Dissolution

by alate_feline, wing_shadow_feline (alate_feline)

Summary:

In this universe, they haven't lost yet. Wei Wuxian defends the Burial Mounds—at any cost.

Wei Wuxian sprawls across a shelf of stone. At a brief glance, his movements, his posture, would seem drunkenly relaxed. A more searching look—or a knowing refusal to stare—readily exposes the lie in that semblance. Exhaustion reveals itself in the thoughtful reeling nod of his chin; and in the would-be evocative lift of a palm, that falls back limp without ever raising his elbow. True lassitude may not even be possible, any longer, for someone who burns with the constant anxious energy of being unable to stop.

Wei Wuxian is intoxicated, yes—poisoned by resentment, decaying from within—and also, there is fruit wine on his breath. His reactions are slowed by strong pain medication taken with that wine. It is a stopgap. A few day's brute-force interference—for any more would be fatal—with the acid-sharp tension that is both killing him and keeping him alive. He still holds a jerky lightning-stabbed twitch of reactivity, rooted somewhere in his spine, his legs and shoulders. His face and hands have gone slow, though. His expression is smeary and his lips slur.

"Insides are so fucking weird, Wen Ning," Wei Wuxian says, detached and wondering. Abstraction is an imperfect protection from thoughts he cannot leave alone. "I mean, who made it so the inside of something is different then the outside?"

There's blood under Wei Wuxian's fingernails. Something from inside someone else.

The blood crusted under one nostril, though, is his own. With Wei Wuxian's meridians in their current state, he usually doesn't spit up bad blood any more. His system can't register it as toxic in time to fully expel it. Instead he digests it, excretes it, survives it somehow, for now. But where his skin is thin and dry, his capillaries often break, and bleed.

"What god decided? What force of nature can draw a line? Doesn't it always wrap back around somehow?"

The blood on Wei Wuxian's lips is of indeterminate origin.

He continues, breathily, dreamily intent, "If you think about it, a bottle is just a flat shape, but bent up. And a person—a person isn't solid. There's a hole right through the middle, like a jade bracelet, like a ring. Like a circular seal. It's just—thick. A tube of flesh. So, really, isn't the inside the outside too?"

Wei Wuxian defines a boundary within himself: the line he draws in defense of the Burial Mounds and the Wen Remnants hiding there.

At that deadly edge, Wei Wuxian stood—alone—against a force of fifty, earlier today.

---

The Jin, always the damned Jin. Jin money and leadership and ambition and lies; and they are trying less and less to hide it. The wards held. As long as Wei Wuxian stands behind them, they will hold. But Wei Wuxian—Modao Zushi, Yiling Laozu—has made himself a thing of constant motion, an unceasing river-rush of oncoming death. So he cannot merely barricade and withstand.

Instead, he walked out. He came out through his blood-red wards. He let the scarlet shine of them trail from his shoulders. He bore them up. He carried them with him, worn on his physical body, yet still delimiting the sloping skeletal terrain of the Burial Mounds. He came forth, without ever leaving.

---

Fifty cultivators opposed him. Against one slight dark figure, under a deep-gray sky, they made a curving wall of garish color. Some stood up bold and armored, swords glaring bright. Others held well back, employing disguise talismans and shielding arrays along with obstructive terrain. Behind their artificially-enhanced cover, they thought that their weapons, their thrice-blessed talisman arrows and their curse-carved grenades filled with fire powder, could be concealed long enough to matter.

Unheralded, the leader of the forward section hurled a peony-bright explosive at the glaring wards—signalling the attack, with no attempt at parley. Each living man leaned forward, keen for action and breathing harshly with the fierce spirit of battle. But even as as the brash commander attacked, the defensive response arrived—behind him.

Somewhere off past the periphery of all possible attention, a groaning rumble, low and far away at the edge of hearing, had already begun. Ground broke and flattened, trees crashed down, and rock pillars crumbled. Unheeded, the deep disastrous sound stripped away every characteristic of the battlefield, save for a barren rocky plain.

The available space of action contracted; and the sensible structure of time collapsed.

---

In a moment, in a shichen, all at once, a dark tattered figure ghosts forth. His dizi is already hidden again.

Over the shriek of nonsensical background noise, an immense song hangs in the air. Chenqing holds them all in melodies previously played/un-played. Each new note echoes forward over and over. Each musical phrase writes backwards four more previous phrases—suddenly always already done, and only then, belatedly recognized.

---

Wei Wuxian moved from one foe to another without haste. His steps fell lightly, as quiet and as sudden as nightfall between mountains. He had all the time in the world to achieve—precisely—nothing.

For the unscrolling indeterminate dimension of that long/short/endless/instantaneous pause, he walked among the men who meant to kill him. Duration was flayed and laid out and spread apart into infinite surface-slices of instants. He held out his bare hands, as if beseeching. Did they drip red?

To his enemies, Wei Wuxian reached out, as would a fellow-warrior, or even a friend. He gave a touch, no more, to each statue-still distracted foe. A shoulder tapped, a chest flicked, an arm patted.

His touch tore space and time. His resentment ripped through them. They crumpled into red rags.

An instant and an afternoon later, Wei Wuxian finished his circuit. He retreated. He lifted Chenqing again; and his song stopped.

---

Wen Ning didn't even need to help with the destruction. Only to stand by, to wait at the gate.

The Ghost General's role was to be sentry and warning at the threshold, when red eyes and black mist turned around again, hands washed with vermilion and bare blasted earth behind. Wen Ning waited to hold open the path, until the Yiling Laozu could come back home. Or, at need, he would try to bar the way against Modao Zushi—once.

After the wards again sealed shut behind him, Wei Wuxian still stood tall, smiling slightly. His lips were very red, and his face very pale. Calm of stance and cold of face, he played a lullaby to the bodies of the fallen corpses outside. The melody was based upon Rest, but sweeter by far. To their torn bodies, it was gentle; he coaxed into sinking them down into the rocky dirt, now gone soft as rich soil, sticky as lotus mud. It spoke to their spirits, too; held them with a promise of golden glory, honeyed and alluring. Unlike the tunes played by the Lan, it gave no release.

When he was done, when the enemy dead had been stored away as his weapons against the next onslaught, Wei Wuxian folded himself downward to kneeling, his motions jerky like a puppet on strings. He put Chenqing away at his side, still smoking cold black mist. It took him three tries to find the belt loop.

Before he could finish the gesture, Wei Wuxian's eyelids closed, shutting down red incandescence.

---

Wei Wuxian's breathing stopped.

Wen Ning knew his job. Wen Ning grabbed Wei Wuxian before he could even sag. With a healer's qi-control gesture turned inside out, Wen Ning twisted the resentful energy seething inside Wei Wuxian's chest, and forced his lungs to move.

Wen Ning took up his master's work—and ordered both of their bodies to continue to imitate life.

---

After that, the fact that Wei Wuxian woke up on his own a shichen later was astonishing. Wen Ning's subsequent finding, that Wei Wuxian had to be drugged out of sensibility before he could speak without breathlessly trying to scream, was hardly unexpected.

Wen Ning knows exactly what he put in the cup he gave Wei Wuxian. How quickly it would become toxic, in someone healthy. How much less time it will take, in someone whose every system is under strain. How much time it might just buy, for someone whose pain in itself could kill them.

Every time he treats Wei Wuxian, Wen Ning feels like less of a doctor, and more of a monster, now.

Notes:

Not properly edited, yet, alas! I am buried under real life work stuff! Still love this fandom and AU!

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 50 of Through Each Other (TEO-verse)