The most obvious of obvious choices, to the point that I've already outright said this is who I was going to be talking about today. 🤣 Because I can't help loving this adorable little gremlin.
So...as per most of my other Mo Dao Zu Shi-related posts this month, I won't bother trying to explain the plot of the original novel, and will just give a brief encapsulation of the character and how I've written him in my fan fiction.
“[homophobic insult deleted]” another voice laughed. “[further homophobic insult deleted]” Wei Wuxian recognized that voice: it was the guy he’d smashed in the face with his backpack the other day.
“This time, you’re not getting off so lightly,” Wei Wuxian told him, cracking his knuckles.
“You’re the one who ran off like a coward after hitting me with your purse!”
Much to the asshole’s surprise, it wasn’t just his cronies who laughed at that. The three who had been stationed at the fire escape laughed, too. “One of the toughest, dirtiest and meanest martial artists in New York running from a flabby, untrained waste of space like you?” one of the Lan students chortled. “What a joke!”
“Meanest?” Wei Wuxian repeated. “Am I mean, Lan Zhan?”
“You can be.”
Wei Wuxian let out an anguished groan. “That is mean, Lan Zhan! Saying things like that about me after we—”
The chain came rattling through the air towards his face, cutting him off before he could stupidly announce what they had just done in front of so many people. Wei Wuxian caught it, feeling glad that he had decided to wear fingerless gloves as part of his gear in setting out for this sting operation. Having that metal strike his palm directly would have hurt. A lot.
“Don’t you know not to interrupt your betters when they’re talking?” he demanded, trying to rip the chain out of the other man’s hand. Surprisingly, he failed to do so, and the other man even managed to pull it free again. “I’ve got this guy,” he said, narrowing his eyes. That had been a challenge, and he wasn’t going to let it go unanswered. “You guys take the little fish.”
“Oh, did you have to follow through on the prayers people made to you?”
Lan Zhan nodded. “When they were made correctly.”
“I bet that got old.”
“I did not mind.” A pause, in which the only sound was that of Wei Ying eating. “I was certain I would eventually receive a prayer from you.”
“Lan Zhan…” Wei Ying had to compose himself for a moment before he could say anything else. “I’m sorry I made you wait so long.”
Lan Zhan walked over to where Wei Ying was sitting at the table and stroked his hair gently. “Wei Ying does not need to apologize to me for anything,” he said, his tone intimate.
Wei Ying could feel his face growing hot, and he had to repeatedly remind himself that no matter how much that had sounded like a declaration of love, it would be a thousand percent wrong to launch himself at Lan Zhan. Acting out hislustlove without any true confirmation that Lan Zhan felt anything even slightly similar would be unforgivable. Maybe, in this situation, it would be wrong even with confirmation? Lan Zhan was a god now, after all. Surely people weren’t supposed to do things like that with gods.
They remained in an unnerving silence as Wei Ying finished eating. After that, he was filled with the awkward uncertainty of not really knowing why Lan Zhan would have even shown himself in the first place, let alone followed him back to his hotel room. No matter how much he turned it over in his head, Wei Ying couldn’t think of any real reason for it. Sure, the last remnants of Wei Wuxian’s native arrogance were still lingering in his soul, despite the modern world’s attempt to stamp that arrogance out entirely, but even those remnants couldn’t make any convincing argument that Lan Zhan could actually care for him in any way. Even as Wei Wuxian, he had often been certain that Lan Zhan felt nothing but hate and disdain for him. All those moments in the dream memories that Wei Ying wanted to believe meant that maybe Lan Zhan had actually cared about him—liked him—those had to be figments of his imagination, surely. Maybe this whole thing was one big figment of his imagination, and he had spent the last three hours talking to himself…
“Wei Ying has not said anything about his new life,” Lan Zhan said, after Wei Ying finished dealing with the delivery containers.
“Huh? Uh…well…there’s not much to tell, really.”
Lan Zhan simply stared at him, clearly disbelieving.
“Compared to the life I led back when you knew me, my life now is unspeakably boring.” Wei Ying sat down at the table again, sighing. Boring except for the problems caused by the current government’s homophobia, but he really didn’t want to get into that right now. “As far as my career goes, I translate from English to Chinese. Well, and I do some programming on the side, too, to earn a little more money, but there’s more market for my translation work, since I’m still only learning programming. It’s all remote work, though, so I don’t leave my apartment much.” He was pretty much the opposite of his previous life in every regard: Wei Wuxian had been almost pathologically compelled to always be moving about and going places, and he had always been surrounded by friends and tended to treat even strangers like friends (at least until he inevitably turned them into enemies), whereas Wei Ying spent so much time at home that he was on the verge of developing a fear of public spaces, and he was rejected at every turn, so that the only people he could even come close to considering friends were ones he only knew virtually.
