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This log covers 7-25 April, drawing from previous discoveries. Feel free to tag in here or make your own posts/logs!

Sign-ups for NPC threads remain open until 23:59 GMT on 9 April.

THE LION’S DEN

WEN QING’S RESCUE | THE HUNTRESS’ CURES | THE HUNT | THE OLD MOUNTAIN

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SWEET HISSED NOTHINGS

CONTENT WARNING: MENTIONS OF SNAKES, SERPENT CREATURES

Prior to the Huntress’ arrival, the group’s healer Wen Qing is captured by a feral half human, half serpent creature. Characters might overhear visiting woodsmen who say a woman was heaved into the woods at night by a large serpent.

After journeying through the illusion-casting forests of Ke-Waihu, prospective rescuers discover that traces of struggle lead them to a 20m-deep, wide pit on brittle pale soil, close to the Fortune fetters ruins:

■ If you cross the Fetters, local prophetesses cryptically advise you to shed torches or clothes and to run to cold streams, if you encounter danger. A distressed Hyang-Tai pleads kindness for ‘ancients’ and ‘children.’

■ The surroundings of the pit are eerily silent.

■ Rescuers can spot a sleeping Wen Qing at the bottom of the pit, patches of her bared skin covered in a slick shine and showing the start of growing scales. She is surrounded by dozens of dormant snakes and nagas, tightly and peacefully coiled around her.

■ Wooden stakes have been thrust into the pit walls — serving as challenging, but workable steps.

■ Some snakes are poisonous — with many cures available in the forest or back in Ke-Waihu — but most bite viciously without venom. Some nagas emit phlegm that briefly impairs the vision or blinds.

■ Watch your step! The creatures are drawn to warmth, fire magic and sound. They stir and climb the pit to attack if they feel threatened.
■ Rusted weapons and broken shields litter the bottom of the pit, dropped in by previous… visitors.

OBJECTIVES

■ Remove Wen Qing from her dire straits.

■ Wen Qing is left with serpentine sensitivities, instincts and scales. To cure her, healers advise a seven-day brew treatment of widow’s lace — an opiate plant found in large forest bushes.

■ Grab a few flowers at a time and store them well — collectors exposed extensively to widow’s lace experience four-six hours of light euphoria, paranoia or bizarre visions — swindling foxes and philosophical parrots are apparently commonly imagined.

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THE MAIDEN’S WATCH

The Huntress joins the group, deprived of her powers and absent her steed. She pointedly stares at the ground, but those who meet her gaze may revisit harrowing moments in their lives.

Following group conversations, her shelter is rotated between two locations: a shallow forest cave and the now deserted snake pit that previously hosted Wen Qing.

Take turns shielding her from the animals that seem drawn to besiege her. The Huntress spends her time in tears or penitence and speaks in a maddened tongue. Voice coarse and wet, she summons the composure to share her knowledge:

■ The Beastmaster and she both seek to witness the imminent eruption of the Ke-Sanwon volcano, expected within a month. The Beastmaster will become more human as that time draws.

■ Ravens excepted, local animals obey the Beastmaster and spy for him.

■ To avoid the pull of the Beastmaster and his Hunt, seek out:

THE SHRINE

Trek through Ke-Waihu’s haunted forests and find the village’s only shrine devoted to ravens, outside of the elusive House of Ravens.

■ Wear pebbles or wood splinters from the shrine to disrupt the Beastmaster’s thrall on you. These items must be replaced after three days.

■ Fox spirits have raised dozens of illusionary copies of the shrine. The stone of the original altar is marked for ravens in a small wooden carving, while copy shrines worship foxes.

■ Young fox spirits imitate ravens or play distant bells to distract travellers from finding the raven shrine.

■ Sometimes, fox spirits swarm, offering to show the way if visitors perform a small dare or tell them a meaningful secret.

■ If asked, Ke-Waihu locals share the shrine was raised by a wanderer, who spent a month in the village many years ago. He was disgusted with the arrogance of Ke-Waicai’s zealots, who insist ravens are sacred and can only be worshipped in the House of Ravens.

THE BRIDGE

Ke-Waihu has briefly reopened its gates to the nearby village of Ke-Waiar — to which it is connected by a fragile and narrow bridge high above a misted abyss.

■ Wind gusts shake the ropes of the rickety bridge, and several wooden steps are putrid, dangling or loose.

■ Ad you near the bridge’s end to Ke-Waiar, you may find a couple of fox spirits are purposefully rattling the ropes to unsaddle travellers. Plead or barter: you can offer anything from riddles to treats, a good performance, a poem, a favour, a shouted confession of true love…

■ The village gates open between sunrise and sunset. Characters who arrive early find many villagers sleep until late in the day. By sundown, some locals become frantic, alert, increasingly irritable.

■ Water can be freely taken from any of the wells within Ke-Waiar to satisfy the quest. Villagers offer it gladly — they too suffer from resurging drought and dark waters.

■ If you arrive at sunset or night, you can see villagers turning to werewolves in various stages of transformation, between humanoid and large wolf beast. They are lured out of Ke-Waiar, gates closing behind them, and released into the thick, vibrant woods — with you.

■ Take cover in the forest, to escape the pack of werewolves and wolves. Some might prove lenient if they catch you, while others feel compelled to draw blood.

■ To wait out the night: climb the forest’s sturdiest trees with help of the ropes purposefully bound from tall branches. Some trees even host rudimentary treehouses.

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THE HUNT

The Beastmaster, his xenomorphic creatures and mutated animals arrive in Ke-Waihu to behold the ‘imminent’ volcanic eruption.

The Beastmaster’s creatures possess sharpened senses and hearing, intense speed and hard carcasses that provide additional but imperfect protection from blows and missiles. They often hunt in packs, but behave themselves in Ke-Waihu during daytime.

The Beastmaster excuses himself from the underground Hok-Shinn clan’s attempts at a welcome celebration, taking residence with his beasts in his village hut. He may be encountered walking the village beside five or six of his creatures, inspecting the markets and even advising new huntsmen — his manner slow, speech rough in a way that suggests oral injury beneath his facial bandages.

THE TRIBUTES

The Hok-Shinn and an envoy of Ke-Waiar each present 10 distinguished but eerily listless youths of their village to the Beastmaster.

■ These tributes are then held in groups of five across four abandoned homes, each closely watched by six-seven men of the Hok-Shinn.

