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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.”

Chapter Text

The boys sent off a few talisman messages announcing his retrieval, and cajoled him through the woods toward one of the houses in the private bit of the compound. Wei Wuxian trailed along, walking beside the white gravel path rather than on it in deference to his lack of shoes.

The boys did not object to this.

They also, very obviously, regarded Wei Wuxian as harmless.

He could take them out without hurting them, with their guards down so far. With the search called off, that might be the best idea. How long would it take for that to be noticed? If he knocked them out and dragged them off the path out of sight, would that help? How much time to work on the wards would he buy himself?

Was that advantage worth turning on A-Yuan, and abusing his faith in Wei Wuxian?

Of course it wasn’t. And there’d be more information to be had, if he bided his time.

So he let them lead him all the way to a house ominously named Silence Room, implying lots of punitive meditation on his crimes as an intended part of the inhabitant’s daily routine, and wave him up the pathway between the remorselessly orderly flowers in the front garden, toward the front door.

“I have to get back to lessons now we’ve found you, but Sizhui just needs to tie up a few loose ends he dropped earlier and he’s free the rest of the afternoon,” said Loud Lan.

“Should I stay with you?” A-Yuan asked, a tell of anxiety in one fidgeting hand. “Jingyi can afford to be a little bit later to class, to fetch Hanguang-jun.”

“No, no,” Wei Wuxian tried a reassuring smile. It seemed to work. “I’ll survive on my own for a little while, I’m sure. Don’t fret so, A-Yuan, I’m not old and frail yet!”

A-Yuan said he’d go sort out his obligations for the rest of the day as quickly as he could and then do his best to bring some food, since Wei Wuxian had apparently slept through both breakfast and lunch—not a rule violation, since he’d had a medical cause, but he was almost surprised to learn such an exception could legally be made, and he wasn’t required to simply starve until the regulation hour of dinner.

But what did he really know about the Cloud Recesses. Not much, he was beginning to believe. Especially if it really had been almost twenty years since he’d been here.

Places could change. People, too.

He just hadn’t thought that was true, somehow, of the Lan.

The deep ache Wei Wuxian felt between his hips with every step hadn’t really gotten worse since their talk than it had been earlier, he knew that. It was just that before it had been just another pain to ignore, and now every time he was reminded of it another pain drew tighter, deeper still inside his gut, cold and ill.

A-Yuan had gone. It was hard to believe in him, now that he wasn’t right before his eyes.

Wei Wuxian, with that very particular peculiar feeling, like he was both floating along and dragging his body like a dead weight, as if his spirit was making a serious attempt at breaking loose from his flesh, moved along as he’d been instructed between the tidy blue flowers, up the steps, over the veranda, and inside a dim, Lanish space reeking of sandalwood, which he was completely unable to be interested in at the present time.

He saw a table and sank down at it, elbows on the smooth cool wood, and regulated his breath until it was normal again.

This time alone was precious—he couldn’t be sure how much of it he’d be allowed, going forward, especially having established himself as a flight risk. He couldn’t afford to go to pieces.

So. What had he gotten himself into, in all these years that he’d forgotten?

Wei Wuxian sat up straight, pushed up one sleeve of his filmy white Lan robe, and looked at the big handprint bruise there. Then he pushed up the other, and looked at the elaborately knotted silk with the Lan pattern embroidered into it. The worked silver nestled against his pulse point like a protective charm, which it wasn’t.

Lan Wangji had very large hands.

Reading between the lines in the account given by A-Yuan and his Lan friend, it was obvious what had happened.

He’d sold himself.

It wasn’t an entirely new idea. Kids on the street got sold pretty frequently, and selling yourself meant you had some control over the circumstances and might even see some money at the end of your term if you lived that long and your master was the honest sort, and it often seemed to be a better deal than starving.

To a brothel cheap enough to take urchins off the street, to a household in need of hands, to some man for a night or a lifetime—

Wei Wuxian had never really considered it for himself. Not just because girls tended to be more desirable as both maids and prostitutes, or because of his pride that said he’d rather starve than crawl, though he would, but because he’d always been just capable enough he was confident of surviving on his own merits.

He went hungry, nearly all the time, as that houseless child Wei Ying whom he rarely bothered trying to remember being; he was cold in the winter-time and wet in the rain and had his share of wretched days. But he rarely outright starved.

He thought, though his memories of those days were too vague to be certain, that he’d known someone might kill him, eventually, someone or something. But that wasn’t enough less likely in slavery to change the balance.

And of course if the house you were bound to happened to have a dog in it, that was even worse than being on the street, where at least you could run away from the dogs, even if there was no one to protect you.

Putting yourself at the bottom of a pecking order never offered the kind of protection Wei Wuxian considered worth the trade, anyway. He could look after himself better than anyone holding a leash on him was likely to bother.

And anyway, there hadn’t been a labor shortage where Wei Wuxian had been a child, and thus no excess of households interested in investing in a spare thieving brat.

Anyone looking to adopt in a son had far more respectable options. Anyone looking for cheap workers could find someone older and stronger, more respectable and equally unfortunate, or get a civilized spare child off a struggling family, rather than risk taking in something who knew where it had been and what habits and diseases it had picked up.

Wei Wuxian had always been good-looking, though, even as an ill-kempt urchin with no education. Handsome, quick, and clever. If that had been a direction he was willing to take his life, if it had looked like his only path forward, if he'd put in the effort, he might have been able to edge his way in at a slightly classy whorehouse.

But obviously nowhere that could even pretend to be as classy as the Cloud Recesses.

The Lan were—of course they’d call it a marriage. If they couldn’t sweep the arrangement under the rug altogether. (Which was what he’d expect of them, so it had to need to be public somehow.) They had standards. Lans weren’t allowed concubines, fullstop.

Apparently even more than they weren’t allowed ludicrously unsuitable spouses.

There was also no allowance for personal slaves—the Sect as a whole kept servants, rather than fully committing to their monastic affectations and expecting the disciples to handle all the grunt work, but that was all. No private ownership or contract-holding, not on any terms. There wasn’t any way for a Lan to keep someone for personal use, except as a wife.

The natural thing for the Lan to have done once they got hold of Wei Wuxian would be to treat him as a prisoner, but if somehow, maybe politically that was unfeasible—

If this very much not customary arrangement meant the Lan got to retain possession of the Yiling Patriarch, whatever they wanted with him, and Lan Wangji got...got....

And Wei Wuxian would never have made that kind of deal just to live. But he’d have done it for A-Yuan.

He turned his wrist, looking at the embroidery along the band. Of course it wouldn’t be worn on his head; he hadn’t really married in, hadn’t been made part of the family or the sect. Property of the Lan Clan, that ribbon said.

The only rough spot in the whole assumption was that it was Lan Wangji.

On the surface of it, the fact that for all their friction Lan Wangji was someone Wei Wuxian respected made it seem more reasonable that he’d agree to submit to him, except that he knew himself.

For the sake of those people he really cared about he’d accept anything, including humiliation if it came to it, and he had both a resilient sense of pride and a thick face so he was hard to humiliate in the first place. But when it came to being truly shamed, brought low without the ability to make a joke of it or strike back, before enemies or before those he thought well of, he’d always want it to be enemies.

What did it matter if they jeered, or looked down on him? He knew his own worth. The opinions of people who hated him were dust.

He’d have hated this idea more for every shred of esteem he’d felt for Lan Wangji.

And that Lan Zhan had agreed. It seemed unlikely, on reflection, to have been his idea. He was so unbending. Would he really demean himself in public like this just for—the kids seemed to think so. Seemed to think he—

Maybe that was a ruse, though. Maybe he’d spared A-Yuan out of sentimentality, and not as a hostage. Maybe for political reasons Wei Wuxian had to pretend not to be doing anything useful for the Lan, whatever it was he was really doing, and they made a show (a very, very convincing show) of him just being here to get fucked.

That all seemed…very cloak and dagger while also being ridiculous enough to belong in a comic play, but it wasn’t impossible. Wei Wuxian had no idea what the political situation looked like at this point.

Other than shijie’s son running the Jin, hopefully paying plenty of heed to his mother’s guidance.

If Jiang Yanli or Jiang Cheng were willing or able to help him, and he needed helping, they surely would have by now, so he wouldn’t count on it.

He didn’t have the Seal anymore. He didn’t have Chenqing. He didn’t have a core, which they must know by now. What was he good for? Talisman designs, maybe? Or just as a threat held in reserve?

He’d have to wait and see. Lan Zhan would know. Maybe he'd have an explanation, for how it had come to this, after everyone else was killed and A-Yuan was carried off and Wei Wuxian was dragged struggling into the Cloud Recesses. For how they'd worked it all out between them, a scheme to save the last two living things in the Burial Mounds at the cost of his dignity and Lan Zhan's reputation. Maybe.

And if it turned out Lan Wangji was not the man Wei Wuxian had always thought he was, and that he believed he had the Yiling Patriarch well broken in to serve and service him, he was going to discover his work had been most fortuitously undone.

Wei Wuxian had resolved thus, achieved a sufficient degree of calm, and was about to get up and start searching the house for anything it could tell him, when he heard very soft footsteps outside. Climbing the steps to the front door.

Barely even footsteps. Most of the sound was the flex of the wood underfoot.

Not A-Yuan. Wei Wuxian had already memorized his stride, at his new nearly adult height. This was a bigger, heavier person, who stepped not with more care, exactly, but as though care was a well-worn habit, that took very little effort. As if absolute precision had been engraved deep into his nature.

Wei Wuxian’s knuckles went white in his lap.

The door slid open. The figure there was tall and broad and stood out flat black against the daylight for a second, before he took a step inside and Wei Wuxian’s eyes caught up with the lighting, so the first thought he had was: he got bigger.

Lan Wangji hadn’t actually grown much, he decided a second later, which was good because if he’d done so it would be some form of suspicious magic in itself, since he’d been twenty-two already when they last met and ought to be done growing taller.

He’d filled out and bulked up a bit more, was all, keeping most of the delicate features of youth as powerful cultivators tended to, but growing onto his bones—though Wei Wuxian was only estimating that in terms of proportion, and since Lan Wangji was wearing a fairly ostentatious layered outfit that made him loom large, he might be deceived by tailoring. Maybe he hadn't grown at all.

Lan Wangji was also wearing his hair taller, with a more imposing guan, which contributed to the impression.

But mostly it was the sense his cultivation gave the space around him, something which aged even when one’s face did not. Wei Wuxian could feel the depth of it, heavy as a drawn sword, and it filled the little house and made the man seem to take up the world.

There was a hint of a storm in his face, but nothing that on a normal person would be called an expression, and nothing Wei Wuxian knew how to decipher. The smoothness that had always called out to him when they were young, that he’d loved to see ruptured and broken up, was denser than ever.

The pressure of the ribbon around his wrist seemed to increase.

He stood. It helped a little.

Lan Wangji was wearing a Lan forehead ribbon, pale blue and embroidered with clouds, so there went any chance that he’d given his own to Wei Wuxian as some kind of, of performative romantic keepsake. It really was a collar. Wei Wuxian glanced down at the silk band around his arm.

It was very clean, for something so pale and pretty worn by Wei Wuxian. He wondered what the penalty was for damaging it. Or maybe he wasn’t allowed to do anything, these days, that would mess it up. It wasn’t as though Lan food had the spice-bright sauces he’d trail a long white sleeve through in the first hour, if he tried to wear one.

“Wei Ying,” said Lan Wangji, and he hurriedly looked up. He couldn’t afford to let his mind wander, even if there was nowhere it wanted to be less than here.

Time enough to climb outside his body and ignore what was happening to it later, if it came to that.

“Looks like you finally got me back to Gusu, Lan Zhan,” he said, and laughed, as if it didn’t cut his throat, as if the memory of all Lan Wangji’s contempt and determination to control and purify him all through the war wasn’t more infuriating now than it had been then, as if the thought of having been brought to heel didn’t burn.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji agreed, looking at Wei Wuxian with alarming intensity.

“The kids gave me a rundown,” he said. “It could have been clearer! What do I do around here, even? Do they really let me teach?”

Lan Wangji nodded. “The older students. Uncle is not convinced you will not be a bad influence on the younger disciples.”

“Of course I’m a bad influence,” Wei Wuxian scoffed. “But I didn’t manage to ruin A-Yuan did I? So cold, Teacher Lan!” He pushed his mouth to one side, dramatically thinking. “Is that still what I’m supposed to call him?” Theoretically, as Lan Wangji’s wife, he should politely address his husband’s paternal uncle as such. This did not sound like him, but if it was expected it wasn’t a point he’d necessarily have fought on either. He’d certainly never tried to call Madam Yu anything but what she expected to be called.

“Mm. Sometimes you say ‘uncle’ to annoy him.”

Wei Wuxian laughed, a little relieved to hear he wasn’t expected to constantly pantomime his own capitulation and very relieved to hear he got away with annoying Lan Qiren. The terms of his bargain could be more onerous. “Does he have me punished for my impertinence?”

Lan Wangji’s face hardened, a little. Firmly: “I would not permit it.”

Wei Wuxian swallowed. He grinned. “Ah, that’s right, Lan Zhan!” he said. “I understand I’m yours to discipline now!” How is that going for you, he wondered.

This seemed to amuse Lan Wangji, which wasn’t an expression Wei Wuxian had ever seen on his face before and which was, under the circumstances, somewhat alarming. “Mm,” he agreed.

Surely they wouldn’t keep him around just to teach a few juniors theory, even if they trusted the kids not to absorb any heresy from him by that age. “Am I allowed in the library?” he asked. “Have I invented anything good recently?”

“Wei Ying is occasionally banned from the library,” Lan Wangji said, still amused, and it was actually kind of funny. Who’d imagine he’d come to the point where the Lan were forbidding Wei Wuxian library access as a punishment, when back when he first came here they’d shut him up there for hours on end! “And has produced many excellent inventions.”

Ah. Well. So he was doing something useful around here.

“Is that why you keep me around?” he made it as teasing as he could manage with guts full of cold mud.

“No,” said Lan Wangji firmly.

They had to have taken the Tiger Seal off him somehow and be keeping it. The Lan unlike the Jin wouldn’t want to use it themselves, but they’d supported his use of resentful cultivation during the war, despite abhorring it. He could see them acknowledging the potential usefulness of such a weapon, while not wanting to risk tainting any of their own with the practice.

They must be very confident about their leverage.

Wei Wuxian grinned. “Is it for my personal charms, then? A-Yuan says we’re married.” He batted his eyes outrageously.

Lan Wangji seemed pleased that he already knew, as much as he ever seemed pleased about anything. “Yes.”

“That’s so weird,” Wei Wuxian said, not seeing any need to prevaricate about that much, when Lan Wangji knew about the amnesia and had to be aware Wei Wuxian had not had this kind of relationship anywhere in his life plans fifteen years ago.

Lan Wangji looked displeased about it anyway. “Wei Ying,” he said, and took a step forward.

Wei Wuxian let him approach. He needed to know where he stood.

Lan Wangji was wearing proper shoes, which turned his tiny height advantage a little more substantive, enough that when he stood this close, Wei Wuxian had to tip his head up a little to keep looking in his eyes. “Lan Zhan,” he replied.

Lan Wangji put a hand on his face, bent in, and pushed their mouths together.

It—wasn’t a bad kiss, probably. It started off pretty gentle and then got more heated, erasing any remnant possibility that this was not very much a fucking-based relationship where Lan Wangji very much wanted to stick his tongue into Wei Wuxian’s mouth, among other things. The hand on his cheek steered him firmly into the pressure. Teeth grazed their way over his bottom lip in a way that made a shiver run up his spine that Wei Wuxian thought might have been arousal under better circumstances.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji said, lifting his head out of the kiss with a slight furrow to his brow. He let go of Wei Wuxian’s face. “You are uncomfortable.”

Ah, he could tell. Wei Wuxian shrugged. “First time,” he pointed out. “Second ki—holy shit that was you.”

The sense memory of the tall, strong presence that had kissed him so forcefully and importunately on Phoenix Mountain had stayed with him better than most things stuck in his spotty memory. It had been very shocking!

Not, at the time, awful, but in retrospect his skin was crawling.

Lan Wangji seemed embarrassed. They’d clearly had this conversation already. Wei Wuxian had no idea what to say. But, well, this did assemble more of the pieces as to how this arrangement had ever come to pass. Lan Wangji had been wanting to fuck him for a long time.

Wei Wuxian laughed. “Well, isn’t Lan Zhan a man who knows what he wants.”

“Mm,” Lan Wangji said, with alarming emphasis. He put his hand out again, touched Wei Wuxian’s cheek. Brushed a thumb over his lips. Wei Wuxian knew he was going to have to endure whatever happened tonight, or right now if Lan Wangji was so inclined, that he didn’t have enough information to try to escape yet, especially when he couldn’t be sure A-Yuan would be safe. But it was newly oppressive to think about, knowing that Lan Wangji really wasn’t above taking what he wanted by force. And that Wei Wuxian wouldn’t have a prayer of winning if he tried to fight.

The bruise on his arm ached.

The broad, hot hand on his face fell away. “You are not…yourself,” Lan Wangji said.

Relief cut the fear from inside him and made space for the anger, which sheeted up like flame. As had so often been his downfall. Wei Wuxian smiled, and knew some poison had seeped in. “Oh, surely Hanguang-jun shouldn’t be deprived of his marital rights just because I’m a little indisposed.”

Lan Wangji went very still, and glowered at him. “My rights,” he said, after an oppressive silence.

Wei Wuxian was kicking himself half to death internally. Outwardly, he shrugged. “The kids informed me that Lan Zhan is very…passionate. Shameless, even! Even if it’s vain of me, I thought my husband would be impatient.”

“Always,” said Lan Wangji, with a terrifying forthrightness that made Wei Wuxian’s heart skip. He was, very literally, so fucked. Lan Wangji frowned at him, in his usual way. “But...”

“Does it matter if I’m uncomfortable?”

Lan Wangji’s frown deepened.

Wei Wuxian raised his eyebrows. The ache inside him and the handprint bruise on his arm seemed to pulse. “Does it hurt your pride? If I’m not eager enough?”

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji reproved, sharply.

“Am I normally better at pretending to want it?” Wei Wuxian asked, his voice rising into a jeer.

Women often talked freely in front of strange children; the fact that he’d never particularly paid attention didn’t mean he’d picked nothing up. He knew how marriage worked, often enough, when it wasn’t like his parents’, a rootless, reckless affection. When you weren’t in a position to be forceful, like Madam Yu. When it was survival.

“Do I act all impressed by your dick, am I cute and coy? Do I dutifully gasp for you? Or do I beg you to stop, and you don’t listen, because I’m yours?” He flicked the wrist with the silken claim on it, making the crossing lines of ribbon slide out from under his flimsy white sleeve.

Lan Wangji’s face by now was set into such a mask of fury it was like he could cut Wei Wuxian in half with his gaze alone. He clearly wasn’t used to this kind of backtalk. From Wei Wuxian of all people! It would seem time had only stiffened the spine of one of them, while breaking the other’s. Wei Wuxian shrugged, all contempt. “I’ve forgotten how this game is played, Lao Gong will have to remind me.”

Lan Wangji’s visible hand had made a fist at his side, and it was tightening all the while as Wei Wuxian spoke on.

Wei Wuxian smiled. He’d tipped his hand, there was no point holding back now. “I don’t know what the terms of the bargain were. I must have agreed to them for a reason, and I already know how far I’ll sink just to live and it’s not this low. Is even Lan Sect really cold enough to raise a child for this many years and still hold him as a hostage against a used-up old heretic?”

Lan Wangji moved, and Wei Wuxian tilted his chin up to accept the consequences of his reckless words, almost giddy with it. It had been stupid, unwise, a gamble on tiles he could not see, but he’d rather accept this than what he’d been planning to endure tonight.

But the blow didn’t come. Lan Wangji had turned his back on Wei Wuxian, instead. The hand in the small of his back was a fist as well, so tight it was shaking.

“Wei Ying has the house,” he said flatly. And stormed out.

He had the house? What was that supposed to mean? Was he not supposed to go out? Wait here quietly while his husband was off having a tantrum privately because he was above beating his helpless wife for a provoking tongue?

Hah. Look how far Wei Wuxian had fallen already, he was half tempted to be grateful to Lan Wangji for being good enough to walk away rather than hit him.

Contrarily, and a little bit in hopes A-Yuan would come with the promised lunch, instead of running off Wei Wuxian stayed around rooting through the house for a while to see if Lan Wangji would come back, and so any hidden watchers would have time to let their guards down.

It really did seem to be their house, even if it was very obviously mostly Lan Wangji’s, so he had to add to Lan Wangji’s dubious credit that he allowed Wei Wuxian to own things to his own taste, more or less.

A lot of the dark robes were deep blue rather than black, and he owned more white than ever before in his life even if it was nearly all underthings.

Mostly his clothes were much cheaper than Lan Zhan’s, he noticed, which was reasonable given how hard he was on clothes but under the circumstances was probably a pointed badge of his status. The clothes fit perfectly, and the shoes were made to his measure and broken to his feet.

