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Chapter Text

Gradually, the leaves stop falling.

Orange, like the sun through mist at Lotus Pier, stays caught for a while in wide flat leaves. Foxglove tree, empress tree, phoenix tree. Enormous five-sided leaves gone to honey-color. In the spring, the clustered blossoms shaded cream through purple; their long curving floral throats necklaced with dew. Gone now. Seeds scattered.

She thinks of Shijie. She wonders what shades of bronze and brown and gold, what stiff embroidery and high collars, what layers of silk brocade and stylized floral motifs, would be considered fit for fall attire in Jinlintai. The scorn is old, soft, bitter. In her mouth it tastes like yellow melon left too long on the vine.

She writes half of a letter. Gets interrupted before finishing. The paper hangs off the corner of her desk for a while. Ends up buried underneath other papers. Slow drift of leaves upon leaves.

Anchoring those unfinished thoughts, an ovoid lump of agate. A-Yuan found it in a stream this past summer. When first given the stone, wet and dirty and smooth, she gasped. She over-acted, over-praised. Intentionally made much of the delight and awe that were actually completely real. She held the stone up to the sunlight. Within angles and concentric polygons, saw translucent orange.

Autumn commences. Daylight dims gradually. First frost arrives on time. Orange on leaves flares, then fades like a dimming flame. The delicate yellow-gold of aspen leaves, slender, sharp-toothed, has already gone on the wind.

Fall in Gusu, or maybe just in Cloud Recesses, is surprisingly cold. It's not south south here but not remotely north either unless the speaker is reckoning from the southern coastline. Altitude and latitude and prevailing winds should warm this place. Instead, while the weather never plunges to reach true crackling tree-killing frostbitten-in-heartbeats northern Qinghe cold, it's never quite Yunmeng-summer-hot here, either. Not even the salt-wild sea wind from the nearby coast can sweep over the ridgeline to Cloud Recesses, though it's hardly a half-day's travel by sword to get to the surf-line alive with swooping gulls. It is not the same here. Inland Gusu remains moderate and cool.

Wei Wuxian shivers, still, unaccustomed even after several years' experience. Here, the deep lakes are chilly, the bright rivers barely-liquid ice, and the littlest streams intermittently solidify into glassy masses of icicles.

The library has answers regarding climate and crop planning, albeit obscured by hagiography and poetry. The Lan like to write, and write about, and write about teaching about, their rhapsodies over company in isolation, the pure sounds of qin and se as heard over trackless snow. Infuriating insistent dualism dividing male and female, society and wilderness, fiction and fact. It's plain that it's always been both together.

The old sect chronicles, recopied over and over, are more than half myths. Still there are building plans and garment measurements and records of grain harvests attached to them too. The Lan have been here a long time. But they are not the oldest presence here. Not at all.

There are, she learns, pine trees in the mountains older even than the sect. There are aspen groves unified at the root that press against the definition of immortal. The footings of the piers of the fishing village that became Caiyi predate the founding of Lan Sect. Carved figures under overhangs in the single-donkey-width smuggler's pass above the town are older still. Scratched images of birds and snakes and turtles predate any known script within any cultivation sect's territory. Alongside them, etched in stone, the shape of the mountains as seen on a clear day. Not identical, no; but close.

Given context, the cool cloudy climes of Gusu are explicable. Ice explains it, ice above all, mutton-fat jade translucence that splinters sunrise and glows at sunset, rich white humps and curls of apparent clouds well beneath the actual clouds. These modest mountains still hold deep glaciers in the embrace of the highest cirques. From crevasses of blue light and echoing sound, misplaced pebbles and milk-white spurts of icemelt come down in the warmer parts of the year. The mist and chill descend nightly in all seasons.

At the equinox there's sun still and plenty of it. But once the clouds start to gather, weather-wise, it's all downhill from there.

Mostly literally. Water knows where to go.

So does Wei Wuxian. Hypothetically. Inconsistently. Intuitively, except when flinches and feral reflexes override her instincts instead. Unconsciously, when her body curves catlike towards warmth.

But she isn't tumbling down any longer. So there's that.

Nowadays, Wei Wuxian can't flow gradually towards an unseen delta, napping on a boat, trusting the current of a familiar river. She can't simply sink down into a swamp of muddy misery, either. Instead, she's like a lodestone, magnetized to what aligns with the mineral grain of her being.

Or like a seedling. She bends toward her source of light.

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Beloved light-bearers can be so obnoxious. When the weather starts to cool, Wei Wuxian asks for an extra blanket out from the cedar-lined teak chest that overflows with them. She doesn't really need it at night, yet. Lan Zhan gives off heat like a stove-bed and clings like a monkey. Really, she just wants one light layer for the mornings when she's the only one in bed because some aggravating people can actually write and accomplish work by early daylight. When she finally breaks down and asks, it's because it's gray miserable rain out, and even Lan Zhan is frowning ever-so-slightly, and she can't hide her teeth chattering.

The very next day she gets three brand-new quilts. Plus a new pair of slippers with a fuzzy lining as soft as milkweed fluff. And then Lan Zhan has the audacity to ask her why she's sweating, that evening!

Well. They do come up with another reason.

As if the blankets and the tea weren't enough. Aiya, Lan Zhan.

