wuding | Why is it Always Meditation?

Why is it Always Meditation?

The ride home gives him time to think and overthink everything they’ve been talking about. There’s a substantial side of him that wishes he could somehow take back everything that they’d been speaking about. He doesn’t want to face his demons. He wants to snuff them out completely and never think about them again.

But now that he’s let Lan Zhan in on it, he can’t see a way to get out of it. He feels exposed after sharing some of his inner workings and there’s plans set in motion to expose more. He hadn’t been lying about trusting Lan Zhan with that side of himself, but he hadn’t been thinking about how much it would hurt Lan Zhan to know about it.

By the time he reaches Cloud Recesses, he’s feeling more than a little frazzled. He leaves Little Apple near the stables where she can have the finest grasses in Gusu to appease her royal senses. He even gives her an apple he’s only had a couple bites of before he finishes the trek back to the jingshi on foot.

Luckily for Lan Zhan, there are only a few people loitering around outdoors so he isn’t flagged down to stop and chat with anyone. Carrying Liang around in public always tends to invite conversation.

He pauses outside the door and shifts Liang in his arms to free his right hand so he can open the door. “Lan Zhan, I’m home!” He doesn’t know what to expect after everything. The thing he looks forward to the most is being in Lan Zhan’s arms, and he can only hope that things haven’t become awkward between them. “I rode as fast as Little Apple could carry me. We should bring some more fruit down for her.”

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He touches Lan Zhan the whole time, hands gentle as they caress his husband’s arms and back as he turns to face him. They journey upwards until he has Lan Zhan’s face between them. “You were,” he grins at him before brushing a chaste kiss across his lips. He knows he’s being a tease and he traces Lan Zhan’s bottom lip with his thumb.

“Love you,” he repeats with a mischievous sort of smile. “You’ve been so good tonight, Lan Zhan. I just want to eat you up.”

He crawls his way closer, arms draping over Lan Zhan’s shoulders, around his neck. “You want more,” he doesn’t need to ask, tipping his face forward to nuzzle his nose against his cheek briefly before he gives his lover what was promised. Their lips come together, this time more purposeful than before.

He could get lost in kissing his husband like this, tongue sneaking past his lips to taste Lan Zhan’s lips. Surely they’re both feeling better now so there’s no reason to hold back, right? They’re not using their affection to enable one another to hide from pain.

If this were his beating heart's last stirring, the last face he saw, the last touch entertained — he would regret nothing.

Kissing Wei Ying often trumps even bedding him, the intimacy of his flesh heating in the bracket of his lover's palms, cheeks heated. The battle of their tongues, Lan Wangji's arms slipping to shackle his Wei Ying's waist and behind. How they come together, half moaning, half prey to heady inhalations, how they thrive.

He wants more. Needs less. Lives in perpetual imbalance, unconvinced that he will ever be satisfied in this world, where Wei Ying and he are distinct and disparate individuals. Two halves of a soul must, inevitably, collide.

Within long, sprawling moments, he pulls back to regard Wei Ying, to take his husband in. To adore him. "My husband who confessed his feelings is the most beautiful."

They kiss like the tide. A constant struggle of give and take when both of them would give themselves wholly to the other. Their bodies press close, each of them moving incrementally against the other to expand the domain of their affection. His touch spreads across any part of Lan Zhan he comes across. His neck, shoulder, side, rear. He pulls at his lover like it will somehow break the laws of the universe and bring them into one body.

Cheeks crimson, he follows Lan Zhan when he pulls back, eyes fluttering open when he doesn’t catch his prey. His eyes try to stay on his husband’s, but they keep sliding down to look at his lips instead.

“You mean that?” He asks, pushing his love’s hair behind his ear so he can see his face better. With a pleased grin he traces the shell of Lan Zhan’s ear. “I should have worked up to telling you sooner,” he says, feeling the truth in his words. He hadn’t been ready to face those parts of himself out of fear and embarrassment, but he’s so impossibly glad now that they’ve started and Lan Zhan is not only accepting, but encouraging.

