Chapter Text
Wei Wuxian never got the hang of his own body.
He didn't mind the scars, at least the ones on his torso. He enjoyed how strong he was once he'd built up his golden core, and the flow of moving through sword forms a little too fast, with a little too much power behind his blows. But otherwise, his was an annoying body.
Some days his body could make him feel queasy and creature-like, like someone had shoved his soul into a half-dead mess which didn't fit, and he had outgrown the shape of his body. He tried to wash the feeling away by swimming under the wooden walkways to more private sections of the lake, scrubbing at his skin with coarse mud until he felt a little more real, skin raw. On other days Wei Wuxian could wash his small breasts and lady bits in a well-lit room, without feeling anything more than slight curiosity about what a proper woman's breasts might feel like in his hands, wondering about the clench of their cunt around his fingers.
Jiang-shushu hadn't minded much when, a few months after finding a little boy called Wei Ying on the streets, he'd found out that Wei Ying's body wasn't right. Jiang-shushu just nodded when Wei Ying explained that he was boy, but also being a girl wasn't very safe, but that was okay because he was happier being a boy anyway. After an awkward few days when Jiang-shushu had told Wei Ying to consider if he wanted to be Jiang Yanli's shimei instead of shidi, he'd never mentioned it again except in the most awkward obfuscations imaginable.
Madame Yu had been firmly in favour of Wei Ying being a boy.
"Of course, he's a boy, Fengmian. Just look at him," she'd said, with that sneer she had for muddy footprints, cold tea, and Wei Ying in particular. "I certainly won't look kindly on you if you ask me to turn him into a girl, out of some twisted sense of propriety. What would the Jin think if suddenly the boy everyone knows you took in was sharing rooms and lessons with A'Li?"
Wei Ying didn't want to be a girl for another reason then, because he was a little scared of being around Madame Yu, and if he was a girl then she would be in charge of him as the Mistress of Lotus Pier. That sounded awful, and Jiang Yanli was still his Shijie either way.
When Wei Wuxian was a little older, floating half-hidden by tall reeds, he would watch the other boys of Lotus Pier swim naked and talk about sex. He was welcome to join them, he was a boy after all, but sometimes it was easier to let his mind drift over problems like the flood barrier talisman arrays while listening to the noise and activity of other people, swimming and ducking and kicking whenever he got stuck.
(His shidis and shixiongs didn't mind that Wei Wuxian didn't swim naked with them. Enough had seen the edges of his scars, and for all that Liu Zhibo was very encouraging, no one bullied him about hiding his body from the other boys and men.)
He didn't find the talk about sex very interesting. It was informative, but not very distracting. It was easy to keep his mind on whatever problem he was gnawing at, or at least not more difficult than in any other location (which was quite difficult, because there were so many thoughts to have, and not nearly enough daylight to have them all in, but Wei Wuxian didn't get hard and stupid talking about sex, not like the other boys).
He wasn't sure if that was because his body wasn't like other boys, or because listening to Zeng Mingtian talking about kissing Gu Shan, (whose mother was one of the leatherworkers in Lotus Cove, but Wei Wuxian knew Zeng Mingtian had never spoken to), was more embarrassing than titillating. Wei Wuxian preferred talking to Gu Shan himself, flicking his ponytail in a way which made her blush, and maybe teasing his fingers right on the edge of her worktable, so they could touch if she chose to reach out.
Wei Wuxian liked flirting with the market girls, and he was rather good at it too. He had fun, but kisses or anything more would probably be bad, in ways Wei Wuxian couldn't even pin down. Madame Yu would likely take very immediate and violent responsibility for him, if Wei Wuxian started seducing maidens, or worse, young shidis.
Wei Wuxian wasn't scared of his body, although he was a little terrified of pregnancy. Babies were very fragile, and when the wind was still, he could hear women screaming from the birthing hut across the water. His place for all of that didn't bleed often, which he was thankful for, although Shijie was a little worried about it (she was much better at tracking the moons than he ever was). When that place was bleeding, shoving two fingers into it and grinding helplessly for as long as he could stand made the pain feel a lot easier to bear for a while. Watching the blood swirl away from his fingers into the river was nice too, like he was giving his excess Yin to the river.
The only times he played with himself which felt easier, not a frantic and confusing fight, his confusing body demanding things he didn't want to give it, was when he watched some of his shixiong fuck. Watching older boys was okay, because that was what boys did, and if they didn't want to be seen they wouldn't fuck in public.
Liu Zhibo and Tang Junjie had a specific place they went, mostly hidden by clustering bamboo, but close enough to the sword practice grounds that everyone knew what they were doing. They liked to get their hands and mouths on each other. Liu Zhibo was all desperate speed and thrashing desire, for the first round just after practice, but they were both slower for their usual second go, once they'd calmed down a little. Liu Zhibo usually talked about girls, while Tang Junjie was sucking on Liu Zhibo's cock, fucking into his own fist. Tang Junjie looked pained, whenever he made himself come, but Liu Zhibo flopped over laughing, relaxed and joyful, and just as likely to drop kisses in Tang Junjie's hair as push him into the river.
