( Storm without, quiet within. His fingers have different callouses now to the prime of his sword arts, more fitted to bow and instrument, regardless of when he does pick up the sword. Nothing spiritual. Nothing which would drain him swiftly, in a manner no usual blade does.
Yet those callouses know the maps of scarring, know what it feels like to find mended flesh which, in and of itself, couldn't heal clean. He memorises each interlaced line, remembers through another's telling the origins, marvels at how cruelty is imbedded, invested, into so many aspects of the major clans. Kindness too. There's no equity in either direction.
Recalling the gasp, first at the window shuddering, then at his own pause, Wei Wuxian does not again allow himself pause. He doesn't need it in the moment, massaging fingers following the slow unfolding down, down, down. )
What you wish to share of yourself, I am glad for.
( These are Lan Zhan's scars. No matter the reasons behind them, the only person who can choose how they're seen, if they're touched, if he wants them even acknowledged is the man sitting before him. One day, perhaps, he may allow them loved.
With the wind sighing at the shutters, perhaps it isn't today. Perhaps it is. His heart aches, pain and fondness twinning around each other, curled up as kittens sleeping in the spring sunlight. )
When you invite my touch, I settle, humbled.
( For the network across his back, especially: he's simply greedy in other contexts, feeling it unnecessary to point out what they both know. )
And when you speak, I listen to hear.
( Speak on the difficult things, on the past or present or future. On vinegar tendencies, or regrets, or fears, or joys. So precious, when they speak intending to hear and be heard. When they listen, and do not lecture.
Simply be. )
Edited (dw wanted this done way sooner than i was ready hahaha) 2024-07-12 15:19 (UTC)
( There are moments, glistening and strung together, when Wei Ying makes himself light and quick and small, so entirely diminutive that he fits in the nooks and crannies of Lan Wangji's need like waters cutting through ravines. When his breaths course like a river of silence.
And Lan Wangji may fool himself into the belief that his husband is attentively present, but not complicit in his humbling. That he is carefully, fastidiously shielded from the vast onslaught of Lan Wangji's ravenous grief.
He does not flinch, again, under Wei Ying's touch, not when its sedate flow sends thin susurrations of pleasure across broken skin; not when they tease and taunt and disarm him; not when flesh feels unbound and dissolving and bones creak and he breathes through the ghosts of ache, exorcism languid and staggered. )
I know it unrequested. ( Of Wei Ying, who asks nothing, who thinks he deserves far less than rags and week-old rice. Who coaxes monsters to his qiankun purse and whispers the dead alive, but starves for the scraps of Jiang Cheng's affection. Who accepted to seek out silks of his own only on request, who bears a body made whole only by death's own kiss, beneath them. ) But I wish I had untarnished flesh to give you.
( Intimacy has already gone shared, desire kindled, gladness shared. What lay in his hands or purse or blade's strength to gift has gone doled out. But it is not worthy, not sufficient. )
A smooth back. A leg unbroken. Hands uncalloused. ( Parts that suit and comprise him, but are not the best iterations of what they might have been. ) So that I might take gladness in handing you the best of myself.
( Ah, how he's thought, perhaps, he handles with better grace what claws at his heart in hearing. He doesn't. Warmth fills his eyes, as if the blood from the heart of him needed as much release as the tears summoned in truth. They're are a quiet thing, dew clinging to lashes, falling inevitably, carving pathways lower, lower, gone into the crook of his neck and his comfortable, dusty robes.
He understands what it is to wish, against reality and sense, to only have beautiful wholes to hand those you love. To have everything intact and wonderful: to measure out lives experiences together, not defined by carved, living truths eroding through them. To wish to have a world of yourself to give, to be frustrated by imperfection, though he himself is less frequently found at such cross purpose. His frustrations, immense as they are, tangled up in solutions he wishes to find, demands placed on himself, and the unutterable knowledge that perfection is never enough. It cannot, by its own nature.
Love is woven into flaws ever changing, improvements which can only exist because they are none of them as whole and untouched as they wish.
What hurts, what aches, is that understanding, imperfect and fractured, a crystal held in hand after breaking in the fall. He says nothing, hums acknowledgement, fingers methodical yet loving, tears... unchecked, viscous, tracing the planes of his face.
Wei Wuxian smiles. It's a joyous agony, that is love. He leans in to press one kiss, then another, to the expanse of his husband's shoulder. Across the back of his neck. Down the length of his other shoulder. Soft lipped, barely parted. If he could consume Lan Zhan's hurt, he would feast. He would glut himself, but he knows the impossibility. He understands sharing what one cannot be unburdened by, but only just, only recently. Only in trust, carved out of the hollow caverns of his humourous defenses. )
I hear. I... understand the wish.
( Even understanding, nboe deep and glacier slow, that he loves more for every fracture, for each deepened understanding of themselves. Oh sharing that too, as the true best, because it is lived. Survived. Embraced.
Which is no small thing. No small thing at all.
His head lifts with the shaking of the shutters, the whining creel of the wind, lamenting then joyous then raging, as winds do. )
They are too different. A man who has fed on slivers and scraps tolerates even days-old rice with gladness. Only perfection suits the second sect of a foremost sect, porcelain unchipped, calligraphy unwavered, the joyous tang of the Emperor, Smiling.
Shuddered is the line of his back, breaking, the dab of sweat that cascades and catches in decline. How he breathes with Wei Ying's affection, his stubborn fool's pride, the tide and deluge of the formidable farce of his carnal want. Can Lan Wangji trust in desire? The truth: it is a fluid, inky, gelid thing, fitting in a hundred dark spaces; Wei Ying sleeps in between the jagged ends of wrath and the soft curves of covetous timidity.
He opens his mouth to round a moan with the fall of Wei Ying's lips again —
And outside, the storm screams ruin.
It is impossible, then inexorable. The burst of movement like a gutting punch, he swerves and turns and is, all at once and irrefutable, a wall before Wei Ying. Their mouths crash, he brings them close. Lust and laughter and a sudden, feral detonation, a kiss like a curse, half-teeth snagging on the cherry skin of Wei Ying's lower lip. Gushing.
He does not linger, slips their foreheads to collide and holds, holds Wei Ying by the upper stretch of his arms, holds his dear heart dearest, holds — )
I might have loved a hundred men. ( But didn't, and it's gravel and hoarse and friction will erode the last of his conviction, turn him a ragged thing, small. ) And abandoned a thousand lovers.
( For duty, for the troubles of a war-torn, haunted son, for the wishes of the sect, for Lan Wangji's own whims and passions. He is stalwart, they say, a storm contained; his roots pillar the world. Yet he is... uncaring, innately negligent in the way of rich men who can readily replace all that which eludes them.
He has been so flimsy, ever allowing the light of his life to dim. His eyes shutter. )
( Thunder booms, a strike reverberating through the hollow of his chest. Lightning struck, he finds himself kissed, startled into appreciative surprise, jolted back and held in place and stunned, in that extended moment, lower lip swelling, delicious in its brief, poignant pain, a burst of sun behind his eyes.
He clutches, grabs, contorts to match the swift turned position of his husband, who speaks of loves and lovers, casts them aside in the same instant.
Dizzying, yet thrumming under his skin. He holds to Lan Zhan, half his wholeness, paradox, and presses his forehead against his soulmate's.
Friends are chosen. There's no immutable truth beyond that fact.
Friends are chosen. )
So you admit it? ( Soft, spoken by lips which ache to smile, then indulge. ) After all this time, we're friends?
( His expression eases, studying this face so improbably important to him, for reasons great and small. )
Thank you. For choosing me.
( For friendship, for arguments, for fights, for resolutions. For love. For lust, too, granted outlet, but most for the rest.
He falls back as the wind howls, pulls his husband with, cradle of thin padded bones passing muster except at the jut of his hips. The pressure and weight of one body, one willing brain wishing to be here, intoxicates. His heart thunders loud as the skies, it must, roaring as it does in his ears. Invitation in his gaze, in his body, in the words: )
So if you ever tire of me as a lover, if you tire of loving, I'll still have leave to call you friend.
( Truly, this man. The aches and hollow beauty and the echoed laughter of him between wilting ruins. A graveyard are his bones, ribs shallowly stabbing when Lan Wangji drops down, called. Ebb and tide, and Wei Ying yielding — so he must be sought and found. The quiet, sickly, late-bloomed surety that he will be given chase, after years of knowing his worth timid and fickle, a child of his immediate utility.
...and does he give his body in an equal trade, ill broken? Does he deceive himself with calculations of Lan Wangji's affections, with bed play and without?
He finds himself drawing back, only far enough to settle on his bent arms and gaze down over Wei Ying like every cat appraising prey caught through immodest ruse. His nose knocks Wei Ying's, bathes in the sibilant notes of his breath, soft and easing. This bed, narrow as any vice, rustling and groaning and feeling like a world, vast. )
Do you know a man learned enough to teach me how cease loving you? ( Drawling, wistful: a hermit, a wandering immortal. The Buddha, reborn. ) Tell me. I shall call him shizun.
( He arches up, just enough to press, to seek, and then to nip at the air before the very nose which had touched his own, eyes star bright within the scattered darkness of his whole. There's laughter here, a burbling stream within his lungs, and the curling of a leg to hook around Lan Zhan's: bold temerity, to claim his husband as his, his soulmate as his, his best friend as his. )
There's no such shizun, only the depths of replacing love with hate. You weren't born to live in hate.
( In spite of, despite, actions of parents; he nuzzles in, kisses pressed as flowing, unplanned seductions across the planes of Lan Zhan's face. )
I don't fear losing your love.
( Surely, he knows, much as the storm raging outside carries its own inevitable damages to the natural world birthing its conditions, were such to happen, it would have already. His worsts have been witnessed, prodded, bemused, agonized, perhaps despaired over by this man. His bests witnessed, longed for. Compromise is the spark of the tended fire between them, a give and take, negotiation and learned grace, learned acceptance. Understanding might be fractured, might be cinders at their hearth, but it isn't what allows the flame to burn.
