Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jiang Cheng wakes. Groggily, like a man dragging himself out of a drowning dream, he blinks into a world of the past with blood on his teeth and salt on his tongue.

Curtains breathe softly in the hush of pre dawn, stirred by a reluctant breeze that spills silver through a slit too narrow to be kind. That glint catches the edge of the room.

And yes. Of course. He knows this room. Gods, how could he not?

This is the room where he learned to sleep without one eye open. The room where his bones layed to rest after the years under that man.

Where he first surrendered the shape of hunger and the sound of laughter that wasn’t meant for him. This is his room in Yue-jiejie’s brothel—was his room.

The bed swells with mismatched blankets and pillows—soft, stolen things, offerings from the jiejies who loved him like a half kept secret.

He’s cocooned in a nest, or something like a nest, though he doesn’t know how to make one—not properly. Not like a true omega. He only knows the ache of needing to build it.

The instinct that scrapes raw beneath his skin, but his mind says survive, survive, survive.

He shifts among the softness against his skin, the flush of his cheeks and breathes in, the scents hit him first, like a blow, like a balm. Yue-jiejie’s omega-sweet amber twined with the bitter hum of black tea leaves, white gardenia soaked in wine, soft sandalwood.

Ning-jiejie’s muted beta, scent of winter moss and pale plum blossom, old pine like her carved toys and quiet hands. Qiao Die-jiejie’s overwhelming alpha scent of pink peppercorn and sugared lychee, mandarin zest in summer sunlight, her laughter lives in that scent.

Ru Fen-jiejie’s omega scent of cherry blossom liquor laced with clove-dusted sugar and almonds—sweet enough to kill you. And his a’jie’s soft beta spice, ginger-steamed pears, dried lavender and the ghost of sun-warmed linen.

The air is thick with them, thick with them, and he breathes in like drowning again. As if he could draw them into his lungs and hold them there.

He sits up. And sighs, low and bitter. Again. The word feels ancient in his mouth— a curse, a prayer.

Again.

He is back.

The room is unchanged in the way a wound scars, imperfectly. It’s bare in a way that suggests someone tried to make it bare but failed. Too much comfort to truly stay bare.

There—scrolls half curled on the table, the wax of an overworked candle hardened. Empty plates, crumbs of sweets eaten. His clothes, tossed with the carelessness of boyhood and exhaustion.

He doesn’t count by years anymore, he counts by loops, by lives.

This is his 56th.

The gods, surely, have forgotten him. Time does not even try to hide its cruelty anymore. He’s stopped asking if it’s a dream. He’s stopped begging to wake up.

Once, long ago, or perhaps not long at all, he thought being an oracle meant seeing. Now he wonders if it means creating.

If he’s the one birthing fate over and over, doomed to repeat his own prophecy like a snake swallowing its own tail.

Does an oracle see the future or make it?

He aches, he grieves.

(He is always grieving.)

In loop 55, he had hope. The kind that blooms bruised and golden in the chest, tender and terrified. For the first time, peace had held without him even needing to do anything much.

He’d fallen in love. Fallen like a star, like a god cast down from heaven. With his husband, slowly, stupidly, honestly, a husband who kissed him like worship, like the world didn’t end a thousand times behind his eyes.

And just as his heart had begun to unfurl, just as he thought maybe, maybe this time, he could be happy, this time—

He died.

That was the horror of it. He was happy, or at the very least, on the verge of it.

And now here he is.

Back again.

Loop 56.

The same broken cycle grinding him into paste, rewinding him into flesh. The chains of destiny drag him back, always the same roads, always the same war.

He’s worn every mask, burned cities for the greater good. He’s taken every turn. He’s been the villain. The saviour. The coward. The king.

He’s died with a blade in his belly, with poison on his lips, burned in pyres he built himself.

He has once fought, tooth and nail, clawed and screamed at fate until his fingers bled prophecy.

Now he is undone, gutted open with grief and longing in equal measure. Undone by the memory of joy, of hope, this soft bellied ache.

That singular sliver of life, loop 55, has hollowed him out more than all the deaths before. Because now he knows what he’s losing. Now he knows it can be better.

Now he carries the echo of that breathless, fleeting joy like a wound that won’t clot. Now he wakes not with anger or numbness, but with mourning.

