( There is a sense in him of misplaced wonder — as if the sand particles of Wei Ying's intimate understand slip threadbare between his hungering fingertips. He should catch them, he should hold — )
The port.
( And he makes rapid time: there, stalwart, coarse but serviceable blanket loaned from the Mouse House, for how can a man with an amputated core find flight anything but disagreeable? Dancing the few steps back to allow Wei Ying's great ungainly beast to find her footing on thudding, growling descent down.
He waits until she has settled, a destructive and gargantuan force between rows of indifferent, milling passers-by. Now and then, the port hoots with the spewed bile of approaching vessels and long, slithering carriages confined to tracks.
He waits until Wei Ying eases down to spread the blanket taut in hand. )
( Lethe can understand and not understand the grief and ache and apology that comes from Wei Wuxian, the sorrow and anger, and with Five popping out like he pops in, it's Wei Wuxian, in his riding leathers and furs, who slides down, pats his dead dragon's nose, and seems oblivious to the blanket held up like some strange sort of net.
He's awkward about affection. He knows it. He expects hands to reach for his throat first, particularly with men. His husband's face, all the minute expressions that tell him what he feels, what he thinks, what concerns he has and which ones evade him, they're familiar. And he remembers a voice that kept speaking when the tongue had long grown overheavy, in the middle of an ice storm, holding him steady, flying them away.
He supposes he has learned something, and he ignores the faces around them just as readily as they ignore him. Ignores Lethe's great head lifted and turned toward him, sadness in the infinite depths of hollowed, sky-stained eyes.
Lifts his arms and crashes into the blanket and his husband beyond it, wrapping arms around his neck, stepping hard into all resistance to stand equally resisting, stone meeting stone, remembering to be bone and flesh and sinew and hot breath by Lan Zhan's ear as he exhales, voice lacking inflection outside of what's necessary for intonation to carry meaning correctly, a man who knows his words: )
Magnus found an eye. ( Of a dragon, calcified and horrific and true. ) Lethe has not breathed since before we arrived.
( Death has echoed and haunted and felt in his mind with an intimacy he's run from, danced around and between, called on, sung for, commanded. But not indelibly linked, not swaying his emotions where his defenses have not grown, not the tears of distress of the dead hatchlings, dead children, dead parents, and so he speaks into his husband's ears, his almost, only lover: )
( At Nightless City, scraps of tendon and splinters of bone crafted Wei Ying and the strength to condemn a sect whole to execution. Here, Lan Wangji does not allow himself the wonder — how Wei Ying, slip of nothing and the jagged turn of a knife-smile, can assail him, send him staggered steps back until he negotiates, finally, his footing and a hand on his soulmate's back.
The blanket draws with his arm, first over Wei Ying's jutting hips, then his ribs, then the soft crown of his head, to shepherd him free of the settling chills, defended from searching eyes and the gasps of the nearest port passer-by, who protests the jump. Lan Wangji's gaze settles — hard, dismissive, dour — on each stranger, until the berth has widened, and he can shift Wei Ying up, nudge him climbed in the cradle of a welcoming arm, at Wangji's side.
Once, I raised a son, and he straddled me so. In name, for all his brother, his uncle, the long and mourning village of the Lan preoccupied themselves with the rearing. )
Hello.
( Their foreheads brush-bridge, neat tautness of Wangji's ribbon pushed in to cast imprint — and he hears Wei Ying. Knows him, the round gravid shape of his hurt, swelling beneath skin. Death dances long and limber between them.
An artless thing, to shift and carry Wei Ying on his side and reach out until the warm weight of Lethe's muzzle answers him. He waits. Feels the slowed, trickled puffs of her breath and greedy inhalations. Dances his fingers on the rim of her lips, teases the brush of fang, until the dragon nips in playful, slow reverence.
His hand withdraws. )
She appears yet living. ( Soft, absent the heat of contradiction. Appearances embellish without defining reality. ) You sense death stirrings within her?
( Slipped to one side, and no minding of it, mind recalling times enough he'd held Jiang Cheng under extended arm, close and in confidence and consolation. Relaxes his arms, because his understanding of the shift is letting go, and the blanket seems to perplex him as he recognises its embrace; what need has he, who suffers not from blood lost or heat bled as readily from his bones of this? Dismissed in thought, dark of his gaze shifting from the living certainty of his husband's face, the pulse at his neck, to Lethe, eyes blinking, nostrils flared for a breath that pretends.
Serthica, a pretense held together in thin strips of carefully denied and disguised reality.
He struggles against the blanket, against Lan Zhan without intent, stiff fingers of his hand sliding up to tuck into the ties of his coat, tugging them free in abortive, violent jerks. )
Are your senses any clearer than mine have been?
( Asked with the distraction of his digging, before his questing fingers slide deep and deeper, wiggling free his end desire. His hand emerges, triumphant, only caught still within blanket's mass, so that he lurches against Lan Zhan's side, leans heavily, struggles his hand free. Lethe watches, head tipping in degrees to see where this ends, inhaling at the steady rate of such massive lungs, exhaling through the nose.
He half shoves, half near punches Lan Zhan's sleeve when his hand finds itself free of blanket net; huffed annoyance and victory and the hollowness of both underlining the shadows under his eyes while he slips the white scale into his husband's hand. Or tries, a shudder building in his spine that waits to shatter free, and he swallows, convulsive. )
( That moment, extended and unavoidable, when your soulmate squirms pathetically against you in hard war won against a blanket, and you must tame the seedlings of your smile, you must not give surrender.
Wei Ying settles, and then there's the ached pulse of strangeness in Wangji's hand, cold and sterile. Eerily glistened, like serpent's hide, like winter wet. He knows, instinctively, as Wei Ying directs him — as Lethe blinks balefully and tips her head, and there is connection, the scale's energy prickles and stings — )
A draw. ( Possibly, probably, realised. Magnetic. Absently, he remembers to round his arm against Wei Ying and perch the blankets back atop his arms and shoulders. Warm, be warm, death sleeps everywhere, be safe. )
You are certain it is to death? ( And not the creature's nature, its profound native sorcery? There are so many irregularities to the winged creatures' form, perhaps the scale is merely attracted, like unto like? ) It is of dragon. It would call to dragons.
( But he knows the lie, even as he stitches reason, knows the formidable ache of certainty, proven. )
( He's fought free, hands back out, and then there's Lan Zhan managing to tuck him away again without so much as a stray suggestion of otherwise. Wei Wuxian tries pushing at the blanket and his husband's arm, shaking his head.
There's a truth caught between the three of them, a sickness of the soul. He knows Lan Zhan feels it, the ache of which like is calling to like. Will know further still, as people pass in the milling crowd, there is not one sensation the scales permit, passing along where eyes don't see the rot underneath.
Lan Zhan may be blessed with that realisation, even as Wei Wuxian worms one arm free again, pushing against his husband and gesturing to Lethe, who lifts head high enough to avoid his seeming flail. )
Magnus has the eye that sees. This feels, and it lay dormant until I was near Lethe. Until any of us were, which is why Magnus looked. Why he saw. None of the loaned dragons are the same. They all live, in appearance and in visible truth.
( Why did the dragons despair? He does not, will not, wonder. )
I see her. ( Soft, penitent, chipped rusting. ) Wei Ying, I see her.
( I see you, the lines and edges of your hurt. A fresh brush is too stiff for rich, full strokes. The emaciated shapes of Wei Ying's lessened hope cannot paint a bright, broad future. Their horizon darkens, dims.
The dragon reaches, long arc of her shimmered neck flinched, strains and rubs her muzzle against the ice of Lan Wangji's spine, the long, escaped tendrils of Wei Ying's hair. Feet stuttering, burdened with the weight of Wei Ying ungainly against his body, his hip, he leans in return and brushes the back of his hand on her cheek, scratches between scales. Welcomes her. )
Be still. ( Why must you always fight? But if Wei Ying does not thrash and squirm and hurt, does he live? What a shameful, shamed, petty existence, defined between heartbeats of disaster. ) Wei Ying, what difference? Dead or living. She is. She breathes. Do not mourn the living.
