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robininthelabyrinth · 10 months

Note

Wen Chao kills Wei Wuxian at the Wen Indoctrination camp to intimidate the heirs of the clans.

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ao3

Untamed

“You know they all think you’re dead,” Meng Yao said. He’d come to check on the status of the latest nightmare torture machine that Wen Ruohan had ordered to be made.

“I know,” Wei Wuxian said, his lips pressed tightly together. He was fiddling with the machine, which really only needed a few minor adjustments to do what Wen Ruohan wanted it to, adjustments that he’d managed to drag on for nearly a month and a half without making, and both he and Meng Yao knew it, and knew that the other one knew that they knew. The fact that Meng Yao hadn’t told anyone was the only reason Wei Wuxian was bothering to have this conversation with him now. “That was made painfully clear early on, thanks.”

Normally his viciously bitter tone was enough to convince people to stop asking.

Meng Yao wasn’t exactly what one would call normal, though.

“How’d he manage it?” Meng Yao asked, and Wei Wuxian looked up at him with a glare. “Wen Chao. He’s too stupid to actually manage to fake someone’s death properly – he’s the sort of person who’d mess up breathing if it didn’t happen naturally. How’d he manage to do it with you without actually killing you in the process?”

Wei Wuxian’s smile was ghastly.

“Stupid question,” he said. “You should know better than to make such a mistake.”

“Mistake? What mistake?”

“The mistake you made,” Wei Wuxian said gently, “was assuming he didn’t kill me.”

“I saw Wei Ying.”

If it had been anyone else, Jiang Cheng would have screamed at them. He would have pulled his sword and tried to stab them, and, lacking that, he would have gone at them with his bare hands, to try to punch them or strangle them until they stopped, one way or another.

But this wasn't anybody, it was Lan Wangji.

Other people had commented, usually sourly, that Jiang Cheng had grown closer to Lan Wangji during the war. They were usually trying to imply that he'd sought to replace one shixiong with another, and from another sect to boot, more than likely trying to capitalize on Jiang Fengmian’s sorrow and anger upon hearing Jiang Cheng's dull report of Wei Wuxian’s death at the hands of Wen Chao, perhaps the only thing that could have moved that otherwise peaceable and easy-going man to militancy. The implication was as wrong as it was filthy, of course - no one could replace Wei Wuxian, not in a million years - but there was some truth to the fact that Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji were better friends now than they had ever been before.

In fact, Jiang Cheng would go so far as to say that there was no one on earth who knew Lan Wangji better than him, possibly even above his own brother and uncle. After all, they had not been the ones that had been there when Lan Wangji had seen – when he had witnessed – when they had both witnessed…

Jiang Cheng thought sometimes that it had been the depth of Lan Wangji’s wild and terrible grief that had allowed him to survive Wei Wuxian’s death. That Jiang Cheng would have let it break him, shatter his mind along with his heart, only that Lan Wangji was a little quicker than he down that path, and Jiang Cheng was a man born overly responsible; he couldn't shatter as long as there was someone who needed him to stay strong. And Lan Wangji, who had already seen his home burn, his brother vanished, his father killed, his uncle tortured, and now his secret beloved murdered right before his eyes...he'd needed Jiang Cheng. He'd needed the only other person, excepting only Jiang Yanli, that felt the same thing he felt, the only other one who truly and unreservedly loved Wei Wuxian.

Even though Lan Wangji had never confessed his feelings, never said anything until the moment he'd unburdened his heart too late, Jiang Cheng the only one listening or able to listen, he had still suffered, and in so suffering, he gave Jiang Cheng the same feeling back - the knowledge that there was someone else out there that understood the enormity of what they'd lost in a way that no one, excepting again only the distant Jiang Yanli, would or could.

Because it was Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng didn't attack.

Physically, anyway.

"Have you started having delusions?" he demanded irritably. "If so, stop it: we have a war to fight, so there's no time. You want to lose your mind, do it after we're done."

"I saw him," Lan Wangji insisted.

"You saw him die, too," Jiang Cheng snapped, voice tight. "Remember that? You and me, we were both there. We saw what Wen Chao did to him. We saw what he did with the corpse, after. There's no way he's still alive."

"I know."

"Good, I'm glad that you know! Then what's this nonsense about?"