He wants to die. Not heroically, not in fire or in song. Just—

once. For real, for death to come with finality. He wants to die happy and die once and for all. He had been so close.

He stares at the wall, at the flickering candle, the soft clutter of youth and carelessness, and thinks:

There was no chance to begin with. No choice but the choice I made. And still, I made it.

God loves him, but not enough to save him.

He thinks:

I am godless.

A false messiah, spat out by time and dream. An oracle lost to his own prophecy.

Does an oracle see the future… or make it?

The scents of his nest lingers, warm and aching. He burrows into it, he burrows like a dying thing seeking warmth in the place it was born.

He doesn’t weep.

Not yet.

The weeping comes later.

First, there is the knowing.

First, there is the loop.

And it begins.

Again.

Chapter Text

Jiang Cheng leaves quickly.

The sky is a deep, suspended bruise—neither night nor morning, caught in the aching hush of in-between.

The moon is a sliver above him, thin as a blade, but the stars have already begun to retreat, and still the sun does not rise. Time stalls like breath held too long in the chest.

He doesn’t wait to see Ruan Yue or the others, though he can feel the familiar ache of them already, like pressure behind his ribs.

In every loop, Yue jiejie knows—with the certainty of women who have had to survive things no one asks about. Her eyes are always first to sharpen. Loop 22, she cried. Loop 41, she tried to stab someone.

This time, she’ll do the same. Her arms are always open before he knows he needs them. She will ask. She always asks.

But he can’t. Not yet.

Not when his skin is still soft from sleep and the memories and suddenness of the past loop still clings to him. He’s still too raw, too folded inward.

He wants to be held.

He also wants to evaporate and rot and become one with the earth as fertiliser.

So he leaves a note, ink smudged from the tremble of his fingers: early morning training.

And then he goes.

The sight of Lotus Pier hits him like a memory and a fever all at once. Nostalgic, yes—but wrong. Or not wrong, exactly. Just… unreal. It’s too intact with the past.

But he is used to it.

The lotus leaves bloom fat and green on the lake. The docks creak like they always did, boats swaying in time with the slow breath of water. The prayer bells hang unbroken.

The scent is sharp—clean brine, incense smoke, the wet rot of lotus roots and river breeze—and he knows it too well. This is the Lotus Pier before the end. Before war. Before fire.

And that’s what makes it unbearable.

He has lived lives far from here and in here. Sweet lives. Bitter ones. Has arrived back to the past as young as three to right when Lotus Pier burned, had run away once, far from this haunted place.

He had lived by the sea, in one loop. By the mountains in another. Loop 7, he was a farmer. Peaches, of all things. Loop 14, he ran away and became a cultivator who lived in Mù Yān forest.

In Loop 54, He had become a wandering cultivator, a ghost that protected Yummeng. Loop 18—ah. Loop 18 was the worst. No, wait. Loop 37. He was proper insane in that one.

And then, lived with his husband in his most recent loop, Loop 55. But now—

Now he is back.

And as he steps into his room, his old room, his first room, something inside him curdles.

What is the word for this feeling?

It isn’t quite panic. It isn’t quite sorrow. It’s the weight of a hand that hasn't touched him in decades but still lives beneath his skin.

It’s the memory of sweat on silk and the scratch of calloused fingers turning the pages of a scroll, pausing, lingering, drifting where they never should have been.

There is no sweet amber or sugared lychee. No sandalwood or cherry blossom liquor. Here, the scent is stale and lonely.

This room. Fucking hell. Untouched, like the world conspired to preserve the worst part of him for him to walk into.

This room, this room, is where it began. Where he had sat on the lap of a man who called himself his teacher, called him clever, dutiful, pretty. Words that felt like honey until they stung, Jiang Cheng, for the longest time, had believed only he had loved him, only he could.

Where he was taught with a hand pressed low on his back. Where fingers traced the curve of his thighs while reciting political theory.

Where he had once, once, voiced his discomfort with the bright, blind hope of a child.

“I don’t like it,” he’d said. So simple. So sure. A truth like a spark, useless against the storm.

And that man had only smiled, patted his thigh, said something like, “Don’t be difficult, Cheng-er. You’re growing up. You must learn how the world works.”

