Chapter Text
PART I.
Lan Zhan is eight years old when the red thread first appears on his wrist.
It happens when he is practicing calligraphy in the lanshi, silent alongside the other students. As part of this week’s classwork, he and the other disciples his age must copy the Lan sect rules a hundred times each until shufu approves their penmanship, then recite them out loud from rote memory.
It is when Lan Zhan is copying the fifty-second sect rule that the new addition to his wrist hooks his attention.
Running is forbidden in the Cloud Recesses, and Lan Zhan is very, very good at following the rules, so when class finally ends, he does not sprint to his brother’s quarters. He walks very, very quickly, his heart pounding sickly in his chest the whole time.
“Gege,” he says when he enters, and he means to explain what’s happened in a manner that’s detailed and controlled, but his voice chokes off and all he can do is wordlessly hold up his wrist, where the scarlet thread is a visible brand for anyone to see. He had tried pulling it off, of course, but his fingers had slipped right through the string, over and over. The pale inner skin of his wrist is scratched red from his efforts.
Lan Huan pauses in the middle of organizing his scrolls; his eyes widen at the sight of his wrist. “Didi.”
“What do I,” Lan Zhan says helplessly. “What should I do?”
Lan Huan abandons his task, rounds the desk to cross over to Lan Zhan as he appraises his expression with concern. “A-Zhan, you are...not pleased?”
“Of course not,” Lan Zhan bursts out as Lan Huan stops in front of him. Louder than is well-mannered. His voice breaks a little over the words.
“Why not?” Lan Huan asks, in calm and soothing tones; only twelve years old, but he still exudes a practiced paternity that Lan Zhan has never questioned. “Having a thread is something to celebrate, no? A red thread only means that someone in the world is your intended person.”
Lan Zhan stares at him, his shoulders drooping and a crumpling feeling in his chest. “I do not...want that.”
A slight frown pulls at Lan Huan’s brow as he asks again, “Why not?”
“I don’t ever want to be married,” Lan Zhan insists.
At this age, he knows he is still considered a child, but he is not so young that he does not know himself. His effect on others. The degree to which he values his uninterrupted space. The thought of forcibly sharing himself with another is alien and arresting, like being unexpectedly thrown into Cold Spring.
From Lan Huan comes the expected response. “You’re too young to know that, didi. When you’re older, matters like marriage will make more sense.”
“I’m not,” Lan Zhan says stubbornly. “I hear what the elders say.” He has seen his father’s coal-black shackle, the colder black of his eyes. “I know the red thread’s love is a bad thing.”
“It’s not,” Lan Huan protests, his frown deepening. “Love is a very good thing. A-Zhan, why do you think that?”
When Lan Zhan thinks of love, he thinks of frostbitten knees, a closed door, the saltwater press of stifled tears. He thinks of his father, his empty eyes and his long sleeves. When he thinks of marriage, he thinks of the tired lines crowded around his mother’s eyes, already fading from his memory. He thinks of her house, beautifully adorned and empty.
Lan Zhan does not say anything in reply to his brother, just bunches his fists by his sides. Lan Huan steps closer to him and drops a light hand on his shoulder.
“In any case, your soulmate thread won’t matter until years from now,” Lan Huan says placatingly. “Try not to think about it, okay? Soon you’ll get used to seeing it, and you won’t think about it at all.”
◈ ◈ ◈
Among the cultivation sects and beyond, the soulmate threads are a shared and common knowledge.
Like anyone else, Lan Zhan has known the colors well from a very young age, and has even seen a few on the wrists of his sect peers — light and faint, but nonetheless visible. Blue for a familial soulmate. Silver for a friend. Red for a lover.
Red threads are rare in the Lan sect, but always a communal source of intrigue in the instances when they do appear — a combination of the GusuLan’s characteristic, tight-lipped disapproval about such matters and a natural but grudging curiosity. Red threads without fail draw hushed speculation, no matter what the sect rules dictate about gossiping.
