Chapter Text

Chapter Ten

First things first: survive the sun. Just one more time.

Resist the temptation to take the easier way out. If he just lets go, stops fighting, lets it take him… easier, for sure, but not better. Lan Zhan is waiting and fighting for him. A-Yuan and Wen Ning too. And on his surface there’s a brave metal donkey who came all the way out here alone to bring him gifts and learn what he’s made of.

That silly small-headed donkey. Of course he knows it’s just a thing, it doesn’t really have feelings or a personality, or bravery or curiosity, but… still, Wei Wuxian is a sentimental old fool, and he loves his brave, lonely metal donkey.

It’s out there now, tickling him with its little drill, taking pictures and doing… whatever other science things it does. Measuring… stuff.

He widens the passage down to his cave for it. He taps it on its shoulder and motions for it to join him down the long stairway, but it seems not to understand and keeps working.

Donkeys. So stubborn.

At last, when it starts getting too hot on the surface, he just turns it on its side, picks it up, and carries it to safety while its wheels spin indignantly, then he closes the passageway behind them. Should have tried that with his first donkey.

He feels a stab of grief: Little Apple died thousands of years ago. Wei Wuxian wasn't there. Someone buried that donkey somewhere. Cloud Recesses, maybe. He hopes the willful old bastard had a good, long life and ate lots and lots of apples.

He sets this donkey down not too close to his lotuses and leaves it to explore while he pulls his consciousness out of his statue-body and focuses on keeping himself intact.

Just one more time.

He’s so tired.

He focuses on preserving his metal donkey and his statue of Lan Zhan, the memories of his long-gone family and his bright fragile lotuses.

It’s not enough.

They’re just things, after all, and things no one would miss too terribly if he were gone with them.

He can't focus. He can't muster the will. He’s going to break apart.

So easy just to let go and give up, let it happen, give himself away, all his pain and his doubt, and all his beautiful silly possessions, give them all up to the bright, clean, confident fury of the sun.

He needs more to fight for (he’s never been great at fighting for himself).

Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan.

He promised.

He promised he would come back. He promised he would fight for a chance at that beautiful, simple future with Lan Zhan: living together, day by day, being part of the world, navigating its changes together, grieving what's lost, rejoicing in what's new, learning and inventing and struggling to understand together.

Lan Zhan asked him if he would fight for that, and he promised he would.

He will. He must.

Even if it’s the slimmest chance at that. Even if it’s a one in a thousand chance, one in a million, fifty million, whatever. Even though fate has never been that kind to him before, and even though the loss will probably hit Lan Zhan worse if they make it all the way to the end just to fail at the last step…

It’s worth trying anyway, just one more time.

It takes all his effort, but he keeps himself together, mostly. The sun burns his surface away, as it always does, and he comes out the other side smaller, but he survives, clinging to the lifeline image of Lan Zhan’s fond, disheveled, unguarded face in the morning, the scratch of the calluses on his fingertips against Wei Wuxian's lips, the sound of his voice saying Wei Ying.

He’s so terribly, terribly tired.

It’s a long time before he can muster the energy to open the passageway back up to his surface for Xiao Pingguo to go back up. Even longer before he can return to his statue-body and carry the silly thing out because without the sunlight to power it Dawn Apple has gone to sleep.

He sits down next to it as it wakes back up, looks around, and returns to its work.

He looks up into the beautiful, lonesome expanse. He can see the Metal Star behind him. The astronomers of the west long ago saw it in their skies and named it after one of their deities, some goddess or other; isn’t that what Sizhui told him, centuries ago? He can’t remember that foreign goddess’ name.

There’s still so much he doesn’t understand about everything. There’s a wealth of knowledge, nowadays, that still barely scratches the surface. There’s a book down in his innards that would tell him more about that boiling planet and all its siblings out here, another that would teach him more about how electricity works and can be harnessed for the greater good of humankind. Wonders. More with every circle of the Earth around the sun, which itself is just a speck in the celestial river, which is just part of a great whirling galaxy, which is one of billions.

What can knowledge, or even immortality, amount to at such a scale?

