Chapter Text
They make first for the hall where the sect leaders’ meeting is taking place, Maiden Jiang and Wen Qing in the lead, and Wangi supported by the surge of energy that washed into him when he heard of Wei Ying in danger.
The pain and exhaustion are still present but pushed back, a sunken pit beneath the swelling drive to reach Wei Ying and the conviction that, once he does, the spell will ensure Wangji saves him.
He wonders, quietly and at a distance, whether Wen Qing needed to intervene to keep him alive, after all. Perhaps it isn’t possible for him to die until he’s certain Wei Ying and A-Yuan are safe. Even without Wen Qing’s skills, Wangji may well have been pulled from his bed in The Unclean Realm and onto Bichen, only to collapse again once Wen Ruohan was dead.
Now, Wangji steps around both women and scans the space. No Wei Ying. No Jiang Wanyin. No Brother, or Nie Mingjue or Nie Huaisang, either.
He barely has to look around at his fellow Lan disciple before she’s striding towards a small cluster of their sect siblings, a determined look on her face. She returns swiftly, looking concerned.
‘Young Master Wei fled the hall. Zewu-Jun and others followed, but both Zewu-Jun and Chifeng-Zun forbade those still here from leaving, too.’
No doubt to avoid an already heated situated from becoming scalding. Brother has always sought to contain and to calm where he can, and Nie Mingjue has no patience for gossiping onlookers.
Maiden Jiang makes a low noise of distress, turning to grasp at Wen Qing’s sleeve with tears in her eyes. She doesn’t have to speak to show how worried she is: it’s written in every line of her. If she knew where to look for Wei Ying, she would likely already be moving. Maiden Jiang would rush to Wei Ying no matter what it took.
A memory blazes across Wangji’s mind, of black rock and dark smoke and screaming, of a woman all in mourning white and blooming red, of Wei Ying’s will to survive collapsing along with his sect sister.
Wangi hisses out a breath through his teeth, his right hand coming up to press against his chest. It hurts. It physically hurts to recall it, that awful stretch of time between Wei Ying putting his head through the noose and Wangji seeing him fall, and he desperately hopes he’s wrong, even as he needs to be right. A qi deviation is not something with which to take one’s time.
Without a word, he turns and heads along the hallway towards the main entrance, hoping and dreading in equal measure that he’ll find Wei Ying where he hoped he’d never see him again.
Wei Wuxian feels every one of the resentful voices in his ears could grow hands at any moment to tear at his flesh, and he would have no way of stopping it. He isn’t stopping it. Already, his throat is torn. The pain doesn’t reach him, but there’s a tang of blood on the back of his tongue, a mundane irritation small enough to make it through the screaming.
It’s just enough to have him choking to silence, to remind him that his own blood won’t be all that’s spilt if he doesn’t wrestle this storm of energy back into something contained. Contained enough to keep any damage inside him.
Wei Wuxian closes his eyes. Everything around him is a darkened, wavering mass, so what use is seeing to him? He did this in the Burial Mounds, back when he still felt the chill of his new cultivation sliding between the splinters of his bones. It worked then. It has to work now.
Sinking to the ground is a quicker process than expected, a mere sagging of the knees, and his kneecaps smart. He must have been most of the way there already, his body weakened and unbalanced by whatever is happening to him. No matter. It’s just one more blow for him to absorb, just one more adaptation he needs to make so he can keep on going. He is so tired of having to keep on going. Dragging his limbs into something close to a mediation pose, he sets his dizi across his thighs and settles his hands on top. He will drag himself back to some form of functioning, because he doesn’t have another choice
The screaming cuts off almost as soon as Wangji hears it, but he only needs a moment to recognise that sound.
He’s ahead of the others as he strides out into the harsh Qishan light, a lance of pain in his temple a needless reminder that he ought still to be in bed. Not slowing, he starts down the steps even as his eyes find Wei Ying, on his knees barely a body length from the sharp jut of rock that loomed in so many of Wangji’s fever dreams, his mind taking him back there again and again as his back burned and he couldn’t always be sure what was real and what was lost.
‘Wangji,’ Brother calls, his voice projecting clearly across the space, the note of concern loud to those few who know him well.
At a glance, Wangji sees both his brother’s desire to leap to Wangji’s side, and the reason he can’t. The great Zewu-Jun has achieved many things in his still short life, but setting himself as the barrier between Wei Ying and the rest of those present is impressive in its own right. The cluster of cultivators have their backs to Wangji, only a few turning to glance his way at his brother’s call, and at their head stands Jin Guangshan.
