Of sorts. [He reaches for his tea, taking a long sip to buy himself a moment and consider what to share.]
It's called the Burial Mounds and it's a mountain range that had become a dumping ground for corpses over the centuries. No one is sure how it started anymore, but by my time it had become a place so saturated with resentful energy that to cleanse them would have been the undertaking of at least a hundred cultivators over a lifetime. Maybe longer.
And there wasn't any glory or money to be found in a task like that, so the leaders of the cultivation world built a wall of protective wards around it and left it alone. [It isn't something he holds his generation of cultivators responsible for, but it's a reminder that the cultivation world has always been the same. Chasing only what served them and not the people as they had always claimed.
His eyes flicker away from his tea to Itachi and he smiles, amused and perhaps knowing.] You're wondering why they threw me there instead of just killing me, aren't you?
[Itachi isn't the only one who knows his friend after all, and it's a reasonable judgment to make if he's honest. Itachi is efficient. If it had been him, he wouldn't have been stalled by Wei Wuxian's threats. Wei Wuxian wouldn't have lived long enough to make them, he thinks, without a drop of judgment.]
The man who threw me in there was called Wen Chao. He was going to just kill me. Except I swore to him that I would return as a spirit and haunt him to death. I meant it too. I would have. A stronger cultivator could have dispelled me, but Wen Chao was weak and he was a coward. I probably could have killed him as a ghost.
The Burial Mounds solved that problem for him. I'd die and then my soul would be stuck there for eternity, never rejoining the cycle of incarnation, and becoming just one more resentful spirit among thousands. That was the idea anyway.
[The smile he shoots Itachi's way at that is genuine and warm despite the grim subject. He's right after all, Wen Chao really was a fool.]
Before I came here, no one, though my brother and Lan Zhan had heard from Wen soldiers. I didn't confirm it though. There was no point. [They would have worried needlessly and it was already over by then anyway. Not to mention it would have invited too many questions about how he'd managed to survive. Questions he had no intentions of answering.]
And here, uh. I mentioned it in passing to Rosinante. After we came out of the school. [A single comment that he had deliberately not expanded on.]
I. Well. I haven't really talked about it. Most people wouldn't understand it. [What the Burial Mounds were. Why the thought of having his spirit destroyed along with his body was so terrifying. And if they did, there would have been pity. He doesn't want pity.] And they fuss. It's all in the past now anyways.
his attention flickers back to the blade, hung in its place on the wall. it is not a new weapon. it had been his grandmother's, though it had been broken some time in the second of the great wars. it was repaired, renamed, and given to him on his entry to anbu. even ravaged as it is by the heartsblood it spilled, the bones on which it stuttered and caught, if one did not know its provenance they would be able to consider it a beautiful thing.
why do people speak of the past as if it is not a living thing, hot breath at your ear, rough hands around your throat? it is not dead, as long as you live to carry it.
wei wuxian survived the burial mounds. but itachi studies him in profile, the elegant curve to his cheek, his chin, and wonders what it was he left of himself in that dark place.
he lifts his tea cup, but rather than take a drink he simply pulls it in against his chest in an idle gesture, enjoying the proximity of that little spark of warmth. ๏ผ
I —
๏ผ the word truncates sharply.
when he speaks again, it is as if the misstep never happened. the surface of a vast ocean, deep and dark, mirror-bright on the surface. ๏ผ
I require your assistance with something. If you are able.
๏ผ it may seem like changing the subject. and it is, in a sense — pulling the focus to himself. what he wishes to ask is a selfish thing, and difficult for him. but necessary, like setting a bone. ๏ผ
[It's the first time Itachi has stumbled over his words in the whole of their acquaintance and it catches his attention as sure as if he'd raised his voice. Wei Wuxian feels the gravity of it and the request that follows only solidifies that whatever this is, it's important to his friend.
๏ผ his skin prickles, at the trust implicit in those words. it has been hard-won, but there is a delicate moment balanced on the edge of a blade where he is seized by an old impulse, by learned cruelty, and wishes to break it to pieces.
you should not trust me, he thinks. but louder, in that moment, is the gratitude that he does.
he averts his eyes like he is chasing the long shadows on the wall. it takes him a moment.
wei wuxian may recognize the way he steels his spine to speak. it is an echo, of the child he had been on that rooftop, readying himself for deep unpleasantness. it is almost a process of self-immolation, unnecessary sentiment cast off and burnt beyond ash. then, it had been kindness. now, it is his own tendency to isolate. he does not require help, as he had said. a quiet lie. this is a navigable matter. that his navigation may be unnecessarily clumsy and cruel does not matter — he is capable.
that is not the point. the point is to ask. ๏ผ
After what you witnessed of my past, in Forsythe Heights, I spoke to Gwen. I told her what had transpired, that I used Tsukuyomi on you, and that you bore witness to a massacre I had committed. From that, she pieced together something I would have preferred her not to know. We have not spoken at any length since.
