Chapter Text
Unlike his brother, Jiang Cheng has never liked the color red. Bright red hawthorn berries leave a sour taste on his tongue, crimson sunsets are tolerated only for the cool nights that follow, and though he’d never admit it, the sight of blood always makes his stomach churn.
Now, it surrounds him on every side.
Wen Ruohan’s hand tightens around his shoulder, the long nails threatening to pierce through skin as he pulls Jiang Cheng down the long hallway draped with the color of blood. Black stone pillars hold up the ceiling above them, each one carved with scarlet flames surging up the sides. Despite being the city that boasts of having no night, these halls are shadowed with darkness, the windows covered with blood-red curtains that stain what little sunlight manages to slip past.
Jiang Cheng stares at the graying boards beneath him, the only spot of reprieve from the sickly pulse of crimson surrounding him. He flexes his fingers against the coarse ropes biting into his wrists, ignoring the sting. He doesn’t know why Wen Ruohan is bothering to keep such a tight grip on him. The idea of running away is laughable, really, what with how they’re flanked with at least a dozen guards.
For now, escape is only a faint flicker in the back of his mind.
And so, Jiang Cheng tries to find reprieve in the faint tendrils of fresh air, the small slivers of sunlight. They’re small mercies after being trapped for heavens knew how long in that rancid dungeon.
They’ve agreed to let him see Wei Wuxian. That’s all that matters, really.
“You know, it’s quite peculiar,” Wen Ruohan says. The gold pieces of his hairpiece glitter faintly in the sparse light as he speaks. “Wen Zhuliu told us he melted your golden core. And yet you still managed to fight us tooth and nail using that famed spiritual whip.”
Jiang Cheng doesn’t bother answering. He keeps his face impassive, his head slightly lowered, though his jaw tightens at the mention of his mysteriously restored golden core. He’s half-surprised they haven’t crushed it again, though Wen Zhuliu’s name has been thrown at him more than once, like a knife poised to strike.
The two pairs of boots continue to hit the floor, pressing closer to the door at the end of the hallway. A pair of stone lions stand guard, their mouths open, each bearing a small flame on their tongues.
“Stranger still,” Wen Ruohan continues, “is how when we found Wei Wuxian… there was no golden core to melt.”
His hand pushes open the door.
Jiang Cheng doesn’t immediately understand why the other is still clamped so tightly on his shoulder—until he steps inside.
The smell is what hits him first.
Sickly sweet, metallic, rancid.
Wei Wuxian is in the center of the room, chained to a pillar. His arms are pulled high above his head, the chains looped through a small metal ring. The lower half of his body spills across the floor, legs unmoving, as though they can no longer bear his weight.
Wen Chao stands beside him, kicking at Wei Wuxian’s side in wet, uneven thunks. He stops as Jiang Cheng and his father enter the room, pausing to wipe sweat from his brow, mouth twisting into a grin.
“No.” The word escapes Jiang Cheng’s throat, barely a breath. But Wei Wuxian still hears. His whole body goes rigid—the body that is so much thinner than Jiang Cheng remembers—like a skeleton wrapped in a thin layer of flesh.
A blindfold covers his eyes, and his mouth is gagged with the same red ribbon he once used to tie back his hair. His soft black robes hang in tatters, streaked with grime and blood. The fabric has slipped from one shoulder, revealing the scorched Wen brand seared into his chest.
The only indication that he is conscious, that he is alive, is the faint flare of his nostrils as he struggles to breathe.
Jiang Cheng wrenches himself free from Wen Ruohan’s grip. The man lets him go too easily, as though he’s all too aware of the uselessness of the action. Jiang Cheng doesn’t care. He strides across the room and falls to his knees before his brother, reaching out to press trembling fingers to Wei Wuxian’s lower dantian.
The touch makes Wei Wuxian recoil. He squirms weakly, muffled sounds rising from behind the gag—a protest that Jiang Cheng pointedly ignores.
“Wei Wuxian,” he says. “Wei Wuxian, what did you do?”
For a moment, the only answer is the sickly smell that curls from his brother’s body, sweat and illness and infection.
Then Wei Wuxian just barely shakes his head. His throat works uselessly, cracked lips forming words too faint to hear.
