( Peace, yet he clings to Lan Wangji as if a noose, drawing, dragging, tight and steeled, and Lan Wangji falls with it and with him, gravity despairing of him. There is no grace to silken agglomeration of layers huddling, thick and weighted down, in the sharp jut of Lan Wangji's knee sculpting off the veneer of the river's bottom, in the old wound of his leg simmering in stubborn pulses.
He catches himself on his arms, then flings them around Wei Ying, and sounds dies a heady, rounded death as the waters trouble under the armored panoply of etiolated weeds. Their mouths meet — first, he lies to himself, because the transfer of breath will assist this writhing fool, his husband. Cold, cunning, more beady-eyed eel than man now, slippery. Transformed, sooner than reduced.
Then, when they break water, and Wei Ying pleads his peace — he thinks, perhaps, to persuade his husband into deeper affections in this one nook of seclusion where the conceit of privacy doesn't gasp, stillborn.
This is no time, no place for love-making. Wet of Wei Ying's hair drags on his cheeks and winds like moulding filigree, catches on his shoulders like ink smearing. And behind him, where Lan Wangji stares transfixed, a great bloom of sparrows erupts in the forest skies with gutted shrieks, as the tail end of dozens of birds plunges back down of own volition, as if scythed down. )
...violence. ( He is quick in this, at least: the loosening of his headband from Wei Ying's arm, the silent, subtle nudge to depart their waters. A brisk bath today, it seems. )
no subject
( Peace, yet he clings to Lan Wangji as if a noose, drawing, dragging, tight and steeled, and Lan Wangji falls with it and with him, gravity despairing of him. There is no grace to silken agglomeration of layers huddling, thick and weighted down, in the sharp jut of Lan Wangji's knee sculpting off the veneer of the river's bottom, in the old wound of his leg simmering in stubborn pulses.
He catches himself on his arms, then flings them around Wei Ying, and sounds dies a heady, rounded death as the waters trouble under the armored panoply of etiolated weeds. Their mouths meet — first, he lies to himself, because the transfer of breath will assist this writhing fool, his husband. Cold, cunning, more beady-eyed eel than man now, slippery. Transformed, sooner than reduced.
Then, when they break water, and Wei Ying pleads his peace — he thinks, perhaps, to persuade his husband into deeper affections in this one nook of seclusion where the conceit of privacy doesn't gasp, stillborn.
This is no time, no place for love-making. Wet of Wei Ying's hair drags on his cheeks and winds like moulding filigree, catches on his shoulders like ink smearing. And behind him, where Lan Wangji stares transfixed, a great bloom of sparrows erupts in the forest skies with gutted shrieks, as the tail end of dozens of birds plunges back down of own volition, as if scythed down. )
...violence. ( He is quick in this, at least: the loosening of his headband from Wei Ying's arm, the silent, subtle nudge to depart their waters. A brisk bath today, it seems. )