This, the quieter pronouncement, Wei Ying's eyes blinding-bright with the feverish agitation of a man who knows his despair misplaced, his pleas pointless. Lan Wangji has tasted the ginger acridity of salted supplications, among petitioners who deal themselves a hundred cuts only to present the blood and bone to the chief cultivator and damn their offenders.
A pledge to their children: one, a heartache of a boy grown his own man, shadowed silhouette drifting after the tatters of his Wen uncle. Two others, unlikely earnings of the road, both carved from rift and suffering, from the pain of their flesh or their forbearers.
"I cannot stay time." Not even in this, for Wei Ying. Beneath the clatter of his falling hand, Wei Ying's fingers scratch the table's sticky lacquered wood, when Lan Wangji drags them. "Qingshan already learns words."
Time is the province of children, wasted without sense or reason. Wangji tallies it in every li of folded, vibrant silk the seamstresses stitch to broaden Qingshan's robes, with every ten days' passage. Children are wet things, made for and of drenching: like lichen and weeds and mould, they grow senselessly, poisoning those who neglect them.
"Come and go as you please. You have claim to Cloud Recesses." Needs must, the wards can disperse like spring's snow and yield the patriarch an open path. "But choose your hours wisely."
"In the dark of the night will hardly make anyone happy, even your esteemed uncle," he says, an allowance of humour and a sort of softening of his expression. There are things even now he's learning, navigations that Lan Zhan hadn't been able to help with before, tectonic movements that Wei Wuxian had to experience alone. Soulmates could not live each other's experiences for them, though they could be a support, leaning like two cracked trees in the depths of a monsoon striking.
Their roots, their anchoring, it had to come from within them. Lan Zhan's meant he did not erode with the mountain storms, and Wei Wuxian, at some point, had found himself adrift and clinging and spreading like vines to, climbing to reach for the world beyond himself without having a proper grounding.
It was not as frightening as it once was, to truly consider his home as being within him, and small as that progress is, gently as he refills Lan Zhan's cup with still steaming tea, he finds and leaves parts of himself everywhere he visits. His once-brother, his mending love with Jiang Cheng, and the gestures of paintings and memories and recollections that hurt as much as they slowly, painstakingly heal. Jin Ling and his vibrancy, smiles and scowls and too keen statements and too knowing looks when it comes to pointing toward his blood uncle's truths, and his own fumbling way to ask for the framework of who his mother was. Even if his cousins, older than he was, could share his father, there'd been only Jiang Cheng for his mother, and Jiang Yanli was a beautiful scar across his heart, a gift given repeatedly in blood he clawed from his chest to leave her son with any memory of a woman he reflected in his own empathy far more than Wei Wuxian would have guessed, in first meetings.
He'd been a fool. He knows he's often enough been a fool, and they both have, and they both will, in the future. Yet their sons, two fathers, soulmates, but not the people who once they'd been, but the versions of themselves they were still growing into: their sons, and their futures, unfettered but by what is chosen.
"You have claim to Yiling," is all he says to that in the end, the same invitation, the knowing quirk of his lips, because Yiling is no man's restful paradise, and he is no man, he is a spectre made flesh, and he will invite rest to this land.
If he will grant himself purpose, if he will grant them both time for themselves, and no time can be granted for their children, then he will be the one to visit and take gasping breath to measure their growth, before he slips under the surface of familiar waters to swim with broad strokes and strong kicks of cloth-wrapped legs, to drag himself out and dry in the familiar sun, or to never quite dry at all in the humid summer's embrace.
Lan Zhan no more wishes to feel saved than anyone else in this world he's been unmoored from, owning relationship's bindings, but with only that weight, and the forever threatening possibility of what he might do, if only, if only. Less with Lan Zhan sitting where he was now, cloaked in his titles and position, but he thinks even after then, they'll see.
There are thoughts for him to investigate, lay flat and view from above, but it is what it is. Things he hasn't allowed himself to consider before, but might now; what fosters a core, and what he might find if he only has that to investigate, and no murders looming, no curses pressing, only the pleasantries of family to turn his attention back onto, and not one of them needs him, beyond everything, needs his sacrifice, without him asking, needs him to prove any part of his unworthy self is worth salvaging. Not for having found worth, exactly, but for having come closer to peace in the wake of storm and child's tantrums and all the terrors and horrors of the everyday and the dead, crossing over with the same abandon that rules the chaos of their beautiful, breathing world.
