[His heart sinks even as he had suspected as much. Itachi is too well trained for the blade to be as dull as it is for any reason other than active choice. Eventually he nods. It's hard to think of that memory—and of the night he witnessed it. Wei Wuxian has too many nightmares of his own to make much room for anyone else's, but those images stay with him, joining the other dark shadows in his mind.
Mostly though, they make him think of his friend's unspoken pain, and he already knows that's not a welcome train of thought. Pushing those thoughts away, he fixes Itachi with a curious look.]
It is possible he picked up some knowledge from watching me, but I largely left his tutelage to our father. By the time he was old enough to learn in earnest, I was away on missions and had little free time. What time I did have needed to be dedicated to my own self-improvement rather than his.
（ and then there was the distance that itachi put deliberately between them. he had begun to guess, by then, how everything might end. after shisui died, that last agonizing year beneath his father's roof had almost broken him, for all the times he had pushed sasuke away. ）
[He lets out a soft humming sound at that and tilts his head up to continue eyeing the sword.]
I didn't teach Jiang Cheng because we were only one year apart. We used to practice together though. [He lets out a soft sigh.] I was the better swordsman back then. I beat him every time and he never handled losing gracefully.
[He lowers his eyes, finally looking away from the sword.]
I let him beat me. Once. [He snorts and shakes his head.] I know, I know, it was stupid. I was very young and I was trying to make him happy. He didn't speak to me for a week.
（ and their relationship, from what he has heard, was... a complicated one. itachi nods to the sword, and with his mouth drawn faintly down at one corner — ）
I intend to sharpen it. （ then, after a moment: ） Do you have an array that could keep it so?
[He hums softly in agreement, having long learned his lesson about pride and how easy it was to damage his brother's.]
Cultivators sharpen their blades with spiritual energy and I never developed an array for that because when I stopped using spiritual energy, I gave up the sword. [He smiles wryly.] It should be very easy. A few days at most. [Something like that would be simple enough.]
（ he has never asked. wei wuxian has never offered. but some things are understood between them in ways that cleave to the similarities between their cultures, things entrenched in what has become an easy familiarity. the energy that xichen uses is different than what wei wuxian uses, and that difference is not the same as how the nature of chakra varies between shinobi. he has known sasuke's chakra in the dark, near death. that volatile nature, like the taste of ozone on his tongue. inclement, but still — chakra.
resentful energy is not what cultivators use. the more he has met, the more apparent it has become.
and — the trouble with recognizing that apparency is that there are only so many reasons that wei wuxian might refrain from its use.
if itachi were to be certain of nothing else about him but this, it is that he knows that wei wuxian would never refuse to use a power at his fingertips, no matter how it might pain him, no matter how it might hurt him, if it meant saving an innocent life. if he were capable of cultivation, he would do it. he would have done it on e23-b. instead, he drew the dead from their restless slumber.
therefore, it is not a stopped. that is a play-word, a stop-gap. an unspoken request.
his power was lost, or surrendered, or taken.
if it were the former or the last, he would not have said stopped. stopped is a way to sidestep the vulnerability inherent in the loss of one's power. it is a declaration of choice. and only one of those three things can be a choice at all.
itachi does not speak for a long time, having risen to start a pot of tea. he busies himself with the easy familiarity of ceremony, informal though it may be between them. it is not until he is again seated, with the tray upon his desk and the warm, fragrant scent of sencha. in a gesture quite uncharacteristic of his usual stoic stillness, he reaches one hand up and traces his index finger along the line of his cheekbone, terminating the touch at the outside corner of his eye socket. he is thinking of shisui, the curl of his fingers into the soft, fleshy hollow in which his eye nested, tugging it free of nerves and muscle without so much as flinching, the way it had felt wet and hot and awful in his hand.
surrendered.
at length — ）
Would you like me to ask?
