Chapter Text
Once a generation, the Ouyang Clan compiled their famous indices. This census tracked the changing state of the factions that comprised the cultivation world over the centuries. The Ouyang Lists marked the size of clans, the disposition of their territories, the talents of their scholars, and the politically-significant matter of prominent young cultivators’ marriageability. This ranking of the relative eligibility of cultivation world’s gentlemen was the subject of great popular interest. Ouyang did sometimes find occasion to alter their rankings after publication, but as they were compiled with great initial care, such amendments were infrequent. Only quite serious misapprehensions or changes in a cultivator’s circumstances merited a reconsideration.
The Ouyang senior cultivator in charge of this aspect of the indices was thus rather surprised to receive an emphatic letter from her chosen second, Lan Wangji, that dared tell her her business. Just as though she hadn’t ranked the boy’s father before him! She’d placed him third, and his brother Qiren fifth—young Fengmian between them, with honest and sweet (but blunt-nosed, hot-blooded and ill-starred) Nie Chengwen behind and Jin er gongzi coming after, to bring up the rear of the Great Sects’ contingent. Lan Wangji was, of course, a polite boy, who merited his place. Thus his pertness came wrapped in silk.
“On the third day of the eighth month, your vassal Lan Wangji obediently salutes you—”
Ouyang Shujing snorted. ‘Obedient’ her old bones. Apparently, little Wangji believed she had “made a grave error” in ranking the Jiang’s ward, Wei Wuxian. Ouyang Shujing could understand if Lan Wangji had written to protest at a boy without property’s being placed so close to himself in the calculation—if Wangji felt that their very proximity devalued his own birth and achievements, and might thus blight his prospects. But no! Wangji evidently thought Jin Zixuan, the pearl of Jinlintai, nothing to Wei Wuxian, and would have Jiang’s penniless chief disciple elevated further still! The idea was ludicrous.
“You have not met him,” the letter insisted, “and where Wei Ying is concerned, to meet him directly is all. Some riches admit of no counting. The points in his favour are too manifold to list, but include his earnest purpose, his lightness of heart, his care for others, his grace—”
Shujing rolled her eyes and reached for her tea. This really was above her pay-grade. (And it seemed that for all his merits, Lan Wangji might be far less ‘eligible’ for marriage to young ladies than she’d previously appreciated.)
It took many letters and a great deal of conniving for Lan Wangji to lure Jiang’s head disciple to a night hunt bordering on Ouyang Territory, some months after Wei Wuxian had left Cloud Recesses in moderate disgrace. Lan Wangji was initially annoyed that Wei Wuxian had brought his irritating brother with him, but then considered that the contrast between them might prove instructive.
“I fear we must tarry with you for the night,” Lan Wangji said to Ouyang’s second disciple, who hastened to assure these important guests that their staying with the family would truly be no trouble.
“We wouldn’t have had to, if Lan er gongzi hadn’t gotten us so lost in the marsh,” Jiang Wanyin snorted.
He opened his mouth to complain further, but cut off abruptly with a yelp. Wei Wuxian had whacked his brother’s shins with his bow behind their backs, never letting his own pleasant expression falter. For his part, Wei Wuxian had been far too surprised and pleased by Lan Wangji’s invitation to hunt with him to mind a little (admittedly unexpected) clumsiness with directions.
Wei Wuxian had a bath before supper. When he’d finished, he was surprised to find Lan Wangji knocking at his door. Lan Wangji looked over Wei Wuxian’s fresh clothes (very presentable spare robes from his qiankun) and nodded his approval.
“Are you refreshed?” Lan Wangji asked. “At your best?”
Wei Wuxian gave him a confused smile. “How could I be otherwise, when my favourite person’s come to see me?”
A flush crept across the tips of Lan Wangji’s ears, but he nodded decisively. “On good form,” he muttered, seemingly to himself, as though that had been an answer. “Come; there is a lady you must win over.”
Wei Wuxian surveyed him. “Care to tell me why?”
Lan Wangji shook his head and led him out. “Not yet.”
“A mystery, then. Interesting.” Wei Wuxian obligingly followed him, adjusting the fall of his sleeves to make himself more presentable. “And what will you give me, if I manage it?” he asked.