“Can I keep confessing?” He asks, but doesn’t wait for an actual response. “I feel good after you told me your pains and let me help out. It makes me feel like I’m making a positive difference for you like you’re always doing for me.”

A practised tease, a consummate flirt, a wild thing and seductive: this is Wei Ying, finger trailing burning heat on the shell of Lan Wangji's ear, gaze molten and all-consuming. There is wet at the corner of his mouth, and Wangji set it there, and this must be true yearning, then. To see your print upon a lover's shape and want him redone in the image of your want.

"Do you believe it a debt?" And he does not wait for the answer, leans in and catches another kiss, crackling. His lips feel stung, vulnerable, raw. He wants, but disciplines himself. "That you must be of use to me, to pay for your own confession?"

It troubles him, to think of a world where Wei Ying fears being vulnerable without doling out compensation — where he only entrusts his hurt to Lan Wangji if they are equal in their vulnerability, as if he is a burden. He thinks, more fool he, he would place faith in whatever Wei Ying tells him.

And yet.

He falls into the next kiss, the question lingering in the back of his mind while his body pulls him deeper into the bliss of kissing his husband. And does he feel like it’s a debt that needs repaying? Maybe in a small part, it does. But the stronger draw is being of service to a husband who asks for very little outside the consummate joining of their bodies nearly every day they’re together under the same roof. A price he’s eager to give, getting his own satisfaction from it.

They part again and he strokes his lover’s cheeks, leaning in to brush a couple more kisses across Lan Zhan’s lips. When he’s… not satisfied, but something close, he presses their foreheads together and looks into Lan Zhan’s eyes. “I just like making you feel good, Lan Zhan. I’d want to do it even if we weren’t working on my problems, too.”

It’s the truth. If the only way he can help Lan Zhan is through the push and pull of surfacing his own issues, then that’s when he’ll do it.

“It’s not a debt I feel like I have to pay. I love you so much, I can’t keep it inside my own body. You… did you feel like it should have been a debt for me to pay back?” He doesn’t think Lan Zhan would feel that way about him, but it’s worth looking at just in case.

"No. No, beloved," he offers it rapidly, sweetly, rushing to take hold of Wei Ying's hands and press light kisses on each of his palms in proof of worship and reassurance. He finds no fault in his lover, no debt to repay, no vengeance that can be wrought against him. But then, Lan Wangji has ever been prejudiced against beliefs otherwise.

"At times, Wei Ying... does not put value in himself, unless he provides a service. As if he must ever prove worth." As if he must contort himself in a hundred folds, suffer thousands of small cuts and bleed on a sacrificial altar. In part, Lan Wangji suspects, this exacerbated Wei Ying's natural sense of justice and propelled him to take in the Wen. Of course he would have been drawn to their cause, but only a man who felt he had nothing to lose would have so quickly volunteered his own defection.

"I assumed it was so in Lotus Pier," he whispers after, gravelly and low. Under the watchful, perpetual criticism of Madam Yu and her stalwart devotees, who might have digested the inevitability of Wei Ying's presence, but always lingered on the cusp of emesis. They never speak of the likely abuses suffered by Wei Ying in his childhood, but questions live on. Prosper.

His smile is soft at the reassurances, head tilting to one side to watch Lan Zhan peppering kisses all over his hands. He hadn’t thought Lan Zhan felt like there was as debt owed between them, but the reassurance that he’d been right feels good.

“You love me. That gives me worth,” he says, catching some of those little kisses on his fingertips. “I just like being able to do things to make your day brighter, too. You feel that way about me, too, don’t you?” He doesn’t realize that he’s still placing his sense of worth to a spot external to him. He’s got self-confidence and self-esteem, but it’s the self-worth that sometimes evades him.

“Yeah, it was pretty hard at first in Lotus Pier. I felt like I’d be too much and Jiang-shushu would change his mind about letting me stay. After a while, I realized that wasn’t going to happen, so I stopped worrying about it.” If Madame Yu speaking against him all the time didn’t get him kicked out, he figured nothing would.

