Chapter Text
(Full Moon Symbol ≊ Full Moon)
I shouldn’t have allowed Sizhui to accompany me after all, Wei Wuxian thinks. He could have kept this quiet devastation and disappointment to himself, and left Lan Sizhui a thread of hope for next year, instead of bringing him up to this cold and desolate mountain top while raising his hopes, only to shatter them in the end.
“How did you know to come here?” Lan Sizhui asks him suddenly.
Wei Wuxian tells him briefly of Lady Meng’s last words to him, before she had forced him back into the world of the living.
“When the moon is roundest and hangs lowest in the sky,” Lan Sizhui repeats, and glances upwards towards the moon. “Maybe that is referring to the end of tonight.”
“Perhaps,” Wei Wuxian allows. He withdraws two warming talismans he had prepared earlier, hands one to Lan Sizhui, and keeps one for himself.
It activates, and spreads a light layer of warmth underneath his robes, like they had been freshly taken off the clothesline after a day of drying under the sun.
They find a comfortable spot to sit down in the tall grass, and settle down to wait.
(Full Moon Symbol ≊ Full Moon)
When Wei Wuxian blinks awake, it is still dark. The moon had fully risen in the sky and is now hanging directly overhead, full and omnipotent in her radiance. He had, apparently, dozed off for a little bit, having lain down in the grass waiting for something – anything – to happen. He glances over towards Lan Sizhui and sees he has also fallen asleep, curled softly inwards on himself in the grass. He freezes as a flash of white enters his peripheral vision.
A small white rabbit is hopping towards him through the tall grass, and with one flying leap lands squarely in his lap.
“Oof,” Wei Wuxian huffs out, and cradles the bunny on instinct. It’s soft and warm, surprisingly heavy, fur flawless and the purest white. “Who do we have here?” he coos softly at it.
The bunny stares directly back at him with steady golden eyes, nose twitching.
The vague image of last night’s dream flashes in front of his eyes. He wonders if he is, in fact, currently still dreaming.
The bunny nibbles pointedly on the front of his robes.
“You want something to eat?”
Wei Wuxian fishes around in his sleeve for the small bundle of lotus seeds he’d tucked away in the morning. He unwraps the handkerchief on his palm, and holds it out in front of the small ball of fur in his lap.
The bunny sniffs at the lotus seeds, and then opens its mouth – and a small golden pellet tumbles out, looking somewhat like the pre-made medicine balls the Lan healers kept trying to talk him into taking regularly.
“What’s this?” Wei Wuxian asks. The bunny stares at him, and nudges at his hand.
“You want me to have this?”
The bunny nibbles on the edge of the handkerchief pointedly.
He may be dreaming, but even in a dream he isn’t going to put a mysterious golden ball into his mouth based on the recommendations of a rabbit. He leaves it where it is, mixed into the small bundle of lotus seeds. The bunny’s nose is twitching vigorously, and it looks almost angry. It butts against his hand again.
“You sure you don’t want a lotus seed?” Wei Wuxian asks, feeling rather silly and strange for talking to the bunny like it could understand him. “My son peeled them himself you know, they’re very special. You should feel lucky I’m sharing it with you.”
And he really has to be dreaming, because the bunny reacts like it truly had understood him – upon the phrase “my son” it turns in Wei Wuxian’s lap to look at Lan Sizhui, still fast asleep in the grass, Suibian clasped loosely in his hands.
Wei Wuxian holds out the lotus seeds again, and this time the bunny delicately takes one, and turns back around to face Wei Wuxian as it begins to chew.
And then –
The air is knocked out of him as he is flattened into the grass by a suddenly large and heavy body on top of him. He smells gut-wrenchingly familiar sandalwood.
“Lan Zhan?” he breathes out, when his lungs decide to cooperate and he can draw in air again. His arms come up and curl around the warm, heavy weight on top of him, and his hands do not pass through mist.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says against his neck, and lifts himself up slightly on his arms to take his weight off of Wei Wuxian’s chest.
