Work Text:
The moon hangs low in the sky, painting the waters of Lotus Pier in liquid silver.
He stands alone at the edge of the dock, where polished wood gives way to the smooth stones of the shore, his bare feet planted just shy of the water’s reach. The air is thick with a mist, clinging to the surface of the water, like second skin, loitering like a ghost, shifting as if a waterborne abyss might rise from beneath it at any moment. It drifts in languid coils across the surface, neither fully fog nor fully smoke.
The mist brushes against his skin like cold silk, curling over his robes and tugging at his sleeves like fingers made of memory. It tastes of old water and half-forgotten prayers, bitter with incense ash and the metallic tang of grief that has long been buried.
The lotus leaves have begun to bloom again, he notes distantly, the way one might notice the passing of seasons from a window. Their wide, waxy leaves unfurl across the surface of the lake too stubborn to die. Too persistent. Unlike the rest of Lotus Pier. He envies them. Their determination to persist through the war, through the rebuilding, through the heavy scent of death that still lingers in the corners. The pink blossoms float like offerings from a dream of faded memories, their petals half-lit by the moonlight, and their roots tangled in mud that remembers everything.
His shoulders tense with the thought. The buildings have been rebuilt. Polished wood and smooth stone has erased the footsteps that were once engraved in the wood. Laughter of bygone days no longer resides in the walls. The blood no longer stains their floors.
But through it all, the earth, as charred as it may have been, still remains untouched with memories, soaked with what the walls and floors can’t hold. It’s the mud that remembers everything, from the touch of hands that will never feel again, to the laughter that will never be heard again, it is all held in the soil, the weight of every step imprinted beneath the new foundations.
He closes his eyes. For a moment, he can imagine another night just like this. Wei Ying and Jiang Yanli’s laughter is somewhere behind him, splashing footsteps racing along the dock, the flash of purple and black robes trailing in the wind.
“A-Cheng, come on!”
He opens his eyes.
There is only mist. Only silence. Only him.
The memory of Caiyi Town comes unbidden. It rushes in like a flood breaking through a dam. It drowns his senses as if it happened yesterday. Each detail surfaces in painful clarity. The laughter filling the streets of the town, sharp and boisterous, the shouts that echoed through the market square, soft and teasing, the exasperated fondness calling his name, A-Cheng. The warmth of hands he can no longer hold lingers in his skin like phantom heat in a cold night.
It pulls him into a world of aching familiarity, like a river of time they waded through together, its currents wide and endless. The future stretched wide and bright before them.
They had no worries, back then, not really. They didn’t have the kind of worries they do now. The kind that rests in bones and hardens in scars. No real responsibilities either. They had nothing but the thrill that came with fighting the waterborne abyss. They had nothing but heroics and all the time in the world.
They were the Twin Prides of Yunmeng.
It was easier then, to be so bold and invincible, so certain of their strength, the bond that tethered them to each other. The monster in Biling Lake was just another victory to claim. It was a testament to their unbreakable brotherhood.
They were the Twin Prides of Yunmeng.
He remembers the spray of cold water on his face, the splash of the lake as their blades cut through the surface in sharp, rhythmic arcs. They fought back-to-back, two halves of a whole, wild, and fierce— though he was arguably less wild. They were untamed, and full of reckless joy that only youth could afford.
He could still feel it, even now. Despite all that has been lost to time, hurt, betrayal, anger, love— he could still feel the strength and certainty. It was the kind of understanding shared in every subtle glance and every quick nod. That sort of warmth only belonged to fighting with someone who always had his back. An understanding older than words.
He used to think it was a bond no absence could sever.
The memory fades slowly, leaving behind a deafening silence. A bitter taste clings to his tongue, sharp and metallic like rust on a blade, heavy with the weight of something precious lost.
His hand tightens around a sealed jar of lotus wine. The rough texture of the wax presses against his skin, grounding him in the present as his mind conjures an image of a grin around the mouth of a stolen jar, with soft voice calling out at them in fond exasperation.
But that was then.
The memories blur and twist, and a hollow pit settles in his stomach as the mist swirls around him. Those grins and voices live only in memory now— at least only for him.
A hollow pit settles in his stomach as the mist curls tighter around him.
