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?
Later, luck of powdered snow fresh on his shoulders' ledge, when he has greeted the day with lashes chills-wet and his joints ache the stiffness of outdoors winter — he will remember, it was well done, to bear it. The weight of Wei Ying's blanket, coarse rope and edges frayed, use and abuse and years of loan and borrow written in moth-grazed wool. He leans in — ostensibly for balance.
He does not require it, well-oiled core reducing necessity to whim. The heat of Wei Ying's proximity singes. There was a time, before a war, where he carved out feuds from petty inconvenience. Now, he conscripts Wei Ying's hand and drags it to his forehead ribbon and thanks in slips and slivers of symbolic obscenity, as is the way of his people. )
We are two daggers in a sheath. ( Clumsy, cluttered, claustrophobic. Tinny residue of sound, when the blades of their prides bruise. ) We brittle each other, or we sharpen.
( To love is to divide oneself in particles that bind with those of another, thereafter. To relearn spaces and interstices not as opportunity to breath, but as disconnection. To embrace the melancholy of constant amputation — of independence, recreated as longing. )
Come back to Gusu, after. ( When roads close barren and the sun sets slate, and the soles of Wei Ying's boots have thinned-torned in travel. When he is done, returned to himself, stitch on stitch renewed. ) When your wars are won.
( There, where every prison can be reshaped as fortress, once Wei Ying gladdens his doorstep. Between the creaking bones of a grave raised tall. )
( He hums, either agreeing or disagreeing or simply making song to slide between the snowflakes. Lan Zhan has kindness in him, what might be greed from another point of view, to lean in, to claim hand, to press the cold silver to chilled hand and feel warmth from the nature of it. Not for the tradition that stains his husband as surely as every childhood mars the adult in the fabric of their being, but for the effort, for Lan Zhan, stepping quietly toward what affections start familiar and intimate.
Steps forward, in stumbling, fumbling hands and stride. )
Come with me from our home, ( he says in turn, and he lets that rest, lets Lan Zhan weigh what words he's assigned to Gusu, because of a person, not because of a sect. He won't try, when it comes to the Lans. He won't court his husband's uncle, but pay him the respect of an elder to be heard and then ignored when vitriol in moments of frustration rises thick and heavy to his poorly bearded lips. ) when your mantle has been handed to another, when you're ready to see a world not just for its chaos. I shall gift you a world we both witness for its good and ills and hundreds of small joys and annoyances, before we return to your home raised beyond your mother's tomb.
( Gaze sharp is abetting the crimes of Wei Ying's beauty, diffused. Wintered, whitened, desaturated by fresh spills of distant, straying snow. The rare flake that accosts him melts instantly on his cheek, drips on the net of his lashes.
Against the porch and waiting gardens, there is no red but his mouth's red. Earlier, Lan Wangi — ...and now, he hears. Leave Gusu. Learn the world. Together. Can it be so simple, then?
When he moves, it feels the body of a different man, as if anticipation has drawn so many decades long that the moment has mythologised. Only an actor can perform it. This one bears his likeness — turns, all at once, to take advantage and push Wei Ying down by his shoulder, until he's toppled on white-soft skins. Wood creaks, bruised, stifled. No sound past the impulse of their motion. The aggression of following Wei Ying close, so very close, arms bracketing Wei Ying's sides.
This man, who has been two decades Lan Wangji's whole world. This man, who can see nothing but Lan Wangji, for two heartbeats. )
Steer me.
( He will be a vessel, at ease at storm, course in want of righting. He will be emptied, husked, to fill with want and wait. Blinder than daozhang Xiao Xingchen, but for the bloom of sight Wei Ying bestows upon him.
The winds of war have silenced. He will not crash ashore. )
Enough games. Wear my ribbon. ( Proudly, frequently, long. Without pause or invitation. ) Join my bed. Speak your wants, not your needs.
