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(no subject)
WHO: Lan Wangji, Wen Qing, Emilia + others to be added...
WHEN: mid/just post-revolution.
WHERE: Palace of the Doxe, broader Taravast.
WHAT: Revolution, spiritual inquisition, the undue instinct to take inspiration from one old, Machievallian man's quest for immortality.
WARNINGS: descriptions of carnage, some roughening up of spirits during interrogation.
NOTE: so far, this houses a few follow-up or pre-discussed catch-up logs, but definitely please PM if you'd like to do something \o/
emilia
( Bodies, bone crackling. Silence gripping him gracile like silhouettes of smoke, claws tethered to his wrists for anchor. They drown: spirits, restless, drifting, blinded. They walk the room with the blink, cat-eyed lethargy of men claimed by the feverish sickness, slow to grasp their circumstances. Their steps do not echo, their shadows sunder and diffuse without deep, owlish cast.
Between them, Lan Wangji’s knelt-sunken to his thighs in spillage, whites burnt at the edges by rust-blood, old gutting, rot new. This is the learning: in the Doxe’s palace, lyre and string music suckled from shrill screams, and red is liberation. The revolutionaries preceded them, then the guards. The devotees of mistress Vannozza Spina. Their own forces of tumbling, snarled infiltration.
Later, when he’s banished himself in the vast bellies of Bonaccorso’s wing, where every body that raised weapon in the name of its volatile master has been hanged to burn or bleed, and ash washes the wrists and foreheads of each witch of Attaryl — and he does not ask, how the Bessis knew them, how their tempers stoked to the murder sprees, and under dark sunset, they put the hurt in their enemies, drip by drip, like relief of water and a bland meal first proffered to a starveling. They killed, how they killed, the dead Attaryl whisper to him, in wails of old qi, and Wangji’s hands glistened with the innards of them, gristle to his knuckles, their raw, animal stench rising high and throttling, cloying like incense of the stargazing lily.
What cadavers he has found, sleep on cold marble beside him, four for the count, the whispers long. He has asked. Without sorcered Inquiry, there is no knowing. Regret stabs like needle, thinned from a dagger blade. To delay the passage of spirits unto the peaceful world is to shackle them down, slow their redemption. Still, mere days before they flee, it is known.
If there is answer to Wei Ying’s quandary — may the heavens forgive Lan Wangji — only witches who craft and weave the unnatural extension of men’s lives unto immortality may reveal it.
In the space of the halls, become death rooms, become Bonaccorso Spina’s cell, become Lan Wangji’s fortress, the ricochet of footsteps deafens. He flinches; does not look up, past the first glance, past the knowing. His molten gaze enucleates the corpses before him, operates to divide personhood from body, bare. He is still calming spirits for further inquisition. Emilia needs-must wait. )
Stay your step. The dead are startled.
( They have yet to clear and settle, like rippling lake waters coming to a still. They are… sensitive in this stage, lent to fast, blind fury, or play. Intruders fascinate them. Even an exorcist of Lan Wangji’s calibre struggles to predict whim. )
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Emilia had not shared Vittoria's fascination with the dead, a fascination their grandmother once feared would lead to the darker side of their practices. She herself had always been torn on the subject, but her twin. Oh, her eyes would alight with interest at the prospect of washing and preparing the bodies of the deceased. It hadn't mattered in the end, of course. The brotherhood had chosen their lone friend Claudia for the task, much to her sister's disappointment.
But on rare afternoons they weren't all working and could walk along the beach to pick shells for their Moon Blessings, Claudia would share stories of how the mummies of the monastery came to be. Vittoria would lean into her with a hungry gleam in her eye as Emilia squirmed, the way she no longer squirms now.
She tries not to think of the last thing her best friend said before she lost herself to a madness, the beds of her nails coated with dried blood from her efforts to pry stones up from the street. Piles of bodies and ashes of the fallen. None are welcome, and you — you'll burn and burn.
A steady drip-drip-drip bring her back to focus, as it did in a dark chamber on the worst night of her life months and months ago. Questions threaten to rise up her throat like bile, but she pushes them back. Forces herself to remain in place, to quiet both her thoughts and the fierce pounding of her heart.
