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“What the fuck are you doing,” Jiang Cheng says, tone as flat as the line of his sword, and it clearly takes a moment for his voice to register, and that’s moment enough for Wei Wuxian to draw his weapon, Chenqing at his lips and at the ready to summon his throngs of undead, and for a second Jiang Cheng wonders if they’ll fight again - his dominant arm is still kind of broken, but when it’s an opportunity to practise using Zidian with his other hand, he supposes - but the moment passes, and the dizi falls from Wei Wuxian’s lips, and Wei Wuxian whips his head up to meet his eyes.
“Jiang Cheng!” Wei Wuxian replies, visibly brightening like a sunflower in daylight, and stands from the dusty ground. His eyes narrow as he casts a critical once-over Jiang Cheng’s form, lingering uncomfortably long at the white bandages peeking from his purple sleeves. Jiang Cheng shifts a little, the cloth of his sleeves falling over his arm, hiding the unhealed injury from view, and scowls at him.
Wei Wuxian seems to wilt, smile falling away at the reminder of their last, violent fight, and tucks his dizi away, patting half-heartedly at the grime gathered on his dark clothes. “Why are you here?” he asks, when Jiang Cheng dithers, unsure and unwilling to break the silence.
(For the love of the Three Realms, Wei Wuxian hopes Jiang Cheng isn’t here to argue again. He’s hesitant to set Wen Ning on his shidi, if they come to blows again, while Jiang Cheng isn’t yet at full health - and somehow he doubts Jiang Cheng has much of the same reservations. Pain twinges across his own wound, half of his stomach coated in medicinal mud donated by Wen Qing, and while to some extent Wei Wuxian will accept that he deserves any hurt Jiang Cheng chooses to dole out, he’d very much prefer if his punishments were more spread out over a longer period of time - he doesn’t have the accelerated healing times a golden core affords - Jiang Cheng still does, though, he notes, unaccountably smug about it, recalling the bandages he’d glimpsed on his wrist, a much lighter layer than his own.)
Why is he here, indeed. He’d spent the journey here carefully preparing his explanations - A-jie made something for you, A-jie is worried about you, A-jie sent me to check on you, I didn’t choose to visit you voluntarily, it’s because A-jie asked me to - but Jiang Cheng falters now, the fingers of his good hand wrapped around the handle of a shihe, warming runes carved on its surface, ensuring the food’s warmth despite his travel through the cold, misty air. The chilliness of Zidian on his index finger draws him back to here and now, perfectly honest half-truths of A-jie choking unto death in his throat, while Wei Wuxian fiddles with his sleeves and waits anxiously - waits patiently for his excuses.
“I,” he says, but doesn’t know how to continue, and his thoughts are a jumbled mess, and he doesn’t know what he wanted to say, anyway, so he closes his mouth, and just. Looks at Wei Wuxian.
Wei Wuxian looks terrible.
Now that he’s looking, he notices the clumsily patched clothes, the original red embroidery, that used to contrast bright and defiant against the inky cloth, now a dull and uninspired maroon sort of colour, barely visible against the black robes. There’s a strange, if minor, bulging on the side of the shirt, and - oh. Bandages of injuries from their last meeting. Jiang Cheng shifts uncomfortably, regretting the smooth slide of Sandu into flesh, but then he remembers Wen Ning snapping the bones in his arm at Wei Wuxian’s behest, and he supposes they’re even.
If Wei Wuxian isn’t going to apologise for breaking his arm - and mark his words, Wei Wuxian isn’t going to - then there’s no reason for Jiang Cheng to offer any apologies for stabbing him, either. He forces his gaze from the bump, and keeps looking.
He notices the gauntness in Wei Wuxian’s face, deep shadows gouged around his eyes, purpling like a bruise, the unnatural pale lips, like all the blood’s been forcibly drained from them, and the tiredness evident in every line of his body - those are all to be expected. His own fellow sect leaders have not been silent with their displeasure of Wei Wuxian’s malpractices up here, and Jiang Cheng knows - he knows it, is sure of it, but he just can’t prove it - that they like to send disciples up the mountain to pillage and plunder.
It’d be a miraculous day, if any of them found anything worth stealing in this blighted, pitiful dump. More likely they ruin any projects Wei Wuxian leaves lying about, and terrorise the innocent civilians hiding out in the place - no, not innocent, they’re Wens , after all, and there are no blameless individuals in that godforsaken sect, but even Jiang Cheng can admit, through his blinding hatred and all-consuming fury, that none of these people, weak and old and mostly powerless, deserve death.
