[ Screamed stilted between layers of glass, and storms stutter before the battered bird of your breath breaks wings against your sternum — and you think, the world has settled and shrieked, in parts of gelid wonder, and still you are whole, feature of fractures and crackling, where your hand's wet red. And when was it, the moment between stink of learning lamp's oil like burnt viscera, and the great grind of Nightless City gravel churned between your whale's teeth, sharpened, when you knew: there sleeps in you starvation to eat the moon's swell in her birthing nights, there wakes in you anger to slaughter tempest.
And you breathed. Became you-I-him-that and distant, 'Hanguang-Jun' and 'this moment' and the animal fractions of you that cannot betray the whole. In sundering, sheltered.
And you pay Wei Ying in the loiter of every inhalation. You do not ask, if Wei Ying comes stranded with twilight and rain, or fresh with the petrichor of dawns after. Barely slip and step and tease yourself into formulas of courtesy: of quieting your wards before the smear of his shadow should strike and ignite them. Of opening your window to him, like the slack mouth of invitation. Of considering your hand on his, then, pivoted, your hand on his offerings, your hand on his possessions, your hand on the lingered warmth of his touch, and beneath the pebbled cicatrices of a fruit, citrus-like, and another, soft.
You do not look up, away, past the measure of his shoulder. If marble bit harder, you'd take the knee. To make waste of obeisance now, before the Patriarch's teeth might fit your jugular, is to dishonour his claim of spoils won. Who are you, but fear of him, bone-ached, marrow-deep?
( 'Lan Zhan.' His gaze wanders. 'Resurrection.' He remembers enough to retrieve each fruit of its confinement, send it tumbled on the table, stab short their momentum. To seek out the dark of Wei Ying's dress, if not his cheek's pallor. ) ]
( He watches the fruit, rolled and stopped, bright or dark and stopped, all, where they are on the decorated, ornate table, like a pittance of gem-destined frosting for a surface that knows only to carry the effervescent whims of the ones who'd fill it with fresh flowers, with delicate blown glass, with wine and witchery of the domestic arts.
All these rooms are echoes of that wealth, of something old and yearning and yawning beneath their feet. His mind flits to this and that, and he swallows, staring after those fruits which feel of a sudden as useless as trying to learn any other way of apologising that isn't bleeding in private while smiling like nothing's ever been lost. )
Oh, ah... that's fine, that's fine. I've—an interview I may as well take them to, in that case, some are bound to try and spoil overnight.
( That hope, nonetheless, that appetite is truly absent, that it will return. he reaches for them, biting into his lower lip when his face is turned away enough he knows he can be unseen. Heavens, but he needs to ready himself for that interview, heavens but he needs to ready himself to speak with his brother, heavens being disinclined to listen, and the words of should speak heavy as boulders on his tongue. Shove them uphill, step by step, bearing the sinking weight of them to say: )
I... I'm sorry, for making it sound like I wouldn't give you a choice.
( Need he say what it is, when he's haunted by his uncle's blood tears, when he sees nothing of the fruit in hand so much as what it isn't, things meant to be undone, rich and juicy, consumed and then tossed aside. )
I should be back later, ( when is later, what counts? before or after Lan Zhan sleeps? ) before you're... abed.
[ He is a child, still. It is known, it is certain, the corners of Zewu-Jun's smile bloomed for this truth. He hears, I've an interview I may as well take them too, sees the bright light glint of study in Wei Ying's eye, predatory — and he reaches with a hand made wall, to draw the lines of territory, his threshold, to pull until the fruit gain their old momentum and waddle back to the edge, within Lan Wangji's reach.
Unwanted now, but a gift given. Lan Wangji's own. To draw a man's appetites, you need only say what he declines, another desires. And then, it stokes like summer swelter, like cloying warmth, like sun. Stings and blisters at Wei Ying's largesse, his peace offering so freely redirected.
Apologies stain Wei Ying's mouth red, ripen it. Lan Wangji's gaze follows them, feline, and wonders where the blood's set to spill on them, where Wei Ying's fang will come down and drip. ]
Whom will you see?
[ Blade sharp, tongue cutting. The air greyed and electric in that state of sickly anticipation, of building, layered wait. He smells a city waking, for all the hour grows dark, and no man of honour would yet visit, but — Wei Ying is a wet knot drawn tangled, of his own devices. Ethics and etiquette bend their knee to him.
