lightbearinglord | [ closed post: the heavy is the root of the light ]

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[ closed post: the heavy is the root of the light ]

His promise has been kept. Gideon has seen Aornis' body, and the conclusive nature of her death can't be denied. When Lan Wangji drew back the covering of his own robe, there was nothing, no lingering spirit. There was only a body.

He finds his way to the game room for the third time that day, weary. It has emptied of all its occupants now. The television has been shut off. Lan Wangji suspects that he spots one of SecUnit's drones, but he doesn't have the heart to look more closely. He is not trudging -- not in reality, not when he has his body trained so impeccably to obey him -- but he feels a certain heaviness of limb as he crosses the room's threshold again. His robes are flecked with blood and there are still traces of dried blood on his face, though the glass shard wounds that bled there are scabbing over by now. Memories keep plucking at him with demanding fingers, trying for his attention, and he continues to dismiss them as best he can, with every scrap of discipline that he has.

The room has been emptied, more accurately, of all its occupants but one. Claudius, who waited to meet him just as he asked. Lan Wangji could easily make an excuse for this request -- he and Claudius worked together on this plan for so long, coordinating what felt like a thousand game pieces and meticulously documenting every move and discovery they made. It would be easy to tell himself that he merely wants to bring finality to their efforts by going over the details of the battle, nothing more. It isn't untrue. But he knows that, in fact, most of what he wants is to see his friend. He wants the comfort of his presence and of the fact that they've accomplished what they meant to accomplish, as unclean as it feels now. They're done, and no one else had to die for it.

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Claudius waited the whole time, of course, focused and thoughtful -- for a flickering moment he felt like he was like more connected to SecUnit than he'd ever been. But he didn't let himself linger on the success of raising slightly in the esteem of someone he's struggled to impress. He was turning through his memories.

Rousseau also says that humans are naturally good but quickly descend into corrupt sophistication -- he remembers the ironic emphasis. When playing the role of the neutral investigator, Aornis rarely let her true disdain be known through such slips. Claudius was the same way, though that quickly broke -- he couldn't keep himself from complaining to Temeraire about all the ways society fails people, all the ways he thought they'd be better off without kings and absolute judgment. If Aornis's last, bitter words about going down without a trial reached no one else, they reached him.

He would've liked to have known her better. He would've taken her side, he thinks, if she relented, if she expressed regret for her petty manipulations with Galahad's dreams when Galahad was (he's sure) nothing but kind and trusting with her. If she expressed fear, when she attacked Magnus for remembering her, or when she attacked Luo Binghe and killed Shen Yuan in the crossfire. He would've helped her lie, helped her evade Luo Binghe's vengeance, which more than ever Claudius finds petty and hollow. Luo Binghe was a convenient figure to manipulate, that was all. Bitter and empty except for his vengeance.

I'm a Hades, Aornis said at the last, in those quick, forgotten seconds which would've been lost forever, if Galahad didn't capture her image that night to fix her face in his mind. Sympathy isn't our style.

There's an integrity to that, he's sure. He thinks he'll mourn her, despite everything, as a niece he'd never had, making the some foolish mistakes as him because she thought she had no choice but to play the villain. But he still holds close to his heart his confession to Tress, the confession of all his lies, but also of how much he'd come to love her. I don't think lies can really make someone happy.

Lies were all Claudius had to give, so he couldn't save Aornis from herself. Not when she didn't want to be saved. She's with her brother now, or she isn't, but whatever else, she'll never be a part of their pack.

And Claudius waits for his. When Lan Wangji returns, Claudius turns, and extends an outstretched hand. "Thou hast done well," he says, and says it like a promise.

Edited 2024-09-11 21:53 (UTC)

Lan Wangji hesitates. There is still blood on his hands, and Claudius is fastidious. But Lan Wangji trusts him. He trusts that Claudius wouldn't offer something he was unwilling to give. And so he takes Claudius' hand, smooth against the sword and qin calluses that characterize his own palm, grateful for it.

