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[equivocations]

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Hello, this is Lan Xichen. I apologize for being unable to immediately receive your correspondence, and will return your message as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

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[famili]

( She considers this, going still more than anything else, setting the cup she held down to reach toward him, lay a hand on his arm, his hand, whatever it is within reach. )

How long has it been for you?

( Between that time and the worlds he's lived on since. It's part of the story, but a backward part; still, the thing she feels to ask right now.

It tells her more in two sentences than she's known in two months. By her own choice, and she doesn't regret that. )

[equivocations]

[ There is a tiny, grateful smile when she puts her hand over his. He does not really deserve it, and were it still only a month or so since that night he is not sure he would have been capable of accepting it, but - he supposes he has come a long way, in terms of both steadying his own mind and becoming more accustomed to physical gestures.

Still, he has to consider her question for a moment. Time had not always been the easiest thing to keep track of, at the hotel in Wonderland where he was first brought to. ]

Around eight months. Time enough to begin to have a better understanding of him in death than I did in life, it seems. [ He pauses, then, and amends, ] Or perhaps, a better understanding of him in this life, if he will allow it. Time enough to understand that he likely remembers more than he is letting on, and he will always do what he thinks he must to survive.

[famili]

... I don't think there's anything here that he doesn't remember.

( Is her soft statement, after he's spoken. A soft and simple certainty, carried by eyes that don't suspect any good stories lead up to this particular ending. )

Between the three of us, I think we each remember what we can, until the point where we cannot. They healed my heart here, and my lung; their capabilities are very great, and he was so certain at first... so certain he could build himself a life here.

( Which at the heart of it is why she doesn't think he fails to remember anything. Jin Guangyao doesn't give up, he's ambitious and stubborn and socially apt, she knows that. Even if she doesn't know it to the extent of its full truth. )

Lan Xichen, by what you say, just... if he will always do what he thinks he must to survive... ( she pauses, longer this time. ) Would letting you believe he doesn't recall everything fit?

( She's truly asking. In a general sense, she'd think yes, it would, but in another sense, talking to this man who had taken the life of a sworn brother, and who never would without cause, and heartbreak, well...

Her stomach has already dropped, lungs constricted. Sixteen years have passed, and what has happened within them? )

[equivocations]

[ He's quiet as she acknowledges what he has come to believe as well - that Jin Guangyao remembers everything up until his death, as she does. And his heart aches for both of them. It never had to be this way, and yet - it is what it is. ]

Yes. [ It hurts to say, but it is the truth. He had always wanted to believe that he and Jin Guangyao could be more themselves with each other, could drop the masks they always had to maintain - but he sees now that was only ever partially true. ] He has always tried to protect me from the dark parts of both the world and himself. I think he is still afraid that if he lets me see all of him, I will not continue to provide support and friendship to him - or perhaps that I will, and then I will have no excuse for it, now that the truth of the terrible things he has done is out.

[ Lan Xichen can still claim to be a good man, after all, if he is only protecting someone who does not remember and may not have even committed the same crimes. But even though he struggles with accepting how much he still cares for Jin Guangyao - he has long accepted that he is not a good man. ]

Perhaps I should start with what he has done, that he says he does not remember.

[famili]

( Good people, such as they are, are impossible to be: good people have to compromise, have to make decisions, and how good those are for anyone else... Ynali has her own uncertainties about those. She'd not been guiltless in her life, on levels of accountability, and good spared no one anymore than bad.

Being a better person, on the other hand, was something any could strive for.

The hollow formed in her centre expands slowly, that Lan Xichen places these words, I will not continue to provide support and friendship to him, and knows this will be even less easy to hear than she wishes. If life could be simple, if even death could be, would that truly ease the world? (She suspects not. Life is too entangled in forever finding its own complexities. Death, as she's learning in her own strange way, is no less complicated.) )

Start wherever makes sense to you. We have time, and there is no hurry.

( Nor does her hand pull away, though the furrow at her brow remains, and she doesn't hide from him that she's not certain to like any of this, that she's prepared for some hidden darkness, but cannot know its depths.

Does not know them, only that pain will be part of it, and learning to let go of what she never had to hold in the first place. )

[equivocations]

[ He nods at that, pulling in a breath and letting it out slowly to prepare himself. It doesn't take him long to collect his thoughts - at least now he has the benefit of having told this before, and he knows where to begin.

He does not pull his hand away, either. Whatever her thoughts end up being, even though it means she may very well pick up on the quiet, aching pain underneath the numbness he sinks into - he appreciates the contact. ]

There was a gap in power after the end of the Sunshot Campaign, with the fall of the Wen sect, and Jin-zongzhu was more eager than many of us anticipated to place himself in a position to fill it.

[ Jin Guangshan's desire to be in a position of power over the other Sects will likely not be a surprise, given that it was fairly clear even back when Lan Xichen had not known much about what was happening behind the scenes, but the depth of his ambitions was so much more. ]

He sought to have each of us beholden to him, in different ways, and it seems he was willing to take more extreme methods as well. He employed demonic cultivators, and he tasked Jin Guangyao with retrieving the Yin Iron from Wei Wuxian - and when that did not work, with encouraging the cultivation world to turn against him.

[ Lan Xichen cannot blame all of it on Jin Guangyao and his father, of course - Wei Wuxian made many choices that drove a wedge between him and the rest of the Sects - but there is no doubt that they pressed in all the right places to widen it. ]

And when he could not control Nie Mingjue, he tasked his murder to Jin Guangyao as well. [ The manner of death that Jin Guangyao chose is perhaps the most personal betrayal that he had committed to Mingjue and to Lan Xichen himself - he who must have known how haunted by the inevitable thought of qi deviation Mingjue was, to take that and use it against him. And he who knew that at the core of Lan Xichen is someone who needs more than anything to protect and support those he loves, to - well. He has to pause, briefly, but it isn't long before he continues. ]

I believe that Jin Guangyao sought his father's approval above all else, and there were many things he felt he had to do in order to continue to remain in his father's favor, and as part of the family, as peripheral as it might be. But there are two crimes he committed that cannot be attributed to his father's wishes.

[famili]

( She maintains that point of contact, listening. Offering nothing more than a squeeze of support, and swallowing the one protest that wants to arise: murdering his sworn brother, on his father's order?

There is so much horror inherent in that. Moreso, because that itself doesn't make enough sense, with Nie Mingjue never having wanted the power that Jin Guangshan so effortlessly took on himself. There hadn't been a reason to object. By the time warning signs were emerging, even Yanli could see them from Yunmeng, let alone once she married in, but this?

There is a deeper darkeness, and she swallows down any words. Lets him feel her confusion, and the coldness that is horror, and a sadness under it all. Sympathy, too, for him, and patience, a steel underneath that said she was feeling all this and in it, she was steady, capable of handling whatever else was coming.

Horrified, and looking at him. Accepting, and choking on it. )

What were those, Xichen?