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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[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Voice shrill like nails' scratch on stone in their silence, Wei Ying's already withdrawn in his darks, in his condemnation.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. )