( Like an itch, like a scab. It wants unstitching. The rabid, eviscerating attention of Lan Wangji's greedy hands. There is a chasm in him, air cloying. He cannot breathe for himself, lungs strained, beat of his jugular's pulse staggered.
He thinks, I can bear this.
Thinks, He'll claw my heart out.
Hardship is a sequence of beads, tolerable in increments. Slip one at a time, between your fingertips. Let it go. Let it flow. You need only survive the one now, I can bear this —
— leans, hand guts the weed of Wei Ying's hair to wrench him up, crashes their mouths together. Tectonic collision, the kiss lands asymmetrical. Their lips, first, do not fit. He forces the position. It stings, rearranging Wei Ying as if he were doll-like, ragged, tender, foreign — an entity that is barely on the cusp of extension to Lan Wangji, that can still afford a distant, dissonant, separate existence. Asynchrony is only the body recognising that which is not itself. Wei Ying. Wei Ying, Wei Ying, Wei Ying.
He bites his husband's mouth, red of it a foregone conclusion. )
Piss off.
( Taunting, teasing, riling Lan Wangji. What was it Emilia said? Whitening his hair. Constantly speaking only to be heard, to irritate, to spark flame or action. Lan Wangji's hand wrestles free, forcibly, with hope of dropping Wei Ying down. Let him be unmoored, too.
After, he feels worn out, eroded. The extremities of his flesh cold, draft of the stairwell backing its home in him. A rabbit slips by his hip, to huddle, to warm him. )
In this, you are as a woman to me. ( No. Cut breath, stilted. The quiet implications of subjugation that gender designations present in the sects, absent here. ) There are mysteries of you I shall never understand.
( For want of different make, foreign natures. The theory of childbearing — the living, the dead — is simple. The emotional resonance overwhelms. )
Unless you speak them. ( Share, not only the burden, but the banalities. The smallest parts of Wei Ying, asked not to incriminate, but to glean. )
( The delicious nature of pressing until Lan Zhan trips over the last vestige of his reserve and acts. Explodes into furious motion, even more contained this time, the cut of teeth and lips and awkward angles forced to compliance with wanting hands, craving thick as the red of blood that decorates his lower lip when he's dropped, and Wei Wuxian collapses with a small sound of loss, pupils too wide in his already dark eyes. The rabbit on his lap scrambles off when he starts to slide out of Lan Zhan's lap wholesale, his hands latching on to his husband's robe-bedecked legs to keep him from slipping down stairs on the thin padding of his backside.
He takes a moment, head tipped forward, dark mass of his hair left for Lan Zhan's contemplationg, to breathe. To turn and look back over his shoulder, open mouth tending toward a smile with a certain amount of wonder, his tongue worrying thoughtlessly at the tooth-born cut in his lip.
To want, and be wanted. To be known in any part, and to hear I want to know more. )
Ah. Okay?
( Let him hold like this for a beat, another, his heart hammering in his chest, visible at his throat. )
I'll speak. About everything. Just, ah. Ask? When I forget?
( He doesn't judge it rightly, even now, when times are meant for speaking, when they're meant for silence. A lifetime of being irreverent to keep relationships smooth hasn't made it easy to reach beyond that and admit what else is there, what he feels, when it isn't convenient.
It turns out, heartache and want and sadness and joy and the hollow space in his chest that Lan Zhan fills with its conflicting, wonderful emotions that leave him exhausted in a pleasant way more often than not, these can all be truths too. And they're never convenient, and that's fine, even if he didn't think that was true before. )
And kiss me again?
( From where he sits below Lan Zhan's feet, arms winged back and holding to his robed knees, awkward and beautiful and nothing like he thought of himself in moments where he was his most appealing, his most confident. Just this. Just them. Just a cold staircase, two rabbits over the entirety of their human antics, and the pain of what awaits, but not alone. )
( His husband, a tangle of limbs, and the rabbits that litter his lap, the young territory between their legs. Latch of Wei Ying's hands on silken spread, anchored. Nails blunt, a precursor to clawing. A rabbit inundates the negative space between Lan Wangji's ankle and Wei Ying's wrist. He lifts it, unbothered by the husband who clings to him with the despair-drenched white knuckles of a man nearly drowned.
Later, the sibling will remember: how hungry hands hunted the other creature, how he went ignored at the root of the stairs by Lan Wangji's shoulder, too northbound to suffer the indignity of two men and their tussle. How they bound themselves together, but left him alone.
