AN: So a little soulmate fic that took like 3 months to write the last missing scene _ This is a soulmate fic, but with the premise of if one character was colorblind. Also loosely taken from a prompt "several months after your soulmate dies you suddenly start seeing color again". Clearly not several months, but my brain went to LWJ and WWX with the concept ^_^;
Colors were a concept. A concept because no one was born seeing them. The leading theory for the soulmate phenomenon was that it was tied into the reincarnation cycle. Every soul had a soulmate, and only someone who has managed to meet that soulmate in their life would be gifted the full splendors of the world.
Lan Wangji had read a good deal about colors and their variety of soul-stirring beauty, and how they were made brighter with a soulmate's love. His sect might have a reputation of asceticism, but its founder had been a romantic, and soulmates were held in high importance. Lan An had hundreds of poems and theories surrounding soulmates, color, and love, all of which a Gusu Lan cultivator was expected to read at least a selection of at some point in their childhood. It had always felt a bit like an exercise in frustration for Lan Wangji because most children had no hope of relating to Lan An's works; there were many people who might never meet their soulmate in this lifetime let alone at a young age.
But perhaps because there was the inability to experience them, Lan Wangji would find himself reading certain poems again and again.
There were people in Cloud Recesses who could see color. Not many, but cultivators tended to live longer lives, and longer lives meant more chances to find their soulmate. His parents weren't soulmates, nor did his uncle have one, but his brother had found his soulmate in Nie Mingjue when they were young and colors had filled his life for years.
Lan Wangji wasn't jealous. He had decided that it didn't matter if he found his soulmate in this life or some other reincarnation. Who needed colors to be content? He had music and the quiet order of the Cloud Recesses to guide his life. He had his brother and his uncle who cared for him and who he cared for in return. He could still appreciate the warmth of sunlight and how it made everything paler, the glow of a full moon, and the beauty of clouds winding through the mountains. Why would he need color or another person in his life when he was already fulfilled?
He believed this whole heartedly right up until he confronted a boy on a rooftop and the gradients of gray and black and white turned sharper, like the world had been an ink wash painting and now the clouds of ink were outlined and defined. Until he looked at a boy in dark clothing under a full moon and saw the bright flash of some color he didn't have a name for start against dark hair. Until he looked at an insolent, smiling face of the most beautiful person he'd ever meant and felt his world upend itself all at once.
He hated this boy a little bit because of it. Because he'd been content and now the world was suddenly more.
"Have a drink with me," the boy said, rude and ignorant and breaking so many rules at the same time. He smiled and looked up through his lashes and continued to be beautiful. He didn't say anything about Lan Wangji or get surprised at the bright color of the rope on the jar that matched the ribbon in the boy's hair. Didn't seem to notice anything had changed at all.
"You…"
"Me?" Another inviting smile, a tilt to his head that bared a thin strip of his pale neck.
Was there such a thing as a one-sided soulmate?
Lan Wangji closed his mouth. This was his soulmate? Indignation, irritation, and hurt rose in him. A rude boy who drank and trespassed and didn't seem to care that they were soulmates at all. "You will submit to punishment," he said because that was clearly the only solution for the tangle of emotions; stick to upkeeping the rules and perhaps see if this boy had any remorse and moral backbone to him.
"E-eh? Punishment?" The boy looked startled. "What so you—"
"Trespassing in the Cloud Recesses. Breaking curfew. Drinking alcohol in the Cloud Recesses. Attempt of bribery."
"Okay now, that last one was just being poli—"
"The rules have been broken so you will face punishment."
"Isn't this all a little extreme? I don't even know your rules." He took a drink of alcohol. It glittered on his skin where a few drops escaped.
Lan Wangji hated the part of his brain that catalogued how those drips slid to pool in his collarbone. "Unimportant."
And because the boy continued to be non-compliant, clearly the only thing left to do was attack him.
Lan Wangji took a certain pleasure in smashing his jars of alcohol.
o*o
Lan Wangji wasn't sure what to feel, or if there was anything to be done. He'd reported the boy—and learned his name, Wei Wuxian, from the Jiang sect, and he wouldn't forget it—but the reality of this new world and the knowledge that he was seeing colors was still sinking in. So of course he went to the one person he could trust to understand him above others. "Brother?"
"Yes, Wangji?" Lan Xichen was working, he was so often working, more and more as the years went on and he took over bit by bit in preparation of fully becoming the sect leader one day. His brother, who he knew so well, looked very different with color. His skin looked warmer, his eyes a color Lan Wangji didn't have a name for yet, except that it was a bit darker than his own eyes. The pale gray of his clothes was now the same color as the sky at the horizon, which meant it must be blue. It was a color he was wearing as well, never knowing it. It was almost a relief how much gray and white still dominated the Gusu landscape with its mountains and the Lan sect robes being predominantly white.
"Brother's soul-bond…" Lan Xichen sat straighter—Lan Wangji usually avoided talking about soulmates. "How did you…?"
"Know?" Lan Xichen smiled. "When I first met Nie Mingjue, our eyes met. It was like something in the world shifted and then everything was brighter and I could see all the colors I'd heard described but didn't know what a single one was in that moment." His smile grew wider, fonder. "Mingjue looked like he'd been hit over his head with his saber. He couldn't even get an introduction out. We both ended up blurting out that we were soulmates at the same time. With that level of difference to the world it was impossible for it to be anything else."
Lan Wangji nodded slowly. "Has there ever been a case of only one person seeing colors?"
Lan Xichen raised an eyebrow. "Not that I am aware of. Did something happen?"
"Hm." He pressed his lips together. "Nothing important. Thank you, brother."
"Wangji?"
Lan Wangji pretended not to notice his brother's gaze becoming concerned and left before he had to answer any questions about why he was interested in this information. This was a troublesome situation. If he was seeing colors, Wei Wuxian must be as well, right? He hadn't reacted though so…
Perhaps Wei Wuxian was as uninterested in soul-bonds and soulmates. There were people like that. Lan Wangji certainly felt like it was a distraction he didn't need. Especially if his soulmate was someone so… so irreverent and brash. What power had looked at Lan Wangji and saw fit to tie him to that?
He scowled to himself, alone on the path back toward his room. It didn't matter that the boy was beautiful or that colors were just as brilliant to look at as Lan An's poems suggested.
It was likely for the better if this Wei Wuxian wasn't interested. They could pretend the other didn't exist and go on with their bright-colored lives without having to carve out time and space for someone else the way he'd seen Lan Xichen do over the years.
o*o
Wei Wuxian seemed to not only not be interested in their soulmate bond, but entirely intent on getting on as many of Lan Wangji's nerves as possible. At this point he wasn't sure if he wanted to throttle him or do something in a very different intentional direction, but whatever Wei Wuxian was stirring in him with his constant barrage of irritation, it was undoubtedly a violent emotion.