Freedom is being so unmoored he can choose his own, true points of contact, and not let it be guilt that binds him, but the warmer, better things, like what ties him to each child of theirs. For the children, it's always been easy for him. It's his peers, and the elders, who have always been difficult, in the same way that they all found him difficult, in his pernicious smiles and too keen intelligence with too little younger reason to wonder at the hows of going about things, and not just the doing with little more than a why not.
He laughs, does not intend it. Crystalline and brittle, scratches on diamond beds. "No man has claim to Yiling. The Patriarch surrendered his."
In death, in the long chase after, the metaphor of the cultivation sects' hounds at his shivered feet. Wei Ying walks these lands more to haunt them — begrudges the lesser ghosts he spies here their frailty of their inheritance, the blunt, bastard dullness of their claws, the silken terror of their transgression. Under Wei Ying's hand, Wangji's tea pours limpid and earthy now, and he strains to balance the cup between two hands, to honour it with careful sip — tasting the granular muddiness of leaf, the threat of idle friction.
"What do you give me?" Empty dowry, poorly brokered. Let Zewu-Jun negotiate for the sect, on the occasion of nuptials he will not know to celebrate. Their secret on pale-dead lips, blued. Shake of his head, hair tumbled and the look of him porcelain stripped and scratched and strained, and he is no second Jade of Lan here, only — foreign. Indistinct in his whites, shrouded already in the exotic veneer of an 'outsider.'
If this were a love match, his brother would coax free from the cage of Wei Ying's gentle fingers the pledge of alliance, the token tolerance of the dead, if not — for terror of abuse — their service. If this were an arrangement of convenience between two sects, Zewu-Jun would wrench land and teeth from Wei Ying's bloodied mouth. But they breed and raise and shelter a fledgling thing, nameless among Lan Wangji's bastards. He finds his loose footing strangely soothing.
"You misunderstand me. I want no land. No bindings." Perhaps in this, he is the cherished, spoiled son of a sect that has yet to exile him — in contrast to Wei Ying, face drawn and alight with the pains of enforced, ill-begotten defection. A simple thing, between the laggard pulse of a slow heart, to say, I wish for nothing, when Wangji's coin purse sings full, and his hands go rich with possibility, when the simplest undulation of his voice commands the sects. To renounce, knowing it will not be accepted — that is true privilege. When his hand singes his forehead ribbon, it lingers, in love with the easy hurt of its symbol.
"I keep the signs of the sect." For as many days as Zewu-Jun chooses seclusion, Lan Wangji is the sect. "I have my children, Bichen, my reputation. Allow me to want nothing more."
"I am no patriarch." He smiles with that, a careless shrug of his shoulders; a name never lived up to, but granted, yes, as such things are, by people. The way of every name, chosen by others to define the ones around them, and there's no ill will within it in the end. "So you're doubly right, I suppose."
It would have bothered him once, either out of spite and acceptance of a name he didn't ask for, simply because he could turn it around on those who yoked him with it. Another time to feel there was anywhere carved out in the landscape of this vast world for himself and those he cared for, only to know now, it was only he who lacked the roots. The rest of those in his heart were established, had places, and if they loved them or resented them, it was a certainty he didn't need to provide.
So brittle laughter of his closest friend, a man who loved the man he once was, and it's easy to smile. No weighted pain, in this moment, or the ones that follow.
He raises his cup high, to Lan Zhan, to whatever the future is or isn't, and to the children they share. Misunderstandings will continue, he knows, because they both are who they are, and they haven't learned how to work smoothly outside of the battlefield. Maybe they never will, but he has faith, and faith is more than he's had in a long time.
"Lan Zhan, my soulmate, whatever claims you felt I once had, the ones I never would have made would be in organising your wants. Allow me only to respect what you decide, and to hope for your happiness, when and where it finds you."
A drink of tea and warmth and second chances, in a world so fond of giving few.
'Soulmate.' A man who knows him, mote to whole, part to system, the bindings. If he is flesh, Wei Ying runs red and raw and rust, blood thick. Poison.
He thinks, once upon a time, he lived under a pale, watchful sky, and he bathed growing limbs in cold waters, and he took his sword and his name and is uncle's path.
He thinks, he died at cliff's edge, a restless collision of electric frictions — a storm that never waged itself, stifled with Wei Ying's fall.
He thinks, he has been haze and dreams and steps bridged one after the next, since.
He thinks —
But he says, "Thank you."