And that's pretty much the only good quote from that one for Wei Wuxian, so let's move on to "A Hidden Road," which starts out while Wei Wuxian is still in his downward spiral. (Actually, it's at the beginning of the brief period where he started breaking out of the spiral and maybe even climbing back up a ways, because being surrounded by the Wen remnants and their warmth and gratitude for everything he had done (and given up) for them was helping to heal his soul.) Only in this fic, Lan Wangji abducted Wei Wuxian and locked him away at Cloud Recesses in order to protect him from the Jin Clan. 😰 So, here's a moment where Wei Wuxian is giving in to excessive fury at the realization of what's happened to him...
Lan Zhan hesitated a moment, averting his eyes. “I thought of another road you could take,” he finally said, looking back at him.
“Locking me up isn’t a road I’m taking,” Wei Wuxian said. “It’s just you holding me prisoner. And leaving everyone I wanted to protect at the mercy of—”
“They are safe,” Lan Zhan assured him. “I have seen to it.”
“Oh, really. And how did you manage that?” His words were filled with much more bitterness than he had realized he was capable of. “Spread rumors that the Burial Mounds are haunted? Oops, no, that’d never work—everyone already knows they really are haunted! Maybe you told people that the world’s most vicious demonic cultivator was lying in wait to kill them to death if they should happen to approach the Burial Mounds—no, wait, they already think that! So what was it, Lan Zhan, what was this brilliant
[expletive]ing plan of yours that you[expletive]ing kidnapped me for?!”Lan Zhan just stared at him, something within his eyes trembling, as if he was hurt that Wei Wuxian was angry at him. As if he was the one being unreasonable here!
“They are no longer in Yiling,” Lan Zhan finally said. “They are outside the reach of the other clans. They are safe.”
“Where are they, then?”
“I do not know the name of the place.”
“That’s not filling me with confidence. Give me some details if you want me to believe you.”
Lan Zhan looked down at the floor, shutting his eyes. “I have few details to give,” he said.
“Didn’t you say it was your plan?”
“It was not my own power that accomplished it,” Lan Zhan said, looking back into his eyes. “It was the scrap-collecting god and his…” He coughed uncomfortably. “His companion.”
“Scrap-collecting god?” Wei Wuxian repeated. “Who the
[expletive]is that?”Lan Zhan shrugged. “That is all I know.”
“How did you call on—no, you know what, never mind. I don’t care. Just take me to them and let me go. I’m done with this place, I’m done with cultivation, I’m done with you.”
Lan Zhan winced visibly. Wei Wuxian had rarely ever seen such a large reaction from him. “I cannot.”
Wei Wuxian clenched his fists, wishing he had the strength to get up and punch him in the face. It probably wouldn’t land even if he did, but just the attempt would make him feel a lot better!
“Fine,” he ultimately said. “Once I get my strength back, let’s have it out. You and me, full-on duel. You with your sword and me with my dizi. Winner gets to decide my fate.”
“No,” Lan Zhan said. “That instrument was corrupting you. You will not use it again.”
Wei Wuxian grimaced. Lan Zhan’s obsession with how demonic cultivation was ‘damaging his soul’ or whatever was bad enough, but now he was blaming Chenqing? That would be like blaming Suibian if he cut himself while cleaning the blade. “Can you really stop me?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, really.” Wei Wuxian laughed. “Don’t you know me better than that by now, Hanguang-jun? The more I’m told not to do something, the more determined I am to do it.”
“You cannot,” Lan Zhan insisted. “Not while you are locked in here and it is not.”
His logic was unfortunately unassailable. Not that Wei Wuxian would ever admit defeat so easily! “You really think a lock is going to hold me?”
“No. The seal array around the house will.”
“So you really are holding me prisoner.” Not that a seal array would be enough to hold him in, either, but it would be harder to get out of for someone like Wei Wuxian, without a golden core. However, it would be easier to get out if Lan Zhan didn’t realize that he was working on an escape plan, so he bit his tongue to keep from taunting the man about how easily he was sure to escape.
“It is for your own protection.”
“Protecting me from what?”
“Everything.” Lan Zhan looked at him, and a hint of dismay crossed his eyes at the sight of Wei Wuxian’s disbelieving scowl. “From the other clans. From indulging in demonic cultivation. From yourself.”
