Chapter Text
∞
Early on the day of their planned invasion of Earth, Lan Xichen's voice startles Lan Zhan out of his morning exercises. "Brother, far be it from me to question your methods, but don't you think you're going to far? Isn't this plan of yours a bit too forceful this time?"
Lan Zhan just hums in answer and lets his aching fingers uncurl from the death grip he's had on the Stygian Tiger Seal for the entire duration of his meditation. He stares out of the window of their spaceship and onto the blue planet below. Somewhere down there, Wei Ying's reincarnation is preparing for the battle to come. That knowledge sits uneasily in Lan Zhan's chest because once again, they're on opposing sides.
"You act so willfully these days," Xichen continues his criticism. "You just do whatever you please, whenever it pleases you. I really don't think it's healthy to go on like this. You cannot continue letting the past affect you this much."
"Can I not?" The thought seems laughable to Lan Zhan. Once, it had felt as though he would be forever stuck in the past that his brother wants him to let go of so much, and Lan Zhan personally thinks that he's done a very thorough job rebuilding himself after that fateful moment in his life.
Sure, it was a patchwork job at best, but Lan Zhan had picked up all of the pieces that remained after his heart had broken and shaped them into as good a semblance of his old self as he could manage.
Of course, he was affected. Losing a soulmate would do that to you, Lan Zhan thinks, and any amount of melancholic reminiscence that followed was, in his opinion, very much justified.
"You know it's unlikely that he even remembers his past life, Wangji! What good will it do if you enact your revenge onto him now, if he doesn't even know what it's all about?"
That makes Lan Zhan snort ungainly. "What makes you think that I'm looking for revenge?"
"I don't know," Xichen answers with a sarcastic and overexaggerated shrug of his shoulders. "Maybe it's the prison cell you've built in your personal shuttle. You know the one? With the chains on the bed?"
"It's not a prison." Lan Zhan says, "It's a bedroom. All I want is for Wei Ying to stay there for a while until all danger has passed and he's had time to hear me out."
"Hm. That sounds totally sensible. It's not at all a prison if he's chained up and at your mercy."
His brother is focusing on that on purpose, Lan Zhan thinks. He must be if he keeps harping on about it. But really, all Lan Zhan wants is for Wei Ying to listen to what he has to say. If it doesn't jog Wei Ying's memories, Lan Zhan will turn him loose and return to Gusu alone and nurse his broken heart for the rest of eternity.
"I'm not looking for revenge on Wei Ying, Xichen. I'm really not," Lan Zhan needs at least this much to be clear between him and his brother before they potentially come face to face with Wei Ying.
Lan Zhan has a plan, and it hinges on the fact that Xichen will keep their forces in check while he goes and grabs Wei Ying. His brother knows that, and he's made his displeasure about being part of the plan very clear.
"Please," Lan Zhan says. "Before our scouts returned with the intel that Wei Ying's reincarnation and his little band of defenders were on this planet, I never asked you for a single thing. I've spent almost two centuries conquering the universe for you and the Grandmaster with this weapon that Wei Ying died for, and never once did I ask you to do something for me or help me in any way."
"That's not true. We've been here before Wangji. You can gaslight yourself if that's what you want to do, but it's not going to work on me."
"What are you worried about? Me? Or my ability to win this war for you?" Lan Zhan grimaces at the way that his brother nods thoughtfully at the options he's given him. "If it's the first one, I've never been better. And if it's the second one, believe me, I've taken over hundreds of planets in the Grandmaster's name, and I will do the same thing here on Earth. That Wei Ying, or rather this version of him, has decided to lend his protection to the people of this planet doesn't make a difference to me. I'll just take him away from the battlefield before I cut down the rest of the forces that stand against us."
"Sure," Xichen says again, doubt dripping off of his intonation. "Sure, you do that. But Wangji, Uncle will not be pleased if this obsession of yours gets in the way of your dedication to the cause."
"Mhn."
