Archive of Our Own

There are legends of cultivators who have the power of dragons.

The common people outside of the cultivation sects have dismissed the stories of people who can transform their human bodies into ones of giant beasts as myths. Parents whisper to their children as they tuck them in for the night that if they’re not obedient or kind that a monster with the face of a lizard, the body of a serpent, the claws of a lion, the scales of a fish and the mane of a horse will sneak into their homes and snatch them away without a sound. Nobody genuinely believes the tales they retell. After all, who’s naive enough to trust in the existence of creatures who haven’t been seen for centuries?

Cultivators are a different story entirely.

Dragons are a part of their rudimentary education. One learns about the names of dragons of the past just as they learn the names of sect founders. Paintings and drawings of dragons who used their towering forms and devastating spiritual weapons to wreak havoc on their foes and past friends are warnings to the future generation. Sculptures of divine allies are the sects greatest treasures, each one trying to outpace the other with its collection of winding, intricate trophies, each larger than the last, every creator attempting to replicate a masterpiece as large as their models only to inevitably fall short. History books filled to the brim with descriptions of what it feels on one’s skin and eyes to be in a dragon’s presence fill just as many shelves as books about dead generals; in fact, the two topics are rarely mutually exclusive.

The cultivation sects dearest secret is one they have not tried to hide in any shape or form; the common folk just refuse to understand what they can’t hope of seeing with their own two eyes in their lifetime. And to deny the existence of dragons is to announce your status as a fool in the cultivation world because those mystical beings are as alive as the culture they breathe life into and take life away from.

Yunmeng Jiang sect disciples make their lives on the water because they trust the power of the serpent slumbering beneath the sand. Lanling Jin sect leaders lace their towers with gold without fear of thieves because they are protected by the bejeweled beast hidden in the hills. Qinghe Nie warriors strap sabers to their sides in the hopes of proving their strength to the armored beast whose spikes are the blades of honored fallen. Gusu Lan sect students peak their heads out from beneath the cover of classrooms to catch a glimpse of the winding deity who lines the edge of storm clouds that threaten to disrupt classes.

Immortality and the body of a divine creature. Those are the two highest achievements a cultivator can reach in a lifetime.

When Wei Wuxian is found by sect leader Jiang Wanyin and Lan sect jade Lan Wangji after a year-long absence, he is covered from head to toe with black silk robes. His hair is coarser and longer than any man or woman can grow it out to be in a lifetime. He sings a dangerous song with a dizi that glints with a strange light and an unnatural sheen.

The two men see the man they lost to a brutal war, and then he turns around to face them with slitted eyes, torn skin, and rows of sharp spikes. Horns crown his head and peek out from beneath his worn hair, one of which is snapped clean off at the end. Wei Wuxian shifts the fabric of his robes and they slide away to reveal black scales that trace the temples of his face, the edge of his jaw, that cover his entire neck and glove his hands. When he sees the rounded eyes and gaping mouths of the others, Wei Wuxian splits into a grin laced with serrated blades.

“Are you surprised? I told you both that I’d ascend to this state before death. Didn’t I?”

A dragon with a serpents body and the hands of a creator tears through the cultivation world. His words are sharp and his bite is piercing. Talismans trail after his distorted footprints. Fire and curses seep through the cracks of his teeth and come pouring out when one prods him. For the first time in centuries, the world meets a new dragon, and the common folk begins to believe.

Lan Wangji goes into seclusion after Wei Wuxian’s death.

“I heard he was killed at the peak of his den. Torn apart limb by limb at the hands of his own corpses. He wasn’t even in his divine form. I mean, if he was then why wouldn’t he have escaped?”

“The hell do you mean divine form? What heavenly ties can he possibly have left after everything he’s done? Who’s to say that his form was ever one of divine origins!”

“A boy with the promise of eminence whose greatest accomplishment was stealing the image of gods and of being destroyed by his own monsters. What irony. I’d pity the fool if he didn’t bring it upon himself.”

When Lan Xichen climbs the Cloud Recesses’ steps up to their father’s cabin to see his younger brother, the entrance is jammed closed with ice. The door is blown off of its hinges with a flick of his wrist and he’s greeted with a room covered in frost. Sheets of glass cover the surface of the room, stretching from one corner to the other in an unbroken streak. His breath turns to fog the instant he steps out of the spring sun and into the ice.