In the howling vastness of the groaning stairwell, Lan Wangji's silence nearly carves out a scream from his lungs. He holds back. Watches the red on Wei Ying's lip, crowds it with his finger, for once not spreading the blood bead but gently bringing it up back to his own mouth, to taste. A smear lingers behind on Wei Ying's lip, timid and doppled.
It suits you, Lan Wangji mouths, for all he suspects Wei Ying's stupor runs like a summer sickness' fever, cloying, frivolous, insufferable — but predictably prone to iminent relief. He might see now, the words plainly shaped, and not glean them. He will understand them, later. After.
He does not force Wei Ying towards him again, but slides down a few more steps, to bracket the side of him. To capture the jut of his jaw in the cup of a hand, and elan in: )
Soft now, or hardened? ( He asks now with the airy, petulant impatience of a precocious student frustrated to ask learning from a master he wishes to outgrow. ) Teach me.
( This, their way, then: negotiation. The cartography of touches and silences. Wei Ying, who taught him the pains of a hard, critical blow, burdened now with the task to educate him and avoid the repercussions of a dissatisfying kiss. )
( What in him shivers at the touch to his lip, at Lan Zhan's mouthed words that don't mean much to him in the moment, the implication of sounds formed and delivered just so, when he's so incredibly distracting with his finger slipping into his mouth—thought doesn't hold coherent, when Wei Wuxian swallows hard.
Bloody lipped, red mouthed. He doesn't crave devouring like this, not dredged into veins, but also like this, the injury of want. Lan Zhan is a picture in pales and blues and dark eyes and the hair that flows down his back, over his shoulders. None of it bears softness the way the rabbits do, their fur silk and velvet, but they're not half the lure of leaning in to the cupped hand, to Lan Zhan's own lean. Fingers twitching, and he moves his hands, runs nails into combed back hair, toward the back of Lan Zhan's head, and up, as the knot of his hair crown holds, whatever the decoration.
Soft now, or hardened? He smiles, teeth a pale wonder that catch light, heart recalling what it is to run when he holds everything in stillness. )
Soft. With the stairs... If we overbalance, the rabbits will suffer.
( As will they, but he's always been more resilient, more used to recovering, more used to the lengths of pain and their forgettings, and the rabbits, the rabbits aren't. Shouldn't be. Are mostly not on his mind at all, given how he's staring invitation at Lan Zhan's lips, not certain he shouldn't have said hard, hard as we can, before this moment flees too.
The ache of his heart, the one that isn't liquid heat that flows through no meridians but through another system entirely, pooling in the absent places of his core and lower still, doesn't diminish. But its edges lose their sharpness, dull down to the inevitable ending of that thread, coming, coming, soon. )
( Soft, sweet. Like feathers, like freshness of snow. A powder of itself. They are temples of bones, still breathing. His walls will crumble, his defences break.
Wei Ying's hand in his hair tightens the wet sailor's knot of him, twists. He falls into Wei Ying, less for gravity or negligence of himself than the quiet exhilaration of knowing he will be caught, he will be brought to shore.
This turn, his palm cradles Wei Ying's jaw, clumsy. Climbs, latches. The single torch's paltry potence leaves dusk to swallow the corridor whole. Spattering of light, here, there, blinks of a candle's wink, and they could be anyone, could be anyone at all. Live in these bodies like thieves, the start of his second kiss a misadventure of clumsy, blunt geometries. The fit is poor. He angles. Then suckles on Wei Ying's lip, more than seduces him, then nearly bloodies his nail, scratching the wasteland of the nearest stairstep to keep himself reined in.
They meet, somehow, in the midst of it all, one soul learning the game of halves combining. Bloodied, Wei Ying's mouth emboldens him to think of conquest, of burning. That, moan stifled, he has won something here. That he has not paid for it with the skin of his back.
It ends before he knows it ever caught shape. Slips from him, even when he resurrects it in quick, dry presses of his mouth on Wei Ying's lids, his forehead after. Ragged breath, he has lost rhythm. )
Don't leave me. ( Soft and not hardened. As if he speaks to the rabbits. )
Wherever you go to make men again from your clay of ashes. Wherever you go that no one may follow. ( But for Xue Yang, Wrath. He suspects, for the dark mahogany quality of her, Vanessa. A meek handful, past this. )
Come back to me after, as today.
