Halfway between Guanyin Temple and Lotus Pier, Jin Ling's sword plummets.
The rational part of Jiang Cheng's mind, the part that has decades of experience as a veteran cultivator, recognizes it as a controlled emergency landing.
All the rest of him - the animal, the human, the uncle - panics.
"Jin Ling!"
He hurls himself downwards at an even steeper angle, made safe only by brute force application of his dangerously depleted spiritual energy.
A spear width from the ground he catches up. Instinctually he aligns the swords' resonances and buffers their remaining descent. His eyes roam the surrounding forest clearing for threats, monsters. Cultivators. A Jin, here to take the sect heir back. A Nie, rising from death. For a second he is sure there will be a short, golden, smiling man, a friend and deadly enemy, waiting, waiting, by the tree line.
Fuck. His mind is still scrambled.
"Jin Ling, what the hell?"
He shakes his nephews arm, maybe a touch harder than necessary, and is suddenly shoved backwards off his own sword.
"Leave me alone!" Jin Ling shouts and then he is on the ground and stomping over the knoll. It's mostly stone and mud, with a few enterprising strands of yellowish grass. The boy's feet make deep impressions in the dirt.
There had been power in that move. Jiang Cheng has never before felt Jin Ling's core in conflict with his own outside of sparring. Somehow it made it past all his defenses and has left him, a sect leader, sprawling.
He's halfway up, halfway to an enraged shout, when Jin Ling screams.
It's the kind of sound that people often will refer to as not even human - except, of course, Jiang Cheng knows that it is the most human sound of all. It's a sound of battlefields and deathbeds. Scorched ground and hollowed out buildings. Hollowed out people. It's rage and despair and humanity.
Jin Ling pauses to take a few breaths, and then he screams again. At the trees and rocks and horizon reaching forest lands surrounding them. At the sky above and the earth below.
It's not a sound that his nephew is ever supposed, ever allowed, to make. It's been Jiang Cheng's overriding ambition, these past fifteen years, to safeguard that. He's changed the powers that be, he's killed and begged and bartered, he's played at politics he's hated, to make Jin Ling's world free from the possibility of that sound.
He's failed. Again.
Jiang Cheng rises into a crouch. His child is not a child any more, but a powerful young cultivator caught in the grip of his emotions. The paths to spiritual cultivation are many, but they all come down to balance. That's what makes qi deviations the monster under the bed, what made Jin Guangyao's manipulations so dangerous despite his average core. Jiang Cheng's balance has, this last decade, settled on the razor thin edge between determination and rage. Jin Ling's pivot points are as yet fluid as the river - and right now he is a maelstrom.
"Jin Ling," he begins. The confidence and certainty he aims to project isn't there. He clears his throat and has just raised his clarity bell when the younger man whirls around and comes striding towards him.
There is nothing childlike about A-Ling just now. His eyes are dark and hooded, his fists are clenched. He steps right up to Jiang Cheng and fists the front of his uncle's muddy robes. It's a gesture Jiang Cheng previously associated with impassioned pleas for sweets.
"What's the worst lie you have ever told me?" Jin Ling bites out.
"What…"
"What. Is. The. Worst. Lie?"
Jiang Cheng blinks.
What is the worst lie he's ever told Jin Ling? He is, he was, a child. Jiang Cheng lies to him all the time, of course. No supper if he doesn't clean up his gear. The big box under his bed is not a birthday present. Uncle isn't sad, that's preposterous.
He'd break his legs if he ever endangered himself again.
Before, Jiang Cheng had resigned himself to being the unpredictable uncle. Changing his mind. Arguing with Jin Ling so loudly that the swallows alighted from the roofs and the servants sighed. A storm cloud to Jin Guangyao's steady, golden guidance. He knew, because it was his greatest and most coveted success, that Jin Ling loved him best, but he never quite understood the why of it. In Lotus Pier Jin Ling had a room, no personal servants once he'd outgrown his nurses, and days of sweaty work, or chores, or training with the notoriously bad tempered Sandu Shengshou. In Lanling, Jin Ling had a small army of attendants and suites, golden armor and diamond encrusted toys, and a calm, smiling, steady uncle.
Jin Guangyao, the liar. Lies as light and airy as the spun sugar palaces that come out of Lanling's kitchens. Lies heavy enough to suffocate, torture and kill. Lies so pervasive, that whatever truth might once have been there, whatever true loyalty, love and care, is now forever tainted.
"Answer me!" Jin Ling demands, and then he shakes Jiang Cheng.
That is what it takes to clear the older man's mind, to make him remember who he is, because a second later his nephew's wrists are secured in his left hand while his right snakes around him. A river wyrm grip.
