Chapter Text
Two weeks after the wedding, Wei Wuxian returned to Lotus Pier with Lan Zhan beside him, spoiled and satisfied and glowing with happiness. They touched down at the far end of the training field – and it took all of three seconds for the youngest disciples to spot them and begin racing over with shouts of delight.
"Ah – slow down, slow down, you'll fall into the lake!" Wei Wuxian laughed as several small purple figures crashed into his legs at top speed. "Where's A-Yuan? Where's A-Yi? Have you hidden my babies?"
"Over there!" A little girl no older than eight pointed back across the field; Wei Wuxian shaded his eyes from the sun and saw three small figures heading over hand in hand – Jiang Zhilan, with A-Yuan on one side and A-Yi on the other, leading them over from the main pavilion.
"Lan Zhan, look! Doesn't A-Yuan look so cute in purple? With his ribbon too – aiya, my heart can't take this, it's too sweet –"
"You have missed them," observed Lan Zhan unnecessarily, and Wei Wuxian nudged teasingly against him, winding his fingers around one trailing end of white ribbon and tugging until Lan Zhan fixed him with a hard stare.
"As if you haven't."
"Mn."
"Ah, Lan Zhan… it's good to be back."
*
It took approximately three hours for Wei Wuxian to decide that actually, it was not good to be back, and he'd quite like to spend another month on honeymoon with Lan Zhan please and thank you.
"Are you going to stay here or not?" Jiang Cheng demanded, and it might have been only them at the table now but it was the same table as it had been two years ago, with the same now-empty spaces beside them, and Wei Wuxian bit back the question of whose seat are you trying to fill before it could make this conversation even worse than it already was.
"Jiang Cheng, listen –" he began, with no real idea where the sentence was going, but it didn't matter anyway because Jiang Cheng didn't let him find out.
"You're my head disciple. You're supposed to be here, not running off who-knows-where with Lan Wangji."
"It was our honeymoon –"
"I'm not talking about that!"
"And I know Lotus Pier hasn't spent the last year without a head disciple!"
There was a beat of awkward silence. Wei Wuxian ignored it and continued. "Whoever's been filling the role – they've clearly been doing a good enough job, so let them keep it. I have –"
"You have what? The Wens? They don't need you any more. You know Chifeng-Zun is preparing to marry –"
"Wen Qing, yes, I know, I'm not talking about them –"
"Then what? Lan Wangji? He wants to keep you locked up in Gusu with all his thousands of rules, is that it?"
"Jiang Cheng!" Wei Wuxian stood up, hands flat on the table as he leaned across it, meeting Jiang Cheng's hostility with his own, "Don't talk about Lan Zhan that way –"
"Or what? What are you going to do if I insult your precious uptight stick-in-the-mud husband –"
Wei Wuxian drew Suibian, with a wild grin that said get mad about it.
Jiang Cheng stared at him.
"What?" He spun the blade by its hilt. "Scared I'll beat you?"
"You always beat me," said Jiang Cheng in disgust, and drew Sandu.
For a moment, as their blades first met, Wei Wuxian thought Jiang Cheng was going to go easy on him. So he shoved forward, hard, with a burst of spiritual energy that sent Jiang Cheng staggering back before immediately charging at him with a newly determined set to his expression.
That was more like it.
He supposed he couldn't blame Jiang Cheng for being hesitant. He hadn't been there for all the months of training under Wen Qing's annoyingly watchful instructions, or the rooftop chases with Lan Zhan, or the first time he'd won against Lan Zhan, pinning him to the ground with a blade against his throat before –
Jiang Cheng tripped him, and he fell off the side of the walkway into the water.
He climbed out with Sandu pointed at his chest, holding his hands up with a rueful smile – then ducked and ran, laughing at Jiang Cheng's yell behind him, and didn't turn to fight again until they were in the middle of the main training yard.
At least ten disciples scattered and gawked as he ran in dripping wet and still laughing – but they quickly cleared out to watch from the safety of the surrounding walkways as Jiang Cheng followed him. And then – then it was almost like old times, the catharsis of shouting everything they couldn't quite actually say through the clash of metal and the burn of exertion against one another, and he watched the anger in Jiang Cheng's eyes burn itself out in glimpses between blocks and parries, and by the time he felt sweat begin to soak his fast-drying robes again it was just the two of them at last.
Just the two of them, with two golden cores that hadn't always been theirs, sparring like children with wildly extravagant trick-dodges and unexpected attacks that were predictable only to each other.
Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes when Wei Wuxian used a Lan attack form, and Wei Wuxian laughed out loud when Jiang Cheng did an actual one-handed cartwheel to dodge a strike, because he remembered coming up with that one on a day of sticky summer heat when neither of them could be bothered to actually train for real –
By the end it was no longer even close to serious, but Wei Wuxian still won. He smiled up at the sky when Jiang Cheng finally shoved him off, sweaty and dusty and thoroughly warm with exertion, and let the sense memory of all the thousand and more times he'd lain here in this very same dirt hold him in the past just a little while longer.
*
"Do you really like it more, there?" Jiang Cheng said beside him after a few minutes, and Wei Wuxian rolled over and sat up to catch him looking just a little lost before he noticed his gaze and scowled to cover it.
"Of course not. It's not like that – for a start, Lan Zhan actually lets me break all the rules I want now – but it's not that I want to be somewhere else." He shuffled around to sit fully beside Jiang Cheng and knocked their shoulders together. "You know this is our home. It's just – I don't want to be tied anywhere. I want to go between both places, and anywhere else I like – A-Yi gets on better here, but A-Yuan gets on better there, and I don't want to take that away from either of them."
"They're just kids." Jiang Cheng wiped at his face, leaving a streak of dirt across his cheek. "They'll adjust wherever you put them."
"Jiang Cheng. I want to travel. It's not fair for me to tell you I'll be here when I won't."
There was a long silence then. Wei Wuxian flopped back onto the dirt and stared up at the sun until his eyes watered.
"You promised," said Jiang Cheng, so quietly he barely caught it.
"I know."
He felt Jiang Cheng's anger spark again beside him, but all at once in that moment he felt far too tired to do anything else about it.
So they stayed there in silence, Wei Wuxian splayed flat on the ground and Jiang Cheng hunched in a semi-upright ball that was definitely unbefitting of a sect leader, and somehow by the time the sun began to sink there was something of an understanding in the air between them.
"Tell me when you're coming," Jiang Cheng said abruptly, "and I'll make space for you to teach in the class lists."
Wei Wuxian said nothing, but the smile that found its way across his face was all real.