Thread by @hyacinthsuns

okay, i have a little thread set in This River Runs to You canon! it’s mostly me being sad about pre-TRRTY timeline wei wuxian, before he met lan wangji.

(heads up if you haven’t read TRRTY on ao3 and want to avoid spoilers! also cw for short-term housing instability, brief mentions of surgery and hunger.)

this fills in a part of wwx’s backstory, about how he went from getting kicked out of the jiangs’ house to living in the cottage, and how wwx got back in touch with wen qing and wen ning for the first time after the war

so wwx last saw wen qing & wen ning at the end of the war, when they realized wen chao was on to them & they had to clear out of the abandoned inn where wwx and a still-unconscious jiang cheng were recovering from the core surgery

wwx had told them to go, that he’d get jiang cheng out of there and meet them two towns over. he knew he probably wouldn’t, but it was the only way to get them to leave in time. and that was the last time he’d spoken to them.

after that wwx was: captured by wen chao ➡️ found by the consortium ➡️ on trial in lanling ➡️ on house arrest in lotus pier, all pretty much nonstop

so now, a month later—if wen qing and wen ning haven’t seen the news, they probably think he’s dead. and if they have—he doesn’t know what they think.

that he’s okay? that he’s not okay? that he needs help? that he ran back home the moment he could? he doesn’t know, because wwx isn’t able to contact them until a week after he gets back to yunmeng.

there hasn’t been a chance so far—ever since waking up in a lanling hospital, to being dragged through the trial, to getting shuttled back to lotus pier, he hasn’t been allowed or able to get to a phone or computer, let alone anything secure.

and he doesn’t have a phone of his own. he’d smashed his old one right after he’d called a car to take an unconscious jiang cheng to the nearest consortium building. by the time wen chao caught him, there was nothing on wwx that could be traced back to anyone else.

now he has time, but neither the funds nor the energy to do anything about it. he’s still recovering from—everything. wen chao & the core surgery & the weeks of hardly eating, hardly sleeping. after he’s kicked out, it’s all he can do to drag himself to a tiny inn and crash there

the first few nights he sleeps all day and stumbles outside after dark to buy whatever food is easiest. lots of tea eggs and malatang and soy milk. after a couple days, he can even keep most of it down, so at least he’s getting better.

then he realizes he’s close to depleting his savings altogether—most of what he’d had he’d withdrawn before running off during the war. once he can stay awake for more than a few hours, he leaves the inn and holes up in the university library

he hadn’t spent too much time here when he was actually a student, but luckily his old student id is in the bottom of his suitcase and he can slip in. he stashes his suitcase way back in the stacks before anyone notices and finds a free computer.

finally, he can email wen qing.

he knows how to contact her, all the burner email addresses they’d made. he doesn’t think she’ll have deleted all of them, not yet. so there’s a chance, maybe, that she’ll check the next time she has service. just in case. if she hasn’t given up on him.

his main priority is making sure they’re all okay. that they made it through the last weeks of the war unscathed, that it wasn’t all for nothing.

(or, not nothing, if he at least saved jiang cheng, but if wen qing and wen ning and a-yuan aren’t safe now—after everything—he doesn’t know what he’ll do. what he can do, anymore.)

and if they are okay, he wants to tell them not to worry. and say goodbye. he just—doesn’t want that last, frantic minute in the inn to be their final conversation.

he emails both of the burner addresses: i’m okay. stuck where i am. please let me know if all is well. i’m sorry.

there’s no reply for three days. in that time he sleeps in the back of the stacks, scours the news, and starts reading silly detective novels. he charms the front desk worker into giving him a hoodie from from the lost and found, and goes outside, blending in with the students.

he sits by a lot of fountains. the running water is soothing, like if he closes his eyes he’ll hear a-yuan laughing as wen ning plays with him in the stream. he ignores a lot of pain in his side, in his stomach. he tries very hard not to think about a lot of things altogether.

he finds out his house arrest order has been relaxed to yunmeng’s borders when he checks the news on day 3. he wonders if madam yu and uncle— sect leader jiang pulled some strings for that, so they wouldn’t have to explain his absence from their home.

then he opens one of the burner emails, and there’s a reply. 2 replies, actually.