As he moves down the steps, Wangji takes in the positions of other important figures. Even when desperate, his training and experience tell him to survey the terrain before battle. Jiang Wanyin is at the back of the group, which would be more confusing if Wangji hadn’t seen the man leap further whilst fighting. The handful who could best him in speed and distance are unlikely to get in his way. Even so, his choice only makes sense to Wangji when he joins those glancing around and sees his sister. Rather than leaping to Wei Ying, he is at Maiden Jiang’s side in the space of two heartbeats.
Wangji adjusts to move around him but is jolted to a stop by a tight grip on his arm. From the corners of his eyes, Wangji notes Wen Qing and Maiden Jiang stop one on either side of him. Despite having a hand on Wangji, Jiang Wanyin fixes first his sister and then Wen Qing with a fierce look.
‘You helped Hanguang-Jun with his core,’ he says to Wen Qing, showing no sign he realises the man’s he’s referring to stands beside her, or that Jiang Wanyin is touching him. ‘Will you do the same for Wei Wuxian?’
Wen Qing’s back is already straight, her posture already one suited to facing criticism and threats with dignity, but she adjusts her shoulders as though bracing for a physical blow.
‘This situation is not the same,’ she says, her voice clear and firm. She must have had sufficient practice at speaking in the face of irrationality and anger. ‘Resentful energy-‘
‘I would not dare accuse Hanguang-Jun of corrupting his core,’ Jiang Wanyin says, perhaps not realising he’s cutting Wen Qing off. ‘Wei Wuxian’s case is different, yes, but both are qi deviations, and surely-‘
‘They are not.’
Wen Qing must know she’s sliced through Jiang Wanyin’s words and, by the look in the man’s eyes, through his patience.
Wangji speaks up before Jiang Wanyin does more direct harm to Wen Qing in this version of events than he managed in the first one.
‘His mind?’
After all, Wei Ying seemed erratic ever since returning from his disappearance, and that can hardly have changed. Wei Ying reappeared from those missing months with jagged fracture lines running through him, and only on that one day in Yiling did they seem somewhat worn down into something that no longer cut.
‘He was managing the effects,’ Wen Qing says, not quite answering Wangji’s question. ‘Something must have happened.’
Something that is not the deaths of Wen Qing and her brother, or of a small boy Wei Ying cared for and protected. Something that is not the death of Maiden Jiang. None of the blows that broke him before have happened this time, yet still Wei Ying is here.
‘He was arguing,’ Jiang Wanyin says, but he says it as though to dismiss it. ‘Jin Zixun was hurling insults, accusations. But it was more than that. It has to have been more.’
Wangji thinks back to Wei Ying threatening Jin Zixuan for insulting Maiden Jiang, in the war and after, but each time the woman herself was the one to pull him back from losing control. It was only with her loss that Wei Ying could not be reached. For once, he is forced to agree with Jiang Wanyin. It must be something else, something to have left Wei Ying off balance and vulnerable. Something that could not have happened the first time.
‘The branding iron,’ he says to Wen Qing.
‘Perhaps,’ she allows. ‘He was agitated, yes, but there was no sign he was losing control. I know those signs and they were not present when I checked him. I will need to examine him again.’
‘You-‘ Jiang Wanyin starts, but Wangji has heard all he needs to from this exchange.
Twisting his arm out of the other man’s hold, he wraps an arm around Wen Qing’s waist and leaps. She stiffens for a moment, but goes with the movement, leaving behind the cluster on the steps and sailing over the heads of those crowded between them and Wei Ying. More than one person calls out, but Wangji pays no mind to what they say. Neither they nor their opinions matter. He keeps his attention on Wei Ying, who has pulled himself into a meditation pose filled with tension.
He touches down close to his brother, exchanging one look with him and knowing he’s being told to be careful, that he’s being assured the crowd will be kept back. He dips his chin in return, a show of gratitude, and wishes he could promise caution.
Wen Qing doesn’t spare even the drop of time needed for a look. She is already striding across the remaining space between Brother and Wei Ying, a needle glinting in one hand and her head held high. Many people have gone into battle with less ferocity and determination. Wangji follows her.
‘Wei Wuxian, don’t you want to make them see?’ one particularly insistent voice whispers by his ear. ‘Shouldn’t they see their hypocrisy? Their lack of reason? Shouldn’t they…’
It fades, but another is already speaking over it, murmuring of revenge, and another layering in with it, whispering that they will all turn on him, all of them, no matter how trusted, how beloved, and how much do they expect him to take?
‘Wei Wuxian!’
That one is sharp. Demanding. It does nothing more than call his name, an order to pay attention.
‘Wei Wuxian, can you hear me?’
There’s a note of…concern? Something akin to it, at least. That’s different.
‘Wei Wuxian, open your eyes!’
His eyes snap open on their own, and there is Wen Qing, vibrant and solid and surrounded by the energy he’s trying to control.
‘Wen Qing, get back!’