To this stillness she remains, though it may be a lie. Whatever he has begun, he must finish. )
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Under the glass, glistened chandelier, he sprawls over marbles and corpses and rights gowns and velvets, stitches broken bone back into familiar geometries of position, shields burns and corrosions of fatty tissue with dregs of veils and shawls. The Bessis deprived the Attaryl of life, of final decorum and dignity; Lan Wangji stole their peace. The well of what is theirs to share has long dried. He cups his hands again to plead teardrops.
Smear of blood on his cheek, the last ghost marks him. Leaned into her touch, his cheek appears perches long. He drifts back to sit, knelt — back to himself, to a gentle righting of his breathing. Sinister fucking bastards, he has heard villagers whisper after them on assignment. Lan Wangji wears the name well, wipes the sweat and congealing, glistened ash and oils off on his palms on tile.
Then, he recalls Emilia. )
Come, as you can, with a mind eased. Bring no anguish or power. ( This is rite, or habit, his voice barren. It strikes him that men, most men, require reasons. ) You are too gifted. ( A simple truth, like Bichen's cut set to perforate and bleed his fingertips. Easy. ) Spirits will ever flock or flee you.
( Like stream and stormed rivulets set to disturb lake waters, Emilia's presence sends ripples the dead cannot ignore or circumvent. )
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But what he asks of her is near impossible: her mind is never at ease and her gifts were dulled long ago. The truth of how and why hides somewhere in her bones, and the key to the lock forsaken. She is only ever left with the fading of a memory, and a sorrow she thought she'd killed.
In another life, these might have been her sisters. Would she have fought for them as she fought for the witches of Palermo, or would her fire burn them, too? It all began this way. With vengeance, yes — but also a burning desire to protect her kind from being slaughtered as Vittoria was. To give the fallen true justice and peace. Accountability for the guilty, no matter what it made her. Whatever the Attaryl were guilty of, and it was dreadful, this — there is no word for this.
She doesn't fully understand, but continues her attempts to push it all back. The sickened dread that twists her insides. The suspicions that roil, and an odd observation: that this should be the most he has said to her all in one go. She wants to turn and flee. She wants to yank his hands away from them.
She thinks she came too late, and this is not a story of forgiveness. ) I thought there was nothing left.
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[ You know better. And, You are no child. His mouth stretches against the silhouettes of laughter. Sound claws its grave at the root of his throat. He cannot release it. Swallows down, in dappled gulps of acrid strain, against the tempting cruelty of childish hysteria. It is a simple thing, to break when others witness you and raise you.
The ticking of a distant clock, his heart beating. He trails fingers wet with cold and writes faint characters of release in the salt he begged off a maddened serving girl, who must have heeded him only to evade the looming threat of his eyes, his wandered step. Better a thick sickness attended and contained than a plague spreading. He has passed his salt not to encircle the bodies — crass, obvious, intrusive — but only to corset the wrists of these witch women and prevent the idle twitching of barely departed flesh, when the spirit is summoned close.
Given the opportunity for possession, victims of burning so often gravitate towards clawing their throats to ribbons. Enough of bloodshed here. All red debts have gone paid. ]
They could only assist Bonaccorso Spina through possession. [ Perhaps it is not he, but another Lan Wangji who speaks — softly, reverently, like any child who accepts and appreciates the demerits of a beloved toy he has taken to play. Who is paternally disappointed with its failures, but ultimately untroubled. As if his stakes in this were threadbare and few. ] They could not improve their rites to extend life, once his flesh was broken. Their knowledge is frail.
[ And rigid and wanting, and Wangji's teeth grit and snap, but release. He can compel spirits to answer him — not to speak those lies he would wish heard. ]
wen qing
( In the first hours, he bides sanity with cruelty. It is the way of war, nimble: sadism infiltrates as efficiency in slaughter, the butcher’s wary concern of blunting his blade as little as possible on resisting bone. Murder displaces detention, when hours thin down to heartbeats, anaemic, and dust-heat from crackled marble walked by furies of the ghostly revolution greet the slam-thud of bodies like graves.
He lingers, fingers spidered over Bichen’s hungry hilt, clashing, teasing, taunting the blade, and stale air shrivels stifling and tight like a wet knot in his lungs, track of road salt and charcoal smeared at his feet. In the Doxe’s palace, sterility was favoured — not the coarse, lived-in blackening of halls walked dailt, but the singing desolation of surgery quarters. Now, they know why: death travelled here, arm soft and braided with Bonaccorso Spina’s at the elbow, for a long stroll towards the niece Vannozza.