( He asks much, the stubborn pull of his mouth feral. Teeth drawn. He swallows around spumes of haunted satisfaction — as if ghostly wisps have finally livened in his grasp. Sixteen years gone. Nearly three years thereafter. Dust motes and gossamer. He has stitched a husband from his dregs.
( Snow falls, and he falls with more solidity, caught and framed and unaware of anything beyond the darks of Lan Zhan's eyes, midnight cascade of his hair tumbled past his shoulders. His heart thunders in a clouded sky, lungs strain for air that flows freely, lips finding themselves in a smile that matches the wonder warming his eyes.
His fingers twitch, birds in a thicket chirping and rustling as the dawn breaks, the chill of a winter morning slow to relax from the night's heavy embrace. Fingers attached to palms, attached to wrists, turning and sliding upward, to trace the ribbon and the metal, grip on blanket forgotten. The halo of it settles around his shoulders, against the roof, trapped down firm by their weight and arms combined.
He tugs, then questing fingers find the knot, cold-numbed and fumbling to work it free. )
I want you. This. The home between us.
( The ribbon freed, falling toward his face, and he catches it against his lips, keeps them closed as his hand tugs it down to drape across his neck. A swallow, and the ribbon sighs with him as he smiles, leans up, and presses lips to skin or lips or jawbone, whatever he finds. )
( There is a moment that is porcelain stillness, the quiet anticipation before a forge master reveals if the blade he's born holds balance, or wants recasting. A silence the world honours beside him. Wei Ying does not fight him — teases and taunts and litters Lan Wangij's face warm with affections, but does not fight him. He can see him, now: see him dishevelled on a tomb of shallow snow, the lines of his body heterogeneously broken, where tiles of questionable mastery lift and sink him.
This is how you must have lain amid the bones of Nightless City, a corpse sleeping unfound. A shiver wrecks his body, warmed. He kisses Wei Ying's young mouth, then passes his hand on the roof's span to collect the drip of snow and cover Wei Ying's lips in wreaths and flowers of snowflakes, too fragile to hold shape, quick to dissolve. )
Pay attention. I've told you. ( Whispered. Crisp, in the snowfall: the home, the journey, the bedding, the ribbon that lines Wei Ying's throat now in chokehold. Above all, the honesty. He rolls off Wei Ying, but curls inwards beside him, less a Lan in repose than a cat seeking out the negative spaces of Wei Ying's body. )
You are cold. ( He cannot be troubled with it. Spreads a sheen of wintered powder like spun sugared glass on Wei Ying's cheek with a conqueror's grin. In Cloud Recesses, other infant disciples might have waged this war, come the first snowfall. ) Endure it.
( Another heartbeat, two. Until Lan Wangji's restlessness quiets, until they're both snow and dispersed. ) I want to breathe with you.
( He laughs, a low sound born above his vivisected core, heat of his tongue lathing over chilled lips, smile lingering. He checks the impulse to roll toward Lan Zhan when he lifts and settles at his side, echoes of childhood secrets and fears confessed in quiet beds to ears as young and unknowing as the mouths that formed the words.
He hears his husband, and he doesn't think his husband fails to hear him, or to even understand. Words repeated often enough, for wants shift, change, transform in moment to moment. He wants the wants of now, wants the wants of passion, wants the wants of anger if only to understand what he navigates, and when it must be navigated.
Snow drifts down in indifferent inevitability, and he reaches out, tugs Lan Zhan closer, curled and coiled feline with his cold and fiendish fingers dancing melting ice-water across his cheek. He endures the cold painted across his cheek, Lan Zhan's victory of play, as he smiles, as anticipation gentles into a steady thrum. Affection, luxuriant as it stretches in the cage of his chest, peers out of the dappled dark in his eyes. Frightening, in the manner of standing at the top of a waterfall and looking down, down, down, considering the leap. Not to death, but to joyous survival. Irreverent and alluring. )
Closer. It's easier when we're closer.
