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Chapter Text

Chapter Text

“Sizhui?!” Jiang Cheng roared as he stormed into Lan Wangji’s room. “You named him Sizhui?”

Lan Wangji had already long ago become inured to Jiang Cheng’s huffing and puffing. Anyway, Jiang Cheng had medicine in his hands when he stormed in, which meant that he wasn’t bothered enough by it to come yell at him outside the usual time - and that meant that whatever it was, it was no big deal.

Accordingly, Lan Wangji didn’t give the yelling any more thought than it required, opting instead to turn onto his stomach in silent invitation.

Sure enough, Jiang Cheng came over to sit on the bed, grumbling the entire time he undid the bandages on Lan Wangji’s back and starting to spread the soothing balm onto the slowly healing wounds.

“I can’t believe you picked ‘Sizhui’ as a courtesy name for A-Yuan,” Jiang Cheng said, sounding thoroughly disgusted and more than a little disgruntled as well. His hands, however, were as gentle as his voice was harsh. “Sizhui. Was carving ‘Lan Wangji loves Wei Wuxian’ into the woodwork too subtle for you?”

Being face down made it easier for Lan Wangji to hide the way his lips twitched.

At first, he had been disturbed at the notion that his grief for Wei Wuxian’s loss – an endless well of despair, an injury that would never heal – might in some ways be balanced with instances of joy, and yet, in time, he had slowly come to accept it. After all, Wei Wuxian himself had never remembered pain for more than a moment; he would not have wanted Lan Wangji to deny himself the pleasures of A-Yuan’s cheerful presence, the peace of being surrounded by Wei Wuxian’s belongings, the amusement of Jiang Cheng’s sarcastic commentary that was so thoroughly ungracious it could only be laughed at.  

The adjustment had not been easy. Lan Wangji was broken in both body and heart, lingering too longer in regrets of the past, while Jiang Cheng had walked a fine line on the verge of true madness, periods of calm interrupted suddenly by grief so intense it manifested as hysterical anger and furious lashing out, his own servants trembling to see it - it was only when Jin Ling had ended up with them, a safe haven for him in his younger years while Lanling Jin sorted out its own internal issues, that Jiang Cheng had started to calm down. His nights were still full of nightmares, brutal soul-shattering screaming ones that Lan Wangji suspected matched his own, but there were now entire days in which the man who kept him company (because apparently “seclusion” wasn’t considered a real word in Yunmeng Jiang, and “alone” was translated to mean “with me”) was a serious, earnest sect leader with a penchant for snide quips rather than the  devastated wreckage of a human being he had met upon the Burial Mounds.

They had not been particularly close, before, and their personalities weren’t exactly compatible. And yet, to his surprise, Lan Wangji found that he didn’t miss the serenity of the Cloud Recesses as much as he thought he would, but rather appreciated the noise and clamor that Jiang Cheng brought into his life.

“ – like two drops of water, both of you,” Jiang Cheng was saying. “Sizhui and Rulan! These are people’s names! They’ll have to bear them their entire lives! Do you think when they’re adults they’re going to enjoy telling people, ‘oh, yes, well, you see, the people who named us had absolutely no sense of dignity or proportion, so –’”

“How is A-Ling?” Lan Wangji asked, feeling his ears go red. He had known about Jin Ling’s courtesy name since long ago, but he hadn’t known until Jiang Cheng had told him that the name had been bestowed by Wei Wuxian, or that Wei Wuxian had praised his sect and maybe even him in the naming – it sometimes made him wonder if his feelings, which he’d long believed to be unrequited, might not have been so hopeless after all.

That didn’t mean he wanted to talk about said feelings with Jiang Cheng, though.

Luckily, Jiang Cheng’s attention was very easy to divert when it came to his precious nephew. “Good! His teeth are finally coming out properly, so we won’t have to deal with all that wailing and gnawing anymore – I thought we’d have to lose A-Yuan’s fingers to all that biting before it ever happened –”

“I thought you told him to stop.”

“Of course I did. Did he listen? No. He just looked sad and obedient whenever I looked at him, and snuck his fingers into the crib whenever I didn’t – I should’ve gotten you to give him the order. He actually listens to you.”

Lan Wangji hummed in response, listening as Jiang Cheng continued in his usual manner to update him about the development of the children they were raising – teething for Jin Ling, Lan Yuan’s rapidly swelling waistline (he was almost recognizable as a child again instead of the pile of bones he’d been after he’d recovered from his fever) and the need to start him on physical conditioning soon, the investment of time and effort that all three of them were putting into trying to convince Jin Ling that his first word should be ‘jiujiu’ – and then, from there, about developments at the Lotus Pier more generally.

At first, Lan Wangji had thought there was a purpose to these updates, that he was meant to give some sort of advice as payment for taking up food and resources, but after a while he realized that Jiang Cheng just wanted someone to listen to him.

He didn’t seem to have anyone else that would.

“– finally finished the full set of docks, so maybe the fishermen will stop beating my ears in about it,” Jiang Cheng was saying. “And yes, damn you, your idea about opening up hotels was both very popular and very profitable – just goes to show that your Lan sect’s reputation for being above it all isn’t in any way justified, you lot make money better than the Jin sect…your brother came by again.”

Lan Wangji tensed.  

“Stop that! Your back’s bad enough without adding knots to it.” Jiang Cheng pressed down on one of them purposefully: it hurt for a moment, and then released, and Lan Wangji involuntarily relaxed as the relief spread through him. Jiang Cheng either had a very good teacher in massage or a natural-born talent for it; Lan Wangji hadn’t yet figured out how to ask which it was. “He’s still looking for you, that’s all, and it’s starting to take a bit of a toll on him; he looks like he hasn’t slept in a while. I’m starting to almost feel bad about it.”

It was very classic Jiang Cheng, Lan Wangji had found, to orchestrate a punishment for someone and feel bad about it almost immediately thereafter. It was no wonder A-Yuan had him so thoroughly wrapped around his little finger.

“You can tell him, if you want,” Lan Wangji said reluctantly. Telling would mean seeing, and while he missed his brother very much, he was still very angry over everything that had happened. “I do not want the Lotus Pier to suffer for having harbored me.”

“Stop being so damned self-sacrificing,” Jiang Cheng said, and Lan Wangji wasn’t looking but he could hear him rolling his eyes. “I don’t care how much you enjoy it; I for one can’t stand it. Anyway, if my Jiang Sect can’t hold our heads up against another sect’s anger, we don’t deserve to be called a Great Sect. It’s like I told you: the moment he actually admits that you’re missing, rather than being all ambiguous and vague about it, I’ll tell him.”

Lan Wangji was secretly glad, even though he knew it was petty of him.

The thought of how frantic Lan Xichen must be after all these months, the idea of him not sleeping, of him travelling to all the sects to ask again and again if they’d seen him…the thought of it hurt, he didn’t deny it. But it didn’t hurt as much as finding out that Wei Wuxian had died with no one by his side – as finding out that his brother, who knew what Wei Wuxian meant to him, had known and deliberately omitted to tell him.

Just as Jiang Cheng was deliberately omitting to tell Lan Xichen the truth now.

“The sect would lose face,” he finally said, offering up an explanation for his brother’s actions, both then and now.

“Yeah, well, fuck your sect,” Jiang Cheng said. “I picked my sect over my family, too, and where did that leave me? Now it’s all I have left.”

His hands stilled for a moment.

“…except you and kids, I guess,” he said, sounding especially bitter about it in the sort of way that Lan Wangji had learned indicated that Jiang Cheng was having an attack of feelings and not particularly enjoying the experience. “You’re not that annoying.”

That was practically stating that Jiang Cheng would die without them.

“Mn,” Lan Wangji said, and after a moment Jiang Cheng continued rubbing in the salve. There was even a brief moment of silence, probably Jiang Cheng being thankful that Lan Wangji didn’t call him out on those feelings. Normally, Lan Wangji would just enjoy it, but… “You could have children of your own.”

Jiang Cheng choked, his hand slipping as he nearly fell over. “What?”

“Children,” Lan Wangji said. “You could marry.”

Not that marriage was a requirement for children, as Jin Guangshan continuously seemed to demonstrate – according to some of the gossip Jiang Cheng had recently reported, he’d recently brought another bastard son home.

“I’m trying, aren’t I?” Jiang Cheng asked, indignant. “I’ve gone on three matchmaking dates –”

Lan Wangji was well aware. He had been the one to whom Jiang Cheng had exaggeratedly complained after each one of those disastrous dates.

“Deliberate sabotage,” he said, because even without having left the four walls around him in months he could figure that much out. “Why?”

Jiang Cheng hesitated, then snorted. “Well, let’s hope not everyone’s as perceptive as you. It’s the agreement I made with the Jin sect to allow me to raise Jin Ling – no other children.”

Somehow, Lan Wangji hadn’t expected that. 

He swallowed, his throat suddenly tight. He knew, of course, that there was nothing Jiang Cheng wouldn’t do for his last living blood relative, even risk having his Jiang sect turned into nothing more than an inheritance to be gobbled up by the Jin sect, but he hadn’t realized – that the Jin sect would take advantage of the grief and trauma that Jiang Cheng suffered, the same grief and trauma that he himself suffered from every day…

It made him taste bile.

“Though you’ve nearly screwed that up, you know,” Jiang Cheng said, sounding suddenly amused. “Back’s done, by the way.”

Lan Wangji sat up and turned his head to look at Jiang Cheng. “How?”

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes. “Well, given your injuries, I’m the one out there teaching Lan Yuan all the basics, aren’t I? The Jiang sect hasn’t started accepting disciples that young yet, so he stands out. Everyone’s starting to say that he’s mine.”

“His surname is Lan.”

“And Wei Wuxian’s was Wei; that never stopped people from talking, did it?” Jiang Cheng scowled a little at the reminder he’d just given himself; as Lan Wangji had found out these past few months, Jiang Cheng was a master of the self-inflicted injury. “The latest I’ve heard is that I fell in love with some lady from the Lan sect who left her child with me when she died – honestly, it’s a bit sad that they can’t think of anything more interesting. Why would I be stupid enough to make the same mistakes as my father?”

Lan Wangji frowned. Jiang Cheng’s voice was shading near to actual pain, rather than his usual bark without a bite – he had let slip enough about his childhood for Lan Wangji to have figured out that the old jokes about the Jiang sect leader’s favoritism for Wei Wuxian were not jokes at all.

More like an old wound ripped open so many times that it would never heal.

It was no surprise, then, that it hurt him to be cast in the same role.

“You could always tell them that the lady still lives,” he said mildly, pretending his words weren’t hurting himself this time. Maybe Jiang Cheng had a point when he said that Lan Wangji enjoyed self-sacrifice. “Only that she’s ill, or in confinement, and cannot be seen.”

“Not a chance! Like I’d ever do something like that,” Jiang Cheng said, and Lan Wangji very briefly loved him for his immediate rejection of the idea. “Besides, if I say that, what do I do when you do come out of here and claim him? Everyone will think we’ve been sleeping together.”

Lan Wangji politely didn’t mention the occasional night that Jiang Cheng spent huddling by his side, wild-eyed, until the nightmares went away, or the way Jiang Cheng would occasionally lend a hand with certain physiological reactions that Lan Wangji could not bear to deal with himself, turning what might have been a trigger for self-hatred and near suicidal despair into a process as mundane as the baths he still needed help taking; neither of those were what was meant.

“No one would fear that you would have children if they thought you cut your sleeve,” he pointed out, not sure why he was pushing the issue. Even if people did say that, it was only rumors, after all, and temporary ones: when Lan Wangji could walk again, even the most pointed would swiftly fade in favor of ones that slandered Lan Wangji’s reputation instead.

“I’m still hoping to get married eventually,” Jiang Cheng said. “Just – after Jin Ling is an adult. Once he’s sect leader, he can release me from the promise I made. No harm done, assuming I don’t die first.”

Lan Wangji nodded. It made sense, though for some reason he felt some dissatisfaction.

“Though,” Jiang Cheng continued, looking thoughtful, “it might not be that bad an idea to spread some rumors. If I never commented on it, people would never know for sure if it was true or just slander by some dissatisfied female cultivator after one of my horrible matchmaking meetings.”

“It would still affect your reputation.”

“Like I care,” Jiang Cheng scoffed. “Let them talk! If anyone is stupid enough to think that the contents of my bed have any impact on my abilities, I still have Zidian to show them the error of their ways. And I will, too; don’t think I won’t!”

Lan Wangji abruptly felt lighter inside. Of course Jiang Cheng wouldn’t care; he hardly ever cared about anything other than his sect and the children – and anyway, just because Lan Wangji had never told Jiang Cheng directly how he felt about Wei Wuxian didn’t mean that he hadn’t guessed. He had given Lan Wangji Wei Wuxian’s bedroom, after all. “I would never be so foolish.”

Jiang Cheng huffed and tossed his head, then turned to say something that he promptly forgot in favor of gaping at him. “Hanguang-jun, what are you doing with your mouth?”

Lan Wangji allowed his smile to widen. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Stop it! It’s creepy! Go back to being humorless and dull this instant!”

“No.”

“This is my sect and you’re my guest; you have to do what I say.”

“No.”

“You’re worse than A-Yuan,” Jiang Cheng complained. “At least he pretends to listen. I’ll have to raise Jin Ling to be properly obedient.”

For some reason, Lan Wangji didn’t think he would have much luck with that.

Chapter Text

“So, I have a problem,” Jiang Cheng said, bursting into the room.

Sometimes Lan Wangji wondered if Jiang Cheng had ever heard of any other way to enter a room. Through the window, perhaps, since clearly walking wasn’t seen as a valid alternative.

“Just one?” he asked, not looking up from where he was repositioning A-Yuan’s hand on the guqin.

“No, I – hey!”

A-Yuan giggled, and that made Jin Ling, currently nestled in blankets next to the guqin, giggle as well, and predictably, Jiang Cheng forgot all else in front of such adorableness, immediately crouching down to make faces at Jin Ling.

“Your problem?” Lan Wangji prompted after a few moments.

“Ah..? Oh! Yes. Remember how I got into a fight with – what’s his name, that idiot?”

Lan Wangji pointedly remained silent. Jiang Cheng got into any number of fights, given his temper, and those were only the ones he told Lan Wangji about – and he wasn’t always reliable on that score, either.

The doctor that came to visit every week was not given to gossip, as Jiang Cheng had promised, but his assistant who waited outside the door, never entering, sometimes said things.

Disturbing things, sometimes.

Lan Wangji had not yet found a way to ask Jiang Cheng if he really did capture and torture demonic cultivators to death – mostly because he didn’t know what he’d do if the answer was ‘yes’.

He knew Jiang Cheng believed that Wei Wuxian had been corrupted by demonic cultivation into something unrecognizable, that he believed it was his own fault for not having stopped him sooner, that he thought it was his responsibility to stop demonic cultivators before other innocent people suffered the way he had because of Wei Wuxian; he knew that Jiang Cheng both longed and feared any success in finding Wei Wuxian’s spirit, wanting desperately to have any hint of him again and yet terrified by the possibility that it had been Wei Wuxian, in the end, that had destroyed him utterly. There were many flaws in his thinking, but without that defense mechanism, Jiang Cheng’s psyche would collapse.

When Jiang Cheng was a little steadier, he’d bring it up, Lan Wangji promised himself. When things were a little calmer.

Soon.

“Right, right, I fight with too many to count,” Jiang Cheng said, grimacing. The expression made Jin Ling giggle again, as if it had been made to amuse him, and that lifted Jiang Cheng’s mood a little. “The one who called me a filthy cutsleeve that shouldn’t be allowed around children.”

Lan Wangji remembered. Even if Jiang Cheng hadn’t told him, A-Yuan would have: he’d been full of excitement at how Jiang Cheng had foregone even whipping the man with Zidian and just punched him full in the face with a fist full of purple sparks. And then there’d been some kicking, according to A-Yuan, and a great deal of shouting about how people who abused children were people who abused children and that being a monster had nothing at all to do with anyone’s preferences in bed.

That poor man – he might have escaped with fewer broken bones if his timing hadn’t been so bad. That confrontation had taken place just after Lan Wangji had finally confessed aloud that his feelings about Wei Wuxian were, in fact, of a romantic nature. Amusingly enough, Jiang Cheng had not guessed it – he’d spluttered and waved his hands and said really?! at least six times – which in retrospect was in line with his general level of obliviousness. After he’d finally realized Lan Wangji was serious, though, he’d responded well enough: he hadn’t said a word about cutsleeves or anything like that, not a single word. Instead, he’d immediately leapt into criticizing Lan Wangji’s poor taste in men, claiming that actually living with Wei Wuxian would have driven him mad within weeks.

He hadn’t said that Lan Wangji could do better, though. They both knew that that was impossible.

“I remember.”

“Well, all sorts of rumors got started after that – no, don’t look at me like that, I told you that I don’t care one way or another! I don’t even want a wife right now; could I even handle having a wife the way I am now, more nightmares than sleep and no ability to control my temper?”

Lan Wangji shrugged and continued to strum the guqin in a repetitive motion, demonstrating to A-Yuan. Jiang Cheng would remember to get to the point eventually.

“Anyway. Rumors. People have started – asking.”

Lan Wangji’s hands paused. “You’ve been propositioned?”

“No! Well, I mean, yes, but dealing with propositions from men is the same as from women; you just glare until they go away –”

Sometimes Lan Wangji felt certain that Jiang Cheng would never find a wife.

After all, one would have to put up with him long enough to find the tolerable parts buried deep (deep) under all the prickliness and bad temper, and that was a task fit only for the inhumanly patient.

“– and anyway, no, I meant…someone asked me for help.”

Lan Wangji finally turned his head to look at him. “Help?”

Jiang Cheng sat down next to him. “Jin Guangshan’s bastard, the new one – Mo Xuanyu. He came to me during one of the conferences recently. He’s…he’s not fit for Lanling.”

Lan Wangji frowned.

“He’s getting bullied at Koi Tower, and pretty badly, too,” Jiang Cheng said. “He gave me some examples. Nothing truly intolerable in isolation, but when you put it all together…He’s very weak. Sensitive.”

“And he approached you?”

“I know,” Jiang Cheng said, long-suffering. “What’s the point of being infamously bad-tempered if people still approach you to ask for things…? He said that he trusts me because he thinks I’m, you know, like him.”

“A cutsleeve?”

“Exactly. It’s not looked on favorably in Lanling, to say the least.” He sighed. “Sometimes I wish we were all like Qinghe. I’m pretty sure if Nie Huaisang announced that he was marrying a sentient rosebush, Chifeng-zun’s primary concern would be how good its saber skills were.”

Lan Wangji felt a similar pang. His own sect elders, at Gusu, were not especially favorable to the idea either – Lan Xichen had long ago warned him that he would need to keep his inclinations to himself and that, if he ever found a partner, it would be best if the two of them could maintain low profile, pretending as much as possible to be merely brothers or close friends.

He’d thought that had all sounded quite reasonable, right up until he met Wei Wuxian, and little by little the idea of denying the way he felt had become utterly repulsive to him.

“Anyway, I feel like I should do something? But I can’t interfere with anything in Lanling, you know that.”

Lan Wangji knew. Matters between the Jiang sect and the Jin sect remained highly precarious. Jiang Cheng’s agreement not to marry or have children had maintained the alliance between them, but there was always the looming pressure that they could one day revoke the agreement and reclaim Jin Ling – perhaps even going so far as to bar them from seeing him again.

It was one of Jiang Cheng’s many nightmares.

“I can’t not do something,” Jiang Cheng was saying, waving his hands, and that was sign enough that whatever Mo Xuanyu had told him had made an impact. Normally if something touched on Jiang Cheng’s bottom line – Lanling and its threats – he stopped thinking about it immediately. “If this isn’t stopped, it’ll only get worse and worse, and the kid’s unstable as it is…I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed himself. Maybe not immediately, maybe not for years and years, but – one day.”

The Lan sect prioritized the preservation of human life over all else.

Lan Wangji considered his options.

“But then we get back to the fact that it’s Lanling. It’d be one thing if he were a nobody, but he’s Jin Guangshan’s son – I probably wouldn’t even be able to get near him, usually –”

“Brother could.”

Jiang Cheng twisted to look at him. “What?”

“Brother could,” Lan Wangji said. “He is sworn brothers with Lianfeng-zun; he has an entry token into Lanling and is familiar with much of Koi Tower.”

Jiang Cheng blinked. “And this helps me…how? I don’t think even Zewu-jun, however kind, would make trouble over a second-hand story that’s not even objectively that bad.”

“He would believe me.”

Jiang Cheng went quiet for a moment, and there was nothing but the innocent plinking of A-Yuan’s fingers on the guqin.

“This had better not be one of your attempts at self-sacrifice,” he finally said. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to – especially for Mo Xuanyu, of all people, you don’t even know him – ”

“I am ready,” Lan Wangji said, and Jiang Cheng looked abruptly stricken. Lan Wangji didn’t understand why until he saw the way Jiang Cheng’s eyes flickered towards A-Yuan, then away, and then back again – as if he were simultaneously trying to memorize his features and also distance himself. “To speak with him only. I will not return to the Cloud Recesses at this time.”

Jiang Cheng gave a guilty start. “Really? You know you don’t have to –”

“I have decided,” Lan Wangji said simply.

Jiang Cheng rubbed his nose. “Well, good,” he said, not looking at Lan Wangji. “It’s better for A-Yuan to get a good grounding in the basics in one place before you move him around. You can always reconsider later, when he’s older.”

Lan Wangji hummed in agreement and looked back down at the guqin. “You may choose how to tell him.”

“Wait, what? Me?” Jiang Cheng asked, looking appropriately horrified by the idea. “Are you crazy? You remember that I have only the most passing familiarity with tact, right?”

“It will probably be better that way,” Lan Wangji said, and even mostly believed it. A letter would be too impersonal, a passed-along message almost certain to get garbled – he had never been eloquent in his terseness.

Jiang Cheng, however tactless, would at least be able to offer some context.

Besides, Jiang Cheng’s inevitable rant about the Lan sect’s mistreatment of Lan Wangji would likely take up several minutes, giving Lan Xichen time to recover from the shock and for his mixed emotions to settle into joy at finding Lan Wangji again. He had made his brother suffer, he knew, and he would have to explain himself and account for that – but enough time had passed, time spent here in the room where his beloved had lived, where they might have lived together if the world had been different, that Lan Wangji felt that he could do it without fear.

He was fairly sure Lan Xichen would respect his request not to share his location with the rest of the sect, and accept his refusal to return – and if he didn’t, well, possession was nine-tenths of the law. It would be very difficult for them to force him to return through anything other than emotional pressure.

A-Yuan broke a string and yelped, making Jin Ling start fussing, and Jiang Cheng immediately panicked, all other thoughts forgotten, and even as he unfolded himself to go over and make peace, Lan Wangji thought to himself that there was enough here to make resisting that pressure worthwhile.

Besides – if it came right down to it, Lan Wangji suspected he would look quite well in purple.

Chapter Text

Sometimes, Lan Wangji would weigh the various downsides of being injured against each other to see which one was the worst.

It was not, in Lan Wangji’s opinion, the pain.

After all, he’d long ago learned to cultivate through suffering, subjecting himself to discipline and the bite of the Cold Springs. Yes, the wounds of the discipline whip took a long time to heal, a constant throbbing agony, but Jiang Cheng faithfully applied a salve to them twice daily (sometimes after kicking the bed to get Lan Wangji’s attention if he happened to be in a stupor, because the man had no notion of grace) and prepared for nourishing soups and bitter medicines to help ease the feeling.

It took Lan Wangji months and an unfortunate incident with Jin Ling sliding himself forward on his belly towards the kitchen with remarkable speed to realize that Jiang Cheng prepared the food and medicine himself. It was supposedly to protect Lan Wangji’s privacy and better keep the secret of his existence, according to a flustered Jiang Cheng upon being confronted, but Lan Wangji knew that he was lying.

Lan Wangji had good hearing, after all, and Jiang Cheng sometimes left the door to his room open a crack, especially if Jin Ling was asleep in his crib in the corner, and, well –

Jiang Cheng talked to himself when he cooked.

(“Damnit, jiejie, did you have to pick the world’s most finicky recipe?” he’d grumble under his breath. “So many onions! I swear you secretly increased the number just to make me cry more – is that why it never tastes like yours?”

A pause.

“I didn’t mean it, jiejie. I know you’d never mess with your recipes, you always said that making us food was how you showed your love for us…what do you mean the soup’s just like me? I’m not finicky.”)

That had eased the pain even more. To know someone cared enough to –

Lan Wanji didn’t say anything about those conversations, or the worrying things they suggested about the state of Jiang Cheng’s mind. After all, a man was entitled to his own grief; wasn’t that how they’d ended up in this situation to begin with?

Anyway, if he were to start hallucinating Wei Wuxian, he’d probably talk with him, too. He’d never stop talking to him.

Of course, he thought, no one would notice it if he did. The conversations would entirely consist of him listening and occasionally grunting in acknowledgment while Wei Wuxian chattered on and on –

He didn’t hallucinate.

No, no matter how bad the pain got, Lan Wangji remained painfully lucid, excessively sober.

There had only been once that it truly got to be too much for him, and he asked Jiang Cheng to bring him wine to drink in an attempt to not think about it –

Jiang Cheng refused to tell him what he’d said or done that night, telling him that nothing of interest occurred, but he never brought him any more wine, either, so Lan Wangji didn’t believe him in the slightest.

He didn’t ask again.

(No one ever answered Inquiry, either)

So no. It wasn’t the pain that was the worst – whether the physical pangs of his body or the mental lashing of his endless heartbreak, he could, and would, survive.

Nor was the worst part the forced bedrest.

After all, staying still for long periods of time was nothing to a member of the Lan sect, and the immobility allowed him time to contemplate his thoughts, turning them around and around in his head until they were as smooth and polished as a stone washed by the river.

He had a lot of thoughts.

Very few of them were good ones.

