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deercountry2022-12-10 08:35 pm
baiyueguang) wrote in deercountry2022-12-10 08:35 pmEntry tags:
baiyueguang) wrote in deercountry2022-12-10 08:35 pm
Winter Mourning
Of Brothers and Brothers of Brothers (Closed to Nie Huaisang)
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Strange question, Huaisang thinks before he has any other cogent thought, here in this place in Qinghe he has no cause to question, not in the first few seconds of this memory— he is standing right here in the doorway, after all. It sinks in after that: the familiar walls and colors of Qinghe, not of Jin Guangyao's home in Trench; the notes of the flute, which surely Xichen-ge doesn't already need to play again unless those two others have fallen down a well or something; and—
Da-ge. Sitting there, whole, alive.
Huaisang doesn't leave the doorway; he can't look away from his brother for a long moment, hardly catching the entire conversation he and Xichen are having while his mind races to place this day, this particular argument, when had he not left his room...?
In the end it doesn't matter, he thinks. Mingjue is alive, although Huaisang can see the red of his eyes and the tension burning at the edges of him even as he sits there enveloped by Xichen's music; da-ge is here and alive, and Huaisang lingers in the doorway as if moving too hastily will break whatever spell this is.
When he finally looks at Xichen it's with a frown, after Mingjue says that entirely uncalled-for thing about Lan Wangji. He isn't sure what he's supposed to do here, just wait and listen? Speak up and see if the moment will shatter, the subject changed?
After a moment he moves, against his better judgment, to stand behind his brother and drop a hand onto Mingjue's shoulder and curl his fingers in the fabric there, knuckles white. He stares down at him for another moment, then looks at Xichen. Mingjue is dead; da-ge is gone, but Huaisang feels he's owed the rest of this conversation, however it ends.
Frankly he isn't sure if Xichen can see or hear him, but he still adds into the silence, "Go on, er-ge."
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"Have you told him…?"
"How can I?! He's holed himself up in his room like some weeping concubine. Over fripperies and trinkets!"
Xichen doesn't remark that a closed door has never stopped Mingjue in the past, though his pursed lips make it plain on his face.
"Da-ge –"
"...Don't."
"--You need to tell him–"
"I said –"
"-- It's killing you."
You could hear a pin drop in the silence that passes after that. Both their eyes fall to 'it'; Baxia thrumming with resentment, but otherwise still.
"It will kill you," Xichen pleads. "And Huaisang won't be ready at this rate. He won't understand. There's only so much the Purification Tone can do and its effects have diminished greatly."
"You think I don't know that…?!"
"I think you are unable to accept that, and Huaisang is the one who is going to suffer for it!"
It's Mingjue's turn to look stricken, and Xichen persists.
"We both know what it is to be underprepared for the role of sect leader," he implores, and Mingjue looks as though he'd prefer if Xichen would yell or get angry, but he persists in trying to be reasonable about all of this when nothing about this can be begin to be considered such.
"It's not too late to reconcile with your brother."
Mingjue makes an incredulous sound. "And which one is that, Xichen?"
The argument continues like this for a long time, an endless back and forth of Xichen pleading with Mingjue to apologize to Huaisang and Mingjue needling about Meng Yao and Xue Yang's head, clearly completely fixated on this subject while Xichen is trying to steer it back to preparing Huaisang for the role of Sect Leader. It's a bit like watching the wind try to argue with a brick wall; relentless and unending but making little to no dent. Eventually, Xichen has to concede; they are going in endless circles, and by the time an awkward silence falls, they both look frustrated.
Mingjue is watching him with a deep frown furrowed into his brow. Eventually, he lets out a frustrated sigh.
"You'll watch out for Huaisang when it's... over. You'll do this for me."
"Of course, da-ge."
"Good. I don't want Meng Yao getting his hooks any deeper in him."
