Work Text:
The first sign was when Tianlang-jun received a letter from Su Xiyan and didn't want to go to meet her.
Tianlang-jun spent the next several hours lying dramatically across a table, contemplating the meaning of love. He slowly determined that the persistent desire for Su Xiyan to pet his hair (which was always a desire, if not usually quite this intense) probably meant that he hadn't fallen out of love. He just, for some unfathomable reason, would rather stay in his boring fortress than to venture out to meet that love.
Strange.
Slightly less devastating.
It was harder to despondently grieve his lack of desire to go out than it was to grieve for lost love, but he still gave it a good attempt until Zhuzhi-lang finally came to find him.
"Junshang?" Zhuzhi-lang was holding a platter filled with a proper humanlike dinner.
Normally, the meal would have looked delicious.
It did look delicious.
Except it wasn't what Tianlang-jun wanted right now.
Or it was. He did want it, but he also wanted...he wasn't sure what. Whatever this thing was he wanted that he couldn't put a name to, he wanted it enough that he'd be willing to forgo the excellent meal his nephew was carrying in order to get it. Tianlang-jun often wanted many things, but usually wanting one thing even if it meant not being able to get other good things was something he only felt about Su Xiyan.
It was very strange and slightly irritating.
"I think I might be ill," he admitted, before dramatically tossing himself back onto the table.
Now that the thought was in his head, he did feel a bit off? Restless, at least. Was that what illness was like? He'd read about plenty of illnesses in books and, having never felt such things himself, he thought it sounded rather like a very intense version of dizziness and imagined it thus. Perhaps this inability to settle was what it really felt like. Maybe soon he'd be curled up in bed, needing someone to dote on him with soups and medicines?
The bed part didn't sound bad, actually. Or perhaps bringing his blankets into the library so he could have a bed and all his books in the same place.
"What's wrong?" his nephew asked, sounding alarmed. He set the platter carefully down onto the table and rushed over to where Tianlang-jun was doing his best impression of an invalid.
"You should tell Su Xiyan. She should come comfort me." Tianlang-jun pouted. That...did actually sound like a very good plan. An excellent plan. He was some sort of ill and she should come dote on him. Or scold him for getting sick in the first place while Zhuzhi-lang doted on him, he really wasn't that picky.
"Junshang, why do you think you're ill," Zhuzhi-lang begged, looking worried and helpless.
"I don't want to eat that food, I want something else," Tianlang-jun whined.
"I can have the kitchen make another thing?"
"No, I want that. And something different."
His nephew shifted from foot to foot, uncertainty running across his face as he tried to figure out how to cater to Tianlang-jun's whims. "Should I have them make different things, until you find what you want?"
Tianlang-jun considered.
Well, the worst case would be that they couldn't find it. "Yes, do that."
Zhuzhi-lang started to leave, but Tianlang-jun stopped him, holding out the letter he'd gotten from Su Xiyan.
"After you've told them, Su Xiyan needs to know why I'm not meeting with her. Invite her here, if she'll come." She never sent letters to invite him so boldly like this, she usually made him wait for her to find him on the road! Tianlang-jun couldn't possibly let the letter go without an answer, and sending a message in return wasn't nearly enough. Surely his nephew apologizing in person and inviting her here would be?
Or maybe it wouldn't. Tianlang-jun was almost tempted to go meet with her despite his odd feelings, lest some sort of opportunity slip through his fingers, but he felt so intensely that he didn't want to leave. The more he thought about it, the less he even wanted to leave the library, much less the fortress.
Zhuzhi-lang frowned, but didn't voice the concerns that Tianlang-jun knew were in his head. "As you say."
The first day after Zhuzhi-lang left, the kitchen servants spent most of it trying to cook what Tianlang-jun wanted to eat, while Tianlang-jun gave into the urge to make his black-armored soldiers pick up all his bedding and arrange it in the library.
The things the kitchen sent got more and more odd as he kept not being satisfied. It wasn't until they started forgoing the more human meats and cooking him the demonic ones that he finally started to settle. He didn't normally eat those, demonic beasts so often tasted of whatever hole they crawled out of, but for some reason it was what he wanted right now.
