During the Sunshot campaign, they seized Wen positions so: at midday, red-drenched generals receding to their rest in the way of southerners accustomed to wait out the heat hours.
Here, snarled parallel, with waves crashing and cresting in a mute heartbeat, a rolled susurrus: he steals Wei Ying under shield of diversion, when cooks call the hour of the midday meal, and fewer men linger aboard deck grounds than even during night's watch.
Seagulls scream down, mercy. None to give — not to Wei Ying, Wangji’s hand steeling a shackle on his bird’s boned wrist, not to the cabin door Lan Wangji hurls shut behind them, after fast-stepped invasion. Luck of the draw, that one of the — a brief study of the toiletries present, the lingering garments — women who occupy private chambers has already deserted her quarters to claim her meal.
She will come again, small feet spattering misfortune across deck boards that begrudge their presence. No time, never time. Breathe, and it’s salt of the sea that permeates air and sickens him, his lungs, he aches for it, how it festers him. Preserves him. In his haste, waste of thinned parchment, he casts a triad of silencing spells, where one might have sufficed him.
Privacy, modesty, discretion is the value. And Wei Ying, unstitching their affairs for every stranger’s ear. The world cannot hold Wei Ying still anymore. He is too returned to himself, a coaxed-back bundle of skin and sweat and motion. No flesh to him. Bones, constantly, between Lan Wangji’s greedy teeth.
What is it men say, when they receive a confession? Kindly refuse. Kindly accept. Remain silent, for a gentleman only brokers his marital arrangements through a matchmaker, and the negotiations are sorely lacking in effusive proclamations. What does he say now?
I did not anticipate, but then, I never anticipate you.. They have only heartbeats, before the cabin’s occupant surely returns.
On Wei Ying’s wrist, his grip spreads red. He opens himself like vivisection, with rasping and choked animal sounds and the wild white of his eyes, bearing into Wei Ying’s, calling the slick stalk of his madness to like-minded bloom:
"Yes." He hears. He understands. He loves. He acquiesces.
you're welcome, husband, public confessions are the in thing
There was a time where his hand sought Lan Zhan's wrist, his shoulder, his ribbons, his sleeve, the tug and direction, dragging along to whatever he'd decided upon, dragged along in turn. Since returning to the world, it'd been Lan Zhan taking him along, a duckling pulled on after its mother, tossed into the rippling wake of a pond's disruption.
Lotus blossoms full and heavy and all just out of reach.
Now, he starts to laugh, when he's pulled along, his words spoken but unanswered from the start.
"Lan Zhan?"
The pounding of his heart, the ache of his lips.
"Where are we hurrying off to?"
The taste of blood a memory fresh on his tongue. His fingers spasm, and he steps fast and close, as Lan Zhan invades a room that was never theirs, when silence is layered and absolute, so that the slamming of the door is a treasure for their ears alone.
"Lan Zhan?"
Skipping and stuttering, the heart caged in his chest. Tiredness from earlier has faded, adrenaline a third wind he sails on ever forward, Lan Zhan looming despite being barely taller, no broader, still better fed.
Eyes catch eyes, a locked gaze before the word that falls between them with an anchor's weight, and he blinks, yes sinking inward, sinking kitten-claws into his heart, sends a flush up his neck, brushing at his cheeks.
"Oh," he says, and it's an exhalation, followed by a smile, the spreading of his fingers with his wrist still caught, the shift of his hips and feet to a ready, braced stance. Shoulders relaxing even as his pulse leaps again, rabbit fast, and he hears it in his ears, that heart of his. "That's good."
Pale words, spilling out as his mind processes and he smiles, dark eyes deepening as he holds Lan Zhan's gaze. The flick of his tongue across his lips, and what is next, because he hadn't thought of a next, not when he's married and bedded without bedding, confessing and answered in turn.
Yes.
"That's very good," he says, and the brook that babbles forth feels beyond his paltry control, a flooding of words for a man struck with no idea of what to say. "Sizhui is going to be happy, not that I'm not happy first, I'm very happy, this is a good wagon to be tied to. Not that we're a wagon! We're people, not horses, maybe something like donkeys, or rabbits, and that's good. I think that's good. Did I tell you yet like this that I—" tongue lathing lips, swallowing with a dry mouth, racing heart and racing pulse and tangled mind all happy, in a complex surging way of things, tied into anticipation with no end goal, and, may he be relieved soon through a cold splashing, where the sudden adrenaline, the violence of the slammed door, the silence wards, the marks of fingers pressed and clutching at his wrist thrums through him with equally chaotic desire.
