Chapter Text
It’s early morning in the Lotus Pier, bright light spilling over the lakes as the sun peeks above the horizon, fishermen and merchants bustling with their preparations for the day, the lotus flowers blossoming with the first light under the thin morning mist. There’s nobody still left in this world that knows that this is Jiang Fengmian’s favourite time of the day.
Only at this time can a busy Sect Leader sit in the calm without doing anything. In an hour, he will be expected to be in his office working, with guests entertaining, at nighthunts supervising, around Yunmeng observing… His duties are endless. But now, at this time, when it is serene and mild and no one has yet awakened fully, he is allowed to be out in a pavilion drinking tea and watching the lotus flowers.
It is perfectly calm, around him. The only sounds are the distant murmur of people setting up their businesses, and the fluttering of the red dragonflies that make Lotus Pier their home. When Jiang Fengmian sets his tea cup down with a quiet clack, the sound almost reverberates in the silent air.
Which is why it’s so startling when an exploding crash comes from the middle of the Jiang estate.
Jiang Fengmian is up on his feet without a second’s hesitation, unsheathing his sword and dashing through the corridors where servants and disciples are panicking. The commotion leads him towards the hall that connects the main dining room to his study, one of the innermost places of their home— it’s unbelievable that an enemy could have entered this far without anyone noticing.
“Check for fires,” He orders a few servants on the way, and then, turning towards the disciples; “Someone go call San-Niang! You two, go to A-Li, protect her from any assailants. Jiang Feng— take a dozen men and reinforce the disciples guarding the treasure rooms. Does anybody know what happened?”
As everyone hurries to do as they’re ordered, a middle-aged woman bows before him. “I saw, Sect Leader,” She says, remarkably calm despite the waver in her voice, “A dark figure fell from the sky, and crushed the roof! He’s there, lying in the wreckage— Master Xiumeng ordered this servant to keep everyone away in case there were any tricks.”
Jiang Fengmian glances, surprised, at Jiang Xiumeng next to him. He’s the senior-most member of the clan in the vicinity, which automatically makes him the leader during an emergency, but Jiang Fengmian knows him to be a mild and kind-hearted man— if a cultivator really fell off their sword and crashed into Lotus Pier, Jiang Fengmian would have expected him to first help heal them.
“Sect Leader,” Jiang Xiumeng says, hesitant, “It is… I don't know. It’s a man, but there was heavy resentful energy around him. He seemed to be in a precarious state, and likely needs immediate medical attention, but I still advised caution until Sect Leader could arrive.”
Now far more cautious, Jiang Fengmian nods at the cultivator and walks past the crowd. The first thing he sees is the hole made in the roof and the floor, wooden tiles lying ruined around a dark man unconscious on his stomach. As Jiang Fengmian approaches, more features are revealed to him.
A black robe spread askew and ripped severely in places. Tangled, long black hair scattered on deathly pale skin. Blood pooling on the broken floor around the man, blood dripping from blue-tinted lips, blood covering the uncomfortably thin, bony hands.
A face that at first Jiang Fengmian almost can’t recognise, which then strikes him with all the shocking force of a heavenly bolt of lightning.
Wei Changze.
Jiang Fengmian loses all notice of the curling resentful energy around the man, throwing his sword to the side and hurrying to kneel at the man’s side. “Call the healers!” He shouts, unable to look away to see if anyone followed his orders, heart beating like a trapped sparrow. “Hurry!”
He starts transferring spiritual energy to the man, but it leaks away without catching onto his body, and at the moment Jiang Fengmian is too shaken to wonder why. He gathers the man in his arms, feeling his insides go cold at how light he feels, how easy it is to pull him to his chest. All he can see is Changze’s unresponsive starved body, the pained furrow in Changze’s eyebrows, the blood still flowing down Changze’s jaw.
“Hang on,” He murmurs, trying not to jar the fragile body in his grasp, and he has to force himself not to cry when Changze groans painfully into the fabric of his robe. “Hang on, Changze. Everything will be alright— I promise, alright? Feng-ge promises everything will be alright, so please hang on.”
“What is happening here?” Comes a familiar voice, harsh like the snap of a whip, and Yu Ziyuan strides past the disciples and comes face to face with Jiang Fengmian. “You— Fengmian! What the hell are you doing with an intruder in ou— wait— Wei Changze?!”
“San-Niang…” Jiang Fengmian says, hands shaking and mind almost completely blank as he holds the trembling, light man to his chest. He feels lost. He probably looks lost.
He must seem pitiful enough indeed, because Yu Ziyuan takes over with a sharp frown on her face. “You, over there! Why aren’t the healers here yet?! Yinzhu, go get them! Jinzhu, help stem the blood flow! Fengmian are you even giving him spiritual energy?! Wake up!”
“Yes, I am giving it!” Jiang Fengmian says, looking back down at the still terribly dead-looking man in his embrace, “But it’s not working. I don’t know why. San-Niang— my energy, is there something wrong with it? What do I do, I can’t make the energy stay in his body, I—”
“Shut up!” Yu Ziyuan snaps, she and her maid coming to kneel by their side in the hole. She takes the pale man’s thin wrist with a grimace that speaks of what she thinks about his state, but still gives the spiritual energy. Meanwhile, Jinzhu shreds the hem of her inner robe without hesitation, plying the cloth onto the deep wound on the man’s chest that is the most obvious source of the blood loss.
“Is it working, San-Niang?” Jiang Fengmian asks, anxious out of his mind now that he’s made completely useless since he can’t even give spiritual energy. “Is he getting better?”
“Tch!” Yu Ziyuan clicks her tongue, and Jiang Fengmian’s heart sinks. “Why isn’t it working? Why isn’t it— the core. His core. It’s broken.”
“Broken?! What do you mean it’s b—”
A quiet, hoarse voice stops Jiang Fengmian’s words in his throat, clogging it. “‘an Zhan…” The man in his arms mutters, his eyelids squeezing and moving for a while before he can pry them apart. “Stop… stop al’rdy… Get out. Leave. Lan Zhan. Get out, stop… st’h.. get…”
His words peter out into soft hisses, and then into word-shaped breaths. He blinks open his eyes just a sliver, looking up with a blurred gaze that passes unseeing across Yu Ziyuan and Jiang Fengmian both. His lips move around the form of inaudible words, and he doesn’t seem to realize that he can’t be heard, speaking to the illusion of whoever it is he’s seeing, blood continuing to trickle down his mouth.
Yu Ziyuan is still working with Jinzhu on keeping him alive.
But Jiang Fengmian’s mind has shut down.
Because Wei Changze’s eyes are a warm, dark brown that looks almost black when he squints his eyes. But this man’s eyes are a slit of silver grey, shining pale under his long, tear-clumped lashes. Jiang Fengmian only knows two people with those eyes: One of them is Cangse Sanren.
The other is Wei Wuxian.
If it was only that, then he might have still accepted the change, might have still explained it away. But now that he looks, he can see where Cangse Sanren’s shapely forehead and nose are placed on the bleeding man, where her elegant fingers have softened the blunt power of Wei Changze’s hands, where the unique shape of Wei Wuxian’s lips have been hidden in the paleness and blood. But Jiang Fengmian knows that Wei Wuxian isn’t this tall, and he couldn’t have gotten this thin in the few weeks he’s been spending in Gusu, no matter what he says about the food there.
For one moment, Jiang Fengmian feels his heart shrink and shrivel, the unexpected hope for Wei Changze’s return that he had so stupidly allowed to grow dying a slow and painful death. This man isn’t Wei Changze. He doesn’t even know who this is, in fact. All Jiang Fengmian knows is that the man is somehow, someway related to the friend he had promised to protect and failed, and the man’s son that he had promised to protect in his stead.
But that’s all that he needs to steel him when a legion of healers descends onto them with Yinzhu at their back, asking him rapid fire questions. “Please,” He says, in between the interrogation and treatment happening around and over him, “Please save him.”
Yu Ziyuan, at his side and still frowning severely, catches his wrist and squeezes once, without looking away from where the healers are loading the man onto a stretcher.
Jiang Fengmian shakes her hand off only to entangle their fingers, also without looking. She squeezes again.
For now, that’s enough.
Jiang Yanli is in the infirmary, waiting to help should anyone be brought in, when Yinzhu comes and takes the best of the healers away with an urgency that she has never seen on the woman. The disciples that her father had sent to protect her are all spread out, guarding the infirmary together with herself, but they still throw confused looks across the hall at each other and at Jiang Yanli.
She doesn’t know either, at that moment.
Then, they bring a single man on a stretcher and she suddenly understands the subtle panic that had overtaken her mother’s ever-poised maid.
Because lying there in the mess of his own blood, eyes roving across the ceiling without seeing anything, is Wei Wuxian.
She’s ushered out of the room before she can do anything but waver on her feet, feeling faint.
Whatever it is that the healers do, it takes them hours upon hours, far longer than any flesh wound should take to be treated on a cultivator. Meanwhile, Jiang Fengmian paces in front of the infirmary doors, Yu Ziyuan doesn’t even eye him with distaste at the expression of his worry, and Jiang Yanli just sits on a pillow the servants brought for her when they finally understood that she’d rather be kneeling here on the cold floor than sitting comfortably in a room with a cup of tea.
She doesn’t know what to do.
“A-Xian,” She manages to say, eventually, when her throat stops feeling so very blocked, “A-Xian, will he be alright? What happened?”
“That wasn’t Wei Ying,” Her mother says, a gentle rebuke in her tone, “Wei Ying is all the way in Gusu. It was your father’s friend, Wei Changze. He just fell into our house, coming and going just as rudely as his son.”
“San-Niang,” Jiang Fengmian says, but his voice is tight and uncertain, “It wasn’t Wei Changze.”
Yu Ziyuan furrows her brows, hand toying with Zidian. “What, you’re telling me that it was Wei Ying? Fengmian, come to your senses. When have you last seen that brat? I fear for A-Cheng if you’ve already forgotten your favourite’s face.”
For once, the words sound unpoisoned, said only by rote and habit. Yu Ziyuan seems too focused on the situation to make more than a passing comment on even the thing that she hates the most in her husband.
“I don’t understand,” Jiang Yanli says, voice wavering on the last word. “Is it A-Xian or not?”
“It’s not A-Ying,” Jiang Fengmian says, completely certain, and Jiang Yanli finally relaxes her shoulders. Thank the Heavens. Thank the ancestors. She’s so going to burn all the incense they have in the house in gratitude the moment she has the free time.
“If he’s not Wei Changze,” Yu Ziyuan hisses, her hold on Zidian growing firmer, “And he’s not Wei Ying… Then who the hell is he?”
Jiang Fengmian shakes his head. “We’ll know when he wakes up.”
In the end, it takes the man an entire week to wake up. Jiang Yanli spends most of that time helping around the disciples and healers and servants, keeping herself busy. She also indeed does finish an entire crate of incense in the Ancestral Hall before her mother drags her out. Whenever she finds herself with too much time on her hands, her feet lead her to the room that has been given to the unknown man that looks too much like Wei Wuxian for her peace of mind.
She stands by his bedside, watching him breath in and out. She worries, most of the time. He’s too fragile-looking, too light, and there’s an expression on his face that shows untold pain and suffering even under the drugs. When she puts her hand into his and holds tight, the expression eases, so she does it often. His hands are big enough that her hand fits in his palm, but his skin is paper-thin and cold.
She worries a lot.
Meanwhile, the baffled healers share with them the discoveries they make with every inspection of the man’s battered body. It’s obvious that there is long-term starvation in the list of his ailments, and just as obvious are the many cuts and bruises and the distinct holes of arrow wounds around his body, the telling signs of a battle or several. There are bitemarks and missing chunks of flesh around his legs, where the healers guess a horde of fierce corpses must have attacked him.
There’s a thin, almost imperceptible surgery scar on his belly which if he were a woman would make more sense. There’s a brand of the Wen crest on his chest that fills them all with a burning fury. The most severe wound, the healers say, is where a spiritual sword has stabbed him through the chest, which seems to also be the slowest to heal.
He doesn’t have a golden core. This confuses the healers greatly, because his dantian has been cleared open —the way young cultivators start before they can form a golden core in there— and his meridians are powerful and clearly well-used. He’s not a mortal, but he’s as good as one. As it is, the only thing the healers can say is that he likely had a core once, but lost it somehow.
But while he doesn’t have spiritual energy, he certainly has another kind of energy.
“He should be dead,” The head healer says to her father, where they think she can’t hear. Not even her own family is free of the crime of frequently underestimating her cultivation. “He’s poisoned like nothing I’ve so much as heard before. His body is literally brimming with resentful energy, and it’s saturated everywhere in his flesh and bones— Sect Leader, at this point he’s more resentful energy than man! Just a trace of it can kill the most powerful cultivator, but this man has an amount that you’d be hard-pressed to find in a boatload of Waterborne Abysses! He should be long dead!”
“Is he in danger?” Jiang Fengmian asks, and then; “Are we in danger?”
“No,” The healer responds, as confused by his own answer as anyone else might be, “No, the energy isn’t harming him or lashing out. It’s circulating his body so docilely that you’d think it was spiritual energy. Heavens, I’d almost believe that he can cultivate it! Even if he dies, I don’t think the resentful energy will leave his body without extensive ritualwork, so it should be safe keeping him here.”
Jiang Yanli still goes to visit the man, despite the resentful energy, uncaring of the disciples that try to block her way, even though her mother orders her to stop. She pets his head, once, and he huffs in his sleep. The furrow between his brows disappears and terrifyingly familiar laugh-lines appear instead on the corners of his closed eyes, in the uptick of his lips. He murmurs something inaudible and all too familiar to her (Shijie—).
She can’t go and leave him alone after that, can she?
She can’t.
The next discovery of the healers’ is something that she doesn’t learn for a long time, and that she once again has to overhear. It’s his father, in his study, in yet another argument with her mother. She doesn’t understand what they’re talking about for a long time, and even thinks that it might be Wei Wuxian for one horrible second.
“—hundreds of purple lashmarks on his back!” His father exclaims then, revolted, at her audibly furious mother.
The next few seconds are spent trying to parse out the muffled words that they throw at each other, before Jiang Yanli hears her father again. It’s almost shocking, to hear so many of her father’s sentences so far away from the study. Usually it is only her mother that can be heard.
“—they’re intimately acquainted with Zidian’s work, San-Niang!” He says, and his voice is nearly shaking with anger. “Jiang Zhang guarantees it was Zidian! Do you even know the meaning of 'going too far'?! Is this not too much!”
“Why are you even so angry?!” Yu Ziyuan yells, both mad and exasperated, “I haven’t seen this man in my life! Who cares if he has this or that scar, I haven’t done a thing! Jiang Fengmian, you—”
The words go muffled again, and Jiang Yanli strains to understand the meaning of her father’s apparent distress and her mother’s answering confusion.
She suspects…
She’s her father’s daughter; she’s heard of how similar they are all too many times, and she sees the things in her father that she thinks most wouldn’t notice. She suspects that her father likely has an inkling as to who the sleeping man in their house is.
He doesn’t seem to like it. Jiang Yanli thinks that she probably won’t either.
She doesn’t.
The man wakes up after one week, when the healers finally deem him ready to respond to questions if not yet ready to leave bedrest, and cut off the drugs. Jiang Yanli isn’t there at the moment of his awakening, and neither are her mother and father who’re both too busy with Sect matters. She’s informed by Qingyu, one of the maids that she’s befriended, who whispers discreetly to her while her mother and father are being led to the man’s room, thinking to keep her out of the conflict.
Jiang Yanli is mature enough to appreciate the thought. She is also definitely going to take a completely random walk through the estate where she will accidentally bump into them in front of the room, and then she will be thankful to fate’s design that has allowed her to be there while her mother and father talk to the man for the first time.
The head healer is waiting in front of the room when they all arrive. “He’s not responsive,” Is the first thing he says, face set in a heavy frown, “At least not to any of us healers. Honestly, you’re not likely to get any answers out of him in this state. It has yet to be seen if this is a result of the physical trauma, the drugs, or— something else. But either way, giving it time might be our best choice. Unless of course Sect Leader would like to use other, more direct interrogation methods—”
“No.” Jiang Fengmian says, firm but pale, “No. There’s… no need. We’re not torturing friends.”
“Friends?” Yu Ziyuan asks, suspicious.
“Friends, of course. If nothing else, he’s clearly related to both Changze and A-Ying. That makes him a friend of our family.”
Jiang Yanli is in deep agreement with this assessment. Her mother huffs, clearly not, but she allows it. That’s as good as agreement from her anyways.
They enter the room. The man is sitting up on the bed, leant against the headboard, ignoring the people fussing around him. His hair has been tied out of his face by the healers and his robes are the Jiang patient robes, and like this, he looks scarily like Wei Wuxian. But unlike her bright and vivid brother, his face is cold and his grey eyes are hazy, staring blankly at the wall across the room. His thin hands are clenched into the sheets.
When Jiang Fengmian clears his throat, Yu Ziyuan willingly taking the back step in this situation of potential emotional confrontation, the man doesn’t so much as blink.
“Hello,” Jiang Fengmian says awkwardly, which doesn’t help either. He too falls into awkward quietness.
After a long silence, Jiang Yanli finally collects her courage.
“A-Xian,” She says. Her father stiffens in surprise, but she doesnt let his clear disbelief in her intelligence get to her. “A-Xian... won’t you speak to your Shijie?”
And then there’s a shocked, pained gasp. Jiang Yanli looks to see that the man has suddenly turned to face them, and that his cold expression has cracked into something painful, lips parted open in disbelief. He murmurs something, the same something that she hadn't been able to hear the few times he did it when he was asleep, and his voice is so hoarse that she almost doesn’t hear it this time either. But then he says it again, his throat raw, his lips trembling like he’s going to cry; “…Shijie.”
And Jiang Yanli knew it, but its still a blow to her heart.
“How..?” She asks.
Wei Wuxian, this older, unfamiliar Wei Wuxian, flinches like he’s been struck. His hands bunch up the bedsheets. “It was Jiang Cheng…” He says, with a pained smile that looks worse than if he’d let himself cry, “His revenge…”
“You said that he was unresponsive,” Yu Ziyuan growls at the healer from next to Jiang Yanli, startling her out of her shock, “Not that he was crazy! What’s with him?”
“Madam Yu… Uncle Jiang,” Wei Wuxian says, the pain in his hoarse voice growing until it’s nearly tangible. He shifts in the bed, hisses in pain, then ignores it to continue shuffling until he can lower his legs down the bed’s side. He doesn’t notice Jiang Fengmian and Jiang Yanli both lurching forward when he winces, intent on helping him.
“A-Ying,” Jiang Fengmian says, voice tremulous, “You’re A-Ying right? What are you— what are you doing here?”
Wei Wuxian pauses. He raises his head to look up at Jiang Fengmian with slowly blinking, still hazy eyes. It’s all too obvious that he’s not all the way there yet, that he’s not as aware as he acts like he is. “I died too,” He says despite his words being garbled through his injured throat, “This is… I don’t know. The underworld?”