( The shift, the sideways slide, the pull, the invitation. His husband's head guided toward his chest, to rest on Wei Wuxian's flattened bellows of his lungs, in and out as steady as wash of water over stones. )
( Closer. Two heartbeats in staggered synchrony, pulses coagulating into a single thrum. Like beads of rain collided, their combination a sea prone to storm.
He breathes, learning to pace himself, to be one with (beside, within, without, beyond) Wei Ying. Breathes and prospers in the shade of his lover's proximity.
Until peace itches him like the scabs of an old wound, and he must exile it. )
I should roll you down. ( He can, watch the curl and release of his fingers, their catch and their latching when they linger near Wei Ying's arm. Only a push, down the rooftop, the tiles glistened slippery.
Watch his hands grieve touch they've barely renounced, watch him consider with the gentle, considering study of a feline. )
And give you siege, and bury you in snow.
( Like children do, like miniature monsters. Like every beautiful creature of ages Lan Wangji has survived, but never lived, consigned to the dignity of the Second Jade of Lan. Blessed be, the spare more muzzled and shackled and bound than the heir.
He did not have his chance of free, winter play, did not engage playmates. But he watched, and he waited, and the cold of snow against slips of Wei Ying's bare skin, the wrist and the pale terrain between the ribbon's noose and the collar southbound — it spells, he thinks, he sees, he sees, 遊戲開始. Game on.
And now, here breathes beside him the one who might bear his transgressions. )
( His smile slips like a sly, beautiful thing, tugging his lips upward, exposing the sheen of opalescence framed by blood-red lips, chapping in the cold, flushed from small, hungry kisses. Play for Wei Wuxian has been a matter of his life's explorations, the joy of moments captured and destined to brevity, not held, but witnessed, appreciated, and gone. Cold fingers find his husband's forehead, tracing a line across to his temple, toward his ear. )
So you're declaring snow war?
( A tug on his lobe, and the sudden withdrawal of his hand, the brightening of his smile dawning like the sun won't, for lifetimes yet. )
Try.
( His bursting into motion is the bolt of a feline into open space, leap-rolling over Lan Zhan to slide across tile in a rush of sound orbiting his motion, Wei Wuxian slipping, sliding on his backside toward the lip of the roof, laughter trailing behind him. A hand scoops up the thin, gathering snow, such that when he reaches the edge, when he twists to send that smile back at his husband, and the challenge and the childishness that is embracing nothing but play for the sake of it, and his handful of snow compacted goes flying at his husband.
He doesn't fall, this time. He leaps with the trailing, soaring grace of a crane, Lan Zhan's ribbon tied around his neck in a deft, carefully careless motion. The snow-drifts of the courtyard below explode outward into thousands of cold, starry points, his laughter winding between them all. )
Only one rule, Lan Zhan! Questionable mercy!
( Whatever that means, when there is nothing of note in this moment for mercy, when questions are asked and left unanswered, or presumed understood. He crouches for more snow, scooped in hands numbed and happy for it, expecting moment to moment to feel the crush of Lan Zhan's weight bear down upon him. )
( He floats, sooner than he collapses, than he plunges down. Gravity ensnares and releases him, set of steps like beads unleashed from a cut strings, before he —
Falls, knee breaking a hard landing, dug into a silvered sheen of fresh-powdered, thick-laid snow. It creaks, sign of wetness and the curious, if deep satisfaction of ice crystallising, taking bone and flesh within to support and sustain the mounds.
Wei Ying's first throw is callous, but fond, a child's feint. His second will not delay or equivocate, not when Lan Wangji — excavating dollops and fistfuls of white, rolling the ball between clenching fingertips and the bridge of his palm — seeks to escape a master archer. )
No mercy.
( And he throws in kind, less kindly than his husband — still unaccustomed with the threshold between race, war and play — but earnest, feet skidding and barely hooking on trembled ground, as he starts to give Wei Ying chase around the labyrinthine pathways and swarms of unfettered branches that litter the crowded gardens.