He pulls his husband close, ignoring the flush, the blush, that's stolen over his own features. Isn't he the shameless one? Yet so often, Lan Zhan's words capture his ability to breathe for a moment, leaving it caught in precious moments before the world spins madly on. )
Don't fear, of all things, losing mine.
( The misunderstanding of reassurance, no thoughts specific to the carnivorous appetites of physical bodies, nor the abyssal consumption of the soul. Only each moment, held within their grasp, thunderous and moving, silent and soft and slow.
Fingers touch and stroke and press, recognizing each scar on a bare back, yet not tracing them for the memory of their laying. Tracing past, creating a second network of touch pathways bridging them all, rewriting the map of complicated living, heartache and righteousness.
Leaving behind a simpler one: written invisibly, in love and respect. )
Shall we drown out the storm?
( Mischief, invitation, and quiet consideration all at once, where he limpet clings and yet drops his head back onto the weight of his hair, haloed imperfectly around him, to watch the constellations of his Lan Zhan's eyes. )
( ...how is it, countlessly wedded and ferally bedded, that this man still finds the audacity to blush? It creeps across Wei Ying's cheeks, a feverish red, storming worse than the pattering, drumming onslaught of rain striking down, scratching the rattling wood of their window shutters and the roofs above.
He intends, at first, to tease him — then, Wei Ying applies himself, consummately fit for the purpose of conquering the territory of his husband's flesh, as if, having denied the guqin, he will still permit himself this one pleasure of tactility. He is weak for it, is Lan Wangji, the dregs of his raw nerves that still crisscross his back and lick his spine now alight with joyous wonder.
What is it that other men do, when they devote themselves to this moment? He wonders, but no cultivator of Cloud Recesses would speak it. Only the plain field of metaphors and the white rolling of painted eyes on contraband pictures no true disciple should behold, but Lan Wangji did, in confiscated spring books. That was his education, his study: eight pages of niche fornication, and Wei Ying, bright-eyed and seeking and willing.
He looks a dream, already ravished and unraveling on his their shriveled sheets. Lan Wangji wants, very badly, to kiss him again. Bites and licks and tortures his own lower lips, as if he might. And he steels himself. )
We start hard journey tomorrow. ( To a village and its mewling maids and men gone amiss, and energies astray. To another strange new world that anticipates Wei Ying's interest like a sleepy spring's breeze whispering across gelid lands. ) You will not taste a bed for days to come.
( Long, arduous, barely mitigated by occasional interruptions to sleep in open fields, in deserts and tents and alcoves. They are both creatures of attrition, resigned to wanting: Lan Wangji, in the name of discipline; Wei Ying, for having known little else. They will weather each call on their resources, though they will not thrive. )
Rest. Gather your strength. ( It is wise. Sensible. Required of them now, surely. Surely. )
( Fingers splaying, palms pressing to slick, warm skin. These are moments electric with understanding, his permission winding through instead of his acceptance of lessening, of tempered worth.
The storm rages, rants, whines, and he smiles, slow and heavy. Squirms enough to press up, anchored by his hands on Lan Zhan's back, simply because he can. Because he's wanted, and he wants. Because those are things they allow themselves, without the world necessitating permission.
Because they know deeper, simpler truths, in the sunshine of their affection, harsh on its warmth, burning in it's feral tenacity. )
The only way I'm resting is if you help wear me out.
( Not sly, this smile. Not even provocative by intent, with his skin stained red, his ears and neck hot, himself craving what he's allowed with this man, what he wants from no other person on this world or the next. This smile settles in a beatific understanding of self, in the promise of mountains and rivers, inevitable, powerful, natural.
He sleeps poorly, but for his husband's presence. He will not rest, without enough to tire not just body, but mind, ceaseless thoughts chasing avenues of question and solution. He's borne such enforced stillness, he yearns most to move, to debatable effect.
The waterfall of rain overhead turns into the muted roar of an unknown beast thwarted, and he strains up, trying to capture those worried, crimson lips with his own.
Bodies will ache, ground will grow no more friendly, but tonight the bed sits tolerable and intact, and they lay tangled across its landscape, parched and willing to drink deep and long, shed sweat and affection alongside this... youthful entanglement with physical desire. He won't find shame in that, not for them, not for twenty years spent in hollow venues for himself, in soul crushing searches for Lan Zhan.
For his own brother, perhaps, too, but the thought is there then gone so quickly, unable to gain purchase in a moment where the only complexity he cares to untangle is the one where he convinces his soulmate of the underlying necessity to pay heed and pour over each other in agonizing, wonderful detail, until tired and satiated, they both might sleep.
Roads stretch unknown lengths, turn beyond trees and hills and ravines. Storms break branches, bridges, barns.
( It should salt and pickle his wounds, should preserve each droplet round and flesh-like, voluminous — to grasp that some part of his husband wants him for the sake of want. And some part, too, desires him as medicinal relief for a sickness unending.
It does not. He breathes — is, and he meets Wei Ying's mouth when it is called, breath purred and chest rumbling, and coaxing the rags of his silks off his shoulders when next this sweet, virulent ghost of Yiling litters caresses on his upper arms, his back. It hangs snagged on his spine after, cold like morning dew and silent a mourning shroud — until Lan Wangji tips them over, legs slowly entangling, to wilt on their sides.
All the better, he illustrates shortly, to dip in and chase Wei Ying's mouth between stray, seismic heartbeats, to take, to take, to take, until they are hard for the telling — moments when they kiss, moments when they merely breathe. It is greedy, he supposes, richly obscene. Outside, past the quickening storm, spears of light still stab in.
Yet Wei Ying is long, lean, nimble. A body at the peak of its prowess, before the waning tides. There is no configuration of their bodies, no constellation of wooing calls that does not present this man as profoundly, resolutely irresistible. Perhaps to a different palate, another eye; Lan Wangji, trained narrowly on single target, cannot decipher another path but the one that leads, viciously, to complete satisfaction wherever Wei Ying lies healthy, laughing, prone. )
I carry two bathtubs' bones with us. ( The dregs, the remains. That of Taravast, with certainty. Of the warrior's pass after. A piece, too, of the House of Manouk, where they did not avail themselves of the facilities to their destruction — but the sweet, patient, placid ghostly apparition tempted Lan Wangji to rare kindness.
They have broken furniture already. What is a bed more. Still, he does not persist — only meets Wei Ying's mouth once, then again, red and riotous. )
Why do you require exertion? ( Why, still? In a realm indifferent to their hurts of old, with much of Wei Ying's typical stressors receded. He does not fault his husband, not in the face of aches he misunderstands. Only asks.
He inhales; no, kisses. Exhales, now. ) What hurts on this night?
( He's pliable under Lan Zhan's suggestions, rolling into his side in his half determined limpet cling. His, theirs, ours. He has to shake out of thoughts like light bleeding down in vicious, sudden branching arcs from the sky: who am I, who am I, who am I.
What smile turns his lips upwards, aching in the pleasant, buzzing aftermath of kisses like a summers hot, lazy afternoon with cooling foods in hand, shaded against the sun, wind stirring the humidity away. )
Nothing hurts tonight. ( A pause, considering, then the nod to follow, hair falling across his cheek where he lays. )
No hurts. It's still early, and I'm inclined to stay up late, you know. My thoughts don't rest easy.
( He breathes out in a huff swallowed by striking lightning outside, removed enough to sound the threat without providing one in truth. He shivers, curling in closer to his husband's front, blinking slow as he studies his face. )
You're a handsome medicine when you want to be, but that's not why I'm asking if you...
( Closer still, holding himself up with that awkward strain to speak by Lan Zhan's ear: )
... Wish to wet our sleeves tonight, indulging in our springtime desires.
( Lan Zhan, sleeves now unencumbered. Wei Wuxian, overdressed yet in comparison, unapologetic. He's hardly had chance or opportunity.
He settles his head down again, strokes down Lan Zhan's back from the side he can still access. Lends a heady weight at the hip, thumb tracing circles against skin. A world of moments, a peace granted in breathing at times like this. Such a fierce ache if affection claws at his heart, he almost gasps. )
I want you. But I'll want you tomorrow, and the day after, and later still.
( Not simply by desire in biology, no. He's too practiced at ignoring the body's wishes to find any necessity in such claims. Indulgences, the extra cake has at the tea house, that decadence? When allowed, accepted and consumed greatly, with equally great affection. )
( Nothing hurts, yet everything is tender, fragile, distant. Wei Ying, clumsily and indefatigably contorted, coils around him like an eel seeking to drink in and strangle.
He answers him, rounds both arms to fasten around his husband's waist and draws him in, the harsh forge of his core churning hot and keen and burning a print of friction and perspiration between them. Even bare, a cultivator will seldom catch chills, the gift of their qi a constant privilege weaponized towards survival.
His head drifts, feline-like and trickling, to rest at a steep angle beneath Wei Ying's chin, perched heavy on his lover's shoulder. And he breathes, pleased and placid with the hypnotic wooing of Wei Ying's clever strokes rousing bumps on his hip's skin, climbing the steps of his spine, spreading up his ribs. )
I desire you. ( Softer, enamoured. To confirm what should be obvious and plain yet wants occasional reassurance: he desires his husband avidly, thoroughly, as part of perfect awareness and in the absence of a concerted effort. There is no sliver of him that is immune and undisturbed by his lover's peripheral presence, let alone his scent, his touch. ) But worry you only pacify deeper hurt with... handsome medicine.
( A pretty, palatable euphemism that still leaves the true wound to bleed Wei Ying out, to skewer and torment him whole. ) Your mind is restless in perpetuity. You think, think, think. What of?
( The ease in lifting his chin, allowing access to his throat, this sweet intimacy which still unsettles the steady rhythm of his heart. He breathes in deep, slow, filling himself with the scent of Lan Zhan, layer and burning, skin to skin. Hair tickles and soothes in contact, his eyes half closing as words sink in, settling below the surface.