It might have been too much, if he’d been alone and in seclusion – if Jiang Cheng wasn’t always blowing into his room like a hurricane, loud and always blowing hot and cold; if he didn’t have A-Yuan coming to him for lessons, regular as clockwork; if he didn’t get Jin Ling dropped into his lap whenever Jiang Cheng was otherwise occupied. But even when they weren’t around, there was always fresh paper and ink if he wanted to write, his guqin close at hand and a never-empty pot of incense…even a weiqi board that they sometimes unmercifully tortured.

There were books as well, of course; all the books that the Jiang sect’s recovering library had to offer. By being conquered, the Jiang sect had escaped the fate of the Lan sect, and while their official library had been plundered of all its manuals and textbooks, many of the personal books remained – especially the ones hidden in the walls or ceiling by mischievous children.

Sometimes mischievous adults.

Lan Wangji read the stories to a fascinated A-Yuan and Jing Ling. Sometimes, if it was a good day, Jiang Cheng would come by as well to tell stories of memories that the stories evoked – that this one was the one Wei Wuxian had insisted on hearing every single night until they were all sick of it, that that one had been purchased on an outing to an especially boisterous market town downriver, that yet another had been read to him first when he’d been sick with a cough and Wei Wuxian had never let him forget how he always seemed to cough whenever the love interest’s name was mentioned.

(If it was a bad day, Lan Wangji would read the stories at a louder volume, trying to drown out the sound of sobs from the room across the way, and ignore as best he could the smell of bile and blood.)

Yes, the bedrest was manageable. Fine, even.

No, Lan Wangji thought, reaching the same conclusion as always – the worst part of being seriously injured was, without a doubt, the getting better.

“Time for physical conditioning!” Jiang Cheng crowed, looking far, far too cheerful about it.

It wasn’t even as if he had any room to complain about Lan Wangji as a patient! Even in the worst days of the injury, Lan Wangji hadn’t once complained about needing to turn over to avoid getting sores or to the endless sessions of acupuncture designed to help maintain his internal stability, he’d submitted to Jiang Cheng helping him stretch his arms and legs without anything more than a grunt of pain – he’d even carefully maintained a regular circulation of qi throughout his body to prevent his muscles and bones from deteriorating too much no matter how bad his mental state would sometimes get.

Lan Wangji had always intended on subjecting himself to a harsh physical regimen to regain his fitness once his wounds were not so dire that excessive movement would rip them open or cause his qi to become unstable. Yet Jiang Cheng took a truly gruesome joy in (unnecessarily) forcing Lan Wangji to do things, things like walk around the room, or lift weights, or – now that he was doing better – exercise.

And he was being such a pest about it, too.

He’d forced Lan Wangji to start by doing the horse stance again, like a child.

In fact, he seriously suspected that A-Yuan’s conditioning training routine and his own were identical, a suspicion supported by the way A-Yuan would mimic him and claim he was just practicing.

“It’s good that he’s so diligent,” Jiang Cheng said with a suspiciously straight face. “And has such a reliable role model.”

Lan Wangji glared at him, exhausted and pushed past his limits from the last hour of performing the most painfully basic sword exercises to re-habituate himself to it now that his back was most of the way healed. “Get lost.”

Jiang Cheng exaggeratedly brought his hands to his chest as if in shock. “It can’t be! Have I reached Wei Wuxian levels at last?”

Lan Wangji, who’d been trying to slowly execute a maneuver he’d had down since he was younger than A-Yuan was now, missed a step, then turned and glared to cover up his amusement.

(Any mention of Wei Wuxian had once immediately summoned a flood of sorrow and regret, but Jiang Cheng simply brought him up too often; Lan Wangji had by now become somewhat inured. He thought that Wei Wuxian’s spirit, wherever it was and however resistant to his summons, might enjoy that.)

Jiang Cheng squinted at him with a suspicious expression. “I think you found that funny, but with an ice-block like you, it’s impossible to say.”

“Feel free to chisel an expression you prefer.” Lan Wangji finished the maneuver and started it over again. The scars on his back pulled, but held without breaking or bleeding anew; it had been nearly two years since the discipline whip had fallen on his back, and while he was still far too weak to risk going out, it meant – irritatingly enough – that Jiang Cheng was correct and this level of exercise was indeed appropriate.

That didn’t mean Lan Wangji had to like it.

“Can I? You mean that you come in an option other than ‘mildly peeved’?”

“‘Faintly murderous’ is also available. Continue on your present course to see it.”

There was a snort from the door, a voice so familiar that Lan Wangji continued another five steps in his current maneuver before realizing that the voice shouldn’t be there, that it was familiar from his memories of Gusu rather than his present day at the Lotus Pier.

His fingers tightened around Bichen. “…Brother.”

Jiang Cheng had finally told Lan Xichen that he knew where Lan Wangji was, and apparently the entire thing had been a fiasco of such epic proportions that he refused to speak of it again.

(The few hints he’d given of the situation suggested that tears might have been involved, and possibly a black eye or two.)

Of course, he’d then followed it up by banning him from the Lotus Pier until Lan Xichen felt that he could come visit without immediately demanding (or requesting, which was more likely) that Lan Wangji return to Gusu with him.

Lan Wangji hadn’t been especially impressed with that requirement, given that he’d already told Jiang Cheng that he would not succumb to any such requests; it had led to several days of cold war between them until Jiang Cheng broke and confessed that he assumed that Lan Wangji would want to leave the second he laid eyes on Lan Xichen and so was postponing it as much as possible.

Lan Wangji had magnanimously forgiven him, since in truth he’d been a little concerned about the same.

He turned around.

Lan Xichen’s eyes were wet and glistening, his body a little thinner than Lan Wangji remembered, but it was still him in all the important, fundamental ways. His elder brother, who loved him, and Lan Wangji was suddenly full of so many feelings that he couldn’t even begin to understand them, much less express them.

“You know, I think I hear someone calling me urgently,” Jiang Cheng – who must have known that Lan Xichen was visiting, since entering the Lotus Pier required reporting his presence to the Sect Leader – said, turning and fleeing from the room at once.

“Coward,” Lan Wangji said mildly, knowing that Jiang Cheng’s cultivation was sufficient to let him hear the word without him having to raise his voice.

“Don’t blame Sect Leader Jiang,” Lan Xichen said, and his voice was warm as the summer days of their childhood. “I came several days ago; he had no idea of which day I would finally work up my courage to see you.”

Lan Wangji blinked, surprised. “Courage?”

Why would his brother require courage to see him?

“Wangji…” Lan Xichen’s hands were clasped together in front of him, a sign of anxiety. “I was worried you were still angry at me. That I would come, and you would turn me away.”

Lan Wangji would not have extended the invitation if he hadn’t been willing to see him. “I would not have turned you away.”

“But you’re still angry,” Lan Xichen said wisely.

Lan Wangji shrugged, meaning a little, meaning the love of my life died alone and you lied to me about it, meaning that I understand why you did it does not lessen how I feel about it.

“I am sorry,” Lan Xichen said. “I was wrong.”

Lan Wangji was surprised. He knew his brother well enough to know he would never say the words merely out of guilt or convenience or a desire to make peace; to say them aloud, he would have had to think over his actions, truly think them over, and to decide that he had in fact been wrong.

Lan Xichen saw his surprise and ducked his head a little. “I confided in my sworn brothers, and each one of them told me, in very different terms and for very different reasons, I was an idiot,” he said. “Even if I feared for your life, even if I doubted your choices – you are an adult, and I treated you like a child. I broke your trust. It was wrong, and I should not have done it.”

They were still in dispute as to the quality of Wei Wuxian’s character, then, but – Lan Wangji could live with that. It seemed more real, somehow, than a complete turnaround would have been.

“You are forgiven,” he said, and mostly meant it. The remaining part of that ‘mostly’ was only a scar, and could be – and would be – ignored by strength of will. And then, because he did love his brother no matter how much pain he had caused him, he added, “I missed you.”

Lan Xichen rubbed his eyes, which caused a dull ache in Lan Wangji’s chest. “I missed you too, Wangji. I – oh, I was so worried!”

Lan Wangji took an automatic step back from the unexpected exclamation, but he supposed it was reasonable. He had disappeared with his back still torn open from the discipline whip, and he had become feverish to the point of fainting – yes, worry was a reasonable reaction.

Especially since Lan Wangji had stubbornly remained missing for two entire years.

“I meant you to be,” he said honestly, because Lan Xichen deserved to know that his perfect little brother had an unexpectedly spiteful side to him.

Lan Xichen smiled at him, unbothered. “I figured as much, when we couldn’t find you no matter where we looked – the cultivation world is not so large that you could go unnoticed, even hurt and suffering; you must have found a place to shelter. We were fairly sure you weren’t dead, and that meant it had to be intentional. I was angry, for a while, but eventually – well, in the end, I’m just happy to see you.”

Lan Wangji was happy to see Lan Xichen, too. He’d missed his big brother, so calm and gentle; that he was angry at him did not mean that he did not love him, that he didn’t want him around.

It was a sudden breath of wind on a pleasant day, a sudden gust of Gusu tranquility in the middle of the now-familiar ruckus of the Lotus Pier.

“Can I serve you tea?” Lan Wangji asked, suddenly full of the desire to show his brother his room here – to show him that he hadn’t suffered during this time. He wanted to show him the weiqi board so that he could laugh at the appalling (and yet disturbingly successful) way Jiang Cheng played, to show him the books and the sandalwood incense that reminded Lan Wangji so much of Gusu that there was no way that Jiang Cheng hadn’t ordered especially for him, to let him meet A-Yuan and get punched by little Jin Ling who was too small for his version of his uncle’s temper to be anything other than cute.

To show him that the Lotus Pier was not merely a shelter for Lan Wangji, but a home.

Lan Xichen nodded, and they went.

Lan Xichen seemed pleased with Lan Wangji’s room, nodding in approval as Lan Wangji showed him around. But when there was nothing else to be pointed out, he looked sidelong at Lan Wangji and murmured, “Sect Leader Jiang informed me that I was not to raise the possibility of you returning. Was that your will, or his?”

If he’s keeping you here by force, I will put aside all etiquette to fight for you, he meant, and Lan Wangji was touched.

“Both,” he said. “I am not ready to return to the Cloud Recesses.”

They both knew that it wasn’t his injuries that were preventing him.

“You like it here, then?”

“I do.”

A pause, and then – “I’m glad.”

They had tea, then, and spoke of other things. Lan Xichen, always the more talkative one, told Lan Wangji of the way life in Cloud Recesses had at long last started to resemble the days before fire and war, of the rambunctious child that their uncle had adopted and couldn’t seem to bring himself to scold, and even of the way his sworn brothers who could scarcely tolerate each other had managed to come together in agreement to help him search for Lan Wangji.

“I may have let them search a bit longer than I needed to,” Lan Xichen confessed. “Things were getting bad for a while there, very bad – did you hear about Xue Yang?”

“Mm. Disappeared before trial.”

“Yes, in the end. Before that, though, there was a period when da-ge’s temper was getting worse and worse, and A-Yao was doing everything he could to irritate him while pretending he’d never done anything wrong in his life, which of course irritated da-ge even more…I honestly thought one of them might try to kill the other. But then I ended up having a small fit while the two of them were bickering, and by the time I recovered they’d somehow managed to get over the worst of it.”

Lan Wangji raised his eyebrows.

“I think they realized that I couldn’t handle losing either of them at that time,” Lan Xichen said with a shrug, indicating clearly that the fit in question was not a subject that was open for discussion. “I’d had the abrupt realization that I really might never see you again, if not even they could locate you...it really was a surprise that Jiang Cheng turned out to be such an accomplished liar.”

“Did he actually lie?” Lan Wangji asked, truly curious. The Jiang Cheng he knew was a horrendous liar, but surprisingly good at omitting details.

A Yunmeng trait, according to Jiang Cheng. It made Lan Wangji wonder what secrets Wei Wuxian might have been keeping hidden behind his smile.

“Well, he was very good at misdirecting away from any direct questions, at any rate,” Lan Xichen said with a smile that was a little tense around the corners. Lan Wangji suspected that he hadn’t quite forgiven Jiang Cheng for his part in hiding Lan Wangji, for all that Lan Xichen would never permit himself to seek revenge for the slight. “Often with anger, or with bluster…do you truly enjoy his company?”

“Very much,” Lan Wangji said, and almost chuckled at Lan Xichen’s somewhat disbelieving face. “Was his confession to you as much of a disaster as he made it sound?”

“There were tears,” Lan Xichen said. “And not just mine.”

Lan Wangji hid away a smile.

In return, his brother’s eyebrows went up. Lan Wangji didn’t blame him; he knew that Lan Xichen was not accustomed to his ever-serious younger brother smiling, even a hidden one.

Lan Wangji did not know how to tell him that the only way to put up with Jiang Cheng for any period of time was to learn to find his antics funny – how to tell his brother that he’d smiled more, here in the Lotus Pier, than any period of his life to date.

Even the parts with Wei Wuxian in them had been too full of confusion for smiles, confusion and love and denial. He dearly wished that Wei Wuxian could see him now, occasional smiles and lowering himself to engage in banter with Jiang Cheng – he thought Wei Wuxian would like it.

He thought, perhaps over-optimistically, that Wei Wuxian might have liked him. This version of him.

There was a familiar creak, then, and Lan Wangji shook his head, even more amused.

“He’s about to kick the door open,” he told Lan Xichen, who looked even more surprised at the unexpected prediction. “He always does.”

Sure enough, a moment later, Jiang Cheng burst into the door like a blast of the south wind, hot and blustery; his arms were unsurprisingly full of children.

“You forgot to stretch before you left the training field,” he said conversationally, which was a tone that, to judge by Lan Xichen’s expression, sounded to a normal person like an angry, dismissive growl. “You get an extra hour of acupuncture as penance. Also, I hope your bonding time has been enjoyable, because it’s over now - I need you to watch the kids before they ruin my trade agreements.”

It was a demand, not a question, and Jiang Cheng didn’t wait for an answer: a moment later and he was gone again. But now there was Jin Ling and Lan Sizhui there, looking curiously at Lan Xichen, and Lan Wangji nodded at them to indicate that his presence had been sanctioned.

Lan Xichen, in turn, recovered himself quickly and smiled at them. “My name is Lan Xichen,” he said, opting for a far more informal introduction than would normally be appropriate. “You can call me Uncle, if you like. What’s your names?”

“I’m Lan Yuan, uncle,” A-Yuan said formally, and tried to salute the way Lan Wangji taught him. “And he’s Jin Ling. He’s not yet two, so he doesn’t bow yet. Hanguang-jun, should I take him to paint?”

Lan Wangji nodded his permission, so A-Yuan took Jin Ling by the hand – not hard, since Jin Ling was not-so-subtly trying to hide behind him to block Lan Xichen’s curious gaze – and led him over to the corner of the room where they’d stored all the children’s supplies.

“Lan Yuan,” Lan Xichen echoed, and turned his eyes on Lan Wangji. “I’d heard of him before. The stories made him out to be the product of some sort of tragic love affair or a mistress of Jiang Cheng’s. I hadn’t put it together with your presence here before. Does that mean…?”

Lan Wangji nodded, confirming Lan Xichen’s suspicions that he was the one raising him – that he’d agreed to share his surname with him.

“Where did you find him?”

Lan Wangji shook his head, refusing to answer.

Lan Xichen nodded slowly. There was a little pain in his eyes: they had once been so close that there had been no questions that wouldn’t be answered, or subjects that couldn’t be discussed, like Lan Xichen’s breakdown or Lan Yuan’s origins. “You’re right; it doesn’t matter. If you say he’s a Lan, then that’s enough for me…I’ll have him included in the family register at home, if you’ll consent.”

Once in the register, Lan Sizhui would have the right to wear the cloud-patterned forehead ribbon. It would give him the backing of being a member of the Lan clan, with all the responsibilities that came with it – the ones Lan Wangji was trying to teach him, and which he could learn better in the future if he went to the Cloud Recesses to learn.

It would be good for him to have that option.

“How will you explain it?” Lan Wangji asked, meaning I don’t want them to know I’m here.

Lan Xichen smiled faintly, and that was agreement – reluctant agreement, but agreement nonetheless. “I wasn’t planning on explaining it.”

For once in his life, Lan Wangji was almost looking forward to hearing the gossip.

Chapter Text

A-Yuan

-

Jin Ling was pretty cool, in Lan Yuan’s opinion, and he didn’t even feel the need to caveat it with the statement that it was as far as young brothers went.

He didn’t really remember a time when Jin Ling wasn’t around – he’d had a bad fever that had eaten away much of his early memories, leaving only a few vague faces and a smile and something that sometimes gives him nightmares he doesn’t quite remember, but since he’s a few years older than baby Jin Ling, that meant there must have been a time when Jin Ling wasn’t there.

Back before, before Hanguang-jun adopted him and before Sect Leader Jiang managed to win the right to raise Jin Ling, who was only his sister’s son, at his home – they wouldn’t have been brothers back then.

Lan Yuan didn’t like to think too much about before. It gave him a headache.

(Except when he thought about someone smiling -)

Anyway, before was one of the secrets. 

Lan Yuan knew all about secrets: he was extremely trustworthy, according to Hanguang-jun and even Sect Leader Jiang, a very mature and intelligent child who knew when and to whom to speak, and that meant he got to know all the cool secrets.

That meant it was his job to make sure Jin Ling kept the secrets, too.

“So, remember, what do we do when your grandmother comes to visit?” he asked encouragingly.

“Talk about her,” Jin Ling said obediently. He was a good kid, even if he had temper tantrums sometimes. “Don’t say anything about the Lotus Pier.”

“That’s right!” Lan Yuan cheered. “If you don’t talk about it, you can’t give any of the secrets away!”

Jin Ling nodded. “I’ll keep the secrets!” But then he frowned. “What are the secrets?”

“What do you mean? We know lots of secrets. Cool secrets!”

Well, some of the secrets were cool, anyway. The ones about how Zidian worked, and the hidden places in the walls, and some of the nasty stuff that Sect Leader Jiang said about the other sect leaders that no one was supposed to repeat and which made even the sailors look pretty impressed, and there was also the super-secret Yunmeng Jiang technique for getting fish to come up to you – it involved your toes and a lot of eye-rolling by Hanguang-jun.

According to Sect Leader Jiang, the eye-rolling was especially critical for it to work, but luckily they had Hanguang-jun for that; he was an expert.

(There was a secret, too, about Sect Leader Jiang’s shixiong and Hanguang-jun’s friend that they sometimes told stories about, the one called Wei Wuxian, and the secret was that that they both loved him even though he’d done bad things.)

Hanguang-jun was one of the secrets, too.

Lan Yuan wasn’t entirely sure why he was a secret, but it was very important that they not tell anyone that he was there. He’d gotten hurt really bad a few years back, really bad, bad enough that he hadn’t walked for a whole year and even after that couldn’t do much more than limp around with Sect Leader Jiang’s help. He ended up needing to learn the sword again the same way Lan Yuan did, except he got better at it a whole lot faster – it was because he was grown up, according to Sect Leader Jiang, and grown-ups had special cheating powers that let them do stuff like that super quick.

(Hanguang-jun said the only cheat was experience, but Lan Yuan preferred the cheating adult powers explanation.)

It was pretty cool to be trusted enough to know secrets, most of the time. The only time it wasn’t cool were times like this, when old Madame Jin came around and said mean things about Lan Yuan not being raised right and it being a pity that her beloved grandson was growing up with no father or mother to teach him.

It made Jin Ling cry whenever she said that, because it was the same thing the mean kids on the Pier used to say to him before Sect Leader Jiang had announced very loudly that he wasn’t so proud or dignified that he wouldn’t throw hands with small children if it made Jin Ling stop crying. It made Lan Yan  so angry because she was Jin Ling’s grandmother, shouldn’t she care if he was crying?

She didn’t, not really; she just snapped at him for being weak. She was mostly just angry about everything: about the fact that he was being raised by Sect Leader Jiang instead of at Lanling where no one wanted to take care of him; about the fact that she wasn’t powerful enough to have stopped that decision from getting made no matter what she tried; about the fact that he wasn’t old enough to do anything useful, as she termed it; about his parents being dead, which wasn’t his fault at all –

It was wrong, too. Jin Ling might not have a mother or father to teach him, but that didn’t matter because he had Hanguang-jun and Sect Leader Jiang instead; who needed any more than that?

But he couldn’t say that, because Hanguang-jun was a secret.

Still, it didn’t mean that Lan Yuan was going to put up with it. Not this time!

He put on his best Hanguang-jun face – neutral but with his eyebrows a little arched like he was asking a question that he sincerely wanted to know the answer to – and asked her: “Are you a hag or a night-witch? They take different talismans to be banished, so I need to know which one to get.”

It wasn’t as deadpan or witty as Hanguang-jun was when he was trying nor as vicious and cutting as Sect Leader Jiang when he was on a tear, but it did the trick, given that the trick was to get her to yell at him instead of bullying Jin Ling any longer.

Lan Yuan was tough: she meant nothing to him, so he was fine with being called a worthless bastard (he knew he wasn’t worthless, so odds were good that he probably wasn’t a bastard either) or a whore’s son (whatever a whore was, he was moderately sure Hanguang-jun had never met one), a waste of space (how could space be wasted?) or a disrespectful brat (possibly true, even though he normally thought of himself as being quite nice).

He wasn’t expecting her to slap him.

“Gege!” Jin Ling shrieked, horrified out of his tears as he rushed across the room to Lan Yuan’s side; he was on the floor somehow, he must have fallen when she hit him. “You can’t hit gege!”

“Don’t address him like that,” Madam Jin snapped. “Pull yourself together – you’re the heir to Lanling Jin, you don’t need to address some bastard as – ”

She was interrupted a crackling sound, like wood popping in the fire, and Lan Yuan automatically smiled, even though it hurt his mouth to do so.

No one lasted long at the Lotus Pier without knowing what Zidian sounded like.

Sect Leader Jiang’s face was as black as Lan Yuan had ever seen it, and that was saying something, given that Sect Leader Jiang preferred scowling to just about any other expression out there.

“Madame Jin,” he said, and she tensed, clearly gearing up for a fight. “Thank you for coming to visit.”

She blinked, clearly surprised – wondering why he wasn’t making a fuss, most likely. Lan Yuan licked the blood from his split lip with a grin and held Jin Ling’s hand in his: he knew better.

“It’s such a pity that you have to leave so soon,” Sect Leader Jiang continued.

“What are you talking about, I’m not –”

Zidian lashed out, leaving a burnt mark less than a hands’ breadth away from her head.

“It is your choice whether you leave by your own free will or get carried out of by my guards,” Sect Leader Jiang snarled, his cold anger abruptly igniting. “How dare you strike A-Yuan? How dare you strike any child? If you’ve dared laid hands on Jin Ling –”

“I would never,” she snapped, but she was backing away: Sect Leader Jiang’s reputation preceded him. “A-Ling is –”

“If you did that, I’d put you in my dungeons,” Sect Leader Jiang continued as if he couldn’t hear her. His eyes were red and bloodshot with rage. “Surely no one could hurt their own grandchild, their own blood. Perhaps you’ve been possessed? I’ve heard rumors of demonic cultivation near your maternal family’s home…”

There was a bit more bluster after that, but Madame Jin retreated quickly, and then she was flying away from the Lotus Pier as quick as she could go.

After all, everyone knew how bad Sect Leader Jiang was when it came to demonic cultivators – and what he supposedly did to them in his dungeons.

It was a little funny, actually, since as far as Lan Yuan knew, the Lotus Pier didn’t actually have dungeons at the moment; the old ones had long ago been repurposed as storerooms and no one had ever quite bothered to replace them. And though Sect Leader Jiang did question demonic cultivators in the storerooms, right next to the rice and beans, it wasn’t – what people said it was.

Lan Yuan wouldn’t have believed such horrible things about Sect Leader Jiang anyway, but as it happened he’d heard Sect Leader Jiang screaming about it when he and Hanguang-jun were having one of their fights. They didn’t fight often, not real fighting, and they were very good at trying to make sure neither he nor Jin Ling were around for them when they did, but A-Yuan had gotten up especially late that night because of a nightmare he couldn’t quite remember and he’d overheard them by accident.

(“Is that really what you think of me? That I disregard all morality, all righteousness, that I’m blinded by hatred, that I wanted – that I wanted him to – to –”

“No. I know you loved him.”

“It wasn’t him, at the end. It couldn’t have been him, he couldn’t – jiejie’s dead. Everyone’s dead. All corpses, all, everyone around me just marking time until they’re dead, too –”

“Jiang Cheng, calm down; your mind is becoming unstable. I should not have asked –”

“But they’re not wrong! I do hurt them, even when I don’t mean to, even when I let them go later. I’m not righteous, I’m not; I find them, I stop them, I take them from where they’re hurting people – someone has to – and what if they’re him? What do I do if they’re him? I question every one of them. No one else can do it, I have to – it’s my fault, it’s my – he wouldn’t have started down that path but for me –”

“Jiang Cheng –”

“So many people hurt because of me, stupid selfish me, and still all I care about is making sure that I’m the one to find him first, just like I said I’d be back at the siege. I have to be the first one to find him so that no one else can hurt him, because if they find him they will – but now I’m the one, I’m the one who hurts them instead and all because I don’t know – I can’t judge – I get so angry –”

“Calm yourself. This is not irresolvable: I will help you question them, to see if any of them are him, and when that is done, we will decide their fate together. The guilty treated as guilty, the innocent as innocent. Or do you doubt my judgment?”

“…only in terms of romance.” A breath. “That would work. Thank you.”)

The second Madame Jin was gone, Sect Leader Jiang was kneeling in front of Lan Yuan, touching his split lip lightly with his fingers, a distressed expression on his face. “I shouldn’t have let her come,” he muttered. “Shouldn’t have let her see you. I knew she was sensitive about children, ever since Lianfeng-zun fully eclipsed her in influence…you need a doctor.”

“I’m fine,” Lan Yuan protested, even as he was swept up into Sect Leader Jiang’s arms. “Sect Leader Jiang…”

“No. Doctor, now.”

“I don’t need it! It’s just a little thing – Hanguang-jun could fix it!”

“Fine. Then we’re going to see him.”

“Take me, too!” Jin Ling demanded, tugging at Sect Leader Jiang’s leg. “Jiujiu, take me! I don’t want to see grandmother again! She’s a bad lady! She hurt gege, and all he did was say she was a hag!”

