Wei Wuxian does not seek early beds. Not without exhaustion chasing at his heels, spiritually or physically, and it has been a different sort of dance that's become their nightly rituals, even when they're locked in daytime arguments. Laying head to pillows, side by side, whatever the bed is or isn't, whatever ground or platform or stuffed mattress is found underneath. He sprawls across surfaces he knows, and while the city runs itself to ruins and hope, himself helping on both sides to different extents, there is still a room with a hearth that burns, not to keep out the cold, lacking that strength, but to keep a light there even when the light-orb lit lanterns falter.
Magic of light, rather than fire. Steadier, those lights, but he flickers as the flames do, banked and tamed, not the weapons they are in his hands or the hands of witches or Lan Zhan, flames beckoned and cast and curtailed and consuming, like curiosity and silence.
Wei Wuxian sits upon the bed, draped in robes, cleanshaven. Papers in hand, quill that never writes as properly as he wishes even when the ink is smooth as silk and endless as regrets. Cloth folded bundle under the crook of one propped up knee, while he sketches through considerations, waiting.
Before, blood and wine. He wets his lips, loosens his tongue, declines the second sip and the slow-trickled lethargy that honeys his bones leaves him syrupy, slow, distanced from himself. Alert, in the way of animals that recognise the critical loss of their senses and must compensate with slow, tactile, strategic precision.
He thinks, I could yet stumble to sleep, one more day gained. Thinks, It is not so cravenly a thing, to withdraw and seize a better battle. Thinks, I have asked nothing of you since your return. I ask now not to speak of this.
Haunts, pale silhouette chased by sickly, wan candlelight across corridors and the snares and snags of hounds, outside, of men turned beasts and hunting their freedom. The bleeding has done. The slaughter. Sticky-sweet, his fingertips reek of red, even now he's thrice removed their viscera, salting the remains. There is a gutting of him, as if he is husked and set to dry, and he stares before him at his known, pulsing heart.
There. That. Wei Ying's quarters, so seldom entered fairly, formally, without the subterfuge of docile roof tile and yielding eaves. The door squeals rust and heft, like an anguished pig before the blade. Do not cut, but inside, Wei Ying's cradled in his darks and the many fine foibles that paint a man tame, swept in sleepy majesty. He wonders how many talismans sleep purchase Wei Ying's relaxation. Thaws and bristles, and turns his face when the diffused beam of his gaze lands on Wei Ying's cheek, like barren land unspoiled. Ah. I bound you when you looked just so.
The door whispers shut before him. He does not prowl. Click, then clank, when one knee hits the floor, strength and lacquer misjudged. On old wood, scratches spider and lent light dapple bite wounds. The second knee, muted. The ghost of wine ashes his mouth. His fingers spoil the arrangements of his hair, before they free his headband, pulled taut and straight for display in both hands, and he kneels with it as he did with the discipline whips once, holds the pose and feels heat lick the bones of his back.
"Close family may touch this ribbon."
You knew. You above all read and wrote the rules once and again and nearly in perpetuity. His brow is too languid to crisp, to wrinkle. Let this moment pass by him, through him, river water. He is not privy to it, only meat and crumbling bone before Wei Ying's assessing gaze, found wanting. An object.
"Once, in our ancestral cave. The rite of your rescue borrowed the forms of wedded claim." Sneering, snarling, the animal that lairs in him shows its teeth. He cannot sate and appease it, only contain, conceal, bury. Stone, gravel. He is. Breathe, survive. What is right, and what is wrong?
"You did not knowingly consent. It does not bind." He wants the wine returned, to gulp it, to sear his tongue. "What difference, now?"
Take the ribbon. Put it to fire. What difference? A city burns.
Lan Zhan comes, and he is as undone as Wei Wuxian can remember him, sharp edges and frayed nerves, when he enters to kneel without a request made, a confession before a conversation. He knows the shape of that movement, what it is to see and accuse and be accused without the words exchanged, what defense is, what surrender feels like.
Fingers fumble through hair, untying a ribbon that leaves its mark across Lan Zhan's forehead, held out as if to ask for some meaning returned, some acknowledgement of supplication. No apologies offered, but cut words, presumptive of one man to state and claim one side as meaningful, to cut two men and declare them both free. Wei Wuxian knows the shape of that story, rises a man not happy, not angered in the way he had been earlier. Quiet, exposed with his layers, and sets the papers, the quill aside. Spreads fingers to catch at the bundled cloth, carries it forward on quieter feet, to stare down for less than half a heartbeat before he sinks down too, knees hitting the floor.
There is an anger born of distress that he knows well, clawing at his heart. Wei Wuxian sets the bundle down between them, reaches for the ribbon weighed down by meanings he had known in side associations, and he who breaks rules, who bends them, who flirts with pushing hard and harder to learn what boundaries he can survive crossing or coming close to, says nothing at first.
Let it settle for heartbeats joined, that silence. While fingers miraculously undyed by ink are delicate with silk, stroking over it, over Lan Zhan's hand without touching.
"Twice," he says, "Scant weeks ago. We slept in reds, and before my adopted ancestors, you tied ribbon to wrist." He can draw the conclusions, as he lifts Lan Zhan's ribbon free, as he shifts to toss one end over his shoulder, to keep the length of it from trailing down to flirt with dust and dirt and stone. "You've used silence to deny me family twice, Lan Zhan. You make decisions the way I did before I died. Without discussion, bearing consequences alone."
He smooths the ribbon, moves to loop it around Lan Zhan's wrist, fingers deft so long as he doesn't fight, doesn't pull back, isn't more the alcohol laced creature who bears teeth and wounds scarred over into whites starker than his mourning. Another loop, then. Securing, before he shifts and the ribbon spools back over his shoulder, leaves a swooping length between them, metal and stylised clouds floating soft. Wei Wuxian binds his wrist meditatively, eyes darker, expression difficult to read for his own difficulties.
