( 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
( 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. )