■ Team up, rescue some tributes — and get out alive.

■ For easier infiltration, try the forest-facing back of the houses, or the generously large, defective chimneys. Beware slippery or broken roof tiles

■ Hok-Shinn guards possess great brute force… and gratefully accept liquor.

■ Some tributes might fight their rescuers and attempt to alert the guards. Some claim it is their privilege to join the Beastmaster, while others say they should be sacrificed to the volcano Ke-Sanwon for their families.

■ You can hide the rescued tributes in the witches’ huts or the Fetters — gather them coin so they can book seats on the next ship out of Ke-Waihu.

THE HUNTING SEASON

The Beastmaster’s creatures are mannered during the day, but join the Hunting season that kicks off after the full moon:

■ Participation is (OOCly) optional.

■ For five nights, come moonrise, some characters feel compelled to flee into the forests and run, hide or avoid detection — alternatively, they join the Beastmaster’s creatures as hunters, chasing this quarry and forest animals.

■ You can chase each other or ‘pack’ up against a common target or enemy.

■ Anyone can ‘hunt’ or ‘be hunted.' Roles can swap across the five nights.

■ Characters can develop overnight instincts akin to an animal of hunt or prey of your choice, and they will be helped by these animals for the night. Snakes and ravens do not participate.

■ Hunting can be vicious (seeking to injure, kill or consume prey) or symbolic (just violently giving chase).

■ Certain characters feel especially compelled to join the hunt and to protect the Beastmaster outside of it. These include characters who are given to war, hunting, violence, wrath, gluttony or feral/animal characteristics. It also applies to those who previously turned xenomorphic during the Beastmaster's trip in Taravast, or whom he marked.

■ To avoid the hunt, stay out of the forest, apply the Huntress’ cures or lock yourself firmly indoors.

A couple of fun locations for hunt participants:

■ A tree enclosure where characters can hide for up to an hour, invisible to their pursuers. They can still be heard or scented.

■ A small lake, silvered at night, in whose waters you can breathe freely.

■ A fox spirit shrine, where a group of four-five vulpine friends defend you alongside their territory.

■ Abandoned wells and the forest streams previously touched by dark waters. The Beastmaster’s creatures seem very curious about the liquid, but ultimately pull back, as if obeying instructions.

■ Areas with strong fire or utter dark deter the Beastmaster's creatures.

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OLD MAN MOUNTAIN

Dormant volcano Ke-Sanwon shows signs of upcoming eruption: soil swells, increases in local temperature and small, low-grade earthquakes.

■ Characters with magical powers may find their strength sometimes fluctuates, suddenly swelling or briefly waning completely.

■ Dark waters fill out some of the ground cracks that follow earthquakes. The liquid is cold, settling as if it were iced. This dark water heals shallow wounds on any skin it touches, or gently revives vegetation over one-three days on any ground it is set on.

■ The strength of the dark water fades over a week’s time.

■ Digging through the ground cracks reveals thin rivulets of the dark water are present all around Ke-Sanwon.They are more numerous the closer you get to the volcano. Dark water also smears the mouths of hell.

THE JEWELLER

A few days after the earthquakes state (after 20 April, for network posts), characters wake to distant screams, as a group of 10 of Ke-Waihu's masked concerned citizens drag handsome young jeweller Dong-Yun out of Ke-Waihu.

■ The group is taking Dong-Yun through the predatory forests.

■ You can play out finding the captors’ convoy separately, or tag into the jeweller’s rescue here.

■ Bring the jeweller back to Ke-Waihu. Dong-Yun can share that his abductors intended to sacrifice him to the Ke-Sanwon volcano. One of the participants in the rescue: please share with the rest of the class!

”I’ve heard, but I’ve never — they used to, when my mother was young… she told, me even when she had me, all the mothers hid their young. She told me, they used to give them to Sanwon. The prettiest, the smartest, the most skilled. Give it all to Brother Sanwon, give it to… so it won’t take everything else. Give it our best, and it will leave us the rest. But this doesn’t happen anymore. The mountain doesn’t want it.”

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QUESTIONS

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Battered and bruised, and his rib — crack against corners, he feels the piercing stab, the swell of hurt spilling from him like river's waters. Does not shrivel beneath his hurts, so they must leave and breathe shallowly on him, must be survivable.

He is not the petty pastures of his war damage. He will endure, for all Wei Ying tumbles them down and rearranges them, and squirms within hands like a sea catch in the net, and his eyes and cheek and the straining parts where tree root has gashed silks reveal skins as pale as a fish's fat belly. When they sprawl, side facing side, crowning a bed of leaves, coppers and cool red and a blossomed heap of vibrant greens, Lan Wangji is already indulgent: anything to sate Wei Ying's frenzy, which sours his scent, no doubt contaminating the taste of his flesh.

An ugly spread, fear. If you treat me as a dog, be in agony of me.

He cannot kneel here, but his hands stray soft, one dangled limply by his face, wrist to the sun, the other drifting the peel hair off Wei Ying's face. Yield. ]

Wei Ying. [ Reasonable, plain. An arc cleaves his mouth that might poison lips to a smile on other, better men. ]

I would like to kill you. [ Then, patiently, like a gust of breezy wind, and his dark eyes no more than a starless sky, husked for it. ] Then, I would have to kill myself.

[ In turn, the bead string of sacrifice would end with Sizhui's own martyrdom or a lifetime's feud, attempting to avenge their deaths against the local curse-craft. He knows this coolly, iced over his nape. A certainty like winter, coming. ]

It is what I wish to do. Allow me.

( He reaches forward, fingers sliding against the landscape of Lan Zhan's cheek, the incidental brush of hair back and away part of the motion, where his touch traces, lingers, tugs, not painfully, but pointedly, on Lan Zhan's ear.

A tweak of reproach, in what used to be a very painful twisting. Here, only a mockery, because if it moves more, he needs to be ready to fend off his insatiable husband's dalliance with death, both of theirs, in a twisted double murder-suicide, at speed. So reasonable, Lan Zhan is, implacable after his present preoccupation. A small smile, a steady, silk-covered steel reply. )

You don't have my permission to die. So it stands to reason, Lan Zhan, that we both must live.

( In another mindset or time, this might seem more a threat to harken back to bitter words and dripped venom in another forest, run darker; another forest, filled with owls and decay slowed down to delicacy. They are not in that forest now, but death stalks here too, and he knows its taste, can feel its weight on the back of his tongue, coating his bruised throat with a cloying rot.