He could better understand now why so many poets paired color and emotion. There was red (his ears as emotions got the better of him), pink (like Wei Wuxian's laughing face as he struggled for breath at Lan Wangji's expense), dark blue (like the blessedly calm depths of the cold springs where he meditated to get rid of the troublesome emotions), pale blue (the sky him the world feeling so much more vast somehow now that it was colored differently instead of simple, flat grays), brown (like wood, like aged paper, like soil and skin and organic things, the first steadying sip of morning tea), green (the other half of brown, life-filled, tranquility), purple (the Jiang robes that kept catching his eye when they weren't wearing white disciple robes, some part of him straying back to where Wei Wuxian's darker color orbited that purple, never in that purple), white (like familiarity, like home, like snow and safety and fresh, clean paper ready for ink), black (ink pooling on an inkstone, familiar shadows hiding familiar scenes, dark hair that he couldn't look away from), gray (like a restless storm, like chaotic silver of Wei Wuxian's eyes, like the steady stone of the mountains). Color after color and new associations and so few from before, the flat gray, carried over. It was re-learning the world. It was everything remade to orbit Wei Wuxian in some way over and over and this, he supposed was what made a soulmate a soulmate. They shook up your world. Changed it inside and out and left their mark upon you.
And yet he wasn't sure if he'd managed to make a mark back at all. Wei Wuxian was every bit as irreverent as he had started out as. No punishment changed that.
It made Lan Wangji want to—
It made him want—
He was growing very familiar with the scenery around the cold springs.
Lan Wangji wasn't going to act on anything he was feeling. Not when it was clear that those emotions weren't being reflected back the same way. Not when this seemed to be so one-sided. Oh, Wei Wuxian wanted his attention. But only his attention, and nothing more. When Wei Wuxian gave him two rabbits, one black, one white, instead of one of the more common brown ones he'd seen in Gusu's hills, he wondered if they were supposed to be symbolic of something.
Of what, only Wei Wuxian would know, because Lan Wangji couldn't puzzle it out. Especially not after Wei Wuxian turned the whole thing into another sex joke. (Lan Wangji was going to— He wanted to— Truly, was Wei Wuxian doing it to be cruel or did he think it was all in good fun?) He'd kept the rabbits though. (They were a gift from his soulmate, he wasn't so annoyed as to disregard that. Now if only Wei Wuxian would acknowledge that they were soulmates—)
Between the rabbits and the lantern declaration, he'd thought they were at least making headway in friendship (even if Wei Wuxian never quite stopped riling him in ways that no one else had ever managed).
Then Wei Wuxian got himself kicked out over fighting and Lan Wangji wasn't sure if they'd ever spend as much time together again.
That left him feeling things that Lan An's poems probably had colors for.
Perhaps blue on the edge of gray. The oppressive feeling of rain just before it starts. Of being alone in the mountains and noticing silence when before there was sound.
He didn't know what to feel, so he just set the whole matter aside and went on with life. Color or no color, soulmate or no soulmate, he still had his sect to live for.
It was strange how the thought felt the same way as remembering the shallow depth of the world in grays.
o*o
The Cloud Recesses were burning, gray smoke choking, shading everything dark and cloudy except for where it was red. Red with coals and orange flame and the blood of his sect. Red of the Wen sect robes. Lan Wangji grit his teeth against pain from a broken leg even as he was informed he was a political prisoner. Oh, it was called an indoctrination camp, but even he knew they would be nothing more than hostages there, fulcrums to lever their sects to make way for Wen control. He didn't have to have the political mind his brother had to see that.
His brother…
Lan Wangji didn't know if he was alive or dead. Didn't know if his uncle, wounded, would live or die as he was dragged away from his home.
Everything red and gray and black as night swallowed up atrocities and his sect was left to sift through bodies and rubble and ash. How many lived? How many of the people he'd seen every day for years were lying dead? There were other Lan disciples captive as well, but that was neither a comfort nor a thing to fear. He wasn't close with any of them. It was strange how seeing the destruction of his sect drove that home; his brother and uncle were the ones he feared for. The others with him huddled together, gaining comfort in each other, but he was apart. Alone in grief in a way they weren't.
Black spots flashed in his vision as he was forced to use his injured leg, but he might as well have been a stone wall. A tempest of emotion contained in the familiar armor of neutrality.
No one tried to comfort him.
No one tried to seek comfort from him either.
Lan Wangji closed himself from the pain, from the present reality, and endured. He could fall apart some later day when he knew for sure who lived or died. When he knew it was safe to be vulnerable.
He didn't let himself acknowledge that it might never be safe again.
o*o
He thought they might die, together in that cave. Live through destruction, through harsh treatment under the hands of Wen Chao, live through fighting the fierce Xuanwu of Slaughter and still they were dying. Trapped in a cave with no food or escape. Trapped with infection chipping away at their golden cores.
Lan Wangji thought that there were worse ways to die than trapped with his soulmate. Like this, they wouldn't live long without each other.
"Lan Zhan, " Wei Wuxian slurred curled against him. Feverish. The infection was setting in badly in his burn wound, the flesh an angry red and pus-yellow. If they lived, it would scar horribly, much like Lan Zhan was not sure if his leg would ever fully recover. "Lan Zhan," Wei Wuxian repeated when he took too long to answer.
"Mm?"
"What do you wish you could do?" His voice wobbled like he wasn't fully awake or in control.
Lan Wangji wiped sweat from Wei Wuxian' s brow. "In what way? "
"Any way." Wei Wuxian turned, face pressed against Lan Wangji's thigh. It was the most intimate Lan Wangji had ever been with a person who wasn't family.
"See my brother alive and well," Lan Wangji said after a moment. "And Wei Ying? "
"Mm. See colors. I want to know what they look like. If they're really worth it."
The words cut into him, even as Wei Wuxian snuggled closer. An actual confirmation that he didn't see color like Lan Wangji did.
"It would be nice," Wei Wuxian mumbled, "to meet my soulmate. I kind of wish it was you."
Lan Wangji swallowed, throat dry as a salted desert. He couldn't get his throat and lips to confess that he already saw color. "Wei Ying, " he said instead, feeling lost. Alone even with the intimacy of the moment.
"Ah, but I wouldn't want to burden you with me for a soulmate..."
"...not a burden."
He didn't know. He'd never known that Lan Wangji saw color for him. Was that better or worse, he wondered? Better or worse to know that the bond only went one way and that Wei Wuxian had never meant to play with his emotions or reject the bond—it just hadn't been there for him at all. His heart ached even as he wanted to cradle Wei Wuxian closer. At least he knew in this moment that he wasn't hated, or even merely tolerated. You didn't wish that someone was your soulmate if you didn't care for them.
"Wei Ying," he murmured. He should tell him, shouldn't he? If they were dying then he should let him know the truth. That Lan Wangji at least was bound to him even if Wei Wuxian wasn't bound in return.
"Lan Zhan," Wei Wuxian said before he could get his throat to work through the words. His eyes were closed and his breathing uneven, pained. He was slipping into infection and nothing scared Lan Wangji more than the idea that he could die first in his arms. "Lan Zhan," Wei Wuxian said in a slurred mumble. "Sing something for me?"
If that was what Wei Wuxian wanted… He almost sang one of the lullabies his nursemaid sang to him and his brother when they were very small, or the one song he remembered his mother humming. He could sing a spiritual song and hope it would help even with little to no energy in it. In the end he sang none of those songs, reaching instead for the melody that has been building in the back of his head ever since he first met Wei Wuxian. Something soft but lonely, full of longing that will never be fulfilled.
Wei Wuxian turned toward the sound, even as he slipped toward sleep—or unconsciousness. "Pretty," he murmured. "What's …it called?"
Lan Wangji wasn't sure he was still awake when he answered, word barely above a whisper. "Wangxian." There was no response, so Wei Wuxian must be asleep.
For the best.
