( Sweet thing, gossamer and fraying thread. A man like the crackling wisps of a dying fire, when the flame burns red and waning. He seeks in the cradle of Lan Wangji's hips and thighs his sanctuary, as if he does not know, as if the copious, mischievous litany of his bones can house and shield him.
His hand drifts to tumble in the choked space between Wei Ying's nape and the crown of his head, thumb dipping in the crevice, dragging lines of white heat pressure. Up, down. The bare temple after, its brother too hidden below.
He inclines down, one arm yet up, then covering Wei Ying with the sails of his sleeve, as if he were young Yuan, Sizhui, thinking the world can disappear when it goes unseen. As if Lan Wangji can entomb him. )
Whom do you hide from? ( Withered, weak. Understanding. This is hate as only Wei Ying may ever know it, a killing of kindness. ) The death of her?
( He holds Wei Ying so close now, like a heartbeat, like a tumour. Drags a rabbit — for once, unwilling to pour down over Wei Ying's head like waters. )
She must die. You know it so.
( The people of Alem will not bear the dregs of death past their walls, not when tragedy yet hunts them. What Wei Ying has born, one of them must slay again, and it will be a quick thing, saddened. Her children need not see again. Perhaps, and Wei Ying's tongue will speak like lead, She has fled where you cannot follow. )
( he breathes under that touch, under the heat of a thumb stroking over skin and muscle and thin membranes of pretense that bone be not exposed to air, that he lives, and prospers, and he does in so many ways. he's not well rested, no, but few of them are, and the weight doesn't all slough off him now as it had before, the first year here a flirtation with ongoing disaster. he's sturdier now, and his eyes close under the sweeping, ticklish sweep of lan zhan's sleeve. breathes in the scent of him, and it's there, less by sleeve and more by chosen burrowing in his lap, with the scent of rabbit, of damp, of metal, of illness that clings to wei wuxian himself.
so much death. he's not a man meant for healing, not the way he's been forced to help, by the necessity of hands to be ordered here or there, for anatomy to be restructured, of each weight laid down before a soul that prefers its investigations and its obsessions come more natural.
he's no natural, not at this. it shows in the shudder of laughter at the rabbit's struggle, his hunching shoulders and tightened hold of his hands on his husband, who states, who simplifies, who... )
We all must, Lan Zhan.
( not now. not soon. it's a reminder, mortality the fright that haunts them both, in their own heavy, heartsick ways. )
Just... let them have the strength of her, until they can evacuate.
( until reality, cruel and cold and consuming and horrible, will catch up, as it must. let him toil and trouble and protect and shield, for the days, the weeks, until her loss must become what it will be, in this world cursed by the deathless lords.
if only this were a different world. if only this were a land freed of ellethia's curdled death spilling past its dark mirrors, crossing boundaries, slick curses and crumbling truths. ah, but he should check in on their living relic of that land: poor curmudgeonly zenobius, trapped as surely as they are in master scorpion's sap-sticky paths. )
Let us ask of her the choice of when she dies, and not the choosing for her.
( Dead and wilted and long gome, when her children are imperiled. The moment when glances darken and snag and sit on her, idle and long. She will not be a beacon of harm and antipathy, to reverberate that displeasure unto her young. And Alem does not stand ready to make its peace with the dead.
He feels Wei Ying small now, a dust mote. Tragic in his futility, reduced. Beautiful, in the calm, unflinching way of nature, where catastrophes always enchant through the music of immutability. He cannot be turned away. Contained, eradicated. )
How is she different? From spirits, to your strength.
( Well resourced, but still broadly untested. Wei Ying has only danced kniwn steps before. The burgeouning sweep of Lan Wangji removes itself. Ebb, tide. He lowers down, until he feels like a pained, tightly bound arc looming large over his husband. )
( A husband that moves, that tries to twist, that ends up impossibly with the beleagured rabbit in arms and nestling in between Lan Zhan's legs, the force of weight of one body trapping robes between braced knees. Strong legs, he remembers, even as the rabbit kicks and he thinks also, strong legs, making himself a nested cradle under his husband's looming form. Looks up, rabbit held to his chest, its nose twitching as Wei Wuxian blinks up into Lan Zhan's face.
As he smiles, small, and asks: )
Do you really want to hear?
( With something dangerously like hope in his eyes. A mother dies; parents precede their children, and that is the way of the world. She too shall pass, in truth, but let it be the moment of them escaping, of her children guided onward, of a sacrifice she can choose, and not the failings of a body that had never been a choice at all.
( He does not wish to hear, to know. Every aspect of his person, every particle of his body, every breath that plagues his lungs is repelled by proximity to the proposition. But Wei Ying has a need to relieve the pressure in his body, like puncturing a wound to weep out puss. He aches to heal. Words balm him.
So be it.
He shudders, and it ripples down, makes storm of the seas of his limbs placid. Bow of his back a stubborn ribbon, creasing on the bend when Wei Ying wriggles worm-like and satisfied to burrow. Indecent.
His hand trickles from bunny to boy and back again, Wei Ying's forehead comparatively dissatisfying as a texture after the rabbit's pleased, teasing form. )
( Lan Zhan is a terrible liar. It's in his body, the curve of it, the words he chooses not to say so that he holds to truth, as much as he can stand it. Comfort doesn't come naturally to him, raised so often without it, that his attempts are warming even in their contrasts. His palm, his fingers, dragging over rabbit to Wei Wuxian's face, where his eyes blink and skin twitches under the caress.
His nose all but twitches like the rabbit's. The weight of it slides down, until it rests in his lap more than against his chest. One hand freed from the hold on the rabbit, who reluctantly settles in to the lap provided, the second rabbit now squirming against Lan Zhan's side, then down, searching for its friend, barely registers to Wei Wuxian. Not in this red eyed moment, where the hollow in his chest feels limed a touch, warmed by his husband's effort when he doesn't, truly, wish to hear a word about any of this.
Wei Wuxian's hand flexes, touches skin warmer than his in the moment, slides to anchor the back of Lan Zhan's neck. Keeps eyes on him, and he says: )
You'd probably rather kiss me.
( Which is the only moment of not so teasing grace before he will, in fact, speak. )
( He would. A plain truth, hard as a mill's stone in the waters of ebbing uncertainty. Wei Ying's kindness is in this: the softening of glaring truths, the shielding of his hurts. He makes no sport of Lan Wangji's own troubled disposition, does not press advantage. This, here, the truth of his necromancy laid bare like the deformed body of a lover who was waged and won your wars — could be quarrel between them.
Wei Ying would have the right to ask, to want his skills discussed publicly, transparently, with the same comfort afforded to archery or the lesser sword talents. It is not. Lan Wangji's reticence does not flatter him.
Their eyes meet, dark chasm. Weight of Wei Ying's palm on his nape branding. Last I kissed you, you put the hurt where you now sprawl. But then, far from Lan Wangji to bear grudges. )
Falsely purposing conjugal wiles is forbidden. ( Besides, it has been some time since the Gusu Lan precepts suffered an addition. He answers, holding the line of Wei Ying's vision. Usurping it, tension of his neck a harbinger that he does not intend to be pulled down towards beautiful distraction. ) Speak.
Ah, they're only to be purposed when in a conjugal mood?