He's ignoring that, irrelevant. Hopes, believes, trust my heart is steady, Lan Zhan might sleep the sleep of a man blessed with more to lose tonight, as he will.
No need for this, the gentle bone-breaking contortion of Wei Ying’s body to bracket gargantuan truths it’s too small and feeble to contain. Like the stretch of vellum until its muscled seams burst.
They have time.
Incipient panic, carefully cultivated so it stays at simmer and never burns to hit boil, can calm nerves. Once Wei Ying begins to taste his fear at length, he will enjoy it. Like petrichor: a great, inexplicable upheaval of the world around him, rough-spun and missed. Only the forensic evidence of itself.
Lan Wangji head dips. It’s very good.
"But you can tell me again." He will listen. He has a lifetime to learn Wei Ying's babbling, his uncertainties, his wonder.
The stench of damp plaster and thick, cloying, honeyed oils that bind a ship against wet rot, against storm agonies, until she is the sum of her adhesives, gelatinous. Shaped, but at once shapeless. Like Wangji’s restlessness, defined by the natural chitinous constraints of his sect-forged discipline. Like Wei Ying, leashed by his scabs.
The strip of jagged, trembled cuts on Wei Ying’s mouth screams at him like a child’s coarse stitchwork. Lan Wangji did this. He did it not. The black carcass of a hard wave crashes the cabin’s window, and likely floods the deck, and Lan Wangji has watched Wei Ying’s mouth too long, for how he can’t even flinch with its violence.
"I apologise." He’s said before. And Wei Ying, whimsy, Only a flesh wound. What are men but bodies? Scholars praise transcendental virtues, but death is the great, primitive equaliser, and it cares only for the sweet scent of burn in Wei Ying’s hair, dark sugars and cardamom. For the feel of him, soft and pale like a fish’s belly and so very brittle, when Lan Wangji’s two joined fingers peel away finesse and tap-tap-tap qi in pulsed rivulets to feed against rising circles of bruising, where he’d manacled Wei Ying’s wrist before.
"I want to bleed you again." It comes from him, the him who shouldn’t speak. Soot and sable. These words, he knows, are new. "Soon."
Pride sundered long ago, broken on the cliffside where he shattered and he chose to fall. He doesn't need pride, doesn't need the bolster of hubris to survive or take step after step forward. Knows a different pride now, one tempered and transparent, and he doesn't miss the old kind. Only misses what youth had that age reflects on had not been held precious enough, and the loss of people, the loss of those he's loved and would love, that throbs in ache within the hollow cavity of his chest.
There, where he finds Lan Zhan too, Lan Sizhui, Jin Ling, and Jiang Cheng, festered and lanced and in some limbo between healing and seeping.
Hope, he'd told his husband, a word written and spoken and whispered and wept for. Hope as part of love, the complexity of emotion that means arousal crosses with wry amusement and calculative resignation at Lan Zhan's words. The acceptance of a body for the outside world pressing in: qi that flows given freely, forcibly, and he doesn't fight, uses and accepts, while he leans in a scant breath closer to his husband.
"Blood me how, Lan Zhan?" In a thousand different ways, to bleed or be made to bleed for each other. Voluntary, chosen, accident, misfortune, the means of it changes, the truth of it reflects and returns, inverted by the mirror they make of each other in their eyes. One of the uncursed ones, and he says, "I forgive the impulse, but next time try finding a new way to gag me, mm?"
Purr or rumble, it's a honeyed churn of sound, guttural, ubiquitous, "Mmmmmmmmmm."
Asset, dissent. White noise-shaped traffic of bids for time, mercenary. He offers, with nothing but a faint, pale glance, a price below the going rate. Use your words, but Gusu Lan prefers him taciturn. Cowardice lives silvered, cunning and strong, like a fox found, belly flat on the forest floor of Cloud Recesses.
He moves, inevitably. Snake fast, always the language between them. Violence. Blood. When he drags two joined fingers to tip Wei Ying's chin up, as if he were a horse on offer to a discerning customer, before drifting north — his touch never lands on skin, always refrains at the last heartbeat. Like a maiden-general, calculating the fine-pointed strategy of releasing the sight of another ribbon's width of ankle skin to the watchful world, while skipping a pond.
