Chapter Text
“Don’t cough blood on me,” Lan Qiren said, voice as prim and proper as it had ever been.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Wen Ruohan replied, teeth clenched and brow furrowed as he fought off the pain. Blood leaked out from the corner of his mouth despite his words. “I suppose the stain of red on white is terribly hard to get out.”
His tone was bitter, angry, and he was probably making some sort of very clever metaphorical point, given the Lan sect’s white robes and Wen sect’s emblem of red and white.
But –
“Actually, blood dries brown,” Lan Qiren corrected him, unable to stop himself, and tried to let the incredulous look Wen Ruohan shot him slide off his back. He was moderately used to people reacting that way by now. “Also, Lan sect robes are embroidered with a number of arrays designed to promote cleanliness, so it wouldn’t actually stain…”
“Lan Qiren.”
The words were spat out through gritted teeth, the tone of voice strongly suggesting that Lan Qiren shut up.
Lan Qiren obediently shut up.
They continued to make their way through the forest. Wen Ruohan was leaning heavily on Lan Qiren’s shoulder, one foot dragging behind, the arm not looped over Lan Qiren’s shoulders wrapped around his midsection – he was very badly injured, although Lan Qiren could not say to what degree. They had not had time to stop for any medical care but the most immediate. If Wen Ruohan were concerned about the state of Lan Qiren’s robes, it had already become a lost cause long ago.
“All right,” Wen Ruohan said after a long while of tense, seething silence. “Tell me.”
Lan Qiren looked at him sidelong, wondering if the loss of blood had led to hallucinations. They had not been having an ongoing conversation.
“You told me not to cough blood on you,” Wen Ruohan clarified. “But not because you want to preserve your pretty white robes. If that’s not the reason, then what is?”
“Oh,” Lan Qiren said. “I just meant…”
“Well?”
“Well, it’s not healthy, is it? With as much blood as you’ve lost, you need to keep as much of it on the inside as possible.”
Wen Ruohan went silent again, although now the tenor of the silence was a little more in the astonished and somewhat disbelieving vein.
Lan Qiren was used to that, too.
After another long pause, Wen Ruohan finally spoke again. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen,” Lan Qiren said.
“Nineteen,” Wen Ruohan echoed. “I suppose that explains it.”
Lan Qiren wasn’t sure he understood what, exactly, was meant to be explained.
“I think we can stop now,” Wen Ruohan added, sounding lofty and condescending as if they’d only continued this far for Lan Qiren’s benefit – as if he weren’t the one who was leaning more and more heavily on Lan Qiren, as if his pace hadn’t been the one that had been getting slower and slower. “I think we’ve lost them.”
“We’re also in the middle of nowhere,” Lan Qiren objected. “We should at least make it to the foothills and find a cave. What if it rains?”
“It will rain. I’ve already summoned the clouds – we need to hide our footprints.”
“All the more reason to find shelter, then.”
Wen Ruohan looked frustrated. “Build one, then.”
“I don’t know how,” Lan Qiren said honestly, and Wen Ruohan looked even more annoyed. “I’m a young master of a Great Sect. No one ever taught me how to build shelters from branches. A cave is a better bet.”
“Do you want me to admit it?” Wen Ruohan spat, and Lan Qiren startled at the venom in his tone. “Fine, have it your way. I can’t make it any further!”
“Oh,” Lan Qiren said, and felt relieved. He’d been hoping Wen Ruohan would bend his foolish pride and agree to receive assistance for the last half-shichen at least. “That’s fine. I’m still all right.”
Now that they were agreed, he pulled Wen Ruohan off his shoulder and hoisted him up on his back in a single motion, a technique he’d mostly gotten used to with his cousins back in the Lan sect – Lan Yueheng’s early experiments with alchemy had often left him dizzy, and Lan Qiren had grown used to returning him to his quarters while carting him on his back.
Wen Ruohan was a bit more cumbersome, but not by much. Lan Qiren was able to pick up the pace considerably.
“What are you…are you carrying me?” Wen Ruohan asked belatedly. “On your back? Like a child?”
A moment’s pause.
“Are we going faster now?”
Lan Qiren stayed quiet.
Wen Ruohan struggled with himself for a while, then finally burst out with – “Then why didn’t you suggest it earlier?!”
