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This is it.
It’s happening.
He’s here.
Wei Wuxian has been waiting for today his whole life.
Well, really, the last 10 years. But also, really, his whole life.
A lifetime of knowing that something’s missing. That something’s out there, when it should be by his side. Something that belongs to him, and isn’t here.
Ten years of searching for something to fill up that void. Ten years of trying to find the unfindable. Ten long, slogging, ha-ha-ha-look-at-me-failing years of chasing down every single urban legend from Yiling to Caiyi to its root, of tracking down every last conspiracy theory on obscure cultivation forums on and off the dark web, of chasing one shady lead down another alley, and coming up blank. Ten long, lonely years, of scraping every surface of every road of every wall of every building for the tiniest hint of a shimmering, diamond-edged scale gleaming with the light of a captured moonbeam, to match the one he wears around his neck.
Ten years, and here he is, back where he started, on the streets of Yiling.
Well, he thinks to himself, not quite where he started. He’s come a ways up since then. He stops to laugh at his own joke, and swings a leg off the parapet, teetering sideways off the roof and letting himself feel the vertigo of almost, almost, almost plummeting thirty-five floors to the pavement, before snatching back his balance and righting himself so he can look out properly at his city.
Yiling, of which he is now the patriarch.
Yiling, where he remembers being abandoned, or orphaned, or perhaps both. Filthy streets and hungry dogs to duke it out with hungry little boys, drug runners and pimps looking for prey, cold rainy nights and sweltering, sickening days. A childhood that should have ended in death, a corpse that should have been devoured before it could ever be found, a little boy who should have been lost, forever. But who had found, instead, a shiny, smooth little pebble made of calcified hearth-glow, warm with magic and protective power, just enough to keep him hidden when he needed to be, just enough to keep him alive when there was no food or water to be had for days, and his belly began to distend with scurvy.
The scale is a mystery – who knows where he found it, or whether it found him? Perhaps he’s always had it. All he has known, is that there’s something at the other end of this mystery that’s his. But no one can confirm or deny it for him, except the owner of that scale.
The dragon he’s been looking for.
And who’s apparently been right here, right under his nose, this whole time.
In his city.
And tonight, Wei Wuxian has finally, finally, caught up.
He wants to laugh, so he does. It’s a beautiful night, lit by stars and a full moon above, and the glitter of Yiling sprawling under his feet, below. It’s a beautiful night, and he has an appointment with a dragon – if the dragon hasn’t misinterpreted his very carefully, pointedly arranged challenge.
He feels giddy and excited, but sue him, it’s everything he’s ever wanted – well, no, it isn’t. Because everything he wants is not made up of things that he can say in words, only in an absence and a loss that he feels too acutely to ever speak of to anyone. But this feels like everything that is achievable, and besides, it’s exhilarating in and of itself – the chance to meet a dragon!
They’re made of ancient magic and ancient knowledge, and no one’s ever found one, or spoken to one, or even found the hint of one actually living among them. Plenty of stories of dragons in the wind and the rivers, discharging their duties in the Jade Emperors court, but none of them walking where mortal cultivators strive to join them in immortality.
It’s gonna serve him right if the dragon turns out to be an irritable, taciturn old greybeard, with crusty eyebrows and rules for proper conduct, up to and including how many bowls of food a person’s allowed to eat at any given meal.
In that case he’ll still do his best to come out of this with a newfound grandpa, so – all in all, he doesn’t think he minds too much who shows up – as long as someone does. He’s ready to wait all night.
And if not tonight –
He never gets to find out what he would have done, in that case, because there is the faintest, softest, most whisper-silk rippling of qi in the air just behind him. Like a very large, very dense object had just displaced a lot of air very fast. But very, very gently.
And just like that, he’s not alone.
There’s a man with him now, a man who should have always been with him, he thinks, though he doesn’t know why, or what that means. He sees a man with a heart-stopping face, framed by ink-black hair that lifts and flutters in the summer breeze and reflects the light of the stars and a thousand reflective windows till it looks like he’s glowing with his own personal spotlight.
He’s ridiculously beautiful.