( 'What might have been,' 'what can never be.' Sixteen years of grief have taught him the only constancy is the depths to which a man will lower himself into despair. Dead but risen is yet better than dead but gone. )
( he doesn't still, though he does sigh, wrangling one hand free to pat the nose pressing into his husband' back for the time it does, as if he's stroking both when his other hand finds robes and settles, pressed against him, with the stutter and stir of Lan Zhan's footprints. )
I mourn a choice not granted. We unwind this, Lan Zhan.
( Comfort extended to Lethe, and the certainty that he'd bear the dragon as he'd bear anything that comes to matter. As he'll bear the whole of the dragons, of the people, in who are and are not alive.
See what lies beneath, and set it free. What wishes to live, what wishes not. )
Wei Ying. ( Silt from his mouth, running gravel. If he smacks his lips together, he thinks they will bloody and stain, tacky and slow. ) How many of your dead chose fealty?
( Was he a kindly master in Nightless City? A conqueror through coaxing in the Burial Mounds? Does Chengqing beg allegiance, sooner than shackle and bind, does it not trade a promise of retaliation and breath in the house of Wei Ying's own bones, for enslavement?
And Lan Wangji's arms feel sullen, weighed, cold. In the lilac hues of a lethargic day, his pallor might reduce him to nothingness, to stain and erosion. )
How many of my spirits chose sincerity?
( Mouths unbound by the guqin, compelled to honesty unearned. Is this not violation? That they proliferate violence of sorcery to reap the gains of obedience from those who already grieve their flesh?
Men gasp. He knows, because he has started the trickling barter of one step, then the next, and carrying Wei Ying — no better than bones, but long — might exceed his natural penchant for diplomatic negotiation. He will see them to a home, a bed, even if Bichen must trouble herself with the delivery. )
( Lan Zhan seeks to move him, and he's searching for the edge of the blanket, exhaustion drooping his head while he works to unwind himself. Once, a tangle of forced spirits, the energies left that couldn't accept death, that rode command as potential for answer elsewhere. Held and contained, where now, even in his largest motions, cajoled, requested, released.
He knows which man Lan Zhan remembers. He remembers that man too. )
When will you ask? When we sit under siege, or when we stand with room to act?
( Sleep is what he needs, always needs, always pushes back for later. He doesn't want the dreams of sleep, wants the exhaustion that drives a body down beyond them, but even that has been denied him, frenetic energies dragging his mind higher and higher until the subconscious blossoms down dozens of unpleasant avenues. He shimmies out of the blanket enough that it falls around his waist, Lethe watching, breathing out in concerned amusement, the huff of exhalation stirring Lan Zhan's hair. )
( Simple barter, Wei Ying shortchanged. One man against the empire of the Patriarch's regrets, shield before infinity. Strikes, scratches, tarnish on his glistened veneer. But for the sum of his scars, he sees himself eroded to translucence.
In the end, slow steps. A wide berth afforded by men bemused, who seem to have grasped Wangji's ongoing misfortune of herding along a man little slimmer than his own weight. The duty: to transport his husband, to provide for him, to shelter, to broker safe. Now, the truth: a swordsman's light touch, more craft and care and acrobatics than the cutting violence of those who prefer the ace and hammer. He thinks to concede the battle — then grudgingly allows a flimsy burst of qi to warm and arm him and lifts Wei Ying on.
Helpfully, the dragon intercedes, the drumming of her close-by exhalations like beads of laughter. Her head nudges first Wangji's arm at the elbow, then simply fits itself to kiss at the rim of Wei Ying's blankets, and Lan Wangji surrenders the weight. A fine thing to transition the heft of your intended on the back of a creature, tight as wet marine knots, curling. )
She wishes to come. To share warmth. ( And is it bitterness then, warm on his bloodless mouth? The road opens, the beast carries. The world, as ever, conspires to provide under greyed listless light and sallow shine. ) This dead thing you mourn.
( He stills, in spite of himself, caught in a moment of surprise when his husband wastes qi to heft him upward, bundled like a recalcitrant child. It's Lethe's intercession that spares them both whatever dignity might squirm its way back into relevance when he stirs out of the gross emotional outpouring he's allowed himself.
To perceive one exchange of words, less than a third of an incense stick's time, to admit for that long, what unsettles him.
A gross outpouring.
He flinches back away from it now, smile a dead thing remembering life until it sits, wry, and he plants his freed hands and balances his tangled centre and legs on Lethe's back. Recognise the swaying of each footstep, and flinch away from the visceral ache that follows.
The faded memory of his parents, leading the way down the road.
The less faded memory of Lan Zhan, leading the way down a different road.
Now here, in this fractal moment of pain and beauty, and he allows himself to close his eyes, and not to speak. Gift to Lethe the early blossoms of anemic love, a shy, uncertain thing. Gift his fondness through her of Lan Zhan, grown deep and rooted and expansive into hurts and happinesses, with her echo of a fondness amplifying warmth. Perhaps its why Lethe noses into Lan Zhan's shoulder, exhales into his hair, breathes him in.
The dead love, and that is a problem, even as it is a solution. He cares, and it would always have been easier if he learned to not. )
I don't wish to lose those who care for me.
( But he has, and he will, and Lan Zhan has screamed his resistance to ever being held, against any better will. )
Wei Ying, packaged and purposed and reduced to the shell and root and seed of himself, eroded — follows. Between them, the mountainous body of the dragon fills out and stretches the span of her wings, coils her neck and teases him with happy, warm-snouted kisses to the back of Wangji's silks, his collar. Here and there, she catches the scent of his hair, grips dark threads in his mouth. And he waits, patiently, until the roads rupture into thin paths that want a delicate step, or they stay their momentum to give rambunctious children passes in the square, while their mother blitzes by relieved, or there is a great, callous deluge, spilling at their feet, where the streets have overflown from last night's rains.
Then, he affords Lethe a gentle nudge and she retreats in fine form and at a respectful distance, allowing the length of the reins Wangji collects in a slack hand to pull, if never grow taut. And his soulmate drifts, as if his melancholy is the blood that leaves fresh wounds scored on patient, young skin. Fearless Wei Ying cannot learn fear.
In the ports, light dims and slouches like an old cat, base greens whispering back from waters across the filigree of bays. An impression of winter that he suspects never comes. And it shivers his back all the same, agony of white lattices and his scars weeping, Once you were worth more than the skins of my back.
Today, more than any limb Lan Wangji has sworn and sold to the Gusu Lan sect's use, already, Guanyin have and forgive him. )
What is loss to a death king?
( Only trails of sand ground and scattered between fingers, only dust motes for Wei Ying's hungering hands to regain. You push hard enough, any man will break, but Wei Ying stands royal, Patriarch and true. His will bends and chokes the unworthy. )
( he is quiet, and it is the quiet of a mind forcibly calmed. features that twitch and settle and smooth into noncommittal nuetrality, the soft back and forth with lethe an emotional battleground he's subjugated for his own sake. that he creaks open, a door with unoiled hinges like the ones of murial's house, to steel himself for what comes through.
it does not help, and yet it steadies. does not explain, and yet encompasses. he blinks, the smiles startled for children, laughter following a beat behind but there.
fingers tucked around the scale at his chest, and the warmth can't balance with the taste of death, or the sparks of wrong and gone sizzling only infrequently as they move. did he feel them, truly? are they imagined, pretended? )
A haunting
( the answer, direct and true, still what he feels now, processing day to day. )
The same as to anyone.
