#but mostly for the opportunity to kill jc in a hit and run if he ever sees him near a road

[drinkingteainthedark]

Jiang Cheng is lucky cars didn't exist in his time because Lan Wangji would not hesitate to run him over

[slippinmickeys]

Totality

Fiona made me write an eclipse fic.

Scully gently shut the door behind her, the crisp blue duffle with leather handles in her grip; the go-bag she always left in her car, just in case. It had been a just-in case, Mulder had to admit. They’d had to fly to Idaho with no time to pack, and had worked a grueling five days straight on a series of local murders with only enough time to catch maybe four hours of sleep a night and pop into a shabby JC Penneys once for more underwear. They were both overworked, overtired, and their suits–of which each of them only had two–were overworn; ripe with the scents of stale sweat and stale coffee and stale eau de morgue. 

Scully looked weary as she handed over the bag to where Mulder stood in front of their rental car’s open trunk. 

“How far away is the airport again?” she asked, squinting up at him as he deposited her bag next to his and slammed the trunk closed. 

“Only about an hour,” he answered, mentally girding himself for what he was about to tell her. “But, I uh,” he went on, “pushed back our flights to this evening.”

Her posture visibly slumped. “You…what?” 

Mulder bit his lip, hoping he hadn’t made a horrible miscalculation. He knew she wanted nothing more than to get home, slide into a hot bath and pull the covers over her head for three straight days. She’d certainly earned it. 

“Hop in the car,” he said, moving to the driver’s side door. “I have a surprise.”

He was exhausted himself, his nerves shot. He was running on caffeine and cortisol, his skeleton rattling with every step. But this…she would like this. He was sure of it. 

“Mulder,” she said wearily, a whine in her voice that he’d rarely had the opportunity to hear. But she said nothing more and reluctantly dropped into the passenger seat, leaning her head against the headrest and rolling it to look at him beseechingly after she’d clicked her seat belt on. 

Mulder turned the ignition and the sedan growled to life under them. 

“It’s a good surprise,” he assured her. 

She only sighed, and they bumped out of the hotel parking lot and onto town’s main drag, the sun shining on the shabby line of depressing suburbia. Ten minutes and five stop lights later, Mulder pulled into the mostly empty parking lot of a dying mall, the tires popping over stray gravel and broken glass. He cranked the wheel and the car swung over the cracked asphalt in front of a defunct Frederick & Nelson, turning in a reflex angle and stopping when the sun shone in full through the windshield. He killed the engine. 

Scully opened her mouth to say something, but he reached into the inner pocket of his suit coat and pulled out a couple scraps of cardboard, handing one over before she could voice a complaint. 

It took her a moment to register what he was handing her. 

“Eclipse glasses?” she said, sitting up a little in her seat. 

Mulder had found the black polymer lenses next to the cash register at a local coffee shop that morning, the bespectacled co-ed working it disinterestedly telling him he could have two pairs for a dollar. 

The upcoming eclipse had been in the news recently, but he’d mostly ignored it–back east it would only be partial at best, the path of totality only hitting the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada. Four murders and a rough case later, he hadn’t given it another thought. Until that morning in the coffee shop. 

“We’re in the path of totality here,” he explained. “We’ll only get it for about a minute and ten seconds according to the local newspaper, but I thought you might like to see it.”

A look Mulder couldn’t read crossed over her face and he swallowed.

“The next full eclipse over North America won’t be until 2017,” he went on nervously. “I can probably change the tickets back if you-”

Scully reached out and put a warm hand on his arm, cutting him off. 

“I’d love to see it,” she said delicately. “Thank you.”

Despite the dark smudges under her eyes, the soft smile she gave him quieted any lingering apprehension about his decision, and he gave her a smile back. 

“I figured we could get on the hood, lean against the windshield,” he said.

“What time does it start?” she asked, popping her wrist out from her sleeve to look at her watch. 

“In about five minutes,” he grinned. 

Scully fingered the glasses and then opened her car door. Energized, Mulder did the same. 

