Asch the Bloody (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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starwardbestrewn2021-01-13 01:24 am
bloodyashes) wrote in starwardbestrewn2021-01-13 01:24 am
Entry tags:
catch me begging a chinese fan for a name consult later
You find the boy in the mountains.
It's not quite 'in the Burial Mounds,' but it's damn close. It's that unsettling region where Yunmeng, Yiling, and Qishan all blend together, the portion that changed hands three times over the course of Sunshot before Wei Wuxian came out of the Burial Mounds like a ghost and let resentment loose on the Wen army. Not many people lived here then, and fewer since.
You're investigating reports of fierce corpses, because this is still Jiang territory even if there still aren't enough Jiang sect members to properly patrol it (and you're working on that, you are), and you see him.
A flash of black and red, as you fly by on your sword, that causes you to stop and swerve so suddenly that if you were any less practiced than you are, you would have slipped your footing.
You think it's him. You think it has to be him. You don't know if you hope it's him or not.
It's not him.
That much, at least, is obvious when you slow down, because the furl of red too brilliant to be blood on the forest floor isn't a trademark bright red underrobe. It's hair, so out of place that it takes you a moment to recognize it as hair, a shade you've never seen outside of weddings and new year's.
You glide closer on your sword and hop off, risking a closer look.
The boy (he's not that much younger than you, really, somewhere around eighteen or nineteen) is clearly from very far away. His features are exotic in a way you can't quite put your finger on, something about the nose and the jaw and the shape of his eyes, but his clothes are clearly foreign.
He's dead. You figure he must be dead, because now that you're close enough to see, there are huge rents through his clothes, his body, stained the actual dark red of blood. It's fresh enough that you can smell it. There's an empty sheath at his waist, partially hidden under the folds of fabric, but no sword in sight.
You have to wonder how the hell he got out here. Whatever injured him is a danger to the people around here, and you have even more questions about why a Westerner is in such a place. Those questions will probably never get answered, but you might be able to find a letter among his clothing, some indication, even if the only people familiar with the tongues of the West are those of the Lan sect...
Your thoughts race as you bend down, and eventually settle into, At least I can give him a decent burial.
He's still warm, when you crouch to pick him up, to give him some manner of dignity. Eyes already closed, expression gone slack but not rigid -
When you slide an arm under his chest (you'll get blood on your robes, but it's not the first time, it's far from the first time, at this time it isn't the blood of your family), there's a sound. It's so quiet you think you imagined it.
But as you lift him, you hear it again. The faintest gasp of inhale-exhale, of a tiny noise like a breath that someone who has lost this much blood shouldn't be able to make.
You almost drop him in your haste, because it seems impossible, it really shouldn't be, to press a hand to his chest. You feel like you could almost reach in and take the measure of his heart by holding it in your hand if you wanted. The wounds are deep, if narrow.
It's faint, under your fingers. You have to shove aside layers of fabric, and even then the only thing that gives you certainty is the way Zidian twitches in response.
But you feel a stuttering rise-and-fall under your hands, an attempted breath, and you -
(Red is the color of good luck.)
There's no way he'd survive the trip. He can't have more than a few minutes to live.
(How lucky, that you happened upon him at all?)
You get back on your sword and fly anyway, more blood staining your robes from purple to black.
(You're the Jiang sect leader. There's no one else to attempt the impossible but you.)
And so against hope, with a stranger's weight in your arms, you fly.
It's not quite 'in the Burial Mounds,' but it's damn close. It's that unsettling region where Yunmeng, Yiling, and Qishan all blend together, the portion that changed hands three times over the course of Sunshot before Wei Wuxian came out of the Burial Mounds like a ghost and let resentment loose on the Wen army. Not many people lived here then, and fewer since.
You're investigating reports of fierce corpses, because this is still Jiang territory even if there still aren't enough Jiang sect members to properly patrol it (and you're working on that, you are), and you see him.
A flash of black and red, as you fly by on your sword, that causes you to stop and swerve so suddenly that if you were any less practiced than you are, you would have slipped your footing.
You think it's him. You think it has to be him. You don't know if you hope it's him or not.
It's not him.
That much, at least, is obvious when you slow down, because the furl of red too brilliant to be blood on the forest floor isn't a trademark bright red underrobe. It's hair, so out of place that it takes you a moment to recognize it as hair, a shade you've never seen outside of weddings and new year's.
You glide closer on your sword and hop off, risking a closer look.
The boy (he's not that much younger than you, really, somewhere around eighteen or nineteen) is clearly from very far away. His features are exotic in a way you can't quite put your finger on, something about the nose and the jaw and the shape of his eyes, but his clothes are clearly foreign.
He's dead. You figure he must be dead, because now that you're close enough to see, there are huge rents through his clothes, his body, stained the actual dark red of blood. It's fresh enough that you can smell it. There's an empty sheath at his waist, partially hidden under the folds of fabric, but no sword in sight.
You have to wonder how the hell he got out here. Whatever injured him is a danger to the people around here, and you have even more questions about why a Westerner is in such a place. Those questions will probably never get answered, but you might be able to find a letter among his clothing, some indication, even if the only people familiar with the tongues of the West are those of the Lan sect...
Your thoughts race as you bend down, and eventually settle into, At least I can give him a decent burial.
