eastbound | un: xianxian of yunmeng jiang

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un: xianxian of yunmeng jiang | video

( The recording shows a small toad, black and red and gold, sitting in the palm of one hand. In another hand a brilliant emerald green toad is held, pointed in the direction of the smaller toad.

The smaller toad shifts to look "toward" the display, lifting up on front legs to address the one recording by pendant. )

I don't want to kiss the toad, Lan Zhan! Hnnngh.

( The toad, who spoke in Wei Wuxian's voice, shifts his legs and tiny bulk back around to stare down the larger toad. Who inflates its throat and offers a long, wheezing croak. )

Ugh. Fine. For the sake of proving this works before anyone else suffers through this —

( He abruptly leaps forward, smashing his small toad face into the larger toad's face. How does one kiss a toad when one has no notably amount of lip? Both Wei Toadxian's front feet plaster against the larger toad's face, attempting to keep the other toad respectable. Holding the awkward position for excruciating seconds. He falls backward, kicking off the other toad, to flop back into Lan Wangji's open palm. )

Was that long enough? I don't —

( Abruptly the image shakes with a yelp of Wei Wuxian's surprise as the screen is filled with pale flesh, mud, and the sudden forward falling scramble of a man who has now found himself with a palm filled with the weight of an adult human male. Welcome to the darkness, shifting, squelching sounds of mud and an irate toad expressing its displeasure even as Lan Wangji's equally excruciatingly dry voice ends the video with a: )

... efficient.

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( He smiles after, unequal parts amusement and curling want that cannot quite escape the need to bathe first, however much he's allowed modesty to stay submerged beneath the waters of circumstance. They never have properly right moments. He's increasingly of the opinion they need to shake the idea free

Moments are moments. Even as he groans in dismay over the comment and tease of toads, even as one hand clutches lotus bud and his own borrowed robes closed almost as Lan Zhan had crafted them to be, the stumble as he steps on uplifted root, shifting his weight so the balance he catches natural has him bumping into his husband, trying to squirm his way into a handhold like a much younger man, all pastiches of courtship and flirtations whispered sweet on springtime's winds.

This is not a sweet village. These moments have harrowed, and he's bothered by the lack of justice for anyone here, villagers suffering, witches accused and accusers, people in power slipping and fighting to keep their home whole. )

A bath, ( he says, no more whine in his voice, the settled nature of a statement, ) Then the learning of this village's hurts. Lance one injury, find ways for it to heal. Understand why time and memory is broken, ah?

( Then the beacon, always the beacon, but he thinks: of course. And so he doesn't think further of the beacon, foregone conclusion, at all. )

Ah. ( Agreement, sound. He is barely an accessory when the wheels that cart Wei Ying's sharp, beautiful mind start turning, and the moment between them has shifted. Wei Ying is ready now, primed to conquer the truths of Yancai — and it is for Lan Wangji to now temper him, reaching out to tug his hand then gently bending the knee and shepherding Wei Ying to climb on Wangji's back, as children might.

He did so pledge, and to think, barefoot. Hardly seemly. Even Jiang Cheng would dutifully protest. )

The man who cannot remember, resolving memory. So be it.

( He pledged this, forgot near as easily, needing it even less now than the time he decried it while wearing the curse taken from his martial nephew. Wei Wuxian pauses as he's prompted, shifts, finds his face turning red in degrees, his turn to highlight sharp cheeks in red, his nose, his ears, the back of his neck. He does not wear the layered robes that make this form of modesty easier, not in Lan Zhan's loaned overrobes, and he swallows and laughs, a touch breathy, a touch nervous over the particulars of his embarrassment — not for anyone else, but for how this, how they, how... )

I did say, ( he does say, ) I remember that much, faulty as anything else is.

( Through genuine disinterest, yes; through defense for keeping himself saner, happier. Had he been happier here as the minstrel, no one and nothing else?

Perhaps. But that never was, never was meant to be, who or what he is.

He slides his arms as prompted, the loss of his hold on robes leading to their shifting, parting. To press himself against his husband's back, to submit to the hands questing for his thighs to support him, that much perhaps spared indelicate exposure.

Again.

Burying his face into his arm and at the side of Lan Zhan's neck when he rises, he bites down on his tongue. )

You.

( Are the evidence he never needed to parts of himself he never paid attention to. He holds as still as he can, burred to his husband's back, and quietly contemplates the absurdity of finding this stirring on any level. )

( He. A man, by any other name, for all the prison of his flesh neglects at times this humble memory. It serves him now, fierce reckoning, as Wei Ying climbs and digs his heels, the jutting, stabbing arrow-tipped pillars of his elbows. There are moments in this tryst when Lan Wangji cannot remember if he is serving a kindly, soft, medical purpose or being wholeheartedly invaded, duly scaled.