"Just remember that. We're supposed to bring order to the chaos of the universe, and you behaving this erratically doesn't really fit that."
"That's what you don't understand, Xichen. This is fate. Wei Ying is my zhiji. He's my soul's other half. We must be together. There's nothing in the whole universe more orderly than that."
∞
"If I had known that I would have to deal with alien invasions, Wen Qing, I never would have agreed to all of this. What the fuck. How are we supposed to stand against this many drones? We're just a handful of fighters!"
Wei Ying thinks his ire is appropriate. Wave after wave of foot soldiers rolls out from the giant Space Ship that had touched down in the middle of Beijing and crushed the glass and steel structure of the National Grand Theater under its weight as if it were nothing but a house of cards.
Dusk has fallen. They've been fighting for hours already.
The enemy's white uniforms are still a bright glowing white, and whenever Wei Ying gets close enough to engage in one-on-one combat with one of them, he delights in soaking the fabric in their blood. That's what they get for disturbing him on the day he was finally supposed to make up with Jiang Cheng's family.
This whole magical warrior of justice bullshit just really wasn't worth it, he thinks. Not when it meant having to deal with a new sort of crazy evil seemingly every week without the support necessary to do it well and definitely not when the crazy evil was actual aliens trying to take over the world.
"Just concentrate on fighting, Wei Wuxian! Better spare your breath for that new weapon that Aurora gave you. It's a flute, isn't it? So at least you will finally stop your constant whining while you use it."
"You're such a bitch, Wen Qing." Wei Ying grins over at his leader. "Sometimes, I don't know why I listen to anything you say at all."
"Yeah, yeah. It's because secretly you're a masochist."
Wei Ying laughs and wriggles his eyebrows suggestively before reaching into his robes to pull out his new flute. "I haven't trained a lot with this yet, so you might want to plug up your ears."
Wen Qing throws him another frosty glare and then turns away from him and back into the fray. The sound of her sword and her spiritual attacks gets swallowed up by the fighting around her pretty much immediately, and Wei Ying is left mostly alone in this quiet corner of the battle until one of the enemies spots him and tries to run him through with his sword.
He jumps out of the way and sends a flare of spiritual power at him, and when that isn't enough, he follows it up with a quick talisman. The man staggers when the talisman paper attaches to his forehead. Then his head blows up.
Wei Ying grins. Boom, headshot.
Wei Ying looks around for a good vantage point where he can keep an eye on the battle and where he also won't be taken down by the enemy forces immediately if he stays there for a bit while he tries out his new weapon.
He spots a low roof terrace on one of the surrounding buildings.
It's quick work to climb up to the roof. Nobody follows him either and so, after a moment of contemplation, Wei Ying settles on which song he wants to use to raise the dead and starts playing.
Wei Ying was right when he'd told Wen Qing to plug up her ears, he quickly realizes. It's an entirely different thing to practice putting spiritual energy into the notes when everything is quiet around him, and he isn't already out of breath from fighting. Here, in the midst of the action, his melody comes out screeching and somewhat off-key.
It still works, though. Below him, he can see the distinctive white forms of their enemies rise again and pick up their weapons.
They don't move as smooth as living humans do, but despite their jerky limbs, they have the unnatural strength of death on their side, and that might just finally give them enough of an edge that they can cut down all of the soldiers that are just cannon-fodder and concentrate on finding whichever mastermind was behind the invasion itself.
Wei Ying narrows his eyes thoughtfully and roams the battlefield for any sign of a commander. It's not really helpful that all of them wear those horrible white uniforms, he thinks. How do they ever tell anyone apart on their spaceship? It seems terribly inefficient to him. He much prefers the way that the members of his team all wear their own colors instead.
He can easily spot Wen Qing in her signature red hanfu. She's fought her way through so many troops that she's close to the entrance of the spaceship already. Wen Ning's grey robes aren't quite as easy to spot, but once Wei Ying's eyes have found him, he recognizes that that is because they are soaked so dark from the blood of their enemies that they look almost pitch black.
