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“Sect Leader Jiang,” says Lan Wangji through the wall.

Jiang Cheng doesn’t bother to answer. He’s listening to the fast, wheezing rattle of his own breath, the rush of blood in his ears. His chest squeezes around the knife-blade with every inhale; the resulting explosion of pain forces air out through his teeth. He chokes. The next breath is faster, more violent. His chest constricts again.

“Sect Leader Jiang.”

~

Jiang Cheng’s job was supposed to be the easy one, theoretically. Distract and delay. Their demonic cultivator captors have to pass his cell to get to Lan Wangji’s or Wei Wuxian’s, so he hears them coming every time; today, all Jiang Cheng had to do was keep their attention so Wei Wuxian would have time to pull back his various reconnaissance spells and regain consciousness before the demonic cultivators reached him. Simple. Jiang Cheng just called out as the group passed— demanded better treatment, threw around some empty threats, played up his own haughtiness.

It went fine, at first: Jiang Cheng needled them until they came inside his cell to express their grievances with Sandu Shengshou. It escalated, which was still fine. It’s not the first time he’s been kicked around by a group of enemies, surrounded wherever he looked, his arms bound and his spiritual powers out of reach. Not the first, and nowhere near the worst. (Even though it felt less like scraping over a toughened callus, like it should have so long after Wen Chao and his soldiers, and more like pressing on a hairline fracture. It’s fine.)

Besides, this group was mostly amateurs, as far as he could tell—not much martial knowledge, little power. He was in an abysmal position, tactically speaking, both wrists chained to the rings in the floor and his back toward but not braced against the damp stone of the cell’s back wall, and still they could barely figure out how to do any real damage. Seriously. What kind of idiots can’t even break a shackled man’s nose? Aim for Jiang Cheng’s face or his fingers, not his torso. Do you just let desecrated corpses do all your heavy lifting for you? Yunmeng Jiang’s youngest junior disciples can punch better than this.

Jiang Cheng was making these sorts of comments (and keeping half an ear out for Lan Wangji’s signal that Wei Wuxian was back safe—spending over a week chained up underground, they’ve established that Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian’s small cells, placed on either side of Lan Wangji’s massive one, are too far apart and too thick-walled to hear each other; Lan Wangji has had to pass communications between them. Theoretically. Mostly Jiang Cheng has been ignored. But still, Lan Wangji should at least have been able to indicate that Jiang Cheng was in the clear to stop getting the shit kicked out of him). Fine. All fine.

Then he met the eyes of one of the demonic cultivators—they all always stayed masked and cloaked, but after observing them for a time it was easy to tell them apart. This particular man, Jiang Cheng recognized, always hung to the back of the group and never spoke. The one who smashed Jiang Cheng’s bell when he and Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji stupidly got themselves captured. The one who stared at Jiang Cheng whenever he passed the cells. Jiang Cheng has a good memory for faces, voices, mannerisms, and an even better one for demonic cultivators, but he had no idea who this guy was.

Whoever he was, he stood next to the mockingly wide-open cell door, hanging back as always, just watching. Motionless. Save for the sudden lash outward of one hand, and the flash of a blade dropping into it.

Things turned abruptly, sickeningly not-fine.

Three lunging steps across the cell, and then the demonic cultivator hit him knife-first. Slash to his right forearm, as Jiang Cheng instinctively threw up his hand even though they’d taken Zidian from him first thing. Upper right arm, a sawing screech, the grind of bone then a sudden stomach-turning looseness. Shoulder. Down. His right side, his side, his side again—frantic-quick stabbing motions that skittered over his ribs, caught in his robes without puncturing deep, no finesse. Hot breath in his face, on the side of his neck. The gleam of metal plunging forward toward his solar plexus—Jiang Cheng pivoted as much as he could while chained. The last blow hit him just under the ribcage and kept going until it clanged against the stone floor.

He slammed down, pinned, pinioned. For a second the demonic cultivator’s whole weight was pressed down on that single fixed point. The pressure would split him open as much as the knife. The man crushed down on him, panting, clambering, trying to drag the blade out of Jiang Cheng’s chest just so he could sink it back in, his eyes still wide open and fixed on Jiang Cheng’s.

For a second Jiang Cheng was a teen again, lungs searing with smoke as Lotus Pier burned all around and a creature looming over him, prising open his body with bare hands.

“Dezun, holy fucking shit—”

One of the other demonic cultivators stopped screaming and finally lunged forward to haul the guy off, which Jiang Cheng presumed had less to do with keeping Jiang Cheng from being stabbed again and more with preventing Dezun (apparently) from getting the knife back and turning it on his companions. Dezun clung to the hilt, which twisted slightly, but blood is slick stuff and his fingers slipped off. The blade vibrated, then stilled.

Jiang Cheng was making… noise. Everybody was making a lot of noise, all muffled like they were underwater. Struggling sounds as Dezun wordlessly fought to get free of the others’ restraining grip, yells rebounding off the stone. Then the struggling stopped but the yelling continued.

“—fucking shit, fucking—”

“—Shengshou—”

“—not supposed to do any lasting damage to his body! Ye Dezun, shizun said we need a spare!”

A low, hoarse, calm voice. “I’ll apologize to shizun. And get him a new one. There are plenty of people in the village at the base of the mountains.”

“That’s not the point! You can’t just—”

Things got even waterier. Somebody maybe came close; Jiang Cheng kicked out—sort of, more of an animal thrash than anything—and they retreated. The light talismans flickered, then flickered again. “We don’t have time,” someone hissed. “Just get the Yiling Patriarch to shizun like he wants and let’s go.” Jiang Cheng blinked. The cell had gone dim and the door was groaning shut, the panicked whispers cutting off.

And then it was just Jiang Cheng, the knife, and his own pathetic little gasps for air. And, on the other side of the wall, the irreproachable Hanguang-jun.

~

He refuses to pass out. When he’s sure the dimness around him is just the cell and not the insides of his own eyelids, he assesses.

He’s pinned at an awkward angle, lying half-rolled onto his side, left arm trapped beneath him and mangled right shoulder pointed up toward the ceiling. The long, narrow knife is driven in at a severe diagonal just below his breastbone, then emerges (thank fuck for that desperate pivot) between his two lowest left ribs somewhere near his boxer’s muscles, like Jiang Cheng’s ribcage is an unfashionable brooch. It seems to have missed his heart and his spleen but fucked his left lung way the hell up. He thinks. It’s a little hard to gauge the specifics.

Well. Distraction achieved. Wei Wuxian fucking better have gotten back to his body in time not to be caught, after all this.

He goes to roll over to free his (unstabbed) arm. And can’t. The knife is—It’s a butterfly-type short sword longer than Jiang Cheng’s forearm, narrow and tapering to a point. The blade cuts him as he moves, with a horrible wet grinding, scraping noise that swells in his ears—yeah, that’s the ribs—but doesn’t shift.

The floor, he thinks. The floor of the cell is rough and cracked and crumbling. When the blade slammed in it must have—

He tries to move again and can’t help the pathetic little sound that wrenches from his throat. The knife still doesn’t budge. Yeah. It’s stuck in the damn floor. Another punchline in the long, deeply unfunny joke that is Jiang Cheng’s life.

His pulse gets louder, faster. Not good. The last thing he needs is his heart pumping more blood out of all the new holes in him.

Beyond the roar of his own heart, he suddenly realizes he can still hear Lan Wangji’s flat voice repeating his name, recognizably louder than before. The ever-dignified Hanguang-jun’s chains don’t let him too far from the center of his own cell; he must really be straining to get close to their shared wall. Jiang Cheng wonders what sounds filtered through, if Lan Wangji heard him take the demonic cultivators’ insults, if he heard him whimper or yelp like a weakling when the knife hit him. He probably did.

“Sect Leader Jiang. Jiang Wanyin.”

“What,” Jiang Cheng finally says. It’s more of a gasp than a snarl, and just the one word dizzies him. He grits his teeth against the acidic salt-swell of blood and bile that wants to boil up his throat.

A single huff of breath, then silence.

For fuck’s sake. Jiang Cheng waits, counting the wall-cracks.

“You are injured,” Lan Wangji eventually says.

Jiang Cheng gives a scathing wheeze. No shit, Hanguang-jun! He’d lost a knife fight! On account of not having a knife!

Another pause. Lan Wangji doesn’t have any knives in his lungs and so doesn’t need to act like deigning to speak to Jiang Cheng causes him literal agony. He’s always been like that, though; even on his periodic visits to Lotus Pier, the thirteen years Wei Wuxian was dead, Lan Wangji was rarely interested in talking.

“How badly are you injured.”

Wheeze. Don’t choke on your own frustration. Lan Wangji is just doing due diligence, calculating how much of a liability Jiang Cheng will be when they fight their way out. If Wei Wuxian’s plan works like he’s insisted it will, their cores will soon unlock and their qi restore itself; then they’ll all have to work together, assuming Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian aren’t too busy staring into each other’s eyes and pressing tender kisses to each other’s manacle-bruised wrists or whatever to notice Jiang Cheng suffocating on the floor. Or, well. Maybe Wei Wuxian would feel he was obligated to the Jiang to do something. At least Lan Wangji will probably stop him from ripping out a lung just to give it to Jiang Cheng.

“I’ll live.”

Another long pause. Jiang Cheng cannot believe he has spent over twenty years in this woodblock’s intermittent company and only occasionally wanted to die of frustrated boredom. He experimentally tries shifting his weight with his feet. Ow.

“Wei Ying is unharmed,” Lan Wangji says at last. “He returned to his body without detection. The demonic cultivators removed him from his cell to go speak to their leader again. He called to me as they took him. He did not—he could not hear you cry out, from his cell. I did not tell him you were injured.”

The breath Jiang Cheng can barely draw hitches. His eyes heat with—irritation, not relief. Of course Wei Wuxian is the only thing Lan Wangji bothers with. But whatever. Good. Jiang Cheng didn’t want Wei Wuxian to know. And if Jiang Cheng has to get fucked over, then the least Wei Wuxian can do is let himself benefit from it, for once.

(Not that Wei Wuxian’s been suffering, here. Many of the demonic cultivators have been quite in awe of him. Lan Wangji’s mostly been left alone in his huge painted cell, the injuries done to him during their capture all bandaged and splinted; Jiang Cheng has been having… as good a time as he’d expect, what with being Sandu Shenghou in the grip of demonic cultivators, though this is the first truly grievous wound he’s taken. (There’s one charming fellow who keeps crouching outside the door of Jiang Cheng’s cell during the deepest hours of the night, quiet enough that Lan Wangji probably can’t hear it, hissing low, calm, raspy sibilations about what he’d like to do to Jiang Cheng’s anatomy. Jiang Cheng’s not sure which of the demonic cultivators it is, but he has some guesses, and while it’s nothing he hasn’t heard before—and indeed, nothing imaginative, considering that after Wei Wuxian’s ostentatious Wen-annihilation during Sunshot all other torture ideas seem kind of meh by comparison—Jiang Cheng is still going to take particular joy in lightning-whipping said guesses to death when he gets out of here.)

Meanwhile, Wei Wuxian reports that he’s received a number of luxuries—such as keeping his own clothes, which Jiang Cheng (the coarse undyed robe he’s been shoved into rubs across the scars on his chest) patently didn’t, and better food than either Jiang Cheng or Lan Wangji, and a mat to sleep on, and padded manacles on his wrists and ankles, chained to each other instead of the floor so he can pace around, and regular outings wherein he’s taken to converse with the leader of this little band of murderous demonic-cultivating criminals about the grand power the group is amassing and wouldn’t the Yiling Patriarch love to join them, etc. etc. Those conversations, admittedly, aren’t exactly a luxury, though Wei Wuxian says the man’s very reverent of the great Yiling Patriarch—albeit not reverent enough to, y’know, let Wei Wuxian go—and that his theories on spirit amalgamation are pretty interesting, if a little underbaked and, of course, heavily seasoned with the murder of innocents. But still! Neat! (Lan Wangji had refused to pass along Jiang Cheng’s snarled retort that oh, in that case, it totally makes up for how the bastard has imprisoned the three of them in an underground cave system, watch out, Hanguang-jun, looks like you’ve got a love rival on the horizon!)