His boots crack the sheet of ice below as he enters. The further he travels into the room the thicker the ice below his feet and above his head and to both his sides grows. Columns of ice sprout out from the floor in small, spontaneous rows, and as he treads forward they grow in length, thickness, and sharpness. Pieces of furniture are embedded in the columns every now and then, some as large as dressers and some as small as flower pots. Dark blue snakes further and further into his vision as he progresses, the light filtering through the entrance becoming nothing more than a faint sheen against the layers upon layers of glass.

At the back of the room stands a thick wall of crystal, built as a square rather than a stalagmite; he can see the outline of a paper screen sitting beneath the smooth, bumpy layers, imitating a waterfall frozen in time. As he squeezes through the gaps between the columns that seem to narrow the farther he travels into the room and peeks around the artificial wall, he sees a shelter. In the corner of the room that he knows once held a floor mat is a cave made entirely of spears, crisscrossing in and out of one another to shield the corner from view in a dome formation.

Lan Xichen’s breath hitches as he lowers himself onto his knees and peeks through a hole in the dome.

He sees a back covered in bleeding ridges and spines, rising and falling and shaking along with the sound of rasping breaths. Snake scales of rich royal blues are etched into the sides of his ribs and blanket the entirety of his shoulders and neck, only fading away to show skin at a small spot on his back where whip scars have already claimed his flesh. A smooth blanket of hair parts down his shoulders and touches the ground beneath in overlapping layers, covering the floorboards below entirely, as neat as a stack of silk hung from a hook on the wall. With every lurching, rattling breath of air inhaled and exhaled, the ice around him crackles and expands to cover more space. Spikes just outside of the cave grow into existence steadily, some forming a path from the ground to the ceiling in the span of a dozen seconds.

“Wangji…”

At Xichen’s voice, the man in the dome raises his head and turns to look over his shoulder.

He sees a set of golden, glowing, slitted eyes peeking out from behind a mask of blue scales.

Xichen feels a tear slide down his face as he reaches out to touch the edge of the barrier. The cold bites his fingers.

“Wangji.”

-awake-

Wei Wuxian wakes up in the body of a human for the first time in a long time. He decides he hates it as soon as he finds out that he can no longer eat fire, or fly, or scare away any dogs within a mile-wide radius with just a high pitched chirp. Life is made ok again when he learns about chilies and hitching rides with cultivators and borrowing tall men as walls to hide behind, but he’s still annoyed by it all. Waking up after a decade and three-year power nap after burning the cultivation world to the ground (literally and metaphorically) is an experience he finds jarring, to say the least. With his death, he left behind a legacy that he decides is unfair to both him and to those dragons of the past. Demonic cultivation and divine beasts are associated together more often than not now, thanks to him.

Having a human body is inconvenient, but he isn’t sure how to get back his divine form without letting himself get snapped in two like he did those months at the Burial Mounds. Remembering how it felt to transform into his alternative skin does nothing but make his chest burn and his mouth taste like charcoal. Demonic cultivation is as familiar as his own aching arms and legs after a fight, but nothing he does with the “dark arts” pulls a dragon-turning string to summon back his scales or makes him start coughing out fire. The sheer uncertainty of a return to the life he once had is enough to keep him up at night scribbling down ideas on how to turn skin into scales (to remind his soul of what it could once do) and of transforming his limbs into ones of monsters (to teach his new form what it has the potential to do), when he isn’t enjoying his efforts to drive Lan Zhan as far away from him as possible.

And then he discovers that Lan Zhan has changed.

Or rather, Lan Zhan shows him that he’s changed.

Wei Wuxian sees him cut down a monster with nothing more than a strain of his hand, a point of his finger, and a huff of his breath. He sees the air around them constrict and then freeze and then snap as a pillar of ice unsheathes itself from the ground and impales two beasts at once. When he sees the ice and the way it slides into place around Lan Wangji, he feels the hum of the Earth that always followed his own commands of the elements when he was alive. Energy fizzles and buzzes and sings as a master slides his grip into the hilt of his weapon and exposes his blade to the world around him; wind and water and sky are his liquid metal and the shape of his hands the mold that guides their form until his whisper of command dunks the material into a bath of cold and allows the solid shape to take hold.

Wei Wuxian watches him eradicate the creatures foolish enough to cross the pair’s path without so much as a shrug. And then Lan Wangji turns to look back at him with golden, crested eyes. Freckles of scales rim his eyes and brush the bottom of his jaw. His hair drifts further and further down the length of his sides until what once grazed the square of his back scuffs the edge of his ankles. A slow, steady huff of breath blankets the air with sparkling frost and swirls against the summer air.

Wei Wuxian drops the arm that lifted his homemade flute to his face when the attack was sprung.

“You… Lan Zhan?”

