There is heat, and desolation, and cold that burns more than any lightning strike or fire, and Wei Wuxian feels them all where he kneels, where Lan Zhan brings dirt that he's seen tilled and tilled and untilled to the point where his walking footsteps lost their care because he had to, to move forward. Learned apathy, stripped from him in those vertical lines, furrows in his skin, both felt and numbed.
His hand comes up, captures one of those hands, captures the dirt and blood and death and the undeniable beat of life between them, palm to palm, calloused fingers to calloused fingers. The shape of those callouses have changed, shifted in their orbits, but still within the same galaxy, still in the same breathless expanse of sky between them, sixteen years in the weaving of quiet and lightlessness.
"We beg." Supplicants, in the dirt and wearing it on hands, fingers, under nails, under eyes, in the lungs that draw in, in the exhalations out, in the hairs that stir from his shoulders, slide forward, follow him down.
Beg, and this is a bow, respect and something that sinks lower, touches on the buckled backs of bone ground to dust and buried by time, even before this was a burial grounds. A bow, and no hold slackened, together, and the words that people have meant for themselves for ages, will mean, but not with the depth of hollow echo in his chest, from deeper, from the space behind his heart and lungs, from the gaps in his teeth, thin and unseen.
"We're sorry." Not simple, those words, not with a weight of apology and grief; three different kinds, between Lan Zhan, Wei Wuxian, and Yiling underneath and over and around them in every sense, mountains looming taller than men can ever strive to rise. A land that holds to what it has been given, and who trembles, unsettled, by the slipping grip of its fingers.
Sorry isn't enough, yet the supplication, the depth of apology, is beyond the simplicity of bowed heads, strained, gaunt fingers, and heartbeats, steady or otherwise, until the ground beneath them thrums and beats to match.
But it begins, he thinks, Here.
The earth rumbles, and shakes, and the cries of the dead are a long, sustained keening, before both settle, bouncing rock and crashing dirt resettling as around them, the world tries to unmake itself. The courtyard held for a century fractures behind them; the stone pillars at the framing door crack, sway, hold.
"I think Yiling heard us," he says, and it's a dry statement from a parched throat, and he can only cast his gaze askance at the solidity of Lan Zhan, the frailty of his dust-bathed light. So human, so alive, so what.
Wei Wuxian stares, and he finds no words in the morass of his thoughts, only glimmering lights and dancing shadows and it is the forest, on an autumn day, brisk and lovely, the sun filtered through the leaves. The river and its susurrations in the distance, whispering promises of water and disaster and travel and trade. No smoke on the wind, but voices, far distant and indistinct. They laugh. Alive.
no subject
His hand comes up, captures one of those hands, captures the dirt and blood and death and the undeniable beat of life between them, palm to palm, calloused fingers to calloused fingers. The shape of those callouses have changed, shifted in their orbits, but still within the same galaxy, still in the same breathless expanse of sky between them, sixteen years in the weaving of quiet and lightlessness.
"We beg." Supplicants, in the dirt and wearing it on hands, fingers, under nails, under eyes, in the lungs that draw in, in the exhalations out, in the hairs that stir from his shoulders, slide forward, follow him down.
Beg, and this is a bow, respect and something that sinks lower, touches on the buckled backs of bone ground to dust and buried by time, even before this was a burial grounds. A bow, and no hold slackened, together, and the words that people have meant for themselves for ages, will mean, but not with the depth of hollow echo in his chest, from deeper, from the space behind his heart and lungs, from the gaps in his teeth, thin and unseen.
"We're sorry." Not simple, those words, not with a weight of apology and grief; three different kinds, between Lan Zhan, Wei Wuxian, and Yiling underneath and over and around them in every sense, mountains looming taller than men can ever strive to rise. A land that holds to what it has been given, and who trembles, unsettled, by the slipping grip of its fingers.
Sorry isn't enough, yet the supplication, the depth of apology, is beyond the simplicity of bowed heads, strained, gaunt fingers, and heartbeats, steady or otherwise, until the ground beneath them thrums and beats to match.
But it begins, he thinks, Here.
The earth rumbles, and shakes, and the cries of the dead are a long, sustained keening, before both settle, bouncing rock and crashing dirt resettling as around them, the world tries to unmake itself. The courtyard held for a century fractures behind them; the stone pillars at the framing door crack, sway, hold.
"I think Yiling heard us," he says, and it's a dry statement from a parched throat, and he can only cast his gaze askance at the solidity of Lan Zhan, the frailty of his dust-bathed light. So human, so alive, so what.
Wei Wuxian stares, and he finds no words in the morass of his thoughts, only glimmering lights and dancing shadows and it is the forest, on an autumn day, brisk and lovely, the sun filtered through the leaves. The river and its susurrations in the distance, whispering promises of water and disaster and travel and trade. No smoke on the wind, but voices, far distant and indistinct. They laugh. Alive.