He found some music scored for dizi, but no such instrument. Maybe they let him borrow one sometimes, to use under supervision?

The Lan almost certainly had the Tiger Seal locked away somewhere under the kind of grim heavy protection they’d see fit to use on something like that, with the understanding that in the face of sufficient need they could unseal it and unite it with their tame diabolist, and carve whatever more-terrible-than-Wei-Wuxian thing had managed to heave itself into being out of existence again.

Would Chenqing be stored in the same place, or as far away as possible so it would be harder to steal them both back at once?

And to think he’d been so fixated on the Wen and the Jin he’d never imagined the Sect to finally bring the Yiling Patriarch to his knees would be the Lan. Stupid of him, really. They’d never been shy about wanting to.

Lan Wangji—

Lan Wangji kept pressed flowers in his books, and allowed Wei Wuxian’s scrawled talisman drafts that he refused to become absorbed in right now to spill over into what was clearly his own workspace, and he’d done this to Wei Wuxian and wanted to pretend it was something other than what it was. Wei Wuxian was being forced into a much more violent empathy for the plight of women than he was in the habit of indulging, outside of tragic night-hunts. He already understood viscerally why murdered and self-murdered wives made such common and such powerful resentful spirits.

Maybe the Wei Wuxian of yesterday was broken-down enough he really was grateful when Lan Wangji didn’t hit him.

Wei Wuxian changed into clothes he didn’t recognize but in which he’d feel more able to recognize himself, putting aside the Lan shift that must have been standard infirmary wear, or something. He pulled his sleeve down over the blue ribbon and cinched it there, not quite daring to try to take the thing off yet, in case that would set off some kind of alarm.

They’d be primed enough for him to do something reckless already, between fleeing the doctors and going off on Lan Wangji like that.

Wei Wuxian flung himself down on the single, wide bed where he apparently slept with Lan Wangji, in all senses of the term, and lay sprawled, taking up two people’s worth of space and getting his shoes on the blanket as much as possible. “All mine,” he said sarcastically.

An itch started between his shoulderblades soon enough, though, and he had to roll off the bed and stand up, tugging at his clothes like he cared if they were mussed, before he could get really spooked at the idea of Lan Wangji walking back in and finding him on the bed like that, and taking it as an invitation.

There didn’t seem to be any food in the house—probably not actually a conspiracy against Wei Wuxian; this was a freestanding building but it wasn’t actually designed to house an independent household, it was part of the sect complex just like Wei Wuxian’s lovely, breezy bedroom back in Lotus Pier had been. But whatever the reason, no food was no food.

Wei Wuxian drank some water, which as common sense had suggested but paranoia had doubted was neither poisoned nor drugged that he could detect, and stepped out the back door of Lan Wangji’s house.

There was a nice little vegetable garden there. He shamelessly stole some young green peas off the vine and walked off toward the back mountain, munching the peas in their pods and already feeling less utterly like shit.

Everything was terrible, but he was eating and not actually locked up! He could work with this.

First order of business was to see if anyone immediately descended from on high to drag him back under closer supervision. If they didn’t, secondary goal was to scout for weaknesses in the wards, so if he didn’t manage to get his hands on a jade token he would have the first stage of his forced exit route worked out.

How did the Lan all manage to tolerate living in a cage.

He’d ask how he managed to tolerate it, but it was obvious he didn’t have a choice. And he’d certainly endured worse things.

It was pretty, the Gusu Lan back mountain. Wei Wuxian found a narrow footpath and followed it between softly waving branches and grass-heads, past banks of wildflowers yellow, white, red, purple. A spot sometimes of blue. Under the heavier tree cover, ferns curled. It was much, much nicer than taking a walk through the Burial Mounds.

Wei Wuxian wished with every fiber of his being he was back in the dust and bones of that place, sixteen years ago. On his own paths, in his own place, with his people he’d chosen, and who trusted him, and whom he hadn’t failed yet.

Wei Wuxian turned off the path, once he'd gotten far enough that it was slanting sharply down across the mountainside, and crossed a small meadow, sinking down cross-legged in the dapple shade at the foot of a tall, slim ash tree.

The meadow grasses were high enough that he’d be very hard to spot from the path, here, and he technically wasn’t hiding, but he’d be able to see before he was seen, if anyone came following after him.

He closed his eyes, removing that last benefit for the moment, and breathed carefully, and started poking mentally at the energy around him, trying to get a better sense of these new wards than he’d had time for earlier.

They’d incorporated his work, he realized rather quickly. He hadn’t spotted it earlier, in his rush and not knowing they’d have had a chance, but elements of the structure were built on work he’d done to secure the Burial Mounds.

Anger lit so white-hot in his chest that if he’d been closer to the inhabited part of the Cloud Recesses he might have gotten up and throttled to death the first person he saw. The Lan, whom he had never wronged more seriously than schoolboy mischief, had come to his home and broken his protections and killed his family and taken his child and made him their dog, and he had let it happen.

And they had the gall to take the work they’d despoiled and add it to their own defenses!

Had they made him help? Wei Wuxian half thought they must have, but then again would they trust him not to sabotage the work. He couldn’t find any loopholes like he would have tried to leave himself, if he’d been forced into such a project. But maybe they’d just caught them all.

So much for the righteous Lan Sect.

He breathed until the killing rage left him, because he couldn’t afford it, not when they had A-Yuan and A-Yuan wouldn’t understand. Then he opened his eyes, and thought he must have found a different way to go mad.

Walking up the path in the direction he’d come from, he saw, incredibly—impossibly—

“Wen Ning?” he asked. And then he was dashing forward, laboriously, through the tall grasses. “Wen Ning!”

Wen Ning turned, looking exactly like he had last time Wei Wuxian had seen him, yesterday and fifteen years ago, except slightly better dressed. “Wei-gongzi!”

“Am I hallucinating?” Wei Wuxian asked, coming to a slightly panting halt. “Am I having a long weird dream? If I am I’m going to have to find a way to apologize to Lan Wangji for how my brain characterized him, once I wake up.”

Apologize without explaining what for.

Wen Ning gave him a funny look. “I’m real, Wei-gongzi,” he said. “A-Yuan called me up here, he says you’re having trouble with your memory.”

“A-Yuan!” Wei Wuxian expostulated, raising a finger. “Is the problem! He told me he was the only one left.”

Wen Ning tilted his head. “Did he say ‘left alive,’ maybe? He doesn’t usually make jokes about that technicality, but…”

“No. He definitely said Lan Wangji took him here after they besieged us at the Burial Mounds, and he was the only one left.”

Wen Ning’s expression cleared. “Ah. I was already gone by the time the siege happened. The Jin had reported me destroyed.”

“Falsely, I see.”

Wen Ning nodded, his same sweet stiff nod. “They put nails in my head.” Wow, fuck. Great to be reminded other people had it a lot worse than Wei Wuxian! Perspective.

He reached out and took Wen Ning’s arm, just to feel him and prove he was really there. Wen Ning’s skin was cold, but he squeezed Wei Wuxian’s hand back with real human sympathy and carefully measured strength.

“How did we get you back?” ‘We’ was probably the wrong word, but Wei Wuxian couldn’t face that reality quite yet.

Wen Ning shrugged. “We’ve never figured that out. You called, and I came. Nie-zongzhu might have done something? To open the way out for me? But that’s awfully direct for him.”

“Unlocking a door is awfully direct for Nie Mingjue now?”

“Ah, no. Nie Mingjue has been dead for over twelve years.” Wen Ning paused, then added: “The Jin murdered him.”

“Man, they really were screwing everyone over, huh? And it sounds like they already got what was coming to them, bah." Wei Wuxian patted Wen Ning's elbow encouragingly, though he couldn't have said who he meant to encourage. "I heard shijie’s son is in charge now, did something happen to Jin Zixuan?”

It would be disappointing to hear, at this point, that the Peacock had been involved in all this murdering of Sect Leaders and any of that, and caught up in the consequences. Once shijie married him, it had become urgently important for Jin Zixuan to be a really fucking annoying but essentially good guy.

Wen Ning made pretty much the most dramatic grimace his stiff face was capable of. “Um.”

“What?”

“Ah. Wei-gongzi. We happened to Jin Zixuan.”

Chapter Text

Wei Wuxian’s hand clenched like a talon around Wen Ning’s wrist. “What?”

“That is…” Wen Ning sighed. “Sit down?” So they shuffled to the edge of the path and sat down in the grass, without actually letting go of each other, somewhat as though Wen Ning thought Wei Wuxian might collapse without his support, although he wasn’t actually feeling faint; he’d exceeded his own capacity for shock for the day.

Wen Ning had gotten more authoritative in fifteen years; Wei Wuxian was glad to see it even as it made him feel all the more morosely unnecessary.

Of course, the Lan wouldn’t want him being too assertive with his Ghost General.

He bet part of the bargain he’d made was for them allowing Wen Ning to exist, and not even locked away. Wei Wuxian would demonstrably do a lot of stupid shit to ensure that Wen Ning continued to exist. (Even if Wen Qing wasn’t here anymore, to ask it of him.)

“There was a Jin ambush for the two of us, with some Lan for added legitimacy,” said Wen Ning, once they were settled, confirming Wei Wuxian’s understanding of how his succession of nemeses had queued up. “It was a sort of nested trap. You played and I fought, and in the middle of things Jin Zixuan ran in trying to stop the fighting. But…he was in Jin colors, rushing toward you. You were angry, and I was…”

Wei Wuxian nodded, knowing how little judgment Wen Ning could exercise when he was like that. That was what Wei Wuxian was supposed to be for.

“We reacted just like the person who sent him there hoped we would. He died.”

Wei Wuxian pressed his eyes closed. A nested trap. They’d walked into the trap set for them, and become the jaws of a trap for someone else.

“Everything went bad after that,” Wen Ning said quietly.

Wei Wuxian put the hand not gripped in Wen Ning’s cool one over his face. Of course. Of course he’d ruined even the one thing he’d thought he might still be able to do, that would be worth something. Fucked over his shijie, failed the Wens. Of course it had been his fault, in the end, that it all went wrong.

Wen Ning squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry, Wei-gongzi.”

“Can’t you just call me by my name,” Wei Wuxian exclaimed, wretched, very much to his own surprise. He looked up to see Wen Ning equally surprised. It wasn’t that Wei Wuxian hadn’t objected before, but never like he really cared, because he hadn’t. “Fuck, Wen Ning, I don’t know why I said that, I’m sorry.”

Wen Ning pursed his lips. “Wei Wuxian?” he tried.

They both winced. Lots of people called him that way, of course, but from Wen Ning it was just a reminder of Wen Qing and how she wasn’t here to say it, and never would be again. That was worse for Wen Ning, of course, but for Wei Wuxian it was currently a fresh wound, shocking and awful and not quite real enough to be raw.

“I can’t say just Wuxian,” Wen Ning said firmly.

“No, no one calls me that,” Wei Wuxian assured him. He grinned, cheeky. “Wuxian-ge?”

Wen Ning huffed a laugh. “Really?”

It would be cute, actually. “Or you could use my birth name.”

Another grimace, less dramatic than the one about them murdering his martial sister’s husband, but still emphatic enough. Wen Ning let go of Wei Wuxian entirely, as part of a full-body wince at the very idea. “Hanguang-jun would obliterate me.”

Wei Wuxian’s stomach turned over. “That!” he half-shouted, his newly freed hand stabbing out in emphasis, pointing right at Wen Ning’s face. “Lan Wangji! What the hell is going on with that?”

He’d—never thought much about how Lan Wangji was the only person since maybe his parents to call him like that all the time—well, there had been Uncle Jiang, but (like his parents had) he’d mostly used it with a diminutive, rather than the family name, and adopted the courtesy name instead, once he’d given it, to set an example to the sect.

Before then, some of the older cultivators at Lotus Pier had used his birth name sometimes, though more often it had been shidi or shizhi. Madam Yu had used it occasionally, when she couldn’t avoid it. Jiang Cheng sometimes, but he’d followed his father like everyone else and switched to ‘Wuxian’ once it was given.

It had been used in contempt, of course, an uninvited familiarity, a refusal to consider him a peer.

But ‘Wei Ying’ had only ever really been his name, the thing he went by on purpose and was called as a matter of course, with one person.

The offer had been carelessly made, a gambit in his attempt at annoying the stiff, impressive boy into some kind of friendship. He’d never been sure if it was being used in acceptance or dismissal, but it had still made ‘Lan Zhan’ fair game, and Wei Wuxian could hardly take the joking invitation back even if he’d wanted to.

He’d enjoyed the privilege of calling Lan Wangji so intimately, like a close friend, until he’d had to give it up as part of his general wartime fuck-off attitude, and he’d failed back then to read very deeply into Lan Wangji’s failure to echo his retreat to formality. He’d thought sometimes it really was an insult, and other times just Lan Wangji’s inflexibility, refusing to adjust his habits to the new situation, and mostly hadn’t thought about it at all.

But it made perfect sense, knowing what he knew now, that granted an intimacy, the Second Jade of Lan had been disinclined to give it up. And of course he was possessive of it, now that Wei Wuxian belonged to him and he felt he had every right to decide things on his behalf. Like how his friends addressed him.

And, sure enough, when it came to their compliance Wen Ning’s life was on the line. So to speak.

And he, at least, knew it. He’d surely have a better idea of the situation than A-Yuan, clearly carefully sheltered from the ugly realities, had had.

And he was looking mortified by the question. About what was between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji.

Wei Wuxian buried his head in his hands. “I already know we’re fucking,” he said. “You don’t have to cover that part. I had to find out from A-Yuan.”

Wen Ning, who didn’t actually need to breathe, let out a breath of relief.

“Coward,” said Wei Wuxian.

Wen Ning made the huff of his laugh again. “What are you asking, then?”

“Why? What was I thinking? What’s the—what are the terms of this situation, Wen Ning, how did it get to this, no one’s being straight with me and I’m losing my mind.”

“I missed…significant parts,” Wen Ning warned him.

“Well I’ve effectively missed everything so get me up to speed.”

“You’d already come to some kind of arrangement with Hanguang-jun by the time you got the nails out for me; you were traveling together. I don’t know about that.

“But he stopped trying to be subtle, uh, probably earlier but especially after we all went to Lotus Pier, and a lot of things came out. About some of the Jin crimes, and I found out for sure about A-Yuan, and…” Wen Ning hung his head, let out a gusty, unvoiced sigh. “And I told Jiang-zongzhu about your core.”

“You did what?” Wei Wuxian’s voice rose half into a shriek, and now it was his turn to shove his tight, shaking hands anywhere he wouldn’t lash out with them. “Wen Ning! You swore. You swore you’d never let him know!”

“He deserved it!” If Wen Ning were alive he’d be flushed with fury. In spite of everything, Wei Wuxian was glad to see him staring back, uncowed. “He was being so cruel to you—he kept lashing out even after you passed out, blaming you for everything under the sun. He didn’t deserve the peace of mind you were protecting, and he…” Finally Wen Ning’s bluster broke. “Gongzi, he didn’t deserve to not understand. It made him worse, not being able to forgive you.”

Wei Wuxian curled in on himself, unable to keep raging but—but—unable to—

“Did I ever do anything right, Wen Ning?” His fingernails dug into the opposite wrist. “Did anything I did even help?” Did any of it matter. Any of Wei Wuxian’s grand ideas. Willful, ruinous, foolish—

A-Yuan was alive, at least. He’d kept him alive. There was that, in spite of everything.

No wonder knowing the Lan had him in their hands was enough to keep the Yiling Patriarch and Ghost General both in line. Wei Wuxian as he was right now would walk back to Lan Wangji’s house and strip himself down to be whipped and used, before he’d allow a threat to A-Yuan’s life.

“Of course it did.” Wen Ning sounded—almost pitying, which Wei Wuxian hated, but confident and almost brisk, too, enough so that he had maybe never sounded so like his sister. “I could make a list, if it would help.”

With the amount of time he’d lost, Wen Ning was years of experience older than him, so maybe it wasn’t surprising he looked back on this version of Wei Wuxian like he was a kid. Annoying though.

“But also, Wei-gongzi. Even the things that ultimately didn’t make a difference…it still matters that you tried.”

Wei Wuxian crunched his eyes shut. “I am not up for platitudes right now, Wen Ning.”

“Mm.”

He sighed. This didn’t matter, did it? It was all in the past. “So A-Yuan sent you after me? Are the Lan looking for me again already?”

“I don’t know.” Wen Ning nodded the way he’d been coming from. “My house is down that way, he sent me a talisman message to come. I didn’t know you’d be here on my route.”

He wondered if A-Yuan had guessed he would be. Probably not. He had no reason to be devious that Wei Wuxian could think of.

“Show me your place?” Wei Wuxian asked, because the news that they’d housed Wen Ning within the precinct of the Cloud Recesses, as far as possible from anybody else but in a house—he felt like it would tell him more about the compromise they’d come to.

He couldn’t tell Wen Ning he was planning to escape. It might be Wen Ning would support him, had only been waiting for Wei Wuxian to grow resolute. Or it might be Wen Ning was content with this much, or would receive Wei Wuxian’s rebelliousness as a betrayal of A-Yuan. And maybe…maybe it was. Maybe in the end it would turn out his future self had been right about having no better choices.

But until he was sure A-Yuan’s life was still as much on the line as it had been when they came here, Wei Wuxian was going to hold out the hope that the situation had changed since he sold himself away, and escape was possible.

And that meant he couldn’t trust Wen Ning to not think he knew better, like he had with telling Jiang Cheng, and sell him out.

The look Wen Ning gave him was different from the worried ones he used to have in the Burial Mounds. Wei Wuxian didn’t know how to read it. “This way, Wei-gongzi.”

“Wei-ge.”

“No.”

“Wei-xiong.”

“Maybe.”

Wei Wuxian huffed, half a laugh, and followed Wen Ning down the path.

Wen Ning’s house was, in fact, a house. A tiny thing, one room, with a hearth and a bed because while he did not eat or sleep he did feel the cold somewhat, and he did rest. He started tea for Wei Wuxian as soon as they got in, very much as if it was their usual pattern.

He had a garden outside far larger than the house, neat and well-kept. Mostly herbs—the ones Wei Wuxian recognized were medicines—but a good patch of vegetables, too. It was noticeably lacking in most things from the garden at Lan Wangji’s house, and had several vegetables that garden had strikingly lacked. Which meant that that garden, on the other side of the mountain peak, was Wei Wuxian’s, and the two of them got together and exchanged produce, even though Wen Ning didn’t even need to eat.

They were each growing a different variety of radish.

Wei Wuxian turned his back on Wen Ning’s garden, trying not to cry about radishes and the Burial Mounds and the evidence of their having scraped together a life here, too, and followed his patient host back inside for a second cup of tea.

As Wen Ning poured, Wei Wuxian asked, “How much would you say the Lan Sect values A-Yuan?”

Wen Ning blinked at him. “A good amount. He’s talented, everyone likes him. They adopted him into the main family, even.”

“So if I continue being a little crazy and piss people off, it won’t make problems for him?”

“…if you make enough problems for yourself he’ll want to get into the middle,” Wen Ning warned, and then winced. “Ah, I mean…”

Wei Wuxian nodded. “It’s okay.”

“But he won’t be blamed for you, don’t worry. He’s like Hanguang-jun’s own son so even if A-Yuan got into real trouble, Hanguang-jun would intervene against serious punishment. Don’t worry.” Wen Ning looked sympathetic.

Like his own son. Wei Wuxian set aside a tearing sensation in his chest at the realization that Lan Wangji had taken even this from him. Did you leave me anything at all, Lan Zhan? “Aiyo, he said something like that earlier, about not letting them punish me. Did Lan Wangji stage some kind of internal coup while I was—I mean, in the last sixteen years?”

Wen Ning made a face.

“Wait, he did?”

“No! Not that, exactly. Just, uh. While Zewu-jun is in seclusion there’s no one left he really listens to, and I think. Um, I think they’re a little afraid of him.”

Wei Wuxian’s stomach felt cold, and he rolled his shoulders so he wouldn’t audibly gulp. It was…such a strange thing to hear about the Lan Wangji who had always been so pure, so admirable, so relentlessly filial, always seemed so determined to be good. Always cared so much about every little rule, and held himself to such a strict standard.

And yet the rigid, furious boy who’d pulled his sword over a curfew infraction…he could almost see how this could have grown from those roots. Lan Wangji, who had at fifteen seen himself as guardian and arbiter of right and wrong in the world. Who’d been through so much before and during the war that challenged his strict thinking, but had never flinched.

Who apparently wanted things his Sect would never have permitted him, enough to make new rules to suit his own will. And force his family to accept them. And force—

No one who’d known him then would ever have thought Wei Wuxian would become what he had, either.

“I won’t be in trouble, either, if you’re worried,” Wen Ning said softly. When Wei Wuxian looked he was watching him gently with his big doe eyes. “No one expects me to be in charge of you.”

Wei Wuxian snorted. “And good for you they don’t, it’s rotten work.”

Wen Ning looked down into his tea, smiling as much as he could.