And Lan Wangji barely straightens on the limbs he names his own, until skies crackle again, rain adjourns. He wets his lips. ]
...apologies. Wei Ying has his freedom to do as he pleases.
( His lips twitch, blocked from claiming fruits that aren't precisely wanted, or welcome, but now incontrovertibly Lan Zhan's, and he reverses movement, ensures nothing else remains nestled, hidden, in his basket. Takes to bundling up the shawl, packing it in without fanfare, still faced away until the burn ceases, and he can turn back, half smiling, eyes glossy but hidden in the darkening hour. )
So is it you want to know, or you don't? One might ask where demands are unnecessary.
( He slips the basket back on his arm, waiting. Clouds stretch thin high overhead, hidden from most angles, but visible through the slant of the window. Sun yearns to settle behind the landscape surrounding, but for now it waits, hangs low and brilliant in crimson and coral and every aching colour of orange and yellow that binds itself to a warmth missing, at times, from the moments that settle into their silences. )
He thinks he can yet name the moment, crepuscular like the pinked, bruising light that absconds Wei Ying's shape gently, erodes his edges. He looks, from a distance, as if sundown's born him, as if blink the once, miss the sketch of him, watch him smear to nothingness of blister and charcoal.
There is freedom in fixing this moment, the catch of his fingers serpentine, when Lan Wangji leans, but Wei Ying has receded, back a wall to him, and his bearings gathered, and the alien thing of their communal grief black, but nothing's passed here, no man's died. Silence wails, and rains batters hard ground, and they grieve the absence of slick sliding skin against skin. He pulls his hand back first, knots it carefully at this spine, where he can anchor himself.
And he asks, gravelly: ]
How do we mend from this?
[ The hour, come, gone. The sibilation of wonder, elided truths, the theft of choice, the hypocrisy of meandering between that which one heart wants in selfish notion and another accepts. They are paper and parchment and rags, and they must sew back, fresh stitch on sixteen years of stitches. ]
( He is stillness, a shadow against the light. Lan Zhan asks, and it's something... stark, to hear it said. To know he has no easy singular solution, that laughing this off helps nothing, that easing the feeling means lying to both of them, as one.
Wei Wuxian closes his eyes. Opens them, to regard the windowsill, trace the interlocking of stones, where seams fit better or fit less well, smoothed over by grout that slowly comes apart with weathering and age. He reaches for it, tracing his finger along one widened path, that narrows, and his finger runs over pure stone, rough and chill and reminding him of what, he wonders. What is it he recalls, or doesn't want to? )
I don't know, Lan Zhan. I'm better at telling people to let go of me than figuring out how to help them want to hold on.
( Cutting losses for them had always seemed easier, seemed less of a demand on them. It's not what he wants here; it's not even his offering, on barren altar that oversees the courtyard. Careful to be caught, standing here, even in this light. He takes a step backward, further into the softened light and shadows of Lan Zhan's room, half turning his way. Not smiling, and not frowning. Torn. )
I can't teach you trust. I can't grant you faith. I promise I still stand at your side. I promise your fights are mine. And I promise, I will not resurrect you against your wishes.
( Gaze catching, dark. Glossy again, and something in his voice cracks, like fissures through the stones behind him, threaded with ache instead of white marble. )
You must promise me you will not seek me resurrected again, against my wishes.
[ In light of day, this would be blasphemy. But they tread twilight, danced in dapples of last light that cross and cut Wei Ying's face, carve out the sharp blade edges of his cheek, paint him a presence golden. Now, Lan Wangji steps, stutters, reaches for him in truth, catches the corners of his elbow, raises the grip to Wei Ying's upper arm, shakes. ]
Did I enforce it, before? [ Remember: Mo Xuanyu, alone, deserted, driven to his own cliff's edge, never recalled. Has Lan Wangji but spoken the name? He thinks it grows in him, gargantuan and aborted, and if his mouth should round it, he will thank, and what will Wei Ying speak then? ] If I wished it —
[ If he weathered the soles of his boots to dust motes and latticework, if he gave search and never found, if he would have, he would have, but didn't, then his fingers should ribbon and knot now, and there will be marks for it, a supplication of bruises, but listen — ]
Damn you. [ Beneath the abyssal hollows of Wangji's breath, in his bloodstream, damn him there. Poison. ] What matters what was wished?
