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Jiang Cheng was running, running, running until he couldn’t run anymore. His legs and lungs burned hotter than his overworked core as he desperately tried to lead the Wen soldiers away from Wei Wuxian, hoping that his shixiong got back to the inn with the food and medicine for A-Jie safely. He leapt onto a rooftop and ran along it, dodging binding talismans thrown his way. He was almost there, the local temple with its many hideyholes and statues on its roof was just up ahead; he’d played hide-and-seek with Wei Wuxian and a few of the older shidis often enough that he had many plans and backup plans of locations to hide in and how to sneak out through the small tunnels at the bottom to allow for drainage during monsoons and the subsequent flooding. He’d have reached it to, if it weren’t for the arrow that was sent shooting through his shoulder, knocking him off balance in midair. He fell down, hard, landing on his now broken hand. He knew what would happen, knew that they’d take him back to Wen Chao who would make Wen Zhuliu melt his core. He knew very well what would happen. Still, he couldn’t find it in himself to regret it.
At least it’s not Wei Wuxian. Better me than him. He thought as he was dragged away.
But then. Then. As he was dragged to the discipline hall and given lash after lash with the discipline rod, there was a shout from the guards. And Wen Chao had clapped with glee and ordered him to be dragged out to watch.
It was Wei Wuxian. They’d caught Wei Wuxian. Why hadn’t he stayed with A-Jie in the inn?! He thought in despair.
Wei Wuxian, who was bruised and bleeding from the beating he’d already received. He’d put up a fight, as usual. It was not like him to go down without one.
They held Jiang Cheng down and made him watch as Wen Chao prised the sparking, angry Zidian off his hand and used it repeatedly on Wei Wuxian, who was clearly trying to control his screams of pain for Jiang Cheng’s sake. The smell of burnt flesh and sulphur filled the air and Jiang Cheng wanted to scream and cry and gag and shield Wei Wuxian with his own body, to take the hits for him instead.
Finally, Wen Chao had drawn his sword and had his guards hold Wei Wuxian’s limp, unconscious body upright, and swung, ignoring Jiang Cheng’s screams. Wei Wuxian’s hand fell onto the ground with a spatter of blood and a raw, guttural scream as the pain momentarily woke Wei Wuxian up.
Jiang Cheng screamed and screamed and struggled to reach Wei Wuxian. Wen Zhuliu advanced. Jiang Cheng threw himself in front of Wei Wuxian, shielding him with his body. The pain of his core being melted away was nothing compared to the pain of having Wei Wuxian prised out of his arms and dragged towards the lotus pond.
“Melt his core, then let him drown!”
“NOOOOOO!”
He was dragged and restrained tightly as he watched Wen Zhuliu snuff out Wei Wuxian’s core, his only hope for survival with an injury that big. He screamed but no sound came out. Wei Wuxian was carelessly tossed into the pond, his blood staining the water red immediately.
Jiang Cheng didn’t realise that they’d let him go as he fell to his knees, shocked into silence at the sight of his world shattering into pieces. He didn’t hear the cruel laughter as he crawled at a snail’s pace to the pond. That they let him go was a surprise, but he was coreless now. An ordinary person of no threat to cultivators.
He crawled and crawled, feeling numb to his heart and cold to the very cells in his bones. He was too weak to pull Wei Wuxian out, so he crawled into the pond, pulling the broken, unmoving and unbreathing body of Wei Wuxian into his arms. He sobbed soundlessly once, twice, thrice- sobs that were mostly him desperately sucking air into his lungs on autopilot and then trying to get the syllables of Wei Wuxian’s name past his lips- and then he looked up and screamed to the heavens with all the agony in his heart.
Jiang Cheng bolted upright with a soundless scream that ended with him hyperventilating and desperately clutching his chest as the air refused to fill his chest. Zidian flickered and sparked due to his emotions, lighting up the room alongside the soft moonlight streaming in from the uncovered upper windows.
It took a while before Jiang Cheng could calm himself down enough to take stock of where and when it was.
He was in Lotus Cove, in Lotus Pier, which was as whole and intact as the rebuilding efforts could make them. The war was over. He had his core back. Wei Wuxian was alive, fast asleep in his room one pavilion over. He was alive, he was safe, he was-
Jiang Cheng threw the covers off him and threw his doors open, uncaring of his state of dress or hair. He grabbed Sandu on pure reflex leftover from the war and ran, barefooted on the wooden walkways until he reached the pavilion Wei Wuxian was in. Tears were streaming from his eyes, blurring his vision, but he didn’t notice.
He barged into Wei Wuxian’s room, startling the man awake from what was a most-likely restless sleep. Wei Wuxian was awake in a second, Chengqing held out defensively. It was a full moon, and the light was enough for him to see Jiang Cheng just in time to lower his flute enough to brace for the sudden acquisition of a lapful of sobbing shidi.
