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It was a testament to the regularity of the Lan Sect lifestyle that Lan Wangji woke up and began his day without noticing anything out of the ordinary. It was only after he had set his morning tea to steep that he realized there was no evidence of A-Yuan in the house.
The absence of his person was not startling—at nine, it was more usual for a junior disciple to sleep in the dormitories than in anyone’s household, especially someone who was not precisely a parent. But it was as though all his possessions and sentimental little gifts had been swept away in the night as Lan Wangji slept.
The initial burst of horror might have swept him toward a violent protective rage, the conviction that someone in his clan had found out the child’s background and erased him from the Cloud Recesses. Except that when he drew a sharp breath, he realized that all this time since he’d woken up, he had not felt the pull of the scars on his back when he breathed.
He checked, sliding a hand down the back of his collar, under his clothes. No trace of them.
If Lan Wangji did not yet bear those injuries, then—
Lan Wangji finished dressing hurriedly, stepping out with his sword at his side and his instrument on his back into the dimness of the first hour after waking. Even in the poor lighting, he could make out signs of the repaired damage the war had done.
Which meant that not only was Wei Ying alive, it was very likely he was—
Lan Wangji left without a word to anybody.
When he got to Yiling, it was raining.
He hadn’t seen the city in the rain before—it was a dry country, compared to both Gusu and Yunmeng, and he had only visited a few times. The louring clouds seemed to press down from overhead. He hesitated briefly in the street. Perhaps Wei Ying was still home in Lotus Pier? Perhaps there was still time to prevent it coming to this?
Black robes and a scarlet sash crossed his line of sight. A man walking hurriedly through the heavy rain, hunched under an inadequate cloak. Not Wei Ying. One of the pretender ‘disciples’ who used his name to cheat people, and the force of Lan Wangji’s disappointment (Wei Ying was already here; Wei Ying was not right here before him) was so great it drove him across the street and pinned the swindler against a wall by the throat.
The man struggled uselessly to object through the pressure of Lan Wangji’s hand, small strangled noises. “Dishonest,” Lan Wangji spat at him, and let him go, knowing he would fall into the muck.
He turned, and started toward the Burial Mounds.
When he reached them, he stood in the road. Somewhere ahead of him would be the wards Wei Ying had set up. It was earlier in the year than Lan Wangji’s original visit had been. Months earlier. In this weather, no one would be coming down.
So, what was he to do?
The cultivation world had successfully stormed this place, so the defenses could not be too mighty. But that did not mean they were not enough to kill a single unwary Lan Wangji.
Should he shout? Fly up until he could be seen from the hilltop? Sit in the rain and play his qin?
...play his qin to interrogate any passing ghosts? That might be his best option, though it sat poorly with him.
But then between one instant and another, though he had scarcely looked away, Wei Wuxian was standing in the road ahead of him.
Wei Ying was in front of him.
He looked distant, untouchable; the water running from his hair and through his clothes in spite of the battered bamboo hat he wore making him seem ghostlike, rather than merely drenched.
Even his ghost was more than Lan Wangji had truly hoped to ever see again. And this was not a ghost, this was the living man.
“Lan Wangji?” he asked, really puzzled. “What are you doing here?”
“Wei Ying,” said Lan Wangji. And then no more.
It was not rare, exactly, for him to find himself at a loss for words, but it was uncommon for him to struggle with it. Usually either he knew what he wished to say, or he wished to say nothing. But he’d always grown tongue-tied around this man. Wanting two or three or four things all at once. To be unmoved; to move Wei Wuxian to smile; to impress upon him the force of Lan Wangji’s feelings and why he should not trifle with them; to touch and kiss and hold—
He felt clearer, now, with the benefit of hindsight. There was no use wishing to be unmoved. There was no use wishing to claim kisses that would not be offered. There was no use lingering on the idea of his own demand for Wei Wuxian to take him seriously, if he did not mean to act upon it.
But even with only a single road left open before him, he remained at a loss as to how to walk upon it.
“Lan Wangji,” said Wei Ying again, and it had in it some of that light contempt with which he’d addressed him that time they had met in Yunmeng, and Wei Ying had ordered corpses to give him flowers.
Lan Wangji had regretted, later on, not keeping any of those flowers.
“What business does Hanguang-jun have with me?” Wei Ying demanded, and his eyes fell to Bichen, gripped so tight Lan Wangji’s hand felt nearly bloodless. As though he expected to be struck down.
Moving Wei Ying to smile might be beyond him, but it wasn’t what mattered. Lan Wangji just needed him to live.
“Well?”
Lan Wangji fell to his knees.
The ground was wet and churned-up; the stain would never come out of his robe.
Wei Wuxian was staring at him.
“Please,” he said. He did not know what else to say.
Wei Wuxian looked alarmed. This was unfortunately an improvement. “Lan Zhan,” he said, and moved toward him. Like that much was simple. Like it was easy, deciding to go to his side. “Lan Zhan, what—really, what is this—”
His hand reached out, then stopped. Remembering that Lan Wangji did not like to be touched.
Lan Wangji caught it in his own, before it could fall back to his side. Wei Ying’s was chilled by the rain. He pressed it to his own cheek, skin cool against his own warmth—to bring it to his lips would be presuming beyond Wei Ying’s comfort; to press it to his brow presuming an intimacy that he had no right to claim, even if Wei Ying would not recognize the weight of the gesture.
Lan Wangji did not feel thirty years old. He felt twenty, and yet he knew what the next decade would bring him, if he kept on as he had.
It was no solution, to live with all his loyalty owed to the Lan, and his heart in the unknowing keeping of Wei Wuxian. It would not protect him, in the end. And it would save no one.
“Wei Ying,” he said.
“Lan Zhan?”
