#chengning

I was dreaming of a summer sky and the wind blew the other way.

here are my favorites, more or less sorted from dark and heavy to more lighthearted! some are mature/explicit, some have heavy content warnings, so please check all the AO3 tags and sorry if something is not your cup of tea!

[T] Forth from Fire by melongumi

Wen Ning & Wen Qing, Speculative Backstory, Child Abuse

exploration of the wen siblings' childhood with their shitty father, from wen qing's POV (check the rest of the series out as well)

[E] Pray the Tearing by vibishan

Jiang Cheng/Wen Ning/Nie Huaisang, Rape/Non-con, Arranged Marriage, Miscommunication

jiang cheng is forced to marry into the wen sect after the jiang sect is destroyed; very dark but cathartic

[M] throughline by lunatea

Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian/Wen Ning, Modern Setting, Crime Scene Investigation

forensic technician wen ning meets two private detectives, THE wangningxian fic to me, with beautiful illustrations from the author

[T] gradation by lunatea

Lan Wangji/Wen Ning, Canon Divergence, Grief/Mourning

wen ning escapes from the jins early, and bonds with lan wangji over their shared grief and co-parenting a-yuan. incomplete, but still changed my life

[M] The Path that led Him to You by TheChangelingKing

Lan Wangji/Wen Ning, Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian/Wen Ning, Canon Divergence, Grief/Mourning, Slow Burn

ongoing! same premise as the previous one, very slow burn

[T] The Living Looked That Day by violettressed

Wen Ning & Lan Sizhui, Post-Canon

wen ning shows lan sizhui the memories about their family

[E] Normal, Healthy, Dead Guy Stuff by LesbianlazerOwl

Jiang Cheng/Wen Ning, Post-Canon, Getting Together, Slow Burn

jiang cheng and wen ning bond over co-uncleing the kids and team up against wei wuxian's approach to bodily autonomy

[G] Fierce Friends by TumblingTroublesomeTumbleweeds

Wen Ning & Nie Mingjue & Song Lan, Post-Canon, Humor

zombie club adventures! (unfortunately, incomplete)

[T] 5 Ways to Summon Your Ghost General by tricksterity (@sandumilfshous)

Immortal Wen Ning, Modern Cultivation

Ning-shushu and a discord server full of descendants <3

[G] No, we're not going to talk about how you killed my dad. This is an archery field, not a therapy session. by haenotic

Wen Ning & Jin Ling, Post-Canon, Humor

the title is self-explanatory lmao

[T] You just let them walk off with your left arm? by haenotic

Wen Ning & Jiang Cheng, Post-Canon, Humor

wen ning & jiang cheng's wacky hijinks in search of missing body parts (unfortunately, also incomplete)

[G] Selling Flowers by AmyNChan

Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian, Wen Ning & Wei Wuxian, Modern AU, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Aroace Wen Ning

wen ning has a flower shop and wei wuxian has a bad idea on how to stop the customers from flirting with him

“Don’t flatter yourself,” was what Jiang Cheng told Wen Ning. “This was a chore on my checklist.”

And then he turned and left.

Wen Ning caught him before he made it back to the road. He grabbed him from behind, picked him up, and slammed him against a tree, so hard Jiang Cheng felt his teeth rattle in his head. Wen Ning’s eyes were all black again, whites completely vanished now. He bared his teeth, and Jiang Cheng could feel the resentful energy curling off him.

You’re not helpless and you’re not innocent, he thought, staring down at him, Zidian hissing on his hand, but holding his strike. I don’t know what you are, but it isn’t safe.

“Why would A-Yuan be in my sister’s nightmares now?” Wen Ning demanded, his cold dead hands curled around Jiang Cheng’s arms, pressing him into the tree so hard Jiang Cheng could feel rough bark digging into his back, even through four layers of silk.

“She killed a child,” Jiang Cheng told him, plainly. It wasn’t hard for him to do the mental math, but he had all the numbers.

