Some people build their own coffins to cope.
This isn't necessarily a good time for their partners or family, especially when no one knows what they're coping with.
A songxuexiao reincarnation AU.
Mobei Jun is big, Shang Qinghua is small. At least until they get their clothes off.
Xue Yang is alone in Yi City; he has Xiao Xingchen's body, his fragmented soul, and the fierce corpse of his erstwhile partner to kick around, but none of this is enough to stop him missing Xiao Xingchen himself. A late night gives him the idea for something that might help.
Xue Yang is apprenticing in demonic cultivation in the Burial Mounds; Wen Qing is trying to keep Wei Wuxian's body and soul together; Wei Wuxian is pretending that everything is all right when it clearly isn't. They all need to blow off a little steam.
"What's wrong, Jiang Cheng?" he asks suddenly, looking up from his bowl.
Jiang Cheng just meets his gaze, not even lifting an arm to convey, Where do you want me to start?
"You've been... staring at me, this whole evening, shidi," Wei Wuxian adds, more slowly. The colour in his cheeks didn't fade after the bath, and now, with the food and candles, the room's got stuffy and he's even pinker than before. It should look healthy but it only highlights the shadows under his eyes, so deep they look like grooves in the skin.
"No, I haven't," he says automatically, and shoves a meatball in his mouth.
Jiang Cheng meets up with Wei Wuxian after Baoshan Sanren restores his golden core, just as they planned. After this, surely things are going to go right, right?
Xue Yang was left for dead by the side of the road to a nowhere town—only when he was rescued did he realise he'd been dropped into the perfect revenge against his nemesis, Xiao Xingchen. Everything was going perfectly... until another exile from the Jin Sect wandered down that same road.
Canon divergence with Mo Xuanyu in Yi City, written for the Songxuexiao Exchange 2020.
Xue Yang is sewing. In the indecisive light of a single candle, the seam he's reinforcing wavers back and forth, merging with his fingertips until the stab of the needle separates them suddenly out: the thing that bleeds and hurts, and the thing that lets the sharp point pass through and through it, apathetic.
A character study of Xue Yang and his sewing skills, through the years in Yi City.
Two months after the night hunt at Phoenix Mountain, Lan Wangji visits Yunmeng to try, once again, to convince Wei Wuxian to come back to Gusu with him. Wei Wuxian is getting drunk with resentful energy for company, and would rather mess around with the esteemed Hanguang-jun than confront literally anything in his life.
Neither one of them expected their meeting to go like this.
He stood up and held his sheets of paper in front of him, imitating a month-by-month calendar bound at the top. Damn it, Nie Huaisang wasn't going to let this gnomic little vice-general embarrass him, not when he was actually an artistic genius.
"Imagine the appeal, to both the cultivation world and mundane society," he said grandly, "of The Most Recognisable Asses of the Sunshot Campaign, in calendar format!"