downswing: (trade)
ʟᴀɴ ᴡᴀɴɢᴊɪ | 蓝忘机 ([personal profile] downswing) wrote 2021-08-11 11:39 pm (UTC)

Old deaths, delicate work, fractured spirits, the token symptoms of the ancient sickness: idleness or fear in the rites, condemning a land to haunting. It is in the way of lonely things and creatures and places and coreless men to grow so, a little walked by death, reshaped in her footprints. Their estrangement, first visitor, then weapon, then a veiled shackling master.

And Wei Ying says, Those dropped in, and, Ah. This, then. Crepuscular pulse of pain like candle wick, flame-bitten, flaring — this is pain, the shape of it, longing. He remembers, distantly, being a creature carved of the negative space surrounding his grief, thin and gossamer. Sixteen years, and the reason spilled gushing like Wei Ying's blood from Wen Qionglin's mouth, forever young, and Jiang Wanyin knelt to receive it. He did not know what bled them all, then.

Sees, now, its absent repercussions in the tidal fragility of Wei Ying's skin, the way his fingers pull back, as if singed, and the touch consuming him. Do not play with talisman fire, Lan Wangji remembered to teach Sizhui once, and Wei Ying smiles through his burns. Their children will learn the lesson faster, keener, better, the one with his rabbit heart and his rabbit fears first of all. A new life, alongside them. Wangji did not earn this.

There is wet in this cave, long arteries of strange life, dense as muscle tissue, knitting and trickling down. Before he knows himself, Lan Wangji reaches for Wei Ying's hand, that old greed anchored in habit, affirmed as routine through sheer will and exercise. He pours qi, and what healing knots between them is Wei Ying's to know, and Wangji's to ignore, to shy his eyes from. A gift given freely need not be thanked, nor Wei Ying's due be acknowledged.

"Pour my cup," he murmurs instead. In his two hands, joined, or in sculpted stone plainly available, or twigs braided together to serve him goblet. What trinkets does the Burial Mound yet keep, what bowls of jade and ewers of porcelain veined like night skies in filigree of wanton, forlorn pattern? What chopsticks of precious zitan, worth gold's weight, sinking?

"Will she be here?" And why, so distant from the City? Why would she follow? A final, careful donation of Lan Wangji's strength, then his grip tightens. Do not stab him when he stands weak. And, Do not let him wander. "Jiang Yanli."

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