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[consignation]

jiang wanyin

missives | encounters

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[consignation]

[ jiang cheng can't tell if he's already feeling the alcohol or if lan wangji is making even less sense than usual. such things are hard to tell even on the best of days. sometimes he feels like he understands wangji innately, without a word spoken between them, in such a way that his skin crawls and soul itches. other days, like this, the words sound in a foreign tongue, garbled and spat out in bitterness and spite.

accusations of violence against wei wuxian, of having him drawn and quartered in heart, in spirit, over this perceived feud between lover and brother. who started it? who carries it on? there should be more than enough room for both, unquestioningly, in wei wuxian's life. but here lan wangji sits, pushing, pulling, admitting defeat to a war of unspoken stakes and undefined spoils. ]

Your mind, maybe, [ jiang cheng mutters, rolling his eyes as he fills his own cup, sloppy, sloshing cheap wine across the table. he waits for access to wangji's cup and fills it the same. ]

What does he want, anyway? Do you even know?

[downswing]

( Drink is poison, petulant and prolific, seeding and reaping and growing in him to bloom. He feels it, like prickling and thorns on his strained tongue, feels it like lead on his tongue, like the slow unwinding of his joints, the slackening of his posture. It does not honour him, to shed discipline so easily. He drinks once, then one cup over, and he knows, all at once, he'll make a nuisance of himself. And it is price paid for privilege of negotiation. )

...who we were. Before. Children. ( Is that what they were, drifting like sea spume in their whites? He remembers, the ungainly stiffness of foreign delegations, Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying and the sister, beautiful slip of domestic diplomacy, parading their innocence before him. What were they, before the Wen made them men? )

He wants... he — ( Is, was, cliff's edge, the drift stain of his fingertips, blood and viscera, stone kissed. Remembers: fall, and Jiang Cheng ruptured from anger like a bird of prey, and he seems, to Lan Wangji's tilting head, so small somehow, this wretched son of Yunmeng, and yet he ended the world. Drove his sword in, stench of bloodshed hot and embers, and he twisted, and Wei Ying —

Fissured and fell, silhouette of him like coarse brush strokes and liminal edges, like the creaking rupture of Lan Wangji's body, from inertia to collapse — tipping, until he must catch his cheek and jaw with his fist and a bent arm, to avoid skidding amid cups. He sees Jiang Cheng, blur and ache of him, like a bruise. )

What... do you want?

[consignation]

[ like so many things in this life, the obvious is the last thing jiang cheng expects to happen. it stuns him, stills him, this act of lan wangji turning this question back upon him.

didn't even answer me properly, he gripes in his own mind, ever desperate for some, any part of lan wangji to be found wanting. to find at least much fault in others that is ever-present in himself.

he shouldn't answer, should keep the focus on the topic at hand. wangji falters, he pitches with liquor jiang cheng has hardly tasted, the alcohol consumed thus far barely enough to blur his pain out of focus even at its sharpest points.

jiang cheng's hand grips wangji's shoulder as though to steady him, as though he ever could, and then he is holding too hard, unable to let go.

the question has been asked and jiang cheng's mind seeks to answer it. turns it in his mind, over and over, even though the shape of the answer is immediate, a bitter pill upon his tongue.

我想回家。 ]

I want to go home, [ he croaks out. 我想回家。 ] I want to go home—

[ like a child who stayed out to late, lost himself in the woods. his voice snags raw on his grief, tantrum rising. just a boy in the rain, sobbing for mom and dad who will never answer his cries again.

我想回家。

there is only one piece of home that remains. ]

[downswing]

( He is held, staggered. Flinched. Print of Jiang Cheng's tortured grasp of him, warmth singeing. He blinks, and the great sullen weight of his lashes begs his eyes long shuttered. He anticipates objection, hears the hungry, tender scratch of Jiang Cheng's silks over coarse floor. Heft rattles on wood, tinny — his cup, newly dropped. )

There is... ( Burned it, ashes and white, and Cloud Recesses first, though no man remembers. What did you lose that Gusu Lan did not first forfeit? Wen Ruohan's war, and the great sects battered, but it Cloud Recesses stood flayed when Yunmeg did not fly its banners and Chifeng-Zun's pride had yet to bruise. His mouth dries, tears. ) No place.

( What is it to drift between truth and memory, to open his eyes once more, owl-like and fond? Light dapples on the floor like pox marks. He chases to bridge them with sweeps of his fingers, into constellations. Bitterness cleaves his smile raw and thin, like unfinished pours of metallurgy, clumsy and grainy at the edges. )

No pla... the likes of us. We may call home.

[consignation]

[ jiang cheng's hand connects with lan wangji's cheek, a slap delivered with all the strength of errant tofu. it's the strike of a displeased cat, a push of hand to skin where the force is not at the point of contact but in the shove that follows. ]

Shut up. You don't know anything. You don't deserve him.