“It is not. This is Lotus Pier, and we’re all in the mortal world.” Yu Ziyuan snaps at him before she glances at Jiang Fengmian, “What’s happening in here? You both think… What, that this man is Wei Ying?”
“That’s what Jiang Zhang said,” Jiang Fengmian admits with his strained eyes locked onto Wei Wuxian. “He’s the head healer, and he’s been perfectly familiar with A-Ying’s meridians since he came here… It’s unbelievable, I know, but he really thinks that this is an older A-Ying. You know that no one spiritual system can be the same as another, and this man’s is the same as A-Ying’s.”
Yu Ziyuan scoffs, but when no one comes out to say that they were joking, she pauses to reassess. “That’s ridiculous, even for you Fengmian.” She declares first, before saying; “If Wei Ying was here, we’d get a letter from the Lan Sect telling us he’d disappeared. There’s no way they didn't notice him being gone. It’s not possible.”
“It is,” Jiang Fengmian insists, turning towards his wife, “It is, if there are two of them. Our A-Ying at Gusu, and this— this A-Ying here.”
Yu Ziyuan continues to argue, saying something else in response, but Jiang Yanli has long since lost track of them. She can only watch, mute and deaf, as this older, painful Wei Wuxian slowly lowers himself onto the floor at the foot of the bed. He kneels. He’s looking at her, but she feels like he’s looking past her as well, because his gaze has gone distant again. But he keeps looking at her.
He opens his mouth to say something, still kneeling on the floor, but nothing comes out. He tries again. He tries one more time. Nothing comes out.
He closes his eyes and lets out a shaking breath of air.
Jiang Yanli wants to fill his silence, wants to put him right back into the bed where he belongs, wants him to stop looking at her with that look as if she’s tearing his body into agonisingly small pieces. She doesn’t manage to decide what to do before Wei Wuxian starts moving again.
He puts his fingers flat in front of his knees, looks up at her deeply through his lashes, and bows through his injuries to place his forehead onto the floor. There’s an immediate silence to her side, as if her parents have finally noticed the injured man kowtowing in front of them. “A-Ying..?” Jiang Fengmian asks, hesitant, “What are you doing?”
“I…” Wei Wuxian says, before his hoarse voice lowers into a whisper; “I’m sorry. And thank you.”
“Get up.” Yu Ziyuan spits, “Get up and explain yourself! What do you think you're doing, messing with time?! Don't think kneeling a little will get you out of it! Now get up!”
Wei Wuxian doesn’t get up. “I’m sorry,” He says instead. Hidden under the curtain of his long hair, there is the distinct plip, plip of tears dropping onto the floor. “I’m so sorry.”
“A-Xian,” Jiang Yanli finally says, dropping onto her knees in front of the man and tugging him forcefully out of his huddle. He’s pulled all too easily by the force of her hand, his body weaker than hers without a golden core, and the taste it leaves in her mouth is unbearable. She hugs him into her arms. “Stop, stop it. You have nothing to apologise for. Everything… everything will be okay. So let’s go back to bed, alright? Just— stop apologising.”
But Wei Wuxian doesn’t hear her. There are tears soaking her robes, dripping down the chin on her shoulder as Wei Wuxian looks out past her at the air behind. “I’m sorry,” He keeps saying with his unrecognisable, raw voice, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Jiang Yanli glances up at her parents, and they look at each other, both of them clearly feeling the same lost, scared confusion that she’s feeling.
Eventually, Wei Wuxian stops apologising. In fact, he stops talking all together, and Jiang Yanli is left with only the terrible impression that she failed, that she didn't say the right thing, that she didn't hug him tight enough. Jiang Fengmian kneels down next to her to wipe the tears falling silently down Wei Wuxian’s unseeing eyes with the hem of his robes, before helping her pull him up and into the bed.
He doesn’t react to any of their actions, other than to close his eyes painfully when Jiang Yanli sits at his side and turns his face to her with gentle hands. She doesn’t know if he can hear her words, but she still says it. She hopes it’s not too late to say it. “I love you. Whatever it is that you’re sorry for, I still love you. No matter what. A-Xian is always A-Xian to me.”
It’s a little embarrassing to do this out in the day, with her parents standing behind her, instead of in the corner of a dark wall at night where she used to find Wei Wuxian crying into his sleeves after a particularly harsh rebuke— but Jiang Yanli is nothing but shameless in her love. This, they share. She doesn’t know how Jiang Cheng would ever manage to have sibling bonds otherwise, if all of those siblings weren’t shamelessly proactive about their feelings.
If Wei Wuxian hears her, he doesn’t show it. But the pained expression on his face is no longer as tight as it had been, so she counts it as a win.
Notes:
Note: wwx says "it was jiang cheng" because he didnt die and instead disappeared after breaking the seal, so as far as he's concerned if anything killed him it must be that one sword stab jiang cheng managed to get in beforehand.
I posted this in a hurry bc Im nervous about it, if there are any typos etc please tell me. <3
Also, this was inspired by Mingyu, a story I like a lot-- I loved it so much that I asked for permission to try my hand at writing something inspired by the idea behind it :D I started writing it years ago (2020?? I think) lol but finally I couldn't hold back from publishing it.
No idea when I can update! This has 50k written already but who knows when it will grow any longer. I hope u all enjoy anyways and please tell me your thoughts!
Chapter Text
For Wei Wuxian, the passage of time is blurry. The past and the present and the future are mixing into each other like ink drops in water, until he can scarcely make out where and when he is. He can’t figure it out: whether he’s lost his control over resentful energy, consumed by his own power, or if he just lost his mind plain and simple. Memories appear in his mind that he hadn't been aware existed, sometimes, and then sometimes he finds himself spending unknown amounts of time unable to remember why he isn’t in the Cloud Recesses, why he isn’t in a war tent, why he isn’t the Burial Mounds.
(Xian-gege! A-Yuan yells, delighted.
When Wei Wuxian wakes up with his mind blank and frozen, there are only bloodstains left of the Wens in the Burial Mounds, and A-Yuan is nothing but a few pieces of the flesh he found scattered in a hut.
Wei Wuxian! Jiang Cheng roars, and Wei Wuxian feels the ever-so-far-away pain of a sword squelching in between his ribs, through his body. It shouldn’t be enough to kill him, not when he can even walk off stuffing his intestines back in, but—
Oh, he thinks, finally…
He attacks the Seal with the last of his lifeforce.)
It’s difficult to grab onto awareness, even when he finds the kind, gentle phantom of his shijie by his side and he wants to stay there with her. Most often, when he does catch it and hold it and stay in the present, his memories start slowly aligning themselves in linear order his mind, and he lets go of his already tenuous hold on reality as if it had burnt his hands. It’s easier like this, when he only has to deal with whatever memory or time is present around him and nothing else, even when that memory is terrible and frightening. The worst is to be forced to deal with the awareness of every single one of his sins at the same time.
(Sometimes he feels the weight of Shijie’s body in his hands, the warmth of her blood splashing on his face, Jiang Cheng’s screams muffled in the far distance, while the sound of her laboured breathing is louder than anything else. A-Xian… A-Xian make them stop first—)
(Then it passes, and he’s back in his cave in the Burial Mounds and Wen Ning is there and so is Wen Qing, and A-Yuan jumps into his arms crying about some silly thing or another, and Wei Wuxian lets himself be lost in the warmth.)
In this muddy, floating passage of time, Wei Wuxian finds himself dropping into harsher, clearer moments at times, ones that are spent on a bed in a familiar-unfamiliar room with some people that he knows are dead and some that he knows aren’t.
Those few clear moments feel stranger than the memories that come and go. But his mind is still cursedly sharp. He knows somewhere in a small corner of his thoughts that this is the real world, and that the more familiar memories that he ensconces himself in are the illusion. Sometimes, it is a relief. This incomprehensible, weird reality that he observes from inside a glass bowl seems to have an Uncle Jiang and a Madam Yu and a Shijie in it.
Other times, it is a curse. He knows. He knows that this is a reality doomed to destruction. There’s nothing he can do to keep it the way it is. Everything he touches shrivels in the palms of his hands.
(Around him, Lotus Pier burns. There are bodies everywhere. Why— Why did you have to play hero?! Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?! It’s your fault, it’s all your fault, Wei Wuxian! WEI WUXIAN! I will avenge A-Jie today—!)
It’s in one of those moments of horrible clarity that he finds a young Shijie with baby fat still softening her cheeks sitting by his side, holding one of his hands in both of hers. She must have snuck into his room without anyone knowing. Moonlight is streaming through the window and pools onto her sleeping robes.
“—and Father thinks that you came from the future,” She says, softly, as if she has been talking this whole time. There are tears in her eyes. “The future… it must be terrible. Father and Mother were fighting again in the study. I think Mother wants to call A-Xian back from Gusu, to make sure.”
Wei Wuxian looks at her, and his chest feels like it’s a dark well overflowing with helplessness and caustic, burning guilt.
“I— I’ve always been weak,” She says, laughing a little with no humour, “You know this, A-Xian. I guess you know even better, in the future; whatever happened to you, I’ve clearly been no help. I wish… ah. No, I suppose there’s no meaning in wishing for unreasonable things.” She sniffs, and her voice trembles. “Mother did always say that I’d be nothing but a burden, if I couldn’t cultivate better. I tried but… There’s no accounting for lack of talent. The future… Ah, A-Xian, what to do? Suddenly I’m not looking forward to the future at all…”
It’s almost unconscious habit that lifts Wei Wuxian’s hand and wipes Jiang Yanli’s tears away. She looks up at him in shock. A few more tears drip down, and Wei Wuxian brushes them away again.
Then, in the silence of the dark night, Jiang Yanli lets out a hesitant, tiny sob, and her face crumples in grief. Wei Wuxian is all but helpless against the urge to smother her small young self in comfort, and he rubs her tearstained cheek the way she did for him after the war, gentle and admonishing both.
(A-Xian, Shijie says, her cheeks thinned in grief and stress, her elaborately pinned-up hair messy now, white mourning dress soaked in warm beating red, and when she coughs a gurgle of blood drips into his hands. A-Xian… stop them first…)
Jiang Yanli throws herself onto his chest, and Wei Wuxian hesitantly, carefully, wraps his arms around her. She’s crying, he can feel her tears through the fabric of his robe, but she’s still hiding it, the way she always did before Wei Wuxian killed her.
He wants to leave. He wants to stop seeing this young, living Shijie. Wants to stop feeling responsible of her, wants to stop wanting to help— he wants to stop waking up in this reality and to stay asleep the way he thought he finally would when the sects came for him in the Burial Mounds. He wants to stop being afraid of losing her when he already knows how and when he will.
“Oh, A-Xian,” Jiang Yanli chokes out, “What do I do? I can’t do anything! I want to protect them so much, I— I—”
He doesn’t want to be here anymore.
“Is there anything good about the future? A-Xian, what kind of hateful future is there for us? Is there even anything good?” Jiang Yanli cries, her fingers curling into his back, “I hate it. I hate that I can’t do anything, I hate that I can’t protect you, that I can’t help anyone. I hate— I hate it. I hate—”
Wei Wuxian closes his eyes.
“You…” He manages to whisper, and when he allows himself to remember, the memories that he had been pushing away with both hands rush at him like vicious spirits. “A baby,” He says.
(You left your own Shijie’s child fatherless! Cries a man in his mind. Did he kill that guy or the one next to him, that night? He can’t remember. They’re all blurring together. You left your own nephew orphaned!)
“You had… a son,” He continues, voice dusty with disuse, “I haven’t seen him, but… they say he’s beautiful.”
“I did?” Jiang Yanli asks into his chest, wonder in her tone, “He was?”
“They said your wedding was the event of the century,” He says, trying to imagine what that might have looked like in his mind, instead of what she had looked like in his arms, dying. Koi Tower is dressed in cheerful red everywhere. There are silver bells and jade chimes hanging down branches and golden ribbons and crimson gauze cloth looping the ceilings. Flowers are blooming. Beaming maids are throwing petals at Shijie’s red-shoed feet. It must have been beautiful. “You looked stunning in your wedding dress. Jiang Cheng thought so too.”
(Wen Ning carries that soup so carefully all the way up the mountain. He gives it to A-Yuan. All the while, Wei Wuxian is grinning because Wen Ning is so ridiculous, but A-Yuan gets to have a taste of his aunt-in-all-but-blood’s perfect soup before—)
(—there’s nothing but bloodstains and a few strips of flesh left on the Burial Mounds. The Wens are all gone, lost to him in the time that he spent trying to bring himself back to sanity. A-Yuan is…)
(I’m sorry, Wen Qing says, smiling and crying, and Wen Ning bows because he can do neither. And thank you.)
“…A-Xian?” Jiang Yanli’s voice comes, and Wei Wuxian tilts his face to look at her where she’s leant back on the bed, looking up at him. “A-Xian… Can you hear me?”
(A-Xian… A-Xian, stop them first—)
“Shijie,” He says, and tears come to his eyes without his say so, “I’m sorry. I'm so sorry.”
Jiang Yanli lets out a sound that’s more a sob than a word. “Just… Just stop it…”
“I’m sorry.” No matter how many times he says it, it never feels enough for what he’s done to her. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry.”
“A-Xian, please,” Jiang Yanli begs and that’s a way he never wants to hear her be, “Please tell me, what happened to you? Can we change it? Please, how can I make the future better?”
Change it… Can it even be changed? Or is Wei Wuxian doomed to watch as every nightmare of his past is repeated before his eyes? Is it fate that Wei Wuxian be a villain? Is it fate that everyone he loves die? Can one truly go against fate?
He’s so tired of attempting the impossible, of swimming against the current.
He lets out a long breath, looking at the starry sky outside of his window, at the fluttering purple lotus flags on the walls, at the torch-lights being reflected from dark ponds as the wind stirs faint waves.
(A-Xian—)
(Promise me that you’ll protect him with your life!)
(WEI WUXIAN! I’ve come to avenge A-Jie today!)
(A-Yuan—! Where’s A-Yuan?! Granny? Uncle Four! Where are you— where— where—?
…is that… blood..?
No… no—
Nonononono—NO!!!
A-yuan! A-YUAN!)
(…the lanterns? Oh, we set them up for you. You’ll fall and break your legs otherwise, and then I’ll have even more work!)
The current of the murky river overtakes him, and the memories clamouring at the back of his head disappear. There are only the apparitions around him, and nothing else. He sees lanterns illuminating the dark road up the Burial Mounds, and a tiny, warm hand squeezes his own. His family is waiting up on the hill, grinning.
How many more families is he supposed to lose?
Wei Wuxian wishes he knew why he’d travelled through time, because he’s definitely never asked for it.
Days pass slowly. Jiang Yanli spends most of them by the older Wei Wuxian’s side. Her father accompanies her whenever he finds the time to, and her mother sometimes stands at a corner with all the fierce presence of a hell judge, but usually it’s just Jiang Yanli.
She observes as Wei Wuxian’s hair regains its shine and lustre in this much longer form, as his starved, bony body starts to look more evened out, and his skin loses some of its pallor. His hands are still thinner than she’d like, but his fingers have stopped looking like talons and gained some meat under the skin. She thinks that he blinks more often, and she frequently finds that he stares out of the window instead of at the wall. When a healer asks a question, he turns towards them more often. He doesn’t answer, though.
For the most part, Wei Wuxian rarely ever responds. The healers claim that he only ever talks to Jiang Yanli, but she’s seen him hug her father once too. Other than that, Jiang Yanli speaks and Wei Wuxian faces away at the distance. She wonders sometimes what he’s thinking about.
She hopes they’re nice things.
The thing that she’s looking forward to the most is her Wei Wuxian’s return, because seeing this broken, older Wei Wuxian day in and out has made it feel like she’s lost him. Her mother tells her that Jiang Cheng will also accompany Wei Wuxian home from Gusu, because they’ve claimed that a Jiang elder is sick and that the elder wishes for her beloved grandnephew and her favourite young head-disciple to be back.
They had considered just calling them back for a few days, but that would have been an insult to Lan Qiren’s honour, and Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng likely wouldn’t have been allowed to go to Gusu. With an excuse, they can stay back home for a week or two and go back to continue their lessons. And if there’s one thing that the Gusu Lan Sect will understand, it’s filial piety.
Jiang Yanli has the vague hope that while she and her parents haven’t been able to pull Wei Wuxian out of his daze, then maybe seeing Jiang Cheng or his younger self might.
In the end, however, she’s proven wrong.
It’s neither her nor anyone else that moves Wei Wuxian to act.
It’s not even a person.
That afternoon, she goes to check up on Wei Wuxian as usual and finds the room empty. The guards have been lifted for a while now, seeing as let alone attacking anyone, Wei Wuxian seems to have no intentions of so much as moving out of bed, so there’s nobody around that she can interrogate.
She panics for a moment, looking around the room and the hall as if she’ll be able to find Wei Wuxian hiding somewhere. Eventually though, her wits return to her, and she spots the kitchen boy loitering around the corner of the hall, seemingly waiting for anybody to pass. He brightens when he sees her, calling her Young Miss! with a harried but relieved voice.
“Meiyu-jie told me to bring you to her if I saw you coming!” He says, dragging her quickly through the halls, “I was so scared the Master or Madam would come first! Thank heavens it was Young Miss.”
“What’s happening?” She asks as she’s lead towards the narrower, less sparkly wings of the estate where the servants work and live. The boy takes her towards the kitchens. “Where is A— Where did the Young Master there go?”
“Oh— well... It was a bet, Young Miss, we really meant no harm by it,” The kitchen boy stutters, anxiety diffusing his entire body. “Meiyu-jie is simply no good at gardening, you see, and I come from a farming family, and I told her ‘Jie, I’m telling you, you couldn’t even grow the easiest crop, don’t underestimate farming!’. And she said that she could, and I dared her to grow a couple radishes on the patch of land in front of the kitchens… We really meant to make it so that it was left perfectly proper, Young Miss, I promise, and we wouldn’t ever eat the radishes of our master’s soil, we were gonna give it to the cooks if they came out edible! I’m so sorry, please don't tell Madam Yu—”
“Calm down, calm down,” Jiang Yanli says, thoroughly confused now, “What does this have to do with the Young Master?”
“I, uh… we were talking about the radish patch while passing by the guest halls,” The kitchen boy explains, also baffled, “And he insisted on coming to see it. He hasn’t left the patch for hours now! I didn't dare force him away, so Meiyu-jie told me to bring Young Miss if you came for that Young Master.”
At that, the boy brings Jiang Yanli out of the kitchens through a small door, and points to the left. There, the wild garden around the kitchen stretches out from below the only window, and under the shadows of the roof is Wei Wuxian.
He’s sitting leant against the outside of the kitchen wall, one knee pulled to his body with his cheek on it and his arm around it, the other leg stretched to the side. He’s silent as he looks down at the eight or nine little sprouts growing out of a truly small patch of dark soil next to the kitchen wall in front of him.