Don’t look. Don’t look.
The words hang unspoken in the air, but Jiang Cheng feels them like a command. Wei Wuxian’s head shifts, as if trying to hide himself, to shield Jiang Cheng from what he’s become. But there’s nowhere to turn.
“Poor little shige,” Wen Chao coos from somewhere beside them. “He didn’t stand a chance.”
Jiang Cheng resists the urge to kick Wen Chao directly between the legs, and merely snarls before returning his attention to Wei Wuxian.
There’s blood pooled under his legs, yellowish infection leaking from a cluster of bright red gashes on his ankle. Then something moves, something that’s white and small, no bigger than his thumbnail. Jiang Cheng stares at it, stares until the pieces click together in his mind and bile rises up in his throat, nearly causing him to gag.
Suddenly, it doesn’t matter what Wei Wuxian might have—what he has done. It doesn’t matter that the room is filled with guards, that Wen Ruohan is standing just a few feet behind him; there are maggots crawling out of his brother's flesh. They squirm, gorging themselves on the decaying body in front of him, as Wei Wuxian's frame continues to shudder.
His brother is alive—and he’s rotting.
“Wei Wuxian,” Jiang Cheng says for a third time, his voice collapsing into a shaking whisper.
His bound hands rise, trembling as they stretch toward Wei Wuxian’s face. Dried bile runs in a pale yellow line down his chin, and Jiang Cheng reaches out to brush it away. The roughened pads of fingers brush against feverish skin… then a sudden wetness spills from beneath the cloth. It slips over Jiang Cheng’s fingertips, tracing a path down Wei Wuxian’s flushed cheek before dripping off his trembling jaw.
“That’s enough,” Wen Ruohan says, his hand once more closing around Jiang Cheng’s shoulder.
Jiang Cheng doesn’t bother looking at him, his gaze still scraping over Wei Wuxian’s shivering body. It feels as though every moment he spends looking reveals a new wound, another broken piece.
His right hand, crushed and mangled, fingers twisted at unnatural angles. The lump of swelling beneath the blindfold, grotesque and straining, as though the bone around his eye has been fractured and is threatening to give way. The flesh around his wrists, rubbed raw until Jiang Cheng can see faint hints of bone.
All this, and he doesn’t even have a golden core to ease the pain.
Jiang Cheng resists Wen Ruohan’s pull for one more second, his bound hands trembling as his finger drags across Wei Wuxian’s heaving abdomen. The strokes are faint, uneven, but deliberate—a message carved in the only way he can.
For a moment, he isn’t sure if Wei Wuxian even registers it through the haze of pain that blankets his body. But then his brother flinches. His body pulls back, weak and shuddering, and his head shakes harder, as though trying to refuse the message he cannot speak against.
The next kick from Wen Chao lands square on Wei Wuxian’s ribs. He convulses once, his body jerking as though trying to cough, but the motion catches in his throat and dies. He gasps—a single, broken sound—and then—
Wei Wuxian’s muscles go slack. He sags against the chains that hold him upright, motionless.
“Can’t even stay awake.” Wen Chao lets out a short huff of annoyance and steps forward. He yanks the blindfold off, then grabs Wei Wuxian’s jaw with bloody fingers, wrenching his face upward into the light. Streaks of blood trail down Wei Wuxian’s face, pooling in the corners of swollen eyes that have fallen shut.
“Isn’t he pretty?” Wen Chao says, his voice an insufferable whine dripping with venom. He tilts Wei Wuxian’s slack face from side to side, as if trying to find the best angle. “He makes an excellent display of what happens to those who defy the rising sun.”
His fingers slip down, moving towards Wei Wuxian’s throat, and Jiang Cheng rips himself out of Wen Ruohan’s grip.
“You bastard, I’ll kill you!”
Jiang Cheng barely gets one step in before he’s jumped by the guards, and wrestled to the floor. He writhes and twists under their grip, snarling like a wounded animal, the ropes that bind his own wrists biting into the skin, as if in retaliation.
Getting you out.
He repeats the words that he traced on Wei Wuxian’s body—
Getting you out.
Over and over, the promise burns in his mind, steady and unshakable—
I’m getting you out.
Just hold on a little longer.