Chapter Text
“Jiujiu! Stop following us!” Jin Ling yells at him over the corpse of a tiger yao, still smoking slightly where Zidian scorched its strips.
“Don’t yell at me, brat,” Jiang Cheng yells back at him.
“I had it. If you didn’t think I was good enough to go on night hunts, why did you let me?”
“Fine. No more night hunts!”
“I’m the heir of Yunmeng Jiang! I have to night hunt!”
“No, you don’t. I’ll just - cultivate immortality and live forever!”
“Jiujiu! You’re the worst! Augh!” Jin Ling tears off into the woods again, and Jiang Cheng droops.
He knows he’s being unfair. Jin Ling is a strong cultivator and a focused fighter. He probably did have it. Probably. Even all these years later, probably isn’t enough. Probably fills Jiang Cheng with the cold, desperate certainty that the worst will happen, that everyone will be gone, that Jin Ling, his last, perfect, most precious family member, the only family he had in the world for those few horrible months between A-Jie’s death and Wei Wuxian’s gaunt, hollow, half-dead return, will be stolen away from him just as quickly.
“Ah…I’ll go after him,” murmurs Jin Rusong, with Fairy at his side, and disappears into the woods.
“Sect Leader,” says Wen Yuan quietly.
“What,” Jiang Cheng snaps, without looking at him.
“Do you remember, when I was younger, and the animals kept getting into my room?”
“I remember the alligator,” Jiang Cheng mutters. It had taken Jiang Cheng and two other cultivators to wrestle it back into the water.
“Do you know why they kept coming in?”
“....why?”
At the time, it had just seemed like…not a curse, exactly. But the sort of shit that would happen, after too long with nothing going terribly awry.
“Because I had rotten fish in my room.”
“What?” Jiang Cheng wrinkles his nose.
“Other things, too, but I’m pretty sure that’s what attracted the alligator. I was hiding food, you see.”
Jiang Cheng doesn’t know what to say.
“Qing-jiejie and the others always tried to make sure I had enough to eat, in the burial mounds. But even that food was…not good. I got sick, sometimes, and couldn’t keep it down. I was hungry, all the time. And when we came to Lotus Pier, there was so much food, but what if there wasn’t? What if a monster came and destroyed everything, or we had to leave again? What if…I don’t know. I didn’t really understand enough to know what I was afraid of. But I had to have extra food in my room. I had to.”
“It stopped, though. After the alligator.”
“Wei-gege figured it out. He showed me some foods I could keep that wouldn’t go bad as quickly. Sealed jars of pickled lotus shoots, nuts still in their shells. I still have one of those first jars. I never did eat them.”
Jiang Cheng swallows.
“Okay, I get it,” he grumbles, even though he’s not totally sure he does.
Wen Yuan puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes. He’s almost as tall as Jiang Cheng, now. They all grew up so fast. Too fast.
“If something happens to Jin Ling,” he starts, and Jiang Cheng scowls.
“Nothing is going to happen -” he insists, despite his own heart pounding all over again. He won’t let anything happen.
“Even if something happens to him,” Wen Yuan says firmly. “He won’t be alone. We’ll be there. His cousin and his friends and me. And he has everything you’ve taught him. Even if something happens, he has Lotus Pier. He has a safe place to come home to.”
Jiang Cheng huffs, swallows three times, but doesn’t shake Wen Yuan’s hand off.
“Well. You better tell him not to come back without a kill,” Jiang Cheng blusters.
“Yes, Sect Leader,” Wen Yuan promises, with that soft, too-wise smile of his. “I will.”