Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.

Chapter Text

The world is uncanny.

He moves through the motions—eating, dressing, breathing. His body is a house someone else lives in now. His hands open and close. His feet take him places. His mouth speaks. None of it feels attached.

Everything is poisoned now. Every word, every glance feels authored, rehearsed, written by a hand just out of sight. They look at him and he knows what they see.

Cruel. Cold. Bitter. Difficult. Jealous of Wei Wuxian. The rumours buzz like fat, heavy flies around his head. He hears them too clearly. He wants to cover his ears, but they are already inside him.

There is no rage left in him, not anymore. Rage was heat, and heat meant life, but what he feels now is only the aftermath.

Only the hollow exhaustion that comes when even grief begins to rot. Hurt so blinding it erodes rage into nothing.

Memory bleeds into the present until he can’t tell what time it is anymore. He blinks and sees the pier burning. He blinks again and it’s just another morning.

He sits in his room—this suffocating little room he has always hated. It reminds him too much of that pig, the ghost of hands crawling under his robes, the cloying, crooning voice. He remembers singing like a housebroken songbird until his throat bled from screaming.

The way that man’s gaze—the way it pinned him like a collector admiring his finest specimen, his favoured creation. He wants to claw his own skin off just remembering it. The room tilts closer. He leaves. He cannot stand it.

His feet don’t feel steady. His breath feels borrowed. The night air outside is damp and cold against his face, but it doesn’t feel real either.

(Jiang Cheng had trained himself in the art of suffering. It was always the one discipline he excelled in, bearing pain in silence until it calcified inside him.

But this, this relentless pace of hell, this knowing, this gnawing awareness that he is hated across worlds and lives—he finds himself undone, finds that he cannot bear any more of this, finds himself yearning for oblivion. He can't bear any more of this—  

this wretched enduring.)

Later, he notices how his sister watches him differently, concerned. Even Wei Wuxian, loud, infuriating, irreverent, goes strangely quiet when he looks at him, laughter trailing off into uncertainty.

He realises they are worried. He does not feel angry. He does not even feel sharp anymore. It’s as though he has been sanded down to something featureless and dull, emptied out and left to dry.

He has stopped snapping. He has stopped reaching. He no longer tries to outdo, no longer tries to prove himself, no longer tries at all.

Everything is everything.

He finds, strangely, that he would rather take their violence than their pity. It is easier to be struck than to be touched gently. It is easier to hate than to be loved, because love is unbearable now and he cannot stomach it.

He lies awake at night staring at the ceiling, feeling himself split wider: half here, half elsewhere. His fingers twitch, and his head is floaty, he is curled, seeing him is akin to watching a dead animal spasm in the dirt.

He thinks: I am unravelling.

He wonders how much longer he has before he finally disappears completely.

Chapter Text

He knows true disappointment in the way it lives in his mother’s face, that tight lipped curve like a blade pulled too taut, the sigh she does not even give him the grace to voice.

Her lips don’t curl in anger today, not even contempt. That’s how he knows. She says nothing as she expels him from the training field, voice flat, uninterested, barely half an hour after he’d arrived.

She no longer bothers with punishment. Not after weeks of failure so consistent even the whip and ancestral hall grew tired of him.

Whatever spark she’d hoped to strike from her son has not come to pass, and now the whole of Lotus Pier treads lighter, wary of igniting another flare of her fury.

He sits beneath a tree afterward, forehead pressed to his knees. He watches a hare dart between the reeds, its white tail flashing and vanishing. He wonders if it knows what it is to be trapped.

His gaze is unfocused. Everything is at once too sharp and too far. The chill of air crawling against his neck, the ache at the base of his skull, the numbness in his fingers he can’t stop noticing.

His head feels full of water.

The wind moves. It carries cold in its teeth now, sharper than last week, and the season has shifted without asking.

Summer’s green is a corpse. The willows are thinning, leaves like yellowed silk, the slow bleed of colour everywhere he looks.

The reeds along the riverbanks sway, pale gold like dying sunlight. Even the river is lower. Pebbles grin through the waterbed, and he sees the detritus caught between them: old ribbons knotted stiff with mud, coins gone black, a comb missing its teeth.