Shrieks, salved by revolutionary chants, by the slouched but heavy blades of other, darkened faces after. Vannozza’s people, he suspects. Those of her cousin. Politics so often precede and privilege execution. After, when Wangji’s boots scuff on corpses spewed like unfurled ribbon on hard floor, he does not ask which party bruised yellow the dignity of the Doxe’s defences. Does not spare moments or sympathy in corridors drenched in screams and Verdigris, only the knife, thin and cleansed on the width of his thigh, collected from a fallen soldier — a fine, balanced blade, light and fit and scarcely weathered, perhaps in its first ten draws.
He offers it to Wen Qing in passing, and learns her — how to walk beside her, shadow and extension, to mind her back and her flank and move, serpentine, to fill in the negative space of her physicality. It is natural in the way of night hunts, to speak the language of pairings and supplement a partner’s strength in battle.
They come with purpose. Watch the years mark Lan Wangji’s face with shadow and ripple of skin, watch the fear gut him. Find the witches of Attaryl, find a core’s alternative to a lengthened lifespan. They say, they granted the predecessors of the incumbent Doxe many years over. And why deny it to a brighter, red-ribboned, laughing cause? He suspects blades persuade more diplomacy than Beitang Moran would wish brokered.
Noise and pale light spool in gentle weave through a half-barred window. He catches himself — catches Wen Qing with the hasty barrier of Bichen before her — before stepping on innards bloomed on slate tile like red lilies opening the autumn season. )
Once, this was Nightless City. ( They do not grieve what Wen Qing has lost, the distant, bird call of her kin felled. Blood of her blood, and how the Wen gave it, hollowing meats and dried off bone. How her people paid their hubris. ) Perhaps Sizhui should learn the truths of that massacre.
( …and this, the grooming and sophisticated education of a blossoming gentleman is the precise, apt topic of conversation one should undertake in the middle of blade-born invasion. Why not?
But then he stills, breath punched, when the intestine of the corridor widens, when another hall breathes, and within it, a witch of the Bessis, descended on her sweet sister of Attaryl like a hawk, feeding. She has long passed, her enemy, her spirit storming beside her like a guttered candle.
Is this moment theirs to intercede in? Once, he contrived to peel Wei Ying from the Wen. And what did he learn? Who are you, you Lan, to interfere — …and yet. )
We see them.
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Death is not her forte, although she trained as a cultivator, carried a sword, and was unafraid to use it. Her words to Wen Ning were not incorrect: their family was full of physicians trained to heal, not harm. Bits of her detach, as she slices through a body, noting the muscles she cuts through, the organs that the sword punctures. No help for them, as the lung deflates, the entrails spill out, the artery is severed.
It's madness, a massacre. The battles she remembers from Nightless City, before Wei Wuxian and Meng Yao and all of the others put a stop to the mindless cruelties of her uncle. Now they seek another man who chases immortality, who refuses to acknowledge the natural order of the world. Is she any better, what she demanded of Wei Wuxian, that night in the rain? When her heart shattered as Wen Ning lingered near death in her arms. Is Wei Wuxian any better, when he asked her to perform an impossible feat?
No matter, the right and the wrong: the Doxe will pay, Vannozza's body out of his grip, and the city in chaos. No sympathy burns in her for him. She can understand the madness, the search, living too close to Wen Ruohan for far too long to not understand what drove him. She even understands why people followed her uncle, why people sought to help the Doxe.
When Lan Wangji stops her, when she watches the witches feed, their bodies broken things, their spirits craven, she considers this. ]
The battle after Wen Ning and I died? [ Because the battles she remembers were not necessarily massacres, although gruesome. ] You have kept that knowledge from him this long. What changes?
[ It is enough, she thinks, that Sizhui knows his heritage, knows he comes from somewhere, that there are ancestors watching over him. There are ties to family even death cannot overtake, that are not replaced with adoption into another clan.