Once, in his first life, back in the time he can barely remember when he was whole and ignorant, he used to wonder if the dead understand more than the living. They don’t, of course. At least, not any of the dead he’s ever talked to. Maybe those that transcend the cycle do. Maybe outside of the great wheel of death and rebirth there’s some sort of understanding, some greater connection to the infinite baffling cosmos.

Part of him still yearns to find out, to seek out the state of being where all the pieces fit. And maybe he will. Maybe sooner rather than later, if the plan doesn’t work like A-Yuan thinks it will.

Of course, the chances of Wei Wuxian ascending out of the karmic wheel must be ludicrously small. More likely he'll either be obliterated completely or reborn as a worm or something. Then another worm after that. An endless lineage of blind, mindless worms (although even that might be better than this--at least then he'd have some fucking company). Maybe every twenty-three years or so one of the worms will wriggle briefly into Hanguang-jun’s majestic presence before getting eaten by a bird or whatever.

Depressing. Likely.

But then…

Another part of him thinks that, in all of this vast uncaring majesty, if a little cottage next to a greenhouse lotus pond exists, a tiny place where he’s wanted and loved, where he could tinker with his insignificant little projects, and learn some insignificant little facts, and have insignificant loud sex with the man he loves, and fight a tiny monster from time to time to make the insignificant lives around his better…

If that can exist, in all of this, then perhaps it’s proof that there is some kindness, some meaning. Even if it’s just a speck, just for a puny wink of time. That little life, he thinks, has great significance, and he wants it.

Wei Wuxian wants it, and he will make it happen if he can, because the universe is so utterly huge and unfathomable that why couldn’t it happen? Why couldn’t he spend a whole lifetime, however long that is, with dragonflies and bunnies and a stupid metal donkey and snow and spicy food and Lan Zhan, and why couldn’t he love every insignificant, painful, wonderful, vitally important moment of it? Why couldn’t that be meaningful enough in itself?

Fuck, maybe if he did come back as a worm he would love the taste of dirt and corpses and the feeling of Lan Zhan’s footsteps, even if he didn’t understand any of it. Maybe the day he wriggled out of the wet soil into the spring sunlight would be beautiful and meaningful too, even if a bird did eat him.

Then there’s another part of him that just wants to be done and not have to care about any of it, because all that shit is exhausting, and it’s depressing to be so tiny and confused and alone. That part terrifies Wei Wuxian, and it’s been getting slowly stronger and stronger.

He’s losing his mind, isn’t he? This is what it feels like to lose his mind, isn’t it?

He’s at the farthest reaches now. In the distance he can see the Earth Star with its beautiful rings and all its moons. A-Yuan said they’re sending things out here too, vessels like the one that brought him Xiao Pingguo (what even happened to it? he can’t remember; did it fly away again or burn up in the sun?).

Anyway.

He has a job to do: the plan won’t work if he’s not aimed right at the world. If he’s not a direct threat, Lan Sizhui won’t be able to get a weapon capable of killing this body from… whoever makes things like that.

He promised to do his part.

He tries his best to concentrate, to feel the eddies and currents of gravity and the pull of home on his spirit. If he focuses he can see the patterns and know where he needs to put himself so everything lines up.

But fuck, it’s hard to concentrate these days.

He does his best. He nudges himself again and again. He gets distracted, loses focus, berates himself for it, and tries again. He aims himself, eventually, as best he can, right at the little cottage and its lotus pond.

If they can’t stop him, if the weapon doesn’t work, will he be able to divert his course? Or will he plow himself right into the heart of the world, take out everything and everyone with him, Lan Zhan’s rabbits and lotuses first?

They discussed that, didn’t they? He and A-Yuan and Lan Zhan and Wen Ning?

What did they say? What was the backup plan? How will he know if something’s gone wrong? Where on his path were they going to meet him?

Shit. He can’t remember.

Surely they would meet him far enough out that he’d have time to adjust again and miss the world if they failed, right?

Didn’t they talk about that?

Fuck this stupid crumbling comet body and what it’s doing to him. Maybe in retrospect hollowing himself out to make room for fucking keepsakes was a bad idea; it can’t be good for his structural integrity.

