( To speak, to entreat, to offer thoughts and plans or their tempering. Nebulous, truly, but his concept is more and more one of the give and take they shared once upon a lifetime, when something like love might have been easier. The kind of time and place they'll never return to, but have learned from, and learned of.
Now, the dead wait, and ache with their edged release. )
It's worth asking, Lan Zhan. I can wear the forsaken suit and haunt the city for any remnants of that which might hold such a flame.
( Light to honour the dead, such as it is, an attempt to allow them freedom, to be sent on. To let go. )
( Wei Ying, Yiling Patriarch, reduced to dust and ash and the dappled marks of his step on barren ground, to the long drifting wander, like moth light under a waxing moon. There is indignity in this — the burdening of a man crafted and condemned to greatness, with purpose that spits on the flushed, thin cheek of his legacy.
What face would Wei Ying have shown, were he the first son of a sect and adorned in the filigrees of true stature? Born, if not to Jiang Fengmian and his lady unloved, than to a dynasty of red, in his veins red, that might join the river blues and yield for the sake of Lotus Pier, a purple most palatable? A welcome addition to the Sunshot campaign, command settling arrogant on his shoulders like the hungry dusting of first snow, and Wei Ying entitled to spearhead a vanguard. A bartered spouse of Gusu Lan, sooner than a gift Lan Wangji has stolen thrice in the night, frail-handed?
What might their lives have been, but for the accident of Wei Ying's parentage? Foolish, to think. They have as they have, as the heavens bless upon them. Their grounds and their waters and the choked interstices between them, where purpose dilates into their legend. )
Thank you. ( His fingers snag and hook and cinch, and the fractured line of Wei Ying's wrist is sharp bone beneath his palm, unbreaking. He raises himself. )
And I am sorry. Wangji has failed you. ( The guqin, the man. What difference? ) I serve you no better than silver thread and gossamer.
( Offering scant use, less protection. He cannot coax coin to their hands, cannot whisper the dead willing in the ways of Wei Ying and master Wrath, cannot even perform the petty parlour tricks of his heritage. Death drowns him. He becomes Wei Ying's shadow and breathes. )
( Feet regained, he regards Lan Zhan, something softened under his breastbone. Warm enough that his marrow under Lan Zhan's grasp feels liquid, his bones heated, and disparaging words over Lan Zhan's fumbling in a world that's not built to bow its head to him willingly, to recognise lineage, to pay heed to unwritten rules and the visible realities of wealth and skill and here? Here, Wei Wuxian remembers all he's learned from his own chosen falls from grace, from thin times and thinner pretenses, and this time not a choice, except in its survival.
Lan Zhan was never meant to learn of a life like this, and yet, yet. He is here, and he tries, and it's arrogance to think either of them are becoming better men, though he does feel it may be true. Not necessarily better fathers, not necessarily better cultivators, but better men.
Little by little, in rebuilding, in the deconstruction of what is true in their world in false absolutes, and what's aching and horrible and real here, likewise without absolutes.
Wei Wuxian doesn't think. He moves, barely rising to his toes to press lips against Lan Zhan's forehead, and his ribbon, the metal clouds, all at once. )
An embroidered pillow still promises a place to rest. That's a great deal more than I'm used to having, ( he says, settling down onto his feet, aware of the feat they must try in seeing spirits addressed, in allowing them acknowledgement, in providing them access to avenues for passing. )
Making mistakes is not the same as being incapable. Don't speak poorly of yourself. The only ones to disparage of are those who never adapt, never change, blame all that happens on others. You are not that man. You, Lan Zhan, are not afraid to try.
( And aware that there is opportunity for success and failure, in unequal amounts. )
( 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. )
( A shiver before the searing heat of touch, not for what it seeks out, winding upstream as carp swim, leaping the dragon's gate in search of transformation. No, nothing so grand, but the ache of fingers in his hair a call back to simpler times, or not simpler, no, he lies to himself in nostalgia and carefully curated memory. A call to times where certainty had lain in his breast, thrumming, that to two people, he mattered; to one person, he was worth caring for, remembered as a child, as a young man grown.