He had learned to keep still. Learned not to speak. Learned to smile and listen and nod and leave his body behind, if he didn’t wish to get—

He exhales. He stands in that room now, grown and war-worn and fifty-six loops old. His breath catches as his vision tilts. His chest stutters, lungs remembering the old rhythm of fear. He closes his eyes—

And for a moment, he is nowhere. Not Jiang Cheng. Not General. Not omega. Not even human.

Just a trembling shape of flesh, haunted by hands long gone.

It’s laughable.

He almost does laugh. He lets out a breath that wants to be a scream and feels instead like dust.

All these years.

All these loops.

And still, still, that man can unmake him with memory alone.

He clenches his jaw.

He finds the stack of papers like a ghost uncovering its bones. Faint ink stains. A smudge of plum jam on the corner of a talisman-drafting scroll. His own handwriting—rounder, less certain.

He studies them the way a man studies a corpse: with disquiet, with knowing, with the small, cold resignation of someone who remembers what the body looked like when it was still breathing.

He finds the date.

Fourteen.

He’s fourteen.

This is a year before he goes to the Cloud Recesses.

He exhales through his nose. Not quite a sigh. Not quite relief. There’s nothing to be relieved about, not when he’s still caught in this purgatory of repetition, but it’s close.

Already, he’s tired.

Already, his limbs remember the weight of lifetimes.

Already, his heart carries fifty-five lives.

But he has a plan. He will get his husband back.

It’s a ridiculous plan.

Beautiful. Idiotic. Holy in its own desperate way. He believes—no, hopes—that the time loops will end only when he is happy.

Not pretend-happy. Not the thin veneer of joy he’s painted over his grief in loop after loop.

Truly happy. Bone-deep, soul-stitched, happy.

And in the last loop… he could have had that. He was happy. Almost. He had tasted it, like sweetness on the tip of his tongue, bitter with disbelief.

A husband whose gaze did not shrink him, whose hands never reached in violence, whose touch was reverent, careful, maddeningly kind, who knew, remembered the past— not all of it, but remembered the life before loop 55.

He had begun to trust. Had begun to love.

And then, like every time before—he died.

Loop 55.

Another closing door.

He drags a hand down his face with a sigh. His skin feels wrong. His body is too full of bones.

He sits at his desk, drowning in ink and memory, surrounded by a child’s half-formed dreams, and begins again.

Chapter Text

He kneels.

It’s too early for meditation, but time is a lie to someone who’s lived through fifty five versions of the same life.

The room is cold. Cold in the way only just before dawn can be—wet and bone deep, quiet enough to hear the oil in the lamp congealing. Outside, the wind claws through the lotus leaves, searching.

Somewhere, a crane shrieks.

Then silence.

Not even the birds have begun. His knees press to the wooden floor, the old slats biting into skin that no longer bruises easily.

His hands rest loosely on his thighs. Palms up. Open. Like offering. Like surrender.

(He won’t call it prayer. That would require faith.)

He closes his eyes. His breath sinks low. There is a darkness beneath his heart that he has not touched in years.

His golden core is there, waiting, sealed like a wound under scar tissue.

(Still, trapped and dormant.)

It hadn’t always been like this. Once, it had burned bright. Yin rich, night slick, coiled like a snake in his lower dantian. 

Dangerous, they whispered—because yin attracts monsters. Because yin tempts the wrong kind of cultivation.

Because someone with a yin core could be used as a cauldron.

(He hadn’t understood what that meant, not at first. He’d imagined herbs and medicine brewing. He hadn’t understood that he would be the vessel. He hadn’t known it meant his body.

That someone would use him, and take and take. Again. And again. And again. He hadn’t wanted to believe it.

That others could feed on him, drain him, tearing him apart as they drew power. That his pelvis could become a mouth for pain.

Not even when—

No.

No.

Not now.)

He bites down on the memory.

The seal had been placed there when he started to develop his core. A tight thing by the very same teacher who would later—

It was supposed to protect him. It was supposed to weaken him.

The former was a lie.

The latter was the truth.

The seal siphoned off the richness of his core and kept it locked. No one told him how to remove it. He made sure he couldn't. Only the one who placed it ever knew how to undo it.

And Jiang Cheng let it be.

Because perhaps if his mother found out, she would hate him more than she already did, that if his father knew his omega son was made weaker by a yin core, he would be more disappointed in him, that this would be another strike, another comparison to his brother, alpha with a strong yang core.

