#wang taojiu

[with-my-murder-flute]

Me: Huh wow why is this hookerfic turning out so long and emotionally painful to write?

Also me: Let’s make a disabled character who has all the internalized ableism you don’t let yourself acknowledge or deal with!!!

Anyway. If you want to know why this hookerfic is turning out so long and emotionally painful to write, it’s because it’s full of long, mundane, not-porny-at-all scenes like the following, in which my OC meets the Lan brother he’s not even going to sleep with. At least not in this fic.

Taojiu knew he had made a mistake soon after arriving at the Cloud Recesses. The cart that brought him to the foot of the path rumbled away long before he’d climbed out of earshot. He’d been warned about the walk, of course, but he’d imagined this would be like a temple slightly removed from the roadside, or like a grand castle with a sweeping flight of steps. Now he saw his mistake: it was not enough for these virtuous people to preach about the narrow and arduous path to Enlightenment. They had to make it so painfully literal Taojiu was surprised the mountainside wasn’t dotted with small didactic placards.

It was easier to blame the Lans—and he did—than think about his real mistake, about how much he had learned to ignore his injuries—forgetting that the last few years of his life had trained him, like an animal on a tether, to walk the narrow limit of the things he could do before the pain stopped him. It was easier not to remember that, so as much as he permitted those thoughts to become conscious at all, he limited them to the directly relevant.

The problem with using a cane, as he already knew, was that it took work. To adequately support the leg, the arm and shoulder must take up some of its weight; and to provide that support, one must grasp the thing. In the city, he had eschewed the upright poles used by serious travellers, or the blind who needed to test the ground in front of them. He used a demure little cane with a bent rosewood handle, one he could easily hide behind the fall of his sleeve if he needed to appear elegant. Thus he did not grip the cane like one pulling a rope downwards, but placed his palm flat on it, then curled his fingers around.

His hands had been broken, once. He preferred not to think about it, but the practical considerations were: the bones in his hands had not been set with perfect precision, and they had damaged the abilities of some of his fingers to perform tasks or perceive pain. Generally, he rubbed a liniment on them at night, and he accommodated for his hand’s difficulty gripping his cane or directing it precisely by becoming a master of swinging it with the twitch of his fingers, and putting it down with precision. In the city, there were usually walls to put his hand against, or to catch him if he fell; the pavements and floors he encountered were rarely so uneven to present his feet with a consistent challenge.

Thus he had forgotten, from the days just after his injuries healed, that if he relied on his cane too much, the pressure ignited a small fire in the mutilated nerves of his palm. And if he switched it to his other hand, his first two fingers would not bend at all, and the ache of holding the handle with the lesser fingers forced the web of his thumb onto a little bump in the handle in a way that swiftly became excruciating. When he reached a slightly wider part of the path than usual, he happily stepped aside to make room for a group he could hear coming up behind him, and experiment with wrapping the tail of one sleeve around the handle in a way that would cushion his hand.

“Uncle,” someone said behind him. “Are you in difficulty?”

Oh. Wonderful. He had an audience.

At least he’d dressed like a respectable citizen today, with his face unpainted and his hair bound up and modestly covered. Taojiu turned and bowed to an illustrious personage even more gorgeously dressed than Lang Wangji had been, and trailed by six white-robed disciples who, at a quick glance, did not seem to recognize Taojiu. Embarrassingly, given that uncle, this man had the kind of carriage and gravity that suggested he was at least Taojiu’s age, if not older. There was nothing like being mistaken for decrepitude.

“Are you going all the way up to Cloud Recesses?” the illustrious personage asked. “We could provide assistance.” Which, indeed; there was something so mild and beneficent in his gaze that he seemed on the verge of doing something altogether saintly, like carrying Taojiu on his back to the top of the mountain.

“Ah, no thank you,” Taojiu said, as politely as he could manage. “I am going to visit a friend who is in hospital, but I see no need to bother anyone.”

“It is another two li up this path,” the man warned, which made Taojiu’s stomach sink. “We could bring a litter…”

“Zewu-Jun,” one of the disciples called out. “One of the merchants in the hospital came on a donkey. I could fetch it back down to carry this man up.” He looked at Taojiu with less heavenly beneficence, but no lack of practical kindness. “It was restless this morning because it has not been out.”

His master nodded to the disciple, and then said to Taojiu, “There is a bench a little futher up the path where you can wait.”

Taojiu didn’t respond for a moment, because with very little fuss the practical disciple had pulled out a sword, stepped on it, and flown away, as simply as if he’d been a house swallow. Apparently such a thing hadn’t lost its ability to delight and astonish him, despite everything. He turned back, a little softened, and said, “Zewu-Jun. It would be my honour.”

The padding of his sleeve, and the promise of relief, helped him walk a little more smoothly. The First Jade of Lan made matching his pace look easy, and the disciples trailed behind them. “Your friend,” Lan Xichen said. “Is it one of the people injured by the spirit roving in Gusu City last week?”

“Yes,” Taojiu said. “Su Mei. I was standing right next to her when it attacked. It gave me quite a fright! I’m grateful to the Second Young Master for seeing to it.”

“I didn’t catch your name either,” Lan Xichen said, looking down at him sidelong.

These pine trees created too rarified an atmosphere in which to uncork his professional name; it meant “peach wine”. He lied quickly, counterfeiting an old truth instead. “Wang Long, Your Excellency.”

With that same kind of powerfully thoughtful mildness, Lan Xichen said next, “I think you are not a native of Gusu, either.”

“Oh!” Taojiu cried out, as the bench appeared at the top of the path. “A didactic placard. I was wondering where those were.”