He tries to meditate in hopes that will help him focus and remember. He circulates his energy. It’s thin and sluggish compared to the tiny magnificent body his friends stole for him. Seriously, fuck being a comet.

He tries and tries, but he can’t remember that part of the conversation. It’s just gone.

It’s a looming, dark fear, like a huge shape moving up towards him from deep water. What if the sharp bright person he used to be is already gone, and the dull, frightened, crazy lump he is now is all he can offer to Lan Zhan?

Fucking stop it, Wei Wuxian.

He takes his stone hand and slaps his stone face with it. The texture of that is grating and unpleasant, enough to snap him back, a little.

He promised.

And even as shitty as he is now, he’s not empty yet. He’s still got a tiny, pathetic bit of fight left in him, and he’s still capable of making a fucking decision.

He decides for himself then: if he gets past the Fire Star’s orbit and they haven’t reached him yet, he’ll wait just a tiny bit longer than that and then start nudging himself back away from the world. Probably… probably straight at the sun, then, if that happens. As much as he wants the cottage and the lotuses and the snow, he doesn’t have it in him to survive the sun again and try another pass. There won’t be enough left. It’s this time, or never.

He waits.

He tries to read some of his books, but it’s hard to focus on them. More and more words sit dead and meaningless on the page.

He leafs through Lan Zhan’s porn book again. There are a few things in there they didn’t try. He doesn’t feel much of anything when he looks at them. He ends up sitting in his statue-body at his Lan Zhan statue’s feet, leaning his stone head against its stone leg, staring emptily at the salacious illustrations lying in his lap. He wishes he could talk, even to statue-Lan Zhan. He doesn't know what he would say, but at least it would be something other than this dull, eternal, freezing silence.

He looks at his ice lotuses and stone rabbits, and thinks about their living counterparts and how he’s throwing his whole destructive self right at them. He’s trying to come home with all that’s left of his heart, and if he succeeds in getting there he fails and destroys everything he loves, and if the people he loves blow him to dust, he might have a chance at succeeding and really going home.

Life is funny, isn’t it?

Whatever happens, all this around him--the memories on the wall, the statues, the lotuses reflecting the light from the talismans--will be gone soon. Blown up or burned to nothing. He ought to feel more about that.

Wei Wuxian senses himself nearing the orbit of the Fire Star, and he unfolds himself laboriously and float-trudges his statue body back up the path to the surface to find out what happens next.

The Fire Star is ahead and to his right, red and confident. The people of the west gave it a god’s name too. He doesn’t remember. It’s beautiful, though, in its own forbidding way. It was considerate of the heavens to give him one more good sightseeing tour of all of this.

If he survives and keeps himself, he is never, ever, ever coming back out here again.

He puts his stone hand on Xiao Pingguo’s side and waits, watching the empty black sky. His shining purple tail is beginning to stretch out again, like intestines dragged along behind a shambling corpse.

He keeps waiting.

He moves even with the red sphere, then past it.

He doesn’t want to give up on the plan.

Of course, he also doesn’t want to destroy the world, so…

He sees something.

It’s tiny and bright and moving towards him. He feels them: Lan Zhan and Wen Ning. They’re there. They’ve come.

The ship catches him and falls into orbit around him. He feels the strings of his attachments circling in that orbit, like they’re winding a cocoon around him.

A little door opens, and a white figure flies out, led by a blue light.

Lan Zhan, flying Bichen through space. He’s holding the sword in his hand out in front of him rather than standing on top of it (makes sense, that technique is pretty reliant on gravity), and he flies straight as an arrow, pulls up at the last moment to land graceful as a bird not far from Xiao Pingguo and Wei Wuxian’s statue-self.

He looks beautiful and silly. His clothing is one single white-and-blue garment, very practical, no floating layers or expensive jade ornaments. It’s moderately form-fitting (scandalous, Lan Zhan), has a great number of pockets on the chest, legs, and arms, and is no doubt enchanted from tip to toe with protections against the pitiless cruelty of space. He’s wearing thick boots, a large pack on his back, and a big clear round helmet that looks like a… Wei Wuxian can’t remember the word. Bichen’s sheath is tied to his belt, as is a small metal box. Wei Wuxian wonders if the bomb is in there.

