( The dead had flowed backward, when at first they sought to flow forward with the shadow. He knows that for Lan Zhan's movement even as he tucks the child in tight and himself sets from the ambling motion of a man retaining the looseness of limbs to one who acts, quick and steady. From above, the vibrations, the calculated angle and then driving down with qi stored by merit of patience and awareness that he doesn't have sparing, only efficiency. He's learned those calculations, smiles grimly as the ground buckles from beneath, as a distant roar sends water hissing upward, too, a dry creekbed hidden in overgrowth and filled with the autumn rains filled now from below, one outlet of many.
There's fear in his heart, as the dead shift, and scream, and flow like tumbling rapids push boats downstream in their turbulence. He holds his position, holds the point of broken altar, and the landscape around him and the child alters. His heart, steady and rabbit quick in turns, breath inevitable in and out of lungs, until the age that separates their beginning and their end resolves to a battered, tattered living, breathing, dirtied haunt of a man crosses the threshold into this broken place. Freedom a song that doesn't sing sweet, precisely, but that can be felt as surely as the quaking, with how the hidden depths of this once beautiful place, this age-old sanctuary, drives out its own infection with the puncturing wounds they've decorated its most sanctified grounds.
Wei Wuxian waits, and he lowers the child down, lets him take his feet, and features arranged into something more and more human, as the hours have passed. The fur receding, the nose turning small and human round, the eyes less large, and pale, so pale regardless. Hair pale too, until it's a white haired child with drooping, rabbit ears and a twitch that trembles in his arms. Toddles on his feet, then more sure, the healing of burns from the night prior showing as shining and pink, flesh knitting over, memories being absorbed by young skin.
Wei Wuxian steps toward Lan Zhan as he speaks. When the words come as a wheeze, and before him, the child moves faster. The rabbit-boy, who cannot truly make himself all boy, or all bunny, barreling forward to cling to Lan Zhan's dirtied robes, the wet tatters, and cling like a different child, a lifetime ago. To bawl, heartbroken and with relief, loss and the break away from a fear he hadn't words for, clinging on.
Lan Zhan was the last one to come up, and the last missing piece of his equally small world. Loss might not mean to him what it will in a few more years, but Lan Zhan returns, and the scary world is scary, but a little less so, now.
Wei Wuxian studies his face, stepping closer, one hand coming to rest on top of the sobbing child's head, the other offered, palm up, for Lan Zhan. )
Yeah. ( He could feel it, had felt the shift. ) They are.
no subject
There's fear in his heart, as the dead shift, and scream, and flow like tumbling rapids push boats downstream in their turbulence. He holds his position, holds the point of broken altar, and the landscape around him and the child alters. His heart, steady and rabbit quick in turns, breath inevitable in and out of lungs, until the age that separates their beginning and their end resolves to a battered, tattered living, breathing, dirtied haunt of a man crosses the threshold into this broken place. Freedom a song that doesn't sing sweet, precisely, but that can be felt as surely as the quaking, with how the hidden depths of this once beautiful place, this age-old sanctuary, drives out its own infection with the puncturing wounds they've decorated its most sanctified grounds.
Wei Wuxian waits, and he lowers the child down, lets him take his feet, and features arranged into something more and more human, as the hours have passed. The fur receding, the nose turning small and human round, the eyes less large, and pale, so pale regardless. Hair pale too, until it's a white haired child with drooping, rabbit ears and a twitch that trembles in his arms. Toddles on his feet, then more sure, the healing of burns from the night prior showing as shining and pink, flesh knitting over, memories being absorbed by young skin.
Wei Wuxian steps toward Lan Zhan as he speaks. When the words come as a wheeze, and before him, the child moves faster. The rabbit-boy, who cannot truly make himself all boy, or all bunny, barreling forward to cling to Lan Zhan's dirtied robes, the wet tatters, and cling like a different child, a lifetime ago. To bawl, heartbroken and with relief, loss and the break away from a fear he hadn't words for, clinging on.
Lan Zhan was the last one to come up, and the last missing piece of his equally small world. Loss might not mean to him what it will in a few more years, but Lan Zhan returns, and the scary world is scary, but a little less so, now.
Wei Wuxian studies his face, stepping closer, one hand coming to rest on top of the sobbing child's head, the other offered, palm up, for Lan Zhan. )
Yeah. ( He could feel it, had felt the shift. ) They are.