Jiang Cheng threw himself onto Wei Wuxian and burrowed as close to him as possible, burying his head against Wei Wuxian’s bare neck and deeply inhaling the familiar scent of his warm, safe and alive shixiong as the sobs were wrenched out from his chest.
“A-Cheng, what’s wrong?! What’s wrong?! Are you okay? Are you hurt?!”
Jiang Cheng just shook his head in answer, or perhaps in denial of the nightmare now that he knew that Wei Wuxian was alive again and pulled him even closer. Wei Wuxian’s arms came up around him and held onto him just as tightly.
“Shhh A-Cheng, it’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you now. Shixiong’s got you now, baby. It’s okay.”
He murmured while lifting one of his hands off Jiang Cheng’s back to gently and slowly start running his fingers through his hair.
It took a while before Jiang Cheng’s heart calmed down to its normal pace and he could breathe without gasping or sobbing. Wei Wuxian was concerned, especially because Jiang Cheng had never once acted like this in recent years, not even when he’d had nightmares during the war- Jiang Cheng had simply snuck into Wei Wuxian’s tent and collapsed on top of him on the bed until Wei Wuxian had scooted over and Jiang Cheng had slipped under the covers and held him before dropping off to sleep shortly afterwards. There were no tears, and certainly no sobs that sounded like Jiang Cheng’s world was shattering around him.
A soft knock on the open door drew his attention. It was Yanli, standing there in her nightclothes with a soft over robe thrown on, looking anxiously into the room. She gasped softly when she saw Jiang Cheng’s state and quietly entered, putting her hand softly on Jiang Cheng’s head.
“What’s wrong? Is he okay?” she softly asked Wei Wuxian.
“I don’t know. He barged in here crying and hugged me and won’t let go and he didn’t say anything about why.”
“Do you think he had a nightmare?”
“It’s possible, but he’s never had them before when he slept with me before, he just collapsed into bed and was fast asleep in a few minutes.”
“That was during a war, A-Xian. There’s too much to do in a war which means nightmares and other issues are pushed aside in favour of the more urgent things. I think, now that we’re out of the war, there’s enough time for these things to catch up to him. To us.”
While Yanli had been talking, she’d settled behind Jiang Cheng and began to finger-comb his hair while Wei Wuxian moved to rub slow circles into his back. Jiang Cheng whimpered and simultaneously relaxed under their ministrations. His sobs had mostly stopped by now, although his eyes were still welling up with tears and he didn’t ever want to let go, to be pulled away from or separated from Wei Wuxian again in his entire life.
At some point, Yanli had gotten up to go and light some candles and close the door to ward off the slight chill and growing mist that tended to creep in from the lotus ponds at night. Jiang Cheng had shifted and so had Wei Wuxian, both of them shifting into more comfortable positions.
And then Jiang Cheng pressed his palm flat against Wei Wuxian’s back, and before the man could protest, he sent a jolt of qi into him. Jiang Cheng had only wanted to check for himself, to finally banish the images from his mind (impossible though that may be, since it felt like they were permanently branded into his brain) and reassure himself that Wei Wuxian was healthy and strong and so was his core. He didn’t expect to find nothing in the cavity where Wei Wuxian’s sun once resided.
Jiang Cheng abruptly sat up even as Wei Wuxian panicked and tried to stop Jiang Cheng from doing any more. He slid his other hand down and tried again from the front, only to find nothing again. His heartbeat spiked.
“A-Jie!” he gasped, the mental image of Wen Zhuliu standing over Wei Wuxian’s body filling his mind and voice with raw fear.
“A-Jie! He- he doesn’t- he-”
“Easy A-Cheng. You need to breathe, okay? Take a deep breath for me, okay?”
It was only a lifetime of automatically listening to his sister that made him comply, completely on autopilot.
“He doesn’t have a core!” Jiang Cheng whispered, looking into the terrified and teary eyes of Wei Wuxian.
Yanli gasped behind them, then she was scrambling to put her hands over his dantian to check for himself. Wei Wuxian tried to deflect and squirm away, but Jiang Cheng was too heavy for him to move, especially now that he was an ordinary person without a cultivator’s strength.
“A-Xian, no!” Yanli breathed out, putting her hands over her mouth as her eyes filled with tears.
“Shije…”
Jiang Cheng, meanwhile, sent a stream of qi into Wei Wuxian’s empty dantian and felt the way it automatically and almost eagerly ran through his meridians, burning it’s way through the massed of resentful energy lingering in Wei Wuxian’s body and meridians and coreless cavity. He felt for the edges of the meridians, looking to soothe and smooth down the jagged edges that were left behind after Wen Zhuliu burned out one’s core. Jiang Cheng was familiar with the intense heaviness and sharp, prickling pain of doing anything with his meridians still unhealed; it was agony, as if his meridians were lightly scabbed wounds that repeatedly tore open and bled every time he moved. To think that Wei Wuxian had been suffering like this for the entire duration of the war..!