Does he look for handsome medicine? At times, yes. The wandering traces of his fingers over Lan Zhan's skin trace characters, lazy and slow. A name, especially: Lan Zhan, roadmap in his mind.
The storm outside renders his mind more calm. There's no immediate escape from his own heart demons. The urge to drown them into silence with alcohol is one he's struggled with internally for years, but neither does it pull on him now. Is there a lurking hurt? Is there an inherent desire for distraction, and this the opportunity? He breathes steady, his own qi following the touch of his fingers: easy sharing, and strange, feeling as if the depths of the ocean within Lan Zhan aren't merely echoing the emptied well with himself. )
Right now, of how our qi feels, of what's changed it in this world, because it's felt more and more like something has. About those such as Anurr, what creeping evils can infest slow and deadly over time. On what we'll find after this journey, not only tomorrow's, about who we'll be when we're wed again to our world. About the electric, savage beauty of the storm outside. About wanting you, in all ways, and wanting these moments, this closeness. Enjoying when we speak, even without words. About a change to that talisman I've been working on lately, you know the one, and the altered flags for directing energies. Thoughts rattle in the cage of my mind, questions and puzzles, and those have the pleasure of tinkering towards solutions. Others won't before it's time.
( So much spoken, and he subsides, mouth drying, throat parched. There is more, if he allows his thoughts to spiral onto pathways further than his current intention. Not frightening nor saddening, no, he's not trapped in a quagmire undefeated. He feels, above all things, happy. )
I've always preferred staying up in the quiet dark, and waking to the loud light. Tonight, there's only that and the fact I would enjoy using the bed for activities harder on aging bodies out on dirt packed roads.
( His chuckling laugh rumbling through him, softer than the swollen moans of the wind outside, the deluge of rain, not quite seasonably early. He cares and caresses with his hand, long strokes, nails pressed down just enough for feeling. Dragging across, not catching on, tissue which sits jagged even decades after some fractured form of healing, loving this embrace. )
( He listens, and for a moments, he lets himself: hear the hard, tectonic rumbling of Wei Ying's heart, quaking his chest. Taste the liminal quality of their qi meeting this world's energies, like spumes dispersing on a heated shoreline. Envision their journey, that of tomorrow and beyond. Breathe in the crackling, head-spinning, rattling and silvered fury of the storm that wages. Want his husband, part and whole and the shadow of him, the sixteen-year absence. Rewrite the drought talisman, one deep jutting line of calligraphy at a time, and refits its boundaries.
And he is with Wei Ying, travelling his mind, making his nest within its crevices. Growing, eyes shuttered as he allows himself to feel and absorb the full scale of his husband's wonderful, savage restlessness. To contain it.
He is alive, is Wei Ying, and Lan Wangji, who has never perished for close to two decades, was always the corpse between them. His mouth feels slack, kissing the column of his husband's throat, dry; rolling out words in a gravelly susurration. )
I lack... ( The manner of most men, their aptitude to breathe and be and sense, to immerse themselves fully in the moment. To plunge and sink and drown in emotion, in raw and unmitigated sensation. )
Your facility for imagination. ( For living life whole as if a painless, unending stretch of insomnia. A rhapsody of thoughts. ) There is... nothing in me. No chaos to tame, no fire to extinguish. No life. I learn, from you. Devouring.
( He makes no sense, he knows; says nothing. Yet it is the greatest, cruelest truth: Wei Ying makes use of him to quiet himself. Lan Wangji weaponises his husband to feel the world. )
( A humming counterpoint to the wrath of the storm, blooming instead of crashing, finding new shape, new form. Struggles needn't be the same to be understood. Here is yet another example.
He doesn't know if this moment is meant for reassurances. He thinks, oh yes does his mind fill as the tides swallow the shoreline, he thinks perhaps not. Yet? Still.
Thus he hums. Thus he strokes and explores skin under hand, swallows against the kisses at his neck, the shiver of want it sends coursing through him, and he holds this husband of his, this split soul, this man who handles his own insecurities in different ways than those Wei Wuxian knows he employs. )
Music. Song. Devotion. ( not always laudable, still sincere. ) Wit. Kindness. Calligraphy. Wanting. Hurting. Joy.
( Spoken almost melodically, each word, the drone of his voice, the fissures at each shoreline opening slowly to demonstrate their depths. Lightning sends white spears of light crashing into their room, leaving stark outlines of faces burned into the back of his eyes, inescapable. )
I love you. You are so much more than you believe... but for the time being, let me fill you however you please.
( A crooked smile in his voice, for every meaning behind the words. )
( He should not laugh; it is base, fickly, impossibly obvious. There is no sophistication to Wei Ying's wordplay, no edge of intellect, no sliver of finesse. He has barely exerted both his wit and his will.
And yet Lan Wangji's appreciation is a warm sound stifled against his husband's throat, punished with lip-rimmed nips, at once punishing and brazen. Truly, this man. )
Who taught you to speak as the pretty girls of flower houses? ( The same Lan Wangji, who pins not a lick of his interest on the fairer sex as a matter of habit, still took in his notice: fair, distinguished, well kept. Some exotic in their likeness, to attract dulled interest. Most learned and svelte, careful to excite with their conversation as much as their character.
Would Wei Ying earn well, exchanged for coin? Silver dripping between his greedy fingers? But, I love you. Who has heard of a prostitute loaned to but one patron? )
You may. ( Majestic, nearly cold if not for the warming sheen of barely veiled laughter. He pinches Wei Ying's side, a masked warning. ) Though the reverse would readily please me.
( With skies breaking, screaming; the wooden, shivered pillars of their room rattling. Only the storms bears them witness, and what is this, in truth? His delay? How strange to think a man led for more than a decade by his want is so often confined from it. That he fetters himself away. )
I enjoy your body. ( He does not say so, often, with tongue and lips and blunt, small teeth. Perhaps with his hands, with his gaze wandered. With the parts of himself that betray him. He forces himself through it, flush foul and ripe on his cheeks, pinching them. ) It gives pleasure. You give pleasure. Company, caresses. You are joy-giving.
( He gasps, mock outage, to be called a flower in a lanter's garden; he has, by this time, been called far worse by those who mean it, versus this man who jests, who pleases. Perhaps not everyone, but certainly pleases Wei Wuxian without strictly attempting. Even more so with deliberation, but there's none in the laughter that burbles beneath the surface as he speaks. )
Can you think of no one else who speaks playing? Ah, Lan Zhan, how many such places did you visit over the long years?
( A jest, because if he did or didn't, there's no concern on Wei Wuxian's account: amusement certainly that his husband is incapable of finding any giving beyond the payment of those who serve in brothels. Curious how minds fixate. His does, simply on various different frameworks, where decades of flirtation sowed social ease and little else. Skill gave him the rest.
In this, he has no skill inherent. Only his interest, his affection, his desire, all culminating in curiosity and passion, a crescendo call within the heart of any storm around them.
He flinches, twitches, for show and dramatics at the pinch of his side, the moue of his mouth paired with large, widened eyes. )
Such pinching, Lan Zhan, you're so fierce!
( Yet he smiles, shifts forward to kiss the nose of his tormentor, improbably fond. His voice, heavy with the gravity of the storm and the deluge of water kept away by patched rooftop, is a murmur now for the one he loves, outside of moments like these, and within them. )
Tell me, husband, lover, second half of my soul, Lan Zhan — in this moment, what is your pleasure?
( Again the stroke of his fingers down Lan Zhan's back, to curve up, rest in the hollow of his hip. Strange how this alone is satisfying, satiating in the way water is to the parched. Warm, even as desire blooms, an unwitting, irrepressible flower, turning its face to the sun of Lan Zhan's regard. )
( And how many places, littered like wilted flowers on his path? His mouth, a soured moue, tightens to a half-stitched line broken by crepuscular inhalations. He has walked a world whole, hunting down the shadows of this man, seeking to fix and impart his lover's justice.
He lets himself fleetingly drown, nose submerged to catch Wei Ying's scent where his pulse flutters and undulates his jugular, where he livens. )
Dozens of brothels, tea houses, the castles of concubines. ( At times practising different arts; more often than not, the same. What little of Hanguang-Jun's reputation survived the war minimally scathed might have tasted a long death of tears and ripping in the maws of idle, unforgiving gossips, He travelled, yes. And found — ) Often, homes to regret. Violence, abandon.
( Abuse of the mind, of the flesh, of etiquettes and politics. Women forced to embrace the theft of their intimacy, to forego the gift of their bodies. To share themselves for the benefit of their consumers.
An exorcist has a place in this willow world, where women wed melancholy and endless despair, and so often their unborn children weep unheard for starless nights. He lets that understanding linger between them, settling like a lazy cat into the fit of Wei Ying's hands on his back, in the spaces where his husband is settling his affection. )
I would like to kiss you. ( He has done so, at great and inexorable length. Still, does again, lips coarse and fleeting when they catch Wei Ying's mouth, his cheek after. ) After our next assignment — ( And this is not what Wei Ying asks, not what he is disposed to. Still, once more. ) I would like to settle for a season. Half or whole. In a small house, if you will have so. You. Me. Peace.
( The easy, syrupy respite they've never had that so often suits marital confinement in the wake of fresh weddings. Nearly two decades late. )
( He murmurs, shifting his chin to allow his husband better access to his throat, inviting him closer without grasping. There's no need, not between them now. What comes, comes. What promises the make aren't destined to expire upon pillows any more than the requiring birthing upon them.
No matter how impressive their blood, or narrow their hips.
His eyes close, caressing hand thoughtful, lingering. He hums, laughs, when Lan Zhan acts on the first wish, kisses gifted as their hearts have been, open and bleeding and wonderful and frightening. His closed eye slit open, the rolling thunder outside a beast beholden to no smallness of nature or form. Not contained. Uncontrollable.
