loveliness, regarding memories not yet a day old.

A feeling, then, of swimming up to the surface after too long underwater—of gasping for air. A moment’s confusion as to whose body was whose.

In the present and their own minds, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian blinked at one another. The oil lamps had burnt low, and needed trimming. The procession had brought them to bed at a Lannish hour, which Wei Wuxian considered incompatible with the best-practice celebration of a marriage (and he ought to know!). It was now well past midnight.

Lan Wangji regarded him. Wei Wuxian realised with a jolt that the hint of redness he could see in Lan Wangji’s eyes was from tears his husband had wept during their reverie.

“You weren’t going to survive whatever came next,” Lan Wangji said, sounding numb with horror.

Wei Wuxian winced. It was typical of Lan Wangji to spring straight for the jugular. He himself hadn’t thought about the question in any detail, or considered it clearly. The Wen remnants had sacrificed themselves for him, but what could he have done with such a gift of blood in a world that manifestly didn’t want him alive?

“I stayed behind to engineer some reconciliation between you and the cultivation world,” Lan Wangji said slowly, piecing his decisions together from Wei Wuxian’s experience of their outcomes, “but I couldn’t protect you. Wei Ying, I failed you.”

“Oh, Lan Zhan, no,” Wei Wuxian said hastily, leaning forward to thumb the tear-tracks off Lan Wangji’s cheek. “No, you tried so hard to be there for me, even at my lowest. I always saw it—darling, I didn’t mean for you to take it like that.”

Wei Wuxian shook his head, trying to smile. “I knew you’d be upset but I’m fine, see? I’ve fixed it. It never happened, not really!”

“It did,” Lan Wangji said, grave and insistent. “It happened to you, Wei Ying.”

Wei Wuxian nodded, looking away from him.

“And as far as that goes, I’ll take responsibility for all I did. If you want me to leave, for tonight or forever, I’ll understand. I won’t blame you, Lan Wangji. I’d never blame you. If you want to only be friends, or—or to never see me again, then I—”

Lan Wangji surged forward, stopping Wei Wuxian’s mouth with his own. It was a hot, awkward, forceful kiss, driven by an instinct to pin Wei Wuxian and keep him close. Wei Wuxian melted under it, and that very yielding seemed to teach Lan Wangji where he ought to push. Wei Wuxian made room, and he took it. It was like fighting together, Wei Wuxian thought. Shockingly natural.

“How can you think I’d love you less for this?” Lan Wangji whispered when they broke apart. “For being so—Wei Ying.” He gripped his husband’s shoulders hard, then looked at his face. “You’ve been the making of me—I have come into myself, with you. Can you, who have filled me in, broadened me and altered me forever, not know what it is you’ve done? Can you know both me and yourself so slenderly?”

Wei Wuxian was speechless. He’d never thought he might be constituently vital to the man Lan Wangji had become. Never once been arrogant enough to imagine he could hold such centrality in Lan Wangji’s life.

“You promised you’d confide everything in me,” Lan Wangji reminded him. “And give me all of yourself. In return, I promised to take all you gave. But what I will not, cannot take, is any talk of separation. If my husband loves me, he will never taunt me with that.”

Lan Wangji pressed Wei Wuxian closer to him, sliding a palm from Wei Wuxian’s shoulder to his back. “In your memories, you didn’t know how I loved you. Before your very eyes I ached and wept and smiled for you. Yet for all that, you didn’t see it. What must I do to make you see me?”

“Oh Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian laughed, the sound half-broken, “when do I ever look away, my love? Not once since the hour we met, I’m sure.”

It was only that it was difficult to believe Lan Wangji properly loved him back because Wei Wuxian wanted it so much. It was too good a thing to use; too dazzling a light to see by. It was going to take, Wei Wuxian thought, a lot of practice. But they would have time: Wei Wuxian had bought them time with his own blood.  

Lan Wangji was so drained by what had been, to him, fresh revelations of awful events rather than well-handled memories and old nightmares. Wei Wuxian could see how frightened his husband still was for him and the surfeit of aching pity in his expression.

Lan Wangji wanted reassurance; this was their wedding night.

Another time, Wei Wuxian would be teasing, or brash and bold. Coy, or forceful. But right now, he thought that what Lan Wangji needed was a sweet, thorough fuck. A reminder that they were both very much alive, and here together, and, evidently, outright mad about one another.

Wei Wuxian stood up from the floor, pulling Lan Wangji up with him. He led Lan Wangji to their red-silk covered bed, and pushed him down on it with a hand at his chest. Lan Wangji allowed all this, regarding him with quiet curiosity and some evident anticipation. Wei Wuxian followed his husband, straddling his waist—his knees framing Lan Wangji’s narrow hips. So lovely, blinking up at Wei Wuxian. Who could look at him, so perfectly put together, and not want to rip him apart?

“Hush,” Wei Wuxian said in response to the noise of question from his lover. “If you’ll have me, then have me. Let me be good to you.” He tucked a strand of Lan Wangji’s hair behind his ear with a fond smile.

“My Lan Zhan—you did so much for me. Let your husband reward your patience and your trust.” Lan Wangji deserved his devoted service, and he was going to get it.

Wei Wuxian bent to bring their mouths together with a dry, chaste press. This second kiss between them was less impulsive and desperate than the first. A more deliberate, sensual thing.

“Oh,” said Lan Wangji softly, as if startled. Lan Wangji reached up and grabbed Wei Wuxian’s forearms, clutching them tight. He wet his lips and pressed up into a third kiss, this time catching Wei Wuxian’s lower lip between his own. A tilt of Lan Wangji’s head, and they were breathing one another’s hot, wet air. A sudden impulsive movement on Wei Wuxian’s part, and his tongue was sliding into Lan Wangji’s mouth, making him gasp.

