( He could, of course, listen to what Lan Zhan asks: or he could, as he intends, hear what Lan Zhan means, and in the course of understanding, allow what he can. Relief. Here there is lingering darkness, crude and cruel underpinnings, a rot to be cleansed bot by themselves so much as the collective around them.
It isn't their masculinity, their scent, their virility that offends or concerns, truly. There's no trust even were they female, waltzing in smelling of spring rains and peonies, in his estimate. What gnaws and yearns here is endemic, is isolated and concentrated, and anything other is not meant to be taken to heart unless fully, wholly consumed.
So he pouts. Gives Lan Zhan the big eyes, out-thrust lower lip, the expression that has nothing of serious displeasure in it, knowing full well this isn't meant for those kinds of moments. Levity, yes. A breath in the cleaned air before they tumble back into the cloying, clotting wound that is the monastery and its missing persons. )
You wouldn't!
( Absolutely, positively, he knows Lan Zhan will. )
Wei Ying. ( And he speaks it in the fatherly way of a man overcome studiously, explicitly and at thorough length by all the petty inconveniences of the world, many ancestral and some freshly devised to torture him.
He is all discipline, a vision of peace and summoned patience. Until, calmly, like a great and basking jellyfish for the grace of his spreading silks — he comes closer to the river's shore. Chin jutting, water crystalizing in cutting droplets that weigh down his lashes, cascade across his cheek.
At first, only silence, mesmerized. He is a beautiful thing, his husband at dawns, made sweet by his theatre. Lively, strong. Desirable.
And, in the fit of that appreciation, Lan Wangji snags his fingertips on the nearest crags, to drag wet red on his sleeve's spread in familiar characters that burst out a — binding talisman, serpentine and plunging to attach itself to Wei Ying's wrist, sparing Lan Wangji the need to exit the waters.
His right eyebrow perks up, first incredulous, then daring. )
When I do it, all your silks will soak cold. ( Better to surrender and remove them now, but for the one required for bathing. ) Count of ten.
( He is, faultlessly, mesmerised. He knows and has always known that Lan Zhan is an objectively, and subjectively, beautiful man. Handsome, delightful, delicious, whatever words one wanted to use, paired with significant ones such as collected (hah), elegant, reserved. Aloof, perhaps, to anything which he doesn't believe concerns him. There used to be more such things in the worlds. These days, in Wei Wuxian's estimate, there are less.
Water traces features he's come to know by eyes and hands and mouth and tongue and slide of skin against skin as much as the nestling, lazy contentment of an evening passed too hot against a body as prone to producing excess heat as his own.
Perhaps that's part of the distracting contrast, seeing Lan Zhan damp, seeing the cold waters consume the warmth of a man whose heart beats larger than many in their particular, peculiar, and cruel sort of righteous world. Or perhaps it's any memory, of words spoken, or silences applied as balms, which leads him into that moment of hazy bewitchment, the urge to tease a quiet voice in the back of his skull.
Until the binding, bonding qi at his wrist, and he smiles then, tugging back on it to see Lan Zhan's arm move a touch. )
Then you'll have to warm me, won't that be a waste of time?
( Yet he's not protesting the impending plunge, or the countdown that proceeds unimpeded: he speaks throughout, his fingers fast, his hands practiced, and unlike the modesty of his husband he does not leave his innermost robe on, the darkest blues and whites sloughed off in haphazard piles under the threatened time-limit.
There's nothing impressive with his standing there nude before the man he's married repeatedly, even unaware of said man's intent. Hard to be anything but reactionary to physical reality with no barrier to the chill air, the spray of colder waters. Gooseflesh ripples down his arms, fine hairs across his body standing on end, nipples contracting like breathing lungs, along with less lauded parts, and he knows it's all preparatory for what happens the moment his husband makes good on his promise.
Hence he's smiling, brows quirked, when Lan Zhan reaches the end of his count.
Because he definitely plans on tackling him after. This day, he suspects, is going to be a long one. They may as well have this moment to themselves, without restriction. )
( He is beautifully pristine, this wayward husband, skin lessened of its scarring in a second life that abided the Patriarch scarred only by his misfortunes. Pretty, were the needle-eye's width of his waist more girlish, the soft roundness of his gaze doe-eyed. Handsome does not yet suit, bones unrefined by age that never lived them. He exists somewhere on the liminal cusp between tender juvenile youth and maturity, a constant reminder that Lan Wangji's interest was snagged by a boy raised to a man only by duty. )
Three... two... ( A heartbeat, echoing and dark. ) One.
( Grit of his teeth clumsy and tight, as if he suffers with Wei Ying's suffering — but he tugs all the same, qi sweetening his strength to drag his husband in just as the river's waves swell, low-humming, and crash and burn to crisps with cold and smears of spume that give Wei Ying's welcome.
He does not hesitate: covers ground, wades in waters, traverses to accept Wei Ying in both arms, to silently bring up cupped streams and descend them on the brittle, narrow bridge of his lover's shoulders, the crown of his head. In between, a minor indulgence: to unfold the span of his headband and bind it, half to his own wrist, half to Wei Ying's and have them impossibly, familiarly wedded, as every river demands of them. )
Good morning.
( Then calmly, saccharine and honest and true, and his sword arm never wavering —
He sets both hands on Wei Ying's shoulders and dunks him down to submerge him in the river's depths. If it were an abyssal cliff, you would have long ago fallen. Ah, but they are not so bittersweet yet, so intimate with their tragedies. )
( The bracing rush of air and water that leads to his yelping, more in the suddenness of the temperature shock than anything remotely like pain, marks his entrance into the waters. Lan Zhan is there, hands warm and cold and water pouring over his shoulders, then clasped, then down, and he catches scant breath before he's under the surface of the stream, the river, whatever body of water moves past, carrying intent and history and self away in unequal measure.
Down, beneath the water, he slides his legs between Lan Zhan's, all but sitting on the smooth-rocked bottom, digging in his heels and hooking his hands behind wet-robed knees. Pulling. Strong, qi-fed, and aware he's inviting the fall into kneeling...
... over himself, even as his head breaks the surface of the water and he laughs, black hair plastered over his face, rendering him incapable of clearly seeing anything, even if there were legions beyond the whites and pale pinks of his husband's robes.
Birds resume chattering in trees, insects buzzing, though they still avoid the expanse over and around the flowing water: something in their play, raucous yet sincere. Further easing of the pressing burden of the mountain and its denizens settles into something closer to peace while two grown men all but attempt to drown each other in their morning ablutions.
In the distance, a hawk cries. Soars around, then aims away, shadow dancing across them both as they find cold skins and warm hearts in the shallow depths of the spring-fed river. )
Peace, peace!
( Wei Wuxian says eventually, laughing, flapping and clinging to Lan Zhan in turns. )
( 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. )
( Violence, he thinks, done to his heart in the wake of a cold embrace and lips against his, air and water and qi and everything else that flows between them, impeded and otherwise. To flush and chill at the same time is an interesting, albeit not unexpected experience. Were Lan Zhan not unknotting his headband from Wei Wuxian's arm, moving already towards whatever sent the sparrows fluttering in a burst of activity then called him to the same. Would have preferred to find how much heat between them it takes to counteract the cold of the mountain spring, the river, the water, the edification of a moment's pleasure in a lifetime of precious seconds spent as one wished, no simply as one was expected.
Instead he hefts himself upward, slipping on rocks before he catches himself, sloshing through water to the shoreline and his tumbled robes, drier for the moments before his hands catch up his innermost. He's racing already after his husband, barefoot and dripping, yet dripping less than the beautiful expanse of Lan Zhan's legs, chest, thighs, back — on what merit was Wei Wuxian meant to concentrate, with his husband dressed only in wet robes of white ahead of him?
The merit of further dressing, perhaps, but he's past now, light and quick on his feet, breathing in, listening, catching himself on a tree trunk with a hand settling on a branch: there. Dark for the dwelling of shadows, a behemoth of form lurching forward, snuffling.
At first he wonders if it isn't some massive boar. The hunching, the snuffling, the sounds and weight of it seems like it might, but as the morning's light catches the creature in spears that cut between tree limbs to touch the forest floor, such notions are banished.
He's never seen a large cat move like this, but he finds that belief also mistaken: what he first thought was fur turns out to be a pelt, worn by an individual crawling along without using their knees. Hence the back arched too high, the weight to every movement. A dirty face, bedraggled hair, hands and feet with nails grown long and then ragged from use and breakage, the person, who he suspects might be male, continues to slink along. Snuffling.
Pausing, as they catch a scent, slowly craning their head towards a nearby bush. Then with sudden, incredible speed, the hunched crawler pushes forward and away, crashing through the bush with a strangled sort of howling yowl.
Wei Wuxian looks to Lan Zhan, a frown pressing his lips into a thin line. Here they witness a hunt, while witnessing also a human's debasement into something other than themselves. Not that humanity fails to sink low on its own initiative. This simply seems... excessive.
He nods towards where the figure disappeared, to the sounds of shivering flora, heavy hands as paws on the forest floor. )
Modesty. ( He hisses it out, but Wei Ying is blitzing across the forest glade in brazen, thorough nudity, sparing no care for Lan Wangji's petulant griefs or the colour of his concern. Thorns, needles, rocks and prickling branches. There is a wealth of torturous possibilities lining the woodland floors, prone to teething on Wei Ying's fresh-skinned soles, the choked width of his ankles. Not to speak of his bird bones.
No time to waste, not with the monastery's world in decadent fragility. Lan Wangji only hesitates to collect the bundle of their combined silks, like brittle, shed snake skins — and calls Bichen from where she sleeps, flying to hand. Then, the hard run, quickening hunger in him, the yearning to hunt.
