Wei Wuxian had a theory, that souls brought into the bodies of willing sacrifices could not be forcibly evicted, such as his in the body of Mo Xuanyu. He never expected to test this theory.

He certainly never expected to be wrong. https://twitter.com/Suibian_gongzi/status/1277634364407533568

The second time Zidian bursts across the space between him and the person he is certain is Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji is too slow.

The world ends in an instant. Sixteen years of searching to find him, only to lose him again in an instant.

He knows what Zidian does, he knows-- and yet, he hopes, too. He hopes as he carries the might-be body of Wei Wuxian back to Gusu. He hopes as he bathes and dresses him. He hopes as he lays him in bed.

He hopes as he settles himself at the guqin to wait.

His fingers falls into the familiar shape of Inquiry, but no, no, not that song. Not now.

(Perhaps, never again? A hope.)

He plays. He waits. A meditation on patience. He rises to check the pulse of the man in the bed. Alive, heartbeat thready but *there.*

It feels like another sixteen years before the man in the bed stirs. It feels like seconds. It is a timeless space in which Lan Wangji hangs between states of being, undone, shattered into the disparate parts of himself and waiting to see what shape he will take.

The man in the bed is slight, a slender figure carved out by years of malnutrition and ill-use. His eyes look bruised. When he bathed him, Lan Wangji found scars, found fresh cuts on his arm, all hidden now under clean white cloth.

He forces himself to consider the implications. The Yin Iron traces on the sword and bodies in Mo Manor. The song played to calm the Ghost General. The Ghost General himself.

What will he do, if this is Wei Wuxian? If he took this man's body by force? If he's become someone would do that?

What will he do, if this is Wei Wuxian?

....what will he do, if this is not?

He waits. He plays. He is no longer a stranger to all-night vigils. He is no stranger to sleeplessness.

The man in the bed stirs. Moans. The breaking silence makes Lan Wangji start, his fingers jerking on the guqin strings. He freezes, leaving discord to fade in the air.

The first threadbare light of morning illumines the sharp bones and hollows of the man's face. His lashes flutter, lift. His head turns.

Hope hope hope...

He can feel the wretched beating of his own heart, about to find out what he will become.

It is not Wei Wuxian who looks out of unfamiliar eyes at him.

He knew him on Dafan mountain, even behind the mask. He knows this is not him, even before the man who is not Wei Wuxian opens his mouth and croaks,

"Who the fuck are you?"

Lan Wangji stands, with no recollection of the impulse to do so, no memory of the tightening muscle. He is sitting and then he is not, his whole being focused on the man, the man who is... who is not...

The man recoils, face twisting. "Don't hurt me!"

Hurting him had not crossed Lan Wangji's mind until he said it, but suddenly he wants to hurt him. Wants to tear him apart looking for Wei Wuxian, who might be in there somewhere, who might be there still--

No. It is not this man's fault. It is someone else's fault Wei Wuxian is not here, and he will deal with *that* later.

"I will not hurt you."

"Who are you?" the man asks. He looks so young, and suddenly Lan Wangji feels so, so old. This night has been a lifetime.

"Where am I?" he scrabbles suddenly at his sleeve, at the scars, three healed, one still wet and red. "I should be-- I'm supposed to be--"

He starts to shake, tears welling in his eyes. He's shaking like he's going to fly apart.

Lan Wangji feels the same way, but he stays completely still.

"I'm not supposed to be here, I thought-- it worked-- I--" He begins to claw at the marks on his arm, and Lan Wangji steps to the side of the bed and take his wrist, gently keeps his hand away.

He doesn't usually touch people. "Mo Xuanyu."

Mo Xuanyu, who is not Wei Wuxian, goes limp at his touch. The tears spill over and down his cheeks.

"It worked," Lan Wangji says, every word torn out of him like a piece of his own lung. "The people of Mo Manor are dead. That's all you wanted, isn't it?"

He knows it isn't.

He knows, also, that is it not always easy to live. To wake and find oneself alive. He wants to hate this Mo Xuanyu for everything he is not.

And yet. He cannot hate him. He understands too well.

"I..." Mo Xuanyu whispers. "I don't want... I don't understand..." Lan Wangji feels his shaking into his own bones. "Where...? Who...?"

"You are in Gusu, in Cloud Recesses." He risks releasing Mo Xuanyu's wrist. "I am Lan Zhan, courtesy name Wangji. You are safe."

This is how Mo Xuanyu comes to Cloud Recesses.

And Wei Wuxian does not.

Mo Xuanyu remains in the Jinshi, in Lan Wangji's care. No one understands why, and no one can get in to find out. Lan Wangji speaks only to his brother. Even his son receives no explanation. Whatever he tells Lan Xichen is enough. Mo Xuanyu is allowed to stay.