Still - and especially for the Jins - the sects have lost disciples too, and Jiang Cheng agrees that their punishment is fitting. Or, it was - no more punishment now, since Wei Wuxian swept them away to his little mountain, unless you count living here, forever ridiculed and scorned.
(Why doesn’t Wei Wuxian understand, hard labour is arduous and tough, yes, but better than execution or exile . These people, even if they’ve never committed crimes as heinous as Wen Zhuliu or Wen Ruohan and his good-for-nothing son - or even committed any crimes at all - they still lived and thrived by virtue of their family name, and that - that is their original sin. But no, Wei Wuxian, the best and brightest of their generation, so clever and so, so gentle, will save them all, nevermind the family he’s grown up with, nevermind the implications this shoves onto his zongzhu, nevermind all that, because Wei Wuxian always does what he wants, doesn’t he?)
He notices Wei Wuxian’s tangled hair, a messy waterfall of dark strands over his shoulder, untied except a thin lock drawn from just below either temple, held up by a length of red ribbon - Jiang Cheng tilts his head, and- yep, those are braids, and for a moment Jiang Cheng could almost laugh.
Braids are, technically, not a part of Jiang sect’s official uniform - but his mother had favoured them, and taught him and A-jie to braid them, neat strands of hair looping over each other, secured by colourful ribbons for Jiang Yanli and milky white rings of Yangzhi Jade or unassuming black bands of cloth for Jiang Cheng.
A-jie taught Wei Wuxian how to braid his hair, after the first night, and within a week of his dramatic, abrupt insertion into his home, his shixiong was braiding his hair each morning, nimble fingers tucking it into his ponytail, before he gets to work on his own - always niggling Jiang Cheng to do his hair for him too, always getting refused.
Wei Wuxian kept the braids - one last piece of Yunmeng Jiang, despite his bold claims of defecting with nothing but the clothes on his back. He kept the braids, and-
“I would let you come back to Lotus Pier, you know,” Jiang Cheng says, the words spilling out of his mouth like blood from a fresh cut, too fast for his conscious brain to stop it. He regrets vocalising them, even before the sound of his own voice reaches his ears, too soft and too raw for him to convincingly pass it off as a throwaway line.
Hope blooms across Wei Wuxian’s features, his whole face brightening - and for a moment Jiang Cheng, too, lets himself hope - but then something dark and grey passes through it, and his expression pinches back into refusal, and Jiang Cheng, following his lead, punches the unworthy crumb of hope back into the abyssal depths of his soul, to lie together forever with the rest of his dreams.
“Why are you here?” Wei Wuxian asks again, and he sounds more subdued, now.
Jiang Cheng lifts the shihe and holds it out to Wei Wuxian. “A-jie made you some food,” he says, the fib coming easy now, even as he swallows his own bitterness that, once again, Wei Wuxian has shown him exactly how much Yunmeng Jiang isn’t on his list of priorities.
(It’s the truth - part of it, anyway. A-jie made the soup now packed in the shihe - she’d slapped his hand lightly, when he’d tried to steal a piece of paigu from it. “You can have more when you’ve given this to A-Xian,” she’d said, spooning more thick pieces of lotus root into the box. “I can’t imagine he’s been eating well, stuck in that place, oh…” That’s not a lie. A-jie had made Wei Wuxian food.
It doesn’t matter, that he’d asked her to. A lie by omission isn’t exactly a lie.)
“Oh,” Wei Wuxian says, surprised, and he relieves Jiang Cheng of his container of soup. “Thank you. I mean,” he corrects himself hastily, “Thanks, shijie, I suppose - could you tell her I appreciate it?”
Tell her yourself , Jiang Cheng wants to snap, get over your stupid pride and even more idiotic hero complex, concede, and come back-
Jiang Cheng doesn’t say any of that. He nods tightly, and Wei Wuxian relaxes marginally, and smiles at the expertly carved mahogany in his hands.
