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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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.

Claudius runs his fingers once more over the creased edges of the letter, reading between the lines of the entry he wrote. He made a choice, a choice he can't remember, not to the copy information into the dossier. He wanted the words to be in Lan Wangji's hand. He wanted a puzzle he couldn't complete without conferring with another -- with the man he called a brother, and trusted more than any of his past selves. Claudius evaluates his actions the way he would a stranger's and, for a moment, the chill of unreality creeps back in.

The worst didn't come to pass -- he didn't forget his friend entirely. Claudius re-folds and re-places the letter where he found it, locks up the drawer with his dossier, and follows.

This is the same instinct that, now, he knows he must have had several times before: seeking some nondescript mansion room, one with no particular association for him or Claudius. Shen Yuan's spirit is unlikely to be malevolent this shortly after his death, and Lan Wangji is far from afraid of ghosts, but death is never kind. It's the same instinct, in fact, that led him to banish Galahad's sword so summarily from the bedroom they are now leaving. That room is a place of sanctuary for Claudius and Galahad, a room increasingly full with their shared life and love. He wants to keep resentful energy far from it.

A table, a few seats. He needs nothing more. He leads Claudius inside and notices only as he is taking Wangji from his back that he is still clutching his own note from Claudius. Before it can have any chance of slipping from his grasp like a stolen memory, he tucks it into the folded collar of his robe. It will be impossible to miss later.

He sits, then, the qin hovering across his lap, and glances at Claudius to tell him to do the same and to make himself ready.

Claudius lays out one of his array of notebooks, slim-signatured to lay flat, with the ballpoint pen he brought for the purpose. His pulse speeds, eyes dark and focused ... but he keeps his voice light and conversational. "Well, then," he says. "Let's see how this goes."

Just for a moment, Lan Wangji meets Claudius' gaze again. This is not the first time he has done this. In a general sense, he has played Inquiry countless times. It requires at least a thousand repetitions of practice before it can even be used to contact the dead. In specific, he must have set his qin across his lap just like this, asking Shen Yuan to speak with him, a dozen times or more in the past few days. He can't remember it.

This is not the first time he has done this, but it is the first time he has done it with Claudius, his sharp-eyed and quick-witted brother, by his side. It will be different this time.

He takes the spirit attraction flag from the pouch at his waist, unfolding it in a flutter of black fabric, and props it up in one of the admittedly convenient empty jars on the table before him. "This will draw any spirits within the mansion directly to me," he says, for Claudius' benefit.

Almost no sooner than the flag has been unfurled, Lan Wangji feels it, an insistent tug at his spiritual senses. Wangji's strings nearly hum, as if something other than him is trying to play them.

Claudius has seen magic many times since coming to the mansion, worked magic himself every time he's opened his wardrobe and willed something new into existence. Cultivation, he's learned, is more like alchemy than withcraft, which he'd been warned as a child could only come from demons. Cultivation comes from understanding the natural forces which move through the world. Living forces and, it seems, the once-living, too.

Time and again, Claudius has witnessed Lan Wangji work small wonders, conjuring flame, floating his qin upon the air, soothing small pains and great ones with swells of spiritual energy. Despite that, Claudius can still find it himself to be amazed. His mind turns back to time spent in meditation, trying to feel the breath of the world, trying to believe in its power. The power flowing through him also flowed through Shen Yuan and even in death, it hasn't gone from this place. Even in death, it's enough to stir the strings of an instrument, to make it sing.

His heart catches, and he waits.

Lan Wangji's hands know these notes with barely any conscious thought. He sets his hands to the strings, draws up qi from within himself, and plays. The first question: Who are you?

Rarely has he encountered a spirit quite this eager to answer. Shen Yuan will have no choice in any case; Lan Wangji's qin language is the work of decades, an irresistible compulsion for the dead. In this case, that skill goes wasted. When he lifts his hand, the qin appears immediately to play itself in answer.

"Shen Yuan," Lan Wangji says to Claudius, merely to confirm what they already know.

The second question: Who killed you? Shen Yuan must be weary of answering this, knowing the dangerous potential of the name. It hums out from the strings anyway, because he must respond, and because he must tell the truth. Aornis.

Here, he looks up from the qin, over to Claudius. This, too, is something they all but knew already. Now it is certain. "The name we cannot speak. She killed him."

Edited 2024-06-10 17:17 (UTC)

The two questions and their answers look so stark upon the page, in Claudius's slanted, spindly handwriting that always seems to rush from indent to margin. "We won't let ourselves forget," he says. Looking up, he asks, "Can Shen Yuan hear me, too?"

"He can hear and see you." Later, if the tangles of this murder unknot themselves to a happy ending, there might be some wry humor to glean from this situation. Lan Wangji must be the last person whose questions Shen Yuan wants to answer. "It will be easier for him to speak through my qin. What would you ask?"

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