Work Text:
So one day you wake up and he isn't gone, although you dreamed—
Lan Wangji breathes slowly, because it would be very easy to forget how to breathe at all—which is how it has been for much of his life. Measure exact volumes, the way a physician might—the correct proportion of air to lungs, food to stomach. He could never measure his grief or his love or his hate, but he could measure everything else—could regulate, indirectly, the things which were impossible to take in one's hands and weigh.
It is a grey-green morning hour. A thin leg is flung across his thighs, another person's hair tickles his nose.
I wonder if he smelled like this before, Lan Wangji thinks. I wonder if I want his skin to have carried the same scent then, or for there to be some difference. I will never know which is true, in any case, because I woke up one morning back then and I realised I had forgotten—the scent of his hair, his skin. I reached for it and it simply wasn't there.
Wei Ying snuffles in his sleep, a soft little half-snort of laughter. He will be wrinkling his nose, but his face is buried against Lan Wangji's shoulder, and so his expression is locked away there.
It is time for Lan Wangji to rise. This is not the Cloud Recesses, no morning bell is struck—but his body feels it anyway, the ghost of a clean reverberation. This is the hour, too, when farm workers pull their clothes on and open their doors, as the morning grows grey enough to see but has not yet begun to properly brighten. In the town pots of food are being hauled out, buns are being steamed, small parcels ready for sleepy men to bite into as they walk. The world moves like this: following the light, skirting the edges of the summer's worst heat.
He extracts himself carefully, reluctantly, from the sprawl of Wei Ying's limbs.
He is not gone. Lan Wangji has to practice the thought sometimes. He is gone is a thought that he has worn into his being through years and years of tracing and retracing, and his mind flows easily into those hollowed lines the way water always finds its course. He has to step out of the house, out into the early morning, and think:
He is not gone. Even though I cannot see him, he is not gone.
Sometimes the thought finds no purchase anyway, the exercise fails. Sometimes he rushes back to Wei Ying's side and Wei Ying is pale and nightmare-shaken and Lan Wangji might be looking at a ghost, the ghost of a boy who said go away go away go away, who clawed and shoved and bled, bled blood and bled resentment—
Today he stands firm against himself, out in the yard of the house. He measures his breathing. He counts the days that have passed in the world in which Wei Ying is not gone.
He is hearing Wei Ying from the mouths of strangers less these days, and it is because Wei Ying is not gone, he is not a despised ghost. Wei Wuxian, he hears more. Young master Wei, to Wei Ying's face at the market. Yiling Laozu seems unlikely to vanish, but the variety of tones in which it is said begins to grow, an expanding repertoire in the mouths of the people.
Wei Ying is for Lan Wangji to say.
When he knows that Wei Ying is alive, has found the certainty of it, he is allowed to look at Wei Ying again—and so he can go inside and fetch Bichen, smile quietly to himself at the way Wei Ying has curled his body around the blanket for lack of a bed partner. He can step outside again and sink into familiar forms as the sun rises fully above the trees.
It was not good—being in the Cloud Recesses. It will be good again, he thinks, and he would have stayed if it had been required of him. But his brother had entered seclusion and Sizhui was travelling and his uncle seemed to look at him in a new way, a way he did not entirely understand, and did not tell him even by implication that he was to be responsible for the sect, although he did not order him away either—and Wei Ying was not there, although he was not dead, he was not dead—
The nightmares were bad, very bad. He woke up with his hands longing for a branding iron, forgetting that he had already used it. He woke up bloody, his right hand clawing itself open in the night.
Wei Ying wrote letters and letters and letters, letters paid for with the coin Lan Wangji had made him take, but the problem with a letter is that it is a message from the past. People receive letters all the time which were penned by someone now dead. You cannot know what has happened between paper leaving one hand and reaching another. A man received a letter from his lover once saying they should meet, but the one who met him on the appointed day was his lover's ghost—Lan Wangji had not enjoyed that job. There had been no satisfaction in resolving the matter of the murder; there had only been fractured lives left behind.
So it was not good—
He left after only months, and it was a sanctioned departure.