（ there is only one thing he might mean, but it is equally as much a do you wish to discuss it? as it is a statement seeking permission. ）
[There' a beat between them that passes in silence and then Wei Wuxian lets out a soft laugh and shakes his head, the sound wry and perhaps just a touch self-deprecating.]
I didn't mean that as—[He stops and wonders, examining his words.
Where it concerned the loss of his power, he's never tried to hide the truth from Itachi. At first it was because he was far enough removed from his home world that it didn't matter, and then later there simply wasn't a purpose. The only damage to be done with the information was to a man who lives on in Yunmeng, and even then, only damage to his pride. It's enough of a risk he still bites his tongue with most, but he knows the truth is safe with his friend.
So maybe Itachi is right. Maybe he had intended it as a lure because there's a part of him that wants him to know. At least a piece of it, if not the whole truth.]
Aiya, or maybe you're right. I guess I do want you to. I mean you must know I can't use spiritual energy by now. [Wei Wuxian pauses for another moment before beginning to explain.] The center of a cultivator's power lies here—[He places a hand just beneath his stomach, over the second dantian.] It forms the spiritual organ known as the Golden Core.
During the war, I lost mine. [He shrugs.] There was a man with the incredibly rare ability to destroy a golden core with a single touch, so...[He sighs, wry smile returning.]
I was caught by the enemy after that. Ended up somewhere full of resentful energy. It was a lot like that school actually, the one in Forsythe Heights, only the ghosts were louder and angrier and I was there for three months. They expected me to die. Wanted me to. The man who threw me into that place thought it would destroy my soul along with my body. No one had ever survived that place before.
They were not counting on how stubborn I am. [He grins.] So. I taught myself to cultivate resentful energy and I used music—[He pulls his flute from his robes, twirling it once and then putting it away again]—to do what no cultivator had ever done before. Master it.
（ wei wuxian is not a natural liar. that is not to say it isn't a skill he possesses — he can, and does lie. itachi has witnessed it to varying degrees across the many missions they have shared. but it is... antithetical, to who he is, or perhaps more accurately to who he wishes he could be.
(in a perfect world, who would they be? he cannot say. but they would be strangers, in such a case, as lost to each other then as ephemera.)
the only lies he can tell convincingly are the ones that are about himself. wei wuxian is a man who would die smiling if he felt it would put others to ease. it is his own misery, the trauma, the suffering and shame that he bundles tight to his chest, and does not share. even the way he tells this story is wildly blithe by omission. the cliffnotes given, glib.
three months in a place no one has ever survived. itachi's mouth cuts downward at one corner as he pours them tea. the only one who recognizes such lies is, as it happens, a better liar. there are many threads on which he could pull, but finally — ）
You were in （ his brow draws down faintly. thoughtful. ） a tomb?
（ if wei wuxian wishes to give him clues, he will piece them apart. resentful energy gathers around the dead, in places of misery and death. but if it was to be a place no one could escape from, it could hardly be an open graveyard. it had to be somewhere in which one could become trapped. threw me. something like a pit, or a mass grave with unclimbable walls.
without a golden core or not, there is unfathomable arrogance in leaving an enemy alive, no matter how slimly gauged their survival. in that man's stead (and how easy it is, how simple, to paint himself as the villain of this story) he would have simply slit wei wuxian's throat. ）
Of sorts. [He reaches for his tea, taking a long sip to buy himself a moment and consider what to share.]
It's called the Burial Mounds and it's a mountain range that had become a dumping ground for corpses over the centuries. No one is sure how it started anymore, but by my time it had become a place so saturated with resentful energy that to cleanse them would have been the undertaking of at least a hundred cultivators over a lifetime. Maybe longer.
And there wasn't any glory or money to be found in a task like that, so the leaders of the cultivation world built a wall of protective wards around it and left it alone. [It isn't something he holds his generation of cultivators responsible for, but it's a reminder that the cultivation world has always been the same. Chasing only what served them and not the people as they had always claimed.