Lan Wangji wouldn't want to burden him with… Well, Wei Wuxian was self-sacrificing. He'd tear himself to pieces for a stranger let alone a friend or family. The infected burn was only more proof of that. If Lan Wangji told him, he'd feel responsible even if that wasn't how things worked. If he thought the mere idea of being soulmates with him was a burden, goodness knew what Wei Wuxian would think of a one-sided bond.
"Not a burden," Lan Wangji repeated to himself. His hand rested just to the side of the awful, livid burn, tracking the life left in Wei Wuxian's body and willing it to fight a bit longer.
o*o
When Wei Wuxian vanished, the only hope Lan Wangji had was the way color never leached from the world. Somewhere, Wei Wuxian was still alive. Not that he could explain to anyone else his conviction; his brother and Jiang Wanyin surely had drawn their own conclusions, but Lan Wangji wasn't willing for the world to know the truth of his connection to Wei Wuxian.
Leaves were still green, the sky was still blue, the blood of soldiers still bled red in skirmish after skirmish and still Wei Wuxian didn't appear. It was like he'd been swallowed into a different dimension, or perhaps he'd been captured, locked away in some dungeon far within enemy territory.
The thought left Lan Wangji sick and sleepless. Being alive didn't necessarily mean Wei Wuxian was well. Soulmate bonds gave no indication of a partner's state, just their existence.
Jiang Wanyin said nothing about Lan Wangji's increasingly desperate search, nor the increased violence against any Wen who tried to harm them. Then again, he was right there too, using his Zidian in cruel ways that a few years ago none of them would have pictured themselves capable of. War changed them. Loss—trauma—was shaping them, and it was as uncontrollable as the turn of seasons, as the shifting of stars in the heavens. There was no going back just like there had been no going back from seeing colors.
Oh, but Lan Wangji wished he could go back to when agonizing over Wei Wuxian's lack of acknowledgement had been his greatest stress. Back to when he at least had Wei Wuxian in sight and knowledge that he was well.
Jiang Wanyin was an odd companion. They didn't like each other. Jiang Wanyin was too abrasive for Lan Wangji's comfort and Land Wangji's silences grated at the Jiang sect leader. Still, their shared purpose and fighting at each other's side had left them allies, and perhaps fostered some sort of understanding between them.
"When I find him, I'm going to strangle him for making Jiejie worry," Jiang Wanyin said, filling the ever-present silence that stretched between them across nightly fires and campsites. A violent sentiment that Lan Wangji knew by this point was an empty threat. "Shake him until his teeth rattle. How dare he disappear? Who the hell is supposed to be my right hand?"
Lan Wangji hummed, only half listening to the now familiar rant. The fire's red coals clink as they burn down, gray ash smothering their glow bit by bit as the fire burns itself out. They ate fish from the nearby river. He'd eaten it because there was nothing else on offer. Survival, he was learning, meant doing away with certain principles. There would be time for them again when peace was restored. It sat poorly with him all the same.
"—making you worry," Jiang Wanyin said, a new grief to his list.
Lan Wangji blinked and tuned back in.
"Making the heir of the Lan clan worry, who does he think he is?"
"He is Wei Ying," Lan Wangji cut in. "Wei Ying doesn't care for propriety."
Jiang Wanyin stuttered to a stop and stared. "Oh, now you decide to say something?" he said after a full three seconds of shock.
"Mm." It was funny, in the muted way anything was capable of being funny lately, how easy it was to de-rail Jiang Wanyin into flustered blustering. Perhaps this was why Wei Wuxian was so fond of needling people where he knew it would bother them most.
Jiang Wanyin scoffed. "…I don't get you at all. Everyone thought you hated Wei Wuxian back at the Cloud Recesses."
Lan Wangji blinked. He supposed he could see why they would think that but… "I did not."
Another scoff. "I got that. You wouldn't be here if you didn't care. What I don't get is why you care. He did pretty much everything to get on your nerves back then."
Lan Wangji looked away, back at the soft glowing embers. Red and orange and black, like a butterfly's veined wings. The confession pressed against his lips, clogged in his throat, but he hadn't told his brother, hadn't told his own soulmate, so of course he couldn't say anything now.
Jiang Wanyin sighed when it became clear he wouldn't answer. "Fine. Keep your secrets. I get it though. He's like some annoying fungus. You try to pretend he's not there and the next thing you know he's grown all over you and you can't get rid of it."
"He is bright," Lan Wangji allowed, a tentative offering between them.
Jiang Wanyin snorted. "Too bright sometimes," he muttered. There was a flash of vulnerability on his face, an old pain, and Lan Wangji wondered for a moment what they were like growing up together. Nothing like himself and Lan Xichen clearly. There was familial love between them, but it wasn't anything so gentle and quietly supportive as he had with his brother. Wei Wuxian had a personality that drew eyes and hearts; perhaps this had been a point of contention in the past. If it had been, it didn't matter now. Jiang Wanyin was searching as earnestly as if Wei Wuxian was a brother in blood as well as in heart. "…I just want him back."
"We will find him." Alive, in whatever state he was to be found, or dead, with color leaching from the world until it was nothing but dull and gray and numb again. Lan Wangji would find Wei Wuxian.
Instead of picking the rant back up, Jiang Wanyin sighed and said, "Yeah," in a small, tired voice. Not giving up, but definitely feeling the strain of each day.
Lan Wangji wouldn't let his conviction fade. "We will," he repeated. Sure. Firm.
And Jiang Wanyin looked back at him and a tiny spark returned to his eyes.
o*o
Lan Wangji was growing to hate the color red. Once, it had been a reminder of Wei Wuxian and his preferred hair ribbon, but now it was the Wen, fire, and blood. Now it was linked to Wei Wuxian, face twisted with something beyond rage, something sadistic and hate-filled, as he added to a blood-strewn room and tortured a man. Tortured a man who tortured him, who slaughtered his sect, yes, but something in Lan Wangji's gut clenched unpleasantly at the scene even as another part of him felt unspeakable relief to see Wei Wuxian alive.
Not well, certainly not well on multiple levels between the uncharacteristic cruelty and the gauntness in his face, but alive.
Jiang Wanyin didn't seem to see the same unsettling undertones to this scene that Lan Wangji did, or perhaps he didn't care. Perhaps he was only too glad to add to it and get his revenge as well, his brother and resolution tied neatly together in one setting.
Either way he didn't ask many questions in the aftermath, less interested in the hows and wheres of the last three months than the now.
Lan Wangji held back, feeling out of place even though he had as much right as Jiang Wanyin to care. To be there now. But no one else knew that.
Wei Wuxian gave him a smile that was a ghost of his old ones, too wild and shallow to bring his heart any true joy. "Did you miss me?" he teased like the whole thing was a joke. Like his cheek bones weren't standing out on his face or his wrist bones prominent. He had a flute now and unsettling powers and Lan Wangji didn't know what to do with any of it.
Wei Wuxian didn't give him a chance to answer truthfully anyway, off on a tangent that Lan Wangji couldn't focus on no matter how much he ordinarily would be listening closely.
Something was deeply wrong, and he didn't know what.
Something was wrong and he couldn't fix it.
Wei Wuxian kept a gap between all of them instead of how he normally would be draped across his brother by this point. Something integral had shifted, and it wasn't just that Wei Wuxian was now the sort of man who could hurt another for the pleasure of it.