Hearts, however. Hearts, like minds, can learn new habits, new manners, new ways. Can tame themselves selectively, for those loved, for ideals cherished. )
Two seasons. ( He says, tectonic shift in his chest at the words. ) In a small house, with a stable for the horse and whatever rabbits want for happiness.
( He's still not sure, but he knows Lan Zhan has that knowledge; he can trust the fulfilling of such fully to him. )
I'd like that. Watching seasons pass, in a home. With you.
( Voice smaller in admission, near swallowed beyond their close sanctuary of bodies on bed, entanglement of limbs and hearts and souls. Soft, for admitting what has felt impossible, beyond reach. He is a man who can travel well and long, who enjoys motion, who excels in adaptivity.
For decades before, he was a boy who became a young man fiercely devoted to his home. Who can, even with it stands hollowed and hallowed, miss what once thrummed in its bones.
Still, his hand falls. Xian-xian is only three, and he does what's he can to bury his face in his husband's hair, barley managing to nuzzle in his nose. Breathing in this familiarity, this certainly, that has helped define home when for so long, he's thought nothing would, in the wreckage of the burning bridges behind him.
So soft, like the brush of a butterfly's wings against a fingertip, silk not quite touching an outstretched hand: )
( Ah, but he betrays himself, slips into the sheets of shyness that dress Wei Ying when the brazen luster of his bravado has faded, like bronze dulled. Lan Wangji hears him, the gutting weight of his breath punching out, battering his insides.
Rolls and drags the heft of his sleeve's silks over his head, over Wei Ying's as if to entomb him in their narrow-light world, to stifle and contain him. Their mouths meet again, and so he has, so he has, and the next turn of the storm's tumbling nearly quakes them —
But cannot interfere in this small, finite space where only the pretty depth of his husband's musk persists, where he breathes in the joy of him, this dream they share between tender heartbeats. Blinking, he thinks his lashes touch Wei Ying's cheeks, their chins knock, and the great white of watching walls screams back down upon them like a summer bird. )
Look at me. Say so again. ( Which part? What a flirt this man is, when he lives in Lan Wangji's heart so, uninvited. ) Two seasons.
( Together, hand in hand amid crops golden and schools of river fishes, and Wei Ying's precious bare ankles, glimpsed a-running through the fields. And making love among grass blades burdened by dew, picking oranges from roadside trees, counting stars off their porch near twilight. )
A lifetime after, but two seasons first. Sleep in my arms. Meditate with morning. Cross swords. Feed me your spiced wickedry.
( He laughs, a summer breeze among the reeds; he squirms, wiggling as they shift, part provocation and part simple desire to be closer to someone whom he holds in incandescent affection; he stills in the gossamer privacy of silk sleeves repurposed yet again, in Lan Zhan's unsung creativity. How to explain the gravity given underneath Lan Zhan's weight, where the world feels unshakeable and considered, where the well of an individual life is pulled instead towards the river of mutual, changing experience. There are few times he wants the second half of his soul more than when he feels so unutterably solid, so undeniably present. The heat of bodies, the humming of qi, the sanctuary of beating hearts cradled in two sets of lungs, matching, badum, badun.
He aches, the wind groaning as it plucks at the eaves, at the shutters, denied entry. )
Two seasons.
( Staring into his husband's face, studying him intently, wholly. He imagines: bare feet on river stones, sleeves tied back, yet still managing to wet. Rabbits tumbling off furniture, only to leap back up, start over again. Of sunsets witnessed in quiet, mutual warmth, leaning shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart, breathing in time with each other and the world around.
Of a kitchen they both stand in, of meals cooked together. Of teasing, of laughter, of love.
Anything else might fill in that imagining, that soon reality. Yet it won't be dead, or dying. It won't be a place of grief, or imprisonment. They can walk, hand in hand, to whatever village or town lays closest, and no one, nothing, will seek to split them apart from that freedom. )
In the kitchen and outside of it.
( He promises. Oh, he promises. )
Let us find each other, in a world where we can learn who we wish to be. Not one where others have created those stories for us.
( A time for themselves, without crisis. How unique an opportunity, is that. )
( There: Wei Ying subdued, molten and exquisitely placid and poised even as he succumbs to the call to rest. Slowly, in increments, Lan Wangji wilts around him, mouths pressing obliviously and calling to each other like planets coaxing strange things within orbit, and the constellation of tacitly surrendered moans and half-stifled breaths is an eruption of vagaries of sound.
At some turn, when the storm threatens to break, but only hastens, and the quiet of tension bursts their eardrums, and petrichor kindles in the air like fresh incense, bloomed — his hands remember themselves, the art of caressing, of whispering his husband close to pleasure, of teasing, pacifying, stroking. He is not... for the lazy, easy application of effort, not for anything but his thumbs chasing the jutting frame of Wei Ying's hips, for kisses rounded under his ear's lobe.
Not for diplomacy, not for sensible conduct — not when Jin Guangyao played a reasonable game, and treachery is simple, extortion consummate, and Wei Ying, poor Wei Ying, never did learn. )
Grant me a child, when we truly settle.
( Returned to their home, Cloud Recesses or the road, or whether it is that Wei Ying wishes their roots bound. It is unfair to ask, when they are tangled, to command, as if this does not require a conversation with a man barely awoken to the reality of his decades-long matrimony.
He should, at the very least, afford Wei Ying the dignity of considering this without the distraction at very literal hand, without his silks parting. Well, family enlargements do start in beds. )
( Oh, there's enough to recommend moments like these, even as there's enough to whisper, will it last? He's grown to ignore those thoughts, aware they're reflections of himself, not his faith in Lan Zhan, and also a part of his faith in standing for what he believes.
He doesn't quiet himself, he makes surrender an art of motion as much as it is grace, rousing from the symphonies of incomplete pleasures to flutter lashes, to arch up, to rake teeth against his husband's throat.
Less calculation than pairing action with thought, for it follows as he rolls them over, as his fingers press and nails trace, how he seeks all baring of skin for the sake of contact and, inevitably, aroused interests. Yet he perches now, hair mussed and falling in tangled tumbles over shoulders and back, braces thighs, anchors himself above and bound to Lan Zhan, this borrowed, wooden bed, this suffusing succor of a storm come passion, oh.
His laughter, bright, deepens. His eyes, dark, shine. )
There's a world filled with orphans, Lan Zhan. ( An exhalation, almost panting. ) If you look, if your heart can bear opening to even those without the famed skills of the clans, you'll grant yourself as many children as you care to watch grow and fly away.
( Kisses, raining down like lightning strikes, and strokes of nothing like genius, fumbling in mild, amused frustration for the later easing of ways — chosen whichever way, in course, so shall it be.
He is not a man who has learned deceit in these avenues, between these sheets or any other, no. Yet he is a man who, tangled as heart and limbs might be, knows the remaining stumbling blocks of pride don't linger in his chest.
Gifted cultivators or not, none among them ever prove immortal. Few even claim the oldest age of healthy workers of the land.
So who are they, really, but another form of temporary creature in this beautiful chaotic world, crafting a home between their hearts?
( And then he is tumbled, fleetingly too fond and readily enamoured, gazing up into Wei Ying's bright eyes and feverish face, Lan Wangji's hair rapidly and loosely dishevelled. There is rain pattering above, like fingers drumming on their rooftop, but he cannot see the tears of it, nothing but his husband and the charcoal-like, dispersing suggestion of a living, breathing world. They might be the only people left in it. They might not exist at all. This is how spirits feel, unanchored.
Wei Ying's kisses punctuate his exhalations, keep him grounded. He answers them on instinct, clumsily brushing their noses at times, their chins at others. Laughs, then — gutturally slow — quiets. )
I risk burying a child without cultivation. ( As I do a husband, he needn't say, but looks and looks and looks, and his bitten mouth feels slack, clammy and cold and a forgotten thing.
This is ever the danger between men possessed of qi and those unblessed with it: the unions are bound for disaster. And he can bear it, he tells himself, can allow himself to love and grieve and love and grieve Wei Ying again, because he has walked with death and returned to him, and the Patriarch cannot be denied.
But a young child is a different proposition, and he feels, selfish and alone, it cannot be that a parent should ever have to think to bury a son or daughter. It is not the way of things, not a pain the mind should muster or the heart survive. )
( Ah, to slowly drink in the pain beneath him, bitter and acerbic, addictive. No desire to create these voids, grief which cannot sink skin deep, only infest marrow like so many burrowing larva, growing fat on the richest part of them, hollowing from within.
Do bones snap as readily as those of the bird, then? When they're so riddled with holes there's no structure remaining to uphold the scaffolding of functioning humanity.
He presses down, blanketing his husband with the warmth of himself, the evidence of how arousal stands unconcerned with extraneous matters of the heart and mind, nudged from intrusion with careful adjustment of hips. Breath matches breath. Hearts beat in time. Rain swells, settles. The storm, uncaring, uninterested, bellows and rumbles on.
How hands find hands to entwine with matters less than the moment they do. Nuzzled into the side of his husband's face, he waits. Lets them settle in turbid water, until the sediment of their sentiments ceases muddying what should be heard, be said. )
Death will attempt to come. We won't allow it to arrive in violence, to what extent we can prevent it.
( Resting as he is, fingers squeezing, asking, alive. )
Find the children of your heart. I'll raise them as ours.
( Don't make him the arbiter. Didn't give him the caveats, he who has before lost every child he's taught, every youth he's cared for, at the hands of violence. Every one a cultivator. Every bright beauty of potential smashed and left to rot.
Cultivation does not guarantee extended life. It's merely a possibility, one rarely made true, but that's not what Lan Zhan needs to hear. It's the practical side of Wei Wuxian with no place in this warmth, this vulnerability.
His soul mate needs heart, not mind. Not unaddressed, buried grief of his own, better left subterranean. )
You know what you need. Let you lead us along that path, ah?
