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It's not like it was a secret– not in Lotus Pier, where boys spent more of the hot, humid summer than not shirtless and dripping with river water. As senior disciple, Wei Wuxian had first dibs on pushing his unsuspecting shidis off bridges and banks; they pretended it was training, making sure that everyone was able to keep their heads and remember to tread water even when surprised, or making sure that they maintained a cultivator's diligence and awareness. Really, of course, it was because they were teenage boys, and the more Wei Wuxian liked you the more often you found yourself pinwheeling into the water with the absolute minimum of grace and dignity. Jiang Cheng was very good at pulling his monster of a shixiong down with him, and then attempting to push his head underwater in revenge.
In all this, it was not even remarkable that Jiang Cheng's trousers clung to him in different places– that the soaked white cotton, translucent with water, showed a smooth dark patch between his legs as he wrung out his hair on the riverbank. Nor was it remarkable, as they grew older, to let Wei Wuxian look at him; to explore the soft skin; to pet a finger curiously through the fine hair as it dried, to spread his lips as they lay sprawled on the bank in the afternoon, to touch, to touch, to touch–
When he was small Jiang Cheng would catch moths in his hands, the little grey ones, fuzzy and dull. They would flutter in his cupped palms, warm and little and tickly. It would have been so easy to smash them, but he never did. When he let them go they would tilt, tipsily, as they inevitably returned to their circles around the candle in his room, searching in vain for the stars.
When they burned up it was as a brief, brilliant, sudden flare. It always left spots on his vision.
Wei Wuxian always had a strange, particular fascination with clothing, with the slide of silk or catch of cotton across skin, with the revelation of taking someone's clothes off, with the strange excitement of leaving them on. When they first started sleeping together, tentative to begin with then swiftly growing bolder, it was to the ordinary tune of boys undressing, of the sheer routineness of nakedness in a riverside sect in summer, of cursing and twisting your belt around to get the clasps open because you could swear you'd gotten it fastened just fine by yourself that morning, and finally, with an unbecoming pout, calling your long-suffering shixiong over to help you get undressed. It had nothing to do with vulnerability. Jiang Cheng's formal robes really do have too much goddamn fabric in them to handle. Even the disciple's tunic they both wore for everyday sometimes got snagged on their own ties. It was– normal, just normal, until the day after the first daring, fumbling touches inside, and Wei Wuxian's fingers had gone suddenly still against Jiang Cheng's collar and Jiang Cheng had gone abruptly, luminously red–
It should have been frightening: how quickly, how easily, they slipped into their strange orbit pattern.
"It doesn't really count," Wei Wuxian always told him, careless, breezy. He would burrow his face into Jiang Cheng's neck, bite and lick at his skin, pinch and pull at nipples and cock alike until he was coming apart shaking and shivery around his fingers or, later on, his dick. Never kisses, though. Kisses mean it's real, and this isn't real. Just a game, you know? Just boys, playing at being men; or scientists, experimenting– what feels good, what feels bad, what can hook into someone's soul and pull a shrieking orgasm out of them like a transplanted organ.
It was never meant to be anything real. Jiang Cheng still started wearing his belt so that it fastened in the back.
See, here's the thing (Jiang Cheng thinks, sometimes, traitorously) about trust: it is vastly different from knowing someone. Wei Wuxian knows him body and soul but does not always seem to quite understand him. Jiang Cheng was always a solemn, over-earnest child. Wei Wuxian has never been serious a day in his life, has never known what it is to be fundamentally inferior, and Jiang Cheng would throw himself into the fire in a heartbeat if it meant keeping it that way. He would rip out his kidneys, his liver, his lungs. He would place them himself into his shixiong’s hands for safekeeping.
Wei Wuxian would not know what to do with them, is the thing. But he would keep them safe. Jiang Cheng wants to (has to) believe that that is enough.
Once, Wei Wuxian's hands came up over his eyes and he'd– gone boneless and pliant, so quickly it felt like falling. It had scared them both, that first time. The next was more deliberate: an experiment, controls and notes and hypotheses, testing the limits of it, and then finally (beautifully, agonizingly) thin clever fingers slipping up into Jiang Cheng's cunt and lighting up the dark space inside the blindfold with sparks.
“Why do you like this so much? It's just dark,” said Wei Wuxian once, trying it himself. Jiang Cheng was suddenly certain that if he said anything about the safekeeping of internal organs he would keel over right there and die of embarrassment, so instead he said “Because I can't see your ugly face, that's why” and they laughed and Wei Wuxian didn't ask again.
The thing is: a heart is a fragile creature. The fact that it can be repaired after the fact does not change this. Jiang Cheng's is a mass of stitches and scars, ugly with its long years of survival. He knows this. He lies in bed and catalogues the mundanities of his life and promises himself that he will stop handing it away to be torn into and apart, dissected like an autopsied corpse by thin clever scientist's fingers. There should not be any tissue left to heal over, by now. Surely there is no one left who would want this scarred, hideous heart of his, this sleeve-open mess of soft stubborn sponge that keeps grimly knitting itself back together. Even Wei Wuxian didn't want it, and yet it continues to beat its delicate little grey wings and circle around the light. It refuses to die.
He thinks sometimes that a part of him knew, even at that desperate moment, that he was being lied to. But Wei Wuxian is so brilliant; clever and fierce and blinding with it– if anyone could have found a way to pull off the impossible it would be him. So Jiang Cheng had let himself been blinded, and walked into the light to be burned up.
(Or maybe that too is a lie. Maybe Jiang Cheng just really is that gullible.)
He remembers: the drag of his lashes like a moth's wings against the rough, makeshift blindfold. Feeling himself drop into that calm, quiet space. Thin, clever fingers gently brushing his hair away from the knot, firming it up; familiar, like smoke on the wind, like the warm water of summer in Yunmeng, like pushing your friends’ heads under the surface of the river. He tried to catch Wei Wuxian's hands, unsure what he needed, what he wanted. Don't leave me, maybe; or maybe, you hold my heart. Kiss me, maybe; I want this to count.
“It'll be fine, shidi,” said Wei Wuxian softly. “You're so good for me. All you have to do is what I told you to do and everything will be alright, I promise. Trust me.”
In this memory, Wei Wuxian has not broken any of his promises yet. Heart and lungs and liver (soul, and golden core) are still clutched gentle, confused but willing, in his cupped palms. They flutter weakly, yearning for the light.
“Remember, which name do you give to her?” he asks.
“Yours,” says Jiang Cheng, into the soft darkness.