( regrets and grief and recollection, however poor in detail. )
The same as to the star who chases chaos, lighting up the way.
( There comes a turn, a time when every word is a private flaying, when he feels brutalised by the burden to reveal himself, to be known. How is it men release so many words upon words upon carelessness? It aches him. It burns. )
I am too small to fill your holes until they no longer leak your hurts, body and blood.
( Any man would be. The wraith of one, is Lan Wangji, pale and aggrieved and the long-hanging tragedy of his draped silks, scratching, hooking on barren earth, where the loose scrawl of port confinements seeps into pavement. The Mouse House is a sullen, dark, dusted thing, and its customs resemble it: no man queues. There is no order.
The waters of the desperate and the resigned well and ebb and tide, and Lan Wangji steers the dragon by heir reins to join the spumes, to wait untidily. Perhaps company should shame him. He is not his uncle's nephew.
He is not his father's son. )
I cannot stay, only sustain. You digest care. Churn it. Metabolise. Then bloom with spring.
( Be reborn, perhaps not sixteen years later. Sooner, hastened, with greed. He yearns, unambiguously, for reassurance: what is dead may not once more die. Wei Ying cannot give himself to his sorrow. A cruel, ambitious thing to ask. Wangji's mouth hungers, the turn of his hand when he reaches for Wei Ying's, searching blindly, steels. He squeezes a thumb, fingers. The knuckles whole. )
( They grasp after each other, the fading passing of silks and robes slipped past doorways and steps taken and failed, day to day, or achieved, hour to hour. He turns his hand, invites the scrabbling, responds to Lethe's inquiry with the rawness of himself. )
The only thing wanting is a choice. To stay, not to solve.
( There are too many, many things which require the individual to tend to, to resolve, to hope. )
Sleep with me.
( Let it digest and churn and live and provoke as it will, later, as what cannot be changed acknowledges the desire, the wish otherwise. He turns hand, fingers finding fingers, palm pressed to palm, wrist held. One pulse to match another, timed off their own breaths, that Lethe does not match, though listening. Learning. )
That is an ache you can choose to soothe.
( While they live, and breathe, and winter stalks closer, little by little. )
( A simple concession. What is a body, if not a shield? Courier of warmth, deteriorating vehicle of reassurance. The back of his hand scratches with the half-moons of Wei Ying's grazing nails and the prickling of Lethe's scales, rising to riot and falling silent to the tune of the dragon's artificial inhalations.
He wonders, more fool he, what is to come of this codependence they've spun between them like gold of spider silk. When they return — never if, there can be no thought of condition, not with Sizhui's future at stake — will Wei Ying concede him nights under the thinly mantled hospitality of Gusu Lan? Threadbare, their current arrangement, gossamer and whispered pledges at lilac dusk. He drags their bound hands to his forehead ribbon, Wei Ying's knuckles against the insignia, while too close, far too close, a man carrying legumes of import mutters about the acrobatics that some people perform in a crowded queue.
Lethe rewards the objection with a huff that descends a light breeze on the man, sweeping off his hat.
...ah, perhaps Wangji too can allow himself to be fond of her, permissive when she reaches to rub her great snout against his cheek. )
She is yours. Sworn to you, freely. A second soulmate. ( One who might yet avail herself of her commitments more expediently, tirelessly, resolutely than did the first. ) Wei Ying, if you wish her...
( He will not, cannot say, Claim her. But he will not damn. )
( Oh, to be perched with wings tucked tight, aware of what flight means, aware of what it is to stay. He and Lethe both a reflection of that concept, the dragon's bulk hemmed in by human carved design, his by similar antics, only loving what it is, what it was, to be part of the living world. Learning and challenging, solving and seeking, and here is Lan Zhan, granting the most he can in concessions and concerns.
He does not know that he can agree that Lethe is sworn freely, because the shape of Lethe's death and overwritten play of life are not yet transparent for their inner workings. Visible, from Magnus's efforts, tangible in the glow of a opalescent scale, touched as lie that begs for believing under his hands, his thighs, his life now.
There is a creature, both great and terrible, who remembers a sense of what living was, and should be. A spirit bound and bonded to flesh that no longer healed, could not grow, would not see in decades forward the great size of a martial beast, the depth of experience that was once potential. If Lethe, unwound, unravelled, will continue to exist, or beg for the release that the witches had, turned into weapons, creatures with no more hope but the purpose forced on them in pulling strings.
He'd ended them, and their suffering, grandfathers as ghosts in watching. Not too soon, before Five and Winnie in their carelessness led to the flood of chill power that froze and swallowed so much of Taravast, just as death swallows here, just as the consequence of erasing those boundaries swallowed Ellethia.
Lethe is beautiful, and Lan Zhan, his forehead band a brand of warm metal on Wei Wuxian's hand, is beautiful, contradictory, loved. The wash of that brilliant fury of it, the swell of affection he'd held on to with nervous laughter and twitching fingers, catapults him now. With the blanket left draping and dragging over Lethe's worthy shoulders, he slides, feet tapping ground and then stumbling into Lan Zhan, too much unchecked force.
It comes to Lethe, her head a balance behind Lan Zhan's shoulders, the carrier of legumes startled and cursing at the tumble of it all, to stall their progress down when Wei Wuxian slides his fingers, then his palm, past the climbing angle of Lan Zhan's jaw, roughly past his ear, into the half down hair at the nape of his neck. There's a graceless art to the press of lips to open mouth, the checked knock of teeth, the gratitude of apologies and want and one reedy voice in the queue warbling, do as you must, but keep moving, to accompany them in the moment.
And Lethe's amused disgust, if for their actions or the flatulence of the legume carrier in their dismay, no way to say. )
( He stumbles back. Catches his footing, caged and contained and Lethe sworn to right him, belt of her neck coiled against his waist. What is it that men are, when they unleash themselves?
Light like a sheen of bathing salts, diluted. Half whisper, half blinks of glittered fall. He delays to close his eyes, and the world is pallor and dark weed of Wei Ying's hair, slithered down, and violence, the tip of Wangji's head, and he does not know, cannot know, if he is meant to oppose, or move in same direction, if it will be as with animals and the first ride, and the truths of of collaboration reveal themselves.
The first kiss was a print on the universe, long tearing. Novelty pronounced a miracle, to live controversial in blasphemy. It was excused of form, of expectation. Now, Wei Ying claims the second — the first too, Wangji cannot be so brittle a maiden, goaded like thunder — and they meet, artlessly, at the intersection between the shame of incompetence and the enthusiasm of children. He remembers, from the many sightings at travelled inns where men and their road wives so often neglected a cultivator of Hanguang-Jun's stature would practise seclusion, and threw themselves and their passion at the nearest shared table, the loudest wall — he remembers and shutters his eyes, and drags his mouth until the fits rights and latches, tongue and teeth and kitten licks, and a queue of fine men, gawking.
One whistles. Another scoffs. A woman laughs, encouraging. They make spectacle of themselves, and yet Wei Ying wants it so, wants the madness of a moment to — ...divert himself. Lan Wangji is not a choice, only a sheltered, bought and paid for. The coin of Wei Ying's body shared.
He shudders, breaks free. Spiders out the fingers of his hand to bracket Wei Ying's temple, then steers the wet warmth of his mouth on the stretch of pulsed skin on the other side. Here sleeps the jewel of the land, a mind to sunder dark infinities. )
...how deep do waters run, where you are?
( Far, so very away from Lan Wangji, drifting amid tempestuous thoughts. Where Wangji cannot reach. When he kisses Wei Ying again, it's snow-soft and fleeting, one heartbeat and a nod. He knows. He knows what this is, he knows all it can be, there is a dragon, scales pin sharp, who bars his path. )
( There are chasms between them that neither see in full, only the fissures that might presage deeper splits to bridge over, time and again, when they're exposed by the storms of their existence. He laughs, and it is for once a lighter sound, the bubbling of a core warmth he forgets half as often as he remembers it.
