Thread by @larkspur_9

I spend a somewhat more than reasonable amount of time thinking about #cql post-canon Wen Qing. (No body no death, amirite?)

After Guanyin Temple, everyone thought they were done with revelations about Jin Guangyao’s shady activities. They learn pretty quickly that everyone was wrong.

Jin Ling has been sect leader for a few weeks, and it’s going...okay. Jiang Cheng is still at Carp Tower, pretending not to hover. They’re having breakfast together (so that Jin Ling can pretend not to ask for his advice) when one of Jin Guangyao’s old advisors interrupts.

Jiang Cheng isn’t sure if any of these Jin sycophants can be trusted, but they can’t get rid of all of them without evidence that they were complicit in Jin Guangyao’s crimes. So he narrows his eyes at the man, but waits for him to speak.

The man bows. “Sect Leader Jin, the dungeon guard has been wondering—what’s to be done with the prisoner?”

Jin Ling stares. “The...prisoner?”

“There’s a dungeon in Carp Tower?” Jiang Cheng hadn’t heard that.

Jin Ling hadn’t either, apparently. He shakes his head, bewildered.

Jiang Cheng snorts, because of COURSE Jin Guangyao had a secret dungeon. “Who is this prisoner?”

The advisor winces. “I don’t know, Sect Leader Jiang. She was here before my time, and Lianfang-Zun never told me her name.”

Jiang Cheng raises an eyebrow and looks to Jin Ling.

Jin Ling just stares back at him.

“Let’s see this prisoner, then,” Jiang Cheng says.

Jin Ling nods. “Right. Yes. Take us to the prisoner.”

The advisor leads them down to the dungeon.

There are four cells, one badly damaged, two others standing empty. The fourth has a small shape huddled in one corner.

Jiang Cheng nudges Jin Ling toward the bars. He should be the one to speak to the prisoner, to assert his authority.

Jin Ling looks at him, eyes wide with panic, and then turns back to the cell. “Um...hello.”

The figure in the corner scoffs. “They’re sending children to see me now? Is this some fresh torture devised by Lianfang-Zun?”

That voice sends a chill down Jiang Cheng’s spine.

She lifts her head, and Jiang Cheng’s stomach drops. Her face is gaunt and coated in grime, her hair hanging around it in a greasy tangle. But still, he couldn’t mistake her.

“Lady Wen?”

Wen Qing doesn’t know what to expect when she sees him. The kid was surprising enough, but Jiang Wanyin? “What is this?” she asks.

Is he here to kill her? There was a time when… But a lot has happened since then. She knows better than to expect that he’s on her side.

“Let her out,” Jiang Wanyin says sharply. When no one moves, he nudges the kid.

The kid jumps, looks back at him, and then turns to the guard. “Let her out,” he echoes.

The guard immediately moves to unlock the cell door.

It doesn’t seem like they’re here to execute her. But she has no reason to expect mercy, either. Honestly, she doesn’t care either way. It would be a relief to just be done with all this. As long as they’ll tell her one thing first. “Where’s my brother?”

A-Ning is the reason they’ve kept her alive. If they want him to be useful to them, they need him to be healthy. She’s the only one who knows how to ensure that. So she’s gotten to see him from time to time over the years. He never recognizes her.

And they never leave her alone with him long enough for her to do anything about those nails in his head. But she’s seen him, at least. She’s been able to confirm that he’s…not well. But alive.

As long as he’s alive, there’s a chance that one day he’ll be free. Safe. It’s the only thing in the world she’s ever wanted.

But it’s been so long since they brought her to him, and she’s starting to think… “What did Lianfang-Zun do to him?”

“Your brother is… I don’t know. With Wei Wuxian somewhere, probably.”

Wen Qing blanches. “Dead.”

“No!” Jiang Wanyin says quickly. “Traveling.”

Wen Qing doesn’t understand. They said that Wei Wuxian died. So many years ago. She’s not sure how many.

