There is a settling in those words. A suspicion, an understanding, whose bones unearth as surely as the ones around them, caught in tangled, dead grasses, gnarled in roots long questing for water, for substance, for life. The trees grow from decay, and like mushrooms in their shadows, find use in it, find life, tenuous and painful.
Crack open his ribs, and find his heart, and the hollow of his dantian, right there where his breastbone ends. The soft spot following the hardness of bone, and yes, in those organs one finds nothing but the usual hollows, the crowded spaces, the mass of viscera necessary for living.
A golden core filling his dantian is not. Neither, as it turns out in aching ways, is the love of a man he thinks, once upon a time, he had started to love too. Had balked in the face of, because his realisation even then came already too late. When he was lessened of this, and could not be the companion he had been, could only disappoint.
Tricks are not true cultivation. You walk a fine line. He's commandeered the path, and his steps fall steady, now, and the joke of it all being his crimes are that of the righteous, too.
"I loved him once, too. That man who lived and died in the shadow of Yiling."
He won't say, that man might have loved you, too. It wasn't true until later, and later, later was too late. Later was a lifetime, even if it'd barely been a year.
He allows the press, forehead to forehead, and he allows the tears, because he allows himself this much felt, too. Not for them, but for an inevitability, a lancing of an old, festering wound. The brief closing of his eyes, in extended blink, and the light that's in them, different but familiar to a man who had once lived, as of yet unbroken.
"You're learning me," is what he says, and feels, because there's enough of a shadow of what he had been that skews what Lan Zhan does, even now. "Just as I'm learning you, sixteen years a widower, sixteen years living that I'll never touch."
Distance, and he pulls his head back, and in the sad quickness of a snake's strike, brushes his lips over Lan Zhan's forehead, above the ribbon. Sparing the whole of silk and metal with uninvited intrusion. No, it is not romance, but benefaction, a rasp of lips rendered soft from time spent living outside of the wind and heat and dry cold of Yiling, and his own heart.
"You still know more of me than anyone else. That's enough," he says, but he reclaims his distance with a foot slide out, turning to no longer face him head on, but to offer his side. To look out into the expanse of forest and rock and grass and decay that wants to be better than the sum of broken parts, but can't heal simply through wishing. Can't be what it was before, but forge through to becoming something new, something different. Better or worse? There was no point in asking such things.
"Knowing this man, that's enough."
What is love? A frightening thing, a binding of the heart, yoked to one cart and unable to slip away, to make it feel like it was okay if the cart goes abandoned, falls sideways, if the axel breaks. Yet only one love, in the shades of so many others: of sons, under their care, of brothers, who they'd face maelstroms for, on some level. For peoples and lands and causes, and those have always been easier for him to grasp, for him to pour himself into, for him to love. It's with bruised, aching heart he feels a little lighter, as if he's been finally absolved of a sin he hadn't intended to write.
I think, once, I may have loved him. I think, you are not him.
If Lan Zhan can say it, he speaks true, for all he lies in omission or technicalities, and Wei Wuxian can let it breathe freely, air in his lungs. There is no owing, for a man he was once. There is only this, and the knowing they grow into, where the support they'll lend of blade and blood is unquestioned, easy instinct. The rest? That knowing comes in time, and if it never touches love, that word, that cart he'd been frightened by when Yanli still breathed, he's no lessened for it.
Lan Zhan is not lessened, for having loved and lost, with some familiar stranger returned as ghost to haunt his bed. Half-married, half-wedded, and it can be that middle ground, Wei Wuxian knowing what boundaries he won't cross, what things he's never tasted, and needn't have. Family, for him... that he's been granted. By a man who says now, he loved what he had been, once. A man who's granted the ghost of whom he loved something so infinitely precious, all he can say, standing there and surveying a realm he will see heal, so help him if it takes a lifetime:
"Thank you." For the honesty, and for having felt, at any time, that Wei Wuxian, Wei Ying, had been a man worth loving. "And I'm sorry."
