"If I was gone, Hanguang-Jun, what would you do?"

He asks it on a quiet morning at the end of summer, the hum and click of insects outside whispering into the Jingshi. It's warm once the mist burns off the Recesses, and bright with dappled sunlight.

Lan Wangji looks at him, brow pinched. "Nothing," he says after a moment.

Wei Wuxian raises his head from the table. "Nothing? If you're not careful, my feelings will be hurt." He taps at the table and then starts to draw little shapes on the polished wood until Lan Wangji takes his hand.

He spreads it in his own, palm up, and presses his thumb to the center. His grip is firm. Mo Xuanyu's body will never be large, will never have the strength and stamina he enjoyed in his first life, but watching Lan Wangji's hand encompass his own, he thinks that it's not so bad a thing. This, too, is good. Lan Wangji raises it to his lips and presses a kiss to his palm, staring at Wei Wuxian as he does.

His eyes make Wei Wuxian think of a clean breeze on a bright spring morning. "Nothing," he repeats. "I will be gone, too."

Wei Wuxian blinks and then scrubs his spare hand over his mouth. It's hard to face his sincerity head on. He regrets asking, but it was only a whim anyway.

"...Who knew you had such a sense of humor." Wei Wuxian smiles at him and pulls his hand away to smooth his fingers over the forehead ribbon, to push back the long strands of hair that trail over it and expose his eyes. Even years later, he shows no age, but his cheekbones are more pronounced, his jaw more firm.

"Don't speak of it," Lan Wangji says. His voice is deep and Wei Wuxian has learned to tease out its nuances and secret pleas.

"I won't."

Nothing, he says. I will be gone, too. Wei Wuxian turns the words over in his mind that night and then rolls his body onto Lan Wangj's to kiss the corner of his jaw and then the juncture of his shoulder, until he wakes and his breath speeds and his arms come up, gripping and holding and ceasing all thought.

Nothing.

It is, he discovers three months later, the first lie Lan Wangji has ever told.

People like you are predisposed to a short life.

Jin Guangyao's words echo through his mind like an offkey note as he lies on the hard packed earth of the party that leads to the Cloud Recesses. He was never wrong about that, no matter what Jiang Cheng raged, no matter what Lan Wangji tried to prevent in all his quiet ways. Some things are inevitable. Inhabiting someone else's body changed nothing—something in Wei Wuxian's nature is broken. Something in him will always lead him to this one end.

The ground under him is littered with stones that stick to his wet clothes as he struggles to push himself up and fails.

Another's words come back to him. The debt of blood you owe will never be repaid, even if you die a million times.

That man may have been right—but optimistic to assume he would have that many lives to give. Now, his blood is seeping out around him, over the grass and stone, mixing with spilled wine and the dust of broken pottery. If he had the strength, he would drag himself up the path, but all he can manage is a foot at a time and no—if he's going to die a second time, it won't be like this. He drags himself off the path, to lean his head against the trunk of one of the tall cedars that preside over the mountains, sharing the space with a gardenia. It smells familiar. They spring up across the forest in the Cloud Recesses, their presence so understated as if to be by accident, but divine. Some nights, he convinces Lan Wangji to come out with him. Sometimes, he can convinces him to drink, too. On rare nights, he can coax a smile out of him, but those are more and more common.

Once, Wei Wuxian picked one to to tuck behind Lan Wangji's ear. He didn't argue or balk, always so patient, always so allowing for all of Wei Wuxian's peculiarities and flaws.

This, though. This will be too far.

I've troubled him again, he thinks, body shaking as the heat drains out of it, drop by drop. It will stain Lan Wangji's white robe when he comes. No—he can't let that man come upon a sight like that. It's too undeserves. Somehow, that's the what his mind grabs on to. Somehow, that small thing is what makes him press a hand to his chest and try to stifle the flow of blood.

The incident occurs on a warm summer night. Lan Wangji is busy with sect business, and for all that Wei Wuxian is one of them now, he's reluctant to step in. This meeting he skips and instead entertains himself with a walk down the mountain to Caiyi Town. He grabbed a money pouch and imagined he would buy a toy butterfly to tease Lan Sizhui with and Emperor's Smile to entice another, but of course, someone is waiting for him. He doesn't have time to wonder how many days they've bided their time there. Unlike the last, this group doesn't waste time reading him a list of his sins. They came for one reason, and they strike without hesitation or remorse. Foolish to leave Chenqing at home, and no time to make a bamboo flute, no time to whistle, no time to yell—the first blade goes through his chest, between his fourth and fifth ribs. Another follows, and a third, so fast it doesn't hurt. So fast, he doesn't have time to breathe or beg or yell.

