A/N: The final chapter! It's been brewing for two years, and I'm both glad and sorry to have it out in the world. Once again, if you're reading this, I do urge you to do so while listening to "Suroor" by Arooj Aftab for best effects.
Happy reading!
The discussion conference lasted two weeks: fourteen days, thirteen nights. Jiang Cheng slept badly through all of them. His head was full of lightning and Lan Xichen.
What he had seen – what he had felt – weighed on his mind, and time did not lighten the burden. If anything, it grew heavier every day he spent in the Cloud Recesses. The memory seemed to infest the whole place until there was no escaping it. Jiujiu, there are shadows under your eyes, Jin Ling pointed out, and Jiang Cheng told him off for it and suppressed a flinch of alarm at a white-clad Lan disciple emerging across the way.
He felt somehow as if he had wronged Lan Xichen. Not just in seeing him – they were both adults, after all – but in feeling what he'd felt at the sight. In letting this speechless hunger, this bright searing flash, touch that stripped-down figure in the pool – letting it spark at all –
He could not trust it. And he didn't know what to do about it. There was no easy way to apologise to a man for desiring him in a way he might not like; no way to do it at all without humiliating them both. The most correct thing to do would be to pass over it in silence, leave the Cloud Recesses without ever speaking of it again. But Jiang Cheng knew himself. That would be like leaving a scab unpicked, an ulcer untouched, and if there was one thing that had always been true of him it was that he could not resist pressing on his own wounds.
Unfortunately, the second most correct thing to do would be to convey a discreet apology for unwittingly breaking into Lan Xichen's seclusion, and the most correct person to carry that message was Lan Qiren. Which put paid to that idea.
He was not thinking of trying to find Lan Xichen again to apologise to him in person. That would be a fool's errand. Apart from anything else, Jiang Cheng thought – late at night, during that sleepless fortnight – first he would have to find the pool again, and the only way he knew to do that was to get lost and hope.
(This thought did not help him sleep, but what did? It was a long time since Jiang Cheng and sleep had really been on speaking terms.)
So he had spent the two weeks of the conference exhausted, worn out by constant thought without action, in a Gusu Lan as haunted by its sect leader's absence as that mountain pool was by his presence. Now, on the last day, he was restless and irritable. Like a dog leashed in the street, snapping at passers-by – his lip curled – because it had nothing better to do.
As he thought this, two figures in black and white rounded a corner, and Jiang Cheng heard that laugh again, and saw Wei Wuxian lean into Lan Wangji with a glad sigh as if coming home.
And was struck by a flash of anger so bright and hot he had to bite back a sound. This, too, was like lightning, swift and blinding, but unlike the other kind: it hurt as sharply as it illuminated. A sudden inferno, leaving scorched earth in its wake – Jiang Cheng felt it in his stomach, in his throat. The noise behind his teeth was one of pain.
Like a dog maddened with it, he turned on his heel and fled into the trees.
It was pain, he knew, that drove him this way, not rage in truth. In his saner moods he knew this. It was pain that spoke in his voice and said unforgivable things; it was his own pain that dogged him when he turned away, to escape saying them. But it was not his own pain that drove his steps now, that sent him clambering through thickets of bamboo, seeking a path he'd only seen once. Ghost fires flickered in his veins. Lightning.
That dazzling scene, lit up so sharply, shed as sharp a shadow upon that ghost in the pool. The contrast made Jiang Cheng's teeth ache. How could he – could anyone bear it? How was it to be borne? How could the world hold both these things in it, without flying apart?
He found a stream and followed it, treading down the undergrowth without a qualm: he had no qualms left to spare for anything, least of all what was correct. Towards Lan Xichen he went, sure as a dog on a scent, hunting something he wanted and did not know.
For he had no idea what he would do when he found the man. He wanted a hundred different things. He wanted to apologise to him for the world and everything in it. He wanted to rip courtesy back like a bandage and find the grief that matched this anger in him, the pain whose ghost moved in his feet.
To find the wound that matched his own – but to press down on it, or to tend to it? Jiang Cheng did not know.