“Wei Ying.”

“... you really are convinced that I’m me.”

The man with dragon eyes just stares at him. Horns are beginning to slide out of his temples, jagged and layered like teeth. Their messy, random forms are a stark contrast to his elegant and organized garments, demeanor, and attitude.

Wei Wuxian smiles with canines that are too dull and eyes that lack sparks.

“I guess it’d be unfair to deny it now that you’ve shown me this side of you.”

And he tells him that the fire won’t come back.

In turn, Lan Wangji tells him about the ice that filled his absence.
-yi city-

When he fights Xue Yang in Yi City, he grows back his scales.

Foggy air filled with death surrounds his entire vision and floods his nose. He can hear taunts and swords being slashed through the air and metal resounding against metal, and then he feels a shift. As his senses are overloaded and fade into one another, he feels many perceptions of reality (the faint shadows he sees infrequently flash in and out of his vision, the rising and falling of voices and sounds of movement, the details of the opponent’s story slipping into place) weave into one another, overlap, and then… tilt. The things begging at his attention and nagging at the back of his mind still and quiet as the light grey fog dims to red. Warmth cuts through the cold air like a knife and he looks behind him to meet the gaze of red eyes.

A face he’s all too familiar with stares at him from the fog.

Steam pours out of its nostrils and from the corners of its long, narrow mouth, which is curled with a subdued snarl. Two twisted horns peek out from just above its eyes and swim away from the crown of its head; one is snapped off at the tip. Three rows of serrated silver spikes run along the back of its neck, each pointed proudly towards the sky. Its neck is sloped downwards as if it’s steeping its head below its body to look upon a creature much more delicate than itself. With eyes glowing as if injected with swirling magma, it pins down Wei Wuxian and refuses to loosen its grasp.

“I know you.”

The dragon does not respond.

“You belong to me.”

The dragon’s jaw falls loose, teeth catching the reflection of the burning vermillion veins crawling along the roof of its mouth, and the corners of its lips curl into a smile. Steam rolls out of its mouth and the red of its eyes glow and glow and glow until they burn away everything else in sight and all he can see is the brilliant ruby red light, and he raises his hand to cover his eyes and all he can see is pure white and he squeezes his eyes shut and then it disappears. As he opens his eyes and lowers his arm, he catches sight of his skin.

Black scales blanket the back of his hand and crawl down his wrist one piece at a time, each bit of his pale skin being eaten away by a reptile’s coating as time passes. Razor sharp claws unsheath themselves from his nails and he watches them grow inches in seconds. When he turns up his palm he sees a collection of pale red leather patches that seem to be stretching to cover more of his skin, but then he realizes that they’re not stretching because they’re covering his skin but are stretching because his entire hand is expanding. Pain shoots up his forearms and then his entire arm is screaming and then he feels his chest being lit on fire. His throat is clogging and he can’t remember how to breathe, because the air is trapped and refuses to leave the hole that’s beginning to fill up his entire windpipe.

He knows this feeling. He knows it so, so very well. He has been searching every crevice of his mind for this exact feeling ever since he woke up in this body that isn’t his own.

From a distance impossibly far away, he hears someone shout his name. It’s a familiar voice, so it must be a familiar person. Where…?

A shadow streaks out from the curtain of white fog and strikes towards the center of his back. He sees it, but he doesn’t see it with his eyes and he doesn’t see it in his head, he sees it in the air and in the heat squeezing around his form. His hand is lashing out towards it before he can see what it is. Warm flesh greets his claws and blood sprays out onto his arms and face as skin splits apart in a familiar tear. The shadow draws back into the fog as quickly as it appeared, but it’s a foolish thing to do now. Blood has already been drawn. The need to see shapes and colors with his own two eyes disappeared the moment his weapon hit its target. This fight has been won.

Now that he can taste his foe through the thick of the air everything but the wound on Xue Yang’s stomach fades into oblivion. It’s a simple dance; one man rushes forward as if the ground is water and his legs are fins, the other stumbles backward with skilled yet futile leaps. He quiets his breathing and silences his steps in order to escape the ears of the other, but such moves are futile against an opponent whose eyes and ears and nose and mouth become one after a common enemy has presented itself to its senses. Jabbing, slashing, cutting, and smashing follows every single step Xue Yang makes, almost as if the very fog he created to hide his dead is caving in on him and tearing him apart thread by thread. Blood spills out of him like a paper boat cut through with scissors until he can no longer jump, until he can no longer run, until he can no longer stand. He collapses to his knees as blood sprays out of his mouth and Wei Wuxian moves to jab his fingernails through the man’s brain.