He recalls the look on the innkeepers face when he sent him off with the wine—he couldn't meet Wei Wuxian's eyes. He's made a habit of going there. Now he wonders how much the man was offered as payoff. Maybe he did it for free. .

"For my father," the last man says as he withdraws his blade and steps away.

His father. There are three thousand men that could be, Wei Wuxian thinks. More still. In all ways, this was inevitable.

The fight is over before it starts. He's a strong fighter, but this body doesn't have the muscle memory or stamina it needs to make a victory out of nothing. No weapons, no time, and the area around Gusu is well seen to by its presiding sect; there are no corpses to call on in this place. At least they don't stay to watch him pass. Maybe because they know what will be coming for them once Wei Wuxian is noticed missing.

After they depart, Wei Wuxian drags himself off the path, close to the cool air and the scent of flowers outside and waits for whatever will come. Once, he tries to stand, but his vision and balance are gone as if he had drank himself all the Emperor's Smile that's soaking the floor. After that, all he can do is wait, marking time by the slow beat of his heart as he digs his palm into the worst of the cuts.

If he could write something on the trunk of the tree or the dirt, some message, he would, but he can't think what he would say to Lan Wangji that he hasn't already said a dozen times. They aren't sparing with sweet words for each other now. He knows he's loved.

With a half a heart he gives it a try anyway, but only manages a few words on the bark of the cedar. Wei Wuxian of Yunmeng was here. The characters come out crooked, lazy, as tired as he feels, but it's fitting.

The ruin of the wine and the stain on the path, the killing of fathers and sons and mothers—and his utter carelessness, to break the same man's heart twice.

Indeed, he thinks. Wei Wuxian was here.

When Lan Wangji comes down from the mountain, it's the coming of a hurricane.

Wei Wuxian feels his entrance before he sees him standing there against the night, clad in white. Some passerby must have seen the pathetic excuse for a fight and recognized his colors, run up the hill in the hopes of a reward, or maybe he was simply too long in coming home and Lan Wangji sensed something. He's always has a sixth sense for Wei Wuxian's trials and stupidity.

Blood loss has blurred his vision; Lan Zhan's white robes seem to gust around him, scattering trails of blue and white against the dark.

Like mourning robes, Wei Wuxian thinks, and aches. Always in mourning. As if his wife had died.

The old tease sours in him and he drags one hand over the wet earth as if to push himself up before he realizes his hands aren't working the way they should anymore. Over Lan Wangji's shoulder, there are others in white, but he can only focus on this one face, still and pale, as if he truly was carved from perfect jade.

"Wei Ying," he murmurs, and then sinks to his knees in the mud and mess.

He wants to apologize, but when he opens his mouth, he tastes blood and can't continue. He isn't sure what he wants to say. Maybe that this will be fine—or maybe to beg him, to hear him say those words instead. For an instant he closes his eyes, but then a soft voice comes to him.

"Don't. Don't fall asleep."

Even you ask that, I can't give it to you, he thinks, but instead asks, "Can we go home?" the words wet and faint.

It doesn't take a moment. Lan Wangji gathers him up in his arms as if he weighs no more than one of his rabbits and holds him close. His wounds ache the whole way back, but he only takes the journey in flashes and fits and starts—a series of bumps that remind him of his pain, a series of murmurings as Lan Wangji tries to soothe him.

Once there, he's laid upon the floor of what must be the Jingshi's outer room, still propped in a soft lap as the layers of his clothes are picked apart with deft hands.

The pain is almost unbearable, but it's starting to fade. Once he's bare, the faces above him go the color of milk. Lan Wangji's wide, clear eyes are all he can see.

"Wangji." a voice says. "We can't treat this. There's—nothing."

He knew. He knew, but hearing it is something else. I was doing so well, he wants to argue. I've made this man happy. I died once for this, why make him suffer twice, too?

Lan Wangji doesn't reply. The moment stretches and stretches, worse than mourning, and too early. A hand falls to his face, gentle and wide and familiar.

"Sing for me." The hand on his face stills. "Please." The blood on his teeth and tongue make it hard to speak, and now his hands won't move at all. If they would, if he could, he would press his finger to the wrinkle between his eyes, smooth it away. "Please. Lan Zhan."

The sound starts low and broken, like stones shifting in a fall, until it resolves itself into the sound of humming. Their song. He can't be doing this again, he thinks once more as his limbs go cold, but it's not the same as the first time. The first was lonely and violent, painful and desperate. To die in the arms of a loved one isn't so bad.

