ravkanwitch | [[open post and announcement: no mourners, no funerals]]

[[open post and announcement: no mourners, no funerals]]

[cw: discussion of death!]

Nina knows that word of Shen Yuan's death has been slowly spreading. She tried to put out a general warning of danger right after it happened... but she's not sure how many people were warned by it. She wasn't in the right mind at the time, after all. This time, she's more careful and collected. With SecUnit's help, she's alerted and gathered everyone who's interested for an important announcement in the lobby of the mansion. Despite all appearances of bossiness and stubbornness - all quite true - Nina has never been in charge of anything so serious. Kaz, Zoya, and the King himself; she followed their lead. As people slowly begin to gather and she attempts to compose herself, she wonders why she decided to put herself up to this.

Deep breath, Zenik. Pretend that - well, that this is pretend. She's back in the orphanage as the official greeter, making an important announcement to all the other children. She's the governor of a small town, making sure that all the citizens are aware and prepared. It does have to be her, after all. She's playing a crucial role in everything. She also doesn't want anyone else to carry the emotional load.

"Hi," she tells everyone gathered, trying to paste on a somber but not-too-morose expression. "Thanks for coming. I'm sure some of you have heard part of this announcement already and I'm sorry that it took so long to pass this information onto everyone else... but there was an incident not too long ago. We're not sure what caused it, whether it was the house or whether it was an individual, but... Shen Yuan is dead." There's most likely a reaction at this point and Nina forges onwards as confidently as she can, pitching her voice above the hubbub.

"But there is a way that he can return. We're sure of it. We're just trying to figure out the details, which might take a while. If you want to know more about that, you can ask Magnus, but I'm not sure how much he can tell you. Also, if you encounter any signs of Shen Yuan's spirit, you can talk to--" Here she meets Aleksander's eyes almost instinctively; this line of conversation is something she's purposefully kept from him. "You can talk to myself. Or... to Lan Wangji. ...That's all. Thank you."

A confident start but slightly deflated by her last few sentences, Nina steps back and allows for conversation to happen. If anyone would like to speak to her, she's looking much less strained and grim than she has in a while.

[[Feel free to post a single comment reaction and/or start a thread with Nina in the comments!]]

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After speaking with Magnus, Claudius takes a slow, deliberate breath. He can envision the weak qi cycling through his middle dantian and his lower dantian, or his sympathetic nervous system slowing down, slowing the release of chemicals that make him want to fight or flee this. However he explains it to himself, he feels anchored once more. He feels like the lights have come on, on an empty stage of his body, and he can inhabit it like a real place. He can think without all his thoughts screaming at him.

In Elsinore and the courts abroad, Claudius always found ways to skillfully cover up truths while offering condolements. He had plans that revolved around addressing the need for public mourning, while hiding his involvement in the king's death. He could fall back on that easily. But his priorities are clear now: to attend to everyone in this room. To scan everyone's expressions and cycle through, offering comfort to those who look saddened, answers to those who look lost, and standing with those who need the shared silence to process what they've heard. Rather than resort to broad strategies, he focuses on the person in front of him.

He thinks of it as politicking, but the feeling's clear: he's worried. This is his community, one he wants to keep safe. He offers every assurance he can, and it's as much to reassure himself.

Galahad's sole focus, throughout this meeting, has been Claudius. For as much as the world has been damaged by Shen Yuan's death, there's a certain unreality to it for him -- if he doesn't keep reminding himself that it happened, it almost feels as if Shen Yuan is just somewhere else, somewhere Galahad can't find him. But Claudius is here.

He doesn't say anything, but he slips his hand into Claudius' and squeezes, doesn't let go.

That hand is an anchor to him, too. Claudius could lose himself in a hall of mirrors, adapting, explaining, reflecting, and soothing -- but Galahad brings him back to himself. And with return, he recognizes how much Galahad has taken care of him and stood beside him. He remembers what he'd started to forget: how dearly he wants to marry this man. He was hoping to celebrate their betrothal this spring, before he stopped feeling like celebrating.

He catches Galahad's eye, signs the one-handed I love you. He signs thank you, bringing his fingers from his lips, like passing on a kiss.

Galahad smiles, and signs girlboss back to him. Claudius is strong and ambitious, and sometimes a woman (and Galahad remembers how he'd laughed when explaining the new words Crowley had taught him and Wangji at their book discussion, and wants to make him laugh again, as much as he means it as an actual encouragement: thou art powerful. I am with thee. We will come through this).

