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In hindsight, Jiang Cheng can admit that chasing blindly after the latest demonic cultivator of the week probably hadn’t been his smartest idea. Normally he wouldn’t let anyone even dare to suggest that let alone admit it, but, well. The disciples he had brought with him are nowhere to be found, and he’s tired. Sue him.
He looks down at the burnt-out array he’s standing in the dead center of, the unfamiliar lines of it no longer glowing red. They’re just marks on the ground, and he realizes as the breeze picks up through the forest that they’re not even permanent. Ash drifts around his feet, the characters blurring and then disappearing altogether into the breeze. There goes studying it to see if he can reverse it - not that he would because he’s not a fucking demonic cultivator but damn if it wouldn’t be nice to try to see how to undo whatever it is that has left him stranded in the middle of the woods with nothing but what he’s carrying on his person.
The breeze carries with it the smell of green water and lotus flowers, and at first he thinks nothing of it - the scent of it is so intimately familiar that he notices it more when it’s gone than when it returns. Except he’s supposed to be on the border with Qinghe. Nowhere near the lotus lakes of Yunmeng.
This just keeps getting fucking better and better.
----
Let it never be said that Jiang Cheng can’t find his way around the forest that surrounds his home. Getting down to the water is easy, and from there it only takes a quick look around to get his bearings to know what part of the river he’s on before he’s on his way home. He flies low over the water perched on Sandu, seething with irritation. Fucking demonic cultivators. Every time he kills one it’s like three more pop up in their place, and no one else is hunting them down to help him cut their numbers down. Not that he necessarily wants the help - better if he just does it himself. But still, it’s the principle of the thing. It’s a thankless and arduous task, and the last thing he needs is to be stuck randomly back all the way in Lotus Pier with his disciples all the way out by Qinghe. His free time to go out trailing these monsters is limited.
He barely pays a thought to Zidian sparking on his wrist as he flies closer to home, he just corrects the flow of his angry energy away from the whip automatically to keep from waking the weapon up entirely. It takes a few more moments before he registers that the weapon is still sparking even without his energy to fuel it - a few moments in which Lotus Pier comes into view, the lanterns on the docks steady in the evening air.
He alights at the end of one of the docks furthest from the main boardwalk back into the complex itself and he sheathes Sandu to take a closer look at Zidian on his hand, his irritation growing when sparks spit and flash along the length of it, utterly uninformed by his own energy. He turns his wrist this way and that as if that will help him solve the problem, and then he hears it.
“Fengmian!”
His blood goes ice cold, his entire body as still as a corpse. It doesn’t even feel like his heart is beating as he holds his breath, muscles in his jaw jumping as he clenches his teeth hard enough to give himself a headache.
“When are you going to stop running off on this fool’s errand?” Yu Ziyuan demands, voice snapping out across the water. Zidian sparks higher on his wrist in response to the anger of her former master somewhere nearby, close enough that he can hear the sneer in her voice. “They died years ago! Their boy is probably dead by now too, and you have a son right here!! Does he mean so little to you that you have to run from home every other week so you can find that boy to replace him?!”
A soft voice, low, conciliatory replies too quietly to be understood, and the breath rushes back into Jiang Cheng’s chest in a painfully sharp inhale. Mother. Father. Arguing about - what else - him and Wei Wuxian. His hand curls into a fist tightly enough around Sandu’s sheath that the worked metal designs on it threaten to puncture. He likes that pressure, he usually finds it grounding, but there’s really no comprehending or coping with the sound of his parents alive and - well, if not well then at least normal - somewhere so close. So so close. He can practically feel Yu Ziyuan’s arms around him in the last embrace she had pulled him into that day the Wen had torn his world to shreds. He can feel the phantom of Jiang Fengmian’s thumb on his cheek brushing away his tears.
The tears are real, but he has to reach up to scrub them away with his own hand. A lantern sparks to life at the end of the pier, bobbing and swaying rather than stationary, and Jiang Cheng darts into the thickest shadows thrown by the overlapping corners of one of the closest buildings, crouching down low as he peeks around the wood and there they are. Younger, alive, and as he remembers them most often - Jiang Fengmian walking sedately where he wants to go, and Yu Ziyuan storming after him to demand answers that will never satisfy her.
