#rozarria

holy shit

so it WAS a very english language in us thing!! i'm pretty sure learning cursive for russian is basically a default mode of learning how to write at all

shgshs THANKS

Fandom: The Untamed Pairing: Song Lan/Xiao Xingchen Rating: Mature Words: 15,128

The realization strikes Song Lan like a bolt of lightning: Xiao Xingchen laughs, and he wants with a sudden, stunning desperation to kiss the mirth from his beautiful mouth. How, precisely, he is meant to manage that—that, he has no idea at all.

Or: introspective meditations on touch, trust, and the problem of desire.

Read it here.

I have done it. I have committed 15k of Songxiao, feat. Song Lan’s touch issues, Xiao Xingchen’s beautiful mouth, and a truly astonishing level of horny on both sides. Yes, the title is a Romeo & Juliet reference. We can all blame Marlon for that. We can also blame Blythe for telling me that according to word of god, Xiao Xingchen laughs easily but Song Lan doesn’t know that because he doesn’t have a sense of humour. However, we can blame only me for this being the result.

•••

The realization comes upon Song Lan abruptly and utterly without warning. One minute he is minding his own business, contentedly occupied with the last of his dinner; at the next, his whole world has turned itself on its head.

It happens like this.

He and Xiao Xingchen are passing through Yunmeng on their travels. They have taken a room at a village inn, small and plain but scrupulously neat (which is to say, Song Lan has taken a room: even now, nearly a year since Xingchen left Baoshan Sanren’s mountain and came down into the world, Song Lan never lets him buy anything if he can help it—the man will happily allow every last merchant to rob him blind and say with a smile on his face that they must have needed the coin). They are in the dining room, sharing a meal of steamed fish cakes and vegetables spiced with chilies, except that actually at this precise moment Xingchen has stepped away to ask the innkeeper for a jar of wine. This, Song Lan does allow: he doesn’t drink, and so does not feel justified in dictating how Xingchen spends this particular share of his money.

But he is keeping an eye on him from the other side of the room, all the same. Call it habit, call it fondness, call it simple uncomplicated pleasure at watching Xingchen be friendly to strangers. The reason itself is irrelevant, and reflecting on it later Song Lan will have no recollection of what it had been in any case. Rather, it is the result which matters: that Song Lan is looking, and so he sees when the innkeeper makes a wryly smiling comment—he is too far away to hear what it is—and Xingchen throws his head back and laughs.

Oh, Song Lan has heard Xingchen laugh before—in small, quiet ways, as soft and gracious as his faultless manners. Never like this. Never this cascade of silvery mirth that springs from him, as pure and sweet as the temple bells and ringing just as clear even from across the busy dining room. Never with his eyes closed, his face glowing in delight, the lovely pale column of his throat thoughtlessly exposed in a gesture that is both joyous and profoundly vulnerable.

Song Lan was looking already, but now he stares.

He didn’t know Xingchen laughed like that. They have been travelling together, with intermittent partings and reunions, for ten months now—and he didn’t know Xingchen laughed like that. He has never made Xingchen laugh like that. Song Lan is not a humorous man; he knows this about himself. It has never once bothered him until this very moment.

The realization—that he would like to make Xingchen laugh like that himself. And the second realization, swift on the heels of the first: that he would like to then kiss the laughter from his blithe and beautiful mouth.

What he is meant to do with either of these revelations, he has not the slightest idea.