Lan Zhan sheathes Bichen and walks a few floating steps across the surface of Wei Wuxian’s comet-body to stand before his statue-body.

Wei Wuxian, it seems, guessed a little bit wrong on the scale of his statue-self; the top of Lan Zhan’s head comes about to his shoulder. Lan Zhan cranes his neck to look at him, and his mouth moves.

Wei Ying.

Wei Wuxian can’t hear him, of course. He moves his statue mouth in response all the same.

Lan Zhan.

He holds out his hand, and Lan Zhan places his own into it, covered in its thick protective glove. It is, Wei Wuxian realizes, the closest they’ve come to actually touching in two thousand years.

Wei Wuxian leads his zhiji down the stone steps deep into himself.

He remembers this part of the plan, at least. The bomb must be placed as close to his center as possible so that when it explodes it… what was the word they used? Anyway, it will destroy the comet completely and instantly, no little floating rocks left to carry the rags of his spirit around. All or nothing.

He watches Lan Zhan take in the cave, the immensity of it, every wall covered floor-to-ceiling with memories, poetry, drawings. The ice lotus pond there at the center, and standing at its edge the statue effigy of Lan Zhan himself.

Lan Wangji pulls something out of one of his sleeve pockets. It’s a little black rectangle, and when he touches it a bright light shines out from a little round hole. Lan Zhan gestures around, then to the rectangle and ends with a questioning look.

Ah. He’s asking if he can preserve the memory of the place. The rectangle is a… fuck, the word isn’t there anymore. A thing for taking pictures. They’d better hurry and blow this body to hell before he can’t remember his own name anymore.

He nods his permission and Lan Zhan tours the cave, shining his little light on everything. Wei Wuxian watches him. He’s comforted by the idea that at least those captured images will remain of him if everything goes wrong. Lan Zhan can look back at it, and read Wei Wuxian’s thoughts over the long lonely centuries, see how often they were of him.

Lan Zhan’s light sparkles through the ice lotuses. The gravity seems to get strange near there; he needs to use little jets on his backpack to steer himself. Wei Wuxian wonders for a moment why that would be before his sluggish thoughts catch up.

They must be near the center of his mass: at his very center, every direction would be up, wouldn’t it, so someone there would be weightless. That’s right, isn’t it?

Surely it hasn’t always been like that. When he nearly shook himself apart centuries ago, back when he almost lost Lan Zhan and A-Yuan, his statue of Lan Zhan had lain on the floor rather than floated, hadn’t it?

But then… there had been more of him back then. Maybe all the passes by the sun since then have burned him away unevenly. And maybe protecting this place all that time has made it more and more the center of him.

When he’d sat himself on the ground next to statue-Lan Zhan with the book of porn, had he even been sitting, or had he been floating? Would he even have noticed? Or since this is all him down here anyway, maybe he can choose which surfaces he sticks to and which he doesn’t, make his own gravity just because he’s used to it. That would probably be very interesting to the old him.

He follows Lan Zhan further down, and yes. Lan Zhan floats perfectly balanced next to the statue of himself. The center of Wei Wuxian. The last thing he’ll protect.

Lan Zhan points his rectangle at it. The light reflecting off his face reveals their expressions to be similar: stoic, solemn, and thoughtful.

Lan Zhan moves on, cataloging everything as gravity catches him more and more. He finds the books, stacked haphazardly, The Lineage of the Gentry Clans on top. He casts a glance and a half-smile at Wei Wuxian, then packs everything gently back into the qiankun pouch: the books, the resin-encased lotus flower, the letter in Lan Zhan’s elegant handwriting.

He holds the pouch to his chest and asks a question with his face:

Shall I bring these back with me?

Wei Wuxian nods, smiles. He still hasn’t finished most of the books. Maybe, if that beautiful slim-chance future comes to pass, he’ll read those books in bed next to Lan Zhan, with that lotus on the bedside table.