Another shift, fast and fleeting, to slide atop his husband, slam both hands down, holding wrists overhead. )

Find another wish. This is no rooftop, this is no trial by injustice. I won't ask you to be my death again.

( To have been glad it would be Lan Zhan, that not some squirming, putrid mass of self-satisfied hedonism would be his end, but instead a man he respected, had seen and understood and yet not fully understood at all, just as he had not been, just as their ways to reach out were blocked by their own choices, their own plodding steps down different paths.

Wells and rivers failing to mix, both quenching the thirsts of different lands. He'd lap him up, if it were a way through to a better understanding. Maybe it's what he's been doing, the last year, as they've nipped and torn at each other, as they've learned and unlearned, as they've fought and not forgiven, or forgiven and not forgot, or forgot, because it was easier than the fight.

Caring, whatever the form, is the hardest damn thing in the worlds. )

Play nice, Lan Zhan. Leave the staining to me.

( A second, a breath, and that talisman will be on him, with the drop of Wei Wuxian down that fractional distance, to press chest to chest. Body Stilling, Frozen, Stopped. A moment is all he needs to plant a suggest, and leave, swallowed by the shadows.

A moment, if it's his. )

He falls thundered under the thrall of three talismans, the fourth waging war with the resurging turbulence of his qi, before it may coagulate. There is a risk in casting spells on creatures that defy normal parameters, and Lan Wangji — stripped unnaturally of his energy to levels beneath even those recorded by pedestrians who can never hope to graduate to cultivation — is a cinnabar notch on that ledger. He wears defeat well, the instinctive struggle quickly simmering sedate, tight set of his jaw a feral clench, each breath hissed like water heating before it wilts tea leaves.

Fight deserts him like a war banner, downed. He will bide his time: he is Lan, he will wait. Pain and tragedy wash over him, drenches the talismans, ebbs and flows. Retreats before their mandate. Body stilling. Frozen. Stopped.

In the dead of rustling night, Wei Ying deserts him. After, when the spells yield and Lan Wangji wakes, more prowling animal and close to coaxing howls, chasing glances of the moon that aren't confused, hazy blindness — when he dashes after Five, a slanted line of vicious dark — when he fails and fails and fails to catch, and he bleeds for it, and leaves creatures of the woods collapsed in his wake.

After, he is not himself. Recovers that man with dawns tickling pale blemishes of warmth on his nape, come morning, itching his wounds. A body absent qi barely remembers healing. He understands now, the waste of qi when he cornered Wei Ying prior, to funnel his supplies.

He knows to crawl, dragging himself like a rag, to Wei Ying's old abode, a creaky, ill-standing thing, husked. It opens for him. It opens, he knows bitterly, for anyone. The termites that sleep within every lining and fitting of wound all but masticate as he passes. And then, he is for stairs, for Wei Ying's quarters, for slipping, one knee, and then the next, by Wei Ying's bed and coercing the line of his boot-fettered foot out.

Breath a dappled path of condensation that breaks lacquer on mite-grazed floors, he bows himself to an arc that flattens, until his shoulders collapse, and his head is a long dip, and the prostration is pure — sentiment leading form. He must do this, he knows, for Five, also, for eight days. In his hands, Wei Ying's foot feels a trembled line; with a sigh that vivisects him, he presses his mouth to the tip of Wei Ying's boot.

"This unworthy one begs your forgiveness."

He does not need to behold the bruises, to know where and how deeply they sleep on Wei Ying's throat.

A tired man might wake; an exhausted man, tensed and keyed for the feeling of dangers, of death come seeking, of thrilling bloodlust lapping at his throat, does not stir for the arrival of his husband. Not for that expectation, though it is strange, strange to be sleeping before Lan Zhan, stranger not to wake when his room intrudes with life, but telling. Exhaustion leaves his face thinned, leaves dark smudges under his eyes, makes him paler I'm his husband's robes, because tonight they were, this morning they are, imperfect inverted mirrors.

His leg twitches, foot knocks forward, a rabbit shivering electric in sleep, recalling motion. Not hard, but a sudden shift, the prelude to a monsters awakening, dark eyes slitting open, slurred moans crossing his lips but refusing to form the murmured words his brain convinces him he's said.

Strange, but familiar: not the man being at his feet, not the state he's in, but those features, that face. Cataloging details, his eyes close again, the furrow of his brow smoothing, a nonsense babble crossing lips he licks.

He shifts, squirms, languidly lifts the edge of his blankets, exhausted enough he never fully wakes, never questions what he should, only that of course, it is Lan Zhan, and if his throat aches, if the dozens of bruises he wears as badges acknowledging he lives still, they are inconsequential to the presence of Lan Zhan, who must be here for the reason they always find each other, except when cursed.

No, even then, his memory says, smoke and illusion as he drifts closer back to sleep, one word forming in the susurrus of every lapping hush of the ones that don't.

"Come."

No awareness of apologies or the stains off light across the dawning sky. No knowledge of kicking as a dreaming thing, a creature caught in nightmares, only relaxing some fraction now. Cavernous he makes the blanket, still holding it open, a maw for Lan Zhan to be swallowed by, if only he would.

This first morning, after this first night, exhaustion holds Wei Wuxian too close for his untimely waking, and this, a child's plea in the night meet with parental placation, he provides.

There is a moment, between strike and contact, when he thinks, This man's boot will shatter my teeth.

He does not shield from it. Trembles, with cowardly inexorability, when Wei Ying's heel draws slow and limp, and the convulsive beat of his kicks turns trickled by sleep, wholly flaccid. He has carved out on Wei Ying's skin a bloom of cadaverous bruises — deserves each of his own bones dug out, his skins flayed and flesh left to dry beneath scavenger birds, and even here, now, thin morning light cascading over Wei Ying's cheek like gossamer, Lan Wangji cannot have succour.

Guilt would have made a mockery of atonement. He accepts that what began in finer quarters with the iron of his knuckles shackled keen around Wei Ying's throat does not end here, in heartbeats of tender lethargy. And Wei Ying, compelled by the kindness of instinct more than by his fear, already unburies him a place between the covers, as he might do for a son chased by nightmares. Sizhui should be buried beneath rabbits, and Wei Ying beneath children.

