Chapter Text
Wen Qing bowed as she entered Jiang Cheng’s office, and he looked up at her with the most beautiful eyes she’d ever seen in her life, a small, pleased smile edging onto his face at the simple sight of her. He rose. “I think you can save your bows, Wen-guniang, until the matchmaker has finished her consultation, and given us an auspicious date for the wedding.”
“About that.” The smile instantly vanished, replaced by apprehension. It made her chest ache, to see how easily she was able to do that to him. How long has it been since you let yourself hope for anything like happiness? We’ve always had so much in common, you and I… “Before we proceed on that front, there’s something I need to tell you.”
The apprehension subtly morphed into wariness. “Yes. I suppose there is.”
Ah, Wen Qing thought. He knows about his core already.
And yet this did not, she felt, remove her obligation to make an accounting of herself to him.
“How did you find out?” she asked.
Jiang Cheng didn’t pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Did Wei Wuxian finally change his mind about not wanting you to know? I told him he should tell you—”
“He did not. Change his mind.” Jiang Cheng’s jaw clamped shut, and Wen Qing had the feeling she was in dangerous territory. (Hadn’t Jiang Cheng claimed he neither knew nor cared where Wei Wuxian was? She believed the former but not the latter. Something must have happened between them, though; it seemed unlike Jiang Cheng not to chase after his brother when said brother’s whereabouts were unknown.
Wen Qing was puzzled. “Who did tell you, if not your brother?”
“Wei Wuxian is not my brother!” Jiang Cheng snapped. “He made that clear enough.”
I doubt that! It hadn’t only been Jiang Yanli that Wei Wuxian had missed, had wept for, a lifetime ago, in the Burial Mounds. But she set that aside in favor of the immediate question. “But how, then, if Wei Wuxian didn’t tell you?”
“Your brother,” Jiang Cheng said, in a clipped voice.
“A-Ning?!” Wen Qing’s jaw actually dropped. “A-Ning told you? But…why?” Especially if Wei Wuxian did not wish it…her brother was accommodating to a fault. She could not imagine him ever breaking his promise to his friend.
“To grind my face in it,” Jiang Cheng said bitterly. “To make sure I understood my inferiority and my ingratitude in the face of my former shixiong’s magnanimity.”
Wen Qing was a little stunned, and evidently Jiang Cheng could see it on her face, for he continued, “I have no accomplishments to my name, it seems; no deeds I can claim as my own. All I have done to make the Jiang strong is due only to Wei Wuxian’s core, without which I would be nothing but a mundane person. Wen Ning was offended that I did not realize my proper place in Wei Wuxian’s shadow, and undertook to correct my misconceptions. No fear, Wen-daifu; I’ve been schooled now, and I won’t make that mistake again.”
“But A-Ning would never say such things!” Wen Qing protested. When was A-Ning anything but gentle, anything but considerate? Her innocent didi, who used to bring home wounded birds and beg her to nurse them back to health—(underneath her fear, when he’d dragged the fugitive sister and brothers of Yunmeng into her supervisory office for shelter and aid, had been a bittersweet pang, that her grown-up brother had graduated from little birds to full-sized people)—her sweet didi, who was so perfectly gentle and patient with their little cousin A-Yuan, even at his fussiest. A-Ning didn’t have an ounce of cruelty in his bones; even if he had gone against Wei Wuxian’s wishes, and revealed what he and Wen Qing had done, A-Ning would never have been as unkind about it as Jiang Cheng implied.
…would he? Could those nails in his head have poisoned him somehow? Or maybe something else had changed. She wasn’t sure, from what Jiang Cheng told her, how long A-Ning had been freed from Xue Yang’s control. He’s very fully himself, was what he’d said, and thinking back on it, now she could hear the anger he’d concealed, in those careful words.
Jiang Cheng did not answer her at first, although his fingers tightened painfully hard on the brush he’d still been holding when she came in. “Perhaps not,” he said, finally, his voice acerbic. “Maybe that was a hallucination.”
He leaned down and set down his brush with a too-firm clack; his hand was shaking slightly as he pulled it back, and he had his head turned away from her again, and she hated it, the sight of him looking away from her. “For your sake, the Ghost General has my protection,” Jiang Cheng said, “As long as he goes on as he’s been doing since his return—and he’s been doing no harm, that I know of—I’ll speak for him, and I will even stand in front of him, if it comes to it. But Wen Ning is not welcome in Lotus Pier, and he never will be. He may come to Yunmeng, for you, but if he dares set foot in my family’s house again, I will drive him out with Zidian and I will not pull my blows this time.”