“I don’t need you to protect me from myself.”
“You will understand in time,” Lan Zhan said. “This is for your sake.”
(In my own defense, I do not normally make Wei Wuxian swear quite as much as he does in the larger conversation that's a section of. (Something like six f-bombs just in the scene immediately after he wakes up in captivity. 😅) But that's just an indication of just how enraged he is. Also he knows that Lan Wangji doesn't like bad language, so expressing his anger by swearing just makes it that much more pointed in that scenario.) Honestly, that scene is as illustrative of Lan Wangji's personality--and utter inability to express his inner thoughts and feelings--as it is of the state of Wei Wuxian's character at this point in the story. The next scene opens with a strong indication of how easily his temper gets the better of him at this point in his life:
It had taken much too long for him to regain the ability to get out of bed. The afternoon was half over, and the disgusting soup was now stone cold, making it even more of a crime against the culinary arts than it had been to begin with. Wei Wuxian ignored it, and went to try the door. It was, as Lan Zhan had said, locked. It wasn’t a complicated lock, and he was able to open it quite quickly. As soon as he tried to set foot outside, though, a strong, sharp force pushed him back again, leaving a slight, stinging aftertaste in his mouth, as though he’d been lashed with Zidian again.
Screaming in rage, he grabbed the bowl of herb soup and flung it out the open door, watching it tumble through the air, dispersing its contents into the grass below before shattering on the ground.
There had to be something in the room that would let him get out. Some weapon, some something. Even if it was only a bit of bamboo he could carve into a new dizi. No, actually, that wouldn’t help, would it? There were neither ghosts nor corpses here: what could he even do with a dizi? Admittedly, there were tricks in his repertoire that didn’t require a full spirit, but they did at least require remnants of ghostly energy. Most places had that, but Cloud Recesses was utterly bereft of it. Made sense, really. That was the sort of thing he would expect of the sanctimonious Lan Clan, clearing away every last drop of ghostly qi.
The more Wei Wuxian searched through the contents of the room, the more enraged he became at this unjust imprisonment. What right did Lan Zhan have to lock him up like this? From the Jin Clan, it would make sense: he had enabled Wen Ning to avenge himself on their corrupt guards, after all. But he’d never done anything to any Lan cultivators, except to piss off Lan Zhan all too frequently, and if that was an imprisonment-worthy offense then half the cultivation world would need to be locked up! So what made him think he could do this?!
Wei Wuxian quickly got to the point that every time he picked up an object and found it useless to him he dashed it down to the floor, exulting if it broke, the smaller the pieces the better! By the time he heard someone speak from the open door behind him, he had actually gotten to the point of picking things up for no reason other than to smash them.
Later that same day, the paranoia that rules him at this stage of his life is already having to fight to maintain its control over him. After he's seen Lan Wangji tending to a large fire outside the small cottage where he's confined, this happens...
“What’s going on?” Wei Wuxian asked. “What’s that fire for?” Surely he hadn’t gone to all that trouble just to burn Wei Wuxian down here on the outskirts of Cloud Recesses. If he’d wanted to do that, he could have done it at the Burial Mounds…
“Heating the bath water,” Lan Zhan said, as if he thought that was obvious. He set down a bundle of white cloth on the table as he did so; clean clothes, probably.
Admittedly, Wei Wuxian did need a bath pretty badly. (Desperately, really. Bathing conditions at the Burial Mounds had been pretty…well…bad.) But he wasn’t about to accept charity so easily! “What, you’d trust me not to drown myself so I can use my mighty demonic powers on my own corpse to escape?” he said, lacing his voice with all the malice he could.
Lan Zhan stared at him, wide-eyed, a hint of absolute panic in his gaze.
Wei Wuxian tried to maintain his cold, harsh demeanor. He really did. But that look! He was soon laughing so hard his sides hurt. “You should see the look on your face, Lan Zhan!” he wheezed. “Don’t be so gullible!”
Lan Zhan’s eyes resumed their normal width, but he still seemed uncertain.