“Mm,” Lan Wangji said, quiet and satisfied. Returning the favour. Raising a hand, as he did so, to delicately pull out the pins of Wei Wuxian’s coiffure. Loosening him up, making him soft and ready.

“I left those in because I thought you might want to undo me,” Wei Wuxian muttered into his husband’s mouth, very gratified when Lan Wangji trembled in response and grabbed a loose fistful of his hair. Lan Wangji managed to place his mother’s comb respectfully on the night table. Stray silver pins he let fall, let drop to the bed and tumble off it, let roll across the floor.

“What a mess you’re making of me, er gege,” Wei Wuxian chid breathlessly. He gave Lan Wangji a considering glance. “It seems I’m not too bad at guessing the sort of thing you might like, after all. Isn’t that lucky?”

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji said, already sounding wrecked beneath him. “You are the sort of thing I like. You ought to know that.”

Leaning back to sit upright, Wei Wuxian traced his slender fingers down over the silk of Lan Wangji’s robe.

“Keep showing me,” Wei Wuxian said. He found where the robe parted at the front via an overlap hidden in its pleated folds. Having sated his curiosity on the point, Wei Wuxian kept his hands above the fabric. He used them to map Lan Wangji’s chest; Wei Wuxian petted his nipples through the cloth.

Lan Wangji wriggled and bit his lip. His eyes were huge in his face. The queer, new alchemy of sex had transmuted their teary glimmer into this strange pitch of brightness.

Only I, thought Wei Wuxian with a moment’s awe, have ever seen Lan Wangji quite like this. There are whole parts of this wonderful, discrete other person that are mine alone.

Wei Wuxian then tilted his head to the side and grinned, performing swagger for Lan Wangji and letting himself feel the things he played at. Making himself as big and brave and brilliant as Lan Wangji’s eyes, for Lan Wangji. If Lan Wangji felt Wei Wuxian had broadened him, Wei Wuxian knew that Lan Wangji had given his own native energy purpose, direction and intent. He wanted to be the man Lan Wangji took him for: that best and kindest version of himself, his every action read by the light of Lan Wangji’s kind acuity.

“So sensitive, Lan Zhan!” He didn’t dare pinch the tightening flesh even lightly; not when this refracted touch alone had Lan Wangji squirming.

“Will you let me be gentle with you?” Wei Wuxian asked as he stroked a silk-covered nipple with the fingers of his left hand, pushing Lan Wangji’s robe open with his right. He dragged his fingertips down the pale skin of Lan Wangji’s chest as he exposed it—the bare stripe of Lan Wangji’s stomach. “Let me take my time, hm?”

He cast his eyes down at the body he’d revealed. Lan Wangji was supine and beautiful beneath him. The white line of his torso, the dark flow of his hair. The sweet jut of a large, firming, blood-flushed cock. One bare hip bone, coyly framed by a curl of his black silk robe. Lan Wangji, looked up at him with dark-eyed solemn trust and shaking, nervous anticipation. Gorgeous and unashamedly vulnerable.

Wei Wuxian swallowed hard.

“I want to cherish you.” He cupped that tempting hip with his hand, and let his whole body slope down so that he could close his teeth around the delicate knob of bone. Lan Wangji’s breath hitched in response, and Wei Wuxian lay his head down on Lan Wangji’s thigh. He ran his knuckles, and then his fingertips, as lightly as he could along Lan Wangji’s twitching cock.

“Treat my Lan Zhan like a prince,” he promised, giving the thigh he was resting on a small, sweet kiss.

Wei Wuxian knew that both before the wedding ceremony and after, when dressing, Lan Wangji would have performed the most thorough ritual ablutions for his marriage. Which suggested he’d be well-prepared for something Wei Wuxian had first thought about doing to him when they’d been at school together here, years ago now, with access to Nie Huaisang’s both wide-ranging and inspiring spring book collection. At the time, Wei Wuxian would have done anything to crack the other boy’s icy composure. Now that he knew he had managed it, Wei Wuxian couldn’t help wanting to push: to spread Lan Wangji open wider—to bury himself in the other’s thoughts and heart, too deeply and fundamentally to be excised.

Wei Wuxian bent and touched the tip of his tongue to Lan Wangji’s entrance. Lan Wangji curved up under him with a startled gasp, his spine a crescent moon. Wei Wuxian gentled him down to the bed with the palm of his hand. He brought the flat of his tongue to the rim of Lan Wangji in a long lick, and then lathed at him with the sharper blade of its side.

Lan Wangji shoved his fingers into Wei Wuxian’s hair, gripping. He then removed them immediately, as if in apology. Wei Wuxian butted his head back under Lan Wangji’s hand.

“Whatever you need, darling,” he said, loving the feel of him and wanting so much to be good to Lan Wangji.

Lan Wangji’s hand hesitantly wove back through the hair at Wei Wuxian’s scalp, then clenched in the thick tresses when Wei Wuxian sucked at him—with gusto now, noisy-slick and lewd. Lan Wangji’s entrance was quivering and responsive under him. He tightened and opened on Wei Wuxian’s tongue, his body as hesitant and resistant as he had been when they’d met, and then as giving and wholly enraptured with Wei Wuxian as he was now that he’d given himself over to love. He was warm, and hitched towards Wei Wuxian, into his touch, with helpless twitches. Lan Wangji leaned and pushed down into it, each burrowing shift of his hips a soundless appeal for more, a testament to how much he liked this.

Wei Wuxian licked and sucked and fucked into him, flicking the edge of him with a tongue-tip over and again. This wasn’t so hard—or Lan Wangji was very generous in his reactions. All Wei Wuxian had to do was play, and explore, and work his lover like a new instrument he was feeling out. All he had to be was eager and attentive: all he had to do was want it, and he’d spent whole cold nights alone in Gusu and Yiling and Yunmeng, thinking and thinking about how much he did.

