lightbearinglord | [ closed post: hold fast to the center ]

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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.

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With a flare of answering fondness, Lan Wangji meets Claudius' gaze. "Internal alchemy," he says, and that will have to be enough of an exploration of the nuances of the translator for now. He doesn't intend to allow them to become distracted. As such, he presses on.

"Shut your eyes. Continue to breathe, slowly, with me, and drop your hands when you are ready." For a collection of breaths, he is silent, his own breathing deep and even. He listens in turn, to be sure that Claudius is with him. "Think only of each breath. When other thoughts come, release them without fighting them. In this room, you need to do nothing but nourish your body with breath and nourish your spirit with qi. Where there is one, the other follows."

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.

"Good," Lan Wangji says, eyes still on Claudius' face. He knows it well enough now to see, when it comes, the minute release of tension between his brows. He knows Claudius' qi, too. He has scoured his meridians and poured his own spiritual energy into them. Here, with none of that urgency, in a safe room with the sky lightening through the window, he catches the flickering rhythm of its circulation as Claudius breathes and begins painstakingly to settle.

With some, he might remain silent from here. Claudius worried about doing this, though, in the flippant way he has that means he cares very much. His thoughts will want to creep back in and fill his lungs and mind. So Lan Wangji continues speaking, low and measured, carving a gentle path for Claudius to follow. "You share this breath with every other thing in this universe. You share it with me, with Danding and Xiaoxue, and with the trees outside as they wait for spring. Like the fruit, like those scraps of clothing, it all springs from the same source, differing only in name. Breathe and feel that sameness."

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.

Satisfied that Claudius is with him, Lan Wangji shuts his own eyes. He no longer needs to look to take the measure of him. "There is power and life in you, the power and life that is in everything." These next words are words he knows so well that they ask no thought of him, only the comfort of well-worn pattern. "The one produces the two. The two produces the three. The three produces the ten thousand things. The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang."

There are countless ways to meditate. Lan Wangji could be icy and remote in the cold spring. He could be holding brush-straight handstands with Lan Xichen. He could be flowing from one sword form to the next, Bichen alight in his hand. This morning, he is here, caught between worlds and glad for it.

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 …

For a time, Lan Wangji continues to speak with the cadence of waves lapping at a shore. "Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind rest at peace." So often, words fail him when he needs them the most, as if his meaning hides beneath a thousand layers of silk. These words are easy and true. These words set him loose from his body, sending him along the curving waterways of Caiyi and the lotus lakes of Yunmeng, letting him unwind an endless ribbon from Wei Ying's hair, escorting him down the white, white paths of the Cloud Recesses as the mist clears and the mountain stretches down toward the land. These words hold him in his body, in this room that smells of sandalwood, as he listens to Claudius' breath while it deepens and holds the awareness of Claudius' qi while it moves within and without him.

"The ten thousand things rise and fall while the self watches their return. They grow and flourish and then return to the source. Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature." He slips into silence then, to see if Claudius can endure it.

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.

It is quiet, and there is only the evenness of their twin breath. Conversation is a gift others give him, more and more often these days. This is something he can offer in return: a peaceful silence, the gentle rise and fall of each inhale and exhale, the kind of hush in which the voice of a qin would resonate without obstacle.

Lan Wangji can sit this way for days. He did so at intervals when he was younger, when the silence was all that he wanted. Causing noise is prohibited. Do not use words frivolously. He has more worldly attachments now and finds himself unable to regret them. He would not want this all the time, not anymore -- and he will not ask so much of Claudius, not during his first morning meditation.

He waits until the stick of incense burns low and then goes out. He opens his eyes. "Claudius."

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.

Lan Wangji isn't quite smiling, but Claudius will probably recognize this expression of his, the one where his eyes are just crinkled at the corners, all warmth. "How do you feel?" There are some niceties he dispenses solely for the ritual, the comfort of the etiquette. Not this one.

"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."

He knows. He recalls listening to Claudius under the compulsion of that truth spell, a tumble of explanations and fears and the way he tucks away his anxiety to make himself more palatable. "Join me again. It will become easier."

