[ Together, but their pacing staggered, and Lan Wangji — stilted for longer than he will admit later, the hour and its danger passed. He sways, nausea striking his nape and his back, the cloying stench of burning inundating the passageway, drowning him past where he can draw true breath.
Still, he waits — and he waits — and keeps vigil, dancing around his site on firefly-light steps, ever circling without stilling long enough to give the dead cause for chase. Let his scent not catch, let his shadow not deepen, let him wander as his thoughts do, wander and stray like ghosts.
A prediction of some merit: time within the corridors is but a fraction of that passed in the outside world. Wei Ying's wards honour his name, fast, breezy, reliable. Within heartbeats of the first alarm drawn, Lan Wangji comes alive — that same breath, Bichen, her pallor sinking up and twisting, manipulate no more elegantly than a shovel, carving out the shape of stones, like every knife that aims the negative space between vertebrae.
He feels the tumult of coming water in the vibration of dirt, feels the raw ache of it bearing down before it splints rock like heavy needle, thrusting down, first in rivulet, then in stream, then in disaster —
And they scream for it, the dead who wait, who waited their lifetime, who waited no further, for the white roil of water catching sulphur, bathing bones, releasing heat off old volcanic plaques. They recoil, run, and it is to Lan Wangji's shame, withdrawing beside them, that he does not understand at first, they run for the water.
So many dead, spirits, bones. So many unburied. The scratched out terror of each breath nearly prevents the next. He dashes out, limbs protesting, Bichen all but a stringing decoration — until he reaches the outside world with a gasp, his clothes tattered, his fingers all grime and his nails worn. A beggar, returned to the temple, exhausted by the last step he takes before Wei Ying in the great chamber, nearly destroyed.
When he speaks, first, sound eludes him. Then, a wheeze. At long last, coughed, the reckoning: ]
They are grateful. [ He wants to laugh. Can't. ] Grateful.
( 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.
[ This child will never be of human-kind, butchered into incongruity. Fate, sorcery and shrivelled magic distorted him, lengthened bone and stripped flesh and painted fur where joints and ligament shouls have shrieked the aches of negative space. Yet Wei Ying cradles him as he would a second, third son, and Lan Wangji knows the truth of him: he will come, as their other children have followed, to earn his place at the Cloud Recesses. So be it.
Brows briefly perked up to flag the token resistance of his incredulity, he clasps Wei Ying's hand, sweat of his nerves to the grit of Lan Wangji's palm, binding their fingers together and taking shameful advantage. Weight lent, he uses the balance to drop to one knee, depositing Bichen to her fettering and straining to sling an arm out and welcome the child in his keep.
He comes, more eager than any living thing should, but innocent in the way of every rabbit that's sought Lan Wangji out to nestle, pale against pallor, its frailty near his mourning sickness, both bare before the sun. Wangji allows it soot and succor, the warmth of his body, a slow and bartered reassurance. A second child waits with his minder in the inn; this one, here, now, heart a deep gong's swing, merits the full measure of Lan Wangji's attention.
They paralyse just so for longer than he'd intended, one arm around the child-rabbit, Lan Wangji's hand still clawing around Wei Ying's. He tugs down. ]
...we should not have left the Burial Mounds as we did.
[ A lacklustre segue, but for their private understanding: they should have salted the barren lands, cleansed away their shadows, extricated their decay. Should have set the grief and regret they summoned and grew in those lands, should have cultivated to their peace.
Lest they become this: festered. A fantasy of regrets. Wronged. ]
We will return there for amends.
[ Together, Wei Ying's word of each day. Very well. ]
( Wei Ying has it in him to fold gracefully, arm firm and balance for Lan Zhan where so often its been the other way around. Watches their third child, for who else will have this one? Who will contest, not seek out death for the sake of eradicating a perversion that is still a life, a living being, finding his own space to fill within the tapestry of their lives?
Challenges are all they collect for themselves, or so life spins itself into becoming, and he finds the ground with his knees, and he shifts closer, circle of their joined arms and the resting of his hand on child's head moving into one that strokes reassuring down his back, over Lan Zhan's arm, settles in there as one pressure in passing over another.
Curled around like hamsters nuzzling into bellies as they sleep, content to let the world past swiftly while they stretch out and wait for the night and what safety it brings.
Yiling, another scabbing scar in his chest, and he picks at it gladly, worries at it and smiles without the shadows dragging behind to say the expression is for show. Hums before he speaks, a warmed note in his throat, held and carried. )
We will. Though for the sakes of the children, ( he says; ) make it a land that can heal, and grow, and allow them to play without its old concerns.
( Death not grasping, madness not seeping, possession of bodies too simple without the concentrated will to resist. A land made whole, out of its barren brutality, and he knows from a lifetime ago, it can be so.
With the time, the effort, the dedication, the resources, it will be so.
He stays as he is, their tightened circle, and only stirs as the child's sobs have long petered into quiet sniffles, the lines of his form softening into an exhaustion the adults must carry on from. Shifts, fingers tightening under Lan Zhan's grip: reassurance and question, his brow quirked, his lips softened into an almost curving line. )
One more son to collect.
( Here he stirs, and feels their own cleansing to be called forth, while his heart feels lighter than it has in some time over scarred lines, buried deep. He cannot wait to see their other child, cannot wait in this moment to see Sizhui, and can wait, for related reasons, for when Lan Zhan moves, to lend his support, and the tired child his side, as if he's a man who can bear the burdens of those he chooses just as much as they can choose to bear his burdens in turn. Together. )
[ ...another son. The third, already, reaped by their hands, seeded by misfortune. Against his chest, the rabbit sighs out the natural anguish of a small body learning the comforts of protection, trusting the next stroke of Wei Ying's hand will spark fires of lethargy to lick at his limbs.
Known for the sword, the guqin, the path of violence, but sacrificed as bed board for the epileptic pulse of a wayward, infant's heartbeat. Lan Wangji would protest, but Wei Ying falls first prey to their routine, and the hour softens to the gentle, febrile cooing of a child settling in place.
Sizhui might have stood so between them, learning the love of two and not passed as priceless burden between the members of the sect, until Lan Wangji returned to him from gelid confinement. They've stolen too much of him, reimbursed little and late. Now, second chances brokered —
And there's the stink of sulphur and hot stone, of moving, precious water. Grime on his legs, where they fold into finery and silk, blood flaked and crisp, deteriorating. Baths. ]
Yes.
[ An inn, a quarter, a night's succour after. Return tomorrow, when the bodies they unearth from the causeway will want their dues, their rites and their last words, shared. When there will be more than urgency and less than dread between them.
He lifts, sparing Wei Ying barely a nod, then a nudge of their joined hands around the child, and washes his mouth on the rabbit-fine fur, the tip of the creature's nose. Uncle will not want such a guest, but he will take a refugee, and so they will present him. No matter his soul's aches, Lan Qiren has never turned nose or walked away from a harrowed innocent.
But still, as they start the walk, even Lan Wangji must note: ]
( In motion, the thin peace that had enfolded their moment in the aftermath of chaos exhales and expires, and he smiles, for the child, for Lan Zhan, for the son waiting in hearth-home nearby, for the son waiting li further still. This rabbit child, who shifts and turns and starts to mold into the comfort of Lan Zhan's dirtied arms, once more sliding the scale toward leporine features, as if each inhalation and exhalation a shifting canvas makes.
Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps what this child of misfortune needs is what Gusu Lan provides even to the most fortunate of children, orphans taken in by nostalgia and offered safety in places that claimed impossible was only a state of mind.
Clarity, focus. There are other gifts delivered in the cool clinging fogs of Gusu, by the structured strictures of the Lan. Words like Lan Zhan's, a different kind of code, tip him into laughing, a tired roll of amusement that aches without hurting at all. )
Right, right. A daughter next time. I'll consult with the universe, it should be so kind as to provide.
( A smile, a wink, and the path spilling downward for the resolution of the evening: each step gains momentum if not energy, so that they're closer with each moment to their first safely minded Qingshan. They're welcomed with wide, curious eyes, a woman paid well and given to a sleeping child at her heart, curled up next to a cat, lean and muscled, and an older child minding the fire with the distraction of the young upon their arrival.
Roused from slumber, their waiting son rubs at his eyes, and beams, and holds out his arms: a demand with the sleepy presentation of the not fully awake, lapsing into mumbled complaint at his waking state and a burrowing nuzzle of his head against a collarbone, hidden. Asking after lodgings points toward another inn, one closer, facilities less polished, interiors carefully decorated, and bathing tubs of metal and kept warm through the ingenuity of the mortals not so blessed as to live in cultivation's finer tunings of work. Negotiated, three baths, and the child left in another's care for most the day demanding in increasingly less sleepy turn to come with, such that Wei Wuxian brings his nose to their human son's in a bop and nuzzle before turning his face to Lan Zhan, smiling tired and content, knowing tomorrow's mission and at ease with the straightforwardness of it: )
Do you have room for two?
( To mean: do you have the energy, because I'm happy taking him in for splashes and earnest attempts to scrub both of them clean in one small, dedicated radius before his childish attention span wanders away again. It means the shorter soak; and they now number two who need the time, and Wei Wuxian considers he can probably handle both. Or handle them first, to lay to rest, if Qingshan will cooperate in curling up with their rabbit-child and sleep the sleep of the young and growing. )
[ They retreat like scavenging hounds with broken scraps to fill concave bellies, the fractions of Qingshan's affection a thickened, stoked deluge after long hours of bone-blanching hunger. The nursemaid surrenders him easily, a beautiful boy for one day's love but fractious after, in the way of children spoiled by the radiance of undying devotion. At Cloud Recesses, in Caiyi, in travel, Qingshan is master and commander of every room he waddles, and he will not be denied. Today, he wishes his voice heard once more.
It's Wei Ying who answers him, while fresh accommodations go brokered. Wei Ying, who steps first, Wei Ying who flirts with toil unending, while Lan Wangji's shadow casts long and deep, a respectable distance behind him. Then, amid the fulmination of cloying, clawing incense, in a room far too expectant of a sophisticated traveller's tastes for a seating of the provinces —
...ah. May Lan Wangji suffer the presence of one of his children in the bathtub Arms steeled, he clings to their nameless rabbit son, then only raises his brow and calmly swoops in to wrest Qingshan free of Wei Ying, also. ]
Wei Ying. [ For how often he speaks the name, poison and honey, known and dissolving. Diluting. But granular, patient, seeding and present — humoured, perhaps, to serve reminders of the plain and the established. ] I raised a child.
[ Long years of dread and mourning and sickness and knee scrapes and bruising, when the first brushes with the sword turned an eruption of adolescent discoveries that heroes might win the wars of poetry, but they do not walk from combat of the living world entirely unscathed. That warriors are not born, but scrupulously crafted, and Sizhui, the hold on the hilt is weak, the turn of the calf too tense, the lines of defence too tender, and — there, the first blow bleeds into a wounding, and the boy (turned man) learns.