That he could not, would not ever, be that man again. That he leaves Lan Zhan widowed, even bodied as he stands now, breathing and never truly dead, and had since long before he'd decided it was easier to fall than breathe in a world where he destroyed everything he sought to protect. To love.
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Crack open his ribs, and find his heart, and the hollow of his dantian, right there where his breastbone ends. The soft spot following the hardness of bone, and yes, in those organs one finds nothing but the usual hollows, the crowded spaces, the mass of viscera necessary for living.
A golden core filling his dantian is not. Neither, as it turns out in aching ways, is the love of a man he thinks, once upon a time, he had started to love too. Had balked in the face of, because his realisation even then came already too late. When he was lessened of this, and could not be the companion he had been, could only disappoint.
Tricks are not true cultivation. You walk a fine line. He's commandeered the path, and his steps fall steady, now, and the joke of it all being his crimes are that of the righteous, too.
"I loved him once, too. That man who lived and died in the shadow of Yiling."
He won't say, that man might have loved you, too. It wasn't true until later, and later, later was too late. Later was a lifetime, even if it'd barely been a year.
He allows the press, forehead to forehead, and he allows the tears, because he allows himself this much felt, too. Not for them, but for an inevitability, a lancing of an old, festering wound. The brief closing of his eyes, in extended blink, and the light that's in them, different but familiar to a man who had once lived, as of yet unbroken.
"You're learning me," is what he says, and feels, because there's enough of a shadow of what he had been that skews what Lan Zhan does, even now. "Just as I'm learning you, sixteen years a widower, sixteen years living that I'll never touch."
Distance, and he pulls his head back, and in the sad quickness of a snake's strike, brushes his lips over Lan Zhan's forehead, above the ribbon. Sparing the whole of silk and metal with uninvited intrusion. No, it is not romance, but benefaction, a rasp of lips rendered soft from time spent living outside of the wind and heat and dry cold of Yiling, and his own heart.
"You still know more of me than anyone else. That's enough," he says, but he reclaims his distance with a foot slide out, turning to no longer face him head on, but to offer his side. To look out into the expanse of forest and rock and grass and decay that wants to be better than the sum of broken parts, but can't heal simply through wishing. Can't be what it was before, but forge through to becoming something new, something different. Better or worse? There was no point in asking such things.
"Knowing this man, that's enough."
What is love? A frightening thing, a binding of the heart, yoked to one cart and unable to slip away, to make it feel like it was okay if the cart goes abandoned, falls sideways, if the axel breaks. Yet only one love, in the shades of so many others: of sons, under their care, of brothers, who they'd face maelstroms for, on some level. For peoples and lands and causes, and those have always been easier for him to grasp, for him to pour himself into, for him to love. It's with bruised, aching heart he feels a little lighter, as if he's been finally absolved of a sin he hadn't intended to write.
I think, once, I may have loved him. I think, you are not him.
If Lan Zhan can say it, he speaks true, for all he lies in omission or technicalities, and Wei Wuxian can let it breathe freely, air in his lungs. There is no owing, for a man he was once. There is only this, and the knowing they grow into, where the support they'll lend of blade and blood is unquestioned, easy instinct. The rest? That knowing comes in time, and if it never touches love, that word, that cart he'd been frightened by when Yanli still breathed, he's no lessened for it.
Lan Zhan is not lessened, for having loved and lost, with some familiar stranger returned as ghost to haunt his bed. Half-married, half-wedded, and it can be that middle ground, Wei Wuxian knowing what boundaries he won't cross, what things he's never tasted, and needn't have. Family, for him... that he's been granted. By a man who says now, he loved what he had been, once. A man who's granted the ghost of whom he loved something so infinitely precious, all he can say, standing there and surveying a realm he will see heal, so help him if it takes a lifetime:
"Thank you." For the honesty, and for having felt, at any time, that Wei Wuxian, Wei Ying, had been a man worth loving. "And I'm sorry."
That he could not, would not ever, be that man again. That he leaves Lan Zhan widowed, even bodied as he stands now, breathing and never truly dead, and had since long before he'd decided it was easier to fall than breathe in a world where he destroyed everything he sought to protect. To love.