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“He died!”
The words ring loud, sharp—in the pavilion where they’re taking their evening meal, surrounded on all sides by untroubled water, the words seem to carry for miles.
It’s unlike Lan Sizhui to raise his voice at all, much less to raise it toward a senior. His hands, resting politely on his knees under the table, have curled into fists.
“Everyone goes on and on as though baba has so much to atone for,” Lan Sizhui says, each word lurching from his throat like a line of fierce corpses shambling through brush. “What more is there for him to give? What more do you want? He died.”
Jin Ling is staring at his friend as though he’s never seen him fully before. On Lan Sizhui’s other side, Wei Wuxian’s expression is shifting rapidly from alarm to comprehension. His gray eyes are full of a painful understanding.
“Sizhui ah,” Wei Wuxian says, touching the boy’s shoulder. “Come take a walk with me.”
Jerking his head in a nod, Lan Sizhui pushes to his feet and then pauses there. His Gusu Lan whites, those extra lines and layers that denote him a member of the main family, ghost elegantly around him when he lowers himself in a bow that is every inch deep that it needs to be and not one inch deeper.
“Sect Leader Jiang, this disciple apologizes,” he says. The cheerful ‘shushu’ of earlier that morning might as well be a memory of another life. “My behavior was unworthy.”
He doesn’t grit it out, the way Jin Ling would probably have had to. It doesn’t even seem to cost him any pride.
For one, single, impossible moment, it’s as though Jiang Yanli is standing there, making her apologies to their mother for her brothers’ sake, to spare them any pain she could. It didn’t matter that the blame wasn’t hers. It didn’t cost her any pride, either.
But Jiang Yanli didn’t have a chance to be a part of her nephew’s life, as much as she would have wanted to be. This likeness isn’t hers, not truly. Wei Wuxian was always more like his sister than he or Jiang Cheng were ready to admit.
“Forget it,” Jiang Cheng says. His voice is hoarse, but in the stillness of the water and the silence of the pavilion, it carries, too. “Go on.”
Wei Wuxian shepherds his son from the table. He glances back at Jiang Cheng once, a grimace of apology on his face, but then Lan Sizhui’s hand finds the trailing black hem of Wei Wuxian’s sleeve and clutches to it, and that steals all of Wei Wuxian’s attention as easily as a slap or a shout might have.
The moment they’re gone, Jin Ling lets out a breath he must have been holding, and rounds on his other uncle with wide eyes.
“What did you say?” Jin Ling blurts. “I wasn’t really paying attention, but it didn’t sound like—I mean, it sounded normal.”
Jiang Cheng is still staring at the place Lan Sizhui had stood.
The last living remnant of a persecuted clan, so much an amalgamation of his two fathers that it didn’t make sense that one of them had been dead for most of his young life—holding a grudge and bowing his head at the same time. Lan Wangji, in Jiang Cheng’s experience, has never once let something go that he could nurse icy resentment for instead. Wei Wuxian has always choked down hurt like it was second nature, no matter that it must feel like swallowing nails every time.
It was a normal conversation, but perhaps that’s exactly why Lan Sizhui couldn’t bear another second of it.
“He died,” Lan Sizhui had said, as raw as a fresh wound, or one that kept getting torn open again before it could heal. “What more do you want?”
“Ah, Jiang Cheng,” Wei Wuxian says the next morning, meeting him in the courtyard. “Did you sleep well?”
He’s smiling with a certain nervous energy that Jiang Cheng can only pick out because he spent the formative years of his life raising and being raised by his siblings. To an outsider, there probably wouldn’t be a single visible chink in that cheerful armor.
Jiang Cheng, for all his failings, isn’t an outsider. Not quite. The door between them is closed—has been closed for years, almost decades—but Wei Wuxian isn’t the one who closed it. There almost certainly isn’t a lock or talisman keeping Jiang Cheng from forcing it open again.
It won’t come open again easily. There is so much stacked in the way. Hurt and betrayal and grief throw their weight into keeping it shut, holding it down on either side.
But—
“What more do you want?” Lan Sizhui had asked.
