ok, labyrinth au, a joint custody baby with @qinghedumpster and a thread:

this is likely going to just be an overall premise as opposed to anything more lyrical. i'm tired, lads. here we go

the labyrinth is a magical realm that exists outside of the mortal one, and it's home to a lot of trapped souls, particularly ones given in a trade for something else, or ones taken from the human realm and held captive and never rescued. jgy is the current (note: current) ruler

he's been there for a very long time, so long he's forgotten the passing time, long enough to have decided it was better not to be human anyway. long enough to have clawed his own way through the labyrinth to the castle at its centre and deposed the previous ruler, because his

own father traded him for his weight in gold and the certainty of his half-brother's successful future, and so nobody was coming to save him. there is no goodness in humans, and there is no good in being human. when nie huaisang enters with his brother and nie zonghui, he doesn't

lift a hand to help them, even as the labyrinth tricks nmj and nie zonghui into killing each other, turning them into feral ghosts who can remove their own heads and carry them. they sometimes lose them. nhs ensures they get them back, and get the right one back.

nhs had survived the fight but refused to leave their side & has met the fate a lot of trapped souls do, the one jgy has: slowly forgetting how to be human, as the magic of the labyrinth slowly sinks into them and they become a creature of it, unable and often unwilling to leave.

nhs is aware an artefact that originated in the labyrinth now exists in the world outside, and wants it so badly that he convinces mxy, another trapped soul that even jgy had thrown from the castle, to summon it at the cost of exiting the labyrinth. nobody's sure what happens if

you do that, because nobody comes back to tell: mxy thinks the risk is worth it. but when the yin iron comes back, it comes back in the possession of its current owner, wwx. which is how he ends up trapped in the labyrinth himself. he has limited time before he is unable to leave

and, for whatever reason, he is explicitly taken from the labyrinth and held in the castle by jgy. so lwj enters the labyrinth voluntarily to try and rescue him.

people don't...........voluntarily enter, so this has the court of all the trapped souls and monsters very excited.

whatever happens, it'll at least be entertaining to witness. but then lxc enters, following lwj, trying to seek an audience with whoever it is that controls the labyrinth, and they go positively wild with excitement. two brothers! two! within days! this hasn't happened in ages!

so this is where the story would split: lwj is doing the traditional fighting through the labyrinth narrative you might expect, and nhs is alternately helping or hindering him, at least until lwj manages to take nmj's head hostage and use it to secure nhs' /genuine/ assistance.

the other side of the story is that lxc appears before jgy and offers a trade. in the original film, the main character experiences time in the labyrinth as far shorter than it ought to be to cross a whole labyrinth. iirc, it's something like 13 hours? in this au, lxc is aware

that time passes differently in the labyrinth, and that the ruler of it can control the passage of time in different parts of it, so the trade is that lxc will experience the time lwj and wwx ought to be experiencing for them, and will stay in the court as a hostage.

jgy agrees to it, mostly out of curiosity, because lots of people have tried to bargain with him, but this is the first time someone has put the sacrifice on the table so obviously in the first act of them bargaining. they decide that lxc will stay in the court and experience

13 moons. for each moon he experiences, wwx will only experience a day, and for each day wwx experiences, lwj will only experience an hour. lxc agrees to the terms. it's done.

so this part of the au would follow the 13 moons lxc stays in the court. spoiler: they fall in love.

lxc is given his own rooms, which are an illusion, probably, because there's a whole beautiful traditional building inside a garden of flowers that never die, but it's all behind a single door to a single room, and in the building there's a perfect replica of his own

sleeping quarters outside the labyrinth. he's left to himself during the day, under strict instructions not to wander the goblin city outside of the castle alone, and then is sent clothing to wear to accompany jgy after dinner. they usually play weiqi. to keep it from getting

stale, and to try and help his brother, lxc introduces new stakes to the game: the winner is allowed to ask three questions a night, and the loser must answer, which is interesting because jgy can evade an answer but cannot outright lie. but lxc can still lie, because he's not of

the labyrinth. but he still doesn't, which jgy is sure of because he can taste lies, and that surprises him, and OBVIOUSLY this is a precursor to flirting that then becomes outright flirting, and jgy taking lxc on tours of the city, and the outfits left for lxc every night

getting ever more beautiful and elaborate. at first, they were clearly just a test of whether lxc would agree to wear them, and they're all clearly made of beautiful, impractical fabric and details, making it clear he's ornamental but also hindering his escape from both

how impractical and how recognisable he'd be. not many people who still smell human running around the goblin city in gauzy blues and whites.