And that's another thing! She has to drink so much hot tea, lately. Right around the moon festival, Lan Zhan learned some tidbit about treating joint pain and muscle inflammation by staying hydrated from one of the Lan sect doctors. He's been insufferable about it following up on it ever since. Constantly fussing in the way that Wei Wuxian has to argue with--and that gives her a tight little thrill in her stomach when he ignores her self-deprecation and does it anyway. His wickedness is boundless, she tells him.

Truly, the topic of tea is worse than most, worse than animals or restaurants or clothing, simply because it's easy for Lan Zhan to persevere on this topic at every opportunity. Therefore her suffering is constant.

Every time she turns around, it seems, Lan Zhan pressing a cup into Wei Wuxian's hands with a melting-soft look that makes refusing it impossible.

He doesn't even have to buy anything unusual or choreograph anything elaborate, for this, unlike his habit of obtaining rare spices for her to try. Simply, Lan Zhan just keeps on doing something he already knows how to do: brewing perfectly-steeped tea. Ruthlessly!

Oh, this obnoxious, absurd, annoyingly ridiculously indulgent Lan Zhan. Her zhiji is impossible to cleverly convince to drop any topic. But he is especially persistent regarding her well-being--ugh!--or A-Yuan's--justifiably--or Xichen's--understandably--or even Lan Qiren's.

Sometimes Lan Zhan infuriates her.

No. Really. Sometimes she's actually, not-playacting, truly angry. Rage simmers sour in her stomach, at his solicitousness, at his obstinacy, at the fact that he's gotten wise to all her best (worst) ways of being aggravating and over-the-top dramatic and downright offensively suggestive. Sometimes she just wants to be able to actually shock him in a way that will mean he gives her some damn space...instead of needing to openly ask for it, because he won't ever get the fucking hint otherwise.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't miserable. When Wei Wuxian was younger, and proud of his singularly wild flirtatious ways, he tried everything to get Lan Zhan to look at him. Now that she's older and settled into a mutually adoring relationship, she wants to be able to distract Lan Zhan's attention away from her. They've been fencing ever since they met, but the vulnerability she's guarding has shifted. She carries, low in her belly, a hollowness deeper than her scars. Behind her grin, there's an abyss.

She hates that she can in fact upset Lan Zhan, easily, but she can never ever get rid of him by doing it. Sometimes, she's damn well aware, she's being stupidly fucking irrational and there is no fucking right answer he can give because she doesn't want him to agree with her that she's outright disgusting, he's literally steeped himself in blood, the whole Modao Zushi thing is precisely the stuff the substance the undeniable screaming source of real living people's worst nightmares, and also at the exact same time she does not want him to be shamelessly selflessly stupidly vulnerable enough to not fucking care what the hell she is. Can't hold on. Can't let go. Can't drag him down. Lan Zhan, piss off forever, and never leave me; you should save yourself, and curse you for not doing it, and damned to you if you ever do; and fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

So. Sometimes she's mad as hell at him precisely for being so kind to her, for being sweet to someone who could do the things she's done, become the kind of monster she is. He was. Whatever.

So there's that.

There aren't the right words for it in any language. Therefore she uses the wrong ones. They're what she has, when he hates himself. When she looks for herself, searches for Wei Wuxian, Wei Ying, in the sheen on the bronze mirror in the frost-silvered Cold Springs in the burning loving golden eyes on her and she's just...gone.

Naturally, sometimes she has to convince Lan Zhan to be mean to her. It's the least of what she owes (wants), and tries to pay (and earn), and can never ever recompense (or deserve).

Cruelly, exquisitely, all-too-satisfyingly, even that just wraps back around to working out.

Autumn hesitates. Clouds over the mountains grumble, undecided, on the cusp between frost and thunder.

The weather briefly warms again when almost all the leaves are down.

Light rain falls overnight, pattering bunny-fur soft. She can’t hear it with shutters closed. Doesn't notice. Totally forgets the prediction Lan Zhan murmured to her; for good reason. He licked her earlobe, right after.

So in the morning she emerges shivering onto the porch barefoot with tea in hand, red under-robe shrugged over too-big white sleep shirt. Blinks sleepily wetly at a world of bead-small glistening drops on every surface.

Green and brown and silvery-shiny around the edges. Dark green of pine, fir and cypress. Silver-white of gravel and silver-gray of boulders. Moss, dampened, expands like lungs inflating; a brighter green. Brown soggy leaves on the ground, in every direction. Side paths and gardens as yet unraked, wet rags of leaves strewn everywhere. Tree branches starkly bare, like fishing boats’ masts without their sails. A distant backdrop of pine-covered slopes, dark as the deep river those boats would sail upon. Humped ridge-line gray-brown-green, backs of underground serpents winding their own way. The sky is silvery-white-gray too. Minnow scales, melting dragons, layer on layer on layer like her robes aren’t yet. Infinite thin wisps of chilly-humid mist.

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The purples of beech, redbud, and elderberry leaves really are too obvious a cue, a hue, a reminder to be concerning. She doesn’t bother curling a lip at the bushes that she walks by daily. She sweeps assorted leaves, indigo through burgundy, off the path uncomplaining.

Miniature maples with dramatic leaf shapes and grafted plum trees that produce double flowers are favored by the Lan gardeners. She lets herself complain about the frilliest ones.

