Chapter Text
Wei Wuxian spent the first half of his first life alternating between being the head disciple of one of the major sects, and being an outcast orphan with no true place. His childhood was steeped in tension – the quivering tension of the lakes of Lotus Pier, droplets of clear rain as they roll down the heavy leaves; the snapping tension of Madam Yu and Uncle Jiang’s catastrophe of a marriage, and with it the impossible task of balancing excelling but not so much that Jiang Cheng would start looking explosive yet not so little that Jiang Yanli would start looking worried; the simmering tension of being at once both the adopted son of one of the big five cultivation clans and also the son of a servant and rogue. Wei Wuxian is about eighty percent certain childhoods aren’t meant to be so utterly exhausting. Not on the child, at least. He may have missed years five to fifteen of his own son, but otherwise he’d like to think A-Yuan could at least eat dinner without having to navigate a political and personal minefield on three fronts. (Jiang Yanli, along with being gentle and kind and compassionate and generous, was an angel from the heavens because she was the only one of her incredibly dysfunctional family to have anything resembling emotional intelligence. Nobody knew how. Uncle Jiang was caring but oblivious when it mattered and unnaturally passive for a sect leader, Madam Yu was protective but abrasive at best and abusive at worst, and Jiang Cheng’s entire range of feelings could be summarised as angry).
(Then again, their entire generation was a mess of spectacular proportions. They may have been raised as a generation of war, but that’s no true excuse. The two Lans were so emotionally repressed Wei Wuxian is still vaguely tempted to try and find Qingheng-jun’s spirit and maybe give him a stern, fatherly talking to; the two Nies were polar opposites and ultimately both drove themselves off their respective cliffs; the one recognised Jin was an arrogant, narcissistic, spoilt brat – the other Jins turned out as either suicidally desperate or maliciously manipulative, and the two Wens were sadistically bloodthirsty and sadistically useless, in that order.
As far as Wei Wuxian remembers, the only proper parental figure for anyone in his generation had been…Lan Qiren. And really, that summed it all up perfectly.)
Then shit really went down.
Cloud Recesses burning, the Xuanwu of Slaughter (the cries of a thousand dead, in pain, in pain, in pain), Lotus Pier also burning, Uncle Jiang and Madam Yu dead (protect him!), the Jiang Sect in absolute tatters, the damned Core-Melting Hand, the core transplant (it hurts it hurts please stop please don’t stop no, no, no), Wen fucking Chao, the burial mounds, the burial moundstheburialmoundstheburialmounds (fall, fall, fall)—the Stygian Tiger Seal, the Sunshot Campaign, the Wen remnants, the Ghost General, the burial mounds again (buy radishes this time! not potatoes!), Qiongqi Path (the box warps, bends, breaks. the bell will never ring again), the Nightless City, Jiang Yanli (A-Xian…), the burial mounds again, the siege.
His death.
Thirteen years.
Then his life, once more.
Wei Wuxian makes a good show of it. He makes a good show of anything: he spent years pretending he was simply too arrogant or too powerful to need Suibian when really the gaping hole where his brilliant core used to sit and the leaking wound where his bond to his sword used to thrum would tear at his very soul every damned second.
He’s a born actor. Wei Wuxian reincarnates—more or less, he’s still maintaining he’s not the sort of vengeful spirit that could be attracted into a body sacrifice rite, okay—into Mo Xuanyu’s body, and promptly goes and creates chaos, gets kidnapped by Hanguang-jun, accidentally solves one of the darkest mysteries of the generation, very nearly starts up another inter-sect war, teaches some children, gets married and celebrates it very much. Celebrates every day even. But it’s not as easy as he makes it look. Mo Xuanyu has a slighter frame, weaker bones and muscles from malnutrition, shorter height and with aching joints that will never go away thanks to past mistreatment. Everything is a different length, a different width. The proportions are changed. Every time he does something out of reflex he dissociates from the body since his mental response far outpaces his physical one. His golden core is dismal, more of a flicker than a glow, but this, at least, is better than the stark void Wei Wuxian’s original body had.
