Work Text:
What Wei Wuxian knows:
“It’s going to take a lot of work to rebuild,” Jiang Cheng said, picking up a fallen door – the Wens had turned just about every building into a barrack, and the soldiers they’d housed had not been especially cautious about their surroundings. “It’ll be hard to do.”
“Don’t worry,” Wei Wuxian said with a sharp laugh. He was still cloaked in resentful energy from a victory hard-fought, the hem of his clothing still flecked with blood. “Whatever it takes, we’ll do it. We’ll put it back just the way it was, the way we remember it being.”
“Not just the same,” Jiang Cheng said. “Better.”
He looked into the distance, remembering the sight and sound and smell of the Pier as it burned.
“I don’t want something like that to ever happen again.”
-
What Wei Wuxian doesn’t know:
Jiang Cheng tried to stand up for him after he took the Wens. No matter what poison was poured into his ears, no matter the accusations, he persisted, defiant, refusing to be convinced.
And then one day he woke up with a delegation from the Jin sect at his door, inside his door, inside his house, and there was nothing he could do to stop them as they walked around his home, his Lotus Pier, as if they were its new possessors.
Another violation.
Jiang Cheng understood the unsubtle and yet plausibly deniable message that he had been sent. The next day he went to Yiling, and the day after, when Wei Wuxian refused to put his family and sect above a group of strangers, broke ties and cast him out from the Jiang sect.
Then he went home and – broken arm or not – broke down his own door in his fury.
“Sect Leader Jiang…” his new second-in-command said, hesitant; he had only just been appointed the role. Jiang Cheng had worked alone for months now, keeping the position open for its rightful owner, but it was now irrefutably clear that Wei Wuxian would never take it up – there was no point in keeping the place vacant any longer.
“We need more defenses,” Jiang Cheng said, breathing heavily, his fingers clenched so tightly that they spasmed in pain that he ignored. “I don’t care what price. It cannot happen again.”
-
What Wei Wuxian doesn’t know:
The Jin sect thought Wei Wuxian would come running home after the disaster at Qionqi Path.
Oh, officially he was no longer a member of the Jiang sect, everyone knew that, and yet –
They smiled.
In the end, family was still family, no?
But of course Sect Leader Jiang had made his position clear: he would never tolerate such a thing. So it wouldn’t be a problem, then, if they just came in for a while, just for a little, made themselves at home while they waited to see if Wei Wuxian would come, just to be sure –
Jiang Cheng couldn’t breathe from anger, but he had no time; he had to get to his bereaved sister’s side.
When he left, there was a man wearing a yellow peony sitting at the head of the table of the Lotus Pier.
-
What Wei Wuxian doesn’t know:
Jiang Cheng was still covered in blood when he came home again. His sister’s body had been wrenched out of his hands, taken to be buried beside her husband – he was not allowed to see the child.
Family was not still family, not when your sister had married out. He had no right to protest.
Go home, they said, eyes alight with demonic delight, a pack of wolves that smelled blood in the air and knew the hunt was on. Raise your army. We march on the Burial Mounds.
Jiang Cheng was one of the only survivors of the massacre at the Nightless City.
He was not – entirely sane.
At the head of the table at the Lotus Pier sat a man wearing a yellow peony.
“Get out,” Jiang Cheng said, words tearing out of a throat already raspy from screaming. “Get out. Get out of my house!”
They said he was a danger to himself and others, and insisted his weapons be taken away from him until he could regain control of himself. And he couldn’t stop them.
-
What Wei Wuxian doesn’t know:
Jiang Cheng didn’t know what he would do at the siege of Luanzang Hill, which was why he insisted on leading it. If he were at the head of the army, he would reach Wei Wuxian first, and then he could decide whether to save him or scold him or – or something else.
He never had the chance to decide. Instead, he had the best view of them all as Wei Wuxian’s demonic cultivation escaped his control for the last and final time, the backlash ripping him to pieces, leaving him without an intact corpse – without anything to place in the Jiang sect’s memorial hall, except maybe his damned flute.
There was blood on Jiang Cheng’s face and clothing. Blood and bones and brains splattered all over him.
The Jin sect called him a hero.
Jiang Cheng went home.
“We will never be taken again,” he said, his voice cracking as it hadn’t done since he’d passed puberty. “We will never allow them to touch a single one of us – no matter what crime, no matter what abomination, nothing. I don’t care. They will not stand in judgment of us again. They will not pass through our doors again. They will not find any of us to take. Not again.”
His servants – all he had left now, all but for a baby locked away behind doors that glittered gold, who he would have to beg on bended knee for months to even see – looked at each other.
“But…how?” one of them asked.
Jiang Cheng smiled. They all flinched and backed away from him.
He didn’t care.
-
What Wei Wuxian knows:
The Lotus Pier looked just the way it used to when they were young – happy and free, with doors wide open and children in the streets, laughter and noise in the air, the smell of hot and sour mixing with the fresh breeze from the river.
“It’s good that at least in one place, nothing changes,” Wei Wuxian said, leaning down to splash Lan Wangji with water.
His husband said nothing, but that was quite normal for him.
-
What Wei Wuxian doesn’t know:
When the enemy came to find the Lotus Pier, it didn’t find the wide-open doors, the broad streets, the boats. It didn’t find anything at all.
No people.
No buildings.
Nothing.
“Where did it all go?” one of them asked, lowering his sword as he stood on the deserted empty pier. He didn’t look down. “Where –”
He died before he knew what killed him.
The others weren’t so lucky, and took up the shout at once: “There’s something in the water! There are people in the –”
It didn’t help them. They died, too.
The Lotus Pier was a beautiful place.
Deep under the water of the river, protected by a crystalline barrier made by the sort of forbidden array that had been banned so long ago that no one dared even speculate how it was formed or on what it ran, it flourished –
Safe at last.