( 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. )
( Wei Wuxian pauses, thestral pausing further behind them, creature dead and risen lost in the gloom and shadow. Pauses to look to he who knows him, and he whom he knows, or at least knew, once, better than he thinks he'd known himself at that time.
Are we still soulmates, he'd wondered on Phoenix Mountain. Here he wonders it again, but not as denouncement; it has become a learning of Lan Zhan, a man different and echoing of the younger man he'd known. He can depend on this Lan Zhan in different ways, trust where he acknowledges the only faith Lan Zhan lacks is in he, Wei Wuxian, and that he can't see the why and not accept there are reasons.
A quiet voice, and less sharp, his shadowed eyes. )
Peace, Lan Zhan. There is only one person who terrifies you enough to have broken faith with them, and he understands. I've spoken poorly for it to sound as if you are faithless in anything else.
( To him, there'd been no admonition, just the statement of what needed voicing, asking. A fact already acknowledged by both, and now given to the world in words. Whatever silences follow, the pursuit of a daughter changed, the beast that will lead the way and would, if left untended, rend and stir itself to murder for all sounds, but stills the impulse, heeds its necromancer's call.
If only because Wei Wuxian is closer than its original master in its time of living, and Wei Wuxian will as soon return it to death, as he's been learning. To inhale, to exhale. To take in hand, and to set down again, and again, and again. )
( Between them, every ledger closed, accounts ended with red-bled fingertips and parchment smeared, and no shrill screams of stalwart reckonings. Sorry is etiquette, respect freely given: among equals, as breath and honour, to no sacrifice. He accepts it, tendered, lifts the battlements and crenellations of Wei Ying's knuckles to the hard stem of his forehead ribbon, then drifts their bound hands down. Forgiveness needs no words, no signatures.
They have buried enough corpses to people a field and feed its flowers, leaf to bloom. They step on rustling leaf and crackling bone, and a tempest of stale, stewed mire. Peace: first the waves of war must anoint it. )
You fool. ( But humour dusts his voice like the tang of the last snows in fledgling spring. Pass your foot or your hand, the innards stand brittle and coarse and green-livened. ) I knew you, masked.
( And playing a dulcet, threadbare sound. What difference would shape have made? One end of a red string knows its twin, close. )
You shed more beauty in Yiling than after.
( There, if vanity commands Wei Ying to grasp with his greedy little hands — and one palm so lost in Wangji's own, so fickle — when he stripped himself of his handsome looks first. Death did not deprive him, as did the sickly, gaunt poverty of hunger and nights endless, unslept, and the spill of dark waters that's stained the valley depths beneath his eyes.
It would fool no man for Lan Wangji to deny this. He does not fool, above all, himself. )
( His lips twitch, and he smiles, no artifice to it; laughs lightly after, albeit not for long. Lan Zhan brings their hands to his forehead, to the ribbon, to something Wei Wuxian better understands day to day now, and his return, in this, as they walk in pursuit of a daughter, as they speak of the old and the new, isn't thought through. If he allowed it, he would stop, not lift their hands and brush his lips, dry, over Lan Zhan's knuckles, the downward press of a feathered wing over a mountain's ragged peaks. )
At the Mo's Manor, even knowing better, I still lingered for the sight of you.
( And that's enough, he thinks, in ancient confessions, and he shifts, interwoven fingers falling, scalded, to tug forward, onward, toward the child who waits, and who is no small thing, but a large one, nestled in the concavity of their chests, next to cores, or where a core might once have settled, bright and burning and effusive in its pulsing light. )
But then, this is the rabbit, beating heart of Wei Ying stormed, crowded, hidden in his truths dark and memories gnarled, alive in the forest of his beaten, bitten-down defences — a penury of skin cradling bone, and what does he weigh? Dust motes, shivered. Moonlight, distorted.
Lan Wangji's fingers chase the sloped line of his knuckles and feels, You did not give me even the wet of you to grieve. When reckoning comes, this moment will be absurdity: how Wangji's silence fled with him, hand in hand, and the other binding seamlessly at his back, to retain the violent treasure of Wei Ying's mouth-print in sanctuary. To carry words, silent, like mad pulse of fireflies.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
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? )
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
Are we still soulmates, he'd wondered on Phoenix Mountain. Here he wonders it again, but not as denouncement; it has become a learning of Lan Zhan, a man different and echoing of the younger man he'd known. He can depend on this Lan Zhan in different ways, trust where he acknowledges the only faith Lan Zhan lacks is in he, Wei Wuxian, and that he can't see the why and not accept there are reasons.
A quiet voice, and less sharp, his shadowed eyes. )
Peace, Lan Zhan. There is only one person who terrifies you enough to have broken faith with them, and he understands. I've spoken poorly for it to sound as if you are faithless in anything else.
( To him, there'd been no admonition, just the statement of what needed voicing, asking. A fact already acknowledged by both, and now given to the world in words. Whatever silences follow, the pursuit of a daughter changed, the beast that will lead the way and would, if left untended, rend and stir itself to murder for all sounds, but stills the impulse, heeds its necromancer's call.
If only because Wei Wuxian is closer than its original master in its time of living, and Wei Wuxian will as soon return it to death, as he's been learning. To inhale, to exhale. To take in hand, and to set down again, and again, and again. )
I'm sorry.
no subject
They have buried enough corpses to people a field and feed its flowers, leaf to bloom. They step on rustling leaf and crackling bone, and a tempest of stale, stewed mire. Peace: first the waves of war must anoint it. )
You fool. ( But humour dusts his voice like the tang of the last snows in fledgling spring. Pass your foot or your hand, the innards stand brittle and coarse and green-livened. ) I knew you, masked.
( And playing a dulcet, threadbare sound. What difference would shape have made? One end of a red string knows its twin, close. )
You shed more beauty in Yiling than after.
( There, if vanity commands Wei Ying to grasp with his greedy little hands — and one palm so lost in Wangji's own, so fickle — when he stripped himself of his handsome looks first. Death did not deprive him, as did the sickly, gaunt poverty of hunger and nights endless, unslept, and the spill of dark waters that's stained the valley depths beneath his eyes.
It would fool no man for Lan Wangji to deny this. He does not fool, above all, himself. )
no subject
At the Mo's Manor, even knowing better, I still lingered for the sight of you.
( And that's enough, he thinks, in ancient confessions, and he shifts, interwoven fingers falling, scalded, to tug forward, onward, toward the child who waits, and who is no small thing, but a large one, nestled in the concavity of their chests, next to cores, or where a core might once have settled, bright and burning and effusive in its pulsing light. )
no subject
But then, this is the rabbit, beating heart of Wei Ying stormed, crowded, hidden in his truths dark and memories gnarled, alive in the forest of his beaten, bitten-down defences — a penury of skin cradling bone, and what does he weigh? Dust motes, shivered. Moonlight, distorted.
Lan Wangji's fingers chase the sloped line of his knuckles and feels, You did not give me even the wet of you to grieve. When reckoning comes, this moment will be absurdity: how Wangji's silence fled with him, hand in hand, and the other binding seamlessly at his back, to retain the violent treasure of Wei Ying's mouth-print in sanctuary. To carry words, silent, like mad pulse of fireflies.
Wei Ying leads. The girl sets their course.
He breathes — and follows. )