( He accepts it, the fool. He will accept anything. )
( Was there pain, in any of this? Has he forgotten in the moment beyond the first sharp inclination, when the warmth that follows is a subtle shift forward, holding and held, faces aligned without perfection until they find ways to slot noses past noses, the small, private noises of it all. Is it a victory, to not be bloodied and desperate, to not be bent over in pain, and to feel, momentarily, the shadows caress their faces, embrace their not-quite-silence, hides them from the world while they're not performing for the world to see?
Wei Wuxian stutters back into himself, Lan Zhan's stifled moan lingering in his ears, a promise unmet, awaiting fulfilling. Blinks against the kisses pressed to his face, to Lan Zhan's breath as ragged as Wei Wuxian feels, his fingers shifting hold to stroke as the words sink below the surface of his too thick skin.
Don't leave me. Not again, not now, and he strokes from temple to the top of his head, and down the cascading waterfall of his hair. Strokes like he doesn't know how to do correctly with rabbits, how his shijie had soothed him from his youngest years to those within her time of dying. Precious, he thinks, recognising it as a tooth bearing truth that smiles or threatens or both, depending on who listens.
He shifts into Lan Zhan, just enough to bring forehead to forehead, metal caught between. )
I'll always come home.
( The simpler truth, found in long journeys and realignments of self before this world, further tempered in the trials of this one. Home is a place, isn't it? A place in the heart of those he loves. And while Sizhui has one kind of love, one kind of respect, he's still an unknown factor to him in the ways that Lan Zhan has learned, in the weak moments, the strong ones, the arrogance of their shared youth, the pain parting them later, a drop in the bucket of Lan Zhan's life.
His hand strokes over Lan Zhan's hair, the ensconced flame shuddering in the gasp of a breeze that staggers past, the rabbits huddling down away from the movement that flutters back to stillness, an exhalation of fresh air finding them even here, so far from where the air flows easy and true. Like they must, to survive each other. Like he wants to, out of the shadows and into the corners of Lan Zhan's heart.
A home, as his is, dusty corners and all. )
I'll always come home to you.
( Not Gusu. Not Yunmeng. Not Yiling, which was never a home, but was a refuge, and a death sentence at different times. Just to Lan Zhan, and the incidentals of location be at times damned. )
( After, his mouth raw, his thoughts stormed. After, Wei Ying unmoored, hands delving haggard and sweet, hold deepened at the rim of Lan Wangji's guan. Sinking. He dips his head into the gesture, works with Wei Ying's pull, sooner than against it. A rabbit tumbles into his lap, idle stray — not purring, but burrowing in the cradle of his silks, where they nestle. )
When we depart here. ( His lips smack together, tacky, tarred. He licks, once. Again. ) If — heed me. ( They do not speak of this, do not consider it. Two years of their lives, stranded on a silvered spider's web thread. ) If one of us... does not remember.
( If, and his heart's shrivelled and bled and ached, they arrive into different worlds, distinct only for the grace of shichen of difference — ) Pledge we will tell one another.
( If not speak of this world, then of the tumult surpassed, of the ebb and tide and deluge of their grown affection. Of their marriage, three, four, five-times honoured. Of their mouths in feral meeting, of how Lan Wangji's hands cling now like forest branches, gnarly and stiff over Wei Ying's, clumsy and plaintive. )
Pledge. ( He cannot be sixteen years a widower to missed opportunity once more. )
( Coaxing himself, or soothing them both, or swelling with a warm and gentle wholeness he doesn't want to examine too hard as Lan Zhan's head dips close. Desire, yes, lust, whatever hard words of the physical pull he accepts now is strong, confused for action, and yet weaker to the trembling in his heart. He wants to claim and give and broker pleasure like a gift of the heart, sibling to the bright cut of pain's grounding.
A hitch in his breath, and it's for another time, for a later when they're not sitting as moss on stones, dampened by the morning dew. Now is his husband's lips, glistening; the hurt that forms between them as a bird newly hatched, staggeringly ugly, piteously crying. Desperate for the protection of the nest they build of words and deeds, to allow its feathers fledge, to the disguise of maturity, protection of a delicate hope learning to spread its bald wings.
