( Says he, who thirsts without end for Suibian, loyal length that draws only to Wei Wuxian's hand and the careless pull of Jiang Cheng's, wielded in trust and faith and honour by Wen Ning, that is the past which clings, wraith like, to Lan Zhan's slowly fraying hems.
He can fix that, he knows. Mostly as he's been keeping up with a dead man's cloak, keeping Asgeirr in tattered dignity, until such a time as the scholar wishes to go.
That isn't on his mind, less than a flittering thought, and his voice drops lower, the murmur for Lan Zhan and anyone else with hearing far too acute for their own good: )
Will only remind me of seeing you.
( Flirtation, yes, but the weight of the word, the choice, to see and to have seen the scars that stretch hidden underneath the touch of robes and the chest of his with its beating heart; the branding on Lan Zhan's breast near aching, immaculate twin to his own.
Seeing, seen, wanted, wanting. It's been a long time for Wei Wuxian to come to terms with all these, and to hold them collectively in his palm.
The timing, however, is as unfortunate as most in his life, so he embraces it with the same expectation.
... Which is to say, none past being a pest to his soulmate, also four time going on five husband, and the man fed in luxuries by Wei Wuxian's creative exploits in making coin. For his son, their son, too, but that is not presently on his mind. )
( Seeing Lan Wangji, part and whole, glimpse of his body a window into the soul of the Wen war, and who are they, but stray marks of an emperor's time, passed? But the footprints of Wen Ruohan's passing?
He knows himself, stitched and woven and the sum of his scars, knows the dark earth of Wei Ying's gaze, churning. How he anticipates, Lan Wangji's fight and his flight and the propriety of his clan, chaperoning every talk turned tryst.
His mouth feels dried, burning with white fever. When he twists his hand, Bichen does bite, shallow as gossamer and lent qi sufficient to satisfy the recovery, when it comes, soon, soon. It will come. Heavens help him, but he steps in. )
Stop me.
( Take a sword, forge a talisman, devise retreat or retaliation. Be menace, because cruelty is a careful game, red of it known. This, here, only drips and dregs of it, the fluidity of Wei Ying's make-believe patience like watered venom. )
( Flesh parts as easily as lips to breathe; he doesn't even feel the sting, so much as the qi that follows, the kiss that never came after the bite of crueler hands, crueler weapons. Oh, this is flirtation, it's danger, it's neither of them knowing how and under a pressure that only expands and extends, and so, and so, and so.
His fingers there, and he catches them in his blood. It's a simple talisman, used infrequently, a trick, not a treat.
It is drawn against Lan Zhan's exposed wrist, each moment of it fluid and an offering of end this, you or I, or we see what happens next, and the talisman, roughshod and red against pale skins, means but this:
Wei Wuxian leans in further still, rough cheeked with the beard that's filled in as he's filled in time here, the mysteries abounding, mannequins and coal necrosis and manufactured disasters and waking up, and he says, command talisman writ in his blood, on his husband's body: )
Stop.
( Steps in, the nature of this temporary, the command behind it once an invitation to drink that was expected to be turned away, now turned to: )
And remember, always, to breathe.
( This is no talisman to hold beyond that moment, to compel more than the pause it might with the blood drawn from his neck, red ties woven between them. Even still, even yet, it's a moment caught and frozen, because one shift closer, and he'll try claiming lips with all the finesse of a man as parched as his husband claims come across clean waters in a dead land, while a sword breathes hot against his neck.
Not a man who chooses all his moments. A man who lives within the moments he finds himself in, maddeningly. )
( The burned bruise of Wei Ying's mouth on his, talisman-roused paralysis dissolving. There is a great, stalwart pressure that grows inside him, sixteen years of another man's want, the ghost he was, soul without body. Now he feels a consummate fever, a man incarnate — wrist answering first in rapid rotation, to summon Bichen from her fall, when he inevitably loosens his hold on her to restrain the blade from biting Wei Ying's throat.
All at once, he feels known, unknowable, invincible. One hand drifting to Wei Ying's nape, drawing hair, turning it, turning the stubble of his fine, hunger-sharpened jaw to scratch Wangji's chin, to rake him. Wei Ying's chest and the cracked rush of his breath, and the round moan of Wangji, fighting the fury of fast reconnaissance, of the aridity that are Wei Ying's lips, blistered beneath his.
He bites, tongue hunting after, teeth like straits thinned by rivulets of fricative breath between them. Raking.
