( simpler, to press now his knee to lan zhan's thigh, settling in to
watch him as he has watched wei wuxian in the arts which leave his body
bared and hollowed, ready to be lost or sown with strange fruit and
stranger dreams. the question of hands, and his don't even twitch. not
more. not when they did before, and all he is returns to rock steady
inevitability. )
Twelve mermaids. Torn asunder, working under my direction. Eight more
released back to their brethren.
( no hesitation, numbers exact. were he asked, he couldn't say the
time each was rent to pieces, but he could note the order, the familiar
alien awareness of their thoughts. )
I'm here. I have you.
( and his chenqing rests across his lap, and that, that too is a
promise. if it becomes too much, the cacophony of voices, offering one last
word: )
They dream of fish and food and carnality, and yearn for it, and for... the
mirror? No, something like it, that they linger here. If they respond, Lan
Zhan, their truths are not human. Their understanding is as Bichen.
( drawn to silver flash of cutting, swift, calculated glory, and
unhappy, put away without blood shed when they are drawn to the idea of a
battle, a meal.
and the human dead, what of them? he will not say. they are as lan zhan
would know, versed in decades of his investigations and interrogations, he
who sought chaos, he who mourned without a word, who raised a son and
reputation and hell in their twisting, binding world. )
( Twelve, dead by Wei Ying's deed, done. Eight returned, no doubt complicit to his violence. There is space in the interstices that carve Wei Ying's private agonies to inject his own horror. More thorns and clenched fist than fragile flower, he. Hands bloodied, palms torn, Lan Wangji knows what he has married, watches it — him — dark and smoke-danced, a man like the last gasp of a chokehold.
In the easy, breeze-swept cadence of grass blades paying tributes of prostration, in the absent trill of distantly roiling birds, he sees Wei Ying, and interrogates him, start to finish: where the questions of him begin, where sin bends and where it breaks and where it saturates his skin, seeps within sibilantly. He decides: )
Take a few steps back. ( And the afterthought nod, Please. ) Draw wards if they seek you.
( Natural, classical precautions. No less than Wei Ying had learned; no more than he has already doubtlessly dismissed. After, a simple exercise to trail his hands in the air in mute symphony, to practise his knuckles, ease and warm joint and bone. When he begins, the execution must prove flawless.
The dead speak to me, he does not say, nor, They accept no less than perfection.
And, No differently than you.
He plays, askance. Shrill, the first notes ever dissonant, a quieted but clawing aggression. There are rules to this, guidance: do not instigate conferences, do not invite to your table more mouths than you can feed. And yet, he is a graceless host, all his doors open. What will ease your hurt?
Below, waters settle, spume, agitate. Stones burn and roast beneath the midday sun, blanched like skins of mother crone, splotched unevenly. He waits for the trickle of trills, of sound peering in like a fragile whisper — shudders, when the voice answers him, already alert to know and read the words behind sound that is language — and then comes the second voice, rushed and hasty, a third.
He's setting his hands on the guqin to steady the strings and infuse them with his own qi, to force a cue among speakers, when the fifth rushes forth, the ninth, Lan Wangji barely keeps the pace past the fifteenth, then they double, the chords overwhelm, vibrate and draw taut and brittle, the eighty-first voice shouts, the hundredth already promises vengeance, some of the first weep —
So many of them, infectious and building like the waves of fever sickness, and waves of water that crest and burst and earth crumbles beneath him, onslaught of horror and trepidation and vibration, he breathes with the wreck of their screams, breathes with the constant tremble of power on his guqin, riding his hands, breathes with the fear of them —
It is surrender, when he waves his hand and forces Wangji removed, severed from physical existence too abruptly to allow a gentle cessation. I wanted. He stings, the waters of his eyes pooled deep on his cheeks, digging ravines. I wanted to help you.
Hand to his stomach, he quakes with a long, visceral heaving, like pigment breaking from oil, the parts of himself divorcing him. he catches himself on one arm, fingers sunken in grass, crisp, clean, green. To smell a colour, to welcome life's stab in his lungs. Distantly, he remembers, Wei Ying. Wei Ying expects an answer. Wei Ying. )
...they are hundreds.
( They knew. Saw the bones. But the spirits — his mouth slack and dry and his teeth raw — the spirits all lingered. )
( Lan Zhan, speaking a truth not realised yet in fullness: these are as his burial grounds, as unsettled, as unrested, as trapped and layered and younger, ah. That's the crux of it. They're younger, and so many.
Yet what for him is deeply, darkly familiar, what cacophony of voices had defined his sword-edge path through insanity and horror, what had been his close, ceaseless companion and the endless demands that invaded his mind, coiled around him like the cloying stench of the decay it embodied in spirit and flesh, this is not Lan Zhan's reality.
No, not with the man he's allowing himself to realise nuances of the depth to which he cares, voicing them only in acceptances and the way he feels panicked concern flare in his chest, sunflare bright, and oh, the sun has burned through his home before, his chest before, his empty, hollow core. Kneeling, he offers a water satchel to Lan Zhan; his hand, lighter than a bird at first, touching to Lan Zhan's shoulder. Touch needs inviting at some times in particular. He wouldn't strive to make this worse. )
Drink.
( He suspected. Heaviness instructed him in the unfortunate truth. )
You named it as the Burial Mounds. I sorrow that you were more right than we yet knew.
( All of this wreckage of a citadel, it is Yiling. Restless, incapable of letting go of what it holds onto, forever greedy, forever swallowing more whole. A place that had once been of normalcy, driven to darkness with the machinations of humanity. Now only the inhuman remained, so achingly reminiscent of what it meant, once, for life to be defined by its presence between death's beginning and end; where death served purpose, where bodies did not birth and grow and wane and decay to birth again with the dawn of a new day.
Where the dead did not lie uneasy under the waves, no rest granted, no salvation, nothing. Not even the strength of the life that is within the lighthouses' limits, instead a carpet upon which the mermaids and their own unrestful dead caper, hunt, and year. )
I'm here, Lan Zhan. You are not alone.
( For he knows what it was to be alone before that understanding, swallowed by it, choking on it. When the dead sing so loud, no other song can penetrate, and the kind of control that works would penetrate Lan Zhan in fractures that would bleed him dry. )
( There is a moment, animal and sibilant and sad, when he recedes within himself, and the white of Wei Ying's hand is the visceral, cloying, gutting white of Lan Wangji's fear, is the slip of erosion that dulls the edge of his wit's blade. He cowers, in a fool's game, instinct giving way to tremble, like fluttered candle light. Sunlight drips and lathers the walls of his bones until they fill with golden lichen. He feels himself a house sundered, the dust of it, the dust of him, the tired, decimated gravel of beach quartz, shredded and teased between his fingertips.
Wei Ying nurses him with drink. Instinct, again: he takes it, clumsy, first meaning to hold it in his own grip, like a calf seeking its mother's teat, but losing it even as his lips smack and stitch glued, as he licks the lacquer of the first drops choked out, so perfectly beaded, their translucence like a silvered swell. He leans into Wei Ying, lets him hold the satchel and only licks and braves the rare gulp, the swallow — shudders to feel waters not of his body cascade down the jutting curve of his throat and drench his collar. He is as a cat and a stray, as Wei Ying. He drinks greedily.
