Chapter Text
‘Have you heard? The Yiling Patriarch, that traitorous evil- fox is to be married today with a Lan. And not only any Lan at that, but Hanguang-jun himself’ he’d heard someone to his right whisper— a Jin. Just them could voice out loud said opinions about him so openly, even more at a crucial, important moment like this, besides.
Wei Wuxian knew there were a lot of people who hated him solely for the fact of practicing an unorthodox, forbidden art like Resentful Yin energy was in order to be able to continue living on— not to mention the fact that he was. Fox-spirit by birth. And many people just thought and assumed whatever they willed and wanted about them.
They assumed huli jings as traitorous evil fox spirits who tricked the weak, secular men— sometimes with the enough gal to go after stronger magical prey, maybe even cultivators, or even other higher-order spirits— using tempting, beautiful disguises and luring them in to consume their Yang life force and leave them drain. Ha, as if he still didn’t possess an enough functional golden core which had helped him greatly to continue his cultivation and purifying himself of any poisonous excess towards his own body (well, albeit a little bit harmed. His spiritual pathways hurt like little evil bitches, sometimes he really, really couldn’t use it at the top best of his ability, therefore he relied strongly and mostly on his yin spirit— although this presents here didn’t need to know. No, oh sir).
Believe it or not, as much as Huli ing learned ho to use yin energy from a young age, in the long run, even in the less proper accent could be— counterproductive, to say the least.
That was why sometimes it was of absolute, paramount importance they could get a partner with him being able to dual cultivate and ease the load against his spiritual pathways. Although, frankly, what could any of this self-proclaimed self-righteous and stupid hypocrites could know about that? They clearly couldn’t look far away from their own stigma and hurtful biases against Wei Wuxian’s kind.
But he doesn’t care honesty. To be frank he long since a long while stoped caring or even pretending to care. He can let all those scathing horrible comments and misconceptions slide this once, since it’s an important event. Today, he will let them go unscathed since this is also about the Wen Remnants getting a home, a safe haven a way to be accepted again in the world of cultivation (and magical beings around them— as much as reintegrated to society and safe they could get, away from their tyrant, tyrant clan Leader, Wen Ruohan).
Hah. But today, he also gets married for that and he is going to meet with his husband-to-be (only on paper) for the first time. He had tried time and again, to meet with the dude forefront before the wedding ceremony, practically wanting to avoid saying something like ‘Hey nice to meet you, husband, I am Wei Ying,’ in front of the officiant but the Lan representative had told him like only one time— with enough irritation and lack of patience, (hah! Prick)! ‘He is an alpha lan dragon, mr. Wei, and is part of the head family. He’s super busy at that, he cannot meet up with you until the next two months and a half, he is preoccupied with taking care of his people.’ They couldn’t even meet up the day before at noon for a cup of coffee!!! (Whatever being a dragon alpha meant).
Well of course, good thing this isn’t an ancient traditionally arranged marriage cut for ages ago, since they might only be joint in paper and in name, Wei Wuxian is pretty sure the man might get him off his hair as soon as everything is done with. So he really shouldn’t be nervous about complying with everything till the end, included the “marital duties” post wedding ceremony? Right?
The Yiling patriarch — an evil fox-spirit who was the common enemy against the others in the supernatural cultivation world, was getting married to the respectable, esteemed Lan Wangji — Hanguang-Jun— so the Wen Remnant’s lives could be forgiven, after having been abandoned and left to die and rot slowly in the dead suburbs of the city’s outskirts, a decrepit hell forgotten by any god worshiped by the capital, baptized as Burial Mounds. The reason, put him tightly under a rein so the Lans could reform his “erratic behavior” as doing so, hoping, collaterally that he were of help to the Jin, the Nie, the Lan and the last three remaining JIangs against the greater common evil that Wen Ruohan was.
The Lan delegation to his left did not speak. They did not whisper, did not sneer, and did not do anything as vulgar as raising their voces the way the Jins did. They simply… existed.
Silent.
Distant.
Cold.
Rigid.
