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un: heart-fluttering hummingbird | audio (forward-dated: 24 May)
...apologies. The blood in the northern halls will want more hands for the washing.
We made insufficient attempt.
...apologies. The blood in the northern halls will want more hands for the washing.
We made insufficient attempt.
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( By four hands, paired. )
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Both, past salvation.
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( Dryly... dryly stated. )
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( Wen Qing, Jiang Wanyin, Lan Sizhui &mdash but not this. )
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( At least he's saying it, he guesses. Not that he'd meant it in that way, but it doesn't so much matter. He rubs his face, making some strangled noise of frustration before: nothing. )
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Just... where can he weigh it? In the months traveling roads with an obstinate donkey, as much charmed as he was frustrated, and glad for the acceptance of his own meandering speech, or his times of silence, or the litany of complaints he invented to fill the other silences. He's narrated entire stretches of road, from the notable to the insignificant, and yet he finds it hard to narrate his own thoughts, when it comes to feelings, versus his understandings of anything else. )
I am learning, Lan Zhan, how to say things without weighing first if someone else needs burdening with that knowledge. Deciding what those who are not among the young should or should not know, for their sakes.
( He pauses again... then just leaves it at that. In the end, it isn't his right to ask someone who doesn't enjoy speaking to find a way to speak up on important things. Lan Wangji has enough going on. It's not like Wei Wuxian has proven particularly reliable in the end, huh? )
I'm boiling water.
( He'll leave it at that, for now. )
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( Before, when they'd barely arrived, and Wei Ying persisted in his one request. To make use of himself. So be it. Lan Wangji wears his weight in another man's reds, let him shed it. )
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Do you prefer I drag in the trough, or the extra water barrel?
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The water barrel, for horses.
...how ever will he choose? )
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Babes are born. Seasons turn.
The moon waxes and wanes.
The scent of the rich ascends from his beings to the high heavens.
He was not born for this. He was not chosen to be poor, thusly. )
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He is a Lan. He will bear.
He is a Lan. He will prevail.
He asked. He did ask. Contorted himself to purpose. Lent the opening. Gave opportunity. Brought this, some might say, upon himself.
And if he must... agree to have an instrument of humiliation brought into his quarters, only to slip out into the night and seek a proper river, well. Well, then. )
The... trough.
4/4 MEMORABILIA
苑
思
追
愿
More fearsome than the whip of discipline is that of marriage. Learn of your father's errors. Live wisely. Beware the trough.
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蓝
忘
机
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Trough it is, then!
( So while Lan Wangji is dealing with cleanup and their son and probably the start of whatever funerary rites may wish to be observed by others, despite souls being sent onward to where souls might wish to rest in this world, he's labouring away haling in the wooden trough after cleaning it, then bringing in water until its filled. If nothing else, the repetitive task lets his mind wander to other things, avoiding what he should think of in favour of what he needn't, necessarily.
Thinking about what his son has said, about the process for those recently laid to peace.
He ferrets a few of his modified talismans for heat out and plants them on the sides of the trough, the water warming until it's just warmer than body temperature. Or so he guesses, checking with his hand, and pulling off two, leaving the other two on to keep the water at temperature instead of quickly losing heat or starting to evaporate.
He leaves a drying cloth of appropriate size behind, and some of the scented cleaning soaps and oil for hair. A second drying cloth, meant for said hair, sits on the bed, and the washing cloth is draped over the side of the trough itself.
Then he leaves, having alerted Lan Zhan to his bath's readiness, and looks for Eleven, to see how he's handling things. )
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And to understand with Uncle's perfect clarity that this shall not pass.
A man wears his sins, his suffering, his atonement. Pays his dues in word and deed this lifetime, or paper money and joss, the next. And he calculates among all the earthly sacrifices, that which behoves him for his nature, his children, his clan, his legacy.
...then, if this man is Lan Wangji, he promptly sheds the red-soaked heft of his silks, leaving the better part of four layers to drench in the hot bathing water, before excusing himself, tip-toed and silent and on frozen wood tile, slick, to head out through the window, into the forest. Still hours before night's passage, and only the blink of an eye to blitz under woods' crown and submerge himself, teeth-chattered, in the graceless familiarity of a half-iced stream. The cold springs of Gusu Lan send their regards.
Later, returning, he is refreshed, arrogantly pleased with his feat, no better than a cat that's licked away every distant trace of cream. Modesty revives itself: captive to his layers, he takes caution not to tear or strain the frozen silk when he slings one leg over the window pane to infiltrate his quarters again, then the other —
And stills.
