Chapter 115: Extra: The Family Banquet 2

So it was said, but that night the two of them did not at once find their chance to 'try.' For Lan Wangji had first to go and see Lan Xichen, long shut away in seclusion, and sit knee to knee with him in a talk that ran late.

Of late Wei Wuxian had taken to a strange habit: he liked to sleep pressed against Lan Wangji, whether stretched out and folded over him, or lying chest to chest, face to face — in short, without this living, breathing man beneath him for a cushion, he could not sleep at all. Idling shamelessly about the Jingshi, turning every chest and case inside out, he had in fact unearthed no small number of things.

From boyhood Lan Wangji had done everything just so, exact to the last stroke: the characters he had practiced, the paintings he had made, the essays he had written were all sorted and shelved in flawless order, arranged besides by year. Wei Wuxian began with the copybooks from his earliest years, turning the pages and laughing as he went, savoring every one, wincing as if at a toothache whenever he came upon Lan Qiren's vermilion corrections. Yet through several thousand sheets in a row, he found only a single page bearing one wrong character — and after it, Lan Wangji had taken another sheet and copied that one error out, scrupulously, a hundred times over, until Wei Wuxian clicked his tongue: 'Poor wretched thing, copied so often the character itself must have stopped looking like a word.'

He meant to go on through these faintly yellowed sheets of bygone years, when beyond the Jingshi a faint lamplight rose in the dark of night.

No footsteps reached him, yet Wei Wuxian, with a single practiced roll, landed expertly upon Lan Wangji's couch and in one motion dragged the quilt up from his feet to his head. So that when Lan Wangji eased the door open and stepped in, what met his eyes was the perfect sham of a man already fast asleep within.

Lan Wangji's movements had always been soundless, and seeing the sleeper 'asleep,' he stilled his breath the more, drew the Jingshi door slowly shut, stood a moment in silence, and only then crossed toward the couch.

Before he could draw near, a quilt came flung over his head and swallowed his whole upper body.

Lan Wangji: '...'

Wei Wuxian leapt down and clamped his arms around the shrouded Lan Wangji, head and face and all, and bore him back onto the couch. 'Ambush!'

Lan Wangji: '...'

Wei Wuxian tugged and hauled at him every which way, yet Lan Wangji only lay there, still as a corpse. Soon enough the fun went out of it, and he complained, 'Hanguang-Jun, if you lie there without so much as a twitch, where's the sport in that for me?'

Lan Wangji's voice came muffled from beneath the quilt: 'What would you have me do.'

Wei Wuxian's face took on the satisfied look of a master whose pupil shows promise, and brimming with zeal he held forth, coaxing and instructive: 'I ambush you, so you resist! You ought of course to struggle for all you're worth, to cry out for help —'

Lan Wangji listened in earnest, then offered: 'Loud noise is forbidden in the Cloud Recesses.'

Wei Wuxian stalled a beat. 'Then you can cry for help quietly. And — you'd surely guard your clothes with your life.'

From under the quilt came a stretch of silence.

After a long while, Lan Wangji said, 'It sounds difficult.'

Wei Wuxian: 'Difficult?!'

Lan Wangji: 'Mn.'

Wei Wuxian said, 'Well, no help for it then — how about we swap, you take a turn —'

Before the words were out, the world spun head over heel, the quilt went flying, and Lan Wangji had him pinned beneath him on the couch.

Because Wei Wuxian had just had him bundled and stifled in the quilt a good while, his forever-immaculate ribbon and forehead band had each gone a touch askew, the dark hair loosening, a few strands fallen free, and his cheeks, jade-pale by nature, now carried a faint flush of rose. Seen by lamplight, here was a beauty shy and timorous. The pity was only that this beauty's grip was outrageously, unreasonably strong, like a clamp of tempered iron, pinching until Wei Wuxian begged off: 'Hanguang-Jun, Hanguang-Jun, a great man is magnanimous.'

Lan Wangji's eyes did not move, yet those two points of hot, bright lamplight within them trembled faintly. His face placid, he said, 'All right.'

Wei Wuxian said, 'All right what? A handstand? Or — hey! My clothes.'

Lan Wangji said, 'You said it all yourself.'

He held there a moment, and Wei Wuxian waited and waited with nothing forthcoming. 'What is it now!'

Lan Wangji raised himself slightly. 'Why do you not resist.'

Wei Wuxian would not let him pull away, and grinned, 'Aiya, well, what can I do. The moment you bear down on me, where would I find the strength to fight back? You've a hard time of it and so do I — stop, stop, come here, let me show you something first.' He drew a sheet of paper from his robes. 'Lan Zhan, let me ask you — how could you write even so simple a character wrong? Did you pay no mind at all to your lessons? What was running through your head all day long?'

Lan Wangji gave the sheet a single glance and said not a word, yet the meaning in that look could not have been plainer: that Wei Wuxian — that king of errors and omissions who copied his lines in wild cursive and shirked the work past all reckoning — should have the gall to fault him for one wrong character.

Wei Wuxian pretended he could not read that look and went on, 'Now look at the date you signed it — let me reckon... by then you'd have been fifteen, sixteen? Fifteen or sixteen and still making this kind of mistake, you...'