Maybe being ill meant he needed something in those meats that he normally was too healthy to bother looking for?
Once the kitchens stopped cooking the meat properly, merely making the outside look cooked and pretty while the inside was still raw, it finally was what he wanted.
The second day he rearranged his library, tearing entire shelves apart as he moved the books he wanted closer to where his bedding had been set, and demanded extra blankets.
The third day he noticed his nephew's continued absence. He distracted himself by stealing Zhuzhi-lang's entire wardrobe to add to the massive tangle of blankets and drapes and shiny trinkets that he was filling the library with.
It wasn't a very sensible action, but he'd never been one for denying his impulses.
The fourth day after he had left, Zhuzhi-lang came back battered and exhausted, with news of betrayal.
When Zhuzhi-lang was finally done explaining what Su Xiyan had done, he took a closer look at the tangled nest that Tianlang-jun had turned the library into.
"Junshang…" Zhuzhi-lang said slowly. "Are you pregnant?"
He was.
Tianlang-jun pretended that he'd never met anyone named Su Xiyan. The less he spoke of her, the more his nephew hovered, eyes worriedly flicking in the silences where Su Xiyan's name would have gone, in the references left unsaid.
A couple months after the betrayal, he sent Zhuzhi-lang to find what sort of books a baby should read. His nephew returned with picture books and toys for the baby, and a pile of new books for Tianlang-jun.
The hero of the first book Tianlang-jun chose to read was described as a severe man, who wore black robes.
In a fit of pique, he sent Zhuzhi-lang to steal Su Xiyan's clothes.
If she had betrayed him and her child, then it was only fair that the child was born with something of her around. It felt right. He'd line the nest with it, tear his favorites of her robes apart for swaddling clothes. It'd be poetic.
Tianlang-jun wasn't prepared for Zhuzhi-lang to be carrying her sword when he returned.
"That was bold," he said, setting his book aside. He had a great many books where cads left poor maidens pregnant and abandoned, only for the foolish men to realize the error of their ways in some dramatic way. This latest one wasn't really anything like his own situation, but it was still incredibly satisfying to skip to the part where the man who had betrayed the heroine came back to beg her forgiveness.
The heroine sent the man out on quests, to make him prove himself.
Tianlang-jun liked to think he would do that with Su Xiyan, if she made such a turn, but he knew himself well enough to know that he'd either be unable to forgive, or fall into her arms immediately.
He wasn't sure which.
Perhaps it would depend on the apology.
"Su Xiyan left it," Zhuzhi-lang told him, sounding confused. "The sword was in her room, in the stand, but she was nowhere to be found. The disciples there seemed to be under the impression that she was in closed cultivation, but I crept into their seclusion areas and she wasn't there."
Tianlang-jun pushed up from his resting place, taking the sword and turning it over in his hands as he pondered what that might mean.
He spent three days curled up in a pile of Su Xiyan's robes, staring at the sword, despondent.
Part of him was hoping that Su Xiyan would come for it; cultivators placed so much value on their swords, surely she would want it.
The rest of him was sure that she had tossed it away as surely as she had tossed him away.
Maybe that was why it felt so right to have it here, as part of the giant messy nest he'd turned his library into. They'd both been betrayed by the one who was supposed to love them most.
...He'd keep it for the child.
He wasn't sure exactly how inheriting cultivator swords worked, but, surely, once the child was old enough to claim it, the sword would have stopped waiting for Su Xiyan to retrieve it?
Tianlang-jun turned onto his back, holding the sword idly above him and turning it to let the hilt catch the light. It was pretty, in a delicate sort of way. Not the sort of sword that one would expect of Su Xiyan. She was calm, cold, decisive.
She liked pretty things.
He knew the sword wouldn't unsheath for him, cultivator swords could never be drawn by their cultivator's enemies, but he wished he knew how the blade was engraved. Surely it would be. He'd never seen it unsheathed (might never, unless it bonded with his child or Su Xiyan reclaimed it to try to kill him) but he imagined the blade was just as pretty.