[ The curse of him, watching and waiting, the perennial observer of Wei Ying on rooftops, Wei Ying on stairs, Wei Ying blooded, Wei Ying torn. And he moved — decided, no better than sixteen years too late for a cold and emptied grave, tectonic in undulation.
He did nothing, unto no one, until Wei Ying himself broke with death, and all heads aligned for Bichen's cut, and if this should be his fault, his fate, if every living moment should be drift of wave never cresting, always spumed, if he meandered from point of one wander to the next, searching, scouting, his hands filthy with dirt and gravel, if he knew nothing but the negative spaces carved by the firefly light of Wei Ying's smiled presence, illusory — if sixteen years were dream, and now he woke, what difference, then? ]
( He doesn't move, stands still and unflinching, features touched by the shadows of the light at his back, and the quieter light within Lan Zhan's quarters. If the ones under his eyes are relearning their depths, it's between his studies and his blessings, something horrifically amusing in the fact he, cursed even by a fish here, and cursed across an entire six realms, could now be sought after for blessings of something so opposed to what he'd once been.
Life, balanced against a man reborn in death, twice. )
I don't mistake the hands that guided events back home, Lan Zhan. I know they weren't yours. I don't lament that fact.
( He doesn't think he'd have been able to really forgive Lan Zhan that, if Lan Zhan had been the fingers plucking an unstable man's strings, if he'd been of the mind to let a distressed, confused, saddened young man driven to the brink to make the kind of choice that Mo Xuanyu made.
A curse, and a replacement. His place in the world for Wei Wuxian's, and let them all burn. And they had, despite Wei Wuxian's distaste for it all, for the burn of it like acid dripped onto his upturned face, eating into what face he had left to face the world when he woke and dawned a mask and threw a tantrum, hoping that'd be enough.
He shifts then, lifts his arm burdened by emptied basket. Places his hand over Lan Zhan's arm and lets it rest there, looking to his face. Studying his expression, carving into his ribs to pull out the marrow enough to try and show, to see, to share: )
We can't be each other's saviours if all we do is save each other at the cost of everything the other man cares for. Unless you truly wish to learn what I did, at a cost I couldn't have imagined.
( His fingers twitch, spasm, and he pulls his hand back, swallowing in reflex. Guilt that he wrestles with, anger that any of this impossible world has stolen of them this much, and the uncertainty of how to bridge this gap between them. Only the need that they do, somehow, when his words are never enough when it comes down to it, and he wishes he could shove them into forms that would carry the right weights. )
I don't want to have to learn to endure this grief, too.
( The one Lan Zhan bore, the one he wore like a chain around his delicate, implacable, stubborn neck. )
[ Burned and branded, where Wei Ying's touch lingers, nettles and pricks and rescinds itself dogged. And beneath it, the husked and alien and terrible thing, Lan Wangji's body, possessed by the ancestors — Gusu Lan. His sword hand, owned by the sect. South-bound and sweetened, his fingers coiling on empty air, music beholden to brother's will.
What is resurrection but theft from his grand masters? He thinks of uncle's blanched palms, brutalised by pull. Thinks of the physical, violent extrication of the debris, his skin, and the rabble, his flesh, and how they should all contort and commingle as graceless pavement blend beneath brother's feet.
I am not my own to give.
If all they do is save each other at expense —
...Wei Ying, what have you built, with your two hands? Only empires, toppled. The phoenix bird of Lanling, rising, only to fall, and fire yielding the final ablution. He mouths, Wei Ying, but twilight blooms and the red of the world drenches Wei Ying's back again, and it might have stood an arrow once, might have emptied him like fractured porcelain. Wangji is worn, suddenly, inexorably, unsurprisingly. Sixteen years, a rag twisted each way, spilling mildew. Wei Ying's hands would fray him.
When he calls, she listed — the old trick, Bichen hissed to reveal herself, a maiden shy: first the hilt, then the length, and Lan Wangji's palm greeting her in slide slickened with thin rivulets of blood his qi rushes to strangle in the flow's cradle. Then, Bichen releases, drips down on paltry floor, returns to her sheath. Before Wangji, his flesh slit seems a barren cavern, emptily sacrificial. He passes it over his lips. 歃血為盟. Blood's smear on a mouth of truth, forging alliance. Once, tribes might have sworn themselves so.
