Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Are you sure, Wen Ning?” Wei Wuxian asks as he clutches at Wen Ning’s hand. “You don’t have to, you know. You could stay! I’m sure it would be okay. We would figure it out. Lan Zhan can talk to the Elders for you. They’ll listen to him. They have to, you know, he’s in charge! At least until Zewu-Jun is back, and he’ll definitely let you stay, I’m sure of it. You… you don’t have to go.”

Wen Ning tries to smile at him, his face stiff as it pulls at the corners. “I’m sure,” he says. “It’s okay, Wei-gongzi. I want to go.”

Wei Wuxian’s mouth snaps shut at that, a strange watery look in his eyes. It makes something in Wen Ning waver, to question himself, to wonder if he really has to leave, only —

Only there are things Wen Ning needs to do.

“Thank you, Wei-gongzi,” Wen Ning says, bowing deeply to him. Wei Wuxian makes a startled sound of protest and tries to pull him up by the elbows.

“Stop that! You don’t need to — ”

“And you as well, Hanguang-Jun,” Wen Ning continues. “For everything you’ve done.”

“Don’t sound so final, Wen Ning,” Wei Ying says, his voice thick. “It’s just for now, right? It’s not goodbye.”

“No,” Wen Ning agrees, rising from his bow. “It is not goodbye.”

𓆸 𓆸 𓆸

It has been fourteen years since Wen Ning died.

Fourteen years since he was brought back.

Fourteen years since the Burial Mounds.

It has been one year since Wei Ying called to him and Wen Ning regained control of his mind.

At first, Wen Ning had felt only confusion. It had been like a waking dream, except the dream had been dark and empty and filled with voices that whispered nothing-words to him; an eternity of being born and dying over and over again until his memories had spun away and left him blank. A story that had been unwritten.

And then, he awoke in an unfamiliar place and recognized nothing. Knew nothing. He looked out at a world twisted with darkness and buzzing with voices nobody seemed to hear and was told that this was real.

And then, the fog cleared. The world coalesced into its true shape, and Wen Ning looked around and found that, with the confusion burned away, he felt something new.

He felt angry.

He is filled with fire. His throat clenches around a blaze of words that he swallows down again and again until his belly burns.

It is why he has to go: to walk backward through the ashes of his life, turn over the coals and find where the fire lives.

𓆸 𓆸 𓆸

The meadow grasses sway, their heavy heads bowed low, reverent at the foot of the mountain, tossing seeds in the wind.

Wen Ning catches them in his hair, memories blooming from the morass of his life before. His feet know the way, following the ghosts who walk in silence at his flank until he arrives, at last, at a lesion of pink and purple flowers that cut through the belly of the field.

They are beautiful. Bruise-colored and familiar, pale pink that ripens into a purple so dark it is nearly black. He kneels, his knees landing in the dip of his memory, his hands hot with shame where he held Wei Ying down, golden light spilling out of him to burn a scar of flowers into the land.

He thought then that, for all the horror of what they were doing, it was right. He thought that, when Wei Ying asked for things, it was right to give them to him.

He was wrong. He sees now that Wei Ying will ask for things that hurt him. That Wen Ning will, again and again, answer the call to destruction with a heart filled with love so blind and boiling that it could spill over and leave wounds that Wei Ying will hide away, a cat slinking off to lick them in the dark.

Wen Ning presses his hands into the ground where they ripped Wei Ying in two, flowers crushed beneath his palms. He does not sigh or breathe deeply around the shame that hollows him out. He does not have breath to give to sadness. Instead, he plucks a purple flower with a promise. He was ignorant, then, to think the price of sacrifice was Wei Ying’s alone to pay. He has learned better. He has learned that joy can not be snatched back from an altar of penance; there is no sneaking into the temple to steal away an offering already claimed.

Wen Ning holds the flower gently and promises to remember.

𓆸 𓆸 𓆸

Wen Ning continues on his journey, the purple iris stored carefully in his sleeve pressed between the folds of a talisman that Wei Ying gave to him before his departure.

"In case you run into any trouble," he'd said, without further explanation.

Wen Ning treasures the sentiment the talisman represents, the love expressed through cinnabar, and knows he will not use it.

He passes through Yiling. The town has hardly changed over the years. Still dusty. Still filled with hard people wearing the thick face of poverty and hardship. And yet, life goes on. Bright, burbling laughter spills from the mouth of an alley. A young woman as gray as stone leans against the wall, a small child grabbing fistfuls of her hair and giggling as he shoves them into his mouth.

