( and in as reasonable a time as can be expected for a man riding much padded on the back of a horse-like being even thinner than he has ever been at his worst, wei wuxian arrives, behind him loping a creature of the towers who has seen better moments, and bears the open wounds of one accosted by claw and tooth and tail.
slowing, features drawn, wearing a buttoned cloak hiding half of its unequal damage, the thestral slows and wei wuxian is... arrived.
with a necromanced xenomorph in tow, and a countdown to when that entity should be likewise laid to rest. )
( He thinks, there are men who have turned away their wives for lesser sins than their profligacy — and watches Wei Ying descend, riding a noble starveling steed and the necromanced corpse of his creature behind him.
To Lan Wangji's sole merit, he takes a steep back — and another, for dust and pity's sake, and that of the rims of his silks — and waits until the stallion has stilled, until the second beast quiets, until the rift that should open beneath his feet to swallow him whole blissfully ignores him once more —
and
nears to gently offer his hand, as if he were a stables' attendant, assisting a lord's arrival. This, then. This is his part to play in life's ambitions. )
( What wife, what husband? Wei Wuxian, ready to slide down the back of the gaunt beast he straddles with such new familiarity, his skirts ragged about him, and the plump mass of blanket that made the riding just bearable left in place, tied there, like Little Apple's blanket a world away.
The hand that meets his does so with a squeezing of fingers, reassurance rather than asking for the assistance of a dismount or the handing off of a reinless steed; misunderstood, perhaps, or mistaken as what Wei Wuxian wants to provide in turn, choosing to say nothing of two steps back and the steps forward after. He is not easy to swallow like this. He's too much a reminder of what about him is frightening, and what about him is fragile in a world of lords of undeath. Ones who wear not his friendly face, and who consume and collect and change and oh, but to be the sweetest of murderous necromancers once standing firm over their own paltry domains.
The thestral regards them both. Turns its beaked head to nibble at its blanket, tearing into it with the pleasure of a creature very sure it will soon devour the whole. The xenomorph, quieted, watches with all the stillness of an apex predator waiting for its moment to strike. )
With breath in my lungs.
( A smile, for a moment of a heartbeat, then two. Seriousness shades over his features, and wanness intrudes, gentled like candlewax molded to purpose. )
( Please and thank you and his fingers wax, molten and fitting in the mould carved by Wei Ying's angular crevices. Bone, sharp enough to graze and spear, eating at Lan Wangji hands.
You are too thin, and he will never fill, not as Sizhui's cheeks did after those scant but critical few weeks of Burial Mounds starvation — for Wei Ying grew a son of market roads, rain-battered, fruit and grain and ill-formed dumplings thieved from his fledgling grasp. There will live in him, always, the marks of madness, the hysteria of flesh that does not learn to swell, that wishes itself gaunt and lean, so he may flee the faster, hide the better, escape beating hands.
Obedient, Lan Wangji escorts him down a road of scattered gravel, marshes governing wet mounds, their footing sabotaged at each turn when their heels would wish themselves anchored. There is no scent of Lily Evans — only the wet of still and stewed and stale pond waters, the bleeding of carnage. Duck bones, already cleaned out by famished ravens. Greyed, browned feathers, straining under Lan Wangji's boot. )
How is your clarity?
( Of mind, he need not ask, of purpose. How quick and strong and heady is the draw, how punched the pull, how inexorable the hands of gravity, when they throttle Wei Ying to collapse him into steady, earnest disaster?
The lady has passed, but the master of beasts lingers. Unwatched, Wei Ying alone shivers beneath the whirling winds of his mind. )
( He could pretend to a surety of strength he doesn't have, not after the horror of the last few days in their understated ways. Their fruits stalk after him, one broken winged mount, whose teeth know the taste of him; the lithe grace of the creature now at their backs, moving so quietly after them, tracking by Wei Wuxian's presence, an awareness that binds them, a distaste that Wei Wuxian has when there's so little in the negotiation with this bestial resurrection.
A stumble, the catch, and the righting, to a grim sort of expression, and the inhalation that takes his lungs beyond capacity, to overfill his lungs. )
Better. Holding. If I avoid his domain.
( Not the Beastly One, but the Cold One, where points of interest hold different overlaps, and he twitches his fingers, the creature slipping past them, more impression of bulk and death and seeking, as if a creature of poor sight would be the one to sense out more of its kind: and yet, and yet. Like enough calls to like. )
Go. Do no harm. ( A pause, and a flick of his fingers: ) Please.
( A creature who did only as directed could not be pleased, could not be given to understanding of gratitude or request. Blind, it hisses and slips further away, dark against rubble and melting into shadows as if properly birthed from them, leading away and ahead. )
( Must you, he does not ask, for this is Wei Ying, and he has yet to encounter a weapon he would not carefully and optimally purpose, no matter the bite of its death, the reign of its devastation.
