( 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}
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. )