More importantly, those consultations with the group’s leader have allowed Wei Wuxian to mentally map out the twists and turns of the demonic cultivators’ center of operations, the tunnel complex, and the underground river system that snakes through the caves. He’s been almost cheerful, working out how to bypass the spells carved into his manacles that suppress his demonic cultivation, analyzing the water-clock gongs and bells that keep his, Jiang Cheng’s and Lan Wangji’s spiritual meridians locked down and their qi drained. He’s in his element. He’s fine, he insists.)

“Okay,” Jiang Cheng says.

“Mn.”

Lan Wangji goes silent, and Jiang Cheng unclenches slightly. He’s not going to bring it up, then. Fine. Thank heaven that’s over with.

Jiang Cheng catalogues the options. Left arm pinned, right arm not quite dead weight (nerve damage can cripple even a strong cultivator if they wait too long to heal the injury. He’s been trying to move the hand, but he can barely feel his fingers. Can’t turn his wrist. Zidian, Zidian, obviously he’ll survive this but what if he can never use—) but it’s agony to try to move it. The main concern is his chest, what with the knife stuck through it. Internal bleeding that he can’t staunch without pressing his acupoints, and his head already slightly foggy from shock and the jolt in blood pressure. No matter how hard he tries, it’s not like trying to stay awake will do anything if he loses enough blood; he’ll pass out regardless.

He shuts his eyes to concentrate. By now, he’s used to the great water-clock that marks every shi, and his body buzzes with grim anticipation. He sinks through that anticipation, through the pain, through the dumb-animal panic at potential slow suffocation, and feels out if there’s even the slightest wisp of spiritual energy ghosting through his meridians. Nothing. It hasn’t yet been a full shi, despite how early the group of demonic cultivators had arrived to collect Wei Wuxian—which was weird as hell, why would they change their behavior now, just in time to throw off the timing of Wei Wuxian’s plan and necessitate Jiang Cheng getting his ass kicked? Inconsistent bastards—and so he’s still powerless. If he gets some spiritual energy back he could heal the slashed right arm, use it to pull the knife out. Or he could try to just… roll, and rip free. But with a rib hooked around the blade and his lung already compromised, that’ll likely do more damage than he can afford before Wei Wuxian takes care of the clock...

…Fuck. Is the wisest option really just to lie here waiting for Wei Wuxian? He learned better than that years ago.

Hell, he learned better than that now. For over a week, he’s heard Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji through the wall. Muffled echoes of Wei Wuxian’s chatter (Mo Xuanyu’s voice all wrong but the cadence agonizingly familiar) and Lan Wangji’s low, monosyllabic replies (other way around—his voice well-known, the audible affection in his tone bizarre). Sometimes Wei Wuxian laughed, even chained down here in the dark. The words themselves couldn’t filter through, but Jiang Cheng could at least tell they were talking.

Probably they don’t even need to talk to each other. Jiang Cheng has seen them doing that weird telepathy thing, communicating with flickers of expression and skimming, fond touches. No words at all.

Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian, on the other hand, have… spoken, since Guanyin Temple. Or exchanged words, anyway. Wei Wuxian bowed and called him Sect Leader Jiang the first few times they crossed paths (because he’d explained in the temple that they were nothing to each other, not just now but never had been anything in the first place), so Jiang Cheng clenched his teeth and called him Wei-xiansheng in return like he wanted, which Wei Wuxian had no right to look gutted about and Lan Wangji had no right to narrow his eyes at, both of them all stiff stances and smooth skin and glowing with companionship and lit half-gold by the sun, and Jiang Cheng hated them—until Jin Ling finally pitched a fit about how everybody’s awkwardness was spoiling the taste of the food the Jin Sect has arranged, Jiujiu. And Wei Wuxian, Hanguang-jun, aren’t you supposed to provide good examples for the younger generation? Everyone, please enjoy the meal in harmony. Meddlesome little hellion thinks he’s sooo slick.

So now they’re back, cautiously, to names, and to not killing each other when they cross paths hunting the same yao. Or, in this specific case, when captured by the same demonic cultivators.

Over a week they’ve all been trapped alongside each other, and they haven’t actually talked. It suits Jiang Cheng fine.

A deep, bone-jarring tone sounds through the cells.

The knife reverberates, which feels very weird and very horrible; Jiang Cheng swallows down a hiss of pain. On the other side of the wall, Lan Wangji grunts as if with impact.

The water-clock’s inescapable gongs roll over them. They rattle the chains, knock stone-dust from the ceilings, echo down through the tunnels and caves and night-black pools the demonic cultivators have stuffed with corpses… and most relevant, sweep away the few weak sparks of spiritual energy anger had fanned in Jiang Cheng’s meridians.

When it’s done, Jiang Cheng slumps back against the floor, hollowed out, ears ringing.

“Third geng,” Lan Wangji says into the echoes, doing that weird Lan timekeeping thing that lets him gauge the hours between his traditional waking and sleeping times (or way after bedtime, in this case), even while shut away down here without the sun.

Then, unexpectedly, he says, “Jiang Wanyin.”

Jiang Cheng jolts. “Ow, fuck—What.” What the hell could Lan Wangji want to chat about now? They’re done. They already had the full conversation. Jiang Cheng’s stabbed, Wei Wuxian’s off doing his plan. Discussion over.

Oh no. Unless Lan Wangji’s decided to talk about—

“The man who attacked you, just now.”

Jiang Cheng grunts, relieved. “I don’t know him.” Ye Dezun could be an associate or offspring of a demonic cultivator Jiang Cheng already put down in the past (likely with Zidian—the arm, the nerves, the grinding noise of metal on bone as Ye Dezun sawed at him without method or combat knowledge but with great focus on mangling his whip-arm), but that hardly narrows it down.

“You provoked him into attacking you. You provoked all of them.”

Jiang Cheng’s eyes fly open. “The hell are you—”

“You have been provoking them,” Lan Wangji says over him. “The whole time we have been imprisoned here. You bluster. You draw attention. I know you know how to be silent, yet you aren’t. Why…” He cuts himself off. “Was it on purpose.”

(It was. It has been. The leader might have a figurative hard-on for the great Yiling Patriarch, but not all the demonic cultivators have been so charmed. Jiang Cheng hears them mutter when they pass his own cell, when they discuss how the Yiling Patriarch seems brilliant, sure, and shizun’s certainly impressed with him. But aren’t there rumors that he and his Lan husband have taken down various demonic cultivators himself since his resurrection, when that used to just be Sandu fucking Shengshou’s thing? Shouldn’t the Yiling Patriarch, of all people, understand their great work? And he’s so wily, so famously crafty. What if he gets loose? How can they be sure he’s safe to keep around? Wouldn’t it be better to have him be the focus of their efforts, rather than—

And then Jiang Cheng would kick the wall of his cell and sneer something brazen and distracting to remind them who all demonic cultivators should be most worried about. Then the whispers would stop, and Jiang Cheng would get things jabbed at him, metaphorically or literally, and Wei Wuxian would be forgotten about for another day.

He may never be as annoying as Wei Wuxian, but he’s well-versed in the art of pissing people off, and he knows how tempting it is for people like these to try to cut down an opponent who’s flashing too much pride.)

“’Distract them’ was literally my assigned role in Wei-xiansheng’s plan,” Jiang Cheng snaps. He has to pause every few words to pant for air. “And the man stabbed me because that’s what demonic cultivators do, maim and murder and lose their minds.” Which Lan Wangji knows damn well, after his years of going where the chaos is. Sometimes right alongside Jiang Cheng. “Whatever. This humble Jiang entreats Hanguang-jun for silence, now, as I’m busy being stabbed.”

“You are already stabbed.”

“I’m busy with the state of having been stabbed.”

“You have also continued to hunt demonic cultivators,” Lan Wangji says over him. He pauses. “Or. You have continued to hunt the demonic cultivators who reveal themselves through violence. Despite knowing, now, that they cannot be Wei Ying resurrected.”

“I have,” Jiang Cheng says through gritted teeth. “Since, as mentioned, they maim and murder and lose their minds. Hanguang-jun is correct; how provoking that must be for the other demonic cultivators.”

“Which suggests your hatred for Wei Ying does indeed extend to everything associated with him.” Yep, there it is. Because Jiang Cheng has nothing better to do with his life than wallow in loathing for Wei Wuxian. “…Or,” says Lan Wangji, like it’s being dragged out of him with sharp hooks, “alternatively, suggests that your motivation may not be wholly dependent on Wei Ying’s direct involvement. That you would fight them regardless, when they attack others.”

…What.

That. Well, that’s. It’s a kind of charitable interpretation. Which is bizarre, considering Lan Wangji isn’t charitable about literally anything Jiang Cheng does. Jiang Cheng stares at the ceiling.

“You also sent Wei Ying’s old possessions to Gusu, recently.”

What is happening. “…So.”

“You kept them. And returned them to him.”

Jiang Cheng died when Ye Dezun stabbed him, and now he’s in the court of hell wherein you lie impaled on the floor while your former whatever-the-fuck grills you about his husband, your former something-the-fuck-else. It’s a very specific court of hell. Exclusive. 

He did send stuff, is the thing, once the truth was vomited out onto the floor of Guanyin temple and Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji waltzed off together, shaking the dust of Lotus Pier from their feet. Jiang Cheng first considered burning it all, furious and humiliated, the sword-wound he’d taken for Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji throbbing in his chest—Wei Wuxian’s old robes, his notebooks, smoke-stained trinkets that had survived the Wen, a bell with a red tassel, his damn sword. He’d already dismantled Wei Wuxian’s old room long ago; burning his stuff was just the logical next step! Might as well do it! Clears out some storage space! Free real estate!

But then he just sent it all on, in the end, once the happy couple returned to the Cloud Recesses from their travels. Some of the items had originally been gifted to Wei Wuxian by A-jie. And Lan Wangji knew Jiang Cheng had it all, anyway, so keeping it would speak louder than dumping it back onto its owner.

“Yeah, so?” he repeats.

“I knew you had some of Wei Ying’s possessions. I did not realize you had preserved so many.”

All right, fuck Jiang Cheng’s life, then. “Don’t worry, I decided to burn all your shit,” he parries. He’d felt petty and pathetic about it, then reminded himself that it would be infinitely pettier to include Lan Wangji’s stuff with the shipment for Wei Wuxian. Really, Jiang Cheng had showed remarkable grace.

“Mn,” says Lan Wangji after a moment, dubiously. “I was not aware I left any…” (Ooh, gonna say it?) “…items…” (Coward!) “… at Lotus Pier.”

“Yeah, because I burned them, keep up.”

Lan Wangji makes a frustrated noise. “My own possessions are not relevant. I wish to know why you sent Wei Ying’s things to Gusu.”

“I don’t need to explain my reasons.”

“Wei Ying says he knows.”

“Great! Ask him!”

“Jiang Wanyin, have some grace,” Lan Wangji snaps, and oh, Jiang Cheng would deck him if he were here, chained wrists or no. “I am trying to speak with you!”

“Badly. Now, riveting though this small talk is, I have been stabbed, and wish to save my breath.”

Lan Wangji makes an even more frustrated sound. “You did not only send Wei Ying’s possessions. You also… you sent a letter.”

“What of it,” Jiang Cheng snarls. “Does the distinguished Hanguang-jun screen all his husband’s mail? Was the wording in my humble missive so blunt that it offended Wei-xiansheng’s delicate sensibilities?”

Lan Wangji, the cold, sanctimonious son of a bitch, listens to Jiang Cheng pant with rage for a minute. Then he says, “I cannot ask Wei Ying about the contents. He has not read the letter.”

Jiang Cheng’s breathing stops.