“She made Jin Ling cry!” Lan Yuan exclaimed, hideously embarrassed. “I had to get her attention away from –”

“You did the right thing, A-Yuan,” Sect Leader Jiang said, scooping up Jin Ling and heading towards the inner quarters where Hanguang-jun would be waiting. “Never let anyone attack your family. No matter what. You hear me? No matter what.”

-

Lan Yuan had had four panic attacks, seven nightmares, and at least twelve rather uncharacteristic temper tantrums (mostly just persistent pouting) over having to go visit the Cloud Recesses, and he was starting to think that he’d overreacted.

The Cloud Recesses was, despite all his fears…actually pretty cool.

Kind of like Hanguang-jun had said all along. And Sect Leader Jiang had even agreed, albeit with his usual caveats and complaining – mostly about the food, and something about quizzes.

It was still scary, though. Lan Yuan had gone on trips outside of the Lotus Pier with Sect Leader Jiang and the other Jiang disciples (he still thought of himself as halfway a Jiang disciple, even though his surname was Lan and he was apparently part of the Lan sect now?), but that was all in Yunmeng except for that one trip he’d taken with Sect Leader Jiang to some place in Qishan that he’d thought was a great deal of fun but which had made Hanguang-jun ask Sect Leader Jiang for a moment of his time in a way that meant Sect Leader Jiang was about to get a very stern talking to, and after that they hadn’t gone again.

This time, though, he wasn’t just going for a single visit, there and back again on Sandu; he was going for a whole month – maybe even a whole season if he liked the first month, but he’d already secretly decided he wouldn’t. Sect Leader Jiang would be there at the beginning, but he couldn’t stay for very long, and of course Hanguang-jun couldn’t go at all.

“For now,” Sect Leader Jiang had told him as they were flying, Lan Yuan held in his arms like he was Jin Ling even though he was old enough to stand on Sandu by himself as long as he was holding onto someone. Sect Leader Jiang had insisted, though, and Lan Yuan was shamefully grateful for it. “In the future, Hanguang-jun will be able to go with you and stay here while you’re here.”

“Really?” Lan Yuan had said, eyes wide. He’d never gone on a trip with Hanguang-jun before, first because he was injured and then because he was a secret, so that would be a brand-new experience – wait. “You didn’t say anything about future trips!”

Sect Leader Jiang had coughed, except it sounded a bit like laughter. “Nothing’s been decided,” he’d said. “We need to see if you’ll even like the place. If you don’t, well, there’s precedent for clan members joining other sects, and of course the Jiang sect would be happy to have you.”

That had been a relief.

Possibly it had been the relief of knowing he wasn’t going to get stuck there – sent away again – that had let him relax and start exploring the new place, which was nice and gentle and quiet in a way the Lotus Pier really wasn’t, except maybe for Hanguang-jun’s rooms…

Wait.

Lan Yuan turned and narrowed his eyes at Sect Leader Jiang. “Is this where the secret is from?” he demanded.

There was another cough-laugh, this time from Uncle Lan Xichen, who was apparently actually called Zewu-jun or else Sect Leader Lan; he’d come out with them to show them around. “The secret?” he asked Sect Leader Jiang, his eyebrows arched.

“He’s a child! They talk unless they’re told a reason not to, so we came up with a reason. I’m not sure what you were expecting us to do,” Sect Leader Jiang said, crossing his arms with a huff. “Put your brother in seclusion and deny him access to his son until he could walk again?”

Sect Leader Lan winced briefly. “I meant no offense, Sect Leader Jiang. It was only that I hadn’t realized how much effort went into keeping – into ensuring Wangji’s privacy.”

“A-Yuan was the easy one,” Sect Leader Jiang said, long-suffering. “When Jin Ling started talking…there’s no reasoning with a one-year-old. At least no one ever figured out who ‘ha-ju’ was.”

Sect Leader Lan abruptly stopped walking and raised a hand to his head, as if suffering from a sudden headache. “The Discussion Conference! When he kept reaching out to me, wanting me to hold him, and then crying when I did…!”

Sect Leader Jiang snickered. “He kicked Sect Leader Jin in the face trying to get to you,” he said in the tone of someone who enjoyed the memory very much. “A good kid.”

Lan Yuan nodded. Jin Ling was, in fact, a very good kid. Even his temper tantrums were getting more and more under control, which was inevitable under Hanguang-jun’s iron fist – if he could get Sect Leader Jiang to stop having so many temper tantrums, Jin Ling didn’t stand a chance.

No one did. Hanguang-jun could do anything.

Sect Leader Lan shook his head. “I can still scarcely believe it,” he murmured. “It seems – ah.”

“Ah?” Sect Leader Jiang echoed.

“It appears that Uncle has returned earlier than I had expected.”

“…you know what, I think I have some paperwork I need to get to,” Sect Leader Jiang said, which was probably both true and a sign that this ‘Uncle’ was either very scary or very annoying. “A-Yuan, act cute.”

Lan Yuan obediently arranged a pleasant smile on his face and widened his eyes.

“A very fine skill,” Sect Leader Lan praised, though his lips were twitching. “Come along, Sizhui; I’ll introduce you to Jingyi – I think you’ll get along.”

Lan Jingyi turned out to be a small scarecrow of a boy, too tall for his age and skinny to boot, and they sized each other up for a good while before Lan Jingyi broke out into a gap-toothed grin and said, “Wanna play?”

Lan Jingyi, Lan Yuan decided shortly thereafter, was awesome.

They ran around the Cloud Recesses (walked at speed, since running was forbidden), played with the rabbits and the birds, tumbled through the vegetable gardens as an obstacle course –

“And that’s just today!” Lan Jingyi crowed. “Wait until tomorrow when we have more time, Sizhui; I’ll show you the mountain, it’s really cool!”

Lan Jingyi, like Lan Yuan, didn’t have parents anymore, having misplaced them during the war like so many others had. He confirmed that sometimes the other children made comments about it – Lan Yuan wasn’t surprised – but also that most of them were too afraid of Teacher Lan to do much more than that, and that was moderately comforting.

Teacher Lan, apparently, was Lan Jingyi’s version of Hanguang-jun, and they sounded very similar in some ways, enough that Lan Yuan was giggling in sympathy and fellow-feeling.

He didn’t mean to slip up.

It was when they were dropping stones down a well. They’d just celebrated a particularly loud plop that had made Lan Yuan scold the rock for violating the rule against excess noise, much to Lan Jingyi’s laughter, and then Lan Jingyi said, pretty casually, “They don’t usually teach Lan sect rules outside of the Cloud Recesses, especially not with the clan-specific flourishes. So who taught you?”

Lan Yuan’s back went straight with fear. “I – no one.”

Lan Jingyi blinked at him. Probably because that was a terrible lie.

Probably because Lan Yuan didn’t like lying.

Lying is forbidden.

Hanguang-jun said so.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Lan Yuan said hurriedly. “It’s a secret. You have to promise not to tell!”

“But why is it a secret?” Lan Jingyi asked bemusedly. “You’re a Lan; it makes sense that you’d know the Lan rules.”

“Just promise,” Lan Yuan said. “Promise, and I’ll tell you.”

Lan Jingyi’s shout when he told him was loud enough to scare away all the rabbits.  

Maybe it had been mean to make Lan Jingyi promise to keep something a secret from Teacher Lan, especially since he was his version of Hanguang-jun, because Lan Yuan wouldn’t be able to keep anything a secret from Hanguang-jun, not even if he promised.

Sect Leader Jiang, maybe, if it was something nice to surprise him with – but not Hanguang-jun.

That was probably why he wasn’t really that surprised when Lan Jingyi showed up to his door with a guilty expression and threw himself at his feet to beg forgiveness, or why when he ran back to the place where he was staying with Sect Leader Jiang he found all the adults shouting at each other.

“What do we do?” Lan Jingyi asked, his eyes wet with tears as he showed him a little hiding place that let them hear everything the adults were saying without getting caught. “I’ve never seen them this angry…you’re not supposed to yell inside the Cloud Recesses!”

“It’s okay,” Lan Yuan decided after watching for a little. He might not know Teacher Lan at all, and Sect Leader Lan not so great either no matter how much he looked like Hanguang-jun, but he knew Sect Leader Jiang very well and his face wasn’t nearly red enough to make him worry. If anything, he almost looked – pleased? Was he deliberately causing trouble? And after all those lectures about not starting anything…

Hmm, on second thought, most of those lectures had been from Hanguang-jun, and Hanguang-jun had been glaring over his head the entire time. Maybe they hadn’t been aimed at him at all.

“What do you mean that it’s okay? They’re fighting!”

“It’s a good type of fighting,” Lan Yuan explained wisely. “This is the sort of fighting that adults do when they have too many feelings and they can’t keep them all inside, so they have to throw them at each other instead.”

“…really?”

“Really. Sect Leader Jiang has a lot of those. They just need to wear themselves out.” At least, he thought so – that was what they did during Jin Ling’s tantrums. “Come on, let’s leave them to it; they’re not saying anything interesting, anyway.”

(“- have no right to refuse to tell us that he was hiding Wangji!”

“But Master Lan, how was I to know you were looking for him? After all, no one ever said – it was all just causal hellos and have-you-seen-any-Lan-sect-recently, never saying anything directly. And all the rumors said he was in seclusion.”

“Sophistry. You knew he wasn’t!”

“I did. I also knew that his sect didn’t seem to care enough about his well-being, after thirty-three strikes with the discipline whip, to actually bother to ask.”

“You -! I should think you of all people, Sect Leader Jiang, would understand our need to make sure he would never again be deceived by the likes of Wei Wuxian –”

“If you dare speak his name again in my presence, Master Lan, I will forget that you were once my teacher. Mark your words!”)

By the next morning, Teacher Lan had a stiff expression, Sect Leader Lan an exhausted one, and Sect Leader Jiang a distinct resemblance to a cat that has just left a corpse on the floor to show off its hunting prowess.

“Looks like I’m definitely staying here the full season,” Lan Yuan told Lan Jingyi, who looked so delighted by the idea that it almost made him feel okay about it. “Now it’s a principle.”

“A principle like our sect rules?”

“No, the type of principle where you want to show that you’re right and other people are wrong.”

Specifically, the type where Sect Leader Jiang got to stand up for Hanguang-jun’s honor, and honestly. If they’d only just told Lan Yuan that that was what they were doing, he would’ve agreed to come ages ago! He wants to defend Hanguang-jun, too!

“Oh. You mean gloating?”

Lan Yuan concealed a smile. It seemed like the Cloud Recesses really wasn’t a bad place after all.

-

Lan Yuan was not supposed to be here, but in his defense, it was totally an accident.

He’d been playing hide-and-seek with Lan Jingyi and some of the other juniors, and no one actually said the hanshi was off-limits. Sect Leader Jiang had always encouraged him to try to think beyond the rules (while Hanguang-jun just looked long-suffering), to not make assumptions about what was and wasn’t allowed, to press his limits until he figured out what he could and couldn’t do for himself.

And then, once he knew, to attempt the impossible.

He’d known that Sect Leader Lan was busy for most of the day with meetings – so why not hide in the hanshi? How was he supposed to know that Sect Leader Lan’s sworn brothers would come in to wait for him there?

Maybe if they’d come in slowly he would have just popped out of his hiding place, apologized, saluted, and scampered, but instead the doors had just burst open and Chifeng-zun strode in, closely followed by Lianfeng-zun, and they were already mid-conversation. It would have been rude to interrupt!

“- can’t decide if I want to thank him or wring his neck,” Chifeng-zun was saying. “But regardless of the conclusion, I’m not going to do either, and neither are you. It’s not our place.”

“I wasn’t suggesting any serious damage,” Lianfeng-zun said, starting to make tea. “A few minor irritations, at most; a trade dispute or two, possibly an inciting incident –”

“Meng Yao. We’ve talked about this.”

“I suppose we have. It’s only…” His voice trailed off.

Chifeng-zun sighed. “I know. Seeing Xichen break down like that was –” He waved his hand, looking for the word. “Horrific. I thought he was having a qi deviation.”

“It would have been easier if it had been something physical or to do with his cultivation,” Lianfeng-zun said. “Something a doctor could have helped, or the Song of Clarity – something, so that we wouldn’t be left doing nothing, nothing but waiting to see if he would die of grief. The way he clung to us both, what he said…well. Wounds of the heart and mind run deep, and the scars last long.”

“As we both know,” Chifeng-zun said, and his voice was a little dry.

Lianfeng-zun chuckled. “As we both know indeed. I must admit, I never expected to reconcile with you in this lifetime.”

“I’m still convinced in retrospect that you were planning on murdering me somehow,” Chifeng-zun said, not sounding as upset as he probably should have been about something like that. “I appreciate your restraint on Xichen’s behalf – and your lack of it when we joined together to search for Wangji.”

“Mm. That came as a surprise, to be honest. I thought da-ge would object to such…viciousness.”

“How was I to know you would have such strange assumptions? Being vicious, and even being petty, are not mutually exclusive with being righteous – and anyway, I like you much better now that I know what you’re like, and can formulate my expectations accordingly. It was always the hypocrisy and lies I despised the most; I’m surprised you didn’t figure that out on your own.”

“Da-ge has always been impossible for me to read,” Lianfeng-zun said, and his voice was strangely – scolding?

Chifeng-zun certainly seemed to take it as such. “I have hobbies! It was war; I just didn’t have time for them, that’s all. Anyway, having hobbies doesn’t necessarily entail having vices.”

“Unlike some other people of our mutual acquaintance,” and now it was Lianfeng-zun’s turn to be dry.

“I didn’t say it, you did. Anyway, returning to the subject of other sect leaders of our mutual acquaintance, I’m still shocked that Sect Leader Jiang kept up the lie as long as he did.”

“I know. I hate to speak badly about him, but he’s normally a terrible liar – his face goes red, he scowls more than usual, he averts his eyes…every single possible indication of untruthfulness. I would never think that he’d be able to keep a secret of this magnitude.”

“A lesson in underestimating people, I suppose.”

They sat in quiet silence for a little while longer, and then Lianfeng-zun poured the tea.

Lan Yuan contemplated escape, but really it was far too late to leave with dignity. They weren’t wrong about Sect Leader Jiang being a terrible liar, so Lan Yuan wasn’t angry or anything, but they’d probably be embarrassed that he overheard them talking about him at all.

“They’ll need a way to get out of it,” Lianfeng-zun said. “I’m not sure they realize that, yet.”

“Get out of it?” Chifeng-zun asked. “What do you mean?”

“As far as the majority of the cultivation world knows, Hanguang-jun has been in seclusion here, in the Cloud Recesses, for much of the past three years. During those same three years, Hanguang-jun’s adopted son has been living, quite publicly in the Lotus Pier – no one knows he’s Hanguang-jun’s now, of course, but if he reveals that he is, how does he explain the child having been there rather than here? Wouldn’t one or another of the sects have to admit the deception, and thereby lose face?”

Chifeng-zun considered the issue for a moment, then huffed. “You’re overthinking it. It’s not that hard problem to solve.”

Lan Yuan, who had started to enter full-fledged panic at the realization that they might have, in fact, messed everything up horribly and all because of him, calmed a little and tried to peer further around the edge of the screen he was hiding behind, eager to hear the solution.

Lianfeng-zun looked equally intrigued. “Well, then, da-ge – don’t leave we simple-minded persons in suspense.”

“As if you’ve ever been simple-minded.”

“Da-ge. Don’t play coy.”

Chifeng-zun chuckled and drank his tea, casually malicious, but then put it down on the table. “Easy enough. They just need to have a fight.”

“A fight?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t they fight? After all, with Hanguang-jun having finally emerged from seclusion, don’t you think he would be furious to discover that the son he gave his name to was being kept away from his family at the Lotus Pier?”

“I think I see your point,” Lianfeng-zun said, starting to smile. “When he retreated into seclusion, he undoubtedly understood that the boy would be delivered to the Cloud Recesses to be raised as a proper Lan, but instead he was kept back at the Lotus Pier –”

“Presumably Sect Leader Jiang made some sort of commitment to the mother that he didn’t feel he could break.”

“And naturally, since the father of the child was not present, there was no way for the Lan sect to claim him.”

“Of course. Especially when we are all in the midst of rebuilding – who would want to start trouble? But now that Wangji is out again…”

Lianfeng-zun laughed. “Doesn’t that result in the boy coming to the Cloud Recesses permanently? I was under the impression he didn’t want that.”

“Are you suggesting that they rob the boy of the only home he’s known?” Chifeng-zun pretended to scold. “Nonsense. Some calmer mind, likely belonging to a sect that is neither of the two in question - and not me -”

“Well, you did say calmer.”

“Someone will have to prevail with a compromise: a division of time between the two places.”

Lianfeng-zun smiled. “I think I see the direction in which you’re going – that’s the same sort of argument that could be used to allow Sect Leader Jiang to retain partial custody of A-Ling once he gets old enough that his return to Koi Tower is required, isn’t it?”

“Precisely.”

Lan Yuan somehow hadn’t thought about Jin Ling having to go back to Koi Tower – in Lanling, which was really far away – and it’s probably his distress at the idea that makes him lean forward a little too far and tip over the screen with a giant crash.

Both men turned to stare at him.

“Uh,” he said, and promptly dropped into a low bow, bringing his hands up in salute. “Sorry for the disturbance! Have a nice day!”

He ran.

(There was laughter behind him.)

-

“You – abandoner of responsibilities! Scum! Bad person!”

Hanguang-jun’s eye twitched. “Jiang Wanyin. I know you can do better than that.”

“Oooh, he’s pulled out the courtesy name,” Lan Yuan whispered to Sect Leader Lan, who was doing a very good job of not laughing out loud but it looked a little like it hurt. His shoulders were shaking and there were tears in his curved-smile eyes. “You know he’s serious now.”

Sect Leader Lan had to put his sleeve in his mouth to muffle the snickering. Jin Ling didn’t quite understand what was going on, but he was giggling quite openly, and that wasn’t helping either.

“I’m trying, okay,” Sect Leader Jiang complained. “It just feels weird, that’s all.”

“You fight all the time,” Jiang Meimei, one of the clan disciples that assisted Sect Leader Jiang with administration, said, rolling her eyes. “I’m not even exaggerating. How can this be hard?”

“We fight over reasonable things,” Sect Leader Jiang argued. “Like him being a snob, or persnickety, or having terrible taste in any number of things, up to and including seasonings –”

“Preferring to have intact taste buds is a reasonable preference.”

“Coward. Afraid of a little chili pepper.”

“That one can do something is not a reason to do it.”

“Is that a Lan sect rule? ‘Refrain from fun’ as the general rule, for everything else see the list of exceptions?”

“I believe the point Deputy Jiang was attempting to make was that this is more along the lines of what we were expecting,” Sect Leader Lan put in. “Perhaps a slightly more aggravated version…?”

“Oh, I can do aggravated,” Sect Leader Jiang said, which in Lan Yuan’s opinion was stating the obvious. “But even I have trouble working up a temper about Lan Wangji, of all people, abandoning some poor woman with a child he’d promised to take care of, which may or may not be his – it’s just not plausible.”

“What part,” Hanguang-jun said dryly, “the abandonment or the woman?”

“Both? Both.”

“While I don’t disagree with your assessment of Wangji’s character, that isn’t the point at the moment,” Sect Leader Lan said, his eyes sharp and interested – he’d looked up suddenly when Sect Leader Jiang had called Hanguang-jun by name, as if he were studying Hanguang-jun’s reaction. There wasn’t one, of course; Sect Leader Jiang had long ago fallen into the habit of calling Hanguang-jun by name, and Hanguang-jun returned the favor – albeit with Sect Leader Jiang’s given name, which everyone used instead of his courtesy name. Unless he was in front of other people, or else being especially sarcastic. “Perhaps you can think of some angle which would work for you?”

“Like what?”

“Well – A-Yao had a suggestion, but I don’t know if it would work.”

“Can’t be worse than this,” Jiang Meimei opined. “No one’ll believe Hanguang-jun for a scum no matter how loudly Sect Leader Jiang yells.”

Sect Leader Lan smiled and nodded, looking proud. He was Hanguang-jun’s big brother, so it made sense. “A-Yao suggested that Sect Leader Jiang consider it as Wangji having promised him something – to assist in caring for A-Yuan alongside him, perhaps – and having then defaulted in favor of something he preferred more, such as leaving to enter seclusion at the Cloud Recesses.”

Sect Leader Jiang’s shoulders abruptly went tense. “Not a bad suggestion,” he said, and his voice was strained as if he were forcing himself to be calm. “But Lan Wangji wouldn’t do that, either.”

“But if you pretend –”

“I would not,” Hanguang-jun said firmly. “I would not violate any vow I have taken, regardless of the recipient of that vow.”

Sect Leader Jiang’s shoulders relaxed a little.

“I do not believe that additional sincerity is helpful in this instance,” Hanguang-jun continued, folding his hands behind his back. “The goal is not to simulate a real argument, but to spread the understanding that there was an argument – wouldn’t a spar in public be sufficient, with explanations to be provided later?”

Sect Leader Jiang tilted his head to the side, looking intrigued. “So, what, you emerge from seclusion, talk to Sect Leader Lan for a bit to ‘find out’ about A-Yuan, then fly straight to the Lotus Pier and attack me without saying anything?”

Hanguang-jun nodded.

“That would be in character for a stone-face like you. And if you really put effort into it, I wouldn’t have time to be shouting out insults left and right.”

“It would confuse people,” Sect Leader Lan agreed, sounding thoughtful. “They would seek out anyone with knowledge, and we could plant some people to gossip appropriately…afterwards, once the information is widely known, we can have Mingjue-xiong or maybe A-Yao - they’re still fighting over who - well, one of them will announce that he was consulted as a neutral third party and that the matter is now resolved, with Wangji returning alongside A-Yuan to the Cloud Recesses for at least a season each year, and remaining at the Lotus Pier to supervise his education during the remaining months.”

“Acceptable,” Hanguang-jun said.

“Is it?” Sect Leader Jiang asked, looking at him. “Not to reverse course and go worry about the exact opposite thing I was worrying about just before, but, well. You know that it wouldn’t be hard to push for you to stay here all year, if you prefer, right? After all, I’m known for being unreasonable…”

Hanguang-jun shook his head. “A-Yuan should have the background to which he is entitled. A few months out of the year are an acceptable sacrifice.”

Sect Leader Lan bowed his head, looking a little sad, but nodded. “Moreover, if Wangji is truly unhappy in the Cloud Recesses, we can adjust the agreement going forward,” he said. “Attention will likely only be paid for the first year or two – thereafter, Wangji can reside wherever he prefers.”

“I will not remain at the Cloud Recesses,” Hanguang-jun said to Sect Leader Jiang, his eyes steady, and Sect Leader Jiang scowled in a way that was almost a smile. “It was my home once, but no longer – but it will be pleasant to visit it.”

“As long as you remember that it’s just a visit,” Sect Leader Jiang grumbled. “All right, I’m signed on. Let’s do it.”

Chapter Text

It was strange, Lan Wangji reflected, to be in public again after so long an absence. Stranger still to be addressed by strangers, to be called the Second Jade of Lan, or Lan-er-gongzi –

He wished that they would use his personal title instead. It might reduce the awkwardness.

Though, he reflected, it was likely that nothing would really reduce the awkwardness inherent in the situation, for all its old nostalgic familiarity: his brother walking in the lead, he and his uncle one step behind him, the representatives of the Lan sect in all their glory, beauty, and righteousness.

Looking at their tranquil expressions and sedate pace, one would never know that Lan Qiren was still furiously angry at Lan Wangji for his decision to abandon his sect and family, now made several times over; that Lan Wangji had been shockingly disrespectful by Lan standards in his response; that Lan Xichen had ordered that neither of them were permitted to speak until they could behave civilly (he’d used the term “like human beings”) once again.

It had been a very quiet journey to Koi Tower.

Luckily, even once they arrived, their customary reserve meant that no one noticed the tensions between them – not even the normally astute Lianfeng-zun, who greeted them at the door, much less his father and brother, and certainly not Chifeng-zun, who was listening to another sect leader speak with the stiff and stern expression that, after several years of keeping company with Jiang Cheng, Lan Wangji now recognized as please stop talking to me.  

(Lan Wangji briefly considered that he ought to suggest that Jiang Cheng spend more time with Chifeng-zun. They shared a history as young men who assumed control over their sects too soon as a result of the same enemy, and he knew Jiang Cheng highly esteemed Chifeng-zun – but then he rejected the idea as unnecessary and likely full of potential political pitfalls, especially given the Jiang sect’s role in the Jin sect’s current one-sided rivalry with the Nie sect.

As the Second Jade of Lan, he didn’t need to worry about political concerns, or at least not those beyond the basic premise of ‘don’t lose face for the sect’. His uncle and brother handled everything of that nature, just as they always had, holding up the sky for him and allowing him to focus on cultivation and his own interests, only he had been Jiang Cheng’s secret sounding board for too long now to fail to think of the potential problems anyway.

He found to his surprise that he missed it.)

Jiang Cheng would have noticed the tension, but he had yet to arrive – they had agreed that it would make everything easier if he would arrive to the gathering a little late, minimizing the amount of chatter they would need to endure about the two of them before the formal events began.

This would be Lan Wangji’s first discussion conference after having “left seclusion”, as people were calling it – his uncle with notably more sarcasm than usual – and the first test of his new public relationship with Jiang Cheng. They’d settled the public fight aspect with some degree of enjoyment, having a spar that extended throughout the rooftops and alleyways of the Lotus Pier, matching Bichen again Sandu and Wangji against Zidian, and the rumors had run wild ever since then. Finally, Jin Guangyao had intervened in his father’s name to “force” the compromise they’d all agreed upon: that Lan Sizhui would fall under Lan Wangji’s personal supervision, as was his right as the (assumed) father, but that he would remain at the Lotus Pier for most of the year to avoid a sudden and traumatic readjustment.

That this coincidentally would result in Lan Wangji spending most of his time at the Lotus Pier had largely passed unnoticed. Most people were far, far too busy gossiping about Lan Wangji’s mysterious Jiang sect wife, each one adding new salacious details atop the other. Some of the nonsense he’d heard…!

