Chapter Text
Is this all we were ever meant to be?
~*~
It takes Lan Wangji far, far too long to realise what his soulmate has done.
His bond with Wei Ying has always been something he finds uncomfortable, in the way it strips his privacy and makes every wall, every boundary he puts up look like smokescreens instead of the shields he needs them to be, to hide safely behind, where he may not be known. Lan Wangji has made it his business to shut it away from himself as much as possible, to avoid hurting himself on the sharp spikes and sudden freefalls of Wei Ying’s emotions. He cannot avoid the pain of the frequent physical punishments that Wei Ying brings down on himself, unruly as he is, uncaring of how Lan Wangji must share in his beatings even if at a distance removed.
It's just that Wei Ying never stops. Never stops, never thinks, never considers. Simply sets his eyes on an undefined point in the horizon and cartwheels towards it, leaving Lan Wangji choking on the dust of his tumultuous, wild excesses. It’s always been too much for a boy who has spent his entire life locked up on a quiet, peaceful mountain. Who has trained himself to be inoffensive and immaculate, so that he may never bring harm or censure on himself, knowing that his soulmate would have to endure it with him.
Maybe Wei Ying just doesn’t care. Lan Wangji has never asked him, and doesn’t plan to.
He’s scared of the answer.
He is happier, not knowing.
Once upon a time, on a high, moonlit wall, Lan Wangji met his match, and his heart has never been able to accept it.
Later, his brother tells him, that must be why he has survived with his sanity intact. He was spared the worst of the pain.
If Lan Wangji were a better soulmate, he would think, how much worse has it been for Wei Ying?
All Lan Wangji can think is, if Wei Ying were a better soulmate, he would not have done this to me.
~*~
He falls to his knees when the knife goes into his belly.
Butter-slick-slide-slice and it’s gone, and there are fingers, fingers in his belly, in his body, pulling his flesh apart at the seams, fingers on his organs, filthy little sharp little fingertips nudging and poking and prodding at the most precious, delicate, sacred part of him, there are someone’s hands in there, someone’s hands digging into his life, putting their dirty sticky self all over it how how how could how dare how dare who’s ripping his life away, who has his soul, filthy little hands all over the most secret, inviolate thing he possesses, and they’re tearing, ripping slicing cutting stealing robbing ripping screaming wailing crying raping killing maiming taking taking taking it gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s gone it’s go-
Mercifully, someone knocks him out.
He sleeps and he swings over the edge of a knife, a broad butcher’s cleaver sharp enough to cut through the thick bones of an ox. He hangs like a pendulum, east-west-east-west-east, and with each slow swing he drops an inch closer to the point where he will be sliced in half.
He wakes, and his skin is on fire, his bones have melted into his flesh, he cannot see, he cannot breathe, he only screams give it back give it back give it back give it-
He sleeps and he wakes and he sleeps and he wakes and somewhere in all the screaming, he gathers enough of himself together to know that something, somewhere, is terribly, horribly wrong, and it is not here.
He screams and screams and screams, and he wants to tell them, not here – the danger is not here, but his teeth have been wrenched apart by a leather bit so he won’t bite his own tongue off, and even if he could speak – but he can’t, so he shivers in his cold, hurting body and focuses on the feeling of the light leaving his life.
It takes two days and two nights for someone to cut out Wei Ying’s golden core, and Lan Wangji feels every second of it.
~*~
Xiongzhang will not let him hunt.
They have only just found each other again. Lan Wangji has watched the ashes of his home scatter into the wind. He has marched to his near-certain death broken, but not bent, and he has paid the price to march away from it in the shredded musculature of his palms after killing a rabid murder turtle. And he has done it all knowing that his father is dead, that uncle might be, that his brother is lost.
Lan Wangji has endured long weeks of uncertainty. Now they have found each other again, the last scions of a broken, burnt home, and they cannot give each other up so easily.
He tries anyway, once or twice. Even he can’t tell if it’s a token attempt to do something, or if he really is that desperate to find Wei Ying, but he is weak and shaken after sweating out Wei Ying’s agony for two days and nights. He doesn’t get far; doesn’t even manage to leave his cot, in fact, and then he gives up trying.