Wei Wuxian didn’t stay too much longer, after that. He had things to do, and looking at Wen Ning hurt, knowing how he’d failed him again. Knowing Wen Qing was gone, and Wen Ning’s grandmother, and everyone.

Before he left,though, he hesitated on the path before the house and asked, “Wen Ning? Did it work?”

Wen Ning didn’t understand. Of course not.

“Telling Jiang Cheng. Like you did. Did it…”

“Well, it disarmed him enough for us all to get out of there safely, which was the main thing,” Wen Ning said, which changed Wei Wuxian’s understanding of the situation slightly. Jiang Cheng? They had to escape from?

He hadn’t been planning on running to hide behind Jiang Cheng’s skirts anyway; he’d made his decision about that when he’d had himself expelled the Sect, so he could stay with the Wens without dragging Yunmeng into it.

How much less now could he ask Jiang Cheng to protect him from another Great Sect that did claim him.

But this did yet again change the list in his head of where he could try to hide, if it came to it. Jin Tower and his shijie had already been eliminated—of course she hadn’t helped him with the consequences of murdering her husband.

And now Lotus Pier was revised downward as well.

Wen Ning made a thinking face. “I think it did? Help? I usually stay out of the way when he’s around, but I think…you’ve made it sound like it released some of the bile. Even if he has regrets, those aren’t as poisonous as resentment, and in medicine that’s sometimes all you can ask for.”

“Wen Ning is too wise these days, what can I do?” Wei Wuxian laughed, and made his goodbyes.

He went back up the path and settled himself down again in a different spot, in more sunshine. His body relaxed into the sun like it was accustomed to it, but according to his memory he’d spent most of his time for a year now in the constant resentful overcast of the Burial Mounds, and the thin but fierce mountaintop sunlight was wonderful but also on the verge of too much.

Making himself focus on things before he was ready to was always difficult, so he let his mind roam over the new information a little first.

So: Wei Wuxian had escaped punishment for killing the heir of one Great Sect by marrying another.

Bizarre, in several ways, but it made slightly more sense than the situation had without knowing that. Every new fact he gained leavened the absurdity, and made this reality seem more uncomfortably plausible. The Jin must have gotten something out of the deal, too, to have gone along, considering the power they’d had compared to (and over) the Lan last he knew, and the gravity of the crime they were letting him get away with.

Surely they didn’t have the Tiger Seal? Ugh. Well, even if Jin Guangshan had staged a successful ploy to rob Wei Wuxian he’d lost his only direct heir in the process and was now dead. No point being mad about it now.

(Had he ever gotten the chance to speak to his shijie, before he’d been immured here? Or since? Did she read his letters. He could not quite imagine Jiang Yanli ordering them burned, but he could easily see her leaving them unopened, if she didn’t choose to hear from him.)

Wei Wuxian refolded his legs, closed his eyes, and went back to the task he’d dropped when Wen Ning came along.

Half an hour later he’d made a lot of progress in feeling out the structure of the wards, but something kept distracting him. A flutter, a pulse of spiritual energy that wasn’t part of the arrays he was trying to understand, that was metaphorically behind him as he studied them.

He—felt. It felt like…

He looked inward, and his eyes flew open with a sharp gasp.

This was…

Wei Wuxian had been aware he felt less hollow. That he was in better health than he had been since that first trip to the Burial Mounds, physically speaking. That the Lan clearly hadn’t been starving him.

But this.

“That’s not possible,” he said to nobody.

Swallowed. Closed his eyes, and sank as best he could into meditation. Prodded.

It was a sad, anemic little thing, nothing like what he remembered of having a core. His cultivation had been about this strong when he was eleven or twelve, probably, though it had felt like more at the time because he’d been sized to match it. But it was there.

How. Where had it come from. Even assuming someone other than Wen Qing could pull off the core surgery, and that having had his cut out didn’t make Wei Wuxian unable to receive a new one, which it probably didn’t if having his burned out hadn’t for Jiang Cheng, why would anyone? For him?

He assumed the donor was some weak adult cultivator and not an actual child. Maybe the Lan had figured out core transplant, possibly by studying him and maybe Jiang Cheng after Wen Ning spilled the beans, and instituted the procedure as a new class of extreme punishment?

But why for him?

No. He could guess why. Lan Wangji had always wanted him to return to the righteous path, and Lan Wangji did not take defeat easily. Finding out why Wei Wuxian couldn’t hadn’t stopped him at all. Maybe it hadn’t been a transplant, maybe there was a secret Lan technique or he’d developed a Lan musical technique that went beyond those purifying songs and—

Unmade the Yiling Patriarch. Restored Wei Wuxian to a shadow of what he’d once been.

It was. Wei Wuxian couldn’t pretend he wasn’t impressed. He hadn’t imagined it was possible.

Even knowing it had to be another gilding of the cage, even though it was so small and weak and for all he knew Lan Wangji could blow it out with a single strum of the qin, something in Wei Wuxian clawed and clung to the golden glow deep in his belly. The physical rightness, the power of a body that had raised itself above the strength it had been born to, even this little amount.

The knowledge of all the things that would be easier to do like this, of the wounds that would knit that much more quickly and the light step techniques that would be practically effortless again, now. (You could do qinggong with no more energy than any reasonably healthy living person had, and he did, but it wasn’t easy.)

The thought that if he had a sword, he might be able to fly a little.

Aiyah, this was terrible. He’d never expected to have this again and now here it was, a mysterious gift from his captors. Unlike A-Yuan’s life, he didn’t have to value it if he didn’t want to, but he’d definitely use it to its utmost.

With a renewed vigor, Wei Wuxian returned to poking at the warding of the Cloud Recesses, until he’d learned as much as he could like this.

Unfortunately one thing he’d learned was that the arrays keeping him pent in here really were very, very good. He wasn’t breaking out in a day.

Given time, he could do it. If he was allowed to wander out here into the back mountain day after day for maybe a week, he’d definitely break out without anyone even knowing right away that he was gone. But that relied on his being allowed that much freedom of movement.

Not out of the question, since no one had stopped him even this soon after his big hospital escape. But it could be he’d be put under house arrest formally, as soon as Lan Wangji got over his snit enough to arrange for it.

They definitely would drag him back and lock him up, if he tried to just stay out here all night.

So he had to be prepared to be in the Cloud Recesses for up to ten days.

Wei Wuxian took an extra minute to settle his mind and body to the possibility of what was going to happen all over again, since he’d thought he was prepared to endure earlier but cracked like an egg after only the one kiss. And then he went back.

The house, he felt upon seeing it, was not empty.

He braced himself before reentering the Silence Room, but Lan Wangji hadn’t returned. There was only A-Yuan, Lan Sizhui, waiting with a covered tray of food and looking very relieved to see Wei Wuxian come in.

“Senior Wei!” He paused. “Still afflicted?”

“Afraid so,” Wei Wuxian replied. “What’s to eat, I’m starving.”

Lan Sizhui uncovered the food, which looked bland and dull but at least there were steamed buns of some kind. “Here. Where’s Hanguang-jun?” he asked, glancing behind Wei Wuxian as if for his shadow.

His son, Wen Ning had said. And A-Yuan called the man who was like his father respectfully by his title, in that stiff Lan way, but—even so, it was still chillingly impersonal to find himself reduced to a mere senior, not even part of the same Sect enough to merit shixiong. And of course it wasn’t that Wei Wuxian wanted to be a Lan, but.

Lan Wangji really had taken A-Yuan away from him.

“Ah, I’m afraid we had a bit of a disagreement!” Wei Wuxian dropped down opposite Sizhui at the table. “You know how it is, I don’t know what not to say since I don’t know anything. He’s gone off to cool down.”

A-Yuan looked troubled, but he nodded, and offered Wei Wuxian some food from the tray.

The buns were bean-filled and there was no meat or real spice, but there was a hint of ginger in one of the dishes and the vegetables had enough pickle mixed in to be adequately salty, and only one thing was appallingly bitter. A-Yuan had clearly done his best to suit Wei Wuxian’s palate within the restrictions imposed by the Lan diet. Always so thoughtful!

“So how does A-Yuan fill his days, now, when he’s not running after me?” Wei Wuxian asked, once he’d tried everything.

A-Yuan’s mouth quirked up, but he swallowed his mouthful and replied, even though he was a Lan and this was mealtime. “Night hunts, Sect duties. Nothing very exciting, or particular to me.”

“But you enjoy it?”

“Yes. Yes, Senior Wei, I’m very happy.” It looked true. It sounded true. Wei Wuxian was everything they said of him, for wanting to find some sign it was a lie.

He sighed. “I know you’re too grown up now to call me gege, but ‘qianbei’ sounds so cold! Aren’t I your mother?”

A-Yuan blushed slightly. He’d grown up to be a blusher! It hadn’t been obvious he would, when he was little, because a two year old was hard to embarrass. “I know that’s not true.”

Wei Wuxian was actually hurt for a moment before he remembered the having-given-birth joke. His chest hurt for a second. He laughed. “I meant since Wen Ning says Hanguang-jun is your father, and we’re married.”

“Oh!” A-Yuan laughed too, though not the hearty open laugh he used to have as a little one. The Lan had rendered him demure. Wei Wuxian was a little worried they’d done that to him, too. Perish the thought. “I, well, the adoption—shushu found you, then?”

Wen Ning got to stay shushu. It really was targeted, then. Well, it wasn’t like Wei Wuxian hadn’t known Lan Wangji to be petty. “He did! I was out on the back mountain trying to clear my head.”

And A-Yuan had evaded the question of why he called Wei Wuxian so impersonally. Well. It was to be expected. “He answered some more of my questions and served me tea. He’s just the same as ever!”

“I’m glad.” A-Yuan smiled, very warmly, so it was obvious he knew what that meant to Wei Wuxian.

A-Yuan was still so good. So bright, and Wei Wuxian was so proud of him.

But he was a Lan. If Wei Wuxian was punished, A-Yuan would know that that was how it was supposed to be. Punishments were for your own good, weren’t they? To make you better.

To mold you into the shape that was wanted. To make you—

Wei Wuxian understood punishment. It was inevitable. Sometimes you deserved it. That didn’t have a lot of impact on whether it happened. And he had no doubt his life here was rich with it. And either Lan Wangji kept that mostly out of sight—he thought again of the handprint bruise on his arm—or A-Yuan didn’t think it was a problem.

“No one’s—weird to you, are they?” Wei Wuxian asked. “I mean, I know the attack on the Cloud Recesses was a long time ago, but…” But if the Lan had held the grudge about it enough to help massacre the last of the Wen sheltered behind wards of death, where they had been bothering nobody and growing root vegetables, then being the very last living Wen clansman, even as an adopted Lan, might be a struggle.

A-Yuan’s expression pinched strangely. “Ah. My background isn’t public,” he said, suggesting some other things which probably weren’t public, like his usefulness as a hostage against Wei Wuxian.

That was probably why he wasn’t to be too familiar with him, wasn’t it? For the sake of his cover, of whatever lie Lan Wangji had told his family about where he found a small child to adopt. Had Wei Wuxian ever really known the man.

“I don’t think many people would make trouble about it, if they learned now,” A-Yuan added hastily, in response to something he saw in Wei Wuxian’s face. “And Hanguang-jun would—well, he’d interfere if they tried. I’m not worried. It’s just nobody’s business.”

And that Wei Wuxian could certainly respect. He’d been a figure of notoriety to some extent as long as he’d been in the cultivation world—even as a child who’d done nothing more dramatic than be catching up with his age group rather handily and making himself sick by eating too many plums, anyone he met would recognize his name and know that he was the son of dead parents and the source of resentment between the Jiang Sect Leader and his wife. It was probably preferable not having everyone think they knew your business.

What would that be like.

He nodded. “Okay, that’s good to know! So I should call you Lan Sizhui if we’re ever in front of people? Besides that friend of yours?”

“Jingyi,” A-Yuan said with a quirk to his mouth. “Yes, besides him, that would be best.”

In front of Hanguang-jun too, Wei Wuxian was sure.

Undoubtedly Lan Wangji been the one to select that courtesy name, and he might not appreciate the presumption of familiarity between them. It had been obvious in only a few minutes of conversation earlier and from what Wen Ning, A-Yuan, and that Lan Jingyi kid had all said that this new, unhinged Lan Wangji was a deeply possessive man.

Affection between people he considered his could become a threat to his pride at any time; Wei Wuxian knew the type.

He stuffed a bun into his mouth to conceal his expression, and once he’d chewed enough to swallow gestured with his chopsticks while winding noodles around them, narrowly missing flicking broth onto A-Yuan’s white robes and kind of wishing he hadn’t missed. A-Yuan could do with some stains and blotches on all that disciple white.

“So!” Wei Wuxian said brightly. “Zewu-jun is in seclusion, what’s that about?”

A-Yuan winced—which was becoming a familiar response to Wei Wuxian speaking to a truly unprecedented degree, and it had already been something that happened a lot—and explained as they ate. Apparently by the time the Jin had dramatically fallen from grace Jin Guangshan had already been dead, and the blame had fallen mainly on a Jin Guangyao, which was the extremely forgettable guy who’d memorably betrayed Wen Ruohan.

Zewu-jun had needed some time to recover from this blow, because apparently they’d been close friends. No, actually, sworn brothers, Wei Wuxian had managed to forget despite the political ramifications because he didn’t care. Sworn brothers with Nie Mingjue, whom Jin Guangyao had murdered personally, poor Zewu-jun.

Wei Wuxian wondered if Lan Xichen knew what Lan Wangji was getting up to without his supervision, and if he’d care to rein him in if he found out. He’d always seemed to dote on his stiff little brother.

Maybe Zewu-jun had been distracted from his real and sworn younger brothers’ transgressions by one another?

Probably though Lan Wangji hadn’t done anything without his brother’s support; the timing would have had to be very tight for the Jin leadership situation to finish playing out before Lan Wangji started kidnapping children and taking concubines and intimidating his elders. And A-Yuan had clearly had time to get to know Zewu-jun, before the drama took him out of play.

So appealing to Zewu-jun as clan head to dissolve his sham marriage was probably not an option. And if Lan Qiren could get rid of him, he surely would have long since.

They chatted about the most innocuous things they could manage as they ate. A-Yuan’s studies. Night-hunting, always a reliable topic between cultivators. You could tell when A-Yuan had already heard a story, but he still seemed genuinely interested—maybe future Wei Wuxian told them differently? He’d probably told Wei Wuxian all his own stories, too, but didn’t seem to mind repeating them. His friend Jingyi featured heavily, both as a performer of feats and as the perpetrator of hilarious errors.

“Oh, sorry!” A-Yuan interrupted himself, halfway through the meal, and got up to rummage through one of the elegant storage chests along one wall. “I forgot you wouldn’t know to retrieve it.” He came back to the table with a bottle of bright red chili oil, drizzled a little of it on his own noodles, and handed it to Wei Wuxian, who took it gingerly.

It was real chili oil, smelled delightfully searing when he pulled the stopper. Wei Wuxian watched A-Yuan carefully eating his newly seasoned noodles for a few moments, before dumping a healthy portion over everything left on his plate and tucking in with new gusto.

He, the Wei Wuxian of the present time, kept that here, hidden. Sizhui knew just where to look for it. Was that a box where Lan Wangji didn’t look often? Did he confiscate the chili oil when he found it, did A-Yuan or Wen Ning or some other ally smuggle in more to replace it afterward?

Seasoned food wasn’t even against the rules of the Cloud Recesses. It was just against their custom. There was no good reason for him to be denied it, no good basis in the Lan precepts to punish him for having it. But he could think of half a dozen bad ones on the spot, and Lan Wangji with his long experience in enforcing the Cloud Recesses discipline could probably conjure up a pretext to beat him for nearly anything.

So the risk run for spice might be anything from mere inconvenience to bruising that would keep him down for a week, but whatever it was, he was still taking it.

Was this a small thing he and A-Yuan still shared? A little, harmless rebellion for the meals they managed unsupervised?

How petty. And yet…not nothing. Not nothing.

There was never nothing left.

Wei Wuxian sighed to himself, and remembered with a deep pang a heavily spiced meal shared with A-Yuan and Hanguang-jun, that felt to him like it had been only a few months ago, although it had really been sixteen years, and set the memory that had been so bright and warm up until today aside. And ate his spicy noodles with care.

After their very late lunch, A-Yuan offered to show him around Cloud Recesses. This was quite unnecessary, and possibly a pretext to get him out of the house for some reason, but he’d take it.

Lan Jingyi met them at the gate.

They followed the graveled path out again, to where the trees fell off and landscaping opened up, into stately pavilions and walkways, carefully tended grounds rolling out along the mountain-top. They seemed to be heading toward the front of the compound, the most public spaces in the compound.

Maybe the goal of the outing was just to show him off walking normally, to reassure the Sect there wasn’t still a half-crazed Yiling Patriarch roaming their woods in his pajamas?

Wei Wuxian, willing to cooperate for now, walked as normally as possible next to A-Yuan, nodding to his explanations of things. He hadn’t been back here since before it had been sacked by the Wen and he was surprised, and not, by how little it had changed.

The Lan Sect were like that, after all. Of course they’d want to make it look like nothing had happened.

Even if he saw something that had changed, would it be from the fires or because it had been twenty years and more since he’d been here last?

But his memory wasn’t good enough to notice anything like that, anyway.

He did remember that they were coming up on the great stone engraving of the clan precepts before they got there, and snorted. If he’d been living here years, how many additional times had he been made to write them?

He cast a smirk at the boys. “I wonder how many of those three thousand rules I still remember?”

A-Yuan smirked back, a cute little expression that wrinkled his nose. “It’s over four thousand now.”

“Four thousand—” Wei Wuxian choked a little.

“Mm-hm.”

“In—A-Yuan, Lan Sizhui, you’re telling me that hundreds of years of Lan tradition added up to those three thousand rules I know, and in the sixteen years I don’t remember the list increased by more than thirty percent.”

Forget the Lan never changing! They changed! They just became more like themselves!

“…mm.” Lan Sizhui’s forehead wrinkled on the affirmation, as though only now it was put like this did he see anything odd about the scale of the increase.

“Who went insane?” Wei Wuxian wondered. And then added, as if he was joking, “Besides Lan Zhan, I mean.”

The faces the boys made suggested that Lan Wangji had, in fact, gone insane, and everyone knew this. Which he supposed, having married Wei Wuxian would tend to give it away. It was almost a relief to know he wasn’t the only one who thought something was strange—that maybe he hadn’t entirely imagined the Lan Wangji he’d thought he’d known before. He’d just lost him, somewhere along the way.

Or rather, Lan Zhan had lost himself.

“No one?” Lan Jingyi hazarded, sounding like he doubted it for the first time. He seemed like an okay kid, but thought dragging a prospective spouse home screaming was acceptable if they stopped screaming before the wedding; clearly he didn’t question his elders’ judgment very much. “I don’t think? I mean.”

“That is a lot, isn’t it,” reflected Lan Sizhui. “Even considering the Sect’s…trials.”

Being invaded and sacked would shake anyplace up, that was true. Still. A third again as many rules in sixteen years. Or maybe more like twenty. Wei Wuxian had hardly kept up to date on internal Lan politics up to, during, or after the war.

“Maybe—” A-Yuan began, and then cut himself off. “No, never mind.”

They’d reached the wall now, and sure enough there was a whole new column of text scrolling down it in the same archaic script. Lines and lines of new rules.

Wei Wuxian was opening his mouth to joke about how many of these were probably because of him when his eyes really snagged on his own name, rendered into seal script.

Surely not, he thought as he snapped them back, trying to find that line again. Surely he’d just seen two of his characters near each other and imposed the third, or it was some similar word and not the same characters at all, he’d just been meaning to be funny—no.

No, there it was; his name engraved on the stone.

“Ah?” Wei Wuxian managed, pointing at the rule, near the bottom of the long, long list. “Ah?”

Do not interact with Wei Wuxian.

Were the boys breaking a rule? Had Lan Wangji broken a rule? The doctors, earlier? No, wait, they’d said he taught classes— was that an exception to the general no-interacting rule, like the way you could kill in Cloud Recesses if it was an invading enemy? Or, instead, since that was a sharp anomaly rather than the normative regimentation of the class schedule, more like the way the killing rule was suspended for formally approved executions.

Or, since that was still a bit dramatic, like the way you could stay up past hai-shi if it was necessary for a night hunt, or to patrol for unlicensed curfew-breakers. Even Lan Wangji as he’d once been had understood the concept of exceptions that far.

“Oh!” A-Yuan seemed embarrassed again. “Wei-qianbei, don’t mind that. It was just the Grandmaster being…”

“Petty,” supplied Lan Jingyi. “Don’t worry about it, no one obeys that unless they want to, it’s not enforced. Anymore. It’s just, like. An excuse to be rude to you. You always say you’d rather people who don’t like you leave you alone rather than talk to you with resentment anyway.”

As long as it wasn’t too many people and they weren’t anyone he cared about, this was true. People had looked away from them as they walked here, not everyone, but more than half, he’d thought that was just determination not to stare after he’d made a spectacle of himself earlier.

