Suanzaoren. Tips of the red nail, slow-chewed, sweet. In Cloud Recesses, seed and skin stripped and beaten, brewed in hard boil, and the first taste brittle on the tongue, fleshy and moist — until sleep ebbs and flows to the natural sea tide of the body at unrest. Simple cure to Wei Ying's sickness, any physician knows, would share. Cleansing in consonance between instrument and qi. Even the sword masters' classical counsel of exhaustion, invited with the day's exercise, sun rising to sun down, and limbs come crashing down.
There are ways to trick the body in stillness. Men given to their stupor are familiar. But Wei Ying is roil and boiling and laughter, a quiet and unmellowed frenzy, storm gazing within itself. He clings to Lan Wangji like a rag left without rinse, but claws rim his grasp, and now and then, Wangji's step deepens with the ill-levelled floor, and he breathes and exhales with the tension of a body upon him, distrusting. The dog, sting of stubborn fear landing erratic, an allergy in bloom. The dog, and Wei Ying who will sell his soul five times at a misplaced going rate to serve Lan Wangji in battle, but never decide to bequeath him the gift of perfect, complete confidence.
No matter. Trust earned, step strengthening. "I would play for you."
Let him. One practitioner's courtesy to another, the intrusion a negotiated risk. Calculated, if not for the ever-misstep of Lan Wangji's effusion. He knows what he knows, the way of generations: and Wei Ying, who bristles with it, recedes within himself, chooses the comforts of curdled, secure isolation.
They pass the kitchens, the first long-shadowed lengths of storage halls. To abbreviate the voyage, the course is plain, but his hand stills, stirring the rust of the barn doors from gasp to hiss to opening.
"Brace," and he steps out into the wretched cold of the inner court, negotiates the doors closed behind him, the dead weight of Wei Ying strapped on him like a child, no more than a mantle. Faster through here, cutting the lines of the aching house, under the plaintive whispers of ghosts whipped back by sunrise. Pale, when it strikes his cheek. Sickened and plain. He lends his cheek, turned, to bracket Wei Ying's, walks them into the belly of recovered foliage. Sorcery and turnips saluting, and soon the day's meal, grown. A world of domestic vexations. "You need not be alone."
no subject
There are ways to trick the body in stillness. Men given to their stupor are familiar. But Wei Ying is roil and boiling and laughter, a quiet and unmellowed frenzy, storm gazing within itself. He clings to Lan Wangji like a rag left without rinse, but claws rim his grasp, and now and then, Wangji's step deepens with the ill-levelled floor, and he breathes and exhales with the tension of a body upon him, distrusting. The dog, sting of stubborn fear landing erratic, an allergy in bloom. The dog, and Wei Ying who will sell his soul five times at a misplaced going rate to serve Lan Wangji in battle, but never decide to bequeath him the gift of perfect, complete confidence.
No matter. Trust earned, step strengthening. "I would play for you."
Let him. One practitioner's courtesy to another, the intrusion a negotiated risk. Calculated, if not for the ever-misstep of Lan Wangji's effusion. He knows what he knows, the way of generations: and Wei Ying, who bristles with it, recedes within himself, chooses the comforts of curdled, secure isolation.
They pass the kitchens, the first long-shadowed lengths of storage halls. To abbreviate the voyage, the course is plain, but his hand stills, stirring the rust of the barn doors from gasp to hiss to opening.
"Brace," and he steps out into the wretched cold of the inner court, negotiates the doors closed behind him, the dead weight of Wei Ying strapped on him like a child, no more than a mantle. Faster through here, cutting the lines of the aching house, under the plaintive whispers of ghosts whipped back by sunrise. Pale, when it strikes his cheek. Sickened and plain. He lends his cheek, turned, to bracket Wei Ying's, walks them into the belly of recovered foliage. Sorcery and turnips saluting, and soon the day's meal, grown. A world of domestic vexations. "You need not be alone."