He tries to stand and can’t tell if he’s moving. He is not moving; his body is stuck in the crouching position, too tired to move. His body feels stitched together wrong, pieces coming apart at the seams.

His fingers are pale when he looks at them, almost translucent, like they’re not attached to him at all. When he flexes them, they don’t feel real.

He presses them to the cold ground, dirt under his nails grounding him for half a second before it slips, before his mind slides sideways again.

Someone calls his name in the distance, and it sounds like it’s underwater. He does not answer. His mouth does not move.

He remembers the whip against his back—not today’s absence of it, but before. He remembers the welt lines and how alive they made him feel, how they gave shape to something unnameable inside his chest.

Pain is proof: I am here, I am still here. Without it, he feels—what?

Wei Wuxian finds him under the willow tree. The grass is damp where Jiang Cheng sits, wet seeping through the knees of his trousers, but he doesn’t move.

He feels anchored by it, the slow cold creeping up his skin like rot climbing fruit. His fingers are dug into the earth, half conscious of the grit wedged under his nails.

He barely notices Wei Wuxian squatting beside him until someone else’s shadow folds over his own.

“So what are we doing?” Wei Wuxian’s whisper isn’t much of a whisper.

Jiang Cheng blinks sluggishly but does not turn to look at him. “Nothing.”

They watch the hare. Or at least Jiang Cheng does, eyes tracking its twitching nose, its stillness between movements.

He envies its simplicity. Wei Wuxian shifts beside him, restless energy too loud even when he tries to mute it. Jiang Cheng can feel him staring.

“You have a question,” Jiang Cheng says flatly.

Wei Wuxian glances away like he’s been caught. “What are you doing?”

Jiang Cheng gives him a quizzical look.

“Aiya, don’t play dumb!” Wei Wuxian’s voice cracks too loudly. The hare bolts, and Jiang Cheng watches it vanish into the reeds. He blinks, and then frowns.

Wei Wuxian huffs. “I’m talking about training! You’ve been making Madam Yu furious—”

Jiang Cheng drags his gaze to him, a tired flicker of violet eyes, empty in their sharpness. He wants to answer, but the words dissolve before reaching his mouth.

Wei Wuxian barrels on, “She’s already furious, but this is worse. You’re not even trying anymore.”

Jiang Cheng stands abruptly. His limbs feel leaden, the world tilting faintly when he moves, but it’s easier than staying still. “And that’s something new?” he says, voice dull. “She’ll always be angry with me.”

Wei Wuxian gawks, scrambling up after him. “Don’t brush me off! I’m serious, Jiang Cheng. You’re going to be in real trouble if this keeps up.”

Jiang Cheng pauses, turns to look at him, “Does it matter? I will never impress her. I will never reach her standard.”

Wei Wuxian gapes and then scoffs. “What kind of question is that? Of course it matters! Don’t you know our sect motto? Don’t tell me you’ve already given up.”

Jiang Cheng lets out a thin, humourless sound. “Don’t you know? I don’t understand it. I don’t embody it. Ask Father and he’ll swear it on the heavens.”

Wei Wuxian freezes. Jiang Cheng sees his mouth open—wants to see him argue, deny it, say no, that’s not true—but nothing comes. Jiang Cheng leaves before Wei Wuxian can find his voice again.

He doesn’t remember walking back, just the blurred corridors of Lotus Pier. His room is too bright and too haunted.

He doesn’t undress before crawling under his bed, dragging blankets down with him like a nest. The floor is cold and smells faintly of dust.

He wraps the blankets tight, cocooning himself until his ribs ache from the constriction, until he can pretend it’s someone else’s arms.

Under the bed, it’s dark enough he can almost believe he’s gone. He presses his face to the floorboards and closes his eyes. If he stays still enough, he thinks, maybe he will be.

Chapter Text

He carves the seal into his thigh. The knife bites dull at first, then deeper. The skin parts, pale stretched taut over trembling muscle, until it gives.

Blood blooms first in small, pretty beads, delicate as pomegranate seeds, then heavier lines that run, stutter and gather in rivulets down his leg.

It’s stark against the pallor of his flesh, obscene, almost ornamental. He watches it drip. Red against white of meat. He thinks: this is cleaner than I am.

His fingers lag behind his thoughts. They’re his hands but not quite. When he rests one against his thigh, it stays there like dead weight until he forces it to move again with tremendous effort.