No one speaks of the black thread. In their limited visits, his father had always donned long, draping sleeves, so Lan Wangji had only caught a glimpse of it twice, charred into his wrist like a shackle. He had known, even from a young age, that the black thread is the worst kind of sentence: a physical and permanent reminder that a soulmate is beyond where they can ever be reached again.
Later that evening, lying straight-backed on his bed, Lan Zhan holds his wrist up against his paper lantern, studies the blue spider crawl of his veins nested in the orange backlight of his skin — and the red thread. So far, he’s noticed that it sometimes fades from view when he twists his wrist, as though shifting in and out of existence with different sources of light.
He had tried ripping it off with his fingers, with his teeth, but perhaps it’s not quite so physical as that. He has only recently started his cultivation lessons, but the elders have informed him, rather proudly, that his golden core is unusually strong for his age. So Lan Zhan closes his eyes and reaches out with the beating ember of his qi.
With his spiritual energy, Lan Zhan plucks at the thread like a guqin string. He feels it hum, then vibrate out into the vanishing silence, meeting only emptiness.
Then, after another still moment, he feels the thread tug on the other end, an unmistakable response. Almost a gentle tease. As if someone is saying, Hello to you too.
◈ ◈ ◈
Lan Zhan does not touch the thread from that night onward. Unfortunately, this means little to the person on the other end, who tugs at the thread constantly, now that this new trick has been revealed to them. Annoying, insistent, almost like they’re trying to exhaust a response out of him. His person does not discriminate based on time of day, either — the string is tugged during morning classes, during his midday guqin practice, during his afternoon cultivation training, during silent mealtime in the evening, during his pre-sleep rituals.
By the end of the first week, Lan Zhan has ground his teeth so much that a permanent ache has taken up residence in his jaw.
“Gege,” he says to Lan Huan after that first week. It is not a whine — he does not whine. Excessive complaining is prohibited. “He will not leave me alone.”
Lan Huan blinks, as though startled, then looks at Lan Zhan with a complicated expression. He asks, a little carefully, “Didi knows that it is a boy?”
Lan Zhan’s teeth click shut, and blood rushes to his face, a sudden roar in his ears. He had not. Meant to say that. He doesn’t know why his automatic assumption is that his person is a boy. It’s just that whenever he pictures the figure on the other end, it’s a boy’s face, bright eyes and a taunting, roguish grin.
“I,” Lan Zhan says, and flounders more.
Lan Huan rushes to end his flustered silence. “I was only curious, A-Zhan. I didn’t know if the person on the other end had done something that let you know their gender.”
Lan Zhan hesitates, then says, “No,” and Lan Huan smoothly lets the subject drop, but Lan Zhan can’t shake the lingering, mortified sense for days after the conversation that — based on Lan Huan’s startled reaction, how quickly he had tried to mask his surprise — he’s revealed something damning about himself. Something he perhaps is too young to fully understand the implications of.
It could be a girl, couldn’t it? The red thread is for…lovers, after all, Lan Zhan reminds himself with a cringe. Thus far, he has only seen marriage between men and women in his sect.
It’s only that, for whatever reason, Lan Zhan cannot picture a girl on the other end, teasingly tugging his string. He does not know many girls — the men and women are educated separately in the Cloud Recesses, so he does not know how girls behave. Maybe that’s why he can’t picture it being a girl. That must be it. He will explain it to gege later.
◈ ◈ ◈
It isn’t long at all before his sect peers notice the new addition to his wrist, before the whispers follow him like a hush of rainfall.
Like a ripple of wildfire, the elders know within days. One visits him in his quarters to give him a stern lecture on the importance of discipline and restraint, on the significance of his headband, how he must guard his heart closely and his carnal desires even moreso.
Lan Zhan nods obediently but thinks, through the entire conversation, I am eight years old.
Sometimes, he can’t shake the sense, when the elders are looking at him, that they are imagining his father in his stead.
◈ ◈ ◈
As the months pass — and in a slow trickle, the years — the hourly string-tugging abates, much to Lan Zhan’s fierce relief.
