westwhere | (no subject)

[ You did not know. It strikes him suddenly, like a jagged stab, the knife twisted at the last moment, shrapnel of skin stringing taut in its wake. You did not know enough distrust of you had seeded in them to bloom deceit.

And what is omission? The lesser coin of subterfuge. Five speaks as if he has been reduced, with finality, to the essence of the boy he gracelessly embodies. As if he does not wear the lent skins of youth only to drench them rust-red with each heartbeat.

All at once, the bodies strewn before them appear familiar: creatures of intimacy, rope-bound to each other through fragile plays of chance. This witch of Attaryl, darkened to ash crisp, might have a mother whose gardener procures his meats from the same butchery that feeds this fallen sorceress of Bessis' stableman. There are invisible links, chained one by one, in wet rope that one day rounds the throat.

Families simply pull the noose. ]

Those we love best betray us most deeply with misunderstandings.

[ How can one fear and disdain and pity and care for one man at the same moment? He looks at Five and finds that truth known. ]

[ He doesn't know why he felt the need to correct him. Maybe it worries him more than he realized that his family only wants to rely on him when they have no other choice. He can't really blame them for losing faith, after he scattered them through time, and brought them here where he nearly got them killed by his own mistakes.

But he wasn't planning to share that, or for Lan Wangji to pick up on it so easily. He shouldn't be this successful at throwing him off, and it's concerning to think that it's because he's gotten to know him.

When he reaches the door, he lingers there, barely glancing at the carnage inside before he turns back. Nothing on the other side will be unexpected, but Lan Wangji's intentions keep him guessing. What he took as a well crafted insult might have actually been sympathetic. He doesn't like the words he uses, and he feels an uncomfortable shift between them. They didn't betray him, but...

He stands there, frowning at him, before his curiosity wins out. ]

Why did you say that? Did you see them, or are you speaking from your own experience?

[ The circus spreads a lavish spectacle before them. If there were an order to slaughter, a pattern — foolishly, eyes squinted and soft, he thinks, years past his first carnage, he can still find pellucid geometries, somnolent repetitions. Discover sense in injuries to sensibility.

Nothing reveals itself, only the absence of meaning. The core-out dark of Five's searching eyes. ]

We did not trade words. [ He walks past bodies, past strings of watered blood. Stalls, absently, only to shutter the eyes of a fallen woman, mouth cleaved wide. ] I have a brother. [ And before, I have a son. Both jewels to his crown, and Lan Wangji's hair now bare. He hesitates. ] A companion.

[ There are betrayals of the heart, those of intention, of purpose. Petty shallow notches on the post of his sternum. So often, his body crumbles in on itself. ]

We have sat at crossed purpose.

[ His eyes narrow when he answers that he hasn't been speaking to his siblings, and after observing him for a moment, he grudgingly accepts that he's telling the truth. The corpses only get his attention after, when Lan Wangji acknowledges them. None of those he can see belong to the one he came to find, so they're not really relevant in the moment, but he's silent as he watches him bend to close a woman's eyes. The only emotion it elicits is mild confusion, wondering if his obsession with the dead is the reason he's still here; the body itself is just another morbid decoration.

Lan Wangji isn't the same as him, in most respects, but he doesn't shy away from violence. Five can't tell if he would act differently if he discovered the scene around them by chance, or if he'd come around to Five's conclusion and murdered them all himself. It makes sense that he would be at odds with those closest to him. He's righteous and ridged, and difficult to predict. The only time they agree is when it comes to what they would do for the people who matter the most to them. Although it's possible that he's failed them too at some point.

He's the last person Five would have come to for advice. And that's not what's happening. This is just taking advantage of an opportunity to find out more about the man who seems to have already drawn all of his conclusions about him and his family. ]

Was that over the whole... necromancy thing?

( Draped over corpses like Mother Death nursing her young, he stills, settles back into the cold shell of himself, listens to what Five asks and the silences that fill out the interstices between weighted words.

He does not say, You paid mind — to the reckless spectacle of Wangji and Wei Ying's squabbles, teeth flashed and hackles raised, the incessant and mutinous parade of their traded insults. Discretion is the better part of valour they have not earned.

He does not ask, It matters? )

My brother does not partake.