[ voice yet hoarse with tears, jiang cheng scowls through watery, red-rimmed eyes. ]

He carries home with him, makes it wherever he rests his head. Don't tell me you don't feel it.

No matter how bad things get, no matter how bad things ever get, he makes some stupid joke and suddenly you're furious and you're home.

[downswing]

( His cheek stings, blooms prickled in the way of surface that is not brutalised but teased, tentatively, with friction. Drunkenness slows him — first to blink slowly, balefully, and watch Jiang Cheng's hand as if it is a weapon unknown, materialised abruptly before him.

Belatedly, he rakes his teeth against the thenar swell of Jiang Cheng's palm, narrowly failing to latch. Gummy, slipping, wet. When he laughs, it's as nothing, a skipped moment of aberration snagged from the cloth of the universe. Unnatural. )

How'd he... could he... he... ha. Ha...? How could he do you to me...?

( Do they know, did they consider? Wei Ying, that mad saintly woman Wen Qing, forging their miracles from blasphemy? Wangji bats more than finds Jiang Cheng's front, stumbles too far left, first. Then skids back to hover, and seeks out warmth, where Wei Ying's core sings and churns, and how could they do this to him? )

Half of him. That... that's my soulmate. Should I...? ( His fingers spider out, still devoid of touch. ) Hello. ( It knows him, this core. Isn't that the way of fairytales and legend? Those who wed and bed and cultivate together, is this not part of what it means to be who they are, this core, gifted away? ) What meaning, then? For you? Who are you?

( Not dust motes or debris on the road. Not hardship, not scattered wind, barely light trickling and trinkets of touch, barely an illusion.

What is it, when your soulmate's core is transplanted to another man? A distribution of your duties? Jiang Cheng cannot ever suffer or go unprotected, not when he carries Wei Ying within him. Forced kinship, when none was sought. Jiang Cheng, become now closer to Lan Wangji through obligation than the sect Gusu Lan, than countless distant relatives of the clan.

He will sicken, bile bundling in his gut. Since knowing, he has sickened. Every time he raised sword against Jiang Cheng, he might have culled a part of Wei Ying. )

Adopted you. Didn't... didn't deserve th — ( His mouth is too raw, too dry, allow him when he chases with one hand his wine cup and depletes the last of it in greedy gulps. ) That either. But we are, here we are.

( And yet, here they are. )

[consignation]

[ lan wangji paws at him and jiang cheng allows it to happen, befuddled, squinting in hazy, distant intoxication. attention summoned to it, wei wuxian's core burns an aching hole through the fabric of his being, an ill-fitting stopper against the churning emptiness left by the war. there have been nights when jiang cheng would have liked nothing more than to claw it back out of him with bare hands just not to feel the crushing weight of its obligation anymore.

he never asked for this, never wanted it, would never in a million years have accepted it given half the chance.

he does not bring up everything that was robbed from him. lan wangji would never understand being made to make half of all his life's worst decisions fully blind. ]

Maybe not, [ jiang cheng concedes instead, though he spits the words out as though they sear his tongue on the way out. ] But at least I see him for what he is now. What do you see him for, Lan Wangji.

When you look at Wei Wuxian, what do you see besides all you failed to do?

If he's the other half of your soul, why doesn't he feel like home?

[downswing]

Shuttu...

( Easy, instinctive, primitive. They teach the silence spell to latch and weave and hold all but in the nursery, talent expressed as natural dominance when dozens of undisciplined Lan infant-disciples exert their strength on each other. On men beyond the clean, it cuts an even simpler cast — the family knows to expect it, to search in the victim's energies where it's taken root with infestation. Strangers are unsuspecting.

When Wangji calls it on Jiang Cheng's mouth, hand still warm on his brother-in-law's lapel, it's a pretty plaything, the trinket of a game. He laughs, but chokes on it, staccato. )

Haaaaaa... hummm. Ha...? ( He has drunk too much, too well. Too little. He searches the glistened trail of wine spilled on hard wood, like morning dew, and finds not one drop spared. Animal, Jiang Wanyin must have drunk. Jiang Wanyin, who ever does as he likes. )

Why aren't you... afraid of anything? Any... thing. Anything at all, you keep... talking. Talking. Talking.

( Striking, cutting, was it fire they used when Yunmeng went for the Wen? Wei Ying never gave up his clan's secrets, not even when he no longer bore the mantle. What was it Jiang Wanyin did, looming over his brother, at cliff's edge? Nearly spat down. This hellish mouth, like a rusted prison's door, Wangji thinks, these maws could chew the world. )

You've got his mouth. ( Family, it runs, and there's no blood between Wei Ying and the Jiang, but there it is, the manner shared. Rapid, loose, irreverent. He thinks he doesn't know when the spell dissolves like gossamer thread pulled, pretends the matter eludes him. But knows, he always knows, when fondness strikes, Don't keep Wei Ying's mouth shut, even on another man. ) And you keep talking.

( So talk now. ) Why don't you say... say... nice thing? A nice thing.