Chapter Text
“Do you think he’s alright?”
“How can he be alright? Would you be?”
Though he tries to ignore them, Jin Ling still hears the unhushed whispers of his friends. He thinks that he’s told them to shut up and leave him alone already, but they’d refused to leave the room entirely, simply huddling a short distance away from where he’s sunk down onto the bed.
Crumbled, and silent, sifting through his own thoughts and emotions as one detached from it. He’s not sure what to feel.
Somewhere, he finds it in him to think Sizhui would be the only one who could understand something of what he feels, which is why his friend might be giving him such wary looks. He might be the only one who understands, because he, too, had a parent return to him.
But at least Sizhui had known Senior Wei, even if most of his memories were lost to a fever. For Jin Ling, it wasn’t a fever that took his memories from him—there aren’t any memories at all. In a sense, it was Senior Wei who took away the opportunity for those memories, as his mother died before he consciously knew what her face looked like.
No, he amends, that’s not right. He knows now it’s more complicated than that.
So Sizhui might understand, but also not. How can he put into words the feeling of meeting someone who is supposed to be his mother, when he essentially feels nothing?
But that’s not entirely true either—he feels sick to the stomach, and he wants to cry. He wants to cry, because Uncle Jiang’s face had been wrought with so much pain, and he’d cried, and that’s something Jin Ling’s hardly ever seen him to do before. The last moments they’d been caught by Zhou Mei’s spell in the bloodbath of Nighless City had been vague and confusing. The vision had blurred and muddled his senses, with only the sounds of a flute and a guqin to tell him he had been awake to witness it, and then they’d found themselves blinking at each other beneath the trees. He’d nearly dropped Suihua with how tired his arms were from fighting, and he’d pinched his sides to catch a breath, and he’d looked up.
His uncle had been there, collapsed in a soundless heap while cradling the body of what he first assumed to be Zhou Mei, as she wore those same clothes—but he’d seen her face, and that wasn’t her face. Jin Ling recalls his first thoughts to be who is she? followed by why is Uncle holding her? and finished with why would he even do that?
The strange woman had been awake, then, her hair slightly undone, but half-draped up, and a face with delicate features had been staring with her mouth slightly open at the faces surrounding her. Maybe Jin Ling should have known when several of the senior Jiang disciples had rushed forward, both to ascertain their sect leader was unharmed as well as letting out exclamations of wonder.
But confusion had gnawed at him, and his feet had only unconsciously driven him forward.
Having turned her head up to see it was Uncle Jiang who held her up, her expression had dissolved into elation. “A-Cheng,” she’d whispered, and Jin Ling had blinked again. This same voice had rung out across the battlefield, which had disturbed his Uncle greatly and made him storm off, even though there’d been more than enough ghost puppets harrowing them that could have used his attention.
Maybe Jin Ling had always known. Now that he thinks back on it, he supposes he simply didn’t want to believe it.
But the woman in Zhou Mei’s clothes had lifted her hand, and caressed Uncle’s face with a bright smile hiding a sob, and Uncle Jiang had cried.
Though Jin Ling is sitting on a bed, fists firmly clenching the sheets on the mat, he still feels how this had unnerved him so much he’d felt his knees buckle and feels them buckle again, as if his brain had been pulled to a stop and panicked. Because his Uncle doesn’t cry—he’ll get angry, most likely, and he’ll snarl, and he’ll shout, and occasionally will smile, but he doesn’t cry.
Jin Ling’s hands are trembling.
He should have known, but even in that moment he had only edged forward slowly, ignoring the people shuffling behind him, the whispered voices, the dull thud and movement. He’d waited, he knows now, he’d waited for his Uncle to give his fateful response.
And when he did, the earth came rushing towards him, his knees finally giving out.
Because Uncle had choked out, “A-Jie,” desperate and relieved at once, and suddenly this woman had a name, a family, and a face, and this formed the first memory Jin Ling has of his mother.
“Jin Ling?” he hears distantly. Giving his head a shake, he lifts it—it feels heavy. Around him, his three friends stand, and their faces are drawn with concern, which he instantly hates.
He answers, “What?”, but it’s almost a snarl. He sucks his lips in, and finds that they’re wobbling even when doing that. On the other side of the room, the boys had deposited their swords, having set them on the stand to be cleaned of blood and guts later—but he wishes he could hold Suihua, now. Jin Ling isn’t sure why he’d let it go in the first place.
