Work Text:
“Lan Zhan,” he says with all the cheer he can muster. “I’m going to travel again.”
Freezing in the door opening of the Jingshi, Lan Zhan lifts his eyes in alarm, which makes Wei Wuxian’s stomach drop along with his courage. Several cold, frozen moments pass in which neither move, before Lan Zhan finally steps inside and places the tray with tea on the low table, deliberate, but stiff.
“Lan Zhan?”
“Where will you go?” There’s nothing of the openness and warmth Wei Wuxian is accustomed to in Lan Zhan’s voice. Instead, the words come out—for want of a better word—choked.
“I don’t know,” he says.
Maybe this hadn’t been a good idea. But looking at Lan Zhan now—beautiful, ethereal, descended from the heavens in person but still so far away—his heart aches in a way he hadn’t felt since he’d roamed the lands some months before.
Lan Zhan does not look at him. Instead, he takes a small breath, then sinks down at the table to pour them tea. “When will you leave?”
Closing his eyes, Wei Wuxian fights a tremor. “I don’t know,” he says again. I don’t want to go.
The cup prepared for him clinks when it’s set on the table, waiting, and with great reluctance he forces himself to sit opposite Lan Zhan. And yet he can’t help it—he sneaks a look at the other’s face, but finds it perfectly impassive, as if truly hewn from jade.
He isn’t prompted again, but feels the need to explain. “It’s not like I don’t want to stay,” he begins, and that’s already a mistake. Though barely noticeable, Lan Zhan flinches at the words.
Wei Wuxian curses his tongue. Saying you wish to travel is obviously different from implying you do not wish to stay, he reasons, and his words had instigated exactly that.
“I love it here!” Also wrong—life in Cloud Recesses is not something he is accustomed to, which Lan Zhan knows, but Wei Wuxian’s willing to learn, willing to make it home, if only—
But that will not happen. And that’s why he needs to go.
“I just get restless,” he says quickly, as last remedy. “And it won’t be forever! Maybe I could go to Lotus Pier, if Jiang Cheng allows it, or travel up to Qinghe.”
Lan Zhan drinks his tea, then sets it down. “If Wei Ying wishes to go, he should.”
Stifling another curse, he wraps his hands around the cup, squeezing tightly. This conversation is not going the way he’d planned. Lan Zhan is giving none of the words he could understand as acceptance, and instead seems further away from him than he’d even been when they were teenagers—at least then, Wei Wuxian had been able to coax a reaction out of him, be it one of anger.
“I feel lonely.”
The words are voiced against his wish, and now he can’t take them back. Dismayed, he shuts his mouth at once, but Lan Zhan has already raised his eyes to him. And with it, a winter passes, and something inside Wei Wuxian melts like snow along with it, and he feels warm all over. He alone has the privilege of receiving that look, of sustaining eye-contact with a man whose emotions are held deep within him, but which are reflected in the glint of his eyes, the twitch of his lids, the smallest of movements.
Met with such vulnerability, an insistent surge of bravery finds his voice again. “You are here, of course, but I rarely get to see you. Our daily lives seem to pass each other, and you have so many duties to attend to.” Wei Wuxian offers an apologetic smile.
Lan Zhan parts his lips, thinks, then says, “We see each other every day.”
At this point, Wei Wuxian can do nothing but bury his head in his hands, leaning forward on the table. It’s not even untrue—they do take tea in the Jingshi every day, and he bothers His Excellency during lectures and conferences whenever he deems it will cause the least of disturbances. They discuss lessons together, confer about night-hunts and the juniors’ advancements, sometimes even bring up the politics of the cultivation world, sharing insights into sect leaders and their motives.
“Wei Ying?”
But how could he explain? How could he tell Lan Zhan that it’s torture being this close to him and still keep his distance? How could he tell him it’s easier to yearn for him from afar and imagine a life at his side, than to live in this cold reality in which he’s not?
“It’s not the same.” His eyes slip closed. He knows Lan Zhan wants to ask him why—and he can’t explain. So he pre-empts him: “I don’t know why.”
Thrice now he’s claimed ignorance. He’s starting to feel sympathetic to Nie Huaisang.
Between the two of them, he has certainly always been the one to give words to his feelings, but Lan Zhan is not a man of many words, and never of his emotions, so he does not expect anything less but for the conversation to dwindle.
When Lan Zhan does rise from the table, his heart sinks, and he opens his eyes to watch him leave. But even though he does cross the room, he does not make to leave, instead seating himself at the low desk in the middle of the low room, and he produces his guqin from his sleeve.
Wei Wuxian wants to weep, and when Lan Zhan brings his fingers to the strings, then pulls the too-familiar melody from it, his tears actually fall. It’s slower, and more hesitant than he’s used to, but he finds himself breathing in tune with it, feeling as if everything might stop if that sound would cease.
Though the melody does not end, something in its timbre draws him from the floor, makes his feet take hesitant steps towards it, to sit down across from Lan Zhan again. Low strums, leaving a resonant echo in his heart, are still played at a slower pace, and he can place it now. It’s a question.