Wei Ying clings, Lan Wangji's arms fold back to capture his legs and cradle his thighs, and the cavernous concavity of his palm catches the bundle of Wei Ying's feet, in passing — fingers flicker, dance and dally, tickling toes with rivulets of entirely misused qi, because a man who runs wild and free in a forest, barefooted, must have waved his banners before every splinter in the land.

He holds on to Wei Ying. Starts them on an even path, only, not home, no. They have — a detour before them. )

I intend — ( This, amiably, in the way of every man who knows he possesses the advantage of physical strength: ) To gift you to Wen Qing.

( What a mighty pity that Wei Ying can't flee now. )

( stiffen, like his member come morning, when urine decries urgency, but anatomy renders it difficult to impossible to meet with immediacy. turn his head, eyes flashing dark in the brightness, lips pulled back from teeth. lean in, to murmur in voice deep and certain: )

I'm no one's to gift.

( and that promise, all before he very fetchingly nibbles, no, latches on to his husband's neck with teeth, using a touch of qi into the lotus pod to give it strength enough to part flesh.

think fast, lan wangji, because he has blood and free hands and the expanse of your white, white back to write on, and your hands there, parting his milky thighs. )

( Hissing, serpentine and quick, brush of Wei Ying's teeth a quiet murder. There's blood to be born of it, clotting with qi, the quiet rejuvenation of a body that above all, protects itself. He should yield, he knows. It makes Wei Ying pliant, bides Wangji time.

Whatever game this is, it will end poorly, frustrated or bittersweet. They have scant time to waste. He walks, branches crackling and wet licking at his ankles, his calves and climbing carelessly and cruel when the dark of the lakes escalates, and they cross drowned land again. He hefts Wei Ying farther up his back.

Then, disarmingly: )

Please. ( Be good. Allow this. It would ease him. )

( no fingers painted red stroke the back of his husband's neck, lines sinuous, curving into known quantities echoing his heart as much as that impulsive part of him unwilling to lay back down again after it awakened to the allowance of his existence once more. the possibility of his hands movement stills with the one word, and his expression, disgruntled and set, morphs slowly into mellow grumpiness, remaining unseen. )

Start by asking. Pleading after deciding for yourself is unworthy.

( there's of course unfair reasons in both directions, but he's tired of this, tired of this treatment of porcelain when he hasn't been fragile in genuine ways for years now. the shift into a man who walks a path other than the one of sword arts is long established, but still not fully accepted; he's not the strong qi cultivator he once had been, but he's not weak except in the bullheaded perspective of those who would only pit themselves directly against unstoppable forces as unmoving walls. it's how his husband has crafted himself, but it's not limited to that, his husband is not limited to that.

but this, too, is true: )

You're precious to me. Agree to your own physical with her now, and I will.

( Silent, still, paralysed. He listens, first to Wei Ying's words, then the murmured cascade of his righteous complaints, as they wade, Wangji's silks a slowing deterrent, through thickened, cold waters.

Unworthy, Wei Ying says, and the sting of it corrodes his skin, poisons his flesh. It singes and brands, and this is the truest hurt, to think that this man he carries in life as he did sixteen years in memory might find him — unequal to the task of serving him as companion. An unsuitable soulmate. Lacking. )

I was not transformed. ( Only one man between them flirted with metamorphosis, and Lan Wangji still touted his opposable thumbs. Even now, waters past his thighs and climbing, as they traverse sunken land, he is still proudly, inescapably human. The danger was born by one, alone.

Yet, conciliatory, he offers — )

But agreed.

( — and releases Wei Ying, dropping him down into lake water. Swim, if his help is so superfluous. )

( pulled back as he was, dropped, he falls fast, the flailing of hands catching at the back of lan zhan's robes to drag him back as he yelps, hitting the water with a splash of silty browns. )

( And down —

down, down, down, flopping, down

— they go, together.

Lan Wangji floundering, muttering, seeking purchase, drowning them in his silks, before emerging to break water with the general grace of an exhausted seal. He remembers, absently, to clutch Wei Ying's wrist and pick him up, protect him from harm's way —

...then, blinking away water from his lashes, as he beholds the shrew, his soulmate, he lets go again with a pointed push. Back in the water you go. )

( fished from the waters, tossed back in, and rising with borrowed robes already falling from shoulders as they still plaster to sides, he does as any man raised in yunmeng might.

he tackles lan zhan into the water with a lilting: )

Haa!

( Stop it. Cease, desist, contain thyself.

He falls back like a hard rock, splintering, like an arrow's tip — absently catching Wei Ying in both arms, before turning them both around, looking to dislodge his pursuer.

