Work Text:
Mo Xuanyu’s body is a small, slight thing, but it carries the sun-bright heat of its unpolished golden core and the marred, grief-dark edges of Wei Wuxian’s soul well enough.
Until, of course, it doesn’t.
“Your cultivation, perhaps,” Lan Xichen muses, an elegant lift to his brow as he studies the reshaping cartography of the body Wei Wuxian has learned to call his own; the new breadth to his shoulders, the muscle that builds more easily with each passing day, the years-old calluses laid into hands fresh to the art of swordsmanship. “It is my understanding that your core has grown stronger since your sword was returned to you. This body is yours, now; it would not be a stretch to say it is remembering, if you grasp my meaning.”
Wei Wuxian nods thoughtfully, smoothing a thumb over the rim of his teacup and blowing gently at the rising cloud of steam. The Hanshi is sparsely decorated, and Lan Xichen has taken to spurning embroidered silks for simple, sturdy cotton, but his tea selection remains impeccable in its variety and richness of flavor. It’s a hobby he regards sheepishly, one Nie Huaisang and Jin Guangyao had encouraged if only to part with the bland, watery dross of usual Lan fare, and it kindles a warm assurance in Wei Wuxian’s chest to know he’s kept at it regardless.
“Lan Zhan and I thought it might be something like that,” he says, setting aside his worries into Lan Xichen’s condition for the moment; it wouldn’t do well to linger, and Xichen-ge has looked steadier with each visit besides. He pastes on a bright smile and sips cautiously at his tea, burning his tongue for his impatience and drawing a rusty chuckle from his companion.
“Ow, still too hot, alright. Anyways, I thought it might still be good to ask your opinion, since you’ve dealt with your fair share of possessions and vessel-jumping and the like. My soul is pretty firmly stitched to this body, but I wasn’t sure how strongly impressions of my old one would affect it. I’ve grown taller, I think. Jiang Cheng is going to be furious.”
“Surely not,” Lan Xichen returns, laughter creasing the gentle curve of his mouth.
The effect is devastating. Though he will always abhor the cultivation world at large for ranking Jin Zixuan directly above him in terms of appearance, he cannot contest the Lan brothers’ placement without great hypocrisy. Goddess’ sake, he married one.
Still, he finds it in him to weather the sunlit crinkles of Lan Xichen’s smile and the awe of being trusted with it, if only to right his kind impression of Wei Wuxian’s horrifically petty younger brother. They’re in-laws now; Jiang Cheng had committed to this kind of familial mortification when he’d fought to earn his place back at Wei Wuxian’s side, unable to accept forgiveness freely given.
“Didi might be a sect leader now, but if anything, he’s gotten even more stubborn in the years I was gone. Over the silliest things too! And don’t get me started on how much A-Ling takes after his jiujiu. It’s like there’s two of them sometimes, you wouldn’t believe …”
The evening passes like this: drifting thoughts and recollections grafted into stories by the deep, song-like cadence of Wei Wuxian’s voice, tales he tells with his hands for having always spoken more freely with his gestures than his words, the settling weight of sand on a kicked-up riverbed as he relearns the heft of a body that feels more like his than anything has in a long time. Lan Xichen is a perfectly engaged audience, allows him to find his legs with the tactful grace of someone who is trying to do the same, and later, returning to the Jingshi under the star-speckled canopy of night, Wei Wuxian wonders if he sought out his company more for that shared feeling than any answer he could give.
-
“Zongzhu, zongzhu!” Wei Wuxian calls as he strips down the pier, Jin Ling and Lan Sizhui at his heels while Wen Ning follows sedately behind, “Da-shixiong has come to help with training! And I brought company!”
Jiang Cheng turns elegantly on his heel, an insult no-doubt poised to fly on his tongue, when he catches sight of his brother and nearly trips into the freshly seeded pond by his feet.
“You,” he tries, stiff with shock as Wei Wuxian skids to a halt a stone’s throw from where he’s standing, “What —”
He’s looking up, Wei Wuxian realizes, the slightest flick upwards for how close they’ve always been in height, but enough to add a tilt to his jaw, one of those little things they hadn’t known to miss until the absence of it lined their every meeting with something bitter and fraught, wrong-footed in the emptiness where familiarity should have been. It startles a laugh from his throat, and Jiang Cheng blinks hazily, lifting a hand to ghost over the reformed planes of Wei Wuxian’s face. The slant of his eyes and their darkening color, the angular dip of his cupid’s bow, the slight upturn at the corners of his lips, as though they’re in the habit of always laughing. His cheeks are void of Mo Xuanyu’s roundness and his fingers are long and thin, hands meant for artistry taught to wield the weight of a sword.
