Work Text:
It’s all long over by the time Wei Wuxian hears the news.
He goes to Lotus Pier anyway, flying on his sword until his still-weak core gives out, then balanced on Bichen with his hands clawed into the back of Lan Zhan’s robes. Yunmeng Jiang doesn’t shoot them out of the sky when they approach, or lash them off the docks when they land, or cut Wei Wuxian’s throat as he steps over the high doorsill like he has the right to be here, getting the dust of the road on Lotus Pier’s tiles and carved wooden walkways, breathing its air still thick with ceremonial incense. Instead, an inner disciple serves them tea in a guest room and tells them someone will fetch them at sunset.
At that, Wei Wuxian loses his nerve and asks if that’s a good idea, if they don’t want Lan Zhan to handle it alone, Hanguang-jun is the finest cultivator of his generation, after all. Even though this is what Wei Wuxian came for. The disciple stares down at him without responding.
When the disciple returns for the cups, there’s an old but well-polished bell on his serving tray, which he hands to Wei Wuxian and leaves. The bell’s tassel is red.
The new head disciple comes when the sky begins to color. She leads them across Lotus Pier as shadows deepen in long diagonals, cutting dark slices across the white banners and curtained pavilions. Wei Wuxian expects Jin Ling around every corner, possibly aiming to stab Wei Wuxian again and fling his body down into the lakes, but is told that Jin-zongzhu is resting before he has to return to Lanling tomorrow to resume his duties.
They end up in the old section of Lotus Pier. The wood is weathered and a little heat-warped, but well-maintained, details expertly recreated where the fire damage had been too great to repair. Wei Wuxian would have expected this area to be closed off like a memorial since Sunshot, but it seems to be used often, the lamps all lit and the walkways worn smooth by a new generation of disciples’ feet.
There is a bridge near this walkway with one slatted section stained dark. The bridge shivers with spent arrays and ragged prayers, the clinging stink of pain. Wei Wuxian grips his bell, thinks of other things, and follows the head disciple.
The room she takes them to used to be storage, when Wei Wuxian lived here. What it’s used for now, he has no idea; everything has been cleared from it, leaving the floor bare and the ceiling far away. There’s a single window for ventilation, high up, which casts a narrow band of light along the back wall. The head disciple motions for Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan to sit where they wish. Bland-faced, she points out the relevant corner they’ll want to watch. She tells them she’ll wait just outside the door, and leaves Wei Wuxian there on his knees beside Lan Zhan.
The light from the window slides slowly higher up the wall, turns from red to purple to dim gray-blue, then vanishes; moonlight replaces it, starting the journey all over to glide in a white trail across the floor. Lan Zhan, ever correct, meditates. Wei Wuxian tries to do the same. It should be easy, with how strange and far-away his body has felt since he heard the news, but now that he’s here his skin crawls with familiar evening sounds and smells and sensations. The murmur of the river, the ever-present scent of lotus flowers and rich lake-mud. The buzzing, burning ache in his bones. Even Lan Zhan’s hand on his can’t ground him. He screws his eyes shut and squeezes the bell in his free hand until the wobbly lotus carving bites into his palm.
There is no change in the room, no sound or breath. But when he opens his eyes, it’s gone full night, and a boy hangs in the corner.
He looks no different from any other young master, save for how still he is. His skin washes gray in the moonlight. His arms are twisted up behind his back, tied to something in a way that forces them to take the boy’s full weight unless he stands as tall as he can – maybe tied to the hooks, Wei Wuxian thinks distantly, that the shidis’ practice bows used to hang from. The boy’s robes are pulled half-open to expose his chest and back, his upper arms, all striped black with whip-cuts and mottled with burns. He hangs forward from the shoulders, hair shadowing his face, save for where the moon strikes the edge of his forehead.
The boy is silent, but Wei Wuxian must move or something, because Lan Zhan looks up. Soundless, he brushes back his white sleeves and settles Wangji onto his lap. He waits for a long moment, just watching.
The crawling sensation Wei Wuxian feels gets worse and worse. The urge to let the boy be, the urge to run, the urge to lick his own thumb and try to wipe the smear of blood off his forehead, the only splash of color in the room. The disciples had said that this is all that happens, that the boy simply appears in the corner, calm and bleeding and unbreathing. Unresponding. Peaceful, one might even think, save for the fact that he’s here at all. Perhaps Hanguang-jun can illuminate the situation, Yunmeng Jiang said. Perhaps a former disciple will understand. Wei Wuxian holds the bell that has apparently been kept for him since his first life, and understands nothing.
Then Lan Zhan strums his fingers across the qin’s strings, and the air breaks open with sound.
Music ricochets around the narrow room in cacophonous assault. Noises want to claw up Wei Wuxian’s throat. The boy doesn’t move. Speak to me, the song lilts. With huge effort, Wei Wuxian lifts the Clarity bell, but can’t ring it. I charge you to speak. What holds you here?
As always, Lan Zhan notices where he fails, and compensates for it. The music swells, sharpens. Undeniable. Inescapable. Wei Wuxian opens his mouth to pour out every secret he’s ever had, vomit them out, purge them.
The boy spasms like he’s been whipped again, and lifts his face.
The moon gives the rest of him color, now. His sun-ruddy cheeks are still slightly rounded with baby fat. His eyes are the same clear dark that his mother’s were, skimming right past Wei Wuxian to rest on Lan Zhan. The slick scarlet of the whip-cuts, of the twin lines of blood streaming from his nostrils over his chin. The flash of his tongue, his teeth, the dark wet red of his opening mouth.
Wei Wuxian wants to cup that round face in his hands like he could when they were children and feel the slide of muscle and bone, the warm breath of words spoken from between his fingers. He half-reaches out to do it. The red tassel of the bell swings from his fist.
“No,” Jiang Cheng says. His voice sounds completely ordinary – a little muffled in the small room, a little tired. He sounds alive. “Tell him to stay away.”
Wei Wuxian recoils.
“Stay away,” Jiang Cheng repeats. His voice cracks like a child’s, then like the crunch of bones breaking. He no longer sounds ordinary, or alive. “Stay away. Stay away! Tell him,” he screams, and Wei Wuxian is scrabbling backwards, twisting. His own fucking limbs tangle him up, clumsy and stupid. “Tell him to stay away! They saw him,” and Wei Wuxian strikes the door with his shoulder as Lan Zhan pivots into a song of rest, of suppression, that drags razor-edged at Wei Wuxian’s guts, “they saw him, they saw him. He can never come here, tell him not to fucking come. Tell him to stay away!”
The head disciple wrenches the door open. Wei Wuxian half-turns as he falls through. He shouldn’t look, but he has never had enough shame to care what he shouldn’t do. Jiang Cheng hangs trapped in place behind him, trapped in pain, face white and mouth black and wide, accusing eyes fixed forward.
“STAY AWAY!”
