His first thought, inane and absurd, is of his schedule. Cultivators are tougher than most but he's still intimately aware that injury and illness have no respect for schedules.
His second thought is that he's been cursed by someone very inept, because there's no way he's fallen in love without noticing. He's thickheaded as a point of pride, but there literally isn't anybody it could be, he hasn't had time to rub two thoughts together since Wei Wuxian upended –
Ah, is his third thought, clear but very distant as he stares at the fully-formed lotus bud sitting in his hand, slick with saliva, that motherfucker. It's almost calm. Of course it would be him. Nevermind everything they went through before, nevermind the fresh agony of being looked at like a stranger from a face he'd known like a brother, nevermind the weeks it's been since that last night in Lotus Pier and what he'd learned there, what Wei Wuxian had once been willing to give him. Of course it was now that things had settled down. A love nurtured in the mild waters of the lotus lakes of Yunmeng wouldn't survive long in the icy climbs of Gusu Lan. Nevermind that he'd heard of two upstanding cultivators playing farm like common peasants. Hanguang-Jun carried all the ice he needed.
Well. He dropped the lotus bud in his wastebasket, where it rustled against papers. It was a simple enough matter. Death could twist such things in strange ways for the living, and he'd been living with the rotting of this love in his chest for thirteen long years. Now that Wei Wuxian was alive again, an independent person instead of a mental puppet for Jiang Cheng to rage against and hoard, of course he would move on. Now Jiang Cheng could straighten out the whole tangle himself and put it away where it belonged, a child's love dragged out far beyond its natural lifespan. He'd spend a few weeks hacking up flowers and then move on.