Wei Wuxian is the only case of died-then-came-back-in-another-body-with-all-memories-and-spiritual-cognition-intact so he can’t draw comparisons to see how he matches up, but he thinks he’s been doing pretty well. It’s nauseating and harrowing, in truth. It hurts. It feels viscerally, deeply wrong. It’s not his body, but it is his mind and his soul. It’s not his fingers that tap shakily against a shoddy bamboo flute, but it is his will that controls them. It’s not his face that smiles to hide tears, but it is his heart that breaks behind it. It’s not his core and his power and his golden, shining pathway – but it is his spirit that now has one foot on both roads.
Sometimes, Wei Wuxian thinks it will tear him apart, cultivating both conventional energy and resentful energy. Sometimes, he does not think he would mind if it does.
(But Lan Zhan looks at him and says Wei Ying, and his eyes do not hold fear or revulsion, only naked hope and desperation. But Lan Zhan takes hold of his wrist and removes a curse mark from his thigh and bandages his abdomen and never, never flinches away. But Lan Zhan tells him that he is loved not because of his voice or his eyes or his body, but because of his soul.)
So, yes, his life. Once more. (The fight goes on.)
Which is no less difficult even without a literal war going on. Two broken brothers (Which? Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng? Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen? Nie Mingjue and Nie Huaisang? Jin Guangyao and Mo Xuanyu? All?) and a thousand broken words and broken bodies between them. Wei Wuxian doesn’t look back very often since his story isn’t exactly sunshine and flowers and the last thing he needs is more reason to snap and just lose it, but when he does, he wonders how many people would laugh if he told them that he, Yiling Patriarch, Grandmaster of demonic cultivation, the one who walks and talks with death, that he knows now, with a clear memory and vivid experience that clutches at his marrow in quieter moments—that dying had been the most comforting part of everything?
Lan Zhan wouldn’t laugh. Might cry. So Wei Wuxian never says it, even though the only, only time he is truly relaxed is at night, as his husband (witnessed by heaven and earth and nobody, nobody else) extinguishes the candles and their blankets are drawn up to their shoulders. Even though sleep is still just sleep, sometimes remembered, sometimes good and sometimes bad – going to sleep is now something else entirely. The act of closing his eyes and feeling his body shut down becomes something addictive.
That’s not to say Wei Wuxian is about to lie down and sleep forever. (Even if he wants to, some days.) No. In the end, at the core of it all, the Yiling Patriarch had never been driven by madness or by greed or by evil. He may have been tainted by it, may have felt his own hubris clambering up his legs and laughed in its face, but no. Wei Wuxian, from the time he was last set down by his mother and father and never picked up by them again, to now, decades later and perhaps no less hurt by the world, has always been driven by love. He will not sleep until Lan Zhan and Lan Yuan and Jin Ling and Jiang Cheng and—everyone else, all the juniors who flock to his words like ducklings, all the cultivators who have learnt to look past the rumours and the night-time tales, all the common people who care not for how he deals with the monsters just that he does—until they are all happy. (An impossible task. Attempt the impossible—but can he, after having been struck out from the register? Having been hunted and cursed and whipped by the new sect leader, who glares at him with lightning-fury in his eyes and a warm, warm core turning in his chest?)
Wei Wuxian’s love once shot the sun then razed the ground beneath it. Perhaps Wei Wuxian’s ultimate crime is not the blood of the thousands that runs down his hands, nor the blood of his family that seeps into his skin. Perhaps it is, instead, that Wei Wuxian knows more intimately than anyone else what his love can do, and still he lets it rise like the tide under a full moon, lets it blanket those around him like the snow of a silent winter.
Just perhaps, his crime is that he knows what his love can do—has done—and still offers it so freely.