in Wildly Not Working, but apparently sweet words drip from Wangji's palms...
...when he wants to miss his mark regarding pressing his husband's bottom line, which, like all sane people equally stubborn as their spouse, was going to happen )
( found in his perch, tucked on one of the lesser rooftops, blankets around his shoulders, he lifts an eyebrow as the wine settles into his lap. )
Nothing's hiding in your sleeves? Under your robes?
( as he finds his tumultuous way into the wine, staring down at it, fingers curling around it's bulk. fine is fine, as long as no canine is waiting to intrude. there's no war but the one they make for themselves. cold and otherwise, colder than the air here, high above the courtyards and business of ghosts and humanity alike. )
( He is too brittle for winter, his shrivelled husband, too gentle, too soft. Snow drips and dances down past the sill in threadbare invasion, and it is siege on his bird bones. A battering ram.
He lingers enough to make a show of lifting his arm and unstitching the rim of one sleeve, folded over his wrist. Its brother. Then, calmly, turning to illustrate the tangle of his legs, lifting their hem to ankle.
See, then. No wolf cub. )
No wolf, child, husband.
( A failed smuggling operation, as these things go. And yet. )
( he observes the show, dark eyes quiet, lips curling into a smile as the second sleeve folds, soft exhalation of gracious appreciation following as robes lift, and almost, he's tempted to laugh for the sheer relief. shoulders hitched upward sliding down in increments measured by breaths forming clouds in the air, cut by falling snow.
a second hand emerges, patting the roof to his side. invitation and calculation, where small discomforts wish for trading, small comforts negotiated in the tap of chilled fingers against thin veneer of collecting snow. )
You already brought wine. Though I wish you wouldn't, sometimes.
( tremor of temptation into falling far, and he hasn't forgotten Taravast, the weeping of a dead woman, the loss of self guiding action, the subsuming to another's will. the wine sits in his lap. his knuckles whiten around it, quiet thoughts stolen as the snow blankets all, muffling sound. )
( He drifts, drips down, anchors himself obediently a haggard pillar at Wei Ying's side, careful not to seep into his territory. A line, invisible on crumbled, winter sand: the division between when he becomes Wei Ying's cage and when he remains his fortress.
Warmth exudes from him , the workings of a thrumming core. He hesitates — hand trickling in air, fingers spidering as if the perch on which they wish to latch escapes them — before landing, in a sputtering of jolts and spasms on the bone-lanced stretch of Wei Ying's thigh.
Gasped breath hot, in the space of gelid air stabbed by white light and condensation. Air stale-thick, cloying. He feels like old lace, breaking at beads — bends, wrinkles, folds. Brings his mouth to Wei Ying's, clumsy and tight like a wet knot, a kiss at shallow surface. He withdraws.
His gift, from a man who has yet to initiate. They say — intimate — he neglects his husband. Finally, rasped: )
( his husband is a man of deliberate movement, in the arenas he knows best, in places he bears confidence as cutting as bichen. wei wuxian stills himself, watching the man he's seen as half his intention in the worlds find succour on the roof, melting snow beneath his radiant heat, the sort of largess he knows wouldn't be expressed without a sense of needing to provide. once, it would have bothered him, flattered him, left him feeling uncertain, left him believing the best response would be pushing away. he makes the choices to fight for a justice the world didn't agree with, the inconvenience of it making them uncomfortable in examination.
once. death, or the closest embracing of it for himself that had almost, but not quite, stuck, wrote a different truth. experience beyond the chaotic months of his return, the nearing two years in this world that divorced them of all home expectations has taught him further and further, no person stands alone. not to their success, not to their life, not to the care of those they love.
he blinks, snowflakes caught in his lashes, when his husband's mouth finds his in a wet, cool, young thing, a child's kiss pressed carelessly, with nothing childlike behind it. for the moment of his husband's pulling back, the heat of his hand on wei wuxian's leg an anchor, the heat emanating from him a reminder, a tease.
awkwardness, when they try these things, and he smiles, blinking at last, snowflakes slow to melt in dark lashes. he leans in, lips pressing a kiss that only gains weight with his weight gently falling behind it. draws them back to rake his teeth gently across his cheek, immediately after.
drifting back, resettling the blanket over his shoulders. the wine slips forward, and he scrambles to catch it, years of long instinct bursting into a bloom of hot, brief panic jolting across nerves as he scrambles to catch it, lest it fall. a waste part of him feels, but also: a gift. the wine, the messy kiss, the company. )
I enjoy a good whine, Lan Zhan.