“C’mon, how could I do anything to my own corpse? I’d be dead!” Wei Wuxian shook his head, and sat down on the bed, still laughing. “Even if knew some way to guarantee my corpse would turn instantly—even if I could figure out a way to retain my intellect on turning, the way I was able to reawaken Wen Ning’s—how would that be better than being alive? Never to be able to taste food again—even worse, never to taste wine! Never to be able to kiss another pretty girl…” Not that he had ever kissed a pretty girl in the first place, of course, but from the look on Lan Zhan’s face, he clearly assumed Wei Wuxian went around kissing all the pretty girls he saw. Of course he did. Everyone thought that. Every time he had snuck out when he was studying here as a boy, everyone assumed he’d been having an assignation with some girl or other. And if he denied it, they just assumed he was keeping it secret because he was too selfish to share his good fortune. “Don’t you worry about me killing myself, okay?” Wei Wuxian said, with an exhalation that was half-laugh and half-sigh. “Do you think I’d want that said about me after I’m gone? That the terrifying and mighty Yiling Lao Zu was actually so feeble that he offed himself after only one day of captivity?”
“You should not want to be terrifying.”
Wei Wuxian sighed. “Want it or not, everyone’s afraid of me. Can’t change it now.”
Lan Zhan’s eyes reflected an almost heart-breaking sadness. “It will change, Wei Ying. Give it time.”
Wei Wuxian just shook his head. Since when was Lan Zhan so naïve? As soon as Wei Wuxian had dug up his first grave, he had become a monster who used the dead against the living. People had put up with it at the time because it was war and he was using it against the tyrant Wen Ruohan, but now that he had used it just once against one of the other clans, that was it for him. No one would ever accept him again. Even the people he had used it to save barely accepted him. They’d have run off screaming if they hadn’t known that everyone else would kill them just as happily as their former Jin captors would have.
And given how claustrophobically centered on Wei Wuxian the first third of that fic is, I could post half the fic here, all too easily. 😅 But I do want to add the following passage, because it highlights the way he relishes his own terrible reputation. By this point, he's been confined for a month, and to pass the time he's been revising an old reference text on yao beasts with all-new illustrations. (Something that almost makes sense in context...) This scene starts as he's finishing up the writing/illustrating part of the project...
It was like fate. When Wei Wuxian finished copying, improving and illustrating the last page from the original bestiary, there were still three pages’ worth left on the roll of paper.
For the first two, he added an entry for the Xuanwu of Slaughter, making sure to specify not just the beast’s history and where it had lived, but how Lan Zhan had slain it while still a teenager. He even went all-out and called him Hanguang-jun in the text, despite that he hadn’t received his sobriquet at the time.
Then, with the final page, he wrote an introduction to the new edition. Describing how he was adding to it with all the knowledge he had accumulated in his ‘long’ life on the dark underside of the cultivation world. How he was writing it during his captivity in the hands of his opposite, his life-long enemies, the Lan Clan. Then he signed the page elaborately: “the most terrifying and evil Yiling Lao Zu, Wei Wuxian.”
(I am constantly going back and forth about whether I think it looks better as Yiling Laozu or Yiling Lao Zu. (The official translation, of course, is of no help on that score, following the thoroughly established earlier translation (obeyed by Netflix in its subtitles of the live-action drama but originating in one of the fan translations of the novel, I'm sure) of Yiling Patriarch, which just feels particularly stupid to me. 'Cause, like, there's nothing in context (or the meaning of the actual term) to suggest a paternal aspect to Wei Wuxian's role among the Wen remnants, meaning that the translators were presumably making a reference to the Eastern Orthodox religious title? Which is a really weird choice, no matter how you look at it. (Possibly even weirder than the fan translator's/Netflix's decision to use Stygian instead of Yin...) Given that it's rather nonsensical, I didn't want to use Patriarch in place of Laozu. I just flip-flop on whether to make it one word or two. I think I usually end up going with one word, though. Uh, okay, actually, my usual preference typically goes canon-divergent before he gets that title, but...*cough*)
Okay, sorry for that nest of parentheses.
I'll move on to some other fic now, because aside from an episode in which Wei Wuxian suffers a bit of a mental breakdown for...uh...reasons...pretty much by that point in the fic he's largely recovered mentally and gotten back to approximately the lighter, fluffier mental state he's in for my other fics. 😅
Mostly, there's not a lot to say about how Wei Wuxian is characterized in the one where Lan Wangji is a dragon who demands Wei Wuxian as payment for vengeance against the Wen Clan after the fall of Lotus Pier, but this one passage feels worth pointing out. This is very early in his time at Cloud Recesses...
“Wei Ying has overslept.”
“Y-yeah. I’m sorry. I—it’s been a rough time, but once I’m more used to—”
“Come.” Without another word, Hanguang-jun led him back towards the buildings nestled in against the slopes of the mountain itself.
Wei Wuxian followed him silently, not wanting to make him even madder than he (presumably) already was. Eventually they stopped in a small courtyard between a few of the other buildings. In the middle of the courtyard was a tall slab of stone, covered with text. “What…?”