He has enough shame for this, at least.
Wei Wuxian runs down the walkway. He passes the bridge where his brother had qi deviated while Wei Wuxian traveled and night-hunted and merrily fucked his husband, leaps over the scuffed dirt where the disciples had dragged Jiang Cheng to solid ground to try to stabilize his treasonous core, and failed. He passes the scorched pier where he’d sworn to Madam Yu that he’d protect her children. He passes the ancestral hall with its new tablet, with Jin Ling just emerging from its doors pale-faced and not resting like he’s supposed to be, all his golds swapped for rough woven white. He watches Jin Ling’s expression stutter from confusion to fury to blank exhausted resignation, watches the ring on his finger flash as he starts to lift one hand. Wei Wuxian’s shadow looms black ahead of him just before he slams through the tall gate, closed for the night to keep monsters and thieves out of Lotus Pier. It swings shut behind him. He runs and runs through the market streets that still smell like roasted peanuts and spicy bao even at night, past the walled gardens shijie had liked to paint. To the river, away.
The bell clangs in his hand, keeping rhythm with his steps. In its high clear tone, he can hear the echo of his brother’s ghost still screaming.
~
He stays away, but not forever.
He should. He would have. He travels in frenzied loops with Lan Zhan steady by his side, keeping clear of Yunmeng and Lanling. But even at the farthest edges of the cultivation world, tongues wag about the ghost in Lotus Pier. Sandu Shengshou’s spirit had been calm, they mutter, until the Yiling Patriarch tried to speak to it. Now it thrashes against invisible ropes night after night in an empty room, raging, desperate, deaf to all attempts to soothe it, shouting words no one can hear.
Except for Wei Wuxian. The bell still sounds for him. The words are indistinct until a sleepless night in a tiny mountain village he and Lan Zhan have cleared of fierce corpses, when Wei Wuxian’s eyes snap open as he hears:
“Please, tell him –”
Jiang Cheng’s voice is hoarse, quiet, clearer than ever. He has been dead for three years. Wei Wuxian had not once spoken to him since Guanyin temple. Wei Wuxian still dreams of his brother’s body split open, bleeding gold into Wei Wuxian’s hands, or worse, into the hands of strangers, or worst of all, into nothing but the dirt, alone. Jiang Cheng is still trapped, and it’s still Wei Wuxian’s fault. The ghost was wrong. Distance will fix nothing.
So, Wei Wuxian still stays away from Lotus Pier, but now he returns to Gusu and installs himself in the Cloud Recesses library. He blazes through the shelves. He slithers into the forbidden collection. He pores over spiky, jagged scores every night, playing the dizi until his lips and fingers blister. Gusu Lan is well-known for its musical techniques to speak with the dead; Wei Wuxian devours everything it has and twists it to suit him, as he does all things.
The labor is unceasing, and he’s fine with that. He wants his songs to work, but he also wants them to be perfect – how can he offer anything less, for something as important as this?
It was his core that killed Jiang Cheng. The least Wei Wuxian can do is help him rest.
It takes a year before he’s satisfied. The Great Hanguang-jun is functionally and not-so-politely banned from Lotus Pier now, and of course the Yiling Patriarch is never welcome. Lan Zhan still flies him to Yunmeng, both of them disguised in cheap gray robes, and sneaks out of the inn with him under cover of darkness, and keeps quiet watch as Wei Wuxian steals into Lotus Pier. Dear Lan Zhan.
The training grounds have been expanded since last time he was here. New plum trees are planted by the round pond where Jiang-shushu used to meditate on winter mornings. The stained bridge where Jiang Cheng died has been scrubbed clean by four years of rain. Yunmeng Jiang moves on.
He swore to stay in Lan Zhan’s sight, so he leaves the door to the empty room slivered open behind him and papers the inside with silencing talismans. He waits cross-legged at the corner. Chenqing rolls between his hands and the bell lies quiet at his waist. There’s no moon tonight, so he has no way to track the passage of time save for his own pulse, which is too quick to use anyway. He just watches until his eyes burn. Silence. Silence. Maybe this was the trick all along. Maybe Jiang Cheng won’t come when Wei Wuxian is here, out of sheer spite.
But he does come.
“Tell him to stay away,” Jiang Cheng says. It’s a whisper this time. He slumps from the ropes like he’s tired to death, a dark shape against a darker space. “Tell him, tell him. He can’t –”
He can, though.
The first night, Wei Wuxian plays through his altered Inquiry, his bastardized Cleansing. He asks and he wheedles; he weaves Yunmeng folk songs into his melodies to rouse Jiang Cheng’s spirit, lullabies to lure him in, bawdy drinking songs that never failed to annoy him into snapping at Wei Wuxian when he hummed them during lessons. None of that now; Jiang Cheng doesn’t react, save to shudder occasionally and pull against the ropes. Eventually Wei Wuxian sees how the light has changed, and he and Lan Zhan trudge away to their inn-room to sleep and regroup.
The second night, Wei Wuxian switches to the traditional Lan compositions, even though Lan Zhan’s playing is a thousand times better yet still did nothing the first time they came here. They do nothing this time either.
Jiang Cheng knows Wei Wuxian can’t stand to be ignored. It was just good luck that Jiang Cheng was always so terrible at ignoring him, at least until this, anyway. Wei Wuxian grits his teeth against the soft siren call of resentment building in his body – he won’t use it, not for this, not on Jiang Cheng – and instead settles himself, on the third night, for Empathy.
Lan Zhan’s mouth thins in worry and he insists on staying inside the room with him, but this is Wei Wuxian’s last resort. He hums the quiet refrain that he uses to summon the spell, and sinks.
It’s like swimming at night – blackness, blindness, silent pressure against his eyes and ears. He tries to gather something to him but his hands stay empty. Faintly, he feels Lan Zhan shift closer to him, but he refuses to return to shore so soon. He’d once known Jiang Cheng wholly, in his entirety; surely he can navigate this darkness.
“My sister,” Jiang Cheng says, warped as though underwater.
Wei Wuxian drags his eyes open, the feeling of deep water still clinging to him.
Jiang Cheng still isn’t looking at him, but his gaze has sharpened. He holds himself tauter, now, than he did as a teenager, and his clothes have become carefully elaborate. But his hands are still bound, his chest still laid open. “My sister invited him to meet my nephew. Tell him –”
Wei Wuxian blinks slowly, then blinks again. Then he draws in a sharp breath to speak.
“Tell him to stay away from Lanling,” Jiang Cheng hisses, face twisting.
And then a cool hand touches Wei Wuxian’s shoulder.
Morning is almost here. Lan Zhan firms his hand on Wei Wuxian’s arm. They go before Lotus Pier’s disciples can wake.
~
He goes to Lanling next. Maybe spite is what’s called for.
