Wangji
For a while now I've struggled to find time to write. Not just creatively, but for anything at all. Time is a strange phenomenon for me. In the morning I feel I have more than enough of it, but as evening approaches, I realise I never actually had any. The days slip through my fingers, swallowed by work, obligations and a tiredness that has been settling in me since December 2024. I know I can't go on like this for long. I'm 34 and I have so many interests, so many plans, and yet I'm exhausted. And maybe that's exactly why this story came back to me. About loneliness that weighs heavy. About time that drags and disappears at the same time. About scents, memories and a silence that never stays empty. About being imprisoned in solitude, and about how the air still carries his name.
The scent of sandalwood lingered in the air. Wei Ying wasn't sure whether he was only dreaming it and imagining it, or whether it truly filled this place. Perhaps it was the mouldering wood of the Jingshi itself, and perhaps Lan Wangji himself wanted Wei Ying to know he wasn't alone. And perhaps flowers had once crept along the walls, and perhaps their roots still whispered stories nobody listened to anymore.
The Jingshi was a simple house. But full of him and Lan Wangji. Even if today it held only his things and memories. Lan Wangji's hanfu still hung in the wardrobe, and Wei Ying sometimes put them on. His desk was still precisely tidy, the brushes properly cleaned and hung up. Wei Ying looked at the ribbon wrapped around his wrist. At the insignia it bore. A delicate pattern of clouds. Lan Wangji's ribbon, which he had given him when they bowed to the ancestors together.
Sometimes music woke him at night. Was it the guqin? No. Only an echo of memories, a false hope his mind invented. Even so, he could hear his name in the wind that whistled around the windows. And Wei Ying was afraid that one day it would stop.
He often pretended he wasn't alone. He closed his eyes and smiled as he touched his growing belly. Sometimes it seemed to him that he felt the weight of Lan Zhan's hand instead of his own. Fingers gently gliding over the taut skin.
Many times it seemed to him that he heard a soft sigh, and then, in his imagination, a deep voice swallowed him. So familiar that its echo vibrated in the empty walls of Wei Ying's soul. Imagination? A dream? Always just a dream.
The moment he opened his eyes, he felt darkness take hold of him. The room seemed colder every time. Bare walls, a closed door and motionless air. Gone was the sunlight that had warmed with its heat, shining through air where light dust swirled, stirred up by ordinary life. All gone. As if the Jingshi itself had stopped breathing.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of the guqin. Lan Zhan had named it Wangji. He had used the name his uncle gave him, referring to Lan Zhan's character. To forget worldly cares. Wei Ying always laughed when he realised the irony hidden in that name.
A fine layer of dust lay on Wangji's strings. Nobody had touched it in several months. Nobody had the right to, either. Wei Ying wouldn't have had the strength to stop them. Fortunately their own shame stopped them. The Lan clan had betrayed Lan Zhan twice. The first time when Wei Ying died. When Lan Zhan got him back, they couldn't share his joy, and the second time when Lan Zhan himself died and they did to his partner the same thing they had once done to his mother. So what had stopped them? Wei Ying wasn't actually sure it was shame. Maybe it was more the fear that Lan Zhan would come back?
The silence in the Jingshi never lasted long. Wei Ying didn't want their child to feel his dull pain. In the end he always reached for his dizi. Every time he began, his breath wavered, but then his fingers closed firmly around the wood and his music steadied. As if Lan Zhan were there with him, and in the echo of the room it almost sounded as if he were playing with him. After all, he was playing the melody Lan Zhan had once composed for him. Gentle, achingly tender, full of longing. Wangxian.
Sometimes, when he played for a very long time, he could feel something else in the air. The scent of sandalwood. Joined by a light note of lotus flowers mixed with a drop of calligraphy ink. A scent that had once meant home to him.
Wei Ying lay back down heavily on the mattress and raised to his face the sleeves of the robe he had borrowed from Lan Zhan. His scent had long since faded from it, but Wei Ying still found comfort in it. Then he moved both hands to his belly and smiled.
"Did you hear that, bǎobèi?" he said in a quiet but steady voice. "Your father played better than me. But I still did alright, didn't I?"
When he felt a gentle kick, he smiled even more and brushed the hair from his face. He closed his eyes and sighed.
A tray of food lay on the table beside the bed. Typical fare of that clan, he thought. Although the soup carried a delicate scent of mushrooms and the steamed rice with pieces of vegetables was carefully arranged, it was food without taste. Bland. They took care of him diligently, he had to admit that. But coldly, as if he were just another soulless object in that empty house that had once lived on love. As if he were a hidden relic of the past. He suspected that to the world he had died, just like Lan Wangji. Nobody would ever come looking for him. The air in the room moved, carrying with it something delicate and fleeting.
While the Jingshi sank into darkness, a wind swept along the paths leading through the Cloud Recesses. It carried a melody with it. And while the young disciples in their rooms tried not to listen and their hands trembled slightly, the clan elders sat silently in theirs. With their lips pressed tightly together and their eyes fixed on the floor.
Only Lan Qiren watched the night. And as he listened to the melody floating on the wind, the one his nephew had played every day on his guqin, he wrapped his arms around himself, as if trying to hold in something invisible. Perhaps his breath, perhaps his own regrets. Wangji. Lan Qiren closed his eyes.
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Mimosa Confiante
By day, I work somewhere between marketing, copy and campaigns; by night, I usually end up somewhere between fanfiction, cosplay and yet another “what if” that refuses to leave me alone. I write mainly in the Harry Potter and Mo Dao Zu Shi fandoms, most often Snarry, Snamione, HarryLu and WangXian. My healthcare background means that anatomy, medicine and far too much research occasionally find their way into my stories. Cosplay is another way for me to play with the characters I love, whether I stay close to canon or turn them into my own fanfiction and AU versions. In Diary of a Slytherin Girl with ADHD, I write openly about life with a brain that usually has far too many tabs open at once.
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