And his eyes –
Wei Wuxian meets those eyes, looks into those eyes, into the soul giving life to the jade-carved curves and angles of that perfect, stunning, heartbreaking face. What looks back from those sun-bright, wine-drenched, golden eyes is –
Something in his own soul shifts just a quarter-inch over. It’s a tiny, infinitesimal movement, perhaps a little to the left, but whatever it is locks him into place, like all his misaligned angles and planes have finally met the correct fittings and slotted neatly into their proper places, instead of just-so-slightly off-kilter.
He looks into the man’s eyes and sees so much love.
He sees – “Lan Zhan?”
~*~
Lan Zhan, he thinks. Of course it’s Lan Zhan.
Who else could it be, for him, but Lan Zhan? There hasn’t been anyone else, in this life or in any other life – and there have been other lives, he remembers now – so many other lives.
He remembers being fifteen, drunk on excellent wine and the even more excellent swordsmanship of a beautiful dragon boy in the moonlight, and a life that went sideways quickfast, until it dragged him into hell. He does terrible, blasphemous things to win a war, and slightly less terrible things to protect the war-torn, and he dies in the end for the very first time, leaving Lan Zhan to wait for thirteen long years before he finds his way back to him somehow.
Then he dies again, and Lan Zhan goes on living, like dragons do and cultivators who owe Yan Wang the debt of a thousand lives, don’t.
Not until they’ve paid their dues.
He remembers being twenty-two and looking out on a little farm that’s all his own, and feeling hope rise in his chest, that here is something he can grow and make good things of. Hoeing his potatoes as Lan Zhan weeded his beds of herbs and gentians next to him. Coming in from the sun, flushed with sweat and the pride of bringing home a pheasant or a fish for their dinner. Flushed with love and Lan Zhan’s horrible, deadly, ultra-sincere compliments, as he peppers kisses over his shoulders, his neck, the dip of his hips.
He remembers being wealthy and celebrated, and realises with a jolt that the scrolls he had painted in that life are still hanging in the homes of wealthy collectors, in carefully curated museum exhibits around the world. His hands, growing old and stiff with arthritis and the labours of a hard-working life. Lan Zhan, smooth-cheeked and black-haired, massaging his rheumy fingers one at a time with gentle devoted care. A life lived large, and lovely, and mourned heartily when he was gone.
He remembers being fifty-seven and looking twenty, on the cusp of immortality but not quite there yet. The hope in Lan Zhan’s eyes, which never dimmed through their lives together, but never quite shone as brightly as it did now. The shattering of Lan Zhan’s heart, when Wei Wuxian decided to throw himself between danger and someone else, and ripped away Lan Zhan’s hope.
He remembers being thirty-three, and angry, and self-destructive, because of what he’d done to Lan Zhan in their last life. Because in this life, he doesn’t get the chance to try for immortality, because he’s just a man, just an ordinary soldier, conscripted for war. War, and more war, Lan Zhan by his side, always in the same regiment, somehow. Lan Zhan, giving him a home to come back to each night in the trenches, and every night that came after. Lan Zhan, holding him together till he somehow glues himself back together and promises to do better.
He remembers being seven, and totally enamoured of his Zhan-gege, who looks at him with gentle, deep affection, and reminds him that he has to grow up strong enough to make his way in the world, and wise enough to know what that way should be. Zhan-gege, leaving, promising to return when he’s older. Trying to follow, with the half-baked understanding of a child who knows nothing, comprehends even less. Losing his way, until he’s utterly and forever lost, and they have to start all over again.
He remembers being – a doctor, an actor, a calligrapher, a farmer more than once, a cultivator almost always. All the footsteps he has been tracing across China for the last decade are paths he has walked, and made a home in, and sometimes even died on. He has wandered with a flute, and a donkey, and Lan Zhan leading the reins next to him – but it must have happened often, because sometimes they wear black and white, sometimes purple and blue, sometimes both black or both blue or both white. He has wandered alone and stumbled his way into Lan Zhan’s home, dying of fever and infected wounds, only to be nursed back to health and happiness, and never let go of again.
Time and time over, he has found his way back to Lan Zhan, and no matter who he is or what he’s done, Lan Zhan has taken him home, and handed him a happily-ever-after on a silver platter, each and every time.
