Work Text:
Wei Changze reluctantly woke to the feeling of sunlight crawling across his cheeks, but remained in bed with his eyes closed for another quarter hour before finally blinking up at the inn roof.
It seemed to surprise people when they discovered Wei Changze was not what one might affectionately call a ‘morning person.’ True, he’d spent the majority of his childhood and young adult years up before dawn, preparing to assist Fengmian with his day with everything from dressing to preparation against political difficulties once he became sect leader. But he never managed to be at his best before midmorning.
The first day away from Lotus Pier, when he’d woken naturally for the first time in almost twenty years and seen the noon sun already high in the sky, he’d panicked. Surely Xiao-Fei would not want a laze about? And Qiren would never countenance such indolence. He’d dressed in a panic, half-convinced he’d ruined his chance to be with them before they’d gotten more than fifty li from Lotus Pier.
He’d burst free from the tent to find them sitting by the fire, chatting quietly, both looking immensely pleased to see him.
“I’m sorry,” he forced out.
Xiao-Fei’s nose wrinkled with befuddlement. “Why?”
“I should have been up.” Their shared confusion continued. “To make breakfast.”
Qiren had sniffed. “No need. We are perfectly able-bodied adults, A-Chang. We can make our own food.” He scowled at the fire in front of them. “You’re not our servant.”
Struck mute—though he could not have said why, back then—Wei Changze dropped down next to Xiao-Fei and let her bully a cup of tea into his hand.
Conversely, both Qiren and Xiao-Fei were horribly early risers, trained to either be up with the sun or beat it to rising all together and continuing to do so out of long habit. This morning, pleasantly, he found them sharing the large tub in the corner of the room, Xiao-Fei curled into Qiren’s front, both of them looking terribly content. He recognized Xiao-Fei’s sloppy handwriting on the warming talismans affixed to the side—the last of her paper, if he wasn’t wrong. In the absence of any cultivation or martial ability of his own, he protected his family the only way he could: through efficient organization, and ensuring they never ran out of the materials they needed to remain safe.
He dressed, debating keeping Qiren’s ribbon wrapped around his wrist before smiling at it instead and placing it atop his husband’s neatly-folded robes. Once he'd finished tying up his hair, he crossed the room and leaned over the side of the tub.
“Good morning.” He kissed Qiren’s forehead, right where his ribbon usually sat, and followed it with a press of lips to the crown of Xiao-Fei’s head.
“Morning,” Xiao-Fei sighed happily, half-dozing in Qiren’s arms. “Did you sleep well?”
“Very well,” Wei Changze assured her.
They’d arrived at the inn quite late, A-Ying fast asleep in Wei Changze’s arms as they finally made their way into an actual town bedraggled and, in Qiren’s case, limping. Nothing serious, they all knew; a jagged scrape running from hip to knee. Easily healed with a few minutes of proper rest but excuse enough to have them seek out comforts they usually forwent in favour of the expedience and convenience of setting up camp wherever suited.
Sleeping in a real bed between his two partners had been bliss.
“I’m going to the market. We need talisman paper and Zhu-er needs a new comb.” His own had lost three or four prongs since its acquisition, not that Lan Zhuliu would ever say anything about it; the only reason Wei Changze knew at all was because A-Ying had noticed and demanded if his could be similarly altered (presumably to allow some of the nastier tangles to remain in his hair instead of being painfully brushed out.)
Their elder son rarely asked for anything for himself, always afraid that the smallest request would be the one which caused them to finally drive him away. They tried to anticipate his needs, now, to help ease the anxiety of making requests. Eventually they hoped to get him to the point where they no longer needed to.
Qiren’s eyes flickered open. “I believe we’re also in need of oil.”
“Hair, sword, or that of a more intimate nature?” Wei Changze asked with a small smirk.
“Shameless,” Qiren rebuked, absolutely without rancor. Wei Changze chuckled. “Hair, if it’s not any trouble.” Qiren took the most care to make sure Wei Changze knew such things were only ever requests and never orders.
