Chapter Text
It is a fist to the jaw, a knife to his spine, teeth wicked and knowing, searing itself into his flesh and bones. It’s not clean pain, it festers in a way that feels obscene, splitting skin, spilling sugar and ants.
If this body is not his own, he might have found it beautiful. Yes, he thinks, yes, he could love it if he weren’t pinned to it like an insect on a needle, if he weren’t nailed into the fact of it, bone cage and all.
The pain says i have come for you, and he says you are too blinding, I don’t want to look. His teeth ache from clenching, his nails drag crescents into his palms.
He is not a person. He has not been a person for some time, he has forgotten the shape of that word. Here is the truth of the matter: he had always grieved his humanity the moment he died and became something other, died and became his creation.
Like clay in god’s mouth, he grieves it still. But now he grieves the fact that he is simply a character, a name pressed flat on a page.
Does an oracle see the future or make it?
The question eats itself: he is nothing.
He is an observer. He is the forest. He is the mildew, the soft green crawl of it over bark, he is the rot of wet earth clinging even when you leave.
He is the fire. He is the witness watching the forest fire.
And it’s warm, yes—oh god it’s warm, like fever, like hands pressing too long on your throat just to see what colour your lips will turn.
He wants to claw out of himself. He wants to unzip his skin and step out slick and new but he can’t. His mind feels full of cotton.
Maybe this is living. Maybe this is what it feels like to exist after you’ve stopped deserving to. Pain drips in and out like light through blinds.
He sees himself from above— a husk, a marionette tangled in its own strings.
He is the forest.
He is the fire.
He is the witness watching the forest fire.
Jiang Cheng is the most cursed being the world has ever produced.
He has always known this. He is too much, too angry, too harsh, too unlovable, too sharp for anyone to stay. He has always known this.
He just never expected it to be written that way.
He wakes from the fever dream like surfacing from deep water—lungs aching, throat raw, nails carving half moons into his palms until he bleeds.
Nails cut through tender flesh as he heaves silently. He has perfected silence after what felt like screaming himself hoarse across lifetimes.
The dreams— the death of his parents, his people dying, his sister dying, and his shīxiōng leaving, always leaving, always dancing ahead of him, untouchable, luminous, already lost.
Worse than that is the sound of pages, the flapping of them like someone is peeling him apart for spectacle, for the sweetness of his marrow.
Jiang Cheng is Jiang Wanyin, heir of Yunmeng Jiang, lotus born and water bound, a siren. He has trained his whole life in a sect that worships the ripple of oars, the lotus bloom.
And yet—what is he in reality but a footnote? He is only ever the foil, the cruel shape meant to sharpen someone else’s light.
He is the villain to Wei Wuxian’s tragedy turned triumph, the pariah brother whose hands are too empty, too bloodied to hold anything that remains.
He knows this. He knows it because he can hear it. Destined, written— he is condemned to hate, condemned to resent, condemned to bear it because someone, somewhere, needed him to be the ugly shape beside Wei Wuxian’s radiance.
Jiang Cheng is nothing more than a figure designed to be despised so the beloved could shine brighter. He is tragedy without tenderness, grief without grace.
There is no ‘before.’ There is only ‘after the ruining.’ Someone wrote him like this, and no one will ever write him saved.
He thinks: this is hell.
He knows: I deserve it.
Even before the visions of another world, the knowledge that he is nothing but a moving piece inside someone else’s mouth— Jiang Cheng has always known this: he is unlovable.
Not just in the way people don’t stay, but in the marrow deep way of rot. He does not blame them. He does not even want himself. There is no crime in abandoning spoiled meat.
(Once, when he was eleven, he learned what it meant to be truly ruined. What it meant to have nothing to lose anymore. Feverish, ribs like scaffolding, skin tacky with sweat, his body still recovering from the incident—too many hands, too much noise, blood on his thighs— from desperation as he ran barefoot through dirt. Wild prey desperation, lungs screaming, heart beating so loud it filled his head with heat.
He remembers the madness and desperation that led him to stab the knife into the man who started it all. Afterward, after the whipping his mother gave him— because Jiang Cheng should have known better, because what shame, what shame— he crawled under his bed.
He had pressed his face to the dusty floorboards until the smell of wood and dirt made him dizzy. He had wrapped himself in his blanket and imagined it wasn’t cloth but arms.
Arms of someone who wouldn’t hurt him. Someone who didn’t exist. He thought if he held himself tight enough, he could trick his body into believing it.)
The first thing Jiang Cheng learned to beg for was love. The second was an open grave. The last is for someone to lay him in it.
Sometimes he wonders if the wound ever healed at all, or if it simply grew over him like a second skin.
He wonders what it would feel like to be held without being devoured, wonders if that is even real, or if it’s just another story.
Jiang Cheng thinks: I want out.
He knows: I never will.
In the quiet hours, when the night air smells of lotus and stagnant water, when his hands ache from clenching too hard, he presses his palm flat against his own chest just to feel the thud of his heart—
He always found himself jealous of euthanised dogs.