His vehemence took her aback. “What—for some unkind words?”
“I’m the only person he’s ever been unkind to, apparently!” Jiang Cheng’s face was weirdly flushed and pale at the same time, hot pink running along his cheekbones, but his lips almost bloodless, from how hard he clenched them. “That leaves the entire rest of the world for him to be as sweet as mooncakes towards!”
How the world has changed in my confinement! Wen Qing felt hysteria bubbling inside of her once again. “You know, I didn’t think A-Ning had that in him!” she said. “He would hardly ever even say anything rude about Wen Chao, even behind his back.”
“I suppose I just draw it out of people, don’t I,” Jiang Cheng said, all bitterness again.
“Maybe you do!” she said, and she began to cackle. “I know I do.”
We are not the gentlest of people, you and I! Necessity had made her too hard, and him as well. I yearn to be soft, but I cannot be. Let me learn to be soft with you.
“I mean it,” Jiang Cheng said, his lips still pressed tightly together, agitation in every movement, large and small. “This is my home. I won’t allow him here—not again. He’s had his fucking say.”
Wen Qing’s spasm of hysteria slowly worked its way out of her. “A-Ning truly said those words to you? When he told you what Wei Wuxian and I had done?”
Jiang Cheng nodded, shortly.
“Well, I suppose he can’t come to the wedding, then,” she said, and emitted a final burble of laughter. She dragged her hand down over her face, and shook her head. “Not after that.”
It was too bad. Wen Qing had put very little thought into what kind of wedding ceremony she might have liked, but if she’d ever imagined having one at all, she did think Wen Ning would be there. But whatever exactly Wen Ning had said to Jiang Cheng had really hurt him, and she wouldn’t ask them to share a ceremony when it was still so fresh. Perhaps it would ease with time—but Wen Qing simply didn’t want to wait any longer than she had to, to marry Jiang Cheng.
“We’re still—?” Jiang Cheng looked confused. Oh! He thinks he might have driven me away. “You still want to marry me?”
“Of course I do,” Wen Qing assured him.” As long as you haven’t changed your mind.” She tried very hard tried to pull herself together. “How long have you known about your core?”
“Since just before Guanyin Temple.”
Wen Qing knew enough to know that the events at Guanyin Temple had taken place the day before he and Jin Ling had rescued her from her prison. Jiang Cheng had known about this for…all of two weeks. It didn’t seem fair. Wen Qing had known about it for two decades.
“How shall we go on?” she asked him. “Do you have questions, or would you like me to make an account of myself, for you to judge?” She tucked her hands inside her sleeves, in an attempt to create the illusion of calm, doctorly composure.
Even after all this time, Jiang Cheng was not good at hiding his feelings; she could almost see the whirl of thoughts and questions as they played out on his face. He touched his abdomen, where the faint white scar was surely still secreted below his navel, underneath those layers of stiff silk; his mouth worked, words starting to form, and then dissolving on his tongue, unsaid.
“Why?” he finally managed to ask. “Why did you agree to do it in the first place?”
“Because I wanted to,” Wen Qing said, thankful it was a question she could so easily answer. “It was originally my idea, you know. Not to do it on you; that came from Wei Wuxian, once he’d found the procedure. But I was the one who first imagined the possibility, and theorized how it might be done, and wrote it down. In a book your brother found, when he was desperate to help you.”
“Not my brother,” Jiang Cheng said, faintly, but otherwise did not interrupt.
“It really was because I wanted to,” Wen Qing continued. “No matter what Wei Wuxian wanted or wished or dreamed, or whatever other crazed things he might have tried to do, if I’d turned him down—in the end, I did it because I wanted to. He offered himself for you, and I took what he offered, to give to you, because I wanted to.”
“But…why?” Jiang Cheng stared at her, his face utterly open; questioning; confused. “When it meant taking everything from him?”
“Because it was for you,” Wen Qing said, simply. “I wanted you to have back what my family stole from you, as much as I was capable of giving you. I wanted it enough to let your brother give it to you at his own cost.”
Jiang Cheng’s gaze dropped to the desk, and he said nothing more for several minutes, absorbing this. Eventually, he turned, a little jerkily, from the desk, and went to a window, leaning against it and staring out over the lake, his face hidden from her. Her eyes went to his hand that bore Zidian, and she could see that it was still and silent.