( But this is the lesser answer, the fool's defence. As if he does not injure Five's wit through the snagged implication that the boy-crone might have considered the absent, innocent Zewu-Jun. They both know better. Wei Ying is known to Five, a dark and splendid silhouette, deceptively gregarious, fond. Beautiful, in the way of wild things men's arrogance has knelt tame.

This is not Lan Wangji's secret to divulge, his truth to spare. Granules of it slip between clenched teeth. )

Necromancy is a symptom. Despair and distrust, a malady.

[ Five scoffs at the word 'partake' when referring to necromancy. Sometimes he has to wonder if it's just the translation device that makes him sound so ridiculously formal, but it's doubtful. — He's heard enough to guess what the conflict is with his brother anyway.

Five remembers how resistant Lan Wangji was to conjuring a spirit, even if it was to help find out who poisoned him. Yet he's the one who pointed him towards Wei Wuxian. He can't object as much as he pretends to.

He looks at another nearby corpse draped in an awkward position and shrugs. ]

He hides it well. Unless necromancy changed his perspective on life. [ No longer in such a hurry to track down the presumed dead, and shifting the subject away from his failures, he sounds nearly conversational. ] You can't say it hasn't been useful.

( Useful. It chills him, blood boiled and curdling, the oils of his flesh separating from the waters of blood. Five speaks, and Lan Wangji hears Wei Ying's tongue, his laughter, coaxing purpose and use from unorthodoxy.

It should not startle Lan Wangji to find himself perpetually bound to men who spit in the bright face of formality, who throw dust and debris on the righteous path. Fragments of him yearn for their light, moth to the flame. )

You are of a likeness.

( Lean, at times meaner for their attrition. Bound to family, whether by blood or adoption. Fair, but at times cruel. Impulsive, strained, worked to the bone, indifferent to the natural limitations of one's talent. Given, in Wei Ying's case, to rare fits of personal sacrifice. He concedes the one difference, attentively: )

Only, his smiles.

[ It shouldn't bother him to be compared to someone he doesn't outwardly object to. If anything, coming from Lan Wangji it was nearly a compliment. But to see a similarity between them is to be misunderstood. He presumably thinks they're similar because they aren't driven by some strict ethical code, but he has no idea how far Five would go. The things he's done to get back to his family.

He decides then that he's getting more comfortable than he has a right to be, and Five makes a point of smiling widely before he responds. ]

I'm not like anyone. [ There's a challenge in his eyes, just begging to see him disagree. ] Survival is the only thing that matters here. As long as you're not stupid enough to show all of your cards, you won't end up like our dearly departed Doxe.

( Not like anyone. Perhaps, also, better than them all.

...like Wei Ying, even at the cusp of sharp-fanged arrogance. And how did Lan Wangji fail to grasp the likeness? The hearts of two men could no better wear the same sketch in charcoal.

At least this, that they walk differently: Five with impunity, unafraid to fill out a room. Wei Ying drifting, as if he cannot yet decipher if he has stumbled upon life and the living and fresh circumstances, or merely sleeps and dreams. )

We arrived, an unexpected complication. ( Snag and stitch undone in an old, decrepit man's plans. He can be faulted his fading virtues, but not the failure to account for the impossible, more than the improbable. ) As a plague upon Taravast.

( And so they leave it: well bled, wanting for graves, winds whispering filth and gravel on each street, sundering rock and road. )

What have we achieved here?

[ Five's smile fades, and he gives an appraising glance around them. There's no denying that they caused this. They may not have plotted with Bonaccorso to rain fire on his own people, but he hadn't needed much of a push to bring them to where they are now. ]

Maybe a bit more than we did in Sa-Hareth. [ At least the farmhouse they destroyed was abandoned. And they had tried to kill them first. Say what you will about their group, but they're amazingly hard to get rid of.

A plague isn't a bad analogy, really. They shouldn't exist here, and their influence is only going to spread. ]

You might as well get used to it. That's what happens.

( This is what happens. To them. To others. They are as plague and nightmare and the war sword, wherever they pass, leaving nothing in their wake. They have improved no citadel, brought no solace. Wherever they go, only death and darkness wander steadfast in their wake.

