含光君

Lan Wangji can't identify the soft music drifting from the record player, but if he asked, Claudius would tell him gladly, and provide an explanation of the musician's life besides. Perhaps he will ask, if there is some lull in the conversation, but there has not been one. Talking with people is so rarely an activity of ease for him. It is so rarely one during which he can feel assured that his silences are understood. He has not forgotten to be grateful for Claudius, the first person related to him by neither family name nor marriage to understand him in this way.

"Mn," he says, gathering up another lock of Claudius' hair in his hands. It is getting longer. Just as notably, strands of grey are visible amongst the uniform darkness of its color. Lan Wangji says nothing about that. He won't draw attention to it unless Claudius wants him to. The absence of the appropriate dye during last Dark was a matter of deep offense.

Ably, Lan Wangji begins the work of twisting it all into a sleek knot that will sit at the back of Claudius' head. Kneeling behind him, he has to bend only slightly to focus on this work. The difference in their heights is greater when they stand, with thanks to the comparative length of Lan Wangji's legs. "And then?" he prompts. Claudius doesn't require prompts, but Lan Wangji is indulgent with him. He likes to answer him, so that his brother will know himself heard.

There are several things Lan Wangji can't control. He can't control whether Aornis takes another clean, untraceable bite out of his memories. He can't control whether Shen Yuan's future body will grow appropriately, although he trusts Magnus and Claudius with the task as much as he trusts anyone with anything. He can't control whether Luo Binghe, in his unpredictability, decides to lash out at another resident of the mansion with the misfortune to cross or offend him. He can't control whether Aornis decides to kill again.

What he can control are the little things, the small tasks that make up the fabric of his days. He can still carry a half-asleep Wei Ying to the bath in the mornings and chide him gently for sleeping so late. He can still watch with quiet pride as Galahad grows stronger, his grip on his sword surer and more practiced. He can still haul logs and clay for Sagramore and Laertes, glad for the simple usefulness of it. He can still tidy the bed each morning, tie Wei Ying's hair up for him, embrace Magnus with steady ferocity each time he sees him.

Small things. He stands in the kitchen, sleeves bound and hair braided for tidiness, methodically washing a pile of dishes he has brought down from their quarters. If nothing else, these will be clean. It will do for now.

The rabbits have been settling in. They have sweet, easygoing temperaments, which helps, and it helps, too, that the mansion has apparently noticed their presence and supplied Lan Wangji with a little wooden hutch for their keeping when he is not able to hold them. He does, on occasion, need his hands for other tasks. His preferred kitchen has also been forthcoming with hay and vegetables for their feeding. Wei Ying has already threatened to cook and eat them several times, which means he likes them and will be whittling toys for them any day now. Once winter passes, Lan Wangji will work on constructing a sturdier hutch for the outdoors as well, so that they can see the lake and the woods.¹

Because they are so sweet, and also so endearingly small, their presence is calming in itself. Lan Wangji does not exactly need help to meditate successfully -- he has been doing it daily since he was very young -- but the company does not go amiss, either. It is difficult to dwell overmuch on anything troublesome with two tiny, warm bodies in one's lap.

Lan Wangji is not actually meditating yet, but he is seated in that side room he prefers to use for the practice. There is incense burning, and he has a little brown rabbit, munching its way through a piece of watercress, perched on his knee. In his hands, he holds the equally little white rabbit, which is overall doing well, but which does have a greater tendency to startle and to want to hide itself. He is speaking to it under his breath, gently.

¹It's important for rabbits who began life in the bottom of a top hat to be exposed to nature.

Lan Wangji has lived through worse feelings than this. He knows this. He has lived through a grief like the night sky dropping to the earth and compressing him beneath its blackness. He lived through the recovery from the discipline whip, weeks of physical pain so searing that he could not breathe, much less walk, without agony. This week, he has lost no one. He bears no injuries to his body or his spiritual power.

He is all the more frustrated, then, that he still feels so helpless with rage and humiliation. He has meditated for so long that it feels nearly indulgent. He has run his sword forms, and he has copied the first thousand of the Cloud Recesses rules for the comfort of it, and he has pinned Wei Ying up against the wall of their quarters and taken him with such punishing force that he laughed and wept and begged all at once until it was finished. That helped, because it always helps, and because Wei Ying required singular focus and care from Lan Wangji afterward. So did cutting down countless corpses. Neither helped as much as he would have preferred.

Perhaps it is the humiliation of it. There was a time when Lan Wangji walked upright on a broken leg for days on end in a seething and desperate bid to hold onto his pride and dignity, so that no member of Qishan Wen could point at him and say see, the Cloud Recesses burned at our hands and, look, we've broken Lan-er-gongzi, too. When he shuts his eyes, before he can slip into the comfort of meditative breathing, he hears Shen Qingqiu telling him that his story, Wei Ying's story, is open to him like the pages of a book, that everything Lan Wangji has kept close and guarded and precious is known to him already. He hears himself telling Galahad about the sacrificing curse, he sees himself crushing wood beneath his bare hand in front of Claudius, he hears himself confessing aloud to his poisonous jealousy toward anyone who has ever looked too long at Wei Ying.

In that same room where he once accidentally received several visitors mid-handstand, he sits. There is a stick of sandalwood incense in the corner, but it has burned out. Lan Wangji, cross-legged, is not meditating. He is looking quietly at the floor, and he is trying to clear his stubborn mind.

On the whole, Lan Wangji has found peace at the mansion. There are parts of his life that are missing; his disciples and their laughter, the waterfalls and natural beauty of the Cloud Recesses, the clarity of purpose of night-hunting. He worries for his brother and hopes that no one has wrested him too early from his seclusion. He dreads, a little, privately, the explanation he will need to give his uncle upon their return.

And yet: he does trust his students. They are capable and clever, even Lan Jingyi, although you wouldn't know it to read the boy's schoolwork. Wei Ying trusts Wen Qionglin, and Lan Wangji trusts Wei Ying. And yet: Wei Ying is here. Wei Ying is here, and there is nothing that could matter more than awakening to his bed-warm limbs and his hair spreading like spilled ink across Lan Wangji's chest where his head is pillowed.

Wei Ying is, and has been, buried in his talismans. Lan Wangji has fed him, brought him tea, and tempted him into bed once already today. Now he has deigned to give his husband space, and has found his way to the library. Improbably, there are some texts here that he recognizes, tomes of musical cultivation he was wholly certain were found only in the Cloud Recesses library.

As such, he can be found perusing that particular section. Little of this is new to him, but there's a kind of nostalgia to reading over the foundational texts of his own cultivation practice. It reminds him of home.