Oh. ]
...Wei Ying returned.
[ Indeed. Indeed he did. ]
technical nudity but nothing's sexy about this
He worries, still, when he returns. Worries as he stares at the silks, then tells himself it's pointless to worry even when he tries to contact Lan Zhan on the two other crystals he's used.
Lan Zhan is strong, and this world is strange.
Time passes, and he's divested of his own layers but one, slipping arms into a hot bath with a hiss and his hair tossed back, taking Lan Zhan's robes in hand an wringing them out, laying them flat on the floor. Salt was one of the easier things to find here when those of them ventured in, and he'd brought it back with him, out of secondary thoughtful consideration; now he sprinkles it on the stains and pats them dry, only shivering once or twice in the process.
The blood comes out, not helped by the heat from earlier, but not so bad yet either. A brief sigh over the colour of Lan Zhan's choice, in its mourning; not that the blues were deeper, or showed the blood any less.
He lays the silks out then over Lan Zhan's sheets, letting them dry, when he turns his eyes back to the tub and the pail still in the room. Filling it from the trough, he shrugs out of his inner robe and steps in, tired and worried and annoyed and also, to some extent, dulled. Not all omission, he recalls, strikes against you.
This the tableau Lan Zhan returns to, Wei Wuxian with his hair combed out and draped over the side of the trough, ends resting just shy of the floor. One leg is hooked out over the side of the trough, because his feet were hot, and he'd just draped the wash cloth over more sensitive areas, out of a sense of modesty for Lan Zhan's sake, more than his own. )
Oh, yes. You see, there was a new soap and hair oil I'd remembered I'd wanted to bring you, and then salt for the blood—worked well, your robes are drying—and then there was this hand drawn bath just sitting there, steaming, and no word from you, so I figured why let a good thing go to waste and lounged around for, you know, some time!
( ... In truth he probably hasn't been in the actual water long, given the robes took priority, but still. Here's his chipper telling of events, staring at Lan Zhan sneaking into his own room.
He smiles, then wiggles his toes. )
Welcome back, Lan Zhan.
( He absolutely wasn't worried, you horrible crane cloud man. )
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He cannot be so cowardly. There are things a man (Wei Ying) will not excuse, not within easy reach and temptation of sharing his plight and his countless disappointments with the impressionable young (Lan Sizhui). There is shrapnel of Lan Wangji's reputation (tattered, tearing) that should be preserved. There is timing (ill-advised) and placement (indiscreet) and any manner of circumstances that might have persuaded Lan Wangji to flinch and withdraw successfully, had he only started a heartbeat sooner, when he was not yet transfixed by the corpse of his drowned silks, crisp and flattened on the bed rest.
Oh. And the gift of Yiling obscenity in the middle of his quarters, dressed for all the world in the finery of scars and calluses and easy mist, and Lan Wangji is hardly the lesser man for thinking, You drew your warmth talisman carelessly, if it has conserved the same temperature, two shi later. Tighten the arrays, next. Reserve more strength.
Far from Lan Wangji to nitpick the finesse of Wei Ying's hooligan execution.
He is a credit to his people, old and new, and to the shiver that assails his shoulders, and he inches into his rooms like every schoolboy caught rule-breaking during Lan Wangji's own tenure as disciplinarian of Cloud Recesses. Flushed. Forlorn. Gaze submerged, li beneath the floor.
Welcome back. Here, a nod returns the greeting. Words come due. Excuses. Flattering, but tight-knitted contrivance. Air shifts with his glide, like weighted shackles. Humidity, to bearable excess. He stays only once he threatens to strike the devil's basin, the trough, kneeling gently at edge like any proper bathing attendant — one swipe, to turn his two-layered sleeves over the pearlescent inside of his elbows, where veins swarm and spider, blue. The second, arms bare and readied for duty, to grasp the nearby comb and the flask of oil — clear, glistened, golden, perhaps less nutty than jojoba — and set himself to the task of parting the length of Wei Ying's hair and spreading out the concoction. From the ends, scrunched, then midway of the strand, then the root, and the comb passes once, down. Again. Again. Again.
He has performed the duties of hair grooming enough for a growing son that he can proceed without his eyes darting mindlessly to where soapy water withhold too little modesty for the comfort of Jiang Wanyin's pride. Blessed be. ]
I do not apologise.
[ Fastidiously, minding a short, stubborn tangle. Combing through it, at long last, with a tug. There — there.