Because maybe if no one knew, no one else would try. Because it was easier, then, to pretend he was like everyone else.

He isn’t.

Not anymore.

He draws the seal into his mind. His Qi circles slowly, like an animal waking from hibernation. Then—

He cuts the seal.

It peels away like dead skin.

His golden core thrums. It unfolds inside him, stretching like something too long contained. It hurts.

Gods, it hurts.

It feels like drowning in moonlight. Like being skinned from the inside out. Like becoming again. And for a moment—just a moment—he sways. His heart lurches like a creature startled in the dark.

His body remembers what it is to be visible to the world in ways he never asked for but he does not stop.

Instead, he builds a new seal. One that is usually used. This one doesn’t choke his Qi. It masks him from those who would try to harvest him, keeps the boundaries of his body sacred, lets no one give or take unless he wills it.

And when it’s done, he breathes. He breathes and settles again, this time deeper.

Beneath the golden core, there is another hunger. His siren self sleeps curled beneath his ribs, coiled like sea monster, too terrible to hear.

But he does not wake it. Not yet.

There is time.

There is always time.

(He thinks of loop 37. Of loop 18. Of his husband’s hands in loop 55. He’s lying to himself, and he knows it.)

From then on, Jiang Cheng wakes before the sun. It's quieter that way. Before the world demands anything from him, before memory stirs.

He sits, spine straight, on the floorboards where he once bled, in the brittle hush of the morning—this is how you build a body back from ruin.

Hands resting just so, breath slow, he reaches inward. Because the effects of the seal is still there. It had thinned his core down, suppressed it, strangled it. An inner sea, dammed and made to stagnate.

What does poison taste like when it’s been part of you for so long?

You mistake it for yourself.

His meridians had blackened, his golden core spins sluggishly. He breathes and pulls qi into himself. Rebuilding hurts but he would rather burn alive than stay weak.

Another benefit of undoing the damage: He can finally begin to regulate his heats without external suppressants.

No more bastardised suppressants. A-Lin had found out by accident—caught him during the tail end of a cycle. He’d been shocked.

And angry, angry for the first time in that loop in his presence.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” A-Lin had said, voice raw. “You think I’ll stand by and let you—” He’d summoned Wen Qing on the spot, like a man calling for fire.

Wen Qing had taken one look and gone still.  Her face was tight. She forced a detox protocol on him the same day.

Drew up a five-phase plan. Internal repair. Meridian restabilisation. Hormonal re-education. Hormonal harmonisation. Heat cycle recalibration.

He hadn’t argued, A-Lin had been unnervingly quiet and Jiang Cheng had realised until then, how much he had gotten used to the gentle reverence A-Lin treated him with.

He remembers. He is powerful. He had always been. And now—now he reaches for the power again.

Chapter Text

Jiang Cheng works in silence. The hours unfold like paper: thin, pale, easily torn. A blankness underlined with quiet ache. The brush scratches like bone on bone.

It’s all familiar. Too familiar.

He knows this world like he knows the lines in his palm—no matter how many times he burns it, they grow back the same.

He reads trade manifests, tax ledgers, land leases. Stamped reports in tidy brushstrokes, the ink bleeding into paper like bruises into skin.

Agriculture reports that stretch down the page in neat columns, detailing how many mu of lotus root will be harvested, how much silver will be lost in flood and rain.

It’s all familiar. Terribly so.

He’s read these documents before. Not these exact sheets, perhaps, but this version of reality. He catalogues it all with the same detached precision he’s used for lifetimes now.

He re-plans reforms with a surgeon’s coldness. He does not need to think hard to find the flaws. He already has an idea of what they are, and simply reads to refresh his memory.

Loop 17, he tried real reform, it backfired horribly. Loop 36, he deregulated fishing and few minor sects retaliated, though that didn't matter by the time the Wen Sect attacked. Loop 49—

He exhales.

The movements are muscle-deep, mechanical. His brush lifts, dips into ink, notes down inefficiencies in the margins with strokes as sharp as cuts.

He remembers the 54th. He’d run away in that one, all bloodied scream and still wounded welts on his back, having arrived at twelve—twelve—barely more than a child. Right before they meant to send him to the Yu Sect.

