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Jiang Cheng watches his nephew Jin Ling - Jin Rulan - take his seat on the throne of the most powerful sect in the cultivation world. The young sect leader is resplendent in gold and embroeidered silk and the mighty, arrogant Jins all bow to him. Jiang Cheng assumes they hope he’ll he a better sect leader than the previous one. He could hardly be worse.
“Sect Leader Jin,” Jiang Cheng says to his nephew. He bows as low as he can, in front of all those assembled, so that everyone will see, in case there is any doubt, that anyone who offends Lanling Jin and its new leader will also offend Sandu Shengshou and Yunmeng Jiang.
The peace between the sects is still fragile. In the second siege of the burial mounds the Jins had almost killed all of them. Now Jin Guangyao is dead, with his ally sect leader Su, and his friend Lan Xichen is in seclusion. Meanwhile people still talk about the Yiling Patriarch who had used to be one of the Yumeng Jiang. The cultivation world is a mess, and Jin Ling and Jiang Cheng are going to be at the center of it. It is’t fair to do this to Jin Ling, it is’t right, but Jiang Cheng had seen broken places before. He’d seen Lotus Peir broken and burned, all its people murdered, and his own hands had rebuilt Lotus Pier and filled it with people. Rebuilding the cultivation world couldn’t be harder than that.
*
Jiang Cheng’s torture by the Wens is a blur of a memory, it sits beow his - Wei Wuxian’s - golden core and he tries not to think about it. But there was moment before that, still hard to remember, when he stood outside in the rain and gave himself to the torturers so that Wei Wuxian could live. He remembers being calm then, full of certainty. If the cost of Wei Wuxian’s life was Jiang Cheng’s own, well, you can’t haggle with the universe about these things, things cost what they cost, and Wei Wuxian’s life was worth the price.
Decades later Jiang Cheng lets Wei Wuxian leave Guanyin Temple with Lan Wanji and doesn’t run after him. He tries to think about what it felt like when he was young, to give up every future moment that he would ever have with Wei Wuxian, to give up his own future, and to feel at peace. Had he ever loved that innocently, in a way so unburdened?
There is so much that Jiang Cheng wants with Wei Wuxian that he will never have. No easy camraderie around Lotus Pier, no punch fights that end in hugs, no smiling together over homemade soup. no years of working together to build a sect that will be both of theirs. But Wei Wuxian is alive, and once Jiang Cheng had thought that was worth his own life. He clutches the memory of being a person who could do that.
*
“You’d better go after them now,” Jin Ling says, when they find a moment in the celebration. “You’ve got no excuse, and it’s your own actions keeping you apart.”
Jiang Cheng thinks for a minute how glad he is for the miracle that Jin Ling grew up abrasive and good instead of sweet-faced and terrible. But if he’s honest with himself it wasn’t a miracle, it was his own slow, patient work of intently, resolutely, never letting him go. Not in the early months when Jiang Cheng returned from the war to find a baby who was crying almost as much as he was, and not later, not even when Jin Guangyao was using all his quite formidable skills to get as much time with Jin Ling as he could, because fuck if Jiang Cheng would let that happen, not over his dead body or his melted golden core. No matter how exhausted he felt every time Jin Ling asked another impossible question or scraped another knee or didn’t want to do his schoolwork or screamed in the middle of the night after screaming in the middle of the night the night before, no matter how much Jin Guangyao was just there, ready to make it easy, if ever Jiang Cheng would let him.
There are ways of giving your life for someone you love that don’t take a moment, that take years and years of hard work and doing the impossible every single fucking day, and that leave you grateful the whole damned time. Jiang Cheng is so lucky that Jin Ling let him learn that.
“I’ll break your legs, brat,” Jiang Cheng says, because he can’t say thank you or I’m sorry or I love you, even though all of them are true. He’s pretty sure Jin Ling understands what he means.
*
When Wen Zhuliu melted Jiang Cheng’s core he showed him the broken remains of Lotus Pier. He took him from building to building and made him watch as he set them on fire. By that point it almost didn’t matter, since everyone he had ever loved there was dead, except for Wei Wuxian and Jiang Yanli, and they were far away.
And then when he got his glden core back the Wens took Wei Wuxian. It was too high a price for his core. It wasn’t what he wanted to pay. But sometimes you don’t choose the price of things, and even then you don’t get to haggle. And if he had a golden core, he knew what he had to do with it.
