Chapter Text
There are so many things that are different about this body – Mo Xuanyu’s body – that at first Wei Wuxian doesn’t even consciously catalogue them all. Some are impossible to ignore from the moment he awakes in the ramshackle building hung with talismans and painted with thick blood-based arrays that smell of metal and sulfur; strong, ugly scents that make his nose twitch. There’s the fact that he bears scars and wounds Wei Wuxian never earned; there’s the knobbly skinniness of this body, the weakness in its atrophied muscles. There’s the paint on his face – bizarre, outlandish – and the way his hair is knotted and dull instead of sleekly oiled, and fact that this voice has a higher register than his own.
But his mind moves on quickly from trying to make sense of this new body to trying to make sense of this new world – one where the Yiling Patriarch’s inventions are used by madmen to summon souls from the depth of the afterlife, and by the righteous cultivators of the Gusu Lan to exorcise spirits. Both bizarre and ironic.
He notes without paying attention that his eyesight is sharper over distances but poorer up close, and that the skin of his feet is not properly calloused, unused to serious walking. He doesn’t really appreciate that his nose is distinguishing finely between the different scents on the breeze – the smell of sunshine on damp earth, the sweet aroma of newly-cut grass, the thick heavy odor of cow pats. All he notes consciously is that he’s in a farming community, a rural village rather than a town.
It's not until after the Lan cultivators – just boys, really, so much younger than Wei Wuxian can believe he ever was when he was sent out to conduct night hunts in Yunmeng – start the work of preparing the spirit lures, that Wei Wuxian realises the most important difference between this new body and his old one. He’s just rounded a corner with a crooked little skip, still playing the lunatic, when he runs into two tall men dressed in Mo colours, muddy greens and yellows that suggest the Jin palette without claiming it. Their scents are sharp, abrasive, an almost physical feeling of something rough curling around his throat and catching there. Wei Wuxian frowns. He isn’t used to being bothered by the scents of others – if anything, he’s used to seeing them shy away from his.
“Get back to your hovel, Mo Xuanyu,” snaps one of them as he capers by. Wei Wuxian grins and gives a vague sing-song answer.
“Shut up,” growls the second, and he feels his mouth click shut so hard it echoes in his skull. He stops moving, stops smiling, stops breathing. He tries to open his mouth, and he can, but it feels awful. Like holding his hand in a fire, like drawing a blade across his flesh – it feels like purposefully choosing pain.
Alphas cannot give orders to other alphas. Their commands, a mixture of tone and scent and stance combined to directly influence instinct, only work on omegas.
Mo Xuanyu is an omega. Mo Xuanyu is an omega.
“Apologies,” he chokes out cheekily, his body fighting him. Fighting to obey the command this alpha gave him. He scuttles off before the alpha can snap a second order, rounding the corner of the house and slinking into the shadow of a shrub where he squats, trembling with panic.
Wei Wuxian presented as an alpha at ten. It was considered very early to present, a sign of significant potency. Certainly he had been told often enough that his scent was intense, that his commanding presence scattered betas like minnows and drew the hungry gazes of omegas. His status as an alpha was welcome both to him, and the Jiang clan – alphas unquestionably make the strongest disciples, their cultivation superior and their families usually large and strong. And it had made things nicely square with Jiang Cheng, who also presented as an alpha; it put them on an even footing, and made their regular wrestling matches permissible as alpha roughhousing.
(Later, in Gusu, no one had called what passed between him and Lan Zhan roughhousing, but the same feeling of tolerance had held. Alphas challenged each other all the time; that was natural and healthy. No one said anything about alphas waking up in the middle of the night sweat-soaked and hard dreaming of each other, of teeth and tongues and rough panting, and Wei Wuxian knew better than to bring it up.)
Being an alpha is not just good, not just convenient or respected or familiar. It’s right. It’s who he is. Everything about him – the way he walks, the way he speaks, the way he can make opponents back off with a flash of his eyes, or protect a child feeling vulnerable with a low sound – draws on it.
He doesn’t know how to be an omega. Omegas are complicated. There are so many rules and expectations, both spoken and unspoken; there are clothes and scents and whole medication regimes. There’s the need to obey an alpha – any alpha – who chooses to use compulsion. There are heats.
Fucking fuck, there are heats.
