audio | un: xianxian of yunmeng jiang

[weifinder]

Bear!? Bear! There was a bear in the bath!

( So comes this startled and startling shout, as elsewhere in camp, Wei Wuxian is (unfortunately) streaking past in damp, confused glory, a bear of arctic composure lumbering after him, soap bar still in mouth. Come back! He was just handing the soap over, he wanted to help! )

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[consignation]

—stop talking about me to her! Wei Wuxian!!

[ He's so absolutely mortified with absolutely everything going on that he's 100% failing to absorb any of Wei Wuxian's words and just wants to stop having his face rubbed in one of the worst mistakes of his life. He tries to grab the crystal from Wei Wuxian, but then his emotions rush ahead of him as they always do, and his words tumble out all at once. ]

There was no fix!! It was war. We were kids.

[ The older Jiang Cheng gets, the more Jin Ling grows up, the more ridiculous it seems. The younger it feels he was back then. He looks at Jin Ling now and thinks, 'This is just a boy, a child.' Just a brat with no sense of the world, but that's how it should be. He would do anything to keep Jin Ling from having to make the choices he did, from going through the heartbreak he lived. He hates himself for his mistakes. He hates Wei Wuxian for his. Jiang Cheng does not know how to let go, to forget, to forgive. But more and more, he thinks...

How could they have done better? How could any of them have done better in their inexperience, in their youth, in their limited scope of the world?

It should not have been put upon them.

But it was.

And they made the awful, bloody messes they made.

And they keep going, or they stop.

Strange to think that Wei Wuxian died, but found ways to keep going.

Jiang Cheng lived, raised his sister's child, rebuilt his sect, led it well.

But he has not taken a single step forward from that cliff.

He stands at the cliff's edge now, hands balled into fists, shouting the words he's held in his heart since he watched Wei Wuxian take that fall, choose that fall. ]

But you always thought you could do everything! Fix everything! You were spoiled and you left me alone!

[weifinder]

I know, and I'm sorry.

( What he can do, standing here, is strongly dislike a conversation he's had to degrees before, but never—never in this way, because of how things were between them back home until the moments they were shifted, but still estranged. He can't answer for Yanli's death in any way that satisifies, not even knowing, now, who's fingers stroked and stoked that final song.

He doesn't disclaim his responsibilities for the lives he's helped take, even if it was not his sole authorship. Opportunity does not exist without reasons; and he was blinded, was not prepared, to fight against another living mind seeking to undermine his control.

Arrogance. Arrogance and despair. He had felt, when seeing that naked greed for power, the jest of why the Wens had been killed, the insatiability of the righteous, that there was one way to end it. One way, and the thin trail of hope that might have fished him back off that ledge disappeared under the shaking of the rock on which Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng stood, as Sandu struck down into stone and not flesh, under the certainty that if he did not let go, Wei Wuxian would destroy the last two remaining people in the world he cared about.

Let one man fall, not three. Just one, and he'd already fallen oh so low.

(Not right, in reflection. Just something in grief and breaking that only so many times one can stand without feeling their marrow's been sucked out to feed the ghosts of their haunted present, and the future feels impossible, before human greed and human failing and the frailty of justice when one has chosen to stand alone.) )

I was wrong, and I can't undo that. All I know is the man I've learned to be in the months since waking... is one thankful for the brother who protected Chenqing all these years.