"Let me go!"
"No. Shut up. I'm thinking."
Jin Ling growls and writhes in his grip, but for all his ill-advised mimicry, rage and anger isn't the fulcrum on which the young man's inner balance and strength balances. Like this, Jiang Cheng will always have the advantage.
It's a good question, Jiang Cheng decides. It is earned. Whatever happens, Jin Ling deserves an answer, because Jin Guangyao just tore down the world that he'd weaved for them all with his silver tongue, and when your foundation stones are crumbling, what can you trust in?
So what is the worst lie he's ever told Jin Ling?
Oh.
Oh. He knows.
"It's about your mother," Jiang Cheng says.
Jin Ling stills.
"When you were nine, or ten, you ran away into the forest. We searched for two days. Do you remember?"
Jin Ling nods once, stiffly.
"And when you finally came out…" Jiang Cheng feels the ghost of the memory, of the embodied horror of his nephew being missing, of the love and gratefulness and overriding rage when the brat appeared on the path behind them, stepping out of the foliage.
"When you came back, I said that your…" He clears his throat. "I said that your mother would have been ashamed of you."
He lets go of Jin Ling's wrists, absent-mindedly notes the bruises there, and feels how his own core sends over small drops of healing energy. It's not necessary. Jin Ling is more than capable of doing that himself. It's Jiang Cheng who is unable to stop. He lets go just enough to be able to look the young man in the eye.
"I… fuck, I shouldn't have said that. I've regretted it ever since. It was a lie, Jin Ling. She'd never be ashamed of you. I'm…" Damn it. And damn Wei Wuxian. "I'm sorry."
Jin Ling doesn't get to hear as many stories as he should about his mother, and that's also Jiang Cheng's fault. He's trying, but. He's trying.
Jin Ling is blinking at him, brow furrowed. He's searching for something and bites his lip, like Jiang Cheng has told him a thousand times not to do.
"I don't remember that," he finally mutters.
Jiang Cheng is outraged.
"How can you not remember! You were shaking and crying, fuck, I had to make you soup."
Jiang Cheng mostly agrees with Cook that clan leaders have no business in the kitchens, but there are things like celebration soup and death-of-pets soup and very, very rarely apology soup, and what else is he to do.
"I remember you being angry! I remember the soup and the blankets - you made me stay in bed for two days! I don't remember, that. About my mother."
Jiang Cheng can't believe this. "I carried that around with me for six years, and you don't remember."
"I was nine! You were angry! It's hard to focus on anything else, when you are angry at me." Jin Ling tugs himself away and takes a step back. He raises his hands to his face, drags them up and and through his hair for a moment until his fingers stop at the Jin peony hair piece.
He studies Jiang Cheng like this. He should look ridiculous, but he doesn't, and Jiang Cheng finds himself suddenly holding his breath. He's being weighed, measured. A part of him wants to bellow, a part of him wants to plead.
Finally, Jin Ling lets out a huff of breath. "I believe you. Everything is fucked, but I have to choose to believe in something. I choose you."
"Language," Jiang Cheng says, hypocrite that he is. It's also not even close, not even on the same continent, to what he should be saying, what he wants to say. "Of course you should believe me."
Jin Ling's mouth twists. "You're a rival sect leader. You're taking me away from my guards, my…" his jaw clenches, "...people. Just after the Jin sect leader has been killed by the Lan sect leader. So I really shouldn't. But thinking like that, that's what he taught me, so maybe that's just a fucking trap as well."
"Stop with the fucking swearing, Jin Ling, I won't tell you again." Jiang Cheng takes a breath, but there's nothing he can say. "There's nothing I can say to make this better. You know I'm no good with sugar coating stuff. It's all shit, Jin Ling. Now come on. I have to get you to Lotus Pier where it's safe, and you need to sleep.
He takes a deep breath. "I do know this." He puts a hand on Jin Ling's shoulder and pours everything he is into a single truth: "We will get through this, together."
Jin Ling looks like he has a thousand things left to say and no words to say them with. After a moment he nods.
"I'm sorry I pushed you."
"You'd better be sorry. I should make you do all this laundry yourself."
"It's not my fault you're old and can't stay on your feet" Jin Ling mutters before deftly gliding out of reach. Jiang Cheng's smack is not even a half-hearted attempt.
They rise over the forest, even more tired and dirty than when they landed. But their swords resonate together now, a song of power. Jiang Cheng knows that for all the lies and the fuckery and the sheer ghastly tragedy of it all, there is room, and space, and time, to try again. It's not like either of them has ever learned how to give up.