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open | teeth on my waist i come undone
WHO: Wei Wuxian & ( you )
WHEN: The week or two following the drinking of village curse-juice and forest capers.
WHERE: Ke-Waihu.
WHAT: Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng managed to knock over a shrine; the local shrine occupant took offense. Now they're temporarily foxes until they finish rebuilding the shrine over the next week (or two). Encounter him as a fox! Work with him while he's a fox. Stare at him wondering what the fox happened.
WARNINGS: Wei Wuxian is deeply, intractably afraid of dogs, and it is likely to come up in narrative, along with the particulars of what he does not like about dogs and/or envisions them doing.
He took no delight in his shifted circumstances, the luck of it all horrid and wrapped up in its own jest: the baying of hounds driving him to bolting, and he, crashing through a shrine built of stones instead of through the underbrush to a nebulous safety, treed.
Wei Wuxian didn't look down to study his paws. Movement was easier when he didn't think about it, when the motion carried him by intent, when he saw the world from lower down, the place from which he'd crawled in darker, more haunted forests, only to be here now, in a village that tasted foreign on his tongue, read nuanced in difference to his far from indifferent nose.
He heard too much with the ears perched upon his black brow, distracted heartbeat to heartbeat by their unnerving twitching movement, centring and recentring on exhalations and scuffs and drags of claw on hardpacked ground. A tail that twitched to similar nerves, and he stood as any fox, tall in his shadows and slinking in the bright light further from safety, to see to his daily deeds.
He carried stones plucked from erstwhile streambeds held delicate between white-yellow teeth, canines visible, tongue deep pink and heavy in his mouth behind them. Wet or dry, less important than the smoothed nature of the rock, beautifully flecked by saliva by the time his journey culminates on a forest knoll, by the shattered structure of a familiar formed shrine. Help, hinder, stare on in silent question: but you found him in these circumstances, so what have you done?
He slipped to your side, silent but for the pad of a paw on the dirt, meant to echo. There were tasks set to them all, but he must stay close, borrow on the certainty of human form to hold canine and suspicion at arms length. His head turned upward, narrow muzzle pointed toward the face of his current companion, before he canted it, giving them a quizzical expression. Where were they off to now? Though he will not accept the discussion of it, his nose now married a sense of purpose to discovery, but it waited on the arrival of his protector, whomever it might be, for them to set off in quest of answers to the questions posed by their hosts, and by themselves. (To all, to any, who wish for a fox-companion in their questing in those days following the induction of the group into the village by awful drunken brew.)
( ooc: honestly these are two setups for run-ins above, but you can tag me in with anywhere in village and even have wei wuxian treed because he'll learn fast that foxes can climb and DOGS CANNOT THANK YOU WORLD FOR THAT BEING CONSISTENT. so wildcard a location/starter at will, if you want! or hit me up on DM or PM to set up a starter for us. )
WHEN: The week or two following the drinking of village curse-juice and forest capers.
WHERE: Ke-Waihu.
WHAT: Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng managed to knock over a shrine; the local shrine occupant took offense. Now they're temporarily foxes until they finish rebuilding the shrine over the next week (or two). Encounter him as a fox! Work with him while he's a fox. Stare at him wondering what the fox happened.
WARNINGS: Wei Wuxian is deeply, intractably afraid of dogs, and it is likely to come up in narrative, along with the particulars of what he does not like about dogs and/or envisions them doing.
He took no delight in his shifted circumstances, the luck of it all horrid and wrapped up in its own jest: the baying of hounds driving him to bolting, and he, crashing through a shrine built of stones instead of through the underbrush to a nebulous safety, treed.
Wei Wuxian didn't look down to study his paws. Movement was easier when he didn't think about it, when the motion carried him by intent, when he saw the world from lower down, the place from which he'd crawled in darker, more haunted forests, only to be here now, in a village that tasted foreign on his tongue, read nuanced in difference to his far from indifferent nose.