Perhaps there were nursemaids too, and a loving uncle, a fostering grandmaster. Perhaps a sect volunteered itself to pay the weak, strangled imprecation of a missing master's fatherhood, while he sought chaos in the wake of his soulmate's disaster.
No matter. He lays claim to Lan Sizhui's rearing, one moment and all. He will raise these two sons also, however dubious Wei Ying stands of his care. He pauses only the one moment: ]
Name your third son.
[ Let Wei Ying have his say of the one thing, while Lan Wangji retreats to shed grit and grime and silks for himself and his two children behind the modesty screen. ]
( He's sad, for the time he did not have to give to Sizhui, in his growing from the child who he'd been as A-Yuan to the young man he's become, under his father's care, and the attentiveness of a clan around him. He's happy, for knowing that A-Yuan had not died as senselessly as his aunts and uncles and cousin, that he had been granted all that by Lan Zhan, that he'd been loved, and had not lacked, and had become a young man of worthy regard.
Wei Wuxian regrets none of that. It had nothing to do with him, beyond an association, an introduction. Everything else had been on Lan Zhan and Wen Yuan, to end up with Lan Sizhui as the young man he is today.
So he smiles and laughs as Qingshan is liberated from his arms with Lan Zhan's I raised a child, because yes, and also, no. Differences in ages they've both been stumbling with, because neither of them had raised any child so young, and yet look at him: he grows, he commands, he is imperiousness in babbles and the first attempts at words that tumble off his tongue to the ground where, bending, his fathers gather them up like pearls to share with a world already rife with such things.
He doesn't say anything, just smile, let that fondness and his amused understanding of Lan Zhan's need to be with the children, more compelling and driving than the simplicity of affection and its depth that Wei Wuxian settles into. There, there goes his spouse, set to bathing and scrubbing and Wei Wuxian shakes his head, moving to the basin to wash his arms and settle on preparing clothing out of regathered packs from the donkey still stabled outside. Easy, when that reunion had only been a logical retreat for lodgings anyway. )
Are they both to be in the Shi generation when they're of age?
( Asked and curious, because he's not sure at what else that might be, where they join with their brother two decades beyond themselves. Still, he can give them something else, he supposes, and that brings a name to mind, simple. )
Qingbai.
( Meanwhile two sets of children's clothes, the one to be too short for the rabbit son, but warm and clean and soft. Not too tight, to rub fur poorly, though he doesn't know if that's a concern.
A pause, and then: )
Their sleeping robes are laid out, did you want me to fetch yours? My hands are clean!
( He's not smearing dirt and debris and blood and wraiths on cloth, for all they once sung it of him, the great Yiling Patriarch in all his devilish glory. )
[ Hands clean, mind dirtied. Wei Ying presents his achievements, the name and the spread of clothes, and Lan Wangji retaliates with the full regalia of Gusu Lan efficiency: first, to lay the children bare, Qingshan precious and easy with kicks and flustered punches of thin air, as if to punish the enemy Lan Wangji, who cannot resist to encroach in his villainy. As if he can, must be stopped, even as he inflicts on Qingshan the child-suffered indignity of stripping the short whip of his sash, first, then parting his layers and abandoning him cruelly unsupervised on the modesty bench, while Wangji progresses to his brother.
And then, the yao, a constant watery flux of shape and stability, fur and fast legs and his fluttered, shuddered pulse. Lan Wangji spares him the better part of his efforts, less to coax cooperation than to broker it soft, to ease him from bruised linens without inviting his panic. This, again, when Lan Wangji raises both children, Qingshan aggressive and imperial, perched on his lent father's shoulder, while the yao grapples with the inevitability of the waiting stillness of the bath water. Lan Wangji, reduced to one silk layer's obscenity for the bathing, a hesitant if coalescing shadow cast long over the bathtub's thick-polished wooden whirl.
Within: a whirl of hard salts and dried wisteria, and Lan Wangji does not say, You wasted coin, it is not of the season, not when each inn competes to recognise and gain the passing chief cultivator's favour. First, he means to dip his fingers, struggling to balance both children and grow a third limb. Then, fear forfeit, he only leans so the yao's foot might tease the water's rim, clicking his tongue when the boy-creature wrenches it back with a fuss, reminded of heat and scars and days of agony. ]
Qingbai will be of Shi.
[ A third son, so named. If not a child by the traditional account, then a creature in sore, striking need of care. The domesticity of the moment — of waving Wei Ying close, of handing over Qingshan, nearly blights his eyes blind.
He must ease Qingbai into subjecting himself to heat again, must trick and gently submerge him, as with the true rabbits, when they never encountered river waters before. Perhaps he should feel ill at ease, to welcome his... dubious husband at his side under the circumstances of transparent, road-worn garments, but here they stand, controlled by practicality, two parents solving the riddle of their ill-behaved children. ]
My third son is of discriminating taste. [ In fewer words than this indulgence: he objects, and Lan Wangji must wet his hand first, then cup Qingbai's limbs with it to prove the wetness brings no harm, only succor. But he pauses, midway, to search Wei Ying's gaze dark and Lan Wangji's own purpose baleful: ] Wei Ying. If he reverts to rabbit form...
[ ...and if Wei Ying is stolen his fresh son, what then? Wangji has born enough of Wei Ying's heartbreak to know its colours deep and true, to prepare in great advance for their arrival. ]
( Qingshan babbles his nonsense and its scattering of almost-words when bathed and handed back to Wei Wuxian's arms, divested a layer to not spread soot and all manner of what else on freshly bathed child. He's no more cooperative in being dressed again as to when he'd been undressed, keen to grip at hair, until he holds on to a lock of Wei Wuxian's with the ironclad certainty of his young self-centredness, unshakable and natural as the mountains of certainty his newest, longest parents become in his eyes.
Extensions of himself, he can continue in his imperious rule, though he relents at last, a gracious emperor, to allow Wei Wuxian to finish the single tie and leave him in his tunic-gown, ready for the night. Equally ready to be down and walking, which he's soon to try, only to be given hand and led, toddling, back toward new brother and scandalous, silk-clad father.
Qingshan watches Lan Zhan's coaxing with wide eyes and the first glimmers of a shared sense of possession, but poorly formed, the idea that all attention is his, too, but that he can be fascinated enough to allow a percent of this attention to fall elsewhere. Wei Wuxian has unearthed a comb, and coaxes it through Qingshan's hair with more success for his fascination with Qingbai's bathing. It's to this, to his pause matching Lan Zhan's, that Wei Wuxian lifts his face and meets dark eyes with his own.
If. He smiles, for Lan Zhan, for all of them. For the way his heart warms and aches at once, and for Qingshan, who turns to look up at Lan Zhan's face too, before grunting and gesturing back to Qingbai. )
Then he has a number of fine-furred friends to stay with, won't he? We can give them what we hope is best for them, but every child is responsible for choosing how they live, in the end. If that's his way... is he any less worth having pulled out of that place?
( Changed forms, reversion to four legs that touch earth and the nose that wiggles and an overlarge, scarred, sweet rabbit: he still lives. There is a weight to that Wei Wuxian holds as precious, for whatever other heartbreak it may herald.
Any child who does not cultivate is heartbreak for parents who may well see them go to white before their hair follows suit. Would that be so different? Is it even so different now? )
[ The noble miracle of teaching, the privilege of watching a young soul's bright eyes widen and capture and hold the terror before him — until it mellows into the safe and the known with each careful, calculated inclination of Qingbai's foot in clear, clever water. Lan Wangji teases more than he descends him, tips of Qingbai's limb — now pinked toes, now furred, at all times wriggling — grazing surface to write ripples.
In the end, the yao is submerged, and Wangji — possessed of that rare indignity only a parent brandishes when his child has finally acquiesced to cooperation or silence — follows shamelessly on his cue. On leg in, the second. Heat suffuses over Lan Wangji, one man turned island when Qingbai wrestles close and mounts him, clumsy and feverish, kicking at waves. The treasury of Lan Wangji's patience depletes itself in slow increments: he allows it, careful to soak both hands in salts and salve, to avoid the trappings of his floated, swollen sleeves, as he bathes clothed.
Qingbai is an easy compromise of cooing and muffled sound and the press of his sweet, milky cheek against Wangji's collarbone, defeated. He allows the torture and disgrace of Lan Wangji's diligent scrubbing, one leg, then the next, and the arms and the narrow, trembled span of his spine. Then, behind the ears — short or long &dmash; and in those parts rendered intimate. Soot, grime, blood. Half shed off Qingbai, half quickly deserting Lan Wangji's own form.
He finishes the child early, then completes his own ablutions and rises wing Qingbai cradles in his arms without care for the deluge of damp each footstep curses freshly on the floors. Merciless in this, as in everything, the military precision of his advance irrefutable. When he presents Qingbai to Wei Ying and his sullen-faced brother, his hands shake for the endeavour. ]
Thank you. For him. [ This, to Wei Ying, words trickled and mouth slow. ] For those who came before. Those who may follow.
[ They trade blows so much more often than gratitude, and yet here lies Lan Wangji's heart, bleeding. He has earned another son, whose hair whips against his arm, whose round bulk narrows in a pleased coil around Wangji's chest. Their heartbeats, war-drummed and matching.
Wei Ying made a gift to him of this. He does not hasten to return it. ]
One day, you will tire of gift giving.
i like how this is the horniest tag you're getting out of wifi so far
( The surge of waters as Lan Zhan stands, the rainfall of his approach, and tides shift for lesser things, like the moon. Qingshan lifts his head and pushes out his lower lip, he hinted start of a pout that doesn't press further, knowing its effectiveness in quiet more than the dramatics other children learn to throw in similar circumstances. He waves his arms, then opens and closes his fists, reaching for his soaking father, reaching for the furred then pink skinned brother he's taking in as part of his egocentric universe: this, too, is his, nevermind that until the day before, no such part of his world had been married in quite this form.
At least one child would wear the earnest possession of his father as a badge of honour due, and temper it in the time after with Lan considerations, but not lose it, no matter the anchoring.
He looks upon the dripping form of third son and singular husband, in whatever fractured way of it they had as a knowing between each other. There are times where he reflects Lan Zhan has unfairly beautiful genetics; that his reputation as a handsome man has only grown with his distinguishment, that his title, handed over in a war that did little service to their souls and much to the reforging of their world at the time, matched him for its matured meaning, and not simply the ruthless precision of his military might. Dry haired, outlined in unfairly sheered silk, all the angular planes of muscle hinted at with the steady drip that plasters cloth to skin. How many times now, over the years? How many times to see without understanding? When does admiration change forms? When did he start trusting in it, without that fatal leap so easy to concede: what wants for owing. No, it's a language of giving, and not to appease. Giving because one wants in turn, and not the dark, bleak belly of a want that cries out in lonely guilt and obligation, wretched as it was once inevitable.
