If you want caught, run. And did he not urge it? Invite the madness?
Strange, to think of Wei Ying's mercuriality as the constant denominator of every war Lan Wangji has fought and won, and now he tinkers with it, turns it to base steel and sharpens it to blade. He flees instead of fighting, flute at hip, talisman drawn. The ink of Wei Ying's sacred cowardice stains Lan Wangji's fingertips.
He breaks his fall on one knee, then its brother. Watches Wei Ying run. Swats, indiscernibly, first at the wet on his nose, then the slow-blinked incredulity of his gaze, molten after Wei Ying.
Senses confused, saturated with rusted awareness — he peels himself up, the simple act of bones in obeisance leaving him adrift. This body is not his own, attuned to sound and movement, skin bumped and rashed by alarm. He shudders, and the long line of his limbs breaks after, in hot chase behind Wei Ying — delayed, and it will cost him when he crosses the house's threshold, taxes him already when a drop from the stair's start down on the ground floor does not recuse itself of hurt to his soles and his heels and his tendons. The burdens of a body unaltered by qi.
Come the forest, he dies the death of a thousand cuts, each to his pride: he had assumes, wrongly, that much of his tolerance and survival was owed to skill. But his core milled, his immunity raised invisible and protective. Like a mother's touch, ever shielding the child oblivious to her toil, in his crib.
The plenty of the woods is his deficit. Sound, strident. Damp, cascading down his back. The tactile urgency of leaves eating at the back of his knees, thorning his arms. He feels too much, too quickly. In the middle of a brewing night's storm, the crisp wet of cold embracing his shoulders, he is alone. This is what it means, to proceed without core, unstable — to be wholeheartedly, purely alone.
In the midst of a meadow, he follows Wei Ying through suspicion, not certainty, the depth of his step's indentations, the bruising he's left on shrub leaves. It could be another, it could be a beast. Bereft of speed, he cannot ascertain. Bereft of his sword, his self — he relies on trickery, on Wei Ying's learning: on the choice set of a dozen talismans that he releases outwardly to encircle him. Spirit lure parchment, now adjusted to hunt not the vibrations of spiritual energy, but its sheer, catastrophic absence, below the neutral level achieved by organic matter, plants and water murmurs.
"Come down of your trees, withered cat." Beneath him, to taunt, but Wei Ying will answer, Wei Wing ever answers, impossibly drawn to win the last word. "The cold will whiten your coat."
In his hands, not the cord that might yet require qi strength of him, but his belt untangled. Enough still to shackle and noose.
no subject
Strange, to think of Wei Ying's mercuriality as the constant denominator of every war Lan Wangji has fought and won, and now he tinkers with it, turns it to base steel and sharpens it to blade. He flees instead of fighting, flute at hip, talisman drawn. The ink of Wei Ying's sacred cowardice stains Lan Wangji's fingertips.
He breaks his fall on one knee, then its brother. Watches Wei Ying run. Swats, indiscernibly, first at the wet on his nose, then the slow-blinked incredulity of his gaze, molten after Wei Ying.
Senses confused, saturated with rusted awareness — he peels himself up, the simple act of bones in obeisance leaving him adrift. This body is not his own, attuned to sound and movement, skin bumped and rashed by alarm. He shudders, and the long line of his limbs breaks after, in hot chase behind Wei Ying — delayed, and it will cost him when he crosses the house's threshold, taxes him already when a drop from the stair's start down on the ground floor does not recuse itself of hurt to his soles and his heels and his tendons. The burdens of a body unaltered by qi.
Come the forest, he dies the death of a thousand cuts, each to his pride: he had assumes, wrongly, that much of his tolerance and survival was owed to skill. But his core milled, his immunity raised invisible and protective. Like a mother's touch, ever shielding the child oblivious to her toil, in his crib.
The plenty of the woods is his deficit. Sound, strident. Damp, cascading down his back. The tactile urgency of leaves eating at the back of his knees, thorning his arms. He feels too much, too quickly. In the middle of a brewing night's storm, the crisp wet of cold embracing his shoulders, he is alone. This is what it means, to proceed without core, unstable — to be wholeheartedly, purely alone.
In the midst of a meadow, he follows Wei Ying through suspicion, not certainty, the depth of his step's indentations, the bruising he's left on shrub leaves. It could be another, it could be a beast. Bereft of speed, he cannot ascertain. Bereft of his sword, his self — he relies on trickery, on Wei Ying's learning: on the choice set of a dozen talismans that he releases outwardly to encircle him. Spirit lure parchment, now adjusted to hunt not the vibrations of spiritual energy, but its sheer, catastrophic absence, below the neutral level achieved by organic matter, plants and water murmurs.
"Come down of your trees, withered cat." Beneath him, to taunt, but Wei Ying will answer, Wei Wing ever answers, impossibly drawn to win the last word. "The cold will whiten your coat."
In his hands, not the cord that might yet require qi strength of him, but his belt untangled. Enough still to shackle and noose.