"I saw Wei Ying," Lan Wangji said. "I saw him alive and whole, though not the same as he once was. I cannot explain it, but I would not have mistaken him."

That was true. Anyone else, maybe. But not Lan Wangji, who had loved him.

"How can it be?"

Silence.

Jiang Cheng pursed his lips. It was probably just a delusion, or maybe some sort of newfangled trap that personalized itself to each person. Something like Wen Chao’s stupid owl with its confusing fog, only more pointed. Of course, if it was that, then it was a threat that needed to be stopped, needed to be hunted down and eliminated by the two best hunters the Sunshot Campaign had…

That was the only reason he was thinking of agreeing. The only reason.

It definitely wasn't because his heart had seized up, filled with impossible hope.

Attempt the impossible.

"I'll get permission for us to track the rumor down," Jiang Cheng said gruffly, and Lan Wangji nodded, his shoulders relaxing a little in silent gratitude. "We leave tomorrow."

“No, Meng Yao’s right. I’m pretty sure that rock is the only thing keeping me here,” Wei Wuxian said. “Destroy it.”

Nie Mingjue glanced back and forth from his traitorous former deputy to the man whose supposed death (real death, he supposed) had been the initiating factor to kick off the Sunshot Campaign in a way even the burning of the Cloud Recesses hadn’t been. Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji had recently grown obsessed with Wei Wuxian, meaning more than the usual amount – they swore up and down that they’d seen him, or possibly his ghost, or something like that – and while he hadn’t exactly disbelieved them, since who even knew these days, he hadn’t actually expected to meet the man in the living flesh.

Possibly non-living flesh.

Yin Metal possessed flesh?

“You can’t destroy it,” Meng Yao argued, and even though he was speaking to Nie Mingjue he was glaring indignantly at Wei Wuxian. He looked actually passionate, for once, and not in the way he had before, when Nie Mingjue had thought he was passionate about things like saving lives and the welfare of the common people; this was less beautiful, but more real. He was grimacing, his face twisted and ugly in a way he’d never before permitted it to be. “If you do, he will die, and die permanently!”

“That’s what people generally do, I think you’ll find,” Wei Wuxian said with a laugh that was mostly fake. “Meng Yao, I don’t know how many times I need to remind you: I’m already dead. That Wen Ruohan resurrected me through some sort of bizarre sorcery based on some stupid rock he found, probably out of morbid curiosity as to what he could do with it, doesn’t mean that I’m meant to be here.”

“But –”

“Meng Yao, you know better than most how awful he is, how terrible it would be if someone as insane as that actually achieved all that he wished to achieve! Wen Ruohan can’t be allowed to succeed in any of his aims. We have to destroy the Yin Metal. That I die is of no matter –”

“Wen Ruohan is a master of arrays,” Nie Mingjue interrupted, and they both looked at him. “His power is not based on a rock, no matter how unorthodox or interesting. Defeating him and destroying the rock – er, the Yin Metal – are unrelated, and the latter is certainly not a prerequisite to the former.”

Wei Wuxian looked taken aback. “What?”

“You’re confusing correlation with causation,” Nie Mingjue said, and shrugged. “That he started playing around with this…rock, this Yin Metal, whatever it is, doesn’t mean that it’s responsible for why he is the way he is, or even why he’s as powerful as he is. He would come to the Unclean Realm quite often when I was a child, and he was pretty different back then…anyway, my point is, can we stop talking about the rock and focus on killing him instead?”

“Looks like your horrible self-sacrifice is just going to have to wait,” Meng Yao told Wei Wuxian, looking especially smug in the face of Wei Wuxian’s gaping disbelief. “Too bad.”

Nie Mingjue hated that he liked Meng Yao better this way.

“Killing now, debate later,” he said, deciding to think about that at another time. “Understood?”

Not that they would have time to debate later, if he played his cards right. As soon as they found out about it, Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji were going to make absolutely sure that whatever the rock was that was keeping Wei Wuxian alive – and despite what he said, Nie Mingjue thought he was in fact still alive, if only by the barest thread – was explored in full, no matter what.

None of them were going to let him go that easily.

#mdzs #wei wuxian #jin guangyao #jiang cheng #lan wangi #nie mingjue #my fic #my fics #just assume the yin metal was actually kept as a secret by the Lan sect #short

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