His fingers dance shadow over Wei Ying's torn lip, where stubbornness and sorcery have unstitched skin. Healing jagged, but well. A dark line, pleasantly seismic. He taps the lip's rim, once, to signal, then retreats his hand completely. "Bite down."
Eyebrows quirk, raising the question that remains voiceless, baring his throat without a concern of those hands seeking a crushing hold, of teeth sinking into carotid artery. They're not bred in gentleness, not men who've found the world delivered in small kindnesses so much as pained lessons while on their knees, while at a sword's edge, while standing impossibly between rocks and a cliff face, under weeping skies again and again.
He wonders, even as his lashes sweep down, the darkness falling with them for the brief moment that a blink lasts, then revealing itself to a different sort of dark, there in Lan Zhan's gaze. Corners of his mouth twitch up, a memory of violence and amusement and wonder long faded. Time slips between their hands as dry sand, hissing to the ground and gathering at their feet while the waves break and lap at the sides of the ship, seeking, forever seeking.
He has that much in common with the sea, he thinks without thinking, and the blossoming awareness of a contact barely there has him biting down on his lip—with care. In spite of his worst tendencies, Wei Wuxian doesn't seek to injure himself for nothing.
This is a terrible way to be asked for silence, he reflects, as the memory of blood fills his mouth, his nostrils, easily dismissed as a child's familiar nightmare. He bleeds, and he heals. His lips ache, and they heal. Have begun, will continue, and he'll tear them to shreds on salt and sun, or silence compelled, or the fist of another person's knuckles kissing his teeth.
The ship creaks in protestation, swaying in the drunken dance that keeps them floating and not capsized and sinking to the depths where the darks gain shape and succor, where ships rot in decades-long peace, summarily reinvented as wood swells and comes apart, fibre by fibre. He swells with air, breathing in through his nose, holding the scent of someone else's sweat and soap and semblance of cleanliness when trapped in a room at sea on the back of his tongue.
His teeth, visible, a fence of bone-that-isn't across his lower lip, altering its shape for obscure purpose, changing nothing in the same heartbeat. Nothing bleeds but in possibility, and he blinks unwary, granting a moment of silence poised to break upon the sharpened edge of his knife's humour.
Of his mistaken understandings, and the want he chooses not to name, too tangled with the violence that defines them, men who have not learned what it means to be gentle, to be kind to any but a few, and never themselves.
The ripe cherry of Wei Ying's lip stretches its skins, blooms under Lan Wangji's eyes, all soft wonder. He hesitates — breathes in the animal tension of the hunt, the stale, electric complicity of air circulated too intimately between two mouths, like mid-summer swelter and burned dust. Suspense sticks his fingertips stiff.
A heartbeat more, and the pressure gives. Fractures him like porcelain, in a rustle of abyssally flinched striations. He hesitates — and steps, and steps again, and does not advance on Wei Ying, as much as he summons the binds of his body from their stupor, calls his joints warm and his hands alive, and braces his feet down when the ship's next tremble nearly tumbles them over.
Later, he will ask, why instinct didn't propel him to stay Wei Ying's balance at his own expense. Later, it will dawn on him like copper mornings, that he trusts Wei Ying to fend for himself. (And when did that paradigm shift?)
This isn't that: the first betrayal between them. It's that he slithers his headband off like a winter snake's skin and wraps it around the span of each fingers' brigade and keeps the length taut. That he punishes himself and stretches the ribbon a barrier before Wei Ying's mouth, and leans in, to hear nothing, and everything, only the glut of his heartbeat like gallop on his temple. That he kisses the vagabond frailty of Wei Ying's mouth through the cloth —
sultry and sweet and nothing, no one, only shapes of wet and quiet devastation, is it so different, one patiently permissive body from another, a whore from a destined lover, when eyes fetter shut and hearts stall to a grind, what is the essence of having after decades of want, how do poets discriminate?
— and removes himself, one step back. Like a star traversing a low sky, at once natural and impermissible. They are married. He loves, is loved. It is right. It should not happen, have happened. It will happen. He cannot breathe.
He licks his lips and tastes the sandalwood afternotes of his silks. The room is thieved. The invitation. The opportunity.
Lan Wangji stole nothing. All is bones and splintered marrow and honesty between them, all is freely given. So often, silver spills between his fingertips like rain. He is too liberal, too hungry. Covets. Craves now, and clutches the headband still a straight line at the level of Wei Ying's mouth between them, and he regrets —
...the hour, not the deed. Not the person. What will it be, to kiss as lovers do? A man and not his memory?