Soothing, his words with their fervor spoken low and deep, eyes hot, the red of them more vibrant now when tears try, try to stir themselves to eyes. Once he wondered how a man could allow himself so much luxury for tears, of joy, of pain, of everything inbetween. Now he has no reserves to keep himself from the trickle of water to wet the earth between them. )
I will sing them to you even when you don't wish to hear. I pledge it, Lan Zhan. My words marked.
( There will be things he's already forgotten, his nature and his turning away from the worst of things to instead hold closer to the better, to the moments he wishes not to forget until time strips them away, like the shape of his mother's voice, the texture of his parents in their shared laughter. )
If I have to whisk you away from Gusu to listen, bind us both until you hear, I pledge I will tell. Until you hear. Until you know.
( In the shifted paradigm of this landscape, broken and dead and brilliantly alive, wartorn and surviving and thriving in pockets of unanticipated beauty. Back home, in their disparate roles, connected by red strings and blue ribbon and a road that curves through everywhere and nowhere, all the same. If he must take the Chief Cultivator and wrap him up, pull him relentless and resentful from the duties he gave himself, single solitary choice in so many dozens they both made, he will.
( A hard pledge, yet easily brokered. Wei Ying murmurs his approval, and he had thought the scratchy, sharp-boned fit of their bodies done, the next expectant exhalation that deflates Wei Ying's lungs bereft of expectation. He kisses him again — one last time, one last time more — with the dried, flecked finality of a brush stroke that sheds at once formality and the last drool of the cinnabar paste left over. Less to communicate than to seal, he has heard, he will keep to account.
What is promised here, with two fumbling rabbits scrambling to win territory on their laps and skidding, as their sweet paws fail to latch, and producing the hummed, gravelly sounds that never seem as if they might fit such small, fragile bodies — these words cannot be rescinded. )
And I. ( He gives it knowing, but weak. Expected. )
I shall not be silent, a coward, or a fool. ( He will be more than himself, layers upon layers of silks and learned bravery. Part his father's greed, his brother's love, Wei Ying's audacity. ) I shall have you in honest marriage.
( And they will not lose what this hour has bound, they will not be slaves to time and circumstance, they will not doubt themselves. Uncle might disapprove. Brother laugh. So what of it? Better the world betrayed than the world once more allowed to betray them. )
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
( Like an itch, like a scab. It wants unstitching. The rabid, eviscerating attention of Lan Wangji's greedy hands. There is a chasm in him, air cloying. He cannot breathe for himself, lungs strained, beat of his jugular's pulse staggered.
He thinks, I can bear this.
Thinks, He'll claw my heart out.
Hardship is a sequence of beads, tolerable in increments. Slip one at a time, between your fingertips. Let it go. Let it flow. You need only survive the one now, I can bear this —
— leans, hand guts the weed of Wei Ying's hair to wrench him up, crashes their mouths together. Tectonic collision, the kiss lands asymmetrical. Their lips, first, do not fit. He forces the position. It stings, rearranging Wei Ying as if he were doll-like, ragged, tender, foreign — an entity that is barely on the cusp of extension to Lan Wangji, that can still afford a distant, dissonant, separate existence. Asynchrony is only the body recognising that which is not itself. Wei Ying. Wei Ying, Wei Ying, Wei Ying.
He bites his husband's mouth, red of it a foregone conclusion. )
Piss off.
( Taunting, teasing, riling Lan Wangji. What was it Emilia said? Whitening his hair. Constantly speaking only to be heard, to irritate, to spark flame or action. Lan Wangji's hand wrestles free, forcibly, with hope of dropping Wei Ying down. Let him be unmoored, too.
After, he feels worn out, eroded. The extremities of his flesh cold, draft of the stairwell backing its home in him. A rabbit slips by his hip, to huddle, to warm him. )
In this, you are as a woman to me. ( No. Cut breath, stilted. The quiet implications of subjugation that gender designations present in the sects, absent here. ) There are mysteries of you I shall never understand.
( For want of different make, foreign natures. The theory of childbearing — the living, the dead — is simple. The emotional resonance overwhelms. )
Unless you speak them. ( Share, not only the burden, but the banalities. The smallest parts of Wei Ying, asked not to incriminate, but to glean. )
no subject
( The delicious nature of pressing until Lan Zhan trips over the last vestige of his reserve and acts. Explodes into furious motion, even more contained this time, the cut of teeth and lips and awkward angles forced to compliance with wanting hands, craving thick as the red of blood that decorates his lower lip when he's dropped, and Wei Wuxian collapses with a small sound of loss, pupils too wide in his already dark eyes. The rabbit on his lap scrambles off when he starts to slide out of Lan Zhan's lap wholesale, his hands latching on to his husband's robe-bedecked legs to keep him from slipping down stairs on the thin padding of his backside.