“Jiang Cheng,” he says gently, disrupting his brother’s trance-like focus, “Are you … is this alright?”
Jiang Cheng steps back, clearing his throat and looping his fingers through the violet thread strapping his clarity bell to his waist. His thumb maps the infolding coils of the ornamental knot laid with shijie’s glass beads, the rhythmic release of nervous energy easing the tight set of his shoulders. Yu Ziyuan had never managed to break him of the habit (a quick, stinging rap to the knuckles, ‘Didi, don’t fidget, it’s unbecoming’) and had given it up as a lost cause when Wei Wuxian and Jiang Yanli had allegedly developed the same tic overnight.
(In the sprawling, golden halls of Jinlintai, Wei Wuxian has caught Jin Ling doing the same, an unspeakable fondness ballooning in his chest).
He nods once, and Jin Ling, his uncle’s son, but so much like his mother in the firm, unshakeable roots of his love, takes this as his cue to start badgering Jiang Cheng about some trivial shared duty of theirs now that he’s taken up partial management of his sect.
Wei Wuxian falls into step a pace behind as they begin the trek up the pier, and loops an arm through the crook of A-Yuan’s elbow for the simple comfort of it. Wen Ning, in a shocking betrayal of choice Wei Wuxian will hold over his head for the good few hours he remembers it, elects to hesitantly keep stride with Jiang Cheng, who does that thing where he arches his brow and silently waits out the shaping of his partner’s thoughts. It’s particularly effective on Wen Ning, who is clumsy with his words despite the care with which he speaks, and whose brittle truce with Jiang Cheng has blossomed into something resembling a friendship since his reconciliation with Wei Wuxian. He hadn’t known how deeply he’d ached to see them snark comfortably at one another like they had a war and a lifetime ago, to see the spirited, clever edge Jiang Cheng coaxed free of Wen Ning’s reserved temperament.
“The lotus ponds,” he murmurs softly, like he’s testing the weight of the words on his tongue, “I wonder if you’d teach me to seed them. Wei-gongzi has tried, but he is something of a natural, and they seem to require quite a lot of care.”
“Wen Ning!” Wei Wuxian cries, betrayed, but Jin Ling waves him off before he can settle fully into the theatrics of his outburst. Wen Ning’s shoulders slope guiltily, but he knows well enough by now to judge offense from ribbing.
“Jiujiu’s really good at it,” Jin Ling praises freely, ignoring Wei Wuxian’s splutter of, ‘And who do you think taught him?’ “He showed me how when I was young, and we’d sit in the ponds for hours until we were more mud than skin. It was kind of surprising, honestly. Every other plant I’ve ever seen jiujiu touch wilts like he’s carrying some sort of herbal plague.”
Jiang Cheng glowers at his nephew — “Herbal plague? Where do you learn these kinds of things?” — and the conversation devolves into a spat, though not before Wen Ning extracts a promise to be tutored in the finer points of lotus gardening by the leader of Lotus Pier himself.
He turns a pleased smile on Wei Wuxian, who returns it with a distracted effort of his own, too caught up in sun-browned images of a Jiang Cheng and Jin Ling he hadn't known. Yunmeng purple and Lanling gold caked with mud, sleeves rolled messily at their elbows and boots abandoned by the pier, dirt painting long, grimy streaks across skin tanned by Lotus Pier’s scorching summers. Jiang Cheng with his hair braided over his shoulder and his douli knocked askew by Jin Ling’s play-fighting, laughter brightening the air as the fragments of a splintered family did their best to build over what was left.
He recognizes the yawning, cavernous want that stretches open its maw in his chest. He’s felt it before, in the tender, quiet moments shared between his Lan Zhan and their A-Yuan, the easy understanding they’ve crafted into an art with patience and love and care. He doesn’t want in, per se, fully aware of the value of things shared just between oneself and another, but its gutting to be faced with just how much he’s missed. Jin Ling wears a clarity bell at his waist that Jiang Cheng had crafted as an echo of the one Jin Zixuan had destroyed, the one Wei Wuxian had made for the nephew he'd already so adored. He bears a name Wei Wuxian had gifted him, and wears the habits his uncles share with pride. There are pieces of him in this boy he never fully got to know, pieces Jiang Cheng had handed over willingly or not, and it aches to see them realized before him in a way only time will heal.
