( Hand to wrist, sliding pressure of touch lower. Not for titillation, and not without eyes fixed on his husband's face, no smile, simply awareness that stains his eyes darker, to consumption. Light still reflects, pinpoint, over the hidden ache, an empty core. )
Hollows leave spaces for filling. However you make them.
( His core, donated, where it thrives now; what would have been as lost as Jiang Cheng's in the moment of his own capture in Wen hands, his own torture under their inflictions, his tossing and improbable survival of the fall into the stained, haunted, ravenous folds of the Yiling hills, the burial mound and its generations spanning memory of pain and death and misery.
He knows shapes of desperation. He knows loyalty that drives beyond what some consider reason. He knows sacrifice, and he can never unknow it, never turn away from plight or need, especially of those he loves. To learn the better ways of handling these things, of not facing the world alone under youthful hubris and misunderstanding of ones strength against a world uncaring, is a matter of age. Experience. Wisdom. Not a matter of cessation.
Drags the same hand up, to his face, where his lips can part and press an open mouthed kiss to the center of a less than clean palm. All their hands, stained in their youth, and written over in callouses of living. )
The advantage is not to those who live, Lan Zhan. What I saw in the arena, what the Hand's trial showed, was a learning. A mimicking. A filling of body. Think you not that evolution is advantage to those who in command?
( Whose hands did they wish dirtied, when they yearned to take Nightless City? Who secured that victory in war, while near dying himself, to be castigated and feared for it? Oh, he knows the strength in an army transformed, in one that cannot be stopped by simpler means, which responds in loyalty or by command and order, to a tune beyond their control, until that control is wrested away by another with even fewer compunctions about the horrors they visit upon the world.
no subject
( Hand to wrist, sliding pressure of touch lower. Not for titillation, and not without eyes fixed on his husband's face, no smile, simply awareness that stains his eyes darker, to consumption. Light still reflects, pinpoint, over the hidden ache, an empty core. )
Hollows leave spaces for filling. However you make them.
( His core, donated, where it thrives now; what would have been as lost as Jiang Cheng's in the moment of his own capture in Wen hands, his own torture under their inflictions, his tossing and improbable survival of the fall into the stained, haunted, ravenous folds of the Yiling hills, the burial mound and its generations spanning memory of pain and death and misery.
He knows shapes of desperation. He knows loyalty that drives beyond what some consider reason. He knows sacrifice, and he can never unknow it, never turn away from plight or need, especially of those he loves. To learn the better ways of handling these things, of not facing the world alone under youthful hubris and misunderstanding of ones strength against a world uncaring, is a matter of age. Experience. Wisdom. Not a matter of cessation.
Drags the same hand up, to his face, where his lips can part and press an open mouthed kiss to the center of a less than clean palm. All their hands, stained in their youth, and written over in callouses of living. )
The advantage is not to those who live, Lan Zhan. What I saw in the arena, what the Hand's trial showed, was a learning. A mimicking. A filling of body. Think you not that evolution is advantage to those who in command?
( Whose hands did they wish dirtied, when they yearned to take Nightless City? Who secured that victory in war, while near dying himself, to be castigated and feared for it? Oh, he knows the strength in an army transformed, in one that cannot be stopped by simpler means, which responds in loyalty or by command and order, to a tune beyond their control, until that control is wrested away by another with even fewer compunctions about the horrors they visit upon the world.
Whose hands?
Whose? )