Even though he’s left behind, picking up the pieces of Wei Wuxian’s lives, every time he lives and dies.
Even though it’s not his fault that Wei Wuxian has to die, over and over again.
It’s Wei Wuxian’s curse, Wei Wuxian’s punishment – and Lan Zhan is here, where he’s always been, serving it right alongside him, all this time.
He’s been counting in his head as he remembers. The numbers are adding up, but to what, he can’t say yet. It’s slowly taking shape in his head, wiggling around in the tight little spaces left behind now that everything else is filled with –
“Lan Zhan,” he says again, the only thing he’s capable of saying.
“Mn,” is all Lan Zhan says back, which is typical of him, but the single syllable is enough to unstopper the dam holding behind everything that’s bubbling and roiling its way out of his mouth, which is gonna translate to some pretty predictable word vomit, stat.
“Lan Zhan,” he tries, for a third time, just to reassure himself, just to hear –
“Mn” – again, and it’s like he’s gotten permission, this is the best, because he can’t even stop himself now.
“Lan Wangji.”
“Mn.”
“Hanguang-Jun.”
“Mn.”
“Lan-er-gege.”
“Wei Ying.”
The dam bursts open properly, fully, at last, and he’s hurtling down with the rushing waters till he crashes ashore against the warm, solid planes of his Lan Zhan, his husband, his dragon. He is caught and held fast, held close and impossibly tight, he can’t breathe, he can’t stop laughing and saying, “Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan,” even as the numbers add up somewhere in the back of his brain and he gets it.
Why tonight feels right. Feels special.
Tonight, his ledger's back in the black. One thousand lives that did not belong to him, paid in full.
Now they stand at the threshold of one thousand and one, which is all theirs, brand new, a fresh start with a golden core brighter than bright spinning in Wei Wuxian’s dantian, the lightness of a sentence lifted from his shoulders, and the certainty that – “This is it,” he mumbles into Lan Zhan’s neck, and is then surprised to find that he’s been hiding in Lan Zhan’s neck without even realising it.
He lifts his head to look at Lan Zhan properly. Lan Zhan’s face is lit up – with hope, with dawning joy. He’s come to the same conclusion Wei Wuxian has – that this really is it.
Their happy ending. Their forever, if they just reach out and take it.
“Wei Ying,” he whispers into the air between them, electricity sparking in his eyes that sends currents of pleasure down Wei Wuxian’s spine.
Then abruptly, he’s letting go and stepping away, leaving Wei Wuxian to stumble, searching for purchase on unsteady feet. There’s a hungry, angry, eager look to him, and the ends of his hair dance wild with barely-restrained qi that threatens to just snap towards Wei Wuxian and bind him tight to itself.
Well, that won’t be any fun at all.
Wei Wuxian grins at his soulmate, a feral hunger of his own kindling deep, deep in his belly, and takes a slow step back, then two, watching the golden eyes that track every move he makes with the sharpening focus of a predator locking onto the hunt.
“All right, Lan Zhan. We’ll do it your way,” he tosses out with a smirk, shimmying back along the parapet till he’s standing at the edge of the roof. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.
“Catch me,” he dares, and jumps straight into freefall.
~*~
Lan Zhan chasing him over the rooftops.
It’s like the very first time all over again, but also something new.
That night, Lan Zhan had been wearing white, over the body and face of a beautiful teenaged boy. He had been angry – downright furious with Wei Wuxian’s audacity and disregard for the rules of his home. Wei Wuxian had looked at him, and thought he was the funniest thing ever.
If only he had realised what he came to know much later – that once having set eyes on Lan Zhan, he would never again be able to look away.
How he had hated Wei Wuxian back then! Of course, he denies it vehemently, insisting that he has never hated Wei Wuxian, but Wei Wuxian’s never completely bought it. He’d gone out of his way to be a royal pain in Lan Wangji’s ass, back then, and he was a professional brat who was aiming to get as deep under Lan Wangji’s skin as he possibly could.
If he’d known, back then, what that would lead to, would he still have chased Lan Zhan down?
He darts out of the reach of a slender, whip-like curl of qi that’s sneaking towards his ankle, swatting it away with a burst of golden sparks from a talisman to tease, before reaching out with a tendril of his own qi, taking it gently into his hold.
