#danmei #BL #TGCF #HeavenOfficialsBlessing #Hualian #MDZS #MoDaoZuShi #Wangxian #HuaCheng #LanWangji #LanZhan #crossover #fanfic #angst #romance #fiction #drama #romance #snow #writing #lore #quietmoments

(Adapted for English-speaking readers)

The forest around the waterfall had died before winter ever came. The air wasn’t cold — it was sharp, like thousands of tiny shards of glass driven into the lungs with every breath. The waterfall itself had frozen, turning into a massive block of porous ice hanging from the black cliff like a heart turned inside out. Only a thin thread of water still forced its way through the icy shell, weeping softly, inconsolably, before falling and shattering against stone.

Lan Wangji stood in that very place. He didn’t feel the cold. He didn’t feel anything at all, except the emptiness swelling in his chest, nearly pushing his heart out of existence.

He came here every day. At first — with tense anticipation, everything inside pulled into a tight knot ready to snap at the smallest flash of red. Then — with the heavy understanding that it would not snap, only solidify into stone. Now — with a hollowness so complete that even the echo of his own footsteps sounded foreign.

“He won’t come.” The thought wasn’t new, but every time it struck him like a blade into frozen earth. “Why am I here then? To put my loneliness on display? To let these cliffs witness my pathetic, unheard confessions? To let them see how Hanguang-jun, the Second Jade of Gusu Lan, is falling apart over the memory of a single touch?”

He forced himself to leave. Turned his back to the waterfall, walked away, counted steps like monks count prayer beads.

“I must learn to live with this. Like before.”

But it was impossible.

Once, his silence had been whole. Complete, self-sustaining — like the still mirror of a mountain lake that reflects only the sky and nothing more. Now there was a hole in it. Not just an absence of sound — an absence of that particular silence he had once discovered. Silence thick as blood and soft as snow falling on an open wound. A silence in which he didn’t have to pretend. Where he could be broken and not gather the pieces.

He often stopped on the path and listened. Not to the wind. Not to the birds. To something else. To a step that could not exist. To a breath that couldn’t be there. To a cold palm that once rested on his forehead.

Lan Wangji did not think of who it belonged to. The thought that the man wasn’t of the human world surfaced only to sink again like a stone into black water. Because something else mattered more: the coolness easing his fever; the peony placed on a table; the complete absence of demands. No “say something,” no “smile,” no “be who you were before.” Just — being. Near him. In a quiet where he did not have to pretend to be alive.

And now that quiet had become an addiction. Like a smoke blend that first carries away pain and then begins to kill without it.

He stood at the edge and looked at the frozen mass of the waterfall. Inside, everything screamed: “Come back. Just for a moment. For one breath. I’m not asking for eternity.” But the only answer was the thin thread of water — weeping over a dead heart.

Lan Wangji closed his eyes. His chest — an emptiness already inhabited by someone else.

Snow began to fall — slowly, heavily, like tears he would never allow himself to shed.

Morning frost hung in the air like crystalline chimes. Every branch, every twig was sealed in rime, suspended in pale light as if in a giant workshop of ice. The snow lay untouched, white and deaf, mirroring the sky — empty like the eyes of someone who has stopped hoping.

The silence was so deep he could hear his blood freezing in his veins.

In this crystal tomb of a world, Lan Wangji was the only living blemish — alive, and therefore unbearably out of place, like a drop of blood on wedding robes.

He sat on a moss-covered stone, guqin across his knees. His fingers, usually obedient, slid along the strings only to tear at them. The sound wasn’t music — it was ragged, wet, as if he were ripping pieces of flesh from himself and calling it melody. Fragments of phrases. Unfinished thoughts. A scream he had swallowed for years and now finally choked on.

He froze — and the sudden silence felt even louder.

And then, from that white, deaf stillness, from the frosty haze, a silver butterfly emerged. Its wings — the finest carving of ice and moonlight — each flutter a cut across the heart that froze over instantly. It danced before him — not alive, not dead, simply impossible. Beautiful enough to bring tears that burned his eyes but did not fall, because this beauty held the same pain as his own silence.

His hand twitched toward Bichen. One strike — and the beauty would die. One chord — and it would end. But his fingers didn’t close around the hilt. They trembled. They lifted — slowly, as if he were reaching not for a butterfly, but for his own death.

The butterfly made one last graceful circle and landed on his index finger. The cold burned his skin — familiar, intimate, like the lips of that night when the fever left and shame remained.

A light touch. And within it — everything he no longer dared to hope for.

He looked up.

White — and red.

Against the blinding whiteness, by the trunk of an old cedar, He stood. His robe — blood on snow, fresh, uncoagulated, like a wound just torn open and destined never to close — obscene in its vividness, but all the more alluring for it.

Hua Cheng wasn’t smiling. His single eye was narrowed, filled with doomed understanding. He had seen everything. How Lan Wangji’s hand reached for his sword. How the same hand loosened. How he closed his eyes for a heartbeat — not in fear, but because relief at His presence burned worse than pain, the way fire burns when you try to hold a coal in your bare palm.

Their gazes met — and the world narrowed to two points where light and darkness touched and could not part.

In Lan Wangji’s eyes lay a plea — so quiet it could only be heard with an ear pressed to the heart itself. A broken pride — no longer keeping his back straight, only preventing him from falling to his knees. And hope — unbearable, like sudden light after a long night.

Something shifted inside Hua Cheng. Not his heart — it had stopped long ago. Something older, sealed in the crimson coffin of eight hundred years of devotion. It cracked. Thinly. But irrevocably.