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Yet those callouses know the maps of scarring, know what it feels like to find mended flesh which, in and of itself, couldn't heal clean. He memorises each interlaced line, remembers through another's telling the origins, marvels at how cruelty is imbedded, invested, into so many aspects of the major clans. Kindness too. There's no equity in either direction.
Recalling the gasp, first at the window shuddering, then at his own pause, Wei Wuxian does not again allow himself pause. He doesn't need it in the moment, massaging fingers following the slow unfolding down, down, down. )
What you wish to share of yourself, I am glad for.
( These are Lan Zhan's scars. No matter the reasons behind them, the only person who can choose how they're seen, if they're touched, if he wants them even acknowledged is the man sitting before him. One day, perhaps, he may allow them loved.
With the wind sighing at the shutters, perhaps it isn't today. Perhaps it is. His heart aches, pain and fondness twinning around each other, curled up as kittens sleeping in the spring sunlight. )
When you invite my touch, I settle, humbled.
( For the network across his back, especially: he's simply greedy in other contexts, feeling it unnecessary to point out what they both know. )
And when you speak, I listen to hear.
( Speak on the difficult things, on the past or present or future. On vinegar tendencies, or regrets, or fears, or joys. So precious, when they speak intending to hear and be heard. When they listen, and do not lecture.
Simply be. )
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( There are moments, glistening and strung together, when Wei Ying makes himself light and quick and small, so entirely diminutive that he fits in the nooks and crannies of Lan Wangji's need like waters cutting through ravines. When his breaths course like a river of silence.
And Lan Wangji may fool himself into the belief that his husband is attentively present, but not complicit in his humbling. That he is carefully, fastidiously shielded from the vast onslaught of Lan Wangji's ravenous grief.
He does not flinch, again, under Wei Ying's touch, not when its sedate flow sends thin susurrations of pleasure across broken skin; not when they tease and taunt and disarm him; not when flesh feels unbound and dissolving and bones creak and he breathes through the ghosts of ache, exorcism languid and staggered. )
I know it unrequested. ( Of Wei Ying, who asks nothing, who thinks he deserves far less than rags and week-old rice. Who coaxes monsters to his qiankun purse and whispers the dead alive, but starves for the scraps of Jiang Cheng's affection. Who accepted to seek out silks of his own only on request, who bears a body made whole only by death's own kiss, beneath them. ) But I wish I had untarnished flesh to give you.
( Intimacy has already gone shared, desire kindled, gladness shared. What lay in his hands or purse or blade's strength to gift has gone doled out. But it is not worthy, not sufficient. )
A smooth back. A leg unbroken. Hands uncalloused. ( Parts that suit and comprise him, but are not the best iterations of what they might have been. ) So that I might take gladness in handing you the best of myself.
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( Ah, how he's thought, perhaps, he handles with better grace what claws at his heart in hearing. He doesn't. Warmth fills his eyes, as if the blood from the heart of him needed as much release as the tears summoned in truth. They're are a quiet thing, dew clinging to lashes, falling inevitably, carving pathways lower, lower, gone into the crook of his neck and his comfortable, dusty robes.
He understands what it is to wish, against reality and sense, to only have beautiful wholes to hand those you love. To have everything intact and wonderful: to measure out lives experiences together, not defined by carved, living truths eroding through them. To wish to have a world of yourself to give, to be frustrated by imperfection, though he himself is less frequently found at such cross purpose. His frustrations, immense as they are, tangled up in solutions he wishes to find, demands placed on himself, and the unutterable knowledge that perfection is never enough. It cannot, by its own nature.
Love is woven into flaws ever changing, improvements which can only exist because they are none of them as whole and untouched as they wish.
What hurts, what aches, is that understanding, imperfect and fractured, a crystal held in hand after breaking in the fall. He says nothing, hums acknowledgement, fingers methodical yet loving, tears... unchecked, viscous, tracing the planes of his face.
Wei Wuxian smiles. It's a joyous agony, that is love. He leans in to press one kiss, then another, to the expanse of his husband's shoulder. Across the back of his neck. Down the length of his other shoulder. Soft lipped, barely parted. If he could consume Lan Zhan's hurt, he would feast. He would glut himself, but he knows the impossibility. He understands sharing what one cannot be unburdened by, but only just, only recently. Only in trust, carved out of the hollow caverns of his humourous defenses. )
I hear. I... understand the wish.
( Even understanding, nboe deep and glacier slow, that he loves more for every fracture, for each deepened understanding of themselves. Oh sharing that too, as the true best, because it is lived. Survived. Embraced.
Which is no small thing. No small thing at all.
His head lifts with the shaking of the shutters, the whining creel of the wind, lamenting then joyous then raging, as winds do. )
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( He understands, Wei Ying says, and in truth —
They are too different. A man who has fed on slivers and scraps tolerates even days-old rice with gladness. Only perfection suits the second sect of a foremost sect, porcelain unchipped, calligraphy unwavered, the joyous tang of the Emperor, Smiling.
Shuddered is the line of his back, breaking, the dab of sweat that cascades and catches in decline. How he breathes with Wei Ying's affection, his stubborn fool's pride, the tide and deluge of the formidable farce of his carnal want. Can Lan Wangji trust in desire? The truth: it is a fluid, inky, gelid thing, fitting in a hundred dark spaces; Wei Ying sleeps in between the jagged ends of wrath and the soft curves of covetous timidity.
He opens his mouth to round a moan with the fall of Wei Ying's lips again —
And outside, the storm screams ruin.
It is impossible, then inexorable. The burst of movement like a gutting punch, he swerves and turns and is, all at once and irrefutable, a wall before Wei Ying. Their mouths crash, he brings them close. Lust and laughter and a sudden, feral detonation, a kiss like a curse, half-teeth snagging on the cherry skin of Wei Ying's lower lip. Gushing.
He does not linger, slips their foreheads to collide and holds, holds Wei Ying by the upper stretch of his arms, holds his dear heart dearest, holds — )
I might have loved a hundred men. ( But didn't, and it's gravel and hoarse and friction will erode the last of his conviction, turn him a ragged thing, small. ) And abandoned a thousand lovers.
( For duty, for the troubles of a war-torn, haunted son, for the wishes of the sect, for Lan Wangji's own whims and passions. He is stalwart, they say, a storm contained; his roots pillar the world. Yet he is... uncaring, innately negligent in the way of rich men who can readily replace all that which eludes them.
He has been so flimsy, ever allowing the light of his life to dim. His eyes shutter. )
But I will never leave my friend.
no subject
( Thunder booms, a strike reverberating through the hollow of his chest. Lightning struck, he finds himself kissed, startled into appreciative surprise, jolted back and held in place and stunned, in that extended moment, lower lip swelling, delicious in its brief, poignant pain, a burst of sun behind his eyes.
He clutches, grabs, contorts to match the swift turned position of his husband, who speaks of loves and lovers, casts them aside in the same instant.
Dizzying, yet thrumming under his skin. He holds to Lan Zhan, half his wholeness, paradox, and presses his forehead against his soulmate's.
Friends are chosen. There's no immutable truth beyond that fact.
Friends are chosen. )
So you admit it? ( Soft, spoken by lips which ache to smile, then indulge. ) After all this time, we're friends?
( His expression eases, studying this face so improbably important to him, for reasons great and small. )
Thank you. For choosing me.
( For friendship, for arguments, for fights, for resolutions. For love. For lust, too, granted outlet, but most for the rest.
He falls back as the wind howls, pulls his husband with, cradle of thin padded bones passing muster except at the jut of his hips. The pressure and weight of one body, one willing brain wishing to be here, intoxicates. His heart thunders loud as the skies, it must, roaring as it does in his ears. Invitation in his gaze, in his body, in the words: )
So if you ever tire of me as a lover, if you tire of loving, I'll still have leave to call you friend.
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( Truly, this man. The aches and hollow beauty and the echoed laughter of him between wilting ruins. A graveyard are his bones, ribs shallowly stabbing when Lan Wangji drops down, called. Ebb and tide, and Wei Ying yielding — so he must be sought and found. The quiet, sickly, late-bloomed surety that he will be given chase, after years of knowing his worth timid and fickle, a child of his immediate utility.
...and does he give his body in an equal trade, ill broken? Does he deceive himself with calculations of Lan Wangji's affections, with bed play and without?
He finds himself drawing back, only far enough to settle on his bent arms and gaze down over Wei Ying like every cat appraising prey caught through immodest ruse. His nose knocks Wei Ying's, bathes in the sibilant notes of his breath, soft and easing. This bed, narrow as any vice, rustling and groaning and feeling like a world, vast. )
Do you know a man learned enough to teach me how cease loving you? ( Drawling, wistful: a hermit, a wandering immortal. The Buddha, reborn. ) Tell me. I shall call him shizun.
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( He arches up, just enough to press, to seek, and then to nip at the air before the very nose which had touched his own, eyes star bright within the scattered darkness of his whole. There's laughter here, a burbling stream within his lungs, and the curling of a leg to hook around Lan Zhan's: bold temerity, to claim his husband as his, his soulmate as his, his best friend as his. )
There's no such shizun, only the depths of replacing love with hate. You weren't born to live in hate.
( In spite of, despite, actions of parents; he nuzzles in, kisses pressed as flowing, unplanned seductions across the planes of Lan Zhan's face. )
I don't fear losing your love.
( Surely, he knows, much as the storm raging outside carries its own inevitable damages to the natural world birthing its conditions, were such to happen, it would have already. His worsts have been witnessed, prodded, bemused, agonized, perhaps despaired over by this man. His bests witnessed, longed for. Compromise is the spark of the tended fire between them, a give and take, negotiation and learned grace, learned acceptance. Understanding might be fractured, might be cinders at their hearth, but it isn't what allows the flame to burn.
He pulls his husband close, ignoring the flush, the blush, that's stolen over his own features. Isn't he the shameless one? Yet so often, Lan Zhan's words capture his ability to breathe for a moment, leaving it caught in precious moments before the world spins madly on. )
Don't fear, of all things, losing mine.