But not letting it get any closer. Can’t make it that easy for Lan Zhan now, can he. He throws a grin over his shoulder, big and beaming with excitement and anticipation, and stumbles over nothing when Lan Zhan smiles back.
If he had smiled like this back then, what would Wei Wuxian have done? Would he have known what a precious gift he was being given? What a rare and beautiful sight he was being shown? He wouldn’t have known any of that, but he thinks that even then, he would have understood at least the quality of his companion, and appreciated whatever he put on offer.
Lan Zhan takes advantage of his distraction to almost sweep him off his feet and into his arms, but Wei Wuxian has spent this whole life training to rule, and he flips easily through the air to somersault over his partner’s head. As he lands, he lets himself reach a hand out to trail his fingertips against the back of Lan Zhan’s neck. Just a barely-there ghost of a touch, to raise his hackles, to make him come at Wei Wuxian just a little faster.
It works. Lan Zhan whips around to glare at him, and Bichen flicks out of its sheath to attack from the side.
It’s perfect. His Lan Zhan, so perfect. Wei Wuxian laughs, and lets himself go.
Suibian zips through the air to clash against its old rival with a twang that resonates through the air like the strike of a gong against the rim of a deep singing bowl. The swords hang suspended against each other for a moment, as if unwilling to part, before slamming back into their masters’ hands and then the chase is on, fast and flashy and leaping over scaffolding and ledge and spire, falling down buildings and rocketing back up on the quicksilver surface of a sword racing against gravity. Suibian meets Bichen and parts, and meets and parts again, in a dance they have been choreographing since that very first fight, on a night just as magical as this.
The night they become each other’s, forever.
They’ve had one of those, technically, if a thousand lives can be summed up as ‘always.’ But tonight is the opportunity for a new kind of forever. A better one, where he gets to stay, and Lan Zhan no longer has to wait for him, ever again.
Wei Wuxian spins to meet the thrust of his soulmate’s sword, parries and dances out of the way, and mischief strikes him with his sudden resolve. He wants to give Lan Zhan everything in this life. And he wants Lan Zhan to understand that beyond all doubt.
His mind goes back to another day, long gone by, in Yiling. The best meal of his life, that he never had to pay for. Little hands holding a grass butterfly. An equally little voice, asking Lan Zhan to stay.
Back then, Wei Wuxian had turned away, and let Lan Zhan go.
Tonight, he wants Lan Zhan to know that he’ll never turn away from him again.
He ducks under Lan Zhan’s arm and whirls in time with his sweeping, ranged attacks, just fast enough that he can’t be cornered – till he suddenly wants to be, and then he has Bichen pointed at his throat and Lan Zhan with fire and a question in his eyes.
He winks, and releases the talisman hidden between his fingers.
Butterflies, golden and silver and blue and purple and red, burst from his hands and straight into Lan Zhan’s face, swallowing him in a vortex of glittering, fluttering pests. Wei Wuxian’s declaration of remembrance. His renewed promise of love.
You’re mine.
I’m asking you to stay.
So hurry up, and catch me already.
Lan Zhan must understand, because when the swarm of glowing, magical butterflies finally dissipates, the man is gone.
In his place surges the immense, shimmering bulk of a full-grown dragon, its vast coils gently unfurling and curving between the gleaming skyscrapers lining the streets, its tail extending so far out into the distance that he can’t even see it from his vantage point above the city, cultivator’s eyesight or not.
It has been a very long time since Lan Zhan transformed for him. And oh, this is all for him, this is Lan Zhan putting on a show, where he knows his scales will refract the glow of a ten thousand city lights till it hurts the eye to look at him directly. He’s grown absolutely humongous; almost too big to fit in the spaces between the various structures dotting Yiling's skyline. He glitters blueish-white like the flame of a faceted diamond, his brilliance broken only by the waving strands of the soft, silvery mane that frames his antlers and runs in a long line from his forehead to the tip of his tail.
Wei Wuxian drinks him in like he’s fine wine. He looks like a moonbeam come to earth. If moonbeams were extremely large and carried a mass of several tons and were majestic as fuck and smug as hell about it, and if Lan Zhan isn’t going to cut short his games and take Wei Wuxian home already – well.