She followed him, and put her hand on his arm. Even through the layers of his sleeves, she could feel the warmth emanating from him, the solid firmness of muscle wrapped around bone. It felt like an anchor. She reached her other hand up—why was he so stupidly tall—and brushed his cheek, and found wetness there.
When did you learn to weep in silence?
“Why didn’t you tell me,” Jiang Cheng choked around his tears. “I used to know Wei Wuxian better than I knew my own hands, and then suddenly it seemed I didn’t know him at all. I spent years wondering how it all went wrong. Why it all went wrong.” He scrubbed the back of his hand across his face. “I would ask myself ‘is it me? Is there too much of my mother in me? Is that why he left me; is that why everyone leaves me?’”
The naked anguish in his voice made her own eyes burn with sudden tears. “Wei Wuxian had his own reasons for hiding it,” she said. “I can’t account for all of them. Mine was simple—I had to be sure that the transfer took. If you had known, and you fought it, it would have failed.”
(Probably. It probably would have failed.)
“And wasted Wei Wuxian’s—great sacrifice,” Jiang Cheng said, bitter again.
“Yes, it would have,” Wen Qing said. “And it also would have left you in the same state I was trying very hard to correct.”
“…did it hurt him?” Jiang Cheng whispered, his eyes flickering to her face. “The surgery. Did he feel any pain?”
“I’m afraid so,” she said, wishing he hadn’t asked that, but unwilling to lie about it. If nothing else, Wen Ning, who’d also been there, probably wouldn’t mind correcting such a lie, in the future, should he discover she’d mislead Jiang Cheng on this point. And I told myself it had to be honesty. “More than either of us realized he would. But he wouldn’t let me stop.” She paused, deliberated, took a risk. “Wei Wuxian loved you enough to bear it all the way to the end.”
Jiang Cheng took a deep breath, and then uttered an absolutely filthy curse. “Wei Wuxian—says it’s all in the past! Wei Wuxian says it’s a debt repaid, that we should wipe the slate clean, and walk away from it. He says all of that was in his past life. He’s got another one now, and it has nothing to do with me, or Yunmeng Jiang and Lotus Pier, or our—my—family. Fucking Wei Wuxian! How can he say the slate is clean—it’s not clean for me! I hate him! How dare he!”
Wen Qing sort of wished she’d been there for whatever that conversation was; she doubted Jiang Cheng’s understanding of it was wholly accurate. She was also glad she hadn’t been, because it sounded frankly wrenching. “I don’t know how he chose to explain himself to you,” she said, “but I was there and I assure you he did not choose to give you his core out of some sense of obligation. He did it because you are his brother and he loves you and he could bear anything for you except the sight of your suffering.”
“So he fixed me,” Jiang Cheng said, bitter, bitter, bitter, “the way he fixes everything, and then hid his own suffering from me, so there was no chance I could return the favor!”
That was…probably true, as far as it went.
Jiang Cheng made a retching noise, as if he was about to be sick. “There never was anything I could do, anything that I could accomplish that Wei Wuxian couldn’t immediately best. Even—sacrifice. If I’d known it was going to turn out like this—I don’t know. What was I supposed to do differently? Stand there and watch it happen? Let him die, too? He and A-Jie were all I had left; I couldn’t just let the Wen take him, too. Fuck! Fuck! It was all for nothing, though!”
“What…was for nothing?”
Jiang Cheng grasped absently at his chest, his hand running a line over where she knew his scar from the discipline whip to be. “This.”
Sacrifice…
“When my cousin’s men captured you, back then,” Wen Qing said sharply. “Did you go willingly?”
Jiang Cheng covered his eyes with his arm, still leaning against the wall. “I let them catch me,” he said. “I ran past the soldiers so they’d chase me, and when they did, and they caught up to me, I fought them—I yelled, and kicked, and cursed, and I did everything I could to keep their attention on me. Just the way Wei Wuxian would have. And when they dragged me back to Lotus Pier and ground my face under their boots into the bloody wooden floor underneath my parents’ corpses, and when they whipped me, and when Wen Zhuliu—” Jiang Cheng shuddered “—when he reached inside me and destroyed my cultivation, part of me was grateful, the whole time, because it had worked.”
Wen Qing pressed her hands against her mouth. “It…worked?” she choked out.
“They hadn't caught Wei Wuxian. I’d managed to distract them after all. They’d been right on top of him, back in the market; they were about to catch him. That’s why I had to do something. I couldn’t…I just couldn’t let them take him! I knew they’d kill him.”
