( This, a blind progression, and he does not think to say, I don't like this. Doesn't think to form the words, I know how to use my other senses, my ears, my hands, my feet, the taste of things, but I don't like to. Not if I can see.
Doesn't pause to think, this is the life of two men I know, and one died in darkness, and the other saw again at a cost he never knew. Not when purpose comes beneath hands grown used to different calluses, to thickened fingertips, to gentled palms.
To bone, brittle and singing, beneath his hands. He swats at Lan Zhan's hand at the back of his neck, the dismissal idle, his focus already beyond the man at his back, the qi offered. It isn't necessary. Not for this work, and not when all he's been is exhausted panic, not qi emptied vessel, hollow for reasons other than an endless, unceasing fear reintroduced with each pronouncement of canine intent from outdoors, from "hello" to "stranger" to "hungry" to "that dog is definitely in heat."
They, as Lan Zhan, are outside distractions. These bones, they're a simpler truth to follow, a known factor, his way of fumbling through a different landscape to bring different spirits to bear. Now, it isn't that knowledge alone, but the compiled logic, the understandings of bones and bodies and healing and summons, and he murmurs, trusting Lan Zhan will hear but not responsive to it even should Lan Zhan for once find words tumbling easily past his lips: )
Summoning isn't resurrecting, but if they're so tightly bound, they'll bleed together, Lan Zhan, it will take time.
( If spirits are interwoven, they may never separate at all. He leaves that truth unspoken, too awaare they both know it's astringent scent. What will come will be known, and here he works what is magic here, what is technique in their world, some marriage of the two with his fingers tracing bones, remembering a body never seen, and the workings of it. Traces to the breastbone, that cavernous ceiling, and lifts one hand to his mouth, sight unseen, blindly, metal and silk a reminder across his tired eyes.
Bites into the pad of his finger, and bless: had but it been forgotten, but he requires ink, and of his own body it floweth free in careful, unhurried strokes. Ink that does not lie smooth, but the intensity of it, the share of himself that becomes her, and spirit calls to body, body calls to spirit, and he feels the shift. He feels: )
Ward the walls when they're here. Lest others come spilling in after.
( Bones are one lure, but cursed as this is, cursed as they are, he doesn't believe in chancing that more will seek opening, seek redress. To Lan Zhan's eyes, watch the artistry of his blood on bone be lost to diaphanous layering, the hum he begins a gentler refrain over a steel core, come, as bones first regain luster, the illusion of marrow, and in reverse, terribly so, she is rebuilt, a memory of a body turning bones into a spirit's hale corpse.
Lan Zhan's carried bride becomes a woman in layers, silvered, dark smoke to outline tendon, muscle, and the organs that were long since dust, and skin, last of all, to fill out whatever tenderness she had, this create of mutilated wholeness, but to birth a fox-that-is-not-a-fox, this woman-no-more-only-a-woman, and Wei Wuxian cocks his head, listening, for the illusion of her breath.
A spirit summoned to bone that called like to like, that called home, and it is Lan Zhan's eyes who see her first, bared before him as the honesty of her condition, of the mother, the matriarch, the driving force who never was. )
no subject
Doesn't pause to think, this is the life of two men I know, and one died in darkness, and the other saw again at a cost he never knew. Not when purpose comes beneath hands grown used to different calluses, to thickened fingertips, to gentled palms.
To bone, brittle and singing, beneath his hands. He swats at Lan Zhan's hand at the back of his neck, the dismissal idle, his focus already beyond the man at his back, the qi offered. It isn't necessary. Not for this work, and not when all he's been is exhausted panic, not qi emptied vessel, hollow for reasons other than an endless, unceasing fear reintroduced with each pronouncement of canine intent from outdoors, from "hello" to "stranger" to "hungry" to "that dog is definitely in heat."
They, as Lan Zhan, are outside distractions. These bones, they're a simpler truth to follow, a known factor, his way of fumbling through a different landscape to bring different spirits to bear. Now, it isn't that knowledge alone, but the compiled logic, the understandings of bones and bodies and healing and summons, and he murmurs, trusting Lan Zhan will hear but not responsive to it even should Lan Zhan for once find words tumbling easily past his lips: )
Summoning isn't resurrecting, but if they're so tightly bound, they'll bleed together, Lan Zhan, it will take time.
( If spirits are interwoven, they may never separate at all. He leaves that truth unspoken, too awaare they both know it's astringent scent. What will come will be known, and here he works what is magic here, what is technique in their world, some marriage of the two with his fingers tracing bones, remembering a body never seen, and the workings of it. Traces to the breastbone, that cavernous ceiling, and lifts one hand to his mouth, sight unseen, blindly, metal and silk a reminder across his tired eyes.
Bites into the pad of his finger, and bless: had but it been forgotten, but he requires ink, and of his own body it floweth free in careful, unhurried strokes. Ink that does not lie smooth, but the intensity of it, the share of himself that becomes her, and spirit calls to body, body calls to spirit, and he feels the shift. He feels: )
Ward the walls when they're here. Lest others come spilling in after.
( Bones are one lure, but cursed as this is, cursed as they are, he doesn't believe in chancing that more will seek opening, seek redress. To Lan Zhan's eyes, watch the artistry of his blood on bone be lost to diaphanous layering, the hum he begins a gentler refrain over a steel core, come, as bones first regain luster, the illusion of marrow, and in reverse, terribly so, she is rebuilt, a memory of a body turning bones into a spirit's hale corpse.
Lan Zhan's carried bride becomes a woman in layers, silvered, dark smoke to outline tendon, muscle, and the organs that were long since dust, and skin, last of all, to fill out whatever tenderness she had, this create of mutilated wholeness, but to birth a fox-that-is-not-a-fox, this woman-no-more-only-a-woman, and Wei Wuxian cocks his head, listening, for the illusion of her breath.
A spirit summoned to bone that called like to like, that called home, and it is Lan Zhan's eyes who see her first, bared before him as the honesty of her condition, of the mother, the matriarch, the driving force who never was. )