One lap, to lay his head on, the calm of the storms in his life allowing him a moment to breathe. Uncomfortable in hindsight, how little he understood her readings of him, how little he could thank her now for her love, for cementing to him that family is warmth as well as rigid expectation and duty and honours he tears the face from for want of righteousness not bedecked in the jewels of tyranny and convenience.
He is death, and he feels it, the cloying sweetness of decay as Lan Zhan's fingers succeed where his washings have not, and for one moment stretching long between this breath exhaling, this breath indrawn, he imagines leaning forward, imagines bracing and embracing, and then discards it, but for the silken ribbon coaxed free of his hair.
Presented, and a wrist that follows. Here a pulse beats, here meridians lie, here blood is blue against pale skin, deprived of air. Are we the men our mothers would wish us to be? His fingers weave the ribbon around themselves, and he lifts Lan Zhan's wrist, lowers his head. One hand ties, a vambrace of red against the white, blood against snow, passion against the fog of daily existence. He studies his work and the answer between them, saying, )
We are the men they did not yet know to imagine, ( and he inhales, ribbon tied, devouring itself and freed. ) I can only feel they'd wish for happiness, true living, and those who do more good than harm.
( In this, and here, the bow of husbands, the heavens witness, the forebearers silent, the present evershifting, remade moment to moment. In the acrid bile the world tears from their throats, the spirits caught and netted as decayed fish left to rot, and the reality that life is not static, that death isn't either, that what is claimed is not permanent by nature.
This is a choice, he feels, one made every day, footprints left in the detritus of the forests they knew in their youths, washed clean with season and storm. Soft, near to drowned by the winds and the surf that pounds below, the dead hidden from view, the lighthouse looming white and broken overhead.
Red, wound and binding, oxygen rich veins flooding two hearts, filling lungs. )
( He waves the wrist, tries the binding tight-loose, until the ribbon knots and nooses and chokes his bone like delicate striations on nascent marble. Wen Chao could not have wished deeper shackling upon him.
The first stroke of Wei Ying's hair lands flat and warm on the top of Wei Ying's head, clumsy for gravity and the lock of knuckles and finger bone, their clasp gaunt. Wangji does not — inspire ease naturally, does not reassure or bring comfort. It is a learned thing with rabbits who behold him, young oily dapplings of white and darks, sweet-nosed, humming. Lan Wangji raises one animal, then another, then the next, and gives them the reins of the land — his arms, the bridge of his shoulder, the sharp slope of his back. They cascade, graze and conquer.
And what came after? Lan Yuan, no greater than a garden creature, glued to Wangji's leg like grains of sticky rice. Possessed of the sterile sagacity and instinctive wisdom to climb Lan Wangji's hip, but not claw it. Lan Wangji offered short, aborted caresses on his nape and neck, the rare refitting of his robe collars. Play. Feverish kisses on Yuan's temple, once sunset rusts slipped him into night's sleep, and Uncle could not complain of Wangji spoiling the infant.
This is a different exercise, its subject long, lean, meaner. Thinned like candle wick, ever prepared for his own burning. Lan Wangji peels his fingers back and tries to stroke again, to capture Wei Ying's hair, to draw it back as if he intends a second binding of it, or a braid — only to release it down in cascade. )
You do not speak of them, as you do of Sizhui. ( As often, as hearted. ) Your parents. Tell me.
( There is greed in this, in counting the coin-wealth of Wei Ying's secrets, watching it gather in Wangji's cupped hands. )
( Wei Wuxian shivers, an unthought response to this revisitation of his hair, the cascade of it down around his shoulders, a waterfall that stills in its heavy warmth like a cowl worn, this nod to filial piety every one of them makes. Asked after his parents, and he wishes he had hands full of stories, that he had memories to spare, that he had anything tangible. Even the whisper of a memory he has from their younger years, the night Lan Zhan drank with him and the trouble that loomed more pressingly, large and indelible, that followed overshadows the confession, once.