He's saved from wandering thoughts by the words that find purchase on Lan Zhan's tongue, and Wei Wuxian blinks, swallows against a dry mouth and redirects his dark eyes to Lan Zhan's. Puts one hand to Qingshan, who holds his thumb, then ruthlessly tosses it away, to better offer both his hands forth again, for the father who holds his brother, and not him.
It gives him that moment to collect the drying cloths, to step forward and drape the first over Lan Zhan's arms and the crescent moon of Qingbai's cleansed form. He's healed further from his injuries the night before, and that may be part of his nature, not human and not animal, trapped as he is in this form of a yao most would consign to a death that lays undeserved, this child innocent. He will steady. Is steadying now, breathing in matched harmony to Lan Zhan. A gift in turn. )
I don't imagine, ( He says, smiling with the slow, seeping warmth of genuine and deep affection, turning to catch up the larger drying cloth to his dry hands, ) that will be any sooner than when you're tired of me.
( A step, and the toss of the cloth, settling over Lan Zhan's shoulders and draping down his back and sides. Qingbai's eyes flutter open and watch, rounded and curious. Qingshan stills in his silent pouting and clutching of fists, mouth opening into a perfect, curious circle. He steps closer, one hand reaching out to run over Qingbai's head. Then he reaches for Lan Zhan, but the sides of his neck, one hand coaxing his hair free and over to spill down directly on the cloth drier than he is. The barest brush of fingers against skin, and he scalds himself, without scolding. His other hand, catching hold of the cloth so it doesn't shift away for the short duration, drops away again, fingers lingering a second too long. )
You're welcome, Lan Zhan. Thank you, for accepting each one of them.
( Their sons, spanning decades, small celestial bodies pulled into their gravitational well. Fixing in steady orbit, steady and beautiful for Lan Zhan's hand on them, for his sect's in their raising, for the warmth that runs deeper than the chill of their cold spring's well. )
And for your answering affections for each, and all the ones to come.
( The curve of lips into silent amusement, and a warm promise, to not forget: a daughter, next. )
steers this thread back to the righteous salt path
[ The landscape, stripped of detail in increments: Wei Ying abstracts himself, more negative space of his passing and absence than shape coalesced, than flesh-being formed. He flickers, flits between child and yao and Lan Wangji, attending to one with cooing and distractions, to another with caresses, to the third with a drying cloth, like an honoured, trusted servant, or a — ]
Gratitude.
[ ...Lan Wangji nods his thanks before the thought suffocates him, before he might crown it with laughter. Like a wife, her household bustling under the white roil of domestic routine. As if they meet each day under this roof, a young family of four and their fifth member — an elder son — only departed to carve his own path in beauty, martyrdom, war or sweeping declarations. Youth propels Lan Sizhui, commands him. He will return to them a little scraped, a little worn, looser-jointed, more rounded at his edges. A jade piece cut and carved and polished splendid by Gusu Lan, relinquished by the heavens to be warmed, finally, by mortal hands.
And the rest of them, two parents and two brothers, like white birds calling in an empty sky, waiting for the flock's completion to head on for warmer winter pastures.
Each day, on waking, Lan Wangji carries the weight of a minute, reduced, cultivators' world on his shoulders. Tonight, readying for the disaster of rest in the close quarters of two children ignorant of one another, he wears his weight in water, mounted on his shoulders — narrowing them, shrinking his arms, licking at his ribs, kissing the lines of his webbed scars deeper than any paid concubine. Qingbai and Wei Ying's prepared dried robes in hand, he excuses himself behind the modesty screen long enough to trade his silks for coarse inn linens, then the yao's scant layers for comfort in kind.
They return back on stuttered step, drifting over dust-desaturated, chilled tiles to leave behind writings of condensation — and he takes again, catching Qingshan from Wei Ying's arms, dragging the boy beside his brother. They weigh less than armour, less than a fresh steel-tipped quiver, than the bearings of salt and stone and rice that Lan disciples must ferry with respectful obedience for each night hunt. Once, for all his rank, Lan Wangji delivered this burden, and his mouth pursed tight and curdled, and he complained not one step, not one word.
Now, he speaks even less of disgruntlement, not when Qingbai shakes his head and shuts his eyes and flattens himself to the side of Lan Wangji's chest, avoiding his brother's scolding swats. Not when Qingshan, ignored and unused to indifference, perseveres in babbling to attract his new playmate's attention, only to earn the click of Lan Wangji's tongue, and a one-armed rise above Lan Wangji's head, from where he kicks out his legs and arms in a delighted squeal. ]
Come here. [ He steals the babe back down and sets him too against his breast, where Qingbai retreats like oil from water, allowing coexistence — but not inviting it. He is too loud, Qingshan, too greedy. He has not spent the day in chase, has not worn himself. Lan Wangji's mouth, a fledgling thief, finds first the yao's distinctly human temple, then his brother's. ] Shhhhhhhh. You are my heart, quartered. My heart is disciplined.
[ Behave, both, while Lan Wangji walks the room with them with perfunctory twitches of each arm to mime cradling. Easier, perhaps, with two parents present, to surrender half his burden — but he has wasted a day deprived of touch, starved of it. He will steal more now, and stitch his eyes close, and wish Wei Ying merciful enough not to speak a word of Lan Wangji's indulgence.
He remembers to sit on the slow-yielding seating cushion, the sound of hard, milk-stained breathing a reassuring fixture from two soft mouths wetting his robe's rim and collarbone. Cute. And past the children and Lan Wangji's unseemly selfishness to claim them, stands Wei Ying — thawed, the common, frenetic electricity of his presence mellowed out in full. A beauty of a different kind, low candle light in rusted brazier. Trust it, and find your touch burned. ]
Wei Ying. Sit with us, before I think to offend you with cup rites. [ A choice, bittersweet moment when threatening to repeat an ill-timed marriage proposal can rouse laughter, sooner than cast fresh wounds. ] The temple. Shall we close it?
[ A tenuous proposal, to deprive the natives of their last vestiges of worship. And yet, more often, in villages that have not yet succumbed to the dread and despair of urgent survival, belief steers closer to spirituality than structured observance. Men wake and sleep too overcome by daily exhaustion to waste coin and breath on spirits and ancestors.
And the risk of leaving it open, for hapless visitors to invite whatever resent yet lingers, until the waters pacify the ghosts... ]
hello wei ying's heavenly pillar................. of salt
( He's at cross purpose with himself, once his arms are freed of Qingshan, once he's watching Lan Zhan in his linens and Qingbai and Qingshan nestled in his arms, one fussing for attention and the righteousness of play with the second, shoving his face further and further into Lan Zhan's shoulder. Watches, pinpricks of kitten claws sinking slow and effortlessly into his heart, one after another.
He'd gladly offer that up, for the moments of softened peace like these; for their slow increase, and for the warm oddity of gratitude and not just the sharp edges they both wear brushing against each other and not quite fitting right, off the battlefield.
Wei Wuxian doesn't have to think about his concept of family, or his security in seeing those he cares for being safe and cleaned and together in a moment that could be broken at any moment. He doesn't think about that, either, beyond the reflexive twitch of his fingers when he wants to place another ward, one more warning, one more turning away of all that is dark and ill and violent in the world, to guard each small sanctuary as he finds it.
For a moment, the feeling that settles over him is contentment, mellowing in the marrow of his bones. No more debts to be paid, and in two heartbeats, it feels freeing, almost true. To do as they may.
It slides away like sand in his fingers, but the greater contentment remains, winding around the lazy amusement and pleasure that is his watching Lan Zhan with their sons. With all things small and in need of love and care; for each wayward soul Lan Zhan has opened his arms to accept, will open his arms to accept in the future.
Called over, he blinks instead of starts, smiles and chuckles, allowing his weight to settle as he approaches. )
Not offended, Lan Zhan, never that. ( Seating himself, leaning forward enough so that he can behold the sleeping faces of both sons, only to find he can see barely more than babyfat cheeks and the moth's wings of lashes against their milk-white skin. The smile that follows softened and fond, affection unrestrained, remaining so when hsi gaze shifts to Lan Zhan. Tired, in linens, at the least of his largess, and rarely so humbly striking. ) I've already said yes.
( To slow shifted dynamics, to quick growing family. To tea in cups and alcohol to mind, but not in the mud of the unpleasant sadness of humanity at its worst, its most desperate, its most greedy. Not wearing trice borrowed robes, painted bride to be and digging to find bones in the forest, and Lan Zhan's hands, a memory around his throat.
A shudder that is not entirely fear travels down his spine. Ah, but a question, and an important one, stands asked, and he can direct his thoughts that way, shifting with a river's flow. )
For these people, I don't know how many would see it as different if we did. ( The cluck of his tongue, and: ) Yes, we shall. Are you willing to hand its monitoring to Yunmeng?
( Hanguang-jun doesn't have to, can state what he wishes, can leave it to coalitions of juniors, can grant it to any one sect for the scale of its festering. There are reasons and reasons why it would lay fallow for so long, and none indicate an inherent, malicious miscarriage of justice in recent decades, or even within the past times. No, only a broken landscape trying to heal itself while its darkness grew, contained by some passing practitioner of the better arts, then left for a later that only came on six feet and a small family's visitation of great heights and the beauty of what spanned out before them, before what lay underfoot took precedence.
He drops his gaze back to the children, reaches out, stills his hand in the moment before he touches one dark head. Then lowers it, stroking over hair still damp. )
When we return tomorrow, we can place a simpler barrier across the narrow section of the temple path. Or one around the whole; it wouldn't be too demanding.
( To keep humanity from intruding to unwarranted doom too soon; to allow nature to take its course as it was ever so inclined to do. )
[ They suit together, shadows a blurred, twined sketch prolonging the anorexic striations of the bamboo floor. Better if it were oiled, recently, the depth of the stain more mature, its moisture closed. Better, but too much asked of Yunmeng's periphery, where Jiang Wanyin's hospitality runs itself thinner and better bruised than the man's patience.
Will Lan Wangji hand the matter over to Yunmeng?
By right, the investigation no sooner left Lotus Pier than it reached ancestral grounds. Its jurisdiction spreads like jade beads cut loose off a string in Jiang Wanyin's broken hands — but for the chief cultivator, whose interest in all things supersedes that of a sect leader. If Hanguang-Jun were to exercise the gaunt, silvered splendour heralded by his guan, then —
No. He will not be so petty, not here, with two children in his arms, with Wei Ying a smear of kinetic warmth beside him. What has Jiang Wanyin still left, that Lan Wangji not taken? This, then. This temple. May he keep it. Lan Wangji can prove... generous, now and in all things.