But when he turned that date over carefully in his mind, it fell, of all things, exactly on the three months he had spent studying in the Cloud Recesses that year.

Wei Wuxian was instantly beside himself with glee and said, all mischief, 'Could it be that my dear young Lan, second brother, at such a tender age, gave no mind to his books and brushwork — too busy thinking of when I might come along?'

That year, sentenced to copy in the Library Pavilion, Wei Wuxian had spent whole days sprawling and rolling about across from Lan Wangji, playing dead, lying stiff as a corpse, pestering him a hundred ways and never letting him have his peace — so that for Lan Wangji not to 'think' of him would have been the hard thing, only not 'think' in that sense. And under such siege Lan Wangji had stubbornly held out the whole time, supervising the copying of the clan rules with one hand and seeing to his own work with the other, and had written but a single character wrong — truly something to admire.

Wei Wuxian said, 'Hey, how is it my fault again, blaming me again.'

'...' Lan Wangji said, low and muffled, 'Your fault!'

His breath skipped a beat, and he reached to seize that sheet of paper — the one blot, as it were, on the record of his life. Wei Wuxian loved nothing better than to see him driven to such a pass, and at once tucked the paper against his own chest, hiding it skin-close. 'Take it if you can.'

Without the slightest hesitation Lan Wangji slid his hand in after it. And did not take it out again.

Wei Wuxian: 'You are far too capable!'

The two of them carried on through the better part of the night, and only in its later hours did they manage at last to speak a few words in earnest.

Wei Wuxian, his face buried in the hollow of Lan Wangji's neck, found that the sandalwood scent about him grew the richer for it, and lay all languid, eyes half closed. 'Is your gege all right?'

Lan Wangji's arm circled his back. He was silent a while, then said, 'Not well.'

Lan Wangji said softly, 'In those years when I was in seclusion, it was my gege who came to talk things through with me.'

Now it was the other way around.

As for what Lan Wangji had been doing through those years of seclusion, Wei Wuxian no longer needed to ask.

He kissed Lan Wangji's earlobe, white as jade, then drew up the quilt at their side and pulled it over them both.

The next morning Lan Wangji rose still at the hour of the rabbit, exactly on time.

These few months of sharing his days and nights with Wei Wuxian he had devoted to setting Wei Wuxian's hours straight, all to no avail. After the disciples brought the warm bathwater, Lan Wangji, long since dressed and groomed, peeled the stark-naked Wei Wuxian out from the thin quilt and carried him into the tub — where Wei Wuxian managed, remarkably, to go on sleeping even as he soaked. Lan Wangji nudged him gently; he caught Lan Wangji's hand, kissed it palm and back a few times, rubbed it against his cheek, and slept on. Nudged past patience, he would whimper twice, and with eyes still shut pull Lan Wangji down, cup his cheeks, kiss him a few more times, and murmur thickly, 'Good, good, I'll behave. I beg you, I'll get up in a moment. Mn.'

Then, with a yawn, he draped himself over the rim of the tub and slept on.

Knowing full well that even were the house to catch fire Wei Wuxian would likely only shift to another spot and keep sleeping, Lan Wangji nonetheless held to it without fail, beginning every morning at the hour of the rabbit to call him, and submitting, without a flicker of expression, to some sixty-odd haphazard kisses and pecks.

Having fetched breakfast back to the Jingshi and set it on the desk that had once held only brush, ink, paper, and inkstone, then having scooped the still-comatose Wei Wuxian out of the wooden tub, dried him, dressed him, and tied his sash, Lan Wangji at last took down a book at random from the shelf, turned to the page marked by a pressed-flower bookmark, and sat at the desk to read it slowly.

Sure enough, at the tail of the hour of the snake, Wei Wuxian sat bolt upright on the couch, punctual to the instant, groped his way down from the bed as if sleepwalking, found Lan Wangji first, hauled him in for a couple of kneading squeezes, and out of habit gave his thigh a pinch. Only after washing up at speed did he come a little awake and feel his way to the desk. Wei Wuxian crunched an apple down in a few bites, then, seeing the meal box heaped near to overflowing, gave his lips a twitch. 'Isn't it your clan's banquet today? You sure it's all right to eat this much first?'

Lan Wangji calmly set right the ribbon and forehead band Wei Wuxian had just rumpled. 'Line your stomach first.'

Wei Wuxian had had ample acquaintance with the fare of the Cloud Recesses: thin broths and watery soups, vegetables reigning supreme, nothing but green upon green as far as the eye could reach, bark and roots and sundry medicinal herbs, every dish giving off an overbearing bitterness with, threaded through the bitterness, an uncanny trace of sweet. Were it not so, Wei Wuxian would never have hit upon the scheme of roasting those two rabbits to eat back then. At their clan banquets one would, more likely than not, go neither full nor satisfied.

Wei Wuxian knew in his heart how gravely the Gusu Lan Clan weighed such matters — that whether or not he was given a place at the banquet amounted, in essence, to whether or not they acknowledged him as Lan Wangji's cultivation partner, and that Lan Wangji must have worn Lan Qiren down a long while to win him the right. He let out a breath and said, smiling, 'Don't worry. I'll be on my best behavior. I won't make you lose face.'