( There's easy, and there's easier. He smiles up at his husband, the warmth of an anchoring hand and the neck that won't bend, even for what one of them preferred, and the other man still enjoyed.
He strokes his thumb against the side of Lan Zhan's neck. A cost, to ask, a consideration, to listen. )
Thank you.
( The soft exhalation that stills even the rabbit in his lap, joined in that moment between heartbeats by the second rabbit, by a fullness of the heart in this carved out, chill earth
Then the shadows blush beneath his eyes, and he answers in what way he can. )
The awareness isn't so different from resentful energies been home, but her mind. There's a will, a wholeness there, that resentful energies never have. They're simplified in wants, caught up in why they couldn't move from the land of the living towards the river that flows through the afterlife and into the next. She's there, and aware, and I want no claim to that, so I don't. Beyond protect, because she, like the true dead turned chattel in the army outside, has no defense against a stronger necromantic power.
( He pauses, brow furrowing, hand on the rabbits stroking absently over their fur. )
Unlike the mermaids, who felt as inhuman as they were. She feels... death touched, not death constructed. Compelled? Retaining herself without the pain and horror those witches suffered, before I granted their final release in Taravast.
( She feels different from Hatisse, too, but he doesn't care to bring up their own undead witch under Wrath's reluctant hand in this fragile moment. Another time, then. )
If I had more experience, if this was my work and not my hope to keep us from being tied to and under the sway of whomever Master Scorpion would give our dead to so they might be forced to live again, she might be more completely her own. I don't know how to properly tie off that bond, only tamp down, not ask or order. Because she's not like the... the dead constructs with little mind or forced inhabitation by a spirit not native to them. It's all her in there.
( He listens in the way of disciplines, hungry for the sun of senior Wei's brilliance, cast sweltering and feverish pale upon them. It is Wei Wuxian who speaks, frivolously academic, impossibly clever, wit biting, edge poison. He does not know himself, how his forensic interest in the scholarly work of necromancy can translate as negligence, as thoughtless indifference, as malice.
How he speaks of the dead and death and the heartbreak of catastrophe without considering the emotions of the woman or those who have survived her, only the answers of her body's work.
When he shudders again, it's a startling thing, at once his instinctive revulsion and his conditioned discipline against ever permitting Wei Ying to comprehend Lan Wangji's fears. He must not. He must not. )
You do not inhabit her. ( Know her, live her, breathe her. Let her become an extension of him, feel the husk of her body like the innards of a well-stretched glove. Worse. No, better. He knows: ) You do not possess her.
( I might have kissed a mouth so red and cruel. He wishes to, despite himself, gaze a forlorn, deep fixation on Wei Ying's lips, the tears and knots of texture. He does not look away. Licks his own lips in return. Quiets, like the anticipation before dew drops descend, come morning. )
Do you crave that? ( An intimacy between summoner and summoned, a bond and bind no man can seamlessly replicate. Like motherhood for those absent a fertile womb. )
( When he listens, what he hears comes in the pauses, the flickers of depth burning in his husband and the generations of training, of thought, of simplified answers that Lan Zhan had learned nuance and depth for over the decades spanned lost between them. Still rigid, but having learned how to bend, to see, beyond the confines of social dictations.
And still. And still, these words, painting a very different image in Wei Wuxian's mind. His brows climb in slow increments, at inhabit, at possess, at language so wholly invasive he can imagine the fires of war burning down the sanctity of each body, blood running in rivulets down a face contorted in pain.
Or warped in a different pleasure, when the last of poison sweet drips from Lan Zhan's lips, do you crave that? To own, to possess, to suffuse, Wei Wuxian's brows so high his brow wrinkled in inversion to the concern or lengthy consideration of a long night spent seeking solutions to problems that felt like his alone to solve.
They were never his alone. These days he admits that, reaches out, discusses. Trusts a shared burden, with people who owe nothing to him but their chosen alliances.
Even Lan Zhan. Steady and certain and at times so beautifully thin, one wrong step might shatter their trust again wholly. That it didn't speaks powerfully to him, even when its close brushes steal the breath from his lungs, embed ice in his heart.
Here, however, there is no ice. No lack of air. A warmth, an incredulity, as his thumb again strokes over his husband's neck, pausing over his pulse, as close as he can. That heart, that heat, and is that jealousy? For whom? For what, in the end? )
There are times I'm suddenly certain you ask me things you already know, simply because you want to fight against what isn't there.
( Emotions, he thinks, and emotions, things he struggles with too. He smiles, still small, but truer than many, and offered honestly up to his husband's hovering face. )
They're not creatures to be possessed. To be owned. They're not to be inhabited, to be puppetted. They're not to be craved. When I broke the Stygian Tiger in Nightless City, you have to know it was because that's what all those righteous people, who were not righteous in that moment, craved possession. Ownership. Inhabitance. Power.
( A shift in his old, fingers dragging down, so that he can brush his thumb over Lan Zhan's lips, even as his tongue lathes over his own, unconscious mimic to his husband from heartbeats prior. )
Power can be useful, but it's as powerful, Lan Zhan, letting go. You know the things I crave.
( He has to, by now. Even if he won't admit it to himself, even if his fears are tangled tapestries of truths and shadows constructed in the lapse between years, in the factual and the fictitious, all important, all seen. All learned, when they seep out, wonderful and hideous alike. Parts of himself like rot that excise, again and again, until he too can breathe free. )
Affection. Steadfast companionship. ( A pause: this should not be the hardest part to say, but it is. Red eyes, rimmed and aching with a pain that shattered through him for the losses he can never fix, for the people who cannot return in any semblance but the capricious one that has left him with Wen Qing, heart's sister, and Xiao Xingchen, martial uncle, in his whirlwind sphere of existence. His voice so soft, his smile melting away, his eyes wide, deep, consuming universes. ) Love.
( Comes the world, and it's a fragile exhalation, it's the blush that steals up his neck, paints too stark against his cheeks, the flush of life that often enough he seems to pale to sustain. Deeply embarrassed, deeply vulnerable, over the implication of one word, one love, the wanting kind, the romance he never figured he was capable of finding. Which he probably still captures imperfectly, with each step they take forward, day to day. )
Student, friend, lover, spouse, twinned half of my soul. You know what I crave.
( Soft, peering up at his husband with intensity, because only once had he craved death, had he craved endings, had he seen no hope and only further destruction at his mere continued breath in a world so determinedly against him. In everything else, in every other moment, he had craved life. Eked out or sung easy and free from mountaintops, life. From the bottom of a wine jar to the bottom of a boat gentle on the river's misleadingly gentle surface, life. )
( Like an itch, like a scab. It wants unstitching. The rabid, eviscerating attention of Lan Wangji's greedy hands. There is a chasm in him, air cloying. He cannot breathe for himself, lungs strained, beat of his jugular's pulse staggered.
He thinks, I can bear this.
Thinks, He'll claw my heart out.
Hardship is a sequence of beads, tolerable in increments. Slip one at a time, between your fingertips. Let it go. Let it flow. You need only survive the one now, I can bear this —
— leans, hand guts the weed of Wei Ying's hair to wrench him up, crashes their mouths together. Tectonic collision, the kiss lands asymmetrical. Their lips, first, do not fit. He forces the position. It stings, rearranging Wei Ying as if he were doll-like, ragged, tender, foreign — an entity that is barely on the cusp of extension to Lan Wangji, that can still afford a distant, dissonant, separate existence. Asynchrony is only the body recognising that which is not itself. Wei Ying. Wei Ying, Wei Ying, Wei Ying.