Lan Zhan packs the pouch into a pocket on his thigh, puts his little rectangle back in its own pocket, and comes to put his gloved hand on Wei Wuxian’s stone arm. He detaches the box from his belt. This close, Wei Wuxian can feel how powerful it is, technology and magic all bound together. A terrible force of destruction. Perhaps also of liberation.

Lan Zhan’s mouth moves:

Are you ready?

Fuck. This is really it. He looks into Lan Zhan’s face. He sees the stress there, the fear. The hope. The strength.

He nods. Even if the worst happens, they’ll still conjure him into the other body first. Worst case scenario, he’ll still have a few moments up there to talk to Lan Zhan, to feel his skin and hear his voice one more time before he’s scattered to nothingness.

He’s about to take the box when a thought hits him. He holds up a finger: wait one moment.

He bends down to pull up a chunk of himself big enough to carve the characters 暁苹果 into.

Lan Zhan reads it, then reattaches the deadly box to his belt and produces a little pad of paper and a pencil, which seems so old-fashioned Wei Wuxian can’t help but smile at it.

Lan Zhan writes on the pad then shows it to him.

Xiao Pingguo has fulfilled its mission.

Wei Wuxian frowns, gestures for the pad and pencil. Lan Zhan hands it over.

It’s my donkey. It’s brave.

Lan Zhan takes the pad back, flips to the next page, and writes again.

It is a machine. It has no feelings.

Wei Wuxian snatches the pad and pencil, trying not to break them but needing to make his point.

Lan Zhan, we can't leave it. It lives with us.

Lan Zhan presses his lips together in the expression that means Wei Ying You’re Being Ridiculous.

Wei Wuxian moves his stone features into his most petulantly childlike pout and turns the full force of it down at Lan Zhan’s face.

Lan Zhan closes his eyes and Wei Wuxian can see him sigh. He takes the pad back again, flips to the next page, and writes one word:

好.

Wei Wuxian is afraid to hug Lan Zhan in this body for fear of crushing him, so he puts his stone fingertips to his stone lips then touches them delicately to the front of Lan Zhan’s round helmet and graces him with his most charming smile. Probably less charming with stone teeth, but well. He’s doing the best he can.

Dawn Apple is, technically speaking, too big and heavy to go in a qiankun pouch, but Lan Zhan is the immortal Hanguang-jun, and he can spare the spiritual energy. There’s also no way he doesn’t have a spare high-quality pouch.

And if it all goes wrong and Wei Wuxian ceases to exist completely or is reborn as an endless series of worms, at least he will have won his last stupid argument. And at least Xiao Pingguo will be safe. Maybe he’ll sit with Lan Zhan by the lotus pond, absorbing the sunlight and analyzing the dirt while Lan Zhan waits endlessly for his zhiji to return again.

Maybe life is kinder than that. They’ll find out soon.

Wei Wuxian holds out his statue hands, still smiling. Lan Zhan hesitates before he hands over the box.

It doesn’t feel heavy, which shouldn’t be surprising in the micro-gravity, but it is anyway. Something so dangerous and powerful ought to at least be heavy.

Wei Wuxian nods as he receives it. No turning back now. He moves down to the center of himself, next to the statue of Lan Zhan. The two of them will hold the bomb together.

He waves at the real Lan Zhan with more confidence than he feels. Lan Zhan nods to him, then circles his arms and bows to him, to their past, to the body that housed the spirit he loves for two thousand years, the body that brought them together and pulled them back apart a hundred times.

Then he turns and makes his way up to the surface where he will gather Xiao Pingguo and fly Bichen back up to the ship. Once he’s back there, it’s almost done. He and Wen Ning will conjure Wei Wuxian into his stolen human body, they’ll fly to a safe distance, and then they’ll detonate the bomb.

Wei Wuxian is scared.

He’s scared it won’t work.

He’s scared of the part of him that wants it not to work, to just be done.

He’s scared it will work, but not enough, and Lan Zhan will be stuck with a dull, stupid, frightened little man who will age and die and leave him mourning and waiting all over again.

