She stayed away for three days, then descended the stairs again. Followed that dark, stinking hallway to its end.

This time, too, she heard stifled, unidentifiable noises on the other side of the door. She walked very quietly, this time. She didn’t know what she hoped to accomplish by it.

When she was near to the other side, she again heard a voice. Wei Wuxian’s, this time. She might not have noticed a different quality to it if she didn’t know what he usually sounded like, and couldn’t recognize what he sounded like trying to swallow his own pain.

“Jiang Cheng,” he said, nearly sheepish. Fond. It was fond, and withered. “Alright, alright.”

“Harder, I told you to do it harder—” It was the most hushed she’d ever heard Jiang Wanyin’s voice. “What, you think I can’t handle it?”

A harsh sound, like someone being slapped. Hair prickled on the back of her neck.

“Do it again.”

“I’m tired,” Wei Wuxian said, and he sounded it. Tired and dulled. His usual spark wasn’t absent, but it was blunted.

“Fuck you. Hit me again.”

Another smack, and then, answering the suspicions she hadn’t wanted to name, she heard Jiang Wanyin’s low, shaky moan.

Wen Qing felt hot and sick, all over, with shock and shame.

She turned on her heel, and left them alone to do what bodies could do. This, at least, could not be taken from them.

There was a kind of connection that sprung up between young people who had suffered together. She’d recognized it in Wei Wuxian and the Jiangs even before the war, back in what passed for the idyllic summer of her life. It was the same intangible cord that bound her and a-Ning together, beyond the familial love of people who lived simple lives. She understood them, without meaning to, and she regretted that she did so. It would have been easier for her if she did not; perhaps easier for them all, considering that her paltry interventions rarely did them any good.

Perhaps this is why Wen Qing continued to be drawn against all reason to provide what paltry succor she could provide them, though she may well be damning all of them, the Jiangs and Wei Wuxian and a-Ning and herself. She had reasoned with herself, at night, many times, over whether it was better to simply leave them to their fate. It may have been a kindness. Her arguments seemed sound, yet when the time came to act, she inevitably failed to turn away from her foolhardy path.

Wen Qing was a true member of her uncle’s inner circle, and as his power waxed, his physical body waned; her doctor’s tricks were ever more needed, so as long as she managed to stay discreet, her own life was not in danger. This did not mean there was nothing for her to lose, of course, but as she descended to the dungeons, she pushed past the pair of guards who attempted to stall her. She outranked them in every respect, and as far as she could tell, she had managed to preserve her uncle’s favour, a fact for which she should be grateful, rather than feel ashamed.

Her excuse for going to them was hardly a lie: she attended to all the prisoners of note who received particularly harsh treatment. Her uncle wouldn’t waste people like that, not as long as they were more useful alive.

They had been given a shared cell, an accidental kindness intended as a slight; when they had first been thrown in here, months ago, following their ill-fated attempt to return Wei Wuxian to Lotus Pier following the Xuanwu Cave, their joint accommodations had been the first instance of the claim that Wei Wuxian, head disciple of Yunmeng Jiang and perhaps the foremost cultivator of his generation, was nothing more than Jiang Wanyin’s body servant. Until now, she imagined that they had been deeply grateful for their togetherness. She couldn’t imagine how they felt, now.

The door was at the end of a long, empty hall. Her tread was distressingly loud, and, perhaps giving in to her sense of secrecy, Wen Qing took care to approach them softly.

When she was about to open the door, something fixed her in place. A low, muffled noise. Her hand hovered aloft.

From the other side, she heard, ”Wei Wuxian.” Nearly begging. Nearly angry. “Where’s your smart mouth now?”

She pushed the door wide, and entered.

If she were a regular person, or even just a worse doctor, Wen Qing may have been fooled into thinking that Wei Wuxian was alright.

He lay on his stomach on the ground, but his ankles were crossed, and he rested his chin on his forearm, like he was skipping sword drills to take a nap in the afternoon sun. Jiang Wanyin knelt beside him, and the look on his face when he saw her was part fury, part guilt. When he blinked through the absence of light and was able to recognize her, the look on his face cooled somewhat, but not entirely.

“Wen-guniang.”

His voice was heavy with meaning that she either lacked the skill or desire to interpret.

She lingered, for a moment, in the doorway, hesitant to cross the threshold.

“I have medicine.”

One of Wei Wuxian’s eyes opened to take her in, full of false laziness.

Jiang Wanyin got unsteadily to his feet. He shook, slightly, as though he was the one who’d taken the beating. “Let me do it.”