( And he knows, they both know, the ache of it: that, to offer the guarantee of blood, to invite the heavens' repercussions, is to distrust a man would honour his word, freely given. ) ]
Patriarch. [ Blood stripes his teeth, stains deep when his tongue cascades in a slow sweep, catches metal, shrivels. ] Name the vow, and I shall make it.
[ Permission won now, forgiveness brokered later. What difference does it make? Once, upon a rooftop, Wei Ying asked murder. Now, he begs life. And what has he learned? That, in all things, he will have his way. ]
( She moves too smoothly, Bichen, to be stopped as would be Wei Wuxian's will. Lan Zhan, ever the extension of his blade, she of him, the two inextricable from each other as each cultivator was meant to be from the sword that is of themselves, the spirit paired to their lifetime, and their service. Some becoming heirlooms, passed between generations. Others spoils of war, locked and silent in their grief, sixteen years and counting.
Lan Zhan bleeds, and Wei Wuxian finds air in short supply, the intake of it stoppered and shocked into his own sense of wrongness. One which blooms, when he's addressed by a title he never worse in personal honesty; the name he least earned, but for the mockery of all who used it.
Laozu.
Trembled fingers, and then the thin, dark smile of someone who doesn't know when apologies are enough. Reaching out, dragging a finger at the blood on Lan Zhan's lips. )
I never styled myself laozu, but that's the reality, isn't it? We don't choose our names.
( Not titles, not birth names, not courtesy names. He brings that finger to his mouth, tongue slipping out to taste red and metal in copper and cooling warmth, unpleasant. Blood that binds, and he does not want this. He swallows: he does not want this. Or does he, in some way the thrill of being whatever dark creature someone needs him to be, as balance, as conqueror, as the one so feared by the cultivation world they would murder farmers and call them disciples of a craft none of them wished to see in anything but their own power-hungry hands. )
Be true to yourself, frustrating as it makes you.
( Nothing else. No blood vows, no bindings like this, no. If Hanguang-jun wishes it, he can keep wishing.
The Yiling Patriarch smiles, and there's nothing of mirth in that expression, just the twist of his lips and the eyes that are too shadowed to be seen as anything other than a glint in shadow. His teeth catch like white pearls flashed from dark velvet before the eyes of one unused to light, and he turns for the window. To give in to his worst instincts is to swallow more than a finger-tip's worth of blood and binding, and it would be easy, part of him knows. Easy now, and hideous later, in the squirming way of these things, pupating into some disastrous, horrific butterfly. Death borne on gossamer wings. )
[ He is animal in this, the sterile, muted, manic quality of his gaze chasing Wei Ying's finger, singeing Wangji's mouth, penciling his own, taste of blood, his blood on another's man tongue — and he was born second only to Zewu-Jun, raised by his hand, bolstered by a sect.
He is no lamb to serve as sacrifice, to watch the wolf and know the spike bolts of his denture, and hear the hollow crackle of these fangs on his bone, suckling his marrow. He will not yield, for it is pretty to spill red and expire with noble splendor, in timid paintings.
Wangji's teeth grind first, his jaw aches in points of tension. ]
First shameless, then coy. Now coward.
[ Steps, as in sword dance: first the plunge, then the recoil, the fall back. Now, the wander. Wei Ying, fixing his balance between tugs of futile gravity, gripped by hands of guilt that thieve and hinder.
And in his grasp, Lan Wangji, the toy he will not concede or crush or consider, only coax, from roll to collapse, to empty rise, to wonder — and is Wangji to blame in this, his inertia? Uncle named the sin of it, hubris, latticed his back raw, but made of him a man repenting. Now, plaything, he simulates: catches one of the precious, voluptuously fleshed fruit, the false loquat that spins obediently on the dust-licked span of a sharp table.
His thumb dances the edge, teases the rich skin, sinks until it too bleeds, wet-golden. Lethargic, Lan Wangji's waxing gaze on Wei Ying's face stabs. ]
Decide the pledges you want.
[ And live and breathe and be as a fortress wall, stood by them. Decide: to want a resurrection. Name the indulgence, salute it for its toll. Decide: to surrender that right in recognition of another man's dignity, but speak not of grief and choice flatteries, after. Decide: to have a companion true to himself, or wish him shaped gem-like, cut to the perfection of a choice ring piece.