Breath a strained, measured sigh, he leans into Wei Ying to surrender the lumped swell of the yao, who proves reticent to abdicate his perch before Lan Wangji tumbles him back into Wei Ying's waiting chest with a nudge of his nose to Qingbai's. There, forfeit. May Qingbai's life know no worse than these small moments of mourning, when his father's treachery expels him in the loving embrace of a second parent.
Then, Qingshan remains alone, rustling and reaching for the retreating Qingbai, where he had earlier begrudged his presence. He tilts, nearly tipping over the arm Lan Wangji's strapped at his back, turning only to slap his father with the broad, careful, sweet slab of his palm, missing cheek more than striking skin. A poor marksman, Wei Ying may weep if he had intended Qingshan for the bow. Drowned in a litany of gasp-babbled protests, each meant to drive attention to Qingbai's disappearance and to the great sin of Lan Wangji's fault in this matter, he asks, serenely: ]
Mercy. [ And when the flat of Qingshan's thumb strikes Wangji's mouth, and he dips in to greet it with a kiss, again: ] Mercy.
[ And ah, but affection ever does the trick, and master Qingshan consents to being refocused, cradled in his Lan father's arms, demolished, skin and bone, against the spread of Wangji's chest. Heartbeat to heartbeat, the old sing. Later, when he may tease a musical instrument, Lan Wangji will teach him to put the tender drumming of it in notes. This song, above all — except the one, which Wei Ying, helplessly ignorant, has the gall to remember as poorly as his answer to honest matrimony: ]
You refused me. [ This, for the annals of pedantry, a correction for the sake of smiles. Then, in the same breath, the true matter at hand, as they both know it so: ] Close the temple, we leave ghosts in the keep of dead things. [ Each thing, to its kind. A dreadful isolation. ] I like it not.
[ Like marshes, phantasms propagate in the damp of their salted tears, the horizon of their misery. Left to their own devices, they sink and spread, corrupting the ground with pox-like erosions. The priests are not brothers of suffering with those who fell dead of the volcano's gurgled, blazing laughter. The men of the temple were sacrificed, chosen and preyed on with intent by the once-living, where the first victims were merely casualties of hazard. Both regretted, earning respect — but their tolls written in different hues of cinnabar in the ledgers of malice.
And yet, leave doors and windows open, and hope and false security will sneak in, twitching like thieves, and the villagers will dare, will presume, will endanger themselves. In search of gold, or mystical artefacts, or seeking a night's shelter from the cold. Perhaps as a challenge among the growing young, to spend a night among famed ghosts and prove the esteem of their worthiness to their intended. Death lures eccentric tokens of favour to itself, like pressed flowers to its pocket. ]
Two cultivators are insufficient to purify so large a territory.
[ But he speaks it slow, inquisitive, like a schoolboy uncertain of his homework, begging the master's contradiction. ]
( He leans in, taking Qingbai with a soft exhalation and murmured nonsense about rabbits and boys and the moon. Qingbai looks up at him through tired eyes, yawns and his teeth are hinting toward rabbit-large, but the fur recedes, more and more of the boy present. Wei Wuxian had carried him up and away, and remembered limbs, those better for grasping, remembered form, that for ease of carrying: these are the ways Qingbai learns humanity, not for its morals or its righteousness, but for its compatibility with survival.
A young boy, curled against his chest, and sighing as he drops back into sleep, exhausted from his day and its terror and its warmth and its coaxing. Qingshan, with his flails and protests, handled in Lan Zhan's care and soft calls for mercy, paired with equally soft presses of lips to quell tiny tantrums.
He was meant for children, Wei Wuxian considers, one hand gently patting on Qingbai's back. He'll have to pace their child acquiring. Keep Lan Zhan occupied with a babe in arms, stretching over years. That daughter owed through circumstance of happenstance may be rightfully years off yet.
His voice is soft, staring down at Qingbai, when he responds: )
I won't take advantage of someone at their worst. Also, less mud would have been nice.
( His lips quirk, just a touch. )
And Qingshan was more important.
( Their absconded child. What is marriage other than a formality, when neither of them stray, both bind with small lives and larger ones, both circle back to a sort of footwork that once was achingly familiar. Now it mostly feels certain when there's something to face; and he's learned the quiet, learned the smaller spaces. That they're not always frought and fragile and prone to breaking; and he leans to the side, shoulder pressed to shoulder. )
We could, given time. Or force, but the drain on both of us wouldn't make it well done work, only capable of returning to life.
( He leans his head forward, presses a kiss of his own to their third son's head. )
Here is a different kind of steeping than what haunts Yiling still. Death, sudden and unfair and unseeing, and the griefs that followed in the lives claimed later. But... it isn't greedy, not in the same way. It doesn't beg for vengeance. You felt it, didn't you? The gratitude.
( His lifts his chin, but comes dangerously close to resting his head against Lan Zhan, giving in to that temptation as he reflects on times he doesn't speak about so much as dance around. They both do that, really. Both look forward in certain ways, but the past informs the present to shape the future too. Something he and Jiang Cheng still come to a head over, still try to work out, brushing up against each other's rough edges. )
Yiling didn't yearn for freedom.
( Revenge, not freedom. Not access to some saving grace just below the surface in that parched mountain landscape. )
[ At his worst: stripped down, battered, sincere. An incredulity of torn silks and bark, coiled serpentine around his limbs, and his heart drenched and drowned in the rot of resentment (foreign; escalated). At his worst raw, at his worst unfathomable. At his worst, alive.
Better this, then, the chief cultivator, spine porcelain-pale and arrow-straight, and his forehead blessed by moonlight, intended for the sun. Appeased, his second son nestles, thin fists dancing a war song, knocking down the bridge of Lan Wangji's shoulders. Within heartbeats, Qingshan has travelled the cycle of a imperial grandeur: more than conquest, now he yearns for hard-earned peace, and spreads like the gold powders of gerber daisies and chrysanthemums and chamomile, with luscious wind.
It is Qingshan who catches, delighted and gasping, the first sight of Wei Ying tilting — of Qingbai coming close, in his second father's arms, and what whims childhood affords its subjects without hypocrisy. Moments ago, Lan Wangji whispers soundlessly against Qingshan's temple, half to pacify him, half to admonish, and the whole to excuse a handful of kisses more, You could not bear the company of him. Now, denied, Qingshan aches.
He will grow as his father did, a stalk thrown bones of light from generous sky, blood-thirsting to pierce it. Jealous, in all ways, of all things, even of those he would claim for himself. Years from now. Decades. And who is Lan Wangji to deter him? Never the better man, hand soft when he reaches for Wei Ying's nape beside him, and directs him like a puppet of bound rags or plywood, until he knows to bend and concede setting his head on Wangji's shoulder, or the bench spread of his thigh. Rest. ]
'XianXian is but three.'
[ Shallow incantations, Jiang Yanli's to whisper best. What Lan Wangji usurps now was never his to earn, but he steals it carelessly, drag of his fingers raking the coils of Wei Ying's dark hair, where he may yet find them. One child, strapped to his chest. Another, flattened against Wei Ying's. Wei Ying himself, basking in undivided attention. An evening of domesticity, settling in its maturity. ]
We were spared a sennight for travel. We may linger here, to purify.
[ Slowly, softly, with care. To the exclusion of Wei Ying's notion of a 'vacation,' if for the benefit of Yunmeng as a whole. ]
( His resistance is thin, a point of capitulation to Lan Zhan's shoulder, avoiding his lap for the upset of their third and second son both. That it merits the partly intended pat to his head by Qingshan, that Qingbai snuggles in closer and butts his head against Lan Zhan too, only unifies the whole, leaves him closing his eyes and then: chuckling, half opening them again. )
Too young to know what love is.
( That last time he talked with his sister in that way, when he'd been asking what it was to like someone like that. Even if he's leaning against the reason why he'd asked, there were obstacles then, and decades that followed, to leave him wondering is it a matter of ever understanding?
No, he doesn't think it does. Not understanding, and maybe that's always been a problem, because the emotions he reacts to, the times he throws all in, are times where he already sets rationale to the side. Maybe that, too, is what one does in love.
Maybe. He's not thinking hard on it right now. Not with one child breathing against him, the sounds of the other child in Lan Zhan's arms right next to him, the steady bone of shoulder, and the fingers cutting through his hair. He's missed this. Somewhat fiercely, he's missed this, and it was not delivered from Lan Zhan's hand in the aching parts of himself that remembers what it was like most strongly.
He fears, sometimes, losing those memories, of his shijie's voice and face, just as he's lost those of his parents. It's a matter of time, he knows. The best he can do is fill in those blank spaces with new memories to hold precious, to remember, when the hold are too faint to bring anything more than their passing impressions of warmth. )
Mm? ( Stirred from his own thoughts, blinking. ) Ah, yes. We do, don't we? ( He wasn't tracking, truly. A longer pause, inhaling, exhaling, and a murmured: ) That'd be nice.
[ Wei Ying drifts to him, crashing like wave and water against his shoulder, and Lan Wangji anchors himself to bear against the collapsed force of a grown man prey to his exhaustion.
You have no core, he breathes and aches and thinks, for all he seldom speaks it. Wei Ying lacks, and this one privilege is never the chief cultivator's to award, hand docile and cruel when it snakes to imitate the obedience of Jiang Yanli's measured strokes, as he remembers them. Wei Ying has no core, flesh chilled for the spell of evening breeze, in a way Qingshan — a babe in name, but ghost-touched, thriving and cuddling shamelessly to curl his fingers in the ink stream of his Yiling father's hair — already begins to dismiss. One that the yao, a compound of aggregated magic, never knew.
It stings, to glimpse sixteen years of mourning in each of Wei Ying's bruises that slows in passage, each of the fine-shaping shadows of his wrinkles. ]
You owe nothing.
[ To strange lands, however distantly chained to Yunmeng. To Jiang Che — Wanyin, blissfully alienated from the straying, haunted peripheries of his own territory. To Lan Wangji, a silent despot, ruling steel-handed over two children and a fettered guqin.
Here, Wei Ying's ledgers bind themselves of paper untattered, parchment fresh, calligraphy in lampblack, soot. Fat and full and flattered by another mystery resolved, another death defied — the priests', sooner than his own, but intent keeps. If action is owed, it need not be a strangled, pale-faced miracle of Wei Ying's performance.
Guilt and obligation may wear other faces. The stark crude carvings of his mask too ill-fitted him to hand out his own features so easily. ]
( He closes his eyes, letting himself bask in a moment of borrowed and allied warmth; unbathed, perhaps, but not unclean. One sleeping child on him and nestling inward with his lean to Lan Zhan's shoulder, and the other one near, child's breath easy in his ears. It's comfortable, bones and angles and slightly less raw edges included, and he curls his lips into a smile that's laughter gone unvoiced. Reaches one hand out to pat Lan Zhan's leg because it's less contorting, easier like this. )
No man can, alone. Not even supported. Just... where we can.