The grin twists and frays at the edges. The voice grows hollow. The waterborne abyss’ rattling fades, replaced by the quiet beating of the water against the shore. The laughter and voices grow quiet, replaced by the whistling of the wind.
He says nothing. Does nothing.
What could he say when he knows no one will be listening? There is no one left to listen.
The past is no longer something to cherish. Somewhere, years ago, it had become an anchor that tethered him, kept him going. It kept his sword steady and his head high, holding him firm when grief threatened to pull him under.
Now, it only drags him into the murky depths of memories of a brother gone. It drags and it drags, and it drowns him. It weighs him down with names belonging to spirits not even Inquiry could call upon. It weighs him down with apologies left unsaid. It weighs him down with the absence of people who were once everything.
The core inside him aches, hurting deeper than any wound he received during the war. The ache is bone-deep, threading through his marrow and muscles, curling into the space beneath his sternum, close to his heart.
How is it possible, he wonders, to still carry the very thing that makes a cultivator whole, and yet be utterly hollow? How is it possible to carry a golden core not his own, and still be utterly alone in the world, with the original owner living somewhere else, far, far away?
The mist thickens around him. It climbs up his throat like a hand made up of smoke, creeping into his lungs, coiling around his ribs. He breathes deeply, but it does little to ease the weight in his chest.
His throat tightens, but he doesn’t shed a tear. His tears had run out long ago. He has cried all there was to cry about, until even his sorrow turned silent.
So, he stays silent and still, looking at the lotus flowers bloom. The pink petals float gently across the surface of the lake, undisturbed by his grief-filled memories. The leaves are wide and stubborn, sprawling across the water as if they never learned how to die. They persisted and resisted through fire and ruin and bloomed through it all— through the soil that was once saturated with ashes.
The water beats gently against the rocks below, moving in tandem with the distant pull of the moon. Somewhere far away, behind the haze, servants begin to light the lanterns, casting a blurred glow through the mist. The glow cuts faintly through the fog, blurred holes of gold and orange press faintly against the grey.
Lotus Pier has always persisted.
However, here, where the water meets the shore, where the past clings like second skin, the world is dim. The colours are dull. The edges fray and smear like ink left too long in the rain.
The mist doesn’t just linger. It seeps. It seeps into his skin, settling in the hollow spaces between his ribs, in the marrow of his bones. The mist has long become a part of him.
And still, his feet stay rooted to the ground. Unmoving.
He has stood here in this spot countless times before.
As a child chasing after lotus seeds.
As a student listening to his father’s teachings.
As a brother, watching Wei Ying dive headfirst into the water when he was finally allowed.
As a sect leader, trying to rebuild what was left.
As a cultivator, a sect leader, a brother.
The roles he played blur together now. The child, the student, the brother, the leader. He has worn them all, sometimes all at once. Now, it feels like none of those roles fit him anymore. Not because he outgrew them, but rather, the roles outgrew him.
The faces that once filled Lotus Pier with life have faded. Time has made them indistinct, and yet, their absence is the one thing that permanently remains, painfully sharp.
Sometimes, he still feels their ghosts, lingering. Not their voices or their hands, but the shape of them, like a warm presence pressing into his shoulder, tethering him to some place between the living and the dead. A familiar weight that presses at the edge of his senses.
Other times, there are no ghosts. Just silence.
Sometimes, the silence talks back. A soft voice, a name called from half a world away, breathing out a memory.
A-Cheng, the mist would sometimes whisper and for one cruel second, it would sound like him.
He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, before opening them again.
Other times, like now, there is nothing but the hollow ache of silence.
His eyes drift across the water. He makes a point not to stare too hard at the mist. If he stares too long, he’s afraid he’ll see more than the fog. He’s afraid he’ll see his a-jie smiling with pork ribs and lotus root soup. He’s afraid he’ll see Wei Ying’s robes whip past him like a phantom caught mid-laugh.
Wei Wuxian had told him to leave it all in the past. He almost laughs at the memory.
How is he supposed to leave the past behind when it owns him? When it only ever seems like the past suffocates the present? When it weaves itself into the new walls of the buildings. When it fossilised at the bottom of the lakes? When it drifts through the air particles?
The past is not something he could leave behind. Not when it consumes him. How could he leave the past behind when it surrounds him in both its glory and ruin?