His eyes flicker away from his tea to Itachi and he smiles, amused and perhaps knowing.] You're wondering why they threw me there instead of just killing me, aren't you?
[Itachi isn't the only one who knows his friend after all, and it's a reasonable judgment to make if he's honest. Itachi is efficient. If it had been him, he wouldn't have been stalled by Wei Wuxian's threats. Wei Wuxian wouldn't have lived long enough to make them, he thinks, without a drop of judgment.]
The man who threw me in there was called Wen Chao. He was going to just kill me. Except I swore to him that I would return as a spirit and haunt him to death. I meant it too. I would have. A stronger cultivator could have dispelled me, but Wen Chao was weak and he was a coward. I probably could have killed him as a ghost.
The Burial Mounds solved that problem for him. I'd die and then my soul would be stuck there for eternity, never rejoining the cycle of incarnation, and becoming just one more resentful spirit among thousands. That was the idea anyway.
[The smile he shoots Itachi's way at that is genuine and warm despite the grim subject. He's right after all, Wen Chao really was a fool.]
Before I came here, no one, though my brother and Lan Zhan had heard from Wen soldiers. I didn't confirm it though. There was no point. [They would have worried needlessly and it was already over by then anyway. Not to mention it would have invited too many questions about how he'd managed to survive. Questions he had no intentions of answering.]
And here, uh. I mentioned it in passing to Rosinante. After we came out of the school. [A single comment that he had deliberately not expanded on.]
I. Well. I haven't really talked about it. Most people wouldn't understand it. [What the Burial Mounds were. Why the thought of having his spirit destroyed along with his body was so terrifying. And if they did, there would have been pity. He doesn't want pity.] And they fuss. It's all in the past now anyways.
his attention flickers back to the blade, hung in its place on the wall. it is not a new weapon. it had been his grandmother's, though it had been broken some time in the second of the great wars. it was repaired, renamed, and given to him on his entry to anbu. even ravaged as it is by the heartsblood it spilled, the bones on which it stuttered and caught, if one did not know its provenance they would be able to consider it a beautiful thing.
why do people speak of the past as if it is not a living thing, hot breath at your ear, rough hands around your throat? it is not dead, as long as you live to carry it.
wei wuxian survived the burial mounds. but itachi studies him in profile, the elegant curve to his cheek, his chin, and wonders what it was he left of himself in that dark place.
he lifts his tea cup, but rather than take a drink he simply pulls it in against his chest in an idle gesture, enjoying the proximity of that little spark of warmth. ）
I —
（ the word truncates sharply.
when he speaks again, it is as if the misstep never happened. the surface of a vast ocean, deep and dark, mirror-bright on the surface. ）
I require your assistance with something. If you are able.
（ it may seem like changing the subject. and it is, in a sense — pulling the focus to himself. what he wishes to ask is a selfish thing, and difficult for him. but necessary, like setting a bone. ）
[It's the first time Itachi has stumbled over his words in the whole of their acquaintance and it catches his attention as sure as if he'd raised his voice. Wei Wuxian feels the gravity of it and the request that follows only solidifies that whatever this is, it's important to his friend.
（ his skin prickles, at the trust implicit in those words. it has been hard-won, but there is a delicate moment balanced on the edge of a blade where he is seized by an old impulse, by learned cruelty, and wishes to break it to pieces.
you should not trust me, he thinks. but louder, in that moment, is the gratitude that he does.
he averts his eyes like he is chasing the long shadows on the wall. it takes him a moment.
wei wuxian may recognize the way he steels his spine to speak. it is an echo, of the child he had been on that rooftop, readying himself for deep unpleasantness. it is almost a process of self-immolation, unnecessary sentiment cast off and burnt beyond ash. then, it had been kindness. now, it is his own tendency to isolate. he does not require help, as he had said. a quiet lie. this is a navigable matter. that his navigation may be unnecessarily clumsy and cruel does not matter — he is capable.
that is not the point. the point is to ask. ）
After what you witnessed of my past, in Forsythe Heights, I spoke to Gwen. I told her what had transpired, that I used Tsukuyomi on you, and that you bore witness to a massacre I had committed. From that, she pieced together something I would have preferred her not to know. We have not spoken at any length since.