Wei Wuxian hadn’t—

Not just a lack of reply, he hadn’t even bothered to—to—

A sudden blast of sound splits the air, shaking the cell like an earthquake. The knife jars in Jiang Cheng’s chest; he shouts, but hopefully Lan Wangji can’t hear him over the cacophony. The water-clock’s bells and gongs clash and thunder without rhythm, clanging over and over and over against each other, first flaring with power then dissolving into a buzzy, achy throb that pierces through Jiang Cheng’s meridians. Water rumbles somewhere far overhead, then stone, then a final metallic screech—the clock’s adornments, maybe tumbling down into the great black river that had powered the wheel mechanisms, the wooden frame splintering—and then only echoes.

Wei Wuxian did it: He took out the damn cursed clock. It’s only a matter of time now before their cores flare and they break free and Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji race off into the sunset, away from their whole miserable experience here.

Jiang Cheng barely hears the noise over the howl of his own thoughts.

He only wrote because Jin Ling kept insisting Wei Wuxian asks after you constantly when he visits Carp Tower, Jiujiu, he’s really annoying about it! Because Wei Wuxian’s face had fallen the first time Jiang Cheng called him xiansheng, because he’d complimented the Jiang disciples on their swordwork last time they’d run into each other in Lanling, because—well, they’d never be brothers again, nor anything else once suggested by the curious, fleeting, easily-dismissed touches while swimming at Lotus Pier as teens or the heated, too-long looks during the war. Never had been anything, according to Wei Wuxian. But maybe they could be—something. Barely. If Jiang Cheng strangled down his emotions and Wei Wuxian watched his careless tongue and Lan Wangji stuck to his best talents, i.e. kept quiet. Something, rather than nothing at all.

So. Jiang Cheng sent a letter with the parcels of Wei Wuxian’s stuff.

And got no reply. For months. Got nothing until a week and a half ago, when the happy couple crashed Jiang Cheng’s solo night-hunt that was supposed to be just a basic mountain-cave haunting. He’d thought, maybe—but it was worse than before. Wei Wuxian was back to Sect Leader Jiang and couldn’t even stand to look at him for more than a moment at a time, while Lan Wangji stared at him with burning eyes, probably plotting to rip out Jiang Cheng’s throat if he so much as deigned to speak to poor fragile Wei Ying. Until finally, to their obvious mutual silent relief, they were all captured by demonic cultivators, and not a word of the letter had passed Wei Wuxian’s lips.

But why would it. Wei Wuxian hadn’t just chosen not to respond to what Jiang Cheng said; he’d wanted nothing to do with it at all. Hadn’t Wei Wuxian made it clear, over and over again, where they stood? That Jiang Cheng is the part of Wei Wuxian’s past he had to cut away to finally be free, to be happy. He’s said it a thousand different ways, left in a thousand different ways. Jiang Cheng was the one stupid enough to keep asking for more, and expecting a different answer. Silence should be answer enough.

“Jiang Wanyin,” Lan Wangji says, once the final rattles of the clock-gongs have faded. His voice is strained, stretched taut. It takes him a long moment to say the next bit, sounding like he’d rather eat his own sword than spit out the words. “I apologize.”

Jiang Cheng freezes.

The flawless Second Jade of Lan. The man who stared pointedly past Jiang Cheng for years, then only looked at him with loathing, then, when they finally collided, only spoke like it was costing them both. Lan Wangji. Apologizing. To him. Jiang Cheng’s head is spinning, not totally from blood loss.

“You what,” he says.

“I took the letter. So Wei Ying would not read it.”

“You what,” Jiang Cheng says, in a very different tone.

“I assumed…” Lan Wangji pauses. “It was the first message you had sent to Wei Ying in years. I was wary. I could not think why you—At the time, I could not think what else you would say to him. Aside from hurting him, by. By…”

Jiang Cheng’s chest stutters reflexively around the knife. Then heat floods his face, blazes down through his body. He sneers so hard he thinks his lips might split. “Oh? Aside from what? Speak plainly, Hanguang-jun! Say, ‘Jiang Wanyin, did you write to my husband just to spill that you and I were fucking for almost a decade? Did you want to drop all the vulgar little details on the hatefucking? Did you hope to shame me? I’m certain you’re just that petty and vicious and utterly stupid, which is why it’s such a shock that I did deign to fuck you for almost a decade, but you know, I just wanted to check. Mn.’ Fuck you—” Jiang Cheng breaks off, grinding a gasp of pain between his teeth. His chest throbs.

“I apologize,” says Lan Wangji.

“For the theft, or for accusing me of trying to be some kind of—” Homewrecker? Vinegar-chugging clown? Fool clawing at the hard-won joy of two married men? “Some kind of jackass?”

“The… both.”

“And you think I have the time, or inclination,” Jiang Cheng snarls (wheezes), “to waste on your self-absorption? That I’ve any more wish to expose a past indiscretion than you do? You think the only thing I could possibly say to Wei Wuxian would be tawdry gossip? I’ve got enough grievances with him to scream for a thousand years, without once mentioning you!”

“You speak cruelly enough to Wei Ying even without invoking my name,” Lan Wangji snaps. Then adds, “But I apologize.”

Lightheaded from outrage and blood loss, Jiang Cheng almost has the bizarre urge to laugh. It feels like vomiting or bleeding or hysteria; he won’t be able to stop it.

(And whatever tiny, miniscule flicker of relief Jiang Cheng might feel—Wei Wuxian hadn’t decided not to respond to him, Wei Wuxian hadn’t known, it’s just that Lan Wangji is an absolute moron—well, that’s probably just dizziness.)

But as for why Jiang Cheng had written in the first place—Lan Wangji knows why. He should know. That was—That he’d seen it, recognized it, was why Jiang Cheng came together with Lan Wangji in the first place. Why he’d let him into his home, his bed, his thoughts, however harshly they scraped against each other there. He says he doesn’t know?

“If you had the letter, why are you grilling me on the contents?”

Lan Wangji sounds offended.  “I did not read it.”

“What, so taking it was fine, but you draw the line at opening it?”

“No. It was not fine. I should not have taken the letter,” Lan Wangji says. “And doing so… hurt Wei Ying. With no accompanying message, he interpreted your return of his possessions as a severing of ties.”

The urge to laugh dissipates.

Sect Leader Jiang, Wei Ying had called him before they were captured, and refused to meet his eyes.

“I felt my caution was justified. Caution was justified,” Lan Wangji says. “You have hurt him already, too often. But even so—Before you sent his things, he wished to talk with you. He told me. There was something he wished to say. But after, he stopped speaking of it. He insisted the return of his possessions meant that you wished every trace of him gone from your life. And then he began to—He theorized about your motivations. Why you must have kept his things, and why you now sent them away. Why you have continued to hunt demonic cultivators. I grew alarmed at how despondent he was, and told him what I had done. But once he had the letter, he kept it, but he would not read it. He said he did not need to, that he already understood.

“He said,” says Lan Wangji, something strange building in his voice, “that you do not care any longer.”

Even with how muffled his voice is behind the wall, it echoes all the way down through Jiang Cheng’s bones, his core, the steady trickle of his blood. The knife in his chest that just barely missed his heart.

“Then there’s nothing more to be said,” Jiang Cheng says, after a long moment. “Hanguang-jun, I acknowledge your apology. But this matter is between you and your husband. If you feel remorseful, have him scold you for stealing his mail.”

A pause. “No. Jiang Wanyin, take this seriously.”

“I am. That was a serious, formal acceptance of your apology for theft. Enjoy.”

“No,” Lan Wangji says again. “Do not... Wei Ying has not—”

“Piss off! Whatever stupid Lan guilt thing you’ve got going on, he’s made himself clear, and you’ve no right—”

“It isn’t true,” Lan Wangji says over him. He’s talking quickly now, unmeasured, staccato. Jiang Cheng has never heard him speak like this. He’s never heard him talk this much, not in twenty years. “Wei Ying knows you best, but—But. But I have known you as well. I could not agree with his reasoning. So I began to question his—You have never not cared about Wei Ying. It may well be hatred, but it is not indifference. Your care is violent and your words are all worthless—”

Oh, Jiang Cheng nearly chokes on rage. “You—!”

“—they are all harsh, so even if you did, somehow, mean well, I could not trust you to say it—so I must assess by actions instead. I know you did not keep Wei Ying’s things just to lure his ghost to you. I watched you gather them; they had no power. Your hunting of demonic cultivators is cruel, but I have fought them with you, and know the dangers they pose. You placed yourself between these captors and Wei Ying. You could have told him of our—my—our—companionship (“’Companionship?’” Jiang Cheng splutters, so hard it jostles the knife. Surely Lan Wangji had never classified their (dissatisfying! Infrequent! Not even worth mentioning!) encounters while Wei Wuxian was dead as companionship) in a way as to shame me, but you have not. I cannot tell what you are doing. I cannot tell why you do anything. I only know it is not indifference.” Jiang Cheng opens his mouth again to argue, but his lung spasms and Lan Wangji barrels over him.  “But Wei Ying still wishes to speak with you. If I stood back while he denies himself something—denies himself for no reason, for my error, for a mistake—it would be unfair to him. To—you both.”

He finally slows, takes a long, deep breath. Jiang Cheng can just picture him settling into perfect posture, lifting his chin high to await punishment, radiating certainty in his own decisions.

Jiang Cheng sits with that image for a second. Then he spasms with a croaky, cackling noise.

It’s excruciating to finally laugh, but once he starts, he can’t stop. He’s trapped down in the freezing dark of hell with his ex-whatever, who moments ago was implying Jiang Cheng was a would-be homewrecker, and is now entreating Jiang Cheng to—what? To help him clean up his own stupid mistake? Because Lan Wangji thinks Wei Wuxian wants to talk to him, despite all evidence to the contrary and despite Lan Wangji’s own decades of loathing, and Lan Wangji always gives his husband what he thinks dear Wei Ying wants? The sheer stupidity of the situation is almost reassuring. Lan Wangji has never been the perfect jade paragon of a man the rest of the world is convinced he is; Jiang Cheng gets to see him be as petty, and panicky, and utterly fucking dumb as any other man. He has to laugh.

“Hanguang-jun,” he gasps at last. “Are you accusing me of possibly, maybe, perhaps, having motivations beyond wanting Wei Wuxian to suffer?”

“Mn,” says Lan Wangji, who has apparently used up an entire decade’s worth of articulation in a single shot. “I am considering it.”

Jiang Cheng’s lung is collapsing. His chest is caving in. He’s—oh. He’s shaking. With anger, obviously.

It’s nowhere near the worst thing he’s felt, even tonight, but it’s… bad. Possibly the tremors from the destruction of the collapsing clock tore his lung even further. He clamps down on the trembling until it subsides, his body clenching tight around the knife, then all his muscles go limp at once. He lies as still as possible, looking up at the hazy, wavering ceiling.

“You once called my methods ugly and cruel, Hanguang-jun,” he says. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I have at all changed since then.”

Lan Wangji inhales, sharply, then breathes out in a long, slow sigh. “Ah,” he says.

He has the nerve to sound—not pleased, Lan Wangji has never been pleased with anything Jiang Cheng has done in his life. Even more than Jiang Cheng realized! And he knew Lan Wangji would tear his guts out if given half a chance!—but almost satisfied. As if Jiang Cheng had answered a question.

Jiang Cheng shudders at the thought.

Then he just plain shudders. He’s freezing, the hot blood oozing from his arm and down across his torso a burning contrast to how cold the rest of him has gotten. Freezing and soaked. His hair is wet, the back of his head where it tips down against the ground, his whole left side… maybe he really should be worried about bleeding out, fuck. The wet chill seeps up from the floor, surrounding him, whispers low in his ears…

He spasms. Something sloshes.

“Oh,” he rasps. “Fuck. Oh, fuck. Lan Wangji—the river.”

Lan Wangji is silent. But Jiang Cheng knows he’s listening, same as he is now that they’re not focused on each other.

They hear it. The ever-present rush of water through the stone walls—the underground river that churns through the whole underground cave system, powering the demonic cultivators’ experiments—has shifted from a dull murmur to a muffled roar. And, closer, a steady, barely-audible trickle as water flows across the floors.