Wei Wuxian sticks his fingers in his mouth to keep from making a sound of panic as two of the Lan boys walk by. He remembers Shijie’s, the way she had gotten sharp and snappish once a month, then disappeared, only to reappear a day later looking wrung-out and tired and smelling strongly of cleansing soap. No one had said her weak cultivation was a result of her gender, but the implication had hung unspoken in the air. It hadn’t mattered; being an omega and the first daughter of the Yunmeng Jiang clan guaranteed her status as an attractive bride regardless of her cultivation – lucky, some had said. Or at least, they’d said it until Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng meted out enough beatings that the gossip stopped.
Shijie was – she was everything. Grief subsumes him, rises like a dark wave over his head and crashes down, and the icy chill of it is enough to make him forget his insignificant problems. His fingers slip out of his mouth and curl into his palms, scratching marks in soft, uncalloused skin. He slips down onto his knees in the dirt, bending inwards, sharp elbows tucked against his stomach, the insides of his knees sweating against dirty linen trousers. For a few moments he is lost to the black water, buffeted in the currents of sorrow and grief.
It’s an unfamiliar scent that draws him out – soft, pleasant, a smell of green things growing, of dappled sunlight on new leaves. It’s not the scent of an alpha. He raises his head slowly and sees one of the Lan boys, headband silver against his pale skin, his robes snow-white and crisp.
He looks nothing like Lan Zhan, but for just a moment Wei Wuxian remembers heat rather than icy emptiness, remembers the clash of blades beneath silver moonlight and dark eyes that burned with banked fire. It’s enough, just barely, to get him moving.
Wei Wuxian takes a breath and eases his body upwards, unfolding out of cramped discomfort. He waits for the boy to go by, then slips out to steal one of the spirit flags. He’s curious about this new cultivation.
***
It is, as it turns out, a night of reunions.
Wei Wuxian meets Jin Ling in the forest of Dafan Mountain, checking spirit traps. He doesn’t know who he is, at first – how could he? What he knows is: young, impetuous, proud, alpha. He smells of hot metal and woodsmoke, and it’s not until much later that Wei Wuxian thinks of Shijie wrapped in white, sitting in the shrine of Carp Tower pouring underworld money into a hungry fire.
Jin Ling and the Lans come up against the same curse from the village, and they’re too young and inexperienced to know how to deal with it. Wei Wuxian is without the Amulet, without a surfeit of strength, so he calls the dead to his aid. And in doing so, accidentally summons Wen Ning.
Things of course get exponentially worse when Jiang Cheng shows up just as he’s playing Wen Ning into retreat. The little Lans look worried, too, which isn’t hugely encouraging. The omega – the green-scented one who introduced himself as Lan Sizhui and whose soft eyes tell Wei Wuxian he’s never perpetrated violence – tries to argue in Wei Wuxian’s favour. Jiang Cheng is not in a receptive mood. Jiang Cheng has never in his life been in a receptive mood.
When Wei Wuxian was an alpha, Jiang Cheng stank of sword oil and sweat and lake water; thick, coiling scents that hung in the air with careless obviousness. He still does now, but the sword oil smells less of animal fat and more of the woody scent tung tree, while the lake water smell verges between clean rainfall and brackish water. It’s not bad, but it’s complicated.
Jiang Cheng’s attitude, on the other hand, is entirely simple. “So you’ve finally come back, Wei Wuxian,” he snarls. Wei Wuxian reads his future on his brother’s face, and backs away. Right into someone.
The breeze is soft today, gusting lightly over his skin and ghosting through his tangled hair. He didn’t smell the stranger behind him, but the instant he bumps into him the wind dies down for a moment.
Wei Wuxian is enveloped in a feeling that’s both familiar and foreign, exhilarating and frustrating.
It’s Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan, whose laundry soap he can smell, whose hair oil he can smell, whose subtle scent of sweat he can smell. Lan Zhan who beneath those things smells of crisp frost and pine sap – the smell of mountains in the dead of winter, icy and alive and gorgeous. Wei Wuxian, just for a moment, lifts his chin in a move that is pure instinct, bringing his nose closer to Lan Zhan’s body while baring his throat. Something he’s never felt before, something wild and roiling like ice melt in the spring pouring white-water through dry riverbeds, floods through him. He wants with sudden shocking intensity, without even knowing what it is he’s hungering for.
Then he remembers where he is and what he’s doing, just as Jiang Cheng lets out a lash of purple lightning.
