i’ve been thinking about this all day, so here we go:
AU where lan wangji is the one who dies. wei wuxian mourns, searches, and finds nothing. 13 years later, lan wangji reappears.

after the battle at nightless city, lan wangji gets wei wuxian safely away from his elders, he stays with wwx in burial mounds, except wwx wasn’t getting better, and his powers were going out of control

more and more fierce corpses are drawn to the burial mounds, drawn to wei wuxian and the powers of the stygian tiger seal, and lan wangji can only do so much to keep them away while doing his best to nurse wwx back to health

with his last efforts to protect wei wuxian, he leaves the cave with the seal, and uses the last of his spiritual energy to destroy it, taking his own life in the process

three days later when wei wuxian wakes up, he finds a cold ribbon looped around his palm. white, splattered with droplets of blood and dirt. he thought it was a dream, when he was drifting in and out of consciousness, he saw a blur of white sitting beside him, humming a soft song

when he sets out to search for him, there is no body, no trace, nothing left of him

maybe lan zhan got home safely, wwx thought, maybe he got into a lot of trouble for losing his forehead ribbon and is now banned from leaving cloud recesses.

and then he heads to yiling.
“did you hear, lan wangji died.”
“he died protecting that yiling laozu didn’t he, what a waste.”

no, no.

wei wuxian has brought corpses back to life, he has brought wen ning back before, he can do it again. he has to. lan zhan can't be dead, he can't die for something so meaningless

lan zhan is so much more than someone who pitifully died trying to save a dead man. lan zhan is a brother, a war hero, gusu lan’s most prized disciple. he was everything. more than a poor misguided soul, manipulated into a pitiful death by the yiling patriarch.

wei wuxian heads back to the burial mounds, theres nothing but bones there, no one alive but him.

and then he hears someone crying

"a-yuan?"

it turns out that lan wangji has been taking care of a-yuan. he was doing what he can, but pulling wei wuxian away from tipping into death was his priority.

before lan wangji left the cave to destroy the stygian tiger seal, he hid ayuan somewhere safe so that if anything happened to wei wuxian it wouldnt hurt him. wei wuxian spends the next year nursing a-yuan back to health, mourning, grieving.

and then he leaves the burial mounds, traveling all around china to look for a way to bring lan wangji back. he hears tales of different kingdoms scattered around the borderlands, practicing different forms of magic regarded as witchcraft by those practicing the swords path

if he cannot find an answer here then there may be answers beyond the orthodox. it’s what he is now, isn’t it. a dead man by traditional standards, yet he feels the need to live more than ever. for a-yuan, for lan zhan.

he cannot die until he brings lan zhan back first.

it was surprisingly easy for him to avoid the large sects, with the stygian tiger seal gone, everyone focused on rebuilding, no one was out looking for him yet. wei wuxian travels south, then west, then north, leaving trails of his spells, his plans, his stories.

he visits villages that rely on talismans and spells, who have heard little of cultivation practices of the east. instead they embrace death, they talk to death, they accept death.

wei wuxian learns the first two, but there are some things he cannot accept

(anyway i know wwx is sad but i think it would be cute for him to trade like different magic spells and his big brain inventions with all these other places he is visiting. he starts writing too, becoming a collector of sorts, documenting everything hes learning)

years passed, and wwx has lived in more places than he can count. a-yuan grows up with him, drawing talismans and arrays that summon large cicadas for him to catch in hot summer days, and sleeping spells to for his gege during nights when the nightmares become unbearable

what wei wuxian doesn't know is that his influence travelled with him. sometimes he'll come across spells that he designed years ago, contraptions he made during days when sleep no longer comes to him.

it is said that yiling laozu appears wherever there is chaos. he appears to study them, to harvest them, and then to dissolve them.

the reputation of yiling laozu has become strange, because people have seen him save villages rather than devour them, because the cultivation world can no longer survive without the hundreds of talismans and arrays that are now the norm rather than the derivative.

one day, wei wuxian takes a-yuan east again, tavern gossip tells him that there were strange bursts of curses travelling along the yangtze river.

"let's go see what the fuss is about, hm?"

maybe some powerful cultivator is wreaking havoc again, maybe he can join in on the reckless fun, maybe lan zhan will get so mad at him that he will raise from his grave just to tell wei ying to shut up

(he has stopped trying this method years ago though, sadly it doesn’t work. perhaps lan zhan doesn’t want to be disturbed.)

they end up in a town a little too close to lanling and gusu for wei wuxian's liking, apparently villagers have been disappearing. something about a statue of a goddess eating people.

a-yuan has gotten really good at handling cases lately. they can usually resolve any trouble that villagers run into with ghosts, curses, and corpses long before the nearest cultivator clan waltzes in as the savouries of the common people.

wei wuxian tells a-yuan to handle it, he trusts him.