Jiang Cheng remembers the huge jolt as Wei Wuxian destroyed the water-clock. The distant crack of stone overhead, the screeching gongs and bells, the sudden rumble of water displaced, redirected. A lot of water, heading down.

“Jiang Wanyin,” says Lan Wangji. Wariness ripples beneath the flat calm of his voice.  “Your cell is not elevated. Move to the wall. Wei Ying will return soon.”

Jiang Cheng clamps down on the reflexive fear response—the water’s rising but it’s barely licking him yet, the water’s rising but he was raised by the rivers, he has time, he has time, he’s not going to drown in half a chi of water—takes three slow breaths to quell his heart rate, and tries to close his right hand around the knife-hilt.

Shifting the arm hurts more than the knife; he groans without caring if Lan Wangji hears. He manages to get his hand at least on the hilt, but can’t close his fingers, and the angle gives him no leverage, and the muscles of his upper arm are weakened by the slashing damage. Left arm, trapped, numb. Bracing his feet against the floor to try to lever himself loose only jars his body around the blade; he grits his teeth and keeps trying anyway. (He ignores the muffled clang of Lan Wangji yanking at his own chains. Lan Wangji will get through this untouched. His cell is enormous, and even though his arms and ankles are both shackled—at least Jiang Cheng still can use his feet, useless though they are in this situation—he’s elevated somewhat on a low, painted dais, carved with an unidentified array. His spiritual energy will probably restore itself before his feet even get wet, and then he’ll tear through his manacles like paper and swan off into Wei Wuxian’s eager arms.)

A gong crashes overhead again, scattered and discordant like it’s been thrown to the floor. A gush of water rushes down the back wall. The clock’s power is finally dulled—Jiang Cheng’s still utterly devoid of spiritual energy, sure, but he can at least tell that the gongs didn’t make it worse this time like they have been—but the impact still ripples the rising water, jolts the knife. Jiang Cheng wheezes instead of screams at the vibration, lets himself splash back down against the floor and lies there for a moment, failing to breathe.

So Wei Wuxian can pour a whole haunted fucking river down onto them but he apparently can’t bother to fully take down the damn demon clock from hell? Useless! “I’m going to kill him,” he croaks. “For true this time, not just rumors. I’ll do it.”

“You will not,” says Lan Wangji, yanking again at his chain.

Asshole. Jiang Cheng focuses on his anger, drawing strength from it for what he’s going to have to do next. The water is now a handsbreadth deep, he can’t pull the knife out, and he can’t tear free.

So. A blunt force, just like Sandu Shengshou is said to be, and then just carry on.

“Lan Wangji,” he says. Lan Wangji stops jangling. “I’m going to—”

But there’s no real point in saying it, so Jiang Cheng just lifts the right arm as high as he can get it—not high, his mother would scoff—and pretends the movement doesn’t make black-red spots burst across his vision, and then lets the weight of the shackle drive the arm down, a blunt force angling into the hilt of the knife.

~

He’d first (finally) collided with Lan Wangji—oh hell, Jiang Cheng barely remembers when it was, some random night-hunt. (It was five years after A-jie and Wei Wuxian died, early autumn. A demonic cultivator had gone mad in northern Yunmeng. Jiang Cheng found the man covered in the blood and viscera of his entire village, and every time Jiang Cheng tried to lash him he dragged another screaming half-aware corpse in front of himself as a shield. He said the Yiling Patriarch was speaking to his mind, urging him on. He only stopped laughing when his throat was crushed.) Afterward, Jiang Cheng limped out of the silent village, dunked himself in the nearest river, and finally dragged himself onshore, his wet clothes still running rusty with blood.

Lan Wangji was waiting at the edge of the clearing. Stone-faced, contemptuous. His robes clean but the bottoms of his boots splashed with mud and blood—he must have been to the village, and seen the remains. He and Jiang Cheng had crossed paths several times in the years since Wei Wuxian died, both of them tracking chaos to its sources, and whatever demonic cultivators Lan Wangji found before Jiang Cheng got dragged back to be imprisoned in the Cloud Recesses, where the Lan either had to execute them—because they were too far gone by the time they turned on the people around them, feral, driven mad by resentment to murder and destroy and desecrate all things good and righteous—or would hand them off to Yunmeng Jiang so Jiang Cheng was the one to bloody his hands after all. (And he did, readily. Demonic cultivators were his duty, his mistake as much as Wei Wuxian’s. His shixiong’s last legacy, who Jiang Cheng had either let go of too late or not late enough.) And usually Lan Wangji glided away, unmarked and uninterested when the demonic cultivator turned out not to be the Yiling Patriarch after all. 

Not this time, apparently. Lan Wangji seized Jiang Cheng by the arm and did not let him pass. He glanced over the wounds the corpses had clawed into Jiang Cheng, the rapidly healing bruises on his wrists where the demonic cultivator had tried to pry his hands away. His thumb brushed across a laceration in Jiang Cheng’s upper arm.

If this is your method of mourning, he said to Jiang Cheng, it is ugly, and cruel.

Jiang Cheng’s throat had closed around his automatic retort, his voice died.

He’d killed Wei Wuxian. Everyone knew it (despite how no one else had been there at the end, as the seal shattered and Wei Wuxian’s corpses all froze, then rippled, then turned their hungry teeth toward him). Everyone said: Sandu Shengshou put Wei Wuxian down himself! Sandu Shengshou keeps Chenqing like a trophy to lure Wei Wuxian’s evil spirit to him. He tears apart demonic cultivators on the barest chance they might be Wei Wuxian returned. He hates Wei Wuxian beyond reason, beyond bearing, beyond death! And surely they were right. After all Wei Wuxian had done to the world—all he had done to Jiang Cheng’s family—how could Jiang Cheng possibly feel anything for him but hatred? It was right to hate him!

And yet. Lan Wangji had looked at how he clutched at what Wei Wuxian had left behind and covered himself in the blood of Wei Wuxian’s imitators and hated him so desperately, hated him—

Lan Wangji looked at all that, and called it—

—your method of mourning—

Jiang Cheng would rather have been slapped, than hear such a thing said aloud. He would rather be stabbed. Lan Wangji practically had stabbed him.

How could Jiang Cheng do anything else but shove Lan Wangji back against the nearest tree, bite at his mouth to make him stop speaking? How could he stop, once Lan Wangji tore back at him like he’d been waiting for it?

But that had been the fixed point, the ugly, devoted truth: Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng were the only two people in the world who mourned Wei Wuxian. Their methods may have been different, sure, but were equally ugly: Jiang Cheng and the blood under his nails, Lan Wangji with the burn on his chest and contempt for the world oozing from his pores. The both of them ripping into each other, Wei Wuxian’s name held clenched in their teeth and between their grasping hands, half-remembered details about him that lost weight and dimension over the years until they floated suspended, thin as breath, in the space between Jiang Cheng’s body and Lan Wangji’s—

Even when Jiang Cheng mistakenly thought it had shifted into something else after nearly a decade, just slightly, just a little, they never stopped holding him between them. Never stopped the keeping of him.

And now, Lan Wangji says he doesn’t know what Jiang Cheng could possibly have had to say to Wei Wuxian? That he only now has considered what Jiang Cheng’s motive for writing to Wei Wuxian, for being here at all, might be? Bullshit. Bullshit.

It is the one thing about him that Lan Wangji has always known.

~

Waking up takes a lot. He has to claw for it, grabbing at the sound of Lan Wangji’s voice to drag himself up out of the numb blackness—Lan Wangji’s voice, like a drumbeat, like a beacon, repeating his name again and again.

He surfaces.

While he was unconscious, his whole body had been hollowed out and refilled with molten glass. He tries to breathe around it, but you can’t breathe burning liquid. He chokes a little, glances down at the worst of the pain.

The knife’s still in him.

It almost makes him turn his face down into the water (which has now crept up around his ears) to drown himself in sheer outrage. But no. The angle’s changed, the hilt knocked out of alignment. The weightless sense that he’s about to tip backwards and fall away from his own horrible body isn’t just blood loss, or just suffocation—it’s also a lack of being pinned to the floor.

The water helps take his weight as he finally, finally rolls fully onto his back. Left hand. Grip the hilt. He won’t even really have to pull upward, just to the side. The wound has gotten much wider, so it’s easy to just—just a little pressure, just a little more, just a little more than that, okay it’s not actually easy, but—

“-anyin?”

With a last, awful little choking noise, Jiang Cheng slides the knife out.

He jabs at his chest with the knuckle of his thumb, bright sparks of pain flaring with each acupoint he seals to slow blood loss, then finally lets his arm fall back to his side with a clanging splash.

“Jiang Wanyin,” Lan Wangji says after a long, quiet moment wherein Jiang Cheng just lies there. He must have heard. “What has happened.”

Jiang Cheng considers just ignoring him, but this is the sort of thing Wangji gets annoying about. Eventually he gets out, wetly, “Not skewered. Anymore.”

The silence after that is incredibly loud.

“Jiang Wanyin did not mention,” Lan Wangji says, voice oddly thin. Then he says, “Never mind. You must move. The water will ease the way. Reach the wall, then lean on it.”

Easy for him to say; Jiang Cheng’s body has come untethered in more ways than one, and he’s not quite sure how to make it do anything. But he does get his distant feet pressed down to the floor, and does push with them. It takes a minute before he starts to slide. The chains drag after him, pulling at his wrists. The knife is awkward to hold. The weightlessness fades, and instead his body turns crushingly heavy.

Right after A-jie and Wei Wuxian died, Jiang Cheng could only focus on what was right in front of him; if he looked up from whatever baby he was rocking or treaty he was drafting or bridge he was repairing or enemy he was lashing apart, he’d collapse in on himself. He got good at it, at the narrowing of himself to one single, sharp point, the one next thing that needed to be done.

Push with one foot, then the other. Keep hold of the knife. Keep going.

After an epoch of shoving himself across what’s probably a mere few chi of distance, his head finally bangs sort-of-gently into the wall. Lan Wangji is saying something about spiritual energy; Jiang Cheng times his efforts to lever himself up to align with his words. Now he’s saying something about pressure, on the—oh. Yeah, that makes sense. As he shuffles up, he slowly wraps his good arm across his torso, almost poking a new hole in there, what with the knife still clutched in his left hand. Pressing on the wound is awful, but he can at least make this token effort to hold his own blood in, and the acupoints he hit earlier will help. Now Lan Wangji has stopped talking, instead emitting a drawn-out, flat hum.

There. Jiang Cheng is sitting upright against the wall.

He inhales. It reignites the liquid feeling in his chest, but sitting up like this, he doesn’t feel the same terrible weight compressing his lungs. (Lung. He’s not going to think about what he’s done to the other one.)

He sits for a bit, head tipped back against the wall, taking tiny sips of air. Eventually he’s able to pick up on things around him. Now that he’s not tunnel-visioning, he can see to the corners of the cell—helped by how the water, now creeping up to cover his splayed-out legs, emits a weak gray glow. No doubt that’s because it has, for months, been marinating several villages’-worth of the demonic cultivators’ murder victims and is thus cursed as fuck, but, well. Problems for the future!

The luminescence pulses, faintly, with the ebb and flow of Lan Wangji’s humming. So does—

“What’re… doing,” Jiang Cheng rasps, feeble enough that even he barely hears it.

Lan Wangji has good ears. The hum pauses, but Jiang Cheng’s meridians keep pulsing, thirsty after over ten days of powerlessness. “The clock’s qi-sealing spell will soon fade. This song will help us both regain our spiritual energy more quickly once it does. Particularly relevant to you. To survive being impaled.”

“Song…?” Lan Wangji is basically just groaning.

The texture of Lan Wangji’s silence changes. Huffy. “It will be more effective once I have Wangji. You and Wei Ying have both individually mentioned that my singing is… flat.”