He tries not to think of Lotus Pier before the siege. But memory is cruel. It paints the old version of it in soft, gold light and laughter that never fades. And in those memories he sees faces. Some are dead. Others might as well be.
He and Wei Wuxian are the last ones who remember it as it truly was in all its glory.
The rest are names on memorial tablets and ashes buried in scorched soil.
Most are dead.
One, however, is just gone.
Does Lotus Pier really belong to him? Does it not belong more to the dead?
Sometimes, he thinks it would have been easier if Wei Wuxian stayed dead. He berates himself for such thoughts. He should be grateful his brother returned. He should be grateful he doesn’t need to add one more tablet in the ancestral hall.
But death is the kindest loss. It is merciful in its certainty. There is solidity in death. A closure which leaving doesn’t offer.
It would be easier. But nothing ever comes easy for him. Not love. Not loyalty. Not loss.
And yet, Wei Wuxian did return. In the end he returned. Not as the same person he used to be. Not as the person he remembers. No, that Wei Ying is gone, leaving only his spirit to fit into the body of another, lesser cultivator. The boy who laughed too loud and smiled too easily was gone. He still laughed just as loud, smiled just as easily, but it wasn’t Wei Ying. In his place stood a man stitched together from borrowed flesh and ghosts. A man with a different voice. A different face. A stranger wearing his brother’s name.
He never thought he could mourn the same man more than once.
Yet here he is, at the edge of a place that doesn’t feel quite like home as it used to, mourning. He possesses a sword that shouldn’t belong to him, a golden core that was never meant to be his, and a silence that stretches longer than any blade.
Mourning is all he ever does lately.
Wei Wuxian left just as quickly as he returned, leaving him in the dust, clenching Suibian in his hand, the weight of something that shouldn’t belong to him pressing into his skin just like the golden core burning inside him. Wei Wuxian had left, and he left Jiang Cheng on his knees holding guilt and grief in his palms and chest.
So, he makes it a point to not stare at the mist too hard for too long.
He breaks the seal of the jar and lifts it to his lips. The sharp burn of the liquor does little to ease the burn of the core. It doesn’t cool the molten grief that sits beneath his sternum, hot and bitter.
He ignores the voice in his head, calling out to him in soft exasperation, berating him for drinking his problems away.
He pushes it down, swallows harder, drowning the sorrow, guilt, hurt, and love with every swallow.
Time fractures and blurs.
Minutes bleed into hours. Hours pass by in seconds. The world shrinks to the cold taste of the wine on his tongue and the hollow ache inside.
One jar empties, another is unsealed. The wooden floorboards creak beneath his restless feet as he discards the glass with a heavy clink.
He doesn’t cry. The tears had run out months ago.
But the ache remains. Always.
“Jiang Cheng.”
His breath catches. The voice— impossibly familiar, breaks through the night air.
He slowly turns, as if any sudden movement might break the illusion. His heart hammers so violently in a silence so thick it presses against his ears, almost as painfully as the core churning in his chest at the sound, as if recognising its original owner by voice alone.
A figure takes shape in the mist, blurred and flickering, like a half-formed dream. Whether a ghost or a hallucination, he can’t tell.
But just as surely as his instincts once knew it was Wei Wuxian as Mo Xuanyu, he knows the figure in the mist is him.
“A-Cheng,” the figure’s voice slips out like a faded echo, soft and careful. It lulls him to the days when the world was simpler, and their bond, unbreakable.
It’s spoken the way it used to be, when their bond was unshaken. When they fought together with unspoken understanding. When he still believed the world could be fair to them.
The figure walks closer, footsteps light as if too cautious to make any noise. As if he fears even the sound of his presence might shatter whatever is left of the fragile thing that lies between them since.
Wei Ying had never walked that way before. Not before the siege.
“Jin Ling said you weren’t doing well,” Wei Wuxian says softly, tinged with worry. His eyes scan the empty jars sprawled near Jiang Cheng’s feet. “You’re drinking too much.”
“You of all people cannot be telling me that I drink too much,” he bites back. His throat tightens as the familiar drunken grin of Wei Ying’s smile flashes in his mind. “I learnt from you.”
Wei Wuxian’s lips tug upwards, but there’s no real amusement there. It seems his own sorrow has bled through to Wei Wuxian. He almost looks like his Wei Ying.