They smelled like ozone and something else— something that made Wei Wuxian’s nose twitch with the kind of instinctive, involuntary wariness he hated admitting to. Antarctic winds and frozen resin. Clean, sharp, and unwelcoming, like the air inside a cavern that never once has been touched by sunlight.
Wei Wuxian could feel their eyes — with several layers of disapproval— over him. No, not in the poetic sense, not in the way storytellers wrote about “a thousand gazes burning into him”. No. He could feel it. Like a physical pressure at the edge of his skin, like thousand tiny needles prickling at the back of his neck, raising his hairs on end.
It was the kind of disdain that did not need words, since it had been refined into a family heirloom centuries ago.
Wei Wuxian drew in a deep breath before he could stop himself
lf— then he immediately regretted it, because, it meant taking this stiff dragon’s smells in, too. Their judgements, the air that carried every whispered rumor and every old superstition about him (and huli jings at the large), like it was holy scripture.
But he forced his shoulders back anyway. He stepped forward with the procession, doing what he had always done best: not caring.
Not caring that the disdain couldn’t get under his thickened skin. Not caring about what the crowd’s words were towards him, not caring about the hatred seeping out of their bodies, unable to scrape his nerves.
Not caring about the words —‘devil, traitorous fox-wretch’— which he had even shun out of hears, deciding not to give a single fuck anymore s if they were the most irritating mantra in the whole world.
Right now, he was more used to a veil. A protective haze over his vision that turned everything little red, little dim, like looking at the world through blood-tinted glass— and he was grateful, for it put some distance between him and the world around him, the world he could pear at though his gaze.
If anyone thought it was some Lan eccentricity — some outdated insistence on tradition— they would have been wrong.
The veil was, objectively speaking, ludicrous. A complete farce and nuance. And it ad been Wei Wuxian’s own idea.
He had suggested it with the innocent tone of someone proposing harmless aesthetic detail, and to his genuine surprise, the all-too-tight, stick in the ass Lan representative had accepted it without further argument. So,Wei Wuxian had ended up being allowed to wear it for the ceremony.
Not because it was necessary, nor because the Lan Clan demanded it as a rule. If anything, the Lans seemed almost offended by the implication that they would need to hide a spouse’s face for something as “improper”as a same -sex union (No, they didn’t usually do that, traditionally going into the typical male alpha omega female kind of bullshit. Although it was a small win the fact that they had accepted this union between male-male dominant interspecies in the first place.)
(At least using the veil had been begrudgingly accepted and they weren’t as tight-tight laced sticks-in-the mud compared to their ancient counterparts. So, the veil had been optional— symbolic —, more of an ornament, rather than a rule).
(It had been a gesture. A small theatric in a situation designed to crush Wei Wuxian beneath the dragon’s order and precuts. He was a little nervous. He hadn’t slept much and he hadn’t eaten much since the last night either— partly, because his stomach was in knots (atrocious! How did his body still want to rebel like that against himself!?) and partly because starving himself was, in it’s own, pathetic way, a form of control. (He won’t argue about this one against Wen Qing, when she had stipulated sharply, ‘If your future-husband-to be, Lan Wangji can at least take care of you better than yourself, I might consider giving you a truce in this one. However I won’t care about the rest’— it’s supper messed up, but what else was he supposed to do?! Wei Wuxian didn’t have a lot of choice to pick from, did he?!)
And besides, Madam Yu wasn’t here to scold him for “making a spectacle” or for “provoking the very people who t least had been so generous and considered to offer shelter to a low-life vermin like him”.
So…he had allowed himself this one indulgence.
(For little bit of gender fuckery in equal parts as in for being in control as well).
The veil was light, translucent—barely a whisper of fabric. It softened his features, the maids had said, a they pinned it carefully into place while dressing him. Inside it— the world was blurred. Not completely obscured but… distant. As if everything around him was held at an arm’s length. (Wei Wuxian didn’t actually hated —a lot— about being grateful for it.)
However he did hate the fact that it had never crossed his mind to practice walking around with it put on before the ceremony because, right now, it was like navigating a battlefield in fog.
“Proceed,” someone ordered.
And the entire procession moved again, including him.
