sa-hareth | arrival (mingle log)

[groundrules]

WHO: Everyone ever + the local Sa-hareth squad.
WHEN: Arc I: Sa-Hareth arrival.
WHERE: Sa-Hareth citadel, salt mine, the old jailhouse,
WHAT: Our intrepid heroes get commandeered into the frosty unknown.
WARNINGS: the glorious undead, background House of Dew mentions, at least one person's terrible sense of humour.

Comments

[downswing]

...pleasure house. Of course. This would be his luck, his ruin. Wet-eyed and the long sleep of thoughtless lethargy is slipping from him, leaves him restless and awake like a stalk of green, eager to shoot up between sprinkled spring's grass at the first lazy lick of sun's greeting. He lives in a home of sins, wood sinewy, trade old, every footstep that haunts his sleep less a scavenger's retreat but the dance of lovers, meeting.

Were he a disciple still, there might be a flush stuck to him, like sickness. Now, his ears threaten to colour, but he only breathes, reaches out and, cat-like, swipes at Wei Ying's sleeve — hooks and tugs to pull him down.

"Stay." He wonders, just once, if he may have this: a toy that sits where Wangji's mind eye pleases, a creature decisively not a pet that respects, nevertheless, those same inclinations. "The road gave you back with bruising."

Lan Wangji, self-satisfied, hopefully added at least two more. Earlier, a heartfelt thud. Promising. Wei Ying's earned the inks of a few hurts, for that cheek.

[weifinder]

Wei Wuxian is a man who selects his resistances, and more often than not capitulates to those he cares about; not wisely, at all times, and not appropriately either, but there's nothing that feels unwise or inappropriate in responding to the downward tug with a pause and then the folding of his limbs into a controlled collapse, flicking his patchwork cloak out behind him.

"Lan Zhan." Staring at him, knowing the concerns, but unwilling to allow him this way over ones shared. "If bruises were enough to stop me, would you have ever heard my name in Gusu Lan?"

Easier to jest about things which are decades removed, things that had traveled in rumours across all five sects, enough that it was known what kind of conflict Jiang Sect's head disciple got into with its lady co-leader; his favouritism with the gentleman co-leader being the contrasting point. Easier to speak on those echoes of a childhood he'd partly made difficult on himself, partly allowed that there was no 'right' he could achieve that would soothe all tempers, than the others: when has being half alive stopped me from trying? When has grievous injury kept me from striving? He's not a man who has ever taken himself in kindness, but he's smiled through most of it, and he'll smile as he needs to for the days that come.

"Your brother, our son. One you have the sole claim to, but don't ask me to act as if I don't care about A-Yuan. I've lost him once."

Don't ask him to stay and risk losing him again.

[downswing]

His brother, and their son. One he has the sole claim to, but Wei Ying snags and lures, grievously into his gravity pull. Who watches and listens and worships the gentle pour of Wei Ying's flickered movements, the restless, watery tumble of his words. Who clung to Lan Wangji's leg once, only as a log at sea, when the storms roiled strong — when Wei Ying absented as his sun. 

But the man doubles Lan Wangji's shadow now, pleasantly seated. Not his son. 

"Never to be lost again," he pledges before he knows the words for what they are, before they reap poison on his tattered tongue. Heavy the rag that slips his fingers, drops down in slick, stubborn silence like grave soil. The afterthought: he brushes his fingers on the edges of it, to relieve the same wetness the cloth carries in full.
 
Then, he only sits, and regulates himself minutely, back straightening, shoulders squaring, knelt pose deepened. The casual, coy invitation of a human anchor, present and available to any errant cultivators, prone to slouching and lending more than carrying their own weight, as they sit. Wei Ying, the classical feline. 

"We go tomorrow." When Lan Wangji is sufficiently mended, and Wei Ying alert. When they've finetuned themselves to each other again in battle synchrony. When the sun's risen to good advantage.

[weifinder]

He's hit hard by those words, the pledge, and he wouldn't be able to frame in words why, precisely. Something about who is saying it, who has lost as much as he has, and his own largely still processing losses. Grief isn't something he lets himself dwell in, but it's something he's made himself face more in months on the road, away from everything else; not losing anyone else. Let alone losing anyone again.

(For him, it's A-Yuan. It's everyone he left behind, in a time where he'd finally broken in a way he didn't get back up after. For Lan Zhan—)

His eyes burn, and he twitches his fingers, reaches out, ends up taking a pinched hold of Lan Zhan's sleeve. "Thank you." With a few rapid blinks taking away the stinging in his eyes, he glances up, nodding to the statement. Tomorrow is reasonable, all things considered. "Lan Zhan, is there anything you need right now? Supply wise," he adds, flicking his gaze pointedly toward the servants quarters behind and around them all. "I can stay for a while today and help, but sometime before the skies darken, I've got to get to market and back."

