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NSFW / Wei Ying living with Jiang Cheng for a few months for lack of options, taking a shower for no reason at 4pm. he thinks he could maybe jerk off and remember that his body can do more than feel terrible and scramble his brain, but +
NSFW / Jiang Cheng opens the bathroom door when —fortunately— he’s not very hard yet but has pressed a finger in his ass (WY’s idea of an indulgent jerk-off) because the cat was meowing to come in?? The cat (Princess Peach) doesn’t even deign to enter, but yeah, so much for that
So Wei Ying is supposed to get dressed because Jiang Cheng is having friends over for dinner, but they’re people JC has kept up with and WWX should have kept up with, but absolutely didn’t. Instead he lies around in a bathrobe in JC’s guest room
And tries to remember what a normal amount of pain is for a body laying on its side. He tries to think thru why spiritual energy settles so well in collagen, and why resentful seems to catch or tear in his joints, as if he needs not just demonic cultivation but new miridians
His neck is twinged because he is 31 and fell asleep on the sofa watching celebrity dance-offs. His left wrist is twinged because two days ago he tracked down a daolao gui in the subway and caught one of its darts between the two bones of the forearm. Radius and ulna.
He did not used to know what those bones are called. He has learned to distract himself from his body with his body. He ignores the sharp tangling in his lower dantian and tries to remember the bones of the hand. Metacarpals? The tip of the dart is still in his arm; a golden core
—could burn it right out. There are other ways, though, folk medicine at very least. Or he’ll find some way to whine till Jiang Cheng does it for him. Either way, he won’t die. Left untreated it would be deadly, but no.
The bathrobe is soft. He can’t hear any trains from +
The bathrobe is soft. He can’t hear any trains from +
JC’s condo, which is nice for a second home. He uses it for business in the city. He uses it to host friends from school, the kinds of friends from school that everyone’s parents sent them there to make, even tho school connections were never enough, alone, to get anyone anywhere
Wei Ying doesn’t want to feel anything on his skin but the soft bathrobe. He would make an exception to touch someone’s hair. Anyone’s— his. He is out of the country right now. He is not coming to get Wei Ying from JC’s condo.
He did not come to get Wei Ying the time when Wei Ying might’ve actually asked for it. He thinks that, back then, he saw the sky a few times and that was when he begged for it, like the sky knew anything about Lan Zhan.
He thinks he said “hey, hey, i need you to come get me” like he was young & too drunk at a party, like Lan Zhan could glance up at dawn and hear him if he whispered it to the distant sky, to the broken beer bottles that glittered so beautifully, the most alive thing in that place
(He thinks the bottles must have been washed down with rain some year. Maybe a flood. There had been many floods, silt on silt in that place. He recognized a faded Snow Beer label and had to — well, not laugh, his back was still broken, but choke on it a little)
(He and Jiang Cheng used to ask jiejie to buy them the worst beer, and she always tried to buy them something nicer, but they’d insist) (imagine telling JC: did u know, the Burial Mounds serves Snow!)
Mostly, it was beautiful. It caught the light.
Mostly, it was beautiful. It caught the light.
It was fine that the glass was broken, because it was pretty that way and because, unlike his bones, it did not try to heal. There is a list somewhere that some western biologist-type put together with 22 criteria to define life. He remembered this back then but did not care.
Life is, Wei Ying is p sure, just the opposite of entropy. Entropy is the universal desire of matter to be less complex & use less energy. Life is not a binary opponent, though. Something softer. Entropy and life have fishhooks in each other, and — Jiang Cheng knocks on the door
Wei Ying licks his mouth. He’d been breathing with it open and it’s sticky. He’s left with time terribly straightened out. The only fishhooks are the ache in his wrist. He still is thinking about Lan Zhan’s hair, somehow. “Oh, you’re not dressed?” says Jiang Cheng
It’s not a demand that he get dressed, but it does leave out alternative offers. Wei Ying kind of wants to swan into JC’s dinner party in the bathrobe like a drunk housewife. He’s never had a Hollywood-esque breakdown before, which is a waste of his foreign exchange year
However, the tangle of resentful energy in his navel has subsided. His hands crack, every bone in them, as he pushes himself up. The room feels to light. Not in a sunshine way, in a gravity way. Demonic cultivation is /great/ for your blood pressure, actually.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “I’ll be hot for your friends.” He smiles because he means it. He’d like to be pretty for somebody, today. Tonight, now. It’s dusk. Jiang Cheng’s mouth is tight. These used to be WY’s friends, too. Jiang Cheng can have them in the divorce.
“Don’t worry, didi,” he says, pulling on underwear. What was a normal lack of boundaries in childhood makes him have to force his hackles down, now. He thinks of Jiang Cheng opening the bathroom door, earlier, every part of him permeable. Which is true; he learned that lesson.
Everyone is permeable in the right conditions. He thinks of how when you pick up Princess Peach, she stops struggling after a while and just stares away with big cat eyes, totally disassociated from her mortal form.
The war is over. He just needs to go limp until — until. Until he’s figured it out. Until he can live here without touching the walls and letting the claustrophobia flood in. He’s still thinking, a fucking obsessive little undercurrent, about Lan Zhan’s hair. Goddamn.