He does not stop for longer than he'd intended. Then, rasped and artless, hand's arc writing Wei Ying's drink dismissed: )
At times, when you are here, I am the most alone.
( There are parts of you that should be parts of me, and to live as a soul divided between two cages of flesh is to suffer torture and ridicule. Salt the stirrings of his body's wounds, set him to dry. He aches in writings of longing, and there is no time, here, now, this is no hour to teach Wei Ying the brush strokes.
The dead. Too often, Wei Ying's presence debilitates him. Now, the waves stoke and crash in rapid violence, and he is only the hard harm of his gaze, beamed, only his furrowed brow, only the shoreline and its dead, vivisected below, for his pleasure. )
They were lured here, under pretences of false shelter. They perished to sirens. ( When he blinks his eyes shut, he is breathless, eyes tightly closed like shutters. ) This, then, is why they wish to reach the shore.
( For sanctuary pledged but withheld, for the terror of the creatures that succumbed them. )
( Water retrieved, set back behind him on the ground, having failed to catch at where he'd hung it before, water and the weight of consideration and preparation not always within his grasp. Clean water, a luxury he knows, and cannot look away from, having worried over the stains, the cloying, clotting abscess of water steeped in suffering. Such as the waters below, salted as it is, added to with tears of desperation, hope, and betrayal. )
The most alone, Lan Zhan, or the loneliest?
( A soft question from lips that smile without mirth, and a sinking in the pit of his stomach, words and fears left years ago in the lap of his shijie rolling back, weighing down on his lungs. Not the time for it, now, and he breathes, breathes in uncertainty and subtle shift of sky and cloud and the hint of light within, breathes out the coiling shadows, and inhales them again. Dark, silken, and acrid, like the scent around them, like Lan Zhan's hair.
He wants to crack his fingers open, spread them wide, stroke them caressingly down and over Lan Zhan's crown, the side of his head, toward the ends of his hair; he wants, for that moment, and he shoves it under, eyes lifting from Lan Zhan back to the waters being swallowed again by fog, amnesiatic and condemning.
Anchor him, and anchor Lan Zhan, staring out. It's a thought with more clarity than what he stares into, and he reaches for Lan Zhan, but doesn't know what to do with his hands that he hasn't already. Presses close, without hemming in. Peace. No peace. Hold steady. )
The way Lily and the rest spoke of it, Master Zenobius acted under compulsion. The sirens, too, act under compulsion of some kind, have you observed that? These poor people...
( He looks out with eyes that see the intangible, and he thinks, lips pursed. )
Our master scholar feels the weight of his own unnatural state as we stay here. If they reach land, they still won't find rest, or resolution. Lan Zhan. What would you have us do?
( Conversation, invited, asking but not with helplessness. Thoughtfulness, and an awareness that their talent has been the chaos caused in each place they've been, no matter the intent. The burning wish to sweep Lan Zhan, Sizhui, Lily, Eleven, all the scattered people who have lingered and who come now away, to be done with this place and its great and horrible magic, balanced against: peace.
( They cannot retrieve these bodies and bury them here, where the soil will turn and churn them and deliver them woken and fresh. They cannot burn meat and bone and deny the construct as a home for the soul, flickered and wandered. They cannot even hope to raise hundreds of corpses and transport them for burial where they next land, for resources are a rope pulled taut. There is a finite stretch to what means their patron may offer.
He feels Wei Ying close in the radiance of his movements, the pleasant, proximate but elusive warmth of his hands. He wants, as kittens and blind, fresh-born rabbits do, to lean into Wei Ying's palm and chase his touch. Abstains, dry ragged taste of his lips quenching their loneliness through gentle friction.
In the end, he yields: takes Wei Ying's hand, nearly dragging him down, as he pushes himself up, and loans far too much weight in the concession. An equal could bear him, and Lan Wangji does not insult his companion today by lessening his body's burden. )
They fear the sirens. ( A truth proven, restated. ) To hunt them would win the dead their peace.
( By removing prey from predator, where the dead cannot win their own refuge, where they fail to haunt and claw and reap gasped, white-heated terror from their pursuers. Wet, drenched, mould fitted, and the many-forked fires of fate's cruelties still singes them, marrow-deep. And yet, Lan Wangji's eyes come limpid in the way of turbulent waters, made fresh by constant wind and stream. )
But the sirens do not kill for sport or intent.
( For instinct exacerbated by compulsion. Are they, then, innocent of the blood that stains them? Enough so that their wrath is animal-like, devoid of the need for Lan Wangji's purposeful castigation.
Earlier, he waged war with hundreds of dead arrogantly, unprepared. Now, he watches the the shivered swell of brimming seas and spies nothing of the white of their bones, yet all of their anger. He feels suddenly small, foolish. Young, as he only wears this guilt beside Wei Ying. )
Among us, there are those with sorcery of endless fire. ( Emilia. Lily. The girl Hermione. Perhaps the innate ferociousness of women lends them to the flame. ) Perhaps, if we release candles at sea?
( To speak, to entreat, to offer thoughts and plans or their tempering. Nebulous, truly, but his concept is more and more one of the give and take they shared once upon a lifetime, when something like love might have been easier. The kind of time and place they'll never return to, but have learned from, and learned of.
Now, the dead wait, and ache with their edged release. )
It's worth asking, Lan Zhan. I can wear the forsaken suit and haunt the city for any remnants of that which might hold such a flame.
( Light to honour the dead, such as it is, an attempt to allow them freedom, to be sent on. To let go. )
( Wei Ying, Yiling Patriarch, reduced to dust and ash and the dappled marks of his step on barren ground, to the long drifting wander, like moth light under a waxing moon. There is indignity in this — the burdening of a man crafted and condemned to greatness, with purpose that spits on the flushed, thin cheek of his legacy.
What face would Wei Ying have shown, were he the first son of a sect and adorned in the filigrees of true stature? Born, if not to Jiang Fengmian and his lady unloved, than to a dynasty of red, in his veins red, that might join the river blues and yield for the sake of Lotus Pier, a purple most palatable? A welcome addition to the Sunshot campaign, command settling arrogant on his shoulders like the hungry dusting of first snow, and Wei Ying entitled to spearhead a vanguard. A bartered spouse of Gusu Lan, sooner than a gift Lan Wangji has stolen thrice in the night, frail-handed?
What might their lives have been, but for the accident of Wei Ying's parentage? Foolish, to think. They have as they have, as the heavens bless upon them. Their grounds and their waters and the choked interstices between them, where purpose dilates into their legend. )
Thank you. ( His fingers snag and hook and cinch, and the fractured line of Wei Ying's wrist is sharp bone beneath his palm, unbreaking. He raises himself. )
And I am sorry. Wangji has failed you. ( The guqin, the man. What difference? ) I serve you no better than silver thread and gossamer.
( Offering scant use, less protection. He cannot coax coin to their hands, cannot whisper the dead willing in the ways of Wei Ying and master Wrath, cannot even perform the petty parlour tricks of his heritage. Death drowns him. He becomes Wei Ying's shadow and breathes. )
( Feet regained, he regards Lan Zhan, something softened under his breastbone. Warm enough that his marrow under Lan Zhan's grasp feels liquid, his bones heated, and disparaging words over Lan Zhan's fumbling in a world that's not built to bow its head to him willingly, to recognise lineage, to pay heed to unwritten rules and the visible realities of wealth and skill and here? Here, Wei Wuxian remembers all he's learned from his own chosen falls from grace, from thin times and thinner pretenses, and this time not a choice, except in its survival.
