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For once, Wei Wuxian had to drink a soup, and did not want to.
No, that was a lie — he wanted to forget, so bad, he wanted to drink the famous Meng Po soup, hot like the tears that crumbled the wall of the bones of her husband who had been taken from her, but he wanted to see Lan Wangji more. Maybe that was why Meng Po, the once young and maidenly Meng Jiangnu, for all her kindness and mercy in allowing others to forget who they loved so much it hurt, never quite forgot her own.
So, crying, he sat, and watched his own sorry face in the reflection of the soup.
He did try to make conversation a little, once he felt a little less broken, a little less desperate, and only bored — which was somehow worse, really.
“Meng Po ah, Meng Po,” he said, wondering if he focused hard enough, a lotus could burble up into his soup, and she could finally answer the question, moved to sentiment by such a miracle display of beauty. “Did you think that you still remember his face? Your 大丈夫。Your husband. Your man.”
Meng Po did not say words, but said, Shut up and drink your soup.
“White would look good on you, Meng Po, but you look good already,” he told her. “It’s depressing looking, but it’s also a mourning color, and you’re already in the land of the dead anyway, so it’s thematic, don’t you think? You might even be a novelty at this point. Wear a nice shade of white, with a splash of blue, and you’ll look like the sky in the mortal world. Maybe a nice cloud pattern, to drive it home. It’s so dark here, Meng Po, I can’t stand it. Did you know lotuses only grow with a lot of sunlight? I should teach you. You should also grow lotuses here.”
This is why Yanwang pawned you off to me, she sighed.
“No, it’s because I really want to drink your delicious soup, but you won’t let me.” He reached for his soup. She slapped his hand away. “See?”
She turned her back on him, busying herself with ignoring him. He reached for the bowl several more times, waving his fingers over its surface, watching the patterns his shadows created in it, in the greater shadow of the bruise-colored dome this plane of the underworld was in, and even sniffed it like it was one of his fine wines.
But he never did drink it, did he?
There were some days when Meng Po really did get annoyed at him, and punished him with the best thing he had ever received in his death — and his life too. She would banish him to a room wafting with the scent of lotus rain, a fine drizzle frosting the endless water outside his wooden doors, so warm and sounding of Lian Hua Wu that although it hurt, he did not mind remembering.
During those days — those long, rainy days that were more likely months — was when he wanted to drink soup the most.
The Yunmeng lakes were pure silver when the sun did not show, and Wei Wuxian counted his blessings that he was able to return home in a different way after so many lonely nights he had spent utterly unable to cry in the Burial Mounds.
So he did his best to ask Meng Po about her husband often and well. If she one day answered, Wei Wuxian would fill his curiosity at last. Until then, she would become annoyed with him and banish him into that little cloudy dream of a room, where he would slide open the door and sit at the edge of the water, dipping his toes in the mist.
Ghosts are supposed to haunt humans in peaceful places. In this place of misty eyes, Wei Wuxian found everyone who was still alive. A lotus more violet than pink. The freshwater of the rain for a quick moment tasting salty against his lips. And though he was still, he realized he was swimming. He was swimming in a cloud.
Mist is clouds. He remembered their shape.
He tasted the name on his lips, wanted to prod it one last time. “You’re here even when I don’t want you to be here,” he mumbled. “You really have to stop following me, you know that? You should live your life.”
But the mist never answered. He wasn’t there.
Meng Po called him back, but Wei Wuxian didn’t answer. His head was cocked, looking for the formless shape of his lost love.
—
He didn’t want to remember their names. If only Meng Po had let him drink her delicious soup! He had stared and stared at it, but even when he had the chance to, he had not drunk it.
Meng Po called him again
“Whenever I go back,” Wei Wuxian mourned, “I will drink it for real this time. Forget your names.”
His voice came out a soft whine in this place. As it was the only sound he heard, he felt — mist gathered around his ankles — that it was a musical sound, and the most familiar thing here. He yelled out into the peace and loved the way his own voice bounced off the water in play rings of sound. He sang a lot of songs, that often contained a lot of names: The girls in Yunmeng, the temple mantras of Gusu, the merchants’ song as they loaded their carts in Qinghe. He even whistled. It filled him with a familiar embrace, liking sitting in the shade of a tree on a particularly gloomy day. Like a story that he could tell, if only he would bother to tell it. 陈情, he thought, and whistled a tune that could wake the dead.
But never the names of those beings like Meng Po and him.
The world dematerialized little by little. The lotuses became petals. The water became droplets. And yet, Wei Wuxian could still name the way water fell from the sky — rain.
—
He thought of Niang.
She was shining with colors. He was in her arms. She chattered gently in his ear.
Wei Wuxian had all but forgotten the sound of her voice. He wondered — “Once I have drunk the soup, would this be the feeling of being born again?”
Then he remembered he was dead.
That refocus shifted him, and he remembered another thing from that precious time he’d let go of before anything else. The first sacrifice he had made, Wei Wuxian thought with a hollow ache that ran from chest to stomach, had been memories of Niang and Die.