He does not delight in the public's opinion, ignores it, has fostered the cost. But it does not bind him in much more than the belated acknowledgement of what he hears, and how from kisses consuming to light and sweet, he in turn shift, lets his crown come to rest against Lan Zhan's, the press of metal and silk between them as binding a kingdom as ever wanted. )
And if I want, ( he asks, dark eyes bearing hint of light within their core, stardust captured and reflecting in scattered ruin; ) for the greed of it, to drown in you...
( Eyes that hold open without blinking, ears that hear and dismiss the grumbling curses and the sweeter words of those who prefer a life that isn't wholly proscribed by the puritanically frightened, touch that feels the light and pulse of Lan Zhan's being, the quietude and heartsung lie of Lethe's reassuring bulk. He can taste on his tongue the air and the heat of Lan Zhan's mouth, not a sweetness, not a bitterness. Less bloody than the first, far more visible, shared, and stuttered. )
Am I allowed?
( Moments that fit like ill suited puzzle pieces, pulled and attracted without regard for timing or sanctity of privacy. Perhaps that's the truth of all regard, for him; that all he does is misaligned in the eyes of those who don't truly care, but would make of him the spectacle they assume, willfully blind to what acts define him step by step on less over-worn throughways.
Lan Zhan dips, allows, embraces what once he would not, could not have. He is himself, slow evolution, and it is a wonder, timeless, unaging, to hear anything more than no. To argue and not believe that means sloughing off each altercation as a necessary defeat, to instead learn and grow and tumble backward, the vine clinging to rock and drinking in sunlight and shadow in unequal measure.
There is the knife of his husband, the honed and sharpened blade, that knows now words of apology, that knows the want of softened touch, that steers towards the defenseless as it always has and hope to hold them safe. He who exists in the heart of chaos lives as twinned beat of Wei Wuxian's own, and peace, fragile and fleeting, is what he'd lay at his husband's feet. An eye of an ever moving storm, but true, tangible, a space between moments of fighting necessity and heartache and heartbreak in a world known for its callousness, and for no concept of honour or fairness.
He breathes in the ache that is his greed, of a want that is possessiveness without the binding urge to hold, to fetter, to hobble. To want the chosen return, to yearn for the companion whose twinned soul stands side by side with his own, as he does in turn.
The child, the dragon, the times to come. Death and life, life in spite of death. Theirs, until it cannot be, and that must, will, by soul decreed be decades forward, on the pathways of their own world's twisting roads. )
( Like like staccato more than crescendo, he feels the wave of lust like abandon, a childish and infinite joy, brimming, warm. Wei Ying is incandescent, and it strikes him like the difference between beholding light and tasting flame on his fingertips — before, two men on the road setting to right the wrongs done against Wei Ying's reputation, he had thought he had glimpsed Wei Ying's honest laughter. Now, his soulmate's delight is a wicked and impossible contagion, a force that suspended Lan Wangji's life before the war — reshaping it.
He bides his time, looks away with the bashfulness of a bride bereft the red of her veil, yet too modest still to accept the stalwart gaze of her husband. Lethe shudders behind him, head peering beneath his elbow, because there is a bond between them, this babe of lizard and death and passion for the sun, and she echoes her master's amusement. The strip of Wangji's headband droops light and frail in his hands, like a second skin.
Less said, sooner concluded: he wrestles Wei Ying's hand, fetters the ribbon tight until it nearly throttles the hard jut of bone. Not one to be lost or overlooked, ends of it flickering in the breeze, let loose like the moment, like their morals. )
The rice you have spilled cannot be picked after. ( But he absents heat or stains of a grudge. ) Wei Ying should remember his refusals.
( And before the Unwinding, both their mouths unstitched-torn, and Let me have you, unanswered. Perhaps one of them yet has the pride to sting. )
( Depths of meaning, wound around his hand now in Lan Zhan's ribbon, in a way claimed and knowing and public where this world barely blinks, and the whole of his husband's clan would shudder to a halt, eyes wide, understanding.
Perhaps more than he understands the words that flow after, grains of rice spilled, a tempering of heat more than joy. He cocks his head to the side, wiggles those bound fingers, still smiles with the pleasure of a man who feels he might. )
Refusals?
( Which stance taken and defended is his husband referring to now? Has there been one, on the boundaries of their bodies or appetites? Was he asked some morning before he woke, when the soft seduction of slumber leaves his tongue heavy and his eyes unwilling to creak open, greeting the dawn? )
Embraced death. Would choose to embrace life... ( he says, head still canted, studying Lan Zhan, feeling his dead dragon's amusement and concern, at him, at them, at nothing identifiable. ) ... and rest. I'm not opposed.
( The queue shifts, and Lethe lifts head, enough to peer through the moving group along their narrowed passage. Resettles wings to better fit, making of a dragon something more lithe than the wagon that, further ahead, restricted passage. Humanity, living in this instance, varied and brilliant, drips and flows forward, some voices left behind, others tended to in ongoing complaint. Winding deeper in, not to the trains, but elsewhere in the warren of the Mouse House, and Lethe, unhappy at the constraint but not unwilling to accept it, the pale ghost of a once living being's regard, carried forward in spite of the rot that stole all breath away. )
( He confirms it, hollowed like tree husk and brittle and soft, and Wei Ying warm beside him, precious. Firefly seeking flame, but he is close, so very close and readied, and what can Lan Wangji do but receive and treasure him, and his findling child?
...he brings, does Wei Ying, so many new offspring. This one, scaly and scattered and her eyes wet with the troubled shine of staring, without discrimination. He hesitates, but offers his hand again, and she is there, viscous or liquid or somehow taking form, surprising him with lent warmth and easy yield of her muscled neck, covetously seeking Wei Ying.
When his fingers drum and scratch, he thinks he hears her hiss her pleasure. )
Will you claim her? ( This, breezily, to no one. This, like an anchor pulling vessels aground, to Wei Ying. He has claimed them before, his innocents and his brothers, and Wen Ning first among them. Those who cannot elude death can join the precious court of a death king. )
( Wei Wuxian brings his bound hand up, letting his lips come to rest against the ribbon, the bracing sensation of his knuckles beneath. Refusals, and he can think of none of them, studying his husband from the corner of one questing eye. It simmers, the suspicion of it, and Lethe presses gentle inquiry and then a sense of scoffing disregard, projecting contentment as Lan Zhan obliges her seeking with the deft cleverness of his calloused fingers.
To think for any moment he could hold brief, passing jealousy of a dragon, and the dead, sets Wei Wuxian into startled inhalation, and the long, low laughing exhalation after. To be silly, by all means.
To feel there's a sense of allowance in it, if only for himself. )
She claims herself. If she wishes, then I would. If she seeks rest, then I will do as I can.
( A lifetime of divide between the young man who'd bound spirits to yin iron and forged from it a means to survive and control and demand what revenge had asked for, then what a war had cried after, what had been the reason for jealousy and fear from all those who looked upon him and his gifts covetously. His downfall, in each step taken alone, error of his ways the self-sacrificing foolishness of heroes, worlds over.
That man had lost everything, watched it slip between his fingers, and slipped himself through his soulmate's at the hope he'd spare him, spare his broken brother, having to choose. Wrong in that, too.
Wrong to hold what doesn't want to be held, and he'd known that, resurrected out of the abyss into the jest of another man's life, wearing his own face. Being his own self, in spite of the costs. )
A man can demand as he likes, and it doesn't make him right. He can ask, and he can assist. Or command for cessation, when a life hangs in balance.
( His demand in the temple, his cutting through resentments to save his nephew, to prevent Wen Ning's possession from leading to something total, impossible to return from.