Outside of Yiling, as he makes his way toward the looming black mountain beyond, the world sounds different: the air grows thick with whispered pleas and dead faces shimmer in the air, and Wen Ning finds himself wishing he wasn’t making this particular trip alone.

The Burial Mounds welcome him home with eager hands that slip over his skin like smoke, breaking apart into empty air. They speak to him, their voices percussing against him, their pleas filling him like the hollow of a drum. The resentful energy that holds him together answers back, a counterbeat of equal longing.

At the top of the mountain, where once their shabby homes had nestled shoulder-to-shoulder for warmth in the dark, there is nothing. Only blackened shadows burnt into stone where once Granny Wen and A-Yuan had shared a bed of straw. Only empty rows of ash where once they had labored in the rocky soil, bidding radish crops to grow.

The resentment churns around him as he stands amongst the ruins where his family had scraped together the pieces of themselves and tried to coax the world into something gentler.

The world doesn’t want to be changed, though. In asking the Burial Mounds for gentleness, the world for mercy, they had asked too much. Wen Ning had escaped death and accepted the parcel of happiness that remained for him. He was given more than he could have hoped for. More than he could keep.

He has A-Yuan. He has Wei Ying. It is enough.

It is enough.

Wen Ning approaches the mouth of Demon Subduing Palace, dust clutching at the hem of his robes as though it could drag him back into the grave. Outside the mouth of the cave, he sees them — floating in the pool of cleansed water, bright beacons in the gray world, are the white petals of a dozen lotus flowers.

That night, Wen Ning stays in the Burial Mounds, sitting at the edge of the pool. He does not sleep — he never sleeps — but he listens to the spirits that call the place home as they speak to him even in death of the ache in their stomachs and their hunger.

In the morning, he wades into the lotus pool and plucks several plants out by the roots, taking a bag from his pack and placing them inside.

Back down the mountain, he finds his way to Yiling, his robe collar pulled high around his throat, his hat tilted low over his eyes.

He finds them quickly.

On a corner, in coarse robes wearing thin around the elbows, is the young woman bouncing the baby on her knee. Her dark hair is tied back tightly, more practical than elegant, a few stray strands tucked behind her ears as the baby grabs at them.

She looks up as Wen Ning approaches, her eyes sharp and bright, even narrowed as they are with distrust. She shifts, bringing the child closer to her chest. “He’s coming back,” she says, sharp and proud.

Wen Ning stops a safe distance away so as not to scare her. Slowly, he reaches into his bag and withdraws the lotus plants, the roots wrapped in a damp cloth for safekeeping. “Put them in the water,” Wen Ning says. “They’re strong, and the seeds are sweet. They’ll grow almost anywhere.”

The woman says nothing as he places them on the ground between them. Wen Ning considers, then bends low again and plucks a single flower head and places it in his pocket before he rises and walks away.

𓆸 𓆸 𓆸

The wind whips over Qiongqi Path as Wen Ning stares down at the now empty valley, green and yellow where the weeds feed on the bodies of his people and the men who murdered them. The grass waves to him, like a friend beckoning from a distance; like family calling him home to rest his head beneath the earth, held snug by the roots of hungry flowers.

The sun burns. The tops of flower heads brown beneath it, and their thorny stalks catch on Wen Ning’s robes as he makes his way through the path, clutching at him like beggars. He feels nothing as they snag on the skin of his ankles and tear at him.

He has nothing to give them. Wen Ning cannot bid the sun to burn less hotly, nor ask the clouds for cover. He cannot summon water to quench the drooping flower’s thirst.

Instead, he sits, their sun-crisp petals crunching into fragile ash beneath him.

Around him, the valley buzzes with summer insects drawn forth as the sun makes its slow arc and burns orange light into the western edge of the sky. Inside his chest, Wen Ning feels an answer to the blazing horizon, an answer to the chill of the evening breeze, and then… nothing.

Beneath the darkening sky, amidst the bugs and wilting flowers, atop remains of lost kin, Wen Ning finds himself in a world with no place for him. The dead rest and the living live, and Wen Ning… Wen Ning sits in the valley where he died and finds the root of his fire.

It is here, in this place where his light went out, where he laid down with family and thought that at least there was peace at the end of violence.

