Chapter Text
Wei Wuxian woke up in an unfamiliar place.
The bed was soft. The light was bright. There was smooth, clean cotton and silk against his skin.
All of these things were terrifying to someone who had gone to sleep in his clothes, on a filthy pallet on a stone shelf in a cave in the Yiling Burial Mounds.
He threw himself sideways off the bed and rolled, before he’d opened his eyes or done anything to give away that he’d regained consciousness.
Opened them once in the shadow of what turned out to be another bed—so not only had they not tied him up, the place they’d left him not-tied-up in had more to it than a barren cell.
“Wei Wuxian!” snapped an unfamiliar voice in the direction of the bed he’d been in, and Wei Wuxian scooted back, checked behind him to make sure no one was waiting to grab him there, then popped out from under the second bed before it could be surrounded, and stood up.
Large pale room, light spilling in through many papered windows, lots of beds made up for sleeping even though it was daylight, several Lans. Nobody he knew. No sign of Chenqing—of course even the Lan were too smart to leave it in reach.
“Get back into bed!” snapped an older man among them, identifying himself as the owner of the original snapping voice.
Wei Wuxian ignored him. He backed toward the nearest window.
“It’s affected his mind,” another mildly elderly Lan said to a strapping young disciple to his left, a man three cun taller than Wei Wuxian and twice his weight, with clear intent.
Why did Lans always say that. His mind was fine!
Wei Wuxian whistled two notes, intending to call up enough resentful energy to impede the Lans long enough to make a run for it, but the amount he got was pitiful. Of course there wouldn’t be much ambient resentment here—this had to be the Cloud Recesses—but Wei Wuxian’s stomach twisted cold as he felt how little was wound around his bones and piled in his belly for him to draw on at need.
However and whyever they’d grabbed him, the Lan must have kept him under long enough to purify him almost clean. He couldn’t sense the Seal and he had no idea what they’d done with Chenqing, and his body was stripped thin.
But they were fools if they thought Wei Wuxian was helpless just because you stripped him of his weapons.
The strapping young lad was advancing warily, at least, eyeing the narrow spiral of resentment that wasn’t yet doing anything.
Wei Wuxian backed away at the same pace, letting the lad isolate himself from the other five Lans in the room. He had his hands up as he advanced, like he was trying to coax a startled horse. Wei Wuxian sneered at him. He blanched. The other Lans started drifting up the room after them, less like they wanted to help the strapping lad than like they didn’t want this operation to go entirely unsupervised.
Wei Wuxian’s back hit the outside wall.
He lashed out with his little coil of visible resentment, past the strapping lad, sending the older Lans knocking themselves backward to stay out of the way.
At the same time, with his hands, Wei Wuxian snatched the bedding off the nearest cot, hit the strapping lad full in the face with the solid bulk of the bolster just as he recovered from automatically turning to look behind him to attend to the flailing exclamations of his alarmed elders. (So filial!)
Snapped the blanket like a whip while the lad was recovering from that, leaving him with what was sure to be a splendid black eye.
Leapt up onto the cot, and hurled himself shoulder-first through the bamboo slats and paper of the window.
The ground outside was a nicely graded pathway, so Wei Wuxian hit it rolling, popped upright, and ran.
Sure enough, it was the Cloud Recesses. He ducked aside any time he saw a person, focused on getting out of the middle of the Sect Compound, definitely getting spotted every time.
He didn’t stand out as much as he expected to, he realized as he went, because instead of a blot of black racing across the Cloud Recesses he’d been dressed in a flimsy white garment as he slept.
His bare feet ached from hitting gravel so hard, which he only really noticed once he broke away from the buildings and was running on grass instead, which hurt much less.
The back mountain, according to his recollection, was minimally maintained, just enough intervention via the removal of certain trees and grading of paths and so forth to improve the natural harmony of the mountain’s shape without leaving any noticeable disruption to the beauty of nature.
The tree and bamboo cover that curled artfully through the Sect grounds outside the central compound, screening apart the more and less public parts of the Lan domain and aiding a mountaintop inhabited by several hundred human beings in maintaining its air of remoteness, were more visibly tended and tamed, but there was still sufficient underbrush amid them to give a man some cover, so he made straight for the trees as soon as he saw them without breaking stride, and with nobody visibly on his tail.
Wei Wuxian was a little surprised by his own stamina. He could keep going a long time if he needed to, of course, but it usually started hurting pretty quickly, these days; the aches deep in his bones flaring up.