He bites his husband's mouth, red of it a foregone conclusion. )
Piss off.
( Taunting, teasing, riling Lan Wangji. What was it Emilia said? Whitening his hair. Constantly speaking only to be heard, to irritate, to spark flame or action. Lan Wangji's hand wrestles free, forcibly, with hope of dropping Wei Ying down. Let him be unmoored, too.
After, he feels worn out, eroded. The extremities of his flesh cold, draft of the stairwell backing its home in him. A rabbit slips by his hip, to huddle, to warm him. )
In this, you are as a woman to me. ( No. Cut breath, stilted. The quiet implications of subjugation that gender designations present in the sects, absent here. ) There are mysteries of you I shall never understand.
( For want of different make, foreign natures. The theory of childbearing — the living, the dead — is simple. The emotional resonance overwhelms. )
Unless you speak them. ( Share, not only the burden, but the banalities. The smallest parts of Wei Ying, asked not to incriminate, but to glean. )
( The delicious nature of pressing until Lan Zhan trips over the last vestige of his reserve and acts. Explodes into furious motion, even more contained this time, the cut of teeth and lips and awkward angles forced to compliance with wanting hands, craving thick as the red of blood that decorates his lower lip when he's dropped, and Wei Wuxian collapses with a small sound of loss, pupils too wide in his already dark eyes. The rabbit on his lap scrambles off when he starts to slide out of Lan Zhan's lap wholesale, his hands latching on to his husband's robe-bedecked legs to keep him from slipping down stairs on the thin padding of his backside.
He takes a moment, head tipped forward, dark mass of his hair left for Lan Zhan's contemplationg, to breathe. To turn and look back over his shoulder, open mouth tending toward a smile with a certain amount of wonder, his tongue worrying thoughtlessly at the tooth-born cut in his lip.
To want, and be wanted. To be known in any part, and to hear I want to know more. )
Ah. Okay?
( Let him hold like this for a beat, another, his heart hammering in his chest, visible at his throat. )
I'll speak. About everything. Just, ah. Ask? When I forget?
( He doesn't judge it rightly, even now, when times are meant for speaking, when they're meant for silence. A lifetime of being irreverent to keep relationships smooth hasn't made it easy to reach beyond that and admit what else is there, what he feels, when it isn't convenient.
It turns out, heartache and want and sadness and joy and the hollow space in his chest that Lan Zhan fills with its conflicting, wonderful emotions that leave him exhausted in a pleasant way more often than not, these can all be truths too. And they're never convenient, and that's fine, even if he didn't think that was true before. )
And kiss me again?
( From where he sits below Lan Zhan's feet, arms winged back and holding to his robed knees, awkward and beautiful and nothing like he thought of himself in moments where he was his most appealing, his most confident. Just this. Just them. Just a cold staircase, two rabbits over the entirety of their human antics, and the pain of what awaits, but not alone. )
( His husband, a tangle of limbs, and the rabbits that litter his lap, the young territory between their legs. Latch of Wei Ying's hands on silken spread, anchored. Nails blunt, a precursor to clawing. A rabbit inundates the negative space between Lan Wangji's ankle and Wei Ying's wrist. He lifts it, unbothered by the husband who clings to him with the despair-drenched white knuckles of a man nearly drowned.
Later, the sibling will remember: how hungry hands hunted the other creature, how he went ignored at the root of the stairs by Lan Wangji's shoulder, too northbound to suffer the indignity of two men and their tussle. How they bound themselves together, but left him alone.
In the howling vastness of the groaning stairwell, Lan Wangji's silence nearly carves out a scream from his lungs. He holds back. Watches the red on Wei Ying's lip, crowds it with his finger, for once not spreading the blood bead but gently bringing it up back to his own mouth, to taste. A smear lingers behind on Wei Ying's lip, timid and doppled.
It suits you, Lan Wangji mouths, for all he suspects Wei Ying's stupor runs like a summer sickness' fever, cloying, frivolous, insufferable — but predictably prone to iminent relief. He might see now, the words plainly shaped, and not glean them. He will understand them, later. After.
He does not force Wei Ying towards him again, but slides down a few more steps, to bracket the side of him. To capture the jut of his jaw in the cup of a hand, and elan in: )
Soft now, or hardened? ( He asks now with the airy, petulant impatience of a precocious student frustrated to ask learning from a master he wishes to outgrow. ) Teach me.
( This, their way, then: negotiation. The cartography of touches and silences. Wei Ying, who taught him the pains of a hard, critical blow, burdened now with the task to educate him and avoid the repercussions of a dissatisfying kiss. )
( What in him shivers at the touch to his lip, at Lan Zhan's mouthed words that don't mean much to him in the moment, the implication of sounds formed and delivered just so, when he's so incredibly distracting with his finger slipping into his mouth—thought doesn't hold coherent, when Wei Wuxian swallows hard.
Bloody lipped, red mouthed. He doesn't crave devouring like this, not dredged into veins, but also like this, the injury of want. Lan Zhan is a picture in pales and blues and dark eyes and the hair that flows down his back, over his shoulders. None of it bears softness the way the rabbits do, their fur silk and velvet, but they're not half the lure of leaning in to the cupped hand, to Lan Zhan's own lean. Fingers twitching, and he moves his hands, runs nails into combed back hair, toward the back of Lan Zhan's head, and up, as the knot of his hair crown holds, whatever the decoration.
Soft now, or hardened? He smiles, teeth a pale wonder that catch light, heart recalling what it is to run when he holds everything in stillness. )
Soft. With the stairs... If we overbalance, the rabbits will suffer.
( As will they, but he's always been more resilient, more used to recovering, more used to the lengths of pain and their forgettings, and the rabbits, the rabbits aren't. Shouldn't be. Are mostly not on his mind at all, given how he's staring invitation at Lan Zhan's lips, not certain he shouldn't have said hard, hard as we can, before this moment flees too.
The ache of his heart, the one that isn't liquid heat that flows through no meridians but through another system entirely, pooling in the absent places of his core and lower still, doesn't diminish. But its edges lose their sharpness, dull down to the inevitable ending of that thread, coming, coming, soon. )
( Soft, sweet. Like feathers, like freshness of snow. A powder of itself. They are temples of bones, still breathing. His walls will crumble, his defences break.
Wei Ying's hand in his hair tightens the wet sailor's knot of him, twists. He falls into Wei Ying, less for gravity or negligence of himself than the quiet exhilaration of knowing he will be caught, he will be brought to shore.
This turn, his palm cradles Wei Ying's jaw, clumsy. Climbs, latches. The single torch's paltry potence leaves dusk to swallow the corridor whole. Spattering of light, here, there, blinks of a candle's wink, and they could be anyone, could be anyone at all. Live in these bodies like thieves, the start of his second kiss a misadventure of clumsy, blunt geometries. The fit is poor. He angles. Then suckles on Wei Ying's lip, more than seduces him, then nearly bloodies his nail, scratching the wasteland of the nearest stairstep to keep himself reined in.