“So nice of shijie,” he says quietly, “I’ve missed…” And Jiang Cheng isn’t interested in listening to him reminisce, especially when he isn’t coming back , so Jiang Cheng gestures at the ground instead.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Oh!” Wei Wuxian startles, and follows his gaze at the inexpertly dug holes in the dry soil. “I’m growing potatoes,” he explains. “The people in the markets don’t like to do business with us, they charge extra when they see me, and I’m running low on coin. So-” he waves an arm at the shovel, so dirty it’s almost the same colour as the soil - perhaps that’s why Jiang Cheng hadn’t noticed it. “So, I’m trying to grow us our own food,” Wei Wuxian finishes, a forced sort of cheer in his voice. “More…” his voice trails off. “More secure,” he tries, and nods, as if trying to convince himself, and he repeats, louder, “A more secure source of food,” and smiles at Jiang Cheng.
“Hm,” Jiang Cheng says, non-committal, and stares at the holes. “They look too small,” he comments. The ground also looks too barren for anything to grow, he doesn’t say. It’d be just cruel to mention that, when there isn’t anything Wei Wuxian can do about it.
“Ay!” Wei Wuxian tsks, indignant. “What do you know about plants, anyway?”
Jiang Cheng raises an eyebrow. “What do you know about plants? You don’t even know anything about the size of the holes,” he challenges.
“S’not the size of the hole that matters,” Wei Wuxian leers, smirking, and the banter - even Wei Wuxian’s half-baked innuendos - is friendly and familiar, and for a moment Jiang Cheng can imagine they’re back at Gusu Lan or Yunmeng Jiang, arguing over something or other that they’ll both forget by the time the shichen is up even if at the moment neither of them is willing to back down.
But Jiang Cheng blinks, and he’s in the Burial Mounds, and Wei Wuxian is in dark ebony, not Jiang purple, a fugitive instead of a deputy sect leader, and amiable conversations can only be a thing of a past between them.
Wei Wuxian is still talking. “-and they fit the potato pieces, so it should be fine,” he pauses, and frowns. Waves a hand in front of Jiang Cheng’s face. “Are you listening?” he demands.
“Yes,” Jiang Cheng says, snapping himself back - back to the present, back to the burial mounds - and casts another judging eye over the holes. “Was this your first attempt?” It sure looks like it.
Wei Wuxian flushes.
Not his first try, then.
“Let’s walk around,” Wei Wuxian says, determinedly changing the subject, and Jiang Cheng is about to decline, but Wei Wuxian hooks an elbow through his arm, dragging him along before he can protest. “I’ll share my paigu,” he offers, and Jiang Cheng thinks of the piece A-jie didn’t give him, and lets himself be pulled along without further protest.
They are accosted by a small boy. “Xian-gege!” he calls, running towards them on his tiny child’s legs. “Qing-jiejie says-” he skids to a stop, just barely stopping himself from colliding headfirst into Jiang Cheng’s boots. He blinks up at him, big eyes wide and round. “Hi,” he says. “Who are you?”
Wei Wuxian nudges him lightly with his foot, turning the boy’s attention on himself instead. “A-yuan,” he says, mock-sternly. “What did we say about running?”
“Qing-jiejie said I needed to find you quickly,” he argues. “She says your wound-”
Wei Wuxian falls into a violent coughing fit at once, effectively covering up anything the boy says, and Jiang Cheng raises a brow at him, and turns to face the boy instead. “His wound?” he prompts.
“Well,” the boy starts, but Wei Wuxian cuts in. “What did we say about talking to strangers, A-Yuan?” he interrupts.
The boy frowns, and looks them both up and down. “But,” he says, “You obviously know him. You’re walking with him, like this-” he crooks his own elbow in a poor imitation of the way Wei Wuxian has linked his arm in Jiang Cheng’s, but Jiang Cheng supposes the boy does a decent job demonstrating, with no partner’s arm to put his through. “So he’s not a stranger,” he concludes, quite sensibly. “And it’s okay for me to talk to him.”