Maybe the resentment was taking more out of him than he’d thought, if there was this much improvement.
Maybe they’d just kept him asleep for a pretty long time, and Wen Qing had a point about lack of rest wearing you down. He liked that idea better.
He couldn’t have been down too long unless they’d been beating him in his sleep, though, which even Lans would undoubtedly find foolish—he could feel fresh, unhealed bruises all up his back and shoulders, probably received in whatever fight had knocked him too silly to recall, and had led to his capture.
His lower abdomen ached, too, not bad but deep, like he’d pulled a muscle somewhere weird; he was feeling it every step, especially as he had to juke back and forth to dart through the trees. And he was still running way better than usual, lately. Okay, yes, that was embarrassing. He was never admitting to Wen Qing that she was right.
Wei Wuxian fetched up against the outer compound wall sooner than he’d hoped—as suspected, the trees he’d dived into weren’t the beginning of the back mountain like he’d hoped, but one of the narrow parts of the more cultivated forest that screened parts of the compound he as a guest disciple hadn’t been allowed into.
And mostly hadn’t bothered to infiltrate, since exploring the back mountain was a lot more fun and less friction than intruding on people’s personal homes, or the private courtyards of secluded maidens.
Wei Wuxian thought he deserved credit for not being one of the visiting disciples who made serious efforts to get a peek at the secret, hidden young women of the famously handsome Lan Sect.
...he’d probably have gotten around to it, if he’d been here the full term instead of getting himself kicked out, especially once the Gusu snows hit and he got bored. Burial Mounds winter had taught him a lot about just how bored he could get, deprived of most of his usual outlets, and it didn’t get nearly as cold there as here.
None of the quick tricks he tried on the outer barrier, starting with the one that had gotten him through in the past, had any effect on the spellwork holding him inside. Not really a surprise; these things were harder to manage without power to put behind the attempt, and even harder without proper supplies.
He peeled up the bandages on his right hand and opened a scab to get some blood to try something a little messier, and that didn’t work either—he could feel it catch on something, but then glance off again.
It made sense they’d have thoroughly overhauled the wards after getting sacked. Wei Wuxian’s one major contribution to the repair work at Lotus Pier had been an elaborate array-based security system to prevent a repeat of what had happened to them. But it was a little startling how good a job they’d done of it. He wouldn’t have thought the Lan had this much innovation in them. Who in this Sect had paid enough attention to his new cultivation method to counter it this well?
He was going to need some time, and ideally writing materials, to break out. It might be easier to steal a token from someone, though that meant heightened odds of recapture.
So. Depending on where he was now, he should follow the wall in one direction or the other to get to the back mountain, where he’d be hard to pin down in all that relative wildness. That would buy time.
If he went the wrong way, he’d hit the open front part of the compound where there was no cover, and have to double back.
No matter where he went, without a jade token to let him through the wards or enough time unmolested to break through them, he couldn’t leave. Cloud Recesses was a prison by default. He had no idea how anyone lived here. Well, the Burial Mounds were even worse, weren’t they; before he’d come along they’d been a prison no one ever escaped. Cloud Recesses couldn’t hope to compare.
But he and the Wens didn’t have a choice. The Lans had done this on purpose.
Wei Wuxian squinted toward the sun through the tree tops and the unfortunately solid, if not very thick, cloud cover, trying to get his bearings. He should know this. Was it morning or afternoon right now? Which direction was west and which was east? He sniffed at the air. Frowned at the undergrowth, he would expect Cloud Recesses to be behind Yiling in the turn of the seasons, considering their elevation, not ahead. But he wasn’t an expert in the local flora of Gusu.
His first guess was wrong, turned out it was afternoon and he’d run west out of that medical building, not east. So much for his sense of direction. He doubled back, hoping no one had heard or spotted him in the time he spent close enough to the margin of the woods to see that there were no more woods to sneak through.
He got back to where he’d guessed wrong and kept going, stepping carefully for silence and for the sake of his bare feet, until from somewhere ahead of him he heard a voice calling, “Wei Wuxian!”
It was calling like it expected him to answer, which was a little ridiculous. He was hiding. They knew he had run away on purpose. How stupid did they think he was?
Stupid enough to get himself cornered into a relatively small patch of woods, evidently, and they were correct. It quickly became evident he was surrounded. Not completely, but beset by enough wandering, not-quite-shouting Lans that he was bound to hit one soon, if he kept moving.
