He thinks, foolishly, he knows this: the moment when Wei Ying unmoors his hand, meanders it north-bound, past the natural bindings of modesty, into territory nebulous and shifting. The moment when a man has narrowed the selfishness of his balance with singular, strategic specificity: when the single-log bridge can only afford him one step, then the next, and no distraction of foreign sentiment.
This is what Lan Wangji has transgressed into: eyes bright, but mind dulled, his affection weighted, an unwelcome margin of error. Offers rejected, hands turned away. Finish the bows, he'd urged in a village half submerged in the terrors of its practicality. Denied, even then.
He presses his other palm, slick with cold shivers, clammy, on the wound of exorcised grand. Grips there, if only to give himself pillar.
"The man you were. Do you begrudge me," he starts, and finishes, and breathes, and is. Is, so very lone, mahogany and hale, but earthy in a way that takes root in this cavernous world of Yiling, his grief their own. He misjudged the land, the hawkish, trembled whispers of its aches. How they woo him. "That I knew him?"
A core alive, incendiary, an example of fortitude. If polished, no doubt Wei Ying might have surged past prominence, into immortality. The heavens would have sundered in sharp, toothy invitation, to rain down their secrets.
"Or do you begrudge me that I was better learned to care for him?" That he knew the Wei Ying who shared his path instinctively, through the wealth of shared experience. That he knows the Wei Ying of now as a broken bone, through splinters of pain delivered throughout Wangji's body, his absence an earthquake, tectonic.
no subject
This is what Lan Wangji has transgressed into: eyes bright, but mind dulled, his affection weighted, an unwelcome margin of error. Offers rejected, hands turned away. Finish the bows, he'd urged in a village half submerged in the terrors of its practicality. Denied, even then.
He presses his other palm, slick with cold shivers, clammy, on the wound of exorcised grand. Grips there, if only to give himself pillar.
"The man you were. Do you begrudge me," he starts, and finishes, and breathes, and is. Is, so very lone, mahogany and hale, but earthy in a way that takes root in this cavernous world of Yiling, his grief their own. He misjudged the land, the hawkish, trembled whispers of its aches. How they woo him. "That I knew him?"
A core alive, incendiary, an example of fortitude. If polished, no doubt Wei Ying might have surged past prominence, into immortality. The heavens would have sundered in sharp, toothy invitation, to rain down their secrets.
"Or do you begrudge me that I was better learned to care for him?" That he knew the Wei Ying who shared his path instinctively, through the wealth of shared experience. That he knows the Wei Ying of now as a broken bone, through splinters of pain delivered throughout Wangji's body, his absence an earthquake, tectonic.