Xue Yang is grabbed by a gravedigger and slung over the man's shoulder before a talisman takes them both away from Yi City.

The fog fades.

“Wei Ying!”

It’s that voice. The voice from earlier, the one that called his name.

Wei Wuxian is soaked in blood and covered in dragon scales when he turns around to meet Lan Wangji’s gaze.

“Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan?”

The man doesn’t hesitate to grab the other’s arm and maintain a firm grip on his wrist. White robes are stained red as he cups the other’s arm in his own and golden eyes scan every inch for a sign of hurt or loss. Then the grip on the wrist loosens just enough to slide down the length of the other’s arm to inspect the black metallic scales that have taken root in his skin. Dark red slides down the flattened layers and drips to the stone below. Both parties know too much about this process to pretend like the blood only belongs to one person. Only one party cares.

“Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan!”

“What?”

Wei Wuxian splits into a grin with canines too sharp and eyes too bright.

“I’m back!”

The other party is filled with joy.

-fire-

It hurts to breathe for far too long.

His scales are back where they should be and his teeth are no longer soft, but this body of his can’t handle the sudden transformation and so won’t stop bleeding. Every time a spike slips out of his neck or back, anytime a claw slides out of the tip of his finger, whenever his scalp has to make room for sudden hair growth; his skin cracks and bleeds and he has to put up with Lan Zhan’s incessant nursing of his wounds. It’s absurd. He’s the Yiling Patriarch, for crying out loud. A couple of incidental scratches (from when he forgets his claws are out and feels an itch) or a couple of gut reactions (when he bites his tongue because he hears a dog bark in the distance and tries to use his old whistle) won’t hurt him. This is the man that once got swallowed by the Xuanwu of slaughter, that was pushed down the Burial Mounds by Wen Chao and came back a divine beast, who has been stabbed in the sides countless times by legendary cultivators only to bounce back twice as strong! So what if he experiences daily blood loss? He can handle it.

But…

It’s difficult to breathe.

Inhales and exhales don’t come out smoothly anymore. Every time he exerts energy and feels his throat squeeze itself tight, so close to shutting itself off from air simply by needing air to keep his blood pumping and his legs moving, he feels so, so frustrated. He needs to keep moving, he needs to keep going, he can’t afford to slow himself or the people around him down by being an inconvenient burden. This pain never bothered him during his transformation before, so why is it like this now? What the hell is holding him back and why does it have such a tight hold on his body and mind?

A part of him knows that it’s the fire. The other part of him wants to think that the fire would never be able to hurt him as he once hurt others with it. Naivety isn’t a character trait he’d assign himself, but he’s on the verge of doing so now that he finds himself defending an element that he knows full well has no loyalty or reserves any kindness for him. But why would the fire sit within him and stew inside him, just enough to alert him of its presence but not enough to give him a chance to redeem himself as a worthy wielder once again?

There are too many questions in his head and he can’t do anything useful with them. All he can do is suffer silently and feel himself unravel from the inside as he puzzles on solutions from the outside.

But the world won’t give him the privilege of silent self-destruction.

One night, when they’d settled down in an inn after a day worth of bloodshed, Wei Wuxian slipped up and couldn’t steady his breathing quick enough after feeling something squeeze his throat. The lapse in consideration caused him to wheeze out a rattly breath, which caused Lan Wangji to stop setting up the room for the night and to stand up as quickly as gravity would allow him to and march himself over to Wei Wuxian’s side.

“I’m fine, I’m fine!” He’d assured Wangji in a voice that was way too strained and grainy to actually assure him of anything. The damn man didn’t give him a chance to prepare for the sudden confrontation.

“Just a bit of a sore throat from all of the yelling I did today. There’s nothing to worry about, Lan Zhan. Why the intensity? It’s not like I-“

Lan Wangji didn’t give him a chance to finish his excuse before closing his hand around the other man’s throat.

If he’d had the opportunity to, he’d have made a joke about not being given a fair warning as to when his words were so annoying as to warrant sudden death. This couldn’t happen though, because he was too busy choking.

It took a hot second for him to realize that he couldn’t breathe and that it wasn’t because of strangulation. His vision flickered, and the next thing he knew he was being laid against the bed beneath him with a cold hand on the square of his back and a hand planted firmly on his throat with a few fingers supporting the back of his head. When his head clears up enough to allow him to think, he realizes that his entire neck is burning and that with every passing second his mouth is filling with fire. Actual, literal fire.