“I ask you to avert your eyes,” he said drolly, putting a hand on the warm hood of the car before awkwardly lumbering his way on top of it, the metal plane thumping loudly under him as it dented to accommodate his weight and then popped back into place. 

Scully, opting to watch, looked on primly. 

Once he was settled, he held out a hand. 

“Milady,” he said, and she settled her warm palm onto his, grabbing on while she put a foot on top of the tire and dexterously swung herself up next to him. 

“Nimble,” he complimented her, reluctantly letting go of her hand. 

She shrugged and leaned back gingerly against the windshield, mindful of the smear of desiccated bugs across the face of it. 

“Here, wait,” Mulder said. He sat up quickly and peeled off his suit coat, rolling it into a ball to tuck behind her head, pillow-like. 

“Thanks,” she said quietly. 

“Don’t mention it.” 

Mulder could feel something ineffable pass between them. He coughed once awkwardly, and then pressed his eclipse glasses to his face, the sharp cardboard edge digging into the skin behind his ear. 

“How do I look?” he asked. 

“Like a dork,” Scully said, delicately donning her own, in, Mulder hoped, solidarity. 

She looked nothing like a dork, Mulder thought, eyeing the sharp lines of her face. She looked like a space girl, sleek and silver, an otherworldly beauty. 

He cleared his throat. “So do you.”

Scully’s face was tilted to the sky and he turned to follow her gaze. 

“It’s starting,” she said, her voice a little irreverent. 

Mulder looked at the sun, dark through polymer lenses of the protective eyewear. The moon was just beginning to edge itself in front of its celestial sister; incremental, pendulous. 

Lacking the pillow he’d given Scully, he raised his arms up and bent his elbows, resting his head back against cupped hands. Beside him, Scully breathed serenely.  He caught a whiff of his fusty clothing and hoped his jacket had fared better in the olfactory department than his shirt. 

They were silent for long minutes, watching the gradual procession of moon across sun. The day was bright but began to take on a verging luminosity, and Mulder raised his glasses up to take a look at the dark shadow of the car under them, which took on an off-putting sharpness against the dusty asphalt. 

“What do you think ancient peoples made of solar eclipses?” came Scully’s voice, a little dreamy. “What must they have thought?”

It was an invitation to oratory. A small gift. Mulder smiled. 

“Cultures throughout the world had wildly different theories,” he said, and Scully turned her head towards him, her eyes hidden behind the dark lenses. “Most of them, obviously, wildly incorrect.” Despite the fact that he couldn’t see her eyes, her look was encouraging. 

“The sun being devoured was popular,” he went on. “From the Norse mythology of Sköll,” at this she smiled. “To Asian cultures like in Java and Vietnam that variously had creatures or monsters swallowing the sun. It was commonly held in ancient China that a celestial dragon attacked and devoured it. Here in the Northwest, the Pomo people’s name for a solar eclipse is ‘Sun got bit by a bear.’”

The bear, Mulder mused, was widening its jaw. It was getting gradually darker, and he could feel the temperature start to dip. He put his glasses back on and looked back at the sun. 

“The Inca and Ancient Greek believed eclipses were a sign of a wrathful and unhappy god.”

Scully hummed. “The word ‘eclipse’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘abandonment.’”

“Right,” Mulder said, “though I think I prefer mythologies of a more solicitous nature.”

Scully raised her glasses to give him a look. “Solicitous?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. 

Mulder couldn’t help his grin. “In Australian oral traditions, the moon falls in love with the sun and chases her across the sky. If caught, the sun plunges the world into darkness. Medicine men recite magical chants to combat the evil omen. In German mythology, the sun and the moon are married. One rules the day while the other the night. When the moon is lonely, he’s drawn to his bride and they come together to create a solar eclipse.”

She looked at him frankly. “You know a weird amount about eclipses.”

“I like to impress you.”

“Is this why you were so late getting back to the hotel this morning? Research? My coffee was cold.”

“But are you impressed?”