Let them play for half a shi, an afternoon, a lifetime. They have this. They earned the world. )
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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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( He stills.
Later, luck of powdered snow fresh on his shoulders' ledge, when he has greeted the day with lashes chills-wet and his joints ache the stiffness of outdoors winter — he will remember, it was well done, to bear it. The weight of Wei Ying's blanket, coarse rope and edges frayed, use and abuse and years of loan and borrow written in moth-grazed wool. He leans in — ostensibly for balance.
He does not require it, well-oiled core reducing necessity to whim. The heat of Wei Ying's proximity singes. There was a time, before a war, where he carved out feuds from petty inconvenience. Now, he conscripts Wei Ying's hand and drags it to his forehead ribbon and thanks in slips and slivers of symbolic obscenity, as is the way of his people. )
We are two daggers in a sheath. ( Clumsy, cluttered, claustrophobic. Tinny residue of sound, when the blades of their prides bruise. ) We brittle each other, or we sharpen.
( To love is to divide oneself in particles that bind with those of another, thereafter. To relearn spaces and interstices not as opportunity to breath, but as disconnection. To embrace the melancholy of constant amputation — of independence, recreated as longing. )
Come back to Gusu, after. ( When roads close barren and the sun sets slate, and the soles of Wei Ying's boots have thinned-torned in travel. When he is done, returned to himself, stitch on stitch renewed. ) When your wars are won.
( There, where every prison can be reshaped as fortress, once Wei Ying gladdens his doorstep. Between the creaking bones of a grave raised tall. )
I shall raise you a home beyond my mother's cage.
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( He hums, either agreeing or disagreeing or simply making song to slide between the snowflakes. Lan Zhan has kindness in him, what might be greed from another point of view, to lean in, to claim hand, to press the cold silver to chilled hand and feel warmth from the nature of it. Not for the tradition that stains his husband as surely as every childhood mars the adult in the fabric of their being, but for the effort, for Lan Zhan, stepping quietly toward what affections start familiar and intimate.
Steps forward, in stumbling, fumbling hands and stride. )
Come with me from our home, ( he says in turn, and he lets that rest, lets Lan Zhan weigh what words he's assigned to Gusu, because of a person, not because of a sect. He won't try, when it comes to the Lans. He won't court his husband's uncle, but pay him the respect of an elder to be heard and then ignored when vitriol in moments of frustration rises thick and heavy to his poorly bearded lips. ) when your mantle has been handed to another, when you're ready to see a world not just for its chaos. I shall gift you a world we both witness for its good and ills and hundreds of small joys and annoyances, before we return to your home raised beyond your mother's tomb.
( Because it's more than a cage, wasn't it. )
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( Gaze sharp is abetting the crimes of Wei Ying's beauty, diffused. Wintered, whitened, desaturated by fresh spills of distant, straying snow. The rare flake that accosts him melts instantly on his cheek, drips on the net of his lashes.
Against the porch and waiting gardens, there is no red but his mouth's red. Earlier, Lan Wangi — ...and now, he hears. Leave Gusu. Learn the world. Together. Can it be so simple, then?
When he moves, it feels the body of a different man, as if anticipation has drawn so many decades long that the moment has mythologised. Only an actor can perform it. This one bears his likeness — turns, all at once, to take advantage and push Wei Ying down by his shoulder, until he's toppled on white-soft skins. Wood creaks, bruised, stifled. No sound past the impulse of their motion. The aggression of following Wei Ying close, so very close, arms bracketing Wei Ying's sides.
This man, who has been two decades Lan Wangji's whole world. This man, who can see nothing but Lan Wangji, for two heartbeats. )
Steer me.
( He will be a vessel, at ease at storm, course in want of righting. He will be emptied, husked, to fill with want and wait. Blinder than daozhang Xiao Xingchen, but for the bloom of sight Wei Ying bestows upon him.
The winds of war have silenced. He will not crash ashore. )
Enough games. Wear my ribbon. ( Proudly, frequently, long. Without pause or invitation. ) Join my bed. Speak your wants, not your needs.