This time, Lan Xichen heard Jiang Wanyin coming before he saw him. It took him a moment to realise why: he was on his feet, hand halfway to drawing Shuoyue, before he remembered that he no longer carried a sword. He had moved even before he felt the impulse. It seemed that his ears – his body – remembered the sound of Jiang Wanyin striding relentlessly to war.
He stood still, robes settling from his rapid movement, and waited for his heartbeat to calm and his hands to stop shaking.
Jiang Wanyin did not come in at once; he did not even knock. Lan Xichen, with all his senses now alert, could hear him outside, breathing. Shifting from foot to foot. He stood there so long that Xichen's heartbeat did slow, and he was almost able to relax. A strand of his hair had escaped its rough confinement of band and pin. He tucked it back behind his ear.
After another long few moments, he said, in a voice pitched to carry just outside the house, "You might as well come in."
The door opened to reveal Jiang Wanyin. He looked much as he had two weeks ago, except that the shadows under his eyes had deepened. Xichen noted distantly to himself that they almost matched the Jiang-purple shade of his robes. For all that he had marched up to the house as if it were a city he meant to conquer, he hovered uncertainly in the doorway.
The sight sparked a discomfort Xichen could not – did not want to – name. "Come," he said. His voice had not changed: why did it sound so unfamiliar? "Sit. My seclusion can't be any more broken than it has been already."
They sat, Lan Xichen behind the desk as if this were an ordinary meeting. If it had been, there would have been tea: some assiduous outer disciple or servant would have brought it. Xichen had the makings of tea to hand, a small comfort in his seclusion. He did not offer it.
He was not sure he would have tasted it, if he had. The sudden beating of his heart seemed almost to have shaken him out of his skin. He felt very aware of it, but not quite present in it, like a cat hovering in the doorway of his own body. Like Jiang Wanyin hovering in his doorway. He felt very aware, too, of Jiang Wanyin, sat cross-legged across from him; but that was an entirely different awareness.
The silence stretched on. At last Jiang Wanyin said, "Have you been eating?"
The question surprised Xichen so much that at first he didn't answer. Jiang Wanyin's tone was clipped, colourless. Not the tone of someone making a veiled complaint about the lack of tea.
"Does that concern you?" he asked, instead of replying, and did not look up. His fingers drummed briefly on the table.
Jiang Wanyin said, "When." He paused. "When Wei Wuxian died, my second-in-command had to sit next to me at mealtimes to make sure I ate every bite."
At that Xichen did look up: he couldn't help it any more than if someone had taken hold of his hair and yanked. To hear Jiang-zongzhu admit to such a bitter truth, so unflinchingly, when in all the years Xichen had known him he would rather have swallowed blood than ever admit to a wound –
Startled, he said the first thing that came to mind. "Jiang Shao did that?"
"Yes," Jiang Wanyin said, without further explanation. His mouth formed a flat line, as if he hadn't intended to say even that much; his eyes never left Lan Xichen. They were fever-bright. Xichen felt a flash of heat, then cold, and looked away.
The words hung in the air, unanswered, for a moment. "…I have been eating," Xichen said, eventually. "Why do you ask?"
Jiang Wanyin made a little noise, not quite a scoff. "You're too thin," he said. He was still looking at Xichen. Jiang Wanyin didn't like looking at people for this long: he only ever did it to discomfit people, in Xichen's experience, to make them look away first. It was something he'd started doing years ago, after the Siege at Nightless City.
He didn't seem to be trying to discomfit Xichen now: this wasn't the same gaze. Xichen felt discomfited anyway. The one thing he hadn't thought to fear or anticipate from Jiang Wanyin was pity.
"You didn't seem to have any complaints," he said, before he could stop himself.
Jiang Wanyin turned abruptly white, then red, as if all the blood had rushed back to his face at once. Xichen felt a distant, weary pang of shame – like a sound far-off and muffled – at his own pettiness, knowing it had been born of the impulse to discomfit Jiang Wanyin in turn, to push him off-balance into the same painful confusion Xichen was mired in.
Evidently he had succeeded. "You noticed, then," Jiang Wanyin said, sounding utterly miserable.