After, he reaches for the cloth between them, ribbon dancing along with one hand's motion, not tight enough to tug as tether, but to suggest nonetheless. Light catches from fire and lantern, dances bright along a form wrought in silvers, impression of mountains embraced by clouds, a sun that rises over, piercing through. Gusu, on some mornings, and the light one of them is named for.
He lifts the crown, such as it is, holds it up, high enough as suggestion. Gifts that had nothing to do with these bindings, but with the ones that Wei Wuxian knew, and he cares, fumbling and angry and breaking and sweet and sour and whatever else he is, flawed, to use inopportune moment to gift.
Twice, and it stings him, chafes the sharp knob of his wrist when his ribbon corsets tight, the tip of his tongue where he strains to build, brick-by-brick, his silence his fortress, its walls crumbled down. A night passed in reds, and this once you did not bleed it, and what was I to do?
But breathe and be, man and monster, and he searches his hand, where Wei Ying's already braided fate to his own wrist, hunts Wei Ying's face for shadow, for the lived-in, stale marks of disdaining wonder, like wet-rot mould. Once, you turned red eyes on me, just so, and you might have spat, but for there was a drought, and you wanted for all things in Yiling, the waters, the bones, the stone, and still you would not choose Gusu instead of it. And Wangji tasted that frenzy, like wild hunt during summer storm, ions itching and prickling his skin, lungs speared be petrichor.
He tugs his arm now, only to try the ribbon's bind — relents, when it holds, and Wei Ying presides over the last of the rites, to bring out...
"No," leaves him once he knows his gift, harsher at the edges. A crown. Not his crown, not the heirloom of Gusu Lan, not the auxiliary piece that once served him, honoured in war, to become known, Hanguang-Jun. Those remain lost, sold off, irretrievable. And this new pretty trinket — the empty gift of a concubine — he has not earned, past salting the wounds of the same man who summoned him here to slap his cheek in one heartbeat, and salve it the next.
If not for Sizhui, they would have torn each other apart by now, limb by limb. There is gristle in him already tearing, organs easing unstitched. And Wei Ying means to give him gold.
"Do not use me to punish yourself." Stop, oh stop. "To indulge me is not to make amends with the world."
Suffering Lan Wangji's indignities will not reimburse Jiang Yanli her life or her widowhood, it will not retrieve Wen Qing's breath, or Jiang Cheng's faith. Hundreds, thousands who watered battlefields with the last of their innards, their blood, their decay, will not rise again, unhurried.
"I did not steal a marriage that died at your unmarked grave."
Held in hands, and he watches Lan Zhan's face. Hears him, and knows they
don't always speak of the same things, but they can, at times, understand
the divides.
Imperfect, those understandings, the nascent selves they became
independently, and then in what stumbling, etched heartbreak endured from
two vastly different perspectives, from two different understanding and
knowledges found within themselves and the world.
He settles the crown into the lap made by his legs as he kneels, not
supplicant. It's not his mood, banked to embers, nor the binding true in
the ribbon, the umbilicus connecting them both. Wei Ying would not choose
to abandon without himself being the collateral cost.
He asked, and did not press, and stripped himself and the world together.
Here, he strips voice to murmur, knowing Lan Zhan can hear, even if he
decides not to.
"I hear you. Your words for your fears, or the feeling of your beliefs.
Will you hear mine, before deciding you know them, ah?" A pause, lingering,
and velvet clad steel of an extended response:
"I do not know," he concedes, gravelly and loose, overspilling. You took your truths to the abyss.
Black weed of his hair wracked by ribbon silk and mourning sadness, Wei Ying is owlish beauty, crude and untamed. His fingers between graze of teeth would feel raw, his skins green, unbroken. Young, for the sixteen years that spared him. Caged and gilded in gold and borrowed fineries, Lan Wangji yearns to bite.
Does not lean. Starts, under licked strips of dying honey-light, to scatter loose the binds and pins of his own hair, Wei Ying's hang dragged and pulled when Wangji tugs at a stubborn snag. Admonished and corrected, but not yet denied. Still welcome in Wei Ying's quarters, lodged before his bed, sleep tickling the edges of his wine-drenched awareness. Until he is repelled, he will ready his body for deep sleep and the kindness of rest earned.
"Master Wei may teach me." One sting, and Wangji's bite done.
"Willing students," he says softly, moving his hand in concert with Lan Zhan's, a strange sort of mimicry that ends with his fingers, once, brushing against Lan Zhan's scalp and through the weight of his dark hair, heavy as all their hair falls. "Are always to be taught. So I learned, growing up in Yunmeng Jiang."
So he doesn't offer now, Master of fields Lan Zhan does not move through, and stumbling as he does with his own ability to handle emotion, a riot of birds kept caged in his chest and soothed with unheard lullabies. He speaks, the story written in the air between them, but that is all it is.
Air from lungs, formed by wound-wet tongues, slipped past bone-white teeth.
"Months ago, I might have considered this penance. Or owed, from guilt or helplessness. Or exhaustion," he says, admitting to that too, before a man whose air tastes of alcohol and exhaustion of the physical and spiritual kind. "I didn't want you to feel guilt, you know. It was never your fault, engaged or married or whatever it is you knew that I didn't, it wasn't your fault we were too young and stubborn to know how to stand by each other. I didn't learn to ask for help until afterward."
After he died. For a knelt conversation, Lan Zhan readying himself for sleep, wrists bound, and rejected crown in his lap, it's a beginning of words, of trying to find explanations, of knowing the horrible fondness and ache and sorrow in his chest was biting at his eyes now. Two rapid blinks that become five, and he breathes in sharp, and smiles.
Rejection, that he's used to. People presuming on his motives and thoughts, that he bears scars from, like any person might.
"I didn't learn how to ask anyone for help, to ask anyone to stay, before it was too late." Too late for him to be heartless; too late for him to have waited for an escort that was never coming; too late to undo his desire to see his sister, to witness his martial nephew, to be part of the circles he'd grown up within as the second class, brilliant citizen he'd been, ostracised and made to live outside to save what he thought was worth saving. To protect and live by the kind of justice that felt more important than innocents killed to appease the bloodlust of those who'd won.