one time, jgy picks a deliberately, scandalously cut one, just to see if lxc will ever protest over anything jgy does at all

but it backfires because lxc wears it and leans over the board and jgy sees his /collarbones/ and nearly has a fit of the vapours, at which point he starts to realise he's miscalculated how stubborn lxc is, and also that he's possibly very, very attracted to him.

the second tip off is the flowers, because it's almost like hanahaki but with "humanity slowly bleeding back into jgy", so the closer they get emotionally and physically, the more he starts to be in pain after, and cough up ridiculous amounts of blood-streaked peonies bc WHY NOT

WHY NOT AT THIS POINT, IT'S ALREADY AN AU OF A FRANKLY RIDICULOUS 80s FILM ABOUT A GOBLIN KING. why NOT have lxc confused as to why jgy will barely kiss him some days and then finding out because nhs appears in the goblin city and slips an aside to lxc that means he catches jgy

choking on them by forcing his way into jgy's own private quarters and finding him on the red lacquer floor surrounded by petals? there is an opportunity for us to live our best fantasy au lives here aesthetically speaking and i'm taking it. also i feel like the implications of

returning humanity manifesting as bursts of chronic pain, like pins and needles in a limb that's been asleep for a long time, is....super interesting. after lxc discovers him, jgy starts avoiding him, so lxc deliberately enters the most dangerous district of the goblin city alone

and by this point he is EXTREMELY recognisable as jgy's current favourite, but also: he still smells like human. by the time jgy shows up, someone's already trying to feed him something that looks like his favourite childhood candy, but that will make him forget his life outside

the labyrinth, and the second they see jgy they visibly panic, but the damage is done and. well. after jgy has made an example out of them, he takes lxc back to the castle, and he's furious at the kind of stunt this is, and when lxc responds by trying to make another move and

proposition him outright, jgy likely angrily (helplessly) tells him that he can't buy less time for his brother with his body, they already have a deal, and it takes a lot of time for them to unravel all the implications of that one.

but by this point, jgy is tired, and in love, and halfway to becoming human again, which hurts? all of that? hurts? and lxc smiles into his mouth when he kisses him and refuses to be cowed or afraid and he never, ever asks jgy for his true name, even when he wins their game

even though if he did it he'd be able to forcibly command jgy like a puppet master, and jgy would have to do whatever he liked, which is both an extremely frightening and extremely appealing idea, but mostly frightening, because lxc is a hostage, and what he'd choose is to take

his brother and take wwx and escape the labyrinth, and getting it out of jgy via the game is such an obvious, brutish, inelegant solution that jgy had agreed to the stakes originally purely to see if that was the play lxc was trying to make. but it hasn't been. it hasn't been.

so in the end, jgy gives in to him, and the next day, lxc wanders around the garden that's utterly ravaged, crushed and fallen flowers everywhere, smiling dreamily to himself.

outside the city, lwj is still fighting for his life, and wwx's life. and nhs, out of spite, tells

lwj that because he was born outside the labyrinth, he can tell one lie for every two truths, and so when he mocks lwj by telling him how his dear, precious older brother is buying lwj's time back for him and working hard on his back to earn it, lwj assumes it's one of the lies.

at which point we get to the equivalent of the ballroom scene in the original film. for those who have NOT seen the film, i hope this part still tracks but lmk if it does not so i can remedy that for you.

lwj is on about hour 12, and seems to enter a kind of dreamscape where he is present at an ongoing party within the city. all these strange monsters and stranger used-to-be-people are in attendance, and he seems to spot wei wuxian across the crowded room in a flash of red ribbon

so he does what anyone would do after spending 12 HOURS fighting through a horrorshow to rescue said wei wuxian: rushes like hell after him. but he always seems out of reach, just beyond the next once-a-person, and then:

lwj rounds one group of people, and spots his brother.

lxc doesn't see him at all. he's dressed all in white, like some kind of fairy prince (consort, lwj's mind dumbly supplies later: in retrospect, he looks like a consort), sitting at the bottom of a staircase, smiling down at jgy lounging in his arms, all in black, eyes dark.

lwj is frozen; wwx's hair ribbon flickers, a taunt, just out of the corners of his own eyes, and he realises now it's a taunt, because when he looks at jgy, not his brother, jgy is watching him and smiling a very small, particular, pleased smile.