Small trees, dogwood and cornel, turn red early. The leaves are sleek, veins linear and orderly. The crimson of them is bright but they're fragile, easily detached from the parent twig at the very base of the stem. The pinkish-red small fruit has to be collected before the freezing rain, or it will ferment unpicked. Leave the cherries and berries for the birds to gobble up, and regret your choices. Who would you rather see get drunk, you and your friends or some bird? (Fourth Uncle used to say that--)

She missed the day A-Yuan and his agemates go in a group to pick from the massive wild woodland harvest of sour cornel cherries, providing material for the sect kitchens to process for weeks. She meant to go, but--well. She stayed in bed, mostly. Indoors, entirely. Fever, cough, dizziness. None of them the reason.

Lan Zhan opened the shutters and screens she tried to leave dark. Fed her bites of clouds-and-snow sugared rice porridge in bed at mid-morning. Left, long enough for sword exercises and tea with Xichen, only because she snapped at him to go. Came back.

The tonic Lan Zhan brought her around noon tasted of licorice and honey, ginger and loquat. For no particular reason, it ended up on the floor. Shouldn't have. She likes spiced as well as spicy, likes anise and coriander and mint. (Wen Qing liked to--)

Every plan, every action, every choice hit the same wall. A howling barren blank in her head said no without explaining why.

The next week she's better. She looks up Gusu recipes for savory-crisp prosperity bread, best served piping-hot around midwinter, and for chrysanthemum wine, because she won't resign herself to chrysanthemum tea again this autumn. Armed with possibly-factual book knowledge and Lan Zhan's embroidered money pouch, she devotes herself to flirting with some grandmothers in Caiyi. One canal dunking and a half-dozen hearty meals later, she's confident that she's well on her way to acquiring a taste for the best of the local cuisine.

No, she doesn’t regret walking over dye-rich hues as they’re mulched into the garden. Flexible at first, then shattering crisp on a dry day. Then wet, another day. Red and purple merge in sodden masses. Eventually they're gone.

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No, another shade catches her. Crows calling while the sky streaks red.

She looks up from the end of a freshly-mulched row. She can't make out the boundary stone. The ovoid boulder, gray and lichen-splashed, merges with the low rock wall at the upper edge of the field. She looks the other way. All the trees below this fold of land are one murky tangle. Looks up. Glowing wisps of cloud chain across between peaks sliced out of the sky, their absence uncompromising.

The purple on the horizon is sadder, darker by far than her haphazard inner time-sense tells her to expect. On her wrist, a talisman smeared into inky obliteration, the intended alarm ignored unnoticed.

She had promised to try not to stay out so late. Had earnestly intended better, as of the day the night guard rotations had moved up in time to match the season, the bell that calls them out starting before curfew instead of after. She wants to do better, wants to be able to stop things, to start things, to have any kind of fucking sense of proportion for once. And here she is, anyway. Letting her day turn to dark.

Regret over another promise casually broken, casually given—and when will she learn—that hits her like a knife in the gut.

She sits down on the ground next to what used to be a bean trellis. The dirt is cold even through Lan layers in Wei colors. She holds her knees. She tries to breathe. She stays right there, her only movement the clench of her hands, until her fingers hurt.

(Eventually, she gets up. She always fucking gets back up. She has been at and past the point of wishing she didn’t, because staying on the ground is not fucking better. There is no way to opt out of things being fucking difficult.)

Cultivating peace is difficult. Time for labor that isn’t required, that’s chosen, that produces next to nothing. Here is a garden plot that’s available. Here is where you can go. Here are so many things you didn’t make, didn’t earn. Yours to use. As if that ever really meant yours.

Achievable tasks, time to do them, allowed, carved out. Offered, unsupervised, medically indicated, wise. Pleasant when she can let it be. Can she let it? Not always.

Really, the key issue is the difference between 'this theoretically helps' and 'this has an effect right now.' Whatever it will look like, to repair her qi, to remake her place in the world, whatever that can look like with the lost core she can't regret—it's literally unimaginable. She's not discouraged, as such. She just can't get a grip on a concept made of clouds.

Seeking an elusive serenity through rural calm...it's the opposite of direct. Or sensible. Non-action, non-being, non-sense. Everything that always made pure sitting meditation a torment, something she had to invent fifty different ways to pretend to comply with. Some of them were legitimate qi-gathering techniques.

She's always been best at attacking a problem head-on. On the same level where she knows that water is wet and falling down hurts, she knows that meek acceptance is the same thing as freezing to death. So get up, get moving, get a little bit warm maybe, do something about it, and while you do, smile.

Sometimes, now—not always, but sometimes, too many times, and pretty much without regard to the size of problem—it could be a night-hunt with dozens of lives at stake, or a cracked dish that can be trivially replaced—that part of her feels broken. Feels missing. Misplaced.

She comes up against a problem. She hits the point where being clever and sneaky falls away, where she knows what comes next, there's just the shrieking wrongness, and then, the need to start trying to fix it now, right now, any way, the hardest way if necessary, and fuck convention and fuck the cost. And then, and yet—and she almost—she doesn't—she can't.

There’s something that’s just—gone—from how she used to scream furiously at the world to be better. She can't inhale that deep. She chokes on it.

In that gap, a stutter-step sideways that almost, almost stumbles. A look over her shoulder for an absent shadow. Lan Zhan's grip on her wrist.

Then after a beat, a breath, maybe, maybe she can be clever again.

But that's when she's doing something. Trying to. Allowed to try to. (Required to be allowed, sometimes, as the leading expert on inhuman horrors; therefore tacitly permitted the scope of action necessary to unmake them.)