He knows they're both orphaned of parents, held within the palms of different sects, to different reasons, respects, expectations. He's heard and understood his own place, too naturally gifted, too pernicious, too bright to hep but cast a shadow in comparison to those who excelled but not to the same degree. A crime of the heart, not of anything else. An accusation that meant the words he heard of his parents were in snippets of a mother's anger, her frustration, and a father's quiet, you look like them both, but especially her, years later agreed on by Lan Qiren, and it wasn't favourable.
His parents, and what he has in his head are the barkings of the dogs that chased him when they'd not returned, when the Night Hunt had sealed their fate and he'd not known the moment he went from beloved son to bereft orphan, and he never would. His second orphaning, he at least hadn't been alone. At least it had not been he who hurt most, and the machinations of it, the opening thrust of the war brewing for decades, had a way to be fought back against.
He swallows, tries for a smile, allows it to fade as he licks his lips. )
I wish I could. I wish I had their stories, Lan Zhan, more than the snippets the senior generation shared every so often, but even your uncle remembers more about my parents than I do. Or at least about my mother.
( Not happy memories, but frustrated ones out of Lan Qiren's own youth, and there's perhaps something to be said for his lineage and their tendency to drive second born sect heirs into distractions of whatever kinds. Perhaps. )
I don't remember what they look like. Sometimes I dream I remember the sound of their voices, but more often their laughter. They liked laughing, I think... and we traveled. I remember a donkey, and I think it must have been my father who led us both, with my mother at my side. But I don't know, not anymore.
( Not unusual, when a child loses parents before the age of five, when memory is less permanent for most, let alone someone who has learned compartmentalising as a matter of coping and persisting, of shutting out traumas, of striding forward, of making himself the accommodating one. The challenging, irritating, annoying, and yet outwardly unburdened one, enough to the point that it was the bone of contention as he swallowed and swallowed and swallowed the deaths he dealt, until one day, they swallowed him in turn.
Staring at Lan Zhan, red ribboned wrist, he swallows. Is swallowed in turn. )
Do you... of your mother, do you recall much of her now?
( He watches Wei Ying watch himself, a bird learning the bend and break of its own bones before the world-maddened rush of first flight and its claws teething at nest's edge. He feels — brittle in the way of fresh amputation, when instinct yet coaxes a missing limb to answer. The world is cinnabar and petty abysses, the blacks and reds of ledgers; Wei Ying is owed a finer grasp of family than he received in his youth, but only faces wan and divine may order his due retribution.
And Lan Wangji, fickle and the line of his shoulders trembled, the deep compulsion to reach a hand out in comfort, resisted to knot wet-like on his thighs, knuckles gristle and white-rawed. There are moments in a man's life when he is but a vessel for the torture of his heavy-weighted emotions, and Wei Ying's cup runs full.
What does Lan Wangji recall of his mother? A battered rasp, lip swollen full under the crown of his feral, feline teeth. He remembers her beautiful, kindly, exquisitely sophisticated, elegant, composed — every word a child encounters in early poems and transfers, generously, unto the tall, looming pillars of his private heroes. )
Eight gashes of crackled wood on her door. The winter creak of her porch. Gentians, lightly acerbic.
( The charcoal marks that sketch out a woman, and Lan Wangji's memory the guiding hand to carve her, something from the nothing of fragile, abortive recollection. Zewu-Jun would know more. Perhaps Uncle. And who are they but the stone-faced captors of Lan Wangji's infancy, the stewards of his awareness?
He withheld, when Wei Ying required himself. Intrudes once more now, spreading and sprawling his fingers through the cascade of silken dark, wrapping it loosely to belt his fingers. Beautiful. None of the other prominent advantages that elevate a match, but Wei Ying was beautiful before he massacred himself to be anything else. )
( Collections of environment, scents and sights and sounds, the powerful evocations of memory. He has his own, and it's the sound of dogs, the flash of teeth, the scent of blood and terror in his tiny lungs. It hurts, thinking A-Yuan lived through some form of this, and his heart constricts within his chest, then he breathes regardless.
