A soft bark of laughter, eyes closing before they open, taking a heartbeat longer than they should. "A Lan, through and through. Maybe if they were as rich in spiritual energy as yours, I'd take to them more swiftly."
Douse himself in the cold for a distilled purpose beyond perked nipples with contracting flesh and the alarmingly pervasive flow of healing energy into a body filled with aches and pains and memories of even more, remembered where the mind has consigned them to ancient history. It all catches up, in fits and starts, one day. Even for immortals, let alone the lower level cultivators in their mortality craven skins.
Hours before, decades ago, don't seek me will still find them turning toward each other, and Wei Wuxian leans into Lan Zhan's well practised manipulations to hold close, for a moment, side to side and arm draped and waist circled, to tighten his own arm, to make it a half-assed and deliberate sideways embrace. All for the butting of forms toward the empty rooftops, and the easy excuse of it makes it simple enough to do, and say nothing, just exhale unsteadily in gratitude for everything he still has, and dismiss the memories of grief that said he might not.
The snow flakes around their feet, melting on skin, but so much of them still is cloth, not warm enough to change their forms from tiny, heaven-bereft crystals to warming water and chilling force. "Together," as if he doesn't have a tangled relationship with that word, that concept, as if it was not a lesson learned that Lan Zhan calls into question each day with reminders and long merited mistrust, slow to shift. "He'd be gladder as a whole."
Two wrecked fathers, but not the ones they'd been in different ways, not for sixteen years and change, and not before the clearing of one name no longer damned both to the same darkness of opinion. Let darkness be for the time of day, or when stepping in shadows.
Step into the light Hanguang-jun casts, having brought Sizhui into a world of it, and their sun rises as they make plodding steps through new-fallen snow, the eventual blanketing of the landscape back to pristine stillness, as if bodies are not strewn across it, as if the soil will not reclaim them in parts, as if there is nothing that hurts that will not heal, and the sun will always come up, tomorrow.
no subject
Douse himself in the cold for a distilled purpose beyond perked nipples with contracting flesh and the alarmingly pervasive flow of healing energy into a body filled with aches and pains and memories of even more, remembered where the mind has consigned them to ancient history. It all catches up, in fits and starts, one day. Even for immortals, let alone the lower level cultivators in their mortality craven skins.
Hours before, decades ago, don't seek me will still find them turning toward each other, and Wei Wuxian leans into Lan Zhan's well practised manipulations to hold close, for a moment, side to side and arm draped and waist circled, to tighten his own arm, to make it a half-assed and deliberate sideways embrace. All for the butting of forms toward the empty rooftops, and the easy excuse of it makes it simple enough to do, and say nothing, just exhale unsteadily in gratitude for everything he still has, and dismiss the memories of grief that said he might not.
The snow flakes around their feet, melting on skin, but so much of them still is cloth, not warm enough to change their forms from tiny, heaven-bereft crystals to warming water and chilling force. "Together," as if he doesn't have a tangled relationship with that word, that concept, as if it was not a lesson learned that Lan Zhan calls into question each day with reminders and long merited mistrust, slow to shift. "He'd be gladder as a whole."
Two wrecked fathers, but not the ones they'd been in different ways, not for sixteen years and change, and not before the clearing of one name no longer damned both to the same darkness of opinion. Let darkness be for the time of day, or when stepping in shadows.
Step into the light Hanguang-jun casts, having brought Sizhui into a world of it, and their sun rises as they make plodding steps through new-fallen snow, the eventual blanketing of the landscape back to pristine stillness, as if bodies are not strewn across it, as if the soil will not reclaim them in parts, as if there is nothing that hurts that will not heal, and the sun will always come up, tomorrow.