and breathe -

[downswing]

WHO: Lan Wangji, your fine self, Zhou Zishu, Lan Sizhui
WHEN: all things underwater during Macaluso’s dragon capture attempts
WHERE: the bay of Taravast
WHAT: in which Lan Wangji loves underwater silence, and sea creatures, dragons and basic breathing don’t love him back
WARNINGS: Sea creatures, underwater claustrophobia




i. open | sea creature served raw

[ Hunt, if you mean to be caught. Later, he will remember.

Now: waters dark, clean. Roiled mourning. Where boats lance above, the skies weep in wake with empty translucence. Below, the smear of golden striations sundering sands Lan Wangji's feet only tease at stark distance. Enough of light yet percolates to know he has not broken to hard depths, though the flickered swell of crowding froth whips and scratches his lungs with each shallow breath.

Trust the thrall, they said, and Gusu Lan trains deft swimmers, but habit and reason prevail over the comforts of sorcery, of artifice. An hour’s time, bought at the cost of instinct that woos him to grasp the beaded string of nearby coral and propel himself up, minutes into the excursion.

He roams farther than the fishermen require it: past schools of stuttered silvered fish, past the dregs of algae and ripped debris, southward into the hungry mouth of the teasing abyss, until the cold magicians send in crepuscular mists of ice pellets and sedative wafts disperses.

Until he drifts, limbs slack, cutting waters blue and deep darks bluer, and thinks, more fool of a man — the creature is only a conjunction of shadow shifting in mimicry of the midday hour’s sun, changing. It rips itself in movement, slow with the grandeur of every predator that knows its survival inexorable: too big to fall, and a tired deluge of yielding fish, plankton and rubble pulled into the gravity of its unshackled mouth. As if it were a tectonic plate, alive.

Retreating as slowly as his limbs may paddle without injecting fresh stream of bubbles in the waters, Lan Wangji does not know when he encounters another silhouette, cannot say when he concludes, this, then, is the warmth of fellow man. Cannot look away from the enormity of the blindly searching creature.

Survival strikes late; he mouths aside, through the peculiar sorcery: ]

Keep still. Stay low.

[ To alert it now is to risk their hides. ]

ii. Zhou Zishu can rescue mermaids too

[ The arrogance of magic: exertion, when breath takes toll and stokes to burn, when whatever sorcery lent him the hour’s time underwater begs leave of him, and he is yet stranded below and beneath water and a quivered, senseless thing, remembering the motions of natural biology. The cost of stabbing sea depths with impunity.

There are mercies: enough of the light of the braziers litters speckles of hot white at the surface that Lan Wangji can yet tell land without losing direction. Whirlpools of fish round the great, stilled shadows of fishermen’s boats like beggars and bruises: green and yellowed and ripening to purples, crowding to ask the alms of any spare morsels, thrown in.

By the end of the ascent, pressure deafens him, water is only a haze of milky whites and butter, light distorted. He heaves — coughs around water, and more fool he, a man of Gusu Lan, learned in swimming, experiened past negligence of the basics — and latches onto the flank of the nearest boat, mindless when his weight and the despair of his pull nearly imbalance it.

Waves lash his face in a rush of spume, the start of sick, stormed unrest, when he breaks surface. He clings on to the bull, the thick knots of net and rope intended for the catch of lesser things, now bound to his wrists. If he knows Zhou Zishu, it is after countless, blind, slicked blinks, lashes steeping. When he reaches a hand out in quiet asking for a pull. ]

...apo... a... ah... [ Give him the moment, the guttural, wrenched breath, the cleanliness of air that seeps the wet and salt the very water absents, at great depth. ] ...apologies.

[ There. Hello. ]

iii. Lan Sizhui goes to the underwater zoo

[ All villagers know this truth: if a lord wishes it done, it will be so. And Macaluso Spina intends to have his dragon.

Sorcery intervenes: the cold’s spread, sticky underwater, part and particles that cloy and crowd and thicken the depths, a great dark stewing. Earlier, the limpid waves had shared the feverish secret of their fish schools, their starvelings, their gossips, the little, curious creatures that tackled boats as if to beg a word.

Now, magic bides Lan Wangji an hour’s endurance underwater. And his knees know, his bones, his fingers: remember from the streams of Gusu Lan how to coil and retract, to curl and contain what licked scarcity of warmth his body possesses in the face of ice terrors, the swarm of white formations, great slow sheets that groan under their own heft.