[downswing]

You do not have to do a thing. No man compels you. Not one creed possessed the Yiling Patriarch, no sect leader commands him. No spirit weighs his flute or taunts his soul. He carries himself, a monument, indestructible — heart as stone.

Crumbling, where Lan Wangji can see it. Tattered earth beneath his step, if he does not rise above. Stills, instead, stranded, anchor between the sea foam of his dangled silks. Sixteen years ago, Wei Ying jumped to gem spread of littered flame. Now, he means to drench himself in Wangji's disaster. What he requires is this: Wei Ying's fingers, gently peeled from Wangji's sleeve. His posture, corrected. The balance of the room restored, so Wei Ying might prioritise his own person.

Shadow of a borrowed smile bright-burn on his lips, the old conceit — he is, here, as everywhere, exalted beauty and nodded grace, the chief cultivator. "I dismiss you."

Go without guilt or fear, then. Be gone, now. Shoo.

[weifinder]

He blinks as his fingers are pried off Lan Zhan's sleeve, and he starts to cant his head to the side as he studies each small adjustment before him. Including the ending by dismissal, one that has both his brows lifting and his lips curled upward before he laughs.

"Right now? So mean, you've just invited me to sit!" Twice, and forcefully. He doesn't think it's mean, of course, but he does lean forward to try and press a finger to the tip of Lan Zhan's nose.

"Just a reminder, Lan Zhan, not me needing to go now. Did you know, they'll even pay you to run errands?" He's still smiling, lopsided, because there's nothing really surprising about this. "Not much, but when you have nothing, each bit helps."

He glances to Lan Zhan's temple, smile fading. "Are there any of the things you usually use that I can help find for you? I'm a little more used to going without, it's almost nostalgic."

The saddest part being it wasn't a lie.

"Plus, if you get creative with the eating utensils, you can find all sorts of uses for the odd ones!" Like the multi tined ones not big enough to use over fires.

[downswing]

He knows himself, in the paints of Wei Ying's pity: wreckage, temple a hard bruise, hand ruined by feverish eruption of need to crumble salt in the mines and cleanse the unburied dead. More shell than man, a familiar travesty.

He knows, too, the sight before him: Wei Ying, protective as he stood once before the young Sizhui, voice figments of carefully crafted tenderness, combined. Hands, hesitant. Words immature, traded only for the reassurance that he is here, beside Lan Wangji, alive and well and paying mind.

Bopping Wangji's nose, with a freedom so cavalier that Lan Wangji blinks at the offending hand, too paralysed to flee it.

"We are not in Cloud Recesses." Where he is royalty of the white mountain, served hand and foot by docile disciples and willing attendants, revered as brother to Zewu-Jun by sect members and chief cultivators by a cohort of squabbling children, the remaining clans. Here, he is stone weight on an ill-cleansed floor, hand curled tight and hot on tile and panel, frown deep-carved and infantile. He has no entitlements.

"I want for nothing," he pronounces, staggered. But lacks, notably, for everything. Foremost:

"...stay." More fool him, he only just said — "Until the floors dry. Footprints."

That old excuse, then.

[weifinder]

Having managed his nose bop, and feeling obscurely like he's seeing a giant, human-shaped rabbit in the form of Lan Zhan, he smiles and settles himself in more at the request, whatever its framework, than the rest. He doesn't address the thinness of the pretext, benefitting from it himself, as long as he allows it.

"As long as we like," he says, agreeing with a nod, and curbing his thoughts that keep trying to turn toward worries and plans for the salt mines and the faces they have yet to see here&mdsah;what if. Wondering at possibilities didn't solve them, and practicalities would be the only responses viable, if they found any familiar among the dead.

They wouldn't. He believes that so firmly he'd swear by it, but he also won't fail to go searching. Not again.

He stares down at the bowl of dirty water, and the rags therein, before lifting his gaze to Lan Zhan where he sits, lap to abdomen to face, concerned. Also feeling his new bruises with a sort of amused nod, ignoring them and the gentled pounding at the back of his head.

"Have you tried using this thing?" He asks after a pause, pulling a crystal out of his waistband and holding it up for Lan Zhan to examine at his leisure, if he wished to at all.

[downswing]

That, pale and rose and a sliver of adornment brother might have pinned at the corner of a wide, generously laughing mouth. Strange, to know the same yearnings of a defunct war slap him, ghost glimpses of Zewu-Jun in passing, alive and well and resolute in battle — prospects that stab his heart.