However, one ritual remains. Every night before hai shi, as Lan Zhan moves through his nightly rituals for sleep — meditating, undressing, bathing, combing his hair, untying his ribbon — there’s a small but unmistakable tug at his wrist. Almost as if the other person is aware of his sleep schedule and is saying good night.
Much against his will, Lan Zhan comes to anticipate it: the tiny thrill of knowing someone else is out there, an unknown face in an unknown place, thinking of him. He spends his days alone, but that small, tethering pull each night is a strange comfort.
Every once in a while, he tugs back.
◈ ◈ ◈
Then, when he’s thirteen, the tugging stops.
Lan Zhan does not tug, not wanting to impose on the person at the other end, but the anxiety of this absence consumes him, enough so that after a few weeks of the silence, he asks his xiongzhang, as they quietly share tea, if it’s possible something had happened to his person.
“Is your thread still red?” Lan Xichen asks, and Lan Zhan hesitates, then nods. “Then they should be okay. If they were gone from this world, your thread would turn black.”
Maybe it’s the fact that they’re both growing up, Lan Zhan reasons, as he tries to fall asleep that night. Although he does not know anything about this person, he thinks that they may be close to his age. Maybe his person had decided the tugging was a childish ritual, or had grown bored of Lan Zhan’s intermittent responses and stopped. Maybe his person had forgotten about him.
Despite himself, Lan Zhan can’t help but house in his chest the new loneliness of these nights.
◈ ◈ ◈
When he’s fifteen, mere days before he receives his courtesy name, Lan Zhan’s father dies.
Lan Zhan’s grief around it is curiously empty, lake-smooth. A hollow mouth in his chest. He feels sad about his father’s passing because he is expected to, rather than that he misses someone he hardly knew. The truth of the matter is that he had known his father far more from sect lore than from personal interaction.
The week of the funeral passes in a blur, a collection of observations and images as slippery as water: A pearl-white banner draped over his father’s house. The cloy of incense and joss paper burning. The tomb-like silence as he had knelt in vigil, for hours, by his father’s stiff, silent body. The crimson red of the thread on Lan Zhan’s wrist, a disrespectful streak of color against his white mourning robes. Too glaringly cheery for current events. He keeps it tucked away, out of sight, inside his sleeve.
The night after the funeral finally ends, as he waits for sleep, Lan Zhan tugs the string. Silence. He tugs again, and again, in a sudden desperate need to know his soulmate is there, still alive.
He waits for a long time with his breath caged tight in his lungs, staring wide-eyed and awake at the gingko-shaped indigo patterns on his ceiling before he starts to drift, his body succumbing to exhaustion.
Right before he drops off, he feels it, the gentlest pull at his wrist. It’s possible that he dreams it.
◈ ◈ ◈
Only months later, the Cloud Recesses are in a flurry.
Well, flurry may be too strong of a word for the reserved movements of Lan disciples, but there’s a suppressed, anxious energy in the air as Lan Wangji’s sect prepares accommodations to host other young disciples for the annual guest lecture. It’s the first year that Lan Wangji himself will be able to participate in classes, to mingle with disciples from other sects.
He is not looking forward to it.
“This will be a good opportunity for you, Wangji,” his xiongzhang tries to encourage him after the silence of their evening meal. “You spend far too much time alone. This ge is starting to worry about you. It will be nice to meet other disciples your age, don’t you agree?”
“Hm,” is all Lan Wangji says. He does not want xiongzhang to worry over him for ridiculous reasons, so he will try. Unhappily, but he will.
◈ ◈ ◈
The night before the first day of lecture, a delinquent breaks into the Cloud Recesses.
Fortunately, Lan Wangji has been trained as disciplinarian for the past year, and he excels exceptionally in this role, so he catches the boy red-handed with little effort.
“You wouldn’t truly be so unforgiving to an honored guest, would you?” the boy is saying as Lan Wangji holds him at swordpoint. He’s a talker. Clearly accustomed to charming his way out of situations, earnest white flashes of teeth, wheedling tones, smiling eyes.