If not woken before his body is ready to move, Wei Ying can go from sleeping to upright and working in what seems like moments, in far less than the time it takes an incense stick to burn. His softly sleeping body sharpens, gains the angles that belong to Wei Ying in motion all at once. Lan Wangji looks, sometimes, at Wei Ying's slack face, and thinks that he can see the other man there, the memory of him, although he changed his body through his demanding sacrifice—and then Wei Ying is awake and there's nothing in his mannerisms and expressions which leaves space for anyone else.
Lan Wangji, returning from the village, finds him grinding ink, with papers spread out in front of him as though he has been awake for hours—although his hair is askew and his robe is unfastened. His stomach has soft folds when he curls forward like this, his body growing healthier by the day. The lines of his ribs are no longer stark. When Lan Wangji holds out bread to him, he doesn't reach to take it with his hand but with his mouth—nips slyly, first, at Lan Wangji's thumb.
He has, then, slept well the whole night through, and not only in the hours after dawn.
His open robe slides across his lap as he gives in to practicality and reaches to take the rest of the bun from his mouth, chewing on a chunk of it. His cock is soft and beautiful and Lan Wangji wants it in his mouth, he can have it in his mouth—
This is still something new. The permission to have.
He washes his hands first, and then draws more water from the well outside. Wei Ying hums to himself with his mouth full—not speaking while he eats, technically—he plays on technicalities a lot—as though Lan Wangji truly cares either way.
Wei Ying tries, sometimes, to make himself neat. He tries to fold himself into available spaces. The expansively arrogant boy who did not even know he was arrogant is decades gone, and perhaps he was one quarter illusion to begin with.
Today he moves his body easily when Lan Wangji touches his shoulder and then his flank, apparently incurious and willing to accept this small piece of direction, occupied in thought. He reacts only when Lan Wangji sinks into the space he has created for himself, moves smoothly from kneeling to bowing in over Wei Ying's lap—
"Ah?" Wei Ying says, then, startled—he tips back as he tries to look at Lan Wangji—settles quickly. One hand comes to rest lightly, so lightly, on Lan Wangji's head. The curve of his skull down towards his spine. Lan Wangji presses his face into the hair between Wei Ying's legs. He lets himself feel the light stretch of scar tissue across his back. Wei Ying is not gone, but he was, that was real. He did grieve, grief isn't only a dream he had.
The balance of it is difficult. Real grief, ghost grief. Wei Ying's warm body which isn't the body Lan Wangji used to know, before the grief.
"Aren't you being kind of shameless, Hanguang-jun?" Wei Ying asks.
"You should fasten your robe, then," Lan Wangji says—turns his face to say the words into the skin of Wei Ying's stomach, which flutters with laughter. Lan Wangji's cheeks will not be showing a flush, he doesn't think, but they do feel warm.
Sometimes he forgets he is allowed shamelessness—his body forgets, most of all. It is reflexively afraid of betraying itself. It tries to freeze up.
Wei Ying pats his hair, takes a few strands between his fingers and tweaks them. Lan Wangji can feel that Wei Ying is grinning at him. He does the thing, somehow, with his entire body. No need to see his face to know.
"My absurd husband," Wei Ying says. "Aren't you . . . ?"
"I'm yours," Lan Wangji says.
The bows they took together were not a wedding, but they meant the same thing. The twist of Lan Wangji's forehead ribbon around two wrists long ago was not a wedding—but it carried, guiltily, a piece of that intent.
Husband. Yes.
Yes.
He turns his head again. Wei Ying shifts to give him space, encourages him closer. He isn't hard yet. Is it strange to like him soft? There is a bare vulnerability to it.
He noses against Wei Ying's cock, kisses it. Wei Ying laughs again, a little breathy.
"Go ahead," he says, patting Lan Wangji's head again. "Have fun down there."
Lan Wangji hums, licks experimentally at Wei Ying's foreskin. He takes the head of Wei Ying's cock in his mouth, works his tongue lightly against the head—presses under the foreskin, pulls back.