“Rules,” Hanguang-jun said, pointing at the stone.
Moving closer so he could actually read the text—which was none too large, despite how big the stone was—Wei Wuxian saw that it was, in fact, covered with thousands of rules of conduct. “This is…Hanguang-jun, why do you have so many—”
“Lan Zhan,” the dragon corrected.
Wei Wuxian sighed. “Lan Zhan, why do you have so many rules if you live here alone?”
“I was not always alone.”
“Oh.” Wei Wuxian studied his face, but could see no sign of sorrow in his expression. And yet, there was something deep within his eyes that might have been pain? “I’m sorry,” he said, just in case. “I know how much it hurts to lose everyone.” Twice over. Three times, really.
Hanguang-jun nodded solemnly.
Wei Wuxian glanced back at the rules on the stone slab. “Do you really follow all of these?” Some of them he certainly seemed to. Particularly the ones about not talking too much, or smiling too much. Those ones the dragon seemed to live by.
“Mn.”
“There’s rules on here about not taking lives.”
“Mn.”
Wei Wuxian looked at Hanguang-jun, his alarm no doubt showing on his face. “Does that mean you didn’t kill the Wen Clan to avenge Lotus Pier?”
A tiny hint of a smile flickered across the tips of Hanguang-jun’s lips. “That rule has exceptions,” he said.
“So…you did kill them?”
The dragon nodded.
“All of them?”
“Their warriors and leader only.”
A bit less than Wei Wuxian had been hoping for, and yet now that he thought about it, he’d met at least one Wen in the past who had actually been nice, so maybe it was for the best that they weren’t all wiped out. “All right. Thank you, Lan Zhan.”
“Thanks are unnecessary. It was a fair exchange.”
Fair exchange? Just how did he figure that? Was this dragon really so lonely that having one live-in companion actually seemed of equal value to killing thousands upon thousands of people?
Something about that idea caused shivers to run across Wei Wuxian’s entire body, and he turned back to look at the stone slab covered in rules instead, trying to divert his mind. “Am I going to be expected to follow all of these rules?”
“As many as possible.”
A groan escaped Wei Wuxian’s lips. “I don’t think I can follow most of these, Lan Zhan. I don’t know how to live if I can’t talk as much as I want!”
“Hm.”
“And to give up meat—and wine?! No way! I can’t—I’ll die!”
“Wei Ying will not die.”
Wei Wuxian sighed. “I’m mortal, Lan Zhan. I’ll die no matter what happens. But if I can’t have meat or wine, it’ll be a lot sooner.”
“Hm.”
They remained in that courtyard a while longer so that Wei Wuxian could read and reread all the rules he was suddenly being told he was going to have to follow. It seemed absurd to him—who would even care if he was making too much noise or laughing too much? There was only one other person (one being, rather) on the entire mountain, and if he was so lonely, wouldn’t he be glad of the distraction of a little noise?
Countless rules to follow: Wei Wuxian's ultimate horror. 🤣
But, moving on to the massively long Jiang Cheng fic. It's hard to find good bits about Wei Wuxian in there that aren't so deeply mired in context that they lose all meaning when taken out of said context, especially since the whole idea of that fic was to put Jiang Cheng front and center instead of Wei Wuxian. But I do have a few moments to share, one of them deeply mired in the plot of the original novel.
However, before I get to the one that's so caught up in the original plot, I want to share this moment that I think really captures Wei Wuxian's devotion and gratitude for the life he was given at Lotus Pier. The following conversation is in response to him referring to Meng Yao as being Jin Guanghsan's bastard. (Which is, after all, the literal truth.)
“As the product of an illicit liaison yourself, you should not be so quick to label anyone else a bastard,” Yu Zongying said. “How is Jiang Fengmian’s lust any less corrupt than Jin Guangshan’s?”
“Don’t you dare say that!” Wei Wuxian shouted, ignoring Lan Zhan’s attempt to calm him. “Insult me however you want, I probably deserve it, but don’t you dare say even one word against Jiang-shushu! He was a better man than anyone gave him credit for, and he may not have ever loved Yu-furen, but he never betrayed her!” He shook his head, fighting against the tears that were already spilling out of his eyes. “Why do you think he even went back to Lotus Pier to die? He was trying to save Yu-furen from the Wen Clan’s forces! After he died for her, how dare you claim he ever touched another woman?!”
