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heart,
I implore you
it’s time to come back
from the dark
- excerpt of Summer Morning by Mary Oliver
Wei Ying spots him halfway up the path, and runs the rest of the way. He’s close enough now that Lan Wangji sees the moment his smile breaks open. It’s his brightest smile. The sun slipping out from behind the clouds.
Lan Wangji has long since promised himself he would not get used to this sight. Sometimes, like today, there is an old voice in the back of his head that wonders if this happiness is more than one person’s share.
Thankfully, that voice gets quieter every day.
“Lan Zhan!” There’s dust on Wei Ying’s chest and sleeves, shadows of a sleepless night or two under his eyes. But his cheeks are flushed pink, his laugh brimming over. “Why did you come to wait all the way down here? It rained all morning, you silly man. Did you get wet?”
“I had an umbrella,” Lan Wangji says, pointedly reaching out to brush back Wei Ying’s hair. It’s damp enough that it’s starting to curl.
“Aiyo, don’t look at me like that.” Wei Ying comes up to take Lan Wangji’s hand with both of his own. “I grew up in Yunmeng, I’ve spent more of my life wet than dry.”
“You could have waited out the storm in Caiyi,” Lan Wangji says.
Wei Ying’s theatrical frown takes shape under Lan Wangji’s fingers. “I’ve been gone for three days! Who knows what would have happened had I been gone a second longer. You could have wasted away.”
Lan Wangji smiles. It has long stopped feeling ill-fitting on his face. “Let’s go up,” he says. The storm has brought an early fall chill with it. Wei Ying’s core has gotten markedly stronger, but Mo Xuanyu’s body is still more prone to illness than either of them would like.
“Ah,” Wei Ying says, “but there are so many stairs. Your poor feeble husband has been walking all morning, Hanguang-jun. Who knows if he’ll make it all the way to our marriage b—”
Wei Ying yelps as Lan Wangji sweeps him off the ground, laughs all the way up the path to the Jingshi. And they don’t get around to unpacking his qiankun bag until late in the afternoon.
Rather, Lan Wangji unpacks it. Wei Ying is still in bed, resting on his stomach with his feet on the pillow. He’s wrapped in one of Lan Wangji’s outer robes. His hair dried a bit curly. He’s beautiful.
“I brought something for you,” Wei Ying says through his smile. “It should be at the bottom.”
It doesn’t take long to find what Wei Ying means: there’s something cool and heavy cradled in the bag under Wei Ying’s spare robes and talismans. Lan Wangji unearths it carefully.
Wei Ying wiggles forward on his stomach, watches him turn the rock in his hands. His grin is only half-visible in the folds of Lan Wangji’s robes. “Yes, I know. Another one. But doesn’t it look just like Wangji? The guqin. Not you.”
Lan Wangji holds it closer to the lamplight. It’s… rectangular. He can say that much.
“I found it on the riverbank in Caiyi,” Wei Ying adds. “There’s a fold near the top that looks like a string, right? Which... would obviously be more interesting if there were more than one of them.”
There is, upon closer inspection, a long, thin erosion across the rock. It looks a bit like a string, if he squints. Lan Wangji’s mouth, of its own accord, curves.
He’s so cute. Lan Wangji won’t tell him so. He’d roll right under the bed.
“I see it,” he says.
Wei Ying, if possible, brightens. “We can put it back outside. I just wanted to show you,” he says. But Lan Wangji is already crossing to the back of the room.
The Jingshi has had a life cycle, over the years. Fastidiously bare when Lan Wangji first moved in. A mess in his late teenage years, at least by his own standards - still clean, still bare, but there were notes tucked in unexpected places of a song that wouldn’t leave him.
Then there were the years Wei Ying was gone. The collection the Jingshi saw grow over those years was subtle. Safely hidden, especially from Shufu and Xiongzhang. There was so little of Wei Ying left to preserve. And Shufu might have thought that by removing the red ribbon, or the pressed flower, or the dizi that was the wrong color, he could pluck Lan Wangji’s grief itself by the roots.
And now this is Wei Ying’s home. And not only has Lan Wangji’s collection flourished in the open - it’s grown.
Their travels don’t take them apart much, anymore. But sometimes Wei Ying needs to leave the Jingshi on his own, whether to travel with the juniors for a few days or to run a quick errand down to Caiyi. And when he does, he always brings something back with him.