"Your mouth had ripened red when you fell." Only, this was the Wei Ying of his feverish dreams, the ghost of his nightmares. "You kissed death first."
In the dead of winter, Lan Wangji would burn hot. Apologise. He wants to. Wants to speak words, and wants to ask them. The ship sways long. He thinks, gracelessly, to fall.
A blink, and Lan Zhan comes partly undone, the deliberation of a man whose symbol of devotions had been taken as something lighter than they were, in a youth gone silent. Wei Wuxian breathes in the sharpness of surprise that isn't surprising, his teeth pressing even and firm down into the healing crags of his lower lip when silk slides against lips and teeth. Heat, borrowed and shared, captured as easily as the heat between them when they sleep side by side as two nesting birds, wholly contained, and wholly entangled.
Lan Zhan's heat lingers far beyond the press of his lips to his silk's thin veneer, as pervasive as the sandalwood that has meant Lan Zhan for longer than he's realised. The ship shifts, bucks, wavers, and he rides the motions, eyes rounded, drinking in this moment as if he were to wish himself drunk, when he doesn't at all.
His mind may need silencing later, but in the now, the moments stolen in a woman's box of a room, there's the focus, the ribbon, Lan Zhan's lips parting so that his too often curtailed tongue might frame words to have meaning to ears that hear.
"Death doesn't kiss back," he says, and it's a wry smile, the exhalation of amusement that comes with no apology. He fell, blood streaked mouth, blood streaked hands, and believed himself surrendered to the gravity of the fall. "Death swallows," he says, fingers twitching into renewed life, reaching up, tracing tips along the straining length of silk bound and binding between Lan Zhan's hands. "Or spits you out again. You never meet Death's lips, Lan Zhan. Only Death's teeth."
One finger, weighing down as an anchor sent shuddering into the depths from its ship, inviting the ribbon to dip, eyes a dark and open invitation with the swells the ship rides. More and motion and unrest and danger and desire, oceanic or as small as the confines of their bodies could make it.
There is no apology for time lost, he thinks, he knows, he steps beyond as if the stains of it haven't marked his spirit, Only the learning of what it means to regret, and what it means to not regret. Lungs hold air and expel it in practised tempo, longer, slower, a meditation that sings his body electric.
One, two, three. Down the narrow hall outside, boards creak, walls wail, the thump and thud of a body against them, caught off balance as the ship thrusts upward, the sea swelling below, cresting in one long moment before it turns and plunges down.
There is the caress of a bird-bone finger on his ribbon, weight so ephemeral he thinks, pettily, to deny it dip — to resist against it, his body so often a fortress against Wei Ying's evils, now turned jail.
But then, Wei Ying's eyes glisten dark like the backbone of a candle's wick just as flame consumes it, and austerity invites a farce of forms. In Wangji's hands, the ribbon is a learned instrument, snake-charmed — he weaponises it neatly, taking advantage of Wei Ying's exposed finger to wrap each end of silk around where root meets knuckle, then cross them over, and bring the headband up to bind the sharp hills of Wei Ying's wrist. Once, around bone. Twice, like a cascading moan, unfinished.
He knots it down — a rustic arrangement, to complement the sea that hurls insults at their ship, the timed cadence of the Pariah's creaks and wooden screeches that swallow them like maws unhinged. A vessel is a loud thing, an organism breathing. It does not sleep.
"Chase off the spirits of this ship, and you win the rest," he gives with his gift, and there's a moment of blessed pale nothing, when he knows all too clearly he has won a hand — that Wei Ying will have anticipated easy concessions or greed or rejection, but not playful bargain, not a game.
"If I complete first, you yield the match."
Lovers are flimsy creatures, scared of the shadow of predictability. And where is Wei Ying, if he is not entertained?
Preoccupied, as experience would have it, by the mysteries he applies himself to, at heart bent toward the protections of his and his own. So utterly has he been destroyed in their eradication, so slow the rebuilding, but still with new learnings, new hopes, new dreams to protect.
A whole world, now two, to find a way though, reliant on skills and not the difference of his youth's strength. He is himself, and he is the thousand creaking groans of the ship, the sea, the people, the rats, the supplies, the skulking shadows, and this moment, precious and powerful.