Closes his eyes at the hand in his hair, the fingers entangling firmly with the length of his parent's gift to him, the devotion he shows as any person does from home, not stripping himself of the body his parents gave him, as none of them do. Filial piety in the wearing of form, the way they grow without contestation, and he sighs, a soft sound swallowed by the susurrations of the sea, down the hill, cloaked in fog.
This is not a touch to lean into, not the rake of nails and fingers, blunt, against scalp, not the cupping of a head, or cheek, or jaw. Lan Zhan is both here, immediate, and distant, the anchoring of a river creature in the water weeds, the strain of waters pulled through tangled roots, strangling. He doesn't feel strangled now, and that perhaps is part of the ease in his bones, why he laughs and he sounds close to carefree.
He's not, not in the waking sea of dead. Not carefree, but perhaps, in part, lightened. )
Do you think this one will like me any better?
( And they no, no, it will not, that no animal rises ready and easy to his touch, but that people, spirits do, that which can be charmed in word or song. He is not a man given to quiet and stillness and silence by nature: he coaxes children, where the rabbits, looking for calmer spirits, shy. Where the donkey, seeking its own way, butts head with one equally independent, and slightly liable to spoils of free feeding along the way. )
This is the truth of him, startled and stone, given to stubborn resistance: to persist, hands claws and sundering Wei Ying's hair again like waters, picking out strands as if they were his noose. How would Lan Wangji die of him, of Wei Ying?
Grit and gravel scrape his knees through granules of sand, shifting, and the world transforms, and he is still this — an anchor, still fixated on Wei Ying, still hollowed, still an accessory. The lace trim on Wei Ying's sleeves, his doubled collar. This is Lan Wangji, flickered beat adorning his soulmate's pulse. He wants to scent him — take, this is what means to own, the capacity to singularly and indifferently shatter.
Does not. He releases (again), withdraws (again), reconsiders (again). Fear is damp and lichen, the silvered edge of his smile, deceptive. )
You are a terrible man.
( Selfish, whimsical, breezy. Possessed of strange and eerie righteousness. Utterly, painfully, wickedly impulsive. Prone to brilliance, to laughter, to sacrifice. To cleaving Wangji's innards and glistening them with their fats over fire. To being, as ash is, dispersed in wind, one moment contained the next coagulated, the heartbeat after gone.
A mystifying, glorious creation. Yiling Patriarch, first disciple, Wei Ying. )
It will know. ( As Lan Wangji knows, a man complicit. One who leads into blindness by example. He thinks, if Wei Ying's hair flies free in the wind spell, it will yet tempt him. Starts, gently, to braid it and leave the ends loose. ) You have no more truths solely your own.
( He laughs, quiet at first, then deeper, richer, returning to a spontaneity he has almost forgotten. Kitten claws pressing into his heart, prickling and painful and sweet, as Lan Zhan attempts his braiding. He could move away, part of him saying he should, but no.
They are themselves, as flawed and terrible and great as that might be, and it might eventually be enough. Choosing what are, and what they do; choosing whom they're with and how and why.
One ribbon wrapped around a wrist, and the red should draw his eyes, but he knows it, has tasted it. Might not be moved to taste it better but were it painting Lan Zhan's lips, and he lets that thought go too, on the same wind that slips past them, thick with the scent of the sea and its natural decay, denying the dead beneath its surface. )
What about you, Lan Zhan? Any other hidden truths to share?
( A reach out, fingers hooked into the skirts of his robes, tugging once. Here. )
( There is a trick to this, as with weighing an unbalanced sword, with teasing it tip-blade-edge close: an art to the clasp of a wrist more bone than softened meat, to drawing Wei Ying near and dear and smear of his shadow dragged on hard land.
There is no kindness in him, for this. No distinction between where the feral appetite to claim begins and the diplomatic one to conquer without bloodshed ends. Greed is a continuum, possession a foregone semantic conclusion. No hunting thrills like that of man.