That he pauses, one step out of alignment, then looks to his husband with furrowed brow of genuine surprise, is a different sort of discord. )
Wait, don't you claim me?
( Sadly, he remains unaware that Lethe is any particular sex. Completely... unaware. All hail ta. )
( This man, who has forged and tamed Yin iron whole, who sundered sect politics, who created new pathways of cultivation.
This man, who grew lotus flower in barren muck, who found a child to raise from ether, who created a clan.
This man, who sequestered his welfare amid threats to banish disrepute and reveal decades of conspiracy.
This man, who has here kept them whole and hale, alive and tremulously bartering their path home.
...this man, Lan Wangji decides between extensive, painstaking blinks, is a fool. Just as politely, he abandons Lethe without her indulgences — bear with it, beautiful girl, serpentine darling, already threatening him with scowls and petty glares and another choice nudge, for she is a conqueror of the skies and he only a peasant who owes her obeisance — and drifts to catch his husband's ribbon-bound wrist. To hold it up in pained, pointed, staring illustration, until one of the matrons left of Wei Ying in the interminable queue, takes this time to mutter, 'Ain't even gold, that.'
Truer than the sophisticated, studied artifice of Jin filigree, deeper than the thunderous cleaving of Nie, more intrusive than the deceptive artfulness of Yunmeng. Heart and soul and the emblem of the clan crowning the bindings of the sect, anointing Wei Ying's claim. )
You recognise no claim?
( There are deserts complaining of more humidity than his voice. )
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( There is a sense in him of misplaced wonder — as if the sand particles of Wei Ying's intimate understand slip threadbare between his hungering fingertips. He should catch them, he should hold — )
The port.
( And he makes rapid time: there, stalwart, coarse but serviceable blanket loaned from the Mouse House, for how can a man with an amputated core find flight anything but disagreeable? Dancing the few steps back to allow Wei Ying's great ungainly beast to find her footing on thudding, growling descent down.
He waits until she has settled, a destructive and gargantuan force between rows of indifferent, milling passers-by. Now and then, the port hoots with the spewed bile of approaching vessels and long, slithering carriages confined to tracks.
He waits until Wei Ying eases down to spread the blanket taut in hand. )
Be welcome. ( And speak on Wei Ying's own time. )
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He's awkward about affection. He knows it. He expects hands to reach for his throat first, particularly with men. His husband's face, all the minute expressions that tell him what he feels, what he thinks, what concerns he has and which ones evade him, they're familiar. And he remembers a voice that kept speaking when the tongue had long grown overheavy, in the middle of an ice storm, holding him steady, flying them away.
He supposes he has learned something, and he ignores the faces around them just as readily as they ignore him. Ignores Lethe's great head lifted and turned toward him, sadness in the infinite depths of hollowed, sky-stained eyes.
Lifts his arms and crashes into the blanket and his husband beyond it, wrapping arms around his neck, stepping hard into all resistance to stand equally resisting, stone meeting stone, remembering to be bone and flesh and sinew and hot breath by Lan Zhan's ear as he exhales, voice lacking inflection outside of what's necessary for intonation to carry meaning correctly, a man who knows his words: )
Magnus found an eye. ( Of a dragon, calcified and horrific and true. ) Lethe has not breathed since before we arrived.
( Death has echoed and haunted and felt in his mind with an intimacy he's run from, danced around and between, called on, sung for, commanded. But not indelibly linked, not swaying his emotions where his defenses have not grown, not the tears of distress of the dead hatchlings, dead children, dead parents, and so he speaks into his husband's ears, his almost, only lover: )
Scales tip and tell.
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( At Nightless City, scraps of tendon and splinters of bone crafted Wei Ying and the strength to condemn a sect whole to execution. Here, Lan Wangji does not allow himself the wonder — how Wei Ying, slip of nothing and the jagged turn of a knife-smile, can assail him, send him staggered steps back until he negotiates, finally, his footing and a hand on his soulmate's back.
The blanket draws with his arm, first over Wei Ying's jutting hips, then his ribs, then the soft crown of his head, to shepherd him free of the settling chills, defended from searching eyes and the gasps of the nearest port passer-by, who protests the jump. Lan Wangji's gaze settles — hard, dismissive, dour — on each stranger, until the berth has widened, and he can shift Wei Ying up, nudge him climbed in the cradle of a welcoming arm, at Wangji's side.
Once, I raised a son, and he straddled me so. In name, for all his brother, his uncle, the long and mourning village of the Lan preoccupied themselves with the rearing. )
Hello.
( Their foreheads brush-bridge, neat tautness of Wangji's ribbon pushed in to cast imprint — and he hears Wei Ying. Knows him, the round gravid shape of his hurt, swelling beneath skin. Death dances long and limber between them.
An artless thing, to shift and carry Wei Ying on his side and reach out until the warm weight of Lethe's muzzle answers him. He waits. Feels the slowed, trickled puffs of her breath and greedy inhalations. Dances his fingers on the rim of her lips, teases the brush of fang, until the dragon nips in playful, slow reverence.
His hand withdraws. )
She appears yet living. ( Soft, absent the heat of contradiction. Appearances embellish without defining reality. ) You sense death stirrings within her?
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Serthica, a pretense held together in thin strips of carefully denied and disguised reality.
He struggles against the blanket, against Lan Zhan without intent, stiff fingers of his hand sliding up to tuck into the ties of his coat, tugging them free in abortive, violent jerks. )
Are your senses any clearer than mine have been?
( Asked with the distraction of his digging, before his questing fingers slide deep and deeper, wiggling free his end desire. His hand emerges, triumphant, only caught still within blanket's mass, so that he lurches against Lan Zhan's side, leans heavily, struggles his hand free. Lethe watches, head tipping in degrees to see where this ends, inhaling at the steady rate of such massive lungs, exhaling through the nose.
He half shoves, half near punches Lan Zhan's sleeve when his hand finds itself free of blanket net; huffed annoyance and victory and the hollowness of both underlining the shadows under his eyes while he slips the white scale into his husband's hand. Or tries, a shudder building in his spine that waits to shatter free, and he swallows, convulsive. )
Hold this. What do you feel?
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( That moment, extended and unavoidable, when your soulmate squirms pathetically against you in hard war won against a blanket, and you must tame the seedlings of your smile, you must not give surrender.
Wei Ying settles, and then there's the ached pulse of strangeness in Wangji's hand, cold and sterile. Eerily glistened, like serpent's hide, like winter wet. He knows, instinctively, as Wei Ying directs him — as Lethe blinks balefully and tips her head, and there is connection, the scale's energy prickles and stings — )
A draw. ( Possibly, probably, realised. Magnetic. Absently, he remembers to round his arm against Wei Ying and perch the blankets back atop his arms and shoulders. Warm, be warm, death sleeps everywhere, be safe. )
You are certain it is to death? ( And not the creature's nature, its profound native sorcery? There are so many irregularities to the winged creatures' form, perhaps the scale is merely attracted, like unto like? ) It is of dragon. It would call to dragons.
( But he knows the lie, even as he stitches reason, knows the formidable ache of certainty, proven. )
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There's a truth caught between the three of them, a sickness of the soul. He knows Lan Zhan feels it, the ache of which like is calling to like. Will know further still, as people pass in the milling crowd, there is not one sensation the scales permit, passing along where eyes don't see the rot underneath.
Lan Zhan may be blessed with that realisation, even as Wei Wuxian worms one arm free again, pushing against his husband and gesturing to Lethe, who lifts head high enough to avoid his seeming flail. )
Magnus has the eye that sees. This feels, and it lay dormant until I was near Lethe. Until any of us were, which is why Magnus looked. Why he saw. None of the loaned dragons are the same. They all live, in appearance and in visible truth.
( Why did the dragons despair? He does not, will not, wonder. )
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I see her. ( Soft, penitent, chipped rusting. ) Wei Ying, I see her.