It’s very lucky for his sect that Lan Wangji is impervious to being swayed. Anyone else might have let this reprobate go.
“You have already broken four of our rules,” Lan Wangji replies, unmoved. “Is that the behavior of an honored guest?”
The boy has the gall to pout at him, as though he doesn’t have a blade pointed to his throat.
“Lan-gongzi,” the boy says, his lower lip still slightly jutted. It would be a nearly endearing expression, to anyone who was not Lan Wangji. “How am I supposed to know your rules? In my Jiang sect, offering liquor would be taken as a sign of friendship. How was I to know that I’d be punished for my generosity?”
Lan Wangji does not buy a word out of this boy’s mouth. But it’s good to know he’s from the YunmengJiang sect. He will keep a close watch on its disciples from here on, especially this boy.
“You will accompany me to receive punishment,” Lan Wangji says, and sheathes Bichen when it becomes apparent the boy won’t attack him. “Perhaps then you will have a firmer understanding of the guest etiquette here.”
“Ah,” the boy replies. “No, I don’t think so.” And he takes off with a wild laugh, flying to the next rooftop. Lan Wangji is momentarily stunned by the sheer audacity of it before he gives chase.
They spar on the next two roofs, and Lan Wangji is infuriated, a little amazed to find his strikes matched blow for blow, interspersed with effortless grins from the boy through the clash of their swords — like he’s enjoying this. The boy’s style is markedly different from his own, a Jiang form of fighting, but he adapts to the Lan style with unflappable ease, picking up the forms by the second.
“Ah, your skills are formidable, Lan-gongzi,” the boy calls over the sharp clang of steel. “Who is it that I have the honor of fighting with?”
Lan Wangji rips away from him, embarrassed to find he’s heaving for breath. The boy is as well, and the playful lilt to his features remains, but he watches Lan Wangji with a closer interest than before, not so dismissive. Despite himself, Lan Wangji’s heart gallops faster in his chest.
“Lan Zhan, courtesy name Wangji,” Lan Wangji replies coolly. He doesn’t often pull rank to gain an upper hand, but he’s angry and a little put out, so he feels rewarded by the slight widening of the boy’s eyes as he recognizes the name.
Then the boy’s mouth curls up, brushing the edge of condescending, and says, “I didn’t realize I was in the presence of Lan royalty, Lan er-gongzi.” In an exaggerated, sweeping motion, he salutes.
It’s outrageously disrespectful, given Lan Wangji’s title and status. Lan Wangji’s fist tightens around Bichen.
“And who do I have the pleasure of reporting?” Lan Wangji asks through his teeth, and ignores the strange flip-flop in his chest when the boy throws his head back and laughs with genuine mirth.
The boy is pretty. It’s a fact, an objectively true one, that should not register or matter, and it makes Lan Wangji angrier when the conscious thought crosses his mind, but the truth of it cannot be denied. The boy is pretty, and he knows it, and he uses it to his advantage in situations such as this one, and Lan Wangji will not be charmed or swayed by it.
“Wei Ying, courtesy name Wuxian,” the boy answers with a wide, moonlit smile. “YunmengJiang’s head disciple, if you’d like to write that in your report.”
Lan Wangji blinks. That explains the boy’s aptitude with a sword. But does the Jiang sect really allow someone so undisciplined and irreverent to lead its disciples? Is the boy lying?
Lying or not, Lan Wangji silences him, dumps his liquor, and drags him to meet shufu and xiongzhang in the hanshi. The boy, Wei Wuxian, pitches a fit the entire time; he sulks when he’s reprimanded, casts about wildly as he retells the events of the evening to his uncle and brother. Mutinous. Bratty. Too loud, exaggerated, talks too much. Lan Wangji cannot stand him.
Wei Wuxian is given a punishment in the library, a standard assignment of repeated rule-copying. It’s completely unfathomable to Lan Wangji, but the boy seems to have recovered his good cheer by the end of the conversation, brightly bidding Lan Wangji a good night as he scampers off to find his siblings’ quarters. As if nothing from the past shichen had just happened.