Lan Zhan was never meant to learn of a life like this, and yet, yet. He is here, and he tries, and it's arrogance to think either of them are becoming better men, though he does feel it may be true. Not necessarily better fathers, not necessarily better cultivators, but better men.
Little by little, in rebuilding, in the deconstruction of what is true in their world in false absolutes, and what's aching and horrible and real here, likewise without absolutes.
Wei Wuxian doesn't think. He moves, barely rising to his toes to press lips against Lan Zhan's forehead, and his ribbon, the metal clouds, all at once. )
An embroidered pillow still promises a place to rest. That's a great deal more than I'm used to having, ( he says, settling down onto his feet, aware of the feat they must try in seeing spirits addressed, in allowing them acknowledgement, in providing them access to avenues for passing. )
Making mistakes is not the same as being incapable. Don't speak poorly of yourself. The only ones to disparage of are those who never adapt, never change, blame all that happens on others. You are not that man. You, Lan Zhan, are not afraid to try.
( And aware that there is opportunity for success and failure, in unequal amounts. )
( It burns in wax drips and simmered red flame, when the wet seal of Wei Ying's mouth encroaches and encircles the cold spread of his sigil, and the blue of his ribbon's silk is a fractured shield thinning to a sheen. He tips into the gesture, obedient and fragile, child moth lulled by ancestral hearth flame, until their foreheads knock together and Wei Ying cataracts into a charcoal sketch of himself, sand pale shrivelled and white in the negative space of his blurred shape. We sit, Lan Wangji cannot speak it, too close.
What do other people do, when they are whole, and the house of their bodies wants no more patches, and their hearts pulse wild and rapid like bundled roots, and time brings expansion and not erosion? Smear of ink is light bruised on Wei Ying's cheek, and Wangji wants water-grazed fingertips, wants to cleanse the scars-stains of Wei Ying. Bird, where would you fly, so free?
He drifts longer than he should, released from the confines of self-sufficiency by the knowledge that Wei Ying is honey-poison, migrated in his bloodstream, and now that the Yiling Patriarch has laid stake, no other sickness or wrong may claim Wangji. That to breathe is a simple, lung scavenging thing, and the birds that beat white roiling wings above wait to feast on his bones at the largesse of Brother Death, who pillars him.
Shuttered, Lan Wangji's eyes pulse and spasm. Awareness kindles back in the space between eclipses, a slow, liminal teasing — as if Lan Wangji is in courtship with himself and must not disappoint by conceding his hand early. He peels himself away, fractured, swaying back to lend Wei Ying a respectful berth, before wetting his fingers in the pool of Wei Ying's dark hair, up the back of it, up the nape, up where Wei Ying's strands tighten and cinch. Red rust and absent blood, Wei Ying's ribbon unravels like serpent's skins.
Lan Wangji presents it to Wei Ying. His own wrist, limp and soft, after. )
Are we the men our mothers would wish us to be?
( He knows, Wei Ying knows. Zewu-Jun spoke the words. Shall they omit this once more? And Wangji tires of it, of this, of sunlight low and lazy. Of death so comfortable in its empire, it need not even rush to claim them. They live suspended here, never controlling the pace or moment. How he has tired of wait. )
( A shiver before the searing heat of touch, not for what it seeks out, winding upstream as carp swim, leaping the dragon's gate in search of transformation. No, nothing so grand, but the ache of fingers in his hair a call back to simpler times, or not simpler, no, he lies to himself in nostalgia and carefully curated memory. A call to times where certainty had lain in his breast, thrumming, that to two people, he mattered; to one person, he was worth caring for, remembered as a child, as a young man grown.
One lap, to lay his head on, the calm of the storms in his life allowing him a moment to breathe. Uncomfortable in hindsight, how little he understood her readings of him, how little he could thank her now for her love, for cementing to him that family is warmth as well as rigid expectation and duty and honours he tears the face from for want of righteousness not bedecked in the jewels of tyranny and convenience.
He is death, and he feels it, the cloying sweetness of decay as Lan Zhan's fingers succeed where his washings have not, and for one moment stretching long between this breath exhaling, this breath indrawn, he imagines leaning forward, imagines bracing and embracing, and then discards it, but for the silken ribbon coaxed free of his hair.
Presented, and a wrist that follows. Here a pulse beats, here meridians lie, here blood is blue against pale skin, deprived of air. Are we the men our mothers would wish us to be? His fingers weave the ribbon around themselves, and he lifts Lan Zhan's wrist, lowers his head. One hand ties, a vambrace of red against the white, blood against snow, passion against the fog of daily existence. He studies his work and the answer between them, saying, )
We are the men they did not yet know to imagine, ( and he inhales, ribbon tied, devouring itself and freed. ) I can only feel they'd wish for happiness, true living, and those who do more good than harm.
( In this, and here, the bow of husbands, the heavens witness, the forebearers silent, the present evershifting, remade moment to moment. In the acrid bile the world tears from their throats, the spirits caught and netted as decayed fish left to rot, and the reality that life is not static, that death isn't either, that what is claimed is not permanent by nature.
This is a choice, he feels, one made every day, footprints left in the detritus of the forests they knew in their youths, washed clean with season and storm. Soft, near to drowned by the winds and the surf that pounds below, the dead hidden from view, the lighthouse looming white and broken overhead.
Red, wound and binding, oxygen rich veins flooding two hearts, filling lungs. )
( He waves the wrist, tries the binding tight-loose, until the ribbon knots and nooses and chokes his bone like delicate striations on nascent marble. Wen Chao could not have wished deeper shackling upon him.
The first stroke of Wei Ying's hair lands flat and warm on the top of Wei Ying's head, clumsy for gravity and the lock of knuckles and finger bone, their clasp gaunt. Wangji does not — inspire ease naturally, does not reassure or bring comfort. It is a learned thing with rabbits who behold him, young oily dapplings of white and darks, sweet-nosed, humming. Lan Wangji raises one animal, then another, then the next, and gives them the reins of the land — his arms, the bridge of his shoulder, the sharp slope of his back. They cascade, graze and conquer.
And what came after? Lan Yuan, no greater than a garden creature, glued to Wangji's leg like grains of sticky rice. Possessed of the sterile sagacity and instinctive wisdom to climb Lan Wangji's hip, but not claw it. Lan Wangji offered short, aborted caresses on his nape and neck, the rare refitting of his robe collars. Play. Feverish kisses on Yuan's temple, once sunset rusts slipped him into night's sleep, and Uncle could not complain of Wangji spoiling the infant.
This is a different exercise, its subject long, lean, meaner. Thinned like candle wick, ever prepared for his own burning. Lan Wangji peels his fingers back and tries to stroke again, to capture Wei Ying's hair, to draw it back as if he intends a second binding of it, or a braid — only to release it down in cascade. )
You do not speak of them, as you do of Sizhui. ( As often, as hearted. ) Your parents. Tell me.
( There is greed in this, in counting the coin-wealth of Wei Ying's secrets, watching it gather in Wangji's cupped hands. )
( Wei Wuxian shivers, an unthought response to this revisitation of his hair, the cascade of it down around his shoulders, a waterfall that stills in its heavy warmth like a cowl worn, this nod to filial piety every one of them makes. Asked after his parents, and he wishes he had hands full of stories, that he had memories to spare, that he had anything tangible. Even the whisper of a memory he has from their younger years, the night Lan Zhan drank with him and the trouble that loomed more pressingly, large and indelible, that followed overshadows the confession, once.
