[ closed post: let's talk about all our friends who lost the war ]

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji can't identify the soft music drifting from the record player, but if he asked, Claudius would tell him gladly, and provide an explanation of the musician's life besides. Perhaps he will ask, if there is some lull in the conversation, but there has not been one. Talking with people is so rarely an activity of ease for him. It is so rarely one during which he can feel assured that his silences are understood. He has not forgotten to be grateful for Claudius, the first person related to him by neither family name nor marriage to understand him in this way.

"Mn," he says, gathering up another lock of Claudius' hair in his hands. It is getting longer. Just as notably, strands of grey are visible amongst the uniform darkness of its color. Lan Wangji says nothing about that. He won't draw attention to it unless Claudius wants him to. The absence of the appropriate dye during last Dark was a matter of deep offense.

Ably, Lan Wangji begins the work of twisting it all into a sleek knot that will sit at the back of Claudius' head. Kneeling behind him, he has to bend only slightly to focus on this work. The difference in their heights is greater when they stand, with thanks to the comparative length of Lan Wangji's legs. "And then?" he prompts. Claudius doesn't require prompts, but Lan Wangji is indulgent with him. He likes to answer him, so that his brother will know himself heard.

Comments

[wickedwit]

"Well, naturally she had to leave it unbraced," Claudius continues, with a fluttery sort of hand-wave to express the agitation in his younger self's heart. "Form-fitting was the style then -- I was still on the skinny side of svelte, and Gertrude was a full-figured woman. Something I certainly felt while wearing her gown ... but she said it draped beautifully on me. It struck me as the sort of encouraging comment older sisters were obligated to make to their unmarried siblings, but she kept fussing with the sash until everything hung just so. I didn't know where to put my eyes! If I looked down, I'd see her legs, and that felt positively sinful. But know thou, she'd only begun to dress so modestly at her husband's request. Even the gown she lent me, she hadn't worn since the wedding. Silver and pleated, I thought it made her look like some sort of Greek goddess -- like a statue of a god, I should say, and not one of the living, breathing gods that walk around here. They're easy on the eyes, but she was ethereal. The way Galahad is when he wears white lace." He lets out a sigh, then directs his attention back to the mirror, where he watches Lan Wangji work. "That's what clothing can do. It forms pieces of our identity, and she had to fold a piece her identity away, until she could gift it to some maiden. By wearing my clothes, she could try on an identity hitherto denied to her ... and I could do the same in hers. And she did my hair, much like this."

[lightbearinglord]

A little smile, one that Claudius won't see, flickers into and out of existence across Lan Wangji's face. He remembers Gertrude well, her beauty and poise. Now that he has met a younger version of Claudius himself, it is not difficult to picture his sweetly flustered reaction to this scenario, to the undeniable suggestion of legs on a woman.

"That is why I like so much to see Wei Ying in white, like a Lan," Lan Wangji says. He sets aside the ivory comb, carved with the shape of a lotus blossom along its spine, in order to have both his hands for taming Claudius' hair, tucking away stray curls and ends. "Once, Uncle would have preferred he never enter the Cloud Recesses again. But he belongs there."

[wickedwit]

"Thou hadst him in white for the first wedding dance," Claudius declares, with the delight of having made a connection. Fashion is a language Claudius will never tire of learning, most of all when it speaks in whispers. "Looking every bit like you belonged together -- cut from the same cloth, if thou wilt. Was that also thy reason for tying him in white ribbon¹ for the talent show?"

¹ The most unmistakably white ribbon in the world, in fact.

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji's breath trips over the suggestion of a laugh, at once sheepish and unrepentant. "My forehead ribbon." Beside him where he kneels, he has a pair of hair sticks, lengths of silver whose ends transform into coiling snakes. These, he uses to secure the tidy bun he has given Claudius. "It is meant to remind us of self-restraint. Only family members or cultivation partners may touch a Lan cultivator's forehead ribbon."

[wickedwit]

"So it is the same!" Claudius tilts his head, to appreciate the reflected shimmer of the snake-heads. "Thou wert saying this man belongs to me. Quite the creative reinterpretation of self-restraint," he adds, as if it were a deliberate art piece, not an impromptu bondage session brought on by a single sip Mai Tai. "They do say to love another you should love them as yourself."