Claudius does laugh, with real and dizzying delight. It's the same dizziness he felt when breathing deep for the first time, realizing how much his lungs could talk. He's at home again. Fearful, frustrated, still achingly sad, but home. He presses Galahad's hand in his.

His laugh is like a treasure, like a pearl, like a burst of sweetness on the tongue after a season of fasting. Galahad savors it as he curls his fingers against Claudius'. For the first time in several weeks, it feels possible that things will get better.

At Nina's meeting, Lan Wangji doesn't speak with Claudius at length. They've both taken the time to ask Magnus their questions. He has his own role there, a role for which Lan Wangji would be ill-suited. Claudius can talk to anyone; Claudius can work through the implications of Magnus and Nina's news about Shen Yuan's promised return with the other residents. He can smooth tempers and weave hope out of words. So Lan Wangji restrains himself from occupying his friend's time. They don't always need to speak aloud to communicate -- that day with no translation proved that. All he has to do is put a hand on Claudius' shoulder, look once at Magnus, and silently agree that they will confer later.

Later comes more quickly than Lan Wangji anticipated that it would. There is newfound urgency to the necessity of contacting Shen Yuan's spirit. He should have done it the day of his death. The next, at the very least. When he slips a hand into his qiankun pouch, intending to summon Wei Ying with a messaging talisman and ask for him a spirit attraction flag, he discovers two things. Firstly, he finds that there is already a spirit attraction flag amongst his belongings. Secondly, his fingers brush the dried peony bookmark he carries with him everywhere. Sentimental, wearier than he has any right to be, he rubs his thumb along its surface. That is when he discovers the third thing: a piece of neatly-folded paper. It does not belong to him. He draws it out and, when he unfolds it, recognizes Claudius' handwriting, or at least the way that the mansion transmutes Claudius' handwriting for him.

None of this alarms him unduly until he reads the contents of the note. Thereafter, abruptly and significantly alarmed, he goes to search for Claudius, the note held tightly in one hand as if he might forget its existence without the minor exertion of holding onto it.

"Ah, Wangji," Claudius says when he sees Lan Wangji come down the hall. There's a more deliberate shape to his days now, which before were wandering and aimless. Before, it feels like he'd been pursuing the shape of a question, unable to articulate the problem enough to solve it. But the problem was death, and the specter of death -- it was all his delicate efforts to keep the peace shattered, because peace no longer reigned here.

Now death is a foe he can look in the eyes. He can fight it the same way humans have fought with death for thousands of years, with medicine and herbalism. He could've laughed, honestly, when the details of Magnus's plan sunk in. A vague knowledge of herbs was what served Claudius in the war, the first time he had to witness a body bleed out and feel himself useless. (And every time he felt useless seeing Gertrude's bruises after the fact, suspecting whatever violence broke out had been his fault. He made her poultices before he started brewing poisons.)

But to the purpose. "Just the man I was hoping to see. I could use a moment's counsel with thee ... art thou well?" Lan Wangji looks solemn and determined, as he often does, but something in the set of his mouth draws Claudius's attention.

Silence wins out temporarily as Lan Wangji struggles with where to begin. Remember what thou toldst me, and that the memory of the exchange was taken away from thee. On any other day, at any other time, he would set aside his own concerns and ask what counsel Claudius needs. This is something larger than himself.

Finally, he opens his hand, the folded note sitting still in his palm. "Do you remember writing me this?"

He looks it over, and -- it's strange. He remembers that episode in the kitchen, after taking a tincture that eased his humors at the cost of loosening his lips. He was quite convinced he could've kept that naive, childish longing to call Lan Wangji his brother to himself, but naturally it was a relief once it was spoken. He didn't want to lose it.

Why would he be afraid of losing it? Because of the effects of the herbal remedy? Why ask Lan Wangji to remember it, too? Lan Wangji wasn't drunk, surely. Lan Wangji forgets everything when he drinks, and nothing otherwise. It makes little sense, but Claudius knows himself, knows he chooses his words in circuitous and careful ways. None of these statements, these remembrances, were meant to be disconnected. So why was this one alone excised from his memory? Remember that Aornis senses whenever her name is spoken as a shiver on the back of the neck ...

Who is Aornis? He opens his mouth to ask, then closes it.

"No," he says, shortly. "Not in full." With a frown, he asks, "Canst thou recall writing a likewise note to me?"

Of course Lan Wangji remembers it too. The memory feels as vivid as any other. He embraced Claudius for the first time with his own arms. Thou art my only brother -- it would be impossible to forget, because it meant so much to him. Wouldn't it? Claudius must have believed it possible.