The low singing continues as an arm is worked under his back and another under his knees and he's lifted, as if he weighs nothing. Lan Wangji's voice is beautiful. He should use it more, for something better than this. A broken body housing a broken soul doesn't deserve so much consolation; with the last strength he can gather, he reaches up, graceless. His fingers land on soft skin, wet where it shouldn't be.

"Are you crying?" he asks and admonishes, "Lan Zhan." This isn't worth your tears.

He presses his fingers into warm skin even as his touch goes numb and his blood goes thin, trying to press the words into him, trying to mold what part of Lan Wangji he can reach to this knowledge. He isn't worth it. He never was. But he can't work the words up his throat, can't make his eyes clear the way they need to be. Instead, they close, bit by bit, no matter how he fights. The sound changes and only Lan Wangji could make his name sound like a song.

In the end, it's almost like falling asleep.

That night, the Cloud Recesses becomes a place of music. There's a rule, two hundred rows down, first column over, just past the height that Lan Sizhui can reach on tip toe if he puts his arm out as high over his head as he can. Music will not be played after nightfall, it says. And just below it: music must not disturb others.

No one, Lan Sizhui thinks, could be disturbed by this. It's new, like nothing he's heard, half a love song. It sweeps and weaves and changes. Sometimes an argument, sometimes an agony. Sometimes frantic, sometimes soft and cold as the morning fog that mists over the towers of rock that spire around the Cloud Recesses. Once, for a moment, it seems playful. Hanguang-Jun's music has always been precise, but now it lilts here and there without destination, falling over itself, drawing the listener along with it.

"Do you think Hanguang-Jun has eaten?" Lan Jingyi asks.

No one has brought him food. No one can get close. First Brother tried and couldn't make it past the stairs. They'll have to do something, but as long as the music plays, it's as if a spell is cast over the whole of the Gusu Lan. No need to interrupt.

Lan Sizhui shakes his head.

"Do you think Senior Wei is…"

He doesn't answer. He doesn't know, and doesn't know how he'd answer if he did. He doesn't want to think of a reality where that happens. To lose one is to lose both and that is beyond imagining.

"I'm sure it's fine," he says after a particularly soft note rings out and leaves a pause in its wake. It will be. Of course it will.

Everyone knows about the attack. If word travels fast in small towns, it travels faster in a cloistered sect on a mountain side.

By the next morning, the news is everywhere. It's better to talk about it than to listen to the song, so the Recesses are filled with rumor and uncharacteristic chatter. Even the Seniors join in. Some say the attack was staged by remnant loyalists to Jin Guangyao. Of course, Wei Wuxian fought them off. Some versions have Hanguang-Jun there with him. All have it end in injury. Grave, maybe, but he's in seclusion, resting and healing. They both are. All is well.

This story begins to fall apart around midday. As if to fit the mod, the clouds above the mountains gather and break in a storm that drives everyone inside.

Through it all, the music plays over the sound of wind and thunder and rain.

It becomes like the sound of a dog barking or a bird singing, so constant that even if it were to stop, Lan Sizhui knows it would keep playing in his head. No parts of it repeat, but it seems to follow one thread. Up and down. Slow then fast. At times it makes his eyelids droop and at others he feels as if something has crawled under his skin and if he doesn't stand and move it will start to eat him from the inside out.

"Someone should notify Jin Ling," he says as they eat that night, to add to the dozen small conversations that have sprung up to drown out the guqin.

Wen Ning is with Jin Ling and it's only right that they should know, but Lan Jingyi shakes his head. "Wen Ning would rip them apart."

The men who orchestrated the attack were caught the first night and are in holding. What's left of them, at least. Privately, Lan Sizhui thinks he's right—but Wen Ning would be busy holding Jin Ling back. He would be just as ruthless. For all his whining and harping, he loves Wei Wuxian like a second uncle. Or a third. Fourth?

Lan Sizhui only has the two, but he's started to think of them as more. It's a shameful wish—Hanguang-Jun is no one's uncle, no one's parent more so—yet he remembers weeks of sitting at his side as he explained the guqin without words, one note at a time. It felt like family. Like the whisper of it he still only half-remembers.

As he lowers his head, the music begins to change again. Now it's low and soft and desperate. The sudden image of bleeding fingers on taught strings spears into his mind before he pushes it away.

From that moment on, he can't hear the soft sounds of the guqin without hearing also the slide of blood over the strings.