“A-Xian?” Jiang Yanli whispers, approaching him with small steps, her hands patting down her sleeves in a nervous gesture. She sees out of the corner of her eyes as the kitchen boy takes Meiyu, who was watching Wei Wuxian watch the radish sprouts with stress lining her pretty face, back into the kitchens.
“Shijie,” Wei Wuxian says without raising his grey eyes from the sprouts, but it feels like an achievement just to hear his voice.
“What are you doing?” Jiang Yanli says as she crouches next to him, far enough away that she won’t crowd him but close enough that he’ll hopefully remember her presence, and also looks at the radish sprouts.
“I’m wondering.” He says, slowly, “…wondering if he’s born yet.”
Jiang Yanli blinks. “Who, A-Xian?”
“A-Yuan,” Wei Wuxian says. He closes his eyes, but there is a tug on his lips that’s nothing like her Wei Wuxian’s bright grin, and yet still so warm as to be endlessly loving. When he opens his eyes back, the faint smile stays. He raises his left hand to brush a gentle fingertip on the tiny leaf of a sprout near his leg. “I used to bury him in the soil with the radish. He really thought he’d grow tall if he was buried and watered. Heh. Granny was laughing so hard you’d think she would die, but when Wen Qing that she-demon arrived, she’d instantly keep mum. Devious grandma. Put all the blame on me.”
Jiang Yanli tries to make sense of the story so desperately that her mind almost lets out a few sparks like the ones that come in particularly intense sword duel. A grandma, a woman —Wen Qing—, and an A-Yuan, likely a child. Wei Wuxian, this Wei Wuxian, looks to be approximately at the same age when her father had her.
Oh.
Oh no.
“A-Yuan was… Is A-Yuan your child?” She asks quietly. Wei Yuan, she thinks. Or maybe Wen Yuan, if this Wen Qing is the mother and Wei Wuxian married into her clan. She has a nephew or a niece.
“What child..?” Wei Wuxian lets out an amused breath, smile dimming, “He only ever called me ‘Father’ when he was scared. And even then he went and kept holding others’ legs and crying Father, Father, waiting for me to find him while causing misunderstandings everywhere.”
But if Wei Wuxian has a wife and a child… then back in his time, they are…
“Did you leave them behind, A-Xian?” She asks, feeling terrible, “Is that why you’re so sad?”
“Leave them behind?” Wei Wuxian repeats, confused. He brings his hand back, looking at the soil stains on his fingers like they hold all the answers he needs. The way he looks at it is distant again, but it’s more melancholy than hazy. He looks more aware than he had since he first woke up. “They’re all dead.”
The breath in Jiang Yanli’s throat gets stuck. She can’t do anything more than bring her shaking hand to cover her mouth to hide some of the all-encompassing horror she feels. She can’t even imagine…
“Granny, Uncle Four, Wen Qing… Wen Ning,” Wei Wuxian counts, closing a finger with every name until only the pinkie finger is left, before closing that too; “A-Yuan… They’re all gone.”
He lowers his hand. It is in the gentlest fist she has ever seen. There are no fingers left open.
“I wonder if the radishes are ready to harvest by now…” He says.
“Did you… plant radishes?” She asks, trying not to focus too much on Wei Wuxian losing so many people he loved, losing his wife and child even.
“Yes,” Wei Wuxian says. He laughs again. “I wanted potatoes, actually. Wen Qing was so mad when I used her money to buy potatoes instead of radish seeds. We planted them together, after she changed it herself. When they first sprouted, A-Yuan would talk to each plant every day, and I had to wash him each time because he would lie on his stomach on the soil.”
“That sounds… wonderful,” Jiang Yanli says, because she can’t go and say; that sounds like a poor life, A-Xian, where was the Jiang Sect’s money for you to buy your potatoes?
“I don’t even know what they did with them,” Wei Wuxian says, in the same vague tone he had used to wonder about the radishes, to the point where Jiang Yanli thinks he’s speaking about someone throwing away the radishes. She tries to hide her flinch when he continues with; “I didn't get the chance to find their bodies.”
“A-Xian…” Jiang Yanli whispers, and she can’t help but close her eyes over brimming tears.
A big hand lands softly on the top of her head. “Shijie. Don’t be sad,” Wei Wuxian says, voice as soft as the gentle hand on her hair, “I’m sorry.”
“Stop!” She blurts out, eyes flying open at that hated phrase, “Don’t say that. Stop saying sorry, please stop saying sorry!”
Miraculously, Wei Wuxian stops. His hand pets her head for a few more times before he pulls it back down to poke at a sprouted radish leaf. “In the future,” He says, “These radishes are gone.”
It takes Jiang Yanli a long while to catch up to the sudden change in subject.
“I… um,” She says, furrowing her brows. “Is that a bad thing?”
“Very, very bad,” Wei Wuxian responds. He shifts to put his cheek more comfortably on the arm he has around his raised knee. “In the future, they’re gone. But right now, they’re here, green and alive. So, in between, they must die. But if I don’t want to see it, is it truly bad if I don’t look?”
Jiang Yanli doesn’t know what to say to that. She doesn’t understand at all.
She’s been crouching for a long while now, and her lower legs are starting to ache from the position. She doesn’t have her brothers’ cultivation. She glances anxiously at the crumbly soil under her shoes, and at her own pale lavender dress that she absolutely must not dirty. It’s been so deeply ingrained into her, that something in her revolts at the sheer thought of sitting down on bare dirt.
But her legs have started trembling, and a question has been brewing in her mind for a long time— she can’t leave now.
Jiang Yanli plants her behind firmly on the dirty ground. She can almost feel the way her prim dress is starting to stain under her. Going by the way the corners of Wei Wuxian’s eyes soften as he looks at her, he also knows how much effort it took her to take this meagre measure that their conversation does not end, and he at the very least finds it amusing.
The expression, one that’s so far from the distant, numb sadness that’s been hanging around him, gives her the courage to ask her question. “A-Xian,” She says, hesitating, “Do you wish to still be back in your time?”
“My time…” Wei Wuxian murmurs, his eyes half-lidded as he turns back to brushing the radish sprouts. “It’s a bad place. I made it a bad place. But Shijie, I’d still rather be there than be here.”
“Why? If it’s so bad… Is it because you have people waiting for you there?”
Wei Wuxian huffs, amused. “I have no one.”
Jiang Yanli swallows. Right then. “Then, why?” She insists despite her choked voice, pushing through the sadness, “Don’t you want to change it, A-Xian? Don’t you want to change the future, if it’s so bad?”
“Can it?” He asks, “Can it be changed?”
And honestly, Jiang Yanli doesn’t know. She’s been learning about fate and the heavenly mandates and the destinies they all carry since she was a small child. She doesn’t see how a single man coming to the past could trump over all of those laws and certainties. But she has to hope. She has to hope.
She balls her hands on her robes, lips pursed and face firmed. “Attempt the impossible! A-Xian, that’s how we must live— if there is badness in the future, then we must do all we can to fight against it. Even if it’s impossible, we must attempt it, for all of our sakes. Surely, then, the heavens will show us a way.”
“I’m tired,” Wei Wuxian says, his hair shifting quietly on the dirt as he leans his forehead lower. “I’m tired of the impossible, Shijie. I was supposed to be done. It was supposed to be over already.”
I died too, says Wei Wuxian’s voice in her head, filling her with fright. It was supposed to be over.
“You are not done!” She snaps, and for a moment she sounds so much like her mother that she scares herself. “You’re not done in the least! It’s not over, and it’s not going to be over until everything is good and happy and the future is beautiful— and, and you have your family with you— and I’m not going to let it! I’m not going to let it be over, okay, A-Xian? It’s not… it’s not over— it’s not over until I say so!”
By the end of her outburst, there are tears falling down her eyes and snot clogging her nose and her throat burns.
“I’m not— I’m not going to let it,” She chokes out, and she buries her head onto her knees and balled fists, hiding her face, “I won’t, A-Xian! You’re fighting until I say stop! Okay? Alright?”
It’s just like that first night when Jiang Yanli snuck out of her room desperate to talk to someone that wasn’t her mother or father, her insides full of pain and tears after yet another scolding, and found herself sobbing ungracefully in front of this man that is both familiar and unfamiliar. The implications that this Wei Wuxian carries are terrible and they make her feel shaken and lost and younger than she has ever felt, but he’s still Wei Wuxian, still the brother that she loves, and it’s such a terrible mismatch that she somehow constantly finds herself crying around him.
And just like that night, Wei Wuxian immediately focuses on her whenever she cries, reaching out to gather her in a hug that makes her acutely aware of how much bigger he has gotten. He’s older than the Wei Wuxian she knows, and is apparently a once-father, so he obviously deals with crying by plying the crier with affection— but it still makes her feel odd.
Her Wei Wuxian never knows what to do when a girl cries around him. He jokes and pleads and teases until they stop out of anger, and she’d feel terrible if she cried near him because even a weak older sister like her has her own pride in front of her little brothers. This Wei Wuxian makes her feel all at once like she got an older brother and a younger brother at the same time.
“If you’re tired,” She declares through her tears, grabbing angrily at the fabric of his robes and holding tight, “If you’re tired, then I’ll make you soup.”
“Shijie,” Wei Wuxian sighs.
“I don’t care! You’ll drink your soup and I’ll hug you and you’ll sleep well and then you will have the energy,” She hiccups, firming her own determination as she speaks. “And then we’ll all fight so that the future is the best future. We’ll— we’ll try our best, okay? And if we still fail… and if we try our best and it still doesn’t work and we still fail, then I’ll forgive you for what might happen. But if we try and we succeed, then there won’t be anything to forgive, so you’ll stop apologizing and we’ll all live amazing lives. Alright?”
A hand passes through her hair, brushing it down her back, and she feels it when Wei Wuxian sighs again. “Ah, Shijie,” He says, “You’ve always been the strongest of us all.”
“A-Xian!” Jiang Yanli protests, hitting his chest once with a forceless, scolding palm. “Alright?”
“…Once,” Wei Wuxian says, and when she looks up, he’s once again watching the radishes through the corner of his eyes. “I promised myself I would do anything for your forgiveness…”
Jiang Yanli looks up in a hurry. “Then you’ll try? We’ll try to change the future?”
“They’re weak and small and I’m terrible at keeping things alive,” Wei Wuxian says, and it’s unknown whether he’s talking about the radishes or something else. “And it won’t change all the ones that died in my hands. But if I can change it, if I’m… allowed… Then, I guess— I’ll try to save as many as I can.”
He takes a deep breath, and meets her eyes with his own.
They’re clear silver.
“Alright,” He says.
Notes:
Im weak so here's chapter 2.
This is not nearly it for wwx's journey to being a well-adjusted man. But we are finally at the beginning of the story <3
Outrageous misunderstandings quota: I (WWX is the tragic widower of a dead Wen woman..?)
Chapter Text
Jiang Cheng steps out of the boat he shares with Wei Wuxian with unease pooling in his guts. Lan Qiren told them about the letter he had received, the one about Elder Wanhua being sick and wanting to see them or something, but Jiang Cheng has never even talked to that Elder before. He can tell an excuse from a reason when he sees it.
The only thing he doesn’t know is why. Why call them back so urgently?
And so the unease keeps expanding.
“—and Lan Zhan, you know how he is,” Wei Wuxian laughs loudly and obnoxiously behind him, leaping up onto the pier, “He was so mad, he literally shouted at me! Hahaha, you should have seen his face! His ears were bright red! Thank heavens I brought my Suibian, right? He just started swinging his sword around, yelling Wei Ying, Wei Ying with this furious voice, hahaha! He even tore apart Nie-xiong’s book and—”
“Can you just shut up for one second!” Jiang Cheng snaps, finally fed up. He’s too focused on the feeling of anxiety that all of this is giving him.
“Wow, alright,” Wei Wuxian says, raising his hands defensively. He still looks like he’s laughing at Jiang Cheng, which is supremely annoying.
“Why isn’t A-Jie here yet?” Jiang Cheng asks instead of commenting on that, because if he does then Wei Wuxian will definitely mock him. “Usually she’s always here to welcome us…”
“Maybe she forgot?” Wei Wuxian says, shrugging. “It’s not like it’s her job or anything, and we did arrive a little early.”
“Young Master! Dashixiong!” A voice interrupts them then, and their youngest shidi comes running to the pier. His face isn’t as light and cheerful as it usually is, and Jiang Cheng feels another rock land onto the rockheap in his stomach. “Welcome back! The Young Lady sent me to bring you this time.”
“Did something happen?” Jiang Cheng asks, striding past the disciple and hurrying towards the estate. “Is A-Jie sick?”
“No, no, Young Lady is fine. It’s… something else,” The disciple stumbles after him, and Jiang Cheng shares a glance of confusion with Wei Wuxian.
“What happened?” Wei Wuxian asks as he steps beside Jiang Cheng, grinning, “Did someone ascend or something? You’re so harried!”
“I don’t know exactly,” The disciple mumbles, looking this way and that before continuing with a whisper, “A cultivator fell through the roof. Nobody knows who it is, Dashixiong, they aren’t telling us anything. Whoever it is, they’re staying in the estate, but nobody’s seen them. I think they must be someone important.”
Jiang Cheng narrows his eyes. “Why?”
“Because Young Lady visits them every day!” The disciple exclaims with the enthusiasm of one who has great gossip to share, “And the Sect Leader goes there whenever he has the time. I’ve heard, you know, that even Madam Yu visits their room occasionally. Madam Yu! Visiting the sick! They must be someone important!”
They reach home soon enough, and the disciple directs them to the Sect Leader’s office with a look that says he’s burning with curiosity and hates that he can’t come with them. Jiang Cheng walks rapidly through the halls with Wei Wuxian behind him, forgetting momentarily in his stress that he’s allowed to run here in Lotus Pier.
When they knock on the door and enter the study, his mother and father are there, standing to the side and talking about something with quiet, serious voices. Jiang Yanli is sitting in front of Jiang Fengmian’s table, kneeling on a pillow and drinking tea. Her face is troubled, though it melts into a smile when she spots them.
“…Shijie?” Wei Wuxian asks from behind Jiang Cheng, stepping around to stand beside him. “Madam Yu? Uncle Jiang? What’s going on here?”
“We have something to tell you,” Jiang Fengmian says, before pausing awkwardly, clearly unable to say whatever it is that he has to tell them.
“A-Xian,” Jiang Yanli takes over. Her smile is much less bright than it ought to be. “A-Cheng. Welcome back home. Come sit down, have tea.”
The way Jiang Cheng’s parents wait for them to listen to Jiang Yanli tells him more than anything else about how harrowing this conversation will be. Whatever it is, even his mother feels it better for them to be sitting down for it. Jiang Cheng shares a brief, wary glance with Wei Wuxian before they both sit in front of Jiang Yanli at the table.
His sister pours them both tea. They sip it, not wanting to be rude. It’s Jiang Yanli’s special calming chamomile blend.
Ominous.
Only then does conversation continue.
“So you were right,” Yu Ziyuan says slowly to Jiang Fengmian, and Jiang Cheng turns to see that she’s looking appraisingly at Wei Wuxian. “There are two of them. Just what we needed.”
“San-Niang, please,” Jiang Fengmian sighs, “Can we not do this right now?”
“When else are we going to do it?” Yu Ziyuan says, and Jiang Cheng takes advantage of a lull in the conversation before she can continue that with a rant.
“What’s going on?” He interjects, holding the tea cup in clenched hands. “There are two of what?”
“Have you heard anything?” Jiang Fengmian asks, also coming around the table to lift his robes and sit at the head spot. “Perhaps of a cultivator that fell into our estate, injured, and that we harboured him and healed his wounds?”
Jiang Cheng nods together with Wei Wuxian.
“Have you heard of how he looked so much like A-Ying that I,” Jiang Fengmian swallows, “That I, in my worry, mistook him for his father?”
“He looks like me?” Wei Wuxian asks, the tea shaking in his hands, before he visibly pulls the cheer back onto his face. “But, like, older hmm... Is he my uncle or something? I’m handsomer right, Uncle Jiang?”
“Can you stop joking for once in your life, Wei Wuxian?” Jiang Cheng groans.
“A-Cheng!” Jiang Yanli scolds, unexpectedly sharply, and Jiang Cheng turns wide eyes at her.
“What?” He asks, betrayed, as Wei Wuxian hehs at his misery. “But A-Jie, he—”
“Don’t… don’t say that, A-Cheng,” Jiang Yanli sighs. Her eyes slide imperceptibly across Wei Wuxian’s smug, grinning, idiotic face with wistfulness in her expression. Jiang Cheng wonders what that’s about.
Jiang Fengmian clears his throat. “A-Cheng, A-Ying,” He says, uncharacteristically hesitant, “It wasn’t A-Ying’s relative that appeared here. It was…”
He stops again, unable to continue.
“Oh for..!” Yu Ziyuan scoffs at Jiang Fengmian’s unusual hesitance, rolling her eyes as she folds herself gracefully onto the last empty pillow. “It’s an older version of Wei Wuxian from the future. He has somehow fallen through time.”
“What? He's really from the future?” Wei Wuxian asks, wide-eyed.
“Yes, he is really.” Yu Ziyuan says, and then, before Jiang Cheng can open his mouth; “Yes, we’re sure. The head healer checked him over; his meridians, his scars, everything matches perfectly. A-Li supports his story. The honourable Second Elder called him a freak and a never-before-seen anomaly.”
A freak and a never-before-seen anomaly..? The Second Elder is an honourable astronomer, the only one in the Jiang Clan, and Jiang Cheng has never heard him say a second word when one would suffice before. Wait hold on that's not the important part now—
“Just… how?” Jiang Cheng asks, mind blank, and then another vital question occurs to him, “Then do we know about the future now?”
“No,” Yu Ziyuan spits, “We don’t know anything about the future at all because the useless brat refuses to interact like a normal human being.”
Jiang Cheng doesn’t know what to say anymore. Next to him, Wei Wuxian shifts in place, toying with the teacup and for once, no one tells him its rude.
“I don’t get it,” Wei Wuxian declares finally, “If he’s me from the future, how come you don’t know everything? I’d definitely tell Uncle Jiang everything so that he can get all the good nighthunts for us! And I’d tell Shijie about how perfect and beautiful she grows up to be! And Jiang Cheng about how many more matchmakers he’ll be blacklisted by! And Madam Yu…”
He can’t seem to think of that one. He hesitates and thinks for a long while before coming up with; “And Madam Yu about all the new punishments she’ll invent?”
“You’d indeed know all about them,” Yu Ziyuan snorts, and it’s so much more restrained than Jiang Cheng has ever heard her speak to Wei Wuxian. Now that he thinks about it, his mother hasn’t made those especially vicious remarks of hers towards Wei Wuxian since they arrived, and most of her anger had been directed at Jiang Fengmian instead. Her lips twist as she looks at Wei Wuxian; not in her usual furious sneer, but rather in disappointment, in half a pity even.