He heard too much with the ears perched upon his black brow, distracted heartbeat to heartbeat by their unnerving twitching movement, centring and recentring on exhalations and scuffs and drags of claw on hardpacked ground. A tail that twitched to similar nerves, and he stood as any fox, tall in his shadows and slinking in the bright light further from safety, to see to his daily deeds.
He carried stones plucked from erstwhile streambeds held delicate between white-yellow teeth, canines visible, tongue deep pink and heavy in his mouth behind them. Wet or dry, less important than the smoothed nature of the rock, beautifully flecked by saliva by the time his journey culminates on a forest knoll, by the shattered structure of a familiar formed shrine. Help, hinder, stare on in silent question: but you found him in these circumstances, so what have you done?
He slipped to your side, silent but for the pad of a paw on the dirt, meant to echo. There were tasks set to them all, but he must stay close, borrow on the certainty of human form to hold canine and suspicion at arms length. His head turned upward, narrow muzzle pointed toward the face of his current companion, before he canted it, giving them a quizzical expression. Where were they off to now? Though he will not accept the discussion of it, his nose now married a sense of purpose to discovery, but it waited on the arrival of his protector, whomever it might be, for them to set off in quest of answers to the questions posed by their hosts, and by themselves. (To all, to any, who wish for a fox-companion in their questing in those days following the induction of the group into the village by awful drunken brew.)
( ooc: honestly these are two setups for run-ins above, but you can tag me in with anywhere in village and even have wei wuxian treed because he'll learn fast that foxes can climb and DOGS CANNOT THANK YOU WORLD FOR THAT BEING CONSISTENT. so wildcard a location/starter at will, if you want! or hit me up on DM or PM to set up a starter for us. )
no subject
He's deposited in the garden, unraveled there, staring at the impossibly broad back of his husband as he leaves, insufficient apologies to mark the growing stretch of disturbed earth between them.
Know me!
Lan Zhan walks on, Wei Wuxian lifts his paws, squelches mud between battered toes, feels fur gather dew and grow laden by it.
Lan Zhan! You're supposed to see me!
Yet he knows better, he knows curses, he knows himself: an expectation, and he is not what his husband expects.
He waits hours before a visitor leaves open the door so that he might swiftly sneak in. This time he curls up in a corner, seeking to dry himself unobtrusively in the room with a hearth. He sleeps, fitful, stomach a tightened emptiness.
You don't see me, and we're both fools.
no subject
Well and true and vision soured, when hours course river-swift and their tumult doesn't deliver sign or sight of Wei Ying, despite Lan Wangji's furious inquiries through the pendant he clutches mark-deep in his hands, its indentations stony pronouncements — or the fury of accidental strolls he commits to each end of the marketplace, or Wei Ying's assigned creaky quarters.
He returns. This house haunts him, silent as the slicked earth of fresh graves in spring rain showers. He whispers its doors open, seeks and breathes with the easing of burdens that gather, whenever the woods and brick of the home groan, and he thinks, more fool he, it is Wei Ying — only to find, in the end, the curled half-moon of fur dark and sweet by fire crackling, close to the kitchen's side.
Eyes wild with alert, deepened by fatigue — he sees the fox. Sees also the broom beside it and cascades two sighs before gently weaponising it to nudge the heft of the fox on the fat-stretched dustpan, then promptly carries the creature out once more:
"Apologies." Dark and wet and misery paint the gardens, and he does not bear the fox a grudge past the ill-timed coincidence of its arrival. "Seek alms elsewhere."
But, heartbeats after, he remembers his moth-like attraction to kindness and, arc of his hand flinched in the gifting, spares the fox the throw of half the remains of Anduin's meat dinner near the patio. There, chicken. Sit still, you wretched creature, and do not grow a habit of return.
no subject
Once, he'd eaten everything he found on the streets. Pride has little to do with survival, but here he is, and here he needn't claim now he's in the dredges of survival.
He can afford pride.
Into the shadows, he turns and melts, the chicken left where it fell, fodder for the watching crows.