Content that those two are safe at least, Wei Ying lets his eyes roam further in search for someone who might need his help now that he's finished his song, but before he manages to pinpoint any of the others, a voice calls out for him from behind him.
"Wei Ying."
Wei Ying whips around in surprise. He doesn't know this voice, and that's a really bad sign, considering this person had managed to sneak up on him this easily. "Who are you? How do you know my name?"
"I am Lan Zhan," the man says and reaches out a hand towards Wei Ying before clenching his fist with a shake of his head and then dropping it again.
The man who'd called out for Wei Ying has an expression on his face that Wei Ying can't quite place. Sadness, maybe? Or perhaps yearning, Wei Ying thinks. It seems too deeply melancholic to be simple sadness.
It's very freaky, either way. An expression like that has no place on a battlefield, and especially not on the face of one of the invaders.
The man keeps staring at him intently. Almost as if he's waiting for some sort of reaction from Wei Ying. His eyes are golden, unnaturally bright, and definitely not human. They seem to glow in the near-dark that surrounds them.
Wei Ying is entranced by them. Like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck, he dithers so much between fight and flight that his entire body feels like lead instead.
His heartbeat rushes madly in his ears, and he shivers.
"What—" he swallows hard and tries to form words, but his lips and tongue have stopped working properly as well.
∞
Those eyes. They look just like they did when Wei Ying had last met his gaze. Full of life. Full of that spark that was unique to only Wei Ying.
The face is different. It's a bit rounder, the cheekbones not as defined as they had been two millennia ago, but it's undeniably Wei Ying's soul inside of that body. Lan Zhan is certain of it.
Just hearing Wei Ying's voice again makes the sharp edges of Lan Wangji's jagged broken heart throb as they stir painfully inside his chest for the first time in an eternity.
"Wei Ying," Lan Zhan says again. Powerless against the persisting urge to touch Wei Ying, he reaches out a second time and doesn't let his anxiety keep him from following through this time. "It's been so long."
Wei Ying's body trembles under Lan Zhan's touch. Perhaps a subconscious part of Wei Ying's soul does remember him instinctively, Lan Zhan fervently hopes for a second.
That hope is dashed as soon as he realizes that Wei Ying is trying to fight against the powerful hold that Lan Zhan's spiritual energy has on him. The fight is the source of his shaking.
"Sweetheart," Lan Zhan cups Wei Ying's face and digs his thumb deliberately into Wei Ying's cheek muscles to loosen them. "There's no need to fight this. I won't hurt you. And I know you've always been stubborn, but just sheer force of will is not enough to break this spell of stillness I've put on you."
He isn't quite sure how old exactly this reborn Wei Ying is, but be it seventeen years or seventy, Lan Zhan doubts that Wei Ying's unrefined spiritual power will be able to stand against his own in any way.
Once upon a time, they'd been evenly matched in their skills. But Lan Zhan has done nothing but train and fight and then train some more since the day that Wei Ying died in his arms, and he's taking full advantage now of the bottomless well of energy that he's amassed inside of himself during those years.
Taking control of someone's body like this had required a lot of experimenting before he'd perfected the technique. In the beginning, his subjects had often died because Lan Zhan lacked the focus needed to keep all of their essential bodily functions going, and so they often suffocated or their heart gave out from the stress.
He's glad for all the time he's had to hone his skills with this technique now. The last thing he wants is to lose Wei Ying yet another time.
But that reminds him. He shouldn't keep stalling.
He'd promised Xichen to be quick during the retrieval phase of his plan and return to his unit before anyone noticed him missing.
With that in mind, Lan Zhan curls his arms into a tight hug around Wei Ying's stiff and unmoving body and then activates his teleportation talisman. When they rematerialize inside his personal space shuttle, he carries Wei Ying towards the bedroom without hesitation.
Xichen had called it a prison cell earlier that day, but that's not it. The chains on the bed were a new addition and they would only be necessary for as long as Wei Ying had to remain here on his own.