Lan Zhan swivels, calling his qin and reflecting the whip. Jiang Cheng curses and turns, using his momentum to take another wind-up. There’s no point to prolonging this. Wei Wuxian runs. An instant later, he hears the sizzle of Zidian coiling, and feels the whiplash sting of lightning striking his back. He’s thrown forward, hits the ground, and rolls.
Still here. Because, of course, he never asked for any of this. Zidian has no power to strip him from this body; it’s his now, for better or worse. He lies on his stomach in the dirt and reflects on that for a moment. Reflects on the complexity of life, and the simplicity of oblivion, and how he made it from one to the other and back again.
It’s much too big a thought to finish right now – maybe too big a thought for him to finish, ever. He becomes aware that the Lan disciples are arguing with Jiang Cheng and Jin Ling.
Wei Wuxian scrambles to his feet, rubbing his ass comically, needling Jiang Cheng in a way that feels painfully familiar. He’s playing the fool, but he always played the fool for Jiang Cheng, who was too uptight about his responsibilities and his insecurities to appreciate a competent adopted brother.
“How can he be Wei Wuxian?” demands Lan Jingyi, the feisty beta. “Wei Wuxian is dead!”
“Is he? How can you be sure?” replies Jiang Cheng, all teeth and tremor.
“Shouldn’t you know? They say you killed him.”
Wei Wuxian closes his eyes. They say you killed him. He remembers: heat, so hot it seared on his skin, the heat of a kiln, a forge, anything that makes things anew but also melts them to nothingness. They say you killed him. He remembers: Lan Zhan, trying to force him to stop, stop, stop, but he couldn’t stop anymore, there was no stopping there was only blood and death, nothing else. They say you killed him. He remembers: Jiang Cheng, screaming, his fury heart-rending, his face white and his hands red. They say you killed him. He remembers: Shijie.
Shijie.
Shijie.
They say you killed him.
He remembers falling, nothing to catch him this time. No one to catch him, this time. No one left at all.
The world spins, sky somersaulting over earth, faces and sounds blurring. Someone catches him now, maybe. Softness, warmth. A clean scent.
Darkness.
***
He wakes once, not fully conscious but with a kind of shallow awareness that tells him he is safe, secure. His head is resting on Lan Zhan’s shoulder; he knows because Lan Zhan’s scent is thick around him, in his hair and on his skin and clothes. Comforting. Wind is pulling past his face, dragging at his limp feet where they dangle; overhead the sun is bright. He makes a low sound and rubs his face against Lan Zhan’s shoulder; he doesn’t know why, it just feels good. The silk of his robes is soothing beneath Wei Wuxian’s cheek, the fine roughness against his skin and the firmness beneath it; he smells himself there and is satisfied.
“Sleep, Wei Ying,” says Lan Zhan, his voice soft. It’s not a command, but he feels the attraction of it all the same, his eyelids sliding shut.
Wei Wuxian sleeps.
***
Lan Zhan won’t tell him how he knew it was him, right from the moment they met. It feels unfair and frustrating, because Lan Zhan doesn’t usually play games. Or at least he didn’t used to – who knows, maybe he’s changed.
“I don’t know what happened – where I was,” he says, sitting in Lan Zhan’s bed in Lan Zhan’s room. He was never here before, as a disciple. There had been dreams of course – the excruciating and exhilarating night-time ones, as well as day dreams of tracking Lan Zhan down to his secret quarters and forcing his way in and wrestling him to the floor, the two of them fighting and growling and biting until it became licking and kissing and fucking.
Now that he is here, it’s both what he would have expected and more than he ever imagined. The design of it – colour, architecture, furniture – is just as beautiful and luxurious as he anticipated. But the way he can smell Lan Zhan everywhere, the way it’s like Lan Zhan is in the bed with him, is wrapped around him alongside his blanket, is present at his qin and also at his writing desk and also at the window/the door/the meditation space… it’s overwhelming.
It's also doing something terrifying to his body. His skin has been warm since he woke, his heartbeat too fast. There’s a slow, consistent throb deep inside him, a mixture of eagerness and anticipation. He can feel slickness sliding out of him, apparently in answer to it. He seems to have no control over it, no ability to stop it or even hold it in. It’s appalling, horrifying. He is sitting here, in Lan Zhan’s bed, getting wet.