( The misunderstanding of reassurance, no thoughts specific to the carnivorous appetites of physical bodies, nor the abyssal consumption of the soul. Only each moment, held within their grasp, thunderous and moving, silent and soft and slow.
Fingers touch and stroke and press, recognizing each scar on a bare back, yet not tracing them for the memory of their laying. Tracing past, creating a second network of touch pathways bridging them all, rewriting the map of complicated living, heartache and righteousness.
Leaving behind a simpler one: written invisibly, in love and respect. )
Shall we drown out the storm?
( Mischief, invitation, and quiet consideration all at once, where he limpet clings and yet drops his head back onto the weight of his hair, haloed imperfectly around him, to watch the constellations of his Lan Zhan's eyes. )
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( ...how is it, countlessly wedded and ferally bedded, that this man still finds the audacity to blush? It creeps across Wei Ying's cheeks, a feverish red, storming worse than the pattering, drumming onslaught of rain striking down, scratching the rattling wood of their window shutters and the roofs above.
He intends, at first, to tease him — then, Wei Ying applies himself, consummately fit for the purpose of conquering the territory of his husband's flesh, as if, having denied the guqin, he will still permit himself this one pleasure of tactility. He is weak for it, is Lan Wangji, the dregs of his raw nerves that still crisscross his back and lick his spine now alight with joyous wonder.
What is it that other men do, when they devote themselves to this moment? He wonders, but no cultivator of Cloud Recesses would speak it. Only the plain field of metaphors and the white rolling of painted eyes on contraband pictures no true disciple should behold, but Lan Wangji did, in confiscated spring books. That was his education, his study: eight pages of niche fornication, and Wei Ying, bright-eyed and seeking and willing.
He looks a dream, already ravished and unraveling on his their shriveled sheets. Lan Wangji wants, very badly, to kiss him again. Bites and licks and tortures his own lower lips, as if he might. And he steels himself. )
We start hard journey tomorrow. ( To a village and its mewling maids and men gone amiss, and energies astray. To another strange new world that anticipates Wei Ying's interest like a sleepy spring's breeze whispering across gelid lands. ) You will not taste a bed for days to come.
( Long, arduous, barely mitigated by occasional interruptions to sleep in open fields, in deserts and tents and alcoves. They are both creatures of attrition, resigned to wanting: Lan Wangji, in the name of discipline; Wei Ying, for having known little else. They will weather each call on their resources, though they will not thrive. )
Rest. Gather your strength. ( It is wise. Sensible. Required of them now, surely. Surely. )
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( Fingers splaying, palms pressing to slick, warm skin. These are moments electric with understanding, his permission winding through instead of his acceptance of lessening, of tempered worth.
The storm rages, rants, whines, and he smiles, slow and heavy. Squirms enough to press up, anchored by his hands on Lan Zhan's back, simply because he can. Because he's wanted, and he wants. Because those are things they allow themselves, without the world necessitating permission.
Because they know deeper, simpler truths, in the sunshine of their affection, harsh on its warmth, burning in it's feral tenacity. )
The only way I'm resting is if you help wear me out.
( Not sly, this smile. Not even provocative by intent, with his skin stained red, his ears and neck hot, himself craving what he's allowed with this man, what he wants from no other person on this world or the next. This smile settles in a beatific understanding of self, in the promise of mountains and rivers, inevitable, powerful, natural.
He sleeps poorly, but for his husband's presence. He will not rest, without enough to tire not just body, but mind, ceaseless thoughts chasing avenues of question and solution. He's borne such enforced stillness, he yearns most to move, to debatable effect.
The waterfall of rain overhead turns into the muted roar of an unknown beast thwarted, and he strains up, trying to capture those worried, crimson lips with his own.
Bodies will ache, ground will grow no more friendly, but tonight the bed sits tolerable and intact, and they lay tangled across its landscape, parched and willing to drink deep and long, shed sweat and affection alongside this... youthful entanglement with physical desire. He won't find shame in that, not for them, not for twenty years spent in hollow venues for himself, in soul crushing searches for Lan Zhan.
For his own brother, perhaps, too, but the thought is there then gone so quickly, unable to gain purchase in a moment where the only complexity he cares to untangle is the one where he convinces his soulmate of the underlying necessity to pay heed and pour over each other in agonizing, wonderful detail, until tired and satiated, they both might sleep.
Roads stretch unknown lengths, turn beyond trees and hills and ravines. Storms break branches, bridges, barns.
Wei Wuxian adds, voice lore: )
Make sure not to break the bed.
( ... this a tease, surely. Surely. )
no subject
( It should salt and pickle his wounds, should preserve each droplet round and flesh-like, voluminous — to grasp that some part of his husband wants him for the sake of want. And some part, too, desires him as medicinal relief for a sickness unending.
It does not. He breathes — is, and he meets Wei Ying's mouth when it is called, breath purred and chest rumbling, and coaxing the rags of his silks off his shoulders when next this sweet, virulent ghost of Yiling litters caresses on his upper arms, his back. It hangs snagged on his spine after, cold like morning dew and silent a mourning shroud — until Lan Wangji tips them over, legs slowly entangling, to wilt on their sides.
All the better, he illustrates shortly, to dip in and chase Wei Ying's mouth between stray, seismic heartbeats, to take, to take, to take, until they are hard for the telling — moments when they kiss, moments when they merely breathe. It is greedy, he supposes, richly obscene. Outside, past the quickening storm, spears of light still stab in.
Yet Wei Ying is long, lean, nimble. A body at the peak of its prowess, before the waning tides. There is no configuration of their bodies, no constellation of wooing calls that does not present this man as profoundly, resolutely irresistible. Perhaps to a different palate, another eye; Lan Wangji, trained narrowly on single target, cannot decipher another path but the one that leads, viciously, to complete satisfaction wherever Wei Ying lies healthy, laughing, prone. )
I carry two bathtubs' bones with us. ( The dregs, the remains. That of Taravast, with certainty. Of the warrior's pass after. A piece, too, of the House of Manouk, where they did not avail themselves of the facilities to their destruction — but the sweet, patient, placid ghostly apparition tempted Lan Wangji to rare kindness.
They have broken furniture already. What is a bed more. Still, he does not persist — only meets Wei Ying's mouth once, then again, red and riotous. )
Why do you require exertion? ( Why, still? In a realm indifferent to their hurts of old, with much of Wei Ying's typical stressors receded. He does not fault his husband, not in the face of aches he misunderstands. Only asks.
He inhales; no, kisses. Exhales, now. ) What hurts on this night?
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( He's pliable under Lan Zhan's suggestions, rolling into his side in his half determined limpet cling. His, theirs, ours. He has to shake out of thoughts like light bleeding down in vicious, sudden branching arcs from the sky: who am I, who am I, who am I.
What smile turns his lips upwards, aching in the pleasant, buzzing aftermath of kisses like a summers hot, lazy afternoon with cooling foods in hand, shaded against the sun, wind stirring the humidity away. )
Nothing hurts tonight. ( A pause, considering, then the nod to follow, hair falling across his cheek where he lays. )
No hurts. It's still early, and I'm inclined to stay up late, you know. My thoughts don't rest easy.
( He breathes out in a huff swallowed by striking lightning outside, removed enough to sound the threat without providing one in truth. He shivers, curling in closer to his husband's front, blinking slow as he studies his face. )
You're a handsome medicine when you want to be, but that's not why I'm asking if you...
( Closer still, holding himself up with that awkward strain to speak by Lan Zhan's ear: )
... Wish to wet our sleeves tonight, indulging in our springtime desires.
( Lan Zhan, sleeves now unencumbered. Wei Wuxian, overdressed yet in comparison, unapologetic. He's hardly had chance or opportunity.
He settles his head down again, strokes down Lan Zhan's back from the side he can still access. Lends a heady weight at the hip, thumb tracing circles against skin. A world of moments, a peace granted in breathing at times like this. Such a fierce ache if affection claws at his heart, he almost gasps. )
I want you. But I'll want you tomorrow, and the day after, and later still.
( Not simply by desire in biology, no. He's too practiced at ignoring the body's wishes to find any necessity in such claims. Indulgences, the extra cake has at the tea house, that decadence? When allowed, accepted and consumed greatly, with equally great affection. )
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( Nothing hurts, yet everything is tender, fragile, distant. Wei Ying, clumsily and indefatigably contorted, coils around him like an eel seeking to drink in and strangle.
He answers him, rounds both arms to fasten around his husband's waist and draws him in, the harsh forge of his core churning hot and keen and burning a print of friction and perspiration between them. Even bare, a cultivator will seldom catch chills, the gift of their qi a constant privilege weaponized towards survival.
His head drifts, feline-like and trickling, to rest at a steep angle beneath Wei Ying's chin, perched heavy on his lover's shoulder. And he breathes, pleased and placid with the hypnotic wooing of Wei Ying's clever strokes rousing bumps on his hip's skin, climbing the steps of his spine, spreading up his ribs. )
I desire you. ( Softer, enamoured. To confirm what should be obvious and plain yet wants occasional reassurance: he desires his husband avidly, thoroughly, as part of perfect awareness and in the absence of a concerted effort. There is no sliver of him that is immune and undisturbed by his lover's peripheral presence, let alone his scent, his touch. ) But worry you only pacify deeper hurt with... handsome medicine.
( A pretty, palatable euphemism that still leaves the true wound to bleed Wei Ying out, to skewer and torment him whole. ) Your mind is restless in perpetuity. You think, think, think. What of?
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( The ease in lifting his chin, allowing access to his throat, this sweet intimacy which still unsettles the steady rhythm of his heart. He breathes in deep, slow, filling himself with the scent of Lan Zhan, layer and burning, skin to skin. Hair tickles and soothes in contact, his eyes half closing as words sink in, settling below the surface.