( petulance a light frost over his words, a tease in and of itself. a whine over nothing, and everything, and an allowance of indulgence. )
I don't kill them, you know.
( a breathless laugh that follows, the smile more real than the sound of amusement, hands clutching at the wine. the dogs. the wolves, the foxes, any canine.
fear is not the same as hatred. not for him. yet asking him to love what he fears in this, at least, remains beyond his grasp, just as simplicity often is. )
( Unbidden, their hands stutter, knot and bind over the wine jar, intent to right it, rescuing droplets from spillage that never comes. His other fingers dance the arid threshold between his lips and his cheek, seeking to recapture the trinkets of Wei Ying's touch as if the warmth left in his wake might still brand Wangji.
Nothing lingers. Not a path smoothened, not a man change. Not even the looming sense of ripped and riotous modesty. Only filigree of snow that cascades kindly down, lick of its trickled chills oiling his stupor. Wei Ying feels a world away, trembled. Too close, like brazier light to a hungry moth. When Wangji drags the blankets tighter over his husband's shoulders, they shudder off white powders. )
Only condemn them to feast on their kin? ( Forgive a man his deathly humour, the turn of his mouth slow. ) I cannot refuse the weak readily. It stumbled in my path.
( I did not seek it out, he needn't engrave in the gossamer of their gently coalescing reality. In truth, what would Wei Ying have wished of him? A culling, abandon?
( warmth and cold and a bottle holding wine, and its the hand not caught between that lifts and traces, without looking, the length of Lan Zhan's fingers. finds the range of his knuckles, tracing to their heights and into the depths of their valleys. chilling, but yet warm enough to feel where his fingertips graze, what path they blaze.
morbid humour suits them both, for similar, then different, reasons. )
By your choice. ( no dictation from Wei Wuxian, and they know it, which is why it can amuse. it never was to happen. ) I haven't told you to be otherwise. I can support you in many things. This one, at a distance. A great distance. Where nothing's audible. Or I'm passed out. Don't let it eat me.
( don't actually bring it anywhere near, though with his husband arranging the blankets and sloughing off snow like he were a tree branch to be liberated of its condemning load, and the words that follow, his distraction is as willing as it is immediate. )
You are? By whose urging?
( eyebrows creeping upward, delight at the ridiculous urging, fission of pleasant awareness of caring being anything more, eventually, than their awkward handlings of it as two men who never grew into easy kindness in heart-to-heart embraces. delighted also anyone asks, that it unsettles Lan Zhan, that his vinegar pours not just for Wei Wuxian breathing, but for words slipped in under the cover of conversations Wei Wuxian will never overhear. )
There is a moment, syrupy in the tired stretch of interludes of thickened snowfall, when Lan Wangji's brow perches on high in a sheen of expectant amusement, as if he anticipates the heartbeat when Wei Ying will realise the absurdity of their difference in stature — that a young cub might waste months feasting on his bones, only to scavenge no meat. That he makes no bait of interest to start, for want of fattening. That even wolf babes give precedence to finer dining.
Wine discarded, no tea to bide Wei Ying in the cradle of crawling chills — he leans in to turn his fingers in Wei Ying's hold and capture his husband's hands, stoking them warm through mellowed exercises of friction. Under dusty eaves and a crooked roof and the drip-drip that splatters the floors' ground, Lan Wangji's body is his only standing instrument to heat, to heal. )
Doctor McCoy, of late. Emilia, prior. Beitang Moran. Wen Qing. ( A list of well-intended, if firmly spoken accusers. Disciplinarians. Elders in the way of learned affection. ) Brother, first of all.