"You have worth without my affection," he corrects with mild, tempered frustration that he should hide so much better, should stifle and choke. The truth, as they both know it: it is no fault of Wei Ying's that he has not learned his true worth, that he has been impeded from achieving it.

To think of Wei Ying, ever proving himself, haunted by the possibility of expulsion from his sect — then, choosing to walk that path willing, for the sake of the Wen. His mouth purses, thin, gaze soft as he takes in his husband, his need. He ruffles, steadfastly, the top of Wei Ying's soft hair.

"We would never seek to throw Wei Ying out. You must know so."

He can tell he’s upset Lan Zhan, but he doesn’t point it out. Worth outside of Lan Wangji’s affection. He supposes that’s true. Sizhui, Liang, Jin Ling. He has worth through their love, too. He forgets his own worth, always making sure if someone has to be expendable that it could - should - be him.

Lan Zhan reminds him that his inherent worth as just Wei Wuxian doesn’t need to be something earned. It simply is. He hadn’t realized that it was something he needed to hear.

“I know,” he replies, squeezing Lan Zhan’s hands gently. “I’m an honored guest of Gusu Lan and the second son’s husband. I know you’d never kick me out and if anyone tried, you’d put a stop to it or come with me.” For all he’s willing to join the sect, he hasn’t brought it up since he’d quipped about getting his own Lan forehead ribbon in Lanling.

An honoured guest. No. A member of —

But he stills, frozen in place by the inevitability that it was Lan Wangji himself who consigned his husband to the part, unable and unwilling to fetter him in sect responsibilities. He nods, hollow and lone, feeling foolishly the victim of his own words. The legacy of his overbearing protectiveness.

"You create their wards and talismans, raise sons of the sect. You are our finest demonic cultivator." ...the only one they will, in truth, ever except, for as long as Lan Qiren yet shepherds the sect. But there is a different time and place to recognise that practical reality.

"You are ours." A claim Lan Wangji has repeatedly made and will gladly defend, come hell or high water. "We do not surrender you."

He brings Lan Zhan’s hands up to his mouth so he can kiss his knuckles. He hadn’t meant to make Lan Zhan feel bad by his words, but it’s pretty clear that’s exactly what he’s done. He murmurs a quiet apology, turning Lan Zhan’s wrist to spread his kisses to more flesh.

“Yeah, you’re right. I do a lot for the sect and I’m happy to do it. Some of the wards were too easy to find a weakness back when I studied here. There’s no way anyone could break in now,” he says, a little smugly.

He’s stuck in the limbo of feeling like he’s a member of the sect in most of the ways that matter, though not in every way. He knows why Lan Zhan had been against making him an actual member of the sect instead of an honorary one by marriage, but he’d gladly accept all the necessary responsibilities if he were to be offered such a position.

“It’s okay, Lan Zhan. I know I’m safe and welcomed here. I have an army of disciples who would fight a war to protect me if it came down to it. I’m home here, with you and our kids, Lan Zhan.” He’s not an idiot. He knows there have been instances where his extraction from Cloud Recesses has been requested by people who he’d wronged during his first life. Families of people he’d killed or men he’d injured into a life of debilitation. Even with his name more-or-less cleared, there will always be those who blame their every hardship on the Yiling Patriarch.

Wei Ying knows, is present, will linger. All the pretty, pleasant, expected words, and yet Lan Wangji's fingers feel chilled even beneath his husband's lips, and the predictability of Wei Ying's reassurance rings hollow. He is a cat, quieted. A rabbit called to ease. A tamed animal, expected not to ask questions or interrogate the half truths cascading from his husband's sweet mouth.

The room feels at once too warm, constrictive, despite the lack of braziers as summer approaches, and only mellowed candle light thrives. Tensions rides up his shoulders again, locking them in unease. A sigh beats its way out of his chest, as he shakes his hand free of Wei Ying's hold.

"We shall have to order you fresh silks cut before Jiang Wanyin's arrival." Soft, practical. Let them distract themselves with logistics. "As befits the spouse of the acting sect leader."

No matter his... temperament, Jiang Cheng is still the leader of a sect, to be treated duly. "If you wish the Yunmeng purple bound in your robes, can be done."

