( 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.
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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. )