A smile, teeth bared, bright, and he laughs. Wear what pleases him, and he'd have to know more about that, he supposes, outside of wearing what's convenient, what's purposeful, what masks and misguides. Purples and blues and blacks, the bruise he'd bear, white layered close to his heart.
Here and now, a wraith that moves with squelching footsteps, ushering water with each step forward, cold but shy of freezing, independent of the moat and its carnage. More ice shattered and rock and décor strewn across its surface, swallowed by the dragon's waves, and less of the blood, which would define it should those trapped inside be forced outward prematurely.
He can see them, in that moment. The torn panic of their masks and magnificent clothing; the scents of burning hair and paper, of smoke lingering and eclipsed by the acid bite of winter. Bodies that could crowd balconies, pressed up to gnarled and jutting thresholds to a fall that would end in splashed, shattered red.
Blinks the afterimage away, to find no shadows spilled so far, but their progress inexorable toward the screams that precede such shadows, thick and heavy and heady enough, were he another man, were this another era. The question asked, and he steps close, shoulder to shoulder, gaze on a wounded man's face before it shifts slowly away, looking forward. Always forward, in the end.
"I tired," he says, that it has happened and could happen, but he smiles, teeth bared, and it is a matter of his past. "I learned to find room to breathe, reasons for joy. Even in the worst of it, Lan Zhan, we have to find the light."
His dark eyes pulled by elliptic orbit to study Lan Zhan's face once more, and he reaches for him, a small shift of hand to brush fingers against knuckles.
"The carnage cannot be all that we allow to define us. And it tries. You know that better than I, I think." Sixteen years of chasing chaos, and the heart of it had always been light and blinding and as hollow as the centre of a lightning struck tree.
He fumbles for his flute, his instrument of horror in one era, his named and thoughtful companion, steadier than his own heart. Salvaged by Jiang Cheng once, and from a time of his worst darkness and desperation, named by the woman who had raised him in the only way that had taught him half of what it can be to love. Wei Wuxian plays, and steps forward, nods for Lan Zhan to take the balcony first. He will follow, but here, also, to clear some of the way for the panicked and the frightened, who will not recall him or thank him for it, when his song rises stronger than the melding of bone from sundered edge to sundered edge. The body that responds dead but living, and the witch that streaks past lingering with scents of burning despite no new burns in injury. She carries with her, always will, that haunting, that hatred.
But she carries with her that power, too, and it is hers that moves the wreckage that turns the screaming passage into louder shrieks before she's sent off again, giving survivors and avenue forward and across, away from whatever haunts the far side. Back to the dragon and its writing tantrums, merited and owed, and there is no life or unlife as sacred as hope in a moment where Wei Wuxian forgets what it means to breathe pain, and simply bolts sideways, away from the flame that reaches toward them, and looks for that balcony, each cliffside conquered in a spire's worth of shuddering near-relief.
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Here and now, a wraith that moves with squelching footsteps, ushering water with each step forward, cold but shy of freezing, independent of the moat and its carnage. More ice shattered and rock and décor strewn across its surface, swallowed by the dragon's waves, and less of the blood, which would define it should those trapped inside be forced outward prematurely.
He can see them, in that moment. The torn panic of their masks and magnificent clothing; the scents of burning hair and paper, of smoke lingering and eclipsed by the acid bite of winter. Bodies that could crowd balconies, pressed up to gnarled and jutting thresholds to a fall that would end in splashed, shattered red.
Blinks the afterimage away, to find no shadows spilled so far, but their progress inexorable toward the screams that precede such shadows, thick and heavy and heady enough, were he another man, were this another era. The question asked, and he steps close, shoulder to shoulder, gaze on a wounded man's face before it shifts slowly away, looking forward. Always forward, in the end.
"I tired," he says, that it has happened and could happen, but he smiles, teeth bared, and it is a matter of his past. "I learned to find room to breathe, reasons for joy. Even in the worst of it, Lan Zhan, we have to find the light."
His dark eyes pulled by elliptic orbit to study Lan Zhan's face once more, and he reaches for him, a small shift of hand to brush fingers against knuckles.
"The carnage cannot be all that we allow to define us. And it tries. You know that better than I, I think." Sixteen years of chasing chaos, and the heart of it had always been light and blinding and as hollow as the centre of a lightning struck tree.
He fumbles for his flute, his instrument of horror in one era, his named and thoughtful companion, steadier than his own heart. Salvaged by Jiang Cheng once, and from a time of his worst darkness and desperation, named by the woman who had raised him in the only way that had taught him half of what it can be to love. Wei Wuxian plays, and steps forward, nods for Lan Zhan to take the balcony first. He will follow, but here, also, to clear some of the way for the panicked and the frightened, who will not recall him or thank him for it, when his song rises stronger than the melding of bone from sundered edge to sundered edge. The body that responds dead but living, and the witch that streaks past lingering with scents of burning despite no new burns in injury. She carries with her, always will, that haunting, that hatred.
But she carries with her that power, too, and it is hers that moves the wreckage that turns the screaming passage into louder shrieks before she's sent off again, giving survivors and avenue forward and across, away from whatever haunts the far side. Back to the dragon and its writing tantrums, merited and owed, and there is no life or unlife as sacred as hope in a moment where Wei Wuxian forgets what it means to breathe pain, and simply bolts sideways, away from the flame that reaches toward them, and looks for that balcony, each cliffside conquered in a spire's worth of shuddering near-relief.