“I wasn’t impressed by the coffee…”

Mulder gave her a long look, the odd light turning her hair a hazy copper wool.

“I like the German one best,” she finally said, plunking her glasses back on and leaning back to gaze at the sky. 

“Me too,” Mulder said. 

More long minutes of silence between them with the occasional car whooshing past on the roadway. Mall security drove by them slowly and Mulder gave the rent-a-cop a small salute. It was impossible to see Scully with the glasses on, so he kept taking them off. 

“You’re going to permanently burn your macula,” Scully said from beside him, not taking her eyes off the welkin of the heavens above them. 

He ran his eyes over the brushstroke of freckles on her nose. She was goddess-like; as luminous as a star. If he was the moon, he’d chase her through the sky, too. 

“You lose enough photoreceptors you won’t pass your next firearms recertification.”

He was tempted to tell her that in all the years he’d known her, her shine hadn’t damaged anything but his poor, lonely heart, but pulled his glasses back down and looked to the sun. It was nearly covered.

He sighed and felt her hand reach for his. His heart beat hard once against his sternum. 

“You can take them off during the totality,” she said, squeezing. “And should. It’s supposed to be incredible.”

“You ever seen it?” He asked her quietly. She was still holding onto his hand. 

“I missed the one in ‘79.”

“Me too,” he said. 

Around them, the air had taken on a distinct chill and the light shining down had grown metallic. Next to the car, in the long shadows of the trees along the edge of the mall driveway appeared little crescents. The colors on the mall’s signage dimmed and brightened. Mulder sat up and pulled his glasses off and blinked, shaking his head. The world felt odd, he couldn’t properly adjust his vision. It felt decidedly like the moment after someone takes your picture with a bright flash.

Scully still held his hand and squeezed it. 

“It’s called the Purkinje effect,” she said calmly, pulling off her own glasses with her other hand, and looking around with a wondrous smile. “As we near totality and the light dims, our eyes transition from photopic vision–which uses the retina’s cone cells to deliver full colors and fine detail–toward scotopic night vision, which relies on rod cells to detect objects in low light. When the light’s intensity dims in an eclipse, colors with longer wavelengths like red will look darker as the cones become less active. But rods are sensitive to shorter blue-green wavelengths, and those colors will appear to shine. It’s not just you. It’s the rod and cone cells in your eyes trying to make sense of the sudden dimness.”

Scully put her glasses back on and looked up at the eclipse. Mulder felt a surge of something so like love that his eyes burned. 

Scully pulled in a sudden inhale of breath. 

“The totality,” she said, pulling off her glasses and gazing up. “It’s starting.”

Mulder raised his eyes to the heavens. The world was dusk-like, the stars in the top of the dome of the heavens were winking on. In the bushes nearby, crickets began to chirp. 

The eclipse itself was like nothing he’d seen before outside of a big budget movie. The moon was utter blackness, but along the upper edge of the eclipsed sun was a hot pink half-ring that erupted into a single bring spot along the edge of the moon’s shadow like the diamond in a giant engagement ring formed by the rest of the sun’s atmosphere.

And then the flaming plasma of corona as the moon reached complete totality. Second contact. It was a living thing. Streams of white light danced around the ring of the black moon. Scully gasped in pleasure and Mulder couldn’t help but exclaim: “Wow!”

He pulled his eyes from the eclipse itself and looked around. Along the entire horizon, all 360 degrees of it, was in full, brilliant sunset. Everything else was the darkness of post golden-hour. He turned toward his partner and locked eyes with her. Her smile was brilliant, and she held his gaze for only a moment before canting her face back to the eclipse itself. 

“This is incredible,” she said breathlessly. 

He had found, as the years of their partnership wound on, that their job turned them into ecstatics, subject to mystical experiences. This was perhaps the most transcendent of them all. He would remember the moment forever. 

 “It is,” he agreed. 

A sharp flash, and Scully squeezed his hand. 

“Third contact,” she said. “Put your glasses back on.”