Each crossing, wrapping down his arm a tightness in his chest and lower dipping, until he smiles, laughing low and deep as Lan Zhan sets the task at hand. The challenge, and there they stood with the Wens pulled before the archer's targets; there they stood in the woods of Phoenix Mountain, where the bartering of twinned souls found steady footing underground before he had it ripped away on the callous words of a petty, jealous man; there he was made and unmade in a time where his secrets were the stitching of his soul, and then, it had been simple. It had been ferocious, and he had lost his sister even as she stood before him and defended him, and that, perhaps, is part of what he doesn't forgive a dead man for.
Not that it is his right anymore than it is his wrong. It simply was.
Like this. Like a step forward, and a ribbon-wrapped hand wrapping companionably around Lan Zhan's upper arm, the hold that so often his husband had employed for him, to stop, to steady, to claim.
Companionable now, with a smile.
"Whatever they ask, Lan Zhan? Oh, the chaos we'll sow." His free hand, reaching forward, fingers touching the door's handle, the pulse of what awaits beyond the quietude borrowed from its intended occupant. "Accepted. On your mark."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
day of that wonderfully public declaration, thanks
During the Sunshot campaign, they seized Wen positions so: at midday, red-drenched generals receding to their rest in the way of southerners accustomed to wait out the heat hours.
Here, snarled parallel, with waves crashing and cresting in a mute heartbeat, a rolled susurrus: he steals Wei Ying under shield of diversion, when cooks call the hour of the midday meal, and fewer men linger aboard deck grounds than even during night's watch.
Seagulls scream down, mercy. None to give — not to Wei Ying, Wangji’s hand steeling a shackle on his bird’s boned wrist, not to the cabin door Lan Wangji hurls shut behind them, after fast-stepped invasion. Luck of the draw, that one of the — a brief study of the toiletries present, the lingering garments — women who occupy private chambers has already deserted her quarters to claim her meal.
She will come again, small feet spattering misfortune across deck boards that begrudge their presence. No time, never time. Breathe, and it’s salt of the sea that permeates air and sickens him, his lungs, he aches for it, how it festers him. Preserves him. In his haste, waste of thinned parchment, he casts a triad of silencing spells, where one might have sufficed him.
Privacy, modesty, discretion is the value. And Wei Ying, unstitching their affairs for every stranger’s ear. The world cannot hold Wei Ying still anymore. He is too returned to himself, a coaxed-back bundle of skin and sweat and motion. No flesh to him. Bones, constantly, between Lan Wangji’s greedy teeth.
What is it men say, when they receive a confession? Kindly refuse. Kindly accept. Remain silent, for a gentleman only brokers his marital arrangements through a matchmaker, and the negotiations are sorely lacking in effusive proclamations. What does he say now?
I did not anticipate, but then, I never anticipate you.. They have only heartbeats, before the cabin’s occupant surely returns.
On Wei Ying’s wrist, his grip spreads red. He opens himself like vivisection, with rasping and choked animal sounds and the wild white of his eyes, bearing into Wei Ying’s, calling the slick stalk of his madness to like-minded bloom:
"Yes." He hears. He understands. He loves. He acquiesces.
you're welcome, husband, public confessions are the in thing
Lotus blossoms full and heavy and all just out of reach.
Now, he starts to laugh, when he's pulled along, his words spoken but unanswered from the start.
"Lan Zhan?"
The pounding of his heart, the ache of his lips.
"Where are we hurrying off to?"
The taste of blood a memory fresh on his tongue. His fingers spasm, and he steps fast and close, as Lan Zhan invades a room that was never theirs, when silence is layered and absolute, so that the slamming of the door is a treasure for their ears alone.
"Lan Zhan?"
Skipping and stuttering, the heart caged in his chest. Tiredness from earlier has faded, adrenaline a third wind he sails on ever forward, Lan Zhan looming despite being barely taller, no broader, still better fed.
Eyes catch eyes, a locked gaze before the word that falls between them with an anchor's weight, and he blinks, yes sinking inward, sinking kitten-claws into his heart, sends a flush up his neck, brushing at his cheeks.
"Oh," he says, and it's an exhalation, followed by a smile, the spreading of his fingers with his wrist still caught, the shift of his hips and feet to a ready, braced stance. Shoulders relaxing even as his pulse leaps again, rabbit fast, and he hears it in his ears, that heart of his. "That's good."