As an alpha, the idea that with nothing more than a glance and a whiff of his scent he could make an omega wet for him had been powerful. There hadn’t been an omega that he wanted of course, but it was part and parcel of the power he explicitly held.
It had never occurred to him what that hypothetical omega would feel, being made to flush and ache and slicken for him, from nothing more than his presence.
Now he knows the answer: it feels incredibly embarrassing. If Lan Zhan comes over here, he’ll undoubtedly smell it. When Wei Wuxian leaves and goes wherever he’s going to go after this conversation (and really, where is that going to be? He has no clue) Lan Zhan will go to bed tonight and smell the faint scent of his arousal. Will know that Wei Wuxian was sitting here in his bed talking about death and loss and looking very serious, while feeling wet for him.
The only thing that makes it bearable is that Lan Zhan won’t tell him how he knew it was Wei Wuxian. He embraces the irritation, because that’s infinitely better than the feeling of wanting to melt into the cracks between the floor mats and disappear.
***
Lan Zhan offers him a separate bedroom in his own quarters to sleep in. Actually, he first offers to take the second bedroom himself, but when Wei Wuxian threatens to pitch a fit at the idea that Lan Zhan would move out of his own room for him, he relents and suggests Wei Wuxian take it.
It’s better. Lan Zhan’s scent in here is much fainter, just an undertone instead of the whole of the tone. Wei Wuxian opens all the windows and gives the bedding a good shake in the cool mountain breeze. He gets himself cleaned up, and discovers as he washes himself in the bathroom that his entrance throbs at his touch, a hot hungry knot that aches to be stroked. He hisses, scandalized, and bathes roughly in cold water in the hopes that it will have the same effect as it did on his alpha body.
It doesn’t, really, but once he’s changed his clothes to some Lan Zhan procured from somewhere and Lan Zhan’s scent is no longer all over him most of the ache disappears. He feels normal again, like he can breathe without worrying his body is going to betray him in some new and hideous way.
When he goes out, his old clothes and the humiliating washcloth coated in his slick stuffed in a laundry hamper that hopefully Lan Zhan will never inspect, it’s to discover that Lan Zhan is absent. Well, that’s fine. It was awkward, feeling the heat of his gaze on his skin, wanting to turn his eyes elsewhere but always looking back to Lan Zhan, like a needle turning to the north. This will give him a chance to explore, get some air and find his feet.
He definitely, absolutely, does not immediately miss the comfort of Lan Zhan’s presence.
***
The Cloud Recesses is beautiful in a refined, austere way. Like Lotus Pier, it borrows its inspiration from the beauty of its surroundings; unlike Lotus Pier it feels staid and splendid instead of loving and homey. Wei Wuxian walks the covered paths and visits old haunts – the classroom, the library, the mountainside where the rabbits feed. The rabbits are still there, and he stops for a while to cuddle with them. Just as adorable as they were sixteen years ago.
He comes across Lan Zhan accidentally in the cold springs. Lan Zhan who, unlike last time, is naked. There’s too much moisture in the air to pick up his scent cleanly, but his skin is shining, his body beautiful. The planes of his chest appear sculpted, the tone of his skin surprisingly warm, his nipples dusky. Wei Wuxian almost staggers beneath the weight of a hundred juvenile wet dreams, and a hundred more new fantasies that spring eagerly into being. And then Lan Zhan, unconscious of his presence, turns.
His back is criss-crossed with whip scars.
The fantasies disappear, burnt off like mist beneath midday sun. Wei Wuxian steps forward, and either the sound of his footstep or perhaps his scent betrays him; Lan Zhan turns, slowly, looking up with dark eyes. Uncertain; ashamed.
Wei Wuxian feels like he’s been kicked in the gut. He wants to demand to know who did this – he wants to apologize for the intrusion – he wants to flee and spare both of them this awkwardness.
Before – when they had been rivals, when they had been fellow disciples, when they had been alphas – Wei Wuxian would have stridden into the spring and made him tell him, so he could rain down punishment.
Now, uncertain of his role and their relationship and his own body, he comes only to the edge of the water. “Lan Zhan,” he says. Lan Zhan turns, and he sees now the pale outline of another scar – one that matches the burn imprinted on his old body. He can smell Lan Zhan now. His scent is no longer clean, sharp; it’s smoky and muddied. Unhappy, upset – deeply so.