( He opens his eyes, stares down on the fine dark hairs of the yao's head, of Qingshan's head. What millennia past had seem them at these ages? Lan Zhan consigned to his uncle's embrace, his brother's besides. Wei Wuxian to his parents, loving and wandering, dead within the span of years that follow.
Lan Zhan doesn't raise orphans. Wei Wuxian remembers that much. )
Is it not worthwhile, to lend help where we can?
( Where there is a need, and it's not the shifting of a world and society to see it granted, instead of suffocated? To the death the Wens had been consigned to, to the silence of the years and crimes thereafter. Buried under the Greater Good, the things which were accomplished, because the world never ceases to move forward. Time, the world, waits for no person, no matter how much they want it to.
It does pause, inhale, reflect, for others. )
There are enough small ways to help. Justice needn't be in grand gestures.
( Justice... might... sometimes be in collapsing tunnels... and setting ghosts and haunts and wraiths and the rest of what lingers, willing or otherwise, once death and claimed the body. )
[ All at once, too close, too warm, two children's fragile breaths allaying the soft breeze of candle flame and suspicion — the impossible appears like hand stitchwork, greedily prone to unravel. In the span of heartbeats, planets forget their gravities, talismans the atomic cores that guide and grow their sorcery. Suns graze with stiffening teeth at their own auras.
He could sleep like this, Wei Ying's hand a quiet burn on his thigh, Qingshan gasping between minute, stifled coos of dormant comfort, Qingbai a pleasant nearby vibration of placid pleasure. Lan Wangji could sleep like this, and know the universe at ease, and all that is fire and stone and madness a splintered dream, smoke-wisped, diffused. In shops of trade and trinket, incense burners breathe this mirage. ]
Wei Ying. [ Too much comfort, slivers of silver pouring between his fingers. ] You were not born to be lessened.
[ Not born to Yunmeng, to wander, to face exile. Persecution, and a traitor's death — an animal's, cruelly mourned. Only the Burial Mounds crested and brittled and gave away their rubble like first blood, and they knew, they grieved, they kept the hour. They whispered, year on end, Here he lay king. ]
Raised in worthiness.
[ For empire and Yiling, to head a sect more than follow it. He curls himself away from Wei Ying, but the pull of flesh and bone redirect them, a gaunt arc set almost to engulf this man who gives himself too freely — their children. ]
The shape of you stings. [ Tongue slack and the muscle of his jaw convulsing, how does he explain, set to words? There is no negative space outside Wei Ying, not when he is sandalwood and cloying resin, set for invasion. ] Uncontainable. Embrace that greatness.
( He acts as driftwood, under Lan Zhan's movements, jostled and boneless in his wake, content that he needn't worry about drowning anytime soon. Too good a swimmer, and too disinclined to fall off whatever craft they've been navigating with the last few months.
Children sleeping, nothing pressing in such a way to demand immediate action. The thoughts of progress, of healing, for a land and people long past or more recently departed, has a different sort of soothing to a mind as used to their screams as the silences between.
He listens with an initial hum, a I'm listening that fades into an open eyed stare down at the heads of their children, at his own hand, at the floor beyond. Like disconnected things that shift and resettle, glaciers gasping and groaning in month long exhalations as each year by millimeters they rearrange themselves.
Like words that stir a shift in glance, and a laugh that's quiet, flattered, seen in a way that to him, makes sense. )
Then I hope you don't plan on a peaceful retirement, he who appears in the heart of chaos.
( Some men are simply born chaos manifested, regardless of outer forming. )
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Still, he waits — and he waits — and keeps vigil, dancing around his site on firefly-light steps, ever circling without stilling long enough to give the dead cause for chase. Let his scent not catch, let his shadow not deepen, let him wander as his thoughts do, wander and stray like ghosts.
A prediction of some merit: time within the corridors is but a fraction of that passed in the outside world. Wei Ying's wards honour his name, fast, breezy, reliable. Within heartbeats of the first alarm drawn, Lan Wangji comes alive — that same breath, Bichen, her pallor sinking up and twisting, manipulate no more elegantly than a shovel, carving out the shape of stones, like every knife that aims the negative space between vertebrae.
He feels the tumult of coming water in the vibration of dirt, feels the raw ache of it bearing down before it splints rock like heavy needle, thrusting down, first in rivulet, then in stream, then in disaster —
And they scream for it, the dead who wait, who waited their lifetime, who waited no further, for the white roil of water catching sulphur, bathing bones, releasing heat off old volcanic plaques. They recoil, run, and it is to Lan Wangji's shame, withdrawing beside them, that he does not understand at first, they run for the water.
So many dead, spirits, bones. So many unburied. The scratched out terror of each breath nearly prevents the next. He dashes out, limbs protesting, Bichen all but a stringing decoration — until he reaches the outside world with a gasp, his clothes tattered, his fingers all grime and his nails worn. A beggar, returned to the temple, exhausted by the last step he takes before Wei Ying in the great chamber, nearly destroyed.
When he speaks, first, sound eludes him. Then, a wheeze. At long last, coughed, the reckoning: ]
They are grateful. [ He wants to laugh. Can't. ] Grateful.
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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.
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Brows briefly perked up to flag the token resistance of his incredulity, he clasps Wei Ying's hand, sweat of his nerves to the grit of Lan Wangji's palm, binding their fingers together and taking shameful advantage. Weight lent, he uses the balance to drop to one knee, depositing Bichen to her fettering and straining to sling an arm out and welcome the child in his keep.
He comes, more eager than any living thing should, but innocent in the way of every rabbit that's sought Lan Wangji out to nestle, pale against pallor, its frailty near his mourning sickness, both bare before the sun. Wangji allows it soot and succor, the warmth of his body, a slow and bartered reassurance. A second child waits with his minder in the inn; this one, here, now, heart a deep gong's swing, merits the full measure of Lan Wangji's attention.
They paralyse just so for longer than he'd intended, one arm around the child-rabbit, Lan Wangji's hand still clawing around Wei Ying's. He tugs down. ]
...we should not have left the Burial Mounds as we did.
[ A lacklustre segue, but for their private understanding: they should have salted the barren lands, cleansed away their shadows, extricated their decay. Should have set the grief and regret they summoned and grew in those lands, should have cultivated to their peace.
Lest they become this: festered. A fantasy of regrets. Wronged. ]
We will return there for amends.
[ Together, Wei Ying's word of each day. Very well. ]
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Challenges are all they collect for themselves, or so life spins itself into becoming, and he finds the ground with his knees, and he shifts closer, circle of their joined arms and the resting of his hand on child's head moving into one that strokes reassuring down his back, over Lan Zhan's arm, settles in there as one pressure in passing over another.
Curled around like hamsters nuzzling into bellies as they sleep, content to let the world past swiftly while they stretch out and wait for the night and what safety it brings.
Yiling, another scabbing scar in his chest, and he picks at it gladly, worries at it and smiles without the shadows dragging behind to say the expression is for show. Hums before he speaks, a warmed note in his throat, held and carried. )
We will. Though for the sakes of the children, ( he says; ) make it a land that can heal, and grow, and allow them to play without its old concerns.
( Death not grasping, madness not seeping, possession of bodies too simple without the concentrated will to resist. A land made whole, out of its barren brutality, and he knows from a lifetime ago, it can be so.
With the time, the effort, the dedication, the resources, it will be so.
He stays as he is, their tightened circle, and only stirs as the child's sobs have long petered into quiet sniffles, the lines of his form softening into an exhaustion the adults must carry on from. Shifts, fingers tightening under Lan Zhan's grip: reassurance and question, his brow quirked, his lips softened into an almost curving line. )
One more son to collect.
( Here he stirs, and feels their own cleansing to be called forth, while his heart feels lighter than it has in some time over scarred lines, buried deep. He cannot wait to see their other child, cannot wait in this moment to see Sizhui, and can wait, for related reasons, for when Lan Zhan moves, to lend his support, and the tired child his side, as if he's a man who can bear the burdens of those he chooses just as much as they can choose to bear his burdens in turn. Together. )
Baths?
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Known for the sword, the guqin, the path of violence, but sacrificed as bed board for the epileptic pulse of a wayward, infant's heartbeat. Lan Wangji would protest, but Wei Ying falls first prey to their routine, and the hour softens to the gentle, febrile cooing of a child settling in place.
Sizhui might have stood so between them, learning the love of two and not passed as priceless burden between the members of the sect, until Lan Wangji returned to him from gelid confinement. They've stolen too much of him, reimbursed little and late. Now, second chances brokered —
And there's the stink of sulphur and hot stone, of moving, precious water. Grime on his legs, where they fold into finery and silk, blood flaked and crisp, deteriorating. Baths. ]
Yes.
[ An inn, a quarter, a night's succour after. Return tomorrow, when the bodies they unearth from the causeway will want their dues, their rites and their last words, shared. When there will be more than urgency and less than dread between them.
He lifts, sparing Wei Ying barely a nod, then a nudge of their joined hands around the child, and washes his mouth on the rabbit-fine fur, the tip of the creature's nose. Uncle will not want such a guest, but he will take a refugee, and so they will present him. No matter his soul's aches, Lan Qiren has never turned nose or walked away from a harrowed innocent.
But still, as they start the walk, even Lan Wangji must note: ]
...next time, a daughter.
[ Truly. Break pattern. ]
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Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps what this child of misfortune needs is what Gusu Lan provides even to the most fortunate of children, orphans taken in by nostalgia and offered safety in places that claimed impossible was only a state of mind.
Clarity, focus. There are other gifts delivered in the cool clinging fogs of Gusu, by the structured strictures of the Lan. Words like Lan Zhan's, a different kind of code, tip him into laughing, a tired roll of amusement that aches without hurting at all. )
Right, right. A daughter next time. I'll consult with the universe, it should be so kind as to provide.
( A smile, a wink, and the path spilling downward for the resolution of the evening: each step gains momentum if not energy, so that they're closer with each moment to their first safely minded Qingshan. They're welcomed with wide, curious eyes, a woman paid well and given to a sleeping child at her heart, curled up next to a cat, lean and muscled, and an older child minding the fire with the distraction of the young upon their arrival.
Roused from slumber, their waiting son rubs at his eyes, and beams, and holds out his arms: a demand with the sleepy presentation of the not fully awake, lapsing into mumbled complaint at his waking state and a burrowing nuzzle of his head against a collarbone, hidden. Asking after lodgings points toward another inn, one closer, facilities less polished, interiors carefully decorated, and bathing tubs of metal and kept warm through the ingenuity of the mortals not so blessed as to live in cultivation's finer tunings of work. Negotiated, three baths, and the child left in another's care for most the day demanding in increasingly less sleepy turn to come with, such that Wei Wuxian brings his nose to their human son's in a bop and nuzzle before turning his face to Lan Zhan, smiling tired and content, knowing tomorrow's mission and at ease with the straightforwardness of it: )
Do you have room for two?
