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! )

Comments

[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.