“You were always the better half of us, keeping me in check.”
“Until the Wens,” he snaps bitterly. “After that you only did as you pleased.”
Wei Wuxian doesn’t answer right away. The silence between them stretches, heavy and brittle of the years that collapsed between them. The mist curls between them, swirling like it too, remembers all the things left unsaid.
“I didn’t know how to come back after everything,” Wei Wuxian murmurs finally. “I didn’t know how to return to you. Not after everything that happened. Not after what I did. What it did to you. What I cost you.”
“You didn’t even try,” he spits. His voice cracks around the edges. His eyes burn but no tears form. “You chose everyone but me, even the remaining Wen.” His hand trembles around the rim of the half-empty jar.
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t lie to me. I’ve lived with this truth longer than you’ve been dead.”
Wei Wuxian’s expression falters, softens, then closes into something unreadable.
“I never stopped thinking about you,” he says so quietly, it almost vanishes in the mist.
His jaw clenches. “That’s not the same as staying. You still chose to leave.”
Wei Wuxian doesn’t reply. There’s only the hush of the lake and the distant flicker of lanterns behind the mist. It presses in around them. Silent. Watchful.
The golden core in his chest aches and the burn of the wine is replaced by something sharper, colder.
“I couldn’t stay here.” Wei Wuxian exhales and gestures around him. “You were rebuilding Lotus Pier. The stigma around demon cultivation was still rampant. It still is within the minor clans. I couldn’t have the major clans turn against you for trying to keep me safe.”
He scoffs, low and bitter. “You always decide what is best for everyone else, don’t you?”
Wei Wuxian flinches, yet his voice still remains soft, “you would’ve had to choose between the sect and me. I didn’t want to put you in that position.”
“You were part of the sect! You were going to be my Head Disciple. We were supposed to be the Twin Prides of Yunmeng. You promised me that. We could have rebuilt all of this together—” His breath catches, and the jar falls from his hand, spilling over the wood as it breaks into pieces.
Wei Wuxian’s expression twists from regret to guilt, pain— all flickering in the half-light. “I know,” he whispers, voice trembling. “I never wanted anything more than that. But then you lost your core going for your parents’ bodies and I— we could never be the Twin Prides with one of us missing our core, and then I fell into demonic cultivation—”
His ears ring. The rest of the words coming out of Wei Wuxian’s mouth are distant, muffled as if they’ve been submerged underwater.
Would it change anything if he tells Wei Wuxian? It wouldn’t erase anything. It would only open more wounds.
“No,” he mumbles, voice rough. His gaze drops to the dark stain spreading across the wood, painting the wood. In the low light, it almost looks like blood.
The words tumbles out of him before he can stop it, raw and unguarded. “I didn’t go for my parents.”
The silence that follows is thick.
Wei Wuxian’s breath catches. “What?” he breathes, voice cracking.
He doesn’t meet his gaze. Instead, he fixes his eyes on the lake, on the lotus leaves, floating.
“That day when shijie fell ill, you went out to get medicine. The Wen soldiers were going to approach you.” His voice softens, but the memory scorches his chest. “They would have caught you, if I hadn’t run out and drawn attention to myself.”
The confession hangs heavy, like smoke choking the air between them. He wills his heart to stop pounding, to stop breaking in slow jagged pieces with every swirl of the mist.
Behind him, the mist stays quiet, remains motionless.
When Wei Ying finally speaks, his voice is hardly audible, fragile. “You never told me.”
He lets out a sound somewhere between a half laugh and half scoff, a shield against the vulnerability threatening to spill over. “We weren’t telling each other a lot of things. Besides, what would be the point? What happened, happened.”
“I thought—” Wei Ying starts, then cuts himself off, faltering. “All this time, I thought it was for your parents. That, that’s why—”
“It’s easier to believe that” he interrupts flatly, shrugging. “It was easier to make sense of. The cultivation world would accept this more noble, righteous act. A son risking everything to recover his parents’ bodies.”
He finally turns to look at Wei Ying then. His figure is hardly more than a shadow in the mist. He looks haunted. Small. Like the weight of the revelation has struck something in him he didn’t know was still there.
“I didn’t know,” Wei Ying says softly, quieter like it’s a fact. A failure. It’s a wound reopened, a truth laid bare.