Wei Wuxian doesn’t understand what this means but he can see the vague shape of it, like a boat drifting in the fog, slipping in and out of view. He doesn’t like it, his stomach twisting, his mouth dry. He wants to offer something to make it go away, this unknown desolation. He wants to sweep it into oblivion, with his fingers, his hands, his tongue. Wants to take its weight from Lan Zhan and leave it to melt into nothingness like a jellyfish on a dock.
He's never felt like this before, and it scares him. The instinct towards tenderness rather than aggression feels entirely natural, and that’s both bizarre and terrifying. His fear makes him doubly certain of not stepping into the water. He asks Lan Zhan about the scars from the shore, instead.
Lan Zhan wades off in the opposite direction without answering. Wei Wuxian watches as he pulls his naked body out of the cold spring, and he should look away, he knows he should, but he watches instead the thickness of his thighs and the curve of his ass, his mouth wet, until Lan Zhan ducks down out of sight to dress.
When he returns, all in white, his hair damp and his skin pink, he patently refuses to answer any of Wei Wuxian’s questions. They spend a few minutes in sullen silence, Lan Zhan morose, Wei Wuxian confused and unhappy. And then a flood of disciples appears, and they cart them off to deal with a crisis.
***
It becomes apparent very quickly that the cursed arm they captured at the Mo Village is going to cause a lot of trouble. It escapes its bindings and tries to throttle Lan Qiran (Wei Wuxian knows how it feels), and only Lan Zhan and Wei Wuxian together are able to restrain it. It’s clear there’s more to whatever’s happening here, and the arm indicates the direction they should be taking.
They agree to set out the next morning, taking Lan Sizhui (the green-scented omega) and Lan Jingyi (the mouthy beta) with them. Back in Lan Zhan’s quarters for the evening, though, Wei Wuxian is irritated and moody. His room is cold and empty, and hardly smells like Lan Zhan at all. How can a room in Lan Zhan’s house not smell like him? How is that fair? It’s unfair. It’s Lan Zhan, being repressed and uncommunicative.
(A small part of him argues that he wanted this, that he chose the bedroom and opened the windows and aired it out. It is firmly overridden.)
He ends up sprawled on Lan Zhan’s bed, because Lan Zhan’s bed is in the main room and that’s where Lan Zhan is and it only makes sense. His bed is better, anyway. More comfortable. Broken in. Smells… so good.
“Lan Zhan,” he snaps, “you’ve really changed, you know. Before, you would tell me things. You never stopped telling me things. How I was breaking the rules. How I was so shameless. How my cultivation was wrong. And that was irritating, but now you won’t tell me anything and that’s worse.”
“Mn,” says Lan Zhan, softly, watching him from across the room with what looks like uncertainty.
“And also, you just up and dragged me back here without even talking about it. Isn’t that a little rude? Do you think, just because I’m not an alpha now, that you can sling me over your shoulder and carry me off? You could have taken a room in a tea house, you could have waited – instead you brought me back here like a… a prize, tossed me down in your bed,” he says, and he doesn’t know what he’s saying or why he’s saying it but he’s angry, he’s angry at the way Lan Zhan is staring at him with a cool face from across the room, angry that Lan Zhan isn’t right here.
“You seem to like my bed,” says Lan Zhan, and Wei Wuxian flushes so hot he feels sweat start to bead along his hairline.
“Rude, Lan Zhan, that’s rude, isn’t there a rule against that? There’s a rule against everything here – why did you bring me back here – why won’t you talk to me?” He’s breathing hard, his skin hot and uncomfortable, chafing under his clothes. He lifts a hand, rubs it over his neck, feels the sweat there. “I hate that you won’t talk to me,” he says, petulantly.
“Wei Ying,” says Lan Zhan. “You’re going into heat.”
“I am not,” he snarls, genuinely angry – and then, a moment later, genuinely terrified. “I’m not.”
Lan Zhan stands. “Come,” he says. “There is space prepared for this.”
“I don’t – I’m not – Lan Zhan.” His voice dies out, the anger and the frustration and the nameless need for something uncertain that have been braiding themselves into his bones and blood fall apart, like spun sugar in water. “I can’t. I don’t know what to do,” he says, voice very quiet.
Lan Zhan’s face flickers, calm coolness revealing something sharp and intense, before he regains his usual unflappableness. “I will send one of the healers to you,” he says. “Come.”