Jiang Cheng blinks, then wheezes a laugh again. It hurts far worse than the previous one, but what else can he do? He’s receiving the worst serenade in history from his ex, because Lan Wangji won’t let Jiang Cheng die of his severe case of Stabbed In the Lung before he… talks to Wei Wuxian, apparently. It’s all just too absurd.

Also the peerless Second Jade of the go-to Musical Cultivation Clan Extraordinaire still can’t sing for shit, and that will never not be hilarious.

Lan Wangji’s next hum sounds more like a jab, it’s so pointed. “Focus,” says Lan Wangji, then does it again. Jiang Cheng considers a token protest, but he’s too tired. He leans back again, shutting his eyes to better feel and direct whatever energy the song will conjure up—nothing yet, and the starved emptiness of his spiritual pathways gnaws at him, but it’s preferable to their numbness of the past ten days, which had felt uncomfortably similar to the aftermath of losing his golden core. It feels… not good, everything already hurts too much for that. But Lan Wangji at least doesn’t make the hurting worse.

Jiang Cheng shakes himself. The water’s still rising, and he and Lan Wangji are still chained, and whenever his qi does stir, he’s got no confidence that it will happen quick enough for shackle-snapping before the water closes over his head.

He’s by now intimately familiar with the shape of the knife, and knows its blade could be a halfway decent shape for lockpicking. If Jiang Cheng were practiced at that. Which he isn’t. He awkwardly jams the pointed tip into the manacle on his right wrist anyway, gritting his teeth at the twist of his torso. He refuses to accidentally slice off his own hand just because of a little pain and dizziness. “Enough,” he whispers. “Get yourself free… first.”

“I need more time to accumulate qi—” Lan Wangji cuts himself off with a sharp inhale. Then he sighs: “Wei Ying.”

From the hallway outside the cells, the sound of splashing is almost too faint to be heard above the quick, thready sound of Jiang Cheng’s own pulse. But it’s there, approaching quickly from the direction Wei Wuxian had gone, and getting closer. Running. Of course he’d run to get back to his Lan Zhan. Of course he’d come back to see Jiang Cheng a pathetic mess on the floor, as always. It’s almost nostalgic.

Then the splashing footsteps race right past Lan Wangji’s cell, and Lan Wangji says sharply “Not Wei Ying’s walk” and then the door to Jiang Cheng’s cell rattles once and then slams open.

The man has a light talisman burning in one hand; hissing, Jiang Cheng turns his face away quick to avoid being blinded. Through the glare, he sees the man’s heaving shoulders and a dangling, injured arm, the gleam of blood down his side clotted black with resentment. (Guess the demonic cultivators finally got a taste of the true Yiling Patriarch. Jiang Cheng has to bite back a grin.) He’s about Mo Xuanyu’s age, pale and reedy. His mask is finally gone, which clarifies nothing: Just as he thought, Jiang Cheng literally doesn’t recognize Ye Dezun’s face at all. He does recognize the type of scar running up the side of his neck and across his throat, however, as he’s given them to enough people: A wide, branching lightning-burn.

Ye Dezun’s eyes flicker all over Jiang Cheng, taking in how he’s slumped backward against the wall, the bloody mess of his torso, the chains still at his wrists, the knife half-fallen out of his hand. He fixes his gaze on Jiang Cheng’s, eyes almost luminous in the dimness of the cell.

“Sandu Shengshou,” he rasps. (Low, calm, hoarse voice. Far more familiar than his face.)

Jiang Cheng wheezes at him, teeth bared. The knife sways as he brandishes it.

“If you touch him, you will regret it,” Lan Wangji says to the demonic cultivator, with remarkable confidence for a man chained up on the other side of a wall.

Jiang Cheng braces against the wall to try to scramble to his feet. Fails. Falls to one knee. Loses hold of the knife.

It gleams in the light of the talisman, then drops into the dark water with a thunk right in front of him, close enough to snatch back if he’s fast. Ye Dezun’s eyes flash down to follow it. Then he leaps forward, one-two-three, and drives his shoulder into Jiang Cheng’s bad one, plowing him backward into the wall—Jiang Cheng makes a strangled noise—then plunges down to knock the knife away before Jiang Cheng can grab it again.

People always grab at the shiny thing, the obvious threat, the moving piece. Jiang Cheng waits on his knees until Ye Dezun is down at his level, hand closing around the knife he thinks Jiang Cheng needs.

He snaps out with his good arm, because any Yu-trained cultivator can wield the whip with either hand, and the chain lashes across the side of Ye Dezun’s face. The impact jars all the way to Jiang Cheng’s shoulder. Ye Dezun goes down hard into the water with a high-pitched noise, clutching at his split cheekbone. Jiang Cheng slams a foot down on the knife and kicks it behind himself out of Ye Dezun’s reach, twists too far like an idiot, gasps at the pull on his wounds. Something is clanging on the other side of the wall. Ye Dezun shoves Jiang Cheng back, clawing at his own waist. Talisman papers fall from his sash into the churning water, where they curl and blacken; one activates with a sudden burst of black light and the smoky stench of resentful energy. Panting with success, Ye Dezun snatches it up and makes to slap it against Jiang Cheng’s side.

Lan Wangji abruptly emits a hoarse, harsh, earsplitting growl. Startled, Ye Dezun misses. Jiang Cheng feels the searing-hot slash and then a burning numbness as the paper flicks past him.

Ye Dezun tries to recover, but Jiang Cheng’s above him now, and all he has to do is fall.

Jiang Cheng drives all his weight down into his good elbow. He hits the back of Ye Dezun’s neck, plunging them both down in a huge splash. Ye Dezun twists, his face ground down against the floor. Bubbles foam around his head as he tries to get his limbs under himself, push up and out of the water—he does slam his elbow backward directly into the stab-wound, which almost gets him free as Jiang Cheng curls in on himself with a scream—but Jiang Cheng is taller and broader and heavier, and has the dubious blessing of being further weighed down with heavy chains. Once he gets Ye Dezun’s flailing limbs tangled in those, he lets himself go limp. He holds his face above the water and keeps Dezun pinned through the increasingly desperate thrashing.

The water may only be shin-deep, but as any river-born Jiang knows, that’s deep enough.

Ye Dezun’s thrashing stops eventually, then the twitching, then the bubbles. The abandoned light talisman flickers out. Jiang Cheng remains lying on top of the corpse for a bit longer, totally by choice, not because his heart and lungs and bones are disintegrating into acid. Finally, he drags his good arm up, creaks into motion.

“Jiang Wanyin,” Lan Wangji says. His chains clang again. “Wanyin. What happened. Say something.”

Jiang Cheng ignores him for a minute, breathing, then croaks, “Fuck was that growl you did.”

Lan Wangji makes an abrupt, weird breathy noise in response. The clanging stops. “Be respectful. It is another treasured, long-developed Lan technique in musical cultivation. Requires skillful control to execute without damaging one’s vocal chords.”

“A growl. Like a bear in heat.”

“Jiang Wanyin is an expert on the mating habits of bears? Enough. Are you safe. Is he dead.”

“Yeah.” Jiang Cheng roots through the rapidly dissolving mess of talisman-paper in Ye Dezun’s sash. The characters bleeding off the paper mark out pre-prepared spells for binding, for paralysis, for pain, for swift silent travel even with a hostage in tow. (Yep. Mystery solved: The culprit behind the nighttime sibilations about inflicting lackluster torture upon Jiang Cheng’s anatomy. Fucking called it.) He digs beneath a mass of wet paper-pulp and grips something narrow, cold and metallic. “And. Hey. Jackass’s got keys.” Lan Wangji makes the breathy sound again.

Specifically, Ye Dezun was carrying three keys bound together with thread. Jiang Cheng scowls in concentration, barely keeping his arms up as he fits the squared-off head of the first into the righthand shackle. It grinds and won’t turn. The second, also no—the water now covers Ye Dezun’s body, creeping up around Jiang Cheng, the whispers louder—the third.

Grind.

The key catches, and—

Clunk.

—the lock splits open, baring the skin of his wrist.

Breath rushes out of him like he’s been stabbed again.

The other shackle is harder with his right arm fucked up, but Jiang Cheng manages by wedging the key in and turning it with his teeth. Each shackle needed a different key, and presumably one lock on the door—three keys. Foreboding presses down on him, but he’ll deal with it as it comes. He lets himself fall sideways into the wall he shares with Lan Wangji, bracing against it to stand with his good arm wrapped around himself. Crawling would be easier, but the longer he keeps the wounds submerged the more they’ll bleed, or so A-jie said whenever she’d forbid Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian from swimming if they’d gotten particularly banged up. And Wei Wuxian still isn’t back, so. He needs to last.

Water sloshes around his unsteady knees as he shuffles forward. Lan Wangji is humming again, and it’s pathetic, but Jiang Cheng leans on it as much as the wall.

“You,” he whispers.

“Mm. My spiritual energy is unresponsive. And my wrist may be broken. It is unimportant.”

How the hell—oh. The clanging. “What th’hell.”

Lan Wangji just goes back to humming so he doesn’t have to comment. What a dick.

Something bumps Jiang Cheng’s foot. It’s the knife, dully gleaming. He exhales, then sinks into a painful crouch to pick it up with numbing fingers and slide it into his sash. Just in case. Without Sandu or Zidian, he always feels naked.

The open door crawls closer, closer. Then finally Jiang Cheng grips the frame and drags himself through. He feels the telltale faint prickle of a broken sealing-ward as he wobbles over the threshold, which is a little gratifying—if they’d only been relying on a mundane lock to keep him trapped, he’d be downright insulted.

Either the hallway is usually kept dark or the destruction of the water-clock has killed all the lights; the only illumination is the whispering gray water. Everything overhead dissolves into a distant mass of shadows. The passage stretches off into blackness in either direction, echoing with the slosh of water and the increasingly furious whispers of the ghosts—the villagers who the demonic cultivators had gutted like fish for their experiments and left to rot in the subterranean pools—and Jiang Cheng’s own quiet gasps. It’s so fucking far, and the gap between the water and the shadowy ceiling slowly, steadily narrows.

He’s shaking; it’s apparently colder out here in the (comparative) open. He tries to call Zidian to him, wherever she’s been stashed in this hellhole, but there’s no response; either she’s too far, or he’s still too weak to reach her. He firms his grip on the keys and keeps walking, eyes squeezing shut, shoulder pressing harder and harder into the wall as the floor seems to roll under him.

The humming doesn’t pause. He must be getting close, but the music doesn’t sound any nearer, actually sounds far more distant than when Jiang Cheng was chained in the cell. The single droning note refracts off itself and the walls and the water until it’s coming from everywhere. “You,” he says again, then forgets what he intended to say to make Lan Wangji speak.

The scrape of stone under his shoulder changes to an electric jolt. He opens his eyes to the door behind which Lan Wangji is locked.

It’s thick, weathered wood, taller than Jiang Cheng, with a narrow slot high up that guards can use to check inside—he can’t look through it, hunched over like he is, and doesn’t bother trying—and carved with blurry characters arranged vaguely in the shape of a gate. There is a door-bar level with Jiang Cheng’s waist, and a bronze lock, marked with more script and no keyhole at all for any of the keys Jiang Cheng has. And the whole door is sizzling (metaphorically speaking) with a sealing-ward, so powerful that Jiang Cheng feels the spell bleedoff vibrating in his bones.

He grits his buzzing teeth, drags at whatever qi he’s got, and half-falls against the door, as if momentum will help.

Absolutely nothing.

He has qi—he can feel it, sluggish and stagnant, building up slowly in his meridians like grains of sand carried by a slow-moving river—but no matter what he tries, it won’t respond to him, doesn’t let him wield it to pierce through the ward. If he can’t overwhelm it with sheer spiritual energy, he’ll need a key—a token like the ones that gets people into the Cloud Recesses—or to identify the specific spells that power the ward and dismantle them. He bangs his forehead against the door and lets it take his weight, staring down at the bloodsoaked mess of his own front and the gray corpse water now sloshing above his knees. “Fuck,” he says.

The humming cuts off. “Jiang Wanyin.”

“There’s a seal. I just—give me a second.”

