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thinking again of the horror of waking up 23(ish) and hot off the trauma-griddle after 13(ish) years of being dead to find out that your brother and your boyfriend are 36(ish) and have been scoured down to their very foundations by a decade and change of grief
(canon isn't 100% with me on this age gap thing but whatever i think it's emotionally sexy so shhhh)
wwx goes from playing games with a raw-boned half-baked lwj to both of them growing up fast and hard during war to falling for someone much older and steadier than he is.
wwx goes from playing games with a raw-boned half-baked lwj to both of them growing up fast and hard during war to falling for someone much older and steadier than he is.
lwj has had /time/ to heal and scar over and learn to live as fully as he can with a heavy, heavy weight of pain
wwx is still bleeding, shocky and running away from feeling too much about his fucked up past.
wwx is still bleeding, shocky and running away from feeling too much about his fucked up past.
how much has lwj's mental image of wwx drifted away from who wwx actually is during all that time? it's very romantic to pine after your soulmate forever, but a memory of a person and that person in the flesh are two very different things
there's a reason lwj is so determined to protect and take care of wwx after he comes back. wwx still has a soft belly! he's surrounded by adults who've had a dozen years to forge themselves extra-deadly emotional (and literal) weapons
and lwj also learned how to nurture during The Worst Decade. he has so much more he can give wwx, but he's also so different.
it's not a one-sided exchange: wwx brings back his joy. a wwx who had lived alongside them all those bad years wouldn't be as open and full of light
it's not a one-sided exchange: wwx brings back his joy. a wwx who had lived alongside them all those bad years wouldn't be as open and full of light
meanwhile mid-thirties jc is completely godawful to deal with and wwx doesn't understand this cruel, brittle version of his brother at all. jc's insecurities have changed a lot; he sure isn't worried about not being a strong enough cultivator to measure up anymore
jc used to worry that he wasn't loved as much as wwx, but he still had people caring for him immensely. wwx left, yanli died, /wwx/ died, and he never got a chance to see the jc who was profoundly alone without his siblings and just had to learn how to deal with that