He’s maybe most scared of the tiny, persistent, bright, tender blossom of hope deep inside his dilapidated spirit that he can finally, finally, finally have the life he’s wanted all this time.

He presses the sinister little box to his chest and wraps his arms around his Lan Zhan statue, the bomb held between them. He rests his head on Lan Wangji’s stone shoulder, a final, eternal embrace, and waits to be conjured.

The pull comes, and he opens his eyes to the bright, loud, disorienting world. He breathes, circulating the brilliant storm this body holds.

Wen Ning greets him, asks him how he feels, and takes his pulse, floating next to him in the cramped little room.

It smells in here, oddly, like nothing much at all, and the weightlessness makes his organs feel weird (or maybe just having organs feels weird).

Lan Zhan is here, in all of his silly space clothes except for the helmet. His hair is bound back in a single tight bun, which looks weird on him.

Lan Sizhui’s voice crackles through the air, and his face looks out from a black rectangle on the wall. He’s back on Earth, managing the mission from there. There are other faces behind him--his team of scientists--and they wave to Wei Wuxian and wish him luck in a variety of languages.

Wei Wuxian waves back. They all seem so young, and their voices sparkle with excitement and optimism.

“You’ll be out of range of the blast in three minutes,” Lan Sizhui informs them. Wei Wuxian can’t remember how long a minute is compared to how long it takes an incense stick to burn. Ridiculous. People haven’t measured time by incense sticks in centuries.

Lan Zhan holds a hand out to him, like Wei Wuxian had done on his comet surface, and Wei Wuxian takes it. Lan Zhan holds onto a handle on the wall and gives him a gentle tug that starts him moving, then pulls himself to float by Wei Wuxian’s side over to a little round window in the wall.

There’s his comet body, lighting up the eternal night, brilliant and doomed, a beautiful ruin. His statue-self is in there, frozen in its embrace with a fake Lan Wangji, fake rabbits at their feet, fake lotuses stretching out in an imitation of tranquility in front of them.

“Did you get my donkey?” Wei Wuxian asks.

“I retrieved Dawn Apple,” Lan Wangji answers. He’s still annoyed about it (maybe playing it up just a little), and Wei Wuxian loves that.

He smiles over at Lan Zhan.

“You’re the best,” Wei Wuxian says.

They float there together, just looking at each other while time speeds away.

That tight bun looks so weird on Lan Zhan that after a moment Wei Wuxian can’t help reaching around to undo it and release Lan Zhan’s long hair.

Without gravity, it goes absolutely everywhere. Wei Wuxian shakes it out until it splays out from Lan Zhan’s head in all directions.

Wei Wuxian laughs, and watches Lan Zhan watch him laugh. They both know it might be the last time. Lan Zhan puts his arms around Wei Wuxian’s waist.

“You look like a… dammit.” Wei Wuxian can’t remember the name of the flower he looks like.

Lan Zhan strokes his thumb over Wei Wuxian’s cheek.

“Tell me again in a moment,” he says.

“Wei-qianbei, Hanguang-jun,” says Lan Sizhui’s voice from the wall. “It’s time.”

Wei Wuxian takes Lan Zhan’s hand in his. They’re both trembling.

“Can I?” Wei Wuxian asks him. “Can I…” he can’t find the right words. “Can I make it happen?” is the best he can do.

His friends understand.

“Push the button?” Wen Ning supplies.

“Start the countdown?” Lan Wangji says at the same time.

Wei Wuxian nods.

“Of course,” says Lan Zhan solemnly.

Wen Ning floats over and hands Wei Wuxian a little box (why is everything little boxes these days?) with a switch on it, protected by a little clear cover.

“Lift the cover with your thumb, then press the switch,” Lan Wangji instructs. His voice is soft, thick with emotion.

“And that will…”

“It will count down from ten, then detonate the charge and destroy the comet.”

Wei Wuxian nods, and takes the box into his hands. Lan Wangji places his hands over Wei Wuxian’s.

“This is it, huh?” Wei Wuxian says.

Lan Wangji nods tightly.