"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."

Those instincts can exist in tandem. Lan Wangji knows that, too, from loving and living with Wei Ying. He doesn't say as much; it will not help Claudius, and he is too fond and relaxed to dwell, just now. "As often as you want. Do you still want that story?"

"More than anything, please."

Lan Wangji might have predicted that eagerness, but it makes him fonder still anyway. Firstly, he rises to replace the stick of incense with a fresh one, lighting it anew. He pauses, glancing out the window at the sun glinting off the sparse remnants of late-winter snow. Spring feels, finally, imminent.

He returns to his seat, sleeves trailing as he crosses his legs again. This story is like a dozen strands of hair knotted together. The only way to unravel it is to pick one strand and begin there. "Qinghe Nie was founded by a butcher. Its cultivators do not cultivate with swords as I do. They cultivate with sabers¹ and the resentful energy of beasts. It is a dangerous path. Nie cultivators live short lives and often die of qi deviations." He knows someone else who died of a spiritual backlash, but he keeps a calm demeanor as he speaks. "Xiongzhang was always close with Nie Mingjue, who became the sect leader of Qinghe Nie as an adolescent. He hoped I would become similarly close with Nie Huaisang." He pauses again, an evocative enough pause to say, clearly, that he and Nie Huaisang did not become close. Plainly put, they could have not have had any less interest in one another.

¹Dao, or 刀.

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.

"He was pleased when I met Wei Ying." Of course that happiness didn't last past Wei Ying's exile from the cultivation world, but Lan Wangji doesn't dwell on that today, either. This is a story for Claudius' entertainment. "After Wei Ying's death, Nie Mingjue suffered a qi deviation and died. Nie Huaisang became the Qinghe Nie sect leader. He relied on the counsel of Jin Guangyao, the sect leader of Lanling Jin. Lianfang-zun, Jin Guangyao, took the role after the death of his father, Jin Guangshan. Jin Guangshan was known for fathering illegitimate children. Jin Guangyao was one of those bastards. Prior to his acceptance as a son of Lanling Jin, he served Nie Mingjue under the name Meng Yao."

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."

They have reached the part of this story that begins to intersect unavoidably with personal matters, but Lan Wangji remains impassive in his retelling for now. Claudius' overt glee is an easy motivator. "Jin Guangshan had another bastard son with the second daughter of the Mo family. As an adolescent, Mo Xuanyu was brought to Carp Tower to study cultivation. His time there ended abruptly. He was a poor cultivator and a cut-sleeve who, according to Jin Guangyao, made advances on his own half-brother." He is skeptical about the truth of these accusations, but the reality will never be uncovered now.

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?"

More than two bastards, but if Lan Wangji begins listing any more of Jin Guangshan's illegitimate children, they will never reach the point. "Mo Xuanyu returned to Mo Manor, disgraced. He was rarely seen until years later. My junior disciples had been summoned to Mo Manor for a night-hunt. They used their signal flare to request my assistance subduing a dismembered arm with significant resentful energy. Mo Xuanyu had been assisting as well. Several members of the Mo family had been killed by the time I arrived.

"Before I could speak with Mo Xuanyu, he fled. The next time I saw him, he barely let me thank him. The third time, he had a bamboo flute in hand, and he played a song only one person could have known."

Claudius smiles, slow and syrupy-sweet, fond as he always is of Lan Wangji's love story. "The song you wrote for Wei Wuxian."

"Mn." He lets himself steep in the memory of that moment, lingering in the notes that had echoed only against the walls of the jingshi for twenty years. Wen Qionglin falling to his knees, Wei Ying with a new face and body but none of his power over the dead diminished. Lan Wangji was frozen with shock, disbelief and hope and swelling determination to do better this time, to stay by his side and protect him the way he had failed to thirteen years before.

It's a beat too long before he gathers himself, looking at Claudius with a hint of sheepishness. He trusts Claudius to understand his lapse into distraction, at least. "Mo Xuanyu was gone by then. He had sacrificed himself with an old, forbidden ritual. He intended to summon the Yiling Patriarch to take revenge on his cruel family on his behalf."

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