Slipped, his fingers dip until he clutches Wei Ying's hand in his own and only wrestles his thumb in, serpentine, to sketch out warm snags of ruined rhetoric on his palm, a fluttering candle of communication poorly traded. What you know, you know. He writes easily, terribly, conveniently, the rushed trill of his countless secrets in the aching code of Gusu Lan private correspondence intended only for the sect.
And reedy in the way of leaves thieving trickle under moonlight: )
( That he tries making sense of the tracings on his palm, the thick brush of the pad of Lan Zhan's thumb forming characters that lack definition, if not certainty, has his mind tugged and distracted while his eyes focus on Lan Zhan's features, his brow, the line of his nose and its dip toward shadow, the shape of his lips. His teeth, when bared.
This is not a matter of fairness, not even justice; this is not sixteen years stretched between them, two very different men standing on either end of it. This is a negotiation between people, whole and fractured and reknit on their own.
Will he? He doesn't need to. Whatever ribbons tied around wrists, Lan Zhan hadn't expected him to wait, to accept, to take in one selfishness in exchange for another, unknowing then known. To choose, daily, what it is they are for each other, what form of support that takes, what demands they make, what they refuse or accept. They, unlike the watery dead, are not bound to singular truths, to clawing ends. What they drown in is, so far, a choice.
His hand closes around that thumb, stilling it, lips curved enough to suggest a smile without dedicating to one. )
I'll wait. For now.
( But not forever, because in nothing can be promise something as impossible as that. Yet to not demand secrets from a man who takes pleasure in declaring Wei Wuxian no longer has any? Oh, pride would say, this is no level playing field, but wisdom notes it never was.
He will learn, or he will not. What matters more is what they learn together... more or less. )
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
( To speak, to entreat, to offer thoughts and plans or their tempering. Nebulous, truly, but his concept is more and more one of the give and take they shared once upon a lifetime, when something like love might have been easier. The kind of time and place they'll never return to, but have learned from, and learned of.
Now, the dead wait, and ache with their edged release. )
It's worth asking, Lan Zhan. I can wear the forsaken suit and haunt the city for any remnants of that which might hold such a flame.
( Light to honour the dead, such as it is, an attempt to allow them freedom, to be sent on. To let go. )
no subject
What face would Wei Ying have shown, were he the first son of a sect and adorned in the filigrees of true stature? Born, if not to Jiang Fengmian and his lady unloved, than to a dynasty of red, in his veins red, that might join the river blues and yield for the sake of Lotus Pier, a purple most palatable? A welcome addition to the Sunshot campaign, command settling arrogant on his shoulders like the hungry dusting of first snow, and Wei Ying entitled to spearhead a vanguard. A bartered spouse of Gusu Lan, sooner than a gift Lan Wangji has stolen thrice in the night, frail-handed?
What might their lives have been, but for the accident of Wei Ying's parentage? Foolish, to think. They have as they have, as the heavens bless upon them. Their grounds and their waters and the choked interstices between them, where purpose dilates into their legend. )
Thank you. ( His fingers snag and hook and cinch, and the fractured line of Wei Ying's wrist is sharp bone beneath his palm, unbreaking. He raises himself. )
And I am sorry. Wangji has failed you. ( The guqin, the man. What difference? ) I serve you no better than silver thread and gossamer.
( Offering scant use, less protection. He cannot coax coin to their hands, cannot whisper the dead willing in the ways of Wei Ying and master Wrath, cannot even perform the petty parlour tricks of his heritage. Death drowns him. He becomes Wei Ying's shadow and breathes. )
no subject
Lan Zhan was never meant to learn of a life like this, and yet, yet. He is here, and he tries, and it's arrogance to think either of them are becoming better men, though he does feel it may be true. Not necessarily better fathers, not necessarily better cultivators, but better men.
Little by little, in rebuilding, in the deconstruction of what is true in their world in false absolutes, and what's aching and horrible and real here, likewise without absolutes.
