A few years post-canon, someone does soul sacrifice summons to bring Jin Guangyao back. Unfortunately this reactivates the curse on Wei Wuxian, which is how they figure it out. Now Lan Wangji has to protect his brother from knowing and grieving again when Lan Wangji kills him again to save Wei Wuxian.
Jin Guangyao was a fool who should have learned his lesson the first time he died. Lan Wangji knew that some people would call it love, but he thinks the man is just obsessed with his brother. It saved him from needing to hunt him down though. He just had to keep an eye on any strange behavior in the servants assigned to taking care of Lan Xichen.
Lan Wangji wasn't sure what Guangyao's goal was. Did he hope to manipulate Xichen into elevating his status again? Convince him to run away with him? Torment him with even more guilt for his death?
Wangji didn't really care enough to ask before he used Bichan to open the snakes throat. He can live without knowing.
Wei Wuxian laughed and called him impatient while they removed the body. He supposed he was. He was growing quiet tired of people trying to bring harm to the people he loved and Jin Guangyao had done it far too many times for Wangji to be anything but eager to cut him down again.
In which LWJ became an Immortal that has long lost his Sanity, and that has been confined to the Gentian House.
Then LSZ meets WWX, freshly reincarnated, and kidnapps him hoping he'd be able to help his father.
WWX doesn't. He begs and he begs and he begs, however he still dies in the hands of a LWJ that forgot how fragile a living, breathing mortal being is.
And LSZ leaves to find WWX once again, after burying his corpse next to the countless other tombs. Gusu Lan became a graveyard, and all the gravestones bear the same name.
The birds are quiet when Lan Zhan wakes up to see a man looming over Wei Ying. The war had never stopped for them, and both resentment and spiritual energy surges with no delay between slumber and awakening. The world narrows down to this man that dares to invade their home.
Bichen shines a bright blue in the darkness as Lan Zhan’s fingers twist in a sword seal. Greasy resentment trails after the flashing sword trail.
The stranger’s sword flashes blue in return, and Lan Zhan sees himself in the stranger. “Fuqin,” he says, cutting through the silence. He is wrong, of course.
The familiar stranger slowly shakes his head, sword hand still raised in a parry.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying begins. He stands tall in his rumpled sleep clothes, red marks peeking over the edge of his collar. The stranger looks at Wei Ying in a way Lan Zhan finds too familiar.
“My name,” the stranger says, “is Lan Zhan.”
Oh...so this is how Lan Zhan must have looked in his 13 years of mourning. Grief transforms his features into those of his father. Even Xiongzhang in his seclusion and grief has yet to match Fuqin’s severe features. Grief had hollowed out Lan Huan but grief had sharpened Lan Zhan and his father.
Wei Ying does not want to recognize the grief in this duplicate’s face. Like a bird fluffing up its feathers, he stands in front of Lan Zhan and raises his dizi upwards and forwards, forestalling the man’s attempt to step closer. “You’re not my Lan Zhan,” he says.
The man flinches, and his mouth is a harsh slash across his face. “You,” he condemns, “are not my Wei Ying.”
And it’s true. A dead man in another dead man’s body. Wei Ying’s mouth twitches in both a frown and a smile. It hurts. His body isn’t his and while there are days where looking into a mirror doesn’t disorient him, there are an equal amount of days where he cannot recognize himself in the mirror.
Lan Zhan sidesteps Wei Ying and the man, Lan Wangji, follows suit, eye to eye with each other.
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Ying protests. He peeks over Lan Zhan’s shoulder and stares down Lan Wangji. Sure, he would hesitate at hurting a man who looked like his husband, but Wei Ying knows he cannot trust this duplicate. There is something wrong with him that disrupts the natural flow of resentment in the world. He is a boulder in a river.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says quietly, a wealth of meaning in his words.
Wei Ying is stricken by the enormity of Lan Zhan’s love. All those years wasted on misunderstandings when their souls had always resonated so clearly.
There is a disquieting look on Lan Wangji’s face as he observes this exchange. He does not look jealous; he looks lost, cast adrift in waters he had once found familiar. Wei Ying knows about drowning, the shock of waters deeper than previously thought. He knows about the desperation that makes a drowning man cling onto another and force them to sink as well.
Lan Wangji lets his sword fall down into a resting position. “I mean you,” he says quietly, “no harm.”
Lan Zhan keeps his sword raised. “How did you appear here?”
Wei Ying watches the twitch of Lan Wangji’s fingers, wrapped around the hilt of his sword. He thinks Lan Wangji did not expect to appear here either.