Does he look for handsome medicine? At times, yes. The wandering traces of his fingers over Lan Zhan's skin trace characters, lazy and slow. A name, especially: Lan Zhan, roadmap in his mind.
The storm outside renders his mind more calm. There's no immediate escape from his own heart demons. The urge to drown them into silence with alcohol is one he's struggled with internally for years, but neither does it pull on him now. Is there a lurking hurt? Is there an inherent desire for distraction, and this the opportunity? He breathes steady, his own qi following the touch of his fingers: easy sharing, and strange, feeling as if the depths of the ocean within Lan Zhan aren't merely echoing the emptied well with himself. )
Right now, of how our qi feels, of what's changed it in this world, because it's felt more and more like something has. About those such as Anurr, what creeping evils can infest slow and deadly over time. On what we'll find after this journey, not only tomorrow's, about who we'll be when we're wed again to our world. About the electric, savage beauty of the storm outside. About wanting you, in all ways, and wanting these moments, this closeness. Enjoying when we speak, even without words. About a change to that talisman I've been working on lately, you know the one, and the altered flags for directing energies. Thoughts rattle in the cage of my mind, questions and puzzles, and those have the pleasure of tinkering towards solutions. Others won't before it's time.
( So much spoken, and he subsides, mouth drying, throat parched. There is more, if he allows his thoughts to spiral onto pathways further than his current intention. Not frightening nor saddening, no, he's not trapped in a quagmire undefeated. He feels, above all things, happy. )
I've always preferred staying up in the quiet dark, and waking to the loud light. Tonight, there's only that and the fact I would enjoy using the bed for activities harder on aging bodies out on dirt packed roads.
( His chuckling laugh rumbling through him, softer than the swollen moans of the wind outside, the deluge of rain, not quite seasonably early. He cares and caresses with his hand, long strokes, nails pressed down just enough for feeling. Dragging across, not catching on, tissue which sits jagged even decades after some fractured form of healing, loving this embrace. )
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( He listens, and for a moments, he lets himself: hear the hard, tectonic rumbling of Wei Ying's heart, quaking his chest. Taste the liminal quality of their qi meeting this world's energies, like spumes dispersing on a heated shoreline. Envision their journey, that of tomorrow and beyond. Breathe in the crackling, head-spinning, rattling and silvered fury of the storm that wages. Want his husband, part and whole and the shadow of him, the sixteen-year absence. Rewrite the drought talisman, one deep jutting line of calligraphy at a time, and refits its boundaries.
And he is with Wei Ying, travelling his mind, making his nest within its crevices. Growing, eyes shuttered as he allows himself to feel and absorb the full scale of his husband's wonderful, savage restlessness. To contain it.
He is alive, is Wei Ying, and Lan Wangji, who has never perished for close to two decades, was always the corpse between them. His mouth feels slack, kissing the column of his husband's throat, dry; rolling out words in a gravelly susurration. )
I lack... ( The manner of most men, their aptitude to breathe and be and sense, to immerse themselves fully in the moment. To plunge and sink and drown in emotion, in raw and unmitigated sensation. )
Your facility for imagination. ( For living life whole as if a painless, unending stretch of insomnia. A rhapsody of thoughts. ) There is... nothing in me. No chaos to tame, no fire to extinguish. No life. I learn, from you. Devouring.
( He makes no sense, he knows; says nothing. Yet it is the greatest, cruelest truth: Wei Ying makes use of him to quiet himself. Lan Wangji weaponises his husband to feel the world. )
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( A humming counterpoint to the wrath of the storm, blooming instead of crashing, finding new shape, new form. Struggles needn't be the same to be understood. Here is yet another example.
He doesn't know if this moment is meant for reassurances. He thinks, oh yes does his mind fill as the tides swallow the shoreline, he thinks perhaps not. Yet? Still.
Thus he hums. Thus he strokes and explores skin under hand, swallows against the kisses at his neck, the shiver of want it sends coursing through him, and he holds this husband of his, this split soul, this man who handles his own insecurities in different ways than those Wei Wuxian knows he employs. )
Music. Song. Devotion. ( not always laudable, still sincere. ) Wit. Kindness. Calligraphy. Wanting. Hurting. Joy.
( Spoken almost melodically, each word, the drone of his voice, the fissures at each shoreline opening slowly to demonstrate their depths. Lightning sends white spears of light crashing into their room, leaving stark outlines of faces burned into the back of his eyes, inescapable. )
I love you. You are so much more than you believe... but for the time being, let me fill you however you please.
( A crooked smile in his voice, for every meaning behind the words. )
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( He should not laugh; it is base, fickly, impossibly obvious. There is no sophistication to Wei Ying's wordplay, no edge of intellect, no sliver of finesse. He has barely exerted both his wit and his will.
And yet Lan Wangji's appreciation is a warm sound stifled against his husband's throat, punished with lip-rimmed nips, at once punishing and brazen. Truly, this man. )
Who taught you to speak as the pretty girls of flower houses? ( The same Lan Wangji, who pins not a lick of his interest on the fairer sex as a matter of habit, still took in his notice: fair, distinguished, well kept. Some exotic in their likeness, to attract dulled interest. Most learned and svelte, careful to excite with their conversation as much as their character.
Would Wei Ying earn well, exchanged for coin? Silver dripping between his greedy fingers? But, I love you. Who has heard of a prostitute loaned to but one patron? )
You may. ( Majestic, nearly cold if not for the warming sheen of barely veiled laughter. He pinches Wei Ying's side, a masked warning. ) Though the reverse would readily please me.
( With skies breaking, screaming; the wooden, shivered pillars of their room rattling. Only the storms bears them witness, and what is this, in truth? His delay? How strange to think a man led for more than a decade by his want is so often confined from it. That he fetters himself away. )
I enjoy your body. ( He does not say so, often, with tongue and lips and blunt, small teeth. Perhaps with his hands, with his gaze wandered. With the parts of himself that betray him. He forces himself through it, flush foul and ripe on his cheeks, pinching them. ) It gives pleasure. You give pleasure. Company, caresses. You are joy-giving.
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( He gasps, mock outage, to be called a flower in a lanter's garden; he has, by this time, been called far worse by those who mean it, versus this man who jests, who pleases. Perhaps not everyone, but certainly pleases Wei Wuxian without strictly attempting. Even more so with deliberation, but there's none in the laughter that burbles beneath the surface as he speaks. )
Can you think of no one else who speaks playing? Ah, Lan Zhan, how many such places did you visit over the long years?
( A jest, because if he did or didn't, there's no concern on Wei Wuxian's account: amusement certainly that his husband is incapable of finding any giving beyond the payment of those who serve in brothels. Curious how minds fixate. His does, simply on various different frameworks, where decades of flirtation sowed social ease and little else. Skill gave him the rest.
In this, he has no skill inherent. Only his interest, his affection, his desire, all culminating in curiosity and passion, a crescendo call within the heart of any storm around them.
He flinches, twitches, for show and dramatics at the pinch of his side, the moue of his mouth paired with large, widened eyes. )
Such pinching, Lan Zhan, you're so fierce!
( Yet he smiles, shifts forward to kiss the nose of his tormentor, improbably fond. His voice, heavy with the gravity of the storm and the deluge of water kept away by patched rooftop, is a murmur now for the one he loves, outside of moments like these, and within them. )
Tell me, husband, lover, second half of my soul, Lan Zhan — in this moment, what is your pleasure?
( Again the stroke of his fingers down Lan Zhan's back, to curve up, rest in the hollow of his hip. Strange how this alone is satisfying, satiating in the way water is to the parched. Warm, even as desire blooms, an unwitting, irrepressible flower, turning its face to the sun of Lan Zhan's regard. )
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( And how many places, littered like wilted flowers on his path? His mouth, a soured moue, tightens to a half-stitched line broken by crepuscular inhalations. He has walked a world whole, hunting down the shadows of this man, seeking to fix and impart his lover's justice.
He lets himself fleetingly drown, nose submerged to catch Wei Ying's scent where his pulse flutters and undulates his jugular, where he livens. )
Dozens of brothels, tea houses, the castles of concubines. ( At times practising different arts; more often than not, the same. What little of Hanguang-Jun's reputation survived the war minimally scathed might have tasted a long death of tears and ripping in the maws of idle, unforgiving gossips, He travelled, yes. And found — ) Often, homes to regret. Violence, abandon.
( Abuse of the mind, of the flesh, of etiquettes and politics. Women forced to embrace the theft of their intimacy, to forego the gift of their bodies. To share themselves for the benefit of their consumers.
An exorcist has a place in this willow world, where women wed melancholy and endless despair, and so often their unborn children weep unheard for starless nights. He lets that understanding linger between them, settling like a lazy cat into the fit of Wei Ying's hands on his back, in the spaces where his husband is settling his affection. )
I would like to kiss you. ( He has done so, at great and inexorable length. Still, does again, lips coarse and fleeting when they catch Wei Ying's mouth, his cheek after. ) After our next assignment — ( And this is not what Wei Ying asks, not what he is disposed to. Still, once more. ) I would like to settle for a season. Half or whole. In a small house, if you will have so. You. Me. Peace.
( The easy, syrupy respite they've never had that so often suits marital confinement in the wake of fresh weddings. Nearly two decades late. )
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So you have.
( He murmurs, shifting his chin to allow his husband better access to his throat, inviting him closer without grasping. There's no need, not between them now. What comes, comes. What promises the make aren't destined to expire upon pillows any more than the requiring birthing upon them.
No matter how impressive their blood, or narrow their hips.
His eyes close, caressing hand thoughtful, lingering. He hums, laughs, when Lan Zhan acts on the first wish, kisses gifted as their hearts have been, open and bleeding and wonderful and frightening. His closed eye slit open, the rolling thunder outside a beast beholden to no smallness of nature or form. Not contained. Uncontrollable.