He looks different, Wei Wuxian realizes. In all his previous dreams, Lan Wangji had appeared exactly as he had the day he vanished. The Lan Wangji before him is dressed not in Gusu Lan robes but in layers of rippling silver silk.
Over the roar of his pulse pounding in his ears, Wei Wuxian hears himself ask, “Am I dreaming? Wait, that’s a stupid question. If I was dreaming you would definitely tell me I wasn’t dreaming. But then, I didn’t think I had the imagination to dream something like this up.”
One of Lan Wangji’s hands come up to tuck a flyaway strand of hair behind his ear, and then shifts lower to firmly cup the nape of his neck.
“You are not dreaming,” Lan who-is-perhaps-a-figment-of-Wei-Wuxian’s-imagination Wangji says, and leans in to kiss him just before Wei Wuxian can pinch himself on the arm.
Lan Wangji tastes like honey, and lotus seed, and salt. Wei Wuxian realizes the salt is because he is crying.
“I don’t understand,” he says plaintively into Lan Wangji’s mouth, when they separate for air. If this is a dream, it is one cruel in its sweetness.
“Papa?” Lan Sizhui’s voice, quiet and drowsy, floats out from behind them.
Lan Wangji rolls off of him into the grass, into a textbook Lan sitting posture. Wei Wuxian sits up with much less grace.
Lan Sizhui is staring at Lan Wangji with wide eyes, his hands clenched onto Suibian.
“Sizhui, I’m really not dreaming?” Wei Wuxian asks dazedly. Lan Wangji reaches out to take his hand. His grasp is as solid as the mountain beneath them.
“A-Yuan?” Lan Wangji says softly, eyes drinking in Lan Sizhui as he clambers up and hesitantly moves closer in.
Lan Sizhui looks hesitantly towards Wei Wuxian, and sees everything he needs to know on his face. With a small cry, he flings himself forward onto Lan Wangji, and Lan Wangji is pulling him in, and pulling Wei Wuxian in as well.
Wei Wuxian is crying, in relief and disbelief, his entire body shuddering with the force of his tears. Thirteen years of searching, of living with his heart on a knife’s edge, each year hoping and failing and hoping and failing to grasp onto Lan Wangji, moving through the courts of death feeling like he was taking one step closer to truly dying himself every time he emerged empty-handed.
The three of them stay like that for a long, immeasurable moment in time, clinging onto each other, until at long last their eyes have dried. The sky has gone from the vast dark expanse of night to the blushing greys of early dawn.
Lan Wangji retrieves from the grass the handkerchief containing the remaining few lotus seeds and the golden pellet. He plucks the pellet out from the lotus seeds, and presses it into Wei Wuxian’s hands. “Wei Ying, take this.”
“What is it?” Wei Wuxian asks, as Lan Sizhui looks on curiously.
“It is for your core,” Lan Wangji says. “Not immortality. Only to revive what was lost.”
He lifts Wei Wuxian’s hand with his own, uses it to press the pellet to his mouth. Wei Wuxian has no strength left in him to disagree with anything Lan Wangji may want, and parts his lips.
The taste of sweet nectar hits his tongue, and a pleasant warmth spreads down his throat, suffusing his chest. He lets out a soft, involuntary gasp. In his chest, a small sun blooms.
As the last vestiges of night fade away, Lan Wangji starts to explain.
That he had returned to the Jingshi earlier than expected, and had stepped through the doors just as Xue Yang had lifted up the loose floorboard to reveal the jars of Emperor’s Smile beneath.
That they had fought over the elixir, that Lan Wangji had secured it back in his hands, and then Xue Yang had lunged towards him with the desperation of a cornered animal, and he had raised Bichen on reflex, and shining blade had met the long pale stretch of Xue Yang’s throat.
That the glass bottle of the elixir had broken in the tussle, that he hadn’t meant to drink it – only to save hold the dregs of what remained in his mouth, and pass it to Wei Wuxian.
But the second the first drop of elixir touched his tongue, he had been summoned.