Something warm lands on his shoulder, and again on his upper arm.
“It’s alright,” Sizhui says. The hand on his shoulder presses down.
“If you want to cry, you shouldn’t worry about it,” Zizhen adds. “I think you have good reason to.”
The cot creaks, shifting his weight first left, then right, as the others seem to huddle around him. Stubbornly, Jin Ling stares at a knot in the wood of the floorboards.
“Yeah, we won’t laugh,” Jingyi assures him from his left.
All he can do is nod. He wants to say something, but he can’t find his voice—so he coughs, frustrated, and manages, “I just want to… sit here, for a while.”
The others don’t waver, he thinks. “Okay,” Sizhui says gently, and he knows he is smiling, trying to encourage him.
And so they sit there, in a silence that should feel punishing, but doesn’t.
Back in the forest, once the woman had ascertained her brother was fine, she’d laughed, the sound of it soft and melodious even in its constriction. Jin Ling wishes he could say it sounded familiar, but it only reminded him of the Jiang spiritual bells, one of which hangs from the ornament on his belt.
His uncle rarely spoke of the woman that was Jiang Yanli, and it’s likely that everything he knows about her must have come from Uncle Jin. The man, although distant in his attention due to sect matters and other political problems, had always spared him a kind smile and a story—and this stabs at Jin Ling like a knife, twisting in his guts, and he scowls.
A-Ling, his uncle would gently say, a glint in his eyes, You shouldn’t listen to them. You are not a lesser person for growing up without a mother.
And well, maybe he hadn’t been an easy child, and maybe he’s still not an easy person, but if there’s anything Jin Ling had hated when growing up, it’s that people weaponised his background to both accuse him and excuse him, and most hatefully, to pity him.
Because it wasn’t just Jin Chan and his petty followers who resented the shift of the sect’s power to Jin Guangyao and resented Jin Ling’s future contention for the role as sect leader, and who would take any opportunity to mock his ill-mannered spats and outbursts, it was also the remarks from Jin elders, who would openly criticise him for anything they considered unbecoming. He had no parents—therefore, the whole cultivation world seemed to think they had the right to weigh in on his education.
His cheeks still burn with the memory of shame and anger this brought him.
Though Uncle Jin never outwardly rebuked them, Jin Ling could see he didn’t like it, either. And those were the moments he could usually play on his softer side to beg for stories about his parents.
He’d learnt his father had been an archer as well, and that he put more stock in martial prowess than studiousness, though he studied what he needed to and was exemplary in both manner and propriety. His father, as an only child—at this, Uncle Jin had stopped, the hitch hidden in a perfectly plastered smile and a furtive, side-eyed glance at Aunt Qin—had shouldered as many responsibilities as Jin Ling had, and, all in all, he thinks his father may have been as lonely as he was.
He’d also learnt of his mother, and these are the memories he tries to dredge up, now. Uncle Jin had told him amicably of Young Madam Jin, Jiang Yanli, and her loving and refined influence on Jin Zixuan—how she both softened him and made him strong. Often, he’d spare words to praise how well-suited his parents were—but Jin Ling wasn’t after the dream their life had been. He just wanted to feel as if he knew them. So he listened better when Uncle Jin shared how famed his mother’s lotus root and ribs soup was, how fiercely she loved her family, and how this devotion resulted in her death.
He doesn’t want to remember the slyly deceitful things Uncle Jin said to paint Wei Wuxian, the Yiling Laozu, as the spearhead of Jin Ling’s loss.
She’d died at Nightless City, with so many others—others he’d now got to see through Zhou Mei’s vision, or whatever was carried by her consciousness. The four of them had half-started some lame attempts to write mission reports on the hunt together in discussion, but the conversation had tapered off quickly enough, each caught in their own thoughts.
For Jin Ling, it’s the faces that won’t let him go.
Four bodies start when someone knocks on the guest chamber’s door, bumping shoulders and knees. “Sect Leader Jin!” they hear.
Jin Ling, still having to get used to being called this, blinks once before letting out a stupid oh, clears his throat and calls, “Yes? Come in.”
A Jiang disciple steps through, bows, and before she averts her eyes, the woman’s brows knit together minutely enough that Jin Ling spares a thought to how she’s finding them, all still caked in grime and huddled together on the bed like children. He jumps to his feet, and the others also scramble to attention.
