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Lan Sizhui sees him first.

He and Lan Jingyi are finishing an evening watch, their customary route back winding them through the Cloud Recesses from the main gate. The library is close to where they plan to split, Lan Sizhui to the Jingshi and Lan Jingyi to the dining hall, allegedly; the library is where they see him. A figure in white and silver, standing in front of the library pavilion, dark hair spilling long down his back.

It wouldn’t be remotely unusual, but that the figure is so small.

Lan Sizhui stops Jingyi’s instinctual shout with a familiar and oft-deployed look. They approach quietly, not that the child notices. Novices are not particularly rare to see in the library pavilion, but they are always carefully escorted in groups, clumped together and stumbling like a crowd of Sizhui’s bunnies. They are never alone, and definitely never present this close to dusk.

The boy is small, yes, but as they approach, Lan Sizhui notes the rigidity of his posture. He seems to be straining up, his elbows jutting out slightly; the posture of a heron, waiting, heartbeats away from bursting into flight.

And he has the long tails of a forehead ribbon laid neatly, meticulously, over the drape of his hair.

Lan Jingyi communicates through another well-practiced look: you take point.

So Lan Sizhui intentionally slides out of the near-silent stroll all Gusu Lan disciples master in their first weeks in the Cloud Recesses. The child does not turn, but his elbows do tuck in. He allows them to approach without fleeing or hunching into himself, which informs Lan Sizhui that he is either very confident in himself, or very resigned to punishment.

“Beg pardon, xiao gongzi, are you lost?” He asks, pitched soft and soothing. “This one is honored to be First Disciple Lan Sizhui, and would be happy to escort you —“

He does not finish the offer, because that is when they reach the child’s shoulder; that is when the boy turns, his head tilted up, his face smoothly, familiarly blank.

Do not form conclusions without adequate evidence. An oft-refrained precept from his early schooling, and his first handful of night hunts. But the evidence is hardly inconclusive. The quiet nobility of his features. The smooth expanse of his practiced expression. The piercing gold of his eyes, which skip from Sizhui to Jingyi and back to Sizhui, where they fix themselves, unblinking.

The Gusu Lan ribbon perfectly arranged on his forehead, embroidered with palest blue in a cloud pattern that Lan Sizhui has known since he was a boy-child being planted in the dirt.

One last familiar, wordless look to Jingyi:

Find Hanguang-jun.

Lan Wangji is arranging dinner for himself, his husband, and his first disciple when Lan Jingyi decides, not uncharacteristically, to demolish the tranquility of the Jingshi.

He has never been the kind of instructor to repeat precepts each time they are broken. Lan Jingyi knows the rule against running, and the rule against shouting. Despite what many instructors and elders seem to believe, he is entirely aware of their existence when he breaks them, and though he does not do it without remorse, it would be futile to believe that greeting him with only the reminder would in any way encourage him against his long-ingrained habit.

Point of fact: Lan Wangji does not, particularly, mind.

Lan Jingyi knocks, as always, but it is the frantic pitch of the knock which alerts Lan Wangji to the severity of the moment.

“Hanguang-jun!” Lan Jingyi shouts, as quietly as a shout can be, through the door. “Please, quick, there’s a situation out here!”

Situation. Never a particularly encouraging descriptor. Lan Jingyi has not yet mentioned Wei Wuxian, but Lan Wangji cannot stop the concern that flares, that drives him to rush to the door and pull it open rather harder than usual.

“Oh, good, you’re still here, not cursed. Um, sorry, Hanguang-jun, this disciple apologizes for the clamor and the running and all that, but there’s a little you in the library pavilion and Sizhui’s bringing him here so we don’t miss curfew!”

Lan Wangji blinks. Lan Jingyi looks — disturbed, his ears flushed. He’s almost laughing, more diagnosable to hysteria than amusement. At twenty, he has grown into his ears and jaw enough to resemble Xichen, complete with the straight lines of his eyebrows and the old glint of humor in his dark eyes.

“‘Little me?’” He repeats, uncertain what Lan Jingyi expects him to make of the words. Lan Jingyi nods, then glances back at the path to the Jingshi.

“Tiny. Maybe nine, unless you’ve always been really tall for your age? And he didn’t even look at me, you know, I tried to call him little cousin just to see his face but he really latched on to Sizhui, which is unfair because the novices always like me better!”

For a moment he is stunned. Lan Jingyi is still speaking, though he’s certainly observant enough to notice Lan Wangji’s shock. A brief moment of unfamiliar, distant panic.

Maybe nine. Coming to the Jingshi through the twilight, as the sun dips behind the mountain and halos it in the desolate beauty of late autumn light.

He does the only thing he can: in the brief moments he has before Sizhui appears at the edge of the courtyard, he takes Wangji from its table. He wraps it in white, as meticulous as he ever is. He stores it in his sleeve, ignoring entirely Lan Jingyi’s subtle curiosity.

The table is empty, but for the silk atop it. An obvious place for a guqin, but the absence will hopefully only be noted and not asked after.

He knows himself — he remembers himself. The child will not ask.

Lan Wangji is still not ready to see him when he appears.

From a distance it is like looking back in time. Lan Sizhui, at the tail end of a late growth spurt, guiding a young boy back to their home. Both of them in white and pale silver and the ghost of blue, both of them with nearly-matched forehead ribbons. Lan Sizhui is speaking quietly, his hands still in his sleeves, his pace perfectly matched to his companion’s.

“Wow,” Lan Jingyi breathes. Before he can finish the thought, Lan Wangji cuts him a sharp look and his mouth snaps shut.

“Bring Wei Wuxian,” he orders. He does not need to elaborate. Lan Jingyi, blanched with the remonstration, darts back the way he came, pausing only to throw the pair on the path a hurried greeting.

And then he waits. He cannot make himself move from the veranda, cannot make himself appear less than what he is as they approach. The boy is looking at the ground, replying to Lan Sizhui in single words or vague sounds of acknowledgment. He gets closer, and his pace slows, until he has reached the steps and he stops, and does not start again.

Maybe nine, Lan Jingyi had said. Lan Wangji knows, now. The boy is eight, on the cusp of nine. He has not yet added the belt and additional layer he had been gifted permission to wear in his last year before his naming. But he has stopped wearing only mourning white, at the behest of his Uncle, and has chosen to accent only in shades of grey.

“Hanguang-jun,” Lan Sizhui says, and salutes. “This disciple… I thought it would be best to bring him here.”

The boy does not look up. Lan Wangji’s mouth is dry. His eyes keep sliding back to the path, waiting for a figure in red and black and grey. Waiting for someone to rescue him.

He takes a breath. No one is going to rescue him from this. The child is likely telling himself the same thing.

“That was wise,” he says, matching Sizhui’s low tone. Appropriate for the encroaching evening. “Please, enter."

There is dinner already prepared, after all. Lan Sizhui mounts the steps, and Lan Wangji greets him with a hand on his shoulder, a nod as assuring as he can make it. Sizhui is palpably anxious, but he relaxes at the touch, at Lan Wangji’s faith in him. He smiles, and something aches in Lan Wangji’s chest.

And the boy, knowing he has no choice, follows. He does not follow Sizhui past Lan Wangji and into the Jingshi. He stands at the top of the stairs, and then he lifts his eyes, and Lan Wangji sees him.

There are some people who have known Lan Wangji his whole life. They know his face, his reactions, his heart. There are others who have known him for less time, but who know him better, who can puzzle out the shifts in his expression that even he sometimes does not realize he has made.