When he peels back, mouth glistened red with Wei Ying's wet, thread of his blood ribboned between them, eyes swept dark between huntsman's desire and trembled stupor — he is silent. Not the disciplined, learned suspense that Cloud Recesses practises, but the gasped muteness of anticipation.
He is learning himself, learning Wei Ying. Learning the steep, abyssal distance between them. )
Like this, then?
( Blood on his wrist, residue of Wei Ying's qi electric between them. Wangji's mouth torn, Wei Ying bitten down. Violence between then. Bichen in sullen gloat. )
( Heat, the clash of them, the suddenness of joining mouth to mouth and no, nothing about it breathes out poetic, but it tips, it tilts, it's the first slide of rocks down a sheer mountain path. He can hear it, the cascade of possibility unformed but breathing in the silence beyond wet noises, neglected grunts of minor impact, the involuntary sound of appreciation when fingers tangle in his hair.
Feel it against the thrum of Lan Zhan's chest, even layered and caged as it is, his own mouth the invitation for more without needing it framed in hows and whys. His eyes, open, lashes peered through as sly flirtation fanned wider, heeding, bear down into Lan Zhan's, and he swallows, tongue tracing over his lips, the ache, the taste of copper he's known so well, so often, scents now on both of them in small, defensible, understandable ways.
Like this, then? There are rivers whose blockades he's seen give under the weight of a storm's onslaught. A violence, a magnificence, that stirs and awes, quick to come, quickly gone, leaving behind its muddy wake. Which he stands, whom dams for whom, what moment it pours over shivers through his veins, expecting. Adrenaline, not unlike when meeting blade to blade, but utterly unlike it in the same shivering, indrawn breath. )
In the moment, ( he says, voice dropping lower, convulsive swallow of his throat followed by the running of his tongue over his teeth, invitation: ) yes.
( In this moment, in so many moments, he doesn't know what this is without the grounding weight buried inside the violence: a call to spar, to meet with purpose, to cut small wounds and lick them clean again in the aftermath. Kindness undoes him too fast; gentle touches are an unmaking he's yet to learn. To press forward, to flow in, to nip at a jawline too smooth in comparison, raked teeth and roughed lips wet and pressing, momentarily there then drawn back, eyes to eyes, nose to nose, breath come faster.
Thrill, then, to fall forward into a trust that balances against his own expectation of defense. To fight, to surrender, no, to meet with terms: )
( What is this hunger, the greed to own so much of another that you must hollow him, must claw and ribbon out his being and replace his flesh with your inner self, pulsing alive beneath his skins? That you must wish the twain destructively bound, colliding, coalescing in union?
The better, wiser, kinder half of Lan Wangji is repelled by the possibility of Wei Ying harmed, least of all by his hand, his teeth. The Yiling Patriarch, a rhetoric of ruin, crafted to the shape of man. And then there's the mould wickedness of Lan Wangji, black and all-reaching and fungal, and it stretches out to want again — the word that could unmake this man, the learning, the gestures.
He does not flinch when Wei Ying irritates the stretch of his jaw, when it blooms to redness that forecasts bruising. When Wangji retaliates with the clever cruelty of every man who is possessed of crude strength, of opportunity: dragging both hands down Wei Ying's flank, Bichen cold and cradled now on hard ground — and bullying, as only predators do, his husband against the flat of the long wall.
There are spring books that depict this in tales of submission, men who find pleasure in their capture. He knows, because Wei Ying's once-upon-a-time stolen masterpieces attested it. And it's his heart that trembles, with the wall in synchrony, it must be, barely contained strength of his arms and their impulse and Wei Ying's weight sending the structure of the room to quiver — )
Let me have you.
( A simple, brazen, proposition — routine among husbands of sixteen, seventeen years, soulmates of decades, and surely the time is ripe for them, shiny and terrible like the blood smear crowning Wei Ying's lips, surely they are owed the satisfaction of —
( They are not their best selves; they are want, consuming, violent, they are the thrum of desire that plays across the cords of their veins and sends heat rushing, running, rampant. He's had books and illustrations and enough of all kinds to know the extent of creativity and none of its application. Craves to be closer, without cracking open the casing of their selves to curl up within, coming as close as one might still breathing through one's lungs.
Lust needn't be poetic, but affection and want weave together into a secondary string as Lan ZHan's hands burn trails down his sides, his back, until the wall shifts to meet them and the air evacuates his lungs in a gasp, eyes locked on Lan Zhan's face.