（ this is as calmly dispassionate as if he were simply reading a mission report off stock card. ）
I... suspect she may feel I am angry with her. I am not. However, I do not wish to put her in a position where she feels she must reconcile what she knows of me with what I have done. You are closer to her than I am. What is your opinion?
[I told her what had transpired, Itachi says, as casually as if he were speaking of the weather, and Wei Wuxian knows his brow furrows in reaction even as he bites his tongue to stop himself from asking why. In hindsight, he wonders if he doesn't know the answer. Itachi wouldn't have assumed Wei Wuxian would tell Gwen, but there's something there in that confession, maybe his own way to mitigate the potential damage. To take control of a situation in which control had been so thoroughly wrested from him.
It takes Wei Wuxian only a few seconds to imagine what he might have done in the same position. If Gwen or Itachi had been privy to the massacre of Nightless City without any context or idea of what was happening. If they had seen that night unfiltered...
He swallows hard at the thought. Maybe he isn't sure why Itachi told Gwen, but he knows it wasn't for his own good.
But none of that is why Itachi is speaking to him now, and Wei Wuxian would be a poor friend if he didn't pay attention and listen to what Itachi is saying.
Gwen figured out something else. There is immediately the instinct to pick and prod. Hasn't he told Itachi before? I like to understand how things work. But people are not inventions and arrays, streaks of ink on paper. Whatever Gwen pieced together is not for Wei Wuxian to know, and so he quiets the questions in his mind. Once, he hadn't listened when Itachi asked him to stop. He will never make that mistake again.
More to the point, the stumbling over the words and (momentary) uncharacteristic hesitance finally make sense to him. Itachi thinks Gwen is upset with him. Or rather he believes that Gwen believes he's upset with her. Oh. Oh.
It's a sentiment that Wei Wuxian understands well and he purses his lips for a moment as he carefully considers the question.]
I don't think you could put her into any position she didn't want to be in. [he starts, thinking of the strength of Gwen's will power—some might also call it stubbornness. His eyes shift back to his tea.]
A wise friend once told me that sometimes in situations like this, people need space. Room to understand what they're feeling. [There is a glint of warmth in his eyes, but despite the somewhat cheeky response, Wei Wuxian is not making light.] He told me that for someone like Gwen, patience is key. Her own experiences with death aren't insignificant.
He also told me that Gwen cared for me, and he was right. So now I am telling you that Gwen cares for you, and not just a little. You matter to her. If you're [Afraid] under the impression that she believes you're angry, tell her you're not. She'll have had plenty of space by the time this mission concludes.
（ the echo of his own words is meant as a panacea, and one corner of his mouth quirks up in faint amusement. it is not wei wuxian's fault that the situations are entirely dissimilar. witnessing the slaughter of people who have had an active hand in harming others, who would have killed wei wuxian or the innocent prisoners on e23-b is not quite the same as gwen realizing that he put his own family to the sword. but the sentiment is appreciated, regardless. ）
I will see.
（ the idea of speaking to her is exhaustive. he has never shied away from being a villain. it was a mantle he accepted that night and has bore unflinching since. but he had... divorced himself if not from the deed itself, then at least from the reputation in which he has cloaked himself ever after.
gwen now knows, irrevocably, that the truth of him is closer to that betrayal in taeum than in the personality he has cultivated since, and he does not know which side to show her now. the distance is easier to maintain, certainly. ）
[He looks at him for a moment longer—recognizing the deferral for what it is—but pushing has never gotten him anywhere with Itachi so he acquiesces to the subject change.]
Yeah. I hope so. The room's too quiet. [He complains softly, disguising a real discomfort with a feigned pout.]