Lan Wangji shudders with the thought of it, the iminent culpability. It would consume him, if not for the dead already strewn at his feet, how they ache and call for him. In these new, cold-licked quarters, he is less attentive — passes them, only staying his hand to right their limbs in positions of dignity, to shroud their open wounds and preserve their innards from vultures, to the clutch of their bodies. No more than this. No time.

Salt cannot bless or saint this. They departed a citadel of salt, and left it defiled still. )

You know so little. ( Of this world, of any world. They are all strangers here, sketched shadows, lines light. ) Yet speak as if you know so much.

( It startles him, how their ancients, their wisemen, their blessed elders so often are no better than whimsy children or fools. How he looks in the dark of Five's hollowed eyes and sees only lingered questions. )

[ A spike of affronted anger turns his gaze sharply away from the bodies to glare at Lan Wangji, but it wavers when he sees the way he's looking back. Judging him silently the way only he can, even in the middle of a room filled with corpses that he had no hand in. There's possibly no one more aware of Five's shortcomings, and their experience in the tower hadn't done anything for his reputation. Either he means to remind him, or he's implying that he understands better than he ever will because of some profound respect for the dead.

He's not entirely wrong. There's a lot he doesn't know. Everything is less accessible to him here, where an entirely new set of rules complicate his plans. Magic and curses and dealing with the undead are all variables he never factored in when he spent a lifetime charting his path back to his family to stop the apocalypse. There are things that he's only begun to have an opinion on, that Lan Wangji has more experience in, that he's resisted to avoid being distracted from his goals — he lost enough time as it is — only to have that bite him in the ass, as he's well aware.

Or maybe the question was how he can still sound confident when he predicts their continued path of destruction. Even for someone without his intellect, that shouldn't seem up for debate. ]

This is nothing. [ He gestures around them and flashes another tight smile. ] How many times have you watched the world end? Billions of people, all dead and not a necromancer in sight. You have no idea what I've done, just to keep that from happening.

You are at odds with yourself.

( A war wages between two factions, both wearing Five's face. Perhaps it is the older who finds the young, or the same, unflinching gaze answers with steel on each side. Dark eyes, hollowed. The line of a mouth perpetually unstitched for laughter, unhinging.

In the space of these great, gargantuan rooms, only echo splinters and sprawls, and within them, Lan Wangji thinks he yet hears the stormed howl of Five's frustration, roiling. He chases, like a huntsman, like quarry, like the push and the pull and the taut string that binds them — the intimate, vulnerable allure of the upcoming kill. )

You believe you know the path of the future, fated. ( All outcomes known, the end of days certain. That it must be shattered and recourse must be taken now. ) But also that you may change it.

[ The reaction he gets isn't exactly what he was expecting to news of the apocalypse. Just like in the tower, Lan Wangji barely flinches when he confesses to something that should at the very least be shocking. If the Doxe would have had him as his public speaker, he probably never would have been found out.

But then he uses the words 'you believe' and he bristles again. Five isn't someone with a picket sign warning about the end of days, he lived it for more years than most in their group have been alive. ]

It happened already, twice. I saw it. [ And damn if there isn't a break in his voice before he forcibly wrangles it back in. It's this young body. (At odds with yourself. Isn't that a joke.) ]

I won't know if what we did changed it until we get back, but it's followed us before. Like I said, things get screwed up when you start altering the timeline and we shouldn't exist here.

( At odds, once more, belligerently. They must make attempt to change the course of time, but their failure is fated. Five at once recognises this inevitability, but curses those who align with that same vision.

He is a strange thing, all thorns and needle, and Lan Wangji's soft touch at his edges — voice dulled at its edges, paternal. Disciples and animals deserve this kindness of approach. )

Then, what recourse?

( If disaster is iminent, but the heart yet wishes to try and defy the apocalypse. If they stand in a room peopled by blood and ghosts they cannot exorcise, then why —

...ah. Ah, how he crumbles, how Five's own cracks show. How the porcelain of their artificial indifference was ever intended to betray them. )

You... are an optimist.

[ For a moment Five is speechless after he makes that unexpected conclusion, like he can't quite tell if he's mocking him, before he breaks into a mirthless laugh. He might as well be an optimist. The Handler called it a fantasy to entertain the idea of stopping an inevitability. But she's dead now, not to mention a goddamn liar, and he refuses to do the same until he's finished. ]

And what are you? You're just someone along for the ride?