I stayed. Like weed and poisoned ivy, climbing the crevices of Wei Ying, the fever of his rebel youth, where the heat of the Wen sun burned roots before their latching. Look at Wei Ying, the imprint Lan Wangji has made on the universe, a man so beautiful, so hunted, touch could only whet him, stones could only sharpen his hurts.
"They made you anew, with hands so soft," and he whispers it, fearful to speak, loud and joyful for the heavens — a secret like incisions of a razor blade, lines dimmed and thin and barely strong through their addition, Wei Ying's secret to own and hone. Bite by bite, bleed a man whole.
Wangji is an animal pacing himself, his convictions. The white, bright slab of his fangs hounds bated breath. Beneath the blunt ledge of his knees, Wei Ying's floor groans and strains, creaks traded between heartbeats. A forest breathes just so, in increments of rustle. He feels himself a snake, laired, burrowing, striking only now as he catches Wei Ying's wrists and opens the bloom of his palms, as if it is a precious thing. He rounds the petal of his fingertips against Wangji's cheeks, pressed in. Breathing, the swell of his cheek fills out the gauntness of Wei Ying's grasp, pushes against his bird bones.
"I did not know," he rasps, the humanity of his body so little lived in. "Your hands could be so gentle. You did not teach me."
Only want and grief, sixteen years taut on their string, how he'd spill the beads bubbling in his grasp. What was Wei Ying's to give? A widow might have had his war stipend, his name, a child to warm her belly, her arms. A paramour of mere association would have earned at least a claim to the flagrant suffering that soubrettes and mistresses of history have worn as a shroud of dignity. We, who were not wives, pity us.
And Lan Wangji? Friend, adversary, tremulous soulmate shielded by anonymity. He has inherited only this, the whimsy of his pulse trapped beneath Wei Ying's fingertips, danced and honeyed, but strong. "I cared for a man with hands so coarse." I wed him, failed him. "He gave me my son. He died. And you are not bound for him."
He looks at Wei Ying now, and there is an emptiness that means Lan Wangji has rallied the banners of his strength, but his soldiers deserted him. He has been so, on the battlefield, remembers his brother at his back, and their disciples a fury white and distant, held at arm's length by the disparity in their skill. Now, he kneels to worship his equal, and Wei Ying's hands slip his, he sets both down.
"When you find a wife," it scratches him to speak so, burns. Knows it right. "I shall give you the bride price."
Of Wangji's own estate, of the stretches of silver his clan and his mother forfeited him gladly. So bear this, until then. Survive the indignity of nights spent in chased warmth, like animals huddled against the quiet shape of their mourning for the same man who was and will not be again. Bear the thought of a marriage in name, absent obligation, easily unspooled. Bear shared custody of their son, beautiful jewel who shares kinship with half the cultivation world, but is theirs alone for the keeping.
In truth, he did not know his hands were gentle, did not know them coarse beyond the course of their lives and learnings, the callouses that kept them strong, that changed, that faded in time spent neither here nor there. A gasp without air couldn't stir him to the acute pain his fingers are aware of, splayed over warmth of skin not his own, and he, so rarely to have been this intimate with any. Fleeting moments, destined to pass.
Fleeting lives, destined to leave. The warmth of Lan Zhan's skin lingers when his hands are returned to their lap, when his fingers curl like gnarled roots into the fabric of his pooled robe, brushing thigh, brushing the space left between. Kneel, and there were memories enough of kneeling being little but the banal price of having been himself, too good and never good enough, and each act chosen to bring down that regard, because it was something, affirmative, and never quite sunk deep enough beneath his skin to bleed him dry.
Not the whippings, the beatings, the normal measures of a growing life lived and disobedience met. Earned or unearned, there was no enough. He took a long time learning the meaning of it, one way or another; still stumbles through it now, but better tempered, each blow striking hot or cold and forming.
Lan Zhan's words fall, the strike of hammer to anvil, ting.
"Ah," he says, and he smiles with the exhalation, tugs on the ribbon that binds them, lifts his hand to capture one of Lan Zhan's, fingers to find their home slotted between fingers. His hands, not as soft as they once were. Lan Zhan's time-worn and calloused in all the expected, understood ways. "The man I am now, and the man I once was, we both know they're two different people. You, too, Lan Zhan. Who you were when we were young, and who you are, tempered by time, are two different people. I've been learning this man," he says, eyes seeking Lan Zhan's, dark of one night peering into the abyss of another.
"I would have no other bride." A pause, and a lift of his lips, wry. "You'd look handsome in phoenix robes, ah?"
Guan sitting in lap, catching the light and sending it shattered along silver length, the dawn breaking over the mountains. To each, their own interpretation. To each, clarified beginnings, and a lifetime of navigating the roads through.
No other bride. A man changed like the butchered passing of seasons. You played sixteen years of door games alone. Did you win?
Here, this body, the man who occupies it. Clasp clammy, the rope of his silks collaring him a noose. Teeth seed back blood into his winter-watered lips. Pain breathes itself.
Here, this body, he despises it. A house hollowed and brittle, and he cannot fill it, cannot make of himself something viscous and vast, cannot suffuse all his tissue, bind the splinters of his bones. Who he is does not suffices himself. The thrummed stirrings of his body haunt him in syncopation.
He is not himself, drifting to sprawl on hard ground, meandered, easy in places he typically turns labyrinthine against himself. The edge of awareness blur and gasp, less for the drink — too gasped, too little even for him, for his weakness, the foolishness of his privileged habit, his innocence to wine. The euphoria of a hundred old hurts sustains him. Curled in the cradle of his whites, he shifts, turns the bridge of his forehead to burn bright against the thick shield of Wei Ying's knee. The trickle and drip of candle wax drowns the room.
"I wore your red at Nightless City." For the blood of Wei Ying, of his enemies. What more can Wei Ying ask, can be asked of him? He tugs once. Collapses his fingers on Wei Ying's, mould against the wiry edges of his knuckles. Rushes the mad, tinkered-smooth planes of Wei Ying's palms to cover Lan Wangji's face, flat and broad, close and closer like a muzzle, a rooftop against the world. In the interstices between Wei Ying's fingers, the sophisticated, manicured crimson of his thick gown fabric is a corpse gored.
