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!]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There must still be something of the child in him, kneeling in wait on a precipice of feeling, sure that if remains still and patient enough, he will be rewarded by an absence of pain. There is Claudius, though, tucking back a lock of his hair and holding onto his hand. It doesn't matter that his grip is weaker. It's steady. "I know," he says on the tail end of a slow breath.

"Good. When fortresses fail us, we turn to our allies." He may not be a military man, but he knows strategy. He knows how sieges can stretch on, even against the best-defended of walls. He knows a well-timed arrival of allied forces can be what turns the tide. "I am here to help thee guard the gate. I can hold it, while thou look'st to thy losses. Even soldiers have a right to mourn."

For a moment, Lan Wangji grips Claudius' hand tighter still -- only a moment, because he is always wary of hurting him and even warier of frightening him. He touches his fingertips to his forehead ribbon and its embroidered cloud, the most familiar shape he could imagine, and then he lets that hand drop, too, to fold around Claudius', one hand in both of his. "After several years, I could no longer recall Wei Ying's face. But I remembered him as he was. I was the only one." There is no reason Aornis might take any of that from him, but she could. She has the ability, and it is apparently impossible to stop her. She has already taken, he suspects, dozens of small moments between himself and his husband. Anything that might lead him back to her.

A thought occurs to Claudius, that he had once while watching the photograph develop on a Polaroid picture. They had nothing like that in his time. In his time, if someone passed away, you remembered them by a portraits painted, letters written, a lock of hair pressed in a locket. It isn't a surprise to him that Lan Wangji forgot Wei Wuxian's face ... but he realizes what a precious image that is. "Thou shouldst have gone through enough," he says, soft. "Every new memory was a memory to cherish. And thou hast carried that memory of Wei Wuxian so long, no matter how others tried to defame it."

It still cuts through him, the simple kindness of Claudius' understanding. Lan Wangji's brother was gentle with him when he was in seclusion, but tried again and again to encourage him to forget Wei Wuxian, to move on, what with the Yiling Patriarch's true nature exposed so wholly to the world. Lan Wangji didn't want to forget.

Overcome again, he shuts his eyes. It's a few still-slow breaths before he finds the next words. "He forgets so much. I remember for him." He remembers the ludicrously spicy dish Wei Ying liked best at the Hunan restaurant in Caiyi, so that they can order it again if they ever return. He remembers to warm Wei Ying's house slippers in time for his return when he has been out, because Wei Ying gets cold easily in his new body. He remembers Jin Ling's birthday. He remembers the cold terror in Wei Ying's eyes the last time they saw each other, even as the fine details of his face have scattered into the mist of a dream.

Ah. It’s not only losing memories of the man he loves that’s rattled Lan Wangji, Claudius realizes. It’s that remembering is one of the ways he loves. “Tell me,” he prompts, “something thou hast remembered for him.”

A thousand possible answers spread out before him. Lan Wangji kept everything, for as long as he could. He told Wei Ying how he loved him, how he had only ever wanted to care for him, and he is the only one who holds the memory of his own words. "In Yiling," he says at length, "we shared a meal." It was the only time he had an excuse to see Wei Ying during those years, before the beginning of the end. "He offered to pay. One of his talismans lit; he was needed at the Burial Mounds. He left, forgetting the food and the bill. I paid before I followed him."

It’s a darling story, and Claudius smiles at it. “Such generous intentions,” he says. “Thou wert the one to put intention to action, but at least he was able to express them. He and thou art truly yin and yang, in perfect balance with another.” Another strand of hair, it seems, needs to be brushed back, and Claudius lets his hand linger and frame Lan Wangji’s face.

The settling of Claudius' hand is so wholly unexpected and carries such easy tenderness with it that it freezes him in place for the first half of a breath. He can't remember the last time anyone but Wei Ying touched his face. It must have been A-Yuan a decade ago, when his hands were still improbably small and he wanted to touch and meddle with everything, or perhaps Lan Xichen's brisk adjustment of his forehead ribbon, a glancing touch at most. He thinks of Sagramore telling him it's not a kindness to refuse care, Claudius himself explaining oxytocin, and he lets his cheek lean into Claudius' palm on the exhale.