And he drinks his stale tea, much as Wei Ying consumes his watered wine, and they comport themselves, loose on their strings, like the puppet show the hour commands, under the weathered, greyed eyes, like morose inertia and sleet, of their curious spectators. What a spectacle they make, two gentlemen in their blood-drenched fineries, negotiating words with the skill of children, gravitating gracelessly towards each other's (absent) cores.
Incomplete, but forcing connection — searching. Lan Wangji's hand trickles on Wei Ying's, on the wine cup. Finding.
Slow, unmoored, but stitching back together through inertia. Place is a function of time. 'Belonging' merely expresses the mathematics. He has the patience to become scholarly, in this.
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no subject
A pledge to their children: one, a heartache of a boy grown his own man, shadowed silhouette drifting after the tatters of his Wen uncle. Two others, unlikely earnings of the road, both carved from rift and suffering, from the pain of their flesh or their forbearers.
"I cannot stay time." Not even in this, for Wei Ying. Beneath the clatter of his falling hand, Wei Ying's fingers scratch the table's sticky lacquered wood, when Lan Wangji drags them. "Qingshan already learns words."
Time is the province of children, wasted without sense or reason. Wangji tallies it in every li of folded, vibrant silk the seamstresses stitch to broaden Qingshan's robes, with every ten days' passage. Children are wet things, made for and of drenching: like lichen and weeds and mould, they grow senselessly, poisoning those who neglect them.
"Come and go as you please. You have claim to Cloud Recesses." Needs must, the wards can disperse like spring's snow and yield the patriarch an open path. "But choose your hours wisely."
no subject
Their roots, their anchoring, it had to come from within them. Lan Zhan's meant he did not erode with the mountain storms, and Wei Wuxian, at some point, had found himself adrift and clinging and spreading like vines to, climbing to reach for the world beyond himself without having a proper grounding.
It was not as frightening as it once was, to truly consider his home as being within him, and small as that progress is, gently as he refills Lan Zhan's cup with still steaming tea, he finds and leaves parts of himself everywhere he visits. His once-brother, his mending love with Jiang Cheng, and the gestures of paintings and memories and recollections that hurt as much as they slowly, painstakingly heal. Jin Ling and his vibrancy, smiles and scowls and too keen statements and too knowing looks when it comes to pointing toward his blood uncle's truths, and his own fumbling way to ask for the framework of who his mother was. Even if his cousins, older than he was, could share his father, there'd been only Jiang Cheng for his mother, and Jiang Yanli was a beautiful scar across his heart, a gift given repeatedly in blood he clawed from his chest to leave her son with any memory of a woman he reflected in his own empathy far more than Wei Wuxian would have guessed, in first meetings.
He'd been a fool. He knows he's often enough been a fool, and they both have, and they both will, in the future. Yet their sons, two fathers, soulmates, but not the people who once they'd been, but the versions of themselves they were still growing into: their sons, and their futures, unfettered but by what is chosen.
"You have claim to Yiling," is all he says to that in the end, the same invitation, the knowing quirk of his lips, because Yiling is no man's restful paradise, and he is no man, he is a spectre made flesh, and he will invite rest to this land.
If he will grant himself purpose, if he will grant them both time for themselves, and no time can be granted for their children, then he will be the one to visit and take gasping breath to measure their growth, before he slips under the surface of familiar waters to swim with broad strokes and strong kicks of cloth-wrapped legs, to drag himself out and dry in the familiar sun, or to never quite dry at all in the humid summer's embrace.
Lan Zhan no more wishes to feel saved than anyone else in this world he's been unmoored from, owning relationship's bindings, but with only that weight, and the forever threatening possibility of what he might do, if only, if only. Less with Lan Zhan sitting where he was now, cloaked in his titles and position, but he thinks even after then, they'll see.
There are thoughts for him to investigate, lay flat and view from above, but it is what it is. Things he hasn't allowed himself to consider before, but might now; what fosters a core, and what he might find if he only has that to investigate, and no murders looming, no curses pressing, only the pleasantries of family to turn his attention back onto, and not one of them needs him, beyond everything, needs his sacrifice, without him asking, needs him to prove any part of his unworthy self is worth salvaging. Not for having found worth, exactly, but for having come closer to peace in the wake of storm and child's tantrums and all the terrors and horrors of the everyday and the dead, crossing over with the same abandon that rules the chaos of their beautiful, breathing world.