And the 55th—he can still taste it in his mouth, bittersweet and rich and aching. He had left Lotus Pier at sixteen. Had married Wen Rouhan, for the first time ever. It was strange, when he received his interest, for it had not happened in any of his past lives.

He lived in the Wen Sect as Wen Furen. He had almost been happy. Could’ve been. Somehow, against all odds, he fell in love with Wen Rouhan.

He presses the side of his thumb into the grain of the table, grounding himself in the splinter rough wood.

The issues are what he remembered; they are unchanged and predictable. It’s comforting in a way he hates.

He sighs again. The second one is heavier, a big whoosh of air expelled from tired lungs. He writes out a fix it list.

It grows longer by the hour. Not extravagant solutions—there’s no room for revolution here. Just small, efficient changes. Slight shifts. A bureaucratic nudge here.

He’s done this before.

He knows how to change things just enough to make them better, without setting off alarms. He wants the machine to run quietly, cleanly, and efficiently.

He wants his people happy. When he had left Lotus Pier, he had always, unchangingly, missed his people the most. He wants—

Loop 9, he tried kindness. It was taken for weakness. Lotus Pier burned earlier that time.

He’s tired.

His mother sees the growing stack of reports with not quite pride, but something like satisfaction. Finally taking responsibility, she says, as if she did not beat responsibility into his skin through harsh lessons and harsher words from the moment he could walk.

His father doesn’t say anything at all, doesn’t even notice. Jiang Cheng hadn’t expected him to. He never expects anything anymore.

Still, something curls tight in his chest, old and sour. A grief so long familiar it no longer has teeth. His feelings about his father are… complicated. That word, again. Complicated.

Sometimes, rarely, his father had seemed like he wanted to care. A cup of tea placed silently beside him. A question asked too late. A conversation half-started and left unfinished.

Other loops had offered nothing.

In some lives, Yu Ziyuan had raised him alone, even though his father was still alive, still lived in the same house Jiang Cheng slept in.

In others, it had been like living with two ghosts who only knew how to speak in absence.

He doesn’t know which version is worse.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

The day passes like a funeral procession. Quiet, steady, hollow. It feels wrong—so wrong—to be so at peace beneath all this grief.

To sit in the same chair where he once dreamed of being a good son. A good heir. A good man.

To walk through the same halls that had once been painted in blood and flame. To hear the wind off the water, to smell lotus flowers curling open in the sun, to breathe in the clean salt air—

When he knows what he’s already lost.

He thinks of Wen Rouhan, A-Lin.

That last loop. The gentleness in his hands and gaze. The terrifying way he remembered Jiang Cheng from his 54th loop—his memory like a fire that refused to go out.

The way he had looked at Jiang Cheng like he was to be worshipped and loved, even when Jiang Cheng couldn’t remember how to love himself or even if he should be.

He remembered.

Jiang Cheng clings to that.

Maybe he will remember again.

He has to.

The quill snaps in his grip. Ink drips like blood onto the ledger. Jiang Cheng doesn’t move.

He just stares.

He remembered.

Jiang Cheng clings to that.

He has to. He has to. He has to.

Or what else is left?

Chapter Text

Jiang Cheng sees her before she sees him.

She’s the same as he remembered, her soft face, gentle smile, almond shaped black eyes and soft purple, a lighter shade than what he and his mother wears.

When she turns and spots him in the doorway, her mouth begins to shape his name. He doesn’t let her finish it.

He crosses the space between them in two steps, reaches for her like a drowning man, and pulls her into a tight, shuddering hug.

“A’Jie—” he breathes, but it collapses in his throat. He holds her like she might vanish if he doesn’t anchor her in his arms.

“A-Cheng?” she murmurs, startled. “You’re—what’s wrong?”

But she doesn’t push him away. Her arms come around him, unsure at first, then warm, and firm. Her scent crashes into him like a wave: ginger steamed pears, dried lavender, and the faintest trace of sun dried linen. Home.

It settles the ache in him. His breath stutters, his throat burns.

“I missed you,” he says into her shoulder. It’s not enough. He says it again, softer. “I missed you so much.”

He hadn’t seen her in years. In the last two lives, he’d left Lotus Pier soon after arriving. And now—here she is. Alive. Laughing somewhere in the background just minutes ago. Holding him now.