Oh, wait, this is amazing! It’s back! The fire has returned! And it’s keeping him from breathing because it’s trapping the air in his lungs. This is no longer amazing. This is bad. His entire mouth is flooding with fire and his eyes are stinging with tears because the sheer heat seeping out of his mouth is enough to singe the hair on his head. It’s parading up out of his chest and through his windpipe and it doesn’t care whether or not he’ll live through the ordeal, because its only purpose is to escape and destroy.

Then the fire subsides. The scorching feeling in his throat becomes burning, and then it turns into stinging, then scratching, and then he’s gasping for air and the entire world around him floods into his system and he can breathe again. Cold grips his neck and he can feel the curl of a hand on his skin. Although his head is trying to murder him and his eyes are glazing over so much that the world around him is buzzing feverishly in a glassy haze, he can see the silhouette of a person above him that dances between dark brown, snow white, royal blue, and gold. When the ringing in his ears subsides and the smoke spilling from his mouth no longer chokes him, he opens his eyes to a world where the haze has been lifted.

Lan Wangji leans over Wei Wuxian and glares at the base of his neck as if he can chase away the problem at hand if he intimidates it enough. It’s been a solid two days since Wei Wuxian’s seen the other man in an inhuman form (one could argue that he never truly stopped looking inhuman with his ethereal, god-like features and presence. Not him, though. Someone else could certainly make that argument) and his endless patience is rewarded with a VIP close up of the world’s next top dragon cultivator’s features.

Some details that stand out from a distance, such as the shape of those blue scales that curve around the corners of his eyes and the horns that are slowly creeping out from his scalp, seem much more… intricate. His scales cover his cheeks in a single sheet of overlapping layers, but unlike Wei Wuxian’s own, they’re not singular pieces of an entire picture (like fish scales, he supposes) but are interconnected tightly together so that he thinks that he could reach up and tug it all off like a bandaid. Like the scales of a snake, except the layer of scales fade into human skin with tiny spots of individual scales rather than shifting abruptly from pale brown flesh to polished blue. Those horns of his, which have grown large enough that Wei Wuxian thinks he could lay the scabbard of a sword across them and expect it to hold, are woven together with small threads of navy blue. They give the illusion of being smooth as stone from a distance, but this close up he can admire the way each line sits in a compact, orderly fashion and trails all the way from the base to the sharpened tip. Unlike his own horns that replicate scraped metal more than anything else (which he has yet to grow back), Lan Wangji’s replicate that of a tree.

From outside the inn, a breeze picks up just enough to break through the cracked window and causes the candlelight to flicker. Wei Wuxian admires the way the change in lighting causes Lan Wangji’s scales to shimmer. He wonders what they’d look like underneath the full force of the light of the sun, and something tells him that the dark blues would be chased away by something even more brilliant.

By now he’s begun to breathe in normal intervals rather than in the inconsistent, pained fashion from before, and Lan Wangji’s grip has loosened. There’s still a burn, and it’s unlikely that the burn will ever fade now that it’s made room for itself in Wei Wuxian’s body again, but he can live with it. The point in his throat that he assumes is his jugular stings more than the rest of his neck, which is where Lan Wangji has rested his thumb and has yet to stop staring at with a death glare. If that’s not an indication of a wicked looking burn scar than he doesn’t know what is. Plus he thinks he hears a faint cracking sound with every inhale and exhale he makes, and the last time his skin made a sound like that was when the palms of his hands had split apart with the force of fire during a fight in his previous life.

Hell yes. HELL yes.

What he now acknowledges was panic fades into pure exhaustion as his body finally grabs hold of his mind and yanks it to the ground. Sudden bursts of fire aren’t something a human body is adjusted to, even if his scales are sliding back into place and his senses are sharpening into what they once were. In other words, after his chest is finished threatening to choke him to death and simultaneously combust like a malfunctioning firework, he’s left with nothing but furious blinking and a bite to the inside of his mouth to keep him from knocking the fuck out. Then he makes eye contact with Lan Wangji, and he slips.

Lan Wangji’s gaze is still glued to the cracked spot on Wei Wuxian’s neck, so it’s not weird (totally 100% not weird) that he’s tracking every shift and swirl of sinking color in the other’s eyes. His pupils are slitted like a cat’s and his irises leave no room for any sclera, which allows for clouds of golden dust to collect and scatter in varying degrees of richness and brightness and to flood every available space. Sometimes the dust clouds disperse into a new part of the eye, sometimes they combine with others to create a burst of scattered particles that steadily flow outwards to escape the initial impact and to cling to the far edges. Rich, dark veins weave in and out of the others, like tree roots, overlapping the unsettled clouds of dust and curve around the outer rim of the eyes. Every blink causes new patterns to form, new ways for the light of the room to dance along with the glass, new particles to pop up so that he can track and take note of them.