Freedom is being so unmoored he can choose his own, true points of contact, and not let it be guilt that binds him, but the warmer, better things, like what ties him to each child of theirs. For the children, it's always been easy for him. It's his peers, and the elders, who have always been difficult, in the same way that they all found him difficult, in his pernicious smiles and too keen intelligence with too little younger reason to wonder at the hows of going about things, and not just the doing with little more than a why not.
no subject
In death, in the long chase after, the metaphor of the cultivation sects' hounds at his shivered feet. Wei Ying walks these lands more to haunt them — begrudges the lesser ghosts he spies here their frailty of their inheritance, the blunt, bastard dullness of their claws, the silken terror of their transgression. Under Wei Ying's hand, Wangji's tea pours limpid and earthy now, and he strains to balance the cup between two hands, to honour it with careful sip — tasting the granular muddiness of leaf, the threat of idle friction.
"What do you give me?" Empty dowry, poorly brokered. Let Zewu-Jun negotiate for the sect, on the occasion of nuptials he will not know to celebrate. Their secret on pale-dead lips, blued. Shake of his head, hair tumbled and the look of him porcelain stripped and scratched and strained, and he is no second Jade of Lan here, only — foreign. Indistinct in his whites, shrouded already in the exotic veneer of an 'outsider.'
If this were a love match, his brother would coax free from the cage of Wei Ying's gentle fingers the pledge of alliance, the token tolerance of the dead, if not — for terror of abuse — their service. If this were an arrangement of convenience between two sects, Zewu-Jun would wrench land and teeth from Wei Ying's bloodied mouth. But they breed and raise and shelter a fledgling thing, nameless among Lan Wangji's bastards. He finds his loose footing strangely soothing.
"You misunderstand me. I want no land. No bindings." Perhaps in this, he is the cherished, spoiled son of a sect that has yet to exile him — in contrast to Wei Ying, face drawn and alight with the pains of enforced, ill-begotten defection. A simple thing, between the laggard pulse of a slow heart, to say, I wish for nothing, when Wangji's coin purse sings full, and his hands go rich with possibility, when the simplest undulation of his voice commands the sects. To renounce, knowing it will not be accepted — that is true privilege. When his hand singes his forehead ribbon, it lingers, in love with the easy hurt of its symbol.
"I keep the signs of the sect." For as many days as Zewu-Jun chooses seclusion, Lan Wangji is the sect. "I have my children, Bichen, my reputation. Allow me to want nothing more."
no subject
It would have bothered him once, either out of spite and acceptance of a name he didn't ask for, simply because he could turn it around on those who yoked him with it. Another time to feel there was anywhere carved out in the landscape of this vast world for himself and those he cared for, only to know now, it was only he who lacked the roots. The rest of those in his heart were established, had places, and if they loved them or resented them, it was a certainty he didn't need to provide.
So brittle laughter of his closest friend, a man who loved the man he once was, and it's easy to smile. No weighted pain, in this moment, or the ones that follow.
He raises his cup high, to Lan Zhan, to whatever the future is or isn't, and to the children they share. Misunderstandings will continue, he knows, because they both are who they are, and they haven't learned how to work smoothly outside of the battlefield. Maybe they never will, but he has faith, and faith is more than he's had in a long time.
"Lan Zhan, my soulmate, whatever claims you felt I once had, the ones I never would have made would be in organising your wants. Allow me only to respect what you decide, and to hope for your happiness, when and where it finds you."
A drink of tea and warmth and second chances, in a world so fond of giving few.
no subject
He thinks, once upon a time, he lived under a pale, watchful sky, and he bathed growing limbs in cold waters, and he took his sword and his name and is uncle's path.
He thinks, he died at cliff's edge, a restless collision of electric frictions — a storm that never waged itself, stifled with Wei Ying's fall.
He thinks, he has been haze and dreams and steps bridged one after the next, since.
He thinks —
But he says, "Thank you."
And he drinks his stale tea, much as Wei Ying consumes his watered wine, and they comport themselves, loose on their strings, like the puppet show the hour commands, under the weathered, greyed eyes, like morose inertia and sleet, of their curious spectators. What a spectacle they make, two gentlemen in their blood-drenched fineries, negotiating words with the skill of children, gravitating gracelessly towards each other's (absent) cores.
Incomplete, but forcing connection — searching. Lan Wangji's hand trickles on Wei Ying's, on the wine cup. Finding.
Slow, unmoored, but stitching back together through inertia. Place is a function of time. 'Belonging' merely expresses the mathematics. He has the patience to become scholarly, in this.