Jiang Cheng wants to weep.
He doesn’t, of course, he’s a sect leader now, but he still wants to. Because after three months of desperate searching in the midst of the horrors of the ongoing Sunshot Campaign, he’s finally found Wei Wuxian again. He’s different; colder and more distant and his smile is sharper than ever before but if he really was thrown to the Burial Mounds, it’s no wonder.
Jiang Cheng doesn’t want to believe Wei Wuxian was thrown into the Burial Mounds but in all honesty, if anyone was to make it out, it would be Wei Wuxian. Besides, whatever happened to him, his ridiculously strong core would repair the damages in no time anyway.
They make it back to Yunmeng in an exhausted stupor. Wei Wuxian is quiet in a way he didn’t used to be, perhaps because Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu were finally dead. Or perhaps because he and Lan Wangji had a falling out. Which was weird and that Jiang Cheng will think about later when he isn’t so exhausted he almost crash-landed into the river. Carrying Wei Wuxian home on his sword was a stupid thing to do but he just…couldn’t let go of him. Not when he finally has him back.
”Come on,” he says, jerking his head in the direction of the Ancestral Hall.
Wei Wuxian turns slowly, his eyes slightly vacant. ”What?”
Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes. ”We’re going to pay our respects and you’re going to tell my parents you’re alright so that they won’t worry.” Mother probably couldn’t care less but Father was always fond of Wei Wuxian—more than he ever was of Jiang Cheng. The thought almost doesn’t sting anymore.
Wei Wuxian is uncharacteristically hesitant when he enters and lights incense, then kneels next to Jiang Cheng. They bow, slowly and in perfect unison, and Jiang Cheng closes his eyes against the tears that threaten to spill.
I found him, he thinks. I found him and now we three are together again. And we’ll build the Jiang Sect back into its former glory together. That I promise.
He breathes out and stands up, feeling a weight drop from his shoulders.
”Jiang-shushu. Madam Yu,” Wei Wuxian whispers next to him, red-rimmed eyes focused on the altar. ”You asked me to take good care of Shijie and Jiang Cheng. I’ve done it. Rest in peace.”
A cold chill runs down Jiang Cheng’s spine at the strange wording. ”What are you mumbling?” he asks, trying to keep his voice calm.
Wei Wuxian offers him a small smile without meeting his eyes. ”Nothing,” he says. ”Tell me, how is Shijie?”
Jiang Cheng gives him a long look and takes in the uncomfortable hunch of his shoulders, then beckons him to follow, clenching the hand holding Zidian into a fist to keep himself from lashing out. ”She’s fine,” he says. ”She’s in Qinghe, working at the field hospital.”
”In the—Jiang Cheng!” Wei Wuxian frowns, hurrying to his side. ”Isn’t that too hard for her?”
”Are you going to tell her she isn’t allowed to be where she wants to be?” Jiang Cheng asks dryly. ”A-jie is doing what she can, just like everyone else.”
”But—”
”She’s always been best at comforting others,” Jiang Cheng interrupts, opening the door to Father’s study—he still can’t quite think of it as his own—and activates a privacy talisman as he closes the door behind them. ”Now,” he says, setting his shoulders as he turns around. ”What did you mean by having ’taken good care’ of a-jie and I? What did you do?”
If Wei Wuxian had been pale before, now his face turns ashen. ”I—don’t know what you mean,” he tries. ”Your parents always wanted me to look out for you and shijie, that’s nothing new.”
Jiang Cheng grits his teeth and waits.
”I’m the reason Lotus Pier fell!” Wei Wuxian adds, insistent. ”Madam Yu said it herself!”
Jiang Cheng draws a slow breath through his teeth. ”The Wen were always going to set up a Supervisory Office on Lotus Pier,” he says slowly. ”You were just a convenient excuse.”
During the past three months, at night when he was having trouble sleeping not knowing whether Wei Wuxian was alive or dead, he’d been thinking a lot of what had happened and how. The attack happened because the Wen wanted it to. It had nothing to do with Wei Wuxian—just like the burning of the Cloud Recesses had nothing to do with the Lan not following orders or some other ridiculous reason presented at them.
Blaming Wei Wuxian was the easy way out.
It was not the truth.
And it was wrong.
”What did you mean with your comment at the shrine?” he asks again.
”I said what I said,” Wei Wuxian snaps. His eyes narrow and turn red-rimmed and Jiang Cheng can feel pressure building in the room.
”Bullshit!” Jiang Cheng takes two steps forward and punches him on the shoulder and—
Wei Wuxian stumbles and falls on the floor, hard.
There’s a wild look in his eyes as he flips his arm up, holding out the black flute like it was enough to fend off an attack. His breathing comes in desperate gasps, almost like he isn’t getting enough air, teeth bared in a grimace that looks like a bloody slash across his ashen face.
”What the fuck—”
He takes a step forward and freezes as Wei Wuxian hisses something under his breath, unseeing eyes staring through Jiang Cheng at something that makes him terrified in a way Jiang Cheng has never seen him before.
There are wisps of resentful energy licking at the hems of his black robe.
