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

[lightbearinglord]

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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[lightbearinglord]

"Nina told me that it would increase the danger to her by tenfold." Lan Wangji can't help but remember the way Nina blinked back tears as he said that, his useless effort to counter her question about Magnus. He should have said much more, should have made himself clearer, but it is behind them now. "She is the only person who has ever survived it without the antidote. I would not let her take that chance a second time."

[wickedwit]

Despite himself, Claudius can't help being curious about what substance the antidote is made from, what chemicals it interactions with in the body. "To call it an antidote it surprisingly honest," he remarks. "It admits what she wanted from you was poison. To be fair, many medicines are poisons, the only difference the dosage. But ..." He sighs, thinking back to some bitterly foolish nights as a youth. "Surviving an overdose once can change your perception of what's lethal."

[lightbearinglord]

That idle sentiment wrenches Lan Wangji back to the present. His brow pinches with a tiny frown as he looks back up at Claudius' face. "There is a reason you know that." He stops there, wanting not to compel Claudius to tell him anything he would rather not share, but, as he often does, wishing concurrently that they could have met, and been what they are to each other now, sooner.

[wickedwit]

"I ... sometimes wonder whether I was sent to war too young," Claudius says, and he doesn't know why it feels like letting go of a leaden weight to admit it. "I was not well-suited for it. Often I think my brother must have sent me to Normandy because he wanted me to fail and fall in combat -- but I never found proof of a plot, or heard it from his mouth. I only know there was no compelling reason to send a prince to the front when he was little more than a child." But though he can say it with something approaching conviction, he also knows why he agreed. "Except, of course, that my brother had been a prince who served alongside his soldiers. He became a king who leads from the front. And I would've looked more the coward, if I refused the assignment in front of the entire court. Of course I proved myself a coward in battle regardless, and that may've been enough for him. But I wasn't entirely useless. Though I had no power to raise the dead, thou knowest I had an interest in alchemy and -- not to say it too delicately -- a familiarity with remedies for pain. That's something, at least, for dying men and wounded soldiers without a proper hospital. Medicine can be a poison, but war-time medicine is the most desperate kind: when the choices are poison or nothing, most soldiers will take poison. I found that easy to forget, when I returned to court. Not the remedies, if anything I'd improved their strength considerably, but that there are doses only the desperate should take. The courtly life holds fewer mortal risks, yet it wasn't a life without pain, and I gave myself the same doses for nightmares that I would give a soldier who'd lost a leg. I took them with wine, which is worse. As I said. It changes one's perception. The more a man can insist I survived it once, the better he can avoid the question of whether he still needs to survive that way. Whether there's another way -- which I think Nina wanted to find, when she put her trust in thee. Her choices were not poison or nothing, however it must have felt."

[lightbearinglord]

They have often skirted this topic, or mentioned it in passing, the fact that they were both sent to war young. Lan Wangji was better-suited to it than Claudius, and he could hardly have refused the call to defend his already-ravaged home, but he wonders still what might have been if the Sunshot Campaign had not demanded his service, had not turned him into Hanguang-jun before he was twenty years old.

He curls his fingers tighter around Claudius' again, helpless against the protective urge that washes through him. He can vow as often as he likes that he will be a better, gentler brother to Claudius, and he can mean it as much as he likes, but no oath of his, no matter how sincere, can reach backward in time and excise the cruelty that was already inflicted. Claudius is the one with surgical experience; he would have already sliced out his own pain if it were possible. No wonder he had bad dreams, and no wonder he found too much respite in his own medicine. Lan Wangji breathes through the feeling, circulating qi. "No. She gave the choice to me, and I made it for her. Even if she had never forgiven me, I would be grateful that I was able to protect her from making it." He directs another troubled little frown downward. "And I am grateful for every time you survived, so that you could find kinder remedies in time."

[wickedwit]

"There's something to this talking and meditating the latest remedy books recommend," Claudius says wryly, curling closer so he can nudge Lan Wangji's shoulder with his own. "I share thy gratitude. No matter how long, historically speaking, it took.