Yu Zongying bowed her head slightly. “Very well,” she said. “I won’t speak another word about him.” She took a seat nearby. “For my cousins’ sake, I should not say such things about their father, after all.”
(Yu Zongying is, as you can probably guess, an OC niece of Yu Ziyuan.) In the novel, it's probably a hard sell for anyone to think Jiang Fengmian went back to Lotus Pier in order to save Yu Ziyuan rather than, you know, the whole freaking clan, but this particular fic is working with the drama's canon, and in the show his arrival in the middle of the battle does seem focused on saving his wife...though he then promptly proves himself considerably less effective than she is in combat. Which, of course, Wei Wuxian doesn't know, so this is more the case of his interpretation of what had happened than anything else. But I do think it's very in character for him to make that assumption.
Anyway, onwards to the part that cannot be separated from a late-story spoiler of the original novel. So if you haven't read the original novel (or watched one of its two adaptations) and you think there's any chance at all that you might want to do so in the future, then stop reading now.
Really.
Massive spoiler.
Honest.
....
...
..
.
Okay, that's probably enough space, so I'll go ahead and explain the context, then show the quote.
So, this is a canon divergence fic working with the canon of the live-action adaptation rather than the novel. (Because one of my highest priorities in any canon divergence MDZS fic is saving Wen Qing, and if Jiang Cheng is the protagonist of the fic instead of Wei Wuxian, then that's much easier done if it's the drama version of Jiang Cheng, since he has a massive crush on Wen Qing from her time being inserted into the Cloud Recesses arc. 😅) Anyway, the divergence point is that Jiang Cheng wakes up after the golden core transfer just early enough to go down the mountain in time to encounter (and, somewhat against his will, rescue) the captive Wen Ning from Wen Chao's men. (For those who haven't seen the drama and only know the novel, what happened in the drama was that we saw how Wen Ning rescued the captive Jiang Cheng, which was by putting something in the wine that made all of Wen Chao's men--even Wen Zhuliu!--fall asleep. Since he had been observed loitering in the kitchen area around where the wine was stored, even Wen Chao wasn't stupid enough to not realize that Wen Ning was responsible for the mass black-out and the disappearance of the prisoner and the bodies of the prisoner's parents. So in the show we saw Wen Qing return to the Yiling Supervisory Office after the transfer only to be captured and thrown into a cell with a badly beaten Wen Ning (presumably he'd had to carry assist Wei Wuxian back down the mountain to town), who promised her he hadn't told them anything.) Jiang Cheng and Wen Ning head into town to find Wei Wuxian before Wen Chao and his men can, but too late: they see Wen Chao and his men flying off with the captive Wei Wuxian. Jiang Cheng decides to go back up the mountain to find Baoshan-sanren to get her to help, despite Wen Ning insisting that won't work. They run into Wen Qing on her way down, and after some stupid accusations against her, Jiang Cheng notices the hat she's carrying and starts putting two and two together. Wen Qing goes into town in disguise to get horses and hears where Wen Chao was headed with Wei Wuxian, so the three of them go to the Burial Mounds to rescue him, which they do, but encounter a Wen patrol on their way out, and Wen Ning is forced to kill one of the soldiers to protect the unconscious Wei Wuxian, so the two of them are forced to defect from the Wen Clan and join the Jiang Clan. (Uh, not that they officially join the Jiang Clan that fast, mind you. That last step takes a while.) All that's the first chapter of the fic, about 8k words in the current draft. Soon after that, they're resting at an inn to let Wei Wuxian get some of his strength back after the beating he took from Wen Chao's men, and stuff happens so that the golden core transfer gets spelled out bluntly and directly, but in a context where Jiang Cheng can't really confront Wei Wuxian about it. So this is the entire next scene, when he actually can have a confrontation... (Which, obviously, cribs heavily from their canonical confrontation about the golden core transfer, only without more than a decade of baggage and tragedy weighing them down. Also without the presence of their enemies in the same room with them. 😅)
As soon as the hallway was silent and the door to Wen Qing’s room was firmly shut, Jiang Cheng stepped back out of his own room and crept back along the hallway towards the one where Wei Wuxian was supposed to be resting. This matter couldn’t wait for him to finish healing. They had to talk about this now, when no one else was around to intervene.
Ever since encountering Wen Qing on the mountainside, Jiang Cheng had been turning this over and over in his mind. Trying to explain what had happened. It hadn’t taken him long to come to the conclusion that somehow Wen Qing had given him Wei Wuxian’s golden core, but he had still been hoping for some other explanation, some way to believe there had been some other method…
On entering the room, he found that Wei Wuxian was not resting in the slightest—he was out of bed and reaching for [something he's not supposed to have right now]. His eyes widened on seeing Jiang Cheng enter the room, and he darted back towards the bed, only to collapse halfway there. How humiliating! Before he could accuse him of anything, Jiang Cheng had to help Wei Wuxian back into bed as if he wasn’t furious with him.