“Fine,” Jiang Cheng forces out. Wei Wuxian blinks, as if he didn’t expect a forthright answer, or any answer at all. Something about his open surprise at the barest scrap of civility makes Jiang Cheng add, “If you’re awake this early, you didn’t sleep at all.”
His brother takes the opening for what it is, and bends into character. “Oh! You know me so well!”
Mo Xuanyu’s body is smaller, slighter, than the body that Wei Wuxian was born into, and his face is not quite the same, but Wei Wuxian’s mannerisms shine through so clearly that it’s easy to look past everything else. Even the way he stands still is entirely his own, his whole body vibrating with the necessary focus it takes to keep from bursting into movement again.
He is so familiar. The most familiar thing in Jiang Cheng’s entire, almost-empty life.
“I’m sorry about last night,” Wei Wuxian says. The words spill from his mouth like river pebbles, scattering around their feet. There’s that echo of their jiejie again, smiling around I’m sorry. “Don’t hold it against him, please. He’s so young, and he’s struggling to make sense of some things. He was happy that you invited him to Lotus Pier.”
The past-tense makes Jiang Cheng want to flinch, but he doesn’t. He just stands there in the peach pink morning and absorbs the beginning of a goodbye.
“So you’re leaving, then?” he mutters.
“I think we’ve definitely worn out our welcome this time,” Wei Wuxian says, easily shouldering the blame for everyone else’s bad behavior. They might as well be twelve years old again, kneeling here in the courtyard under Madam Yu’s furious eyes. “But it’s alright! Wen Ning sent word that he’s waiting for us outside of Yunmeng and Sizhui is eager to see him. We’ll go find some trouble to get into before we head back home.”
He won’t say a word about this change of plans to his husband, but Lan Wangji will still find out—whether Lan Sizhui tells him, or Wen Ning, or he just picks up something from Wei Wuxian through osmosis—and the next cultivator conference will be excruciating. And if the Jiang clan gets anything out of it, it won’t be anything good. And Jiang Cheng will feel slighted and angry for months, until the next time Wei Wuxian swings by for a visit. And having his brother nearby will soothe an ache in the pit of Jiang Cheng’s chest that he’s able to ignore all the rest of the time. And then, inevitably, Wei Wuxian will look wistfully at the water, or linger for too long by the flowers their sister liked best, or bring some other manner of ghost to the dinner table, and Jiang Cheng will lash out because it’s the only way he knows how to handle hurt. And then Wei Wuxian will extract himself and go home to Cloud Recesses early, and Lan Wangji will rightly guess why. And it just never fucking ends, does it?
The grief he carries around with him—he’s not wrong to carry it. It’s his. He was hurt, time and again, by a person he used to count on not to hurt him. He’s two times an orphan; once when his parents died, and again when his siblings did. He had to rebuild his home from the ground up, by himself, with his own two hands. Everything he has is what he was able to dig out of the dirt and ashes.
It isn’t Wei Wuxian’s fault that Lotus Pier fell. It isn’t his fault that the Wens were persecuted, that they had nowhere else to turn for protection. And it isn’t—
This one hurts; this one comes away bleeding. Jiang Cheng forces himself through it anyway.
It isn’t Wei Wuxian’s fault that Yanli died.
She died for him, but he didn’t ask her to.
Jiang Cheng feels his brother’s golden core thrumming inside his chest, hyper-aware of it now in a way he rarely was before—how it feels the way the sun looks in the morning, warm and brilliant and spilling color across the dull gray of dawn.
He didn’t ask Wei Wuxian to cut himself open for Jiang Cheng’s sake. He can’t be blamed for his brother’s choices. And if that’s true (and it has to be true or Jiang Cheng will go insane) then Wei Wuxian can’t be blamed for their sister’s choice, either. Yanli died for Wei Wuxian because she loved him, and Wei Wuxian gave Jiang Cheng his golden core because he loved him, and Jiang Cheng never moved on and never let go because he loved them, too.
