( 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. )
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no subject
( 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.
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
( 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. )