[ He forgets himself, his face. Shields behind the broad spread of a veined, gasped mask and assumes the tatters of borrowed disposition — brother's polish, the abyssal, oceanic depth of a courtier's bow, the breezy elegance of a coquette seeking her first matrimony.
Flickered light forgives him; trailed like a firefly's train, he flits — a creature of white still, pale under his silks, like spume of anger — from the periphery of the reception halls to their bright-blinding maws. Candles at each step, sundering the room between territories of dark shadow. Traversing them, come the whispering emissaries of milling crowds. Cloying, sticky sweetness of incense and the organic pungency of excess alcohol, so thickened still that its scent spreads aftertaste.
For Lan Wangji's part, he looks each way: when lovers nearly crash into him, too immersed in their affections. When the attendants bring in mounds of delicate, shifting, trembled confections. When diplomats mistake him for a skittish negotiator, and sorcerers for a spy, turned indiscreet. When servants, finally, tire of the seamless, stiff stolidity of his presence and entrust him with a tray of wine cups he seeks to returns to them, only to be seized, at each step, by thirsting merrymakers.
Lan Wangji was not forged for popularity. And finds himself ill at ease enough to offer the tray of half-filled wine cups that's periodically refilled and assaulted by vultures to the nearest, dearest, standing-still person. ]
...perhaps, for your balance.
[ Take it. It's your turn. ]
ii. after: the sickness halls (#teamMacaluso)
[ He takes to sickness easily, with the greed of the death-marked. Poise is the first casualty of honeyed erosion, the line of his shoulders ruined — a house, lessened at its foundation. Poison, but he knows the word before the healer speaks it, feels it in the empty, ceaseless turmoiled groan of his core, grinding.
Hurt starts so: when his body, depleted of recourse, bides the time to recuperation with false surrender. He feels it warm, a feverish spread, molten, where his fingers scatter, spider, catch cold and futile on the ledge of the fainting sofa they've delegated him. Rest, they said, and to what purpose? In his mouth, tongue slack, and behind his lids, white brilliance.
He ate of the thing, the one paltry concession to their benefactor. And him, a politician of the courts, an envoy of Gusu Lan, chief cultivator. Survivor of two war campaigns, and of Jin Guangyao. And he closed his mouth and walked his teeth and in the space of these roiling, cluttered, suffocated quarters, he hears only the hollow collision of regrets unspoken. You fool. Fool thrice over. You leave behind a son, you leave a man who knows you, a woman without defences. You leave a life. You walk freely.
Between them, the healers come and go, to trade the lilting platitudes of coreless reassurance. Distantly, he feels the shift of weight, redistributed — the soft, intrusive presence of another person sat beside him. The healers again, with their borrowed poetry. The verdict of sickness. The plaintive apology. The bows, the pledges to attempt against odds of impossibility, to seek a cure or a palliative brew. Like a brush of birds' wings, come.
And gone.
He is not a man of medicine, not a priest, not a hermit possessed of kind patience. Knows not whom he speaks for (another; himself) but offers indistinctly, once the healer has retreated, and it is only them, two fools condemned: ]
Fear nothing.
iii. the second poison: jiang wanyin
[ He knows, Jiang Cheng knows.
Round, empty-minded gasp: Lan Wangji tastes fear vinegary and thick-laced down his throat like poorly-ground ginseng, a hard swallow. Watches the small hands of a healing woman extricate the sweat from Jiang Cheng's face, take the soft, ghostly print of his pulse, doubtlessly as defiant as Lan Wangji's.
He remembers: Jiang Cheng's eyes dark across the feasting table, Wangji's first to turn away. Unpleasantness begs no persistence of company. There are rules for this, for them, etiquettes that paint their hostility as indifference through the lens of vagaries. They crumble like scratch-marred walls now.
No sooner the healer leaves Jiang Cheng, Wangji meets him. Silence spell. Bichen. Talismans. His bare hands, turned feral. Of all the weapons at his disposal, he chooses the bend of his knees: one, then its brother. The trickled, calculated collapse of his arms beside him, for a bow would be too insincere of a transaction.