The art of platonic best friendship and the raising of your necromancer is knowing how to diffuse quarrel by postponing it until Wei Ying can no longer heatedly engage. ]
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Instead, the creeping progress, the downcast eyes. He's tempted to laugh, then, watching this pale, too living shade glide closer, eyes downcast, until he's standing behind him, the looming shelf of ice that collapses with grace into the avalanches of thawing silks behind him, encasing Lan Zhan on the floor as surely as Wei Wuxian's shoulders tense, fingers of his hands latched to the sides of the trough twitch, prepare to move.
He's not surprised at a lack of words, when there's body language enough, and he's stalled from how he plans to shift forward and twist around, withdrawing his foot from its lackadaisical dangling at the troughside. It's only chance that he knows this moment, chance from a different kind of weighing and demarking of gratitude and gracelessness, the reasons why he'd been unsettled earlier not in the blood that shed, but in the silent carving.
Why is a question he turns over, just as how many of those chances are my own? Which silences has he offered to Lan Zhan, as surely as Lan Zhan continues to offer his own? When is it comfort? When is it not?
The hand collecting the ends of his hair stills him, expression freezing. It's not as if he's under illusions that when he lay recovering of injury, Lan Zhan was not a thorough caretaker; everything about him is meticulous and ruthless and warm, in varying degrees, no matter the rigidity of his features. Even those have relaxed with the time that Wei Wuxian himself will never regain, having passed it in muffled darkness, unaware and aware at once, but only of time's passage. It had been a quiet death, he'd thought. A lonely, quiet ending.
He's shaken from that thought with the stroke of the brush through his hair, fingers twitching at it, shoulders hiking up a touch, visible but not comically overdone. Whatever Lan Zhan's done for him in times where Wei Wuxian could not himself, this was not such a time; he can't remember being tended in any baths, though he must have been by his parents in his youngest years, and only his shijie had combed through his hair in times where it'd been too tangled and tried his patience, or he came pleading while still young, comb in hand.
The art of platonic best friendship and taming your stick-in-the-mud Lan doesn't have a chapter for this, not even a tagline of the obvious: distraction. It's Lan Zhan's words that shatter Wei Wuxian's stillness, comb catching on a tangle, and breath starts to fill his lungs and whatever bare question had been in his unseen eyes falters, then hides. )
I know.
( He says, and shifts forward, one hand lifted to collect his hair at the nape of his neck, tugging it free from Lan Zhan's fastidious ministrations. He leans to the side, out of the trough to where the water in the pail remains, cooler now than the rest. One haul upward has him standing, a grunt for his effort masked by the cascading water off his form, the unremarkable fall of the washing cloth out of his lap, his back to Lan Zhan. The pail lifts between his hands, hair left to fall down his back, clinging where it does until the pour of cooled water over his head sends another cascade down, even less polite for the man who had been kneeling behind him. It rinses away the lingering suds, does little to the oil, but it hadn't been meant for that.
He steps out of the tub, ignoring the water that trails after him, back still as much to Lan Zhan as can be afforded when he reaches for where his inner robe lay waiting. Shaken out, pulled on, and he almost laughs ten: reminders of Lan Zhan's quick dressing in the cold spring. At least black disguises, and he doesn't pull his hair free, trapped as it is against his warm back underneath his robe's collar.
He holds it closed with a hand, not bothering with the ties yet. Inclines his head to his friend, and allows himself... something like seriousness. Or no, not that. Sincerity, yes, that was closer, and something dry, to offset the water gently pooling underfoot. )
I'm thankful that once, you were willing to accept what poor hospitality I had to offer.
( At that, a smile, this one self-aware. He's been poor before; he's been a poorer host, able to offer heated water and no tea, trying to make a life eked out among the memories of the wrongfully murdered seem sensible, like he'd needed it to be for the people he'd taken on, the ones who depended on him.
This is not the same, and it has echoes of the same. )
And sorry that I have nothing better to offer, even now.
( Poor again, and the money he's earned largely turned to getting them all out and away. There's nothing steady here but the people, and they, too, will have their unsteadiness.
But if he's going to spend his time in fruitless endeavours, better to know up front; more than that, too, is knowing Lan Zhan is okay, even when running off to the woods to bathe himself according to the traditions of his people. Bizarre as he still thinks that can be, and he, a riverside, lakeside child, not afraid of bathing in such places, but also not ascetic enough to enjoy bathing in frigid waters. Or so unwilling to adapt, but that had been a difference, hadn't it? He'd chosen his own way, and learned because he could hardly do otherwise. None of them chose this. )
See you in the morning, Lan Zhan.