"Thou know'st this already, but I'll say it, anyway," Claudius says, as he pets Lan Wangji's cheek. Like a cat who's pressed against his hand. "Thy yin and yang work because they are in flux. Like a landscape of peaks and valleys, struck against the sky: where one rises, the other descends. Shouldst thou falter, thy partner will be there to inspire thee. Shouldst thy partner forget, thou wilt remember. We will protect what remains of thy memory, so that it may always be so, and thou wilt make many new ones with him."

Lan Wangji sits quietly as Claudius talks, his eyes still closed and Claudius' hand still caught between both of his. The words wash over him in concert with Claudius stroking his cheek. There is some fitting circularity to this. Claudius is comforting him by draping words over the structure of a concept Lan Wangji taught him. He thinks it may even be working. Wei Ying will tease him later, exclaiming how remarkable it is to have Lan Wangji finally be the forgetful half of their marriage. "I know," he says again. He doesn't say thank you, but when he opens his eyes, his gratitude is evident in them.

“Ay, as thou art a scholar and a gentleman.”

Unbidden, Claudius thinks of Lan Wangji truth-compelled, eyes shut against shame as he begun to speak of a kind, beautiful mother imprisoned, a mother who teased him, who knew when he bit it was from the strength of unspoken feelings. Lan Wangji has always felt things strongly beneath his silences, and Claudius has always admired it in him.

He wonders whether Lan Wangji’s mother fussed over him this way, in their stolen hours in her appointed prison-house, the way Gertrude fussed over Claudius before such innocent touches became forbidden. Whether sitting in the snow outside her soor, Lan Wangji longed for his mother to touch his hair, and tut that he’d better come in before he caught his death of cold.

“And shouldst thou need to bite anyone,” he softly teases, “Wei Wuxian will aid thee there, too, I’m sure.”

Lan Wangji doesn't quite smile, or laugh, either, but Claudius knows him so well now that he no longer wonders or worries whether the depths of his feelings will come across. His eyes soften and brighten; that's enough. I like to be around people who laugh and talk and tease me. That is something Claudius has remembered for him.

"He will have no choice," he says, after one more small sojourn in silence. The implied second half of that sentence, naturally, is nor would he want to.

Claudius laughs for them both — a bright, pealing laugh that says there’s still some joy in the world. “Good man,” he says, and he could mean either of them.

This little breath is not precisely a sigh, but it might qualify as the close cousin of one, Lan Wangji coming back to himself under Claudius' fond attention. He could almost wish for a second truth spell, so that he could say, I am so glad you were here with me and that I didn't have to face this alone. I could have, and I would have withstood it, but it means something that I didn't have to. Because he can't, he only presses Claudius' hand more firmly between his for a moment, the firm and gentle pressure of setting something beloved in its place.

Claudius understands something of the sentiment, nonetheless. He squeezes back, before releasing a sigh of his own. "Now I suppose the only question is how to responsibly spread this information. I'm disinclined to start a witch hunt for blonde women in hiding ... but for many, it will be a relief to know it's only one woman. The unknown is always more frightening than the known."

"Mn." A return to tactics will not go amiss. The more people who know Aornis exists, and the more who think to put that knowledge in writing, the more and more difficult she will find it to evade their collective memory. "I will tell Magnus." At the mention of Magnus, something occurs to Lan Wangji. "How is her name spelled in English? I know the signs for the English alphabet." And if he cannot speak it, at least he can sign it. For this reason and this reason only, he frees Claudius' hand.

"While thou art at it, do remind him to rely upon his friends or allies, and take more rest," Claudius says, tongue firmly in cheek. "If I see him again and he still has that weary, bearing-the-weight-of-the-world-alone look about him, I'm giving him a soporific. I'm not above slipping it in his drink¹." That said, his fingers flicker through the signs, A-O-R-N-I-S. "Thou shouldst also repeat what Shen Yuan said of growing his homunculus. I still don't know whether I'll be allowed in on that particular project, though Shen Yuan's assent will certainly help."

¹ He should be above it but honestly, it's unclear whether this part is still tongue-in-cheek.