His entire body aches to run to them.
“I have a duty to him, I cannot ignore it,” Jiang Fengmian says now, close enough that Jiang Cheng can hear the weariness already so present in his voice.
“You have a duty to your own first! Do you think A-Li and A-Cheng don’t see you leaving to search for him?! What do you propose I tell them, that they’re inadequate children because I bore them for you?! That you do not love them as you love a boy who is, for all you know, already nothing more than a figment of your imagination!”
“Yu Ziyuan!”
“Jiang Fengmian!!”
Jiang Cheng is expecting them to storm apart, to go their separate ways and seethe until the next time they come together. But...if they’re talking about Wei Wuxian like he’s not even here, if the only children in Lotus Pier are...himself and Jiang Yanli, then, he supposes, it shouldn’t surprise him that their reactions aren’t like what they will later become the more their marriage fractures apart.
Jiang Fengmian turns and sets the lantern at their feet so that he can place his hands on Yu Ziyuan’s shoulders. Jiang Cheng blinks as Zidian settles down on his wrist, finally no longer spitting little sparks under his muffling hand there in the dark. He watches with wide eyes as Jiang Fengmian sighs and pulls Yu Ziyuan to his chest and she...goes. To him. To her husband. She folds herself into the circle of his arms like she belongs there. What the fuck is happening?
“I will go out once more, no more than three days. If we can protect him, we must. I owe his father the wellbeing of his only son. It is a good lesson for the children in duty to protect those weaker than us, to extend kindness where we can.”
Yu Ziyuan is still for a long moment before she extricates herself from Jiang Fengmian’s hold and pushes him away by the arms to look up at him. Jiang Cheng can’t see her face clearly from here but he can imagine all too easily - her eyes angry and determined under the hard cut of her brows, lips pressed together in open irritation.
“Do not let this boy take your son’s rightful room in your heart or in this Sect,” she says, voice deadly calm. “I will revisit such hell on you a hundredfold for each day I see it. Do not test my patience any longer, Jiang Fengmian.” She stoops to scoop up the lantern and retreat back towards the residences, leaving Jiang Fengmian alone on the pier.
Fresh tears spring to Jiang Cheng’s eyes as he stays frozen in the shadows watching his father tip his head back to look up at the moon overhead. He stays there for a long time, lost in thought, before he heaves a sigh and turns to follow after Yu Ziyuan back into Lotus Pier.
The only other time Jiang Cheng has so desperately wanted to follow after them is the day they died. He knows he can’t. This is either a figment of his imagination, in which case it would likely end how all of his dreams of them do, or he has truly somehow been forced to travel to a time where he’s still a child, in which case they wouldn’t recognize him, nor believe him when he tells them who he is and what their future holds. He doesn’t know what will happen if he’s discovered, but it seems better not to risk it, much as he longs to run to them and collapse into their arms.
A different plan takes reluctant shape in his mind as he crouches in the shadows and watches the complex gradually go darker and darker as candles and lanterns are extinguished for the night. By the time everything is still and quiet but for the frogs in the mud and the wind in the trees, he knows what he’s going to do.
He’s going to find Wei Wuxian, and he’s going to kill him.
----
Finding Wei Wuxian is so easy he nearly laughs aloud at the sight of him. After chasing ghosts and rumors of his brother for thirteen years it’s almost anticlimactic to find him sitting on a stoop in town gnawing on a piece of..something that’s burned so black as to be inedible to anyone but the truly desperate.
Any doubts that he may have had about this somehow being the past are thoroughly dashed as he stands there watching the boy who is without a doubt the same boy he remembers his father bringing home so many years ago. He’s hunkered down over his ‘meal’ as if afraid someone will come along and snatch it from his hands. There’s a bundle of coarse fabric beside him that may have once possibly been meant to carry vegetables or rice or any number of things, but Jiang Cheng knows from that first night together as children that it’s full of the sorts of things a young boy with nothing else to his name would consider worth keeping. An extra shirt, so riddled with holes and bare patches that it’s more rag than clothing. A blanket suitable only for swaddling a baby that he had sworn up and down that he could still curl up tightly enough to fit under as long as he didn’t mind cold toes or fingers. A few melon rinds to snack on. A grass butterfly to play with.
