#THE RENOUNCEMENT VERSE IS BACK BAYBEY

[stiltonbasket]

Hi!! I love renouncement verse So Much!!! The balance of angst and fluff is just 👌 and I love every single prompt! In the one where the couple is comforting the bride, LWJ mentions a paperman. If WWX were to find it, what would his reaction be?

anon 2: I just read the ficlet with arranged marriage verse wwx and lwj talking to a nervous bride, and now I have to ask: does wwx ever find those paper men? Or any other keepsakes lwj might have of him?

Wei Wuxian finds the dusty box under Lan Zhan’s old bed.

As far as boxes go, this one is so completely unassuming that it practically blends in with the floorboards. It's nothing like the deep red wood that Wei Wuxian’s dowry boxes were made of, or the delicately carved chests that held his late mother-in-law’s old dresses. But Wei Wuxian has never been one to quash his curiosity, and Lan Zhan has often said that the jingshi and everything in it belongs as much to Wei Wuxian as it does to him--so Wei Wuxian gives in to impulse, and pries the little chest open with the point of one of his fingernails.

At first glance, the box seems to be full of letters. All of them are dated in Lan Zhan’s own hand, meaning that the chest had not belonged to Madam Lan as many of the older treasures remaining in the jingshi did; and Wei Wuxian flips through the unsealed envelopes one by one, wondering why his husband never sent them.

“They were for you.”

Wei Wuxian nearly leaps out of his skin. “Lan Zhan!” he gasps, as his husband’s soft lips brush the top of his head. “You startled me, xingan. I thought you were going to spend the afternoon in the nursery with A-Yu.”

“Mm, I was. But he wanted to play with San-shushu’s children, so I took him to visit Lan Li and Lan Yue. Third Uncle is watching over them now with Shufu.”

He goes gracefully to his knees at Wei Wuxian’s side and takes the box from his hands, setting it down between them before digging out a small grass butterfly. “A-Yuan had this in his robes when I found him in the Luanzung Gang,” Lan Zhan murmurs. “I put it here for safekeeping, since it was the only thing he had from that time save for his clothes.”

“It looks just like it did then,” Wei Wuxian marvels. The butterfly has been meticulously preserved, right down to the straw fringe on the battered wings and the dent at the bottom of the tail where A-Yuan always gripped it, so worried that his favorite toy might be lost somehow that he never learned how to hold it gently. “Have you kept it here all this time, sweetheart?”

“En, I did. Xiongzhang bought an identical one after he recovered from his fever, so I let him have that one instead.”

Casting one last reverent look at the grass butterfly, Lan Zhan returns it to the trunk and presents Wei Wuxian with what looks like one of his own red ribbons, folded away in a nest of dried mint leaves and lotus petals.

“You left this behind in your guest quarters when you stayed here during the lecture,” his husband explains. “That side of the compound survived the fires, and nobody stayed there after you did, so I found the ribbon in one of the drawers after we retook the Cloud Recesses. I meant to return it to you, but with everything that happened afterward...”

“Ah, I know. My Hanguang-jun was too shy to tell me that he went to visit the guest house I stayed in, just because I was the last one to visit there,” Wei Wuxian teases, bringing a soft flush to Lan Zhan’s cheekbones. “Lan Zhan, did you really carry my ribbon in your lapels all the way through the Sunshot Campaign?”

Lan Zhan nods. “Sometimes I wept, on days where it was plain that your cultivation was hurting you, and held the ribbon while I slept to keep nightmares at bay. And after--” and here his breath catches, as if the pain of their sixteen years apart were wearing on him still, even with Wei Wuxian alive and well in his arms. “After the Nightless City, I knew I would never have anything more of you even if I cultivated to immortality. So I put it away, and covered it with mint to prevent moths from chewing it, and lotus petals so that it would not lose the fragrance of your hair.”

Wei Wuxian trembles against him, sniffling helplessly into his shoulder as more keepsakes come forth from the box: the old drawing Wei Wuxian made in the library pavilion, one of the peonies he threw at Lan Zhan during the crowd hunt on Mount Baifeng, now dried and wrapped in white silk to protect it from crumbling, and even...

“You kept these?” he cries, as a pair of red papermen crawl out of the box. “And they still have a trace of my lingli in them! How did you manage that?”

“I preserved them in a spirit-trapping bag, because they kept trying to escape,” Lan Zhan says bashfully. “I did not know that would catch the spiritual power you put into them, but now and then I would take out the pouch, and...”

His voice trails off into silence, and Wei Wuxian bites his lip at the thought of it: Lan Zhan mourning him, wounded and in pain as he held on to the little qiankun bag to feel the tiny papermen wriggling inside, imagining that he was protecting a part of Wei Wuxian himself.

“I’m here now,” Wei Wuxian whispers. “I’m never going to leave you, Lan Zhan. You’ll never have to lose me again.”

Lan Zhan reaches out and brushes back a loose strand of his hair.

“No, I will not,” he replies. “But if I did, I would never survive it.”

I spent half a lifetime without you, is what Wei Wuxian hears instead. And if I could have joined you without leaving our son, or if I had gone to the Luanzung Gang and not found A-Yuan after the siege, the day I realized that you were dead would have been the end of me.

Lan Zhan is already aging again, Wei Wuxian knows. His own jindan is gone forever, his dantian and meridians so thoroughly damaged that he will never regain the ability to cultivate; but Lan Zhan’s body was about Wei Wuxian’s physical age when it stopped sensing the passage of time, and the first thing he did after their wedding was alter the flow of his spiritual energy, so that the both of them will age together with the coming years and pass on into death almost as one.

“We should fill another box. Perhaps more than one,” Lan Zhan says quietly. “One for A-Yu’s baby keepsakes, and A-Lan’s, and another for our wedding--and we can keep them here, beside this one and the chest where I saved Sizhui’s things. What do you think, Wei Ying?”

Wei Wuxian’s eyes fill with tears.

“I’d love to,” he chokes. “But not now. I’m going to spend today right here, in your arms, and we can start tomorrow.”