He is the child before his mother's home, cold with his faults: his head mute pulse, his qi redacted, his limbs mellowed down. Only Wei Ying, quiescent and slow to anchor him. Have Lan Wangji's better possessions, his feeding, his human warmth — only, linger.

Have his attention, first, soft over the quartz fragment, knowing.

"Ill suits me." Given to speech more than the written word, for all Lan Wangji imposes on his interlocutors to conspire with him in calligraphy. "We have no alternative."

And he lends the knocked jade strips of his fingers, fumbling and crossing and curling around Wei Ying's crystal piece, extending the tendril-roots of his magic to bury in the fertile soil of any deviation in the stone. No stirrings of shadow or crepuscule chime in answer. He releases the piece back to Wei Ying.

"Safe." Searched, to the best of Lan Wangji's curtailed ability. No possession, no curse, no lingering shadow. No danger. "Use it without qualms."

If he can do nothing for Wei Ying now, he can do this little.

[weifinder]

"Certainly a little more two way than what I can do," he says, small paper men running around and performing mischiefs from a time long before and a time not even a handful of months in the past now. A thought he considers with a frown, thinking of salt encrusted walls and the cut of them against his palm, supplies strewn and torn, decay hinted at but not followed through on.

Tomorrow, yes. For now, he watches Lan Zhan twitch and clutch his fingers around the stone, and hums acknowledgment before the words follow.

"Thank you." It was not a necessary check, perhaps, but it is its own kindness, offered in a way that doesn't have him as inclined to stare at the still healing injury at Lan Zhan's temple. Look to yourself, only something he reflects on as strikingly unfair for either one of them to think the other man incapable of, but strikingly fair to presume both compromise their own selves for the sake of each other. A lifelong problem of his own, and his fingers twitch in turn to capture the stone so deemed as safe within his palm, tucked away.

"They have attached names, have you discovered yours?" A beat, as Wei Wuxian keeps his hand closed, not looking to the curious spelling of a stone utterly new to his experience. "This one," he says, leaning in a touch for the idleness of dramatics, tone turning wry at the admission that follows, "Is 'old dog turning new tricks.'"

The grimace following is unfeigned and unexaggerated. An absurdity and a jest of its own, extended between them, as something so silly as to not be worth noting, that the greatly feared Yiling Patriarch's fear of dogs might hound him across realms.

[downswing]

...wonderfully canine. The small-toothed smile of fate, cautiously upturned. Old, but Wei Ying wears his years like jade pieces, with the stolen dignity of a hawk or hunting bird, a crone. Half a lived life, half borrowed. The whole, patchwork of craft and strain. What new tricks can a creature learn whose entire existence is perverse, blaspheming novelty?

"A hummingbird." Heart-fluttering. A quiet, shy and softened thing. He does not know himself in the name. Sharpens it, dulled first, but finding edge and tip and blade's side, steel, into the trade instrument Wei Ying requires.

"Apologies. If we trade," and he does not offer it, not with this traitor's mouth, not with the shivered line of his pressured shoulders, "Wei Ying will fear me."

Better to suffer the ridicule of a savage reminder than recoil in base fear from the written sight of the one lingering ally. Wei Ying need not witness his name as often as others will, surely.

[weifinder]

Ah, but the new tricks here are insidious in nature, new workings of waking death, now bodies attached and enslaved to a continued existence in a way that hadn't been feasible in their own world. He'll hope to learn more on the morrow, but as the water dries to his pointed lack of attention, and Lan Zhan claims they cannot exchange quartz for fear, he's both touched and amused.

Worried, still, aching and feeling new and old bruises settle, but so too settles something else of the absurd that's easier to swallow than a second summoning. If he was going to fear Lan Zhan, if he'd drum up that emotion from the sea of those he chooses to examine or ignore, it would be long before now.

He laughs, a low chuckle and a tooth baring grin as he looks to Lan Zhan, dropping his named quartz into his lap without much concern. Wagging a finger, he gives a small shake of his head. "Lan Zhan, you're this unexpectedly cute! Words may influence enough, but even that one can't leave me, ah, indisposed." Annoyed, yes, but life is filled with irritations he shrugs off for the sake of moving forward and not being weighted down by things that do nothing for him. "If you started sneaking up on me and barking, that, that would be worse."

He pouts, saying this, but the shiver he doesn't quite manage to hide thinking about that also translates into thoughts of the walking dead in the mines, to the stranger shapes he barely remembers from their chained up days on the plateau, and to teeth, bared and dripping, and the surging worry: are the walking dead only human.