He’s not quite spiteful enough to invade Carp Tower itself, though. Wei Wuxian dispatches Sizhui and Jingyi to keep Jin Ling busy with night-hunts and friendship, and focuses on his research. Lanling’s techniques aren’t as cohesive or well-developed as Gusu’s, but money talks and its bustling streets draw all sorts of entrepreneurs trying to hawk their cultivation ideas. None of them are great – they tend to have that Lanling drippiness – but Wei Wuxian is going for breadth. He half-listens to a half-million half-baked ideas, absorbs the intriguing parts and tosses the chaff. Like the jingshi, the walls of his and Lan Zhan’s inn-room become scrawled with notes. Talisman sketches skitter like roaches every time Lan Zhan opens the door to bring Wei Wuxian food, or to carry him to bed, or to sleep. Wei Wuxian mumbles apologies into his white-robed chest on these occasions. He gets up again once Lan Zhan is asleep and returns to work.
And all the while, the bell mutters and sighs, too-late threats washing over him. “Stay away – stay away from Lanling – They’re waiting at the pass, they’re waiting for him. Tell him –”
He can only stand Lanling for three months, and then heads back to Yunmeng. This time, Lan Zhan wants to arrive during the day. They walk around the market together, disguised again. Lan Zhan watches him and buys him spicy things he doesn’t taste. Wei Wuxian summons up a smile for his husband. After dark, they slip through Lotus Pier’s gates, easily avoiding the night guards’ lanterns.
The room, the ropes. Lanling-based techniques are worse than useless. Well, he shouldn’t have expected better; fucking Lanling. Jiang Cheng keeps his face turned away and twitches with rage and pain and spite and says nothing to him, nothing.
~
Qinghe. He upends the fragile balance between himself and Nie Huaisang, and for his trouble is allowed to invade the Unclean Realm’s archives. Nie Sect techniques are stubborn and unyielding. Saber-based techniques, stone-based, everything a battle. Jiang Cheng likes battles. He likes stubbornness. Maybe these will –
They don’t.
~
He goes everywhere. He returns to Lotus Pier every few months, and fails to get Jiang Cheng to speak to him. He studies. He talks to the dead. He has nightmares. He holds the bell close and listens to it. What if he never succeeds? Jiang Cheng will be trapped in an empty room forever, frightened, alone, never able to rejoin his family.
Or – surely the Jiang Sect tries to lay him to rest periodically, though clearly their soul-calming ceremonies are total shit. Or maybe they call in talented cultivators to make the attempt. What if someone else succeeds? Before Wei Wuxian can apologize, before he can fix anything, before he can know? He didn’t get to be there the first time, during the qi deviation. And Jiang Cheng hates showing weakness. Hates anyone seeing him cry. What right does another person have to be there to watch him die again? Or even just to look at him in there, bleeding from the Wens’ wounds, breathless, begging? Someone else? Shameless. Disgusting. How dare they, how dare –
The bell rings and rings and rings.
~
It’s not like Jiang Cheng never reacts, is the thing. That would almost be less frustrating. But there are the barest brushes of acknowledgment – when Wei Wuxian uses a spell adapted from a Qinghe technique, Jiang Cheng’s voice roughens to the timbre of the young man who blazed together with him through the Sunshot campaign; when it’s a Lanling art, some sort of dream-sharing drivel or whatever that Wei Wuxian picked up, he sounds older, tired, a man grown who flew to Carp Tower as often as his nephew needed. Gusu songs turn him sour and restless; Yunmeng water-bells either sink him into comparative calm, or make him choke and snarl against the invisible enemies invading his home. Wei Wuxian can wring these from him, these slight shifts in tone. But that’s all.
He does get more peaceful in April and November. Wei Wuxian eventually figures out it’s because Jin Ling visits at those times, for Qingming and for his jiujiu’s birthday. Even dead, Jiang Cheng is picky about the company he keeps.
Picky, prickly – he’d do the same thing when they were young, get haughty and shove Wei Wuxian away, go hang out with the other shidis like he had a point to prove. Never could help glancing back over his shoulder, though. The tease. Wei Wuxian could always make room for himself, always find a way to wriggle back under Jiang Cheng’s arm, pinch his ribs, flip his robes, mess up his hair, make Jiang Cheng look at him. So what if the method this time has to be a little different? So what, as long as he gets there in the end?
~
Missed opportunity. Was he not once the Yiling Patriarch? He could have fixed at least part of this situation if he’d known. If he hadn’t been traveling, if someone had contacted him right after the death, if they’d let him in before it was too late –
But Yunmeng is a bad climate for bodies, humid and hot; things fast get positively grisly.
He does check, just in case. Then checks again a few months later. No, it won’t do, not for Jiang Cheng; he’s always been a little vain about his appearance, his clothes. There’s only so much even Wei Wuxian could do with this.
The next time Wei Wuxian checks there are new seals on the tombs – rude – and sure, he could tear through them with ease, but he knows it was a pretty dumb possibility to get fixated on anyway; it’s not like Jiang Cheng’s body is quite the thing he wants. He lets the seals be.
~
Adjustments to the Sacrifice Array patently do not work. Messy, disappointing non-results. As a last-ditch effort he could try it himself, but then he’d never know if it truly worked. And isn’t knowing the least he deserves for all his trouble? That’s all he wants.
Fuck. Again, he gets hung up on the wealth of possibilities he might have had if he’d gotten to Lotus Pier fast enough. Arrays, talismans, lures. He could have used a spirit-catching pouch, at least held Jiang Cheng’s soul safely down until a better solution presented itself. It might not even have been too late to try during that first visit to the empty room, the blood had barely been dry on the bridge. Gods, but Wei Wuxian had been so stupid back then, so damningly soft. He says so aloud. He says it a few times. A lot of times. There is smoke in his throat as he speaks, there’s knives, there’s songs. He needs to make sure he doesn’t forget again; it’s about A-Cheng, so he’d better not let himself forget.
~
His right hand hurts. This body touched his brother’s bare skin only once, in the temple. Jiang Cheng on his knees, wet with sweat and rainwater and his own blood, crying and crying. Cried until Wei Wuxian laid a hand on his cheek, and only then finally quieted.
Wei Wuxian rubs his fingers together, back and forth and back and forth, remembering the damp heat against his fingers, remembering how easy it had been. He mustn’t forget. Lan Zhan takes his hand and holds it still. Wei Wuxian switches his ink-brush to the other hand and keeps scribbling.
~
Wen Ning, he realizes one night. Wen Ning.