The last he saw of her was at another conference. Ever since his wedding with Wen Rouhan, she’d been upset, not at him, but rather at the circumstance.

He holds her tighter, dose not let go, even as her fingers smooth along his back, even as her brow furrows with unspoken questions. She holds him anyway.

Sweet, gentle a’jie.

She has always loved him the best in this family.

The dining table is loud with ghosts.

Everything looks the same. And nothing does. He doesn’t know if it’s the time loop or his grief doing the warping.

He sits, the feeling tight in his chest, and the table stretches long before him like an altar to all his failings.

His mother starts before he even picks up his chopsticks.

“Sit up straight, Jiang Cheng. Did you forget how to carry yourself properly? You’re a sect heir, not a beggar on the street.”

He flinches, faintly, but doesn't respond. His hands stay neatly folded in his lap. He’s heard this before. He’s heard every variation.

The next line will be—

“And you—” Yes. There it is. She rounds on Wei Wuxian. “Look at this mess. Can't you eat without slurping like a pig? You bring shame with every movement you make.”

Wei Wuxian ducks his head, silent, staring into his bowl. Jiang Cheng watches the small tremor in Wei Wuxian’s hands as he lifts his chopsticks again, one grain of rice at a time.

He looks younger than Jiang Cheng remembers, meeker. He doesn’t know how to feel about that. His father clears his throat, and just like that, the familiar hell begins.

“That’s enough, my lady. He’s only a boy.”

“A boy? He’s sixteen. He should know better.”

“Not everyone’s perfect. Why must you attack him every time?”

“You defend him more than your own son—!”

Loop 41, he stabbed his father in the hand with a fish skewer. Still not the worst outcome. He had the reputation of being ‘mad’ in that one, Jiang Cheng nearly laughs because if they saw him in Loop 37, he wonders what they would call him then?

He stares at his bowl, untouched. The food smells rich. Spiced broth and fresh greens, sweet root vegetables sautéed in sesame oil.

Every word flung across the table hits something raw in him. Not because it’s new, but because it isn’t.

Because it's all exactly as he remembers it: the same fights, the same defence of Wei Wuxian, the same silencing, the same gaping holes in his chest that no amount of food or time could fill.

He used to shout back. Once. He used to cry after every fight. Now, he doesn’t have it in him.

He’s tired.

Yu Ziyuan turns on him again, sharp eyed and cold lipped. She opens her mouth—another lash, surely—but Jiang Yanli cuts in before it lands.

“Mother,” she says, and her voice—soft, soft always, but firm underneath—edges in like a wedge of light through the storm. “He’s just tired. It’s been a long morning.”

Yu Ziyuan glares at her, but Jiang Yanli keeps her gaze steady. Their mother looks away first. It’s always like this. Like balancing a blade between ribs, knowing the next breath will make it cut deeper.

He sets down his chopsticks. He’s not hungry anymore.

Later, as they walk back down the quiet corridor, Jiang Yanli slips her hand into his, like they’re children again, like nothing’s changed as Wei Wuxian chatters on ahead of them.

“You’re quieter than usual,” she says softly.

He gives a tired smile. It feels more like a grimace. “Am I?”

“I worry for you.”

“I know.” A pause, “I’m sorry, I’ll try not to.”

Jiang Yanli frowns, a furrow of her brows and Jiang Cheng aches, something fierce, for that same furrow looks so much like A-Ling.

They walk on, the day ahead of them is long, and Jiang Cheng slips into his role, like he always has.

He tells her she’s incredible. Just—

in the way he says you’re really good at that stitch while pouring her tea,

or this is better than the food at that gaudy Jin banquet with those chefs with absolute sincerity and a mouthful of sticky rice cake.

Sometimes he says it in passing:

You should design, you have a talent for it.

Sometimes he says it like a fact:

Your cooking’s better than half the famous chefs.

She never believes him at first. Smiles, tight lipped and dismisses it with a wave of her hand.

“It’s just a hobby.”

“I’m not that good—”

“It’s silly, really—”

But he doesn’t stop.

You’ve got an eye for colour.

That new stitch pattern? It’s so pretty.

You should enter that competition. Have you talked to Madam Fu? She would love to have you as her apprentice. Anyone would if they had half the talent you have.

And slowly, slowly, she softens. She starts to share more. Rambling, even, when she gets excited.