His hand moves, and it feels like falling, as if the wall gave way under his weight and Lan Zhan's bearing down. These walls aren't the termite-devoured ones of the island village, and it's wrong, it's
shifting
Lan Zhan's lips move and
the roaring crash of a formless tide
the drop of his stomach, the air ripped from his lungs
and the fall, complete, as reality's coil winds down. )
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
He can fix that, he knows. Mostly as he's been keeping up with a dead man's cloak, keeping Asgeirr in tattered dignity, until such a time as the scholar wishes to go.
That isn't on his mind, less than a flittering thought, and his voice drops lower, the murmur for Lan Zhan and anyone else with hearing far too acute for their own good: )
Will only remind me of seeing you.
( Flirtation, yes, but the weight of the word, the choice, to see and to have seen the scars that stretch hidden underneath the touch of robes and the chest of his with its beating heart; the branding on Lan Zhan's breast near aching, immaculate twin to his own.
Seeing, seen, wanted, wanting. It's been a long time for Wei Wuxian to come to terms with all these, and to hold them collectively in his palm.
The timing, however, is as unfortunate as most in his life, so he embraces it with the same expectation.
... Which is to say, none past being a pest to his soulmate, also four time going on five husband, and the man fed in luxuries by Wei Wuxian's creative exploits in making coin. For his son, their son, too, but that is not presently on his mind. )
no subject
( Seeing Lan Wangji, part and whole, glimpse of his body a window into the soul of the Wen war, and who are they, but stray marks of an emperor's time, passed? But the footprints of Wen Ruohan's passing?
He knows himself, stitched and woven and the sum of his scars, knows the dark earth of Wei Ying's gaze, churning. How he anticipates, Lan Wangji's fight and his flight and the propriety of his clan, chaperoning every talk turned tryst.
His mouth feels dried, burning with white fever. When he twists his hand, Bichen does bite, shallow as gossamer and lent qi sufficient to satisfy the recovery, when it comes, soon, soon. It will come. Heavens help him, but he steps in. )
Stop me.
( Take a sword, forge a talisman, devise retreat or retaliation. Be menace, because cruelty is a careful game, red of it known. This, here, only drips and dregs of it, the fluidity of Wei Ying's make-believe patience like watered venom. )
no subject
His fingers there, and he catches them in his blood. It's a simple talisman, used infrequently, a trick, not a treat.
It is drawn against Lan Zhan's exposed wrist, each moment of it fluid and an offering of end this, you or I, or we see what happens next, and the talisman, roughshod and red against pale skins, means but this:
Wei Wuxian leans in further still, rough cheeked with the beard that's filled in as he's filled in time here, the mysteries abounding, mannequins and coal necrosis and manufactured disasters and waking up, and he says, command talisman writ in his blood, on his husband's body: )
Stop.
( Steps in, the nature of this temporary, the command behind it once an invitation to drink that was expected to be turned away, now turned to: )
And remember, always, to breathe.
( This is no talisman to hold beyond that moment, to compel more than the pause it might with the blood drawn from his neck, red ties woven between them. Even still, even yet, it's a moment caught and frozen, because one shift closer, and he'll try claiming lips with all the finesse of a man as parched as his husband claims come across clean waters in a dead land, while a sword breathes hot against his neck.
Not a man who chooses all his moments. A man who lives within the moments he finds himself in, maddeningly. )
no subject
( The burned bruise of Wei Ying's mouth on his, talisman-roused paralysis dissolving. There is a great, stalwart pressure that grows inside him, sixteen years of another man's want, the ghost he was, soul without body. Now he feels a consummate fever, a man incarnate — wrist answering first in rapid rotation, to summon Bichen from her fall, when he inevitably loosens his hold on her to restrain the blade from biting Wei Ying's throat.
All at once, he feels known, unknowable, invincible. One hand drifting to Wei Ying's nape, drawing hair, turning it, turning the stubble of his fine, hunger-sharpened jaw to scratch Wangji's chin, to rake him. Wei Ying's chest and the cracked rush of his breath, and the round moan of Wangji, fighting the fury of fast reconnaissance, of the aridity that are Wei Ying's lips, blistered beneath his.
He bites, tongue hunting after, teeth like straits thinned by rivulets of fricative breath between them. Raking.