Jiang Cheng looks at his waif of a child and he can’t help but see all the pain he’ll come to cause in the future. He can prevent it all right here, right now. Zidian sparks on his wrist, begins to flicker to life. Little Wei Wuxian looks up and around suddenly at the noise of it, his eyes zeroing in almost instantly on the purple lightning at his side.
“Whoa!!” he cries with delight, his entire face lighting up with delight. “That’s so cool, sir!! How do you do that?!”
Zidian sputters and then flickers out again, responding to the horror in his chest that replaces the fury. He’s just a child. A child .
He’s his brother.
Jiang Cheng holds onto the last vestiges of his fury for another long moment or two as he watches Wei Wuxian return to gnawing on his food with his back teeth as he looks up at him with wide, guileless, quicksilver eyes.
And then with a breath he shoves 13 years of blinding hatred away from his chest.
It feels like setting down a heavy pack at the end of the day. Like taking his guan out of his hair and removing the stiff shells of his Sect Leader robes until he’s stripped down to just..himself. Jiang Cheng, A-Cheng, who misses his siblings more and more with each passing day and yearns for the days when things were so much simpler. Whose grief is threatening to swallow him whole in a blaze of blistering fire.
“Do you want more to eat?” he asks his brother, small and vulnerable sitting there with nowhere else to go. Wei Ying blinks up at him and then glances at the food in his hands and back up to him. “You can say yes, Wei Ying,” he sighs and Wei Wuxian’s eyes go even wider.
“You know my name?!” he chirps, seeming torn between being afraid and excited.
“Yes. I know you. I can keep you safe and get you more food, food that isn’t burnt. Come with me.” Jiang Cheng turns on his heel with a swish of silk and he hears Wei Wuxian yelp a little before tumbling to his feet to come running after him.
“Hey!! Mister! Wait!” he calls, out of breath, and Jiang Cheng stops in his tracks so suddenly that Wei Wuxian runs into his legs with an, ‘ oof ’. “Ow,” he mumbles as he rubs at his head. Jiang Cheng is going to have a bruise on the back of his thigh in the exact shape of that head but he scowls as he recognizes that he really has no one to blame but himself.
“What? Aren’t you hungry?” he snaps, and Wei Wuxian blinks slowly up at him.
“Yes,” he replies as he reaches tentatively towards Zidian with one dirt-smeared hand. “But...I don’t want to get separated,” he adds, voice small, and then those little fingers are slipping into his palm. Not reaching for Zidian, then. Reaching for him . “Can I?” he whispers, eyes beginning to shine with unshed tears as he tries to hold Jiang Cheng’s limp fingers in his tight little fist. Jiang Cheng swallows past the sudden tightness in his throat and glares straight ahead for a moment before turning and kneeling on the hard-packed dirt in front of the boy. He adjusts his grip to clasp Wei Wuxian’s hand like he had when they had both been this age, when they had held hands in his room in Lotus Pier and promised to protect each other from their worst fears.
“Yes,” he says now, chest tight. “Yes, we should not get separated again. You can hold onto me. Don’t let go, alright?”
Wei Wuxian smiles at him wide and happy like the break of dawn and Jiang Cheng finds himself smiling in response, his eyes definitely wet again. “I’ve missed you, Wei Ying.”
He’s not prepared for Wei Wuxian to throw himself into his arms for a hug, but he immediately wraps his arms around the boy anyway and holds him close, his eyes squeezed shut against the torrent of emotions flooding through him, too numerous and too raucous to be named. So he just hugs his brother there in the middle of a street in Yunmeng, and he wonders just what the fuck they’re going to do now.
----
Lotus Pier is, of course, not an option. Not only can he not show up there dressed like the Sect Leader and wearing Zidian, but if he takes Wei Wuxian there nothing will change. Gusu’s out as well. He’d like to claim that he has some rational, thought-out reason for it, but honestly he just doesn’t see a point in letting Lan Wangji finally get what he wants after all these years, even though he’s just a boy right now. Petty? Sure. Jiang Cheng has never claimed not to be.
Lanling is an enormous ‘absolutely not’ written in bright red ink in his mind’s eye, as is Qishan. Qinghe very nearly makes the list, but then he thinks about trying to explain such esoteric, questionable events to anyone in the straightforward, bullheaded Nie Sect and he puts it under a mental column labelled, “I guess, but only if it’s absolutely, 100%, life or death necessary”. Not very promising.