( This shallow wound at time stings: born of the same house, tumbled in equal disaster. Yet Zewu-Jun has retained an immense capacity for carefree love. )
( leaving his husband to his contemplations of what amusement might follow should Wei Wuxian ever unknot his singular, consumptive fear, he instead blinks long and slow as his husband rubs at his hands, leaning in, more present in the small ways that aren't twitching and starting back as if Lan Zhan has realised what bodies are, sung electric and weighed down by contact not so cleanly confined to the fight.
he listens to the list, lips curling, fondness and amusement and exasperation in differing degrees. he wiggles his fingers, freeing his hands from Lan Zhan's ministrations and shifting, nudging closer. curls fingers into his cool blanket with its warmth trapped inside, and sneaks it open, with the cold lapping at his robes and eliciting the pebbled gooseflesh that doesn't show, but for at the nape of his neck. he brings that arm, that blanket, up around his husband, still expecting the wedge of Lan Zhan's uneasy relationship with touch; similar, and so different, from his own. )
Did either of us learn how? Shijie showed me, in her ways, where she could. Her heart was always large.
( tucking his arm, the blanket, the whole of this rooftop perch and the slow drip of decay in the world around them, swallowed and softened and disguised by the steady, twisting dance of snow down, down, whole and unique and uniquely forgettable, to rest on the ground, the eaves, their blanket, their hair. )
I know how to fight someone important to me. I know how to find words that drive them away, bleeding unseen, just as they know the words that do the same for me. I know how to care and let them hurt me, and feel that's what I earn, and it's... ( a pause, the consideration of words, his eyes lifting to the skies overhead. a snowflake spins, dances in a misleadingly slow swirl, and lands on his nose. he smiles as it melts, one wet point on a cold nose. ) ... it's why I matter. Why I mattered. I knew how to care, deeply, and cut a path for them to leave. It's taken well over a year for me to start learning how to cultivate a way for someone to stay. If he wanted.
( his gaze drops back down, looks toward his husband. his. he can be possessive, that's allowed, isn't it? he wants to, in ways he turns over in his mind with a sort of disconnected curiosity familiar to many beats of his life. he wants to whine, he wants to pout, he wants to sigh, he wants to lean on and be leaned on. he thinks. he thinks, and the snow frosts them with a memory of water, and he tugs, suggests, Lan Zhan to curl in. to come closer. to be close, and nothing else needed, nothing else required. )
You don't understand affection, and I don't, so we're learning. Aren't we?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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two... hours... later...
Isolated. In a bloodied shed.
( ARE YOU FEELING BAD YET. )
eventually...
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Less well for others, but you're not worried about after it grows.
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Anyway, you've two parents, plenty to feed.
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Goodbye.
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( When You Only Endear for Cannibal Cub. )
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in Wildly Not Working, but apparently sweet words drip from Wangji's palms...
...when he wants to miss his mark regarding pressing his husband's bottom line, which, like all sane people equally stubborn as their spouse, was going to happen )
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When you have learned the way of the venal and conjugal world, and the twain ever collide, you come a knelt and bowed-back penitent. )
Have we peace between us?
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Nothing's hiding in your sleeves? Under your robes?
( as he finds his tumultuous way into the wine, staring down at it, fingers curling around it's bulk. fine is fine, as long as no canine is waiting to intrude. there's no war but the one they make for themselves. cold and otherwise, colder than the air here, high above the courtyards and business of ghosts and humanity alike. )
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( He is too brittle for winter, his shrivelled husband, too gentle, too soft. Snow drips and dances down past the sill in threadbare invasion, and it is siege on his bird bones. A battering ram.
He lingers enough to make a show of lifting his arm and unstitching the rim of one sleeve, folded over his wrist. Its brother. Then, calmly, turning to illustrate the tangle of his legs, lifting their hem to ankle.
See, then. No wolf cub. )
No wolf, child, husband.
( A failed smuggling operation, as these things go. And yet. )
I bring a gift.
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a second hand emerges, patting the roof to his side. invitation and calculation, where small discomforts wish for trading, small comforts negotiated in the tap of chilled fingers against thin veneer of collecting snow. )
You already brought wine. Though I wish you wouldn't, sometimes.
( tremor of temptation into falling far, and he hasn't forgotten Taravast, the weeping of a dead woman, the loss of self guiding action, the subsuming to another's will. the wine sits in his lap. his knuckles whiten around it, quiet thoughts stolen as the snow blankets all, muffling sound. )
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( He drifts, drips down, anchors himself obediently a haggard pillar at Wei Ying's side, careful not to seep into his territory. A line, invisible on crumbled, winter sand: the division between when he becomes Wei Ying's cage and when he remains his fortress.
