Work Text:
There was no other word for it. Surveying the new contingent of guest disciples for this year’s lectures was eerie.
Lan Qiren felt, simultaneously, waves of déjà vu, twinges of nostalgia, and a deep frustration at the concept of time in general.
Over the months of lectures, he would often look over the class and wonder: how could this Jin-gongzi look as old as the Jin-gongzi who once sat conspiring in corners at cultivation conferences, whispering with the then Wen-gongzi?
And then… the Jiang siblings? He almost laughed. They seemed almost a parody their parents. They held a seeming soothing influence over one another, as though flying in opposition to how little their parents were calming forces for each other, if Lan Qiren were to believe rumours even he had heard. The Yunmeng Jiang sect had always had a tendency to let their every secret flow downstream, apparently unconcerned with how they were perceived.
It was not this Nie-gongzi’s first time in the Cloud Recesses, but Lan Qiren still had difficulty reconciling this Nie-gongzi with the sect leader Nie he had once known. Should it not have been that sect leader Nie who introduced the boy to him? Not a teen hardly older than him, already bearing that same title? But then again… should it not have been his brother who introduced his nephews to one another, rather than himself?
And then there was their son. The child of the first ones of them to go. Wei Changze and Cangse Sanren. He looked like both, but also neither of them. Had her rebellious streak. His steadfast loyalty, each reliably sticking close by the side of their own Jiang-gongzi.
He felt it should still be Summer – maybe Fall for the disciples he had grown up with. But somehow, it was now already a new Spring, Winter having already come to take the once vibrant – once familiar – leaves away. It had started when with his nephew standing by his side, rather than the brother who should have still been there. And now… Now every familiar face was gone. Each one replaced with one fresher faced, so like them yet so unlike them.
Similar patterns grew from the branches left behind. Bonds formed – or, more likely, were expected, and so made to form.
And his nephews…
Xichen was hardly older than many of the disciples, and yet he stood with him. Apart. Dutiful. Responsible.
Wangji, too, valued his role in the sect. Put his obligations so far forward that Lan Qiren more often than not found himself asking Xichen what was really going on below the surface. Even now, Lan Qiren couldn’t tell if Wangji didn’t want to join the others, or simply felt like he shouldn’t.
Lan Qiren shook his head. It didn’t matter, did it? He shouldn’t join in with the others. They – that Wei-gongzi and his entourage especially – seemed to behave in opposition to everything he had taught his nephews to be.
And look at them now! Respected across the cultivation world, admired, even. And at such young ages! He was proud. He was hard on them, perhaps, but they had turned out so well.
Lan Qiren carefully avoided recognizing anything familiar in his younger nephew’s solitary figure.
And even if recognition threatened to surface, what then? Standing apart in his generation had, after all, left him one of the last standing.