He knows, Jiang Cheng knows. They ate of the same poison. Were seen by the same healer. Abandoned in the same corner of the emptying quarter. ]
Say nothing of me to them.
[ But Jiang Cheng will. Spite rots his blood, compels him. Spills across the parchment of his body, his soul, like downturned ink. Wangji cannot fight tide, being himself half-water. ]
Brother. [ And watch her, Bichen's tip would not carve out his ribs and gut him so cleanly, would not skewer so completely as this one word, ill purposed. Blessing, turned curse. May Zewu-Jun spit a thousand turns upon Wangji's face, and honour will not be satisfied. ] Hate me enough to deny me this. Remember what I stole. That I watch his sleep and stand his sword, and he will not be returned to you.
[ Sizhui. Wei Ying. What difference will a final cruelty make, now? With all lost, already? ]
iv. a man and his game
[ Forests, again. Haunting, once more. Phantasms, greedy hands, bleeding him, scratching them, chasing. Scenting despair, roots of the nearby trees riotous, trembling to hunt them down. Under a gravid moon, he feels himself the part of the rebel hero of legend, in motion.
He has yielded, by now, the better part of lesser senses: touch fooling him to question if the bark under hand is thick or thinned. If his grip on Bichen, the sword unmoving in her hilt, comes errant and wavered. His hearing starts to give, and he thinks, more fool him, he needs only blood in his strangled veins to sense his heart adrift, then beating, as a war drum.
Fortune favoured him: Wen Qing bargained their entry, but he fled discreetly, purchased the privilege of perching alone in this mad, tight-bound tree with the coin of his own untempered yearning. He cannot ask where Wen Qing and Wei Ying have gone, how they keep. Cannot invite the imprint of care, like hands strangling his throat.
So, he waits for the owl. Waits the hour. Waits and waits and waits, and remembers that he was never a hunter of animals, only of men — and that, peering in the distance, he suspects he sees an owl — a large voluminous beard, bright-eyed and majestically indifferent in the way of creatures that owned a land before it was peopled. It need not fear Lan Wangji: it was old, before he left his swaddling. It will outlive him.
And he does its prophecy little injury when it lands at the tail end of the branches whose root he'd perched on, and Lan Wangji deploys against her the full strength of a tutelage in talisman magic, a shower of parchment, an excess of cord sorcery and, finally, the man himself, dashing, sword drawn, to strike down the beast —
Only to land at the feet of the tree, proudly holding out his catch before the newcomer who's joined him: a well-fed, murmuring, terrified... ]
...nightingale.
[ Better luck next time, Lan Wangji. ]
v. same verse, same as the forest's first | wei ying wuxian
[ They circle in each other's orbit so often than the tragedy of gravity collides them inexorably. He does not ask how came the familiar, tendril warmth of Wei Ying at his back, how he tastes it like blood-iron in the back of his mouth, between the sharp rustle of grass and leaf, the waters of misted moonlight.
There is a thrill of exhilaration in this: knowing the enemy close, however discarded its face, however scratched its eyes and likeness. Scenting death and decay and the bite of both on his limbs, and knowing them kept jealously safe under the watch of a companion. This man, whose shoulder rises with Wangji's, to mirror the balance of their footing. Who knows, inexplicably, the smears and catches in Wangji's breath, echoed in his own.
Who needs no greeting past the soft, silvered inclination of Bichen to Wangji's right side, a broad arc that betrays an excess of indulgent comfort: an enemy might find the span to strike. Wei Ying requires no opportunity, fits his blind spots like a weathered glove. Even in this, he proves a fluid, generous companion.
If Wangji loses every sense, every thought, every compulsion, he will retain this: the certainty that comes, quicker than velvet shrivels on ground, when his sight of true enemies is lost, but he is found.