“Got anything you want to say to me?” Jiang Cheng said coldly, once Wei Wuxian was settled.
“Thanks?” Wei Wuxian offered, with a weak smile.
“Try again.”
Wei Wuxian’s smile faltered, and he looked away. “Is there even anything to say?”
“Were you ever even going to tell me what you had forced Wen Qing to do to me?”
“Do to you?” Wei Wuxian repeated, looking back at him with mild anger. “Would you rather you still didn’t have a golden core? Would you prefer to still be hopeless and helpless, moaning and groaning about how pointless you’ve become?!”
“Who would want that?!”
“Then what the[expletive]are you complaining about?”
“You didn’t even ask,” Jiang Cheng pointed out coldly. “You didn’t ask me if I would rather stay as I was or have your—” He couldn’t even force himself to say the words.
Wei Wuxian sighed. “Of course I didn’t ask. And no, I was never going to tell you.”
“Why not?!”
“Because I know you, Jiang Cheng,” Wei Wuxian said, shaking his head. “You think I wanted you to spend the rest of your life feeling like you were in debt to me—or thinking that anything you accomplished wasn’t your own accomplishment but really mine?”
An icy hand gripped Jiang Cheng’s heart. How could anyone have known he was thinking that? Unless that thought came from Wei Wuxian’s golden core…?
“Look, it’s bull[expletive], okay?” Wei Wuxian went on. “Remember what your father taught us? The golden core is just a receptacle; it holds our spiritual energy for us, allowing us to gather more than we could otherwise, but that’s it. Giving it away is no different from giving away any other body part. If you’d lost your eyes and I gave you one, you wouldn’t think that everything you saw was somehow mine and not yours, would you?”
“Of course not, but who could just give away an eye like that and have it actually work?”
Wei Wuxian sighed. “I’m sure it’s possible, but that’s not the point. I’m just saying, what you do with the energy in that golden core is all you, and nothing to do with me. You won’t use it the way I would use it, so…just…” He looked away again, shutting his eyes and leaning back in the bed, as if he was too tired to remain awake.
“Don’t think you can go to sleep and get out of this!” Jiang Cheng shouted at him. “You owe me an explanation! What is wrong with you? Why do you always have to play the hero—and this time, what, you wanted to be a martyred hero, dying in shame while secretly thinking you’re so great because of what you gave up for someone who didn’t even appreciate it?!”
Wei Wuxian groaned, and opened his eyes again. “See, this is what’s wrong with you,” he said. “You always think the worst of people, Jiang Cheng. I wasn’t trying to be a hero. I wanted to help my brother.” He shook his head. “Besides, I thought…this was the only way I could repay Jiang-shushu. If he hadn’t found me and brought me home and raised me beside you, then what could I have ever known of cultivation? I’d probably still be living in the streets of Yiling right now: the best I could have hoped for would have been to be the leader of a band of other street kids, still fighting stray dogs for food. But he let me join this amazing world of people who can do miraculous things; I got a taste of a world I didn’t belong in.” He sighed sadly. “But did Jiang-shushu really do all that just because he had loved my parents? Or did he see me as an investment in his future—in your future? Wasn’t I always trained to help and support and protect you? Wasn’t that the last thing both your parents said to me, to order me to protect you?”
Jiang Cheng did his best to withhold both his tears and his guilty conscience. He was all too acutely aware of the fact that the last thing his mother had said to Wei Wuxian was to tell him how much she hated him.
“I couldn’t protect you from Wen Zhuliu, but I could give back what your father had given me,” Wei Wuxian went on. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d never agree to it, and…and I didn’t want to see you looking like this,” he added, looking straight into Jiang Cheng’s eyes.
What was he even supposed to say to that? All Jiang Cheng could do was to scrub at his tears, trying to erase them from existence.
“Look, just think of it as a…a qiankun pouch, okay?” Wei Wuxian said. “That’s all it is, in the end, really. It’s just a pouch to hold energy, and you’d lost yours so I gave you mine. Because you need it and I don’t.”