He turned it slightly in his hands, gripping the hilt and trying to imagine it swinging. Trying to imagine another little heavenly demon grasping at that same hilt and pulling and--
The blade slid cleanly out of the sheath. Like a rebuke. Like Su Xiyan's dark eyes as she waited for him to come to an obvious conclusion.
The blade was beautiful.
It took time to find her. Time spent huddled in his library, whispering love poems to a sword and lullabies to a baby yet to be born. Time spent out on the practice field, adjusting his stance to fight with a sword that wasn't his, and was.
When Zhuzhi-lang finally found Su Xiyan, she was in the first place they should have looked.
Tianlang-jun was heavy with child by that point, but he simply adjusted his robes to compensate. He added armor, specially formed and heavily enchanted, to make his nephew feel better.
It didn't calm Zhuzhi-lang's stress, but he did stop trying to convince Tianlang-jun to stay home.
"The old man has accused me of preparing to bring my armies to attack Huan Hua and steal treasure, so that's exactly what I'll do. I'll steal the only treasure they have worth taking." Tianlang-jun told him, watching the walls of the palace master's city. His black-armored army was as close as he could get it without alerting anyone. Despite the old palace master's claim, he didn't seem to actually think that Tianlang-jun was about to attack. Or maybe the months of silence had mollified him into dropping his guard.
They attacked as the inner guards were changing shifts, another concession to Zhuzhi-lang's fussing, and Tianlang-jun let his army surround him as he struck.
Perhaps with the help of other powerful sects, the cultivators could have defeated him.
The other sects weren't there.
Tianlang-jun sent Zhuzhi-lang to the dungeons, set his army to laying waste, and went to find the palace master. He wanted nothing more than to be the one to fling the door open and rescue his beloved, but someone needed to deal with the old man and Tianlang-jun's desire for a dramatic moment wasn't worth the risk of his nephew's death.
The shocked look on the old man's face as he recognized the sword in Tianlang-jun's hand was glorious enough to make up for it.
That shocked look turning to furious betrayal minutes later, as Tianlang-jun's love ran into the room, was even better. Su Xiyan had deep bags under her eyes, as though she hadn't had a moment of rest or mediation since they had last met. Her robes were wrinkled where the immortal binding cable had pressed into them for so long and her hair was a tangled mass of unbound curls.
She held herself like a warlord, her eyes full of steel.
"Here!" she called, raising her hand.
The sword tugged lightly at his fingers, a gentle suggestion. Tianlang-jun lept back, black qi swirling into a shield in case the palace master tried to strike, and flipped the sword in his hand. He meant to anoint the blade with his blood as he sent it to her, but instead the edge slid harmlessly against his fingers as he let it go.
She caught the blade middair. Dodged. Spun. Struck. And the palace master fell dead.
It was so quick, after the old man had held his own against Tianlang-jun for several minutes, that he wondered if maybe the fool had still somehow expected Su Xiyan not to strike him down.
Tianlang-jun decided that he didn't care. He had spent the last several months imagining this reunion, and whatever Su Xiyan did next was the only thing worthy of his attention.
He hadn't imagined her jumping on her sword, grabbing roughly at his arm to drag him up behind her, and speeding off into the sky.
In retrospect, he should have.
"Zhuzhi-lang is making his own way out," she told him.
He wrapped his arms around her waist, wishing that he could press his belly against her back without all this armor in the way. He settled for burying his face into her hair, ignoring the slight sting of the acid still clinging to it. They would need to spend so much time brushing it through with special oils, to fix the damage done and turn her curls back from frizz to smooth loops.
He was already looking forward to it.
She stood tense, grabbing at his hand hard enough to hurt. She didn't ease her grip, not even when they sped into the demon realms.
But she reached her other hand back as they crossed over that barrier, smoothing it over his hair just like he'd been wishing she would for months. "Is there something you should be telling me, or has your fashion simply taken a turn for the ridiculous?"
Tianlang-jun laughed, tilting his head against her hand. "Our child is going to be beautiful."
"Our child is going to be terrifying," Su Xiyan said, voice going darkly smug. "If anyone tries to harm it, I'll destroy them."
He didn't doubt her.
He almost hoped someone tried, just so he could watch with babe in arms while Su Xiyan taught them their errors.