Even if they find him, what’s to be done, now? Now, now that Wei Ying’s golden core has been – stolen.
Lan Wangji wonders, with infinite hate, to whom it went.
Xiongzhang doesn’t believe him.
It must be Wen Zhuliu, he insists. Nie Mingjue’s scouts have brought back news of the Wen marching towards Yunmeng. It’s days old intelligence, of course, so by now the Wen must have clashed with the Jiang, may have overpowered the Jiang, and Wei Ying, his bright beautiful beating heart torn out by the monster in a man’s skin. Wen Zhuliu.
It’s not like any of them know what it’s like to have their golden core melted, Xichen tells him, wincing his way through it with miserable determination. It’s terrible, an unspeakable tragedy – but for Lan Wangji to go out now in search of his soulmate, across borders besieged by patrolling Wen troops, in his current state of weakness and semi-delirium – it will not be even thought of. He must rest, and recover his strength, and hope and pray for better news. Any news at all.
He has to think about revenge, Mingjue-xiong tells him. Wen Zhuliu’s a rabid, slavering filthy disgusting mutt who should have been put down the moment he popped his head up in the world, and the only way forward is to avenge Wei Ying, avenge his golden core, his ruined potential and all the years of immortality that Wen Zhuliu has stolen from them both. He has to rest, and recover his strength, and think of revenge against the filthy, greedy, gluttonous, ruinous, repulsive beasts, those Wen-dogs.
Poor Wei-xiong, Nie Huaisang commiserates in strangely low, gentle tones, as if he understands the magnitude of what is lost. He looks like he wants to ask Lan Wangji how Wei Ying is doing, what he’s feeling. He opens his mouth as if waiting, judging whether it’s safe to speak. He shuts his mouth and goes away quietly, with his head bowed. And in the end, Lan Wangji says nothing.
None of them believes him. Wei Ying’s golden core isn’t gone. It’s been taken from him. From them.
But it isn’t gone.
~*~
He wakes up in the middle of the night, wondering if Wei Ying’s golden core lives inside Wen Zhuliu now, if that is what the monster does to his victims.
He can still feel Wei Ying’s core, a little weaker, a little fragile. But growing steady, settling – in.
He vomits.
~*~
Lan Wangji isn’t sure if it’s Wei Ying who is going insane, or himself.
He thinks it’s Wei Ying. He frankly can’t see it isn’t Wei Ying, who has surely, surely endured more than any human being can be expected to take, and keep his sanity. The worst of the pain is not over; Wei Ying has simply grown used to it, and so too has Lan Wangji. Now that some broken part of them both has accepted the hurt as unending, like a heartbeat or a breath, Lan Wangji can remember more than knives and that horrific, catastrophic sensation of tearing.
It has been so long since he felt what Wei Ying felt, right through to the beating heart of him. Ever since he had locked away his end of their bond, he has not received more than the odd, hazy flash from his soulmate. Easily brushed away, thoroughly ignored. None of his business, usually.
It somehow doesn’t surprise him that what Wei Ying felt – has been feeling – is determination. Wei Ying has always been so stubborn. So reluctant to let go, even when he is not wanted. Of course he would cling to life with everything he had. Of course he would not let the Wens break his spirit, even though they have taken everything from him.
What is a cultivator, without a golden core?
Not a cultivator.
Wei Ying, Lan Wangji realises with absolute clarity, for the very first time, is going to die.
If he survives the torture he is being subjected to, he will fight this war that the sects are allying towards, and he will die, because he is a mediocre man now, with a mediocre man’s strength and endurance.
If he survives the war, he will grow wrinkles and rheumatism, his hair will grey and thin and his teeth will grow soft in his gums, and in a few short decades he will die, because he is a mediocre man now, with a mediocre man’s lifespan and vitality.
And Lan Wangji, if he survives this war, will live for centuries, untouched and unchanging through the swift-flowing rivers of time.
