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"Move aside.”
Ah, here it comes—except Lan Xichen doesn’t move.
“He’s one of them,” Nie Mingjue insists. “Just look at him!”
Mottled gray-brown feathers lie beneath Meng Yao, splayed out in disarray. No one is born with wings, but Meng Yao’s are particularly new, and they still feel like a foreign object forced upon him—or they did, until Nie Mingjue took one in his grasp and cast him to the ground.
“Mingjue-xiong, Meng Yao was our spy. He gave us the information that was able to lead you here. To do so, he had to earn Wen Ruohan’s trust—”
“If Wen Ruohan trusted him enough to give him those —” It comes out nearly a growl.
It’s true. Wen Ruohan had bestowed the wings of his sect to only one other, and that was Wen Zhuliu, and everyone knew how far Wen Zhului’s loyalty went. “Cut them off,” Meng Yao hears himself say.
“A-Yao, no!”
Meng Yao manages a smile. “Zewu-jun, Chifeng-zun is right. These wings…”
Nie Mingjue raises Baxia. But Zewu-jun, too, raises Shuoyue. The saber crashes down and Meng Yao flinches but there is no pain.
Nie Mingjue did not strike him. Somehow, Lan Xichen stayed his hand.
Meng Yao wakes in a new room, and that’s when he realizes he must have passed out. A new room—but not an unfamiliar one; he’s still somewhere within the Nightless City. And Lan Xichen is watching him.
“It seems our roles are reversed,” says Lan Xichen as he notices Meng Yao wake. It’s a moment before Meng Yao catches on—Lan Xichen must be thinking about back when Meng Yao sheltered him, on the run.
Times were simpler, then.
“Who saw me?” he asks.
“No one else. I brought you here alone.” And they’re still in the Nightless City, so perhaps Lan Xichen is even right.
“Your sword—”
“...A-Yao?”
“I’m going to have to cut them off sooner or later,” Meng Yao says. “Better now, before anyone else sees them.”
Lan Xichen’s reluctance is plain on his face. And he could say not while you’re injured or he could say find someone else to do it but instead, Lan Xichen says, “They’re beautiful.”
They’re really not. They’re dull and drab, not the striking white, or steel gray, or even, sometimes, that splash of red, of a true Wen. Wen Zhuliu, he recalls, had the speckled gray wings of a common owl. So while Meng Yao does not doubt that Wen Ruohan truly meant the honor in bestowing the Wen wings upon him, he knows he meant the slight, too.
What Meng Yao says, is “They’re a mess. I think this one is broken—” By Chifeng-zun, of course, but he doesn't say it.
“Let me take care of it.” Lan Xichen places a hand atop Meng Yao’s right wing, and Meng Yao flinches—not from pain, but from the touch itself.
Lan Xichen isn’t supposed to be part of this. Lan Xichen should never have known.
“Zewu-jun, you know that Jin Guangshan cannot—” He breaks off. Once, young and foolish, he’d thought that all cultivators had wings. Once, he’d lain at the feet of Koi Tower’s steps and dreamed of flight.
“He cannot have a son with Wen wings,” says Meng Yao. “I can think of no good reason to delay this any further.” He has to do this now, before it sinks in that he still has them, before they're something he can lose.
And then Lan Xichen says the thing that makes it real, says “Have you flown?”
“You know I haven’t,” Meng Yao returns. In the final weeks of the Sunshot Campaign, the Nightless City had gone to ground.
“You should get a chance to have that, A-Yao.”
Once, young and foolish, Meng Yao had told the wayward heir of the Lan his dreams, too.
“Let me heal you. After that, I’ll let you make your own decision. But I want to give you this, A-Yao.”
So he lets him. He hides the pain as Lan Xichen guides his hollow bones back into place—and then there’s no pain to hide, because he has never felt spiritual power so strong and gentle at the same time.
“I must confess, I don’t know what to do about the feathers,” says Lan Xichen.
“I haven’t had them for long, I still haven’t figured everything out myself,” Meng Yao says, then reconsiders. Lan Xichen, after all, hadn’t even known how to wash clothing.
He sits up. His wing is healed enough, now, that he can bend it forward to inspect the rest of the damage. Probably not healed enough to fly. “They’re fine,” he says. “They’re out of alignment, that’s all.”
“Then, if you’ll allow me—”
Lan Xichen begins with the primary feathers. Easier to see what needs to be done, Meng Yao supposes. He steadies his breathing, doesn’t let Lan Xichen feel him tense up. Preening is an intimate gesture, so the Wen say, but until this moment the only other man who’d touched his wings this way was Wen Ruohan.
—oh.
“You were so awestruck, back then, when you spoke of flights of Wen cultivators,” says Lan Xichen. “Even though they were the ones pursuing us. I didn’t tell you that before the Cloud Recesses fell, I once felt the same.”
Meng Yao swallows. “Who wouldn’t?” he asks.
“Who wouldn’t?” Lan Xichen agrees. “A-Yao, I simply hoped I could help you keep one good memory of your wings. That, for the sake of the awestruck boy who saved my life, they could be more than a reminder of your time undercover.”
But you hope for more than that, don’t you? You want to overwrite Wen Ruohan’s claim on me.
“Wen Ruohan never asked if I wanted these,” Meng Yao says, and Lan Xichen’s hands still.
“...did you?”
It’s an impossible question to answer. Meng Yao had felt only a dawning horror as they had made their presence known, growing beneath his skin. But had the circumstances been different—?
“It should have been the Lan with wings,” says Meng Yao. It’s not an answer, but it should please Lan Xichen all the same.
Wen Lan Xichen brings his hands back, combing through the soft underlayer of feathers one by one, Meng Yao lets himself relax. Sighs audibly, knowing Lan Xichen won’t take it for weakness. He does still dream of flight, but this may be all he can have.
It will have to be enough.