Did they lie? Has he been out there all this time? She tries to remember that’s what she and A-Ning intended when they left him in the Burial Mounds and turned themselves in. She tries not to be bitter that he’s been out there in the world while they’ve been here. So many years.

She hasn’t moved to get up from the cell floor yet. Jiang Wanyin steps inside, his hands reaching out toward her. She flinches away.

“Lady Wen, I—” He doesn’t seem to know where to go from there.

She looks up at him, at the stricken expression on his face, and she tries to feel something about it. She can’t find the energy to care.

“Why are you here?” she asks. She’s so tired. If A-Ning is really free, is really somewhere with Wei Wuxian... This is fine. She’s ready.

“Jin Guangyao is dead.”

That’s. “Dead?” What does that even mean?

“A-Ling is Sect Leader Jin now,” Jiang Wanyin says, gesturing to the kid, who’s still hovering outside of the cell, scowling and silent.

A-Ling. Oh. She looks at him, and something breaks. Her heart, maybe.

She closes her eyes. Nods. Jin Ling deserves justice. And she’s the only Wen they have.

“Lady Wen…”

Just say it, she thinks.

“A lot has happened.” Jiang Wanyin’s voice is unaccountably gentle. “I’ll explain. But first. Let’s get you out of here.”

She opens her eyes, and he’s holding a hand out for her again. And she doesn’t know what it means, what any of this means. But A-Ning is safe. And Wei Wuxian? Lianfang-Zun is dead. And she’s…here.

She reaches up and takes his hand.

{{I am once again (read: always) thinking about post-cql Wen Qing, so I guess it’s time to pick this thread up again!}}

No one has any idea where fucking Wei Wuxian is. Of course. Not even Hanguang-Jun. Which, that one’s a surprise. Jiang Cheng hadn’t expected him to let WWX out of his sight ever again.

Jiang Cheng has people looking, though. He updates Lady Wen on their lack of progress daily.

He’s not sure it’s the right thing to do. All he has to offer her is continual disappointment. But it’s the only excuse he can think of to check in on her. She hasn’t left the guest room they put her in. She just sits by the window, still and silent.

Whenever Jiang Cheng visits, she’s listless, her attention wandering. He supposes it stands to reason. She was imprisoned for 16 years, alone with her thoughts for most of that time. Most likely she was treated...poorly. But she hasn’t spoken of it, and he doesn’t want to ask.

He wishes he knew what to do to help her. (He wishes he’d done anything to help her before, when he had a chance.)

(He wishes, more frequently than he has since that first year caring for A-Ling, that A-Jie were here. She would know what to do. How to help.) He makes soup.

Wen Qing is waiting. For this to fall apart. For it to turn out to be a dream or an elaborate ruse. Some fresh torture Lianfang-Zun has devised, giving her hope only to take it away again.

She doesn’t really think that Jiang Wanyin would participate in such a thing. She keeps turning everything over in her mind, and however she looks at it, she has to conclude he’s been honest with her.

But she can’t logic her way out of the feeling at her very core that she’ll surely lose everything again. So she waits.

She marks the passing of time by Jiang Wanyin’s visits. Every evening he brings her dinner, along with a promise that he’s still looking for WWX and A-Ning.

There’s a knock at her door. The eleventh evening since she left her prison cell. “Come in, Sect Leader Jiang,” she calls without getting up from her seat by the window.

He enters with a tray. “I brought you soup. Lotus and pork rib.”

“Your sister’s recipe,” Wen Qing says. Jiang Wanyin looks surprised, so she adds, “Wei Wuxian used to talk about it.” It was common practice in those days, to reminisce about their favorite meals whenever they were low on food.

They took turns coaxing A-Yuan to eat his fill of what little they had, prompting him to imagine that the radishes he’d grown so tired of were actually great feasts. They all tried so hard to keep him healthy. Their little A-Yuan.

She closes her eyes against the memories.

“Lady Wen. Back then, I wish— I didn’t— I should have—”

She can hear the struggle in his voice. The desire to say the right thing. The certain knowledge that nothing he can say will be enough. The guilt and sorrow and regret.