I end up talking to myself too much. It's weird how easy it is to get used to something so quickly. [He misses Gwen specifically, but he also misses the presence of another person. He'd thought about approaching Lan Wangji for just a second, but the way things have been between them had made him dismiss the idea as soon as he'd had it.]
（ quiet is an impoetic word for it. gwen's absence is a void, the absence of sun in spring. of all of them, however, wei wuxian is the most poorly equipped to endure solitude comfortably.
he gives wei wuxian a long, studied look. then: ）
Stay with me until she returns. You may take the bed.
（ as if he doesn't already sleep on the futon tucked neatly away in a cupboard to begin with. ）
['Stay with me,' Itachi says, not 'you can stay with me' or 'if you want to.' Just stay with me. The gentle insistence of a friend. It's a foolish detail to get caught up on, but Wei Wuxian can't help ducking his head to hide a warm smile, nodding in answer.]
Alright. [And gone too are the days of 'If you don't mind.'
The thanks dies before it even reaches his lips, as much because he's mindful of Itachi's aversion to gratitude as because it simply doesn't seem to fit. Sometimes, a thanks really isn't needed between friends.]
Me? Snore? [He winks.] It's too late, you can't take it back now even if I do. You're stuck with me. [To prove the sentiment, he quickly shimmies up higher on the bed and ducks under the blanket, immediately calling out 'night!' from under the covers.
He is absolutely not going to bed yet but that is very much not the point.]
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（ not with this blade, but there are swords in the training room he has used. he is too much a perfectionist not to resent the dulling of a skill. ）
In combat, I have not used one since the night you saw in my memories.
（ there is no inflection, no weight. he is stating a simple fact. ）
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Mostly though, they make him think of his friend's unspoken pain, and he already knows that's not a welcome train of thought. Pushing those thoughts away, he fixes Itachi with a curious look.]
Did you teach Sasuke how to use a sword?
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（ and then there was the distance that itachi put deliberately between them. he had begun to guess, by then, how everything might end. after shisui died, that last agonizing year beneath his father's roof had almost broken him, for all the times he had pushed sasuke away. ）
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I didn't teach Jiang Cheng because we were only one year apart. We used to practice together though. [He lets out a soft sigh.] I was the better swordsman back then. I beat him every time and he never handled losing gracefully.
[He lowers his eyes, finally looking away from the sword.]
I let him beat me. Once. [He snorts and shakes his head.] I know, I know, it was stupid. I was very young and I was trying to make him happy. He didn't speak to me for a week.
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（ and their relationship, from what he has heard, was... a complicated one. itachi nods to the sword, and with his mouth drawn faintly down at one corner — ）
I intend to sharpen it. （ then, after a moment: ） Do you have an array that could keep it so?
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Cultivators sharpen their blades with spiritual energy and I never developed an array for that because when I stopped using spiritual energy, I gave up the sword. [He smiles wryly.] It should be very easy. A few days at most. [Something like that would be simple enough.]
cw: eye horror/gore
resentful energy is not what cultivators use. the more he has met, the more apparent it has become.
and — the trouble with recognizing that apparency is that there are only so many reasons that wei wuxian might refrain from its use.
if itachi were to be certain of nothing else about him but this, it is that he knows that wei wuxian would never refuse to use a power at his fingertips, no matter how it might pain him, no matter how it might hurt him, if it meant saving an innocent life. if he were capable of cultivation, he would do it. he would have done it on e23-b. instead, he drew the dead from their restless slumber.
therefore, it is not a stopped. that is a play-word, a stop-gap. an unspoken request.
his power was lost, or surrendered, or taken.
if it were the former or the last, he would not have said stopped. stopped is a way to sidestep the vulnerability inherent in the loss of one's power. it is a declaration of choice. and only one of those three things can be a choice at all.
itachi does not speak for a long time, having risen to start a pot of tea. he busies himself with the easy familiarity of ceremony, informal though it may be between them. it is not until he is again seated, with the tray upon his desk and the warm, fragrant scent of sencha. in a gesture quite uncharacteristic of his usual stoic stillness, he reaches one hand up and traces his index finger along the line of his cheekbone, terminating the touch at the outside corner of his eye socket. he is thinking of shisui, the curl of his fingers into the soft, fleshy hollow in which his eye nested, tugging it free of nerves and muscle without so much as flinching, the way it had felt wet and hot and awful in his hand.
surrendered.
at length — ）
Would you like me to ask?