“I didn’t want to offend you,” Lan Qiren said, relieved that they had gotten through the awkwardness of a social interaction without anyone being mortally insulted. “It seemed like something you’d object to. Strenuously, even. I’m glad we’ve gotten over that.”
“…have we.”
Lan Qiren craned his neck backwards for a moment, unsure of what Wen Ruohan seemed to be hinting at, but the other man unhelpfully pressed his lips together and refused to say anything the entire rest of their journey to the foothills, even when Lan Qiren needed to spend some time investigating until he found a suitable cave without any existing inhabitant that might try to bite their heads off. It was late and had started raining by then; they were both utterly drenched by the time they managed to find a safe place.
Lan Qiren wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep.
Naturally, that was when Wen Ruohan decided to speak up again.
“Why did you assist me?”
At first, Lan Qiren did not understand. “I thought we covered that,” he said, puzzled. “You couldn’t walk, and I could –”
“Not with walking.” Wen Ruohan’s voice was as cold as ice, and sharp as a whip. “If you had stood aside and done nothing, I would be dead even now. I expected to be dead. I am not. I would know why.”
Lan Qiren hadn’t been expecting that.
“Our sects are not allies,” Wen Ruohan continued, implacable and unmoved. “Nor do we have a personal relationship – I don’t think we’ve even exchanged more than five words before today. You are nineteen, the second young master of the Lan sect, soon to be its heir once your father retires from public life and your brother ascends to the position of Sect Leader Lan, and I am Sect Leader Wen, with everything that name connotes. We may not be so far apart as night and day, but one could certainly make a compelling argument for dawn and dusk. Why did you help me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Lan Qiren asked in return, helpless. He didn’t know what to say. “I mean, those people, they were trying to kill you!”
“I am well aware of that. What I want to know is why you chose not to let them succeed.”
Lan Qiren faltered, remembering the solemn faces of those strangers that had come in with such force: a black-clothed young man with eyes that crackled red with demonic power, with a Lan sect disciple beside him, tall and straight-backed with classic Lan features, clearly one of Lan Qiren’s kinsmen and yet not anyone he recognized; the young man in black had called him only Lan Zhan, a given name, and that could have belonged to any number of people. They had seemed terribly determined, acting with resolution and absolutely no hesitation.
Their attack had taken Wen Ruohan completely by surprise. It was not wrong to say that if Lan Qiren hadn’t acted when he did, as he did, Wen Ruohan would indeed be dead at this very moment. Never mind helping the strangers, as they’d oddly seemed almost to expect when he’d risen to his feet, but even if he’d simply refrained from acting, that would have been enough. But he hadn’t done that.
Instead, he’d…
“I couldn’t let them kill you,” Lan Qiren said. “You haven’t done anything – well, no, that’s not right, you’ve done rather a lot that might call for it, actually. And one can’t say that you’ve avoided evil paths, or behaved righteously in a consistent manner, I mean, just that Fire Palace of yours alone is fairly damning and all of that’s putting aside any political considerations there might be for…what was I saying?”
“You were talking yourself into explaining why it wouldn’t have been so bad for me to be killed, I believe,” Wen Ruohan said dryly, but the icy feeling from earlier was fading. “Quite effectively.”
Lan Qiren shook his head to clear his thoughts. “The rules say Love all beings.”
“They also say Stay away from evil men.”
“Uphold the value of justice.”
“Who’s to say that justice wasn’t on their side?”
Lan Qiren didn’t know what to say to that.
“I just couldn’t,” he finally said, lacking anything cleverer to say. “It seemed wrong.”
His brother hadn’t lifted a finger in Wen Ruohan’s defense, and neither had his father. Lao Nie probably would have if he’d been there, but he’d been called away by something extremely urgent related to his sect, something involving one of the sect disciples and a fierce corpse (or possibly two?), though there hadn’t been many details. But Lao Nie did have a personal connection with Wen Ruohan, which Lan Qiren certainly did not, and everyone said that the Nie sect was likely to establish a formal alliance with the Wen one of these days. One could argue that the Lan sect, as an ally of the Nie, might have an obligation to the ally of their ally, but that was a tenuous enough link, and to balance it out there was that strangely familiar-yet-not Lan sect disciple among the attackers, with just as strong a call to Lan Qiren’s loyalty if you looked at it objetively…
But Wen Ruohan had truly done nothing to any of those attackers, as far as Lan Qiren knew, and the idea of simply sitting there and doing nothing – of letting the other man just die, when he could do something to prevent it – was simply unthinkable.