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn." The corner of Lan Wangji's mouth quirks up again, an almost instinctive pleasure at the idea of having staked his claim on Wei Ying in an obvious fashion. It was humiliating in retrospect, but not without its successes. "Another rule instructs me not to use the forehead ribbon in any other ways. I think I cannot claim creative reinterpretation in that case."

[wickedwit]

"Such a shame!" Claudius laughs. "Sagramore likes to steal my neckties. But there's only so much one can do with a single piece -- safety, knowest thou,” he says, with every confidence that Lan Wangji does, in fact, know. He twirls his fingers through the air as he speaks, as if wrapping something several times, distributing pressure. "A ribbon like thine is the ideal length."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji has long been fond of the length of his ribbon for its utility, never mind its beauty. He finds it very satisfying to wrap Wei Ying's wrists again and again, trapping him thoroughly. "It is not what Lan An, my ancestor, intended. But it is useful." He tucks a final errant curl into the knot of Claudius' hair. "This is how a married woman would wear her hair."

[wickedwit]

Claudius looks at himself in the mirror, and for a mere moment, it's chaos -- a conflagration of light and feeling that happens to end in an image. Lan An, Lan Zhan's ancestor, surely never predicted this. But how could he predict his ascendant spirit would be stolen from another world, made to interact with the likes of Claudius? Base, ambitious, and soulless in a way only Catholicism could explain. Without it, Claudius sometimes felt he had too much soul to be exposed. When he looks at himself like this, at least he feels he belongs. Like an overripe fruit, matured too young, but part of the season like anyone else. Like a debutante. Like wine grapes on the vine.

He's beautiful. He twists his neck this way and that, and thinks how Galahad would admire it. "Thou art an artist," he announces.

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji looks into the mirror, too, though he doesn't need to in pursuit of seeing Claudius' hair. This glance is in pursuit of seeing the whole of him, the brother he claimed from worlds away. His hair is sleekly tamed, the silver hair sticks catching the light, and he looks, so far as Lan Wangji can tell, nothing like a prince of Elsinore. He doesn't look like the wife of a cultivator, either -- but he looks like something caught between the two, something liminal and changeable, a reminder that such changes are possible.

Lan Wangji smiles, seeing that, too, in the mirror. The mirrors here leave nothing hidden, and it used to shock him, the way such clear glass reflects reality without erring. Bronze is more forgiving. He puts his hands at Claudius' shoulders, a brother protective of his sister, seeing her off before some journey. "Would you still try your hand with mine?"

[wickedwit]

"I will," Claudius says, turning and smiling upward at his brother and friend. "Though I'm afraid I have may work cut out for me. I've never styled such a length of hair."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji clasps Claudius' shoulders, fond, before he nods and turns away to begin the work of releasing his hair from its topknot, all that blackness cascading down his shoulders. "I trust you," he says. His forehead ribbon, too, he unknots from the back of his head, letting it slink free and into his hand in a tidy coil.

[wickedwit]

"I'd trust more men with my life than I would my hair," Claudius laughs, radiating that fondness back to him. "Come down, then -- sit on the floor. I need some way to reach thee, thou bamboo stalk of a man."

[lightbearinglord]

"At least I am not a tree," Lan Wangji says thoughtfully. It could be worse; he could be unreasonably tall, rather than, of course, the most suitable height possible. He sinks to the floor as directed, legs crossed, and gathers up his hair to draw it behind his shoulders, letting it all fall straight down his back like a waterfall of ink.

[wickedwit]

"A star magnolia," Claudius says decisively. It truly is an honor to work with this hair, and he begins making careful plaits, mindful of the entire length. "Very stately. And in the spring and late summer, the flower-buds are nearly as soft as Xiaxoue's paws."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji is not unaware of the intimacy he's offered Claudius in allowing him to touch his hair. For many years, no one did so but him. It seems a moment curiously without ceremony; he's already let Claudius see him in times of great vulnerability. This, at least, is a calm day, time spent between friends with no urgent crisis looming. "I will accept anything that compares me with Xiaoxue as a compliment coming from you."