๏ผ this is as calmly dispassionate as if he were simply reading a mission report off stock card. ๏ผ
I... suspect she may feel I am angry with her. I am not. However, I do not wish to put her in a position where she feels she must reconcile what she knows of me with what I have done. You are closer to her than I am. What is your opinion?
[I told her what had transpired, Itachi says, as casually as if he were speaking of the weather, and Wei Wuxian knows his brow furrows in reaction even as he bites his tongue to stop himself from asking why. In hindsight, he wonders if he doesn't know the answer. Itachi wouldn't have assumed Wei Wuxian would tell Gwen, but there's something there in that confession, maybe his own way to mitigate the potential damage. To take control of a situation in which control had been so thoroughly wrested from him.
It takes Wei Wuxian only a few seconds to imagine what he might have done in the same position. If Gwen or Itachi had been privy to the massacre of Nightless City without any context or idea of what was happening. If they had seen that night unfiltered...
He swallows hard at the thought. Maybe he isn't sure why Itachi told Gwen, but he knows it wasn't for his own good.
But none of that is why Itachi is speaking to him now, and Wei Wuxian would be a poor friend if he didn't pay attention and listen to what Itachi is saying.
Gwen figured out something else. There is immediately the instinct to pick and prod. Hasn't he told Itachi before? I like to understand how things work. But people are not inventions and arrays, streaks of ink on paper. Whatever Gwen pieced together is not for Wei Wuxian to know, and so he quiets the questions in his mind. Once, he hadn't listened when Itachi asked him to stop. He will never make that mistake again.
More to the point, the stumbling over the words and (momentary) uncharacteristic hesitance finally make sense to him. Itachi thinks Gwen is upset with him. Or rather he believes that Gwen believes he's upset with her. Oh. Oh.
It's a sentiment that Wei Wuxian understands well and he purses his lips for a moment as he carefully considers the question.]
I don't think you could put her into any position she didn't want to be in. [he starts, thinking of the strength of Gwen's will power—some might also call it stubbornness. His eyes shift back to his tea.]
A wise friend once told me that sometimes in situations like this, people need space. Room to understand what they're feeling. [There is a glint of warmth in his eyes, but despite the somewhat cheeky response, Wei Wuxian is not making light.] He told me that for someone like Gwen, patience is key. Her own experiences with death aren't insignificant.
He also told me that Gwen cared for me, and he was right. So now I am telling you that Gwen cares for you, and not just a little. You matter to her. If you're [Afraid] under the impression that she believes you're angry, tell her you're not. She'll have had plenty of space by the time this mission concludes.
๏ผ the echo of his own words is meant as a panacea, and one corner of his mouth quirks up in faint amusement. it is not wei wuxian's fault that the situations are entirely dissimilar. witnessing the slaughter of people who have had an active hand in harming others, who would have killed wei wuxian or the innocent prisoners on e23-b is not quite the same as gwen realizing that he put his own family to the sword. but the sentiment is appreciated, regardless. ๏ผ
I will see.
๏ผ the idea of speaking to her is exhaustive. he has never shied away from being a villain. it was a mantle he accepted that night and has bore unflinching since. but he had... divorced himself if not from the deed itself, then at least from the reputation in which he has cloaked himself ever after.
gwen now knows, irrevocably, that the truth of him is closer to that betrayal in taeum than in the personality he has cultivated since, and he does not know which side to show her now. the distance is easier to maintain, certainly. ๏ผ
[He looks at him for a moment longer—recognizing the deferral for what it is—but pushing has never gotten him anywhere with Itachi so he acquiesces to the subject change.]
Yeah. I hope so. The room's too quiet. [He complains softly, disguising a real discomfort with a feigned pout.]
I end up talking to myself too much. It's weird how easy it is to get used to something so quickly. [He misses Gwen specifically, but he also misses the presence of another person. He'd thought about approaching Lan Wangji for just a second, but the way things have been between them had made him dismiss the idea as soon as he'd had it.]
๏ผ quiet is an impoetic word for it. gwen's absence is a void, the absence of sun in spring. of all of them, however, wei wuxian is the most poorly equipped to endure solitude comfortably.
he gives wei wuxian a long, studied look. then: ๏ผ
Stay with me until she returns. You may take the bed.