They arrive, Lan Wangji less delicate in his descent, the excess of his speed carrying a weight of momentum, on a crown of branches. Huddle, and witness... true debasement, a man deprived of wit and the will to raise himself from the primitive state in which curse and misfortune have arrived him. Defiled, dirtied, starved. And possessing, somehow, of enough qi or derived magic to have called a ward of semen and spittle and urine on the ground, netting birds that cannot lift themselves further. Disgusting, if efficient.
Their... intruder kills his prey with a stick, little sharpened, or crushes their throats with his hands, and binds them with hemp rope to slink back in the depth. He is fast, at least, with his work. Timid, almost, if not terrorised: as if fearing he will be caught, scolded and banished, but not injured. He scuttles away.
And Lan Wangji, faced with his own bare barbarian, politely extends the mountain of their layers, unfolded on his arms, for Wei Ying to have his pick, once they drop down. Only then: )
Assuredly. ( Then, measured, attempting and perhaps failing not to seem every piece of him a privileged gentleman assessing the less fortunate as if he were an animal: ) Unless... he is lesser in the ranks, turned to domesticity. If they are all — ( And there must be more. ) — in such state, they are as if... cattle. Kept.
( For... nightly congress? Strange, if not the first distortion he has witnessed of men to passion. Why should women be any better? ) We must take fire within.
( One layer is modest enough! Thin, yes, not terribly protective, yes, as the welts visible on his lower legs indicate, but he's at least not fully bared. More or less. Perched in a tree makes that a matter of discussion even if he were in all layers. He does not, generally, wear pants.
A situation his husband has been woefully slow to find advantage in, if he were asked, but he isn't, and so he's accepting handed robes and shrugging into them. It's not gracious, the way he moves, but it is clever, gaining no vestiges of tree himself in the process, what with it's proximity, well within arm's reach. )
Assuming there are ranks. It's as possible the whole monastery always used some form of body-linked magic, such as what that was, and it'd explain something about the readings in chicken entrails.
( Intimate, basic, and mixing of similar compliments to what this cursed man used just now. )
True fire, or illuminating fire alone?
( Waistband coming last, he finally has himself in rights enough to go trekking into unpleasantly musky caves. He pauses, listening to the wind, the river, the resuscitation of the natural world around them, but for a persisting blank spot where the body-magics had been cast. When he leaps down, it's with a feline grace and qinggong to keep his landing lighter than feathers brushed against a lover's bared skin.
Damp hair gathered back over his shoulder and pulled carelessly off his face, he looks to Lan Zhan, gesturing ahead, then moving, stalking through shadows with greater finesse than that which had come snuffling out of them. )
He lacked permission to hunt. Whose?
( Barefoot still, refusing his boots for the moment for the lack of socks that can stay dry, he simply walks. Robes catching with his movements, stuck to skin then free again; hair a heavy drape, but less so than if they'd tended to it fully and properly. He is young in that moment, the daring fool who threw himself with abandon into the waters of Gusu and came out, smiling, fish in hands.
Shadows cross his face, and he is again his age, thinner and yet not so thinned, marked by tiredness and yet still vivacious, vividly alive. Appealing, attractive, engrossing, and why are his eyes so inexorably drawn to his husband? Likewise wet, likewise cavorting around with the evidence of their interrupted brief exchange? )
( This matter burdens him with consideration, mouth first slack then tersely pursed, before pronouncement, haphazard: )
True fire. ( Warmth, a secondary weapon, often overlooked. Shadow recedes before light, but heat cauterizes, gifting ablution. They cannot neglect their cautions, and the talismans of Wei Ying's design are remarkably adept at preserving qi: minimal consumption for boisterous flame.
He concedes Wei Ying's fleeting penchant for juvenile play, sequestering his husband's boots in one hand, twinned together with their upper bindings. A moment, coming down after, to attend to his own person, wrapping six further silken layers across his body with gritting teeth that gratefully mark the arrival of fresh comfort when he places a warming talisman beneath his collar. Another, held slack-wristed toward Wei Ying —
Only to find his husband enraptured, always on the cusp between graceful and gaunt, between elegant and ethereal. Alert, in ways nearly feline. Truly, the grounds have been marked with folly. )
The monastery secludes them. ( A filthy secret, sheltered away from the day's light. He nods once towards the cave. ) Break fire.
( An unkindness, perhaps, to call on the one with scanter qi resources to spare to produce their talismans, but Wei Ying is the better hand of it, and Lan Wangji has long tired of paying obeisance to his vulnerability when the man himself begrudges it. Let him wear himself down, let him begrudge Lan Wangji's supply.
Steps closer, the mouth of the cave is diminutive, cramped. Barely held together by wishes and stones and a frailty of infrastructural wood, pillars crumbling. The mines must have been ancient when Wei Ying and Lan Wangji were mere dreams in their grandfather's resting hours. Now, they scream their years. Worse still, to enter, they must bow their heads, walking bent, if not crawl — surrendering the natural advantage of having all limbs at the ready. He hesitates: )
We risk ambush. Proceed through here, or infiltrate through the monastery? ( There must be a hole there, surely. ) The cat-women must have their corridor.
( There's a lazy assuredness to how he moves forward, the talisman between his fingers, the branch he has surreptitiously procured in their drift through the forest, cast down from its lofty perch in one of the old, tall trees lingering the mountainside over. A torch of a kind, without embers, burning slow for the delays written in, flickering as any true fire does.
Wood already likes to burn. Slowly, the branch sparks, then simmers. Light throws short in the brilliance of the sunlit shadows, but the cavern ahead looms voracious, little visible even to their enhanced eyes within the shadow-thick interior. )
Up. See there?
( A turn of his wrist and his fingers flick towards the thin lip of a ledge, high up to the side. A perch barely visible without squinting, a different degree of dense darkness to those surrounding shadows, swallowing light that dared touch.
He doesn't wait after the indication, gathering qi in the simple, efficient ways of a man long used to pulling the most from the least. His balances, and he likes to believe them more fruitful these days than when he first awoke with his core transferred, are keen. Sharp as his bladework with Suibian had once been.
Two steps, leaping up the side of the entrance, and he finds the ledge: moves in far enough as he lands and sinks into a light crouch, heat and light of the torch gentle above and before him. Beneath is darkness, as expected, and musk that rises, among other scents he can name and thus feels no inclination to. None of them yet are out of place. Only the something metallic without being blood does.
He waits for his husband's attendance, presuming on Lan Zhan's arrival much as he presumes on stars to brighten in the night skies the further into the mountains they rise. )
Feathers. Bones. Small ones. There's a trail down there, leading to the right. If their noses are at all strong, do we want to anticipate confusing them?
( There are means for being quiet they can do, already do, but there are others to mark the scents of healthy cultivators, of perfumes and incense preferred and used. Less concerning with their present state of affairs, but wet bodies carry scent better than dry, and neither of them are yet parched as the deserts they've recently traversed. )
( Either way, they must enter as rats do: on their knees or with the stench. If their noses are at all strong, they will catch whiff of wet and spumes and weeds, of mould and the tragedy of crisp, teeth-gritting freshness that accompanies the cold. Worse still, they will smell of nothing, but moving, incite the passions of prey-driven animals.
They will be hunted, he supposes, instincts glass-sharp and flaring, for all they think of themselves as warriors and the fiercer men. No matter. Ferocity is a matter of despair, sooner than technique. They must merely wish victory dearer than their opponents do.
He nods, tranquil, although he offers no strategy, no word of encouragement. Only walks like winter wind, casting a breath of white behind him, silks dangling as he bows his back or makes himself small or twists or turns or perverts his flesh away from its natural geometries — to make advance. Slow progress, after, his every step measured, and the flame lighting his path from behind, until he finds the choked corridor finally erupts in a broader gateway that feeds into...
Stairs crudely constructed against a decrepit wall and a large, cavernous pit below. In it, at a far distance, dozens of men of strength, youth and marrying age have curled around each other, borrowing the heat of each other's limbs to grapple with the cold as they persist, largely clothed. In the middle of the circle, a crude net of captured sparrows, and shimmering blood and the bones of feasts old. On their arms and legs, dirt, crusted blood, the fur of likely downed animals, semen. He suspects, if they were to catch the smell, chicken entrails.
They sleep, he notices, flinching through the dim, crepuscular light. No — they doze. And to Wei Ying, murmured behind himself, at ease and safeguarded by the many floors of distance that divide them from the crowd: )
( A part of his heart breaks at the sight, the sound, the smells. These are not well people. These are not people kept in a healthy state even for the animals their tendencies seem so similar to, and this, he thinks, is the "cure." Abandoning them to live in a way unfit for any reality, but trying regardless to live in any way they can.
Palpable as well, an oppressive air, a force of presence behind it that hovers over all the men arrayed below, features distorted by ears and tails and fur that may be the clotted coverings of their bodies, or may be sprouted from their skin true. He narrows his eyes, lifting his gaze to the dark ceilings, letting his senses extend further. Concentrated purpose, not so much dark as feral, uncaring, wild, thrums along with the deeper thumping of the mountain. Of... ah. The mining. The tunnels here might not be directly linked, not in a way to move between, but the sounds of it, the cranking rumbles of rock and ore brought out, the striking of metal against stone.
His fingers curl towards his palms, nails biting into skin. Blood, he knows, has sway here, and not just from the bodies of the men or birds or other paltry hunted creatures below. More than what runs in his veins, or his husband's, or every human shaped being on this mountain.
The talisman he coaxes free is simple, old: following the source of a negative qi. He holds it up, for him and Lan Zhan to see in their flickering light. )
I have a feeling they were closer to the source, but that the infection's spreading. Feeling up for this hunt?