And Wei Ying – what is Wei Ying to him, even? Just a soulmate, whom he is wildly attracted to, desperately in love with, and does not in the least want to keep.
He shouldn’t care, not beyond what is decent and necessary to mourn his and Wei Ying’s premature losses. He shouldn’t care.
He keeps telling himself he shouldn’t care, and Wei Ying keeps breaking, pieces of him shattering off like so much scattered ephemera – a broken wrist here, a stab in his thigh there.
And then – a moment of picture-perfect clarity. Of terror so acute that Lan Wangji wakes from his fitful dreams, seizing on his cot, his arms locked to his sides, his eyes wide and unseeing, his belly cramped and bile surging up his throat for him to choke on.
He can’t breathe.
Wei Ying is going to die. Wei Ying is going to die and Wei Ying knows it. Wei Ying can see it. He’s going to die now. Wei Ying is going to die now now now now now now now n-
His brain whites out. His nerves are a hundred thousand pinpricks of white-hot needles stabbing into his gut his eyes his lips his tongue his toes his teeth his lungs his arms he can’t feel his arms he can’t feel his he can’t he can’t feel his legs he can’t feel his bones his bones the edges of his bones through his flesh grinding scraping what is that noise make it stop make it stop he can’t feel anything he can’t feel anything he can’t feel
He has to be dead.
He must be dead. Please be dead. Please please please be dead. Please please please please please please please please please
Now they’re going mad together.
~*~
He shivers awake in the dark. He’s so cold.
~*~
Maybe he’ll freeze to death. All the way to death, and it’s so, so close. He could reach for it, and have it, and keep it.
It wouldn’t be a bad way to die.
~*~
But but but but but but
~*~
Who’s going to make them pay?
~*~
Everything hurts and why can’t he just die.
~*~
This, too, he gets used to.
~*~
When Lan Wangji wakes up next, they tell him seven days have passed. His brain stumbles over the information, filled with the clickety-clack of abacus beads trying to compute a sum that just doesn’t make sense. Only a week? How is it possible for so much to have happened in just seven days, for his world to have been turned upside down again, in between one breath and the next?
He isn’t sure how much of the loss he feels is his own, and how much is Wei Ying’s, blaring unfiltered through their bond for the first time since they met. It takes him a while to work through the wall of determination – still the same obstinate focus, now pointed like the tip of a sword, sharp enough to bleed out on. It’s a long time before he realises that of course Wei Ying can’t suppress the bond at his end anymore.
You need a golden core for that.
He wonders if it would be a kindness to undo the latch at his end, to slide open the door and let the tangled skein of his own feelings unravel outward, towards his soulmate. He wonders if Wei Ying would welcome it, or if it would add to his burdens to have to bear all of Lan Wangji’s messed-up, confused, half-resentful affection towards him, all his fear and pain reflected back like cold comfort.
If it were him in Wei Ying’s place, as horrifying and unimaginable as it seems, he would want Wei Ying to keep himself away. He would want to recover his sanity and dignity in peace; he would want to be afforded privacy to suffer and to heal, if Wen Zhuliu had taken his golden core.
So he keeps himself locked away nice and safe, and congratulates himself on a job well done. There are bigger priorities than pestering Wei Ying with unwanted attention when he is nearly dead, when he should be dead but is somehow choosing to go on. He’s such a cockroach. Lan Wangji loves him.
But for Wei Ying to live – Lan Wangji considers the distance between Qinghe and Yunmeng, considers the legions of assembling Wen troops between here and wherever Wei Ying is has been left to die. He’s not going to make it unless someone brings him back here.
Lan Wangji knows that these are the first seedlings of rebellion sprouting in his heart. No one is going to rescue Wei Ying unless no one is named Lan Wangji. And yet, how? Xiongzhang will not let him leave, especially now. Lan Wangji has seen the grim looks his brother and Nie Mingjue have been trading over his sickbed when he’s been screaming his head off. They’ve already written Wei Ying off as a casualty of war. Tragic, but done for.
