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( long, his answer in coming. he takes part challenge, part appeasement, has little preparation, plenty of charming words. until he does, finally, answer with the vision of himself, instead of the words of his authorship alone. lips red, crimson, lurid compared to his complexion, which has more colour to it now than it had in serthica. that will change again, soon enough.

for now he smiles, and it's a small, genuine thing, undercut by the nervous lathe of his tongue over his lower lip. these are not the simple, quiet brooks he leapt across as a young man. these rivers run deep, these waters run long, and their boat is only as steady as their hearts and minds are, harmonising. )

Do you want lamp light to cherish the fading red, Lan Zhan?

( Ah, to have beauty like snow before you, ephemeral. Dead once it falls in grasp. )

Wet the fingertips burned on that flame.

( to draw a finger over lips, light enough to leave them stained, rough enough to drag the flesh: )

Consumed and consuming, reborn anew from ash.

( as he has been. as both their homes have been. )

( Well, then. Breath staggered, stilted. )

...run.

( the answer, before he ceases the pendant's communication, is a smile. a lower of his gaze. the challenge.

then, absence.

he runs, masking his self much as he can, and runs in the manner of one not seeking the attentions of the workers here, or the ghosts, or most particularly his brother, some things need not be known. even while they're known. )

( And being who they are, trinkets of touch starved, moths to fire —

Of course, this man gives chase. )

( There are places he will not touch: the woods here, with their dire wolves and dire threats to his sanity; resting places of the dead which stir and shift under their own whims and cacophony of hauntings; wings of merchants and celebratory not-yet-brides.

No. With the creatures below the ice contained once more to their prison, he stands instead there, footsteps the staccato heartbeat of his motion, his robes layered, red, and red, and white, and white, and white. Black for his shoes, and they settled too in white, the snow of the landscape fallen fresh and new and infant, and he, and he standing in it, blood red lips, night black hair, the shades of life spread thick inbetween.

Find me, he thinks. Wind shudders and chills through him, caresses his hair, sends it framing and flailing past his face, his shoulders, and settles again, whipping it back, then whirling away, roaring. Find me. )

( Find him. The instinct, itch unscratched, low burning. Prickled skin and the saccharine, read pulse of spreading infection. The wind whistles, reedy, and in white-cold he comes alive, like candle light, keening.

Wei Ying did not invite this, did not wake the animal who livens his bones. Knows better. They both ever know better, that there lives beneath Lan Wangji's skins a monster with his father's face. But Wei Ying, too, did not refute him.

Underfoot, husked branches crackle and coo and break, when his step heavies, then lightens, flitting from corner to corner. Hunting, more than searching. Easy, easy, fast. He sees him like a fragment of light breaking, Wei Ying bride-ride and his mouth blooded. No, smeared. No, asking.

They crash. He collides them — knocks Wei Ying down, Lan Wangji's hand to his nape, cushioning to break the petty abrasions of the fall. Other elbow to Wei Ying's belly, pushed in, chaining down, Lan Wangji's own weight his foremost weapon. Crisp flash of his teeth is bright gleaming. )

Yield. ( But they're rolling, fumbling, fallen. Down. )

( Down, and he, married to pain years before he knew the contours of Lan Zhan's face, dismissive of it as long, arches up, continuing the motion, cleaving close to the cutting edge of Lan Zhan's force. Yield, a word, and not one he's ever been graceful about but for the sake of those he loves, and here it comes to cross purpose of competition and one predator's recognition of another, an unwillingness for complacency. )

Why?

( The problem inherent with bucking into his husband is, of course, the placement of limbs, the lack of intent to injure or dislodge, and the equal intent to not stay pinned. The shift and planting of a foot against ice and snow and the sleet made between both, the slick slip, the corrective jerk, trying to offseat and reverse position.

The unintentional marriage of knee and nethers, lo and behold, the man need sire no daughters, no sons, so helps us all. So help us. )

Edited 2023-01-30 07:34 (UTC)

( — skinny, knobby, bony joints. Hard extensions. The knee.

It latches, snags, hits. Dull bruise of his recognition is this: the moment when Wei Ying transforms from bird bones and wilted limbs to feral thing, all hiss and spittle, clawing. When strategy simmers in slow boil to instinct. When he strikes —

...and really, what's a man to do but stare down, stunted, breath stilted, as if confronting his groin with his indignation will erase the reality of the attack? It — troubles him, first. Before pain bolts in, and he could be a gentleman, could grit his teeth and bear it no worse than a stabbing, but this is Wei Ying returned to his Yunmeng form, and wisely, Lan Wangji rolls over, back sunken in cold ground.