“Sect Leader Jin, you’ve been assigned a night-hunt by Sect Leader Jiang. We await your orders.”
“A night-hunt?” he echoes, exchanging a look with the others. “Now?”
“Yes, Sect Leader Jin. A water ghoul has suddenly and aggressively attacked a group of lotus farmers.”
“Is that normal?” Zizhen asks.
Jin Ling shrugs. “It happens, but they don’t usually leave the lakes to attack. How many are you?” he asks the disciple.
“Five.”
Jingyi has already crossed the room to reach for his sword, lurching it from the stand and catching it mid-air. “We’ll help!” The other swords he tosses at Sizhui and Zizhen—but at the glum glare he receives from Jin Ling, he picks up Suihua with slightly more reverence, and delivers it to him with a mock bow.
“Sect Leader Jiang said the juniors are free to join—but not the Lan disciples.”
Before Jingyi can protest, Sizhui asks politely, “Why not?”
The disciple hesitates, then relays Uncle’s assertion that the Lan disciples would require the explicit permission of Hanguang-Jun to go out for this mission and at this hour—and as the honourable Hanguang-Jun is currently unavailable, they’d better stay put.
“Ridiculous!” Jingyi sputters. But somehow, Jin Ling feels the corners of his mouth lift, and he snorts.
“Well, I’ll join,” Zizhen says with a shrug. “My dad isn’t here to tell me what to do.”
With a nod, Jin Ling dismisses the disciple, and turns his father’s sword over in his hands. The timing of this mission is more than a little off, and he wonders what his uncle is thinking, sending him on this hunt.
Apparently, Sizhui shares his apprehension, because he stays at his shoulder where Jingyi has plopped back down on the bed. “Jin Ling,” he says quietly, “don’t you want to stay here?”
“No.”
In his innocent way, Sizhui’s eyes widen and narrow, not understanding. “But—”
Jin Ling can’t help but act frustrated. “What?” he bites out. “We’ll be back by morning. What does it matter?” Though he regrets that at once, he can’t take it back—but looking away, then looking back, he hopes his friend can read the apology in his eyes for what it is.
Zizhen has tied his blood-splattered outer robe back around himself—if he’d worn the red, it wouldn’t show so much, but sadly he’d ruined the more decorative blue ones—and holds up his sword sheath. “I’m ready.”
A water ghoul. What will his uncle think of next?
He shrugs it off. “Let’s go, then.”
In Nightless City, Wei Ying had rested in a room of dark bamboo wood and vermillion veneer, and his features had been drawn with fatigue and fever, and the red had stayed in his mind as the red of blood, of loss, and of fear.
He had nursed him back to health in the Jingshi twice, the atmosphere cooler in its soft, kindly blue hues, and when Wei Ying had slept, he had focussed on the rise and fall of his chest, on the flutter it sent through the light covers with every rhythmic breath, and it had been quieting, and comforting, and his mind had been at ease.
But in this room—Lan Wangji has not yet made up his mind. Lotus Pier is warm and fragrant, though the privacy lattice separating parts of the room prevents him from being able to observe Wei Ying’s face from where he is seated. On the low, light-cedar table, his guqin strikes a clear contrast, and the melodies he has plucked from it for the last hours are somehow equally too solemn and too grave for the energy he feels would suit the room best.
Outside, the night seems ready to break into day, but a few candles inside keep its lure away. Mao hour has come and passed, and Lan Wangji had played, then meditated, keeping his vigil over Wei Ying’s sleeping form.
A knock precedes Sizhui’s quiet entrance, and he bows. “Hanguang-Jun,” he says. He seems to make himself small, as if ready to flee the room if required. “The servants told me you hadn’t taken breakfast. I brought soup.”
Lan Wangji nods, and Sizhui relaxes in relief. The small bowl in his hand is placed on the edge of the low table, but when the boy straightens up, his eyes fly briefly up to Wei Ying.
“Hanguang-Jun,” he begins again, “how is Senior Wei?”
“Stable. He has not woken.” And he would likely not do this for another several days. Lan Wangji remembers the toll his path takes on Wei Ying’s spirit and body, even though he has not made use of the Tiger Seal, in this instance.
Sizhui fidgets. He can see his robes are clean, but he must have only recently changed, because his hair looks rumpled, and—
He sighs, if fondly.
“Sizhui,” he says, lifting his voice a little. “Your forehead ribbon.”
The boy flusters so quickly, he starts stammering and apologising, his hands shooting up to feel where the ribbon sits crooked.