Wei Wuxian feels like he should say something profound, but the best he can come up with is:

“Kiss for good luck?”

Lan Zhan pulls him in and kisses him softly, deeply. With his eyes closed and his arms wrapped around the man he will love until his last moment, however far away that is, Wei Wuxian flicks the little cover up with his thumb and presses the switch.

A slightly echoey woman’s voice says:

“Countdown initiated. Detonation in ten.”

“Good luck, Wei-gongzi,” says Wen Ning, raspy with emotion.

“Nine.”

“Wei-qianbei, jiayou!” calls Lan Sizhui.

“Eight.”

A-Yuan's team calls out again from behind him:

“Haeng-un-eul bibnida!” “¡Buena suerte!” “Good luck!” “Saphalata mile!”

“Seven.”

Wei Wuxian breaks the kiss, looks at Lan Zhan with his beautiful, ridiculous explosion of hair around him.

“Lan Zhan.”

“Six.”

“Wei Ying.”

“Five.”

“When we get home…” Wei Wuxian says.

“Four.”

“...let’s get married.”

“Three.”

“Yes,” says Lan Zhan simply. There are tears sparkling in his eyes.

“Two.”

Wei Wuxian wraps his arms around Lan Wangji, like his statue is doing out there with the bomb clenched between them. Unlike out there, Lan Zhan holds him back.

Please, Wei Wuxian thinks. Please, please, please.

He holds on to Lan Wangji with his whole stolen body and his whole fading spirit. The image of his face in the morning, the calluses on his fingers, his barely-smile that lights up everything, his perfect sword-sharp wit, the infinite beautiful possibilities of their future together.

“One. Detonation.”

He opens his eyes to watch out the window. There’s a flash of white light brighter than anything he’s ever seen, first out the window, then inside his head. It’s fire and lightning and deep-sea pressure all in an instant, a deafening scream of fear or elation that resonates through every atom of him all at once.

Then, darkness and silence, absence of everything.

Then.

Then he’s looking out a window at a blank space where a comet used to be.

He has eyes that absorb the light that bounces off the surfaces around him. His ears collect the vibrations of the sounds: the whirring and humming of the ship, the soft repetition of a low voice repeating the same two syllables over and over and over.

His heart beats in his chest, carrying blood through his body. His spiritual energy flows through his meridians to and from his golden core. His lungs pull air in and out.

He blinks and turns to look at the man who’s holding onto his arms.

“Lan Zhan,” he says. “You look like a dandelion.”

There’s a heartbeat of silence, then Lan Zhan laughs his quiet perfect laugh and crushes Wei Wuxian into a kiss.

There are shouts of elation from the screen in the wall, blending together in a cacophony of victorious joy.

His heart cries out with its own raucous ecstasy.

The word had just been there: a dandelion. The others he’s been searching for too: Lan Zhan’s helmet looks like a bubble, the device he used in the cave was a camera, possibly a smartphone, and what the bomb had been designed to do--and had done--was to vaporize the comet. The Romans called the Metal Star ‘Venus’, their goddess of love and beauty, and the Fire Star ‘Mars’, after their god of war.

He feels like he’s been shackled in heavy irons for so long he’d forgotten they were there, and now they’ve been removed. He feels boundless and fearless as well as weightless.

He kisses Lan Zhan while tears cling to his lashes. It’s done, it’s decided. He’s caught. He’s saved. He’s free.

He's whole.

This body is his. This life is his.

He and Lan Zhan move a little apart and Wei Wuxian is beaming, smiling so hard his cheeks are cramping.

“Congratulations, Wei-gongzi,” says Wen Ning, who is smiling too, so sweetly, the best friend and bodysnatcher a comet could have.

Lan Zhan still looks like a fucking dandelion, and he’s crying too, his tears floating around his perfect gorgeous face, beading in his beautiful ridiculous hair, and Wei Wuxian, still crying, laughs and laughs and laughs until he can barely breathe, clinging to his zhiji, his future, his lover, soon his husband.

“Lan Zhan,” he says when he gets his breath back.

“Wei Ying.” Sweetest sound in the universe.

“Let’s go home.”

The End.