Xichen takes a deep breath trying not to let his exasperation show at every conversation with Nie Mingjue turning back to Jin Guangyao (it's like a dog worrying a bone - he wishes Mingjue would focus on anything else), but it's as much ground as he can expect Mingjue to concede. He'll take the little victories where he can; at least he's acknowledging the end that's coming up even faster than Xichen expected and that Huaisang will need all the support he can get.
He excuses himself for the evening, promising to play once more in the morning, the memory fading around the edges when he steps outside, striding past the blackened smear in the training grounds where Nie Mingjue had burned his little brother's treasures barely a week prior.
A familiar silhouette is there, staring pensively at the soot and bits of debris that may have once been a fan here, or a bit of tapestry there. Whatever the fire hadn't claimed, the wind, rain, and endless foot traffic to the training grounds had left scattered and ruined.
"A-Yao," Xichen greets. "You're early."
Their polite chatter gradually fades with the rest of the memory, the Unclean Realm shifting into the siheyuan and Xichen comes back to himself holding the Winter Mourning wreath and conversing with empty air.
No, not completely empty.
"Huaisang...? ...When did you...? Was I asleep?"
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He doesn't listen to some of it, wandering away from da-ge back to the doorway and peering out, just to see Qinghe for a moment. He can see the smear of blackened stone and oh, he realizes, it's near that day. He wonders if he could make it all the way to his own room and take a look at himself still sulking in there, but there's no point now; no one listened to him back then and no one can hear him now, so he'll stay here, where da-ge is.
"You'll watch out for Huaisang when it's... over. You'll do this for me." His heart tightens; he turns back around.
"Of course, da-ge."
"Good. I don't want Meng Yao getting his hooks any deeper in him." For fuck's sake.
Now, Huaisang leaves the room, tired of politics and arguments and being a piece to leverage between the three of them. He doesn't go far, lingering just outside the door, and so he watches when Xichen leaves and is looking at him in placid silence when the illusion of Qinghe lifts and Xichen is surprised to see him.
"No, er-ge, it wasn't that," he says, and wiggles a finger at the wreath Xichen is holding. "It was that."
A beat. He hasn't got any other ideas, so why not get right to the point, "Er-ge, did da-ge even see me at all?"
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He hates to speak ill of the dead, especially of the man who was, perhaps, Xichen's first real form of human connection beyond his own family. A friend, yes, and a comrade in an ugly war that had never truly felt like anything of import had been accomplished. Just a bunch of cultivators -- many barely of an age -- dead in all the various ways that matter. Wen Ruohan was defeated, of course, but Jin Guangshan was little better. He certainly did a fine job of prettying up his dominion over the cultivation world, but tyranny is still tyranny whether it comes at the end of sword or honeyed words laced with slow poison.
He doesn't want to talk about what Mingjue had become in his decline. He wants to only remember the good of him, press those moments like flowers between the stale pages of memory and let everything else blow away like so much mental dust and detritus.
Lan Xichen doesn't want to think ill of Nie Mingjue, the elder brother he loved and cherished, but when the man had done so much to Nie Huaisang and Jin Guangyao (and does he not also love and cherish them? Does he not owe them more than gentle platitudes?), he must face this reality.
"I think in some respects, he did."
He speaks softly, but there is a sharpness to his words. Silk wrapped around steel.
"I think it terrified him that you would and could walk a different path. I think it hurt him too that he never felt like he had that same choice."
It's hard to be a big brother sometimes, trying to find a balance between one's own needs and one's duty.
"It didn't make what he did right, but I don't think da-ge was blind to Huaisang."
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Still. At least Lan Xichen cared about his brother. He'll take that, he supposes.
It doesn't stop him from scoffing once, louder than he intends— loud at all, a sudden noise of surprise and indignity, because, "Da-ge is an idiot who makes excuses! What did he think would happen, if— if he kept—"
He scoffs again and turns away, arms crossed and shoulders hunched. There are too many ways to end that sentence is the problem, from 'kept forcing me to learn something I hated' to 'kept using his stupid saber when he knew what it would do to him' to so many more, and the tangle of Huaisang's emotions serves as too great an impasse to actually pick any of them to say. He's angry, he decides: duty is made up and imaginary, and Mingjue was a sect leader, so if he didn't think he had a choice, whose fault was that, hmm? Whose?