His shy friend was never much of a cultivator, but he does remember some of the Wen clan’s techniques, and of course there’s no greater expert on the art of being dead. Wen Ning writes down what he can recall – and what techniques they are, from the clan that once conquered the world! There’s the Dafan healing arts, of course, but the rest is all fire and force, a roiling cage to trap a spirit and overwhelm it, techniques that dip halfway into demonic cultivation even before Wei Wuxian gets his hands on them – and gives the pages to him with a trusting smile and only the barest pause. A-Yuan – bigger even than Lan Zhan now, when did that happen – furrows his brow at the writing, and speaks with Lan Zhan in a quiet voice later that night as Wei Wuxian reads. But it’s fine. Beneath his dutiful anxiousness, Wei Wuxian knows well how hungry he must be for his birthright, for information about the family he’d lost, now beyond the reach of everything except longing. Wei Wuxian can relate.
They return to Gusu for the first time in a long while. Lan Zhan is out most of the time on sect business, so Wei Wuxian works uninterrupted. The Cloud Recesses have stayed the same. Sure, the juniors are taller and calmer, not juniors at all now, and the rabbits have multiplied, and Lan Qiren’s beard is white and his veins blue as he grips his nephews’ elbows, needing help to leave his bed and limp around. But these small shifts are swallowed up by the muffled hush of the never-changing mountains.
The quiet helps Wei Wuxian focus, honing him like a knife. Wei Wuxian has a good feeling about these techniques. They inspire him. His eyes spark and plans pour from his hands; his body is filled with heat, with light. He feels more like himself than he has in a lifetime.
~
Lan Zhan comes with him to Lotus Pier. A nice surprise – he’s been so busy, and Wei Wuxian knows dealing with Jiang Cheng stretches his husband’s patience. So Wei Wuxian feels even giddier as they roam through town hand in hand, stopping at stalls for the specific Yunmeng foods Lan Zhan has learned to like, admiring the reddening sky, watching the boats, feeding each other, smiling. It’s almost like the early days of their marriage. Even the bell has quieted to an expectant, soothing whisper.
After dark, they amble undetected through Lotus Pier’s wards like it’s just another stop on their stroll. They know the layout by now, having come here so many times in the dead of night; they have favorite courtyards, spots from which they like to view the moon. They walk through hazy gardens and past night-black ponds, linger beneath the graceful curves of Lotus Pier’s architecture. It really is beautiful still, or rather beautiful again. It’s good to think about the satisfaction Jiang Cheng must have gotten from building it anew. That caring for this place must have made him happy, sometimes. Occasionally. It must have, statistically speaking.
They make their slow, winding way to the old section of the complex – which is no longer as well-kept as it was in Jiang Cheng’s day, Wei Wuxian is a little affronted on Lotus Pier’s behalf – but before Wei Wuxian can slip into the empty room, Lan Zhan takes his hands, drawing Wei Wuxian around to face him.
After this, Lan Zhan says in a low, unusually hesitant voice, he may stay in Cloud Recesses for a time. Lan Qiren’s health has worsened even further, Xichen-ge is struggling with the impending loss, Sizhui’s firstborn will be marrying soon – smiling, Wei Wuxian tries to look like he totally knew these things – and Lan Zhan wishes to be there for his loved ones.
Wei Wuxian assures him that of course he must. Wei Wuxian will help too. He might continue to travel, of course, depending on how tonight goes, but Wei Wuxian wouldn’t miss any of these things for the world. A-Yuan, father of a beautiful… er, bride? Heavens! He’s grown up so well! It’s wonderful!
Lan Zhan searches Wei Wuxian’s face, his own cast in shadow save for the bright band of his ribbon. He must find whatever he’s looking for, because he huffs a sweet little breath and puts his lips to Wei Wuxian’s forehead, murmurs Wei Ying. Wei Wuxian kisses the warm curve of his throat in reply, looking over Lan Zhan’s shoulder at the yawning doorway.
Lan Zhan folds himself down to meditate, appeased. Wei Wuxian finally turns to the empty room, veins buzzing with anticipation.
Chenqing. The bell. Lit incense and smoldering wood stolen from one of Lotus Pier’s pillars. Arrays that glow brilliant red, traced in vermillion powder and blood from the sliced tips of Wei Wuxian’s forefingers. Everything is set up for when Jiang Cheng appears. Wei Wuxian sprawls in the corner to wait, humming, one leg thrown casually out. His fingers tap a restless, jagged staccato against the bell at his hip.
“They saw him,” Jiang Cheng whispers.
He sounds young tonight.
“Tell him,” Jiang Cheng says over Wei Wuxian’s head. Wei Wuxian looks up at him. His brother’s gaze is far away, face wreathed in incense-smoke. His round cheeks shine with blood and sweat. “Tell him, tell him. Is he –”
“Tell me,” Wei Wuxian interrupts, “yourself.”
He breathes the incense, swallows its smoke and sparks. Heat blooms from his mouth as he whistles a sharp clear note. The smell of burning wood intensifies, now tinged with a faint charred stench – the Wens had set fire to the bodies, he remembers. It seems Jiang Cheng remembers too; his lashed shoulders go rigid. The note rises and rises, louder, piercing. The smoke turns thick, twining between them.
Wei Wuxian reaches up through the haze, palm burning like he’s trying to touch a lit forge or a shard of ice, and he
grabs
Jiang Cheng’s
jaw
and drags downward.
Jiang Cheng’s eyes go wide and Wei Wuxian almost loses the thread of power that runs through the music, breath stuttering with the need to laugh in relief as he feels – not flesh, quite, under his hands, but something, finally, finally. He keeps it together though, keeps whistling as he pulls Jiang Cheng down where he wants him. Now the bell picks up on the song, chiming at a pitch higher than it’s meant to produce, now Chenqing turns biting-cold against his skin, now the arrays flare and the taste of smoke changes in his mouth and there’s heat in his hands, slippery, wet, slithering away until he tightens his grip. The floorboards are hard under his knees; Jiang Cheng is young under his hands, chest heaving, arms still bound behind him, thrashing like a fish in a net. Wei Wuxian forces Jiang Cheng’s legs apart and crowds close between his stripped-bare thighs to pin him down so he can’t fight free again. A blink, and then his hands are sunk inside Jiang Cheng, buried to the wrists in his lower dantian. Jiang Cheng's body squeezes searing-hot around him as Jiang Cheng tries to buck him off, the wound in his abdomen bubbling slick red one moment, gold the next, black and burned the moment after. The walls press in: The empty moonlit room flickers back and forth into the smoke-stained storage room hung with training bows and the discipline whip tossed down next to Wei Wuxian’s knee and the Wens laughing on the other side of the door and Wei Wuxian is not sure whose role Jiang Cheng has put him in here, himself, the Wens, both, whether Wei Wuxian is ripping the ugly core out of his brother or shoving it in, and what does that matter, really, Wei Wuxian can do either if he needs to, whatever he needs. Jiang Cheng is making a horrible noise beneath him, but that’s not speaking to him, so.