Sometimes it’s something he bought from a market stall, or a merchant he met along the road. Now that he knows how to withdraw money with his jade token, Wei Ying delights in being able to buy things: hairpins, tea, little wooden animals. If he can’t shop, he finds something along the road, usually flowers to press or strangely-shaped rocks to look at.
The old things remain, too, the ones from those thirteen years. Once, unable to find his hair ribbon, Wei Ying picked the frayed ribbon off the shelf to tie up his hair. Lan Wangji has always been cautious with it, afraid it would fall apart in his hands. In Wei Ying’s hands, it’s bound to. But seeing him wear it settled something long crooked in Lan Wangji.
Lan Wangji lifts the stone onto the shelf —
— and then gets a better look.
The Jingshi has had a life cycle, over the years. But in all its stages, it could never be described as ‘cluttered.’
But the shelf of Wei Ying’s gifts, from end to end, is completely full.
Wei Ying, behind him, props himself up by the elbows. “Lan Zhan?”
Lan Wangji feels the beginnings of a crinkle in his brow. “One moment.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” Wei Ying rolls off the bed and onto his feet. “You should have stopped me sooner!”
“There’s still some space.” Or there will be. Some things can be shifted. The rock is long and thin, he can prop it against the back. If he just nudges this wooden Little Apple to the left —
— then he’d be nudging the paper toy from Qinghe into the open space, instead. If he tries to slide the rock there, it’ll be crushed.
“Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying soothes. “We don’t have to keep it, I just wanted to show you. Or, ah, you don’t need so many rocks, do you. We could get rid of this one, here? It doesn’t even look that much like a fish.”
“It’s alright,” Lan Wangji says quickly. From him, it’s very nearly abrupt. But Wei Ying doesn’t look startled. More than anything, he looks confused.
This is foolish. And not the kind of warm, breathless foolishness that Wei Ying brings out in him. This is a rock. A rock he can easily return to the mountain path where Wei Ying found it.
Lan Wangji places it on his desk.
The set of Wei Ying’s mouth, so rarely very good at hiding his feelings, is careful. Despite Jiang-zongzhu’s accusations to the contrary, Wei Ying can be very tactful. Lan Wangji knows him. Right now, he must be thinking that at the end of every day, Lan Wangji clears every spare note and brush from his desk until it’s pristine. The guqin is its only permanent resident. The guqin, and now its small, would-be rock twin.
Wei Ying can read Lan Wangji better than anyone, now. He’s bound to catch the flicker of a frown that crosses Lan Wangji’s mind, if not his face.
You shall keep your home tidy and free of clutter .
But when Lan Wangji doesn’t move the rock, Wei Ying doesn’t say anything. He just swings to the balls of his feet and kisses Lan Wangji’s cheek. “Er-gege, are you hungry? I gave Jingyi all my travel snacks.”
Lan Wangji reaches up to cradle his soft, questioning face with one palm. He recognizes what Wei Ying is trying to give him: an opening to step back, to leave the Jingshi and make them both a warm, hearty dinner. To look at the desk later, with his arms full of a dozing, travel-worn Wei Ying, and remember that he likes it empty after all. To stop being stubborn about a rock, of all things.
But for all that Wei Ying knows him, in this, he’s still learning. Lan Wangji has been stubborn about much bigger things than a rock.
***
The winter Lan Wangji turned five, his mother sewed him a sachet.
Even now in this half-dream, Lan Wangji can’t remember exactly what it looked like: the pattern, the embroidery. He remembers it was green, because he can hear it in her voice.
Your grandmother’s favorite color , she told him, with a finger in her laughing mouth. She’d pricked it again. She’d pricked that finger twice already that day. Ah, you know, she was the one who used to make these for all of our neighbors. She always scolded me for having no interest. See, my lines aren’t very neat, are they, A-Zhan? Smells nice, though. Doesn’t it?
It was small enough to fit in Lan Wangji’s cupped hands. He doesn’t remember the lines being crooked. He just remembers how strong the scent of the herbs was, how far it spread. It barely seemed to fit in the room.
She knelt, closed his hands around it. Do you want to take it with you, A-Zhan?
When Lan Wangji finally gives up on sleep, it’s not quite dawn. For a long, long while, he lies under Wei Ying’s warm weight, and he thinks.
Wei Ying, as always, curls tight to sleep like a sated fox. He only rouses a little when Lan Wangji washes his hair, furrowing his brow and tilting his head as he tries to kiss one of Lan Wangji’s busy hands. “Good boy,” he murmurs. “Hold still.”