Cultivation has accelerated many wonders. Not immunity from the worst prank of the play grounds.

He does not grip himself. There is dignity. Only, suddenly, impossibly, confounded by betrayal — erupts in tectonic, heady, first harsh laughter that thins reedy, and convulses on. They are not under his uncle's roof, his skies. He may, hands clutching against fair snow, before releasing the weight of it in aimless spatters over Wei Ying's cheeks, his neck. Hoarse: )

You will die like snow on mountain's peak.

( Untouched, untarnished, virginal. Entirely and wholeheartedly uncorrupted

...which means, with resigned inevitability, that Lan Wangji will suffer the same fate. Most unfortunate. Another handful of snow dropped on Wei Ying's mouth, for good measure. You animal. )

( The realisation comes to Wei Wuxian late, where bone and cartilidge and sinew met flesh unresisting but for layered robes to halt the motion from unintended brutal efficiency. Frozen in mirrored moments, eyes widening in fractions, and there goes Lan Zhan, to his side, and he rolls that way too, hefts up on an elbow. Is greeted with his husband's ragged laughter, thin and birdboned, and snow speckling his cheeks. )

Lan Zhan, are you—

( Aching, okay, terribly unmanned in a moment that reminds Wei Wuxian, with sudden clarity, of tumbling wrestling as a child, and unplanned blows that landed and left stomachs sick and pain harrowing, a narrowed world to dwell within until breathe returned to lungs. His mouth is filled, snow melting and bitten down, and he half swallows, half spits it out. Collapses with a groan and sudden loss of all bone to support the angles of his body. Limp, wet mouthed, dry eyed, he whines apology. )

Books make this all sound so easy. Are we just broken? Do we just not understand bodies that aren't fighting? Lan Zhan, I'm sorry.

( He flicks a touch of snow at his husband's torso, no lower, no higher. Reaches out one cold hand, hovering it near his husband's face. Husband, he tells himself. )

Want me to kiss it and make it better? Or blow the pain all away.

( The twitch of his lips, because apologising more for what he didn't intend, or for his apparent guaranteed chastity while his husband bedded his brother relentlessly in his death, seems about apt for what life he never imagined surviving to see. )

Edited 2023-01-30 08:29 (UTC)

( He is sorry, rumbles the twinge of searing phantom ache in Lan Wangji's groin, as if apologies stitch back wounding and revive a man's hopes and dreams of siring heirs.

May the heavens bless Sizhui and give him life long-lasting.

And then, Wei Ying murmurs, ruinous — are they just broken? No. He raises himself, on his elbow, skidding, anchoring down. Turns to catch Wei Ying's stormed gaze: )

Intact. ( No, the kittenish tip of his head. And he concedes: ) Mending.

( He will not let this be what plunges Wei Ying back into the depths of self-doubt and injury. No fault breathes in him, but the vile alliance with spices that have no business in the act of being.

He rushes to expel snow dusted on Wei Ying's mouth corners, the cold of failure from his bones. )

Inconsequential. We wed until Wei Ying's virtue no longer defends itself.

( Clearly, the trouble here is one of memory, Wei Ying's fresh-gained flesh yet to fall in duet with his vows. Once his mind concedes to matrimony, his body will follow. Uncouth men speak of peasants who tumble on the first, likely hyperbolic encounter, with no temple present to witness their bows. But then, Wei Ying was raised a gentleman.

Eight is a fortuitous number. Surely, it can be this simple. They will make it so. )

She was dying, and her children were with her. They were going to be orphaned. Wen Qing couldn't save her.

( all this said, low and level, with a pained exhalation at the end, the huff of laughter that isn't laughter slipping past his lips. )

She asked that we try anything. So I did.

( the silence just hangs there, aching. and then it ends.

the voice contact, that is. )

( A voice like rust, like a chokehold, tinny, raw, creaking. Wet with the red wet of blood spilling. He knows the quality of Wei Ying's stifled screams. )

Your resting place, within tenth of a shi.

( the response, delayed by heartbeats: )

Mm.