He did as she asked, and they leaned back and watched in silence as the moon continued its journey, as the sky relit and the nighttime animals calmed, as the world came back to itself. 

Eventually, Scully sat up. The light was still odd, seeming to come almost from inside her, and she lowered her glasses and leaned in to him. For a heady, divine moment, Mulder thought she was about to kiss him, but instead she pressed her cool lips to his cheek, her hair falling down to brush along the skin of his jaw. 

“Thank you, Mulder,” she said, and then straightened, the cool air rushing to fill the space she’d just been. 

“You’re welcome, Scully,” he said, his voice a little rough. He lowered his glasses slowly and watched her slide off the hood of the car, watched her stretch and smile to herself; a Mona Lisa grin gently stretching the planes of a face with the same faultless symmetry of the celestial bodies sliding across the sky.

[more-gremlin-than-fae]

Yet another CQL canon-divergence

Episode 26 this time. @bladedweaponsandswishycoats reminded me of this post about the use of zhiji in CQL and it reminded me of the AU my brain spent hours and hours on when I hit that episode in my first rewatch of the series.

This one’s gonna be just as long as all the others, although I might actually write this one since it’s mostly altering a single scene rather than having to write actually new stuff.

What if: WWX doesn't get there in time to intercept LWJ's glass of wine?

I'm assuming here that Lan Xichen has never actually seen Lan Wangji drink alcohol and has assumed that he knows the “golden core burning off alcohol” trick but never actually taught it to him, maybe he assumed their uncle had. 

So, episode 26, all the same except at the banquet WWX gets there just after LWJ has been peer pressured into drinking the wine so he’s there instead just in time to catch LWJ before he falls face first into the soup with an oh so casual hand on his friend's shoulder. Cue the initial round of insults with Jin Zixun, but with the addition of a distracted WWX making 'come over here and pick up your passed out brother' faces at LXC when he thinks nobody’s looking.

(I'm assuming also LWJ tends to get past the initial passed out stage fairly quickly as in CQL here)

WWX and LWJ have just had the 'what am I to you/zhiji' conversation so that's at the absolute top of LWJ's mind when he wakes up drunk. He wants that with Wei Wuxian, even a Wei Wuxian who’s been weird and moody and emotionally distant. So. He wakes up drunk thinking about “how do I get that back? how do i prove that i feel the same way?” and drunk LWJ is just an LWJ without brakes.

So when WWX notices he’s awake and tries to take back the hand that has been oh so casually holding LWJ upright by the shoulder, LWJ just grabs it and holds on. 

And then the rest of the scene unfolds more or less as canon but now WWX is trying to get the information from Jin Zixun and deal with Jin Guanshan and Jin Guanao while being followed around by a drunk and slightly belligerent and needy LWJ who just wants people to stop pissing off his zhiji and give him a break, for once. And at the same time, WWX is also trying to keep LWJ from losing face/people knowing he's a lightweight and now super drunk off one cup of wine. And he absolutely cannot bring himself to not be soft with drunk LWJ, so he’s switching back and forth on a dime between being cheerfully soft at LWJ and being angry and intimidating at Jin Zixun and everybody else.

LXC watches this for a little bit before realizing something is very wrong with his brother and that WWX is being king and running interference to save him face, so he stands up and asks WWX very quietly what the fuck is going on with Wangji, did they drug him?

WWX (under his breath, while JGS is talking): “No, he’s drunk. This is what he’s like after one cup of wine. You seriously never -?”

LXC: “Let’s not get into that here.”

WWX turns to LWJ: “hey, buddy, you’re brother’s here, you should go with him” and tries to transfer the hand currently locked around his wrist (not so incidentally preventing him from so much as slightly threatening anybody with Chenqing) to LXC

LWJ: “No.”

LXC: “Wangji, we need to have that important sect business meeting back in our quarters right now.”

LWJ looks at LXC, looks at WWX, looks daggers at Chenqing and then turns to his brother and says “No” again.

(This is how he’ll prove it, he’s decided. Since WWX insists on carrying Chenqing instead of Suibian then LWJ will just have to make sure he doesn’t need to use the demon flute and risk further corruption while LWJ is around.)