Warmth exudes from him , the workings of a thrumming core. He hesitates — hand trickling in air, fingers spidering as if the perch on which they wish to latch escapes them — before landing, in a sputtering of jolts and spasms on the bone-lanced stretch of Wei Ying's thigh.
Gasped breath hot, in the space of gelid air stabbed by white light and condensation. Air stale-thick, cloying. He feels like old lace, breaking at beads — bends, wrinkles, folds. Brings his mouth to Wei Ying's, clumsy and tight like a wet knot, a kiss at shallow surface. He withdraws.
His gift, from a man who has yet to initiate. They say — intimate — he neglects his husband. Finally, rasped: )
No more wine.
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( his husband is a man of deliberate movement, in the arenas he knows best, in places he bears confidence as cutting as bichen. wei wuxian stills himself, watching the man he's seen as half his intention in the worlds find succour on the roof, melting snow beneath his radiant heat, the sort of largess he knows wouldn't be expressed without a sense of needing to provide. once, it would have bothered him, flattered him, left him feeling uncertain, left him believing the best response would be pushing away. he makes the choices to fight for a justice the world didn't agree with, the inconvenience of it making them uncomfortable in examination.
once. death, or the closest embracing of it for himself that had almost, but not quite, stuck, wrote a different truth. experience beyond the chaotic months of his return, the nearing two years in this world that divorced them of all home expectations has taught him further and further, no person stands alone. not to their success, not to their life, not to the care of those they love.
he blinks, snowflakes caught in his lashes, when his husband's mouth finds his in a wet, cool, young thing, a child's kiss pressed carelessly, with nothing childlike behind it. for the moment of his husband's pulling back, the heat of his hand on wei wuxian's leg an anchor, the heat emanating from him a reminder, a tease.
awkwardness, when they try these things, and he smiles, blinking at last, snowflakes slow to melt in dark lashes. he leans in, lips pressing a kiss that only gains weight with his weight gently falling behind it. draws them back to rake his teeth gently across his cheek, immediately after.
drifting back, resettling the blanket over his shoulders. the wine slips forward, and he scrambles to catch it, years of long instinct bursting into a bloom of hot, brief panic jolting across nerves as he scrambles to catch it, lest it fall. a waste part of him feels, but also: a gift. the wine, the messy kiss, the company. )
I enjoy a good whine, Lan Zhan.
( petulance a light frost over his words, a tease in and of itself. a whine over nothing, and everything, and an allowance of indulgence. )
I don't kill them, you know.
( a breathless laugh that follows, the smile more real than the sound of amusement, hands clutching at the wine. the dogs. the wolves, the foxes, any canine.
fear is not the same as hatred. not for him. yet asking him to love what he fears in this, at least, remains beyond his grasp, just as simplicity often is. )
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( Unbidden, their hands stutter, knot and bind over the wine jar, intent to right it, rescuing droplets from spillage that never comes. His other fingers dance the arid threshold between his lips and his cheek, seeking to recapture the trinkets of Wei Ying's touch as if the warmth left in his wake might still brand Wangji.
Nothing lingers. Not a path smoothened, not a man change. Not even the looming sense of ripped and riotous modesty. Only filigree of snow that cascades kindly down, lick of its trickled chills oiling his stupor. Wei Ying feels a world away, trembled. Too close, like brazier light to a hungry moth. When Wangji drags the blankets tighter over his husband's shoulders, they shudder off white powders. )
Only condemn them to feast on their kin? ( Forgive a man his deathly humour, the turn of his mouth slow. ) I cannot refuse the weak readily. It stumbled in my path.
( I did not seek it out, he needn't engrave in the gossamer of their gently coalescing reality. In truth, what would Wei Ying have wished of him? A culling, abandon?
But he is not that man. )
I am urged to show you care.
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( warmth and cold and a bottle holding wine, and its the hand not caught between that lifts and traces, without looking, the length of Lan Zhan's fingers. finds the range of his knuckles, tracing to their heights and into the depths of their valleys. chilling, but yet warm enough to feel where his fingertips graze, what path they blaze.
morbid humour suits them both, for similar, then different, reasons. )
By your choice. ( no dictation from Wei Wuxian, and they know it, which is why it can amuse. it never was to happen. ) I haven't told you to be otherwise. I can support you in many things. This one, at a distance. A great distance. Where nothing's audible. Or I'm passed out. Don't let it eat me.