Wei Wuxian doesn't think. He moves, barely rising to his toes to press lips against Lan Zhan's forehead, and his ribbon, the metal clouds, all at once. )
An embroidered pillow still promises a place to rest. That's a great deal more than I'm used to having, ( he says, settling down onto his feet, aware of the feat they must try in seeing spirits addressed, in allowing them acknowledgement, in providing them access to avenues for passing. )
Making mistakes is not the same as being incapable. Don't speak poorly of yourself. The only ones to disparage of are those who never adapt, never change, blame all that happens on others. You are not that man. You, Lan Zhan, are not afraid to try.
( And aware that there is opportunity for success and failure, in unequal amounts. )
no subject
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. )
no subject
One lap, to lay his head on, the calm of the storms in his life allowing him a moment to breathe. Uncomfortable in hindsight, how little he understood her readings of him, how little he could thank her now for her love, for cementing to him that family is warmth as well as rigid expectation and duty and honours he tears the face from for want of righteousness not bedecked in the jewels of tyranny and convenience.
He is death, and he feels it, the cloying sweetness of decay as Lan Zhan's fingers succeed where his washings have not, and for one moment stretching long between this breath exhaling, this breath indrawn, he imagines leaning forward, imagines bracing and embracing, and then discards it, but for the silken ribbon coaxed free of his hair.
Presented, and a wrist that follows. Here a pulse beats, here meridians lie, here blood is blue against pale skin, deprived of air. Are we the men our mothers would wish us to be? His fingers weave the ribbon around themselves, and he lifts Lan Zhan's wrist, lowers his head. One hand ties, a vambrace of red against the white, blood against snow, passion against the fog of daily existence. He studies his work and the answer between them, saying, )
We are the men they did not yet know to imagine, ( and he inhales, ribbon tied, devouring itself and freed. ) I can only feel they'd wish for happiness, true living, and those who do more good than harm.
( In this, and here, the bow of husbands, the heavens witness, the forebearers silent, the present evershifting, remade moment to moment. In the acrid bile the world tears from their throats, the spirits caught and netted as decayed fish left to rot, and the reality that life is not static, that death isn't either, that what is claimed is not permanent by nature.
This is a choice, he feels, one made every day, footprints left in the detritus of the forests they knew in their youths, washed clean with season and storm. Soft, near to drowned by the winds and the surf that pounds below, the dead hidden from view, the lighthouse looming white and broken overhead.
Red, wound and binding, oxygen rich veins flooding two hearts, filling lungs. )
Sought together, side by side.
no subject
The first stroke of Wei Ying's hair lands flat and warm on the top of Wei Ying's head, clumsy for gravity and the lock of knuckles and finger bone, their clasp gaunt. Wangji does not — inspire ease naturally, does not reassure or bring comfort. It is a learned thing with rabbits who behold him, young oily dapplings of white and darks, sweet-nosed, humming. Lan Wangji raises one animal, then another, then the next, and gives them the reins of the land — his arms, the bridge of his shoulder, the sharp slope of his back. They cascade, graze and conquer.
And what came after? Lan Yuan, no greater than a garden creature, glued to Wangji's leg like grains of sticky rice. Possessed of the sterile sagacity and instinctive wisdom to climb Lan Wangji's hip, but not claw it. Lan Wangji offered short, aborted caresses on his nape and neck, the rare refitting of his robe collars. Play. Feverish kisses on Yuan's temple, once sunset rusts slipped him into night's sleep, and Uncle could not complain of Wangji spoiling the infant.
This is a different exercise, its subject long, lean, meaner. Thinned like candle wick, ever prepared for his own burning. Lan Wangji peels his fingers back and tries to stroke again, to capture Wei Ying's hair, to draw it back as if he intends a second binding of it, or a braid — only to release it down in cascade. )
You do not speak of them, as you do of Sizhui. ( As often, as hearted. ) Your parents. Tell me.
( There is greed in this, in counting the coin-wealth of Wei Ying's secrets, watching it gather in Wangji's cupped hands. )
no subject
He knows they're both orphaned of parents, held within the palms of different sects, to different reasons, respects, expectations. He's heard and understood his own place, too naturally gifted, too pernicious, too bright to hep but cast a shadow in comparison to those who excelled but not to the same degree. A crime of the heart, not of anything else. An accusation that meant the words he heard of his parents were in snippets of a mother's anger, her frustration, and a father's quiet, you look like them both, but especially her, years later agreed on by Lan Qiren, and it wasn't favourable.