“Tell me what you want,” Wei Wuxian says. Inquiry skitters over his tongue. Jiang Cheng’s teeth click shut; he tosses his head to the side. Wei Wuxian grabs his jaw again with a gold-stained hand, his red sleeves dragging across Jiang Cheng’s torn skin, and forces their eyes to meet. “Stop that, it’s just me. I look different now, new body and such, but I’m the one you want to talk to. Tell me what you have to say. You trapped yourself here just to fucking say it. Tell me what was so important.”
Jiang Cheng’s stubborn mouth twists, then parts. “Don’t you fucking touch him. Tell him –”
“No,” Wei Wuxian snarls. He jerks the arm still buried in Jiang Cheng’s body and the back of Jiang Cheng’s head slams against the floor as he arches up, mouth a silent circle. Always so contrary. “Tell me. What was so fucking important? What did you want from me? I studied up on qi deviations after you died, you know. It must have been building for years, the core was working wrong for years. And what did you do? Not call on me, kept me shut out, kept quiet. You’ve always fucking been like this –” And isn’t it fitting, isn’t it just that Jiang Cheng would be fixed in this place, this memory, this tiny stinking room from when he’d first thrown Wei Wuxian away to go running back into the Wens’ grasp. The first time he’d decided he preferred literal death over Wei Wuxian. Jiang Cheng always – Jiang Cheng could never just let him – Jiang Cheng had never wanted to be with him the way he – “Sure it’s a little my fault, but you hated me so much you let it kill you? You’re really so proud? You’d rather die than let me into Lotus Pier and ask for my help? Fuck you. Look what you did!” His eyes blur. He shoves forward and Jiang Cheng slides across the floor under him, bound hands scrabbling, body shivering, feedback shuddering up Wei Wuxian’s hips and hands and spine. “You don’t get to tell me to stay away!”
Jiang Cheng keens. Wrecked, reacting, eyes on him at last. Wei Wuxian bears down harder. He’s not stupid, okay, he’s not blind. He knows this is hurting Jiang Cheng. But you lance a wound to drain it of poison, and Jiang Cheng always could take a bit of pain. It’ll be worth it in the end –
Words bubble out of Jiang Cheng’s mouth like blood. “The Wens, they saw him,” he says. He is young and ripped open on the floor. He still has that smear of blood on his forehead, the one Wei Wuxian always wants to wipe away. And then: “The Jins are waiting for him at the pass,” his eyes sharp, clothes viciously splendid, shoulders bowed with weight Wei Wuxian had intended to help him carry. And “I should kill him, when he comes back here I should do it, I swear I will,” snarls it into Wei Wuxian’s face, crying, shijie’s blood spattered across them both, and “He can’t stand it here, and why would he, why should he have to, he should go where he belongs.” Voice cracked, body slack, gold seeping from his mouth and eyes and welling up between Wei Wuxian’s fingers. Not old, but as old as he’ll ever get; not that Wei Wuxian got to be there to see. The thought makes him punch down deeper, instinctive and snarling. Jiang Cheng’s body curves up in response, either to draw him in or push him away and he doesn’t know which, he doesn’t know. He reaches.
“He has to stay – stay – stay away,” Jiang Cheng hisses into his ear. “I'll never tell him.”
Still just that. After all Wei Wuxian has done.
Rage and resentment and the first strains of Empathy boil up from his lungs. Music streams from his mouth as he surges forward, shoves Jiang Cheng’s legs wider and crushes him nearly in half under him, traps his own arms between their bodies. He bites down on Jiang Cheng’s neck with Empathy blistering the inside of his mouth. There’s a secret, there must be, he can taste it like salt on Jiang Cheng’s skin but he doesn’t know. Even like this, here, dead and trapped and pinned down at last, Jiang Cheng keeps shutting him out.
“Answer me,” he says. Garbles the command, gurgles it; his teeth are still in Jiang Cheng’s neck. “Answer me, tell me –”
Jiang Cheng gurgles too. They thrash in unison, strain against each other in unison. One of Jiang Cheng’s legs kicks out and slams against the floor beside them and there’s something he can’t say, won’t say, refuses, never spoke it aloud, a lifelong betrayal that Wei Wuxian can feel roiling behind Jiang Cheng’s clenched teeth. He’s the one who’s hurt Jiang Cheng the most, marked him the deepest, even before Wei Wuxian’s core killed him; he has a right to that secret. He chases it with his own mouth. He drives himself into Jiang Cheng’s body, through it, simultaneous shocks of pressure and horror and instinctive, quickly-smothered exhilaration. Sinks down into him like into black water once again –
It’s a long, slow fall. Wei Wuxian is facedown, bleeding into the dirt, clutching at the carved-out wound where his core used to be. Rain drums across his body, runs into his eyes and open mouth. This is not how it happened – he’d given up his core writhing in stark sunlight, under Wen Qing’s expert hands and with Wen Ning’s soothing touch on his forehead. His brain is just tangling together memories and delusions and dreams. But Wei Wuxian recognizes the relief he’d felt after the surgery, the satisfaction. It worked. He’s dying but his brother will live and live well. Everything was worth it.
He sinks deeper. He remembers being on his knees, so much older now. Gasping, crying, hands empty, the veneer of his whole life ripped away. He was wrong. His core only bought his brother more suffering. He wants to strangle the smug, naïve child that he’d been, who’d congratulated himself as he died in the dirt – when actually his so-called sacrifice had destroyed his brother, destroyed them both. When for years he’d had the fucking gall to think that at least he’d helped, that it was worth it, that he’d done the man he loved any good at all….
Gods, he can’t bear it, he won’t. Lan Wangji had been there when Wei Wuxian heard of Sandu Shengshou’s death, where is Lan Zhan, what is this memory, why has Wei Wuxian been abandoned, why is Suibian unsheathed in his hands –
Deeper. Lying in the dirt again, faceup this time. The sky is bright, bright, bright. Where is he? His whole body is sliding away, cracking apart. His bones gone, his breath. A fire eats them all away from the inside out. He's alone. Good. Good.
He sinks –
It hurts –
Oh. It’s quiet here.
Wei Wuxian lies prone. He can’t hear the throbbing bell, or feel the burn of the arrays he’d laid around the empty room. The feverish wildness that has fueled him since Jiang Cheng’s death is muffled. The agony of memory is dimmed. There’s only the cool dark all around him, and, somewhere, the faint hiss of rainfall. He remembers something like this from when he was dead – the stillness.
The sense of how alone he is.
This is Empathy. He should be surrounded by Jiang Cheng. He should be folded into his brother’s bones, feeling everything he’d felt. But there’s nothing, nothing new. The rage at his younger, stupid self – the grief and the guilt and the resentment that choke him, the deep greedy hollow where his brother should be – the even deeper desire that his brother stay safe and happy, free from burdens – the aching awareness that he couldn’t be the one to give that to him, his very presence the worst burden of all – this bitter knowledge that everything he does hurts his brother, and so he had to let him go, had to let him stay apart, stay distant, stay alone, stay away –
– this utterly useless love –
Obviously these aren’t Jiang Cheng. These are nothing but Wei Wuxian’s own emotions. His own self, reflected back at him like mockery.