It looked like fun.
Wei Wuxian was pretty sure he had never made himself climax. He was probably touching himself wrong, but he wasn't going to watch girls, not even if he paid for them.
Climax sounded dramatic, and looked almost painful when Tang Junjie yanked it out of himself. That wasn't much like the intangible relief Wei Wuxian felt when he used his fingers inside, even if it spent so long at the task that his fingers were wrinkled like dried plums.
He wasn't sure what climax even looked like, for girls' bodies, because he'd never managed to spurt like the boys did, and he wasn't as sloppily relaxed as they were after either. He never reached a point of not being able to touch himself anymore, not like Liu Zhibo who would start whining and pushing Tang Junjie away. Although sometimes the uncomfortable feeling of his own body ripped through to the front of his mind, the wrongness sudden and sharp, and he had to stop (or keep going with silent tears running down his face). Or when he got a cramp in his fingering hand.
It would be different if he had a cock, like the boys. Jiang Cheng's cock was nice. Not too big, and not easily excited (Jiang Cheng didn't disappear for a few minutes after sword practice nearly as often as most of the shidis), so it looked perfect for Wei Wuxian. He wanted a cock like that one, not like the one tucked up in his body, that he squeezed between two fingertips hoping that this time it might change.
The first time Wei Wuxian thought he might have climaxed, was very almost sure he had, was at the Cloud Recesses. Nie-xiong's books had been very inspiring, and he had a toy as well, which he had smirked about after showing Wei Wuxian, and certainly knew he had 'borrowed'. It was shaped more like a crane's curving head and neck than a prick, made of polished and waxed wood. The toy felt good pressed inside. Very good. Wei Wuxian liked having something inside him to press on strange places especially behind his dick, his hands more free to touch his cock. It felt even better to clutch the flared end of Nie-xiong's toy between his thighs while his thoughts wandered, imagining someone on their knees in front of him, taking him in their mouth.
(Nie-xiong would definitely have arranged for Wei Wuxian to watch women pleasure themselves, if he had ever mentioned the problem of not quite knowing what to do with himself, but the Cloud Recesses was hardly the place to find beautiful women to watch and Wei Wuxian wasn't sure that challenging Nie-xiong would go well for him. It was much more fun to gossip about girls, and bluster about how Nie-xiong was very fun, but he wasn't interested in sharing hands because Wei Wuxian was desperately in love with someone named A'Ping in Lotus Cove, so he couldn't possibly betray her by trying things with Nie-xiong after the Lans fell asleep.)
Wei Wuxian still didn't want to anyone to touch him.
He wouldn't mind touching a pretty girl, or a maybe playing with a boy with an open mouth in the lake, or even taking Nie-xiong into his mouth to see why Tang Junjie liked it so much. (He even imagined he was Tang Junjie, who was sucking Wei Wuxian's cock behind the bamboo, a thought that tangled around his feet like water weed dragging him under.)
But he didn't want someone to open his robes and see that he was wrong. He didn't want to disappoint a girl (or even Nie-xiong who would likely be very dramatic about it all), unable to provide what they might want. It didn't matter much. Wei Wuxian was never going to marry, even if Madame Yu would champion him as a groom. He hardly wanted to see a woman, his wife, looking down at him with confusion and displeasure through the red of a veil.
It didn't matter much.
After the fall of Lotus Pier, Wei Wuxian stopped touching himself. He stopped bleeding, in the Burial Mounds, which was both a relief and a thorned bramble in his belly.
He didn't even get the urge to touch himself after the Burial Mounds, or perhaps it was after Lotus Pier burnt.
He didn't need to twist on his fingers for pain relief, either, not that there was time for that. Most people's Sunshot Campaign had rest spots, and slow periods, when a section of the armies were entrenched somewhere, waiting. Wei Wuxian's war wasn't like that. There was always something more to do, and somewhere else to be, and more ghosts to listen to as they whispered resentful secrets of the Wen they had been or the Wen that had killed them. There were always more corpses to raise, and no time for thought.
Of course, there wasn't anyone to watch either. Liu Zhibo had died. Tang Junjie was vicious in battle, almost feral, likely bite anyone who put their cock in his mouth.
Wei Wuxian was so full of resentful energy that he scared the entire Jianghu into calling him a demonic cultivator, but his body was collapsing, Yin shedding off him like the dirty blood that no longer came.
The voices of the Burial Mounds, and the resentful energy that swirled through him, keeping his shattered bones together in something resembling a human shape, kept trying to be helpful. The energy would twist away from his control, when he got distracted, and try to remake the rest of his body into the shape he knew it should be.
Of course, he had no ability to store the Yang energy his body might need to finish the task. It was almost funny.