( I see you, the lines and edges of your hurt. A fresh brush is too stiff for rich, full strokes. The emaciated shapes of Wei Ying's lessened hope cannot paint a bright, broad future. Their horizon darkens, dims.
The dragon reaches, long arc of her shimmered neck flinched, strains and rubs her muzzle against the ice of Lan Wangji's spine, the long, escaped tendrils of Wei Ying's hair. Feet stuttering, burdened with the weight of Wei Ying ungainly against his body, his hip, he leans in return and brushes the back of his hand on her cheek, scratches between scales. Welcomes her. )
Be still. ( Why must you always fight? But if Wei Ying does not thrash and squirm and hurt, does he live? What a shameful, shamed, petty existence, defined between heartbeats of disaster. ) Wei Ying, what difference? Dead or living. She is. She breathes. Do not mourn the living.
( 'What might have been,' 'what can never be.' Sixteen years of grief have taught him the only constancy is the depths to which a man will lower himself into despair. Dead but risen is yet better than dead but gone. )
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I mourn a choice not granted. We unwind this, Lan Zhan.
( Comfort extended to Lethe, and the certainty that he'd bear the dragon as he'd bear anything that comes to matter. As he'll bear the whole of the dragons, of the people, in who are and are not alive.
See what lies beneath, and set it free. What wishes to live, what wishes not. )
Let them choose.
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Wei Ying. ( Silt from his mouth, running gravel. If he smacks his lips together, he thinks they will bloody and stain, tacky and slow. ) How many of your dead chose fealty?
( Was he a kindly master in Nightless City? A conqueror through coaxing in the Burial Mounds? Does Chengqing beg allegiance, sooner than shackle and bind, does it not trade a promise of retaliation and breath in the house of Wei Ying's own bones, for enslavement?
And Lan Wangji's arms feel sullen, weighed, cold. In the lilac hues of a lethargic day, his pallor might reduce him to nothingness, to stain and erosion. )
How many of my spirits chose sincerity?
( Mouths unbound by the guqin, compelled to honesty unearned. Is this not violation? That they proliferate violence of sorcery to reap the gains of obedience from those who already grieve their flesh?
Men gasp. He knows, because he has started the trickling barter of one step, then the next, and carrying Wei Ying — no better than bones, but long — might exceed his natural penchant for diplomatic negotiation. He will see them to a home, a bed, even if Bichen must trouble herself with the delivery. )
Will you sleep?
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( Lan Zhan seeks to move him, and he's searching for the edge of the blanket, exhaustion drooping his head while he works to unwind himself. Once, a tangle of forced spirits, the energies left that couldn't accept death, that rode command as potential for answer elsewhere. Held and contained, where now, even in his largest motions, cajoled, requested, released.
He knows which man Lan Zhan remembers. He remembers that man too. )
When will you ask? When we sit under siege, or when we stand with room to act?
( Sleep is what he needs, always needs, always pushes back for later. He doesn't want the dreams of sleep, wants the exhaustion that drives a body down beyond them, but even that has been denied him, frenetic energies dragging his mind higher and higher until the subconscious blossoms down dozens of unpleasant avenues. He shimmies out of the blanket enough that it falls around his waist, Lethe watching, breathing out in concerned amusement, the huff of exhalation stirring Lan Zhan's hair. )
I don't care to dream.
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( Simple barter, Wei Ying shortchanged. One man against the empire of the Patriarch's regrets, shield before infinity. Strikes, scratches, tarnish on his glistened veneer. But for the sum of his scars, he sees himself eroded to translucence.
In the end, slow steps. A wide berth afforded by men bemused, who seem to have grasped Wangji's ongoing misfortune of herding along a man little slimmer than his own weight. The duty: to transport his husband, to provide for him, to shelter, to broker safe. Now, the truth: a swordsman's light touch, more craft and care and acrobatics than the cutting violence of those who prefer the ace and hammer. He thinks to concede the battle — then grudgingly allows a flimsy burst of qi to warm and arm him and lifts Wei Ying on.
Helpfully, the dragon intercedes, the drumming of her close-by exhalations like beads of laughter. Her head nudges first Wangji's arm at the elbow, then simply fits itself to kiss at the rim of Wei Ying's blankets, and Lan Wangji surrenders the weight. A fine thing to transition the heft of your intended on the back of a creature, tight as wet marine knots, curling. )
She wishes to come. To share warmth. ( And is it bitterness then, warm on his bloodless mouth? The road opens, the beast carries. The world, as ever, conspires to provide under greyed listless light and sallow shine. ) This dead thing you mourn.
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To perceive one exchange of words, less than a third of an incense stick's time, to admit for that long, what unsettles him.
A gross outpouring.
He flinches back away from it now, smile a dead thing remembering life until it sits, wry, and he plants his freed hands and balances his tangled centre and legs on Lethe's back. Recognise the swaying of each footstep, and flinch away from the visceral ache that follows.
The faded memory of his parents, leading the way down the road.
The less faded memory of Lan Zhan, leading the way down a different road.
Now here, in this fractal moment of pain and beauty, and he allows himself to close his eyes, and not to speak. Gift to Lethe the early blossoms of anemic love, a shy, uncertain thing. Gift his fondness through her of Lan Zhan, grown deep and rooted and expansive into hurts and happinesses, with her echo of a fondness amplifying warmth. Perhaps its why Lethe noses into Lan Zhan's shoulder, exhales into his hair, breathes him in.
The dead love, and that is a problem, even as it is a solution. He cares, and it would always have been easier if he learned to not. )
I don't wish to lose those who care for me.
( But he has, and he will, and Lan Zhan has screamed his resistance to ever being held, against any better will. )
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( He leads.
Wei Ying, packaged and purposed and reduced to the shell and root and seed of himself, eroded — follows. Between them, the mountainous body of the dragon fills out and stretches the span of her wings, coils her neck and teases him with happy, warm-snouted kisses to the back of Wangji's silks, his collar. Here and there, she catches the scent of his hair, grips dark threads in his mouth. And he waits, patiently, until the roads rupture into thin paths that want a delicate step, or they stay their momentum to give rambunctious children passes in the square, while their mother blitzes by relieved, or there is a great, callous deluge, spilling at their feet, where the streets have overflown from last night's rains.
Then, he affords Lethe a gentle nudge and she retreats in fine form and at a respectful distance, allowing the length of the reins Wangji collects in a slack hand to pull, if never grow taut. And his soulmate drifts, as if his melancholy is the blood that leaves fresh wounds scored on patient, young skin. Fearless Wei Ying cannot learn fear.
In the ports, light dims and slouches like an old cat, base greens whispering back from waters across the filigree of bays. An impression of winter that he suspects never comes. And it shivers his back all the same, agony of white lattices and his scars weeping, Once you were worth more than the skins of my back.
Today, more than any limb Lan Wangji has sworn and sold to the Gusu Lan sect's use, already, Guanyin have and forgive him. )
What is loss to a death king?
( Only trails of sand ground and scattered between fingers, only dust motes for Wei Ying's hungering hands to regain. You push hard enough, any man will break, but Wei Ying stands royal, Patriarch and true. His will bends and chokes the unworthy. )
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it does not help, and yet it steadies. does not explain, and yet encompasses. he blinks, the smiles startled for children, laughter following a beat behind but there.
fingers tucked around the scale at his chest, and the warmth can't balance with the taste of death, or the sparks of wrong and gone sizzling only infrequently as they move. did he feel them, truly? are they imagined, pretended? )
A haunting
( the answer, direct and true, still what he feels now, processing day to day. )
The same as to anyone.
( regrets and grief and recollection, however poor in detail. )
The same as to the star who chases chaos, lighting up the way.