Does he need the knowledge of a slaughter? More wars? ]
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( Courtesy slick and clammy on his tongue, he swallows wet against it. Breathes burning. Patience, with the knowing of it: that Wei Ying only cares for the martyrs of the heavens, for Jiang Yanli and Wen Qionglin and Lan Sizhui, whose coffers of kindness will never run emptied or dry. And that he loves too the worst plagues of the world, dark-eyed and haunting — Jiang Wanyin and Wei Ying's own maudlin pets, twined wisps of brittle shadow.
This ethical sundering of Wei Ying's affections leaves scant quarters for ambiguity. And where does Wen Qing fall? She knows herself — the syrupy beam of Wangji's gaze lands low — she took the blade. There is enough animal cruelty in her that she bares sharp teeth now and Lan Wangji concedes another step back — I hear you, in your silences — but hesitates to bear his throat.
Enough blood wets these rooms, slips under his feet. Let her quench her thirst elsehow. )
The Doxe's history will be written by his survivors. ( With diligent cruelty, for threat of violence and arson have their way of conscripting partisans to a cause Bonaccorso Spina might find — unflattering. At most, today, Wangji can hope to ease an elder's spirits; Bonaccorso's name is ripe for tarnish, oily and visceral. He will be — he is — anathema. ) As was that of the Wen.
( Wen Ruohan, defaced of his past glory, became a many-headed beast: mad or perverted or estranged from humanity. A fool or the face of brilliance. Cursed or sharply possessed of his senses, but lacking the dignity to tame them. A political starveling, or a tragic casualty of his own greed before powers he proved too weak to contain. Each scribe of renown wrote a different if sophisticated account of the Wen, when the ashes of their downfall had stilled safely cold — and each historian took his coin from a different sect master, keen to legitimise a skeletal claim to the looting of Nightless City. )
Is that all Sizhui should learn? ( Think. Best to have moderation, balance. Who can say what was right then, when the sun was shot from the skies, and what is wrong now, when they've buried Jin tyrants? The justice of battle does not excuse its means. At Nightless City, they fought bravely. They did not fight well. ) You know his people.
( Some might say, Wen Qing is that. )
five
Mid-revolution, all is change: at the brink of poverty and disaster, men turn fang and claw and the weapon of their indignation upon their masters. Bonaccorso Spina repays their feverish bellicism with blood, with great vast tiles of dusted marble cracked, and fissures sundering the walls of the Doxe palace like the root of trees, spreading evil. Fire should not impact stone, but the pressures of bodies thrown and the telekinesis of the Attaryl, attempting (failing) the art of their salvation have exposed the palace to assault, and it opens itself now, each chip and cranny deepening to fracture, like the first bruising of a mirror that reverberates in indelible breaks.
There is plasticity in the loss of trust, of men in men, of men in nations. Once deformed, never regained to the same shape.
Shivered, Lan Wangji waits out the better part of the executions. Whatever reduced the sorceresses of Bessis to previous submission has expelled itself from the equation of their fractious morals. Like animals, they turn on him — on any strange face in their path — and only the stay of Wangji’s hand on his blade’s hilt, only the subdued, accepting tip of his head, southbound, confesses his inclinations. Those who permit evil become its accomplices.
Wei Ying would never stand for the injustices of slaughter. But then, Wei Ying’s war was a simple thing: he, the one man on his bridge, and the abyss beneath. He needed not abide the monstrous cruelties of others.
Between early morning and midday, the pallor of greyed light is like a sickly gasp. It streaks through windows, half crushed and missing the teeth of their mosaic. Once, they dressed these halls in splendour. Now, the slick at Lan Wangji’s feet sprawls thinned and meek, no better than a sheen. In the sunset hours, sheets of it would pass for routine beauty. Today, the stench of moribund bodies wafts and thickens like winter incense.
To see Five in Doxe Bonaccorso’s wing is to watch a vulture settle on prey. It is to know the spread of his wings will topple the room’s riches, nine times over. There is about the boy-man, Wangji thinks as he passes him at short step, barely interrupted, something unfinished: as if the heavens created an animal with the likeness of man, but forgot to lend him man's learned graces. )
Exhausted opportunities to sell us to dead lords?
( That Five should be troubled with the petty, nauseous progress of a revolution that stands little to benefit him, without first-hand gain. In this, wonders appears to have defied every natural odd. )
You come futilely. ( Whatever wretched little game of efficient cruelty Five intends to propose is already likely in effect. ) Outside, they call to cull their leader.
