Spiritual Weapon: This Remnant of You (We Can't Let Go)

[ranalore]

Title: This Remnant of You (We Can't Let Go)
Author: Rana Eros
Word Count: 250
Ship: Jiang Cheng & Wei Wuxian
Rating/Warnings: G; Canon major character death, angst, shuangjie feels
Summary: Jiang Cheng always has a reminder of Wei Wuxian.
Author's Notes: I've had most of this drafted for a few months, without knowing where it was going. Then I ran across it again and had an "Aha!" moment. Might as well go for the Yunmeng sib trifecta. Eliza liked it.

~~~~

He thinks about burning it, that first year. Burning it and scattering the ashes off that cliff. Off the end of the pier, to sink down among the lotus stems and vanish and remain in a fitting tribute to the not-brother who haunts him.

(He thinks about putting it on a stand in the corner of the ancestral hall. No tablet. No offerings. No place of prominence. Just a corner for remembrance. Just a black flute, all he could find, all that's left.)

(He refuses to think of the sword he could claim from Lanling Jin, as the man said to—well. He has the right, but he imagines how Jin Guangshan would look at him, and something twists in his chest, nausea climbing up his throat.)

What he does is keep it in his qiankun pouch, where he doesn't have to look at it. Where, if it were not what it was, and did not mean what it meant, and he were some other kind of person, he wouldn't have to think about it. It weighs nothing. It takes up no room.

(It weighs as much as a whole person. It crowds his solitary hours, which are most of them, with suffocating absence.)

For sixteen years, he carries it. Then he gains the sword, after all, and learns of what else he carries. It's the thing he least wants. It's the thing he can't destroy.

(Later, he'll understand: His brother never left him. His brother will never leave.)

Comments

[amedia]

I love how you use negations ... the not-brother, It weighs nothing. It takes up no room. and also how you turn them around ... His brother ..., It weighs as much as a whole person. It crowds his solitary hours ... It's SO beautifully done, and yet not obtrusive or showy. I can just hear Jiang Cheng thinking the first thoughts, and struggling *not* to think the second.

The final statements, in parentheses, remind me of how JG accused WWX of leaving him after promising that they would be the Twin Heroes of Yunmeng ... but now he knows that WWX did the only thing he could to support JC as sect leader. ♥

[ranalore]

The structure of reversals is something I usually see (and do) in poetry, so I wanted to see if it might work in short fic. I'm so glad to hear you specifically liked that element! You got exactly what I was doing with them, too. Jiang Cheng is a character so clearly in conflict with himself, I could see him arguing with himself like this.

It always gets me when he finally breaks down and talks about that promise, and it's so clear that this is at the core of all the anger, all the blame and bitterness, this hurt baby brother who was abandoned right when he most expected he could depend on his older brother. And I'm a Wei Wuxian stan, and I get why he didn't, but I still wish he'd told Jiang Cheng at the time.

[elwendell]

I like this very much and I was always touched that he would keep it all those years. This line, "It crowds his solitary hours, which are most of them, with suffocating absence." is particularly good.

[ranalore]

When I was watching the first time and he pulled it out, I was like WAIT. BACK UP. It's not really that it changed everything, because Jiang Cheng's bark has always been worse than his bite, and he and Wei Wuxian honestly can't quit each other, but. It shifted the canon lens on quite a few elements. And then the look he gives Wei Wuxian once WWX starts playing. Such blatant, raw love. No wonder he was so grouchy with Jin Ling about the subject after the fact, he hates feeling vulnerable.

Anyway, I'm so glad you liked it, thank you!