At least, he comforted himself, none of them would be rude enough to actually ask him about it directly.

“Lan-er-gongzi!” a voice called, and Lan Wangji would have stiffened if his back hadn’t already been straighter than a board. His uncle coughed and stroked his beard to conceal his expression of amusement – he probably thought that having to deal with Nie Huaisang, inveterate gossip and useless person extraordinaire, was exactly what Lan Wangji deserved.

He was probably right, too. Lan Wangji had brought this on his own head.

“Nie-gongzi,” he said, very reluctantly, as the Second Young Master of Qinghe Nie showed up with a feckless smile, promptly clutching at his arm and insisting that they go catch up and indulge in nostalgia about their shared school days.

Which ones, Lan Wangji wasn’t sure – Nie Huaisang had attended his uncle’s classes three times over before passing, and whether or not that final pass had been fairly earned or whether his uncle had simply yielded to his desire never to see Nie Huaisang’s face in his classroom ever again, Lan Wangji remained unsure.

Still, it suited him not to be forced to make nice with all those sect leaders pretending that they weren’t gawking at him, and so he permitted Nie Huaisang to drag him off to some unoccupied garden he had somehow managed to uncover, the other man chattering in his ear like a magpie the entire time.

“ – supposed I really should call you Hanguang-jun now, but that just seems so formal, though at least I remember it. I barely remember anyone’s title. Though now that my big brother’s sworn brotherhood with your big brother, I could probably just get away with calling you Wangji-gege –”

“No.”

“You’re so mean!” Nie Huaisang wailed. “Aren’t we old friends?”

“No.”

“Well, we’re close enough to count, anyway,” Nie Huaisang said. “Jiang Cheng’s my friend as well, you know; you can’t keep him to yourself just because you’re angry at your family! That’s just selfish. Aren’t there Lan sect rules against being selfish? I assume so, though I admit I’ve forgotten more of them than I’ve learned…don’t tell your uncle that, I’m afraid he’ll revoke my sympathy pass.”

Lan Wangji reflected briefly that it was good that Nie Huaisang was self-aware enough to recognize that the pass mark had likely been given out of sympathy rather than for merit, but then returned to the more critical point of what Nie Huaisang had said.

“Why do you think I’m angry at my family?” he asked. And what was that about Jiang Cheng?

It was critical that Sect Leader Jin, among others, not suspect that Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng shared a closer relationship than apparent – even Jin Guangyao had agreed with that – and if they had been sussed out so quickly, and by Nie Huaisang…

Nie Huaisang rolled his eyes at him. “You may be an unreadable stone wall, my – er, acquaintance, but do you really think I can’t tell when your uncle is upset? Me, of all people?”

This was a good point.

“And if your uncle’s upset at you, again, of all people, and you haven’t apologized or made up to him yet, that means you’re the one that’s angry,” Nie Huaisang concluded. “And anyway, why else would you agree to stay for so long at the Lotus Pier if you weren’t angry? You and Jiang Cheng must drive each other up the walls.”

Lan Wangji relaxed minutely. That was a reasonable explanation.

A moment later, he tensed up again – he was abruptly convinced, albeit without any logical basis, that the explanation was too reasonable, meant to put him at ease, designed to allow him to move on with the conversation without thinking too much or questioning too deeply. No one else had put the facts together the way Nie Huaisang had, and, most notably, Nie Huaisang hadn’t yet asked a single question about Lan Sizhui, who was, without making an appearance, the main subject matter of the day.

But then, a moment after that, he relaxed again, somewhat unwillingly – this was Nie Huaisang, who’d been born useless, grown up useless, and remained useless. It was a little absurd to suspect him of having figured out something that had duped the entire rest of the cultivation world.  

As Nie Huaisang said – of all people…

“What do you want?” he asked, shaking his head a little to try to clear it. It must be the oppressive atmosphere of Koi Tower, gilded and rotten, that was affecting his thoughts.

“What do I always want?” Nie Huaisang asked philosophically, and then helpfully answered his own question: “Attention.”

Lan Wangji was starting to remember why he’d avoided Nie Huaisang so thoroughly in their youth.

“I’m not telling you anything about Sizhui,” he said.

Nie Huaisang pouted at him. He was still clinging to Lan Wangji’s arm, and Lan Wangji wondered whether it would count as ‘losing the sect face’ if he threw him out a window.

(He wished Jiang Cheng were around so that he could mention the thought to him - he suspected it would make the other man turn purple with suppressed laughter, and probably get some sort of comment about it being the only sort of flying Nie Huaisang could manage, with or without a blade.)

“Fine,” Nie Huaisang said sulkily. “Turns out you’re still no fun, even after all these years. I’ll have you know, Jiang Cheng’s a lot nicer than you. He appreciates all the things I bring to the table.”

Lan Wangji seriously doubted it – unless perhaps if Nie Huaisang was speaking literally, referring to fine foods and liquor – but his mood improved a bit nonetheless at the compliment. Given the Jiang sect’s relatively isolated political position, with all the smaller sects looking at it hungrily, just waiting for it to trip up and give them a chance to snatch away the title of being the fourth Great Sect, it was only good that the second young master of Qinghe Nie had a positive impression of the ever-prickly Jiang Cheng.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Nie Huaisang said, and dug something out of his sleeve. “Give this back to er-ge for me, will you?”

Lan Wangji stared blankly. “His passage token for Koi Tower?”

He had planned to ask his brother later if he could borrow it – perhaps not that night, since it was the first day of the discussion conference and he suspected his brother would want to visit with his sworn brothers, but in the next day or two. That was the only reason he had agreed to go to Koi Tower at all, agreed to visit Lanling at all: so that he might try to steal away at some opportune moment to visit Mo Xuanyu unattended, before anyone noticed where he’d gone, and talk to him about the request for safe harbor that he had made of Jiang Cheng.

Lan Wangji had still been thinking over how he would phrase the request for the token without giving away his suspicions of the boy’s mistreatment, which his brother would likely take as a slight against Jin Guangyao even though it was fairly obvious to everyone that Sect Leader Jin was keeping Mo Xuanyu as a weapon against Jin Guangyao. He hadn’t yet managed to think of a way to do it.

And now – how had the token ended up here, in Nie Huaisang’s hands?

“Well, yes,” Nie Huaisang said. “I wanted to talk to you privately, without everyone eavesdropping, so I asked him for it. Da-ge never lets me use his, he says I’m a menace to both people and property, and for some reason san-ge never lets me take his. Probably because he’s always so busy all the time.”

That sounded – very much like all three of them, in fact. Nie Mingjue, bluntly refusing; Jin Guangyao, politely eliding; his brother, yielding in utter capitulation to the first bit of begging, confident enough in his own righteous reputation to not worry about the consequences…

An idea appeared in Lan Wangji’s mind.

It was not the sort of idea that might naturally come to a member of the Lan sect. Perhaps his uncle was right in saying that he’d been lingering at the Lotus Pier for too long.

“Nie-gongzi,” Lan Wangji said, looking at the token. “You are right.”

“I…what?” Nie Huaisang frowned. “Are you getting sick, Lan-er-gongzi? I’m never right.”

“I am angry at my family,” Lan Wangji continued, deciding to ignore him. He did not specify why he was angry – let Nie Huaisang assume, as everyone else assumed, that it was because they had not retrieved Lan Sizhui earlier, and for sticking him with the ‘compromise’ of having to stay at the Lotus Pier, no matter how far that was from the truth. “I have not had the opportunity to vent my feelings.”

Nie Huaisang blinked at him. “You…vent feelings?” he said, sounding doubtful, but a moment later he brightened, as Lan Wangji had expected he would. “We could play a prank on somebody! That always makes me feel better – something petty and ridiculous, so that they won’t get really angry, but still know that you’re upset.”

Lan Wangji nodded.

Nie Huaisang appeared somewhat dazed by his agreement. “We could do so many things,” he marveled. “I mean, the possibilities are countless. We could throw paint at something, we could put water on top of a door, we could…”

“I do not want to be publicly associated with it,” Lan Wangji said.

Nie Huaisang pouted, but tapped his fan against his cheek, thinking. “That makes things harder, but not impossible, I suppose…oh, I know! Why don’t we pretend that you’re your brother? You two look like peas in a pod, but for the color of your eyes and your expressions – if I’m hanging around and calling you er-ge and no one looks too closely, they would have no idea it was you involved.”

That was precisely the idea Lan Wangji had hit upon, and the one that he had hoped to lead Nie Huaisang towards suggesting. He had gotten to the point much quicker than Lan Wangji had thought he would; it seemed, useless as he might be, Nie Huaisang was still apparently capable of accepting at least some guidance.

(Unless perhaps...but no. It was Nie Huaisang.)

“This evening?” he suggested, and Nie Huaisang nodded.

“That’ll give me time to think of a proper prank,” he said happily. It was as if he’d never encountered a care in his life, Sunshot Campaign or no. “Don’t you worry, Wangji-gege! Leave it all to me!”

Lan Wangji returned to the main hall, the token tucked into his sleeve, and said nothing when his older brother smiled at him, faintly apologetic, nor when his uncle turned his face away from him. By that point, Jiang Cheng had arrived, scowling as usual, and he was mingling, speaking with the smaller sect leaders with a stiff and stern expression that said please don’t talk to me – Lan Wangji really would have to see about convincing him to invite Chifeng-zun to the Lotus Pier, politics or no politics – and he and Lan Wangji stared at each other briefly before turning away from each other, whispers sprouting up around them like grass.

Why must we put up with people? Jiang Cheng’s expression eloquently conveyed, and Lan Wangji didn’t disagree in the slightest. Life was so much easier in his little room back at the Lotus Pier, where he could shut the door and not let in the world – sometimes he wondered if all of this was really worth it.

Later that evening, he was reminded that it was.

Mo Xuanyu had been invited to the opening ceremonies, sitting in the main row with the important people of the Jin sect – directly beside Jin Guangyao, as if everyone didn’t know his purpose already – but he hadn’t spoken at all, keeping his face down and demeanor as withdrawn as possible. Sect Leader Jin had found an opportunity to praise him for his humility and obedience, and even Lan Wangji, who did not like Jin Guangyao, was indignant on the man’s behalf in the face of such obvious humiliation.

Etiquette dictated that no one could intervene in another man’s family affairs, but Chifeng-zun had rather loudly remarked to Lan Xichen – as if only just remembering – that it must be good to have his brother (subtext: notable for being humble and obedient) out of seclusion at last, inquiring as to whether Lan Wangji was planning on attending any night-hunts in the near future and, if so, whether he would be bringing his son, for whom he cared so deeply, along.

Lan Wangji was accustomed to being the other person’s child, held up as a positive comparison to the annoyance of the person being compared, and it took Jiang Cheng’s eyes crinkling with barely concealed laughter for him to realize that the person he was being compared favorably against this time was Jin Guangshan, absent father extraordinaire, and not poor Mo Xuanyu.

Later, when his brother slipped away to meet with his sworn brothers, as Lan Wangji expected, and Jiang Cheng was gone reluctantly to take Jin Ling to visit with his grandfather, Lan Wangji headed out with Nie Huaisang, who had come up with some prank involving feathers and glue that Lan Wangji wanted nothing to do with.

“But it would be funny,” Nie Huaisang argued.

Lan Wangji blamed Jiang Cheng for the fact that he even considered it.

“We can simply walk around in the guise we agreed,” he finally said, banishing that unhelpful part of him that loved chaos a little too much – the Wei Wuxian part, perhaps. “That will be confusing enough.”

“Oh, all right,” Nie Huaisang said. “But the feathers are hidden in the linen closet off the main guest hallway if you change your mind.”

With Nie Huaisang complaisant, it was easy enough to gradually make their way through Koi Tower, seeming to stroll without any apparent goal but in fact edging closer to Lan Wangji’s destination: the Jin family quarters.

“Wangji-gege – oops, I mean, er-ge,” Nie Huaisang said after he had exhausted at least three other pointless topics. “Why don’t you trust me?”

Lan Wangji looked at him, surprised by the question.

Nie Huaisang was pouting. “You clearly have a goal,” he said. “I know I’m not much, you know, but I’m not nothing. I could still help. If you wanted.”

Lan Wangji opened his mouth to refuse on instinct – the idea that Nie Huaisang could be helpful to him in any way seemed utterly absurd, utterly impossible – but then he paused.

Attempt the impossible, he reminded himself. After all, was it really so long ago that he himself had done what he had never dreamt he could do and chosen to leave his sect behind?

For a life at the Lotus Pier with Jiang Cheng, no less?

Maybe even Nie Huaisang could overturn expectations.

“I want to speak with Mo Xuanyu,” he finally said. “And, if he is unhappy, remove him from Koi Tower. Is that something in which you think you can assist me?”

Nie Huaisang blinked at him, just once – he did not appear nearly as surprised by the request as Lan Wangji thought he probably should be – and then smiled.

Chapter Text

“Why are you covered in feathers?” Jiang Cheng asked, and then immediately afterward added, “On second thought, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”

Lan Wangji checked himself over and brushed off the few feathers that had ended up on his shoulder. “Are there any others?” he asked solemnly. “They might be evidence.”

Jiang Cheng’s eye twitched, as Lan Wangji had intended. “I don’t want to know,” he repeated, and Lan Wangji believed it about as much as he’d believed it the first time Jiang Cheng said it – which was to say, not at all. “I don’t want to…okay, fine, tell me.”

“You don’t want to know,” Lan Wangji informed him, and Jiang Cheng looked as though he was considering strangling him. “I will explain later. For the moment, it is best to pretend as if you know nothing.”

“I really don’t know anything,” Jiang Cheng said.

“That will make pretending easier.”

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes at him, but stopped arguing, and Lan Wangji felt warmth in his belly at the instant capitulation. All of his life experiences had conspired to make Jiang Cheng an untrusting person, suspicious almost to the point of paranoia and constantly afraid of losing everything to the unknown, and yet he chose to trust Lan Wangji without question.

“Is there anything else I should know?” Jiang Cheng asked with one of his friendlier scowls, crossing his arms over his chest. “Or not know, as the case may be?”

Lan Wangji considered for a moment. “Don’t count the number of Jiang sect disciples leaving with you,” he suggested, and Jiang Cheng’s eyebrows shot up. “Consider storming out in a fury the next time someone insults you.”

“You were right,” Jiang Cheng said. “I didn’t want to know.”

Lan Wangji heard footsteps and put his hands behind his back. “Naturally, Sect Leader Jiang is entitled to change his mind. I understand it happens often.”

Jiang Cheng’s eyes narrowed. “You must be struggling with coming out of seclusion, Hanguang-jun,” he remarked. “To come mucking around with the rest of us after spending so long on - avoiding worldly matters, let’s say.”

The sect leaders passing by sped up with expressions suggesting that they were dreadfully curious but did not want to get involved in a repeat of the fight that was rather infamously had throughout the Lotus Pier, with all of the attendant property damage (that they’d paid for later, but still).

Once they’d passed, Lan Wangji gave Jiang Cheng a look that suggested he did not appreciate the joke. Jiang Cheng appeared undeterred.

He also appeared, on closer examination, somewhat tired.

Lan Wangji frowned and stepped closer, lowering his voice. “You have not slept.”

“I’m fine,” Jiang Cheng said, and realized his mistake at once – such excess vehemence meant that he was lying, and badly, too. “It’s your fault, anyway.”

“My fault?”

“Entirely your fault. I can’t eat my lunch without wondering why you’re not plucking away on your guqin the way you normally do at that hour, I can’t finish my paperwork without trying to find you to ask for your views, I can’t sleep without hearing you making noise next door…who made you fit yourself in so well at the Lotus Pier?”

“You,” Lan Wangji said dryly, ignoring the warmth he felt. Surely it was wrong to feel touched when someone’s unhealthy co-dependence with you was mentioned. “When you kidnapped me.”

“It was only technically kidnapping,” Jiang Cheng grumbled. “And only at first, anyway…really, it’s no big deal. Just had a few bad nights.”

Jiang Cheng’s nights fell on a scale between decent, mediocre, bad, and genuinely horrific, and he generally only conceded that something was ‘bad’ when it fell toward the lower end of the scale – when his thoughts kept scattering like a flock of bird being chased off their perch, returning to circle around sore subjects and drill worries into his skull, when there would be blood and bile and panic and his mind would linger on anxieties he had long ago put aside in the light of day.

He hadn’t had one of those in months – and now he had had a few?

“Because I…?”

Jiang Cheng shook his head. “A-Ling had a temper tantrum last week,” he explained, voice low and more than a little helpless. “I think he misses you and A-Yuan, and he’s at the age for pushing his boundaries, too…he told me that his Wei-jiujiu wouldn’t have made him eat his vegetables.”

He would have, of course, Lan Wangji reflected. He remembered how Wei Wuxian had been with A-Yuan, always mercilessly teasing him. Wei Wuxian had a spine when it came to children, one that wouldn’t crack into a thousand pieces at the first sob – that was Jiang Cheng, who was all bluster and bark without the slightest bit of bite.

But that wasn’t the issue, not when Jiang Cheng’s soul was a patchwork of ragged wounds and insecurity, a lifetime of being second-best and second-loved, and on his worst days he would voice doubts that he’d even been esteemed as much as that.

By his father, by his mother, by his sister, by Wei Wuxian himself –  

“Maybe he would’ve done better,” Jiang Cheng murmured, his eyes already blank with self-hatred – no doubt this was what had kept him up on those bad nights, the angry whispers of a too-fragile mind that said why did he leave me, why wasn’t I good enough, he said he’d stay by my side and then took the first chance he could to leave me behind, that said it couldn’t have been him that did all those things and betrayed me like that, no, he must have died earlier on and it was my fault for not noticing, that said if it’s all my fault then it all makes sense, it’s always because of me, no one ever stays with me.

That said if it’s my fault then it’ll happen again.

Lan Wangji did not like those nights.

“Mm,” he said mildly. “And then A-Ling would also know how to hide dirty pictures in awkward places.”

Lan Wangji had never been good at comforting people, having always been the one being comforted, and his failure to convey his feelings to Wei Wuxian during his life spoke volumes regarding his ability to communicate – but he knew Jiang Cheng.

After so long living together, he knew him.

(Jiang Cheng wasn’t the only one who had difficulty sleeping without those familiar sounds next door.)

Sure enough, Jiang Cheng choked, his eyes clearing up, and he spent the next few breaths struggling not to burst out laughing. “We’re supposed to be arguing,” he hissed at Lan Wangji, who smirked – from a distance it would certainly look as though they were arguing, Jiang Cheng’s cheeks all red and his shoulders shaking in what a stranger might mistake for rage. “You stone-faced bastard, that’s not funny.”

Lan Wangji disagreed. Jiang Cheng’s reaction was, in fact, extremely funny.

“We will need to diversify our collection of such things,” Lan Wangji said thoughtfully. “Given the inclinations of our future house guest…”

“I am not buying Mo Xuanyu pictures of – ! He can buy it himself if he wants…wait, you’re really planning to have him come with us?”

“He will die if he remains,” Lan Wangji said simply, because it was that simple. Their conversation, however brief, had been extremely informative. “And so he must not remain. We have concocted a plan.”

“We? I wasn’t involved in this.”

“Myself, and Nie Huaisang.”

Lan Wangji was expecting some sort of reaction to that – what, he wasn’t sure, possibly disbelief or ridicule or even panic that they were entrusting themselves to the most useless fop to grace the current generation of cultivators – but instead Jiang Cheng relaxed, looking pleased. “Oh, well, Nie Huaisang,” he said, as if that explained anything at all.

“You trust him?”

Jiang Cheng shrugged. “I don’t not trust him?” he hazarded, and seemed rather helplessly puzzled by his own ease with the situation. “He’s terrible at anything a sect heir ought to be good at, but he’ll come up with the wildest sort of things if it’s nonsense he’s after, and he usually gets his way in the end. He’s a pretty good judge as to how likely his chances at success are, too.”

“He’s smarter than he looks,” Lan Wangji agreed, his voice neutral.

“Don’t tell me you fell for his ‘who, me, a person capable of doing anything, surely not’ act,” Jiang Cheng said, looking vastly amused. Lan Wangji might normally object to such teasing, but if it got Jiang Cheng away from his dangerous self-hatred, he’d take it – even if the idea that Jiang Cheng, master of obliviousness, had correctly judged a person that he himself had misjudged seemed just plain wrong. “He just does that to anyone he thinks might squeal on him to his brother.”

Lan Wangji probably would have, too. Still, he felt that Jiang Cheng should have warned him better.

He glared.

“Second Young Master Lan has no grounds for complaining at his own lack of perception,” Jiang Cheng said, and Lan Wangji noted again the presence of people in their vicinity. “It’s all that navel-gazing you do in the Cloud Recesses, no doubt – should I start to worry about A-Yuan?”

“Lan Yuan,” Lan Wangji said snippily, then added, “Lan Sizhui.”

Jin Rulan, Jiang Cheng mouthed at him, and both of them were forced to briefly avert their faces in sheer amusement. Poor Jin Ling – no one would ever call him by his courtesy name, not if even his two guardians weren’t able to keep a straight face.

(Well, comparatively speaking. Lan Wangji was well aware that his own expression of deep amusement looked, to the uninitiated, exactly like his neutral expression but for a very slight narrowing of the eyes.)

The footsteps passed, and Jiang Cheng relaxed once more. Lan Wangji was pleased to see it, but acknowledged that if they were to keep up the pretense of disliking each other, deplorable political necessity that it was, they would need to do better in the future.

“Today will be a disaster,” Lan Wangji murmured, a warning. “But beneficial in the long run. Do not take what they say to heart.”

He would not have said it if Jiang Cheng was not more fragile than usual. Normally, Jiang Cheng could, after years of practice, let insults flow off his back like water from a duck, unmoving and uncaring – he was a flawed man in many ways, Lan Wangji acknowledged, but he generally only had to make a mistake once to learn from it.

For instance, he would never again allow the poisoned words of others to interfere with those he loved.

Not when he still tormented himself for not having done more for Wei Wuxian, as if there had been more Jiang Cheng could have done without losing everything else he held dear – not even Lan Wangji, who was helplessly and hopelessly in love with Wei Wuxian and couldn’t keep himself from sometimes playing Inquiry in search of him, summoned his ghost into their lives so often as Jiang Cheng did.

“Sometimes I wonder what goes through your head,” Jiang Cheng remarked, glaring at the perceived commentary about his lack of emotional resiliency no matter how accurate. “And then I realize I don’t want to know.”

“Lying is forbidden.”

“I am not a Lan. And, yes, fine, it’s a lie. If I could crack you open and crawl into your head, I probably would, but that doesn’t make you special or anything. I’d do that to most people.”

Lan Wangji believed it – Jiang Cheng was just that insecure.

He didn’t let Jiang Cheng change the subject, though, continuing to stare at him until Jiang Cheng shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, rolling his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll prepare for a calamity and storm out as quickly as possible. What are they possibly going to say about me now?”

They said he was like his father.

It was usually meant as a compliment, but not always. In this case, it was the latter: the implication that Jiang Cheng would, like his father, eventually forget to care for the child he already had when another, better one came along put an especially ugly expression on his face.

As Nie Huaisang had gleefully predicted, Jin Guangshan was enraged to the point of maddening by the prank they had pulled and framed Mo Xuanyu for. Nor could he be blamed, the prank was positive infantile, and highlighted Mo Xuanyu’s relative youth and immaturity, losing his father and sect face in the process. Everyone had wanted to talk about that, about how extremely obvious it was that Mo Xuanyu’s only use was to humiliate the already legitimized Jin Guangyao, but in deference to their host they turned their conversation onto past examples like Jiang Fengmian – and, of course, the more recent example of the ongoing fight between Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji over Lan Sizhui.

Jiang Cheng had had no choice but to ignore it, no matter how his face purpled in rage at the suggestion that he might neglect either Lan Sizhui or Jin Ling in favor of the other.  Still, no one had really questioned it when he left in a huff not long after in response to an extremely unfortunate comment by the ever-feckless Nie Huaisang (of course: Lan Wangji shouldn’t have doubted him) about the ability of young men to handle child-rearing, returning to the Lotus Pier in a fury with a parting shot about how the Lotus Pier, at least, did not follow the Wen sect in encouraging the indoctrination of children – a vicious and unwarrented smear regarding the Lan sect’s lectures that made Lan Qiren almost visibly see red and Lan Xichen frown but which Lan Wangji thought was rather useful to their ultimate goal.

When later it was discovered that Mo Xuanyu had apparently run away – and based on the clues that had been left behind, that he must have pulled off his escape by disguising himself as part of Jiang Cheng’s retinue – Jin Guangshan was so angry that smoke nearly poured out of his ears, to the point that Jin Guangyao hastily came up with some excuse to briefly remove him from the scene.

Nie Huaisang winked at Lan Wangji from behind his fan, looking pleased with himself, and he looked so ridiculous that Lan Wangji had to forcefully remind himself once again of his personal revelation that the second young master of Qinghe Nie was far away from being the useless waste that he presented himself as.

Far more effective a reminder, though, was Jin Guangshan’s announcement later that day that he would indulge Mo Xuanyu’s desire for a little bit of freedom – natural in a boy of that age, he’d chuckled, playing the indulgent father – by requesting that Jiang Cheng keep him for some time at the Lotus Pier to tutor his young cousin Jin Ling in the ways of Lanling Jin.

Just as Nie Huaisang had so enthusiastically and confidently said he would.

“And with Hanguang-jun there to supervise, there will be no question of misconduct,” Chifeng-zun said, nodding in approval at the proposal. “Your son and grandson will benefit twice over! I think our younger generation is stronger for having all gathered together in one place, whether learning at the Cloud Recesses or resisting the oppression of the Wen sect…”

“That requires there to be a younger generation,” someone in the crowd interjected, as they almost always did when someone of their present generation mentioned the next. “Sect Leader Nie, don’t you think it’s time you settled down?”

“Why are you looking to me?” he demanded, looking annoyed. “Zewu-jun is equally unattached, and he ranks first on the list of women’s hearts, doesn’t he?”