Jiang Cheng is suddenly very, very afraid—not of Wei Wuxian but for him.
”Wei Wuxian!” he snaps almost as a reflex, only to doge sharply as a thin strand of resentful energy lashes out, clearly with the intent of impaling him—or whatever horrors Wei Wuxian is currently seeing.
Cursing under his breath, he spins aside and out of the way of yet another burst of resentful energy whipping out. It doesn’t seem like Wei Wuxian is consciously directing the resentful energy at Jiang Cheng, more like he’s lashing out at anything that might be coming at him. Like he’s half-ready to die.
Jiang Cheng dodges again, hissing as he sprains his ankle, and then decides that this fucking ends now.
With a thought, he sends Zidian out, wrapping it around Wei Wuxian in a tight but not strangling hold. Wei Wuxian lets out a desperate sound like a wounded animal backed to a corner and Jiang Cheng doesn’t stop to think: he darts behind him and with a couple of taps, hits his acupoints to knock him unconscious.
The dizi lets out a threatening thrum of barely contained violence and Jiang Cheng sighs. That instrument might not be a conventional cultivation weapon but it is a sentient weapon and it clearly trusts no one. He isn’t stupid enough to try and touch it.
”I’m trying to help him, not hurt him,” he says aloud. ”If you got him out of the Burial Mounds alive, the Jiang Sect is in your debt,” he continues. ”But he’s my—” he chokes for a moment. ”He’s my brother and I need to make sure he’s not actively dying because he’s too stubborn to ask for help.”
His sense of the dizi eases from tightly coiled violence into a vigilant awareness as the thrumming energy relaxes. It reminds him of the way that an apex predator lays down: not actively about to attack but still very aware of its surroundings, still extremely dangerous.
”Thank you,” Jiang Cheng mutters. Gently, he picks Wei Wuxian up, sets him on the daybed, and spreads a blanket over him.
Now that he’s still, it’s painfully obvious he isn’t well. His pale face still has the ashen hue, his hair is limp and tangled, his cheekbones so sharp they almost seem to cut through the skin. His hand, when Jiang Cheng picks it up, is cold to the touch and almost skeletal, the tendons and veins straining through the thin skin. Shaking his head, Jiang Cheng turns the hand palm up in his own and presses two fingers on Wei Wuxian’s wrist to feed him spiritual energy.
And meets only emptiness.
”…what?” he whispers, blinks at his fingers on the thin wrist, looks at the gaunt face with horror, then looks at the body hidden under a blanket. ”No—that can’t—no!”
He tries to push more spiritual energy into him, follows the meridians through to where Wei Wuxian’s powerful core should be thrumming and finds nothing. The meridians are there and then they’re not, almost like they’d been cut—
A terrible sense of foreboding spreads through him like something oily and thick resting in the back of his throat and sliding down to pool in his stomach. There’s no sign of charring, no sign of the kind of violation Jiang Cheng had felt even after his core had been repaired. The echoes of Wen Zhuliu’s power burning through his core still linger, but he can sense none of that in Wei Wuxian. Whatever had happened to his core, isn’t what happened to Jiang Cheng.
Frantic, he tears the blanket aside and yanks Wei Wuxian’s robes open, paying no mind to how the fabric rips under the strain. And there, over his navel, is a jagged, angry red, barely healed surgical scar, at the exact place where his golden core should be.
If Wei Wuxian has a scar on his stomach, then—
Jiang Cheng’s hands shake so hard he’s having trouble opening his own robes, and then he has to take a moment to breathe before he’s able to look down. Because he already knows what he will see—he’s seen it before, the paper-thin, well-healed scar in the exact same place as Wei Wuxian’s scar.
He looks anyway, pressing a hand on his mouth to keep in the scream or the compulsion to throw up, or both.
Jiang Cheng might not be the genius Wei Wuxian is but he isn’t stupid.
The core that thrums inside him is so much stronger than the core he had before Wen Zhuliu burned it away.
Wei Wuxian no longer has a core.
They both have identical surgical scars on their dantians.
”Wei Wuxian, what the fuck did you do?” he whispers in horror.
He slaps additional privacy talismans on the walls and then screams until his voice breaks. Then he swears and curses and spits and rages, at one point punching one of the supporting beams in the room’s corner so hard it splinters, making the whole room shudder.
”Why the fuck would you do something so monumentally stupid like that, Wei Wuxian?!”
”What the fuck gave you the right?!”
”Did you think I’d welcome your core?!”
”Why did you think this was fucking necessary?”
”Did you think I wanted you to fucking mutilate yourself?”
”What the fuck do you think I’m going to tell A-jie?”
When he runs out of steam, he slumps down on his knees next to the daybed, frantically making sure Wei Wuxian is still breathing. He is, and Jiang Cheng is so relieved and furious he wants to slap him and hug him and shake him until his ridiculous red ribbon comes loose and then he’s never going to let him out of his fucking sight anymore.
The dizi rests on his side, tightly clasped in Wei Wuxian’s hold.