The unease stirs once more in Jiang Cheng’s stomach.
“So—” Wei Wuxian continues, “Why didn't I tell you? And where am I, uh— where is he anyways? Shouldn’t he be around for this conversation? I’d hate to be left out of this! I’d want to see our faces during the reveal!”
Jiang Cheng’s parents exchange unreadable glances across the table. Jiang Yanli sips her tea with a wobbly smile that looks like it’s there solely for their sakes. Jiang Fengmian gives Wei Wuxian a kind, loving look that would have had Jiang Cheng’s chest constricting if not for how incredibly pitying it seems. Wei Wuxian must have felt it too, because his hackles visibly rise and he draws himself back.
“Is he dead?” Jiang Cheng asks, then, because that was the only answer he could come up with. “Is he dying?”
“No, his wounds have all started to heal,” Jiang Fengmian says, with a sigh in his voice. “I’m afraid, A-Ying— this older you, he’s… not as we imagined. Not very much like you.”
“At all,” Yu Ziyuan scoffs. She likely means for it to be a mocking jeer, but it comes out no less short than when she says ‘what a waste’ about a strong disciple who died doing something particularly stupid.
Wei Wuxian swallows, and gives a shaky laugh. “Oh, come on, Uncle Jiang,” He jokes, “How different can he be? You know I’m never gonna be anything but ridiculous, like Jiang Cheng says!”
“Yeah, Mom, Dad,” Jiang Cheng huffs, “This idiot’s incapable of changing. Heaven knows how many times I’ve tried to do it!”
Nobody says anything for a moment. Yu Ziyuan sips her tea.
Jiang Cheng exchanges another glance with Wei Wuxian.
“…He’s been through a lot,” Jiang Yanli says after the moment passes, smiling apologetically at Wei Wuxian.
“Like what?” Wei Wuxian wonders.
Yu Ziyuan glares at him. “You’re going to have to ask A-Li,” She says accusingly, “She’s the only one that knows anything, and she refuses to tell.”
“It’s not my place,” Jiang Yanli says, shaking her head.
“We should make him tell the future by force if necessary!” Yu Ziyuan says, now glaring at Jiang Fengmian. “Who does he think he is? We’re feeding him and clothing him and he’s not even willing to talk to us.”
“We’re not threatening him, San-Niang,” Jiang Fengmian interrupts her, “He can stay here for as long as he wants, he doesn’t need to speak if he can’t bring himself to.”
“It’s not a greeting or a courtesy we’re asking of him, it’s information from the future.” Yu Ziyuan says, “We could be getting countless treasures, lucrative treaties, hidden nighthunts! What you’re telling me here is that you value that brat’s little comfort more than our sect’s livelihood. Jiang Fengmian sometimes I cannot even believe—”
“My lady, my answer isn’t going to change no matter when you bring it up,” Jiang Fengmian says tiredly. “How many times must we argue about this same thing?”
Yu Ziyuan purses her lips so hard they pale, but before she can speak out again Jiang Yanli pours more tea for her. “Mother, here, your cup is empty,” She whispers with a weak smile.
Yu Ziyuan looks at the cup of fresh tea resentfully, but clicks her tongue and starts drinking it.
“Sorry, I just don’t…” Jiang Cheng says, shaking his head, but he doesn’t even know how to continue that with. He just doesn’t what? He just doesn’t believe it? He just doesn’t understand? He just doesn’t agree with anything that’s been said? He just can’t digest all of these things at the same time, it’s too much?
These are all true.
“I want to see it,” Wei Wuxian says, resolute now.
That’s exactly what he needs. “I want to see it too,” Jiang Cheng says. “I want to see both Wei Wuxians in the same place before I believe it.”
“Just what I said,” His mother has a sharp smile on her face as she nods. Jiang Cheng preens a little.
His parents don’t inflict onto them the injustice of having to sit around talking about inconsequential things until the tea is finished, and Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian are led towards a room near those that their family shares, but still far enough away to be proper.
As they approach, a healer is walking out of the room with a bundle of bloodied bandages in her hands. She bows at them as she walks by, and Jiang Cheng just pauses for a moment in front of the doors to take a deep breath and calm his nerves.
Wei Wuxian has no such compunctions. He slides open the door and bursts into the room without so much as a moment’s hesitation, only to freeze in a place just past the door. Jiang Cheng sighs as he follows after him, pushing him forward to be able to enter, and very deliberately not laughing when Wei Wuxian stumbles ahead at the push. His family walk into the room with less of a spectacle, silent and sombre in a way they have no right to be when entering a Wei Wuxian’s room.
Since Wei Wuxian is still standing stupidly in the middle of the room, Jiang Cheng decides to step around him like one would around a particularly badly-placed, obnoxious column.
The first thing he sees is the mess of numerous loose papers strewn around the room. A faint breeze entering through the window pushes one over Jiang Cheng’s foot, and he glances down at it to see the drawing of a complicated piece of metalwork that he certainly doesn’t understand. There are tiny scribbles of ink around the drawing, denoting different parts of it to someone that might understand, and the hand-writing is so familiar that Jiang Cheng almost makes a doubletake. He’s only ever seen that chicken-scratch written into things like cheat sheets and funny notes on Lan Qiren’s manner of speech, and never on anything so important-looking.
His eyes follow naturally along the floor, jumping from paper to paper, taking in the odd talisman designs, the hasty, lopsided equations, the drawings of increasingly more complicated mechanics.
Eventually, in the middle of the biggest pile of scattered notes, there’s the bed. A man is leaning against the headboard with his bare torso covered from top to bottom in clean bandages that are pink in places with new blood, his bunched-up patient robe forgotten around his hips. He has a brush in his hand that is poised on a notebook, but he’s staring blankly out of the window, not looking at the page.
His face is wan and gaunt, and his eyes are distant. He’s not smiling. But it’s still such a familiar face, still so very much Wei Wuxian’s face, that Jiang Cheng is completely stumped.
“That’s… me?” Wei Wuxian whispers to himself in a hushed voice that says he didn't intend to be heard by anyone at all, “But he’s so still.”
He is. The man hasn’t so much as twitched in the time that has passed since they arrived in his room, and the brush his hand is drip-dripping ink onto the page in a stain that’s growing ever deeper. Jiang Yanli steps past them, and towards the man, calling “A-Xian,” in this soft quiet voice, but the man only blinks slowly a few times. He doesn’t seem to be altogether right in the head, and Jiang Cheng balks at the idea that this is Wei Wuxian in any shape or form.
Jiang Yanli perches on the man’s side on a spot where there aren’t any papers and takes the abandoned patient’s robe behind him in her hands, helping put the robe over his shoulders to offer at least a modicum of dignity to the man that clearly doesn’t care at all about it. “A-Xian,” She calls again, endlessly patient and without a change in expression, as if she’s done this many times before.
This time, the man seems to awaken from his daze. He blinks again, and his distant, uncaring gaze drags from the window and towards Jiang Yanli. At the sight of her, his eyes focus a little back into life, and his numb blank face moves into a frowning one. “…Shijie,” He greets, his voice hoarse. He takes a few of the papers at his wall side and holds them out to Jiang Yanli, who takes them with an open hand. “I haven’t finished the array yet. These are the only things I have.”
Jiang Yanli shakes her head with a small smile. “I’m not here for that today,” She says, before blinking at the papers given to her, “What are these for?”
“Spirit Attraction Flags,” The man says, tilting his head. His longer, untied hair brushes across his shoulder, and he makes no move to put it back. “Use them on nighthunts, share with other clans if you wish. I marked the ranges of all three types; long distance, mid, and short.”
Indeed, there are three papers in Jiang Yanli’s hands, and they do seem to be designs for cloth talismans. “Thank you,” She says, smiling brightly.
The man’s frown lifts at that, and he even seems to have a pale, cold mockery of Wei Wuxian’s smile on his face. “I will try, and we’ll see if anything can be changed,” He says, and when Jiang Cheng looks around, he sees that only Jiang Yanli seems to understand what he means.
“I’m sure it can,” She says with fire in her eyes, her hands crinkling the papers, “I believe in A-Xian.”
The man gives a snort that’s darker and more cutting than even anything Jiang Cheng has heard from his mother. But he doesn’t do anything but shake his head, turning his gaze away from Jiang Yanli and towards his notebook again. He lifts the brush. He turns over the page that’s too stained to be written on with an uncaringness that tells of how used he is to zoning out and forgetting his brush. He dips the brush in ink. He starts writing.
“…” Jiang Yanli raises her hand as if to touch him, but lowers it without doing so. She says instead, “A-Xian.”
The brush stills. The man raises his face again, looking at Jiang Yanli as if in question.
“I’m not here for your research today,” Jiang Yanli says, before gesturing with her sleeve at Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian who are both standing frozen in disbelief behind her. “A-Cheng and, ah, the younger A-Xian are here.”
“Hm,” The man says, and if his gaze flits across them then it definitely doesn’t do so for long, because Jiang Cheng feels like he didn't even look at them. He’s focused only on his notes. “Why is Jiang Cheng here?”
That visibly throws Jiang Yanli for a loop. “Why wouldn’t he be?”
“I got kicked out,” The man says, and he moves a few fingers in Wei Wuxian’s vague direction as if he can’t even be bothered to gesture with his hand, let alone with his whole body the way Wei Wuxian does. “Why is Jiang Cheng back at the same time?”
“Nobody got kicked out, we called them back,” Jiang Fengmian says now, finally interjecting into the conversation and stepping forward to sit at the foot of the man’s bed, across Jiang Yanli. Yu Ziyuan is in the shadow of a corner, arms crossed and glaring at Wei Wuxian as if he really was kicked out and it wasn’t a crazy man’s delusions.
“So he hasn’t been kicked out yet,” The man says, considering. Jiang Cheng kind of wants to punch him in the face for the way his mother is eyeing Wei Wuxian.
“You were kicked out?” Yu Ziyuan snaps at the man, looking between Wei Wuxian and him as if she can’t decide who to be angrier at. “Were you even thinking about the Jiang Sect’s reputation?! How can you get kicked out?! You— you’ll definitely bring disaster on the Jiang Sect! How many times have I told you not to—”
Too late, she notices that the man’s attention has long since slipped, and he is looking at her but not seeing her. Jiang Cheng can tell by the way his eyes unfocus and his hands curl around the blanket into clenched fists, the way Jiang Yanli’s lips are pursed and she very carefully doesn’t turn her displeased gaze towards their mother.
Yu Ziyuan huffs and puffs and rubs Zidian with her thumb but doesn’t do anything else. She just throws an angry glance at Wei Wuxian —who has become startlingly still— and scoffs out; “That’s one good way you’ve developed to escape retribution.”
“That’s,” Wei Wuxian says, and then he laughs, “That’s not me.”
Jiang Fengmian’s face softens even further in pity. “It is. I’m sorry, A-Ying, I don’t know what happened in the future, but it must have been difficult. I’m sure that A-Ying isn’t always this— isn’t always like this in the future either. He’s just not in very good health right now.”
He says it so beautifully, so offhandedly, as if nothing is wrong, as if they can’t all hear the words he hid in between.
I’m sure A-Ying isn’t always this— he says. Jiang Cheng can fill in the blanks. I’m sure he isn’t always this broken.
Like the wooden dog figure Jiang Cheng used to carry around after his puppies were sent away, everywhere from bed to bath to the training grounds where a distracted disciple dropped a heavy rock onto it. Like the wooden figure with its limbs torn and face bent and deep cracks and fractures everywhere; useless and heart-wrenching and so fragile that when Jiang Cheng had taken it in hand it had crumbled into little pieces.
Like the wooden figure, there one second and gone the next; in the future, Wei Wuxian is broken.
“He doesn’t act like me at all!” Wei Wuxian protests, desperate smile hiding the real unease underneath it, but even like this he’s smiling while the future him hasn’t smiled properly once during this entire time. “He’s so— dark. And frowny! And silent! And, and he isn’t even trying to get out of bed! Are you sure he isn’t Jiang Cheng’s future self? I mean sure he looks like me in the face, but how do we know he’s me inside?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Wei Ying,” Yu Ziyuan sighs, “Healer Zhang says that his spiritual system is an exact match for yours. He’s you.”
Wei Wuxian falls silent with shocking speed, and it looks less like easy acceptance and more like a sort of— resignation. “But…” He says, “What happened?”
That’s what Jiang Cheng wants to know.
His father has on his face the same expression he had when he had to tell Wei Wuxian that there were more than three thousand rules in the Gusu Lan Sect that they’d be expected to obey, only hundreds of times more despondent. “We don’t know the exact reason,” He says, with a silent but attached to the end, “There are many wounds on him. One of them is… a brand.”
Jiang Cheng recoils, hand grabbing Wei Wuxian’s sleeve in an almost instinctual need to keep him close, and feeling terrible when Wei Wuxian doesn’t so much as comment on it, let alone tease him. “A brand?” He asks, and before he can stop himself, he finds himself adding; “Like— like a cattle brand?”
His mother harrumphs with a dark face. His father swallows deeply. Jiang Yanli is too focused on the future version Wei Wuxian who is seemingly absorbed in writing something with rapid speed on his notebook, both thankfully not hearing Jiang Cheng’s blunder.
“It is the scar from a brand,” Jiang Fengmian repeats, nodding at Jiang Cheng’s graceless but apparently legitimate question. “In the shape of the Qishan Wen Sect’s crest. They’ve branded him with their sect crest. The Wen Sect… they’re the oldest sect, so their power and pride are to be expected. But all they’ve ever openly done till now has been to cause some trouble or steal some resources, nothing we can’t turn a blind eye to. Nothing so overt as this… This… I don’t know how it could have come to this. And another of A-Ying’s wounds, it’s— actually, A-Ying maybe you should sit down first.”
“I’m fine,” Wei Wuxian says, insistent, “Tell me Uncle Jiang.”
“Well it’s,” Jiang Fengmian hesitates again, glancing at the older Wei Wuxian who’s writing like his life depends on it, and then he whispers as he continues; “It’s his golden core. It’s gone. Removed.”
“No one can figure it out,” Yu Ziyuan frowns, “It should be impossible. I’ve never heard of a curse or creature that can destroy cores. But if anyone would have such an artifact… it’d be the Wen Sect.”
“He’s been stabbed so close to the heart,” Jiang Fengmian says, mournful.
And Jiang Cheng can suddenly see that very same picture in front of his eyes, inescapable and absolutely horrifying.
His hand leaps from Wei Wuxian’s sleeve to around Wei Wuxian’s wrist, holding it in an iron grip. There is an inferno in his heart, when he so much as imagines it, when he thinks about someone breaking Wei Wuxian’s golden core, about someone scarring him and wounding him and branding him, someone taking him away from Jiang Cheng and stabbing him through the heart. Fury rises storm-quick inside of him, and the Wen Sect is the only viable target.
“I’m going to kill them,” He whispers, the words burning in his throat like flames. The Wen Sect had made this cracked, broken Wei Wuxian in front of him from the cheerful, happy-go-lucky Wei Wuxian by his side— and Jiang Cheng remembers his wooden figure, remembers the disciple and the rock, and wonders just what he could have done if that disciple had been gleefully, cruelly using it to shatter his figure instead.
He’s never killed a person before. Seeing this Wei Wuxian, he thinks he could do it anyways.
“You will not kill anyone,” His mother says, voice heavy, and the not for Wei Wuxian, is implied. “Ridiculous! Do you know how many years it’s been since any of the great sects warred? We’re not going to war with the Wen Sect.”
From the side, an unexpected voice agrees. “Not yet,” He says, and Jiang Cheng turns to find the older Wei Wuxian looking at Yu Ziyuan. “But we will.”
“Who are you to decide that kind of—”
“They will attack first,” The future Wei Wuxian interrupts, a careless, arrogant impatience in his tone despite speaking to Yu Ziyuan who he’s always treated with caution if not fear. “They’ll burn down Lotus Pier.”
The room is silent, so oppressive that the shadows seem to elongate and bear down on them.
The older Wei Wuxian closes his eyes, and breathes deeply through his nose. His hand is shaking around the brush he’s holding. Jiang Yanli brushes the outer robe hanging down his shoulders, and when that meagre comfort isn’t rejected, she puts a supportive hand on his back. He keeps breathing quietly, and when he finally opens his eyes, they’re unprecedently focused.
“They are too strong to keep the peace,” He says, “In two years, the minor sects; in three or four, the great sects. They will subjugate more and more sects until either there’s a war or the Wens rule all of China. We will have to fight, or we’ll be enslaved.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask, A-Ying…” Jiang Fengmian starts hesitantly, placing his hand on the older Wei Wuxian’s thin ankle over the blanket, “Because of some things you have mentioned a few times…”
The future Wei Wuxian furrows his brows. “What is it?”
“Just who… who of us in this room, who of our family—” Jiang Fengmian shakes his head. “A-Ying, who died? Who of us even lived?”
The older Wei Wuxian’s hardened and lined face softens at that, but not in a good way. It softens like fruit left outside, like something too old and tired to keep its firmness, like grief and pain are poison seeping into his expression and eating away at his muscles. He lifts an arm gently, gently, and points at Jiang Cheng. He’s still not looking at him.
Jiang Cheng takes a shaky step back from that thin hand pointing at him. “I… I died?” He asks.
Wei Wuxian shakes his head. “Jiang Cheng survived,” He says.
And then, mysteriously, his face seems to lighten just a little as something occurs to him. He turns to Yu Ziyuan and says with a voice full of wonder; “I fulfilled my promise.”
Yu Ziyuan’s eyes narrow in confusion for one second, two seconds, and then her expression clears. She gives Wei Wuxian a complicated look. “…Good job,” She says, finally, with an intonation as if she might even add thank you, next.
Wei Wuxian almost smiles.
This entire interaction fills Jiang Cheng with ice and dread. “Wait, wait, wait! Who survived? What promise? Me and who, Wei Wuxian?” He asks, and when Wei Wuxian doesn’t answer, he asks again with a shaking voice, “Me and who?! Who else, Wei Wuxian! Who else survived?!”
He’s just about to lurch forward, intent on shaking the answers out of the man, when his hand tugs on something. It’s the younger Wei Wuxian’s hand, the wrist he had been holding onto that Wei Wuxian had turned around to grab Jiang Cheng. The younger Wei Wuxian shakes his head as well.
On his face is a look that says he just might have understood what was going on between Yu Ziyuan and the older Wei Wuxian.
“You—” Jiang Cheng snarls, ripping his wrist out of Wei Wuxian’s hand, and he turns towards the time-traveller to ask again; “You are not telling me that I was the only one that survived, I know you’re not. You’re not, so tell me clearly, Wei Wuxian— Who. Survived.”
Wei Wuxian —the older one— lets out a long, weak sigh. “Jiang Cheng,” He says, pained, and he’s still not looking at him.