“I didn’t know that,” Wen Qing said, stunned. “Wei Wuxian didn’t tell me.” For a dizzying moment, she asked herself would it have changed things? If she’d known, would she still have—
“Wei Wuxian doesn’t know.” Jiang Cheng removed his arm from his face and looked at her, his eyes so focused and so intense on her face that it made her feel dizzy and warm. “Wei Wuxian doesn’t need to know.”
Wen Qing swallowed twice, trying to control the surge of emotion this confession had brought out in her, and then she said, “The two of you are really a pair. You don’t think he’d want to know that you were willing to trade your life for his?!”
“No, I don’t!” Jiang Cheng said, briskly. “The core—the core matters. Don’t try to tell me it doesn’t! But this makes no difference. It never made any difference. And if Wei Wuxian found out, he’d just get upset about it, and he’d probably try to do something stupid.” Jiang Cheng sounded very sure about that, for a man who insisted that his brother no longer cared about him and had deliberately chosen a new life without him in it.
“I won’t try to tell you that the core doesn’t matter,” Wen Qing said. “Of course it matters. Do you think I agreed to it thinking that it didn’t matter? When I did the surgery, when I took his core into my hands for you, do you imagine that I thought that there was any possibility that you might waste it; that you might squander that gift? Jiang-zongzhu, I knew you never would! I knew you would use it well. And I was right!” She gestured broadly, trying to convey that she meant all of Lotus Pier. “You need a core to lead a cultivation sect, it’s true, Jiang-zongzhu, but all the work you’ve done with it is your work, and only you could have done it! I have many regrets in my life, but this—” she dared to lay a hand on his lower belly, over his lower dantian. Jiang Cheng sucked in a breath, surprised by the touch, but did not flinch or pull away. “—this, I do not regret. Not at all. No matter what else has happened. When I see what you’ve done with your new core, I know I was right to give it to you.” She smiled, feeling rather satisfied, and nodded. “I’d do it again.”
Jiang Cheng’s eyes narrowed, and lingered on her face. “Wen-guniang…you’re quite mad.”
“Maybe. If I am, I’ve come by it honestly, though, don’t you think?” She was still touching him. Wen Qing pulled back her hand, not precisely self-conscious, but also not not self-conscious. Just conscious, perhaps. “…I suppose your disciples have told you about some of the madder things I’ve done since I came here.”
“Oh yes,” Jiang Cheng said, a hint of amusement in his voice. “I wouldn’t worry about all that, though. Running around Lotus Pier half-dressed and shouting nonsense is considered everyday behavior for disciples of the Jiang. If anything, it’ll help you fit in better.”
That, of all things, sent Wen Qing off into another spasm of semi-hysterical laughter. Wiping at her eyes, she asked, “Will I fit in, though? You said there are those in Yunmeng who still despise the name Wen. Will ‘Jiang-furen’ be enough of a different name to pacify them?”
“It will for enough of them,” Jiang Cheng said, and she had the impression that he’d thought about it. “For those for whom it is not…I am Jiang-zongzhu, and they know better than to cross me.” Zidian sparked briefly on his finger. “You may not realize what an advantage you’re coming in with, though, Wen-guniang. Most of the sect has long since despaired of my marital prospects. I could be marrying Wang Lingjiao’s revivified corpse, and people would resign themselves to it, if it meant I somehow managed to produce an heir.”
“I’m not sure that would work,” Wen Qing said, dryly.
“Ah—” Jiang Cheng suddenly looked worried. “—that is, assuming you want children? I just realized we hadn’t discussed it.” It was almost endearing, how quickly he swung from total assurance to uncertainty, at the thought of Wen Qing’s unknown desires.
Children, though. Children! Wen Qing was surprised herself, and had to take a moment to examine the thought.
She had wanted them once, although she could never quite picture where she would find space for a child in her life. The idea of raising a child in the toxic miasma of Nightless City had been—unpalatable, even if there had been anyone there with whom she might have liked to have one in the first place. Then there had been all the upheaval of the war, followed by life—barely a life—as a refugee, then the Burial Mounds, and then that hideous, unending captivity. The possibility of children was something Wen Qing had set aside a long time ago, without ever consciously choosing to do so.
(But Lotus Pier is beautiful and safe, and so are you.)
She didn’t have Wei Wuxian’s natural affinity for children. Helping to care for A-Yuan (oh A-Yuan, she thought, a pang of grief running through her, as it always did, when she remembered all the family lost forever) when they were in Yiling had been no more or less a burden than caring for her brother or the rest of her family, but she knew that she didn’t take the pure and simple joy in playing with him as Wei Wuxian.