Temptation itches his skin like pox plague. His fingers dance the edge lines of Wei Ying's boot, ride up his covered ankle. Shamelessly, he loosens their laces enough to tease the covers free and the boots released, set to guard Wei Ying's sleep by the bed's side. Linens stretch out meagerly in hand, ridiculing him with the scant warmth provided. He swaddles Wei Ying as he was before, and only lingers enough to powder his ink, make paste, slap strikes on reused parchment —

魏
婴

|

I entrust you my son, sword and apologies, until the curse's pull passes.

Give them care.

|

蓝
忘
机

Until, for far better to presume the ache of hunt that haunted Wangji for a night is fleeting. Better to remove himself, as Wei Ying did once, so he may pose no threat under the thrall.

He is silent in retreat, in parting glances. This too shall pass.

Vague memory forgotten by the time he wakes that first morning, sun climbing halfway to it's zenith in the skies overhead. No sign of his husband until the note consumes his gaze, until familiar script carries its intent, and he sees Lan Zhan, knows him qi sealed still, and there is Bichen, contained in white, and everything goes still.

Stupid. Himself of course, but also the fool he's married once, and been married to three times over. The man he had unwittingly widowed once.

This is not what they need to do. This is not solving things together. This is not even trying, and oh, he laughs, bitter the brew slipping down his throat, because he understands far too much, far too intimately, why this has seemed best.

Has been safer, and leaves his marrow cold with the weight of Anurr's seeking mountain winds.

He continues. He watches their son, notes their loss of Lily. He stakes what range he can independent of where the canids roam, and he returns to his room of rotting wood and clean sheets, even finally, forcibly attempting the mystery of laundry this fifth day, to eventually not horrific results. It's the bed he's made because the village washer women have their own busy preoccupations, and it is to this room, cleaned but hollowed into foreign, hidden patterns within the walls, that he stands, pouring another bucket of water into a round tub. Affixes the talisman to maintain the heat, and searches for the oil pressed from vegetable matter, without the strong scent, to brush through hair after it's cleaning.

He has acquired robes at least, Lan Zhan's borrowed set cleaned and draped over a chair, folded in thirds. Now he looks more to the local dressing, and he wants, more than many things, to rest with a semblance of peace in his soul. So rare the occasion when anything like it nestles in the curve of his ribcage, next to his beating, steady heart.

When will this curse pass?

A war has wrapped them in misused strips of talisman parchment paper and bandage ribbon and the red-coloured tinsels of disinfectant cloth, drenched in blood — they have crossed paths before, worse for their wear. But he knows the picture he cuts, a rag doll of beaten leathers, weathered and withered by lashing of branches, the claws of animals culled or calmed, his own now-broken fever of hunt, stoked by possessive appetites. Five days and their nights, crowned in bloodletting, have reduced him.

He crawls back to Wei Ying, feet stumbled, breath ill bartered. Neglected, bodies are as children, asking stewardship and guidance, when they have failed to direct themselves. He enters his soulmate's rooms like every ghost that's trampled the territory of its pray, drag of Wei Ying's dark silks weighed at the ends by the drench of lake water, shedding nests of leaves in wake.

Somnolence greets him in raw wafts of lavender. He thinks, at first, to fault Wei Ying's salts, but recalls the wealth of overgrown greenery in the gardens that lace the mouth of this stale, decrepit home, its teeth rotten. Drifting, he slows to a treacle before the calm rippling of the bath's waters, the lazy round circling of spumes and oils like a pretty moan spelled out in foreign calligraphy. He does not chance his filthy touch staining Wei Ying's ablutions. Does not chance, too, a rushed glance to the ring of bruises that likely still collars Wei Ying's throat.

"See to your needs. I intend..." But he has no business here, no empire, no right. Doubt and unease shrivel and quiver him like frissons of sickness. His mouth is slack drought, tame. "Only Bichen."

And his ribbon and his robes and his qi released, once Wei Ying has acquitted himself of his indulgence and may hold court over the petty matter of Lan Wangji's form.

"Half a shi. I shall return then."

Here stands his husband, bedraggled and drenched, wearing the detritus of the last handful of days as forlornly as the borrowed robes. Here he stands, swallowing, and clutching at one solid dependency, looking to slither away from the rest, lick his wounds.

Wei Wuxian points toward the waters, the coiling steam from its surface.

"Stay, Lan Zhan. You can make better use of this than I can."

He, wearing a wreath of healing bruises around his neck, and he stares, firm, at the one who this time, has been running.

He must look as he feels, a wreck of himself, firm collection of sharp bones and the long, tapered tapestry of his bruises stitched as skin. Before him, the bath water bubbles and boils in callous invitation, and the careful eye of the heating talisman blinks wide, stares inexorably.

How many increments of his pride has fate sundered him from already, that he cannot afford to lose a scant few more? He takes the knee at the bath's edge like flustered, crowd-shy children, two fingers dipping and strolling through waters — betraying his body's physical relief not in a deep moan, or the tip of his head back, but in the telltale crumbling of his shoulders, the rigidity of his lines in collapse.

A bath would be a fine cure for his aches, his chills, his sores, his filth — if he allows it. And yet Wei Ying's bruises have barely greened like spring. "Have I not stolen enough of your comfort?"

And what is the word Wei Ying weaponises like honeysuckle? It sharpens on Lan Wangji's tongue, then slashes it. "Husband.

Steps forward, and he's within touching distance of the wooden tub, steam wafting upward in patterns that shift as the air does, as Lan Zhan unwinds in fractions, as Wei Wuxian moves with feline grace. Two predators don't stalk each other so much as admit awareness and respect for each other's claws, their strengths, their aptitudes. Catalogue each others weaknesses, and decide, too often independently, what they mean, and how to relate, to excuse, to gloss over them.

"When something is given, Lan Zhan, you cannot steal it."

Steps around, and he broaches the foot, such as it might be, of this tub not as grand as those in Taravast, but leagues beyond Lan Zhan's condescension in Sa-Hareth. Around and toward one man, kneeling, to crouch, studying Lan Zhan's face in profile. To soften words, but not attempt disguises, not of his self, or the pain that was taken out of his flesh, the marks mistakable for nothing other than fingers, hands, which had marked flesh as surely as teeth did.

"When something is taken, Lan Zhan, you can apologise for it. Not always return it," he says, conceding a point where undoing is not within the nature of this world they're in, nor within the nature of the world they descend from, like roots from the tangled mud of a lotus's anchor. "There are things that can't be returned. For those, we can ask forgiveness, make reparations. We do." Facing what it is, perhaps lacking, perhaps adequate.

