Chapter Text
Jiang Cheng grieves for Wei Wuxian, but he does not love him. He does not love him. He does not love him.
Jiang Cheng had met Wei Wuxian when he was eight years old, and he will not pretend that he had loved him from the moment he had known him. It did not take long for him to love Wei Wuxian, however, like he was truly Jiang Cheng's brother. They had been inseparable - if there was one, there was always the other.
The three months after the massacre of Lotus Pier was the first time that they had been apart for so long. He remembers it feeling wrong in his body, like it wasn't right for Wei Wuxian to be so far away from him for so much time. When people saw him they would ask, confused, where Wei Wuxian was, because they knew it too - if there was one, there was always the other. It was unnatural for two inseparable things to be separated.
When Wei Wuxian went to the Burial Mounds with the Wens, it was his fault that they were apart for so long. He had done it intentionally, he had made the choice. Jiang Cheng was angry with him.
Unless you are the grand and powerful Yiling Laozu, there is no greater separator than death. And Jiang Cheng doesn’t love Wei Wuxian anymore, he really doesn't, but his body hasn't stopped feeling wrong.
As it goes, if you separate two inseparable things, there is bound to be chaos.
Jiang Cheng will move past this grief, his anger will eventually grow big enough to swallow it. His body just has to get used to being apart. Yes, that's it, he just needs time to acclimate. Jiang Cheng does not love Wei Wuxian. He doesn't.
There is nothing to swallow his grief for Jiang Yanli, however, and he doesn't think it will ever be gone. He is always aware of the loss, no matter what he's doing, like someone has severed his sword arm from his body. How is he to move about the world without such a vital part of him?
Jiang Cheng met grief the night he returned to Lotus Pier after Nevernight. He had sat on his bed and shook for hours, he had wept into his pillow until he had exhausted himself to sleep. And then, for days, he was done with the violence of it. The grief always trailed after him, but there was no explosion of tears, no screaming into the soft fabric of his blankets. He moves about his life on autopilot.
And then, one warm evening, as he walks back to his quarters from the sword hall, he turns to say something to somebody who is not there. He startles himself - how foolish to fall back into old rituals when his companion had already been gone before death. Jiang Cheng is glad that nobody else is around, because he falls to the ground, and meets grief on the hard stone.
He meets grief in the pain in his knees as they collide with the solid surface.
He meets grief in the blood of his palms as his fingernails dig into them.
He meets grief in his swimming vision, his hot, fat, sticky tears.
He meets grief and he cannot run from her, his anger will not win the fight.
He stands, quickly, and sprints the rest of the way to his rooms, his hanfu billowing behind him. And in his bed, his face pressed into his pillow, grief stays the rest of the night.
-
Jiang Cheng cannot eat. He's barely consumed anything in the past week, and each time he comes away feeling ill. He feels sick to his stomach, always, and he keeps convincing himself that there are better things to do than waste time with meals. When there is not a child to care for, there are sect duties, and when there are not sect duties, there is sitting on his bed so stiff and paralyzed that the act of getting up to eat seems impossible.
If Jiang Yanli were here, she would make him eat.
I am worrying her, he thinks.
He stomachs down dinner that day, and it is mostly for her sake. If he doesn't eat something, it will worry her.
-
Wei Wuxian had spent over a year in the Burial Mounds before his death. He had not returned to Lotus Pier at all during that time, and Jiang Cheng had only seen him a handful of times during his absence. So why does Lotus Pier feel especially empty now, more than it ever had while Wei Wuxian was merely elsewhere? Why does his whole chest feel horribly rearranged?
What is there even to miss?
Jiang Cheng had met grief before, had known her shape in his parents' death and his sect's massacre, but there was really no time for grief then, no chance for an excess of mourning. There were so many other things happening, sorrow and fear and anguish presented to him in so many other ways. Back then, Jiang Cheng had not had the chance to process how a person could simply be gone from the mortal world.
Wei Wuxian is gone, Jiang Cheng will never see his living face again. He is gone, he is not coming back. He existed and now he doesn't. Jiang Cheng is finding this hard to grapple with. Grief is running straight for him, but his anger reaches out and swallows it.
It is good that Wei Wuxian is gone. It is good that his sorry existence has been wiped off the earth, that Jiang Cheng never again has to see the sight of his treacherous face. Jiang is happy, he is happy. There is no reason for him not to be happy.
Yes, Jiang Cheng grieves for Wei Wuxian, but grief is not quite sadness, and it is not quite pain. Those things can come with grief, of course, but they are not synonymous. So yes, Jiang Cheng grieves for his brother, but in his grief he finds no sorrow.
Sorrow in grief is for somebody that you love. And Jiang Cheng does not love his brother anymore.
Jiang Cheng thought, though, that he would be finished with said grief faster. He thought that he had gotten a head start on the thing.
Jiang Cheng's love for Wei Wuxian had ended before his death, so, had Jiang Cheng let him go? Had he made his peace before Wei Wuxian fell from the cliffs of Nevernight? Was his brother already dead before his body knew it? Had Jiang Cheng met his grief before and long since dealt with it? Jiang Cheng thought he had but knows he didn't, and yet still Wei Wuxian being dead in flesh and spirit hits him in a way he should be able to dispose of with grace but can't.