But he can read this child perfectly. He hardly has to look at more than his eyes to do it.

Few alive remember what his father looked like, and fewer had seen him regularly in the twenty years before his death. He is looking at one of those few, and he sees in Lan Zhan’s furious glare just how well he has grown into his father’s image.

But the fury, incandescent, lasts the barest fraction of a second. It is shielded immediately by blank nothingness that slides across Lan Zhan’s features, disjointed in his mind’s eye by youth.

Lan Wangji, not knowing what else to do, bends to one knee. He does not want this boy to have to crane his neck to meet his eye.

“You may call me xiongzhang,” he says quietly. “Hanguang-jun, if you wish. Or nothing at all.”

He will not force his name onto the child, not until he has to.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Lan Zhan says, polite and perfunctory. “I am happy to do anything to minimize my burden upon Lan-er-gongzi.”

An acceptable compromise. Lan Wangji inclines his head in a nod.

“Sizhui will be joining us for dinner, as will one other. After, we can address your concerns, and the strangeness of our situation. Is that acceptable?”

“This one has no concerns.” It comes out in a rasped whisper, and he sees Lan Zhan’s ears flush hot. It is a lie. Perhaps the first one this child has tried to tell. It is borne, Lan Wangji knows, entirely out of a shame he feels like acid in his stomach to this day.

He does not do Lan Zhan the indignity of acknowledging it. He rises, one knee sore from bearing his weight against wood. His leg is heavy with the phantom memory of old injury, which has no basis in its true physical condition.

Sizhui is waiting for them at the table. He beckons Lan Zhan over with a wave and a smile, and gets him settled before Lan Wangji can do more than process his own relief that Lan Zhan seems to have placed faith in someone, at least. Last he knew, Wei Wuxian spent the afternoon hosting a workshop for a handful of senior disciples in one of the more remote workrooms; it is likely that the session ran over, as it is wont to do when Wei Wuxian and like-minded disciples find a productive rut, and that Lan Jingyi will not be back for an incense time or so.

“Eat,” he offers, waiting near the door rather than settling at the table. Sizhui acknowledges him with a glance, but continues explaining their dinner routine to Lan Zhan.

“The red ones are probably no good for you,” he says, “but Wei-qianbei has really been working on my spice tolerance with me. I think he gets lonely with his palate, and Jingyi — you met Jingyi — keeps trying to match him and keeps regretting it. Best to taste once from the end of your chopstick and decide if you’re really committed to the consequences.”

Lan Zhan does so. His face contorts before he can school it again, and Lan Sizhui slides one of Wei Ying’s dishes away with a kind laugh.

“Exactly. Now eat while it’s hot, okay? Hanguang-jun didn’t cook for nothing.”

“He cooked?” Lan Zhan closes his mouth on the words, cutting them off. They’re more curious than accusing. Sizhui hums an acknowledgment, but looks at Lan Wangji over the child’s head before he says anything.

Lan Wangji wants to sigh. He wants to leave his home forever for the first time in years, to flee down the mountain and abandon his responsibilities and not look back.

He sits at the table, across from Sizhui, and does not look at Lan Zhan for longer than he has to.

“Wei Ying is not accustomed to our meal traditions,” he tries, careful. “As I care for his happiness and well-being, it has become my habit to prepare foods that support those goals.”

And, like a storm on the wind, his words bring the man.

“Aiyah, Lan Zhan, you spoil me!”

Wei Wuxian looks no more rushed and disheveled than usual, but Lan Zhan sees the exertion that pinks the back of Lan Jingyi’s neck as he flees toward the dining hall. He is profoundly, sickeningly grateful; he knows his face is flayed and raw from the wide whites of Wei Wuxian’s eyes. From the way he swans in from the doorway and immediately plasters himself to Lan Zhan’s back and side, his chin on one shoulder and his hand on the other.

“Lan Zhan, and Lan Zhan!” He says, his voice gentled yet still profoundly bright. “Ah, let me clear this up quickly. I can’t ask my Lan Zhan to be anything but my Lan Zhan, so you must be xiao-Zhan, okay? Just for a little while?”

His smile, though Lan Wangji can’t see it, must be blinding. Xiao Zhan, newly dubbed, looks as though he’s been struck by the force of it, his mouth slack, his eyes fixed on the place where their skin touches, the backs of Wei Wuxian’s fingers against a warm strip of skin just under Lan Wangji’s jaw.

“No objection?” Wei Wuxian wheedles, and then moves quickly to serve himself and sit properly, breaking Sizhui out of his effort to stifle a laugh as he follows suit.

“Wei Ying, courtesy Wuxian,” Lan Wangji says to Xiao Zhan, who flicks his eyes over in evident confusion. “My husband.”

There is no point in hiding it; it would be stranger if he tried. Xiao Zhan’s face shutters once again, and it would pain Lan Wangji how adept he is at it were it not so awfully necessary.

Had anyone thought it strange, he wonders, that he had mastered himself so fully at such a young age? Or had there always been something wrong with him, something closed off and frigid, something that meant no one had to wonder about the child behind those careful walls?

“That’s right!” Wei Wuxian says, painfully bright. “Really, what a catch for me!”

“They’re always like this,” Lan Sizhui says in a quiet aside to Xiao Zhan. “Wei-qianbei and Hanguang-jun are the most esteemed cultivators of their generation, but they’re also attached together all the time.”

“Lying is forbidden,” Wei Wuxian says absently, around a mouthful of tofu, and Lan Wangji sends him a pointed look. If Wei Wuxian is hoping to capitalize on his distraction to downplay his achievements, Lan Wangji will not allow it.

“No lie was spoken. Wei Ying is esteemed by those of import.”

“Oh, I see I married a flatterer. Xiao Zhan, won’t you save me? Tell your xiongzhang that you’ve never heard of me, so I can’t be all that great to anyone who matters!”

Xiao Zhan’s ears, already pink, darken to an alarming shade of red.

“Talking during meals is forbidden,” he whispers, and Wei Wuxian slumps — melts — into Lan Wangji’s side.

“So cute,” he whispers loudly, which everyone at the table hears. But after that he is resolutely quiet, though Lan Wangji notices that each time Xiao Zhan musters the will to look in his direction, Wei Wuxian is always smiling back.

Xiao Zhan watches Sizhui prepare to leave with a dread that creeps over his face so slowly that he must not notice. Wei Wuxian watches him, in between watching Lan Wangji, and does not like what he sees.

“Will you come back in the morning?” He asks, lingering intentionally over the tea that Sizhui had prepared.

“The morning?” Sizhui blinks at him, then seems to catch the casual tilt of Wei Wuxian’s head. “Of course. I’ll do morning meditations with all of you, and then maybe Xiao Zhan can aide me for an introductory guqin lesson? If you don’t need him, of course.”

Xiao Zhan’s mouth twitches. His fingers clench in the lap of his pristine little robe.

“I can help you, qianbei,” he asserts. “If these elders will give their permission.”

“Done,” Wei Wuxian beams at him, then claps his hands softly in front of him. “Then it’s probably time to figure out how you got here, huh? A-Yuan, a written report from you and Jingyi tomorrow afternoon at the latest, please.”

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says quietly, and Wei Wuxian’s attention fixes on him. His husband. His husband who is pale and drawn, who had taken perhaps five bites of anything at all throughout the meal. “We have not yet cleaned after the meal.”

Wei Wuxian is making quite a lot of meaningful eye contact with Lan Sizhui tonight.