Lan Wangji felt lost, leaving behind the gristly red of the room Wei Wuxian tortured Wen Chao in.
They had Wei Wuxian back, but somehow he felt further away than when he'd been lost.
o*o
The rest of the Sunshot Campaign was snapshots of memories, many of which repeated on Lan Wangji in his nightmares. Battlefields churned red and brown, stinking of death and rot and blood and smoke, the sect colors of the fallen slowly covered in the mess around their corpses. Red and orange camp fires, and familiar red-gold-black of coals, the brown of their commissioned tents, and the colorless mush that was rations, sprinkled with pitiful looking greens.
Wei Wuxian, red-eyed as black-smoke resentment clung to him, a wild, terrifying rictus of a smile on his face as he roused dead from their peace and turned them on people who usually knew them in life. Wei Wuxian, pale as death with purple circles under his eyes and a scowl on his face saying, "I'm fine, Lan Zhan. I know what I'm doing!" None of Lan Wangji's worries reaching through to him.
Multi-color robes rotating around him as he moved from front to front wherever he was most needed. Red-brown spatters on his white and blue robes, stains that not even the talismans sewn into them could keep out.
Screams of the living and the dead, faces of people who were living puppets. Faces of people breaking down beside him as he was numb inside. Faces there one day and buried the next. (Or worse, not buried at all, still fighting even after death, jerky and unnatural). The haunting, awful sound of Wei Wuxian's flute. How he never carried a sword, never explained it, the tight, mocking smile that he pasted on whenever anyone mentioned it, deflecting, always deflecting.
(How were they growing further apart every day? He was trying so hard, but every attempt seemed to be pushing Wei Wuxian further away instead of reforging the friendship he wanted.)
His brother (alive), the nervous flutter of Nie Huaisang's fan, Wei Wuxian silvered by moonlight on a hard-tiled roof.
Wei Wuxian on the battlefield, more horrific deaths.
Wen Ruohan, Wei Wuxian as his talisman spun out of control. Red and black and gray and red all over again as a sword cut down Wen Ruohan and Wei Wuxian collapsed.
Being powerless to do anything to truly help Wei Wuxian recover as all offers of the only methods he could think of were brushed off. Brushed away. It felt like a lifetime ago that Wei Wuxian had wished he was Lan Wangji's soulmate as they were dying in a cave. Wei Wuxian after almost dying on a battlefield didn't seem to share that feeling.
It cut deeper than Lang Wangji wanted to admit.
It was forever and the length of a nightmare before he was at the Cloud Recesses again, facing the broken wreckage of his home with the awful feeling of the war being over but not truly over.
o*o
Lan Wangji wasn't sure when it all spun so impossibly out of control. Maybe it had been out of control from the start. Maybe there hadn't been any control in his life from the moment he met Wei Wuxian's eyes on the Cloud Recesses wall. Or maybe it was the war, or being stuck in a cave with a monster or the Phoenix Mountain hunt where Wei Wuxian played his heartstrings yet again without seeming to notice at all.
Maybe it was after, during the feast, when Wei Wuxian stormed in, stole Lan Wangji's unwanted drink, and threatened an ally before all the sects.
It definitely was out of control by the time Lan Wangji caught up to him, rain pouring around them and several dozen Wens at Wei Wuxian's side, all looking a step away from death. Wei Wuxian didn't look much better.
There were barely any colors in the rain and dark. Black, gray, brown. Pale faces and worn bodies. Wei Wuxian looked him in the eye and asked him what, in harming these people, way was there justice? In ignoring it, they would be in the wrong. And Lan Wangji's heart hurt. It hurt and Wei Wuxian looked at him like he was an obstacle. Little more than a stranger, like he did every time Lan Wangji tried to convince him to let him help.
"We were going to fight evil. Protect the weak," Wei Wuxian said, looking at the Wens. "We couldn't even stop the Jin from doing this. But I can do something now, and I'm not going to look away. No more death. The war is supposed to be over."
Lan Wangji's throat was frozen. He wanted to speak. Wanted to try to convince Wei Wuxian that there was a different path, any other path than this, but there was too much truth in Wei Wuxian's words and speaking had only pushed them further apart lately.
He forced words through anyway. "If you do this it will be rebellion. They will kill you."
"If I'm in the wrong, kill me now," Wei Wuxian said. "If it's you doing it, I'd accept that. If anyone has to kill me I'd rather it be you."
It was like being struck, the idea that he could ever cut Wei Wuxian down. Even if he went too far, even if he turned against the whole world, he wouldn't be able to do that. Definitely not now that he was protecting people who shouldn't have to pay the price for having the wrong name and living in the wrong place. Lan Wangji's fist clenched.
Wei Wuxian stepped forward.
Lan Wangji stepped aside.
It was unthinkable to hurt him, not the man that brought his world to color, not the man that held his heart. Wei Ying, don't make me fight you!
Wei Wuxian didn't look back, leading the Wen away into the dark and leaving Lan Wangji alone in the rain, swallowed up by black and gray like a horrible premonition of things to come.
o*o
Months passed. There was still color in the world, but already it felt dimmer, less real with Wei Wuxian nowhere near. Lan Wangji had plenty to keep busy with still; there were many repairs still needing done, books to replace and copy, and never-ending night hunts that there were not enough people to cover. The war had left far too many unsettled dead and too few cultivators to handle the problem.
There was no real news about Wei Wuxian, just rumors and fear-mongering. People seemed to believe he was forming a sect, or perhaps creating a private army of the dead. The only thing anyone could agree on was that he'd had an argument with sect leader Jiang and been removed from the sect.
Life carried on.
Lan Wangji knew that Wei Wuxian had taken residence at the Burial Mounds. If he hadn't been worried about his health before, he definitely was now. That place was no place for someone living, let alone a group of people…
Jiang Yanli was getting married soon.
Wei Wuxian had always spoken positively of her. More than positively, like she was some immortal being gracing the world with her kindness. Lan Wangji didn't know her well enough to say whether she was as kind as Wei Wuxian portrayed her to be, but he knew that if she was even a fraction of what Wei Wuxian built her up to be, she had to be sad that her honorary brother wouldn't be attending.
Did Wei Wuxian even know she was getting married? Did rumors filter back to Yiling and the Burial Mounds?
There were dozens of reasons why Lan Wangji should stay away, many more for why he shouldn't find himself on the streets of Yiling, hoping by some slim chance to run across Wei Wuxian in a way that didn't seem overbearing or threatening, but Lan Wangji found himself there anyway.
He wandered aimlessly until he found a child on his leg. Then he didn't know what to do. He never interacted with children. He stared down at the small boy who couldn't have been older than four at most. The boy stared back, his neutral expression quickly shifting to tearful eyes and wobbling lips the longer Lan Wangji went without reacting. When he started to cry, Lan Wangji shut down completely.
Did he pick the child up? Should he try to find its parent? Was the boy crying because he was lost or because something else was wrong?
Lan Wangji cast an eye around and lo and behold, there was Wei Wuxian. Wei Wuxian who scooped the crying child into his arms and scolded him before turning a smile on Lan Wangji like nothing had ever gone wrong between them. Lan Wangji blinked at the brightness of it.