It took Wei Wuxian an entire second full of his own will power to—manually— remember how to walk— left foot in front first, right next. One two, one two— without tripping with his own hidden tails and without face-planting into the ground in a messy bundle of nerves.
His heartbeat was loud, thundering. No, not in his ears, but in his ribs.
In his throat.
In his palms, making them sticky and clammy with sweat as well.
He almost stumbled once more in front of— everybody present there.
‘Get a grip of yourself, Wei Wuxian!’ he had to internally scream, ‘You’re the Yiling Laozu!’ He couldn’t afford to let nervousness slip past his features and gestures. He wasn’t like… that.
He suddenly ws too fast to regain his own footing at the last moment. He tapped, surreptitiously, his right thigh, once, twice as he regained control over himself in the way he tended to do when in need of an anchor.
‘Don’t react too soon.’
‘Mimic.’
‘Observe carefully what you’re facing.’
‘Let no one see your ears, your claws, your six fox-tails.’
‘Slow down your senses, lower your Yin output.’
Wei Wuxian has spend a long time learning control, almost as long as a monk spending the most of their alive years mastering the Shaolin life teachings on the monastery they lived in.
Ever sine the war took both of his parents at the tender age of six, and left Wei Wuxian with only a handful of fox spirits— survivors of that time’s fox-spirit cleansing in the entire Central Plans— to lead on the outskirts of Yiling, he had learned how to make himself smaller. How to guise his form and reduce any perceptible Yin energy resonance his dark core always seemed to ooze out, as naturally as it was breathing to one.
All foxes who had survived the great purge years ago, had learned these things since they were young, unexperienced kits.
They had to stay still when danger was nearby. They couldn’t bare their teeth until the right moment strikes. They had to analyze, observe, blend in if necessary. Their bodies could not betray what they were thinking, nor the red color of their spiritual energy pulsing through their spiritual pathways.
Foxes who reacted too quickly didn’t live long.
Foxes who wee discovered by the enemy died slow, tortuous deaths.
And foxes who did not seem like treats — who smiled, bowed their heads down, and acted harmless— were the only ones who reached adulthood.
(And even more so, he had to learn to train himself, for being the Infamous Yiling Laozu.)
Wei Ying stood among the last remaining five percent of his kin, being the only one left of the original bloodline of the Yiling Wei Foxes.
He learned from a very young age who the enemy was — The dragons of the Lan Clan).
Who the allies were — The bite from the Nie Clan, and of course, the bengal tigers from the Jin Clan, although devious characters and terribly vain, but effective.
And who the previously neutral-now-turned-into-greater-evil party was— The Wen Clan human cultivators— whose patriarch, Wen Ruohan, had willfully tipped the scales in his favor.)
Wei Ying learned how the world moved at the tender age of six, and how cruel it could truly be, so forgive him if he wants to spare some relentlessness to this sheltered, too self-righteous dragons from Lan Clan who clearly were loved and worshipped by everyone, like fucking heaven deities that walked earth, even though they took massive shit-ass dumps that could destroy the environment.. and anyone nearby— with the stench alone (Okay, maybe not everywhere but still…) and they turned into feral, wild creatures; willful, possessive, and downright insane during their mating runs and breeding cycles — or so he’d heard. Uff and let’s not forget the huge, gigantic scales they supposedly shed everywhere. Not even Wei Wuxian shed enough hair for you to need a lint roller— or hell, a vacuum cleaner. And god help the poor bastard who got one of those sharp dangerous things dropped on their head while walking past.
So yeah, to sum it up, he… hated dragons, and he was going to marry one right now to save the last remains of his family.
The procession advanced to his left, to his right, in front of him, behind him, wearing the red of prosperity and fortune as tradition demanded for weddings. No one said a word— and yet, the air was tense. Cold. Everyone looking to the other side, distrustful.
Wen Qing appeared at his side, straight as a rope pulled taut to its own limit. She didn’t say anything, but she shot him a meaningful look from his right.
‘For heaven’s sake, Wei Wuxian, please behave. And don’t make a scene.’
Wei Ying almost smiled beneath the veil. He wanted to act like a complete brat— to snort, to stomp his food hard against the ground, to wave his hands around and whimper and cry sulkily and make a full-blown tantrum like an angry child. But… he was here under his very best behavior. He was here to do politics, becasethere ws too much at stake back home.