“A talisman malfunction,” Lan Wangji answers.
There is no satisfaction to be found within Lan Zhan at this answer. His own reticence stymies him. “What was the purpose of the talisman?”
If the man before them truly is Lan Zhan and has appeared here via talisman, then it must be time travel or travel between worlds. This Lan Zhan does not have the timeless air of an immortal. Tales of Baoshan Sanren speak of a presence so heavy and palpable that it almost seems tangible. What sort of talisman could bring this pale shadow of Lan Zhan here?
“Time travel,” Lan Wangji answers.
—
Lan Wangji meets Lan Sizhui, and the grief already carved on his face deepens. “A-Yuan,” he says softly. He reaches out with a hand, only to pull back at the last moment. His hand clenches into a fist at his side.
Sweet boy that he is, Lan Sizhui darts a worried glance at Wei Ying and Lan Zhan. He can almost understand the shape of the grief Lan Wangji carries.
When Lan Sizhui leaves to join his fellow disciples, Wei Ying opens his mouth to voice a question that he does not want to ask. But Lan Wangji forestalls any questions by speaking first.
“I found him,” Lan Wangji says. “He was so small. He did not understand what was happening.” The smooth timber of Lan Wangji’s voice roughens.
Yet Wei Ying still cannot help the disquiet that festers within him when he observes Lan Wangji. He thinks that this sort of persistent grief is dangerous. Lan Zhan has never known how to let go and this Lan Wangji clearly does not know how to either.
“He was so small,” Lan Wangji repeats.
Lan Zhan rarely repeats himself; his speaking style never demands repetition, not when he captures attention so easily with his terse eloquence. The divergences between Lan Wangji and Lan Zhan grow.
—
Lan Qiren shakes his head when he meets Lan Wangji. “Silly boy,” he murmurs, and Lan Wangji flinches. “What have you done to yourself?”
Disapproval is how Lan Qiren expresses his affection, Wei Ying thinks wryly. Lan Wangji’s mouth firms into a straight line as he listens to his uncle reprimand him. He must find it too familiar, longing for his own home, surely.
“Shufu,” Lan Wangji says. He says nothing else, and he no longer looks at his uncle. A blank gaze dull the gold of his eyes, and his eyelashes shadow them further.
—
Lan Wangji does not meet Lan Xichen.
Lan Xichen is in seclusion.
Lan Wangji is not surprised.
—
The days go by and Lan Wangji becomes Lan Zhan’s shadow. By extension, he becomes Wei Ying’s shadow too. Such a dour man, Wei Ying will think, and he will coax Lan Wangji to walk beside them. (He does not want Lan Wangji at his back.)
—
“It was never time travel,” Lan Wangji whispers. His breath ghosts across the shell of Wei Ying’s ear.
Wei Ying flinches. The hands around his wrists tighten, and he reaches for resentment. He finds nothing, and he stiffens as Lan Wangji lets out a short laugh.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says with an awful tenderness, “why do you always walk such a crooked path?”
Wei Ying had never thought of a Lan Zhan who would dare to walk on the crooked path. He wonders why this Lan Zhan uses resentment when his golden core is stronger than that of his own Lan Zhan. Resentment has corrupted Lan Wangji—the classic example of why demonic cultivation is so heavily warned against. It is not meant to coexist with righteous cultivation, and this instability corrupts.
With a scoff, Wei Ying says, “Then why do you walk the crooked path?” He twists his head to peer at the thin smile on Lan Wangji’s face.
“Demonic cultivation is only demonic cultivation when it uses human lives,” Lan Wangji answers. “I am beyond that. You know that everything in the world has the potential for resentment.”
The world? And if it is not time travel that has landed Lan Wangji here—
“What happened to your world?” Wei Ying says. A shiver works its way down his spine and the chest behind his back presses closer.
“I wanted to understand the world so much that I unraveled it. I wanted to understand how there could be justice in a world you died in.”
“When you used your world’s energy—”
“Wei Ying, my world is no more. Like a loose thread in a tapestry—”
“—you pulled.” What an awful thing it is to understand this Lan Wangji as easily as his own Lan Zhan.
“I pulled,” Lan Wangji agrees easily. “I have no regrets.”
The enormity of this loss is incomprehensible. Wei Ying does not understand how Lan Wangji can so casually speak of the death of an entire world. The Lan Zhan he knows is a righteous man who would rather die before letting innocents die in his place. His Lan Zhan is so, so good, and disgust wells up within Wei Ying as he stares at that thin, twisted smile. This man does not deserve to be a Lan Zhan in any world.
