Summary: Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, and Wen Ning are unsure of how they feel about Nie Huaisang trapping them in a soul-transferring array that sends them to the past, long before the happy ending they had suffered so much for. Reliving their most traumatic memories is not what they had planned when they went out on a seemingly innocuous nighthunt. But now that they're here, apparently to stay, they have no intention of making the same mistakes twice.
(Or, a Time-Travel AU where Nie Huaisang sends Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, Wen Ning, and himself back to their first night at the Cloud Recesses with an agenda: save everyone, especially his brother)
Kay's comments: So, this story is one of my favourite time-travel stories and it's one I find myself re-reading again and again, because it's just so good. Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji and Wen Ning are send back in time to the Cloud Recesses Study Days and the story explores how they adjust to being back, who they decide to tell and how the start making changes to make sure things will play out differently and better. I really love the choice of which characters travelled back and that Wen Ning gets some love as well, since I feel he often gets overlooked and I love how the story explores the scars, visible and not, which their lives left on the characters and how they can't just go back in time and pretend to still be the same people.
Excerpt:With a sudden gasp of realisation, Wei Wuxian straightens in his lap, hands coming up to pull at Lan Wangji’s collar frantically, trying to pull apart his many layers.
Lan Wangji, who had been busy committing his husband’s old-but-new face to memory (Wei Wuxian has the faintest mole beneath his lower lip, it’s adorable), is unceremoniously jerked back to the present.
“Wei Ying!”
Wei Wuxian ignores him and manages to loosen the robes enough to slide one hand underneath to the back of his shoulder and then down his chest over his heart. A sob wrenches out of him, “They’re gone. They’re gone.”
Oh. Lan Wangji smiles softly down at Wei Wuxian, pressing their foreheads together, “They never were, Wei Ying.”
Wei Wuxian’s hand slips out of his collar only to grasp it tightly and yank him forward, crushing their lips together. Lan Wangji kisses back, hands coming up to cup the sides of his face, matching Wei Wuxian's desperation and relief with his own. ‘He still tastes the same,’ he thinks absently. It had surprised him before, too, the first time he kissed him in Mo Xuanyu’s body. As though this essence of Wei Wuxian had transmigrated with his soul somehow. He deepens the kiss, chasing that sweetness, remembering the long years after their hunt on Phoenix Mountain when he had had nothing but his memories of that stolen kiss to keep him company. Wei Wuxian makes a punched-out sound low in his throat—guttural and desperate—that Lan Wangji has never heard from him before. It’s different and startling and incredibly arousing, and Lan Wangji realises that he would do absolutely anything to hear it again.
But Wei Wuxian jerks back, seemingly surprised by his own noises, and stares at Lan Wangji in wide-eyed shock.
wip, wip rec week, time travel, time travel fix-it, established relationship, pov alternating, canon divergence, wen ning lives, angst, hurt/comfort, emotional hurt/comfort, inventor wei wuxian, genius wei wuxian, domestic fluff, good sibling lan xichen, cloud recesses study arc, cloud recesses shenanigans