"Da-ge is an idiot," he says again, quieter. May the ancestors take his blasphemy and suck on it. "And I am not a child. Someone— someone owed it to me to say something."
We've Turned Aside the Stories of Our Gentle Fall (Closed to Jin Guangyao)
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This, he realizes, is what he has to look forward to, when he leaves Trench--
--which makes it impossible for him not to choke in horror at what the desperate, bloodied creature he becomes begs of Lan Xichen, because no, no, of all the monstrous and selfish things he has done, or contemplated doing, never, never would he have believed himself capable of this. Yet there he is, wasting his last moments of life on a last, pathetic attempt to provoke Lan Xichen into rejecting him. It's easy for him to see this clumsy manipulation for what it is, because if Jin Guangyao knows nothing else about the scared, bitter animal that lives in his heart, he knows this: he will always opt to bite the hand that feeds him, rather than wait for it to abandon him first. He would rather go to his death vindicated and furious than shame himself further with heartbreak and betrayal.
And then Lan Xichen--stays.
("I would have gone with you, gladly." Lan Xichen had said those words not two months ago when they'd first reunited. Jin Guangyao hadn't realized just how true they'd been.)
He stays, eyes closed and resigned, until the Jin Guangyao of the future, his heart broken for entirely different reasons now, pushes him away to safety, seconds before Nie Mingjue's grey fingers ensnare his throat. Jin Guangyao's hand jerks up reflexively to his own neck and feels nothing, because this isn't happening to him. Not yet.
He jolts like he's been struck at the sound of his own neck snapping under that ferocious, bestial grip, and can't look away from the moment his body is hauled into the crypt by Nie Mingjue's corpse.
(The terrible truth is that Jin Guangyao did die afraid of Nie Mingjue, didn't he? He'd been afraid even before his actions in Wen Ruohan's court had irrevocably changed the trajectory of their relationship, and each trip he'd made to the Unclean Realm to soothe his eldest sworn brother's fractious spirit with Clarity or Cleansing had the potential to be his last, because during each visit, he courted death. Would this be the day that Da-ge finally took up Baxia and finished the job he'd started on the day the Sunshot Campaign ended, or would Jin Guangyao still be alive to fly back to Jinlintai and, again, plead with his father on Nie Mingjue's behalf for just a little more time?)
Well. It looks like none of it mattered in the end, did it? Not the pathetic concessions he'd bargained for with Jin Guangshan for Nie Mingjue's benefit, not the months spent pouring his limited spiritual reserves into Clarity and Cleansing, and worst of all, not the violation of Lan Xichen's trust by stealing the Song of Spirit Turmoil from the Cloud Recesses' Library Pavilion when he'd finally resigned himself to murder. And not even killing Nie Mingjue and scattering his remains to the four corners of the cultivation world had been enough to save him from his dear Da-ge's vengeance. Maybe there is some dark, absurd satisfaction for Jin Guangyao in seeing it confirmed before his eyes that he'd been able to accurately ascertain at least one of Mingjue's desires, even if no one else had believed it to be true: Nie Mingjue had wanted Jin Guangyao dead.
But not Lan Xichen.
With painstaking tenderness, Jin Guangyao gently lays Minshan's body back down, cradling his head so his friend can be spared one last insult by having his body treated roughly by the one who used him without apology until the moment of his death. Then, rising to his feet, pristine of any blood or dirt (because this memory cannot touch him physically, for all that it is savaging him in other ways), he moves swiftly across the temple floor towards Lan Xichen where he stands, stricken with shock. He steps neatly past Shuoyue, still slick with his own blood, and reaches up both hands to frame Lan Xichen's face.