The thought born that first evening by the waterfall now sounded with terrifying clarity: “I gave Him eight hundred years of my death. Perhaps… it is time to allow myself a little life?”

But the thought wasn’t a thought — it was pain. Sharp, fresh, as if someone had stabbed an old wound and twisted the blade.

He looked at the silver butterfly trembling on Lan Wangji’s finger. A fragile, immortal creature on the hand of a mortal.

“He cultivates, yes. He will live a century. But for someone who has watched heavenly palaces fall and seas dry up, that is only a moment. A single, piercing moment.”

A moment. Piercing.

“Like a kiss that has already happened and must never be repeated.”

To come closer — was to kill him slowly. To step away — was to kill himself instantly.

He saw the silent question in those golden eyes. Saw the same yearning — only eight hundred years younger. And understood: he could not leave. Not now.

Their gazes held. No words. Only the aching, unbearable confession of two souls who met at the wrong time, on the edge of the impossible.

Hua Cheng stared at him, and within his ancient devotion, a new, tormenting question settled: “What are we supposed to do?”

And inside that question — everything: pain, tenderness, hopelessness, and all the hope neither of them had the right to hold.

Hua Cheng stepped forward. Another step. And another. Until nothing remained between them — no air, no time, no eight hundred years, no sixteen. Only crystalline silence, ringing like ice.

He stopped half a step away. His gaze slid to Lan Wangji’s pale lips — lips he had once kissed in fever and remembered with a vividness both immediate and unreal.

“You were ill not long ago,” he murmured, voice low, almost a whisper. “Why stand in the frost again?”

He knew. He knew everything. And the fevered kiss had not been a dream — it was the first stone thrown into the bottomless lake of their future.

Lan Wangji lowered his eyes. His fingers gripped the edge of his sleeve — white-knuckled, as if holding his own heart and afraid it would run to the one standing before him.

“The melody…” His voice snapped like an overstrung string. “I can’t finish it.”

“Sometimes the silence between notes is the music,” Hua Cheng said softly. And the tenderness in his voice cut deeper than any blade.

A pause stretched between them — thick, agonizing, like old blood trapped in a closed wound.

“You were gone a long time,” Lan Wangji whispered.

“I needed time. To think.”

“Do you… have someone?”

Lan Wangji’s heart clenched — painfully, fiercely, as if about to tear apart from the answer.

Hua Cheng said nothing. Instead, Lan Wangji coughed — short, but so raw each sound scraped his throat from within.

Without looking, Hua Cheng removed his crimson cloak. The heavy fabric fell onto Lan Wangji’s shoulders — cool, carrying the faint scent of night wind and eternity. It wrapped him like unfamiliar arms he had waited for too long.

Lan Wangji froze. A tremor ran through him — not from cold, but from something sharper.

He looked at Hua Cheng. And understood — if he didn’t kiss him now, in this moment, he never would.

Slowly, as if in a dream, he reached out and touched Hua Cheng’s cheek.

Their lips met. First uncertain, almost timid. Like two shards of ice afraid to shatter. Cold to warmth. Ice to fire.

One breath — and it broke.

Lan Wangji pressed him to the cedar trunk — fiercely, desperately. His fingers tangled in dark hair. This was hunger — years, centuries of hunger finally tearing free. He devoured his lips like a drowning man gasping for air. His tongue slipped into a cool mouth, shocking him with newness so sharp it sent a shiver down his spine.

He tasted salt — his tears, or the forgotten humanity of the man he kissed. He bit down — until blood bloomed. Warm iron filled their mouths. Hua Cheng answered with a muffled sound, a deep and hungry kiss.

The red cloak mixed with the blue, falling into the snow — like spilled blood on white.

Ice and flame. Death and life.

For Lan Wangji, who had known only one man before, this was a fall into an abyss. For Hua Cheng — a return to his own humanity.

He pulled back, breath ragged, lips burning and smeared with blood. He looked at Hua Cheng and saw the same stunned turmoil, the same fear, the same wonder.

“I’ve had no one… except him,” Lan Wangji whispered, voice hoarse. “Maybe that was my mistake. I knew nothing else. I had nothing to compare to. I loved in him merely a chance to live. Freedom.” He closed his eyes. “What am I supposed to do now?”

Hua Cheng stared at him, thoughts crashing inside him — loyalty colliding with desire, the past with the present.

“For eight hundred years I carried one god inside me. And now I stand on the edge with a mortal, and his silent pain has become my new scripture.”

He saw before him someone who, like him, had burned with a single feeling — so bright it consumed him and left him alone in the silence of his own fire.

Lan Wangji opened his eyes. There was no hope in them now — only a flat, faded light, like a room after a long illness.

“Will we have a tomorrow?”

Hua Cheng didn’t answer. Gently, as if afraid to disturb the fragile stillness, he pulled him close.

Lan Wangji brushed his nose against his cheek — quiet, as if holding on to the last breath of their kiss. His heart thudded wildly — in his throat, in his temples, in his clenched hands. It beat as if it wanted to escape and remain here — in the moment where time had stopped.

Hua Cheng felt every heartbeat through the layers of cloth. Wild, unruly — like the muted toll of a forgotten bell. He pressed his lips to Lan Wangji’s hair. It smelled of snow — pure, untouched, belonging to no one. The crystalline emptiness of winter air. Cold and beautiful, like everything tied to him.

“We are already in it,” Hua Cheng whispered into his hair. His voice was quiet, nearly soundless — but Lan Wangji felt it tremble along his skin. “I will be your morning, and you…”

He leaned back. His single eye shone with a warm, sorrowful light.

“…you have already become my evening.”