“I’ll take care of it, Hanguang-jun.” And Sizhui does, not waiting for permission before clearing the plates and trays, leaving Lan Wangji at the table looking, for the first time in a long time, looking entirely lost.

“Ah, I know it’s not a fun topic, but we do need to make sure of a few things tonight, before something nasty tries to take us by surprise.” Wei Wuxian has been writing and re-writing the list in his head ever since Lan Jingyi practically flattened the doors of his classroom in his haste to get Wei Wuxian back to the Jingshi.

Hanguang-jun didn’t look okay, he’d said, while Wei Wuxian was gathering his things, and Wei Wuxian had immediately flung everything down and demanded Jingyi fly him back, every rule on the Wall of Discipline be damned.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says again. His hand finds Wei Wuxian’s wrist under the table. “Perhaps we should let him rest before we attempt to discover the force behind his visit.”

But that’s not the esteemed cultivator Hanguang-jun talking; it’s not even logical, intelligent Lan Wangji. It is a plea, more than anything, from Lan Zhan.

“And if there’s a curse, on one or both of you, and it spreads in the night?” Wei Wuxian asks, as gently as he can. “No, Lan Zhan. I won’t let that happen.”

Sizhui returns, then, to take his leave for the evening. He’s scrupulously correct, every inch the perfect Lan disciple, until Wei Wuxian takes it upon himself to rope him into an embrace, carefully designed to muss his hair in the front and send a pleased flush along the bridge of his nose. Xiao Zhan watches this, blank-faced, and then stands to offer Sizhui a salute.

“Thank you for your assistance today, qianbei.” His little voice is so quiet and somber. It’s adorable; Wei Wuxian’s chest hurts. It would be easier to adore if he weren’t so aware that tiny Xiao Zhan is terrified of being left alone with them.

Not that he would admit it. Not that Lan Wangji will admit it either, but that’s what Wei Wuxian is for. He has taken it upon himself, these last years, to learn all the things that Lan Wangji cannot say.

“It was my honor,” Sizhui says. He returns the salute, perfectly solemn, and then turns to Lan Wangji. “Good night, Hanguang-jun.”

It’s a familiar ritual. They don’t eat together every night — they all travel too much for that, and Sizhui’s life has only gotten busier these last few years — but when they do manage it, Wei Wuxian is always pleased at the glimpses he can get into the years shared between the two of them.

Moments like this. Lan Wangji, pulling himself out of his own head with a quiet breath. He’d stood for the farewell, and he steps forward now to place a careful hand on Lan Sizhui’s shoulder. Lan Sizhui, long familiar with the motion, leans into it almost imperceptibly.

“You did well today,” he says, and Sizhui stands up a little straighter under the praise. “I will see you in the morning.”

And then, sooner than Wei Wuxian thinks either he or Lan Wangji are ready for, the three of them are alone.

Lan Wangji allows Wei Wuxian to inspect him for curse marks in the parlor, while Xiao Zhan assesses himself, with the use of a mirror, behind the privacy screen near the bed. The Jingshi is quiet, other than the rustle of fabric; he can hear Wei Wuxian’s breath as he runs gentle hands down the bare, scarred skin of Lan Wangji’s back.

“Nothing,” he says. “Really, Lan Zhan, it would almost be more convenient if there was a mark.”

“Do not,” he warns. He feels the puff of warm breath on the back of his shoulder, then the cold absence of Wei Wuxian’s palm. His husband drapes his layers back over him, and Lan Wangji assists him as best he can.

He is ignoring the child behind the privacy screen. He cannot stop hearing his breaths, with his cultivation as high as it is, but he can let it fade from the forefront of his mind. It may take him a while to emerge. It does not help him, imagining over and over the things he could say when he does. Things he should say.

“Breathe,” Wei Wuxian whispers. His hand is back, steady, over Lan Wangji’s heart. Lan Wangji blinks and realizes that he’s close now, their faces almost touching.

He can breathe. It requires conscious effort. It has been a long time since he felt like this, for this reason; thirty years have condensed into the Jingshi in the space of an evening, and the weight of all of them is heavy in his lungs.

Before he is ready, Xiao Zhan emerges from behind the privacy screen. Lan Wangji is not facing him; he only hears the motion, and sees Wei Wuxian’s gaze fix over his shoulder. His lips press tight together, briefly, and then he steps away. Immediately, Lan Wangji misses the heat of him. The weight of his hand.

“No unusual marks?” Wei Wuxian asks, entirely casual. Lan Wangji turns, in enough time to see Xiao Zhan’s jaw set.

“Nothing abnormal,” he reports: not a lie. The first week of the month. He stares at Lan Wangji, and Lan Wangji can see the storm of conflict in his eyes. It is almost a challenge, but Xiao Zhan is too afraid to follow it through.

He is only eight. Lan Wangji remembers feeling ancient. He remembers being so ashamed at every moment of lapsed control. He remembers sitting alone at a study table in the library, and watching a novice class receive a tour, and thinking to himself: I am nothing like them.

He sees now, clearly, that he was not exceptional, and he cannot stand it.

He keeps healing salves on hand; Wei Wuxian’s core is growing stronger by the year, but he often sustains minor injuries to himself. He bruises, not easily, and though he likes the ones Lan Wangji gives him, he has learned to let Lan Wangji treat them carefully, reverently. As he deserves.

“Here,” Lan Wangji says. “Treat what must be treated.”

By ten, he had been competent at healing his own minor bruises, and well-practiced at concealing them. At eight, his golden core had been prodigious, but entirely nascent. He had been used to enduring what must be endured, had bathed alone and dressed his own hair. No one would have let him request healing salves without probing into why; he was not supposed to be practicing anything more physical than basic martial arts and sword stances. It was unthinkable that anyone would have struck him. It was unthinkable that Lan Zhan, by eight, would have done anything to deserve it.

Xiao Zhan glares at him. For a moment, Lan Wangji feels his hatred in a powerful, sickening wave.

And then he breathes, and accepts the burden of his own shame.

“Please,” he says. He crouches, again, to one knee.

Xiao Zhan takes the pot. He stares at it, then looks behind Lan Wangji to Wei Wuxian, who has firmly kept his silence. His eyes have gone very red. He takes three short, shallow breaths in through his nose, and then he turns, vanishing back behind the privacy screen at very close to a run.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says. He does not have to say anything else. He is just there, pressing himself against Lan Wangji’s back, tucking careful arms around his ribs.

“Wei Ying.” It is grounding. To say his name, to hear the acknowledging thump of his heart. “Wei Ying.”

“I know.”

The child must be listening. Lan Wangji cannot care.

Help, he wants to say, but the word gets lost somewhere in his mouth. Wei Wuxian hears it anyway. His lips are soft, pressed against the side of Lan Wangji’s head.

“Come on, Lan Zhan. Let’s sit down.”

He guides Lan Wangji to his desk, and finds him a piece of paper, an inkstone, a brush.

“Make me a list, okay? Everything you did today. Focus on that, Lan Zhan, I’ll keep an eye out for him.”

It is vaguely humiliating, to be guided through the motions of life, but Lan Wangji is desperately grateful for it. He breathes again, and the word slants into place. The inkstone. The brush. Wei Wuxian, kneeling next to him, their thighs pressed together.

The list is easy to draft. He has been nowhere new; the practice halls, the back hill, the library. He supervised the junior disciples’ sword training, and noted his observations to their instructor. He fed the rabbits, dismissing Lan Jingyi from the task to finish a neglected report from the last night hunt he supervised. He assisted his brother in sorting through the library of a recently passed clan elder, setting aside a handful of the elder’s personally copied tomes on musical cultivation for his own perusal.