“No trouble at all,” he promised. “I’ll check on the boys and have breakfast sent up.”
“Bring me back something interesting,” Xiao-Fei sighed at his back as he made his way to the door.
The last time their spouse went to the market unsupervised, he’d adopted a teenager. And while Wei Changze would never begrudge the joy Lan Zhuliu brought their lives—particularly as an older brother capable of keeping up with A-Ying—he also knew he’d never find anything to compare with such a priceless acquisition.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised anyway. He kissed them both again and saw himself into the hallway and to the room adjoining theirs.
Wei Changze knocked but only waited a moment before easing the door open. Inside, A-Ying still snored away the morning, sounding like an aggressive, if small, rhino (this, Wei Changze knew firsthand, came to him naturally by way of his mother.) Zhu-er, already dressed and with his ribbon perfectly seated upon his brow, sat in meditation. His eyes flickering open when Wei Changze opened the door.
"I'm going to the market. Do either of you want anything?"
Zhu-er frowned a moment then shook his head silently. "No, thank you, Baba."
"Anything A-Ying might need?"
A-Ying's nose scrunched up in sleep and he rolled over. "Bunnies!" They both looked his way, Wei Changze unable to stop a lopsided smile when A-Ying, still sleeping, continued, "I like the orange ones. Lan Zhan, the pink ones smell like eggs. Yuck."
Zhu-er's expression softened fondly. Coaxing a true smile from him remained the sole purview of A-Ying, but in quiet moments Wei Changze could always detect signs of happiness.
“Lan Wangji's birthday is approaching. Ying-di will want to find him a gift."
"Ah." He momentarily considered rousing A-Ying to drag him along but his son had inherited his deep distaste for mornings and would only grump about the stalls if woken too early. "Perhaps we will stop somewhere on our way to Cloud Recesses."
Zhu-er bunched his left sleeve up in his right hand. "We're going to Gusu, then."
Wei Changze carefully maintained a neutral expression. "For A-Zhan's birthday, yes. Fuqin has already been in touch with Lan-zongzhu to let her know to expect us."
"Do you think Lan Xichen will have returned from Qinghe?"
Some days, neutrality proved more difficult to master than others. Fortunately, today felt like a good day. "He will."
Zhu-er nodded in quiet satisfaction, both of them studiously ignoring the blush spreading across his neck. "I'm glad."
"Mn." Sometimes, Qiren had the right of it: a non-response was truly the best response. "If you think of anything, catch me up. I'm going to have breakfast brought to Mama and Fuqin whenever you and A-Ying are ready."
"Thank you." Zhu-er closed his eyes and returned to his meditation, leaving Wei Changze to slip back out of the room and gently close the door behind him. Wei Changze mentally added candy to his list; though Qiren would scold him for the indulgence he couldn’t help but want to spoil his children.
He paused to speak to the innkeeper and requested a variety of dishes to be sent up within the hour to give everyone a chance to finish meditating, bathing and (hopefully albeit optimistically) crawling out of bed, then headed out into the town.
Flowers lined the beautifully kept streets, the postscript to what had obviously been an important festival for the town. Wei Changze floated between crowded merchants, keeping half an eye out for anything 'interesting' as his wife might define it, generally synonymous with 'dangerous' or 'hideous' in turns. The same things tended to catch A-Ying's eye as well, which had long led Wei Changze to the uncomfortable conclusion that he would be spontaneously childproofing for perhaps the rest of his natural life. Or, at least, as much as encompassed A-Ying's childhood. Lan Zhuliu frequently offered himself up as a chaperone and minder, of course, but Wei Changze and his spouses had agreed he was best encouraged to enjoy what remained of his own youth instead of sacrificing it supervising his little brother.
A merchant waved him over, proudly displaying long sticks of sumptuously candied hawthorn.
"The best you'll find anywhere, gongzi," the merchant promised.
Wei Changze, though distracted by the brilliantly coloured treats, did not miss the sudden sensation of a small hand dipping into his robes in search of his purse.