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji looks down at him, overpoweringly fond, and lets himself relax just slightly, just enough, to lean against him. His body is not tired, but every other part of him is weary, and Claudius has offered his shoulder more than once. "I am glad to help with the meditating. Talking is your area of expertise."

[wickedwit]

"Then I am glad to help thee with the talking," Claudius says, warm and comfortably near. "Dost feel unburdened somewhat?"

[lightbearinglord]

"Yes," Lan Wangji says, at the conclusion of a long, careful moment during which he weighs his answer to this in the pursuit of telling Claudius the truth. "Nina has forgiven me, but I was certain she would not. And..." For once, he trails off, gathering a fresh set of thoughts like Claudius gathering new flowers for the welcome table. He carried Nina's choice for her. He carried the choice to kill Aornis on behalf of the mansion. He carried more sessions of Inquiry than he could remember, the last few of them longer and more grueling than any Inquiry he has ever before played. He carried the fear of his memory slipping away again. He carried his own unkind bitterness at the sureness of Shen Yuan's return, at how easily he could speak to those he loved, when Lan Wangji himself spent thirteen years in the silence of Wei Ying's death and expected to remain there for the rest of his life. He carried several sets of grief, knowing that it was not his grief, that listening and bearing it for others was the least he could do. He would change very little of what transpired, or at the least of the parts that were under any of his control, but--

He shuts his eyes and gives himself a slow, deliberate exhale. "Yes. I think that Sagramore was right. He came close to warning me that I would need to accept care before long."

[wickedwit]

“He spoke from experience,” Claudius says with fondness for them both. “So do I. During those same years I came back from war, I had my first fights with Gertrude …” So many memories from his youth are disorganized, full of static snow like the screen in the game room before it forms a picture. But even fights with Gertrude were too precious to lose. “Whene’er she tried to treat me with care, I felt she was treating me as a child, and I had many foolish ideas about manhood and what my fellows would think. And, as thou knowest, I was used to solving problems mine own way.” ‘Solving’ said with utmost irony. “I see an echo of that in Magnus. A little soldier boy, too used to self-sufficiency to listen to adults’ advice. I have to bury my advice in a lesson for him to hear it. An it aids thee, think thou art setting an example: accept care the way thou wouldst he did, if he needed it from thee.”

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn. Sagramore and I discussed that, too." He's loosened his grip on Claudius' hand now, not letting him go, but a little easier, more certain that he doesn't need to hold onto him with all the will he has. "How Magnus is so young. I do not remember ever feeling as young as that."

[wickedwit]

"Nor do I," Claudius admits wryly. "Dwale addles the memory. But I admit, I counted the years Magnus spent in Valhalla to his age, and was mistaken. Age is measured in experience, experience young death denied him." He looks around the game room, suddenly fiercely glad Magnus wasn't crammed in there with them. Fighting and death were experiences he'd had more than enough of -- and for all that Claudius was told war made a man of him, it's another thing to learn to live peaceably among one's peers and learn navigate those little dramas which were less than life-or-death. Like telling a friend some news that might sadden him.

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji follows Claudius' gaze, and he is just as glad that he told Magnus, in such certain terms, not to be a part of this whatsoever. "Valhalla is a facsimile of war. Magnus has died again and again, and killed, but it was reversible there." He speaks of it with distaste regardless. The pain is real, and it is an outsized cruelty to inflict on children or on anyone. "You and I have lived through real wars. The lives I have taken could not be given back."

[wickedwit]

Claudius can’t help a classic, bitter eye-roll, as he says, “Valhalla is what mine ancestors aspired to — until, of course, our kings became Christian saints, replacing battle-glory with martyrdom. It still comes down to being willing to die. And -- in the case of Valhalla -- to believing there can be no greater reward for dying than another, more glorious battle."

[lightbearinglord]

"I don't care for it," Lan Wangji says plainly. "It is often harder to live on than it might be to die."

