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What a strange grief it is, to love a home that is no longer yours.
Wei Wuxian knows he could go back and visit Lotus Pier, see all the familiar places and people again. Maybe he will. He could. He probably won’t.
He has a home. He has more of a home than he’s had for longer than he can remember. He loves the Cloud Recesses, now. This, here, is more fully his home than Lotus Pier had ever managed to be. And his life is better than it has ever been, in many ways. He has a place and a role and a community to call his own. He has his husband, and his son. He’s happy. And yet.
Lotus Pier is warm, in his memory. Warm warm warm and alive. The Cloud Recesses doesn’t feel as dead as he’d thought it might, back in the bad days, but it—isn’t the same. It smells different here. Sometimes he yearns for that thick humidity wrapped all around him. It isn’t even that he likes it, necessarily, the muggy summers sucked ass, but. It was his. It’s what he’s always known and a part of him misses that specific discomfort desperately even as he enjoys the mild mountain summers. And he doesn’t crave it desperately like he used to, but he hasn’t tasted real Yunmeng food in a long time. He appreciates it whenever the Gusu cooks try, and of course he can’t live without his chili oil, but still, nothing quite tastes like the food from home.
The muscle memory of his tongue, still calling Lotus Pier “home.” He had called it that defiantly, deliberately, and now he calls it that automatically. It makes him feel a little sick, maybe, now.
Lotus Pier isn’t home anymore. It doesn’t get to be home anymore. He has no right to claim it. He doesn’t know if he ever did. It wasn’t like he was really a Jiang. Maybe there was a time when it was right to instinctively, fiercely call it “home,” against everyone’s expectations, but it’s not that anymore. He’s left the life in which it was his. But he’d spent so long holding on to that identity so strongly that he almost feels adrift without it. He doesn’t know if he means it when he says it. He doesn’t need the Lotus Pier anymore, not like he used to. He has a home. He isn’t even pretending about that anymore. He loves it more than he knew was possible. But—sometimes he misses his first home so much it feels like death.
He could go back to Lotus Pier. Things have been patched over with Jiang Cheng. His reputation in the cultivation world is no longer in shatters. He could go back.
Things would be different there if he did. Lotus Pier rebuilt and changed. He hadn’t been there to see the changes over the years, to grow along with his home (“his home.” Hah!), and now it is frozen in his mind, the halls and streets he tumbled through as a child and drifted through as a young man, that he knows have their equivalents, but are still changed and lost forever from the memories he had clung to to keep himself sane. He’s already had enough ruined in his life. Must the sourness creep into the golden laughing memories as well?
He knows it could be good if he went back, too. Probably would be. There would still be the market stalls and food vendors, the river and the lakes, the buzzing wet summer heat, his old friends, the sky low and wide and bright.
He doesn’t think he’ll go back.
“You can visit Lotus Pier, if you want,” Lan Zhan had said to him, brow furrowed. He always looks at him with such sad eyes when Wei Wuxian thoughtlessly mentions “home.” “I am not forbidding you. You would not be run out of Yunmeng.”
“It’s not that,” Wei Wuxian tried to explain weakly. “It’s not that I can’t go back. It’s not that I want to, really. It’s just—ah, Lan Zhan. Sometimes you lose something, and you’re not going to get it back.” He blinked away tears in his eyes.
Lan Zhan understands about some of that. He’d lived in a world where he wasn’t getting Wei Wuxian back for a very long time. And he had lived through the Cloud Recesses being burnt. But the rebuilt home is still his. It is the only place he’s ever really loved. But as for Wei Wuxian, echoes of every other home he has loved still pang through him.
He even still misses the Burial Mounds, and nearly every fucking moment in that place was a horror. He can’t help it. What is it like to love a place forever, to need to love it to survive, not—not even to love it, it’s simply what life is. And he has to, to some extent, love his life, because it’s his, and what is life but being a little desperately in love with everything around you, no matter how good or bad? He doesn’t know how else to live. And then he wasn’t there anymore, and it’s not going to get to be home again. He doesn’t get to love it that much.
He just…he was so used to loving Lotus Pier, and maybe he isn’t ever going to be there again. Maybe he doesn’t even fucking want to.
He doesn’t think he’ll go back. He doesn’t think he could make himself. He’ll probably die for a second time never returning to the place that still has half his beating heart in it.