The good news was, there were no pets allowed in the Cloud Recesses. If they were going to try to use dogs to track him, they’d have to go all the way down the mountain and hire some.
Wei Wuxian climbed a tree, tucked himself out of sight in its fork and, with nothing better to focus on, finally took stock of his own condition.
The scrapes on the back of his right hand, minor. Bruising, as noted, distributed widely enough it was much more likely to be from a fight or from getting kicked around after defeat than a formal, punitive beating like the Lan liked to dish out; most of it not very serious. The stuff on his back felt mostly like impact from a fall, or being thrown.
Someone or something with long fingers had, additionally, wrapped their hand around his right wrist and squeezed hard enough to leave a full hand-print of bruising. Looked like a night-hunt injury; it was the kind of thing you got from particularly aggressive ghosts, but he’d gotten marks like that occasionally before, especially as a kid, so it could have just been a person with particularly large hands.
No open wounds or curse marks.
Not that he could check his whole body for marks, especially while sitting in a tree, but his sense for resentment was strong enough he’d have known something was there, even if he couldn’t see it.
While he was out, they’d put him in a single lightweight cotton robe over thin linen pants, both in the natural, undyed whites of those fibers, with Lan clouds dye-printed onto them in a washed-out indigo.
Not disciple robes, though vaguely reminiscent of them in both color and style. Probably Lan pajamas, since he’d been in a bed?
His hair was loose but had been recently combed, presumably by a stranger while he was asleep, which somehow made his skin crawl worse than the fact that they’d stripped him naked. And possibly given him a bath. He sniffed his own skin with suspicion and decided he might have been spared that indignity, at least.
He was, as he’d noticed on the paths, barefoot, which wasn’t necessarily an act of malice on the Lans’ part since he had been in bed, but his feet were pretty fed up with him about it. Not having shoes when he wanted them hadn’t been a problem in his life since he was nine years old. Even in the Burial Mounds the first time, he hadn’t gone barefoot.
Wei Wuxian decided to be annoyed about the shoes.
It seemed to be summer, though a cool sort of day, so even on a mountain in Gusu he wasn’t freezing in this ensemble, but it was a little disturbing that the Lan had dressed him up like this, in clothes with their mark. Even before he got to the inexplicable sky-blue embroidered silk ribbon, with a little wrought silver seal in the middle, which lay twisted around his whole left forearm under the loose cotton sleeve in an intricate woven knot, inexplicably identical to the forbidden sacred forehead ribbons of Grave Importance that he was Not To Touch.
“What is this, a Property of the Lan badge?” Wei Wuxian muttered, tugging at it. He couldn’t even find the ends. They must be cunningly tucked inside the knots somehow. Maybe if he found a sharp rock he could cut it?
…his forearm was thicker around than it had been last time he’d seen it. The fuck.
Poking himself all over again, with a wider focus, it seemed like he’d put on weight all over, a lot of it muscle. He knew for a fact the problem there had not been ‘too much resentment’ but ‘too little food,’ so the Lan music regimen couldn’t have accounted for that unless they had some very impressive, very secret healing songs.
And why would they waste them on him, if they did? Even Lan Wangji—
It stung, he found, to think of Lan Wangji. He’d always been wanting to take Wei Wuxian to Gusu to fix him, to purify and discipline him back into the cultivation world’s idea of a real person.
And he’d been allowed up the mountain, to see the Burial Mounds settlement.
He knew how much the Wen needed Wei Wuxian and how little they deserved to suffer, and yet who else could be behind this? Who else knew all their weak points? How vulnerable they really were, where to look for Wei Wuxian when he’d have his guard down.
Who else could have gotten close enough to get the drop on him, and would have the motive to carry him off here, to be made harmless?
To think Wei Wuxian had thought so warmly of him after that visit, had thought, our relationship isn’t too bad after all.
He swallowed hard. It was stupid to feel betrayed over this, of all things. Lan Wangji hadn’t promised him anything.
“Senior Wei!” a youthful voice called from somewhere uncomfortably close to his perch. How polite! He’d never been called that in his life, that he could recall. He’d still been a junior disciple, barely, when the world cracked open, and during the war everyone had called him by his full courtesy name or Wei-gongzi, and since then—well.
