His lashes draw wetly together like spider's legs, shuddered in a death's dance. He listens. To understand is to turn base metals into gold.
Heat tames him, wafts and slinks and curls around them, diffuses the look of Wei Ying into a silhouette sixteen years soft. He has not gained the years, unlike the cracks and fractures where Wangji's skin has jotted down the start of time, offset by cultivation. Wei Ying will be beautiful in the way of flowers, for a spring's lifetime.
It aches Wangji, pores a well of pain the cloth clogs, briefly, that Wei Ying's mouth closes on his forehead. You are right, the world is wrong. His forehead slips, child-like, in the divot between Wei Ying's neck and collarbone, where the sharp of bone stabs at him, the telltale signature of years of starvation.
It strikes Lan Wangji, slap like sharp-fingered clawing, that he is loved.
"At Nightless City, I remember. His hand, your throat." Mid-air, limp and listless as a rag doll. Lan Wangji's hand, mirroring the clasp on Bichen then, steeling it now. She coos for him, pulse of friendly fire, the slow simmering of notes shaping a melody that does not crest. Of tension sustaining itself. Wei Ying, dancing in the skies of Nightless City, defying the pull down. Two images, juxtaposed. Lan Wangji lives so often in the here, the then, the combined now. "I learned. What is it to hold control of you? To have you for keeping. He squeezed. I think..."
He thinks, often, of men and of monsters. Brother downcast, brow like a summer tempest. Jin Guangyao, Meng Yao, a slip of coppered scales and a pale belly, slippery and moist, retreating behind garden stone. Thinks of Jin money, making Wen trials a mockery. Of the Wen, devising new perversities of torture and rape when their fires failed to shatter all into ashen crumbs.
"He was a man who was a ruin. Who understood decay." Motes and debris and haunting things and mirrors that showed him as smoke. Who led the Wen? And Wangji, when the beam of his gaze crosses the lavish spread of Wei Ying's mouth and he thinks, it's Wen Ruohan who moves it broad. "He wanted you fractured in pieces he could know and own."
A lesser man possesses in destruction. Whittles down beauty, until it comes at a level palatable, until it no longer blights his eyes. Ghosts shrieked silent and muttered discontent at each step on their brittle monument of bones. Wangji walked those stairs, knelt those men, knew Nightless City, knew the Wen, knows himself. "At times, I want you reduced in parts small enough to savour. I squeeze. I want to swallow whole."
Absorption is way for one person to breathe inside the skins of another. Cannibalism. Dual cultivation. Intercourse. Impregnation. It is safer to exist communally than as separate individuals. What are the merits of being, distinct? 'Soulmate' is a concept of fundamental division.
Neglected, Bichen slips free of his hand with a tired, sullen thud. The floors mourn, groan, under the perpetual gnawing of vermin. Lan Wangji's gaze drips up like morning light, pale and insincere. He thinks of foolish young shamelessness, of adolescent cultivators who chase to kiss a ghost. Thinks, if he lingers here, he will be pale and wooden and squalor.
He breathes Wei Ying. Five days, he has not breathed Wei Ying. Sixteen years of deficit, and now they compound it more. "I do not love well."
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Heat tames him, wafts and slinks and curls around them, diffuses the look of Wei Ying into a silhouette sixteen years soft. He has not gained the years, unlike the cracks and fractures where Wangji's skin has jotted down the start of time, offset by cultivation. Wei Ying will be beautiful in the way of flowers, for a spring's lifetime.
It aches Wangji, pores a well of pain the cloth clogs, briefly, that Wei Ying's mouth closes on his forehead. You are right, the world is wrong. His forehead slips, child-like, in the divot between Wei Ying's neck and collarbone, where the sharp of bone stabs at him, the telltale signature of years of starvation.
It strikes Lan Wangji, slap like sharp-fingered clawing, that he is loved.
"At Nightless City, I remember. His hand, your throat." Mid-air, limp and listless as a rag doll. Lan Wangji's hand, mirroring the clasp on Bichen then, steeling it now. She coos for him, pulse of friendly fire, the slow simmering of notes shaping a melody that does not crest. Of tension sustaining itself. Wei Ying, dancing in the skies of Nightless City, defying the pull down. Two images, juxtaposed. Lan Wangji lives so often in the here, the then, the combined now. "I learned. What is it to hold control of you? To have you for keeping. He squeezed. I think..."
He thinks, often, of men and of monsters. Brother downcast, brow like a summer tempest. Jin Guangyao, Meng Yao, a slip of coppered scales and a pale belly, slippery and moist, retreating behind garden stone. Thinks of Jin money, making Wen trials a mockery. Of the Wen, devising new perversities of torture and rape when their fires failed to shatter all into ashen crumbs.
"He was a man who was a ruin. Who understood decay." Motes and debris and haunting things and mirrors that showed him as smoke. Who led the Wen? And Wangji, when the beam of his gaze crosses the lavish spread of Wei Ying's mouth and he thinks, it's Wen Ruohan who moves it broad. "He wanted you fractured in pieces he could know and own."
A lesser man possesses in destruction. Whittles down beauty, until it comes at a level palatable, until it no longer blights his eyes. Ghosts shrieked silent and muttered discontent at each step on their brittle monument of bones. Wangji walked those stairs, knelt those men, knew Nightless City, knew the Wen, knows himself. "At times, I want you reduced in parts small enough to savour. I squeeze. I want to swallow whole."
Absorption is way for one person to breathe inside the skins of another. Cannibalism. Dual cultivation. Intercourse. Impregnation. It is safer to exist communally than as separate individuals. What are the merits of being, distinct? 'Soulmate' is a concept of fundamental division.
Neglected, Bichen slips free of his hand with a tired, sullen thud. The floors mourn, groan, under the perpetual gnawing of vermin. Lan Wangji's gaze drips up like morning light, pale and insincere. He thinks of foolish young shamelessness, of adolescent cultivators who chase to kiss a ghost. Thinks, if he lingers here, he will be pale and wooden and squalor.
He breathes Wei Ying. Five days, he has not breathed Wei Ying. Sixteen years of deficit, and now they compound it more. "I do not love well."