"I haven't been away from human society as long as that," Xichen replied. He was unable to make the words sound light-hearted: they came out flat and cold. The skin of his hands tingled.
"I didn't –" Jiang Wanyin managed to get out, strangled. "I didn't come here expecting –"
He clearly hadn't, he was so unprepared for this. Some part of Xichen, hearing this, untensed; and yet his heartbeat felt heavier, somehow. "It wasn't an accusation," he said quietly, without knowing if the words were true. And then, more softly, and more true: "Why did you?"
Jiang Wanyin said nothing. His mouth twisted, not bitterly, but in the way it did when he was considering some weighty matter. He sat so still that Xichen's eyes were drawn to it when a breeze breathed through the room, lifting one strand of Jiang Wanyin's hair – a small motion, against that motionless figure.
He wasn't looking at Xichen, now, but through him: his gaze had turned inward. Xichen did not know whether he found this more or less unnerving.
When he spoke, it was very quiet. "Until then, Zewu-jun hadn't been seen in the world since that night," he said. "How was I to know I hadn't imagined you?"
Xichen felt the words pass over and through him like the breeze, prickling at the back of his neck. He could not tell if the air was cold, or if he was. Imagined you. He wanted desperately to be imaginary, to be Zewu-jun, a storyteller's creature. He wasn't. He was flesh and blood, no matter how loosely anchored his spirit was within it.
What did Jiang Wanyin think he might have imagined? What had he seen, startling at his approach to the pool? The words were unreadable as the wind. Or not unreadable, but full of a meaning Xichen could not read, a language he could not speak.
Like Jiang Wanyin's eyes, burning in that pale, drawn face like the lit lamps of a foreign city.
"You came to make sure I was still here?" he said, the words careful, empty.
"Yes."
Again the curt answer. It offered so little, and seemed so hard-won, like – Xichen felt his mouth twist – like a coal plucked from the fire. He didn't know what to do with it; he didn't dare touch it. If he could only find something polite to say, he could say it, gently, and Jiang Wanyin would take the hint, fire a civil handful of parting barbs, and leave, taking his coal-hot Yeses with him –
But he couldn't do it, he couldn't think of anything: he was so tired. "Well, you've seen me," he said. He could not muster one drop of courtesy to smooth out the words. "You've seen that I am."
Jiang Wanyin scoffed this time, a fully-formed Tch!; Xichen felt his exhaustion swell again at the sound. Then Jiang Wanyin opened his mouth to speak again, and said, in that rich, restrained singer's voice, "Have I?"
Xichen stared at him. His own heartbeat was loud, heavy in the empty air. "What do you mean?"
"I've seen…" Jiang Wanyin said, and paused as if to gather his thoughts. Xichen watched his throat work; felt his own fingers judder, unsteady, against his thigh. "You're too thin," he repeated. "You move… differently." His mouth paused, moved, trying to find the shape of the next word. His eyes transfixed Xichen.
"Even if you are here," Jiang Wanyin said, at last. "You're not all the way here."
Xichen felt his eyes fly wide open even as his mouth slammed shut against a gasp. For a moment he did not even register it as a gasp of pain, only felt the words land, sharp and painful, under his breastbone, and lodge there. It hurt, why did it hurt? An anchor in his flesh. An arrow.
"Why does that matter to you, Jiang Wanyin?"
Shocked into discourtesy, the words came out almost before Xichen had formed them. They shocked Jiang Wanyin, too: his brow lifted – furrowed again. His burning eyes were wide. "What?" he said.
"Why should it matter?" Xichen said again. The words flowed out easily – too easily – his chest ached. "If I'm… all the way here, or not?"
Now it was Jiang Wanyin's turn to stare at him. "Are you joking?" he said, in that sharp tone he had that was halfway to a demand. "Of course it matters. What happened to you –"
"What I was a part of," Xichen corrected, quiet but urgent –
"What was done to you!" Jiang Wanyin shot back. He was leaning forward now, his face was closer to Lan Xichen: when had he done that? "You didn't ask for it –"
"I made my own choices," Xichen said. Still quiet, the voice had to stay quiet – and smooth, light. Smoothing off the edges where the breath caught, where the words had to be forced out –
"You weren't the only one in that temple who made them," Jiang Wanyin said, and it was only when he spoke now that Xichen realised how empty his voice had been of scorn, before: now it was loaded with something richer and darker than scorn. With rage.
