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The thing is, he has always known Wei Wuxian.
Jin Ling wouldn’t believe that. Jin Ling would say, Jiujiu, you killed all those men you captured, with a disparaging, superior look that would remind him too much of Jin Zixuan.
And Jiang Cheng would snap, brat, don’t think I won’t do the same to you, instead of letting himself shout, don’t you think I know that? I killed them because they weren’t him.
He doesn’t know which is less true. Maybe it doesn’t matter, since he says neither.
Wei Wuxian’s new body is younger than his is. Small, weak, afraid. At least, that’s how it looks – but when Zidian lashes across its narrow back, its mouth opens to scorn him.
Thirteen years.
He no longer knows the voice or recognises the words, but he watches the shape of them spitting from those unmasked lips and the Yunming lilt is the same as his. The tone is barely half angry, more than half exasperated. Half familiar.
Zidian sparks again. It won’t make a difference, but the sound of the snap is enough to cover up the sound of the things that crack open inside him. The scrape of Sandu unsheathing. The low groan of a cliff crumbling.
Lan Wangji steps between them again. Jiang Cheng heard that he took thirty-three lashes of a discipline whip for this.
Was it not enough? he wants to ask. He wants to let Zidian unfurl; to strike that white cloth and watch it turn red as the wild things inside him. He wants to say, for him? He’s not your brother.
When Wei Wuxian falls, he wants to catch him, to hold him close enough to feel his heartbeat, to pummel him back into dust.
He lets them go. Lan Wangji cradles Wei Wuxian in his arms like Jiang Cheng carried their A-Jie home. He doesn’t watch until they’re gone. He grabs Jin Ling’s wrist and pulls in the opposite direction.
I hate you, Jin Ling tells him, as they are walking back. It is one of the things Jin Ling often tells him.
Jiang Cheng never says anything in return. It’s better that Jin Ling hates him. Jin Zixuan hated him too. Their hatred is easy to bear.
When Jin Ling forgets to hate him, sometimes he starts to smile, and Jiang Cheng remembers that he has the same smile his mother did.
***
He dreams, that night, that she is still alive.
He dreams that she was watching.
A-Cheng, she scolds in his dreams, and it sounds nothing like the way she called out, A-Xian?
The air is empty now. This is where the dream begins. He doesn’t wait to watch Wei Wuxian disappear. He didn’t then, either.
For as many years as it had mattered, Wei Wuxian was already gone.
A-Jie, he replies, turning towards her. In the dream, her eyes fall on where Sandu is stained. Blood curls around its blade like a red ribbon.
Even in the dream, he hates that this is the first thing he thinks of.
When the dream starts, they are meant to be gone. Instead, they are there and he has something burning inside him, bright as the empty sky. He wants to tear the mountains apart and send them crumbling into the valley. He wants to throw Sandu over that ledge of stone and curl up in A-Jie’s arms.
Lan Wangji kneels at the cliff edge, white robes pooling in the black and the red. Maybe he will do it, Jiang Cheng thinks. Maybe Lan Zhan will tear the world apart, starting with him.
Maybe Jiang Cheng will let him.
Was it you? A-Jie asks, in his dream. Her voice shakes. She is dressed for a funeral. Her and Lan Wangji. They both are.
Yes. He replies, I killed him. But the thing is – When he looks up, every person on that mountain is wearing white mourning clothes. Everyone, except for him.
***
The morning after his brother comes back to life, the sun rises bright and heavy, light crowding the air.
He has spent thirteen years killing people who are not Wei Wuxian.
Once, he found a man with a propensity for rubbing the tip of his nose and a smile like daylight slicing through the clouds. For a month, Jiang Cheng left him alive. When he killed him, he broke his nose before pushing Sandu through his ribcage.
There is no one to look for now, no rumours to follow. That was his brother lying in the dust, and he watched as Lan Wangji wrapped a hand around his wrist and lifted him up.
He could laugh, although he doesn’t.
It was no different to watching him let go.
Now that the sky is clear, he is empty. Shadows move across the floor. Each time he blinks, he sees the shape of a black robe crumpled on the ground.
There is nothing to do, so Jing Ling hates him again. He knows because Jin Ling has told him.
Jiang Cheng replied that if he tries to leave the building, he will tie his wrists so tightly to the wall that they bleed.
Sunlight casts a crumpled black silhouette on the floor, and Jin Ling has not left. He is drumming his fingers on the hilt of his sword and swinging his foot against the table leg.
Do that again and I’ll break your leg, Jiang Cheng tells him. Jin Ling stares at him for a long moment and then pushes his shoe into the edge of the table and tips it onto the floor.
Jiang Cheng does not break his leg.
He closes his eyes. In the darkness there, Wei Wuxian is looking up at him. His eyes are red-veined, his smile stained with blood. Zidian sparks, pain curling around his fingers.
When Jiang Cheng opens his eyes, Jin Ling is gone.
He does not drag him back and tie his wrists to the wall.
The thing is, of all his threats, there was only one he ever meant.
***
Jin Rulan is the same age Jiang Cheng was when he found out that all the strength he thought he had belonged to his brother. They meet on a Nighthunt, tracking a monster that is rumoured to appear as one’s greatest weakness.