( Turning his head, serious and sincere. There's mishaps enough that can happen under the weight of this much mountain, and he won't make that call for the both of them. Not right now, and hopefully not in the future. )
( Wei Ying's hunger apparent, predictable, blatant. They must seek out the root of a sickness that appears to have eroded swathes of good, strong, standing men — reducing them to... animals. Base renditions and emulations of a human skin.
Wei Ying wants them to go, illicit hunger glistening in his gaze. He shutters his eyes, lets the wave of fermented, stoking stench wash over him. Bites down his tongue. Then, murmuring, he starts to draw their protection talismans. )
We will require defense.
( And it cannot be guaranteed. The risk to their persons is inevitable and terminal. He acknowledges it so, pragmatically, unflinchingly, already simulating the bravado required to slink further, taking their lead. Whatever the illusions of control Wei Ying crafts around himself — this will remain. He must go first. Must expose himself foremost.
Firm ground beneath his feet, despite the makeshift, crafted nature of the stairwell. He feels secure, hovering over the beds of bodies dishevelled and drowning in their debasement — as if a master overseeing a herd of fresh horses, crop at the ready.
He calls Bichen before he knows his own mind, her silver cutting in a hard, dashing line. She slips brazenly by his knees, and he mounts one foot, before simply waving Wei Ying forward. )
Swifter to cross the halls without exposure. ( But they would require a perfect silence that Wei Ying's developed hesitations towards sword flight might not guarantee. They can walk the grounds deeper into the mines, if Wei Ying is unwilling — but this way is their natural, unquestionable advantage. )
( What Lan Zhan says is true enough, and his desire to take front understood. Wei Wuxian lacks the youthful arrogance of one who has yet to fail so unutterably he cannot breathe: he's surfaced from depths of knowing that knowledge cannot save you, at all times.
Preparation is never fully complete.
So he steps upon his husband's sword, letting his talisman fly, holding fire out to their sides: a close bound star above the heads of the restless sleepers.
Trust and faith and awareness of self all help him balance expectations as they fly, his gaze locked over Lan Zhan's shoulder, his hand now freed off talisman burden circled around familiar waist.
Ahead the slip of paper twists and curls on unseen eddies of energy, dark and devouring. Across the cavern it flies, turning sharp into a shadowed alcove from which another narrow tunnel extends, falling to narrower ends. Flight remains necessary and expedient for the moment, stalactites bumps that start to reach from above, stalagmites glimmering with beautiful death in reflected firelight below.
In time they reach a ledge, beyond which they cannot fly: the talisman shivers before it departs into the interior, swallowed by the miasma within.
Sounds have grown louder and then distant in their pursuit. Here, it thrums like a massive beast's hibernating heart. Stepping from Bichen, he pauses to breathe in: dry rot, greed, and anger.
Longing, too. His fire burns quietly, mellowed, but he allows still his husband the due of first stepping entrance.
Into a cavern of unknowable depth and height, thin, cracked lines of sunlight far above, light swallowed long before it reached them. Here, instead, decays many, many things: hides stretched over bones, dangling from whichever ledge they landed on, the whole suffused with suffering more animal than human, old death stagnant in the air.
And the sound, unmistakable between the slow, thudding heartbeats of the mountains awareness, of water flowing. )
( Trickling flight, steadied. Between the dangers of exposure to the resting men — and he will not deny them their names, for all they deny themselves their nature — and Wei Ying's learned inhibition towards sword flight, best to keep their progress stifled, pace measured. He guides Bichen as far into the subterranean maws as she'll weather, before they descend in timid plunges to study the mouth that opens to reveal a lichen-poxed, stone-jutting jugular.
The stench is foul, old rot, desiccated and slow, and the quieted pulse of waiting water. He thinks, where there is a source, there will be creatures to drink of it — and where, carcass crushed beneath his step, there are bones, animals feed. He sees on walls the narrow depths of claw marks, irascible and inevitable, and somehow, in their crass brutality, benevolent. He recalls, with silent shudder, the stripping of flesh and the yielding to scar of many of the men who sleep.
Magic crackles in their surroundings, whispers old, ancestral, waiting. He turns to pass his hand over the walls and take inventory of their surroundings, to sense and immerse himself within, and soon enough, he returns to Wei Ying with his discoveries: a stretch of linens, straddling the ground, tattered and thinned — most likely, he presumes, given the red that lines its edges, once worn by one of the men. Silver bells on string, some bereft of clappers. The dregs of incense sticks, root still carrying the scent of raw musk. And a scratch-marred doll of wood and twine, depicting a wild feline.
He offers one and each in unwavering hands, as if a student presenting his findings to a critical professor. Then: )
Whatever this creature, it was summoned, sooner than found.
( It's the doll which gives him most pause. The scratches are undeniable. The twine harkens to its origins, organic and recent for the way it doesn't rot away under their touch. The wood? )
This is wood turned stone.
( Stone can be shaped, yes, but this looks carved, not hewn and polished. He offers it back to Lan Zhan, even as the weight of the darkness grows, as dozens of nictating eyes open and blink in a disturbing lack of coordination, dripping down from further inside. Claws unseen click and drag and tap, and he looks up, unblinking in turn.
Summoned, yes. Yet found, also. )
What are you?
( He murmurs, and the low growl that reverberates to the clanging bangs of mining happening nearby, muffled by separating stone, rolls over them both.
Perhaps surprising, yet feeling inevitable, the darkness responds: )
Greed. Lust. Perverted natures. Hunger. Sorrow. The flooding rivers. All of these, none of these. What are you?
( Down closer and closer it tumbles, spilling past ledges, viscous and slow. Bones disturb in it's passage. Death and musk and crisp scented spring water gust down with each flowing movement, until it ceases, both perched and held, before the weaving form of the energy seeking talisman. Darkness coalesces into a paw with digits too long and almost finger-like, reaching out to scrape one claw across the paper, missing by less than a hairs width. )
( Wood turned stone. A man-made carving, the human intervention. He accepts the token again, and the crackling pulse of energy awakened greets him. Whatever lingers here answered Wei Ying, activated by a necromancer's presence. As everything else in this great, horrible abode.
Then, even he senses the cloud-agglomeration of thousand-blinking eyes, the same one-that-is-hundred creature watching. He stirs, hand on Bichen, and lets Wei Ying carry the thread of their conversation to start, until — they must give answer. And he knows this: he to engage a demon is beholden to it. He speaks before his husband must: )
The quieting.
( Death, exorcism, silence. They are end to that which this place names birthing cradle. At once inimical and inevitable, that which all that lives is resigned and all that is dead embraces.
And he asks: ) Were you found here?
( The miners, he remembers. A house of stone, built to uncover the core and depths of the world. Something emerged from these grounds. By his feet, roiling but never touching, rot rallies and surges in caked and matte layers, a clawed hand tickling stone to touch paper.
He kicks the parchment handily away, but does not scold the creature. As long as they do not acknowledge its incursions, they may pretend diplomacy and communal understanding. It cackles, sharp and tinny, bright-blinding: )
Born... of a... womb. ( Fertility, he remembers. There is a root to this cause, amorous. Asking: )
Whom do you answer? ( And the laughter is trickling, then tenebrous, then like water bursting through a dam, nearly rattling the cave or waking those who sleep. Lan Wangji's breath catches — and he turns to capture the parchment in hand, strategically removing it from any wandering claws. )
Do you know, gentleman... there were so many children on these... grounds... before. So many... children...
( ...gone. In a monastery that —
The cave, once more, shakes and erupts in quakes, floors pulverized crumble. He steps away to avoid the spiderwebbing ripple of a fresh fissure — and the parchment is snatched of his hand. )
( It cradles the parchment close, as one might a doll, held between those elongated toes which cannot decide if they're handlike or pawlike, the claws at their tips unconcerned with the disquieting uncertainty. Fascinated as the ground cracks further, as heat and steam rise in unequal proportions. )
They all... fell... down... down, down, down...
( Those eyes in their multitude stay focused on the talisman, even as bones bounce and rattle and fall, brittle and cracking before they disappear into the yawning maw so close to his and Lan Zhan's feet. )
They can't see the children... can't see... more children...
( Its shaggy shadow mass lifts, a number of those eyes blinking out of rhythm, focussing on the two of them where they stand. )
No more.
( Breathed out, and he finally listens to Lan Zhan's request, the one made by the use of Wei Wuxian's name: go.
He steps back even as the creature before them appears to melt into eyes and darkness, the water and steam and everything falling and roiling as a cauldron bubbles over fire becoming thick and hazy and acrid, seeking to invade nostrils, lungs. He shoves backward, as much to find Lan Zhan and to flee out into the area behind them as it is to puzzle over what's been said.
No more.
Can't see the children.
Oh, but he does not think this monastery was ever polite. He can't say so once they're free, coughing and eyes weeping, but the difference in air quality is stunningly immediate, for all that the air outside of the creature's residence is still musty with the dust of a mountain's age. )
He wishes himself the better man, a hero. The one who might have considered this a priority, sooner than a distant goal, work unachievable. Instead, he is the fool and coward, who stumbles back, accepting Wei Ying as if a catapulted weight in his arms, dragging and binding him.
Bichen spills silver frost at his feet, and they are for air again, for blitzing, storming surrender and an immediate evacuation that barely permits glimpses of the beds of flesh and savages who sleep still in the mines. Scant still in number, he notices this much, and scuttling: whatever the rotting, dark, effusive miasma that spreads now to flood the quarters, it does not carry out its first incursion. These men know where to retreat, and it strikes him now that the numerous nooks and holes in dead, fattened, groaning walls must house them during similar tides.