And Lan Wangji has tired of playing the part of tutor, of straight-backed professor, of master. If the virtues of orthodoxy are so evident, let them speak for themselves, one by one, let them prove worth. Let Wei Ying's ears, ever indifferent to crowns of blush or fluster, hear the semblance of them.
The creature is dismissed on sharp-toothed, avid hunt, and Lan Wangji steer clear of its, affords it a wide and careful berth, and simply — allows the moment. He knows what they must speak of, rot on his traitor's tongue. Mourns the question. )
Should... it prove impossible to recover her humanity. ( A distant thing, failure, yet noosing ever close. ) What then?
( They cannot simply execute a child. Yet to cage her, to allow her to become an instrument of the dead in their wars... what fate is this? )
( Hardness, in his features. Understanding too, with a depth to it that says, we know this pain, we know this fear. The war had taught them both the capacity for a mind to be driven to a place from which it cannot be recalled. He, with no clan but for a brother and sister left, had seen the cost to the remaining clans, to the Lans and Jins and Nies, when their disciples had been lost to Wen Ruohan's puppetry, to his incomplete grasp of the yin iron's potential, to the pettiness of his power and the horror he would have visited on them all, if only.
If only.
A man, struck down through the back by a flexible sword, and undone by the efforts of a young man backed by two armies, one living, one dead. Meng Yao, to be Nie Guangyao, festering in the heart of power even then.
Ah, but the ones he fought hard for, in the rains and in the wardings months after. Wen Ning, who sometimes still could have once sunk into the madness of the resentful energies that took sunken host in his body, too much strength tethered to an already once blessed martial genius, permanently scarred. )
We restrain. We cajole. We invent new talismans, new wards. We play, and sing, for clarity.
( Softened, something in his look, resignation at his twisted lips, not a smile but remembering the feel of one as he looks to Lan Zhan, as his creature slips through the rubble in pursuit of another of its kind. )
We don't give up. These creatures deliver death, they invade, they impinge on a spirit and the flesh, but it's death reinvented only after they die, and we must prevent her from facing that. Or from following he who commands their forms... for long enough. The pull, ( he says, voice soft as they walk on ground unsteady and shifting, sharp with broken stone and splintered, burnt wood ) lessens. Even when it feels too much, it lessens, with distance.
( The pull. The death. Wei Ying speaks of absolutes, of categorical fates, of certain, resolute outcomes. But there are nuances to tragedies, to how many cuts and skinnings a girl may suffer before she is no longer her own or whole. Bones recognise themselves. Faces waver even before misted mirrors.
Wei Ying's fate lay in the strength of his discipline, the earlier divisions ghosts and the Burial Mounds had already inflicted in his mind. Bit on bit and bone whispering to bone, Wie Ying recovered himself, and though Lan Wangji names himself blessed in not having born privy to the details of his battle, Wei Ying survived it, in the longer term, relatively unscathed.
He sits now, beside Wangji, a king of death's world, sending ahead his envoys. But he has not been knelt, where lesser men live on their knees. )
Wei Ying. ( Soft, gentled for him. For this moment. Heed, now. ) She does not wear the shape of men.
( And perhaps it is an unkindness, harsh and rasping, to speak such a simple truth in pained, bloodied words, but hear him: )
She may not regain it.
( And what if this is the choice they lend her? To survive, but never thrive as she was? Possessed of life, but not her likeness? )
Would you love her less, should she look other than she once had?
( There is a pause in that statement, a different kind of weight behind dark eyes that understand a depth of question unfair to ask. Is it their decision? But no, it remains hers. If she survives, and she is like this, then she chooses: live or die.
They can grant her that wish, or any permutation inbetween, but this question isn't fair as they walk on, as they hear behind them the skittish settling of feet that indicates even the broke-wing thestral follows, too aware of what else lurks to wish to remain still, free. Or free, in the way they'd all been enthralled, wasn't it?
Free to death. Enslaved to death-living. )
Would you decide for her? Should I?
( If his spirit had been poured into Mo Xuanyu instead of them changing physical locations in the kind of dark impossibility tied into curse and desire for harm that hadn't been Wei Wuxian's given nature, but oh, oh, how his legend grew. How the wrecker of families, the murderer of clans, was born from the legacy that had never been his. )
( Handsome, distorted, an abbreviation of herself in body, so long as the spirit remains. Reduced or ruptured, or alien. People belong to themselves and to time. They do not exist as the functions of relationships, defined by the wants those who behold them. True beauty is in the eye of he who cannot have it.