“Your Wei Ying was lucky to die then,” he spits out.
Lan Wangji laughs again, and it is nothing like Lan Zhan’s low, rare laughs. It has none of the warmth that Wei Ying associates with it. It is a cold, soulless sound that hollows Wei Ying inside-out.
“You ruined me that first night you came to the Cloud Recesses.”
“Don’t you dare blame me! You’re a monster!...You’re no Lan Zhan of mine and I’m not your Wei Ying! I could never be!”
“You ruined me,” Lan Wangji repeats softly. “Have I turned into my father?...I think worse…” And his hands let go of Wei Ying’s wrists to grab at Wei Ying’s face instead.
Wei Ying chokes on the tongue in his mouth. It is not a kiss; it is a violation. It is punishment from a man who never learned to grieve properly or proces his emotions in any other way than repression and subsequent force. This Lan Zhan knows nothing of tenderness. He knows only of pain.
—
“What did you do to my Lan Zhan?”
“I am your Lan Zhan.”
“Tell me...please…”
A quiet hum of satisfaction. “He wanted to save you but he could not save himself.”
The hot sting of tears futilely blinked away.
—
Lan Wangji hums a song and Wei Ying wants to vomit. His body wants to love this man but his mind knows better—knows worse. He has never associated cruelty with Lan Zhan, and he hates this man for defiling his love with this crude mockery.
“Isn’t it enough?” Wei Ying asks. The rasp of his own voice surprises him.
He does not recognize himself, and he does not recognize this Lan Wangji.
Dark Lan Wangji AU where after yet another refusal to come to Gusu, he kidnaps Wei Wuxian and A-Yuan (leaving such an innocent child in the Burial Mounds wouldn't be right, after all) when they see him to the border and locks them in the secluded Gentian House, with talismans further masking their presence there.
The Wens have no way or power to get an investigation going, or even raise the alarm, and Lan Xichen is reluctantly covering for his brother out of fear of what he'd do if his new family gets taken away from him.
(1/2) Dark!LWJ eventually cultivates to immortality, but WWX, in MXY’s weaker body, is unable to do so. After he dies, LWJ forces someone else to use the same ritual to bring him back in a different body. And then…this just keeps happening. Eventually, it becomes tradition that he holds a sort of party/ceremony where all of the younger males in the nearby area (let’s just say that the Lan Sect gains even more prominence over the years) are required to attend,
(2/2/) and LWJ picks one person out of all of them who he thinks resembles WWX the most/the one who he thinks WWX would feel most comfortable in the body of. And then he forces them to do the ritual, and WWX is brought back. And WWX doesn’t like to see his husband upset, and knows how much his death hurts LWJ, so he just ends up going along with it. After a while, the people of Gusu learn to expect and dread the inevitable day when a new person will be chosen.
-
Wei Wuxian can remember when his husband had told him that the body was irrelevant. In recent lifetimes thats changed. Lan Wangji would sometimes spend weeks searching for a victim. The Gusu Lan sect, still standing proud and strong, are eager to assist him. People say that it’s an honor to be chosen by the great Hangung-jun, but Wei Wuxian can remember all the devastated friends and family of the bodies he’s been forced into. They certainly didn’t think it was an honor.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says his name like it was a relief. He kneels and picks Wei Wuxian off the floor that was still wet with blood before holding him tight. “This one is strong. I’m sure Wei Ying will reach immortality this time.”
Wei Wuxian leans against his husband and hums. Lan Wangji has been saying that for the past seven lifetimes.
WWX needs to absorb cores to sustain his life in MXY’s body. While he was able to grab a couple from the people trying to kill him, he is always on the brink. LWJ soon becomes known as the judge of the cultivation world, as he makes it his mission to seek out any cultivators committing evil and “confiscating” their cores to give to WWX.
The first time his husband offered him a golden core, small and fully intact and glowing in the palm of his hand, it had caused an argument that made Wei Wuxian avoid the Jingshi for almost three days. When he returned home the core had withered away to almost nothing but Wei Wuxian had still swallowed it whole. He made Lan Wangji swear not to do such a thing again and kissed him sweetly after he reluctantly promised.
Less then a month later Wei Wuxian collapsed in their home and was too weak to protest when his husband gently pushed another stolen core passed his lips. And then another and another until Wei Wuxian felt stronger and fuller than he had since he woke up in Mo Xuanyu's shack.