He reaches out, touching Lan Zhan's arm, watching what his weight does in one touch, and a glance that shifts from his husband's features to the alluring swirl of warm, hot water, of the soothing it promises, of the comfort in a worldly flesh, of a body that isn't beyond all awareness of ills done and received, immune to changes in temperature, in deprivations.

"Bathe, husband." Another shift, and his fingers travel fast paths, an intrusion of space and intent that unseals qi locked away from Lan Zhan's hands during the time where their dangers could make themselves known. Once, he'd watched Lan Zhan seal himself up, at the power-hungry fear of a man who could never forgive the world for treating him as his birthing, and not his capabilities, would provide. "Meditate. Grant me this," he says, and he searches for Lan Zhan's gaze, lifting his brows, canting his head a touch. "For having had to guard you against your own strength."

Grant him caretaking that is not brutal, ruthless, calculated clarity. A pause, and he adds, lips quirked upward, just a touch.

"I'll even wear a blindfold, if you like."

And he winks, because it's easy to grant that playfulness, that teasing, that sincerity in allowing barriers when others are removed, if it helps.

Lanterns burn mellow and cool, a dulcet, coppered exhalation. He thinks, a less fickle man, lent to care, might have coaxed himself to whisper the flame unwound, then dead. But this is Wei Ying, who crystallises chaos, who flits and blitzes from man to man and spell to spell and cliff to death and wanton abandon.

Who bids Lan Wangji bare. Are we yet so mercantile? That Wei Ying must wish to see what sixteen years of longing have bought him? He, who has scratched Lan Wangji's scalp like a kept cat and owned his ribbon and rationalised Lan Wangji's most intimate desires to inventory them like private, trinkets of possessions.

His mind clouds, whites like sea foam when waves crest. He thinks — not of savage lust, immature and sophomoric. His want is a simmered thing, an imprecise and foreign calculation. The empty desires of another man, dead sixteen years at a cliff's side. Need will not betray him.

Only — the husked sensation of coring, the temple of his body abandoned. The knowledge, as he strays his fingers silent, eyes catching Wei Ying's to hold them, keep them, watch him now — that he is purchased and owned, and collared. Fresh cuts riot against the friction of dark robes, slipping his shoulders. Bruises sing a swarthy gold, like a maiden's beads, drumming his collarbone. Restlessness swells in his joints, where cartilage has wounded and the bloat of his limbs threatens misalignment.

Wei Ying's lent robes whisper down the floors.

Morning searched him, clever, with diffuse light. It bathes him before the waters, casts him pretty and pale and wandered in the liminal space between captive and free. He knows, inks and poetry paint Hanguang-Jun beautiful. He knows, footing trembled as he enters the bath, and warm waters sway, and he stumbles more than he descends, until he settles, they settle — he is the sum of scars gaping, of sacrifice screamed. Bare, vulnerable before Wei Ying, like a war horse before its first rider, the paraded prime mistress of a flower house.

Waters singe his hurts. Cauterise them. In his belly, resent curdles. Do not ask, knowing you will not be denied. "I do not wish your eyes haunting my back."

For a constellation of reasons known, undying. "I do not wish..." And how to speak his truth? That his hands, curling beneath waters cloyed by salts should break, that he wishes his fingers dancing on fire, flesh festered and burned and paying at each turn the gasped ache he has given Wei Ying's throat. "To wear these skins."

Dry his throat, no longer aching, days ago ignored and forgotten, left to heal as healing will do, faster than if he were never once who cultivated, slower than if he possessed still within himself that central burning core. Lan Zhan holds his gaze, demands it, and he's helpless before the unspoken request, eyes on eyes, and swallowing down some sensation of improbability that has no place here and now.

He keeps his eyes locked with Lan Zhan's as robes slide down, cascading to the floor, puddling as rent shadows and gasping darkness in the first blush of morning's light. Banished from white shoulders, the white jade of his frame, but that in and of itself isn't unknown, isn't fully unfamiliar.

Steam wafts and washes over him, he who remains crouched, who follows his soulmate, his husband, to the waters run hot and deep enough for submerging, and he only blinks after, at the statement of wishes in their inversion, as his head tilts just enough to shift tendrils of hair to one side, accepting.

"Of course," he says to the first, because Lan Zhan did not wish to speak on the carving of his flesh by the discipline of his sect, and Wei Wuxian had not asked, never would have asked, does not when he carries his own carved hurts, some visible, some less.

He has the bathing rag in hand, and for one of those hands beneath the water, he doesn't so much reach as allow the clean rag to soak up the water's heat, drenched in moments of scattered heartbeats, breath indrawn.

"Which would you wish to wear?"

A question asked, and he starts, with care remembered from a cross of one child's bathing needs when barreling into the blood-red waters of his bathing cave, to the ablutions delivered by one who nursed when he was ill, more care taken to scrub down from Lan Zhan's shoulder toward his submerged, clenched fist than given to Wei Wuxian's own skin so addressed by proper bathing. Care taken for every scratch, and eyes that don't wander so much as catalogue, that liminal space between a desire he'd denied existing for longer than he wanted to realise, and a desire to understand a body's toils, its hurts and healings, but only as he's allowed.

Time also to not linger, to not send Lan Zhan flinching away as violently as he might, and so he hesitates on the consideration of mindless chatter versus silence to sit as lightly across their shoulders as it might, were hearts not heavy.

"Want me to talk through this?" He says instead, bent to his ministrations, kneeling now properly at the tub's side, facing Lan Zhan's front ongoing, as had been wished without wishing.

"Sixteen years silent. Always speak." And the silence spell, never again to be cast, not while Wangji and Sizhui live to unfetter it. Longing is lace waiting to unspool at the first catch of a nail's snag. Wei Ying has a generous mouth, unstitched wide for laughter. On Mian Mian, Lan Wangji remembers, it rounds as if it were a syrupy moan.

Heat cloys, inextricable. He feels at once armoured in fluttered spasms of warmth and suffocated. In Wei Ying's hand, a rag clots wet and prunes, and Lan Wangji, modesty a limpid but tenuous abstract, leans towards it, head a sloppy weight on the one arm he's slung molten and loose on the rim of the bathtub. His lids draw down heavy, leaden, the world reduced the blade's cut his slanted eyes still perceive, serpentine.