Decide: nothing, as is Wei Ying's way, whimsy on a rooftop, until one wrongful step, the trick of breeze, and the maws of the abyss unhinge open beneath him. Until the fall is but foregone conclusion. ]
You had an errand. [ Limpid, with the wave of a hand — the chief cultivator's flourish, sending an envoy with the parting rose light of a sunset alive in its last brushstrokes. ] I dismiss you.
( Decide: nothing, as a man who has decided and stood with conviction at every decision, to have his legs cut out from under him again and again. Who has guilts and griefs that are barely two handfuls of months dulled, and here, his time old means to address them, by shoving them off, by being fine, by being whatever it is people need him to be.
The juice of the date down Lan Zhan's hand, and he feels an intense, sudden thirst, and he laughs with it, a short, dark bark of laughter, that turns tired, a note too high. Cups his hands, turns, and makes his parting way out the window with the floating words left behind: )
As you wish.
( Wishing has made neither of them the people they are in flesh and bone. Wishing has carved from both of them their marrow, the cavities of their chests, and figuring out who it is they see, what it is they are, well. In that, he hopes Lan Zhan has the advantage.
Wei Wuxian disappears into the stretching bleedover of day into night, and he is but light steps and an empty basket and a stomach left levels below where he walks, ghost of the rooftops, to return and keep his appointment with a woman who is half of everything in politics he finds boring, and half of what he finds bearable, and for a quarter of the same reasons.
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no subject
And you breathed. Became you-I-him-that and distant, 'Hanguang-Jun' and 'this moment' and the animal fractions of you that cannot betray the whole. In sundering, sheltered.
And you pay Wei Ying in the loiter of every inhalation. You do not ask, if Wei Ying comes stranded with twilight and rain, or fresh with the petrichor of dawns after. Barely slip and step and tease yourself into formulas of courtesy: of quieting your wards before the smear of his shadow should strike and ignite them. Of opening your window to him, like the slack mouth of invitation. Of considering your hand on his, then, pivoted, your hand on his offerings, your hand on his possessions, your hand on the lingered warmth of his touch, and beneath the pebbled cicatrices of a fruit, citrus-like, and another, soft.
You do not look up, away, past the measure of his shoulder. If marble bit harder, you'd take the knee. To make waste of obeisance now, before the Patriarch's teeth might fit your jugular, is to dishonour his claim of spoils won. Who are you, but fear of him, bone-ached, marrow-deep?
( 'Lan Zhan.' His gaze wanders. 'Resurrection.' He remembers enough to retrieve each fruit of its confinement, send it tumbled on the table, stab short their momentum. To seek out the dark of Wei Ying's dress, if not his cheek's pallor. ) ]
Apologies. Appetite flees me. [ No. Thinner: ] Fault is mine.
[ Take no offence in this, the decline. ]
no subject
All these rooms are echoes of that wealth, of something old and yearning and yawning beneath their feet. His mind flits to this and that, and he swallows, staring after those fruits which feel of a sudden as useless as trying to learn any other way of apologising that isn't bleeding in private while smiling like nothing's ever been lost. )
Oh, ah... that's fine, that's fine. I've—an interview I may as well take them to, in that case, some are bound to try and spoil overnight.
( That hope, nonetheless, that appetite is truly absent, that it will return. he reaches for them, biting into his lower lip when his face is turned away enough he knows he can be unseen. Heavens, but he needs to ready himself for that interview, heavens but he needs to ready himself to speak with his brother, heavens being disinclined to listen, and the words of should speak heavy as boulders on his tongue. Shove them uphill, step by step, bearing the sinking weight of them to say: )
I... I'm sorry, for making it sound like I wouldn't give you a choice.
( Need he say what it is, when he's haunted by his uncle's blood tears, when he sees nothing of the fruit in hand so much as what it isn't, things meant to be undone, rich and juicy, consumed and then tossed aside. )
I should be back later, ( when is later, what counts? before or after Lan Zhan sleeps? ) before you're... abed.
no subject
Unwanted now, but a gift given. Lan Wangji's own. To draw a man's appetites, you need only say what he declines, another desires. And then, it stokes like summer swelter, like cloying warmth, like sun. Stings and blisters at Wei Ying's largesse, his peace offering so freely redirected.