“Anything you like,” Lan Wangji said. His lip twisted wryly at the corner. “Indeed, all I have.”
Wei Wuxian laughed. “I’m not so greedy as that. I’d settle for your being just a little impressed with me, Lan Zhan.”
Lan Wangji stopped outside a certain door and knocked, turning properly to face his companion. “Wei Ying. I am always deeply impressed by you.”
The effect of these words on Wei Wuxian was instantaneous. His skin flushed, his eyes brightened, and he looked every inch what Lan Wangji thought him: the most charming boy born inside a decade.
A maid answered and took Wei Wuxian, thus attired in his best expression, to speak with Ouyang Shujing. Shujing continued to watch him carefully all through dinner. She saw how the boy worked carefully to soothe his sharp-edged brother, to endear himself to the ladies of the house and to include taciturn Lan Wangji in the conversation.
Afterwards, Wei Wuxian was shocked to discover he’d somehow risen on the list of eligible bachelors, on account of being (according to the letter he received to inform him of his elevation) “as charming in person as I was promised”, and “owing to new information I have recently received as to another candidate’s general eligibility.”
Wei Wuxian answered a request from Lan Wangji for another hunt, chiefly so that he could apologise for somehow stealing his friend’s place on the list, demoting both Lan Wangji and Jin Zixuan a rank in the process. (Ouyang Shujing would never say it, but that poor gongzi, rich, handsome and faultlessly well-mannered as the boy was—provided nothing even the slightest bit unusual occurred to upset Zixuan's careful ideas of propriety—had all the personal enchantment of a turnip.)
“I should never mind being beneath you,” Lan Wangji said in answer, when they met in a private dining room he’d taken at an inn in the town reporting a disturbance. A second later he flushed, discreetly biting his lip rather than awkwardly attempting to rephrase that.
Wei Wuxian blinked shrewd eyes at him. “At Baling, you had me speak to an Auntie. You wouldn’t quite say why.”
Lan Wangji nodded. “The Elders of my clan agreed that I could choose any spouse I liked, so long as that person was unrelated to me and considered more eligible by an esteemed independent authority.”
They had, of course, been being sarcastic. The Elders had only meant to assert their right to long discussions of appropriateness and dowries. Lan Wangji had not appreciated their flippancy, but he would take it. He had it on good authority—from is brother’s own mouth—that Lan Zongzhu would hold the Elders to precisely what they’d agreed to. ‘Be careful of idle words, lest they turn serious.’ Surely Lan’s own masters had not flouted such an important precept?
Lan Wangji drew a deep breath, screwed his courage more than any hunt had ever required him to and arrested his companion’s eyes with his own intent gaze.
“Wei Ying, you have surpassed me in an objective reckoning. And yet I dare presume to ask if you will have me.”
Wei Wuxian goggled at him. Sputtering and bewildered, he made a strange squawking noise. Perhaps, if she could have seen him like this, Ouyang Shujing would have reconsidered her high opinion of him. In Lan Wangji’s more nearly-concerned and more careful estimation, nothing on earth could have shaken Wei Wuxian’s position at the very summit of a list that contained only his name.
“No! What? Well, well of course I—Lan Zhan, you!” Wei Wuxian burst out laughing, seeming not to know what to do with himself. He clutched his own sides; he threw himself at Lan Wangji. He gasped into Lan Wangji’s neck, “I can’t believe you—”
And suddenly he was crying, and then apologising, saying he’d no idea why, and really, really? And yes. Of course, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
“What a lot of trouble you went to to get me,” Wei Wuxian laughed, after they’d gulped down wine and a much-watered-down cup of something that had once been. The thing done, privately, and consummated: any other celebration or contestation rendered an after-the-fact formality.
“I would,” Lan Wangji admitted, “have gone through far more trouble than this, if necessary.”
Alternatively, post-canon Lan Wangji has massive beef with some seemingly-random Ouyang auntie. Wei Wuxian observes that so far as he knows, this is one person who’s never even tried to kill him. Lan Wangji must have wholly unrelated issues with her, but what could they be? Lan Wangji admits that it is about Wei Wuxian, and classism, and a long, long fight that he and this elderly woman once got into about Wei Wuxian’s unduly low bachelor-ranking. Wei Wuxian finds this so stupid and adorable that he can hardly believe it’s real.