Wei Wuxian looked at the wall wondering how many of the Lan obeyed it, how often he slipped through the Cloud Recesses ignored, a living ghost. How he kept from screaming just to make them look at him and admit he was real.

If he made someone acknowledge him, would they both be punished. Surreally, he imagined being forced to sit and copy out the broken rule a thousand times: do not interact with Wei Wuxian.

But maybe it really wasn’t that many people, just the way the boys made it sound. Maybe it did just give a few boring Lans an excuse to not deal with him, and he let that be. Maybe that much was fine.

Maybe the purpose of chiseling that rule up there and then not enforcing it wasn’t anything to do with the present at all. If they wrote that in stone and ignored it in his lifetime, then after he was dead when people looked back at the records showing the scandalous marrying-in of the outrageous heretic Wei Wuxian to the second young master, they would also see written in stone do not interact with Wei Wuxian and suppose it had been a real rule, and say, look, the man who walked the ghost-path walked ghostlike and alone through the Cloud Recesses, a prisoner of propriety. He was not heeded by the disciples, he was not touched by his supposed husband, he did not corrupt the Lan. Never mind him.

Any influence he had had or use he had been would be wiped from memory along with every other worthwhile part of him.

Perhaps that was how the Lan had always kept their reputation so pristine: they wrote down what they felt should have happened, and no one else kept good enough records to disagree with them for long. And so every indiscretion was swallowed up by time, and every generation’s scandal was the first of its kind.

There were so many ways to lie, and Wei Wuxian understood them better the longer he spent living one.

Wei Wuxian was escorted pointlessly around the place for a while more after that, with even less conversation.

They settled in the library for about half a shichen, where he was given things to read that he’d clearly already read and mentioned liking, in the period he’d forgotten, and strictly prohibited from trying to research curse-induced amnesia, until Wei Wuxian’s skin threatened to crawl off his bones with impatience, and the boys exchanged a speaking look and took him away again.

Then A-Yuan took him out to a training courtyard, gave him a wooden sword, and the three of them ran low-impact spars, both boys looking to Wei Wuxian for advice as though he wasn’t mentally only about four or five years older than them, and also not a real cultivator anymore.

He was a war veteran, but he hadn’t fought that war with a sword. But they thought he could help them improve, and they weren’t wrong. So that was something.

He didn’t bring up the little golden core nestled in his belly, just in case it was somehow a secret his future self was keeping. But he felt it fueling him, so he could almost keep up with these sprightly, promising young cultivators again, even without carefully holding back and husbanding his strength.

His stamina still wore down first, but he was good at fronting about that so he was surprised when A-Yuan noticed, and called a halt well before Wei Wuxian’s arms began to shake.

(The low ache that remained between his legs and up inside him didn’t help. It wasn’t that the pain was enough to hold him back, itself, but every time a step or lunge made it flare he flinched inwardly, and suppressing that kind of thing took it out of a man.)

Dinner was in the main hall with the Lan disciples. Lan Wangji was absent, as of course was Lan Xichen. Lan Qiren had already seemed like an old man when they were young but now he was starting to look it, a little, despite his cultivation; his scowl was graven deeper in his face, and darker than ever, when it fell on Wei Wuxian.

Wei Wuxian was pointed to a bench among a knot of senior disciples, men over thirty but not yet old, some of whom had probably met him when he was sixteen, and seen his work in the Sunshot Campaign, but must know him best now in his weird dual role as concubine and adjunct instructor. Of course, they didn't speak to him, but some of them watched.

Wei Wuxian didn’t look anyone in the face throughout the silent meal.

It tasted so bad.

If he hadn’t had that nice big late lunch keeping him from being very hungry, Wei Wuxian could have cried with how bad the taste was. He pushed the food around in his bowl, breaking the rule against waste.

How had he lived like this? For years and years? Over a decade? Of course, you could get used to anything. But Wei Wuxian hadn’t thought his control of his temper was this good. Surely he’d have snapped and lashed out at somebody or started pulling pranks by the end of the first month.

Maybe Lan Wangji was...very good at keeping him in line.

There’d been so many marks on him, when he changed clothes. He’d refused to look closely, to try to figure out what he’d gotten in the night-hunt that had scrambled his mind and what had been...older.

If any of the marks were obviously from punishment, or bedroom nonsense. Or nonsense bedroom punishments.

More disciples watched him more obviously, the longer the meal went on, as though they were waiting for something. Wei Wuxian kept his head down and kept wasting food. Would someone tell Hanguang-jun he was owed so many blows for that?

“Hanguang-jun spent the afternoon with the doctors,” Lan Sizhui told him in an undertone when they met up outside the refectory, and could talk again. As though he thought Wei Wuxian might be bothered by Lan Wangji’s prolonged absence, he added: “He’s working diligently to treat Senior Wei’s condition.”

“Of course,” said Wei Wuxian, grinning. “He’d rather have me back the way I usually am. Don’t worry, I’m not offended.”

He was, however, newly aware he might not have the days he’d estimated it would take to make that nice subtle hole in the wards. After all, the Wei Wuxian he’d been until this afternoon hadn’t escaped, in all this time. (Or maybe he’d been dragged back again too many times to bother trying again.)

The Silence Room was still empty of Hanguang-juns when Wei Wuxian returned to it. A-Yuan saw him all the way inside, fussing in a way that would have been deeply annoying from anyone else besides his shijie, and maybe Wen Ning.

Wei Wuxian had Lan Sizhui’s measure, by now. He could definitely have knocked the young man out. How long would it be, if he did, before someone noticed Lan Sizhui hadn’t come back from stowing the Yiling Patriarch in his pretty prison?

Probably not long. Lan Jingyi stuck to A-Yuan the way Wei Wuxian used to stick to Jiang Cheng, or the other way around. He didn’t even think the kid had been assigned the task by his Sect elders; he seemed too direct to hide such a thing, he’d have blurted it out. And even if he’d managed not to, he’d have looked shifty at certain points. He was just hanging around because he wanted to.

But he’d notice.

Wei Wuxian could probably steal Lan Sizhui’s token of passage without Sizhui noticing, though.

He bid the only person he’d ever managed to save good night, and didn’t take anything. Went back into Lan Wangji’s house, shut the door, and sat down with a sigh.

If he’d taken A-Yuan’s token, and A-Yuan didn’t notice and report it immediately, and Wei Wuxian subsequently used it to get out of here, A-Yuan would be implicated. They might suspect he’d helped Wei Wuxian escape intentionally. That wouldn’t do.

Wei Wuxian should have caught a nap back at Wen Ning’s place, where he’d had someone to watch his back, but he’d been much too keyed up and not tired enough then to think of it. He certainly wasn’t falling asleep here, and he wasn’t pushing his plans back long enough to go crash with Wen Ning now, either. Not when Lan Wangji might recover from his sulk and come back to take who knew what actions, at any time.

He’d been unconscious into the early afternoon; he could go a few days before he really needed to rest again.

Wei Wuxian settled in with the large supply of talisman paper and good ink, a positive treasure trove compared to the supplies he was used to working with. Nicked Lan Wangji’s cinnabar stick, a second inkstone, and a nice brush from his desk, even though Wei Wuxian’s desk had perfectly adequate brushes. And set to work.

A shichen and a half before the Lan morning began, full dark but for the stars and half a moon, Wei Wuxian approached the lantern-lit front gate.

“Just having a look at the wall,” he told the guards stationed there, when they heard the crunch of his boots on gravel and looked around at him. They should be trained to not do that together; had all the lessons of war been forgotten so quickly? What if Wei Wuxian had had an ally?

Hah, never mind, silly thought.

“There’s over a thousand new rules since I remember, I at least want to be breaking them on purpose.”

One of the disciples looked away with a sniff and tightening of the mouth that didn’t successfully pretend not to be stifled laughter, not if you could see his expression. Wei Wuxian wondered if this had been one of his students. The other one looked at him in fairly open contempt, lip slightly curled, then turned his head away with scorn.

Well, either way Wei Wuxian got what he wanted.

Wei Wuxian paced back and forth, studying the rules and fidgeting with his hands, until they’d lost interest in him. He got quieter as they ignored him more, until he was using light-step to hardly disturb the ground underfoot as he paced.

When he was sure they’d nearly forgotten he was there, he approached the gate. Slipped up between the disciples, ghosting over the gravel without a sound, and slapped talismans on their backs that made them collapse like felled trees. Wei Wuxian broke the fall of the one who’d laughed, then set him down on his back. He flipped the other one over, too, still slumbering away, and quickly slipped the jade token off the man’s belt.

He took his sword, too. Better than no weapon at all.

Wasting no more time, Wei Wuxian stepped smoothly across the wards of the Cloud Recesses and broke into a run.

Once he was out of sight of the gate, he drew the stolen sword. Flying on someone else’s sword was gross and rude and difficult, but not necessarily impossible, and he needed the early burst of speed if he could get it, to extend the area the search needed to cover. So they didn’t just scoop him back up.

But before he tried that, he had an even more urgent need for a sharp edge.

Wei Wuxian pulled a loop of pale ribbon as far from his skin as the knotting allowed, drawing it tight enough to ache, and sliced it clean through with the sharp spiritual blade-edge. Once he’d done that, the rest of the knots unraveled easily, and he left the thing in two pathetic silken piles on the path.

Then he vanished into the night.

Chapter Text

When Wei Wuxian had reached the end of how far he could push on the stolen sword with his pitiful supply of spiritual energy, dawn had come and found him skimming his way along the top of a bamboo forest. He did not have very far to go to the forest floor, and was not quite falling when he got there, but lay for several seconds catching his breath, all the same.

This part of this forest had been burned out about twenty years ago. You could see it, if you looked closely—Jiang had always had the best forestry training of any of the sects.

The bamboo had come back very tall, growing as quickly as it did and not having been burned thoroughly enough to be taken out at the root, but it wasn’t yet as thick, and the scattered non-bamboo trees still showed old evidence of fire, or were themselves less than twenty years old, and had taken advantage of the burning to become established.

A little further back along his route, it hadn’t even been a forest, before. He’d spotted signs of habitation. Probably, this all had been a battlefield.

Not one he’d fought on. He’d spent most of the war on the Jiangling front, making up for Jiang Sect’s reduced numbers with his new methods.

The Lan and the Wen had fought here, as the Lan drove the Wen back out of Gusu, early in the war, while Wei Wuxian was still in the Burial Mounds. (And then later, the Lan had come to the Burial Mounds for the last of the Wen.)

Wei Wuxian left the pilfered sword propped upright against a tree, with the jade token looped over the hilt. Yes, it would tell the Lan what direction he’d gone in, when they found it, but that should take long enough not to matter.

And yes, if an enemy of the Lan found it instead, they would gain access to the Cloud Recesses, but he didn’t find he could care.

He didn’t want to give them any good reason for coming after him, like trying to get such a thing back.

Besides, of course, that he was the Yiling Patriarch, and keeping him controlled and contained and biddable was always virtuous and upright.

He turned his face toward the darkest part of the forest, and walked.

When they found him, he was waiting.

He’d hoped they’d let him go, he really had. That the Lan would look away from this problem, now that it was outside the Cloud Recesses, or that they wouldn’t be equal to tracking him down. That he could slip away unremarked.

But hoping was not trusting.

He had followed his senses to a disused graveyard near a long-abandoned village, deep in the woods.

The village, vanished long before Wen Ruohan had sought to set himself above the cultivation world, perhaps long before Wen Ruohan had even been born, was now no more than the sunken shape of its rammed-earth wall, a suggestion of rubble, and the rectangular echoes of once-plowed fields, under the wildness that had risen up to consume what had been a human habitation. And beside these, the ruin of its tombs.

The dead that lay here were ancient enough, and had been well enough treated while their descendants still lived here, that there was little chance of their rising, especially on their own—ancient enough that many of their bones had gone to powder. Perhaps most of them had by now been reborn, and forgotten the lives they’d led here.

But the memory of death lay on the land that had been a burying-ground, the long-untended graves a deep, quiescent coil of resentment that, on its own, could do no more than render this patch of trees vaguely ominous, even before you noted the fallen grave-markers.

Wei Wuxian had come here just after noon and found the largest extant break in the tree cover, a hole in the canopy where a tall pine had fallen a few years ago, smashing some of the grave markers apart. Through the break in the canopy, sunlight spilled in and struck against the tombs, so that their worn characters could almost still be read through the moss. There, Wei Wuxian had settled in. Rested up. And waited.

When the Lan advanced, they did it cautiously, but not cautiously enough.

They must have flown part of the way, to have caught up so quickly, but by the time they reached him they were on foot, walking in orderly lines as Lans tended to do. Two by two they filed into what open space there was between forest and graves, hanging back as much as there was space to do so, five and ten and twenty and more Lan disciples, all in their neat pretty robes and ribbons, expressions uniformly solemn and intent.

A-Yuan wasn’t there, but his friend was. Lan Jingyi, the one who’d been so informative with his prattle.

Lan Qiren wasn’t there. Lan Wangji wasn’t there, either. Of course, Wen Ning wasn’t there. If there was anyone there whom he’d met, besides Lan Jingyi, he didn’t recognize them.

There were a few women, surprisingly. It was sometimes easy to forget Cloud Recesses was not actually a monastery.

Maybe they’d taken every volunteer they could get.

How many parties like this one had been sent out? How had they found him? This time, there had been no golden butterfly.

All told there were about forty of them, which would have been terrible odds in his youth, when he’d been a genius young cultivator, still short of the promised full flower of his strength. Though not entirely out of the question, if most of them were only average in cultivation, especially if he’d been given this much time to prepare.

During the war, forty would have been nothing, but he’d been at the height of his power then, so long as all you wanted accomplished was death.

The Lans stood still in their line, curving around but not seeking to encircle him. Not saying anything, as though waiting for Wei Wuxian to say something first.

He was sitting on a fallen monument, comfortably, one heel swinging, his shoulder set against the slanting corpse of the dead pine. Tracing the worn-away character for wood that was the only remaining part of the name with one hand, and spinning a freshly carved bamboo flute in the other.

He watched, as it struck some of the Lans for the first time that this mission could be dangerous.

Some of them had known—some of them were veterans of the same war that had made him. Some of them should have known, but clearly hadn’t, and some of them—some of them were simply far too young. Some of them were so young. What were the Lan doing, sending children to fight him?

He wondered if they’d trusted him. If he was their teacher.

Wei Wuxian twirled the bamboo dizi he’d carved that morning, and watched the Lan disciples watch it like a snake, watched their eyes snag on the talismans between his fingers, stashed at his waist, the ones plastered openly all over the trees and graves. Attraction talismans, drawing evil things here; talismans for other purposes they might or might not be able to read the functions of, from where they stood.

They were the ones who’d chosen to walk out here, onto his prepared ground.

This was a different sort of retrieval than the one following his panicked flight from their hospital, yesterday afternoon. They were beginning, as he watched, to understand that.

However many years of him trapped in their Sect, the plaything of their Sect Heir, for the youngest ones it must have been all their lives, or nearly, and they hadn’t all forgotten to fear him.

Or maybe they had, until today. Maybe what he was seeing in the oldest disciples was the fear of a mad dog finally off its leash.

“This doesn’t have to come to violence,” he said at last, when the silence had had time to become strangling, and begun screaming to be broken. Let the dizi slap firmly into his palm, his fingertips bending into place on its stops, so he could be playing in an instant. “Let me walk away, honorable cultivators. I don’t have anything of yours.”

He’d trespassed against their Sect by leaving it, if they wanted to see it that way. By his little fit of violence and theft. The clothes on his back were Lan property. He was Lan property.

But he wasn’t. He wouldn’t be.

If he didn’t fight them, or if he lost. He’d be dragged back to Cloud Recesses.

There’d be a beating in store for him, and they’d lock him up in some narrow room, and at least they’d be admitting it. What he was. What they were doing.

Better that than to go back to Lan Wangji’s pretty, silent house. To the heartbreaking stupid little vegetable garden and the evidence of his own capitulation in every corner, and the lie of a harmonious little household. Better anything than to have to try to breathe that air.

“Wei-qianbei,” said a young female disciple, one of three disciples here with an embroidered ribbon. Wei Wuxian didn’t think he’d ever seen such a young girl Lan before. Hadn’t, as noted, seen many lady Lans at all, ever, even during the war.

Except he had seen them, of course. In the time he couldn’t now recall. He was practically one of them. For all he knew, he was allowed to freely come and go in the women’s quarter of the Cloud Recesses; being the wife of their Sect Heir was probably something like being a eunuch.

“Please,” said the girl, gentle, reasonable. “Just come back.”

Wei Wuxian inclined his head, as polite as the situation allowed. “Maiden Lan,” he greeted her. “Not without a fight.”

A Lan halfway around the curve from her drew his sword, and that was that.

Wei Wuxian blew a single rising note on his dizi, and the ghosts leapt and boiled up into the air.

Only a few of them were from the graves underfoot. He’d drawn many of them with him as he walked across the overgrown battlefield, and whistled them to him from further afield—dead spirits long languishing in this wood, none of them angry enough to have dragged themselves toward human habitation to seek out objects of haunting and draw in turn the attention of cultivators, but all of them too resentful to be at peace.

Only two had been Lans—outer disciples both of them, lesser members of the Sect, youths cut down on the battlefield and passed over somehow afterward, who had not had enough soul-calming ceremonies in life to overcome the violence of the way they’d died, if they’d had any at all. Perhaps the Lan had not been able to gather enough of their pieces to bury.

Several were Wen, or at least had fought on that side of the war—over half of the Wen forces, back then, had not been Wen sect proper, but members of vassal sects, and ordinary conscripts from among the people. Wen Ruohan had, after all, been dreaming of founding a state.

Bringing these spirits under his power, for Wei Wuxian, had been almost nostalgic. He had disturbed the graves of more Wens than any other sort of person, back in the day. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant time to remember, but it wasn’t the worst either.

Against ordinary people, even a lot more than forty of them, this many ghosts would be more than enough, but these were cultivators. Laying ghosts was their business, and the Lan were not among the less capable at it.

But he had a lot more tricks than just this.

As the Lan advanced toward him and his few dozens of ghosts, Wei Wuxian smudged his thumb through the cut he’d made on the back of one forearm, bifurcating the thumbprint bruise there. The Summoning of the Painted Eyes worked better the larger and more flexible the vessel you used, it was really meant for paper effigies, and he hadn’t had anything quite ideal, but a trio of bamboo dolls he’d twisted together out of leaves and sticks took a single smudge of blood each to be complete with the second eye, and then leapt up into a solid defensive line between him and the enemy.

The Lans advanced anyway, except for three who stepped back instead, drawing out two xiao flutes and a qin, and Wei Wuxian set his rough dizi again to his lips. And played.

The more evil a creature was, the easier it was for Wei Wuxian to control it. He hadn’t had the time to seek out forgotten, restless corpses—and besides, grave-robbing now would be committing fresh new crimes, and giving righteous cultivators every excuse they needed to lock him away.

But they were no longer very near the Cloud Recesses. His present entourage was nothing compared to what he had trailed with him during the war, neither in numbers nor in monstrosity, but they would serve. The space around the forgotten tombs devolved rapidly into a muddled melange of a dozen separate spontaneous night-hunts.

The young xiao players’ melodies kept being drawn into his own, the spiritual energy turned against itself, harvested to strengthen the ghosts, until both of them gave up with furious expressions that suggested that, had they not been well-brought-up Lans, they would have liked to curse. The qin player had better luck, but was pushed back and back by two determined ghosts she was only barely able to hold at a distance, entirely unable to support her martial siblings, let alone targert Wei Wuxian as she had clearly hoped to do.

Whenever a Lan passed too near a tree or grave where Wei Wuxian had placed a bit of paper, their passing activated some trap. A burst of flame, a jolt of lightning, a paper doll weighed down by a ghost knocking them flat, a loud noise. A cold burst of disruption to their cultivation—not enough to send them into a deviation, but enough to cut off anything they were doing with their qi, and leave all but the most capable cultivators thoroughly out of balance, struggling to regain the focus and control to shape their own energy into any useful form.

He’d only finished inventing that one last night, based on some of his older self’s notes.

(Lan Qiren would hate this one, the half-finished design had had scrawled crookedly across the top, before evidently being tucked away unfinished.

Wei Wuxian didn’t know the person he’d become in the Cloud Recesses well enough to be confident whether he’d been merely hiding the subversive concept from his overbearing spouse at the bottom of a heap, or if he’d given up on it for knowing it would be rejected by the Lan. It was very annoying, not being able to guess his own intentions. Was this how other people felt, when he was obscure at them.)

The Lan outnumbered the ghosts, though not dramatically. The weak, eager shade of a Wen conscript got a young disciple by the throat, only to be vanquished quite summarily by one of his comrades’ swords, dispelling the man’s soul without hesitation.

Most of them were more careful than this, though. One of the Lan ghosts had gone into a doll, but the other stood pale and insubstantial, ribbon on his brow, frowning back at the living Lans, who looked sick at the sight of him. Probably they would be hesitant to destroy the spirit of one of their sect-mates, who had died younger than most of those here, before a few of the rest had even been born.

