#xiao jingyan

rhysiana:

Here we go: NiF Jingsu dreamsharing AU, because it’s been haunting me for months. (Gifset that sparked my initial thoughts for reference/visuals, if you want them: https://rhysiana.tumblr.com/post/655545822279352320/hardwareabstractionlayer-jingsu-wuxia-au)

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When Jingyan returns from Donghai, he learns many things, not all of them as fast as he should have. Eventually, the thing he learns most is to keep his thoughts to himself and not appear to care about anyone too much. (He’s not particularly good at either.)

It’s lonely and isolating and he barely ever gets to see his mother after he’s essentially banished from the capital. Others find him icy and rigid, difficult to like, a stark contrast to his sunshine youth by Lin Shu’s side. (He isn’t allowed to mourn Lin Shu.)

He is fairly certain these things could break him—that they are in fact intended to—if he didn’t also have the dreams.

In his dreams, Lin Shu is not dead. He is hale and healthy and as teasing as ever, and they have leisurely adventures through the jianghu like they always said they would, whispering to each other late at night.

The first dream was not happy. The first dream happened when he was still on a ship, and was full of fire and blood and endless falling, until he woke up clutching Lin Shu’s pearl like a lifeline.

The other dreams didn’t start until weeks later, just before he got back to the capital. He would have thought the first one just an unconnected nightmare if not for the troubled way his mother ran a finger over the line of cliffs at the northern border on her map.

She didn’t tell him they were just dreams. She didn’t prescribe him tea or incense. She asked him for every detail he could remember, and then sat patting his hand absently for a while.

“You must tell no one else about these dreams,” she advised, and the frightened hush of her small, ill-favored palace only served to drive the point home. “What do you think they mean?” he pressed, quietly desperate. “His spirit is with you… wherever he is.”

In the months and years that followed, he takes a great deal of comfort from the ambiguity of that answer.

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