In the between times, in this ongoing annoying pursuit of personal improvement, of bare-bones human functionality, wherein she is not faced with an external problem, just interior warfare—for this type of task, this lifetime supply of annoying tasks, this absurd idea of after—she doesn't even need to be action-oriented.

(So, she's angry at herself for not doing something she isn't required to do in the first place. A basic principle for building self-sustaining patterns of entrenched resentment, that—the futility, misery biting its own tail. And an advanced refinement—mere awareness of dysfunction doesn't equal escape.)

Still, the fact that immediate direct impressive overkill doesn’t work, doesn't activate—like a malformed talisman, energy halfway lighting it up with no result but for a scorched-paper smell—that do it now doesn't happen, not always, not any more (not that it ever really fixed things like it was supposed to)—that burns like branding.

Mere reality still doesn’t excuse or justify choosing indirection. Not to the back of her mind.

Without consulting either her capabilities or the situation, the crackling lash comes down. You have to, you should be able to. Her head keeps screaming at her—and she can’t. Doesn’t want to. Should want to, and can’t.

She knows the point of indirection, open-ended tasks, choices with no wrong answer. Options. She understands the ways it helps mind, body, qi. The rationale.

But to even begin. How, how. Nothing is growing, now. Or it is, but so slowly. Green only down by the roots.

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Spring, summer, it was easier. There’s a layer of—something. Gone now. The clouds are the same shapes but they feel heavier.

Harvest and planting don’t end, but the rhythms change. Spring's fervor of germination, summer's illusion of endless growth, both are gone along with the height of the sun. Now is the time for slower actions, for long-term thought. Putting bulbs in dirt now, to wait. Raking, cutting, adding dirt, digging compost in. Seeds blanketed thickly from the frost.

Here, now, those seeds won’t wash away, won’t dry out before spring, won’t twist. There are no ghosts waiting. So they say.

It's not easy. Not alone.

Being with Lan Zhan, that’s easy, always—except when it’s the hardest thing, and even then, in some ways—at least it's easy to care.

But this. But letting herself do something because she can. Because she wants to. Alone. Is difficult.

So she—doesn’t. Not always.

But then she comes back to this. To going out, to mountain air and clean soil and abundance. To breathing harder as she labors, catching a short sharp breath and no, there’s nothing behind her. There’s fresh water at her belt. Her pulse beats strongly, steadily, in her wrists. Soreness of exertion, but no collapse. Dizziness passes by like cloudshadow; the gray and buzzing dark doesn’t go up and up and everywhere until she’s out... Just clouds, just fog, and then the sky clears.

This is allowed. This is possible, somehow. She learns it again every time, and that’s hard.

She’s supposed to make gardening--supposed to make self-care--part of her routine. Her hobby, her choice. Her contribution of produce and blossoms, always appreciated but not required ever. It's impossible, awful, this ridiculous thing where the entire point of it is the unnecessary nature of success.

Know what you can't let yourself do. Then do what you can. Impossible or not.

But this! This stupid, infuriating, privileged, pointless, over-groomed and absurdly easy total mockery of survival. Gardening, of all things, in a wealthy sect. In Lan Sect, specifically, where alleged austerity looks more elegant than outright indulgence. Among the Gusu Lan, the wealth of generations is exquisitely maintained in present service. An enlightened benevolent focus on educating everyone coexists with meticulous record-keeping aimed at providing for the future generations of this one sect specifically. In the meantime, they have the luxury of not needing to grasp.

Lan Sect buys all its rice—and there is rice for every meal, pearl-white or onyx-black, jasmine-scented or toasty-nutty, smoothly glutinous or delicately fluffy. Lan Sect rakes in grateful tribute for superb night-hunting service like waterfalls of silver, owns white jade grade investments guarded by brokers the Wen never even touched, and atop that adds the diamonds of regional rights over salt production. Riches beyond her counting. But that they are all accounted for and triple-checked, she believes that, yes. In such a context, the fresh vegetables grown by junior disciplines with the aid of servants become essentially decoration for everything else, all the supplies carried up from Caiyi.

Her work on this land, slapdash and personal, an ongoing argument with dirt, talismans kicked out by her own choice, with no quota no requirement no punishment no point—and nothing even to rebel against except her own screaming impossible standards—is a step even beyond that. It lands in absurdity.

It's a good thing she's shameless. Farming on a mountain of desecrated corpses was, part of her says, less fucking disrespectful than this.

Another part of her argues, of course. She wouldn't be Wei Ying if she wasn't always ready to be the advocate of dissent, even internally. Logically, if you had to earn the right to begin growing food by starving whenever you didn’t do that, then nobody would qualify all the time, and so nobody could live. Everyone is a child once, is sick or hurt or old sometimes. Everyone fails. Everyone has been given something unasked-for, unearned, if only as an infant at the breast.

Saying you ought to be ashamed to beg is how they justify never fucking feeding you. (Something Wei Wuxian doesn’t like to admit about herself: she’s never fucking once been actually shameless. Not since childhood. Not since Yiling, the first first time. Flaunting what you can’t fucking help being is different.)

She has a garden. She has choices. And sometimes she wants to rip it all out just because of that. That it’s not needed.

She doesn’t know how to be if she’s not needed.

Lan Zhan needs her, she admits it, she hates it, she loves knowing it, she can't fail him, and she can't forgive herself knowing she will and she already has. (Wen Ning she failed before she even started--) A-Yuan needs her, too; a thin thread, a possibility of someday, eventually, if she works hard enough, one last chance to do something at least halfway right. If not for that, on bad days she halfway knows she’d already be gone.