On the morning of the third day, the music stops.

The moment it ceases is a kind of awakening. The sun is starting to burn the mist off the compound, the storm from the day before barely a memory, shafts of light falling through the trees outside. All the sect seems to hold its breath, and the only sound left is the dripping of dew off leaves and the tittering of birds. Sometimes, the breeze carries a bit of a note that might be a plucked string and Lan Xichen's heart skips a beat in dread, but it never is. The guqin has been quiet now for hours.

"Someone must go," says Lan Qiren.

Someone, he says, but there's only one they can send. The same person they sent to tell Wangji about the passing of the Yiling Patriarch, though in truth, Lan Xichen volunteered for that. This is the place an older brother, surely. If he can't protect, at least he can console. He steels himself and stands. "I will go."

One of the juniors stands straight up. Lan Sizhui. "Let me go with you—"

"No!" Lan Qiren clears his throat. "No. It would be best if he went alone."

Uncle is right. And yet, there is nothing Lan Xichen would like to do less. Always, this falls to him. The sun has barely risen, but the usual curfews and schedules have slipped out of use for these past nights; even where the notes of the guqin couldn't reach, the energy emanating from that place slipped down quiet paths, to every corner of the Cloud Recesses. It was no song he was ever taught, though some notes echoed familiar for a moment before they fell back into chaos. It made his hair stand on end where he lay in bed at night, kept him from sleep for hours, and when he did rest, his dreams were dark and full of terror and sorrow.

When they were young, he envied Wangji's skill at composing, but after a time he stopped altogether. Lan Xichen tried for years to convince him to write again. I got my wish, he thinks a bit manically as the Jingshi comes into sight.

As he approaches, he tells himself he's ready for anything he might see—the room destroyed, Wangji bloody-fingered and passed out over his guqin, or worse. Much worse. Two corpses in perfect repose and nothing left of them to retrieve to ask why, both of them gone and never to return. Still, that isn't the worst he can imagine. The worst, he doesn't let himself dwell on.

The doors are intact, somehow, the silence before them a perfect one, born of utter stillness. The only evidence of aberration is the trail of blood up to the doors, the handprint on the polished wood. Beyond it, the trail thins but leads to inside, to the sleeping quarters.

Lan Xichen follows it, heart in his throat. These doors were left open, do he can see what's inside without preamble or even the chance to fear.

The room smells like blood, but not like death. The bed is a mess, but not ruined. On it, the two figures lie in perfect repose, black hair loose and spread across the pale sheets, cascading to the floor. Lan Xichen holds his breath while he waits to see if any movement is left in either of them, and then the body closest to him shifts. Wangji sits up and eyes him blearily, utterly disheveled, his robe half off his shoulders. He opens his mouth but it takes him three tries to form words.

"He's sleeping," Wangji says, voice broken. Maybe he was singing, too. The thought makes his chest ache.

The body beside him is still obscured under blankets but for a bare shoulder, pale as snow, still as a statue. If it's breathing, he can't see it.

"You need to eat," Lan Xichen says in a breath, and then adds to persuade him, "You both do." He takes a step closer and another. Wangji blinks at him and now Lan Xichen can see the blood on on his mouth, old and dried to the color of rust. It looks as if he's bitten into a rare fruit, as if he's eaten something he shouldn't have—as if he kissed a dead man. A chill passes through the room. The breeze lifts Lan Zichen's hair past his face and brushes it back from Wangji's.

What blood isn't on the floor must have been caught by his robes instead. They're black with it down there front and over the sleeves.

"He's sleeping," Wangji repeats, nonsensical.

Lan Xichen has encountered many sights, many unbelievable things. Many times now, this boy has been the source, and Wein Wuxian the catalyst. He wonders what it would feel like to want something, to need something, to love something so much. Wangji would defy anything to keep him.

Even as a corpse.

His mind almost falls to panic. They can't restrain him—the fight with the elders at Yiling proved that thirteen years ago and he's only become more powerful. That can't happen again.

"Wangji… Why don't you come away and let him rest then? We'll get some food and bring it back to him." Anything to get him out of that bed and away from that body.

He takes a step past the threshold, hand outstretched, and in an instant the air changes.

The body beside Wangji twitches and shudders and then rises slowly, like a puppet on strings, drawing both their gazes. Unlike Wangji, his lean form is unclothed and clean.

There isn't a mark on him.

Lan Xichen was second there that night—the shattered red pottery littering the path and crunching under foot, the ruin of Wei Wuxian's clothes, the smell of blood so heavy on the breeze he wanted to hold his breath. The wounds were clean through, made in anger.

