Work Text:
They said it was for his benefit, but Jiang Cheng knew it was because he’d embarrassed them.
If it wasn’t, then why would they send him away? To another sect, even?
Oh, his father said fine words about how the Qinghe Nie were the best at dealing with qi deviations and their assorted side effects – how they would have insight that no one else had – that he would heal better there, faster, become stronger. It was as if his father had abruptly forgotten all the not-so-nice things he’d said about the Nie sect over the years after one discussion conference or another, about how they were overbearing and overly martial, with rocks for brains and too much emphasis on their saber above every other concern.
When Jiang Cheng reminded him of that, his father faltered, and looked away.
It didn’t matter, Jiang Cheng supposed. Even if Jiang Cheng was sent away, his father would still have Wei Wuxian around, after all, and he understood the Jiang sect motto better – wasn’t that what his father was always saying? Always implying without saying it outright that Jiang Cheng just wasn’t as good because he wasn’t naturally talented, because he wasn’t naturally happy, because he had to struggle to be half as good and half as pleasant, as if Jiang Cheng couldn’t figure out what his father thought about him when it was Wei Wuxian that got all his smiles, all his laughter, all the casual physical affection that had once been his before Wei Wuxian had shown up. Well, he wasn’t that dumb, despite what his father might think, he knew. He knew what it meant, what it said about him that he wasn’t good enough to win his father’s love or even his attention – what everyone else in the world got naturally, he was, in his father’s eyes, simply too inferior to even have a chance to strive for.
He'd said that, too. Yelled it out loud as if he couldn’t stop himself.
Maybe he shouldn’t have – he wouldn’t have, normally. Normally, he would have just buried it down deep, just the way he always did. Maybe if he’d done that he wouldn’t have had to deal with Wei Wuxian having listened in, having turned pale-faced and trying to apologize. Wouldn’t have to deal with Jiang Yanli looking broken-hearted when he told her with a sneer that she could stop crying because once he was gone she’d still have her precious A-Xian, wouldn’t she, who she considered a little brother of her own, always making him soup and taking care of him because he just needed more attention, A-Cheng, because it was just his way to need her, to monopolize her attention. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, and Wei Wuxian got her attention and affection, her time and energy and love, leaving Jiang Cheng pathetically happy to receive only the dregs.
“Don’t listen to him, shijie,” Wei Wuxian said, which only infuriated Jiang Cheng all the more. “It’s not true, it’s not what he thinks. It’s just the qi deviation making him say it –”
“You look at your own conduct,” Jiang Cheng said to him. “Look at yourself, and ask again if it’s just the qi deviation making me say such things, or if it’s the qi deviation that stops me from keeping quiet about them.”
“You don’t mean that,” Wei Wuxian said stubbornly. “You don’t.”
“No? Then why don’t you ask jiejie what my favorite type of soup was before you arrived – assuming she even remembers. Nowadays, she always makes your favorites, even when she says it’s for me – and why not, when I’m little more than your little tag-along shadow, eclipsed by you who doesn’t need to try to draw everyone in? Tell me, if not an acknowledgement of my own inferiority in her affections, what else am I supposed to think it means?”
“You should have said something, A-Cheng,” Jiang Yanli said, her voice breaking. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“You told me that it was my job to take care of him,” Jiang Cheng told her. “Don’t you remember? When I was angry at him because my dogs were all sent away because of him, when I fell into that hole going to look for him and hurt myself, you told me I had to be grown up and care for him, make sure he was happy, and then he'd be my friend.”
She opened her mouth but said nothing, speechless.
Jiang Cheng smiled at her.
“Well, haven’t I done that, jiejie?” he asked. “Haven’t I taken such good care of him, just the way you asked, putting him even above myself, making sure he was happy even if it meant my own sorrow? Didn’t I do a good job, haven’t I finally done enough to earn his friendship – or no, wait, there’s no such thing, is there? It’s a price I have to keep paying forever, always second-best, always chasing after him as he leaves me behind, just the way you have…Why are you crying? Why are you both crying? Isn’t all this only what you’ve always wanted me to do? Isn’t this what you’ve always asked me to do for you, and then also lie about it on top lest I make the two of you feel guilty for having made the request in the first place? Isn’t this what you want from me?”
