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mjsakurea · 2 years

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Bent Not Broken - a 5+1 fic

5 times Lan Wangji struggled with his scoliosis and one time he didn’t have to

June is not only pride month and Hanguang-June, but scoliosis awareness month!

TW for discussion of medical stuff and surgery

The x-ray images as the header of this fic are in fact my own x-rays before and after surgery to treat scoliosis. Scoliosis is a fairly common disorder where a person’s spine curves in a C or an S shape. It is usually mild but can sometimes be severe enough to require corrective treatment such as bracing or surgery. I had about a 70 degree S curve which was reduced to about 25 with surgery and the help of a couple titanium rods and a bunch of screws. Despite it being fairly common, I have only come across one fictional character that was mentioned to have scoliosis offhanded once and it was used as a joke. With the Untamed, I always resonated with LWJ, especially in fanon. I may only have the one scar on my back, not 33, but whenever fanon interpretations gave him chronic back pain because of his scars I felt so understood. So this is partly my way of projecting my own experience but also a love letter to all fanfic authors that have helped me feel represented through LWJ! Thank you! Please if you feel like it, do some research on scoliosis sometime this month and help spread awareness ❤

Continue reading below or on AO3

When Lan Zhan is 14, they discover he has a curve in his spine. He and his older brother had been brought to the clinic by their uncle for a regular school physical. Lan Zhan quietly follows the directions of the doctor, going through the motions of the mundane exam. At one point, he is asked to bend down to touch his toes. He does as he was told, waiting for the doctor to permit him to stand up straight again. Lan Huan only had to for a few seconds.

The doctor hums. Lan Zhan wants to ask what was going on, but his uncle had taught him not to question people of authority. He stays staring at his toes and starts counting seconds. When he gets to 11 seconds, the doctor tells him he can stand up now. The rest of the physical progresses and the doctor doesn’t say anything out of the ordinary.

The next week, his uncle tells him he will be picking up Lan Zhan from school early that day for a doctor’s appointment. Lan Zhan is confused but does not question it. He turns in all his homework and collects the next day’s assignments before he needs to leave.

His uncle drives him to a hospital, not the clinic they usually go to. After checking in, he is escorted to the imaging labs.

“Have you ever had an x-ray before?” a nurse asks. Lan Zhan shakes his head.

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing to worry about,” she says with a smile, and then goes behind a reinforced wall as the machine whirs to life and takes its images—one of his chest, back, and both sides.

When it is done, he waits with his uncle in an exam room. It is half an hour before a doctor comes in holding some shiny black and white sheets. He pins them up on a light board and points out Lan Zhan’s spine, or what he says is his spine. It doesn’t look like one to Lan Zhan. In his health class textbooks, spines were always straight. He had never seen bones that looked like an S before.

Scoliosis.

They tell him it is called scoliosis. Or well, they tell his uncle. The doctor hardly addresses Lan Zhan at all. He just has to sit and listen to the doctor say things like “severe curvature,” “progressed too far for effective bracing,” “surgery.”

Surgery.

His uncle agrees to it. There’s nothing else they can do, they assure him. They’ll schedule it over summer vacation, a couple of months from now. He will need the recovery time, the doctor says. But he’s young, he will bounce back quickly.

He never gets a chance to ask why it’s necessary.

In the early summer, while all his classmates are enjoying summer recess, Lan Zhan spends five days in the hospital recovering from a seven-hour operation. He ends up with two titanium rods in his back and twenty-two screws. His uncle and older brother stay with him during the day, but between strong pain medicine, more x-rays, and frequent excursions walking up and down the hallway, he doesn’t have much chance to talk with them. Five days pass in a flash but also at a snail’s pace simultaneously. But eventually, he gets to go home with less-strong pain medicine and a form-fitted, hard plastic brace around his entire torso. He has to wear it for six months, they instruct him.

Lan Zhan is done with the bulky and constricting brace by the time he starts high school. He expects to feel free without it, but he quickly finds that is not the case. The foot-long metal rods now fused to his spine restrict his movement almost as much as the brace had. He chastises himself for not realizing.

In physical education class, he can no longer touch his toes. He has to relearn how to tie his shoes.

His classmates all slump in their chairs during class, resting their heads on the desk when the teacher isn’t looking—or sometimes even if they are if they don’t care. Lan Zhan had always been taught to sit properly growing up, but he still cannot help but resent his classmates slightly for it. He cannot slouch if he wanted to.