His parents, and what he has in his head are the barkings of the dogs that chased him when they'd not returned, when the Night Hunt had sealed their fate and he'd not known the moment he went from beloved son to bereft orphan, and he never would. His second orphaning, he at least hadn't been alone. At least it had not been he who hurt most, and the machinations of it, the opening thrust of the war brewing for decades, had a way to be fought back against.
He swallows, tries for a smile, allows it to fade as he licks his lips. )
I wish I could. I wish I had their stories, Lan Zhan, more than the snippets the senior generation shared every so often, but even your uncle remembers more about my parents than I do. Or at least about my mother.
( Not happy memories, but frustrated ones out of Lan Qiren's own youth, and there's perhaps something to be said for his lineage and their tendency to drive second born sect heirs into distractions of whatever kinds. Perhaps. )
I don't remember what they look like. Sometimes I dream I remember the sound of their voices, but more often their laughter. They liked laughing, I think... and we traveled. I remember a donkey, and I think it must have been my father who led us both, with my mother at my side. But I don't know, not anymore.
( Not unusual, when a child loses parents before the age of five, when memory is less permanent for most, let alone someone who has learned compartmentalising as a matter of coping and persisting, of shutting out traumas, of striding forward, of making himself the accommodating one. The challenging, irritating, annoying, and yet outwardly unburdened one, enough to the point that it was the bone of contention as he swallowed and swallowed and swallowed the deaths he dealt, until one day, they swallowed him in turn.
Staring at Lan Zhan, red ribboned wrist, he swallows. Is swallowed in turn. )
Do you... of your mother, do you recall much of her now?
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And Lan Wangji, fickle and the line of his shoulders trembled, the deep compulsion to reach a hand out in comfort, resisted to knot wet-like on his thighs, knuckles gristle and white-rawed. There are moments in a man's life when he is but a vessel for the torture of his heavy-weighted emotions, and Wei Ying's cup runs full.
What does Lan Wangji recall of his mother? A battered rasp, lip swollen full under the crown of his feral, feline teeth. He remembers her beautiful, kindly, exquisitely sophisticated, elegant, composed — every word a child encounters in early poems and transfers, generously, unto the tall, looming pillars of his private heroes. )
Eight gashes of crackled wood on her door. The winter creak of her porch. Gentians, lightly acerbic.
( The charcoal marks that sketch out a woman, and Lan Wangji's memory the guiding hand to carve her, something from the nothing of fragile, abortive recollection. Zewu-Jun would know more. Perhaps Uncle. And who are they but the stone-faced captors of Lan Wangji's infancy, the stewards of his awareness?
He withheld, when Wei Ying required himself. Intrudes once more now, spreading and sprawling his fingers through the cascade of silken dark, wrapping it loosely to belt his fingers. Beautiful. None of the other prominent advantages that elevate a match, but Wei Ying was beautiful before he massacred himself to be anything else. )
We shall procure you another donkey.
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Closes his eyes at the hand in his hair, the fingers entangling firmly with the length of his parent's gift to him, the devotion he shows as any person does from home, not stripping himself of the body his parents gave him, as none of them do. Filial piety in the wearing of form, the way they grow without contestation, and he sighs, a soft sound swallowed by the susurrations of the sea, down the hill, cloaked in fog.
This is not a touch to lean into, not the rake of nails and fingers, blunt, against scalp, not the cupping of a head, or cheek, or jaw. Lan Zhan is both here, immediate, and distant, the anchoring of a river creature in the water weeds, the strain of waters pulled through tangled roots, strangling. He doesn't feel strangled now, and that perhaps is part of the ease in his bones, why he laughs and he sounds close to carefree.
He's not, not in the waking sea of dead. Not carefree, but perhaps, in part, lightened. )
Do you think this one will like me any better?
