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“It’s a shame you still ended up paying the bill, ha ha!” Wei Wuxian laughed. He sat cross-legged on the donkey, swaying back and forth, and asked with seeming nonchalance, “Speaking of which, Hanguang-jun – do you have any plans to retreat in retirement?”
Lan Wangji paused for a moment, seeming to be pondering the question. Wei Wuxian struck while the iron was hot and pushed further.
“Have you even considered what you’ll do when you retire?”
Lan Wangji regarded him. “Not yet.”
Perfect! Then I’ll help you think, Wei Wuxian thought.
*
Never one to hold back his ideas, be they good or bad or half-formed (as Lan Qiren had often lamented), once the picture was clear enough in his mind, Wei Wuxian declared aloud, “No, you should be the weaver. I’m too restless, so I’ll take the hoe. I’ll grow potatoes.”
Lan Wangji’s steps didn’t falter, but he glanced at him. “Pardon?”
“I’m making retirement plans for you, Hanguang-jun. Be grateful for my sense of forethought,” he replied with faux loftiness.
The tiniest, barest suggestion of a crease appeared between Lan Wangji’s eyebrows. “And these plans involve me weaving, and you farming?”
His tone lacked any judgment or even inflection, as usual, but Wei Wuxian took it as a good sign that there was nothing disapproving in his word choice. Perhaps it was because he had never made a joke in his entire life, but the flatness in his tone read as sincerity. So, Wei Wuxian grinned and elaborated cheerfully, “Yup! We’ll have houses next to each other that we’ll build ourselves. We’re certainly handy enough! And we’ll have soup and make food every day and dine together. Though, you ought to do the cooking. You’ve never had my food, have you? I don’t think so. You probably shouldn’t. It wouldn’t be good for you.”
Now understanding the other’s tastes to be milder than he let on that day, Wei Wuxian worried what his preferred amount of spice would do to the poor man. Then again, it could be entertaining to see if it made his face red or his eyes teary.
Thoughts for later, perhaps.
Wei Wuxian rambled for a minute, explaining how Lan Wangji would handle finances and they’d make all their own furniture and patch up their clothes, living modest and comfortable, private lives.
Seeing that Lan Wangji wasn’t replying, he added, “But we can keep up the Night Hunts at – well, night” – in case Lan Wangji was getting bored already. “Slaying evil, going where the chaos is. And we can bring all your rabbits from the Cloud Recesses! Though you’ll have to handle feeding them. They didn’t seem to like me much. I think they’d try to nibble my fingers instead, ha!”
The only thing this countryside life would be missing was a little one, like that farming couple’d had. But Wei Wuxian kept that thought to himself as his memories drudged up small, grubby hands clinging to his leg everywhere he went, and fragile butterfly toys clutched dearly.
How old might A-Yuan have been now? Late teens?
He hadn’t noticed the smile had slipped from his face until Lan Wangji, who had dutifully taken up Little Apple’s reins again after Wen Ning disappeared, pulled the donkey to a stop. Wei Wuxian looked at him curiously. They were past the edge of the town, in the space now between Yiling and the Burial Mound’s many memorials. Thirteen years to everyone else was no time at all to the dead.
“…If we’re taking meals together, why would we have two houses?” Lan Wangji asked him.
Surprised Lan Wangji was entertaining this daydream now, Wei Wuxian bounced back to his merry disposition. “I’m too messy,” he answered easily. “You saw my Demon-Quelling Cave back in the day, didn’t you? Not a clean surface to be found to sit on. Not even in our disciple days…You’re too tidy to live among that.”
“It would not be intolerable.”
“Oh?”
“I keep my space clean, even if my space is your space,” Lan Wangji explained. He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Oh~?” Wei Wuxian repeated singsong, delighted as he propped his elbows on Little Apple’s head, chin in his palms. The donkey brayed discontentedly and both cultivators ignored it, though Lan Wangji’s grip on the reins tightened so it couldn’t try anything. “What if I leave my stuff everywhere? And never put things back where I got them from? And abandon my projects wherever I was working on them? And I hate doing laundry.”
“Mn,” was all Lan Wangji had to say about that.
