Second Time Around

9. More Confessions

What are we doing? Such a simple question with an overly complicated answer. Wei WuXian waited patiently for Lan Wangji to give him an answer, even if it wasn't a correct answer.

"I am paying attention to you," Lan WangJi finally stated. "After the cave, after XuanWu, I found a junior disciple dead among some Wen. I wanted to bury her properly, so I used Inquiry to get her name and family. A different spirit answered and said you were going to commit suicide in a few years and I needed to pay attention if I didn't want that to happen. Spirits cannot lie to me in Inquiry, so...."

Wei WuXian stared in disbelief at his friend. "Some strange spirit told you I was going to die in a couple of years, so you decided that you had to kiss me?"

"No. The kissing was an accident." Wei WuXian suppressed a giggle; Lan Zhan's ears were a brilliant scarlet. "I didn't mean to do it. I just saw you there at the tree, and then I was kissing you."

Wei WuXian bit his lip. "Did you enjoy it?" A stupid question, because he'd already felt the answer to that question the night before. Lan WangJi nodded anyway. "Did you mean to do it again last night?" That received a 'no'. "Do you want to do it again?" Lan Zhan's jade-like skin was no longer so jade-like. His skin flushed from his forehead all the way down to his neck and into the teeny vee of skin allowed by his robes. A 'yes', then. Wei WuXian sighed and thought hard about what Lan WangJi admitted to knowing about: his suicide.

"Your spirit back then..." he started. "Well, it was telling the truth. I've lived this already. Well, not this exactly because I've changed the way I did things. But the Wen civilians at the work camps? In my other lifetime, I saved them." He rubbed at his nose at the partial lie. "Well, I didn't actually save them. I stole them after a friend killed a bunch of the guards. We lived in peace for a while, and then...." And then. And then I lost control and killed a bunch of people and got my people killed, and then I blew myself up. He glossed over the bad parts with, "And then a bunch more people were killed, so I destroyed the Stygian Tiger Amulet and killed myself in the process." Not a total lie, but not the truth either. "The souls in Purgatory said I could come back and do it all over again. Maybe I can save my people this time."

"Your people are Wens?" Lan WangJi's voice was somehow clear of the resentment that usually accompanied that surname. But then, maybe it always was clear of resentment? He hadn't acted aggressively towards them in the other life when he visited the Burial Mounds.

Wei WuXian nodded. "Wen Qing and her brother, Wen Ning. A bunch of their extended family. Including A'Yuan."

"So what did you do differently this time?" Somehow Lan WangJi seemed to be accepting the whole time travel/dead returned to life idea very calmly. "Was it related to your Core?"

"No. The Core thing happened before I returned. But since I wanted to keep my friends safe, I... found them and told them about the war and Wen Qing hid her family from her uncle and from the allies. I thought, I hoped, that the work camp at Qiongqi Path wouldn't hold civilians again, since the people who were there the first time were now not captured by the Jin? They just took other civilians. So... instead of stealing them again, I decided to ask for your help. I thought.... Well, I don't know what I was thinking, really, other than you have a strong sense of justice and maybe you'd be able to help me figure this problem out without so many people dying this time."

"Mmm," was pretty much the response Wei WuXian was expecting. He did not expect to hear, "I would have helped you before, too, I think."

"By the time you found out, Wen Ning was already dead. The guards were already dead. Even ZeWu-Jun thought I should be brought in for punishment." That might be a truth and it might be false. But there were Lan guards killed that night, so.... It was probably the truth. "You didn't offer your assistance, and I didn't ask for it. It was my grave I was digging; I couldn't ask you to grab a shovel and jump in it with me."