It will break, he thinks, and cannot say whether he speaks of the wave of magic and misfortune that gives them chase, or the mine's battered bones. It will break, but we need not bear witness.
White light slants blinding through needlepoints of entry, then Bichen sunders a curtain of fresh thicket to deliver them back up on the hill's flattened side, fair distance from the river's susurrations. Out, where air punches their lungs with every exhalation and midday has yet to wholly expiate the chills of dawns.
This mountain smells of damp and incense, of perpetual animal warmth. They land, half-thrown onto grass, and Lan Wangji breathes in its unclean ferocity, dirt and gravel stranded in the hook of his hands. On them, on his knees also. He waits, then turns to face Wei Ying, rolling over to cover him and calling Bichen within grasp just in case pursuers follow. None, but he watches the entrance point, hawkishly, indifferent to the tremulations of weeds or Wei Ying or the cutting voice of a nun, behind them: )
If the honoured guests can bear to disentangle from the meadows, the midday meal will be served shortly.
( The abbess, it appears, would be grateful to host them.
Lan Wangji still has enough dregs of his dignity to flush. )
( Fire burns out behind them as Lan Zhan rides the airs through to the cave's entrance; Wei Wuxian breathes shallow against the taste of copper in his mouth, the heaviness in his lungs, watching behind and below them. The skittering of nothing, before they emerge into the cavern where the men dwell, and they too have skittered, tucked into cracks and nooks and crannies barely big enough to hold them.
This is not new to them.
He drags his eyes forward, to the blinding light before they too fly out and meet the ground with the reverence it demands, and their bodies caving before it. Caught, held, and thrown all in part, he rises with his hands dusting off his robes and smiles guilelessly at the nun courting them on demand of the abbess, dark eyes swallowing light even as they give the illusion of sparkling. )
The meadows are so lovely! The whole mountain, really, miss, it settles a longing in my soul.
( Her eyes, squinting and discerning, likewise glint as she turns away, hands folded to her middle, precise and proper. Not one of the felinoid sisters. Yet.
She's sure, and she says as much, if only they'd follow. Contemplation crossing her features before she schools them back to studied neutrality, not exactly calm.
He considers, too, smile easy, gaze dense. When he tugs on Lan Zhan's sleeves, two fingers catching at the fabric, he makes as if to pout at his husband, murmuring words: )
I love you. Those who lead here aren't innocent.
( A smile, again, as the nun glances back at them, and he leans in, beseeching: )
Will you feed me at the midday meal?
( He's been carried out already today, and it doesn't harm him to create the sort of daft and self-involved mask which allows people to believe, between the two of them, Lan Zhan the superior in sensibility. A lack of obvious affectation does wonders for perceptions, just as an overabundance can do the same.
The trails they follow back start off fresh, then rejoin with the one they walked the evening before. Only one feather, lingering on pine needles, pinned through the centre.
Activity levels have gone towards stillness in the monastery as they return, but not eerily so - distant the sounds of shuffling and clacking and the scent of cooking food gives indication to the current preoccupations. Only one hint suggests otherwise: two of the enrobed women without visible faces, near leaping out of the way when they walk down a narrower alley. The nun leading them stills, momentarily hesitating, before she continues on, towards the large hall with the rising rooftop. Not the main area for worship, but a side chamber, connected directly to the kitchens.
Inside, the scents of soup: vegetables, too, baked or thrown into a pan with or without butter. Platters being brought out by younger nuns, likely still appreticing to their holy craft, and simple fair, but plentiful, and hot, and..
... unseasoned but for the soup, which is the telltale red of some interfering tomato or chili.
They're lead to one long bench, closer to where the abbess already sits waiting. She eyes them both, unsmiling, but says nothing while the food is laid out, and then the rest of the nuns take their places, including the final stragglers from the kitchens themselves. )
— fissures his mouth, reaping a brief smile of burning incandescence. He catches himself on the cusp of foolishness: Wei Ying only invokes his pleasantries to shield subterfuge. Still, rising to his feet, one hand drifting to assist his woefully fragile husband after, he cannot sabotage the trickle of amusement that settles his mouth taut.
Then, they are herded, back into the mouth of a regimented hell for a different enterrement. At least they are welcomed by clutter, a tinny relish and bursts of movement, an institution alive. Here and there, young nuns walk at brisk pace, sparing them wandering glances and hushed conversation. Farther on, veteran nuns yet observe their vows of silence, heads bowed and long veils drawn over their faces.
He thinks to ask their guide, Why do they pray so strictly?
They have lost loved ones, he hears, and dedicate each day to honourable grief that might elicit pity from the skies and mercy upon those already gone.
They are herded into fresh hall quarters, where tables spread in tight configurations to house far more nuns than Lan Wangji had assumed the monastery sheltered, all sharing their midday meal. At least, to thank the Heavens, the meal looks safe but for the punitive copper of a soup Lan Wangji wisely defers to Wei Ying, sat primly beside him. And will Lan Wangji feed his husband?
...certainly, thick, blunt-carved wooden spoon lifted tenderly to transport a sturdy mouthful of the fragrant soup, its spices already sufficient that their very smells rouse the start of wet in Wangji's eyes. He blinks once, again. Then, as he leans in to deliver Wei Ying's meal, murmured: )
More than half of these women mourn. ( If they go by their veils, only primly shed and folded at their side to avoid contamination during the meal — or elegantly pinned up against a nun's ear, to reveal only her mouth. And another matter even Lan Wangji can surmise, in his otherwise studied ignorance: ) All have beauty.
( Wei Wuxian opens his mouth, uncaring, his cleaned hands reaching out to cradle his husband's face, swiping at the not-tears building at their corners. There's no playacting in this, not for either of them: surely he'd be fussy if everything were millet or the like, but while such is present here, it's not the sum total of what they're eating.
Besides, sweetened by the burn of spice, he swallows, and licks his lips. A reminder to himself: they need tending, as the traces of heat on them state calmly and without confusion. )
Were all blessed in marriage? With that beauty? Some of us are more than others, in the turnings of any world.
( Pad of his thumb tracing the arc of Lan Zhan's cheek, before he lets them fall away, to settle in Lan Zhan's lap, leaning towards him for ease of unconventional feeding far, far away from the sickbed, only place he'd previously allow. It's... strangely nice.
Very strangely nice, in the way of a wanted touch at the small of his back, in the care behind a loved one brushing hair back off his face, freeing his eyes to greater clarity.
The bell at his waist rolls as he shifts closer, the clang a gentle ting that cuts underneath the quiet prayers and mastication of a meal well met. The abbess aborts a startled look, eyes narrowing after, glaring around, but the lack of repetition settles her poorly into an accounting of her own meal.
He considers that, too, mouth opening as prompted, chewing as needed, swallowing because spitting out food that does not, as of this point, technically taste...
...
...
...
He sighs. )
Lan Zhan. I think you'll need to tie me down for the hour after sunset.
( Because one can taste nothing through the heat, and reds mask reds, and he has an inkling about what they were served the night before, and a certain disinclination to dance according to the whims of the manipulators here. )
( He offers back between unsuccessful attempts to arm another spoonful with enough red swill to plunge the monastery's reserves of cinnabar or hemorrhage a dozen fowl. There is a stench to the meal entirely too acrimonious, at once chalky and moulding and lacking in the stereotypical, gut-binding acidity that so often condemns spiced dishes.
Beside him, a nun gasps, shrill. Another farther down begs her leave and waves two distant sisters to fly the room in a cloud of resurrected veils and silence. Far more flush feverishly and their gazes seem suddenly, inexplicably affixed onto their soup.
It strikes Lan Wangji, thunder in wake of lightning, what he has said. He blinks down, first at the spoon in his hand and its rancid poison. Blinks again, at the waiting bowl-sized cesspool of much the same. Blinks with finality at Wei Ying, custodian of his never-ending affections and now, decisively, the last dregs of Lan Wangji's dignity.
And he politely whispers: ) I was a man of honour once.
( Before the Yiling Patriarch successfully punctured his poise and eradicated Hanguang-Jun's hopes of a future aligned with perfect purity and the sect's precepts. He does not accuse Wei Ying for his part in this.
...it is, all things considered, implicit. )
Hereby, shall cut you off from the cock. ( The feathery root of all evil, abolished in a sentence that, shockingly, seems to not cleanse his reputation across the table. )
( He smiles, brief and sharp, amused because of the wording and Lan Zhan's statement about honour as if this world and their own wasn't prone towards making mockery of the concept. He knows bone deep his husband is the kind of honourable that cannot turn away from itself, but can stand eventually before the torrents of expectations around.
He, however, knows that honour is disposable when it isn't something felt in the heart, guiding a soul. Breathed and understood for the ups and downs the world demands, and the cost of compromise, in which directions.
Wei Wuxian slides closer, then into his husband's lap, half closing his eyes as he sighs. Long. And. Slow. )
Will that really satisfy?
( He doesn't know that the living chicken will matter, cock or hen, but the magics at use are simply carried as easily by their bloods and last night's magics as any other way. Easiest still to make it part of what stew spiced so hot; the nuns flutter and fluster, but the abbess is unmoved by now, even as Wei Wuxian curls into Lan Zhan fully. He plays with the hairs at the back of Lan Zhan's neck, leaving Lan Zhan's arms as unimpeded as he can. )
Whatever happens, it strengthens at night. But if they think I'm incapacitated already, we might learn more of why this came to be, and how they woke up the mountain.
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no subject
( He could, of course, listen to what Lan Zhan asks: or he could, as he intends, hear what Lan Zhan means, and in the course of understanding, allow what he can. Relief. Here there is lingering darkness, crude and cruel underpinnings, a rot to be cleansed bot by themselves so much as the collective around them.