Pulling himself away from the bed – from the mattress and the pillows and the blankets that smell like Lan Zhan, that he wants to drape himself in and huddle under – is hard. Wei Wuxian feels fragile, wraps his arms around himself and walks forward edging away from furniture and doorways that loom at him as though they might bump into him and break him. He is uncomfortable in his skin, wants to tear his nails through it, wants to scrub it with pumice or hold his breath and lay at the bottom of the cold springs like a stone until it wrinkles away.
Lan Zhan escorts him through the Cloud Recesses, to a back path he never noticed as a student here, and a set of three small separate residences. Each has a clearly legible sign on the front reading vacant. Lan Zhan gestures to the one on the left, and turns the sign to read in use.
Inside the floor is covered in straw mats, new and shiny and smelling faintly of lye. There is a low table and a bookcase with some tattered books and a tea set. There is no bed, just two large rush hampers holding blankets and pillows, and a stack of pallets. Through a doorway, he sees a small bathroom with a hip bath that’s much smaller than the luxurious full-sized one in Lan Zhan’s quarters.
It doesn’t look like a prison room, but it also doesn’t not look like a prison room.
He has no idea what he’s supposed to do here.
No – that’s untrue. He knows what all unmated alphas think omegas do in their heats. Spend countless hours fucking themselves with toys, with their fingers, panting and moaning in lust-addled states for an alpha’s big cock, for their knot. Writhing in an agony of denial and near-pain, hot and sweaty and gushing slick. It’s what he himself always thought. It had seemed erotic, then.
It seems horrible, now.
“Please,” he says, and doesn’t know how to finish that sentence. Please make this not be happening? Please tell me what to do? Please don’t leave?
He is not a mindless, uncontrolled beast. He’s not going to beg Lan Zhan to stay with him – Lan Zhan who hated him the whole time they spent together in the Cloud Recesses; Lan Zhan who afterwards only showed a baseline lack of indifference towards him; Lan Zhan who spent the final years of his (former) life telling him he was screwing everything up.
He’s not going to beg, but fuck he wants to.
Instead he straightens up and takes a breath. “No – I’m okay. I’m okay. I just –” he looks at the room, devoid of anything personal, devoid of anything that smells like anyone. Devoid of anything that smells like Lan Zhan. A thin panicked wail starts to build in the back of his mind at the idea of spending a day without even a hint that Lan Zhan exists. “Could you. Leave something? With me?”
Lan Zhan looks at him, eyes just a little too wide. Wei Wuxian grits his teeth. “Please don’t make me beg,” he says. Because he knows he will. He can feel it, the wailing in his brain getting louder because it knows in a minute Lan Zhan is going to walk out that door and he is going to be in here alone.
Lan Zhan takes off his heavy outer robe, lovely silk embroidered with silver clouds. It’s too nice, much too nice, but Wei Wuxian is focusing too hard on not grabbing to think of that. He holds it out, and Wei Wuxian takes it with stiff arms. “Thank you,” he says, thickly, his jaw tight.
“Do you want me to send someone? To… instruct you?” asks Lan Zhan.
Much as he doesn’t want to be here alone, the idea of some faceless Lan telling him how to fuck himself feels infinitely worse. “No,” he says. “It’s – fine.”
It is very very not fine.
Lan Zhan nods. “Then – you can find your way back? After? Or I can come and –”
“I can find you,” he says. He thinks, light-headed with terror, that he could find Lan Zhan anywhere. He found him from beyond the grave, after all.
“I will have food brought to you. They will leave it outside the door at regular intervals. Is there anything else…?”
He looks uncertain, worried now. Wei Wuxian can smell him, his scent growing stronger the longer he stands in the doorway, clean clean Gusu pine, sap that’s amber and thick and so fresh – he wants it, wants that scent all over him, wants Lan Zhan’s hands and his mouth and his prick – and –
“Please. Go.”
Lan Zhan closes the door, and goes.
Wei Wuxian slumps to the floor and buries his face in his robe.
***
If he’s expecting anything, it’s to devolve into a madness of lust in short order, but in fact he just feels uncomfortable. His skin is hot, sometimes itchy, his chest tender. His stomach twists and untwists, cramping sometimes, nauseous at others. He drinks water from the tap in the bathroom, he strips off everything but his undershirt and trousers. He dumps out the baskets of bedding and makes a big heap to lie in. It’s more comfortable than anything they had in the Burial Mounds, this pathetic little room with its noise-suppressing talismans and its shelf of boring spring-books.