Because it was his duty.
He knew that if the alliance fell apart right now— if the Jin who stood to his right as he climbed, and the Lan at his left— watching him with varying degrees of coldness and disapproval, nostrils faintly flaring and sharp antlers raised high beneath the dim light of a grey day filled with stray early-morning mist— and the few Wen around him, who where holding everything together, vigilant, rose up in war right now… The masacre would be… Intense. Rutless.
Just like centuries ago.
One of the Wen men at his side spoke into an intercom. “We have the devil in position. Repeat, we have the devil in position. It’s time to take him to the lizard,” and Wei Wuxian forced himself to not let out a snort of… disgust.
What wonderfully “original” little nicknames these Wen humans had given hm and his future spouse. A dragon. And an alpha as powerful as one, (whatever that was supposed to mean.) One belonging to the Lan Clan of ancestral dragons from Gusu. Nothing more, nothing less.
The sheer absurdity of it all made Wei Ying want to laugh.
But he didn’t. He stayed under control instead, counting even numbers in his mind, as he had been taught long ago to anchor himself.
In a short time, they reached the top of the mountain stairs, and at last arrived at the pavilion where the celebration would take place. Everything was decorated in red.There was very little opulence and far too much minimalism for one of the country’s old-money families, but now he could understand a little bit more why the information scroll he’d been given months ago had said his future husband and his family came from monks.
The air was heavy and saturated with incense, and it was very cold in here.
Wei Wuxian suppressed the shiver the air provoked as it slipped through the layers— very thin layers, if you asked him— of his wedding robes. He hoped that later, at least, his husband would allow him to put on something warmer.
Everything was utterly silent as the officiant chanted and recited sutras.
As he finished approaching now alone— or rather as the bodyguards around him allowed him several feet of distance to maneuver--toward the alter,Wei Ying finally caught sight of the figure of his future husband from behind, already waiting, kneeling, his back impossibly straight like a brush, in his place.
The moment Wei Wuxian stepped beside him— but still unable to see more of the man who would be his future husband than his sharp, tense jaw— something happened.
It wasn’t an impact, nor a collision, but an adjustment.
It was as though the world — which was usually very good at keeping the fragile balance between things like this— had suddenly made a small mistake.The room around him didn’t grow narrower, nor did it visibly change. And yet, the air around him— heavy with incense— did. It transformed, stretched, and then… concentrated.
In Wei Wuxian’s nostrils.
It felt heavier, as though it wrapped Wei Wuxian in its mantle, attentive to every movement he made.As though the air were aware of every heartbeat beneath his ceremonial robes. And everything was suddenly ruled by a persistent, fair scent of ozone, and sandalwood. Rich, deep notes of sandalwood, forest, and morning dew…
‘Dragon,’ thought the smallest, hindbrain at the back of his subconscious, and Wei Wuxian fought the urge to whine.
The energy surrounding the scent— like the perpetual ice of an ancestral cave the cold never truly reaches, like snow after it falls, with faint but sorrowful notes of sandalwood— made him want to shiver in his own skin. It was almost suffocating, making his heart pound hard against his ribs, his ears— hidden by containment talismans, invisibly wrapped beneath his carefully arranged hair—sharpen in defense.
But what was absolutely maddening, an absolute unfair abomination, besides that smell, it was the heavy, thick thrumming, delicious scent of a powerful Yang energy flowing and thumping in this dragon’s core. The man had to be absolutely in the same level as Buddha or someone else, in terms of cultivation. Fuck. Wei Wuxian’s inner huli jing wanted to lick at its chops and pounce into him.
‘What the hell?’ This was clearly an effect (unwanted as it was, subconscious and base), an instinct he didn’t recognize. So alien to him… This had… this had never happened to him before!!!
‘Don’t— don’t react—‘ he had to immediately remind himself firmly.
No, not now. Not here.
This dragon presence left a deep sensation of unease in the pits of the fox spirit’s bely. And it was almost as thought he instinctively knew what was about to happen t him now.