He’d been kicked out of the Jiang so it wasn’t even an accurate thing to call him, really, since he had no status in the cultivation world, but it was polite, and he appreciated courtesy in the people hunting him down like an animal.
As he thought this, a little golden butterfly shattered itself against his face with another tiny exclamation of ‘Senior Wei!’ and there was a vibration through his seat as something smacked the trunk of the tree. He peeked down. Two Lans stood there, looking up.
“Wei-qianbei!” one of them shouted up. Definitely shouted. There was a rule about that. “We know you’re up there!”
It had been too much to hope the tree would hide him altogether, in this stupid white getup. Brilliant use of what looked like the Jin message butterfly as a tracker, too! Unusual flexibility for the Lan, he was a little interested by it.
Wei Wuxian swung himself down to a lower branch, and crouched, smirking down at the two youths.
“Aiyah, what a loud Lan! Does the Grandmaster not have you beaten for this kind of infraction?”
“Shouting’s a kneeling offense,” said the shouting disciple, craning his head back to look up at him. “Do you really not recognize me? It’s Lan Jingyi!”
“I don’t recall,” Wei Wuxian drawled.
The young man, whom he really didn’t think he’d met before but he’d been wrong in the past, made a terrific grimace. “The doctors said your mind might be a little scrambled. From the backlash.”
“They’re working on how to fix it,” said the boy beside him, who hadn’t quite shouted.
He was good-looking, in the soft sweet way that made a person seem younger than they were, like a finer, rounder-featured Wen Ning, but seemed about of an age with his companion. Wei Wuxian would estimate them both to be juniors, edging toward the point of graduation into senior disciple status. Eighteen, maybe. With all the losses in the war they might be new-minted seniors already.
The other young Lan, whose name Wei Wuxian had just heard but already forgotten again, had a less interesting face—evenly proportioned, and handsome enough, in the way the Lan always were, but saved from being entirely forgettable only by an animation unusual among his Sect.
He was probably the one responsible for that clever use of the Jin butterfly; Wei Wuxian wondered how he’d learned it.
“Have we met?” Wei Wuxian tried, doubtfully. People often expected him to recognize them when he didn’t, especially cultivators, who tended to be self-important, especially the ones from Great Sects. You didn’t get it quite so much from Lans, though, who mostly worked to be interchangeable.
These kids were too young to have been in the war, he was pretty sure, even if they were only about three years younger than him, rather than the four or five that seemed plausible. The Lan had kept back everyone younger than their Hanguang-jun, as well as all their surviving elders and nearly every female disciple, all staying back putting Cloud Recesses back together so the fighters had somewhere to come home to.
He was more or less certain these two baby-faces hadn’t been at the front, where he’d met a lot of people and paid attention to none of them.
And they were definitely too young to have met him when he was a student here. The foreign disciples were kept well away from both the women and the children; the Lan were fussy about purity of every kind, and talking to outsiders while below a certain age could, they felt, instill the wrong kinds of thoughts. Probably why Wei Wuxian had never met Lan Wangji before coming here, when he’d gotten to know all the other Sect Leaders’ children around his age years before.
Lan Qiren had barely tolerated Wei Wuxian’s potential influence on disciples his own age, when he’d studied in the Cloud Recesses! They’d never have let him at a ten-year-old, and he wouldn’t have forgotten the event if they had.
The cuter of the Lan kids looked stung by the question, though, and the loudmouth wrinkled his face up. “Senior Wei,” he complained, like this was a full statement, with the kind of familiarity that suggested he wasn’t just being self-important in his expectation.
“What?” Wei Wuxian retorted, with a small laugh. Maybe they had met! But his memory wasn’t good! “Answer the question!”
“Of course we’ve met! Don’t you even know Sizhui?” He gestured toward his companion, who was indeed a bit more memorable-looking but Wei Wuxian wouldn’t have called him actually more memorable overall, considering this one’s antics.
Wei Wuxian shook his head. “Nope.” But come to think of it, he had forgotten something recently. That was, what had led to his waking up in a Lan dormitory of some kind, with his cultivation stifled and his physical health rather improved.
That could account for this very nicely. It could account for the whole situation, even! If Wei Wuxian had bumped into some Lan juniors over their heads he could certainly see himself getting himself beaten up like a fool by intervening in their night hunt, though why they’d be night-hunting near Yiling he couldn’t imagine.
And these two dragging him back to Cloud Recesses for doctoring would be just like them, he could already tell.