Wei Wuxian makes an amused, tired noise between his teeth. “Not a stranger to me, yes,” he allows, finally removing his arm from Jiang Cheng’s person to take ahold of the boy, pulling him a little ways further from Jiang Cheng’s shoes, “but to you, this gege is-”
“Not a stranger to you, either,” Jiang Cheng finishes for him, ignoring his look of indignation. “Now,” he plucks the shihe from Wei Wuxian’s hand in a smooth, easy motion, “Why don’t you ,” he levels a frosty look at Wei Wuxian, “run along to Wen Ning, and get whatever wounds you have treated.” Wei Wuxian opens his mouth to protest, but Jiang Cheng silences him with a sharp glare. “Otherwise, A-Yuan here can tell me all about your injuries, can’t he?” he lowers his voice to a whisper. “Wei Wuxian, if you get an infection because you refused to see a physician, I-” he falters for a moment - he’ll what, kidnap Wei Wuxian to force him to see a doctor? Actually, not a bad idea, and probably doable - but he gathers himself quickly, and hisses, “I will tell A-jie, and there will not be enough gods in the heavens to help you flee her.” He smiles, and says, at normal volume, “Right, A-Yuan?”
A-Yuan nods, all business in his movements, the seriousness in his expression at odds with his general… childishness. It’s comical, and rather cute.
“Traitors, the lot of you,” Wei Wuxian mutters, but he trudges off, probably to find Wen Ning, and Jiang Cheng watches him go, concerned.
“What happened to him?” he asks A-Yuan, thinking back to his stab wound on Wei Wuxian.
A-Yuan shrugs. “Jiejie didn’t say,” he says, sounding distracted, as he rises on tiptoe to poke at the shihe hanging off the crook of Jiang Cheng’s arm. “What’s this?”
Jiang Cheng pauses, thinks - his thoughts cast back to the pitiful little potato pits in the ground, and he says, “Are you hungry?”
A-Yuan nods.
“Yeah, I figured,” Jiang Cheng says, and sighs. “Do you have a kitchen?”
A-Yuan nods again. “I’ll bring you,” he offers eagerly. “Do you have potatoes? Can you give me a few before you give them to Xian-gege to plant? He’s terrible at growing things, this is the third batch he’s trying to grow, but Qing-jiejie says it’s nigh impossible to grow anything here and she says Xian-gege is an idiot and something else I’m not allowed to say, and-”
“Does she,” Jiang Cheng hums, half-listening to the incessant chatter, but following the small boy to the dilapidated thing - generously named a shack, he supposes - that’s supposed to serve as a kitchen.
He wonders if the rotted wooden beams might collapse into A-jie’s soup, ruining its texture.
===
Wei Wuxian catches up to Jiang Cheng just before he leaves, one leg braced on his sword.
Wei Wuxian ignores the emotion welling up in his chest - he misses Suibian, he has her, yes, physically, he can hold her hilt in his hands, but his sword doesn’t respond to his touch anymore, but his shidi is healthy and happy (for given value of it, anyway), and he refuses to regret the trade.
“What do you want?” Jiang Cheng asks, finally, when after a few moments it becomes quite clear that Wei Wuxian is, apparently, just going to stare at him.
Jiang Cheng looks good. Other than the bandage on his arm - imperceptible, if he arranges his sleeve to cover it - he looks perfectly fine, his hair wound into a neat bun behind his head - a change, from the high ponytail Wei Wuxian is used to seeing, and tying for him, though his braids are the same - clarity bell hanging neatly from his waist - he recognises the traditional knot securing it as shijie’s handiwork, one of the loops playfully lopsided, shijie used to tie his bells like that, too - and clean purple robes - a darker purple than his disciples’ robes, a rich, vivid colour, a plum violet fit for a zongzhu.
He’s comparing - he can’t help it, but he is - Wei Wuxian is comparing the Jiang Cheng hovering on his sword before him to the shidi he’s known in Lotus Pier, cataloguing their similarities and differences, yearning for his shidi and Lotus Pier.
Jiang Cheng meets his eyes, searching - and Wei Wuxian doesn’t know what he finds there, but Jiang Cheng implores him, the tiniest edge of desperation in his voice, again, “Come home.”
And he aches to, he wants to, more than anything, wants to fall into Jiang Cheng’s arms and be hauled back to Yunmeng, hug shijie and eat her cooking till he’s full to bursting.
He misses Lotus Pier, and more than that - he misses Jiang Cheng.
But he’s needed here - if he leaves, he knows the Jins will come again. They’re out for blood - and it’s his own fault, really, for killing the guards at Qiongqi Path - blood debt upon blood debt upon blood debt, building up into a crushing wall of wrongs he can never absolve himself of.