"That child…"
"Who, A-Yuan?" Wei Wuxian laughed, a wonderful sound that Lan Wangji hadn't heard in a long time. He looked so thin, but at the same time Wei Wuxian looked better in other ways. More present, less haunted. It made Lan Wangji want to scoop him up and carry him away, take him somewhere safe and care for him until the healthy glow he remembered from their time at the Cloud Recesses was back in his cheeks and Wei Wuxian was well again. Seeing him hold a child only made that urge stronger. "I birthed him with my own body!" Wei Wuxian said absurdly, this A-Yuan cradled in his arms.
Lan Wangji knew it couldn't be possible, but his brain still stumbled on the thought. Wei Wuxian having a child. Wei Wuxian able to give birth to a—
Wei Wuxian's laughter jerked him out of the rapidly spiraling thought. "Aw, did you actually believe me? I'm looking after him."
Ah. The child must be a Wen. Which meant he had been at the Jin labor camp. As the boy looked up at them with wide, innocent eyes, Lan Wangji felt sick in his stomach. "Wei Ying," Lan Wangji said a bit helplessly.
And Wei Wuxian stepped into the familiar, teasing role like they were best of friends, like they hadn't fought and all was well. Lan Wangji let himself be tugged from place to place, buying treats for Wei Wuxian and Wen Yuan. How could he not? How could he not fall into their orbit and wish that this was his daily reality?
Wen Yuan played with the toys Lan Wangji brought him, and the child didn't look like a Wen. In brown cloth and hair gone wild with tangles the way children's hair did when they were left to their own devices, he could have been anyone's child. Wei Wuxian, dressed in rough black cloth, could have been Wen Yuan's true father. Lan Wangji could have been—He wasn't though. There was no use daydreaming what would never be. Wei Wuxian might tolerate and like him. He might even look at him and have at one point wished they were soulmates—how, how was it a one-sided bond?—but Lan Wangji knew that this wasn't reality, this little moment in a bubble of time and peace. Wei Wuxian had the cultivation world clamoring against him, Wen Yuan was deemed a crime for existing with the Wen name, and Lan Wangji had too many obligations to cast them off no matter how much he wished in his heart to live in reality the family they currently appeared to be.
He wished, as he watched Wei Wuxian laugh, that this was always his reality. Wei Wuxian happy, no pressing tasks to burden them in the moment. Even a child in the picture was something that Lan Wangji could—. He couldn't let himself think that.
Instead, he drank in Wei Wuxian's words and basked in the moment, storing it up even as he wanted to grab Wei Wuxian's hands and beg him to go to Gusu with him again. With Wen Yuan. With all the Wens if need be, he'd find a way, just let him have this! But he knew if he opened his mouth and uttered those words, the smile on his soulmate's face would melt away to the cold chill he'd seen all the other times he'd said those words.
"Ah," Wei Wuxian said, barreling on in his ramblings that Lan Wangji was less hearing and more experiencing, "and the Aunties are trying to teach A-Yuan his colors already even though none of us on the Burial Mounds can see anything but grey. It's kind of hilarious when you think about it! Actually I have no idea what color anything we're wearing is. Is my robe really black, do you think, or is it just a dark blue or something?"
"It's black."
"Good, good, it was supposed to be but no one can double check! Ah, we're all just wearing dark colors so there's less visible stains…"
Lan Wangji was willing to bet that Wei Wuxian had black because of preference no matter what he said of stains. He'd worn it more and more often after his return in the war. Like the dark cultivation had twisted his shade sense as well as leaving its imprint on his body.
"You should see the robes tha—" Wei Wuxian cut off, distracted by something only he knew what before his happy expression shifted to concern, then the cold, serious look he'd get before a battle in the war. "Something's wrong."
The thing wrong turned out to be Wen Ning, roused as a fierce corpse and raining destruction on the poor, desolate settlement the Wen refugees had managed to scrape together. Working with Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji was able to help restrain him, and somehow Wen Ning came to his senses, the first sentient fierce corpse in known existence.
It was unsettling and unnatural, but Lan Wangji couldn't see it as a bad thing. Not when the worn people living there wept in joy at being reunited with Wen Ning. Not when Wen Qing looked like her purpose for living had been restored and Wei Wuxian had looked so relieved and glad.
How anyone could look at these people and see danger, he didn't know.
Lan Wangji watched them and felt out of place, too white among poor-quality brown robes, too rich among the poverty, too foreign amongst a group of people that seemed to claim each other as family regardless of if they actually were so.
Wei Wuxian fit. He fit and even as worn as he looked, he looked happier than Lan Wangji had seen since before the war started.
Perhaps that, if nothing else, was worth all the pain until this point. If living on the Burial Mounds with a group of non-combatant ex-enemies was what it took for Wei Wuxian to smile, then Lan Wangji was glad that he'd found this even if it left Lan Wangji even less of a place in his life than ever.
(If he were to drop everything, join them here, would he feel happier? But no, he could never do that, could he. There were too many obligations tying him to Gusu.)
Lan Wangji returned to Gusu after passing along news from Wei Wuxian's sister. No matter how much he wanted to take that step forward and somehow fit the way Wei Wuxian did, to share a bit of that brittle happiness, he couldn't stay.
Later, as things began to spiral further, he wished he'd found the courage after all. Because surely things would have gone better if he had.
But Lan Wangji hadn't stayed and Wei Wuxian hadn't asked.
Jin Zixuan died at Wen Ning's hand on Jin Ling's first month celebration, and the sects called for Wei Wuxian's head.
Lan Wangji had no control of anything and he was starting to wonder if he ever had.
o*o
Wei Wuxian looked like a man a step away from a corpse, blood-shot eyes and sunken cheeks and frail in a way that felt wrong because Wei Wuxian—Wei Ying—had always been someone bright to Lan Wangji's senses. Lan Wangji tried once more to reason, to plead as it felt like everything was falling apart no matter how he tried to patch the cracks. Everything just kept pouring out like a fatal wound.
Wei Wuxian brushed him off without even seeming to see him, told him to leave with no uncertain terms and stabbing deep into his heart with it.
He'd laid himself bare and vulnerable and was pushed away.
Truly this was the only way it could go for a one-sided bond. He felt and cared and pushed and met with a wall. Met with indifference and chill dismissal.
Something broke in him. Love was not enough. Soulmates were not enough. He'd known that from the start, his own parents' love a lesson in that. And yet he'd hoped…
If there was one thing he never thought he'd have to make a choice on, it was choosing between the will of his sect and the life of his soulmate. For the Lan, soulmates were precious, intrinsic in their values and their rules. Lan An's teachings often reflected on the soulmate bond that led him to leave his monastic life and found the Lan sect in the first place, so if any sect was to be understanding of a bond between someone and their soulmate, and the loyalties therein, Lan Wangji would have believed that his sect would never be a problem.
Perhaps, though, it was because he never openly claimed Wei Wuxian as his soulmate even if his brother had long known of the one-sided bond by this point. Or perhaps, with the threat of demonic cultivation looming over the world, the elders had deemed that Wei Wuxian was a threat outweighing the need to respect the soulmate bond. What Lan Wangji couldn't understand is how they expected him to turn aside.
Like the bond was nothing.
Like arbitrary morality of methods outweighed the fact that Wei Wuxian's methods had won them the war and saved at least as many lives as they ended.
Wei Wuxian was self-destructing but Lan Wangji would not, could not surrender him to the death the sects wanted. Knowing full well there would be consequences, he raised his sword against his own elders, staining white and blue with red.
He truly hated the color.