( He asks much, the stubborn pull of his mouth feral. Teeth drawn. He swallows around spumes of haunted satisfaction — as if ghostly wisps have finally livened in his grasp. Sixteen years gone. Nearly three years thereafter. Dust motes and gossamer. He has stitched a husband from his dregs.
And he nods. )
We will walk the world.
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His fingers twitch, birds in a thicket chirping and rustling as the dawn breaks, the chill of a winter morning slow to relax from the night's heavy embrace. Fingers attached to palms, attached to wrists, turning and sliding upward, to trace the ribbon and the metal, grip on blanket forgotten. The halo of it settles around his shoulders, against the roof, trapped down firm by their weight and arms combined.
He tugs, then questing fingers find the knot, cold-numbed and fumbling to work it free. )
I want you. This. The home between us.
( The ribbon freed, falling toward his face, and he catches it against his lips, keeps them closed as his hand tugs it down to drape across his neck. A swallow, and the ribbon sighs with him as he smiles, leans up, and presses lips to skin or lips or jawbone, whatever he finds. )
I want to hear what you want, Lan Zhan.
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( There is a moment that is porcelain stillness, the quiet anticipation before a forge master reveals if the blade he's born holds balance, or wants recasting. A silence the world honours beside him. Wei Ying does not fight him — teases and taunts and litters Lan Wangij's face warm with affections, but does not fight him. He can see him, now: see him dishevelled on a tomb of shallow snow, the lines of his body heterogeneously broken, where tiles of questionable mastery lift and sink him.
This is how you must have lain amid the bones of Nightless City, a corpse sleeping unfound. A shiver wrecks his body, warmed. He kisses Wei Ying's young mouth, then passes his hand on the roof's span to collect the drip of snow and cover Wei Ying's lips in wreaths and flowers of snowflakes, too fragile to hold shape, quick to dissolve. )
Pay attention. I've told you. ( Whispered. Crisp, in the snowfall: the home, the journey, the bedding, the ribbon that lines Wei Ying's throat now in chokehold. Above all, the honesty. He rolls off Wei Ying, but curls inwards beside him, less a Lan in repose than a cat seeking out the negative spaces of Wei Ying's body. )
You are cold. ( He cannot be troubled with it. Spreads a sheen of wintered powder like spun sugared glass on Wei Ying's cheek with a conqueror's grin. In Cloud Recesses, other infant disciples might have waged this war, come the first snowfall. ) Endure it.
( Another heartbeat, two. Until Lan Wangji's restlessness quiets, until they're both snow and dispersed. ) I want to breathe with you.
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( He laughs, a low sound born above his vivisected core, heat of his tongue lathing over chilled lips, smile lingering. He checks the impulse to roll toward Lan Zhan when he lifts and settles at his side, echoes of childhood secrets and fears confessed in quiet beds to ears as young and unknowing as the mouths that formed the words.
He hears his husband, and he doesn't think his husband fails to hear him, or to even understand. Words repeated often enough, for wants shift, change, transform in moment to moment. He wants the wants of now, wants the wants of passion, wants the wants of anger if only to understand what he navigates, and when it must be navigated.
Snow drifts down in indifferent inevitability, and he reaches out, tugs Lan Zhan closer, curled and coiled feline with his cold and fiendish fingers dancing melting ice-water across his cheek. He endures the cold painted across his cheek, Lan Zhan's victory of play, as he smiles, as anticipation gentles into a steady thrum. Affection, luxuriant as it stretches in the cage of his chest, peers out of the dappled dark in his eyes. Frightening, in the manner of standing at the top of a waterfall and looking down, down, down, considering the leap. Not to death, but to joyous survival. Irreverent and alluring. )
Closer. It's easier when we're closer.