He lost track of time, but he knew he’d been at this for a while because Lan Wangji was so very gone, writhing for it. His breathy, barely-vocalised ‘ah, ah, ah, ah’ hit Wei Wuxian so hard he thought he’d swoon.

“Fuck, fuck, you—”

He drew back, and Lan Wangji’s disappointed moan could have killed him. He hadn’t words for what Lan Wangji was.

“Gods, you’re so fucking delightful like this. You’re doing so well for me. Lan Zhan, I’m going to finger you open now. Have you ever done that for yourself?”

Lan Wangji gave a slight, single nod. With an unsteady hand, he reached over and passed Wei Wuxian a jar of ungent from atop the night table. Uncorking it, Wei Wuxian was met with a gently herbal smell. Trust the Lans.

“Someday I want to see that,” Wei Wuxian said, unfastening his robes so they fell around him and oiling up his fingers.

Lan Wangji nodded once more, staring at his now-exposed husband.

“You’d do that for me?” Wei Wuxian asked, delighted. He really hadn’t expected that, but then his zhiji often surprised him. Lan Wangji, fucking himself pliant and wide—that would truly be something to see. Even distracted as he was by the banquet spread before him, Wei Wuxian would endeavour to remember to add that prospect to his list of ideas.

“I learned for you,” Lan Wangji said, blunt and wholly unabashed. “Because I wanted you terribly. I learned so that I could take my husband, when the time came, and so that I could bide my time until it did.”

“Fuck,” Wei Wuxian gasped at that. His own cock was achingly ready, and Lan Wangji was swollen hard. When Wei Wuxian bent to give the tempting length of him a clumsy lick, from base to tip, Lan Wangji instinctively attempted to buck up into his mouth. Wei Wuxian liked Lan Wangji’s greed for him. He thought he could easily become smitten with it.

Wei Wuxian pressed a solitary digit into the slick, fluttering warmth of his husband.

“Even though I tongued you, I think this is going to take a lot of fingering,” he remarked, dragging in and out of his husband while trying to steady his own breath.

“My cock’s not so massive as this brute here,” he cupped Lan Wangji’s member, then rolled his thumb over the head to spread the drop of moisture beading at the tip, “but it’ll fill you up nicely.”

Wei Wuxian brought his hand back to his own cock. He gave it a stroke, spreading the slick of Lan Wangji’s precome over himself and meeting Lan Wangji’s black eyes.

“I’m going to take such good care of you with this. You’ll see.”

He rocked fingers into Lan Wangji. Push and pull, like the swing-step of sword drills. The familiar, enjoyable strain in his muscles. The pain of not yet having come like the pain of pushing through another set. And ever so much better, because delectable Lan Wangji jerked on his fingers. His whole body followed Wei Wuxian’s movement, drawing down with the drag of Wei Wuxian’s hand when he pulled away and meeting Wei Wuxian with a hard squirming smack when he pushed up again.

And all the while his body surged in accordance with Wei Wuxian’s will, Lan Wangji watched him: intent as a bird of prey was on the movement of an animal in long grasses beneath him; gentle and habitual as the breath of wind across that field.

“What is it, Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian asked.

“I didn’t imagine you would have me quite like this,” Lan Wangji admitted, his voice low. “Everything was vaguer, in my mind. Rougher. I thought you’d always tease.” He looked up at Wei Wuxian with stark, undeniable enchantment. “I forgot how gentle you could be. How well you can take care of people.” He shook his head, bringing his right hand to cup Wei Wuxian’s cheek. “You so surpass even the idea of you, Wei Ying.”

Wei Wuxian removed his fingers from Lan Wangji and held the tip of his cock at the entrance of Lan Wangji’s slick, worked-open hole.

“Well,” Wei Wuxian said lightly and easily (just as though his heart wasn’t being forced, like any other exercised muscle might be, to grow and strengthen under Lan Wangji’s patient tutelage), twining their free hands together and pushing in slow, just as slow as he could bear. “I love you so, Lan Zhan. And I want you every way they ever invented, and then to come up with some new ones.”

He bit his lip, closed his eyes and steadied himself as he rested entirely inside Lan Wangji, who gripped his hand like a lifeline.

“But just now,” Wei Wuxian continued, “I want you to feel safe, and adored. To know that I’m here. That you’re here. And that having taken you, I’ll never let you go.”

“Don’t,” Lan Wangji said, hard and automatic and visceral. His gaze turned harried, as though this were some old wound Wei Wuxian had unknowingly cut deeper into. “Don’t ever leave me alone.”

“How could I?” Wei Wuxian said, surging forward with reassurance, eager to give Lan Wangji anything he needed of him, all of himself he could.

“How could I?” He repeated. “You peerless, perfect thing—”

He rocked into Lan Wangji, knowing that he wouldn’t last long, this first time, and having made Lan Wangji very, very ready with that caveat in mind. Wanting to speak his delight. Knowing he needed to bring Lan Wangji with him, and knowing also that nothing in the world unspun Lan Wangji so well as his chatter.

“You’re bottled glory,” Wei Wuxian said by way of description, rolling his hips harder, giving them a snap that made Lan Wangji gasp. “Beautiful as fallen snow, resolute as mountains, sweet-mouthed, responsive as an instrument, so fucking tight, and mine, my husband, my Lan Zhan—”

Lan Wangji seemed to choke on his own breath, in time with Wei Wuxian’s thrusts. His eyes went glassy; his head rolled on the pillow.

“You like it?” Wei Wuxian asked him.

