#byi(idws) excerpt

[gravitywonagain]

Breathing You In (I Don't Wanna Stop)

Hi... this is nonsense. Un-beta-ed nonsense. But enjoy the fruits of my overactive imagination. I'll edit it when I finish the rest, I just thought I'd post this. For fun?

Modern cultivators gym au where WWX and LWJ meet because of their ridiculous schedules and then just stare at each other across the exercise equipment. Don't worry, it'll get hot.

[M (for now?), 1.5k, 1/?, Wangxian]

1.

It’s still dark outside when Wei Ying shoulders open the glass door into the gym. He flashes his membership keyring, a small black card with a silver beast head on it, to the teenager at the front desk. She doesn’t even look up from her phone as she waves him in.

He quietly makes his way past the free-weights to the locker room. The gym is silent but for his own steps. Even the speakers are lacking the standard crackle of bland pop music.

Wei Ying isn’t surprised. It’s part of the reason he comes to the gym when he does. Nobody wants to get up and exercise when the moon is high but the stars have faded. That liminal space between too early and too late. Wei Ying wouldn’t be awake now if he could help it, but all-nighters generally leave him more riled up than strung out. He’s found that a good workout after a night of exorcisms is the only way he can get to sleep. That or pot, but he doesn’t really have the budget for building up a habit.

When Nie Huaisang had told him that Da-ge was opening a new Unclean Realm location closer to his part of the city, Wei Ying had done whatever was needed to get that friends and family discount. (What was needed was forcing Nie Huaisang to meet him there once a week, which was, mostly, doable. Getting Nie Huaisang to actually do a workout once he was there was, thankfully, not a requirement.)

The Unclean Realm was the first 24-hour cultivation gym to open in the city. It offered things no mundane gym could: reinforced facilities, significantly heavier weights, magically fortified mu ren zhuang, among other things. Unsurprisingly, it was a very profitable enterprise. Cultivators -- sect-affiliated and not -- flocked to them, desperate to stop lifting boulders for strength training.

There are now four gyms spread across the city in various boroughs.

This one, the one that Wei Ying frequents most, is the farthest from all of the main cultivation clans and, accordingly, the closest to Wei Ying’s apartment.

Wei Ying shoves his bag into an open locker and locks his sword into the rack on the wall. His boots, caked in dried mud from the night’s work, are set under the little wooden bench Wei Ying is sitting on. He pulls off his work jacket and hangs it carefully on the locker door. It’s enchantments shimmer under the fluorescent lights. His jeans are not enchanted, but only because he hasn’t taken the time to sew in the various protections like he should. He drapes them over his jacket and grabs his shorts from his bag.

Disrobing after a night like this always feels like an unburdening. Like disarming himself, taking off his jacket, removes some of the awful responsibility of being a cultivator in this city. In this country.

It doesn’t. He knows it doesn’t. But sometimes it’s nice to pretend for a while.

As he slips into his gym clothes, Wei Ying closes his eyes and imagines that he’s just an average person, going to the gym after working the nightshift.

It doesn’t work very well. He always gets caught up in the specifics. What kind of job does he work? Why doesn’t he go to the gym before work? Why does he still feel so fucking stressed?

The gym smells like any gym. Rubber and sweat and cleaning product soaked into the carpet, into the drywall. It’s a calming sort of scent. Wei Ying finds himself already relaxing into the routine of his workout before he even gets to the bench.

He likes to use the weight benches here because they are new and still soft on his spine and shoulder blades. He’s gotten a bit bony since he moved to Yiling. A consequence of no longer having access to the Jiang family bank accounts and Jiang Yanli’s 24-hour comfort-soup service. So any extra padding is just nice to have.

The sound quality in his old, shitty headphones is, well, shitty. But when he starts into his set -- legs and back, today -- he loses himself in it. He’s always meditated the best while in motion. Sitting still was never good for his brain. In this, the slow build of the burn in his muscles, the focus on his form, the regulation of his breathing, he can push aside all of the worst parts of the night.

He filters through all of the bullshit, the feelings of guilt and failure and inadequacy, and, somewhere in the back of his mind, he begins to tease apart the problem. It’s not a conscious process. No, presently his thoughts are full of rep counts and song lyrics. But he knows the way his brain works by now. He knows it’s turning on the problem. So he lets it.

His body moves, his brain works, and his self relaxes into these things he was made for.

Golden energy pulses through him in time with the bellows-press of his lungs. A fire stoked in his core, giving him strength and energy and focus. The meditation of his workout pools serenity inside him. Discipline that builds power, spins sweat into gold.

He stretches again between free weights and cardio. He drinks water. He shakes out his arms and touches his toes before he steps onto the treadmill.

Running at the end of leg day is a special kind of torture. But if he doesn’t run, he won’t sleep when he gets home, and he desperately needs to sleep today if he’s going to go back out tonight.

It’s a good burn once he settles into the flow of it: steps and breaths and heartbeats and core revolutions all coalescing into a deep and easy kind of harmony.

Sometimes he likes to think of his workouts in terms of music. Not the music in his headphones, though he has listened to classical compositions in the past and he will again, he’s sure. He matches the movement of his body to movements composed to compliment and grow, building from a tuning note breath into an orchestral resonance that thrums through him. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but it tickles the musician in him.

Halfway through his run, a man walks past the treadmills and into the locker room. It’s probably around 5:30am. When he comes back out, Wei Ying is just slowing down into his cool down jog.

