In truth, he did not know his hands were gentle, did not know them coarse beyond the course of their lives and learnings, the callouses that kept them strong, that changed, that faded in time spent neither here nor there. A gasp without air couldn't stir him to the acute pain his fingers are aware of, splayed over warmth of skin not his own, and he, so rarely to have been this intimate with any. Fleeting moments, destined to pass.
Fleeting lives, destined to leave. The warmth of Lan Zhan's skin lingers when his hands are returned to their lap, when his fingers curl like gnarled roots into the fabric of his pooled robe, brushing thigh, brushing the space left between. Kneel, and there were memories enough of kneeling being little but the banal price of having been himself, too good and never good enough, and each act chosen to bring down that regard, because it was something, affirmative, and never quite sunk deep enough beneath his skin to bleed him dry.
Not the whippings, the beatings, the normal measures of a growing life lived and disobedience met. Earned or unearned, there was no enough. He took a long time learning the meaning of it, one way or another; still stumbles through it now, but better tempered, each blow striking hot or cold and forming.
Lan Zhan's words fall, the strike of hammer to anvil, ting.
"Ah," he says, and he smiles with the exhalation, tugs on the ribbon that binds them, lifts his hand to capture one of Lan Zhan's, fingers to find their home slotted between fingers. His hands, not as soft as they once were. Lan Zhan's time-worn and calloused in all the expected, understood ways. "The man I am now, and the man I once was, we both know they're two different people. You, too, Lan Zhan. Who you were when we were young, and who you are, tempered by time, are two different people. I've been learning this man," he says, eyes seeking Lan Zhan's, dark of one night peering into the abyss of another.
"I would have no other bride." A pause, and a lift of his lips, wry. "You'd look handsome in phoenix robes, ah?"
Guan sitting in lap, catching the light and sending it shattered along silver length, the dawn breaking over the mountains. To each, their own interpretation. To each, clarified beginnings, and a lifetime of navigating the roads through.
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Fleeting lives, destined to leave. The warmth of Lan Zhan's skin lingers when his hands are returned to their lap, when his fingers curl like gnarled roots into the fabric of his pooled robe, brushing thigh, brushing the space left between. Kneel, and there were memories enough of kneeling being little but the banal price of having been himself, too good and never good enough, and each act chosen to bring down that regard, because it was something, affirmative, and never quite sunk deep enough beneath his skin to bleed him dry.
Not the whippings, the beatings, the normal measures of a growing life lived and disobedience met. Earned or unearned, there was no enough. He took a long time learning the meaning of it, one way or another; still stumbles through it now, but better tempered, each blow striking hot or cold and forming.
Lan Zhan's words fall, the strike of hammer to anvil, ting.
"Ah," he says, and he smiles with the exhalation, tugs on the ribbon that binds them, lifts his hand to capture one of Lan Zhan's, fingers to find their home slotted between fingers. His hands, not as soft as they once were. Lan Zhan's time-worn and calloused in all the expected, understood ways. "The man I am now, and the man I once was, we both know they're two different people. You, too, Lan Zhan. Who you were when we were young, and who you are, tempered by time, are two different people. I've been learning this man," he says, eyes seeking Lan Zhan's, dark of one night peering into the abyss of another.
"I would have no other bride." A pause, and a lift of his lips, wry. "You'd look handsome in phoenix robes, ah?"
Guan sitting in lap, catching the light and sending it shattered along silver length, the dawn breaking over the mountains. To each, their own interpretation. To each, clarified beginnings, and a lifetime of navigating the roads through.