He gently but firmly caught the retreating arm laden down with his coin pouch. When he looked down, frightened eyes in a round face stared back at him, aghast and already filled with furiously frightened tears.
The child looked younger than A-Ying, though it very well may have been due to the wide eyes and sunken cheeks. He had the rough, hungry look Wei Changze had seen on the faces of many street urchins in Yunmeng, those who Uncle Jiang had taken in, long ago, before Fengmian stepped into the role of sect leader and stopped the practice for fear of losing face before his peers.
(Wei Changze couldn't recall him caring about such things during their boyhood. He feared he carried the blame for the change. Perhaps, had he found it in himself to love Fengmian as more than a brother, Fengmian might not have lost his love for the world in turn. Qiren and Xiao-Fei often admonished him for such thoughts, but he entertained them regularly nevertheless.)
"You again!" the merchant howled. He rounded his stall, one of the rods used for threading the tanghulu clutched tightly in his hand. "This is the last time you rob my customers, you wretched little thief!"
Before the rod could fall, Wei Changze dropped the boy's arm and caught the merchant's instead. The older man boggled at him.
"This is not the way to instruct children," Wei Changze told him. He used his free hand to rip the sharp skewer away.
He noticed the boy take off into the crowd out of the corner of his eye.
The merchant sneered. "So righteous. But tell me, where is your purse?"
Wei Changze allowed no quarter. "In worthier hands than yours."
He released the man and snapped the skewer in half, scanning the street for the boy yet disappointed to note that he'd already disappeared into the swelling morning crowd. Little matter; he had more money in his qiankun pouch and hopefully the boy would use the lost coin to improve his circumstances.
He left without purchasing any of the candies and continued his perusal of the market. The town sat far enough between the seats of any reputable sect as to be practically unmapped and without any local cultivators to speak of. News of a nasty haunting had drawn their family here to offer aid; hopefully the rumours of YueyangChang taking a home here would come to fruition and give the town a measure of protection.
While he eventually passed another vendor and purchased an entire bag of candy, the lack of regular cultivators quickly brought him to a wholly different problem: none of the merchants stocked the materials he needed to replenish Xiao-Fei's talisman paper. He knew from experiencing his wife's trial and error secondhand that subpar materials produced occasionally painful results and refused to knowingly put her in such a position. He might not be a cultivator himself, but he had grown up in one of the Great Sects and married two of the most promising cultivators of their generation; he knew the importance of quality merchandise. And, more relevantly, how to spot it.
He reached the end of one side of the market and turned to begin browsing the next street over when a flash of dull grey caught his eye. A father's instincts for mischief, he decided, when he turned his head and spotted his little thief darting between two large men in ostentatious robes.
Wei Changze watched as quick hands snuck out again in search of more bounteous fare than he himself had carried.
And he watched as, like himself, the owner of said fare caught the boy out. No wonder the boy had a reputation for thievery; he was terrible at it. Luckily Wei Changze had always been soft-hearted, otherwise—
Otherwise came at the hands of the taller of the two men, who grabbed the boy by the hair and shook him violently. Several purses fell free from his sleeves, including Wei Changze's, the sound of them hitting the ground drowned out by the boy's cry of pain.
They flung no accusations or harsh words. The man hauled the boy to his toes by the rough hand in his hair and held him still as his friend's fist drove forward with enough strength to break bone and rupture organs.
The blow did not land.
The man looked shocked as he followed the stretch of his arm and found Wei Changze holding him at the wrist. The man threw Wei Changze’s hand off his arm, scowling and dropping his hand to his sword. “How dare you?!”
“Gongzi,” Wei Changze said, polite yet firm. “I don’t believe a violent response is appropriate in such a case.”
“I will punish thieves—and those who protect them—as I wish,” the man snarled in response. “I suggest you move out of my way before you prove yourself among the latter.”