“Uh huh,” Lan Wangji said, voice small—working his hips in tight circles, the better to really feel Wei Wuxian in him.

Wei Wuxian couldn’t help bending down to lick the metal diadem of Lan Wangji’s still-tied ribbon. Gods, that perfect little noise! And then Lan Wangji wrapped a leg around his hip to pull him in at a deeper angle, and who was Wei Wuxian to say no to such a clear, polite request?

“I really have to thank you for your virginity,” Wei Wuxian said with a grin, releasing Lan Wangji’s left hand to lift and grip his thick, well-developed thighs. “Lan er gege could have had anyone in the world, but he reserved himself just for my enjoyment.”

Lan Wangji flushed and made a stifled sound at the prospect of being enjoyed. This only egged Wei Wuxian on further.

“Do you know how lovely you are?” Wei Wuxian asked, properly crashing into Lan Wangji now in a way that left Lan Wangji scrambling at the sheets and had his fingers twisting into, clutching at the material.

“How I’ve wanted you as I’ve never wanted anything in my life?” Wei Wuxian continued, punctuating that with a deep thrust that punched the breath out of Lan Wangji. “Do you know how good you feel, what a rush and a delight it is to make your perfect mouth drop open, to make your breath come faster—”

Lan Wangji was panting now, staring up at Wei Wuxian more like he was the moon than like he’d hung the thing.

“Gods I love getting you off,” Wei Wuxian said, “being of use to you—tell me more about how you thought it would be. You learned, for me—I love that. Did er gege get off to me?”

Lan Wangji was struggling to speak, but so clearly wanted to do well for him.

“Yes, I—I imagined anything, with Wei Ying. Everything. Fucking you, and this, you doing just this. Riding you, or you making me—you catching me pleasuring myself, moaning your name, and your telling me you’d let the whole thing go if I—if I just—”

Wei Wuxian shuddered, his cock throbbing in the grip of his husband’s body. This had been an astounding miscalculation on his part. There was no way he could last another five minutes with Lan Wangji saying things like that. This called for desperate measures. He seized Lan Wangji’s hips and held him in place. Lan Wangji made a noise of protest.

“Shhh,” Wei Wuxian said. “There, there. You can take it. You can make your husband come in you, can’t you, Lan Zhan?”

Lan Wangji gave a shaky, desperate nod and twined his arms around Wei Wuxian’s neck. Wei Wuxian turned his head to give Lan Wangji’s right hand a kiss, then unpeeled it from his neck and brought it down to Lan Wangji’s own cock.

“Show me how to do it right, er gege. Show me how my husband likes it.” Lan Wangji bit his lip and wrapped his hand around himself. Wei Wuxian watched how his husband took himself in hand, with such a surprisingly delicate touch, and fucked him all the while.

“That’s it,” he praised, “such a good boy for me, Lan Zhan. I want you to come for me. You’re going to tighten up for me—fuck, er gege, you’re going to make me feel so good.”

Lan Wangji surged up to demand a kiss as he spent, spilling onto his stomach and Wei Wuxian’s and his own silk robes. Wei Wuxian held him through it. When Lan Wangji slid, boneless, back down to the bed, Wei Wuxian pressed once more into him. The careful, deep, magisterially sedate thrust served as a question.

“Tell me you want it,” Wei Wuxian demanded, so close but trying to gauge whether Lan Wangji, sensitive as he was in this regard, would be overwhelmed by his continuing.

“Come in me,” Lan Wangji said decisively, flushed but plain. “I want you to do it. Wei Ying, husband, please.”

The demand brought Wei Wuxian right to the edge. He scrambled to ride and relish it, fucking through his orgasm, fucking Lan Wangji almost to the point of pain. Lan Wangji jerked like a doll or a puppet on his cock, mewling “Wei Ying, Wei Ying” as he was thoroughly used.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” Wei Wuxian muttered nonsense as he collapsed over him. “My good, good boy, you took it so well.”

When he’d caught his breath, Wei Wuxian propped himself up on an elbow. He understood he’d have to pull out of his snug position inside his husband, and clean them up, and be responsible. (His instruction regarding marriage had been quite clear on these points, and Wen Qing was professionally shameless enough to grill him on his successful execution of her teachings.) But not, he thought, for another few minutes.

“Did your bride fuck you well?” he asked, placing a possessive hand on Lan Wangji’s chest.

Lan Wangji nodded. “My Wei Ying was perfect,” he said with smug contentment, giving a satisfied stretch-and-squirm. “It was more overwhelming than I imagined it would be,” Lan Wangji confided quietly after a moment, as though he were a little miffed to have been so wrecked by his own first time—as though Wei Wuxian hadn’t been rendered equally a mess in the face of him.

Adorable, Wei Wuxian thought, wondering if he could get away with calling Lan Wangji this thing he inarguably was outside of sex. Wei Wuxian was getting the impression that there was relatively little Lan Wangji wouldn’t let him get away with. Between that and the sex, he really was going to get spoiled!

***

Unexpectedly awoken at five in the morning, Wei Wuxian was decidedly less sanguine about his marital future.

“I’m not going to adopt the Lan sleep schedule,” Wei Wuxian said, his eyes still closed. “That was in my contract.”

“Mm,” his husband agreed, pleasantly enough. But he didn’t stop fussing with Wei Wuxian—toying with his pretty lingerie, his hair. Stroking his arms and his belly. Teasing Wei Wuxian until he was shivery and half-hard.

Wei Wuxian cracked an eye, giving Lan Wangji a sullen look. Lan Wangji seemed as satisfied with himself as a child who’d bullied his mother out of bed.

“Oh, you’re awake,” Lan Wangji said. The sheer cheek of him. Absolutely shameless. Jiang Wanyin had been right, he’d married an asshole.