fae, lwj remembers, like games.

and this is clearly a game to him. the purpose of the game is this: if lwj can only choose one of them to chase, just one he'd reach towards, which one would it be? his soulmate or the childhood caretaker of his soul?

it's the kind of choice that could rip anyone in two.

so lwj does not choose. he stands there, paralysed, perhaps afraid for the first time, watching jgy hold onto his brother's waist like a spoiled child with a toy, listening to a terrifying approximation of wei wuxian's voice calling his name. he knows it cannot be him, because it

calls his true name, and he's certain that if lxc is truly a prisoner of the labyrinth and this isn't an illusion, then he would never have given that up. he might not be fae, but there's power in a name, even so. but hearing the fake wei wuxian call to him still hurts.

he points the sword he'd found during hour 6 at jgy in a deliberate, silent threat, and jgy opens his mouth and laughs outright, and lxc turns as though to see what he might be laughing at and -

the dreamscape shatters. lwj is back in the labyrinth still. and very, very angry.

he grabs hold of nhs and shakes him, and nhs says the same refrain he's said ever since this whole saga begun, which is: i don't know, i don't know, i don't know, i did tell you, i don't know but if i did know ---

meanwhile, from lxc's pov, that ball? took place just before the 13th, and final, moon. by this time, lxc is treated as the de facto consort, and neither he nor jgy openly talk about the oncoming separation. sometimes they ask each other to stay or to be allowed to stay -

usually in bed, in the heat of the moment, and after they put it down to desire or compulsion, that their own sheer need forced the other to agree.

so then we get to the final confrontation, which in the film is fantastic. for those who have seen the film, picture

the "you have no power over me" line said from lan xichen to jgy, and that being the part that breaks jgy, and then he opens the exit and watches lxc and his precious brother and wwx leave, and hates humans, and being human, because it's equivalent to weakness, and in choosing it

he's destroyed himself. for those who don't know the film, picture the line anyway, it's basically the same. and once lxc steps through the exit, probably a mirrored portal, jgy lets the room they were all in for that final confrontation, which was a maze of escher-like stairs,

collapse around him, because what was the point of becoming human again, when all humans are traitors and fallible. he's no different, hasn't he betrayed himself, the small boy who was abandoned in the labyrinth and sold for gold so long ago he believed he'd forgotten the pain?

all the blood and flowers and questions and answers, and it turns out that being human is still, fundamentally, at its root, about the same old hurts it had been in the first days he spent in the labyrinth. he remembers why he had renounced it. the illusion of the room coalesces

and darkens, like an imploding star, and when he looks up and lan xichen is there again, he nearly laughs, because of course a world he can control would try and build a new one for him, like stemming bloodflow. a false idol for a tourniquet.

but this one is warm.

in this universe, lan xichen comes back for him. because the fun part about fairytales, or aus of 80s films that are based on fairytales, is this: that love is meant to fix things, but that there is far, far more power in free will.

free will, or the will of a maker, and in fairytales anyone can be a maker, is far more of a concentrated force behind magic than anything else.

"you have no power over me," lan xichen says again, and kisses him, and the sky stops falling.

of course, there's a cost to be borne. in that one shivering moment, the world responded not to jgy's wish to stop, but to lan xichen's. 13 moons, it turns out, might not to be too long to stay in the labyrinth, but it might be long enough: and the one holding the strings of the

labyrinth had loved lan xichen for enough of those moons that a slow, bleeding transference of power had begun, without either of them ever realising it. lan xichen has grown to love the labyrinth: the labyrinth loves lan xichen back. they will have to rule together.

the cost is this: lan xichen's mortality is gone, without either of them noticing, and the magic that has replaced it, now that he's returned of his own free will, seals him into a contract. he's tied to the labyrinth as surely as any other trapped soul, but the voluntary nature

of how he originally entered gives him some leeway. he can leave if he takes a token of the labyrinth, and enters through a mirror, and only stays three days in the mortal world. otherwise, he can never return.

it's not a bad ending. and in the house lwj and wwx share, there

are mirrors everywhere. sometimes, you can see a face in them, one that almost looks like lwj, but they tell you it's a trick of the light. but when you look back, it's almost as if the reflection heard, because it's fading, but it's.....it's almost like it's laughing at you.

[END OF THREAD]