The Abyss Also Stares

Wen Ning resents WWX bringing him back, instead of being grateful. This time WWX is the one getting the verbal beat down instead of JC!

Wei Wuxian was tight-lipped and angry, and Wen Qing was helpless to do anything about it.

Maybe she could have, before, but…

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known Wen Ning had a temper.

He always had, even as a child. He’d been rather like their uncle in that way, odd as it was to say, though surely Wen Ruohan had never been such a quiet and obedient child, and certainly not a docile and obliging adult who loved his sibling so much that he suppressed his own personality to accommodate their interests over his own. Wen Ning knew how precarious Wen Qing’s position was, and he was grateful to her; it was therefore only rarely that she saw the rage that lurked beneath his placid exterior.

Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d see it now.

A fierce corpse, full of resentment – she carefully hadn’t thought about how such corpses only formed in people who had great resentment in their hearts to begin with, who had died unhappy deaths and died angry over them; she’d thought instead that when Wei Wuxian succeeded in bringing Wen Ning back to his consciousness, because she hadn’t accepted that he might not, Wen Ning would simply go back to the way he usually was when he was around her.

Quiet, obliging, grateful.

Not…this.

“How dare you,” he’d howled at them both. “Who gave you the right to choose if I stayed or if I went? Look at what you’ve done to me! Look at me! A living consciousness trapped in a dead body, trapped in corpse flesh that cannot eat or sleep, that does not rot, and no realistic probability of it ever ending…how am I supposed to live, when you two have grown old and died? When your children have died, your grandchildren? Did you think I would be happy like this? Did you think I would thank you for this?”

Wei Wuxian was tight-lipped and angry, but Wen Qing knew that soon enough it would turn to grief.

Just as it had for her.