“Old books?” Wei Wuxian asks, after a moment. “You know I love an old book curse, Lan Zhan. Any chance you brought them back here?”

“No. Xiongzhang wished for the archivist to have a complete understanding of the collection before I claimed them. He was planning to have her appraise them tomorrow.”

“Well, we’ll just have to interrupt them, I suppose.” Wei Wuxian rests his elbow on the table, and his chin on his palm. The fingers of his other hand drum casually on the table. “You don’t remember anything strange?”

“Mn.” He casts his mind back. Like many of the clan’s elders, Lan Haiyang had been a scholar; unlike many, he had been something of a hoarder. Lan Wangji had paged through a few sheafs of correspondence, set them aside, and moved on to the collection of books. He had read nothing that immediately signals in his memory as relevant; it is possible he had skimmed too lightly, or activated a long-dormant spell through simple contact with his spiritual energy.

“Mysterious,” Wei Wuxian hums. Lan Wangji turns his head, to look more fully. Wei Wuxian looks back at him, his eyes warm, his lips turned up at the corners. He has settled into his body, into his life. Lan Wangji loves him, and needs him, and is desperately grateful for him.

Soft slippers scuff against the floor. Xiao Zhan kneels across from them at the desk. He looks between them, eyes wide, unable to mask the edge of his curiosity.

“I can help,” he says firmly. He smells, faintly, of the pungent herbs in the healing salve. “I can make a report as well.”

Wei Wuxian beams at him, and slides Lan Wangji’s inkstone across the table.

Xiao Zhan sleeps on a bedroll in the parlor. Or, rather, he pretends to sleep. Lan Wangji himself does not. Wei Ying keeps his regular hours, poring over a manuscript draft in their bed by the light of a lantern, and Lan Wangji allows himself the comfort of resting, eyes closed, with his head in his husband’s lap. Occasionally Wei Ying hums, adds a note to a page, careful to keep the ink constrained to brush and paper. Occasionally he sets down his brush and strokes a hand along Lan Wangji’s head, through his hair.

He listens to Xiao Zhan breathe. Occasionally the pace of it picks up, panic overwhelming and then quickly suppressed. If he closes his eyes he can picture it: the child under the blanket, hands and feet perfectly still, looking at the flicker of lamplight on the ceiling.

Lan Wangji does not close his eyes. At least, he does not mean to.

He jerks when Wei Ying shifts underneath him. The lamp has been put out, the manuscript and travel brush set aside. Lit as a slick shine by the moonlight, Wei Ying’s hair falls in a curtain over his face as he cups Lan Wangji’s jaw.

“You were dreaming,” he whispers, and Lan Wangji exhales, his chest tight.

Was he dreaming? He was watching lamplight on the ceiling. His head was in someone’s lap. He was playing the guqin, but his hands had been severed at the wrist.

Wangji is on the floor next to the wardrobe, still wrapped. He tunes and plays it every morning.

In the parlor, a boy breathes slowly, peacefully, deeply.

Morning meditation outside the Jingshi is not quite peaceful. Wei Wuxian has grown used to meditation again, although the Lan style of core development is starkly different from what he learned at Lotus Pier. As reluctant as he is to admit it, he enjoys sitting by the water, focusing on the pulse of the core in his lower dantian. He doesn’t take it for granted anymore — at least, not yet.

Waking up at dawn is a necessary evil. He, unfortunately, is starting to come to terms with it.

This morning, the atmosphere is unsettled. Lan Sizhui is sitting next to Xiao Zhan, breathing with him, his long years of mentorship as First Disciple showing through. Lan Wangji, at Wei Wuxian’s side, is pretending not to pay attention to the two of them, and failing miserably.

Usually, meditation is secondary to Lan Wangji’s guqin practice. Usually, Wei Wuxian wakes up to the pluck of strings, his breakfast already waiting for him; Lan Wangji plays while he eats, sometimes familiar tunes, sometimes unfamiliar snatches of melodies. He is composing again, slowly. Wei Wuxian is learning the care he takes with it, and the frustration that often wrinkles his husband’s brow as he thinks.

Today, there was only silence. Xiao Zhan was awake before Wei Wuxian, and he emerged from groggy confusion to see two Lan Zhans sitting together, taking tea, and not speaking.

Lan Zhan, would it kill you to talk to him? He’d wanted to ask, and bit down firmly on his tongue.

He used to wonder what Lan Wangji was like as a child. When they were young, it was funny: such a solemn, stuck-up teenager must have been a solemn, stuck-up little boy, which in Wei Wuxian’s opinion was the last thing a little boy should be. Later, it became almost a comforting thought: Lan Wangji was a familiar pillar of stoicism, and it was only correct that his righteousness had been with him since childhood.

He’s learned better. He’s learned, at such a terrible cost.

Xiao Zhan, maybe eight or nine, is clearly not used to being worried about. He keeps looking at Sizhui out of the corner of his eye, pulled out of his precociously somber meditation by the reminder of someone next to him, breathing with him. At that age — well. At that age, Wei Wuxian probably would have been just as wary of an outstretched hand.

They conclude their meditation early. No one except Lan Sizuhi seems to be getting anything out of it.

“Why don’t we get set up for my lesson?” Sizhui offers. “It would give us time to warm up before the students arrive.”

Xiao Zhan turns first to Wei Wuxian. He does not look at Lan Wangji unless he has to.

“Fine with me,” he replies, shrugging. “Just find us in the library after, okay?”

“Thank you, Wei-qianbei,” Xiao Zhan says, entirely correct. And then, turning to Sizhui: “You are already an instructor?”

Well. Not everything about him is agonizing. Of course he wants to know about Sizhui’s proficiency on the guqin. It’s so Lan Zhan of him.

“I have taught for about a year,” Sizhui replies. “Only the introductory lessons, but — I have a good foundation. Hanguang-jun taught me everything I know.”

Lan Wangji, at Wei Wuxian’s side, goes as still and glacial as a mountain peak.

“Come on,” Wei Wuxian says, as sharp and bright as he can. “Lan Zhan, let’s leave Sizhui with our young friend! So much to do!”

It’s not very subtle, but no one ever accused Wei Wuxian of that. He manages at least to get Lan Wangji back into the Jingshi, where he sits, disconsolate, at his guqin stand.

“I should play,” he says. Wangji is still in his sleeve.

“You don’t have to.” I won’t make you, Wei Wuxian means. But Lan Wangji fixes him with a look, his chin set. He is himself again, suddenly, firmly. Wei Wuxian had not even known he was capable of vanishing until that cursed night hunt, the spirit on the lover’s bridge.

Unfaithful, the dead woman had whispered on the wind, and Wei Wuxian had thought, idiotically, of Jiang Cheng yelling at him for flirting with shopgirls.

She had already killed six couples, ranging from newlyweds to grandparents, in under half a year. She had been powerful, and powerfully angry. Wei Wuxian had not known how powerful, until he reached to steady Lan Wangji against the buffeting gale of resentment and found himself lost in memories that did not belong to him. They were disjointed; fragments of scenes. The sweltering heat of a mountain summer. A familiar guqin on an unfamiliar table, moonlight coming in from the window. Smoke and fire and blood. Nightless City.

He did not want to understand. They quieted the ghost — betrayed by the woman she loved, killed by her lover’s husband, her bones washed clean in the river — and Wei Wuxian had thought, for a moment, that Lan Wangji had not felt it.