One evening, she’s hunched over the low table, scattered fabric around her like flower petals, and she lights up—

“Look, this shade of silk—see how it catches the light? I thought maybe it’d go with the jade beads, but then I found these—”

She talks with her hands, glows with the concept of someone finally listening and seeing her. Speaks like she’s unfolding something long hidden, petal by petal.

Jiang Cheng doesn’t interrupt. He just listens, resting his chin on one hand, soft-eyed and still.

It’s the only thing he’s ever done right without anyone asking. And it makes something in his chest loosen, just a little.

Like maybe there’s a world where they both get to be more than what they were shaped into.

Where she’s allowed joy.

And he’s allowed to guard it.

Chapter Text

It was by the start of the second week that Ruan Yue cornered him. She did it with the kind of quiet determination that reminded him of waves that wear down stone, certain and utterly immovable.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Not What’s wrong with you or What are you hiding.

No.

Who.

It was not suspicion. It was grief sharpened into instinct, the kind that sits behind the eyes of mothers who have already lost too much, and will not lose again without a fight. 

Every loop, every life—without fail, she had always been the first to notice. The first to see. The first to say: this boy is not as he was.

And without fail, she had always asked.

He looked at her, this version of the woman who had not yet died for him, who had not yet watched him bury half of himself beneath the rot of time and the loop of lives.

Her spine was straight, chin tilted. There were calluses on her fingers from calligraphy and hard work, and she held her hands in front of her as though they might tremble if she let them hang loose.

She looks ready to fight god.

Or him.

He smiles. It's too gentle for how he feels.

“I’m Jiang Cheng.”

He paused. “Just… older.”

Her eyes narrowed but she didn’t interrupt.

“Your mother had a hair ornament. It was the only thing of hers you had left. The rest was taken—sold by your father’s second wife. You hid the ornament in the lining of your robes when you were a child. You told me once that it was the only thing that felt like her, like anything soft was still left in the world.”

He saw her still. Her breath catching, once.

“It was a golden butterfly,” he said. “Plain gold. Wings folded slightly, like it was about to take flight.”

She sat down hard, as if her body could no longer hold the weight of standing. Her mouth was open, but no sound came out.

She hadn't told him.

Not yet.

She had in his previous lives, even in his fifty fifth life. On the day of his wedding. She’d sat behind him as he faced the mirror, her hands deft and soft as they pinned back his hair.

Her fingers trembled when she placed the butterfly, just behind the crown of his head.

“You’re beautiful,” she’d said. “Don’t cry. You’ll ruin the kohl.”

He’d nearly wept anyway. That version of her had smiled and touched his cheek. My silly little dancer, she had murmured, voice filled with unshed tears and unspoken worry. I hope you know what you’re doing.

Here, now, this version of her stared at him like he had pulled the stars from the sky and dropped them in her lap.

“Explain,” she said, voice low. Barely above a whisper. “Please.”

And so he did. He told her everything. He spoke with the precision of someone who had repeated this story more times than he could count.

He told her about the loops. About the lives. About the years he had spent running, the ones he had spent fighting, the ones he had spent alone. He told her about her laughter in the 17th life, her fury in the 33rd, the horrified sound she made when she saw Lan Wangji kiss him in Loop 39.

“You always knew,” he said.

Her hands were clenched on her knees. Her knuckles were white.

“Even when you didn’t understand. Even when you didn’t believe. You never gave up on me.”

He met her eyes.

“You’re doing it again.”

She made a noise in her throat, something wounded and wild and barely human. Her hands lifted slowly, like she wanted to reach for him but wasn’t sure she had the right.

And still—still—he waited.

Because in every life, she had chosen him but she had always deserved the choice. Because love without choice isn’t love. Because even grief deserves consent.

Then—finally—she touches his cheek. Her hand was warm. It trembled.

“Why?” she whispered. “You—you must be so…how are you still—?”

Alive?

Whole?

Human?

Her voice trailed off. He leaned into her palm.

“I’m ok. I think…I think I could’ve been happy in my last life.”

She pulled him close.

And for a moment, just a moment, he let himself believe that he was home. Believe that this, here, now, is not another beginning of an end.

Chapter Text

Jiang Cheng feels the proximity first, the brush of heat, the presence that’s always made too much noise in the silence, the scent of red wine spilt across wild chrysanthemums and scorched cinnamon.