They meet, somehow, in the midst of it all, one soul learning the game of halves combining. Bloodied, Wei Ying's mouth emboldens him to think of conquest, of burning. That, moan stifled, he has won something here. That he has not paid for it with the skin of his back.
It ends before he knows it ever caught shape. Slips from him, even when he resurrects it in quick, dry presses of his mouth on Wei Ying's lids, his forehead after. Ragged breath, he has lost rhythm. )
Don't leave me. ( Soft and not hardened. As if he speaks to the rabbits. )
Wherever you go to make men again from your clay of ashes. Wherever you go that no one may follow. ( But for Xue Yang, Wrath. He suspects, for the dark mahogany quality of her, Vanessa. A meek handful, past this. )
Come back to me after, as today.
( He accepts it, the fool. He will accept anything. )
( Was there pain, in any of this? Has he forgotten in the moment beyond the first sharp inclination, when the warmth that follows is a subtle shift forward, holding and held, faces aligned without perfection until they find ways to slot noses past noses, the small, private noises of it all. Is it a victory, to not be bloodied and desperate, to not be bent over in pain, and to feel, momentarily, the shadows caress their faces, embrace their not-quite-silence, hides them from the world while they're not performing for the world to see?
Wei Wuxian stutters back into himself, Lan Zhan's stifled moan lingering in his ears, a promise unmet, awaiting fulfilling. Blinks against the kisses pressed to his face, to Lan Zhan's breath as ragged as Wei Wuxian feels, his fingers shifting hold to stroke as the words sink below the surface of his too thick skin.
Don't leave me. Not again, not now, and he strokes from temple to the top of his head, and down the cascading waterfall of his hair. Strokes like he doesn't know how to do correctly with rabbits, how his shijie had soothed him from his youngest years to those within her time of dying. Precious, he thinks, recognising it as a tooth bearing truth that smiles or threatens or both, depending on who listens.
He shifts into Lan Zhan, just enough to bring forehead to forehead, metal caught between. )
I'll always come home.
( The simpler truth, found in long journeys and realignments of self before this world, further tempered in the trials of this one. Home is a place, isn't it? A place in the heart of those he loves. And while Sizhui has one kind of love, one kind of respect, he's still an unknown factor to him in the ways that Lan Zhan has learned, in the weak moments, the strong ones, the arrogance of their shared youth, the pain parting them later, a drop in the bucket of Lan Zhan's life.
His hand strokes over Lan Zhan's hair, the ensconced flame shuddering in the gasp of a breeze that staggers past, the rabbits huddling down away from the movement that flutters back to stillness, an exhalation of fresh air finding them even here, so far from where the air flows easy and true. Like they must, to survive each other. Like he wants to, out of the shadows and into the corners of Lan Zhan's heart.
A home, as his is, dusty corners and all. )
I'll always come home to you.
( Not Gusu. Not Yunmeng. Not Yiling, which was never a home, but was a refuge, and a death sentence at different times. Just to Lan Zhan, and the incidentals of location be at times damned. )
( After, his mouth raw, his thoughts stormed. After, Wei Ying unmoored, hands delving haggard and sweet, hold deepened at the rim of Lan Wangji's guan. Sinking. He dips his head into the gesture, works with Wei Ying's pull, sooner than against it. A rabbit tumbles into his lap, idle stray — not purring, but burrowing in the cradle of his silks, where they nestle. )
When we depart here. ( His lips smack together, tacky, tarred. He licks, once. Again. ) If — heed me. ( They do not speak of this, do not consider it. Two years of their lives, stranded on a silvered spider's web thread. ) If one of us... does not remember.
( If, and his heart's shrivelled and bled and ached, they arrive into different worlds, distinct only for the grace of shichen of difference — ) Pledge we will tell one another.
( If not speak of this world, then of the tumult surpassed, of the ebb and tide and deluge of their grown affection. Of their marriage, three, four, five-times honoured. Of their mouths in feral meeting, of how Lan Wangji's hands cling now like forest branches, gnarly and stiff over Wei Ying's, clumsy and plaintive. )
Pledge. ( He cannot be sixteen years a widower to missed opportunity once more. )
( Coaxing himself, or soothing them both, or swelling with a warm and gentle wholeness he doesn't want to examine too hard as Lan Zhan's head dips close. Desire, yes, lust, whatever hard words of the physical pull he accepts now is strong, confused for action, and yet weaker to the trembling in his heart. He wants to claim and give and broker pleasure like a gift of the heart, sibling to the bright cut of pain's grounding.
A hitch in his breath, and it's for another time, for a later when they're not sitting as moss on stones, dampened by the morning dew. Now is his husband's lips, glistening; the hurt that forms between them as a bird newly hatched, staggeringly ugly, piteously crying. Desperate for the protection of the nest they build of words and deeds, to allow its feathers fledge, to the disguise of maturity, protection of a delicate hope learning to spread its bald wings.
Soothing, his words with their fervor spoken low and deep, eyes hot, the red of them more vibrant now when tears try, try to stir themselves to eyes. Once he wondered how a man could allow himself so much luxury for tears, of joy, of pain, of everything inbetween. Now he has no reserves to keep himself from the trickle of water to wet the earth between them. )
I will sing them to you even when you don't wish to hear. I pledge it, Lan Zhan. My words marked.
( There will be things he's already forgotten, his nature and his turning away from the worst of things to instead hold closer to the better, to the moments he wishes not to forget until time strips them away, like the shape of his mother's voice, the texture of his parents in their shared laughter. )
If I have to whisk you away from Gusu to listen, bind us both until you hear, I pledge I will tell. Until you hear. Until you know.
( In the shifted paradigm of this landscape, broken and dead and brilliantly alive, wartorn and surviving and thriving in pockets of unanticipated beauty. Back home, in their disparate roles, connected by red strings and blue ribbon and a road that curves through everywhere and nowhere, all the same. If he must take the Chief Cultivator and wrap him up, pull him relentless and resentful from the duties he gave himself, single solitary choice in so many dozens they both made, he will.
( A hard pledge, yet easily brokered. Wei Ying murmurs his approval, and he had thought the scratchy, sharp-boned fit of their bodies done, the next expectant exhalation that deflates Wei Ying's lungs bereft of expectation. He kisses him again — one last time, one last time more — with the dried, flecked finality of a brush stroke that sheds at once formality and the last drool of the cinnabar paste left over. Less to communicate than to seal, he has heard, he will keep to account.
What is promised here, with two fumbling rabbits scrambling to win territory on their laps and skidding, as their sweet paws fail to latch, and producing the hummed, gravelly sounds that never seem as if they might fit such small, fragile bodies — these words cannot be rescinded. )
And I. ( He gives it knowing, but weak. Expected. )
I shall not be silent, a coward, or a fool. ( He will be more than himself, layers upon layers of silks and learned bravery. Part his father's greed, his brother's love, Wei Ying's audacity. ) I shall have you in honest marriage.
( And they will not lose what this hour has bound, they will not be slaves to time and circumstance, they will not doubt themselves. Uncle might disapprove. Brother laugh. So what of it? Better the world betrayed than the world once more allowed to betray them. )
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( Sweet thing, gossamer and fraying thread. A man like the crackling wisps of a dying fire, when the flame burns red and waning. He seeks in the cradle of Lan Wangji's hips and thighs his sanctuary, as if he does not know, as if the copious, mischievous litany of his bones can house and shield him.