He knows they're both orphaned of parents, held within the palms of different sects, to different reasons, respects, expectations. He's heard and understood his own place, too naturally gifted, too pernicious, too bright to hep but cast a shadow in comparison to those who excelled but not to the same degree. A crime of the heart, not of anything else. An accusation that meant the words he heard of his parents were in snippets of a mother's anger, her frustration, and a father's quiet, you look like them both, but especially her, years later agreed on by Lan Qiren, and it wasn't favourable.
His parents, and what he has in his head are the barkings of the dogs that chased him when they'd not returned, when the Night Hunt had sealed their fate and he'd not known the moment he went from beloved son to bereft orphan, and he never would. His second orphaning, he at least hadn't been alone. At least it had not been he who hurt most, and the machinations of it, the opening thrust of the war brewing for decades, had a way to be fought back against.
He swallows, tries for a smile, allows it to fade as he licks his lips. )
I wish I could. I wish I had their stories, Lan Zhan, more than the snippets the senior generation shared every so often, but even your uncle remembers more about my parents than I do. Or at least about my mother.
( Not happy memories, but frustrated ones out of Lan Qiren's own youth, and there's perhaps something to be said for his lineage and their tendency to drive second born sect heirs into distractions of whatever kinds. Perhaps. )
I don't remember what they look like. Sometimes I dream I remember the sound of their voices, but more often their laughter. They liked laughing, I think... and we traveled. I remember a donkey, and I think it must have been my father who led us both, with my mother at my side. But I don't know, not anymore.
( Not unusual, when a child loses parents before the age of five, when memory is less permanent for most, let alone someone who has learned compartmentalising as a matter of coping and persisting, of shutting out traumas, of striding forward, of making himself the accommodating one. The challenging, irritating, annoying, and yet outwardly unburdened one, enough to the point that it was the bone of contention as he swallowed and swallowed and swallowed the deaths he dealt, until one day, they swallowed him in turn.
Staring at Lan Zhan, red ribboned wrist, he swallows. Is swallowed in turn. )
Do you... of your mother, do you recall much of her now?
( He watches Wei Ying watch himself, a bird learning the bend and break of its own bones before the world-maddened rush of first flight and its claws teething at nest's edge. He feels — brittle in the way of fresh amputation, when instinct yet coaxes a missing limb to answer. The world is cinnabar and petty abysses, the blacks and reds of ledgers; Wei Ying is owed a finer grasp of family than he received in his youth, but only faces wan and divine may order his due retribution.
And Lan Wangji, fickle and the line of his shoulders trembled, the deep compulsion to reach a hand out in comfort, resisted to knot wet-like on his thighs, knuckles gristle and white-rawed. There are moments in a man's life when he is but a vessel for the torture of his heavy-weighted emotions, and Wei Ying's cup runs full.
What does Lan Wangji recall of his mother? A battered rasp, lip swollen full under the crown of his feral, feline teeth. He remembers her beautiful, kindly, exquisitely sophisticated, elegant, composed — every word a child encounters in early poems and transfers, generously, unto the tall, looming pillars of his private heroes. )
Eight gashes of crackled wood on her door. The winter creak of her porch. Gentians, lightly acerbic.
( The charcoal marks that sketch out a woman, and Lan Wangji's memory the guiding hand to carve her, something from the nothing of fragile, abortive recollection. Zewu-Jun would know more. Perhaps Uncle. And who are they but the stone-faced captors of Lan Wangji's infancy, the stewards of his awareness?
He withheld, when Wei Ying required himself. Intrudes once more now, spreading and sprawling his fingers through the cascade of silken dark, wrapping it loosely to belt his fingers. Beautiful. None of the other prominent advantages that elevate a match, but Wei Ying was beautiful before he massacred himself to be anything else. )
( Collections of environment, scents and sights and sounds, the powerful evocations of memory. He has his own, and it's the sound of dogs, the flash of teeth, the scent of blood and terror in his tiny lungs. It hurts, thinking A-Yuan lived through some form of this, and his heart constricts within his chest, then he breathes regardless.
Closes his eyes at the hand in his hair, the fingers entangling firmly with the length of his parent's gift to him, the devotion he shows as any person does from home, not stripping himself of the body his parents gave him, as none of them do. Filial piety in the wearing of form, the way they grow without contestation, and he sighs, a soft sound swallowed by the susurrations of the sea, down the hill, cloaked in fog.
This is not a touch to lean into, not the rake of nails and fingers, blunt, against scalp, not the cupping of a head, or cheek, or jaw. Lan Zhan is both here, immediate, and distant, the anchoring of a river creature in the water weeds, the strain of waters pulled through tangled roots, strangling. He doesn't feel strangled now, and that perhaps is part of the ease in his bones, why he laughs and he sounds close to carefree.
He's not, not in the waking sea of dead. Not carefree, but perhaps, in part, lightened. )
Do you think this one will like me any better?
( And they no, no, it will not, that no animal rises ready and easy to his touch, but that people, spirits do, that which can be charmed in word or song. He is not a man given to quiet and stillness and silence by nature: he coaxes children, where the rabbits, looking for calmer spirits, shy. Where the donkey, seeking its own way, butts head with one equally independent, and slightly liable to spoils of free feeding along the way. )
This is the truth of him, startled and stone, given to stubborn resistance: to persist, hands claws and sundering Wei Ying's hair again like waters, picking out strands as if they were his noose. How would Lan Wangji die of him, of Wei Ying?
Grit and gravel scrape his knees through granules of sand, shifting, and the world transforms, and he is still this — an anchor, still fixated on Wei Ying, still hollowed, still an accessory. The lace trim on Wei Ying's sleeves, his doubled collar. This is Lan Wangji, flickered beat adorning his soulmate's pulse. He wants to scent him — take, this is what means to own, the capacity to singularly and indifferently shatter.
Does not. He releases (again), withdraws (again), reconsiders (again). Fear is damp and lichen, the silvered edge of his smile, deceptive. )
You are a terrible man.
( Selfish, whimsical, breezy. Possessed of strange and eerie righteousness. Utterly, painfully, wickedly impulsive. Prone to brilliance, to laughter, to sacrifice. To cleaving Wangji's innards and glistening them with their fats over fire. To being, as ash is, dispersed in wind, one moment contained the next coagulated, the heartbeat after gone.
A mystifying, glorious creation. Yiling Patriarch, first disciple, Wei Ying. )
It will know. ( As Lan Wangji knows, a man complicit. One who leads into blindness by example. He thinks, if Wei Ying's hair flies free in the wind spell, it will yet tempt him. Starts, gently, to braid it and leave the ends loose. ) You have no more truths solely your own.
( He laughs, quiet at first, then deeper, richer, returning to a spontaneity he has almost forgotten. Kitten claws pressing into his heart, prickling and painful and sweet, as Lan Zhan attempts his braiding. He could move away, part of him saying he should, but no.
They are themselves, as flawed and terrible and great as that might be, and it might eventually be enough. Choosing what are, and what they do; choosing whom they're with and how and why.