The junior Lans are kind to her now. On any kind of day, their politeness eats like acid.

She never wanted pity.

Lan Zhan had to forbid the disciples from cleaning and putting away her garden tools when she leaves them out, loses them between rows. Because undone becomes unhappened becomes really fucking not good. Because she can’t fucking remember, because unreliable impossible delusional demonic driven mad deserves it. Because no.

Lan Zhan protects this for Wei Wuxian: the essential moving pieces and the parts-left-alone; the things that make it work; above all, the lack of evaluation. He loves her by leaving alone this space where he doesn’t go. He waits for her to come back.

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Not every day, not for this, not for growing.

Still. The garden helps. She knows it helps.

She grew lotus roots in the Burial Mounds but she knows better than to plant lotus at this altitude. She reminds herself that it’s all right. The lotus in Yunmeng are still there. Just not for her.

Wei Wuxian promises herself (like a liar) that she won’t ask for too much. She remembers how to weave walls of sticks, how to temporarily edge terraces with woven mats. She knows digging holes. She knows how easily she can get caught up in a project, grime under fingernails, stained hands flying until she leaves fingerprints smudged with blood. She sets limits. Plants that need ongoing heating or careful irrigation or too much specialized fertilizing grafting pruning whatever—fruit bushes, vine trellises, trees—no, not now.

She decides not to try them this year.

Better: she lets that be where the decision-making stops.

So, she'll stick to annuals, maybe. Flowers that smell nice. Herbs with attractive foliage. Frivously, selfishly, only vegetables she actually likes. Or thinks she remembers liking. Memory can be tricky like that; it's all down to associations. And omissions.

One day late last summer, on a stroll through Caiyi, she casually admired some deep-throated rich blue blossoms on tall stalks that she spotted growing in front of a house just across the nearest canal. Lan Zhan missed a step—she turned toward him—saw him recovered his stride, but with his face abruptly still, frozen-stiff She thought oh, and after that oh no and then oh you stupid fucking Wei Ying how dare you forget you worthless—stop. Then, carefully, deliberately, she told herself, Lan Zhan isn't mad.

She breathed. Kept walking. Gently changed the topic.

But that one decision was made: she took every last species of gentians off her her mental list of possible plants, permanently.

If the memory of that particular grief can be someday be planted, without renewing the injury, reopening the scar—still. That is not hers to do, she thinks. There are offerings and offerings. What is right to say, breathing incense, bowing before memorial tablets, is not the same as what the heart cries out when you find yourself on your knees in the dirt.

Her fingernails cut crescents into her palms. Her shin is bruised where it landed on the handle of a shovel. Burrs catch in her robe. Her breath smokes.

Her sixth shidi liked teaching the kids in town how to make flower crowns out of weeds. He liked getting to be elder and wiser for once. Clover, she thinks, and bindweed. She should leave a patch to grow, she thinks, in spite of the risk of letting something small get out of hand. Next spring, maybe. Or the year after that.

Her garden will be very empty, come winter. Or look that way.

Even perennials often die back, leaving only shivering hollow dry stems above ground, like ghosts of abundance. Or else they strip down to skeletal woody branches, all the buds of next year's new growth waiting beneath thick bark.

The difference between gone and just waiting isn't visible, she thinks. You have to know it. Have to learn from experience. Sustain your attention, bring it back again and again, until you see the cycle whole. You have to choose to survive, have to use curiosity or stubbornness or logic or whatever it takes, until you finally get enough evidence to believe in what's impossible to take on faith.

Now, frost blanches the grass. Fading light, as it bleeds away, is drenched to drowning in brilliant early stars in this clear cold weather. Color blooms, in spite of her best efforts, deep twilight blue.

She wrote herself notes. Made up songs. She constantly creates reminders and then forgets them.

How many things can she really do every day? Sleep, actually sleep at night—with Lan Zhan there to hold her hard—that, yes, maybe. For a while. A few shichen, most nights.

Another thing—Clutching want, need like a disaster and a prayer. An answer when one of them, both of them can’t rest. That, yes. Touch every single day—sharp as a bite, body-length warmth. The slip and clutch of arousal, tongues, filling and being filled until she’s stretched like a drum. Fingers outlining her skin real again, pressure and desire rushing until her heartbeat is a waterfall in her ears. Too much, always, and so the perfect answer to but how to even imagine enough. Yes.

But simply to remember and think and decide and move, to eat meals and drink water and write and meditate and exercise and bandage scrapes and listen to healing music and and AND—How. How can she do all that.

How can she remember to take care of one ridiculous gawky-tall mostly-alive body. To keep track of one singular point of view from which her eyes look out on the world, one set of shoulders where her hands have their anchor, one juncture where her feet uphold her body to carry around, one batch of muscles so her spine can hold up her chin with pride, all of it given to her conditionally, just as long as she stays hydrated and fed. It's nonsense. Not enough. Too much. She's letting herself fall apart, acting like she's incapable of, of basic, of just, of independently living, of quitting just a few bad habits. If she hadn't scammed her way in when they were desperate who'd let her take care of a kid. It's hard enough, just to try to look after Lan Zhan even a tenth as much as he looks after her, to think about more is—she can't fix her own hair reliably. Let alone take care of stupid plants.

