( His blink is slow, leonine, the spread of heat and promise and melting humidity around them a crinkling of the corner of his eyes, his lips left parted, tongue caught between the gentle vise of his teeth after Lan Zhan pulls back, breathe shallow in his lungs. The words shift through, fast and keen, cutting deep with small upturn of his lips: challenge, in a way, to procure what it is they don't have, and yet. And yet. )
Marked.
( The words, the conditions, the conclusions of months and years of intersecting orbits and his own conflicted sense of desire and duty and obligation and uncertainty. These days his path does not feel so narrow, so lonely, under dappled shadow and sunlight, but be it little more than the deer path lancing through the mountains and woods or the wagon's path between villages, he accepts what in it cannot be known. There's a beauty in choosing, day to day. Choosing now, and choosing again.
He sighs, draped himself against Lan Zhan's chest, leans into him, the cloying heat not enough for his greed. Head nestled next to his husband's, resting on his raised shoulder and arm, he says: )
Carry me on to her, for now.
( To the medical checkup he had not wanted or asked for, for Lan Zhan's mental quietude, for the moment of play and the moment of heat and the unending recollection of a world that moves beyond them, uncaring. )
We can bathe, head back out.
( As he'd said from the first, made man again after the woman's curse and his own toad-strewn horror. The future ever stretches forward, and they live in these, the moments they embrace. Wei Wuxian, learning ever as it is what he can do to claim the happinesses that pass by them, ephemeral, knowing duty is relentless, uncaring, unkind.
A balance, then. He's nothing if not a man determined to find ways forward outside of the proscribed, but ah, today, it is this, and now: a bed to make. Privacy to craft. He will manage this, even as they trek onward, even as Wen Qing pays little heed to the lacking dignity of a man again recently cursed and cured. To Lan Zhan's own bearing with the same, and truly, earned on both parts, but perhaps she has better salve for his back — )
no subject
( His blink is slow, leonine, the spread of heat and promise and melting humidity around them a crinkling of the corner of his eyes, his lips left parted, tongue caught between the gentle vise of his teeth after Lan Zhan pulls back, breathe shallow in his lungs. The words shift through, fast and keen, cutting deep with small upturn of his lips: challenge, in a way, to procure what it is they don't have, and yet. And yet. )
Marked.
( The words, the conditions, the conclusions of months and years of intersecting orbits and his own conflicted sense of desire and duty and obligation and uncertainty. These days his path does not feel so narrow, so lonely, under dappled shadow and sunlight, but be it little more than the deer path lancing through the mountains and woods or the wagon's path between villages, he accepts what in it cannot be known. There's a beauty in choosing, day to day. Choosing now, and choosing again.
He sighs, draped himself against Lan Zhan's chest, leans into him, the cloying heat not enough for his greed. Head nestled next to his husband's, resting on his raised shoulder and arm, he says: )
Carry me on to her, for now.
( To the medical checkup he had not wanted or asked for, for Lan Zhan's mental quietude, for the moment of play and the moment of heat and the unending recollection of a world that moves beyond them, uncaring. )
We can bathe, head back out.
( As he'd said from the first, made man again after the woman's curse and his own toad-strewn horror. The future ever stretches forward, and they live in these, the moments they embrace. Wei Wuxian, learning ever as it is what he can do to claim the happinesses that pass by them, ephemeral, knowing duty is relentless, uncaring, unkind.
A balance, then. He's nothing if not a man determined to find ways forward outside of the proscribed, but ah, today, it is this, and now: a bed to make. Privacy to craft. He will manage this, even as they trek onward, even as Wen Qing pays little heed to the lacking dignity of a man again recently cursed and cured. To Lan Zhan's own bearing with the same, and truly, earned on both parts, but perhaps she has better salve for his back — )