"Uhh," Wei Ying says. His cock stirs a little—just a little. His thighs flex. He is easy, he likes to call himself easy, but even if he wakes quickly there is a sleepiness to his arousal in the mornings—that is a pattern, Lan Wangji thinks. We have done this enough for there to be patterns. It takes him longer to harden in the morning, if he hasn't just then woken up wanting. I don't know why, but it's how it is, and it's a thing I know about him.
So many facts—far too many to hold. And they have hardly begun.
He takes Wei Ying's cock fully in his mouth, while he can—while it's soft and pliant and fits on his tongue, only stretches his jaw a little. He closes his eyes.
They can be mean to each other, sometimes. They're figuring it out, the wanting—to be tested just a bit, to bite and prod. To make things strange.
But Wei Ying allows it to be something quiet now. He fills Lan Wangji's mouth until Lan Wangji has to let a little of him go to be able to breathe. The ache settles into the sides of Lan Wangji's face. It feels like holding a handstand for as long as you can, until you start to get dizzy from it. He does not quite know where the need for this comes from, but he does not fight it. He is learning, learning not to fight it.
Wei Ying brushes Lan Wangji's hair aside, tucks it behind his ear for him. He hooks his fingers under the ribbon still tied around Lan Wangji's forehead. He breathes with a series of little shudders, the stutter of it audible.
The taste of salt and desire bleeds itself into Lan Wangji's mouth, tiny pulses, over and over. It spills across his lips. It is very alive. People in bodies, bodies that feel things and do things, leave traces like this.
"Uhh," Wei Ying says. His breath hitches higher, into a half-moan. "Okay, wow, yeah, mm, that's—that's good, like that—"
It is not a focused act. The first time Wei Ying took Lan Wangji in his mouth it was a shatteringly good experience, Wei Ying was—not practiced, but—but he had thought about it, he had read about it. He had decided he would be good at it and it seems, sometimes, that deciding is all it takes—for Wei Ying. The first time Lan Wangji took Wei Ying in his mouth he hardly knew what to do with himself, because he too had thought about it but was, in practice, so overwhelmed that he had thought he might start crying—and that would have been terrible, it would have made Wei Ying think—
He likes it so much, is the thing. To be this close. To have this much of Wei Ying around him, enveloping him. He likes it so much that he can hardly even do it, so much that he wants to just stay there between Wei Ying's legs all day and perhaps rub against the inside of his own robes until he spills in them. Perhaps do that more than once. It becomes strangely selfish.
So it is unfocused. He lets it be unfocused. Wei Ying's hands brush restlessly across his head, his back. His body tightens. He makes breathless little noises, ah, ah, ah. There is a scuffing thud as one of his legs jerks, catches against the table.
"You're gonna have to give me a bit more," he says, finally. "Gege, come on."
Lan Wangji's jaw feels half-numb. He pulls off awkwardly. His face is wet, chin and jaw and cheeks.
Wei Ying coaxes him up. He wipes at Lan Wangji's face with his sleeve. "You want to fuck me?" he asks.
To know that you are loved. Wei Ying's open expression on a mountainside. Moments before that when they sat together, when their eyes met and their fingers brushed and they knew that they were something to each other still. Moments when music spoke for them.
A serenity found Lan Wangji once, after he knew that Wei Ying was gone. What is there to be afraid of once the worst thing of all has already happened? He moved quietly through the world and he chose his actions thinking of a dead man, and it hurt terribly, but the worst thing had already happened.
He dreams of Wei Ying dying more these days. When Wei Ying was dead Lan Wangji dreamt of him alive. Now that he is alive, Lan Wangji dreams of him dead. A broken body in a cave, at the foot of a cliff, on an ordinary floor. A body run through with a sword, cooling in Lan Wangji's arms. A body pulled apart by the dead. A body pulled apart by the living.
He is loved, loved in the one way he thought he could not have, and so he has learned once more how to be afraid of loss.
Come away from everything with me, he said into Wei Ying's hair. It was after they had kissed for the first time. The mountain grasses swayed in the wind, so that the whole landscape seemed to ripple. Wei Ying was light in his arms. His hands clutched the back of Lan Wangji's robes, fistfuls of fabric. They shook, shook and swayed. Like grass in the wind.