"Er-ge. Lan Xichen, can you hear me? Can you see me?" It's a fucking miracle he can keep his voice steady after--after this, but he manages it.
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He watches with a look of despair as Wangji helps his laughing lover down from the sarcophagus, and wishes nothing more than to also be entombed within its confines, away from all of this. It would be easier than trying to hold back this tide of emotion breaking him apart at the seams. He should have died. He'd wanted to. Why hadn't Jin Guangyao allowed it...?
He watches and there are suddenly hands upon his cheeks, warm and familiar, and Jin Guangyao swims into view like some spectre. A ghost already and Xichen can only stare in disbelief.
(But no, he's too solid, too warm to be a ghost or a fierce corpse, but no one else seems to pay him any mind, the same way they aren't paying Xichen any mind, carrying on as if they aren't there at all.)
He touches the hands on his cheeks, eyes wide as though trying to take in every detail of Jin Guangyao, miraculously alive and whole in front of him. The memory fades around the edges as Xichen's own recollection of the past month and a half returns and briefly they are standing together on the steps of Guanyin Temple. Lan Qiren is talking to Xichen about sealing the coffin properly, Jin Ling is seated with his uncle, no longer crying but still red-faced and miserable. Nie Huaisang is nowhere to be found and Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are slipping away in the commotion as cultivators swarm the place to enjoy the spectacle of other people's lives in turmoil.
But Xichen only has eyes for the man in front of him now and the memory flickers into darkness.
"A-Yao," he says, stunned and otherwise at a loss for words. "You saw...?"
He can't finish that sentence. He can barely slow his quickening pulse, forced to relive this dark moment for someone to whom it hadn't even happened yet.
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"Yes," he answers softly, wide eyes full of wretched feeling. He shakes his head once and brushes his thumbs across Lan Xichen's cheekbones, tries not to focus on the blood on his skin (Jin Guangyao's own blood, which stains Lan Xichen's sky blue silks, there's too much of it, the stains will never come out). He draws a breath, tries to smile, and whispers, "Don't think about this anymore, Er-ge. It will only cause you pain. Think about--"
--and as though responding to some command he has issued in earnest, the fading memory around them changes. Gone are the temple grounds, the crush of familiar faces, the smell of blood and ashes, and in its place unfurls a different picture entirely. The Cloud Recesses in the early mornings has always held a particular fascination for Jin Guangyao, not only because of the serene beauty of the predawn light filtering through the canopy of trees and the mist hanging heavy in the air, but because there had been something precious, sacred about the time he spent walking these paths side by side with Lan Xichen. The rest of the world might still be slumbering, in Qinghe, Da-ge might still believe him a deceitful monster, and in Jinlintai his father's bloody work still waited for him--but here, he could reclaim a fraction of that inexplicable, unlikely peace he'd found in the back of a bookkeeper's shop in the middle of a war.
Jin Guangyao startles some as he takes in these changes to their surroundings, slowly lowering his hands from Lan Xichen's face. "Oh," he says, which isn't an explanation at all. (Very helpful.)
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The last time he was here, he'd resigned himself to walking these paths alone, and yet, here is Jin Guangyao beside him and he's home.
He knows that this too is a dream, or some gentle memory where he and Jin Guangyao wandered these grounds and let the weight of their responsibilities slide from their shoulders for a short while. If this were real and knowing what he knows now, he would take Jin Guangyao's hand and run and run and never look back.
(Better a life on the run than one where Jin Guangyao is dead or imprisoned.)
"After seeing that," Xichen says softly, "I would not blame you if you could not forgive me."
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It should not stun Jin Guangyao to hear Lan Xichen say such things, even now. Still, the shock of hearing the words widens his eyes and pulls a faint, stifled sound of pain past his lips. "Er-ge." He reaches up to touch his cheek again and by the time he remembers why he should not do such a thing, he can't bear to pull his hand away, not now. "I would forgive you anything. I would forgive you everything. But you are not the one who killed me." A tight, watery smile quirks up the corners of his mouth, and he shakes his head, thumb brushing Lan Xichen's cheekbone. "There is nothing for me to forgive."