“What happened to my good boy?” Wei Wuxian demanded. “What have you done with him?”

“It was you who did much with him,” Lan Wangji said primly. “Now it is your turn to be good for me.” That tone was decidedly less prim.

Lan Wangji echoed Wei Wuxian’s opening gambit from the previous night, straddling his husband. He looked down at Wei Wuxian, considering him with scholastic focus—as though Wei Wuxian were a particularly complex curse he was figuring out how to break.

Wei Wuxian didn’t know that he’d mind being broken. Not if it were by Lan Wangji. “Are you going to be gentle, Hanguangjun?”

“I always believed I would be, this first time,” Lan Wangji said, regarding him seriously. Stroking a thumb over Wei Wuxian’s lip. “And I am certain that eventually, I shall be. But my Wei Ying,” he pushed his thumb into Wei Wuxian’s mouth, “made me watch him marry another man. Twice.” As if to emphasize this fact, he gave Wei Wuxian two more fingers to suck. “Each of them infinitely beneath him. My Wei Ying made me watch these mockeries touch him. And as a result, I find I am not yet inclined to gentleness. You will have to win that of me.”

Lan Wangji removed his fingers from Wei Wuxian’s mouth, bringing the wet digits to Wei Wuxian’s nipple to give it an experimental twist. Wei Wuxian shivered, and Lan Wangji noted the results of his exploration with some interest and satisfaction.

“Don’t you know the saying? ‘The louder the bride cries on her wedding day, the better the marriage.’” Wei Wuxian canted his hips, pressing his erection up against Lan Wangji’s. (Who’d probably woken up with one and decided to put it to practical use. That would be very Lan Wangji.)

“You want to make me happy, don’t you, Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian goaded him. “Make me weep.”

Lan Wangji tilted his head to the side. “I’m still somewhat sore from how well my pretty wife fucked me.” He idly palmed Wei Wuxian’s cock, gripping it harder than Wei Wuxian ever had his. “But I think I can manage.”

How had he figured out the sort of touch Wei Wuxian liked best? Wei Wuxian sulked about it, even as he bucked up into Lan Wangji’s unrelentingly firm hand. “Hanguangjun, you truly learn everything so quickly!”

“I have had a great deal of opportunity to consider these matters,” Lan Wangji admitted calmly, giving Wei Wuxian’s cock a steady, sliding pull. “Especially while I watched you try to offer others something you know very well is mine.”

“You thought about me,” Wei Wuxian sing-songed, as though it were wholly novel rather than something Lan Wangji had confessed before they’d slept. As though Wei Wuxian were winning some concession from his husband—as though he hadn’t carved a stick figure of Lan Wangji into his bedpost in another life, and the characters of the other boy’s name into his heart in both.

He poked Lan Wangji in the chest. In response Lan Wangji used one hand to pin Wei Wuxian’s wrists above his head, grinding their erections together with slow deliberation. It was a silent command for Wei Wuxian to pay attention.

“I did,” said Lan Wangji, sliding his hips across his husband’s in an indolent rhythm. “I thought of you at the gate when we met, when you were pert and insolent. I thought of you on the roof, when you were so much more so. I thought about you in the library, and in my rooms, and in this bed. I thought about you in the lecture hall, and in the Cold Pond, and in every single roadside inn we spent the night in while we travelled. In Qinghe and Qishan and Lanling, I thought only of you, and of when you would cast off your pretenders and ask me to fight at your side. You were never out of my thoughts. I have wanted you in ways that even you have never imagined, Wei Ying. Of that, I am certain.”

Wei Wuxian stared up at him, looking almost frightened. “I,” he said, “am going to die if you don’t fuck me. You are so much. I knew you would be, and I need it. I need you. Fuck.”

He outright wriggled under Lan Wangji, frustratedly trying to expedite matters any way he could.

“What an impatient little slut,” Lan Wangji tsked, sounding glacial—putting on his own manner. Tilting his head in his most dismissive way. Still rocking his hips against Wei Wuxian’s. “I haven’t even fingered you yet.”

The aspersion knifed through Wei Wuxin. Lan Wangji had watched him savour the word in Qishan, when he hadn’t even meant to do it, and had remembered to deploy it against him now. Lan Wangji was going to be the fucking death of him.

“Please?” he begged with wide-blown eyes. “Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, you know how much I like your attention—and besides,” he mustered, recovering himself a degree, “given the transmigration, technically I might just be your gege right now! You really ought to do what your elders tell you!”

Lan Wangji snorted, giving Wei Wuxian the tiniest hint of a smile.

“Absolutely not, A di.”

Wei Wuxian made a strangled sound. The combination of Lan Wangji’s soft expression and that regional endearment, which turned his own teasing ‘gege’ on its head, had slain him.

Lan Wangji leaned back, breaking the contact between them—much to Wei Wuxian’s distress—only to come to lie at his husband’s side. He then abruptly turned his husband in his arms, rolling Wei Wuxian over on the mattress, so that his face was buried in the pillow. He jerked Wei Wuxian’s open robe off one of his arms as he did so.

This allowed Lan Wangji to run his hand down Wei Wuxian’s back, and over the curve of his ass. He squeezed the flesh hard with his hand and dipped his head down to carefully bite the juncture of Wei Wuxian’s neck and collar bone. While Wei Wuxian gasped, Lan Wangji coated his fingers in oil and shoved two at once into his husband.

“How do you know I can take that?” Wei Wuxian demanded, kicking his foot up in the air only for Lan Wangji to press it back down against the mattress.

“You were very assured in doing it to me,” Lan Wangji pointed out. “Your skill spoke of experience, and you have known no other. Be good, Wei Ying.”