"...can't breathe." The soft spill of Wei Ying's skin inundates him, rips and stitches him back in punishments of kindness. Feverish, Wangji's thumbs arch in, steel their grip and graze the ridges of Wei Ying's palms in minute sketches of scratching. Too slow. Futile rattle. He burrows his nose in the fold of Wei Ying's hands, remembers grey days and a groaning abyss, and how he laughed after, how they laughed at the filth of his robes, how grief mutated the debris of Wei Ying's hundreds of unnamed graves into lace and finery. Then, no. Soft and coarse. He needs —
His teeth flicker sharp at the edges, when he rakes the meat of Wei Ying's left palm with them, bites in and in and blood won't spill, can't spill, he keeps the clench clean. Nuzzles once, still sweet and soft and fresh-snowed, nothing of the battering he'd felt before, sixteen years ago, a lifetime. And he murmurs again, "I cannot breathe."
If asked, would he ever allow the trespass of another's canines against his flesh, Wei Wuxian would laugh, who send cutting looks, would dance away from the topic with all the grace of a well-trained expert swordsperson, would have dismissed it like he dismisses the possibility of running into canines, lest he never enter towns. Now, his bride teethes on the flesh of his hand, and Lan Zhan is nowhere near the inebriated he's seen him before, nor does he teeter into sobriety as a rickety gondola, bereft of concern in waterways too shallow to have stealing depths.
There is no torture worse than the ones self-made, and Wei Wuxian allows his hands to be playthings, flinches at the pressure of teeth, shivers and frowns as an afterthought. No thoughts to chase down, not now, perhaps not ever, because if he understands they share marriage bed day after day bleeding into long weeks, months, hopeless millennia, nothing in that knowledge changes that it's just a bed, and they are just the people who've always slept upon it. Tethered to each other's rise and fall of chest, the pulse in their throats.
He teases one hand away from Lan Zhan's nose, then the other, moving to cradle either side of an angular face, feeling warmth and skin more smooth for cultivation than any care taken for it, especially. So many small tells for one of excellent cultivation, and yet it doesn't linger, doesn't necessarily link, to the vibrancy of the core so strong, born better capable, in Lan Zhan's chest.
"Sssh." What is it to hold anyone with some element of care? He'd placed himself into his shijie's hands, sought benediction at her knees, beseeched with eyes and ears and witticisms, all for love and understanding of a preciousness he'd never earned. Precious, cradling Lan Zhan's face, forcibly allowing him his breath, though who is he to say if it's wanted? "Hard to breathe when you suffocate yourself, Lan Zhan. I'm here."
In what sense, anchored to body of no milk and plenty, but of hollow bones, hollowed stomach, hollowed eyes seeking steadily to hydrate back into better memories of health. A slow battle, long in the fighting, and at times bolstered and at times undercut by Lan Zhan's single-minded drive for millet filling bowls to fill flanks, poorly. Wine poured, puddled between them, and his head lowers, hair falls, as he regards Lan Zhan's head, his crownless crown, ignoring the bite of the crafted one in his lap as it finds the flesh beneath his robes as he leans.
"You've been enough in red. Blues," he says, voice softening, "I'd like to see you in even more of those." Dressed as bride to death, once, and dressed in reds to panic, fleeing after tying knots and tying himself into more of them, memories strung together, beads to clack in hands that hold and forget what it is within their grasp.
"Come to bed, wife, you've fought hard today. The stones don't need to embrace you, let the sheets handle that much." Not that he moves them, not that he lifts either of them to stand, bound together in ways he thought he'd understood, but hadn't the idea of Lan Zhan's single-minded, single-sided additions; and it is good, he thinks, that he's died once, that Lan Zhan admits to it, to having been widowed.
Wei Wuxian would be as breathless, as drowning, if he'd needed to be the man he once was, a man buried and gone, fallen before Nightless City, morphed in the breakings and gildings of cracks that came before into someone no one had known, for he preferred it to be so.
Let the knowing arguments of marriage begin. Couldn't be too different, could it? (Awareness, however. A nod, a hint, that awareness chances things in ways he would only learn in time.)
In the sugar-spun string of a moment that stretches and thins between them, he watches Wei Ying's face for its hidden youth and finds, not for the first time, no sign of the absent Mo Xuanyu. No inclination. The Jin weep and bleed gold, and so they paid death in handsome full.
A wife. Lan Wangji, Hanguang-Jun, second Jade of Lan, chief cultivator, has worn enough names to dress each season. In this room, Lan Zhan. The rustle of flame and the curtains, creased, and their weight dancing. Time betrays itself in the plasticity of its erosion. Each hour is born with its grain, polished down to an even patina. A wife knows the way of the cleansing work, of cloth and tinkered smoothness, of destructive friction. Wangji's touch has not whispered on wet rags since Cloud Recesses burned, and every man who could bend the knee or bear weight attended the reconstruction. It will come to him, like the coy, ink-clotted stroke of an ambitious character in calligraphy. He will remember the ways in which servitude is pleasing.
"Stay," he contradicts Wei Ying, at first for the sake of voicing an objection. Wives rule every household, he will not be gainsaid. Hissed, the lift of his body; he is ill roused, no better than the worms that crush as slick beneath Wei Ying's feet. Squirming, he banishes the stabbing shape of his gifted crown from Wei Ying's lap with an abrupt sweep, and substitutes it with the weight of his head, uninvited. He will not beg this, the intimacy of a hand in his hair, the traditional boon mothers give their children — white glint of his teeth sharp and his eyes at dark sunset, he will anticipate it. He breathes, and lets his bones fill the negative spaces of grooves and crannies in rigid wood beneath him. Remembers the months when he last failed to greet sleep on his back, for the spider's web of gashes that crisscrossed his spine.