Hanuang-jun (or so this persona was called) would subdue the Yiling Laozu, mold him and rein him in with his iron-fist will and every commands. And accommodate Wei Wuxian so he could be stripped off of any “evilness…”
He shivered internally at this.
Maybe this was what happened when you grew up at home, listening to horrible, horrible things about your natural enemy; mixed with the nonsense- gossips people liked to spew about you because— you could never ever— keep them satisfied: that the Dragons from the Lan Clan of what anciently was Gusu, now is a large part of Wuhan were monsters of cold scales and boiling blood. That they would leave you dry and ruined if you didn’t please them. That their Yang energy could be enough to subdue you and in due time, annihilate you, because to their eyes, you’re ‘impure, an heretic, a carrier of Yin energy and an abomination that needs to be vanquished’ in their eyes.
Wei Wuxian recognized the power and presence this man commanded without even trying.
(Without even having to see his face yet.)
And what most bewilder Wei Wuxian, what unsettled him… wasn’t te fact that Wen Qing and A-Ning had suddenly appeared one day at his aparmtne door with dark looks and lips pressed into firm lines, saying ‘You will marry, Wei Wuxian’; nor it was even the fact that today, at his own wedding, he was barely going to meet his husband in an arranged marriage to a man who was his natural enemy, and whom he would inevitably despise.
(Perhaps the feeling became to be mutual — and yes, you fucking instinct be doomed!!!)
Hah. No.
It was the fact that he didn’t seem to hate any of this.
It was almost as though something inside him wanted to bend and please this man in front of him.
Wei Wuxian felt the drumming of his Yin energy— that which he had spent so many years training with the utmost care, surpassing it, disciplining it as best as he could— make him tremble slightly, like a faint hum within him. Like a taut string not by anyone’s intention, but a tripwire all the same: one misstep and it could send him falling fifty meters straight into the center of the earth.
It wasn’t an intense flare that rose in his stomach, but he recognized it as… the beginning of a spark. His resonance.
That was what enraged him the most —His body reacting without even asking his own permission!!!
Wei Wuxian avoided— by a hair— showing his fangs in delight, but his ears (hidden by those invisibility talismans) flattened against his skull all the same, and his six tails (which he also kept completely sealed, so as not to offend Lan Qiren’s sensibilities and the others present) twitched restlessly between his thighs beneath his ceremonial robes.
‘Enough. Get a grip.’
Wei Wuxian tried to manually slow his breathing down further, to lower the output of his energy. He forced himself to think of even numbers, dogs, escape routes, politics, the… irony of all of this, to lessen the pulsing sensation in his core that the air around him… was changing and wanted to… draw him in, like a siren to a sailor.
(Or other, like fire to a moth, and Wei Wuxian was definitely the moth here. In this hostage situation, disguised as an interspecies marital agreement.)
Maybe he did remember something about these beings (so mystical and poorly understood by the outside world): that they used a very old system similar to the alpha-bet-omega wolves (which Wei Wuxian did not support…ugh he’s not a fan. Thank you)… and their jerarchies and “dominance” were eerily similar.
But those were just myths, right?
Right?
And besides, he was sure that, for centuries, fox spirits hadn’t reacted to things like pheromones. Yes, they tended to do so with scents, they could even have their own sects at times, but something like that didn’t exist in real life outside of fairy tales (What the f legends? Huli Jing didn’t react to pheromones and didn’t scent tones dem selves like— like canines did. Ughh, they at most used “pleasing” scents to lure in potential mates but that was it.)
So why did something not fit in his gut?
Wei Wuxian slowly lifted his gaze.
He could see the sturdy, slightly blurred shadow of his future husband —Lan Wangji—and among other things, he made out something pale and long around his head.
’Forehead ribboN’, supplied the fox’s mind, helpfully.
From what he had read and heard whispered by tongues, all the Lan wore it tied to either their foreheads or more fashionably, around their wrists and sash belts. or so he’d been told, after the engagement. That forehead ribbon wasn’t only discipline incarnated. But a warning: an invisible, irreversible boundary.
His future husband tied it with skilled fingers, with the upmost care not to touch him at all. And in seconds, his hand vanished from the fox spirit’s body.