Hearts, however. Hearts, like minds, can learn new habits, new manners, new ways. Can tame themselves selectively, for those loved, for ideals cherished. )
Two seasons. ( He says, tectonic shift in his chest at the words. ) In a small house, with a stable for the horse and whatever rabbits want for happiness.
( He's still not sure, but he knows Lan Zhan has that knowledge; he can trust the fulfilling of such fully to him. )
I'd like that. Watching seasons pass, in a home. With you.
( Voice smaller in admission, near swallowed beyond their close sanctuary of bodies on bed, entanglement of limbs and hearts and souls. Soft, for admitting what has felt impossible, beyond reach. He is a man who can travel well and long, who enjoys motion, who excels in adaptivity.
For decades before, he was a boy who became a young man fiercely devoted to his home. Who can, even with it stands hollowed and hallowed, miss what once thrummed in its bones.
Still, his hand falls. Xian-xian is only three, and he does what's he can to bury his face in his husband's hair, barley managing to nuzzle in his nose. Breathing in this familiarity, this certainly, that has helped define home when for so long, he's thought nothing would, in the wreckage of the burning bridges behind him.
So soft, like the brush of a butterfly's wings against a fingertip, silk not quite touching an outstretched hand: )
Thank you.
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( Ah, but he betrays himself, slips into the sheets of shyness that dress Wei Ying when the brazen luster of his bravado has faded, like bronze dulled. Lan Wangji hears him, the gutting weight of his breath punching out, battering his insides.
Rolls and drags the heft of his sleeve's silks over his head, over Wei Ying's as if to entomb him in their narrow-light world, to stifle and contain him. Their mouths meet again, and so he has, so he has, and the next turn of the storm's tumbling nearly quakes them —
But cannot interfere in this small, finite space where only the pretty depth of his husband's musk persists, where he breathes in the joy of him, this dream they share between tender heartbeats. Blinking, he thinks his lashes touch Wei Ying's cheeks, their chins knock, and the great white of watching walls screams back down upon them like a summer bird. )
Look at me. Say so again. ( Which part? What a flirt this man is, when he lives in Lan Wangji's heart so, uninvited. ) Two seasons.
( Together, hand in hand amid crops golden and schools of river fishes, and Wei Ying's precious bare ankles, glimpsed a-running through the fields. And making love among grass blades burdened by dew, picking oranges from roadside trees, counting stars off their porch near twilight. )
A lifetime after, but two seasons first. Sleep in my arms. Meditate with morning. Cross swords. Feed me your spiced wickedry.
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( He laughs, a summer breeze among the reeds; he squirms, wiggling as they shift, part provocation and part simple desire to be closer to someone whom he holds in incandescent affection; he stills in the gossamer privacy of silk sleeves repurposed yet again, in Lan Zhan's unsung creativity. How to explain the gravity given underneath Lan Zhan's weight, where the world feels unshakeable and considered, where the well of an individual life is pulled instead towards the river of mutual, changing experience. There are few times he wants the second half of his soul more than when he feels so unutterably solid, so undeniably present. The heat of bodies, the humming of qi, the sanctuary of beating hearts cradled in two sets of lungs, matching, badum, badun.
He aches, the wind groaning as it plucks at the eaves, at the shutters, denied entry. )
Two seasons.
( Staring into his husband's face, studying him intently, wholly. He imagines: bare feet on river stones, sleeves tied back, yet still managing to wet. Rabbits tumbling off furniture, only to leap back up, start over again. Of sunsets witnessed in quiet, mutual warmth, leaning shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart, breathing in time with each other and the world around.
Of a kitchen they both stand in, of meals cooked together. Of teasing, of laughter, of love.
Anything else might fill in that imagining, that soon reality. Yet it won't be dead, or dying. It won't be a place of grief, or imprisonment. They can walk, hand in hand, to whatever village or town lays closest, and no one, nothing, will seek to split them apart from that freedom. )
In the kitchen and outside of it.
( He promises. Oh, he promises. )
Let us find each other, in a world where we can learn who we wish to be. Not one where others have created those stories for us.
( A time for themselves, without crisis. How unique an opportunity, is that. )
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( There: Wei Ying subdued, molten and exquisitely placid and poised even as he succumbs to the call to rest. Slowly, in increments, Lan Wangji wilts around him, mouths pressing obliviously and calling to each other like planets coaxing strange things within orbit, and the constellation of tacitly surrendered moans and half-stifled breaths is an eruption of vagaries of sound.
At some turn, when the storm threatens to break, but only hastens, and the quiet of tension bursts their eardrums, and petrichor kindles in the air like fresh incense, bloomed — his hands remember themselves, the art of caressing, of whispering his husband close to pleasure, of teasing, pacifying, stroking. He is not... for the lazy, easy application of effort, not for anything but his thumbs chasing the jutting frame of Wei Ying's hips, for kisses rounded under his ear's lobe.
Not for diplomacy, not for sensible conduct — not when Jin Guangyao played a reasonable game, and treachery is simple, extortion consummate, and Wei Ying, poor Wei Ying, never did learn. )
Grant me a child, when we truly settle.
( Returned to their home, Cloud Recesses or the road, or whether it is that Wei Ying wishes their roots bound. It is unfair to ask, when they are tangled, to command, as if this does not require a conversation with a man barely awoken to the reality of his decades-long matrimony.
He should, at the very least, afford Wei Ying the dignity of considering this without the distraction at very literal hand, without his silks parting. Well, family enlargements do start in beds. )
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( Oh, there's enough to recommend moments like these, even as there's enough to whisper, will it last? He's grown to ignore those thoughts, aware they're reflections of himself, not his faith in Lan Zhan, and also a part of his faith in standing for what he believes.
He doesn't quiet himself, he makes surrender an art of motion as much as it is grace, rousing from the symphonies of incomplete pleasures to flutter lashes, to arch up, to rake teeth against his husband's throat.
Less calculation than pairing action with thought, for it follows as he rolls them over, as his fingers press and nails trace, how he seeks all baring of skin for the sake of contact and, inevitably, aroused interests. Yet he perches now, hair mussed and falling in tangled tumbles over shoulders and back, braces thighs, anchors himself above and bound to Lan Zhan, this borrowed, wooden bed, this suffusing succor of a storm come passion, oh.
His laughter, bright, deepens. His eyes, dark, shine. )
There's a world filled with orphans, Lan Zhan. ( An exhalation, almost panting. ) If you look, if your heart can bear opening to even those without the famed skills of the clans, you'll grant yourself as many children as you care to watch grow and fly away.
( Kisses, raining down like lightning strikes, and strokes of nothing like genius, fumbling in mild, amused frustration for the later easing of ways — chosen whichever way, in course, so shall it be.
He is not a man who has learned deceit in these avenues, between these sheets or any other, no. Yet he is a man who, tangled as heart and limbs might be, knows the remaining stumbling blocks of pride don't linger in his chest.
Gifted cultivators or not, none among them ever prove immortal. Few even claim the oldest age of healthy workers of the land.
So who are they, really, but another form of temporary creature in this beautiful chaotic world, crafting a home between their hearts?
And bodies, and souls, and oh. )
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( And then he is tumbled, fleetingly too fond and readily enamoured, gazing up into Wei Ying's bright eyes and feverish face, Lan Wangji's hair rapidly and loosely dishevelled. There is rain pattering above, like fingers drumming on their rooftop, but he cannot see the tears of it, nothing but his husband and the charcoal-like, dispersing suggestion of a living, breathing world. They might be the only people left in it. They might not exist at all. This is how spirits feel, unanchored.
Wei Ying's kisses punctuate his exhalations, keep him grounded. He answers them on instinct, clumsily brushing their noses at times, their chins at others. Laughs, then — gutturally slow — quiets. )
I risk burying a child without cultivation. ( As I do a husband, he needn't say, but looks and looks and looks, and his bitten mouth feels slack, clammy and cold and a forgotten thing.
This is ever the danger between men possessed of qi and those unblessed with it: the unions are bound for disaster. And he can bear it, he tells himself, can allow himself to love and grieve and love and grieve Wei Ying again, because he has walked with death and returned to him, and the Patriarch cannot be denied.
But a young child is a different proposition, and he feels, selfish and alone, it cannot be that a parent should ever have to think to bury a son or daughter. It is not the way of things, not a pain the mind should muster or the heart survive. )
You cannot ask it of me.
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( Ah, to slowly drink in the pain beneath him, bitter and acerbic, addictive. No desire to create these voids, grief which cannot sink skin deep, only infest marrow like so many burrowing larva, growing fat on the richest part of them, hollowing from within.
Do bones snap as readily as those of the bird, then? When they're so riddled with holes there's no structure remaining to uphold the scaffolding of functioning humanity.
He presses down, blanketing his husband with the warmth of himself, the evidence of how arousal stands unconcerned with extraneous matters of the heart and mind, nudged from intrusion with careful adjustment of hips. Breath matches breath. Hearts beat in time. Rain swells, settles. The storm, uncaring, uninterested, bellows and rumbles on.
How hands find hands to entwine with matters less than the moment they do. Nuzzled into the side of his husband's face, he waits. Lets them settle in turbid water, until the sediment of their sentiments ceases muddying what should be heard, be said. )
Death will attempt to come. We won't allow it to arrive in violence, to what extent we can prevent it.
( Resting as he is, fingers squeezing, asking, alive. )
Find the children of your heart. I'll raise them as ours.
( Don't make him the arbiter. Didn't give him the caveats, he who has before lost every child he's taught, every youth he's cared for, at the hands of violence. Every one a cultivator. Every bright beauty of potential smashed and left to rot.
Cultivation does not guarantee extended life. It's merely a possibility, one rarely made true, but that's not what Lan Zhan needs to hear. It's the practical side of Wei Wuxian with no place in this warmth, this vulnerability.
His soul mate needs heart, not mind. Not unaddressed, buried grief of his own, better left subterranean. )
You know what you need. Let you lead us along that path, ah?
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