Lan Wangji tends the man who is not Wei Wuxian as if his own life depends on it, with a single-minded dedication and an absolute refusal to examine his own feelings.

Saving Mo Xuanyu makes for a good distraction from saving himself.

And because Lan Wangji is so very good at denying himself, it's Mo Xuanyu who notices first.

The drafts under the door. The particular consistency of smoke from the fire. While Lan Wangji moves through life like an automaton, Mo Xuanyu is a hair-trigger, sensitive to everything.

On one of the rare occasions Lan Wangji leaves him alone - never for more than an hour at a time and never with access to anything sharp - he returns to find the Jingshi in chaos.

Screens torn down, clothing flung across the floor, furniture hurled into corners.

And Mo Xuanyu, lying in the center of the wreck of Lan Wangji's home, his arms over his head.

When Lan Wangji enters, Mo Xuanyu scrambles to him, catching the edges of his robe, as white as the cloth with panic.

"He's come for me! He's going to kill me!"

This is, at least, some improvement. A Mo Xuanyu being afraid of death is better than a Mo Xuanyu seeking it.

"Who is coming to kill you?" Lan Wangji asks patiently.

"The Yiling Patriarch!"

Time grinds to a halt.

It means, mostly likely, nothing at all. The terrified ravings of a lunatic.

But perhaps Lan Wangji is something of a lunatic himself, or else, Mo Xuanyu is not so much of one as people said.

Breaking the grip on his robes, he crosses to the only piece of furniture left untouched. The table with the guqin on it. The vase is overturned water and flowers spilled, but nothing touched the instrument.

He kneels, Mo Xuanyu kneeling across from him, watching with wide eyes.

In the time Mo Xuanyu has been here, between bouts of panic or despair, Lan Wangji has found him to have a quick and agile mind, a bright curiosity that shows itself like sunlight through tattered curtains.

His mind is a wounded thing, but lovely.

What might he have become, in a world that had been kinder to him?

Mo Xuanyu is not the first person he has wondered this about.

What might he become now, if given the chance?

"Don't let him kill me, Hanguang-jun," he says, leaning forward.

"You want to live?" Lan Wangji asks. He lays his hands on the guqin strings. The silence seems to wait for them.

"Y-yes." There's a waver in the answer, a flicker in his eyes.

Well, it's a start. "Good."

Lan Wangji closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath, holds it for a moment. Tells himself not to hope too much.

And plays the first notes of Inquiry.

The music hangs in the air, shimmering, fading, gone.

Silence, silence... he holds his hands above the strings, leaving space for the silence, space for...

A single note rings out in the Jingshi.

*Are you there?* asked the guqin.

*Yes,* came the reply.

This is how Wei Wuxian comes to Cloud Recesses.

Lan Wangji plays for a long time, most of the usual questions, and many that are not usual.

Every time, he thinks Wei Wuxian will not answer.

Every time, he does.

All the while, Mo Xuanyu listens, watches, with uncomprehending interest.

And if he is looking more at Lan Wangji's face, and perhaps not thinking quite as much about the music, well, who could blame him?

At last, the instrument falls silent. Mo Xuanyu finally looks at Lan Wangji's hands.

Poised above the strings, they tremble. A fine vibration, as if the music still runs through him, from his fingertips up his wrists. It spreads. Lan Wangji shuts his eyes again. He's shaking.

He's never been anything but utterly composed, calm verging on cold, for all the brief time Mo Xuanyu has known him.

Is the great Hanguang-jun afraid of the Yiling Patriarch?

No, he does not look like a man afraid.

He looks like something Mo Xuanyu recognizes.

Like someone who has reached the absolute limit of what they can bear, and is still trying to hold on.

He doesn't have to understand why. Tentatively, gently, Mo Xuanyu reaches out, lays just the tips of his fingers over the tips of Hanguang-jun's.

Hanguang-jun's throat works, the smooth column of it a small, pained convulsion. When he exhales, even his breath shakes.

Now it is Mo Xuanyu who considers the implications. Himself, brought to this place, tended like family. The way Hanguang-jun looked at him when he first woke. Now, this.

"You..." he guesses, slow and unsure. "You... wanted him back?"

Hanguang-jun bows his head.

Mo Xuanyu swallows his fear. He's already died once. How bad could it be, really, a second time? And doesn't he owe it to him, to this man who saved him, and has been, at no benefit to himself, kind to him?

"I'll bring him back," he says. "I can do it again. If you want."

Hanguang-jun opens his eyes. They are a deep, deep gold, rimmed with red.

"You just said," his words are slow, laborious, "you don't want to die."

"I... What do you want, Hanguang-jun?"

"I will not ask that of you. I ask only that you teach me how, so I may do it myself."

Mo Xuanyu sits bolt upright, shocked out of any remaining fear.

"No! Hanguang-jun, you-- no." He shakes his head. "I won't teach you."