Why, why? Why is there nothing here?
Where is his brother?
Wei Wuxian wants to weep, but he can’t just lie here, useless. Something is wrapped around him that keeps him from moving. He turns his face to look up, slow and wet and stupid as he’s ever been. This place is dark and it’s a bad angle, but he glimpses the curve of a cheek, the fall of black hair splayed over a shoulder broader than what he remembers.
Then the weight of Jiang Cheng’s hand in his hair – it seems his arms aren’t tied here – pushes Wei Wuxian’s face back down against the side of Jiang Cheng’s neck where Wei Wuxian had fixed his teeth.
Wei Wuxian barely dares to breathe. Finally, after a long, frozen moment, he settles more heavily onto Jiang Cheng’s body.
They are pressed so close it takes a moment for Wei Wuxian to tell where he ends and Jiang Cheng begins. But Jiang Cheng is all sharp bones, neither life-hot nor corpse-cold, and is the wrong size against Wei Wuxian, whose own body should be big enough to hold him down but now, reborn, is too small and too weak. Jiang Cheng doesn’t smell like river-water or blood or wine or the snapping tension before a storm. His skin has no taste under Wei Wuxian’s tongue. No pulse, no spark.
Unfamiliar. He’s been unfamiliar for years. No wonder Wei Wuxian couldn’t make him rest. No wonder Wei Wuxian can’t even make him speak.
Jiang Cheng’s hand shifts in Wei Wuxian’s hair, ever so slightly.
“Tell me,” Jiang Cheng says. He sounds tired and ordinary again, like he did years ago, that first moonlit night in the empty room. “Tell me. Did it work? Was it worth it? Was he… happy, after everything?”
Wei Wuxian jerks like he’s been punched. Then he laughs. It’s an ugly sound, all ripped edges.
“How,” he says.
Jiang Cheng stays heavy and unmoving beneath him even as the furious heat returns to Wei Wuxian’s limbs, wets his eyes, as he hunches forward to grip his brother hard enough to crack bone.
“How the hell did you expect me to ever be happy, after you.”
Jiang Cheng is silent. The rain gets louder.
They lie for a long while, the rain building and building pressure in Wei Wuxian’s chest, bleeding out to taint everything around him. And when Wei Wuxian decides he could just stay here until he drowns, until he’s indelible, until Jiang Cheng can’t ever hope to cut him away, until Wei Wuxian forgets the failure of his body and his hands and his vile murdering core and how there is nothing else he can think to try after this, nothing, nothing, there has to be something — Jiang Cheng twitches, and his hands move to cup Wei Wuxian’s face, lifting it.
Wei Wuxian’s breath hitches. He drags heavy eyes up Jiang Cheng’s mangled chest, his throat, the knifecut of his jaw. He wants to see Jiang Cheng’s eyes but his gaze catches on his mouth instead; Jiang Cheng’s lips part, tongue darting out to wet them as if he’s nervous, awkward and determined like he always gets when he’s unfortunately decided that they need to talk about a stupid hard thing.
Wei Wuxian grips Jiang Cheng’s waist, tight, tighter. He wants to hear what Jiang Cheng will say. He wants to hear.
“Listen –” Jiang Cheng begins. Says it directly at Wei Wuxian. To him, at last.
Wei Wuxian doesn’t even have time to react, because fire suddenly blazes in burning handprints across his shoulders. He shouts with startled pain as the whole world tilts. He lashes out. The heat pulls away, splashes across his mouth and hands. The rain swells to a roar, then fragments into gurgled screaming and the high shriek of a qin struck too hard and a cry of Wei Wuxian’s given name.
His body clamps back down around him. His ears and eyes throb and the smell of burnt flesh stings in his throat and his hands are empty, empty. Being alive is overwhelming after the quiet cool space inside Jiang Cheng. He drags open his blurred eyes.
The room is no longer empty. Moonlight spills across the floorboards. Lan Zhan stands just inside the thrown-wide door, and he… looks fine, thank goodness, but his face is taut with alarm. He has slapped a hand down on Wangji to still the strings after pulling Wei Wuxian out with his music, the echo still ringing in Wei Wuxian’s ears. His white sleeves are spattered with red. So is the floor. And the wall. So is – Wei Wuxian doesn’t know who this other person is. Purple robes, simply decorated, sword not even unsheathed, caught in the middle of crumpling to the floor with an astonished expression and hands still outstretched from pulling Wei Wuxian away from Jiang Cheng’s ghost. The disciple’s throat is gashed wide.
Wei Wuxian stands frozen. His outflung arm is bloody, and Chenqing, clutched in his hand, is soaked. There’s a shred of something gory caught on its sharp tip.
They all hang there, gawking at each other.
Then everything snaps back into motion. The Jiang disciple finishes collapsing, snatched up right before his face hits the floor; Lan Zhan has leapt forward to seize him by the arm, other hand sweeping up to the gash even as the disciple’s head lolls. Lan Zhan presses against the cut, staining his sleeve further, then shifts to the man’s pulse point, then stills. He looks at Wei Wuxian, shocked silent.
Wei Wuxian still stares. He remembers corpses at his feet and the iron tang of blood mixed with nauseating peony perfume.
This was an accident. Obviously. And it’s awful, of course it is. But it’s not fair, it wasn’t Wei Wuxian’s fault…. Why the hell would a disciple come in, what right did he have to disturb a cultivator in the middle of Empathy? What sort of people does Yunmeng Jiang accept these days, what breed of lowlife would try to force Wei Wuxian away from his place, away from his –
Behind him, Jiang Cheng gasps into the silence.
It’s the first breath Wei Wuxian has ever heard in this room, the most living sound Jiang Cheng has made in years. It goes on and on, rising in pitch until it’s a scream.
Wei Wuxian’s eyes widen. Oh. Oh.
Of course. It fits his theory, the reason he’d sought out Wen techniques in the first place – the goal of recreating as much of the memory that traps Jiang Cheng as possible, of creating a doorway for himself to slide inside. The fall of Lotus Pier, the ropes and the whip in the empty room, the core, the Wens who apparently tore open Jiang Cheng’s ripped robes and bare thighs and isn’t that an option that had never even occurred to Wei Wuxian before but wow what a reaction, the cries, the burning bodies. Of course the death of a Jiang disciple would trigger a response. Gods, Wei Wuxian is a moron, this is the strongest reaction Jiang Cheng’s ever had, Wei Wuxian could have induced this years ago, should have, this is wonderful. He feels his face break open into delight as he turns.
He only gets a glimpse of Jiang Cheng, who has gone strange, rippling and rising and reshaping himself like smoke as he screams. Jiang Cheng lurches forward. The savage cold of him barely brushes Wei Wuxian’s outstretched fingers, splitting them open, before Lan Zhan seizes Wei Wuxian around the waist and throws them both backwards toward the door. Wei Wuxian yelps in protest, still reaching.