“What about you?” Jiang Cheng begs, truly desperate now, “You’re alive now. So you must have survived too. It wasn’t just me. It couldn’t be.”
“I’m sorry, Jiang Cheng,” The older Wei Wuxian says, bowing his head. His hair slithers down to cover his face in shadows, and with his gaunt face and haunted eyes he truly does look like someone who might have died.
“How?” Jiang Cheng asks, “Why? How did they die?!”
Wei Wuxian’s hands clench so tight on the bedding that his knuckles pale. And yet the sheets don’t rip and the mattress doesn’t puncture because the man doesn’t have a golden core, he’s no stronger than a strong mortal. Jiang Cheng hates it. He hates it so much.
“Why?” He repeats, and a tentative hand lands on his shoulder, strong and warm and reminding him that the withered man in front of him isn’t the real Wei Wuxian, that the real one is the one behind him. That the real one is still strong and happy and light, still the same person Jiang Cheng always wants him to be. That this older, scarred version is just a passing stranger.
The man in front of him raises his head. “Meaningless wars,” He looks aside with a sardonic tilt of his lips, his eyes dark as his lashes come close to each other, and though Jiang Cheng’s hackles rise he can’t actually tell who the man is mocking; his family or himself. “Meaningless deaths. They were all killed trying to protect things that couldn’t be protected.”
“Then what about you?” Jiang Cheng demands.
The mocking darkness overtakes the man’s expression fully. He only says, “Killed in revenge.”
It doesn’t mean anything to Jiang Cheng, but Jiang Yanli lets out a gasp of such profound pain that he startles together with everyone else. “No,” She says, clearly having realized something terrible that everyone else hasn’t. She grasps one of the man’s hands in hers, tears gathering in her eyes as she pleads, “No, he wouldn’t have. He couldn’t have. He— A-Xian, when you said— the first time you woke up, when you said A-Cheng’s—”
“Don’t!” The man commands with such force in his voice that the entire room seems to ripple, before Jiang Cheng remembers that it isn’t possible because he doesn’t have any spiritual power.
Jiang Yanli has been shocked mute, the wavering tears now streaming down her face, and obviously this is as much confirmation as she needs, because she hiccups.
“Shijie…” The man sighs, his expression now clear of that acrid expression, and he looks at Jiang Yanli with his eyes a softer shade of grief. He pets her hair in comfort, “Why are you crying again? It hasn’t happened yet, has it?”
“Because, you said—” Jiang Yanli tries, and she hurries to pull out a handkerchief and dab at her eyes, wiping the tears away and steadying herself the way she always does. She’s just so strong, and she never seems to want to let neither Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian nor her parents see her vulnerable. “You said— and, your… your family… A-Yuan and them, were they—? Was it—? It wasn’t him, was it?”
“It wasn’t,” The man says, “Probably.”
“Probably?” Jiang Yanli asks, sounding a little hysterical now.
“Shijie. Don’t cry,” The man says, pulling Jiang Yanli into a hug that she unexpectedly allows. “It’s okay, I’m not upset. It was another life. Didn't you say we would change it? I’m not upset about it. There was a lot going on there, it’s already behind me. There’s nothing to be sad about.”
Jiang Cheng doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and looking at the way his always strong, always proper sister is crying, so desperately, even the question of it raises chills in his heart. He doesn’t want to know anymore.
More relevantly, he also doesn’t know why his mother is allowing this. It’s not that Jiang Cheng thinks there’s anything wrong with Wei Wuxian and his sister hugging —because they would never ever look at each other that way, ew, plus Jiang Yanli is in love with that peacock— but Yu Ziyuan is usually onto them like a vicious spirit whenever Jiang Yanli so much as brushes Wei Wuxian’s hair away from his face. Right now, that man is… literally consoling Jiang Yanli the way Jiang Cheng sometimes sees the more shameless parents embracing their toddlers in the marketplace, and Yu Ziyuan should have blasted the man halfway out of the room with Zidian already.
Jiang Cheng’s eyes slide away from the bed and towards the corner where his mother is, and he finds her looking at the man with uncharacteristic shock on her face, with something underlining it that’s almost confused, an outrage as if the very foundations of her life have been shaken. Looking at the man, her brows furrow so furiously that her shaking eyes look strange.
He scowls. His mother definitely figured out whatever it was that sent Jiang Yanli into such grief. He looks at his father to see if he’s figured it out as well, and sees that he’s looking around with the same desperate cluelessness and curiosity that Jiang Cheng is feeling. That makes Jiang Cheng feel a lot better. If nothing else, his father hasn’t gotten it either. Maybe it’s even a girl thing, and he’s not supposed to figure it out at all.
Perfect.
“Wei Wuxian,” Comes the hoarse voice of the time-traveller, and Jiang Cheng sees Wei Wuxian snap into attention beside him. Jiang Yanli has stopped crying, and is wiping her face with her handkerchief again.
The room is silent as they wait.
The man looks deeply at Wei Wuxian with his dark grey eyes, and he says; “Remember. If we can change one thing, we can change everything. If we can’t change one thing, then it must mean that fate is moving as it was planned, and we can’t change anything.”
“What?” Wei Wuxian asks.
“Remember,” The man insists, and Wei Wuxian gives a shaky nod. “Fighting Jin Zixuan in Gusu now is the same as killing Shijie at the Nightless City in the future. Don’t punch him. Prove that the future can be changed.”
For a moment, everything is still and sombre, and they try to digest this mountain-heavy sentence that the man has dropped into their midst. Jiang Cheng feels wobbly and nauseous, trying not to think about his beloved older sister, dead, and where— the Nightless City? The Wens. He thinks if this time-traveller keeps talking he’s just going to steal Zidian one day and go on a rampage and not even Wen Ruohan will be left intact, let alone Jiang Cheng’s sanity.
Then, as if nothing has changed and everything is still the same, Yu Ziyuan suddenly bursts out with a furious growl;
“You punched JIN ZIXUAN?!”
And Wei Wuxian ducks around Jiang Cheng, hiding from the flashing purple lights of Zidian’s erratic flickering while yelling “Wait I didn’t, I didn’t, I won’t—!”, and Jiang Cheng huffs, and Jiang Yanli laughs wetly from the side…
And Jiang Cheng thinks that maybe he can keep his sanity after all.
When he glances to the right, he finds the older, feeble Wei Wuxian looking back at them. There’s a softness at the corner of his mouth.
Yes. He can keep it together after all.
Notes:
F in the chat for all the new traumas inflicted upon Jiang family members. It's for their own good lol.
Also: the Zhao Sect is still standing well and as there's relative peace real cultivator-cultivator fights are rare, so in this fic's timeline, Wen Zhuliu (currently Zhao Zhuliu) is still an unknown and a part of his original sect.
Knowledge about future wwx's pairing etc for those who are worried and enjoy spoilers:
hanguang-jun and a-yuan are coming to the past too!! pairings are wangxian for everyone lol. This is much later in the story tho.
Chapter Text
“San-Niang, I’m busy right now. Let’s talk more about this later.”
Yu Ziyuan slams the door behind her as she storms out of Jiang Fengmian’s study. If she has to swallow her anger down for another second, she will simply grab her husband by the robes and scream and scream and scream. It will earn her no sympathy nor any further consideration. That man will write off everything she said to him as just an attack of hysteria and in the end he will continue doing as he likes.
“Madam…” Jinzhu murmurs as she and Yinzhu hurry after her through the enclosing halls of the estate. They don’t say anything more than that.
They too have learnt by now: no matter how strong she is, how decisive, how overbearing, she will never be a master of Lotus Pier. She will always only be the wife of the sect leader, and Jiang Fengmian will always be the final decision maker. If he says he will raise a servant’s son alongside his children, the servant’s son will be raised alongside his children. If he says he will allow her to arrange an engagement for Yanli but not for A-Cheng, not a single sect will offer her their daughters. If he says they will not be pressing a literal bearer of future knowledge for his very knowledge… then they will not be pressing him, will they now.
It was one thing when she only wanted to interrogate him for some benefits, a bit of extra fortune. Now that they’ve confirmed that they’re facing a war and the imminent deaths of both themselves and their daughter, it’s a whole other issue. Yu Ziyuan would have assumed it would be the case for Jiang Fengmian as well but clearly, it isn’t. What, we still have years? What, let him have a couple of days to adjust at least? It’s the deaths of the whole clan, the whole sect, their own daughter!
No amount of arguing or shouting or trying to reason with Jiang Fengmian has ever worked. She’s heard them all, those little excuses of him, the not now, and the can we not, and the I’m tired, let’s talk later, San-Niang please. Arguments pass from one of his ears to another, shouting only makes him fall quieter, insults and curses slide off his smiling face, that very smiling face that she fell in love with when they were still young and Jiang Fengmian still had those joyful, carefree eyes she couldn’t take her gaze from.
Back then, he had obviously been the only noble man out there who wouldn’t lock her out of meetings and call her a shrew to his friends. She knows that even now he doesn’t speak a single bad word about her to anyone, not like Jin Guangshan does about her closest friend. Once upon a time, Yu Ziyuan had thought that to be an expression of Jiang Fengmian’s regard for her. She had thought that one day in the future, after the thrall of Cangse Sanren passed, he may even come to give her his heart in return for the one he had stolen from her.
Youth was a foolish time. Jiang Fengmian has yet to give her a single real concession, let alone something as vulnerable as his heart.
Yu Ziyuan grits her teeth. After an argument like this, normally she would take her maids and leave immediately on a nighthunt to blow off steam. But it doesn’t feel right, this time. She’s anxious. Her skin feels clammy, blood running like blistering lightning, mind caught in the thought of war, at the presence of invisible enemies, at the mere possibility of her precious A-Li dying.
“This hall..?” Jinzhu says, eyes wide as she follows behind Yu Ziyuan’s prowling path. As they pass through the shadowed inner corridors, the walls turn towards where Yu Ziyuan was told explicitly not to go. The door at the end comes closer and closer.
Yu Ziyuan pauses in front of the door, skin tightening at the faint brush of remnant resentful energy seeping out from under it. Her eyes sharpen into a flinty glare.
“Madam… is this a good idea?”
“Jinzhu.” Yinzhu warns her sister to stop questioning Yu Ziyuan, quiet as always. Jinzhu falls silent in response, though she’s still visibly worried. These two are her firmest allies and the most trustworthy supporters she has in her life. She had wanted to give her kids allies like this, once, but servitude in Yunmeng Jiang simply does not work like that. Forcing it would only alienate her children from their clan and do nothing to help support them.
“Jinzhu,” Yu Ziyuan says, pausing before she pats the younger woman on her shoulder once in thanks. She then turns back to the door. “You guard the hall. Yinzhu, go outside to the window. Don’t let anyone enter or leave.”
The two look hesitant, but when Yinzhu nods and heads towards the window, Jinzhu also turns around to put her back to the door. Yu Ziyuan nods and enters the guest room without allowing herself to hesitate.
Inside the room, the air feels stale. The setting sun has cast a dim red hue across the floor, and there is no breeze despite the wide open window. At the bed by the window, a young man is sitting silently and watching a flock of birds fly across the sky over the Jiang Estate. Yu Ziyuan knows that there’s no way he missed the distant figure of Yinzhu where she’s gone to guard the area around the window at a far enough distance to miss their conversation. But it’s impossible to tell what he thinks of it. What he thinks of anything around him, really. His expressions are muted, and he has all the faint and hazy presence of a drifting spirit.
It unsettles Yu Ziyuan every single time. She closes the door with a harsh crack, walking towards the bed in silence. “Wei Ying,” She calls, voice already grating at the complete non-response this man has towards her. “Wei Ying! Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
He turns around.
It doesn’t make sense that a man who looks around with those distant eyes, a gaze like the world around him is a dream he will wake up from at any moment, could possibly be Wei Wuxian.
But this Wei Wuxian is a man out of his own time. A man isolated in a world not his own, cut off from the ties of his own life and untethered to this new present they all share. He’s not truly connected to anyone here, after all. All the people he knows, the life he recognizes, have disappeared like the haze of a dream the moment he opened his eyes here. And in return, Yu Ziyuan can hardly recognize him, nor can she trust that he has their best interests at heart.
“…Madam Yu,” The man greets quietly.
His expression carries regret and confusion, as if he doesn’t even know how to treat Yu Ziyuan. It’s that carelessness in his gaze, the lack of caution when he looks at her that feels like disdain, which irritates her the most. He’s not concerned with the power she wields, not truly, not anymore.
Beyond that power, she doesn’t know how to act towards Wei Wuxian, and he to her. They’re no longer the matriarch and the little bastard kid she doesn’t want. They’re a powerless host and a valuable guest, two people who should never have had the chance to meet; passing acquaintances with a rotten history.
He can only stare at her, evaluative and hesitant and uncaring, uncaring, uncaring. “Do you need something from me?”
It unsettles her.
Yu Ziyuan purses her lips before sniffing, “What do you think, Wei Ying? Did you think I would have simply forgotten everything you just spilled out? You must regard me as stupid, if so.”
Wei Wuxian only continues staring at her, expression tired. “…what is this about, Madam Yu?”
Yu Ziyuan says this plainly; “I’ve had enough of your vague hints and crumb trails. Speak clearly, how does the Jiang Sect get destroyed? How do we and my children die, Wei Ying?”
“The sect’s destruction..?” Wei Wuxian swallows visibly, already looking nauseous. But she doesn’t have time for his weaknesses.
“Yes,” Yu Ziyuan says, “You should have spoken to us the moment you arrived here. We have to prepare, Wei Ying!”
“Right. You’re right. You should know,” Wei Wuxian murmurs with his voice hoarse, “The Wen Sect… a battalion under Wen Chao attacks Lotus Pier.”
“Wen… Chao?”
That sleazy, talentless, useless brat that Wen Ruohan hides away more often than speaks about? Yu Ziyuan can’t take the thought of a worthless waste of space daring to stand against the peerless Jiang Sect she married into.
Wei Wuxian’s expression says that he more than agrees with Yu Ziyuan’s hate and distaste.
“How could he even..!” Yu Ziyuan clicks her tongue, “How did it happen? What do they attack first? The gates? The towers?”
“When the Wen Sect starts the war, first the minor sects around Qishan are all destroyed, then the Lan Sect, and then the Jiang Sect,” Wei Wuxian says in a low voice, every word slow and sharp-edged like they cut his throat as they pass, “They kill the cultivators holding up the barrier formation first, then they kill the Jiang archers. That dog of Wen Chao… Wen Zhuliu matches you in battle. Uncle Jiang and his reinforcements get struck down by arrows. After your cores are melted, you and Uncle Jiang are killed…”
Wei Wuxian’s hands are have started on the bed, his face pasty white and pupils large.
“They display your bodies,” He says, “I had to fight Jiang Cheng to stop him from going in… They display your corpses, you and Uncle Jiang, and the shidi and shimei... most of them are killed and piled on top of other corpses, waiting to rot. We watched it from behind the river grass. The bugs and the crows were already gathering. While we watched, the Wens… they had a feast over your corpses.”
Yu Ziyuan notices that she’s breathing shallowly, the air heavy and stuck in her lungs. Wei Wuxian’s eyes are lost and he’s also breathing through gritted teeth. His pauses like he will continue to speak at any moment, but no words are coming out.
“Then what?” Yu Ziyuan manages to ask, swallowing through a bone-dry throat. This isn’t what she really wants to know; only what she has to know as the Madam of the Jiang Sect. What she wants to know is who exactly lives, who dies, and how to prevent those deaths. What she wants to know is how this leads to her daughter dying in the Nightless City.
Wei Wuxian is silent, his eyes unfocused, lost in another time.
“Wei Ying!” Yu Ziyuan says, and Wei Wuxian snaps back into reality. He stares at her with those large, shaking eyes. “Tell me clearly, who lived and who died? Which of our disciples?”
“I…” Wei Wuxian gasps. He calms his breaths down slowly. “…It’s been a while since you all died, Madam Yu. It was a massacre… I can’t really remember… Fifth shimei, uh, she had her stomach cut out. Third shidi’s corpse was down without any eyes… The elders were killed by arrows. One of the shidi’s head was at the bottom of the pile, maybe Jishen..? The ones who lived and came back during the Sunshot Campaign… maybe second shimei? I can’t remember… I can’t remember their faces.”
Something bubbles in Yu Ziyuan that’s almost fury but not quite. Closer to fear than that.
She had always kept in mind the possibility that this man might not even be a time traveller; that maybe he was just some new type of creature, some exceptionally dedicated conman… But now, if asked, she would admit it: This Wei Wuxian really did live through the massacre he’s describing.
The more she sees him, the more she’s convinced that Jiang Fengmian was right in his thoughts, the more it seems certain that this man came from a terrible if horrifically realistic future.
“Try to remember then,” Yu Ziyuan snaps, “You always say you forget what doesn’t matter, don’t you Wei Ying? Could there be anything that matters than this? Remember!”
“I don’t remember..!” Wei Wuxian says shakily and clasps his hand on his head as if just the act of trying to think is painful. “How much did I try to forget these deaths? I don’t remember it. I don’t remember… I can’t even remember how I went from one warfront to the other those days. I can’t remember how I went from that damn battle at the Nightless City back to the Mounds to die… I can’t even remember how I ended up here in the past..!”
“You dared to say that I and my husband died a meaningless death,” Yu Ziyuan grits out, voice dangerously low, “If you dare make a claim like that, you should better remember enough to explain it, Wei Ying!”
Wei Wuxian takes a shaky breath, his fingers clenched in his hair. “I remember enough to know that when the Wen soldiers broke the sect wards, you should have escaped! You and Uncle Jiang and as many of the disciples as you could take. All of you died there just to make a stand!”
“Shut your mouth!” Yu Ziyuan clenches her fists and hisses, “You take that back right now, Wei Ying. How dare you. You want the mighty Jiang Sect to abandon our land to some lawless bastards? It’s more honourable than anything else to die standing for our home!”
“Five fleets of Wen soldiers… How could you defeat them without the sect wards?” Wei Wuxian’s voice also starts rising now. “What’s the point of an honourable death? All it does is that you leave people behind, people who needed you, Jiang Cheng and Shijie and I who needed you! After you died, all we got was a few words, a passing praise there and gone. What honour, Madam Yu?! You died meaninglessly!”
“Better to die an honourable death than live like a squirming worm!”
Wei Wuxian laughs a terrible, awful laugh and repeats Yu Ziyuan’s phrase as if it was so very interesting, “A squirming worm?”
“Do you know anything about honour, you ungrateful kid?!” Yu Ziyuan demands, furious now, “If we run away when enemies are at the door, the Jiang name will be sullied forever. Calling the deaths of your elders meaningless, calling the death of my daughter meaningless..! What would a servant’s child know about a noble death, hah! If you know what’s good for you, apologise right now!”
Wei Wuxian laughs again, his whole body shivering with it. “What would I know about a noble death?”
He moves off of the bed. When he stands, even as emancipated as he is, he looms over her. There is something uncomfortable about the way his hair slithers over the sheets, the way he stalks forward from the bed, the way his chest stutters with his laughter.