Apologies stain Wei Ying's mouth red, ripen it. Lan Wangji's gaze follows them, feline, and wonders where the blood's set to spill on them, where Wei Ying's fang will come down and drip. ]
Whom will you see?
[ Blade sharp, tongue cutting. The air greyed and electric in that state of sickly anticipation, of building, layered wait. He smells a city waking, for all the hour grows dark, and no man of honour would yet visit, but — Wei Ying is a wet knot drawn tangled, of his own devices. Ethics and etiquette bend their knee to him.
And Lan Wangji barely straightens on the limbs he names his own, until skies crackle again, rain adjourns. He wets his lips. ]
...apologies. Wei Ying has his freedom to do as he pleases.
no subject
So is it you want to know, or you don't? One might ask where demands are unnecessary.
( He slips the basket back on his arm, waiting. Clouds stretch thin high overhead, hidden from most angles, but visible through the slant of the window. Sun yearns to settle behind the landscape surrounding, but for now it waits, hangs low and brilliant in crimson and coral and every aching colour of orange and yellow that binds itself to a warmth missing, at times, from the moments that settle into their silences. )
no subject
He thinks he can yet name the moment, crepuscular like the pinked, bruising light that absconds Wei Ying's shape gently, erodes his edges. He looks, from a distance, as if sundown's born him, as if blink the once, miss the sketch of him, watch him smear to nothingness of blister and charcoal.
There is freedom in fixing this moment, the catch of his fingers serpentine, when Lan Wangji leans, but Wei Ying has receded, back a wall to him, and his bearings gathered, and the alien thing of their communal grief black, but nothing's passed here, no man's died. Silence wails, and rains batters hard ground, and they grieve the absence of slick sliding skin against skin. He pulls his hand back first, knots it carefully at this spine, where he can anchor himself.
And he asks, gravelly: ]
How do we mend from this?
[ The hour, come, gone. The sibilation of wonder, elided truths, the theft of choice, the hypocrisy of meandering between that which one heart wants in selfish notion and another accepts. They are paper and parchment and rags, and they must sew back, fresh stitch on sixteen years of stitches. ]
no subject
Wei Wuxian closes his eyes. Opens them, to regard the windowsill, trace the interlocking of stones, where seams fit better or fit less well, smoothed over by grout that slowly comes apart with weathering and age. He reaches for it, tracing his finger along one widened path, that narrows, and his finger runs over pure stone, rough and chill and reminding him of what, he wonders. What is it he recalls, or doesn't want to? )
I don't know, Lan Zhan. I'm better at telling people to let go of me than figuring out how to help them want to hold on.
( Cutting losses for them had always seemed easier, seemed less of a demand on them. It's not what he wants here; it's not even his offering, on barren altar that oversees the courtyard. Careful to be caught, standing here, even in this light. He takes a step backward, further into the softened light and shadows of Lan Zhan's room, half turning his way. Not smiling, and not frowning. Torn. )
I can't teach you trust. I can't grant you faith. I promise I still stand at your side. I promise your fights are mine. And I promise, I will not resurrect you against your wishes.
( Gaze catching, dark. Glossy again, and something in his voice cracks, like fissures through the stones behind him, threaded with ache instead of white marble. )
You must promise me you will not seek me resurrected again, against my wishes.
no subject
Did I enforce it, before? [ Remember: Mo Xuanyu, alone, deserted, driven to his own cliff's edge, never recalled. Has Lan Wangji but spoken the name? He thinks it grows in him, gargantuan and aborted, and if his mouth should round it, he will thank, and what will Wei Ying speak then? ] If I wished it —
[ If he weathered the soles of his boots to dust motes and latticework, if he gave search and never found, if he would have, he would have, but didn't, then his fingers should ribbon and knot now, and there will be marks for it, a supplication of bruises, but listen — ]
Damn you. [ Beneath the abyssal hollows of Wangji's breath, in his bloodstream, damn him there. Poison. ] What matters what was wished?
[ The curse of him, watching and waiting, the perennial observer of Wei Ying on rooftops, Wei Ying on stairs, Wei Ying blooded, Wei Ying torn. And he moved — decided, no better than sixteen years too late for a cold and emptied grave, tectonic in undulation.