（ there is only one thing he might mean, but it is equally as much a do you wish to discuss it? as it is a statement seeking permission. ）
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I didn't mean that as—[He stops and wonders, examining his words.
Where it concerned the loss of his power, he's never tried to hide the truth from Itachi. At first it was because he was far enough removed from his home world that it didn't matter, and then later there simply wasn't a purpose. The only damage to be done with the information was to a man who lives on in Yunmeng, and even then, only damage to his pride. It's enough of a risk he still bites his tongue with most, but he knows the truth is safe with his friend.
So maybe Itachi is right. Maybe he had intended it as a lure because there's a part of him that wants him to know. At least a piece of it, if not the whole truth.]
Aiya, or maybe you're right. I guess I do want you to. I mean you must know I can't use spiritual energy by now. [Wei Wuxian pauses for another moment before beginning to explain.] The center of a cultivator's power lies here—[He places a hand just beneath his stomach, over the second dantian.] It forms the spiritual organ known as the Golden Core.
During the war, I lost mine. [He shrugs.] There was a man with the incredibly rare ability to destroy a golden core with a single touch, so...[He sighs, wry smile returning.]
I was caught by the enemy after that. Ended up somewhere full of resentful energy. It was a lot like that school actually, the one in Forsythe Heights, only the ghosts were louder and angrier and I was there for three months. They expected me to die. Wanted me to. The man who threw me into that place thought it would destroy my soul along with my body. No one had ever survived that place before.
They were not counting on how stubborn I am. [He grins.] So. I taught myself to cultivate resentful energy and I used music—[He pulls his flute from his robes, twirling it once and then putting it away again]—to do what no cultivator had ever done before. Master it.
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(in a perfect world, who would they be? he cannot say. but they would be strangers, in such a case, as lost to each other then as ephemera.)
the only lies he can tell convincingly are the ones that are about himself. wei wuxian is a man who would die smiling if he felt it would put others to ease. it is his own misery, the trauma, the suffering and shame that he bundles tight to his chest, and does not share. even the way he tells this story is wildly blithe by omission. the cliffnotes given, glib.
three months in a place no one has ever survived. itachi's mouth cuts downward at one corner as he pours them tea. the only one who recognizes such lies is, as it happens, a better liar. there are many threads on which he could pull, but finally — ）
You were in （ his brow draws down faintly. thoughtful. ） a tomb?
（ if wei wuxian wishes to give him clues, he will piece them apart. resentful energy gathers around the dead, in places of misery and death. but if it was to be a place no one could escape from, it could hardly be an open graveyard. it had to be somewhere in which one could become trapped. threw me. something like a pit, or a mass grave with unclimbable walls.
without a golden core or not, there is unfathomable arrogance in leaving an enemy alive, no matter how slimly gauged their survival. in that man's stead (and how easy it is, how simple, to paint himself as the villain of this story) he would have simply slit wei wuxian's throat. ）
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It's called the Burial Mounds and it's a mountain range that had become a dumping ground for corpses over the centuries. No one is sure how it started anymore, but by my time it had become a place so saturated with resentful energy that to cleanse them would have been the undertaking of at least a hundred cultivators over a lifetime. Maybe longer.
And there wasn't any glory or money to be found in a task like that, so the leaders of the cultivation world built a wall of protective wards around it and left it alone. [It isn't something he holds his generation of cultivators responsible for, but it's a reminder that the cultivation world has always been the same. Chasing only what served them and not the people as they had always claimed.