It isn't their masculinity, their scent, their virility that offends or concerns, truly. There's no trust even were they female, waltzing in smelling of spring rains and peonies, in his estimate. What gnaws and yearns here is endemic, is isolated and concentrated, and anything other is not meant to be taken to heart unless fully, wholly consumed.
So he pouts. Gives Lan Zhan the big eyes, out-thrust lower lip, the expression that has nothing of serious displeasure in it, knowing full well this isn't meant for those kinds of moments. Levity, yes. A breath in the cleaned air before they tumble back into the cloying, clotting wound that is the monastery and its missing persons. )
You wouldn't!
( Absolutely, positively, he knows Lan Zhan will. )
no subject
Wei Ying. ( And he speaks it in the fatherly way of a man overcome studiously, explicitly and at thorough length by all the petty inconveniences of the world, many ancestral and some freshly devised to torture him.
He is all discipline, a vision of peace and summoned patience. Until, calmly, like a great and basking jellyfish for the grace of his spreading silks — he comes closer to the river's shore. Chin jutting, water crystalizing in cutting droplets that weigh down his lashes, cascade across his cheek.
At first, only silence, mesmerized. He is a beautiful thing, his husband at dawns, made sweet by his theatre. Lively, strong. Desirable.
And, in the fit of that appreciation, Lan Wangji snags his fingertips on the nearest crags, to drag wet red on his sleeve's spread in familiar characters that burst out a — binding talisman, serpentine and plunging to attach itself to Wei Ying's wrist, sparing Lan Wangji the need to exit the waters.
His right eyebrow perks up, first incredulous, then daring. )
When I do it, all your silks will soak cold. ( Better to surrender and remove them now, but for the one required for bathing. ) Count of ten.
no subject
( He is, faultlessly, mesmerised. He knows and has always known that Lan Zhan is an objectively, and subjectively, beautiful man. Handsome, delightful, delicious, whatever words one wanted to use, paired with significant ones such as collected (hah), elegant, reserved. Aloof, perhaps, to anything which he doesn't believe concerns him. There used to be more such things in the worlds. These days, in Wei Wuxian's estimate, there are less.
Water traces features he's come to know by eyes and hands and mouth and tongue and slide of skin against skin as much as the nestling, lazy contentment of an evening passed too hot against a body as prone to producing excess heat as his own.
Perhaps that's part of the distracting contrast, seeing Lan Zhan damp, seeing the cold waters consume the warmth of a man whose heart beats larger than many in their particular, peculiar, and cruel sort of righteous world. Or perhaps it's any memory, of words spoken, or silences applied as balms, which leads him into that moment of hazy bewitchment, the urge to tease a quiet voice in the back of his skull.
Until the binding, bonding qi at his wrist, and he smiles then, tugging back on it to see Lan Zhan's arm move a touch. )
Then you'll have to warm me, won't that be a waste of time?
( Yet he's not protesting the impending plunge, or the countdown that proceeds unimpeded: he speaks throughout, his fingers fast, his hands practiced, and unlike the modesty of his husband he does not leave his innermost robe on, the darkest blues and whites sloughed off in haphazard piles under the threatened time-limit.
There's nothing impressive with his standing there nude before the man he's married repeatedly, even unaware of said man's intent. Hard to be anything but reactionary to physical reality with no barrier to the chill air, the spray of colder waters. Gooseflesh ripples down his arms, fine hairs across his body standing on end, nipples contracting like breathing lungs, along with less lauded parts, and he knows it's all preparatory for what happens the moment his husband makes good on his promise.
Hence he's smiling, brows quirked, when Lan Zhan reaches the end of his count.
Because he definitely plans on tackling him after. This day, he suspects, is going to be a long one. They may as well have this moment to themselves, without restriction. )
no subject
( He is beautifully pristine, this wayward husband, skin lessened of its scarring in a second life that abided the Patriarch scarred only by his misfortunes. Pretty, were the needle-eye's width of his waist more girlish, the soft roundness of his gaze doe-eyed. Handsome does not yet suit, bones unrefined by age that never lived them. He exists somewhere on the liminal cusp between tender juvenile youth and maturity, a constant reminder that Lan Wangji's interest was snagged by a boy raised to a man only by duty. )
Three... two... ( A heartbeat, echoing and dark. ) One.
( Grit of his teeth clumsy and tight, as if he suffers with Wei Ying's suffering — but he tugs all the same, qi sweetening his strength to drag his husband in just as the river's waves swell, low-humming, and crash and burn to crisps with cold and smears of spume that give Wei Ying's welcome.
He does not hesitate: covers ground, wades in waters, traverses to accept Wei Ying in both arms, to silently bring up cupped streams and descend them on the brittle, narrow bridge of his lover's shoulders, the crown of his head. In between, a minor indulgence: to unfold the span of his headband and bind it, half to his own wrist, half to Wei Ying's and have them impossibly, familiarly wedded, as every river demands of them. )
Good morning.
( Then calmly, saccharine and honest and true, and his sword arm never wavering —
He sets both hands on Wei Ying's shoulders and dunks him down to submerge him in the river's depths. If it were an abyssal cliff, you would have long ago fallen. Ah, but they are not so bittersweet yet, so intimate with their tragedies. )
no subject
( The bracing rush of air and water that leads to his yelping, more in the suddenness of the temperature shock than anything remotely like pain, marks his entrance into the waters. Lan Zhan is there, hands warm and cold and water pouring over his shoulders, then clasped, then down, and he catches scant breath before he's under the surface of the stream, the river, whatever body of water moves past, carrying intent and history and self away in unequal measure.
Down, beneath the water, he slides his legs between Lan Zhan's, all but sitting on the smooth-rocked bottom, digging in his heels and hooking his hands behind wet-robed knees. Pulling. Strong, qi-fed, and aware he's inviting the fall into kneeling...
... over himself, even as his head breaks the surface of the water and he laughs, black hair plastered over his face, rendering him incapable of clearly seeing anything, even if there were legions beyond the whites and pale pinks of his husband's robes.
Birds resume chattering in trees, insects buzzing, though they still avoid the expanse over and around the flowing water: something in their play, raucous yet sincere. Further easing of the pressing burden of the mountain and its denizens settles into something closer to peace while two grown men all but attempt to drown each other in their morning ablutions.
In the distance, a hawk cries. Soars around, then aims away, shadow dancing across them both as they find cold skins and warm hearts in the shallow depths of the spring-fed river. )
Peace, peace!
( Wei Wuxian says eventually, laughing, flapping and clinging to Lan Zhan in turns. )
Peace, Lan Zhan!
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. )
no subject
( Violence, he thinks, done to his heart in the wake of a cold embrace and lips against his, air and water and qi and everything else that flows between them, impeded and otherwise. To flush and chill at the same time is an interesting, albeit not unexpected experience. Were Lan Zhan not unknotting his headband from Wei Wuxian's arm, moving already towards whatever sent the sparrows fluttering in a burst of activity then called him to the same. Would have preferred to find how much heat between them it takes to counteract the cold of the mountain spring, the river, the water, the edification of a moment's pleasure in a lifetime of precious seconds spent as one wished, no simply as one was expected.
Instead he hefts himself upward, slipping on rocks before he catches himself, sloshing through water to the shoreline and his tumbled robes, drier for the moments before his hands catch up his innermost. He's racing already after his husband, barefoot and dripping, yet dripping less than the beautiful expanse of Lan Zhan's legs, chest, thighs, back — on what merit was Wei Wuxian meant to concentrate, with his husband dressed only in wet robes of white ahead of him?
The merit of further dressing, perhaps, but he's past now, light and quick on his feet, breathing in, listening, catching himself on a tree trunk with a hand settling on a branch: there. Dark for the dwelling of shadows, a behemoth of form lurching forward, snuffling.
At first he wonders if it isn't some massive boar. The hunching, the snuffling, the sounds and weight of it seems like it might, but as the morning's light catches the creature in spears that cut between tree limbs to touch the forest floor, such notions are banished.
He's never seen a large cat move like this, but he finds that belief also mistaken: what he first thought was fur turns out to be a pelt, worn by an individual crawling along without using their knees. Hence the back arched too high, the weight to every movement. A dirty face, bedraggled hair, hands and feet with nails grown long and then ragged from use and breakage, the person, who he suspects might be male, continues to slink along. Snuffling.
Pausing, as they catch a scent, slowly craning their head towards a nearby bush. Then with sudden, incredible speed, the hunched crawler pushes forward and away, crashing through the bush with a strangled sort of howling yowl.
Wei Wuxian looks to Lan Zhan, a frown pressing his lips into a thin line. Here they witness a hunt, while witnessing also a human's debasement into something other than themselves. Not that humanity fails to sink low on its own initiative. This simply seems... excessive.
He nods towards where the figure disappeared, to the sounds of shivering flora, heavy hands as paws on the forest floor. )
Did they come from the caves?
no subject
Modesty. ( He hisses it out, but Wei Ying is blitzing across the forest glade in brazen, thorough nudity, sparing no care for Lan Wangji's petulant griefs or the colour of his concern. Thorns, needles, rocks and prickling branches. There is a wealth of torturous possibilities lining the woodland floors, prone to teething on Wei Ying's fresh-skinned soles, the choked width of his ankles. Not to speak of his bird bones.
No time to waste, not with the monastery's world in decadent fragility. Lan Wangji only hesitates to collect the bundle of their combined silks, like brittle, shed snake skins — and calls Bichen from where she sleeps, flying to hand. Then, the hard run, quickening hunger in him, the yearning to hunt.
