Work Text:
Taxian-jun and Chu Wanning became bonded at some point.
Possibly in this universe you can force a bond but it wouldn’t from an outside perspective seem likely Taxian-jun would do this, because of how he says he feels about Chu Wanning, and Taxian-jun himself also can’t notice that he might want to do this. Possibly you can’t force a bond in this one.
But it turns out out that if you force enough other activities, and both people have enough underlying want - whatever else they have, however much underlying and whatever it underlies - at some point the dice come up the right way (or the wrong way).
Taxian-jun can’t notice this. He can notice that he sometimes knows more of what will hurt Chu Wanning and how much it will hurt him and how it hurts him, that he can sometimes taste Chu Wanning’s pain and humiliation in a visceral felt way (that he couldn’t before, but that he can’t quite notice), but he can’t know why or really have it occur to him there’s something to ask why about or that he knows more than he should be able to tell from even the most careful physical observation.
Occasionally he can notice flashes of other things. Occasionally he has flashes of feelings, at them, turmoils of feelings. He can’t remember this.
The way that going to Chu Wanning some days can soothe him has changed, but he can’t really notice that.
Chu Wanning of course has no such barrier. He can’t tell Taxian-jun and have Taxian-jun remember, but he knows. He feels it.
He doesn’t feel everything. The flower’s strangulation cuts things off before they can get to him. (He doesn’t know Mo Ran loves him, or would, or did). But he feels, intimately, Taxian-jun’s hatred and suffering both, the anger and the misery, the pieces and turmoil of other things sometimes (the flower doesn’t affect his memory; he remembers all of them).
(It turns out that when your love for someone has turned to something you can taste and feel like you can feel their hands squeezing your wrists, and they come and hold you down and hurt you, and the only thing they can feel in any way that rises enough is hatred and ownership and the desire to tear you open, and you feel it, and the only thing they can can feel is how much you hurt, and the only thing they can feel is that that’s right, and you feel it -
it turns out this is worse than just being raped until you can’t stand and knowing it’s only what you deserve could ever be.)
(No one else knows. I think both Taxian-jun’s use of forbidden techniques and Chu Wanning’s shattered core confuse people’s relevant sense of them enough that the fact that there’s a bond doesn’t come through clearly like it usually would. It helps that not that many people ever see Chu Wanning or see both of them together.)