"You asked what I wanted."

"No." He shakes his head harder, loose hair whipping across his face. "Not that."

"You asked what I wanted," Hanguang-jun repeats, but his voice is different, this time. No longer clinging to serenity, it is hard bordering on harsh, and Mo Xuanyu's breath stutters in his chest.

"But you're important! No one will miss me, I'm nobody, but you--"

"You have family. You have-- that boy? Your son, right?"

Hanguang-jun's face freezes. His hands curl into fists above the guqin, away from Mo Xuanyu.

Mo Xuanyu presses his advantage.

"Besides, if you bring him back, what will he do without you?"

"I will ask no one else to do this thing," Hanguang-jun replies.

"Well, I won't tell you how." Mo Xuanyu folds his arms stubbornly over his chest. His pulse races with the absolute nerve of defying Hanguang-jun, of all people. "I won't. No matter what you do to me."

Hanguang-jun's gaze slides off him as if he has simply ceased to be there. He is no longer useful, no longer interesting. He's probably going to be kicked out, now. It wouldn't be the first time he's been kicked out. Hell, he hasn't even gotten around to flirting with anyone yet.

The white-clad figure towers over him when he stands, turns his back, begins to pick up scattered robes and broken screens as if Mo Xuanyu does not exist.

"Maybe," he says, a little desperate, "maybe we can find another way."

Hanguang-jun doesn't acknowledge him.

"You're, like, the strongest cultivator, right? And you can talk to him, he's the one who invented that spell in the first place. And me, I managed to pull it off. Besides, I'm the only demonic cultivator you've got. We really could do it!"

This time, Hanguang-jun pauses, hand extended in the act of picking up a fallen vase. He straights slowly, as if moving through honey.

"Very well," he says.

And this is how Mo Xuanyu finds a purpose in Cloud Recesses.

For the first time in many years, he has something to do. Something to want beyond vengeance. Something to make him feel like he matters.

He can save the men who saved him.

Few doors are closed to Hanguang-jun. The libraries of the great sects open to him, and if he has an odd little shadow, a wisp of a disgraced cultivator, following behind him, well...

That's really no one's business but his.

Mo Xuanyu delves into books he would otherwise never have seen, devours them, eager for knowledge. He is not a strong cultivator, and never will be, though practicing with Hanguang-jun is certainly helping.

But in demonic cultivation, knowledge matters more than power.

And Lan Wangji finds... well, Mo Xuanyu is not Wei Wuxian, but he's not bad company, either.

If he'd just stop flirting with him. It's far more subtle flirting than Wei Wuxian's ever was, which in some ways, definitely makes it worse. It's harder to tell him off, for one thing.

He's skittish, too. The few times Lan Wangji has snapped at him, he ducks like he expects to be hit and goes quiet and small for the rest of the day.

It makes Lan Wangji furious, that someone did this to him.

But Mo Xuanyu smiles more, these days. He's mostly stopped picking at the scars on his arm. He bounces in his seat when he finds something in a book that excites him.

Maybe it's the fact that he's had such direct contact with Wei Wuxian. Or the fact that they can talk about him without Lan Wangji having to conceal his feelings or get uncomfortable looks. He can be more free with himself around Mo Xuanyu, at least, as much as he ever is.

Or maybe, it's the fact that he's talking to Wei Wuxian again.

Inquiry isn't made for full conversations. It cannot reproduce the way Wei Wuxian talks, the way he laughs, the rambling and the teasing and the...

But it's more of him than Lan Wangji has had in sixteen years.

It takes them three years of study. Of attempt after failed attempt. How do you bring a man back into the world of the living, wholly himself, without sacrificing someone else?

They are three years in each other's company, both of them, the three of them, in a way.

There are the ways Lan Wangji protects Mo Xuanyu, from slander by cultivators, from bandits on the road, from fierce corpses after a flood.

There are the ways Mo Xuanyu protects Lan Wangji, from loneliness, from despair, and once, from a resentful spirit.

There is the time Lan Wangji carries Mo Xuanyu back to the inn when he's too drunk to walk.

There is the time Mo Xuanyu fends off a girl flirting with the great Hanguang-jun -- yes, by draping himself on him and generally being an embarrassment. Whatever, it works.

That is to say, they both have a friend for the first time in a long time.

And they have Wei Wuxian, who does everything in his power to get them into harmless trouble for his own amusement, because being dead is, according to him, extremely boring.

That is all to say. It takes them three years, but they are not bad years. They're pretty nice, actually, by their standards.

Bit by bit, they figure it out. They find a way.

And then Lan Wangji has not one shadow, but two.

Wei Wuxian is all of himself, in silhouette. His shape in the window of the Jingshi. His laugh as he absorbs the candlelight into his form.

Lan Wangji basks in the shade of his presence.