When he raises his hand, waters crash each way, as if he dreamed them high and crashed them down. Sound is absorbed in the heat that slackens his tongue. His fingers trip, knot in air, stretch out before they reach the column of Wei Ying's wreath-marked throat.

"I wish to be a mother's son." And not the father, written in the manacle that rounds Wei Ying's jugular now, in bruise and shadow and swell each time his pulse blooms. Lan Wangji's grip moulds over the marks, qin player's nails strong. He does not clasp down. Releases, nearly instantly, wet of his palm a glistened print, the only evidence of an accident of last night's nostalgia he seems too indifferent to accept and too transfixed to ignore.

"Release my core," he murmurs, but dips his head closer to the wash rag, so Wei Ying might proceed with Lan Wangji's ablutions.

Heat drips down his neck, soaking the collar of his local styled robes, beading and trailing away to be swallowed as tears in the rain. Dampening, cooled mark as he swallows, stills for a moment, passes his rag over Lan Zhan's chest, catching droplets which were never there.

"Seems like you can be," he says, and his wash rag traces the planes of Lan Zhan's face, just one side, from the line of his cheek toward its rise by his eye, to his temple, to his ear. "Seems you already decided to be a mother's son years ago."

Not for the shadows around his throat, but for having let go, for outrunning himself and his incessant need to hold. Come to Gusu Lan cannot be the sanctuary it has been, in brief times, without them both free to walk away from those haunting mountains and their legacy of restraint.

A home to come back to, and a home from which to leave. He sighs, switches the wash rag to his other hand, and as he carefully cleans Lan Zhan's face, his fingertips in their chilling reality tap down on each of the points of pressure across Lan Zhan's chest, down to the one that rests well below the water line, no lingering gaze needed to know its mark.

"You could have done so too," he says, says what they both know, as the qi is freed from its restrictions to allow the warm blossom of its plenitude to unfurl through Lan Zhan's aching form. "Lean forward, ah? Easier for me to pour water through your hair this way."

Not the lazed, slit eyed exhaustion that rested as surely predatorial as languid, but the one that catches more of the water within the basin than without, that he might pour water kept warm in its bucket down through dark locks, work out the dirt and leaves and twigs and filth that accumulates even without a forest's fingers raking through. Wei Wuxian settles the wash rag across the lip of the bath, shifting to take hold of the bucket tucked by its side. Water glistens at his neck, flecked diamonds in the morning's light.

His face, his body. What is he, if not a vessel for water to cross and fill, for heat to beat and his mouth to snag on the edges of Wei Ying's fingertips, passing? Born so his brother might have a spare, his uncle a spoiled nephew, Wei Ying a pursuer, Sizhui and now the sects a father. What value is there to him but service to others? To fulfill a function, to hold a form.

It's a knot when Wei Ying revives his qi, more than a web, or stretching tendrils. One moment he eases, licks of heat and water clawing marks on the film of forest debris that Wei Ying unravels from him with linen cloth — the next, he curdles, skin on his nape like pebbled scales, and he cannot breathe for it, how his organs rearrange themselves, become tender and small, and a foreign intrusion propels and worms its way in him, he cannot refuse it. He gasps, audibly, suffocated, worn. Falls back, head knocked on the bath's rim until pain anchors him from where the surge of his qi has cast him at sea. He forgets what it is like, godliness beneath his leathers.

When he comes to himself, Bichen is a heavy, familiar, stalwart weight in his hand, cradled out of the bath's keep. He called her. Some part of him knew, the same that will stay amputated, unfinished until Yuan crosses his horizon. He set his mouth a hungry wet print on the sword's hilt and simply — hangs on. The tip of the clothed blade scryes sweet nothing on the waiting floor planks.

"At night, I gave empty chase to Five." The heavens smiled; he did not catch. "I thought, if he meant to have life's blood in vindication, it should be his. He did not claim it."

He could not have done so too. Bitter satisfaction swells in him like cave water, filling until it knocks at walls. The sixth and seventh rib stretch and contract. He retains the autonomy to do this, to offer himself to another man than those who claim him. What will you do, if I cheat you of this death?

He has stolen nothing in this life. His bare palm itches beneath a sheen of condensation. Catch, hold. His fingers curl, calling Wei Ying.

To lean is to coil is to shrink is to shrivel is to regress, babe-like, and bare his back when the weeds of his hair weep forward. I think not.

"Come here." And his mother's son remembers, "Please."

He feels the sword moving, glances up to watch it find Lan Zhan's hand, as unerring and right as his own had been, still craved to be, and he could not meet. He sighs, lips curling up, admiring what it is that he always has in Lan Zhan's skill with a sword, in that stillness, the white knuckled grip, the lips that had brushed his fingertips as careless as butterflies flitting from flower to flower pressing firm, intentional, to Bichen's length.

"He's too practical to want you dead," he says, and perhaps it's callous in its own way, to speak a truth not tied into tradition or grace, but cold, cutting ruthlessness. A part of himself that will remain colder than the springs in Gusu, knowing how to act that way, to make those calls. Knowing how to avoid them, too, even as he brushes his thumb against Lan Zhan's cheek, and cants his head, questioning, uncertain.

So often he doesn't feel he has a stake to claim in Lan Zhan's time or interest, not as the man he is now, versus the youth he once was. They've talked on this, how he who was had been loved, in secret or otherwise, and how he who is becomes a paradox, a complication. To try has been seeing each other as the men they've become even before sixteen years stretched dark and taunt between them, even since they'd wandered in each other's footsteps to strike into the shadows manipulating his return, the cultivation world's upheaval.

Lan Zhan, he thinks, can do better than whatever he is, but chooses not to. Not all of it comes from nostalgia now, he tells himself this. That as frustrating as they find each other at times, as frightened by broken gaps between them, they can reach across: that Lan Zhan can learn to let go of the fear that defines him, the one he cripples himself with, fetters himself with, and so Wei Wuxian reaches, slides his fingers between Lan Zhan's own, holding and clutching.

Like his own mother's son, the spectre of a woman he'd always been akin to, had always called upon in his actions, unknowing. Only one man loved him for that, in particular. More had resented him for the same.

Hand in hand, stilled for the moment, he breathes in, breathes out, adjusts how he kneels.

"Even at your worst, you weren't implacable. If we're all to be held only as our worst moments, Lan Zhan, then you should never forgive mine, mm? You carry guilt on strong shoulders, but have you ever learned how to forgive yourself for what was beyond you? I'm terrible at it, but I've been learning."