That didn’t necessarily improve his current situation much, since the Lans weren’t the type to adjust their sense of justice for things like ‘context’ or ‘having done them a favor,’ but he felt much better about it than the idea of some horrible Lan raid through his security measures, that could have left his people in any kind of state.
“Did we meet right before whatever landed me in the Cloud Recesses?” he asked, hopefully. “I don’t remember any intention of coming around for a nice visit, did I hit my head?”
The youths exchanged glances, and proceeded to dash his newly raised hopes in the weirdest fashion possible.
“You live here,” said the loud one, with exaggerated patience.
“Bullshit.”
They both thought that was funny. Great.
The softer one stopped being amused very quickly, though. “It’s true,” he insisted, earnest, and his snickering friend sobered to match him.
“You’ve lived here for years,” he emphasized. “Have you seriously forgotten?”
“Let’s say I have,” said Wei Wuxian.
He wasn’t inclined to buy this, but he was missing at least a bit of time, and he had put on all that weight. Amnesia was possible. Made more sense than anything else he could come up with, if he was honest.
But why in the everloving fuck would he ever wind up living with the Lan? For years?
“Oof,” said the loud Lan, sounding so much like he would in the situation of having to drop this kind of news on someone that Wei Wuxian was slightly endeared again against his will. “Scrambled is right. Well, you do live here. They sounded very optimistic about being able to fix it so I don’t think your mind is injured, exactly, so how about you calm down and get out of the tree?”
“How about I don’t?”
Being in the tree conferred almost no strategic advantages, but it had the tactical benefit of making him harder to lay hands on and surround, since he was well out of human reach and the branches grew thick enough it’d be tricky flying to get to him by sword, if he went even one branch higher.
“Please?” the cute one tried, but he wasn’t that adorable.
“Fine, stay there.” Loud Lan rolled his eyes. “We’ll get your husband to come retrieve you, you know he won’t begrudge the time.”
Wei Wuxian almost fell out of the tree. “You’ll get my what?”
The Lan juniors seemed taken aback by his being taken aback. “Your husband,” the less cute one prompted, a little reproachfully. Neither boy seemed to see the problem.
Wei Wuxian pointed at his own face. “I’m a man?” he pointed out.
“So?” asked the less cute kid, with active belligerence, and then swung his body away, grumbling. “Can’t believe I’m having this conversation with you.”
So if he was a man he shouldn’t be able to be a wife? Wei Wuxian did not have much shame but he had a lot of pride, and this was a lot to take. He’d demeaned himself in a lot of ways, but this was a lot!
He belatedly identified that pulled-muscle feeling in his lower body as being. Maybe. Oh. Hell.
“Senior Wei says that sort of thing isn’t as important as people make it out to be,” said the less rude young Lan, watching him with uncomfortable intensity.
Wei Wuxian grimaced. “Well, I’m sure future me had his reasons,” he said, beginning to suspect that whatever they were he’d kept them to himself. “How did this happen?”
Ignore the issue of whether Wei Wuxian could be anyone’s wife; who would let the Yiling Patriarch quietly marry into a Great Sect even if he wanted to? He was too much trouble for even the Sect that raised him!
“Ah—I don’t know exactly.” The kid looked a little embarrassed for some reason. “Let me—what’s the last thing you remember from before?”
“I was in the Burial Mounds,” Wei Wuxian said, watching the kid to see how he reacted, if this was a surprise. It wasn’t. So they knew that much about who he was. Or who he’d been.
“Which time?” asked the cuter junior disciple.
“Uh.” Did he lie? But then he might get bad information in return. “Second. I guess. I did go in and out a fair bit recently though, and I didn’t keep count. Was there a third time?”
“You came in to get us after we got kidnapped one time,” said the loudmouth, further endearing himself to Wei Wuxian against his will with the carelessness with which he shared all the parts of that, like none of it was surprising or alarming. “We all had to fight our way out, but it wasn’t a long visit.”
Wei Wuxian nodded slowly. He appreciated knowing he’d apparently done something useful for these people. Who would put baby Lans in the Burial Mounds, especially if they had the Yiling Patriarch in the wings to get them out? They must have been bait.
“It’s been about fifteen years, Senior Wei,” the cuter kid said kindly. “Maybe sixteen.”
Wei Wuxian swallowed. That was—a while.
“So you’re telling me there’s not a settlement there to get back to,” he said slowly.