WWX is still under a time crunch here, he has to get the information and get back to Wen Qing before she gives up on him or ends up arrested for the crime of looking like a Wen in Jin territory. So while he keeps questioning Jin Zixun about the Wen prisoners, LXC and LWJ are having a low voiced argument about letting go of WWX until LWJ busts out of with  "no, he’s my zhiji, this is important to him so it's important to me" and ends up being the one who intimidates Jin Zixun into giving up the info. LXC’s only choice at this point is to help or get out of the way.

Bonus: Jiang Cheng hears the zhiji comment and is like "oh, man, I thought it was one-sided, this is so much worse" and forgets about politics for a single minute, which is long enough for him to get involved in this whole mess out of sheer jealousy that suddenly the Lans are standing with WWX and Lan Wangji is claiming this intimate relationship with HIS brother, excuse u very much, Lan Wangji.

So they get the info and decamp as a group to an empty courtyard where WWX has to explain to LXC and JC why he’s suddenly interested in the treatment of the Wen prisoners all while trying to gently detach a Lan Wangji who’s still stubbornly attached to him at the wrist.

He’s distracted enough to actually tell the truth about Wen Qing being in town and how the Jiangs owe her and Wen Ning for hiding them from her relatives (shut UP, JIang Cheng, they HELPED and they ended up in Wen Ruohan’s dungeon for it, if Meng Yao gets a pass for actively helping Wen Ruohan while being a spy then WQ and WN deserve a pass for hiding and healing the Yunmeng sibs and refusing to participate in the burning and sacking and killing of the other sects)

The upshot is that now LXC and JC know everything except the golden core thing and LWJ is now insisting that he will go along and help his zhiji "your debts are my debts" etc. And he’s functional enough, and stubborn enough, that no one involved can actually stop him without injuring him. 

So it shakes out that JC goes to get Wen Qing on his sword while LWJ more or less kidnaps WWX onto Bichen and they meet up at the camp.

This is definitely a “Wen Ning lives” fic because they get there much faster.

Anyway, fast forward to LWj waking up in a bedroll in a camp in the woods just past the Jin territory border with the Wen remnants and hazy memories but just rolls with it because he was absolutely not drunk what are you talking about and he is definitely going along with them to wherever they’re going, he’s the only one not starving and sleep deprived (he fell asleep at 9 while riding behind WWX on the horse).

That's as far as my brain managed to take it anyway.

Randomly: Wen Qing makes WWX tell LWJ about his core basically that morning because she refuses to conceal if he’s really all-in with them then he needs to know.

Actually this might be an "everybody lives" AU because giving WWX the opportunity and necessity of explaining to LXC and JC what he's actually doing and why before he gets more or less kidnapped onto Bichen to go rescue Wen Ning would likely throw off all the politics. And as much of an ass as JC canonically is about the Wens, there's no way he sees what's been happening at the work camp for himself and isn't absolutely appalled. So :waves hands: JGS' PR campaign against WWX doesn't work because there might not be a Geneva Convention but there are limits at least for some of the major sect leaders.

And also at the Qionqi Dao, drunk LWJ smacks WWX on the hand every time he tries to bring Chenqing anywhere near his face so he has impeccable testimony that he used no demonic cultivation in the whole incident. Wen Qing finds this hilarious and encourages him to do it always.  

[devianta]

MDZS/Persona 5 xover that literally no one asked for

I just feel like there’s so much potential for this. Think about it, both of these works have themes surrounding the damage gossip can cause, getting punished for doing the right thing (no good deed goes unpunished), what constitutes justice, and the consequences of shitty parenting, amongst other things. 

Mostly I just want to run wwx’s palace. He has a palace, there’s no doubt about that, and I want to run it. I’d kill 500 men for the opportunity. Also, pretty sure his treasure would be his lost golden core. Meaning, that if you successfully steal that shit you get to give to it him and then he’d have a new one without 1) him having to die and be brought back in a new body or 2) having to fuck anyone else up. (Phantom Thievery ftw!) You’d just have to successfully complete the palace. That’s all. 

