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}
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.
cockadoodleditter
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.
marrieddit
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?
you bet he did (did we already haytumblr)
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.