He struck them down, but did not kill; he would not go that far, not unless there truly was no other option. Taking Wei Wuxian from there was all he could do, but Wei Wuxian was barely conscious of him, lost in a haze of despair and resentment thick enough to coil around him.
He didn't want to leave, but Wei Wuxian had made his feelings clear. And those feelings were that Lan Wangji didn't have a place by his side.
If things had gone differently… If Wei Wuxian had accepted him… Perhaps he would have turned his back on his sect altogether.
It was too late to change that choice now though.
o*o
His punishment and Wei Wuxian's death blurred together in his memories, years later.
He was aware of the whip striking down, the lines of fire on his back, the white in front of him of all the witnesses to his punishment, right up until he saw gray stone and the red of his own blood, his ability to stay upright leaving him. Being flayed alive hurt, hurt almost as much as the heartbreak he felt. It seemed like it couldn't get worse.
At some point his vision went black, and later, Lan Wangji wasn't sure if that was the moment Wei Wuxian died, or later, sometime in the hazy first few days after the punishment where everything was pain and a blur of half-consciousness.
It was said that when color leached from the world with a soulmate's death, it brought as much pain as the first rush of color gave positive emotions.
Lan Wangji must have been in so much pain he didn't recognize the change in the world, because the first moment he was fully conscious again, he was struck with the realization that the world was wrong and dull and flat again. Lifeless. Empty.
He didn't need his brother's careful words to tell him that Wei Wuxian was dead, wary sympathy on his face.
That stung. He had no right to show that sympathy when he'd been one of the people persecuting Wei Wuxian.
The pain of his back was nothing compared to realizing that the world was gray again though.
Lan Wangji forced himself upright even as his brother tried to stop him. He was re-opening wounds that had barely stopped bleeding in the first place but there was an unsettled ache in him that he couldn't ignore.
"Do not stop me," he told his brother, pulling away, seeking his sword.
Lan Xichen gave him a hurt look.
Lan Wangji didn't have the emotional capacity to care at the moment. He mounted his sword and flew, only desperation giving him the strength, toward Yiling.
Wei Wuxian was dead, but.
He knew he was dead but.
There was no life in the world.
But he needed to see with his own eyes.
Lan Wangji didn't remember how he got there, or where he landed. He couldn't say if there were any other cultivators around, looking for something to scavenge from the place Wei Wuxian had made an unlikely home. But there was no sign of a body, no matter how many dark stains he found, no matter the remains of other people he found.
The burial mounds village was destroyed. The scrapped together fields had been trampled, the turnips they had so carefully nurtured to grow in this cursed place lost in churned mud of hundreds of feet. With color gone, he couldn't tell if any of the greens were there or if it was mud alone. Everything blurred together and he was out of practice at differentiating, hadn't even realized he'd grown to rely on color at all.
There was nothing of Wei Wuxian in his cave, nothing but some scattered papers and belongings, none of which brought any comfort. His sword and flute were gone. There wasn't even an identifiable scrap of cloth.
It was by chance that he found Wen Yuan, staggering past trees that grew toward the edges of the safe areas of the Burial Mounds. There was a sound, he thought, or maybe it had been some instinct that drew him there, but he found the boy, curled up and hiding, the only survivor of a massacre.
Somehow he lifted him, his back one mass of pain, fire in his veins and white and black spots on his vision from over-exertion. Somehow he flew back to the Cloud Recesses. Somehow he got the fevered child to the medics before he collapsed himself, claiming Wei Wuxian's A-Yuan as his own.
Wei Wuxian was gone but he wasn't going to lose the last remnant of him.
o*o
Life after Wei Wuxian was…difficult. Lan Wangji no longer had to wonder why Lan An had wasted away after the death of his beloved, nor why his own father had failed to leave seclusion even after his mother had died (theirs being a failed soulmate relationship aside, it had still been a soulmate bond lost). There was very little that sparked joy in his world, very little that gave it life. That joy, what little he could find, came from A-Yuan, who grew into a talented cultivator and kind child.
It was perhaps a blessing that A-Yuan didn't have much in the way of memories from before the Cloud Recesses. What memories he had were likely filled with traumatic pitfalls, and Lan Wangji was grateful to see every smile the boy gave. It was sad though, that Lan Wangji was perhaps the last member of a cultivating sect that still remembered Wei Wuxian as the brilliant man he was instead of the terror that haunted the sects' nightmares. In his moments stuck recovering from his punishment, he had wished more than once that he could see recognition in A-Yuan's eyes the few times he could stomach voicing memories of Wei Wuxian aloud.
There was none, though, and as time passed, Lan Wangji found himself holding those memories close to his heart for whenever cruel stories inevitably circled around again about the terrible Yiling Patriarch.
Time passed. A-Yuan grew. Lan Wangji grieved.
When his brother lost his soulmate, Lan Wangji could only look on in understanding as something in Lan Xichen shattered with Nie Mingjue's loss.
Months, but less than a year, after Nie Mingjue's disappearance and death—confirmed by Lan Xichen's loss of color—his brother came to him, lost and sleepless.
"I understand now," he said into the silence that had never fully thawed between them even though it had been years now that Wei Wuxian was dead. "I understand why you chose what you did. I'm sorry, Wangji."
Lan Wangji hadn't been able to give a response to that. There were no words that would make the loss of a soulmate right. There was nothing truly left to forgive at this point either. It hadn't been Xichen that gave the order to the elders any more than he'd been the one to decide on the punishment; he'd merely stood aside and let it happen.
He'd reached out then, though, rare contact with another soul.
Lan Xichen leaned on him, weeping. "The world feels so dark," he said.
And Lan Wangji held him because he understood.
o *o
It was years later, A-Yuan almost an adult in his own right, when things changed again. It had been difficult years to pass, years spent seeking trouble because diving into chaotic messes helped him feel like he still had some sort of purpose, A-Yuan his other reason for living.
The latest batch of Lan juniors—A-Yuan included—were at the delicate stage where they could be trusted to night hunt on their own. Of course they couldn't be left completely unsupervised. Lan Wangji remained within a reasonable distance in town, letting them search Mo manor for the reported disturbance. Signal flares would be more than sufficient to call him if he was needed.
And he was needed; none of them could have guessed that there would be a murderous arm that would strangle its victims and proceed to have a rampage. So he didn't begrudge them needing him. This was far outside the level of threat than had been expected. And then later on the mountain he was content to sit back and let the children find their own way. Except that the threat turned out to be a murderous goddess statue, and that also was far more than children could handle.
Lan Wangji didn't know what to make of the sudden appearance of Wen Ning—he was supposed to be dead, truly dead and burned, ashes scattered, but there he was. And there, on the wind, played poorly, were notes he would recognize anywhere.
His heart started beating faster, the world's focus narrowed to one man. One man with a crude, bamboo flute, dark hair held in a red ribbon. Too short to be Wei Wuxian yet… Yet…
Lan Wangji caught the man's wrist. His mind was a blur of hope and fear that somehow, impossibly, he'd be wrong. That this wasn't Wei Ying no matter that this was a song he'd played for only one set of ears.
"Wei Ying," he said, voice hoarse with too many emotions he didn't know how to express.
Pale eyes, gray eyes, the wrong shade of eyes, looked up. And the world burst into color again. It felt like he'd had the breath punched from his lungs and had something fixed inside him at the same time. Impossibly, it could only be Wei Ying. Had only ever been Wei Ying that his soul matched. Tears slid down his face. Finally, the world was right.