The bamboo dolls, despite being only as high as Wei Wuxian’s knee and not terribly well articulated, struck hard enough to knock a cultivator to the ground with a single well-placed punch; several disciples in quick succession discovered this.

The girl Lan who’d asked for his surrender so politely ducked out of the way of a long-clawed ghost who’d long forgotten anything but the pain of starvation, and in so doing came too close to a trap; a thunderclap flung her clear off her feet.

A grim-faced adult Lan who was almost certainly a war veteran, some years Wei Wuxian’s senior if you counted the years he had forgotten, delivered a powerful slash that sliced apart the third of the defending haunted dolls—not the one animated by a Lan—sending its right and left halves separately to the ground, only inert green bamboo now.

Wei Wuxian blew a particular note, and activated one of his reserve talismans. The paper flew toward the veteran, glowing with red menace, and he severed that just as powerfully.

This, however, was exactly what he should not have done, and the Lan found himself enveloped in ever-growing strips of curiously strong sealing paper, fouling his sword arm and bearing him to the ground, where he struggled mightily but without noticeable success to tear free.

Nearly half the Lan had given up on advancing entirely for the moment, and fallen into little knots and pairs, standing back to back to defend one another from the onslaught. Over a dozen were no longer upright.

Now.

Wei Wuxian dropped smoothly off the top of the fallen tomb, still playing, and when his feet hit the ground they struck with a deliberate force that fell into the rhythm of the music. And at this beat, all the dead below who still had bones woke, and skeletal hands burst up out of the ground and seized cultivator’s ankles, robes; arms and sleeves and throats where they could get them, binding those who had fallen down in place on the ground.

Someone screamed. It had taken surprisingly long—the Lan deserved their reputation for discipline.

Someone aimed a wild blow at the skeletal grip on his ankle, struck too hard and cut into his own foot; he howled in pain.

The grim veteran, who was probably the most senior Lan present, had managed to gather his spiritual power, and now he blew the paper and the bone-hands both away from his body in a costly expulsion of energy. Hands shaking from the exertion, he started to rise. Wei Wuxian played a few deliberate notes, and one of the ghost Wens slammed him back onto the ground before he could finish getting up.

About half the bone-hands reassembled themselves from fragments and dust, and dragged at him once again.

Two of the small knots of Lans still making an effort to apprehend Wei Wuxian had made their way quite close, now, past the combat roiling around the two remaining dolls, and were now picking their way determinedly toward him, through narrow corridors where talismans either had not been placed or had been used up. Swords naked and upheld, expressions doing their best to be focused and serene, but somewhat undermined by the way they had to keep looking down at their feet, because of the skeletons.

“Wei-qianbei!” Lan Jingyi shouted, not out of one of these little groups but from further back and to the left, with the same note of aggravated reproach he’d had in his voice yesterday, when Wei Wuxian declined to get out of a tree.

He’d been the forward point of a chevron formation, but lost both his comrades to traps. His sword-work as he cut his way forward alone looked even more capable-for-his-age now than it had the day before, set against the backdrop of other Lans who were not as talented as A-Yuan had of course grown up to be.

Wei Wuxian gestured, and a pair of ghosts swooped in and flattened the noisy youth against the worn face of a neglected tomb, slamming his sword from his hand. He squawked outrage, struggling to twist his head around so he could protest directly to Wei Wuxian’s face.

“Just stay put, young master,” Wei Wuxian instructed him, a little amused. “No one has to get dragged anywhere screaming today.”

A look of horrified understanding overcame the youth’s expression. “Wait!” he shouted. “No, that’s—”

But the ghosts silenced him, and Wei Wuxian was distracted by the shriek of a Lan who had gone too close to one of his reliable old fire-plume talismans and caught both hair and sleeve on fire.

He kept an eye on that situation—the point of the fire plumes, which were not particularly powerful, had been to herd the cultivators where he wanted them; he hadn’t expected anyone to walk right into them, and while he didn’t particularly want to roast anybody alive, he was aware that doing anything to put the burning man out again would puncture his aura of menace and make the Lan over-bold, and might mean he had to actually kill someone to be taken seriously again.

Two of the man’s sect-siblings solved the problem, a little bit hilariously, by cutting the burning parts of both hair and robe away with their swords—efficient yes, but rather overconfident both that the man who was on fire wouldn’t move his body into the way of the blades and that they would aim their cuts with enough precision, even if he held still. And surprisingly willing to inflict a most unfilial haircut on their comrade, even if he was on fire.

But unless they had quite a lot of water or some kind of fire-suppressing talisman on them, their alternative had been to throw him to the ground, amidst the grasping bones, and stomp on him, so they had probably chosen the most Lanish option. Wei Wuxian hadn’t seen Lan Wangji do such a thing during the war, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if he had.

One thing Wei Wuxian did tend to appreciate about Lans was their decisiveness, their lack of dither whenever the situation they were in was at all covered by their rules, although it had always intermingled itself in his mind with the pitiless approach they took to punishment, and looked all the darker since he’d woken up in this future.

The burned man staggered back, into the arms of a chattering ghost, and swung blindly at it with his spiritual sword without any great precision. One of his rescuers took a careless step aside from this wild blade thrashing and was brought down by skeletal hands. The other, finding himself alone and undefended, looked about wildly, sword upheld, trying without success to watch in every direction at once.

A majority of Wei Wuxian’s pursuers were now down, stunned or contained by talismans, or by the dead.

This was the time to make some kind of speech, to lay out for them all the great benefits of leaving him alone from now on, and the tremendous risks of continuing to piss him off.

He’d gone easy on them, most of them had to know it. Was he a man they wished to harry to the ends of the earth? And then what, drag him back to their home?

“Do you think you can hold me,” he asked mildly, letting the dizi fall from his lips and fall to one side, negligent. “Even if you did manage to bring me back?”

“That’s something for our elders to determine,” said one youth, much too young to be here really, fifteen at most.

Wei Wuxian grinned. “Ah, that’s not your problem? I see, I see.” He nodded. “What humble, respectful disciples Lan Sect has.”

“You!” snapped one of them, lunging forward half a step as though this had been an insult and not a compliment said in not quite the right tone of voice. He caught himself just in time, and aborted his aggression to hop-skip out of reach of a grabbing bone-hand.

“Mm?” asked Wei Wuxian, in his most condescending way, an attitude he had perfected during the war when annoying people into going away and not asking him questions had been vital. He blew a single low, melodious note, reedier than he would have liked due to the inferior quality of the flute, but that made no difference to the result. His ghosts loomed a little taller.

The Lans seemed to be gathering themselves to make one last push of an assault. Once that failed, he’d have his best moment to convince them they ought to retreat before he killed them.

A voice came, then, out of the gloaming of the darkening evening, emitting from a pale figure almost ghostlike itself. Walking steadily out from among the trees, face like jade:

“Stop.”

It was Lan Wangji, and Wei Wuxian was tempted to attack twice as hard just to spite him.

But the remaining upright Lans were falling back, not putting their swords away but lowering them, and he didn’t actually want to kill a lot of people unless he really had to. It would interfere with his ability to disappear, and make A-Yuan and Wen Ning’s situations in Gusu more precarious, and probably wasn’t technically deserved by most of these disciples.

(That was besides the objectively less important fact that, although he sometimes enjoyed it, Wei Wuxian wouldn’t say he liked killing.)

And then, too. He wasn’t wholly confident in his ability to defeat Lan Wangji, as he was right now, not head-on, not while his opponent had living comrades for support and he had not even a decent spiritual tool. Certainly not without going determinedly for the kill, which he wasn’t wholly sure he could bring himself to do.

Even now.

Wei Wuxian had never been betrayed before, not like this. He knew that face as a friend, as someone to preserve from harm. They’d fought a dozen battles side by side and back to back, during the war. They hadn’t been on bad terms in those days, in spite of the arguments.

He might have known better than to ever exactly trust him, than to expect Lan Wangji to side with him, when he went against decency and propriety, indeed than to expect more than the barest courtesy due a comrade-in-arms. Than to betray a secret in his presence, or show weakness when it mattered.

They had never been close; he would never have looked to Lan Wangji to support him for his own sake, the way he did to Jiang Cheng or Wen Ning.

Lan Wangji thought poorly of Wei Wuxian, and did not like him, and people who disliked you were never ideal confidants.

But he’d trusted him as far as he could. He would always have offered Lan Wangji his back in a tight place, without hesitating, thinking that even if they in the end found themselves on opposing sides, even if they agreed on nothing in the world, this person would not behave dishonorably. He would not wrong Wei Wuxian for his own sake. He would act, always, out of principle.

And for all the man had changed since Wei Wuxian remembered knowing him, or perhaps as badly as he’d misjudged him from the first, he would still even now probably become more dangerous in defense of his fellow Sect members. If only because they, too, belonged to him.

Wei Wuxian should want this man dead. But he’d liked him so much, once. It was a brittle, stale feeling, trying to hate him. He would settle for being left alone.

“A truce,” Lan Wangji said, looking at Wei Wuxian, and it was not a command.

Wei Wuxian let himself be seen considering. “For a few minutes,” he agreed. “Lan-er-gongzi.”

He snapped his fingers, and the ghosts not fully entangled with keeping cultivators pinned in place fell back to him, disengaging, ranged leering at his shoulders.

Lan Wangji began to walk forward. The Lan who were free to move opened a corridor for him as he came. He reached the surviving bamboo dolls, and walked past them without being struck.

Wei Wuxian kept the bamboo flute beside his lips, the fingers of the hand holding it poised over the stops. His left hung near the sheaf of talismans in his belt, ensuring that no matter what Lan Wangji attempted, Wei Wuxian could strike him down.

Even if Lan Wangji killed him in one blow, the ghosts would all fall upon him. Even Lan Wangji might die to that.

The dead Lan boy not tucked inside a bamboo doll stood blocking Lan Wangji’s path. He looked up at the man, solemn, a blot of blood spreading across his chest as though he had once again received his death-wound. Lan Wangji stared back, expressionless. Wei Wuxian couldn’t see the ghost’s face, but he could feel through his cultivation senses, and see in the expressions of the Lan observers, when that face began to rot away.

Lan Wangji remained expressionless, but lowered his head in a slow, solemn nod.

The ghost’s shoulders heaved as though with a sigh. Wei Wuxian considered instructing him to attack, but didn’t. The dead boy stepped aside.

The murdered bride hanging red and gruesome before Wei Wuxian grinned with all her teeth, but she too slid aside, to allow Lan Wangji to advance as far as he dared.

Lan Wangji came, in the end, almost within the strike range of a sword—within the range of a lunge—before he stopped, surrounded on either flank by the dead. By then, Wei Wuxian could see what he had in his hand.

It was Chenqing.

He held it out.

It looked almost exactly as Wei Wuxian remembered, every detail as he’d crafted it and A-Yuan’s toothmarks in one end, with one unfamiliar scratch in the finish and, offensively, a blue and white Lan tassel next to the red one, yet another gratuitous claim stamped on yet another part of him.

But it didn’t matter how it looked. He knew it.

Wei Wuxian narrowed his eyes. “Is this a trick?”

Lan Wangji, the picture of solemn grim majesty, shook his head and held the flute out a little closer.

Wei Wuxian had been entirely resigned to never seeing it again. It was hardly the most crushing of his losses.

Part of him hissed and flinched and said never to accept anything offered by an enemy, that this could only be bait in a trap. But Wei Wuxian wasn’t a coward, refused to become cowed enough to refuse a weapon in a tight place out of formless fear of some unnamed consequence.

He slipped a talisman from his waist and held it ready, clenched the improvised bamboo dizi between his teeth to avoid dropping it before he had a substitute in hand, and reached.

Chenqing recognized him, with a little leap. It didn’t feel like it had been years of separation, so they must have been allowing it to him sometimes. Wei Wuxian spat the replacement flute to the graveyard ground, set Chenqing to his lips, and blew a note.

The disciples around them flinched, the ghosts flared up dark and menacing, but Lan Wangji stood solemn and serene.

Lan Wangji reached into his sleeve, then, and Wei Wuxian took a sharp step back and drew in a lungful of air, ready to bring down all the power he had hanging in the air, but what Lan Wangji came out with was a packet of folded papers.

Not talismans. Just paper. Not really cheap stuff, but not the good, archival mulberry kind either—the sort of thing the rich used for note-taking and the not-quite-poor splurged on for letters.

“This is the completed research for the process to reverse the memory suppression effect of the interrupted curse. It is untested, but the work is sound.”

Wei Wuxian pressed his lips against Chenqing. He had a talisman here for fire. He could burn the papers.

That wouldn’t help him, if they’d brought the method here with them, fruits of their research all prepared to deploy on the spot. If all his captor had had to do was get close enough, to change him back into his own creature. And if it couldn’t be done so easily, there was no benefit in burning it right away.

But Wei Wuxian waited to hear what Lan Wangji had to say. What bargain was he offering? What leverage was he ready to exert, in front of so many of his clansmen and disciples?

All of them knew how he’d been kept. What use Lan Wangji had for him.

Wei Wuxian wondered if any of them chafed at the indignity of being asked to risk their lives for the convenience of their Sect Heir’s dick, or if they felt that constraining the Yiling Laozu and keeping him useful was a worthwhile goal for all the Lan, his status as fucktoy aside.

“It should work. It can be performed alone.” Lan Wangji waited for him to say something, or to accept the papers. “Wei Ying should have it.”

This was, in its way, a trap. Inasmuch as Lan Wangji knew Wei Wuxian well enough to know his curiosity would eat at him terribly, once he had the means of restoring his memories; that the urge to know would war against the urge not to be changed. It was a well conceived temptation.

But Wei Wuxian—well. This was a weapon, too. Knowing. Being able to choose whether to know.

Chenqing was too much to give, just to get his guard down, right? And if Lan Wangji tried to grab him when he put his wrist in reach a second time, to drag him off again and lock him away, he could kill him then.

Even without the Seal, on this readied ground, with his own spiritual weapon, Wei Wuxian was the match for everyone here, especially if he didn’t care about making it out alive.

If Hanguang-jun made a false move, they could all die. Surely everyone knew it.

Wei Wuxian didn’t put the readied talisman away, or reach out again. The grinning murdered bride drifted forward and took the papers from him, and Lan Wangji didn’t flinch even when her cold hand brushed against his. Did not move when she unfolded them so Wei Wuxian could glance over the first page and see that it at least broadly seemed to be what he’d claimed.

But when Wei Wuxian had accepted the packet from his subordinate, Lan Wangji stepped calmly back. Did not let a hand drift to his sword. Did not summon forth his instrument.

Wei Wuxian took a step backward, too. “And?” he prompted.

Was this the end of their truce, or was Lan Wangji now going to start setting conditions for the things he had already done, making demands of Wei Wuxian for the favors he’d accepted?

Lan Wangji shook his head. Wei Wuxian stepped back again. He couldn’t back up any further without trapping himself against the front of the fallen tomb.

“Do you mean to let me escape? Let the Yiling Patriarch walk,” he snorted, sneering the title that had always been stupid and drenched in falsehood, even before however many years it had been of being paraded around as a tame Gusu concubine. “After all your trouble?”

Lan Wangji remained expressionless. “They change white to black,” he quoted. “Invert the up and make it down.”

“Carve the square to make it round,” Wei Wuxian rejoined.

Lan Wangji nodded. “Wei Ying has yet done no lasting harm. To further corner you…” he shook his head.

Wei Wuxian grinned, not entirely joyless because there was such a fierce surge of satisfaction in his chest at the implied respect. Even if it was only for the bite of a beast in a trap, Lan Wangji knew what he’d held caged. “A needless waste of life,” he agreed. “Hanguang-jun is wise after all!”

Lan Wangji lowered his head.

Wei Wuxian took one more step backward, and then with a flex of qinggong launched into a long graceful leap that carried him back up to the top of the stone, beside the word wood. Several disciples flinched. Otherwise, no one moved.

Wei Wuxian waited. Lan Wangji was not even looking up at him. There was no expression on his face other than perhaps a hint of stifled anger. He blew one note on Chenqing, turning the ghosts loose to do as they liked, and as chaos broke out once more he turned, leapt down the back of the tombstone, and ran.

Behind him, he heard the melody of Rest rise up from the body of a seven-string qin.

Wei Wuxian traveled for a week, not in a straight line away from the Cloud Recesses because that would make things too easy for a tail, but in a zigzagging arc.

Three days in, he stopped in at a lonely highway inn, thinking to trade some of the coins he’d found tucked into his sleeve for a hot meal, only to be greeted by name and asked about Hanguang-jun’s whereabouts. The proprietors had evidently met him more than once, but to see him without Lan Wangji’s direct supervision was unthinkable. The innkeeper’s wife made a joke right to his face about jealous husbands and their clingy behavior!

Wei Wuxian bought a bowl of congee, ate it numbly without really answering any questions, and left, putting as much distance as he could behind him before resting. He did not try such a thing again.

At the end of ten days, when he was finally confident no one was close on his tail and the urge to run and run and run was finally more or less salted from his bones, he settled down in southern Qinghe with the packet of notes.

It wasn’t the first time he’d looked at them, of course. He’d gone through them very thoroughly that first evening to make sure there were no subtle tricks embedded in them, tracking talismans or anything like that, and read through the pages as he went so that he’d had most of the information percolating in the back of his mind as he walked.

But now he buckled down to make sure he understood every nuance.

He had never been going to ignore it, after all. He couldn’t. Lan Wangji had known that.

Wei Wuxian did not want to be changed. Not again. He had changed and lost more than enough in his time.

But. It was always better when you did these things to yourself. And he hated not knowing things. And—what Wen Ning had said about not-knowing hurting Jiang Cheng, harming Jiang Cheng, he thought he understood. Wei Wuxian was a very different person than Jiang Cheng, but he wasn’t a less curious one, even if he was one who accepted things more easily.

And there wasn’t much use in keeping his own mind just as it was, if he had nowhere to go and no one to look after. He couldn’t even risk becoming a wandering cultivator; Lan Wangji would be able to track him down too easily from the rumors of his passage. If there was anything for him to do with himself in the world as it was now, he didn’t know about it.

So maybe he should do it.

He wouldn’t walk back into that trap again just because he remembered, after all. He’d gotten away. He was out. If he went back—if he recovered all that information, and he went back, it was probably because there was a good reason for it that he just didn’t know about, now.

Unless the Wei Wuxian of sixteen years in the future, the Wei Wuxian who remembered nearly twice as much time as he did now, considering his memories of being a small child were almost nonexistent and shouldn’t count...unless he really was. Broken.

What if Lan Wangji had given him this in the full confidence that he’d use it on himself out of curiosity, and then come crawling back because he no longer knew any other way to live?

Well, what if that was what he thought, but he had it all wrong? Just because Lan Wangji knew more than he did, didn’t mean he knew him better than he knew himself. Wei Wuxian was entirely capable of sustaining a prolonged deception, just look at how handily he’d destroyed his relationship with Jiang Cheng.

In the end, it came down to this:

How much did Wei Wuxian trust himself?

...and what was there in the world to trust, if he gave up on his own strength?

Chapter Text

What hit Wei Wuxian first, with the restoration of his memory, was the fact that Jiang Yanli was dead.

It drove him to his knees with a cry, a sharp agony of remembrance, brutal as though she had just died all over again. For fifteen days, in his heart, she had been alive. Beyond his reach for what he expected to be forever, widowed by his hand, but alive.

Wei Wuxian knelt in that place at the middle of the array and wept, loud and messy, keening, hitching, shaking, for his martial sister and for his own dead self, for Wen Qing burning, for all the stolen time and chances, all the grief he’d been free of in his forgetfulness washing over him in a gut-wrenching wave.

Before his sobs and tears could fade away naturally, however, he choked and gasped on another recollection, this one not new-recovered but its meaning sickeningly inverted, and his head snapped up. “Lan Zhan,” he said aloud.

What had he done.

Hastily he got up, grabbed his things, and took his bearings from the fading stars. It was a four-day trip at least from here back to the Cloud Recesses, if he made the best possible time along the straightest possible route.

The living were always more urgent than the dead.

Wen Ning didn’t find him on his way back, even though Wei Wuxian had stopped hiding his presence from him. Was he angry? Or just respecting Wei Wuxian’s clearly signalled preference for being left alone?

Or just avoiding the very stupid argument they’d have had, if he’d caught up with the young idiot version of Wei Wuxian, and had to try to convince him there’d been a terrible misunderstanding.

In Caiyi, he put the last of the money he’d been too paranoid to spend all this time toward a bath. The innkeepers there all knew him, and it was unlikely the Lan had gone around telling everyone he’d parted ways with them, so he probably could have charged the bath and a meal, and laundry services besides, and anything he liked to Lan Zhan’s account, just as he often did. But of course he wouldn’t.

He’d fled with only the set of clothes on his back and these were somewhat the worse for wear by now, but he neatened himself as best he could so as not to look like a raving maniac returning for revenge, tied his hair up with more than his usual care, steeled himself, and set his feet on the road to the Cloud Recesses.

Climbing the mountain took long enough for Wei Wuxian to work up a full head of nerves, and so he approached the two disciples guarding the gate with his brightest smile, then let it fall.