So many words, their flowing expanse over the deeper truth in rounded, smoothed stones below their surface. I care, you care. If you wish to give yourself up, give up on me, too.

"I want to be here," he says, after a pause and the dip of his lashes, eyes half shaded, words now difficult to parse. "With you, wherever you are. Wherever we are, and not wondering if I should feel that way, if you do, if it's gratitude I need to repay, a debt that can't be calculated. If you'd asked, before, it might have been. All of everything I could mold myself to be, for whatever I thought you wanted."

What does it mean, then, to qualify he wants to stay now, that he chooses, when his neck is ringed in damp and healing bruises, when his husband languors in the bath's sweet heat, when he shudders and collects himself from the grips of something larger, more compelling, more insidious than what stalked the depths of darkness back home. Still from a human heart, once. Now gone beyond, inhuman, feral. What does it mean, but to accept there are hurts they continue to cause, and healings they continue to foster, in spite of and because of who and what they are.

He was frightened of something like this, as a younger man, as one who worried over bonds that he had to uphold and find himself choked by, fettered and left less and less able to choose any path forward for all their contradictions. Bereft of them all, what then? To have and to hold, and to hold on to Lan Zhan's hand now, and to study his face, rather than let his eyes wander, because it can be admiration and curiosity and want and still be intrusion, too, whatever their titles, whatever their bond. He knows that, even in his carelessness for himself, for what a body is, what it gives, what it disguises.

Leans in, to press a kiss to Lan Zhan's forehead, dampened by cloth, and some perspiration perhaps in the heat. There is this, whatever it is, and while he can agree, I appear worth wanting, what he can only recently acknowledge is, I am worth wanting as I am. Close after, following, you see me, not who I was, and though it leaves them restless, though the scars of the past won't unmake themselves, they can loosen, snakes coiled that stretch slow and sumptuous under a summer's sun.

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."

The weight of one man's head, and Wei Wuxian bids his eyes rise, not dip downward, not flirt with glances which might, somehow through the thickened curtain of the long, black tresses draped down over Lan Zhan's shoulders, bare skin. His husband has asked this much of him, and he speaks, further, thus listening is his duty. Hear.

Harken back to the weight his head must have been on his sister's lap, and there's a softened fierceness, a warmth, that floods through him even with the chill of water's kiss, of damp, of heat rising and inundating his pulled back sleeves. Scared of this, as a younger man. Strength is not always what he's understood it to be.

"Mm," he says, and the hum of soft assertion vibrates in his throat, the beat of dragonfly wings. Wen Ruohan and his greed, his inability to understand what command meant if it were not in the way he wished it, where the compromise of surrender and guidance called on horrifying possibilities, invited the sweeping gesture that was Wei Wuxian's bold claim to end a war, within proximity. Even the men who followed, tripping over their lowered robes as easily as their lowered sense of justice for any but themselves, could never quite grasp the sacrifice inherent in keeping from true demonic cultivation.

He does not mourn any of their lack of insight. Doesn't rejoice in it, either. Only considers where Lan Zhan might swallow, and what Wei Wuxian will accept, trusting those teeth across his throat will graze, not tear. They are each born greedy men, striving after different wholes destined to lack completeness.

Bichen's fall startles him from this quiet, from the room he makes for Lan Zhan's words alone, and their combined pulse, the weight of him not quite in his arms, the lapping water at the tub's sides, shush, shush.

"Learn with me," he says, any of the thousand of things that occur to him he might say. He does not love well either, but for different faultlines across the expanse of his heart. Too great, he supposes, his capacity to care, and love as a word from Lan Zhan's mouth strikes him hot, a brand invisible, heat rising to bleed a blush up his neck, flowing in reverse, to his ears, to the expanse of his cheeks. Love is not a word that sits easy in his flirtatious mouth, too direct, too honest, too private, but who are they now but private with each other?

"The only way we love better," he says, and he stumbles, throat thick and catching and dry all at once on that word, on the love he frames for being theirs, for being specific, particular, unique, "Is in learning."

Love, he thinks. What is love but a grand adventure, with the pains and trials that come along with breaking through to find that path ongoing, shared underneath the same skies, hand in hand as often as they're sundered by temporary circumstance? If they must be, he thinks to himself. If these days past, if the time he stood in fox's pelt, if the thousand tiny ways they cannot live within each other's skins aren't a lesson in and of themselves, learning to align two bodies, two hearts, two spirits, to fill in each other's spaces, invade by invitation, possess by permission, and settle, even when they stood shoulder to shoulder across a divide of time, space, agony.

The search for breath starts with starvation, then urgency, then fear, then inhalation. On Wei Ying, the weight of the cultivation world is tangle of dark-wetted weeds, Lan Wangji's head reduced to white noise and its ornaments. Scratch and scrape, where pins still bind back tresses loosened. Damp has triaged his hair, made noose of the half that it has not born a mourning shroud over his forehead, his heated cheeks.

He gasps with it, chases Wei Ying's pulse with eyes beaded and round, a cat set on prey.

"...a-Yuan? Safe" Between them they share the lacquered, temple beads of a secret, rolling like dull, hollow heartbreak. He does not reduce Sizhui to his infancy often, to the years of his innocence as if his identity among the Lan is unrepresentative. But they are family, Wei Ying frames him.

He presses the tip of his nose against Wei Ying's collar, then, calmly peels back, until he is alone, severed, distant — orbiting the bath's lip again, easing in until his hair succumbs and spreads like a wild net in lake waters. A lotus flower, unfurling. In Lotus Pier, they eat and bruise and wear the blossoms in their hair. What would they make of him, so vulnerably ready for the killing?

"If he asks of your marks, speak their truth." A man should not lie to his one son.

"He'll know, if he asks. He's been safe. He's been well." A sigh, but one in fondness, as Lan Zhan makes of himself a whole that possesses the space of the tub and its waters in the slow, spreading, unfurling manner of an easing.

Wei Wuxian reaches for the wash rag, left draped over the lip, and rewets it, sets to his work again, with a small turn of his lips, and a smaller shake of his head.

"Wen Qing, too, because I don't have the steel in me to lie to her, and Jiang Cheng can recognise what his hands might have once done." If Wei Wuxian had lacked a core at the time of Jiang Cheng's parent's murder, if the massacre of Lotus Pier hadn't been in that liminal space between an assurance of stability, of sanctity, and the gaping maw of war. More voracious than any one of them, and as blind as anyone could be. Blinder still than his martial uncle.