After all, even if Wei Ying survives his broken body, he’ll be relegated to nothing, a crippled dependent to be given a sickroom and a healer where he can live out the rest of his days in peace and quiet. Standard care for victims of Wen Zhuliu.
And he’ll weaken and age and sicken and die, of something unbelievably stupid, like a winter chill or an infection of the lungs or something else common like that. Standard end of victims of Wen Zhuliu.
So really, rescuing Wei Ying can wait, Xiongzhang will say in reasonable tones, because Lan Wangji, with all his potential still awake and unfulfilled before him, is too precious to risk over the short, predictable life of a commoner.
Xiongzhang, Lan Wangji thinks with gradual deliberation, can go fuck himself.
Lan Wangji knows that he has not been a welcoming soulmate, and is perhaps even an unwelcome one. He’s never bothered to fix the first, and has gotten over the rest. He has never wanted to keep Wei Ying. He has never made any secret of that fact. But not wanting to be with someone, and wanting to throw them away, he thinks, are two entirely opposing propositions.
He feels the manic concentration of Wei Ying’s resolve soak into his own bones and wonders if he’s selfish for taking strength from Wei Ying when he doesn’t dare offer any of his own back.
He’ll take his punishment later, after he has found Wei Ying.
Surely, having to watch Wei Ying die will be punishment enough?
~*~
Seven days after that, Jiang Wanyin walks into Nie Mingjue’s ancestral halls. He wears a scowl on his ugly face, Wei Ying’s golden core in his guts, and a pack of inconceivably idiotic lies about Baoshan Sanren on his tongue.
~*~
In the months that follow, Lan Wangji learns to hate.
Jiang Wanyin makes himself easy to loathe, available and guilt-ridden as he is. Through his half-crazed rantings they have pieced together a terrible picture – Wang Lingjiao and her unreasonable, psychotic demands, Wei Ying’s whipping, the devastation of the Jiangs. The havoc wreaked by Wen Zhuliu, who took Jiang Wanyin’s golden core, and then by Wen Qing, who took Wei Wuxian’s.
Because he willingly handed it to her.
And from there, it’s so, so easy to hate.
It licks like a fire under Lan Wangji’s skin, till he feels like a monster waiting to be unleashed. On whom, he doesn’t know yet, but he will have the chance to find out soon enough. Jiang Wanyin is hateful and he should be dead instead of here, with Wei Wuxian’s life spinning away in his dantian, but he makes himself useful. With him roaring and raving and bulldozing over everyone’s politely horrified attempts to make sense of the abomination that Wei Ying has enacted, it is easier than Lan Wangji had anticipated, to get Xiongzhang to agree to a manhunt for Wei Wuxian.
Lan Wangji would spare some sympathy for the way the other man has been violated, saddled with half a soulbond that is not his own, if he wasn’t quietly burning with revulsion and fury himself, at what Wei Wuxian has dared to do to him. To him.
He has known that Wei Wuxian, for all his teasing and pigtail-pulling, has never really thought of Lan Wangji as a true companion. Boring, unyielding, pedantic and repressed – the four nails of death in the coffin of all Lan Wangji’s hopes, the sum total of Wei Wuxian’s true opinion of him. That’s fine, Lan Wangji hasn’t exactly been enthused by his fated life’s companion, either.
But this?
Tying him without his knowledge, without his consent, and very much against his will, to someone else?
Wei Wuxian has never touched him in that way, but Lan Wangji feels like he’s been bent over and fucked like some bitch in public, his humiliation and desecration out there for everyone to see.
He wants to know why.
Jiang Wanyin has the answer, and won’t say it. He averts his eyes from Lan Wangji’s, shame bowing his spine even as he bristles and mutters insults towards his brother. At first, Lan Wangji takes his reticence as a sign that Wei Wuxian gave up his core under duress, that Jiang Wanyin had forced him to –
But Jiang Wanyin looks him in the eye and says no. Says no and means it, and Lan Wangji can tell, because of the shared churning nausea in their bellies above the conjoined hum of their cores. His body is tearing itself in half, unable to reject the spiritual energy it desperately needs to heal whatever Wen Zhuliu did, yet also unable to accept the roots of Lan Wangji’s soulbond with Wei Wuxian, locked between their cores. At the moment, the bond is a jagged thing, rending at their meridians so every breath is torture, every heartbeat out of sync.