“I want to help you.” Had he ever said as much before?
Get lost. Get lost. Get lost.
He added, “Please.”
“You can’t help me! Hanguang-jun.” Wei Wuxian took the hand Lan Wangji was holding, twisted it so he could firmly grip Lan Wangji’s hand across the palm in return, and hauled him onto his feet. Steadied him with the opposite hand on his elbow, touches easy and casual now, warm despite the chill of the rain, neither hesitant nor teasing, only a little brusque. “Lan Zhan. It’s too late to help me.”
But it wasn’t too late. Too late was when Wei Ying was dead, his body shredded and lost in the hell of the Burial Mounds, his spirit unanswering, his possessions looted; not a thing left of him but the child.
Lan Wangji shook his head.
“Not too late?” Wei Ying grinned, after all, and there was mockery in it, and tension, but it was so bright and warm and living. “Ah, Lan Wangji. I can’t be mad at you, when you’re like this about it. But you need to let it go. I can’t be fixed, no matter if you locked me in the Cloud Recesses and played at me for ten years straight.”
Ah. Yes. Back in these days, he’d had such ambitions for saving Wei Ying, if it could be done at all—that he could mend all the harm that loss and war and wickedness had done, and get back the boy he had loved.
But that day in Yiling had shown him that most of what he longed for survived in the man.
Of course he still wanted to heal him, but it wasn’t like during the war. Wei Wuxian wasn’t lost, he didn’t need Lan Wangji to fish his spirit back from the depths like a ghost that was forgetting its own name. It had been infuriating, to realize he’d worked so hard on music that wouldn’t solve Wei Ying’s greatest troubles even if he were allowed to use it. That Wei Ying’s trouble now was that he’d chosen to die in a place like this, for these people.
For A-Yuan.
Get lost. Get lost. Get lost.
Wei Ying didn’t want his love. But he wasn’t spurning him so harshly, now that things were less terrible. His fingers were wrapped around Lan Wangji’s hand, and even now he squeezed a little, bracing. “Lan Zhan—”
“Let me help,” he repeated, and then fumbled a little with the hand Wei Ying wasn’t holding, to draw out his money bag. It was full of silver. He didn’t know how much. Would not have known precisely even without the falling-away of years. He had never bothered being careful with his personal finances, habitual frugality being sufficient to make him comfortable spending however much he liked, when he did want to, since he always had more than he needed.
He pressed it on Wei Ying, who frowned, and stopped holding his hand, and stepped backward. Lan Wangji closed his eyes in pain. Would it always happen like this? Was there nothing he could offer without driving Wei Ying away? “Please,” he said again. “Wei Ying has dependents.”
A-Yuan had not gone hungry, in the Burial Mounds, but Wei Ying had grown so thin.
Wei Wuxian’s face twisted up, but not, in the end, into a mask of rage, so it did not alarm this older Lan Wangji the way it would have when he was really this young. “Lan Zhan,” he groaned. “You’re just too good, aren’t you? You just have to be this righteous all the time.” He sighed, but he took the bag of silver, swinging it by the strings as though it were a cheap bauble. “Do you want to come meet them, then?”
Ah. Had he not, yet? That must make him seem even more mad than he would have anyway. Lan Wangji nodded.
“Well. We’re not really prepared to welcome guests. But you’ll fit in much better with all that mud on your skirts!” Wei Wuxian laughed, and Lan Wangji’s heart thundered within him. What would he not do, to hear that sound every day?
Wei Ying began to turn, to lead him up the mountain, and then paused.
“Ah,” he said, and tucked the purse into his sleeve and bent, to pick up—Bichen.
Lan Wangji had let go of it at some point while kneeling, had left it in the mud.
“Careful,” said Wei Ying, passing it over. Teasing, now. Something tense and watchful almost concealed under his warm and easy manner, but not, Lan Wangji thought, something suspicious. Wei Ying was worried. “Hanguang-jun can’t go picking up this one’s careless habits, ah!”
Lan Wangji accepted the return of his sword, slightly shocked with himself and yet oddly unsurprised.
When he had really been this age, he could never have done such a thing. But he had not known what it was to truly fail Wei Wuxian, then; what it meant to lose him.
Yes, he thought, as Wei Wuxian began to lead him through the rain up the narrow track that led into the worst place in the known world. Feeling the weight of Bichen in his hand, the most precious and priceless thing he had ever owned—but still, in the end, though it had its own spirit, it was a thing. When Wen Xu had taken it from him, it had not ached the way not knowing his family’s fates had done.
When Wei Ying had snatched the ribbon from his head to tie up his hurt leg, it had not burned like watching that same youth die by inches before his eyes, in that cavern where there had been nothing left he could do to help.
Yes, I would give even this for you, if it would let you live.
There was no way, of course, for Lan Wangji to trade his spiritual weapon for Wei Wuxian’s life. Any more than there had been to trade his life for it, or his position in his Sect.
The thought was merely a measure of his resolve—strengthened and annealed, by now, from the uncertain stuttering thing of the youth he had been and even from the wild, desperate sudden conviction of a young man choosing love over sense, into something smooth and ungiving as the surface of the blade itself.
He had already found a way to offer something in a way Wei Ying would accept, even if it was something so small. Proving, perhaps, that he had always been his own greatest enemy.
Yes, he decided, setting his feet carefully in the wet mud of the path, avoiding the occasional bone exposed by new erosion, and checking every few seconds that Wei Wuxian's back was still before him, grey through the rain but exquisitely corporeal. Yes. He could succeed. He would succeed. The problem before had been that there were too many things he wanted, and too many things that he feared.
They gained the summit of the sodden trail, and A-Yuan's high young voice cried out for his Xian-gege. Lan Wangji drew breath, and gripped his sword, and went to seek the promised introductions.