( An unpredictable, if welcome transition from the earlier devotion. )
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But none of that had involved his family.
Even those who don't have any clue about what he's done could guess why he's in Bonaccorso's wing. Five isn't someone who sits idly by just because he made one mistake. Now that he's been thinking more clearly, it's obvious that they were making a mess of things that he could have wrapped up months ago. Since the mirror incident, he overcompensated in an effort to course correct, but working with others only left him annoyed and frustrated at how they complicate everything. He quickly lost faith that Taravast would still be standing no matter what happens from here on out. It's become too great of a threat to his siblings. Bonaccorso only has himself to blame.
So of course, when he's decided to be the one to get his hands dirty, he's almost immediately greeted by a man who has an objection for his entire existence.
Five should have blinked away before he had a chance to open his mouth. It's just that the novelty of being interrupted by someone stumbling across him whenever he's alone never fully wears off, and it manages to get to him sometimes. He halts in his steps and doesn't hide the tension radiating from his shoulders when Lan Wangji passes by. Most of those who have been on the receiving end of his hostility might have learned to leave him alone, despite his young appearance, but not him. He always says something.
Even in the midst of an overdue insurgency, he appears as calm as ever, like he's attempting to fill a void in his conscience. Five feels it coming before he opens his mouth, and he casts him a sour look when he can't help but jab at a sore subject. He isn't sure why he's bringing it up now, except to cast doubt on his plans. He hasn't forgotten, but what Five did is a complication for another day.
Instead of driving the point, he takes an abrupt turn to the matter at hand. He isn't sure how he wants to interpret that statement, or if he wants to ask at all. Five holds his gaze for a long moment before he breaks his silence. ]
Why are you here, then? [ Tempting as it may be, he doesn't actually think Wangji would be stalking him with everything else going on. ] Did you beat me to it?
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Thinks, Their path is not our own.
Thinks, How can your hands, so small, hold a well's worth of bleeding?
But he has beheld Five before, learned the deceptive strength of his diminutive construction. He has no body, no biology. All parts of him, to the rust of his heart, is machine. ( Once, you thought him a child in need of comfort. Wangji's pulse, listen to it gallop and storm, a sworn traitor. )
In the space of this graveyard, Bonaccorso Spina's greyed and shrivelling empire, footsteps are lightning and thunder, divisive, destructive. Five and Lan Wangji's infectious presence alone insults and deteriorates a dynasty. The old man is only the work of his age now — reduced to his decrepit inefficacies. The sum and part of his wrinkled face and shimmered eyes and the tremble of his wandering hand. )
They are not our playthings, to intercede with.
( Like tattered gods, righting silks that misaligned in the tapestries of heaven. Lan Wangji has yet to carry out the day's noblest execution. Carefully, as if speaking instructions to the rattled rabbits of his gardens, he knows he will plead with Five to consider the same: )
We set them on path of war, then depart.
( It is wrong, to unsettle a citadel and ferry it to ruin, then take the coward's leave — run. )
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This wasn't supposed to be a discussion. Five isn't trapped here like he was in the tower. He's thinking clearly, and he can blink away and do what he's inclined to before anyone could even think to stop him. But he lets it bother him more than he should. Lan Wangji is the one who had a desire to work as a team, and yet he never seems willing to compromise when it comes to him.
Does he really think he came here for his own amusement? He's willing to do what others aren't, that doesn't make him sadistic. ]
They threatened my family. [ In case he doesn't think he's taking this seriously enough. ] We aren't supposed to be here. Everything we do corrupts their timeline, at this point what difference does it make who pulls the trigger?
[ He could have done the job already, but he lingers there, stuck on a nagging feeling that there's more he's missing. Discussions he wasn't a part of. ]
They're already planning on leaving, aren't they? What are they waiting for?
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They threatened all our families.
( Poison, siege, possession. Sizhui has been as white silk before bloodied stain, quarry for corruption. Wei Ying, claimed and traded by deathless kings, hands trembled as he sheltered and drank to annul the threat he posed to himself, to others, to the very strength he might otherwise surrender.