But he rubs cleansing circles down Lan Zhan's arm, strokes fingers through his floating locks of hair to coax them away, tend to his chest without undue lingering or ceremony. Pays no heed to the scar of the brand, beyond the fact of its existence, and says instead:

"Can we have tea with them all?" Meaning, moreso, the family I will not have once we are gone from here?

He is cared for. Webs of flimsy-thin oil in kaleidoscopic translucence, spume snagged on skin. Wei Ying weighs him with touch and teasing attention, wet of the rag enshrouding muscle where it's bloated, skin that's cracked, the deep-sculpted rivulets of his gashes. His bruises weep their gratitude. He leans into it, willow-like and soft, here to allow Wei Ying the greater expanse of work between his neck and clavicle, there to shudder like a breeze dancing leaves on string.

He is himself, absent ownership of his bones, accountability. Limbs move in familiar geometries Wei Ying yokes to whim, then the slipper gravity of his cloth, seeking shadows of filth. Enough on Lan Wangji, at first, to raise a palace of silt and debris. It scrapes off him in thin, crackled skins, polluting waters that roil and round, waves hard breaking.

When his moan crests, round, is when Wei Ying's cloth finds his temple, as if by accident, and the blackening there burns in pleasant waves of synchronised, dull torture. He is a child again, subject to uncle and large doting hands and attendants. His father's heir, his brother's spare, his mother's son.

"Enough." But he turns his head, so his lips spill rich and wet prints of stunted affection on Wei Ying's knuckles, when he catches them, in passing. Later, when he is armed with his ribbon again, he might pay this pale branch of a hand its due. "Fetch your wine."

Early, grey and slate and white morning. No hour for drink. Yet. "You wish to be my husband." I am, Wei Ying will curse him back, but there are notions to have, and notions to hold, and truths relative in this world, shaking. "Sit with me without purpose. Why do you want this? Tea."

The pretence of a happy, lost family, when Wen Qing does not meet their eyes, Xiao Xingchen cannot perceive them, and Jiang Cheng would sooner claw them out.

"Don't tell me you'll drink," he says, but the worry is there in his eyes, at the low growl of a sound that was, he supposed, a moan, but a different sort of animal than the man who'd chased him through this room, out to the threshold of the woods and into their prison of shadow and swallowed starlight. He breathes out, the cage of his lungs holding his heart in all its prickled, light bleeding finery, and he moves, looking for yes, one jar, though it does not remain here. The wash rag drapes again over the tub's lip, streaked in water and grime and polished with something like hope, but less acrid to the taste.

He heads for the door, glancing back before he reaches to open it, to step past sliding frame for anything else. Dampness beads on his fingertips, sliding down, pulled by gravity and happenstance to the boards underfoot, still holding strength despite the many millions of mouths chewing their way through them, one single breath at a time.

"You're my husband," as simple declaration. "If you're not decided on me yet, get around to it. The wine's downstairs, Lan Zhan, you really want it?"

Not he, who drinks more when he hides away from what he feels is beyond his grasping fingers to change, when his mind is too loud, his thoughts too inescapable, and he needs that freedom from the weight of himself. Drinking as he walks, as he sits, as he slips closer and closer to slumber, but doesn't quite tumble over into the sea of sleep. No words yet, on the why. Words that will follow with less reluctance than Little Apple under only his guiding hand on the pathways across the country spanning far beyond the realm of five clans fractured down into four, to where everything is not clan and birthing and birthright, where people remain as beautiful and crass as they've been here, as incredible and horrible as people might be in any mortal place, tied deeply to mortal concerns.

"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."

A pause at the threshold, and he smiles, shakes his head, turns around.

"You know me," he says, and there's enough truth there as he returns to the side of the tub, to where the warmth beckons, to where light slants in through the windows and speaks of early hours, not his known favourites for movement. "I'm going back to bed after you're cleaned up."

As if it's jesting, when it's also true: he'll finally catch more of sleep, elusive at the best of times, knowing Lan Zhan is safe, cared for, tended to, warm. He'll eat, he'll drink, he'll make whatever merry strikes after that, and so for this question asked as he kneels again, his husband's companion at his bathside station, his hand finding Lan Zhan's, to rest on it, to press down light, to pause.

"They're people who matter to me. We have enough sorrow we share with those we care about, those who care about us. I can't find it wrong to want to share some of the joy, too."

To see if Lan Zhan understands that, where Wei Wuxian's once bafflement, once brief born anger, long standing wrestling with the idea that he deserves anything like choice in a life he had no right to have been granted, sat, there is a hope that grows with roots deep in the earth, unfurling petals to an uncaring sky. A weed can be as tenacious, and no less important, no less part of what he wants to give, what he wants to share, to those who are his family. To those who are already gone, but are reachable now, where Wen Qing's body was rendered to ash and spread on the wind, her soul irreparably shattered. To where his martial uncle's soul is shattered too, from other heart-sad avenues.

Let there be some positive, some warmth, some indication of life that grows in the people who find each other through its worst, like his sister, visiting to share with him her wedding gown, the one he'd never see her married in, and with her soup. Fed, heart and body, by the warmth of her affection, her regard.

What is it men do, when they are neither children nor monsters, but the transient, mundane emptiness between these states? When they must decide, if, like planets, they can love themselves and pull and yoke and tether others close? When they are simply, intrinsically insufficient and their only chance of survival is not the autonomy of amputating half of their soul's yearnings, but finding a pair?

They marry in this life and the next, the heavens their sullen witness. He does not flinch when Wei Ying's fingers insinuate themselves, a warm blanket overlapped, when Lan Wangji's head roams in tumble, and his cheek crosses Wei Ying's knuckles on the bathtub's edge, and there is stillness between — that moment when a fissure must decide whether it will rot into breakage, or trip back into balance, whether the matter it sink or come afloat.

And he warns, pale ash in his mouth, "This is not a marriage they will understand."

A binding of fates and blood and curse and qi, and no sanctity of romance, no trinkets of gifting, no honeyed courtship. No beauty of youth swollen to great convexity with each conventional milestone marked, each merit earned.

He thinks, they are great proud fools, stones stabbing seas and failing to broker ships their passage. Their door game is carnage, their red was the war.

Softened, like the warmth of air beside him, an exhalation, "We shall have tea."

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