"Stay, Wei Ying." Oh, but it's a drawled thing, gnashing. There is a knowing in his teeth, a fond and beastly sickness. Rabid, he wonders if the nearby stretch of Wei Ying's thigh would be as lean and mean under a cautious bite, as was the swell of his palm. Throned on silks and Wei Ying's limbs, Lan Wangji learns to be a generous king. Sleep woos him from his crown. "Water is enough."
He will sleep here, to morning. Ache stiff and lost and bound, guilt-stricken enough to question if he condemned Wei Ying to discomfort on drunken whim. Let him.
Even the child that a-Yuan had been did not so quickly claim the expanse of
his lap, perhaps wise to the bony nature of it, perhaps inclined to cling
and be embraced, held by everyone, until there'd been no one at all. It's
no memory of his mother that brings his hand up, that sends questing,
uncertain fingers stroking down, over, through hair as dark as midnight's
silence. It's his shijie, her memory and care leading the way, decades
since she's passed. Less than a year for how he feels it, and the time
passing did not create for him acceptance.
Still, he knows this, and with Lan Zhan claiming his lap as a domain of
restiveness, of comfort in spite of it's lacks, his hand strokes, caresses,
follows the curves of his soulmate's head as faithfully as he's followed
his blade.
And he hums, quietly, no song of summons, no song of power, but a lullaby,
and it will be the water that feeds them, empty bellied and gaunt, until
they learn to fatten on love's largess. Full of aches and pains and knees
that won't remember straightening, backs that fail the same, but limbs gone
quiet with meditation, this is how they'll stay
Until morning, or the end of the world Whichever arrives first
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
that evening in which he asked to Talk
Magic of light, rather than fire. Steadier, those lights, but he flickers as the flames do, banked and tamed, not the weapons they are in his hands or the hands of witches or Lan Zhan, flames beckoned and cast and curtailed and consuming, like curiosity and silence.
Wei Wuxian sits upon the bed, draped in robes, cleanshaven. Papers in hand, quill that never writes as properly as he wishes even when the ink is smooth as silk and endless as regrets. Cloth folded bundle under the crook of one propped up knee, while he sketches through considerations, waiting.
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He thinks, I could yet stumble to sleep, one more day gained. Thinks, It is not so cravenly a thing, to withdraw and seize a better battle. Thinks, I have asked nothing of you since your return. I ask now not to speak of this.
Haunts, pale silhouette chased by sickly, wan candlelight across corridors and the snares and snags of hounds, outside, of men turned beasts and hunting their freedom. The bleeding has done. The slaughter. Sticky-sweet, his fingertips reek of red, even now he's thrice removed their viscera, salting the remains. There is a gutting of him, as if he is husked and set to dry, and he stares before him at his known, pulsing heart.
There. That. Wei Ying's quarters, so seldom entered fairly, formally, without the subterfuge of docile roof tile and yielding eaves. The door squeals rust and heft, like an anguished pig before the blade. Do not cut, but inside, Wei Ying's cradled in his darks and the many fine foibles that paint a man tame, swept in sleepy majesty. He wonders how many talismans sleep purchase Wei Ying's relaxation. Thaws and bristles, and turns his face when the diffused beam of his gaze lands on Wei Ying's cheek, like barren land unspoiled. Ah. I bound you when you looked just so.
The door whispers shut before him. He does not prowl. Click, then clank, when one knee hits the floor, strength and lacquer misjudged. On old wood, scratches spider and lent light dapple bite wounds. The second knee, muted. The ghost of wine ashes his mouth. His fingers spoil the arrangements of his hair, before they free his headband, pulled taut and straight for display in both hands, and he kneels with it as he did with the discipline whips once, holds the pose and feels heat lick the bones of his back.
"Close family may touch this ribbon."
You knew. You above all read and wrote the rules once and again and nearly in perpetuity. His brow is too languid to crisp, to wrinkle. Let this moment pass by him, through him, river water. He is not privy to it, only meat and crumbling bone before Wei Ying's assessing gaze, found wanting. An object.
"Once, in our ancestral cave. The rite of your rescue borrowed the forms of wedded claim." Sneering, snarling, the animal that lairs in him shows its teeth. He cannot sate and appease it, only contain, conceal, bury. Stone, gravel. He is. Breathe, survive. What is right, and what is wrong?
"You did not knowingly consent. It does not bind." He wants the wine returned, to gulp it, to sear his tongue. "What difference, now?"
Take the ribbon. Put it to fire. What difference? A city burns.
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Fingers fumble through hair, untying a ribbon that leaves its mark across Lan Zhan's forehead, held out as if to ask for some meaning returned, some acknowledgement of supplication. No apologies offered, but cut words, presumptive of one man to state and claim one side as meaningful, to cut two men and declare them both free. Wei Wuxian knows the shape of that story, rises a man not happy, not angered in the way he had been earlier. Quiet, exposed with his layers, and sets the papers, the quill aside. Spreads fingers to catch at the bundled cloth, carries it forward on quieter feet, to stare down for less than half a heartbeat before he sinks down too, knees hitting the floor.
There is an anger born of distress that he knows well, clawing at his heart. Wei Wuxian sets the bundle down between them, reaches for the ribbon weighed down by meanings he had known in side associations, and he who breaks rules, who bends them, who flirts with pushing hard and harder to learn what boundaries he can survive crossing or coming close to, says nothing at first.
Let it settle for heartbeats joined, that silence. While fingers miraculously undyed by ink are delicate with silk, stroking over it, over Lan Zhan's hand without touching.
"Twice," he says, "Scant weeks ago. We slept in reds, and before my adopted ancestors, you tied ribbon to wrist." He can draw the conclusions, as he lifts Lan Zhan's ribbon free, as he shifts to toss one end over his shoulder, to keep the length of it from trailing down to flirt with dust and dirt and stone. "You've used silence to deny me family twice, Lan Zhan. You make decisions the way I did before I died. Without discussion, bearing consequences alone."