Both boys winced.
“Nope.”
“Jingyi!”
The cuter kid’s mortified hiss at this bluntness made the whole thing more likely, but Wei Wuxian was unable to feel anything about that. He stared down from his tree limb, feeling a worrying flat distance close over him. “And why should I believe you?”
The polite one closed his eyes and took a long steadying breath, then opened them again and said: “Xian-ge. It’s me. Wen Yuan.”
Wei Wuxian recoiled, nearly fell out of the tree, peered down at the youth, and finally dropped to ground level to bend in and look at him closer. It—he was—
“You—” he said, shaken by his inability to dismiss it. It was…he could recognize some features—no wonder he’d compared him to Wen Ning earlier, there was a definite resemblance…but, could it really be?
He took a step back again, to where he could put a hand on the tree trunk for steadiness. “A-Yuan?”
The sweet-faced Lan smiled at him, a little tremulously, and it was him. Wei Wuxian knew him. Knew his smile, his eyes—his A-Yuan.
It was. It was Wen Yuan. Which meant—
“What,” Wei Wuxian began, and then didn’t know how to frame a sentence around it. “How?”
“Hanguang-jun brought me back here after the Siege of the Burial Mounds,” A-Yuan explained. “I was raised as a Lan.” He smiled again, soft and sympathetic and with a fragile look in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Xian-gege. I’m the only one who made it.”
Wei Wuxian would break down about that later, in private. He blinked hard and looked anywhere else. A-Yuan had Wen Ning’s same sympathetic smile, but without the shyness.
Should he think Lan Wangji had kidnapped his little radish, or spared him from being killed with the rest of his family? It could be both at once, he supposed. Spared his life only to carry him away.
He couldn’t call it saving. A siege? No one else left?
How dare Lan Wangji, no matter what crimes Wei Wuxian had committed. He’d been a guest in the Burial Mounds, he knew the people there were harmless—
Wei Wuxian wrenched his mind onto a new track before tears could rise up. A-Yuan had clearly forgiven the Lan their part in killing the remnant Wen, and Wei Wuxian didn’t know enough about the situation to, to bring that up again for him by raging about it. More important for now to keep putting the pieces together.
If A-Yuan was this much older, Wei Wuxian really had forgotten a lot, and he probably really did live in the Cloud Recesses. Without weapons, or resentment, or any means of defense.
Lan Wangji must be so smug about that, unless he’d learned to regret bringing that state of affairs on himself. They’d certainly been glad to see the back of him the first time!
Hm. A thought. “And did he bring me back here, at the same time?”
Now both boys winced. “That was later,” the one who wasn’t A-Yuan said. “It was—after a lot of—well, there was a whole mess, with the Jin Sect, and…but Jin Ling, that’s your martial nephew, he’s Jin Sect Leader now and that’s improved things! Generally. In the world.”
Wei Wuxian squinted at A-Yuan, who had to be a good three years older than shijie’s child at least, given he’d been well past his second birthday last Wei Wuxian remembered, when she was just now married and not to his knowledge yet pregnant with the kid she’d asked him to name. A-Yuan couldn’t be as much as twenty. “Shouldn’t he be just a kid still?” Fifteen tops? Much too young!
The Lan disciple who was not A-Yuan laughed. “Yeah! He does alright, though. Don’t tell him I said that.”
Wei Wuxian snorted, amused. A-Yuan was smiling, too. “He’s started pointing out, when it comes up, that he’s only a few years younger than his uncle was when he took over the Jiang,” A-Yuan said, which was a ridiculous comparison because Jiang Cheng had also been too young, and thinking about Jiang Cheng right now just hurt so Wei Wuxian went back to the timeline he’d been building and said,
“So Lan Wangji brought you here first, and me later?”
A-Yuan nodded. “I know you used to have trouble with the rules, but it’s a good place to live.”
“Better than the Burial Mounds, at least,” acknowledged Wei Wuxian, which was true and sounded positive while not allowing much, really.
He’d much rather be in the Burial Mounds with everybody.
Though A-Yuan did look well, he had to grant that. Tall, or at least not short, and fit and well-fed. Even his hair showed evidence of good nutrition, and was up in a pretty guan with silver inlays. He’d had things here they could never have given him, back home.