...never mind the water that keeps inundating his mouth. )

What — are you doing? ( What is this all about. )

( he laughs, short and water interrupted, struggling in the pointed way of one at play and willing to send them both repeatedly splashing into the waters: )

Playing, Lan Zhan!

( no fishing, but plenty of poignant grins and the tenacity of the man who was labeled yiling laozu as a mockery later morphed into a fear with respect, before it became arrogance.

play with him in the waters, maybe see the advantage to a proper bath, maybe not. he throws himself as fully into this moment as his complaints many moments before, addicted to the fluid nature of a life lived. )

( ...playing. Squirming, struggling, splashing. Lan Wangji, whose border between roughhousing and mere violence is, optimistically, liminal, follows between blinks.

Finally, stunned, in between the water, cascading over him: )

...you've lost your gift.

( As if the lotus pod can never be replaced again. )

( in a moment of limpet clinging to his wet husband, he blinks, then laughs in a low, rolling way. )

We've given it a chance to grow!

( seeded a different beginning for a lotus that might one day be. they're in the right environment for it, at the least.

he takes a moment to coax wet tendrils of hair off lan zhan's face, freeing his mouth and cheeks and jaw from their careless plastered embrace. )

Besides, are you not the real gift?

( Ah, to be a man loving, in love, trapped and entrapping. Subject to the whims of Wei Ying's stroking hand, hair swept from his face, and with it worry that these moments of understanding are more than the ripples that scatter and turmoil lake waters, willing them agitated.

Destinated to break. )

And you, a true frog?

( Truly, one manner of teasing deserves another. )

( Eyes alight with mischief and good humour, affection no affectation without an audience, a private moment in the waters, dirty and dripping and smelling of the elegance of worldly, healthy decay, the living system around them uncaring witness to two soaked men playing in the waters, to some extent. Fish and fowl and frogs and toads alike avoid them, insects undeterred, buzzing and flitting past on their own business.

The loaned robes cling indecent, caressing the curves of muscle, the angles of hip bones less visible now than two years ago, but still not the healthiness of his time in Yunmeng. He's slow to heal, still healing, and aside from the brand and scar within it that shows now where the robes fail to cover his pale chest, seemingly unmarked. Most his scars are small and faded, two lives lived, and here, flirtation given a purpose of endearments and wanting, being social simplicity and submission, he leans. Allows fingers to frame Lan Zhan's face, smiles with lashes lowering, happy because he wants to shake up the pique of their halting misunderstandings of intentions. Because his husband teases now, because he shows his soreness, his sourness, his heartbreak, his joy. Wei Wuxian asks for what's held as silent rule within society, because its silent expectations destroyed him, root by root.

Share with me the things you face. Let me share with you. Let burdens be questions with support if not solutions we both find.

Ask, request, state importance. )

We should kiss to see, ( he says, coming closer in increments waiting either the response of waters or Lan Zhan's sharp, sweet, petal pinked mouth ) but if you wish me a frog true, then only for you.

( Romance.

He's stunning at it. )

( Look at him, bold, nearly bare, the dregs of a man. Wei Ying, Wei Wuxian, this nightmare. Beautiful.

And Lan Wangji, fond, head tipped feline-like and gaze oil-slow, trickles the undivided, fluid heft of his attention onto Wei Ying's face, to know the cut of his likeness, the shape of his lure.

Kiss him, comes the invitation, and a day so harrowed and grey, frogs croaking turbulently in the distance does not deserve the sight of them. He leans in — measured, breath warm and flighty over Wei Ying's mouth, air purposefully blown — and lingers just far enough from contact. )

You will cut your feet on shells and pebbles. I object. ( This, from before. He does not forget. Never forgives. You made a scene. )

You did not walk on death to step on gravel after.

( Whatever little he imagined for himself a lifetime ago, or within the brittle beginnings of this one, it is Lan Zhan who has struck deeper without necessarily intending, time after time. Claws dig into his heart, the pain of it sharp and sudden enough he breathes in, emotion delivering what lashes to his back, his sides, his thighs finds so difficult to evoke. This vulnerability, this state of being that has a soul baring that has little to do with his near nudity, draws magnetic, clear, and to the everlasting truth of his own heart, brings a glimmer to his eyes.

Wonder, yes, swirling in the trapped galaxies within them, and the pearling edges of tears forming along his lids. He has cried, will cry, for so many reasons in the lives he's lived, the ones he builds and tinkers with even now. Preferred are the moments where it's in joy or the beauty of a heartbreak he cannot frame with words, the catch of air in his throat, the hitch to his breathing, the only response.

It's ridiculous, his husband's priorities at times. Wei Wuxian has not been a man well met to placing himself first, by nature one who does not, who has been taught by his growing that it's a selfishness gone unforgiven. For reasons he knows, for the loves and resentments that shaped his growing, for the empty faces of his parents in memory, for the last vestige of an outline of laughter and a donkey, for the long stretch of darkness and silence echoing in his own mind, it was never this.

