It is as he expects, as Wei Wuxian and Wangji always warn him before he visits: Jin Guangyao has nothing but words to turn into weapons and it is still his first instinct to do so. Disappointing and predictable, with Lan Xichen sitting as cool as jade where he watches the performance take place, the huffing and whining and insulting pleas that come off hard-done-by as if Jin Guangyao is the one suffering now compared to all the evils he visited on people. Self-centred. Everything is still about him.

Xichen hates that he knows what the echo of loving this man feels like, a tight and bitter knot in his chest.

"You never knew me," he says quietly after the tirade thrown his way. A slow blink speaks of tiredness, of resignation. "All you knew was how to keep me pacified."

Rising in a sussurating hiss of blue robes, his expression is stony and hard where he looks down at his former zhiji, so fallen from grace and goodness that it feels hard to breathe no matter how calm he forces himself to be. Xichen is known for his smiles and warmth but he grew up surrounded by ice and snow, and he has felt a quiet winter storm brewing in his breast for months after the fallout of the Guanyin temple.

"If I wanted to keep you safely here like a wife, merely errant and misbehaving, it would be a kindness compared to how little you deserve from me. In all honesty, I am astonished the spirit of Baxia has not returned to drag you to the Cold Pond to be drowned, for I do not know if I would stop it."