His eyes flicker away from his tea to Itachi and he smiles, amused and perhaps knowing.] You're wondering why they threw me there instead of just killing me, aren't you?
[Itachi isn't the only one who knows his friend after all, and it's a reasonable judgment to make if he's honest. Itachi is efficient. If it had been him, he wouldn't have been stalled by Wei Wuxian's threats. Wei Wuxian wouldn't have lived long enough to make them, he thinks, without a drop of judgment.]
The man who threw me in there was called Wen Chao. He was going to just kill me. Except I swore to him that I would return as a spirit and haunt him to death. I meant it too. I would have. A stronger cultivator could have dispelled me, but Wen Chao was weak and he was a coward. I probably could have killed him as a ghost.
The Burial Mounds solved that problem for him. I'd die and then my soul would be stuck there for eternity, never rejoining the cycle of incarnation, and becoming just one more resentful spirit among thousands. That was the idea anyway.
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（ if he had any inkling of who wei wuxian was as a person, he might have risked the ghost. he is not one to be left alive.
wen chao. the name is committed to memory. he would risk viveca's wrath for that, should the man ever arrive on the ximilia. ）
How many people have you told of this?
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Before I came here, no one, though my brother and Lan Zhan had heard from Wen soldiers. I didn't confirm it though. There was no point. [They would have worried needlessly and it was already over by then anyway. Not to mention it would have invited too many questions about how he'd managed to survive. Questions he had no intentions of answering.]
And here, uh. I mentioned it in passing to Rosinante. After we came out of the school. [A single comment that he had deliberately not expanded on.]
I. Well. I haven't really talked about it. Most people wouldn't understand it. [What the Burial Mounds were. Why the thought of having his spirit destroyed along with his body was so terrifying. And if they did, there would have been pity. He doesn't want pity.] And they fuss. It's all in the past now anyways.
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his attention flickers back to the blade, hung in its place on the wall. it is not a new weapon. it had been his grandmother's, though it had been broken some time in the second of the great wars. it was repaired, renamed, and given to him on his entry to anbu. even ravaged as it is by the heartsblood it spilled, the bones on which it stuttered and caught, if one did not know its provenance they would be able to consider it a beautiful thing.
why do people speak of the past as if it is not a living thing, hot breath at your ear, rough hands around your throat? it is not dead, as long as you live to carry it.
wei wuxian survived the burial mounds. but itachi studies him in profile, the elegant curve to his cheek, his chin, and wonders what it was he left of himself in that dark place.
he lifts his tea cup, but rather than take a drink he simply pulls it in against his chest in an idle gesture, enjoying the proximity of that little spark of warmth. ）
I —
（ the word truncates sharply.
when he speaks again, it is as if the misstep never happened. the surface of a vast ocean, deep and dark, mirror-bright on the surface. ）
I require your assistance with something. If you are able.
（ it may seem like changing the subject. and it is, in a sense — pulling the focus to himself. what he wishes to ask is a selfish thing, and difficult for him. but necessary, like setting a bone. ）
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He meets Itachi's eyes and nods.]
Name it.
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you should not trust me, he thinks. but louder, in that moment, is the gratitude that he does.
he averts his eyes like he is chasing the long shadows on the wall. it takes him a moment.
wei wuxian may recognize the way he steels his spine to speak. it is an echo, of the child he had been on that rooftop, readying himself for deep unpleasantness. it is almost a process of self-immolation, unnecessary sentiment cast off and burnt beyond ash. then, it had been kindness. now, it is his own tendency to isolate. he does not require help, as he had said. a quiet lie. this is a navigable matter. that his navigation may be unnecessarily clumsy and cruel does not matter — he is capable.
that is not the point. the point is to ask. ）
After what you witnessed of my past, in Forsythe Heights, I spoke to Gwen. I told her what had transpired, that I used Tsukuyomi on you, and that you bore witness to a massacre I had committed. From that, she pieced together something I would have preferred her not to know. We have not spoken at any length since.