“On the list of young masters, of which I no longer count,” Lan Xichen stressed hastily, holding up his hands in a vain attempt to ward off the discussion topic. “At any rate, I’m far too busy to be interested in courting at the moment – anyway, wasn’t Sandu Shengshou trying to set up a match some time back?”

“Didn’t he get blackballed?” Sect Leader Qin, ever Jin Guangshan’s faithful dog, interjected, always on the look-out for a way to denigrate the other Great Sects. “I didn’t even know that was possible –”

“At least he’s demonstrated the ability to care for a child –”

Lan Wangji decided that that was an excellent time to make his escape. This was one situation in which he especially did not want to get held up as a positive comparison.

His uncle went with him.

“Very cleverly done,” Lan Qiren remarked as they strolled into one of the many gardens that peppered Lanling City and Jinlin Tower in particular, and Lan Wangji looked at him sidelong. “Matchmaking and children are the favorite subjects of old men; by the time the noise dies down, Sect Leader Jin’s decision as to his newest son will be considered as settled and unquestionable. It was good of your brother – and Chifeng-zun, of course – to throw themselves on their swords for you.”

Lan Wangji put his hands behind his back, uncomfortable. “I did not ask them to act.”

His uncle said nothing. He didn’t need to – if perhaps Chifeng-zun was somewhat opaque to them both, his sheer straightforwardness ironically enough serving to conceal any subtle thoughts he might have, Lan Xichen was as clear as a calm lake. He had jumped into the conversation at just the right moment, saying words that would only inflame the situation rather than calm it, displaying just enough dismay to be humorous without actually appearing, to those that knew him well, to be surprised at all.

“It was Nie Huaisang’s idea,” Lan Wangji added, and that did get Lan Qiren’s eyebrows to rise up in surprise. Probably wondering, just as Lan Wangji was, when exactly Nie Huaisang had had the opportunity to rope the Venerated Triad into his scheme – as far as Lan Wangji could tell, he hadn’t had any opportunity to speak to them.

Still, however intriguing the speculation was, it wasn’t enough to dissuade his uncle from his target.  

“The motivation was yours,” he said, the question implicit.

“Mo Xuanyu requested Jiang Cheng’s assistance,” Lan Wangji explained. “He is – unhappy, in Lanling, and ill-suited to it. Jiang Cheng feared that he might one day bring harm upon himself if he remained.”

His uncle nodded slowly, looking thoughtful. “Having him at the Lotus Pier to teach Jin Ling the ways of Lanling Jin also means that there is no urgent need for Jin Ling to return to Lanling himself. He can remain with Sect Leader Jiang.”

“Yes.”

His uncle huffed out a breath and leaned down to smell one of the flowers. “I will give you some books before you return to the Lotus Pier,” he said. “Mo Xuanyu is already past thirteen; it is not at all the same as dealing with small children. You will need to be prepared.”

Lan Wangji looked at his uncle, a little surprised. He had expected more resistance to this scheming plot, which was not at all in line with Lan sect principles.

“Mo Xuanyu is old enough to make his own decisions,” his uncle said, his eyes still fixed on the flower. “If he cannot happy here, he should go to where he can be.”

Lan Wangji’s heart trembled within his chest. He’d thought – his uncle, who had led the charge at the Burial Mounds, who had been the most disappointed at all of his choices–

“I am sorry that we did not suit you, Wangji.”

Lan Wangji exhaled, hard, feeling a stinging feeling in his eyes and nose.

He had not expected an apology.

It didn’t change everything all at once, of course. He was still angry, still spiteful, still furious, fill of bile and bone-deep rage at how his own family had so thoroughly failed to trust in him that they would take away even his right to choose. His belly was heavy with his resentment at how they disapproved of him, how they were ashamed of him, and it would take more than mere words to liberate him from it.

But still, he had to admit – there was something more complicated about it now.

It had been easier, he thought, to be merely angry.

“It was not you,” he said, a small concession. “If the circumstances were different, I could have lived my whole life at the Cloud Recesses with no dissatisfaction.”

“But they aren’t,” his uncle said, bowing his head in understanding. “And you can’t. I – do not understand, and I do not like it, but that is not necessary. It is still my dearest wish for you to be happy and safe.”

Lan Wangji wasn’t sure that being truly happy was possible in a world that lacked Wei Wuxian – a world his uncle had helped bring about with his own two hands – but he knew that the life he had built with Jiang Cheng in the Lotus Pier, warm and tightly packed and full of worries as it was, was as close as he would come, and a life of solitude and distance and tranquility at the Cloud Recesses would only be worse.

“I have another month left before I return,” he pointed out, seeking to change the subject.

“Not after that conversation,” Lan Qiren said, looking reluctantly amused. “You will be sent to the Lotus Pier as soon as can be managed to make sure that everyone is being properly supervised.”

“Jiang Cheng can supervise.”

“Jiang Wanyin won’t.”

Lan Wangji bowed his head to hide a smile. His uncle wasn’t wrong.

And he had to admit - he wouldn’t miss Jiang Cheng dealing with a teenager for the world.

Chapter Text

Author note: This chapter is an interlude that contains JC/LWJ adult content. It can be skipped without impacting the remainder of the story.

-

“This is an idea so stupid that I can’t believe Wei Wuxian wasn’t that one to think of it,” Jiang Cheng said.

Lan Wangji didn’t disagree. If either of them had any sense whatsoever, they’d call off this whole idea before it was too late and they did something that permanently damaged the delicate balance of the life they’d built together forever – and they had, somehow, built a life together, cobbled together out of convenience and tragedy and the fact that no one else in this rotten world would understand what it was to miss someone like Wei Wuxian.

It was utter recklessness to throw it away for – what? Indulging some curiosity? Killing some time out of boredom, now that the Lotus Pier had finally quieted down enough for Jiang Cheng to no longer need to work from sunrise until sunset? Now that Lan Wangji didn’t have to hide himself away at all hours, afraid that someone would see him coming and going?

“You don’t even like me like that,” Jiang Cheng complained mutinously, and glared when Lan Wangji nodded in confirmation. “Wow. Thanks a lot.”

“We don’t have to proceed,” Lan Wangji pointed out.

“No, we’re doing this,” Jiang Cheng said at once, because he was contrary down to the last inch of him. “Take off your clothing already. No matter what the Lan sect may think, there are circumstances that call for not wearing four layers of clothing, and sex is definitely one of them.”

Because that was what they were apparently doing.

This was all Mo Xuanyu’s fault for leaving his books lying around – Jiang Cheng had finally succumbed to pressure and ordered his steward to get some for him – and in particular a spring book with pictures that went beyond the merely suggestive into the explicit. Jiang Cheng had picked it up while neatening up the room and gawked for enough time to make a cup of tea; when Lan Wangji had politely asked if he’d perhaps been abruptly struck blind by the contents and, if so, if there was any medicine he would like Lan Wangji to fetch for him, Jiang Cheng had instead turned to him and said, very frankly, “This cannot be a thing people actually do.”

Lan Wangji had, with great patience and an expression of intense suffering, held out his hands for the book.

The years following his awkward initial interaction with Wei Wuxian – the discovery of his own inclinations, the confirmation that they were irrevocably set in that way, his eventual acceptance of that fact – had led him to explore the more idiosyncratic portions of the Lan library. He was no longer the boy that had spluttered and cursed when tricked into looking at some (fairly run of the mill, in retrospect) pornography.

“Mm,” he’d said after a brief examination. “Real.”

“Impossible. Why would anyone -?”

Lan Wangji hadn’t bothered to dignify that with a response.

“It can’t possibly feel good,” Jiang Cheng had protested.

Lan Wangji had graced him with a pitying look. He hadn’t experienced the act in question with another person, of course, but his older brother had been perhaps unduly interested in ensuring that Lan Wangji had access to anything he might need to assuage his curiosity regarding his unorthodox affections, and, well, the Lan sect did always value a thorough approach to learning.

In other words, he’d read a lot.

It might have been left at that, a casual conversation between friends, except that Lan Wangji must have been suddenly possessed by the spirit of Wei Wuxian because he felt compelled to add, “Not that you would ever have a chance to find out.”

And that, of course, was that; once Jiang Cheng’s competitive instincts were awakened, there was absolutely nothing for it but a test to determine who was right.

Little details as to whether or not Jiang Cheng was even attracted to men enough for the question even to matter were dismissed as irrelevant.

And that was how they’d ended up here. About to go to bed. Together.

Though – perhaps that wasn’t exactly how it had started.

Perhaps it had started earlier, when Jiang Cheng had started helping Lan Wangji with those very particular physical reactions he’d had during the period he’d been too weak to do it himself, or perhaps when he’d continued to help him with it long after the trauma of it was no longer so near as to make it impossible for him to use his hands on himself.

Perhaps Lan Wangji should have been the one to stop that – the one to say no, no more, it’s unnecessary, thank you. But in those years of seclusion he had seen so few people, and seen Jiang Cheng most of all; he hadn’t quite been able to give up the desire for the touch of a human hand against his skin. To give up the intimacy of the act, for all that Jiang Cheng routinely brought him to completion as casually as if he were merely rebandaging his wounds, was simply impossible. Nothing could detract from the satisfaction he obtained, even if Jiang Cheng often spent the time talking about something else entirely, complaining about his day or a particularly irritating set of paperwork.

(There was a period in which Lan Wangji had briefly started to develop unsavory connections to the subject of dam rebuilding – luckily the dam project had ended before it had become a real problem.)

At minimum Lan Wangji should have put a stop to it once he was no longer secluded: when he had Lan Xichen’s embraces, gentle nudges from visiting Lan disciples, all the regular physical contact he had grown up with, and now all the casual affection that passed between Jiang sect disciples, of which he was considered an honorary member…it was more than enough to satisfy any skin hunger that might have been compelling him to continue with that inappropriate behavior that neither of them saw as important enough to name.

It had become a habit by then, though, a part of the routine, and the Lan sect thrived on routine.

“You have to remove yours as well,” he reminded Jiang Cheng, folding his clothing up neatly. If they had been lovers, perhaps Jiang Cheng would have been staring at him at this moment – perhaps he would have been tracing Lan Wangji’s body with his eyes, hunger and anticipation on his features – but they weren’t lovers. They were just friends, and that was why Jiang Cheng was fighting to get his shoe off (it had grown too small after too many washings and was starting to fall apart but he inexplicably refused to get new ones) instead of examining a body he’d seen naked a thousand times already during Lan Wangji’s slow recovery. “Do you –”

“If you offer to assist me, I will punch you,” Jiang Cheng threatened, and finally got the shoe off. “And if I hear one word about me needing to replace it –”

“You do.”

“It’s fine. It does the job! What else do you want from a shoe, damnit?” The other shoe was removed. “Leave me alone. I don’t need your help.”

The rest of his clothing came afterwards, tossed casually onto a chair, and Lan Wangji watched out of lack of anything better to do. In the years that had passed he had also seen Jiang Cheng’s body many times, an inevitable result of living across from each other in a place as hot as Yunmeng. Jiang Cheng was undeniably beautiful, all long lines and slender, his flesh marred by the discipline whip as Lan Wangji’s own had been, although in much lower quantity.

No, Lan Wangji concluded. This would not be the problem he had almost been concerned that it would be. For all that Lan Wangji’s heart belonged to Wei Wuxian and always would, his body had no objection to the idea of trying out something new.

“I assume at least some help is not unwelcome,” Lan Wangji said dryly, standing and walking over to put his hand on Jiang Cheng’s cock. At Jiang Cheng’s mild exclamation, Lan Wangji arched his eyebrows. “You can’t even do this? I may have overestimated your bravery.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jiang Cheng said, although he was clearly flustered; he reached out to assist Lan Wangji in the same manner. His palm was callused and warm, as always; Lan Wangji’s cock stirred at once at the familiar stimulus. “It’s been a while since it was someone else, that’s all.”

“You’ve had experience?”

“There’s no need to sound so skeptical about it. I was a teenager once too, you know; Wei Wuxian and I – hey, watch it!”

Lan Wangji relaxed his grip apologetically. “You did for Wei Ying as you do for me?” he asked, and didn’t even care when Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes at his obvious and immediate fascination. It was a good thing that neither of them had any illusions about Wei Wuxian’s role in their friendship, the ghost of him that hung over it all; if they pretended otherwise, they might have hurt each other. “How did he..?”

“You’re not seriously asking me that question,” Jiang Cheng said, but of course Lan Wangji was.

Jiang Cheng glared at him, but Lan Wangji was patient, and as with all things relating to Jiang Cheng, his patience was rewarded.

“You’re a little more direct,” Jiang Cheng finally said, rolling his eyes once again to demonstrate how ridiculous he thought Lan Wangji was being. “You like long strokes, like this, very purposeful – his preference was a bit more playful. A bit of teasing around the head, like this, and then a bit with the thumb…listen, if you’re going to turn that shade of red this quickly, we’re going to have to call this whole idea off.”

“I can do more than once.”

“I’ll give you the whole rundown another time, you pervert,” Jiang Cheng promised, and Lan Wangji’s cock twitched at the thought of it. “Can we please focus on proving you horribly wrong already?”

“I’m not wrong.”

“So you say.”

Lan Wangji rolled his eyes and resumed moving his hand on Jiang Cheng’s cock. It felt nice in his hand, filling out as he stroked it. “Why?” he asked after a moment.

“Why what? Why did Wei Wuxian and I get each other off?”

“En.”

“We were young and stupid, obviously,” Jiang Cheng said. “He was my shixiong. We shared everything, figured everything out together…it wasn’t that weird, okay? It was just lending a friendly hand. Literally.”

Lan Wangji could imagine it. The scene sprang up fully formed in his eyes: Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian as he remembered them from the Cloud Recesses, cheeks still a little fat with youth and glistening from perspiration from the humid Yunmeng air, sitting together side-by-side on a bed with their hands in each other’s laps. Perhaps even the bed he slept in now, or Jiang Cheng’s. And perhaps even back then Jiang Cheng liked to talk of other things while he was performing the chore – his lessons, perhaps.

Perhaps they’d even done it for each other while they’d been at the Cloud Recesses…

“Did you do anything more?” he asked, licking suddenly dry lips.

Jiang Cheng blinked at him. “Like what?”

Perhaps it was petty to use their conversation as an excuse to step forward into Jiang Cheng’s personal space, to use his free hand to rub up and down his chest and tweak his nipples, to use teeth and tongue liberally on his neck, on his shoulder, his collarbone, until Jiang Cheng’s knees had grown so weak from surprise and pleasure that Lan Wangji had to loop his arm around his waist to help support him –

But if there was one thing Jiang Cheng had taught him in all these years, it was that there were times when being petty was the best possible option.

“Can I use my mouth on you?” he asked, and took the incoherent spluttering and vague hand-waving he received as a yes. “Sit down on the bed and lean back.”

Jiang Cheng obeyed without a single complaint, which Lan Wangji accepted as the compliment it was.

“I think I can definitively say no, just so you know,” he observed as Lan Wangji lowered himself down to his knees. “I did not do anything like this with Wei Wuxian.”

“Did you ever want to?” Lan Wangji asked, mildly curious, and then he leaned down and put his mouth on Jiang Cheng’s cock.

“Am I supposed to be having a conversation with you about this?” Jiang Cheng demanded, thrashing underneath his ministrations. Lan Wangji had to hold his hips down with his hands, using a little force. “Now?”

Lan Wangji purposefully stopped moving.

“You are a piece of shit, you know that?” Fingers made their way into Lan Wangji’s hair, careful to avoid his forehead ribbon as they lightly tugged – hmm, that was rather nice, actually. Lan Wangji mentally noted down the preference. “Fine. Ugh. No, I didn’t. It wasn’t like that. It really did just start out innocent, you know. Us being boys and all, measuring the difference in size and all –”

Jiang Cheng paused and rolled his eyes down at Lan Wangji, who had perhaps overly demonstrated his interested in hearing more.

“– yes, you obsessed stalker, I’m getting there. He was longer, I was wider; we called it a tie. Later on, we got drunk and started talking about how we were both worried that we were doing it wrong, except, you know, that would have been way too embarrassing…you know how we were. It turned into a dumb sort of competition about who could do it better, which one of us was the one doing it wrong, who was doing it right – we got into a lot of stupid contests like that.”

A brief pause.

“Don’t say that I’m stating the obvious.”

Lan Wangji’s mouth was full, which was probably the only reason he wasn’t. He really had lost all sense of self-control when it came to deliberately irritating Jiang Cheng, and he wasn’t sure when that had happened. His uncle would be disappointed in him again.

Good.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Jiang Cheng muttered. He’d gotten into the groove of things, his hips rocking slightly as Lan Wangji sucked him, careful not to go too far or too fast for fear of making Lan Wangji gag again – though to be fair, that had been mostly Lan Wangji’s fault for being overly ambitious in trying to take him in too deep that time. The real thing really wasn’t anything like the jade pillar he’d practiced on. “This is ridiculous. You’d better never expect me to do this for you. No way.”

Lan Wangji didn’t bother responding.

“I mean, I guess if my hands were broken. It’s not like I couldn’t do it. I’ve put worse things in my mouth, over the years.”

No response was necessary. Jiang Cheng’s complex about needing to be the best at everything – or at least skilled enough to be respected – was truly a fearsome thing.

Though speaking of which...

Lan Wangji reached with one hand to pull over the small packet of thickened, scented oil that he’d obtained long ago, dipping his fingers into it and working one finger, then another, into Jiang Cheng.

“How do you even think of these things?” Jiang Cheng complained, because he wouldn’t be Jiang Cheng if he didn’t complain. “You must have done nothing but read spring books day and night – hey, wait! What are you doing? I’m going to be the one on top! Not you!”

Lan Wangji hummed and removed his mouth – Jiang Cheng whined in complaint – and then lifted one of Jiang Cheng’s legs, pressing his cock against him. He didn’t get a fist in the face, even when he rocked back and forth teasingly, his cock sliding right up to Jiang Cheng’s slicked-up entrance and then away.

“…just go ahead and do it already!”

Lan Wangji’s analytical mind temporarily blanked out when he pushed inside. It was hot and tight around him, squeezing him – it felt good. Very good.

“Fuck,” Jiang Cheng said. His voice was a little unstable, almost breathy. “Fuck.”

“If you insist,” Lan Wangji said, and began moving his hips before Jiang Cheng could correct him. Jiang Cheng grunted as if the sound had been punched out of him. Fucked out of him. “How is it?”

“Why are you asking me, don’t you already – Lan Wangji. You said the picture in the book was realistic.”

Lan Wangji hummed in agreement.

“I assumed that meant you’d done it before.”

That seemed like a Jiang Cheng problem.

“Lan Wangji! Are you saying you don’t know what you’re doing?!”

“I’ve read a lot of spring books,” Lan Wangji said dryly, and started to really put his back into it, long thrusts that felt fantastic to him and from the looks of it not all that bad to Jiang Cheng, either. After a few thrusts, he apparently hit the place described in the books, if he were judging by Jiang Cheng’s sudden moans and a notable increasing in generalized cursing, as opposed to cursing his name in specific.

Lan Wangji finished first, which increased the amount of cursing by a significant degree.

“I can’t believe you –!”

“Would you like to finish in my mouth?”

“It is,” Jiang Cheng hissed at him, “the very least you could do!”

Jiang Cheng was much less polite this time as he fucked his way into Lan Wangji’s mouth, his hands firmly gripping Lan Wangji’s hair and pulling him into place, forcing his way deeper with brutal snaps of his hips.

Despite having recently been wrung dry, Lan Wangji’s cock did its best to give an interested twitch, and Lan Wangji noted that down as well. Perhaps next time he should encourage Jiang Cheng to be the one on top, to see if he would enjoy the sensation more if it was someone else doing the fucking rather than a toy carved out of jade. After all, Jiang Cheng had certainly responded well enough to it.

Lan Wangji was moderately sure there would be another time. Jiang Cheng was not a man motivated by sex – remarkably so, in fact. If anything, he seemed to view physical pleasure, even at his own hand, as a perfectly decent activity, but nothing worth kicking up a fuss over, little different from a massage or a round of acupuncture; neither something especially desirable nor repulsive. As Jiang Cheng himself had admitted, he hadn’t experienced the touch of another since his youthful experimentation with Wei Wuxian, even though Lan Wangji was well aware that he’d received plenty of offers from all types of types of people over the years, and yet the lack hadn’t seemed to bother him.

If not for Lan Wangji, he probably would have continued on with his life without thinking about it any further, either, except perhaps in the theoretical box in his mind that he’d earmarked for having a wife, which he seemed to want only because everyone was expected to want a wife.

That competitive streak again.

But he did have Lan Wangji, who was not naturally inclined towards abstinence, and now that they’d opened the door to having a friendship that included certain additional benefits, he had no intention of shutting that door absent any indication from Jiang Cheng that it no longer suited him.

After all, Jiang Cheng might yet have a wife one day, assuming a patient enough marvel could be found – but Lan Wangji was a Lan, born and bred true, and he would only have one love in his life; he had fallen long ago, chosen long ago. Wei Wuxian was gone, and he would never regret it, nor love another. It had been living with Jiang Cheng, being friends with him, that had taught him to remember joy; what was this, then, but more of the same?

Of course, that was assuming that Jiang Cheng would agree in the future to sate Lan Wangji’s rather prodigious appetites with more than just his hand. He might not. After all, it really wasn’t his area of interest –

“Fuck,” Jiang Cheng abruptly said.

Lan Wangji, who was fetching a wet cloth, turned to look at him.

Jiang Cheng was propped up on his elbows, scowling bitterly. “You know what,” he said. “We didn’t even manage to do the right position! The one in the spring book was more – more twisty – you know – with the leg up in the air like that –”

“…mm,” Lan Wangji said. “We’ll do better next time.”

“You’re smirking,” Jiang Cheng said suspiciously. “Why are you smirking? What are you up to?!”

“Nothing,” Lan Wangji said peaceably, putting down the cloth and picking up the oil. “You’re right.”

“Of course I’m right! I’m – I’m not usually right. Or at least, you don’t normally admit it when I’m right. What am I right about?”

“Did it wrong,” Lan Wangji said, and settled down again. “Need to try again.”

“Try – wait, now? Already?! You can’t be serious!”

Lan Wangji started rearranging limbs. “You’re already prepared,” he pointed out. “‘Avoid needless waste.’”

“Don’t you quote your Lan sect rules at me, Lan Wangji! You’re inhuman! You’re – ah!”

He’d slid right in that time, Lan Wangji observed, all at once in a single smooth slide that made Jiang Cheng moan and his cock start to fill up again; the ease of it must be due to how relaxed Jiang Cheng’s body was after he’d come, and the slickness of both the oil left behind and the new amount he’d added. Definitely a different experience from the previous time, but equally enjoyable.

Well, as he’d said before – the Lan sect always did value a thorough approach to learning.

Chapter Text

The Lotus Pier was a free and unrestrained place in comparison with the Cloud Recesses, and there was no similar prohibition on raising pets. This was a good thing, largely because Lan Wangji had recently started to think of his little found family primarily in animal metaphors.

It was, he concluded, because of the way Mo Xuanyu followed Jiang Cheng around like an imprinted duckling, with stars in his eyes and an unfortunate tendency to try to emulate his actions while possessing exactly none of the temperament required to pull any of it off.

Indeed, watching him wheezing his way through a threat to break Jin Ling’s legs was a sight worth seeing, especially with Lan Sizhui patting him on the back and encouraging him when he temporarily got stuck stuttering on the word ‘legs’.

Jiang Cheng, for all his faults and imperfections, could be terrifying when he wished to be, the blood of the battlefields of the Sunshot Campaign forever impressed upon his bones; with Zidian to hand, he could look commanding and fearsome, decisive and harsh, and with his sharp looks and sharper scowl, he cut a fine picture - even if Lan Wangji knew the truth, that behind all that sharpness was the soul of a grumpy marshmallow.

Mo Xuanyu, with his wild thatch-like hair that couldn’t be controlled no matter their joint efforts and even wilder and far more questionable taste in appearance, couldn’t hope to match him, and really ought to stop trying.

Naturally, Jin Ling looked about as convinced about the threats as he ever was when Jiang Cheng said it, meaning of course that he didn’t care one whit, but despite their initial concerns, he took to Mo Xuanyu quite well. Lan Wangji was initially puzzled by it, given their conflicting personalities, but Jiang Cheng insightfully (for once) pointed out that it was most likely that Jin Ling was willing to forgive quite a lot in exchange for having another person dressed in Lanling Jin gold around to make him feel less awkward about it.

The two of them together were two little goldfinches strutting around in a sea of purple – or, perhaps more accurately, two golden roly-poly puppies bounding around, tails wagging, trying to befriend the Jiang sect’s army of sleek haughty purple cats. They were accompanied, of course, by a small, gentle crane with a most un-Lan-like taste for spicy fish with radishes and absolutely no head for water travel.

(They were working with Lan Sizhui on that. He lived in the Jiang sect now; he couldn’t spend his whole life being seasick!)

“What does that make you, then?” Jiang Cheng asked when Lan Wangji – after incessant prodding – mentioned his thoughts on the subject of their growing nest. “Master Rabbit?”

Lan Wangji glared, but didn’t object to the characterization; regardless of his personality, there was good reason to make the association. This was largely because Lan Xichen had recently embarked on a mission to capture the rabbits Lan Wangji had been – not raising, precisely, because pets were forbidden in the Cloud Recesses, but feeding on occasion when he had the time. He had brought them to Lan Wangji’s new “residence” at the Lotus Pier as a housewarming gift.

(Lan Wangji had no intention of moving out of Wei Wuxian’s bedroom, of course, but Jiang Cheng had long ago exercised his authority as sect leader to clear out the rooms just beyond it to create a small additional courtyard for him, in which he could exercise and meditate without being too far from the main quarters of the Jiang sect leader. As a result, the only change involved in his new, public, and above-board decision to reside in the Louts Pier was adding a new entranceway to make it appear as though they lived in separate albeit adjoining houses rather than living together in just one. Of course, it being the Lotus Pier, the new entranceway involved constructing not only a gate but a new bridge…)

“What exactly are we supposed to do with a bunch of rabbits?” Jiang Cheng had demanded at the time, staring down at them - there were rather more than Lan Wangji had remembered there being, but he supposed that was the nature of rabbits.