He did not appear to be a cultivator, had no outward appearance of belonging to any known sect, and the way he grabbed his sword suggested he did not know how to properly use it. If he tried to draw it from such an angle, he’d overextend his wrist and leave himself open to any opponent with half a mind to capitalize on the opportunity. The sword itself was poorly made, poorly wrapped and obviously not a spiritual tool by any stretch of the imagination; hopefully he hadn’t been otherwise convinced by some unscrupulous salesperson.
“I appreciate your frustration—” Wei Changze continued.
“You’ll appreciate more than that in a moment,” he snapped, drawing his sword.
Wei Changze stared at him, unimpressed. Everything about the man reminded him of days when Fengmian locked himself away in his office, leaving Wei Changze to serve at the whims of the remaining cultivators from his father’s generation, many of whom considered Wei Changze to be inappropriately elevated and wanting to punish him for his impertinent competence.
“There is no need for this,” Wei Changze said.
The man drew close, slapping the flat of his blade against Wei Changze’s chest. It stung, even without art or power behind the blow, but Wei Changze remained carefully composed. Their eyes met, the man’s shot through with red. This close it was easy to smell the liquor still on his breath from the night before. The edge of his blade slid up towards Wei Changze’s unprotected neck.
Wei Changze refused to betray the sudden panicked hammering of his heart in his chest; fortunately he had substantial practice in maintaining an unaffected mask.
(“You can’t honestly believe this bastard son of a maid to be an appropriate companion for our son? My heir?”
“Please, his mother was very dear to me, despite her deplorable choices. You needn’t train him as a cultivator. Let him serve Fengfeng as his mother served me. Treat him with even the smallest kindness and he will obey like the most unfailingly loyal hound our son may ever wish for.”)
“Gongzi,” he tried again. The blade nicked his neck when he spoke, enough to draw a small bead of blood. “I have no strength to fight you. And given that you have threatened violence to a four-year-old boy, I cannot imagine there is much decency in you to which I might appeal. Let me say, then, that I am married to two of the strongest cultivators of their generation, and they would be deeply, deeply disappointed should I come to harm.” Possibly murderously so in Xiao-Fei’s case; her formative years upon her master’s mountain had left her with somewhat unconventional opinions regarding life and death.
The man’s eyes widened as he searched Wei Changze’s expression for any sign of deception. He stared back, unyielding in his conviction, as there was none to be had.
“Qunhai!” he finally snapped, tucking his sword away.
His friend released the boy, who immediately scarpered off to hide in a nearby alley. Wei Changze kept half an eye on him as he dove beneath a precariously stacked pile of refuse.
Wei Changze deeply bowed to them as they collected the dropped purses—all of them—and set off in a thundercloud of resentment. He waited until they had disappeared into the slow-swelling crowd before heading into the alley.
He crouched down beside the refuse pile. “Are you all right?”
When no reply came, he pulled one of the sweets he’d collected earlier and placed it in front of the small opening into which the boy had disappeared. A dirty hand shot out, grabbed the candy, and disappeared back into the rubbish.
“I’m five,” came a muffled growl.
“Hello, A-Wu. I am Wei Changze.”
An angry face appeared. “I meant I’m not four! My name is Xue Yang!” Then, as if remembering himself, he shot back into his hiding place.
“My mistake.” Wei Changze placed another candy on the ground. It disappeared with equal, if not more ferocious, alacrity. “My younger son is only a few years older than you. He likes candy, too.”
Xue Yang’s face appeared again, though the anger had faded somewhat into concern bordering on fear. “Is this his candy? Is he going to be angry that you gave it to me?” He stuck his tongue out, the last lingering bit of candy sat on the end. Years of translating words spoken through a full mouth (A-Ying’s, occasionally Xiao-Fei’s, but only when she was very excited) helped him understand, “You can have it back if he’s going to be upset.”
“He will not be. And I can always buy him more.”
Xue Yang cautiously crept out, though he remained tense and ready to bolt back to safety. “He gets candy whenever he wants?” Envy dripped like poison from every word, the type of which might blacken the heart if left unaddressed.
“No. To feed a strong body and mind he eats mostly healthy food. But he does get candy when he’s earned a treat.” Xue Yang frowned in confusion. “When he’s been good.”
