welcome to siege day networking

[weifinder]

( for the sake of keeping everything that happens on that day contained, please feel free to use this as a catch-all network 'post' for everyone's communications and shouting over each other should that be happening!

all top level comments below can be new communications, please threadjack each other at will! adding a general time marker to the top of your comment to this post can indicate a when where that communication is happening, as you like. )

Comments

[consignation]

[ ???????????? ]

We're being attacked and you're trapped on the other side of enemy forces?

[weifinder]

You're being attacked and I'm at the flank.

[consignation]

That's what I said!

[ Don't split hairs with him! ]

Just— Just stay there and stay out of sight until we work this out! You're the only one of us without a sword, so just— Just hang back!

[ Yeah, this is actually better. Except the part where he already knows Wei Wuxian is never going to listen to him. ]

You can just provide enemy movements to us. Don't do anything rash.

[weifinder]

I'm not going to rush in! To be any help I'm going to have to backtrack to the citadel! While I can. Otherwise I can tell you what they're doing, but it boils down to you're surrounded by bodies that are even less responsive than when we were fighting puppets in the war.

[consignation]

We'll handle it! We survived the war, this is just—

[ He thinks to the war, to the events preceding, to being young and stupid together. Being sent to the Wens for their idea of an education, that cursed cave, all that happened thereafter. Wei Wuxian always at the forefront, the center, always taking the entire world on his shoulders.

Just once, Jiang Cheng tried to do it in turn.

Just once, and— ]

We're not invalids. I've been sect leader about as long as you were even with Jiang Sect, and your precious Lan Wangji is a damned war hero so you can take a break for a change.

[weifinder]

( His own frustration, his concern, the stretch of time between them and sixteen years he'll never have back, his darkness the only swallowing stretch he'll ever know, the mark of time passing and his certainty, then, that it was simply the hell he was due, beats against the cage of his lungs.

He breathes out, sharp, release and headache all at once. )

Jiang Cheng, if I didn't trust you and Lan Zhan and Lan Sizhui and the rest of everyone in that farmhouse to handle it, do you think we'd be talking right now? Unhalad's dead won't want to move into Anurr's forests, and they're going to be slow before the sun warms them. They'll slow again by nightfall. Think, you know it like I do, while they focus on you, and you hold them off, am I not supposed to look for how to cut them off? How to make sure this doesn't happen again while we escape this forsaken region?

( There will be another sort of joke, later, that it is not Wei Wuxian who will target Unhalad, that he will not be the driving force after that creature, when it gains the field. He's not trying to win this battle, but he sure as hell won't let them retreat to regroup and come again. )

[consignation]

I don't like you out there alone. You're cut off. Or— Or we are, whichever. The point is, if something happens to you— No help can reach you. Do you understand?

Are you so accustomed to having your back to a wall you no longer know any other way to act?

[ There's a hiss of breath as Jiang Cheng regrets those words just as soon as they leave his lips. They're unkind, and they do not serve them.

He doesn't know why his love always hurts the people who love him.

Maybe he learned it from his mother.

He takes a sharp breath, then tries again. ]

Keep me appraised of your location. I'll make sure our defenses are in place here, then find a way to join you.

[weifinder]

( He'd flinch, if he wasn't used to worse. He'd made those choices, had tried to offer those outs to everyone he's ever cared about. Repeatedly, you don't have to keep me when it's easier to let go. Lan Zhan was the one who finally said no. Who stood firm against the tide of opinion pressing down over shoulders and the better politics, the better sense to most eyes, than to believe in the Yiling Patriarch.

His back had been to a wall for years. It's free now, and no, it isn't a wonder that the first name on his lips is Lan Zhan, the sword and shield for he who, previously, as Jiang Cheng has pointed out, does not have a sword.

He's working on that. A nod to Eleven, for the how and why, and that this place doesn't carry the weight of a world finding out again what he is and what he isn't, where he doesn't need to fend off spars meant to show off skill and little else. If he had a sword now, not one of their spiritual blades, but simply forged steel, he could fight. Would fight, with the brutal trained precision they both share, with the finesse that sets them off from the Nies.

Slow down, breathe. Say the things he needs to, in the face of the kinds of conflicts he's only been learning to have without shutting down in the newness of recent months, in the refinding of what and who Wei Wuxian, wreck of a cultivator, is in a world that no longer aches to drink him dry and dance on the ashes of his grave. )

I won't make myself the target.

( He won't make himself the risk to take. )

Jiang Cheng, I don't—their strength isn't in the bow.

( Flight if one must, fight of course, but if he's seeking a means out, there's that one. Probably. He's sick to his stomach and standing, the crunch of snow underfoot. )

I move for the citadel now, before the light's full. I'll return as soon as I can.