Work Text:
The sky mourns, the day after you kill your brother.
The world says that you kill him, at the very least. You wish you could tell yourself you killed him. Just the word brother makes you feel sick. It’s not all the truth; not all a lie; it feels like a betrayal to the feeling of your sister’s blood cooling on your palms. Strange word, brother. It implies companionship. Implies loyalty. Implies meaning.
A pall of ash-grey clouds coats the sky above. Rain storms down in wet, dirty clumps, cold and hard against your skin. A knife of frigid wind makes its way across the air and fades, and then another takes its place.
Throughout the day, the sky mourns. Throughout the day, you do not.
There is work to be done. There is always work to be done. There has always been work to be done since you were young and had watched your parents bodies splayed out along the same stone courtyard you walk through daily, left there, disgraced, like an old rug. Disrespected, the way those Wen dogs put their hands and feet on them. Blood drying, cooling, turning from crimson to brown.
Lotus Pier requires rebuilding. Trade routes need to be reestablished. Your people are ravenous, starved of food and stability - most came to you hungry for vengeance and you gave them that. Now, it has all cooled, and you must find a way to pound what is left to the shape of something functional.
The sky mourns, the day after you kill your brother. You grip your brush so tightly as you write until the tip gives out, and you do not.
They all say that you killed him. You know that you did not. Even in this, he had outdone you; eyes bleeding with madness and fractured with regret. It had made something in your stomach burn. How dare he? How dare he look like that? How dare he not? How dare he be so obstinate as to get your sister killed and how dare he have that corpse of his leave your nephew without a father and how dare he never come home?
You rebuild a broken bridge. The wood had been burned; the river beneath it runs red. Children splash in clear water, and when you see them, you turn away. It makes you feel sick.
Clear water looks like blood, now. In your memories, two boys with their smiles bathed in it look like blood. Their laughter had been bright, but their eyes must have been dark, and hearing its sound echoing through Yunmeng makes you want to burn it down. You want to leave it blackened, charred. You never want to hear it again. A secret that you will never tell a soul is that there’s a part of you that’s glad that your nephew does not laugh. You don’t know what you would do, if he sounded like those two boys from years ago.
Jiang-zhongzhu , your people say, eyes wary and respectful. You do not give your people kindness. You give them stability, and you give them a reason to stay. But you have never been a kind man. You have never been a charismatic man. You have never been a man who is enough for that brother of yours - for that brother who had refused to allow you to understand him, even in death.
The sky mourns, the day that everyone says that you killed your brother.
You don’t know what you would have done, if you’d had the chance to, properly. You like to tell yourself that you would have. That the ache in your chest is a hatred, a demand which will only be satisfied with his blood on your hands. You tell yourself that every Demonic Cultivator who dies begging at your fists is only meeting the same fate that he would have. People whisper that you’re looking for him - you want to agree. You want to be looking for him. You want to meet his eyes and you want to look at his face and you want to-
You want to-
The sky mourns, the day that everyone says that you killed your brother. The sky mourns afterwards, as well, for a very long time. Your farmers rejoice at the rain but worry about the lack of sun.
You think about a man who stole away with the same Sect who massacred both of your own, on a mountain of corpses. You think about standing across from him in that cave, a corpse and a ravine of everything unsaid between you. You think about standing across from him at a battlefield, piles of bodies and your entire family between you.
The sky mourns less, as time goes on. You tell yourself that you never mourned at all.
Your nephew grows up. He looks like you - those same sharp cheekbones and shaded eyes and a snarl on his face that has rage twisted up into every corner. He’s angry, and he’s lonely, and there’s no other half for him, and you think, good. If he has no one, that means there’s no other half to his body that will bleed buckets when it rips itself away.
The sun comes out, slowly. It did not come out the day after it all happened, but it comes out in the weeks after. Sodden streets warm; aching roofs are given relief. You are not; the weight on your chest does not ease, and the emptiness at your side does not fill. You take the wooden flute hidden in your chambers, kept in the dark, and you clean it out, feel resentment emanating from it with every wipe. You feel sick; you feel disgusting; you feel like a traitor, to your brother in law and your sister and your nephew. You feel that wooden flute in your hands, feel where your brother’s fingertips once laid, imagine your own echoing a memory.
You hate him, you say. You killed him, they say. You don’t talk about him. He is the one person your nephew never asks about. He asks you about his mother, and you snarl at him. You don’t know what you would do if he asked about him. You don’t know what you would do. You don’t-
The sky mourns, the day after you kill your brother. You did not kill your brother. You wish that you had. You wish that you knew that if it was really him in front of you, if you would be able to.