“You cannot break it?” Lan Wangji says. Jiang Cheng shuts his eyes, too tired to even bristle. “Your qi has not recovered,” Lan Wangji concludes. Jiang Cheng wheezes pointedly. “Nor mine. Though by now the musical cultivation should have helped… The water,” he says after a moment’s thought. “It is hampering our energy restoration. This was the river that powered the clock; perhaps it was not only the clock that was malignant, but the cursed water itself has gained qi-sealing properties.”

Of course. Jiang Cheng’s useless body throbs. He leans harder against the door to stay upright as his vision tunnels. “Mundane strength only, then. Your wrist?”

“Broken.”

“Broken enough?”

There’s a pause, then a sharp clang. A grunt. Another clang, then a gasp. Jiang Cheng doesn’t think about how important Lan Wangji’s hands are to his cultivation, his wrists and fingers. His cultivation base is powerful; whatever breaks in him will heal. And this is just the sort of moment where Wei Wuxian would turn up, anyway. Dramatic to the core. He’s probably right around the corner.

The ghosts hiss right in his ear: If Wei Wuxian were going to come back, surely he’d have done it by now. He won’t come, not ever for Jiang Cheng, not even for Lan Wangji, because he hates Jiang Cheng so much that Lan Wangji has become tainted by association. Or no, he doesn’t even care enough to hate Jiang Cheng, and never did, he wouldn’t even read the letter—Or he does want to come for Jiang Cheng, meant to come, but the demonic cultivators shoved their knives through his chest and pinned him to the floor somewhere and he’s alone, trapped, he’s already dead again without Jiang Cheng even knowing, and hadn’t Jiang Cheng practically killed him himself, before, hadn’t he stolen the thing that was supposed keep Wei Wuxian strong and safe? Wei Wuxian is dead and Lan Wangji is dying and it’s all Jiang Cheng’s fault and he knows that thought is just the ghosts trying to drag him down but it still chokes him, chokes him.

No. He wrenches himself back under control. Focus. Focus on what’s right in front of you. The one next thing you can do. He goes over the cell’s layout in his head, as Lan Wangji described it to him and Wei Wuxian when first imprisoned: Lan Wangji at the heart of a huge, carved array, the characters unreadable but arranged like the markings on a sundial—the raised dais—the water spilling over the floor—the chains at his hands and feet, binding him so he can’t move from the center of the room—And even if he does get free, what about the lock, the seal-ward? Wei Wuxian better get back soon; he loves untangling shit like this. Jiang Cheng only has brute force as usual, and not even that, right now. He’s so dizzy. He’s cold. He literally, physically cannot let the man Wei Wuxian loves drown right in front of him, all Lan Wangji’s self-righteous smugness and blade-bright tenacity snuffed out by some idiot group of Wei Wuxian wannabes (Wei Wuxiannabes)—damn, Wei Wuxian would snicker at that one—Fucking think. Tools. The talisman-paper on Ye Dezun, even Jiang Cheng’s tiny scraps of qi should be able to activate one if he bleeds on it enough—but they’re soaked to uselessness now in the water. The manacles from his own cell, if he at least gets through the ward he could easily smash the lock—no, the chains are still attached to the floor. His teeth? His bare hands? His—

“Why the hell,” rips its way up his throat, and he bangs his good hand against the door to make sure Hanguang-fucking-jun is listening, “did you even come here?! The pair of you hadn’t come anywhere near Yunmeng for years! You could barely stand to even speak to me for years! And then you decide to drop in at the exact perfect moment to be kidnapped and drowned? You’re supposed to look out for each other, you’re supposed to—What’s the point of either of you, when you won’t keep each other safe?!” His lungs can’t take the yelling, and he slumps against the door again, gasping.

“I told you,” Lan Wangji says, the strain audible in his voice. “We wanted to speak with you.” So it’s his fault now? Jiang Cheng bares his teeth. “Never mind. There must be passages leading upward from this hallway. I will follow in a moment. Jiang Wanyin should go.”

“I will,” Jiang Cheng spits. Then he drags himself down the hall, away from the door.

…‘Away’ in the sense of ‘basically right next to it,’ whereupon he seizes the open door of Wei Wuxian’s cell and wrenches it wide. (The broken-ward prickle here is stronger than the one around Jiang Cheng’s cell was. Now he is insulted.)

The cell is almost bare. There’s no furniture, no brazier, no evidence of food beyond a small, dried-out bowl of the same muck the demonic cultivators have been feeding Jiang Cheng. There is a sleeping-mat, if your definition of ‘mat’ is either deeply generous or deeply uncivilized, floating in the gray water. And every bit of the walls is carved with spells to suppress, to bind, to weaken, to keep captive. So many the overall effect is somewhat frantic, so many the very air in here feels almost too thick to breathe.

(Wei Ying says he has been given many luxuries, Lan Wangji had said, the first time Wei Wuxian was brought back from a ‘conversation’ with the demonic cultivators’ leader, and that he is well.)

Jiang Cheng’s throat tightens. Luxuries, his ass. As if these second-rate murderers could hold Wei Wuxian forever, anyway. They’re all so goddamn fucking stupid and Jiang Cheng hates them.

He looks closer and sees areas where the carvings are marked with blood, temporarily but painstakingly prying gaps into the constraining enchantments, reversing small portions of some spells or nudging the flow of power in others so Wei Wuxian could slide his own weak threads of resentment through to do reconnaissance. Some of the marks are traced over and over; he must have had to redo them each time the clock sounded, and weakened himself every time. There are also a few ugly little drawings, similarly rendered in blood. Donkeys. Lotus ponds. Forehead-ribbon-sporting figures kissing ponytailed figures. Ponytailed figures kissing other ponytailed figures. Forehead-ribbon-sporting figures kissing no one and sporting no clothing other than the forehead ribbons. What, had Wei Wuxian gotten bored while starving in his cell? Bored enough to waste vital bodily fluids on doodling? He is just as goddamn fucking stupid as the demonic cultivators. Jiang Cheng hates him.

More to the point, there’s nothing obvious for Jiang Cheng to use to dismantle the seal on Lan Wangji’s door. He’d assumed there would be furniture to smash apart or burn, the talisman-paper or silk needed to make talismans… Wei Wuxian can’t have left nothing useful in here; even after Lotus Pier burned and Wei Wuxian left for the Burial Mounds, Jiang Cheng was still forever finding small pieces of junk he’d left behind, all scorched or faded or broken. Wei Wuxian is physically incapable of not leaving a mark of himself everywhere he goes.

The clanging of Lan Wangji trying to wrest out of the chains cuts off abruptly. “The water has activated the array surrounding me,” he says. There’s an audible edge of alarm in his voice.

Jiang Cheng’s head whips around. “What.”

“The array is lighting up, and has gone cold. There are components in the array to attract spirits. The spirits trapped in the water have grown louder.”

Because of course. With a curse, Jiang Cheng takes a last wild look around the cell. He shoves the floating mat over, swipes his good hand across the carvings to see if his blood sparks any power, scrapes the knife at a discolored patch of stone in case it’s some sort of weird Wei Wuxian spell. (It’s moss.) He’s about to give up and slosh back to Lan Wangji and hope bleeding pathetically on the ward will somehow intimidate it into submission when a pale flash catches his eye. Something is stuck to the overturned sleeping-mat.

It—

Jiang Cheng stares. Then he reaches out and peels the thin parcel of folded papers from the underside of the mat.

It’s a letter. Still sealed, though the corners are battered. The spell scrawled across it to keep off the rain and dirt has faded, but it seems to have worked well enough to keep the letter from totally dissolving in the water. It’s Jiang Cheng’s handwriting.

It’s—It is.

Lan Wangji had said that Wei Wuxian kept Jiang Cheng’s letter, but Jiang Cheng hadn’t thought he meant… what, just, in his robes? Everywhere? On night-hunts, on travels? He must, to have brought it down here with him, to have hidden it away under the mat so it couldn’t be taken like their weapons and tools were.

He refuses to find out what Jiang Cheng had to say, but he won’t just burn the damn thing and be done with it?

Jiang Cheng tears it open, the ink on the paper bleeding under his wet fingers. The words are banal, for all he’d agonized over what to write. He might as well have rambled about the weather. The first pages are just a stilted inventory of the items kept for Wei Wuxian, and which were now being delivered to their rightful owner. The second part an almost-as-stilted note that, since Jin Ling recently mentioned that he’d sent Wei Wuxian and Hanguang-jun an official invitation to travel unimpeded through Jin Sect territory whenever they like, the two of them had better conduct themselves with discretion while in Lanling and treat Jiang Yanli’s son’s invitation with the respect Sect Leader Jin is due. The last part—

The final page is a corresponding decree that Wei Wuxian and Hanguang-jun may travel through Yunmeng, written on silk and marked with Yunmeng Jiang’s nine-petalled Lotus to show yes, Sect Leader Jiang means it, officially. The words themselves are just as stiff and dry as the rest of the letter, save for the final line, which Jiang Cheng had hesitated over for too long before finally saying Fuck It and scrawling it in.

He’d assumed Wei Wuxian would know what he meant, upon reading the letter. That Jiang Cheng’s intent, his weakness, would practically shout from the pages. I kept your memory. I will trust you with my family. May you both pass through safely, wherever you go. Wherever, whether it’s toward Jiang Cheng or away. Wherever, whether Wei Wuxian is his brother or not, whether Lan Wangji was ever anything like a lover or they were just mutual collateral damage. Whether or not he and they ever speak to each other again.

But that he hoped they would.

His chest hurts worse than ever. He shoves the paper-pulp mess into his robe—the letter is pretty much destroyed already, not like getting blood all over it will matter—and lurches back out into the corridor, bracing himself on the wall, water churning around his thighs. With the knife, he slashes through the final page to give himself a swatch of clean silk. He starts to swipe seal-script across the silk with the blood on his fingers.

A cold, sickly gray glow emits from the slot in Lan Wangji’s door, casting pale shadows across the water. There’s a final clang from inside the cell, a muffled cry of pain, and then the scrape of a loose chain falling to the floor. Jiang Cheng sets his jaw and reaches down as deep inside himself as he can, feeling like he’s ripping at his own meridians with his fingers, with his teeth, scraping qi from the soft undersides of his heart and lungs and empty core. “Wangji,” he croaks. “Your stupid humming thing.”

Lan Wangji, for once, doesn’t push back. He just hums his qi-restoring song, voice rich and resonant and completely flat, and the qi Jiang Cheng’s managed to drag up finally bursts out of his body in response, flowing like pins and needles down his arm and through his hand and from his blood and into the messy, ugly, ragged-edged makeshift talisman. He wraps the silk around the blade of the knife, breaking into as much of a run as he can.

His words are cruel and worthless, apparently, but now that he’s finally moving he can feel himself narrowing to a single sharp point, a single purpose. The one next thing that can be done.

Safe passage, he thinks as he drives the knife and talisman into the ward.

It’s not a clean break—for all the power he’s forcing into it, a simple travel talisman isn’t the proper key to this ward, so the spell fights him. A gong seems to ring in his ears as he leans his full weight on the knife; his veins burn and overflow. He hangs in place, trying to force through.

Then, finally, something gives. The ward cracks open. Power erupts outward (and slams right into the stab-wound, fuck, ow) then scatters and dims.

Jiang Cheng pitches face-first against the door and manages to not skewer himself on the steaming-hot knife by dropping it. He has to grab at the door-slot overhead to keep from sliding right down with it. The outpouring of qi has hit him hard.

“Jiang Wanyin!”  

Blood crawls up his throat. Jiang Cheng opens his mouth to let it run down into the water, then leans on the door-bar until it dislodges and splashes down. “Okay,” he mouths. Okay. Almost there. The bronze lock is the wheeled, keyless kind that needs a phrase or a line from a poem to unlock, or alternatively, can be opened by smashing it really hard with the hilt of a knife. He scrapes around with his foot to search for that.

Above Jiang Cheng’s fingers, the array’s light shines bright and icy through the slot. The chains rattle through the ringing in Jiang Cheng’s ears. “…injury… Ying.”