He did nothing, unto no one, until Wei Ying himself broke with death, and all heads aligned for Bichen's cut, and if this should be his fault, his fate, if every living moment should be drift of wave never cresting, always spumed, if he meandered from point of one wander to the next, searching, scouting, his hands filthy with dirt and gravel, if he knew nothing but the negative spaces carved by the firefly light of Wei Ying's smiled presence, illusory — if sixteen years were dream, and now he woke, what difference, then? ]
Nothing was done.
no subject
( He doesn't move, stands still and unflinching, features touched by the shadows of the light at his back, and the quieter light within Lan Zhan's quarters. If the ones under his eyes are relearning their depths, it's between his studies and his blessings, something horrifically amusing in the fact he, cursed even by a fish here, and cursed across an entire six realms, could now be sought after for blessings of something so opposed to what he'd once been.
Life, balanced against a man reborn in death, twice. )
I don't mistake the hands that guided events back home, Lan Zhan. I know they weren't yours. I don't lament that fact.
( He doesn't think he'd have been able to really forgive Lan Zhan that, if Lan Zhan had been the fingers plucking an unstable man's strings, if he'd been of the mind to let a distressed, confused, saddened young man driven to the brink to make the kind of choice that Mo Xuanyu made.
A curse, and a replacement. His place in the world for Wei Wuxian's, and let them all burn. And they had, despite Wei Wuxian's distaste for it all, for the burn of it like acid dripped onto his upturned face, eating into what face he had left to face the world when he woke and dawned a mask and threw a tantrum, hoping that'd be enough.
He shifts then, lifts his arm burdened by emptied basket. Places his hand over Lan Zhan's arm and lets it rest there, looking to his face. Studying his expression, carving into his ribs to pull out the marrow enough to try and show, to see, to share: )
We can't be each other's saviours if all we do is save each other at the cost of everything the other man cares for. Unless you truly wish to learn what I did, at a cost I couldn't have imagined.
( His fingers twitch, spasm, and he pulls his hand back, swallowing in reflex. Guilt that he wrestles with, anger that any of this impossible world has stolen of them this much, and the uncertainty of how to bridge this gap between them. Only the need that they do, somehow, when his words are never enough when it comes down to it, and he wishes he could shove them into forms that would carry the right weights. )
I don't want to have to learn to endure this grief, too.
( The one Lan Zhan bore, the one he wore like a chain around his delicate, implacable, stubborn neck. )
Not here. Not this far from everything we know.
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What is resurrection but theft from his grand masters? He thinks of uncle's blanched palms, brutalised by pull. Thinks of the physical, violent extrication of the debris, his skin, and the rabble, his flesh, and how they should all contort and commingle as graceless pavement blend beneath brother's feet.
I am not my own to give.
If all they do is save each other at expense —
...Wei Ying, what have you built, with your two hands? Only empires, toppled. The phoenix bird of Lanling, rising, only to fall, and fire yielding the final ablution. He mouths, Wei Ying, but twilight blooms and the red of the world drenches Wei Ying's back again, and it might have stood an arrow once, might have emptied him like fractured porcelain. Wangji is worn, suddenly, inexorably, unsurprisingly. Sixteen years, a rag twisted each way, spilling mildew. Wei Ying's hands would fray him.
When he calls, she listed — the old trick, Bichen hissed to reveal herself, a maiden shy: first the hilt, then the length, and Lan Wangji's palm greeting her in slide slickened with thin rivulets of blood his qi rushes to strangle in the flow's cradle. Then, Bichen releases, drips down on paltry floor, returns to her sheath. Before Wangji, his flesh slit seems a barren cavern, emptily sacrificial. He passes it over his lips. 歃血為盟. Blood's smear on a mouth of truth, forging alliance. Once, tribes might have sworn themselves so.
( And he knows, they both know, the ache of it: that, to offer the guarantee of blood, to invite the heavens' repercussions, is to distrust a man would honour his word, freely given. ) ]
Patriarch. [ Blood stripes his teeth, stains deep when his tongue cascades in a slow sweep, catches metal, shrivels. ] Name the vow, and I shall make it.
[ Permission won now, forgiveness brokered later. What difference does it make? Once, upon a rooftop, Wei Ying asked murder. Now, he begs life. And what has he learned? That, in all things, he will have his way. ]
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Lan Zhan bleeds, and Wei Wuxian finds air in short supply, the intake of it stoppered and shocked into his own sense of wrongness. One which blooms, when he's addressed by a title he never worse in personal honesty; the name he least earned, but for the mockery of all who used it.