Wei Wuxian watched him only for a moment, then turned forward again.
For an instant, he had the absurd sensation— if you asked him— that they were completely alone. Which, felt far too odd. Wen Qing and A-Ning and another small group of the Wen Remnants had been with him since he arrived. But it felt as though right now, he didn’t even have the valid certainty that there was any familiar person around him, giving him silent support.
It wasn’t because the procession had vanished, but because suddenly, it was a though the rest of the world had become … irrelevant, as though everything else had faded away.
And now there was only him and the presence of Lan Wangji, his future— now?— husband.
Like two forces that had met too early, ahead of time, before what was planned, beyond auspicious colors and beyond any carefully choreographed political technique.
Wei Wuxian’s core reacted— not violently. But with confusion. And it was as though his scent spiked without his permission, and his legs buckled beneath him on their own accord.
A low-frequency vibration ran up his spine, and suddenly it was as though it echoed and reverberated through the white stone floor around them. Most of the people surrounding them might not have noticed. But he felt everything, s though he were at the center of a lighting storm. And apparently, his husband reacted too, however imperceptibly.
Most of the humans and tigers present perceived nothing, said nothing— yet the dragons were on alert, disgusted, apprehensive, or so their smells let Wie Wuxian interpret. They seemed to react in opposition, apparently insulted beyond anything.
And the tension could be felt in the air.
“Do you think they’ll tear each other’s throats out right now?”
“Should we intervene?” (This seemed to come from one of the Wen bodyguards dressed in red.)
“We have to observe them carefully. The ceremony hasn’t concluded yet,” his partner had told him.
Wei Wuxian felt more inexplicable vibrations shake his core, and he tensed at the thought of it… shit, and here he was thinking his husband smelled terribly good, his Yang energy was rich, and delicious, and perfect, and the fox spirit in Wei Wuxian wanted to pounce on the dragon, climb him like a tree, and purr happily, licking at him for what all he was worth.
He would pretty much like to keep his neck intact, and attached to his shoulders, thank you very much.
And then, heavy, warm, firm hands on his shoulders. Body heat that could incinerate anyone— he had thought this Lan dragons were cold as iceberg, Who would’ve guessed, hmm—… a hand at his neck, and then… the man leaned in, too close, so close he was at Wei Wuxian’s neck.
And…
Lan Wangji, his new husband, was smelling him.
Wei Yng went rigid, and suddenly it was as though he stopped breathing altogether; as though his body reacted before his mind did. The veil over his face shifted slightly with the closeness, and suddenly, it was as though everything around him froze.
‘WHAT THE FUCK!?!?’
It wasn’t in animal form, nor was it open possession. It was something far more precise, ritualistic. Like verifying the authenticity of an ancient relic.
Wei Wuxian knew it. He had heard that scent compatibility was a real matter for dragons— not something that dictated everything to form a bond, but a decisive, base factor in recognizing potential mates. And the rest— people said— was done by vibrations, and thermodynamics, or something like that (Which, Wei Wuxian still didn’t fully understand.)
But right now, Wei Wuxian couldn’t stop his mind from going completely blank. The sudden, almost embarrassing impulse to whine out of nowhere, for no apparent Eason. To tilt into it slightly, as though his body recognized his logic refused to accept. The sudden impulse to bare his neck to permit Lan Wangji more access and think of even that powerful dragon jaws bitting him down.
’Stay still,’ he ordered himself, trying to bite his tongue. ’Still! Don’t react.’
Then Wei Wuxian perceived— more than saw— Lan Wangji’s nostrils flare up as he exhaled sharply, something almost as hot as cold and sulfurous and thing as smoke opening way and materializing in just a brief second.
Only a brief moment, he felt Lan Wangji inhale deeply into his lungs and release something like a strained, sharp breath. But maybe, it was a trick of the light, or of his mind.
We Wuxian remained motionless, pretending he had his body under control, as though his skin wasn’t burning beneath the veil. He didn’t want any of his reactions to be perceived as weakness, or worse… a rejection.