Jiang Cheng has always been resilient, and he’s always been resourceful - he doesn’t need Wei Wuxian at his side, dragging him down, an impulsive burden he’s got to make excuses for, forcing him to bow his head to arrogant bastards of sect leaders - Jiang Cheng, and Yunmeng, by extension, is better off without Wei Wuxian, soiling their clean streets and sparkling waters with the black weight of his demonic cultivation.
“I can’t,” he says, quite miserably.
Jiang Cheng scoffs. “You kept the braids,” he points out, and stresses, “ A-jie’s braids,” He’s right, Wei Wuxian’s kept the braids, the hairstyle shijie taught him, a lifetime ago - he hadn’t thought Jiang Cheng would notice. He’s missed the quiet mornings, brushing his hair in front of the bronze mirror - when their most pressing concern was that day’s trainings, and whether the Zi Zhizhu would catch them skiving off work to steal lotus seeds from the ponds.
“And you lost the ponytail,” he responds, adding quickly, “As have I.” The bun is more Jiang-shushu’s hairstyle than Jiang Cheng’s - perhaps he’s trying to look like his father, look more grown-up, force the other sect to take him seriously, this upstart little youngster barely a quarter their age, trying to rebuild his massacred sect with little more than a hope and a prayer (and the Peacock’s support, but today is not the day that Wei Wuxian accepts shijie and that pompous golden thing will soon be wed - he’s still not forgiven the man for the Langya Front incident).
Jiang Cheng’s expression freezes. “Fine,” he snaps. “I suppose you’re right - Lotus Pier now is too different to be worth your time. Fine ,” Jiang Cheng repeats, ice-cold, as he turns away. “Have it your way, then.”
Wei Wuxian blinks. “That’s not what I meant,” he tries to say, but Jiang Cheng’s already gone.
Wei Wuxian sighs, but it’s not like he can chase after him, now, and he lets him go.
He turns, and looks back at his desolate little potato plants.
Where did A-Yuan go, anyway?
===
He finds the child in the rickety kitchen, the shihe open - god, it smells so good Wei Wuxian could cry - A-Yuan happily shoving pieces of lotus into his mouth. Beside his bowl, there’s a stack of paigu bones, gnawed clean of any bits of meat.
Wei Wuxian fetches a bowl for himself as well, and goes to ladle some soup for himself too - there’s only a few pieces of paigu left, and he stops himself from taking them with a sigh - A-Yuan needs the protein, and he should save one for Wen Qing, too, just to make sure she doesn’t kill him when he inevitably forgets to apply the new salve she’s given him for his slowly clotting wound - even without any meat, the soup still tastes divine. Much better than the sorry state of his potatoes.
A-Yuan swallows, and tugs on his sleeve to get his attention. “Xian-gege,” he says, patting about in his sleeve. “The gege just now gave me- aha!” he pulls out a small, lilac pouch, and gives it to Wei Wuxian. “He gave me this bag, before he left, told me to give it to you,” he tells him, and turns back to his soup, content to ignore mortal distractions for the heavenly taste of shijie’s cooking.
Wei Wuxian takes the pouch and turns it over in his hand. The stitching is characteristically of a Yunmeng fashion - careful, tiny knots in the thread, forming the intricate design of an anti-theft talisman. He opens it to find it filled to the brim with silver yuanzi, and a small strip of parchment, lying haphazardly upon the heavy pouch of coin.
You suck at gardening , it reads, in Jiang Cheng’s familiar, elegant hand, brisk and to-the-point, Buy better food.
Soft-hearted fool , Wei Wuxian thinks, wry smile curling on his lips. He moves to pocket the pouch of coin, when a hand reaches out and takes it from him. God, he’s getting everything snatched from under his nose today.
Wen Qing - when did she arrive? - dangles the coin pouch from her fingers. “What’s this?” she asks, sharp and suspicious. “Did you rob someone?”
“No!” what the- What does she think of him?
Wen Qing narrows her eyes at him, and turns to A-Yuan, a hand on her hips and a thin brow cocked.
“A nice gege gave it to me,” A-Yuan reports, obediently.
“Hm,” Wen Qing says, and tosses the pouch back at Wei Wuxian. “Don’t get robbed, then.” She turns to the still warm contents of the shihe. “What’s this ?”
“Soup,” Wei Wuxian replies, scrambling to tuck the pouch - and its note - back into his robes. “Let me get you some.”
He picks out the smallest piece of paigu for her, just to be petty.
===
The potatoes never do grow that well. He figures the land is too arid to support proper growth.