( agreement enough that he'll be there within that time. he holds himself still before leaving, summons a smile, and crosses the open spaces crammed with the desperate like a cat slinking across a cluttered room, untouched. masks are easy, simple things to wear; he has a lifetime of awareness of that fact. no one wants to see uncertainty. it's not helpful, when people know you hurt, that you don't act only in the fullness of expecting you're right. )

( The tenth of shi, and a mere scattering of heartbeats after. He is early; molten on steps, dragged like a smear of oil viscera across the tight convexity of their stairwell. In the dappled, mellowed light of his brazier, hand sweet when it strokes the miniature swells of rabbit mounds, released from their warded cage to bask in shy contentment. One is a tight, unmoving moon on his lap, rounded. The other peppers sweet-whiskered kisses by his ankle.

Three pairs of beaded dark eyes dart up, when Wei Ying creaks the door open, only its rustling and the drip-drops of bone-deep humidity breaking their silence. )

...sit. ( What happened? Something did, must have. Ever does. There is room, between the steps and Lan Wangji's ribs, to fit Wei Ying. To shield him. )

( he's made of awkward angles, in moments like these. energy that has a hard time settling, and here he is, with red rimmed eyes, and dry cheeks. the rabbits, familiar now in their traveling trials, merit the slow blink, the ghost of a smile before he folds in on himself, collapsing with elegant coordination to the stairs, to lan zhan's legs. to the perched rabbits, for whom he half turns, bringing himself nose to nose with the moon of one.

the rabbit's soft nose twitches. one ear swivels forward, and then it swivels back. the rabbit at lan zhan's ankle shivers, stretches upward on stairs to climb, then turns and thuds back down, patting wei wuxian's leg and hauling over it to climb past his frame to the other side. it contents itself thus burrowing into the lack of space between lan zhan's side and the wall, working its way into lan zhan's lap, crowding the other rabbit.

wei wuxian watches, head canting to the side. it means avoiding looking his husband in the face for now, so that when he does, when the hollow ache that paints shadows under his eyes can deepen in the brazier's light, it's with dark eyes, consuming light as easily as some breathe air. )

Do you recall your parents faces?

( Two rabbits and a plague, both raining hazard on his silks, the stretch of his lap rippled when they tumble, nose and play. The second rabbit, mischievous, rounds the first to bruise the trembled swell of his flank with his whiskers, to tickle the furred, rounded pads of his toes.

Lan Wangji, who has never known the great pressure of justice without abiding them, find himself introducing a mediator — gentling his hand to cup and weigh the slow expanse of Wei Ying's nape and bring him in, the rapid, thundered pulse of his temple against the perch of Wangji's knee. Sit still, breathe, listen. Bear the tender weight of Lan Wangji's stroking hand branding heat on Wei Ying's forehead. )

Father. ( A charcoal sketch of imprecisions, the vagaries of Lan Wangji's growing antipathy, the colour of stewing, humid mornings and squalor and a sun never settled to shine. ) Mother, a mist.

( Too young, when she — retired. When her jail birthed the pillars of his fortress, strong, and he raised himself a man from the bones of her solitude. When her absence turned Zewu-Jun into a god and Lan Wangji, his disciple. )

What bleeds?

( he bows, before that touch, that pull, the gravity he'd been slow to allow himself the consistent succor he now finds it, sharp as their edges may find each other's flesh, day to day. his bones forget their rigidity when his head rests against his husband's knee, when one hand balms his clammy forehead with soothing, intractable heat.

his eyes close, and his breathing changes cadence, longer and slower, the gritty texture of them itching as salt crusted on skin might. )

There were too many orphans in our generation. ( A pause, the exhalation: ) Too many in the one that followed, too.

( the problem of wars and warring, done openly or in the silence of one clan's assured dominance over a hundred years of inadequate protests. it hadn't always been the way it ended, pressure building behind a dam built of the detritus of power finding choke-points in their society. not the point in the moment, a stumbling stone in the journey that led them to the days they live now. )

They came with their mother. Now she's living, but vulnerable. To anyone stronger if I'm not close enough.

( that bleeds; that aches in his joints, shards of ice that shimmer and dig. )

Wen Qing asked me to help. The children, they were there, crying. The older one knew what was likely. The younger one couldn't have been more than a'Yuan's age... I couldn't.