Wen Qing closed the door behind her, and then offered him the bandages and salve. “Sect Leader Jiang.”

After several seconds, he took them from her. “Don’t mock me.”

“It’s what you are.”

For reasons that she did not quite understand, Wen Qing glanced at Wei Wuxian, and found him staring at her face with all of the sharp-honed intent he had previously been lacking. At the brush of their eyes, an understanding passed between the two of them, and Wen Qing wondered how quiet she’d really been, out in the hall.

“Thank you, Wen-guniang,” Wei Wuxian murmured through a raw throat.

She stayed just long enough to make sure that Jiang Wanyin administered the remedies correctly, then took her leave. She told herself it was to reduce the possibility of suspicion. Wen Qing was cowed by neither gore nor pain. She had never fled the aftermath of violence in such a way. All she knew is the longer she stayed, immersed in the smell of fear-sweat and piss and rot and guilt, the harder she found it to breathe.

The hall was full of onlookers, but few had such advantageous positions as Wen Qing, who stood at her uncle’s side. A-Ning was but a few heads lower down the line. From the corner of her vision, she could see that was hunched in on himself, nominally watching the scene, but she suspected, though could not prove, that his eyes were wide and unfocused, trying not to land on the two figures at the centre, and trying not to look away. Or maybe that was just herself.

To avert her gaze seemed like further betrayal, further cowardice, though she couldn’t imagine that the two of them would want to know she watched them. As if sensing her thought, and wishing to confirm (or deny?) it, Jiang Wanyin looked up and, fatefully, or perhaps intentionally, met her eye. Wen Qing imagined that her answering stare contained fruitless sympathy, at best, and emptiness otherwise.

Wei Wuxian, on the other hand, never looked up. He simply braced himself more firmly against the wall, and the knobbly ridge of his spine flexed and twisted.

Crisp and mocking as a jackdaw, her cousin, Wen Xu, called out: “Now, Sect Leader Jiang, a loyal vassal such as yourself couldn’t be hesitating to do something so simple as disciplining a subordinate.”

Jiang Wanyin’s knuckles were white. Zidian, his mother’s famous scourge, had been returned to him for this purpose only, and, at last, its lash fell in a sinister coil by his feet.

He wants to break your will. To make it so that you can’t stand yourself, she thought, furiously, in Jiang Wanyin’s direction. Even if he could hear it, she didn’t know what good it would do him. Understanding one’s position only went so far when one’s options themselves went unchanged.

Jiang Wanyin’s sister was still in Yunmeng, under guard but, allegedly, unharmed. The handful of other surviving members of the Yunmeng Jiang sect were with her. And here, trapped in Heavenly Nightless City for months, now: the sect’s heir apparent and its head disciple. Neither hale nor hearty, but alive.

Sensing the precarity of that fact, Wei Wuxian muttered, “Come on, Jiang Cheng. You think I can’t take it? I’m insulted.”

”Shut up,” Jiang Wanyin hissed.

“The Jiang really are weak, to tolerate such mouthy manservants,” continued Wen Xu.

Just do it, she thought. For both of your sakes. She was sick to her stomach.

Slow, slow, painful seconds stretched out, sinewy and pale. Wei Wuxian’s fingers twitched against the wall. He was afraid; not for himself. Perhaps somewhat for himself.

So low she could scarcely make it out: “I’m getting cold, here—”

Jiang Cheng lifted his hand, and the crack of lightning silenced every other sound in the room.

He didn’t swing nearly as hard as he could, she knew. But this was no ordinary whip. Wei Wuxian’s back bore a gnarled, white stripe, and though he fought to stay firm, to give no indication of flincing, he was only human. His head hung low between his shoulders, his hair draped loose like a ghost’s.

“Sect Leader Jiang is just getting warmed up for us,” her cousin chimed in, and laughter flickered through the hall.

Don’t mock him. That’s what he really can’t take.

The second time he raised the whip, it flew through the air, a beautiful, ephemeral crest of pain. Wei Wuxian sagged against the wall, and a low groan escaped his chest.

Her thoughts were an incoherent mess. Be careful. Don’t hit too hard; anyone can tell this is no toy of a weapon. Don’t hit too lightly, or someone else will do it for you, and they will not love him.

“This must be satisfying for you. Didn’t they always say your father liked him the most?”

The third strike was so powerful and quick she scarcely heard it move through the air. What was unmistakeable was the cry, sharp, childlike, too visceral to be suppressed, that came from Wei Wuxian’s chest.

From what little she could see of Jiang Wanyin’s face, his cheek was wet with tears.