His teachers praise his good posture. His classmates call him a stick in the mud, teacher’s pet, fuddy-duddy. He tries not to care; tries not to bristle every time someone compliments his posture even well after high school.

Lan Zhan remembers growing up his grandmother would joke that her knee could tell when it would rain. He never understood how that was possible. A few years after his surgery he realizes she was not exaggerating.

He tells his brother to take an umbrella with him as he goes out. The forecast said nothing about rain, but Lan Zhan can feel it coming anyway. Lan Huan gives him a knowing smile and takes his advice.

As thunder rumbles lightly in the distance and Lan Zhan lays awake in too much discomfort to sleep, he browses the internet for a reason. Research tells him it is something to do with changes in atmospheric pressure, but there is no concrete answer nor solution to the pain.

He acquiesces and endures it, learning to dread the rainy season each year.

In his adult life, Lan Zhan avoids flying anywhere if he can help it at all.

When his work sends him on a business trip across the country—too far a distance for a car or train—Lan Zhan wrings his wrist as he waits in line in the airport security check-in. He stares in disdain at the x-ray machine as he moves up in line closer and closer to it.

He holds his breath as he finally has to step through the incriminating archway.

Beep, beep, beep

“Sir, could you step aside for just a moment,” a security officer asks him. Lan Zhan has heard the same line before. He wonders when they got a different idea than him of how long a moment was. Another comes forward with a flat beeping wand.

Lan Zhan follows the procedures he knows by heart at this point, raising his arms, turning his pockets inside out, letting them pat down and scan until they are satisfied. He gave up trying to explain after the first few similar airport experiences.

Even a decade after his surgery, Lan Zhan finds himself questioning it. Especially on nights like this one where he lays awake, tossing and turning looking for relief from the impossible discomfort. He cannot really call it pain, that is not what it is. It is more a tightness—a knot that cannot be unwound or an itch that cannot be scratched. It leaves him feeling that if he could just stretch a little bit farther, twist a little bit more, maybe something would click, and he would get relief. But the metal restricting his movement makes it impossible to truly release the pressure.

It is not truly pain, but Lan Zhan sometimes wishes it was. Then maybe he could take pain medicine to relieve it. But this feeling, this ache, responds to no remedies.

It is not every night, he reminds himself. He should be grateful, he tells himself. But it is often enough to wonder if it was all worth it.

As he has grown and learned to live with scoliosis, he has also taken the time to grow more educated on it. When he was first diagnosed, everything had happened so fast that he had no time to dwell on it. And he was too young to truly question it. Now, he knows logically that without the surgery his spine curvature would have most likely progressed until it crippled him. However, that would not have happened for decades. Despite the severity of the curvature he experienced as a kid, it had never caused him pain. He had not noticed it at all and probably would not have for a long time except for the random check-up.

Although he knows it was inevitable, it is hard to justify the pain of the present against a possibility of pain in the future. This feeling now sticks in his thoughts. He supposes it is pain—what he is feeling—what else can be so impossible to ignore? He cannot ignore it, so he can only hope his body’s tiredness will win over soon so that sleep will take away the pain.

+1.

Lan Zhan does not intentionally conceal his scoliosis from his boyfriend. It is not like he tries to hide it, but he also does not consider it worth mentioning. The fact that it never came up was not really a concern. His and Wei Ying’s relationship is fairly new, anyway. To be completely honest, Lan Zhan had different, more important things on his mind for the most part.

Like now, the important things being Wei Ying’s lips opening for his and his hands, running all over his body. Lan Zhan crowds over Wei Ying on the couch, chest to chest—a random movie plays in the background, forgotten. Lan Zhan runs his hands up under Wei Ying’s shirt and Wei Ying’s mouth turns up in a smile, a breathy noise escaping his lips when they briefly part.

Soon, Wei Ying’s hands creep up under the back of Lan Zhan’s shirt. Lan Zhan does not feel it—another side effect of major spine surgery. He does not notice until Wei Ying stills under him, mouth curving into a slight frown instead of the ever-present smile. Lan Zhan suddenly remembers why Wei Ying might have reason to be surprised at his back.

