Work Text:
Had he been given one more chance, or perhaps no such chance at all, this would not have happened under Jiang Cheng's responsibility. Parents, or at least those who were aware that they were parents, would try to forgive every sin of their own children, no matter how many such sins were, in the beginning, caused by those before them.
However, Jiang Cheng stood beside a countertop, inside the open kitchen, staring emotionlessly at the corpses of his parents.
He did not drink water, he did not eat. At least, when his hands were soiled with Yu Ziyuan's and Jiang Fengmian's blood, their stomachs were already supplied with water and food. Jiang Cheng didn't quite remember what had happened. Next to him was the cell phone, with the screen showing the call log. The last call had consequently attracted police sirens. The typical lights, red and blue, were illuminated amidst the scattered morning, newly born at half-past six in the morning, falling on the distress-filled outline of Jiang Cheng's face. He didn't wash his hands, didn't clean his clothes, and just left the blood to harden on his wheat-colored skin.
Then, he looked away from both corpses, which, barely placed side by side, stared vacantly at him. As if expectantly waiting for Jiang Cheng to touch their eyelids and close them. But his son could not, for he felt that overflowing feeling of numbness. Soon after, Jiang Cheng looked at them again, waiting for them to shake off that dreadful lie and mock him or get angry in his face for not laughing. He said nothing, cried no tears.
Sudden footsteps that felt somehow distant came to the door. When it opened, the police officers arrived stunned in front of a silent house, painted in the grayish morning light, with a young man watching them trying to call for help knowing it would be in vain.
Getting into the police car was so uninteresting that the five-minute walk was condensed into the blink of an eye. Seeing the blackness of the seats, feeling the dry burning of his eyes, no words came out of his mouth. He could have called his siblings, with the names of Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian, and yet he tried to anticipate their reactions (disappointed, angry, shocked? He wouldn't know) but nothing formed in his mind.
Jiang Cheng knew that in any situation they would support him, but he knew the truth. And the truth was that he had ended up stained with the blood of his parents. Slowly, his mind cleared the fog from his memory. He let the memories of the screams run and replayed over and over how he pushed his father. How his mother lunged at him to break his fall. He shouldn't have taken the knife out of Jiang Fengmian's hands. Now he had no escape, not even to deliver a proper funeral. He thought it was only fair to have surrendered himself to the police, and yet. At that moment, heartbreak was never as sound as it was for him.
He got out of the car and bumped into the chilly breeze that settled after the sun's rays appeared. It was nothing compared to how rough and icy it was in the building of the general detention center, where he stood in front of a metal desk. The disinterested officer sitting there was writing something endlessly, until after a few minutes he raised his head and looked irritably at Jiang Cheng.
“Is this the arrested man from building number six on Shanlong Road?” he asked quickly, as if instead of merely asking a question and worrying about how someone as young as Jiang Cheng got here, he simply saw his terror and started his bureaucracy.
It was a bureaucracy that forced him to spend three days in jail, with three people who each had not committed a crime similar to Jiang Cheng's. No matter what, the guards were carrying, dropping off, and releasing various prisoners, and Jiang Cheng tried to get away from meeting them. But the pain was so careless, so forgetful that he started counting people who came and went, trying not to lose track of the date he lost everything. He got to know the world better, inside a small cage where gray was even the most colorful color of a lifetime.