A farmhouse, Wei Ying said, and then he was laughing, and Lan Wangji didn't know why—laughing harder and harder until Lan Wangji had to hold him up.
Yes, Wei Ying said—later, when he could breathe again. Yes, yes, I'll come with you, Lan Zhan. I'd come back to Gusu with you now—I'd go anywhere—just ask—don't you know I'm just waiting for you to ask?
Yes, Lan Wangji wants to fuck Wei Ying. Sex is a way one can be inside another person. It is safer to be inside Wei Ying than to be an entirely separate person, a person whose body tries to forget what it has, tries to grieve what isn't lost.
The table scrapes across the floor, dislodged by Wei Ying as he tumbles half way onto his back.
They watch each other, breathless.
"Clothes off," Wei Ying says. He's still half in his own robe where he sprawls, propped up with his elbows on the edge of the table behind him. It spreads loosely under him, pulls tight around his left shoulder. "Let me see, let me—"
Lan Wangji was not slow in order to tease him the first time, he had no such intent—was just shaking, then, and could not be faster. He feels a little absurd, still, when he teases Wei Ying—in sex, at least. He is easy to tease in other ways. But sex is—
It's new, the two of them are very new, and it feels so big. He has grown into himself, he knows who he is—he knew, before the first time, about ways to give himself pleasure, about the things his hands could do. But he did not know how to be a body pressed naked against another body. He fumbled, placed his limbs wrong. He was too forceful, perhaps—clumsily so—but Wei Ying had only asked for more and more. How I've wasted my time, not being with you, Lan Zhan—ah, ah, let me feel it, yeah—
Perhaps Lan Wangji teases a little now, in how deliberately he removes his layers. Perhaps he is teasing himself even more than he is teasing Wei Ying. Perhaps that's alright. He thinks it may be alright. It feels hard to know, sometimes. How much one can tease, how mean one can be.
The soft drag of fabric feels nice. The rhythm of it, also. Wei Ying watches him with bright eyes, his face flushed.
"You were planning this," Lan Wangji says.
"Of course not," Wei Ying says, and means obviously.
"I won't find you ready to be fucked, then," Lan Wangji says. The words feel stilted, awkward—but Wei Ying shivers, lips parting.
"Ah," he says. His hips move restlessly. "That—I—"
"Hm," Lan Wangji says.
He folds his robes neatly. It is unbearable, the not touching. It is good. He lets Wei Ying look, even at his scars—that's important, even if the attention squirms horribly under his skin sometimes. He is not ashamed of the scars but he is afraid of the conversations they might lead to. Should he be angry that his brother took some of those conversations and had them for him? He isn't. The relief felt oceanic when he realised. To be swept up by a wave and not have to decide one's direction is, sometimes, necessary. For him.
And then he is naked, nothing is occupying his hands. He is naked and Wei Ying's legs are already parted for him. Here it is, here they are.
Stillness then motion. They are watching each other, and then they are kissing, deep and urgent. Hands in hair, teeth on lips. Wei Ying laughs into it as he tangles himself in fabric, but he doesn't stop, they don't stop. A scroll falls with a clatter from the edge of the table, followed by a book. Wei Ying's elbow slips across smooth wood, and Lan Wangji uses Wei Ying's loss of balance to push him all the way down onto his back. Drags his mouth across Wei Ying's throat, down between his collarbones.
Wei Ying is loose between his legs, slick with lubricant all along the cleft of his ass and up inside. He laughs, stuttering, when Lan Wangji's fingers find their way there.
Lan Wangji raises an eyebrow.
"A man can have needs, gege," Wei Ying says.
"If I don't fuck you often enough," Lan Wangji says, "that can be changed."
"You mean it," Wei Ying says—into his hand, he has his face covered with his hand, fingers splayed so that a glittering sliver of eye is visible between them. "You're too much, you're too good, I just—and then you say things like—"
Lan Wangji pushes three fingers into him—pushes Wei Ying's balls up out the way with his thumb and watches the way Wei Ying takes him, the wet stretch of his body, delicate flushed skin. There are three small freckles right there on the curve of his ass, hidden even when he's naked unless he's being spread a little.