It hurt to hear, it caught in Xichen's chest the same way his breath did, as if someone was pressing on the arrow, was pulling, tugging – Jiang Wanyin's anger made the wound fresh again, made it bleed once more –
For what right did Xichen have to pain? In the end, what was his pain but the consequences of his own actions? "Jiang-zongzhu," he said, a last appeal to courtesy. "Let's not argue blame."
"Why the hell not?" Jiang Wanyin demanded. No, pled. He sounded desperate as he had not since – since –
Xichen could not think it. Any more than he could express the horror of assigning blame, the mountain of it that might fall upon his head, the weight. Or, worse, the idea that it might not fall upon him, and he might float away, free as a bird, into disasters as yet unknown, new horrors of his own making… Blame was a weight he could not bear, and could not risk not bearing.
"What good would it do?" he asked, hearing the same terrible desperation in his own voice.
"What good? Look at you!" Jiang Wanyin gestured to him, a wide gesture like a wingbeat. Leaned across the table, loose-haired and burning-eyed as a drunkard and far more frightening. "You couldn't bring yourself to blame anyone – no, you'll sit here and waste away instead. You'll accept it, all of it. Everything that happened to you. As if it were part of you, as if it were your fate. And then you'll sit here till you disappear. As if that would unmake you and it both. As if that would undo any of it."
The words came out in a flood, as if they'd been waiting behind a dam all this time to be released. Where had they come from? Why did they fill Xichen with terror like the sound of a dam creaking, a levee about to break? "Would that be so bad?" Xichen said, and he knew now he was no longer asking, he was imploring. Begging. "What does it matter? What difference can it possibly make to you now?"
"Is it so hard to believe that –" For the first time, Jiang Wanyin's voice cracked, hoarse at the edges. The sound was like the crack of lightning, if lightning could beg. "– that the world would be poorer without you? Is it asking so much to believe that I might not want that? That I –"
His fist, set on the desk, clenched and unclenched. His knuckles were as white as if they gripped a sword. He was fighting his way into saying something, into naming something that was too big to be named, a silent grief they both had carried, for years – a grief Xichen could feel in his heart and throat –
"– that I don't want the last I saw of Lan Xichen to be in that fucking temple?" The words rang in the room, loud and unrestrained. Jiang Wanyin stopped, breathed – he was breathing hard – stayed where he was, halfway across the desk. His eyes were alight where they met Xichen's, shining with that grief, a grief that neither blamed nor pitied him.
His voice was softer but no less resonant, no less aching, as he said, "We two are the last ones left, now. The only ones who lived through all of it. Who remember all of it. Can't I want you to still be here?" His hand leapt from the table, as if to reach out for Lan Xichen, and stopped still in the air. Xichen's breath stilled. Jiang Wanyin said, very softly, "Can't I want the you I saw in that pool not to be a ghost?"
Xichen met his eyes, and heard the unspoken question: Can't I want you?
All at once – it suddenly seemed – he understood Jiang Wanyin, and what he was asking. Jiang Wanyin, who hadn't wanted anyone since the Sunshot Campaign, who had not-wanted anyone enough to let the matchmakers blacklist him without complaint; who had looked on at conferences with those unreadable eyes. They were readable now. Their gaze did not make Xichen feel hunted, or looked on from afar, like an ornament. It made him feel as if someone had reached out to touch him – reached out and pierced him, just there behind his breastbone, where the breath caught –
Jiang Wanyin's hand was still in the air. Xichen lifted his own, and touched it.
There were sword calluses on it. It felt ordinary, like any human hand, except for how much he didn't want to let go of it. "You want that," he said, softly.
Jiang Wanyin nodded. He spoke no word, only stared at Xichen: it was as if all his voice had gone into his eyes. That was all right. Xichen could read them. "You want me to still be here," he said, not quite questioning, not quite stating. Wondering.