Not even his shijie could, or should, have cared about something as silly as him walking on the ground, barefoot or otherwise. Boyish silliness, at one age. Simple necessity and many others. That he complains is that he finds he can, the novelty of small, useless, unimportant aches communicated with this man before him because they're all those things, and because Lan Zhan bears with listening or ignoring the complaints, knowing they're not deeply meaningful.

Yet the ache is in the sincerity, teased and lectured millimetres from each other, that exemplifies he cares.

Wei Wuxian tilts, fingers digging in just enough for his nails to leave crescent impressions on Lan Zhan's skin, bringing lips to lips in an exhalation and the closing of tear-lined eyes, simply, stupidly happy that Lan Zhan does not want him to step on gravel.

Knowing they're both fully aware that in no way will it cause Wei Wuxian genuine distress if he does for the li it takes to see all those they love home safe. )

( He weeps like the child, his namesake — a deluge. Flushed, fair, feverish. Pretty, only in virtue of habit, as if his body, having learned beauty, is hesitant to surrender it — for all Wei Ying's eyes glisten and puff, his cheeks swell.

There is an absence of grace in the game of Wei Ying's quiet acceptance of his mortality, his openness to hurt. Their lips meet, the starved animal of their fledgling attraction stretching long claws between them.

After, the first call to orbit Wei Ying heeded, he dips his head to drink down, greedy, the beaded prints of tears on Wei Ying's shuttered eyes, one, then the next, and murmur: )

You did not transform. ( Again, then, mouth to mouth and branding. ) Shameless toad.

( Two can breathe the fires of play and walk unburned, unscathed. But then, perhaps it is Lan Wangji who is the toad between them? He wears, in the end, enough of the wet and the slime. )

( He shivers in the small upsets of pleasant awareness and fissions of want traveling down his spine, paired with the ache of caring and being cared for flowing warm as sun heated stone through his veins. The departure of Lan Zhan's lips from the curve of his closed eyes, the murmur that follows, leaves him breathing out in a laugh, lashes raised so he might see his husband's face from too close, too precious, all their angles tight and worn down only enough to cease cutting each other simply by proximity.

Slotting together has been a long navigation of puzzles, and even now, they only find momentary solutions to a shifting, evolving reality.

His fingers skim back, nails raking into wet hair to hold it back again, pulled up like robes around ankles, coaxed away from Lan Zhan's chest, his shoulders. )

Again. ( He says, content as his husband's toad, if that's what he's to be, because a name is a name is a word, and he doesn't wear that title when he holds his true born form. For him, let Wei Wuxian croon. He does now, in the low rumble of a toads call, teasing in the moments before he kisses Lan Zhan again, savouring him as he does the last drops of Emperor's Smile, a world and a clamouring mind away. )

Just in case, ah?

( Pulling back only enough to speak, the humming drone of insects settling over then again, the cry of a water bird echoing along the water's surface. )

Will you be mine, ( He asks instead, ) after we've appeased Wen Qing, sister of my heart? After we've done our duties this day, striving after the hidden causes to this village's ills, knowing one rising and setting of the sun has not resolved them all, whatever we wish otherwise?

( Fingers anchored around his skull, draped in water dripping locks of hair, largely bared front even now barely pressing against Lan Zhan's modest immodesty in his own soaked tableau, either of them easily mistaken for men of jesting consequence. Waterlogged and half drowned, mud streaked and slimed, and he cannot think Lan Zhan any less handsome, less real, than now, damp and surrounded by the halo of light off water and clouds of gnat like bugs avoiding them in favour of nearer shores. )

( Wei Ying's — and whose else? It seems to him a long, pained stretch of duties between them: they belong to honour, to justice, to their son, to pride. To clan and amends and legacy. To each other, as a clever ruse, a wayward, estranged afterthought.

Wei Ying has wetted him in every one of his waters: blood and wine and cinnabar and now the helpless ponds. Unbidden, Lan Wangji crosses the distance, just as an owl hoots deep and dark and sickly like fresh-spun tanghulu, and a distant toad remembers it is king of a forlorn, verdant empire. He catches his husband's mouth again, soft, unlearned. Like children, they play with their food; they tell Lan Wangji, this man bites.

He is no savage, surrendered to beauty, silken shirt and Lan Wangji's fingertips sticking to his back. Tongues are a hard negotiation, lips clumsy. If ever they perfect the arrangements of their lanky, helpless geometries, they will be unbeatable.

A kiss like a heartbeat, a blink. )

Build a bed. ( And modesty and seclusion, in the confines of their cave. Let Wei Ying's will be then done. ) And I shall come.

( 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 — )

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un: xianxian of yunmeng jiang | video

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