Work Text:
Jing Yuan doesn't listen to music.
He used to, as a kid, before he fell headfirst down the path of the sword. He used to learn to play it himself. He still knows how, in the way of dusty old muscle memory. His hands remember the motions, his mind forgets the notes. Isn't that how it always goes with him?
This is not to say he hates music. He will acknowledge a street performance, he will not begrudge Yanqing the music he blasts in the shower.
The problem, as it so often seems to be, is Dan Feng. Because how could any mortal music compare to the voice of the divine? To a voice that could have sailors pitching themselves into the deep to hear, a voice that sang beauty into the most heartbreaking tragedies. The elder who'd seemed otherworldly in his dirges. He'd mostly heard it as a young man, healing songs wrapping around his scrapes and winding into his heart. Now, even centuries later, that voice still haunts him.
And Bailu, for all that she is dear and all that she is precious, is only that. She sings the same healing hymns, and yet it never sounds the same, from a voice that is not beloved. He sits on the hospital bed under her care post battle and tries not to compare them. He lets the familiarity of the songs wash over him, and pretends that it doesn't make him miserable with loss every time.
The day he goes against his own heart, to force Dan Heng into a role he knows the man never wanted to reprise, he hears the songs of his youth again. Dan Heng sings it differently, or maybe it's just different with the actual weight of Cloudhymn behind it instead of when he'd needled Dan Feng into singing for him one afternoon.
He watches March 7th and Caelus as they watch Dan Heng in turn, and recognizes the look in their eyes. He knows what it's like to love the Imbibitor Lunae.
Jing Yuan closes his eyes, and listens. Here, with the crash of waves, under the same statue, with the same music as all those years ago, he hums along softly. Here, he can pretend. It doesn't work for long. The way Dan Heng sings is so different from Dan Feng, even in the same notes and rhythms, because Dan Heng sounds so painfully alive. His desperation marks every note in a different way from the exhaustion that had plagued Dan Feng's every song. An exhaustion that had only made itself known for what it was years into knowing the man behind the High Elder. He almost laughs, at how both incarnations have needed to escape who they're told to be. How the same need colored their hymns differently.
The music tapers off, final notes ringing off the muraled walls and echoing in the newly opened watery canyon. He sighs. He closes his heart as he leads them down into the Scalegorge Waterscape. Already, his memories are blurring together. Was it so different from Dan Feng's rendition, or was he trying to respect Dan Heng's wish by not listening for where they were the same? If he came back here tomorrow, if he survived today, whose song would he hear haunting him?
Truly, he'd rather not have listened to any music at all.