But her hands are on his shoulders, are pressing on his chest, even as she scolds him for telling her what to do. If she sees the black smoke whipping around her, through her, she shows no sign of it, her eyes now closed and her lips pressed together as she works.
‘You can’t do anything,’ he tells her, urgent now as he feels the resentful energy swell around her, pulling at him the way the ground pulls someone falling from a height. It wants to lash at her, to spend itself upon her flesh, and then on to the next person, to-
‘Lan Zhan?’ A jolt of panic surges Wei Wuxian to his feet, glaring at the figure standing not far behind the healer. ‘What are you doing here? You aren’t even dressed!’
Why this detail shocks him, why it even registers against everything else, he doesn’t know. Perhaps it’s just because this is Lan Zhan, who resisted being less than properly dressed when they were trapped bleeding in a cave, and who is now out here before unfriendly eyes, wearing only the clothes from his sickbed. It’s jarring. It’s wrong.
‘It’s poison.’
‘What?’
Wen Qing focuses still on his chest, where one of her hands has managed to stay.
‘You’ve ingested poison,’ she says, her words clipped. ‘It wasn’t there when you left us.’
‘The antidote?’ Lan Zhan asks.
‘I don’t know which of several poisons this is.’ She pulls her hand away and looks him in the eye. ‘Did you eat or drink anything? Feel anything prick your skin?’
For all Wei Wuxian can gather his thoughts, she may as well be asking him to recall a past life. He remembers turmoil, anger, the need to get away. Little else.
‘He drank some wine. Could it be that? A-Cheng, where is the cup he drank from? Fetch it. Quickly!’
‘Shijie?’ he asks, but the dark smoke around him is thickening again.
Wen Qing is the only one mostly clear to him. Lan Zhan is a wavering line of hazed out light, and the shapes beside him could be Shijie and Jiang Cheng, but the whispers are growing back into wails and perhaps he imagined her voice.
‘I’ll go,’ Wen Qing says. He thinks she says. Her lips move mostly in time with the words. ‘You should stay back.’
Voices overlap, Lan Zhan and Shijie and Jiang Cheng, and maybe others. If they’re real, if people are really so close to him, they should move back. Wen Qing is right.
‘Get away,’ he orders. Mutters. He isn’t sure how it comes out, or if he really says it at all. A deep breath lets him try again, through the blood in his mouth and the pain in his throat. ‘Away!’
‘A-Xian-‘
The words warp, even those he’s almost sure are from the resentful energy, and he can’t summon any more of his own, but the wavering light moves between Wei Wuxian and the other shapes, blocking them. More sound, pleading or shouting or both, and he isn’t sure if he’s trying to move towards those shapes or away, but either way he’s stumbling. He’s stumbling and falling and-
He's caught.
Lan Zhan stands clear and real before him, his hands holding Wei Wuxian by the shoulders, holding him steady, and the look in his eyes is just the same as it has been since…
How long ago did Lan Zhan start to love him?
‘Lan Zhan,’ he manages, ‘how long?’
The only response he gets is a shifting of one of those hands from his shoulder, down to his sternum. To… There’s a reason he doesn’t want anyone doing that, if he could only think through the noise, but the whispers and screams are claws now, hooking into his brain, peeling it away in ribbons, and screaming was involved in the reason, wasn’t it? There was screaming. A long stretch of screaming. Then it stopped.
‘Wei Ying!’
Now, one hand is on his shoulder and the other holds his face, tilting it, and Lan Zhan is suddenly so much taller. How strange. Has so much time passed, somewhere away from where Wei Wuxian has been existing?
The voices tell him too much time has gone, that he should already be moving to…to do something, something vital, before it’s too late, but the ground is hard beneath his back and Lan Zhan has dissolved into the sky, and he’s too busy marvelling at the rightness of that to listen to talk of revenge.
Wei Ying collapses slowly, first sagging, then falling, and Wangji folds himself to follow. He seems unable to remove his hand from Wei Ying’s face, his fingers slipping from beneath the chin until they curve around a cheek. His other hand is braced against the ground by Wei Ying’s shoulder, whatever energy the spell grants him choosing this moment to pull back.
‘His core,’ he says, unable to tell whether he has spoken loudly enough to be heard, or so loudly he has spilled Wei Ying’s secret to all those watching.
Wen Qing kneels beside him, her expression taut and still. She doesn’t reach out a hand to check Wei Ying, her hands flat on her thighs, but she does keep her gaze on him as she speaks. Quietly.
‘He didn’t want anyone to know,’ she says. ‘He’s refused to let me tell anyone and would not thank you for spilling this secret.’
He must have spoken quietly enough not to have already done so, then. Even with his thoughts turning foggy around the edges, he knows that, at least, is good.