He lets himself drop out of the air to land on the jutting metal scaffolding of a sky-bridge under construction, and walks on light, sure feet down the length of it till he reaches the centre. The floating, serpentine coils of Lan Zhan’s body curve and curl around them both, creating a nest, or a cocoon, made of Lan Zhan. A little private world high above the flash of who-knows-how-many-cameras, just for them.
Just because Wei Wuxian indicated, not with words, and not even really with his actions – that he wants this.
All he has to do, all he’s ever had to do, he reflects, is tell Lan Zhan he wants something, to be given it immediately.
So he lets Lan Zhan lower his head till they can look each other in the eye, at a level, as the equals they are and always have been, because each is worse than useless without the other.
He reaches out with his hand, and allows Lan Zhan to touch it ever-so-gently with the tip of his snout. So close. Right there.
And he says, “Lan Zhan, you caught me. Now take me home.”
~*~
Home, it turns out, isn’t in Gusu anymore. Lan Zhan has been living in Yiling for a while now, but not nearly so long as Wei Wuxian had thought.
“You were getting close. Waking up. I thought it was time,” he explains when questioned, which, okay, reasonable.
What’s less reasonable, in Wei Wuxian’s eyes, is the way he insists on – urgh, typical Lan Zhan – doing awful, terrible things that he insists with emphasis, are necessary to Wei Wuxian’s well-being. Like hand-feeding him a feast of his favourite spicy dishes. And hand-washing his hair while he soaks in a hot, hot bath. And hand-scrubbing his back, including all the forever-itchy bits he can never reach. And hand-combing his hair till his whole scalp feels like it’s one unified tingle.
In short, getting his hands on Wei Wuxian for anything and everything except actually getting his hands on Wei Wuxian.
It’s horrible. Wei Wuxian has not been taken care of like this since the last time he was alive and had Lan Zhan around to take care of him – exactly like this. It’s terrible and no-good and he can’t deal with it. He’s a puddle. Lan Zhan will have to learn to fuck a liquid human.
“No fucking,” says Lan Zhan, till Wei Wuxian has been fed, watered, washed, and pampered to within an inch of his life. To Wei Wuxian, who’s familiar with his thousand-times-and-one husband’s appetites, it rather feels like being fattened for slaughter, but…
Oooh, what a feast Lan Zhan will make of him.
~*~
In the end, he loses his patience first, as he always does, and falls on Lan Zhan with the thwarted hunger of too many lives cut short. They kiss and kiss, and he falls back on the bed with Lan Zhan still kissing him, and feels like this too, is a first they get to have again.
He’s hard, and desperate for his husband, but Lan Zhan’s had years of waiting again to build up the reserves of his passion, and besides, he still carries a smidge of guilt for the rough and unprepared nature of their very first coupling.
So Wei Wuxian has to lie back like the good boy he isn’t, and endure the exquisite torment of Lan Zhan taking his time with him. He trails kisses, soft and slick and a little slurpy, over Wei Wuxian’s nipples and belly and the sensitive insides of his thighs. Those same soft, teasing, terrible kisses, that he presses over the length of Wei Wuxian’s straining dick, before finally taking a little mercy – or what he calls mercy and Wei Wuxian calls calculated torture – and wrapping his lips just over the head of Wei Wuxian’s cock, suckling softly, softly, always soft and maddeningly slow, till Wei Wuxian’s crossed the line from flirting, to cajoling, to begging, to just whining in short, breathy little whimpers that he knows must be going straight to Lan Zhan’s dick, if the way he digs his nails into Wei Wuxian’s sides says anything.
When he finally slides a finger, then two, then three, into Wei Wuxian’s carefully lubricated hole, it’s still slow, still syrupy, clever fingers twisting and rubbing in every direction inside him, against and around and over his prostate till he’s glassy-eyed and pent up from pleasure that never tips over into just-quite-enough.
Then Lan Zhan slides into him, big and breathless and he finds his words again, begging him to be go slow, to go easy, to prepare him better, it’s his first time all over again, Lan-er-gege, won’t you take it easy on your Wei Ying?