In towns and small villiages Jiang Cheng went to markets asking if by any chance anyone there would like to be a cultivator. If anyone said yes, he immediately taught them a few basic Yunmeng Jiang moves, right there in public. The Jiangs had once been rangers and still a few of their techniques were quick and rough, not like demonic cultivation but not that much harder, especially if you were decently physically fit, you didn’t need years of training like a Lan. Anyone who could master even one Yunmeng Jiang technique and wanted to come with him was now a Yumeng Jiang disciple. Then at the next town Jiang Cheng let them demonstrate, to show what just a few lessons from Yunmeng Jiang could teach someone to do.
In three months he had recruited dozens of disciples. Years later he had hundreds. There was a time when every single Yunmeng Jiang disciple had been someone that Jiang Cheng had personally trained and recruited from life as a commoner, and he doesn’t know of any other sect leader who can say the same.
With Wei Wuxian beside him he knew he could’ve done even more.
“I can’t protect you,” Jiang Cheng had said to Wei Wuxian. “Not if you try to protect them.” Them meant the Wens, that had destroyed Lotus Pier, that the entire cultivation world wanted to kill. Allying himself with them would turn his own students into targets. They’d followed him when he had nothing but Yumeng Jiang teachings, he owed them more than that.
But things cost what they cost. On a dark mountain Jiang Cheng watched Wei Wuxian die, throwing away his life that Jiang Cheng had given his core to save, while Jiang Cheng’s sword trembled in the cliffside.
Years later, in Carp Tower, Jiang Cheng tries to figure out which of the many empty spaces at Jin Ling’s celebration would have belonged to Wei Wuxian, if he had decided to come here instead of wandering. “I love you,” he whispers to the empty spaces. “I’m sorry.” But it’s useless, he knows. Wei Wuxian had left, and Jiang Cheng had let him go. People sometimes understand what you say if you say it the wrong way, but not if they can’t hear you because they’re not there.
*
“Then I’m going home with you,” Jin Ling says.
“Idiot,” Jiang Cheng says. “Your home is here. That’s what this whole ceremony was about, didn’t you notice, Sect Leader Jin.”
“But I can leave sometimes,” Jin Ling says. “I can come back with you. To Lotus Pier.”
Jiang Cheng didn’t raise his nephew to simper like this. He glares. “Say what you want to say.”
“Fine then,” Jin Ling glares back. “I’ll just say it. You said you wanted Wei Wuxian to be with you, to help you rebuild Lotus Pier. He didn’t. But I could. I want to.”
Jiang Cheng isn’t even tempted. “You’ll do your own damned job,” he says. “Like I did, and like you know how to do.” But there’s more to say, and he’s got to say it, because he can’t leave Jin Ling like he left Wei Wuxian. “But I’ll visit. A lot. I’ll help you.”
“That’s not enough and you know it.” Jin Ling says. “I saw you cry on the floor. I heard what you said. You wanted Wei Wuxian to help you lead the Yumeng Jiang, and you never had that. You always had to do it yourself. But I’m a sect leader now, I’m not as powerful as he was but I’m pretty strong, I could help you.”
“Yunmeng Jiang doesn’t need your help,” Jiang Cheng says, and the minute he says that he knows that it’s true. It’s as strong a sect as it had ever been, and it’s strong the way Jiang Cheng had rebuilt it. He’d done it without Wei Wuxian, but he’d done it. Things cost what they cost, but Yumeng Jiang is strong and Jin Ling had grown into someone brave and loving and Wei Wuxian is alive.
“Dumbass,” he says, because Jin Ling has just outmaneuvered him and they both know it and he loves his nephew so damned much. “We’re still working together, even when we’re far away. Even when we’re doing different things.” Jiang Cheng can feel the tears in his eyes, he’s been on the verge of crying again since Wei Wuxian had wiped his tears in Guanyin temple. There’s so much out there that is broken, in the world and between them. But Wei Wuxian is out there, and alive, and Jiang Cheng expects he’s probably doing something good. Maybe in some sense they’re still doing something together.
“Whatever’s broken, we can rebuild it,” Jiang Cheng says to Jin Ling, and to himself, and to Wei Wuxian who isn’t there and can’t hear. Everything he’s had with Wei Wuxian is damaged and broken, but not more broken than the ruins of Lotus Pier, no more broken than the wreckage of the cultivation world that was somehow going to be something that Jin Ling and Jiang Cheng were going to have to help fix together. Jiang Cheng feels a calm he hasn’t felt since the time in the rain, when he was young, when he gave himself to the Wen soldiers to save Wei Wuxian’s life. Sometimes giving your life for someone doesn’t happen in a moment. Sometimes it takes years of patience and not letting go, and being grateful the whole damned time.
“So you’ll find him?” Jin Ling asks. “And you’ll come back and help me?”
“Idiot,” Jiang Cheng says, so full of love and gratitude he feels like he’s choking on it. He can fix broken things. He’s done it before. “Yes.”