Something strange about the way that for every step he takes the shadows seem to distort around the room.
“What would you know about death, Madam Yu?” Wei Wuxian asks, standing at a distance from her, laughing silently.
“Wh—what?” Yu Ziyuan stops herself from taking a step back. But the unease melts into the anger and Zidian crackles on her finger. “I’m a cultivator with decades of experience! I’m more than familiar with—"
“Who have you lost, Madam Yu?” Wei Wuxian’s lips are pulled in a terrifying laugh that sits unfamiliar on that face, his tone too harsh for the always-cheerful Wei Ying in her memory. “Who have you killed? How many? How did you kill them? Easily? Honourably? As painfully as you could make it? Who did you torture again and again until they begged to die?”
Wei Wuxian takes a step forward and Yu Ziyuan stumbles back.
“How many corpses have you hugged? How many times did you get stuck with a dead body still clutching you? How many times have you thought to kill yourself? Whose soul have you cupped in your hands and poured back into place?! There’s no honour or nobility in death! It’s meaningless! What would you know, Madam Yu? What could you know about death!”
Zidian flies through the room in a lightning flash that burns through the shadows. Right as it reaches him, Wei Wuxian tilts his head gently to the side and Zidian sails past his loose hair to strike one of the bed posts.
The wood of the bed post explodes into a cloud of hundred splinters.
Zidian slithers back to Yu Ziyuan, who is trembling with her teeth gritted harshly enough to creak.
Wei Wuxian doesn’t say another word, merely putting his palm on his eyes with his head bowed, his shoulders still shaking. Yu Ziyuan can’t tell if he’s laughing or crying because either way it’s too maddened.
“How did my daughter die, Wei Ying?” She asks directly, through gritted teeth, “How did my daughter die!”
“I killed her!” Wei Wuxian cries out, his voice shaking with that possibly-laughter. “She died a death as foolish as you, trying to protect me! She died to protect me, and Jiang Cheng ran me with a sword, isn’t that meaningless? She wasn’t supposed to be there. She wasn’t even supposed to be there! She could have been alive, you and Uncle Jiang could have been alive, but you are all dead! Isn’t that meaningless?! She died a meaningless death trying to protect a man who dies anyways!”
Yu Ziyuan cries out and attacks him with Zidian. The whip catches around a ceiling beam and wraps around his throat, snapping sharply as if to break his neck. “I’ll kill you!”
Wei Wuxian cries breathlessly with his hand on the whip digging into his neck. “What’s going to happen if you kill me?” He chokes out, “Everything will just be the same again! It’s too late!”
“I’ll kill you first then that ingrate outside!” Yu Ziyuan snarls and yanks at the whip. She can hardly even think straight. “That will keep them safe! After you die..! After you die… they’ll be safe!”
Wei Wuxian, the frail powerless man she has tied by the neck, lashes out with his hand.
A force of pure black coldness throws Yu Ziyuan across the room to the wall.
The crash slams against her ribs, making her gasp for breath. When she comes back to awareness, there’s a sharp bruised pain in her back and her neck, and she can’t feel the ground under feet. Zidian has fallen limply to the floor.
Before she can even look up, she immediately senses the slimy, freezing-cold discomfort of resentful energy shrouding the room. There’s a claw of resentment at her throat holding her up against the wall by the neck.
Yu Ziyuan opens her eyes with difficulty, breathing hard. The room is buried in darkness like the dead of the night, the window and door impossible to see. The only thing she can barely see is a dim silhouette of a man creeping towards her through the black room… A pair of shining blood-red eyes looking at her from a hazy face.
And suddenly, Yu Ziyuan can feel it. A shadow of death staring at her. Something unfathomably evil and powerful.
It’s Wei Wuxian.
The resentment that they all thought he was poisoned by… it’s all under Wei Wuxian’s control.
“I can’t die.” Wei Wuxian whispers, those terrifying crimson eyes staring at her. “I can’t die. You think they’ll be safe if you kill me? Do you really think the Wen Sect won’t come here? What lows didn’t I fall to, just to see Jiang Cheng alive at the head of this sect?! You think he’ll be fine all alone? I can’t die Madam Yu! …I promised Shijie. I have to keep her safe this time. I promised her I’d try. I have to try. I have to try.”
Yu Ziyuan croaks out a curse, “Diseased dog who bites the hand that feeds it..!”
Wei Wuxian breathes harshly and angrily but doesn’t speak out.
He takes one last look at her before he lets her go.
Yu Ziyuan lands on her feet and rubs her bruised throat. The darkness in the room has receded a little bit, allowing a blurry and dim portion of the light outside to stream in. But still, the room is in complete silence, without any sound passing through the darkness. The window is merely a hazy outline, like a silhouette seen when underwater in the darkest depths of a lake.
She can see Wei Wuxian’s face now, the unresigned expression on it.
His throat is also bruised, perhaps worse than hers, but he doesn’t even touch it. It’s as if the pain means nothing to him. That more than anything seems to separate him from the boy she’s trained, who can ignore pain just as well but does so with intention and makes a point to complain as much about it as possible. She hates that she can imagine Yanli jumping in front of a sword for him right this moment, him or that brat version of him. Hates that she can imagine A-Cheng doing the same for that boy.
“…” Yu Ziyuan glares at him and glares at him and just can’t figure it out. She says in a hoarse voice, “A-Cheng’s revenge…”
Wei Wuxian flinches.
“Did A-Cheng really kill you?” She can see her daughter dying for him, this boy that barely means anything to her, just a servant’s son who’s inserted himself into her family like a favoured bastard child she can’t do shit about… and she can’t even imagine her son killing him for it in revenge. She can’t even imagine it.
“…” Wei Wuxian looks at her with just as much exhaustion and contemplation as she looked at him with. He turns his eyes away. “…Sandu was the last sword in me. But if I didn’t die of that, I’m sure I would have died some other way.” In a very quiet voice, more the whisper of the wind than a man’s speech, Yu Ziyuan hears the words; “…after all, even Shijie was dead. Everyone I protected… even A-Yuan... everyone was dead.”
A-Yuan…Yu Ziyuan is the one who looks away this time. She’s not so interested in him as to ask if that’s his child or wife. But she remembers her daughter’s words, ‘But your family..?’ and feels a faint touch in her heart, some connection that she loathes to admit, connecting her and this man who’s lost his entire family without being able to do anything about it.
Even a stray rock would receive a speck of affection if it stayed fifteen years in your home. Even Wei Wuxian, that servant’s son she can neither accept nor chase out, features in a couple few good memories.
“If I die now, there won’t be anyone to protect them,” Wei Wuxian murmurs quietly, a stark shadow even in the wavering darkness of the room. His crimson eyes are half-hidden under his trembling lashes. “There won’t be anyone to protect Lotus Pier, and you and Uncle Jiang… I promised Shijie I’d try to protect everyone. Madam Yu…” His voice shakes for a mere moment from the intensity of his emotions. He looks straight into her eyes. “Madam Yu, before, I once promised myself that I’d do anything Shijie asked me to... anything at all.”
Yu Ziyuan swallows harshly. The Wei Wuxian who grew up in her home; that naughty, irreverent, joyful boy too talented for his own good… this man doesn’t look like that Wei Wuxian. The more she interacts with him the more he looks nothing like Wei Wuxian. But even this man so unlike Wei Wuxian— when he says that he’d do anything for her daughter, she can’t help but believe it.
Her stifled heartbeat seems abnormally loud in the boxed-up pure silence of the room. There is a choice to be made here: One that she has had to make over and over again in her life.
Compromise with him or be pushed to the side.
This man is going to do what he sees the need to do no matter what she says or does, and he’s more than powerful enough to stand against her. She can’t kill him or subdue him herself. What would happen if she went to her husband with the knowledge that once, this man killed their daughter? He’d say that A-Li moved to protect her brother and forgive him in a heartbeat. What about this resentful energy, this power he controls? Who’s going to believe her in the first place! Perhaps if she commanded the Jiang disciples against him, it might be a reasonable offense… but in a divide between her and Jiang Fengmian, the Jiang disciples will always defer to their sect leader. Against her husband’s decisions, she has never wielded any real power. In the truly important matters, she has never wielded any real power.
All she can do is shout at her husband and curse him and blame him. Then blame herself for being too weak to do anything without his concessions. Blame her kids for being too weak to leverage for their mother’s authority.
And now…
“Protect Lotus Pier… the Lotus Pier that you dared called me foolish for trying to protect, how can you alone protect it?” Yu Ziyuan asks roughly, after a moment. “Five fleets of soldiers, hundreds of Wen cultivators… what can you do against such a thread?”
Wei Wuxian looks at her again with his glowing crimson eyes, face shadowed and wan and tired. “I can kill them.”
“Kill them?! Hundreds of cultivators, hundreds! With what army are you planning to kill them?!”
“Their own army,” Wei Wuxian says easily, like he’s speaking of his morning routine or something else he’s done countless times in the past and could still do with his eyes closed. “Those who serve them, those who hate them, those who they’ve killed, they themselves… I will raise every single dead thing in Yunmeng and kill them.”
All the hairs on Yu Ziyuan’s back rise. The words spill from her lips like wind on sand, hissed and quiet; “You’re talking about necromancy… actual necromancy, controlling the dead, on the scale of an army…”
Wei Wuxian continues staring at her as he says, “With what army do you think we killed them when Jiang Cheng retook Lotus Pier from the Wens?”
Right… the Jiang Sect demolished, the Jiang cultivators all killed. She hadn’t forgotten that the Jiang Sect would be destroyed, but it’s simply so outrageous that she can’t even visualise it. Even if she knows it logically, it doesn’t actually register in her mind. But that’s right; if all the experienced and loyal Jiang cultivators were killed, even if they recruited a few dozen new cultivators it wouldn’t be enough to lay a siege on that scale. So, it must really be this man who served as the largest portion of A-Cheng’s power during that war which he describes.
Yu Ziyuan looks again at Wei Wuxian, at this unfamiliar, faintly horrifying man who stands in her home with all the power of a whole army folded into himself. She imagines it. The vast pressure he exudes, this threat of death he weighs down on her without even pulling out a weapon, the terrible ease with which he speaks about killing hundreds of cultivators… all of it behind her son as they lay waste to the army of the strongest sect in the world.
She swallows again.
“…A-Cheng killed you in revenge for A-Li’s death,” She says in a slow, cut voice, “Do you feel that there are any blood debts between you and the Jiang Sect?”
“No,” Wei Wuxian murmurs, “I’ve let that all go already. Now, there’s nothing Jiang Cheng and I owe each other… least of all blood.”
Yu Ziyuan smooths down the tight sleeves of her robes, brushes her fingers against the bruises on her throat. The shadows around them flicker one way and another, like plumes of smoke from a wavering fire, and slowly dissipate.
In the full sunset light that starts seeping back into the room alongside the birdsong, Yu Ziyuan can glimpse the cold sweat on Wei Wuxian’s sickly pale skin. He’s shaky and hazy-eyed, all of his fingers trembling as he stands. Somehow he looks less sane like this, when he’s just standing there and winding down, than when he was lashing out at her with cold precision.
“Can you really stay in control of all this resentful energy?” Yu Ziyuan demands.
Wei Wuxian starts laughing again and turns around to stumble towards his bed on his chewed down and patched up legs. His long hair swishes behind him as he wavers. “Who could say?” He chuckles.
Once again, snapped threads of too many unrelated thoughts rush through Yu Ziyuan’s mind: He’s a danger to all around him. His only goal is to act as Jiang Yanli asked him to. He’s older than when she had her children, he probably has children himself. He doesn’t have anyone anymore. He could be a weapon of unmatched power at her hands. He’s not in his right mind. He prides himself in having promised her to protect A-Cheng and having done it. Can she really trust what he says he can do? If the Wen Sect really attack the Jiang Sect there’s no way they could defend themselves alone. Jiang Fengmian doesn’t know anything about him and his power, for once she can finally be a step ahead. What difference does it even make if she’s a step ahead when she doesn’t have any real authority anyways? If the Wens attack… if the Wens attack…
If the Wens attack..?
Yu Ziyuan suddenly realizes it.
The Wen Sect, the strongest of all major sects, is actually going to attack the Jiang Sect.
Her heart starts thundering in her chest, fear and fury making her hands shake faintly. If all those she loves are destined to be massacred by some arrogant alleged-overlord, then Yu Ziyuan would even make a deal with a real demon to destroy them.
Let alone Wei Wuxian, she’d even clasp hands with a real demon to protect her family.
“In a few days, I’m leaving on a nighthunt,” Yu Ziyuan says, “You come with me when I go. Show me what you can do.”
Wei Wuxian wavers again before he turns to look blankly at her. The shadows dissipate entirely.
“And if you really are all that you claim…” Yu Ziyuan takes a deep breath before meeting the eyes of the too-powerful man in front of her. “So that we can make sure that no one can scratch a single flag of this sect… I will compromise to collaborate with you.”
The younger Wei Wuxian seems perfectly happy to go about his days acting as if his older self didn't exist, other than making the odd complaint or joke. Jiang Yanli, on the other hand, is the exact opposite and spends most of her time accompanying the time-traveller.
Jiang Cheng is of the opinion that both of these are unnecessarily extreme responses and instead chooses to keep away and watch him from a distance.
It comes as a surprise when he realises that it’s not just his injury that keeps Wei Wuxian —the old one— in his bed. The man is wounded, yes, and unable to heal fast without his core, but he’s no longer at the stage where he’s unable to leave bed. He could easily take a couple of steps around his room or go outside and sit under the sun to cure that terrible paleness of his skin, but he doesn’t.
He just… simply doesn’t want to go out.
Jiang Cheng finds himself keeping closer to the younger Wei Wuxian, so much so that the boy starts complaining about it. He can’t help it, really. Even though the time-traveller has clearly made some plans of sorts with his sister —and isn’t that a shock? His sister has never been so proactive about anything before— and Jiang Yanli told them that they don’t foresee any trouble at all for 2 more years, Jiang Cheng can’t help but feel like Wei Wuxian might find it anyways.
The way that man had said it, ‘Jiang Cheng survived’… Jiang Cheng doesn’t want to survive like that. He trains harder than he ever has, and he makes sure to convince Wei Wuxian to train with him because he can’t be in two places at the same time. He cultivates and spars and meditates and works hard to the point where his father comes to stop him. He all but orders Jiang Cheng to take a break, and despite the way their unprecedentedly vicious arguments are echoing through the estate every day, even his mother can’t bring herself to disagree with him.
But in the end, Jiang Cheng doesn’t go interact with the older Wei Wuxian, and the man doesn’t come for him either.
Then, out of the blue, the currents in the house start changing.
One night after a long evening of being gone, his mother comes to dinner late with bandages wound around her neck. At their polite questions, she merely says that it was done by a resentful creature and that it will heal. It seems reasonable, so Jiang Cheng believes it right away.
The next morning, though, when Jiang Cheng unenthusiastically brings to the older Wei Wuxian’s room the tea that his sister requested, the older Wei Wuxian also has bandages around his throat. His voice sounds hoarse on his scant few answers to Jiang Yanli’s almost desperately cheerful one-sided conversation and when asked about his new injuries, he just gives a pale, inscrutable smile. He says it’s just from a careless move and that it will heal.
…That one, it’s hard to believe.
A few minutes later, his sister catches Jiang Cheng just outside the room after excusing herself for a second.
“A-Cheng… you saw, right?” Jiang Yanli asks. “A-Xian’s injuries.”
Jiang Cheng nods, looking away towards the hall. He is very invested in not caring about this. He has enough trouble trying to keep the younger Wei Wuxian out of trouble, considering no one else will help him, so he doesn’t have the time to worry about this old stranger as well. He mutters, “What about it?”
“I spoke with a few servants cleaning the courtyard.” His sister whispers to him. When he glances at her, her eyes are wet but she has a helplessly angry expression on her face. Jiang Cheng isn’t used to seeing his sister angry. It seems strange. “They saw Mother coming here to interrogate him. When she left, they took a glance inside and saw A-Xian sitting with his head in his hands.”
“What?” Jiang Cheng furrows his brows. “So Mother and that man, they fought…?”
Even as he says that, it feels ridiculous. Sure, this man is an adult like his father, but in the end he’s a Wei Wuxian, not some visiting noble cultivator from another sect. Even the Wei Wuxian at Jiang Cheng’s side, the one with his core and full power and vitality, can hardly be said to ‘fight’ with Mother. At most, he annoys her and she punishes him for it. How could any altercation between his mother and the older Wei Wuxian, this mortal man who barely speaks and can’t even lift a sword, be called a fight?
“Apparently the servants could see the bruises on A-Xian’s neck from all the way across the courtyard,” Jiang Yanli manages to say, her whisper fierce and desperate. “They said he didn’t lift his head from his palms for at least an hour afterwards! How could Mother do this? A-Xian wouldn’t even be able to heal if she really hurt him, so how could she… Shouldn’t she at least be careful with him when he’s this injured and weak?! A-Cheng, I’m afraid that if Mother gets angry enough to do something worse, this time it might be…”
She doesn’t continue, only pursing her lips with a wobble.
Jiang Cheng is embarrassed about this, but his first thought isn’t for the older Wei Wuxian— it’s for his Wei Wuxian, the younger one by his side, who is likely to get more than his fair share of the punishment Mother wants to dole out on the older one. After all, with everyone worrying about the older coreless man, Mother might find it appropriate to turn her anger on the Wei Wuxian who can take it…
However, he glances at the expression on his sister’s face and immediately feels a little ashamed. Their Wei Wuxian probably can take it even if Mother goes absolutely crazy, but the older Wei Wuxian who Jiang Yanli loves so much will actually die if that happens to him.
“You and A-Xian —ah, younger A-Xian— are often in the training yard right, A-Cheng?” Jiang Yanli asks, “If you see Mother leaving training with any particular anger, could you try to stall her until I can come here at least? I’m afraid that it will happen when I’m running to the metalworkers or not around... If you can distract her for a bit, I can at least be here to talk Mother out of anything too rash.”
“Okay, A-Jie.” Jiang Cheng purses his lips.
It’s a common tactic, distracting Mother with other things until one of them can accompany the other during their punishment. If there’s more people around and some time has passed since her initial anger, Mother’s actions also get softer than usual.
Just... He doesn't think that his sister is making a conscious choice to risk their own Wei Wuxian, who will also be at the training ground, but his first thought from before keeps coming back to his mind. Mother might not care which Wei Wuxian receives her punishment, if she's angry enough.
If they have to choose one of them to take a whip, logically, it should be the younger, stronger Wei Wuxian. But secretly, in the depths of his heart, Jiang Cheng can’t help but feel that it should be the outsider who appeared suddenly without a single spark of the Wei Wuxian that Jiang Cheng knows in him. Why should his Wei Wuxian always have to bear the brunt of the pain? Just because he’s stronger? It seems unfair.
