It wasn’t entirely unusual for Wei Wuxian to drag some member of his family out on an errand. He didn’t like to be alone with his thoughts these days, if he could help it, but this was different. He knew what he was in search for.
But he also didn’t want to be let down alone if it didn’t pan out. Or worse - stuck. He knew Lan Zhan would have gone with him without hesitation, but Wen Qing had made the Burial Mounds just as much as her home as Wei Wuxian had, and it would be easier to share disappointment together if he was wrong. Disappointment - would it be that? Or relief, if he did not find it? The place held a lot of memories, and not all good ones, especially not in recent years. But once upon a time, it had been a comfort to him, a place to grow and nurture, not just the crops they had planted on the land, but their own emotions.
As they approached, the feeling got stronger. The familiarity, the spiritual pull. He reached out to wrap a hand around her wrist gently, and looked over at her. “Do you feel it too? It has to be nearby! I know it.”
Wen Qing’s gaze was straight in front of her, her face giving away nothing, at least, nothing if you didn’t know where to look. She had her own mixed emotions about the Burial Mounds and didn’t want to weigh down Wei Wuxian with them. On one hand, they were the last place she was able to live peacefully - not on the streets, nor in prosperity with a gilded cage with the Wen clan. On the other hand, memories of the Burial Mounds were unavoidably tangled with memories of her brother, Wen Ning. Her missing of him felt like a mild toothache - it was always with her, always on the edge of awareness.
She neither confirmed nor denied the feeling that the woods were changing, becoming ashier, that she thought she smelled smoke and incense. “Let’s keep going,” she said, her expression flicking to his briefly, a half-smile on her mouth that showed vulnerability for just a split second. We’re nearly there. This she didn’t voice, but it was true. One of the many true things she’d kept silent over the years.
Kept going was what they did - for all his teasing and arguing, there was very little Wei Wuxian didn’t do when told to by Wen Qing. He knew the instant they stepped into Burial Mounds territory, the forest shifted as it was prone to doing, but in a way that felt familiar. The paths he’d taken hundreds of times, the trees he’d talked to, the grave markers he’d cleaned and cleansed.
He started walking a little faster, not seeing any of the flags or totems that had been put up after his death. That was telling - they hadn’t worked on him anyway because Wei Wuxian wasn’t evil as so many had thought, but they were gone entirely.
“Oh--!” His surprised gasp was loud enough to reach the top of the trees, as Wei Wuxian stepped into the clearing of wooden and red adorned houses. In their prime, cheerfully standing and not burned to the ground, even if they were quiet and lonely. “It is--” He rushed forward without a second thought.
Wen Qing followed close behind him, a silent shadow, shading her eyes as she took in the good condition of the houses. They hadn’t had time to build the perfect town, but they had claimed the wilds nonetheless, strengthening foundations and adorning the ramshackle buildings to make them more palatable for the children.
In a way, this was the final resting place of her clan. Once mighty, then cruel, and finally brought to heel - Wen Qing frowned, her lips tight as she struggled with a mighty conflict in her heart. She was glad that things were still clean, that they hadn’t been ravaged by superstitious enemies or time. She didn’t want to imagine it otherwise.
And then Wei Wuxian scampered off and with a low complaint under her breath, she chased him. This was familiar territory, but it was still Vallo, which had its own tricks to play.
“Turnips!” she shouted as a warning, surprised, as she nearly tripped over one. This place wasn’t just present; it was waiting for them.
“Ahh-- Ah ha!” Wei Wuxian went through a series of noises just as he went through a series of movements. First, it was a reminder of home, the excitement of seeing the village they’d built, the time and effort that had been put into it. It was different from when he came here with Lan Zhan, the grief he had experienced then was left behind, lingering and whispering from the trees.
Second, it was the field of turnips. He’d doged one in his partial run, and then tripped over his own feet trying to dodge another, but was quick enough to not fall on his face and landed just behind it. “Turnips!” He echoed her statement, and made another little noise as he leaned down to touch the leafy greens sprouting out of the ground.
Life growing in the Burial Mounds had always been a strange thing, and Wei Wuxian looked up at Wen Qing with a grin touching his lips. “I- This is- When I was here before, with Lan Zhan, and then others… all of this had been gone. Like the life had been sapped from it again. I didn’t expect this.”
She shook her head, a little too quickly to feign indifference, her dark eyes wide. She didn’t want to imagine the place anything but this, not a before nor an after.
“I was frightened, when I was here at first,” she confessed, hugging her arms against her chest. “I felt like my back was against the wall, that this was our best option, but still.” Her eyes flicked to Wei Wuxian. “The rumors of this place. I figured if anyone could tame the wicked spirits here, it would be you.”
She took a step toward the buildings peering out of the dense trees. “And you did,” she concluded softly, noting a child’s toyset carefully to the side of the wall so no one would trip over it. Perhaps she had moved it there in another world.
For all his show-off and talking shit nature, Wei Wuxian could be modest. Usually it was for the things that really mattered, the ones where he knew he had help, where he didn’t have to be a cocksure to get attention or pull attention away from something else.