She didn’t blame him, back then. She understood him. They were so much the same, after all. Hadn’t she always done what was needed to protect her own, and damn the consequences for anyone else? She should say as much now, probably. Absolve him, insofar as she can.

But with her own thoughts and emotions so heavy, she can’t carry his too. She can’t bear the thought of prolonging this conversation.

He’s still trying, though, to formulate words. “If there’s anything I can do to—”

“Sect Leader Jiang.”

“Lady Wen?”

“I find your remorse exhausting.”

“I. Um. That’s,” he stammers. It’s funny. In their conversations over these past eleven days, he’s mostly seemed gruff and no-nonsense. But every once in a while, Wen Qing sees a flash of the awkward boy she knew at the Cloud Recesses.

Her mind drifts, briefly, to the comb he gave her during the Sunshot Campaign. She wonders what became of it after she returned it to him.

He clears his throat. “I apologize. I’ll leave you in peace.”

“Thank you,” she says, already turning away from him, back to the window.

As she hears the door slide closed, she sighs and looks down at the soup. She’ll have to talk to him eventually. She wants to. Because she’s not the only one who lost everything 16 years ago. They were so much the same before, and she thinks they’re a little bit the same still.

That will have to wait for another day, though. A day when the past isn’t hanging so heavy over her shoulders.

The soup grows cold before she can bring herself to eat it.

{{That’s all for tonight, but there will be more coming sometime soon! Here’s the top of the thread, so folks don’t have to scroll so far.}}

https://twitter.com/larkspur_9/status/1382889776190214146

((Apparently “sometime soon” is a relative term. But I’m finally back with more post-canon Wen Qing!

cw for this installment // agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress, depiction of a panic attack))

It’s been 15 days since Wen Qing’s release, and she still hasn’t been outside. Just thinking of it makes her chest tight and her breathing quick and shallow. She can’t shake the notion that the moment she steps out of Carp Tower, she’ll realize that there’s nothing out there.

That the world is gone, it was all a lie, and she’s nowhere. She’s nothing.

She’s still in that cell.

Or worse, she’ll find that the world is still out there, and she doesn’t know how to be in it anymore.

Anyway, she can’t be sure they’d let her leave if she tried. For all that she believes she can trust Jiang Wanyin, she hasn’t seen him in days. He has his own sect to run. Maybe he’s returned to Lotus Pier, left her in the care of the Jin.

Maybe they won’t be as generous with her as Jiang Wanyin would be. After all, what is she to them but the latest scandal? And the last thing they’ll want is further scandal marring the beginning of Jin Rulan’s tenure as sect leader. Perhaps they feel she’s best kept hidden away.

The idea that she might not be free to leave is a strange comfort to her. If the choice is out of her hands, she needn’t come to terms with the panic she feels at the thought of a cool breeze on her face, a marketplace teeming with life, a road stretching out before her.

There’s a knock at the door. She frowns. It’s between her usual mealtimes, and she doesn’t typically get visitors otherwise. But maybe Jiang Wanyin hasn’t returned to Lotus Pier after all. He’s the only one she can think of who might come by just to speak with her.

But it isn’t Jiang Wanyin. It’s his nephew. Curious.

“Lady Wen,” he greets as he enters.

“Sect Leader Jin.”

The young sect leader flinches at the title. “You can… Please call me Jin Ling.”

Odd, for him to be so informal with a prisoner. Or whatever she is now. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. He clears his throat, squares his shoulders, and scowls at her, and she almost has to smile.

“Lady Wen. I came to tell you that we’ve gotten word of the Ghost Gen— Of your brother.”

Something like hope swells in her chest before she quickly, instinctively crushes it down deep. Hope has never served her well before.

“He’s been traveling with a Lan disciple,” Jin Ling continues. “I’ve sent a messenger after them.”

Curious, that he should be with a Lan disciple rather than Wei Wuxian. She wouldn’t have expected the Lan to accept her brother.

