content warnings: vague discussions/references to past abuse, mild dissociative line, general tension
The drive to the safe house takes several days. Mo Xuanyu obviously can't take public transport, not while toting around the comatose body of the cultivation world's most wanted man, and then there's the small matter that he's likely become the cultivation world's second most wanted man for breaking him out. No doubt the Lanling Jin sect is clamping down vicelike security upon every part of the country they can get their hands on; Mo Xuanyu has to take huge detours through unpaved roads and barely inhabited backcountry in order to avoid the major highways. He sleeps in the car, loads up on convenience store food whenever he passes through somewhere more populated and lives off that, spends his waking hours driving his precious and sleeping cargo around.
Stressful doesn't even begin to cover it. The paranoia of when he first escaped Koi Tower is now multiplied by a thousand alongside the increased severity of his transgression; the fear sticks to him like glue as he drives, chases him through fitful and restless sleep, overtakes him completely sometimes so that he has to pull over and dig his fingers into his arms and breathe harsh and fast and saw-edged in his throat. He's terrified, all the time.
Nie Huaisang could have picked someone less mentally ill to do all this, he thinks viciously after one such attack, slamming the car door shut again from where he'd opened it in a desperate bid for fresh air. As soon as he thinks it, though, he knows it's not a fair thought. He agreed to this; as soon as he heard "expose Jin Guangyao" he knew he'd do anything that was asked of him. Even now, if asked again, he'd still do it. Probably. Maybe. The certainty of his reconsidering highly depends on just how intense the fear is at any given moment.
…What if that was the point? What if Nie Huaisang was lying about his end goal, saying whatever he thought Mo Xuanyu would want to hear in order to faithfully carry out orders?
Whatever. It won't do to worry about hypotheticals when he has the much more immediate problem of one of the most powerful organizations in the world calling for his blood.
He's taken to talking; first to himself, then to the body in the backseat that for its stillness and deathly pallor Mo Xuanyu still sometimes forgets isn't a corpse. "Two more days of driving," he groans, peering into the backseat mirror. The car turns a corner; Wei Wuxian's arm slips off the seat and dangles limply. The scourge of the cultivation world is drooling a little. "Two more days and then we'll be fucking done, it'll be done with we won't have to worry about this shit anymore… won't that be nice? Then you'll have a nice little safe house to… to wake up in and probably go murder a bunch of people when you're awake, who knows what the fuck Nie Huaisang expects you to do, I sure don't have the faintest idea what he's thinking half the time…"
Sometimes it's a little less topical. "And then I had to write lines," says Mo Xuanyu, tearing into his sandwich as night falls outside the car window. "For crying. Who does that to a ten-year-old, right?" Wei Wuxian's torso slides slowly down the seat. There's a torn-off bit of sandwich in his lap; Mo Xuanyu can never help the impulse. Like an offering to a god. "My mom was really nice about it but then my aunt got wind of it and, well, you know…" Not a topic he wants to dwell on. Wei Wuxian's mouth is lolling open again; he looks like he'd be snoring if he weren't half dead. "I bet you got detention a lot. Everyone says you were a troublemaker. But it was probably for cooler reasons than me, right?" He finishes the sandwich, balls up the wrapper and tosses it into the plastic bag he uses for trash. "Something badass and rebellious. Not crying in class."
"Although I did get into fights too," he adds as an afterthought later, when they're on the road again and he's finally succumbed to eating that last bit of sandwich. Offering or no, it has to go somewhere. "But that was for, like, failure kid reasons. Disturbed reasons. I bet you got into fights for more—" He stops eating. The mental image of the wound in Wei Wuxian's abdomen, the blow he tried to kill himself with, has popped into his mind, stark and red. "Well, never mind. Who knows."
The wound in question is healing, in slow incremental paces. Mo Xuanyu did, true to his intents, raid a pharmacy, but it's mostly the healing talismans doing the trick; Mo Xuanyu just sort of aimlessly throws on antibiotics and bandages when they seem applicable. He can't look up any kind of first aid; can't risk using the internet, putting out a traceable signal of where he is. That means no more contact with Nie Huaisang, either. He's alone; it's just him and the Yiling Patriarch, and the immense fear always looming just out of sight, and the road unspooling ahead of them.
One night, curled up in the backseat, he wakes from a nightmare so intense his shirt is soaked in sweat, heart pounding. He can't remember what it was he dreamed about, but it throbs and races over his skin as though the Jins are just outside. In desperation, he climbs over the seats, throws open the door, and inhales the fresh air, cold and silvery with night time. The stars are so bright, out here, out in the undetectable countryside. There are so many. "Hey," he whispers, turning back into the car, and dragging out Wei Wuxian's unconscious body, "hey, Yiling Patriarch, come look at the stars, okay?" He props him up against the outside of the car, sits down next to him, something still jittering in his chest and arms. He's not quite sure this moment is real. "When was the last time you saw this many stars, huh?"
The night sky wheels silently overhead, an inverted bowl, blue velvet sprinkled with silver dust. Wei Wuxian's slack face tilts up towards the stars for the first time in thirteen years. Mo Xuanyu wraps his arms around his knees, rests his head on top, and sinks into a sort of reverie watching the most wanted man in the world continue slumbering, heavy and still as a corpse, as the sounds of night animals trill and chirp loud around them.
A couple days later Mo Xuanyu reaches the designated point on the map. Mouth dry with anticipation, he branches off into a side road, then a side side road, then—with trees all around, shrouding them in green—onto a narrow path that's just two wheel tracks worn into the dirt, bushes brushing the car on either side. After about a mile of that, the world shivers and distorts, his ears popping as he drives; it happens again, and again.
Three layers of wards. Just as he was told.