One ribbon wrapped around a wrist, and the red should draw his eyes, but he knows it, has tasted it. Might not be moved to taste it better but were it painting Lan Zhan's lips, and he lets that thought go too, on the same wind that slips past them, thick with the scent of the sea and its natural decay, denying the dead beneath its surface. )
What about you, Lan Zhan? Any other hidden truths to share?
( A reach out, fingers hooked into the skirts of his robes, tugging once. Here. )
( There is a trick to this, as with weighing an unbalanced sword, with teasing it tip-blade-edge close: an art to the clasp of a wrist more bone than softened meat, to drawing Wei Ying near and dear and smear of his shadow dragged on hard land.
There is no kindness in him, for this. No distinction between where the feral appetite to claim begins and the diplomatic one to conquer without bloodshed ends. Greed is a continuum, possession a foregone semantic conclusion. No hunting thrills like that of man.
Slipped, his fingers dip until he clutches Wei Ying's hand in his own and only wrestles his thumb in, serpentine, to sketch out warm snags of ruined rhetoric on his palm, a fluttering candle of communication poorly traded. What you know, you know. He writes easily, terribly, conveniently, the rushed trill of his countless secrets in the aching code of Gusu Lan private correspondence intended only for the sect.
And reedy in the way of leaves thieving trickle under moonlight: )
( That he tries making sense of the tracings on his palm, the thick brush of the pad of Lan Zhan's thumb forming characters that lack definition, if not certainty, has his mind tugged and distracted while his eyes focus on Lan Zhan's features, his brow, the line of his nose and its dip toward shadow, the shape of his lips. His teeth, when bared.
This is not a matter of fairness, not even justice; this is not sixteen years stretched between them, two very different men standing on either end of it. This is a negotiation between people, whole and fractured and reknit on their own.
Will he? He doesn't need to. Whatever ribbons tied around wrists, Lan Zhan hadn't expected him to wait, to accept, to take in one selfishness in exchange for another, unknowing then known. To choose, daily, what it is they are for each other, what form of support that takes, what demands they make, what they refuse or accept. They, unlike the watery dead, are not bound to singular truths, to clawing ends. What they drown in is, so far, a choice.
His hand closes around that thumb, stilling it, lips curved enough to suggest a smile without dedicating to one. )
I'll wait. For now.
( But not forever, because in nothing can be promise something as impossible as that. Yet to not demand secrets from a man who takes pleasure in declaring Wei Wuxian no longer has any? Oh, pride would say, this is no level playing field, but wisdom notes it never was.
He will learn, or he will not. What matters more is what they learn together... more or less. )
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( simpler, to press now his knee to lan zhan's thigh, settling in to watch him as he has watched wei wuxian in the arts which leave his body bared and hollowed, ready to be lost or sown with strange fruit and stranger dreams. the question of hands, and his don't even twitch. not more. not when they did before, and all he is returns to rock steady inevitability. )
Twelve mermaids. Torn asunder, working under my direction. Eight more released back to their brethren.
( no hesitation, numbers exact. were he asked, he couldn't say the time each was rent to pieces, but he could note the order, the familiar alien awareness of their thoughts. )
I'm here. I have you.
( and his chenqing rests across his lap, and that, that too is a promise. if it becomes too much, the cacophony of voices, offering one last word: )
They dream of fish and food and carnality, and yearn for it, and for... the mirror? No, something like it, that they linger here. If they respond, Lan Zhan, their truths are not human. Their understanding is as Bichen.
( drawn to silver flash of cutting, swift, calculated glory, and unhappy, put away without blood shed when they are drawn to the idea of a battle, a meal.
and the human dead, what of them? he will not say. they are as lan zhan would know, versed in decades of his investigations and interrogations, he who sought chaos, he who mourned without a word, who raised a son and reputation and hell in their twisting, binding world. )
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In the easy, breeze-swept cadence of grass blades paying tributes of prostration, in the absent trill of distantly roiling birds, he sees Wei Ying, and interrogates him, start to finish: where the questions of him begin, where sin bends and where it breaks and where it saturates his skin, seeps within sibilantly. He decides: )
Take a few steps back. ( And the afterthought nod, Please. ) Draw wards if they seek you.
( Natural, classical precautions. No less than Wei Ying had learned; no more than he has already doubtlessly dismissed. After, a simple exercise to trail his hands in the air in mute symphony, to practise his knuckles, ease and warm joint and bone. When he begins, the execution must prove flawless.
The dead speak to me, he does not say, nor, They accept no less than perfection.
And, No differently than you.
He plays, askance. Shrill, the first notes ever dissonant, a quieted but clawing aggression. There are rules to this, guidance: do not instigate conferences, do not invite to your table more mouths than you can feed. And yet, he is a graceless host, all his doors open. What will ease your hurt?
Below, waters settle, spume, agitate. Stones burn and roast beneath the midday sun, blanched like skins of mother crone, splotched unevenly. He waits for the trickle of trills, of sound peering in like a fragile whisper — shudders, when the voice answers him, already alert to know and read the words behind sound that is language — and then comes the second voice, rushed and hasty, a third.
He's setting his hands on the guqin to steady the strings and infuse them with his own qi, to force a cue among speakers, when the fifth rushes forth, the ninth, Lan Wangji barely keeps the pace past the fifteenth, then they double, the chords overwhelm, vibrate and draw taut and brittle, the eighty-first voice shouts, the hundredth already promises vengeance, some of the first weep —
So many of them, infectious and building like the waves of fever sickness, and waves of water that crest and burst and earth crumbles beneath him, onslaught of horror and trepidation and vibration, he breathes with the wreck of their screams, breathes with the constant tremble of power on his guqin, riding his hands, breathes with the fear of them —
It is surrender, when he waves his hand and forces Wangji removed, severed from physical existence too abruptly to allow a gentle cessation. I wanted. He stings, the waters of his eyes pooled deep on his cheeks, digging ravines. I wanted to help you.
Hand to his stomach, he quakes with a long, visceral heaving, like pigment breaking from oil, the parts of himself divorcing him. he catches himself on one arm, fingers sunken in grass, crisp, clean, green. To smell a colour, to welcome life's stab in his lungs. Distantly, he remembers, Wei Ying. Wei Ying expects an answer. Wei Ying. )
...they are hundreds.
( They knew. Saw the bones. But the spirits — his mouth slack and dry and his teeth raw — the spirits all lingered. )
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Yet what for him is deeply, darkly familiar, what cacophony of voices had defined his sword-edge path through insanity and horror, what had been his close, ceaseless companion and the endless demands that invaded his mind, coiled around him like the cloying stench of the decay it embodied in spirit and flesh, this is not Lan Zhan's reality.
No, not with the man he's allowing himself to realise nuances of the depth to which he cares, voicing them only in acceptances and the way he feels panicked concern flare in his chest, sunflare bright, and oh, the sun has burned through his home before, his chest before, his empty, hollow core. Kneeling, he offers a water satchel to Lan Zhan; his hand, lighter than a bird at first, touching to Lan Zhan's shoulder. Touch needs inviting at some times in particular. He wouldn't strive to make this worse. )
Drink.
( He suspected. Heaviness instructed him in the unfortunate truth. )
You named it as the Burial Mounds. I sorrow that you were more right than we yet knew.