Plants that she shouldn't cry over. Isn't. It's not about that. It’s completely expected that some of them thrive better than others. That some die and fail, pushed out of the way, cut off small—and she’s even doing that on purpose, experimenting, finding hardy species and low-effort techniques. No need for sentiment. Except this whole project is emotive, the thrill of gently stroking a leaf wrapped around with the savage joy of hacking out weed-roots with aggressive hoeing. She depends on the gradual selection of the life in her garden learning to exist with, around, and despite her. She still hates that she can’t just stay there, sunk to her chin in the dirt like an extra-long radish. That she cannot watch and will flawless thriving universal growth into being.

The guilt of absent-minded neglect and the absurdity of even caring in this trivial context: two weights like unstable rocks leaning on each other.

So: not every day, not always. Sorry, so fucking sorry what did you even expect I’m just this and I’m sorry, thank you for putting up with me, thank you for not dying yet, I’m sorry I as good as killed you—that, all of fucking that, to the thirsty plants, the overgrown paths, the seedlings that wilt whenever she’s gone too long.

But nonetheless. But come back. But for a while, stay.

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It’s late. Dimming light stealing the edge of the sloping field from vision, fools eyes that aren’t qi-enhanced any more. The air is shiver-worthy.

Guilt-inducingly late, truthfully. Still she drives herself forward. Turning over a trench between rows planted for next year. Raking flat the places where she plans to put down flagstones, sooner or later, when she can. Stacking sticks to the side and generally cleaning up.

As much as her attention span allows, she focuses on tidying away, a dozen works in progress pushed to a pause point. As if she can get a wholly fresh start tomorrow. As if her presence is nearly that consistent. Or as if she won't ever be back, and must leave her work in order for other hands.

It's hopeless, she knows even as she tackles every task at once. She attempts to impose cohesion on chaos by attacking on all fronts. But by its innate nature, gardening is never finished.

Dirt on her hems. Breathing hard. Heart pounding. A rake, a hoe, a spade hefted in her hand because she can, now.

She's strong enough, now, that she can survive wearing herself out.

(A flute in her belt, from when she couldn’t. From the moment when I can't met I have to and then we'll make them pay was what came out.)

So she forgets the time. So she stays late in the garden plot that’s three winding walkways and a fold of mountain away from the Jingshi. So she swears not to trip on the path home this time, and eyes the lantern-less, eggplant-purple, starry sky with a shadow of unease. So what.

Chapter Text

Wei Wuxian stops to rests on the way up, three times. It’s getting dark already, it's gotten dark, and tian a, sorry to worry you Lan Zhan, sorry, sorry, you knew this when you got me, but I can’t. I can’t.

At the second pause, a slightly-resentful talisman from her pocket and a paper-cut under her thumbnail allows her to revive her tired eyes. The cool slither of controlled resetment widens her pupils to black pools, enhances color and contrast, draws focus to movement, with all the effects cleanly temporary and under control. True, she hasn't got the accompanying tingling headache quite fixed yet, but not coming home with bloody knees and bruised elbows from tripping on the path is a worthwhile goal.

She'll do better next time, she swears. She just needs more practice, to fully fix the hurt, to refine the design, to make the sacrifice small enough to seem reasonable to—to people who can be reasoned with, and aren't ruthlessly overprotective. If she could find anyone reasonable (careless) enough. Some people allow Wei Wuxian her compromises with herself on the barest sufferance, enduring with strained patience, and perhaps a sternly moralizing refusal to constrain her against her will. And so, unwillingly, she's learned restraint, tethered as she is: held by the steadfast refusal of her loved ones to forgoe noticing her small hurts. Even those that she would gladly let slip out of memory on her own behalf.

Wei Wuxian blows out a big puff of air that sends the strands of hair in front of her face flying upwards. Stubborn, bedraggled, and muddy, she creaks on uphill, humming.

Hers is not the only garden over this way. Some of them are actually attached to houses. The houses are old, and many are no longer in use. They slump and lean, straight tall beams aging into the drunken tilts forbidden their erstwhile inhabitants. Porches ramble and airy walkways end in actual drop-offs. Foundations fall sideways, and steps go up and down half-flights of stairs to end in alleged inner courtyards that are now hillsides.

In some cases, stone-flagged courtyards and projecting entryways are the only substantial part of the dwelling left. Remnants of wood and plaster lay amid drifts of leaves and pine needles, tangling down into the tiny pine saplings and the enormous ferns and the blackberry brambles.

(Lan Sect replaced what had been inhabited and had therefore burned. Not what stayed in childhood memory during long, long lives. Not what was left standing for generations, decaying at its own pace, out of quiet respect.)

So, the thorn-bearing plum trees and stinking scallions, the snowdrops and briar roses, the chrysanthemums and azaleas, growing from abandoned gardens all along the path...they are no longer tame. They have already made all the required compromises with living unattended, unasked-for, unneeded.

Logically left fallow while other places received priority repair, this landscape has grown unruly. All the fruitful bounty growing of itself here falls outside the accounting; rich or poor, all yields occur unplanned and impromptu. This delights both stray rabbits and clever children. It brings despair to the formal gardens' landscape artists and the sect's feng shui experts, two entwined professions esteemed by Gusu Lan that must constantly restrain the excess of windblown seeds pushing their limits. When most of Lan Sect are vegetarians, and even the Lan doctors admit to the importance of eating seasonal fruit, there's always a source of fruit pits and scattered grains. Meanwhile, there are no efficient area effect arrays that can block the seeds and spores of unlimited species of plants without also barricading out necessities such as clothing and foodstuffs...all people rather than just the unauthorized...or water...or air. Not yet, anyway.