“I have a good feeling about that Wei-gongzi,” xiongzhang tells Lan Wangji moments later with a serene, almost mischievous expression, and Lan Wangji is shocked speechless. He storms off to the jingshi, too indignant to indulge whatever ridiculous potential that his brother imagines he sees in the Jiang boy.
That night, as Lan Wangji tries to fall asleep, he scowls at his ceiling, his muscles still too tense from the events of the evening, from their sparring. He thinks about how Wei Wuxian had looked silenced and on his knees, his mouth twisted and his brows pulled together. About the mercurial dance of his moods, from cheerily bright to hotly indignant to childishly sullen, each a performance on his expressive face.
Who does he think he is? Lan Wangji wonders to himself in a quiet rage, and he suddenly feels a pull at his wrist. He holds up his arm and blinks at the thread, certain that he’s mistaken. It’s been a long time since he’s heard from his person, since his father’s funeral, but sure enough, the tugging starts up again, insistent and almost obnoxious.
Lan Wangji isn’t sure whether to be more pleased or annoyed at this development.
He tugs back once, sharp, as if to say, Shut up.
It is far past his bedtime, after all.
Three quick tugs from the other person, a petulant cajoling. Pay attention to meee.
With a brief spasm of horror, Lan Wangji realizes he’d heard the silent plea in Wei Wuxian’s whiny, wheedling voice.
Of course that wretched boy would ruin this part of his evening, too. Lan Wangji slips into a furious meditation, blocking out all other sensations until the tugging finally goes away, like the person had either fallen asleep or given up. Eventually, Lan Wangji, too, drifts off into a fitful, restless sleep.
◈ ◈ ◈
As to be expected, Wei Wuxian starts causing problems in the Cloud Recesses almost right away.
It takes two days for him to be thrown out of lecture for suggesting alternative, unorthodox cultivation methods. Two days for Lan Wangji to watch his uncle turn a sickly shade of violet that he has, in his entire life, been yet to witness. Two days for Lan Wangji to be saddled with the unenviable — but grimly necessary — task of rehabilitating Wei Wuxian’s behavior.
Wei Wuxian tries to sneak off to the back mountain before his first afternoon of punishment. When Lan Wangji searches for him, he finds Wei Wuxian in the middle of wrangling with a poor, helpless pheasant. Lan Wangji physically drags him to the library pavilion as Wei Wuxian whines in his ear the whole time.
“Such a brute, Lan er-gongzi,” Wei Wuxian sniffs at Lan Wangji when he takes up a seated position at one of the desks in the library. “It’s good to know your gentlemanly reputation is nothing but a huge farce.”
“Quiet,” Lan Wangji says icily.
Wei Wuxian flashes him a grin across the library, a shaft of sunlight bouncing off water. “Or what? You’ll silence me again?”
“Yes,” Lan Wangji says, and digs his nose into his book to ignore Wei Wuxian’s grunting and moaning.
Mercifully, Wei Wuxian stays quiet as he grinds ink and starts on his task, but of course it doesn’t last. Not even a quarter shichen after, Wei Wuxian wanders across the library to sit next to Lan Wangji’s desk.
“Wangji-xiong,” Wei Wuxian says, tugging at his sleeve.
Lan Wangji ignores him.
“Lan Wangji,” Wei Wuxian tries again.
Lan Wangji pictures a clear, undisturbed cold spring. He envisions sinking into its silent, glacial depths.
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian chirps, too loud, and Lan Wangji does flinch at this, the shock of over-familiarity in it.
“There we go,” Wei Wuxian says with a self-satisfied curl of his lips as Lan Wangji turns to glare at him. It’s the first time Lan Wangji has been so close to him. The bow of his mouth is rosebud-pink, very plush. His eyes are gray, glinting with mischief. Quick and lively, like sun catching the silver backs of darting minnows. Lan Wangji returns to reading, ignoring the observations.
“Or would you prefer Lan er-gege?” Wei Wuxian wonders aloud, and walks two fingers along the desk toward Lan Wangji’s hand.
