Oh my god, anyone realise that for Jiang Cheng to have had the comb to give to Wen Qing after Lotus Pier fell, he must have had it on him on the day which means...he regularly carried it around. This teenage boy who knew full well after the Qishan Indoctrination that the Wen were The Enemy and he wouldn't ever be allowed to be with Wen Qing carried that comb around with him because he presumably couldn't bear to put aside that symbol of his feelings. Remember the day Lotus Pier was sacked started out the same as any other day - even if Jiang Cheng anticipated trouble from the Wen at some point following the fiasco in the Xuanwu Cave, there's no way he could have known that by nightfall he would have lost his home, his parents and his sect and be on the run with his siblings with nothing but the clothes on their backs and whatever they carried with them. And so he carried that comb around next to his heart everyday, just like afterwards he would carry his love for Wen Qing despite her clan massacring his, despite being so traumatised he flinched from her in the supervisory office. He carried that love through the months after the sacking until he offered it to her along with the comb when he found her in that cell. And much later, when she followed him down from the Burial Mounds and returned it to him because she couldn't accept his love and his protection, not when she would have to leave her family behind, the freaking devastation on his face as she gave it back and the way he took it so reluctantly as if it physically pained him because his feelings hadn't ebbed at all...man, that comb encompassed so much. And it was a crying shame that they couldn't be together, that the world wouldn't let them.
#jiang cheng#wen qing#chengqing#the untamed#cql#i cannot take the credit for this galaxy brained realisation#i stumbled across it in a fanfic whose name i can't recall and felt like i had been punched in the gut#just when you thought the chengqing storyline couldn't be any sadder#also about the wq's sect massacring jc's:#of course she wasn't responsible for it#BUT if jiang cheng had been unable to continue feeling for her the way he had because of traumatic associations and#the attendant baggage of her wen heritage that would have been understandable#but no#that boy continued to love her#and the only thing that stopped him protecting her was that his duty to his nearly-crippled sect came first#just as her love and loyalty to her family before herself prevented her from accepting that protection and the love that came with it#and so she returned that comb#damn