But…what if it was a child of her own? A child that she made herself?
A child with Jiang Cheng?
Wen Qing thought that she might want one indeed. Very badly, in fact.
And… I hope they get your cheekbones! Jiang Cheng really was the most absurdly beautiful man she’d ever met. She wondered how all those young maidens could have ranked him fifth, after his brother and Jin Zixuan, and the Twin Jades. Perhaps they hadn’t been given an accurate enough likeness of Jiang Cheng’s jawbone, or his lovely, large, oh-so-expressive eyes. Which were even now staring at her in concern, waiting for her answer.
“I’d like that,” Wen Qing said softly. She was rewarded with a smile from Jiang Cheng that was almost shy, and as lovely as his eyes.
Then she blinked, rapidly, and tried to shove down other child-related memories that suddenly came surging to the forefront of her mind, memories of dull eyes and blood, and needles—only the once; Xue Yang might have had no inhibitions, no constraints, and cared nothing if he drove her past the breaking point, but Jin Guangyao had more care for his tools, and seemed to know that even if Wen Qing’s love for her brother had no limits, her sanity did.
“We won’t be doing that again,” he told her, with a little smile, always with that horrible little smile, as he shut her back into her prison cell, and left her to clean the blood off her shaking hands with nothing but soiled rags and drinking water.
She knew it wouldn’t be the last child, though. It would just the last time they left her unattended near one, with even a single needle in her hands. Now that they knew what she could do with even just one.
“Wen Qing?” Jiang Cheng said gently, eyes flickering over her, aware of her abrupt distress. No wonder; she was shaking, and she felt cold, incredibly cold. Her temperature had probably dropped.
“Jiang-zongzhu—” Wen Qing shuddered, a full-body shudder she couldn’t control. “Could you please hold me?”
Immediately, his arms came up around her, and he pulled her against his chest, which was firm and warm, and smelled sharp, somehow, like summer, just before a rainstorm. After a moment, and as she pressed gratefully into the embrace, Jiang Cheng tucked his head carefully over her shoulder. His arms were wrapped firmly around her, holding her tightly, rocking her gently, and he whispered, “Shh, shh, it’s all right,” as if she was a child who needed reassurance.
Wen Qing was not a child, but she needed reassurance. “It’s just,” she started to say, and couldn’t go on.
“I know,” Jiang Cheng said. He really must have read all of Xue Yang’s notes; he didn’t seem even a little confused by this. The thought of it spurred Wen Qing to sob, sudden and brutal, against his chest, her eyes clenched tight, and she keened in anguish, cried again for the hateful memories, and for her own madness. “Shhh, shh,” Jiang Cheng said, and stroked her back in a soothing rhythm. “It’ll be all right.” Nonsense comfort for a child, but it was comfort, and she took it.
“Why,” Wen Qing made herself ask, unable to tear herself away from him, her face hot, her eyes burning wet, “did I have to be the one to bring up…this?” She slipped one hand between their bodies, and pressed the back of it over his golden core. “Why aren’t you angrier with me? No matter what else, no matter who else, I’m the one who did it. Would you just have never mentioned it if I hadn’t? Even though you knew what I’d done? Why?”
“…because,” Jiang Cheng said, in a voice so small she could barely make it out, even with her head resting against his chest, “You said you would stay.”
Oh. Wen Qing’s heart felt like some enormous, impossible throbbing thing, larger than her own body. Oh. I will bring you inside my heart and keep you safe there. My heart has many chambers, after all; I can give you one all to yourself.
“I will stay,” Wen Qing told him, fisting her free hand in his robes, and wrinkling the silk, probably. “I want to. I don’t want to go anywhere else, I want to be here! I want to be with you.”
“Stay,” Jiang Cheng said. “I promise I’ll find your brother and I’ll bring him here for you.”
“I will, I’ll stay.”
“Stay with me. Please. Please stay with me! I’ll keep you safe; I won’t let anyone hurt you ever again.”
“I will,” she mumbled against his chest. “I’ll stay forever. I won’t leave, I promise.”
“Stay,” Jiang Cheng said—no, begged—into her shoulder, and she could feel that he was shaking himself, could feel his own hot tears soaking her robes through. “Please. Please!”
“I’ll stay,” Wen Qing told him, and also herself. She pressed into him even harder, and she was crying again, but it felt good this time; it felt good to make the promise, because she could, and she wanted to, and she meant it. “I promise I’ll stay. You won’t be alone again, not ever. I’ll stay. I will. I’ll stay.”