"Yes," Jiang Wanyin said, a hoarse breath. His hand was very still in Xichen's, but warm and pliable, not rigid with stress. Xichen imagined he could feel the pulse in it.
"You want me," he said – speaking the unspoken question. Answering it by speaking it.
Jiang Wanyin gazed at him with those dark, speaking eyes, shadows written under them in that careworn face. Pale, but its lines set, as if he had seen fear and set his face against it anyway. "Yes," he said, again. A single word, plucked from the fire.
Xichen let his eyes close for a moment. It didn't burn going down, that Yes. It wasn't a coal at all, and neither was the ache in his breast, that was spreading, spreading until he could take a breath, and another, and another –
It was water. Cool water.
He could not speak, so he let his hand speak for him: let his fingers curl around Jiang Wanyin's hand, draw it to his face, set it against the curve of his cheek. Leaned into it, as a fevered man would lean into a cold compress. When he turned his face, his lips brushed against it.
He opened his eyes just in time to see Jiang Wanyin's whole face change at the touch. Every set line of it seemed to drop away at once, leaving behind a look of shocked, painful sweetness. Xichen watched, and felt his heart ache at the sight, and let it ache. It was a good ache, a living one. It hurt like the river bursting from the spring, or the waters of the cataract meeting the pool.
He lifted his other hand, and brought it to that shocked face, as if to mirror Jiang Wanyin's hand at his own. Where his fingers met skin, he could feel the movement of breath, rising and falling. It had grown faster at his touch. Jiang Wanyin's other hand came up to find Xichen's extended arm, to rest on it: not gripping it, but the touch was strong. Urgent. Xichen could feel it, warm – almost hot – through his two thin layers of clothing. The hand at his cheek shifted, growing bolder. Its fingers sank into the edge of his hair.
Xichen almost swayed into it. He let out a slow exhale, let his thumb rub across the harsh line of Jiang Wanyin's cheekbone. Jiang Wanyin shivered, tangible beneath Xichen's thumb. His eyes were piercingly bright.
Like a knife, Xichen thought, and then, or a needle. Something sharp, come to release something: to let water instead of blood. Why had he resisted it so long? He had feared the flood it would unleash, feared letting it hurt, letting it matter. Now the flood had come, and the relief of it was so strong it drowned out terror.
He met that gaze, and leaned forward, slowly – Jiang Wanyin did the same, mirroring him still. They met in the middle, forehead to forehead. Xichen breathed in; Jiang Wanyin inhaled, and they breathed out together.
It felt good, to match breaths. How long had it been since he had done this with anyone? He could feel Jiang Wanyin's breathing, the pulse in his wrist where Xichen's fingers touched it. Xichen had not quite realised he was still holding Jiang Wanyin's hand in place. He let it go, so his hand could wander down, to find Jiang Wanyin's arm as Jiang Wanyin's hand had found his. There it was, the gentle movement, running all the way down from the shoulder, as the breath rose and fell – hitched, at the changing touch. Their eyes met again, inches away from each other.
What was it he had feared, that Jiang Wanyin had seen him and known him, rightly, for a wounded animal? No, he thought. We are the same kind of animal.
He felt like an animal, a creature without language. He had lost his own speech, had forgotten it; and so now he was speaking in gesture, hand to arm, fingertip to face. They were not new gestures – he had touched people this way before – and yet he felt a strange conviction that he was learning a language he had never spoken.
With Jiang Wanyin, the inarticulate, the unexpectedly eloquent.
They sat in silence like that for a luxuriously long time, just breathing. It wasn't until a bird startled and took off outside, disturbing the air with its wings, that either of them let go of the other. When Jiang Wanyin's hand left Xichen's face, it slid away slowly: slow enough that Xichen had time to catch it with his own. That seemed to signal to Jiang Wanyin – Jiang Cheng, Xichen thought, in the privacy of his own mind – that he need not disengage completely, and he took Lan Xichen's other hand in his, laying them on the table. Their fingers intertwined.