‘How?’
Wen Qing doesn’t answer.
‘Wen Zhuliu,’ Wangji offers, because the reports from Yiling are clear the man was there. But even as he says it, something about it sounds the wrong note. Jiang Wanyin doesn’t know, and how could he not, had Wen Zhuliu destroyed Wei Ying’s golden core during the burning of Lotus Pier? Both young men had been there, and Wen Zhuliu never hid his use of that skill. Wen Chao would have had the man flaunt it.
As his thoughts race, his hands remain where they are. It’s a fact he notes distantly as unusual for himself, but he makes no move to break the contact. That would be…wrong. It’s wrong that only one of his hands is touching Wei Ying.
Without meaning to, he forces enough stability into his body to lift his other hand from the ground and rest it on Wei Ying’s body instead, back over the spot where his golden core should be most strongly felt. That feels right. That is where his other hand should be.
He could not begin to explain why even if all the elders of the Lan Clan summoned him and demanded it.
‘Lady Wen, the cup.’
Jiang Wanyin’s voice is close, too close, and Wangji feels the urge to shift, to spin and face the intrusion with his sword. It’s an impulse he was already training himself to manage in that long year after the war ended the first time, but now it seems more that his body simply can’t react. It is right that he kneels here with his hands on Wei Ying, and nothing else can be done. He doesn’t even find it in himself to turn his head as an object is thrust into view between Wen Qing and him.
Reason tells him it must be the cup Wei Ying drank the poison from, of course, but it’s an unimportant conclusion.
As Wen Qing speaks again, her words smudged to sound alone, Wangji finds his focus on the sensation of skin under one set of fingertips, on the rougher texture of fabric under the other, and on the vital energies flowing through his own body and through Wei Ying’s.
The hollow where a golden core should sit is a gaping horror, but now the first shock of discovery is passing he finds that hollow is not a smooth cavern. Just as the Xuanwu’s cave had crevices and protrusions, so too the emptiness in Wei Ying has dips and jagged edges. It is not truly physical. Wangji is well aware that a golden core is not truly a thing of the flesh, not the way a heart or a lung is, but still there is a sense of roughness around the absence, as though a person could run a finger along them and cut their own skin. Leave a drop of themselves behind.
That thought is barely formed before he feels the same surge of power that carried him out of his sickbed and deposited him here rise again. It did not leave him as he thought, but pulled back the way the sea pulls back before a tidal wave, now racing up and beyond its bounds, carrying Wangji with it. Higher and farther and higher again, out of his own skin and into Wei Ying, spilling into that coreless cavern, crashing him against those walls.
It’s a little like meditation, that sense of an image summoned to sharpness until it is almost real, but it’s also something like a dream, a vision that happens around and to you, over which you have no control and which, as you wake, is both more solid than the bed beneath you and less substantial than memory.
Wen Qing’s voice is almost nothing, now, but he can hear her just enough to register the rise in volume, the increase in sharpness, just before he realises what he’s sensing caught along those cavern walls.
Scraps of spiritual energy. Shreds of Wei Ying’s golden core. Tiny, so tiny as to be almost not there, but with the energy of the spell carrying him, Wangji feels them. He reaches for them and he…gathers them. Somehow. In a way he thinks he will never be able to explain to someone else.
He gathers them and as he does so he feels his own surging, shattered core catch on the juts, leaving small pools of itself behind in the dips, taking those scraps of Wei Ying’s core and tumbling them in with the new shreds until there is more attached to Wei Ying than before.
It rises in Wangji’s throat, this wash of energy and horror and sudden, painful hope, because it seems the spell has found a way to work, that it’s taking action in light of this discovery that Wei Ying has been torn from the proper path, and even as he feels it rip chunks from his own being, Wangji is thankful.
He is thankful because this is what he wished for, as he held that brand. He knows that now. He came back here to save Wei Ying and brought A-Yuan along to keep him safe, and so it doesn’t matter if Wangji is torn apart here, so close to where Wei Ying died before. This can be how Wangji dies, how his life and his golden core are used up, and he will let his soul go gladly as the final price, so long as the spell finally, truly, works. So long as Wei Ying is saved.
Just as he feels the power, of the spell, of his own core, of the blood in his body – any of those or all – high up under his jaw, choking him, Wei Ying’s eyes open. For a long, suspended moment he meets Wangji’s eyes, shocked and confused and…despairing. That is wrong. Wei Ying should never feel despair.
‘Lan Zhan.’
Wei Ying’s lips barely move, but his name rings loud enough to drown out a battle.
‘Wei Ying,’ he offers in return. He has no idea what his voice sounds like. He can’t hear himself over the roaring.
And it doesn’t matter. At that moment, the spell stops, and so does Wangji.