Lan Wangji silences him.
Wei Wuxian gives a stifled groan of protest and reaches out again, spreading his fingers wide and placing his hand directly on Lan Wangji’s scroll to stop him reading. Very obnoxious, and Lan Wangji almost slaps him away, but the motion causes Wei Wuxian’s sleeve to slip, and Lan Wangji blinks, momentarily arrested by what he sees.
A faint but unmistakable red thread.
He lifts the silencing spell and does smack Wei Wuxian’s hand away, then swivels to stare at him. Wei Wuxian harrumphs at him and cradles his hand close to his chest with a petulant expression.
“Your wrist,” Lan Wangji says — unable to stop himself from asking, or to keep the grudging curiosity from his voice. In his whole life, he’s had yet to meet someone else his age who has the red thread.
“Huh?” Wei Wuxian asks, and squints at him. Then he blinks in realization. “Oh! You mean this?”
He peels his sleeve back and holds his wrist up, where the red thread pulses against his tan skin.
“Red,” Lan Wangji says, still angry with Wei Wuxian, but the question in his tone unmistakable.
“Yeah,” Wei Wuxian replies with a bright smile, seeming eager to have finally captured Lan Wangji’s attention. “It means that I’ll get to fall in love one day.”
Lan Wangji blinks again, then scowls. “Ridiculous.”
“What’s ridiculous?” Wei Wuxian protests. “That’s what it means! Don’t tell me you Lans don’t have red threads here.”
“We do,” Lan Wangji says coldly, and leaves it at that.
“I think it’s nice,” Wei Wuxian says, rocking his bent-up knee back and forth. He sucks on his lower lip thoughtfully before he adds, “It’s romantic. It means that I’m meant to love somebody out in the world, and they’re guaranteed to love me in return.”
There’s a hot, squirming pressure building in Lan Wangji’s chest. The heat of it creeps to his ears and steadily burns. How can Wei Wuxian listen to himself talk this way? It’s absurd.
“What’s that face for, Wangji-xiong?” Wei Wuxian asks, tilting his head to survey him. “You don’t believe in soulmates?”
“Of course I do,” Lan Wangji answers, irritated. The existence of soulmate threads is an irrefutable fact.
“You don’t believe in romance, then,” Wei Wuxian tries.
“In fiction, perhaps,” Lan Wangji says coolly. “Many other matters take precedence over love.”
He’s well aware he’s saying too much, being lured out into this conversation like a wary mouse as Wei Wuxian circles him like a smug cat. He finds, for whatever reason, that he cannot stop himself.
“Wow, you Lans are so boring,” Wei Wuxian replies, sounding appalled. “So vapid and stuffy! What’s the point of anything if not for love?”
Lan Wangji stares at him, utterly taken aback. Wei Wuxian meets his gaze, earnest and a little challenging. He really believes what he’s saying, not just spouting shameless nonsense for the sake of annoying Lan Wangji.
Then there’s a teasing hook of Wei Wuxian’s lips, and Lan Wangji at once senses danger.
Wei Wuxian slithers closer to him, leaning forward on Lan Wangji’s desk on both of his elbows.
“Or,” he says in a low, silken voice, “could it be that Lan er-gongzi is jealous he doesn’t have a red thread?”
“Shut up,” Lan Wangji snaps, flinching away from his proximity. Too close, too warm — he wants to flee, to unsheathe his sword and fight.
“I can only imagine what your soulmate would be like, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says laughingly, a shimmer of sound close to his ear. “Oh, god, there’d be two of you in the world. That I would like to see.”
Lan Wangji doesn’t know why he does what he does next; there’s something about Wei Wuxian that makes him desperate to grapple for the upper hand, in a childish, immature way he’s never experienced. For that reason, he yanks back his sleeve and holds up his wrist, and feels a vicious tug of satisfaction to see the surprise register on Wei Wuxian’s face.