“Summoned?” Wei Wuxian asks, grasping onto the most crucial phrase.
Lan Wangji glances up at the last, silvery echo of the moon in the early dawn sky.
“Summoned by Lady Chang’e,” Lan Wangji answers quietly. “Her husband had also accomplished a great feat, and been rewarded with an elixir for immortality. But he grew hungrier for power, and she grew afraid of what he might become if he lived forever. And she misunderstood. She thought that I was like her.”
“And she – just kept you, for thirteen years?” Wei Wuxian frowns. He’s remembering the dream he’d had, of a woman holding a white rabbit who had disappeared in a flash of golden light.
Lan Wangji is gazing at Lan Sizhui, who has been listening to his story with rapt attention.
“Time passes differently, in the heavenly realm,” he says wearily. “It has only been thirteen days for me.”
He brushes a hand across Lan Sizhui’s cheek with tender bittersweetness.
Says to him, “You’ve grown up well.”
Thinks, I have missed so much.
“What – what changed her mind?” Wei Wuxian asks. He’s too scared to ask his real question, which is – what if she tries to take you back?
“You,” Lan Wangji says simply.
Wei Wuxian blinks.
“I dreamed of her, I think,” he says slowly. “She said, ‘I see Meng Jiang was right.’”
Lan Wangji is careful of Lan Sizhui between them, and doesn’t lean forward to kiss Wei Wuxian as he wants, but leans in to press their foreheads together.
“Lady Meng visited. She told her you walked through all ten courts of hell searching for me,” he murmurs, a little wonderingly. “Without even considering the story Xue Yang told you. That kind of faith has a power. It allowed her to send me back.”
Lan Wangji places a hand over Wei Wuxian’s chest, above his dantian where his golden core has flickered back like the embers of a banked fire stirred back to blazing flames. “She hoped healing your core would be a small measure of recompense.”
Wei Wuxian exhales, shaky. He still can’t quite believe Lan Wangji is back in front of him, warm and real and alive, as beautiful as the day he’d gone. He would have been glad of his return, would have burnt incense and offerings at an altar to Chang’e for the remainder of his life, even without the return of his core.
He’s holding Sizhui’s hand with his right hand. With his left, he clasps onto Lan Wangji’s hand pressed into his chest, threads their fingers together. He thinks he won’t feel secure without maintaining at least one point of contact with him for a long, long while.
(Full Moon Symbol ≊ Full Moon)
The moon has completely vanished like gossamer blown away into the autumn breeze. The sun has begun its slow ascent up into the sky.
Wei Wuxian thinks about Chang’e. He can’t muster up any anger towards her, despite the fact that she had cost the two of them thirteen long years, had caused Sizhui to grow up always half-hoping for one more person to join them at the dinner table for Mid-Autumn.
Instead, he wonders if she had gazed down from the moon as her husband grew wrinkled and white-haired without her, if she had ever thought to cross Lady Meng’s bridge to see where he went in his next life. Wonders if she ever thinks about what might have been, if she might have been mistaken, if she lives with regret.
Wonders how lonely she is, to have noticed even their small corner of the world and leap at the chance for a companion. Wonders what she would give to spend one more Mid-Autumn together with her husband. Wonders what she felt when she returned his husband to him.
They split the rest of the lotus seeds between the three of them, then begin the descent down the mountain. It’s slow, and arduous, as they only have one sword between the three of them and must go on foot.
But none of them mind the slowness, or the dense trees and undergrowth they must carefully navigate through before they can make it back onto the footpath for the remainder of the way down. It could take them the full day, full week, full month to make the descent, and it would be alright, and they would be happy to do it.
After all, they have reunited, and the empty space that has been at Wei Wuxian’s side like a ghost for thirteen years has been filled, and they have all the years to come stretched out in front of them – shining and boundless as the sea.
(Fallen Leaf ) (Sparkles ) (Full Moon Symbol ≊ Full Moon) (Sparkles ) (Fallen Leaf )