Xue Yang’s face fell. “I’m not good. They tell me all the time.”
“Your parents?”
“No. Everyone. My parents didn’t like me, I don’t think. They left me here.”
The simplicity of the statement, and the unaffected tone in which it was delivered, made Wei Changze’s heart clench in his chest. “I believe you are good.” He offered up another piece of candy.
“You do?” Xue Yang’s shoulders slowly untensed, and he crept closer to take the candy from Wei Changze’s palm. He flinched when his fingers closed around it. Bracing himself. Wei Changze was intimately acquainted with the feeling of being presented with kindness and receiving violence instead. It made it all the more gratifying when Xue Yang took his intentions at face value and collapsed against his side in contentment and popped the candy into his mouth. “Why?”
“I believe everyone is good. Or wants to be.”
He and Qiren could argue until they were blue in the face over the point. Like a good Lan, Qiren believed that rules needed to be put in place to help people remain upright and moral. Wei Changze believed people were inherently good. Needed to believe it. Clung to the belief like a lifeline, sometimes, because he couldn’t conceive of the cruelty of a world where it wasn’t true. Eventually the two of them would probably come to a quorum—some middle ground where rules helped direct morality instead of demand it—but for the time being they both enjoyed the occasional foray into philosophy. Xiao-Fei had no patience for it (“if I wanted to endlessly debate philosophical points I would have stayed on the mountain!”) and often threw up her hands and dragged A-Ying and Zhu-er off to make mischief when they got into it. Both him and Qiren had more than once used her actions as means of proving their points.
“I think,” Xue Yang said, with a childishly calculating glance, “That people are good when they are given candy.” He held out his hand expectantly.
Wei Changze laughed and offered up another little piece. “I suppose candy helps.” He could already hear Qiren harrumphing about bribery, as though he wasn’t the absolute softest touch when it came to their sons and nephews, no matter how vehemently he denied it.
“Then if you give me lots and lots of candy, I will be the best ever.”
“A very interesting point, young master.” His smile softened. “Of course to receive the candy, you would need to join my family and I on our travels.”
Xue Yue worried at his lower lip. “You said you were married to two cultivators.” Wei Changze nodded. “Is your sons cultivators, too?”
“They will be. You could be as well if you wanted. We could teach you.”
Xue Yang considered this with appropriate gravity. “And there will for sure be candy?”
Wei Changze laughed again. “Yes, A-Yang. There will be candy. Not all the time. As I said, growing children require all sorts of nutritious food. But I promise you will never starve.”
Xue Yang scrunched up his nose. “You’re not trying to trick me, are you? Some people. They like to play tricks. Mean ones.”
Wei Changze placed his hand on Xue Yang’s shoulder and met his eyes. “I promise I will never try to trick you.”
“That's okay then.” He jumped up and dusted off the bottom of his tattered pants. “Let’s go.”
“Now?”
He nodded decisively. “I want to earn more candy.”
Wei Changze stood and offered out his hand. Xue Yang stared at it in confusion. “You may hold my hand. My younger son often does. He likes it.”
Cautiously—they would need to work on this, to make sure Xue Yang never again looked at their hands with the expectation of being harmed—Xue Yang rested his small palm in Wei Changze’s. His arm shook with tension, preparing to snap it back and out of reach in case of any ‘mean tricks.’ Wei Changze began walking, gently tugging Xue Yang along beside him.
As they made their way back towards the inn, Xue Yang’s hand tightened in his own.
"Maybe one more?" he asked when the inn came in sight, his steps slowling as nervousness crept in.
Wei Changze squatted down before him. "This is the last one," he said, pulling the sole remaining treat from the bag.
Xue Yang licked his lips and stared at it. Then, with a decided squaring of his shoulders, he shook his head. "Save it for your sons and tell them it's from me so they'll like me."
Wei Changze nodded and slipped it back into the bag. Xue Yang immediately took his hand again and held it tight, nervous and excited all at once.
"Don't worry, A-Yang. I promise, they will love you."