“I don’t know why I helped you,” Lan Qiren finally admitted. “I just…did.”
“Do not act impulsively,” Wen Ruohan quoted at him, and Lan Qiren winced. “Well, whatever may have motivated you, I am in your debt, and I will surely find a way to repay it, with interest.”
That sounded oddly like a threat.
“I don’t need anything –”
“Oh no,” Wen Ruohan said. “I insist.”
The ice had faded out of his tone entirely by this point, and he sounded rather smug, if anything, which was ridiculous. They were both completely bedraggled, each one drenched through and through, Wen Ruohan injured and Lan Qiren tired and neither of them expecting any support or backup; they weren’t in any position to be smug about anything. If it weren’t for the fire Lan Qiren had built to warm them and the drying arrays in his robes, which he only knew how to activate after having spent years in his childhood hiding away in small dark spaces to avoid talking to anyone and ending up in the laundry listening to the washerwomen chatter, they would probably be too cold to even have this conversation – their teeth would have been chattering too much. As it was, Lan Qiren still had to remove his outer robe and wrap it around them both. It was an uncomfortable sort of intimacy, though strangely less unpleasant than most times he’d had to make physical contact with another person.
“I didn’t get to my current position through sitting around and waiting for people to attack me,” Wen Ruohan added, his eyes lit up with a fire that Lan Qiren had never seen in him before; if anything, Wen Ruohan usually tended to give off the impression of being thoroughly indolent and even lugubrious in everything he did. The unexpected infusion of vigor made him seem a full century younger, as if he were the one who was nineteen and Lan Qiren the old man. “They will regret their actions, each and every one of them.”
Lan Qiren had the sinking feeling that Wen Ruohan wasn’t just referring to the strangers, but to the others that had been there at the discussion conference. The ones who’d done nothing to help.
Like his father and brother.
“But there must be balance in all things. Just as I lift my hand in vengeance against those that turned against me, I also never fail to reward those that chose to back me, returning favor with favor in turn –”
Lan Qiren was suddenly aware of how close together they were pressed, Wen Ruohan’s form a shocking line of heat running right up and down his side from his shoulder to his hip to his knee. Huddled as they were under his outer layer, with only Lan Qiren’s wet inner layers left to him, it felt almost as if they were wearing nothing at all.
Lan Qiren had actually been intending on suggesting that they both strip down the rest of the way in order to put their inner robes near the fire to dry, thinking no more of it than he would have if it had been Lan Yueheng beside him, but suddenly he felt his face and ears go red for no reason at all.
Maybe it had something to do with the way Wen Ruohan’s voice had suddenly dropped low, deep and meaningful and right in Lan Qiren’s ear.
He swallowed.
“Don’t waste your time with that,” he said, reaching for sternness and coming up short – he was only nineteen, in the end, and only a disfavored second young master; he was not yet accustomed to being authoritative. “You’re not in any condition for either favor or vengeance at the moment. Let me see where you’ve been hurt. You probably need new bandages.”
“We don’t have any left,” Wen Ruohan said. He was watching Lan Qiren’s face with a strange sort of intensity. “We’ll have to make do with something else…would you let me have your forehead ribbon?”
Lan Qiren flinched automatically at the thought. According to custom, only parents, children, and spouses could touch someone’s forehead ribbon. Technically the rules only prohibited using another’s ribbon without authorization, which could be granted, but to actually grant such a thing was tantamount to a declaration of intent. The mere idea made him go hot with embarrassment.
On the other hand, human life took precedence, always.
“…all right,” he said. “If you need it.”
Wen Ruohan smiled as if Lan Qiren had said something very important.
“Favor with favor,” he murmured, seemingly speaking to himself. “Measure to measure. I’ll have to find something fit to equal the favor you have given me – and that will be very difficult indeed.”
“I already told you, you really don’t have to –”
Wen Ruohan raised his hand and pressed two fingers to Lan Qiren’s lips, silencing him as effectively as any Lan sect spell ever had.
“As I said,” he said, his eyes dancing in the firelight of the dark night. “I insist.”