（ this is as calmly dispassionate as if he were simply reading a mission report off stock card. ）
I... suspect she may feel I am angry with her. I am not. However, I do not wish to put her in a position where she feels she must reconcile what she knows of me with what I have done. You are closer to her than I am. What is your opinion?
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It takes Wei Wuxian only a few seconds to imagine what he might have done in the same position. If Gwen or Itachi had been privy to the massacre of Nightless City without any context or idea of what was happening. If they had seen that night unfiltered...
He swallows hard at the thought. Maybe he isn't sure why Itachi told Gwen, but he knows it wasn't for his own good.
But none of that is why Itachi is speaking to him now, and Wei Wuxian would be a poor friend if he didn't pay attention and listen to what Itachi is saying.
Gwen figured out something else. There is immediately the instinct to pick and prod. Hasn't he told Itachi before? I like to understand how things work. But people are not inventions and arrays, streaks of ink on paper. Whatever Gwen pieced together is not for Wei Wuxian to know, and so he quiets the questions in his mind. Once, he hadn't listened when Itachi asked him to stop. He will never make that mistake again.
More to the point, the stumbling over the words and (momentary) uncharacteristic hesitance finally make sense to him. Itachi thinks Gwen is upset with him. Or rather he believes that Gwen believes he's upset with her. Oh. Oh.
It's a sentiment that Wei Wuxian understands well and he purses his lips for a moment as he carefully considers the question.]
I don't think you could put her into any position she didn't want to be in. [he starts, thinking of the strength of Gwen's will power—some might also call it stubbornness. His eyes shift back to his tea.]
A wise friend once told me that sometimes in situations like this, people need space. Room to understand what they're feeling. [There is a glint of warmth in his eyes, but despite the somewhat cheeky response, Wei Wuxian is not making light.] He told me that for someone like Gwen, patience is key. Her own experiences with death aren't insignificant.
He also told me that Gwen cared for me, and he was right. So now I am telling you that Gwen cares for you, and not just a little. You matter to her. If you're [Afraid] under the impression that she believes you're angry, tell her you're not. She'll have had plenty of space by the time this mission concludes.
Talk to her.
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I will see.
（ the idea of speaking to her is exhaustive. he has never shied away from being a villain. it was a mantle he accepted that night and has bore unflinching since. but he had... divorced himself if not from the deed itself, then at least from the reputation in which he has cloaked himself ever after.
gwen now knows, irrevocably, that the truth of him is closer to that betrayal in taeum than in the personality he has cultivated since, and he does not know which side to show her now. the distance is easier to maintain, certainly. ）
They should be returning soon.
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Yeah. I hope so. The room's too quiet. [He complains softly, disguising a real discomfort with a feigned pout.]
I end up talking to myself too much. It's weird how easy it is to get used to something so quickly. [He misses Gwen specifically, but he also misses the presence of another person. He'd thought about approaching Lan Wangji for just a second, but the way things have been between them had made him dismiss the idea as soon as he'd had it.]
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he gives wei wuxian a long, studied look. then: ）
Stay with me until she returns. You may take the bed.
（ as if he doesn't already sleep on the futon tucked neatly away in a cupboard to begin with. ）
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Alright. [And gone too are the days of 'If you don't mind.'
The thanks dies before it even reaches his lips, as much because he's mindful of Itachi's aversion to gratitude as because it simply doesn't seem to fit. Sometimes, a thanks really isn't needed between friends.]
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（ ... a joke?
a threat???
who knows with him. ）
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Me? Snore? [He winks.] It's too late, you can't take it back now even if I do. You're stuck with me. [To prove the sentiment, he quickly shimmies up higher on the bed and ducks under the blanket, immediately calling out 'night!' from under the covers.
He is absolutely not going to bed yet but that is very much not the point.]
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