They weren’t raised to love softly or quietly. Love between the three of them was always fierce, like a wild animal baring its teeth. Clinging to each other in a world that wanted to rip them apart. Even Yanli, who smiled and spoke with such sweetness, went to war because her brothers were there.
“What more do you want?” Lan Sizhui had asked.
Jiang Cheng lifts his head. Wei Wuxian is already looking at him, poised, as ever, to leave the moment Jiang Cheng gives him any indication that he should, like a bird ready to fling itself into flight. His brother, dead for thirteen years and back again, and only sometimes-welcome in the place he used to call home. Only sometimes-wanted by the person who used to be his family.
In a world full of people missing people they’ll never see again, Wei Wuxian is a miracle that Jiang Cheng is entirely unworthy of.
He’s right to carry his grief, because it’s his. But he wouldn’t be wrong—it wouldn’t be a betrayal—if he chose to set it down.
“You find trouble as easy as breathing,” he says, speaking through his heart, where it’s lodged in his throat, “so that shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Maligned!” Wei Wuxian cries with an air of great sorrow. “Blatantly maligned, by my own flesh and blood!”
Jiang Cheng can’t say what he wants to say. He can’t find the words. There’s only so much of himself he can dig up and expose like raw nerves before the pain of it becomes overwhelming, and he reacts to the hurt the way he always does, and shoves Wei Wuxian away.
“Don’t forget to say goodbye to Jin Ling, or he’ll never forgive you,” Jiang Cheng settles for. “And I’ll be the one stuck hearing about it.”
“I would never forget my favorite nephew,” Wei Wuxian says easily.
“And if you fuck up, and get yourself into a stupid mess,” Jiang Cheng adds, before he loses his nerve, “don’t let me hear about it from someone else.”
For a moment, Wei Wuxian doesn’t seem to know what to say.
“What if it’s very stupid?” he finally asks, his voice at once both faint and painfully fond.
“What else is new?” Jiang Cheng snaps. “Just send for me, and I’ll come.”
Above them, the pink and orange of fresh dawn make way for vivid blue. As Jiang Cheng stands in his childhood home with his only brother, while the market comes to life outside the walls and the breeze sweeps the smell of lotus flowers and scallion pancakes through the courtyard, the years seem to fall away. For a brief, uninterrupted moment, they’re both back where they belong.
“Aiyah, shidi,” Wei Wuxian says. “Of course you will.”
The next time Jiang Cheng sees Lan Sizhui is at the cultivation conference in Gusu, two months later.
The boy smiles politely but greets him as ‘Sect Leader Jiang’ again, and next to him, Jiang Cheng can feel Jin Ling wince. Lan Sizhui’s counterpart, the wildly opinionated and deeply un-Lan-like Lan Jingyi is giving him a frank, up-and-down appraisal.
“I mean, I’ll give it to you,” he says baldly. “You’re brave. Like, if Hanguang-jun hated me as much as he hated you, I just wouldn’t show up. You couldn’t pay me to show up.”
“Jingyi,” Lan Sizhui says at length.
“No, I know. I’m just saying. Young Mistress,” he adds, sweeping into a deep, performative bow in front of Jin Ling, “if you’ll come with me, your presence is earnestly awaited by Young Master Ouyang in the library pavilion.”
“Shut up, Jingyi, I swear,” Jin Ling snaps, but he lets himself be herded away with only a single worried glance back at his uncle.
Lan Sizhui is gazing up at Jiang Cheng with a complicated expression. Even though the explosive anger of that disastrous dinner doesn’t seem likely to make a reappearance, there is still something troubled in his eyes.
“I wanted to apologize, shushu,” the boy says slowly. “Properly, that is. For the way I spoke to you last time.”
Ah. So the stiffness isn’t born of lingering irritation, but worry. These Lans, Jiang Cheng thinks, with significantly less venom than he’s used to thinking of the Lan sect with.
He has a well of patience for his nephews that has never run dry. Jin Ling has stretched it nearly to the limit, more than once, but it will take Lan Sizhui more than one emotional outburst to come even close. Given that they’ve only been family (for given value of the word) for a short while, it makes sense that Lan Sizhui wouldn’t know that.