( To mean: do you have the energy, because I'm happy taking him in for splashes and earnest attempts to scrub both of them clean in one small, dedicated radius before his childish attention span wanders away again. It means the shorter soak; and they now number two who need the time, and Wei Wuxian considers he can probably handle both. Or handle them first, to lay to rest, if Qingshan will cooperate in curling up with their rabbit-child and sleep the sleep of the young and growing. )
I can manage them both first.
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It's Wei Ying who answers him, while fresh accommodations go brokered. Wei Ying, who steps first, Wei Ying who flirts with toil unending, while Lan Wangji's shadow casts long and deep, a respectable distance behind him. Then, amid the fulmination of cloying, clawing incense, in a room far too expectant of a sophisticated traveller's tastes for a seating of the provinces —
...ah. May Lan Wangji suffer the presence of one of his children in the bathtub Arms steeled, he clings to their nameless rabbit son, then only raises his brow and calmly swoops in to wrest Qingshan free of Wei Ying, also. ]
Wei Ying. [ For how often he speaks the name, poison and honey, known and dissolving. Diluting. But granular, patient, seeding and present — humoured, perhaps, to serve reminders of the plain and the established. ] I raised a child.
[ Long years of dread and mourning and sickness and knee scrapes and bruising, when the first brushes with the sword turned an eruption of adolescent discoveries that heroes might win the wars of poetry, but they do not walk from combat of the living world entirely unscathed. That warriors are not born, but scrupulously crafted, and Sizhui, the hold on the hilt is weak, the turn of the calf too tense, the lines of defence too tender, and — there, the first blow bleeds into a wounding, and the boy (turned man) learns.
Perhaps there were nursemaids too, and a loving uncle, a fostering grandmaster. Perhaps a sect volunteered itself to pay the weak, strangled imprecation of a missing master's fatherhood, while he sought chaos in the wake of his soulmate's disaster.
No matter. He lays claim to Lan Sizhui's rearing, one moment and all. He will raise these two sons also, however dubious Wei Ying stands of his care. He pauses only the one moment: ]
Name your third son.
[ Let Wei Ying have his say of the one thing, while Lan Wangji retreats to shed grit and grime and silks for himself and his two children behind the modesty screen. ]
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Wei Wuxian regrets none of that. It had nothing to do with him, beyond an association, an introduction. Everything else had been on Lan Zhan and Wen Yuan, to end up with Lan Sizhui as the young man he is today.
So he smiles and laughs as Qingshan is liberated from his arms with Lan Zhan's I raised a child, because yes, and also, no. Differences in ages they've both been stumbling with, because neither of them had raised any child so young, and yet look at him: he grows, he commands, he is imperiousness in babbles and the first attempts at words that tumble off his tongue to the ground where, bending, his fathers gather them up like pearls to share with a world already rife with such things.
He doesn't say anything, just smile, let that fondness and his amused understanding of Lan Zhan's need to be with the children, more compelling and driving than the simplicity of affection and its depth that Wei Wuxian settles into. There, there goes his spouse, set to bathing and scrubbing and Wei Wuxian shakes his head, moving to the basin to wash his arms and settle on preparing clothing out of regathered packs from the donkey still stabled outside. Easy, when that reunion had only been a logical retreat for lodgings anyway. )
Are they both to be in the Shi generation when they're of age?
( Asked and curious, because he's not sure at what else that might be, where they join with their brother two decades beyond themselves. Still, he can give them something else, he supposes, and that brings a name to mind, simple. )
Qingbai.
( Meanwhile two sets of children's clothes, the one to be too short for the rabbit son, but warm and clean and soft. Not too tight, to rub fur poorly, though he doesn't know if that's a concern.
A pause, and then: )
Their sleeping robes are laid out, did you want me to fetch yours? My hands are clean!
( He's not smearing dirt and debris and blood and wraiths on cloth, for all they once sung it of him, the great Yiling Patriarch in all his devilish glory. )
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And then, the yao, a constant watery flux of shape and stability, fur and fast legs and his fluttered, shuddered pulse. Lan Wangji spares him the better part of his efforts, less to coax cooperation than to broker it soft, to ease him from bruised linens without inviting his panic. This, again, when Lan Wangji raises both children, Qingshan aggressive and imperial, perched on his lent father's shoulder, while the yao grapples with the inevitability of the waiting stillness of the bath water. Lan Wangji, reduced to one silk layer's obscenity for the bathing, a hesitant if coalescing shadow cast long over the bathtub's thick-polished wooden whirl.
Within: a whirl of hard salts and dried wisteria, and Lan Wangji does not say, You wasted coin, it is not of the season, not when each inn competes to recognise and gain the passing chief cultivator's favour. First, he means to dip his fingers, struggling to balance both children and grow a third limb. Then, fear forfeit, he only leans so the yao's foot might tease the water's rim, clicking his tongue when the boy-creature wrenches it back with a fuss, reminded of heat and scars and days of agony. ]
Qingbai will be of Shi.
[ A third son, so named. If not a child by the traditional account, then a creature in sore, striking need of care. The domesticity of the moment — of waving Wei Ying close, of handing over Qingshan, nearly blights his eyes blind.
He must ease Qingbai into subjecting himself to heat again, must trick and gently submerge him, as with the true rabbits, when they never encountered river waters before. Perhaps he should feel ill at ease, to welcome his... dubious husband at his side under the circumstances of transparent, road-worn garments, but here they stand, controlled by practicality, two parents solving the riddle of their ill-behaved children. ]
My third son is of discriminating taste. [ In fewer words than this indulgence: he objects, and Lan Wangji must wet his hand first, then cup Qingbai's limbs with it to prove the wetness brings no harm, only succor. But he pauses, midway, to search Wei Ying's gaze dark and Lan Wangji's own purpose baleful: ] Wei Ying. If he reverts to rabbit form...
[ ...and if Wei Ying is stolen his fresh son, what then? Wangji has born enough of Wei Ying's heartbreak to know its colours deep and true, to prepare in great advance for their arrival. ]
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Extensions of himself, he can continue in his imperious rule, though he relents at last, a gracious emperor, to allow Wei Wuxian to finish the single tie and leave him in his tunic-gown, ready for the night. Equally ready to be down and walking, which he's soon to try, only to be given hand and led, toddling, back toward new brother and scandalous, silk-clad father.
Qingshan watches Lan Zhan's coaxing with wide eyes and the first glimmers of a shared sense of possession, but poorly formed, the idea that all attention is his, too, but that he can be fascinated enough to allow a percent of this attention to fall elsewhere. Wei Wuxian has unearthed a comb, and coaxes it through Qingshan's hair with more success for his fascination with Qingbai's bathing. It's to this, to his pause matching Lan Zhan's, that Wei Wuxian lifts his face and meets dark eyes with his own.
If. He smiles, for Lan Zhan, for all of them. For the way his heart warms and aches at once, and for Qingshan, who turns to look up at Lan Zhan's face too, before grunting and gesturing back to Qingbai. )
Then he has a number of fine-furred friends to stay with, won't he? We can give them what we hope is best for them, but every child is responsible for choosing how they live, in the end. If that's his way... is he any less worth having pulled out of that place?
( Changed forms, reversion to four legs that touch earth and the nose that wiggles and an overlarge, scarred, sweet rabbit: he still lives. There is a weight to that Wei Wuxian holds as precious, for whatever other heartbreak it may herald.
Any child who does not cultivate is heartbreak for parents who may well see them go to white before their hair follows suit. Would that be so different? Is it even so different now? )
We'll care for him all the same.
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In the end, the yao is submerged, and Wangji — possessed of that rare indignity only a parent brandishes when his child has finally acquiesced to cooperation or silence — follows shamelessly on his cue. On leg in, the second. Heat suffuses over Lan Wangji, one man turned island when Qingbai wrestles close and mounts him, clumsy and feverish, kicking at waves. The treasury of Lan Wangji's patience depletes itself in slow increments: he allows it, careful to soak both hands in salts and salve, to avoid the trappings of his floated, swollen sleeves, as he bathes clothed.
Qingbai is an easy compromise of cooing and muffled sound and the press of his sweet, milky cheek against Wangji's collarbone, defeated. He allows the torture and disgrace of Lan Wangji's diligent scrubbing, one leg, then the next, and the arms and the narrow, trembled span of his spine. Then, behind the ears — short or long &dmash; and in those parts rendered intimate. Soot, grime, blood. Half shed off Qingbai, half quickly deserting Lan Wangji's own form.
He finishes the child early, then completes his own ablutions and rises wing Qingbai cradles in his arms without care for the deluge of damp each footstep curses freshly on the floors. Merciless in this, as in everything, the military precision of his advance irrefutable. When he presents Qingbai to Wei Ying and his sullen-faced brother, his hands shake for the endeavour. ]
Thank you. For him. [ This, to Wei Ying, words trickled and mouth slow. ] For those who came before. Those who may follow.
[ They trade blows so much more often than gratitude, and yet here lies Lan Wangji's heart, bleeding. He has earned another son, whose hair whips against his arm, whose round bulk narrows in a pleased coil around Wangji's chest. Their heartbeats, war-drummed and matching.
Wei Ying made a gift to him of this. He does not hasten to return it. ]
One day, you will tire of gift giving.
i like how this is the horniest tag you're getting out of wifi so far
At least one child would wear the earnest possession of his father as a badge of honour due, and temper it in the time after with Lan considerations, but not lose it, no matter the anchoring.
He looks upon the dripping form of third son and singular husband, in whatever fractured way of it they had as a knowing between each other. There are times where he reflects Lan Zhan has unfairly beautiful genetics; that his reputation as a handsome man has only grown with his distinguishment, that his title, handed over in a war that did little service to their souls and much to the reforging of their world at the time, matched him for its matured meaning, and not simply the ruthless precision of his military might. Dry haired, outlined in unfairly sheered silk, all the angular planes of muscle hinted at with the steady drip that plasters cloth to skin. How many times now, over the years? How many times to see without understanding? When does admiration change forms? When did he start trusting in it, without that fatal leap so easy to concede: what wants for owing. No, it's a language of giving, and not to appease. Giving because one wants in turn, and not the dark, bleak belly of a want that cries out in lonely guilt and obligation, wretched as it was once inevitable.
He's saved from wandering thoughts by the words that find purchase on Lan Zhan's tongue, and Wei Wuxian blinks, swallows against a dry mouth and redirects his dark eyes to Lan Zhan's. Puts one hand to Qingshan, who holds his thumb, then ruthlessly tosses it away, to better offer both his hands forth again, for the father who holds his brother, and not him.