( voice catching, the rest of the statement swallowed. i couldn't fail them all again. though he had, in a way he's not happier with, that's tolerable only as long as he keeps a resurrected woman safe, and keeps her children from understanding that truth, as if there's ever a time for children to be ready for their orphaning. as if there's ever a time where loss hits less bone-deep, but for time erasing the immediacy of it, laying over old hurts with newer, fresher ones, and memories of teeth and whips and blades and the blue, blue skies he stared into when wen qing and wen ning cut out his core for his brother.

his recourses since then, his pathways since that moment, aren't ones he regrets for their existence. no, his regrets are in the lives he hadn't been able to save. the lives he still holds precious, even knowing their faces, their voices, will fade as fully as his parents have, little beyond an impression of a road and a memory of laughter, all walking, all together, all enough.

if there was a time to feel enough, childhood had the glimmer of it, for one precious, precious moment. )

( He heeds. Listens. Holds, his hands listlessly following Wei Ying's strands like a weaver knows threadbare silk strips or wool, binding. His fingers fumble, tangle. Snag. He does not tug, but evens, presses the pads on the length of Wei Ying's strands, feels out the imperceptible, resolute web of where texture neatens, then coarsens, then ribbons.

A woman. Children, crying. As young as a-Yuan, as tender. What could Wei Ying have done?

And what did he do? It sings in him, the rippling, raw, metallic deluge of listlessness. He has endured, over time, poison. The quiet thrumming of his dying core, beneath self-inflicted seals. Knows silence, intimately. A wilting of the self.

His fingers course again. Move, moving. His throat, the sweet-swelling jugular, the string of cartilages, moving. Sound, moving. He does not live in this body, in this moment, rasping: )

Your heart has spread so vast, you have become the Heavens.

( With mandate to rule, to rue, to ruin. To call up bones and bind back flesh and stitch life where strands have stripped stolen. Necromancy is arrogance, the artist's will above his work. It is war, a red-mouthed general birthing his tyranny.

He cannot approve. He cannot push his maudlin, defeated lover from his lap. Cannot exist at once as who he is and who he must be, to conclude the diplomacy of this encounter.

Zewu-Jun might. His hand stills once more. This does not concern his brother, does not concern Lan Wangji. Wei Ying. Wei Ying bears too much burden on shoulders small. )

Introduce us, later.

( no sound, to either. only the quiet of staying, the furrow on his brow that hasn't smoothed. lan zhan is a light that doesn't necessarily burn comforting or welcoming, but he burns, and that compels.

it's kinder, when he doesn't think their inclinations in this are kindness. he exhales, long, slow, unending, the wheeze of existence whistling past his teeth in memory of every time he's sung, played, commanded, thanked the dead or the living. )

To all three. Sizhui, too. She can't be near where he can reach.

( the death lord that lurks outside the gates, metaphorically and literally, biding his time.

silence again, and the rabbits shift, one nosing then nibbling at his hair. the mischievous rabbit nibbles likewise on lan zhan's sleeve, one ear swiveling forward as wei wuxian speaks. )

I'm tired of death, Lan Zhan. Am I allowed to be?

( And is Wei Ying? Look at the tea dregs of him, withered flower and ash powders and the bones of him greyed, and how he moulds and wilts and fits himself, like the dog he would sooner perish than hear named — sinking in the negative spaces between stone and Lan Wangji and the rabbits, round, to make the least trouble of himself. To hide.

This, then, must have been his learning of Yunmeng: how to occupy the least amount of territory, to supplement the better man who was meant to rise as Jiang Wanyin. Loud, despite it, like a waning summer's sun. Born with cold in his marrow, despite it.

Lan Wangji's fingers meander, tapping the nose of the young rabbit that grazes, ushering it gently away from both their sides. It scuttles, forlorn and begrudging and trickling by, the last of its hop beating Wangji's thigh and Wei Ying's cheek. 'Miss me, why won't you?'

And Wei Ying says, tired. Not too fatigued, notably, to have raised the woman from her death's woes. But then, brute ambition superseded that exhaustion. Wei Ying will forgive himself any fault that starts with testing his own strength. )

Shall I steal you from yourself? ( Breezy, uncontrolled. Unwanted. Come back to Gusu, when Wei Ying would sooner take a torch to the grounds. They can pretend to live in skins beyond their own. ) Be my husband, a farmer of blistered hands. Raise my turnips. Raise my children. Nameless, powerless, indifferent. Of short, thin shadow on this world.