As a sign of unity, not unlike what the bride of a loving House might wear. But then, Wei Ying has formally defected, and relations remain strained.

It’s a reluctant thing letting Lan Zhan remove his hand, but he doesn’t chase it. Only frowns for a moment before forcing a smile instead. Honesty. That’s what they’re trying to cultivate together, yet he’s fallen back into the habit of placating as if there really is a danger of him being forced from the sect.

He sighs, sitting back and giving Lan Zhan a little more space to himself. He doesn’t want to start a fight, doesn’t trust that speaking the truth here won’t make things worse between them.

“Okay, I’m not completely okay,” he admits even after Lan Zhan offers an alternative subject they could focus on instead. “I mean, I am for the most part, but I still feel like an outsider sometimes. I know I have the protection of the Lan sect and that I’m welcome in most ways. I’m grateful for all that, truly. It just bothers me sometimes that I’m a Lan by marriage but not by merit.”

He is prepared, steeled and ready to proceed with a different, lighter conversation and shelve the imminent exploration of Wei Ying's discomfort until a later time. Wei Ying, beautiful and fearless, blocks his path.

Earlier, he had assumed Wei Ying's smile signaled a return to their roles, a subtle confirmation that whatever war wants fought cannot be waged today. He had anticipated Wei Ying's procrastination.

Instead — he is left breathless to consider the weight of his husband's words, then the likely impact of his own, as he studies Wei Ying, his eyes for steel, his jaw for lock strain. Would Wei Ying ever be considered a cultivator of Gusu Lan by merit? He pays obeisance to a scant selection of their rules, violates the tenets of Cloud Recesses' hospitality, would never give up meat and practises the demonic cultivation that is anathema among most clans. It seems... an improbable partnership, at best.

Carefully, then, "Do you wish to be a Lan, with all restrictions involved?"

He holds Lan Zhan’s gaze, stubborn to a fault. When it’s all laid out in front of him like this, he falters. To be a Lan is to place enough restrictions on himself to wear a symbol of restraint that can only be removed by close family. Wei Wuxian is cocky, picky, likes to do his own thing.

What would Lan Wuxian be like?

He sulks a little, but can’t even call the question unfair. “I’d want to be welcomed in as myself, but that’s out of the question, huh?” With a sigh and slumped shoulders, he shakes his head. “I’m not strong enough to cultivate on my own without using demonic cultivation. That’s the first thing I’d have to give up, isn’t it?” So much for being the Lan’s demonic cultivator.

“To be honest, I didn’t think I’d get this far when I admitted it was bothering me. So I get to choose between being a rogue demonic cultivator who happens to be married to the second son of Gusu Lan or to be a Lan cultivator stuck at a kid’s level of strength without frequent dual cultivation. I want both. I want to be good enough that I’m wanted. But maybe it’s best to figure things out later. I’ll decide before our next wedding. If I choose to join the Lan sect, would you welcome me?”

He considers it, fleetingly, gaze arrested by Wei Ying's handsome face, the clear nerves that rattle and shake him. A rogue cultivator who happens to be married to the second son of Gusu Lan. No, Wei Ying has never learned to dwindle his light and become only that. It strikes him, unsettlingly, that this should wound him — that Wei Ying will never be appeased and content as just Lan Wangji's partner. That their marriage, however joyful and reiterated, amuses Wei Ying, but cannot sustain him.

The worth of one does not lie in others. He has only just spoken so. Breathes in and out and teases himself to a brink of obedience to his own well-crafted discipline. He cannot chip or bruise now, he cannot falter.

"I shall present the matter before our elders." As in all sects, the induction of a member who has not purely been adopted or married in will require scrutiny. They must decide whether Wei Wuxian, stripped of his demonic cultivation, possesses the merits and means to hold his head high and add to the Gusu Lan. Years prior, when they were so very new from the chokehold of war, they would have accepted nearly any candidate with the glimmers of a golden core to replenish their ranks. Now, their need dimmed, they can afford to be — fastidious.