Glancing down the empty corridor, Jiang Cheng whispers, “He’s coming any second—” just as Lan Wangji says, “You—”

The water-clock sounds.

Or, no. The clock broke; Jiang Cheng felt the spells weaken, heard the resonance muffling as the gongs and bells were scattered or submerged, whatever Wei Wuxian had done. What he hears now isn’t the sound of the clock, but the echo of its impact, thudding against him. It strikes again, the whole cave complex humming with echoes—again—deeper than before—again—louder with each repetition, closer, reverberating in his bones and blood. The pressure all through the hall shifts, like a door slamming open onto an airless room. Something—many somethings, merged into one—storms down the black hallway toward them. The water’s glow snuffs out as it comes. It’s the clatter of gongs and the skitter of fingernails and the snapping of bone and the echo of rockfall and the thunder of fast water and the wordless shouting of a thousand tongues, a blank, inhuman roar.

“Wangji,” he says, as if Lan Wangji will hear him, “get up.”

Then the blackness reaches them.

In the dark, something knocks Jiang Cheng sideways like a huge fist—he can’t hear the noise he makes over the roaring but he hangs onto the door as hard as he can, arm and shoulder and ribs wrenching—and then it bears down on him as it passes. It’s endless. It crushes him downward, pressing blood from the cuts, tightening around his throat, compressing his chest to nothing. It might kill him without ever noticing.

And he can tell he’s not even the one it’s looking for.

The dais, the array, the careful avoidance of injuring Lan Wangji’s body, the wide cell luxurious in its emptiness, the chains heavier than Jiang Cheng’s and Wei Wuxian’s combined, the need for a spare—

The shadow rushes over and past Jiang Cheng, through the gate of script cut into the door. The gate flares bright with resentment, then dims.

The noise stops. Everything stops. The water goes still as stone, all its whispers quieted. Jiang Cheng clings to the door-slot, held upright only by the one hand, blackness swimming in the corners of his vision, unable to do anything but try to claw back the air the shadow crushed out of him.

Into the silence, Lan Wangji gasps.

Jiang Cheng tightens his grip on the slot, trying to lever himself up to see through it; he needs to understand what happened, figure out what he can do, identify what sort of creature the demonic cultivators summoned up to set on—in?—Lan Wangji. The light that had emitted from within the cell has gone out, and he hears no movement inside.

As he struggles up, Lan Wangji’s hand clamps down over his.

Jiang Cheng knows the specific calluses on the fingertips, the exact breadth of his palm compared to Jiang Cheng’s own. It is Lan Wangji’s hand. Even if it’s shockingly cold. Even if he shouldn’t be able to move his fingers so well with his wrist broken; Jiang Cheng can see the misshapen jut beneath the pale skin. And, more relevant, even though Lan Wangji shouldn’t have been able to reach the door with both legs and one wrist still chained.

Lan Wangji doesn’t move for a moment, motionless with his spidery fingers clenched around Jiang Cheng’s. Then his fingers spasm once, straining against nothing, and clamp down tighter. They jerk like Lan Wangji is being silently shaken.

Jiang Cheng might fall if Lan Wangji lets go, but his grip loosens just enough for Jiang Cheng to twist his hand and grab Lan Wangji as hard as he can, crushing Lan Wangji’s twitching fingers down into the circle of his own blood-streaked ones. Lan Wangji jerks again, then curls his hand around Jiang Cheng’s. He makes another awful noise. Jiang Cheng tries to respond, but his lungs are well and truly out of commission now.

He’s coming back, Jiang Cheng wants to tell him. He’s gone right now, but he’s alive this time and he’ll come back to you. Keep it together just a little longer.

He can’t say it. He can’t even hum or growl, like Lan Wangji’s misguided efforts tonight to keep Jiang Cheng alive, or make threats against a common enemy. Besides, nothing he’s ever said has been comforting or useful to Lan Wangji. And Lan Wangji has probably never once wanted to be a comfort for Jiang Cheng either, tonight’s bizarre circumstances aside. Even during the moments over the years when they handled each other with slightly more care, Jiang Cheng’s sharp tongue and Lan Wangji’s sharper contempt no doubt shredded any feelings inching toward tenderness.

But Jiang Cheng can be here. He and Lan Wangji stood right next to each other for thirteen long years, all their sharp-broken edges matching, skewered in place by the same misery and anger and awful, incurable hope. Nobody else knows what that was like. Maybe they’d bitten at each other more than spoken honestly, maybe they couldn’t and wouldn’t fill the space torn open between them, maybe Lan Wangji hadn’t known why Jiang Cheng wanted him, but they could—withstand, like that. They had withstood.

Jiang Cheng wordlessly tightens his grip on Lan Wangji’s hand, pulling himself up, and Lan Wangji does the same.

He’s coming back. Hang on.

Then, from far away down the corridor:

It’s not a sound, quite. More of a shift in gravity, a displacement of air. It actually feels kind of similar to the rippling impact of the clock-gongs, which, fuck, not again—but then the familiar ozone taste of activated power cuts through the bloody iron-tang in his mouth. Jiang Cheng snaps alert.

Lan Wangji freezes in his hold, then tries to pull away. Jiang Cheng latches on harder.

The bubble of unearthly silence breaks. Jiang Cheng can hear his own heartbeat again, the click of Lan Wangji’s broken wrist in his grip. The water ripples, almost imperceptibly at first, then quicker, pulsing around Jiang Cheng’s hips. The ozone taste spreads; the sharp smell of it prickles Jiang Cheng’s nose. Faintly, someone approaches from down the passage, an odd jangling and the quick one-two slosh of a living human moving as fast as they can through deep water.

Jiang Cheng’s eyes might be blurry, but he can see his own shadow growing starker and starker against the wooden door, his shape framed by light. Jiang Cheng twists to face that light.

“Lan Zhan!”

Wei Wuxian races toward them, so fast he practically leaves a wake. He looks like shit: Covered in blood (hopefully not his own) (maybe Ye Dezun’s! Nice!), his cheek darkened with a spectacular bruise, his eyes wild and red-stained with resentment. The skin of one arm is mottled with unhealthy-looking patches of purple and black and bronze-green, the discoloration worst at his hand but faintly visible up past his elbow and even at the folded collar of his rough undyed robe. A light talisman sputters in his other hand. And he is absolutely festooned, absolutely bejazzled, with musical tools: Cracked bells and dented gongs in his arms and a thread of clattering wooden pegs looped around his waist and even the planks from the huge water wheel that powered the awful clock jammed into his sash, clunking against each other as he runs. Presumably these are the source of the power Jiang Cheng senses.

His brother is ridiculous. And he’s not dead, after all. Not dead anymore.

“Lan Zhan! Ji—Sect Leader Jiang! I set off some flares from the top of the cliffs—well, through the top, funny story—though I don’t know how close we are to any Gusu or Yunmeng disciples. But great! Sect Leader, you’re—” Whatever Wei Wuxian thinks Jiang Cheng is audibly withers on his tongue as Jiang Cheng turns to him more fully; the faint light probably doesn’t show his torn-up chest to best advantage. Wei Wuxian’s face goes white beneath the bruising. “Oh. Oh no. Jiang Cheng. A-Cheng.”

There’s an odd ping sound near Jiang Cheng’s waist, then a hot sting of pain. The copper lock has cracked slightly. As Jiang Cheng looks down, more slivers of shorn metal burst from the crack, plunging into the streaming water like a spray of fallen stars. The lock splits with a snap.

“Patriarch,” says Lan Wangji.

Or something like it. His voice layers over itself, fluid and refracted, a thousand black-ice rivers rushing over ten thousand razored rocks.

Lan Wangji’s hand wrenches from his, then the door slams outward. Jiang Cheng is thrown into the water. He reflexively doesn’t gulp for air as he feels something cut into his good hand, grabs for it, grabs for the surface. He gets his feet under him, he flings himself back up—well, more like falls forward, very fast and mostly intentionally—in the direction of the tall, blurry shape that emerges from the doorway, a broken chain trailing off its wrist. He gets his good arm hooked around Lan Wangji’s chest and collapses against his back (this time fully intentionally), trying to drag him off-balance. Pressed this close together, like they haven’t been in years, the twinned wrong-rightness hits Jiang Cheng hard—the familiarity of Lan Wangji’s shape, the unnatural crawling shudder of the whatever moving beneath his skin, the mundane changes in his body since the last time Jiang Cheng touched him, less gaunt now that he eats better, now that he’s had someone he wants to eat well with.

“Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian misses a step. His expression is awful. Jiang Cheng can’t see Lan Wangji’s face, hanging off him like he is, but it must be pretty bad for Wei Wuxian’s expression to twist like that at the sight. Lan Wangji doesn’t respond nor even seem to notice Jiang Cheng’s weight, only drags them both forward, his hands rising with a noise like shattering ice. He speaks again, but this time it resembles nothing like a word. The water pulses with impact; the temperature plunges. Jiang Cheng’s skin burns with cold.

Wei Wuxian doesn’t even flinch at the blast, still hurtling forward with no sign that he’s about to use a weapon, he has no weapon, no talismans, probably no plan as usual, if he could even bring himself to lay a finger on the man he loves in the first place. And the thing inside Lan Wangji is opening its grasping hands to reach for him.

Jiang Cheng tries again to call Zidian. Nothing. He’s completely drained. So he wrenches Lan Wangji around as hard as he can instead, pivoting him away from Wei Wuxian, putting himself between them—being the obvious threat, the moving piece, loud and blunt and just begging to get all the pride knocked out of him. It’s not so different from earlier, drawing Ye Dezun and the other demonic cultivators toward himself to give Wei Wuxian time to fix things. Not so different from even earlier than that. 

Like always, though, Jiang Cheng doesn’t do it gracefully. Things are shutting down all through his body. His legs give out and he splashes to his knees in front of Lan Wangji, whose hands fist reflexively in the collars of Jiang Cheng’s robes, rocking Jiang Cheng back.

He can see Lan Wangji’s face like this, finally. It’s utterly blank—which is nothing new, obviously, but Jiang Cheng has had decades to learn to read hints of feeling in it. Grief, determination, contempt, confusion; rarely, around him, something softer-edged and unidentifiable. Now there is nothing in Lan Wangji’s face at all.

Lan Wangji looks down, then one hand makes a sharp movement toward Jiang Cheng’s throat as though to seize it and fling him aside, the other sweeping up toward Wei Wuxian. He and Wei Wuxian both make identical strangled, horrified sounds; Wei Wuxian lunges forward, but Jiang Cheng can’t tell if he’ll dodge in time.

Despite Lan Wangji’s high cultivation, his worst scars bother him in the cold and wet, including the bad leg that the Wen broke before the war and then was kept from healing for weeks. Jiang Cheng never offered to knead the pain out of it and Lan Wangji would never have accepted, but he’s offered salve, silently, and watched from the corner of his eye as Lan Wangji used it. He could find that old injury blind.

He finds it blind now, and drives the hilt of the knife straight into it. Lan Wangji lurches sideways at the impact, silent mouth wide open. His one hand drops from Jiang Cheng’s throat and the other arm swings out, away from Wei Wuxian.

Wei Wuxian’s fist, in turn, swings over Jiang Cheng’s head and slams Lan Wangji in the chest with a cracked, plate-sized gong.

The resulting thunderclap of sound jolts all through Jiang Cheng’s body. Lan Wangji staggers back, silver light crackling along his meridians, as Wei Wuxian half-trips over Jiang Cheng in his haste to drag Jiang Cheng back, away, arms clamped around Jiang Cheng’s ribcage to haul his weight, every movement snapping like a bowstring. He gets Jiang Cheng shoved behind him and then crouches, light talisman held out in front of him. The light falls across Lan Wangji, who has sunk to his knees too, curled in on himself. Sparks still arc up and down the trembling lines of his body, hissing as they fall into the water.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says. He sounds anguished, but he doesn’t move away from Jiang Cheng. Jiang Cheng struggles not to slump against his warm, trembling back. “Lan Zhan, come back. It’s me. I’m here, Lan Zhan. I know there’s a lot of voices probably shouting at you right now, but just listen to mine. The spell on that clock-gong will help with that. Well, not quite, it’ll more stop the effects of the possession from progressing too fast—but our weapons are upstairs, so once we get you to Zidian that’ll expel the possession—uh, assuming Jiang—Sect Leader Jiang will help to—Well, you’ll be cured! So just follow my voice back…”

He blathers on. Lan Wangj slowly stops twitching. The water rises. The sparks dim.