But they had stood on the bridge in silence, and Lan Wangji had looked down at the river below, as though he was forgetting how to exist, and he had said I am sorry.

Even the memory of it is revolting.

But he understands. He had a momentary glimpse of Lan Wangji’s memory; his hands on the strings. The instrument is part of him because he has made it so, and not through refusing it. So he watches as his husband unwraps Wangji, sets it back on its table, and begins with his scales.

Lan Wangji arrives at the library, Wei Wuxian in tow, half a shichen before his brother’s planned meeting with the archivist. Lan Haiyang’s books and correspondence are where they had left them, in a private reading room on the second floor. Leaving behind no children, or close kin of any degree, Lan Xichen had volunteered the two of them for the task.

His brother rarely attends discussion conferences any longer; Gusu Lan has not hosted one in years. He fills the time.

“More than I was expecting,” Wei Wuxian says, peering skeptically at the towering, half-organized piles of books and scrolls. “Are you sure this guy was a Lan?”

“As much as Lan Jingyi,” Lan Wangji tells him, and earns himself a laugh.

“Well, we can’t all be ascetics, I suppose”

And so they begin, more carefully than Lan Wangji had worked yesterday. They start with the most likely culprits: Lan Haiyang’s collection of esoteric cultivation texts. He worked primarily with arrays, in his personal scholarship; many of the texts are transcribed and annotated in his own hand, or stuffed with loose pages of notes.

“Can I keep this?” Wei Wuxian asks once, and then twice, and then he stops asking and starts making his own stack to be kept for him by the archivist. Lan Wangji reviews his own selections, paging through each carefully. He’d spent the most time yesterday with a research monograph contrasting the methods and results of array suppression with the traditional Lan musical technique, but the text yields nothing relevant.

“Hanguang-jun,” Lan Sizhui says from the doorway, and Lan Wangji lifts his head to see that the slant of sunlight through the window has shifted, and Xiao Zhan is standing at Sizhui’s shoulder, looking almost happy. “I’m sorry, I have a few meetings to attend, or I would stay and help.”

“Understandable.” He finds his voice, after a long moment. “How was your lesson?”

Lan Sizhui grins and — to Lan Wangji’s surprise, he leans just a fraction of his weight to the side, pressing his elbow against Xiao Zhan’s shoulder.

“Of course, our Hanguang-jun has always been a rare talent,” Sizhui says. “Xiao Zhan caught me slipping on my finger placement.”

Lan Wangji feels it warm in his chest. Our Hanguang-jun. He catches the look Xiao Zhan gives him, the twinned suspicion and surprise.

It is not shocking to him, that Xiao Zhan is avoidant and afraid of him. The shame is eclipsing. He tries to imagine it: himself, in the middle of years in which he sought to make himself perfect, to ignore what was being done to himself so completely as to render it invisible even in his own mind, being confronted with this. The absolute proof of his own violation. An adult man, with the face of his father, who looked at him and saw him fully, for all his weakness and guilt and fear.

Lan Wangji can hardly stomach the thought. He cannot look at Xiao Zhan for long either. It is the cousin of another memory. Looking down at Lan Yuan, all of six years old, and thinking for the first time: this is what his father had seen.

Wei Wuxian brings Xiao Zhan into the reading room, and has him set up with a drafted inventory list by the time Sizhui is gone. Both of them have thrown over their responsibilities for the day, limited though they are. It is almost time for them to descend the mountain for the winter, traveling through warmer regions for a string of night hunts and visits to old friends. Lan Wangji had been planning their departure for soon after the Mid-Autumn Festival.

He’s jolted from his thoughts by the sound of voices on the stairwell.

“Hanguang-jun is waiting,” the archivist, Li Wenting, is saying. “He requested that I defer assessing the collection until he finished his task, Lan-zhongzhu.”

Across the writing desk, with his back to the door, Xiao Zhan flinches. And then he goes still, his eyes fixed and flat on the paper in front of him.

“No,” Lan Wangji says, before he can stop himself. “Xiongzhang.”

“Hm?” Lan Xichen asks from the doorway. “Oh.”

His eyes find the small figure in Lan white and silver. They trace the ribbon down his back. His brow furrows in genteel confusion.

“Wangji,” he says, and Xiao Zhan’s eyes snap back up. They bore into Lan Wangji, bright and gold and furiously alive. “Who is this?”

A moment of blank silence. Wei Wuxian intervenes, too late, after it has already settled heavy in the air.

“Ah, Zewu-jun,” he says, with a sweep of his hand. “We’d appreciate your help. Something in this room seems to have brought a little Lan Zhan to our doorstep, and we’re not quite sure what to make of it.”

“Lan Zhan?” Lan Xichen says. He steps into the room. “Wangji, really?”

Lan Wangji, Xiao Zhan mouths. His shoulders still, his hands flat on the desk.

Lan Wangji dips his chin in silent acknowledgement, and the rage in Xiao Zhan’s glare sparks into hatred.

“Please excuse me, Lan-er-gongzi,” Xiao Zhan says, and the venom in his tone makes Lan Xichen pause, makes Wei Wuxian turn his head, reach a hand out in concern.

Lan Wangji closes his eyes. He nods, curt and silent, and then looks up.

Xiao Zhan does not even salute to Lan Xichen on his way out of the reading room. His spine is straight, his hands folded in his sleeves, the tails of his forehead ribbon following him around the corner.

For a moment, the room is silent. Lan Wangji’s eyes close again, shrouding him in comforting darkness.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, hand gentle on his shoulder. “Go after him.”

He doesn’t want to. He forms the words under his tongue, and then he names it for what it is. Fear, and shame, and loathing — a deep well of it, still waters hiding black, plunging depths.

Lan Wangji does not need another reminder. He follows.

After the conclusion of the Sunshot Campaign, Lan Wangji had taken over the maintenance of the gentian house. Uncle had been happy to wash his hands of it, though untouched as it was by the smoke or fire that ravaged the central compound, it had not been a heavy burden.

It still is not. He comes once a month, when his travels allow, to sweep and dust and clear away fallen leaves and petals from the veranda. He has allowed the gentians to take over the small clearing, rather than keeping them confined to the original beds. In the early autumn, the house is a riot of color, blue and violet spreading down the forest path, edging closer to the Cloud Recesses proper every year.

No one has been inside but him in decades, save those few desperate, fugitive days after Koi Tower, when he had thought I must hide him, and knew nowhere else to go.

Brother, of course, had found them immediately. It was a small, private humiliation.

He finds Xiao Zhan not kneeling at the top of the step, but instead sitting hunched and small in the center of a patch of flowers. He’s holding one in cupped hands, the petals bruised and trampled. He does not look up to see who has followed him.

“Lan Wangji,” he says, when Lan Wangji has picked his way through the small meadow and sat in front of him. The venom is gone, drained away, replaced by weariness.

“Yes.”

“Do you have it?”

For a moment, Lan Wangji considers refusing. Not lying, just — refusing to allow himself the indulgence of pain. But Xiao Zhan’s eyes are bright, and his fingers are gentle around the flower he must have crushed in his haste. His back is to the cottage.

Wangji slides out of his sleeve, a motion as familiar as breathing. He unwraps it, balances it on his lap, strokes a hand down the ebony wood to clear away any dust that might linger on the polished surface. Once, an elder had told him that he was not at ease with his own instrument; he does not know if she would say the same now, after all these years. The wound it probes in him is scabbed over by the long pass of years. Memories have layered over memories. His hands on the strings, and a-Yuan’s. An empty house, and the high croon of a dizi.