I'm sorry. Lan Zhan, I'm sorry. He kept repeating it and he sounded so young. Lan Xichen remembered how young Wei Wuxian was when he died the first time—barely past twenty and already a force, already burnt out. Thirteen years of death changed nothing—he's still younger than Wangji, and he was always a stoic, but pain is pain. Whoever took their revenge on him wanted it to hurt and they wanted it to last.

There was too much blood for the medicine of the Gusu Lan to heal him. Too much for him to be carried away to someone who could. Too much for him to be breathing now and moving and whole and unwounded—but he is.

He rises and eyes them both with a kind of slowness. His eyes are clear.

"First brother," he says in quiet greeting and then realizes what's beside him as he raises his eyes. "Lan Zhan," he whispers in a voice that could break a heart.

Wangji looks as if the sun has risen. Before he can move, the arm Wei Wuxian is using to hold himself up buckles. He collapses in a dead faint. No—not dead, Lan Xichen realizes as he watches Wangji fuss over him. Now he knows what happened. Now, he knows what Wangji did with a certainty.

Cultivation is an art, and like art, the artist's soul is written in every line. Every creation is unique. This is true for the demonic path, too, Lan Xichen thinks as Wangji leans over the body beside him and draws the loose hair off Wei Wuxian's still face.

Still, but alive. Not some shambling corpse. Not a black-eyed, dead thing like the Wen boy, either.

Lan Xichen takes a deep breath. "Clean yourself up. I'll have food sent."

The room needs cleaning more, but it can wait, and he doesn't have the heart to ask the juniors to do it. Not when he himself is only coming to terms with what he's seen.

Lan Zhan is still staring down at his prize, bloody fingers trailing over Wei Wuxian's hair and skin. If it weren't for the blood on them, it would be a serene sight. An intimate sight, either way.

On his way out, he sees the Guqin, propped against the wall without care. Almost every string is snapped, the hardwood spattered with blood. Lan Xichen keeps walking, letting his eyes slide past the grim display. Wangji didn't stop playing because the song was finished, he realizes with a drop of ice down his spine, and it wasn't Wei Wuxian's blood on his fingers. Not only his blood.

Once more he wonders what he would give to love something like that.

"I didn't expect to wake up," Wei Wuxian confesses as night falls outside and the sound of crickets floods the Cloud Recesses. Lan Wangji's hearing feels strange, as if he's hearing sounds that aren't there, notes in the distance. He expects it will be that way for some time.

The words make him ache, but there's something new beside it—something solid, crystalline, that sits in the pit of his stomach now. He hums in response and resettles the body in his arms.

"No—" Wei Wuxian pushes at him and tries to pull away, but it's a weak touch. Either his heart isn't in it, or he needs more time to regain his strength. Both, maybe. "Why am I awake?"

His voice in this body is imperceptibly different. Higher, younger, but just as playful, though there's nothing mischievous in it now. Lan Wangji dressed him in one of his own robes, oversized so it hangs off his shoulders, untied because no one else is coming in tonight and there's nothing to hide here.

What he means is: Why am I still alive?

If Lan Wangji tried a for a hundred days, he couldn't explain it. I wanted you to live isn't an answer. Neither is its mirror, which is: I couldn't live without you.

In his heart, it feels as if half of him is missing. As if he traded half his soul to bind Wei Wuxian to this body again—but it feels as if the other half is right there, beating against the hand he has spread over Wei Wuxian's chest. Instead of answering, he tightens his arms, lowers his chin to Wei Wuxian's shoulder, takes a breath. He still smells of blood. When he's well, Lan Wangji will take him to the coldspring and let it soak the memory of what happened off of him. Off of them both.

"You can't die," he says in feeble answer.

Wei Wuxian wraps one hand around Lan Wangji's, intertwines their fingers, and pulls it away from his chest. "One day, I will."

"I'll go with you." He knows it sounds petulant, like a child, but it's honest, too.

He takes a moment to reply and then says with uncharacteristic softness, "No. You have more to live for."

He could bring Wei Wuxian back again, he wants to rage. He could make the world shake, too, the way the man in his arms has. His sorrow means as much. His rage. But instead he turns his hand to clasp Wei Wuxian's in his own and brings it to his mouth to press a kiss to the back of it. If he doesn't agree, he's made no promise, no oath.

"Lan Zhan," Wei Wuxian says, chiding.

"Fine," he replies.

It's not the first lie he's told, and it won't be the last.