“You too, Ji-xiong?” Wei Wuxian asks with a startled blink. “Huh. I wouldn’t have thought that you…”
There, Lan Wangji wants to say, smugly. That will teach you to think you know anything about me.
“Wow, your soulmate is gonna be so bored,” Wei Wuxian says, then starts laughing, too loud and unbridled for general tolerance, but especially for the observant silence of the library pavilion. Lan Wangji glares at him, seething with outrage.
Finally, Wei Wuxian leans out of his space, yawning with a creak in his jaw, an appealing flex of his jawline. Abruptly, Lan Wangji remembers that Wei Wuxian still has several lines of precepts to copy. He’s allowed himself to be goaded as he told himself he wouldn’t, letting himself become unforgivably distracted from his task.
Just as Lan Wangji is about to tell him off, Wei Wuxian asks, consideringly, “What do you think your soulmate is like, Lan Zhan?” and the line of inquiry brings Lan Wangji up short.
“Do you know anything about them?” Wei Wuxian continues.
Lan Wangji frowns. He reflects on the years of teasing tugs, his own furious despair over it as a child.
“Playful,” he says before he can stop himself. “Loyal.” The person had pulled his thread every night, after all, even when there was often no reply. “Persistent.”
Wei Wuxian laughs, looking a little surprised to be answered. “How can you know?”
“I just do,” Lan Wangji snaps, and returns to staring unseeingly at his scroll.
“I don’t know anything about mine,” Wei Wuxian says mournfully, either oblivious or uncaring to Lan Wangji’s lack of attention. “I think she must be quieter than me, though. More...subdued.”
That would not be a difficult achievement, Lan Wangji wants to say, but bites it back, doing his best to ignore Wei Wuxian’s words where they settle in his ears.
“I bet yours is another Lan,” Wei Wuxian tells him. “All that no-nonsense, no-romance stuff. I’m sure you two will be very happy together.”
The sarcasm earns Wei Wuxian another heated scowl, but Wei Wuxian just smiles sunnily back at him, clearly pleased to have snagged Lan Wangji’s attention again.
This conversation is over. For no reason other than petty spite, Lan Wangji silences Wei Wuxian again, ignoring the small tantrum in his periphery as he does his best to unhear everything from this last conversation.
Lan Wangji can’t help but pity the person destined to deal with Wei Wuxian forever, he thinks, watching through his eyelashes as Wei Wuxian finally returns to copying rules, his face blotched a deep red from resisting the silencing spell. It’s enough of a trying task just to try to modify his uncouth behavior. Whoever Wei Wuxian’s soulmate is will have to constantly keep him in check. To wake up every day to overbright laughter and teasing jibes and swooning, ridiculous notions about love.
It would be awful, Lan Wangji thinks, ignoring the unsteady rocking of his chest, like a boat on storm-tossed waters.
◈ ◈ ◈
A routine develops. Every day, Wei Wuxian — Wei Ying — causes a ruckus in class, enabled by the quietly cackling Nie Huaisang and some of the other Jiang disciples. Every day, he makes his library punishment as difficult as possible, for both himself and Lan Wangji. Every day, Lan Wangji silences him at least once.
Every day, Lan Wangji’s gaze snags on the red thread looped around Wei Ying’s wrist, and he wonders.
The routine is broken about a week and a half later when Wei Ying doesn’t show up to the library. This negligence is to be completely expected. Lan Wangji is going to give him a quarter shichen to show up before he goes out to hunt him down with his not-inconsiderable tracking skills.
Then, surprisingly, Wei Ying does appear, flushed and sweaty and panting for breath and his arms wound tight behind his back.
“You are late,” Lan Wangji says sternly at his arrival.
Wei Ying beams at him with all of his teeth, and Lan Wangji’s heart constricts. An odd reaction. Discomfort or anxiety, perhaps.
“I know how hard Lan er-gongzi has been working to oversee this humble student,” Wei Ying begins in ingratiating tones, crossing the library floor with his arms still behind his back. It cannot mean anything good. “So I thought I’d bring a small gift in thanks. Not Emperor’s Smile this time, I promise.”
