( He stills, and it's a sullen thing, the forest's inhalations frozen beside his own. Eyes slanting, gaze haunted and thin and not flinching, not he, not the traitor's flesh that rounds his bones, pebbled. He does not turn to behold Wei Ying, for all he feels the searing print of his body's heat like lichen, spreading, savaging, a tired corruption. Like waters, filling the negative space where Lan Wangji might have thought to sequester his private shames, his burdens.

Hands in his hair, desired, fictive, haunted. Hands on his back, fastened around his flank, honest and true and carnal, stalwart and solid. You like that?

He wants to speak poetry and dreams and all the pretty, playful things and trinkets of illusory affection that grace the thinned parchment paper of marriage books: that he will accept and worship whatever Wei Ying surrenders him, that he has no appetites, only attunement, like string beneath nails of the right softness and curvature, that he sings for whatever alms Wei Ying spares his beggarly soul.

It is not so. He walks, nearly stumbles. It is not so. )

And... if I do? ( Will it shame him? It must, if even shameless Wei Wuxian rips time from his busied day to remark upon Lan Wangji's eccentricity. )