๏ผ as if he doesn't already sleep on the futon tucked neatly away in a cupboard to begin with. ๏ผ
['Stay with me,' Itachi says, not 'you can stay with me' or 'if you want to.' Just stay with me. The gentle insistence of a friend. It's a foolish detail to get caught up on, but Wei Wuxian can't help ducking his head to hide a warm smile, nodding in answer.]
Alright. [And gone too are the days of 'If you don't mind.'
The thanks dies before it even reaches his lips, as much because he's mindful of Itachi's aversion to gratitude as because it simply doesn't seem to fit. Sometimes, a thanks really isn't needed between friends.]
Me? Snore? [He winks.] It's too late, you can't take it back now even if I do. You're stuck with me. [To prove the sentiment, he quickly shimmies up higher on the bed and ducks under the blanket, immediately calling out 'night!' from under the covers.
He is absolutely not going to bed yet but that is very much not the point.]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
It's called the Burial Mounds and it's a mountain range that had become a dumping ground for corpses over the centuries. No one is sure how it started anymore, but by my time it had become a place so saturated with resentful energy that to cleanse them would have been the undertaking of at least a hundred cultivators over a lifetime. Maybe longer.
And there wasn't any glory or money to be found in a task like that, so the leaders of the cultivation world built a wall of protective wards around it and left it alone. [It isn't something he holds his generation of cultivators responsible for, but it's a reminder that the cultivation world has always been the same. Chasing only what served them and not the people as they had always claimed.
His eyes flicker away from his tea to Itachi and he smiles, amused and perhaps knowing.] You're wondering why they threw me there instead of just killing me, aren't you?
[Itachi isn't the only one who knows his friend after all, and it's a reasonable judgment to make if he's honest. Itachi is efficient. If it had been him, he wouldn't have been stalled by Wei Wuxian's threats. Wei Wuxian wouldn't have lived long enough to make them, he thinks, without a drop of judgment.]
The man who threw me in there was called Wen Chao. He was going to just kill me. Except I swore to him that I would return as a spirit and haunt him to death. I meant it too. I would have. A stronger cultivator could have dispelled me, but Wen Chao was weak and he was a coward. I probably could have killed him as a ghost.
The Burial Mounds solved that problem for him. I'd die and then my soul would be stuck there for eternity, never rejoining the cycle of incarnation, and becoming just one more resentful spirit among thousands. That was the idea anyway.
no subject
๏ผ if he had any inkling of who wei wuxian was as a person, he might have risked the ghost. he is not one to be left alive.
wen chao. the name is committed to memory. he would risk viveca's wrath for that, should the man ever arrive on the ximilia. ๏ผ
How many people have you told of this?
no subject
Before I came here, no one, though my brother and Lan Zhan had heard from Wen soldiers. I didn't confirm it though. There was no point. [They would have worried needlessly and it was already over by then anyway. Not to mention it would have invited too many questions about how he'd managed to survive. Questions he had no intentions of answering.]
And here, uh. I mentioned it in passing to Rosinante. After we came out of the school. [A single comment that he had deliberately not expanded on.]
I. Well. I haven't really talked about it. Most people wouldn't understand it. [What the Burial Mounds were. Why the thought of having his spirit destroyed along with his body was so terrifying. And if they did, there would have been pity. He doesn't want pity.] And they fuss. It's all in the past now anyways.
no subject
his attention flickers back to the blade, hung in its place on the wall. it is not a new weapon. it had been his grandmother's, though it had been broken some time in the second of the great wars. it was repaired, renamed, and given to him on his entry to anbu. even ravaged as it is by the heartsblood it spilled, the bones on which it stuttered and caught, if one did not know its provenance they would be able to consider it a beautiful thing.
why do people speak of the past as if it is not a living thing, hot breath at your ear, rough hands around your throat? it is not dead, as long as you live to carry it.
wei wuxian survived the burial mounds. but itachi studies him in profile, the elegant curve to his cheek, his chin, and wonders what it was he left of himself in that dark place.
he lifts his tea cup, but rather than take a drink he simply pulls it in against his chest in an idle gesture, enjoying the proximity of that little spark of warmth. ๏ผ
I —
๏ผ the word truncates sharply.
when he speaks again, it is as if the misstep never happened. the surface of a vast ocean, deep and dark, mirror-bright on the surface. ๏ผ
I require your assistance with something. If you are able.
๏ผ it may seem like changing the subject. and it is, in a sense — pulling the focus to himself. what he wishes to ask is a selfish thing, and difficult for him. but necessary, like setting a bone. ๏ผ
no subject
He meets Itachi's eyes and nods.]