In contrast, it sounds to his ears as though Lan Xichen has forgiven Jin Guangyao for more cruelties than any one man should ever be expected to endure, especially from a sworn brother. If any of it is true, if he really does have A-Song and A-Su's blood on his hands--
--then these hands have no business being anywhere near Lan Xichen. Jin Guangyao swallows hard and forces himself to pull his hand away from Lan Xichen's face. Feebly, he whispers, "But I don't know how you can bear to look at me."
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But Xichen doesn't want to debate which of them is most responsible for Jin Guangyao's death. He doesn't want to waste precious breath arguing the semantics of whose crimes are greater, who bears the most guilt for the nightmare that was Guanyin Temple.
(And it feels like just that; a nightmare. Xichen knows it happened, he's not delusional. But Jin Guangyao stands before him alive and breathing and real, and sometimes he just wants to let it all be a bad dream.)
But I don't know how you can bear to look at me.
His heart and stomach exchange places when these words leave Jin Guangyao's mouth, and he doesn't even bother to protest. No, he simply reaches out, wraps his arms around him and pulls him close.
How could he hate him for trying to survive when the world was so bleak with him gone? There was, most likely, very little Xichen would not forgive of A-Yao, and by now he had forgiven what wrongs were his to forgive. Perhaps that broke a dozen rules on the wall of discipline, perhaps that made Xichen selfish, but if this is what a second chance looked like, he would seize it.
(Maybe Wangji had the right idea all along and Xichen should take a leaf or two out of his didi's book. ...Just a leaf or two though.)
"A-Yao already knows how," he says shakily into his hair, tears falling despite his best efforts to hold them in. "That will never change."
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That knowledge shames him. It also does not stop him from wrapping his arms tightly around Lan Xichen's waist and shoulders, or from going up onto his toes to hide his face against his neck.
"Stop that," he demands, his voice a weak, tearful sound halfway between a gasp and a laugh, and immediately he tightens his grip lest Lan Xichen think that he wants to be free of this embrace. (He does not. He could die here like this, right now, and that would be fine actually.) "You are too good. Too good, Er-ge. How has the world not ground this goodness out of you after all this time, after everything you have seen and endured?" He's abruptly furious and, paradoxically, overwhelmed by the sudden and tender impulse to smooth out every wrinkle in Lan Xichen's robes, to lead him down the back hill paths of the Cloud Recesses to the cold spring and gently wash the dirt and debris and blood out of Lan Xichen's hair with his own hands. To attend him and care for him, as Lan Xichen always seeks to care for everyone else around him.
Jin Guangyao squeezes his eyes shut and cradles the back of Lan Xichen's head in his palm. This isn't the first time he's had the thought, but perhaps it is the first time he's voiced it aloud. "You are the very best of men." A gentle warmth filling the deepest of needs.
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If he had been better, then Jin Guangyao would not have died.
But he can't speak; his throat is too tight to protest and all he can manage is shaking his head 'no' again and again. He doesn't understand why Jin Guangyao isn't furious with him at this moment.
(And yet he cannot let go of Jin Guangyao. Not after that. If he lets go now, the other man is liable to vanish in a puff of smoke and Xichen will never see his warm brown eyes or dimples in his cheeks, and he has already lost Jin Guangyao once and resigned himself to that life, he cannot do it again. Contrary to popular belief, he is not made of stone.)
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He does not notice as the edges of the memory shrink and fade around them, the light filtering through the Cloud Recesses' canopy of trees gradually growing dimmer and fainter until it is gone altogether, and with it the scent of the pines and the ground after the rain. In its place is the subtle fragrance of the remaining osmanthus oil that came to Trench with Jin Guangyao, and which lingers in trace amounts in his private rooms in the siheyuan. Which is where they are now, seated side by side on the chaise lounge and illuminated by weak, diffuse winter light filtering in through the window. There is a discarded antler wreath on the floor beside their feet.