When he peels back, mouth glistened red with Wei Ying's wet, thread of his blood ribboned between them, eyes swept dark between huntsman's desire and trembled stupor — he is silent. Not the disciplined, learned suspense that Cloud Recesses practises, but the gasped muteness of anticipation.
He is learning himself, learning Wei Ying. Learning the steep, abyssal distance between them. )
Like this, then?
( Blood on his wrist, residue of Wei Ying's qi electric between them. Wangji's mouth torn, Wei Ying bitten down. Violence between then. Bichen in sullen gloat. )
no subject
Feel it against the thrum of Lan Zhan's chest, even layered and caged as it is, his own mouth the invitation for more without needing it framed in hows and whys. His eyes, open, lashes peered through as sly flirtation fanned wider, heeding, bear down into Lan Zhan's, and he swallows, tongue tracing over his lips, the ache, the taste of copper he's known so well, so often, scents now on both of them in small, defensible, understandable ways.
Like this, then? There are rivers whose blockades he's seen give under the weight of a storm's onslaught. A violence, a magnificence, that stirs and awes, quick to come, quickly gone, leaving behind its muddy wake. Which he stands, whom dams for whom, what moment it pours over shivers through his veins, expecting. Adrenaline, not unlike when meeting blade to blade, but utterly unlike it in the same shivering, indrawn breath. )
In the moment, ( he says, voice dropping lower, convulsive swallow of his throat followed by the running of his tongue over his teeth, invitation: ) yes.
( In this moment, in so many moments, he doesn't know what this is without the grounding weight buried inside the violence: a call to spar, to meet with purpose, to cut small wounds and lick them clean again in the aftermath. Kindness undoes him too fast; gentle touches are an unmaking he's yet to learn. To press forward, to flow in, to nip at a jawline too smooth in comparison, raked teeth and roughed lips wet and pressing, momentarily there then drawn back, eyes to eyes, nose to nose, breath come faster.
Thrill, then, to fall forward into a trust that balances against his own expectation of defense. To fight, to surrender, no, to meet with terms: )
Lan Zhan.
( Not so little now. )
no subject
( What is this hunger, the greed to own so much of another that you must hollow him, must claw and ribbon out his being and replace his flesh with your inner self, pulsing alive beneath his skins? That you must wish the twain destructively bound, colliding, coalescing in union?
The better, wiser, kinder half of Lan Wangji is repelled by the possibility of Wei Ying harmed, least of all by his hand, his teeth. The Yiling Patriarch, a rhetoric of ruin, crafted to the shape of man. And then there's the mould wickedness of Lan Wangji, black and all-reaching and fungal, and it stretches out to want again — the word that could unmake this man, the learning, the gestures.
He does not flinch when Wei Ying irritates the stretch of his jaw, when it blooms to redness that forecasts bruising. When Wangji retaliates with the clever cruelty of every man who is possessed of crude strength, of opportunity: dragging both hands down Wei Ying's flank, Bichen cold and cradled now on hard ground — and bullying, as only predators do, his husband against the flat of the long wall.
There are spring books that depict this in tales of submission, men who find pleasure in their capture. He knows, because Wei Ying's once-upon-a-time stolen masterpieces attested it. And it's his heart that trembles, with the wall in synchrony, it must be, barely contained strength of his arms and their impulse and Wei Ying's weight sending the structure of the room to quiver — )
Let me have you.
( A simple, brazen, proposition — routine among husbands of sixteen, seventeen years, soulmates of decades, and surely the time is ripe for them, shiny and terrible like the blood smear crowning Wei Ying's lips, surely they are owed the satisfaction of —
...the walls, the windows
the world
rattling, shattering, surging, breaking
Lan Wangji's mouth a tired, fissured gasp
floors beneath shifting like stormed seas
and instant, visceral collapse, as reality starts
Unwinding. )
no subject
Lust needn't be poetic, but affection and want weave together into a secondary string as Lan ZHan's hands burn trails down his sides, his back, until the wall shifts to meet them and the air evacuates his lungs in a gasp, eyes locked on Lan Zhan's face.
His hand moves, and it feels like falling, as if the wall gave way under his weight and Lan Zhan's bearing down. These walls aren't the termite-devoured ones of the island village, and it's wrong, it's
shifting
Lan Zhan's lips move and
the roaring crash of a formless tide
the drop of his stomach, the air ripped from his lungs
and the fall, complete, as reality's coil winds down. )