Name it.
no subject
you should not trust me, he thinks. but louder, in that moment, is the gratitude that he does.
he averts his eyes like he is chasing the long shadows on the wall. it takes him a moment.
wei wuxian may recognize the way he steels his spine to speak. it is an echo, of the child he had been on that rooftop, readying himself for deep unpleasantness. it is almost a process of self-immolation, unnecessary sentiment cast off and burnt beyond ash. then, it had been kindness. now, it is his own tendency to isolate. he does not require help, as he had said. a quiet lie. this is a navigable matter. that his navigation may be unnecessarily clumsy and cruel does not matter — he is capable.
that is not the point. the point is to ask. ๏ผ
After what you witnessed of my past, in Forsythe Heights, I spoke to Gwen. I told her what had transpired, that I used Tsukuyomi on you, and that you bore witness to a massacre I had committed. From that, she pieced together something I would have preferred her not to know. We have not spoken at any length since.
๏ผ this is as calmly dispassionate as if he were simply reading a mission report off stock card. ๏ผ
I... suspect she may feel I am angry with her. I am not. However, I do not wish to put her in a position where she feels she must reconcile what she knows of me with what I have done. You are closer to her than I am. What is your opinion?
no subject
It takes Wei Wuxian only a few seconds to imagine what he might have done in the same position. If Gwen or Itachi had been privy to the massacre of Nightless City without any context or idea of what was happening. If they had seen that night unfiltered...
He swallows hard at the thought. Maybe he isn't sure why Itachi told Gwen, but he knows it wasn't for his own good.
But none of that is why Itachi is speaking to him now, and Wei Wuxian would be a poor friend if he didn't pay attention and listen to what Itachi is saying.
Gwen figured out something else. There is immediately the instinct to pick and prod. Hasn't he told Itachi before? I like to understand how things work. But people are not inventions and arrays, streaks of ink on paper. Whatever Gwen pieced together is not for Wei Wuxian to know, and so he quiets the questions in his mind. Once, he hadn't listened when Itachi asked him to stop. He will never make that mistake again.
More to the point, the stumbling over the words and (momentary) uncharacteristic hesitance finally make sense to him. Itachi thinks Gwen is upset with him. Or rather he believes that Gwen believes he's upset with her. Oh. Oh.
It's a sentiment that Wei Wuxian understands well and he purses his lips for a moment as he carefully considers the question.]
I don't think you could put her into any position she didn't want to be in. [he starts, thinking of the strength of Gwen's will power—some might also call it stubbornness. His eyes shift back to his tea.]
A wise friend once told me that sometimes in situations like this, people need space. Room to understand what they're feeling. [There is a glint of warmth in his eyes, but despite the somewhat cheeky response, Wei Wuxian is not making light.] He told me that for someone like Gwen, patience is key. Her own experiences with death aren't insignificant.
He also told me that Gwen cared for me, and he was right. So now I am telling you that Gwen cares for you, and not just a little. You matter to her. If you're [Afraid] under the impression that she believes you're angry, tell her you're not. She'll have had plenty of space by the time this mission concludes.
Talk to her.
no subject
I will see.
๏ผ the idea of speaking to her is exhaustive. he has never shied away from being a villain. it was a mantle he accepted that night and has bore unflinching since. but he had... divorced himself if not from the deed itself, then at least from the reputation in which he has cloaked himself ever after.
gwen now knows, irrevocably, that the truth of him is closer to that betrayal in taeum than in the personality he has cultivated since, and he does not know which side to show her now. the distance is easier to maintain, certainly. ๏ผ
They should be returning soon.
no subject
Yeah. I hope so. The room's too quiet. [He complains softly, disguising a real discomfort with a feigned pout.]
I end up talking to myself too much. It's weird how easy it is to get used to something so quickly. [He misses Gwen specifically, but he also misses the presence of another person. He'd thought about approaching Lan Wangji for just a second, but the way things have been between them had made him dismiss the idea as soon as he'd had it.]
no subject
he gives wei wuxian a long, studied look. then: ๏ผ
Stay with me until she returns. You may take the bed.
๏ผ as if he doesn't already sleep on the futon tucked neatly away in a cupboard to begin with. ๏ผ
no subject
Alright. [And gone too are the days of 'If you don't mind.'
The thanks dies before it even reaches his lips, as much because he's mindful of Itachi's aversion to gratitude as because it simply doesn't seem to fit. Sometimes, a thanks really isn't needed between friends.]
no subject
๏ผ ... a joke?
a threat???
who knows with him. ๏ผ
no subject
Me? Snore? [He winks.] It's too late, you can't take it back now even if I do. You're stuck with me. [To prove the sentiment, he quickly shimmies up higher on the bed and ducks under the blanket, immediately calling out 'night!' from under the covers.
He is absolutely not going to bed yet but that is very much not the point.]
no subject