Which was a thought so stereotypically parental that Wei Wuxian remembered his own supposed position here all over again. That he’d supposedly acquired a Lan husband while the kid he’d never quite officially declared himself any sort of actual parent to was raised as one of them. “Really married, though? Really? This isn’t a joke. Who the fuck—”
And as he asked he realized he already had a strong idea. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
“Hanguang-jun,” A-Yuan prompted him, still as though this he should have remembered or guessed, even while forgetting that fifteen or sixteen years had passed and half the people he knew in the world—nearly all the ones he saw every day—were dead, again.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian repeated, not shocked exactly, because he’d already guessed Lan Wangji was the one who’d taken him here—was, after all, the only person who’d ever wanted him here—and it all fit together, despite making no sense at all. He felt oddly distant, even more than he had ever since only one left. “He finally made a winning argument to get me into Cloud Recesses, huh.”
“Well, you were dragged in screaming at first,” the less cute kid rolled his eyes, like this was a personal failing of Wei Wuxian’s dignity rather than a description of his Sect committing a crime, namely kidnapping. “But you came around. It’s fine now.”
“This has got to be a joke,” Wei Wuxian tried. “Come on, stop messing with me. A-Yuan?”
“It’s not a joke, Senior Wei.”
“We can’t be married married,” Wei Wuxian reasoned, not even sure which parts of marriage he was specifically excluding but sure there were some of them. “Wait, is this—some kind of legal protection? Safe harbor?”
Wei Wuxian would rather die on his feet than get entangled in something like that for his own sake. But for A-Yuan, if Lan Wangji had come up with marriage—cut-sleeve and, logically, illegitimate—as a way to get Wei Wuxian under Lan jurisdiction and away from the Jin, to protect A-Yuan….
Undoubtedly it would have been among the more unpleasant experiences of his life, because even as shameless as he was he liked to have some control over the joke rather than being made the butt of it by other people, but he’d have considered it.
If Lan Wangji had unbent enough to first make such an outrageous suggestion, after outrageously capturing him, after having outrageously carried off his A-Yuan. Wen Yuan, the only thing Wei Wuxian would have had left at the time, after somehow surviving the deaths of everyone he’d been trying to keep safe. It had never occurred to Wei Wuxian that this might happen, that he might be the last of them alive. He was never supposed to outlive everybody.
Wen Ning. Wen Qing. I’m sorry. I hope I tried with everything I had. There’s nothing I can do to make up for failing.
Both boys looked excessively mortified. “Ah, no, Senior Wei,” A-Yuan called him, which he still hated, even if admittedly this young man was too grown up to be calling him Xian-gege all the time. And of course, the Lan were so stuffy. Lan Wangji called his own brother xiongzhang. “It’s real, and nobody is trying to persecute you, presently. You’re just...married.”
“Very,” grumbled the less cute one. “Passionately.”
“Jingyi!”
“What? This is weird.”
“You’re being embarrassing.”
And indeed A-Yuan was blushing and avoiding Wei Wuxian’s eye, but not in a—not like someone who was prevaricating. He looked like a kid being embarrassed by his parents. Extremely uncomfortable, but probably not hiding anything.
So if there was something else going on, something that made more sense according to what Wei Wuxian knew about the world, A-Yuan hadn’t been told.
But he was extremely confident that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji. That they.
The ache in his lower body throbbed. His stomach clenched like a fist.
“They’re the ones who are embarrassing,” retorted A-Yuan’s very annoying friend. “Sorry, Senior Wei,” he added dutifully. “It’s just I’m never going to recover from walking in on you two when Hanguang-jun—”
“OKAY,” said A-Yuan, a good child, very loudly, over what was hopefully going to have been something like ‘forgot I was delivering papers’ rather than a deeply unwanted description of whatever Lan Wangji had been doing to Wei Wuxian.
He felt cold and hot and like there was something heavy and alive deep in his gut.
“Lan Wangji wouldn’t really,” he said.
A-Yuan gave an uncomfortable but horribly gentle smile. “He...Hanguang-jun is sincere, Wei-qianbei.”
“Passionate,” his friend repeated, scoffing, and got his foot stepped on. “Ow!”
“I think that’s a lost cause, A-Yuan,” Wei Wuxian said, smiling, feeling very strange.
“Let us take you home, already,” A-Yuan’s friend said, bringing them full circle. “Hanguang-jun can talk to you about your personal relationship, okay? Just don’t sit here in the trees barefoot, weirding everyone out. Our Sect does have better things to do than run after you, you know.”