Laughter claws out, coarse. He cannot help it. Omissions and secrets only thrive in silence. What more is there to say? ]
no subject
romevenicetaravast (masquerade)[ He forgets himself, his face. Shields behind the broad spread of a veined, gasped mask and assumes the tatters of borrowed disposition — brother's polish, the abyssal, oceanic depth of a courtier's bow, the breezy elegance of a coquette seeking her first matrimony.
Flickered light forgives him; trailed like a firefly's train, he flits — a creature of white still, pale under his silks, like spume of anger — from the periphery of the reception halls to their bright-blinding maws. Candles at each step, sundering the room between territories of dark shadow. Traversing them, come the whispering emissaries of milling crowds. Cloying, sticky sweetness of incense and the organic pungency of excess alcohol, so thickened still that its scent spreads aftertaste.
For Lan Wangji's part, he looks each way: when lovers nearly crash into him, too immersed in their affections. When the attendants bring in mounds of delicate, shifting, trembled confections. When diplomats mistake him for a skittish negotiator, and sorcerers for a spy, turned indiscreet. When servants, finally, tire of the seamless, stiff stolidity of his presence and entrust him with a tray of wine cups he seeks to returns to them, only to be seized, at each step, by thirsting merrymakers.
Lan Wangji was not forged for popularity. And finds himself ill at ease enough to offer the tray of half-filled wine cups that's periodically refilled and assaulted by vultures to the nearest, dearest, standing-still person. ]
...perhaps, for your balance.
[ Take it. It's your turn. ]
ii. after: the sickness halls (#teamMacaluso)
[ He takes to sickness easily, with the greed of the death-marked. Poise is the first casualty of honeyed erosion, the line of his shoulders ruined — a house, lessened at its foundation. Poison, but he knows the word before the healer speaks it, feels it in the empty, ceaseless turmoiled groan of his core, grinding.
Hurt starts so: when his body, depleted of recourse, bides the time to recuperation with false surrender. He feels it warm, a feverish spread, molten, where his fingers scatter, spider, catch cold and futile on the ledge of the fainting sofa they've delegated him. Rest, they said, and to what purpose? In his mouth, tongue slack, and behind his lids, white brilliance.
He ate of the thing, the one paltry concession to their benefactor. And him, a politician of the courts, an envoy of Gusu Lan, chief cultivator. Survivor of two war campaigns, and of Jin Guangyao. And he closed his mouth and walked his teeth and in the space of these roiling, cluttered, suffocated quarters, he hears only the hollow collision of regrets unspoken. You fool. Fool thrice over. You leave behind a son, you leave a man who knows you, a woman without defences. You leave a life. You walk freely.
Between them, the healers come and go, to trade the lilting platitudes of coreless reassurance. Distantly, he feels the shift of weight, redistributed — the soft, intrusive presence of another person sat beside him. The healers again, with their borrowed poetry. The verdict of sickness. The plaintive apology. The bows, the pledges to attempt against odds of impossibility, to seek a cure or a palliative brew. Like a brush of birds' wings, come.
And gone.
He is not a man of medicine, not a priest, not a hermit possessed of kind patience. Knows not whom he speaks for (another; himself) but offers indistinctly, once the healer has retreated, and it is only them, two fools condemned: ]
Fear nothing.
iii. the second poison: jiang wanyin
[ He knows, Jiang Cheng knows.
Round, empty-minded gasp: Lan Wangji tastes fear vinegary and thick-laced down his throat like poorly-ground ginseng, a hard swallow. Watches the small hands of a healing woman extricate the sweat from Jiang Cheng's face, take the soft, ghostly print of his pulse, doubtlessly as defiant as Lan Wangji's.
He remembers: Jiang Cheng's eyes dark across the feasting table, Wangji's first to turn away. Unpleasantness begs no persistence of company. There are rules for this, for them, etiquettes that paint their hostility as indifference through the lens of vagaries. They crumble like scratch-marred walls now.
No sooner the healer leaves Jiang Cheng, Wangji meets him. Silence spell. Bichen. Talismans. His bare hands, turned feral. Of all the weapons at his disposal, he chooses the bend of his knees: one, then its brother. The trickled, calculated collapse of his arms beside him, for a bow would be too insincere of a transaction.