Searching for words feels like plunging his hand into an icy pool and plucking stones from its very bottom one by one, his fingers numb with it. For Claudius, though, he flicks his gaze down at himself and at the uneven spray of blood across his front and says, "None of it is Luo Binghe's." He took especial care to avoid Luo Binghe's blood.

"My brother," Claudius says with a laugh, a little broken, but sincerely glad. That frustrating point he felt foolish of raising, with Sagramore in front of him ready to give up everything -- Claudius has reasons not to want Luo Binghe's blood near him. Reasons not to trust Luo Binghe, who slipped that poison at their first meeting, and thought himself innocent because he didn't intend to torture Claudius right away, because he only succumbed to temptation the first moment he felt insecure. "Thou needst not fear. Soon, that blood will mean nothing to us."

Edited 2024-09-11 22:44 (UTC)

Soon, but not yet. Still, the reminder is a welcome one. Lan Wangji tightens his hold on Claudius' hand. There is a nearly backwards logic to it, that he would rather come to him with Aornis' blood on him than Luo Binghe's, his ostensible ally -- but Aornis was only a human woman, gifted in the art of mental manipulation but ultimately almost defenseless against them.

Aornis sat with him, a drink in her hand and a bland expression on her face, and asked, We all have our own narratives, don't we? All the while, Magnus was in danger. Her power was pinning Magnus in place, nearly gutting him with that sword, the one that still sits wrapped in fabric in his bedroom. Lan Wangji dismissed her as a suspect because of that conversation.

This memory is the one he has been trying, with limited success, to push aside. He can only barely identify the cold rush of feeling that comes with looking at it head-on: anger, betrayal, desperate protectiveness. With the hand that isn't gripping Claudius', he covers his face and endeavors to breathe.

Through it all, Claudius holds Lan Wangji's hand. Claudius has no illusions about himself. He isn't supernaturally blessed. He isn't the protagonist, meant to emerge victorious from every conflict, but neither he is the sort of villain who flourishes outside of narrative limitations, who always comes out ahead despite being so obviously being in the wrong. He's from a tragedy.

And yet, coming from a tragedy, Claudius managed to met a truly good man, a man meant to be the romantic hero (Claudius sometimes thinks, with no evidence) who holds the antihero when he stumbles. Their brotherhood wasn't destiny. No one who wrote their stories required this happen, required Claudius to catch Lan Wangji, and look at him with a world's worth of gratitude and love. "I have thee," he murmurs. Of that much, he's sure. If he was wrong, to put Lan Wangji on this path, that's a responsibility he'll bear -- but he'll bear it gladly. He pulls his friend close.

That assurance is enough, and the gentle tug on his hand. Lan Wangji could easily ignore it if he meant not to accept the kindness. He is more than strong enough to. It makes it a deliberate choice when he comes into Claudius' space and seems almost to buckle, like his strings have been cut. He tucks his arms around Claudius and drops his forehead to his shoulder. Claudius is shorter and slighter than him, a comfort for him to curl himself around, alive and unscathed, so alive that Lan Wangji can feel the qi circulating steadily through him. He would thank him, but they've dispensed with the need for thanks. He can find nothing else to say, but he holds on, as tight as he can at the very limits of what will stay comfortable for Claudius.

There's no need for thank you, no need for I'm sorry, no need to tell Lan Wangji how brave he's been or how much he's borne up to this moment. It's enough to bear it with him. There's no need to count the favors between them -- something Claudius has long accepted, but at last understands. Holding Lan Wangji, he's also held. Bloody hands and all, he runs his thumb in soothing circles along the edge of Lan Wangji's palm, and by it soothes himself. "Thy stolen memories," he murmurs. "Have they returned?"

"Mn." Later, Lan Wangji thinks, he will find his way to gladness for it. Before this, he imagined those memories gone forever. He had been grimly resigned to never knowing what was taken or how much, and there will be relief in having it all returned to him. Little things: Claudius in the kitchen, their decision to write notes so that they wouldn't forget each other; kneeling behind Wei Ying and watching him deftly paint white ink onto a night-black flag. In this moment, he can think only of what else she might have taken if they had failed and of the slippery, insidious feeling of having his own mind, the part of himself he considers at once the safest and the most dangerous, turned against him. "Yours as well?" he asks, muffled into Claudius' shoulder. He has his attention pinned on the repetitive path Claudius' thumb is tracing on his hand.