Pale words, spilling out as his mind processes and he smiles, dark eyes deepening as he holds Lan Zhan's gaze. The flick of his tongue across his lips, and what is next, because he hadn't thought of a next, not when he's married and bedded without bedding, confessing and answered in turn.
Yes.
"That's very good," he says, and the brook that babbles forth feels beyond his paltry control, a flooding of words for a man struck with no idea of what to say. "Sizhui is going to be happy, not that I'm not happy first, I'm very happy, this is a good wagon to be tied to. Not that we're a wagon! We're people, not horses, maybe something like donkeys, or rabbits, and that's good. I think that's good. Did I tell you yet like this that I—" tongue lathing lips, swallowing with a dry mouth, racing heart and racing pulse and tangled mind all happy, in a complex surging way of things, tied into anticipation with no end goal, and, may he be relieved soon through a cold splashing, where the sudden adrenaline, the violence of the slammed door, the silence wards, the marks of fingers pressed and clutching at his wrist thrums through him with equally chaotic desire.
He's ignoring that, irrelevant. Hopes, believes, trust my heart is steady, Lan Zhan might sleep the sleep of a man blessed with more to lose tonight, as he will.
this isn't instaboat
No need for this, the gentle bone-breaking contortion of Wei Ying’s body to bracket gargantuan truths it’s too small and feeble to contain. Like the stretch of vellum until its muscled seams burst.
They have time.
Incipient panic, carefully cultivated so it stays at simmer and never burns to hit boil, can calm nerves. Once Wei Ying begins to taste his fear at length, he will enjoy it. Like petrichor: a great, inexplicable upheaval of the world around him, rough-spun and missed. Only the forensic evidence of itself.
Lan Wangji head dips. It’s very good.
"But you can tell me again." He will listen. He has a lifetime to learn Wei Ying's babbling, his uncertainties, his wonder.
The stench of damp plaster and thick, cloying, honeyed oils that bind a ship against wet rot, against storm agonies, until she is the sum of her adhesives, gelatinous. Shaped, but at once shapeless. Like Wangji’s restlessness, defined by the natural chitinous constraints of his sect-forged discipline. Like Wei Ying, leashed by his scabs.
The strip of jagged, trembled cuts on Wei Ying’s mouth screams at him like a child’s coarse stitchwork. Lan Wangji did this. He did it not. The black carcass of a hard wave crashes the cabin’s window, and likely floods the deck, and Lan Wangji has watched Wei Ying’s mouth too long, for how he can’t even flinch with its violence.
"I apologise." He’s said before. And Wei Ying, whimsy, Only a flesh wound. What are men but bodies? Scholars praise transcendental virtues, but death is the great, primitive equaliser, and it cares only for the sweet scent of burn in Wei Ying’s hair, dark sugars and cardamom. For the feel of him, soft and pale like a fish’s belly and so very brittle, when Lan Wangji’s two joined fingers peel away finesse and tap-tap-tap qi in pulsed rivulets to feed against rising circles of bruising, where he’d manacled Wei Ying’s wrist before.
"I want to bleed you again." It comes from him, the him who shouldn’t speak. Soot and sable. These words, he knows, are new. "Soon."
more like boatfans
There, where he finds Lan Zhan too, Lan Sizhui, Jin Ling, and Jiang Cheng, festered and lanced and in some limbo between healing and seeping.
Hope, he'd told his husband, a word written and spoken and whispered and wept for. Hope as part of love, the complexity of emotion that means arousal crosses with wry amusement and calculative resignation at Lan Zhan's words. The acceptance of a body for the outside world pressing in: qi that flows given freely, forcibly, and he doesn't fight, uses and accepts, while he leans in a scant breath closer to his husband.
"Blood me how, Lan Zhan?" In a thousand different ways, to bleed or be made to bleed for each other. Voluntary, chosen, accident, misfortune, the means of it changes, the truth of it reflects and returns, inverted by the mirror they make of each other in their eyes. One of the uncursed ones, and he says, "I forgive the impulse, but next time try finding a new way to gag me, mm?"
boatik boatok
Asset, dissent. White noise-shaped traffic of bids for time, mercenary. He offers, with nothing but a faint, pale glance, a price below the going rate. Use your words, but Gusu Lan prefers him taciturn. Cowardice lives silvered, cunning and strong, like a fox found, belly flat on the forest floor of Cloud Recesses.