In the end, there’s really only one place he can think of that’s at all viable, and so after a few days of Wei Ying eating his fill as often as necessary and sleeping almost constantly in their room in an inn a few towns away from Lotus Pier, Jiang Cheng gathers his brother up with their few meager belongings and begins the trek to a place few people know about, even among the Great Sects.
It takes another two days of travel at the pace Wei Ying is capable of maintaining with him, and then a day after that of looking for what he knows to search for in the area, but finally he finds it. Or, rather, it finds them.
“Where are we?” Wei Ying chirps from where he’s perched on his back like a sack of potatoes (potatoes with very knobbly knees that won’t quit squeezing his ribs) and Jiang Cheng shushes him, but it’s too late.
“Stop!” Jiang Cheng obeys the command and between one blink and the next there are two women blocking the path in front of him, nearly identical down to the numerous weapons strapped to their belts. And the knives leveled at his throat.
He can’t put his hands up or Wei Ying will fall off his back, but he does his absolute best to look as unthreatening as possible.
“You are trespassing on the lands of the Meishan Yu. Turn back.”
“I need to see the Grandmistress.”
“Turn back.”
“Please,” he adds, desperation beginning to bleed into his voice. Wei Ying is very still on his back, mostly hidden in his cloak, and Jiang Cheng can feel him trembling faintly. “Hold on tight,” he whispers before he lets go to brandish Zidian on his wrist for the two women to see. “I am her grandson. I need to see her, it’s urgent.”
The two guards share a glance with each other and then drift forward in sync to study the weapon on his wrist. There’s no mistaking it for anything but an artefact of the Meishan Yu. And everyone in the cultivation world knows who its current master is.
“Demonstrate,” one of the women says, the one on the left who he’s pretty sure is the one who ordered them to stop. He nods and takes a step back before holding his wrist out to the side and letting Zidian spark to life, feeding his fear and desperation into it until the whip uncoils and he’s got his hand wrapped around the hilt. Lightning spits and arcs from the whip as he lifts it to crack once into thin air before he withdraws his energy and it goes dormant again.
“I need to speak to my grandmother.”
For too long there’s nothing but the sound of the wind through the trees, Wei Ying’s too-quick breathing in his ear, and two unreadable gazes fixed on his as the Yu warriors size him up. Without any external cue that he can see, the pair of them suddenly turn at the exact same moment and begin walking up the path. Jiang Cheng scrambles to get a good hold on Wei Ying’s knee again so he can follow after them.
----
“So - you’re from the future.”
“Yes, Popo.”
“And this boy is going to ruin it?”
Jiang Cheng looks over at where Wei Ying is studying a rack of retired spiritual swords so closely his nose is almost touching the side of one of the blades, his little puffs of breath fogging up the cold surface.
“Wei Ying!” he barks. “Not so close!”
“Yes Yin-gege,” he says dutifully, without moving an inch. Jiang Cheng slumps forward to brace his elbow on his knee so he can hide his eyes in his palm.
“That means step away from the swords, Wei Ying.”
“Yes Yin-gege,” he says again, but this time he at least shuffles two steps back. And then he leans even further forward to keep squinting at the steel at precisely the same distance.
“He seems truly monstrous,” Grandmistress Yu says with an indulgent chuckle.
“You haven’t seen what he’s capable of later,” Jiang Cheng mutters, his tone dark. “The things he did...what I’ve seen..”
“Mm, I believe you, very ominous. What would you like me to do about it?” Grandmistress Yu is just as pragmatic as Jiang Cheng remembers her, and just as emotional alongside it. She had taken one look at Wei Wuxian hidden in his cloak and ushered him out to ply him with sweets and tea and an affectionate ruffle to his hair. Not for the first time in his life he wonders how his life could have been different if he’d been brought to Meishan Yu to be raised rather than staying in Lotus Pier.
“I don’t know,” he admits with a growl of frustration, though he’s quick to check himself when Grandmistress Yu raises an admonishing eyebrow. “Sorry, Popo. I really don’t know. I just..I figured if I’m here, now, maybe it means everyone can maybe..try again. Growing up with me and jiejie in Lotus Pier wasn’t...it led to such terrible things, in the end. Maybe things can be different if he’s raised somewhere else. Maybe people won’t have to die.”