“Wei Wuxian,” Jiang Cheng calls over his shoulder, glancing back at him, “Wei Ying. Are you listening? Gods, I’d forgotten just how much that face of yours gave away without all of Mo Xuanyu’s fluff. Stop moping, you idiot, your son is asking if he can join us later in the ponds. Tell him yes. I’ll break your legs if either of you tries to weasel your way out of it.”
“Thank you, shushu,” Lan Sizhui replies politely, because he is Wei Wuxian’s sweet, sweet angel of a son, and then, “Baba, are you alright?”
Wei Wuxian hums, picks apart the film of longing that sometimes shades his world a dreary gray, this handful of exchanges with a family that has managed to stitch itself together against a roiling sea of poor odds. He feels unmoored, sometimes, left behind to play catch up as he learns how to live with the grief of what he’s lost and the blushing joy of what he’s come to have. Still, as he contemplates his son’s question, he finds himself admitting that he’s quite alright.
So, “Fine,” he chirps, hooking his free arm around Jiang Cheng’s neck to drag him back into an embrace, “Aw, A-Cheng, A-Cheng, don’t be like that! If you’re mad that your Ying-ge is taller than you again, you can just say it!”
Jiang Cheng goes scarlet with the force of his anger, spitting, ‘Whose fucking Ying-ge,’ before he’s wrestled onto his back with an obnoxiously triumphant shout from his brother and muted cheering from his turncoat nephews.
Wei Wuxian laughs, bright as pealing bells, and feels free with it.
-
Later, when it’s just the two of them, a wine jug shared between them on the stoop of Jiang Cheng’s office, Wei Wuxian will admit to the guilt he feels for the slow erasure of Mo Xuanyu’s person from the body that was once his. Jiang Cheng doesn’t call him an idiot or placate him or pass judgement. He just sits in the rosy spill of waning light and says, quietly, “Maybe it makes me selfish and irreverent for the gift we’ve been given, but … it’s nice to see my brother’s face again. I don’t mean — I don’t intend to treat you any differently, or pretend what happened didn’t. It’s just … nice. Good.”
He clears his throat and takes an aggressive swig of wine, fingers tight against the neck of the bottle. They wander down to his clarity bell when the jug reclaims its place on the stoop, and he thumbs over the metalwork with a distant, searching look. A twin chime clangs merrily by Wei Wuxian’s hip, and he lets the familiarity of it wash over him, clearing the gentle fog that’s taken hold of his thoughts and pressing a smile into the bow of his lips.
“Yeah,” he says, folding a palm over Jiang Cheng’s knee. “It’s nice to feel like my body is … mine again. My face, my hands, my lips on my dizi. My sword feels lighter than it did when I first came back, and the forms Jiang-shushu taught us are easier. Like muscle memory.”
Jiang Cheng nods, lips quirking with the ghost of a memory. They’ve been training together more often these days, tricks old and new, the weight of Suibian flying between them when Wei Wuxian takes up Chenqing and Jiang Cheng quiets Zidian electrifying in its possibility.
It is as Jiang Cheng said. Good. Really, truly good.
“Speaking of A-die,” his brother says, an unsteady quiver to his brow, “Qingming Jie isn’t too far off. You’ll be here?”
Wei Wuxian blinks, eyes wet for not the first time since he and Jiang Cheng have shouldered the weight of this rebuilding business.
“Yeah,” he says wetly, “I have to go to the Burial Mounds. To see the Wens. But I’ll — I’ll be here, Jiang Cheng. Of course, I will.”
They have a complicated relationship with their parents, the both of them, a long-buried memory of Jiang Cheng fumbling out, ‘I know — A-niang wasn’t good to you, to any of us really, but mostly to you, and — and A-die, his last words, they weren’t fair, and I’m sorry,’ of Wei Wuxian’s ugly tears as he held his little brother and begged him not to apologize for hurts that weren’t of his making, of Jiang Cheng’s voice, quieter still, ‘Sometimes, I fear there’s more of her in me than anyone else, and they’re not the parts of her I loved or admired.’
Still, Wei Wuxian never goes a visit without paying his respects, and Jiang Cheng accompanies him each time. Of course, of course, he will go. Qingming will be for A-jie too, deeply as the thought stings.
“Okay,” Jiang Cheng breathes, and rests his hand shakily over Wei Wuxian’s, “Okay. I’ll — if you need anything, incense sticks or joss paper or fresh food for the Wens, ask. I’ll have it ready for you.”
“Thank you, A-Cheng,” Wei Wuxian says warmly, and squeezes his little brother’s stupidly bony knee with the stupidly bony fingers of a life he’ll never fully leave behind.
He’s learning to be okay with that.