Lan Wangji runs the comb through his hair, which seems to lull Wei Ying back into a doze. He suspects Wei Ying was indulging him at first, letting Lan Wangji care for him like this. Wei Ying was proud in his first life. Resolutely self-sufficient. But little by little, he came to delight in letting Lan Wangji do things he could easily do himself. He treats it like a game. Lan Wangji suspects that’s how he lets himself allow it.
For Lan Wangji, it’s a bone-deep calm. Even through the restless twitch of his thoughts, it’s easy to focus on the feel of his palm against Wei Ying’s trusting shoulders.
He dries Wei Ying off, tucks him back into the bed, and presses a kiss to his forehead. And before he leaves the Jingshi to find breakfast, he takes a moment to watch Wei Ying wriggle his way into the warmth Lan Wangji left behind.
Lan Wangji passes the kitchens and heads toward the back hill. Wei Ying won’t wake anytime soon. And he could use the walk.
He was only six years old the last time he saw his mother. But when someone’s time in your life is short, you account for every second, once they’re gone. It takes time. Sometimes longer than the time you had with them to begin with.
And Lan Wangji started late. Some of it he only let himself think about during his seclusion, when he could choke on all the rage he wanted.
It was early, in those three years, that he remembered the sachet. Even searched the Jingshi for it one cold day, when he was lost in a tumble of memories and needed to keep the blood flowing to his scars. The fever of infection had long, long passed. But he wonders now if he was still a little delirious, all those months. He didn’t remember until nightfall, that day, that the sachet had never been in the Jingshi at all.
Do you want to take it with you, A-Zhan? she’d asked. And he’d shaken his head no. The Gentian House was a fragile existence, just barely pinned to the earth. An unclaimed gift was a weight. If he kept leaving it behind, it meant she’d be there to offer it again the next time.
It didn’t work, obviously. Children’s logic rarely does. And by the time Lan Wangji brought himself to open the door and look for it, her things had already been cleared away.
Wei Ying is not his mother. But some days, mourning them took the same shape. And though his mother’s belongings were easy for Gusu Lan to erase from existence, Wei Ying’s were much harder. Even in death, he couldn’t be contained.
Wei Ying is here now. He was tentative, at first, about leaving signs of his presence. But now they’re around every corner. Here in the rabbit meadow, the Jingshi far out of sight, there’s a broken branch he brushed against last week, a set of footprints in the mud from one of Wei Ying’s walks in the rain. There’s more of Wei Ying than Lan Wangji can account for. More than even he can hold onto.
The problem is, Lan Wangji is greedy. Whatever he can hold, he wants to keep holding.
He keeps walking until he passes the rabbit meadow, reaches the tree line that would take him down the hill. And only then does he turn around and make his way back into the Cloud Recesses. Wei Ying will wake soon. And keeping one’s home tidy isn’t the only applicable rule on the discipline wall. There are more than a few about the keeping of bad habits.
Lan Wangji understands himself better now than he did when he was young. He’s never kept the rules as well as he used to think. He doesn’t agree, for example, that there is such a thing as grieving in excess.
But however he’s grieved, he’s done it for more than half his life. In this, at least, he may have grieved enough.
***
It wasn’t until after Wei Ying’s death that Lan Wangji came to appreciate the power of a meandering walk. Another thing he wanted to hold onto, at first. Wei Ying himself had never been one to go straight to his destination. But Lan Wangji came to like them for their own sake. They calmed him. Let him think. And if nothing else, they gave him a few spare moments to talk very firmly to himself.
And he does, as he collects breakfast for himself and Wei Ying. Wei Ying is his husband. They’re never going to be parted. He could return home, clear the entire shelf of Wei Ying’s gifts, and Wei Ying would still be there in their bed. He’s never going to want for signs of Wei Ying again. There’s no reason this should feel like a loss.
It works, mostly. Though when Lan Wangji nearly trips over a stone coming up the path to the Jingshi, he has to concede that he’s still just a little distracted.
He shifts on the path, and almost keeps on walking -- until he remembers that there shouldn't be a stone at all, there.
Lan Wangji glances down. And looking up at him is a misshapen stone face he’s used to seeing across the Jingshi. The little rock that Wei Ying thought looked like a hedgehog.