They weren't meant for any sort of nefarious purpose either, not in the way that Xichen had implied. Although, Lan Zhan thinks as he checks the fit of the manacles around Wei Ying's wrist before locking them with a quick application of his qi, some part deep inside of him does take pleasure in how they make Wei Ying look claimed somehow.
Wei Ying blinks up at him angrily. His eyes are the only part of his body that Lan Zhan still lets him control by himself, and he uses it to make his displeasure clear.
When Lan Zhan bends down over the bed one last time to strip Wei Ying of all of his weapons, Wei Ying closes his eyes completely as though he's trying to block him out. If Wei Ying could have, he probably would have turned his entire face away in defiance, Lan Zhan thinks fondly and brushes a stray hair away from Wei Ying's brow.
"Worry not," he murmurs. "I will return soon. Then we'll talk."
He lets his touch linger for just a second more on Wei Ying's soft skin before he leaves.
When he steps back into formation next to his brother on the battlefield, he still feels the heat of Wei Ying's body on his fingers. Alive, his heart beats. He's alive again.
∞
As soon as his kidnapper dissolves in front of his eyes into the tell-tale cloud of a teleportation talisman, Wei Ying feels his motor control return to his body.
He struggles against the chains on his wrist almost instinctively. With as much strength as he can come up with, he throws himself against their hold in the hopes that there's some sort of weak point in them that might break if only Wei Ying managed to hit the right angle or force.
The cold hard metal around his wrist makes it hard to concentrate for him. Makes him feel panicky and out of sorts.
This is not at all comparable to the time his first, and only girlfriend had tied him up a little for a makeout session once. That had been based on trust. That had not involved a complete stranger and a kidnapping.
Bloodying his wrists is all that Wei Ying manages to accomplish with his struggling, but he feels almost proud of it. His captor had checked and rechecked the fit of the manacles at least twice, muttering things under his breath about ensuring Wei Ying's comfort, and so to go against what the man wanted gives Wei Ying back at least a little bit of a sense of control again.
He breathes hard from his exertion when he settles back on the bed again and starts looking for something to distract himself from the grave inescapability of the situation.
The room he's in is immaculate. Large and spacious. Airy, somehow, despite the metal walls.
It has a bit of an old-time-y feel to it, too. It almost seems to Wei Ying as though somebody had gone back in time to ancient times and stolen a young Master's furniture to decorate this room. Everything looks wooden and hand-carved and well-worn with age.
It's such a contrast to the blinking stars and the glimpse of the vast darkness of space that looms beyond the glass ceiling that it makes Wei Ying's head hurt from the dichotomy.
"Ah fuck," he murmurs to himself. How could everything have gone so wrong? There's no way he could escape from space. It's not like he knows how to pilot a space ship, even if he did manage to get out of the chains.
Wei Ying examines the chains again, and this time he makes sure not to dissolve into a base panic. He keeps his breaths nice and even and meditative — slow inhale, slow exhale— until he feels settled enough that he can reach for his golden core and coax some of the energy out of it.
It turns out that he can circle his qi through his meridians just fine, but as soon as he tries to send a sliver of it out of his body, the chains start glowing and sap all of the energy away from him.
"Fuck," he says again. So not even spiritual power would get him out of this. He'd kind of been hoping that he might be able to send a flare out so that his team might come and get him, but that doesn't seem likely now.
∞
Lan Zhan returns from the battle weary and tired. He's fighting off a headache, though whether it stems from his exhaustion or from his brother's constant snide remarks about Wei Ying, he doesn't know.
Finding his love passed out from exhaustion and with dried blood crusted under his binds does not help at all with that.
"Wei Ying!" He exclaims as he sinks to his knees next to the bed. "What did you do?"
Wei Ying doesn't answer. Even when Lan Zhan takes off the chains and begins to assess the damage Wei Ying had done to himself, he barely stirs. He shows signs of qi exhaustion, probably from trying to break his bonds, but luckily the only physical damage is limited to the deep cuts on his wrists from where the edge of the manacles had dug in during his struggling.