...Which did explain why he periodically “forgot” Suibian everywhere and shirked his teaching duties- he couldn’t do them and he couldn’t use Suibian anymore.
But just as that realisation hit him, he felt the edges of Wei Wuxian's meridians and frowned, even as Wei Wuxian sighed in sheer relief as his general body pain subsided and he let himself go limp in his arms. Wei Wuxian had unusually smooth meridians, and the connections between them hadn’t been burned in the brutal way that Jiang Cheng- and all of Wen Zhuliu’s other victim’s- had been. No, these were clean and smooth. Almost as if they had been neatly cut . Cut, as if with a surgeon’s knife. With Wen Qing’s knife. Wen Qing, who was the most famous surgeon and medical cultivator in the entire cultivation world.
He gasped, retracting his qi and feeling lightheaded and sick to his core. Sick to Wei Wuxian’s core.
“A-Cheng, what’s wrong?”
His sister’s worried face fluttered into his vision, and he realised that she’d been trying to get his attention for a while now. He looked at her and his face crumpled.
“He gave me his core A-Jie.” he whispered, feeling the tears start to well up in his eyes again.
She stared at him in shock and horror.
“He- he… fuck!” he yelled, making her jump and Wei Wuxian stir in his arms.
“Wei Wuxian! Wei Wuxian! What have you done?!”
He grabbed hold of Wei Wuxian’s shoulders and shook him awake.
“Wei Ying, look at me! You- you- how could you! How! You-”
He pressed his hand to Wei Wuxian’s dantian and watched as his shixiong’s eyes widened.
“How could you give me your core?!” he asked, feeling anger and fear and love, so much love, surging through his veins that he could barely contain it all. His hands shook.
Wei Wuxian looked around for a single, panicked second, before Yanli’s firm hand on his back and the look in her eyes made him slump in defeat. His own eyes watered and he swallowed past the lump in his throat.
“Because you needed it more, shidi.”
“No! I didn’t want to take it from you! I didn’t want you to take it out from you and put it into me! I was not that desperate!”
“You were dying, A-Cheng! You were dying and I could only watch-” Wei Wuxian’s voice broke and the tears spilled out his eyes; and then, as if the floodgates had been opened, he started to sob, his face crumbling and eyes never leaving Jiang Cheng’s face.
“You were dying! You asked me to kill you! Kill you, A-Cheng! And that was when you were awake! You didn’t eat or drink and Wen Qing had to forcibly knock you out with her needles to make you get the rest you needed! I couldn’t bear to see you suffering so much, A-Cheng! You’d be miserable for the rest of your life and I love you too much to see you in such pain! What was I supposed to do? A-Cheng, what was I supposed to do? Shije, you saw him!”
Wei Wuxian turned to the crying face of Yanli, who was gripping his hand tightly, as if to anchor her.
“Shije, what was I supposed to do? You saw him! I couldn't let him go through life like that! How could I look at him and see his pain and not try to move the heavens to make sure he’s not in any more pain? I love him too much for that! His pain is agony to me-”
Wei Wuxian was cut off by Jiang Cheng pulling him in for a kiss; the kind of kiss that was rough and desperate and more teeth clacking than an actual kiss. Jing Cheng tried to fit the ocean of emotions swelling within him into a single kiss, to let Wei Wuxian know how much he loved him. Wei Wuxian needed to know. He had to know. Jiang Cheng too would move the heavens and earth for him, for this man that he’d grown up with and fallen in love with and planned to live out the rest of his days alongside.
“Marry me,” he gasped as soon as he pulled back.
“Marry me, A-Ying. Please. Be my husband. Please, A-Ying.”
“A-Cheng! You-”
“Please! It’s you, Wei Ying. it’s only ever been you. You know that, right? You have to know that! It’s only ever been you. It’s you I want to spend the rest of my life with, and you I want to raise children and grow old with. It’s you I lost my core for.”
Wei Wuxian looked up at him in shock and horror.
“I- they… they were going to catch you. That day at the food cart when you went out to get food for us and medicine for A-Jie. The Wen soldiers were behind you and if you had turned around, they’d have seen you and then Wen Chao would have cut your hand off and had Wen Zhuliu melt your core and left you to drown in the lotus pond outside and and-”
“Woah easy there A-Cheng. Take a deep breath for me now, baby.”
Jiang Cheng stopped and took a deep breath. And then another. And another, pushing aside the images from his nightmare away.