“A-Li won’t have to die, you mean.”
“There are plenty of others! He killed so many cultivators! And Wen Ruohan, he -”
“Oh yes, you leave that snake to me. But we’re discussing this parentless, future-evil child you’ve brought into my home. What are you looking for, A-Cheng? Someone to adopt him for you? A wife to raise him with yourself?”
“No!” Grandmistress Yu raises her eyebrow again at that outburst and he ducks his head, but this one he won’t apologize for. “No, Popo. I don’t want a wife or..anybody. But thank you. I don’t think I could even raise him, anyway. I don’t even know if I can stay here or if I have to try to go back or..I don’t know.”
“Hmph. I always thought you Great Sect Leaders always have an answer for everything,” she needles, a glint in her eye.
“ Who would have an answer for this?!”
“Well. Probably Wei Wuxian,” she chuckles and, as if summoned, Wei Ying suddenly pops up next to her, his little face peering over the edge of the table between them.
“Hey, that’s me! Popo, can I have more sweets?”
“Of course xiao-Ying,” she tuts, pulling the plate of little honey cakes close enough for Wei Ying to reach over and snag one.
“Don’t touch anything with sticky hands!” Jiang Cheng turns in his seat to call as Wei Ying promptly runs off again to resume studying the weapons lining the walls as he munches on his cake.
“Okay Yin-gege!!”
“He’s a cute little thing, isn’t he?” Grandmaster Yu chuckles, though she finally relents when Jiang Cheng gives her a look that can only be described as ‘morose’. “A-Cheng, you worry too much!” she chides. “You can stay here for now, with xiao-Ying of course, while you get things figured out. You’re safe here, you know that. And if everything you’ve told me really happens so far from now I’d say you’ve got plenty of time to figure out what’s going on.”
“Popo..”
“Aiyah, A-Cheng, I know . I’m sure it’s very disorienting to be here from the future, but we’ll figure it out! And anyway, you’ve already changed things just by stopping your father from finding the boy. No matter what happens next, you’ve changed the future. Best to just take things one day at a time, there’s only moving forward.”
“What a nightmare,” he mutters into his hands as he scrubs them at his face. “I need to go back to where I came from, I believe. Whether things are different there or not, I don’t think it’s a great idea for me to exist here at the same time that I’m a child in Lotus Pier.”
“Mm I suspect you’re right about that. You said Zidian recognized your mother and you simultaneously?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting, I’ll want to look more closely at that one day. Until then - we’ve got all sorts of unorthodox cultivation manuals in our library. Perhaps something we find there can help you.”
Jiang Cheng drops his hands at that to stare at Grandmistress Yu, who scoffs at him as she picks up a honey cake for herself.
“Don’t look at me like that, A-Cheng. We’re known for crafting unusual first class spiritual tools and utilizing thoroughly unique combat methods. Do you really think we limit ourselves to the hidebound orthodoxies the other Sects do? Open your mind a bit, child, you’ll be much more content in life for it. Xiao-Ying, come talk to your Popo.”
Jiang Cheng watches in stunned silence as Grandmistress Yu pulls Wei Wuxian up onto her lap to talk to him, indulging him and his chatter easily as he talks, clearly thrilled to have an attentive audience.
Research. He can do research. He can research the hell out of unorthodox cultivation manuals, and one way or another he’s going to go home .
----
“Yin-gege, look what Popo gave me!!”
“Not now, A-Xian, I’m busy.”
“Yin-gegeeeeee,” Wei Wuxian whines, flinging himself into his lap and laying across him with one arm flung over his eyes. Jiang Cheng turns a page in his book and tries very very hard not to think about this exact scene playing out almost identically in Cloud Recesses in less than a decade from now. He really doesn’t want to compare himself to Lan Wangji but the resemblance is mildly uncanny in this particular moment. “It’s really really cool! It’s just like your bracelet!”
Well. That’s one way to get his attention.