He smooths the ribbon, moves to loop it around Lan Zhan's wrist, fingers deft so long as he doesn't fight, doesn't pull back, isn't more the alcohol laced creature who bears teeth and wounds scarred over into whites starker than his mourning. Another loop, then. Securing, before he shifts and the ribbon spools back over his shoulder, leaves a swooping length between them, metal and stylised clouds floating soft. Wei Wuxian binds his wrist meditatively, eyes darker, expression difficult to read for his own difficulties.
After, he reaches for the cloth between them, ribbon dancing along with one hand's motion, not tight enough to tug as tether, but to suggest nonetheless. Light catches from fire and lantern, dances bright along a form wrought in silvers, impression of mountains embraced by clouds, a sun that rises over, piercing through. Gusu, on some mornings, and the light one of them is named for.
He lifts the crown, such as it is, holds it up, high enough as suggestion. Gifts that had nothing to do with these bindings, but with the ones that Wei Wuxian knew, and he cares, fumbling and angry and breaking and sweet and sour and whatever else he is, flawed, to use inopportune moment to gift.
"May I?"
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But breathe and be, man and monster, and he searches his hand, where Wei Ying's already braided fate to his own wrist, hunts Wei Ying's face for shadow, for the lived-in, stale marks of disdaining wonder, like wet-rot mould. Once, you turned red eyes on me, just so, and you might have spat, but for there was a drought, and you wanted for all things in Yiling, the waters, the bones, the stone, and still you would not choose Gusu instead of it. And Wangji tasted that frenzy, like wild hunt during summer storm, ions itching and prickling his skin, lungs speared be petrichor.
He tugs his arm now, only to try the ribbon's bind — relents, when it holds, and Wei Ying presides over the last of the rites, to bring out...
"No," leaves him once he knows his gift, harsher at the edges. A crown. Not his crown, not the heirloom of Gusu Lan, not the auxiliary piece that once served him, honoured in war, to become known, Hanguang-Jun. Those remain lost, sold off, irretrievable. And this new pretty trinket — the empty gift of a concubine — he has not earned, past salting the wounds of the same man who summoned him here to slap his cheek in one heartbeat, and salve it the next.
If not for Sizhui, they would have torn each other apart by now, limb by limb. There is gristle in him already tearing, organs easing unstitched. And Wei Ying means to give him gold.
"Do not use me to punish yourself." Stop, oh stop. "To indulge me is not to make amends with the world."
Suffering Lan Wangji's indignities will not reimburse Jiang Yanli her life or her widowhood, it will not retrieve Wen Qing's breath, or Jiang Cheng's faith. Hundreds, thousands who watered battlefields with the last of their innards, their blood, their decay, will not rise again, unhurried.
"I did not steal a marriage that died at your unmarked grave."
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Held in hands, and he watches Lan Zhan's face. Hears him, and knows they don't always speak of the same things, but they can, at times, understand the divides.
Imperfect, those understandings, the nascent selves they became independently, and then in what stumbling, etched heartbreak endured from two vastly different perspectives, from two different understanding and knowledges found within themselves and the world.
He settles the crown into the lap made by his legs as he kneels, not supplicant. It's not his mood, banked to embers, nor the binding true in the ribbon, the umbilicus connecting them both. Wei Ying would not choose to abandon without himself being the collateral cost.
He asked, and did not press, and stripped himself and the world together.
Here, he strips voice to murmur, knowing Lan Zhan can hear, even if he decides not to.
"I hear you. Your words for your fears, or the feeling of your beliefs. Will you hear mine, before deciding you know them, ah?" A pause, lingering, and velvet clad steel of an extended response:
"Because you don't know."
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Black weed of his hair wracked by ribbon silk and mourning sadness, Wei Ying is owlish beauty, crude and untamed. His fingers between graze of teeth would feel raw, his skins green, unbroken. Young, for the sixteen years that spared him. Caged and gilded in gold and borrowed fineries, Lan Wangji yearns to bite.
Does not lean. Starts, under licked strips of dying honey-light, to scatter loose the binds and pins of his own hair, Wei Ying's hang dragged and pulled when Wangji tugs at a stubborn snag. Admonished and corrected, but not yet denied. Still welcome in Wei Ying's quarters, lodged before his bed, sleep tickling the edges of his wine-drenched awareness. Until he is repelled, he will ready his body for deep sleep and the kindness of rest earned.
"Master Wei may teach me." One sting, and Wangji's bite done.
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So he doesn't offer now, Master of fields Lan Zhan does not move through, and stumbling as he does with his own ability to handle emotion, a riot of birds kept caged in his chest and soothed with unheard lullabies. He speaks, the story written in the air between them, but that is all it is.
Air from lungs, formed by wound-wet tongues, slipped past bone-white teeth.
"Months ago, I might have considered this penance. Or owed, from guilt or helplessness. Or exhaustion," he says, admitting to that too, before a man whose air tastes of alcohol and exhaustion of the physical and spiritual kind. "I didn't want you to feel guilt, you know. It was never your fault, engaged or married or whatever it is you knew that I didn't, it wasn't your fault we were too young and stubborn to know how to stand by each other. I didn't learn to ask for help until afterward."
After he died. For a knelt conversation, Lan Zhan readying himself for sleep, wrists bound, and rejected crown in his lap, it's a beginning of words, of trying to find explanations, of knowing the horrible fondness and ache and sorrow in his chest was biting at his eyes now. Two rapid blinks that become five, and he breathes in sharp, and smiles.
Rejection, that he's used to. People presuming on his motives and thoughts, that he bears scars from, like any person might.
"I didn't learn how to ask anyone for help, to ask anyone to stay, before it was too late." Too late for him to be heartless; too late for him to have waited for an escort that was never coming; too late to undo his desire to see his sister, to witness his martial nephew, to be part of the circles he'd grown up within as the second class, brilliant citizen he'd been, ostracised and made to live outside to save what he thought was worth saving. To protect and live by the kind of justice that felt more important than innocents killed to appease the bloodlust of those who'd won.
Too late. He wouldn't be too late ever again.