"I remain of the belief that formal membership of the clan will suffocate you. Wei Ying does not find freedom in binds." And stricter now, nearly cutting, "If you join ranks to misery, you cannot decline your commitment after. Would require defection."

And retaining Wei Ying as a spouse adjacent to the clan after might prove... a tenuous task.

Surprised that Lan Zhan’s agreeing to talk to the elders about recruiting him as a cultivator, he grabs for his husband’s hands simply to hold them for a moment. Part of him wants to tell Lan Zhan to forget it because without his demonic cultivation, he really isn’t all that great of a cultivator. He’s whip-smart and creative, but he’s not powerful in the state he’s in. Rejection would sting more than not trying.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. If I become a Lan Cultivator, I’ll have purpose, but I’ll also have a leash.” He sighs and looks down at the hands he’s holding, rubbing his thumbs across the backs of Lan Zhan’s hands.

What he wants is to be welcomed by the other Lan Cultivators. He has the juniors and even some of the senior disciples interested in him and his stories, but the only person his age he spends any time with is Lan Zhan. And he’s arguably a decade older than him. He has the best husband and children in the world, but why does he still feel down so often?

“I wouldn’t defect,” he claims, though if it comes down to it, his own sense of justice would likely prevail if he ever had a disagreement with the elders’ decisions.

“It just feels like something’s missing. Inclusion in the Lan sect might not change anything,” he sighs again and looks back up at Lan Zhan. “Don’t get me wrong, I love you and taking care of the kids. I just feel like I’m useless outside of it.”

Wei Ying will have a purpose if he becomes a cultivator of Gusu Lan. Something is missing. He is useless outside of family care.

There is no accusation in this, no criticism, no condemnation. Yet it stings, guts, pulls out Lan Wangji's innards. And it stings, oh, it stings, and he cannot breathe for it, all at once aware that he has drawn his husband in a pit of futility, that Wei Ying suffers, wilts and despairs under his roof.

That he is miserable even now, rubbing sweet friction in Lan Wangji's hands, exorcising the last of his tension. They breathe, together, Lan Wangji only stirring to turn his palm outwards and catch Wei Ying's hands in his own, tugging once.

"Make your own sect. I will join."

It’s silent between them for several moments. He can tell Lan Zhan is harmed by what he’s said and he wants to take it all back and both of them forget he’d ever mentioned anything. He shakes his head, looking down at their hands again.

“Make my own sect?” That gets a short laugh out of him despite the gravity of the situation. The thought of him becoming a sect leader isn’t really something he’d ever considered. Sure, he knows about the rumors that he was creating a sect of necromancers back when he’d been trying, and failing, to protect the remnants of the Wens. “Lan Zhan, I can’t ask you to leave Gusu Lan. These people are your family. Our family. I’d be putting a target on all our backs doing something like that.”

He brings their hands up to his chest and holds them there. “I don’t really know what I’m talking about,” he admits. “I know I love you and the kids more than anything else. And I know that sometimes I… feel bad for no reason at all. Sometimes it’s the nightmares or the memories, and sometimes it just hits me out of nowhere when I’m feeling otherwise contented. The only thing that really works is to be too busy for it to get to me.”

Wei Ying fiddles, his natural restlessness compelling him to discover and make weapon of a toy. Even now, Lan Wangji's hands slack and obedient, he drags them to his chest, and Wangji permits it, only pulsing a rare squeeze in answering kind.

He drifts in to catch Wei Ying's mouth and tease him, after the inevitable confession of... uncertainty. Puzzle. Wei Ying's constant, bone-deep sorrow, a grief that Lan Wangji had thought he'd staked claim on, but finds himself unable to answer in his husband's shape. Death did not do this, he knows, exhaustively; it was life and its people and their countless, careless betrayals.

"We cannot... neglect hemorrhage, beloved. You will only perish of it." And this hurt, this depressive idleness only ever deepens. "You are not happy. You survive, but do not thrive. What does your heart desire, however selfishly?"

He cannot say how or when, but he will see the deed done.