Jiang Cheng snaps the book shut and looks down at the boy in his lap. Over the last few months in Meishan Wei Wuxian has gained all the appropriate baby fat for his age and is now, obnoxiously, cuter than ever. A fact which he absolutely uses to his advantage, no one will ever convince Jiang Cheng otherwise. Right now Wei Wuxian is grinning up at him so widely his eyes are nearly shut and sticking his right hand up towards Jiang Cheng’s face to show him a jet black bracelet, currently far too loose on him but it’s clear he’ll grow into the fit of it nicely.
“Popo made that for you?”
“Uh-huh. She won’t tell me what it does yet,though, she said I have to learn how to talk to it and ask it myself. But isn’t it so cool?! Maybe it’ll make lightning like yours and we could be like twins!”
Jiang Cheng pauses at that and can’t help but cast a slightly guilty glance at his book set aside on the table. Raising Wei Wuxian, even temporarily, has become full of these little moments - moments where Wei Wuxian is certain their future together is as set in stone as the present, while Jiang Cheng is desperately researching how to leave.
He refuses to let the reversed circumstances make him at all sympathetic to the Wei Wuxian of their adulthood after the Sunshot Campaign, though he can at least acknowledge the dark humor of whatever or whoever is in charge of deciding such twists of fate. The brother who was left behind is now the one attempting to escape. Funny, in a sick way. If he ever meets the author of his fate he’s going to punch them.
“Yin-gege, are you ever going to help train me to fight like the others do?”
He’s going to punch them hard .
“No, A-Xian.”
“Why?”
“I don’t fight like the Meishan do and you shouldn’t learn different styles when they’re trying to teach you theirs.” It’s not strictly a lie but it still sits sour on his tongue.
“Oh okay! Yin-gege?”
“What, A-Xian?”
“Popo said there might be one day when you’re not going to be here anymore.”
Jiang Cheng goes still and he looks down at Wei Wuxian still laying in his lap, his cheerful face unusually solemn all the sudden.
“Did she?” he whispers. It’s surprisingly gutting to hear it from Wei Wuxian’s mouth.
“Mhm. When do we have to leave?”
Oh - that’s worse. That’s so much worse.
“A-Xian..I...we’re not...I can’t take you with me.”
Wei Wuxian blinks up at him and Jiang Cheng watches in horror as it clicks. As understanding floods his little face and his eyes fill quickly with tears.
“Oh,” he manages to choke out and Jiang Cheng tugs him upright quickly to crush him to his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes, tears springing to his eyes without his permission. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He repeats it over and over into Wei Wuxian’s thin, trembling shoulder, but it feels so painfully inadequate. How can he even begin to apologize for this? For everything? For horrors that haven’t even happened to him yet, and for the sorrows that have?
“If you’re sorry then don’t go!” Wei Wuxian demands, petulant and sure that the solution is just that easy, in the simple way that children so often try to solve their problems. Jiang Cheng manages a watery, strangled sort of laugh and holds on a little tighter.
“It’s not that simple, A-Xian. I wish it could be. I do.”
Wei Wuxian clings to him hard enough that his nails leave little scratches in the back of his neck and Jiang Cheng still feels like it’s not enough to make up for all the years without him, all the years of pain and misunderstandings, or what he still has to do no matter how much it’s going to upset them both.
Grandmistress Yu finds them like that just before dinner. Their tears have mostly dried but Jiang Cheng can’t stand to let go of his brother, and Wei Wuxian doesn’t seem inclined to let go either.
“A-Cheng,” she says quietly as she lights some of the candles around the room to chase away the evening shadows. “I found something.”
----
“I’ll make sure he meets you and A-Li,” Grandmistress Yu promises him a week later. The array they’ve agreed is their best bet to get him home is glowing the same sickening shade of blood-red as the one that had brought him here. “And I’ll tell him what I feel is important for him to know about all of this. I’ll help him, A-Cheng. Trust your Popo.”
Jiang Cheng nods and tries to pretend that he’s not clenching his teeth against the pressure of the lump in his throat. Grandmistress Yu reaches up to caress his cheek and brush his tears away, an unconscious echo of Jiang Fengmian’s final goodbye to him. Needless to say that doesn’t help him stop crying.
“No tears, A-Cheng, come along. He’ll find you when you get home, I’ll make sure of it. He’ll know to find you.”