And the rest? Here, now, Wen Qing is snared and snagged by the physical threats to which her strength — refined for healing — leaves her vulnerable. Lily has been contorted into the likeness of a beast. Alina's conviction has dimmed until she seems more the echo of her past certainty, diluted in a well, than her true self.
They have all accepted injury and worn the damage well. The Hargreeves have no dominion over human suffering.
But there's a softening to Wangji, between the smell of damp tapestry and that of thickened incense, doubled to hide blood spill. A careful gentling of his voice. )
You did not disclose your family was hunted with specificity. ( You did not ask aid. But then, when has Five ever done so? )
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Or maybe it's something else. Maybe he's keeping him from seeing a slaughter in the next room and that's why he's not in any hurry to move from the hall. Since he seems to be allergic to answering any of his questions, he can only lean on his suspicions.
Does it really matter, as long as the right people end up dead? He should be happy if that's the case. As if it matters now if there's slightly less blood on his hands.
He'd brought up his family to explain away any motivation that wasn't obvious, and for a moment he almost believes Lan Wangji understands. Possibly because he would do the same for those he cares about. Unfortunately whatever point he's making is second to the fact that his family didn't want Five's help. Allison and Diego both didn't want him getting involved after Vannozza threatened their lives. They thought, he assumes, that he would take it too far and murder everyone involved.
And look where they're at now. ]
They wanted to take care of it themselves. [ Admitting that leaves a bad taste in his mouth, and he gestures around them. ] That obviously hasn't worked out too well.
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Lan Wangji remembers enough of his graces to whisper the next door open, tsking with the moan of its heft, lest Five should transport himself past it and abandon him. And conversationally: )
Your own family places no trust in you. ( Appropriate, but hiss and venom, and that is unkindness on his tongue. He swallows it down. ) Why?
( Perhaps it has not escaped Allison Hargreeves, sly and deranged but clever like fox, that her younge — ...elder brother is not the founding stone that can pillar great confidence.
Perhaps she has scented the blood and rust on him, the viscera, the strain. Perhaps she knows, she should know, that Five's diminutive hands can yet grow to throttle throats.
And perhaps — what is theory but a tree, and why should Lan Wangji be first to cut its branches? — there is more to Five's treachery than even he had prophesized. )
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Despite how much he should have seen it coming, hearing it so plainly stated hurts, even more than he expected it to. Because it's true. His siblings still don't understand that he's not the same person he was when they were kids. At worse, they think he's crazy, and at best... they have to know that he'd do anything for them, but that only seems to scare them. They don't trust him.
He glares at Lan Wangji when he doesn't immediately have a comeback. Yet again he failed to read the other man, who is always one step away from making an enemy out of him. Anyone who has been around him for more than a day knows that his family is an easy target to get a reaction out of him. It's a dangerous game. ]
That's not it. [ It sounds like a lie even to him, but he doubles down in his next breath. ] They're adults, I can't be doing everything for them.
[ He says that like it a mutual decision when it wasn't. He'd only gotten involved when Alina asked for his help, not his family. Even now, he's had to track them down and play catchup to find out what happened.
This isn't the time to be thinking about it. Five flexes his jaw as he challenges him to make another remark, then marches forward towards the door. ]
...I was wrong in this case. Next time I'll follow my instincts.
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(BABY) sizhui
Pain rings and reverberates around each room, untouchable, celestial. He hears them, in transit: first the guards, burning, then the witches of Attaryl scorched, then all those who have not yet cleared the path, ash unto ashes, and he does not ask the Bessis, What have you done? He knows the game of it — played it, won against the Wen, when the sun was for arrows and the banners red for blood. The survival of one depends on the ruthless, carefree extinction of hundreds. Today, the species of Bessis triumphs against its natural predators.
And outside, dark of the evening mantling, the revolutionaries storm. Across their various communication devices, their comrades declare their movements — the Bessis have abandoned their fire upon innocents. The bear is returned. The doxe Bonaccorso has been captured, his nephew Macaluso roams free. The petty, paltry politics of Taravast smear like crushed tea leaf for sooth-saying before him. He accepts them, and knows, knows, knows, they walk and flee like children: spared the consequences of their interventions
What is it like, to ruin a city until it rues you? Until stone weeps for want of your name scryed on grave? He has drenched to the calves, and the thighs, where he’s knelt, in the waters of dying men: their blood, the melting fats of their burned bodies, the infection of their pustules. Reeking of disaster, when he spies the tender silhouette of his son, he should know better than to approach him, until Lan Wangji has taken the purification rites.