Called a clan banquet it might be, but the banquet of the Cloud Recesses was nothing whatever like what Wei Wuxian had always understood a clan banquet to be.

The Yunmeng Jiang Clan's banquet meant a dozen-odd great square tables set up on the open Training Ground of the Lotus Pier, men and women, old and young, all jumbled together wherever they pleased, calling out across the seats in glorious disorder. The kitchen too was moved outdoors, a row of stoves blazing fire to the sky and fragrance to the sky, and whatever you wanted to eat you went and took yourself, with more made fresh if it ran short. The Lanling Jin Clan's banquets he had never attended, but that clan was never sparing in trumpeting far and wide every lavish detail of them — famed masters' sword dances for entertainment, coral trees and pools of jade-bright wine, red brocade laid out a hundred li along the ground — enough to leave one staring.

By comparison, the banquet of the Cloud Recesses was neither lively nor sumptuous.

The household discipline of the Gusu Lan Clan had always been frightful in its strictness: no speaking at meals, no talking in bed, and so, even before the banquet had begun, every person at the seats sat without a word. Save for those just entering the hall, who would greet their elders in low voices and make their bows, scarcely anyone spoke, and no one laughed. The same white robes, the same cloud-pattern white forehead bands, the same solemn, even wooden expressions — as though every one of them had been cut from a single mold.

Surveying this whole hall of figures decked out as if in mourning sackcloth, Wei Wuxian feigned not to notice the looks from those around him, some startled, some unfriendly, and grumbled inwardly, 'They call this a banquet? It's more deathly still than a funeral.'

Just then Lan Xichen and Lan Qiren entered the banquet hall. Only now did Lan Wangji, sitting quietly at Wei Wuxian's side, stir.

Lan Qiren was likely to take ill at the very sight of Wei Wuxian, and so simply chose not to look at him, gazing levelly ahead. Lan Xichen was as mild as ever, a faint smile resting at the corner of his lips, leaving one as if bathed in a spring breeze. Yet — whether owing to the seclusion or not — Wei Wuxian felt that Zewu-Jun seemed to have grown a good deal gaunter.

Once the clan head had taken his seat, Lan Xichen spoke a few simple courtesies, and the banquet began.

First to be served was a soup.

Taking soup before a meal was a custom of the Gusu Lan Clan. In form it was a plain round bowl of black earthenware, light enough to rest in the palm, smooth to the touch. Lifting the small, neat clay lid, one saw — sure enough — another heap of green-and-yellow leaves, bark, and roots.

Merely looking at it set the tips of Wei Wuxian's brows twitching twice. After ladling a spoonful into his mouth, prepared though he had thought himself, he could not help shutting his eyes and pressing a hand to his brow.

It was a good while before he came back from the daze of that tremendous blow to his palate, his elbow barely propping up his body, and thought to himself, '...If the founding ancestors of the Lan were monks, they were ascetics for certain.'

Wei Wuxian could not help but yearn for that great pot of lotus-root-and-pork-rib soup on the Training Ground when the Lotus Pier held its banquets — the savor of meat and the sweetness of lotus root drifting ten li, drawing the children of the neighborhood to clamber up the wall of the Lotus Pier and peer in, drool streaming down, so that going home they wept and wailed to be made disciples of the Yunmeng Jiang Clan. Set against that, here and now, he hardly knew whether to pity himself more, mouth full of bitter and sweet, or to pity Lan Wangji more, who had been raised on such fare from a child.

Yet seeing all the other Lan in the hall finish off this bowl of medicine soup without a flicker, their movements and expressions still elegant and natural, perfectly at ease, Wei Wuxian was too ashamed to be the only one leaving the better part of his behind. Besides, among the Lan's four thousand — no, by now goodness knows how many thousand — clan rules, he recalled there were requirements as to table manners too, such as no picking at food and leaving leftovers, no more than three bowls of rice. Outlandish as he found such rules, he had no wish to be spat upon by Lan Qiren again quite so soon.

Who would have thought — just as he was steeling himself to tip the strange bowl of medicine soup back in a single draught, he suddenly found the soup bowl before him already empty.

Wei Wuxian: '???'

He could not help picking up the dainty little bowl of black earthenware, thinking, 'I'm certain I only took one sip? Is there a hole in the bottom that drained it all out?'

But the dining table was plainly clean and gleaming, with no trace of spilled soup.

Wei Wuxian glanced aside, and just then caught Lan Wangji finishing the last mouthful of his medicine soup as though nothing were amiss, fitting the clay lid back on, eyes lowered, dabbing the corner of his lips with a snow-white cloth.

But Wei Wuxian remembered clearly that Lan Wangji's bowl had most certainly been emptied long before.

He noticed too that Lan Wangji's dining table seemed to have come a good deal closer to him than before the banquet began, as if it had been quietly shifted over.

Wei Wuxian: '...'

He arched a brow and mouthed across to Lan Wangji: Hanguang-Jun, quick hands, eh?

Lan Wangji set down the cloth, glanced this way, then calmly moved his gaze back.