“A-Cheng, you…”
“I love you. Wei Ying, I love you so so much.”
Jiang Cheng said with the certainty of the sunrise, blinking his eyes to focus on Wei Wuxian’s tear-stained face.
“Marry me. Please. And then we’ll go and find Wen Qing again-”
-Wei Wuxian looked up in hope.
“She’s still alive, yes. I’m sire Wen Ning is too, she was imprisoned in one of the supervisory offices’ dungeons, alone. I offered to let her join us, but she declined, wanting to look for Wen Ning since they’d been separated. We’ll find them again, and then we can ask her to see if we can do something about getting you your core back.”
“A-Cheng.” Wei Wuxian looked focused, urgently gripping Jiang Cheng’s arm with all his strength.
“A-Cheng, no. I gave it to you. It was my gift of love and power to you. It cannot be taken back. A second surgery won’t work.”
Jiang Cheng breathed past the emotions in his throat.
“Then we’ll ask her to find a way for you to cultivate a new one with me giving you energy. I felt how my- your- qi flowed through your meridians like it belonged there- which it did. It was cultivated there. Your meridians aren’t damaged like Wen Zhuliu does- yours is a clean edge, and it’s already healed it seems- so there’s a possibility you can somehow reform a core from your old energy, since it’s here and still recognises you.”
Wei Wuxian smiled a watery smile at Jiang Cheng, eyes sparkling with hope and tears, and then laughed before swooping forward to kiss Jiang Cheng, cupping his cheeks between his hands and holding Jiang Cheng’s face like he was the most precious person in the whole world.
“Yes yes yes,” Wei Wuxian chanted in between kisses.
“Yes to the core idea or yes to the marriage?”
“Yes to both, silly! You asked me to marry you, now you’re never getting rid of me, A-Cheng! Never! Shije tell him!”
Yanli laughed beside them, and Jiang Cheng flushed as he’d totally forgotten she’d been sitting there beside them the past few minutes.
“ We are never getting rid of you, A-Xian! You’re my brother-in-law now, my mischievous second little brother. I’m going to be your A-Jie forever, XianXian!”
Wei Wuxian laughed a proper laugh for the first time since Wen Chao had come into Lotus Pier demanding his hand, and the sound felt like the sun rising in Jiang Cheng’s heart again.
He laughed too, loud and completely, utterly happy as he caught Wei Wuxian’s weight as he threw himself into his and Yanli’s arms. They held each other tightly, laughing and laughing until they were breathless and giddy and Yanli’s tears had stopped flowing- yes, even her happy ones.
They manoeuvred themselves until they were lying down comfortably, Wei Wuxian sandwiched tightly between them and breathed and breathed until they fell asleep.
Well, Wei Wuxian and his sister fell asleep. Jiang Cheng stared at the window behind Yanli’s back and watched as the moonlight faded away and the sun slowly but surely rose again.
It felt like a new beginning. One that Jiang Cheng never thought he’d get to have, but would fight an entire war again if it meant he’d get to keep this. Wei Wuxian shifted closer to him, which caused Yanli to shuffle closer to him .
Tomorrow they’d make an announcement to the sect and invite the matchmaker to set the dates for after their mourning period was over. In the meantime, he’d send disciples out to search Yunmeng and Yiling, and possibly Dafan as well, if Wen Qing had decided to resettle there now that the war was over. He had some extra farmland on the outskirts of Yunmeng, near Yiling- in fact, Yiling was unclaimed territory now that the Wens had fallen. If he could get Yiling and the land between it, he could gift it to her and her family could stay there while she stayed closer to be able to tend to Wei Wuxian.
They’d have to announce it at the Phoenix Mountain Hunt, but they’d have to secure a betrothal agreement first- there were no rules against it during the mourning, just against marriage- and he’d have to find courting gifts for Wei Wuxian. Maybe a new sword for him to use- a mundane one- until they could find Wen Qing? Maybe one that he could use with Demonic Cultivation, if he still wanted to do that?
He was definitely getting him some Emperor’s Smile. He’d have to import some for the wedding, and also add them to his list of regular imports from Gusu. He’d have to revise the curriculum as well, have Wei Wuxian teach the theory while he taught the practical stuff. And they’d have to tell the disciples that Wei Wuxian didn’t have a core- but they’d have to blame Wen Zhuliu for it, of course.
Jiang Cheng watched the sunrise as he mentally sorted and categorized all the tasks he’d have to do, feeling excitement and elation filling his body in a way he’d never thought he’d feel again. He leaned down to softly kiss Wei Wuxian’s forehead before closing his eyes and leaning into him, breathing in the soft scent of his future husband(!!) while he waited for the servants to start bustling around so he could “officially” get up.