The path ends right in front of a house tucked among the trees, sitting silent and empty before him. He's here. He's made it. Shivering with the relief already setting in, he climbs out of the car, taking a moment to give his legs and arms a long luxurious stretch. No more driving! He was getting so sick of driving!
The key to the safe house is in the glove compartment; Mo Xuanyu retrieves that, climbing up onto the porch. The thud of the wood is loud and hollow under his feet; wind sighs through the trees around them. The whole scene feels so peaceful, hidden away from the world, like the times he and his family used to go to a cottage for a week in summer when Mo Xuanyu was very young, before things got bad; his heart aches, something deep and wistful rising up within him. He turns the key in the lock, and the door opens with a creak of hinges.
Inside is the faint dusty-woody odor of a house not lived in for a while, but the rooms are clean and comfortably furnished. Mo Xuanyu leans his head inside just enough to take a glance around, then goes back out to the car. Two trips—one to dump his backpack and various miscellaneous items just inside the door, and one to lug Wei Wuxian inside. Bridal style, which Mo Xuanyu finds funny for some inexplicable reason. Wei Wuxian's head, unsupported, hangs back, skinny neck stretched long and exposed like a goose. Mo Xuanyu deposits him on the couch and sets about looking around in earnest.
He wasn't given any instructions after this, only to bring the package to the safe house and look for further directions once he was there. Now, he's looking. His eye catches on a strip of paper on the coffee table in the living room, and upon picking it up, the first thing he notices about that are the array components written around its edges—from what he can tell, what's written on one piece of paper will appear on the other across any distances, with this particular sheet on the receiving end. Huh. Useful. Outside of the arrays, there's a message written in pen, although it's oddly…blurry.
Hi! it says, hope you made it safe! Also hope the transfer paper left in this house way back hasn't been moved, because now that you've kidnapped the Yiling Patriarch I can't risk sending people here to leave this message when their movements could in some way be traced. The Lanling Jin sect is making a big brouhaha about how something valuable was stolen from a facility and how they need to catch the criminal at all costs (they won't say what was stolen, of course), so I'm assuming that means you made it out safely and are now on the run. As of me writing this it should be a few more days until you get to where you can read it, try not to get caught in the meantime! I would hate that!
I have a couple more instructions for you now that you're here. Memorize them, then burn this paper. Thanks~
The list is short. Mo Xuanyu reads it, commits it to memory, then uses a flare of spiritual energy to burn it up. He kind of feels bad about the pile of ashes it leaves on the coffee table; the rest of the room is so pristine.
Speaking of which. He takes a few minutes to take stock of everything: a living room, minimally furnished, with a few books on the shelves that were all trending bestsellers five years ago. A TV, which Mo Xuanyu doesn't turn on, yet. The kitchen is spotless, and the freezer is stocked with a pile of microwaveable meals. The bathrooms have hotel brand shampoo, conditioner and soap sitting by the sink. Upstairs contains two bedrooms, and it's obvious which one he's meant to put Wei Wuxian in, because that one has clothes hanging in the wardrobe; nice, fashionable, but quite generic. The upstairs bathroom closet is ranged with first-aid supplies and a selection of over-the-counter medications.
Mo Xuanyu takes a moment to appreciate just how goddamn loaded the Qinghe Nie sect must be, to be able to keep this house, and surely a few others like it, fully stocked and maintained and mortgaged just for esoteric situations like this one, then goes back downstairs. He hoists Wei Wuxian back up into his arms, gets a crick in his back carrying him up the stairs, and seats him on the bed in the main bedroom, nudging him so that his limp torso slumps forward over Mo Xuanyu's arm and the strands of matted hair slide off the back of his neck.
The pins are still in there, keeping Wei Wuxian asleep—more than asleep, because sleeping people aren't this quiet and still. Keeping him half-dead, a living corpse. Mo Xuanyu slowly, carefully pulls the pins out, one by one, reaching over to lay them on the bedside table. Wei Wuxian doesn't wake up, which is fine. The instructions had said it should take him a while to regain consciousness once the pins were out, on the order of a few days. When Mo Xuanyu lays him back down, his fingers twitch and tremble—something they'd never done before—and his breathing is slowly rising to a normal volume from the feather-faint wisp it was before. It sounds very loud, in comparison.
The room is quiet. A bird twitters outside the window. Mo Xuanyu gazes down at the Yiling Patriarch arranged against the floral-patterned duvet cover, and his brain feels like two blunted edges sliding past each other, unable to form a complete whole.
Well, he thinks, that's the mission finished. He did everything that was asked of him, successfully, without dying. Quietly he goes back downstairs, his footsteps muffled on the carpet, and this time heads into the one place he hasn't explored yet, the basement. It's a very minimal place: cement floor, water heater in the corner, a washer and dryer jammed along one side of the wall. Most of the floor is taken up by a Distance-Shortening Array—a real one, one that must have taken several cultivators working together to put down, nothing like the catapult knockoff invented by Wei Wuxian. Single-use, a one-way trip back to the Unclean Realm.
All he needs to do is step onto it, and feed it some of his own spiritual energy to activate the mechanism.
He stares at it a while. His heart is heavy in his throat, all the tension and fear from the past few days congealed into something else, something weighing down his chest. He thinks of Wei Wuxian sleeping, upstairs, climbing out of death bit by tiny bit with each inhale and exhale. Of showing him the stars, except not really. All that time spent talking to him, and him never once speaking back. Somewhere sleeping inside that body, slowly struggling towards wakefulness, is the magnetic, despised, firebrand soul known to everyone in the cultivation world, but known by none of them; least of all Mo Xuanyu. Echoes in shaky camera footage, a shadow in a notebook, and a warm living body up in the biggest bedroom lying on a floral duvet.
He turns around and goes back upstairs, shutting the door behind him.