It had been an uphill struggle, these past few years, carving out a place for himself in the Cloud Recesses. Something a little larger than the hollow of space at Lan Zhan’s side he’d taken shelter in, to begin with.

Finding tasks he could be trusted with, and thereby prove they could trust him with more; finding places no one minded having him and widening those cracks, ingratiating himself with servants and gardeners, charming children and the sort of old Lan aunties who didn’t take the Sect rules very seriously. He hadn’t worked very hard at it, but he had been working steadily, because while Lan Zhan was happy to spend as much time as Wei Wuxian liked traveling and night-hunting, he had not wanted to be the reason his husband felt he was not welcome in his own home.

Truthfully he couldn’t blame Lan Sect, if they took it all back now. If he was never allowed inside again.

The Lan very much tended to see things in black and white. Wei Wuxian had spent the last few years working to be seen as harmless, as an ally, as a bit of a clown whom nobody could really fear. He’d made so much progress! Look how long it had taken, after he fled the doctors, for anyone to see him as a threat, as the Yiling Laozu whose name had been a curse so long.

He’d just been silly Senior Wei, up a tree.

It was one thing from Sizhui and Jingyi, but no one had been afraid of him, really, if you didn't count the caution from the medics when he first woke up. That was the fruit of his efforts of more than two years!

And he’d been so offended! Such a proud little idiot, ah. Wei Wuxian wanted to rub the face of his younger self in the dust and teach him a lesson.

Where would he go, if he couldn’t go here?

The two young men flanking the entryway were both looking at him.

Wei Wuxian made a cheery, casual salute. “Hi, uh. It’s me again. Not that I wasn’t me before, I just had a significantly worse understanding of the last sixteen years. Can I come in?”

He had Chenqing tucked into the back of his belt, out of sight, and looked as hapless and harmless as he physically could, but still. He’d understand if they said no.

He didn’t have a pass. Last time he’d gone through this gate, it was with a stolen one he’d taken from someone doing this same job. Fortunately, it wasn’t either of those guys on duty now—they’d done such a bad job, ah! Hopefully they would get lots of retraining before they were left to guard anything again!

Lan Xichen never would have permitted such slackness during the war, he was certain. Lan Qiren probably had run them through some kind of punishment for falling prey to the Yiling Patriarch’s wiles, but no amount of punishing a man for failing would teach him how to do the thing properly.

Wei Wuxian would understand, if these disciples said no.

If they said no, he’d…well, his first impulse was to break in. He had a much better idea of how to manage it now than he’d had without his memories, although he had personally made it as hard as possible.

But actually, if he wanted to ever sleep in his own bed with his husband again, he should wait until someone who didn’t hate him came by, and ask them to find Lan Wangji, and tell him Wei Wuxian was home.

Lan Zhan had the authority to let him in, and there was a marvelous bedrock security to knowing that Lan Zhan would be waiting for him. Mass murder and rejection and thirteen years to move on hadn’t stopped him. Nineteen days wouldn’t have changed a thing. Breaking his heart all over again wouldn’t have swayed it.

Wei Wuxian did not want to wait.

Lan Zhan did not deserve to be kept waiting a minute longer. He had already waited far too long.

The guards were young inner disciples, just a little older than Sizhui, Lans by birth although not close enough cousins to be considered main family. Lan Bulan and Lan...Yinfu, he was pretty sure? Yes, because it was written in a conventional way as ‘prosperous’ but Wei Wuxian had deliberately pronounced it with a rising tone at the end, as though he thought the boy’s name was the far more Lanish ‘musical note.’ He’d had them for a three-session talisman seminar last year. Lan Yinfu’s sister had married out into a minor cultivation sect recently. Lan Bulan asked interesting questions in class.

Lan Yinfu had his eyebrows up, watching Wei Wuxian with an evaluating sort of interest. Lan Bulan was squinting—more than he did all the time anyway, kid was a bit nearsighted. Had either of them been with the party that had tracked him to that disused boneyard? No, he was pretty sure they hadn’t been.

He hadn’t looked closely at everyone there, and of course at the time he’d recognized nobody besides Jingyi, but he didn’t think they’d been there.

Wei Wuxian rubbed the back of his neck, feeling self-conscious in a way he very rarely had in either of his lives. It was so embarrassing, having to come and politely ask to be let back in, after all his high melodrama about breaking out. No wonder the disciples who’d come to try to drag him back had been so torn about whether to be spooked; he’d been very dangerous and also a complete joke.

Unlike him, they’d known what happened, the last time Wei Wuxian was surrounded by sect cultivators with no one on his side, thinking he had nothing left to lose. Although a lot of them very clearly hadn’t understood it.

“Did everyone come out alright?” Wei Wuxian asked, breaking the increasingly strained silence. “None of those ghosts were too strong, they should have been able to handle things, with Lan Zhan there. But I saw that one concussion talisman go off pretty close to Lan Min’s head.”

She’d asked him so nicely to come back, too. Wei Wuxian didn’t feel very bad about most of what he’d done without his memories, just deeply embarrassed, but he would feel bad if anything irrecoverable had happened to Lan Zhan’s cutest baby cousin. Who had allowed a fifteen-year-old girl to chase after the Yiling Patriarch, ah? Did they think he was a terrible criminal who was dangerous to the world, or not?

Lan Yinfu’s raised eyebrows went down a little, though his eyes stayed sharp. “She was pretty deaf on that side for a few days. But she’s better now.”

“Good, good. And ah, who was it that got set on fire? I was a little worried…”

“Hu Miao,” said Lan Yinfu, which meant the man was an outer disciple and Wei Wuxian wasn’t obligated to know who he was, since he wasn’t Lan Zhan’s family.

Lan Zhan didn’t pay a lot of attention to his extended family, or feel that close to them, but he took the Lan clan seriously. So Wei Wuxian took it a little bit seriously as well. If he was marrying in, he wasn’t being half-hearted about it! He had learned the names of at least twenty-five Lans so far.

“Except for his hair,” said Lan Yinfu dryly, “Hu-shidi has fully recovered as well.”

“He says he’ll get revenge on Senior Wei for his hair,” said Lan Bulin.

“Ah?” said Wei Wuxian, who went about daily under the complex burdens of having killed hundreds of cultivators in a mad fit fifteen years ago, for which many still harbored grudges against him. He’d very nearly been assassinated once since Yunping, and there had been at least four less creditable attempts. “For his hair?” Wei Wuxian huffed. “How is that fair? He walked into that talisman on his own, and his comrades cut the fire off him, not me!

“Anyway,” he continued, “that’s not important. There weren’t any serious casualties, though? Or, before, the kids all got home alright?”

Before waking up in the infirmary without his memory, Wei Wuxian had been assisting a newly-risen Lan senior in supervising a little mob of baby Lans on their first trip outside the Cloud Recesses. There shouldn’t have been any kind of incident; the kids were just learning to find their way through an ordinary unfamiliar forest, a little way beyond the foot of their own mountain.

Wei Wuxian had been attached to the outing as much for his Jiang forestry as for anything, certainly more than for his ability to subdue ghosts and spirits. Mostly he’d been attached to it because his husband liked to spoil him, and he liked to tease children.

His memory of the incident that had gotten him cursed was still a little scrambled and presumably always would be, but he remembered that the other supervisor, who’d been leading the chain of little Lans, had disappeared down a hole with a yell, and before Wei Wuxian could get there from his place at the rear of the column, a lot of the children had already crowded around the shaft, crying out for their senior, oblivious to the evil miasma reaching out at them from it.

Wei Wuxian had had to throw himself into the middle of the mess with even less preparation than usual, before any of them could be dragged down.

He thought he remembered getting the adult Lan out of the hole, so he probably hadn’t been stricken down immediately after jumping? The children were all fine, right? He’d been assuming they were fine. The energy in the room when he woke up would have been very different, surely, if the Sect had lost any under-twelves under his supervision.

He could still remember the horror that had come over Jiang Sect when the Wen seized their youngest shidi, barely hours before they killed all the rest of them. And that had been after the Lan had already weathered an assault, so they’d had no excuse to be so surprised.

“The children,” said Lan Bulan darkly, “were beside themselves when they carried you and Hao-shidi home. When they couldn’t visit you later some of them became convinced their elders were concealing your death.”

Wei Wuxian stifled a hoot at the thought of any of those tiny disciples squaring up with their elders for concealing information. He was such a bad influence! And that must have been an extremely funny sight, twenty little Lans in white ribbons hauling two big floppy unconscious adult cultivators up a mountain. Why hadn’t they fired an emergency flare? Had Wei Wuxian and Lan Hao contrived to drop the whole supply down the evil hole?

“Any child leaving the Cloud Recesses should have their own emergency fireworks,” Wei Wuxian announced. “Every single one of them.”

“You can submit that proposal in writing,” said Lan Yinfu.

“If the Grandmaster ever agrees to accept correspondence from you again,” said Lan Bulin.

Wei Wuxian sighed. “Can I come in?” he asked. “Please?”

“No pendant, no entry,” said Lan Yinfu, too solemnly to take at face value.

He tried his most pleading expression. “You know it’s me.”

“You didn’t kill anybody,” said Lan Bulan, squinting intently again. “Why?”

Oof. Wei Wuxian gnawed at the inside of his cheek, trying to figure out how to answer such a thing. “Well, I didn’t want to,” he said.

“Why not?”

That was worse! What could he say to that? “It’s not that I didn’t earn my reputation for slaughter,” Wei Wuxian sighed. “But that was war.”

Well, the last parts hadn’t been, but they hadn’t quite been not the war, either. It had still been that same conflict, those same wounds, playing themselves out. On both sides, the war had turned them all into the kinds of people who would do those things, and deserved to have terrible things done to them.

The Lan had sent kids after him. How could they have sent kids after him?

“No one there was my enemy,” said Wei Wuxian. Even thinking the Lan had killed his Wens and taken him and A-Yuan as hostages, none of the people he’d blamed for that had been there in that ruin, trying to drag him back. Most of them had been too young to be responsible for anything he was mad about.

Perhaps Lan Sect had been cleverer than he’d thought, if they’d considered that. But if so, they had rather more faith in his character than he would personally call advisable. Surely only Lan Zhan had that much, and surely he hadn’t come up with the ridiculous idea of encircling Wei Wuxian with junior disciples.

“It wasn’t like before, when I had people to protect and avenge.” He shrugged. “This was just—I thought I’d been kidnapped. I wanted to get away.”

And even with amnesia, effectively restored to the second most dangerous version of himself and shorn of almost all the people he’d been protecting back then, and staying good for, he’d still been in a body that had been well fed and rested and held for months on end. Strong, and healthy, and not drenched through with resentment. Looking back at this time, compared to the way things had played out when he’d really been that age, it was amazing how much difference that made to his self-control, and ability to make reasonable decisions about the use of force.

In a word: embarrassing.

The guard disciples exchanged a look again. “Well, so long as no one here is your enemy,” said Lan Yinfu, dryly, and fished in his sleeve. “Here.”

He passed Wei Wuxian a jade token—his own token, the one he’d run off without knowing he even owned, because it had undoubtedly been in a box in the infirmary along with Chenqing and Suibian and however much of his outfit from that night hunt had survived.

Wei Wuxian took it, laughing. “You know,” he said, “if someone had just managed to return my things during that day I spent hanging around here being desperately confused, we wouldn’t have had all that drama.”

“If you hadn’t thought the right response to doctors was to flee barefoot, you’d have gotten them right away,” retorted Lan Yinfu.

Of course everyone knew about that. If you did something sufficiently dramatic in front of enough people, it wasn’t even gossip anymore.

Wei Wuxian tilted his head and let the point be scored, but as he sauntered through into the Cloud Recesses he did complain, “Aiya, cut me some slack, half the cultivation world was out to rob me at that age.”

Word of his return contrived to spread much faster than he could cross the Cloud Recesses, at least without breaking the no-running rule.

Which he wanted to break, but he’d learned over the past few years that this tended not to save any time, because elders would materialize out of nowhere to make you stand still and be scolded.

And he had put himself on sufficiently shaky ground to not want to defy the senior Lan cultivators to their faces, just now. Especially since Lan Zhan would get dragged into it, and while there was some appeal in the idea of skipping over the awkwardness of his return by causing a distracting commotion, that would be unworthy of him. Lan Zhan deserved better. So he walked.

Sizhui emerged from the library to intercept him, word of his coming no doubt carried ahead by someone who’d seen Wei Wuxian across the open courtyards, and ducked inside to pass it on. Or maybe someone had resorted to discreet use of message talisman.

“Senior Wei,” he greeted, with a little bobbing salute.

“Aiyah, A-Yuan,” Wei Wuxian groaned, as they fell into step together. “Come on, make fun of me, I know everyone’s going to.”

Sizhui shook his head. “No.” He glanced over and up at Wei Wuxian’s face. “It is a little funny, now you’re back,” he allowed.

“It’s very funny!” Wei Wuxian said. “I think it’s hilarious! It’s just also embarrassing.”

Lan Sizhui’s crooked little smile acknowledged both. “Jingyi feels really awful,” he said. “I mean, about telling you you were dragged in here screaming.”

Wei Wuxian snickered. “It was true!”

Sizhui looked harassed. “Well.”

It had been. Wei Wuxian, back then when he’d still been playing at being Mo Xuanyu, had been trying so hard to get out of the Cloud Recesses without having to resort to anything that would give away his identity. He’d had no idea then how determined Lan Zhan was to keep track of him!

Or that, knowing full well who he was, Lan Zhan would know very well he wasn’t actually being very serious in those escape attempts. Because he hadn’t had anywhere to run away toward.

Wei Wuxian laughed. “You remember the next day after that, I tried to convince Lan Jingyi that Lan Zhan and I were sleeping together? And he very correctly didn’t believe me. And now, the other way around, here’s him trying to convince me of the same thing! And me not believing it either, and Jingyi just as fed up as when it was the other way around.”

Sizhui’s smile was a touch wry. “Jingyi feels it’s all his fault Senior Wei got the wrong idea. He’s been writing lines in a handstand for two hours every day.”

“Ah, who made him do that?”

“Nobody. He just wants to make it clear he’s sorry.” Sizhui gave a little sigh, and looked at the path under their feet. “I’m sorry, too.”

“Oh, don’t, A-Yuan.” Wei Wuxian stopped his urgent forward progress long enough to drag Lan Sizhui into a one-armed, sideways hug.

“You didn’t do anything wrong. The part where the two of you didn’t imagine I could think badly of Lan Zhan is sweet.” He snickered into the top of Sizhui’s head. “And the part where you all just left out me having been dead for thirteen years is very funny.”

He could see why they’d done it. Even if the clueless amnesiac Wei Wuxian hadn’t summarily disbelieved them (which he probably wouldn’t have, considering he had by that time already put together his reconstruction of the body-offering ritual, that he was nearly sure would actually work, unlike most of the hack versions circulating) he would have had follow-up questions.

And the answering process would have been awful for everybody, and as long as they expected him to be fixed up soon, why put them all through that?

Of course the boys hadn’t considered that the implied fifteen or sixteen years at Cloud Recesses in the version of the story where he had never died should have left Wei Wuxian much more a part of Lan Sect than he was after only two and a half, and that he might notice the discrepancy, and draw logical but wrong conclusions.

Even less could they imagine that someone they knew to adore Lan Wangji could ever have looked at him and seen a villain.

After a second, Sizhui nodded, turned under his arm, and returned the hug, right out here where anyone could see. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he said into the front of Wei Wuxian’s shoulder. “When they caught up. Jingyi says you wouldn’t listen to him.”

But maybe he would have listened to Sizhui. His A-Yuan. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “If I know you, you were trying hard wherever you were, even though it’s not your job to clean up after me, ah.”

A little crooked smile, too sweet to call a smirk. “Who better?”

Wei Wuxian laughed, and squeezed his grown-up radish tight around the shoulders, then let him go. “Maybe so!”

Sizhui dragged his sleeve discretely over his face and then presented the perfect image of a calm and upright young cultivator once again. “Uncle Ning felt bad too. He brought wine, and Jingyi and I got drunk.”

“Driving good disciples to drink! I can’t help but be a menace even when I’m gone.”

But saying that recalled Wei Wuxian to his chief mission, and he looked forward along the path they were on, as if he’d already made it through the public parts of the Sect and the Jingshi was just in sight.

“Hanguang-jun is at home,” Lan Sizhui said, stepping back to a polite distance away, instead of the intimate one he’d maintained since before the hug. “He—hasn’t really been seeing anybody.”

“He’ll see me,” said Wei Wuxian, with all the confidence he could fit into his mouth.

“Of course he will,” said Lan Sizhui stoutly, just as if Wei Wuxian had finished with, won’t he?

Then he looked past Wei Wuxian, more of the worry Wei Wuxian had never wanted to cause him tightening his young face, and when Wei Wuxian followed the look, Lan Qiren was there, very nearly in his way, looking especially upright and stern.

Internally he cursed. What was the point of not running if interfering elders were going to turn up anyway, ah?

Externally, he saluted, perfectly respectful. Lan Qiren looked sour, and moved forward onto the path Wei Wuxian had been following, a clear deliberate intercept.

Nothing for it. “You should head back to your studies, Sizhui,” he said.

“No,” said Sizhui firmly. Like he thought he could protect him by staying—like he thought it was his place to shield Wei Wuxian with his body, wretched boy. Entirely too filial!

“Go,” said Wei Wuxian. “I’ll be fine. It’s better to let him say his piece unhindered right away, he’s less likely to stew himself into a tizzy.”

Of course, Lan Qiren had already had plenty of time to stew, and wouldn’t necessarily hold back just because Sizhui was there, but even though Wei Wuxian, as he was now, knew his A-Yuan was more or less entirely safe with the old goat, that didn’t mean he wanted to put him through the distress of being there as Wei Wuxian was scolded.

And it wouldn’t do to put Sizhui in the middle, if it turned out he was being thrown out on his ear.

He shouldn’t have hugged him in front of everyone like that, should he. Ah, Wei Wuxian. Do you never learn.

Sizhui shook his head. “Xian-ge,” he said, and Wei Wuxian’s stupid stirred-up emotions swirled in his chest and made his throat go tight.

He clasped a hand around Sizhui’s shoulder. “Just stay here, then,” he said. “You can watch and make sure the scary old uncle doesn’t eat me up in one bite.”

Sizhui acceded, reluctantly. Wei Wuxian turned and went toward the scowling Lan Qiren.

Lan Qiren was so emotional for a Lan, Wei Wuxian found himself thinking as he drew close. Not that they weren’t emotional people, but for the teacher who was praised for his ability to beat decorum into recalcitrant youths, he certainly let his temper show more than could be considered decorous. Then again, he was an important man; important men were allowed certain privileges.

He would be outraged by the suggestion that he took advantage of his position to slack in any respect. Wei Wuxian reached him and smiled politely, some warmth added to it by the thought of that entertaining fury.

“Wei Wuxian,” said Lan Qiren.

Wei Wuxian agreed. That was him! “Sorry for all the trouble,” he said, ducking his head a little. He could eat crow to get what he wanted! He’d gotten so much less prideful since his youth, it was something to be proud of!

“Hmph,” said Lan Qiren. “You mean to stay, then?”

Wei Wuxian considered some polite mouthing like ‘if I’m allowed,’ but Lan Qiren wouldn’t appreciate it, probably, under the circumstances. Especially since the only person’s opinion he intended to seriously consult was Lan Wangji’s. “Yes.”

“And if there are conditions?”

None had been set, when he’d originally moved in, mostly because that would have required extending official sanction to his presence.

“Then I’ll ask what those are,” Wei Wuxian said. There were a lot of punishments he wouldn’t mind suffering, honestly; the Lan had beaten him black and blue for far less than he’d done now, and for having beaten up a bunch of their disciples who weren’t even doing anything really wrong, he would accept a repeat of the discipline board with no quibbling whatsoever.

He had, after all, most certainly gone outside the walls during curfew.

The problem was that, if it got much worse than that—long before the stage that Wei Wuxian would find unacceptable—Lan Zhan would become distraught, and Wei Wuxian knew perfectly well he couldn’t control his husband, not when he was truly upset.

If the Lan sect meant to engage in their usual retribution against rule-breakers, Lan Zhan might escalate in reply, and who knew where they’d wind up?

The terrifying implacable juggernaut of a Hanguang-jun that he’d been led to imagine in his forgetfulness was mostly a mirage. It was true the clan didn’t want to challenge Lan Zhan if they didn’t have to, understanding that on the points where he was not inclined to compromise he’d break before he bent, and valuing him too much to want to have to break him again, or the more likely case to see him walk away.

But Wei Wuxian did not want to test that forbearance, nor what would happen if it wore out. If he was forced to fight the Lan for real, after all…

Hopefully, he and Lan Zhan would see each other out safely, if worse came to worst. But then Lan Zhan would have lost his home, his family, because of Wei Wuxian.

Lan Qiren glared at him some more, mouth pursed. It wasn’t very unlike the way he’d looked at him across the refectory, during that awkward dinner when Wei Wuxian hadn’t had his memories.

“Wangji,” the old man said at length, “is entirely too dependent on you.”