Die wore dark clothes and smiled a lot. Wei Wuxian — A-Ying — would bat at the purple lines at the edges of his clothes, and when he got another year older, trace them with his clean little hands over them.
“A-Ying,” Die would say, the smile in a mere two syllables. A-Ying would cling to it for months after Die died, only to let it go on a desperate night full of cold snow and snarling teeth.
And then he forgot. He tried to forget, in order to live with less fear, to survive, but in the end he forgot the warmest things about his parents and all he remembered was teeth.
Meng Po was calling him.
—
The first time she offered him the soup, he had laughed. “I bet this isn’t as good as my shijie’s,” he had joked. And then he remembered his shijie, and could not laugh anymore. He reached for the soup. He would probably never taste Shijie’s cooking again.
Meng Po was calling him.
—
Wei Wuxian forgot to count the bones that shattered in every part of his body. He opened his eyes to rain on silver mist, and touched the too-violet lotus gently. It seemed to warm on his skin.
“I promise you I left your vengeance in good hands,” he whispered. “I promise my Xiao Shishu will keep them safe.”
He did not say who they were, because then it would come with the pain of how unfair it was that he had died.
Life isn’t fair. He reached back again for Die and Niang.
He had forgotten a lot in his short life. But no matter what, even after that clean sweep of his memories of Die and Niang — in order to be able to smile, though he had lost everything, in the cold-stricken homeless nights — there was that fair memory of riding on Die’s shoulders while Niang laughed from the back of a donkey. Nothing could seem to get rid of it.
He imagined words Die could have said with that voice; a memory that, now that he was dead, he was remembering. “My Caihong,” he had called Niang. “Let’s live a wonderful life as free as the clouds.”
Wei Wuxian remembered A-Ying. He reached back, a huge lurching sensation in his stomach desperate for closeness to his parents. A closeness that even while he was alive, he would forget was there until someone brought up the name — “Cangse Sanren.”
Cangse Sanren —
His eyes widened, and suddenly he could name the mist at his feet, that held him so securely even as his mind went far away.
“Wei Ying,” sang some distant chords. “Wei Ying.”
—
That sensation in his stomach lurched to a stop, as that precious safety slipped past his fingers once more. He scrabbled the cool, damp floorboards beneath his fingers as he became overwhelmed by the memories of his life, which piled and pressed on the memories of Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze until they were so buried he couldn’t see them anymore.
A call. “Wei Ying.”
Falling. The memory of falling. As he stumbled onto the misty floorboards, he fell not onto the floor of his house on the lake, but on the lake itself. Falling did not hurt. When he came back up to the surface, the mist greeted him, as though it had dipped down from the clouds themselves.
They had thrown him into Luan Zang Gang. He had died. And yet he had not allowed himself to let go of that place until he found his Xiao Shishu. Until he had given Xiao Shishu all the knowledge the Yin energy had granted him. Until Xiao Shishu disappeared, hale and whole, from Luan Zang Gang altogether.
Only then had Wei Wuxian let go, and passed on. Here was his last step, and he could pass into the cycle of reincarnation.
Meng Po was calling him.
—
The house disappeared. But the mist seemed to stick to his ankles. “Wei Ying,” asked Lan Wangji, and Wei Wuxian regretted so much. “Where are you?”
The sound of Inquiry filled his spine, crept up his ribcage, warmed him from the inside.
It did more than this soup of forgetfulness ever could. He stared at the proffered bowl of steaming liquid, quite frozen and realizing that she was giving him the chance to cleanse everything and move on again.
Meng Po sighed. “You begged me for days to give you the soup,” she said. “The moment I did, you refused to drink.
“You thirsted for it. I could see the 渴望 in your eyes. But all you did when it was in front of you was play with your food.”
Is this what it means to miss your husband? You must have lost him so young when they took him away.
Wei Wuxian felt the tears well in his eyes. The soup must taste of warm salt. He could smell it through the tears on his lips.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji asked again, desperately, from the world of the living. “Are you well?”
Wei Wuxian shut his eyes, and pondered their lost chances, the time they should have had, and the realization that he loved Lan Wangji.
As he thought, he felt himself return to Lan Wangji’s side. Wei Wuxian was Xiao Xingchen, and he had successfully given Luan Zang Gang to him. Through Xiao-shishu’s eyes, he heard Inquiry fill his mind, the question more desperate, “Are you well? Are you happy? Are you in pain? Are you at peace?”
Yes, Wei Wuxian thought, but I miss you. I never got to say it.
He raised his fingers in the air, knocking the bowl from Meng Po’s hands. She tutted. Wei Wuxian responded, at long last, to that precious memory asking and asking only if his spirit was well:
“谢谢你。对不起。我等你。”
Meng Po sighed, and Wei Wuxian felt a meek, hopeful smile swim onto his face even as he slipped away.
When he awakens, it is in a little house on a lake with the sound of rain. The sun has been here; the water is still warm. Mist wreathes itself comfortably over the lotuses.
There is nothing else. Wei Wuxian holds the mist in the palm of his hand, and waits.