He doesn’t move. He lies curled on the floor, the boards sticky under him, the stink of iron soaking into the stale air of this disgusting room.

His gaze drifts, unfocused as it catches on the desk—that desk, where he was always touched, where hands pressed him down, where his breath fogged against wood.  It blurs, shifts in and out of focus until it’s barely furniture anymore.

He was born with something rotten. Is it any wonder, then, that anyone who gets close takes the first chance to leave? His mother, his father, his siblings. The rot leaks out of him, and they will always know once they get close enough.

In his beginning is his end.

There is a song everyone wants to learn. The song is irresistible, the one that drags men to their deaths smiling, claws in their own chests just to reach.

They see the beached skulls and leap anyway. He remembers their faces—fear and desire braided so tightly they’re indistinguishable.

The crush of bone. The wet scream of predator made prey. Blood in his ears.

He is dying in their hands and being born again in their gaze: something other, sharp edged, only made again with the remains of rage and hunger, of desperation, the aftermath of horror.

He doesn’t enjoy singing. He hasn’t for years. Not since that pig ruined it. He cannot separate the song from him anymore, he has become the song now.

He thinks of how the song sounded then: not beauty, but a cry. Help me.

And in the end, it’s only him, always him. Jiang Cheng saves himself.

He wishes he didn’t.

Chapter Text

He thinks that he might be lonely.

(It’s not a big deal. It shouldn’t be.)

The thought had lingered for weeks now. There must be a reason, of course there must be, why no one wants him around.

He is curled beneath the river’s skin. The water does not welcome him. The water does not kill him. He has been here for a while, and he hates how he can no longer drown.

Maybe one day he’ll find the courage to put himself down. The way you put down rabid dogs, the way monsters are meant to be killed.

Here’s the truth of the matter: if asked, Jiang Cheng would have to admit that he doesn’t like looking at himself.

It goes like this:

Fresh after the whipping, he had crawled on hands and knees to hide the mirror in his room. He covered it with a sheet. He couldn’t stand it.

It goes like this:

One night, he died. Hands around his throat, teeth in his shoulder, fingers digging and taking. He had died at the hands of men who only knew how to take. He died. He knows he did.

And then—he was reborn. Different, not better, an other. Flesh stretched tighter, skin luminous in ways it shouldn’t be, something in his veins screaming wrong wrong wrong.

Jiang Cheng had hated how he looked so much that six months later, he began sealing himself. Carving seals into skin, dampening what he had become.

He couldn’t stop. It became a habit. Every time his reflection looked too clear, every time his pupils bled too purple in the dark, every time his hair moved as if underwater. He bound himself down.

Panic would claw through him whenever he left the binds even a little loose. His vision blurred, his heart misfiring in his chest, his breath short gasps. He thought: I will be seen. I will be known.

It goes like this:

Yuanzhi Huí used to tell him stories. His ancestor, the first siren, the first Jiang. How she killed the forty four gods who betrayed her, how she died and became something other.

He’d recite it like a prayer, like scripture and Jiang Cheng—he remembers sitting still, hands in his lap, listening, wanting to be anywhere else.

I don’t want to be a tragedy, he had thought then when he realised why Yuanzhi Huí was so interested in him. Over and over again. I don’t want to be a tragedy.

But maybe he already was.

He sinks deeper, curls tighter, the cold biting through him. His hair fans out, dark silk in the river’s slow drag. It veils his face like a mourning shroud.

He closes his eyes and feels his body drift from itself. His chest is quiet except for that one truth scraping along his ribs:

There is something rotten in me. Something bad. Something loud enough that everyone hears it even if he says nothing, something that causes him to beg don’t come near me, be careful, hate me, love me.

(Who would’ve thought it really is his destiny to be lonely. There’s no use crying over it. There’s no use at all.)

He closes his eyes and imagines he could drown. He imagines his lungs filling like sodden cloth, the ache swelling sharp then softer then—gone.

He pictures the river folding him in, eating his flesh, drinking his bones hollow, drinking down every part of him until there is no Jiang Cheng.

He thinks of slipping loose, body unhooking from consciousness. The cold would cradle him, wouldn’t it?