.o*O*o.
Wei Wuxian blinked awake. He hurt all over, but considering he didn't expect to ever be awake again, he supposed he couldn't complain about a bit of pain. The room was unfamiliar, strewn with talismans and painted lines, everything oddly off for a few moments until it settled into familiar grays instead of... whatever that had been. He glanced down at the lines of an array and it took him a moment to recognize it as one of his own. A self-sacrifice array. He looked down at the painful stinging cuts on his arms, the same shade as the lines on the floor, lines that hadn't been gray when he first looked at them and felt sick.
Had that been color? Whoever this body belonged to, they might have met their soulmate, still had their soulmate, and chose to sacrifice themself anyway. That had some nasty implications about the kind of life this person had, as if the shabby surroundings and bodily aches didn't give enough of a story.
Wei Wuxian shuddered, but before he could do much of anything, someone burst through the shoddy door and started insulting and assaulting him.
The next several hours were chaos, and not the fun kind. One, he was in the body of the local lunatic—or at least the local cast-off—and whoever Mo Xuanyu had been, he had lived a shitty life if the screaming, kicking, abusive cousin was just a shoot of the bamboo forest. Two, he'd been summoned for revenge—hence the body-sacrifice ritual—and he had to kill-and-or-let-die whoever was on Mo Xuanyu's hit list. Most of which had miraculously taken care of itself, so at least Wei Wuxian didn't have to feel bad about murdering someone he didn't personally have a vendetta against. (Though honestly he couldn't feel much sympathy for the victims of the possessed arm when they were so clearly abusive.) And three? Three, there were several baby Lan disciples and they went and summoned Hanguan-jun. If anyone would catch on that he wasn't actually Mo Xuanyu, it would be Lan Zhan, and that was something that would be bad. Because Wei Wuxian might not remember a lot of what led up to his final moments (only just the worst highlights of it hahaaaaa), but he did remember the number of times the man had tried to get him to go back to Gusu with him, being a pillar of righteousness who needed him to submit to punishment.
That had really hurt back then. Because he'd believed that they were finally something like friends, that maybe if he had someone to be a soulmate, he'd want it to be Lan Zhan. He'd thought, for a brief moment, Lan Zhan felt that way back. But then Wei Wuxian took up demonic cultivation and Lan Zhan couldn't stop hounding him to return to the righteous path.
How Lan Zhan would react to finding another demonic cultivator even not knowing it was Wei Wuxian was enough to have him ducking and running, leaving the disciples to the trusty might of Lan Zhan's guqin and sword. They'd be fine. Wei Wuxian might not be if he stayed. He wasn't going to squander the gift of being alive again even if he did have to act out someone's revenge plot. What was one more corpse to his list of hundreds?
So now he had an ornery donkey, only the clothes on his back, and was slowly getting lost in a woods that was full of a ridiculous number of spirit traps. Did whoever strung them up really think they'd be useful in fighting whatever was making peoples' souls go missing or…? Because spirit nets like these, expensive or not, would only work on a fraction of the kind of creatures that ate souls.
Also, they were a pain in the ass to avoid, and whoever strung them up was definitely over-compensating for something. If they were rich enough for this many nets, they were rich enough to hire dozens of cultivators to deal with the soul-stealing problem. This many nets were just excessive and a gross display of wealth. There were so much better ways to spend that level of coin. Like on alcohol or good food, or to make talismans with the highest quality ingredients.
"Just gain a bit of skill," he muttered under his breath. Wei Wuxian would have continued on his way from there, but of course the one responsible showed up. And of course it would turn out to be someone he knew. Jin Ling, all grown up and spouting insults like they were spewing from Jiang Cheng's mouth. Wei Wuxian's heart lurched because of course Jiang Cheng had had a part in raising him; Jin Ling didn't have many other close relatives at this point, no thanks to Wei Wuxian's own actions.
And Jiang Cheng… Jiang Cheng had always had a temper, but looking at him now, he looked like he hadn't smiled in years. Like he'd let his heart harden as if that would ward off any further heartbreak. Over a decade. How could he have been gone for that long? How many people he knew were still alive or had some other catastrophe killed them? Although of the people he knew, how many had been alive when he died?
When Lan Zhan inevitably showed up after a gaggle of baby Lans, Wei Wuxian let himself disappear into the background, careful to avoid line of sight.
He fully intended to get the hell out of there and hopefully never come on the radar of cultivation populations again, because ahaha, he didn't want to die again! (Yes he still had to figure out who the last wound was from, but a man could dream of a simple life on the road with a donkey and no people potentially chasing after him to kill him just because of things that happened over a decade ago.) Sadly, like most things in his life to date, that plan fell through almost immediately thanks to an evil goddess statue trying to kill a bunch of juniors. And Jin Ling. Jin Ling might have turned out kind of bratty and entitled and way too much like Jiang Cheng for the world's good, but he was Jin Ling, and Wei Wuxian would feel horrible if he let anything happen to his Shijie's child, especially after how much pain he'd caused Jin Ling in the first place.
So of course Wei Wuxian stepped in. And of course things went sideways because his life never went normal ever. He wasn't expecting Wen Ning to appear, not when he was supposed to have been burned to death and his ashes scattered to the four corners of the earth, but he could work with that. At least until the cultivators started turning on Wen Ning. Then it was a mad rush to try and calm down Wen Ning without any casualties on either side, and Wei Wuxian couldn't remember exactly where he heard the song he was playing. But he'd played it before for A-Yuan, and Wen Ning had been there, and it was a melody that made him feel peaceful and safe.
It worked.
Right up until a hand closed around his wrist and the familiar scent of sandalwood swirled around him. Right up until Lan Zhan said, "Wei Ying," in a broken, heart-wrenching voice. Right up until Wei Wuxian looked up and met his eyes and the world changed, color spreading like ink on wet paper, Lan Zhan's eyes, his skin, his clothes, out past him to the rest of existence even as everything felt like it was trapped between the short space from Lan Zhan to him. Wei Wuxian's breath caught in his chest as Lan Zhan's usually stoic face seemed to crumple with emotion, a tear sliding down his face.
Wei Wuxian used the last scrap of attention not riveted on Lan Zhan to send Wen Ning away before giving in to the instinct to stare. Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan. What color was the shade of his eyes? The embroidery on his ribbon? Lan Zhan was looking at him like he broke and fixed the world at the same time and there was nothing else he'd rather look at.
His hand came up without any conscious thought to wipe at Lan Zhan's tears. The last time he saw so much emotion on Lan Zhan's face, he'd been spiraling toward his death. It hadn't impacted him then, but nothing could have reached him then.
Wait. How did Lan Zhan know…? "Uh. Uh, I'm not. I'm."
"Wei Ying," Lan Zhan said, something weirdly soft and…fond?...crossing his face. "I would know you in any form, with any face. I will always see you as you."
Eh?
Wait wait wait, Lan Zhan had to be seeing color right now too, right? And no matter their disagreements in the past, he wasn't the sort of person to… to lock up a soulmate or let them get killed. So. Holy crap, Lan Zhan was his soulmate.
"…So this is what color looks like?" Wei Wuxian said in a weak, half-joking tone. "Kind of distracting."
Lan Zhan's eyes widened. His hand went bruising tight on Wei Wuxian's wrist and he winced. "You are seeing color?"