That is, in fact, what the books are. Back in his youth, reading illicit material provided on loan by Nie Huaisang, he wouldn’t have believed that spring-books could be boring. These ones are mostly text, dry chapters of court politics and vivid depictions of ceremonial robes and family histories with very little actual fucking. The illustrations are tame, very unimaginative. Wei Wuxian was having much dirtier fantasies with no actual inspiration other than Lan Zhan’s broad shoulders and angry eyes as a poor innocent student. (And also subsequently, as a poor innocent protector of a tribe of condemned outcasts.)
There are also, he discovers, no toys. Is this a Lan thing? Some sort of exulting in repression? He’s pretty sure that the Jiang omegas had it much better – although he absolutely never even considered asking Shijie and even now the thought of it makes him a little queasy. He goes to sit by the toilet for a few minutes just in case, but nothing comes up.
It’s late when he feels the heat really beginning to settle in. He’s really hot now, too hot for clothes, and he sheds them and lies sweaty and fitful on the pile of blankets. His pulse is throbbing between his legs, hot and aching in his entrance, slick trickling out to coat his cheeks and thighs. His cock is half-hard, much smaller than his old one. He gives it a few strokes and feels his pulse speed, sweat breaking out as his body seems to tip over the edge and embrace what’s happening. He’s unsettled, fractious, the quick strokes of his cock not reaching the molten need that’s growing deep inside him. He comes half-heartedly, feeling barely any relief. He fondles himself as the tension in his balls release; it feels tight and a little exciting, but not much more significant.
He knows what he wants. The ache is strongest between his legs, his entrance throbbing and wet. He wants to be shoved over on his stomach, lifted and parted and taken. Wants to be filled and fucked, hard. His entrance is begging to be stretched, forced open around a thick cock, worked until he pants and begs and screams. He turns over, too uncomfortable to be trepidatious, and runs his hand back. Over his flank, his hip, his ass. Parts the cheeks and feels the slick wetness that’s already everywhere, that’s already soaking into the blankets. His fingers brush the coil of muscle and he catches his breath, a jolt of pleasure flaring. He swallows and sinks a finger in.
The relief is heady, his hips jerking against it, hungry for more as he stretches himself open. He’s never done this before, never touched himself here, but his finger is already moving fast. It’s not enough, is nowhere near enough, the heat inside insatiable. He adds another finger and moans – it’s easier to be focused with two, to stroke himself, to open himself up. He’s so wet inside, unbelievably slick, his walls soft and warm. The muscle of his rim is strong, tight, but it stretches as he moves his fingers, allowing entrance. He’s panting, up on his knees, hips rocking into it. It feels good in a way he never knew he could feel. Maybe he couldn’t, before.
He adds a third finger and keens against the stretch. This is what he wants – this fulness, this satisfaction, feeling himself entered and filled and used. He pants against it, his cock hot and aching but largely forgotten, the feeling of being fucked so much more fulfilling. It’s still not enough, though, the press of his fingers not deep enough, not strong enough, not thick enough.
He turns his head from where it was resting on a thick pillow, and accidentally buries his face in Lan Zhan’s robe.
His nose full of Lan Zhan’s scent, the need in his body is suddenly pin-point sharp. His fingers are no longer his fingers, they’re Lan Zhan’s cock – that’s what he needs, that’s what he wants – and he shoves his face into the soft silk and twists his fingers and comes so hard he sees stars.
***
He’s not exactly mad – he’s certainly present enough to get up to piss, and drink water, and even eat some food that arrives on the doorstep in the early morning – but largely, he’s in a fugue state. His mind floats, full of dreams of Lan Zhan. Dreams where Lan Zhan fucks him from behind, where he pins him to the wall and rails him, where he lets Wei Wuxian ride him until he comes deep inside him. He bites and chews and cries on the robe, he wraps it around a pillow and ruts against it; he certainly comes on it. It’s all he has to remind him of what he needs so badly, to fill his mind with the satisfaction that Lan Zhan is here, that the hot hands on his sensitive flesh are not his own but Lan Zhan’s, that he’s being fucked by his alpha. He has nothing to take the place of the knot his body is begging for, and as the hours pass it becomes harder and harder to please himself without that subsuming fulness.
He manages, just barely.