Icy fingers unpicking his spine, ripping his soul free, and guiding him to a carriage waiting in the fog—wheels creaking, doors open like a mouth. Get in, it would say. Finally. Get in.

He does not remember when he started to hate how he looked but he remembers when he started to hate having a body. It was the moment he realised nothing would stop it.

That no amount of crying, biting, begging, clawing would make it stop. And then, oh then, when he learned what he wanted from him, what he liked best. The lesson was easy, wasn’t it?

The only thing pleasing about him wasn’t him at all. It was his body, the pretty waste of it, the way it bent under teeth and force and taking.

His personality only ruined the appeal. But despite the tears, despite his choking sobs, that pig liked him all the more for it, for the bite and rage.

He sinks deeper. His knees scrape the muck, his hands brush through weeds slick and stringy like hair. He feels the slimy press of the riverbed beneath his palms— the rotten bottom.

How fitting. How perfect. Of course, he belongs here. His hair floats around his head like some sick halo, and the cold—

The cold stings.

No. No. He got it wrong. His feet are burning. Burning from cold, standing barefoot on the ice, naked toes blistering on a frozen block.

Stand still, Shizun had said. Don’t move.

He doesn’t move. His cheek stings. (A slap? Was it?) His nose is bleeding now, a thin trickle, sharp copper in his mouth. It drips to the ice, dots like red flowers blooming and blooming. His feet crack open. His skin splits at the seams.

Wrong, they tell him. Mother, father, teacher. Everyone. There’s something wrong with you.

And it must be true, if everyone, even another world, believes so.

When he finally drags himself from the water, a waterlogged corpse in ill fitting skin, he feels the cage of himself like chains.

His body lags behind him, heavy, uncooperative, as though he’s wearing something dead and it’s just hanging there. He stumbles through the hall, dripping, head hollow and floaty.

He realises, then, quietly, numbly, as he peels his wet clothes from himself: This is all I’ll ever be.

He throws himself into training. Purposefully weaker, pulling blows, stepping into strikes. Each hit lands like a kiss that hurts too much, ribs shattering raw, skin blooming black, purple and red.

The disciple across from him falters, horror bleeding across his face. Jiang Cheng doesn’t care. He bites down and lunges again. Pain is better than the numbness. Pain is better because it feels like something.

Nothing is enough. It doesn’t kill him.

Sometimes he wishes—

Sometimes he prays—

That it would.

Destiny leans in close then, hot breath in his ear, laughing— high, wild, unhinged. His fate is written already. He knows how it goes, doesn’t he? He’ll never get what he wants. He’ll live.

Forever cursed to live, to survive. Survival isn’t mercy; survival is teeth dragging across bone, the long gnawing ache of it.

He closes his eyes, presses his forehead to the ground, and thinks:

I wish I had drowned.

Chapter Text

Jiang Yanli has always been steady. That’s what they needed from her and what she decided she’d be. The calm, the soft thing in a house full of sharpness.

She grew up listening to their parents fight and learned how to speak softly enough to coax their tempers down. She became the quiet hinge holding doors shut when they wanted to slam open and break.

She was the one who’d read to Jiang Cheng at night. He used to crawl into her bed after nightmares, small enough to fit in the crook of her arms, clinging and trembling, breath hiccupping against her neck.

He used to be sweet in that soft, guileless way children often are, shy enough to hide behind her skirts, earnest enough to give her the bigger half of his sweets because you’re bigger, jiejie, and as if that logic could solve everything.

She remembers cooking for him at midnight once, quietly reheating leftovers while he rubbed at his eyes, hair sticking up every way. He’d been sent to bed without dinner, another arbitrary punishment from their mother, and his stomach had growled so loud she’d laughed despite herself.

His hand had been so small in hers, baby soft and warm, clinging tight as though she were the only safe thing left in the world.

She misses that boy.

She remembers when he stopped being him. The way he hardened, year by year. Rage and bitterness, that desperate gnawing need to be seen, to be good enough, to be more. It was like watching their mother’s temper take root in him, growing inexorable, and Jiang Yanli—well, she got used to it.

But now, now he’s changing again. Wei Wuxian notices it too. They exchange a look across the dinner table. Jiang Cheng sits there, stiff backed and silent, while Madam Yu’s voice lashes across him like a whip.