So the weeds get in, over and over.

There are no perfect barriers against decay. Nor against renewal.

Even dangerous invasive transplants adapt to local conditions, given time. (Wei Wuxian eats tomatoes right off the vine, in season, and steadfastly refuses to contemplate metaphor.)

(A weed is just a plant where you don't want it, she muses. Wei Wuxian only ever wanted to put down roots.)

In this area, wildlife wanders freely in and out of the sect grounds. Indeed, Wei Wuxian has abetted them. At one time, she placed carefully-carved channels for harmless small beings to migrate naturally, while assisting (leading) the implementation of Lan Sect's new and superior wards. These wards are closely aligned to, but deliberately not quite overlapping with, the outermost wall. Leaving some gaps that go nowhere of note was useful. Engineering those intentional tiny openings greatly eased the overall pressure of maintaining containment between areas with different densities of spiritual energy; metaphorically, allowing the Cloud Recesses to breathe. Too, life moving on pathways inaccessible to humans would likely confuse any attempt to get in just far enough to map the weak points of the ward structure. Now, bunnies and the like can bound freely through the net of layered protections. Meanwhile, yao, gui, guai, mo—or people—attempting to cross will be confounded by the interweave of yielding and unyielding lines.

So, animals below a certain size and energy-level can go in and out. Wei Wuxian knows this. She also knows where to expect them to go on their own, and where they would have to be smuggled should she choose to surprise someone. Within Lan Sect's protection but outside the more active areas, the rocky back hills, the creeks, the meditation groves, and the horticultural areas lack the sorts of lesser barriers that keep the rabbits (mostly) in their meadow—and deer out of front windows and raccoons out of chimneys and monkeys out of the bath, except on special occasions, like Lan Qiren's birthday.

The Jingshi is about as remote as one can get while remaining one of the inner family residences. Just a few cottages surrounded by flowers, inhabited by elders in voluntary seclusion, lie along pathways branching from the route between Wei Wuxian's garden and her home.

Small animal sounds in the undergrowth next to the path, therefore, are expected.

Chapter Text

A louder rustling noise around the bend pauses Wei Wuxian stock-still on the path, ears metaphorically pricked up, curious and leaning forward. She slides her feet forward to try not to move the leaves. She squints into the shadows, and then grins suddenly.

It’s a young fox, gobbling up an ripe persimmon that’s basically the size of its entire head. She smiles right away, seeing it. And then she hears the noises. Snorts and snarfling and grunts of enjoyment. The fox backs away with teeth sunk into sweet pulp, then sits down suddenly when a stem pops loose. Her smirk grows to a giggle and then an outright cackle.

She watches the fox eat. Sees the sticky orange juices and gummy seeds drip on its muzzle and chest and forelimbs. There's someting pretty relatable about that, yep, fine. But let's be honest, it looks much sillier on an animal that’s basically made of fancy long fur.

She shudders, at one sharp yip, but it’s a fox not anything else fluffy as hell practically a cat not anything else don’t even start.

The fox flattens its ears at her and puts tidy black paws further up the tree, craning its neck for a fruit just out of reach.

It occurs to her to worry about the bunnies, but, well, this is a fruit-eating fox, evidently. Animals are allowed, generally. She’s not really feeling up to trying to catch it and then transport it out of Cloud Recesses unharmed.

One sharp fang hooks over a thin lower lip. She realizes it’s barely the size of a sewing needle. Cute and pointy.

The ruddy coat is like a flash of golden flame, in the deepening dim—is it a spirit fox? Is it actually glowing? Or is she just telling herself that, as an excuse?

It's so small for the amount of teeth it's showing. It lives here, or near here. So does she, now. Just being capable of being dangerous doesn’t have to mean anything.

Lan Zhan is ridiculously attached to his rabbits but he wouldn’t want to hurt or scare the fox either. He’s too soft on animals. Tofu heart. The people who can’t see that in his face make no sense to Wei Wuxian—younger Wei Wuxian very much included. Lan Zhan’s ears give him away every time, or the grip of his hands, or the corner of his lips, or his music. There’s a reason Wei Wuxian doesn’t wonder if she’s wanted here. If she’s allowed.

Little hnrf hnrf hnrf noises. Busy paws tugging down fruit still attached to branches. And meanwhile,the fox side-eyes her, completely unbothered, as if to say, What the fuck are you doing here still, staring? This is my dinner. Go get yours.

While blocking the fucking path, basically. Because she’s not about to try to pass it.

She laughs, and laughs, and laughs, until she cries.

Jiang Cheng, she says into the night air gone indigo-dark, shidi, ah, did we look that ridiculous stealing lotus seeds?

The crows have found their roosts down the mountain. Nobody answers.

The fox huffs at her, and stops to pick up a half-eaten fruit. Trots off into the wood and vanishes, the white tip of the tail going last. Her eyes lose it in the gray-black almost immediately, but after it's apparently gone. She waits, though. Before the noises fade completely, there's just a flicker of white tail-tip, as a reward for patience.

Her excuse for lingering when she's already wildly late is gone along with the animal.

It's dark enough out, now, that she feels like she's been blindfolded with thin cloth.