"Your hands," Wei Ying mumbles—laughs again, not the way he laughs when something is funny but the way he laughs when he doesn't know what to do with himself. He squeezes around Lan Wangji's fingers, muscles shifting, a rolling pressure—but he isn't tight, not really. He's stretched himself well. Taken his time with his fingers.
Lan Wangji crooks his fingers, feels after the right place inside Wei Ying. The angle is awkward, he has to twist his shoulder down and tuck his elbow in close against his own hip to reach. He should have thrown Wei Ying down on his front instead, but he was too hungry for the way pleasure looks on Wei Ying's face. It's written there now. Slack mouth, screwed up eyes. His body arches jerkily.
"Come on," Wei Ying says.
Lan Wangji bites Wei Ying's nipple, quick and sharp. Wei Ying's legs tighten against his.
"Yeah, yes, I get it, I can't tell you what to do," Wei Ying manages, after a gasping moment. Grins up at Lan Wangji, pats his cheek. The pads of his fingers are rough, the drag of them defined. His thumb touches Lan Wangji's bottom lip, still tender from his earlier efforts. The urge to bite him is irresistible, and so Lan Wangji doesn't try to resist it.
"Oh," Wei Ying mumbles. He pushes his thumb in deeper as Lan Wangji's teeth loosen, gives him the bulk of it instead of just the tip—lets him worry at the prominent knuckle, work his tongue against the nail. This too is ridged, the way nails can be after sickness or malnourishment—marks that predate Wei Ying's presence—
He needs to be deeper inside Wei Ying. The feeling is acute, a stinging pressure under his ribs—they fumble together—manage between them to slick his cock—
He holds Wei Ying too tightly as he pushes inside. His hands feel cramped, can't be loosened. But isn't he allowed to hold on like that now? Cling?
He needs—he needs. He needs it—the clinging. Everything, every scrap of overwhelming closeness. He needs the way Wei Ying can laugh as he's pushed, laugh as he gives under the force of Lan Wangji's love. Turn it from the bitter and vicious thing he used to believe it was into something sweet.
He pushes Wei Ying all the way down at last, flat on his back. Hitches his hips up for him—sinks deeper with the better angle—Wei Ying arches his back again. His stomach rises and falls heavily. Lovely Wei Ying, lovely man. His husband, his.
"Fuck," Wei Ying gasps. "Fuck, fuck, you're—haa, you're inside me—"
As though it were the first time, the first shock of understanding, realising what this could be. Wei Ying was not Lan Wangji, he hadn't spent years and years exploring his own body. He has had years and years less of any sort of ordinary life.
"Yes," Lan Wangji murmurs. He slides a hand under the hollow curve of Wei Ying's back, smooths the other across his stomach—Wei Ying obligingly tightens his legs around Lan Wangji's waist—
They both shudder.
"You're inside me," Wei Ying says again. It means—something other than the words. It means something, to Wei Ying, which Lan Wangji cannot see. It soothes something for him—
That it is good, does something good, is perhaps all he needs to know, although he wants to know more, to know everything. Instead of asking, he kisses Wei Ying's chest, right where an old scar isn't—presses his palm down more firmly on Wei Ying's stomach, where a new scar is. Fucks him, with growing confidence—with growing force—takes his legs and bends them up to get more leverage, and to see more—fucks Wei Ying until he cries—
Lan Wangji cried, the first time, despite his desperate determination not to—and the second too. He cried because he was in love and because it felt strange to feel so good and because before Wei Ying stopped being dead it had been a long time since he'd cried over anything at all, and Wei Ying's living presence had shaken something loose, and now Lan Wangji is a person who cries sometimes—not heavily, not loudly. Sometimes Wei Ying doesn't even notice. But his eyes sting—when he's too happy, when he's too sad. That's how it is.