(Even though, well, it wasn’t really as if Wei Wuxian’s own rejection mattered here. It was Lan Wangji’s—his now husband—on paper only— rejection that mattered here. And if Lan Wangji didn’t accept him, he would probably cut Wei Wuxian’s throat and the entire attempt at alliance and peace would collapse.
And goodbye plan; another three centuries of war and massacre, with nothing being resolved.)
He couldn’t do that to Wen Qing and Wen Ning; to the Wen Remnants who were his family and all he had left. He couldn’t do that to Shijie (who might not even live with them anymore, having married Jin Zixuan, but who still had the tendency to worry too much about Wei Wuxian all the same, because… bless his Shijie’s magnanimous, bleeding heart.)
He simply… couldn’t.
So Wei Wuxian gulped.
‘It’s fine,’ he told himself through the knot in his throat. ‘You’re already here. Finish this.’
He knew that was what had to be done: finish the ceremony with the best possible disposition. The rest, time would provide when tehe moment came.
Even if his husband was the coldest, most aloof Lan of all, an ancestral alpha dragon who could cut his throat at any moment. Even if he was going to live Mong the enemy to face Wen Ruohan and his sadistic men.
(At least, as consolation, Wei Wuxian knew Lan Wangji had been agreeable and reasonable enough to accept that they would perform this ceremony to become mates, but without forcing Wei Wuxian to go so far as to have children with the dragon. He was aware of the fact that in ancient times, that would have needed to happen inevitably. tHE dragon, his now husband, would force him down into the marital bed, get rid of his clothes, mount him, and do him until Wei Wuxian was full and bribing with his seed,doesn’t matter how —as little or as—much say the fox spirit had about it. He knew it would be mandatory, tradition and responsibility to be made. But right now, Wei Wuxian couldn’t help feeling relieved that dragons, miraculously, had rules that protected their spouses from abuse and from their own aggressiveness; from their natural, draconic tendency to overpower, even when their mates didn’t want it. Right now he was glad to know Lan Wangji might not in fact consider this either as much than just apolitical marriage done out of convenience through paper alone. )
(He also found it ridiculous to hear all the little Lan dragons went to sleep at 9 pm, like old people, but well… save that thought for later.)
Lan Wangji withdrew and the contact vanished, releasing a faint huff, and just as his husband’s head had appeared near him, it disappeared as well, leaving only an echo— like the touch of a present ghost— against the fox spirit’s neck, very near his pulse point, which still throbbed hard like a tanggu drum.
Wei Wuxian did not feel disappointed.
He didn’t believe he had displeased Lan Wangji, his new husband. Rather, he sensed the dragon musth have pulled back more out of duty and discipline, out of sheer willpower. But with all the nerves still twisting and turning in his stomach, Wei Wuxian couldn’t help wanting to smile a little and say something to lighten the tension, heavy and theca in the air.
But he didn’t.
Because… he had read the copy of rules that had been delivered to him when the arragenemtns were finalized (Wen Qing had strictly made herself personally monitor that he did so.) The Lan did not speak during this ceremony. It would be a complete lack of respect to do so.
‘What the fuck is even allowed in this damned clan, then!?’ he thought, resigned, as they were instructed to perform the three bows: ira to their families (The Wen Remnants present. And, ah— Shijie had bothered to bring the tables of Jiang Fengmian and Madam Yu. She shouldn’t have, but… how lovely his sister was.)
Then the Lan dragons continues to watch him with now open disapproval as Wei Wuxian and his husband bowed before them.
Finally, it was time to bow at each other--
And the pulse of energy Wei Wuxian had felt earlier, the resonance activating around him…he ws sure Lan Wangji must have felt it too, because, for the tiniest moment, he seemed to pause before continuing.
Everything was stronger, of course.
Inevitable.
Inescapable.
Undeniable.
And yet, the dragon did not look at him.
Wei Wuxian didn’t lift his head to look either, holding his deep, low kowtow posture to offer submission, adoration, and respect to his now spouse.
But… he knew… He was screwed.
Because Wei Wuxian…
He… wanted to dual cultivate with this dragon, his now husband… and he bit an all-mortified groan down.
Fucking mother of all fuckball fucks.