Chapter Text
The only conclusion he can come to, Wei Ying thinks, is that everyone has lost their collective nut.
“But it’s just so….I mean, come on. It’s completely unreasonable! No, unpractical! It’s insane, it’s…..it’s….at the very least, you’d think they’d put something about it in the rules.”
Jiang Cheng looks as if he is about to burst a vein.
“Are you kidding me? It is in the rules. How could you make three hundred copies and fail to notice all the ones about never touching the headbands?!”
Wei Ying rolls his eyes, because that isn’t what he meant. The night feels darker, somehow, than all the other nights they have spent in the Cloud Recesses this summer, as if the light from the torches is being suppressed by some sinister presence lurking somewhere in the mountain behind them. Wei Ying is very suspicious– he knows too much, now, about the kinds of surprises hiding in the mountains of Gusu, thanks to extremely recent events. He looks sulkily into the darkness for a sign that something has been up to mischief – the dire owl, an imp, anything. It would explain why no one other than him is making any sense right now. But the darkness just stagnates in front of him, silent and unperturbed.
So unhelpful, he thinks resentfully. To Jiang Cheng he says,
“Of course I noticed them! But you’d think that they would allow for some common sense, I mean, what if you are out with a friend and they cut themselves and you don’t have anything to stop the bleeding with, except your headband ribbon? Are the Lan disciples just supposed to let people bleed to death because the ribbons are so bloody sacred?”
The unreasonableness is unbearable – Wei Ying would be impressed, if it weren’t so completely devastating. Secretly, he’s now worried that all his childhood convictions might actually be true – because if adults really don’t make any sense (like he’s always claimed), if they really do just make up rules just to be annoying and to suck the fun out of everything (as he’s always suspected), if there really isn’t some mysterious reason behind it all that gets magically revealed to you the moment you transition from teenager to grown-up (as they – the adults doing the fun-sucking – always claim), then could all of it be true? Every childish belief he’s ever held, every lie ever told to him to make him eat his vegetables; really, when he thinks about it, anything could happen now that nothing makes sense anymore.
“There’s no good reason to make us do this! I explained. It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Why can’t they see that? What is it about ribbons that defies logic?”
It is so exasperating that Wei Ying feels physically exhausted.
“It isn’t just the bloody ribbons,” Jiang Cheng spits back to him, “it’s all of it! Why couldn’t you just leave Lan-er-gongzi alone? It’s not as if he did anything to encourage you. But you didn’t, so this is what you get.”
Wei Ying thinks about that - but it’s not as if this is a beating or kneeling or transcribing lines or a punishment, like they have inflicted on him before, is it? Punishment would one thing; preferable. He’d happily copy all the rules about headbands one hundred thousand times – on his knees, in the rain, if they insisted - because eventually that would end and then everything would go back to normal. But this…..this is the rest of his life. This is permanent. This is not funny.
“I….I….I cannot marry him.” He squeaks out in a very undignified plea to no one in particular, but if someone could swoop in and stop this madness, then that would be great, “Can’t everyone just, I don’t know, not?”
Ever since he’d fallen out of the Cold Pond Cave with Lan Zhan earlier in the day – wrists still attached by that stupid bloody Lan headband – and everyone saw them before they could take it off (exactly how the entire population of the Cloud Recesses, visiting or otherwise, had wound up at the back hills precisely in time to see them, Wei Ying would be very interested to learn), things have gone from bad to worse. After the yelling and Lan Qiren’s declaration that there’s nothing for it, you’ll have to be married, Jiang Cheng had dragged Wei Ying back to their guest dormitory to try to hide him from everyone, but with little success. The afternoon had eroded away in an endless string of cultivators coming to scold him for his carelessness (Wen Qing can be so harsh), to solicit details from him of a scandalous liaison that didn’t happen, (thank you very much, Nie Huaisang), to empress upon him the seriousness of what he had done (so many Lans, where did they all come from?) and to threaten him with everything from minor curses to physical disembowelment if he did anything to hurt everyone’s precious Hanguang-Jun (MianMian and her ladies are completely terrifying), until Zewu-Jun had turned up to send everyone away. Letters were then written and dispatched with great haste - so Jiang Fengmian is probably only hours away from learning about everything - and somehow among it all, Wei Ying is finishing off what began as a perfectly normal day with a husband.
And no one – absolutely no one other than him – thinks it’s just back-crack bonkers. This absolutely cannot be happening, he thinks; except, according to literally everyone else, it absolutely is.
The three of them are alone now; Wei Ying, Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli. The rest of Cloud Recesses are, for the moment, successfully shooed away to their own rooms and beds for the night, although Wei Ying can’t imagine that there’ll be much sleep for anyone after the day’s excitement. There certainly won’t be any for him. They’re sitting outside their dormitory in the relative coolness of the summer night’s breeze, and Jiang Yanli has made him his favorite lotus root soup (before they left Lotus Pier, Wei Ying had insisted that she pack some pork and other home favorites; the rumors of Gusu-Lan cuisine had been more than terrifying), but Wei Ying can’t eat it. For once, he has no appetite – it’s like he’s dead. If I have to stay in the Cloud Recesses forever, I’ll never have Yanli’s soup again, he thinks miserably, this could be my last ever bowl, and I can’t eat it because I am dead. It rests sadly neglected on top of the little table they are sitting around.
“I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,” Jiang Cheng seriously has zero chill “it’s expected that you would one day have to marry, what difference does it make if it’s now? At least you’ll have to stop your endless flirting and we’ll be spared the embarrassment of troves of lovesick maidens turning up at Lotus Pier because you once smiled at them.”
Wei Ying scowls at him. It’s not his fault he’s so adorable, as he’s told Jiang Cheng multiple times.