( All of this wreckage of a citadel, it is Yiling. Restless, incapable of letting go of what it holds onto, forever greedy, forever swallowing more whole. A place that had once been of normalcy, driven to darkness with the machinations of humanity. Now only the inhuman remained, so achingly reminiscent of what it meant, once, for life to be defined by its presence between death's beginning and end; where death served purpose, where bodies did not birth and grow and wane and decay to birth again with the dawn of a new day.
Where the dead did not lie uneasy under the waves, no rest granted, no salvation, nothing. Not even the strength of the life that is within the lighthouses' limits, instead a carpet upon which the mermaids and their own unrestful dead caper, hunt, and year. )
I'm here, Lan Zhan. You are not alone.
( For he knows what it was to be alone before that understanding, swallowed by it, choking on it. When the dead sing so loud, no other song can penetrate, and the kind of control that works would penetrate Lan Zhan in fractures that would bleed him dry. )
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Wei Ying nurses him with drink. Instinct, again: he takes it, clumsy, first meaning to hold it in his own grip, like a calf seeking its mother's teat, but losing it even as his lips smack and stitch glued, as he licks the lacquer of the first drops choked out, so perfectly beaded, their translucence like a silvered swell. He leans into Wei Ying, lets him hold the satchel and only licks and braves the rare gulp, the swallow — shudders to feel waters not of his body cascade down the jutting curve of his throat and drench his collar. He is as a cat and a stray, as Wei Ying. He drinks greedily.
He does not stop for longer than he'd intended. Then, rasped and artless, hand's arc writing Wei Ying's drink dismissed: )
At times, when you are here, I am the most alone.
( There are parts of you that should be parts of me, and to live as a soul divided between two cages of flesh is to suffer torture and ridicule. Salt the stirrings of his body's wounds, set him to dry. He aches in writings of longing, and there is no time, here, now, this is no hour to teach Wei Ying the brush strokes.
The dead. Too often, Wei Ying's presence debilitates him. Now, the waves stoke and crash in rapid violence, and he is only the hard harm of his gaze, beamed, only his furrowed brow, only the shoreline and its dead, vivisected below, for his pleasure. )
They were lured here, under pretences of false shelter. They perished to sirens. ( When he blinks his eyes shut, he is breathless, eyes tightly closed like shutters. ) This, then, is why they wish to reach the shore.
( For sanctuary pledged but withheld, for the terror of the creatures that succumbed them. )
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The most alone, Lan Zhan, or the loneliest?
( A soft question from lips that smile without mirth, and a sinking in the pit of his stomach, words and fears left years ago in the lap of his shijie rolling back, weighing down on his lungs. Not the time for it, now, and he breathes, breathes in uncertainty and subtle shift of sky and cloud and the hint of light within, breathes out the coiling shadows, and inhales them again. Dark, silken, and acrid, like the scent around them, like Lan Zhan's hair.
He wants to crack his fingers open, spread them wide, stroke them caressingly down and over Lan Zhan's crown, the side of his head, toward the ends of his hair; he wants, for that moment, and he shoves it under, eyes lifting from Lan Zhan back to the waters being swallowed again by fog, amnesiatic and condemning.
Anchor him, and anchor Lan Zhan, staring out. It's a thought with more clarity than what he stares into, and he reaches for Lan Zhan, but doesn't know what to do with his hands that he hasn't already. Presses close, without hemming in. Peace. No peace. Hold steady. )
The way Lily and the rest spoke of it, Master Zenobius acted under compulsion. The sirens, too, act under compulsion of some kind, have you observed that? These poor people...
( He looks out with eyes that see the intangible, and he thinks, lips pursed. )
Our master scholar feels the weight of his own unnatural state as we stay here. If they reach land, they still won't find rest, or resolution. Lan Zhan. What would you have us do?
( Conversation, invited, asking but not with helplessness. Thoughtfulness, and an awareness that their talent has been the chaos caused in each place they've been, no matter the intent. The burning wish to sweep Lan Zhan, Sizhui, Lily, Eleven, all the scattered people who have lingered and who come now away, to be done with this place and its great and horrible magic, balanced against: peace.
How many will know it? )
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( They cannot retrieve these bodies and bury them here, where the soil will turn and churn them and deliver them woken and fresh. They cannot burn meat and bone and deny the construct as a home for the soul, flickered and wandered. They cannot even hope to raise hundreds of corpses and transport them for burial where they next land, for resources are a rope pulled taut. There is a finite stretch to what means their patron may offer.
He feels Wei Ying close in the radiance of his movements, the pleasant, proximate but elusive warmth of his hands. He wants, as kittens and blind, fresh-born rabbits do, to lean into Wei Ying's palm and chase his touch. Abstains, dry ragged taste of his lips quenching their loneliness through gentle friction.
In the end, he yields: takes Wei Ying's hand, nearly dragging him down, as he pushes himself up, and loans far too much weight in the concession. An equal could bear him, and Lan Wangji does not insult his companion today by lessening his body's burden. )
They fear the sirens. ( A truth proven, restated. ) To hunt them would win the dead their peace.
( By removing prey from predator, where the dead cannot win their own refuge, where they fail to haunt and claw and reap gasped, white-heated terror from their pursuers. Wet, drenched, mould fitted, and the many-forked fires of fate's cruelties still singes them, marrow-deep. And yet, Lan Wangji's eyes come limpid in the way of turbulent waters, made fresh by constant wind and stream. )
But the sirens do not kill for sport or intent.
( For instinct exacerbated by compulsion. Are they, then, innocent of the blood that stains them? Enough so that their wrath is animal-like, devoid of the need for Lan Wangji's purposeful castigation.
Earlier, he waged war with hundreds of dead arrogantly, unprepared. Now, he watches the the shivered swell of brimming seas and spies nothing of the white of their bones, yet all of their anger. He feels suddenly small, foolish. Young, as he only wears this guilt beside Wei Ying. )
Among us, there are those with sorcery of endless fire. ( Emilia. Lily. The girl Hermione. Perhaps the innate ferociousness of women lends them to the flame. ) Perhaps, if we release candles at sea?
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( To speak, to entreat, to offer thoughts and plans or their tempering. Nebulous, truly, but his concept is more and more one of the give and take they shared once upon a lifetime, when something like love might have been easier. The kind of time and place they'll never return to, but have learned from, and learned of.
Now, the dead wait, and ache with their edged release. )
It's worth asking, Lan Zhan. I can wear the forsaken suit and haunt the city for any remnants of that which might hold such a flame.
( Light to honour the dead, such as it is, an attempt to allow them freedom, to be sent on. To let go. )
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What face would Wei Ying have shown, were he the first son of a sect and adorned in the filigrees of true stature? Born, if not to Jiang Fengmian and his lady unloved, than to a dynasty of red, in his veins red, that might join the river blues and yield for the sake of Lotus Pier, a purple most palatable? A welcome addition to the Sunshot campaign, command settling arrogant on his shoulders like the hungry dusting of first snow, and Wei Ying entitled to spearhead a vanguard. A bartered spouse of Gusu Lan, sooner than a gift Lan Wangji has stolen thrice in the night, frail-handed?
What might their lives have been, but for the accident of Wei Ying's parentage? Foolish, to think. They have as they have, as the heavens bless upon them. Their grounds and their waters and the choked interstices between them, where purpose dilates into their legend. )
Thank you. ( His fingers snag and hook and cinch, and the fractured line of Wei Ying's wrist is sharp bone beneath his palm, unbreaking. He raises himself. )
And I am sorry. Wangji has failed you. ( The guqin, the man. What difference? ) I serve you no better than silver thread and gossamer.