”You’ve kept him alive so far, haven’t you?” Jiang Cheng asks after he’s run out of things to yell at least for now. ”Keep doing that. Perhaps together, we’ll make it through this fucking war.”
He decides they have an understanding now.
Wei Wuxian draws a slow breath, looking like a corpse.
When Wei Wuxian finally stirs, it’s getting light outside. Jiang Cheng has fallen asleep curled next to the daybed, fingers on his pulse point and his other arm awkwardly thrown over his midriff, as if being bound with Zidian wasn’t enough to keep him put.
Knowing Wei Wuxian, it might not be.
”Wha—” Wei Wuxian slurs, twitching slightly even before he blinks his bleary eyes open.
”You took your fucking time,” Jiang Cheng says.
Wei Wuxian stills and his hand twitches in Jiang Cheng’s hold before he clearly forces himself to relax.
”I know it won’t do you much good,” Jiang Cheng continues in the same, even voice. ”But at least circulating spiritual energy will help you heal the multiple hairline fractures you have practically in every bone of your body.”
”Jiang Cheng—” Wei Wuxian starts hoarsely.
”Even if you die, you still have to keep him safe,” Jiang Cheng says slowly. ”That’s what she said when she sent us away.” The thought makes him sick.
”What?” Wei Wuxian whispers.
He takes a deep breath, holds it in for a moment, then lets it slowly out. ”I’m not going to ask how you managed to do what you did,” he says in a low voice without looking at Wei Wuxian. ”I’m not going to ask why you thought for a moment that I would welcome your self-mutilation and—” he motions sharply with his hand, cutting off Wei Wuxian’s protests. ”I’m also not interested in hearing whatever twisted reasoning you came up with to justify your deed.”
He finally raises his head to look Wei Wuxian in the eye and manages to hold the eye contact only through sheer force of will; Wei Wuxian looks terrified and it’s not a look he’s ever seen on him before.
”I have only one question,” he says. ”Can you control it? The resentful energy?”
Wei Wuxian blinks. ”I—yes?”
”Do you know that you can, or do you think you can?”
Something flickers across Wei Wuxian’s face and he settles, shifts more into the Wei Wuxian he’s known almost his whole life. ”Yes, Jiang Cheng. I know I can control it.”
He nods and recalls Zidian. ”Alright,” he says and stands up, holding out a hand. ”Get up.” When Wei Wuxian stares at his outstretched hand and then at him, he rolls his eyes. ”Get up. We have work to do.”
Wei Wuxian still looks wary but he takes Jiang Cheng’s hand and he tries not to feel sick about how light he is, how easy it is to pull him up. ”Just like that?” Wei Wuxian asks.
Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes again. ”No, not ’just like that’,” he snorts. ”Our forces are nonexistent, our home has been burned down, and we’re at war, there’s no ’just like that’ anywhere. But it’s a start.” He goes to smooth down the black lapels and gives up the attempt. ”You look like shit. And you smell like shit. Go take a bath. We’ll eat before we fly out to Qinghe.”
Wei Wuxian makes a face. ”I can’t—”
”Oh for fuck’s sake, Wei Wuxian! I’m flying us both—even if we had horses, riding from Yunmeng to Qinghe would take way too long. I’m sure your Hanguang-jun has told A-jie we found you so I have to get you to her as soon as possible.”
”He’s not my—”
”He sure as fuck isn’t mine, either,” Jiang Cheng snaps. ”The Lan have a lot of music that helps deal with resentful energy. If he offers to help, you will accept.”
A stubborn look flashes on Wei Wuxian’s face. ”Jiang Cheng—”
”No!” he hisses, whirling around fast enough to make Wei Wuxian scramble back with a yelp. ”I’m your sect leader, Wei Wuxian! If you tell me you can control it, I’ll believe you, but. You are mine and you will do as I tell you, and if Lan-fucking-Wangji playing at you helps, you will sit your fucking ass down and listen to him with a smile on your face! Do I make myself clear?”
Wei Wuxian stares at him with wide eyes. ”Um.”
”I don’t know what’s going on between you two. I don’t want to know what’s going on between you two. Cry at A-jie about it if you want, I don’t care. But you will listen to me and you will listen to A-jie, and if I tell you to listen to your precious Hanguang-jun, you will listen to him.”
”Okay, A-Cheng,” Wei Wuxian says softly. ”I’ll try.”
He shakes his head sharply. ”Don’t try. Do.” He rubs a hand over his face, feeling like he’s suddenly aged a decade. ”Go take that fucking bath, Wei Wuxian. You stink.”
”Hurtful!” Wei Wuxian gasps but he tentatively bumps their shoulders together and then looks at him with imploring eyes, almost as if he isn’t sure he’s allowed to do that anymore.
Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes and pushes him out of the door and then stays in the office for some time, just breathing, trying to get himself under control.
So. Wei Wuxian gave Jiang Cheng his golden core.
Wei Wuxian no longer has his golden core.
Wei Wuxian wields resentful energy and a spiritual weapon that’s clearly protective of him.
Okay.
Okay.
One thing at a time.
First, bath and food. Then Qinghe.
And then A-jie will help them figure out how to deal with all of…this.