Jiang Cheng forces himself to rest his heart at ease with the knowledge that the younger Wei Wuxian can’t be hurt too much by this. Despite everything, Wei Wuxian is pretty strong after all.
As long as Jiang Cheng keeps him away from the big evil of the Wen Sect, no one else should be able to really hurt him, right? He’s hardly like Jiang Cheng’s beloved A-Jie, who often needs to be carefully and dedicatedly protected. Jiang Cheng can’t imagine anything less than full on torture or core-breaking actually getting to Wei Wuxian.
Jiang Cheng leaves his sister to go back to training and resolves himself once again to keep an eye out on any Wen disciples during nighthunts. Sure, he’ll do as promised and watch Mother for that other Wei Wuxian. But no matter what his sister says, it’s their Wei Wuxian who actually matters.
The older one... Jiang Cheng sets his brows in a tight frown. That other Wei Wuxian is just a broken shell left over from another, weaker, less determined Jiang Cheng’s mistakes.
This Jiang Cheng won’t be making the same.
Notes:
hello everyone sorry for the extremely long wait, I had to completely rewrite this chapter because Yu Ziyuan is extremely stubborn and refused to be in character haha.
Outrageous misunderstandings quota: II (What's going on between Yu Ziyuan and the older Wei Wuxian..?)
This is a fic full of my self-indulgent favourite tropes with less depth and arcs and stuff than usual but I hope everyone will still like it. More BAMF wwx getting cooler to arrive in the future <3
Chapter Text
Jiang Cheng gets used to keeping an eye on Mother in a day or two. Thankfully, he thinks, she must have gotten her anger at Wei Wuxian out of her system. She doesn’t even spare an insult or glare for the young Wei Wuxian —she doesn’t even glance at him much, for some reason— let alone search for the older one. She seems busy with her own stuff anyways, apparently preparing for a nighthunt a little bit further into the wild mountains than usual.
All in all, older Wei Wuxian’s not a difficult man to corral. He doesn’t leave his room much and really only speaks when he’s talking to Jiang Cheng’s sister. Just throwing him a glance from the window in the morning is basically enough to understand how he will generally be at noon and night.
Jiang Cheng does the job given by his sister and otherwise puts the older Wei Wuxian and his uncomfortable situation far out of mind.
That must be why Jiang Cheng feels so shocked that night, a few days after they’ve arrived at Lotus Pier, when he goes out on a midnight walk to clear his head after a dream and ends up overhearing choked off cries echoing in one of the halls.
The hall is empty, lit only by the blue moonlight streaming from the windows and the small light of the lantern carried by a pair of servants walking through the hall. The servants grimace briefly at the muffled screaming, but don’t react otherwise. So Jiang Cheng just pauses for a moment, body ready to run off to the source to protect whoever is making the sounds, but mind aware of the fact that the servants aren’t panicking the way he is.
“What’s happening?” He demands, and the servants pause when they see him stalking towards them.
“Young Master?” One of them asks, talking calmly over the pained crying in the background as if he can’t even hear it. “Is everything alright? What can this servant do for you?”
“What the hell are you talking about?! Can you not hear that terrible noise?” Jiang Cheng snaps, and then he feels bad about it when the servants flinch at his tone. Aah, his sister is so good at making friends with the servants, why can’t Jiang Cheng ever do anything but scare them?
The other of the pair bows over the lantern he’s carrying and says; “This servant apologizes for Yunzhou, Young Master, we have been patrolling this hall for a while now and have gotten used to the sound, so we don’t hear it anymore. Yunzhou meant no disrespect.”
“Yes, yes, I apologize most humbly! Please forgive this servant, Young Master!” Yunzhou also bows.
Jiang Cheng waves their bowing and simpering away with an irritated huff. “Whatever. Just tell me then, if you’re so used to it, where is this infernal sound coming from?”
The servants share an unreadable glance as they rise from their bows. “It’s… as far as this servant knows, it’s from the room at the end of the hall,” The lantern-carrying one says.
Yunzhou sighs as he adds with a shake of his head. “The young master staying there… I’ve never heard nightmares plaguing anyone so badly. No wonder they say that he’s shrouded by evil energy all day, he’s really been cursed by some terr—”
“Shhhh!! Shh!!!” The lantern-carrier’s single-handed cut it off gestures fail badly, so he resorts to smacking his friend right on the head to shut him up before Jiang Cheng does something like strangle them with one of his training whips. “Shut the fuck up, Yunzhou! That’s an esteemed guest of the Masters, why are you speaking of baseless rumours about him, stop being so disrespectful!”
“Ah? Disrespectful? Everybody knows about it!” Yunzhou gestures as if to say that Jiang Cheng must have already expected this awful blatantly-insulting report. “Young Master Jiang must also know; everyone’s talking about the poisoned, frail young master cursed with nightmares every time he slee— mmmph!!”
The lantern-carrier, Yuncheng, closes his friend’s mouth with his free hand, looking apologetically up at Jiang Cheng who is suddenly much less concerned about his inability to stop scaring servants.
“Leave,” Jiang Cheng growls, “Don’t catch my eyes again, or so help me you’ll discover what I’ve been learning in the whip arts. And if I ever hear you two talking like this again, I’ll send you both to Mother! Get out of my sight!”
“Yes, Young Master!” Yuncheng whimpers before scampering away with Yunzhou.
Jiang Cheng is left alone in the hall with only the moonlight to light up his way, and now that his attention is not being distracted by annoying servants, he can only focus on the cries coming from the nearby guest room.
His traitorous feet carry him hesitantly towards the room, and as he comes closer and closer the sounds form more and more distinguishable words. The resentful energy that his father explained to them this Wei Wuxian is poisoned by lashes around the room and into the hall, caustic and erratic, as if reacting to Wei Wuxian’s distress.
Ignoring the resentful energy with some difficulty, Jiang Cheng slows as he approaches the closed door, listening with his fists clenched at his sides.
Wei Wuxian’s older-self sobs, the words muffled through the sliding door and slurred by his unconscious state, but still understandable enough to someone who stands close enough. “Get out,” he’s saying, though it sounds more like “g’ht outh” through his choking sobs.
Jiang Cheng recognizes a few other phrases too, amidst the moaning and crying. “Get out” is chief amongst them, but there are other such blood-chilling phrases such as “Leave”, “Let go”, “No!", “Get lost!”.
The bed creaks and mattress flumps as Wei Wuxian audibly tosses and turns on it. “Lan Zhan!” He growls, “Let go! Get lost!”
Jiang Cheng slams the door open in a boiling fury right in time to see Wei Wuxian throw himself up on the bed, panting like he has ran a marathon with his eyes wild and face wet with tears and sweat. His eyes are flickering everywhere in the room as he fumbles around the bed with unseeing hands, muttering something indistinguishable but clearly panicked under his heaving breaths.
“Wei Wuxian,” Jiang Cheng calls, since being made aware of his presence usually works well to make the Wei Wuxian he knows get it together. “Wei Wuxian!”
Wei Wuxian chokes on a breath and crumples over his legs, trembling, and Jiang Cheng feels his anger get doused by a pail of ice water.
This isn’t the Wei Wuxian he knows. He doesn’t even hear Jiang Cheng, still hyperventilating on the bed, and he’s likely going to asphyxiate to death and Jiang Cheng won’t be able to save him, and then Jiang Yanli will look at him with disappointment because Jiang Cheng let her new favourite die, and Jiang Cheng doesn’t know what to do.
“Chenqing,” Wei Wuxian mumbles then, with his hands still patting around jerkily on the bed. “Chenqing— where—”
Alright. That’s a directive, at least.
Jiang Cheng hurries to the bed, and all but rips the blankets away to see whatever it is that the man’s looking for. He regrets it deeply one second later, when he spots it: A black flute, rolled to Wei Wuxian’s pillows where he can’t find it. It’s smelling so heavily of resentful energy that Jiang Cheng feels like one touch will melt his fingertips, but fuck— fuck, fuck, fuck—
Jiang Cheng picks it up.
It feels terrible in his hands. Everything he associates with resentful energy with rings in his head like funeral knells. It feels slimy and bone-dry in the worst ways, cold like corpses, chilly and stinging hot, like the fear of darkness given form and death creeping up over his arm to slowly, slowly caress his face.
Jiang Cheng shivers and drops the flute into Wei Wuxian’s lap as if it’d burnt him.
The second Wei Wuxian has the flute back in his hands, he clenches it in his fist with an inhale of relief, once again breathing. Even the lashing, heavy resentful energy in the room calms down like a deep breath of air after too long spent underwater. Jiang Cheng doesn’t understand anything at this point, but hell— if it calms Wei Wuxian down then what does it even matter.
“Hey, Wei Wuxian,” Jiang Cheng calls again, to no avail. He sits down on the bed and tries again, “Wei Wuxian!”
It’s useless. Now that the panicking has stopped, it’s like Wei Wuxian has shut down. He’s looking blankly at the wall across the room, shoulders shuddering, the flute clutched in a desperate, white-knuckled grip. He doesn’t respond no matter what Jiang Cheng says, except sometimes murmuring other people’s names when he says the man’s name loudly enough. And honestly, Jiang Cheng is too uneasy to try and shake him out of it because if he starts another panic then he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Run away perhaps.
In the end, he just sits there at Wei Wuxian’s side and grumbles the hour away, feeling his eyes close more and more heavily the more time passes. He doesn’t know why he’s not leaving. It’s just that every time he thinks to get up, he glances at Wei Wuxian’s haggard, silent form, and he keeps sitting… as if something might change, if only he waits long enough. He spends long enough sitting crossed legged on Wei Wuxian’s bed that, by the time the moon moves over to the other side of the estate, leaving the room in total darkness, Jiang Cheng is still complaining quietly about anything and everything and mostly Wei Wuxian.
He shuffles around on the bed’s side, reaching at the nightstand to light the oil lantern on it with a flick of his qi. It flickers to life, engulfing the nightstand and bedside in soft orange light, revealing the little trinkets on the table.
Jiang Cheng’s startles when he sees a brass flame-stick by the lantern, because the only person he’s ever seen use one was that one rich merchant he, Wei Wuxian, and his other disciples escorted across the Great River a few years ago. It’s an unnecessary expense when all the disciples and members of the sect can use their qi (however meagre it might be) and the servants use cheaper matches. Then he remembers. Wei Wuxian can’t light a fire on his own. Jiang Yanli must have bought this for him. Since his golden core is gone.
Right.
Jiang Cheng drops himself back onto the bed with his face in his hands, and from the corner of his eye he can see Wei Wuxian’s squeezed-shut eyes and strained face in the soft lanternlight.
“…Fuck,” Jiang Cheng groans, burying his face into his palms to not see anymore. “This is so stupid! I’m never letting that Second Lan close to you again, I swear, I don’t care how much you whine. Idiot Wei Wuxian. What were you even dreaming about..?”
“I remembered it,” Answers a most unexpected voice, scratchy and quiet.
Jiang Cheng startles up, looking behind himself to look at Wei Wuxian, whose eyes are still closed, face still tautly lined, facing the wall. “…Wei Wuxian?” He asks, uncertain if he’d hallucinated it just now.
“I remembered it,” Wei Wuxian says, and he breathes out shakily before he opens his clumped-teary eyelashes. “I remembered how I travelled to the past.”
Jiang Cheng swallows, unsure if he wants to ask, but not wanting Wei Wuxian to go back to not speaking. “…How?” He asks finally.
“I made the array. It was supposed to use the Seal’s energy to activate.” Wei Wuxian’s hand clenches over the front of his hair right above his forehead. “But it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t work. It needed so, so much spiritual energy, and by then Wen Qing was… Aah, who knew it’d end up being activated after all?”
Before Jiang Cheng can say anything, Wei Wuxian lets out a laugh that’s more bitter, more choked and teary than any cry that Jiang Cheng’s heard before. This terrible laughter is also the first time he’s heard this Wei Wuxian laugh, and that simple fact’s worse than anything else could ever be.
“Lan Wangji, ah, Lan Wangji, what have you done? What have you done?” Wei Wuxian whispers to himself, still laughing with his head bowed down, “Why didn't you say it earlier? Earlier, earlier, I still had time back then… You’re so late all the time..! What have I ever done to deserve that? What am I supposed to do with this? Why didn't you get out?”
Wei Wuxian buries his crying and smiling half-crazy face into his hands, his loose hair tumbling over his shoulders under the warm light.
“Lan Zhan,” He laughs, and his breath hitches over another sob, but he doesn’t stop laughing. “Aah, Lan Zhan, what have you done to me? After everything, how can you say you don’t want me dead..?”
Jiang Cheng almost cannot believe what he’s hearing.
It’s official. He’s going to go back to Gusu, and then he’ll be sent right back home because he’ll have murdered that surnamed Lan and he won’t even do it in secret, he’ll do it the moment he sees that smug icy face of his sneering at Wei Wuxian’s earnest offers of friendship.
He doesn’t care what exactly it is that Lan Wangji will do to Wei Wuxian in the future, whether he tricks him and tortures him or throws him to where those terrible fierce corpse bites happened or something worse. He’s going to murder that bastard. He’ll do it right there, in front of Lan Xichen and Lan Qiren and however many other disciples there are, with Sandu speared right through his guts for the most painful and slow death possible. Lan Wangji is dead.
It takes longer than an incense time before Wei Wuxian stops laughing crazily and moves onto tiny quiet cries, and when Jiang Cheng finds the strength in himself to touch a comforting hand onto his back, the man all but throws himself at him.
“T-there there,” Jiang Cheng manages to choke out awkwardly, patting Wei Wuxian’s back carefully. He tries to keep in mind that his Wei Wuxian is still fine. This man is just a warning. Just a warning about a future where Jiang Cheng was too careless. Here, he still has time to fix this mess.
In the silence, the future version of Wei Wuxian breathes in and out over Jiang Cheng’s shoulder, quiet and shaky. There’s a soaked patch of tears on the overrobe that Jiang Cheng threw over his sleeping robes on the way out of his bedroom, still thinking he’d be able to clear his mind from his nightmare with a walk. The real nightmare, of course, was just out here.
“I’ll keep that bastard away,” Jiang Cheng mutters under his breath just to make himself feel better, “I’ll keep him and the Wens and whoever else away from here… and he’ll be safe. They’ll all be safe. It’s not that hard. It can’t be that hard... Damn Wei Wuxian..! He’s worse than A-Jie..! I should just break his legs so he can’t ever leave Lotus Pier! That’ll keep him out of trouble!”
There’s a damp chuckle muffled on Jiang Cheng’s robes.
Jiang Cheng freezes.
“You were such a worrywart, Jiang Cheng.” Wei Wuxian’s voice comes exhausted and quiet. Out of nowhere, there’s a small shift as Wei Wuxian moves his hand behind Jiang Cheng’s back.
Gently, he strokes the top of Jiang Cheng’s hair with his palm.
It moves Jiang Cheng’s face just a little against Wei Wuxian’s shoulder, where his temperature is strangely cold but his scent is exactly the same as Wei Wuxian’s— the younger Wei Wuxian’s. The one who Jiang Cheng grew up with, the one who he shared beds with after nightmares, who hugged him after scoldings, who wrestled the last meat bun or bite of soup away from him too many times to count. Despite everything, still exactly the same right now.
Jiang Cheng can’t speak or do anything except to dig his fingers instinctively into Wei Wuxian’s back.
Wei Wuxian’s palm remains on Jiang Cheng’s hair for a few endlessly long seconds before he pulls it away. It falls down to pat Jiang Cheng’s back lightly a few times.
“You should go back to sleep,” Wei Wuxian says, pulling back with that now-familiar pale, too-dim smile. His eyes don’t land fully on Jiang Cheng’s face, as if he’s hard for Wei Wuxian to look at… as if out of everyone else in the Jiang family, instead of everyone else who died in untold ways, it’s only Jiang Cheng whose younger self Wei Wuxian can’t bear to see.
In the flickering candle-light, now that Jiang Cheng has made the mistake of looking properly, he can tell that Wei Wuxian’s face when he sees him looks wistful.
“Why…” Jiang Cheng starts before he loses his nerves and stops. He snaps his gaze away from Wei Wuxian. “Never mind. Whatever.”
Wei Wuxian pauses as well.
“…” Jiang Cheng doesn’t say anything.
“Go sleep,” Wei Wuxian says finally, his smile fading away. “Don’t stay up worrying about everything all night.”
Jiang Cheng nods sharply without looking back at his eyes. ‘Whatever,’ He thinks. ‘Whatever. Whatever. Whatever,’ And he pats the bed a few times as if to straighten out the blankets before getting up to leave.
In the flickering little candleflame, Wei Wuxian’s silhouette looks dark and mixes too neatly into the shadows. Jiang Cheng doesn’t really know him, what he’s like, or how he grew up to be like this, but it’s not that he doesn’t want him to be well. It’s not that he doesn’t want him to be well.
It’s just…
“You sleep too,” Jiang Cheng mutters.
“Mm,” Wei Wuxian responds with a noncommitted look on his face that says he will be doing whatever he wants and not listening to a word Jiang Cheng says.
Jiang Cheng considers insisting, but the memory of those wistful eyes sliding over his face holds his words hostage. He just stands there, hesitating, before making a responding noise of acknowledgement. There’s only so much he can do for this man who’s half Wei Wuxian half a stranger. He starts to walk away.
He’s only taken a single step before his feet stop again.
“About… about that Lan Wangji…”
A hitched noise. Jiang Cheng can almost hear Wei Wuxian swallowing painfully dry around a silent crack. “…”
“If you tell me—”
Wei Wuxian takes a deep breath, and Jiang Cheng hurriedly cuts his own words off. Wei Wuxian then lets out the breath, shakily. When Jiang Cheng turns around to look at him, he seems even more wistful and lost now than he did when he was looking at Jiang Cheng. There’s a something truly shaken in the angle of his eyes; shaken like a shell of boulders has unexpectedly cracked open and fallen off of him more than any hurtful shock, but it’s still difficult to understand.
“There’s nothing to say,” Wei Wuxian says finally, softly. “Nothing to say anymore. He just said somethings that I didn’t expect… things I could never reply to.”
“What did he say?” Jiang Cheng demands, angry, before he can stop himself. Wei Wuxian looks at him with a blink like he’s bemused by Jiang Cheng’s irritation, making Jiang Cheng defensive now. “What?”
Wei Wuxian shakes his head.
“He asked me to live.” He makes a sound of amusement, half-bitten, like this is something that’s so thoroughly unexpected from Lan Wangji that it should be a joke— only that it’s a terrible, miserable joke no one would laugh at. “Since I met him, not one of his words have ever matched his actions, really…”
All of Jiang Cheng’s hackles rise. He doesn’t know what kind of actions don’t match asking for someone to live, but certainly none of them can be good. No doubt, Lan Wangji is clearly a scheming villain in the disguise of some pure, righteous overachiever, playing hard-to-get all the time. Actually, Jiang Cheng disliked him from the very beginning— he always thought that Wei Wuxian liked Lan Wangji suspiciously more than his own sect shidi. Clearly, he was right all along.