“I have no idea,” Lan Xichen had replied, smiling broadly. “But Wangji likes them.”

Lan Wangji had pretended that neither of them existed, and also that he was urgently needed elsewhere.

Later, Jiang Cheng had cornered him, demanding an explanation or else the rabbits would be sent down to the kitchens to be repurposed, and Lan Wangji had reluctantly confessed that they were from the burrow first established by the two wild rabbits Wei Wuxian had caught for him all those years ago.

Naturally there was no more talk of repurposing after that, and three sets of rabbit coops – far more than the rabbits Lan Wangji actually possessed required – mysteriously appeared in his small courtyard the next day.

“Wouldn’t want the stupid things to drown,” Jiang Cheng had grumbled when confronted with the evidence of his sentimentality. “If they attacked your garden and tried to burrow down they’d only hit water, and then where would we be? Awash in bunny corpses, that’s where, and that’s just unsanitary. I have a duty as sect leader to preserve the public health, you know.”

Lan Wangji had initially had some difficulty determining what type of animal Jiang Cheng was. He was as prickly as a porcupine, as standoffish as a hedgehog, as fickle as a cat, as graceful and vicious as an angry goose…

Recently, however, Lan Wangji had met a merchant from the south who had been selling a type of bird he called zishuiji, or purple swamphens – the merchant claimed that they were descended from the famous zhanniao, the poisonfeather zhen bird noted for their purple bellies, scarlet beaks, and deadly venom. Although Lan Wangji was moderately certain that the man was exaggerating for the sake of a sale, he had found himself compelled to purchase several sets to house in one of the empty rabbit coops, now moved to be placed in the main courtyard, nominally to be nearer to the waterways but mostly so that they’d be easily accessible to everyone - and, of course, to subtly harass Jiang Cheng.

It turned out that zishuiji could apparently be treated in much the same way as chickens. They were highly adaptable, but thrived best near water; they were generally shy around humans, but vicious in defending their territory, capable of biting and mobbing when provoked; and they preferred to raise their eggs with company –

Truly, he had found the right bird for Jiang Cheng.

(Not to mention the euphonious imagery of a purple hen strutting around with its purple lighting, zishuiji with zidian...truly, a picture meant for the ages. Lan Wangji determined at once to make a painting of it and insist Jiang Cheng hang it on some wall. Maybe even one of the ones in the main hall, where strangers could see.)

“Some of these are getting used for food,” Jiang Cheng insisted with a glare. “Some of the rabbits, too. There are no rules against the killing of livestock here, you hear me?”

Mo Xuanyu fell in love with them immediately – Jiang Cheng’s theory was that he was entranced by their iridescent feathers, while Lan Wangji’s view was that he recognized the innate Jiang Cheng-ness of them – and quickly took charge of their care, although Lan Sizhui and Jin Ling routinely assisted in collecting eggs.

Jiang Cheng reluctantly admitted, after some time, that the purchase had been a good one, if only because it served to settle their little awkward duckling into place, finally allowing Mo Xuanyu some sense of stability, as if having some type of small duty for which he was responsible was all he needed to believe that he wouldn’t be forced back to Lanling or to Mo village, his original place of origin, which he somehow feared even more than the backstabbing snakepit of Koi Tower.

(“You need to stop calling him a duckling,” Jiang Cheng said, quivering with laughter. “Do you know that could also mean…no, I’m not saying it. Anyway, he’s such an impressionable brat. Did you see what he did with that make-up he bought? He really does look a bit...”

From this, Lan Wangji inferred that the nickname was both extremely apt, extremely unfortunate, and had permanently stuck.)

In fact, despite initial concerns, it had been surprisingly comfortable to bring Mo Xuanyu into their lives at the Lotus Pier.

He was grateful and happy to be there, which helped; Lan Sizhui was welcoming, and Jin Ling somewhat reluctantly accepting, each for their own reasons, which helped more.

Best of all, he was at just the right age to be a regular disciple, and the current Jiang sect was especially welcoming to outsiders, having been cobbled together from a wide range of previously rogue cultivators and the small handful of survivors of the previous sect’s massacres. It improved Mo Xuanyu’s mood tremendously to be around boys and girls his own age, doing the same thing as them, without the weight of Lanling Jin’s expectations on his shoulders even if he sometimes wore their colors.

“He’s never going to be the most martially inclined,” Jiang Cheng opined after a small period of observation. “But he might make a decent administrator.”

Lan Wangji glanced at him sidelong in silent question, since Mo Xuanyu had not displayed any especially notable scholastic talents either. He had started cultivating fairly late, although obviously not as late as Jin Guangyao, but he lacked the other man’s genius for organization and management. Moreover, while his studies did admittedly exceeded the low bar set in Lan Wangji’s mind by Nie Huaisang’s miserable performance, that was a very low bar indeed.

(Nie Huaisang wasn’t stupid, he reminded himself once again. He was in fact extremely clever. And yet, even knowing what he knew, it was so easy to forget…)

“He’s kind and thoughtful of the well-being of others,” Jiang Cheng said, averting his gaze and pretending his cheeks weren’t tinting red. “Calligraphy and math, people skills, that can all be learned, but at least he has the important part down…I told you to stop doing that.”

Lan Wangji ignored him and continued to smile.

“Freak,” Jiang Cheng muttered, then shook his head. “I can’t believe anyone actually listens to you. Least of all me!”

Lan Wangji rolled his eyes. That part was Jiang Cheng’s own fault – he’d been using Lan Wangji as a sounding board more or less from the beginning, and started making him do some of his paperwork as soon as he’d been regularly awake for more than a shichen at a time under the barely plausible claim that it was good for him to exercise his hands. Now that Lan Wangji was officially out of seclusion, Jiang Cheng had promptly shoveled even more work at him – despite the fact that they were supposedly at each other’s throats.

The Jiang disciples that had not been in the loop – most of them, to Lan Wangji’s mild surprise – adjusted quickly, especially after they noticed the long-suffering expressions on the faces of Jiang Cheng’s immediate deputies. They had remained wary for a while, possibly expecting Lan Wangji to seek to implement the Lan sect rules at any moment, but after a time he had managed to win their confidence through his efficient administration and respect for their customs.

He did…rather a lot, actually. He reviewed the sect’s accounts along with Jiang Cheng, managed certain negotiations, oversaw the continuing reconstruction efforts, reviewed submitted proposals –

All things that the Lan sect did as well, but which had never come to him before. Lan Wangji suspected that in many cases, they did not even come to his brother or his uncle, who were nominally in charge of such things; the Lan sect disdained such worldly affairs, while the Jiang sect embraced them.

Although while he was on the subject of being above worldly affairs, it occured to him that he had not had an opportunity to take Bichen out recently, and it would be good to do so. He would need to come up with some excuse to insist on Jiang Cheng accompanying him for a night hunt sometime soon, some reason that would stand up to scrutiny from the outside.

As for convincing Jiang Cheng himself, however, that would be no problem.

“We are going night-hunting soon,” he informed Jiang Cheng, who looked appalled by the very thought.

“You’re joking, right?” he demanded. “Do you know how much work we have to do? The yearly update with the dyer’s guild is –”

“Not for another two months, and preparation typically takes only two weeks.”

“Reconstruction –”

“Does not require constant supervision at this stage.”

“The – there’s training –”

Lan Wangji attempted to convey his feelings on the validity of that excuse entirely through his facial expression, and it must have worked because Jiang Cheng crumbled at once, grumbling to himself.

“Who’ll we leave the children with?” he tried. “Especially with Xuanyu being so new – oh, all right. It’s weak and I know it, you don’t have to give me that judgmental look of yours.”

“If Jiang Wanyin believes that his skills have gotten so rusty that he would be unable to keep up…”

“I’m going to break your legs,” Jiang Cheng hissed at him. “I’m going to – to – oh, wait, actually, there is a reason we can’t go just yet. We’re expecting honored guests!”

Lan Wangji arched his eyebrows.

“You wouldn’t have seen the report yet, it’s still on our desk,” Jiang Cheng said. “You know of the Baixue Temple, right?”

Lan Wangji looked askance, indicating that he had of course heard of the temple, a renowned place of learning, but that he presumed that that was not what Jiang Cheng meant and also that perhaps Jiang Cheng would like to get to the point at some time before their deaths from old age.

“Fuck you too,” Jiang Cheng said conversationally, having learned the nuances of Lan Wangji’s expressions by now. “It was attacked recently, and rumor has it that it was Xue Yang that did it. Yes, the same Xue Yang who did the Chang clan massacre, the one the Jin sect was protecting before they washed their hands of him.”

Lan Wangji frowned.

“They made it through with relatively minimal casualties,” Jiang Cheng assured him. “Out of luck, mostly – when Xue Yang disappeared before his trial, the Nie sect made sure word got out everywhere, and Lianfeng-zun, who might’ve quashed it, even helped spread them, instead. From what I understand, Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen returned to Baixue Temple to make sure it wouldn’t be attacked over their part in Xue Yang’s initial arrest, as it later turned out to be - truly, evil is mundane and predictable. They led the defensive efforts and saved many lives.”

Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen –

Lan Wangji had heard Jiang Cheng speak of them before, of course. Rogue cultivators of considerable fame, who had refused all offers to join any of the sects, major or minor, but instead professed a desire to start a cultivation school of the old-fashioned sort, valuing affinity and merit over blood relation.

Not that that was what had caught the attention of Lan Wangj, or of Jiang Cheng for that matter.

Rather, it was said that Xiao Xingchen was a disciple of Baoshan Sanren, the famous immortal that lived secluded on the mountain. That made him Wei Wuxian’s martial uncle, and both of them were shamelessly interested in all things relating even tangentially to Wei Wuxian, however indirectly.

Jiang Cheng had sent several invitations for a visit back when the Chang clan disaster had happened. None had been accepted, which was probably all for the best – he had had to stop inviting them on account of how they’d angered the Jin sect over the matter.

(It had caused Jiang Cheng no end of nightmares, the feeling of complicity in a massacre just like the one that had destroyed his own sect sending him into a spiral of self-hatred, questioning his own morality and righteousness, wondering if his ancestors were judging him and finding him wanting, wondering if Wei Wuxian was –

It had not been a good time, a thankfully temporary reversion back to the bad days closer to the start. But Jiang Cheng was better now.)

“Why accept an invitation now?” Lan Wangji asked.

“They’re planning on hunting him down, I think, and having learned a little bit from last time, they want to get as many allies on board as possible in advance,” Jiang Cheng said, and shook his head at the depressing need to account for worldly politics when seeking to live a righteous life. A lesson hard-learned, for both of them. “They wrote to me first, this time. In return, I plan to indicate that they are welcome to come to the Lotus Pier to try to convince me – we’ll agree to help them, of course, but it’ll be nice to share a meal with them. Maybe some stories.”

“Mm,” Lan Wangji said. “And entertainment, of course.”

Jiang Cheng looked at him.

“We should take them night-hunting,” Lan Wangji elaborated, and Jiang Cheng scowled at him.

“There are oxen less stubborn than you! Donkeys! Geese!”

Lan Wangji was not a goose. A crane, perhaps, like Lan Sizhui – gentle and graceful and well-educated, with a sharp beak that most people overlooked.

He suspected Jiang Cheng would argue instead for the goose.

“I will write to my brother,” he said, opting to change the subject. “Xue Yang is a sensitive subject for his sworn brothers, as you know. It would be best to prepare him should they resume their fight with each other.”

“Oh, that’s just what we need,” Jiang Cheng grumbled. “Lianfeng-zun and Chifeng-zun at each other’s throats again…did I tell you about the series of small but extremely irritating disasters that happened that time I was at Koi Tower? The room flooding, the too-thick incense, the – the thing with the cat –”

“I also recall you coming back from a night-hunt with Chifeng-zun with an expression suggesting that someone had put the fear of death into you, yes,” Lan Wangji said.

“It’s Chifeng-zun. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you avoiding any circumstances where he could have the same talk with you!”

Lan Wangji did not deny it. As he was not a sect leader, he could avoid such things with much greater ease than poor Jiang Cheng – who was glaring again.

“You should try harder to get along with him,” he remarked, and Jiang Cheng’s eyes narrowed even further. “You have many things in common –”

“Lan Wangji. You are, as A-Yuan’s father, permitted to set up as many playdates for him as you’d like. You are not permitted to do the same for me.”

Lan Wangji nodded, indicating that would give that all the consideration it deserved, namely none.

Jiang Cheng made a sound not unlike the whistling of a boiling pot.

Lan Wangji decided that a triumphant but timely retreat was appropriate.

Chapter Text

In Lan Wangji’s view, the best part about the upcoming visit by Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen wasn’t the excuse to drag a tetchy and reluctant Jiang Cheng night-hunting, nor the chance to meet such interesting and swiftly famous cultivators, or even the vanishingly rare opportunity to learn more about Wei Wuxian by exploring his heritage on his mother’s side.

No – it was definitely the way the mere concept transformed Jiang Cheng into a stuttering teenaged admirer about to see their revered idol for the first time.

“You remember that they are both nearly ten years your junior?” he asked as Jiang Cheng fussed around, alternating between worrying himself sick for not being prepared to receive guests (for all that the Jiang sect had been receiving honored guests for years at this point) and bragging about the exploits of their soon-arriving guests to the fascinated flock of children dogging his heels.

“No more than seven or eight at most,” Jiang Cheng objected, and Lan Wangji rolled his eyes. “Anyway, that’s not the point. Look at how accomplished they both are! When I was that age, I hadn’t done anything!”

Lan Wangji didn’t think that was entirely right. When Jiang Cheng had been the age Xiao Xingcheng and Song Zichen were now, he’d endured the loss of his sect and rebuilt it from nothing, acting more or less singlehandedly while still finding time to fight the Wen sect shoulder-to-shoulder with the other Great Sects and also search for the missing Wei Wuxian with Lan Wangji.

He opted not to mention it.

Let Jiang Cheng keep his illusions and ignore the steady encroachment of time.

“You’re calling me old in your head,” Jiang Cheng said accusingly, and Lan Wangji pasted an innocent expression on his face as confirmation. “You are, you bastard! You know you’re older than me, right?”

Lan Wangji could get a great deal of out of an admission like that.

“That’s not what I meant! We’re peers, you…!” Jiang Cheng huffed. “Listen, you’d better be on your best behavior around our guests, all right? I don’t want them to be scared off just because it looks like you’re glowering whenever you think –”

“I’ll follow your example, then, and simply not think at all.”

“Go jump off a pier!”

The children all giggled.

“You’re all going to be on best behavior too,” Jiang Cheng told them, fierce as a hissing domestic cat and just as adorably toothless. “You hear me? All of you! A-Yuan, A-Ling, that means you’re going to be cute but not spoiled, while A-Yu can – actually, just do the same as them in an age-appropriate way, you’re cute enough –”

Mo Xuanyu beamed.

“Still, we don’t know what they’re like. Start by being a little reserved – not too loud –”

Lan Sizhui waved for attention as if they were in a classroom.

“…yes?” Jiang Cheng asked, looking vaguely resigned and grumpy in a way that was clearly meant to conceal how unbearably charming he found the gesture.

“Can I be called Sizhui this time?” Lan Sizhui asked eagerly. “I’m old enough!”

Jiang Cheng frowned a bit, and Lan Wangji understood. The Jiang sect generally didn’t use courtesy names until the child in question had mastered a full sword routine, usually age eight or nine, and close family almost never made the switch in full; from what Lan Wangji knew, Jiang Yanli had called Jiang Cheng ‘A-Cheng’ right up until the end of her life, not to mention referring routinely to Wei Wuxian, who she’d only met when he was already old enough to use his courtesy name, as ‘A-Xian’. The Lan sect, in contrast, started using courtesy names almost exclusively once a child was old enough to leave his parents, typically age three or four – Lan Wangji had been calling Lan Sizhui by name for years already, and had been needling Jiang Cheng to pick it up as well without success.

“I’ll introduce you,” Lan Wangji offered, saving Jiang Cheng the awkwardness of having to explain or decline or, worst of all for someone like Jiang Cheng, accidentally slip up and say something sappy like you’ll always be A-Yuan to me.

Lan Sizhui nodded, satisfied, and next to him, Jin Ling frowned. “What about me?” he asked. “Am I going to be Rulan?”

“The Jin sect is the last of the Great Sects in using courtesy names,” Jiang Cheng said, finally on more solid ground. “Not until you get your sword, and that’s not until you’re eleven. Or twelve!”

“But I already have a sword…”

“The age you would be if you were getting your own,” Lan Wangji interjected. “To make it fair to all the rest.”

That seemed to reassure Jin Ling, who nodded. “Good,” he grumbled. “I don’t wanna be Rulan, anyway…jiujiu, when did you say these guests would be arriving?”

That, of course, sent Jiang Cheng back into a flurry of activity, and Lan Wangji shook his head, long-suffering. “You’ve hosted entire discussion conferences,” he pointed out to Jiang Cheng. “There are only two cultivators this time. It is far easier.”

“Is it?” Jiang Cheng shot back. “Is it really?”

In contrast to the expectation and build up leading up to it, the actual arrival of Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen was rather unremarkable. They arrived just as the sun was setting, two young men, one beautiful and the other handsome, both valiant heroes with faces that shone with kindness and righteousness. Xiao Xingchen’s face was curved in a gentle smile, Song Zichen set in a neutral expression. Both seemed sincere and respectful when they bowed deeply in greeting.

“It’s a pleasure and honor to host such heroes,” Jiang Cheng said, nodding his head regally in return. He really had at some point learned how to fake being a competent and confident sect leader, and it might have even had the effect he was going for if it wasn’t for the small gaggle of children very eagerly stealing peeks from next to him – but Lan Wangji wasn’t going to be the one to tell on them. “I’ve heard many stories of your adventures, and I have long looked forward to meeting you in person. My Lotus Pier is open to you for as long as you require.”

“Sect Leader Jiang is upright and straightforward, well known for his righteousness,” Xiao Xingchen said, and perhaps only Lan Wangji knew precisely why Jiang Cheng flushed with such pleasure at a compliment more commonly applied to Nie Mingjue. “We are happy to be here as your guests.”

Jiang Cheng nodded a second time, still a little stiff and wooden. “You have traveled quite a distance. Are you tired or hungry..?”

They shook their heads in refusal.

Jiang Cheng darted a glance at Lan Wangji, then turned back to them, finally relaxing out of the excess formality that suited Jin Guangshan far more than it did Jian Cheng. “In that case,” he said, his voice a little dry. “Upon the suggestion of certain of my advisors, would you prefer to cut the boring small talk and go out on a night-hunt instead?”

Xiao Xingchen’s face split into a genuine smile, and even Song Zichen’s severity seemed a little eased.

“What an excellent idea, Sect Leader Jiang,” Xiao Xingchen said warmly. “We’d be happy to. I was just telling Song Zichen not long ago that it seemed as though we hadn’t been on a proper hunt in far too long.”

“You think you have problems, try being a sect leader,” Jiang Cheng replied impulsively, then turned red when he realized how rude he’d just been. “That is, I mean – well, there’s not nearly as much free time, that’s all.”

Xiao Xingchen laughed. It gave Lan Wangji a good impression of him: light-hearted and lively, his demeanor kind and good-humored. Despite the lack of blood relation, Lan Wangji was reminded of Wei Wuxian – although perhaps that was just his wistful thinking.

“Well, there’s a reason Zichen and I haven’t started our own just yet,” he said mischievously. “There’s time for that later, after all. Youth is when you make a name for yourself! And speaking of which, I’ve heard plenty about your own prowess, Sandu Shengshou. I admit I’m looking forward to seeing Zidian in action.”

Jiang Cheng looked unbearably pleased at the compliment, clearly sincerely meant, and something in Lan Wangji’s heart that he hadn’t even known was tense finally eased.

He hadn’t realized that he himself was nervous about this meeting – less for his own sake, although he burned with curiosity to learn everything he could about Wei Wuxian, than for Jiang Cheng, who had longed for this meeting so much, cared so much. Lan Wangji found to his bemusement that he had even been a little afraid: afraid that the two strangers would be cold or arrogant, afraid that they’d reject Jiang Cheng tentative overtures of friendship – that Jiang Cheng would be disappointed.

Lan Wangji might enjoy teasing Jiang Cheng into a frenzy, but that was his prerogative. In fact, one could argue that it was only what he was due for having lived with and put up with the man for so long. He’d been the one who’d been there all this time, the one who’d put in so much effort to help rebuild him back into the man he could be rather than the wreck he had been; he’d earned the right to mock him.  

No one else was entitled to so much as touch the hem of his robes.

“I have heard much of your matchless skill as well, Hanguang-jun,” Song Zichen said, his voice unexpectedly deep, and Lan Wangji’s attention came back to him as he returned the man’s salute. They both had reputations for being closed-mouthed ice-blocks, and it seemed to Lan Wangji that Song Zichen was probably just reserved, like him, rather than truly standoffish.

“You’re in for a treat, then,” Jiang Cheng said with a faint smirk. “Whether in sword or music, few can match Hanguang-jun’s talents, and he never stints on displaying them.”

To the untried ear, perhaps Jiang Cheng sounded bitter or jealous, and given his competitive mania he probably was, a little, but to Lan Wangji he sounded more smug than anything else, as proud as if he were the one being praised.

With everything settled, they headed off at once.

The subject of the night-hunt was nothing terribly exciting – a troop of fierce corpses ravaging the countryside that someone had finally managed to divine the location of, with the only interesting aspect about them being that they were unusually fast-moving – so there was plenty of time for them to talk as they followed the trail.

Lan Wangji expected Jiang Cheng to start asking questions about the immortal mountain and Wei Wuxian’s mother at once – Jiang Cheng might be prideful and thin-faced, prone to shame and overthinking, but he’d been raised along Wei Wuxian, who was second to none in shamelessness, and Lan Wangji was well aware of how much he hungered for that knowledge.

Of course, probably as a direct result of Lan Wangji’s expectations, Jiang Cheng went for a completely different target.

“It’s said that we live in an age of young heroes,” he remarked, seemingly casual. “Of course, for most of us, that was simply the inevitable result of war – crisis demands the best from people, regardless of age. Without such necessity to spur us onwards, most of us probably would’ve been still kicking our heels even now, whereas you two became heroes as soon as you arrived…how old are you now, again?”

“We are both twenty-one,” Song Zichen said, and Lan Wangji used the moment to glare over at Jiang Cheng when he mouthed six years at him – was this really the time to quibble over something as pointless as the exact age gap between them, which he’d clearly inquired about for no other purpose than to prove Lan Wangji’s earlier assumption wrong? This was Wei Wuxian’s martial uncle here! They should be getting all the information out of him that they could!

(Lan Wangji had long ago decided that when it came to feuding over minor matters with Jiang Cheng, he would be as gracious in defeat as his opponent…which was to say, not at all.)

Jiang Cheng smirked at him, knowing what he was thinking, but then – finally – turned the subject onto the immortal mountain, or more specifically its former disciples.

This time it was Song Zichen’s turn to relax minutely, Lan Wangji noticed. A moment’s thought revealed the reason: they’d probably feared cultivators asking questions that were far more pointed than what they were getting from them – cultivators greedy for the secrets of immortality. No wonder they so assiduously avoided being hosted by the Great Sects, and had done so even before Lanling Jin had gotten in the way of their heroism.

Well, luckily for them, the interest Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji had was a little more…down to earth.

“Cangse Sanren was a talent to shake the ages,” Xiao Xingchen said, his eyes bright and expression enthusiastic. “It was as if anything she turned her mind to, she excelled at, and she turned her mind to all sorts of things without discrimination – painting, poetry, swordsmanship…” He paused, then firmed his shoulders. “I heard that her son was much the same..?”

Lan Wangji felt a smile want to come up to his lips.

It seemed that Xiao Xingchen was just as interested in finding out more about his martial nephew as they were in finding out more about Wei Wuxian’s martial uncle.

Jiang Cheng glanced over at Lan Wangji, who nodded very shallowly, indicating his approval. In his judgment, both of them seemed safe enough: trustworthy, and not like people who would spread gossip.

They could talk about Wei Wuxian.

Talk truly about him, praising his good points and speaking fondly of his faults…these two, Lan Wangji thought, wouldn’t judge them harshly for failing to condemn him, and they wouldn’t tell anyone else, either.

Later, after they’d finished dispatching the ghouls – and the Wei Wuxian portion of the conversation, for which Jiang Cheng had taken the lead and which a listening Lan Wangji had enjoyed tremendously, largely on account of Xiao Xingchen’s genuine enthusiasm for learning everything he could about the martial nephew he had only just barely missed meeting, fearsome Yiling Patriarch or not – Jiang Cheng finally and regretfully brought them back to the original subject.

“I heard that you two are collecting allies to go after Xue Yang,” he said, and pretended (just as Lan Wangji did) to ignore the way Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen suddenly glanced at each other. “I’ll support that, of course. From everything I’ve heard, he’s become a mad dog, trying to bite anyone he sees. Hasn’t he been launching all sorts of raids on sects left and right these past few years?”

They nodded.

“Rather pointless ones,” Song Zichen said, a deep frown on his face. “He runs in and causes chaos, then flees into the night – he barely even stops to kill people, and almost never steals treasures. At most he goes to make trouble by defacing the walls of some of the ancestral tombs…we can see no sense in it. The only explanation is that his demonic cultivation has in fact driven him mad.”

Demonic cultivation didn’t necessarily drive a person mad. That was something Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng had painfully learned over the years, much to Jiang Cheng’s distress. However, it certainly didn’t help maintain calmness or peace of mind; there was every chance that a delinquent like Xue Yang had had his temperament worsened by demonic cultivation, leading to his present circumstances.

“Indeed,” Jiang Cheng said noncommittally. “I really have only question for you, then.”

Knowing where this was going, Lan Wangji turned his gaze on their guests’ expression.

“Haven’t you been chasing him on your own for all these years now, trying to get him to go to trial for his crimes, refusing any offers of help?” Jiang Cheng asked, his voice suddenly pointed. “Why the sudden change in favor of asking for help now?”

Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen shared another long look between them.

