[ 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.

Comments

[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.

[wickedwit]

Claudius nods, sifting through his own memories. “I am still confident my dream was sent by Luo Binghe — I had it some days before her arrival, and it was filled with details only Luo Binghe could supply. It was not unreasonable of thee to conclude he might meddle with another’s. Aornis must have realized that herself.” After a moment’s hesitation, he says, “I considered conferring with Shen Yuan, and asking for his insight, when I still thought Aornis a jurisfiction agent. But he was so unable to understand what it was like to be a victim of Luo Binghe, rather than his best-beloved object .. when I questioned him, he told me Luo Binghe had no interest in making trouble for anyone. What happened with me, he insisted, was but one time, the subject a horse beaten well beyond death. He had no natural sympathy in him -- not for me -- and he had shown that. So I kept silent. I did not wish to share my other fears with him, and risk a fresh dismissal."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji's posture reasserts itself. He can't help it, at the phrase a horse beaten well beyond death. He could, if he wanted, help his expression, a hard set of irritation to his mouth, but he sees no reason to bother in front of Claudius. "Luo Binghe does have interest in making trouble," he points out. "He did for both of us when he could pass himself as Aleksander. What he did to you is enough to earn mistrust, but it is not only that." He pauses. "I was certain my dream came from him, and then not so certain, thanks to Aornis. I am more sure it was his handiwork now that I know it came before she did."

[wickedwit]

"What was the dream?" He called it cruel. There's a flare of fresh, long-buried anger in Claudius, the kind he felt when he realized Galahad's nightmares weren't conjured from his own mind but crafted to torment him.

[lightbearinglord]

"A cliff," Lan Wangji says, after a beat. The memory of this dream is unusually vivid. "And a tree trunk. Wei Ying, xiongzhang, my uncle, Sizhui, Magnus. And you. Saving one would doom the others to the rapids below."

[wickedwit]

That anger rises like in him like a fire catching, blazing through dry kindling. It’s such calculated cruelty — proof against whatever shallow defenses he’d once made of Luo Binghe lashing out in the moment, in the extremes of emotion. Claudius provoked his ire, and for that he claimed some credit, but Lan Wangji was asleep in his own bed. Luo Binghe had no reason to hurt him except that he wanted to hurt someone, nothing to prove or protect, only malice. And he didn’t merely inflict fear through the threat of pain — he didn’t send some impersonal vision of monsters with teeth — he used Lan Wangji’s fierce and loving heart against him. For what? For nothing. Nothing came of it, except denying a man the private peace of sleep.

“Cruelty for the sake of cruelty,” he says. “At least Aornis knew herself to be a villain.”

[lightbearinglord]

Thinking of it now, with fresh clarity, with a rising certainty that it was Luo Binghe rifling through his thoughts and memories and uprooting all the people he loves the most -- Lan Wangji has to shut his eyes again, taking one hand from around Claudius' to cover his face as he breathes. In, and then out. "I can't stand to imagine that he saw them," he says when he regains the ability to speak, when he can drop that hand back to his lap. Any of them, any of those who aren't already here for Luo Binghe's eyes, as little as he deserves that, but especially-- "A-Yuan." He can't say more than that. There are few people more precious to him than Lan Sizhui, whose likeness Luo Binghe must have taken from somewhere in his mind. Lan Wangji has a thousand or more preserved memories of A-Yuan, small and sweet and precocious, chasing butterflies and laughing amongst the rabbits of the back hills. Wei Ying requests them now and again, bartering for them with his own fragmented memories of A-Yuan as a toddler at the Burial Mounds. They're not for Luo Binghe to see.

[wickedwit]

There's the other cruelty -- Claudius has talked and laughed about Luo Binghe being too blinded by his own vice to see Lan Wangji's virtues, but there is nothing more virtuous in Claudius's mind than taking in a war-orphaned child. Luo Binghe, of all men, could've seen that. If he saw how much that child meant to Lan Wangji, enough to torment him when forced to choose between that child and his husband, his family, his first friend ... but no. There are too many if onlys with Luo Binghe. Luo Binghe told Claudius what he was, that there was no goodness left in him, and Claudius can at last believe it. There was no chance of him realizing Lan Wangji took care of a child as vulnerable and alone as Luo Binghe himself, and softening his intent. Luo Binghe saw Lan Wangji's virtues, and decided he wanted to hurt a virtuous man. A man who was no threat to him, who had done him no harm.