( The shift, the sideways slide, the pull, the invitation. His husband's head guided toward his chest, to rest on Wei Wuxian's flattened bellows of his lungs, in and out as steady as wash of water over stones. )
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( Closer. Two heartbeats in staggered synchrony, pulses coagulating into a single thrum. Like beads of rain collided, their combination a sea prone to storm.
He breathes, learning to pace himself, to be one with (beside, within, without, beyond) Wei Ying. Breathes and prospers in the shade of his lover's proximity.
Until peace itches him like the scabs of an old wound, and he must exile it. )
I should roll you down. ( He can, watch the curl and release of his fingers, their catch and their latching when they linger near Wei Ying's arm. Only a push, down the rooftop, the tiles glistened slippery.
Watch his hands grieve touch they've barely renounced, watch him consider with the gentle, considering study of a feline. )
And give you siege, and bury you in snow.
( Like children do, like miniature monsters. Like every beautiful creature of ages Lan Wangji has survived, but never lived, consigned to the dignity of the Second Jade of Lan. Blessed be, the spare more muzzled and shackled and bound than the heir.
He did not have his chance of free, winter play, did not engage playmates. But he watched, and he waited, and the cold of snow against slips of Wei Ying's bare skin, the wrist and the pale terrain between the ribbon's noose and the collar southbound — it spells, he thinks, he sees, he sees, 遊戲開始. Game on.
And now, here breathes beside him the one who might bear his transgressions. )
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( His smile slips like a sly, beautiful thing, tugging his lips upward, exposing the sheen of opalescence framed by blood-red lips, chapping in the cold, flushed from small, hungry kisses. Play for Wei Wuxian has been a matter of his life's explorations, the joy of moments captured and destined to brevity, not held, but witnessed, appreciated, and gone. Cold fingers find his husband's forehead, tracing a line across to his temple, toward his ear. )
So you're declaring snow war?
( A tug on his lobe, and the sudden withdrawal of his hand, the brightening of his smile dawning like the sun won't, for lifetimes yet. )
Try.
( His bursting into motion is the bolt of a feline into open space, leap-rolling over Lan Zhan to slide across tile in a rush of sound orbiting his motion, Wei Wuxian slipping, sliding on his backside toward the lip of the roof, laughter trailing behind him. A hand scoops up the thin, gathering snow, such that when he reaches the edge, when he twists to send that smile back at his husband, and the challenge and the childishness that is embracing nothing but play for the sake of it, and his handful of snow compacted goes flying at his husband.
He doesn't fall, this time. He leaps with the trailing, soaring grace of a crane, Lan Zhan's ribbon tied around his neck in a deft, carefully careless motion. The snow-drifts of the courtyard below explode outward into thousands of cold, starry points, his laughter winding between them all. )
Only one rule, Lan Zhan! Questionable mercy!
( Whatever that means, when there is nothing of note in this moment for mercy, when questions are asked and left unanswered, or presumed understood. He crouches for more snow, scooped in hands numbed and happy for it, expecting moment to moment to feel the crush of Lan Zhan's weight bear down upon him. )
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( He floats, sooner than he collapses, than he plunges down. Gravity ensnares and releases him, set of steps like beads unleashed from a cut strings, before he —
Falls, knee breaking a hard landing, dug into a silvered sheen of fresh-powdered, thick-laid snow. It creaks, sign of wetness and the curious, if deep satisfaction of ice crystallising, taking bone and flesh within to support and sustain the mounds.
Wei Ying's first throw is callous, but fond, a child's feint. His second will not delay or equivocate, not when Lan Wangji — excavating dollops and fistfuls of white, rolling the ball between clenching fingertips and the bridge of his palm — seeks to escape a master archer. )
No mercy.
( And he throws in kind, less kindly than his husband — still unaccustomed with the threshold between race, war and play — but earnest, feet skidding and barely hooking on trembled ground, as he starts to give Wei Ying chase around the labyrinthine pathways and swarms of unfettered branches that litter the crowded gardens.
Let them play for half a shi, an afternoon, a lifetime. They have this. They earned the world. )