beneath rose-colored clouds

by Rose Thorne

Disclaimer: I don't own anything associated with The Untamed, and make no money writing fanfiction.


Lan Wangji was pleased to have finished his work for the day early, as it would give him time to take his husband to Caiyi to dinner and the night market. Far too often, he didn't finish the business of the Chief Cultivator until late enough into the evening that Wei Ying brought dinner to his office to ensure he took care of himself, and it was nice to find the time to spoil him as he deserved.

Wei Ying wasn't in the jingshi, and so Lan Wangji gathered his purse and went to the place he was most likely to find him in the late afternoon: the bunny meadow.

The sight that greeted him was one he wished he had the skill to paint. Wei Ying, covered with bunnies, seated and asleep beneath a juvenile dawn redwood tree that had been planted when the Cloud Recesses had been retaken from the Wen, to symbolize the renewal of the Cloud Recesses from the flames. Young or not, the tree was fast growing, and its feather-like leaves dropped every fall and grew back in the spring.

At first glance, Lan Wangji assumed one such leaf had alit on Wei Ying's head, but when he came closer he found that it was an actual feather, the perfect blue feather of the kingfisher, as though blessing his husband's beauty with a piece of its own.

He couldn't think of anything more apt, as Wei Ying stirred at his approach and smiled at him, and he pulled his sleepy husband to his feet for a kiss, fishing the feather from his hair and stowing it in his sleeve.

A specially-commissioned tian-tsui hairpin in the shape of a leaf from the dawn redwood made its way into Wei Ying's tresses a few months later, as winter turned to spring, gifted under the same dawn redwood, and his husband laughed to hear the story, the symbolism—his own rebirth dear to them both.


The title is from the work of Tang Dynasty poet Hanshan, Red Pine poem 106. Supposedly he and his cohort wrote poems on rock, bamboo, trees, and the walls of people's houses.

Tian-tsui is a style of Chinese art featuring kingfisher feathers.

I wrote this as a part of Writer's Month 2021, using day 7's prompt "feather."