un: heart-fluttering hummingbird | audio (forward-dated: 24 May)

[downswing]

( A silence to his mouth, begrudging. The words, when he does speak them, gravel between teeth: )

...apologies. The blood in the northern halls will want more hands for the washing.

We made insufficient attempt.


( ooc: posted today for ooc ease, but assume this comes up after Sizhui/Eleven/Mingyu speak with the miners, around 24 May. Alina and Lan Wangji have given the miners their mercy kill, before they could fully transition, and removed the bodies from where they were kept... but clean-up. )

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[weifinder]

( For a long moment, he wonders with a kind of curious, intrigued suspense more than the worry or anything else that preceded it: will he witness Lan Wangji, Hanguang-jun, fleeing from his chosen chambers, in his frozen underrobes. The absurdity would have been laughable, in a way easing tension that clings to his joints, stretches taunt in his shoulders, makes his neck ache in a familiar, comforting way.

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. )

[downswing]

[ White heat light and the sultry, wicked, singeing accident of froth, foam and suds caught in Lan Wangji's eyes, when Wei Ying rises, as if he were a sea creature breaking stormy waves. Wangji blinks against the assault. Once, twice. Again. Nearly sways back, graceless and fraught, until balance restores itself as his left knee locks down, and his bones armour themselves against gravity's ridicule. 

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. ]

[weifinder]

( Pain is a memory even as it lives in his wrist, in the clutch of chilled skin to warm, damp and dewey as he stands, bleeding heat and modesty he has rarely cared about. He doesn't twist away, though part of him wonders for a moment if he should; it's more to hear the words, to give the respect of his attention, even if he turns his head just enough to show the side of his face. To hear, two lifetimes of hospitality, a son.

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. )