Jiang Cheng
crawls
after them
out of the corner.
His arms – what were his arms, until a moment ago – are finally unbound. He curls over the disciple’s body, screaming and screaming higher and higher – which is kind of adorable, actually, A-Cheng is always so protective of the people he’s marked as his, even though this disciple’s so young he probably never even served under Jiang Cheng at all so it’s kind of outrageous that the poor bastard even counts – and the incense and burning wood fling away from him to hit the walls in streaks of light, and the arrays blaze searing-hot and then rip apart. Smoke and screams and Jiang Cheng are filling the whole room and Jiang Cheng’s eyes are still fixed on Wei Wuxian, still seeing him. Wei Wuxian could cry from vindication, from glee. From love.
He and Lan Zhan burst out into the clear night. The screaming follows them, emitting not just from the open room or from the bell at Wei Wuxian’s waist but from the water, the wood, maybe even the sky itself. Lanterns flare across the courtyard as disciples shout. The wooden slats in front of the open door begin to pry themselves up, splintering apart as if clawed by a dozen unseen hands, the furrows dragging deeper and further every moment. The door groans and then snaps clean in half, blown outward.
He’s coming. He’s really coming out. Giddy, Wei Wuxian twirls Chenqing up to his mouth to trill out a welcoming, snaring song – some half-baked but gratifyingly melodic bit of improv that slams together the cheerful rhythm of the river as they used to share wine on the banks, and the single lullaby Wei Wuxian ever heard Madam Yu sing under her breath one time when Jiang Cheng had a bad fever, and something that isn’t really a song at all but the twined-together crackle of burning buildings and the hiss of the Wens’ laughter. The combination is just mocking enough for his purposes; he can tell it works because all the ponds in Lotus Pier pulse with impact and Jiang Cheng’s screams pitch furiously higher. The song digs into Jiang Cheng’s resentment like hooks and drags forward. The doorframe bulges with a series of loud crunching noises, shards of wood cutting Wei Wuxian’s face as he laughs into the music.
His laughter cuts off as Lan Zhan steps past him. Stained sleeves snapping, Lan Zhan swipes a hand across Wangji’s strings, and music bursts forth in the most hostile command for calm Wei Wuxian has ever heard. Jiang Cheng’s voice stutters and gasps.
Wei Wuxian immediately gets between them, trapping the qin between his and Lan Zhan’s chests. Lan Zhan looks agitated. Okay, fair enough, he’s just trying to defend Wei Wuxian from what seems like a ghost gone resentful and violent – Hanguang-jun is always so gallant, so pointlessly protective, it’s fine. Wei Wuxian doesn’t need the resentment racing through his veins. He’ll just be patient, explain his plan better, make Lan Zhan understand what a good thing this is, how this is just what he wanted. He sighs with forced, fond frustration and goes to take Lan Zhan’s hand.
But then resentful energy erupts at his back like a crack of lightning and Lan Zhan looks past him, thrusting Wei Wuxian aside to raise Wangji again. The music that emerges isn’t Rest but a crash of war-music. Elimination, not suppression.
There’s a tearing noise. Jiang Cheng’s scream throbs like a heartbeat, then cuts off.
Bichen flashes silver in the moonlight, aimed true and unhesitating, until Chenqing smashes it aside in a screech of sparks.
Wei Wuxian shoves Lan Wangji back, throat burning, eyes burning, slashing with Chenqing like a sword as he shouts to fill the awful sudden silence. Lan Wangji’s eyes are wide above their crossed weapons. He’s saying something and Wei Wuxian doesn’t care. How dare he. How dare he. Lan Wangji has never wanted to understand. Wei Wuxian needs to turn, to see the damage and how he can repair it, but he has to do this first. Something stabs into his foot as he lunges and a glance down reveals it’s the sharp-edged remains of the bell, his bell, his red-tasseled bell kept safe in Lotus Pier for two decades, his connection to Jiang Cheng’s voice for the past however-long-it’s-been since his brother died. Bichen’s strike shattered the metal. Was that the goal? In the corner of his eye he sees Lan Wangji reaching out to soothe him and Wei Wuxian bites his hand like an animal.
Something thunks to the ground beside them and an explosion of violet knocks them both sideways into the railing of the walkway; the first wave of Jiang disciples are firing arrows across the courtyard, fire talismans streaming from the fletchings. Wei Wuxian’s ears ring and the insides of his eyelids are stained green from the bright light. Splinters fly and woodsmoke swirls into the black not-smoke of resentment, blinding him. He shrieks a high clear note on Chenqing to slice through it all and clear his eyes.
The note turns to a gasp as the wood cracks beneath him, slicing his legs and hips as he falls through. Chenqing clatters across the boards as he slams his hands down to keep from falling further. There are fingers dragging him down, unless they’re lotus roots; water sucks at his legs; the broken wood bites into his flesh like hungry teeth, constricts greedily around him like a throat. Lotus Pier is trying to swallow him. Claim him, like he’d once-always-ever yearned for it to do.
As he squirms, two arms wrap around him. In the black smoke and the red haze, he can’t see whose they are. But –
The chill of flesh that is not flesh. The familiar sting of resentment. A mouth moves at his ear; he can’t hear what it says, nor feel the brush of breath. Just soft, cold pressure sliding over his skin, silently shouting. Then teeth.
Wei Wuxian lets out a breathless laugh of relief.
Another arm encircles him in a rush of white. Wei Wuxian is wrenched up out of the hands that hold him, out of Lotus Pier’s embrace, up through the smoke and into the sky. He looks down past his own feet balanced wobblingly on Bichen’s blade.
The courtyard is ablaze. The disciples’ running figures are barely visible through the ribbons of smoke that sweep across the courtyard, their bodies lit only by the light of burning bridges and smoldering purple remains of fire talismans. The empty room is now no longer a room at all – it has cracked outward like a ribcage, like butchery. There is nothing inside.
Wei Wuxian looks and looks, eyes darting back and forth. Where. Where.
With a sudden lash of movement, the smoke bursts upward. It twines around Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, who tightens his grip and flings them up again, so high that the blood in Lan Wangji’s hair turns to ice and all Wei Wuxian can see is the moon. The smoke thins to nothingness and lets them go.
There.