He takes a moment, head tipped forward, dark mass of his hair left for Lan Zhan's contemplationg, to breathe. To turn and look back over his shoulder, open mouth tending toward a smile with a certain amount of wonder, his tongue worrying thoughtlessly at the tooth-born cut in his lip.
To want, and be wanted. To be known in any part, and to hear I want to know more. )
Ah. Okay?
( Let him hold like this for a beat, another, his heart hammering in his chest, visible at his throat. )
I'll speak. About everything. Just, ah. Ask? When I forget?
( He doesn't judge it rightly, even now, when times are meant for speaking, when they're meant for silence. A lifetime of being irreverent to keep relationships smooth hasn't made it easy to reach beyond that and admit what else is there, what he feels, when it isn't convenient.
It turns out, heartache and want and sadness and joy and the hollow space in his chest that Lan Zhan fills with its conflicting, wonderful emotions that leave him exhausted in a pleasant way more often than not, these can all be truths too. And they're never convenient, and that's fine, even if he didn't think that was true before. )
And kiss me again?
( From where he sits below Lan Zhan's feet, arms winged back and holding to his robed knees, awkward and beautiful and nothing like he thought of himself in moments where he was his most appealing, his most confident. Just this. Just them. Just a cold staircase, two rabbits over the entirety of their human antics, and the pain of what awaits, but not alone. )
no subject
( His husband, a tangle of limbs, and the rabbits that litter his lap, the young territory between their legs. Latch of Wei Ying's hands on silken spread, anchored. Nails blunt, a precursor to clawing. A rabbit inundates the negative space between Lan Wangji's ankle and Wei Ying's wrist. He lifts it, unbothered by the husband who clings to him with the despair-drenched white knuckles of a man nearly drowned.
Later, the sibling will remember: how hungry hands hunted the other creature, how he went ignored at the root of the stairs by Lan Wangji's shoulder, too northbound to suffer the indignity of two men and their tussle. How they bound themselves together, but left him alone.
In the howling vastness of the groaning stairwell, Lan Wangji's silence nearly carves out a scream from his lungs. He holds back. Watches the red on Wei Ying's lip, crowds it with his finger, for once not spreading the blood bead but gently bringing it up back to his own mouth, to taste. A smear lingers behind on Wei Ying's lip, timid and doppled.
It suits you, Lan Wangji mouths, for all he suspects Wei Ying's stupor runs like a summer sickness' fever, cloying, frivolous, insufferable — but predictably prone to iminent relief. He might see now, the words plainly shaped, and not glean them. He will understand them, later. After.
He does not force Wei Ying towards him again, but slides down a few more steps, to bracket the side of him. To capture the jut of his jaw in the cup of a hand, and elan in: )
Soft now, or hardened? ( He asks now with the airy, petulant impatience of a precocious student frustrated to ask learning from a master he wishes to outgrow. ) Teach me.
( This, their way, then: negotiation. The cartography of touches and silences. Wei Ying, who taught him the pains of a hard, critical blow, burdened now with the task to educate him and avoid the repercussions of a dissatisfying kiss. )
no subject
( What in him shivers at the touch to his lip, at Lan Zhan's mouthed words that don't mean much to him in the moment, the implication of sounds formed and delivered just so, when he's so incredibly distracting with his finger slipping into his mouth—thought doesn't hold coherent, when Wei Wuxian swallows hard.
Bloody lipped, red mouthed. He doesn't crave devouring like this, not dredged into veins, but also like this, the injury of want. Lan Zhan is a picture in pales and blues and dark eyes and the hair that flows down his back, over his shoulders. None of it bears softness the way the rabbits do, their fur silk and velvet, but they're not half the lure of leaning in to the cupped hand, to Lan Zhan's own lean. Fingers twitching, and he moves his hands, runs nails into combed back hair, toward the back of Lan Zhan's head, and up, as the knot of his hair crown holds, whatever the decoration.
Soft now, or hardened? He smiles, teeth a pale wonder that catch light, heart recalling what it is to run when he holds everything in stillness. )
Soft. With the stairs... If we overbalance, the rabbits will suffer.