He moves, inevitably. Snake fast, always the language between them. Violence. Blood. When he drags two joined fingers to tip Wei Ying's chin up, as if he were a horse on offer to a discerning customer, before drifting north — his touch never lands on skin, always refrains at the last heartbeat. Like a maiden-general, calculating the fine-pointed strategy of releasing the sight of another ribbon's width of ankle skin to the watchful world, while skipping a pond.
His fingers dance shadow over Wei Ying's torn lip, where stubbornness and sorcery have unstitched skin. Healing jagged, but well. A dark line, pleasantly seismic. He taps the lip's rim, once, to signal, then retreats his hand completely. "Bite down."
shippr
He wonders, even as his lashes sweep down, the darkness falling with them for the brief moment that a blink lasts, then revealing itself to a different sort of dark, there in Lan Zhan's gaze. Corners of his mouth twitch up, a memory of violence and amusement and wonder long faded. Time slips between their hands as dry sand, hissing to the ground and gathering at their feet while the waves break and lap at the sides of the ship, seeking, forever seeking.
He has that much in common with the sea, he thinks without thinking, and the blossoming awareness of a contact barely there has him biting down on his lip—with care. In spite of his worst tendencies, Wei Wuxian doesn't seek to injure himself for nothing.
This is a terrible way to be asked for silence, he reflects, as the memory of blood fills his mouth, his nostrils, easily dismissed as a child's familiar nightmare. He bleeds, and he heals. His lips ache, and they heal. Have begun, will continue, and he'll tear them to shreds on salt and sun, or silence compelled, or the fist of another person's knuckles kissing his teeth.
The ship creaks in protestation, swaying in the drunken dance that keeps them floating and not capsized and sinking to the depths where the darks gain shape and succor, where ships rot in decades-long peace, summarily reinvented as wood swells and comes apart, fibre by fibre. He swells with air, breathing in through his nose, holding the scent of someone else's sweat and soap and semblance of cleanliness when trapped in a room at sea on the back of his tongue.
His teeth, visible, a fence of bone-that-isn't across his lower lip, altering its shape for obscure purpose, changing nothing in the same heartbeat. Nothing bleeds but in possibility, and he blinks unwary, granting a moment of silence poised to break upon the sharpened edge of his knife's humour.
Of his mistaken understandings, and the want he chooses not to name, too tangled with the violence that defines them, men who have not learned what it means to be gentle, to be kind to any but a few, and never themselves.
seavine
A heartbeat more, and the pressure gives. Fractures him like porcelain, in a rustle of abyssally flinched striations. He hesitates — and steps, and steps again, and does not advance on Wei Ying, as much as he summons the binds of his body from their stupor, calls his joints warm and his hands alive, and braces his feet down when the ship's next tremble nearly tumbles them over.
Later, he will ask, why instinct didn't propel him to stay Wei Ying's balance at his own expense. Later, it will dawn on him like copper mornings, that he trusts Wei Ying to fend for himself. (And when did that paradigm shift?)
This isn't that: the first betrayal between them. It's that he slithers his headband off like a winter snake's skin and wraps it around the span of each fingers' brigade and keeps the length taut. That he punishes himself and stretches the ribbon a barrier before Wei Ying's mouth, and leans in, to hear nothing, and everything, only the glut of his heartbeat like gallop on his temple. That he kisses the vagabond frailty of Wei Ying's mouth through the cloth —
sultry and sweet and nothing, no one, only shapes of wet and quiet devastation, is it so different, one patiently permissive body from another, a whore from a destined lover, when eyes fetter shut and hearts stall to a grind, what is the essence of having after decades of want, how do poets discriminate?
— and removes himself, one step back. Like a star traversing a low sky, at once natural and impermissible. They are married. He loves, is loved. It is right. It should not happen, have happened. It will happen. He cannot breathe.
He licks his lips and tastes the sandalwood afternotes of his silks. The room is thieved. The invitation. The opportunity.
Lan Wangji stole nothing. All is bones and splintered marrow and honesty between them, all is freely given. So often, silver spills between his fingertips like rain. He is too liberal, too hungry. Covets. Craves now, and clutches the headband still a straight line at the level of Wei Ying's mouth between them, and he regrets —
...the hour, not the deed. Not the person. What will it be, to kiss as lovers do? A man and not his memory?
"Your mouth had ripened red when you fell." Only, this was the Wei Ying of his feverish dreams, the ghost of his nightmares. "You kissed death first."