His hand drifts to tumble in the choked space between Wei Ying's nape and the crown of his head, thumb dipping in the crevice, dragging lines of white heat pressure. Up, down. The bare temple after, its brother too hidden below.
He inclines down, one arm yet up, then covering Wei Ying with the sails of his sleeve, as if he were young Yuan, Sizhui, thinking the world can disappear when it goes unseen. As if Lan Wangji can entomb him. )
Whom do you hide from? ( Withered, weak. Understanding. This is hate as only Wei Ying may ever know it, a killing of kindness. ) The death of her?
( He holds Wei Ying so close now, like a heartbeat, like a tumour. Drags a rabbit — for once, unwilling to pour down over Wei Ying's head like waters. )
She must die. You know it so.
( The people of Alem will not bear the dregs of death past their walls, not when tragedy yet hunts them. What Wei Ying has born, one of them must slay again, and it will be a quick thing, saddened. Her children need not see again. Perhaps, and Wei Ying's tongue will speak like lead, She has fled where you cannot follow. )
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( he breathes under that touch, under the heat of a thumb stroking over skin and muscle and thin membranes of pretense that bone be not exposed to air, that he lives, and prospers, and he does in so many ways. he's not well rested, no, but few of them are, and the weight doesn't all slough off him now as it had before, the first year here a flirtation with ongoing disaster. he's sturdier now, and his eyes close under the sweeping, ticklish sweep of lan zhan's sleeve. breathes in the scent of him, and it's there, less by sleeve and more by chosen burrowing in his lap, with the scent of rabbit, of damp, of metal, of illness that clings to wei wuxian himself.
so much death. he's not a man meant for healing, not the way he's been forced to help, by the necessity of hands to be ordered here or there, for anatomy to be restructured, of each weight laid down before a soul that prefers its investigations and its obsessions come more natural.
he's no natural, not at this. it shows in the shudder of laughter at the rabbit's struggle, his hunching shoulders and tightened hold of his hands on his husband, who states, who simplifies, who... )
We all must, Lan Zhan.
( not now. not soon. it's a reminder, mortality the fright that haunts them both, in their own heavy, heartsick ways. )
Just... let them have the strength of her, until they can evacuate.
( until reality, cruel and cold and consuming and horrible, will catch up, as it must. let him toil and trouble and protect and shield, for the days, the weeks, until her loss must become what it will be, in this world cursed by the deathless lords.
if only this were a different world. if only this were a land freed of ellethia's curdled death spilling past its dark mirrors, crossing boundaries, slick curses and crumbling truths. ah, but he should check in on their living relic of that land: poor curmudgeonly zenobius, trapped as surely as they are in master scorpion's sap-sticky paths. )
Let us ask of her the choice of when she dies, and not the choosing for her.
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She is a mother. Her choice plain.
( Dead and wilted and long gome, when her children are imperiled. The moment when glances darken and snag and sit on her, idle and long. She will not be a beacon of harm and antipathy, to reverberate that displeasure unto her young. And Alem does not stand ready to make its peace with the dead.
He feels Wei Ying small now, a dust mote. Tragic in his futility, reduced. Beautiful, in the calm, unflinching way of nature, where catastrophes always enchant through the music of immutability. He cannot be turned away. Contained, eradicated. )
How is she different? From spirits, to your strength.
( Well resourced, but still broadly untested. Wei Ying has only danced kniwn steps before. The burgeouning sweep of Lan Wangji removes itself. Ebb, tide. He lowers down, until he feels like a pained, tightly bound arc looming large over his husband. )
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( A husband that moves, that tries to twist, that ends up impossibly with the beleagured rabbit in arms and nestling in between Lan Zhan's legs, the force of weight of one body trapping robes between braced knees. Strong legs, he remembers, even as the rabbit kicks and he thinks also, strong legs, making himself a nested cradle under his husband's looming form. Looks up, rabbit held to his chest, its nose twitching as Wei Wuxian blinks up into Lan Zhan's face.
As he smiles, small, and asks: )
Do you really want to hear?
( With something dangerously like hope in his eyes. A mother dies; parents precede their children, and that is the way of the world. She too shall pass, in truth, but let it be the moment of them escaping, of her children guided onward, of a sacrifice she can choose, and not the failings of a body that had never been a choice at all.
Hope, tenacious, gleaming, maddening. )
You really want to know?
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( He does not wish to hear, to know. Every aspect of his person, every particle of his body, every breath that plagues his lungs is repelled by proximity to the proposition. But Wei Ying has a need to relieve the pressure in his body, like puncturing a wound to weep out puss. He aches to heal. Words balm him.
So be it.
He shudders, and it ripples down, makes storm of the seas of his limbs placid. Bow of his back a stubborn ribbon, creasing on the bend when Wei Ying wriggles worm-like and satisfied to burrow. Indecent.
His hand trickles from bunny to boy and back again, Wei Ying's forehead comparatively dissatisfying as a texture after the rabbit's pleased, teasing form. )
Speak.
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( Lan Zhan is a terrible liar. It's in his body, the curve of it, the words he chooses not to say so that he holds to truth, as much as he can stand it. Comfort doesn't come naturally to him, raised so often without it, that his attempts are warming even in their contrasts. His palm, his fingers, dragging over rabbit to Wei Wuxian's face, where his eyes blink and skin twitches under the caress.
His nose all but twitches like the rabbit's. The weight of it slides down, until it rests in his lap more than against his chest. One hand freed from the hold on the rabbit, who reluctantly settles in to the lap provided, the second rabbit now squirming against Lan Zhan's side, then down, searching for its friend, barely registers to Wei Wuxian. Not in this red eyed moment, where the hollow in his chest feels limed a touch, warmed by his husband's effort when he doesn't, truly, wish to hear a word about any of this.
Wei Wuxian's hand flexes, touches skin warmer than his in the moment, slides to anchor the back of Lan Zhan's neck. Keeps eyes on him, and he says: )
You'd probably rather kiss me.
( Which is the only moment of not so teasing grace before he will, in fact, speak. )
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( He would. A plain truth, hard as a mill's stone in the waters of ebbing uncertainty. Wei Ying's kindness is in this: the softening of glaring truths, the shielding of his hurts. He makes no sport of Lan Wangji's own troubled disposition, does not press advantage. This, here, the truth of his necromancy laid bare like the deformed body of a lover who was waged and won your wars — could be quarrel between them.
Wei Ying would have the right to ask, to want his skills discussed publicly, transparently, with the same comfort afforded to archery or the lesser sword talents. It is not. Lan Wangji's reticence does not flatter him.
Their eyes meet, dark chasm. Weight of Wei Ying's palm on his nape branding. Last I kissed you, you put the hurt where you now sprawl. But then, far from Lan Wangji to bear grudges. )
Falsely purposing conjugal wiles is forbidden. ( Besides, it has been some time since the Gusu Lan precepts suffered an addition. He answers, holding the line of Wei Ying's vision. Usurping it, tension of his neck a harbinger that he does not intend to be pulled down towards beautiful distraction. ) Speak.
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Ah, they're only to be purposed when in a conjugal mood?