"Unexpectedly, yes." His notes prepared him, at least, for the mortification of being fooled for so long by her, of how easy it was to set him scrambling and spreading word of her manufactured history, and the one-sided war of rumors that followed. But other memories arise, memories he was too shamed to put to paper. “She meant to make a scapegoat of Luo Binghe. She told me once, but took the memory after taunting me, then set me back on my path like an automaton wound to walk in only one direction. I would've followed it to the end, to some conflict I would never win, except ... I confided my fears in thee. I never forgot I trusted thee, yet I forgot thou kept'st my confidence."

This memory fills itself in more gently than many of the others, a touch of watery ink to paper that fills in the shades of a landscape. Lan Wangji was content that day, he recalls, the rabbits divided between them and dreamily eating their watercress, Claudius confessing his fears with an undertone of bitterness. I wanted to use my arrangement with Aornis to plan something against Luo Binghe. It would have been disastrously simple to pin the blame on Luo Binghe, like rolling a boulder down a mountain and watching it gain speed and force until destruction became inevitable.

Perhaps he ought to straighten and look Claudius in the eye, but his body is leaden. He hopes Claudius will not mind the weight of his head on his shoulder. He thinks he will not. "We thwarted her more than once," he says, and despite everything, he could smile to realize it, if he could smile at all in the grip of this uncanny exhaustion. "Our friendship."

"'E'en so," Claudius says, and there's a warmth when he says it, coloring the edges of his voice like the warming glow of a hearthfire. His mind darts from memory to memory, as it often does when drawing connections -- but the weight of Lan Wangji's head on his shoulder steadies him. It fills him with fondness, the same fondness first kindled when he shared a drink with a composed and elegant stranger, and endearing sleepiness sunk in. Lan Wangji let himself feel what he needed to feel: tired and lonely, demanding Wei Ying like a child demanding a cherished toy.

It's a gentle memory, soft as rabbit-ears beneath his fingertips. So many of Claudius's memories, from childhood onward, are more like a broken mirror with jagged edges, slicing his palm whenever he tried to assemble the pieces. He's used to it, he realizes. It gives him something to share. "Know thou ... many scholars of trauma I've read theorize that trauma arises when we cannot integrate our memories into our sense of self." He takes a quiet, explanatory tone. "Autobiographical memory, they call it. The stories we tell, ordering all the events of our lives, from the most distant memory to the present moment. Yet some events are too violent, too violating, too chaotically cruel to slot in with the rest. This is the nature of my disorder -- a disorder of memory and emotion, where past pains recur as vivid and immediate as anything in the present. For a while ... thou may'st feel as I do. As though thy memories have been re-shuffled and re-dealt to thee, and thou know'st not how to order them, or how to keeping telling the story of thy self when thou hast lived so many months without them. An thou dost, I would have thee confide in me. As I did in thee."

The story of thy self. Lan Wangji has always been telling that story to himself, polishing it with every meditation, the story of a boy who knew precisely what to do with every moment of every day until he met someone whose light flooded him and scoured all of his certainty away. He knows who he is: the second young master Lan, Hanguang-jun, Wei Ying's devoted husband, a man who mourned the Yiling Patriarch for thirteen years and who battled his way to reconciling the rules of his childhood with the betrayal of watching his world turn cruel and unreasoning. Some memories flare cold and bright, their pain slow to fade, but he has always had them. He has never forgotten like this before.

In the slow silence, he breathes, careful with it. He has to line up the words before he can speak them, like assembling a weiqi defense stone by stone. "Magnus," he says when he can. "He nearly died and I was not there. I was with Aornis. It was a mundane conversation. She was working her entropy manipulation to kill Magnus all the while."