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( There comes a turn, a time when every word is a private flaying, when he feels brutalised by the burden to reveal himself, to be known. How is it men release so many words upon words upon carelessness? It aches him. It burns. )
I am too small to fill your holes until they no longer leak your hurts, body and blood.
( Any man would be. The wraith of one, is Lan Wangji, pale and aggrieved and the long-hanging tragedy of his draped silks, scratching, hooking on barren earth, where the loose scrawl of port confinements seeps into pavement. The Mouse House is a sullen, dark, dusted thing, and its customs resemble it: no man queues. There is no order.
The waters of the desperate and the resigned well and ebb and tide, and Lan Wangji steers the dragon by heir reins to join the spumes, to wait untidily. Perhaps company should shame him. He is not his uncle's nephew.
He is not his father's son. )
I cannot stay, only sustain. You digest care. Churn it. Metabolise. Then bloom with spring.
( Be reborn, perhaps not sixteen years later. Sooner, hastened, with greed. He yearns, unambiguously, for reassurance: what is dead may not once more die. Wei Ying cannot give himself to his sorrow. A cruel, ambitious thing to ask. Wangji's mouth hungers, the turn of his hand when he reaches for Wei Ying's, searching blindly, steels. He squeezes a thumb, fingers. The knuckles whole. )
But now is your winter. You must sleep.
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The only thing wanting is a choice. To stay, not to solve.
( There are too many, many things which require the individual to tend to, to resolve, to hope. )
Sleep with me.
( Let it digest and churn and live and provoke as it will, later, as what cannot be changed acknowledges the desire, the wish otherwise. He turns hand, fingers finding fingers, palm pressed to palm, wrist held. One pulse to match another, timed off their own breaths, that Lethe does not match, though listening. Learning. )
That is an ache you can choose to soothe.
( While they live, and breathe, and winter stalks closer, little by little. )
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I choose.
( A simple concession. What is a body, if not a shield? Courier of warmth, deteriorating vehicle of reassurance. The back of his hand scratches with the half-moons of Wei Ying's grazing nails and the prickling of Lethe's scales, rising to riot and falling silent to the tune of the dragon's artificial inhalations.
He wonders, more fool he, what is to come of this codependence they've spun between them like gold of spider silk. When they return — never if, there can be no thought of condition, not with Sizhui's future at stake — will Wei Ying concede him nights under the thinly mantled hospitality of Gusu Lan? Threadbare, their current arrangement, gossamer and whispered pledges at lilac dusk. He drags their bound hands to his forehead ribbon, Wei Ying's knuckles against the insignia, while too close, far too close, a man carrying legumes of import mutters about the acrobatics that some people perform in a crowded queue.
Lethe rewards the objection with a huff that descends a light breeze on the man, sweeping off his hat.
...ah, perhaps Wangji too can allow himself to be fond of her, permissive when she reaches to rub her great snout against his cheek. )
She is yours. Sworn to you, freely. A second soulmate. ( One who might yet avail herself of her commitments more expediently, tirelessly, resolutely than did the first. ) Wei Ying, if you wish her...
( He will not, cannot say, Claim her. But he will not damn. )
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He does not know that he can agree that Lethe is sworn freely, because the shape of Lethe's death and overwritten play of life are not yet transparent for their inner workings. Visible, from Magnus's efforts, tangible in the glow of a opalescent scale, touched as lie that begs for believing under his hands, his thighs, his life now.
There is a creature, both great and terrible, who remembers a sense of what living was, and should be. A spirit bound and bonded to flesh that no longer healed, could not grow, would not see in decades forward the great size of a martial beast, the depth of experience that was once potential. If Lethe, unwound, unravelled, will continue to exist, or beg for the release that the witches had, turned into weapons, creatures with no more hope but the purpose forced on them in pulling strings.
He'd ended them, and their suffering, grandfathers as ghosts in watching. Not too soon, before Five and Winnie in their carelessness led to the flood of chill power that froze and swallowed so much of Taravast, just as death swallows here, just as the consequence of erasing those boundaries swallowed Ellethia.
Lethe is beautiful, and Lan Zhan, his forehead band a brand of warm metal on Wei Wuxian's hand, is beautiful, contradictory, loved. The wash of that brilliant fury of it, the swell of affection he'd held on to with nervous laughter and twitching fingers, catapults him now. With the blanket left draping and dragging over Lethe's worthy shoulders, he slides, feet tapping ground and then stumbling into Lan Zhan, too much unchecked force.
It comes to Lethe, her head a balance behind Lan Zhan's shoulders, the carrier of legumes startled and cursing at the tumble of it all, to stall their progress down when Wei Wuxian slides his fingers, then his palm, past the climbing angle of Lan Zhan's jaw, roughly past his ear, into the half down hair at the nape of his neck. There's a graceless art to the press of lips to open mouth, the checked knock of teeth, the gratitude of apologies and want and one reedy voice in the queue warbling, do as you must, but keep moving, to accompany them in the moment.
And Lethe's amused disgust, if for their actions or the flatulence of the legume carrier in their dismay, no way to say. )
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( He stumbles back. Catches his footing, caged and contained and Lethe sworn to right him, belt of her neck coiled against his waist. What is it that men are, when they unleash themselves?
Light like a sheen of bathing salts, diluted. Half whisper, half blinks of glittered fall. He delays to close his eyes, and the world is pallor and dark weed of Wei Ying's hair, slithered down, and violence, the tip of Wangji's head, and he does not know, cannot know, if he is meant to oppose, or move in same direction, if it will be as with animals and the first ride, and the truths of of collaboration reveal themselves.
The first kiss was a print on the universe, long tearing. Novelty pronounced a miracle, to live controversial in blasphemy. It was excused of form, of expectation. Now, Wei Ying claims the second — the first too, Wangji cannot be so brittle a maiden, goaded like thunder — and they meet, artlessly, at the intersection between the shame of incompetence and the enthusiasm of children. He remembers, from the many sightings at travelled inns where men and their road wives so often neglected a cultivator of Hanguang-Jun's stature would practise seclusion, and threw themselves and their passion at the nearest shared table, the loudest wall — he remembers and shutters his eyes, and drags his mouth until the fits rights and latches, tongue and teeth and kitten licks, and a queue of fine men, gawking.
One whistles. Another scoffs. A woman laughs, encouraging. They make spectacle of themselves, and yet Wei Ying wants it so, wants the madness of a moment to — ...divert himself. Lan Wangji is not a choice, only a sheltered, bought and paid for. The coin of Wei Ying's body shared.
He shudders, breaks free. Spiders out the fingers of his hand to bracket Wei Ying's temple, then steers the wet warmth of his mouth on the stretch of pulsed skin on the other side. Here sleeps the jewel of the land, a mind to sunder dark infinities. )
...how deep do waters run, where you are?
( Far, so very away from Lan Wangji, drifting amid tempestuous thoughts. Where Wangji cannot reach. When he kisses Wei Ying again, it's snow-soft and fleeting, one heartbeat and a nod. He knows. He knows what this is, he knows all it can be, there is a dragon, scales pin sharp, who bars his path. )
Shameless thing, you will not drown.
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He does not delight in the public's opinion, ignores it, has fostered the cost. But it does not bind him in much more than the belated acknowledgement of what he hears, and how from kisses consuming to light and sweet, he in turn shift, lets his crown come to rest against Lan Zhan's, the press of metal and silk between them as binding a kingdom as ever wanted. )
And if I want, ( he asks, dark eyes bearing hint of light within their core, stardust captured and reflecting in scattered ruin; ) for the greed of it, to drown in you...
( Eyes that hold open without blinking, ears that hear and dismiss the grumbling curses and the sweeter words of those who prefer a life that isn't wholly proscribed by the puritanically frightened, touch that feels the light and pulse of Lan Zhan's being, the quietude and heartsung lie of Lethe's reassuring bulk. He can taste on his tongue the air and the heat of Lan Zhan's mouth, not a sweetness, not a bitterness. Less bloody than the first, far more visible, shared, and stuttered. )
Am I allowed?