( There's easy, and there's easier. He smiles up at his husband, the warmth of an anchoring hand and the neck that won't bend, even for what one of them preferred, and the other man still enjoyed.
He strokes his thumb against the side of Lan Zhan's neck. A cost, to ask, a consideration, to listen. )
Thank you.
( The soft exhalation that stills even the rabbit in his lap, joined in that moment between heartbeats by the second rabbit, by a fullness of the heart in this carved out, chill earth
Then the shadows blush beneath his eyes, and he answers in what way he can. )
The awareness isn't so different from resentful energies been home, but her mind. There's a will, a wholeness there, that resentful energies never have. They're simplified in wants, caught up in why they couldn't move from the land of the living towards the river that flows through the afterlife and into the next. She's there, and aware, and I want no claim to that, so I don't. Beyond protect, because she, like the true dead turned chattel in the army outside, has no defense against a stronger necromantic power.
( He pauses, brow furrowing, hand on the rabbits stroking absently over their fur. )
Unlike the mermaids, who felt as inhuman as they were. She feels... death touched, not death constructed. Compelled? Retaining herself without the pain and horror those witches suffered, before I granted their final release in Taravast.
( She feels different from Hatisse, too, but he doesn't care to bring up their own undead witch under Wrath's reluctant hand in this fragile moment. Another time, then. )
If I had more experience, if this was my work and not my hope to keep us from being tied to and under the sway of whomever Master Scorpion would give our dead to so they might be forced to live again, she might be more completely her own. I don't know how to properly tie off that bond, only tamp down, not ask or order. Because she's not like the... the dead constructs with little mind or forced inhabitation by a spirit not native to them. It's all her in there.
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( He listens in the way of disciplines, hungry for the sun of senior Wei's brilliance, cast sweltering and feverish pale upon them. It is Wei Wuxian who speaks, frivolously academic, impossibly clever, wit biting, edge poison. He does not know himself, how his forensic interest in the scholarly work of necromancy can translate as negligence, as thoughtless indifference, as malice.
How he speaks of the dead and death and the heartbreak of catastrophe without considering the emotions of the woman or those who have survived her, only the answers of her body's work.
When he shudders again, it's a startling thing, at once his instinctive revulsion and his conditioned discipline against ever permitting Wei Ying to comprehend Lan Wangji's fears. He must not. He must not. )
You do not inhabit her. ( Know her, live her, breathe her. Let her become an extension of him, feel the husk of her body like the innards of a well-stretched glove. Worse. No, better. He knows: ) You do not possess her.
( I might have kissed a mouth so red and cruel. He wishes to, despite himself, gaze a forlorn, deep fixation on Wei Ying's lips, the tears and knots of texture. He does not look away. Licks his own lips in return. Quiets, like the anticipation before dew drops descend, come morning. )
Do you crave that? ( An intimacy between summoner and summoned, a bond and bind no man can seamlessly replicate. Like motherhood for those absent a fertile womb. )
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( When he listens, what he hears comes in the pauses, the flickers of depth burning in his husband and the generations of training, of thought, of simplified answers that Lan Zhan had learned nuance and depth for over the decades spanned lost between them. Still rigid, but having learned how to bend, to see, beyond the confines of social dictations.
And still. And still, these words, painting a very different image in Wei Wuxian's mind. His brows climb in slow increments, at inhabit, at possess, at language so wholly invasive he can imagine the fires of war burning down the sanctity of each body, blood running in rivulets down a face contorted in pain.
Or warped in a different pleasure, when the last of poison sweet drips from Lan Zhan's lips, do you crave that? To own, to possess, to suffuse, Wei Wuxian's brows so high his brow wrinkled in inversion to the concern or lengthy consideration of a long night spent seeking solutions to problems that felt like his alone to solve.
They were never his alone. These days he admits that, reaches out, discusses. Trusts a shared burden, with people who owe nothing to him but their chosen alliances.
Even Lan Zhan. Steady and certain and at times so beautifully thin, one wrong step might shatter their trust again wholly. That it didn't speaks powerfully to him, even when its close brushes steal the breath from his lungs, embed ice in his heart.
Here, however, there is no ice. No lack of air. A warmth, an incredulity, as his thumb again strokes over his husband's neck, pausing over his pulse, as close as he can. That heart, that heat, and is that jealousy? For whom? For what, in the end? )
There are times I'm suddenly certain you ask me things you already know, simply because you want to fight against what isn't there.
( Emotions, he thinks, and emotions, things he struggles with too. He smiles, still small, but truer than many, and offered honestly up to his husband's hovering face. )
They're not creatures to be possessed. To be owned. They're not to be inhabited, to be puppetted. They're not to be craved. When I broke the Stygian Tiger in Nightless City, you have to know it was because that's what all those righteous people, who were not righteous in that moment, craved possession. Ownership. Inhabitance. Power.
( A shift in his old, fingers dragging down, so that he can brush his thumb over Lan Zhan's lips, even as his tongue lathes over his own, unconscious mimic to his husband from heartbeats prior. )
Power can be useful, but it's as powerful, Lan Zhan, letting go. You know the things I crave.
( He has to, by now. Even if he won't admit it to himself, even if his fears are tangled tapestries of truths and shadows constructed in the lapse between years, in the factual and the fictitious, all important, all seen. All learned, when they seep out, wonderful and hideous alike. Parts of himself like rot that excise, again and again, until he too can breathe free. )
Affection. Steadfast companionship. ( A pause: this should not be the hardest part to say, but it is. Red eyes, rimmed and aching with a pain that shattered through him for the losses he can never fix, for the people who cannot return in any semblance but the capricious one that has left him with Wen Qing, heart's sister, and Xiao Xingchen, martial uncle, in his whirlwind sphere of existence. His voice so soft, his smile melting away, his eyes wide, deep, consuming universes. ) Love.
( Comes the world, and it's a fragile exhalation, it's the blush that steals up his neck, paints too stark against his cheeks, the flush of life that often enough he seems to pale to sustain. Deeply embarrassed, deeply vulnerable, over the implication of one word, one love, the wanting kind, the romance he never figured he was capable of finding. Which he probably still captures imperfectly, with each step they take forward, day to day. )
Student, friend, lover, spouse, twinned half of my soul. You know what I crave.
( Soft, peering up at his husband with intensity, because only once had he craved death, had he craved endings, had he seen no hope and only further destruction at his mere continued breath in a world so determinedly against him. In everything else, in every other moment, he had craved life. Eked out or sung easy and free from mountaintops, life. From the bottom of a wine jar to the bottom of a boat gentle on the river's misleadingly gentle surface, life. )
You know.
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( Like an itch, like a scab. It wants unstitching. The rabid, eviscerating attention of Lan Wangji's greedy hands. There is a chasm in him, air cloying. He cannot breathe for himself, lungs strained, beat of his jugular's pulse staggered.
He thinks, I can bear this.
Thinks, He'll claw my heart out.