Wei Wuxian let out his breath. That was a long way from the worst thing he could have said. “He’s not, really,” he said. “I mean, he got along fine for ten years while I was dead, hm?”

Lan Qiren’s scowl darkened at the choice of number. It was him and his that had stolen those first three years from Lan Zhan; he could endure the reminder. “He is too much like his father.”

Tension crackled up Wei Wuxian’s back. “Did you tell him that?”

Lan Qiren huffed in irritation; Wei Wuxian judged from the level of defensiveness in his bearing that the answer was along the lines of not lately. “He is well aware.”

Wei Wuxian sighed. It was always so much harder to be patient when people swollen on their own authority went after people he cared about, and not just him. But he’d learned some things since he was fifteen, or even twenty-two. “I never met Teacher Lan’s older brother, so I can’t speak to that,” he said. Lan Zhan had given him his flute and let him go, but Lan Zhan didn’t blame Wei Wuxian for any of the things he’d done, even the ones he deserved blaming for.

Zewu-jun had said that their father couldn’t forgive their mother’s crime, but couldn’t stop loving her either—they were already so far from that situation between them that the comparison seemed almost silly. Though of course the people who’d been scarred by the previous generation’s tragedy wouldn’t see it that way, and Lan Qiren probably was one of those people, wasn’t he.

“But Lan Zhan is actually pretty sensible. Isn’t he the one who stepped in and sent me away to get my head on straight before anyone got really hurt, instead of sending a pack of children after me?”

“I was not in favor of that approach,” said Lan Qiren flatly.

“Oh?” Well, if it hadn’t been Lan Qiren’s idea, and it certainly hadn’t been Lan Zhan’s, that didn’t leave many possibilities. “I’m almost insulted, Teacher. Did your elders think I’d go down easier than Lan Zhan?”

That was a cruel way to put it, but it was merited. Had the Lan truly learned nothing? Did they really only ever become more like themselves?

Lan Qiren had flushed with fury. He still blamed Wei Wuxian for what had happened the first time Lan Wangji defied his Sect, and while Wei Wuxian would never claim not to have been at fault that day, he declined to accept responsibility for all that had happened amongst the Lan.

He could barely have been considered conscious, when the first part happened, and then he’d been far away and furthermore ignorant of all the particulars! The Lan Sect leadership had dug themselves and Lan Zhan a nice earthen bed! Wei Wuxian had been uninvolved, for once, and it was shameful for them to try to blame the part they’d done entirely themselves on him.

Wei Wuxian did have a little pity in him for Lan Qiren these days, though. The man hadn’t been old at all, when Wei Wuxian first knew him—only about Lan Zhan’s present age, maybe even a little younger. Running a sect without the authority of the position of Sect Leader, and with no end of people older than you breathing down your neck all the while, was an impossibly thankless job; it would turn anyone into a crotchety asshole before their time. Even with the title, Jin Ling was having a hard enough time of it.

Even with no elders to boss him around, Jiang Cheng had struggled, when they were young and he was new to the work.

Lan Qiren still shouldn’t be considered very old, especially as a cultivator, but there had been white already in his hair when Wei Wuxian returned to life.

“Or,” Wei Wuxian asked, raising an eyebrow, “did they think they were sending those young people to die?”

“You know very well they did not,” snapped Lan Qiren.

Wei Wuxian shook his head. “I don’t know it.”

“Wei Wuxian.”

“A few years ago, you led half the Sect to the Burial Mounds to fight me, thinking I was a terrible demon,” Wei Wuxian pointed out. They’d brought some women along that time, too, come to think of it. “If I’d really been out to hurt anybody and had had the Tiger Seal again, like you all thought, what did you think was going to happen?”

He shook his head again. It seemed the cultivation world had convinced themselves they’d done a lot more of the actual work of killing him than they really had done, all the while they were convincing themselves he was an implacable demon possessed of nothing but endless malice, responsible for every ill in the world. “It’s not that I oppose fighting evil, but you old men are too reckless with the lives of the youth.”

Lan Qiren’s mouth thinned. “We were there to—no,” he cut himself off, rather than be drawn into an argument. Of course, Wei Wuxian knew that he’d been going to say, the truth: the Lan had come, back then, to the Second Siege, to rescue Sizhui and Jingyi and the other juniors of their sect who’d been among the hostages. Just as Jin Guangyao had counted on.

If Wei Wuxian had been evil, or even slightly less helpful than he really was, that set of choices would have gotten half the cultivation world killed off in one go. Getting them out of that trap had bought him back the right to live among them as a cultivator rather than a hunted thing, grudgingly, but it was such an annoying memory from start to finish.

“Wei Wuxian,” Lan Qiren said, in his most forbidding manner. It was not nearly as good at Lan Zhan’s. “Have you no shame?”

“I’m terribly embarrassed about the whole incident,” Wei Wuxian assured him brightly. “Assign me lines or something later, would you?” He was adult enough not to say, I really don’t have time for this.

Lan Qiren sniffed in disgust. “You are a terrible influence on the youth,” he said firmly, which he had said repeatedly since Wei Wuxian married Lan Zhan. He looked past him, at where A-Yuan was undoubtedly still watching. “Lan Sizhui still has thousands of lines to finish for arguing with his elders.”

Well, he guessed he knew what his little radish had been doing while Wei Wuxian was being cornered by his fellow sect members. “Do not argue with your family, because it does not matter who wins,” he said sagely, nodding and not entirely repressing a grin.

Of course, the elders he’d argued with almost certainly hadn’t gotten lines for arguing back. But lines was a fairly gentle punishment, all things Lan considered. He wondered if they’d held back from violence because of Sizhui’s connections, or for some other reason. He was such a good boy, after all. And the hunting party limping home had probably proven him right.

Lan Qiren knew better than to walk himself into the verbal trap Wei Wuxian had just set, and merely glared.

“Lan Zhan isn’t dependent on me,” Wei Wuxian stated, after a few more seconds.

Lan Wangji had lived a whole life, decades , at this point, and while he’d spent more than half that time wanting Wei Wuxian to some extent, he had never floundered or broken under the mere lack of having him. Even losing him, in Wei Wuxian’s opinion, to death wouldn’t have been enough to do it, if the circumstances of the event had been less hideous, and if Lan Zhan hadn’t lost so much of himself at the same time, to these assholes.

And even then, with the way things had been, he’d recovered, and become stronger and better than before. All of it without Wei Wuxian.

If anyone was the dependent here, it was certainly him—homeless, nearly friendless Wei Wuxian, living in his husband’s house and spending his husband’s family’s money; Wei Wuxian who had broken himself once and might well do it again, left to his own devices.

But of course Lan Qiren knew that. It wasn’t worth mentioning, it was so obvious.

That Lan Zhan did not need Wei Wuxian to make him complete, only drew joy and satisfaction from his presence—that bore saying, evidently.

“I’m grateful,” Wei Wuxian said, studying the old man, who usually preferred to pretend he didn’t exist or at least didn’t live here, and certainly that he wasn’t even vaguely a part of his family. “To have the opportunity to make your nephew happy, in this second life of mine.”

Lan Qiren scoffed. “Make him happy? Isn’t it your doing he’s locked himself away like this?”

Lan Zhan had locked himself away? Ah, no. This might be worse than he’d thought. Fury flared through him, obliterating his carefully cultivated patience for the old man blocking his way. “Sorry,” he said, unable to erase the perfunctory note from his voice. “I should go to him.”

“Wei Wuxian.” His name was still said harshly, but it was not being wielded like a stick to hit him with. Lan Qiren was demanding his attention.

Grudgingly, Wei Wuxian gave it to him.

“I know,” Lan Qiren bit out, equally grudging, “that you depend upon my nephew.”

That—was nice, actually, for a value of Lan Qiren; he was acknowledging it went both ways, that Wei Wuxian wasn’t simply taking advantage of Lan Zhan’s attachment. Wei Wuxian nodded.

Lan Qiren took a breath as though steeling himself. “If,” he said, “you wished.”

He seemed to get stuck and Wei Wuxian made an encouraging noise in his throat, you can do it, for which he was fiercely glared at.

“If you wished to go,” Lan Qiren said. “In your right mind, as you are now. Lan Sect would not pursue you. And you would be granted. Some funds.”

“Uncle,” said Wei Wuxian after a moment, too confused to be angry, “are you offering me money to go away?”

Lan Qiren huffed. “Would you? Of course not. No. I realize Wangji is all you have in the world.” He did not add that this was Wei Wuxian’s own fault; they both knew it. “For that reason, your motive for remaining in the Cloud Recesses becomes uncertain.”

Hadn’t Wei Wuxian just run away with nothing, the second he stopped being in love with Lan Zhan? But ah, no: it had been as soon as he stopped believing Lan Zhan loved him. From the outside, perhaps that did look very like his not wanting to live here at all, and only enduring it for the security of sheltering under Hanguang-Jun’s crane-wings.

“My motive is Lan Zhan,” he admitted freely. And Lan Sizhui also, but he was grown, and if Wei Wuxian’s husband had lived in a different spot from his A-Yuan he would have made do with visits, just as he did with Jin Ling. “But not like that. I just want to be near him, it doesn’t matter where.”

He started to turn away, to get around Lan Qiren somehow because he’d doubly reminded himself of where he ought to be right now and this was far too much delay, and then he thought about why Lan Qiren would be saying this, now, and stopped. “Thank you,” he told the old man.

Not for trying to protect him, because the offer hadn’t been for his sake—for trying to protect Lan Zhan, by making it easier for Wei Wuxian to run. Making sure that Lan Zhan could feel certain he was chosen freely and for love’s sake alone.

For the fact that perhaps the old man did care about his nephew’s heart, after all.

Wei Wuxian knew that the Lan thought they had been acting to protect Lan Zhan even when they scourged him, so he hardly trusted their judgment in such matters. But they had similar reasons not to trust his. If they could get as far as trusting one another’s intent, that would be...well. Better than nothing.

Better than Wei Wuxian had any real business expecting, to tell the truth.

Lan Qiren said, “Go.”

Twenty days was too long to have made him wait. Lan Zhan should never have to wait for him again.

Lan Zhan had let him go, knowing he might never come back.

He was so good. Wei Wuxian had promised himself he’d never do this to him again.

Wei Wuxian knew, as soon as he stepped over the threshold, that the house was quite empty. No one’s breath stirred the air inside. The closest thing to a living presence were the inert forms of Suibian and Bichen, placed together on their stand in the dim room.

Despite himself, Wei Wuxian felt a deep pang. As though he was the one who found himself abandoned.

“None of that,” he told himself, and walked briskly through his house, not lingering on all the homely comforts he’d been unable to take any comfort in, last time, until he reached and opened the back door.

Sure enough, there on the veranda, when he looked left, sat Lan Wangji. Turned away, bent over his own lap. Too low and too still to be playing his qin—Wei Wuxian had seen him bent just so over a calm, sleepy rabbit enough times that he was already smiling at the thought as he took soft steps forward, glad his husband had taken comfort in the pets he wasn’t supposed to have, in his absence.

But then enough of his lap came into view to see that there was no rabbit there. Only the severed halves of an embroidered silken ribbon.

Wei Wuxian came to a halt.

Lan Zhan continued to sit there, staring at it. One hand resting on his own thigh, a few cun from the strip of silk, the fingertips so close and yet not close enough to touch.

Not looking at Wei Wuxian, even though he’d made no effort to conceal his approach. He couldn’t detect, either, any of the frosty reserve of a Lan Wangji refusing to acknowledge you; as much as he didn’t want Lan Zhan to be angry with him he might have preferred that to whatever this was.

Lan Zhan’s hair was loose, but thoroughly combed; his own ribbon tied in place properly on his forehead; his attire neat and appropriate in every way, though informal. His face almost entirely hidden, but no evidence, from the slivered edge of it that could be seen past his right ear, that his expression was anything but smooth.

And yet it was undeniable that he looked, in some way, a complete wreck.

“Wei Ying,” he said, just when Wei Wuxian thought he would have to speak up to draw Lan Zhan out of his brown study.

His name was not spoken without warmth, but it lacked the dawning glow of joy Wei Wuxian had expected, anticipated—if he was honest, counted on, throughout his anxious days of travel.

He never needed his er-gege to say anything at all, not a word, as long as he turned and smiled at him with his glass-colored eyes that weren’t cold at all, not when you really knew him. But he wasn’t looking at him now.

“Lan Zhan,” he said, his throat sticking a little. I’m so sorry.

He swallowed. Lan Zhan had told him there was no space for such words between them, but he felt like he’d choke on the need to say them. And Lan Zhan wasn’t looking at him. Maybe he should say them; maybe this new round of suffering that was wholly and entirely Wei Wuxian’s doing had finally tipped the balance, and Lan Wangji no longer felt that there was no space for obligation in this marriage.

Wei Wuxian would accept that. He would always have accepted so much less than his husband so willingly gave to him, generosity hand over fist, overwhelming in his determination not ever again to deny Wei Wuxian anything he truly wanted.

Just as he was about to let the apology free, to empty his mouth of it if nothing else:

“I thought I had learned better,” Lan Zhan said, with a dreadful bitterness.

Wei Wuxian swallowed the apology back once more. Stupidly, he said, “Ah?”

“I thought I could show you that I love you, always. But when Wei Ying stood before me changed, and spat disgust at me, all I could do was retreat. And seek to remold him into a more convenient form. As though I were that same foolish boy again.”

He continued not to touch the severed ribbon, and continued to look as though he wanted nothing more than to touch it. Wei Wuxian would be a little jealous of it, if he had any less thorough a grasp of his husband’s sense of symbolism.

“Ah,” he said again, gentle now. “Lan Zhan. Of course you wanted me back like this. Anyone whose husband didn’t remember loving them would want to fix it.”

“What I want,” said Lan Zhan, with such contempt there was no need to say more.

Slowly, Wei Wuxian walked forward along the edge of the veranda, giving himself a better angle of view of his husband’s lovely profile—well, still mostly his cute right cheek and ear. A bright hint of full lower lip, paler than it should be, and a feathered edge of ink-black lashes.

“Come on, Lan Zhan,” he coaxed. “I was so mean! You can be mad. I’m sorry.”

“No.”

Wei Wuxian ignored this, because Lan Zhan had said enough to make it clear he was trying to apologize, without actually saying as much, which was outrageous.

He squatted down, still a little out of reach. “Of course you couldn’t answer, when I said such things.” It would have stricken his er-gege to the heart. Being accused so confidently of such a thing, of being the worst imaginable version of himself, and yet not quite unimaginably bad—of being bad in the exact way he was afraid he could be. Of letting that delicious vein of selfishness that ran through his character become a darkness that eclipsed all his light, and defined him.

Of turning Wei Wuxian into nothing more than a tool for his own satisfaction.

Wei Wuxian himself could never find words that would help, only ones that made things worse or, at best, turned people away, when his own heart was breaking. And while Lan Zhan was rather better than he was at telling the truth as a rule, that wasn’t enough to entirely make up for how bad Lan Zhan was at simply talking.

He thought about what he could say now, that wasn’t just some form of the reassurances his husband was clearly in no mood to hear. “You should have told someone,” Wei Wuxian decided to allow, “told Sizhui what I thought, so he and Jingyi could set things straight while you worked on the problem. That would have been better than what you did, it’s true!” He itched to be touching, to be able to pet Lan Zhan’s shoulders or sides or hand or thighs to soothe him as he spoke. “But it’s over and done now, and no one’s much the worse. It all turned out okay.”

Wei Wuxian was very much aware that his husband was the type of man who hung on tightly—to his regrets and his grudges, as well as his hopes and his loves and his loyalties. If he had not had those thirteen years to put himself in order and come to terms with it all, while Wei Wuxian rested on the other side of death, they would have struggled to ever have a compatible amount of distance from the grief of those awful days at the end of his first life, probably.

What was easiest for Wei Wuxian to forget and put behind him needed heavy, careful sorting-out for Lan Wangji.

He could be patient. He could be good to his husband, who deserved all the patience in the world.

“Lan Zhan,” he said. “Please. Look at me.”

And of course, Lan Zhan did. There were very few things he would not give Wei Wuxian when coaxed in such a way, and least of all, probably, when it was something he wanted, too.

There was so much regret on his perfect face, far more than this little series of absurdities called for, now that it was all over with no real harm done, and Wei Wuxian had meant with such sincerity never to give Lan Wangji anything to regret again. “There,” he murmured, heart aching but settling, too. “There, my Lan Zhan. It’s okay. I came back. You don’t need to be sad.”

But there was still a distance there, one he’d never wanted to see again. “Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian asked, cold settling in his chest.

He’d really thought Lan Zhan would be happy to see him again. He’d been so sure.

It couldn’t be that this had ruined things between them. Not after everything.

But he’d hurt Lan Zhan so badly, that time all those years ago when he’d rejected his confession, raving. He’d had time to get over that, before he had to face Wei Wuxian again.

Maybe it was just too soon? Maybe hurrying back had been the wrong thing? But oh, he couldn’t have let that terrible emptiness press in on his love any longer.

Wei Wuxian would wait as long as it took. That was the least he could do, after all Lan Wangji’s waiting for him. “What’s wrong?” he pressed, when Lan Zhan didn’t answer, because he’d never found that setting yourself up to have to be even more patient was a particularly good use of the supply of patience you had.

Lan Zhan sighed, and broke eye contact. “Wei Ying let me kiss him,” he said, sounding angry about it.

For a second Wei Wuxian failed to follow, but then he winced. Ah. That.

He had. And then he’d made clear what further he’d been intending to allow. It was a good thing, for once, that he’d lost his temper! If Lan Zhan had somehow gotten all the way through taking him to bed, only to find out later on that he’d thought he was being raped for real this time—

Ugh. Wei Wuxian was such an idiot.

“That...Lan Zhan shouldn’t worry about it, I was just confused at the time.”

Lan Zhan’s face hardened. “Mm.” This, forbiddingly.

“Lan Zhan.”

For once, Lan Wangji blinked first. He looked aside. “Those things you said…”

Wei Wuxian growled with frustration when his husband stopped there. “I didn’t know what I was talking about! Literally. I didn’t understand you, I didn’t know anything about sex or marriage or, or us. You know how foolish I am, Lan Zhan!”

Lan Zhan closed his eyes. “All the accusations you made were…real.”

He meant the things Wei Wuxian had said in his fit of temper—moaning for his cock, or whatever it had been. Saying stop without the expectation of Lan Zhan stopping. Details that matched how Wei Wuxian really behaved.

“Because I brought those things into the bedroom?” Wei Wuxian pointed out. “Aiyo, Lan Zhan, I’m still the same person. I still have the same silly ideas. They just meant something different when I thought—”

Lan Zhan turned his face away again. Wei Wuxian could see nothing but beautiful hair, hanging loose and, now he looked closely, showing subtle signs of neglect.

“Lan Wangji! You know it makes all the difference why a person does a thing! We pretended I was possessed last month, you know that wouldn’t be sexy if it really happened.”

Lan Zhan wasn’t going to let himself be coaxed, clearly, so Wei Wuxian went over and settled himself deliberately against his back, arms looped around his neck, bearing down with his full weight. Which Lan Zhan could take without struggle but would definitely notice. “We don’t ever have to play those sorts of games again, if you don’t want. I won’t miss it. Whatever is good, as long as we’re both enjoying it.

“But you haven’t trapped me, Lan Zhan. I have my own token and my Chenqing and even Suibian, and I know you wouldn’t take them away to control me.”

Lan Zhan shivered. It was barely enough to see, but pressed against his back like this it might as well have been an earthquake. “I could,” he said.

Wei Wuxian bit his lip. Lan Zhan could, of course he could. Wei Wuxian had made himself utterly assailable to Lan Wangji. He was entirely within his power almost all the time, even when he wasn’t tied to their bed with his legs spread, pretending to beg for mercy.

He’d thrown himself into it being like that because he trusted him. And it felt so good, trusting him like that.

“And sometimes you want to?” he asked, making it as gentle and as knowing as he knew how, and making sure there was nothing in his voice Lan Zhan could mistake for fear.

Lan Zhan shuddered again. How easy it had been for a Wei Wuxian who knew him less well to mistake agony for fury on this man. But now he was so obviously broken-hearted. “Wei Ying.”

“It’s not bad to want bad things sometimes, Lan Zhan. Look at me! You know me, you know sometimes I still want to make every problem I meet worse. Or kill people I’m not entitled to kill, because I got too used to reacting that way to problems when I was young. But you always tell me I’m good, right?”

“Wei Ying is good. This and that are different.”

“Lan Zhan. You wouldn’t really. I know you wouldn’t.”

“I did,” Lan Wangji pointed out. Wei Wuxian frowned into his husband’s hair. “I brought you here by force. You were trapped. You kept trying to escape.”

“I—oh hell, Lan Zhan, you mean when I first came back?” Jingyi had probably confessed all, after he realized his role in shaping Wei Wuxian’s misunderstanding. Wei Wuxian rocked a little, like he was soothing at least one of them. “That was—extenuating circumstances. You knew I wasn’t very serious about getting away. You wouldn’t have kept it up long, right?”