Wei Ying has never looked lovelier than now, a hollow and meandering thing, fatigue-stripped and chased down by another steed who stubbornly refuses him its taming. You were loved as a dawned dream, you were loved before you remembered your name, your face. )
But I am not sufficient.
( Not here, where he stands the flimsy fixture of a world borrowed and strange. Not home — and what is that, but a place, a moment? A heartbeat, the string of its siblings lost? — stranded with Wei Ying on brittle cliff-side, gravel slipped beneath their soles in hard but trembled tumble.
If he could not stir the man who knew him, who knew he set the axis of Lan Wangji's existence, dictated its orbit, wrote its gravity — then, what great devotion can he hope to enforce upon Lily? What attachment? He is Hanguang-Jun, second Jade of Lan, heir to Gusu, chief cultivator.
He is not enough. And still, his teeth grit — ) Nor as faithless as you name me.
( For he will not take admonition from the one who lessened him. )
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( and in as reasonable a time as can be expected for a man riding much padded on the back of a horse-like being even thinner than he has ever been at his worst, wei wuxian arrives, behind him loping a creature of the towers who has seen better moments, and bears the open wounds of one accosted by claw and tooth and tail.
slowing, features drawn, wearing a buttoned cloak hiding half of its unequal damage, the thestral slows and wei wuxian is... arrived.
with a necromanced xenomorph in tow, and a countdown to when that entity should be likewise laid to rest. )
no subject
To Lan Wangji's sole merit, he takes a steep back — and another, for dust and pity's sake, and that of the rims of his silks — and waits until the stallion has stilled, until the second beast quiets, until the rift that should open beneath his feet to swallow him whole blissfully ignores him once more —
and
nears to gently offer his hand, as if he were a stables' attendant, assisting a lord's arrival. This, then. This is his part to play in life's ambitions. )
You came.
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The hand that meets his does so with a squeezing of fingers, reassurance rather than asking for the assistance of a dismount or the handing off of a reinless steed; misunderstood, perhaps, or mistaken as what Wei Wuxian wants to provide in turn, choosing to say nothing of two steps back and the steps forward after. He is not easy to swallow like this. He's too much a reminder of what about him is frightening, and what about him is fragile in a world of lords of undeath. Ones who wear not his friendly face, and who consume and collect and change and oh, but to be the sweetest of murderous necromancers once standing firm over their own paltry domains.
The thestral regards them both. Turns its beaked head to nibble at its blanket, tearing into it with the pleasure of a creature very sure it will soon devour the whole. The xenomorph, quieted, watches with all the stillness of an apex predator waiting for its moment to strike. )
With breath in my lungs.
( A smile, for a moment of a heartbeat, then two. Seriousness shades over his features, and wanness intrudes, gentled like candlewax molded to purpose. )
Please show me to where she lingered, Lan Zhan.
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You are too thin, and he will never fill, not as Sizhui's cheeks did after those scant but critical few weeks of Burial Mounds starvation — for Wei Ying grew a son of market roads, rain-battered, fruit and grain and ill-formed dumplings thieved from his fledgling grasp. There will live in him, always, the marks of madness, the hysteria of flesh that does not learn to swell, that wishes itself gaunt and lean, so he may flee the faster, hide the better, escape beating hands.
Obedient, Lan Wangji escorts him down a road of scattered gravel, marshes governing wet mounds, their footing sabotaged at each turn when their heels would wish themselves anchored. There is no scent of Lily Evans — only the wet of still and stewed and stale pond waters, the bleeding of carnage. Duck bones, already cleaned out by famished ravens. Greyed, browned feathers, straining under Lan Wangji's boot. )
How is your clarity?
( Of mind, he need not ask, of purpose. How quick and strong and heady is the draw, how punched the pull, how inexorable the hands of gravity, when they throttle Wei Ying to collapse him into steady, earnest disaster?
The lady has passed, but the master of beasts lingers. Unwatched, Wei Ying alone shivers beneath the whirling winds of his mind. )
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A stumble, the catch, and the righting, to a grim sort of expression, and the inhalation that takes his lungs beyond capacity, to overfill his lungs. )
Better. Holding. If I avoid his domain.
( Not the Beastly One, but the Cold One, where points of interest hold different overlaps, and he twitches his fingers, the creature slipping past them, more impression of bulk and death and seeking, as if a creature of poor sight would be the one to sense out more of its kind: and yet, and yet. Like enough calls to like. )
Go. Do no harm. ( A pause, and a flick of his fingers: ) Please.