All the same, he hastens — spiders his fingers on the nearest water pitcher, and wets the length of his robes, where the worst of the debris builds. It will want more, again. A true scrub. And salting, incense, long cleansing. It does not matter. A day of conflict and churned earth, and he needs this — Sizhui, the better part of his heart — more than a man of learning should.
Both hands sink on his son’s shoulders; he contorts himself, molten and leaned in, and leans to press his mouth, wet and soft and warm and revering, on the familiar ridges of Sizhui’s headband. A visceral intimacy, soon no longer Wangji’s to claim. There will be a bride, a groom, a beautiful and deserving lover. Another to with a deeper right.
But their shadow is distant, and Hanguang-Jun carved his name by expelling ghosts. Hand to Sizhui’s nape, he drags the boy — he is a man now, only do not tell him; he is a man now, but perhaps he might yet be persuaded to linger a child — to Wangji’s chest, but for one heartbeat. Another. A third. Thief. Let him steal. )
Once, I thieved you from a war. You do not belong returned to it.
( To honest battle, to exorcism. To night hunts and duels and the excursions of a gentleman. Not this, not Sizhui. )
beitang moran
( Clear the room. Were this Cloud Recesses, he might retain mandate — the solidity of authority to order the crowds dispelled. They do not move for him any better than waters iced and stormed. Only the sword divides them, terror breaking madness like a snake in strike. Later, he will ask, why he stayed his blade against them: offered the dulled edge of Bichen, breathless, unprepared, hungry for the bite, holding her teeth.
High-pitched, the screams of servants abused as collateral quake the halls of the palace of the Doxe. More blood sheens and swells the shapes of errant furniture than gold. Slick under foot, he nearly slips over — eases himself to cut through rabble and shield two maids retreating in the interstices of the palace’s secret corridors, its labyrinths of cosmetic logistics: the Doxe should not be troubled to see his servants herding and ferrying the wares that buttress his daily rites, only to reap glistened benefits.
Behind the women, Wangji hears only white, petty noise in his ears — static, discordant notes, claws scratching. When he too sinks into the servant corridors, it is with a hand soft against the whites of his silks, where ruptured, modest midday light gives the wound on his belly its first wash of purification. One hand wills it shut, presses hard and within, like a thundered bruise — in which conflict and escalation his skin bore the wound, he cannot say. Only that he will survive this, the damage only muttering bleeding.
An inconvenience, its truth hissed when the lock of Wangji's jaw yields to teeth that seek his lip as soft tether. He bites down. Breathes. When he unburies his bones from the servants’ passageway, the peppered, chipper rows of candlelight blind him. He blinks against them — once, twice — acknowledges only the hallways to sleeping quarters, and wastes no more of the time they never earned.
Thud of weighted doors like shivered teeth, rattling. He enters the bedroom — whoever’s, what difference to it, when the air reeks, stale and fat with ash? And he takes from the creaking coffers what cottons and linens will serve for sturdiness, the sophisticated layers of finer clothes strewn haphazardly on lacquered wood.
It is so that he turns, when Beitang Moran’s step betrays him: Lan Wangji half-bare, a precious undergarment slaughtered in his hands, binding quickly to corset Wangji’s fresh wound tight. )
...apologies.
( For Lan Wangji bloodying and spoiling, as of the tally at his feet: three zhongyi, a now-tattered zhaoshan, a furred cape, two braids of lace and doubtlessly more decorations than any man can number. Let no one accuse Lan Wangji of searching with restraint, in his haste. )
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[Moran honestly wasn't expecting to find Lan Wangji not only inside the palace, but also rummaging through the chests where he keeps whatever clothing he's been given in his time here.
He is about to make a light-hearted quip about Master Lan only needing to ask if he finds himself in need of a change of clothes, but then he notices the way the fabric has been wound around his midsection, and the blood seeping through it, and he immediately gets concerned.]
You're injured.
[A look at the mess made of what seems to have been a hunt for suitable fabric for this very purpose, and he sighs and shakes his head.]