Lan Wangji was silent. “Not long,” he decided. Snorted. “Couldn’t.”

It was true the mere restriction of being inside the wards wasn’t really sufficient to contain Wei Wuxian very long. Witness: his escape earlier this month. Wei Wuxian could have tried harder, back then, when he’d first been dragged here. To avoid being taken to and to escape from the Cloud Recesses, at first, and then to sneak away from Lan Wangji, in the first several days they’d spent traveling together looking for the rest of Nie Mingjue’s corpse. He could have taken advantage of the commotion to break out, when the corpse arm set off the alarms in the Mingshi, rather than throwing himself into the middle of the problem.

He could have tried much harder, even restricted to pretending to be Mo Xuanyu. Lan Zhan had chased him down several times when he snuck off, and dragged him back, and kept him paralyzed overnight when Wei Wuxian bothered him in bed, but Wei Wuxian had made it easy, all that time, to catch and to hold him.

Even back then, he hadn’t really wanted to be parted from Lan Zhan so quickly, even if at first it was mostly just that he’d been, as far as Wei Wuxian knew, the only person who’d ever meant anything to him who was still alive and had never tried to kill him, and Wei Wuxian had been. Very lonely, at that time, though he’d never have admitted it.

Being ‘kidnapped’ had made it easier to let himself stick around this person who meant something to him but not enough, yet, back then, to ever have broken his heart. Even knowing it was stupid to do anything but run.

Wen Ning had been out there, but even once the nails were out and he was himself again it had taken all Wei Wuxian’s strength to face him, after failing him so utterly. Lan Zhan, he had thought at the time, he couldn’t possibly hurt. The worst thing that could happen between him and Lan Wangji, he’d believed, was that he got killed again, which he hadn’t wanted but it hadn’t been frightening.

Now, he didn’t need excuses to stay close to Lan Wangji, not any longer. He dropped his head forward over Lan Zhan’s shoulder and rubbed his cheek against the side of Lan Zhan’s face, the ridge of bone outside the eye, the softness of the temple, the smooth slide of his hair. “Please,” he said quietly. “Won’t you forgive me?”

Lan Zhan stiffened in his arms, at this, and then he was all motion, grasping at his arm and shoulder, dragging and flipping Wei Wuxian heels over head, and clear over his shoulder so that he landed, all a-muddle, on top of Lan Wangji, in his arms. Laughing with the suddenness of the reversal, even as Lan Zhan rearranged his legs beneath him to create a better lap for sitting in.

“No forgiveness,” Lan Zhan said, and bent close, and kissed him. But pulled away quickly, refusing to let either of them fall into the dragging goodness of that touch, after twenty awful days without. “No need.”

Wei Wuxian sighed. Of course it wasn’t him Lan Zhan was holding a grudge against. He reached up to thumb over his husband’s cheek, as though wiping tears. There weren’t any, but there might as well have been. “Of course there is. I hurt you.” On purpose, even, though just like every time before he’d had no idea of how deep his little barbs had lodged.

He should have. He should have known. He’d had so much more information to put it together with, this time. Would anyone make so shameless a marriage public, if it wasn’t a love they refused to deny? But he hadn’t been able to see it. Pride, and fear, and—

“I know you don’t want me to be sorry, any more than I want you to. But I need to hear it. Say you’ll forgive me.”

The Wei Wuxian he’d been at twenty-two couldn’t imagine anyone loving him this kind of way. Enough to—to be glad of the cost of having him close, not merely willing to pay it.

That had been impossible, and awful too, because he also at that time had thought letting anyone suffer on his account was the last thing he could ever allow again.

Even his late master had not been glad to suffer the cost of taking Wei Wuxian in, willingly though he’d borne it, shouldering it with even more deliberation than he’d borne all the rest of the consequences of the marriage his parents had arranged for him. And he had done it for Wei Wuxian’s parents’ memory, rather than his own sake, fond though he’d grown of Wei Wuxian as he grew up in his house.

And in the end, the cost of him had grown so high...

No one could or should upend their life and destroy their reputation for Wei Wuxian—back then, after the war, when they’d been living in the Burial Mounds together, he’d been desperate to make sure he didn’t accidentally force Jiang Cheng to do it. How much more absurd, to imagine it from the proud and distant Lan Wangji!

And so of course, he’d believed it wasn’t true.

But Lan Zhan loved him. This much, this completely. He could never deserve it; even a far better person than Wei Wuxian couldn’t have deserved this much. But he’d accept it, all the same. That was the kind of shameless person he was.

“Always,” Lan Zhan whispered. “Anything.”

Wei Wuxian let a breath out and snuggled in against his husband’s warm chest. “And I’m sorry for insulting your mother like that,” he added. The shift in tension in the body under and against him conveyed confusion at this remark. “Oh, did you not notice that? Never mind, then, forget I said anything.”

But of course, Lan Zhan didn’t. Wei Wuxian could feel his mind working over what he could have meant. “When...you said you wouldn’t lower yourself so far,” Lan Wangji said finally. “Just to live.”

Wei Wuxian sighed. “When I said that I didn’t know about your mother’s situation,” he said. Though he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t have said something similar if he had.

In fact, if he’d known about the late Madam Lan while still misunderstanding Lan Zhan so terribly, it would probably have been worse—he’d have seen that as the precedent Lan Zhan was repeating, building upon. It would have made the whole thing seem more believable. People did so often grow up into their parents. “I’m sure whatever decision she made was well considered.”

“I hadn’t thought of it as an insult,” confessed Lan Zhan, after a few more seconds. “Just to live…”

“She might not even have been guilty,” said Wei Wuxian. She might not even have chosen anything more complicated than ‘not to die fighting.’ And perhaps the teacher had deserved it, after all. “It’d be different if I wasn’t trying to avoid justice I deserved, and—anyway. I’m sorry, Lan Zhan. I didn’t mean it to reflect on anyone but me, when I said that.” He hugged Lan Zhan a little tighter, wishing the arms around him weren’t so very still.

“I hadn’t,” Lan Zhan said again. “Compared the cases thus. Mother was a woman, after all. Whatever choice she made, she wasn’t exposing herself to the same sort of—disgrace. If it dishonored her to marry my father, it was not in the eyes of the world.”

Wei Wuxian’s stomach flipped, and he sat up in a jolt so sharp he almost fattened Lan Zhan’s lip with his skull. “Aiyo, Lan Zhan! I am not ashamed of this marriage!”

He pressed a kiss beneath his husband’s mouth, where his forehead had nearly struck, as emphasis. “Don’t ever think that. That’s a useless kind of pride I don’t bother with these days—and at my most foolish, I would still never be ashamed of loving you.” He kissed him again, on the mouth this time, and Lan Zhan kissed him back, softly, sweetly, a little too tentative to bear.

Wei Wuxian was almost frantic with the need to be kissed properly, to draw his husband into the kind of kiss that you lavished on a lover you expected to have for the rest of your life, to be ravished to within an inch of his life and finally know that he was home again.

But he had to take care of Lan Zhan first, had to set the record straight. They couldn’t afford more misunderstandings between them.

“I was ashamed,” he said softly when their lips parted, “to think I’d sold myself away for protection, like a farmer selling himself and all his children into slavery to avoid taxes. Of course I’d do it for A-Yuan, if there was no other way to save him, but it was shameful to think I’d come to the end of my resources, and given up my dignity because I had nothing else left to sacrifice.”

Even more shameful was the truth of what had happened, back then, when the world came for them: he’d come to the end of his resources and thrown away his life and those of the remaining Wens in a great gesture of defiance without even trying to bargain for A-Yuan. His pride had doomed them all.

It was in spite of him that the child had survived.

“I thought—” Wei Wuxian drew in a sharp breath at the twist in his chest of remembering what he’d thought.

It had hurt so much, and he knew, now, that that was because he’d loved Lan Zhan a little, even back then, and he’d been mourning that slim thread of easy affection that had run under even the worst of their fights, from his side, even when he thought himself entirely despised. Grieving his shattered image of the righteous and beautiful and so wonderfully absurd boy he’d met in the moonlight and always enjoyed knowing so much, despite having always failed to win his friendship; mourning it right along with nearly everything else in the world that he’d loved, all ash.

“I thought I’d lost the right to even ask for your respect, Lan Zhan. I thought I’d signed up to be reminded every day for the rest of my life that I was beneath you. That you could never...”

Lan Zhan’s arms squeezed tight around his back when he fell silent. “Wei Ying.”

“I’m so stupid, Lan Zhan, I can’t believe I hurt you all over again with the same stupidity.”

“Wei Ying. No. It was my own doing. If, back then, I had not allowed you to believe I held you in poor esteem—”

“Lan Zhan’s not responsible for my—”

Lan Zhan cut him off with two fingers to his lips. “Interruption is forbidden.” Wei Wuxian glared at him; Lan Zhan only cared about that rule when it suited him. But he’d let him say his piece. “It was for the sake of my own petty pride I let you believe I thought poorly of you. Let you believe, truthfully, that you could not rely on me, because for so long I chose not to act on your behalf. This was the consequence.” He sighed. “That Wei Ying believed this of me.”

“If it helps, I had trouble believing you’d do such a thing,” Wei Wuxian said. “I mean, that you’d…” He waved a hand. “Any of it. I thought you were rigid and controlling and didn’t like me, but it was a shock to think you’d—”

He waved his hand again. He didn’t want to name any of his dark imaginings too precisely; whatever wording he chose would stick with Lan Zhan. “It was just that it was easier to believe that I’d misjudged you, or you’d lost your mind, than that—well, that we’d actually be able to get away with what we have, let alone that you’d want to.”

Lan Zhan looked at him with his most serious, judging face. “And that Wei Ying would want to?”

Wei Wuxian made a scornful sound. “Of course I didn’t even think about it. The feelings matter, Lan Zhan! I’d want anything with you, but also anything would be bad, if it was a trap. It’s worse if it’s nice, even. You know that, Lan Zhan, I know you do.”

Lan Zhan nodded.

Wei Wuxian slumped against his husband’s chest. The idiotic tragedies that had seen him out of his first life were fresh in his mind again, with the memories newly back in place, feeling somehow closer now than when he’d first come back from the dead; he didn’t like it.

He’d let go what it had been like, to live out those dying days. Knowing all the while they were all doomed but hoping that just maybe, if he drew things out, he could turn it around for at least some of them. That somebody would make it out. That he could use the last of himself up to some good end.

He’d had hopes of saving Wen Qing, at least. Of holding out until she and Wen Yuan could slip away as the last survivors, and rejoin human society. Instead, he’d doomed her and his shijie both.

He’d seen the world as a ring of enemies, and hadn’t even been wrong, but he hadn’t done anything useful about it, either. He’d only ever made things worse, arrogant brat that he’d been, and with his memories gone he’d gone right back to it.

If it was his husband, he could confide anything. “I...didn’t even realize, back then, how scared I was all the time. I wasn’t afraid of dying, after all.”

Lan Wangji held him close.

“Don’t worry, Lan Zhan. I want to live.” He turned his head to nuzzle into the silk covering his husband’s collarbone. “I’d have laughed at you, back then, if you suggested we get married, but I wouldn’t have expected to be kidnapped or anything. You wouldn’t. I know you. I promise I do.”

“I wanted to steal Wei Ying away so badly.” Lan Zhan cupped one of those long-fingered hands around the back of his skull. “If I’d thought I could really save you by force. I cannot swear I wouldn’t have tried.”

“Mmm,” said Wei Wuxian, who thought that was a pretty enormous ‘if.’ But while Lan Zhan had hinted at this a thousand times, he didn’t think he’d ever said it like this. And maybe he needed to. Sometimes you really did need to confess things out loud. “And once it didn’t work, would you have let me go?”

Lan Wangji went very still, tense under him with his breathing shallow. He was really thinking about it. About how long he would have clung to the idea, to trying different ways of making it work, in the face of how Wei Wuxian’s cultivation had been lost, the Lan Sect a hostile place for him, his duty elsewhere and his dignity a fragile, precious remnant thing that he had vested so heavily in choosing to die standing for something honorable, on ground of his own choosing, blighted though it had been.

“Yes,” he whispered at last. “I—would have let Wei Ying go.”

Wei Wuxian very nearly wept for his Lan Zhan’s sake, it was so good to see him say that and believe it. He kissed him, sweetly, on the cheek, the side of the nose. When he tipped his face up into it, on the mouth at last, a press just a little too lingering to be chaste.

“Lan Zhan is good,” he whispered, kissing again, deliberate, gentle. “I know Lan Zhan is good.”

Lan Zhan should know it, too. And most of the time, he did—he was confident in his own virtue, his own judgment, the same way he was confident in his own strength.

But even though he had never been wicked (the way Wei Wuxian always would be, at least a little) there were parts of his own heart Lan Wangji had always feared, when they were young. Not without cause. And the fears of your earliest youth never entirely leave you.

“You let me go,” Wei Wuxian reminded him. “You let me run away, even though you couldn’t be sure I’d come back to you.”

What if he hadn’t, ah! What if he’d thrown those papers away and fled the country!

He never could have. Wei Wuxian...he wasn’t made to be alone in the world. He could survive that way, better than most, but it was a wretched kind of life. If he hadn’t risked the Lan method for recovering his memories, he’d still have tried something. Spying on Jin Tower, maybe, or bothering Jiang Cheng. He would never have run away by himself to Dongying or the western wild, without looking back at the people he cared about.

Couldn’t have risked not being in reach, if Sizhui or Wen Ning turned out to need him.

“I trust Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan murmured against his lips.

Foolish man. Wei Wuxian kissed him again. “I hope you had some kind of a plan besides waiting.”

“Sizhui would have come to find you, eventually.”

That was a perfectly good plan. Not complicated, but that wasn’t a fault; every bit of complexity you added to a plan was another place where it could fail. Wei Wuxian had never made a complicated plan in his life that he didn’t detest for needing to be so convoluted, and even then he didn’t think he’d ever gotten more than about three fairly simple layers deep. A strategist he would never be.

He’d ask why Lan Zhan hadn’t sent Sizhui in the first place, except that it was obvious the crowd of disciples had been Lan Sect’s stupid plan, whose predictable catastrophic failure Lan Zhan had merely been cleaning up after.

Wei Wuxian also didn’t need to say that he hadn’t been intending to hurt any of the Lans, not badly—Lan Zhan knew. He also knew Wei Wuxian couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t have gotten badly hurt, if things had gone on the way they had been, regardless of his intentions. It was for the best that Lan Zhan had interrupted.

“It was so clever of you giving me those papers,” Wei Wuxian said. “Or did Lan Zhan just not want all his trouble writing them to go to waste?”

“Wei Ying deserved to have a choice.”

Wei Wuxian made a slightly frustrated noise, even though that was such a perfect and romantic thing to say and his husband was really too good. “I choose Lan Zhan,” he said firmly, stroking Lan Zhan’s hair back along the hairline, as though it needed smoothing into place. “Every time, ah? Every day.”

Lan Zhan ducked his head and held him a little tighter, oddly careful. Like he’d been really, truly afraid that he’d somehow tricked or forced Wei Wuxian into loving him, that it had been unlikely instead of the easiest thing in the world, and that given a chance to do it all over again he’d been bound to fail and lose him forever.

Wei Wuxian fished the two pieces of cut ribbon out from under his ass and held them up in his fist. “I’ll sew this back together, okay, it’s only one cut.”

Lan Zhan looked forbidding in the way that was actually sulky. “Wei Ying need not wear patched things.”

“Ahhh, I don’t mind it.” Wei Wuxian flopped forward against Lan Zhan’s chest, the fist with ribbon spilling out of it braced on one shoulder. “But I won’t wear this one if it will make er-gege sad.”

Lan Zhan was quiet, in the thoughtful way. He said, “Wei Ying can fix it. But let me give you another.”

“Of course! Haha, I’ll wear this one when I’m doing dirty work, it’s already messed up so there’s no need to worry about soiling it.”

Lan Zhan’s arms clamped around him, a tight fierce hug. Wei Wuxian let himself be clutched, perfectly happy to accept even a somewhat uncomfortable expression of affection. “Yes, Lan Zhan, hold me tight,” he crooned, barely even teasing.

Lan Zhan complied, although Wei Wuxian knew he would have to have protested very genuinely to get any other result.

“And then we can go to bed,” said Wei Wuxian, who had been sleeping on the ground for two weeks without even a blanket.

“Mm,” Lan Zhan agreed into his left collarbone, with an emphasis that was not for the softness of pillows.

Wei Wuxian pretended not to notice. He nodded sagely. “We will be asleep promptly by hai-shi, all snuggled up according to the rules. A sleepy, happy, retired old married couple, ah?”

“Not old yet.”

Wei Wuxian laughed. “What ‘yet,’ Lan Zhan is going to live forever!”

Lan Wangji relaxed the embrace, caught him under the chin, and ran the hot pad of his thumb over Wei Wuxian’s lower lip, his voice low and terribly sincere. “Not without you.”

Wei Wuxian’s mouth worked against his husband’s touch, words stolen again as only Lan Wangji could manage. “That’s not allowed,” he managed eventually. He was going to cry. “I’ve been away, I’m not acclimated to that sort of treatment, Lan Zhan is going to make my heart stop by being so—”

It wasn’t even just that it was romantic, it was that Lan Zhan was threatening to die rather than be left behind again, and he was breaking Wei Wuxian’s heart, ah!

He ducked his head forward and bit the thumb pressing at his mouth, which helped. His sharp incisors gnawed against the joint, and instead of pulling away Lan Wangji pushed his thumb further in. Obligingly, Wei Wuxian sucked at it, teasing, swiping over the callus with his tongue, until his Lan Zhan was so worked up he took his hand away from Wei Wuxian’s mouth to be able tip his husband’s head back and press kisses to his throat, tugging the collar of his clothes further open as he went.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian gasped, wriggling for the fun of it, and then squirming much harder as Lan Wangji vengefully poked the ticklish spot between his ribs that reliably made him giggle. “Haha, Lan Zhan!”

He let the cut ribbon fall, hooked one hand over the back of Lan Wangji’s neck, tangled the other in the flowing ends of the ribbon he was wearing, and pulled him at last into a proper, deep kiss, a real reunion kiss of the kind they always indulged in when they’d had to be apart, which went on until his Lan Zhan spilled him decisively onto the smooth wooden flooring of the veranda and went at the knot of his belt.

He kissed down the length of Wei Wuxian’s neck again, biting at the collarbone, sucking a mark into the muscle just beneath it. The low-level arousal that had been running through Wei Wuxian since he’d first wound up in his husband’s lap was heightening sharply.

“Yeah, yeah, bite me there too,” he panted, as Lan Wangji worked his way slowly down the front of his body. “Ah, Lan Zhan, all your marks healed while I was gone, I want more.”

Lan Zhan’s hand on his left hip tightened, not quite hard enough to leave bruises through the cloth but in promise of them, and Wei Wuxian sighed comfortably into the feeling of a mouth closing hot and wet over his nipple. It really felt so good! Lan Zhan sucked, and Wei Wuxian wriggled delightedly up into him, making his task more difficult in a way that he knew Lan Wangji enjoyed just as much as he enjoyed it when Wei Wuxian lay still for him.

He wouldn’t even object if Lan Zhan wanted to bite down right there on his nipple, too, and make him whine in real discomfort. Not today. Today, Lan Zhan could do even the things Wei Wuxian didn’t like, since of course Wei Wuxian trusted him not to do anything he really couldn’t bear.

But if his husband meant to utterly destroy him in reprisal for the stress he’d put him through, he was working up to it slowly; it only felt wonderful, wonderful the exact amount he could stand. Wei Wuxian sighed happily and twisted the fingers of his left hand in the hair at the nape of Lan Zhan’s neck, just hard enough to give a satisfying sensation of pull, but not enough to hurt.

“Senior Wei?” The sound of Lan Jingyi’s voice came just ahead of his footsteps, crunching along the path. Wei Wuxian’s whole body shook with silent laughter. “Senior Wei, hello? I heard you were back, I came right away, I wanted to say—augh!”

Lan Wangji hadn’t even bothered to raise his head to acknowledge the young disciple who’d come around the back of their house uninvited, so Lan Jingyi was able to retreat without suffering a glare from Hanguang-jun, chased by the sound of Wei Wuxian’s increasingly loud hilarity.

A little bit later Lan Zhan gave up marking his chest, accepting that no amount of biting there would distract him from the interruption, and came up to bite instead at his mouth, a favor Wei Wuxian happily returned. He let out a final burst of laughter when their lips parted again, though, shaking his head. “That Lan Jingyi, he never learns.”

“Hm,” said Lan Wangji, which meant that he didn’t want to talk about Lan Jingyi right now.

Wei Wuxian laughed again and sat up, kissed Lan Wangji beside his mouth and below one eye as he pushed both robe and linen underlayer off his own shoulders, and climbed mostly naked back onto his Lan Zhan, straddling him this time and tugging at the belt holding his respectable clothes respectably in place. “Come on, let me at you. Haven’t you missed your husband, gege?”

“So much,” Lan Zhan breathed, and parted his lips softly into the kiss Wei Wuxian gave, and let himself be unwrapped like a gift.