a collection of random writings i'll never do a single thing with: mdzs edition

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Just like the other one I did, this is basically just a dumping ground for some random MDZS writings that I had laying around for either 1) projects I'll never finish, or 2) just random writing or characterization exercises that I pumped out and then ever did anything with.

I have a couple more that are a bit longer that I might throw into another post: one that's the beginning of a Lan Wangji character study that traced his character development through him composing different songs (including Wangxian), and one that was about how the Lan Sect perceived Sizhui and kind of like... his relationship to the Lan Sect. We'll see about that, though.

Anyway! Please enjoy these two little Wei Wuxian character study drabbles I did 5000 years ago. They're both canonverse, and I'll literally never do anything with them except maybe filch lines here and there, but I do like them, so it'll be nice to have them out there.

Sometimes, Wei Ying thinks bitterly, what he really wants to do is just lie down on the hardwood floor and just... shatter.

It's a satisfyingly vindictive little thought, and he hates himself for it, but there it is. He thinks about burying himself in the floorboards like broken glass, pointed little minefields of himself for Lan Zhan to find with his barenaked feet, and it's satisfying, in a way. To imagine that even a tiny little sliver of him could get under Lan Zhan's skin.

His stomach curdles sourly beneath his ribs. He doesn't mean that.

There's still blood on his hands, from earlier—it's dried now, but it's still wet enough to be vibrant. He hates how he's not even fazed by it anymore: hates how more than anything, he's just glad that it's his.

He remembers the first time he ever cupped too much of his own blood in his hands. There'd been an arrow in his gut, and then there wasn't: in the absence, there was miles and miles of bleeding. He'd gone mad with it.

"I never realized I had this much in me," he'd told his brother, voice tinged with laughter. The delirious stupidity of a man who was emptier inside than he ought to be. "Ey, Jiang Cheng, do you see this color? I've never seen a red like that. It's just—it's so red. I'm so red inside, Jiang Cheng, do you see it?"

His brother, predictably, had told him to shut the fuck up—just stop talking, Wei Wuxian—and he hadn't. Of course he hadn't.

Maybe that's what this is really about, he tells himself. He presses his palms together and pulls at the tackiness of the skin: looks again at that terrible, vivid color. Maybe that's the whole point of all his wickedest thoughts.

He wants to shatter on the floor, wants to watch Lan Zhan get caught in the shrapnel, and none of it is ever about hurting. Not really.

He thinks, perhaps, that he just wants to see if Lan Zhan is as red inside as him.

Absentmindedly, Wei Ying runs his fingers through the soil.

By all accounts, it should be good soil. It's heavy; velvet-soft and black as night against the paleness of his sword-calloused palms, made rich by the floods and rains of the valley that cradles and cups it. Everything in Heaven had paved the way for this valley to be good.

And yet it is not. It is not, and never was.

Plant any seed in the poisoned earth of the Burial Mounds, they say, and fear what grows.

Little will—this ground is hard and angry, ruthless and mean, and few things in this world are strong enough to fight their way out. Anything that comes from this place escapes, moreso than it is born.

But that, they say, is why it is to be feared. Anything that can survive the night there only does so because it is darker and colder. That's why every tree that sprouts from that foul ground sprouts black and gnarled, a desperate hand begging the sky for relief. Why every plant that dares bloom there is a weed, angry and thorny and undying. Why every crop that takes root there tastes like blood.

Men like to imagine that war is an angry stroke of a brush across the annals of history, but Wei Ying, unfortunately, has seen the truth. War is the ink bottle upended, the blackness bleeding out across the page, past every line and boundary, all the way down to whatever rests below.

It creeps, he's found, and it bleeds. It stains.

War takes good soil—healthy soil—and uses it to bury a thousand screaming bodies in unmarked graves. It tills the earth in an act of violence; scars it, uses it to blanket all kinds of horrible truths and terrible secrets away from the sun. Then, when all is done, it's left to rot.

And rot it does. Heaven paved the way for this valley to be good, but war does not mind the pavement. The soil did what it had to—it turned to poison out of spite—and now it's poison. The war is over and everyone's sorry and it's still poison. There are still so many bodies in unmarked graves.

Wei Ying cradles the soil for a moment longer, and then he doesn't. He upends his hand and lets the dirt drop: stands and tries (and fails) to wipe himself clean on his new sect robe.

Plant any seed in the poisoned earth of the Burial Mounds, they say, and fear what grows.

I grew here, he thinks quietly. I was born here. I was made here.

So what kind of thorn does that make me?