Work Text:
Hanguang-jun discovers the pom-pom
After the night hunt, the seamstress and her family insist that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji stay for breakfast. Lan Wangji wants to say no –– the hunt had been simple and he has enough spiritual energy to take them both home on Bichen –– but Wei Wuxian takes one look at the seamstress’ gaggle of toddlers with their big, round eyes and emits an overwhelmed keening sound, and Lan Wangji knows he has no chance.
The toddlers want to show Wei Wuxian their swimming pool, which, it turns out, is more like a muddy pond in the patch of forest behind the seamstress’ house inhabited by frogs, snails, and algae. Not that that deters Wei Wuxian, of course, who runs off with them without sparing another thought, leaving Lan Wangji in the house with the seamstress and one of her daughters.
The seamstress busies herself with the congee in the kitchen and has already yelled at Lan Wangji for trying to help, so he supposes he should hang around and make sure her daughter doesn’t hurt herself on the loom.
The daughter is quiet, unlike her siblings, whose whooping and hollering can already be heard as they –– poke frogs with sticks, or whatever mischief Wei Wuxian is currently teaching them. Lan Wangji kneels in one corner of the room and watches the daughter without making it too obvious that he’s staring at her –– he just wants to be sure she won’t catch her thin little fingers on anything.
She seems to be entertaining herself quite well, singing something nonsensical under her breath. Soon she’s bored with the loom and waddles to a wooden box near where Lan Wangji sits. She flips the lid open to reveal heaps of threads and textile scraps, and starts burrowing in, searching for something so enthusiastically that she tips over and falls in, her legs kicking in the air.
Lan Wangji rushes to lift her out, worried that she’ll suffocate, but when her face emerges from the box it’s wearing a delighted smile. She kicks her legs, still, and wiggles, but she’s so light that Lan Wangji can keep her in the air, which it seems she enjoys.
She looks minuscule in Lan Wangji’s hands, and for a moment he’s reminded of papayas at the market, or that story of the ginseng tree that the Monkey King encounters on his journey to the west, its branches heaving with fruits in the shape of laughing babies.
The daughter lifts her hand and shows Lan Wangji what she’s holding –– it’s a fluffy little ball, round and soft as a rabbit’s tail.
“Pom-pom,” she says.
“Pom-pom?” Lan Wangji echoes. He isn’t sure if the daughter is telling him her own name, or if she’s given him a nickname. He hopes it isn’t some toddler form of Papa, because he doesn’t know how to explain to the girl that he isn’t her father, and is also slightly worried that she’d assume he was so soon after meeting him.
The seamstress emerges from the kitchen and laughs, hurrying to take her daughter from Lan Wangji’s arms. “Sorry about that,” she breathes, nuzzling her daughter’s head in her neck with fondness in her eyes.
“Pom-pom,” Lan Wangji says again; a question.
“Oh!” The seamstress pries her daughter’s fingers open and retrieves that fluffy white ball. “Does Niuniu want to give Hanguang-jun her pom-pom?”
Realisation dawns on Lan Wangji –– pom-pom is the ball.
“She made it herself, just the other day,” the seamstress adds. “She’s very proud of it.”
The daughter is looking at Lan Wangji expectantly, a slight blush creeping across her impossibly round cheeks. He accepts the –– the pom-pom.
It’s so soft. The texture, Lan Wangji notes, comes from the countless little threads that come together to weave themselves into a veritable tapestry of comfort. He runs a thumb across it, feeling the way it tickles his skin.
“Thank you,” he says to the little girl, hoping that she can detect the genuine emotion and joy in his voice.
Pom-pom.
“I made it myself,” the little girl says. She looks up at her mother, who nods at her in acknowledgement.
Lan Wangji feels like he’s meant to ask some kind of follow-up question to that, but in truth the only thing in his mind right now is the absolutely unbelievable softness of the thing he’s holding. He can’t think.
“H-how?” he ends up stammering.
The seamstress and her daughters both smile at the same time, their eyes curving into crescents. “Shall we teach Hanguang-jun how to make a pom-pom?” the seamstress asks the daughter, who yelps with pleasure.
So Lan Wangji is made to sit down once more, and the seamstress procures a wooden object shaped in a circle. The daughter finds a ball of thread, and shows Lan Wangji how to wind the thread round and round until the entire wooden object is covered in it. The thread is bright red, and must have been expensive to dye –– Lan Wangji doesn’t want to accept it, but the daughter looks so happy that he can’t bring himself to refuse her.
He doesn’t see how this disk can become the impossibly hearbreaking thing that is the pom-pom.
But then the seamstress takes out a pair of scissors and says, “You cut along here.”
Lan Wangji does so, and the threads fall apart, and he can’t help but gasp in wonder.
Such a simple procedure, to create such a beautiful thing.
Lan Wangji can’t even begin to conceive of how he might thank the seamstress and her daughter for this priceless gift. He hasn’t felt this happy, this exhilarated since––
“We’re back!” Wei Wuxian calls as he and the rest of the children tumble back into the seamstress’ house, all of them now covered in mud and something green and moss-like that Lan Wangji doesn’t want to interrogate.
“Just in time,” the seamstress says, standing up. “Breakfast is ready. Children! Go get changed.”
The house is filled with noise again as the children forget momentarily about Wei Wuxian. His eyebrow raises in a silent question when he sees Lan Wangji kneeling there, still holding the pair of scissors in one hand.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” Wei Wuxian asks, coming closer. He reaches out a hand, and Lan Wangji accepts it, allows his husband to help him up.
Lan Wangji keeps his husband’s hand in his, and turns it over so that Wei Wuxian’s palm faces up. He places the red pom-pom into Wei Wuxian’s hand, gently, as though it were a precious flower.
Seeing the gift, Wei Wuxian’s smile broadens. He holds the pom-pom up to the window. Outside, the sky is beginning to lighten, sending arrows of pink shooting across the clouds. Wei Wuxian carries the pink glow on the side of his face as he turns and catches Lan Wangji’s eye and laughs, his laughter clear as a bell, the only sound Lan Wangji needs to hear ever again.
“It is called a pom-pom,” Lan Wangji says seriously.
The name delights his husband just as much as it had delighted him. “Thank you,” Wei Wuxian says. He tucks the pom-pom into his hair ribbon, which is the best idea he has ever had, and what is Lan Wangji supposed to do?
He kisses his husband, who is still grinning so hard that all Lan Wangji really gets is teeth. They try again, and again, until they get it right.
Dawn has brought the new day, and pale sunlight that casts itself across Wei Wuxian’s hair as he and Lan Wangji bid farewell to the seamstress’ family and thank them for the breakfast. Wei Wuxian’s robes are still caked with dirt, but he skips back toward the pond anyway, telling Lan Wangji that he found something funny there that he absolutely has to show him right now.
Lan Wangji watches the pom-pom in his husband’s hair bound up and down in time to his husband’s quick steps, and smiles. Follows.