But Xiao Zhan has none of those years, none of those memories. His face is deathly pale under the morning sun.

“I thought,” Xiao Zhan whispers. “I thought. One day, it will be over.”

He remembers. Not being able to articulate it. Pushing down on the formless dread that it would last for the rest of his life. Convincing himself that if he were stronger, or less afraid, he could make it stop.

Every month he spends in the Cloud Recesses, Lan Wangji returns to the gentian house to clean, to air out the single-room living space. He does not blame himself for coming. It is still the best way he knows to remember his mother, to honor her. To thank her, for enduring what she had, and for loving him anyway.

“It will,” he says. Despite the instrument on his lap. Despite the child in front of him, who he remembers being with perfect, anguished clarity.

For a moment, they sit together and listen to the mountain. Xiao Zhan is still looking at Wangji.

“Play something,” Xiao Zhan says, with the same tone he might use to say: prove it.

Lan Wangji hesitates. He could choose anything. One of his own compositions, one of the old clan songs he’s been learning since childhood. He could play something he learned in the dark, with his father at his side.

He does not. His hands find the strings, checking their tension out of habit, and he begins Cleansing.

He does not infuse it with energy. He does not need to. None of the turmoil in either of them is something that can be resolved through the correct application of spiritual power. But the sense memory of it is soothing to him anyway; he has picked out these notes a hundred times before, on night hunts and in the healing halls. His brother and uncle had both played it for him in the early days of his own seclusion, when he had staggered back from the resentment-soaked Burial Mounds with nothing but a-Yuan in his arms to show for it.

Xiao Zhan is too young to know the song. Lan Wangji remembers learning it at twelve or thirteen, over a long week spent alternating between the head healer’s office and the library. A week was as long as it took him to memorize the score, but for months afterward he had practiced, had pushed himself to perfection, before he submitted himself to Uncle’s evaluation.

When he learns something, he does not forget. When he knows a song, it lives in the muscles and tendons of his hands. They feel the instrument as an extension of themselves.

The last notes do not linger. The mountain breeze whisks them away, through the almost-changing leaves.

Xiao Zhan says, “I don’t understand.”

He is not talking about the song, or the instrument, or the strangeness of the two of them sitting face-to-face. Lan Wangji dips his chin, acknowledging.

“I do not, either.”

“You have a son.” The words are barbed, but not sharply. Lan Sizhui might have shared this; more likely he picked it up from the disciples in the classroom. “You have a husband.”

“I am fortunate,” Lan Wangji says. “I chose them both.”

“And xiongzhang is Sect Leader,” Xiao Zhan says, and he looks back down at the guqin. “And he does not know.”

This silence is thick. Lan Wangji follows Xiao Zhan’s gaze to look at his hands, holding Wangji steady.

He does not know how to explain it. He does not think he has to. He thinks that he and the child in front of him both feel the same thing at the thought: the turn of nausea in their stomachs, the tight beat of panic in their chests.

There had come a point, sometime in the last decades, where not telling Xichen began to feel like sparing him a blow. What is the point, he thinks, of sharing a hurt so old, so embedded into him that his brother has hardly known him without it? Why should he pick open that scab, only to make Xichen feel blood on his own hands again? Why should his brother feel guilty, when Lan Wangji was the one who should have asked him to stop it, and could not?

“It cannot be changed.” The time to tell him has come and gone. All that he could say to his brother, if he tried now, would end in absolution that Xichen does not need, and that Lan Wangji, selfishly, does not want to give.

“Am I a coward?” Xiao Zhan demands, finally, with the unflinching justice of youth.

It is what he has wanted to ask someone for years. It is what Lan Wangji has thought about asking Wei Wuxian, now that there is someone he could, but he has not been able to bring himself to speak of it.

Wei Wuxian had questioned him, gently, after that night hunt. Lan Wangji had been able to give him scraps of answers. Sitting at the table in their rented room, looking down at his own hands. He replied simply. Carefully. It had been exactly as awful as he was always afraid it would be, and he closed his hands into fists a scarce handful of minutes in and Wei Wuxian had stopped asking.

For a moment they had been terribly apart, separated by an arm’s length of space. And then Lan Wangji thought, come back, and like a tide Wei Wuxian had flowed into him, fingers digging into his hair, his chin a solid weight on Lan Wangji’s shoulder.

I’m sorry, Lan Zhan, he said, and Lan Wangji thought that if there was ever something he should thank Wei Wuxian for, it was saying his name.

“No,” he replies, finally, after an age of silence. “You are not a coward.”

You are a child, he wants to say, but he knows that Xiao Zhan already knows that, is already horribly aware of his own smallness.

For a moment, he thinks that Xiao Zhan will demand that he pass over Wangji. One of his hands drifts, leaving the bruised gentian, to press the tips of his fingers against the wood.

“It feels different,” Xiao Zhan says.

He has been playing Wangji for longer than his father ever possessed it. It is attuned to him in the perfect, instinctual way of a spiritual weapon, as if it had been carved for him alone.

When he had first formed his golden core, not long after his eighth birthday, Uncle brought him to one of the clan’s rooms of treasures. It was filled with instruments, guqin and xiao and dizi and half a dozen others besides. He laid his hands on them, and practiced feeling their power.

You do not have to choose yet, Uncle said to him. But even then, it had been too late. He had already felt the thrum of Wangji, the coldness of it thawing, just barely, as he played. He could never forget it.

“Come back to the library,” Lan Wangji says. He does not want to stay out here, with the ghosts of his parents. He wants Xiao Zhan to trust him enough to follow.

Xiao Zhan looks at him, and the hatred does not flash in his eyes. He looks — resigned. Exhausted. He still smells like medicine, underneath the incense that clings to his robes. Xiao Zhan pulls his hand back, and lays the tattered flower on the ground.

It is Lan Xichen, in the last span of minutes before the lunch hour, who discovers it.

“A-Zhan,” he says, and Wei Wuxian watches as Xiao Zhan raises his head from a sheaf of guqin scores and Lan Wangji, sorting through the last box of cultivation texts, does not. “You will be nine this winter?”

“Yes, Xiongzhang.” He seems pleased that Lan Xichen has identified this without asking. They have not spoken overmuch, focused on their own tasks, but Wei Wuxian has been watching Lan Xichen look at him, his face stripped, in stolen moments of silence.

“I see. Wangji — this may be clarifying.”

Lan Xichen is pointedly not touching the note at the top of his pile with his bare hands. Wei Wuxian, attention piqued, shifts over, and Xiao Zhan follows, until the three of them are all hovering over the desk, peering at Lan Haiyang’s cramped, nimble calligraphy.

It is a love letter, or at least the echo of one in Lan Haiyang’s private papers, dated from a few years before Wei Wuxian ever set foot in the Cloud Recesses.

He skims it, reaches the end, and goes back to read it again.

“You Lans,” he mutters, before he can really stop himself. “Terrible romantics.”

I have missed her with the weight of all my soul, Lan Haiyang tells him from the page. And it is not a burden to bear the grief of these last months, and to carry it forward with me in this life and the next. In the faces of my peers and my students I see pity, but it is unearned.

At the bottom, he has sketched the cardinal points of an array, entirely experimental, and several drafts of a talisman. It should not even be enough of them to activate, but Wei Wuxian sees it and understands.