The flesh around the cuts is swollen and dark red, and when Lan Zhan has finally cleaned the wounds completely, he can't help from pressing a soft kiss to the blooming bruises.
It feels illicit. Dangerous.
Even before, when all Lan Zhan had let himself indulge in were carefully measured touches of his hand, he'd felt an urge to claim Wei Ying. Putting his lips onto Wei Ying's skin fuels that urge even more.
"Sweetheart," he murmurs, "Little Rabbit."
Lan Zhan's eyes flicker up to Wei Ying's face and then
get stuck on the soft pink invitation of his sleep-slack lips. Just one kiss, he thinks to himself. What could it hurt? Wei Ying wouldn't even know. And once Lan Zhan had explained himself, wouldn't Wei Ying allow him all the kisses he wanted anyway? They were soulmates, after all.
Lan Zhan nods to himself decisively. Just one kiss. That's all he would take before he and Wei Ying talked.
Careful not to disturb the bed too much, he leans down over Wei Ying's face and pauses for one last time. Then he brushes his lips across Wei Ying's own, and all hesitation flees from his mind. He lets his tongue flick out to lick up some of Wei Ying's inherent sweetness, and it's even better than he'd ever imagined. It's overwhelming, being this close to Wei Ying. The taste of him, the scent of him, the feel of him. All of it threatens to overcome Lan Zhan entirely, and he deepens the kiss in a frenzy.
He could do this forever, he thinks. And he'd be happy. Even without Wei Ying's participation, even with Wei Ying's mouth slack and open and unresisting, this moment is magical.
Lan Zhan can hardly bear to think how much better it would be if Wei Ying were actually to wake up during this.
He's so lost in the kiss that it takes him a second to realize that Wei has started to stir. Even when he does, he can't bring himself to let go of him. Not now, when he's finally got him in his arms.
Then Wei Ying slaps him across the face hard and Lan Zhan reels back in shock.
∞
"What the hell are you doing?" Wei Ying screams and almost falls off the bed in his hurry to put some space between himself and his assaulter.
The guy is still on the bed, his lips red and swollen and his eyes wide in surprise. But really, Wei Ying thinks, what the hell had he expected? One second Wei Ying had been asleep, and the next he'd woken to a tongue down his throat and hands casually fondling his body. Of course, he would push him off.
Of all the things he'd expected this kidnapping to turn into, some sort of crazed rape-fantasy from this guy had not been it.
"Wei Ying," the guy says. "I'm sorry. I meant to explain first. This isn't how…" he trails off and smoothly rolls off the bed. "You must have been surprised."
Wei Ying almost laughs at that. "Surprised? That's a bit too soft a word for what I feel right now, buddy. Stay the hell back."
The guy stops his slow approach towards Wei Ying immediately, which is a relief for Wei Ying. He's already backed up against a wall, so there's not exactly a lot of places that he could flee. The guy is huge, too, broad-shouldered and tall. In a one-on-one fight, Wei Ying knows he probably has no chance at winning.
"Look," Wei Ying says. "You're objectively hot for an evil alien guy bent on taking over the world, but I'm not sure how things are where you come from. On Earth, we have this concept called 'consent,' and it does not include chaining someone up in your bedroom and jumping them in their sleep, at least not if they don't explicitly state they're alright with it. And for the record, I'm not alright with it. I don't know you. I don't even know your name."
The guy looks lost for a second, but then he nods. "I apologize. I am Lan Zhan. I already told you before, but you must not have heard."
He sounds utterly unruffled, too, as if his lack of introduction was his big misstep here. Wei Ying shakes his head in wonder.
"Great, nice to meet you, Lan Zhan. Please let me go now."
"I—" that seems to disturb the guy, at least from the strange sudden downturn to his lips. "Wei Ying, there's something I need to explain first. It will make things clearer for you, I think."