He knows, Jiang Cheng knows. They ate of the same poison. Were seen by the same healer. Abandoned in the same corner of the emptying quarter. ]
Say nothing of me to them.
[ But Jiang Cheng will. Spite rots his blood, compels him. Spills across the parchment of his body, his soul, like downturned ink. Wangji cannot fight tide, being himself half-water. ]
Brother. [ And watch her, Bichen's tip would not carve out his ribs and gut him so cleanly, would not skewer so completely as this one word, ill purposed. Blessing, turned curse. May Zewu-Jun spit a thousand turns upon Wangji's face, and honour will not be satisfied. ] Hate me enough to deny me this. Remember what I stole. That I watch his sleep and stand his sword, and he will not be returned to you.
[ Sizhui. Wei Ying. What difference will a final cruelty make, now? With all lost, already? ]
iv. a man and his game
[ Forests, again. Haunting, once more. Phantasms, greedy hands, bleeding him, scratching them, chasing. Scenting despair, roots of the nearby trees riotous, trembling to hunt them down. Under a gravid moon, he feels himself the part of the rebel hero of legend, in motion.
He has yielded, by now, the better part of lesser senses: touch fooling him to question if the bark under hand is thick or thinned. If his grip on Bichen, the sword unmoving in her hilt, comes errant and wavered. His hearing starts to give, and he thinks, more fool him, he needs only blood in his strangled veins to sense his heart adrift, then beating, as a war drum.
Fortune favoured him: Wen Qing bargained their entry, but he fled discreetly, purchased the privilege of perching alone in this mad, tight-bound tree with the coin of his own untempered yearning. He cannot ask where Wen Qing and Wei Ying have gone, how they keep. Cannot invite the imprint of care, like hands strangling his throat.
So, he waits for the owl. Waits the hour. Waits and waits and waits, and remembers that he was never a hunter of animals, only of men — and that, peering in the distance, he suspects he sees an owl — a large voluminous beard, bright-eyed and majestically indifferent in the way of creatures that owned a land before it was peopled. It need not fear Lan Wangji: it was old, before he left his swaddling. It will outlive him.
And he does its prophecy little injury when it lands at the tail end of the branches whose root he'd perched on, and Lan Wangji deploys against her the full strength of a tutelage in talisman magic, a shower of parchment, an excess of cord sorcery and, finally, the man himself, dashing, sword drawn, to strike down the beast —
Only to land at the feet of the tree, proudly holding out his catch before the newcomer who's joined him: a well-fed, murmuring, terrified... ]
...nightingale.
[ Better luck next time, Lan Wangji. ]
v. same verse, same as the forest's first | wei
yingwuxian[ They circle in each other's orbit so often than the tragedy of gravity collides them inexorably. He does not ask how came the familiar, tendril warmth of Wei Ying at his back, how he tastes it like blood-iron in the back of his mouth, between the sharp rustle of grass and leaf, the waters of misted moonlight.
There is a thrill of exhilaration in this: knowing the enemy close, however discarded its face, however scratched its eyes and likeness. Scenting death and decay and the bite of both on his limbs, and knowing them kept jealously safe under the watch of a companion. This man, whose shoulder rises with Wangji's, to mirror the balance of their footing. Who knows, inexplicably, the smears and catches in Wangji's breath, echoed in his own.
Who needs no greeting past the soft, silvered inclination of Bichen to Wangji's right side, a broad arc that betrays an excess of indulgent comfort: an enemy might find the span to strike. Wei Ying requires no opportunity, fits his blind spots like a weathered glove. Even in this, he proves a fluid, generous companion.
If Wangji loses every sense, every thought, every compulsion, he will retain this: the certainty that comes, quicker than velvet shrivels on ground, when his sight of true enemies is lost, but he is found.
Laughter claws out, coarse. He cannot help it. Omissions and secrets only thrive in silence. What more is there to say? ]
...that day. I craved loquat.
[ That, apparently. ]