So Lan Wangji is not the only one who is worried for Magnus. His mind continues to return to the overwhelming tension he felt in Magnus' body at Nina's meeting, how Magnus promised he would tell Lan Wangji if he were not well, and how badly he wants to believe him. Dutifully, he recreates Claudius' signs, A-O-R-N-I-S in turn. It almost comes to him to ask why Claudius would not be allowed to assist with the plants, but -- of course. Luo Binghe. "I will," he agrees. "I would rather Magnus share that burden."

"There are so many here willing to share it with him," Claudius says, with another sigh. "And we'll share our burdens, as well. Know'st thou, when I was Elsinore, I would've advocated for absolute secrecy in this matter. Call up a council of trusted advisors and decide what convenient half-truth to share with the crowd, something that will accomplish our aims without giving too much away. But I trust a truly extraordinary number of people here. Thou must understand how rare trust was in my old life. I think I will tell Sagramore and Laertes, too, all we learned when I deliver Sagramore his message. Sagramore is well-connected, and Laertes is committed and honest." And he hopes it will ease some of the fears that had the couple fleeing the house and running to the woods. But it's the sort of decision Laertes and Sagramore would make, the sort of impulse they'd take and pour their whole hearts into. Claudius wants to see the home they'll make. It just won't have to be a hiding-place anymore.

Sagramore does know everyone. Lan Wangji is fond thinking of it and of him, and of the hope he has that this news will bring him and Laertes a measure of peace. He trusts a surprising number of people here, too; it is not so much that his previous life was plagued with mistrust, but that he kept himself at a remove. He worked and walked alone for long, long years. He spoke with his brother, and trusted Lan Xichen, but he could not speak with him of the thing he carried closest to his heart. Marrying Wei Ying began to break down his walls. Coming here has done a considerable amount of additional work. "This killer is only one woman," he says, "and she can trust none of us. We discovered her because we trusted one another."

"As always, thou art most eloquent on the point," Claudius says, and he isn't even teasing. The simplicity of Lan Wangji's speech, the clarity of its purpose, always has an effect on Claudius. We discovered her because we trusted one another. Claudius can hold on to that statement like a cherished jewel, worn over his heart. And just as true, she can trust none of us. Claudius spent a long time struggling to trust anyone here, and it happened as he slowly began to share his intentions and found his friends accepted his past and understood his sin. Aornis likely never came to that point, always able to reset the interaction the moment she revealed anything she didn't want.

Wryly, Claudius thinks he's rather glad he doesn't have that power. He would have stalled so many friendships out of fear, taking away the memories of his worst moments and confessions, and he wouldn't have Lan Wangji -- or much of anyone -- to trust.

Indulgent, especially fond in the wake of how kind Claudius has just been to him, Lan Wangji lets this particular accusation stand without protest. It is only the truth. He accepted a drink from a smiling stranger, and now he sits here with a brother, someone he has trusted with more of himself than he could have ever imagined revealing when they met. How long would he have kept going in circles, losing large swaths of his days to Aornis' power, if he had not found that note, been pleased to recognize the hand in which it was written, and read it with eagerness to learn its contents?

As for the rest of the mansion: he considers the residents. Claudius will tell Galahad; he will tell Wei Ying. That much is obvious. Telling Sagramore will take care of a significant portion of the population. "Young master Morozova was shaken," he recalls. "He should know."

Edited 2024-06-18 15:50 (UTC)

"I can hardly blame him," Claudius says, with the sympathy of someone who was shaken for days himself. "Aleksander was once a general. He was ready to done with that life, the way I was ready to be done with politics. A death among our numbers is rather rattling."

Lan Wangji meets Claudius' eyes, well aware of how vacant Claudius has been of late. Claudius was performing his own life without any of the wit, humor, and zeal that characterize him; Lan Wangji was wandering through his own days, fogged and afraid of something he could barely remember. He has, now, just a little hope. It is only a little, but it's something. "It is," he agrees. He has taken lives. He speaks with and suppresses the dead. He is married to a man whose dearest friend is an unsmiling corpse. And yet the sudden death of someone he barely tolerated was almost too much to bear. "Do you feel better able to face it now?"

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