( Moments that fit like ill suited puzzle pieces, pulled and attracted without regard for timing or sanctity of privacy. Perhaps that's the truth of all regard, for him; that all he does is misaligned in the eyes of those who don't truly care, but would make of him the spectacle they assume, willfully blind to what acts define him step by step on less over-worn throughways.
Lan Zhan dips, allows, embraces what once he would not, could not have. He is himself, slow evolution, and it is a wonder, timeless, unaging, to hear anything more than no. To argue and not believe that means sloughing off each altercation as a necessary defeat, to instead learn and grow and tumble backward, the vine clinging to rock and drinking in sunlight and shadow in unequal measure.
There is the knife of his husband, the honed and sharpened blade, that knows now words of apology, that knows the want of softened touch, that steers towards the defenseless as it always has and hope to hold them safe. He who exists in the heart of chaos lives as twinned beat of Wei Wuxian's own, and peace, fragile and fleeting, is what he'd lay at his husband's feet. An eye of an ever moving storm, but true, tangible, a space between moments of fighting necessity and heartache and heartbreak in a world known for its callousness, and for no concept of honour or fairness.
He breathes in the ache that is his greed, of a want that is possessiveness without the binding urge to hold, to fetter, to hobble. To want the chosen return, to yearn for the companion whose twinned soul stands side by side with his own, as he does in turn.
The child, the dragon, the times to come. Death and life, life in spite of death. Theirs, until it cannot be, and that must, will, by soul decreed be decades forward, on the pathways of their own world's twisting roads. )
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( Like like staccato more than crescendo, he feels the wave of lust like abandon, a childish and infinite joy, brimming, warm. Wei Ying is incandescent, and it strikes him like the difference between beholding light and tasting flame on his fingertips — before, two men on the road setting to right the wrongs done against Wei Ying's reputation, he had thought he had glimpsed Wei Ying's honest laughter. Now, his soulmate's delight is a wicked and impossible contagion, a force that suspended Lan Wangji's life before the war — reshaping it.
He bides his time, looks away with the bashfulness of a bride bereft the red of her veil, yet too modest still to accept the stalwart gaze of her husband. Lethe shudders behind him, head peering beneath his elbow, because there is a bond between them, this babe of lizard and death and passion for the sun, and she echoes her master's amusement. The strip of Wangji's headband droops light and frail in his hands, like a second skin.
Less said, sooner concluded: he wrestles Wei Ying's hand, fetters the ribbon tight until it nearly throttles the hard jut of bone. Not one to be lost or overlooked, ends of it flickering in the breeze, let loose like the moment, like their morals. )
The rice you have spilled cannot be picked after. ( But he absents heat or stains of a grudge. ) Wei Ying should remember his refusals.
( And before the Unwinding, both their mouths unstitched-torn, and Let me have you, unanswered. Perhaps one of them yet has the pride to sting. )
Today, he hunted death. Earned sleep.
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Perhaps more than he understands the words that flow after, grains of rice spilled, a tempering of heat more than joy. He cocks his head to the side, wiggles those bound fingers, still smiles with the pleasure of a man who feels he might. )
Refusals?
( Which stance taken and defended is his husband referring to now? Has there been one, on the boundaries of their bodies or appetites? Was he asked some morning before he woke, when the soft seduction of slumber leaves his tongue heavy and his eyes unwilling to creak open, greeting the dawn? )
Embraced death. Would choose to embrace life... ( he says, head still canted, studying Lan Zhan, feeling his dead dragon's amusement and concern, at him, at them, at nothing identifiable. ) ... and rest. I'm not opposed.
( The queue shifts, and Lethe lifts head, enough to peer through the moving group along their narrowed passage. Resettles wings to better fit, making of a dragon something more lithe than the wagon that, further ahead, restricted passage. Humanity, living in this instance, varied and brilliant, drips and flows forward, some voices left behind, others tended to in ongoing complaint. Winding deeper in, not to the trains, but elsewhere in the warren of the Mouse House, and Lethe, unhappy at the constraint but not unwilling to accept it, the pale ghost of a once living being's regard, carried forward in spite of the rot that stole all breath away. )
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Refusals.
( He confirms it, hollowed like tree husk and brittle and soft, and Wei Ying warm beside him, precious. Firefly seeking flame, but he is close, so very close and readied, and what can Lan Wangji do but receive and treasure him, and his findling child?
...he brings, does Wei Ying, so many new offspring. This one, scaly and scattered and her eyes wet with the troubled shine of staring, without discrimination. He hesitates, but offers his hand again, and she is there, viscous or liquid or somehow taking form, surprising him with lent warmth and easy yield of her muscled neck, covetously seeking Wei Ying.
When his fingers drum and scratch, he thinks he hears her hiss her pleasure. )
Will you claim her? ( This, breezily, to no one. This, like an anchor pulling vessels aground, to Wei Ying. He has claimed them before, his innocents and his brothers, and Wen Ning first among them. Those who cannot elude death can join the precious court of a death king. )
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To think for any moment he could hold brief, passing jealousy of a dragon, and the dead, sets Wei Wuxian into startled inhalation, and the long, low laughing exhalation after. To be silly, by all means.
To feel there's a sense of allowance in it, if only for himself. )
She claims herself. If she wishes, then I would. If she seeks rest, then I will do as I can.
( A lifetime of divide between the young man who'd bound spirits to yin iron and forged from it a means to survive and control and demand what revenge had asked for, then what a war had cried after, what had been the reason for jealousy and fear from all those who looked upon him and his gifts covetously. His downfall, in each step taken alone, error of his ways the self-sacrificing foolishness of heroes, worlds over.
That man had lost everything, watched it slip between his fingers, and slipped himself through his soulmate's at the hope he'd spare him, spare his broken brother, having to choose. Wrong in that, too.
Wrong to hold what doesn't want to be held, and he'd known that, resurrected out of the abyss into the jest of another man's life, wearing his own face. Being his own self, in spite of the costs. )
A man can demand as he likes, and it doesn't make him right. He can ask, and he can assist. Or command for cessation, when a life hangs in balance.
( His demand in the temple, his cutting through resentments to save his nephew, to prevent Wen Ning's possession from leading to something total, impossible to return from.
That he pauses, one step out of alignment, then looks to his husband with furrowed brow of genuine surprise, is a different sort of discord. )
Wait, don't you claim me?
( Sadly, he remains unaware that Lethe is any particular sex. Completely... unaware. All hail ta. )
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( This man, who has forged and tamed Yin iron whole, who sundered sect politics, who created new pathways of cultivation.
This man, who grew lotus flower in barren muck, who found a child to raise from ether, who created a clan.
This man, who sequestered his welfare amid threats to banish disrepute and reveal decades of conspiracy.
This man, who has here kept them whole and hale, alive and tremulously bartering their path home.
...this man, Lan Wangji decides between extensive, painstaking blinks, is a fool. Just as politely, he abandons Lethe without her indulgences — bear with it, beautiful girl, serpentine darling, already threatening him with scowls and petty glares and another choice nudge, for she is a conqueror of the skies and he only a peasant who owes her obeisance — and drifts to catch his husband's ribbon-bound wrist. To hold it up in pained, pointed, staring illustration, until one of the matrons left of Wei Ying in the interminable queue, takes this time to mutter, 'Ain't even gold, that.'
Truer than the sophisticated, studied artifice of Jin filigree, deeper than the thunderous cleaving of Nie, more intrusive than the deceptive artfulness of Yunmeng. Heart and soul and the emblem of the clan crowning the bindings of the sect, anointing Wei Ying's claim. )
You recognise no claim?
( There are deserts complaining of more humidity than his voice. )
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