Right. The winter mourning. He should have remembered.
He should do many things--like letting go of Lan Xichen, for example, which he demonstrably does not do. He squeezes his eyes shut and curls his fingers into Lan Xichen's silk robes; he does not want to know if his own spilt blood has followed them from the cultivation world back into Trench.
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Xichen just cannot, at this moment, bring himself to pull away.
He had not let himself grieve, for starters. He had not mourned the loss of two men he saw as brothers, he had not mourned Nie Huaisang using him as a vehicle for his vengeance, he had not mourned his own part in any of it.
How could he, when he'd suddenly fallen in to a second chance to make this right? To avert their fates at Guanyin Temple and perhaps allow something better to grow in place of that dark, twisted thing that had crawled up from the cracks in their relationship? There was no time to grieve what had been when he'd heard that melody beyond the wall of the siheyuan, and suddenly there was Jin Guangyao, alive and well, and Xichen could not ignore this one miracle to confront the fresh, raw wounds across his heart.
And now they'd been opened anew. Or, like a poorly set bone, broken once more to heal properly. Either way, holding Jin Guangyao like this is a balm to that agony, easing the pain out of him as his shoulders shake and heave with tears that have long gone unshed.
Occasionally, he manages words. An apology, perhaps, because he knows this is selfish of him to want this comfort when he is sure Jin Guangyao is hurting just as badly (if not moreso; what a horrible demise to witness) -- that despite his own survival, this is what has broken him into pieces and it is only the miracle of being here that is holding him together. Sometimes he just utters 'A-Yao' without much rhyme or reason. Nothing sensible is coming out of him. It would be a wonder if he's even managed to realize they're back to reality at this point even if he can faintly smell osmanthus rather than pine and gentians.
Eventually the trembling of his shoulders stops, and there's an end to choked sounds that are very clearly sobs being fiercely bitten back. But his arms remain around Jin Guangyao; he's not quite ready to relinquish the warmth of him, the way he can feel his pulse under his palms, assuring him that the man is alive and safe. He cannot let that go yet.
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Even after this, even after knowing... knowing what happens, Jin Guangyao sets no limits on what he would have done to prevent Lan Xichen from suffering through this. (Or what he will do to prevent this misery from revisiting him again.)
All that to say that there is no danger here of Lan Xichen overstaying his welcome in his embrace, because Jin Guangyao's arms are firm and unyielding around his shoulders. He voices soft, subdued shushing sounds intended solely to offer comfort rather to quiet him, and has to turn his own face into Lan Xichen's hair (ever mindful of that ribbon), letting it absorb his own tears before they can fall freely. He doesn't even notice tucking himself into the corner of the lounge, or guiding Lan Xichen to lean against him, to again cradle the back of his head with a hand while the other smooths across his shoulder.
(Later, he decides. He will ask about--about A-Su, and A-Song later, when he doesn't see Da-ge's grip on his throat every time he closes his eyes. When he does not see Shuoyue piercing through his chest. When he doesn't see Lan Xichen letting go of his own life to die with someone who does not deserve his devotion.)
"I'm here," he whispers, eyes closed and his cheek resting on the crown of Lan Xichen's head. "I am here, Er-ge."
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He feels a dampness in his hair, and his arms around Jin Guangyao tighten.
He's warm and alive in Xichen's much colder embrace, his own body barely approaching room temperature. He's sure it can't be pleasant for his sworn brother, but to end this moment feels impossible right now.
Settled into this dangerously intimate position, Xichen rubs gentle circles on Jin Guangyao's back.
"I told you --" he tries to explain, voice hoarse and choked, "--I never wanted you to have to see it."
One way or another.
