not sure how to phrase this but something i have been ruminating on recently is that xue yang is strangely fragile. obviously he is also incredibly resilient. he survived, and continues to survive, impossible things. he has a million barriers between himself and the world, but none of this actually matters when it comes to what he feels. everything is personal to him. everything pierces straight through all that armor and goes right to his battered heart, the heart that no one else believes he has. that even he is not fully cognizant of. the world strikes and strikes and strikes and so he strikes and strikes and strikes back, even (especially) when the wound is something other people would not think worthy of retribution.
xue yang would never realize this- would be outraged at the concept of it- but the way everything, everything is something to rally a defense against is in itself a form of fragility. he does not know how to let go of things, or let them pass him by. passivity is death. so he is ruthlessly cruel and violent. he projects himself as a lunatic untouchable by anything you might possibly do to him, and on some level he even believes this. but in actuality he is one raw emotional wound. he never learned to separate himself from his emotions, much less process them. the volatility is not so much insanity as it is the constant lashing out of an animal in a trap, and the trap is the world, and the trap is himself, and he is never going to get out. and like so much else, this pain is just part of the background radiation of his life. it hardly registers. to be able to register the hurt, you would have to be able to register a time in which you were not hurt.
i feel like it is a fragility that could blossom into such tenderness, given exactly the right set of circumstances. how at the very first touch of softness in his life he fell into a domesticity from which he never recovered. how much was there, still, to be salvaged from the cruelty. on some level i am always thinking about the little apple bunnies. about the meal for daozhang and the straw in a-qing's bed.
it was too little, too late. it shattered like glass when the world intruded back in. but the tenderness was there. no one, least of all xue yang, knows what might have happened had it been unearthed in him any sooner.
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