[ 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. )
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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. ]
no subject
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.
no subject
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. ]
no subject
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. )
no subject
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. ]
no subject
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. )
no subject
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.
no subject
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. )