( As will they, but he's always been more resilient, more used to recovering, more used to the lengths of pain and their forgettings, and the rabbits, the rabbits aren't. Shouldn't be. Are mostly not on his mind at all, given how he's staring invitation at Lan Zhan's lips, not certain he shouldn't have said hard, hard as we can, before this moment flees too.
The ache of his heart, the one that isn't liquid heat that flows through no meridians but through another system entirely, pooling in the absent places of his core and lower still, doesn't diminish. But its edges lose their sharpness, dull down to the inevitable ending of that thread, coming, coming, soon. )
no subject
( Soft, sweet. Like feathers, like freshness of snow. A powder of itself. They are temples of bones, still breathing. His walls will crumble, his defences break.
Wei Ying's hand in his hair tightens the wet sailor's knot of him, twists. He falls into Wei Ying, less for gravity or negligence of himself than the quiet exhilaration of knowing he will be caught, he will be brought to shore.
This turn, his palm cradles Wei Ying's jaw, clumsy. Climbs, latches. The single torch's paltry potence leaves dusk to swallow the corridor whole. Spattering of light, here, there, blinks of a candle's wink, and they could be anyone, could be anyone at all. Live in these bodies like thieves, the start of his second kiss a misadventure of clumsy, blunt geometries. The fit is poor. He angles. Then suckles on Wei Ying's lip, more than seduces him, then nearly bloodies his nail, scratching the wasteland of the nearest stairstep to keep himself reined in.
They meet, somehow, in the midst of it all, one soul learning the game of halves combining. Bloodied, Wei Ying's mouth emboldens him to think of conquest, of burning. That, moan stifled, he has won something here. That he has not paid for it with the skin of his back.
It ends before he knows it ever caught shape. Slips from him, even when he resurrects it in quick, dry presses of his mouth on Wei Ying's lids, his forehead after. Ragged breath, he has lost rhythm. )
Don't leave me. ( Soft and not hardened. As if he speaks to the rabbits. )
Wherever you go to make men again from your clay of ashes. Wherever you go that no one may follow. ( But for Xue Yang, Wrath. He suspects, for the dark mahogany quality of her, Vanessa. A meek handful, past this. )
Come back to me after, as today.
( He accepts it, the fool. He will accept anything. )
no subject
( Was there pain, in any of this? Has he forgotten in the moment beyond the first sharp inclination, when the warmth that follows is a subtle shift forward, holding and held, faces aligned without perfection until they find ways to slot noses past noses, the small, private noises of it all. Is it a victory, to not be bloodied and desperate, to not be bent over in pain, and to feel, momentarily, the shadows caress their faces, embrace their not-quite-silence, hides them from the world while they're not performing for the world to see?
Wei Wuxian stutters back into himself, Lan Zhan's stifled moan lingering in his ears, a promise unmet, awaiting fulfilling. Blinks against the kisses pressed to his face, to Lan Zhan's breath as ragged as Wei Wuxian feels, his fingers shifting hold to stroke as the words sink below the surface of his too thick skin.
Don't leave me. Not again, not now, and he strokes from temple to the top of his head, and down the cascading waterfall of his hair. Strokes like he doesn't know how to do correctly with rabbits, how his shijie had soothed him from his youngest years to those within her time of dying. Precious, he thinks, recognising it as a tooth bearing truth that smiles or threatens or both, depending on who listens.
He shifts into Lan Zhan, just enough to bring forehead to forehead, metal caught between. )
I'll always come home.
( The simpler truth, found in long journeys and realignments of self before this world, further tempered in the trials of this one. Home is a place, isn't it? A place in the heart of those he loves. And while Sizhui has one kind of love, one kind of respect, he's still an unknown factor to him in the ways that Lan Zhan has learned, in the weak moments, the strong ones, the arrogance of their shared youth, the pain parting them later, a drop in the bucket of Lan Zhan's life.
His hand strokes over Lan Zhan's hair, the ensconced flame shuddering in the gasp of a breeze that staggers past, the rabbits huddling down away from the movement that flutters back to stillness, an exhalation of fresh air finding them even here, so far from where the air flows easy and true. Like they must, to survive each other. Like he wants to, out of the shadows and into the corners of Lan Zhan's heart.
A home, as his is, dusty corners and all. )
I'll always come home to you.