( don't actually bring it anywhere near, though with his husband arranging the blankets and sloughing off snow like he were a tree branch to be liberated of its condemning load, and the words that follow, his distraction is as willing as it is immediate. )
You are? By whose urging?
( eyebrows creeping upward, delight at the ridiculous urging, fission of pleasant awareness of caring being anything more, eventually, than their awkward handlings of it as two men who never grew into easy kindness in heart-to-heart embraces. delighted also anyone asks, that it unsettles Lan Zhan, that his vinegar pours not just for Wei Wuxian breathing, but for words slipped in under the cover of conversations Wei Wuxian will never overhear. )
Lan Zhaaan, tell me, tell me!
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( Don't let it eat Wei Ying.
There is a moment, syrupy in the tired stretch of interludes of thickened snowfall, when Lan Wangji's brow perches on high in a sheen of expectant amusement, as if he anticipates the heartbeat when Wei Ying will realise the absurdity of their difference in stature — that a young cub might waste months feasting on his bones, only to scavenge no meat. That he makes no bait of interest to start, for want of fattening. That even wolf babes give precedence to finer dining.
Wine discarded, no tea to bide Wei Ying in the cradle of crawling chills — he leans in to turn his fingers in Wei Ying's hold and capture his husband's hands, stoking them warm through mellowed exercises of friction. Under dusty eaves and a crooked roof and the drip-drip that splatters the floors' ground, Lan Wangji's body is his only standing instrument to heat, to heal. )
Doctor McCoy, of late. Emilia, prior. Beitang Moran. Wen Qing. ( A list of well-intended, if firmly spoken accusers. Disciplinarians. Elders in the way of learned affection. ) Brother, first of all.
( This shallow wound at time stings: born of the same house, tumbled in equal disaster. Yet Zewu-Jun has retained an immense capacity for carefree love. )
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( leaving his husband to his contemplations of what amusement might follow should Wei Wuxian ever unknot his singular, consumptive fear, he instead blinks long and slow as his husband rubs at his hands, leaning in, more present in the small ways that aren't twitching and starting back as if Lan Zhan has realised what bodies are, sung electric and weighed down by contact not so cleanly confined to the fight.
he listens to the list, lips curling, fondness and amusement and exasperation in differing degrees. he wiggles his fingers, freeing his hands from Lan Zhan's ministrations and shifting, nudging closer. curls fingers into his cool blanket with its warmth trapped inside, and sneaks it open, with the cold lapping at his robes and eliciting the pebbled gooseflesh that doesn't show, but for at the nape of his neck. he brings that arm, that blanket, up around his husband, still expecting the wedge of Lan Zhan's uneasy relationship with touch; similar, and so different, from his own. )
Did either of us learn how? Shijie showed me, in her ways, where she could. Her heart was always large.
( tucking his arm, the blanket, the whole of this rooftop perch and the slow drip of decay in the world around them, swallowed and softened and disguised by the steady, twisting dance of snow down, down, whole and unique and uniquely forgettable, to rest on the ground, the eaves, their blanket, their hair. )
I know how to fight someone important to me. I know how to find words that drive them away, bleeding unseen, just as they know the words that do the same for me. I know how to care and let them hurt me, and feel that's what I earn, and it's... ( a pause, the consideration of words, his eyes lifting to the skies overhead. a snowflake spins, dances in a misleadingly slow swirl, and lands on his nose. he smiles as it melts, one wet point on a cold nose. ) ... it's why I matter. Why I mattered. I knew how to care, deeply, and cut a path for them to leave. It's taken well over a year for me to start learning how to cultivate a way for someone to stay. If he wanted.
( his gaze drops back down, looks toward his husband. his. he can be possessive, that's allowed, isn't it? he wants to, in ways he turns over in his mind with a sort of disconnected curiosity familiar to many beats of his life. he wants to whine, he wants to pout, he wants to sigh, he wants to lean on and be leaned on. he thinks. he thinks, and the snow frosts them with a memory of water, and he tugs, suggests, Lan Zhan to curl in. to come closer. to be close, and nothing else needed, nothing else required. )
You don't understand affection, and I don't, so we're learning. Aren't we?
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