[wickedwit]

"Well, everyone knows Xiaoxue has the softest paws. Danding can compare, but he travels more ground with them. Xiaoxue will you come to him, and if he needs to be anywhere else, someone will come along and convey him. Just ike an aristocratic gentleman who knows his hands weren't meant for labor." Claudius sighs. "I love them both terribly."

[lightbearinglord]

Invisible to Claudius, Lan Wangji's mouth quirks into a smile. "Magnus reports that the feeling is mutual."

[wickedwit]

"Does he now?" Claudius asks with obvious delight. "It's not why I became a father, of course. But one does hope for a return on one's affections. We raised fine children, didn't we?"

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji tolerates this nonsense indulgently because he loves Claudius, and because it seems to make Claudius so delighted to refer to the rabbits, who are not human and who, arguably, never were children, thanks to their unusual origin, as his own progeny. "They do excel at filial piety."

[wickedwit]

“As thou dost,” Claudius says with fondness. In his shy, private way, Claudius has always thought of Lan Wangji as an elder brother, the sort who could make a nervous young lady new to court relax her shoulders, content in knowing her brother was nearby and ready to protect her honor. Claudius never knew what that was like, having a protective older brother, and he envied it. But seeing little Lan Zhan awoke the desire to fuss over his friend as if he were the younger one¹, the one to be coddled and doted over. It’s a good thing they’re equals, and it’s Claudius’s turn to plait and play with Wangji’s hair. “Thy mother would be pleased to see thy long hair — thou said’st it was a gift from one’s parents, didst thou not?”

¹ Which he very well may be, in terms of years.

[lightbearinglord]

"I did." Lan Wangji trusts Claudius to be careful with his hair. He has hardly forgotten the agony Claudius underwent during Dark when he could not tend to his own hair precisely as he liked. If this hair, the night-black length of it that has never been cut, is his last remaining gift from his mother, then he is glad to entrust Claudius with it for that reason, too. Lan-furen would have liked Claudius. "Both parents. I am meant to honor my father even above my mother." He is sure Claudius will read his delicate subsequent pause correctly: But I prefer not to.

[wickedwit]

Claudius rolls his eyes, and without being asked, he supplies, "This is my theory. So many strictures of power and influence are really strictures of insecurity -- masculine insecurity, in particular. Because we can't bear life the way born women do, we can't help but want credit for something. My father gave me nothing, but because he was king, he could hide behind his title and let his son and wife do all the work. Miserable woman that she was." When Claudius is being fair -- which a long life has forced him to be -- he must admit his father was also a miserable man, already dying by the time Claudius was born. It isn't much of a redemption. More fondly, Claudius says, "I rather like genetics. Have I told thee about genes?"

[lightbearinglord]

Hiding behind his title was nearly all that Qingheng-jun did for the portion of his life that overlapped with Lan Wangji's. Masculine insecurity indeed -- he could bear neither to love his wife nor to let her go. Lan Wangji lets his single measured breath speak for itself, a quiet declaration of his agreement. "You have yet to tell me about genes." This, of course, is a clear invitation.

[wickedwit]

“This man named Mendel figured it out, from pea plants, of all things. Took exacting notes on every way his plants could grow, from seed to flower to fruition. The important thing is he observed them across generations — very like my tulips, know thou, the ones I’ve been breeding for purple-black petals and a red-or-orange center.” Like mourning weeds, stripped away with the spring, to reveal an unquenchable, unconquerable heart of fire — he plans to name it Gertrude. “Mendel wasn’t so exacting about his color profile, but he did observe certain details. Purple flowers bred together produced more purple flowers. So did purple and white. There were dominant traits that persisted from generation to generation … and as it is in pea plants, so ‘tis in other creatures. Take thy black hair. ‘Tis from thy mother and father, ay, but science suggests even if thy father was as fair-haired as Galahad, thou wouldst still be born with black hair. Our parents are like … two players in a card game, showing each other their hands. The higher number gets passed on to their children, but every once in a while, they’ll reveal an identical pair. In such circumstances, even a trait long-hidden can re-emerge. Two purple flowers can create a white one, if they've the same cards tucked in their respective hands."