"For you. Wine, water, tea. Morning millet." More fat on jutting bones that all but spark when they connect with Lan Wangji's shoulders, his arms, his back, pained and painful in friction. "To ease Wei Ying sweet."
Because you are thorns, plague on my fingertips. Because I catch you and bloody myself wounded, because I peel away skins, I'd lend you bone. Pain is pedestrian, a whim slivered. To suffer for Wei Ying is no more a hardship than to dance his fingers on the bath's rim, to hold the beat. A learned peculiarity. He is silent when Wei Ying shifts, and the orbit of Wangji's world quakes and distorts itself around a new, gently eclipsed epicentre.
His hand curls on the bath's lip, thumb drifts into an opening that the softest provocation could transform into an anchor. He does not reach.
"Tea, with them." The witnesses, the clan and name-bound, the family. He knows how men are hungry: how they take and they take, starved, with both hands, and choke after, because want does not always find the body willing. "To what end?"
To conform, to be complicit. So that Wei Ying, who has awarded Lan Wangji the pretence of a marriage might give his chosen few the conceit of happiness. He subtracts himself so often from his own life that Wangji must wonder, in whole and part, how much of it he witnesses through clouded glass. How much he dreams. How much surprises him. An actor, at once performing and beholding his own play.
And hushed, before Wei Ying may hasten with retaliation, "This is no shame. I claimed you before ancestors and heavens. I ask to understand."
no subject
Because you are thorns, plague on my fingertips. Because I catch you and bloody myself wounded, because I peel away skins, I'd lend you bone. Pain is pedestrian, a whim slivered. To suffer for Wei Ying is no more a hardship than to dance his fingers on the bath's rim, to hold the beat. A learned peculiarity. He is silent when Wei Ying shifts, and the orbit of Wangji's world quakes and distorts itself around a new, gently eclipsed epicentre.
His hand curls on the bath's lip, thumb drifts into an opening that the softest provocation could transform into an anchor. He does not reach.
"Tea, with them." The witnesses, the clan and name-bound, the family. He knows how men are hungry: how they take and they take, starved, with both hands, and choke after, because want does not always find the body willing. "To what end?"
To conform, to be complicit. So that Wei Ying, who has awarded Lan Wangji the pretence of a marriage might give his chosen few the conceit of happiness. He subtracts himself so often from his own life that Wangji must wonder, in whole and part, how much of it he witnesses through clouded glass. How much he dreams. How much surprises him. An actor, at once performing and beholding his own play.
And hushed, before Wei Ying may hasten with retaliation, "This is no shame. I claimed you before ancestors and heavens. I ask to understand."