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(Spoiler alert: the rest of the world gives far less of a fuck than either of them realize.)
"And yet I have." He speaks quietly, nose pressed into Lan Xichen's hair, eyes closed, and smooths his fingers soothingly across the pale blue silk covering his shoulders. "I have seen it, and I don't blame you for it. In my heart I believe you have done nothing that requires my forgiveness, but you have it anyway. Er-ge," softly, "do you believe me?"
This question he asks with some hesitation, because he knows--they both know--how willing he is to lie when it serves his needs. But even when the lies he was forced to tell for his father, and then the ones he told to conceal the worst of his own secrets, became bigger, grander, bolder, terrible lies of omission and obfuscation, the one unmovable truth in his world had been his love for Lan Xichen, and his unspoken vow to himself that, whatever else he must be prepared to do, Jin Guangyao would never turn against him. He can only hope that, after what they have seen and experienced together during their time in Trench, that truth remains a north star for Lan Xichen, too.
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"I do believe you," he murmurs softly into the dark spill of Jin Guangyao's hair. "This one should have believed in A-Yao then too."
Gradually the tension drains from his body, with them settled in each other's arms. He tries not to think how well two bodies can slot together, or the thousand and one promises he wants to utter into the silky warmth of his beloved's hair. Too much, and this is already nurturing that traitorous seed of hope that sprouted in his chest when he saw Jin Guangyao alive. If he lets it grow any more, then it will be too painful to bear.
He swears only one oath in this quiet cocoon of warmth, words only for Jin Guangyao's ears.
"I will not repeat that mistake ever again."
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"Er-ge," Jin Guangyao starts to chide him so very gently, breathless, but then stops himself, because at his core he is fundamentally too selfish, too covetous of Lan Xichen's love and kind regard to ever risk giving it up when it is handed to him like this, raw and vulnerable and unconditional. A good man, a better man, would insist that Lan Xichen never vow such unwavering loyalty and devotion to the likes of Jin Guangyao, doesn't he know how much blood he has on his hands? But he does know, doesn't he? He knows, and Jin Guangyao knows, and they have chosen each other again in spite of it.
He curls his arm more securely around Lan Xichen's shoulders and allows the fingers of his other hand to trail through the ends of his hair. Their intimate embrace is so far beyond the bounds of propriety and the realm of plausible deniability that Jin Guangyao knows any excuse he might try to come up with now would be too bold a lie even for him, and would succeed only in driving them apart. And right now, he needs... whatever this tender, nebulous, beloved thing between them is. (He knows what this is. He has always known what this is.)
Quietly, he asks, "Stay with me?" It is dark outside now, and the distant sounds of the city at night are filtering in through the windows. They should both be retiring to their respective beds for the night, and yet. "Forgive me for asking--" even softer, "--but I don't want to be alone." I don't want to be without you, not tonight, is what Jin Guangyao does not allow himself to say. It burns inside him regardless.
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That he put his sword through Jin Guangyao instead of dragging him into seclusion, locking him away and... (And, Xichen thinks conclusively. He doesn't know enough about his mother and father's relationship, but it could not have been pleasant for her) is proof apparent that there are very different lines he will and will not cross.
He is still his father's son, however, and something hot and satisfying almost purrs at the back of his mind when Jin Guangyao asks him to stay. He stuffs it down, of course, shoos it back to the darker corners of his heart, but it lingers there, nonetheless, smugly stroking that little sprout of hope.
Moreover, he does not want to let Jin Guangyao go, because they are both distraught after that whole ordeal and they need this. (And, in his heart of hearts, he knows he just doesn't want to let go of Jin Guangyao at all, because he is warm and real and alive and all those things are very, very important facts about his beloved A-Yao.)
"I will stay," he assures, "for as long as A-Yao wants."
And then, after a pause, he gently amends "For as long as A-Yao would have me."
Because they both know if he stayed as long as either of them wanted, their bodies would never part again.