It’s a lie, whispers a soft, insidious voice in her mind. It doesn’t sound true because it’s not.

But surely Jin Ling would have had the sense to come up with a more believable lie.

Surely she doesn’t have to go on doubting every word that’s spoken to her.

It’s good that they found A-Ning. (If they found A-Ning, that quiet voice says.) Maybe once she sees him, all of this will finally start to seem real.

When Jin Ling doesn’t take his leave, Wen Qing looks at him again. “Was there something else, sect leader?”

“I…um…just was…”

She raises an eyebrow at him, at his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, at his cheeks gone red, at his eyes locked on his shoes. She waits.

“Did you love Wen Ruohan?” he blurts at last.

Her other eyebrow shoots up. “No.”

He wilts slightly. “Right. Of course. He was an evil man.”

“He was. He threatened everyone I loved. Held their lives ransom to force my loyalty. His was a straightforward sort of villainy.”

She tilts her head, examining the young sect leader. He looks so small. “Lianfang-Zun was different.” Jin Ling flinches, and Wen Qing continues, “More clever. He could win loyalty—love, even—without ever letting on that he was playing you for a fool.”

“What do you know of it?” Jin Ling demands. “You’ve been locked in a cell for sixteen years.”

Wen Qing stares at the boy until he blushes and looks away. “I saw more than enough during the war,” she says. “He was my uncle’s right hand for a while, you know.”

The stubborn jut of his chin prepares her for his objection. “That was…”

“Different? Maybe not so much, from what Sect Leader Jiang has told me. Everyone did things during the war that…” She frowns. Shakes her head. “But for Lianfang-Zun it never stopped. His war never ended.”

“So you think he never really cared about—” Jin Ling breaks off with a scowl.

“I have no answers for you there, sect leader. But doubtless he made sure you had every reason to love him.”

“He had my father killed.” Jin Ling’s voice is low. Hollow.

“Yes. He used my brother as his weapon, and then he imprisoned us and executed our family for his crime. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t care to ruminate further on whether he was capable of love.”

Jin Ling blanches, seeming to realize for the first time that this might be a sensitive subject for her. “Right. Um. Sorry. I’ll just. Be going, then.”

He really is so much like Jiang Wanyin. That must be what makes her speak up just before he reaches the door. “Jin Ling.”

He looks back at her, everything in his demeanor suddenly braced for attack.

“You aren’t wrong to love the person you believed he was,” she says. And if she’s thinking of Wen Ruohan when she says it, well. Maybe this is yet another conversation she’ll want to revisit.

Jin Ling swallows and turns abruptly away from her. “I’ll let you know when our messenger catches up with your brother,” he says stiffly, and then he’s gone.

It’s strange, she thinks, to feel pity for a Sect Leader Jin.

But.

He’s so young.

They were all so young when the war took their childhoods. And now somehow it’s taken his too.

How can she be expected to believe that the world really is out there, that it really did move forward around her, when this place is exactly the same as everything was before?

She turns to the window. Somewhere, the Jin messenger is traveling through a world that still doesn’t feel real. Traveling to her brother.

A-Ning will be here soon, she tells herself, and tries to believe it.

She thinks of him coming here, finding her in this room, learning that she’s exchanged one prison for another. She can’t let him see this, see the way she’s trapped in her own mind.

She gets to her feet. She walks to the door.

There are two women standing guard outside her room. To keep others out or to keep her in, she wonders. She almost retreats back inside, not ready to know.

But then she notices that only one of them wears the gold of Lanling Jin. The other is dressed in purple.

Maybe…

Wen Qing squares her shoulders. “I would like to go outside.”

“Of course, Lady Wen,” the Jin disciple says.

The Jiang disciple smiles. “We can show you to the lotus pond, if you like.”

Wen Qing nods, and lets them lead her through the corridors of Carp Tower.

Her heart is beating so loud, she’s sure they must be able to hear it. The Jiang disciple speaks to her again, she thinks. She sees the woman’s lips move, at least, but she can’t hear the words. She fights to keep her breathing even, fights to appear in control of herself.

