"I am calm." It slips him as his chokehold unspools, like thread loose on a needle. Easy and negligent and a lived-in gesture, as if he wastes a portion of each day negotiating the next aggressions against the man he has deigned to marry.
Death might break us apart, but he shivers with the knowing of it, back of his hand surging to cage his mouth, while a gratifying groan of disgust blooms in him like hot fever. He is still himself in this, absent inhibition and ability, still enough of Lan Wangji in the ridges of his scars and the roiling damp of the Wen brand that is always destined to leave his skin in white-pinked, ripe sheen. Still here, sufficiently present for terror and turbulence to cannibalise any joy this — shift in him wishes to waken in Wei Ying's carnage.
He would blossom in blood like fields of summer-sweet poppy.
"I am calm," he murmurs again, and this time, when his hands reach, it's to catch Wei Ying's own where they've written a subtle growth in the caverns of his robes, to press on them over the stretch of Wei Ying's silks, to crunch what is doubtless the paper man or talisman in their keep. He speaks, he knows, to excess, with a large predator's appetite for gloating. Despair frays the ends of it, ladens his tongue. "Do you think your tricks unknown?"
The mouth of Wei Ying's daintiest, most sophisticated curses, is open and waiting and familiar like a ravished courtesan. His talismans, work of brilliance and deception, are no more unexpected than the lines and crevices that carve Wangji's palms. He could not have defended this man so long without learning him in battle.
"You should run." From Lan Wangji, from here. The door rattles and shrieks, when he pushes Wei Ying harder in, digs him a home. He breathes him in, a scent like burning. After, set his ground bones in an urn. "Run far."
no subject
Death might break us apart, but he shivers with the knowing of it, back of his hand surging to cage his mouth, while a gratifying groan of disgust blooms in him like hot fever. He is still himself in this, absent inhibition and ability, still enough of Lan Wangji in the ridges of his scars and the roiling damp of the Wen brand that is always destined to leave his skin in white-pinked, ripe sheen. Still here, sufficiently present for terror and turbulence to cannibalise any joy this — shift in him wishes to waken in Wei Ying's carnage.
He would blossom in blood like fields of summer-sweet poppy.
"I am calm," he murmurs again, and this time, when his hands reach, it's to catch Wei Ying's own where they've written a subtle growth in the caverns of his robes, to press on them over the stretch of Wei Ying's silks, to crunch what is doubtless the paper man or talisman in their keep. He speaks, he knows, to excess, with a large predator's appetite for gloating. Despair frays the ends of it, ladens his tongue. "Do you think your tricks unknown?"
The mouth of Wei Ying's daintiest, most sophisticated curses, is open and waiting and familiar like a ravished courtesan. His talismans, work of brilliance and deception, are no more unexpected than the lines and crevices that carve Wangji's palms. He could not have defended this man so long without learning him in battle.
"You should run." From Lan Wangji, from here. The door rattles and shrieks, when he pushes Wei Ying harder in, digs him a home. He breathes him in, a scent like burning. After, set his ground bones in an urn. "Run far."