Finally, Xiao Xingchen cleared his throat. “In truth,” he said, “we spread that rumor as a smokescreen. We’re not looking for allies, generally speaking…we really only wanted a reason to ask for your help.”

Jiang Cheng stopped and stared, visibly surprised. Lan Wangji kept his expression more neutral, but privately he was just as taken aback; when they’d discussed this earlier, planning out this conversation in advance, that wasn’t even remotely one of the possibilities they’d considered.

“My help?” Jiang Cheng asked cautiously. “Or…?”

“Yours and Hanguang-jun,” Song Zichen said. “We weren’t sure who else to turn to.”

“What’s the issue?” Jiang Cheng asked, waving a hand to halt their forward progress. A good idea, in Lan Wangji’s view: it was the middle of the night, and they were in the middle of the forest in the back hills near the Lotus Pier, with no one around for a good distance except for trusted Jiang sect disciples – if there needed to be privacy for this discussion, this was the best place for it.

Another shared glance.

Lan Wangji slanted a glance of his own to Jiang Cheng, who returned it: they’d been right, there really was something unusual with this visit.

They stood in silence for a while.

Finally, Xiao Xingchen yielded. “Very well,” he said, and met Jiang Cheng’s eyes. “Sect Leader Jiang…can you tell us what you know about the Ghost General?”

Jiang Cheng stiffened, his fists clenching.

Lan Wangji’s heart felt just as stiff. He stepped forward.

“There are many people who can tell you about Wen Ning,” he said neutrally, watching them carefully. “Assuming that what you wish to know is how he fought or his transformation into a conscious fierce corpse. Is your concern that Xue Yang has replicated the technique and created his own ghost general?”

He didn’t think it would be that. As he’d said, everyone knew what Wen Ning had done once he’d become the Ghost General – the Jin sect would know far better than either of them how fearsome he was, since it was at Jinlin Tower that he had erupted in his final massacre. If they wanted to know about fierce corpses in general, they could go there.

To come here, to Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji – the only two people who were known to have gone up to the Yiling Burial Mounds while Wei Wuxian lived there with Wen Ning at his side, the only living people who knew what the Ghost General was like when he wasn’t being a weapon, to know what Wen Ning was like as a person – suggested something different.

Something impossible.

Xiao Xingchen met his eyes. “It is not.”

“Wen Ning was destroyed,” Jiang Cheng said, his voice tight and unsteady. “He murdered my brother-in-law, my nephew’s father, and when Lanling Jin demanded his head as retribution, he and his sister went to them under pretense of surrender and murdered even more of them before they were taken down. He was destroyed.”

They said nothing.

“The former Sect Leader Jin was very interested in demonic cultivation,” Lan Wangji said slowly. “While Wei Wuxian lived, he sought to claim the Stygian Tiger Seal. When he died…”

He glanced at Jiang Cheng a second time. They had not discussed the subject of the Siege of the Burial Mounds in any detail, as it inevitably put Jiang Cheng into a terrible frame of mind, and Lan Wangji remembered with a shudder the state they had both been in at that fateful meeting – he didn’t want to remember it himself, much less bring back bad memories for Jiang Cheng.

They certainly hadn’t discussed the subject of spoils. The only thing that had ever brought it to mind was the silent presence of Chenqing lying in place of pride in the Jiang sect’s memorial hall as the substitute for the memorial tablet they could not afford to raise for Wei Wuxian.

It hadn’t seemed relevant.

It was now.

“Sect Leader Jin took it,” Jiang Cheng confirmed, his voice shaking a little. “The Stygian Tiger Seal was broken in two, and Wei Wuxian destroyed one of the halves – the Jin sect claimed the other, saying that they were going to destroy it. I think they took more than that, too…I know they took Suibian, but they also took all the papers that’d been left in the cave. I always suspected that that was why they were so protective of Xue Yang, who was a demonic cultivator himself – that Jin Guangshan wanted to squeeze him for information, or maybe even use him to figure out some of Wei Wuxian’s notes…”

His voice trailed off, and he shook his head furiously.

“Wen Ning was destroyed,” he insisted. “The Jin sect scattered his ashes! They – they…”

“They lied,” Song Zichen said.

Lan Wangji pressed his lips together. He had no particularly warm feelings towards Wen Ning, who had been Wei Wuxian’s shadow in that last year or so of life when Wei Wuxian had turned his back on the world – a position Lan Wangji would have given his left arm to have, and over which he had had all sorts of inappropriate feelings of envy and stifled, unjustified possessiveness – but Jiang Cheng took the man’s existence far more personally.

In Jiang Cheng’s view, it had been for Wen Ning that Wei Wuxian had stolen the Wen sect remnants, for Wen Ning that Wei Wuxian had abjured his relationship with the Jiang sect and Jiang Cheng himself, for Wen Ning that Wei Wuxian had given up everything, and yet simultaneously it had also been Wen Ning that had pushed him to the very brink and over. Wen Ning who had murdered Jin Zixuan – Wen Ning who Wei Wuxian had so brutally avenged in the massacre at the Nightless City, at which Jiang Yanli had died.

Wen Ning, who they thought had been destroyed.

“We believe that the former Sect Leader Jin hid Wen Ning away instead of destroying him, then gave Xue Yang access to him, just as he did with the Tiger Seal and Wei Wuxian’s notes,” Xiao Xingchen said, his face solemn. “We also believe that Xue Yang took Wen Ning away with him when he escaped Jinlin Tower once the former sect leader died and the current sect leader took over. We believe that he has been controlling him through demonic cultivation, using him as something of an – accomplice, or something of the sort.”

“Controlling him how?” Jiang Cheng asked. They paused, and he continued, “I’m not stupid. You’re very sure that Wen Ning’s not gone, which means you located him and saw something that made you think so. What was it?”

Lan Wangji nodded shallowly, approving of Jiang Cheng’s deduction – and of the self-mastery he was demonstrating in not exploding in rage on the spot.

“He had nails in his head,” Xiao Xingchen said. “He…the Ghost General was mindless and unthinking, but strong. Very strong. He…”

He trailed off, and shook his head, seeming a bit sad.

“What help do you require from us?” Lan Wangji said, suddenly sick of the tension, and he saw Jiang Cheng throw him a look full of relief for having raised the question.

“Hanguang-jun is right,” Jiang Cheng said, backing him up at once. He crossed his arms over his chest. “What do you need us for? You two are heroes, and half the cultivation world would sell their firstborn child for a chance to bring down the Ghost General to increase their fame – there’s no way you came here just to get our help in bringing him down. If that’s what you wanted, it wouldn’t have needed to be us, and there wouldn’t have needed to be a smokescreen. What do you want?”

“We want to heal him,” Xiao Xingchen said solemnly. “To bring back his consciousness and return his sanity. But we don’t know what he was like, before Xue Yang. The only ones that do are the two of you.”

“You do remember that he killed my brother-in-law?” Jiang Cheng asked, his voice sharp.

“At Wei Wuxian’s order,” Song Zichen responded, equally sharp. “You do not blame the sword for the men it kills.”

Lan Wangji closed his eyes briefly, in pain at the reminder. He took a breath, steadying himself, and then another.

He opened his eyes.

“We will help,” he said, and ignored the betrayed look Jiang Cheng shot his way. They would talk about it later, and he would help Jiang Cheng see that this was what they had to do, no matter how painful. “And we will not betray the secret of his existence.”

“Thank you,” Xiao Xingchen said, and saluted deeply; Song Zichen did as well. “And yet, we have more we would ask of you.”

“Spit it out, then,” Jiang Cheng growled.

“Finding Wen Ning had shown us that Xue Yang’s actions have gone truly beyond the pale, beyond redemption,” Song Zichen said, and his voice was fierce. That wasn’t surprising: it had been his childhood home, his master and fellow disciples, that Xue Yang had attacked. “He is, as you said, a mad dog, biting all that he can – I believe that Wen Ning was his only companion as he fled, chased by the whole cultivation world these past few years. I fear what Xue Yang will do now that his last connection to humanity is gone. He is capable of anything.”

“We must find him,” Xiao Xingchen agreed. “We must find Xue Yang, and we must stop him from doing – whatever it is that he will do next. I cannot even begin to imagine the atrocities he might perpetrate. And so we must ask…”

“Fine,” Jiang Cheng said, and they both looked at him, surprised. “We’ll help you heal Wen Ning, and we’ll even help you hunt down Xue Yang. But this time, no excuses, no dragging your feet, no waiting for a proper trial, nothing like that. He dies, you hear me? Xue Yang is to be killed on sight!”

“I agree,” Lan Wangji said, folding his hands together behind his back. He had helped Jiang Cheng in pursuing and judging demonic cultivators before – there were those that could be granted mercy, and those for whom the only just answer was death; time and too many second chances had made inescapably clear that Xue Yang was the latter. “Each time you have sought to bring him to trial, he has taken advantage of your devotion to justice to escape.”

Xiao Xingchen looked at Song Zichen, who nodded firmly; a moment later, Xiao Xingchen sighed and nodded himself. “Agreed,” he said. “You will help us?”

“We will,” Jiang Cheng said grimly, and Lan Wangji nodded in full support. “It would be a pleasure to wipe that trash off the face of this earth.”

-

The town was full of mist and fog, choking the throat and making it hard to breathe or see; the feng shui of the entire valley was as bad as could be, and there was more miasma than there was air.

“You there, drunkard, what are you doing!” someone shouted at a figure lying halfway in the door of a house that was filled to the brim with coffins. “Don’t mock our livelihood! Just because it’s a coffin house doesn’t make it a good place to play dead!”

The figure stirred.

But I’m not playing dead, he thought, rubbing his aching head with one hand, noticing that he seemed to be missing his little finger. I actually was dead, wasn’t I?

Wei Wuxian opened his eyes.

Chapter Text

In the shichen or so since he’d woken up, Wei Wuxian had reached several conclusions.

First: he had, in fact, been dead.

Also, it must have been at least a few years since he’d died, since no one was talking about him even in a town with feng shui as terrible as this. Before he’d died, the Yiling Patriarch had been a watchword for all things bad regardless of whether or not he had anything to do with it, but the people in this obscure “Yi City” seemed perfectly content to suffer through their catastrophes without cursing his name. The most he’d heard were some kids playing out a few outdated copies of stories about him and one random passerby with not enough to do chattering to his dining companion about the utility of the compass of evil.

Second, Wei Wuxian had not, as he’d temporarily feared, gone off and snatched a body when he wasn’t paying attention. Rather, an investigation of the coffin house he’d found himself in revealed traces of the ancient forbidden technique of offering a body, which used incisions on the body of the summoner to call forth an extremely villainous spirit and force it to grant their wish. Based on the bloody inscriptions and marks on his body – his new body, which was a little shorter and skinnier than his old one, and was irritatingly missing the little finger on his left hand to boot – the person whose body this had previously been had in fact decided to call on Wei Wuxian all on his lonesome, no body-snatching required.

Never mind that Wei Wuxian wasn’t an extremely villainous spirit. Really, he’d been minding his own business, quite happy never to bother anyone ever again, before this brat had shown up.

Third, as far as Wei Wuxian could tell, the previous owner of this body?

Was completely insane.

“You couldn’t have left something a little more coherent to tell me what task I’m supposed to fulfil?” Wei Wuxian complained, digging through the coffin house for clues. “Or your name, for instance?!”

A diary would be best, really. Something that conveniently laid out a little bit of background about the body, some context as to the circumstances that led the previous owner to use such a dire ritual, maybe a strong hint regarding what type of revenge was wanted – out of the three or four times the ritual had been used, to Wei Wuxian’s knowledge, the reason had always been revenge.

Yes, something like that would have been helpful. You can’t have revenge without a motive or a target, after all.

But no.

Instead, Wei Wuxian was left with one long incision on his forearm, a handful of completely incoherent scribblings about demonic cultivation that had something to do with nails, an uncooperative black spiritual sword named disaster – Jiangzai, according to the inscription, and really, if Wei Wuxian couldn’t figure anything else out about his body’s former owner, he could at least determine that he must have been an arrogant little punk – and, of course, a single word scrawled on a wall in blood.

FIND.

“Find who,” Wei Wuxian groaned, glaring at it as if it had personally offended him. “Male? Female? Human? And what am I supposed to do when I find them, anyway – kill them, kiss them? What in the world was so important that you’d give up your life to see it done?”

At least the demonic cultivation suggested why he’d picked Wei Wuxian to resurrect. A lot of the scribbled notes were on subjects very familiar to Wei Wuxian: the compass of evil, the spirit-summoning talismans…even the Stygian Tiger Seal. As far as Wei Wuxian could tell, the demonic cultivator who’d resurrected him had once been tasked with the job of repairing the damn thing, which ought to have been impossible without Wei Wuxian’s unexpected turn of luck in finding an ancient sword filled to the brim with resentment, but it seemed like with enough resources the brat who’d once had this body had actually made a considerable bit of headway on doing just that.

He was a genius, like Wei Wuxian, and a genius of demonic cultivation in specific. One could even say that he’d been shaping himself by taking Wei Wuxian as his model.

He was an admirer.

Ugh.

Wei Wuxian supposed that under those circumstances what happened made a certain amount of sense. Sure, if a crazed fan were going to bring back an evil spirit and they could only pick one, fine, it was reasonable that he’d choose bring back Wei Wuxian, whether or not Wei Wuxian wanted to be brought back – only he’d clearly severely overestimated Wei Wuxian’s cleverness, or maybe assumed that the body offering ritual would automatically include a section on instructing the summoned spirit, because Wei Wuxian had no idea what his next step was.

He didn’t even know what the brat’s name was.

Sure, he had the sword’s name, but he’d never heard of anyone with a sword named Jiangzai. Now, Wei Wuxian knew his memory wasn’t exactly the greatest, and that last year or so he’d spent completely isolated on the Burial Mounds meant he wasn’t exactly up to date on the most attractive young masters list or other such important news (he assumed he’d been dropped off of it, but then again, female cultivators could be a bit strange – he might’ve gone up!), but on the other hand, Jiangzai was the sort of name that would stick in your head.

Largely on account of making you snigger at the owner’s presumption, but still!

(It didn’t help that Jiangzai utterly refused to accept Wei Wuxian as its master, however temporarily. At least he was already used to not being able to fly from place to place…)

It had briefly occurred to Wei Wuxian that perhaps the reason he didn’t recognize it was because of the number of years since his demise – he still had no idea how long it had been, since no one had come up to talk to him and perhaps conveniently drop in a reference to the number of years since the Yiling Patriarch met his demise – but a moment later he recovered his wits, thinking to himself that there was no way that the previous owner of his body would have been able to gather so much information about him and his inventions if too much time had passed. There was no way it had been a hundred years; undoubtedly, it was less than twenty.

By now, he’d scoured the entire coffin house for clues, and just about the only things he’d figured out were that threefold:

First, he wanted to punch the former owner.

Second, wearing the somewhat ostentatious black glove with the false finger the original owner owned was in fact more comfortable than not wearing it, even if it did make him feel a little pretentious.

Third, someone else had previously lived in the coffin house alongside the original owner, and one of the two of them had, as far as he could tell, existed for the sole purpose of obtaining and maybe eating candy.

There were a lot of empty candy wrappers.

Well, whoever it was, they hadn’t come back yet, and it’d been practically half the day gone already. That suggested that they probably weren’t going to come back…and possibly were the person that Wei Wuxian was supposed to “find”.

Just then, while Wei Wuxian was standing in front of the message once again, contemplating his next move, his stomach abruptly growled. He was reminded of the fact that his new body apparently did not practice inedia to any reasonable degree, and therefore required food.

Maybe I’ll find more clues at the market, Wei Wuixan decided, rubbing his belly and thinking dark thoughts about the former owner’s lack of consideration in not having anything left at home. Ideally, he’d like to be subtle about his resurrection for the time being to avoid problems. Still, maybe if he went out, he’d be lucky enough to find someone who would take one look at him and immediately say something along the lines of “Oh, hey, I know you! Your name is So-and-So and your lineage is the This-and-That sect and you’ve always wanted revenge on that person for that thing with the stuff –”

…that was probably a little too optimistic.

But markets had gossip, and maybe he’d luck out and find some gossipers going “Oh look there’s that poor nine-fingered child again, the one who really hates those people in particular” or something like that, anything, just some hint to get him started. After all, based on the incision on his arm – luckily just the one – he really did have to get around to handling the brat’s wishes, or else his soul would be destroyed. He needed answers!

As for whether the market would be the place to get them…well, only one way to find out.

“Are you one of the new cultivators in town?” one of the street food vendors asked him, eyeing his sword. “To take care of the corpse poison problem?”

Wei Wuxian once again cursed the original owner in his mind. Who sacrificed their body in a town where nobody even knew who they were?!

“Maybe,” he hedged, and leaned forward with his best charming smile. “Could you tell me a little more about that corpse poison problem? What’s the problem, exactly?”

It turned out that while Yi City had always been a place with terrible feng shui, beset by ominous and dangerous rolling fogs that would rapidly sweep in and make the entire place virtually opaque, some of those fogs had recently started carrying corpse poison – a dangerous powder created from walking corpses, and capable of slowly turning its victims into walking corpses as well. And those walking corpses, naturally, would go on to infect others…

In short, the villagers had sent out messages begging for help.

“There aren’t any cultivator clans nearby, or even any Watchtowers,” the food-seller said, and Wei Wuxian briefly wondered what a watchtower was, since the careful pronunciation suggested that it probably didn’t mean what he thought it meant. “And it’s been getting to the point that people are afraid to leave their houses. But recently lots of cultivators have shown up – we don’t really see them, though, they don’t come by the town. They all just head straight up the mountain.”

“Then I’m sure they’re dealing with the issue,” Wei Wuxian reassured him. “It sounds like a regular night-hunt.”

If a bit esoteric, and rather dangerous. Corpse poison could affect cultivators as well as regular people, and it could unsettle the mind as well, distracting the victim from taking steps to cure themselves.

“Have you been making glutinous rice to treat the victims?” he asked, accepting a few skewers from the food-seller. “It’s a folk remedy.”

“When we can get to them in time,” the seller agreed. “If it’s just inhalation, it’s fine, everyone’s got a pot of congee going more or less constantly as a matter of public health, and if someone can’t afford rice, they can borrow from a neighbor; we’re all sticking together now. But if someone doesn’t get it in time and turns into a walking corpse, and then directly infects someone else…”

Those cases could often be more severe for ordinary people, and glutinous rice only worked when the victim had time to get to it.

“That does seem like a problem,” Wei Wuxian said. “I’ll go check out what cultivators have come to deal with it.”

Maybe they’ll be more likely to let slip who exactly my body used to be.

As he walked away from the market, munching on the skewers, he idly wondered about the issue. He’d never heard of fogs containing corpse poison – it sounded like some demented plot thought up by some deranged evil cultivator in a story. And yet that also seemed wildly unlikely: while any cultivator worth his salt could gather up corpse poison and release it into the wind, no one actually would. The entire purpose of night-hunts was to decrease the resentment and evil in the world, not increase it, and obviously innocent people who died prematurely and unjustly on account of corpse poison would be the most likely to turn not only into walking corpses, but fierce corpses. And then where would they be?

But on the other hand, it seemed equally implausible for that sort of situation to occur naturally. While walking corpses did let off some powder in the normal course of things, especially when they were newly risen, it wasn’t enough to affect anything but their immediate vicinity, or else they would have been long ago recognized as a far greater problem than they were. In order to have enough corpse powder to get swept up into the wind, you’d need dozens or hundreds of corpses – that was how the Burial Mounds had gotten so thoroughly poisoned, after all.

The Burial Mounds…

Wei Wuxian shook his head firmly, dismissing the thought. That whole business was a lifetime ago, and the only current relevance to him was that his little admirer here had probably been a rogue cultivator drawn over by the chance to see something resembling Wei Wuxian – no, that didn’t make sense. Who went on a standard night-hunt and then got so stimulated that he decided to sacrifice his body to summon some evil ghost?

Unless…maybe it was something or someone he’d met that had driven him to it?

Clearly talking to the other cultivators was the right move. Wei Wuxian’s new body had rather obviously gotten some level of training from some sect or another, based on the fact that it had formed something of a golden core, though far below the level of Wei Wuxian’s own in his previous life, and the sword was properly made, too, if a little ostentatious. So why not go seek them out?

Wei Wuxian walked up towards the mountain.

His good intentions lasted right up until he caught sight of one of the cultivators already there, standing on some lonely cliff and looking up at the moon, and then he promptly turned around and headed right back down the mountain.

What are the chances? he moaned to himself. Of all the sects I had to run into, why the Lan sect?

It was unmistakable, of course. Fancy mourning clothes, white with luxurious embroidery, and of course there was the distinctive forehead ribbon…

Worse, while Wei Wuxian had only very briefly caught a brief glimpse of the one standing on one of the peaks, looking out into the distance, the small bit of profile he’d seen looked an awful lot like Lan Wangji.

Of course, he couldn’t really get a glimpse of the man’s face, hidden away as it was by the darkness of the night and the shadows of the tree above him, and yes, the silhouette wasn’t quite right, being a little older and perhaps broader at the shoulders, but then that could be explained away by time, couldn’t it? He still had no idea how many years had passed since his death – ten? fourteen? twenty? – but Lan Wangji would’ve grown up in the meantime, as handsome as ever.

He was pretty sure that however long it had been, it wasn’t long enough to make Lan Wangji forget about him. After all, for all of their disputes, Lan Wangji had known him pretty well back then, hadn’t he?

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad to meet up with him again, hiding behind a brand new face, except that Wei Wuxian currently didn’t even know his own name, much less how to act in accordance with the previous owner’s personality. It was entirely possible that he’d slip up and give himself away. And then, bam! Back to Gusu to face trial or something like that, and never mind that he’d already died for his crimes once over.

No, he couldn’t face Lan Wangji.

He thought he’d seen some other cultivators up there as well, congregating further up, but they seemed to be equally unfortunate choices – some Jiang sect, plenty of Jin, maybe a Nie or two, a few smaller sects…maybe they wouldn’t recognize him at all, given the new face and all, but it’d be very suspicious if he showed up without being able to identify himself, a situation which would lead most cultivators to suspect possession. Plus, what if Lan Wangji came back and revealed him? Wei Wuxian wasn’t looking to do a reenactment of the Siege of the Burial Mounds quite so quickly – especially since he still didn’t know who he was or what task he needed to accomplish.

All right, back to the coffin house. There has to be something!

He dug around, but there really wasn’t. Clothing, demonic cultivation notes, some small signs of two people staying there (he was now increasingly sure that the other was probably the object of the bloody command on the wall), trash consisting mostly candy wrappers…

Hmm.

Wei Wuxian went back to the market the next morning. “Who sells candy? The little wrapped sort?” he asked, waving an example, and got pointed in a certain direction.

There was, in fact, a female street vendor there that sold exactly the type of little wrapped candies that had been scattered all over the coffin house.

“Hello there,” Wei Wuxian said with a smile, leaning on the counter and aiming for charming. He’d studied his reflection and thought that his new body was really quite cute: pointy little chin, narrow eyes, and tiger teeth when he smiled. And naturally, his own flirting skills were first rate. “It’s me, your best customer!”

The street vendor shrunk back from him. “Oh, it’s you!” she said, putting on an especially fixed, frightened smile – the sort you got when serving someone rich who didn’t pay and threatened to hurt you if you complained, actually. Was the brat he was possessing some sort of dine-and-dash bastard? What sort of awful reputation was he getting stuck with here? “I have your weekly allotment back here, if you want to pick it up early, Master Xue.”

Wei Wuxian’s smile turned genuine: he’d hit the jackpot!

So I’m surnamed Xue, huh? Master Xue – doesn’t sound that bad. And at least this idiot surnamed Xue wasn’t putting on airs and demanding that everyone call him Venerated Immortal or something! Not to mention if he had a standing weekly order, he couldn’t have been cheating them. Maybe he was just an irritating customer.

Now, to get a first name…

“Thanks,” he said. “Say, I know there are cultivators coming into town. Have any been asking about me?”

“I wouldn’t say a word, Master Xue!” the vendor bleated. She seemed the anxious sort, or maybe it was just the unfamiliarity of common people interacting with people they knew to be cultivators. “I really wouldn’t, I know how much you value your privacy –”

“Of course, of course,” Wei Wuxian said, waving it off. “I trust you entirely. I just want to make sure you know what name to be listening out for, so that you can tell me if anyone does ask.”

“Oh, I know, I know,” the vendor said hurriedly. “I wouldn’t dare forget! If anyone asks about Xue Yang, Master Xue, I’ll be sure to tell you at once.”

“Great,” Wei Wuxian said, congratulating himself for his genius, and accepted the candy the vendor offered. “Say, by chance do you remember who I especially want to know about, if it turns out that they’re looking for me?”

He was hoping to get something along the lines of “Oh yes, of course, your worse enemy, the one named so-and-so, who horribly wronged you in the past”, but instead the vendor mostly looked baffled and confused.

Apparently they hadn’t been on backstory-swapping terms. Too bad.

“Uh,” she said, clearly searching her mind to come up with something that would suit the bill. “I guess – Jiang Cheng, maybe? Everyone knows he hates demonic cultivators with a passion.”

Wei Wuxian’s heart sank.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know that Jiang Cheng hated him, but he’d rather been hoping that it had gotten a little better in the intervening time – apparently not, if some common person in some obscure town that wasn’t even in Yunmeng knew about his grudge. And it seemed that his previous self was known to be a demonic cultivator, which meant that going to the Lotus Pier was right out.

Not that he’d been planning on it.

Well, maybe a short visit. Surely Jiang Cheng wouldn’t mind that much, would he? Especially if he didn’t know about it…he’d be a busy sect leader now. How much attention could he devote to hunting down demonic cultivators, anyway? No matter what, Jiang Cheng couldn’t keep track of them all!

Besides, now that Wei Wuxian had a name to go by, he could go find some cultivators – not the ones up the mountain, but maybe some smaller sects – and ask around about Xue Yang.

“Oh, Master Xue, that reminds me,” the vendor said meekly as he was about to leave. “You asked me to let you know if anyone had heard anything about the famous Daoists Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen, didn’t you?”

