lightbearinglord: (petal)
Lan Wangji (蓝忘机) ([personal profile] lightbearinglord) wrote2024-04-25 06:51 am
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[ closed post: hold fast to the center ]

With Dark behind them, most of Lan Wangji's routine has managed to reassert itself. He awakens at mao hour and disentangles himself from his clinging cultivation partner, who tends to sprout several additional limbs in the night. He dresses and slips away for his morning meditation. He takes Bichen to the air, circles the grounds of the mansion and checks the woods for any changes beyond the known quantities of Ragnelle's nest and Magnus' camp, and runs through his sword forms. He stops in the kitchen and makes breakfast for his husband. By that point, his day can branch in several ways: he can, upon bringing the breakfast to Wei Ying, also opt to return to his bed, a perpetually tempting option. He can find Magnus and indulge in listening to him talking about whatever strikes his fancy. He can practice his qin, work on his calligraphy, retreat to the library for the endless project of educating himself, or embark on some more ambitious culinary endeavor.

Recently, however, Lan Wangji was reminded of a promise he made to someone important. Where possible, he prefers to keep his promises. So this morning, after he has sufficiently fed Wei Ying, made his apologies in the form of several lingering love-bites along his neck and shoulders, and changed his boots for house slippers, he approaches Claudius and Galahad's room. This route is one of the few persistently familiar paths that seem to exist in the ever-changing mansion.

It is early, but not so early. And Claudius did ask him for this, not once but twice. He lifts a hand and knocks crisply at the door.
wickedwit: (intent)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-01 07:06 pm (UTC)(link)
His first thoughts, flickering with the low flash of light behind his eyes, are wry, self-deprecating, something about how the shallowness of his breath must speak to the state of his spirit -- he can't stop the thought from starting, but he does go back to his breath before he finishes it. Think only of each breath. How much is there to think? He tries to focus, but every other thought feels like weeds crowding around the edges of his head, strangling the ground before any new seed takes root. He worries about his health. He worries about time passing. He's worries how boring he must be -- not to Lan Wangji, perhaps, but then he worries about a dozen other people not here and what they've always thought about him.

He breathes out, slow, and tries just to think of the air passing through his lips, his chest falling. He's tilling the earth. He pulls up the weeds, then tries to let them go. There's no use in dwelling, in planting them again.
wickedwit: (thoughtful)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-02 03:54 pm (UTC)(link)
Claudius taught himself to identify fabric by feel. When he settles back into his body, every draped layer surrounding him feels like something familiar -- cotton spun from cotton blooms, silk spun from silkworms. Somewhere bolls must form on mallow branches, like white pearls form within the shell. Somewhere there must be groves of mulberry trees, and the children of wild moths emerging from their eggs to feed. Even worlds away, he knows it must be warm there, or the eggs wouldn't hatch. The mulberries wouldn't fruit. It all springs from the same source. Even worlds away, he knows breathing leaves must fill the sunlit air with oxygen. People live and walk beneath them, who couldn't live without them.

There's plenty to think about. Wryly, Claudius realizes that's another ancillary thought -- thinking about thinking, typical -- but he breathes in, sharing that air, the same air that brings Wangji's voice to him.

Voices, too, are breath. He lets Wangji's words fill his lungs, and become a part of him. Perhaps he'll form some fruit from it.
wickedwit: (thoughtful)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-02 09:12 pm (UTC)(link)
To his credit, Claudius doesn’t scoff — what power? Voices, too, are breath. Lovers’ whispers, demagogues’ declarations, the adages of old men, the murmur of the crowd. They spread like cotton seeds, and drift, touch down and take root. Put Claudius on a battlefield and his breath would quickly tire, but he has enough life in his lungs to join a sea of voices. Enough even to sing, when it suits him.

Cotton seeds, drifting. One touches down, and becomes two, the last seed of the old plant and the first seed of the new. Two becomes three. Generation after generation, season after season, the three becomes ten thousand. Floating on the air, carrying yin, embracing yang.

He could be anywhere, doing anything. Doing something more productive — no. The cotton plant is still, and still produces ten thousand things. It doesn’t rush. He resists the urge to rise and pace, recites Wangji’s mantra in his head. The one produces the two. The two produces the three …
wickedwit: (thoughtful)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-03 06:40 pm (UTC)(link)
Silence is always a struggle to bear -- he bore it so easily, he thinks, as a child, but that was when he had a duty to be seen and not heard. Now it feels remiss to let a conversation lapse, a failure if he can't smooth over the slightest awkward pause. Frankly speaking, it raises his blood pressure. He remembers lamenting to Lan Wangji that between Lancelot and Galahad, he would have to bear the burden of speech like Atlas on his shoulders.

So perhaps he's putting the burden down. With the next, sigh-like breath, he wills his shoulders to sink. He lets them rest. He listens to the silence, and recognizes there's still sound in it. Their breaths still stir the shared air. It's a kind of touch, Claudius recalls from diagrams. Sound moves on waves, and like fingers strumming harp strings, it brushes by something in the outer ear.

The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang. Carrying like a sound, like cotton seeds on the wind.
wickedwit: (smiling villain)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-04 03:14 am (UTC)(link)
Claudius eyes open slowly, letting light back in gradually. He'd be dazed otherwise -- like someone emerging from a dim cavern, to be struck by a sudden sunflare. As remedies go, he doesn't know whether this meditation healed something in him. But he does feel, almost, relaxed. All that tension's left his shoulders. "Wangji," he says with a smile.
wickedwit: (mm really?)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-05 01:16 am (UTC)(link)
"Reasonably calm." Reasonably, but also exceptionally, given his usual disarray of humors. "Thou may'st not know this, but I have very few hours of calm in a day."
wickedwit: (mm really?)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-05 10:28 pm (UTC)(link)
"Thou wilt see me more and more often." Until thou hast tired of me is the light, self-deprecating add-on that should follow, but he refrains. "The aim is to make meditation as easy and natural as reaching for a drink in times of turmoil. That's a well-trained instinct."
wickedwit: (smiling villain)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-05 10:52 pm (UTC)(link)
"More than anything, please."
wickedwit: (smiling villain)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-07 10:34 pm (UTC)(link)
Claudius tries to envision Lan Wangji as the dutiful disciplinarian he was in his youth, tries to envision him crossing paths with an Osric-like man, from whom serious requests slide like water off a sea otter stole. Immediately he laughs. "I'm sure your xiongzhang would be satisfied," he says, "with any friend you managed to make." But not that one, pointedly.
wickedwit: (smiling villain)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-08 01:32 am (UTC)(link)
Claudius's eyes are wide and, frankly, delighted. It's dizzying in the same way listening to gossip the first day in a new court is, already untangling the knot of relations and business partners and illegitimate children that lies at the heart of understanding anything about the way societies move. "Well," he observes, "that does sound like quite the pairing of sect leader and counselor. Tell me more."
wickedwit: (mm really?)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-08 10:01 pm (UTC)(link)
It's a familiar sort of rumor -- the sort often spread about a man whose only sin was loving other men, and not being politic or subtle enough to disguise it. Claudius can imagine the murmuring gossips with fans before their mouths, saying, not only that, his own half-brother …

"And yet the philandering of their father, which produced two bastards, was easily forgiven," he remarks, with a wry roll of eyes. "What a difference power can make. What happened to Mo Xuanyu?"
wickedwit: (smiling villain)

[personal profile] wickedwit 2024-06-10 02:59 pm (UTC)(link)
Claudius smiles, slow and syrupy-sweet, fond as he always is of Lan Wangji's love story. "The song you wrote for Wei Wuxian."

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