Edited 2023-02-16 22:18 (UTC)

( part of him wishes to say, fine. part of him, so tired and bruised, of being called on to perform for what he can, whatever that is in the moment, and with others to whom he is ever not quite enough. lan zhan as part of that, through lack of fault and for acute faults of his own. wei wuxian, for never being content in and of himself. content with himself.

he'd learned a bit of that, traveling alone. little apple tolerated his irritating necessity, but there'd been nothing else but himself on the road those years ago. now here, the way he's made of himself, and here, rabbits and a husband and a son who is and isn't his, but that he cares for, that he wants the better world for, regardless.

he reflects, quietly, on what he could expect out of his husband. and it's this, he knows: the reminder that his path is his path, wherever it turns, and that lan zhan had no answers. that lan zhan's lack of answers had been a failing of bridges between them, just as wei wuxian's lack of reaching out to ask for help had hastened his fall. as with his brother. as with his attempt to resolve so much on his own, when no one person can.

no matter how talented. no matter how quiet they held themselves after, to coax the world into understanding their gentleness held in a bloodied fist. )

You'd hate that man as much as I'd hate to only be him.

( only, he sayss, because he will do those things in various ways, he without a clan, he without a core, he without the attention span to recall one death lord's name from another. thin as his frame leaves him, bruised as his chasing sleep leaves under his eyes, this world as indifferent to him as it is to any one of them.

he shifts, buries himself in lan zhan's lap with the rabbits and the space meant for children and people who are not him. even with his shijie, he never claimed this much, an expanse of robes pool with fur and heat and knees in his chest, the murmured mumbling of whatever he isn't quite saying and makes a meaningless hum of sentiment.

you'd hate that man, because that man would cease to be wei wuxian. )

You hate enough of what I am like this, ah? Death this, death that, we deal it in different ways now. Death is so far from quiet. It's so loud, loud like grief, loud like a rockfall. Children the loudest of all.

( Sweet thing, gossamer and fraying thread. A man like the crackling wisps of a dying fire, when the flame burns red and waning. He seeks in the cradle of Lan Wangji's hips and thighs his sanctuary, as if he does not know, as if the copious, mischievous litany of his bones can house and shield him.

His hand drifts to tumble in the choked space between Wei Ying's nape and the crown of his head, thumb dipping in the crevice, dragging lines of white heat pressure. Up, down. The bare temple after, its brother too hidden below.

He inclines down, one arm yet up, then covering Wei Ying with the sails of his sleeve, as if he were young Yuan, Sizhui, thinking the world can disappear when it goes unseen. As if Lan Wangji can entomb him. )

Whom do you hide from? ( Withered, weak. Understanding. This is hate as only Wei Ying may ever know it, a killing of kindness. ) The death of her?

( He holds Wei Ying so close now, like a heartbeat, like a tumour. Drags a rabbit — for once, unwilling to pour down over Wei Ying's head like waters. )

She must die. You know it so.

( The people of Alem will not bear the dregs of death past their walls, not when tragedy yet hunts them. What Wei Ying has born, one of them must slay again, and it will be a quick thing, saddened. Her children need not see again. Perhaps, and Wei Ying's tongue will speak like lead, She has fled where you cannot follow. )

( he breathes under that touch, under the heat of a thumb stroking over skin and muscle and thin membranes of pretense that bone be not exposed to air, that he lives, and prospers, and he does in so many ways. he's not well rested, no, but few of them are, and the weight doesn't all slough off him now as it had before, the first year here a flirtation with ongoing disaster. he's sturdier now, and his eyes close under the sweeping, ticklish sweep of lan zhan's sleeve. breathes in the scent of him, and it's there, less by sleeve and more by chosen burrowing in his lap, with the scent of rabbit, of damp, of metal, of illness that clings to wei wuxian himself.

so much death. he's not a man meant for healing, not the way he's been forced to help, by the necessity of hands to be ordered here or there, for anatomy to be restructured, of each weight laid down before a soul that prefers its investigations and its obsessions come more natural.

he's no natural, not at this. it shows in the shudder of laughter at the rabbit's struggle, his hunching shoulders and tightened hold of his hands on his husband, who states, who simplifies, who... )

We all must, Lan Zhan.

( not now. not soon. it's a reminder, mortality the fright that haunts them both, in their own heavy, heartsick ways. )

Just... let them have the strength of her, until they can evacuate.

( until reality, cruel and cold and consuming and horrible, will catch up, as it must. let him toil and trouble and protect and shield, for the days, the weeks, until her loss must become what it will be, in this world cursed by the deathless lords.

if only this were a different world. if only this were a land freed of ellethia's curdled death spilling past its dark mirrors, crossing boundaries, slick curses and crumbling truths. ah, but he should check in on their living relic of that land: poor curmudgeonly zenobius, trapped as surely as they are in master scorpion's sap-sticky paths. )

Let us ask of her the choice of when she dies, and not the choosing for her.

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