He is, as expected, not up to the task in his embarrassment, so Lan Wangji motions for him to come closer.
Silently, Sizhui approaches, and kneels down before him. With practised precision, Lan Wangji unties the boy’s ribbon and undoes the knot in his hair.
“I’m sorry.”
“No need.” With a light pat to his shoulder, he encourages him to turn around, then rises from the table in search of a comb.
“Jin Ling was called on a night-hunt.”
A small vanity, on which at least one red ribbon and an odd-looking ornament are haphazardly thrown, proves fruitful to his search.
“Zizhen joined him, but Jingyi and I were told to stay. Sect Leader Jiang wanted your permission before allowing us to join.”
Good, Lan Wangji thinks, allowing himself to relish the petty feeling for only a moment, and hums his acknowledgement.
With his hair loose and wild around his face and shoulders, Sizhui looks a lot younger than he is. His chin is nearly on his chest, though if tired or still feeling chastised, he does not know. When he sits back down behind him, he touches his shoulder again to ask him to sit up straight, and he does so at once.
Slowly, Lan Wangji runs the comb through sections of Sizhui’s hair, allowing them both this indulgence. He remembers doing this for a smaller, younger A-Yuan, who would lean back against his knees and talk about his classes and adventures for that day.
“Have you slept?”
Sizhui shakes his head only a little, not wanting to disturb him. “I couldn’t.”
Perhaps he should press him, but Lan Wangji feels that he will tell him when he is ready. For now, he combs Sizhui’s hair in languid motions, until the snags are gone, and the shine returns to it. Eventually, he parts the upper section of his hair to make the topknot, careful not to make the pull too painful.
He takes the boy’s forehead ribbon with the proper reverence, and allows himself a small, private smile. Not only had his sect allowed him to initiate little A-Yuan into the Lan sect, but they had afforded him the status of a true Lan—and he knows how much his brother’s avid support had helped smooth over the elders. He had been desperate enough—the trembling bundle in his arms weighing him down with responsibility, having clung to him more tightly than the child’s fever had, even if he had to be taken from his arms to be cared for by others for years. He had not been there to give him the ribbon, but he remained the only person thereafter who was allowed to touch it.
He is grateful for that trust, as he pulls the ribbon’s ends across Sizhui’s shoulder, and lastly, pins the small headpiece in place over the topknot.
“Thank you,” Sizhui says quietly, the words heavy enough to carry another meaning.
He waits.
Then, Sizhui turns around, eyes troubled. “Thank you,” he begins again, and the addition is barely heard: “For giving me a home.”
Lan Wangji lets his face soften. Clearly, the boy’s thoughts had matched his own.
“No thanks are needed,” he says sincerely.
Torn by conflict, Sizhui looks up to his face, then to his hands, searching, and Lan Wangji recognises that distress. He removes his hands from his lap, and it is all the invitation the other needs.
A brief flicker of surprise is quashed by relief when it goes noticed. Sizhui shuffles forward to brace his arms around his neck, leaning into him with half his weight, the rest leaning on his leg, but he does not mind. Embracing him, he lets Sizhui take the comfort he needs.
When he extricates himself, Sizhui quickly dabs at his eyes with the back of his hands. “Hanguang-Jun, will you stay here until Senior Wei recovers?”
“Mn.”
“Will you not be missed?”
“No. I am where I am needed.”
Sizhui nods, then tilts his head a little as he stares at Wei Ying again. “I wish I understood what happened,” he shares. “But… But I am happy, for Senior Wei! And Sect Leader Jiang, too, though I think Jin Ling still needs some time.” A kind smile lights up the boy’s face. “But it’s not every day you meet someone who is your parent, but who was also gone for so long.”
In the deafening silence that follows, Lan Wangji keeps his eyes fixed on a book in the shelves opposite him, but he knows the meaning of the words dawns on Sizhui as well.
“Uhm,” he hears, Sizhui’s voice small. “Oh.”
Lan Wangji’s gaze glides over to Wei Ying yet again—and it is easy to remember the bright, overjoyed smile, eyes crinkled with wetness in their corners, when he had looked over at him while cradling the back of Sizhui’s head, who had latched onto him like he had as a child, too overtaken by joy in his discovery to be ashamed.
“Hanguang-Jun, please eat.” The bowl is slid across the table, and Sizhui withdraws.