( Offering scant use, less protection. He cannot coax coin to their hands, cannot whisper the dead willing in the ways of Wei Ying and master Wrath, cannot even perform the petty parlour tricks of his heritage. Death drowns him. He becomes Wei Ying's shadow and breathes. )
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Lan Zhan was never meant to learn of a life like this, and yet, yet. He is here, and he tries, and it's arrogance to think either of them are becoming better men, though he does feel it may be true. Not necessarily better fathers, not necessarily better cultivators, but better men.
Little by little, in rebuilding, in the deconstruction of what is true in their world in false absolutes, and what's aching and horrible and real here, likewise without absolutes.
Wei Wuxian doesn't think. He moves, barely rising to his toes to press lips against Lan Zhan's forehead, and his ribbon, the metal clouds, all at once. )
An embroidered pillow still promises a place to rest. That's a great deal more than I'm used to having, ( he says, settling down onto his feet, aware of the feat they must try in seeing spirits addressed, in allowing them acknowledgement, in providing them access to avenues for passing. )
Making mistakes is not the same as being incapable. Don't speak poorly of yourself. The only ones to disparage of are those who never adapt, never change, blame all that happens on others. You are not that man. You, Lan Zhan, are not afraid to try.
( And aware that there is opportunity for success and failure, in unequal amounts. )
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What do other people do, when they are whole, and the house of their bodies wants no more patches, and their hearts pulse wild and rapid like bundled roots, and time brings expansion and not erosion? Smear of ink is light bruised on Wei Ying's cheek, and Wangji wants water-grazed fingertips, wants to cleanse the scars-stains of Wei Ying. Bird, where would you fly, so free?
He drifts longer than he should, released from the confines of self-sufficiency by the knowledge that Wei Ying is honey-poison, migrated in his bloodstream, and now that the Yiling Patriarch has laid stake, no other sickness or wrong may claim Wangji. That to breathe is a simple, lung scavenging thing, and the birds that beat white roiling wings above wait to feast on his bones at the largesse of Brother Death, who pillars him.
Shuttered, Lan Wangji's eyes pulse and spasm. Awareness kindles back in the space between eclipses, a slow, liminal teasing — as if Lan Wangji is in courtship with himself and must not disappoint by conceding his hand early. He peels himself away, fractured, swaying back to lend Wei Ying a respectful berth, before wetting his fingers in the pool of Wei Ying's dark hair, up the back of it, up the nape, up where Wei Ying's strands tighten and cinch. Red rust and absent blood, Wei Ying's ribbon unravels like serpent's skins.
Lan Wangji presents it to Wei Ying. His own wrist, limp and soft, after. )
Are we the men our mothers would wish us to be?
( He knows, Wei Ying knows. Zewu-Jun spoke the words. Shall they omit this once more? And Wangji tires of it, of this, of sunlight low and lazy. Of death so comfortable in its empire, it need not even rush to claim them. They live suspended here, never controlling the pace or moment. How he has tired of wait. )
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One lap, to lay his head on, the calm of the storms in his life allowing him a moment to breathe. Uncomfortable in hindsight, how little he understood her readings of him, how little he could thank her now for her love, for cementing to him that family is warmth as well as rigid expectation and duty and honours he tears the face from for want of righteousness not bedecked in the jewels of tyranny and convenience.
He is death, and he feels it, the cloying sweetness of decay as Lan Zhan's fingers succeed where his washings have not, and for one moment stretching long between this breath exhaling, this breath indrawn, he imagines leaning forward, imagines bracing and embracing, and then discards it, but for the silken ribbon coaxed free of his hair.
Presented, and a wrist that follows. Here a pulse beats, here meridians lie, here blood is blue against pale skin, deprived of air. Are we the men our mothers would wish us to be? His fingers weave the ribbon around themselves, and he lifts Lan Zhan's wrist, lowers his head. One hand ties, a vambrace of red against the white, blood against snow, passion against the fog of daily existence. He studies his work and the answer between them, saying, )
We are the men they did not yet know to imagine, ( and he inhales, ribbon tied, devouring itself and freed. ) I can only feel they'd wish for happiness, true living, and those who do more good than harm.
( In this, and here, the bow of husbands, the heavens witness, the forebearers silent, the present evershifting, remade moment to moment. In the acrid bile the world tears from their throats, the spirits caught and netted as decayed fish left to rot, and the reality that life is not static, that death isn't either, that what is claimed is not permanent by nature.
This is a choice, he feels, one made every day, footprints left in the detritus of the forests they knew in their youths, washed clean with season and storm. Soft, near to drowned by the winds and the surf that pounds below, the dead hidden from view, the lighthouse looming white and broken overhead.
Red, wound and binding, oxygen rich veins flooding two hearts, filling lungs. )
Sought together, side by side.
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The first stroke of Wei Ying's hair lands flat and warm on the top of Wei Ying's head, clumsy for gravity and the lock of knuckles and finger bone, their clasp gaunt. Wangji does not — inspire ease naturally, does not reassure or bring comfort. It is a learned thing with rabbits who behold him, young oily dapplings of white and darks, sweet-nosed, humming. Lan Wangji raises one animal, then another, then the next, and gives them the reins of the land — his arms, the bridge of his shoulder, the sharp slope of his back. They cascade, graze and conquer.
And what came after? Lan Yuan, no greater than a garden creature, glued to Wangji's leg like grains of sticky rice. Possessed of the sterile sagacity and instinctive wisdom to climb Lan Wangji's hip, but not claw it. Lan Wangji offered short, aborted caresses on his nape and neck, the rare refitting of his robe collars. Play. Feverish kisses on Yuan's temple, once sunset rusts slipped him into night's sleep, and Uncle could not complain of Wangji spoiling the infant.
This is a different exercise, its subject long, lean, meaner. Thinned like candle wick, ever prepared for his own burning. Lan Wangji peels his fingers back and tries to stroke again, to capture Wei Ying's hair, to draw it back as if he intends a second binding of it, or a braid — only to release it down in cascade. )
You do not speak of them, as you do of Sizhui. ( As often, as hearted. ) Your parents. Tell me.
( There is greed in this, in counting the coin-wealth of Wei Ying's secrets, watching it gather in Wangji's cupped hands. )
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He knows they're both orphaned of parents, held within the palms of different sects, to different reasons, respects, expectations. He's heard and understood his own place, too naturally gifted, too pernicious, too bright to hep but cast a shadow in comparison to those who excelled but not to the same degree. A crime of the heart, not of anything else. An accusation that meant the words he heard of his parents were in snippets of a mother's anger, her frustration, and a father's quiet, you look like them both, but especially her, years later agreed on by Lan Qiren, and it wasn't favourable.
His parents, and what he has in his head are the barkings of the dogs that chased him when they'd not returned, when the Night Hunt had sealed their fate and he'd not known the moment he went from beloved son to bereft orphan, and he never would. His second orphaning, he at least hadn't been alone. At least it had not been he who hurt most, and the machinations of it, the opening thrust of the war brewing for decades, had a way to be fought back against.