“It wasn’t you that I was angry with, not really,” Lan Sizhui says, explaining when Jiang Cheng has already largely guessed. “I know that you care about baba in your own way, even if a-die doesn’t think so. But—there are—”
His young face folds in frustration, less remarkably than Jin Ling’s does when he’s having a snit, but just a creased forehead speaks volumes in this repressed sect.
“There are other people. Who say similar things. And they don’t mean it the way you mean it.”
Jiang Cheng knows that. He attended those meetings, too.
“And let me guess,” he says, “my idiot brother doesn’t want you speaking up for him.”
Lan Sizhui’s mouth twists. “He says that he did horrible things, and those people are well within their rights to feel about him however they want to feel about him. But—he did good, too. He protected my clan, even though he had to do it alone. I don’t remember very much,” he goes on, slightly quieter, “but I know that he made the Burial Mounds a warm and safe place for me. I know that I never felt scared or cold or hungry when I was there with him. And I don’t think most people could have done that.”
Jiang Cheng boxes up the involuntary pain that swells into place at the poking of this half-healed wound, and gives himself a moment to organize a reply. Talking to the mind-healer his chief physician recommended to him has helped a lot, not that he’ll give that smug witch the satisfaction of admitting it.
“Wei Wuxian hurt a lot of people, but so did everyone else,” he says when he’s certain he can say it without losing his composure. “We were at war. None of us are blameless. He was just the most convenient scapegoat. He still is.”
Lan Sizhui’s eyes are bright with vindication. He was born a Wen and raised a Lan, but there’s a streak of Jiang in there, too, Jiang Cheng thinks with pride. It’s that love that Jiang Cheng recognizes, the same kind of love that he and jiejie and Wei Wuxian had cultivated between them since they were children—the vicious, untamed kind of love that marches to war and claws its way up from hell and clings too hard to things it rightly should let go of.
“It isn’t fair,” Lan Sizhui says.
“No,” Jiang Cheng allows. “It isn’t.”
Wei Wuxian waves animatedly at Jiang Cheng from across the room, even though it makes Lan Qiren scowl at him. It’s reminiscent of every single stuffy banquet they had to sit through as kids, making faces at one another when Madam Yu’s eyes were turned away.
Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes in return, and Wei Wuxian lights up like he’s been handed a pile of gold. Lan Wangji gazes at him with a tenderness that would be absolutely absurd if Wei Wuxian didn’t actually deserve every scant inch of it that got sent his way, and even though the entire cultivation world is waiting, he spares a moment to tuck a stray piece of hair behind Wei Wuxian’s ear.
Sect Leader Yao scoffs, a bit too loudly. “Shameless upstart.”
Lan Wangji’s eyes turn so sharp so fast that it promises violence.
Before he can say anything that starts another war, Jiang Cheng turns fully around in his seat.
“Problem?” he asks shortly.
Baffled, Sect Leader Yao’s gaze skates around the room for a moment before landing back on Jiang Cheng.
“If you have something to say about my brother,” Jiang Cheng says, his voice a snarl, Zidian sparking on his arm, “say it so that I can hear you.”
“Ah, this meeting is off to such a lively start,” Wei Wuxian says into the ominous stillness of the room. “Shidi, you’re so energetic, why don’t you kick things off?”
It would be the first time in his career that he’s the first to speak at a conference. Openly disbelieving, Jiang Cheng looks from his brother to Lan Wangji. Lan Wangji’s eyes are narrowed, but not as though he’s sizing Jiang Cheng up for a coffin, which is how he usually sizes him up. All he does is tip his head incrementally, conceding the floor to him.
Gods. It’s that simple.
“You are really not a difficult person, are you?” Jiang Cheng says aloud.
“No,” Lan Wangji agrees, this force of nature who turned the world upside down and challenged every single person in it, who would do so again and again and again, just to be able to sit there and hold Wei Wuxian’s hand.
And then, in the closest the two of them have ever come to an understanding, Lan Wangji adds, “Neither are you.”