Taking up the spoon, he eats from the soup without interest. When the day breaks, he must convene with Jiang Wanyin again to review the hunt—and face the probability that he must put forth an account to the other sects as well in Wei Ying’s absence.
He rejects the notion that Wei Ying is at fault. It is a bitter fact that Jiang Wanyin would immediate suppose it to be so—or fear it, if he can read him correctly—but whatever had transgressed between Wei Ying and Lady Zhou, he had not set out to replace her broken spirit, for another’s to take the body she would leave behind. Whatever purpose that had served, it had been per Zhou Mei’s inclinations.
Between the last spoonful of soup from the small, teal bowl and putting it down, Lan Wangji has to allow a Jiang disciple entrance with the correspondence he had requested to be forwarded to Lotus Pier in his absence at Cloud Recesses. Though he would much rather spend the time playing for Wei Ying, he feels his spiritual powers edge on depletion, what with the long night behind them.
He only allows himself the barest of sighs when he tucks Wangji away, and sorts the linen bag of letters and missives in order of priority and urgency. He reads.
Before long, his concentration wavers, his dormant thoughts always resting on Wei Ying, and as time passes, the pinch between his eyebrows deepens.
There is only one letter that catches Lan Wangji’s full attention, and the moment his eyes fall upon it, the air in the room stills, as if looking up and waiting for his response.
And in one elegant, though stiff, sweep, he rises, takes Bichen, and leaves the room.
As he had expected, the Sword Hall has Jiang Wanyin in attendance, who dismisses the servant he had been addressing with a wave when he sees his arrival, perhaps understanding the urgency.
“Any news?” Jiang Wanyin inquires sharply.
Lan Wangji answers, “He is asleep.”
The response confuses the other only for a moment, when he scoffs and says, “Do you think I care?” The fabric of his purple sect leader robes is flicked aside as he stands up. “I want to know what he did.”
When Lan Wangji lifts his eyes to him, he lays heavy judgement in its glare. “He is not at fault.”
“You’re quick to defend him,” Jiang Wanyin accuses.
As sect leader, he has always seemed a man of two faces. There is the irate, vulnerable manner when he speaks from emotion which Lan Wangji knows best, because he has never shied away from behaving in this childish way around Wei Ying, especially in the years around their studies at the Cloud Recesses. And yet, when it comes to discussions of politics, Jiang Wanyin is often as quiet as he is, calculating the situation, weighing his options carefully. He would admire the trait as wisdom if he did not know it so obviously to come from self-doubt.
Perhaps it is due to his exhaustion that Jiang Wanyin resorts to his annoyed and bitter self, possibly due to the discussion subject being Wei Ying, and his next words are sneered, sleeves irritably flapped aside. “There’s always someone to defend him. He’s used to it, to make trouble and let others answer for it.”
Though his fingers only shift their grip on Bichen minutely, he catches the other’s eyes flicking towards it, seeming to understand Lan Wangji’s displeasure. “Wei Ying need not answer for his actions. Neither does the Jiang sect.”
“And the Lan sect will?” Jiang Wanyin asks coldly.
“I will stand by him,” Lan Wangji says. “If necessary, I will admit him to the Lan sect and protect him thus.”
The latter he had not meant to share, and least of all with Jiang Wanyin, but his intent to defend Wei Ying from anyone’s judgement had spoken for him. His nostrils twitch when he breathes in sharply.
Before him, Jiang Wanyin stares at him as if he had just spoken profanely, and his mouth is slightly agape when he pushes himself out of his seat. What follows, unsurprisingly, is anger. “You wouldn’t dare,” he hisses. When Lan Wangji is about to state that he certainly would, Jiang Wanyin continues, “If such a thing were to happen, you can ask him the right way, or not at all!”
He blinks.
Then, he feels his ears start burning.
Ignoring the elevated pace at which his heart thumps against his chest, he takes his indignation and pours it into the gaze he levels Jiang Wanyin with. “As a disciple—”
“No,” is the brusque interruption. “If he is to be a disciple, it will be of the Jiang sect, where he belongs.” The moment those words echo across the empty Sword Hall, Jiang Wanyin snaps his mouth shut, his eyes dropping to the floor in dismay. These words, too, cannot have been meant to be spoken out loud, and in this company.
A timid voice interrupts their fraught silence. “Sect Leader Jiang?”
“What?”
The servant curtseys, then says, “Lady Jiang is awake.”