[ Lan Wangji has a funny way of disapproving of everything he does while enabling him at every turn. He'd think it was because he didn't like to get his hands dirty, but that's clearly not the case. Part of him still wonders if he was the one to kill the Doxe and just keeps turning the subject away to avoid looking like a hypocrite.

Five's goals are obvious. Extremely difficult to execute, but straightforward. Lan Wangji's seem a lot more fluid, and it makes him impossible to read from one minute to the next.

He doesn't know if telling him about the apocalypse was a wise decision. There's only a small chance that he really believes him. But he's not about to encourage more pity by detailing his decades alone in a wasteland, so he just shrugs his shoulders lightly and repeats his usual refrain. ]

I can fix it. Keep trying, until we get to right. It's more complicated now, but I'll figure it out.

( 'Along for the ride.' You fool, you have never sat a horse.

Lan Wangji knows this, in the same way his gaze lances the blooming spell of Five's studied indifference, in how he scents, and he tastes that Five has never gone to war. There is a privileged purity to the spirit and skin of those untried in battle for another man's cause. Those who have only ever defended themselves, stirred and stoked the flames of their own survival, weaponising the kindle of a handful of desperate notions.

A part of him begrudges Five's certainty. That he is as adamant as any madman in his path, undeterred by questions or reason. That Lan Wangji, voice brittle and crystalline and begging the scratch of objection, must find his footing now, for he is of slimmer, paltry resolve — of human inclination to doubt. )

I am a father ( You are not alone in this, the want and hold and grasp of family. In a house of glass and silence, Five would not be first to cast a stone if their defences so much as taunted the possibility of severing them from kin and kind. He nods, gently, on honey trickles of borrowed time. ) And a companion.

[ Five lets go of some of the tension he was holding when Lan Wangji doesn't question his resolve. While he's told him about the mistake that resulted in his embarrassing age regression, he doesn't want to get into his unique ability to reshape history. The risks are obviously high, but when the alternative is causing another apocalypse everything suddenly sounds a lot more reasonable.

So why is he staying here, trying to explain and defend his reputation against someone who will never really be able to understand? He doesn't have an answer for that, any more than he does for why Lan Wangji reminds him of his own loyalties.

A father and a companion, and yet whenever he runs into him he's almost always alone.

Maybe there is one common thread between them. Of course it would be the one he pulls at, and it has Five studying him closer than he has any of the surrounding corpses. The things they do for those they care about. ]

...You do this so they don't have to?

( Strange, how lightning strikes and branches splinter, how earth sunders and fresh founts are born, and Five glistens with the sudden, pale and frail understanding that coalesces between them. How they might have been enemies before this, on a whim, or passing strangers — but the animal, incomprehensible instinct to possess and protect jealously, without restraint, boils both their blood.

What will you do for those you love? Affection is but currency, each man a merchant. More knowing than some, Lan Wangji admits, in his hands rattles gold. )

I did not win a war so my son could bloody himself in another.

( To see the winter of Sizhui's robes rusted and time reversed, and his silks like autumn, earth-dirtied. To see scars accrue on Sizhui's face or his arms, or worse still, liquified as invisible aches that skin does not mark, but the eye records in stiff, disjointed movement. ) Or my companion should burden his brow.

( He does this so they need not think to have to. So that whatever sheen of carnage must veil them in this world, it should not wrap wet-tight around Sizhui and Wei Ying once more. Spare them. Think nothing of them. Do not see them. )

You, also.

( No question, only the steel of conviction, surer than his blade. )

[ That's not exactly a revelation; he practically said as much when he saw him in the tower. Before that. For some reason he felt the need to say what he recognizes in him. That Lan Wangji accepts his reasons without question is one reason they've been able to stay more or less aligned.

The biggest difference is that Lan Wangji is still young. He has a life to return to when the killing is no longer needed, whereas Five exists outside of time, and he doesn't know where he'd fit in if he wasn't constantly chasing the apocalypse. But that day isn't today, and a room full of corpses isn't the place to offer his advice.

The air shifts, and Five sighs when he breathes it in, letting his shoulders drop as he takes one more look around. ]

Next time let me know if you need a hand.