pre-yunmeng.

For Wei Wuxian, his world started taking form in the colors of white and gray and brown and red. The world to his few winters was only the crunching of snow beneath his feet, the dust by his cheeks, the fur of rabid dogs and the blood on their teeth. By then, that was all he's ever known. A palette of hues found on the streets; colors dragged through the mud.

It's the color of fear and trepidation, one that can't remember what the light once was like. It's bone-deep fragments of broken legs and bloody wrists, tested and tried by the one-sided marathon of sharp teeth and ear-splitting barks that followed him all through his childhood, an expanse of time he spent running and cowering and shaking.

Through the blurry days, he's not sure when the world's colors changed for him. He's not sure how many winters and summers he'd survived when his world burst forth with a myriad of violet and green, triggered by a hand reached out in the middle of all the blinding whites. It's the color painted on the surface of Yunmeng; the seeming shadows of the sailboats floating by the water. It's the color of the pier's lilies — even the shade of the wild, unnamed flowers blooming on the creeks of the stalls, clumped together in a sense of familiarity Wei Wuxian was a stranger to.

(And there are times when the scales tipped to violet, almost overwhelmingly. He remembered the times when he'd be forced to remember just what he was, where he was from, and where he really belonged. They all came from slips of the tongue — although not quite — maybe they were words to be deliberately uttered, maybe they were strings of phrases meant to be spoken, so he'd know. So he'd be aware.)

And that was it, for a long time.

Those were his colors for several winters.

But then: blue.

It was unlike anything he's ever felt from the colors before. It was a terrible, almost great, almost daunting, onslaught of blue. It scared Wei Wuxian far more than he'd care to admit out loud — or to anyone. In some way, the blue was restricting; like a mirror of Gusu. A phantom touch that took hold of his will, rattled away a part of his freedom. And that was new for him.

When he was on the streets, only a few years old, he had reign on his life. His feet went where he wanted them to, and there was no one to tell him what the limits were. And even his time on Yunmeng changed only a little of his liberation. There, even with Madam Yu's condescending eyes and poisonous words, he was still free; he was still home. (Yunmeng is and will always be his home, he realizes, despite of the feeling he harbors that he doesn't quite belong there, that he was an intruder, an outsider; an interloper in their life, like Madam Yu has always told him.)

This was a blue that made him waver. Stand on his guard, if you will. It was like something inside of him knew his life would stir here, that it would take a direction he hasn't foreseen yet even when he dreamed night by night of what his future would be like, if kismet found itself kind.

A night proves this all right for him.

It's a night with the moon haphazardly hung behind them — one a figure in pristine Gusu robes, another in opposite hues. And it's blue all over again, but it's not the way he's seen it at first. It's not a daunting cerulean, not something that restricted a part of his liberty, yet something that made him feel little, feel unwhole — for under all of that, there is he; someone with nothing under his name.

And he meets him again, this time with the sun's rays dancing in their shadows.

(People call him Lan Wangji, Hanguang-jun, Second Jade of Lan — and they're fitting, he muses. They sound exactly like they're names that have something under them. Like names that are meant to be important, names to be planted in history, rooted and traced back to someone worthy. That of which is one of grace and beauty, he thinks, as he memorizes the features laid before him. A jade, indeed.)

It's then, when the light of the morning dawned upon them both, that Wei Wuxian decided Lan Wangji would not be rid of him, in this lifetime or the next.

He's always been called a menace, after all.

yiling burial mounds.

The blue breaks fast.

It breaks to black as Wei Wuxian falls and almost tears the fabric of the sky, down and down and down to an abyss of a cliff, to a place no one yearns. It's… it's not something he can compare to daunting, because it's not even close. This black was like inches off of an ink canvas, like one of the paintings hung on Madam Yu's walls. Deep, straight out pitch, an overdose of senses. A solid, swirling chroma of darkness that would and will make you go mad.

This is the color of the dead, Wei Wuxian realizes, of death.

And — and the color. It's not just something you feel, not just something you see in spite of how visible it is, how undeniable it seems. It's something you smell, you hear, you taste, you know.

And, for gods and all those above, you're going to wish it had a name. You're going to wish you had something to call it, something you can curse and blame and grind on the tips of your teeth, blood marred on the cracks.

For it brings an awful, awful feeling; one that empties you out and leaves you hollow, leaves you in ruins of your own bones and your own skull, until you're only a visceral skeleton, buried deep down the earth, wrapped in filth and part of history. And there will be whispers on the corners of your ears, speaking, telling you of what you've been running away from all your life. It's going to take hold of your sanity and keep it.

And Wei Wuxian is strong. He's not weak-willed. He's not known for going down without a fight. (And if he had any say in it, he won't go down at all.)

So he does the only thing possible in that situation: embrace it.

Wei Wuxian was once bright, had once been golden. And without that light, what's he's left to do was veil himself in the dark and hum to the songs of the dead.

Make music for madness.

the void of thirteen years.

It's funny, you see, because Wei Wuxian thought he knew abyss. He thought — laughably, naively — that he knew what darkness was.

This was a place he cannot explain. A place he cannot begin to form words to decipher. This… was just a place. It feels almost like an ending, like a farewell of a fading lullaby (but loudloudloud, like static, and there's nothing you're going to hear over its cries.)

Wei Wuxian cannot think.

For this wasn't a place for such.

And oh god, he can't think. It's terrifying. He can't feel.

There's nothing, nothing, nothing — because don't you see? This was a void. This was empty. This was a place of nothingness, and yet, somehow, Wei Wuxian was here. He was here, with all the — the… blank space. He's completely alone, and he can't remember what the color of warmth was like. He can't remember what Yunmeng's colors were. He can't remember a night with the moon baited and hung on their (whose?) backs like a halo, sacrosanct.

It's damning.

Wei Wuxian was dead. He's dead.

That's why he's fading, isn't he?

So why, why can't this void let him go?

mount dafan.

He's wrong.

Once, he thought that Lan Wangji was blue. He thought he was seas and rivers and oceans of folding waves, unreachable to him.

But now, as he looks at him in the eye, a flute in his hands — playing their song, not that he knows it — he realizes that Lan Wangji, his Lan Zhan, was of pure gold. He's standing now, right in front of Wei Wuxian, and he can feel the warmth of his hand burning around his wrist, so real and existing that it almost makes him cry.

Ah, he just wants to stay right there, bathing in the light Lan Zhan gives.

And now he understood. He came back, just for this moment. This was why the void had let him go.

Wei Wuxian, in all his glory, came back to give all of his heart, all of his colors, just for this.

Just for this blinding, golden light.