( It burns in wax drips and simmered red flame, when the wet seal of Wei Ying's mouth encroaches and encircles the cold spread of his sigil, and the blue of his ribbon's silk is a fractured shield thinning to a sheen. He tips into the gesture, obedient and fragile, child moth lulled by ancestral hearth flame, until their foreheads knock together and Wei Ying cataracts into a charcoal sketch of himself, sand pale shrivelled and white in the negative space of his blurred shape. We sit, Lan Wangji cannot speak it, too close.
What do other people do, when they are whole, and the house of their bodies wants no more patches, and their hearts pulse wild and rapid like bundled roots, and time brings expansion and not erosion? Smear of ink is light bruised on Wei Ying's cheek, and Wangji wants water-grazed fingertips, wants to cleanse the scars-stains of Wei Ying. Bird, where would you fly, so free?
He drifts longer than he should, released from the confines of self-sufficiency by the knowledge that Wei Ying is honey-poison, migrated in his bloodstream, and now that the Yiling Patriarch has laid stake, no other sickness or wrong may claim Wangji. That to breathe is a simple, lung scavenging thing, and the birds that beat white roiling wings above wait to feast on his bones at the largesse of Brother Death, who pillars him.
Shuttered, Lan Wangji's eyes pulse and spasm. Awareness kindles back in the space between eclipses, a slow, liminal teasing — as if Lan Wangji is in courtship with himself and must not disappoint by conceding his hand early. He peels himself away, fractured, swaying back to lend Wei Ying a respectful berth, before wetting his fingers in the pool of Wei Ying's dark hair, up the back of it, up the nape, up where Wei Ying's strands tighten and cinch. Red rust and absent blood, Wei Ying's ribbon unravels like serpent's skins.
Lan Wangji presents it to Wei Ying. His own wrist, limp and soft, after. )
Are we the men our mothers would wish us to be?
( He knows, Wei Ying knows. Zewu-Jun spoke the words. Shall they omit this once more? And Wangji tires of it, of this, of sunlight low and lazy. Of death so comfortable in its empire, it need not even rush to claim them. They live suspended here, never controlling the pace or moment. How he has tired of wait. )
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What do other people do, when they are whole, and the house of their bodies wants no more patches, and their hearts pulse wild and rapid like bundled roots, and time brings expansion and not erosion? Smear of ink is light bruised on Wei Ying's cheek, and Wangji wants water-grazed fingertips, wants to cleanse the scars-stains of Wei Ying. Bird, where would you fly, so free?
He drifts longer than he should, released from the confines of self-sufficiency by the knowledge that Wei Ying is honey-poison, migrated in his bloodstream, and now that the Yiling Patriarch has laid stake, no other sickness or wrong may claim Wangji. That to breathe is a simple, lung scavenging thing, and the birds that beat white roiling wings above wait to feast on his bones at the largesse of Brother Death, who pillars him.
Shuttered, Lan Wangji's eyes pulse and spasm. Awareness kindles back in the space between eclipses, a slow, liminal teasing — as if Lan Wangji is in courtship with himself and must not disappoint by conceding his hand early. He peels himself away, fractured, swaying back to lend Wei Ying a respectful berth, before wetting his fingers in the pool of Wei Ying's dark hair, up the back of it, up the nape, up where Wei Ying's strands tighten and cinch. Red rust and absent blood, Wei Ying's ribbon unravels like serpent's skins.
Lan Wangji presents it to Wei Ying. His own wrist, limp and soft, after. )
Are we the men our mothers would wish us to be?
( He knows, Wei Ying knows. Zewu-Jun spoke the words. Shall they omit this once more? And Wangji tires of it, of this, of sunlight low and lazy. Of death so comfortable in its empire, it need not even rush to claim them. They live suspended here, never controlling the pace or moment. How he has tired of wait. )