Lan Zhan withdraws his hands from Wei Ying and sits up abruptly. Wei Ying is slower to pull his hands out from Lan Zhan’s shirt, so he is pulled up with him.

“No, Lan Zhan, I’m sorry, I didn’t—” Wei Ying stops, he bites his lip, looking pensive for a moment before adding, “Is that a scar?”

“Mm,” Lan Zhan nods. He searches Wei Ying’s face, trying to get a read on what he is thinking. He does not think Wei Ying will be disgusted, but the spike of fear is there.

“It doesn’t—I didn’t hurt you, did I?” he says.

Lan Zhan blinks. “No,” he says, shaking his head. Feeling the need to clarify he adds, “I can’t feel it at all.”

Wei Ying nods. He looks relieved for a second, but his face takes on a pensive look again. “It must have hurt you, though, at the time?”

He says it as a question, but Lan Zhan just shrugs. He cannot really remember the pain from back then, nor does he bother to dwell on it now. He doesn’t mention the ways it still hurts because that would not reassure Wei Ying.

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” Wei Ying says, “But, can I see it?”

Lan Zhan nods. He barely gets the chance to see it himself, so he does not feel particularly self-conscious about it. He turns to face away from Wei Ying on the couch, reaching his hands up to grip the back of his shirt, and then pulls it over his head. His mind jumps to a different reason for having his shirt off with Wei Ying, but at this point, the mood is sufficiently dead.

He cannot see Wei Ying’s reaction, but he can hear a slight intake of breath.

“Woah, did you get in a fight with a samurai?”

Lan Zhan turns slightly, as much as his fused spine will allow him to. Wei Ying winces at his own joke.

“Sorry, it just came out,” Wei Ying offers. “But what did happen?”

“Scoliosis,” Lan Zhan says. He turns back around and slips back into his shirt. Wei Ying tilts his head. Lan Zhan does not fault him for not knowing what it is. He would have had no idea what scoliosis was if it weren’t for his intimate experience with it. So, he tries to explain it to Wei Ying in as simple terms as possible; Wei Ying does not have the same benefit of a decade of research as he did. Wei Ying listens intently. Lan Zhan even pulls up an old couple of x-rays he had saved to his phone—before and after images. Wei Ying takes his phone from him and studies the photos intensely.

When he is done explaining, silence hangs for a minute. Then, Wei Ying speaks up slowly. “So, you have steel in your spine?”

“Titanium, and not in my spine,” Lan Zhan corrects gently.

“That’s so—” Wei Ying grabs his hand, “Cool!”

Lan Zhan stares at him.

“You’re like a cyborg—No, a superhero!” Wei Ying laughs, his grin overtaking his whole face. “There’s already Iron Man and the Man of Steel, but you can be Titanium Man, or does Man of Titanium sound better?” Wei Ying scratches his nose, then shakes his head, “Doesn’t matter, but Lan Zhan you’re incredible, indestructible!”

Lan Zhan can feel his ears heating with Wei Ying’s every word, growing impossibly hotter when Wei Ying scoots even closer to him on the couch. He casts his eyes down to their still-joined hands. Wei Ying brings one up towards him, Lan Zhan following the movement with his eyes. Instead of the excited grin Wei Ying had before, his smile is impossibly fond. Lan Zhan finds his lips twitching upwards unconsciously in response. Wei Ying finally pulls Lan Zhan’s hand up to his mouth and presses a kiss to the center of the back of it.

“Thank you, Lan Zhan, for sharing this part of you with me,” he says.

Lan Zhan shakes his head, “No, thank you, Wei Ying.”

“What for?” Wei Ying lowers his hand but does not let go of it.

Again, Lan Zhan minutely shakes his head. “Just, thank you.” Lan Zhan does not think he could put into words how Wei Ying made him feel so wholly and truly accepted at that moment. The feeling is indescribable.

Wei Ying smiles a big, toothy smile like sunshine, his eyes creasing at the corners and Lan Zhan cannot resist but kiss him again. Wei Ying lets out an mmph as his back hits the couch again. Lan Zhan does not need to feel it to know Wei Ying’s hands go to his own back again, finding his scar not on accident this time. The barely-there sensation makes Lan Zhan shiver, the feeling heading straight downward. He can think of another couple of reasons to embrace this part of himself.

#mdzs #cql #the untamed #wangxian #hanguang-june #scoliosis awareness month

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