They arrive, Lan Wangji less delicate in his descent, the excess of his speed carrying a weight of momentum, on a crown of branches. Huddle, and witness... true debasement, a man deprived of wit and the will to raise himself from the primitive state in which curse and misfortune have arrived him. Defiled, dirtied, starved. And possessing, somehow, of enough qi or derived magic to have called a ward of semen and spittle and urine on the ground, netting birds that cannot lift themselves further. Disgusting, if efficient.
Their... intruder kills his prey with a stick, little sharpened, or crushes their throats with his hands, and binds them with hemp rope to slink back in the depth. He is fast, at least, with his work. Timid, almost, if not terrorised: as if fearing he will be caught, scolded and banished, but not injured. He scuttles away.
And Lan Wangji, faced with his own bare barbarian, politely extends the mountain of their layers, unfolded on his arms, for Wei Ying to have his pick, once they drop down. Only then: )
Assuredly. ( Then, measured, attempting and perhaps failing not to seem every piece of him a privileged gentleman assessing the less fortunate as if he were an animal: ) Unless... he is lesser in the ranks, turned to domesticity. If they are all — ( And there must be more. ) — in such state, they are as if... cattle. Kept.
( For... nightly congress? Strange, if not the first distortion he has witnessed of men to passion. Why should women be any better? ) We must take fire within.
no subject
( One layer is modest enough! Thin, yes, not terribly protective, yes, as the welts visible on his lower legs indicate, but he's at least not fully bared. More or less. Perched in a tree makes that a matter of discussion even if he were in all layers. He does not, generally, wear pants.
A situation his husband has been woefully slow to find advantage in, if he were asked, but he isn't, and so he's accepting handed robes and shrugging into them. It's not gracious, the way he moves, but it is clever, gaining no vestiges of tree himself in the process, what with it's proximity, well within arm's reach. )
Assuming there are ranks. It's as possible the whole monastery always used some form of body-linked magic, such as what that was, and it'd explain something about the readings in chicken entrails.
( Intimate, basic, and mixing of similar compliments to what this cursed man used just now. )
True fire, or illuminating fire alone?
( Waistband coming last, he finally has himself in rights enough to go trekking into unpleasantly musky caves. He pauses, listening to the wind, the river, the resuscitation of the natural world around them, but for a persisting blank spot where the body-magics had been cast. When he leaps down, it's with a feline grace and qinggong to keep his landing lighter than feathers brushed against a lover's bared skin.
Damp hair gathered back over his shoulder and pulled carelessly off his face, he looks to Lan Zhan, gesturing ahead, then moving, stalking through shadows with greater finesse than that which had come snuffling out of them. )
He lacked permission to hunt. Whose?
( Barefoot still, refusing his boots for the moment for the lack of socks that can stay dry, he simply walks. Robes catching with his movements, stuck to skin then free again; hair a heavy drape, but less so than if they'd tended to it fully and properly. He is young in that moment, the daring fool who threw himself with abandon into the waters of Gusu and came out, smiling, fish in hands.
Shadows cross his face, and he is again his age, thinner and yet not so thinned, marked by tiredness and yet still vivacious, vividly alive. Appealing, attractive, engrossing, and why are his eyes so inexorably drawn to his husband? Likewise wet, likewise cavorting around with the evidence of their interrupted brief exchange? )
no subject
( This matter burdens him with consideration, mouth first slack then tersely pursed, before pronouncement, haphazard: )
True fire. ( Warmth, a secondary weapon, often overlooked. Shadow recedes before light, but heat cauterizes, gifting ablution. They cannot neglect their cautions, and the talismans of Wei Ying's design are remarkably adept at preserving qi: minimal consumption for boisterous flame.
He concedes Wei Ying's fleeting penchant for juvenile play, sequestering his husband's boots in one hand, twinned together with their upper bindings. A moment, coming down after, to attend to his own person, wrapping six further silken layers across his body with gritting teeth that gratefully mark the arrival of fresh comfort when he places a warming talisman beneath his collar. Another, held slack-wristed toward Wei Ying —
Only to find his husband enraptured, always on the cusp between graceful and gaunt, between elegant and ethereal. Alert, in ways nearly feline. Truly, the grounds have been marked with folly. )
The monastery secludes them. ( A filthy secret, sheltered away from the day's light. He nods once towards the cave. ) Break fire.
( An unkindness, perhaps, to call on the one with scanter qi resources to spare to produce their talismans, but Wei Ying is the better hand of it, and Lan Wangji has long tired of paying obeisance to his vulnerability when the man himself begrudges it. Let him wear himself down, let him begrudge Lan Wangji's supply.
Steps closer, the mouth of the cave is diminutive, cramped. Barely held together by wishes and stones and a frailty of infrastructural wood, pillars crumbling. The mines must have been ancient when Wei Ying and Lan Wangji were mere dreams in their grandfather's resting hours. Now, they scream their years. Worse still, to enter, they must bow their heads, walking bent, if not crawl — surrendering the natural advantage of having all limbs at the ready. He hesitates: )
We risk ambush. Proceed through here, or infiltrate through the monastery? ( There must be a hole there, surely. ) The cat-women must have their corridor.
no subject
( There's a lazy assuredness to how he moves forward, the talisman between his fingers, the branch he has surreptitiously procured in their drift through the forest, cast down from its lofty perch in one of the old, tall trees lingering the mountainside over. A torch of a kind, without embers, burning slow for the delays written in, flickering as any true fire does.
Wood already likes to burn. Slowly, the branch sparks, then simmers. Light throws short in the brilliance of the sunlit shadows, but the cavern ahead looms voracious, little visible even to their enhanced eyes within the shadow-thick interior. )
Up. See there?
( A turn of his wrist and his fingers flick towards the thin lip of a ledge, high up to the side. A perch barely visible without squinting, a different degree of dense darkness to those surrounding shadows, swallowing light that dared touch.
He doesn't wait after the indication, gathering qi in the simple, efficient ways of a man long used to pulling the most from the least. His balances, and he likes to believe them more fruitful these days than when he first awoke with his core transferred, are keen. Sharp as his bladework with Suibian had once been.
Two steps, leaping up the side of the entrance, and he finds the ledge: moves in far enough as he lands and sinks into a light crouch, heat and light of the torch gentle above and before him. Beneath is darkness, as expected, and musk that rises, among other scents he can name and thus feels no inclination to. None of them yet are out of place. Only the something metallic without being blood does.
He waits for his husband's attendance, presuming on Lan Zhan's arrival much as he presumes on stars to brighten in the night skies the further into the mountains they rise. )
Feathers. Bones. Small ones. There's a trail down there, leading to the right. If their noses are at all strong, do we want to anticipate confusing them?
( There are means for being quiet they can do, already do, but there are others to mark the scents of healthy cultivators, of perfumes and incense preferred and used. Less concerning with their present state of affairs, but wet bodies carry scent better than dry, and neither of them are yet parched as the deserts they've recently traversed. )
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( Either way, they must enter as rats do: on their knees or with the stench. If their noses are at all strong, they will catch whiff of wet and spumes and weeds, of mould and the tragedy of crisp, teeth-gritting freshness that accompanies the cold. Worse still, they will smell of nothing, but moving, incite the passions of prey-driven animals.
They will be hunted, he supposes, instincts glass-sharp and flaring, for all they think of themselves as warriors and the fiercer men. No matter. Ferocity is a matter of despair, sooner than technique. They must merely wish victory dearer than their opponents do.
He nods, tranquil, although he offers no strategy, no word of encouragement. Only walks like winter wind, casting a breath of white behind him, silks dangling as he bows his back or makes himself small or twists or turns or perverts his flesh away from its natural geometries — to make advance. Slow progress, after, his every step measured, and the flame lighting his path from behind, until he finds the choked corridor finally erupts in a broader gateway that feeds into...
Stairs crudely constructed against a decrepit wall and a large, cavernous pit below. In it, at a far distance, dozens of men of strength, youth and marrying age have curled around each other, borrowing the heat of each other's limbs to grapple with the cold as they persist, largely clothed. In the middle of the circle, a crude net of captured sparrows, and shimmering blood and the bones of feasts old. On their arms and legs, dirt, crusted blood, the fur of likely downed animals, semen. He suspects, if they were to catch the smell, chicken entrails.
They sleep, he notices, flinching through the dim, crepuscular light. No — they doze. And to Wei Ying, murmured behind himself, at ease and safeguarded by the many floors of distance that divide them from the crowd: )
I believe we have the evening's grooms.
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( A part of his heart breaks at the sight, the sound, the smells. These are not well people. These are not people kept in a healthy state even for the animals their tendencies seem so similar to, and this, he thinks, is the "cure." Abandoning them to live in a way unfit for any reality, but trying regardless to live in any way they can.
Palpable as well, an oppressive air, a force of presence behind it that hovers over all the men arrayed below, features distorted by ears and tails and fur that may be the clotted coverings of their bodies, or may be sprouted from their skin true. He narrows his eyes, lifting his gaze to the dark ceilings, letting his senses extend further. Concentrated purpose, not so much dark as feral, uncaring, wild, thrums along with the deeper thumping of the mountain. Of... ah. The mining. The tunnels here might not be directly linked, not in a way to move between, but the sounds of it, the cranking rumbles of rock and ore brought out, the striking of metal against stone.
His fingers curl towards his palms, nails biting into skin. Blood, he knows, has sway here, and not just from the bodies of the men or birds or other paltry hunted creatures below. More than what runs in his veins, or his husband's, or every human shaped being on this mountain.
The talisman he coaxes free is simple, old: following the source of a negative qi. He holds it up, for him and Lan Zhan to see in their flickering light. )
I have a feeling they were closer to the source, but that the infection's spreading. Feeling up for this hunt?