( And they no, no, it will not, that no animal rises ready and easy to his touch, but that people, spirits do, that which can be charmed in word or song. He is not a man given to quiet and stillness and silence by nature: he coaxes children, where the rabbits, looking for calmer spirits, shy. Where the donkey, seeking its own way, butts head with one equally independent, and slightly liable to spoils of free feeding along the way. )
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This is the truth of him, startled and stone, given to stubborn resistance: to persist, hands claws and sundering Wei Ying's hair again like waters, picking out strands as if they were his noose. How would Lan Wangji die of him, of Wei Ying?
Grit and gravel scrape his knees through granules of sand, shifting, and the world transforms, and he is still this — an anchor, still fixated on Wei Ying, still hollowed, still an accessory. The lace trim on Wei Ying's sleeves, his doubled collar. This is Lan Wangji, flickered beat adorning his soulmate's pulse. He wants to scent him — take, this is what means to own, the capacity to singularly and indifferently shatter.
Does not. He releases (again), withdraws (again), reconsiders (again). Fear is damp and lichen, the silvered edge of his smile, deceptive. )
You are a terrible man.
( Selfish, whimsical, breezy. Possessed of strange and eerie righteousness. Utterly, painfully, wickedly impulsive. Prone to brilliance, to laughter, to sacrifice. To cleaving Wangji's innards and glistening them with their fats over fire. To being, as ash is, dispersed in wind, one moment contained the next coagulated, the heartbeat after gone.
A mystifying, glorious creation. Yiling Patriarch, first disciple, Wei Ying. )
It will know. ( As Lan Wangji knows, a man complicit. One who leads into blindness by example. He thinks, if Wei Ying's hair flies free in the wind spell, it will yet tempt him. Starts, gently, to braid it and leave the ends loose. ) You have no more truths solely your own.
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They are themselves, as flawed and terrible and great as that might be, and it might eventually be enough. Choosing what are, and what they do; choosing whom they're with and how and why.
One ribbon wrapped around a wrist, and the red should draw his eyes, but he knows it, has tasted it. Might not be moved to taste it better but were it painting Lan Zhan's lips, and he lets that thought go too, on the same wind that slips past them, thick with the scent of the sea and its natural decay, denying the dead beneath its surface. )
What about you, Lan Zhan? Any other hidden truths to share?
( A reach out, fingers hooked into the skirts of his robes, tugging once. Here. )
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There is no kindness in him, for this. No distinction between where the feral appetite to claim begins and the diplomatic one to conquer without bloodshed ends. Greed is a continuum, possession a foregone semantic conclusion. No hunting thrills like that of man.
Slipped, his fingers dip until he clutches Wei Ying's hand in his own and only wrestles his thumb in, serpentine, to sketch out warm snags of ruined rhetoric on his palm, a fluttering candle of communication poorly traded. What you know, you know. He writes easily, terribly, conveniently, the rushed trill of his countless secrets in the aching code of Gusu Lan private correspondence intended only for the sect.
And reedy in the way of leaves thieving trickle under moonlight: )
Forgive me. Will you wait for them?
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This is not a matter of fairness, not even justice; this is not sixteen years stretched between them, two very different men standing on either end of it. This is a negotiation between people, whole and fractured and reknit on their own.
Will he? He doesn't need to. Whatever ribbons tied around wrists, Lan Zhan hadn't expected him to wait, to accept, to take in one selfishness in exchange for another, unknowing then known. To choose, daily, what it is they are for each other, what form of support that takes, what demands they make, what they refuse or accept. They, unlike the watery dead, are not bound to singular truths, to clawing ends. What they drown in is, so far, a choice.
His hand closes around that thumb, stilling it, lips curved enough to suggest a smile without dedicating to one. )
I'll wait. For now.
( But not forever, because in nothing can be promise something as impossible as that. Yet to not demand secrets from a man who takes pleasure in declaring Wei Wuxian no longer has any? Oh, pride would say, this is no level playing field, but wisdom notes it never was.
He will learn, or he will not. What matters more is what they learn together... more or less. )