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji warns, disliking the general direction of this.
Wei Ying’s arms snap out in front of him in a white blur, and suddenly, Lan Wangji’s lap is full of — soft, wriggling warmth. Warmth that is very much alive.
It renders Lan Wangji mute with shock. He can only stare downward, frozen to his seat.
“Bunnies!” Wei Ying says happily. “Look at how cute they are, Lan Zhan! I saw the two of them on the back mountain and knew I had to catch them for you, if only to see your face.”
“Why,” Lan Wangji says, strangely flustered as the rabbits poke and sniff their way across his lap; cloud-like balls of fur and wiggling, pink noses.
Lan Wangji adores them, helplessly and immediately. He hates the fact that he does. But he does. One of his hands comes up to cup the downy fur of the white one, his heart twisting strangely in his chest. He’s not sure what his face is doing, but it is likely damning.
Wei Ying is watching his expression closely when Lan Wangji looks up, just in time to see delighted awe break over his features, a soft light.
“Oh, Lan Zhan, you…” Wei Ying says, his eyes so warm. Almost tender. “You really like them, huh?”
“Get out, ” Lan Wangji yells at him, and Wei Ying scampers away cackling while Lan Wangji buries his face in his hands, miserably, as the bunnies scuffle on his desk.
◈ ◈ ◈
It’s during the third week of Wei Ying’s library punishment when it happens.
The afternoon starts out as any other has, with Wei Ying deliberately trying to annoy Lan Wangji and Lan Wangji stonily ignoring him.
Wei Ying is, unfortunately for Lan Wangji, keenly perceptive, and he had picked up from their first days in the library that the most likely way to engage Lan Wangji was the soulmate conversation.
So today, Wei Ying asks, with no subtlety, “Hey, Lan Zhan, have you ever tried to talk to your soulmate?”
Lan Wangji takes a breath, aware he’s being baited. He replies anyway. “How would I do that?”
“I don’t know, you’re a really strong cultivator,” Wei Ying says, propping his chin on one hand and swaying forward on his desk. He uses the other to twirl a dark strand of his hair around his finger, around and around. “Surely you could come up with some creative way.”
“Hm,” is all Lan Wangji says, and he continues copying lines before he comes to the humiliating realization that he’s been mindlessly sketching the characters of Wei Ying’s name instead of Lan An’s poetry. Carefully, so as not to draw Wei Ying’s attention to it, he rips out the leaf of paper and crumples it in his fist.
“Like, for example,” Wei Ying is saying, chipper and blessedly oblivious, “I found out when I was young that if I use spiritual energy a certain way, I can do this.”
Wei Ying closes his eyes in concentration, and from across the room, Lan Wangji sees the red thread around his wrist jerk, as though it’s been yanked.
At the same moment, Lan Wangji feels the familiar, unmistakable tug at his own wrist.
His breathing stops.
“I’ve done it a lot,” Wei Ying continues over the sudden oceanic roar in Lan Wangji’s ears, “but I don’t get much of a response, which makes me think my soulmate isn’t a very strong cultivator. That’s fine, though. Cultivation isn’t everything.”
A coincidence. That’s all it had been, Lan Wangji reasons, still feeling dizzy. A very odd coincidence, but there’s absolutely no possibility that —
“You try it,” Wei Ying says, guilelessly eager as he stares at Lan Wangji from across the room.
Lan Wangji’s heart thunders in his chest, a rapidfire knock against his ribs. With practiced ease, he reaches out with his qi to pluck the string, and watches with mounting horror as Wei Ying startles the moment he does.
“Oh, that was strange,” Wei Ying says with a small laugh, a smaller frown. “It felt like…”
All at once, aglow in a slant of sunlight through the library windows, the red thread is visible, a long scarlet string that spans the space between them. Less translucent, more solid than Lan Wangji has ever seen it. On one end is Lan Wangji’s wrist; on the other is Wei Wuxian’s.
“No,” Lan Wangji chokes out, just as Wei Ying blurts, in disbelief, “You?!”