( Turning his head, serious and sincere. There's mishaps enough that can happen under the weight of this much mountain, and he won't make that call for the both of them. Not right now, and hopefully not in the future. )
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( Wei Ying's hunger apparent, predictable, blatant. They must seek out the root of a sickness that appears to have eroded swathes of good, strong, standing men — reducing them to... animals. Base renditions and emulations of a human skin.
Wei Ying wants them to go, illicit hunger glistening in his gaze. He shutters his eyes, lets the wave of fermented, stoking stench wash over him. Bites down his tongue. Then, murmuring, he starts to draw their protection talismans. )
We will require defense.
( And it cannot be guaranteed. The risk to their persons is inevitable and terminal. He acknowledges it so, pragmatically, unflinchingly, already simulating the bravado required to slink further, taking their lead. Whatever the illusions of control Wei Ying crafts around himself — this will remain. He must go first. Must expose himself foremost.
Firm ground beneath his feet, despite the makeshift, crafted nature of the stairwell. He feels secure, hovering over the beds of bodies dishevelled and drowning in their debasement — as if a master overseeing a herd of fresh horses, crop at the ready.
He calls Bichen before he knows his own mind, her silver cutting in a hard, dashing line. She slips brazenly by his knees, and he mounts one foot, before simply waving Wei Ying forward. )
Swifter to cross the halls without exposure. ( But they would require a perfect silence that Wei Ying's developed hesitations towards sword flight might not guarantee. They can walk the grounds deeper into the mines, if Wei Ying is unwilling — but this way is their natural, unquestionable advantage. )
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( What Lan Zhan says is true enough, and his desire to take front understood. Wei Wuxian lacks the youthful arrogance of one who has yet to fail so unutterably he cannot breathe: he's surfaced from depths of knowing that knowledge cannot save you, at all times.
Preparation is never fully complete.
So he steps upon his husband's sword, letting his talisman fly, holding fire out to their sides: a close bound star above the heads of the restless sleepers.
Trust and faith and awareness of self all help him balance expectations as they fly, his gaze locked over Lan Zhan's shoulder, his hand now freed off talisman burden circled around familiar waist.
Ahead the slip of paper twists and curls on unseen eddies of energy, dark and devouring. Across the cavern it flies, turning sharp into a shadowed alcove from which another narrow tunnel extends, falling to narrower ends. Flight remains necessary and expedient for the moment, stalactites bumps that start to reach from above, stalagmites glimmering with beautiful death in reflected firelight below.
In time they reach a ledge, beyond which they cannot fly: the talisman shivers before it departs into the interior, swallowed by the miasma within.
Sounds have grown louder and then distant in their pursuit. Here, it thrums like a massive beast's hibernating heart. Stepping from Bichen, he pauses to breathe in: dry rot, greed, and anger.
Longing, too. His fire burns quietly, mellowed, but he allows still his husband the due of first stepping entrance.
Into a cavern of unknowable depth and height, thin, cracked lines of sunlight far above, light swallowed long before it reached them. Here, instead, decays many, many things: hides stretched over bones, dangling from whichever ledge they landed on, the whole suffused with suffering more animal than human, old death stagnant in the air.
And the sound, unmistakable between the slow, thudding heartbeats of the mountains awareness, of water flowing. )
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( Trickling flight, steadied. Between the dangers of exposure to the resting men — and he will not deny them their names, for all they deny themselves their nature — and Wei Ying's learned inhibition towards sword flight, best to keep their progress stifled, pace measured. He guides Bichen as far into the subterranean maws as she'll weather, before they descend in timid plunges to study the mouth that opens to reveal a lichen-poxed, stone-jutting jugular.
The stench is foul, old rot, desiccated and slow, and the quieted pulse of waiting water. He thinks, where there is a source, there will be creatures to drink of it — and where, carcass crushed beneath his step, there are bones, animals feed. He sees on walls the narrow depths of claw marks, irascible and inevitable, and somehow, in their crass brutality, benevolent. He recalls, with silent shudder, the stripping of flesh and the yielding to scar of many of the men who sleep.
Magic crackles in their surroundings, whispers old, ancestral, waiting. He turns to pass his hand over the walls and take inventory of their surroundings, to sense and immerse himself within, and soon enough, he returns to Wei Ying with his discoveries: a stretch of linens, straddling the ground, tattered and thinned — most likely, he presumes, given the red that lines its edges, once worn by one of the men. Silver bells on string, some bereft of clappers. The dregs of incense sticks, root still carrying the scent of raw musk. And a scratch-marred doll of wood and twine, depicting a wild feline.
He offers one and each in unwavering hands, as if a student presenting his findings to a critical professor. Then: )
Whatever this creature, it was summoned, sooner than found.
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( It's the doll which gives him most pause. The scratches are undeniable. The twine harkens to its origins, organic and recent for the way it doesn't rot away under their touch. The wood? )
This is wood turned stone.
( Stone can be shaped, yes, but this looks carved, not hewn and polished. He offers it back to Lan Zhan, even as the weight of the darkness grows, as dozens of nictating eyes open and blink in a disturbing lack of coordination, dripping down from further inside. Claws unseen click and drag and tap, and he looks up, unblinking in turn.
Summoned, yes. Yet found, also. )
What are you?
( He murmurs, and the low growl that reverberates to the clanging bangs of mining happening nearby, muffled by separating stone, rolls over them both.
Perhaps surprising, yet feeling inevitable, the darkness responds: )
Greed. Lust. Perverted natures. Hunger. Sorrow. The flooding rivers. All of these, none of these. What are you?
( Down closer and closer it tumbles, spilling past ledges, viscous and slow. Bones disturb in it's passage. Death and musk and crisp scented spring water gust down with each flowing movement, until it ceases, both perched and held, before the weaving form of the energy seeking talisman. Darkness coalesces into a paw with digits too long and almost finger-like, reaching out to scrape one claw across the paper, missing by less than a hairs width. )
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( Wood turned stone. A man-made carving, the human intervention. He accepts the token again, and the crackling pulse of energy awakened greets him. Whatever lingers here answered Wei Ying, activated by a necromancer's presence. As everything else in this great, horrible abode.
Then, even he senses the cloud-agglomeration of thousand-blinking eyes, the same one-that-is-hundred creature watching. He stirs, hand on Bichen, and lets Wei Ying carry the thread of their conversation to start, until — they must give answer. And he knows this: he to engage a demon is beholden to it. He speaks before his husband must: )
The quieting.
( Death, exorcism, silence. They are end to that which this place names birthing cradle. At once inimical and inevitable, that which all that lives is resigned and all that is dead embraces.
And he asks: ) Were you found here?
( The miners, he remembers. A house of stone, built to uncover the core and depths of the world. Something emerged from these grounds. By his feet, roiling but never touching, rot rallies and surges in caked and matte layers, a clawed hand tickling stone to touch paper.
He kicks the parchment handily away, but does not scold the creature. As long as they do not acknowledge its incursions, they may pretend diplomacy and communal understanding. It cackles, sharp and tinny, bright-blinding: )
Born... of a... womb. ( Fertility, he remembers. There is a root to this cause, amorous. Asking: )
Whom do you answer? ( And the laughter is trickling, then tenebrous, then like water bursting through a dam, nearly rattling the cave or waking those who sleep. Lan Wangji's breath catches — and he turns to capture the parchment in hand, strategically removing it from any wandering claws. )
Do you know, gentleman... there were so many children on these... grounds... before. So many... children...
( ...gone. In a monastery that —
The cave, once more, shakes and erupts in quakes, floors pulverized crumble. He steps away to avoid the spiderwebbing ripple of a fresh fissure — and the parchment is snatched of his hand. )
Wei Ying. ( They should, perhaps, leave. )
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( It cradles the parchment close, as one might a doll, held between those elongated toes which cannot decide if they're handlike or pawlike, the claws at their tips unconcerned with the disquieting uncertainty. Fascinated as the ground cracks further, as heat and steam rise in unequal proportions. )
They all... fell... down... down, down, down...
( Those eyes in their multitude stay focused on the talisman, even as bones bounce and rattle and fall, brittle and cracking before they disappear into the yawning maw so close to his and Lan Zhan's feet. )
They can't see the children... can't see... more children...
( Its shaggy shadow mass lifts, a number of those eyes blinking out of rhythm, focussing on the two of them where they stand. )
No more.
( Breathed out, and he finally listens to Lan Zhan's request, the one made by the use of Wei Wuxian's name: go.
He steps back even as the creature before them appears to melt into eyes and darkness, the water and steam and everything falling and roiling as a cauldron bubbles over fire becoming thick and hazy and acrid, seeking to invade nostrils, lungs. He shoves backward, as much to find Lan Zhan and to flee out into the area behind them as it is to puzzle over what's been said.
No more.
Can't see the children.
Oh, but he does not think this monastery was ever polite. He can't say so once they're free, coughing and eyes weeping, but the difference in air quality is stunningly immediate, for all that the air outside of the creature's residence is still musty with the dust of a mountain's age. )
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( How will they save the men —
He wishes himself the better man, a hero. The one who might have considered this a priority, sooner than a distant goal, work unachievable. Instead, he is the fool and coward, who stumbles back, accepting Wei Ying as if a catapulted weight in his arms, dragging and binding him.
Bichen spills silver frost at his feet, and they are for air again, for blitzing, storming surrender and an immediate evacuation that barely permits glimpses of the beds of flesh and savages who sleep still in the mines. Scant still in number, he notices this much, and scuttling: whatever the rotting, dark, effusive miasma that spreads now to flood the quarters, it does not carry out its first incursion. These men know where to retreat, and it strikes him now that the numerous nooks and holes in dead, fattened, groaning walls must house them during similar tides.