Can you imagine wwx as a boss? Like, can you imagine that boss fight? He’d have at least 12 health bars. I mean, this is the guy who got shot by an arrow, pulled it out, and threw it back, instantly killing the bitch who shot him. This is the fucker who got disemboweled by his brother, stuffed his intestines back in, and then went and bought potatoes. This guy got a super experimental operation done on him, got stabbed with his own sword by wen chao (at least in the donghua, can’t remember if this happened in the other adaptations), and was then thrown into burial mounds. Like after all that, he was literally thrown off a cliff and he was still able to move around. Wwx is not unlike a termite: there’s really not much that can kill him. During the Sunshot Campaign he managed whole battlefields on his own. He played the flute days and nights on end without rest. 

His boss fight would be near impossible but I would be so willing to try. BTW, I’m imagining this taking place after he’s moved into Burial Mounds with the Wen Remnants but before jzx gets dead. You know, before everything gets irreversibly fucked. So the Stygian Tiger Seal will definitely feature in the boss fight. Most likely it’ll be something you need to steal it during the fight. I’m imagining that he uses to summon endless waves of corpses that prevent you from getting any hits in so you have to distract him in order to steal the seal off him and finally be able to deal actual damage to him. That’ll be stage one of the fight. Stage two will be fighting wwx and shadow wen ning. You have to defeat wen ning before you move on to stage three. Wen ning exclusively uses physical attacks. Wwx never uses physical attacks. He mostly commands wen ning but throws out curse and almighty attacks every one or two turns. Stage three is just wwx and he starts hitting you with a crap ton of curse damage with some almighty mixed in to spice things up. He repels most physical attacks and all curse moves. He’s weak to bless skills but has a 50% dodge rate for them. Beating wwx earns you no money (b/c he’s poor af) but he drops 2x Shijie’s soup (restores full sp to all party members), 5x wen qing’s needles (cures any status condition), 5x curse talismans (does 50 dmg), and one (1) golden core. 

What does wwx’s palace look like? Where is it? I want to say Lotus Pier and the distortion (what he thinks of it as) is a graveyard/mausoleum/something along those lines. But an argument could be made for burial mounds. I’m not sure what the distortion would be though in that case. I feel like wwx sees burial mounds pretty clearly. No, I think wwx’s distortion revolves around Lotus Pier and his family there. Mini bosses? Jiang Cheng definitely. Maybe Madame Yu? Shijie would show up (his palace wouldn’t be complete without her) but she wouldn’t be a shadow you’d fight. She’d offer guidance or healing items. Lwj’s shadow would definitely be there but I’m not sure what his role would be. At that point in the story, wwx’s unknowingly in love with lwj and sees him as a nice guy who asks wwx questions he can’t answer. He believes that he and lwj will inevitably end up on opposite sides of the battle field but ultimately wwx does not want to fight him. He feels that a death at lwj’s hands would be a good death. So he might be a shadow you have to impress or prove yourself to before receiving help. I feel like wwx’s palace would be a bit like Futaba’s in that he wouldn’t have full control over it because he no longer has complete control over himself or his demonic cultivation. Which is why I think there would be shadows in wwx’s palace that act counter to his purpose of pushing others away (not unlike in Futaba’s palace). If anything, I feel like his palace would be like a weird mix of Futaba’s and Nijima’s palaces. Because wwx has that distinct self-blaming loneliness that so permeated Futaba’s pyramid but he also has that single-minded determination and overbearing hubris that featured so strongly is Nijima’s casino. I don’t know. Nijima, in her boss battle, repeatedly yelled “I must win! I must win at any cost!” and I can kinda hear wwx saying something similar but it would be more along the lines of “I must protect them! I must protect them no matter what!” “Them” of course being his family and the Wen Remnants. 

 Other palaces to conquer in the MDZS universe? (It might be easier to list the people who wouldn’t have palaces.) 