His face is blank, mellow, almost. Not angry, not defiant, not anything. Just simply gone. It’s not unusual for him to look mellow at times, but this stillness, this dead eyed stillness, while their mother scolds him, is new.

When Madam Yu pauses for breath, ready to launch herself into another round, Jiang Yanli cuts in smoothly.

"Let’s finish dinner," she says, smiling the kind of smile you wear when you’ve practised it. "Everyone’s had a long day."

Her mother bristles but she relents. The silence at dinner is worse. Jiang Cheng doesn’t say a word. He chews slowly as if someone has wound him up and set him moving. Across the table, even Jiang Fengmian notices. He glances at his son with a faint crease in his brow, the kind he rarely bothers to show.

Took you long enough, Jiang Yanli thinks bitterly, the words winding up in her mouth before she swallows them down. She forces herself to keep smiling. Wei Wuxian catches her eye again, faint panic in his gaze. Jiang Yanli doesn’t let hers waver.

It’s fine, she tells herself. Everything will be fine.

After dinner, she finds him where he’s taken to haunting lately: beneath the willow tree, its branches stooping low, trailing like tired fingers across the damp earth.

The rain has thinned to a mist now, but it’s still cold enough that her breath fogs before her. She carries an umbrella, and in her other hand, a lantern whose glow is already waning. He’s lying on the ground, eyes closed, face tilted skyward as though offering himself up to the night.

For a heartbeat, she wonders if he’s asleep, or worse, until his lashes flicker, and he looks at her. He blinks slowly like surfacing reluctantly from a deep, dark pool.

She tilts the umbrella toward him, angling it so rain slides off in rivulets around them. A few stray drops cling to her hair and robes. He frowns faintly as he stands up, and even now, soft and unthinking, he reaches for the umbrella, rising to hold it over her instead. Dutiful as always.

"What are you doing here, A-Jie?" His voice is quieter than she remembers it being. Mellow, flat in a way that feels wrong on him.

She smiles, the kind of soft, deliberate thing that feels worn but still warm. "Can’t I look for my brother?"

He shakes his head, but doesn’t pull away. His fingers brush hers on the handle, and she shifts, taking his hand properly, pulls it gently away from her forearm, and laces her fingers through his.

It still surprises her a little, how large his hand is now. When did that happen? Once, it was tiny, clinging to her sleeve or hiding behind her skirts, warm and damp with childhood.

She remembers that baby soft palm in hers, remembers cooking for him in the dark of night, remembers shielding him from their mother’s temper and their father’s indifference.

So many times she looked at him, his cheeks round, voice sweet as a bird’s song, and wondered how anyone could be cruel to something so soft, so painfully good.

Their mother, apparently, never wondered. Madam Yu had always treated his sweetness like a defect to be hammered out. And slowly, painfully, she succeeded.

Jiang Yanli had watched him sharpen over the years, watched that softness bleed away and calcify into fury, bitterness and need, but now, now, she’s not sure what he is.

"A-Cheng," she murmurs, thumb brushing over his knuckles. "Were you dreaming earlier?"

His lashes lower. "I was.”

"Will you tell me about the dream?”

He pauses long enough that she wonders, not for the first time, what world he’s living in that she’s not allowed to see.

"I don’t quite remember."

A lie, probably. Or maybe not. Maybe he really has been swallowed whole by whatever’s eating at him, so deep there’s nothing left to bring back. Her mouth is full of unsaid questions swallowed.

The lantern wanes weakly in her other hand. The flame gutters, then dies, snuffed out with a thin thread of smoke, and just like that, they are standing beneath nothing but the dark of the willow and the distant sound of rain.

By the time they reach his door, she wants to ask again, wants to demand something, anything, to tether him back to her.

“…What happened, A-Cheng?” She says finally.

He laughs. It’s brittle, dry, soft and mirthless all at once. "A lot."

There is nothing in his eyes at all.

"Good night, A-Jie," he says, and his voice is too gentle.

He slips inside his room before she can answer, the door shutting softly. Jiang Yanli stands there for a long time, umbrella trembling faintly in her grip, the rain whispering around her.

There’s an ache in her chest sharp enough to hurt. She wants—God, she wants to drag him back out, to hold him so tightly he can’t vanish, can’t fold himself into nothing the way he’s trying to.

She doesn’t know what to do.