A/N: GOODNESS is that the time. Everyone pretend it's still the 5th for a second so this is still a Jiang Cheng birthday fic.
I don't think this fic requires any warnings that aren't present in canon, but be aware that it takes place in post-canon Jiang Cheng and Lan Xichen's heads, and they're not always very nice to themselves or each other. This fic is essentially two prologues followed by a meatier final chapter: updates will be weekly. Thanks are due to TrueColours and to my sister for beta reading!
There is also a playlist for this fic (you can find it on the fic's AO3 mirror, since I can't link it here), but if you don't feel like listening to that, do definitely listen to "Suroor" by Arooj Aftab, after which this fic is named. Happy reading!
It had always felt to Jiang Cheng like a flash of lightning.
That sudden, and that rare. He could go for weeks, months – sometimes years, without it; and then suddenly someone would turn their head a particular way, and it would light him up from the inside out. A shijie would lean back to drink, water running down her throat, and it was as if the clouds had parted to reveal the sun, and left Jiang Cheng – in the wake of this beauty – with a sudden, inexplicable thirst.
It was a shixiong, sometimes, which was… Jiang Cheng had not needed anyone to tell him that that did not bode well. Even after the lightning-flash was over, the thought would haunt him, for days afterwards, of what his mother would say if she knew. Oh, sure, everyone knew there were women in Meishan who swore themselves to each other; but he was his mother's son, and the sect's heir. He had a duty. This was not where it lay.
His father would doubtless have said the same, had he ever noticed. But no-one had ever accused of Jiang Fengmian of being eagle-eyed.
He had been lenient, even amused, with Wei Wuxian, who flirted as naturally as breathing with any Mianmian or Yuandao who would pass the time of day with him. Jiang Cheng wondered sometimes if his father would have found it easier if Jiang Cheng had been like that too – charming, freewheeling. He wasn't: he couldn't be.
Wei Wuxian had made that easier, once. Jiang Cheng might have found it tiresome to watch him flirt with all and sundry – troublesome, even, when it led them both into trouble – but it camouflaged his own general lack of interest well enough. Beside Wei Wuxian, as always, he looked a proper sect-heir, if somewhat stiff.
And it was harder to care that he was alone in this too, in not understanding what his peers seemed to want so desperately, when he was never really alone. With Wei Wuxian at his side, it faded into the background: just one less thing to worry about among a sect-heir's daily duties.
He would have to marry eventually, of course, but… that was for the future. And in that at least he and his sister were the same, knowing that it did not matter what – whether – they wanted. They had a duty.
(Though it wasn't what Jiang Cheng wanted for her – that lack of desire, corralled into the shape of marriage…)
He'd thought that duty might become sweet, once, at Cloud Recesses. When one of those rare lightning-flashes had struck him, with Wen Qing's upright bearing and solemn eyes. It had seemed like good luck, that a calm, wise woman of his own rank could move the lightning in him and stir him to want.
After Sunshot, it hadn't seemed like good luck any more.
After the death of the Yiling Patriarch, there had been no luck, and no lightning, at all.
Not that it mattered. He still had a duty, but he had found it hard to care that he was incapable of carrying it out. The matchmakers had given him up as a lost cause – well, who was to say they weren't right? What business did a man like him have getting married? He was madness, dragged from the battlefield and dressed in robes and duties. He was rage and grief clad in work clothes.
The romantics, the ones who thought he showed signs of restrained passion, quickly learned better. The sensible ones saw straight to the truth of him and wisely turned away. What woman worth her salt would marry the half-grown, half-mad leader of a starveling sect? Any woman who saw all this, the bad manners and the monstrous grief beneath, the years of hard work to come with no reward, the marriage bed barren of comfort, and still walked into it clear-eyed and cold-hearted to win herself the Jiang name – what good could she possibly bring to the Jiang sect?
(What could she bring to Jin Ling? To a baby already bereft of the best mother ever to walk the earth? Even the sensible ones seemed to see Jin Ling as merely another responsibility of the sect leader's wife, and he couldn't seem to make them see that Jin Ling was the priority. Not the price for Jiang Cheng's heart, but the whole of it.)
So in the end there had been no dutiful marriage, and no lightning. Neither the calm nor the storm: just the little daily griefs that he grew and shed like skin.
Which left him here, thrown wildly off-balance, struck by lightning in the midst of Cloud Recesses.