Is this how his own eyes look?

He doesn’t think so.

Gold is so much grander than fire, he realizes. But only when in its purest form. Only when in this form.

Then Lan Wangji meets his stare and Wei Wuxian blinks a whole bunch before staring at the ceiling, which is hard to do when most of it’s covered up by another person’s face. He saves himself by pointing a finger to his neck and croaking out a “Can I move?”

Lan Wangji withdraws his hand from the other’s throat and slides out the hand under his back which allows Wei Wuxian to finally sit himself up. He leans against the wall and kicks out his legs with an exaggerated huff. A few minutes later, he’s using a small mirror to admire the series of faintly glowing cracks branching out from the center of his throat, surrounded by a darkened patch of black scales.

Wei Wuxian turns to the Lan Wangji who’s sitting at the other end of the room, whose horns have retreated and whose skin is free of any blemishes, and who’s watching Wei Wuxian’s every move with poorly concealed concern. Then he flashes a grin with serrated teeth and swirling eyes. When Lan Wangji closes his eyes and turns his head away, Wei Wuxian notes the way the newly formed cracks in his own neck glow just a little brighter.

-flight-

Flying is fucking fantastic.

Not the bullshit, cheapskate, abhorrent form of flying that every lowly cultivator in this goddamned land chooses to stand all high and mighty by. He pities and wants to devour any fool who claims they know what it is to fly.

Flying on swords is like hopping along on one leg. It’s like fighting with one arm tied behind your back. It’s like eating a bowl of congee without adding an entire bag of dried ghost peppers into the mix. In other words, it’s like getting a taste of the possibility to experience something useful or proper or just- just good, and then choosing to stand at the very edge of the whole experience because nah, you’re good with just getting a quick look and then staying at where you’re at.

Actual flying is the source of all that is good in the world, he thinks as he clings to the back of Lan Wangji’s neck and watches the landscape blur into a repetitive stream of hills and mountains and rivers and lakes.

He’s missed this more than he’s missed the promise of fire, and he missed that so much it felt like he was caving in on the hollow spot where it used to be. Now that it’s back where it should be, he realizes that the desperation due to a lack of power (because that’s what it was called, he admits) was nowhere near the desperation due to a lack of joy. And that joy came from people (that he can never get back) and places that, for what seemed like an eternity, he could not reach. Places like the Lotus Pier’s river during the Spring festival, where they sent countless lanterns into the water and watched them spin around each other for hours on end; a table on LuanZang Hill with mounds of dishes and crowds of people gathering at his shoulders. Places like the roof of a shop overlooking the houses of the city below, watching the bustling of people and the swaying of the lanterns strung high above the heads of pedestrians, a figure at his side scowling at his every comment and yet grinning at the sound of laughter.

And then there was the sky.

Wei Wuxian wraps his arms in the threads of Lan Wangji’s hair and leans out from the safety of his scales to feel the wind yank at his hair and robes. He closes his eyes once they begin to sting, and then opens them again to take in the full extent of the night sky above. Familiar constellations swim alongside unfamiliar ones, each collection sinking into one another in such a way that they stand alone and yet cannot be considered separate. The sky is devoid of clouds, which leaves nothing but black rimmed with dark blue to hold up the stars.

Ah. That’s what Lan Zhan’s scales reminded him of!

When Wei Wuxian first discovered Lan Wangji’s divine form, he demanded that the other take him for a flight. It was directly after the slaughter (calling it a fight is laughable) of those monsters and Wei Wuxian had submitted to the concept that ok maybe he was actually the Yiling Patriarch. His request to go flying was immediate and demanding, because Wei Ying is a man who sets his priorities straight, and also because his brain jumped immediately from “Lan Zhan’s a dragon” to “a dragon delivery service is a fantastic idea once I get my divine form back” to “Lan Zhan can do it for me until I get my divine form back” to “holy SHIT Lan Zhan can take me flying” and everything after that train of thought was said aloud.

It took a solid week of constant badgering, but here he is! Wrapped in the mane of a dragon and swimming through the air at a height that would put clouds to shame, watching the world below sleep under the blanket of a quiet night with stars he’d long given up on counting. The pulls of the wind are combated by the warmth of the neck he holds, so much so that if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d slip to his death if he dozed off, he’d already be sinking into sleep with the warmth of the other to guide him.