fuck you, wen qing says in the first one. do you know how scared we were? my brother cried when he read your message.

in the second: all is well here. please say you’re really safe now. don’t lie.

wwx has to hide his face in his sleeve for a bit before he can type anything back.

safe, he replies. don’t have a phone yet. messages will be unreliable for a bit. sorry.

don’t apologize, wen qing writes back, which wwx thinks is a bit of a mixed signal after her first email. wen qing peppers him with questions about his health and healing, vague enough not to be damning but pointed enough that wwx has trouble answering.

then wen qing writes: if you want to come back, there is a place for you here.

wwx can’t reply to that one, not right away. he exits the browser and logs out of the computer. slips back to his tucked-away corner of the stacks. pulls his knees up to his chest, even though it hurts his still-healing burn.

he thinks about wen qing, and her quiet, immovable resolve. wen ning’s gentle hands bringing wwx fresh bandages, pain meds after the surgery. a-yuan’s face lighting up after wwx taught him to tie his shoes.

he wants to go to them. leave the chilly library basement and get on a train and make his way to the mountains again. he wants it so bad. he looks at the consortium's tracking anklet and knows he could find a way to remove it if he tried, trick it long enough for him to run.

but if he does that, he knows he’ll never be able to come back.

more importantly: the wens’ little village will be okay without him. will be, in fact, safer without him, because no one else knows about them. not anymore. and if wwx stirs up a manhunt by disappearing and ends up leading the consortium right to them...

so he can’t go to them. all he can do is reply and mollify wen qing enough that she and wen ning won’t come for him in yunmeng, which isn’t too hard, because they have their family to worry about. so that’s what he does, and he spends another night asleep on the library floor.

the next day wwx helps an elderly lady find a good handbook on household curses, and she ends up complaining to him about a haunted cottage in her neighborhood. wwx offers to take a look—he needs to do *something* to distract himself.

and that's how he ends up exorcising a nasty spirit from this tiny, run-down cottage near the river, which is also how he ends up finding a place to live.

the cottage is still stubbornly haunted with too many things to identify, but it’s reasonably warm and the landlady hardly cares who he is as long as he can pay some sort of rent. for the first time in weeks, wwx...stops running.

soon another neighbor hires him to clear out a tiny water ghoul infestation from their pool, and word gets around, and then he has enough money to buy real groceries and an ancient smartphone.

when he gets a phone, it still takes him a day to call jyl. she cries when he does, and says she was so worried, she’s this close to flying in from lanling. she asks why he left. wwx feels a tiny spark of relief that jiang cheng did as wwx asked and hasn’t told jyl everything yet

wwx swallows past the lump in his throat and says: oh, i just. i needed to figure things out on my own.

well, jyl says, still worried, have you? figured things out, that is.

wwx looks at the growing clutter around him. his burn has become a fresh scar. he’s sleeping in an actual bed, so there’s that. i’m starting to, he tells her, and hopes one day soon it’ll be true.

and he does, at least, do *something.* he invents an attraction charm so he gets signal in the cottage, he sets up better methods of communication with wen qing and wen ning, and he eventually starts working consortium jobs.

and one day he gets summoned to a warehouse full of cursed objects and finds a dragon pearl in the shape of a white ribbon, and...well.

(later, after everything, when wwx and lwj are off on their big Research + Look For More Dragons vacation and hunting through a library collection somewhere, wwx makes a passing comment about it being surprisingly easy to stay in a library through the night, actually.

you just tuck yourself away in the stacks an hour or so before closing time! libraries are very nappable places, too.

and lwj already knows he's not going to like the answer, but he asks how wwx knows this, and wwx realizes he accidentally veered into Sad Backstory time.

he ends up telling lwj about his time right after returning to lotus pier, glossing over as much as possible while still being truthful. he thinks he does a pretty good job, but then lwj is hugging him, and wwx’s eyes are stinging a bit, and, well.)

(they don't get any research done that day because they're too busy cuddling.)

the good news is now wwx is hanging out with his dragon boyfriend every day and he's never going to not know where his home is ever again ✨

thank you everyone for reading along and indulging my lonely wwx backstory thoughts!!