return of the other fox | curse caused thought to text transmission

[weifinder]

Crouch, stay low, watch the wings. High. Still. Beating fast, then tucked, it dives, moving, leap, and hah! Caught, caught, struggles, feathers fall, help, who will help contain these captured birds?

Henhouse, henhouse, where are you, thumbs are so useful at times like these, oh, yes, right, you're still here, and you are...?

( wei wuxian is still in fox form (think red fox sized, black fur), capturing birds by mouth. did he just nab one going after you? will you help him store these birds? please help him he has no thumbs to open doors or cages so he's shoving them into empty sacks, as you do )

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[weifinder]

( he doesn't release the cock. the whole point, he finds, is to keep living birds from aggression on those working to return wards as they must, and while he questions the whole process, death isn't what he invites into it.

nor does he now, ears flicked forward, focussed much like he is on his husband, stark in his canine vision. he stands, bird protesting with a kick of legs in the air, then simply waddles closer, having been trained to this by sizhui, lily, even wen qing's touch, but not lan zhan's. his paws leave the clean dirt of the world on lan zhan's legs, dark marks of nature against purity of man's condescension, and carefully, so carefully, steps himself and his chicken into the waiting lap, the opened arms, of he who rejected and rejected and yet held in fear so tight what he wished to protect wei wuxian from, offering instead no protection.

all he has is the pendant, and if wangji can read it, there are words waiting: )

The bird will just attack us if I do.

( but he leans the side of his head, his shoulder, his chest, against that of his husband's. the recognition, late as it may be, soothes a burr caught otherwise in the fur between his toes. bearable, perhaps inevitable, but a relief when resolved. )

[downswing]

( ...later, once the chicken has retreated the foot that catches Hanguang-Jun illustriously on the broad terrain of his cheek, he will remember: this is the first petty injury he's born since the war. To celebrate, the chicken volleys another strategic offensive, and the stormed eye of Lan Wangji's paralysing stupor barely begins to open. He blinks in protest. Accepts another slanted kick that ends in ribboned claw scratches and the deafening pulse of his qi, seismic when it galvanises for the rare opportunity to instantly mend a wound.

Tip of his finger ungainly wet on the tongue, he inflicts the indignity of a body bind talisman, loosely scrawled on the soft-feathered back of the rebellious chicken — until its legs expel a last syrupy kick, its eyes web in lethargy, and it sways, back and forth and back and forth, and the pendulum of Wei Ying's mouth eases its arcs in increments.

...here, now, grass prostrations wheezing in his ears, it strikes Lan Wangji as strategic, when he leans in to cradle the fox's sweet snout between the fingers of one hand and to scratch beneath Wei Wing's chin with an adoring maiden's enthusiasm, with the other. Hello, husband. How... fluffy you are today, but in no way reduced in your manhood or cultivation by the sheer and perplexing inability to calm down a mutinous bird. )

Wei Ying caught a majestic chicken. ( Vanity is a fine thing to bolster. ) He is a generous provider. ( For Lan Wangji, consumer of precisely no meats, especially. ) A skilled hunter.

( ...now spit, do not swallow around the cock, and kindly surrender its heft to the great outdoors. )

[weifinder]

( blood, sharp. it floods him like a spring storm over a narrow ravine, sucks the air from his lungs as the bird thrashes, stills, until it slows, and there are Lan Zhan's hands, and he remembers breathing can be automatic, not a remembered response. these are words of nonsense, chickens nothing majestic, his provisions never enough, his hunting too skilled, ah, too skilled and remembered for it, phoenix mountain behind them a cry in the dark of petty jealousies and of his shijie's firm stance and cutting down of Jin depridations.

machinations, all the world of political machinations, and he an orphan and then a scion and too good, too exceptional, to be enough. fear was always easier, and he knows that now, understands it in a way he hadn't as a younger man, where arrogance was thicker than his face out of necessity of survival and the unseen callouses on his knees and within his ears.

blood, and the chicken, hale and whole, drops from his horrid maw, those jaws he cannot continence with kindness, and he lifts his muzzle, he lifts under those hands, to a tongue that lathes over the lines of the chicken's trespass. a feather, small downy remnant, sticks there with the smooth roll of hot saliva, and blood is a scent on his tongue even if healed and gone, a scent on the cock's spurs, spurious in an aftermath of a curse remembered, retained.

no sound, from wei wuxian. his breath, yes, and the heat of him, and dark eyes seeking dark eyes, before he kicks forward, muzzle tipped down, down, so his forehead bumps against Lan Zhan and his ineffable ribbon, the feather drying to his husband's cheek. )

[downswing]

( ...wet slick and glistened, cold in the wake of the fox's sharp, sand-papery tongue, and he flinches with it, sigh measured and melodious like morning light seeping between wood shutters. He cannot escape this. Time, wasted energy and soulful resignation have taught him better than to repeat the attempt, and there is a quickening in him, the loneliness of being a constant and unshakeable thing, born to withstand the sudden gust of wind with rigidity. Only Wei Ying changes him, trickle of his wet tongue slow on Wangji's cheek; only Wei Ying stirs him from constancy and into change.

He remembers, distantly, to nod along with the gift of his indignity, just as the chicken plops down on leg and rolls tragically over, painting a divot in bowed grass. )

Thank you. ( Then, the wretched learning, what time with his — brother-in-law has taught him: to make himself curled in and small and lend his face for rubs and scenting, to ask nothing of the temple the brothers must refurnish to regain their shape, to be a silent, graceful and unassuming companion. Eased of his forehead, his ribbon drips down like forks of white flame, and he tames them tidily to wrap around Wei Ying's fluffed neck, collared. )

Half a shi...? ( A timid negotiation. Once the ribbon has departed its owner, all attempts to broker good behaviour from Wei Ying are forfeit. ) You will muddy it elsewise.

( There. Be reasonable, like the weighted pat of Wangji's hand on the fox's flank. )

Show me your work.

[weifinder]

( one rub of his lean face against the opposite cheek, the most he indulges instincts he ruthlessly quashes otherwise, and he starts to settle back, not sure what to do, but also wanting to convince Lan Zhan to deposit the chicken where ti couldn't wake and return to its attacking ways, when: )

Did you just pat my butt?!

( don't read that message, don't read that message, the ribbon is on him but he shakes himself and hops backward, too much of a springboard, that lap of his husband's. the ribbon should have been many more rounds of his furred neck, but as it is, he bolts, tossing a look over his head to invite the chase.

running, the ends of ribbon stay fluttered, flittering over the ground and not beholden to it yet. this way, to either a stash of birds in sacks or more, to the rebuilding shrine, and the woods that begins to loom closer as his paws tap down and push off the dampened, dead grasses lining the pathways that people strode in their moments out in this part of the village. )