( Not Gusu. Not Yunmeng. Not Yiling, which was never a home, but was a refuge, and a death sentence at different times. Just to Lan Zhan, and the incidentals of location be at times damned. )
no subject
( After, his mouth raw, his thoughts stormed. After, Wei Ying unmoored, hands delving haggard and sweet, hold deepened at the rim of Lan Wangji's guan. Sinking. He dips his head into the gesture, works with Wei Ying's pull, sooner than against it. A rabbit tumbles into his lap, idle stray — not purring, but burrowing in the cradle of his silks, where they nestle. )
When we depart here. ( His lips smack together, tacky, tarred. He licks, once. Again. ) If — heed me. ( They do not speak of this, do not consider it. Two years of their lives, stranded on a silvered spider's web thread. ) If one of us... does not remember.
( If, and his heart's shrivelled and bled and ached, they arrive into different worlds, distinct only for the grace of shichen of difference — ) Pledge we will tell one another.
( If not speak of this world, then of the tumult surpassed, of the ebb and tide and deluge of their grown affection. Of their marriage, three, four, five-times honoured. Of their mouths in feral meeting, of how Lan Wangji's hands cling now like forest branches, gnarly and stiff over Wei Ying's, clumsy and plaintive. )
Pledge. ( He cannot be sixteen years a widower to missed opportunity once more. )
no subject
( Coaxing himself, or soothing them both, or swelling with a warm and gentle wholeness he doesn't want to examine too hard as Lan Zhan's head dips close. Desire, yes, lust, whatever hard words of the physical pull he accepts now is strong, confused for action, and yet weaker to the trembling in his heart. He wants to claim and give and broker pleasure like a gift of the heart, sibling to the bright cut of pain's grounding.
A hitch in his breath, and it's for another time, for a later when they're not sitting as moss on stones, dampened by the morning dew. Now is his husband's lips, glistening; the hurt that forms between them as a bird newly hatched, staggeringly ugly, piteously crying. Desperate for the protection of the nest they build of words and deeds, to allow its feathers fledge, to the disguise of maturity, protection of a delicate hope learning to spread its bald wings.
Soothing, his words with their fervor spoken low and deep, eyes hot, the red of them more vibrant now when tears try, try to stir themselves to eyes. Once he wondered how a man could allow himself so much luxury for tears, of joy, of pain, of everything inbetween. Now he has no reserves to keep himself from the trickle of water to wet the earth between them. )
I will sing them to you even when you don't wish to hear. I pledge it, Lan Zhan. My words marked.
( There will be things he's already forgotten, his nature and his turning away from the worst of things to instead hold closer to the better, to the moments he wishes not to forget until time strips them away, like the shape of his mother's voice, the texture of his parents in their shared laughter. )
If I have to whisk you away from Gusu to listen, bind us both until you hear, I pledge I will tell. Until you hear. Until you know.
( In the shifted paradigm of this landscape, broken and dead and brilliantly alive, wartorn and surviving and thriving in pockets of unanticipated beauty. Back home, in their disparate roles, connected by red strings and blue ribbon and a road that curves through everywhere and nowhere, all the same. If he must take the Chief Cultivator and wrap him up, pull him relentless and resentful from the duties he gave himself, single solitary choice in so many dozens they both made, he will.
He'll have nothing to lose. )
no subject
( A hard pledge, yet easily brokered. Wei Ying murmurs his approval, and he had thought the scratchy, sharp-boned fit of their bodies done, the next expectant exhalation that deflates Wei Ying's lungs bereft of expectation. He kisses him again — one last time, one last time more — with the dried, flecked finality of a brush stroke that sheds at once formality and the last drool of the cinnabar paste left over. Less to communicate than to seal, he has heard, he will keep to account.
What is promised here, with two fumbling rabbits scrambling to win territory on their laps and skidding, as their sweet paws fail to latch, and producing the hummed, gravelly sounds that never seem as if they might fit such small, fragile bodies — these words cannot be rescinded. )
And I. ( He gives it knowing, but weak. Expected. )
I shall not be silent, a coward, or a fool. ( He will be more than himself, layers upon layers of silks and learned bravery. Part his father's greed, his brother's love, Wei Ying's audacity. ) I shall have you in honest marriage.
( And they will not lose what this hour has bound, they will not be slaves to time and circumstance, they will not doubt themselves. Uncle might disapprove. Brother laugh. So what of it? Better the world betrayed than the world once more allowed to betray them. )