their royal profusion
Part two of mixed metaphors
When Jiang Cheng broke up with him, Lan Wangji’s world imploded.
It was only fitting, Lan Wangji supposed, because when Jiang Cheng had asked him out, his world had exploded, into a riot of color.
Truly I lived as in black and white before I first laid eyes on you.
It had been in the first minute of his first class on the first day of his junior year, at his new high school in this California suburb so different from what he’d known on the East Coast. Yet all homesickness and discontent had been driven from his mind when he’d noticed the brilliant-eyed, perfect-skinned, small-waisted boy sitting one desk over and three desks up. Lan Wangji had seen the tiny waist first, and his body had done something complicated and unprecedented in response which had so discomposed him that when the boy had turned and revealed a profile both sculpted and delicate, and a skin like glass yet also like cream, Lan Wangji had gasped aloud. The sound had been as a summoning, because the boy had turned further around, and met Lan Wangji’s eyes, and whatever he made of what his own eyes like stars beheld turned them wide and wondrous.
Thus had been born the palest shades of purple.
Lan Wangji had done the only thing he could, in order to keep breathing: he’d looked disdainfully away.
He hadn’t let himself look toward the boy—Jiang Cheng, he’d learned upon roll call, and taken the name home to whisper into his pillow upon nights, and stifle against his wrist upon dawns, all unknowing until made all at once aware upon an orgasm not only exquisite but also amethyst that each invocation was further empurpling the world—again, until the day came in mid October when the object of his fantasies both fevered and sweet had approached him, and asked to speak to him, and beseeched him with those eyes like stars.
“My name is Jiang Cheng,” he’d said, “and I’m in love with you. I know I am, because I’d die for you. My brother told me not to say it so plain, but I decided to speak my heart. Lan Wangji: you have my heart. What will you do with it? Will you reject it, and by doing so break it? Or will you accept it, and have me for your boyfriend, and make me the happiest boy in the world?”
But the world had exploded into a riot of purples.
“I knew your name,” Lan Wangji said into their royal profusion. Lilacs and lavenders—violets and veronicas—plums and amaranths and aubergines—he gazed through them, past them, around them, into those eyes like stars.
But then he could say nothing more.
But then he found himself saying it all.
“I love you too,” he said. “I loved you at first sight, because you are the most beautiful boy in the world. You have my heart, and I will cherish yours. Yes. I will have you for my boyfriend, and make you as happy as you are beautiful.”
Those eyes like stars had shined like stars.
“Kiss me,” Jiang Cheng said. “Say my name, and kiss me.”
“Jiang Cheng,” Lan Wangji said, and kissed his boyfriend.
If the following weeks had been the happiest of his life—how could they have been, if he’d known what heartbreak would follow?
If Jiang Cheng’s brother hated him—for all his show of warmth, Lan Wangji knew Wei Wuxian hated him—how could it yet more than barely dim his happiness that he was dating the most precious boy in the world?
If Wei Wuxian dared to yell at the most precious boy in the world, on Thanksgiving night, and flounce off, and slam his door—
“No, Wangji,” Jiang Cheng protested. “He’s never like this. Something’s very wrong. I have to find out what it is. It may take a while—would you mind waiting in my room while I go to him? I know you’d rather not try to pass the time downstairs with my parents.”
Yes. Lan Wangji would mind. He minded very much.
He hesitated for only a moment, before taking his precious boyfriend’s perfect face in his hands.
“Jiang Cheng,” he said, very gently. “I do not want to wait in your room while you soothe your brother for overreacting to seeing me kiss you. I want to be in your room with you, on your bed, and I want to kiss you some more, and touch you, and make you feel good. That is what I want. Tell me: what do you want? Do you not want more kisses, and touches, and pleasure? May I not give them to you? Can your brother not wait? Your brother, who hates me? Who has continually set little traps for you, over the past weeks, to make you choose between him and me? You have chosen him, Jiang Cheng, every time. Every single time. I want you to choose me, tonight. I want you to choose me, now.”
But Jiang Cheng was pulling away.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, both passionate and distracted. “My brother doesn’t hate you. He was the one who made me see that I love you. He was the one who encouraged me to approach you. He would never conceive of making me choose between you and him, when he knows how much I love you both. I don’t understand, Wangji. But I don’t have time to try to understand you now. I have to go to him this very moment. He’s hurting, my gege is hurting, and I have to find out why, and I have to make it stop. If you don’t want to wait in my room, then you might as well go home.”
This is the beginning of the end of happiness.
“Very well,” Lan Wangji said. “I will go home.”
But Jiang Cheng was already knocking on Wei Wuxian’s door.
So Lan Wangji went home.
He woke the next morning to a gloomy sky.
He woke to a text from Jiang Cheng: I’d like to see you. We need to talk.
When they met, under the gloomy sky, Jiang Cheng broke up with him.
“It’s not you,” he said. “It’s me.”
That, then, was the end of happiness.
Lan Wangji got to keep the purples that painted his world.
But what good were colors in an imploded world?
“Wangji,” Lan Xichen said, one night one week later.
“Xiongzhang.”
They were in Lan Xichen’s room, a single on the Row.
Lan Wangji had unburdened his heart—so why did it still hurt?
“Stay here tonight,” his brother said, and kissed him on the temple. “I don’t want you going back home, where you’ll have to put up a facade for Uncle. He can see through it, of course—you know as well as I do he’s been seeing through it all week long—but, for tonight, let’s spare you the effort of pretending you’re fine and him the effort of holding back asking you why you’re not. I’ll call him. You get ready for bed.”
So it was that Lan Wangji, who had come seeking solace, found truth instead.
It’s not you.
It’s him.
He woke in the deep night, disoriented until he remembered where he was: on a futon, in Lan Xichen’s room, on Stanford campus.
Yet what had woken him wasn’t his brother’s slow breaths from the bed across the room.
What had woken Lan Wangji was the noise of voices on the other side of the wall against which the futon was laid flush—the sound of murmurs in the room next door which Lan Xichen had mentioned was empty.
“Well, not technically,” he’d said. “But the junior who supposedly occupies it is never here. I met him only once, and briefly, and I didn’t get his name.”
I know his name, Lan Wangji thought, when one of the murmurs coalesced into words.
“Precious boy. My precious Jiang Cheng. Will you be good for your gege, A-Cheng? Will you hold very still?”
His name is Wei Wuxian.
The voice in response remained a murmur—until it became a moan.
And he has his hands on the boy I love.
On the other side of the paper-thin wall, Jiang Cheng moaned again—
And again—
And didn’t stop.
And he is pleasuring the boy I love.
For the first time in his sixteen years of life on the earth Lan Wangji saw red.