Standing on the burnt bridge where he’d died, looking up, looking straight at Wei Wuxian. Bent where bones shouldn’t bend, limbs roiling like fog, but standing, upright and unbound. Eyes like wounds in his face, tears on his cheeks. Lips skinned back in a snarl. That gash where he’d let Wei Wuxian sink inside him, gold and black and bleeding by turns. His hands are free, his hands are outstretched, his hands are reaching for Wei Wuxian. Even so far away, Wei Wuxian can feel him shouting – not hear him anymore, ah, Wei Wuxian’s poor bell, Lan Zhan can be so rash sometimes – can’t hear him but feels him like the shuddering pressure of approaching thunder. Calling Wei Wuxian back, he’s sure. Commanding him back. That stubborn plea to stay away finally, finally overturned –
Wei Wuxian’s throat throbs with the memory of tightening hands. Jiang Cheng wants to get Wei Wuxian back under him and squeeze.
Laughter spills out of Wei Wuxian’s mouth, and words. “Lan Zhan,” he says, “ah, Lan Zhan, that went wonderfully! You saw him, right? He was looking at me, I finally made him speak to me. Ah, I have so many ideas after this! The thing with the disciple was such a helpful accident, can’t believe I didn’t think of that, and now there’s so many of them to choose from – Oh, your hand hurts where I bit you? That looks bad. You look upset. I’m not angry anymore, though, it’s fine. Take me back to Gusu, Lan Zhan, I want to make A-Yuan tell me more about the Wens’ techniques, I want to practice new songs, I can already feel them welling up in me – fuck, I’m so happy. I’m so happy. Let’s go, quick, so we can come back even quicker!”
Lan Zhan just looks at him, silhouetted against the moon. His ribbon is slightly askew and the fire below reflects liquid light in his eyes. He is breathing hard. His bleeding hand shakes just a little, gripping Wei Wuxian’s so hard you’d think they were at another cliff.
Wei Wuxian raises their hands to his mouth and nips at Lan Zhan’s fingers with distracted affection, unable to help looking back down again. The disciples have noticed Jiang Cheng, are starting to cry out in alarm. Jiang Cheng’s silent voice pulses and pulses. Wei Wuxian hums against Lan Zhan’s stiff fingers. The future unspools before him, shining with hope. Ah, he has so much to try.
~
Wei Wuxian’s flight gets in just after two in the morning. He takes the express into the city proper and loops around for a bit on foot, gets hot dry noodles from a twenty-four-hour kiosk that he eats standing next to the stall. Squints up at the neon-lit haze of the sky to try to pick out stars, breathes the slightly burnt smell of asphalt. Then he walks onward, and eventually leaves the lights and busy roads behind.
This city is so thick with people, with noise, with growling cars and rattling trains and the low relentless hum of life that one might think there is no quiet to be found anywhere. But he knows better.
He meanders down to the river, hands in his pockets, whistling along with his earbuds. Even here is crowded with boats, but he’s not going out on the water. His goal is an old construction site where the city had started to build a bridge a while back, until a rash of accidents and nightmares among the crews ground things to a halt. Important men held meetings, offerings were given just in case, but somehow even in this age of fast growth and skepticism and alluring riverside real estate no one seemed eager to push the project further. Now there’s nothing here except the occasional group of kids who’ve dared each other to sneak in. And Wei Wuxian, of course.
And –
He wriggles through a broken chain-link fence and stops, shoes crunching on broken glass. The river laps quietly nearby. The air reeks of gasoline and dried piss. He takes one earbud out, the comforting constant whisper going flat and tinny. Stay, stay –
“Stay away,” Jiang Cheng says.
His voice is so thin the distant traffic almost drowns it out, his body barely visible. He flickers a little more into being as Wei Wuxian puts down his bag and steps, smiling, closer to the old perimeter of Lotus Pier. The whip-cuts, the round cheeks, the fall of his hair as he paces wary-eyed and waiting. A single neon light is visible between the tall black structures behind him, dimming and brightening by turns, silhouetting his body in light. Jiang Cheng is so beautifully familiar. And Wei Wuxian is the only one who can pull him back into shape like this, sharpen him, tighten him into tune like the string of an instrument.
“I’m back, A-Cheng. I found some new techniques to try out, way down south; bet you’ll love these.”
“If he comes here I’ll just hurt him,” Jiang Cheng hisses, a little louder. He’s still so bad at making it sound threatening. And his spirit’s gotten too weak over the years to really hurt Wei Wuxian, anyway.
He’d been strong after Wei Wuxian got him out of that empty room, and angry. At that point, the cage grew bigger – he could roam the whole of Lotus Pier instead of one tiny room. But the Jiang sect eventually moved upriver and subsided there – oh, some number of generations later, Wei Wuxian’s not sure. Pitiful. A supposedly-great sect that can’t manage one ghostly ex-zongzhu screaming from the lakes and river, plus an occasional nighttime visitor, usually mistaken for another ghost? It's not like Wei Wuxian even picked off so many of them. But fine, fair enough, nobody’s ever been able to handle Jiang Cheng properly but him. And with Lotus Pier mostly empty it was certainly easier for Wei Wuxian to stay there.
Well. At least until the structures all burned in a fit of raging experimentation, which turned out to be ineffective except for making Jiang Cheng scream like he’d been set ablaze himself and then give Wei Wuxian the silent treatment again for what felt like decades. So, overall a wash.
Wei Wuxian had had to handle the burning alone – Lan Zhan hadn’t helped, he’d gone off somewhere else by that point. To…? Wei Wuxian can’t actually recall the last time they saw each other. Heavens, Lan Zhan is so patient! Well, Wei Wuxian will remember where he went one of these days, it’s fine –
Anyway. With Lotus Pier burnt he’d traveled more for his research. And then more, and more, as time passed and such things came easier – trains, planes, whatnot. He does stay away a lot, now.
But Jiang Cheng appreciates commitment. Always, Wei Wuxian comes home in the end.
He chatters about his travels as he pulls energy from around them. A city that blares with so much life is, by necessity, also overflowing with death, so there’s a lot to work with. And these new techniques are so elegant, so interesting; he can’t wait to show Jiang Cheng.
“No,” Jiang Cheng says, before the earbuds looped around Wei Wuxian’s neck screech with reverb, beating his voice into near-unrecognizable crackles. Wei Wuxian steps right up to the perimeter. Jiang Cheng mirrors him, arms rising and hands opening even as he whispers rejections. He gets clearer and clearer the closer Wei Wuxian comes, the edges of his body bleeding into resentful smoke, eyes never leaving Wei Wuxian’s face. His silent mouth moves. The reverb pulses in time with it. “No. I hurt you. I’ll hurt you. Go home. Go away. Stay away.”
Wei Wuxian reaches across the distance between them, and cups Jiang Cheng’s cheek in his hand.
Jiang Cheng ripples under his touch. Gold and red and smoky black spill from his eyes and mouth as he digs his nails deep into Wei Wuxian’s wrist. Wei Wuxian reaches up with his free hand to rub a fond thumb across that familiar smear of blood on his brother’s forehead.
Jiang Cheng holds him fast, still looking at him. The reverb pitches up to a shriek.
“Tell me,” Wei Wuxian says, voice brimming with love, “when have I ever listened to you?” And presses in.