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"They made you anew, with hands so soft," and he whispers it, fearful to speak, loud and joyful for the heavens — a secret like incisions of a razor blade, lines dimmed and thin and barely strong through their addition, Wei Ying's secret to own and hone. Bite by bite, bleed a man whole.
Wangji is an animal pacing himself, his convictions. The white, bright slab of his fangs hounds bated breath. Beneath the blunt ledge of his knees, Wei Ying's floor groans and strains, creaks traded between heartbeats. A forest breathes just so, in increments of rustle. He feels himself a snake, laired, burrowing, striking only now as he catches Wei Ying's wrists and opens the bloom of his palms, as if it is a precious thing. He rounds the petal of his fingertips against Wangji's cheeks, pressed in. Breathing, the swell of his cheek fills out the gauntness of Wei Ying's grasp, pushes against his bird bones.
"I did not know," he rasps, the humanity of his body so little lived in. "Your hands could be so gentle. You did not teach me."
Only want and grief, sixteen years taut on their string, how he'd spill the beads bubbling in his grasp. What was Wei Ying's to give? A widow might have had his war stipend, his name, a child to warm her belly, her arms. A paramour of mere association would have earned at least a claim to the flagrant suffering that soubrettes and mistresses of history have worn as a shroud of dignity. We, who were not wives, pity us.
And Lan Wangji? Friend, adversary, tremulous soulmate shielded by anonymity. He has inherited only this, the whimsy of his pulse trapped beneath Wei Ying's fingertips, danced and honeyed, but strong. "I cared for a man with hands so coarse." I wed him, failed him. "He gave me my son. He died. And you are not bound for him."
He looks at Wei Ying now, and there is an emptiness that means Lan Wangji has rallied the banners of his strength, but his soldiers deserted him. He has been so, on the battlefield, remembers his brother at his back, and their disciples a fury white and distant, held at arm's length by the disparity in their skill. Now, he kneels to worship his equal, and Wei Ying's hands slip his, he sets both down.
"When you find a wife," it scratches him to speak so, burns. Knows it right. "I shall give you the bride price."
Of Wangji's own estate, of the stretches of silver his clan and his mother forfeited him gladly. So bear this, until then. Survive the indignity of nights spent in chased warmth, like animals huddled against the quiet shape of their mourning for the same man who was and will not be again. Bear the thought of a marriage in name, absent obligation, easily unspooled. Bear shared custody of their son, beautiful jewel who shares kinship with half the cultivation world, but is theirs alone for the keeping.
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Fleeting lives, destined to leave. The warmth of Lan Zhan's skin lingers when his hands are returned to their lap, when his fingers curl like gnarled roots into the fabric of his pooled robe, brushing thigh, brushing the space left between. Kneel, and there were memories enough of kneeling being little but the banal price of having been himself, too good and never good enough, and each act chosen to bring down that regard, because it was something, affirmative, and never quite sunk deep enough beneath his skin to bleed him dry.
Not the whippings, the beatings, the normal measures of a growing life lived and disobedience met. Earned or unearned, there was no enough. He took a long time learning the meaning of it, one way or another; still stumbles through it now, but better tempered, each blow striking hot or cold and forming.
Lan Zhan's words fall, the strike of hammer to anvil, ting.
"Ah," he says, and he smiles with the exhalation, tugs on the ribbon that binds them, lifts his hand to capture one of Lan Zhan's, fingers to find their home slotted between fingers. His hands, not as soft as they once were. Lan Zhan's time-worn and calloused in all the expected, understood ways. "The man I am now, and the man I once was, we both know they're two different people. You, too, Lan Zhan. Who you were when we were young, and who you are, tempered by time, are two different people. I've been learning this man," he says, eyes seeking Lan Zhan's, dark of one night peering into the abyss of another.
"I would have no other bride." A pause, and a lift of his lips, wry. "You'd look handsome in phoenix robes, ah?"
Guan sitting in lap, catching the light and sending it shattered along silver length, the dawn breaking over the mountains. To each, their own interpretation. To each, clarified beginnings, and a lifetime of navigating the roads through.
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Here, this body, the man who occupies it. Clasp clammy, the rope of his silks collaring him a noose. Teeth seed back blood into his winter-watered lips. Pain breathes itself.
Here, this body, he despises it. A house hollowed and brittle, and he cannot fill it, cannot make of himself something viscous and vast, cannot suffuse all his tissue, bind the splinters of his bones. Who he is does not suffices himself. The thrummed stirrings of his body haunt him in syncopation.
He is not himself, drifting to sprawl on hard ground, meandered, easy in places he typically turns labyrinthine against himself. The edge of awareness blur and gasp, less for the drink — too gasped, too little even for him, for his weakness, the foolishness of his privileged habit, his innocence to wine. The euphoria of a hundred old hurts sustains him. Curled in the cradle of his whites, he shifts, turns the bridge of his forehead to burn bright against the thick shield of Wei Ying's knee. The trickle and drip of candle wax drowns the room.
"I wore your red at Nightless City." For the blood of Wei Ying, of his enemies. What more can Wei Ying ask, can be asked of him? He tugs once. Collapses his fingers on Wei Ying's, mould against the wiry edges of his knuckles. Rushes the mad, tinkered-smooth planes of Wei Ying's palms to cover Lan Wangji's face, flat and broad, close and closer like a muzzle, a rooftop against the world. In the interstices between Wei Ying's fingers, the sophisticated, manicured crimson of his thick gown fabric is a corpse gored.
"...can't breathe." The soft spill of Wei Ying's skin inundates him, rips and stitches him back in punishments of kindness. Feverish, Wangji's thumbs arch in, steel their grip and graze the ridges of Wei Ying's palms in minute sketches of scratching. Too slow. Futile rattle. He burrows his nose in the fold of Wei Ying's hands, remembers grey days and a groaning abyss, and how he laughed after, how they laughed at the filth of his robes, how grief mutated the debris of Wei Ying's hundreds of unnamed graves into lace and finery. Then, no. Soft and coarse. He needs —
His teeth flicker sharp at the edges, when he rakes the meat of Wei Ying's left palm with them, bites in and in and blood won't spill, can't spill, he keeps the clench clean. Nuzzles once, still sweet and soft and fresh-snowed, nothing of the battering he'd felt before, sixteen years ago, a lifetime. And he murmurs again, "I cannot breathe."