Jiang Cheng nods again and turns resolutely away from Wei Wuxian’s tiny form, sleeping soundly in Grandmistress Yu’s bed on the other side of the room. It’ll take a couple of days for the drugs they gave him to wear off enough for him to wake. By then Jiang Cheng will be long gone, and Wei Wuxian will have to move on, grow up without him. Without their family. Fresh tears drip down his cheeks as he steps forward into the array. No sooner does he center himself in it just so than it flares blindingly bright around him, obscuring everything but the shadow of his hands through his eyelids as he raises them in front of his face to shield his eyes from the glare.
When the light fades, he keeps his eyes closed. He’s sobbing anyway, so there’s really no point in opening his eyes yet. Jiang Cheng drops to his knees and wraps his arms around his chest and he wishes he could hold his brother. Over the months of raising him as A-Xian, of being his Yin-gege, he’s had to let go of his anger entirely to avoid taking it out on him, so young and defenseless and still so wonderfully, beautifully innocent.
Now, all that fills him in the vacuum left by his anger is the gaping wound of a sibling he’ll never have again. He had told Grandmistress Yu everything he could about their lives and what he knew of the political intrigues that had been their ruin. He had needed to make sure she knew so she could prepare for the events that would unfold between then and now, but he’d also needed someone still alive to understand just how much he loved - loves - his brother. No one is alive now to remember just how inseparable they were, how they would both be willing to either kill or die for each other with no questions asked.
He had needed to remind himself of it, most of all.
But all of it, now, is gone. He knows he’s not in Meishan anymore. The world is quiet around him, too quiet for the middle of a sect. He’s in the woods again, the sound of trees rustling and the call of a night bird underpinning the ragged sobs tearing from his chest.
“A-Xian!” he manages, trying to give a voice to his pain, a name, to speak it into the air so maybe it won’t weigh quite so heavily on his heart. “ Wei Wuxian !!!”
“Jiang Cheng?!”
Jiang Cheng’s head snaps up and he forces his eyes open as there’s the sudden sound of hurried steps crashing through the underbrush.
“Jiang Cheng!”
He can only stare in shock as Wei Wuxian himself - a grown man - comes skidding to a stop on his knees in front of him, frantically patting him down looking for injury, for a good reason for him to be on the ground in the middle of the woods crying like he’s lost Lotus Pier and his parents all over again.
“You’re here.”
Wei Wuxian laughs nervously, still patting him down. “Yeah? Where else would I be, huh? What’s wrong, are you hurt? I can’t find anything.”
Jiang Cheng grabs both of Wei Wuxian’s wrists and the gesture forces the man to meet his eyes, his own wide and startled.
“Wait - what in the world are you wearing, A-Cheng?” Wei Wuxian laughs as he pats him down again, this time just tugging on his robes - the same ones he had been given soon after he had decided his Jiang robes were too conspicuous to keep wearing in Meishan. “Is this Yu Sect? Where did you -” Jiang Cheng watches as Wei Wuxian’s eyes somehow manage to go even wider.
“Yin-gege?” he breathes, as if afraid of the answer, and Jiang Cheng isn’t sure if the sound that escapes him is another sob or a laugh.
“I’m sorry,” he croaks. “I didn’t want to leave you like that I swear I didn’t, A-Xian, please, believe me-”
“Oh A-Cheng come here,” Wei Wuxian chuckles, pulling him in for a hug and holding him tight. “Shh, it’s okay. Popo told me everything, she wrote every bit of it down for me, it’s okay. That was so long ago for me, you don’t have to be sorry. Come here, I’m here. I thought this might happen soon, we’re the right age for it hm? It’s alright, don’t cry.”
“Everyone else - Lotus Pier. Jiejie -”
“All alive, everything’s fine , Jiang Cheng. Shh. Just calm down first and then I’ll catch you up on everything, alright?”
Jiang Cheng nods and gulps in deep breaths as he clutches Wei Wuxian’s robes, buries his face in his brother’s hair.
“I’ve missed you, Wei Ying,” he whispers, his voice breaking. Wei Wuxian shushes him again and rubs a hand slowly up and down his back.
“I missed you, too, Yin-gege, A-Cheng, my didi. But I’m right here. You’re alright.”
There’s a long pause and then, as if lifting the weight of the world off both of their shoulders with the depth of his sigh, Wei Wuxian adds, “We’re alright.”