That was when his mother came in and separated them.
“Go on,” she said fiercely once she’d dragged him away into her rooms. “Tell me I’m a bad mother, too. Tell me I don’t love you most, don’t love you the best.”
Jiang Cheng wanted to stop talking. He hadn’t especially wanted to start talking in the first place, but that part, ah, that part really was the qi deviation – the same thing that made him bleed from the eyes and the ears and the nose meant that he couldn’t stop the flood of words that leaked out of his mouth out just the same, evil and vile words that he wasn’t even sure he’d ever even thought before but which he no longer knew if he did or did not believe.
“Go on, then,” she snapped at him. “Say it, if you dare!”
Jiang Cheng dropped down to his knees. “Mother, don’t be angry,” he cried out, bowing his head. “Don’t worry, I’ll do better this time – I’ll be better than Wei Wuxian, even if it’s impossible! I’ll be better than him even if I have to cut myself all to pieces for it, even if I have to hold my dearest friend at arm’s length and pretend he’s not like a brother to me. This time, this time, I’ll finally be so good that I’ll finally win Father’s affection, even though he’s always denied and rejected me no matter how good I am or how hard I try, no matter that you know in your heart that all of my efforts have no effect on what he feels at all – but never mind that, I’ll do it, somehow. Mother, Mother, I’m a good child, your good child, and I’ll take all your burdens onto myself. I’ll work myself to tears and bleed myself to the bone, all just to try to make Father forget that he hates you –”
She slapped him.
He grinned up at her, his cheek bright red and sore. His cheeks were wet, though he did not know whether it was with tears or with blood once more. “What is it, Mother? Am I not an adequately filial son to you? You told me to tell you that you were a bad mother. I would be a bad son if I didn’t obey…or did you think that it was only Father’s words that lingered in my heart in the middle of the night? I hear everything you tell me, too.”
His mother looked stricken.
Jiang Cheng laughed.
He laughed until he started crying. Crying in big heaving sobs that wracked his whole frame, howls of grief as he convulsed on the floor, spitting up blood as he wailed – spitting up every last bit of anger and regret that he’d ever swallowed in all those years, all the unspoken words he’d never said and barely even thought, but which lurked deep in his soul like shadowy nightmares.
His mother knelt in front of him and pulled him close to her in a way she hadn’t bothered to do in years, holding him tightly in her arms.
“We have failed you,” she said in his ears, and her voice was wet with her own tears. “But we will not fail you again. You will go to the Unclean Realm, A-Cheng, and they will help you – they will help you get better – and when you are better, you will come back. When you come back, we will be here, and we will be better, too. All of us. I swear it.”
“Mother,” Jiang Cheng said. “I wish I believed you.”
He laughed again. He couldn’t not laugh.
He wished he could stop laughing. It was a gross and grotesque sort of laughter, hoarse and jagged and broken, with no joy at all – sounding of nothing but misery.
“Send me Wei Wuxian,” he said to her, pulling away from her arms as if casting away a viper that had caught him fast. “At least when he lies to me about how much you and Father love me, he looks sorry about it.”
In the end, they did send him Wei Wuxian, a silent and miserable guard to keep Jiang Cheng safe on his way to the Unclean Realm. He didn’t listen when Jiang Cheng ranted or raved, ignored the poisonous sarcasm that dripped from his lips along with his blood – he only responded when he had to, picking things up when Jiang Cheng threw them, stopping him from harming himself in his fits of temper, urging him to eat when he refused. He got all the sweets and snacks Jiang Cheng had always said he liked best, and watched him carefully as if trying to determine if Jiang Cheng really liked them or if he’d been pretending about that, too.
“Wei Wuxian, hiding gratefulness behind his arrogance,” Jiang Cheng mocked him. “Do you really think I’ll thank you for sacrificing yourself for my sake? After everything I did to myself to see you smile, do you think I want you sad and somber, and all for me?”
“It’s not a sacrifice,” Wei Wuxian said. “Not when it’s you.”
“You don’t get to decide that. When you heap debts upon my head, I’m the one who has to pay.”
“It’s not –” Wei Wuxian stopped, clearly frustrated. “You do things for me because you love me. Why can’t I do things for you, too?”