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There is no torture worse than the ones self-made, and Wei Wuxian allows his hands to be playthings, flinches at the pressure of teeth, shivers and frowns as an afterthought. No thoughts to chase down, not now, perhaps not ever, because if he understands they share marriage bed day after day bleeding into long weeks, months, hopeless millennia, nothing in that knowledge changes that it's just a bed, and they are just the people who've always slept upon it. Tethered to each other's rise and fall of chest, the pulse in their throats.
He teases one hand away from Lan Zhan's nose, then the other, moving to cradle either side of an angular face, feeling warmth and skin more smooth for cultivation than any care taken for it, especially. So many small tells for one of excellent cultivation, and yet it doesn't linger, doesn't necessarily link, to the vibrancy of the core so strong, born better capable, in Lan Zhan's chest.
"Sssh." What is it to hold anyone with some element of care? He'd placed himself into his shijie's hands, sought benediction at her knees, beseeched with eyes and ears and witticisms, all for love and understanding of a preciousness he'd never earned. Precious, cradling Lan Zhan's face, forcibly allowing him his breath, though who is he to say if it's wanted? "Hard to breathe when you suffocate yourself, Lan Zhan. I'm here."
In what sense, anchored to body of no milk and plenty, but of hollow bones, hollowed stomach, hollowed eyes seeking steadily to hydrate back into better memories of health. A slow battle, long in the fighting, and at times bolstered and at times undercut by Lan Zhan's single-minded drive for millet filling bowls to fill flanks, poorly. Wine poured, puddled between them, and his head lowers, hair falls, as he regards Lan Zhan's head, his crownless crown, ignoring the bite of the crafted one in his lap as it finds the flesh beneath his robes as he leans.
"You've been enough in red. Blues," he says, voice softening, "I'd like to see you in even more of those." Dressed as bride to death, once, and dressed in reds to panic, fleeing after tying knots and tying himself into more of them, memories strung together, beads to clack in hands that hold and forget what it is within their grasp.
"Come to bed, wife, you've fought hard today. The stones don't need to embrace you, let the sheets handle that much." Not that he moves them, not that he lifts either of them to stand, bound together in ways he thought he'd understood, but hadn't the idea of Lan Zhan's single-minded, single-sided additions; and it is good, he thinks, that he's died once, that Lan Zhan admits to it, to having been widowed.
Wei Wuxian would be as breathless, as drowning, if he'd needed to be the man he once was, a man buried and gone, fallen before Nightless City, morphed in the breakings and gildings of cracks that came before into someone no one had known, for he preferred it to be so.
Let the knowing arguments of marriage begin. Couldn't be too different, could it? (Awareness, however. A nod, a hint, that awareness chances things in ways he would only learn in time.)
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A wife. Lan Wangji, Hanguang-Jun, second Jade of Lan, chief cultivator, has worn enough names to dress each season. In this room, Lan Zhan. The rustle of flame and the curtains, creased, and their weight dancing. Time betrays itself in the plasticity of its erosion. Each hour is born with its grain, polished down to an even patina. A wife knows the way of the cleansing work, of cloth and tinkered smoothness, of destructive friction. Wangji's touch has not whispered on wet rags since Cloud Recesses burned, and every man who could bend the knee or bear weight attended the reconstruction. It will come to him, like the coy, ink-clotted stroke of an ambitious character in calligraphy. He will remember the ways in which servitude is pleasing.
"Stay," he contradicts Wei Ying, at first for the sake of voicing an objection. Wives rule every household, he will not be gainsaid. Hissed, the lift of his body; he is ill roused, no better than the worms that crush as slick beneath Wei Ying's feet. Squirming, he banishes the stabbing shape of his gifted crown from Wei Ying's lap with an abrupt sweep, and substitutes it with the weight of his head, uninvited. He will not beg this, the intimacy of a hand in his hair, the traditional boon mothers give their children — white glint of his teeth sharp and his eyes at dark sunset, he will anticipate it. He breathes, and lets his bones fill the negative spaces of grooves and crannies in rigid wood beneath him. Remembers the months when he last failed to greet sleep on his back, for the spider's web of gashes that crisscrossed his spine.
"Stay, Wei Ying." Oh, but it's a drawled thing, gnashing. There is a knowing in his teeth, a fond and beastly sickness. Rabid, he wonders if the nearby stretch of Wei Ying's thigh would be as lean and mean under a cautious bite, as was the swell of his palm. Throned on silks and Wei Ying's limbs, Lan Wangji learns to be a generous king. Sleep woos him from his crown. "Water is enough."
He will sleep here, to morning. Ache stiff and lost and bound, guilt-stricken enough to question if he condemned Wei Ying to discomfort on drunken whim. Let him.
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Even the child that a-Yuan had been did not so quickly claim the expanse of his lap, perhaps wise to the bony nature of it, perhaps inclined to cling and be embraced, held by everyone, until there'd been no one at all. It's no memory of his mother that brings his hand up, that sends questing, uncertain fingers stroking down, over, through hair as dark as midnight's silence. It's his shijie, her memory and care leading the way, decades since she's passed. Less than a year for how he feels it, and the time passing did not create for him acceptance.
Still, he knows this, and with Lan Zhan claiming his lap as a domain of restiveness, of comfort in spite of it's lacks, his hand strokes, caresses, follows the curves of his soulmate's head as faithfully as he's followed his blade.
And he hums, quietly, no song of summons, no song of power, but a lullaby, and it will be the water that feeds them, empty bellied and gaunt, until they learn to fatten on love's largess. Full of aches and pains and knees that won't remember straightening, backs that fail the same, but limbs gone quiet with meditation, this is how they'll stay
Until morning, or the end of the world Whichever arrives first