...Actually, she would really like a talisman to blindfold just the part of her mind that is simultaneously running away from and towards the Jingshi, while she's just walking slowly. On the one hand she's getting stomach-gnawingly concerned about seeing Lan Zhan after screwing up by staying out too late.

(Yup, even though she never actually told him she wasn't going to be late anymore, at least had the good sense to keep her worthless promise to herself, because lying to Lan Zhan is nope and making commitments she can't control pretty much is lying--Which just goes to show she knew she was lying to herself, too! And is totally untrustworthy!)

On the other hand she also simultaneously wants Lan Zhan to hold her and make her feel better about her weird worried feelings? ...Because talking to herself is no way to have an intelligent conversation. Because everything is stupid, maybe.

Or because gardens, evenings, shadows. Because foxes eating fruit, because fallow fields, because falling down over and over again. Because fall.

Because failure is scary, because falling in love is also terrifying, because hope is hardest of all.

Because Lan Zhan is the best, and also the worst, simultaneously. He sees her clear as the brightest moonlit night.

What was she thinking about? Blindfolds? Sexy. Useful for trick shots and stunts. Handy for napping. She looks hot wearing one.

Historically, blindfolds have allow Wei Wuxian to let her snark out. Because she can't see how people look at her antics, probably, and so she can pretend they're impressed with her. Comfier to imagine winding a blindfold around a tiny paperman Wei Wuxian sitting inside of her own actual head until she's/he's/they're smooshed completely flat in layers of cloth. She wants that; wants to feel bold and snarky and fearless.

Instead....ugh, anxiety. It is illogical and terrible and won't shut up. Just like the rest of her!

But hey, since it's part of her, logically, it's also distractible. Right?

Wei Wuxian makes a game of walking up the last part of the path to the garden by the Jingshi as quietly as she can. It's unfair, how well Lan Zhan can sneak up on her! So she might as well get some practice in, hey? She gives herself an arbitrary starting score, incrementing upward with each successful move. She awards the squirrels and mice and sleepy birds she passes scores as well. No deduction simply if she detects the presence of their living qi a few body-lengths to either side (a fraction of what she could sense, once), but absolutely points off for yawping at her, and double extra negative points for scurrying right across her feet. She decides her total score represents a future demand for cakes with pomegranate seeds and pine-nuts, just so she can feel she's gotten one up on random local wildlife.

Silly competitiveness is healthy, right? As long as you know it's a game? Somebody must have said that. At least once, maybe when they were very tired, and had too many raucous children to look after. That person was probably Shijie.

She might as well play around a little, trying to be stealthy. After all, since she doesn't have a core, Wei Wuxian has to watch where she places her feet. She has to squint and step carefully. No lanterns hung along the path here; no fruit wine. Making a game of it is better than cursing herself over each stumble.

She moves too carefully, almost—movement so cautious it's unnatural, stifling. Like following rules, even the ones she agrees with. Like thinking first about which ones to break, because it affects others.

Lately, she has been holding on to as little resentment as she can without getting sick from the lack of it. She hasn't been faking high-level spiritual cultivation with blood talismans and attitude, either. She's been trying because—because she is not so many things, things she should be, but one of the things she can not-do, maybe, sometimes, is—is not make it all worse. Let it be not-worse. Dimly, secretively, look sideways at the idea of better.

Her eyes hurt and her nose is leaking with the cold evening air. She swipes a dusty sleeve over her face.

Then she unlatches the gate, lets it creak open, and looks up from the archway at the edge of the garden.

At the same moment, the screen door slides open. Lan Zhan appears in front of the main room of the Jingshi. He steps out onto the porch.

Behind him, color and brilliance overflow out of the house at every opening. What must be every last one of the interior lamps has been illuminated fully.

The streaming light turns the residence into a glowing toy, a perfect little model of itself, too idealized to be real.

Over the latticework of the walls, the timbers of the porch, all the indirect light, twice diffused, layers extra lines, wild and woodsy. Wei Wuxian recognizes the elaborate tree pattern on one of the ornamental screens inside the Jingshi, normally invisible but backlit now. Slashed across the clear amber of regular rectangles of light, negative space is made visible. Shadow-vines sprung up out of nowhere, their roots in the gloom underground, their branches reaching riotously outwards.

Lan Zhan looks her way. Wei Wuxian looks back at him, glancing across the long-tended garden in the courtyard. Between them lie the dim humps and swells of precisely pruned shrubs and gravel-bordered perennials. A harmonious, intentional, long-living composition—turned unidentifiable, incoherent, in the dark.

The carved stone lanterns along the path are as yet unlit. The moon, oldest night lantern of all, has yet to rise this evening. Everything outdoors is colorless, misty, uncertain.

Everything except this: their gazes intersect. Down Wei Wuxian's spine runs a vibration as clear as the tap of two swords making contact.

She can't see Lan Zhan's face, in the gloom. Still, his posture is clear enough: head raised, hands gracefully falling back to his sides after moving the screen door, shoulders relaxed, chest open. She knows he's smiling—on his face, maybe, maybe not, but still, it is a smile—no question of that. No room for doubt.

She recognizes how Lan Zhan looks at her. Even in the hollow of autumn. Even at the edge of the lamplight. Even on the verge of night.

An odd warmth begins to unfold in her chest. A feeling as complicated and tightly-creased as the edges of a paper lantern. Bright as sunset. Quick as a fox. Orange as persimmon.