So Claudius says farewell to all thoughts of redeeming Luo Binghe, who has no desire to be redeemed. "My friend," he says, and he embraces Lan Wangji, there on the couch together. "My brother. I have thee still."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji folds himself into this embrace with an immediacy that would have stunned him once. He remembers the day Claudius brought him the rabbits, his own fleeting impulse to hug him then, and how quickly he dismissed it. He is glad for his own failure of self-control, the moment when his happiness about Claudius' engagement overpowered his adherence to propriety.

That all seems frivolous in hindsight. He tucks his arms around Claudius and buries his face in his shoulder again.

[wickedwit]

Claudius did it without thinking, but with Lan Wangji in his arms and Lan Wangji's wrapped around him, he wonders whether the Twin Jades ever held each other like this, Lan Xichen coming to collect him from outside their mother's empty home. "Thou art loving," he says. "And loyal. Thou always hast been. And thou know'st not every loving feeling is mild or gentle ... how thou feel'st imagining Magnus's many deaths, how thou feel'st remembering the image of A-Yuan on that branch, knowing that villain saw his face ..." He tightens his hold. "This is love, too. And there is nothing I would not do to protect that part of thee."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji is quiet a moment or two longer, too many things crowding his chest for any speech to shoulder its way out. Anger with Luo Binghe, an anger he will hold until he dies. Bitter dismay, the thought of Luo Binghe's mocking eyes on A-Yuan, on his grieving brother, on his uncle, who has been carrying so much for Lan Wangji's entire life. And that fierce, ungentle love Claudius invokes: for every one of them, for the brother who holds him so patiently now. He breathes through it. "I..." He sighs, a rare concession to the layers of his weariness in the rise and fall of it. "I would have said I needed no protection."

[wickedwit]

Claudius laughs, fondly. "In some ways, thou dost not. I want to preserve that part of thee, too, but there is in risk of thee of falling to a cruel world's pressures -- thou art too constant for that, too set in thy ways to change how thou lovest now. But still, the world can wear on such hearts. I would guard thy heart from all unkindness, an I could ..." With a soft smile against Lan Wangji's shoulder, he says, "It must be because I love thee as well."

[lightbearinglord]

The sentiment isn't any kind of surprise. Lan Wangji has already felt the truth of Claudius' love in a thousand ways: every game of weiqi, a gift of their time to one another; the kind and gentle way he can walk Lan Wangji through the maze of saying aloud when something is troubling him; the impossible honor of the word brother, when Claudius could just as well never have trusted anyone to hold that responsibility again. Hearing it aloud affects him nonetheless, pulls his heart open with tenderness. These words have never come easily to him. Even with Wei Ying, he says them rarely. There lives in him some fierce, unreasoning instinct to protect such a vulnerability from the light of day.

Claudius, in another declaration of disarming kindness, has already stated his intent to guard Lan Wangji's heart. He's handed the words to him; he must know by now that it is often simpler for Lan Wangji to merely hand words back to people, polished anew with his own meaning.

Lan Wangji leans his forehead, ribbon and all, on Claudius' shoulder. "I love you," he says, and he can't be anything but deeply serious about it. "I would thank you if I had not already forbidden that between us."

[wickedwit]

Claudius knows Lan Wangji well, but there's more yet to learn -- that incidental touch of a head ribbon feels significant, if only because Claudius has never felt invited to touch it before. He's fussed with Lan Wangji's clothing, casually stolen into his personal space, brushed back his hair but avoided that ribbon, so carefully tied that Claudius couldn't even pretend to fix it. Now the bump of Lan Wangji's forehead feels rather like the bump of a cat's, and Claudius smiles at it. He pets Lan Wangji's hair just as he would a cat's fur, a few fingers smoothing out the long ribbon laid over it, and his heart fills to the brim with fondness. "'Tis well," he says. "I've retreated to manners too many times, and said thank you when I meant I love you. I know thou mean'st both."

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn." Lan Wangji finds himself, just for a flickering moment, smiling, hidden from Claudius' view where he is resting his head. He is weary to the bone, in countless ways, but he remembers now that it is over. They completed their work; Aornis is gone. Luo Binghe will soon lose the power of fear over them. Claudius will walk into his wedding day unburdened, and Lan Wangji will walk beside him. Claudius' fingers are soothing as they pet his hair and forehead ribbon, and Lan Wangji considers telling the weight of the tiny gesture he has just made, but he keeps it to himself for now. Claudius likes slowly uncovering information. "You have known how much I care for you since that truth spell."

[wickedwit]

"Ay, I have. 'Tis how I muted my shock in finding out I was on that tree branch, and thou couldst not easily let me fall. I suppose I knew 't for a while."