"Yes? Are you not?" He'd never heard of one-sided bonds.
Shit, why did Lan Zhan look like he was going to cry again?
"I always wanted it to be you," he blurted, before he had to watch Lan Zhan cry more. And yeesh, he needed to know the names of the colors, seriously what color were Lan Zhan's eyes? The under-robe that had a dark spot from a fallen tear? What was truly white and what was truly black or gray in this newly tinted world? It felt important, as important as letting Lan Zhan know that he was wanted, because this was all a part of the bond between them. "I can't believe we're soulmates. How were we not soulmates before?"
Lan Zhan's face twisted minutely, but that was a grimace, and what did that mean?
"Lan Zhan?"
There wasn't really a chance for him to explain anything though. Their moment was ruined by Jiang Cheng barging in, Zidian sparking on his hand, murder on his face. And then Wei Wuxian was being attacked, and there were blatant lies being thrown around about his identity, and somehow he found himself whisked away by Lan Zhan and not facing a painful death via torture by his brother's hand. Go figure.
Wei Wuxian's head all but spun with how he was carted off. But Lan Zhan's touch was gentle and he had nowhere he'd rather be.
Later, much later, they stopped at an inn, and Wei Wuxian found himself in a room with Lan Zhan pouring alcohol for him like something out of a fever dream. He could never have pictured this in his first life. Wei Wuxian looked around the room and at all the odd colors with their many shades that were all so different from grays. He couldn't have pictured this either.
"What color is that, do you think?" he mused pointing at a painting decorating the wall. It was done in colored ink washes instead of gray, meaning the artist must have been able to see color.
Lan Zhan glanced at it. "Green, blue, and pink," he said, like identifying the colors of a lotus painted over still water was that simple.
"Really?" Wei Wuxian pointed to the deep shade of the wood with its warm feel. "This?"
"Dark brown."
"Your robes?"
"White and pale blue."
"This?" Wei Wuxian held up something from their food.
"Yellow."
"My ribbon?"
"Red."
Wei Wuxian sat back, dumbfounded. Words matched with a concept for the first time. "Wow. You're amazing to figure them out so fast, Lan Zhan."
Again, there was a strange expression on Lan Zhan's face that Wei Wuxian couldn't read.
"I… This is not the first time I have seen the world in color," Lan Zhan said with painful hesitance. Like he was worried how Wei Wuxian would react.
Wei Wuxian blinked, processed that. Lan Zhan had seen color before, which meant he'd had a soulmate sometime since they last met. But he was seeing color again meaning he'd lost it, meaning whoever had been his soulmate had died and that was horrible. Wei Wuxian was only just getting used to how strange and vibrant the world was, but the idea of it all turning flat and gray again made something in his chest recoil like the thought burned. "I'm sorry for your loss," he said on automatic, because what else could be said? A second thought occurred. "I didn't know people could have more than one soulmate in a lifetime."
Lan Zhan's face went even more pinched like Wei Wuxian had said something particularly upsetting. Or maybe he was annoyed; Wei Wuxian was out of practice reading his expressions.
"Wei Ying," Lan Zhan said slowly, like he was explaining something that should be obvious, "I have only ever had one soulmate."
Wei Wuxian looked at him blankly. Because he couldn't have. That would mean it had to be Wei Wuxian, and he'd never seen color in his first life.
"Wei Ying," Lan Zhan said, even slower. "You have been my soulmate from the moment I laid eyes on you."
"But. That would have been all the way back at the Cloud Recesses." And Lan Zhan had hated him back then—understandably because Wei Wuxian knew he could be annoying and too much but he hadn't been able to resist pestering Lan Zhan just to get a reaction, like he'd been addicted to the tiny, irritated sounds he could get Lan Zhan to make even when he was doing his best to appear unmoved.
"Yes," Lan Zhan said.
"I never saw color."
"I am aware."
"You hated me," Wei Wuxian said.
"I have never hated Wei Ying," Lan Zhan said with such a firm tone it couldn't be anything but truth.
His fundamental understanding of their relationship over the years had just lost its foundation. He didn't know how to reclassify all the bits and pieces he could remember of times spent with Lan Zhan now. "You saw color all that time?"
"Yes," Lan Zhan said, somehow still patient with him.
He had to have been patient for a very long time. "You never told me."
"At first I thought you did not want the bond," Lan Zhan said like the idea was expected instead of something that cut like a knife, the thought of not wanting Lan Zhan—no. "Later, I learned you did not see color. It would have been a burden to you and there were more important things happening than soulmates."
A war. The deaths of so many they knew. The loss of his whole sect, the loss of his core, Wei Wuxian's slow self-destruction. But having Lan Zhan as a soulmate would never have been a burden. He said as much and Lan Zhan looked back at him with eyes that saw through him, that knew him perhaps better than he knew himself it seemed.
"Wei Ying would have felt guilty that the bond went one-way."
"I wouldn't—" But no, he kind of did even now, sitting here with a bond that let both of them see color. It must have really sucked for Lan Zhan. "How is it even possible?"
"I am unaware of another case happening, but the world is vast; it likely has occurred before."
"But why can we both see color now?" Why not before? Of course there was no answering that; what caused a bond was something no person had managed to explain, and the soulmate phenomenon was beyond what even a cultivator could comprehend. "Well… Well, it's not one-sided now. And I won't leave you alone like that again."
"Swear it," Lan Zhan said, more a command than a question, something desperate and wounded in him even though he had to have had time to grieve and move on over the years.
Wei Wuxian swore it easily. If Lan Zhan weren't his soulmate he'd probably be trying to run away right now, but knowing that they're soulmates, he didn't want to be anywhere else. Because Lan Zhan wasn't the sort of person who'd do anything to hurt their soulmate.
…That…put the past into a very different perspective though. "Lan Zhan, why did you keep trying to get me to go to Gusu?"
Lan Zhan frowned. "To protect you," he said like it was the only answer there could possibly be.
"Oh."
"Wei Ying, what did you think…?"
"It's not important."
From Lan Zhan's expression, he didn't agree, but he didn't press for the moment. Wei Wuxian looked down at the meal Lan Zhan had ordered them instead of the too-intense clarity of his gaze and his bright, bright eyes. Right. Lan Zhan poured him alcohol. Lan Zhan missed him. Lan Zhan had been his soulmate on some level from the start even if Wei Wuxian hadn't been able to see colors for him until this lifetime.
Honestly, Wei Wuxian didn't feel like he deserved so many nice things all at once. One moment he was watching the world fall apart, pained, starving, and dying. The next he was alive and everything his younger self wanted seemed to be falling into his hands. He rubbed the remaining cut under his sleeve carefully, its ache a reminder of just what this second chance had cost.
"Wei Ying?"
He'd been silent too long. Ah. He smiled, a little lopsided and wry, but a true smile. "Let's eat before it's cold. Maybe share a toast to being alive and soulmates properly, hmm?"
"Mm."
And the brilliant fool of a man actually raised a cup of wine, Gusu Lan rules be damned, for him.
Wei Wuxian might, he realized with all the blunt force of hitting the ground after a long fall, be a little in love with him. Might have been from the start. Might be willing to face the world and all the cultivators in it if he could keep this bright world and the small, intimate smile of Lan Zhan's face, and this second chance.
He swirled the wine in his cup and drank the toast.
AN: And then everything devolves into chaos 5 seconds later and plot continues mostly as normal haha