Jiujiu, he says, be careful not to slip when you’re chasing it, you might fall and break something. He grins. His mouth is the same shape as hers, though she never whetted it to be sharp and cutting.
After thirty-two years, Jin Ling still hates him.
The thing is, the years have passed and neither of them have changed. Jin Ling tells him he looks older. He doesn’t.
The man who arrives beside Lan Wangji is the one with streaks of grey in his hair.
The wind whistles through the leaves, so Jiang Cheng follows the sound. At the peak of the mountain, he finds his brother leaning against a tree, Chenqing resting between his lips.
“Jiang Cheng.” The man greets. The freckle beneath his mouth disappears with the movement. He is taller than Jiang Cheng remembers, red ribbon soaring behind him as his black hair tangles in the breeze. Eyes softer than they should ever have been. He spins the flute around his fingers.
Jiang Cheng draws Sandu and slides it through his stomach.
He has done this countless times. He knows where to aim; the plane of skin just a few inches lower than the solar-plexus. It is empty. It is as easy as it was the first time he first did it, easy as drawing his brother’s sword.
Thirteen years killing people who were not Wei Wuxian. What’s one more?
He is used to the way his core gutters as the body falls.
They will honour him for this. He will carry back the body and the generations who do not remember his brother will gather around and praise him for killing a monster.
Those who remember will look at the shape it took, and they will not praise him the way they did when he failed. They will know he is a coward. Lan Wangji will say nothing, as always, but Jiang Cheng imagines he might smile as he guides the grey-haired man back home.
They would be right. He is a coward.
For a moment, after the monster’s hand opens and before it turns to nothing, the flute catches between his fingers, slipping into the fold of his sleeve. For a moment, Jiang Cheng is perfectly balanced.
For thirteen years, he carried Chenqing.
Each day, he told himself he would destroy it. After a while, the routine became almost comforting.
The thing is, one of his sleeves is always heavier now.
***
The thing is—
***
The thing is, there was a body.
There was a black robe crumpled in the dust.
He told them there wasn’t, but there was.
Among the scattered bones under the cliff, it was curled up so small that he thought it was a child. A boy wrapped in an old duvet. A bundle of skin and cloth and hair.
He imagined, for a moment, that it might unfurl like it used to; jumping up on strong, spindly legs and laughing when he recoiled.
As a child, Jiang Cheng had been afraid so often.
When he was young and they had played together, Wei Wuxian teased him for it. He became the dark shapes under the water that Jiang Cheng feared, wrapping around his ankles like weeds. It was reassuring, each time he surfaced, black hair floating in strands of shadow around his head, to know that the scary things were not scary after all.
He was not afraid when the time came that he should have been. Wei Wuxian had taught him well. Jiang Cheng remembered him tugging, once, before he opened his slippery hand and floated away. He remembered watching calmly as it sank to the lakebed.
He didn’t remember swimming down after it, because he hadn’t.
A-Jie was the one who dredged it up onto the shore.
And the thing is.
The thing is—
It looked a bit like this.
***
It looks different now.
It touches the bridge of its nose just like he used to, but it is not Wei Wuxian’s hand. It is not Wei Wuxian’s nose.
Lan Wangji says something too quiet for Jiang Cheng to hear, and it laughs, it laughs in a rhythm he recognises. But its voice is high-pitched, now. Lighter.
When it stops laughing, the sound just floats away.
***
He buries the monster.
He has done it before.
***
The thing is.
The funniest thing in all of it is that, kneeling beside that crumpled black shape, it was the silence that told him. Wei Wuxian had never been quiet. Not ever. He used to chatter on about anything he could think of, from lotus-seed-wine to cinnabar ink to the meaning of life, until Jiang Cheng wanted to punch him in the teeth just to shut him up.
Even when he was asleep, Wei Wuxian would talk.
Jiang Cheng, he mumbled, as they lay on the hot stone floor under gauze-cast shadows and pretended the air was cooler there, if I turned into a water ghost, would you drink me to cool down?
When he was half-asleep, he made even less sense than usual. No sense at all, actually. But that didn’t stop him.
Nothing stopped him, really. Not sleep, not his ideas being impossible. He lived up to the Jiang precept better than Jiang Cheng ever had.
What the hell would it take for you to shut up? Jiang Cheng asked, once, and Wei Wuxian woke up just so he could laugh. His grin was like the sun, too warm and bright to want to look at. It made Jiang Cheng’s eyes water.
I dunno, he replied. He scrunched his nose, rubbed the corner of it with the tip of his finger. Death?
Jiang Cheng watched him stretch out each of his limbs, cracking his neck with a casual toss of his head. It made a sound like a spine snapping.
Just as long as you don’t come back to haunt me, he said.
Wei Wuxian pulled a face at him for that, mouth pressed and curled into something too threatening to be a real smile. It was funny, though, because he didn’t mean it. Neither of them ever really meant it.
Until they did.
Under the Qishan cliffs, Jiang Cheng touched the cold flesh of those cheeks, felt the bloated, hardened edge of a smile. It was real, frozen on his dead face. It remained after he wiped the blood away.
***
The thing is, whenever he sees Wei Wuxian now, he never says a word.