He had no reason to do that here, just the faint blush that swept across his cheeks. “I had help,” he shied away from taking all of the credit, because if it had just been Wei Wuxian, he would have stayed in his cave with his blood pool and his inventions and only ventured out to get food. But with them, the family he had gathered and had adopted him, they all had more drive to make it their own.
Wei Wuxian fiddled with a crop, and got up and started busying himself with his hands, putting aside some tools. “This place made me-- it wasn’t until bringing you were here I had a reason to do more than control it.”
Wen Qing was no more wanting a prolonged emotional conversation than he was, despite her belief in giving credit where credit was due. “You need to be less messy,” she teased in her usual bossy tone, and gave his shoulder a light squeeze. “This place was perfectly neat after we got through overhauling it.”
She looked out over the buildings made a hazy golden in the muted sun. This place always had an otherworldly, haunted feel about it, even when it was filled with friends. She had seen a painting from something called the ‘impressionist’ movement in the last few weeks, and it had reminded her of this strange, in-between place. Wen Qing was fond of it. She wondered if anyone else would be.
She darted a glance over to him. “Will you return here?” She didn’t ask the question: will you leave the Jingshi?
Wei Wuxian huffed out a laugh and shrugged unapologetically. He knew she didn’t really mean it, but even if she had, he was okay with that. He was messy, both literally and figuratively. It was how they loved him - and that he was certain of, after all this time.
So when he looked at her as if she was the moon, bright and whole, a part of his life that truly, he needed around, it was genuine and familiar. He straightened and brushed his hands along his robes, reminded of when he used to spend hours planting lotus seeds and tending to gardens. “Lan Zhan would follow me if I did. I don’t think I will live here? But I will come everyday, and tend to the crops, take care of things. Will you?”
Even though he lived in a house named Quiet Place, Wei Wuxian wouldn’t have enjoyed being here with thoughts to himself, alone.
“I will,” she answered, and it wasn’t solely because she didn’t want him here on his own. Wei Wuxian had proven himself more than capable in combat, but what was less unproven was his own insecurities, weaponized by the beautiful loneliness of this place.
There was no reason for it to stay lonely, even if they both knew they were liable to dance with ghosts of memories, pleasant and otherwise. Thoughts of her brother would never be unkind. “I’ll visit here. Living here, no.”
She eyed the land. “We can grow things. Perhaps sell them, in town. Supplement our own incomes.” She made a face. “Does it still have the blood pool? That’s going to be difficult to explain.”
Wei Wuxian reached out to squeeze her wrist, before his face lit up with excitement that literally no one else shared. The blood pool! It could be helpful here - maybe even with Serefin, and his magic.
He dropped her hand and rushed off, glancing back at her with a grin on his face. “I don’t know but we should check! Everyone has been very friendly here, and it could help!” It could also upset his brother, but that was a risk Wei Wuxian took in everything in his life. And the blood pool had helped things in the past.
But it was also temperamental and Wei Wuxian had to use a lot of power to control it when it decided to get temperamental, and that thought made him wince before he turned away to rush up the hill. It was probably not comforting to say back to her over his shoulder-- “You have to promise to go get Lan Zhan and not Jiang Cheng if something goes wrong, okay?”
Wen Qing’s disgusted face hadn’t quite gone away when he called out his request. “I’ll get whoever needs to be gotten,” she said back to him crossly without actually being cross, taking off behind him like it was an ice cream truck she was after and not a disgusting fountain of literal blood. Wei Wuxian’s heart was in the right place, and she trusted the citizens of Vallo mostly at this point, but he was still very stabbable. Wen Qing didn’t like the idea of someone attacking him just because a blood fountain was… disconcerting.
As they entered the cave, she purposefully didn’t look at the bed she’d once bound him to - not like that, it was bad memories - and let her shoulders relax as she heard the expected burbling. “Still here.” A beat. “Great.”
Wei Wuxian’s grin grew when he heard it. Sure, it was a little weird, and a little creepy, but this place held a lot of memories for him, in such a short period of time. He paused, and then backed up a little when Wen Qing entered, so he could touch her shoulder consolingly.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell everyone it can heal and put you out of a job.” Well, the hand was consolingly, but the words were pure troll, and he grinned, knowing she was likely to stab him or at least elbow him in the middle if he was lucky. He put up a hand in mock-surrender before she could. “I kid I kid! But, there is the Asetenarra Coven, maybe they would like to see this place.” A pause. “With a few rules.”
The expression she sent him was dripping with death, but she didn’t comment other than that. Sometimes the only thing you could do to combat Wei Wuxian’s dedication to teasing was just glare.
“Rules,” she agreed, not knowing who this Asetenarra Coven was and not particularly caring; the more people who knew about the Burial Mounds the more likely it was that one of them would be trouble. If there was one thing Wen Qing had learned, it was that you could only be so useful before people began to take advantage of you. “Many of them.” She’d write them herself, if necessary.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s see what else there is.”
Wei Wuxian sighed, but followed along without too much more complaint. The sigh was half a whine, anyway, and he knew it was probably as much as he’d be allowed to get away with. It was easier instead to tease, and to be playful, instead of serious and concerned.
He left that to the stern ones in his life.
And we was so much like a grasshopper, jumping from one thing to the next. “Oh! Maybe my compass! Let’s look!”