Hardship is a sequence of beads, tolerable in increments. Slip one at a time, between your fingertips. Let it go. Let it flow. You need only survive the one now, I can bear this —
— leans, hand guts the weed of Wei Ying's hair to wrench him up, crashes their mouths together. Tectonic collision, the kiss lands asymmetrical. Their lips, first, do not fit. He forces the position. It stings, rearranging Wei Ying as if he were doll-like, ragged, tender, foreign — an entity that is barely on the cusp of extension to Lan Wangji, that can still afford a distant, dissonant, separate existence. Asynchrony is only the body recognising that which is not itself. Wei Ying. Wei Ying, Wei Ying, Wei Ying.
He bites his husband's mouth, red of it a foregone conclusion. )
Piss off.
( Taunting, teasing, riling Lan Wangji. What was it Emilia said? Whitening his hair. Constantly speaking only to be heard, to irritate, to spark flame or action. Lan Wangji's hand wrestles free, forcibly, with hope of dropping Wei Ying down. Let him be unmoored, too.
After, he feels worn out, eroded. The extremities of his flesh cold, draft of the stairwell backing its home in him. A rabbit slips by his hip, to huddle, to warm him. )
In this, you are as a woman to me. ( No. Cut breath, stilted. The quiet implications of subjugation that gender designations present in the sects, absent here. ) There are mysteries of you I shall never understand.
( For want of different make, foreign natures. The theory of childbearing — the living, the dead — is simple. The emotional resonance overwhelms. )
Unless you speak them. ( Share, not only the burden, but the banalities. The smallest parts of Wei Ying, asked not to incriminate, but to glean. )
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( The delicious nature of pressing until Lan Zhan trips over the last vestige of his reserve and acts. Explodes into furious motion, even more contained this time, the cut of teeth and lips and awkward angles forced to compliance with wanting hands, craving thick as the red of blood that decorates his lower lip when he's dropped, and Wei Wuxian collapses with a small sound of loss, pupils too wide in his already dark eyes. The rabbit on his lap scrambles off when he starts to slide out of Lan Zhan's lap wholesale, his hands latching on to his husband's robe-bedecked legs to keep him from slipping down stairs on the thin padding of his backside.
He takes a moment, head tipped forward, dark mass of his hair left for Lan Zhan's contemplationg, to breathe. To turn and look back over his shoulder, open mouth tending toward a smile with a certain amount of wonder, his tongue worrying thoughtlessly at the tooth-born cut in his lip.
To want, and be wanted. To be known in any part, and to hear I want to know more. )
Ah. Okay?
( Let him hold like this for a beat, another, his heart hammering in his chest, visible at his throat. )
I'll speak. About everything. Just, ah. Ask? When I forget?
( He doesn't judge it rightly, even now, when times are meant for speaking, when they're meant for silence. A lifetime of being irreverent to keep relationships smooth hasn't made it easy to reach beyond that and admit what else is there, what he feels, when it isn't convenient.
It turns out, heartache and want and sadness and joy and the hollow space in his chest that Lan Zhan fills with its conflicting, wonderful emotions that leave him exhausted in a pleasant way more often than not, these can all be truths too. And they're never convenient, and that's fine, even if he didn't think that was true before. )
And kiss me again?
( From where he sits below Lan Zhan's feet, arms winged back and holding to his robed knees, awkward and beautiful and nothing like he thought of himself in moments where he was his most appealing, his most confident. Just this. Just them. Just a cold staircase, two rabbits over the entirety of their human antics, and the pain of what awaits, but not alone. )
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( His husband, a tangle of limbs, and the rabbits that litter his lap, the young territory between their legs. Latch of Wei Ying's hands on silken spread, anchored. Nails blunt, a precursor to clawing. A rabbit inundates the negative space between Lan Wangji's ankle and Wei Ying's wrist. He lifts it, unbothered by the husband who clings to him with the despair-drenched white knuckles of a man nearly drowned.
Later, the sibling will remember: how hungry hands hunted the other creature, how he went ignored at the root of the stairs by Lan Wangji's shoulder, too northbound to suffer the indignity of two men and their tussle. How they bound themselves together, but left him alone.
In the howling vastness of the groaning stairwell, Lan Wangji's silence nearly carves out a scream from his lungs. He holds back. Watches the red on Wei Ying's lip, crowds it with his finger, for once not spreading the blood bead but gently bringing it up back to his own mouth, to taste. A smear lingers behind on Wei Ying's lip, timid and doppled.
It suits you, Lan Wangji mouths, for all he suspects Wei Ying's stupor runs like a summer sickness' fever, cloying, frivolous, insufferable — but predictably prone to iminent relief. He might see now, the words plainly shaped, and not glean them. He will understand them, later. After.
He does not force Wei Ying towards him again, but slides down a few more steps, to bracket the side of him. To capture the jut of his jaw in the cup of a hand, and elan in: )
Soft now, or hardened? ( He asks now with the airy, petulant impatience of a precocious student frustrated to ask learning from a master he wishes to outgrow. ) Teach me.
( This, their way, then: negotiation. The cartography of touches and silences. Wei Ying, who taught him the pains of a hard, critical blow, burdened now with the task to educate him and avoid the repercussions of a dissatisfying kiss. )
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( What in him shivers at the touch to his lip, at Lan Zhan's mouthed words that don't mean much to him in the moment, the implication of sounds formed and delivered just so, when he's so incredibly distracting with his finger slipping into his mouth—thought doesn't hold coherent, when Wei Wuxian swallows hard.
Bloody lipped, red mouthed. He doesn't crave devouring like this, not dredged into veins, but also like this, the injury of want. Lan Zhan is a picture in pales and blues and dark eyes and the hair that flows down his back, over his shoulders. None of it bears softness the way the rabbits do, their fur silk and velvet, but they're not half the lure of leaning in to the cupped hand, to Lan Zhan's own lean. Fingers twitching, and he moves his hands, runs nails into combed back hair, toward the back of Lan Zhan's head, and up, as the knot of his hair crown holds, whatever the decoration.
Soft now, or hardened? He smiles, teeth a pale wonder that catch light, heart recalling what it is to run when he holds everything in stillness. )
Soft. With the stairs... If we overbalance, the rabbits will suffer.
( As will they, but he's always been more resilient, more used to recovering, more used to the lengths of pain and their forgettings, and the rabbits, the rabbits aren't. Shouldn't be. Are mostly not on his mind at all, given how he's staring invitation at Lan Zhan's lips, not certain he shouldn't have said hard, hard as we can, before this moment flees too.
The ache of his heart, the one that isn't liquid heat that flows through no meridians but through another system entirely, pooling in the absent places of his core and lower still, doesn't diminish. But its edges lose their sharpness, dull down to the inevitable ending of that thread, coming, coming, soon. )
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( Soft, sweet. Like feathers, like freshness of snow. A powder of itself. They are temples of bones, still breathing. His walls will crumble, his defences break.
Wei Ying's hand in his hair tightens the wet sailor's knot of him, twists. He falls into Wei Ying, less for gravity or negligence of himself than the quiet exhilaration of knowing he will be caught, he will be brought to shore.
This turn, his palm cradles Wei Ying's jaw, clumsy. Climbs, latches. The single torch's paltry potence leaves dusk to swallow the corridor whole. Spattering of light, here, there, blinks of a candle's wink, and they could be anyone, could be anyone at all. Live in these bodies like thieves, the start of his second kiss a misadventure of clumsy, blunt geometries. The fit is poor. He angles. Then suckles on Wei Ying's lip, more than seduces him, then nearly bloodies his nail, scratching the wasteland of the nearest stairstep to keep himself reined in.