At a greater distance, Claudius might have slowly nodded to show his understanding. Instead he tightens his hold on Lan Wangji. "Thou art someone who would do anything to protect those he loves. I could tell thee many stories to prove it; I have seen with my own eyes how tireless thou art. To know thou couldst do nothing, thou wert not there, thou couldst not predict the danger ... 'tis hard enough to reconcile for a man such as thee. But now thou rememberest how close thou wert to his attacker, who even then had fooled us all, and cruelly used thee as a cover to evade suspicion. It brings back regrets thou didst not know to have, sharper and keener than before. Am I right?"

"Yes. I--" Without warning, Lan Wangji's breath hitches, only once. No other sound accompanies the tears that spill from his eyes, hot and damp on Claudius' shoulder. He has already gotten blood on Claudius' hand and his clothing; perhaps tears will not be so offensive in comparison. In any case, he is abruptly powerless to stop them. He was ignorant of it when Wei Ying died, shut away in the jingshi and incapacitated by the discipline whip. Foolishly, fruitlessly, he believed that Wei Ying would make it, that he had bought him enough time. He knew only when the messenger came with the good news. Lancelot fetched him more quickly when Magnus was attacked, but he was still too late, and he was still ignorant, and if Magnus were not already dead, he would be gone. He curls his fingers into Claudius' jacket, holding onto him afresh, an anchor against the way his body wants to tremble with the painful frustration of all his failures.

Tears have always been Claudius’s weakness — women’s tears, more than any other, since the first time Gertrude failed to keep the tremor from her voice when she said I wouldn’t want to worry you. Truthfully, his feelings frightened him more than hers, swelling fierce and sudden in his chest, and he knew he would commit any sin to see her smile again. His instinct is to soften himself, to apologize for prying, to bear all smooth and even.

But there are no apologies between himself and Lan Wangji. I wouldn't ask you to feel guilty for wanting to understand me. Now even if Lan Wangji begged him not to look, not to care, not to acknowledge the pain they were able to push through when they had an objective in front of them … Claudius couldn’t bring himself to turn away. Not now. Not after all they’ve been through.

“I have thee,” he says again, as fiercely as he feels it, blood and tears and all. “I know thee.”

Once, not so long ago, decades ago, Lan Zhan knelt outside of his mother's house every month, as still as a held breath, waiting. Months passed, and he knew that she was not coming. Even then, he came to meet her. As long as he waited, he could imagine that she might slide open the door at any moment. As long as he was quiet and obedient and good, she might emerge with a smile, scolding him for staying so long in the cold and ushering him inside. If he waited faithfully enough, his mother would arrive and chase away his pain.

Then, only one person could coax him away. Lan Huan would find him, look at him with concern and trepidation, and bundle him back to their shared house before hai hour, saying, Remember, Lan Zhan? She's gone. Lan Zhan would let himself be led, but he knew that he would be back the next month, too.

There is nothing left to await here. Aornis is dead, and whatever damage she has inflicted is unchangeable. All Lan Wangji's fears and doubts and responsibilities are snapping loose, the sudden and shocking absence of several of his burdens, and he knows that satisfaction and relief are on the horizon, but that he must navigate his way through this pain first. Staying its hand has never worked. He hangs on and lets himself cry, silent and shaking and safe in his brother's arms.

"Thou hast a heart," he murmurs. It's what he wishes he told Gertrude -- no. It's what he wishes he could have told himself. He kept trying to shut his heart away, to stuff down that swelling feeling in his chest. But Lan Wangji feels everything fully, loves with abandon, would hold a man for thirteen years in his heart after being flogged for defending him. He put a brand to his chest just to share a scar with that man he thought was forever lost to him. To feel no pain, he would have to be heartless. He simply held that pain inside himself, until it was safe to let it go. That's trouble with these memories, Claudius thinks wryly. You can't let something go if you don't know where to put it.

Lan Wangji does have a heart, a heart that frequently feels too big for the fragile cage of his ribs, that often squeezes tight with feeling so powerful he might stagger. His breath hiccups, just a little, over something soft that could be the suggestion of a sob or a laugh or simply the welcome reminder of it, their shared humanity. Nearly a year ago now, he liked Claudius and wanted to be a dutiful friend to him, but he thought that they could hardly be more different, the charismatic prince and the icy, stoic cultivator. Now he feels certain that, for all their small divergences, they have the same heart.

