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The ice-cubes in Lan Wangji’s water jostle gently against each other in the glass between his hands.
There’s no one else in the diner at this hour; Jiang Wanyin had been here, briefly, for the same reason Lan Wangji is, lingering at the perimeter in case his nephew needs assistance. Lan Wangji is certain Sizhui and his juniors will need no such thing—they’ll have the yao haunting the market nearby easily in hand, and then they will meet back here. Depending on the swiftness of their return, Lan Wangji may buy them waffles.
Jiang Wanyin had sat at a booth a few tables away, alone, and cast a series of increasingly furious glances at him before finally storming out. As if Lan Wangji’s refusal to engage with him was new, and not the same cold silence he’d given the Jiang sect leader for sixteen years.
Someone in the kitchen starts whistling a song.
Lan Wangji is on his feet before he’s aware of moving. The waitress behind the counter calls out to him, but subsides when she sees his official cultivator regalia. He strides past her and into the kitchen.
The whistler is currently folding himself in half to fit under the industrial sink. All Lan Wangji can see are black jeans, a tool-box at his side. Beat-up vans with no socks, ankles thin and pale.
It can’t be him. It can’t—he’d seen him fall. Dangling off the edge of the Wen headquarters, a skyscraper high enough to obscure the sun. His arm aching, aching. His heart, aching, aching, beating warm for the final time.
He wraps a hand around the whistler’s ankle.
“Hey,” says an impossible, wonderful, familiar voice, startled. “Who’s out there? Let go!”
"Lan Zhan, let go. Let go of me."
He hadn’t then. It hadn’t mattered.
He doesn’t now.
The owner of the ankle squirms out from under the sink. They’re wearing a mask—thin, paper, over their mouth and nose, presumably to prevent breathing in dust or fumes. Their eyes—warm brown—widen when they see who he is.
Outside the diner, the sun rises.
+
This place wants him back.
It’s in the soil itself: the radioactive fallout of so many dead, a half-life imbued into the soil that means it can never be at rest. Wei Wuxian had been a piece of it, once, a half-alive thing waiting to decay, hollowed out, filled up with nothing but hunger.
Any non-cultivator walking by would see only a vast empty lot where some enormous building had once stood, now overgrown with whatever weeds and wildflowers thrive in thin, metal-heavy soil. A small shanty-town of tents and cardboard along the chain-link fence at the back. No one left.
To Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan and the boys at their sides, the whole block is moaning.
"There's an array, here," Sizhui says, with a kind of fascinated horror. He kneels, immediately dirtying the knees of his washed-out jeans. "If we renew it, we could hold them off for a while."
Wei Wuxian knows. He remembers blood on concrete, desperate and dizzy. Protect. Protect.
It would take more blood to renew. He glances sideways at Lan Zhan. His eyes are determined, and when Wei Wuxian meets them he shakes his head, the motion minute but certain.
Wei Wuxian inclines his head and Lan Zhan steps past him and Sizhui both to place himself between them and the oncoming wave of ghosts. In one graceful movement, precise and determined, he draws Bichen.
Wei Wuxian smiles to himself and steps up to join him. They will fight back to back, not for the first time and not for the last. He is not alone in this place, and Lan Zhan will not let him bleed.
+
Wei Wuxian is busking at the train station.
He's beautiful, even travel-weary; lost in the music. When someone tips him–dropping a few coins into the flute case at his feet–he gives them a nod and smiles a little with his warm eyes alone.
He is playing Lan Wangji's song, the song Lan Wangji had first gifted to him on a tape he'd recorded himself, alone in his bedroom, burning with love and lust and frustration, the song he'd been whistling in the back of the diner when Lan Wangji had found him again. The song only he knows, that he'd kept on knowing through death itself. The song that was Lan Wangji's question, and now his answer.
"Wei Ying," says Lan Wangji, stepping toward him.
Wei Wuxian lowers his flute, breaking into a smile so slow and lovely it steals the breath from Lan Wangji's chest and replaces it with light. He can feel it through his whole body, this relief, this brightness, this lightness. When he takes another step forward he's surprised his feet touch the floor.
Wei Wuxian reaches for him, and Lan Wangji catches his hand, pulls it to his throat where his sect ribbon is woven around his neck. Wei Wuxian tangles his fingers in it, lips parting on a gasp, and Lan Wangji is powerless to stop himself from leaning in. Wei Wuxian meets him halfway: eager, here, his, home.