The canals cannot survive ice magic long, he suspects, not with the traffic of vessels, the people unaccustomed. But Lan Wangji can have this: a moment, his son yet at his side, when there is only the prickle of wet and cold, and the white of them, drifting, and then —

The bright, swirling strike of lightning, serpentine, the dragon at distance. He sees it, and first assumes it only a cutting of ice, sinking, drowned — but it traverses, rounds, turns into itself, seeks out. It appears to chase nebulously, whatever chilly sorcery they drip from above dulling its wits —

And Lan Wangji’s arm comes up, signals Sizhui at ease, to yet stand his ground, as the dragon surges to break the surface, then collapses back down, slabs of gelid thickness crashing back with it into grey waters, their silence depths now a battlefield before its trashing. It does not seek them out, only slithers, scales long and slick and returning motes of distant light.

It aches Lan Wangji, to speak underwater, body distressed by sorcery. Still, Sizhui must have his instruction: ]

Do not stain your hands with its capture.

[ Let it be witnessed, let them learn the creature, how it shifts and turns and tatters water — let them remember, and assist it later on. ]

Comments

[downswing]

[ Seek them out. A noble pursuit, signed and condemned through Lan Wangji's absent nod, diluted. They know nothing of what waits above, the boats rallied like foam on water, chipped and rattling and weakly assembled, tarnished by time. Taravast boasts every wealth and mark of decadence among its gentry, no expense or finery spared: but the foundation of the citadel rots as well and deeply as that of Caiyi, of Yiling. These sailors do not man the ships of kings. ]

Why alone? [ But he knows the truth of it, tender on a traitor's tongue, the simple political reduction of sect echelons between those deemed worthy, and they who go dismissed. Knows too that the age is fragile, yet turning: this year, five more, Lan Wangji — spare to a secluded brother — will rank still above Sizhui, the de facto successor. Until the tide breaks, one white hair too many gather, faith shrivels in Zewu-Jun's odds of honouring the succession line, and Sizhui becomes the hope of a golden age, its ephemeral triumph.

And Wangji remembers a time on stair steps, binding his fate to that of another man who thought himself lesser — starts the swim first, cautious for the greedy undulations of the dragon's bending being, not so much hunting them but answering the provocation of fleeting, active motes of dust in its horizon. ] Together.

[paperbutterflies]

Together. I would much like that.

[ Sizhui's joy is not hidden, not down here.

He does not think of the future in those terms. He hopes that Zewu-jun will one day recover enough to step out of seclusion, and even if he should take no wife, he might choose an heir to train. Sizhui himself doesn't consider himself (perhaps a little blindly) the kind of person to inspire hope, let alone be the hope of many. Or the whole sect.

But he will always do his best, always, and he will improve until he is strong enough to carry whatever task is needed of him.

He follows his father as he ascends towards the surface, trying to discern what and who is up there, and who might need them. ]

Do you think that they will be able to catch the dragon?

[downswing]

[ Together, they swim in a tumble of misaligned limbs and struggling breath, racing not to capture ground and take a finer position against the dragon, but strictly to outpace it. It strikes him with distant but lingering satisfaction, that they do not indulge in this often — a silent, stake-free exercise of their bodies, bartering co-ordination.

He has supervised his son's forays in sword work, however distantly, deciding in the way of estranged mothers which style and form best suit his young shape, his growing inclinations. Later, in deployment, he could direct and discover and heal Sizhui's rare oversight.

But leisure and sport, the act of sharing water and a swim have long avoided them, too often burdened by duty. Now — ...even now, it comes with price and purpose, and the stinging striation of hurts on Lan Wangji's straining back. ]

I think of what they will do to the creature after. [ How they will torture, savage it. How they will make a spectacle of its capture, a triumph of its containment. How Lan Wangji's eyes dart back to the gallant, undulating figure, white slipped through the deep jeweled tones of water, briefly roiling, before remembering the elasticity of a landscape unchanged. Too settled in its age to tolerate lasting skirmish. ] Men house great cruelty. [ And in a rare moment of loquacity: ] As your relations learned.

[paperbutterflies]

[ Sizhui has been diligent, not needing the reminders of a senior to know that the best of his skills will be required in this odd realm, over and over again. He hopes that it will be enough; he knows that he has not slacked in ways to bring him or his teachers shame.

If not for the constant worry - and the poisoning was enough of a reason to worry, let alone the various kinds of separation, from those here and from those back home - he would find the places and ways of learning very interesting and fascinating. And there is lady Wen...

But that is... generally. Right now, there is a dragon.

Hanguang-jun's words make his lips purse, and his eyes narrow as he looks through the dimness of the water. ]

I know not what they plan. But if we are known to have helped, perhaps we can find ways to ease its fate later.

[ There are times to speak one's opposition openly, and times to be silent on it so that actions can speak louder than any words said. ]

Hanguang-jun, do you think one of the cousins crueler than the other?