He's still warm, when you crouch to pick him up, to give him some manner of dignity. Eyes already closed, expression gone slack but not rigid -
When you slide an arm under his chest (you'll get blood on your robes, but it's not the first time, it's far from the first time, at this time it isn't the blood of your family), there's a sound. It's so quiet you think you imagined it.
But as you lift him, you hear it again. The faintest gasp of inhale-exhale, of a tiny noise like a breath that someone who has lost this much blood shouldn't be able to make.
You almost drop him in your haste, because it seems impossible, it really shouldn't be, to press a hand to his chest. You feel like you could almost reach in and take the measure of his heart by holding it in your hand if you wanted. The wounds are deep, if narrow.
It's faint, under your fingers. You have to shove aside layers of fabric, and even then the only thing that gives you certainty is the way Zidian twitches in response.
But you feel a stuttering rise-and-fall under your hands, an attempted breath, and you -
(Red is the color of good luck.)
There's no way he'd survive the trip. He can't have more than a few minutes to live.
(How lucky, that you happened upon him at all?)
You get back on your sword and fly anyway, more blood staining your robes from purple to black.
(You're the Jiang sect leader. There's no one else to attempt the impossible but you.)
And so against hope, with a stranger's weight in your arms, you fly.
SOME TIME LATER
He reminds you all too much of yourself, really. Sour-faced, temperamental and stern - though you're sure frustration at his inability to express himself forms a part of that temper. He's good enough to handle day to day conversation now, and has been working steadily on building his vocabulary. He takes writing lessons with Jin Ling, showing none of the irritation that another might have at sharing lessons with a small child as an adult; and anyway, the lessons are mostly to get Jin Ling used to handling a brush, something that Yan Hui apparently needs to learn as well.
It isn't that he can't write. He just can't write with a brush. On the day he finally gets fed up with it, he goes down to the butcher's and comes back with a sack of goose pinions, and sits down for two hours cutting the tips off them with an impressive delicacy and eye for detail, even if it seems unpracticed in the way that most of the things you can hire someone to do are.
This is also how you learn that Yan Hui is ambidextrous, as he shows up to lessons the next day with his goose feathers, and every time he brushes a character with his right hand, he follows it up with scribbled notes in his own language in his left, the tip of the feather leaving narrow lines of ink across the page. The way he holds the feather is completely different from a brush, but somehow the tight lines of looping characters are never smeared.
Yan Hui isn't much like Wei Wuxian, because you can't imagine Wei Wuxian putting nearly so much effort into learning. It came easily to him, like so many other things. He never learned how to work for his knowledge.
Yan Hui works, and he works, and he works. Not quite silently, but quietly enough that the occasional curse isn't enough to disturb you when he joins you for paperwork in the afternoons while Jin Ling is sleeping. Because the pace of a child's lessons isn't fast enough to satisfy him, isn't enough to express what needs expressing.
To be fair, it is also frustrating for you. However, even with the hour or two a day you set aside for trying to help the boy with your language, he is somehow making things go more efficiently. You teach him the characters for the other sects, and he sorts your correspondence. He watches Jin Ling, he gets you food and fresh ink and saves you a handful of minutes every day.
It's servant work that most cultivators would be ashamed to do. When you finally ask about it, after ten minutes of frustration at trying to express the concept of a lie to someone who knows what it is but doesn't have the vocabulary to use the damn word, Yan Hui goes quiet. And then in his limited words, he finally says:
"You don't say I can't, won't understand. You find time. You pull time out from between the walls and still don't have enough, but you find time."
And... Well, you can't very well argue with that.
However. However.
The times when Yan Hui decides to remind you of Wei Wuxian are always the most fucked up, painful, and inconvenient ones.
no subject
Specifically, opinions on the way the Lan Sect teaches. Opinions that make you incredibly glad that you didn't send him off with Lan Xichen, because if you had, you would probably be dealing with the successor to all the letters your father must have gotten about Wei Wuxian.
"They're garbage," Yan Hui says, after three days working on the rules. You think he's somewhere in the fifties. "They don't teach to think, they teach..."
And then he goes silent in the visibly frustrated way he gets when the words he needs aren't words he knows.
"To listen and do, not think," he says. "Like soldiers, waiting to be told what to think."
"Obedience," you say, filing in the gap and hoping you got his intended meaning right. You do a lot of that; you like to think you've gotten good at it. "They teach obedience." You pause. "Why is that bad?"
"If a son only knows obedience to his father, what happens when his father dies?" Yan Hui says. "Who will he listen if he never listened to himself?"
You suck in a breath. No one has told Yan Hui the story of the Jiang Sect's recovery, of the slaughter by the Wens, as far as you know. But the question is so on the nose, takes sight at you like an arrow to the heart.
(Wei Wuxian was disobedient at times, as it suited him. He could certainly listen to himself. You wouldn't consider it a virtue.)
(But you can't deny that you wish you had known more, about how to make decisions for yourself, when your parents died. That you envied him, having a compass inside himself to show him what to do, after the dust had settled and the need to avenge your family was sated.)
You snap, "You must be lucky, being able to live outside the rules."
And to your surprise, Yan Hui snaps back, "The lucky one is the one who never has to." And he closes the book of carefully written rules and leaves your office, stomping his way across the floor.
The two of you don't speak for the rest of the day, much to the distress of Jin Ling, who makes sad faces at you both through dinner and whines when you put him to bed. He's gotten too damn used to Yan Hui singing him to sleep in words no one else can speak.