( His departing note, nothing to it but factual statement and the ending sort of sigh that has him smile, eyes downcast, before heading for the door. )
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Voice shrill like nails' scratch on stone in their silence, Wei Ying's already withdrawn in his darks, in his condemnation. Who taught you to be so unforgiving, so cruel? Tiles, Lan Wangji knows. A rooftop. Every golden dome and great awning and yawning canopy, from Qishan to Lanling. From atop them, Wei Ying judges the world, and above him, he is only reproached by the heavens.
So be it. Lan Wangji, faster of the two, flattered by the survival of his core. What shall he call it? The Wen Qing advantage. Perhaps, Wei Ying might refer to it as the Jiang Wanyin detraction. No, Jiang Cheng — warmth, even in this. Intimacy, even now. Yearning. ( It stings to know and hear and live, better than the soaped water. ) Whatever its name, the edge shoes: water splashes and clacks in fat drops when he stirs, nearly crashes in the abandoned trough, giving chase to Wei Ying.
The door is no barrier, not in a house spelled silent by the forced courtesy of cautious, distrustful friends at arms, who only seek one another out to put the hurt in their communal enemy, perhaps too in their benefactor. Still, the door cannot creak open. His heart thunders thrice, rattling the cage of his ribs, the sword of his sternum; he catches Wei Ying's wrist without turning him, twists, thumb deep and mean against the bone. Let it hurt. This is their tongue, wanting no crystal, no translation, no artifice.
Let it hurt, as Lan Wangji aches to know the first, foremost change must come from within him. Let it hurt, as he steels to commit to it. ]
You gave the best of me. My son.
[ Wet-eyed and fragile in this house, discovering himself as another pale-faced ghost among the many spirits his life will parade before him to exorcise. They are not kindness, the Lan white walkers, heralds of true death. Spirits rise to occupy flesh and create purpose once more, and the Lan take, and they take, and they take of them, until even the dead go depleted. Cruelty, carelessness, decisive extermination. They fit incomprehensibly in the living world, like a sickness that divides itself to conquer. They dress in white to mourn the happiness they steal of others. ]
Gift enough, hospitality enough — for two lifetimes.
[ Both, Wei Ying's.
And Wangji? Yiling lives with him, beside him, on the road, in his home. In the jingshi, when Sizhui was yet Lan Yuan, an inherited, lively, but absurd addition, learning to fit himself in the rigid voids of a bed occupied by a man and his wounds, after three years of cavernous seclusion. Lan Wangji does not forget the Burial Mounds, not when they dress in his colours, learn his instrument, wear his name.
The oil lingers behind, faint glow of it, lush and sebaceous, nourishing the floor in a miniature spill. With him, the comb, Wei Ying's first concession here — and he transfers, a stern but steady and balanced weight, from one hand to the next, then kissing Wei Ying's fingers. Hard mahogany, lightly carved, with anonymous native flowers and abstract filigree stitched in each corner.
He lets it drop in Wei Ying's hand. Lets Wei Ying go. ]
No more of them. If I must learn to do without, let me learn.
[ No more champions. Defenders. Providers. He cannot at once be a grateful student of Wei Ying's poverty and the subject of his munificence. He cannot in turn be independent and reliant, like a well-fattened cat Wei Ying keeps for his amusement. ]
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Whose, in the end. Lan Zhan's, more truly than anything. Wei Wuxian can have his heart and fondness, but he is the fever fractured remembrance of a year. He is sixteen years gone, and it is Lan Zhan who is left behind, it is Lan Sizhui who grew, it was not Wen Yuan, it was not in victories, it was not in battles won. Wei Wuxian had gambled, had hoped, had lost, and grieved, had died in the vain hope that it would have freed those who remained.
Vain, and learned sixteen years too late to have changed it, and even looking back, he doesn't know what it is he could have done as the man he'd been in the world that had been. Not when he had been so convinced he stood alone.
The comb is a foreign invader, steady and slick against the pad of his fingers, in his hand and held like the shell of an egg already cracking. Let me learn. )
... Mm. ( Acknowledgement, and unknowing in the moment just how much he mimics Lan Zhan, the unthought nature of it. ) Just... know, as I didn't, that you're not alone. You're not hated, and you are not alone.
( Striding forward, but the footfalls are soft, as he slips out the door, as he banishes himself with the drips of water long losing warmth, pearls of a different irritant that bead and clatter to the floor. Behind him, the door closes with a sigh, a step forward into something complicated and lined with breathing, living, shifting things; enough to think on, as the night stretches colder, and Wei Wuxian resumes his post at the great doors, against all that whispers on the winds. )