un: xianxian of yunmeng jiang | video

[weifinder]

( 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.

Comments

[weifinder]

( 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. )

[downswing]

( 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.

[weifinder]

( 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 — )