“What did he even do?” Jiang Cheng asks, scowling. “When? Where? I’m going to beat him up!”
Wei Wuxian shakes his head again, as if to end this conversation. “Just go sleep, Jiang Cheng. If things get to that point, you can just give up.”
“What the hell?” Jiang Cheng is outraged. “What does that mean? Why would I give up?! You think I can’t even defeat another junior disciple?! I’m not giving up just because some prissy know-it-all tried to hurt my shixiong! How dare you—”
“Go to bed, Jiang Cheng.”
Of course. Why isn’t he surprised. Jiang Cheng huffs an annoyed breath and walks all the way out of the door, yelling, “Fine!” behind himself.
He should have known. As if this man would ever give any useful information on how Jiang Cheng can protect his stupid errant shixiong. No, Jiang Cheng has to do all the work around here. The best option is clearly to never let Wei Wuxian out of his sight.
As Jiang Cheng steps right out of the room, he hears Wei Wuxian blowing out the little candleflame and settling back in bed with a rustle behind him.
He stops for a moment, clenching his fists.
While he’s listening, Wei Wuxian lets out a long, quiet sigh that’s only barely audible from where Jiang Cheng is standing. It doesn’t sound like a bad or despairing sigh, exactly. Maybe a lost sigh. A confused sigh?
“I need fucking sleep,” Jiang Cheng grumbles, rubbing his face with a palm.
He closes the door behind himself and heads back to bed in order to sleep.
He somewhat manages.
They finally come across the problem during dinner one time, when Jiang Fengmian says; “Remind it to A-Ying, will you A-Li?” and Jiang Yanli who hadn’t been listening all too well has to blink and ask; “Which one?”
They all pause.
“The older,” Jiang Fengmian says, with a small smile of amusement. “Unless the younger A-Ying has also started designing metalwork?”
“I totally could!” Wei Wuxian says. And Jiang Yanli feels so bubbly at the sight of his light-heartedness that she can’t help but place a few choice bits of her lotus-roots and meat onto his plate. When he beams up at her, she feels very very fond.
“I’m sure you could,” She tells him, “After all, you learn it in the future. A-Xian —that is, the older A-Xian— can do it, so certainly you can as well.”
“This is so inconvenient,” Jiang Cheng grumbles from her other side, disgusted as always by Wei Wuxian, “You both have the same name, how are we supposed to introduce the older you into society? We can’t hide him away forever! He needs to go out in the sun or something.”
Wei Wuxian groans into his bite of the rice. “I can’t believe I have to share my name now,” He grumbles after swallowing it. “This time thing is too inconvenient!”
The older Wei Wuxian is not around for dinner, seeing as he still doesn’t get out of his room often, so there is nobody around to defend his side of the argument.
“One of you two should change their name,” Jiang Cheng declares. “I think it should be you.”
“I’m not giving up my name!” Wei Wuxian protests immediately, scowling dramatically large. “Why don’t you give up your name and see how it feels, huh, Jiang Cheng?”
“Why would I change my name? I don’t have a time-leaping doppelganger like you.”
“Maybe you should change it cause it doesn’t fit your ugly face,” Wei Wuxian retorts and Jiang Cheng visibly almost throws himself across the tables and onto him.
“You take that back! You're the ugly one!”
“Who’s ranked above whom in the list of eligible young masters, Chengcheng?” Wei Wuxian smirks.
Jiang Cheng lets out a sound that’s more growl than word, and Jiang Fengmian chuckles from the head seat. “Now now, boys,” He chides, “Don’t fight over something like that. Why don’t you think about how we can solve this problem? We do indeed need a way to differentiate between the two A-Yings.”
“I think it’s obvious!” Wei Wuxian grins before gesturing with his chopsticks, “That guy should change his name, and we can call him my older brother! Anyways, it’s not like we can hide how similar we look, and someone will eventually ask questions.”
“We should ask A-Xian his opinion before that,” Jiang Yanli interjects, seeing that her family are starting to nod in agreement and accepting the solution. “It’s not fair for us to decide everything on our own.”
“So doting, A-Li,” Yu Ziyuan harrumphs, speaking up for the first time after having stayed silent the entire meal, not even taking the many opportunities to scold Wei Wuxian. She shakes her head with a scowl. “It’s not like that man ever has any opinions on the little things. No doubt he’ll go along with this too.”
Jiang Yanli doesn’t like it, because the younger Wei Wuxian is someone with strong opinions that he sometimes expresses for the sheer fun of the ensuing debacle, never getting tired of fighting on the pettiest matters. She doesn’t want to think that he lost that spark as he grew up.
But in the end, Yu Ziyuan’s assessment turns out to be on point.
That night, Jiang Fengmian and Jiang Yanli sit around the older Wei Wuxian’s bed, her at the foot end of the bed and him on a chair by the side, watching as Wei Wuxian puts aside one of the dozens of notebooks he has been working on to focus on the two of them. When Jiang Fengmian cautiously breaches the subject, trying to sound as non-pressuring as possible, and Wei Wuxian only nods his head thoughtfully.
“Alright,” He says, “I’ll be the lost eldest son of Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze, then? And my younger self will be my little brother.”
“There’s no need to agree so fast, A-Ying,” Jiang Fengmian reminds, speaking carefully and quietly the way he always does towards this Wei Wuxian that he seems to perceive as too fragile to be pushed. “In fact, there’s no need to agree at all. If you wish to keep your name, I’m sure we can work something out.”
“I’ve been Wei Wuxian long enough,” Wei Wuxian says, shrugging, “Maybe my younger self will do a better job of it. I’m just wondering about my name…”
Jiang Fengmian and Jiang Yanli exchange a brief look, while Wei Wuxian keeps thinking.
Seeing that he’s serious about changing his name, Jiang Yanli says; “Then, A-Xian, do you need any help deciding..?”
“We only need to decide on a courtesy name to use officially for now,” Jiang Fengmian says thoughtfully, “And if you’d like, perhaps I should decide it. I’m your elder, and the courtesy name is an important part of your identity. I won’t agree if it’s not a name that sounds well, you know?”
It’s a lie. Jiang Yanli doesn’t point it out, but she’s pretty sure that everyone in this room already knows. After all, it was Jiang Fengmian who not only allowed but pretty much joined Wei Wuxian in naming his spirit sword Suibian. He would give Wei Wuxian the freedom on just about anything about his own path, and he has only gotten worse after meeting this pained and sad Wei Wuxian. Honestly, Jiang Yanli herself is starting see the appeal.
“Ah, Uncle Jiang, don’t you know? I’ve gotten better at naming,” Wei Wuxian asks with a crooked smile. He turns down to the bed, reaching through the blankets by his side to fish out a black bamboo flute. It’s one of the few things that had been on him when he had appeared in the past, other than his shredded black robes and inner cloths.
Jiang Yanli has gotten too used to the resentful energy that’s seeped into the man by now, knowing it to be poisoning from the healer’s words, but she always startles whenever she comes across the flute. It’s as saturated with resentful energy as Wei Wuxian is, and it can only be called a demonic, cursed object of the kind that brings misfortune to every single one of its owners. She doesn’t know why the man likes to keep it so close to him to the point he won’t even let them try to cleanse it.
“Chenqing,” Wei Wuxian says softly, caressing the flute as if it brings him comfort, “I carved this flute, and I named it too. Not bad, no?”
“Chenqing?” Jiang Yanli blinks before smiling, “I guess it’s a big step up from Whatever, A-Xian. Chenqing, Expressing Thoughts. Very poetic. It just seems somewhat… familiar…”
Wei Wuxian almost smiles. “‘I wished to explain my reasoning, little did I dream that this would be held a crime.’”
“Oh.” Jiang Fengmian says, “From Master Qu Yuan’s book. Chenqing, Explaining Reasoning. That’s a beautiful name, A-Ying.”
He sounds surprised, Jiang Yanli suspects, because like most people he too often forgets that Wei Wuxian is fourth on the list of eligible young masters for a reason, that he has memorized more than a few dozen books on poems. Wei Wuxian certainly never uses that education and poeticism, instead preferring to joke around and name even his sword as a prank to mock the people who ask him about it.
Or rather, the younger one never uses it. Sometime in the next ten years, Wei Wuxian has become someone that names their flute after a wish to be listened, after an expectation of prosecution, and uses the poem of a tragedy to do so.
“Then, do you want to use a poem for your new courtesy name too?” Jiang Fengmian asks, and Wei Wuxian hums in response.
It takes a long, thoughtful pause before he seems to decide.
“Has Uncle read any of Lan Yi’s works?” He asks, looking at his flute with a pale smile. “Wei Fenming. Fenming, distinct and clear.”
“I… don’t think I’ve read any of her poems,” Jiang Fengmian says, glancing at Jiang Yanli for aid even as he tacks on a smiling; “It is a nice name, still. Suits you well. Why did you choose it?”
“Just as a memento,” Wei Wu— Wei Fenming continues smiling that distant smile, leaning back with his hair trailing over his shoulder when he looks outside the window up at the stars visible in the night sky. “I said I’d try, didn’t I? It’s a new name fitting for a new life…”
When he turns towards them, Wei Fenming’s smile looks cloudy and indistinct to Jiang Yanli, though she doesn’t know why.
“Lan Yi, huh..? What were her poems about, for you to speak so highly of them?” Jiang Fengmian wonders, trying to ascertain answers from Wei Fenming’s inscrutable expression. He glances at Jiang Yanli again, as if asking if she knows anything about Lan Yi’s poetry.
Unfortunately for her father’s curiosity, Jiang Yanli can only shake her head. She too has never read any of Lan Yi’s poems, and hadn't in fact even known that she wrote any.
“I was under the impression that the Third Sect Leader Lan was more famous for her assassination skills and…” Jiang Yanli hesitates as Wei Fenming’s expression grows increasingly more wry. “And the criticism against her massacre of dissidents… she wrote poems?”
“The Lan library has more, but I think we have a few of them in Lotus Pier too,” Wei Fenming says, shaking his head. “People always remember the evil and never the good. Her poems are pretty good actually.”
Jiang Yanli and Jiang Fengmian exchange a few more glances, shrugging. “What about your personal name, then?” Jiang Yanli asks, “Do you have any ideas what you want to change ‘Ying’ to?”
“Wei Ying…” Wei Fenming murmurs, his lashes falling over his eyes. “I’ll think on it.”
Jiang Yanli suddenly remembers that unlike ‘Wuxian’, ‘Ying’ is a name that was chosen by his parents and falls silent with a quiet gasp. She doesn’t think anyone calls Wei Wuxian ‘Wei Ying’ other than her mother and some of the Jiang teachers, but still it must mean a lot to him… Anyways, since he doesn’t ever contact or go out and meet people, it doesn’t matter that much if he takes some time to change his personal name.
They don’t get any more meaningful conversation in, that night, before Jiang Fengmian decides that Wei Fenming needs more rest. They leave the room to the quiet sound of brush on paper, and Jiang Yanli only sighs at the fact that they both know that Wei Fenming will be working instead of sleeping for many more hours.
Short of drugging him, there’s nothing they can do about it, so Jiang Yanli lets it go. Perhaps this too is something that will only improve with time.
The next day finds her in the Library Room, leafing through books such as Collections of Lan Poems and Poetry of Famous Women in a curious search. By the time she has collected her thirtieth book in a heap without any trace of Lan Yi’s poems, the door slides open and in enters Jiang Fengmian with a tower of books of his own, precariously balanced in his arms.
For a moment, they stare at each other in embarrassed surprise.
The moment passes, and Jiang Yanli realises that her father is definitely searching for the same thing as her, with clearly similar results. He gives her a secretive, cheery smile before placing down the tower of books, and she feels buoyed. Her father usually has so little time to spend with her, it makes her feel warm inside to share something special with him.
“You haven’t found it either, A-Li?” Jiang Fengmian asks as he approaches the spot by a bookshelf where she’s kneeling.
“Sadly no,” Jiang Yanli sighs, putting down yet another poetry book by the useless heap, “I’ve scoured the entire poetry section to no avail. It sems that A-Xi— Fenming was right. People really do like to forget the beautiful, good sides of Lan Yi and remember the horrors she committed instead.”
“Well, A-Ming said that we have it here,” Jiang Fengmian says without a trace of enthusiasm in his voice, “Surely we’ll find it eventually.”
Jiang Yanli nods decisively. “Yes, it has to be here somewhere.”
Right then, she hears the doors slide again. Someone enters the Library Room, and freezes in place when they both turn to stare at him.
It’s Wei Wuxian, with two thin books in his hand.
“Shijie? Uncle Jiang?” He asks, his paused body slowly thawing down the way he always does when he remembers that he hasn’t gotten into trouble yet, “What are you both doing here so early?”
Jiang Yanli shares a look with her father. “Research.” She says, raising her brows, “What about you, A-Xian? It’s not like you to be up at this hour. And to come to the library too! Aah, I could almost think that my little shidi was growing up...”
“No, no!” Wei Wuxian protests with a laugh, stepping closer now, “Xianxian will always be Shijie’s little shidi! No older than three years old, guaranteed!”
“Then what are you doing here?” Jiang Fengmian asks, laughter in his voice, “Three-year-olds shouldn’t be in the library, Xianxian.”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to find new ways to teas—” Wei Wuxian coughs and amends— “new ways to talk with Lan Zhan! Did you know that despite their looks, most Lans are desperate romantics? It’s so funny! Almost all of the important Lans have either poetry or songs written, and some even draw!”
Jiang Yanli gasps. “Poetry of Lans! A-Xian, do you know where there might be poetry of the Third Sect Leader Lan, Lan Yi? We’ve been searching for it!”
“Wow! Really?” Wei Wuxian asks, and he stuffs one of the books into the crook of his elbow to hold out the other book, showing its title of Thoughts Formed in Clouds with the Gusu Lan Sect emblem underneath, “I was just reading them! I was expecting something flowery and lovesick like all the other Lan poems, but it seems Lan Yi went through a lot; all her poems are about the martial path and injustice. Her poems are really pretty good actually!”
At that last phrase, the way he says it exactly as Wei Fenming did, Jiang Yanli feels her heart soften for the both of them. Oh, A-Xian…
“So it seems the reason why we couldn’t find it was because it was with you,” Jiang Fengmian teases. He takes the book on Lan Yi’s poems from an apologetic Wei Wuxian.
“Sorry, Uncle Jiang!” Wei Wuxian says, “I know I’m supposed to copy the book and take that, but I was in such a hurry! I promise I’ll go kneel as punishment later, no need to tell Madam Yu to order it, hehe…”
“No matter,” Jiang Fengmian waves it off, smiling, “I did the same too.”
Wei Wuxian grins back and hastens to stuff the other book in its rightful place somewhere to Jiang Yanli’s left, before coming to stand behind them. Jiang Fengmian, meanwhile, kneels next to her and opens the poetry book in a position where they can both see. Jiang Yanli starts flipping through the pages carefully. “What are you researching?” Wei Wuxian asks curiously, leaning down from over her shoulder.
“Your older self— or rather, we should call him your older brother,” Jiang Fengmian says as he watches Jiang Yanli turn pages, “He decided on a name and claims that it’s from a poem by Lan Yi. We were wondering which one.”
“Oh he decided already? That was fast! Well what is it? I should know what my big brother’s name is, shouldn’t I?”
“Fenming,” Jiang Yanli says, and she puts her hand over a page to hold it in place. “I found it. Drunken Dreams of the Past.”
“Good eye, A-Li,” Jiang Fengmian smiles. They all look down at the poem, as Jiang Yanli brushes her fingertip over the two characters; distinct and clear.
“‘I’ve been brave and chivalrous’,” Wei Wuxian recites, starting from the beginning of the verse. “‘And yet it was still all in vain.’ Pretty despondent, for a poem he chose to name himself from.”
Jiang Yanli looks down at the poem. She can’t help but wonder if Wei Fenming had related to it, if he had ever felt like this, for him to have immediately thought of this obscure poem when asked to name himself.
I’ve been brave and chivalrous,
And yet it was still all in vain.
Good and evil are distinct and clear,
But love and hate are interwoven.
Knowing you is just like a dream.
Indeed, she imagines that everyone he has ever known must feel like a dream to him now, since they have all but disappeared from the world with his time travel. It makes her feel really sad, though, so she doesn’t think about it.
“Good poem, though,” Wei Wuxian shrugs. “Fenming. Wei Fenming. Do you think he’ll mind if I call him Fenming-ge? Or is that too unfamiliar for a family member… Fen-ge? Ming-ge? Or just Gege, maybe? Shijie, can you ask for me?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself, A-Ying?” Jiang Fengmian asks distractedly, still looking down at the poem. Jiang Yanli is the only one to glance back at Wei Wuxian, so she’s the only one who sees how uncomfortable he suddenly looks before he hides it under a bright mischievous smile.
“Shijie should ask, Uncle, who doesn’t know that Shijie is my favourite person ever? I’d definitely agree to whatever Shijie says! Please, Shijie? Pleeaaasseeeee~”
“Alright, alright, how could I say no to my Xianxian’s request?” Jiang Yanli laughs, and Wei Wuxian somehow manages to brighten even more.
“Isn’t that nice, A-Ying?” Jiang Fengmian asks, and Wei Wuxian nods rapidly.
“Thank you Shijie!”
“What is A-Li going to call him then? You can’t keep letting A-Ming call you ‘Shijie’ when you’re younger than him, can you?”
“Oh yeah! Gege’s older than Shijie isn’t he?” Wei Wuxian says, sounding incredibly excited by this fact, “That means he’s your shixiong, Shijie! I’m your shixiong, Shijie!”
“You are my shidi.” Jiang Yanli pinches Wei Wuxian’s cheek playfully and he pouts at her. “But I’ll see if A-Xi… I mean, if Fenming is willing to let me call him Shixiong. He might not agree, you know?”
“Why wouldn’t he—” Too late, Wei Wuxian seems to remember that Wei Fenming doesn’t have his cultivation anymore and might not consider himself a part of the martial world. But his bluster doesn’t stay down for long despite the hiccup, and he moves on to declare; “Well he’d want to be called Shixiong anyways! I just know!”
“Then I’ll have to trust my shidi about it, won’t I?” Jiang Yanli smiles. “Shixiong, huh? I never thought I’d suddenly get one.”
“Life is unpredictable,” Jiang Fengmian agrees, both of them looking at the grinning Wei Wuxian, and she feels a momentary understanding with him.
Life is unpredictable indeed.
Notes:
Poem lifted off of lyrics to the donghua opening song 1, Drunken Dreams of the Past. I considered other (real) historical poems, but finally decided on this one for narrative sake and also so I can give it to Lan Yi lol. sorry to the original songwriter.
Outrageous misunderstandings quota: III (Just what have you done, Lan Wangji!)
Next chapter: Actually some tiny bit of adventure and progression finally.
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