He hadn't even meant to be there. In Cloud Recesses, yes, but not there – not in that specific clearing, by that specific pond. It was the first discussion conference since the death of Jin Guangyao, and all the revelations that had come with it. Jiang Cheng had come to Gusu Lan dreading it, but determined to do as he always did: sleep in the quarters he always slept in, speak to the people he always spoke to, walk by the ways he always walked. Not to stray from the path.
And then he had heard that laugh, braying and familiar, and suddenly he had needed to be somewhere – anywhere – else. Just for a moment, just to gain a moment's calm. And when was it safer to flee Wei Wuxian than when you already knew where he was? Jiang Cheng had only wandered down a path, a clear one, if narrow. He had taken note of every turning: it wasn't as if he couldn't retrace his steps.
But then, somehow, he had turned around to find that the scene behind him was unfamiliar. The trouble with the Lan living amid a bamboo forest, Jiang Cheng thought bitterly, was that to a stranger every glade in it looked a lot like every other glade in it.
So he had kept going, hoping to find some landmark that would tell him his rough direction from the main set of buildings, at least. Until he had come to a pond, set in a deep hollow in the hills. One of the ones the Lan built – he ought to have known – artfully constructed, to look like nature, only perfected. And in it –
Even now, safely back in his room, Jiang Cheng's nerves seemed to shiver and blaze at the memory of Zewu-jun rising out of the water.
Long, wet hair clinging to his back, water dripping down the curve of his shoulderblade, from the perfect line of his jaw… Was it any wonder Jiang Cheng had stumbled back as if from a blow to the gut? Oh, he had known Lan Xichen was beautiful, he had eyes, but – not like this.
This was different, because it wasn't only Lan Xichen's beauty that had shocked him.
The man was too thin. Halfway to gaunt, but… he looked softer. Smaller. It seemed that when Lan Xichen flagged, all the lines of him, instead of turning sharper, grew blurred. His face was sunken around the eyes.
A cultivator's body was a weapon, but there was no display of power in this nudity. Just bare skin beneath the water. A body that could be chilled; skin that could be broken. Like this, Lan Xichen looked vulnerable.
(Of course he looked vulnerable, you stumbled in on him bathing!, Jiang Cheng's mind snapped at itself, now.)
It was as if he had taken something off – (oh, he'd taken plenty off, snarled that furious, bewildered voice) – or rather, had it stripped from him. Pared from him, right down to the bone. He looked… mortal.
Faced with that, how could Jiang Cheng look away?
He had made some excuse: he hardly remembered what, now, mind blank with the roaring white fire of lightning. Whatever it was, it hadn't seemed to offend Lan Xichen, who had given him solemn, quiet directions back to the centre of Cloud Recesses. Where he was now, pacing his room like a caged tiger and losing his mind.
He did not know what to do with the sudden realisation that Lan Xichen's beauty had the power to move him. Worse was the knowledge that Lan Xichen's startling vulnerability did not change this – that whatever this hunger was, it wanted the man it had seen, stripped down and visibly diminished by grief. That, if anything, that blatant vulnerability made it want –
– what? What the hell did it want? What was Jiang Cheng supposed to do with any of this?
He knew he had seen bared skin, and felt an urge to – get closer. For what purpose? For the simple kind of desire he had heard others speak of, the joy of touching and being touched? Or was this the caged tiger, baring its fangs? He saw that skin, easy to wound: he almost wanted to get in wounding-close, to know that he could, so that he could… choose not to. Could show that he would not, that his hands could do other things than wound, could…
Was that it? Worst of all, was it the need to comfort? To console that breakable, mortal skin with his own?
If that was it – if he wanted to get close and cover Lan Xichen with his own body, take the place of that invisible covering, stripped away – then Jiang Cheng was doomed. He knew too well how little he had left in him to comfort anyone. Cover someone else's grief? He had spent the last sixteen years as a raw, exposed nerve. He had no relief to give.
But even the bleak truth of that thought could not drive what he had seen out of his head. It was still there, as vivid as ever, a restless itch in his nerves that would not be banished no matter how swiftly his feet carried him over the floor. It was as if the lightning had been swallowed into his body.
Jiang Cheng stopped pacing, lifted his hands and dropped his head into them. He was going mad. He felt far too old for this, and at the same time staggeringly, catastrophically young.
In his mind, that stark figure stood still at the centre of the pool, outlined in shocking clarity. A breath of light in the midst of a storm.