"release a signal if you run into any trouble, stay away from sect cultivators if you can. i'm gonna snoop around a bit. apparently this village used to belong to a large family of doctors and i want to see if they have any spells hidden up their sleeves."

and they go their separate ways

that is, until a few hours later, wei wuxian hears a familiar song

wei wuxian is delirious with hope at this point. thirteen years has been far too long for someone to truly remember the face of your lover, no matter how beautiful he was.

this song, this song is the last thing he clings to, the one thing that surely belongs to lan zhan.

wei wuxian never forgets a song once he hears it, and he has only heard this song twice in his life. in that stinky dark cave with the fucking murder turtle, and then in his own stinky dark cave during his tug of war with death.

this man, however, is not lan wangji. he is shorter for one, his hair is messy for lan zhan standards. Its like he tried his best to press down all the baby hair but eventually gave up.

he fought with the same elegance that wei wuxian remembers, on the rooftop of cloud recesses, in the courtyard of the unclean realm, on the rooftop of nightless city.

but instead of swords, he drew talismans with bloody fingertips.

he can't be. no. but wei wuxian will cling onto anything, any possibility, he-

"lan zh-"

"wei wuxian. how dare you show your face here again."

shit, it's jiang cheng.

wei wuxian would've heard that crackling sound of zidian, he knows it too well. he would've been ready to face jiang cheng after all these years but, there is something more pressing right now.

because the man in front of him looked up, past his eyes at the white ribbon in his hair that wraps around his own red one. a moment of recognition.

(once upon a time he briefly considered wearing the ribbon around his forehead, like lan zhan did, but he could not even fathom disrespecting lan zhan even more than he already did.)

years ago, he might've panicked. he had no core nor stygian tiger seal to defend himself. but wei wuxian is now one of the most powerful cultivators in china, if you can even call him that. he had to survive. for he cannot die until lan zhan is back.

and now, now he might be. he needs to know.

"i'm sorry jiang cheng. let's do this some other time, okay?"

wei wuxian draws up a teleportation spell in the air, just as a blurring flicker of purple lashes his way. He grabs a-yuan in one arm, and the man in white in the other, and gets them somewhere safe.

so basically, you know how wwx left things everywhere, his spells, his writings, his influence. mo xuanyu found his sacrificial summoning spell and patched a few strokes to complete the spell. well, he might have had help from a little someone, you know who.

wei wuxian abandoned this spell years ago. he knew that lan wangji would have never forgiven him if he was returned to the living at the price of another life.

well, here he is now.

"a-yuan, could you give us a moment."

wen yuan nods, letting them know that he'll be downstairs of the inn in case they need him for anything.

At least lan zhan didn't try to hide who he was, breaking the silence between them.

"wei ying, it's good to see you."

"lan zhan, i-"

what did he want to say? he dreamt about this day everyday during the first few years of lan zhan's absence. then he stopped. he did not want to fantasise a reality that might never come true, he didn't want to distort whatever memories he still held of lan zhan

"you're shorter than me now, it’s cute," he says. it's the only thing that comes to mind.

wei wuxian reaches up to his half ponytail and undoes the white ribbon threaded in his hair.

"i kept it clean, don’t worry."

he has dreamt of this day, of returning lan zhan’s ribbon to him, the white ribbon that was his only symbol of mourning.

wwx (re)introduces him to a-yuan, and they travel to cloud recesses

a place that forbids yiling laozu and all practices that deviate from the path of the sword

And they were greeted by lan xichen, furious that wwx would dare to show his face after causing his brother’s death

basically lwj can’t wield swords anymore because mxy had such a weak golden core. so when he woke up, he turned to what he could.

slowly, he began to understand why wei ying turned to demonic cultivation, he did it to survive.

oh also, god the mo village case would've been so interesting

because its lxc who shows up to help the lan disciples

lwj having to lie from the second he wakes up, just another reminder of how much pain he caused for his clan, his family, his brother

okay i'm out of brain space basically they follow the novel plot but ofc things are different because lwj is mxy!lwj now

also wwx buys lwj a nice ass guqin

and lwj gets!! magical ! theyre both core-less but boy are they about to kick some ass together

Also other things to think about:

-lan wangji doesn know that wwx didnt hear his confession at nightless city
-he also doesnt know that it was wwx who brought him back in a round about way

-wwx knows that lwj nursed him back to health in his hazy days but it was so fuzzy, he doesnt know that lwj destroyed the seal, he just assumed. also what if it was him who actually killed lwj when his demonic magic was going haywire

haha okay here’s some art, thank you for tuning in

-the end-

linking the start of the thread here! https://twitter.com/wwxsAJ1s/status/1283419645735821313