An alien kind of panic wants to take him, a kind he hasn't felt in a very long time. He guides himself through his own painstaking breath, but it doesn't slow his heart as it should. "No," he echoes. "But I must have." Claudius would not have written so otherwise.

It's a game of strategy. The thought arises in his mind, and he's had it before, he's certain. He doesn't know where, or why. The best he can grasp is the memory of looking around the café with Grantaire, during a nonsense debate about origin spirits to keep his mind sharp. The game isn't like chess, with pieces lined up on both sides of the boards, but like weiqi, with pieces being dropped in as they go. He focused on the faces in the room, but now the faces blur when he tries to place them. In the reel of his memory, there's a crisp image of Galahad, blue-eyed and serious, in conversation with something. That something is a stark absence like the overexposed edges of a photograph, back when Claudius was still learning how to use a camera.

His mind is reeling. It darts so fast from implication to implication, it's a struggle to slow down and speak. It's a game of strategy, like weiqi.

He can't picture his opponent. But if he were crafting lines of defense to keep the breath of his stones, he'd want more than one angle to defend them from. If he were shielding memories from something (someone) he'd leave pieces to make a connection in more than one place. "Come," he says, briskly. "I need to collect something from my room."

Lan Wangji recognizes the intent cast to Claudius' expression. He is making connections. One after the other, quick and clever. Wei Ying gets the same look on his face shortly before he puts together all the pieces to some mystery, announces to the room at large that he has solved it, and infuriates every listener by refusing to elucidate that solution until he has explained everything that led him there.

He follows Claudius without hesitation. His own mind doesn't work that way. It doesn't leap from branch to branch. It nests, settling in until it is ready to move on. As they walk, he can think only of the flag already in his qiankun pouch, the way his days have melted away from him of late like the last of the snow outside.

The shape of the room has changed, since Claudius first invited Lan Wangji into it, when the locked drawer of his own desk was something he couldn’t face alone. Furniture’s been pushed to the side, opening up space by the record player for slow dancing; shelves have been added to collect novels and curios, the kotatsu clustered to one side for Galahad to keep warm while he reads. But the desk remains the same.

The key Claudius gave Laurel had been the key to all his secrets -- all the obsessive workings of his mind, hoarding over what scraps of knowledge he’d like a little dragon. It means as much now as it did then, to let anyone else stand beside him and see where he keeps the most private of things: his thoughts, his memories.

Something strikes him, the shuddering feeling they say means someone’s walked over your grave. It’s the feeling of disjointed familiarity, not deja vu, but jamais vu. He draws out his dossier, flips through it and fingers a folded piece of parchment. The feel of it's familiar, but he can't remember touching it -- because he can't remember ever seeing this page. Aornis. Whole swathes of the entry have been bracketed -- with words and terms he's never heard before, jurisfiction chief among them -- with a single note penned in the margins. She lied.

One thing at a time. "The matching letter," he says, and unfolds it.

Edited 2024-06-07 14:34 (UTC)

There could be no mistaking Lan Wangji's handwriting. Claudius' name, 克牢荻斯 in brisk and careful strokes. His own courtesy name, the characters tidy after a childhood spent copying precepts and poems and the Tao Te Ching again and again until Lan Qiren was satisfied. He looks at it for longer than he needs to, reading it once and then twice. The letter is short and to the point. We believe memories can be taken at her will.

When they first stood here, opening this desk to unwrap the parcel that contained Laurel's gift for Claudius, it was a blossoming of comfort. Whatever happened thereafter, Claudius would have the assurance that Laurel had thought of him with comfort and beauty in mind. This is the opposite, an unfolding of nothing where there should have been something. He can't remember writing this. He can't remember the name Aornis at all.

"Claudius." Lan Wangji's voice is exactingly level. "I have been losing track of time."

"... Perpetual check," he murmurs aloud. In weiqi, one stone is much like any other -- only the placement differs. In chess, it takes a knight to leap over other pieces, a queen to traverse every square. Pawns can only move forward, square by square, and never back. The pieces you advance determine what checks you can make.

Sensing one's name isn't a significant advantage on its own, but erase all memory of it, and you can evade every capture. The moment anyone comes close, close enough to call 'check,' they can be made to forget. Calling 'check' itself is the signal. It's the name no one was meant to know, the shiver at the back of the neck.

Which means Lan Wangji came close. "How much time have you lost?"

It feels like trying to hold onto a wisp of smoke or steam, like trying to retrieve a piece of eggshell with one's hand, like closing his fingers around the lost time only makes it scatter again. The honest answer is that Lan Wangji isn't certain. That fact in itself coils unsettlingly in the back of his awareness.