He shifts back just slightly. Wei Wuxian leans in anyway, grinning like he’s never learned how to take a hint. Jiang Cheng’s eyes flick sideways, flat and unimpressed.

Go ahead. Make my day, he thinks.

“Do you need something,” he says, not really a question.

Wei Wuxian squints at him. “You look different.”

That sets off something low in Jiang Cheng’s chest, a cold click, like a lock sliding shut. His spine straightens by reflex, his expression blanking just enough. “Huh?”

His pulse jumps. He’d barely begun to unseal his siren abilities. Had it already begun to show too much? 

(Loop 18, someone noticed early. They tried to drown him and when that didn't work, they burned him.)

Wei Wuxian’s face lights up.

“I knew it!” he crows, triumphant. “You’re not wearing that ridiculous leather and armour get up! And your hair—” He gestures wildly. “It’s not in a bun.”

Jiang Cheng exhales through his nose. “It’s hot,” he says, dryly. “Lotus Pier is always humid this time of year.”

“So I finally wore you down,” Wei Wuxian says, nudging him with an elbow. “Took me only a decade and five lifetimes, but I knew I’d get there.”

“You didn’t,” Jiang Cheng scoffs, pushing his chair back to stand. His robes shift with him, soft and loose cotton that sways as he moves. A far cry from his usual armoured stiffness during this age.

Wei Wuxian laughs. “Oh no. You sound like you’re admitting I was right. I’m going to write this down.”

Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes. Wei Wuxian throws an arm around his shoulders. Jiang Cheng doesn’t shove him off but he doesn’t lean in either.

There’s a stillness to him, a waiting. Wei Wuxian pauses, leaning in to peer closer.

“…Wait,” he says, squinting at the side of Jiang Cheng’s face. “Is that—”

Jiang Cheng sighs. “What?”

“Is that an earring?”

“Oh.” Jiang Cheng touches his ear absently. “Yeah.”

Wei Wuxian squawks. “You own jewellery? And wear it? Since when did you wear earrings? Wait, since when were your ears even pierced?”

“It’s an ear cuff,” Jiang Cheng says, deadpan.

Wei Wuxian leans in with exaggerated inspection. “Pearls and silver? What, does it keep the sinful away?”

“Try harder. If it did, it hasn’t worked yet, seeing as you’re here.”

“Ouch,” Wei Wuxian grins. “You wound me.”

Jiang Cheng’s eye twitches. He shoves him, lightly. Not enough to make him fall, just enough to reestablish the distance.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

Wei Wuxian beams. “Nope. You always say the sweetest things, A-Cheng.”

His mouth twitches into a smile. Something that would’ve been real in another life, another loop, another body.

“Your jokes aren’t funny,” he says.

There’s no snapping and no yelling. The sharp edges are dulled now, sanded down by repetition, by exhaustion. But there’s no softness either. Just the kind of closeness that hurts if you breathe too deeply.

Wei Wuxian watches him, a question half buried in his gaze. Jiang Cheng doesn’t give him the space to ask it. It’s easier now, this version of them. Less blood in the water. Memories only Jiang Cheng remembers.

Loop 7, Wei Wuxian died on their wedding day. Loop 19, they fucked. Loop 20, he died in Jiang Cheng’s arms. Loop 31, he said I love you and jumped.

In this life, they are… easy.

In this life, they are not enemies. They are closer, having not been broken down by tragedy and unspoken misunderstandings. Jiang Cheng allows the warmth of Wei Wuxian’s shoulder beside his for a heartbeat too long before stepping away.

He cannot afford to let the ache build. He remembers the life where they loved each other. Where Wei Wuxian had whispered his name like prayer, where his hands had been steady, reverent, wrapped around his hips as though Jiang Cheng was something sacred. He remembers all of it.

But he also remembers the loops that followed. Forty-seven lives, to be exact, where Wei Wuxian had left. Some gently. Some cruelly. Some not at all—just vanished, dead, empty eyed or burning alive.

So Jiang Cheng steels his heart, tucks it behind old scars and tightly bound seals and lets Wei Wuxian joke and lean and smile.

Lets him stay.

But only at arm’s length.

Because he knows the leaving is coming.

It always does.