Jiang Cheng definitely has a palace. A very purple palace. Lotus Pier, the Revenge. But what does he see his home as? An empty house? Jyl did say in the Untamed that three of them must remain together forever. And what happened? Wwx ran off with the last of the Wens and Jyl got married and left. If anything, jc is lonely. All he wants is his family back. So his palace would either reflect the state of his existence: alone in an empty home with no one to call his own, or it would reflect his deepest desires: his whole family returned to him. What sort of palace ruler would he be? He has that inferiority complex and brother and mother and father issues. (So. Many. ISSUES.) I can see his wwx shadow being completely obedient, because that’s sort of what he wants. He wants his brother home again and fulfilling his promise, to be the other half of the twin heroes of Yunmeng. It might be fun to fight shadow!jc and shadow!wwx at the same time. The Phantom Thieves vs the Twin Heroes of Yunmeng, loser gets sent to the Shadow Realm! (Just kidding. Unless...?) The other possibility is that wwx is completely absent from the palace but his absence is blatantly obvious to anyone that gazes upon the palace, like walking into a bedroom with no bed. There should be a bed there. Everyone knows a bed belongs here but there is no bed. Jc’s palace should have a wwx but wwx is not here. But he should be.

What would jc’s treasure be? His original golden core? Probably not. As far as he’s concerned (at this juncture) the golden core in his body is his original, restored by baoshan sanren. So it’s not that. The puppies that he lost as a boy, that he was forced to trade for an errant brother? A possibility. That was seemingly the start of jc’s problems. First he lost his beloved dogs, then he lost the love of his parents. Jfm focused on wwx to the detriment of jc and madame yu wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how jc couldn’t compare to wwx. If wwx hadn’t come to lotus pier, jc’s parents might’ve been satisfied with him. But I sincerely doubt that. There were clearly problems between J-fucking-M and Mad-Yu’s (can you tell that I think nothing of these two assholes god what I wouldn’t give to kick their asses in the metaverse I’d tear their fucking hearts out to quote ryugi) marriage prior to wwx’s arrival. Wwx’s presence there only brought those problems to the surface. Whether jc is capable of recognizing that truth is another matter. (Sorry, jc but your parents are shit and their marriage was doomed to failure before they even made their bows.) 

Or would wwx himself be the treasure? Jc’s parents are dead; they can’t be returned to life and therefore are unattainable. Jyl didn’t necessarily abandon jc and I doubt he sees her leaving as a betrayal. Jyl’s marriage was more or less inevitable. She’s able to easily visit. There’s no real conflict there. Wwx, on the hand, defected from Jiang sect. Jc has to pretend to loathe him, to not want him back when the opposite is in fact the case. Most of jc’s problems, wishes, and desires center around this one person. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that wwx is the locus of jc’s world, the axis upon which all turns: the triumphs and failures, tragedies and victories. When wwx is missing, jc looks for him. When wwx drops his sword, jc picks it up and returns it to him. Whatever happens to one brother affects the other. Even if/when wwx isn’t obviously present in jc’s life, he’s still there, even if you don’t see one brother next to the other. Even though jc doesn’t know it at that point in the story, wwx is the core of jc’s body and, therefore, it would make thematic sense for him to the be the core of jc’s palace.

Other palaces? Well, Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao obviously. Su She is debatable. I feel like he’d be a Mementos run. Besides, he’s not important enough to warrant a palace. Likewise, Jin Zixun would be a Mementos case. Wen Ruohan would have a palace but we don’t get to really know him as a character so I can’t say what his palace would like look except that it would encompass the whole of Ancient China. Wen Chao would likely have a palace even though he doesn’t deserve the attention ripping his palace apart would require. Most likely it would be a cross between Kamoshida’s and Kanoshiro’s. Jgs’ palace would probably look like Kamoshida’s and Jgy’s would probably be like Shido’s. 

Am I missing anyone? What do you think the characters’ palaces would look like? Whose palace would you most like to run? Let me know!