They meet, somehow, in the midst of it all, one soul learning the game of halves combining. Bloodied, Wei Ying's mouth emboldens him to think of conquest, of burning. That, moan stifled, he has won something here. That he has not paid for it with the skin of his back.
It ends before he knows it ever caught shape. Slips from him, even when he resurrects it in quick, dry presses of his mouth on Wei Ying's lids, his forehead after. Ragged breath, he has lost rhythm. )
Don't leave me. ( Soft and not hardened. As if he speaks to the rabbits. )
Wherever you go to make men again from your clay of ashes. Wherever you go that no one may follow. ( But for Xue Yang, Wrath. He suspects, for the dark mahogany quality of her, Vanessa. A meek handful, past this. )
Come back to me after, as today.
( He accepts it, the fool. He will accept anything. )
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( Was there pain, in any of this? Has he forgotten in the moment beyond the first sharp inclination, when the warmth that follows is a subtle shift forward, holding and held, faces aligned without perfection until they find ways to slot noses past noses, the small, private noises of it all. Is it a victory, to not be bloodied and desperate, to not be bent over in pain, and to feel, momentarily, the shadows caress their faces, embrace their not-quite-silence, hides them from the world while they're not performing for the world to see?
Wei Wuxian stutters back into himself, Lan Zhan's stifled moan lingering in his ears, a promise unmet, awaiting fulfilling. Blinks against the kisses pressed to his face, to Lan Zhan's breath as ragged as Wei Wuxian feels, his fingers shifting hold to stroke as the words sink below the surface of his too thick skin.
Don't leave me. Not again, not now, and he strokes from temple to the top of his head, and down the cascading waterfall of his hair. Strokes like he doesn't know how to do correctly with rabbits, how his shijie had soothed him from his youngest years to those within her time of dying. Precious, he thinks, recognising it as a tooth bearing truth that smiles or threatens or both, depending on who listens.
He shifts into Lan Zhan, just enough to bring forehead to forehead, metal caught between. )
I'll always come home.
( The simpler truth, found in long journeys and realignments of self before this world, further tempered in the trials of this one. Home is a place, isn't it? A place in the heart of those he loves. And while Sizhui has one kind of love, one kind of respect, he's still an unknown factor to him in the ways that Lan Zhan has learned, in the weak moments, the strong ones, the arrogance of their shared youth, the pain parting them later, a drop in the bucket of Lan Zhan's life.
His hand strokes over Lan Zhan's hair, the ensconced flame shuddering in the gasp of a breeze that staggers past, the rabbits huddling down away from the movement that flutters back to stillness, an exhalation of fresh air finding them even here, so far from where the air flows easy and true. Like they must, to survive each other. Like he wants to, out of the shadows and into the corners of Lan Zhan's heart.
A home, as his is, dusty corners and all. )
I'll always come home to you.
( Not Gusu. Not Yunmeng. Not Yiling, which was never a home, but was a refuge, and a death sentence at different times. Just to Lan Zhan, and the incidentals of location be at times damned. )
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( After, his mouth raw, his thoughts stormed. After, Wei Ying unmoored, hands delving haggard and sweet, hold deepened at the rim of Lan Wangji's guan. Sinking. He dips his head into the gesture, works with Wei Ying's pull, sooner than against it. A rabbit tumbles into his lap, idle stray — not purring, but burrowing in the cradle of his silks, where they nestle. )
When we depart here. ( His lips smack together, tacky, tarred. He licks, once. Again. ) If — heed me. ( They do not speak of this, do not consider it. Two years of their lives, stranded on a silvered spider's web thread. ) If one of us... does not remember.
( If, and his heart's shrivelled and bled and ached, they arrive into different worlds, distinct only for the grace of shichen of difference — ) Pledge we will tell one another.
( If not speak of this world, then of the tumult surpassed, of the ebb and tide and deluge of their grown affection. Of their marriage, three, four, five-times honoured. Of their mouths in feral meeting, of how Lan Wangji's hands cling now like forest branches, gnarly and stiff over Wei Ying's, clumsy and plaintive. )
Pledge. ( He cannot be sixteen years a widower to missed opportunity once more. )
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( Coaxing himself, or soothing them both, or swelling with a warm and gentle wholeness he doesn't want to examine too hard as Lan Zhan's head dips close. Desire, yes, lust, whatever hard words of the physical pull he accepts now is strong, confused for action, and yet weaker to the trembling in his heart. He wants to claim and give and broker pleasure like a gift of the heart, sibling to the bright cut of pain's grounding.
A hitch in his breath, and it's for another time, for a later when they're not sitting as moss on stones, dampened by the morning dew. Now is his husband's lips, glistening; the hurt that forms between them as a bird newly hatched, staggeringly ugly, piteously crying. Desperate for the protection of the nest they build of words and deeds, to allow its feathers fledge, to the disguise of maturity, protection of a delicate hope learning to spread its bald wings.
Soothing, his words with their fervor spoken low and deep, eyes hot, the red of them more vibrant now when tears try, try to stir themselves to eyes. Once he wondered how a man could allow himself so much luxury for tears, of joy, of pain, of everything inbetween. Now he has no reserves to keep himself from the trickle of water to wet the earth between them. )
I will sing them to you even when you don't wish to hear. I pledge it, Lan Zhan. My words marked.
( There will be things he's already forgotten, his nature and his turning away from the worst of things to instead hold closer to the better, to the moments he wishes not to forget until time strips them away, like the shape of his mother's voice, the texture of his parents in their shared laughter. )
If I have to whisk you away from Gusu to listen, bind us both until you hear, I pledge I will tell. Until you hear. Until you know.
( In the shifted paradigm of this landscape, broken and dead and brilliantly alive, wartorn and surviving and thriving in pockets of unanticipated beauty. Back home, in their disparate roles, connected by red strings and blue ribbon and a road that curves through everywhere and nowhere, all the same. If he must take the Chief Cultivator and wrap him up, pull him relentless and resentful from the duties he gave himself, single solitary choice in so many dozens they both made, he will.
He'll have nothing to lose. )
no subject
( A hard pledge, yet easily brokered. Wei Ying murmurs his approval, and he had thought the scratchy, sharp-boned fit of their bodies done, the next expectant exhalation that deflates Wei Ying's lungs bereft of expectation. He kisses him again — one last time, one last time more — with the dried, flecked finality of a brush stroke that sheds at once formality and the last drool of the cinnabar paste left over. Less to communicate than to seal, he has heard, he will keep to account.
What is promised here, with two fumbling rabbits scrambling to win territory on their laps and skidding, as their sweet paws fail to latch, and producing the hummed, gravelly sounds that never seem as if they might fit such small, fragile bodies — these words cannot be rescinded. )
And I. ( He gives it knowing, but weak. Expected. )
I shall not be silent, a coward, or a fool. ( He will be more than himself, layers upon layers of silks and learned bravery. Part his father's greed, his brother's love, Wei Ying's audacity. ) I shall have you in honest marriage.
( And they will not lose what this hour has bound, they will not be slaves to time and circumstance, they will not doubt themselves. Uncle might disapprove. Brother laugh. So what of it? Better the world betrayed than the world once more allowed to betray them. )