Jiang Cheng thought he'd lost Wei Wuxian the moment Jin Zixuan had died, thought he'd already dealt with the death he had known was fast coming, and would have honored it whether or not his brother's body felt the same. Wei Wuxian would have been dead to Jiang Cheng regardless of his fate, but his fate, Jiang Cheng had known. He had wept and he had grieved and he had been done with it, before Nevernight he had been done with it.
The image of Wei Wuxian's face as he falls plays over and over again in his mind. No, Jiang Cheng had not been done with it at all. How is it that you can grieve somebody twice?
-
Jiang Cheng keeps having this dream, one where Jiang Yanli makes it out of Nevernight alive, and he must go to the infirmary and tell her that Wei Wuxian is dead. Each night it becomes harder to face her, to look her in the eyes and tell her what he's done. No guilt could surpass that of making his jiejie unhappy, even if it is only in his dreams.
There are different endings to this dream, in most, she is angry with him. In all, she is sad. There is one where she dies before the confession is done. That one feels like a dream he's had before.
Tonight, she is angry with him.
Jiang Yanli speaks to him in tones he did not often hear when she was alive, and almost never directed at him. She admonishes him for losing control of his anger, for not thinking his actions through. She scolds his hatred, his apparent lack of grief. She asks him how he could do such a terrible thing, how he could separate them all in such a way. It was his fault that the three of them were apart from each other. Jiang Yanli weeps.
This person in his dreams does not much resemble the one he had known in life, but then, maybe this, too, was his fault. Maybe he had done such a terrible thing as to change his gentle sister into this angry, scolding woman.
Jiang Cheng wakes crying while the sky is still black.
No, he reassures himself, even if Jiang Yanli had lived, Wei Wuxian would still be the one to blame for whatever mess followed anyway. The outcomes of Nevernight were due to his brother's reckless arrogance and careless heroism. Throughout the cultivation world, Jiang Cheng is praised for slaughtering the beast. His dreams lie to him.
His dreams of Jiang Yanli are not his only nightmare, however, so he does not go back to sleep. Instead, he finds himself wrapping loose robes around his shoulders and wandering the docks of Lotus Pier.
When Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng were young, they would wake before the sun broke over the horizon, before his parents and sister woke, and cause mischief. Jiang Cheng remembers their antics, and fondness almost crawls out of his anger's stomach. Almost.
He comes to the end of one of the docks, and he can almost hear the splash of bodies hitting the water, the trill of delighted laughter. Jiang Cheng is not old, really, but he feels old. The idea of such things now make him feel exhausted. How had they had the energy for such things back then? His head hurts.
Jiang Cheng turns around and walks back to his room as the sky begins turning pale blue at the edges. Nightmares are better than these early morning recollections.
-
Jiang Cheng is finding grief to be very unpredictable. He moves through his days and responsibilities, he manages minute by minute. And of course, grief is always there, she seems to trail him incessantly, to hover constantly and block the sun out with her shadow, but he is not consumed in every second. He lives his life.
Sometimes, to his shame, Jiang Cheng will even forget that Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian are dead.
But grief will always find her way, she is there, in the quiet moments. Sometimes it is because something reminds him of his loss, sometimes it is random, but often, it is over in a matter of seconds.
Jiang Cheng collects himself in the hallways of Lotus Pier, and goes on with his day as if he had not just wept into the fabric of his sleeves.
-
When the Jiang sect had been slaughtered, three had felt the pain, and when Yu Ziyuan and Jiang Fengmian had been killed, two had known the loss of a mother and a father, but in the wake of Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian's deaths, no one knows the sorrow of losing older siblings. Nobody could possibly fathom his grief. He has never been so alone before.
One does not love anything the way one loves their older sister - Jiang Cheng had loved Jiang Yanli from the moment he was capable of loving anything. So how could anybody possibly understand his grief?
There is a voice in the back of his head that tells him there could have been one more in the world he could have shared his grief for her with, and he had caused himself the loneliness.
To know his grief for Wei Wuxian seems even more impossible. How could anybody comprehend the hatred, the way his grief is too big to be consumed by it? How he is trying so desperately to get rid of the thing but it's proving impossible to rip it out of himself? How could anybody know grief for Wei Wuxian at all? To admit to missing the monster of his brother would be his worst injustice.
The death of his sister is merely a tragedy to the world, the death of his brother a celebration he shares in. And oh, how he celebrates. People raise glasses to Jiang Cheng's accomplishment, praise him for killing the wicked Yiling Laozu.
'But he was my brother', Jiang Cheng thinks, but that's the worst part, isn't it? That Wei Wuxian was his brother.
To others, this is just one more thing to praise him for. That Jiang Cheng had seen past familial ties, that he had slain wickedness no matter how he had loved it before it became wicked. He was brave and righteous and commendable, and it was good that the Jiang Sect was free of such a person. Yes, it was good to be rid of him.
Ironic , Jiang Cheng thinks, that I can only be praised above him once he is dead.
Jiang Cheng knows grief, yes, Jiang Wanyin knows grief very well, but he has never known grief with such loneliness. There is nobody here to hold him, there is nobody here to hurt how he hurts.
-
Three months after Wei Wuxian's death, Jiang Cheng decides that it is finally time that he goes to find the body.