Chapter Text
It starts out like this. Jiang Cheng is tired and weary. He is angry and resentful. He wants to wage a tremendous war. He’s tired of fighting. Jiang Cheng is divided, bitter, and unstable. His anchor, his beloved sister’s son, has left his side. Jiang Cheng hates the world.
Once, he engaged Jin Guangyao into terse conversation. The enigmatic man had always been capable of keeping the atmosphere light and peaceful, but Jiang Cheng was talented at igniting tension. The residues of his teenage years with Wei Wuxian.
Did he know Jin Guangyao’s social background? The answer is yes, he did.
People talk in front of you and people talk behind your back. The difference comes with your social status. If you’re seen as lowly and worthless, then nobody cares about hiding their true thoughts. If you’re respected and useful, people go to great lengths to please you. Either way, they will always sneer and giggle until you give them a reason to remain petrified, even when you’re not there.
Jiang Cheng learnt this from his mother. And what did Jin Guangyao learn from his own? How to fuck someone, is what a Nie disciple would tell you. How to fuck someone, is what a Jin disciple would tell you. How to trick someone, is what a Lan disciple would insinuate. Jiang disciples don’t bother with those that aren’t their own. That being said, Jin Guangyao was once Meng Yao from Yunmeng. You’ll never catch a Jiang disciple running their mouth about Jin Guangyao.
In that tense conversation, the only one they ever had before Jin Guangyao’s brother died and Jiang Cheng’s world ended, he tried to thank Jiang Cheng. "You must know what everyone thinks of me," he had said, with wide eyes and dimpled cheeks, smiling through the pain. "I don’t," Jiang Cheng had replied shortly, just to be difficult.
He remembers the conversation like it was yesterday. The unspoken words between them had been heavy, permeating the thick silence and awkward pauses. It’s so stupid. At the time, he had so much to mourn. He felt useless. He felt disrespected. Jiang Cheng had no way to prepare for the approaching storm.
They never spoke like that ever again, him and Jin Guangyao. Two months later, after his world had brutally ended, he found a beautiful painting on the banks of Yunmeng. Addressed to him, anonymously. A beautiful painting of Jiang Yanli in her golden Jin robes, her Jiang lotus pin sparkling in her hair. She’s smiling by the little lotus cove that Jin Zixuan built for her. It looks like she’s beckoning the artist and the viewer to her side. Jiang Cheng remembers wanting to jump into the painting.
At the back, in beautiful, dark, inky calligraphy, someone had written: live through this.
He didn’t understand at the time and he doesn’t understand now. But it meant something to him, even then. A secret correspondence which carried on for years: a painting of Jiang Yanli and a cryptic message beautifully inscribed at the back. When Jin Guangyao died, the paintings died too.
Jiang Cheng has kept every painting in a secret room at Lotus Pier. Jin Ling is the only other person to know of its existence, though he heavily suspects that Wei Wuxian could find the room too, if he tried hard.
He once sent a painting of his own. Left it at the same bank. It’s the most daring thing he’s ever done, and he fought in a fucking war.
A painting of a beautiful lady, known to many and known to none at the same time. In his shaky, barely passable calligraphy, he had written: someday you will ache like I ache.
Jiang Cheng wonders what Jin Guangyao felt that day, when he received a painting of his deceased mother. He’ll never know. Jin Guangyao’s dead. Like everyone else in his life.
There is no tablet to honour him, no incense lit for him, no Jin disciples demanding everybody bow, out of respect, in the Ancestral Hall. There is nothing. He knows their nephew (soft, kind-hearted to a fault, loyal) would like to install something, of some sort, to recognise the golden uncle who raised him in a pit of vipers and protected him throughout it all. But Jin Rulan can’t do as he pleases, even as Sect Leader, especially as Sect Leader.
Sometimes, for seemingly no reason at all, Jiang Cheng lights a stick of jasmine incense. When asked, he says it’s for nobody in particular. The disciples of Yunmeng Jiang are generally agreeable, so they accept his non-answer. But everyone knows that particular stick of incense is for a dimpling man, who has never known peace. Just like Jiang Cheng.
He likes to think he gained a glimpse into Jin Guangyao’s real self over the years. He won’t know what to do with himself if their shared grief was also an elaborate lie. It’s best for everyone that some secrets are taken to the grave, and this is one of them.
I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.