At the large, ornate golden doors, Wen Qing stops. The disciples both turn to her. Maybe they speak. One of them reaches out to her, but she jerks away.

She can do this. She can. She remembers how it felt. The open air.

She never thought about how vast it was when she could move through the world at will. She never thought about how small she was within it.

She draws in a breath. Nods. Pushes the door open.

There’s a rushing in her ears as she steps outside. She thinks she might be crying.

It’s so. So bright. She thought she’d gotten used to the brightness, the glare of the sun through her window. But it’s so much brighter out here. So much more. Everything is so much more.

She can’t breathe.

She’s not moving anymore, she realizes. She can’t. She needs to turn back, to go inside, to get away from the…everything. But she can’t make her feet move.

Her ears are ringing now, and a tremor runs through her, her racing heart trying to escape her chest.

She clenches her hands into fists, feels the sharp bite of her nails in the soft flesh of her palms. She focuses on that sensation, and closes her eyes, and draws in a long, slow breath. Keeps breathing in until she can’t anymore. Then she lets it out just as slowly.

It used to help when she felt like the walls of her cell were closing in around her.

What if that’s exactly what’s happening now?

She’s afraid to open her eyes. Afraid that when she does, she’ll see those damp gray walls. What will she do if it was all in her head?

She tried so hard not to hope. She knows now that she failed. She let herself believe it, all of it. And now it’s gone.

But it felt so real.

Feels so real.

There’s still. Still sunlight warm on her skin.

She needs to open her eyes. She can’t know until she opens her eyes.

She’s not sure how long she stands there, locked in a battle with herself. But she needs to know. Finally, finally she opens her eyes.

There are no walls.

The two disciples hover before her, twin expressions of concern on their faces.

She gulps in the clean air, feels dizzy with it. One of the disciples steps toward her, hand outstretched.

She shakes her head. “I’m…” Fine? That’s not exactly true. She’s still trembling, her heart still racing.

The disciples exchange a look. “If you’d like to go back inside…”

Yes. Please. Yes. “No.” She needs to do this. She’s so afraid. So afraid that if she doesn’t do it now, she never will. “No, I can do this.”

She takes a step forward, and then another. That cold, fluttering panic doesn’t subside. But it doesn’t consume her either. She can do this.

“You said there’s a lotus pond?”

Somehow she keeps moving. Follows the disciples to the pond one faltering step at a time.

She’s not prepared for the way the sight of it punches through her chest. All at once she’s back in the Burial Mounds, surrounded by her family, celebrating WWX’s first lotus sprouts. The memory is so visceral it hurts.

She reaches out to the nearest flower, slow, hesitant, half expecting it to fade away to nothing. But the petals are soft against her fingertips. They’re real. She’s real.

She’s real, and she’s here, and she’s grounded in her body, and it doesn’t matter how wide the sky is above her.

She sinks to her knees in front of the pond, leans over to trail her fingers through the water.

She can feel the tears running down her face again, and she doesn’t try to stop them. In the rippling surface of the pond lies every beloved face she’ll never see again. Her heart aches with the echo of their bright spot of joy in the midst of so much struggle.

There are so many pieces of herself she thought she lost during those sixteen long years in the dark. Joy and warmth and love. She worked so hard to hollow herself out. In the damp chill of that cell, she let herself freeze to her very core. There was safety in numbness.

But here, in this place that holds an echo of who she used to be, she can feel the seed of something—not gone, just hidden away, lying dormant.

Maybe, if she’s free, if the world is real, she doesn’t have to be this hollow, frozen thing anymore.

Even in the Burial Mounds, Wei Wuxian found a way to create something beautiful, a piece of home. Wen Qing can do that for herself. She can remember what home felt like. She can find a way back to it.

She closes her eyes, and breathes in the scent of the lotus blossoms, and tilts her face up to the sun.

((That’s all for now! Next time: a reunion.

From the top, for folks just joining))

https://twitter.com/larkspur_9/status/1382889776190214146