Jiang Cheng smiled nastily. “Did you like it, then?”
“…what?”
“Did you like it, when you found out?” Jiang Cheng asked, and Wei Wuxian’s eyes widened. “When you found out how much I suffered for you, did you enjoy it? The thought of my tears at night, the pain in my heart, did it please you?”
“What – no! Of course not!” Wei Wuxian looked indignant. “It’s the worst thing I ever learned!”
“Then why are you so eager to return it back to me in kind?”
Wei Wuxian faltered, at that. And then, remembering, he went back to saying nothing.
Jiang Cheng spat on the floor.
“Fuck your gratefulness, Wei Wuxian,” he said to him. “I never wanted your pity. I only wanted your friendship.”
“You have it,” Wei Wuxian said, his expression wooden. “Even if you don’t believe it right now – you have it.”
He was right, too.
Jiang Cheng didn’t believe him.
When in the end they got to the Unclean Realm – Jiang Cheng’s place of banishment – it wasn’t anything like that Jiang Cheng was expecting. There was almost no one there to greet him, the way there was every time he’d gone to another sect in the past; there were only a small handful of people waiting outside the gate: a boy near his age, a tall young man only a few years older, an elderly woman with the look of a doctor about her, and two muscular men in their prime, their heads bowed in a way that suggested lower status than those around them.
“What is this?” Wei Wuxian demanded, furious on Jiang Cheng’s behalf. “Is this the Nie sect’s hospitality? Keeping it quiet, as if it’s something to be ashamed of –”
“It’s for his own sake,” the tall young man said. “He’ll be embarrassed when he knows what he’s said, later. Do you want to make it worse by increasing the number of people he says it to?”
Wei Wuxian scowled, not appeased. “Who are you to make such decisions on his behalf?”
The tall young man arched his eyebrows. “Qinghe Nie sect’s Nie Mingjue.”
Jiang Cheng had the joy of seeing the normally unflappable Wei Wuxian turn red and splutter, although Sect Leader Nie, Chifeng-zun – because of course it was him that Wei Wuxian had mouthed off to – waved it away indifferently.
“Bring him inside,” he ordered. “And then leave. We’ll do whatever we can to help, but it’ll only be worse if you’re here.”
“Why would it be worse?” Wei Wuxian asked, forgetting his embarrassment. “I can help – I know him –”
“Qi deviations make things backwards,” the boy their age said. He was presumably the Nie sect heir, Nie Huaisang. “Your spiritual energy goes the wrong way, driving you to madness and death instead of strength and health, and the rest of you goes the wrong way, too. Hate and love, interchanged…the more he loves you, the worse he’ll be to you.”
“But…if it’d help him…”
“It might help him to have you here now, in the short term; it will ease his suffering a little,” Chifeng-zun said. “But he’s young, and we’re not yet resigned to only doing what will help in the short term. In the long term, he will suffer more for having hurt you now.”
Wei Wuxian slowly nodded.
“All right,” he said. “I see your point. I’ll – I’ll go.”
“Traitor,” Jiang Cheng hissed at him. “Betrayer. Abandoner.”
“Go,” Chifeng-zun said, and waved for the two guards to help carry Jiang Cheng inside. “Return in two months – I’ll have something to update you with by then, though I would warn you not to expect him to be ready to return to the Lotus Pier for at least half a year.”
Jiang Cheng watched Wei Wuxian go, and turned to look at his new jailors. He did not know their intentions, whether good or evil – he didn’t know anything at all. He only suffered, but that as fine, for it seemed to him that his lot in life was to suffer.
“Qi deviations make such overly dramatic tragedians of us all,” Chifeng-zun said with a sigh, listening to him. “I’m not looking forward to that. Doctor, do me a favor and knock him out. I don’t want to hear this miserable sort of talk while we straighten out his meridians.”
Jiang Cheng gaped – they couldn’t be serious! – and while he was still shocked, the doctor’s fingers moved nimbly, and he was falling to the ground, body paralyzed and vision fading, before he knew what was happening. And yet, even as he fell, he couldn’t help but feel the smallest little stirring of hope.
Maybe the Nie really did know what they were doing.
Maybe they could help.
Maybe things really could be better.