The years of knowing her were sweet and torturous, and as a youth I could not have imagined how much I would savor those memories that I was building. I would bring that youth to me now, if I could, and I would give him the promise of thirty years’ blessings. I would have him see me, and the privilege of my grief, and I would revel to see him in that first blush of outraged, insolent joy.

“Thirty years’ blessings, huh?” Wei Wuxian says, and then he looks to the side, and sees the desolation struck across the faces of the Twin Jades of Lan.

Terrible romantics, indeed.

Xiao Zhan only looks vaguely confused, a small furrow of frustration dug between his brows. He’s adorable, really; his forehead ribbon is thinner than Lan Wangji’s, covering a proportional amount of his forehead, and Wei Wuxian wonders idly what might have been done with this one, once he outgrew it.

“I see,” Lan Wangji says, and forcibly moves himself away. “Not a curse, then.”

His voice is tight. He does not look at Xiao Zhan, which means that Wei Wuxian is the only one who sees the expression on Xiao Zhan’s face shift and dig deeper, suddenly, into that same devastation that Lan Wangji had so carefully cleared away.

“Aiyah,” Wei Wuxian mutters to him. “Don’t think like that, okay?”

The next look he knows perfectly: how do you know what I think. Lan Zhan is Lan Zhan, after all, and this little one much closer to the teenager on the rooftops than to his thick-faced husband.

But he does know, because he’s learned; because he wanted to learn, always, from that very first night.

Lan Xichen’s hands are very still on the table. He’s still staring, unable to shake off the stillness that had come over him. Over his head, Wei Wuxian catches Lan Wangji’s eye.

“Xiongzhang,” Lan Wangji says. “Did you not promise to meet Shufu?”

It’s a convenience, in a way. Parceling away his own distress and discomfort, to reach out a hand to his brother. To pull him back, again, from sinking into his own silence and shame.

Wei Wuxian doesn’t know Lan Xichen as well as he could. They always seem to be dancing around one another, the past just heavy enough to linger, words spoken and unspoken between them that mean less than they might and perhaps more than they should, after so long. But Wei Wuxian does know him, for better or worse. He can see his desperation, perhaps because it looks so familiar. He knows what Lan Xichen wants, right now: to take the paper with both hands, and to push his spiritual energy into it until it gives him what he wants, and then to say something terrible to a twelve year old who had not yet made his own mistakes.

Well. It’s not as though Wei Wuxian doesn’t want to take it either. If only it would give him a Wei Ying who would listen.

It hardly matters. Knowing his luck, he’d get a little baby or a feral street rat or nothing at all — thirteen years dead have left him with less than thirty years of living under his belt, since the little he remembers of those years hardly seems to count to anyone he’s asked about it.

“Yes,” Lan Xichen finally says. “Apologies. Wangji, Wei-gongzi. A-Zhan.”

He does not look at Wei Wuxian when he departs. He leaves Xiao Zhan with a soft touch to the top of his head, which does little to dispel the small, tight frown at the corners of Xiao Zhan’s mouth.

“A talisman draft,” Wei Wuxian murmurs, mostly to himself. He does not touch the paper; instead he peers more closely, observing its worn edges, a soft, fuzzed crease on one edge. This was not an idle project, he thinks. Perhaps Lan Haiyang had looked at the sketches for days, perhaps he had worried with the corner with a finger. The note had been handled enough to become reactive, and then — from what he understands of the nature of the elder’s illness — abandoned to a stack of papers, while its creator withered away over long, slow years.

“I don’t understand,” Xiao Zhan finally says. “He wanted — it was a past he wished to recall fondly. So why am I —”

“No.” Lan Wangji’s voice is firm. Wei Wuxian looks up at him, careful to move only his eyes. His two Lan Zhans are facing each other, each of their faces set in reflexive, stubborn blankness. But there is anger in Lan Wangji’s eyes; not at the child, but at his words. He breathes in, and chooses his phrasing. “The spellwork is clear. He wished to choose a time from his past, and bring it forward. The emotions are inconsequential to the effect. It is not a failing of yours, or of mine, that you are here.”

It is the most Wei Wuxian has heard him speak since Xiao Zhan arrived. The relief of that is palpable, a weight lifted from his shoulders.

“I don’t think he ever used it,” he says, before Xiao Zhan can do anything like argue. “But I think he wanted to.”

Probably he knew it was a terrible idea. Already Wei Wuxian’s mind is spinning out the possibilities, the strange consequences, the questions that Xiao Zhan’s presence raises. Lan Haiyang was too wise to ever finish his spell, but his fixation on it lingered. Wei Ying covers his hands with his sleeves, and shifts the paper over, and sees that the one behind it is a messy scrawl of notes, on less-worn paper. Half of it is obscured by an inkstain that warps the paper, crawling down the lines of draft notes and theories, but it’s helpful enough. Mostly an echo of Wei Wuxian’s own preliminary thoughts, but with a line that sticks out to him, referring to the array construction.

“It won’t last,” he says, and realizes he’s been tuning out anything else going on in the room. “Or it shouldn’t, at least.”

“Wei Ying?”

“Sorry — look, Lan Zhan, he worked in a time limit, or he was planning to. I was thinking a neutralization talisman on the paper could work, but we might not even need to try.”

“Mn.”

Lan Wangji leans over, glancing at the notes. He breathes out, quietly enough that only Wei Wuxian notices. In response, Wei Wuxian leans back, pressing his shoulder against Lan Wangji’s chest.

“It is good to know.” Wei Wuxian can feel the low rumble of his voice, the warmth of him through his layers. “We should not forget the lunch hour.”

He doesn’t have to crane to see Lan Wangji’s face to know what he’ll find on it. He can see it whenever he wants, whenever Lan Wangji wants to take care of him, whenever he allows it. If Wei Wuxian wants Lan Wangji to look at him, these days, all he has to do is ask. Not even that, really. It’s a heady kind of certainty.

Xiao Zhan, lingering at the end of the table, is watching them. He’s thinking hard, Wei Wuxian can tell. When Lan Wangji’s hand finds Wei Wuxian’s wrist, drawing him away from the table and the notes, he tracks it.

There’s no harm in showing him. Where Lan Wangji leads, Wei Wuxian follows.

It should last until dusk, or around then. Lan Wangji does not know how long Xiao Zhan had stood before the library, likely puzzling over the subtle differences in its structure, in the surrounding pathways and greenery.

He has been thinking about time, for the last long stretch of the afternoon. He has been thinking about thirty years, and twenty, and ten. There are thirty-eight years of his life, and each decade has brought unimaginable change.

Lan Wangji thinks he would have had much to say to himself of ten years ago. He had been guiding Lan Yuan in his studies, learning to step into a role he was not yet sure he was capable of taking; he had been preparing to gift him a courtesy name that could mean something for them both. He had been grieving, endlessly, with no hope for reprieve, and trying to live well despite it.

Twenty years ago — it had been war. It had been following smoke and screams to burned-out villages and Wen camps, and bringing justice where he could, and vengeance when he could not. It had been Wei Ying, his whole body concave and smudged, digging up corpses, and shouting in his face, and clenching trembling fingers around a flute Lan Wangji had not known he could play. He thinks he would have much to say to this memory of himself, as well.

But this child. He does not know what else to say, and does not know how to say it, so after they lunch he had allowed Xiao Zhan to once again slip away in Lan Sizhui’s shadow.

They are back in the Jingshi, for lack of need to keep researching and lack of desire to resume already-canceled responsibilities. He has settled with Wangji on its table, in Xiao Zhan’s absence, and is playing through a steady catalogue of old Lan love songs.