Straightening his back, he reaches for his belt and takes Chenqing, and when he sets the flute to his lips, he plays an answer.
He wants to play softly, find a harmony with the guqin’s strings, with Lan Zhan. But his breath is high in his chest, and uneven for the tears that still form in his eyes, so he plays in concordance with the melody he knows in the most pathetic way he ever has. He plays until another note fails to sound, fading under his lack of breath, and a sob constricts his throat. Squeezing his eyes shut, he lowers his hands and instrument into his lap.
When he breathes in, there’s a hitch.
“Wei Ying.”
The music stops. All he hears now is the sound of his own wet breaths, and he shakes with the effort of crying quietly.
Suddenly, warm fingers touch his cheek, gathering his tears. His eyes fly open. The hand retreats.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan repeats, low, tender. He’d leaned across the table to reach him, and is now retreating.
With quick reflexes, Wei Wuxian grabs his hand. He presses it back against his cheek, suddenly uncaring of the response.
“Lan Zhan,” he echoes. I don’t want to go.
Lan Zhan twitches his fingers, trapped between his hand and cheek. But he does not pull back. Instead, he strokes his thumb carefully, wonderfully, across his cheek, gathering more tears. “Wei Ying. Do not leave again.”
The words are laden—he knows he doesn’t mean his brief travels some months back. Sixteen years weigh heavily between them, and weigh most heavily on Lan Zhan, though he barely speaks of it. He dares not ask.
“I don’t want to leave,” he whispers. Having controlled his breath a little, he looks at him from beneath wet lashes.
“Then stay,” Lan Zhan says decisively. There is determination in the set of his brows, in the nod he gives, but some vulnerability in the way his lips are parted.
Wei Wuxian drops his chin to his chest. “Not like this,” he says. In spite of the pain of parting, he can’t retract his words and do away with his concerns, plastering on a smile and pretending it’s alright.
“Then how?” What can I do? Lan Zhan means.
Still holding onto Lan Zhan’s hand, he lowers both to the table, lightly over the guqin there, unwilling to let go. “You are, in this life and the last, the one who knows me,” Wei Wuxian says. Though his heart is hammering, he takes the leap. “But I wish for—for more than that.”
His gaze is fixedly on the guqin, cheeks burning, and ears, too. Out of his control, the hand he’s holding flexes, moves, and he relinquishes his hold at once to let it free.
Lan Zhan, however, only shifts to grab his hand in turn.
He blinks up.
“For what?” Lan Zhan demands. What do you want?
Wei Wuxian’s anxious mind races to make sense of his face.
It’s not the affronted frustration that had made him huff, nor the shocked indignation that had made him fluster. It’s not the frowned determination with which he’d defended him, nor the concerned desperation with which he’d tried to dissuade him.
His eyes are wanting.
So Wei Wuxian simply says, “You.”
And if those words are not clear enough, he will show him. Letting Chenqing stay loose in his lap, he uses both hands to wrap around Lan Zhan’s, bringing it up. Just as he locks eyes with him, he presses his lips lightly to the knuckles.
Something shifts on Lan Zhan’s face—and slowly, his features soften into the brightest expression of relief he’s ever seen. At this, Wei Wuxian breathes out a silent laugh, a burden lifting from his chest.
Lan Zhan is looking intently at his smile, then back up, and while Wei Wuxian still wants to hear something of a response—
A hand winds into his hair at the back of his neck, and he’s tugged forward, until Lan Zhan is closer to him than he’s ever been. He lets himself be pulled in easily, but does not anticipate how soft lips press against his, and he gasps. The pressure is gone before he can either process or respond to it, and that won’t do.
Tipping his chin forward, he captures Lan Zhan’s mouth again, and there’s the quietest of sounds from him, which delights him to no end. He doesn’t know what he grabs to get closer, because he is lost in the new feeling of kissing Lan Zhan, of soft, pliant lips, of a taste he cannot place, and a rush of sensations he’d only ever dreamt of feeling.
When he moves to deepen, get closer, taste more, he is made aware of the low table separating them when his hipbone collides with it. He almost loses his balance, too, but Lan Zhan’s hands are bracing his shoulders and hold him steady.
Lan Zhan, whose mouth is now reddened and slightly wet, breathing a little heavier, and Wei Wuxian doesn’t want to stop.
When he springs to his feet, slamming Chenqing next to Wangji, Lan Zhan seems slightly alarmed, but he is truly only getting up to sidestep the table. He drops to his knees next to him, reaching out to grab at his robes.
“Wei Ying,” says Lan Zhan, welcoming him back, and when their knees knock together as they shuffle closer, he simply wraps arms around Wei Wuxian’s waist to pull him in his lap.
He is warm, so incredibly warm, and willing beneath Wei Wuxian’s every touch. It’s too much at once, but he can’t just let him go.
The small, decorative plate of Lan Zhan’s headband is cold against his forehead where they’re pressed together.
“Always been yours,” Lan Zhan whispers.
He nods against him, bringing his arms up around his shoulders to let his head fall against Lan Zhan’s neck, holding him in a tight embrace.
“And I’ve always been yours,” he whispers, “even if I didn’t know it.”