( He holds his gaze on Lan Zhan, the shadowed planes of it, the whites and blues and ice layered over a warmth he remembers to his own surprise, day after day. Not because it's new, the knowledge of it, but because he still comes to terms with if he, the man he's become, should want it as much as he does.
He cares, for the weak and unprotected, for the young and the old, for the sufferers and the suffering. Not with the blind persistence of his younger years, but he still feels the call to take action, has learned after months of travel on his own how to manage that, how to consider, how to move and not make himself the weightbearer for it all.
It is still a process of learning, to trust again, to allow himself the luxury of forgetting his own driving desire to carry more than he can or should. Even a child in his arms, recovering and frightened, half in his robes and shivering against his inner robes, ears long and covered in velvet soft fur, and he steels himself. Tips his head to Lan Zhan, Lan Wangji, Hanguang-jun. )
You too.
( Trust given, trust returned. He shifts the child on his hip and narrows his eyes, stepping forward on silent feet to flow into the dark, then hit stride, and he is everything he was said to be, and nothing like it at all in the moment where he is as alive as the husks of those who stir with his passage, as the blood of the child in his arms sings to them, as the scent of burning intensifies without flame, and Wei Wuxian recalls an older dance of survival and single minded belief, no room for worry, no room for anything but the efficiency of movement, the cold gaze that lacks forgiveness, no room for compromise.
It's not untouched that he emerges, but tattered in negligible ways; scratches as lacerations across his cheek, the backs of hands, the black robes that show little to nothing of their unwhole state. The rise of those final stairs find sunlight spilling over him and the child, protected and anointed in the blood of a man who bleeds clean, when he bleeds these days, and who gains the top, who hears the mournful howling cries of the undead at his back, who seals no entrance but finds they cannot, will not cross to the light, but creep forward greedy for the falling of it.
There is a framework in his mind, the geometry of architecture and energy flow, so that he bides each step its purpose as he says to the child, meant for ears below: )
Together, Lan Zhan.
( For the fall of the sun, for the moment that shadow reigns supreme, for when the fall of earth to shatter the dam holding back the cleansing this mountain has yearned for, pleaded for over an age might see its way through. Uneasy and destructive and healing, all these things and more. )
no subject
He cares, for the weak and unprotected, for the young and the old, for the sufferers and the suffering. Not with the blind persistence of his younger years, but he still feels the call to take action, has learned after months of travel on his own how to manage that, how to consider, how to move and not make himself the weightbearer for it all.
It is still a process of learning, to trust again, to allow himself the luxury of forgetting his own driving desire to carry more than he can or should. Even a child in his arms, recovering and frightened, half in his robes and shivering against his inner robes, ears long and covered in velvet soft fur, and he steels himself. Tips his head to Lan Zhan, Lan Wangji, Hanguang-jun. )
You too.
( Trust given, trust returned. He shifts the child on his hip and narrows his eyes, stepping forward on silent feet to flow into the dark, then hit stride, and he is everything he was said to be, and nothing like it at all in the moment where he is as alive as the husks of those who stir with his passage, as the blood of the child in his arms sings to them, as the scent of burning intensifies without flame, and Wei Wuxian recalls an older dance of survival and single minded belief, no room for worry, no room for anything but the efficiency of movement, the cold gaze that lacks forgiveness, no room for compromise.
It's not untouched that he emerges, but tattered in negligible ways; scratches as lacerations across his cheek, the backs of hands, the black robes that show little to nothing of their unwhole state. The rise of those final stairs find sunlight spilling over him and the child, protected and anointed in the blood of a man who bleeds clean, when he bleeds these days, and who gains the top, who hears the mournful howling cries of the undead at his back, who seals no entrance but finds they cannot, will not cross to the light, but creep forward greedy for the falling of it.
There is a framework in his mind, the geometry of architecture and energy flow, so that he bides each step its purpose as he says to the child, meant for ears below: )
Together, Lan Zhan.
( For the fall of the sun, for the moment that shadow reigns supreme, for when the fall of earth to shatter the dam holding back the cleansing this mountain has yearned for, pleaded for over an age might see its way through. Uneasy and destructive and healing, all these things and more. )