#not in a romantic way but especially in the context of deleted scenes in carrion glass

[hunxi-guilai]

helloo i really loved your songxian fic - i was wondering if you had any xiao xingchen and/or song lan fic recs? gen or in a relationship (from one ace spec person to another :D) ALSO for carrion glass, i would love to hear about song lan's double agent adventures (and oh man WHAT did the inside of his head look like as he was figuring that out? in terms of how do i survive & how do i live with myself & how do i be someone xiao xingchen wouldn't hate) OR any deleted scene you'd like to share!

:DDDDDDDDDDD omg I got a question! multiple questions!!! about carrion glass!!!!

hmm... I’m afraid I don’t really have fic recs for songxiao just because I haven’t read enough -- I’m sure there are good ones out there, I just haven’t read much in this fandom. Off the top of my head, I remember enjoying “Words Unspoken, Sights Unseen” by GlendaloughGoddess for the nuanced portrayal of Xiao Xingchen -- I feel like Xiao Xingchen often gets pigeonholed as this ‘uwu pure sweet innocent angel’ archetype that to me feels two-dimensional and unsatisfying, so I enjoyed the fact that Xiao Xingchen was mad in this fic

(as always! heed the warnings in the tags!)

more about carrion glass under the cut! (rip assuming tumblr puts my readmore where I actually put it, idk if anyone else’s readmores have been fucked up by formatting but mine have been s u f f e r i n g lately)

Okay! Okay okay okay let’s talk about double agent Song Lan!

So Song Lan actually deals with the whole “oh-shit-I-reneged-on-everything-I-ever-stood-for” much, much better than Xiao Xingchen does; in that split second, he looks at their shared ideals, then looks at Xiao Xingchen, living, breathing, and so goddamned precious to him, and he chooses -- whatever will keep Xiao Xingchen alive, and Xiao Xingchen’s odds aren’t looking good after he mouthed off to Wen Xu.

That being said, Song Lan doesn’t just drop all of his morals -- he negotiates a contract with Wen Xu, a contract with a steep price but one that he knows he can pay (what’s a tongue, in the scheme of things? Xiao Xingchen would literally dig out his eyes for Song Lan), because he has no intention of actually compromising his morals that much and allying with the Wen Sect. From the moment he signs the talismanic contract, he gives up his voice and makes his peace with that.

He goes straight to Lan Wangji, the only person in Sunshot leadership that he knows, and immediately outlines his offer of becoming a double agent. What didn’t make it into the final version was the whole logistical mess of what being a double agent would actually entail, because Lan Xichen (yeah, Lan Xichen was almost in this fic) is the one who’s receiving and analyzing military intelligence for the campaign as a whole, so Song Lan works with Lan Xichen (and Meng Yao) to cherrypick what (mis)information he ends up communicating back to the Wen Sect

so when Meng Yao shows up for a hot second in carrion glass? That was the remnants of a foundation for a longer subplot arc involving Song Lan and his espionage, and in that moment, Meng Yao was genuinely trying to protect Song Lan but it’s hard to protect someone from Wen Chao when you’re undercover yourself

god, Lan Tayun didn’t even make it into this version -- she would’ve been Song Lan’s handler, a special messenger between Lan Xichen and Song Lan specifically, and she was great. Her name，踏云 tayun, literally means ‘to step on clouds’ and is actually a nickname instead of a courtesy name -- she got it because she could outrun and outfly everyone else in her cohort at Cloud Recesses, and she tells Xiao Xingchen that he can call her by her courtesy name if he can ever beat her in a footrace, and not a day before

BUT I’m getting distracted from Song Lan, what I’m trying to say is that Song Lan made peace with himself pretty easily; he just recalibrated his value system from morality-based to Xiao Xingchen-based, and so his primary conflict was his worry that, because of said morality recalibration, Xiao Xingchen would no longer want to associate with him because they no longer shared the same values, which is part of the reason why Song Lan is so quietly devoted in the background of carrion glass -- he’s terrified that Xiao Xingchen will come to his senses and choose to part ways with him, but Song Lan will not give up on the two of them until Xiao Xingchen does

(Xiao Xingchen doesn’t. The thought never crosses his mind. but c’mon, would it be a proper CQL fic if there weren’t some serious miscommunication about the mutual devotion and adoration in the central relationship?)

one thing that I was pleasantly surprised to discover while writing carrion glass? Xiao Xingchen is INCREDIBLY sassy, which is only compounded by the fact that he’s now also part-chaos-gremlin-Wei Wuxian. One of the deleted scenes involved a roundtable interrogation of Xiao Xingchen by all the major sect leaders (kind of an echo/parallel of that time Wei Wuxian rolls up to a strategy meeting, says ‘don’t worry about the yin iron but also don’t ask me how I’m planning to deal with it,’ and peaces out), where they start poking holes in his story about the Burial Mounds ( “but how did you survive if Wei Wuxian died?” "so you’re asking us to believe that you massacred two Wen encampments approximately two weeks after you came back from the brink of death?”). Xiao Xingchen fields the questions as politely as he can until he gets fed up and says something along the lines of 

if Jin-gongzi would like to accuse me of murdering Wei-gongzi in the Burial Mounds, please say so directly so that I may be confident in my belief that associating with cultivation sects is, in fact, a complete and utter waste of time

a silence falls in the war room like the stunned moment after a slap. Jiang Cheng visibly flinches. The Twin Jades stare. Nie Mingjue breaks the silence with a startled laugh, and says that was not our intended implication, Xiao-daozhang -- I’m merely impressed that you did alone what twenty of my best men could not because godDAMMIT this entire fic WAS born out of that post about Nie Mingjue being the only sect leader songxiao would truly respect, and I wanted some Nie Mingjue - songxiao solidarity!!!!

this isn’t a deleted scene or more Song Lan content, but a question I still find myself thinking about (ffs when will I move ON) is whether or not Lan Wangji was quietly, sorrowfully, resignedly in love with Xiao Xingchen by the end of the fic. We know that Lan Wangji loves Wei Wuxian with a deep, eternal love, vast and ancient as glacier rivers, everpresent as great winds rushing over grasslands. We know that Lan Wangji will love Wei Wuxian into death and beyond, through worlds and lives and resurrections; we know that Lan Wangji will love Wei Wuxian no matter what body Wei Wuxian wears 

yeah. I wonder. I wrote the goddamned fic, and I don’t even know the answer to that