Finally, Lan Wangji lifts his head—his forehead ribbon is gone, which makes Jiang Cheng’s fist curl—and, the rush of water fainter in his voice, gurgles, “Wei Ying. J…”

Then he tips forward. Wei Wuxian yelps and scrambles to catch him, then yelps again as Jiang Cheng collapses too. Gravity upends as the three of them presumably fall over each other, but Jiang Cheng can’t open his eyes to confirm. There’s an arm around Jiang Cheng, skin shockingly hot in the cold water, and smooth links of chain touching him, and an irritating jangle in his ear that he thinks are Wei Wuxian’s ridiculous musical clock components. The world pulses around him like a slow heartbeat, sensations squeezing around him and then easing into numbness.

~

Jiang Cheng hears some kind of humming.

He lurches gently back and forth, suspended like breath, twin forces drawing his body in opposite directions. Qi flows in and out of him. He dazedly traces its current.
Himself. Everything hurts. His chest has compressed to a tiny, molten, jagged lump. His good (well. Comparatively good) arm is pulled high, taking all his weight while his feet alternate between shuffling and dragging. Steps. They’re going up some steps.

Something warm and bony presses against his side—Wei Wuxian, bedecked in clanking things that jab into Jiang Cheng’s ribcage. Jiang Cheng’s arm is slung across Wei Wuxian’s shoulders.

Then Lan Wangji, shuffling along with slightly more grace than Jiang Cheng, but that’s a low bar. His arm is also slung over Wei Wuxian, his hand tucked beneath Jiang Cheng’s arm, his shoulder shifting under Jiang Cheng’s hand. Jiang Cheng slowly curls his fingers into the rough fabric of Lan Wangji’s undyed robes.

Energy rocks back and forth between them all like waves. For the space of a long breath, Jiang Cheng is gliding through Lan Wangji’s meridians, the heat of Wei Wuxian’s energy melting the foreign, icy demonic power trying to accumulate inside Lan Wangji’s body; then the balance shifts, and instead qi washes through Jiang Cheng’s own body, coaxing air into his good lung, urging his wounds to close, keeping him afloat on top of the pulsing tide of pain. All directed by the thin, bright thread of the tiny new core he can feel glowing in Wei Wuxian’s lower dantian. Back and forth. A rhythm.

As his head clears, Jiang Cheng realizes the humming sound is actually a low, constant mutter, the vibration of it buzzing through Jiang Cheng’s torso, and that said mutter is Wei Wuxian cursing wildly and creatively and unceasingly as he hauls two huge grown-ass men up a flight of stairs with his skinny Mo Xuanyu noodle arms.

“—such a damn dumbass, shidi, what were you doing putting yourself in front of me, I had it under control, you should never and you were already hurt and whoever it was I need to kill them, obviously, just point him out. Why would you, why would you—fuck, augh, Lan Zhan, light of my life, can you please actually walk with your beautiful sculpted legs just a little, you are so heavy and this husband’s arms are so noodly and I’m distracted yelling at Jiang fucking Cheng—”

Jiang Cheng’s had just as many nightmares about Wei Wuxian holding him this close as he’s had nostalgic dreams, but the usual instinct to fight back doesn’t flare up. Instead, he almost relaxes into the sound. When the next wave of qi leaves him to sweep back into Lan Wangji, he pushes it along, joining Wei Wuxian’s energy with his own.

The swearing stutters. “Jiang… sect leader. You’re awake?”

Jiang Cheng pushes the qi a little harder, then settles, going even more boneless against whatever part of Wei Wuxian he’s leaning against. His chest seems to expand, slightly. He can almost draw breath.

“Sect Leader Jiang,” Wei Wuxian says again, very quiet. Like he doesn’t know what comes next.

Ha. Wei Ying wishes to speak with you, Lan Wangji had sworn. Well. Jiang Cheng has, at least, some words to start them off.

He rams Wei Wuxian’s shoulder with the side of his head as hard as he can. Which is not very hard, but their ridiculous shambling collective form wobbles dangerously anyway.

“Answer me,” he rasps.

“Uh. Sect—?”

“Answer me. You thought I didn’t give a shit? I didn’t? You couldn’t even be bothered to read a letter. It was five pages, Wei Wuxian. Three of which were just a list of your shit. You can bleed yourself dry trying to pacify demonic cultivators so they don’t fucking kill us, but you’re too much of a coward to answer a letter? Lan Wangji says you want to speak to me. So do it. Answer me."

“What the fuck—”

“Jiang Wanyin’s words,” says Lan Wangji from Wei Wuxian’s opposite side, voice like a tomb groaning open. “Always cruel.”

“Shut up, Wangji. You were even more insecure about five fucking pages than him.”

“Hey!” Wei Wuxian yelps in protest, the way he always does when his precious husband is insulted. “I’ve already spoken to Lan Zhan about letter-tampering, Sect Leader, and I assure you—"

Jiang Cheng feels molten. He feels like there are stars going supernova in his lungs. He feels like he’s slipping down a long embankment, into a river. But they gave him enough qi to speak, a little; they can deal with the consequences. “Wei Wuxian,” he says.

Wei Wuxian stills. They are pressed so close Jiang Cheng can smell him—sweat and blood and saltwater—can see him only in slivers—the bedraggled black of his messy hair, the movement of his throat as he swallows, the way his eyes flick reluctantly from the dark staircase ahead over to Jiang Cheng’s, then back.

For his part, Jiang Cheng shuts his eyes. He can take whatever the answer is, but that doesn’t mean he can look. All three of them are allowed to be cowards, a little, about this.

“I wrote that you two could travel safely through Yunmeng,” he says. “And that Lotus Pier has… rooms. For travelers."

Wei Wuxian jolts next to him. “Oh."

They climb in silence for a few more steps. After that tirade, Jiang Cheng’s lungs are caving in again, his head lightening with every dragging step upward out of the black, drowned caves.

That’s it? Oh? That’s his answer? Fine. Fine. Jiang Cheng’ll be—he will be fine.

He just wanted Wei Wuxian to answer to his face.

“Oh,” says Wei Wuxian again.

But this time the cadence is different. There’s—bells in it, gongs. Air and sunlight. Metaphorically speaking.

“Jiang Cheng,” Wei Wuxian says, and that’s the last bit Jiang Cheng hears before his lungs give out for good.

~

He wakes up with a silent gasp. For a second, his limbs are tangled and the dark presses down on him and his chest is cracking inward and he’s still underground, they’ve taken A-Xian and Wangji is chained down in the rising water, and he has to—

The gong for fifth geng rings. It’s the distinct reverberation of Yunmeng silver.

He stills, panic slowly draining out of him. It’s dark, yes, but the room smells of lakewater and medicinal salve; the walls are hung with lavender silk, distinctly not an ugly stone cell hacked into the innards of a mountain, and marked with sigils to encourage healing and rest. Jiang Cheng is clean, and dressed in proper sleeping-robes, and the throb in his chest is medicine-numb and so thickly packed with cloth that he could rest his arms on his own chest like a pillow. Everything is the particular kind of hazy-hushed that only happens in the space between true night and early morning, or in dreams you half-forget upon waking. The air is clear, and warm, and he can breathe. He can breathe.

Home.

Lan Wangji kneels beside the bed. A lightning-burn from Zidian curves up across the side of his flawless throat, shiny with salve and already healing. He's dressed in white again, albeit not true Gusu white, but it feels better to see him in his proper (lack of) color again, with a ribbon back at his forehead. Both his wrists are splinted and his qin is laid across his lap. He moves gingerly as he adjusts it. Several strings had burned during the fight when the three of them were captured, but the instrument has now been restrung. The particular shade of silk of the zheng string is ominously familiar. “Augh,” says Jiang Cheng.

Lan Wangji’s head snaps up. "Jiang Wanyin." He sets the qin aside and rises to his feet, unfairly graceful for a man who spent the last ten days locked in a—actually, Jiang Cheng doesn’t know how much time has passed between him passing out in the caves and waking up here; maybe Lan Wangji’s had plenty of time to heal, and thus doesn’t need to be lauded for his ease of motion. He steps to the side of Jiang Cheng’s bed, keeping the exact distance they’d established whenever he stayed the night and one of them woke from nightmares. (Jiang Cheng sleeps lightly and is more likely to be kept awake by them; Lan Wangji, who sleeps like a log and so can’t flail his own way back to consciousness, often had to be shaken, and then, on the occasions he struck out in disorientation, be dodged.) “Wei Ying is safe,” he says, first thing. He gestures to the bed one over from Jiang Cheng's, where Wei Wuxian lies sprawled facedown like he did when they were kids, limbs curled in on himself. Jiang Cheng's pulse slows, seeing him. "You are safe. It has been two days since your disciples responded to the emergency flare, and arrived at the caves to assist us. You are healing well. Wei Ying is healing well.

“And I have been playing for you both,” Lan Wangji says, infinitesimally tilting his chin toward the restrung qin. He’d left the silk string here on one of his final visits to Lotus Pier.

Jiang Cheng scowls at the ceiling. “Said I’d decided to burn your shit, not that I’d gotten around to it yet,” he croaks.

"Mn."

The croak was loud. Wei Wuxian snorts, then jerks upright. "Jiang Cheng!" (Jiang Cheng?) Then he scrambles up from the bed in a flurry of sheets, bandages, ink and paper—

Paper.

Water-warped paper covered with blood and familiar handwriting. Pages, spread out across the bed.

Lan Wangji looks down at Jiang Cheng. His face looks strange; there’s—not no hostility in it. But less, and. And something else.

“I have apologized again to Wei Ying for interfering with his letter,” he says, “and reiterated that I hoped he would read it. It will be good for the two of you to speak plainly.”

Jiang Cheng stares up at them both. “What the fuck,” he rasps, then grimaces. “Ow.”

Lan Wangji quickly turns to the side-table for the pitcher of water there, but fumbles it with his bandaged hands and splinted wrists. Wei Wuxian dives off his own bed—he barely looks injured at all beyond whatever the demon clock had done to his mottled arm, which Jiang Cheng is simultaneously relieved and outraged about—to help him. He’s the one to hold the cup to Jiang Cheng’s mouth, to let him drink.

“Your lungs are still in bad shape,” he whispers. His voice is soft and raspy. It’s weird hearing him so quiet. “We can talk in a little while, okay?”

“We will,” Jiang Cheng says. Just drinking has exhausted him; he’s slipping back down again. “You son of a bitch. You coward. You and your husband the petty thief.” His eyes shut. "I can't believe you didn't even read it. I can't believe how fucking dramatic you were about this. It was pleasantries."

Wei Wuxian huffs a laugh. A too-hot, too-bony body clambers into the bed at Jiang Cheng's side. Another, less bony but annoyingly broad, body settles on his other side. 

“Well yeah, I know that now. I kept it, though,” Wei Wuxian says. “I didn't read it, but I kept it. Like you kept—I just thought—” He pauses. “We’ll talk tomorrow. For now, can we just be here? Like this? Here, this will help.”

A quiet rumble travels down Jiang Cheng’s body. Humming, imbued with spiritual energy. It’s warm. It’s nice. It helps his chest expand into what feels like the first full breath he’s taken in years.

“You’re flat, and you’re off-key,” he mutters first to Lan Wangji, then to Wei Wuxian. Wei Wuxian laughs, and Lan Wangji murmurs something too quiet for Jiang Cheng to hear as he slips back under. But, he thinks—

He'll tell Lan Wangji to repeat it in the morning.