The words hang in the air, fragile and trembling, as if spoken too loudly would shatter the air around them.
“You couldn’t have,” he replies softly, steadily, as if trying to soothe the wound. But the reassurance feels hollow, like a thin shield against the bitter chill creeping up from their past.
Another beat of silence passes, this time less thick and suffocating. Relieving, instead. Jiang Cheng picks up a new jar, but he doesn’t unseal it. He just holds it, fingers wrapped tight around it.
Wei Ying watches him. His eyes flicker with something he can’t name. The mist curls between them like it’s trying to obscure the distance that never really left, thick and swirling.
“Jin Ling worries about you,” Wei Ying says, eyeing the jar. There’s no accusation in his voice, only care, faint and tentative.
“He shouldn’t.” The words come out sharper than intended. “He’s a sect leader. He has better things to do than worry about me. I can handle myself.”
The sharpness fades instantly, replaced by something more raw. The claim feels hollow. The weight of loneliness presses down against him. But pride is a shield, and stubbornness is a mask that he wears like second skin.
Wei Ying stares at him. His expression twists again, this time guilt and regret flickering behind his eyes, before it softens into something warm.
He has to look away, unable to handle the weight of his gaze. Slowly, he unseals the jar but doesn’t drink from it yet. He holds it near his chest, letting the scent of the liquor bleed into the air around them.
It was once nostalgic and sweet. Now, it burns the back of his eyes.
“Will you give me one?” Wei Ying asks, inclining his head.
He blinks. For a moment, he thinks he misheard.
“You want one?”
Wei Ying nods, just once. “If you’re going to drink like it’s the end of the world—” he pauses, flinching at his choice of words. “—I might as well join you.”
It’s an olive branch, he recognises. A fragile bridge of shared loneliness in the cold night.
He scoffs a dry humourless sound but grabs a jar and throws it blindly in his direction. “You never needed an excuse before.”
His gaze snaps to Wei Ying when he hears the jar break. Wine pools around his feet, painting the wood a deep shade of red.
“Just how many jars are we going to break?” he asks dryly, rolling his eyes.
Just as he is about to grab another, Wei Ying speaks, “maybe, it’s better if you just drink, A-Cheng.”
He raises a brow. “Did your reflexes dull with age?”
Wei Ying’s smile flickers with something fragile but genuine. “Something like that.”
They stand there for a moment, neither moving. Then, with a sigh, he nods, bringing his own jar to his lips. The familiar burn dulls his senses. Wei Ying appears more hazy around the edges.
“I just think I probably shouldn’t drink if I want to get back to Gusu in one piece.”
He stills, the jar halfway to his lips. “You’re not staying?”
The silence that follows is loud, hanging heavily in the air. Wei Ying doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, he looks out over the lake. The mist curls around him, as if trying to obscure him.
He feels the tug to reach out, to pull Wei Ying from the haze, to keep him anchored here, where memories still cling like dew to lotus leaves. But the more reasonable part of him keeps his hands at his sides.
Wei Ying no longer belongs here. Not the same way he used to. His home is with Lan Wangji in Gusu. His home is elsewhere now, far from Lotus Pier.
It’s a luxury Jiang Cheng can’t afford. No matter how much he may wish for it.
He turns away, mirroring Wei Ying as he gazes out over the lake, the stubborn lotus leaves stubbornly afloat.
“You know I can’t.”
The words are a resignation whispered between them. An acceptance as bitter as the cold night air.
He doesn’t hear Wei Ying’s footsteps retreat into the mist.
But he knows, just as he once knew instinctively that it was Wei Wuxian as Mo Xuanyu, and how it was Wei Ying in the mist, he knows now, Wei Ying is not with him. He won’t be. Not now, not for a long time.
The mist around him thins as he is brought to a stark realisation that threatens to suffocate him as it seeps into his skin, settles into his lungs.
He stands alone at the edge of the dock, where polished wood gives way to the smooth stones of the shore, his bare feet planted just shy of the water’s reach. The air is thick with a mist, clinging to the surface of the water, like second skin, loitering like a ghost, shifting as if a spirit might rise from beneath it at any moment. It drifts in languid coils across the surface, neither fully fog nor fully smoke.
The moon hangs low in the sky, painting the waters of Lotus Pier in liquid silver.