“Shijieeeeee…..” surely, Wei Ying thinks as he turns his appeal to Jiang Yanli, his sister doesn’t expect him to just go along with this madness. Yanli will understand; Yanli will make it all go away. She’ll find something to say that will fix everything and make it all better and then they will all go home….
Jiang Yanli gives him a very soft, pitiable sort of look.
“A-Xien,” she says, and Wei Ying can already feel that he is doomed, “There is more to this than just blindly following rules. You are not seeing the position you have put Lan-er-gongzi in.”
Wei Ying can’t see that he’s put Lan Zhan in any sort of position. He makes several grumpy noises and stares at his rapidly cooling bowl of soup.
“A-Xien,” Jiang Yanli starts again with the patience of a monk, “You are not a selfish person. Think about what everyone has seen. All the cultivation world has been gossiping about the way you have been trying to win Lan-er-gongzi’s attention, taking it for flirtation. For weeks you were told not to touch his forehead ribbon and to leave him alone, but you persisted. Then you disappear with him for a day and a night and when you are found, you are bound together by the Lan forehead ribbon. No one will believe that in the time you were alone, you did not win him over. No one will believe that Lan-er-gongzi would have removed his forehead ribbon, unless you had promised yourselves to each other. People will gossip and insinuate that much more passed between you. In ancient Lan custom, the sharing of a forehead ribbon is equal to marriage itself. In the eyes of all gentry, you are already married to him.”
“But that is not what passed between us! How can it be reasonable to expect us to fall in line, just because that’s what everyone thinks? It’s ridiculous and I don’t care what they think”
Wei Ying has already considered - several times over actually, because he keeps coming back to it, because look at the position he is in - telling everyone exactly why Lan Zhan had needed to tie his headband to Wei Ying’s wrist, but he already knows that it won’t matter one ounce to Lan Qiren that Wei Ying could have been mortally wounded or, you know, killed; he’d still insist on his stupid rules anyway - so there’s no use in exposing what they’d learned about the Ying Iron when it won’t make a difference, even though Wei Ying really wants to.
Jiang Yanli is looking at him with deep eyes full of the care of things Wei Ying doesn’t yet understand and Wei Ying is really, seriously, not emotionally prepared for this, like at all.
“Maybe you don’t, A-Xien. Maybe you could find a way to live happily, after walking away from this. But what about Lan Wangji? He’s been publicly declared as your husband; if you refuse him now, he will be forever shamed. A-Xien, he will be considered an abandoned spouse – he’ll never be free to marry anyone else.”
At that, Wei Ying’s whirling thoughts suddenly stop in their tracks. He redirects them and, for the first time since everything kicked off, thinks only about Lan Zhan.
It goes something like oh; and then again, slower; oooooooh.
Wei Ying knows that he is many things - a harmless prankster, a breath-taking hero, a talented cultivator, a charmingly mischievous free spirit, a clever and quick wit, a well-intentioned young boy with a big heart - but above all things he is mostly (and at this particular moment, extremely) oblivious. As a rule, Wei Ying often misses between thirty and fifty percent of what’s going on that is (apparently) obvious to everyone else, and whenever someone finally explains it to him, he wonders why he didn’t get it in the first place. For someone so talented at the cultivation arts, it’s remarkably embarrassing.
He just……..he hadn’t realized. For a moment, he’s completely stunned.
It is a very humbling realization to crash headfirst into, especially as he hadn’t been looking. Lan Zhan….how could he have forgotten to think about what this all meant for Lan Zhan? Of course, he had, but he’d only got as far as thinking how unreasonable and unjust it was for both of them….it hadn’t occurred to him that in the middle of this whole mess, Lan Zhan has lost any chance of future happiness and is pretty much screwed either way, and all because of Wei Ying.
Wei Ying has a sudden vision of the grand and majestic Hanguang-jun, as beautiful as the finest jade and more dazzling than the sun, living in practical seclusion in some obscure corner of the Cloud Recesses, completely alone, wandering the hillsides at dusk shamed and alone and abandoned as people everywhere shun him like some kind of disgraced concubine, all his many admirers gone and his great talents wasted, completely alone and disgraced because Wei Wuxian refused to honour him……..and Wei Ying just can’t.
He won’t.
That much is suddenly very clear now; for all else that still doesn’t make any sense (and, let’s face it, never will, because it’s insane), Wei Ying knows what he is and is not capable of - and doing that to Lan Zhan, who deserves far better, is something he cannot do, no matter what it means for Wei Ying.
So…..that’s that, then?
Wei Ying drops his head to rest on Jiang Yanlí’s shoulder in an admission of defeat.
“I suppose,” he says in a quiet and pitiably hopeful voice, “people even more at odds with each other than Lan Wangji and I have found ways to make a marriage work?”
Better to light a candle he tells himself, and the vision of a lonely and shunned Lan Zhan looking romantically tragic in the dying sunlight of a future Cloud Recesses fades, just a little.
Jiang Yanli and even Jiang Cheng look kindly at him.
“‘Attempt the impossible’ “Jiang Yanli says to him with a light smile, bopping his nose with the curve of her forefinger.
Wei Ying has always known that their clan’s motto would one day bring about great disaster for him, but he’d always imagined it would be a glorious blaze of disaster in the pursuit of such things as decency, elegance and, you know, saving the world that would forever mark his place in cultivation history, not this.
He glances across at Jiang Cheng, who looks as if he has forgiven Wei Ying and may even be feeling a little sorry for him, so Wei Ying takes the advantage and says in his best feel-sorry-for-me voice
“In that case, you’d better sneek down into Gusu and get me a few bottles of Emperor’s Smile, A-Cheng, because after tonight I’ll never be able to taste it again.”
And because that is so very true, Jiang Cheng goes.