Lan-er-gege, now that he’s finally got his dick where it wants to be, decides that he most emphatically has not waited over thirty years since their last lifetime to do anything as uninspired as taking it easy.
Time dilates.
Wei Wuxian comes once, comes twice still in his senses, before he loses himself entirely to the slick, aching friction of Lan Zhan’s cock pounding into his ass, sending deep pulses of pleasure through his prostate with every thrust. Lan Zhan takes him from above, and from behind, like he’s nothing but Lan Zhan’s bitch, to be bred full of his seed. Wei Wuxian’s leaking precum everywhere, he’s so wet and hard and desperate with pleasure at the way Lan Zhan takes him in hand and strokes him firmly up and down, twisting with his fist over the head before every downstroke as he buries himself deep in Wei Wuxian’s quivering, overstimulated hole like he was born to fuck it. He makes Wei Wuxian come like that, squealing and trembling, and then he makes Wei Wuxian ride him on tired legs, forcing him to move himself to completion and cruelly refusing to help till he can’t lift himself anymore.
Then he puts Wei Wuxian on his knees and stuffs his cock down his throat, and returns the favour by milking Wei Wuxian with his tongue and clever, clever mouth till he screams for mercy, which he isn’t going to get, and doesn’t actually want.
But he begs for it anyway, because he knows he can trust Lan Zhan to hold him down and fuck him right through it and out the other end, and when he finally comes back to himself, shaking and shivering with the final throes of pleasure, it’s to find that he’s wrapped up tight in Lan Zhan’s arms, in Lan Zhan’s bed, whispering words of desperate devotion into Lan Zhan’s skin that are reciprocated with sweet, slow kisses that steal his breath before putting it right back into his body.
Outside, the sun is making its feeble way through the early morning mist, and the rest of their tomorrows is begun.
~*~
One thousand years later, somewhere in China
On that morning, like every other morning, Wei Wuxian wakes with the sun streaming steadily in from the window to slant against his eyelids, forcing him out of his final snooze and into full wakefulness.
He turns away from it, burrowing his face deep into his pillow, but it’s too late. The pillow is soft, but not the one he wants to be hiding his face in, and this close to consciousness, he finds that the bed is too large, too empty, too cold, despite the perfectly warm pile of blankets he’s nestled in like a snug little piggy all ready to toast.
Now that he’s kind of awake, he doesn’t want to sleep alone. So up he gets, grumbling and grouching against the hour, until he shuffles over to the breakfast table where a meal sits ready for him in covered bowls inscribed with heating talismans. He digs into his congee and eggs, adding liberal doses of his favourite chilli oil, humming under his breath as the food settles into his tummy, leaving him full and happy, like a well-kept housecat.
He moves through the house as he prepares for the day – there’s the spring planting to finish today, and the rabbit hutch needs a new door. There’s very little to tidy up – Lan Zhan always takes care of that before he leaves to teach his current batch of ducklings at the village school, so Wei Wuxian has precious few chores to occupy his time before he needs to quit malingering over the manifest unfairness of mornings being like, a thing, that he has to deal with, like an adult.
He works hard with his hands in the earth, touching green, growing things. He hoes long furrows in the new plots that he’s spent the last week marking out, and carefully drops in his seed potatoes at regular intervals. Lan Zhan thinks purple potatoes are too much of a fussy speciality to make for profitable growing, but this year they have the space for it, so Wei Wuxian has put his foot down – that is to say, batted his lashes at his husband – and got what he wanted.
He spends a hot, happy day in the fields, and a pleasant evening with their rabbits, in their backyard. He fixes the hutch, and weeds the beds of gentians lining their garden, and finally turns his feet towards his door, with the ache of honest work in his shoulders.
Lan Zhan is at home preparing dinner when he returns. He smells clean and fresh from the bath, and Wei Wuxian takes the kindling welcome in his eyes as invitation to wrap himself around his husband’s waist, hanging onto him as he tries to chop scallions and mince ginger with a grown man clinging to him like a limpet.
“Wei Ying, you’re back early,” is all he says.
“Mn. Lan Zhan, I’m here!”
And he always will be.
~*~
Fin.
~*~