It will break, he thinks, and cannot say whether he speaks of the wave of magic and misfortune that gives them chase, or the mine's battered bones. It will break, but we need not bear witness.
White light slants blinding through needlepoints of entry, then Bichen sunders a curtain of fresh thicket to deliver them back up on the hill's flattened side, fair distance from the river's susurrations. Out, where air punches their lungs with every exhalation and midday has yet to wholly expiate the chills of dawns.
This mountain smells of damp and incense, of perpetual animal warmth. They land, half-thrown onto grass, and Lan Wangji breathes in its unclean ferocity, dirt and gravel stranded in the hook of his hands. On them, on his knees also. He waits, then turns to face Wei Ying, rolling over to cover him and calling Bichen within grasp just in case pursuers follow. None, but he watches the entrance point, hawkishly, indifferent to the tremulations of weeds or Wei Ying or the cutting voice of a nun, behind them: )
If the honoured guests can bear to disentangle from the meadows, the midday meal will be served shortly.
( The abbess, it appears, would be grateful to host them.
Lan Wangji still has enough dregs of his dignity to flush. )
...apologies. We shall arrive.
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( Fire burns out behind them as Lan Zhan rides the airs through to the cave's entrance; Wei Wuxian breathes shallow against the taste of copper in his mouth, the heaviness in his lungs, watching behind and below them. The skittering of nothing, before they emerge into the cavern where the men dwell, and they too have skittered, tucked into cracks and nooks and crannies barely big enough to hold them.
This is not new to them.
He drags his eyes forward, to the blinding light before they too fly out and meet the ground with the reverence it demands, and their bodies caving before it. Caught, held, and thrown all in part, he rises with his hands dusting off his robes and smiles guilelessly at the nun courting them on demand of the abbess, dark eyes swallowing light even as they give the illusion of sparkling. )
The meadows are so lovely! The whole mountain, really, miss, it settles a longing in my soul.
( Her eyes, squinting and discerning, likewise glint as she turns away, hands folded to her middle, precise and proper. Not one of the felinoid sisters. Yet.
She's sure, and she says as much, if only they'd follow. Contemplation crossing her features before she schools them back to studied neutrality, not exactly calm.
He considers, too, smile easy, gaze dense. When he tugs on Lan Zhan's sleeves, two fingers catching at the fabric, he makes as if to pout at his husband, murmuring words: )
I love you. Those who lead here aren't innocent.
( A smile, again, as the nun glances back at them, and he leans in, beseeching: )
Will you feed me at the midday meal?
( He's been carried out already today, and it doesn't harm him to create the sort of daft and self-involved mask which allows people to believe, between the two of them, Lan Zhan the superior in sensibility. A lack of obvious affectation does wonders for perceptions, just as an overabundance can do the same.
The trails they follow back start off fresh, then rejoin with the one they walked the evening before. Only one feather, lingering on pine needles, pinned through the centre.
Activity levels have gone towards stillness in the monastery as they return, but not eerily so - distant the sounds of shuffling and clacking and the scent of cooking food gives indication to the current preoccupations. Only one hint suggests otherwise: two of the enrobed women without visible faces, near leaping out of the way when they walk down a narrower alley. The nun leading them stills, momentarily hesitating, before she continues on, towards the large hall with the rising rooftop. Not the main area for worship, but a side chamber, connected directly to the kitchens.
Inside, the scents of soup: vegetables, too, baked or thrown into a pan with or without butter. Platters being brought out by younger nuns, likely still appreticing to their holy craft, and simple fair, but plentiful, and hot, and..
... unseasoned but for the soup, which is the telltale red of some interfering tomato or chili.
They're lead to one long bench, closer to where the abbess already sits waiting. She eyes them both, unsmiling, but says nothing while the food is laid out, and then the rest of the nuns take their places, including the final stragglers from the kitchens themselves. )
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( In the end —
I love you.
— fissures his mouth, reaping a brief smile of burning incandescence. He catches himself on the cusp of foolishness: Wei Ying only invokes his pleasantries to shield subterfuge. Still, rising to his feet, one hand drifting to assist his woefully fragile husband after, he cannot sabotage the trickle of amusement that settles his mouth taut.
Then, they are herded, back into the mouth of a regimented hell for a different enterrement. At least they are welcomed by clutter, a tinny relish and bursts of movement, an institution alive. Here and there, young nuns walk at brisk pace, sparing them wandering glances and hushed conversation. Farther on, veteran nuns yet observe their vows of silence, heads bowed and long veils drawn over their faces.
He thinks to ask their guide, Why do they pray so strictly?
They have lost loved ones, he hears, and dedicate each day to honourable grief that might elicit pity from the skies and mercy upon those already gone.
They are herded into fresh hall quarters, where tables spread in tight configurations to house far more nuns than Lan Wangji had assumed the monastery sheltered, all sharing their midday meal. At least, to thank the Heavens, the meal looks safe but for the punitive copper of a soup Lan Wangji wisely defers to Wei Ying, sat primly beside him. And will Lan Wangji feed his husband?
...certainly, thick, blunt-carved wooden spoon lifted tenderly to transport a sturdy mouthful of the fragrant soup, its spices already sufficient that their very smells rouse the start of wet in Wangji's eyes. He blinks once, again. Then, as he leans in to deliver Wei Ying's meal, murmured: )
More than half of these women mourn. ( If they go by their veils, only primly shed and folded at their side to avoid contamination during the meal — or elegantly pinned up against a nun's ear, to reveal only her mouth. And another matter even Lan Wangji can surmise, in his otherwise studied ignorance: ) All have beauty.
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( Wei Wuxian opens his mouth, uncaring, his cleaned hands reaching out to cradle his husband's face, swiping at the not-tears building at their corners. There's no playacting in this, not for either of them: surely he'd be fussy if everything were millet or the like, but while such is present here, it's not the sum total of what they're eating.
Besides, sweetened by the burn of spice, he swallows, and licks his lips. A reminder to himself: they need tending, as the traces of heat on them state calmly and without confusion. )
Were all blessed in marriage? With that beauty? Some of us are more than others, in the turnings of any world.
( Pad of his thumb tracing the arc of Lan Zhan's cheek, before he lets them fall away, to settle in Lan Zhan's lap, leaning towards him for ease of unconventional feeding far, far away from the sickbed, only place he'd previously allow. It's... strangely nice.
Very strangely nice, in the way of a wanted touch at the small of his back, in the care behind a loved one brushing hair back off his face, freeing his eyes to greater clarity.
The bell at his waist rolls as he shifts closer, the clang a gentle ting that cuts underneath the quiet prayers and mastication of a meal well met. The abbess aborts a startled look, eyes narrowing after, glaring around, but the lack of repetition settles her poorly into an accounting of her own meal.
He considers that, too, mouth opening as prompted, chewing as needed, swallowing because spitting out food that does not, as of this point, technically taste...
...
...
...
He sighs. )
Lan Zhan. I think you'll need to tie me down for the hour after sunset.
( Because one can taste nothing through the heat, and reds mask reds, and he has an inkling about what they were served the night before, and a certain disinclination to dance according to the whims of the manipulators here. )
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As ever, in the company of a fattened cock.
( He offers back between unsuccessful attempts to arm another spoonful with enough red swill to plunge the monastery's reserves of cinnabar or hemorrhage a dozen fowl. There is a stench to the meal entirely too acrimonious, at once chalky and moulding and lacking in the stereotypical, gut-binding acidity that so often condemns spiced dishes.
Beside him, a nun gasps, shrill. Another farther down begs her leave and waves two distant sisters to fly the room in a cloud of resurrected veils and silence. Far more flush feverishly and their gazes seem suddenly, inexplicably affixed onto their soup.
It strikes Lan Wangji, thunder in wake of lightning, what he has said. He blinks down, first at the spoon in his hand and its rancid poison. Blinks again, at the waiting bowl-sized cesspool of much the same. Blinks with finality at Wei Ying, custodian of his never-ending affections and now, decisively, the last dregs of Lan Wangji's dignity.
And he politely whispers: ) I was a man of honour once.
( Before the Yiling Patriarch successfully punctured his poise and eradicated Hanguang-Jun's hopes of a future aligned with perfect purity and the sect's precepts. He does not accuse Wei Ying for his part in this.
...it is, all things considered, implicit. )
Hereby, shall cut you off from the cock. ( The feathery root of all evil, abolished in a sentence that, shockingly, seems to not cleanse his reputation across the table. )
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( He smiles, brief and sharp, amused because of the wording and Lan Zhan's statement about honour as if this world and their own wasn't prone towards making mockery of the concept. He knows bone deep his husband is the kind of honourable that cannot turn away from itself, but can stand eventually before the torrents of expectations around.
He, however, knows that honour is disposable when it isn't something felt in the heart, guiding a soul. Breathed and understood for the ups and downs the world demands, and the cost of compromise, in which directions.
Wei Wuxian slides closer, then into his husband's lap, half closing his eyes as he sighs. Long. And. Slow. )
Will that really satisfy?
( He doesn't know that the living chicken will matter, cock or hen, but the magics at use are simply carried as easily by their bloods and last night's magics as any other way. Easiest still to make it part of what stew spiced so hot; the nuns flutter and fluster, but the abbess is unmoved by now, even as Wei Wuxian curls into Lan Zhan fully. He plays with the hairs at the back of Lan Zhan's neck, leaving Lan Zhan's arms as unimpeded as he can. )
Whatever happens, it strengthens at night. But if they think I'm incapacitated already, we might learn more of why this came to be, and how they woke up the mountain.
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