Xichen felt a bone-deep relief at it. He did not want to let go of Jiang Cheng's hands.
He lifted his head a little, and found Jiang Cheng looking at him with a gaze that felt at once familiar and unfamiliar. It was a look Xichen had seen before, many years before, when they were both younger; but he had never seen this Jiang Cheng wear it. He wore it strangely easily, that was what made it look so strange. It was like a glimpse of another life, of a world where that younger Jiang Cheng had had the chance to grow into this one.
"What happens now?" Jiang Cheng said. His voice, matured like wine, was full of the uncertainty of youth.
Xichen did not know. His body was still thrumming, quietly, with the feeling of someone else's skin against his. He had no idea what to do with this gift, which he had not wanted and now could not help wanting desperately.
It struck him that Jiang Cheng, who had not wanted in years, would be equally unprepared for wanting something and getting it. They were both entering the unknown here, thrown adrift on an unmapped sea.
"I don't know," he said, aloud. How strange, after all these years, to be relieved by his own lack of knowledge. By admitting to it. "But I don't…" Now it was his turn to speak around the shape of something, find words to clothe it. "I don't wish these words unsaid."
The words came out more fervently than he had intended; just as fervently as he had meant them. He held Jiang Cheng's hands in his. His grip tightened. "I don't want to let go just yet."
Jiang Cheng let out a long, slow breath, and the lines of his face slackened, as if he was letting out something he had held in too long. As if – Xichen thought, a little madly – Xichen's grip had squeezed it out of him.
"I don't want to, either," he said. For a moment after he was silent, eyes fixed on their joined hands. The pattern of light and shade thrown upon them was shifting, Xichen noticed: and the light upon them was warm. Outside, surely, a cloud was passing the sun, now high in the sky.
When they lifted their heads they did so at the same time: Jiang Cheng let out a little ha, not quite a laugh. His mouth tightened again, just a little. "I can't stay," he said. "The conference –"
"Your disciples will already be looking for you," Xichen said, not needing him to explain. It was almost midday: the Yunmeng delegation had to be looking to depart. They could not afford to leave it much longer. Xichen remembered the rhythm of it, like migrating birds.
"It's not that I want to go," Jiang Cheng said. The words came out awkwardly, but his eyes pled their earnestness. They fell on Xichen's heart like rain.
He said: "No, I understand." He did understand, no matter how little he wanted Jiang Cheng to leave this room. How hungrily his fingers clutched at the just-given gift.
Not that he knew what he would do with it. Every desire he could remember having carried its fulfilment with it, or its lack of fulfilment, a barred path; not this one. This desire was a spring, leaping up without rhyme or reason, no path laid out for it. It needed time to carve out its own path, to wear away the rock.
Perhaps that was the source of the strange calm he felt, now. There was nothing for him to clutch onto, nothing but the current. The movement of time – not the empty timelessness he had embraced upon going into seclusion, where the world stretched into one still, endless moment, but time passing like a river. A sea carrying him to other shores.
He wondered what those shores might hold. "How's your calligraphy?" he asked, eyes flickering to the desk. Ink sticks and brush looked back at him, pristine.
"Passable," Jiang Cheng said. That was both true and false – his formal letters had always been very neat, very correct; it was his wartime communiqués that were dashed off in a workmanlike scrawl.
Xichen wondered which he would see from Jiang Cheng, now. He felt a smile, very faint, tug at the corners of his mouth. Saw an answering quirk of the mouth – how new, and how old, to see it with no scorn or pain attached – from Jiang Cheng, who said: "For you, I'll write slowly."
Xichen had always been a slow letter-writer. Choosing the words had been an indulgence to be lingered over, each stroke of the brush something to be savoured. As if – he thought, now – in writing the letter he could pretend the recipient was there within reach, and there was no need to write at all.
He said: "For you, I'll write fast."
Jiang Cheng inclined his head, not quite a nod. It was a grave gesture, the same he made to seal an agreement, but the light in his eyes stole all the gravity from it. He began to rise: Lan Xichen rose with him, and they separated.
The last brush of their fingers felt intimate, snatched. Like a kiss.