The corner of his mouth turns up as their lips meet. The kiss is too short, but he only chases Lan Zhan’s for a moment. He figures his husband will insist on talking through this, too, before bedding him and kissing more would only make their conversation harder to focus on.

“What I want the most… other than Lan Zhan and the kids,” he starts, nuzzling his nose and cheek against their hands. “Give me some time to think about it. I expect you’re asking about things that are possible to give or fulfill.” The first thing that comes to his mind is his sister, but that’s impossible and it would be unfair to saddle Lan Zhan with the burden of an answer that can’t be delivered.

“I’m sorry, Lan Zhan. You should be enough. You make me so happy when we’re together until I find myself in the dark again and ruin it like I’m doing now.” He squeezes Lan Zhan’s hands.

"You ruin nothing." Life decimated Wei Ying's odds and plans, made a mockery of him and his prospects. This man, trembling and lost in Lan Wangji's hold now, might have been brilliant, once. This man, so beautiful, so despairingly brilliant.

And he murmurs, like a wrenching of him, a gutting of his innards to show his virtue to the heavens. "I am not enough."

He had anticipated the ache would paralyze him, would leave him sullen and still, at a loss for his own prospects in the wake of no longer serving his husband. Instead, he finds he is galvanized, given purpose. If he has failed before, he can rectify it now. He can build, he can grow. He can bloom and gain importance.

"I need not be your worth or your world." Better, if anything, that Wei Ying should have multiple points of focus, of gladness.

He wants to tell Lan Zhan that he’s enough, but everything he’s just said would make it too easy to argue otherwise. He kisses his husband’s hands once more, then lets go of them to cup Lan Zhan’s face between his palms again. His thumbs rub at the height of his lover’s cheekbones just under his eyes before leaning in to give him a firm kiss on the lips.

“You are both for me,” he insists as he moves back. “You and the kids. I just need to find out how to extend that feeling to me, too.” It will be an uphill battle given that he’s never put as much value on himself as he does with those around him. Not since he was too young for it to be necessary. Maybe it was Madame Yu that killed that part of him, but he thinks that he’d already felt that way shortly before meeting the woman.

The urge to fall into the comfort of physical affection is annoyingly strong when he’s trying not to give in to it. He leans forward and kisses Lan Zhan one more time, then stays close this time. “You can help me through this, Lan Zhan. If I can’t do it by myself, I know I can do it with you.” He can learn to value himself through Lan Zhan.

He is kissed and soothed and beloved, and it should sting and bruise him that Wei Ying feels the compulsion to treat him as if — ...a child. Another dependent in need of protection. No matter. Later, when he is secluded and alone in the mellow whites of early morning, he will allow himself a moment to analyse his feelings, their consequences. The inevitable, striking context.

"I only wish you hale and whole." And well and gladdened and happy. And perhaps kissing Lan Wangji again, even as his forehead dips to cradle in the nook of Wei Ying's collar and to breathe, breathe him in.

"A warning." This, offered without further thought or indication, will not in fact prove enough to warn Wei Ying. Irrelevant. "You are formidable, beautiful, incomparable. Strong, in cultivation and soul. Generous. Loving. There is nothing in you that is wanting."

He wraps his arms around Lan Zhan’s neck and brings him in closer. He likes the way the warm puffs of air feel against his throat. His Lan Zhan. His love and life is right here with him and he can take comfort in that. So what if he’s still lost? This moment feels good and that’s what he wants to focus on.

“I will be,” he assures, closing his eyes and letting one of his hands wander softly over silk clad skin. He’s not intentionally trying to seduce his lover, but he wouldn’t be disappointed if it does. “I’ll bare the darkness of my soul and if… when you love me anyway, I’ll take comfort in it. I’ll learn from it.”

He only freezes a moment when Lan Zhan gives him a warning. Expecting worse, he’s relieved that it’s mostly compliments. But why would that be a warning? “You mean I’ll still be the same person after we do all this work. Nothing will change except you knowing me more intimately. And, hopefully, my own perceptions of myself. But when it comes down to it, I’ll have to learn to accept the bad parts with the good.”

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