Wei Wuxian hadn’t even heard of those names, much less that they were famous. They must have gotten famous after his death.

“You said they were friends of yours…?”

“Oh, yes, of course!” Wei Wuxian said, and grinned, relieved: friends were good. Friends might have suspicions, sure, but they’d also know critical details like who the ‘them’ he was supposed to find and avenge himself on might be. “Very good friends of mine!”

I assume, anyway.

“So what have you heard about them, anyway?” he asked.

The vendor seemed relieved. “Only that it turns out that they’re not far away – a city down south, no more than half a day’s travel by cart. I think they’re night-hunting? Or hunting something, anyway, they’ve been very politely asking people to stay indoors at night and all that…”

“Good, good, excellent advice,” Wei Wuxian said happily. “I’ll go see them at once!”

Chapter Text

“This is the most humiliating moment in my life,” Jiang Cheng said.

Lan Wangji considered it for a moment, then said, “I agree.”

Jiang Cheng glared at him.

“I meant that it is my most humiliating moment, as well,” Lan Wangji clarified, and the glare disappeared, Jiang Cheng letting his head fall back on the ground with a thump.

“I can’t believe this,” he muttered, staring blankly at the sky. “I really just can’t believe this.”

Lan Wangji sighed.

And the day had started out so promisingly, too.

Or at least Lan Wangji had allowed himself to be deceived into thinking it was going promisingly – and that, he supposed, was the problem. He really ought to have learned by now that nothing with Jiang Cheng ever went easily.

Jiang Cheng had stormed away after their conversation with Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen, refusing to even listen to Lan Wangji’s explanations about why they needed to help them with Wen Ning – Lan Wangji had several, all perfectly plausible, that he’d been planning to use, and had planned to only use the real one (that Wen Ning was someone that Wei Wuxian had cared deeply for and would probably want them to help) as a last resort, but he hadn’t gotten to use any of them. Instead, when he’d knocked on Jiang Cheng’s door, he’d been met with a shout that went along the lines that Jiang Cheng had already understood the necessity of helping Wen Ning and accepted it and agreed with it so there was no need to pester him, which had thoroughly cut off most of the rebuttals Lan Wangji would have made.

Lan Wangji had debated making his way in regardless – Jiang Cheng would never actually block the door from him – but ultimately concluded that it was probably one of those times when Jiang Cheng just needed time to cool off. It wasn’t worth pushing him, not when they had guests…not when his temper was so uncertain, as it always was on matters relating to Wei Wuxian.

In the morning, he decided. He’d talk to him in the morning.

He hadn’t gotten the chance.

The moment he stepped out of his room the next morning he discovered that Jiang Cheng had already kicked into a frenzy of activity, which meant he probably hadn’t slept more than a shichen or two. The entire endeavor would be cloaked as a common night-hunt to try to deceive Xue Yang into not realizing that he was their real target, and he’d already pulled together all the things that needed to be arranged for that proposed night-hunt, including several teams that would be sent out to hide the direction they were really going. By the time Lan Wangji caught up with him, Jiang Cheng was already pushing Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen to identify some towns near the area Xue Yang had last been seen and where they’d found Wen Ning.

He’d also pushed them to agree to start to set out as soon as possible, and unsurprisingly they’d agreed.

Lan Wangji thought there might be a little time to talk when Xiao Xingchen had bowed out to go fetch Wen Ning, but apparently they’d kept him quite close as they were back in almost no time at all, not enough time to coax any sort of real discussion out of Jiang Cheng, who was at the moment pretending Lan Wangji didn’t exist – and then, once Wen Ning arrived, even Lan Wangji didn’t have much desire to speak.

Wen Ning was dressed in ragged clothing, his hair hung loose and limp on his shoulders, his limbs bound with chains – his eyes were pure white and his veins raised and black, an inhuman snarl on his lips of the sort that had graced that mindless corpse filled with rage. It was probably what he’d been like all that time ago on the Burial Mounds, before Wei Wuxian had managed to get his consciousness back…it was as if Wei Wuxian had never done anything to him, never returned him to himself, never helped him.

Lan Wangji had barely been able to look at him before.

But all of that jealousy had suddenly seemed useless and petty.

Of course, Jiang Cheng could have spelled his name with the characters for petty and jealous. He hadn’t had any such issues with Wen Ning’s wretched appearance, or at least he hadn’t seemed to – he’d just dealt with the matter practically, ordering his most trusted subordinates to put Wen Ning into a warded storeroom for safekeeping. It happened to be the same one that they used to interrogate demonic cultivators, though Lan Wangji suspected it wasn’t entirely a coincidence.

(He’d been briefly distracted by rolling his eyes in fond amusement at how predictable Jiang Cheng was sometimes, and when he next focused Jiang Cheng had already bound Wen Ning into an array to restrict his movement and posted guards all around.)

“Are you sure about this?” Xiao Xingchen asked anxiously, his eyes drifting over Wen Ning.

“Very sure,” Jiang Cheng said harshly, seemingly cold and careless, the way that had led so many outsiders to misunderstand him in all these years. “Stopping Xue Yang is the priority. Once he’s dead, we’ll help you figure out how to fix up Wen Ning, as agreed.”

But then he hesitated briefly.

“…why didn’t you try taking out the nails?”

That was Jiang Cheng in a nutshell, Lan Wangji reflected. Harsh and prickly on the outside, soft on the inside.

“We didn’t dare,” Song Zichen replied solemnly. “For fear of side effects.”

Jiang Cheng nodded, accepting it, then waved his hand and ordered Jiang Meimei to watch over the children while they went out night-hunting. Lan Wangji had known, of course, that Jiang Cheng could be brutally efficient, but it was still a pleasure to see the Lotus Pier in set into swift and efficient motion: goodbyes were said to the children, work was handed over to the proper places, a delegation of trusted disciples capable of handling themselves selected and prepared, and then they were ready for an immediate departure.

There’d been no time to fret or worry, for Jiang Cheng to torment himself with doubts and self-blame – or so Lan Wangji had thought. Even after they’d arrived to the area Xiao Xingchen had indicated, he was just as efficient, assigning everyone into pairs like he would for a normal night-hunt, sending Xiao Xingcheng and Song Zichen one way and taking Lan Wangji along with him in another…

Lan Wangji thought that Jiang Cheng was handling this whole business remarkably well.

That belief had lasted right up until the pit.

They’d been walking down one of the more obscure paths between the various towns, looking for any trace of a demonic cultivator or any other sign that Xue Yang might have passed this way or that, and there had unexpectedly been a trap laid right in the middle of the path, a gigantic pit opening up under their feet.

Not that such a trap was much of a threat to a cultivator, of course. Lan Wangji had leapt up at once, easily evading it, but for whatever reason, Jiang Cheng had not, falling in with the rocks and the dirt.

Lan Wangji waited, but Jiang Cheng didn’t get out, either.

So he went in after him.

Jiang Cheng was lying on his back and staring up at the sky. He appeared unharmed.

Lan Wangji walked over and looked down at him. After a moment, he extended a foot and prodded at Jiang Cheng’s leg with his toe.

“What,” Jiang Cheng said, sounding irritable.

“I was only wondering when your legs had stopped working,” Lan Wangji said.

Jiang Cheng snorted and turned his head away.

“After all, if they were working, you could have jumped out, rather than fall in.” Lan Wangji glanced around the pit they were in. It was impressively deep – the rim of the pit was at least twice his height – but that was absolutely nothing to a cultivator. “You could in fact jump out now.”

“Maybe I don’t want to.”

Ah, Lan Wangji thought to himself, I see how it is.

He really should have expected something like this.

He swept his sleeves back and sat down, settling his clothing around him in a comfortable manner, and reflected to himself that this was probably going to take a while for Jiang Cheng to get over himself.

Not that Lan Wangji wouldn’t help, of course.

 “Would you like to talk about it?” he asked in his most irritatingly solicitous manner.

“Fuck off.”

As expected.

Lan Wangji had long since figured Jiang Cheng out. When bad things happened, Jiang Cheng generally started by getting angry and trying to solve the problem, often violently. When it turned out that the problem wasn’t something that could be solved straightforwardly, he would scream and shout as if he could vent out all his emotions, never causing real damage beyond the most superficial insults that anyone who knew him could easily ignore. Eventually, the storm would pass, and things would resolve themselves one way or the other.

Lan Wangji had, by now, years of experience in dealing with this type of Jiang Cheng.

For matters relating to his parents or sister or Wei Wuxian, though, he’d found that Jiang Cheng had a far less tenable set of reactions. He would turn his violent anger inwards, his mind growing unstable with guilt and self-hatred squeezed into an irrational hatred of everything around him, his never easy temperament worsened by many degrees; he would blame himself for everything, tormenting himself with questions that would never be answered, castigating himself for things that were not and could not have been his fault. If not prevented or distracted, he could even start harming himself through too much work and too little sleep, as if he thought he could simply will himself into having enough strength to never let anyone he loved down ever again.

That was the present Jiang Cheng.

“I thought you’d decided to stop doing this,” Lan Wangji said after a little while had passed without any developments. “On account of not wanting to show the children a bad example.”

“Fuck off.”

In fact, Jiang Cheng had gotten far better these past few years. If Lan Wangji were being honest, they had helped each other get better, dragging each other kicking and screaming down the path towards wellness. No longer did Lan Wangji have to sit by, unable to do anything, as the smell of blood and bile drifted through the wall that separated their rooms, and the days that he classified as Jiang Cheng’s good days – even very good days – were by now far outnumbering the occasional bad ones.

Lan Wangji himself had been getting better, too. Jiang Cheng no longer had to make uncalled for and very pointed comments about unhealthy coping mechanisms, whether alcohol or seclusion or playing guqin until his fingers were raw and bleeding, staying awake to avoid the nightmares or retreating into a stony silence that worried everyone around him – it had taken a series of extremely vicious fights that involved throwing the word ‘hypocrite’ around to make Lan Wangji sore enough to truly rededicate himself to regulating his conduct.

After all, he was a Lan, however differently situated and distanced he’d gotten from the Cloud Recesses. What was the point of wearing his forehead ribbon if he couldn’t exercise self-discipline?

Certainly he could exercise it better than Jiang Cheng.

Lan Wangji meditated on a time on the idea that perhaps Jiang Cheng was his punishment for arrogance.

(Perhaps competitive spite was not quite the behavioral motivator that his ancestors would have preferred, but for a while, it was all Lan Wangji had had. And then, somehow, implausibly, despite himself, it had actually started to work, which was…Lan Wangji was not thinking about that.)

After a long while, Jiang Cheng finally said, “It’s not that bad, actually. It’s just – a lot, that’s all.”

“Mm.”

“…what’s that supposed to mean?” Jiang Cheng eyed him sidelong. “That was a very meaningful ‘mm’.”

“Mm.” Lan Wangji deliberately used the same inflection and tone, not varying it one iota.

“I will kick you.”

Lan Wangji rolled his eyes at him until Jiang Cheng seemed to be seriously considering following through on his promise. At that point, Lan Wangji decided to take pity – as much to avoid a footprint on his robes as for Jiang Cheng’s benefit.

“You are experiencing negative emotions in connection with Wen Ning’s reappearance, and your attempt to vent by murdering Xue Yang has been impeded on account of not being able to find him immediately,” he said, his voice carefully monotone and disinterested. It wouldn’t do to show Jiang Cheng that he was emotionally involved in this conversation. “You have accordingly given up on life.”

There were a few more moments of silence.

“…stop knowing me so well. And I haven’t given up on life, I’m just – resting. For a moment. That’s all.”

Lan Wangji pointedly ignored him, repressing the smile that wanted to come to his lips. The fact that Jiang Cheng was talking was, in fact, a good sign, and an indication that he wasn’t doing as bad as all that; he hadn’t lost his reason or become unstable, he wasn’t lashing out, he hadn’t kicked into an unreasonable spiral of self-blame.

Anyway, it wasn’t as if Lan Wangji didn’t have similarly conflicted feelings about Wen Ning that he could use a little more time to work through – and besides, he reasoned, Xue Yang had been on the run for years. He’d be hard to track down, hard to corner, hard to catch.

A short break wouldn’t impede them.

Of course, it was barely any time after he’d thought that when someone came out of the woods near the path they were on and shouted, “Hey, you in there! Fellow strangers! Is something the matter? Do you need help?”

Lan Wangji suppressed a sigh, even as Jiang Cheng twitched, rather violently. Probably he was abruptly becoming aware of how humiliating it would be for cultivators of their status to be found sitting in the bottom of a ditch.

Lan Wangji was also not especially looking forward to that.

He opened his mouth to respond, but unexpectedly, before he could, Jiang Cheng reached out and grabbed his arm, fingers squeezing so tightly that it was almost painful.

Lan Wangji glanced at him, seeking an explanation, but Jiang Cheng shook his head in negation.

“You’re both powerful cultivators, so if everything was all right, you could just jump out,” the person standing above them continued.

Lan Wangji turned his glance at Jiang Cheng into a meaningfully pointed look instead, only to get a crude gesture in return.

Well, at least Jiang Cheng was feeling more like himself.

“I noticed you haven’t jumped out, though, and you haven’t moved for a while…did someone seal your spiritual energy? Is the pit actually a trapping array? Is that why you can’t get out?”

Lan Wangji could feel his eyebrows going up slightly in surprise: clearly, the person who had found them was also a cultivator, apparently, and a clever one, too, to think of valid explanations for their (non-existent) plight.

The part of him that had been assisting Jiang Cheng in running the Lotus Pier for years now immediately thought of recruitment. Much of the current Jiang sect was made up of former rogue cultivators having accepted positions as guest disciples or even been adopted in, yet their ranks were still smaller than the other Great Sects. They could use all the clever cultivators they could find.

Lan Wangji glanced up and saw the face peering down at them from the edge of the pit: his first impression was of shining black eyes and a radiant smile with adorable little tiger teeth that reminded him a little of Mo Xuanyu. The face was handsome, with a high nose bridge and thin red lips, the chin a little pointy in a way that made his whole face seem full of gleeful mischief when he grinned.

It was a nice smile, Lan Wangji thought, cheerful and carefree, and felt a nostalgic tug on his heart.

Even the cultivator’s voice was pleasant enough – light and lively, as if he was at any point on the verge of laughing at some joke as he kept chattering on and on, hypothesizing about reasons they might not be able to get out of the pit, as if he were trying to fill the silence alone. There were a few instances in which he seemed to be attempting to disguise his voice, only to forget a moment later and resume his regular voice, but then he was a little younger than they were; he might just be trying to seem older than he was. They’d certainly encountered rogue cultivators like that before.

“…but I suppose it doesn’t really matter what the reason is! You two just hold on, all right? I’ll go find a rope!”

The face disappeared before Lan Wangji could signal to him that all was well.

Clever, insightful, and resourceful.

“Promising,” Lan Wangji remarked to Jiang Cheng. Naturally he wouldn’t extend an offer of recruitment without approval from the master of the Lotus Pier, especially when Jiang Cheng was there to give it, but Jiang Cheng usually agreed with his assessment –

“You are joking,” Jiang Cheng hissed, and Lan Wangji blinked, surprised at the intensity and venom in his tone. “That was Xue Yang!”

Lan Wangji’s eyes widened. He hadn’t seen Xue Yang before: he had been in seclusion when all of that had happened, though of course he’d heard all about it later from Jiang Cheng. But everyone had been very clear about how ruthless and inhuman and wicked Xue Yang was, how his eyes were full of disdain towards all living things, how his aura was chilling and offensive.

Nothing at all like the young man that he’d seen just now.

“Impossible.”

“Not impossible. Listen, I was at his first trial – I remember what he looked like. There’s no doubt about it. He’s even missing his little finger!”

That did seem conclusive.

“It seems Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen were right to think he was here,” Lan Wangji observed, and put his hand on Bichen. “Why hasn’t he recognized us and fled, though? He must know that no person from a righteous sect would be willing to tolerate his existence.”

“I was lying flat, he probably couldn’t see me,” Jiang Cheng said. “And you’re wearing the wrong color for a Lan.”

Lan Wangji was in fact wearing one of the sets of robes he used for night-hunts around the Lotus Pier. It had seemed wrong, somehow, to allow the merits of his actions to be ascribed to the Lan sect – only his forehead ribbon remained the same, and the style he had long ago grown accustomed to, but the colors were wholly different. The result was something neither quite of the Cloud Recesses nor of the Lotus Pier…yes, he could see how a cultivator with a weaker golden core might not have identified him.

“It could still be a trap,” he pointed out. “Xue Yang did not escape from his captors so many times out of luck. From what you have told me, he is extremely clever, and extremely dangerous. You remember what he nearly did at the Baixue Temple.”

“Of course I remember. I told you about it myself!” Jiang Cheng frowned, then groaned. “I suppose there’s nothing for it. We’ll have to play along for the moment, since it seems that he genuinely thinks our spiritual energy has been locked away. We hide our faces so he doesn’t see, climb up whatever rope he gets us, and when we get up top, attack before he has a chance to put his own plans into action.”

Lan Wangji nodded. “You attack from the front with Zidian, I will come from the side with Bichen; dodging one will lead him into the path of the other. If we are lucky, we can cut off his head before he can summon any fierce corpse to come to his aid.”

It was an approach they’d used with especially vicious demonic cultivators before with success.

“It’s a plan, then.” A pause. “There’s only one problem.”

Lan Wangji raised his eyebrows.

“For this plan to work, we’re going to have to let ourselves get rescued – by Xue Yang.”

Lan Wangji felt his lips purse as if he’d just bitten into a lemon.

“This is the most humiliating moment in my life,” Jiang Cheng announced.

Lan Wangji shook his head but agreed.

Luckily it wasn’t very much later that he heard Xue Yang’s footsteps. Not long after that, the man himself reappeared, still chattering like a monkey – apparently he’d found rope in an old woodcutter’s hut – and then they had to listen to the entire process of him trying to find an appropriately strong tree to tie the rope to, since he didn’t want to risk using his own strength in the event whatever had affected them unexpectedly spread to him.

Lan Wangji spent the time watching Jiang Cheng’s face, which was going through a journey involving at least three epic poems and one war-song that involved self-incineration or possibly honorable suicide.

“All right, update, good news, I finally found a big old one, definitely won’t snap at the first push the way the last one did. This time it’s really going to work. I’m going to throw in the rope now, all right? Stand ready!”

A rope dropped in.

It was helpfully knotted at the end, presumably in case the spiritual suppression that Xue Yang had decided was afflicting them was also affecting their muscles and they needed something to grab onto.

It was very considerate, if utterly unnecessary.

Still, there wasn’t anything for it. Kindness to strangers, if that was what this was rather than some sort of especially clever trap, could not erase all of Xue Yang’s former crimes. They had all agreed: he had to die. They couldn’t even reverse their original position on killing him on sight and try to push for a trial now – a trial was too risky. Xue Yang had escaped too many times before, using the kindness of others as an opportunity to continue to wreck havoc, and Lan Wangji was unwilling to see any more innocent lives be harmed by him.

It did seem a bit of a pity, though. Xue Yang didn’t seem nearly as bad as the stories said…

No, this wasn’t Wei Wuxian all over again. This was different. There were eyewitnesses to Xue Yang’s crimes, which were far more malicious and cruel than anything that had been attributed to Wei Wuxian, and Xue Yang had even admitted to them, swearing that he would continue to act wretchedly.

There was no going back.

Lan Wangji reached out to take the knotted rope in his hand.

Jiang Cheng snatched it away before he could.

Lan Wangji frowned at him, but Jiang Cheng didn’t notice; he was too busy staring at the rope with a slightly wild-eyed expression, like a cat that had just seen a snake.

“Hey, you down there! Did you see the rope? Have you’ve got it now?” The rope jerked a little, meeting resistance from Jiang Cheng’s hands. “Good, I see you have! Now climb up!”

Lan Wangji waited, but Jiang Cheng didn’t move.

Lan Wangji waited more.

“…are you having problems climbing up?” Xue Yang asked. “Do you need me to come pick you up? I could probably manage to carry you in my arms one at a time –”

Lan Wangji had his pride. There was allowing himself to be rescued by the enemy to obtain an advantage in the upcoming battle, and then there was allowing himself to be carried out by a mass-murderer. Intending on forestalling the unthinkable, he reached out and gave Jiang Cheng a firm shove in the shoulder, knocking him sideways and, hopefully, out of his daze.

Jiang Cheng hissed at him like an upset chicken – Lan Wangji owned waterfowl now and was in a position to testify as to the similarity – then turned back to stare at the rope.

“Kuizhou isn’t near the ocean, right?” he asked, voice pitched low. “Or any major river?”

“Not as far as I’m aware, no,” Lan Wangji said slowly, puzzled by the utterly bizarre question. “Why –”

Jiang Cheng was on his feet and leaping out of the pit before he could finish the question, precisely as they’d already agreed they would not do, as it would immediately give away any surprise advantage they might already have.

Lan Wangji gritted his teeth, reminded himself that he actually liked Jiang Cheng most of the time, and leapt up after him.

“What’s this?” Jiang Cheng said, shaking the knot at Xue Yang’s face. “Tell me, what’s this?”

“A…rope?” Xue Yang said hesitantly, his eyes wide as saucer plates – presumably at seeing the great and terrible Sandu Shengshou miraculously appear right in front of him – and for once Lan Wangji’s sympathies were entirely with him. He knew Jiang Cheng very well, better, or so he thought, than anyone else currently yet living, and yet he had no idea what was going through his mind right now.

“Xue Yang,” Lan Wangji said, deciding he was done with this conversation and drawing Bichen. “It’s over.”

“It’s…Lan..? Wait, what are you even wearing – oh shit!”

Xue Yang hopped back, ducking under away from Bichen’s first sweep. Normally, this was when Jiang Cheng would whip out Zidian to tangle in the demonic culivator’s legs, but Jiang Cheng still seemed possessed by whatever had gotten into him; he didn’t do anything.

At any rate, it didn’t matter. From over Xue Yang’s head, Lan Wangji could see Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen cresting the horizon, each one on their sword and shooting toward Xue Yang with grim expressions.

Even if Xue Yang summoned corpses now, it would all be over soon.

“Xue Yang!” Song Zichen called, and Xue Yang turned to look. “Your crimes end today!”

Xue Yang took a step back, but Xiao Xingchen was faster – he was already leaping down, Shuanghua leaping up to his hand in a single graceful movement. His white robes swirled around him, and Lan Wangji was immediately reminded that the cultivation world called him “the bright moon and the gentle breeze”, accompanying Song Zichen’s “distant snow and cold frost”.

His strike was sure and true, perfectly aimed. Xue Yang’s hand dropped to his waist, reaching for Jiangzai, but it would be too late, the attack somehow taking him by surprise despite everything –

The ringing sound of metal on metal was nearly deafening, and Lan Wangji stared in shock: Shuanghua’s beautiful strike had been blocked by Sandu.

By Jiang Cheng.

“What are you doing?” Xiao Xingchen exclaimed, startled, and Lan Wangji wanted to ask the same question.

“Don’t hurt him!” Jiang Cheng shouted back, his teeth pulled back in a snarl. “Don’t you dare!”

Lan Wangji stared at him, wondering if Jiang Cheng’s grief and instability had suddenly driven him utterly mad. Why would he defend Xue Yang, of all people?

It wasn’t the first time Jiang Cheng had acted irregularly or irrationally, of course. Demonic cultivators were always a sensitive spot for him, convinced as he was that Wei Wuxian would one day come back, but those episodes only happened when one of the demonic cultivators they found did something that was too familiar, too reminiscent. That sort of thing only happened during a bad day, a bad time, and Jiang Cheng hadn’t seemed that bad.

He’d been talking, even making jokes. He hadn’t seemed near to the point of mental collapse.

Lan Wangji hadn’t expected such an outburst to happen here, given that Xue Yang had never reminded Jiang Cheng of Wei Wuxian before – and anyway what could have been the trigger? The smiling? The chattering? The improbable rescue?

“He’s been affected by something,” Song Zichen deduced, his voice cold as ever. He was flanking Xiao Xingchen, planning to duck around Jiang Cheng’s defense to skewer Xue Yang, who seemed to be having some trouble maneuvering his own sword for some reason, the blade either refusing to cooperate or his muscles seemingly not answering to the actions he wanted. “Hanguang-jun, restrain Jiang Wanyin. We will help him once Xue Yang has been eliminated.”

Jiang Cheng affected? But with what? What could possibly do –

“Lan Wangji, help me!” Jiang Cheng howled, throwing himself forward against Xiao Xingchen, who he had so admired only a few days earlier, against Wei Wuxian’s martial uncle.

The behavior was truly very uncharacteristic of him, completely unlike him.

Lan Wangji drew Bichen, moving forward –

And blocked Song Zichen’s sword with his own.

“You know what you’re doing,” Lan Wangji told Jiang Cheng, meaning you had better and also I trust you, don’t let me down.

Jiang Cheng shot him a look of desperate gratitude. “Don’t let him get away,” he shouted, and for a moment Lan Wangji thought he meant Song Zichen before realizing he probably meant Xue Yang – where had Xue Yang gone? He’d been there only a moment or so before –

Dividing one’s attention during a fight was never a good idea, and it was even less a good idea when the opponent was as skilled as Song Zichen. In that moment, Song Zichen feinted and brought his sword in, Lan Wangji turning to meet him, but he knew he would be too late –

“Hey! Leave him alone!”

Xue Yang had managed to get his sword out, and now threw himself out of the bushes to try to defend Lan Wangji. It was rather a beautiful move, too, seamlessly interrupting the flow of Song Zichen’s attack while also leaving Lan Wangji enough room to complete his own parry and start a counterattack – it was so well done that Lan Wangji briefly had the illusion that they had fought together before, familiar with each other’s moves.

“Sect Leader Jiang – Hanguang-jun – what are you doing?” Xiao Xingchen asked, utterly bewildered, and Lan Wangji had to admit he felt the same. “Why is he defending you? Why are you defending him? This is Xue Yang!”

“He’s not Xue Yang,” Jiang Cheng snarled. “He’s Wei Wuxian. And I’m going to kill him myself!”

…oh, Lan Wangji thought. I see.

This again.