Wen Ning abruptly released him and stepped back, dropping him into the dirt in the process. “You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie about that?” Jiang Cheng said scornfully, as he pushed himself to his feet, tree bark catching at his robes, and didn’t bother with any performative sleeve-straightening. “It was a mercy-kill,” he said. “Xue Chengmei was torturing him. He could not have lived, after what he did to him, so she killed the boy, to stop it from going on longer.”

“How do you know these things?” Wen Ning snarled, furious and frustrated.

“They kept records,” Jiang Cheng said. “Wei Wuxian ciphered all his notes, and that made it hard for them to replicate his work, when Jin Guangshan was riding Jin Guangyao to reproduce it. So Jin Guangyao made sure Xue Chengmei kept extensive records of the work he did, in that damned dungeon, and he never quit the habit, even after he’d murdered his father and answered to no one but himself. There were hundreds of pages of those psychotic notes, filed neatly away, when Jin Ling and I went looking. I didn’t let Jin Ling read them. I read them all. Then I burned them.”

Wen Ning’s eyes were still wholly black, and his fists were clenched, and trembling.

Jiang Cheng finally let Zidian screech the way she’d wanted to, even while he kept his arm down. Brilliant violet lightning lashed at the ground, at the tree behind him, at a nearby stone, and then Zidian’s aftershocks shuddered up and down his arm. It felt good. “If you touch me again, I will whip you into the sea,” Jiang Cheng said. “I know what this is like. Because of that, I’m giving you slack. But you don’t get to lay a hand on me ever again, and you will never come into my home without an invitation.”

When he turned to go, this time, Wen Ning did not come after him again.

A tense scene from @cerusee’s fic- Leave It There For Safekeeping

Hi Pallas! I'm always down to talk about chengning!

5.) What do they need to better themselves as people first?

Haha, I actually think they need to get slightly worse in order to get together post-canon! Wen Ning has to give into his impulsiveness and Jiang Cheng some self-harming tendencies so they can have bad idea hatesex.

Alternately, I guess maybe they could night-hunt with their nephews for long enough that they chilled out and got to know each other. But I think that could take a really long time... and how much time will Jin Ling spend in the field, anyway, now that he's a sect leader? Bad idea hatesex is faster!

7.) Could they have piqued interest in one another without said circumstances?

If they hook up at all, that's totally in spite of their circumstances.

I do think there's a universe (maybe Wen Ruohan choked on a grape and ate it when Wen Ning was a kid?) where Wen Ning got absorbed into Wei Wuxian's wider social circle and then got to know Jiang Cheng that way. I think I've seen this approach in a couple of different modern!au fics, where Wen Ning has the time to get over his crush on Wei Wuxian and then discovers that he likes Jiang Cheng.

Jiang Cheng strikes me as someone who doesn't necessarily like others easily, even as a teenager, and there's one adaptation (CQL) where the Wen sibling he notices is Wen Qing, not Wen Ning. He's someone who I think you need to hang around with for a minute before he warms up to you, plus Wen Ning is very shy. But also I think he'd be a sucker for someone genuinely extending him kindness, so if that happened...maybe!

18.) Do they love the real them or a mask? Both?

I think they hate each other for their mutual history, which is as close to emotional intimacy as either of them have gotten since both their respective sisters died. We make do!

More positively, I do think that starting from rock bottom is the only thing that might compel Wen Ning to be honest, since when he likes someone he doesn't seem to want to express any of his negative feelings around them... and I think he has many more of those than he'd like. And from honesty, sometimes you can get to actual emotional intimacy! Sometimes?

So if they do love each other, it's from a place of real, ugly honesty. One of the things that I find interesting about their dynamic is that Wen Ning is more honest with Jiang Cheng than he is with most other people. He's not, like, nice about it. But he's communicating! Which is more than Jiang Cheng is getting from basically anyone else (cough cough, Wei Wuxian)! Wen Ning gets someone he can be direct with and Jiang Cheng gets someone who isn't going to bother to lie to him. (As always, Jiang Cheng is very miserable.)

20.) What experience do they share only with each other?