“Ah, you do too?” Wei Wuxian intentionally misinterpreted. “We’ll have to take turns, then. Or do it together so it goes faster.” His imagination was already filling the spaces of this shared home. No doubt Lan Wangji would be very particular about how everything was laid out. There were plenty of precepts dedicated to the keeping of the home, with a lack of frivolity being the primary factor. But judging by the stash of Emperor’s Smile in The Tranquility Room, he wouldn’t mind Wei Wuxian keeping a cabinet for alcohol. And so long as Wei Wuxian could still dink around with little inventions – though probably less destructive ones; retirement was supposed to be peaceful, after all – he would be happy.
“I suppose that would be simpler,” he conceded eventually, after Lan Wangji had already continued pulling Little Apple along. “Then we wouldn’t have to make two of everything. Tables and shelves and beds and screens…”
Lan Wangji’s eyebrow twitched ever so slightly, and Wei Wuxian realized what he’d just implied. His mouth opened and closed as he tried to decide if he should backtrack, or if he even wanted to. It was honest, anyway. They had already shared a bedmat more than once, and it would certainly be better when he wasn’t pretending to have lost his mind, and Lan Wangji didn’t have to paralyze him overnight. Was it so wrong if Wei Wuxian genuinely wanted to try it?
“Nevermind,” Wei Wuxian decided. “You would wake me up before the sun does. I wouldn’t survive it.”
“You would.”
“No, you would have to leave me there while I sleep in.”
An image appeared unbidden of Lan Wangji’s slender, guqin-playing fingers brushing Wei Wuxian’s hair out of his eyes, the latter’s face slack with sleep, but the former’s touch tender as though for a wife. Or a husband.
“…I changed my mind. I’d get used to it. You’re already cruelly making me get used to it now, after all.”
Some time idled by in comfortable silence. Wei Wuxian was lost in thought, but Lan Wangji snuck many glances at his companion, wearing an expression that betrayed none of his contemplation. They were fully ensconced in the sharp mountain range of Yiling before Wei Wuxian spoke again.
“Do you think I’d make a good husband, Lan Zhan?” he asked.
Lan Wangji stopped walking. Little Apple complained about the sudden halt, but Wei Wuxian only lifted a curious eyebrow.
The question was every manner of frivolous and shameless, but, as he had already observed, the adult Lan Wangji of today was as unshakable as the very mountains, and he merely cut Wei Wuxian a flat look.
“Would you, Wei Ying?” he asked.
The comment was oddly serious, even coming from someone who never wasn’t. They were still, a breeze lightly tugging at their long hair, eyes caught in one another’s gaze. Lan Wangji’s beauty had always been a frigid sort, distant as the icy peaks, like an unnavigable trek through packed snow. His countenance now should have felt no different, but a warmth was lodged in Wei Wuxian’s throat, making it hard to breathe.
He swallowed thickly. “…Yes. Because I would grow radishes with the potatoes, too.”
“Mn,” Lan Wangji agreed, still staring into him intensely. Wei Wuxian felt he had spent most of his life intermittently under that piercing gaze. For the first time, he truly wondered what Lan Wangji saw.
“We’ll have to name our farmhouse,” Wei Wuxian said, changing the subject. “Can I choose it?”
“No.”
“So mean, Lan Zhan! You haven’t even heard my suggestions yet!”
“Suibian,” Lan Wangji reminded him.
Wei Wuxian laughed. “Wow, saying ‘whatever’ to me like that! Am I a bad influence on you? Your shufu always said I would be…”
Lan Wangji didn’t reply. Instead, his free hand came up to rest atop Wei Wuxian’s knee. In another context, it might have appeared comforting or even casual, but with those icicle eyes trained on him, it felt possessive. He looked like he wanted to tuck Wei Wuxian in his sleeve and keep him there.
It wasn’t terribly different from how he had always looked at him, though, so maybe Wei Wuxian was misreading that.
“What about ‘The Wei of the Lan’? Get, it like the way of the land-“
“No.”
“Lan Zhaaan!”
*
Later, when Lan Wangji stood at Wei Wuxian’s side against the entire cultivation world, corpses fertilizing the soil at their feet and those rescued disciples looking at them with twisted brows, Wei Wuxian decided it wouldn’t matter what they named their farmhouse, if they ever got that far.
Lan Wangji would be there, so he was just going to call it “home.”