Flying like a passenger is underwhelming compared to flying in his own divine form. He can’t feel the thrum of energy squeezing through every blood vessel in his body in order to lift him up into the air, he can’t feel his own head of hair turn into a mane, he can’t feel his limbs stretch out until the bones no longer resemble the weak forms of humans and instead become the pillars that hold his winding, impossibly long spine up and up and up until the screams from below become drowned out by the wind. As a passenger, he can’t change his body into anything but a faint mockery of the celestial prowess that once enveloped his soul. All he can do is lean out over the world below enough so that Lan Wangji’s hair doesn't suffocate him and pretend like it’s 15 years in the past.

It’s still exponentially better than flying on a sword, though. He’ll stand by that until the day he dies again.

“Lan Zhan?”

Rather than speak in a human tongue, the body below him hums a single, flat tune in such a way that the sound resonates in Wei Wuxian’s mind more than in his ears. One that can be heard through the thick of the wind. Gods, he misses having a voice like that.

“They know now.”

Lan Wangji hums in the same level note as before.

“This body is too weak. If you weren’t forced to carry me then you wouldn’t have revealed yourself to them. Now that they know about your divine form, you can’t live a quiet life. I’m… I'm sorry.”

The wind in his ears slows to a light breeze and the landscape below stands still. Lan Wangji twists his neck until the spot on his mane that Wei Wuxian grips is in his direct line of vision, and then he pins the man down with golden eyes. Rather than look at him directly, Wei Wuxian admires the way that the rest of the dragon’s body sways in the still air, curling in and out of itself like a snake swimming through water.

There is no need.

Wei Wuxian blinks once, then twice, then looks at the other’s face. Lan Wangji’s eyes glow an unnatural sheen in the full light of the moon.

“No need? No need for- oh.”

Wei Wuxian stares, then grins, then snickers, then laughs.

“I did say that, didn’t I?”

Lan Wangji blinks in the way that lizards do, which is a very disturbing thing to witness so up close. Then he dips his head, a head twice as large as Wei Wuxian’s body, and begins to unwind his neck so that it isn’t squeezing around itself.

“Let’s go back to Gusu,” Wei Wuxian says.

The other pauses, offers one last glance back at the man clinging to his neck, and then dives towards the ground below.

-luanzang hill-

The first thing Wei Wuxian does when he gets his divine form back is explode into flames, because he isn’t the Wei Wuxian the world knows and hates if he doesn’t put on a fantastic display of anarchy once he has a crowd.

Fierce corpses line the outside of his old den on the burial mounds. Cultivators of all ages hold their swords at the ready if they haven’t already collapsed from exhaustion. The sounds of labored breaths and wallowing dead fill the cave, blood covers the ground in a sticky layer of dark red, and the humidity in the space is enough to make one consider losing a layer of clothing. All in all, it’s the perfect environment for a living versus dead showdown whose opening act was the reveal of a traitor.

Blood red corpses crawl out of the blood pool in the center of the cave as Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji stand their ground with a spirit attracting flag and a sword laced with light.

When Wei Wuxian recognizes their faces, he opens his mouth and bleeds.

He almost stumbles off of his perch on the mound in the center of the lake. Lan Wangji reaches out to grab the other’s wrist, but freezes when Wei Wuxian catches himself with an arm that’s suddenly grown to be twice as long as his leg. Wei Wuxian convulses and wheezes and gasps and feels a shriek squeeze its way out of his mouth as his head drops down and then lurches upwards in a repetitive dance. Both his arms prop his body up off of the ground like stilts in such a way that his legs stand straight while he grabs the ground with his hands which have long since doubled in size. Bones expand as quickly as his heavy, spotted breathing, skin splits open and slides out over his new muscles and his transforming limbs like water spilling out over the edge of a basin’s rim, and the eyes that he refuses to shut for more than a second slip in and out of total black and burning crimson.

His robes grip tightly at his skin until they burst apart, his hair squeezes out of his scalp until the layers drag below into the blood pool, his teeth squeeze tightly against one another even as his jaw grows long enough to fit each and every dagger. He feels his spine stretch and burn as it slips down the mound in the center of the lake and winds further and further around the ground and eventually occupies too much space to stay on the mound and instead spills out over the surface surrounding the pool and arches into the air. He feels his arms wrap around the entire space of the mound as if it’s a thin tree’s trunk, he feels his back feet slip and scratch against the base of the mound until he has no choice but to let them dip into the shallow lake below. Two arms and two legs turn into three arms and three legs as the tail that has long since snaked onto the surface of the ground outside of the pool branches out into three structures, one of which continues to travel along the ground and become pointed at the end while the other two ends melt into joints and feet and claws.