[wickedwit]

"Even for the dead," Claudius agrees. He hesitates -- that's the difficulty Claudius sometimes has looking at Magnus, at Grantaire and Enjolras. (Though he certainly has an easy way with Grantaire in other respects). Knowing they've died, and while Grantaire and Enjolras have come fresh from death, Magnus had many years in the afterlife. Of course he's still the boy he was at sixteen. That's when his life ended. And for years, he participated in the ritual of dying over and over again, with little room to grow. Valhalla is a place to prepare, to train, but it's also a place of stasis. Everything and everyone in wait for the last of all battles. "Magnus," he says, slowly, testing the truth of it as though he were under a truth spell, "is no longer alive. But I think he has the chance to learn to live on, here."

[lightbearinglord]

"I want him to." Much of what Lan Wangji wants for Magnus is impossible, or would not truly be helpful: freedom from pain, sadness, or hardship. It would not even be preferable, ultimately. Learning to live on is an exercise that requires pain, sadness, and hardship. And it requires those feelings to linger rather than occurring in a repetitive and endless cycle like what Valhalla enforces. "I hate to think of him dying. I know I would not have known him otherwise. And I know that he would rather it not perturb me." But, of course, it does.

[wickedwit]

Claudius shakes his head, gently and with fondness. "I rather think loving someone means thou wilt hate the thought of them coming to any harm. Thou dost love him, dost thou not?"

[lightbearinglord]

"Of course." Lan Wangji gives Claudius a rueful glance, slightly sidelong. "He says that his trauma is not from Valhalla." Naturally, he wasn't about to argue with Magnus on the nature and origin of his own trauma, despite his doubts.

[wickedwit]

"I find the more I insist a trauma cannot possibly be from something, the more likely it is." Claudius returns the rueful glance, with a sardonic turn.

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn. I suspected as much." This seems to follow, from what Lan Wangji knows of the type of person he tends to find himself loving. The closer something is, the more it hurts; the more personal and painful, the more likely they may be to deflect, to joke, to find ways not to care. Magnus has an easy affect and he is quick to smile and laugh, but Lan Wangji often finds him more difficult to understand than Galahad, even while he loves Magnus in a way that makes him unaccountably tender to think of it. He hopes that this -- the end of Aornis, and the upcoming conclusion of their collective responsibilities to Shen Yuan and his new body -- will ease Magnus' worries and grant him freedom. He lets more of his weight rest against Claudius, some of that fatigue tightening its claws around him afresh.

[wickedwit]

Claudius holds that weight, small and slight and he is. It’s as simple as yielding instead of resisting, sinking into the couch and letting it support them both. Another way he’s rather like his favorite plants. “Gertrude won all those arguments we had, know thou. Not at once, but she right and I was foolish, and age and wisdom show us what fools we once were. I shook off her sympathy, believing it would unman me to accept it, believing it would be better to bear it alone than bring her any sadness. But there is nothing more natural to mankind than sympathy.”

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji knows that, or he ought to know it, at least. He thinks of his brother -- the one back in Gusu, voluntarily caged by the walls of the hanshi. Lan Wangji still aches to think of how deeply Lan Xichen was betrayed, but he also recalls the tender gratitude he felt for his brother's trust when he first visited upon returning home and they spoke for the better part of a day, Lan Xichen wounded and still clutching his love for Jin Guangyao.

"I recovered another memory," he says. As ever, he knows Claudius will trust him to bring this around to its point in time. "I recall the day I met Aornis, and that it came after a cruel dream I was sent."

[wickedwit]

“The first meeting,” Claudius surmises, settling in to listen, but also drawing connections. “Was that the day she arrived?”

[lightbearinglord]

"No." Lan Wangji meets most new arrivals, but not all. "She had been here long enough to try convincing me that Luo Binghe was interfering with her own dreams. It nearly worked." With her, he was quicker to take the bait, not in the careful and thoughtful mood Claudius brings out in him.