Wei Wuxian gives up on the current batch, buys fertiliser with the money Jiang Cheng had left him, and tries again a fourth time, and then a fifth.
There’s no sixth try, because Jin Zixuan dies, a gaping hole carved from his chest by Wen Ning’s hand; and then shijie dies too, felled by a sword meant for his throat, and Jiang Cheng doesn’t visit him anymore, which is fine, just fine - Wei Wuxian is busy trying to figure out how to destroy the Yin Tiger’s Tally that made his little nephew an orphan, and there’s no time to try to grow potatoes anymore.
===
Wei Wuxian dies four months after shijie’s death, almost down to the exact day - and it’s fitting, isn’t it? Poetic, in a macabre kind of way, he supposes - and Jiang Cheng is there to watch his fall from not-grace, and he thinks there might be tear tracks on his face, except that can’t be, because there’s no reason for Jiang Cheng to cry for him, when he’s renounced all ties to Lotus Pier, hasn’t even been back since then, when he’s the reason Jiang Cheng’s got no family left anymore.
Chenqing turns against her master, no longer controlling the hordes of undead, and they swamp him almost immediately, but even as they tear at his flesh, the pure, distilled agony of the spiritual backlash is. so. much. worse. It’s torture, like fire burning straight into his soul, karmic flames of the three thousand dead from his bloodbath of the Nightless City reaching up directly from hell to bring their fury upon him. He’s never been in so much fucking pain in his entire life, and he’ll never be in this much pain ever again.
Through the haze of pain, he hears Jiang Cheng scream.
Zidian crackles through the air, purple lightning charring the rotting flesh of the corpses surrounding him as the whip wraps around the masses of long-dead men, dragging them from Wei Wuxian.
“ Wei Wuxian! ” Jiang Cheng shouts. And what a sight he is, hair flying free of its ties, whip lashing out again and again, pulling the blackened figures from Wei Wuxian - he’s not fast enough, though, for every ten of the corpses he pulls away there’s another twenty at the ready to take their place. There’s no shortage of corpses on the Burial Mounds, after all, and these undead don’t even have to go through the trouble of digging themselves out of their graves when most of them haven’t any at all.
A particularly fierce corpse lunges at him, ragged fingernails swiping blindly at his face, and Jiang Cheng catches its wrist in his whip. A flash of electricity, and the hand falls cleanly off.
The corpse growls.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jiang Cheng screams at him, voice cracking on the curse. “You said - you swore - you could control them!”
He’s said both of those things to him before. The former while watching him bustle uselessly about his potatoes, and the latter while cradling his motionless sister, Wei Wuxian standing uselessly by.
Wei Wuxian opens his mouth to respond, but Jiang Cheng lets out a huff of pain at this moment as his core finally drains of spiritual energy and Zidian slips back onto his finger in ring form, and a corpse takes advantage, sinking its teeth into his leg. Jiang Cheng curses, reaching out blindly for Sandu, and drives its blade through the skull of the corpse.
The fierce corpse from earlier, one-handed now, as if sensing his distractedness, leaps determinedly at Wei Wuxian. He notices at the last second and leans away from it, but not far enough - its nails dig into his throat, ripping out his larynx and trachea with a chunk of bloodied flesh, another layer of pain on top of the suffering that is the backlash of his demonic cultivation snatching at his soul.
Jiang Cheng’s got no spiritual energy left, physically wielding his sword now, trying in vain to clear a path to him.
Wei Wuxian gurgles, touches a hand to his neck, and - of course - it comes away red. He wonders which will kill him first, the spiritual backlash, or the blood loss.
He’d rather it be the backlash. Jiang Cheng must not have much energy left in him, even if the way he’s screaming his voice raw indicates otherwise, and if his cultivation crumbles, the dead bodies will disintegrate with it, and Jiang Cheng, at least, will be spared further injury from the corpses.
“Jiang Cheng,” he says - tries to - no voice comes from his mouth, even if he shapes the words properly.
He doesn’t know what he wants to say next, as he meets his shidi’s eyes across the mass of undead, almond eyes wild and desperate - I’m sorry , perhaps, or I’ve missed you , or even, dare he say, I love you -
It doesn’t matter anymore, because the agony crests and holds, and finally, finally , the bliss of dark nothingness claims him, growls of fierce corpses and Jiang Cheng’s scream ringing in his ears.