( A creature who did only as directed could not be pleased, could not be given to understanding of gratitude or request. Blind, it hisses and slips further away, dark against rubble and melting into shadows as if properly birthed from them, leading away and ahead. )
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And Lan Wangji has tired of playing the part of tutor, of straight-backed professor, of master. If the virtues of orthodoxy are so evident, let them speak for themselves, one by one, let them prove worth. Let Wei Ying's ears, ever indifferent to crowns of blush or fluster, hear the semblance of them.
The creature is dismissed on sharp-toothed, avid hunt, and Lan Wangji steer clear of its, affords it a wide and careful berth, and simply — allows the moment. He knows what they must speak of, rot on his traitor's tongue. Mourns the question. )
Should... it prove impossible to recover her humanity. ( A distant thing, failure, yet noosing ever close. ) What then?
( They cannot simply execute a child. Yet to cage her, to allow her to become an instrument of the dead in their wars... what fate is this? )
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If only.
A man, struck down through the back by a flexible sword, and undone by the efforts of a young man backed by two armies, one living, one dead. Meng Yao, to be Nie Guangyao, festering in the heart of power even then.
Ah, but the ones he fought hard for, in the rains and in the wardings months after. Wen Ning, who sometimes still could have once sunk into the madness of the resentful energies that took sunken host in his body, too much strength tethered to an already once blessed martial genius, permanently scarred. )
We restrain. We cajole. We invent new talismans, new wards. We play, and sing, for clarity.
( Softened, something in his look, resignation at his twisted lips, not a smile but remembering the feel of one as he looks to Lan Zhan, as his creature slips through the rubble in pursuit of another of its kind. )
We don't give up. These creatures deliver death, they invade, they impinge on a spirit and the flesh, but it's death reinvented only after they die, and we must prevent her from facing that. Or from following he who commands their forms... for long enough. The pull, ( he says, voice soft as they walk on ground unsteady and shifting, sharp with broken stone and splintered, burnt wood ) lessens. Even when it feels too much, it lessens, with distance.
no subject
Wei Ying's fate lay in the strength of his discipline, the earlier divisions ghosts and the Burial Mounds had already inflicted in his mind. Bit on bit and bone whispering to bone, Wie Ying recovered himself, and though Lan Wangji names himself blessed in not having born privy to the details of his battle, Wei Ying survived it, in the longer term, relatively unscathed.
He sits now, beside Wangji, a king of death's world, sending ahead his envoys. But he has not been knelt, where lesser men live on their knees. )
Wei Ying. ( Soft, gentled for him. For this moment. Heed, now. ) She does not wear the shape of men.
( And perhaps it is an unkindness, harsh and rasping, to speak such a simple truth in pained, bloodied words, but hear him: )
She may not regain it.
( And what if this is the choice they lend her? To survive, but never thrive as she was? Possessed of life, but not her likeness? )
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( There is a pause in that statement, a different kind of weight behind dark eyes that understand a depth of question unfair to ask. Is it their decision? But no, it remains hers. If she survives, and she is like this, then she chooses: live or die.
They can grant her that wish, or any permutation inbetween, but this question isn't fair as they walk on, as they hear behind them the skittish settling of feet that indicates even the broke-wing thestral follows, too aware of what else lurks to wish to remain still, free. Or free, in the way they'd all been enthralled, wasn't it?
Free to death. Enslaved to death-living. )
Would you decide for her? Should I?
( If his spirit had been poured into Mo Xuanyu instead of them changing physical locations in the kind of dark impossibility tied into curse and desire for harm that hadn't been Wei Wuxian's given nature, but oh, oh, how his legend grew. How the wrecker of families, the murderer of clans, was born from the legacy that had never been his. )
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( Handsome, distorted, an abbreviation of herself in body, so long as the spirit remains. Reduced or ruptured, or alien. People belong to themselves and to time. They do not exist as the functions of relationships, defined by the wants those who behold them. True beauty is in the eye of he who cannot have it.
Wei Ying has never looked lovelier than now, a hollow and meandering thing, fatigue-stripped and chased down by another steed who stubbornly refuses him its taming. You were loved as a dawned dream, you were loved before you remembered your name, your face. )
But I am not sufficient.
( Not here, where he stands the flimsy fixture of a world borrowed and strange. Not home — and what is that, but a place, a moment? A heartbeat, the string of its siblings lost? — stranded with Wei Ying on brittle cliff-side, gravel slipped beneath their soles in hard but trembled tumble.
If he could not stir the man who knew him, who knew he set the axis of Lan Wangji's existence, dictated its orbit, wrote its gravity — then, what great devotion can he hope to enforce upon Lily? What attachment? He is Hanguang-Jun, second Jade of Lan, heir to Gusu, chief cultivator.
He is not enough. And still, his teeth grit — ) Nor as faithless as you name me.
( For he will not take admonition from the one who lessened him. )
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