He swallows, tries for a smile, allows it to fade as he licks his lips. )
I wish I could. I wish I had their stories, Lan Zhan, more than the snippets the senior generation shared every so often, but even your uncle remembers more about my parents than I do. Or at least about my mother.
( Not happy memories, but frustrated ones out of Lan Qiren's own youth, and there's perhaps something to be said for his lineage and their tendency to drive second born sect heirs into distractions of whatever kinds. Perhaps. )
I don't remember what they look like. Sometimes I dream I remember the sound of their voices, but more often their laughter. They liked laughing, I think... and we traveled. I remember a donkey, and I think it must have been my father who led us both, with my mother at my side. But I don't know, not anymore.
( Not unusual, when a child loses parents before the age of five, when memory is less permanent for most, let alone someone who has learned compartmentalising as a matter of coping and persisting, of shutting out traumas, of striding forward, of making himself the accommodating one. The challenging, irritating, annoying, and yet outwardly unburdened one, enough to the point that it was the bone of contention as he swallowed and swallowed and swallowed the deaths he dealt, until one day, they swallowed him in turn.
Staring at Lan Zhan, red ribboned wrist, he swallows. Is swallowed in turn. )
Do you... of your mother, do you recall much of her now?
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And Lan Wangji, fickle and the line of his shoulders trembled, the deep compulsion to reach a hand out in comfort, resisted to knot wet-like on his thighs, knuckles gristle and white-rawed. There are moments in a man's life when he is but a vessel for the torture of his heavy-weighted emotions, and Wei Ying's cup runs full.
What does Lan Wangji recall of his mother? A battered rasp, lip swollen full under the crown of his feral, feline teeth. He remembers her beautiful, kindly, exquisitely sophisticated, elegant, composed — every word a child encounters in early poems and transfers, generously, unto the tall, looming pillars of his private heroes. )
Eight gashes of crackled wood on her door. The winter creak of her porch. Gentians, lightly acerbic.
( The charcoal marks that sketch out a woman, and Lan Wangji's memory the guiding hand to carve her, something from the nothing of fragile, abortive recollection. Zewu-Jun would know more. Perhaps Uncle. And who are they but the stone-faced captors of Lan Wangji's infancy, the stewards of his awareness?
He withheld, when Wei Ying required himself. Intrudes once more now, spreading and sprawling his fingers through the cascade of silken dark, wrapping it loosely to belt his fingers. Beautiful. None of the other prominent advantages that elevate a match, but Wei Ying was beautiful before he massacred himself to be anything else. )
We shall procure you another donkey.
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Closes his eyes at the hand in his hair, the fingers entangling firmly with the length of his parent's gift to him, the devotion he shows as any person does from home, not stripping himself of the body his parents gave him, as none of them do. Filial piety in the wearing of form, the way they grow without contestation, and he sighs, a soft sound swallowed by the susurrations of the sea, down the hill, cloaked in fog.
This is not a touch to lean into, not the rake of nails and fingers, blunt, against scalp, not the cupping of a head, or cheek, or jaw. Lan Zhan is both here, immediate, and distant, the anchoring of a river creature in the water weeds, the strain of waters pulled through tangled roots, strangling. He doesn't feel strangled now, and that perhaps is part of the ease in his bones, why he laughs and he sounds close to carefree.
He's not, not in the waking sea of dead. Not carefree, but perhaps, in part, lightened. )
Do you think this one will like me any better?
( And they no, no, it will not, that no animal rises ready and easy to his touch, but that people, spirits do, that which can be charmed in word or song. He is not a man given to quiet and stillness and silence by nature: he coaxes children, where the rabbits, looking for calmer spirits, shy. Where the donkey, seeking its own way, butts head with one equally independent, and slightly liable to spoils of free feeding along the way. )
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This is the truth of him, startled and stone, given to stubborn resistance: to persist, hands claws and sundering Wei Ying's hair again like waters, picking out strands as if they were his noose. How would Lan Wangji die of him, of Wei Ying?
Grit and gravel scrape his knees through granules of sand, shifting, and the world transforms, and he is still this — an anchor, still fixated on Wei Ying, still hollowed, still an accessory. The lace trim on Wei Ying's sleeves, his doubled collar. This is Lan Wangji, flickered beat adorning his soulmate's pulse. He wants to scent him — take, this is what means to own, the capacity to singularly and indifferently shatter.
Does not. He releases (again), withdraws (again), reconsiders (again). Fear is damp and lichen, the silvered edge of his smile, deceptive. )
You are a terrible man.
( Selfish, whimsical, breezy. Possessed of strange and eerie righteousness. Utterly, painfully, wickedly impulsive. Prone to brilliance, to laughter, to sacrifice. To cleaving Wangji's innards and glistening them with their fats over fire. To being, as ash is, dispersed in wind, one moment contained the next coagulated, the heartbeat after gone.
A mystifying, glorious creation. Yiling Patriarch, first disciple, Wei Ying. )
It will know. ( As Lan Wangji knows, a man complicit. One who leads into blindness by example. He thinks, if Wei Ying's hair flies free in the wind spell, it will yet tempt him. Starts, gently, to braid it and leave the ends loose. ) You have no more truths solely your own.
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They are themselves, as flawed and terrible and great as that might be, and it might eventually be enough. Choosing what are, and what they do; choosing whom they're with and how and why.
One ribbon wrapped around a wrist, and the red should draw his eyes, but he knows it, has tasted it. Might not be moved to taste it better but were it painting Lan Zhan's lips, and he lets that thought go too, on the same wind that slips past them, thick with the scent of the sea and its natural decay, denying the dead beneath its surface. )
What about you, Lan Zhan? Any other hidden truths to share?
( A reach out, fingers hooked into the skirts of his robes, tugging once. Here. )
no subject
There is no kindness in him, for this. No distinction between where the feral appetite to claim begins and the diplomatic one to conquer without bloodshed ends. Greed is a continuum, possession a foregone semantic conclusion. No hunting thrills like that of man.
Slipped, his fingers dip until he clutches Wei Ying's hand in his own and only wrestles his thumb in, serpentine, to sketch out warm snags of ruined rhetoric on his palm, a fluttering candle of communication poorly traded. What you know, you know. He writes easily, terribly, conveniently, the rushed trill of his countless secrets in the aching code of Gusu Lan private correspondence intended only for the sect.
And reedy in the way of leaves thieving trickle under moonlight: )
Forgive me. Will you wait for them?
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This is not a matter of fairness, not even justice; this is not sixteen years stretched between them, two very different men standing on either end of it. This is a negotiation between people, whole and fractured and reknit on their own.
Will he? He doesn't need to. Whatever ribbons tied around wrists, Lan Zhan hadn't expected him to wait, to accept, to take in one selfishness in exchange for another, unknowing then known. To choose, daily, what it is they are for each other, what form of support that takes, what demands they make, what they refuse or accept. They, unlike the watery dead, are not bound to singular truths, to clawing ends. What they drown in is, so far, a choice.
His hand closes around that thumb, stilling it, lips curved enough to suggest a smile without dedicating to one. )
I'll wait. For now.
( But not forever, because in nothing can be promise something as impossible as that. Yet to not demand secrets from a man who takes pleasure in declaring Wei Wuxian no longer has any? Oh, pride would say, this is no level playing field, but wisdom notes it never was.
He will learn, or he will not. What matters more is what they learn together... more or less. )