It’s not the only one. A little further up, on the other side of the path, sits the rock Wei Ying thought looked like a fish. A little further, opposite that, the one Wei Ying thought looked like a cloud. And at the Jingshi’s front steps, balanced by the porch’s overhang, the one Wei Ying thought looked like Wangji.
Lan Wangji steadies the breakfast tray and follows their path through the front door.
Wei Ying is awake, standing by the opposite wall. He’s not yet dressed. His hair is unbound around his shoulders, and he’s still wearing one of Lan Wangji’s spare robes, a little too long in the arms and big in the shoulders. When he sees Lan Wangji coming, he smiles. His sun-coming-out smile. His usual smile, now.
He’s holding something up to the wall. It takes a moment for Lan Wangji to look away long enough to see what he’s holding: a long, flat piece of wood to the wall, just next to the shelf of all his gifts.
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Ying lays the wood slab gently to the floor. Lan Wangji sets the breakfast tray down in turn, just in time to catch an armful of husband. “Don’t mind the wood grain, I know it doesn’t match. I just needed to get an idea of the length. Luckily I kept forgetting to put up this shelf in my workshop! Turns out it’s the perfect size!”
Lan Wangji’s eyes dart from Wei Ying’s gaze, tipped up to meet his and crinkled with his smile, back to the shelf. It’s still crowded. But with the stones moved to the front path, there’s more room. “Wei Ying,” he says, “what…”
“Ah,” Wei Ying says. His eyes flash serious for a moment. Lan Wangji instinctively kisses the side of his head. “I knew I was getting carried away, with the gifts. But they made you so happy. What’s one weak man meant to do when he can bring a smile to Hanguang-jun’s face, huh? I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t expect you to keep them for so long, you know.”
Lan Wangji holds him tighter. Wei Ying was cautious, early in their marriage, about taking up space in the Jingshi. If he’s still worried about that now — “I wanted to keep them,” he says. “But — I don’t have to.”
Wei Ying reaches for his face, then. Mo Xuanyu’s body isn’t much shorter than Lan Wangji’s own. But Wei Ying sometimes stands on his tiptoes to do this, as if he wants to look at Lan Wangji from his old height. He doesn’t look worried, or guilty. Just thoughtful.
“But you still want to keep them,” he says. “Right?”
Lan Wangji lets go of Wei Ying’s waist just long enough to brush the loose hair back from his face. He’s such a fool sometimes. He still assumes, some thoughtless days, that Wei Ying can’t tell what he wants if he hides it well enough. It’s been many months since that was true.
“I do,” he says. It comes out softer than he means it.
Wei Ying kisses him then, quick and firm. “Then keep them, you silly man. This is your home. They make you happy.”
Lan Wangji can feel the blood rising through his neck, into his ears. Almost like he’s embarrassed instead of speechless. “You shall keep your home tidy and free of clutter,” he recites, clumsily.
“Aiya. Look at him, reciting the rules as if I don’t know them,” Wei Ying says. “What do you think the second shelf is for? If we spread them out a little more, they’ll look much nicer, won’t they? And if you want another shelf, we’ll build another shelf. If you want to give some away, we’ll give some away. As long as it’s what you want.”
There are times, Lan Wangji knows, that he feels that this happiness is more than his share. Times that are fewer and further between, as the months go on. Eventually those times may disappear altogether. But until then, Lan Wangji’s good at recognizing the sentiment. Setting it aside. It’s just that sometimes, it seeps into his thinking quietly. It goes deep. It takes root.
But Wei Ying catches it every time. He’s probably figured it out already, too, long before Lan Wangji got here. He must know that this happiness only feels so big because it isn’t Lan Wangji’s alone. It’s Wei Ying’s too.
“Hmm.” Wei Ying twists a little to look at the shelf. “A nice life to live, isn’t it?”
“What is?” Lan Wangji says.
“To be a little token of affection, sitting up on the wall.” Wei Ying leans back playfully, just enough that Lan Wangji has to tighten his grip to hold on. “Nothing to do but watch over the great Hanguang-jun, always within reach. I’m about to be jealous.”
“Absolute nonsense,” Lan Wangji declares. There’s one very reliable way to stop Wei Ying’s nonsense in its tracks, now. He reels him in, kisses him deep enough that Wei Ying makes a pleased little sound into his mouth. And by the time they pull back, Wei Ying has already forgotten that he was saying anything at all.
There’s one thing, after all, that Lan Wangji never doubts anymore. Wherever Wei Ying is, he’s always within reach.