Lan Wangji fucked Wei Wuxian with long, efficient plunges and drags of his fingers, flexing and twisting them inside his husband. He was careful enough in it that Wei Wuxian recognised a hint of his composed husband’s sight-reading.

“You can,” Wei Wuxian huffed after a minute, “go faster.”

“I will go exactly as fast as I wish to,” Lan Wangji said. “I warned you I wouldn’t be gentle with you. And you said you wanted it.” He went no faster, but he added another finger.

“I do,” Wei Wuxian said, as he gripped the bed frame with his hands to brace himself. “I want it, you know how much I’ve wanted you. Mm, Lan Zhan, you’ve such a pretty cock. Do you have any idea how big you are?”

“Yes,” Lan Wangji said simply, pushing in a fourth finger, as if to demonstrate that he was aware of the precautions his natural endowment rendered necessary.

Wei Wuxian hissed in breath. “Speak of attempting the impossible—it’s fortunate you married the first disciple of Jiang, you know.”

“Mm,” Lan Wangji said, sounding amused and fond. “It is.”

“You’re going to give it to me soon, right er gege? You’ve made me ready enough, surely. Such a brutish thing, to be attached to the elegant Hanguangjun! But I want you to ruin me with it.” Wei Wuxian shifted to fuck himself on those relentless fingers. Indulgent play-acting spilled into truth. “Even if I think I can’t handle it, you should make me take it. I want you to.”

Wei Wuxian choked in surprise when a forceful smack hit his ass. Another followed, and then another. Lan Wangji had a strong arm, and a grip Wei Wuxian couldn’t wrench himself away from.

“Don’t be a brat,” Lan Wangji said. “Don’t tease me about wanting what I’m going to make you beg for in earnest.”

“I’m not!” Wei Wuxian insisted as Lan Wangji struck the firm mound of his ass, again and again. “I’m not, I—”

“You aren’t a tease?” Lan Wangji quirked an eyebrow, stroking and kneading Wei Wuxian’s red, stinging ass with his large hands, each of which covered the whole of a cheek with ease. “But I think you liked everyone looking at how pretty you were in your finery and your déshabillé. Didn’t you, Wei Ying?” He curled his fingers in Wei Wuxian, making him twitch and twist between poles of sensation.

“Did you like driving me insane?” Lan Wangji whispered, his voice low and intent. He dropped down to just three fingers, opting for a clean piston over sheer fullness, and fucked Wei Wuxian hard. “Did you even think of me, Wei Ying, for all I thought of you? Did you factor it into your plans that I wanted to rip that lingerie off you with my teeth, and take you in front of everyone? I wanted to make you tell me you were sorry. I wanted to make you beg for it.”

Lan Wangji worked with a punishing speed now, his words coming more raw. His tone deepening to something fast and rough. If play was to be real enough to sate otherwise unspeakable hungers, then it had to encompass sharp edges, and to let the resultant blood show through.

“The men you gave yourself to didn’t even appreciate having what was mine,” Lan Wangji said. “You were supposed to marry me, Wei Ying. I was going to ask, so seriously, for you. You deserved that, and you threw yourself away. And if you cannot value yourself in your own right, then think what you denied me.”

Lan Wangji was breathing hard. Wei Wuxian understood that this was as much about Lan Wangji’s having seen Wei Wuxian’s suffering in Empathy as having his borne witness to Wei Wuxian’s dangerous, loveless marriages with his own eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Wei Wuxian gasped, pleasure buried inside him, fire licking up his skin and an ache in his heart. “I’m sorry.”

Swift as a sword-strike, Lan Wangji pulled out of Wei Wuxian and flipped him over on his back, leaving him reeling. He cradled Wei Wuxian’s head in his clean left hand, his fingers catching in Wei Wuxian’s long hair, and kissed him emphatically. He deliberately flicked his tongue over the pronounced dot of the beauty mark directly under Wei Wuxian’s lower lip.

“You’ll try to guard all of yourself from harm for me?” Lan Wangji murmured when the rush of passion had found this partial release. “For us?”

Wei Wuxian nodded and pulled him back into another desperate kiss.

“That’s all I need,” Lan Wangji said, tilting their foreheads together when they broke from one another’s mouths. “No one could try harder than you, Wei Ying. I only ask to be something you value enough to try for.”

“Oh sweetheart,” Wei Wuxian said, kissing his face and trying to work himself down on his husband cock, his hole sliding against the thick head. Needing to show Lan Wangji how very wanted he was, needing this for himself. “Zhiji, anything for you. Anything. Please, please—”

Lan Wangji obliged him, sheathing himself in Wei Wuxian fully with a few firm jabs. Wei Wuxian found that he couldn’t keep still for this. He was a flurry of desirous motion. His hips flexed to work for another inch of his husband. His body fluttered around and gripped at Lan Wangji’s cock. His hands flexed and his fingers gripped the muscles of Lan Wangji’s arms.

Seated in his husband, Lan Wangji couldn’t keep his eyes open.  Couldn’t help throwing back his head, showing off the column of his neck in the frail dawn light. Couldn’t help gasping, “oh, Wei Ying”, undone, and pushing in deeper.

Mastering himself to a degree, Lan Wangji avoided the sort of punishing thrusts his husband wasn’t yet accustomed to taking. Instead he opted to grind himself in, letting Wei Wuxian adjust to and appreciate the length and girth of him. Wei Wuxian was glassy-eyed as it was, and needed the opportunity to to get used to him. Wei Wuxian gulped when he saw Lan Wangji’s hand twist over his abdomen in the form of a swift qi suppression that would delay his orgasm. (What did they teach these Lans? Wei Wuxian only learned about that this week!)