+
Lan Wangji runs the comb through the length of Wei Ying's beautiful hair, then gently tilts his head so he can examine his side-shave. He runs a fingertip over the shell of Wei Ying's ear just to watch him shiver and go pink in the bathroom mirror.
"What do you want?" he asks, holding his gaze.
"Lan Zhan," Wei Ying protests, eyes glittering, "you can't just ask me that—"
"They would ask you at a salon," Lan Wangji points out.
"Not like that, they wouldn't," Wei Ying grumbles, but it's all for show. "Now that it's getting warmer I was thinking maybe shave the other side, too? That way I could do, like a stupid little man-bun, keep it out of my way."
"It would not be stupid," Lan Wangji counters. The idea of Wei Ying's hair coiled up above his nape, leaving it bare for Lan Wangji's gaze, his lips, his teeth… "It would suit you."
Wei Ying bites his lip, ducking his head, and then stills gratifyingly when Lan Wangji curls a hand around the back of his neck to keep him still. He runs the comb along Wei Ying's scalp on the long side, creating a new part to mark where the shave would begin, and gathers up the rest of his hair atop his head.
Wei Ying is not vain, and never has been. Cocky, yes, but that had always been far more about his ability than his appearance, and even that was born of a kind of desperation—he needed to be as good as he was, and needed people to know it, whether because of his precarious place among the Jiang or, later, because his reputation was one of the few true shields the Wen remnants had between them and the vengeance of the cultivation world.
Vanity is different. Vanity, in Lan Wangji's experience–and he is not ashamed to admit he has quite a bit of experience, as it is a flaw he acknowledges in himself and in many of the Lan Clan–comes from the opposite of precarity. True vanity differs from posturing because it is born of self-knowledge, of confidence in one's own beauty that cannot be snatched away by the whims of society or dictated by its terms.
He thinks—no, he hopes, fervently—that one day Wei Ying will be vain. That he will live long enough at Lan Wangji's side to truly believe in his own beauty and the ways that beauty is seen, admired, loved. To be safe in that belief. To be certain of the stone beneath his feet, the man at his side, and the joy in his heart.
Lan Wangji carefully shaves the sides of Wei Ying's head, cradling his jaw, turning him this way and that, thrilling quietly at how easily he is led. He retrieves the hot, damp towel he'd prepared for this purpose and runs it over the newly-shaved skin, over Wei Ying's throat, his bare shoulders, and Wei Ying sighs, head tilted up toward him, eyes fluttering closed in contentment.
"You're beautiful," Lan Wangji tells him, and Wei Ying's eyes open, his lips curling in a pleased, almost-shy smile.
He does not yet believe it, not truly. Lan Wangji will do everything he can to make him.
+
The peach trees are all in bloom, great clouds of pale blossoms hanging over their heads as Wei Wuxian walks with Lan Zhan through the neatly planted corridors. "I had no idea this was here," he admits. He keeps his voice low, not wanting to break the unique springtime type of quiet, not silence, but a blanket of soft sound underpinning everything: the hum of bees, the rustle of wind through leaves and petals, the sweet call-and-response of courting birds.
He's technically been to the botanical gardens associated with the Cloud Recesses International Campus before, but he'd been young, and far too fixated on getting an equally young Lan Zhan's attention to really appreciate them. He hadn't even known why he'd wanted the attention so badly, at the time, nor what he would do if he got it.
He knows now.
When he turns to look at Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan is looking back at him, the sunlight slanting across the beautiful planes of his face. To many people, that face is difficult to read; to Wei Wuxian, it speaks a want so plain it takes his breath away and sets his stomach squirming.
"Not many people still come here," Lan Zhan says, his voice low. "We may be the only visitors all day. Perhaps all week."
Wei Wuxian swallows hard as Lan Zhan closes the gap between them, his hands coming up to fit themselves around Wei Wuxian's hips, his big thumbs sliding into the belt loops of Wei Wuxian’s jeans and tugging him close.
God, he loves Lan Zhan's hands. He loves them on him, in him, steadying him after a fight, catching him when he falls. Wrapped around his ankle in a diner at 5AM. He could probably recognize Lan Zhan's hands anywhere, conjure the full shape of them from the smallest segment, just the index finger to the first knuckle–
"Wei Ying," says Lan Zhan, his hands shifting lower, and the humming warm flirtatious buzz of spring fills Wei Wuxian to the brim, builds in him, threatens to melt him entirely.
"Lan Zhan," he breathes back, "husband, was that an invitation–"
Lan Zhan's hot, perfect mouth cuts him off, and steals all of his coherence for a long, long time.