“How could you not need it?” Jiang Cheng countered. “You’re always saying what a great genius cultivator you are, so how could you not need—”
“Because you’re the heir to the Jiang Clan and I’m just a nameless orphan,” Wei Wuxian snapped, interrupting him. “Without you, how can the clan ever be restored? I can’t do it; I’m just a disciple with no blood ties to anybody. And shijie can’t do it, because she never even tried to learn anything beyond the most basic techniques. You’re the only one who can restore the clan, so you need that golden core. Cultivation is your life. It’s just something I was doing because it was fun.”
“That isn’t why.”
Wei Wuxian laughed uncomfortably. “Well, no, I guess not,” he admitted. “But if it hadn’t been fun, if I hadn’t been good at it, you know I’d have stopped a long time ago. I’d have made my excuses and found some other way to repay Jiang-shushu. And I’ll still find some other way to support you. If Baoshan-sanren can’t help me, then…I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
“But…”
“I promise, I’ll still be here to support you. No matter what.”
But as important as Wei Wuxian's brotherly relationship with Jiang Cheng is to me, his romance with Lan Wangji is even more important, so I want a good quote about that, too. 🥰 This one is actually "about" Wei Wuxian in a very different way than usual: he's not even in this scene, he's just being talked about!
“Do you really think Lan Wangji is romantically interested in a-Xian?” Jiang Yanli asked.
“At this point, I think it’s more like ‘involved with’ than ‘interested in,’ to be honest.”
Jiang Yanli’s eyes widened. “Really? But a-Xian’s always been such a flirt with pretty girls!”
Wen Qing shrugged; based on all the behavior she had seen from Wei Wuxian, she had thought he was a cut-sleeve all along—particularly after the manner in which he had been giving a-Ning ‘instructions’ in archery! “Maybe he likes both? Or maybe Lan Wangji is just so beautiful that Wei-gongzi views him as a pretty girl? Whatever the case may be, I do think it’s impossible to interpret their behavior any other way.” She explained what they had done every time they had stopped on the way from Qinghe to Cloud Recesses, and how very disappointed Wei Wuxian had looked on that last stop, when there were no woods for him and Lan Wangji to disappear into for the privacy to do whatever they had been doing every other time under the guise of recharging Wei Wuxian’s artificial core.
Jiang Yanli let out a soft sigh, smiling wistfully. “I hope someone like Lan Wangji is capable of making a-Xian happy,” she said. “I’ve often felt he was forcing so much of his good cheer, as if he thought he would be ungrateful to Father if he wasn’t always happy.”
Wen Qing’s brows raised in surprise, but she couldn’t find anything to say. She had always looked at Wei Wuxian and seen a terminally shallow young man who was capable of hiding things only for the sake of making mischief.
(which I had to get from Youtube because Netflix stopped cooperating with screenshots for some reason 😭)
(Yeah, Wei Wuxian succeeds in getting Baoshan-sanren to give him an artificial golden core in this fic. That's why he's still absent for the first three months of the war, and only shows up in time to horribly kill Wen Chao alongside Jiang Cheng. Only the artificial core can't refill itself properly, and dual cultivation was suggested to him as the best way to refill it. Though (taking a hint from Hua Cheng) Lan Wangji figured out that he could also pass energy to Wei Wuxian by kissing him...which helped Wei Wuxian figure out his own feelings while leaving him clueless as to Lan Wangji's feelings. 🤣 Though by the time of the quote above, his cluelessness has been fully dispersed and they really are properly involved. Though possibly that isn't confirmed to the reader by that point...)
I really enjoy playing with how other people perceive the characters. And given how fixated on Lan Wangji Wei Wuxian was throughout the Cloud Recesses arc--and the hunt for the Yin Iron arc--it's understandable that Wen Qing would come to the conclusion that he's into men. Especially seeing as it's not exactly wrong. 🤣 But seriously, I feel like they're both right in those last two paragraphs: Wei Wuxian does feel that he's obligated to be happy in his life with the Jiang Clan so he won't be ungrateful to Jiang Fengmian for taking him in, but he's also extremely talented and experienced at hiding things for the sake of making mischief. 🤣
Hmm.
I feel like this post has not done a very good job of addressing how I characterize Wei Wuxian in my fanfic about him. In part because most of my MDZS fanfic is so all about him that it's hard to boil it down. (He is, after all, like Curt Wild, the one who is at the center of my fixation.)
And I feel like I probably should have more to say, but also that this post is already ridiculously long, so I guess I'll just abruptly stop here. 😅
Oh. I should add some links to the fics that are already posted. 😅 Due to a recent change, they are now all on AO3.
He sounds like an interesting character and who doesn't love a bit of a bad boy haha
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