It gives him that moment to collect the drying cloths, to step forward and drape the first over Lan Zhan's arms and the crescent moon of Qingbai's cleansed form. He's healed further from his injuries the night before, and that may be part of his nature, not human and not animal, trapped as he is in this form of a yao most would consign to a death that lays undeserved, this child innocent. He will steady. Is steadying now, breathing in matched harmony to Lan Zhan. A gift in turn. )
I don't imagine, ( He says, smiling with the slow, seeping warmth of genuine and deep affection, turning to catch up the larger drying cloth to his dry hands, ) that will be any sooner than when you're tired of me.
( A step, and the toss of the cloth, settling over Lan Zhan's shoulders and draping down his back and sides. Qingbai's eyes flutter open and watch, rounded and curious. Qingshan stills in his silent pouting and clutching of fists, mouth opening into a perfect, curious circle. He steps closer, one hand reaching out to run over Qingbai's head. Then he reaches for Lan Zhan, but the sides of his neck, one hand coaxing his hair free and over to spill down directly on the cloth drier than he is. The barest brush of fingers against skin, and he scalds himself, without scolding. His other hand, catching hold of the cloth so it doesn't shift away for the short duration, drops away again, fingers lingering a second too long. )
You're welcome, Lan Zhan. Thank you, for accepting each one of them.
( Their sons, spanning decades, small celestial bodies pulled into their gravitational well. Fixing in steady orbit, steady and beautiful for Lan Zhan's hand on them, for his sect's in their raising, for the warmth that runs deeper than the chill of their cold spring's well. )
And for your answering affections for each, and all the ones to come.
( The curve of lips into silent amusement, and a warm promise, to not forget: a daughter, next. )
steers this thread back to the righteous salt path
Gratitude.
[ ...Lan Wangji nods his thanks before the thought suffocates him, before he might crown it with laughter. Like a wife, her household bustling under the white roil of domestic routine. As if they meet each day under this roof, a young family of four and their fifth member — an elder son — only departed to carve his own path in beauty, martyrdom, war or sweeping declarations. Youth propels Lan Sizhui, commands him. He will return to them a little scraped, a little worn, looser-jointed, more rounded at his edges. A jade piece cut and carved and polished splendid by Gusu Lan, relinquished by the heavens to be warmed, finally, by mortal hands.
And the rest of them, two parents and two brothers, like white birds calling in an empty sky, waiting for the flock's completion to head on for warmer winter pastures.
Each day, on waking, Lan Wangji carries the weight of a minute, reduced, cultivators' world on his shoulders. Tonight, readying for the disaster of rest in the close quarters of two children ignorant of one another, he wears his weight in water, mounted on his shoulders — narrowing them, shrinking his arms, licking at his ribs, kissing the lines of his webbed scars deeper than any paid concubine. Qingbai and Wei Ying's prepared dried robes in hand, he excuses himself behind the modesty screen long enough to trade his silks for coarse inn linens, then the yao's scant layers for comfort in kind.
They return back on stuttered step, drifting over dust-desaturated, chilled tiles to leave behind writings of condensation — and he takes again, catching Qingshan from Wei Ying's arms, dragging the boy beside his brother. They weigh less than armour, less than a fresh steel-tipped quiver, than the bearings of salt and stone and rice that Lan disciples must ferry with respectful obedience for each night hunt. Once, for all his rank, Lan Wangji delivered this burden, and his mouth pursed tight and curdled, and he complained not one step, not one word.
Now, he speaks even less of disgruntlement, not when Qingbai shakes his head and shuts his eyes and flattens himself to the side of Lan Wangji's chest, avoiding his brother's scolding swats. Not when Qingshan, ignored and unused to indifference, perseveres in babbling to attract his new playmate's attention, only to earn the click of Lan Wangji's tongue, and a one-armed rise above Lan Wangji's head, from where he kicks out his legs and arms in a delighted squeal. ]
Come here. [ He steals the babe back down and sets him too against his breast, where Qingbai retreats like oil from water, allowing coexistence — but not inviting it. He is too loud, Qingshan, too greedy. He has not spent the day in chase, has not worn himself. Lan Wangji's mouth, a fledgling thief, finds first the yao's distinctly human temple, then his brother's. ] Shhhhhhhh. You are my heart, quartered. My heart is disciplined.
[ Behave, both, while Lan Wangji walks the room with them with perfunctory twitches of each arm to mime cradling. Easier, perhaps, with two parents present, to surrender half his burden — but he has wasted a day deprived of touch, starved of it. He will steal more now, and stitch his eyes close, and wish Wei Ying merciful enough not to speak a word of Lan Wangji's indulgence.
He remembers to sit on the slow-yielding seating cushion, the sound of hard, milk-stained breathing a reassuring fixture from two soft mouths wetting his robe's rim and collarbone. Cute. And past the children and Lan Wangji's unseemly selfishness to claim them, stands Wei Ying — thawed, the common, frenetic electricity of his presence mellowed out in full. A beauty of a different kind, low candle light in rusted brazier. Trust it, and find your touch burned. ]
Wei Ying. Sit with us, before I think to offend you with cup rites. [ A choice, bittersweet moment when threatening to repeat an ill-timed marriage proposal can rouse laughter, sooner than cast fresh wounds. ] The temple. Shall we close it?
[ A tenuous proposal, to deprive the natives of their last vestiges of worship. And yet, more often, in villages that have not yet succumbed to the dread and despair of urgent survival, belief steers closer to spirituality than structured observance. Men wake and sleep too overcome by daily exhaustion to waste coin and breath on spirits and ancestors.
And the risk of leaving it open, for hapless visitors to invite whatever resent yet lingers, until the waters pacify the ghosts... ]
hello wei ying's heavenly pillar................. of salt
He'd gladly offer that up, for the moments of softened peace like these; for their slow increase, and for the warm oddity of gratitude and not just the sharp edges they both wear brushing against each other and not quite fitting right, off the battlefield.
Wei Wuxian doesn't have to think about his concept of family, or his security in seeing those he cares for being safe and cleaned and together in a moment that could be broken at any moment. He doesn't think about that, either, beyond the reflexive twitch of his fingers when he wants to place another ward, one more warning, one more turning away of all that is dark and ill and violent in the world, to guard each small sanctuary as he finds it.
For a moment, the feeling that settles over him is contentment, mellowing in the marrow of his bones. No more debts to be paid, and in two heartbeats, it feels freeing, almost true. To do as they may.
It slides away like sand in his fingers, but the greater contentment remains, winding around the lazy amusement and pleasure that is his watching Lan Zhan with their sons. With all things small and in need of love and care; for each wayward soul Lan Zhan has opened his arms to accept, will open his arms to accept in the future.
Called over, he blinks instead of starts, smiles and chuckles, allowing his weight to settle as he approaches. )
Not offended, Lan Zhan, never that. ( Seating himself, leaning forward enough so that he can behold the sleeping faces of both sons, only to find he can see barely more than babyfat cheeks and the moth's wings of lashes against their milk-white skin. The smile that follows softened and fond, affection unrestrained, remaining so when hsi gaze shifts to Lan Zhan. Tired, in linens, at the least of his largess, and rarely so humbly striking. ) I've already said yes.
( To slow shifted dynamics, to quick growing family. To tea in cups and alcohol to mind, but not in the mud of the unpleasant sadness of humanity at its worst, its most desperate, its most greedy. Not wearing trice borrowed robes, painted bride to be and digging to find bones in the forest, and Lan Zhan's hands, a memory around his throat.
A shudder that is not entirely fear travels down his spine. Ah, but a question, and an important one, stands asked, and he can direct his thoughts that way, shifting with a river's flow. )
For these people, I don't know how many would see it as different if we did. ( The cluck of his tongue, and: ) Yes, we shall. Are you willing to hand its monitoring to Yunmeng?
( Hanguang-jun doesn't have to, can state what he wishes, can leave it to coalitions of juniors, can grant it to any one sect for the scale of its festering. There are reasons and reasons why it would lay fallow for so long, and none indicate an inherent, malicious miscarriage of justice in recent decades, or even within the past times. No, only a broken landscape trying to heal itself while its darkness grew, contained by some passing practitioner of the better arts, then left for a later that only came on six feet and a small family's visitation of great heights and the beauty of what spanned out before them, before what lay underfoot took precedence.
He drops his gaze back to the children, reaches out, stills his hand in the moment before he touches one dark head. Then lowers it, stroking over hair still damp. )
When we return tomorrow, we can place a simpler barrier across the narrow section of the temple path. Or one around the whole; it wouldn't be too demanding.
( To keep humanity from intruding to unwarranted doom too soon; to allow nature to take its course as it was ever so inclined to do. )
i request an adult
Will Lan Wangji hand the matter over to Yunmeng?
By right, the investigation no sooner left Lotus Pier than it reached ancestral grounds. Its jurisdiction spreads like jade beads cut loose off a string in Jiang Wanyin's broken hands — but for the chief cultivator, whose interest in all things supersedes that of a sect leader. If Hanguang-Jun were to exercise the gaunt, silvered splendour heralded by his guan, then —
No. He will not be so petty, not here, with two children in his arms, with Wei Ying a smear of kinetic warmth beside him. What has Jiang Wanyin still left, that Lan Wangji not taken? This, then. This temple. May he keep it. Lan Wangji can prove... generous, now and in all things.
Breath a strained, measured sigh, he leans into Wei Ying to surrender the lumped swell of the yao, who proves reticent to abdicate his perch before Lan Wangji tumbles him back into Wei Ying's waiting chest with a nudge of his nose to Qingbai's. There, forfeit. May Qingbai's life know no worse than these small moments of mourning, when his father's treachery expels him in the loving embrace of a second parent.
Then, Qingshan remains alone, rustling and reaching for the retreating Qingbai, where he had earlier begrudged his presence. He tilts, nearly tipping over the arm Lan Wangji's strapped at his back, turning only to slap his father with the broad, careful, sweet slab of his palm, missing cheek more than striking skin. A poor marksman, Wei Ying may weep if he had intended Qingshan for the bow. Drowned in a litany of gasp-babbled protests, each meant to drive attention to Qingbai's disappearance and to the great sin of Lan Wangji's fault in this matter, he asks, serenely: ]
Mercy. [ And when the flat of Qingshan's thumb strikes Wangji's mouth, and he dips in to greet it with a kiss, again: ] Mercy.
[ And ah, but affection ever does the trick, and master Qingshan consents to being refocused, cradled in his Lan father's arms, demolished, skin and bone, against the spread of Wangji's chest. Heartbeat to heartbeat, the old sing. Later, when he may tease a musical instrument, Lan Wangji will teach him to put the tender drumming of it in notes. This song, above all — except the one, which Wei Ying, helplessly ignorant, has the gall to remember as poorly as his answer to honest matrimony: ]
You refused me. [ This, for the annals of pedantry, a correction for the sake of smiles. Then, in the same breath, the true matter at hand, as they both know it so: ] Close the temple, we leave ghosts in the keep of dead things. [ Each thing, to its kind. A dreadful isolation. ] I like it not.