By the time the twenty-four hours is up, Wei Wuxian is exhausted. He feels empty and dry and headachy. He feels like he never wants to touch himself again. He feels a sort of proxy embarrassment for Lan Zhan’s robe – not real actual embarrassment, but the knowledge that if he were less fucked out he would be embarrassed.
He takes a bath, struggling to wash all of his sweaty self in the hip-bath. But he does it, using the strongly-scented soaps that are provided to clean away all the traces of his heat, until he feels pink and pristine and slightly more human. He also washes his hair, which feels wonderful. Combing it out will be another matter.
He can smell, now, that his clothes are pretty strongly scented even though he removed most of them before the heat hit fully. There’s a small stack of neutral robes in the bathroom, and he pulls on one of these to wear, not wanting to make an exhibition of himself even this late at night.
It’s almost midnight, and he really should stay here until tomorrow – it’s far past the Lan bedtime. But the idea of having to remain locked in this tiny anonymous room that feels like judgement and shame is too much. He pulls on his boots and slips out into the chill night air.
Seeing the Cloud Recesses by lantern-light is surprisingly nostalgic. He looks up at the rooftops and remembers them as they were when he was young. When he and Lan Zhan had sparred for stupid reasons, less concerned with the excuse than the opportunity to butt heads. Lan Zhan had been so righteous, so uptight. So strong, and beautiful in the moonlight. They had fought on most of the roofs in the Cloud Recesses, back then. But of course those were different rooftops – the Wens burned them all down.
The door to Lan Zhan’s quarters leads directly into the main room where his bed is. Wei Wuxian pulls it open quietly, intending to creep through to his own room. He feels like he’s run three marathons back-to-back, his weak muscles trembling as he climbs the stairs. All he wants to do is lie down and sleep.
But Lan Zhan is awake, sitting at his low table reading a book by candlelight. He puts it down as Wei Wuxian enters, and stands.
“Wei Ying.”
Wei Wuxian smiles wanly. “Hey. I’m back.” Lan Zhan’s scent lingers in the air, but it’s no longer overwhelming, no longer muddling his head and heating his skin. It just feels nice, familiar. Safe.
Lan Zhan comes over. “Are you alright? You look tired.”
“I’m fine. And I am tired. I didn’t sleep much.” He looks around and his eyes catch sight of Lan Zhan’s bed. It must be some kind of instinctive response, because he feels the pull of sleep so suddenly and so strongly that he staggers. Lan Zhan catches him, his arms under Wei Wuxian’s, holding him up carefully. Strong, but not too tight. It feels so right, feels like a habit between them instead of something new.
Wei Wuxian closes his eyes and leans his head against Lan Zhan’s shoulder. He’s so tired.
“Wei Ying?”
“’m okay.”
Lan Zhan sighs, quietly, then bends. A moment later he’s scooping him up and carrying him through to the second bedroom. Wei Wuxian wriggles a little, but it’s just for show. He wants this. He wants it so badly. He’s just spent the past day pretending he could have it.
He can’t have it. Lan Zhan’s just being nice. Being sympathetic to the poor pathetic former-alpha who just had to go through a heat all on his own. He might want Wei Wuxian, just a little, because omega pheromones are strong. But not beyond that. He never wanted Wei Wuxian on his own merits – that was the problem.
Tears prick at his eyes. He turns his head away as Lan Zhan puts him down in bed, pulling the blankets up over him and closing the windows.
“Wei Ying?”
He makes a quiet sound, just to show he’s listening. Keeps his face to the wall, his spine a long line.
“Was it so bad?”
Was Lan Zhan worried about him, while he was gone? Maybe. Or maybe he’s just curious. Alpha-to-former-alpha. Maybe he wants to know if it feels as good as they all pretend it does. Wei Wuxian closes his eyes.
“It was fine, Lan Zhan. Go to bed.”
“Do you need anything?” presses Lan Zhan, strangely persistent. He considers snapping back that all he needs is sleep, but that’s unfair. This is Lan Zhan’s home, and he’s been surprisingly kind.
“Really, I’m fine. I had everything I needed.” Except you. Except you. Except you. “I just want to sleep for a while, okay?”
“Of course. If you need – anything – call me.”
Weird. Lan Zhan is definitely being weird. Something must have happened while Wei Wuxian was gone for all those years. Maybe someone thawed his icy heart. But if so, where are they? He sighs. He’s too tired for this shit.
“G’night, Lan Zhan.”
“Good night, Wei Ying.”