When Lan Wangji then began to establish a rhythm of thrusts, Wei Wuxian found himself making desperate, humiliating non-volitional noises. When Lan Wangji began to properly fuck him hard, Wei Wuxian started to babble.

“Er gege,” Wei Wuxian panted, “forget whether those others wanted me. No one could ever fuck me like you, er gege.”

“No one’s going to,” Lan Wangji growled into his ear, “because you’re mine, Wei Ying.” When Wei Wuxian only made a lost sound in response, Lan Wangji frowned. “Say it,” he demanded, coldly.

“Yeah,” Wei Wuxian breathed, “yes, of course I am, anything you want Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan.”

Pleased with himself, Lan Wangji licked Wei Wuxian’s throat and once more bit deep into the muscle at the base, making Wei Wuxian shriek. This didn’t move Lan Wangji to shame—in fact he seemed still more determined to suck his mark onto his husband.

“Hanguangjun,” Wei Wuxian gasped, “stop, everyone will see—”

Even as he said it, he wrapped his leg around Lan Wangji’s waist, canting his hips up to force Lan Wangji’s cock deeper into him—a copy of the move Lan Wangji had tried the previous night. Even here, they learned from one another.

“So clever, even when you’re this far gone,” Lan Wangji praised as he tilted back and pulled Wei Wuxian’s legs up, spreading him wider. Making room for himself, as though he belonged exactly where he was.

“No, but listen, everyone will see me marked up,” Wei Wuxian said. “It’ll be so embarrassing, my lord husband.”

“You’d be embarrassed?” Lan Wangji sneered, fucking him harder and deeper. “You? By this? But Wei Ying, everyone knows you’re mine. I claimed you before the world.” He put his hand on Wei Wuxian’s collarbone for leverage, rubbing his thumb into the softened flesh where a bruise would form. “Everyone will know what I do to you.”

“Fuck, you’re so much,” Wei Wuxian said, his whole body jerking now with the force of Lan Wangji’s efforts, but pinned in place by his grip.

“My Wei Ying loves this,” Lan Wangji scoffed. “My pretty bride gags for it. Throws a fit if he doesn’t get me, like a little brat.” At last he shifted to the brutal rhythm his fingers had at once presaged and prepared Wei Wuxian for. “You can take it, can’t you beloved? Didn’t you ask me to make you?”

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian begged him, “let me make you come, please. I’m sorry, I’m sorry I taunted you. You know I’m just for you. I know I act like such a slut, but it’s only because I wanted you so badly. I couldn’t help it, Lan Zhan. Come on, give me what I’ve been asking for. Come in me, Lan Zhan—you’re the only one I really married.”

“Of course I am. And you are still far too articulate for my tastes,” Lan Wangji observed. He then did his damnedest to fuck his husband stupid. Wei Wuxian was so clever that this was a particular challenge, but one it seemed Lan Wangji believed he was up for.

When Wei Wuxian was appropriately incoherent, he felt a wrenching, climbing sensation in him. Words, for the most part, deserted him, for once in his life. He could only slur out ‘please, please, please’. He came digging his nails into Lan Wangji’s shoulders.

Lan Wangji came only a moment after, as though he’d been desperately holding on and had barely outlasted his husband. Lan Wangji held Wei Wuxian close, shaking as he poured himself into Wei Wuxian, making him take it all and kissing Wei Wuxian until he was struggling to breathe.

Lan Wangji then slid to the bed at his side, falling flat on his back. Wei Wuxian managed to turn onto his stomach, throwing his arm and leg over his husband like a starfish. With some annoyance, Wei Wuxian considered that Lan Wangji was probably counting it as a personal victory that Wei Wuxian was too winded to speak.

“You know,” Wei Wuxian managed to croak after a few minutes’ recovery, “I still have the lingerie Wen zongzhu and Jin zongzhu gifted me. And I never did get to use it.” He drew his hand up Lan Wangji’s chest. “Would it make you feel better to interrupt my weddings, er gege?” His voice turned musing, and his eyes sparkled. “You could steal the bride and ruin her. Keep her for yourself.”

“I hear she’s a menace,” Lan Wangji observed, giving Wei Wuxian’s ass a fond squeeze. Which absolutely wasn’t a no.

“Well, it’s like I said. You’re lucky I’m your menace.” Wei Wuxian rested his head on his husband’s chest. They’d have to get up soon. But it was so lovely and warm in the bed, and Lan Wangji had ravished him to the point where standing seemed as though it’d be as difficult as it was unwise.

“I am lucky,” Lan Wangji said. “I wished very hard to continue thus, as my husband instructed me.”

His tone was terribly earnest and fervent for someone who was shamelessly playing with Wei Wuxian’s butt. But then Wei Wuxian supposed Lan Wangji was earnest and fervent about his ass, as well. His husband was generally very consistent in his character, and in his application of his principles.

***

Lan Xichen barely slept. He was terrified that at any moment he’d be awoken by some insultingly theatrical announcement of his beloved younger brother’s demise. Lan Wangji was, at least, the swordsman and cultivator Lan Xichen himself was. Thus he might well prevail even in a fight with a talented swordsman like Wei Wuxian—though he’d surely break his heart in the process. Lan Xichen wasn’t certain his brother’s guarded affections would ever recover from such a betrayal.

Morning came, and Lan Xichen dressed. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, dark-circled and mussed, and smoothed his hair as best he could. The anxious hours wore on. Xichen found that sect correspondence could not distract him, nor even hold his attention.

At last the hour of the newlyweds’ formal reception breakfast neared. Lan Xichen braced himself and walked to the main hall. If anything had happened to Wangji, he didn’t know what he’d do. He wondered, almost hysterically, how effectively the wedding preparations could be converted into funerary trappings.