Wei Wuxian’s screams are as desperate and as human as the people he burnt with his flames over a decade ago, until they fade into something lesser than that, and eventually slip into something more ancient and resounding than any one human being has the power to make with their own two lungs.

As he arches his winding neck off of the rock below him and raises his head coated in coarse hair, the strands slip away to reveal a panting, serrated maw and two glowing, burning eyes that dance like flames and swim like magma. Spikes the color of rusted iron raise off of the back of his neck in three rows like the frill of a serpent. Smoke spills out of his mouth like an open furnace, and veins of scarlet embedded in the roof of his mouth shed a bright glow.

Hissing akin to a snake yet not like a snake at all fills every crevice of the cavern. To some it sounds like the sizzling of water evaporating around fire, to others it sounds like the scraping of a blade against rock, to few it sounds like seeds in a sack spilling out into a metal pot. To all who hear it, it sounds like music, in the sense that no single layer can be heard without the accompaniment of another, and all of the layers combine together to create a song that nobody can sing to because there’s already a vocalist on the verge of spilling out a dominant melody.

The living, the dead, and the divine all stare up at the dragon winding around the ground and looping through the air that fills its den. Those that can breathe inhale the smell of a spark. Those that can listen hear the scraping of scales against rock and the distant ringing of a shrill ding.

Then the dragon breathes in its vengeance and regret and hate and whistles out the voice of a dizi.

Wei Wuxian’s pupils narrow into thin lines as he catches sight of his prey and the metal skin that lines his form splits apart to make room for the smoke that seeps out of his body. And then the snap of a spark sets every single line between his muscles and his scales alight in a flash of fire. And then he lunges.

-lead me home-

Lan Zhan, rings the flute.

Mm, hums the strings.

Should we return, inquires the flute.

Only if you want, replies the strings.

Two winding figures dance together in the blue of the sky and the embrace of the clouds. Beneath the shine of the sun and in the open arms of the wind, the two coil around each other in a practiced hold. Neither disrupt the other’s flight and yet both hold onto the other as if afraid they’ll slip away from reach if they swim at a distance. Just as the chilled specks of water scrape off of the clouds as they pass through and just as the wind pushes them as much as it pulls, the two dragons curl around each other with just enough distance to distinguish them from one another.

Above them lays a crystalline sky, the one that humans watch and long to reach out to in hopes that some hand will pull them up into the unknown, and that humans can do nothing to touch and instead peek at through glass that catches its light and replicate in stones that mock its versatile blues. Below them sits a sea of pearlescent clouds that shift between thick waves of bumpy edges and thin sprays of misty tails. There is no ground in sight. The only eyes that could possibly land on them are the eyes of the gods and what remains of the sun.

The dragon that looks of ash and smells of smoke burns a path through the mist in the air and emits a thoughtful song. Around him swims the dragon as blue as the view that holds them and that shimmers between the different palettes adorned by the sky according to the way in which the sun is watching.

When do we have to return?

Rather than sing an answer, the blue dragon lets out a series of notes akin to the plucking of a well-tuned guqin when each note is allowed to stew in its own tune for a long while before the next note is called upon. These notes resound through every vein that runs through the two beings, and then settle, and then repeat, until each note slides naturally into the last and the next so that the plucking of the strings is happening separately yet all at once in a single sweeping motion.

That is, until he pulls the strings to say We do not.

At this, the grey dragon laughs a laugh that sounds of a thousand bells and that chimes so much more wonderfully when one remembers its absence, as well as the lengths in which it took to repair them so that they could ring out what was once torn apart by history. He squeezes against the other’s body for a brief moment before twining himself further up the other so that he may be in a position that allows him to turn and face a golden gaze.

Lan Zhan! How rebellious! I never took you to be the type to run away from home so easily! Ah, but we can’t just leave behind your sect. Your Uncle would hunt me down and skin me alive, and what type of parents would we be if we just suddenly abandoned our son?

One day.

At this, the grey dragon turns back towards the horizon and shuts his eyes against the wind.

When what we’ve built has gone. When the world knows us as names rather than people.

The strings hum an affirmative in response, and the flute lets out a soft sigh.

Until then, we stay, the strings call to comfort.

Until all they know of us is our nature and our song, the flute tweets with a sharp grin.

Then, as the grey dragon swims further above the clouds and the blue rises to meet him, as the wind’s howling lowers to a whisper, as the sun watches it all with its single eye and its brilliant, impossibly bright glow, the flute and the strings sing.