The tears are beginning to slow, but he stays as he is for one more careful, drawn-out breath, his face tucked into the shelter of Claudius' shoulder. When he does straighten, tear-tracks cutting through the traces of blood still on his face, he looks at Claudius with something suspended between ruefulness and gratitude. He presses his hand, all the depth of his gladness for their brotherhood in the way his fingers tighten around Claudius' palm for that moment. "I--" he starts again, then, realizing what he wants, says only, "I would like to sit down."

"Of course." Claudius tugs his hand, a little. "Come sit with me."

Lan Wangji lets Claudius lead him. He feels like a child, but it isn't such a bad feeling. The game room couch is familiar territory, and he sinks onto its cushions with a distant surprise at what a relief it is merely to distribute his weight differently. The battle is, truly, over.

Both their hands and clothes still have blood on them, which might may might the sight surreal -- but sitting like this, it feels like any light-hearted evening where Claudius might steal a few hours of his friend's time to sit and talk and sip tea together. "Wouldst thou know something I am proud of thee for," he asks, "that thou mightst not think to be proud of?"

Lan Wangji, who has yet to let go of Claudius' hand, looks up at him. It might behoove him to demur. It would certainly be polite. "I would," he says. With the other hand, he reaches to detach Bichen from his waist, so that he can set it tidily on the floor beside the couch. He never resents its weight, but he is ready to be without it for a time.

"Thou didst never waver in thy intention. When Aornis meddled in thy mind ... from here, it seemed to happen so quickly." He tells it like one of his cocktail stories, but with the dark humor that could only be a war story. Too soon, perhaps, to tell, but it matters that Lan Wangji hears. "SecUnit caught on quickly, of course. I have to respect its insight -- even with its eyes in the room, it couldn't have seen what was in thy head, but it understood at once that thou wert manipulated. And as soon as it warned thee, I could hear Luo Binghe, shouting his unhelpful nonsense about how thou couldst not resist opposing him, because he needs everyone in the world to be as obsessed with him as he is with himself. He doesn't know thee as I do, and never will, to his own detriment. Thine intention was not to oppose him for its own, blind sake. It was to use what power thou hast to protect those more vulnerable than thyself. Even if thou wert against a stronger opponent, with an unreasoning grudge against thee. I was fiercely glad, know'st thou. Knowing that Luo Binghe could justify the pettiest of cruelties against a man who spoke so much as an unkind word to him ... I could trust him to face Aornis without swerving or distraction. He would pay for blood with blood, as he always does, and nothing she said could sway him. But he hardly cares as thou dost about using his power to protect the vulnerable, not unless those vulnerable gave him all their praise and affection. If I sent him against Aornis alone ... I would have to bear on my conscience whatever lengths he went to, to prove his own strength and superiority. Dost thou understand? Because thou wert in the advance guard with him, I knew thou wouldst bring as swift and as merciful an end as thou couldst make. 'Tis thine intention I trust completely. And whatever she did to thy memories, that intention did not change. That's why it was possible for thee to remember who thou wert protecting, who was most at risk, and find thy purpose again."

Edited (a million typo corrections) 2024-09-16 11:42 (UTC)

As Claudius surmised, Lan Wangji would never have thought to consider that a moment of pride. The imprint of her half-successful manipulation will haunt him, he already knows, phantom fingers that reached within and remapped the path of his mind for him. He brings that free hand to clasp around Claudius', too, holding on with both hands as he likes to do, so that all of his attention is on him. "I saw Thursday Next again," he says softly. Innocent and vulnerable, someone who might need him. He has never been able to refuse a call for help. "She brought forth the memory of what Luo Binghe did to you." He doesn't need to explain how easy it was for Aornis to weave a plausible tapestry, even a short-lived one, from those strands. It was a false fear, facing Luo Binghe and anticipating a bitter fight that might end in his own death, but the feeling was real, and its memory is real, too. "And then I saw you. I remembered you. You reminded me why I had come."

"I did?" Claudius's eyes momentarily widen. "Perhaps I am a good influence on you, after all."

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