But then. But then there was darkness that tore into the wound in his chest, that clawed its way in and made space and spread its cold roots through him. It gouged black rivers into him, poured out of him, and in the end there was no peace. He woke, and his sister embraced him, cried into his shoulder as he wrapped his arms around her, and he told himself that this was worth it. But Wen Ning was a blade, and the tighter Wen Qing held him, the deeper he cut her.

Wen Ning is angry. He lies back as dark spills into the sky and, as though he can slice his arms through time and paddle backward like a boat in water, Wen Ning closes his eyes and imagines a different world. A world where he had fallen to the ground in this spot and never moved again. A world where Wei Ying had not pulled him back and run resentment along his edges like a whetstone along a knife.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there. Long enough for grass to curve between his fingers in a bid for light? Long enough for him to sink into the earth and for the flower seeds to send weak-fingered roots into the ground before raising red faces to the sun like flowers over a grave?

It is light when he hears the approach of soft footsteps that stop just at his side, and still, Wen Ning lies a little longer. “Ning-shushu?”

Wen Ning opens his eyes to find Lan Sizhui kneeling next to him. “Sizhui,” he says, attempting to smile at the young man. “I’ve told you. Call me ‘qianbei’.”

“Of course, Qianbei,” Lan Sizhui says, returning his smile gently.

Wen Ning sits up, looking around himself at the valley. It is daylight again. The sun feels softer today, the wind quieter. The fields are full with blooms of shimmering red.

“Why did you want to meet here, Qianbei?” Lan Sizhui asks, looking out and seeing the emptiness that stretches around them.

“There are spirits here who need to rest,” Wen Ning says. “What do you remember?”

𓆸 𓆸 𓆸

That night, as Lan Sizhui sleeps, Wen Ning slips away deeper into the valley. They had done good work that day, turning stones and playing music for the dead as Wen Ning told A-Yuan stories. A-Yuan doesn’t remember this place, but Wen Ning remembers every moment of it; his memory is an undying thing that clings to the scraps of his life like a hungry dog, unwilling to let a single color or sound spill wasted through the cracks.

So Wen Ning told him of how Wen Popo had tied him to her back. Of how he had woven him a hat of grass to shield him from the sun. Of how Uncle Four used to tell him stories when he cried. He did not tell him that Wen Popo would hide him beneath her robes when guards got too close, or how fear lanced their hearts whenever he cried for fear of what those guards might do.

He told Lan Sizhui stories of how he was loved before he was a Lan. Of the little boy who was a Wen and how, to his family, he was sunlight that filled them with color and hope back when these fields were only gray.

Wen Ning walks deeper and deeper into the valley until, suddenly, he stops, having reached the place that burns the hottest. Here, in the dip between two hills, is a low wide bowl in the land overflowing with dark red azaleas that ripple like liquid in the mountain wind.

This, he knows, was the place that it started. The place where Wen Ning died.

He wades in, letting the flowers catch his hands and drag the anger out of him.

He died here. But this is also the place where his family took an orphaned boy, knit themselves tight around him, and saved him. Their love had been enough, had left behind prints deep enough for others to find and step into when they were gone.

𓆸 𓆸 𓆸

“What do you have in your hands, Qianbei?”

“I found some flowers in the fields. Would you like one?”

𓆸 𓆸 𓆸

There are people in Dafan, again.

They are unfamiliar people. There are no noses he recognizes, or smiles that tug higher on the left side the way A-Yuan’s does.

Lan Sizhui goes to find them a room, Wen Ning opting to walk the market — it will be easier for him to find a room for a good price without Wen Ning there.

It is a small village, nothing like he remembers. Or perhaps it only seemed big to him when he was a child. Maybe it only seems small when people turn down alleys and press themselves into shop doors as Wen Ning passes.

His eyes drift over the village, and he does not realize what he is looking for until his eyes snag on a string of familiar characters on a book in a shop display. His feet carry him forward and he finds himself in the store, a book of medicine in his hands.

“How much is this?” he asks, tracing a finger over the lines,

The shopkeeper looks at him — his eyes linger on the black veins that vine up his neck and on the bloodless lily pallor of his skin. The left edge of his mouth twitches, an echo of a smile. “Take it,” he says. “No cost.”

That night, as Lan Sizhui sleeps, Wen Ning sits in the dark and reads. The words are stiff and pointed and prick like thorns behind his eyes. Or, perhaps, like shining silver needles.

As the night begins to thin to a gray trickle through the slatted shutters, as Lan Sizhui stirs, Wen Ning takes each flower he carries with him and tucks them between the pages of the book with a promise to remember.