Laozu.
Trembled fingers, and then the thin, dark smile of someone who doesn't know when apologies are enough. Reaching out, dragging a finger at the blood on Lan Zhan's lips. )
I never styled myself laozu, but that's the reality, isn't it? We don't choose our names.
( Not titles, not birth names, not courtesy names. He brings that finger to his mouth, tongue slipping out to taste red and metal in copper and cooling warmth, unpleasant. Blood that binds, and he does not want this. He swallows: he does not want this. Or does he, in some way the thrill of being whatever dark creature someone needs him to be, as balance, as conqueror, as the one so feared by the cultivation world they would murder farmers and call them disciples of a craft none of them wished to see in anything but their own power-hungry hands. )
Be true to yourself, frustrating as it makes you.
( Nothing else. No blood vows, no bindings like this, no. If Hanguang-jun wishes it, he can keep wishing.
The Yiling Patriarch smiles, and there's nothing of mirth in that expression, just the twist of his lips and the eyes that are too shadowed to be seen as anything other than a glint in shadow. His teeth catch like white pearls flashed from dark velvet before the eyes of one unused to light, and he turns for the window. To give in to his worst instincts is to swallow more than a finger-tip's worth of blood and binding, and it would be easy, part of him knows. Easy now, and hideous later, in the squirming way of these things, pupating into some disastrous, horrific butterfly. Death borne on gossamer wings. )
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He is no lamb to serve as sacrifice, to watch the wolf and know the spike bolts of his denture, and hear the hollow crackle of these fangs on his bone, suckling his marrow. He will not yield, for it is pretty to spill red and expire with noble splendor, in timid paintings.
Wangji's teeth grind first, his jaw aches in points of tension. ]
First shameless, then coy. Now coward.
[ Steps, as in sword dance: first the plunge, then the recoil, the fall back. Now, the wander. Wei Ying, fixing his balance between tugs of futile gravity, gripped by hands of guilt that thieve and hinder.
And in his grasp, Lan Wangji, the toy he will not concede or crush or consider, only coax, from roll to collapse, to empty rise, to wonder — and is Wangji to blame in this, his inertia? Uncle named the sin of it, hubris, latticed his back raw, but made of him a man repenting. Now, plaything, he simulates: catches one of the precious, voluptuously fleshed fruit, the false loquat that spins obediently on the dust-licked span of a sharp table.
His thumb dances the edge, teases the rich skin, sinks until it too bleeds, wet-golden. Lethargic, Lan Wangji's waxing gaze on Wei Ying's face stabs. ]
Decide the pledges you want.
[ And live and breathe and be as a fortress wall, stood by them. Decide: to want a resurrection. Name the indulgence, salute it for its toll. Decide: to surrender that right in recognition of another man's dignity, but speak not of grief and choice flatteries, after. Decide: to have a companion true to himself, or wish him shaped gem-like, cut to the perfection of a choice ring piece.
Decide: nothing, as is Wei Ying's way, whimsy on a rooftop, until one wrongful step, the trick of breeze, and the maws of the abyss unhinge open beneath him. Until the fall is but foregone conclusion. ]
You had an errand. [ Limpid, with the wave of a hand — the chief cultivator's flourish, sending an envoy with the parting rose light of a sunset alive in its last brushstrokes. ] I dismiss you.
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The juice of the date down Lan Zhan's hand, and he feels an intense, sudden thirst, and he laughs with it, a short, dark bark of laughter, that turns tired, a note too high. Cups his hands, turns, and makes his parting way out the window with the floating words left behind: )
As you wish.
( Wishing has made neither of them the people they are in flesh and bone. Wishing has carved from both of them their marrow, the cavities of their chests, and figuring out who it is they see, what it is they are, well. In that, he hopes Lan Zhan has the advantage.
Wei Wuxian disappears into the stretching bleedover of day into night, and he is but light steps and an empty basket and a stomach left levels below where he walks, ghost of the rooftops, to return and keep his appointment with a woman who is half of everything in politics he finds boring, and half of what he finds bearable, and for a quarter of the same reasons.
Shadows take him. Those, at least, he knows. )