“Hanguang-jun, don’t be maudlin, it doesn’t suit you.”

“Not maudlin.”

He is reminiscing, that is all. He had learned many of these songs while working on his first composition. It had been Uncle’s advice: to search for his expression in the voices of his ancestors. He had directed Lan Wangji to a selection of scores which, in annotated volumes, had been noted for their composition in seclusion. Above worldly concerns. He had found a different set of volumes, and had not allowed himself to dwell much further on it.

He likes these songs. He thinks about Lan Haiyang, a distant and little-known relation, loving someone so much that what he wanted more than anything was to see himself in the first flush of it, and to tell himself to savor it while he could.

“He trusts a-Yuan, you know,” Wei Wuxian says, practically a question.

“Mn.” A cascade of notes: Lan Jiayi’s lament. That story is not well-known — her lover, the first disciple, had defected from the Lan in a time of war, and been killed by the sect he attempted to join. Lan Jiayi’s brother, the sect leader, married her off not long after the war’s conclusion; she, in response, took her own life.

“Do you think it’s because he’s just so friendly looking? Even Xiao Zhan can’t resist that smile. Were you always such a sucker for a pretty face?”

“Mn.” He had found that accounting in the clan archive, and recopied it to add to his personal collection. He had copied it again, during the rebuilding of the library. Many of the Cloud Recesses’ texts live in annexes to the main library, and had survived the fire, but much had been destroyed. Much had been lost. Many works in his hand now live on the shelves, and may endure through the ages. Or may not.

“And I’m sure a-Yuan appreciates Xiao Zhan’s honest and sincere admiration — are you listening to me, Lan Zhan?”

“This husband always listens to Wei Ying.”

“Ah, but this Wei Ying rarely says anything worth listening to. Is this Lan Jiayi? Lan Zhan, really. ‘Not maudlin’?”

His hands still the strings.

“It is natural that he trust Sizhui. Sizhui is not afraid of us, and he is not so imposing an authority.”

“Oh.”

And, Lan Wangji thinks, at eight he had been unused to attention from disciples of Lan Sizhui’s age range. He had been raised and tutored largely by advanced seniors and elders, and in the classes he had been allowed to sit in on he had been an oddity, a seven- or eight-year-old in a class of junior disciples nearly ten years his senior. They had not spoken to him; they hardly looked at him. He was Lan-er-gongzi, when he was referred to by anyone at all, and to them his face had been an impenetrable mask.

Who had joked? Brother had come closest, with his mild teases. But Lan Sizhui knows his face, and his heart, and Lan Wangji is entirely unsurprised that Xiao Zhan is desperate to be known by him.

“You were pretty lonely, huh, Lan Zhan.”

“Yes.” His hands move, and start another song. Familiar; his. Wei Wuxian settles next to him, pressing their shoulders together.

“Are you still?”

He does not have to look down to keep playing. Wei Wuxian’s face is very close. His eyes are very dark.

“Wei Ying,” he says.

He finds something better to do with his hands.

Uncle finds them in front of the library, close to dusk.

“Xichen told me,” he says, in his brusque manner, but he is not looking at Lan Wangji. Like everyone else today, he is preoccupied with Xiao Zhan, who is examining him in turn with his head slightly tilted to one side.

You look old, he is much too mature to say, but for the first time he looks at Lan Wangji, and a shared thought passes between them, and Xiao Zhan is almost startled into a laugh.

“Xiansheng,” Xiao Zhan says, and bows to cover his face. “Thank you for coming.”

“Yes,” Uncle replies. “Well. As if I would not.”

He does look old. His posture is perfect, but something in him is curling toward the child. Lan Wangji cannot stand it — he steps away, closer to the magnolia tree with its browning leaves. Wei Wuxian follows him, quiet as he has been since they set out to meet Lan Sizhui and Xiao Zhan.

Lan Sizhui joins them. Together, they give Uncle and the child a moment to themselves.

It must be awful for Uncle, he thinks, in a cold sliver of unkindness. To be faced with this beloved child, who has not yet let him down.

He wonders what Xiao Zhan is thinking. And he knows.

Lan Wangji turns away. For a moment, he wonders how he can possibly live with himself, how he has tolerated it all these years. It is what he has always known: that there has always been something splintered and ugly at the core of himself, that he had looked at his Uncle and thought of asking for help and had been too convinced of his own guilt to ever manage it.

He should have asked. He should have confessed. He should not have had to.

Here, in the secret part of his heart, he has always thought: someone should have known.

“Lan Zhan,” says Wei Wuxian. He opens his eyes, where he had not intended to close them.

Lan Sizhui is at his shoulder, not quite hovering. Wei Wuxian is in front of him. His outer robes are a dark, cool blue; grey peeks out from under them. The red ribbon in his hair seems to catch the light of the sunset, the air crisp, the sky purpling like a bruise.

“I should,” Lan Wangji says. He does not know how to finish. He turns around before he can, and sees that Uncle has his hand on Xiao Zhan’s shoulder. It’s a gentle, familiar touch. Xiao Zhan’s chin has dipped close to his chest.

Wei Wuxian lets him go. Uncle steps aside when he approaches, and in a handful of moments he seems only to have aged further. He is just a man, Lan Wangji knows, and an overburdened one. His family has not been kind to him. Their family is not one that had invited kindness, but instead gratitude for the absence of pain.

“Wangji,” Uncle says. “A-Zhan.”

And he goes. Again, it is the two of them, and Lan Wangji does not know how to go forward.

“I have to go back,” Xiao Zhan says. His voice is very quiet, and very flat.

“Yes.” Lan Wangji wishes, almost, for the comfort of a lie. The sun is lowering itself down to the horizon; this time last evening, he had left the reading room and taken up in the kitchen, greeting the cooks and disciples on kitchen duty, pulling his smock from its peg. Tonight, their meal will not have been made by his hands.

“Will you,” the child says. He looks up. He musters his courage to do it. “Will you walk with me?”

Their audience is polite, at least. Wei Wuxian and Lan Sizhui, turned away speaking so quietly under the young magnolia that it is difficult to make out more than the low sounds of their voice. The library is not busy. No one is lingering under the veranda; no one watches them as they mount the steps, side by side.

“He called it thirty years’ blessings,” Xiao Zhan says, “but it all seems so sad.”

“Not all.” Lan Wangji’s throat aches. “Not everything.”

“I can’t imagine.” He speaks faster, now. His hands are shaking, even with fists clenched tight at his sides. “I can’t — I don’t —”

Lan Wangji stops him, before they reach the door. He turns, and kneels, and his hands find themselves on the child’s shoulders without hesitation. He looks, for a long moment, at the softness of his cheeks. He must be growing in a molar or two, if memory serves, but he speaks too carefully to let the absence show.

“I don’t know if I can,” Xiao Zhan finally says. He blinks, and only the redness of his eyes betrays the tears that threaten.

You will, Lan Wangji could tell him. His is proof of it.

But it is not what Xiao Zhan should hear, and it is not what Lan Wangji wants to say.

“It should not be your burden,” he says. “It should not have been asked of you. It is, and it has, but that is unjust, and it is cruel.”

The child’s breath hitches. He cries silently, like they always have.

“I am sorry,” Lan Wangji says.

The child gasps, wet and shaking, and he stares into Lan Wangji’s eyes as he weeps, and he opens his mouth, and —

Lan Wangji’s hands fall through empty air.

The sun dips low over the forest.

Thirty years vanish in the blink of an eye.