In the dead of winter, Lan Wangji would burn hot. Apologise. He wants to. Wants to speak words, and wants to ask them. The ship sways long. He thinks, gracelessly, to fall.
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Lan Zhan's heat lingers far beyond the press of his lips to his silk's thin veneer, as pervasive as the sandalwood that has meant Lan Zhan for longer than he's realised. The ship shifts, bucks, wavers, and he rides the motions, eyes rounded, drinking in this moment as if he were to wish himself drunk, when he doesn't at all.
His mind may need silencing later, but in the now, the moments stolen in a woman's box of a room, there's the focus, the ribbon, Lan Zhan's lips parting so that his too often curtailed tongue might frame words to have meaning to ears that hear.
"Death doesn't kiss back," he says, and it's a wry smile, the exhalation of amusement that comes with no apology. He fell, blood streaked mouth, blood streaked hands, and believed himself surrendered to the gravity of the fall. "Death swallows," he says, fingers twitching into renewed life, reaching up, tracing tips along the straining length of silk bound and binding between Lan Zhan's hands. "Or spits you out again. You never meet Death's lips, Lan Zhan. Only Death's teeth."
One finger, weighing down as an anchor sent shuddering into the depths from its ship, inviting the ribbon to dip, eyes a dark and open invitation with the swells the ship rides. More and motion and unrest and danger and desire, oceanic or as small as the confines of their bodies could make it.
There is no apology for time lost, he thinks, he knows, he steps beyond as if the stains of it haven't marked his spirit, Only the learning of what it means to regret, and what it means to not regret. Lungs hold air and expel it in practised tempo, longer, slower, a meditation that sings his body electric.
One, two, three. Down the narrow hall outside, boards creak, walls wail, the thump and thud of a body against them, caught off balance as the ship thrusts upward, the sea swelling below, cresting in one long moment before it turns and plunges down.
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But then, Wei Ying's eyes glisten dark like the backbone of a candle's wick just as flame consumes it, and austerity invites a farce of forms. In Wangji's hands, the ribbon is a learned instrument, snake-charmed — he weaponises it neatly, taking advantage of Wei Ying's exposed finger to wrap each end of silk around where root meets knuckle, then cross them over, and bring the headband up to bind the sharp hills of Wei Ying's wrist. Once, around bone. Twice, like a cascading moan, unfinished.
He knots it down — a rustic arrangement, to complement the sea that hurls insults at their ship, the timed cadence of the Pariah's creaks and wooden screeches that swallow them like maws unhinged. A vessel is a loud thing, an organism breathing. It does not sleep.
"Chase off the spirits of this ship, and you win the rest," he gives with his gift, and there's a moment of blessed pale nothing, when he knows all too clearly he has won a hand — that Wei Ying will have anticipated easy concessions or greed or rejection, but not playful bargain, not a game.
"If I complete first, you yield the match."
Lovers are flimsy creatures, scared of the shadow of predictability. And where is Wei Ying, if he is not entertained?
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A whole world, now two, to find a way though, reliant on skills and not the difference of his youth's strength. He is himself, and he is the thousand creaking groans of the ship, the sea, the people, the rats, the supplies, the skulking shadows, and this moment, precious and powerful.
Each crossing, wrapping down his arm a tightness in his chest and lower dipping, until he smiles, laughing low and deep as Lan Zhan sets the task at hand. The challenge, and there they stood with the Wens pulled before the archer's targets; there they stood in the woods of Phoenix Mountain, where the bartering of twinned souls found steady footing underground before he had it ripped away on the callous words of a petty, jealous man; there he was made and unmade in a time where his secrets were the stitching of his soul, and then, it had been simple. It had been ferocious, and he had lost his sister even as she stood before him and defended him, and that, perhaps, is part of what he doesn't forgive a dead man for.
Not that it is his right anymore than it is his wrong. It simply was.
Like this. Like a step forward, and a ribbon-wrapped hand wrapping companionably around Lan Zhan's upper arm, the hold that so often his husband had employed for him, to stop, to steady, to claim.
Companionable now, with a smile.
"Whatever they ask, Lan Zhan? Oh, the chaos we'll sow." His free hand, reaching forward, fingers touching the door's handle, the pulse of what awaits beyond the quietude borrowed from its intended occupant. "Accepted. On your mark."
Get set.
Go.