Fluffy WangXian Oneshots

Bigger Pockets of Happiness

A year has passed by.

A year...three hundred and sixty five days without WangJi returning to Cloud Recesses.

Lan Qiren is aware of this.

He has been counting.

Not obviously...not openly.

But in his head, there was a calendar that marked off each day as it passed.

He had thought, on that day when Wei WuXian was leaving with his precious nephew, that the Yilling Patriarch had done something to his WangJi.

Maybe a curse, maybe a spell.

But WangJi's eyes were clear...and full of love when he looked at that heathen.

Even Lan Qiren had seen it.

Something so pure, so vivid, so alive...that the whispers of it still remained, following him like a shadow wherever he went.

All over Cloud Recesses, in the classroom where he loved to teach, in the Great Hall where he used to see WangJi marking papers...in the library where WangJi used to spend his free time...in the Discipline Hall...where he had suffered those blows, each one a testament to how strongly he felt about...about that boy.

When Wei WuXian had died, Lan Qiren couldn't quite believe it.

He had hoped, and prayed, that it would be the last they ever heard of him.

But WangJi had spiralled out of control and fallen into the depths of despair, mourning that other, and Lan Qiren was well aware that if it had not been for the arrival of Lan SiZhui...he might have lost WangJi then.

Still, he refused to think about that time, when regret and guilt prevailed, festering away inside him like a wound refusing to heal. How could he have punished WangJi so brutally, his own flesh and blood?

Why had he?

He could tell himself that it was because WangJi had to be made into an example, to teach others that there was no favouritism in the Lan Sect, that rules were made to abide by, and the punishment was worse for lax discipline.

But his mind did not allow for lies...not when he knew the truth.

Not when he refused to acknowledge it.

He had been trying to blast WangJi's feelings away, fear was his main reason for inflicting such a harsh sentence. He was scared of losing WangJi, his nephew, his pride and joy, the second piece of two he had remaining of his brother.

And yet in the end, he still lost WangJi.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, still stuck somewhere in his throat.

As the days passed from warm sunny afternoons to golden fall days, and then to the crystal whites of winter, Lan Qiren realised he was always cold.

The blood in his veins was turning into ice and he had no remedy for it...or perhaps he did, and his suffering was merely a result of his refusal to take the medicine.

Forgiveness.

How many times was that word, or something like it, mentioned in their four thousand rules?

At least five hundred times. One eighth.

And Lan Qiren knew only too well that he was guilty of neglecting it.

As the winter passed and new buds grew on the trees around him, green leaves bursting forth against his will, thawing his frozen heart, Lan Qiren began to understand something.

Lan WangJi was never coming back.

The shock of those words in his head, made him sit down immediately.