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a man's just trying to get a-head
WHO: Xie Yun, Lan Wangji
WHEN: 9 December
WHERE: the inn grounds, a sadly defiled hot spring
WHAT: Xie Yun and Lan Wangji stare, Xie Yun and Lan Wangji glare, Xie Yun and Lan Wangji beware — and this poor ghost and its head still just want the soap
WARNINGS: the comedy of a ghost's pristine manners
( The inn’s house was too warm, too clean, too tidy. Too welcoming of their drifting steps and battle-burned wits and their chilled fingertips and their ruin. No questions asked, fewer answers demanded. The patrician turn of the mistress’ nose, speaking of indiscretion as an ancient imprecation. Thou shalt not gossip, the principles exalt.
And yet wherever their coalition has gone, eyes have turned, men have wondered. Lies have been spoken diligently, liberally, to learned and stupefying degrees. Here, they were asked nothing: only, each morning, to fill of buckets, to mind the broths brewing, to undertake the farce of cleansing the inn’s garden steps, just before fresh snow would dust them thickly by midday.
It was too simple. Enmeshing a panic that blossoms in Lan Wangji's heart, a white feverish frenzy. They will be found. Claustrophobically, he tries each shuttered window at night, sets himself against each door’s salted lines to ascertain that he could, he can leave, can take his child and Wei Ying and the woman of Qishan Wen, and they can flee when misfortune strikes.
It will, with inevitability. Drip and drip, from thawing icicles down frosted eaves, drip of cold sweat down his back, licking his spine, drip and drip, the condensation that breathes out from the springs’ mouth, when Xie Yun and Wangji are assigned the sweeping of snow from curled stone edges.
He had anticipated the great, wanton tragedy of domesticity, corrupted. Hidden monsters with bright fangs. The porcelain of glistened scales, a flurry of claws.
...instead, cajoling the crooked, stiff gate with a drawling creak, in saunters a man ferrying his unrooted head peacefully in hand, politely taking care not to step and drag in motes of winter where Xie Yun and Lan Wangji have just passed their broom. The man bares himself — flushed, Wangi shields his eyes — and dips into the springs' pool to swim a few carefully curated, obliging laps that barely spume the bubbling waters. He even commits, at all times, to the safety of all parties involved, sitting the broken head on the upmost ridges of his spine with rope bound around his neck. It dutifully sees and reports back steering guidance.
Then, awkwardly the deadened thing asks to be passed the soap from a distant caddy, past his hand’s reach.
Lan Wangji blinks. Neary falters as he holds his broom. Stares, deeply, meaningfully, with the disciplined aridity of a soul only his Uncle may have nourished young, towards Xie Yun, as if to ask, Do you see this?
Snow starts to fall. The ghostly man suggest, perhaps, if they don’t mind, the soap, please, so he might make haste with cleansing and retire before the wind stokes? )
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Those currents are wild and seemed a bit more violent. Of course, the soap ends up closer to him in the end. He was not, however, going to kneel down to get it. Nor was he going to take his eyes off of the man in front of him.
His own sword, bright and beautiful, is pulled from its confines and he reaches the tip of his sword out, batting the soap in the direction of the headless man. Whether it got to the man or not was a whole other story. Maybe he could distract the headless creature in another way, with music or a story. ]
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( Ah, what wicked gentleme —
...no, no, the soap is floating briskly towards the headless swimmer now, he loves them, he loves them well, sir, and you, other sir, how righteous you are, how formidable, has he said? But he has thought it, simply wonderful, true visions. He cannot help but think it so — the head, while the body yet wanders, drifting and dragging in the currents, and starting to.
Oh.
Oh, but the Heavens must bless the twitch of Lan Wangji's jaw, his mouth, the headless man is drowning — more so, the body, while the head shrieks, the head convulses, the head seems to be taking water.
Oh, no.
Now, and Lan Wangji despairs to be fettering Bichen, rolled eyes praying to Guanyin above, they must rescue the dead thing from bubbling froth.
See you in the water, Xie Yun. In he goes.
A-gloo-gloo. )
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Shouldn't they be?
Growing up with Taoist monks of a mythical island he can't just do nothing. That would not appease anyone. Nor could he just do nothing as the young Emeperor he was. What message would that send to his godbrother, Zichen? Even if the man wasn't there with them.
Heaven help them both. Down into the water he goes with Lan Wangji. Hopefully they can get to the headless body in time... ]
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( A hard pace, bolstered when the body — absent direction — fails to set itself afloat. Distantly, over groaning waves and bubbling spumes and a storm of rivers, he hears the head's mound wail out cries for assistance. He gives it, balancing the beast of the corpse's bones against his shoulder, his back, and rousing it
with strained and imbalanced sighs to break water.
...the headless corpse kicks, instinctively, still trying to paddle, only to target Lan Wangji's calves and lower back instead. No good deed without its righteous punishment.
Preparing to ferry the creature ashore, he spots the tumbling, grousing sphere beyond, tearing his air's fill from the next breath to shout out to Xie Yun, rasping — )
Fetch the head.
( ...that floats merrily ahead, cursing its luck for dear life as it threatens to collide with the springs' thorny, moss-caressed edge.
Well, then. )