( There is a moment, animal and sibilant and sad, when he recedes within himself, and the white of Wei Ying's hand is the visceral, cloying, gutting white of Lan Wangji's fear, is the slip of erosion that dulls the edge of his wit's blade. He cowers, in a fool's game, instinct giving way to tremble, like fluttered candle light. Sunlight drips and lathers the walls of his bones until they fill with golden lichen. He feels himself a house sundered, the dust of it, the dust of him, the tired, decimated gravel of beach quartz, shredded and teased between his fingertips.
Wei Ying nurses him with drink. Instinct, again: he takes it, clumsy, first meaning to hold it in his own grip, like a calf seeking its mother's teat, but losing it even as his lips smack and stitch glued, as he licks the lacquer of the first drops choked out, so perfectly beaded, their translucence like a silvered swell. He leans into Wei Ying, lets him hold the satchel and only licks and braves the rare gulp, the swallow — shudders to feel waters not of his body cascade down the jutting curve of his throat and drench his collar. He is as a cat and a stray, as Wei Ying. He drinks greedily.
He does not stop for longer than he'd intended. Then, rasped and artless, hand's arc writing Wei Ying's drink dismissed: )
At times, when you are here, I am the most alone.
( There are parts of you that should be parts of me, and to live as a soul divided between two cages of flesh is to suffer torture and ridicule. Salt the stirrings of his body's wounds, set him to dry. He aches in writings of longing, and there is no time, here, now, this is no hour to teach Wei Ying the brush strokes.
The dead. Too often, Wei Ying's presence debilitates him. Now, the waves stoke and crash in rapid violence, and he is only the hard harm of his gaze, beamed, only his furrowed brow, only the shoreline and its dead, vivisected below, for his pleasure. )
They were lured here, under pretences of false shelter. They perished to sirens. ( When he blinks his eyes shut, he is breathless, eyes tightly closed like shutters. ) This, then, is why they wish to reach the shore.
( For sanctuary pledged but withheld, for the terror of the creatures that succumbed them. )
no subject
Wei Ying nurses him with drink. Instinct, again: he takes it, clumsy, first meaning to hold it in his own grip, like a calf seeking its mother's teat, but losing it even as his lips smack and stitch glued, as he licks the lacquer of the first drops choked out, so perfectly beaded, their translucence like a silvered swell. He leans into Wei Ying, lets him hold the satchel and only licks and braves the rare gulp, the swallow — shudders to feel waters not of his body cascade down the jutting curve of his throat and drench his collar. He is as a cat and a stray, as Wei Ying. He drinks greedily.
He does not stop for longer than he'd intended. Then, rasped and artless, hand's arc writing Wei Ying's drink dismissed: )
At times, when you are here, I am the most alone.
( There are parts of you that should be parts of me, and to live as a soul divided between two cages of flesh is to suffer torture and ridicule. Salt the stirrings of his body's wounds, set him to dry. He aches in writings of longing, and there is no time, here, now, this is no hour to teach Wei Ying the brush strokes.
The dead. Too often, Wei Ying's presence debilitates him. Now, the waves stoke and crash in rapid violence, and he is only the hard harm of his gaze, beamed, only his furrowed brow, only the shoreline and its dead, vivisected below, for his pleasure. )
They were lured here, under pretences of false shelter. They perished to sirens. ( When he blinks his eyes shut, he is breathless, eyes tightly closed like shutters. ) This, then, is why they wish to reach the shore.
( For sanctuary pledged but withheld, for the terror of the creatures that succumbed them. )