Lan Wangji’s heartbeat has never known any other rhythm but Wei Wuxian’s. It revolts in disgust and fear at the unsteady staccato thumping of the thing in Jiang Wanyin’s chest, shuddering away into the shadows at the slick-slide sensation of Jiang Wanyin’s blood alongside his own.
Jiang Wanyin isn’t doing any better. His temper is a feral beast as they track Wei Wuxian across the Jianghu. Zidian lights up with a viciousness that is eclipsed only by the thrum of Wangji’s strings as it cuts through the necks of Wen Ruohan’s clansmen. They work well together, he and Jiang Wanyin, and it sickens him to the marrow, because he and Wei Wuxian have never had the opportunity to fight together in this way, towards a shared goal. It is a dream that will stay unfulfilled, dashed to smithereens by Wei Wuxian’s own uncaring hands.
Lan Wangji hates him.
~*~
Wherever Wei Wuxian is holed up, he’s still in unimaginable pain. It burns icy-hot through Lan Wangji’s meridians till his bones feel fissured and his muscles feel like crushed fruit pulp.
A few weeks ago, he wept for Wei Wuxian’s agony, wondered how he could stand it when it must be so much worse for him than it is for Lan Wangji, who’s getting everything through a filter. Now he knows that Wei Wuxian chose this, that he did this to them both with full deliberation, and when he wakes up thinking that he’s breathing air that feels like rotten flesh and acid in his throat, he hopes spitefully that Wei Wuxian chokes on it.
Sometimes, when the exhaustion drags heavy on his sleeves, the strain begins to show. Whatever Jiang Wanyin sees in his face on those nights, it disturbs him enough that he makes a few clumsy attempts to soothe Lan Wangji’s anger towards Wei Wuxian, tries making excuses about his mother and his father and himself and half a dozen other irrelevancies.
His rage is not something that he has spoken of openly. He can’t escape the uncomfortable sensation that Jiang Wanyin can only sense it because of the soulbond that is still locked onto Lan Wangji’s core, despite his constant attempts to block it out. It ignites a revulsion in him that is visceral in a way that shakes them both, leaves him standing breathing heavily over Jiang Wanyin’s body where it lies beaten down into the mud.
Lan Wangji raises a leg over the whimpering form at his feet, and aims a kick right into the soft tissue under Jiang Wanyin’s ribs. He kicks twice, and again, and again, till the other man has gotten the point – shut the fuck up.
Jiang Wanyin doesn’t try to talk to him again.
They hunt for Wei Wuxian in near-silence, well-coordinated like gears made to fit each other’s grooves, and he despises every minute of it.
~*~
They find him three months later in Yiling, where he’s busy chopping Wen Chao and his pet dog into little pieces and feeding them to each other. On principle, Lan Wangji approves. Once, he might have been appalled by how far Wei Wuxian has clearly fallen, cloaked in resentful energy, cultivating it of all the blasphemies he could have chosen to carry out.
But that was before. When he believed that there were still lines of decency his soulmate would not cross. Now, he watches alongside a stunned and scared Jiang Wanyin as Wei Wuxian brutalises the Wens till they have been reduced to sub-humanity, and wonders if this capacity for obscene degrees of violence comes from the same place that allowed Wei Wuxian to desecrate a soulbond. He is not surprised, not really anything until the three of them confront each other and through all the screaming, Wei Wuxian makes one thing very, very clear: he has no regrets for what he’s done.
Then Lan Wangji is glad, so glad, that he did not let down his walls, that he chose wisely to keep the bond shut tight. If he had exposed himself to Wei Wuxian, to the soulmate who threw him away, bonded him to Jiang Wanyin and betrayed the most sacred of intimate connections between two people –
He is relieved that he did not humiliate himself. Wei Wuxian has taken enough from him already. Lan Wangji will give him no more.