[ Like marshes, phantasms propagate in the damp of their salted tears, the horizon of their misery. Left to their own devices, they sink and spread, corrupting the ground with pox-like erosions. The priests are not brothers of suffering with those who fell dead of the volcano's gurgled, blazing laughter. The men of the temple were sacrificed, chosen and preyed on with intent by the once-living, where the first victims were merely casualties of hazard. Both regretted, earning respect — but their tolls written in different hues of cinnabar in the ledgers of malice.
And yet, leave doors and windows open, and hope and false security will sneak in, twitching like thieves, and the villagers will dare, will presume, will endanger themselves. In search of gold, or mystical artefacts, or seeking a night's shelter from the cold. Perhaps as a challenge among the growing young, to spend a night among famed ghosts and prove the esteem of their worthiness to their intended. Death lures eccentric tokens of favour to itself, like pressed flowers to its pocket. ]
Two cultivators are insufficient to purify so large a territory.
[ But he speaks it slow, inquisitive, like a schoolboy uncertain of his homework, begging the master's contradiction. ]
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A young boy, curled against his chest, and sighing as he drops back into sleep, exhausted from his day and its terror and its warmth and its coaxing. Qingshan, with his flails and protests, handled in Lan Zhan's care and soft calls for mercy, paired with equally soft presses of lips to quell tiny tantrums.
He was meant for children, Wei Wuxian considers, one hand gently patting on Qingbai's back. He'll have to pace their child acquiring. Keep Lan Zhan occupied with a babe in arms, stretching over years. That daughter owed through circumstance of happenstance may be rightfully years off yet.
His voice is soft, staring down at Qingbai, when he responds: )
I won't take advantage of someone at their worst. Also, less mud would have been nice.
( His lips quirk, just a touch. )
And Qingshan was more important.
( Their absconded child. What is marriage other than a formality, when neither of them stray, both bind with small lives and larger ones, both circle back to a sort of footwork that once was achingly familiar. Now it mostly feels certain when there's something to face; and he's learned the quiet, learned the smaller spaces. That they're not always frought and fragile and prone to breaking; and he leans to the side, shoulder pressed to shoulder. )
We could, given time. Or force, but the drain on both of us wouldn't make it well done work, only capable of returning to life.
( He leans his head forward, presses a kiss of his own to their third son's head. )
Here is a different kind of steeping than what haunts Yiling still. Death, sudden and unfair and unseeing, and the griefs that followed in the lives claimed later. But... it isn't greedy, not in the same way. It doesn't beg for vengeance. You felt it, didn't you? The gratitude.
( His lifts his chin, but comes dangerously close to resting his head against Lan Zhan, giving in to that temptation as he reflects on times he doesn't speak about so much as dance around. They both do that, really. Both look forward in certain ways, but the past informs the present to shape the future too. Something he and Jiang Cheng still come to a head over, still try to work out, brushing up against each other's rough edges. )
Yiling didn't yearn for freedom.
( Revenge, not freedom. Not access to some saving grace just below the surface in that parched mountain landscape. )
This land does.
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Better this, then, the chief cultivator, spine porcelain-pale and arrow-straight, and his forehead blessed by moonlight, intended for the sun. Appeased, his second son nestles, thin fists dancing a war song, knocking down the bridge of Lan Wangji's shoulders. Within heartbeats, Qingshan has travelled the cycle of a imperial grandeur: more than conquest, now he yearns for hard-earned peace, and spreads like the gold powders of gerber daisies and chrysanthemums and chamomile, with luscious wind.
It is Qingshan who catches, delighted and gasping, the first sight of Wei Ying tilting — of Qingbai coming close, in his second father's arms, and what whims childhood affords its subjects without hypocrisy. Moments ago, Lan Wangji whispers soundlessly against Qingshan's temple, half to pacify him, half to admonish, and the whole to excuse a handful of kisses more, You could not bear the company of him. Now, denied, Qingshan aches.
He will grow as his father did, a stalk thrown bones of light from generous sky, blood-thirsting to pierce it. Jealous, in all ways, of all things, even of those he would claim for himself. Years from now. Decades. And who is Lan Wangji to deter him? Never the better man, hand soft when he reaches for Wei Ying's nape beside him, and directs him like a puppet of bound rags or plywood, until he knows to bend and concede setting his head on Wangji's shoulder, or the bench spread of his thigh. Rest. ]
'XianXian is but three.'
[ Shallow incantations, Jiang Yanli's to whisper best. What Lan Wangji usurps now was never his to earn, but he steals it carelessly, drag of his fingers raking the coils of Wei Ying's dark hair, where he may yet find them. One child, strapped to his chest. Another, flattened against Wei Ying's. Wei Ying himself, basking in undivided attention. An evening of domesticity, settling in its maturity. ]
We were spared a sennight for travel. We may linger here, to purify.
[ Slowly, softly, with care. To the exclusion of Wei Ying's notion of a 'vacation,' if for the benefit of Yunmeng as a whole. ]
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Too young to know what love is.
( That last time he talked with his sister in that way, when he'd been asking what it was to like someone like that. Even if he's leaning against the reason why he'd asked, there were obstacles then, and decades that followed, to leave him wondering is it a matter of ever understanding?
No, he doesn't think it does. Not understanding, and maybe that's always been a problem, because the emotions he reacts to, the times he throws all in, are times where he already sets rationale to the side. Maybe that, too, is what one does in love.
Maybe. He's not thinking hard on it right now. Not with one child breathing against him, the sounds of the other child in Lan Zhan's arms right next to him, the steady bone of shoulder, and the fingers cutting through his hair. He's missed this. Somewhat fiercely, he's missed this, and it was not delivered from Lan Zhan's hand in the aching parts of himself that remembers what it was like most strongly.
He fears, sometimes, losing those memories, of his shijie's voice and face, just as he's lost those of his parents. It's a matter of time, he knows. The best he can do is fill in those blank spaces with new memories to hold precious, to remember, when the hold are too faint to bring anything more than their passing impressions of warmth. )
Mm? ( Stirred from his own thoughts, blinking. ) Ah, yes. We do, don't we? ( He wasn't tracking, truly. A longer pause, inhaling, exhaling, and a murmured: ) That'd be nice.
( I'd like that. )
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You have no core, he breathes and aches and thinks, for all he seldom speaks it. Wei Ying lacks, and this one privilege is never the chief cultivator's to award, hand docile and cruel when it snakes to imitate the obedience of Jiang Yanli's measured strokes, as he remembers them. Wei Ying has no core, flesh chilled for the spell of evening breeze, in a way Qingshan — a babe in name, but ghost-touched, thriving and cuddling shamelessly to curl his fingers in the ink stream of his Yiling father's hair — already begins to dismiss. One that the yao, a compound of aggregated magic, never knew.
It stings, to glimpse sixteen years of mourning in each of Wei Ying's bruises that slows in passage, each of the fine-shaping shadows of his wrinkles. ]
You owe nothing.
[ To strange lands, however distantly chained to Yunmeng. To Jiang Che — Wanyin, blissfully alienated from the straying, haunted peripheries of his own territory. To Lan Wangji, a silent despot, ruling steel-handed over two children and a fettered guqin.
Here, Wei Ying's ledgers bind themselves of paper untattered, parchment fresh, calligraphy in lampblack, soot. Fat and full and flattered by another mystery resolved, another death defied — the priests', sooner than his own, but intent keeps. If action is owed, it need not be a strangled, pale-faced miracle of Wei Ying's performance.
Guilt and obligation may wear other faces. The stark crude carvings of his mask too ill-fitted him to hand out his own features so easily. ]
You need not save each land.
[ And each sect, each people. ]
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No man can, alone. Not even supported. Just... where we can.
( He opens his eyes, stares down on the fine dark hairs of the yao's head, of Qingshan's head. What millennia past had seem them at these ages? Lan Zhan consigned to his uncle's embrace, his brother's besides. Wei Wuxian to his parents, loving and wandering, dead within the span of years that follow.
Lan Zhan doesn't raise orphans. Wei Wuxian remembers that much. )
Is it not worthwhile, to lend help where we can?
( Where there is a need, and it's not the shifting of a world and society to see it granted, instead of suffocated? To the death the Wens had been consigned to, to the silence of the years and crimes thereafter. Buried under the Greater Good, the things which were accomplished, because the world never ceases to move forward. Time, the world, waits for no person, no matter how much they want it to.
It does pause, inhale, reflect, for others. )
There are enough small ways to help. Justice needn't be in grand gestures.
( Justice... might... sometimes be in collapsing tunnels... and setting ghosts and haunts and wraiths and the rest of what lingers, willing or otherwise, once death and claimed the body. )
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He could sleep like this, Wei Ying's hand a quiet burn on his thigh, Qingshan gasping between minute, stifled coos of dormant comfort, Qingbai a pleasant nearby vibration of placid pleasure. Lan Wangji could sleep like this, and know the universe at ease, and all that is fire and stone and madness a splintered dream, smoke-wisped, diffused. In shops of trade and trinket, incense burners breathe this mirage. ]
Wei Ying. [ Too much comfort, slivers of silver pouring between his fingers. ] You were not born to be lessened.
[ Not born to Yunmeng, to wander, to face exile. Persecution, and a traitor's death — an animal's, cruelly mourned. Only the Burial Mounds crested and brittled and gave away their rubble like first blood, and they knew, they grieved, they kept the hour. They whispered, year on end, Here he lay king. ]
Raised in worthiness.
[ For empire and Yiling, to head a sect more than follow it. He curls himself away from Wei Ying, but the pull of flesh and bone redirect them, a gaunt arc set almost to engulf this man who gives himself too freely — their children. ]
The shape of you stings. [ Tongue slack and the muscle of his jaw convulsing, how does he explain, set to words? There is no negative space outside Wei Ying, not when he is sandalwood and cloying resin, set for invasion. ] Uncontainable. Embrace that greatness.
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Children sleeping, nothing pressing in such a way to demand immediate action. The thoughts of progress, of healing, for a land and people long past or more recently departed, has a different sort of soothing to a mind as used to their screams as the silences between.
He listens with an initial hum, a I'm listening that fades into an open eyed stare down at the heads of their children, at his own hand, at the floor beyond. Like disconnected things that shift and resettle, glaciers gasping and groaning in month long exhalations as each year by millimeters they rearrange themselves.
Like words that stir a shift in glance, and a laugh that's quiet, flattered, seen in a way that to him, makes sense. )
Then I hope you don't plan on a peaceful retirement, he who appears in the heart of chaos.
( Some men are simply born chaos manifested, regardless of outer forming. )