When the new couple did not enter at the appointed time, Xichen felt a swoop of dread in his heart. He gripped the edges of the table before him, white-knuckled. His uncle frowned, clearly beginning (belatedly, Xichen thought!) to worry.

Only a minute or so later, a great clatter sounded from the door.

“Sorry we’re late,” Wei Wuxian said, bounding in, with a miraculously hale-looking Lan Wangji at his heels. “My fault, my fault, I couldn’t tie this right.”

Over his delicate light blue sleep-robes Wei Wuxian wore a midnight blue, rough-silk robe, which he gestured to now. It transformed intimate apparel suitable for a wedding night into a respectable, mature and comely ensemble suitable for Lan furen to serve his new in-laws tea in.  

Wei Wuxian gave the Lan sect leader and grandmaster quite a passable bow, knelt before them and poured still-steaming tea into their cups. Even Lan Qiren looked mollified.

“Did you sleep well, Xiongzhang?” Wangji had the absolute nerve to ask, sitting down beside his husband. “Forgive me, but you look tired.”

“I—did you, Wangji? Are you well?” Xichen searched his brother’s face for signs of mind-control, poisoning, gods only knew what.

“I hardly slept at all,” Wangji said, entirely without shame. “But I am none the worse for that.”

Lan Qiren snorted into his tea-cup.

“Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian said, flushing. Xichen now noticed the chain of bruises at his brother-in-law’s neckline. It was as pronounced as a necklace. Really, Wangji? he thought, exasperated. It was so obvious—Xichen had a terrible suspicion that, for the rest of their lives, Wangji would be glacially furious if anyone so much as alluded to Wei Wuxian’s having had prior husbands.

Wei Wuxian cleared his throat and bowed once more.

“There will be an official announcement at the banquet today, with testimony from witnesses from the Jiang and Wen clans. But my honoured in-laws should know beforehand that I’ve destroyed the yin iron seal in its entirety, in accordance with Lan Yi’s wishes. Anyone may check the Cold Pond cave to confirm this.”

There was a pause. “The green flash, last night,” Qiren said. “Of course. Well done, Wuxian.”

“Thank you, grandmaster,” Wei Wuxian said. Wangji placed an affectionate hand on his husband’s back.

Xichen sat stunned, and Lan Qiren took up the thread of the conversation in his stead.

“Given that we’re all here, everyone will want to discuss the Chief Cultivator role. Lan ought to have a position on the matter. Wei Wuxian, give us your opinion.”

The young man nodded.

“You’ll think I’m biased in favour of my parents’ house, but why not Jiang Fengmian? Jin Zixuan is young, and far too busy at present. Lan Xichen has the temperament,” Wei Wuxian gave him a respectful nod, “and my Lan Zhan to advise him, but he’s not much older. So too Nie Mingjue, who does not have the temperament.”

Lan Qiren gave his troublesome but talented pupil a school-room nod. “Good. You know Jiang best. We must look to you, now, to advise us on our relations with your mother sect. What else should we consider?”

“Well,” Wei Wuxian thought, “the post would allow Jiang Fengmian to be diplomatic, which is one of his strengths. His occupation would give Madam Yu greater dominion over Jiang’s affairs, so might add to their marital harmony.” He would not speak ill of his family, even in a small company that already knew its members well, but he could allude that far. Only Lan Wangji, Xichen now suspected, might receive his full confidence.

Wei Wuxian looked directly at Lan Qiren. “Now that Lan Zhan is of age and married, you haven’t the claims of children on your time. Thus the other obvious choice is, of course, you.”

Lan Qiren gave him a look of infinite distaste. Wei Wuxian cackled.

“Don’t laugh for no reason,” Qiren muttered.

“Grandmaster’s face gave me reason enough,” Wei Wuxian said, and Wangji actually had to hide the smile at the corner of his mouth.

“Maybe the office should open to minor sect leaders,” Xichen found himself saying.

“But who among them?” Wangji said, elegantly summing up the whole situation: the idea was better than the pool of candidates.

“Lord, anyone but Sect Leader Yao,” Wei Wuxian answered with a roll of his eyes.

“Ouyang, then?” Wangji suggested innocently. Wei Wuxian gave him a look of deep betrayal.

“Whose side are you on, Hanguangjun?”

“Always yours, beloved,” Lan Wangji assured him, refilling their elders’ tea in his stead. The looks on their faces ought to have been illegal. It was painfully obvious even to Lan Xichen that Wei Wuxian was not, in fact, a murderous vixen, but rather a stupidly besotted young bride.

Eventually, Lan Xichen and Wei Wuxian would become great friends. Wei Wuxian would never stop taunting Lan Xichen for his absolute conviction that his younger brother wouldn’t survive his wedding night, but eventually, Lan Xichen would find the misapprehension almost as funny as Wei Wuxian did. At present, however, the couple’s devout ardour and radiating smugness could hardly be quenched even by the restraining presence of Uncle. In such a case as that, what chance had Lan Xichen? The prospect of enduring the first weeks of the couple’s honeymoon period made Lan Xichen feel lonely, and more importantly, as though he might well die of second-hand embarrassment. Someone had to feel such things, if the couple themselves wouldn’t.

Nothing could have been more welcome to Lan Xichen than the invitation he received from Sect Leader Nie and his steward Meng Ziyao the next day to spend some weeks in Qinghe. Meng Ziyao suggested that he might like to give his new brother a little space in which to settle in. It only added another layer to Lan Xichen’s considerable chagrin that he indirectly had Wei Wuxian to thank for a most interesting visit, which led to many fruitful and lasting developments in his own personal life.

Lan Xichen did not mark any stage of these developments with a gaudy public ceremonial, nor did he parade around in any revealing intimate attire. Someone in this family had to keep up standards.