We do have some actual bandages here. Sit down.
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The shake of Wangji's head invites more imbalance — the brief, hissed recognition of frail footing — than he had anticipated. He stands (of course, stands) by the pronouncement, washed warm for all his pallor by earnest candlelight. )
Your furnitures will stain.
( Grave enough of an offence to have blasphemed against master Beitang's garments. There are insults against a household that a gentleman mere steps — but not breaths — short of permanent discomfort should not see through.
Once upon a time, Lan Wangji bowed his head and his back, a quiet soldier. He remembers enough of obedience still to transact in cooperation, at times of necessity — lets one hand slip free of the injury, the other press into the meat of his wound, pressuring the fount dry. )
If it does not burden master Beitang. Your bandages.
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[Maybe Lan Wangji was a soldier, once. But Beitang Moran is a general, still, and a prince to boot, and when he gives a command, he expects it to be obeyed, especially when people are being foolish.
And while he is no great doctor himself, he knows enough to at least patch a battle injury on the field until it can be seen by someone with more competence.
He'll go rummage in a small supply box for actual, clean bandages, and some ointments as well.]
How did this happen? And how come you found your way here? It isn't the safest place to be at the moment.
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( A man, wandering the halls like a ship struck at spuming seas during winter's most vicious storms, what port will he spit at? The first quarters that promised shelter sufficed him, and the silence of Beitang Moran's room betrayed its vulnerability to invasion. When the master is away, the rats join in play.
He has not solicited Beitang Moran's attention. Despises it, on a shallow-water level, not for its actor or delivery, but for the picture Lan Wangji must paint, each brush stroke layering weakness. What a sight he must tally to, if Beitang Moran thinks him reduced enough to fix, a trembled, squealing, ill-gotten toy, requiring fresh patching and new strings.
Obediently, Lan Wangji yet spares the furniture — not Beitang Moran's to claim, but still the work of masters craftsmen — and eases down onto both knees, holding the pose. He can linger so, sturdy, accessible, prone. A compliant patient, whispering the outer layers of his robe past the chokehold of his sash, only enough to reveal the wound in full. Modesty, above all. )
Revolution is butcher's work. ( Today, Wangji proved the meat. ) They belove chaos in the streets.
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And since Lan Wangji has chosen to kneel, he'll do the same without sparing any thought to the precious silks he is wearing.
He'll examine the wound with a critical eye. He's not a specialist, but he knows enough to see it isn't very serious, but probably painful and in an inconvenient place.]
Lucky for you, your clothing seems to have staved off the worst of it, and at least the blade was sharp so the cut isn't too jagged.
[He'll start with a wet cloth to clean up the wound and then a dab of some of the ointment, cool and almost numbing, before applying a another clean cloth and keeping it secure with a bandage around the man's torso.]
You should still see an actual doctor, if you can, but this should help in the meantime. Try not to put too much pressure on it if you can until then.
[Cultivators probably have their ways with those things]
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To let them go about the craft, taking idle inventory of their measures, only to recite them obediently to the next healer who takes him in their in care and must supplement the extant work. Shallow cleansing, a coarse bandage. Beitang Moran's rag catches on the abysses of the wound, and Lan Wangji exhales with it — one and two and three and hissed — and absorbs the glittered gold before his eyes, the shapes of Taravast's soon-lost abundance. )
Frail mending suffices me.
( No need to bother the mistress Wen. The body compensates, qi circulation reshaping its circuit to favour injuries over donations of strength for offensive attacks. Flesh makes a finer attempt to stay alive than the bones it dresses.
Though some minds are more concerned with self-preservation than most. He does not waver: )
You stayed past the tarnish of battle. ( Untouched, ever beyond harm's way. )
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[What purpose would it have served for him to add one more blade to the chaos outside? None at all, in this case.]
The witches are... slightly scared of my power, it seems, which is ridiculous because they have infinitely more than I do, but they do not know that and I do not plan on informing them. Right now, it is of utmost importance to ensure there isn't a complete power vacuum at the top, or things will become much more dangerous.
... but Don Bonaccorso definitely needs to be taken down.
[His lips twitch slightly as he rises to his feet to put away the meager first aid supplies.]
Some battles you fight with different blades, Master Lan. My actual one would be of little use right now.
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