"I--" He puts a hand to his face, breathes in yet again, and pushes past his frustration. "Some every day since Shen Yuan's death. Some days, only a little. Others are missing more. I nearly missed making Wei Ying's dinner." There's no need to tell Claudius how unlike him that is.

Claudius could almost laugh. "There is no more dutiful husband than thee," he says, with a flickering smile instead. "And no man more loyal to his routines. What would change in thy routine? When thou didst hear of Shen Yuan ... no." He stops himself. He can't ask that Lan Wangji remember his first thought; he has to go further back. "If thou didst hear the news today. What wouldst thou think to do?"

This question is so much easier that the relief is almost disorienting, taking a step expecting brambles and vines and finding a smooth path instead. "I would play Inquiry and question his spirit." With that, Lan Wangji drops the hand covering his face so that he can make eye contact with Claudius. It's too obvious; it doesn't require speaking aloud. He has already played Inquiry for Shen Yuan.

"Whatever the results of your Inquiry were," he says, "they led you to her name." He taps the page beneath his fingers, eyes skimming the idle observations, first impressions he'd recorded before bracketing everything off. Too many speculations started from seeing her as agent of another world's laws, trying to understand the system she seemed to represent. All that remains are how she looked (blonde as any Dane) and dressed (with a kind of casual luxury, but he couldn't speak to the style, and at a party of other well-dressed women he suspected he'd struggle to say what made her unique). She seemed young to him, perhaps as young as Enjolras or Grantaire. According to the notes, she lost a brother. He had wondered whether he could step into that role, in order to know her better.

There's no record of the attempt. Perhaps he'd never made it.

Shaking his head, he says, "We've two mysteries, and we didn't know them. A murder, and a missing person. We should assume that they're connected, rather than disparate, because your lapses in memory seem to connect to them both. Naively, I suppose, we could imagine that she's in hiding from whatever killed Shen Yuan, and erasing your memory whenever you might risk revealing her." Saying naively suggests its likelihood, to Claudius. But he didn't seem to hate the woman he wrote about, even if he didn't trust her. "Regardless, I doubt she'll emerge until she's quite certain she's been forgotten. And that's once everyone's stopped saying her name."

Over Claudius' shoulder, Lan Wangji examines the notes. He has none of his own aside from the one Claudius wrote him in the kitchen. He trusted his own memory. He has never before had a reason not to.

A murder, and a missing person. One who knows when her name is spoken and who can excise memories with precision. This memory loss is not like Wei Ying, who drops important details and remembers others without any apparent pattern, whose fear and grief at the end of his life wiped the last several weeks of it from his mind entirely. It is targeted and specific.

"They are connected," he says, after another short silence. He's quiet but confident. "When I play Inquiry, I always begin with the same two questions. The first is who are you? The second is who killed you? The spirit has no choice but to answer me."

"Then it's obvious what the answers are, isn't it? Shen Yuan. And ..." Tap. He taps the name on the paper again. An unsettling certainty grows in him: the likelihood that they'll forget this, too. Even if they avoid saying the name between themselves, Shen Yuan's spirit is still somewhere to contact. Reliably enough, given how much of Lan Wangji's memory is missing -- he didn't contact Shen Yuan once, or twice, but day after day.

So the moment someone else contacts Shen Yuan, Claudius may lose this entire conversation, this moment of shared realization. Despite everything, that's good news. Shen Yuan's spirit is here. He tears a page out of the back of the dossier, and writes it down in his spidery hand.

"Mn." He watches as Claudius writes, as the words transform into spindly characters before his eyes. There is some reassurance in it. Evidently, Aornis can pluck memories at will, but the written word is beyond her power. If there is limited time before they forget this discussion, too, then they must make the most of that time.

He looks back up at Claudius. "I will play Inquiry again. You accompany me and keep a record of what we learn."

Claudius can't help but laugh, this time. It's a release of breath, of tension. "Thy amanuensis. Know'st thou, in ev'ry detective story, the detective has an amanuensis."

"Your records have proven invaluable," Lan Wangji points out, with a significant glance in the direction of Claudius' dossier. He steels himself, recalling the hand-lettered flag at the top of his qiankun pouch. Aornis took from him the memory of asking Wei Ying to make it. It is a small thing, but it lights him with a slow-kindling rage. He had thirteen years of time with Wei Ying taken from him. He would like to never lose another moment.

He steps back, waiting for Claudius to be ready to follow him.

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