The man folds himself in half like it’s nothing as he starts what looks to be a variation on a sun salutation flow. Wei Ying isn’t overly confident in his knowledge of yoga, though he has enjoyed a class every now and then, but the man moves with all the confidence and grace of a lifetime practitioner. The mats he’s using happen to be directly in Wei Ying’s line of sight and it’s… a problem.

Wei Ying tries very hard to keep his eyes to himself. He really does. But, the man is, in a word, stunning.

He’s wearing so much white that he looks like he belongs on a tennis court, but, somehow, it works for him? The fabrics all look high-quality in a way that somehow looks more curated than ostentatious, but the whole look still speaks of money. The man’s ultra-lightweight, sweat-wicking, odor-resistant (if Wei Ying had to guess) shirt probably costs more than Wei Ying’s phone. (To be fair, Wei Ying has a Nokia brick from 2004 -- yes, they do still work -- because his particular brand of cultivation does not mesh well with technology. But the point stands.)

He’s obviously Lan. Even if the necklace didn’t give him away, the everything-else about him would.

That Lan necklace, though. Wei Ying saw the chain first, it’s not hidden, nor should it be. But a chain could be anything. When the man moved through his low plank into cobra pose, however, the pendant slipped free of his (probably $70) shirt and Wei Ying could see the tell-tale cloud pendant of the Lan sect.

If he’s not mistaken, and Wei Ying has been staring like a stalker for long enough to be fairly confident, the cloud was pure jade, marking this gorgeous being as a scion of the Lan family. A direct descendant of Lan An.

It’s during this contemplation that Wei Ying is caught.

The man looks up, meets his eye, and smirks. Smirks. He’s a fucking menace.

Wei Ying realizes, a bit belatedly, that he hasn’t even been jogging as he’s been staring. He idly wonders when he stopped and tries to blame the heat in his cheeks on his workout. Unfortunately, he’s never been particularly good at lying to himself.

He nods in acknowledgement and apology and the man goes back to his flow. (A deep crescent moon pose that could probably go deeper with some help.) Pull yourself together, Wei Ying!

.

It’s almost a month of this before they even speak to each other.

#wangxian #fanfiction #the untamed #cql #mdzs #modern au #byi(idws) excerpt #or maybe i'll just post is all as successive comments? #we'll see how it goes #byi(idws) #my writing #my wife hasn't read this yet so it's all my bad grammar choices #this is fun but i really need to go work on ch11 of words now

[gravitywonagain]

So... I wrote a thing based on this post... and named it after this song... and will almost certainly expand it...

Here's the first excerpt of Breathing You In (I Don't Wanna Stop):

~

“Do you think you can even land a hit,” he says as he steps easily out of the way of Wei Ying’s first attack, “Yiling Laozu?”

“Ah, so Hanguang-jun does know who I am!” Wei Ying strikes again, but his hand is knocked away easily.

“Of course I know you,” says Lan Zhan. His steps are light and well placed so he seems to almost spin as he dodges and circles around Wei Ying. “I know your cultivation is strong, formidable even.” He gently blocks another hit with nothing more than a nudge. “But I also know your unarmed combat is severely lacking.”

As if to punctuate his words, he slips around Wei Ying’s guard, moves to Wei Ying’s back, and presses two fingers to an accupoint at the back of Wei Ying’s neck that they both know could cripple or kill Wei Ying if enough spiritual power were forced into it. Instead of death, Wei Ying feels a jolt that is closer to a tiny electric shock. Like the signal buzzer in a game of Operation.

Lan Zhan steps in front of Wei Ying and bows shallowly.

Wei Ying can see the beginning of a smirk on Lan Zhan’s perfect, plush lips and he feels electric in a different way.

“You’re unusually chatty, Lan Zhan,” he says with a grin, “I like it.”

They go again.

This round is much the same as the last. A different series of moves, sure, but Lan Zhan dances around Wei Ying and, within moments, has Wei Ying’s meridians buzzing again.

It goes like this for six rounds.

Wei Ying loves it.

This is exactly what he wanted, what he’d hoped for when he asked Lan Zhan to spar. A challenge, a distraction from the memories of the night. Something that slowly drags every part of his brain away from his waking nightmares and into the present moment. It’s meditation in motion.

And Wei Ying hasn’t spent the last ten or fifteen minutes just getting his ass repeatedly handed to him by the most handsome cultivator he’s ever known. He’s thoroughly enjoyed that, to be sure. But he’s also been watching. Learning.

When Lan Zhan goes to step away at the beginning of their seventh round, Wei Ying’s foot catches him by the heel and drags his foot back into the stance he started in.

Lan Zhan freezes in his surprise. Just for a moment, but it’s enough.

Wei Ying uses that moment to lock Lan Zhan’s leg in place, step right into his guard, and bring two fingers to the left side of Lan Zhan’s neck, level with his Adam's apple. It’s a quick set of motions and the round is his. But, more importantly, there’s a look of shocked respect on Lan Zhan’s face that alights something in Wei Ying’s chest. And then…

And then Lan Zhan smiles at him.

#wangxian #the untamed #fanfiction #modern au #cql #mdzs #it doesn't really matter #there's already more of this because why write one fic when i can write ten? #but this is the most complete bit i have so far #other than introducing the gym #because why plot when i can worldbuild? #idk #sorry #my writing #byi(idws) #byi(idws) excerpt