It had been such a long few months, and Wei Ying had welcomed him into his arms so easily. Had walked along unfamiliar roads, thinking about it—about them, about himself, about the tangled sort of way he felt about desire—and he had returned to Lan Wangji with the thought already complete. They should get married; they should fuck. They should probably not do it in that order, because if Lan Wangji didn't kiss him right then he was going to die and if Lan Wangji did kiss him he wasn't going to want to stop at kissing.
Lan Wangji, who had wanted all of these things for perhaps eighteen years, angrily and reluctantly and desperately, hopelessly and then hopefully, found himself feeling slow to understand all the same. Overwhelmed. Always, Wei Ying can overwhelm him.
Come away with me.
A farmhouse. Dust and stale air. The work of cleaning. Spider webs caught on skin. The way the good bones of the building revealed themselves. The growing scatter of belongings.
The nightmares.
I'm the one you want dead, so kill me. Wei Ying's open blank eyes. The phantom pain in Lan Wangji's chest. The horrible silence between them, sometimes, when their grief has been yanked violently to the surface. The shaky effort it takes to break it.
This is not a home, precisely, not for them. They have not decided if it will be, or if they are only passing through. It is a small haven. It is a place without ghosts—not Gusu, not Yiling, not Yunmeng. Somewhere we've never been before, Wei Ying said, as though proposing an adventure. They had both been having nightmares. Waking in a place where those nightmares had been real or had been close to real or might become real—
Better to go somewhere new. The nightmares came with them, but—
It is better. For now, at least, it is better.
They lie together in the heavy noon heat, windows shuttered. The light is reduced to thin strips: a blade of gold across Wei Ying's shoulder, his ankle. Across Lan Wangji's throat. Wei Ying is quiet still, his movements sluggish. There is a soft melancholy to him, although he has slept well, although the sex was good.
"Tell me a story," he says.
Lan Wangji thinks. It's such a difficult thing—tell me a story, tell me what you're thinking about, tell me how you feel. The request locks up the words he might be able to say unprompted, and he has to struggle to unlock them again.
"When Sizhui was young," he says, "he always wanted stories."
"I bet," Wei Ying says. "Did you recite precepts for him, Lan er-gege?"
"No," Lan Wangji says. "I told him about animals."
"Rabbits."
"On occasion."
"Are you going to tell me about rabbits?"
Lan Wangji brushes Wei Ying's hair back from his face. "Is that what you want?"
"Yes," Wei Ying says. "No. I want—"
Lan Wangji keeps stroking his hair, fingertips against his sweaty scalp.
"I was gone a pretty long time," Wei Ying says.
This, they have talked about—a little—haltingly.
Wei Ying did not wake up at Mo Manor feeling twenty-two. He woke up in a body which had been perhaps twenty-five before it was violently reworked to fit him. He woke up feeling seventy, feeling five, feeling thirty-five, feeling like someone who had only ever dreamed of being twenty-two. He woke up wanting to be dead still.
"Mm," Lan Wangji agrees.
Grief that is and isn't fresh. That feels as though it should be bloodier or more thoroughly scarred over.
"Tell me a story," Wei Ying says again.
Things that mean something more than themselves.
Once upon a time, a boy Lan Wangji was in love with killed a legendary beast.
Once upon a time, Lan Wangji sat in a restaurant with a child and a young man, a young man he was in love with, and—
The past crawls after them.
"There is a woman at the market who has a cat," he says. "I saw her this morning."
Wei Ying's face relaxes.
"There is a dog in this story," Lan Wangji warns him.
"But it doesn't get the best of the cat?"
Lan Wangji shakes his head. Wei Ying grins—slow and real.
"Okay. Tell me."
There is no story which is free from ghosts. They bring their own ghosts with them. But in a world which is very big, even ghosts can enjoy small simple stories, and be soothed.
"The cat is very small," Lan Wangji says. "It sits on top of her stall's awning."
"Perched like a little owl?" Wei Ying asks.
"Mm. Big ears."
"Good."
Wei Ying stretches out, cat-like himself.
Lan Wangji smiles, and knows that Wei Ying will notice, even though the room is dim.
Tell me a story. Sing me a song.
Not feverish requests now, not desperate ones. Quiet comfort for quiet melancholy.
Something simple, something sweet.